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" The songs of our ancestors

are also the songs of our children "

The Druid Way

THE LEGACY OF DRUIDRY

June 12th, 2016

A Legacy of Druids coverA few months back, an interesting new book was published: A Legacy of Druids – Conversations with Druid leaders of Britain, the USA and Canada, past and present, edited by Ellen Evert Hopman.

Ellen asked me to write the foreword, which I began like this:

THE LEGACY OF MODERN DRUIDRY

To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye,
to restore it…
Margaret Fairless Barber

Ellen Hopman gathered the material for this book twenty years ago. When I was invited to write the foreword, I was hesitant. Would anyone be interested in what some modern-day Druids said or wrote two decades ago? But when I read the interviews Ellen has collected here, I realised that they articulate most of the issues contemporary Druidry is still concerned with today, and the insights they offer are as valid now as they were twenty years ago. This in itself would be sufficient justification for publication, but in addition I found I could engage with the material in another way. In reading the interviews, I had the benefit of hindsight – twenty years on I could see what ambitions had been realised, and whether any fears had proved justified. In addition, I could imagine how a similar collection gathered today might differ, and I could start to get some sense of what legacy modern Druidry might be leaving the world.
As the opening quote suggests, when we look backward, we have the opportunity to refresh our perceptions, and this is what this collection offers – the potential to refresh our vision of what Druidry is, and what it can offer that is of lasting value.

Failed Predictions, Hopes and Fears

Let’s begin with what this collection shows us about the contributors’ hopes and fears… To read the rest, click here which will take you to foreword, which is in the essay section of my website.

You can find the book on Amazon UK here  and Amazon USA here.