Culling the Celtic Furies
"Since the early 1980s the idea of the 'Celt' has been subjected to a multi-disciplinary assault ... The cumulative weight of all this 'celto-scepticism' is considerable."
Jonathon Wooding, 2002, 'The idea of the Celt', in Celts and Christians, p.39.
This much is obvious from a range of book subtitles published soon afterwards, such as Michael Chapman's The Celts: The Construction of a Myth (1992) and Simon James' The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention (1998).
A more discursive summary of the decades-long dispute is contained in a paper given by Simon Rodway called 'Celtic ― Definitions, Problems and Controversies' (2010).
LF Vagalinski (ed.), 'In Search of Celtic Tylis in Thrace (111 C BC)', Proceedings of the Interdisciplinary Colloquium ... Held at the National Archaeological Institute and Museum, Sofia, Bulgaria, 8 May 2010, pp 9-10.
"The traditional consensus holds that the Celts spread from a homeland somewhere in central Europe during the first millennium BC, until, at the height of their success in the third century BC, they occupied a vast territory stretching from central Turkey to the Atlantic coast of Ireland. In Brittany, Ireland and the least Romanised parts of Britain, Celtic culture(s) continued to flourish into the Middle Ages and beyond. Classical historians provide us with accounts of the southward and eastward expansion of the Celts into Italy, Greece, the Balkans and Turkey, but their migration into the Iberian peninsula, Britain and Ireland can only be surmised on the basis of other types of evidence. Presence of Celts has been deduced in areas in which one of the so-called 'Celtic' languages is or was spoken. Since the nineteenth century, it has been believed that ancient Celts are also archaeologically recognizable, mainly on account of artistic style."
"The very validity of the concept of 'the Celts' has been questioned. Much has been made of the 'constructed' nature of Celticity, which was ingeniously explained by the anthropologist Malcolm Chapman as a series of core/periphery oppositions in which a self-appointed centre (Greece, Rome, London etc.) constantly 'creates' a 'Celtic Fringe' inhabited by a motley collection of 'barbaric' 'Others' (Galations, Gauls, wealas, 'wild Irish' etc.) with no internal cohesion. According to Chapman, this periphery has always been diverse, culturally, ethnically and linguistically ― it only looks homogenous from a centre uninterested in differentiating between types of 'barbarian'. Claims by the modern Welsh, Irish, Bretons, Scots etc. that these 'constructed' Celts were their ancestors would thus be no more valid than the medieval origin legends which derived the Welsh and Bretons from Troy and the Irish and Scots from Scythia. Chapman's view is that in the modern period, a number of disparate 'marginal' peoples have seized upon an external label and created their own 'imagined community' in opposition to English or French hegemony."
In a wry footnote, Rodway also quotes the venerable linguist and Middle Earth 'fantasist' JRR Tolkien: "'Celtic' of any sort is [...] a magic bag, into which anything may be put, and out of which almost anything may come".
"The term 'Celtic' has been used in many conflicting senses. In this paper, 'Celtic' refers both to the peoples whom Greek and Latin writers called variously Celts, Galations, Gauls and Celtiberians and to their related languages, as known from inscriptions or inferred from place- and personal names. Applying a single term both to a population and to a language should never be done lightly, but in the case of the Celts they do seem, at least from the middle of the first millennium BC onwards, to constitute a valid 'ethno-linguistic' group ... No single material 'culture' can be associated with them, and there is no prima facie reason why we should expect one to do so. The relevant material 'cultures' are so varied as to cast doubt on the coherence of 'Celtic archaeology' and 'Celtic Art' ... 'Celtic' is rightly regarded as a misleading label for the central European Hallstatt and La Tene material 'cultures' of the Late Bronze and Iron Age. The peoples of the first millennium BC who spoke the attested languages which meet the philological criteria for Celticity ― certain unique divergences from reconstructed Proto-Indo-European ― corresponded encouragingly well in their distribution to the historically attested Celts, Galatians, Celtiberians, and so on, while corresponding poorly to the 'archaeological Celts' deduced from Hallstatt and La Tene archaeology."
The argument provided by Sims-Williams above still relies on a particular reading of the 'ancient sources' ― on the distribution of "historically attested Celts, Galatians, Celtiberians ...". As Jonathon Wooding puts it in 'The Idea of the Celt', "Collis ... along with Simon James, continues ... to debate the congruence of the linguistic definition of 'Celtic' with the [alleged or assumed] ancient distribution of Celtic peoples ..."
"The term 'Celt' comes to us via the Greeks, to whom the Κελτοί or Ιαλἁταί were people who lived in the north and west ... The Romans described the Κελτοί as Celtae, but more often as Galli or Galatae (cf Greek Ιαλἁταί), names which left their legacy in such extant regional names as Galatia (Asia Minor), Galicia (Spain and Central Europe), as well as the name of the antique province, Gallia (Gaul).
