mythology course comparitive essay on celtic and germanic cultures

Most of our knowledge of early Celtic culture comes from Latin historians and from an extensive body of early Irish texts composed between 700 and 1000 AD. These include native law texts as well as heroic prose narratives and intricately crafted rhymed verse in hundreds of different meters. There are a few early texts from Celtic Wales as well, but paradoxically most of the surviving Welsh stories about the legendary Celtic king Arthur are translations from earlier …

…texts from the third western branch of Indo-European, Italic. We tend to associate Latin verse with the meter of Virgils Aeneid (dactylic hexameter), but this is a Greek meter, and was not used by the Romans until their military conquest of Greece brought them into contact with the poetry of Homer and Sappho. The Latin alliterative charm for fruitful land quoted in an agricultural treatise by Cato looks more like Beowulf than like the Aeneid.