Aaround the Nineteen Nineties, the historic Celts endured one thing of an id disaster. First in educational articles, then in common books, and ultimately in newspaper headlines, folks began loudly declaring that ‘Celts’ didn’t actually exist. Not all of the scholarly concepts had been new, however the temper actually was: the final consensus that you can use the phrase Celtic to conjure up a comparatively coherent historic folks was referred to as into query. The self-discipline of Celtic Research grew anxious and self-critical: I’ve heard, from senior colleagues, accounts of scholars begging them to show what may very well be stated concerning the Celts, fairly than the issues that couldn’t. Fashionable ‘Celts’, particularly, began to achieve scare quotes: these identities, it appeared, had been current innovations grafted onto historic abstractions, a collage of disparate symbols from the pre-Roman previous, caught along with creativeness, enthusiasm, and educational linguistics. Ian Stewart’s The Celts: A Fashionable Historical past broadly agrees with these conclusions. However fairly than seeing this as a purpose to desert the Celts, Stewart builds on current scholarship to make a compelling case for the importance of contemporary Celticism, in all its paradoxical glory.
This can be a huge, bold, erudite ebook. After a crash course on educational developments, and on historical proof for the Celts, Stewart begins within the early trendy interval, with the scholarly restoration and reconstruction of Celtic data. This restoration was required after the near-total disappearance of Celtic concepts in medieval Europe, however Stewart avoids portraying the period as considered one of dry, disinterested scholarship. As he writes, nation and race ‘are saved firmly in view all through’, and he reveals that debates about Celtic historical past and linguistics incessantly descended into squabbles over ‘prestigious ancestors whose legacy was up for grabs’. Repeatedly, we come throughout authors who simply so occur to find that their very own native dialect was the unique tongue of all Europe.
For the uninitiated, the prominence of German claims to Celticity would possibly come as a shock: Celtic and Germanic ideas weren’t definitively separated till the late 18th century, and the obvious incongruence of contemporary German-speakers figuring out as Celts would possibly make their scholarship appear faintly ridiculous. However alongside a document of mental missteps and prejudices, Stewart demonstrates the actual and lasting linguistic discoveries made on this period, not least the proofs of Celtic linguistic relatedness printed by the Welsh Edward Lhwyd in 1707, which had already been ‘speculatively’ recommended by the German G.W. Leibniz. Readers anticipating dramatic tales of neo-druids and nationwide struggles will, I hope, not flip away from prolonged sections on (for instance) the importance of the phonological distinction between P-Celtic and Q-Celtic: a part of the cleverness of Stewart’s ebook is that he manages to mix a full account of the weirder and wilder Celtic theories with proof that, in among the many eccentricities, real scholarly advances had been going down.
With regards to scholarly advances, one of many many modern facets of Stewart’s grand narrative is his give attention to James Cowles Prichard (1786-1848), an Anglo-Welsh ethnologist who emerges as one of many pioneers of inserting Celtic languages within the Indo-European household. Prichard is proven to have profoundly influenced the continental linguists who typically get many of the credit score. He additionally, nevertheless, inaugurates a piece of Stewart’s ebook wherein the idea of race turns into central to the expression of Celtic id. Right here, as an illustration, we discover the Scottish phrenologist George Combe (1788-1858) predicting, by fortunate accident, the emergence of a second Napoleon in Nineteenth-century France, primarily based on his perception that ‘the small Celtic mind of the French’ was ‘weak to demagoguery’.
A chapter on race and the ‘Irish Query’ surveys a big and contentious physique of proof on the function of anti-Celtic racism in Britain’s therapy of Eire, concluding that any racialised interpretation should all the time be balanced with different particular elements. And a superb consideration of the ‘Land Query’ throughout the British Celtic fringe reveals that racial rhetoric was simply as vital in makes an attempt to unify opposition to ‘Saxon’ landlordism because it was in English denigration of ‘Celtic’ tenants. This duality continues to be vital within the ebook’s remaining part, which focuses on the daybreak of organised pan-Celticism across the flip of the twentieth century. Right here Celtic connectivity was asserted on mixed racial and linguistic grounds: it may very well be mobilised on behalf of each nationalist radicalism and quiescent Unionism, and conferred an ongoing racial tinge to the self-consciously anti-colonial and left-leaning Celtic activism that developed because the century wore on. Hitler, it emerges, might need thought Jesus was a Celt, and the Nazis used Celtic Research for their very own ends; however that didn’t cease later left-identified pan-Celts from asserting that Celtic society was ‘all the time socialist’.
In a ebook that covers this a lot floor, it’s all the time potential to think about different routes that may have been taken. Stewart is a historian of concepts, not a literary critic: you can think about a story wherein poetry, novels, and aesthetics play a much bigger function. Equally, you can write a ebook wherein materials written in, fairly than about, the varied Celtic languages was extra central. However this latter level appears churlish when Stewart – whose multilingual give attention to English, French, and German is unprecedented – can also be in a position to cite extra main and secondary Celtic-language sources (predominantly in Welsh) than is common for students exterior Celtic Research. Pan-Celticism itself was a motion so uncomfortably conscious of its dependence on English that there have been makes an attempt to make Esperanto its different lingua franca.
From the trendy melancholy Celticists of the 18th century to the scholarly sceptics of the twentieth, folks have lengthy predicted the approaching disappearance of the Celts. However as Stewart’s ebook reveals, like King Arthur getting back from Afallon, the Celts are all the time coming again.
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The Celts: A Fashionable Historical past
Ian Stewart
Princeton College Press, 576pp, £35
Purchase from bookshop.org (affiliate hyperlink)
Rhys Kaminski-Jones is a Analysis Fellow on the College of Wales Centre for Superior Welsh and Celtic Research and the writer of Welsh Revivalism in Imperial Britain (Boydell & Brewer, 2025).
