keep the Celtic languages alive. The sooner the Celts fused into “one homogeneous English speaking whole,” the better. He ignored the Bretons but presumably felt they should become French. However, Arnold recognised the wealth of the Celtic cultural achievements and felt they should be studied as an academic subject. The result of his plea was that the first chair of Celtic studies was established at Jesus College, Oxford, within a few years, with John Rhys becoming its first incumbent. By the 1880s there were also chairs of Celtic studies at Edinburgh, at Trinity College in Dublin, and at the University Colleges of Cork and Belfast. A new wave of study at scholarly level began and the ancient texts were identified and examined.

During the last two decades, there has been an extraordinary interest in Celtic culture and history. Departments of Celtic Studies have been opened at universities from as far afield as Nagoya, Japan; Sydney, Moscow, Oslo, Ottawa, and so forth around the world. Even UNESCO established a “Project for the Study and Promotion of Celtic Cultures” in 1984. And of all the subjects encompassed by Celtic studies, it is Celtic mythology that has achieved a great popularity, not only among university students but with a wider general public in many countries.

During the current century there have been countless popular retellings of the myths, while modern fantasy writers have seized upon characters or particular tales to create a new literature.

In Celtic mythology one enters into a fascinating world of fantasy that is remote from the world of Greek and Latin myth, and yet one is aware that the Celtic stories seem to share a curious Mediterranean warmth rather than fall under the brooding bleakness that permeates Nordic and Germanic myth. The English poet Laurie Lee once remarked that the Celts were Mediterraneans sheltering in the northern rain. It is difficult at times to realise that we are considering a north-west European culture. A happy spirit pervades even the tragedies. There is an eternal spirit of optimism. Death is never the conqueror and we are reminded that the Celts were one of the first cultures to evolve a sophisticated doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The druids taught that death is only a changing of place and that life goes on with all its forms and goods in the Otherworld. When a soul dies in this world, it is reborn in the Otherworld and when a soul dies in the Otherworld, it is reborn in this. Thus birth was greeted with