THE CELTIC MYTH
We Scots, along with the Irish and Welsh, believe that we are Celts – but we are wrong
Dr Bruce Durie shatters the myth that Scots are Celts
‘Your romanticism is one vast self-delusion, and it blinds your eye to the real thing. We have got to clear it out, and with it all the damnable humbug of the Kelt.’
John Buchan, Huntingtower, 1922 I’m terribly sorry to be the one that points it out, but the term ‘Celtic’ – as applied to the original people of Ireland, Scotland, the Isle of Man, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany – is a 300-yearold mistake, following a suggestion by George Buchanan in 1582 and nothing more.
This is all based on one document, the Leabhar Gabhála, or Book of Invasions, which describes how the Fir Bolg were defeated by the Túatha Dé Danann then the coming of the Sons of Mil (the Gaels, or Milesian Celts). It was first written down in the seventh century AD by monastic scribes and ‘perfected’ in the 12th Century AD – in other words, some 1,700 years after the supposed events took place.
‘Celtic’ was a real culture and languagegroup (but not a single ethnic group) which flourished in continental Europe for about 1,000 years from 500BC to 500AD – roughly coincident with the Roman Empire. It possibly originated around the source of the River Danube in the Black Forest of Germany.
The Greeks called t hem Keltoi, and the Romans Celtici. They are represented by the La Tene and Haltstatt cultures, but hardly anything is known about their language, despite many heroic (but misguided) attempts to retro-fit the Gaelic and Welsh languages to a few inscriptions.
There is now good evidence that the modern-day Irish and the Gaelic Scots are genetically the same, thanks to the remains of a Neolithic woman (3343–3020BC) found at an Irish megalithic site near Ballynahatty, Co. Down, and three Bronze Age individuals (2026–1534BC) found behind a pub on Rathlin Island, Co. Antrim.
They all have substantial Steppe genetic heritage, including the Y-DNA haplogroup R1b1a2a1a2c (M529). This suggests a substantial influx of early farmers to Ireland some 2,800 to 1,500 years before the Celtic culture got going. Also, there is no evidence of European Celtic-type burial sites in Ireland or the west of Scotland.
The term Celtic is all down to the work of one Welshman – Edward Lhuyd or Lloyd (1660– 1709), antiquarian, philologist, and keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford from 1690. He decided the Celts described by Graeco-Roman writers were the same as the pre-Roman people of France, Great Britain and Ireland. He was right about France but wrong otherwise.
Therefore, he said, Irish and old British were Celtic languages and their descendants were Brythonic or ‘P-Celtic’ (Breton, Cornish and Welsh) or Goidelic or Q-Celtic (Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic). These people were therefore called ‘modern Celts’ and attempts were made to link their distinctive cultures to those of the real Celtic people.
This was driven by the Welshman’s desire to create a separate identity from the English (and their associations with the Anglo-Saxons, the Romans and then the Norman-French). There are now no continental Celtic languages, so it’s hard to check the linguistic claims. However, the Greeks distinguished between Keltoi and Pretannoi or Britanni. The Romans did not consider inhabitants of Britain as ‘Celts’, and they would know.
By the late 19th-century there was a Celtic revival, which became ethnic nationalism based on a sense of deep political and social malaise. This can be seen in the Irish Home Rule movement which resulted in the Irish Free State in 1922, the Welsh nationalist movement, the early days of Scottish nationalism, Cornish indigenous and Breton nationalist movements.
It gave rise to the idea of the ‘Celtic nations’ and ‘Celtic culture’, built mainly on complete inventions such as solo step dancing (introduced from Europe) and the first céilí in Ireland (organised by the Gaelic League in 1894). It also fitted with the fashion for the Scottish Highlands and the re-invention of Gaeldom.
Celtic design
High-status artefacts previously catalogued as ‘Celtic’ (e.g., a single torc found at Knock, Co. Roscommon, dated third-century BC) are probably later copies of imported items. The renowned Celtic knot design is not as distinctive as often claimed: its interlacing is a feature of Migration Period art and is found across Northern Europe. By about 700 it had become less common in continental Europe, but continued to mature in both the British Isles and Scandinavia, where it can be seen on metal and wood workings, crosses, and illuminated manuscripts from the seventh to 12th centuries.
It is also possible that braid patterns from the Coptic monasteries of Egypt were transmitted directly to the scriptoria of Irish and Scottish monasteries. Either way, there is nothing ‘Celtic’ about it.
So in summary, there is no direct evidence of a mass presence of continental Celtic people in Ireland, despite much wishful thinking – in fact, the culture and people of Ireland seem to have settled there 1,500 years or more before the European Celts emerged.
A typical and rather circular rationale goes something like: ‘Irish and Scots Gaelic are Celtic languages and therefore the people who spoke them were Celts,’ without examining whether the word ‘ Celtic’ is even justified – we’re Celts because we’re Celts.
So we Scots, Irish and Welsh need a new way to describe ourselves – Brittano-Hibernic, perhaps? And of course, Celtic harpists, sellers of Celtic jewellery, organisers of Celtic festivals, and a few sports teams will have to find other names. As JRR Tolkien said during a 1955 O’Donnell lecture, ‘English and Welsh’ (published in Angles and Britons, 1963): ‘Celtic is a magic bag, into which anything may be put, and out of which almost anything may come. Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not so much a twilight of the gods as of the reason.’
‘Organisers of Celtic festivals and a few sports teams will have to find other names’