ARE YOU CALLING ME A CELT?

Imagine you travel back in time to ancient Britain and, meeting a native, you ask him if he is a Celt. You may not be treated with hostility, more likely bemusement. The term ‘Celtae’ (from the Greek, Keltoi) was used by the Romans liberally and was so broad that it covered all non-Romans of northern and western Europe. It would be a bit like saying to an Amazonian tribesman that he is South American. In fact, the analogy works well, as the both the native Britain and rain-forest denizen would have an identity that was both tribal and completely rooted to their part of the dense woodland they had made their own in rivalry with other tribes.

The coining of the word ‘Celtic’ first used in respect of the peoples pushed to the fringes of Europe seems to date to early eighteenth century when an antiquarian called Edward Lhuyd, a Welsh man living in Oxford, who was inspired by a Breton, Paul-Yves Pezron. Both shared an agenda to establish a separate defined identity which created a concept of the Celt, a defined people with a common language. But once ‘Celtic’ began to be adjectively applied beyond the rarified world of philology or linguistics and nationalists and historians got hold of it, in relatively short order we have it describing a distinct race bound together by a culture, producing unique artefacts and most of all exhibiting a sense of otherness.

Add to that the revisionist invention of the 19th century and, in particular, that of the romanticist Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg) who re-imagined the druids together with the whole mystical cult of nostalgia, and the current identity of the ‘insular Celt’ is born. Unfortunately, painstaking archeology and modern genetics do not uphold this simple view. According to Stephen Oppenheimer in his excellent study ‘The Origins of the British’, a native family living in the Roman era of Britain would almost certainly recognise no such identity, and may have even spoken a western Germanic language akin to Flemish (this is pre Saxon, remember).

Arguably then, the term Celt speaks more to the oppression by the English and the Anglicised Scots and Irish in asserting their land interests over the last three or four hundred years. This led to famine and clearances but also the suppression of the Gaelic languages. To have your mother tongue denied you on pain of eviction or even death did much to bring together disparate clans and peoples to unite in resistance. It was a modern oppressor that gave us the identity of the Celt, not a Roman or a Saxon.