The Element Encyclopedia of the Celts

Storytelling has always been an important element in the Celtic psyche, and the edge between story and history has always been blurred. But a story, or the complex web of interlocking stories that made up the tribal myth, was what held Celtic society together. Every community needs an idea of itself in order to survive, a clear self-image that makes it possible to tell the difference between itself and other communities. This was why one tribe adopted one totem animal and another tribe adopted a different animal, and why one tribe adopted one species of tree, and another tribe a different species. “We are the elm people.” “We are the oak people. We are different.” That sense of special identity has always been important.

An important theme in this book is that the key to that sense of identity has changed through time. The basis, the foundation, of Celticness is not the same now as it was. What I hope to show is that in spite of this the roots of Celticness are deep; they are thousands of years old, much older than most modernday Celts realize.

PEOPLE WE KNOW

Sometimes we think of that early world of the Celts as being an anonymous tribal world, a place where we know no one. In fact we know a surprisingly large number of people who lived in that world and we will be meeting some of them in the first section of this book.

There were several kings in Britain whose names are known: Cassivellaunus (or Caswallawn), Cunobelin (or Cymbeline), Caratacus, Cogidumnus, Cartimandua the client queen of the Brigantes, Boudicca the warrior queen of the Iceni, Diviciacus the Druid king who visited Rome and befriended Cicero, and Vercingetorix the heroic Gaulish king who surrendered to Caesar rather than see his horses, or any more of his companions, killed. A few centuries later we stumble upon St. Patrick, St. Columba, and the ever-mysterious, ever-elusive figure of King Arthur.

Arthur has somehow moved across from history to myth, acquiring the character of a Celtic god along the way, and some of the mystification surrounding his life may reflect the religious beliefs of the time. Another section of this book is devoted to these beliefs.

The spirit world was integrated into the everyday Celtic world in a way that it no longer is today. There was no separation between the people and the spirits: the gods and goddesses who inhabited and controlled everything. The spirits were seen as residing within the natural features of the landscape. Every hill and headland, and every stream and spring, every forest and marsh had its own in-dwelling spirit. Worship was a matter of communing with the spirits in the places where they lived. People went to riverbanks to commune with the spirits of the river. They went to springs to commune with the sprites who looked after those magic places where life-giving water seeped out from the Underworld. There were temples and shrines, but a great deal of the mediation between the everyday world and the spirit world went on out in the landscape, in the open air.

Another section of this book looks at places that have special associations with the Celts: their settlements and strongholds, the scenes of their famous victories and defeats in battle, their sanctuaries and cult places.

There is also a section about the symbols and archetypes that underpin the culture of the Celts and another looking at a selection of their myths, legends, and folktales; the Celts have always been great storytellers.

The final section is a brief overview of the last thousand years or so of Celtic history, which falls into two halves. One is a phase of suppression and eclipse which I call the “Celtic twilight.” The second is a phase of rediscovery and re-emergence—the “Celtic revival”—which brings this review of the Celts up to the present day.

To go back to the beginning, the origin of the people first named the Celts by classical writers has long been the subject of speculation and discussion. The Celts of the Iron Age have an aura of mystery about them because, like the Minoans, they did not leave us any written literature of their own. There are some inscriptions and a fragmentary calendar, but there is no literature as such. The ancient Celts, either deliberately or inadvertently, surrounded themselves with mystery, like the hero Caswallawn with his magic plaid of invisibility.

Who were they? It is a question we are going to come back to again and again, and it is not an easy one to answer. BBC Wales has posted a Celts “factfile” on its educational website aimed at children. The first question is: “Who are the Celts?” It is answered by a simple timeline showing five blocks of time: “STONE AGE” (to 2000 BC), “BRONZE AGE” (to 600 BC), “IRON AGE CELTS” (to AD 50), “ROMANO-BRITISH” (to AD 400), followed by “CELTS OF TODAY.” There are two cartoon Celts: one wearing a helmet and waving a sword, for the Iron Age, and one wearing a yellow shirt and blue tracksuit bottoms for today. So, according to BBC Wales, “Celt” has two senses, describing a group of people today and another group of people 2,000 years ago. Then a link between them is made: “Their culture lives on in language, music, song, and literature.”

