The Druids

Since the little that is actually recorded about Druids turns out to be half classical authors paraphrasing each other, a full-sized book on the subject looks like a marvel. It proves to be a comic marvel, for much of Mr. Piggott’s text is devoted not to Druids, but to modern fantasies about them — speculations by seventeenth-century ur-archaeologists, ceremonies concocted by dubious Welsh poets, the pious whimsies of William Blake, and the various groups who romp around Stonehenge in bedsheets.