The Discovery of Middle Earth: Mapping the Lost World of the Celts

by Graham Robb

Fifty generations ago the cultural empire of the Celts stretched from the Black Sea to Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland. In six hundred years, the Celts had produced some of the finest artistic and scientific masterpieces of the ancient world. In 58 BC, Julius Caesar marched over the Alps, bringing slavery and genocide to western Europe. Within eight years the Celts of what is now France were utterly annihilated, and in another hundred years the Romans had overrun Britain. It is astonishing how little remains of this great civilization. While planning a bicycling trip along the Heraklean Way, the ancient route from Portugal to the Alps, Graham Robb discovered a door to that forgotten world--a beautiful and precise pattern of towns and holy places based on astronomical and geometrical this was the three-dimensional "Middle Earth" of the Celts. As coordinates and coincidences revealed themselves across the continent, a map of the Celtic world emerged as a miraculously preserved archival document.Robb--"one of the more unusual and appealing historians currently striding the planet" (New York Times)--here reveals the ancient secrets of the Celts, demonstrates the lasting influence of Druid science, and recharts the exploration of the world and the spread of Christianity. A pioneering history grounded in a real-life historical treasure hunt, The Discovery of Middle Earth offers nothing less than an entirely new understanding of the birth of modern Europe.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Travel, European History, Archaeology, Anthropology, Ancient History

387 pages, Paperback

First published October 10, 2013

About the author

Graham Macdonald Robb FRSL (born June 2, 1958) is a British author.

Robb was born in Manchester and educated at the Royal Grammar School Worcester and Exeter College, Oxford, where he studied Modern Languages. He earned a PhD in French literature at Vanderbilt University.

He won the 1997 Whitbread Book Award for best biography (Victor Hugo) and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Rimbaud in 2001. In 2007, he won the Duff Cooper Prize for The Discovery of France.

On April 28, 2008 he was awarded the £10,000 Ondaatje Prize by the Royal Society of Literature in London for The Discovery of France.

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 2 out of 5]

‘Stare at a series of lines on a map,’ warns Graham Robb, ‘and eventually a pattern will appear as surely as a human destiny in a fortune-teller's cup.’ And he knows what he's talking about – he's written a 350-page book, based on years of fieldwork, which does exactly that. Nor does he intend it to be a cautionary tale. He believes it. He thinks he's found a hidden astronomical principle linking the sites of Celtic Europe, a principle which explains, inter alia, the basis of Roman roads, the true meaning of Celtic mythology, the hidden function of La Tène art motifs, and the location of Excalibur. On page 64 I was noting, ‘getting a little speculative…’ in the margin; by page 234, I was simply scrawling ‘Bullshit’ across whole chapters.

It's hard because Robb is a good writer and I've enjoyed his books before; he is not a cracked eccentric, tinkering with ley-line theories in his garden shed, and he does his best to keep himself as grounded as he can. But the very best you can say about his theories is that they are extremely speculative, which isn't enough to support a book of this size.

Part of the problem is that he overreaches. If he had confined himself to some observations about the alignment of Gaulish oppidia, it would have been great. Could I believe that Roman roads were based on previously existing, hitherto unsuspected Celtic infrastructure? Sure. Can I be convinced that the ancient Celts structured their towns around winter and summer solstice lines? Why not. But to suggest that the alignment of towns proves that they had solved pi to three decimal places a century before Archimedes – or that all the settlements of Iron Age Europe were planned out in advance, to coordinate in a linked network (Robb draws a line, for example, between Celtic Alesia and Delphi, 1800 kilometres away) – these things seem to me to be infeasible a priori.

In this way he takes some fairly plausible ideas and stacks them on top of one another to form great ladders of supposition. He relies heavily on the evidence of toponymy, which is notoriously tricksy (and indeed he makes mistakes, like saying that Leiden is named for the god Lugh when in fact it was given that name much later). He also – and here your heart sinks – makes much of the Druids, about whom we know almost nothing. Total primary source material on the Druids comes to something like six paragraphs. Yet somehow, in Robb's telling, these figures represent ‘a teaching order […] which had more influence over the actions of individual states than the United Nations does today’.

Once he's got you to accept that, then nothing is a coincidence. It just has to be ‘interpreted Druidically’, as he puts it. Well I'm sorry, but if a particular confluence of rivers is southwest of a particular mountain pass, that is a fact of geography, not of geomantic engineering.

I tried to find out what experts in the field thought of this book, but couldn't turn up very much. Historians who reviewed it for the papers were, on the whole, rather kind about it, suggesting, hopefully, that it might generate a welcome renewal of interest in the period. It would certainly be great to see some of Robb's theories investigated properly (‘I decided not to present the findings in an academic form,’ he confesses at the beginning, which is probably enough grounds for more demanding readers than I to ditch it straight away), since there is surely lots of useful stuff here which needs to be extracted from the waffle about Middle Earth and cultic land surveyors.

I am certainly credulous and romantic enough to hope that Robb's ideas do turn out to hold water; but on the evidence here, I'd have to conclude that – as Robb himself fears – his theories are at heart ‘a testament, not to the Druids' genius, but to the ruthless ingenuity of the unconscious mind’.

[Katharine Kerr · Rating 2 out of 5]

I greatly admire Robb's THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE and his biographies of French literary figures of the 19th century. Unfortunately, his latest work shows why writing outside your area of expertise is so dangerous for scholars. Robb himself is aware, judging from his frequent remarks in the text, that he embarked on a daft adventure when he started writing this book. Like so many people over the past 3 or 4 hundred years, he got himself snared by the ancient Druids, leylines, Indo-European philology, and other subjects that cluster on the border of rational discourse.