One of the questions this book needs to address is how far that is true. Is the Celticness of today really the same as that of 2,000 years ago?

BARBARIANS?

The earliest documented reference to the Celts comes from about 450 BC. Herodotus, long known as “the father of history,” mentions the “Keltoi” briefly:

The River Ister [Danube] begins in the country of the Celts and the city of Pyrene [perhaps Girona, near Barcelona] and flows through the middle of Europe, bisecting it. The Celts are outside the Pillars of Heracles, bordering the Kynesians, who dwell at the edge, farther toward the setting sun than all other inhabitants of Europe.

Herodotus was well traveled, but he admitted to knowing little about northern and western Europe. His Celts are located in relation to the source of the Danube, which he wrongly believed to be near the Pyrenees, but he emphasized that the Celts lived further west in Europe than any other race. This implies that he was thinking of them as being the people of the Atlantic fringe, not of central Europe, but the misplacing of the Danube source confuses the issue. Herodotus had perhaps heard that the Kynesians and Keltoi lived in the far west (the Bay of Biscay coast of northern Spain), not far from the Pyrenees, and that was true. It was also true that those people lived further west than the Pillars of Heracles, which were the Straits of Gibraltar (longitude 5° 21’W). The longitude of La Coruña in Galicia is 8° 25’W, three degrees further west. Herodotus was just mistaken about the course of the Danube. Nineteenthcentury scholars chose to correct him regarding the river’s source, which is in the Black Forest, and accordingly moved the homeland of the Celts to southern Germany as well.

Other fragmentary references to the Keltoi suggest that some Greeks may have used the name loosely to apply to all the tribes of northern and western Europe.

The ancient Greeks thought their own language was the hallmark of civilization and that people who gabbled away in foreign languages were automatically uncivilized—the meaningless “barbar” of their speech defined them as barbarians. So the Greeks tended to lump together all the indigenous peoples of northern, central, and western Europe—non-Mediterranean Europe—and treat them as if they were all the same, even though they were not.

By the fourth century BC, the Celts were regarded as one of the four peripheral peoples of the known world. To the south were the Ethiopians, to the east were the Scythians, and a long way farther off were the Indians. It was a simple, generalized view: only the Mediterranean world was in sharp focus.

The Roman writers of 2,000 years ago took the same view as their Greek predecessors, regarding all the non-Latin-speaking peoples who lived to the north as “barbarians.” The word was not used with any anthropological accuracy—even then—and covered a multitude of peoples with a range of customs and traditions. Roman writers had little interest in the ethnic differences among these peoples. The word Galli was used in the same negative way as the label “barbarian”—the Galli, Gauls, or Celts were all the uncivilized people on the other side of the Alps, and the Romans were doing them a tremendous favor by conquering and civilizing them.

The Romans stereotyped these people, denigrating them in standard clichés. The Celts wore trousers (a very primitive garment compared with Roman tunics and togas) and let their hair grow long and tousled. They were tattooed, foolhardy, and aggressive. They were childish, quarrelsome, and inconstant. They went in for bloodthirsty rituals including human sacrifice. They were headhunters and drunkards, and led scandalous sex lives. In Britain, most amazingly of all, their warriors tore about in chariots—an outmoded style of warfare that in the Mediterranean world had gone out with Homer’s Iliad. (The Romans used chariots only for racing and for sport, not for warfare.)

The Romans liked to portray the Celts as backward and primitive. When Roman legionaries were posted along Hadrian’s Wall, they referred disparagingly to the native Celts as Brittunculi—“wretched little Brits.” It was typical colonial army talk.

The mindset of the Romans was not so very different than that of the British imperialists who 1,700 years later denigrated a wide range of native peoples all around the world, labeling them “pagans,” “heathens,” or even “cannibals.” Bringing such unfortunates under the umbrella of British rule and converting them to Christianity was seen as the right thing to do. The British genuinely believed they were doing these modern barbarians a favor by conquering them, imposing British law, and forcing on them a Victorian version of Christianity.

