The Celtic World: A History
| By: | John Waddell |
| Publisher: | Four Courts Press Ltd |
| Published: | February 2026 |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Categories: | History, Humanities, Non-Fiction |
| Language: | English |
| Available as: | Hardback |
| On sale at: |
At the dawn of history the Celts occupied a vast swathe of Europe from Ireland in the west to lands south of the Black Sea in Asia Minor. The study of this Celtic past has often been a disputed and debated territory and for centuries the true story of these Celtic-speakers of old was obscured by fanciful origin myths. Their origins and subsequent history were slowly revealed when linguistic studies and archaeological discoveries in the nineteenth century began to expose a rich and complex narrative that is still being clarified today. A series of dramatic finds in France and Germany in particular have brought these ancient peoples to scholarly and popular attention. This was a prehistoric world that offered an intricate picture of connectivity and diversity across much of Europe. These were people who have bequeathed us a remarkable archaeological heritage, an astonishing art style, several living languages, and, in Irish and Welsh, the most substantial body of early written texts in a non-Latin tongue in western Europe. This book is a historical exploration of how our understanding of the ancient Celts and the concept of a European-wide world inhabited by Celtic-speaking peoples developed over time.