Jenkins says the Celts don’t exist

THE CELTS: A SCEPTICAL HISTORY

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SIMON Jenkins isn’t the first to have argued that the word “Celt” is a misnomer, but he’s probably been the most polemical about it. In line with the Celtosceptic tendency, which took off in the early ‘90s, his position is that there never was a people or language called Celtic, and that lumping together Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany and the Isle of Man as the “Celtic nations” is a romantic fantasy unsupported by evidence. It’s a myth Jenkins wants to put to rest because, he says, notions of Celticism “continue to fuel many of the prejudices and misconceptions that divide the people of the British Isles to this day.”

He sets out to debunk the belief that a central European people called the Celts populated the British Isles in the second or first millennium BC, only for those living on the eastern side to be overcome by German invaders who imposed Anglo-Saxon on them and obliterated all traces of Celtic culture. What really happened, Jenkins claims, was that the western and eastern inhabitants arrived at their separate languages “independently of any population movement”, those in the west and north adopting the proto-Celtic Indo-European tongue of international trade, which was not rooted in any specific culture. As he puts it, “There were no Celts, only sociable sailors.”

This is the precursor to an exhaustive, and at times exhausting, history of the relationships between the constituent countries of the British Isles, from pre-Roman times to the present. There’s no denying that it’s comprehensive and informative, but one does feel impatient for Jenkins to get back to his core theme: how the kingdoms on the eastern side of the country were unified as the dominant nation of England, while the so-called Celtic nations showed no inclination to cohere into a collective entity that could challenge English supremacy.

The idea that they might have a common heritage only arose in the 17th century, with a second wave of Celticism following 200 years later; both ridiculously romanticised visions of bardic rites and druidic robes, later dismissed by the Gaelic League as “Protestants playing at pagans”.

In the absence of a genuine tribe called the Celts, and the inability of the Celtic nations to present a united front, Jenkins looks upon the efforts of Ireland, Scotland and Wales to assert their national identities and finds them somewhat silly and hollow (and a hindrace to his preferred devolution strategy of radical federalism).

But the Celtosceptic case is not as cut and dried as Jenkins makes out here – at least one academic, the University of Aberystwyth’s Simon Rodway, has taken him to task for some highly debatable conclusions – and, even if it was, the devolved nations don’t actually need shared Celtic roots to legitimise their aspirations.

Having grumbled at length about the incomprehensibility and “obscurantism” of Irish Gaelic, the man whose aim was supposedly to dispel divisive prejudices boils his argument down into an anecdote about a meeting between Lloyd George and de Valera in 1921.

“It was said that the latter formally addressed Lloyd George in Irish in the absence of an interpreter. Lloyd George duly replied to him in Welsh . . . leaving de Valera baffled in turn. We thus glimpse the spectacle of the elected leaders of the two principal peoples of the British Isles, each addressing the other in a Celtic language which he could not understand.”

It’s a good story, but making it a metaphor for present-day devolved politics loads it with more weight than it can support.

Celtic jewellery