"I asked on that thread about the evidence for some of the statements made but didn't get much further."


And I pointed you towards articles on Samhain, including the ever-reliable Wikipedia overview - not sure what else you'd have expected me to do!

These write-ups are based (in some cases!) on learned research, but even the most eminent scholar is only striving to interpret what was written down either later as an attempt to explain surviving tradition or by hostile contemporaries such as Caesar, so everything comes down to us, as it were, through a prism. If anyone had a hotline to 'what we genuinely know about the origins of Samhain', you wouldn't be able to get to them for scholars, neo-pagans and romanticists pumping them for every last detail.

The 'druidism' of the Eisteddfod is from the late 18th century rather than Victorian times, with Iolo Morganwg organising an event on Primrose Hill in London, though it was in Victorian times that the two bodies, the Court of the Bards (Gorsedd y Beirdd) and the organising committee of the Royal National Eisteddfod of Wales joined together to run the annual event. The whole 'druidic' aspect is for spectacle only, nothing to do with history.


Lhiats,

Bobby Bob