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WHENEVER IRISHNESS IS discussed, the word “Celtic” comes to mind. Indeed, “Celtic” is often a synonym to describe things “Irish”. We label things as Celtic music, Celtic art, and Celtic crosses. When we reflect on the personality traits we as a people have, we regularly attribute them to our ancient Celtic ancestry.
In the popular view of Irish history, our island was invaded in the distant past by the Celts, who brought a language and culture that was to dominate Ireland for millennia.
While we now speak English and share much of our culture with the Anglophone world, we still feel our Irish identity is rooted in our Celtic past.
Settled by Celts?
What many don’t appreciate is that the idea that Ireland was once settled by Celts has been called into question by many scholars.
Archeological digs offer scant evidence that there was ever any sudden change in culture in Ireland’s ancient past that we would expect to see if invaders suddenly arrived from the continent.
Whatever about whether the Celts ever did come to Ireland, what is undeniable is that medieval Irish and Welsh writers said absolutely nothing about a Celtic past. Nor did they suggest that the Irish and Welsh people had an affinity for one another based on this shared heritage.
In other words, before the year 1700, no one called the Irish and Welsh Celts. So where did the idea that we are Celts come from?
The story starts in the early eighteenth century. Two linguists, Paul Yves Pezron and Edward Lhuyd, discovered that the Gaelic languages and Brythonic languages (Welsh and Breton) were members of a single language family. Pezron suggested that the people of Brittany were the descendants of the ancient Gauls, who were Celts.
Because of the close similarity of Welsh and Breton, he assumed that Welsh had been brought to Britain from ancient Gaul. Building upon this, Lhuyd hinted that the language family they had discovered should be labelled as “Celtic”.
The problem with Pezron’s idea is that modern archeologists are now confident that the Breton language was brought to France from Britain (and not the other way around). On the basis of a possible misunderstanding, the ancient history of Britain and Ireland was reimagined.
Nevertheless, the Celtic connection with Ireland had been established, but it took time to gain widespread acceptance. My own research has shown that the word Celtic rarely appeared in Irish newspapers in the early nineteenth century. Suddenly, the regularity of its use increased dramatically in the 1840s. It doubled again in the 1850s, and by the 1880s, had doubled once more.
Clearly, something happened between the 1840s and 1860s. But what?
The most important factor in the formation of our Celtic identity was the emergence of a “scientific” understanding of race. Scholars increasingly believed that cultural differences were evidence of biological differences. As many of the academics who worked studying racial biology were also linguists, it is not surprising that knowledge from one field crossed to the other. Each language family was assumed to mark a subspecies of the various human races. The Celtic identity suddenly had a “scientific” basis.
Other contemporary events built upon this. Archeological excavations in Switzerland in the 1850s revealed evidence of an ancient Celtic civilization that had once dominated Europe. Meanwhile, Johann Kaspar Zeuss published Grammatica Celtica in 1853. This was the first scientific analysis of the Celtic language family, and made Celtic studies one of the hottest fields of academic research in the later nineteenth century.
At the same time, writers like Ernest Renan discussed the Celtic influence on modern English and French literature. To do this, they first had to explain what characteristics the “Celts” had. Renan described the modern Celts as romantic, whimsical, emotional and with great powers of imagination. They were very unlike the stoic, rational, hard-working Anglo-Saxons. Such stereotypes still hold considerable influence in how Irish people are perceived today.
Over a twenty-year period, the Celts were established as a biological fact by scientists, given a glorious past by archeologists, a sense of scholarly gravitas by linguists, and identifiable personality traits by litterateurs. This made Celticness attractive to nationalists in Ireland and Wales, and by the turn of the twentieth century, most people in both countries believed they were Celts.
Racial identity
The belief that we share a Celtic identity with the Welsh and the Scottish is still widely held today. But what does this mean? What do we actually have in common with them that we could say points to a common Celtic identity? People might say Celtic music, dancing, or languages. yet these are only practiced or spoken by a small minority in each country and can’t truly be said to unite the three nations.
What links us with our fellow Celts today is a lingering sense of a common racial identity. Of course, in a post-Nazi world, most people steer clear of any association with “blood nationalism”. Yet, subconsciously, that is still at the core of the bond we supposedly share with the Welsh and the Scots.
When the Provisional IRA announced in 1972 that they would not carry out attacks in Scotland or Wales, they justified it by stating that they stood with their “Celtic brothers”.
During the Six Nations next year, count the number of times the players from those countries are called “our Celtic cousins”. “Brothers” and “cousins” are meant as friendly terms, but they also reinforce the idea of a relationship based on common bloodlines.
