Cruvamendica (Goidilic Cavalry) Description Incorrect

[oudysseos]

Yes, Riastradh, I am afraid that you are going to have to do better and throw out some names that support your claims.

while almost no such parts [of chariots] are known from the Irish archaeological record

we can not assume that the chariots described in the Irish literature actually describe Iron Age chariots

These are quotes from the sources you yourself linked. And even if the Tain and other 12th century Irish sources are part of an older Oral tradition (big if, actually), what's to say that the Oral tradition is an irreproachable source of detail about Ireland in the 3rd century bce? That just doesn't necessarily follow, particularly without archaeological evidence to back it up. There are any number of ways that the oral tradition would have been influenced and mutated in the 1500 years that separate its recording and your claims about Irish Warrior Culture. For example, Homer was around for more than a thousand years before the very earliest recorded references to episodes from the Tain, and chariot-driving heroes figure prominently in the Iliad. If even only the story of Achilles dragging Hector by the heels reached Ireland as a travellers tail, a monk hunched over his desk in some damp, cold scriptorium might have thrown a chariot or two into the folk-tale he was recording just to enlighten the tedium. Or maybe the clan chief who commissioned the bards recitation wanted chariots.

I think that bovis post is very telling: the changes that you seem to think are necessary to the unit description are actually very minor and really are already mostly encompassed by what has already been written. So where's the beef?

P.S. Concerning bogs: as I posted before, Ireland, with 85,000 square kilometers, has ca. 12,000 square kilometers of bogland. Great Britain, with 244,000 square kilometers, has ca. 16,000 square kilometers of bogland. Those are current figures, including in both countries a fair amount of man-made boglands. Also, some land that was wet in 300 BCE will have been drained for farming and so on. Even so, it seems fairly clear that Ireland is indeed soggier than Britain, especially considering that at least 2/3 of British boglands are north of the Highland line, leaving the south even drier relative to Ireland. This may explain why once you leave the safety of the M50, Ireland seems infested by hairy-backed muck savages.