IAN STEWART
Princeton University Press
$39.95
ISBN 9780691222516
Reviewed by
Mark Williams
Of late there has been a tendency to assign the ‘Celtic’ to that pile in the scrapheap of ideas marked ‘worse than useless’. So murky is the concept, so contradictorily deployed across politics, historiography, archaeology and literature, that some have argued that it should simply be written off altogether. And along with the Celtic go the Celts: Celtic Studies as a field rests on apparently insubstantial foundations, since, according to this view, there is nothing to link the Welsh and the Irish apart from self-propagating cultural fantasy. As J.R.R. Tolkien (no great fan) put it, ‘“Celtic” of any sort is, nonetheless, a magic bag, into which anything may be put, and out of which almost anything may come’.
In response, Celtic scholars and linguists are apt to point out that ‘Celtic’ is an indisputably useful linguistic term. There really is a demonstrably distinct branch of Indo-European which encompasses the ancient languages of the Britons, Gauls, Celtiberians and—in Asia Minor—the Galatians, to whom St Paul wrote, and the post-medieval languages—Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx on the one side and Welsh, Cornish and Breton on the other.
But the cat is long out of the magic bag. Ian Stewart’s magnificent book clambers boldly into the Celtic murk and provides something that has long been needed: a full intellectual history of the development of concepts of the Celtic (‘Celticism’) in all their ideological fraughtness and oddity. The book deals with the genesis and circulation of ideas, from their roots in antiquity through to early modernity, and then looks at how and why the Celts came to be known as such in modernity, with an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century focus. Such a project requires a huge reach and a scholar with very sure command of two millennia of material. The result is a tour de force, and throughout the reader feels in safe hands.
Stewart’s book is divided—like Caesar’s Gaul—into three parts, which broadly tackle the roots of national thought about the Celts, the contentions between various racial and ethnographic theories in the eighteenth century and the emergence of pan-nationalism.
Part I begins with the ancient sources. Classical authors, writing with very different aims, describe barbarian peoples variously labelled as Keltoi, Celtae, Gauls and Galatians. (The ethnographic details are lurid: here are the druids, whether depicted as wise Pythagoreans or as barbarian priests presiding over a ghastly cult of human sacrifice.) It has become a commonplace to dismiss the idea of the Celts by arguing that these are all external ethnonyms and thus that the Celts never called themselves ‘Celts’. Towards the end of the book Stewart refers to the recent suggestion of the Celticist Kim McCone, who argues that all these names may ultimately be forms of the same term, meaning the ‘fierce ones’, from *gal-(at)-, and containing the second element seen in the name Fearghal. The kelt– word, McCone argues, resulted from a mangling of the term by speakers of Etruscan—so the Celts may have called themselves Celts after all, in a sense. All this could well be true, and it illustrates how in matters Celtic there is an infuriating cycle whereby an idea from professional scholarship finally percolates as a truth into the resistant public mind at exactly the point it begins to be seriously doubted in academe.
That said, as Stewart shows, in the Middle Ages the Irish and the Welsh were certainly unaware of any shared identity, and their languages were mutually incomprehensible. One result (surprising to us) was that the Celts of antiquity were of limited interest to medieval scholars, there being no modern people to whom they obviously corresponded. But in time the French and the Germans developed rival vogues for Celtic ancestry: the French had an obvious claim to be the descendants of and heirs to the ancient Gauls, but the Germans were unexpectedly keen to be considered Celts as well. This was partly the result of the huge German animus against the French and partly arose from debates about the extent of the imperium of the Holy Roman Empire. One scholar, Johannes Aventinus (1474–1534), went so far as to claim that ancient authors had merely got in a geographical muddle, so that ‘wherever one finds in Old Greek and Latin the words Galli Galate Celtae, must be understood German’.
Stewart then takes the narrative forward into the eighteenth century. Literature begins to play a more prominent part in the argument here, and he deftly unpicks the cultural and historical forces which made Celtic such a breeding ground for literary fraud in the 1700s and early 1800s. The most famous is, of course, the Scotsman James Macpherson’s ‘Ossianic’ poems, published in 1761 and 1763—purported translations from ancient Gaelic which managed to convince Goethe, Napoleon and Thomas Jefferson. On the Brittonic side we have the bardic fantasies of the Glamorgan stonemason Iolo Morganwg (1747–1826), who claimed in his Barddas to have retrieved the mystical theology of the ancient druids; rituals devised by Iolo continue to supply much of the official eisteddfod pageantry of Welsh-language culture. The Iolo material has attracted much excellent scholarly work, and here in particular Stewart shows his ability to integrate recent research in an even-handed manner in the service of larger arguments.
