ABSTRACT
Because the pagan Celts did not write about themselves, the only way that modern scholars can learn anything about their belief-systems is by constructing hypotheses based upon archaeological sources and historical documents written by contemporary, but alien, classical observers, who selected and often misunderstood what they recorded (Rankin 1987). There is another group of documents, those which tell of the earliest Welsh and Irish myths and written in the vernacular. But these have to be treated with extreme caution as sources for pagan Celtic religion, and as a strand of evidence which must be treated separately from contemporary data (Green 1992a: 18–21). This tradition is the work of Christian redactors writing in medieval times, and close links between the undoubted mythology it contains and the evidence which is synchronous with the pagan Celts (around 500 Bc to Ad 400) cannot usefully be made. Moreover, this vernacular tradition relates only to Wales and Ireland, far from the continental heartlands of the early Celts.