This probably has never occurred to the vast majority of Irish people. But it has not escaped the notice of those who are interested in race-based identities. White nationalist groups in both Europe and the United States have adopted the Celtic cross as one of their symbols. Stormfront, one of the largest white supremacist websites, uses the Celtic cross as its logo.
Bans have been put in place in Italy and Germany on the use of the Celtic cross at neo-Nazi rallies, as some groups use it to get around bans on swastikas. As the Celtic cross can be imagined as symbolising an ancient, white, pan-European identity, it holds obvious appeal to such groups.
Will Ireland retain its Celtic identity? As the meaning of “Irish” evolves towards greater inclusivity of people from diverse ethnic backgrounds, and if the link between Celtic symbols and white nationalism gains more attention in mainstream Irish society, hard questions might be asked as to whether “Irish” and “Celtic” are really the same thing.
In the same way that Celticness became a central part of Irishness in the nineteenth century, it is possible that the twenty-first century will witness a disentangling of these identities once more.
The book is called “The Coming of the Celts, AD 1860: Celtic Nationalism in Ireland and Wales”. It is published by the University of Notre Dame Press and can be purchased through Amazon or here.
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There is scant evidence for your undermining Irish culture. What there is evidence abounding is the countless Celtic crosses that stand in our graveyards to our buried dead. These media efforts to destroy everything Irish for the advancement of multicultural goals are tantamount to sacrilege and treason.
@Free Thinker ❌: not to mention a rather large collection of celtic gold trinkets found in the state
@Free Thinker ❌: he’s saying there’s no evidence of our Celtic origins. Have you got anything to refute that? Your talk of Celtic crosses just reinforces his point that it’s more of a branding thing than based on real evidence.
@The Guru: the author is the one making the claim. Proof is his job. He offers absolutely no evidence other than the lack of mention in Anglo Irish newspapers prior to the ‘revival’. He offers no alternative explanations to the wealth of Celtic artifacts present or the lack of a another distinct culture from the time. It is clearly a whitewashing exercise. I’ll stick with DNA as the only reliable method.
@Greg Blake: it’s been accepted for years that there was no large movement of a Celtic people from Central Europe into Ireland. This is based on dna and archeological evidence.
It is likely that there was an exchange of ideas possibly language and artwork through trade.
Very unlikely that there was a mass settlement of celts in this part of the world.
@john doe:
Yes. That’s further confirmed by numismatic evidence. No Celtic coinage in Ireland despite many hoards and samples discovered in South England.
@ Free Thinker. Celtic/Iron Age was pre-Christian and Pre-Roman. Even with the arrival of Romans in England they were still Pagan at that time. There is no such thing as an authentic “Celtic Cross”. They didn’t exist. Just another post era cultural invention which in fact supports the authors opinion.
@Tweed Cap: yet the cross is adorned with Celtic symbolism, adapted from where? I suspect it was a spread of people to the fringes sooner than the full development of the culture and politics in the central regions, they were remote and diluted with the thinly spread pre-existing cultures. How dominant they were is anyone guess.
@Free Thinker ❌: The Celtic Crosses in the graveyard are relatively modern ( last 200 years) This gentleman was going back much further in history. There ae Celtic Crosses in England, US, Canada, Aus etc that doesn’t mean ancient Celts got to these place, rather the result of recent immigration. (If Donald Trump don’t have them removed from the US as unamerican)
@Tweed Cap: that’s a great point. All of the Celtic/Irish symbols like crosses and sculpture that are deemed to be the examples of Celtic culture were all post Christianity. Genuine Irish culture, such as ogham and newgrange are never included as “Celtic”.
@Tweed Cap: People still think of travel in the ancient world as similar to later migration routes but they were very diiferent places. The Irish share a lot of DNA with Gallicia, which was much bigger back then. Gallicia also claims a wealth of Celtic archeology and culture (eg Santa Trega) I tend to agree with the author but only to limited extent. It seems morecredible as someone said above, that older Gaelic tradition adopted Celtic tradition from a small group that made the trip. Tuatha De Dannan etc.
@john doe: yep that’s exactly what I was learnt in college while studying archaeology. The only real evidence of there being Celts in Ireland is the language. Nothing like the iron age finds elsewhere in Europe like in lake Nauchatel in Switzerland. It took me years to get over this! But I’ve come to accept it..
@Free Thinker ❌: exactly.. More agenda driven liberal left cultural revisionism.
@Katie Murphy: what you were learnt in college… Oh dear.
@Free Thinker ❌: There is no evidence of a Celtic migration or invasion of Ireland. The Celtic culture did come here because the people’s of this island traded extensively within Europe. This is widely documented – a simple Google search will provide scholarly articles.
Unfortunately the whole Celtic & Gaelic identity were manufactured to bolster racial purity ideals & Nationalist notions.
@Raymond Power: clearly a typo.. what I learnt..
@Greg Blake: the celtic cross symbolized an amalgam of Christianity and Druidism
@The Guru:
It is obvious Irish and Welsh have a common root language. verb–subject–object in sentence construction and much more. Ty Bach – Tí Beag just one of thousands of identifiable similarities.
I suspect the author, who sports a Norman surname, just doesn’t like the natives.
@Free Thinker ❌: Not being celtic should re-inforce your nationalist spirit not erode it, that means the Irish people did all that art on their own, Its Gael Cross on the grave, Gael Knots, Gael Gold, Gael Language. That we inspired art and language in mainland europe, not the other way around, that we are the people who arrived on the land when it first saw the sun after the ice. It means we are people who come from much older line than the celts, and are like cousins to them. The evidence says we are just part of the caucasian tribe wo stopped in Ireland cause we couldnt go any further.. that this is our home. I even surnames are a Gael custom, our dancing, our music, imagine if tomorrow we took it out from the celtic umbrella and held it high as our own.
Assume a link between the ‘tribes’ could be tested with the widespread use of DNA kits. I am a little disappointed the article did not explore this aspect.
@Joe Hill: You’re right about DNA kits. The book thats being flogged here focuses on how they went about establishing this between 1860 & 1925 though. It got a one star review.
@Joe Hill: First thing that struck me as I read. No DNA mentions seems odd.
@Joe Hill: there’s no such thing as Celtic DNA. It’s too far back.
@The Guru: it’s perfe toy possible to trace DNA back thousands of years if you have ancient bone samples who h we do. Whatever about Celticness an interesting find was our DNA links to the Basques.
@Joe Hill: DNA testing is in its infancy so the technology is not advanced enough to deliver the accuracy that we need.
@Garvan Rushe: we would find much more Germanic DNA than shared with Breton. But it could be useful to see if there is a unique common ancestor between Celtic cultures that is not there all the way back to non Celtic migrations.
@The Guru: actually there is a DNA trail, have a look at ‘The origins of the Irish, by Professor James P Mallory’ on YouTube, it’s a fantastic lecture that explores DNA, linguistics and archaeology to build a picture of historical Ireland. Well worth a view, very enjoyable.
Interesting read, until I got to the end and I realised what this opinion piece is really about. White supremists have hijacked the Celtic cross and therefore we should distance ourselves from the Celts and everything they meant. Id Rather fight for our history and not let these sub humans hijack another symbol!
DNA? the writer is sadly as confused as the Victorian label of “Celtic”. What he fails miserably to point out is the actual PHYSICAL connection between tribes from this landmass and Wales and Scotland who settled in both in early Christian times. The ancient kingdom called Dal Riada existed in Ireland and Scotland – whether it was CELTIC is irrelevant to de facto cultural, political, military connections. The part in the opinion piece about the Irish language being spoken by a tiny miniority as evidence to back up his claim of a slim “celtic” connection between Ireland and Scotland is off the wall. “Irish” was spoken throughout Ireland and Scotland up to the late medieval period alongside a variant of Welsh in the lowlands. So the plug for the book has back fired – sounds like nonsense to me. The label Celtic is as I say irrelevant to factual, actual connection between the peoples of these islands – at least modern historians like Prof Cunniffe is not as silly to exclude modern discoveries in DNA. wake up lad.
@Austin Rock: Jordan Peterson is right, Identitarians like this guy (diversity identarian) skew facts to suit their agenda on both sides of the political divide.
I have noticed the tendency to confuse the term ‘Celtic’ with ‘Gaelic’ or use them interchangeably; the Celtic cross really should be referred to as a Gaelic cross.
@Shaner Mac: It’s a Breton symbol too, so Celtic is more appropriate than Gaelic.
@Brian Ó Dálaigh: Well it may well be used in Brittany but it’s very much a Gaelic symbol
What’s annoying about the article above, is the fact that the author did not provide any information as to what we might be if we are not “Celtic”
And the ending of the article was so odd it jumped to white supremacy and nazism!?
@Aaron Tynan: The majority of people in Britain and Ireland are still mostly descended from the same people who repopulated the islands following the end of the last ice age. What they spoke before the Celtic languages arrived is still debated. But as several others have already pointed out, the original ‘Celts’ were Central Europeans whose langauges and culture spread over Western Europe until they were slowly replaced by Latin and Germanic cultures. Britain and Ireland were the last strongholds of these languages.
@Aaron Tynan: It’s worth bearing in mind that linguistic change doesn’t necessarily imply a change of population. For example, the classic view of English history was that the Anglo-Saxons exterminated or pushed the native Britons out of the lands they conquered, whereas modern archaeological and genetic evidence suggests that most Britons actually stayed put, ruled by a small but powerful Anglo-Saxon upper class, and eventually began speaking their langauge in turn. The Anglo-Saxon genetic component in modern English folk is actually around 30% at most. A similar situation occurred in Scotland when Irish raiders established the Kingdom of Argyll and their culture slowly replaced that of the native Picts.
@Harry Whitehead: I think you forget that Anglo Saxons were a Germanic race which arrived in Britain after the Roman conquest. Britons, Picts & Scotia (Gaelic Irish) already existed but were pushed westward as the Romans created their foothold and built settlements, very different from bronze and iron age settlements. Other invaders such as Jutes and Belgic (from Belgium) could not match the Romans. The Romans also introduced Christianity through St Augustine who created his church at Canterbury in Kent a former Jute/Belgic kingdom.
‘Celtic’ as an archaeological or historical concept in Ireland has not been seen as valid for years. However as a cultural concept to describe the commonality of the Atlantic fringe it is as good as any. ‘Celts’ was only a word used by the Greeks to describe the peoples of Central Europe. These people didn’t call themselves that.
The Irish and the Scots where historically known as Gaelic. While the word Celtic may not have mentioned until modern times, there is a vast amount of archaeological and linguistic evidence to point at similarities with the Celtic world.
What utterly baseless rhetoric. Fallacies and outright lies employed to bolster the rhetoric that we have no identity and should welcome our destruction as a people as plantation continues of our homeland. Propaganda ladies and gentlemen, and not even well constructed propaganda at that.
@Rob O’brien: Didn’t you that the world is now just a big tourist hostel and business. Having a nationality and boundaries isn’t welcome any more, certainly not to the likes of this articles author
Are we not Gaelic? separate from mainland celts, I could have sworn this had already been proven. I thought according to DNA research we were more closely related to people from northern Spain than France, Germany etc.
“inclusivity of people from diverse ethnic backgrounds, and if the link between Celtic symbols and white nationalism gains more attention in mainstream Irish society” Aaaaand there it is, bualadh bos
The author is right inasmuch as the notion of Celticness as it is understood by the people of so called Celtic nations has nothing to do with the Hallstadt Celts or any of the iron age cultures that scholars label as Celtic. That’s completely beside the point though as the notion of Celticness has always been incredibly hard to define. From what I understand, the continental Celts themselves never called themselves so, as the word originates with the Greeks. In fact, a number of tribes in Celtic Gaul aligned themselves with the Romans to fight other gaulish Celtic tribes and some scholars argue that the Germanic tribes Cesar mentions in his writings were also Celts.
@Ths Fer: The bottom line is, like any other cultural identity, Celticness isn’t hard science but a living concept that is constantly reshaped by what a living people ascribe to it. Are Ireland, Scotland and Wales Celtic nations? Yes, definitely. As long as their peoples define themselves so.
@Ths Fer: If Irish, Scots and Welsh are defined as celts then it must have a bearing on the English being a race apart and that of domination by England over the other countries and cultures which make up the British Isles.
Don’t care about this article I think the Celtic cross is a wonderful symbol, don’t care who hijacks it. If people dismissed things because nutters adopt then then we wouldn’t have civilised people getting involved in sport etc. Fact early medieval Irish/ulster tribes founded scotland so there’s one clear connection. Why doesn’t the writer look at the varying archaeology around the island eg the difference between ancient(pre medieval) Munster and the rest of the country. This indicates at least small scale invasions in different parts of the country. Oh I’m all for multicultural Ireland as long as our own culture maintains respect
I just don’t get this article? Also the Bretons descend from Celtic speaking tribes going to the west of France from Britain to escape the Anglo-Saxons.
The Celts as a people did exist; they just didn’t call themselves Celts.
Just another you don’t have a culture so accept multiculturalism or you are a white supremacists article.
There’s no shame in being Celtic or indeed celebrating a set of languages and cultures that are otherwise extinct from the world.
However, there is a subset that uses the Celtic identity to create division. By saying “Celtic” they really mean “not English”. And and they mean it in a racial way, that no one who is from England can ever be Celtic; in the some way some people use “Irish” to exclude immigrants, no matter the number of generations or how integrated they may be.
The writer would have us purge our identities, in the belief that the past, current or future attachments to racist movements spoils them. However, I’d say, let’s work harder to keep and protect them, and open those identities in the way those identities were opened to us.
As a tour guide, I find it tiresome of having to answer “Do you speak Celtic?” It’s like asking a French or Italian person if they speak ‘Romantic’. The answer is not exactly ‘no’ or ‘yes’, but ‘kind of’. I’m writing in ‘Germanic’ right now. English and Swedish are both Germanic languages, yet it would seem proposterous to refer directly to either solely as ‘Germanic’.
@Garvan Rushe: It seems like, due to the interest in Celtic Studies at the end of the 19th-c, terms like ‘Celtic’ and ‘Gaelic’ became ambiguous to people (those unfamiliar with the Indo-European family tree), then became substituted, and then we treated them like synonyms. To me, the analogy of Nazi ideology is the closest in a European context: the feeling of low esteem, the desire for strength on cultural & (less so for ‘Celts’) ethical foundations led to the genesis of this grouping and the requisite structure around it.
“Clearly, something happened between the 1840s and 1860s. But what?”
A massive genocide attempt using famine, legislation, and theft.
Did the Celts not migrate from a central European landmass to Ireland in pre-owned historic times?1
@Locojoe: no it’s seen as unlikely in academic thinking that there was a mass movement from Central Europe to Ireland in the Iron Age
@Locojoe: Your thinking of Indo-Europeans
@Locojoe: no they did not. Ireland was repopulate after the last Ice Age by people from what is now the Basque Country.
Latest theory on the language is that it developed as the lingua franca of the tin trade on the Atlantic seaboard starting in southern Portugal. Adopted by local leaders it eventually replaced earlier languages.
The builders of Newgrange or the Ceide Fields where genetically similar to modern Irish people but did not yet speak a so called Celtic language
Imagine writing this complete embarrassment of an article to undermine Irish culture….you are a disgrace Lad
@Jasun Ó Cearnaigh: you can’t cherry pick your culture from immigrants. The celts ‘came’ to Ireland.
Anyone interested in our origins should take themselves over to Rathcroghan, Co Roscommon to see the excellent exhibition based on archealogical and geophysical field studies of the remains of forts dating back to the iron and bronze ages. In fact there are simularities with other pre-Christian sites found in Britain and Nordic countries. What we call Celtic is more a nomadic lifestyle and stories/legends from the other world. Early Christian writings talk of this as folklore intertwined with was to become the early church. Festivals such as Halloween, Christmas etc all have their origins to pre-Christianity solstices and recognition to the spirit other world in Ireland and elsewhere.
DNA testing might conjure up stuff that we may not appreciate:
https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/neanderthal/
@Moorooka Mick: it’s not the case that we might not appreciate it – personally I don’t mind if my ancestors interbred with Neanderthals – but the issue here is that you have an established story backed by “evidence” that was taught when I was in school that the Neanderthals were all dumb, went around saying Ug all the time and died out long before modern humans. And DNA evidence shows that that was all poppycock. They were smart, possibly as smart as us, had their own complex tools and looked great in a skirt. The important thing to remember is that history and prehistory is largely just someone’s opinion.
I wonder how many of the negative commentators have actually read the book ?.
This article is a two or three page extract from a book about the rise of nationalism in two Celtic countries in the 19th century and the use of Wales by Irish Nationalists asan example for the promotion of the revival of the Irish Language.
pre historic times?
It’s like saying what is a American are they celts that invaded that country
Good article – looking forward to getting the book: the following is a link to a paper I wrote on the subject. I’d be interested in your thoughts: https://pfiddle.wordpress.com/2013/01/17/irish-celtism-the-big-lie/
Cunliffe’s book is good too – as a follow up to The Atlantean by Bob Quinn
I remember looking through a very detailed book about the ancient Celts years ago. It was very expensive so well out of my budget. From memory it said the Celts originated in eastern Turkey and moved westwards. They fought with the Romans and the Greeks. There is a quote from Plato about Celts or Keltai being drunk and combative, fighting with only sticks in their hands. HAs for finding evidence such as coins etc, I’m guessing, at one point there was 8 million people living on this island maybe hard evidence was simply destroyed. Plus our climate has always been cold wet and damp, such evidence might never survive till now unless it was preserved somehow.
From all of my studies, the idea of the Celts did originate from Ireland, Scotland, and Britain. And then spread throughout Europe and into the East. The common denominator in all the expansion was the singular linguistic element. I’m not sure of your source of the language developing in what’s now known as France. It’s also been disputed that the Breton Celts and the Gauls were not the same at all. It would be fair to argue that Celt was a general term much like European is today.
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