Welsh Journals

manage to be. He is always a little embarrassed about Iolo Morganwg's activities (calling him a 'career forger' is the closest we get to warmth on this) and some of his reaction to 'purism' in Welsh place-names seems a little excessive. The difficulties of transatlantic bibliography may contribute to a few mistakes in the final (and generally invaluable) chapter on 'Historical Writing in Wales'. Martin Daunton has become Michael Daunton; Dot Jones is renamed Dot Smith, and a never published (or written) book by Deirdre Beddoe and Anne Jones (The Welsh Maid) is referred to as if it has been consulted. This section would be more serviceable to students if it were as specific about articles as it is about books, but undoubtedly this is a constraint of space. The publishers rightly say that it is a challenging book. It is not a textbook for beginning students in Welsh history, though the more advanced will gain much from it. It is probably the best book to recommend to readers with a good understanding of English history who want to know something of Wales. Writing such a book seems to have been one of his aims, and it is admirably fulfilled. Professor Jenkins's energy and reserve power rarely falter and he always has novel things to say. The only point where it flags a little is in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is as if he runs out of the insights provided by his detailed research and cannot quite reach out to grasp those given to him by growing up in Port Talbot, which sustain the later twentieth century more effectively. The account of the coal industry is (by his high standards) a little tired and routine, that of the slate industry the only time the word 'inadequate' ever crossed my mind, and while the chapter on 'Red Wales' is never less than competent and informed, it does not give the novel insights that the others do. These are the grouses of a reader who has become greedy because of the wealth of fare generally on display. Fifteen years ago it was possible to complain that research in Welsh history had run too far ahead of the desire to synthesize. Now there is almost a plethora of general studies, but this is one that deserves an honoured place amongst them. Port Talbot, Cambridge and Pennsylvania are all good vantage points from which to view Wales. In combination they produce even greater splendours. NEIL EVANS Coleg Harlech THE GODS OF THE CELTS. By Miranda Green. Alan Sutton, 1986; reprinted 1993. Pp. x, 257. 103 figs. £ 9.99. This study presents a synthesis of work (up to 1986) on the religious framework for the peoples of northern Europe during the Iron Age. It approaches religion through different categories of gods: Cults of Sun and Sky (ch. 2); Fertility and the Mother- Goddesses (ch. 3); War, Death and the Underworld (ch. 4); Water-Gods and Healers (ch. 5); and Animals and Animism (ch. 6). Such a study depends for the most part on silent archaeological artefacts. In which chapter should the Battersea shield be discussed? Was it an offering to a War-god (p. 105, fig. 50) or to a Water-deity (p. 139)? Or was it just lost? In the absence of an inscription (which we would not expect in prehistory), we are unlikely ever to know.