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The Druids: A Study in Keltic Prehistory
T. D. Kendrick
An early, sober scholarly attempt to say what can actually be known about the Druids — written in 1927, when the subject was thick with romantic invention. T. D. Kendrick, an archaeologist who would go on to direct the British Museum, sets out to separate the historical Celtic priesthood from the fog of myth, gathering and weighing the ancient Greek and Latin sources alongside the archaeological evidence for Druidic religion in Gaul and Britain. It is very much a book of its period in tone and terminology, but its instinct — skepticism toward the fanciful, respect for the evidence — was ahead of its time. For anyone interested in the Celts, or in how modern scholarship pried the real Druids loose from the legendary ones, it is a founding text.
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The author
Sir Thomas Downing Kendrick (1895–1979) was a British archaeologist and art historian who rose to become Director of the British Museum. Early in his career he turned to the Celtic past, and The Druids is a product of that period — the work of a rigorous museum scholar rather than an enthusiast.
The book
Published in London by Methuen & Co. in 1927, subtitled A Study in Keltic Prehistory, with 51 illustrations and an appendix collecting the original Greek and Latin texts that mention the Druids. Kendrick's aim was to assemble and soberly assess the whole body of reliable evidence — the priests and their rites, their probable origins in Gaul and Britain — as a corrective to centuries of speculation.
How it has aged
Inevitably dated in its scholarship and its now-archaic spelling ("Keltic"), and long superseded by later archaeology; but valued as an early, level-headed landmark in the modern study of the Druids, and still readable for its marshalling of the classical sources.
For more context
Stuart Piggott's later The Druids (1968); and Ronald Hutton's modern studies of the Druids and their long afterlife in the imagination.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- T. D. Kendrick
- Publisher
- Methuen & Co.
- Place of publication
- London
- Year
- 1927
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- History
- Location
- Maine