The Mysteries of Stonehenge: Myth and Ritual at the Sacred Centre

by Nikolai Tolstoy, John Waddell (Foreword)

Stonehenge presents us with one of the greatest archaeological mysteries from prehistory. With each new breakthrough in field research and technological innovation, the full scale and significance of the ancient site only deepens. In this new magisterial study by Nikolai Tolstoy, an essentially historical approach is used to try and explain the human story behind the implacable stones, and to enliven our understanding of Stonehenge through the fragments of myth and ritual that survive through Britain’s oral tradition. With years of patient study and an acquired fluency with the island’s many ancient languages, Tolstoy excavates a new theory from the layers of cultural sediment. Whilst admitting the latest archaeological evidence and research, Tolstoy aims to reconstruct the significant aspects of British pagan ideology and thinking from the pre-Roman era. By exploring the myths and rituals passed down alongside the material remnants of this lost civilisation, Stonehenge becomes illumined as the ‘sacred centre’ of Britain, the holy site at which the ancient peoples’ most profound beliefs – in the birth, destruction and eventual rebirth of their island itself – were celebrated.

Genres: History

608 pages, Hardcover

Published September 15, 2016

About the author

Count Nikolai Dmitrievich Tolstoy-Miloslavsky (Russian: Николай Дмитриевич Толстой-Милославский; born 23 June 1935) is an Anglo-Russian author who writes under the name Nikolai Tolstoy. A member of the Tolstoy family, he is a former parliamentary candidate of the UK Independence Party.

Source: Wikipedia

The photograph by Justin K Prim.

Reviews

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not much of the book is actually about Stonehenge directly, but he looks at myths and legends that have been preserved in the medieval stories such as the Mabinogion and Saints lives which Tolstoy believes relate to the Omphalos (centre or navel) of Britain which he argues is what Stonehenge was believed to be. Although most of the sources he looks at are Celtic (Welsh and Irish), Stonehenge was built in the Neolithic age long before Celtic culture arrived in Britain. He convincingly argues that it was quite likely that Celtic people would have taken on some of the beliefs of their predecessors and the plausibility of traditions and rituals surviving over long periods of time although I'm not sure he made a case for the specific myths he was examining being derived from pre Celtic times.