His basic premise is that Druid proto-scientists chose the sites for ancient Celtic oppida by mapping out certain astronomically determined paths on the Gaulish landscape. His starting point is a cluster of myths about Herakles, whom he stubbornly identifies with a Celtic sun god. Herakles at one point stole the cattle of the monstrous Geryon and drove them back to Greece along a particular route, which most ancients mapped along the southern coasts. Robb insists that the route was a straight line that determined the prime meridian of the Druidic "map."
In my opinion, he proves none of these assumptions.

What the Druids were and did is always something of a trap for scholars. The ancient testimony falls into two wildly differing camps: savage, bloodthirsty priests of a barbaric religion on the one hand, and on the other, highly learned educators who ran boarding schools. Some people who've attended boarding schools might not see these two as irreconcilable, of course. But it's unlikely that either is true. Robb has gone over to the Wise and Learned camp on the basis of fragmentary evidence.

The misleading title is probably his publisher's fault. The original title of the British edition is simply THE ANCIENT PATHS, much much better than a spurious reference to Tolkien.

[Loring Wirbel · Rating 3 out of 5]

The subject of Celts in continental Europe is near and dear to my heart, and Graham Robb is a compelling writer. I found I could not get as engaged as the NY Times Book Review critic and others, however, because of the mixed type of story Robb sets out to tell.

Let's face it, the Celtic history is so spotty and contradictory, most books on history or culture of the Celts are uneven by nature, with the best probably being Dillon's and Chadwick's 'The Celtic Realms.' Often, the 21st-century neo-Druids intrude on such works with New-Agey lore that make some books on Celtic culture all but unreadable.

Robb has a more unique problem, however. He wants to show that the solar-based mapping talents of the Druids were considerable, particularly in Gaul and Spain, and to a lesser extent in the British Isles. Were he to make this point in the most direct way possible, he would be writing a dry, social-scientific tome of limited interest.

In order to make the book of interest to a wider audience, Robb includes some tales of his own exploration, as well as some history of the Celts, particularly before their battles with the Roman Republic and Empire. The intent was admirable, but the result is occasionally hard to follow. Nevertheless, by the last half of the book, Robb has provided enough continuity to keep the reader's interest, despite some rapid shifts in focus.

Robb makes clear that the distinction between Celtic-speaking, Belgic tribes stemming from the Halstatt and La Tene cultures, compared to other "barbaric" tribes which challenged Rome, is often a fuzzy one. This even includes Britain, where some of the tribes that fought against Rome often were "fellow travelers" who helped the Iceni and Cantevelauni who protected and defended the Druids who lived on Anglesey Island. Who was a Celt - and does that matter?

There remains much to be written about the links between Celts in Gaul and the Druids who protected the "Iberian triangle" of Finisterre, A Coruna, and Santiago de Compostela. Was the entire myth of St. James's bones residing in Santiago really based on a Celtic tale? (And what about St. Andrew's bones in San Andres, if you want to get really strange and spooky?) Was there a link between Finisterre and the Sacred Promontory in the southern Algarve region of Portugal? Was there really a Celtic Galician King Breogan who sent his followers to Ireland? Robb provides many hints and possibilities, but little solid information, simply because there is not a good way of disentangling Celtic myth from the physical evidence.

Robb has moved the football further in demystifying the Celts, particularly the mysterious scientist-scholar-shaman Druids. But until more archaeological evidence for continental Celts is unearthed, much will remain in mist.

[Tim · Rating 2 out of 5]

This one took me ages to get through, despite the interesting premise: The Celtic tribes having arranged their settlements following the Via Heraklea (the Heraklean Way). As the description says: a pattern of towns and holy places based on astronomical and geometrical measurements.

Graham Robb took his bicycle for a very long ride and took notes of his findings and compared them with the books and other sources he consulted for this project. It's thus partly a travel book.

The book is divided into four sections, each focusing on a certain theme, like the gods, terminology, the druids, etc. As you can imagine, there are many descriptions and elaborations. You'll also read about several tribes, kings, emperors (especially the Roman ones), battles, and more.

Celtic history is not easy and there are the usual prejudices, like with the Vikings. One has to rely mostly on what others wrote about these people, the battles, and so on. I'm going to direct you to readers who wrote a better review of the book. I have mixed feelings, even if I do want to believe that the Celts were so advanced as to arrange their settlements and alike based on astronomical and geometrical measurements. Again, the original setup looked interesting, how this book turned out to be... pretty boring here and there and not always convincing. Honestly, I skimmed and skipped the last 80 pages.

Bonus points for the maps and pictures, though. Always helpful in a book like this one.

Recommended? It depends on how much you're interested in the Celts, or better, this aspect of the Celts and how critical you are.

