Seven Stars in the North

A claim has circulated for years: that ancient Celtic tradition preserved an unbroken inheritance stretching back to Vedic India - seven sacred seers, seven ruling planets, a celestial bear watching over a queen's throne in the North. It's been cited and repeated across popular Celtic mythology and Indo-European studies alike. It has rarely been checked against the primary sources.

Seven Stars in the North checks it.

Working from the earliest surviving Sanskrit, Latin, and Old Irish texts - not the retellings built on top of them - this book tests the claim source by source: the word behind Manu and the Germanic "first man," genuinely inherited across three thousand years; Queen Medb's seven sons, never quite seven in any two Irish manuscripts that name them; Arthur's own name, caught between three rival derivations no Celtic scholar has settled; a bronze calendar buried in Gaulish soil for two thousand years, and what it does and doesn't actually record.

For readers of Ronald Hutton's Druid histories, and anyone who has ever wondered how much of "ancient" Celtic mythology is actually ancient - this is a source-by-source accounting of what real inscriptions, real cognates, and real comparative mythology can support, and what got added later by writers who wanted the resemblance to be more than it was.