The Druid's Prayer and Its Many Versions

Several modern Druid orders use versions of a text commonly called the Druid's Prayer, generally traced to eighteenth-century Welsh Druid revivalist Iolo Morganwg, though Morganwg is now known by scholars to have fabricated or substantially embellished considerable material he presented as ancient Druidic tradition, meaning even this relatively widely shared modern Druid text carries a documented history of contested authenticity that responsible discussion of Druidry needs to acknowledge rather than obscure.

Different orders have modified and adapted this and other core texts over subsequent generations, producing multiple distinct versions rather than one single authoritative wording, a variation this entry treats as itself informative about Druidry's character as an actively evolving modern tradition rather than a fixed ancient one. Given this documented history of nineteenth-century embellishment underlying some of modern Druidry's most widely used material, and the genuine diversity among specific contemporary orders, this entry limits itself to recording that history and the movement's general character rather than presenting any specific order's current prayer text as representative or as more authentically ancient than it demonstrably is.