Dear friends,
This may be a bit simplistic, but could the solution to the problem be
simply this -
Just as many - all ? - Christians were given the names of Christian saints,
it is not reasonable to suppose that many ordinary Celtic men and women were
given names that were either identical with the name of one of their
deities, or were a male/female/ diminutive version of that name ? And is it
not at least possible that some of these people became Christian converts
and even saints ?
To suggest that a similarity between the name of an early Christian saint
and a pre-Christian pagan divinity means that the "saint" is a "fake" seems
to me to be taking scepticism too far, and to miss an important cultural
point. Even if elements in the myth surrounding the Christian saint appear
as a sanitised version of the appropriate pagan equivalent, need this mean
more than that the legend of the pagan god attached itself to the Christian
saint because of the similarity in the name and not the other way round ?
An example of this might be that a Martian scholar of the 29th Century might
postulate that there was never any such person as Princess Diana of Wales
because she is clearly a 20th C version of a Roman Goddess ....
BMC
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