A review by graculus
Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain by Ronald Hutton
4.0
This is one of those books which I'm glad I persevered with, considering that it's quite literally a solid piece of work (very small type too, which doesn't help) but it doesn't quite do what it says on the cover. It's not so much a history of the druids as a history of what people thought and wrote about the druids and why/how that changed over time.
Considering that the first chapter is all about how little we actually know and can prove about the druids in the first place, I suppose there wasn't really much else for the author to do, either in this book or in his previous one. Perhaps that one ([b:The Druids: A History|3092261|The Druids A History|Ronald Hutton|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347673081s/3092261.jpg|3123368]) was the one I should have read instead, though this one certainly introduced me to a wide variety of folks with varying degrees of scruples about making up history out of whole cloth if it didn't exist previously or didn't quite say what they wanted to hear.
Considering that the first chapter is all about how little we actually know and can prove about the druids in the first place, I suppose there wasn't really much else for the author to do, either in this book or in his previous one. Perhaps that one ([b:The Druids: A History|3092261|The Druids A History|Ronald Hutton|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347673081s/3092261.jpg|3123368]) was the one I should have read instead, though this one certainly introduced me to a wide variety of folks with varying degrees of scruples about making up history out of whole cloth if it didn't exist previously or didn't quite say what they wanted to hear.