Celtic History
Overview
The Celts originated in eastern Europe, and then moved west to occupy the central and western parts of the continent from southern France through Germany to what is now the Czech Republic. This happened sometime in the last millennium before the birth of Christ. The Greeks, apparently the first to notice their existence, gave them their name--Keltoi or Kelts. By the fourth century they were on their way to becoming a great power. In fact before the days of Roman greatness few other cultures could compare with the Celts in terms of power and influence. Ankara, Turkey; Belgrade, Yugoslavia; Milan, Italy; and Cologne, Germany all fell under Celtic control at one time or another. During the 200's BC the Celts were on the move all over western and southern Europe and even into the Middle East, invading Italy and putting great pressure on the ancient Etruscans living just north of Rome. In 279 Celtic marauders rampaged through Macedonia, defeated the Greek phalanxes at Thermopylae, even reaching Delphi, the home of the famous oracle. Another group of Celts returned to Greece, took control of the northern part of the country and ruled it until 210. Yet another tribe marched through Asia Minor, now Turkey, to establish the kingdom of Galatia.
Perhaps the strongest of all Celtic peoples were located farther to the west - Gallia in Latin, Gaul in English. The Galli inhabited what is now (roughly) modern France. Beginning about 400 the Celtae, as they called themselves, began moving south towards the Alps, eventually establishing a strong presence in Spain and in Cisalpine Gaul in the Italian Po Valley. The Romans took immediate notice and sounded the alarm. It was bad enough in their eyes to have a strong foreign presence on their doorstep, but the reputation of the Galli as half, maybe fully, crazed warriors set Roman teeth on edge. They fought, witnesses' claimed, totally naked with ìred hot waves of ecstasy.î They were said to challenge their enemies, announcing before battle the fate awaiting them--excruciating pain, instant death, and decapitation--and sometimes offering to settle matters by having each side choose a single champion and fight to the death--sort of an early form of psychological warfare. They generally charged on horse and foot, beating drums, screaming at the top of their lungs, heaving javelins and spears with such fury that it sometimes brought victory before the battle had really begun. Indeed, a Latin nickname the Romans devised for the Gauls was furor celticus. Later, the heads of the slain would be posted on the top of Gallic doorways as a warning for other enemies to be! By using something like these methods, the Celts succeeded in sacking much of the city of Rome in 387 and threatened to do so again in 226.
But these were the high points of their influence in Europe. Now Roman power increased while the Galli sharply declined. But it had been a near thing--the Celts possibly could have won all of Italy, and if that had been the case, the history of Western Europe would have been very different from what it turned out to be. But the Romans had superior organization, and for the time an advanced military technology. These factors, combined with the Roman advantage in leadership and tactics, make it clear that the Celts over the long run probably never had a chance.
Hundreds of years later the Romans were again on the move. As the Romans plowed into what is now France they once again ran up against their old enemies. A collision course now awaited, with Julius Caesar, the great Roman commander and his vast legions on one side of a divide, the Gallic warriors on the other. Caesar was on the march, determined to make a name for himself and for Rome and no one would stand in his way. He defeated the Galli in a tough campaign lasting from 58 to 51 BC. He wrote of them in his famous Commentaries on the Gallic Wars, admiring their great military prowess and the headlong bravery they showed in the face of certain defeat. The Romans won and the Celtic tribes receded until they formed only a small rump spread about in isolated parts of the continent. Their days of greatness on the continent were at an end.
As the events described above were going on many Celts decided to move from Europe over the channel to the British Islesó specifically, to now Ireland, England, the Isle of Man, Wales, and Scotland. Over time each people would build their own local culture and their own variety of Celtic language--Gaelic, Welsh, British, Cornish, and Manx among them. But once again they were to be challenged by the persistent, ever present Romans, and by their old nemesis, Julius Caesar. The Romans never got to Ireland, but between 43 BC and 400 AD they conquered most of the Island of Great Britain up to southern Scotland. And as soon as the Romans departed in the early fifth century the Angles and Saxons from northern Germany and Denmark subjected the beleaguered Celts to yet another foreign invasion. What did the Celtic Britons do in the face of this new threat? For years, even centuries, they resisted the Germanic forces by fighting a long series of rear guard actions led by many military chieftains, perhaps even the semi-legendary King Arthur, possibly a Welsh or British nobleman or prince. (Incidentally, the story of Camelot, Arthur's court--including Guinevere, Merlin, the Knights of the Grail, Sir Lancelot du Lac, and others--all took place in Celtic Britain.) Finally, some others took the opportunity to depart from Britain altogether, embarking for Armorica, a small peninsula in northwest France, which they named, aptly, Brittany.
The Irish, left alone by Roman or Saxon, continued on their merry way, creating a rich culture of song, legend, and literature, including beautifully crafted illuminated manuscripts and epic poetry of great power, especially the Ulster saga called the Tain Bo Cuailgne, or the Cattle Raid at Cooley. This was a rural society where the family, tribe (tuath), aristocracy, druid priests, and later Christian monks came to be mainstays of the social order. Eventually great houses of Irish kings (Ri) would supplant the aristocrats. For years the civilization of early Ireland, pagan and Christian, excited the imagination of all Europe. Christianized by St.Patrick, himself a Romanized Briton, they sent out saints, missionaries, and scholars like Colum cille or St. Columba, the priest-warrior and his followers, to convert the pagans of northern Britain to the new faith. They and the Celtic Britons took a hand also in civilizing parts of Europe. Alcuin, the great Charlemagne's top assistant, and Einhard, his biographer, were originally from Britain. But sadly Ireland ceased to be an independent entity starting first during the time of Queen Elizabeth I in the 1500's, when the English began to clap an ever tightening hammer lock on the Irish, not to be fully relinquished in the south until 1937, and continuing in the north even to this day. English gradually supplanted Gaelic until today the Irish tongue is spoken on a daily basis only in the western counties of the old province of Connacht, and even there by a minority.
