Malcolm Chapman

Who Are the Celts

This title has a familiar ring. It might announce a very different kind of book, one of a series through which a publishing house hoped to turn ethnic variety into book sales. The series might include other titles like ‘Who are the Greeks? — the Egyptians? — the Germans?’ The form of the books in this series would be similar, telling the story of a people from their origin to modern times, passing, with illustrations, through the ups and downs of history.

The Celts and the Classics

The references to the Celts in the classics are usually taken as evidence about the Celts. As such they have been minutely inspected by Celtic scholars. These references, however, are necessarily embedded in a cultural meeting — a cultural meeting, moreover, where the organising principles of observation and understanding are not on the Celtic side. The classical sources tell us primarily about the classificatory systems of the classical authors. It is more difficult to say what they tell us about the Celts.

Celtic Continuity: Culture

The people whom scholars call ‘Celts’ emerge in archaeological and literary record in the first millennium bc, and are associated with a series of retrospectively defined archaeological culture-types even before their incorporation in the Roman Empire — Urnfield, Hallstatt and La Tene. This last is often seen as the culmination of Celtic cultural achievement, and modern ‘Celtic’ artists and craftsmen often imitate its styles. The curvaceous asymmetries of La Tene decorative work are justly admired, and an entire comparative morality is often poured into their interpretation, as we shall see.1 Even within the archetypical Iron-Age Celts, however, there are styles rolling over the people whose ethnic integrity we assume.

‘A Branch of Indo-European’

The adjective ‘Celtic’ has its most respectable and formal use within linguistics. The idea of the Indo-European languages is a result of the increasingly scholarly and scientific study of language in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Similarities between otherwise very different languages in Europe had long been noticed, with erudite Romans speculating on the relationship of their own language to Greek.1 Gerald of Wales made some thoughtful suggestions about the relationships between disparate languages in the late twelfth century, which have been seen as an early attempt at comparative Indo-European linguistics.2 Only in the late eighteenth century, however, did thoughts on this subject begin to assume their modern form. Before then, attempts to understand the relationships between different languages had usually aimed at derivation from Greek or Latin (as privileged languages of ancient scholarship), or from Old Testament Hebrew. In 1786, however, William Jones, in a now famous address to the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, noted that Sanskrit, the language of Indian religious learning, had remarkable affinities with Latin and Greek. He further suggested that these three languages, and indeed other European languages, and Persian, had a common origin. As Lockwood says, ‘the modern science of comparative philology had begun’ (Lockwood, 1969:22).

The Modern Celts

Much that I have already said about the definition of ethnic groups must be taken, mutatis mutandis, to apply to the modern Celts. In passing from antiquity to the modern day, I have taken a detour via Gerald of Wales, and in so doing I have bowed to modern retrospective definition of what a Celt is: in modern parlance the Welsh are Celts, although Gerald would not have called them so. I would otherwise have had to leave the Celts in antiquity, and rejoin them in this chapter, in the eighteenth century, with nothing but a gulf in between. For there were, over this period, no Celts in north-western Europe; nobody called themselves, or anybody else, Celts (with the few fantastic scholarly exceptions, to which we shall come). I could have pursued the career of the Byzantine keltoi, down to their presumed conceptual disappearance with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks; it is again a measure of the limitations of our historical vision, that this would seem an entirely different subject, interesting though it might be.

Celtic Continuity: People

It will be clear by now that the notion of a finite, biologically defined and biologically self-reproducing population as the basis of an ethnic group is largely fictional. Before looking further into this, we can recall earlier thought on the subject. The nineteenth century was the great period of the formulation of racial theories in Europe. Theories about the nature of human races were not always coherent or consistent, but there was a general tendency to regard human races as the same kind of entity as biological species. Such a species is definable in one simple respect — it reproduces itself, and does not cross with other species. Today’s fox population is descended from that of a thousand years ago. If there are more foxes today than there were then, this is a reproductive success, a population growth. If the foxes of today inhabit places that mediaeval foxes did not inhabit, then migration has occurred.

Celts into Welshmen

It is worth noting that Europe has still not seriously begun to aspire to the degree of ethnic uniformity which the term ‘Celt’ imposes upon Iron-Age Europe. When the Western Roman Empire failed, the definitions of a power with transcontinental structures and aspirations failed at the same time. When the barbarians invaded, much of the European map was, for a brief moment, almost completely obscured. Emerging again into the light of history, it was transformed. Where once a single definition prevailed, we have a thousand fragments of boastful and vainglorious self-identification. Christianity gave writing to the post-Roman world, and with it the power not only to name things, but to have these names remembered. The apparent discontinuity in European forms of self-definition at this stage is, therefore, only a trick of the record. If history had proceeded differently, and Iron-Age Celtic Europe had been offered the opportunity to define itself and its discontinuities, and to leave written record of these, then the supposed great unity of the Celtic people would never even have suggested itself to subsequent observers.

Gerald of Wales

In the post-classical period, records of the customs of ‘the Celts’ (or their various successor ethnicities) become very sparse. Historical records of various kinds are available, but there are few attempts at ethnography. The Anglo-Saxon settlement of England, however, undoubtedly provided rich opportunities for the observation and construction of boundaries between Anglo-Saxon and Welsh, and for elaborations upon the relative character of these two peoples, as they were coming into being in opposition to one another. The early Icelandic material presented by Hastrup1 shows, within the best documented early Germanic example, sophisticated use of the boundary between the social and the non-social: beyond the domestic space of family and farm was an area of the breakdown of law, morality and reason, the habitat of outlaws, monsters and goblins. Early Anglo-Saxon society no doubt made similar moral use of its ethnic and geographical frontiers. In Beowulf, Grendel lies beyond the frontier: a fiend from hell was that grim guest Grendel called infamous march-stepper, he who moors held fen and fastness; … Cain’s kin … thence were born monsters and elves and orcs, likewise giants they against God strove2

Classification and Culture-Meeting

In Chapters 11 and 12 I discuss in detail some accounts of culture-meeting involving the Celts. Here, I deal with culture-meeting in general, and its expression in written accounts. I have already referred to two notions — that society is ‘a web of boundaries’, and that any society tends to ‘bound’ itself away from its neighbours as ‘culture’ to ‘nature’ (p. 28). Here, I present the argument behind these rather vague assertions.

A Wave of Barbarians

I have suggested that there is no necessary relationship between the name given to a people, the archaeological or cultural evidence, the linguistic evidence, and the flesh and blood. It is often argued that the spread of the archaeologically defined culture styles across Europe is accompanied by a spread of place-name elements of a Celtic kind. There is a serious danger of circularity here, however, in that an archaeological feature found in a place with a Celtic name will be called Celtic on that account; its presence elsewhere can then be used as evidence of the ‘Celtic’ nature of the local place-names, and so on. Much argument of this kind has gone on, and there is, of course, no ultimate tribunal. Let it be, however, that a new language — a Celtic language — and a new culture — a Celtic culture — spread across large parts of Europe together during the first millennium bc. What can we then say about the people?