Some better, more detailed reviews:
Loring Wirbel
Al Bità
Nikki

[Al Bità · Rating 2 out of 5]

The title and sub-title ('Discovering the Lost Map of Celtic Europe') of this book promised much, and I was intrigued enough to part with my money and purchase it, if only to learn something more about Celtic Europe. Nowadays one hears about the Celtic revival going on in Europe, and the efforts to adjust traditional history to accommodate this heritage. What one usually hears, however, seem to be more akin to those New Age types, who mimic what they believe to be ancient Druidic rituals, without necessarily being true to the real spirit — at least, that’s the way it seems to me. The trouble is that, since the Celts themselves left no written records, one has to ‘interpret’ what their attitudes might have been from bits of stories included mostly in Roman generals’ and historians’ writings — and from the Roman perspective, these troublesome Celts were merely barbarians, brutal, pagan, aggressive, rude — and much taller than the Romans…

Robb includes these references as part of his work (the Appendices include 25 pages of notes quoting references, but this is one of those publications with the annoying decision not to include any references to them within the text itself!) and his justification for including these Roman texts is so that he can argue that one can read between the lines and re-discover the ‘real’ story underneath… Not very convincing, as far as arguments go, but these sections of the work are perhaps the most accessible and interesting.

Robb’s main thesis appears to be that the Celts had very detailed, mathematical mental maps of their land, which were the province of the master magicians or priests, the Druids. This knowledge was apparently based on Pythagorean maths (some of them were recorded as speaking a form of Greek). This Greek knowledge was studied by the Druids and their apostles over long periods of time, sometimes with one’s whole life being dedicated to this end. This knowledge was passed on by oral tradition. In practice, it was used to establish communication lines and pathways between the settlements of different Celtic clans and tribes. This secret knowledge seems to be based on accurately divining the intersection of the lines on earth of the sun’s path across the heavens at the summer and winter solstices, meeting at some central and therefore significant point (the ‘middle’) where more often than not a Celtic settlement was established. Why this might be significant remained obscure for me. There are lots of maps strewn throughout the book. The use of the word ‘strewn’ is deliberate: often enough they seem to have no real connection to where they are in the book; they often contain lots of information (lots of locations, linking Celtic names to their Roman equivalents, and sometimes to their modern equivalents) and lots of superimposed lines (meridians, longitudes, latitudes, solstice lines, etc.) but they are not always easy to decipher: I found that the legends accompanying these maps were in most cases not particularly helpful or enlightening.

On another level, Robb basically denigrates the Romans’ claims for the development of the Celtic countries they overcame and conquered, apparently with ease, as simply because they used what had already been scientifically mapped out (albeit only mentally, and never written down) by the Druids. The Romans were merely following along the same paths that had existed millennia before them. There is probably some worth in ‘toning down’ some of the hubris one finds in the Roman versions of their conquests, but Robb is concerned with raising the stakes when it comes to declaiming the glories and achievements of the Celts. Here his prose sings out poetically, waxing lyrical at what ‘probably’ was their way of life. Problem is, with no records, one can dismiss these interpretations as mere speculation: they will not necessarily convince anyone except those already convinced. Robb argues for the special significance of sacred, religious rites and rituals dedicated to the various gods of the Celts, and sees the survival of the Celts and their modern resurgence as evidence of the continuing power of those gods.

At one stage Robb provides a reference by Julius Caesar that after losing a long eight-year-long war with heavy Celtic casualties, the Druids sacrificed large numbers of people ‘for state purposes’. According to Robb, the loss indicated that the gods’ will had been done; and the offering up of sacrifices was somehow necessary. Over two pages (at pp 208 and 209) one can connect the following: Gaul recovered from the war, psychologically and materially, within two or three generations. Unlike other vanquished civilisations the Gaulish Celts did not punish or deny their gods. They continued to worship them under the Romans. and later, on the sacrifice referred to by Caesar, the following explanation is proffered: Usually the sacrificial victims were packed into gigantic dolls in the image of gods with wicker limbs, which were then set on fire. The besieged oppida, [i.e. a Celtic town or fortified settlement] crammed with thousands of people, had performed the same religious function. This holocaust can hardly have been the original objective of the Gauls, but it was not the final disaster that it would have been for other nations. The gods had been propitiated, and the Druids were vindicated by the subsequent prosperity of Gaul.

Huh?

[Nicky · Rating 3 out of 5]

The problem with this book is that, despite Graham Robb’s claims of having disbelieved the idea and sought extra hard for proof, etc, etc, it’s hard to believe something which is so broad and sweeping, which if true would change the perceptions of a whole period of history. Despite his attempts to methodically lay out the proof, it still reads kind of like someone excitedly believing in ley lines, or maybe better, imagining they can see the lines of intelligence-made canals on the face of Mars. It feels so massive and coincidental, especially because Graham Robb comes to this from the point of view of someone cycling across the ancient paths, rather than an archaeologist or historian.

Would I like to believe that the ancient Celts were this clever, this organised, this technologically advanced? Yes. And the idea of things being laid out along the solstice line isn’t so far fetched on its own: archaeologists like Francis Pryor have claimed similar for sites like Seahenge. But you don’t have to coordinate across the countryside to lay things out along solar lines, and place names could turn out to be a false signal — maybe it was just a common way to refer to places, maybe it was just a way of saying ‘the middle of nowhere’.

As far as I can tell, when Graham Robb links deities and folklore together, he isn’t going against the general wisdom, and that and the way some of his evidence hangs together makes me think that parts of his theory do have merit. It just seems overall too sweeping, and too much like wishful thinking — and sometimes his explanations of how x or y might have happened sound far too much like a story. In the end, I don’t have nearly enough knowledge of the field to make any real judgement on the theory.

Nonetheless, this does make for an interesting read, explaining the ways fairly advanced mathematics would’ve been possible, how communication might have been kept up across all the Celtic areas, and how some myths and stories might still connect to reality. It feels like a good story, regardless of whether the history and theory is sound.

