Talk:Scottish mythology

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Scottish mythology is within the scope of WikiProject Scotland, which aims to improve Wikipedia's coverage of Scotland and Scotland-related topics. If you would like to participate, visit the project page.	Scotland Portal
Start	This article has been rated as start-Class on the quality scale.
High	This article has been rated as high-importance on the importance scale.
Article Grading: The article has been rated for quality and/or importance but has no comments yet. If appropriate, please review the article and then leave comments here to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article and what work it will need.
WikiProject Scotland To-do: edit  Peer review — general community input. Featured Portal Candidates — our ultimate short-term goal is to achieve Featured status for the portal. Featured Portal Candidate — 23 April 2007; result, Featured Portal Status awarded, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

	Mythology Portal This article is supported by WikiProject Mythology . This project provides a central approach to Mythology-related subjects on Wikipedia. Please participate by editing the article, and help us assess and improve articles to good and 1.0 standards, or visit the wikiproject page for more details.
Start	This article has been rated as start-Class on the Project's quality scale. (If you rated the article please give a short summary at comments to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses.)

There is almost nothing of use here to a Wikipedia user who wants to know what mythological information (of the religious kind) survives in Scotland. What are the literary sources? What was preserved in folklore and oral tradition? Anybody have anything to contribute in that vein? QuartierLatin1968 19:43, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

I've never contributed to this page., but I can give some idea of the sources. There are loads of early modern collectors of Highland, Lowland and Galloway folklore, as well as Scottish-derived Gaelic texts such as the Book of the Dean of Lismore and the Lebor Bretnach, medieval historical works and various saints lives compendia such as the Breviary of Aberdeen. The subject is simply gigantic, but not well studied. - Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ) 19:48, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

There is something of a clash of terminologies between anthropological uses of the term "myth" and popular notions of gods and goddesses. Early folklorists (basically most people before the 1950s) had naive notions about "primitive cultures" that simply aren't useful any more. If WikiPedia writers want to glean sources for archetypes of deities that appeared in Scotland, they could do no worse than to read Anne Ross's "Pagan Celtic Britain". Gaelicmichael 22:25, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

An additional n.b.: Ronald Hutton's book (I think tiitled) "Pagan Gods of the British Isles" has lots of useful warnings for those who think that compiling a list of pagan gods is a trivial task!! Gaelicmichael 22:27, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Re clash of terminologies: Yes indeed; I was a little disappointed to see that this page had been moved from Scottish folklore to Scottish mythology, because it seemed that the former was more to the point. But not being familiar with the Scottish literature on the subject, I couldn't be sure. QuartierLatin1968 03:45, 15 April 2006 (UTC)