Spring Clean 2021 - Totally historically accurate fantasy Celtic army

My first foray into researching the Celts was to buy Celts by Captivating History – a book available from Amazon for about £10. At 100 pages long it promised to be a quick read that would give me a boost of Celtic knowledge.

The topics covered in the book (i.e. chapters) are: who are the Celts; the Celtic migrations; the many Celtic tribes of Europe; the Celtiberians; the Gallic wars; the Insular Celts; Celtic warriors; Celtic way of life; Celtic religion; and Celtic art.

The book gives a basic introduction to each topic, but with only about 20 pages per chapter it doesn’t have the space to go into depth.

The book itself is OK but not professional. Several images are taken from Wikipedia and are too blurry to really benefit the book, while another image was just a black box. Clearly it had not imported into the text properly and had not been picked up during the proof reading.

What I learned:

• the origins of the Celts aren’t certain as they date back so far.
• knowing about the Celts is difficult because they did not develop a written language – everything we know comes from the writings of other cultures (usually the Romans or Greeks) and from archaeology.
• they were never a unified nation or empire (in fact it was even punishable by death to try and become a high King), with most tribes being independent of each other but with many aspects of their culture in common.
• Celtic culture resolved around the upper class (i.e. warriors) raiding for luxuries which they used to pay the lower class (i.e. non-warriors) to do the menial tasks. They were also accomplished merchants – again to help them acquire luxury goods.