Celtic The A HISTORY World
John Waddell
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THE CELTIC WORLD – A HISTORY
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The Celtic World A History
JOHN WADDELL
FOUR COURTS PRESS
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© John Waddell and Four Courts Press 2026
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Contents
7
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
11
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATIONS
13
INTRODUCTION
1 Early fact and fantasy
15
2 A long eccentric century
35
3 Early Celtic studies and archaeology
58
4 Racial lunacy and unearthing the Celt
78
5 Celtic archaeology – Celtic studies
90
6 Celtic realms
113
7 Language and literature
149
8 The Celtic world in a new millennium
165
187
NOTES
203
BIBLIOGRAPHY
222
INDEX
5
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Introduction
Today the study of the former Celtic world is a remarkable multidisciplinary undertaking involving archaeology, linguistics, history and genetics. It is an investigation of a Celtic past that had its beginnings in prehistoric times and, in parts of western Europe, a lifespan that extended well into the early medieval era. This book is a historical exploration of how our understanding of the ancient Celts and the concept of a European-wide world inhabited by Celtic-speaking peoples developed over time. Some years ago, one historian writing of the legendary king Arthur identified three ‘worlds of Arthur’, which he characterized as the ‘Old’, the ‘Present’ and the ‘Mad’. 1 It is probably fair to say there are three similar Celtic worlds as well but this study, it must be emphasized, is firmly focused on the Celtic world of old in Continental Europe, in Britain and in Ireland. For many years the number of pioneering practitioners in this field of study, whether in archaeology or language and literature, was very small, so to a great extent this is their story too. Inevitably, any attempt to describe it has to be quite selective and has to mainly focus on those discoveries that contributed in a significant way to our understanding of how it all came about. In other words, this is an account of some of the major archaeological finds and linguistic developments that gave shape and substance to our present understanding of this former world. Almost from its inception the study of the Celtic past has been a disputed and debated territory. At different times a Celt has been defined by some or all of a host of characteristics such as language, material culture, art and race. In Britain in recent decades the term Celt has been questioned and opposed, and the notion of a Celtic world questioned. In outlining the development of the exploration of this ancient world, it will become clear, in this study, that a Celt was someone who first and foremost spoke a Celtic language. This was a language family that facilitated social contact at every level and archaeology offers abundant supportive evidence in the form of wide-ranging trade and exchange. Where goods and people travelled, so did stories, myths and religious beliefs. Celtic peoples first appear in the written record in Greek and Roman sources. In Greek they were the Keltoi , in Latin Celtae or Galli . These early historical references, along with inscriptions and place-names confirm their widespread presence across Europe, from Ireland in the west to Turkey in the east, perhaps even as far as Kazakhstan beyond the Caspian Sea. In most of Europe they and their language
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would eventually succumb to the power of Rome and other historical forces, and fade away by the early medieval period around AD 500. Celtic languages would then be confined to the western fringe of Europe, mainly to Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Brittany where they are still spoken today. In medieval Ireland these Continental beginnings were forgotten and native origin myths were aligned with an irrefutable biblical world history as expounded by the Christian church. In this fiction, Japhet, one of the sons of Noah who attempted to build the Tower of Babel after the Flood, became the ultimate ancestor of the peoples of Europe. While they had a long life, such eastern origin myths of one sort or another would eventually be rejected as an affinity between the Irish, Scots Gaelic, Welsh, Cornish and Breton languages was gradually recognized in the sixteenth century. It was a slow process however and eccentric speculation about Celtic origins would continue until the middle of the nineteenth century when the modern study of Celtic linguistics and archaeology began. Celtic Druids had been a subject of interest for several centuries because of their appearance in classical writings. They became especially popular in the eighteenth century when stone circles like Stonehenge and other archaeological monuments were often attributed to them. In the following century archaeological discoveries, in areas known to have been inhabited by Celtic-speakers, would be credited to prehistoric Celts with a greater degree of plausibility. A whole series of dramatic finds in France and Germany in particular would then bring these ancient people to scholarly and popular attention. In the twentieth century and in the new millennium the Celtic world of old would be clearly defined and new approaches in both linguistic studies and archaeology would add immeasurably to our understanding of a remarkable European phenomenon.
