Oh my beautiful gods! Please don't tell me that you seriously condone this "work" of pseudo-scholastic tripe?! (And, that's being generous.) This is one of the worse books that I've ever before read on ancient Pagan history; it was a direct offense to my intelligence, which I take directly to heart. Where the bloody-hell was his objectivity, to allow the evidence and present academic leanings to shape his views? What we have, here, is not a work of objectivity, but a polemical rant (and one that has been purposefully justified to one *extremist* side that was, even at the time of writing, in the process of collapse or revision). Some of the MANY problematic habitual traps that ol' Prof. Hutton falls into are numerous, but a few will suffice: He dismisses Inbdo-European Studies from the outset; he couches his personal opinions as if they are established facts; academic conclusions/ consensus are not mentioned unless they are his own extremist views [such as the works of noted Celtic scholars, or Germanic specialists, etc.]; he frequently misrepresents the views of numerous sources he claims agree with him, such as Kieth Thomas and Prof. Monter]; he writes with such an authoritative tones that it is bound to intimidate any contrarian views by either other scholars in the field or or Pagans reading his books [even if they come across a scholar who portrays history different from Hutton they may not accept it because Hutton has a severely unyielding tone of voice]; and his Logical Fallacies are just as numerous: One especial pet peeve of mine is Special Pleading (he draws arguments based upon very weak similarities while rejecting any disimilarities, yet, he, earlier, castigated another scholar for drawing a conclusion based upon VERY strong similarities]; observational selectivity [or, not giving hius readership the "full story"]; he makes sweeping generalizations that are, when thoroughly examined, usually flawed quite deeply, etc. I could go on, and on, and on! :o) Quite honestly, I dsimply can't trust him as a reliable resource--and, this book is the worse one he'd ever written! I was surprised at what I had learned from specialist scholars and academic journals...these were academic views that were never even introduced withion this particular text. And, in so doiung,m he treated them as though they were non-existant, by default. Honestly, I am STUNNED beyond all reason that Prof. Hutton was never publically censured by his peers for his writings! I know full well that if *I* had written anything of this calibre, I would hope to the gods that someone would call me on my crap; and, I have every suspicion that they would, too.