Scotland developed in a different way from the rest of Britain or Ireland, yet there were for many years close links between all peoples who inhabited the Celtic world of the British Isles. Its early inhabitants, the Cruithin, were called Picti or Picts by the Romans, because the latter thought they tattooed their bodies with designs and pictures. They controlled the north and central regions of the country. Other Celtic tribes, the Britons, settled in Strathclyde in the southwest, just below Scotland's now largest city, Glasgow. Non-Celtic Angles and Saxons would come from England to found Edinburgh in the southeast (Edwin's town or city). But a new influx of Celts riding in from northern Ireland called the Dalriada Scots actually gave their name to the nationóScotland. In 843 one Kenneth MacAlpin became the king of a united monarchy of Picts and Highland Scots named Alba. Eventually this line of kings conquered almost all of Celtic Scotland. Then for about five hundred years a Norse-Gaelic empire, the Lordship of the Isles, under Clan Donald, consisting of the mainland of northwestern Scotland and the inner and outer Hebrides, a small series of islands off the west coast, held sway. Maintaining close relations, each country developed its own Celtic tongue-- Erse or Irish and Highland Gaelic(usually pronounced Gallic by the Scots). People moved back and forth between the two areasóIreland and Scotland ñ and shared a great deal. Indeed, its not overstating matters to say that until late in the sixteenth century the two countries shared basically the same civilization, with only slightly differing tendencies.
The early Irish and Scots wrote their own music, with the harp (Clarsach) and various forms of the bagpipe taking center stage. Today we call it folk music, the traditional music of a people. They were great dancers and musicians putting many hours into the creation of a huge variety of reels, jigs, planxties, strathspeys, and step, country, and highland dancing. Poetry and story telling based on Irish and Scottish myths, stories, and legends combined to create a rich and vibrant oral tradition, in which incidentally, second sight (an da shealladh,), the ability to look into the future was a prominent, if controversial, feature. These mythic tales and stories were later transformed into an equally rich printed literature in which both Scots and Irish excelled. In modernity the Irish in particular have become, or so it seems, a nation of writers, a few of the quality of James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, and Seumas Heaney. Material artistry was highly prized as well with fine filigree work intricately displayed in a mass of interlaced circles set into silver, bronze, and gold. Beautifully crafted brooches and other jewelry were the order of the day. They dressed distinctively too, in something resembling the kilt of today, with the Scots later developing fine plaid tartans to identify each clan. In physical appearance many men were strong and tall, with reddish or dark hair, pale skins, and blue eyes, the women charmingly outgoing with peaches and cream complexions. Traditionally, Scots and Irish together formed a strong warrior culture in which the martial arts were highly prized, supplying mercenaries to many countries outside the Gaidhealtachd (land of the Gaels). Irish soldiers were known as ìwild geese,î and fought for Russia, Prussia, and other states. Scots highlanders and islanders did the same
But sadly, after the 1400s there occurred a sharp break in the unity of the Gaels. Ireland and Scotland now pursued very different historical development, especially in religion and national identity. The Irish retained their fervent Roman Catholicism; the Scots during the Reformation became Protestant. The latter folk even became divided against themselves, the lowlands taking up English, the highlands trying desperately to retain their Celtic ways. The Irish after many years of bloodshed and struggle became totally independent from Great Britain, but Scotland yet remains, although increasingly restive, a constituent part of the United Kingdom. We have even witnessed the horrific spectacle of Gael fighting Gael, when Scottish highland regiments as part of the British army, like the Black Watch or the Argylls and Sutherlands, were sent to fight their cousins in Northern Ireland, who were demanding independence from Great Britain.
Today, even after many years of modernization, there is something magical and strange about the Irish and Scottish countryside. They yet haunt the imagination. As you walk through the heather on moorland and crag on a late summer eve one can almost hear through the wind the incantation of druid and filidh(bardic) rites, the recitation by sacred memory of the history of the great clans and familiesóthe O'Neils and O'Connors, the Campbells and MacDonaldsó, the slow, stately recounting of their bloody defeats and glorious victories. These were and are melancholy, ghost ridden lands, where deep in the countryside its possible to find elderly people who can still speak of sithichean or fairy folk, of water sprites or uruis, and of the keen, the unearthly wail of the living for the dead. The old chants and lamentations speak to a time, long gone now, when the culture of the Gaidheil ruled the day, when a form of Gaelic was on the lips of nearly every Albannaich(Gaelic for Scots) and child of Eire. But hark, according to the prophecies of the Brahan Seer, Mairi Mor, Thomas the Rhymer and others known to be blessed or cursed with the Sight, those days will come again. The Gaels will return to the glens and all will be as it once was.
