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

Robb, Graham

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 039308163X ISBN 13: 9780393081633

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013

Synopsis

A treasure hunt that uncovers the secrets of one of the world’s great civilizations, revealing dramatic proof of the extreme sophistication of the Celts, and their creation of the earliest accurate map of the world.

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 measurements: 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.

50 illustrations

About this title

About the Author

Graham Robb is the author of several award-winning books on literature and history. His book The Discovery of France won both the Duff Cooper and Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prizes. For Parisians, the City of Paris awarded him the Grande Médaille de la Ville de Paris. He lives on the English–Scottish border.

Reviews

Starred Review. Presenting one of the most astonishing, significant discoveries in recent memory, Robb, winner of the Duff Cooper Prize and Ondaatje Award for The Discovery of France, upends nearly everything we believe about the history—or, as he calls it, €œprotohistory€�—of early Europe and its barbarous Celtic tribes and semimythical Druids. Popularly dismissed as superstitious, wizarding hermits, Robb demonstrates how the Druids were perhaps the most intellectually advanced thinkers of their age: scientists and mathematicians who, through an intimate knowledge of €œsolstice lines,€� organized their towns and cities to mirror the paths of their Sun god, in turn creating €œthe earliest accurate map of the world.€� In his characteristically approachable yet erudite manner, Robb examines how this network came to be and also how it vanished, trampled over by a belligerent Rome, which has previously received credit for civilizing Europe—though in Robb's account, Caesar, at the helm, appears dim, unwitting, and frankly lucky, and the (often literally) deeply buried Celtic beliefs and innovations seem more relevant in modern Europe than previously assumed. Like the vast and intricate geographical latticework that Robb has uncovered, the book unfurls its secrets in an eerie, magnificent way—a remarkable, mesmerizing, and bottomless work. 50 illus. Agent: Gill Coleridge, Rogers Coleridge & White (U.K.). (Nov.)

Were an atlas of the Celtic world before the Roman conquests ever created, it could derive from the information amassed in this volume. The author of a prior geographical investigation, The Discovery of France (2007), Robb remarks that this one begins with a scholar’s hypothesis that Celtic settlements, sacred places, and roads were sited on abstract lines based on summer and winter solstices. Off and running after explaining one such line, named for the classical hero Hercules, Robb proceeds to delineate scores of lines at whose intersections archaeological evidence of Celtic habitation has been excavated in modern France and Britain. Dozens of diagrammatic maps visualize Robb’s somewhat complex accounts of Celtic cartography, which developed in the course of Celtic migrations. When one of these reached Rome in 387 BCE, Celts entered a written history that Robb taps for his narratives of Celtic resistance and defeat in Rome’s invasions of Gaul and Britannia. Assiduous research into the obscurities of an ancient culture, including its Druids, Robb’s opus should lure readers interested in the Celtic domains. --Gilbert Taylor

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 039308163X
• ISBN 13: 9780393081633
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416