Originally posted here.

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is Robb's theory of how the ancient celts organised themselves.

Whilst following the legendary Via Heraklea he concludes that this pre Roman peoples layout of settlements and ritual sites follow a series of solstice lines across Gaul (France). These lines follow a particular angle, from east to west and another angle from west to east. Some of these lines go directly through the centre of these sites, and others pass through at a distance of 1km or so away.

It does have lots of fascinating facts in the book, and some of the details that he brings out as supporting evidence, show that this culture and people were far more sophisticated than was previously though. There is also evidence to suggest that the Romans overlaid their roads and towns on some of the features that the celts had developed.

I am not an expert of the ancient celts of Europe, but it doesn't seem really convincing as an argument, and reminds me rather of ley lines, those mysterious links between features and ancient sites that amateur archaeologist Alfred Watkins proposed. As has been demonstrated elsewhere any series of points on a map can be shown to have a link purely down to chance. It is a shame really as I hoped that this would be more than a speculative book, and was going to be more about this fascinating culture.

[Graeme · Rating 1 out of 5]

Robb is a talented writer: his style is engaging and pleasant to read, so the book certainly deserves credit for that aspect. Unfortunately the actual content leaves something to be desired. While he sets out to provide a new perspective on movement throughout pre-Roman Europe, this is largely unsubstantiated by solid evidence. While he pays attention to the archaeology in terms of establishing the locations of major sites, this is overlooked in favour of support through place-names and solstice lines.

The arguments are patchy, with some significant leaps in reasoning being made on the basis of very little evidence and quite a lot of supposition or assumption. Robb makes sweeping statements that those working in the same period would be very hesitant to make on the basis of evidence, and unfortunately this detracts significantly from the book. In particular, he does not assess sufficiently the existence of the 'Celts' as a whole people, nor provide a convincing reason how a network of routes could have been established by such diverse groups of people.

While the book is at least novel, and the writing style engaging, I can't honestly recommend this for those interested in the period.

[Andrew]

Let's talk about the word "hotep." Normally, it's used to apply to a particularly ludicrous type of Afrocentric militant, like the gentleman decked out in Afrika Bambaataa-style Egyptian finery (no disrespect to Afrika Bambaataa, man changed the face of music) who screamed at me in downtown Seattle by calling me a "homosexual redneck," which was interesting to me, as these were clearly his two major criteria for white dudes.

I would argue that there are also white hoteps, many of whom (but by no means all) are associated with creepy European far-right groups, and the ancient Celts seem to be favorites of theirs. Ley lines, pagan spirits, and the like...

And Graham Robb's argument, while I do think he's acting in good faith, seems to be along these white-hotep lines. Lots of dodgy inferences, and the sort of philological reasoning popular among "national revival" movements during the era of the revolutions of 1848, and lots of references to solar paths overlaid on maps of Europe -- it's as boring and as woo-woo as it sounds. Go read Graham Robb's French history books, they're amazing, but skip this shit.

[Steve · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to enjoy this book. I had high hopes for it, as reading the blurb and flicking through it sounded like a combination of two of my favourite things - archaeology and cycling. However, cycling is mentioned maybe twice in the whole book! The book is a chore to read, mainly due to the poor layout of the figures and diagrams meaning that I frequently found myself reading a caption to a figure instead of the next page. The figures themselves seem included purely to pad out the book and are rarely referred to in the text or provide any real value, and the text itself feels repetitive, giving the sense that the author was trying to meet a word count target. There seems to be a lot of speculation in the content ("perhaps", "maybe", "what if"), without any references to back up these statements, and the discussion never seems to reach any logical conclusions. The author clearly had some interesting hypotheses on Celtic society, but the lack of structure to the book means these feel poorly thought out. There were however some interesting anecdotes in the book, but I finished it feeling underwhelmed.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 1 out of 5]

Honestly, i think if you look hard enough, the same faults occur in every book Robb has done. I'm just waiting for enough time to pass, before it all unravels.

He tackles biographies and histories to 'push his strong opinions', and I just wonder if all the praise is really due to choosing subjects who have been neglected for a few decades, where there wasn't a new biography in a generation, and capitalizing on it.

And in the latter, with his 'histories', merely going on about his own fanciful speculations about the celts, the french, if sherlock holmes was a sissy, and in the end all we get out of the deal is 'a fun read'.

The book on the Celts, seem to be the crumbs of his Scotland and England book, like his book Parisians are the leftovers of The Discovery of Paris...

And if the New York Review of Books, shows, don't let him do a review of Sarah Bernhardt either...

All you eventually get is a shallow taste in your mouth.
And perhaps, his myopic speculative outlook infesting into your brain.

The more he writes, and the more reviews of his work, the less you see.

If you don't take him seriously, he's sorta fun
but if you take him seriously, woe unto you!

[Ann Keller · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an incredible book this is! I didn’t expect to read The Discovery of Middle Earth in a single sitting, but that is precisely what I did. I couldn’t put it down!

Graham Robb, an avid cyclist and historian, sets before the reader a bounty of scintillating facts, from which we can glean an astonishing view into the lives of the ancient Celtic people. Told with humor and in an engaging style, the reader will thrill to Mr. Robb’s amazing treasure hunt into the past.

The world of the Celts rolls out like a vast, dusty scroll. It ranged from the cool, green hills of Ireland and craggy mountains of Scotland, across the fertile plains of what was to become Belgium and France, to sunny Italy and the Black Sea. Beneath many well laid out Roman cities lay the shocking evidence of over six hundred years of exquisite artistry and astonishing scientific accomplishments. Who were these ancient people? Where did they come from?

