History is big business these day. Yes, ‘past studies’ at it will no doubtedly soon be called in our universities, makes stars of sensible pullover and tank-top wearing lectures as they grace our tv screens and stare at us from book-shelves.
The good news is that it’s not all history about Hitler! One popular period, lets say, the second division after the ever fashionable fascists, the horrible Tudors and the marmite Victorians is the Celts … or as they’ve now been re-branded, the Iron Agers.
Yes, as a Celt, or Iron Ager, I can’t help but notice that the Celts are slowly being airbrushed from history. Whilst Romans get copyright credit for their Roman roads and villas and Vikings for their rape and pillage, the Celts have become mutes. They don’t speak a language nor have a civilization, they’re just people who played about with metal. For Celts, see Iron Age.
Why’s this? In a lecture to mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Celtic League the journalist, historian and novelist, Peter Beresford Ellis took an honest look at the history of the League – its success and failures – since it was founded by political Celts who wanted to see a future for their languages and nations – people like Per Denez and Yann Fouere of Brittany.
Beresford Ellis notes that there’s a recent, rather silly argument, that the Celts weren’t a racial group. But then as Peter Beresford Ellis argues, those who take the sides of Celts (usually speakers or supporters of a Celtic language) never argued that there was a Celtic blood group in the first place. There’s a school of thought which has grown in popularity since the 1990s by historians such as the Sheffield University archaeologist, John Collis or Dr Simon James, author of ‘The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention?’ and the popular tv and radio programmes like Time Team, that the Celts are an invented people.
The argument is that the Celts were ‘invented’ in the 18th century by people like the Welsh linguist Edward Lhuyd. But then, hey, Lhuyd couldn’t even spell his own name correctly, so, who’d take his word for it? Or, there’s the idea that the Celts didn’t think of themselves as Celts. However, the Celto-sceptic fail to remember that, erm, they did. As Cesar himself said; “qui ipsorum lingua Celtae, nostra Galli appellantur” – in their own language they are called Celts, in our tongue Gauls.
In a lecture to mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Celtic League Peter Beresford Ellis notes that ‘the only accurate way to define Celtic is by language and attendant culture. A Celt is simply one who speaks, or is known to have spoken within the modern historical period, a Celtic language.’
It is this definition which the National Library of Wales took, and took for granted as the basis for any discussion on the Celts, as they put together their Celtic Voices exhibition in 2004 which can also be seen online. The exhibition, which was translated into French by students at Brest University in Brittany (see the Celtic link?), chronicles the Celtic nations and languages. And hey, there’s not a sentence about DNA or blood group, why? Because it’s not relevant, any more than it would be relevant to talk of a Latin blood group or DNA. The definition of Celt is their language and attendant culture. It is this definition which is used by august institutions such as the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies which is located next door to the National Library of Wales and makes great use of the Library’s collections.
To brush over the fact that rivers, mountains, settlements on ‘Iron Age’ Britain and mainland Europe have Celtic names is to deny those people the dignity of existing. It’s to think, or give the impression to readers and tv viewers, of England as an empty land before the Roman and then Anglo-Saxon conquest. It’s to deny that the indigenous Celtic people of England were either absorbed, fled or ethnically cleansed.
It’s to deny, or down-play, that the language spoken thousands of people (not all of whom, thankfully, are ‘ethnically’ Welsh) has been the only language spoken continuously in Wales since before the Roman invasion. It’s to deny, or down-play, that Welsh, or an ancient form of it, was also once the language of England.
Two thousand years later, the Celts are still contentious.
Siôn Jobbins
Ah, so, because everyone speaks English today, everyone is English, right? That is the prevailing methodology for defining Celts right? It is so flawed to be beyond belief that this is held up as a model for defining a people. Go to eastern Europe and try the same thing with related languages there. Tell them they are all the same and you would be chased out of town. The ancient Celt is a leftover of historical guesswork that became enshrined in national identity, which makes it untouchable today, despite its inherent flaws.
The history of Wales is important, the history of the Welsh language is important, but it is not a Celtic identity. There is no pan identity across Europe or Britain even. Cite Cesar? He stuck his head around the door, blinked and left – hardly anthropological research now is it? Banging on about Celts does the opposite, it muddies the water, clouds the views of the general public. They do not think Celtic and dwell on such languages being spoken in Wales, they hear Celtic and think of the bits of Britain that are not English.
The word being so rift with continued contemporary connotations makes it an ailment of public perceptions of the Iron Age, and should be killed off once and for all. Let the linguists play with it if you must, but dont kid yourselves into thinking that keeping the Celt in our interpretations does anything but hinder the ability of the public to understand what on earth it is that you are talking about.
Ehm, well, I come from Central/Eastern Europe, my mother tongue is Czech, which like Polish, Sorbian, Slovak, Russian, and many, many others, is a Slavic language. Now, I would certainly not vouchsafe to say that the Slavs form or formed a homogeneous civilisation. On the other hand, apart from the lingusitic connection, we do share common cultural features in the same way, I believe, as the Celts did and still do. If anything muddles the public’s view of the matter ‘Celts’, it is the nineteenth century heritage, that is to say, the claim that Celts were a nation in the modern sense of the word. I say there are and were peoples who you can call Slavic, Germanic, or Celtic, because those adjectives involve a cluster of solid common cultural phenomena. The word Celtic is useful, provided that it is used with caution and in an honest way. Once upon a time, there was a unique, ‘barbarian’ civilisation, which shared a common lingua franca, which happened to be Common Celtic. Apart from sharing a common linguistic medium, the people, which inhabited large part of the ancient world, also produced and traded artefacts of a very specific design and very probably possesed a common lore and oral literature. None of these aspects might have been present to the same extent in any part of the Celtic world and it is beyond any doubt that an Haeduus, an ally of Caesar, would not have liked to coupled with some wild Briton or ferocious Galatos. But it is very probable that he would have understood those and he would acknowledged that they did certain things very similarly, that is to say, if he had been an honest Haeduus, like good Diviciacus. And those people, whoever they were ethnically, left a tradition, in language and in art, again variously present in the countries in which Celtic languages are spoken, and in the countries, where they used to be spoken. Look at La Tene art and Irish mediaeval manuscripts, read Mabinogi and the reports of Classical geographers, compare the placenames in the Czech Republic and Spain, and see the common linguistic thought behind many of them. You’ll get a very complex picture, for sure, a palimpsest of variously congruous fields, but the usefulness of the abstraction, in any one of those fields, art or lingustics, will be apparent. And the abstraction must be questioned, of course, but shall we just say that the theory of relativity is rubbish, because we now possess a more accurate picture of the cosmos. No, it is part of the tradition of human thought, and in human thought and in language even an apple is abstraction. But shall we deny the existence of apples because of there sheer variabilty?
Celtic Sceptic and Hynek – thank you for your comments. Diolch am eich sylwadau. It’s good to have a debate on the new-look NLW blog.