BOOK REVIEW: THE CELTIC BABY NAMES BOOK
The
Book: The Celtic Baby Names Book
The Author: Compiled by Gillian Delaforce
Publication
Info: Published May, 2007, by Vermilion, an imprint of Ebury Publishing, Random House UK Ltd, London
Author’s
Track Record: No
further information
was provided by the publisher.
What You Get:
Any time you wander into the world of Celtic
baby names, you can get lost in a labyrinth of names, where
it becomes difficult to separate fact from fiction, history
from myth, and scholarship from guesswork. Even the genetic
origins of the people referred to as Celts is a hotly-debated
academic argument.
To the author's credit, this difficulty is
squarely acknowledged in the short but useful introduction
to The Celtic Baby Names Book. The author states that:
"The
old names that came down through the oral tradition of story-telling
have many variations of spelling, as nothing was written down...The
derivation of names is a very imprecise science. Similar-sounding
Gaelic words may mean different things, hence various sources
will give quite dissimilar meanings. This does not necessarily
mean that one is right and one is wrong, just that there are
different valid interpretations."
Beyond the introduction,
the book is
basically a dictionary of names, with none of the trimmings
usually found in today's baby name books. There are no lists,
no popularity charts, no graphs plotting the rise and fall
of a name over the last century. Just an alphabetized dictionary
of about 2500 names with definitions. There are more boys'
names than girls', a fact that is noted in the introduction.
Many of the
names have been used for both boys and girls.
One shortcoming
of the book
is if you are seeking a specific type of Celtic name, such
as a name of Irish origin, or Welsh, or Scottish, you have
no alternative but to scan through the listings looking for
those words to jump out at you. The names are alphabetized
without regard to any other filter. On the other hand, it's
a lot of fun to browse through the pages of these Celtic names,
just letting your fancy take you where it will. From Rhona,
named after a Scottish island, to Banadel, the name of an early
Welsh king, to Glastenen, the Cornish name meaning "red
oak," the book is a treasury of Celtic names, both familiar
and obscure. It's a labyrinth you'll enjoy being lost in for
a while.