Having said this, the Roman commentators were partially right, at least in grouping together the peoples who lived north of the Alps. In the period 500–200 BC, north of the Alps from France across Europe to the Black Sea, there was a family of peoples who shared a number of common elements.

A surge in population growth seems to have driven the central European group to become expansionist. In about 400 BC, Celtic tribes moved south into Italy. In 387 BC, they defeated the Romans in battle and sacked Rome itself. In 279 BC, another group of Celts moved into Greece, attacking and plundering the rich, sacred site of Delphi. The following year, 278 BC, three tribes crossed into Asia Minor. Together these three tribes were known as the Galatae, which may be the ultimate origin of the name Keltoi (in Greek) or Celtae (in Latin). They established colonies in what is still known as Galatia.

These things happened. But nineteenth-century historians believed that there was an aggressive expansion in all directions.

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY VIEW

There is a familiar and oftenrepeated classic nineteenthcentury view of the Celts, which survives in some serious academic work written as late as the 1970s, and in more popular writings since then that are based on the older books. It is still being promoted in some quarters. As recently as the 1990s, a book was published in Ireland, in Irish, and therefore presumably for Irish consumption, which gave the view in outline:

Before Rome became a power, the people we call Celts dominated much of Europe. Their influence ranged from Britain and Ireland in the north to France and Spain in the south and east as far as Turkey. They were united not by a common ruler but by a common language and culture… Their power declined, the influence of their language and culture remains.

This persuasively expressed view gives us an Iron Age race of people bonded by language and culture, with a heartland in central Europe in the first millennium BC. These people migrated outward from their heartland in all directions to invade and colonize most of Europe, taking their culture with them (roughly 800–100 BC). The objects unearthed by antiquarians and archeologists were identified as being in more than one style, so three successive invasions or waves of migrants were inferred, representing three different cultures: Hallstatt, La Tène, and Belgic.

A key element in this approach is the idea that almost everywhere the old pan-European Celtic culture has died out. Only a few refuges are left in the far west—Galicia, Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.

Interestingly, however, the Greek and Roman writers who used the word “Celts” applied it only to the barbarian people who were their northern neighbors, not to the people living on the Atlantic fringes to the far northwest. There is a certain irony in this, as these are just the people who are usually thought of as Celts today.

THE NEW VIEW

By the 1960s, the nineteenthcentury view was being seriously challenged. There was no real archeological evidence for three major invasions; in fact there seemed to be no evidence of any invasions.

Now we come to an important archeological reality: there was no Iron Age Celtic explosion in the center of Europe spinning migrant Celts off in all directions. This will make an enormous difference to the way we view the modern Celts of the Atlantic coastlands. If those territories on the western fringe of Europe were not invaded by waves of Celtic invaders or migrants in the first millennium BC, the people who live there now are unlikely to be descendants of the central European Celts. This is an idea we will come back to later.

The modern view may perhaps be disappointing to some people. There was not, after all, a pan-European Celtic civilization that was uniform in language, culture, and race: there was no golden age of the Celts. Instead there were many separate autonomous communities—tribes—who exchanged goods, styles, and ideas but remained quite diverse and independent, and their relationships with one another shifted through time. This modern view is based on greater archeological and anthropological knowledge.

The new view is that the prehistoric Celts were essentially two distinct groups: the Iron Age peoples of central Europe and the Iron Age peoples of the Atlantic coastline of western Europe. The Atlantic Celts were more or less stationary, although there was a good deal of trading and other communication among them. The central European Celts, on the other hand, were on the move, migrating south into Italy and east toward Romania and Greece.

A fascinating and exciting aspect of this new approach is the realization that the Atlantic Celts did not arrive in the west as a result of an Iron Age migration in the first millennium BC. They were there already and they had been there for a very long time. Their culture had been evolving over thousands of years. They borrowed or acquired some fashions from the central European Celts, but as a result of contact and trade, not invasion or mass migration. The book will focus mainly on the Atlantic Celts, whose enduring culture was a very long time evolving, though there will be entries about the central European Celts too.