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CHAPTER 1
Early fact and fantasy
Parts of the world of the ancient Celts are first mentioned by two Greek historians Hecataeus of Miletus ( c .560–480 BC ) and Herodotus of Halicarnassus ( c .485–424 BC ). Hecataeus wrote a ‘Description of the Earth’ that only survives in fragments in the work of some later writers. He mentions a Celtic city called Nyrax somewhere in the west, but its location is debated. He also refers to Celtic peoples in France north of the Ligurians who occupied the territory of the Greek colony of Massalia in the south, modern Marseille. Herodotus is equally brief in his ‘Histories’ as far as the Celts are concerned. The known world is divided into three major sections: Africa, which he calls Libya, Asia and India, and Europe (fig. 1.1). In Europe the two major barbarian peoples are the Scythians in the east and the Keltoi or Celts in the west. On the River Danube, which he calls the Ister, he writes that it rises in the land of the Celts near the city of Pyrene and flows through the middle of Europe. The Celts also live beyond the Pillars of Hercules and border on the Kunētes , who are the westernmost inhabitants of Europe. 1 In placing Celtic peoples beyond the Strait of Gibraltar he locates Celts in the Iberian peninsula and these Kunētes or Cynetes in the Algarve region were perhaps not Celtic-speakers but nonetheless were neighbours of Celtic-speaking peoples. The location of the city of Pyrene has been the subject of much discussion but some archaeologists would now equate it with the very wealthy early Iron Age settlement complex at the Heuneburg on the Danube, near Hundersingen, in southern Germany. The identification of the wider Celtic-speaking world would be a slow process and how and when this came about is a convoluted story. The answer to these questions, and the historiography of the Celtic world itself, is complicated. It involves history, archaeology and linguistics, and a vast body of serious scholarship in several languages on every aspect of the subject of Celtic studies. This is also a perilous territory inhabited by a few curious archaeologists, romantic nationalists, neo-pagans, assertive historians and fierce philologists. How did Ireland on the western fringe of Europe become a Celtic country and be seen to be a part of such a wider Celtic world is an equally difficult question. Archaeology is a large part of the story and it is archaeology that holds the likely answer. A century or so ago the solution seemed deceptively simple. In 1928, for instance, the eminent archaeologist R.A.S. Macalister in University College Dublin asserted that the Iron Age was brought about by the immigration of Celtic peoples
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16 The Celtic World – a history
about 400 BC . The invading Celts subdued the aboriginal inhabitants of the island with their superior iron weapons. According to him this immigration produced a complete revolution in the life of the country, introducing a new culture, a new language, new rulers, a new organization. 2 Matters were much the same in England at this time. In 1920 the archaeologist O.G.S. Crawford studied a series of hoards of bronze objects and concluded ‘towards the close of the Bronze Age the British Isles were invaded by the first wave of Celtic- speaking peoples bringing with them leaf-shaped bronze swords, many other entirely new types of bronze objects, and at least two types of pottery new to these islands’. 3 Very influential in British archaeology, he was employed by the Ordnance Survey and is renowned for founding the important archaeological journal Antiquity and for his early use of aerial photography. This invasion model was widely accepted and developed in various ways in the following decades. However, in time it was recognized that the distribution of some sword types might reflect trade and exchange rather than the movement of migrating Celtic ‘sword-bearers’. Eventually 1.1 A cartographic reconstruction of the ancient world according to Herodotus c. 430 BC .This map was created in the nineteenth century in a series on ancient oceanographical views for the scientific reports of the voyage of HMS Challenger in 1872–6 and published in 1895. Pyrene and the Ister (the River Danube) are depicted on the upper left.
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Early fact and fantasy 17
the whole question of the overuse of a simplistic ‘invasion hypothesis’ would be critically evaluated in both Britain and Ireland. In Ireland a belief in Celtic immigrants has a long history going back many centuries and the notion that they were a special people would play a crucial and role in the formation of a national identity in more modern times. They assumed a romanticized and idealized character. For instance, the remarkable politician, poet and romantic nationalist Thomas D’Arcy McGee (1825–68) would write in his well- known poem on ‘The Celts’:
Long ago, beyond the misty space Of twice a thousand years In Erin old there dwelt a mighty race Taller than Roman spears. Like oaks and towers they had a giant grace, Were fleet as deers, With winds and waves they made their ’biding place, These western shepherd seers. 4
Unfortunately, history is all but silent on this ‘mighty race’ in ancient Ireland. While Greek and Roman writers have much to say about the Celtic peoples of old in Continental Europe, there are only a few tantalizingly brief references to those early Celts who lived in Ireland on edge of the known world. Fragments of an account of a voyage to the Atlantic from the Greek colony of Massalia in southern France are preserved. Known as the Massaliote Periplus, this was a sea journey by an adventurous Greek seafarer from present-day Marseille, through the Strait of Gibraltar, the Pillars of Hercules as they were called, into the ‘Outer Sea’ and along the coasts of western Europe. It may have been written shortly before 500 BC but survives only in part in quotations in Latin verse in the Ora Maritima of the Roman writer Rufius Festus Avienus of the late fourth century AD . This periplus or manual for navigators recorded the existence of the islands of Iernē and Albion, Greek forms of the earliest known names of Ireland and Britain. One section of this navigational aid mentions a place called the Oestrymnides, believed by some commentators to be islands off the coast of Brittany, or perhaps the Isles of Scilly, and from this location the author declared:
From here it is a two-day voyage to the Sacred Isle, For by this name the ancients called the island.