The Celts created a carefully orchestrated geometric pattern of holy sites, towns and cities aligned with the rising and setting of the sun, moon and other stars and constellations. From the tribal centers of Chateaumeillant, Alesia, Nimes, and Lausanne, the Celts branched out across Europe, establishing a dynasty based upon the Heraklean ratio. Countless mediolana or central sanctuaries were established across Gaul, England, Wales, Germany, and Switzerland, enabling a network of towns to spring up, one equidistant from the other. The perfect symmetry of this layout, approximately eight centuries before the birth of Christ, is truly remarkable.

The mysteries of the Druids and Celts weren’t written down on parchment. News travelled swiftly by human voice, as one man shouted the latest developments from one outpost to another. Perhaps the term “herald” might have had its origins in such a practice.

Unfortunately, Rome’s power soon spread northward from the white marble columns, arenas, and grand palaces in Italy into southern Gaul, Germany and Switzerland. In one bloody battle after another, the Celts fell before Caesar’s sword, retreating against a veritable tsunami of Roman legions bent on destruction. From the tip of Iberia’s Sacred Promontory, the desperate Celts sailed north to Ireland, Wales, England, and Scotland. It was here where the Celts would make their last stand at Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall.

I have stood among the stones at Stonehenge and walked in the churches at St. Albans and York. There is definitely something there, pulsing beneath the façade of gray stone and mortar. It is a heartbeat, a throbbing presence which defies explanation. One cannot help but feel a part of something much larger than oneself, a connection with other peoples, other places far beyond the rising of the yellow sun. Indeed, by following the pattern established by the Celts, one can even chart the location of the walls of Camelot standing at the edge of Martin Mere, the largest freshwater lake in England. Into these waters, so the legend proclaims, the great sword Excalibur was thrown. Standing here upon a misty morning, this may seem, as Mr. Robb says, “more plausible than ever”.

[Elizabeth Judd Taylor · Rating 2 out of 5]

OK: my first clue about this book should have been that while the British hardcover jacket features a man & a bike, and the blurb talks about biking along old forgotten roads, when I actually started reading the book, cycling was mentioned very briefly and then dropped. So, it was not the travelogue/history book I had been expecting. Not the end of the world, though, it could still be an interesting book, if not what I thought I had bought. However: when a publisher decides to "masquerade" a book it often is a warning of sorts.

This book starts with an interesting, and plausible, idea; that the Celts had a network of roads already in place, over long distances, before the Romans ever came into their lands and started building and "improving" everything. So far, so good. However, in an attempt to "prove" this theory, what happens is a lot of this:
--the Roman chroniclers and writers exaggerated everything, unless they didn't
--the Celts learned everything important that they knew from the Greeks, unless they didn't
--lots of ancient names are related, unless they aren't
And so on and so on...the author tries to make his idea fit so hard that he grasps tightly onto anything that might help but totally dismisses anything that does not, with no real sense of rhyme or reason. At the same time, he throws in weird asides such as we can "prove" that ancient Celts liked to migrate because modern Scots migrated to North America in the 1800's, or that the Romans must have imported more Celts as slaves than Colonial America ever did, because, well, who knows?, but it seems like it could be true.

If you add to this that from what I can tell the book was renamed for the American market by replacing Celtic Europe with Middle Earth, as though to capture another type of audience, I think it's clear the publishers were a little concerned with this book (it's not that Middle Earth is totally misleading--the author does discuss Celtic spirituality--but I think it's clear what the new title was aiming to achieve--a bigger audience, with both New Age and fantasy fans added to history and travelogue buffs).

This could have been an interesting book, but it is way too incoherent and filled with bits such as "suddenly it all became clear" "now after 2,000 years all can be revealed!" and so forth. Not impressive and a real chore to work through.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Knowing little more than nothing about the Celts, I found Robb to be a compelling storyteller who sufficiently embellished what little he found to base his main thesis upon. Robb clearly outlines the academic pitfalls of the pursuance of these shrouded and at times repetitive theories. I am not sure if he adequately fleshes out what he says is evidence of a Roman interlude opposed to conquest. Nor does he unearth any type of holy grail that would unify his main argument. He hints at Hellenistic influences on Greater Gaul though, unfortunately, most of his data comes from the precise and businesslike Roman records. The body of work sounds like it is product of an interesting tour and Robb's writing swerves out of the path of tedium convincingly, but left me wanting more.

I wish he would further explore the Celts courageous stands at preordained holy sites to fight hordes of ruthless mercenaries and politically minded bureaucrats. He surely could delve into some fascinating historical reconstructions based on what is known about Roman military habits and the nature of war during the age. The Celts seem to be an interesting collection of tribes united in kinship and belief who were ready to defy Roman colonization. Surely, Caesars own records of the slain and enslaved serve as a reminder of what they refused to allow to be imposed upon them much like the active and effective resistance of WW2 in modern France defied more barbaric fascists in the name of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

This alternate history is like, for better or for worse, two very different books scrambled up together.

