Ten Thousand Saints: A Study in Irish and European Origins [Paperback]

When it was first published in 1972, Hubert Butlers pioneering masterwork was received with scepticism by his contemporaries. He used linguistics to trace the origins of myths and saints back to pre-Celtic Ireland and Europe, and showed how these stories and names  ancestors of half-forgotten tribes  became absorbed by Christian mythology. The early Irish wove their stories, as did the Greeks, the Hebrews and all early peoples, from the migration of tribes and by wordplay with their time-battered, unstable names. Ten Thousand Saints raises fascinating problems that take us beyond the frontiers of recorded history to the remote movements of European peoples, to the clash of tribes and tongues. As modern DNA sampling and genome-mapping, seen in the regional patterning of todays Irish surnames, reinforce Butlers findings, his methods and thesis are now gaining scholarly recognition. This new edition, amplified and updated, demonstrates ingeniously coded histories  via place names, legends, hero-figures, saints and ancestors  that relate to the wanderings and minglings of all the great tribes of Europe, extending back to Neolithic times.

Ten Thousand Saints raises fascinating problems that take us beyond the frontiers of recorded history to the remote movements of European peoples, to the clash of tribes and tongues. As modern DNA sampling and genome-mapping reinforce Butlers findings, his methods and thesis are now gaining scholarly recognition.

HUBERT BUTLER was born in Kilkenny on 23 October 1900. Educated in England at Charterhouse and St Johns College, Oxford, he travelled extensively throughout Europe during the twenties and thirties before returning in 1941 to Bennettsbridge, Co. Kilkenny, where he lived until his death on 5 January 1991. Market gardener, journalist, essayist and historian, his works include Escape from the Anthill, The Children of Drancy, Grandmother and Wolfe Tone and In the Land of Nod  all of which gained him internal€