The Discovery of Middle Earth: Mapping the Lost World of the Celts
by Graham Robb
First Posted April 2014
Yikes. 2014 was a big year for verbosity. This review is simply too many words for the format. Too many quotes.
Functions in the way I wanted my reviews to work, though: reading it a decade later reminded me of a bunch of cool things.
That I have been trained by countless non-fiction books to completely ignore their sensationalized subtitling really worked against me in The Discovery of Middle Earth: Mapping the Lost World of the Celts. It plays it pretty straight, outside of the fantasy nerd-grab of including “Middle Earth” to reference a historical period that does not include hobbits. The vast majority of the book is filled with detailed latitudinal coordinates and complex angular equations:
The trajectories of these ‘Roman’ roads are a closer match for Celtic Gaul than they are for the Roman province. The line of the road from Chartres to Dreux misses out the Roman town of Évreux and passes instead through the Gaulish sanctuary of Gisacum, before meeting the Paris line at Matrona. The more the puzzle is examined, the less Roman it looks, and the less surprising Caesar’s rapid conquest of all the lands between the Alps and Brittany. Either the Gauls already had a coordinated infrastructure worthy of their sleek chariots, or they thoughtfully arranged their settlements and sanctuaries so that once the country had been conquered, Roman engineers could easily join them all together with straight roads.
It is not a metaphorical tour but a true mapping the world of the Celts: discovering—via maps and rhumb lines and even great circles—evidence that the menhirs of Britain are not aberrations but the simple work of a society oriented around solar bearings.
The sun must not have been aligned when I picked up my copy of Discovery, as the librarian, citing the fresh ink of the “injury noted” stamp under the front cover, warned me that some pages were missing. He asked me if I’d like to place a hold for a second copy. I agreed to the new hold after not seeing any torn-out pages during my quick flip through the front half; I figured that by the time I hit the missing pages—which, by process of elimination must be on the back end—my fresh copy should be available and I would be able to continue reading unabated.
Had I availed myself of what Romanophilia has transformed my mental image of a Druid into, he or she might have interpreted the missing pages as portent for future hardship and difficulty with Discovery:
In AD 43, the Roman geographer Pomponius Mela claimed that ‘the noblest of the Gauls’ received their twenty years of Druidic education ‘in caves and secret woods’. This was the civilized person’s fantasy of hermits’ glades and wizards’ glens accessible only by some Celtic equivalent of Platform 9¾. Apprentice Druids who required writing tablets, measuring equipment and medical instruments, not to mention board and lodging, would not have spent twenty years in a dank cavern or sylvan hut.
The view of the Druid as mystical dirt-rubbed indigent has traveled down through the centuries; the Druidic focus on oral tradition eschewed the historicity that the prolific Roman scribes achieved simply by existing in tangible records outside the mind of humanity. Time and again, Discovery will search outside of the written record and find evidence of Celtic advances lost to time, while the bureaucratic tediousness of Roman culture survived, thrived, and shaped modern interpretation of barbarous lands:
To most Greeks and Romans—especially those who had never left home—the typical Celt was a rampaging drunkard who blundered into battle at the side of his brawny, blue-eyed wife, wearing either animal skins or nothing. At home, the Celts festooned themselves with gold jewellery and drank undiluted wine—to which the entire nation was addicted. Their table manners were atrocious: they wore woollen cloaks and trousers instead of togas, and sat on the hides of wolves and dogs instead of reclining on couches. This was in the part of Gaul known as Gallia Bracata (‘Trousered Gaul’). Further north, in Gallia Comata (‘Hairy Gaul’), things were even more exotic.
The missing pages of my borrowed copy were not lost to the mists of time, nor were they torn out, but a simple, ghostly blank. They were near the very beginning of the book and—after my first attempt at bypassing them—crucial in establishing a base of knowledge with which to decipher the rest of the text. I decided to delay my cartographic journey until my second library hold arrived, certain that the guide-pages meant to lead me deeper into Iron Age Gaul would appear:
Until now, it has been impossible to show exactly how divinatory calculations determined historical events. The Druids who directed the tribes were not fraudulent conjurers who made a nation’s destiny depend on the twitch of an entrail or the parabola of a bird’s flight. They were the coordinators of an immense work of art that was one of the most ingenious and effective federal systems ever devised. It gave the tribes a view of Middle Earth that had once been the prerogative of the gods and that would not be seen again by earth-bound mortals until the cartographic marvels of Renaissance.
My second library copy contained, of course, the same jarring, eerie blankness at preface pages xi-xiv; again at one through four; yet again at nine through twelve. I decided—after consulting the parabola of a pigeon’s fearless strut down Second Avenue—that the blankness filled the role of dark space of cartographic legend, a fundamental impossibility of complete, elucidative knowledge available to, or perhaps about, Celtic society.
So I pressed forward.
What fate decided to omit was a simple fact that likely seemed obvious to most of the target readership; I had to piece it together bit by bit until the evidence was overwhelming. The opening sections—blank, for me—made sure that even if you were an uneducated rube thumbing through the pages, you’d begin the journey knowing that Celtic society was not simply Ireland or even the British Isles; it extended across most of Gallic Europe:
Because the Celts were a group of cultures, not a race, they spread rapidly from central Europe, by influence and intermarriage as much as by invasion, until the Celtic world stretched from the islands of the Pritani in the northern sea to the great plains east of the Hercynian Forest, which even the speediest merchant did not expect to cross in under sixty days.
