Posted: May 24, 2000 at 13:17:14: by Jason Clarke
: Beautiful, of human proportion, immortal, magical, great craftsmen and artists, poetic and musical, mighty at war.
: Am I talking about Tolkien's Elves or the Sidhe? Actually both - just a few similarities, but telling ones.
: Celtic mythology and belief-systems had some unique features but a great deal of it had a common basis with that of other Indo-European peoples. The Romans had little trouble identifying the Gallic and British gods with their own, as many double inscriptions testify (Sulis-Minerva, Taranis-Jupiter etc). Even the Germans were not that far off from the same continuum the German god Tiw is identical to Jupiter and Zeus and is found with the same addition of -Father ie Tiw-fader, Jiu-pater, Zeus-pitar.Hmmm...your similarities between the Elves and the Side are interesting, and I'll take those into consideration.
But as for the similarities with the gods...I find those much more suspect. The early classical observers labeled Lug as Mercury. Two millenia of bad ethnography has created a lot of "connate" gods that have only the most basic common origins.
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