CELTICFEST’S DAYS OF LORE
Ancient traditions come alive in cultural celebration.
The ancient Celts were proud entertainers, and artisan Rudi Diesvelt carries on this tradition with a wink and the occasional cry “Freedom!”
“Being an oral tradition, much emphasis was on the spoken word,” Diesvelt says. “The bards would go around and tell stories while playing the harp or some other instrument.”
A storyteller himself, Diesvelt will be marching in his hand- crafted warrior’s kilt and armour in Vancouver’s St. Patrick’s Day parade. For the eighth year in a row, the self- educated historian will join green floats, horses, fiddlers and at least one bag- piper on a unicycle on the last day of the Celtic Festival.
Diesvelt says the six nations celebrated in the weeklong event — Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall and the Isle of Man — were more like 200 clans at “the turn of the century.”
( When Diesvelt refers to the turn of the century, he means when BC became AD.)
It was an era when men drank from flagons with ornate bottoms — best appreciated when tilted skyward — and when a certain league of warriors rushed into battle wearing nothing but warpaint.
“It was called woad,” he said of the bluish skin dye worn during countless battles. “It had properties that prevented bleeding.”
Diesvelt sports a bronze coil around his neck, embellished with boars’ heads on either side. “Called a torc,” he says, pointing to each animals’ tiny ivory tusks.
“If somebody tries to cut your head off, that’ll protect you.”
The symbol of a boar’s head dates back to the 20th Roman Valerian, a legion that unsuccessfully attempted to quell a Scottish uprising. “They sent two cohorts — a cohort is about 500 people — north beyond Hadrian’s Wall into Scotland to try to prevent them from raiding down south of the wall.”
Diesvelt walked the wall himself when he studied in Scotland decades ago. “They did a lot of raiding,” he says of the ancient Scots. “They’d go for the cows and the girls.”
When the Roman troops scaled the wall with boar- emblazoned shields in hand, they were simply no match for the clansmen, according to Celtic lore. “They were never heard from again,” Diesvelt says. “They disappeared. A thousand people, just like that.”
But tales of pre- Christian Celts weren’t just about war and violence. Love, infidelity and the supernatural are woven throughout the tales in Diesvelt’s collection.
From scorned wives casting shapeshifting spells on stepchildren to the miracles performed by Celtic monks, Diesvelt is keen to remember the clans’ pagan days.
Even St. Patrick, the feted patron saint of Ireland, is credited with having a little magic up his sleeve.
“Legend says he got rid of snakes in Ireland,” says Diesvelt. “But to the best of our knowledge, there never were any snakes in Ireland.”
This winking sense of humour makes Celtic lore a memorable treat, and a theme throughout the Celtic Festival programming.