The new Celtic Croft Fall Catalog is now available! Request one here Originally Published December 2010 I admit I may be stretching the “Celtic” connection pretty thin for this month, but it is about the son of a Scottish immigrant, and he is such an interesting character I couldn’t resist Another American-born adventurer, Josiah Harlan […]
Category: Blast from the Past
Newsletter Blast from the Past: Escorts to the Afterlife
Originally published October 2008 With Halloween or Samhain coming I thought I would touch on something spooky this month. In the old Disney movie “Darby O’Gill and the Little People” there is a scary scene (at least it was scary when I first saw it as a child) when the Banshee and and the Death […]
Newsletter Blast from the Past: Scots Greys
Alleged corn/maize carvings in Rosslyn Chapel I’ve previously discussed the claim that Henry Sinclair sailed to the New World in the 1300’s. The Archeological Fantasies Podcast discussed “-the supposed pre-contact images of New World maize in places like Rosslyn Chapel and ancient temples around the world. What do these images actually look like, is it […]
Newsletter Blast from the Past: The Celtic Church
Originally published October 2010 By the 6th century the Christian church in Ireland had become organized in a system of monastic “federations” connected to a mother house. By the 7th century this system appears to have replaced the Diocesan system, giving authority to the abbot of the monastery rather than to a Bishop. Bishops still […]
Newsletter Blast from the Past: MacBeth
The real MacBeth was the High King of “Alba” from 1040-1057. (In the eleventh century the name Scotland was beginning to appear, but Alba was how the area would have been most commonly named at the time.) Chroniclers from the time describe him in complimentary terms. He is referred to as “ruddy of countenance, tall […]
Newsletter Blast from the Past: Ireland, Lotteries & American Slang
Most people view lotteries as a modern practice that some governments use to raise funds outside of taxation. However the earliest known example of a European lottery to benefit the public good was in 1444 for the sake of repairing the city walls and fortifications of L’Ecluse, France. Probably the earliest English lottery was in […]
Newsletter Blast from the Past: Crannogs
Crannogs are usually artificial “islands” that were constructed mainly in lakes, but on occasion in rivers. The name may derive from the Irish word for tree “crann” and may have referred to the timber palisades that protected such sites, or the timber foundations on which they were built. In Ireland most of the crannogs have […]
Newsletter Blast from the Past: Celtic Spain
People usually don’t think of Spain when they think of Celts, but other than Gaul it is the only other place where the use of the term “Celt” is documented in antiquity in the form of names such as “Celtius” and tribal names such as “Celti Praestamarici.” Celts seem to have been just one of […]
Newsletter Blast from the Past: Druids
Originally Published February 2010 According to Julius Caesar The Druids were: “concerned with divine worship, the due performance of sacrifices, public and private, and the interpretation of ritual questions: a great number of young men gather about them for the sake of instruction and hold them in great honor. In fact it is they who […]
Newsletter Blast from the Past: Celtic Italy
While we normally think of the Celts in the British Isles, or northern Europe, an archeological site known as Monte Bibele in the province of Bologna, Italy revealed a picture of rural life in Celtic-ruled Italy. Unlike their northern relatives the “Italo-Celtic” people seem to have assimilated into a more “urban” life-style rather than the […]