The Sacred Isle: Belief and Religion in Pre-Christian Ireland (review)

256 Reviews The next two essays deftly introduce large and complex topics. Clare Lees's 'At a Crossroads: Old English and Feminist Criticism' frankly declares the ideological status of feminism as a politics, not just a hermeneutic. Her review of scholarship to date and her practical analysis of Elene provide a convincing critique of the intersection of gender and genre in the Old English poetic tradition. Carol Braun Pasternack's 'PostStructuralist Theories: The Subject and the Text' ranges over Derrida, Lacan, Barthes, Kristeva, Foucault and others before moving into a brief post-structuralist reading of Beowulf that highlights the 'fissures and slippages' which point to 'contradictions between an older oral-heroic social formation and the written-Christian formation attempting its conversion' (p. 185). O n e must sympathise with Peter Baker, but also celebrate, that i f this book is to remain in print, as one hopes it will, his chapter on 'Old English and Computing: A Guided Tour' will require frequent updating. H e admirably outlines the history and 'present' (circa 1995) state of humanities computing and Old English-related projects and bravely looks to the future which so rapidly becomes the past in this field. The challenge to humanities scholars is to design analytical and disseminatory frames for scholarly material that are not overtaken and rendered obsolete by hardware and software advances occurring before their completion. Several good pedagogical books on Old English have appeared recently, and Reading Old English Texts is as welcome as The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England, George Jack's Beowulf: A Student Edition, Bruce Mitchell and Fred Robinson's Beowulf: An Edition, and some others. In Reading Old English Texts, most obviously, some ofthe challenges to the Old English teaching community laid d o w n by Allen Frantzen in his Desirefor Origins (New Brunswick, 1991) are being answered. Greg Waite Department of English University of Otago 6 hOgain, Daithi, The Sacred Isle: Belief and Religion in Pre-Christi Ireland, Woodbridge, The Boydell Press and Wilton, Cork, The Collins Press, 1999; cloth; pp. viii, 259; R.R.P. £25.00, US$45.00. Reviews 257 The beliefs of the pre-Christian Irish Celts have often been fancifully 'reconstructed', and the texts from which they are customarily derived are universally acknowledged as problematic. This is because the material was not committed to writing until after the conversion of the Irish to Christianity in the fifth century CE. This book attempts to combine archaeological evidence, Christian-influenced texts and surviving folkloric customs to arrive at a cautious reconstruction of the beliefs of the pre-Christian Irish. The archaeological remains of the pre-Celtic inhabitants of Ireland is first considered, and the emphasis is on the megaliths and passage-graves which feature in later Celtic tales. 6 hOgain is careful not to speculate beyond the evidence and discusses in general terms Neolithic and Bronze Age cultural and social shifts which affected technology and attitudes to death. Chapter Two, 'Basic Tenets in the Iron Age', reviews the evidence for the arrival date of the Celts in Ireland and the earliest Greek texts which provide information about Ireland and the Celtic peoples. This involves discussion of archaeological hoards and the reconstructions ofIndo-European philologists concerning the relationship between the 'p' Celtic and 'q' Celtic language branches. The student of Celtic mythology will here recognise some of the motifs which are initially introduced archaeologically, but contribute substantially to the later tradition, for example the cult of the severed head (p. 49). At this point a difficulty with The Sacred Isle becomes apparent. W h e n dealing with the later textual material 6 hOgain does nothing strikingly original. His six-page discussion of the severed head is a workmanlike summary of other materials, nothing more. Yet, as the book is not written as a conventional introduction to the subject, it would not really be suitable to recommend to junior students. This impression deepens with the next chapter, "The Druids and Their Practices'. This is a conventional coverage of the Classical ethnographic texts (Julius Caesar, Strabo and others preserving sections of the lost work of Posidonius of Apamea) followed by the accounts of druids and their rituals and social...