It lies rich in turf among the waves, Thickly populated by the Hierni . Nearby lies the island of the Albiones.
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18 The Celtic World – a history
1.2 An early sixteenth-century attempt to depict Ptolemy’s geographical account of Britain and Ireland as a map.
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Early fact and fantasy 19
This would have been a quite feasible passage in fair weather, sailing northwards from Brittany or the Isles of Scilly via Land’s End and skirting the Saltee Islands to the south-eastern Irish coast. While it would be nice to think that Ireland was renowned for its sanctity at this early date, the epithet insula sacra may be an error prompted by
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20 The Celtic World – a history
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Early fact and fantasy 21
the fact that the oldest Greek name for Ireland, Iernē , is similar to the phrase hiera nesos meaning ‘holy island’. A Greek sailor may well have confused the two. Several centuries later another Greek voyager is known to have ventured into Atlantic waters. About 325 BC , Pytheas of Massalia, whose account is also known only at second hand in later works, travelled extensively around the coast of Britain and may have circumnavigated that island. He was certainly aware of Ireland but has nothing to say about it. Importantly he does refer to both islands as the Brettanic Islands , a Celtic name and the earliest usage of the term ‘the British Isles’ that presumably includes Ireland. 5 The name Iernē is a Greek rendering of the Celtic *Iweriu, translated as ‘the fertile land’, becoming Ériu in Old Irish. Following the Massaliote Periplus it seems the island, inhabited by the Iverni , ‘the people of the fertile earth’, may have been Celtic-speaking by the sixth century BC . The ‘British Isles’ is a term also used somewhat later, in the second century BC , by the Greek historian Polybius. Later writers too refer to the inhabitants of Britain as Brettanoi or Prettanoi but call the Irish Hiberni or Scotti, or by some tribal name. Early in the first century AD , the little-known merchant and geographer Philemon was told by traders who had travelled to Ireland that the length of the island was a twenty-day journey, a reasonably accurate estimation if an average daily trek of 21 miles (33km) is accepted. Philemon was probably one of the sources for Ptolemy’s Geography compiled in Alexandria in the second century AD . This famous work is a list of some 8,000 places in the known world including Europe given with their longitude and latitude. Using these coordinates, a number of early maps were produced in medieval and later times (fig. 1.2). It is the first written source to include Ireland and thus has a particular importance. Place-names, including settlement, headland, island and river names, and tribal names are given with their longitude and latitude. From this information it is possible to reconstruct a map which is the oldest documentary account of this island. While Ptolemy records many Celtic place-names and tribal names in Britain, many more are recorded there in numerous Roman sources. It is in these writings that many well-known Celtic tribes first enter the historical record and, combining history and the evidence of coinage in 1882, John Rhŷs, the first Professor of Celtic in Oxford, was able to map the relative locations of some of these ancient British peoples in Roman times (fig. 1.3). 6 * * * In Britain as elsewhere a Celt was a person who spoke a Celtic tongue, so it is necessary to very briefly summarize the earliest linguistic evidence. Names of places and people are, of course, interesting as indicators of the presence of Celtic-speaking peoples but any more detailed knowledge of their language must obviously rest on a
1.3 (across) The Celtic tribes of Britain as mapped in Early Britain – Celtic Britain by John Rh ŷ s in 1882. The areas that he claimed were occupied by the invading Britons are shown in pink, the lands of the Goidels in light blue.The aboriginal Ivernians ‘or traces of them’ are depicted in dark blue.The approximate locations of over thirty Celtic tribes with their Roman names are shown.