Part II takes us into race, and in particular to the intersections of philology and ethnology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here Stewart has to pivot and become a historian of linguistics. We go back to meet the fascinating polymath Edward Lhuyd (1660–1709), who on the back of a long tour was the first person to realise that Irish, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Cornish and Breton were related. Celtic philology begins with him, though it was to take a century or more to be firmly placed on an empirical foundation. In this section, too, we find expert discussion of the roots of romantic nationalism. Influential here were the racial theories of Ernest Renan (1823–92) and Matthew Arnold (1822–88), thanks to whom a set of supposed racial characteristics enters the complex of ideas that travel under the name Celtic: the Celts are supposed to be intuitive, feminine, in touch with nature and terminally ill-suited to self-governance, unlike the stolid Teuton. Stewart’s account of Arnold is particularly good for re-examining the views on Ireland of his father Thomas, ‘the Celt-hating Dr Arnold’, Professor of Modern History at Oxford, which he finds more subtle and informed than generally presented; this in turn sets Matthew Arnold’s own influence into more subtle relief.
Part III turns to the historical phenomenon of a shared Celtic consciousness from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Stewart argues that from the 1830s it became possible to personally identify as ‘Celtic’ rather than merely being (say) an Irish person who might recognise in the Welsh a cognate nation.
Stewart introduces here a useful terminological distinction between lower-case pan-Celticism and upper-case Pan-Celticism. He uses the former to refer to an awareness of a degree of meaningful relationship between speakers of individual Celtic languages and their enthusiastic hangers-on; in this sense it was a dutiful handmaiden to philology, culture and politics. The latter, however, is a self-propelled movement which subsumes the individual nations under a larger Pan-Celtic banner, improvising with whatever might be to hand in order to invent tradition: ‘the purpose of Pan-Celticism is Pan-Celticism’, as Stewart puts it. The distinction is a productive one.
For pan- (and indeed Pan-) Celticism to work, Ireland and Wales in particular had to be drawn together as the leading representatives of each of their branches of Celtic. A number of individuals that Stewart traces followed Lhuyd’s footsteps in touring all the Celtic-speaking communities. Even encounters between speakers of Welsh and Breton—languages obviously related, if a great deal less mutually comprehensible than speakers of either sometimes claim—could lead to culture shock. The Revd Thomas Price (1787–1848), a Welshman whom Stewart identifies as the first true ‘pan-Celt’ and who did more than anyone else to make the Welsh and Bretons aware of their ancient kinship, expected to find the nominally French and Catholic Bretons ‘something between the Esquimaux and the Hottentots’. In the end he was horrified by the sheer squalor of Brittany’s rural poor, and especially—oddly enough—by their habit of wearing wooden clogs, which he called ‘this remnant of the rudest and most uncouth effort of barbarian ingenuity’.
Stewart notes in his introduction that at present we lack a full history of Celtic Studies as a field. A huge virtue of his book is that it goes a long way towards providing one, especially in the final chapter. The book is not the place for an account of the progress of Celtic scholarship as a body of knowledge—the decipherment of the monstrous Old Irish verbal system, the chronology of the sound-changes that separated Insular Celtic into Goidelic and Brittonic branches, the publication of major editions of texts—but we do get a vivid account of the discipline’s politics and personalities. Familiar names are given sharply drawn biographies: I was chastened to find that the Swiss Rudolf Thurneysen (1857–1940), author of the monumental Grammar of Old Irish and perhaps the greatest Celtic scholar of all time, did not consider himself a Celticist and doubted that the field held sufficient interest on which to base an entire scholarly career.
Stewart uncovers two phases in the history of the discipline: an initial 70-year domination of Celtic Studies by German or German-speaking philologists, followed by a gradual shift in the field’s centre of gravity to Ireland, despite major historical oddities such as the Jesus Chair of Celtic at Oxford, which had in fact been inspired by Matthew Arnold. The shift was partly due to pan-Celticism (in Stewart’s lower-case first sense) in that it grew from the ambitions of Irish scholars and politicians to make Ireland the centre of the field in all aspects, including Brittonic. The School of Irish Learning and later the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies—still the discipline’s major powerhouse—produced a pivotal two generations of Irish scholars trained in the philological complexities which their German-speaking forerunners had excavated. It is figures from this era—especially the brilliant scholar and politician Eoin MacNeill (1867–1945)—who began to reflect self-consciously on the history not just of Celtic but also of Celticism as a phenomenon.
A second reason for the pivot to Ireland was the dismal effect of the two world wars. The Great War cut off communications between German-speaking and Irish scholars, and with regard to the Second World War Stewart is a sensitive handler of cases of German Celticists who became card-carrying Nazis. (Nazi ideology was not unfavourable to Celtic Studies because for them it was necessary to distinguish sharply between Germans and Celts.) Stewart is particularly good on the still-painful episode in which some Breton nationalists—reacting against the French state’s long-standing hostility to regional languages—collaborated with the Nazis on the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. One was the great Breton grammarian Roparz Hemon (1900–78), who sought shelter in the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and never returned to Brittany.
The Celts: a modern history gives us an enormously impressive and often witty account of the development of Celticism. Ian Stewart manages to combine originality and insight with the ability to draw on the research of other scholars (especially linguists) with acuteness. It will not only become the standard work for the foreseeable future but should also provide a jumping-off point for a host of new angles of research. Anyone who writes on the subject will be in the author’s debt.
Mark Williams is Associate Professor of Global Medieval Literature at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford.