The Celts: A Modern History by Ian Stewart - an extensive work overlooking several essential studies

Irish Times

22-04-2025

The Celts: A Modern History
Author
:
Ian Stewart
ISBN-13
:
976-0-694-22251-6
Publisher
:
Princeton University Press
Guideline Price
:
£35
This is an ambitious work that attempts to put three historical themes about the Celtic peoples into one. It is more a commentary on the works of the historians pertaining to those themes.
The first part is about the origin and development of the Celtic peoples and their absorption into various empires. The second is the rediscovery of their culture, languages and links. The third is the growth of Pan-Celticism out of the early academic findings leading to a 20th-century conflict between some academics and advocates of political Pan-Celticism.
In trying to intertwine these aspects, it becomes an impractical source book by confusing its variation of themes.
Apart from the 11 pages of preface and acknowledgments, there are 87 pages of notes and 45 pages of bibliography. As extensive as that is, it overlooks several essential studies.
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The author is an intellectual and cultural historian of modern European culture. He is not a Celtic scholar, and that makes his examination of the origin and development of the Celtic branch of Indo-European culture somewhat cursory.
[
The Celts: A Sceptical History — Celts used as mythological political whipping boys
Opens in new window
]
The advancement of the Celtic culture and languages in the first millenniums BC is indispensable to any subsequent development. We remember that Celtic is, first and foremost, a linguistic definition, in the same way we speak of Romance, Germanic, Slavonic, Baltic and so on. Without the linguistic definition, the Celts do not exist. Even though Celtic languages are still living entities, the author can dismiss this as 'linguistic antiquarianism'. When the author speaks of 'Celtic literature', he is talking about works in English during recent centuries and not literature in the Celtic languages.
A missed opportunity here was the lack of analysis of the dynamics of why the Romans, later followed by the Germanic tribes, pursued the path of annihilation of the Celtic people. How and why were the Celtic-speaking peoples relegated from a major European civilisation to a modern, almost vanishing people, whose languages continue to be endangered to the point of disappearance? As an example, 16th-century English law announced the intention to 'utterly extirpate' the Welsh language, and similar legislation was applied to Irish and Scottish Gaelic.
The speed with which the European Celtic world, from Anatolia in the east to Britain and Ireland in the west, was eclipsed by the Roman Empire, and then by Germanic invasions, was a major historical phenomenon. The reason for this, I ventured in my study that I ironically entitled The Celtic Empire (1990), was Celtic lack of cohesion. It was summed up by Welsh poet Harry Webb's famous paraphrase of the historian Tacitus: 'Fighting retail, they were beaten wholesale. Had they been inseparable, they would have been insuperable.'
Pan-Celticism was developed as a political philosophy in the anti-imperial struggle. The author rightly concentrates on the rise of Celtic scholarship after the Renaissance. The discoveries of intellectuals about who the Celts had been before the conquests and attempted absorptions resulted in the discovery of common heritage and linguistics. This was finally established by 19th-century German scholars when Celtic was identified as a separate branch of the Indo-European family of languages.
The modern Celts were therefore linguistically identified as Brythonic (Welsh, Breton and Cornish) and Goidelic (Irish, Scots Gaelic and Manx).
The author concentrates his commentaries along two paths. There is the history of Celtic Studies, and there is the history of Pan-Celticism, the latter initially being inspired by the academic work on the Celtic peoples.
'A commentary work of this magnitude is hard to follow, even with such a long period of study'
It was only in the mid-20th century that groups of Celtic scholars began to feel that Celtic academia and Celtic political movements ought to be separated. While logical, it was interesting that academics used support for the colonial status quo to argue for their separation. Some, like Dr Simon James, even argued that the word 'Celtic' was an invented modern term. This was in spite of Julius Caesar pointing out 'in their own language they are called Celts'.
The author does me the honour of quoting some of my early works published in the 1960s, although neglecting the many studies on the Celts I have since published. A commentary work of this magnitude is hard to follow, even with such a long period of study. Compressing the diverse themes into one large volume is somewhat muddling.
The rise and fall of the varied Celtic peoples, their languages and culture, from ancient times to their conquests and near absorption in other cultures, may be compressed as one subject. The rediscovery by academics of those languages and cultures is a second subject. The modern campaigns for self-government is a third subject. In trying to combine all aspects, the work fails in clarity due to its perplexity of themes.