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22 The Celtic World – a history
lengthier written record. The Celtic languages, Continental Celtic and Insular Celtic, belong to the Indo-European language family and descend from a parent language variously called Proto-Celtic or Common Celtic. This is a hypothetical prehistoric language not attested in writing but reconstructed by identifying linguistic features that distinguish it from other Indo-European dialects. The Continental Celtic language family includes Gaulish in parts of France and surrounding territories (including modern day Belgium, most of Switzerland and parts of Germany), Celtiberian in Spain, and Lepontic (sometimes grouped with Gaulish as Cisalpine Celtic) in northern Italy. Gaulish is first documented in the second century BC in inscriptions written in Greek script on pottery, metal and stone. Invariably relatively short, they often just mention the name of a dead person or the owner of an object. The famous Coligny calendar and the inscriptions to Celtic deities (named as Cernunnos, Tarvos Trigaranos and Esus) on the Pilier des Nautes (the Pillar of the Boatmen) in Paris (figs 2.1 and 2.2) are other examples of Gallo-Latin work with a religious dimension. 7 Celtiberian is attested mainly in north-central Spain where several hundred inscriptions are known. From around the second century BC the Continental Celts appear on the stage of history with a measure of greater clarity. The names Keltoi used by a number of Greek writers and Celtae by some Romans appear to have been native words used on the Continent by Celtic speakers. Julius Caesar, writing in the first century BC in his De Bello Gallico stated ‘all Gaul ( Gallia ) is divided into three parts, one of which is inhabited by the Belgae, another by the Aquitanians and the third by those who are called Celts ( Celtae ) in their own tongue and Gauls ( Galli ) in ours’. The element Kelt- occurs in a few Greek compound names such as Keltolígues in north-western Italy and south-western Gaul, Keltíbēres in Spain, and Keltoskythai on the Black Sea. The evidence suggests that Keltoi was a native term once in use as a general designation of themselves by numerous Continental peoples stretching from Iberia in the west to the Black Sea and Anatolia in the east. Place-names, especially in western Europe, and numerous other proper names are further confirmation of the geographical presence of these Celts. Historically attested migrations were also a part of this remarkable picture. Movements of people into northern Italy from around 400 BC if not before, an attack on Delphi in Greece in 279 BC , and immigration into Anatolia in the third century BC are well-known examples. Crucially the Celtic language family was probably relatively undifferentiated in the last four centuries BC facilitating communication and conducive to a shared sense of ethnic identity. 8 This linguistic evidence in all its forms is highly important. In recent decades a number of English writers have claimed that the ancient Celts were never a cultural entity but are a construct of modern times. They have given particular and understandable emphasis to the archaeological diversity that is such a striking feature of the world of the Celtic-speaking peoples of the first millennium BC . However, they
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Early fact and fantasy 23
1.4 Carving an ogam stone as depicted by the Scottish illustrator Stephen Reid in T.W. Rolleston, Myths and legends of the Celtic race in 1911.
have persistently ignored or given little weight to the language question. This ‘Celtoscepticism’ is encapsulated in the inventive titles of books such as The Celts: the construction of a myth (1992), The Atlantic Celts: ancient people or modern
A
t the dawn of history the Celts occupied a vast swathe of Europe from Ireland in the west to lands south of the Black Sea in Asia Minor. The study of this Celtic past has often been a disputed and debated territory
and for centuries the true story of these Celtic-speakers of old was obscured by fanciful origin myths. Their origins and subsequent history were slowly revealed when linguistic studies and archaeological discoveries in the nineteenth century began to expose a rich and complex narrative that is still being clarified today. A series of dramatic finds in France and Germany in particular have brought these ancient peoples to scholarly and popular attention. This was a prehistoric world that offered an intricate picture of connectivity and diversity across much of Europe. These were people who have bequeathed us a remarkable archaeological heritage, an astonishing art style, several living languages, and, in Irish and Welsh, the most substantial body of early written texts in a non-Latin tongue in western Europe. This book is a historical exploration of how our understanding of the ancient Celts and the concept of a European-wide world inhabited by Celtic-speaking peoples developed over time.
H
John Waddell is a former Professor of Archaeology in the University of Galway. His books include Archaeology and Celtic myth (Dublin, 2014) and Pagan Ireland: ritual and belief in another world (Dublin, 2023).
FOUR COURTS PRESS
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