THE PAST IN BOOKS

The Celts had their roots in several pasts. We are perhaps too accustomed to reading about peoples in books, where the neatness and clarity of chapter headings can give too sharp a focus.

In nineteenth-century school history books, centuries, periods, and reigns were separated off from one another in just this way; it made history simpler for pupils to learn, simpler for teachers to test.

There was a leftover of this approach in a recent TV history program. The writer and presenter, a distinguished historian, compellingly described the Battle of Hastings and its climax with the death of the last Saxon king of England, King Harold. “That was the end of Saxon England” made a dramatic and memorable conclusion to the program. The battle was certainly a major landmark in English history. The Saxon king was dead, hacked to pieces on the battlefield, and there would never be another Saxon monarch, but 99 percent of the “Anglo-Saxon” population of England lived on, and they passed on their genes, their language, and many of their customs to their children and grandchildren, whereas only a small number of Norman French people arrived in England in 1066. In a very real way, England went on being as “Saxon” as it was before, in spite of being ruled by Normans.

But this raises another question: were the people living in England Anglo-Saxon when Duke William conquered it in 1066? Had the Celtic population of England really been wiped out and replaced by the Anglo-Saxon colonists who had arrived in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries?

To take one area as an example, when the Jutes arrived from Jutland on the European mainland, they landed in Kent and established a base on the Isle of Thanet in 449. From there they were able to take over the old kingdom of Kent by military force. They did this by murdering or driving out the British (Celtic) ruling class. The conquering Jutish chief, Hengist, ruled Kent from about 455 to 488. Hengist was succeeded by Aesc, who reigned from 488 to 512. His family and descendants, the new Kentish ruling class, became known as Aescings. This was to distinguish them from all the other people living in Kent, the Kentings, who were descendants of the Cantii, the Iron Age tribe living there before both the Jutish and Roman occupations. The Kentings were the Britons who were doing the manual work and producing the food. They were the the slave class. They were Celts. In the nineteenth century there was an assumption that the invaders had massacred all the existing inhabitants, but this would not have been pragmatic. It was more useful to keep the Kentings, who knew the land and how to work it.

Throughout the country, the Anglo-Saxon conquest was a process of replacing the ruling class, but underneath that there was continuity of community: continuity of bloodline, continuity of genetic material, and continuity of custom. Again, as far as the nineteenthcentury historians are concerned, it is a case of a chapter boundary that has been drawn too sharply.

Many people living in southeast England today are less English than they imagine. In terms of ancestry, they are more Celt than Saxon. According to Professor Stephen Oppenheimer, a leading DNA expert, as few as 5 percent of the people now living in England are of Anglo-Saxon stock; most people who think of themselves as English are genetically of a much more ancient native stock—not Germanic incomers at all.

This discovery, a result of the DNA revolution, raises many questions about ethnic identity. Often when the issue of devolution has been discussed in relation to Wales or Scotland, journalists and politicians have spoken of the views of “the Welsh” or “the Scots,” as if the Welsh and the Scots are distinct and recognizable populations. But, in the terms envisaged in any referendum that has been conducted or planned, they are simply those with Welsh or Scottish addresses who are entitled to vote. Many people of Welsh and Scottish origin have moved to England in search of work; are they no longer Welsh or Scottish? There are also many people raised in England who have gone to Wales or Scotland to live; have they ceased to be English? Did they become Welsh or Scottish by moving house? Defining the Welsh and the Scots turns out to be much harder than anyone imagined.

Professor Norman Davies dedicated his excellent 1999 book The Isles: A History to “the memory of Richard Samson Davies: English by birth, Welsh by conviction, Lancastrian by choice, British by chance.”

Simon James, who wrote The Atlantic Celts (also 1999), makes the interesting point that each of us possesses more than one ethnic identity, because several identities nest inside one another. Simon James himself is a Westerner, a European, a British citizen, an Englishman, a Southerner, and a Londoner. He also has more than one ethnic identity because of his mixed ancestry. Among his recent forebears (he is not specific, but by implication his grandparents and great-grandparents) he can identify Welsh or Cornish, Norman-French, and English people, which gives him the mixed genes of Celtic, Latin, and Germanic bloodlines.