Celtic/Irish History & Mythology

[Marshal Murat]

Could anyone point me to some good websites or books on
1)Celtic Mythology
2)Celtic History & Culture
3)Irish Myth
4)Irish history and culture

All at or before Iron Age?

[Antagonist]

The House of Bards (when it works, anyone who wants a webpage to last more than a week should avoid GeoCities) is good, a very extensive collection of literary material, Classical writings touching on the Celtic peoples, Welsh and Irish mythological literature, etc.

The Corpus of Electronic Texts(ahaha) is the biggest and most widely used collection of Irish primary sources on the web, though there is no easily digestible context and most of the stuff is post "Iron Age"

There are some better ones which I can't remember, I'll post them if I can find them. It would be nice to have more though, there is an astonishing amount of obsolete scholarship and misinformation (running the gauntlet from 18th-century Celtophobes like John Pinkerton to New Age mysticism about how they were matriarchies worshipping the Earth Goddess or whatever) about them.

Antagonist

[Watchman]

You know, strictly speaking we're still living "Iron Age" - after all, what's the most common metal used for tools and weapons ?

[Antagonist]

It is a fairly vague term at the best of times. IIRC though as a descriptor of a historical period, as far as the Celtic-people are concerned the Iron Age begins with the rise of the La Tene culture and ends with the conquest by Rome, except in Ireland and Scotland where it ends with Christianization (mid 5th Century for Ireland, late 5th and 6th for Scotland)

Antagonist

[Watchman]

Oh, I'm aware of its "starting date" use. I just don't recall normally seeing any references to it "ending" at some point (partly, no doubt, due to the aforementioned reason) - people instead start using other denominations based on who exactly owns a region (eg. "Celtic Britain" or "Sassanid Persia"), some more removed reference point (say, "early Roman period"), major changes ("Migration Period"/"Dark Ages") etc.

The "[material] Age" designation is after all primarily a technological one, and as mentioned iron has yet to lose its ubiquitous usefulness.

[Antagonist]

Hey, I'm not defending it, just providing context for its techincal use. It is used "officially" sometimes, such as in Ireland, in order to avoid more controversial labels like "Celtic" etc.

Antagonist

[Kralizec]

You know, strictly speaking we're still living "Iron Age" - after all, what's the most common metal used for tools and weapons ?

Most cultures still used bronze well into the iron age. So maybe history will look back to this stage of history as the "plastic age"?

[Watchman]

People also used stone tools for most of the Bronze Age (owing to the expense and rarity of bronze) and copper by itself, but it's still called Bronze Age.

[Kralizec]

People also used stone tools for most of the Bronze Age (owing to the expense and rarity of bronze) and copper by itself, but it's still called Bronze Age.

Thank you for proving my point further

[Watchman]

Since when did plastic come with socioeconomic and cultural shifts comparable to those that accompanied the adoption of bronze and iron ?

[Kralizec]

It was a joke, as I tried to emphasize with the clown smiley