One of the books is a meditation on the fragments of Celtic tradition preserved in legends and place names and ancient Roman histories of the conquest of Gaul. Genuinely interesting observations about linguistics and misdirected road segments bring to life an ancient scientific tradition that supported a cosmology of manifest destiny. And Robb offers a reasonably coherent pocket history of Celtic resistance to the Gallic conquest, with Celtic superstars like Vercingetorix, Caratacus, and Boudica making their obligatory appearances,

The other book is an account told with Holy Blood Holy Grail-style breathlessness (or perhaps, Chariots of the Gods?) about the Amazing Coincidences that resulted when Robb laid a stray tedge across a topographic map of France. The rampant speculation and circular reasoning make the whole thing a challenge to take seriously, and leave me with a splitting case of side-eye at all the ways these maps could have been manipulated to underline (or simplify) the construction of the argument.

It is a damned perplexing thing, at best.

On Druids:
http://www.thebritishhistorypodcast.c...

[David Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compelling and enthusiastic guide to the layout of Celtic Western Europe which, although largely speculative, is premised upon the idea that the Celts were able to perform rather wonderful engineering feats in driving roads (fit for their streamlined chariots) straight as an arrow along the summer and winter solstice lines to link significant sites and townships and, through the druids, sort out boundary disputes between neighbouring tribes.
I like the idea that the Romans merely improved pre-existing road infrastructure and that the Celts had an efficient bush telegraph system. It may all be bonkers (he convinced me) but I like the author’s self-deprecating style and sentences like:

“You’ve got to admire those Roman engineers,” said the guide…
“Or,” I suggested, “the Gaulish engineers…”

‘The next two days were devoted to what seemed, at first, an austere, postmodern form of tourism — visiting sites where there was nothing to see, matching drab places on the ground to their colourful equivalents on the map, pursuing a journey of discovery that would discover nothing but itself.’

‘In Britain, perhaps the most intriguingly uninteresting sites are the boundary intersections called tripoints.’

It says a lot for the book that it makes me want to get out immediately and visit them myself.

[Koit · Rating 5 out of 5]

This could all be a complete fallacy and nothing in here be true, but there's a limit beyond which one stops believing in coincidences and trust that this could have been an actual fact. 'The Ancient Paths' and the theories postulated here crosses that limit for me.

The strongest evidence is presented for modern France (Keltika Main, I might call it) but evidence also favours taking these theories of a highly advanced Celtic civilisation into both Britain and Ireland as well. However, it is clear that the Irish section in this book is far more of an afterthought, and I would have wished for a bit more of an expansion on those sections.

The other issue here is that by now this is a relatively old novel, and I do not know what more recent historiography has made of Mr Robb's novel methodology. Some of the problems the author grapples with also present less of an obstacle for me (Google Maps' zoom-dependent projections, for example, would be solved by using a specific GIS software), but he still managed to bring across a set of very interesting theories. I am also a fan of the plentiful maps noted here as maps often help the reader understand, and especially in the case of a topic like this one become invaluable.

[R Arnaud · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would have loved to love this book. In principle, a mixture of history, travel writing, ancient mathematics and Celtic legends has much to please an entertaining need of mine. But the literary tone of the rambling mind, opening drawers and topics here and there, mixing personal experiences, historical facts and romanced historical flashbacks, may work well for travel books and the modern kind of historical monographs, but it is not appropriate to explain an idea. Especially when the idea is new and original. I had much trouble understanding the author's perspectives because there is so little time spent explaining them. His ideas, which clearly took him a long time to mature (and may be still need some maturing), are mentioned en passant in an overwhelming flow of facts and fictions.

Still, it is an exciting story, but it would deserve a second round of editing.

[G Steele · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a fascinating slog. What might have made for a better history might have been if Robb had stuck to what the Roman's and others wrote about the Celts. The fact that they ran schools during Roman times; I had not heard of that.

Their custom of migrating with a tribal leader as directed by Druids was (if true) another revelation.

This kind of real information was much more satisfactory than the piling up of Celtic astronomical and supposed scientific and philosophical superiority.

A well researched history (I need to go through the end notes) could have been the result instead of the stew of facts, speculation, magical conclusions and repeated grand conclusions.

Oh well. Any suggestions on good proto-history texts?

[Laura · Rating 1 out of 5]

Got half way thru when I had to check first the endnotes, then the bib, then for any cites of a paper published and finally reviews from the field because the claims were so significant they had to be discussed and shared among peers. But that's not what's out there. Writers of science and anthropology are so important to those of us not in school. But you can't have it both ways-publish a theory based on selective evidence and romance it in a biking travelogue.

[Liz Henry · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sometimes compelling but pretty clearly nonsense. Just kind of sad, since Discovery of France was so brilliant.

[William Korn · Rating 1 out of 5]

When I enter Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena armed with a gift certificate, I feel a sense of liberation. I can range more widely in my search for a new book, since it will be, for all practical purposes, free.

I admit when I did just that last Christmas the title of this book was the first thing to grab me, but it didn't take long to determine that it had nothing to do with The Lord of the Rings. What it might have to do with, I thought, was more information about the Celts, a people who held sway in most of Europe before they, and their history, were obliterated by the expanding Roman empire. And so it did, sort of.

Graham Robb developed a theory that the Celts had built a marvelously accurate set of roads based mainly on solstice lines, lines drawn across the earth between the rising and setting points of the sun on the summer or winter solstice. These roads were so useful that, according to Robb, they allowed Celtic civilization to persist longer than it might have otherwise because of more efficient communication across long distances.