Knowledge common enough to need only be referenced obliquely outside of the clear delineation made once or perhaps twice during the limbo pages that my copy did not contain. Unfortunately for me, I was not privy to this expected piece of common knowledge. Thinking of Hibernia as the sole home to Celtic life created a dissonance in my mind between the frequent references to Gallic society and the map I was trying to form of the of the Iron Age; I was excising anything that wasn’t labeled “Celtic” from my image, exiling the discussion of “Gaul” into preamble or background prep. That trenchant ignorance is my burden, and Discovery should not have to suffer for it; if you already knew, like most people that I asked, that the pre-Roman Celts dominated most of Continental Europe, you’ll do fine.
The neat historical facts bubble to the surface through the slow boil of geometry and terrain: again, I cannot emphasis enough that both the title and the subtitle are extremely clear and literal on the position of what subject matter they cover. I brought into Discovery a willful expectation of historical vignettes concerning new interpretations of Celtic life rather than a deep discussion of Celtic cartography, astronomy, architecture, and federal planning: in short, mapping. As far as books about mapping go, I enjoyed The Lost Art of Finding Our Way and On the Map more, likely because both are broad overviews of basic cartographic techniques and history. Discovery assumes the reader’s basic competence and engages in high level discussions about very specific topics.
The fun historical tales do pepper the text, though always with some geographical bent:
At the time of Boudica’s rebellion, Westminster was an island. A medieval charter described it as a ‘locus valde terribilis’— ‘a truly terrible place.’. Despite the mirthful interpretation of the word by Westminster schoolboys, ‘terribilis’ means ‘awe-inspiring’ or ‘venerable’. Thorney Island was a sacred place. One of the earliest Christian churches had been founded there, according to a sixth-century legend, by King Lucius of Britain. No king of that name ever existed, and so ‘Lucius’, like ‘Luc’, is probably a corruption of the name of the god ‘Lugh’ or ‘Lugus’. An early British chronicle stated that the primitive church was replaced by a temple to Apollo, then restored in AD 488 by Ambrosius Aurelianus, the Romano-British chieftain whose name, like that of Apollo, evokes the immortal sun.
The lingering visual evidence of pagan sites turned Roman cult temples and then Christian holy sites is always appealing from a cultural perspective; time, stretched out across millennia, conflates mythology. But the rigid structure of time brings concerns of its own:
In Britain, the clock of ‘history’ does not begin to tick until ten o’clock in the morning on a summer’s day in 55 BC, when Julius Caesar anchored off the Kentish coast. The following year, he returned with water-clocks, measured the length of the English summer day (longer than on the Continent), and brought prehistory to an end, at least in the south of England.
Turn the water-clock back two hundred years and the Romans were not the technological savants nor astute timekeepers they would become:
In 263 BC, in the early stages of the war on the Carthaginians, Roman legions captured the Sicilian town of Catania. Among the trophies that were carried back to Rome was a curious invention called the horologium solarium. The sun cast the shadow of an upright stick onto a flat surface marked with lines and, in this way, indicated the hours of the day. The device was set up on a column facing the Senate House in Rome. For ninety-nine years, it gave the citizens of Rome the wrong time of day until finally someone realized what people on the Mediterranean coast of Gaul had known two centuries before: that the height of the sun and the angle of its shadow vary with latitude. Unless the earth shifted on its axis, a sundial made for Catania would never be accurate four degrees further north in Rome.
It is a fair point to be reminded from time to time that the modern image of Celtic society was built from scraps of Roman writing; there is a certain amount of bias written into the system. Discovery does its best to shift the frame of the Iron Age from purely Roman records to a Celtic perspective, but the lack of writings require interpretation of whatever evidence did stand against the passage of time; architecture. Viewing and extrapolating fragments of the a pre-Roman road system—built around the solar solstice and equinox lines—allow, if not outright require, that Celtic citizens had access to complex mathematical educations:
Those diligent, ambitious children of the Iron Age who ‘[flocked] to the Druids in great numbers’, said Caesar, subjected themselves to the longest education in the ancient world. A Greek education began when the boy was seven, and usually lasted no more than eleven years. A pupil of the Druids remained in full-time education for as long as it takes a modern student to progress from nursery school to a doctoral degree. The family would lose a useful, intelligent child, but the advantages were enormous: not only were Druids exempt from tax and military service, they also settled disputes concerning inheritances and property boundaries, and they had the power to excommunicate offenders by banning them from sacrifices, which was the worst of all punishments.
This is a far cry from Pomponius Mela’s noble savage squatting in the woods. The counterculture pleasure in tweaking the nose of a Classicist curriculum that continues to laud the Roman life adds a joie de vivre to some of the more dazzling tales:
Educated Celts clearly enjoyed bamboozling foreigners. When Caesar was collecting material on the Hercynian Forest for his book on the Gallic War, a native informant told him of a creature called the ‘alces’ (elk) which, having no joints in its legs, was forced to spend its entire life standing up. Caesar recorded the information as he heard it: to sleep, the alces leant on a tree, so that hunters simply sawed through most of a tree-trunk in a glade where the animal was known to rest, and then returned to collect their prostrate prey.
To the mirthless conqueror of the Gauls, the Celtic mind was a closed book. He knew that the Gauls made fun of the Romans ‘because of our short stature compared to their great size’, but his attempt to explain the taunts of the Aduatuci tribe when they saw the legionaries building a siege-tower is so clumsy that is takes a while to realize that what the Gauls were shouting from the ramparts was, ‘You’re so short, you need a tower to see over the wall!’
It’s nice to see some history from the point of view of the unsung underdog: Discovery does its best to find interesting stories and reach strong conclusions, all drawn from extensive cartographic research. What tales that are told tend to be great, but you need to push through a lot of technical, tedious detail to get to them. If you’re looking for history in broad swaths, you should look elsewhere. If you’ve a sneaking suspicion that the heretofore unknowable pattern of nemetons scattered throughout France assemble around the path the sun traces during its solstice, you’ve found your next book.