"The Celts were already a widespread people when first encountered by the Greeks. Hecataeus of Miletus, in his now lost Peregesis of the sixth century BC, described the Celts as living in Narbonne and near Marseilles. Herodotus, in the fifth century BC, possibly using the work of Hecataeus, saw them as one of the westernmost of the European peoples, living west of the Pillars of Hercules and stated that the Danube rose in their territory. Over the next two centuries the Celts would be recorded as moving south into northern Italy and through Greece to Asia Minor. The sack of Delphi by the Celts (279 BC), along with that of Rome by the Gauls living in northern Italy (390 BC), would become ... symbolic events in the Graeco-Roman psyche.
"The Graeco-Roman world saw a natural potential for expansion at the expense of these neighbours. Anthropologists such as Posidonius (early first century BC), or intelligence officers such as Pytheas (c. 325 BC), both operating out of bases in the Greek colonies in the south of France, documented the Celts, the latter almost certainly with direct eye to conquest. From such early Greek writers via the many later writers who used their no longer extant works, we obtain our 'cliche' of the ancient Celt. The Celts as encountered by the Greeks exhibited a range of 'national' characteristics. Many of these parallel modern cliches of the Irish, the Scots, and even the Welsh, as depicted in the 'Blue Books': a fondness of alcohol, for colourful dress, for violent and trivial disputes.
"These romantic qualities, as observed in their neighbours by more urbane trading partners and future colonists ... In this process of ethnographic discovery, the Celts tended to become invested with Graeco-Roman desires to see them as a wild and expressive counterpart to Classical civilisation. The Celts became fairly typical 'noble savages; the Druids, the intellectual class of the Celts, were at times seen as 'perfect' natural philosophers and cosmologists. Individual details, quoted and re-quoted often without attribution ― even in works by supposed 'eye-witnesses' such as Caesar ― created at times a suspiciously seamless garment of Celticity.
"In this way the Graeco-Roman world was proactively engaged with its 'Celtic fringe'. The wine which fuelled much of this romantic Celtic sensibility was fed to these neighbouring peoples by Roman traders. The tacit investment of desired 'noble savagery' in their Celtic neighbours lent itself to propaganda ― especially as dictators, such as Sulla and Caesar, used campaigns on the Celtic frontier to enhance their status ... Caesar's elevation of the Druids as a defining element of Celtic culture led later to their propagandistic demonisation and subsequent destruction as a stage in the subjugation of Britain.
"The homogenous cultural profile of the Celts as described by ancient writers thus may reflect no more than repeated citation of the same lost sources. At times it may also represent overt propaganda ..." [Wooding 2012, pp 39-41].
Archaeologists like John Collis insist that more intellectual rigor be applied to the business of identifying Celtic people. At a conference in 2012 he reiterated his position in plain English.
"... I never set out to define the Celts myself, but rather have tried to work out how the Celts were defined in the ancient world ... my attack has been on those who have tried to redefine the Celts and then to impose this on the ancient world ... in the ancient world the definition of 'Celt' can vary from one author to another ...
"Though the Modern Celts can be defined by their language, this cannot be done for the Ancient Celts ... The Ancient Celts as a category died in the 5th/6th century AD, and our only information about who were or were not Celts in the ancient world is entirely derived from the classical written sources ... As soon as we use other criteria we are talking about a different category ― people who spoke a certain language, or wore a certain type of brooch, or had certain genes or a combination of genes, and these can never be used in the place of the ancient category of Celt ...
"So my primary aims were not a new definition of the Celts, but:
1: to find out the origins of the preconceived ideas and see if they were viable;
2: to verify that the ancient sources on which these ideas were based actually say what they are supposed to say;
3: to establish an acceptable epistemology and methodology as a basis of study of the Ancient Celts.
When we view the Ancient Celts we are looking through a series of distorting lenses, firstly that of the classical writers (mainly Greek and Roman, but with some Celtic writers like Martial and Sidonius Apollinaris). Then we have the distorted views from the 16th century onwards with concepts like Celtic languages and Celtic culture, and finally our own distorted lens based on our own preconceptions, pre-occupations and paradigms. What I have been doing is to try to remove all the intermediary lenses and reduce it to two, so that we can look directly through our own distorting lens at the lens that the ancient writers hold up for us."
John Collis, 2012, 'Rethinking Celtic Studies', Die erfundenen Kelten: Mythologie eines Begriffes und sein Verwendung in Arcaologie, Tourismus und Esoterik (Interpretierte Eisenzeiten 4), 67-73
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