One might well ask whether the Celts had the astronomical, surveying, and engineering knowledge necessary to build roads so accurately over hundreds of miles. But the beauty of Robb's theory is that since no one knows much of anything about the Celts, it's just as easy to impute that knowledge to them as to not impute it to them. Also, since the very locations of Celtic settlements are largely not known, the fact that settlements that ought to be along the solstice lines are not there (while others that are known to be there are not on the solstice lines) is easy to explain away by the same method. After all, the missing settlements could have been there!

This is not the way to prove a theory. I became so frustrated with Robb's attempts to make apologia for the fact that the evidence on the ground was running against him that I almost gave up the book before getting through 100 pages. Friends convinced me to try reading Robb's theorizing as simply another myth attributed to the Celts, but he was far too earnest in his presentation. I didn't finish the book, and it will become part of my donation to the Altadena Library Book Sale. Maybe someone else will enjoy it more than me.

[Craig Barner · Rating 2 out of 5]

I heard about "The Discovery of Middle Earth" via a mention on the website of travel writer Rick Steves and was immediately interested because I love Celtic culture. Unfortunately, I was disappointed in the results because the book is often confusing.

Robb argues that the ancient Celtic peoples located their settlements and holy places in Europe on astronomically determined paths. They also practiced sacred geometry, which was learned from Pythagoras, the Greek mathematician, for numerous reasons, including where to go into battle. Robb's starting point is Herakles, the Greek god, after whom the Heraklean Way in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Switzerland is named. Other sacred paths and locations in Gaul (France), Central Europe and the British Isles are also described in detail.

The problem with the book is that it is not clear whether it is intended for an academic or general audience. If aimed at a general audience, the book could have used a good content edit because it is so perplexing and hard to follow. Sometimes Robb appears to be writing for the general reader but other times for an academic audience with some background in this material.

Some elements of the book are quite interesting, but those usually cover topics other than sacred geometry and the location of settlements. The sections on the Druidic religion, ancient Celtic communication methods, the voyage of Pytheas and Celtic revolts against the Romans are sometimes compelling.

I especially enjoyed the material on Caratacus, a British Celt who led an eight-year war against the Romans. After Caratacus was finally captured, the Romans likely paraded him, as a leader of a revolt against their empire, through the streets and normally would have executed him. But they spared Caratacus because of his charisma and a speech by him before the Roman Senate. He was even given Roman citizenship. I also enjoyed the material on Boudica, a Celtic woman who had her own army and also for a time successfully opposed the Romans.

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review title: Treasure map of the western world

When Robb says in his preface that he made sure meetings with his publisher in New York and London were absolutely private because he was worried for his reputation as an academic historian should word of the topic leak out, you know you're in for a different sort of history. And as he lays out his case for Celtic mapping of western Europe along meridians of longitude, latitude, and winter and summer solstice diagonals, you can understand his concern; like a pirate's map with an X marking the spot of the buried treasure, Robb has relied on the slimmest of historical evidence to draw his map of this lost world.

The evidence is slim because the Celts (the name covers a range of tribes and ethnic groups much like referring to all of the different tribes in North America as "native Americans") of western Europe (the region encompassing Portugal, Spain, France, and northern Italy, as well as England, Scotland, and Ireland) were prehistoric, or as one historian Robb quotes, "protohistoric ". By which he means that the Celts, despite the lack of written history, did have a rich oral tradition which has survived in echoes in languages and place names across this region, and in second hand writings by Greek and Roman travelers and conquerors. The history written by the victors is neither objective nor fair, but Robb reading it both literally and in the meaning written between the lines can produce enough to draw faint lines on the map. And the map, surprisingly enough, brings the stories and the prehistoric Celts into history on living literal ground.

Robb's geographic survey started while he was mapping out a bicycle tour of the Via Heraklea, a route according to legend mapped by Hercules that started at the far western tip of the Iberian peninsula and headed west-northwest across the top of the Mediterranean and went through, with Herculean effort and miraculous support, the only crossable pass through the Pyrenees and the Alps. But his treasure map hunt started when he noticed that the route also aligned perfectly with Celtic sites, which predated the Roman legend by several centuries (going back to the 4th century BC), and when it struck him that Hercules by the legendary accounts seemed to know where he was headed, as if following an earlier marked route. When Robb combined this insight with the approximately 60 locations in Britain and western Europe whose place name can be traced back to the Celtic root Mediolanum--"It meant something like 'sanctuary' or 'sacred enclosure' of 'the centre' or 'middle'"--he realized that he was looking at the idea of a "Middle Earth whose sacred sites correspond to places in" our world (p. xii), the world of the Celts, Romans, and even today's national, political, ethnic, and cultural borders. In other words, a map of the western world from before Christ oriented to latitude, longitude, and solstices drawn with incredible accuracy by highly intelligent and educated Druid leaders of the Celts that mirrors and shapes our modern world.

Fleshing out the map with more details and less conjecture requires some complex and close examination of the Thin historical record, with some assumptions and guesswork confirmed as much as possible by the archeological evidence. The reader can get lost following Robb's logic, and while he is not afraid to state the logical conclusions of his theory, he is also quick to point out the thin thread of historical corroboration and conjecture on which it rests. After pointing that the precision of a set of Celtic points and orientations toward the solstice lines is well beyond statistical coincidence, Robb is quick to remind his readers that it is at this point that history is often most coincidental.

