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Are you a Celt? Being half Welsh and partly Irish, I may be. However, where are the Celtic peoples exactly? Admittedly, the former Roman writers such as Tacitus, César and Living provided the Celts with a large and important pedigree, linking them with the Gauls, a set of warrior and migratory peoples who dismissed Rome, invaded Greece and moved to Great Britain and Ireland. But the first Celtic cultures left no written evidence of their own, and in the Middle Ages, they were generally ignored. Over the past centuries, Celtic cultures have been more widely sought after and be Celtic has become a popular allegiance. To what extent it is a definitionable and uniform identity remains, however, in the debate.
Irish Gaelic, for example, is a different language from Scottish Gaelic. We may want that in these islands to think of a “Celtic fringe” involving Cornwall, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. However, in terms of genetic composition, the people of these places differ considerably. They also had different political objectives. The great poet WB Yeats (himself Anglo-Irish) wrote his Celtic twilight (1893) “show in a vision” the roots of a distinctive Ireland, but he was not interested in Scottish nationalists. In our time, most Irish and Northern Scottish voters opposed Brexit; Most Welsh voters have supported it.
The great success of Ian Stewart in his new lively book The Celts is to examine these rockets and complexities with imagination and scholarship, while avoiding certain obvious temptations. It does not assume or does not resolutely defend Celtic identities and ideologies, but it does not reject their importance either. Instead, its objective is to show how the understanding of the Celts has changed over time, and why different groups in Great Britain, Ireland and in certain parts of France came to identify with them.
The interest in the Celts developed during the Renaissance, but Stewart focuses on the subsequent periods of widening attention and invention. Matters Celtic benefited from the rise of antiquarism in the 18th century. The remarkable William Stukeley, for example, began to explore the stone circles in the west of England like Stonehenge and Avebury, interpreting them as learning and religion cathedrals chaired by the Druids. Celtic languages and folklore have also started to receive more attention. From 1760, the Scottish Highlander James Macpherson published in an increasingly ecstatic transatlantic audience, the epic poetry of Ossian, an ancient renowned warrior, and “Rude Bard of the North” while the future American president Thomas Jefferson styled it. It was not a simple literary hoax, but rather a skilful reconditioning in the part of Macpherson in Gaelic oral traditions and sagas. In the same way, Edward Williams, who was from Glamorgan and renamed Iolo Morganwg, was both a serious collector of medieval Welsh literature and an expert blacksmith. He was also a cultural entrepreneur, organizing the first Bardic congress in 1792, not in Wales, but in Primrose Hill, London.
However, why did such initiatives get such attention and an important and grateful audience? An expansion of literacy and printing was part of the answer. Thus, as Stewart shows, there was the arrival of an era of revolutions and romantic nationalism. While some ancient nations were withdrawn and the new nations appear, the appeal of reference to the ancient heroic identity has extended. Among the many illustrations of the book, one of the best is a wonderfully shameless painting of 1802 by a revolutionary French artist “Ossian receiving the ghosts of French heroes”.
Other factors were also involved. In some countries, the age of revolutions has accelerated the growth in the centralization of states, industrialization and migration. As these uniformities have developed, the same goes for pressure on older allegiances and lifestyles. The rise in Celticism can be partly understood as a reaction against these broader trends and incursions.
Thus, as French centralization increased during the 19th century, the attraction of the claim of a Celtic identity among the inhabitants of a traditionally distinctive Brittany. Ernest Renan, the great historian born in Breton, raged against what he considered as a “increasing tumult of uniform civilization”. In Ireland, too, it is not an accident that some of the main nationalist spirits in the 1830s and 40s – including the poet James Clarence Mangan – were used to carry out the investigation of the order of the island. Ireland's overall cartography on the order of London to facilitate taxation and control of the country only emphasized and others which was distinctive in this field and what needed more care.
It is Ireland and Irish nationalism that Stewart naturally favors in its last chapters. Before the 18th century, Irish commentators rarely claimed a Celtic descent. From the 1770s, however, it started to change, and not only because of the increase in cultural work levels. As an enthusiasm for the rule of the house and, finally, for the separation of Great Britain, the attraction of wallowing a loose Celtic identity which could comfortably accommodate Catholic and Protestant Irish activists.
Stewart refrains from giving The Celts A formal conclusion, because it considers Celticism as a continuous fluid process. As he suggests, there are signs of conservation of the political lever effect. In 2023, the Scottish National Party and Brittany joined forces with other allegedly Celtic regions to advance a green agenda. However, just like some in the United States, now spends DNA tests in the hope of establishing Amerindian ancestry, affirming that Celtic identity no longer concerns politics. In a world of large crowded, bureaucratic, often autocratic states, being Celtic can allow individuals to feel rather more special and rather rooted.
Celts: A modern story By Ian Stewart Princeton University Press £ 35 / $ 39.95, 576 pages
Linda Collie is The author of “British: forging the nation 1707-1837”. His latest book is 'The pistol, the ship and the pen: war, constitutions and manufacturing of the modern world'(Profile books)
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