Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference)

As a word merely denoting ancient, extinct languages, ‘Celtic’ was fairly widely known to informed English writers at an early date; Milton uses it in
Paradise Lost
(1667). But the notion that it could also describe the living languages of impoverished and despised peoples on the periphery of Europe was slow in coming. George Buchanan was ignored when he asserted (1582) that Scottish Gaelic was derived from ancient Celtic. In France, however, where the national history begins with the story of Gaulish resistance to Roman rule, several commentators discerned a survival or archaic language among the Bretons on their isolated peninsula in the northwest. Paul-Yves Pezron was much more persuasive in arguing for the continuity between ancient and modern in
Antiquité de la nation et la langue des Celtes
in 1703. Working concurrently with Pezron, the Welsh-born Edward Lhuyd or Lloyd (
c
. 1660–1709), Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, had been studying the minority languages of the British Isles in the field. His
Archaeologia Britannia
(1707) introduced the word ‘Celtic’ in its modern definition into widespread use.

In little more than a half century almost any reader could be expected to have seen the word ‘Celtic’, following the hoopla accompanying James Macpherson’s specious ‘translations’,
The Poems of Ossian
(1760–64). A young Highland Scottish schoolmaster, Macpherson purported to derive the
Poems
(produced in prose translation) from ancient Celtic documents, which later investigation proved to have been adapted from recent Scottish Gaelic ballads. Although so prolix that they cannot be read today without sustained ardour,
The Poems of Ossian
became an international rage, attracting admiration from such diverse figures as Thomas Jefferson and Johann von Goethe, who translated them into German. This created a fashion for the ‘Ossianic’, of haunted, rugged landscapes peopled by fatalistic, fair-haired warriors in chariots, which affected all the arts. At least thirty operas were composed on themes from
The Poems of Ossian
, and Ossian’s image was idealized on hundreds of canvases. The name of Ossian’s father, Fingal, was known across Europe by 1829 when Felix Mendelssohn’s
Hebrides Overture
was nicknamed the ‘Fingal’s Cave Overture’. The name of Ossian’s son Oscar became so popular in Germany and Scandinavia that it was eventually borne by a succession of Danish kings. Concurrent with and related to Macpherson came the so-called Celtic Revival in English literature, 1760–1800, led by such Anglo-Welsh writers as Thomas Gray, whose poem ‘The Bard’ (1757) helped make that word, known in both Welsh and Irish, idiomatic in English.

Bards, crags, mists, harps, golden-tressed maidens, forgotten but recoverable magical feats: such was the Celtic world for the Romantic era. Antiquarianism, led often by enthusiasts rather than by what we would call archaeologists, began to turn attention to the Celtic fringe of northwestern Europe. Wide-eyed speculation attributed to the druids, priests of ancient Celtic religion described by Roman commentators, virtually all pre-Roman monuments, including the pre-Celtic (we now know) Stonehenge. It was also a time when a plaintive longing for a past more beautiful than the present prompted more sober-sided scholars to search out and translate the neglected texts of earlier Celtic tradition. Charlotte Brooke’s
Reliques of Irish Poetry
(1789) established that Old Irish texts actually existed, even while the infatuation with Macpherson’s chicanery and his even more bogus imitators drew attention to other traditions. Mid-way between sobriety and moonshine was Iolo Morganwg (
né
Edward Williams), a laudanum-addicted stonemason, who invented a society of poets and musicians, Gorsedd Beirdd Ynys Prydain (literally, the Throne/Assembly of Bards of the Isle of Britain); it was purportedly based on ancient models, to foster the culture and literature of Wales against the encroachments of the utilitarian Saxons. From this movement came the revival of the eisteddfod (1819), a nationalist popular celebration of traditional culture that would be imitated under other names – such as the Irish
feis
and Scottish Gaelic
mòd
– in other Celtic countries. A well-born Breton admirer of Macpherson and Morganwg, Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué, gathered native materials for
Barzaz Breiz
(Breton Bards) in 1839. Although yet another pseudo-medievalist, his conscientiousness and superior grasp of the language furnished texts to launch the modern, written literary tradition in Breton.

Despite the modern deflation of romantic puffery, the origins of the Celtic languages are indeed still lost in the mists of early history. Imaginative speculation purports to find roots as far away as central Asia and northern China, but Celtic is certainly a branch of the Indo-European family of languages, which includes the Slavic, Germanic and Romance languages. It is necessarily more arduous to trace the language of a pre-literate society than it is to uncover physical evidence. Searching is made more difficult by the Celts’ lack of a single, self-conscious ethnic identity or any unifying physical characteristics; Virgil (first century
BC
), memorably, saw them as tall and blond, but elsewhere they were reported shorter and darker. The Celts appear to have had something in common in terms of religion and social structure as well as material culture, but with wide variability.

Lying east of Salzburg in the magnificent mountains of the Salzkammergut, Lake Hallstatt and the adjacent salt-mining complex are today remote from main routes of transportation. But in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages, their huge reserves of salt made them a destination for travellers seeking the only food preservative known at that time. This same salt preserved skeletons of 980 bodies and many artifacts buried with them, giving nineteenth-century scholars the first great trove of Celtic material culture, including clothing, leather sacks and wooden implements. This evidence gives us the name Hallstatt for a period of culture, not a tribe or an ethnic group. Settlement of the mines and the lake shore began as early as 1200
BC
and continued to as late as 600
BC
, while the influence of Hallstatt designs flourished in Celtic Europe from
c
.800 to 450
BC
. After decades of study of such items as weapons, buckets, and human and animal figures, scholars have determined four phases of Hallstatt art, lettered A, B, C and D. Modern viewers tend to admire the technical skill of execution of Hallstatt artefacts rather than their aesthetic distinction. They are generally severely geometrical with only rare examples of plant patterns, although bird motifs appear, perhaps an influence from Italy. There is little influence from the Greeks. At the same time, Hallstatt art can be extravagant, almost baroque.

During the first millennium
BC
, concurrent with the succession of Hallstatt and La Tène styles in art, came a decisive split into the two branches of the Celtic languages, usually described as the P-Celtic and Q-Celtic languages. The hard sound inherited from Indo-European that we represent with the letters
qu
-, for reasons unknown, came to be replaced by the sound of
p
-. We can illustrate this with contrasting examples from modern Q-and P-languages, Irish and Welsh, which still retain the same roots. The Irish word for head,
ceann
, is
pen
in Welsh. Likewise,
mac
, meaning son in Irish, is
map
in Welsh. At one time the split was thought to reflect migrations of different peoples across Europe, a position not supported by recent findings. Simple explanations are hard to come by. The substitution took place among peoples living in close proximity to one another as they migrated across Europe. As they settled in different areas either the P-Celt languages or the Q-Celts would become dominant while retaining trace patterns of the other family. Gaulish was largely P-Celtic with traces of Q-Celtic. The languages of ancient Britain were predominantly P-Celtic, as are the modern languages derived from them, sometimes designated Brythonic or Brittonic: Welsh, Cornish and Breton. Both Q-Celts and P-Celts settled in Ireland, with the Q-Celts becoming dominant. Q-Celtic invaders occupied much of Dyfed, in southern Wales, where their language was incorporated into the dominant language. Other Q-Celtic invaders, the Scotti, left northern Ireland for the islands and Highlands of Scotland where they established Scottish Gaelic, driving P-Celtic speakers into the Lowlands, where they became incorporated into populations speaking Scots or Lallans, related to English and thus part of the Germanic family of languages. Q-Celtic Irish settlers on the Isle of Man, sometimes dominated by Norse and Scottish rulers, spoke a language now known as Manx. Closely related, Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx are also known as the Goidelic languages after
Goídel
, the Old Irish word for the Irish people.