Once of the results of Robb's research is to recover the popular perception of the Druid elite, and by relation the broader Celtic world, from the purely mystical and anti-logical stance they have been associated with. In fact Julius Caesar, and a contemporary Roman historian Pomponius Mela, writing in the first century AD, describe the Druids in nearly the same terms:

They profess to know the size and shape of the earth and the universe, the motion of the sky and the stars, and what the gods want. (p. 131)

The Druids spent 20 years in formal education learning their craft and transferring "what the gods want" onto the shape of the geographic, political, and cultural world under their feet. So much for the mumbo-jumbo mysticism of our intellectually "backward" ancestors !

The concept is fascinating and unfolds like a mystery, but one that requires flipping pages back and forth to many line diagrams and maps with many tiny dots, lists, and place names in two languages. This isn't light reading and sometimes the way gets too convoluted and I lost my place between the words and the treasure map. But when he is able to use the map to point to Celtic sites that should be there which are subsequently confirmed by archeologists, and when he uses the map to make sense of Caesar's war and eventual victory against the Celts, its viability is proven by its usefulness, and its geological and statistical accuracy tends toward a proof Robb never claims.

With Roman control of western Europe, the frontier shifted to the British Isles, the more traditional home of the Celts, and here too Robb is able to draw the Celtic map, but with less certainty and more speculation that requires digging even deeper into the thin layer of language, place names and written sources. Did the Druidic influence originate at the far western edge of the known world, in pre-Christian Ireland, to spread east across the continent, or was it driven from the continent to extinction on those distant rocky coastlines? Robb provides evidence that could be traced either direction (see p. 269-287)

Robb is a fun detective to follow; see his subsequent book on the Debatable Land on the border of England and Scotland as he continues his detective work and even extends his insight from Middle Earth into Arthurian legend, which comes up here as well. Note that while he name checks Tolkien's use of the term, Robb does not spend much time on it. However, fans of Tolkien and his Lord of the Rings books will recognize the touch points which likely result from the authors' applying innovative approaches from different starting points to some of the same sources.

His reputation, despite the potential for tabloid-level headlines (CELTS INVENTED ASTRONOMY! KING ARTHUR CONCLUSIVELY PROVEN HISTORICAL FIGURE!), remains intact. His handling of the sensational material is sober and realistic, his conclusions tempered with the right amount of qualification. But his conclusions are powerful and thought-provoking, and traces the roots of the western world on our very own treasure map.

[Christian Matyi · Rating 3 out of 5]

CHALLENGING if you are not from Europe or deeply familiar with European geography and history. That is not to say it is completely inaccessible, but the book relies heavily on the reader "just knowing" historical events, major touchpoint in European history, and names of places dropped rapid fire. Because of this, reading can move slowly, as you often find yourself pausing to look up references or work out maps in your mind.

Meanwhile, the writing itself is dense and elevated. It is well written, but complex, also making it feel like a study session at points.

These affects are a shame because buried in all the academic and referential content are some fascinating (and convincing) theories and discoveries about more ancient times that we scant factual records for These were why I came to the book, and the book delivered. But, just as with his archeological journey, the casual ready often had to extricate the precious from the soil.

Robb tried at many points to bring some humanity and familiarity to the book, to ground it in a loose narrative of his own explorations. It's charming, but those bits stand in such contrast to the aforementioned hyper-academic density. Even these read like the casual reader knows off the top of their head thousands of city, town, and geological place names without having to reference them; as if we are all thoroughly travelled as himself. It becomes slightly annoying at points to where I would have preferred some of it removed in spite of it adding a touch of human flavor.

Overall I am glad I made it through, and learned a lot for which I am delighted. But my middling review is designed to offer caution: this is not one to pick up casually.

[Fraser Sherman · Rating 1 out of 5]

There's an early section of this book where Robb takes Julius Caesar's statement that the Celts used to pass along news by shouting to each other and imagines an elaborate, organized network of people positioned where they could call out the news and spread it with telegraph speed (I was reminded of the Twilight Bark in Lady and the Tramp). Later he explains how one of the legends in the Mabinogion could be an allegory for the arrival of Celtic Druidism in Britain. "I have discovered the hidden truth behind X" is a seductive fantasy, and I gave up when I became convinced Robb had been seduced (and not by truth).

[Brad Needham · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book has a promising title, but it lives in the valley-of-death between a scholarly work and fantastical speculation: too lacking in sources and data to be an archeoastronomy text, but too lacking in speculation to be appealing as a fictional work.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

I admire Graham Robb’s scholarship, and have read a number of his books. As someone interested in “pre-history” I was fascinated by the ideas behind this book, namely, that the ancient Celtic people of Europe were not the wild “barbarians” that Romans described them as being, but highly intelligent and cultivated peoples, with art, mathematics, astronomy, and other training. Robb meticulously takes apart how Celtic people situated important towns and roads according to lines defined by solar movement (i.e. the path delineated by where the sun rose and set on the solstices and equinoxes). In the process he debunks various ideas that have come down to us through Roman sources, and in particular, explains the roles of the Druids in these Celtic tribes. The book is dense with detail, so not an easy read, but I come away with a much better understanding of the Celts, one that transcends popular mythology of the “Blue People” of Northern Europe.

[Stan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Doorheen moeten ploegen, net interessant genoeg om door te zetten. Gaat vooral over hoe de Kelten georganiseerd waren en zich verhielden tot de Romeinen, en biedt tegenwicht aan het standaard beeld dat Kelten een barbaarse club waren. Alleen iets te veel gezever over hun geometrische locatiebepaling adhv de zon.

[i_hype_romance · Rating 5 out of 5]

Invaluable in my research for my series inspired by Celtic mythology.