The Element Encyclopedia of the Celts

THE ATLANTIC CELTS

We have to set aside the long-held assumption that the Celts were a pan-European Iron Age race. This means rethinking European prehistory. Modern archeological and anthropological evidence is pointing toward a reality that is far more exciting.

Instead of the Celts of the west being relative newcomers, arriving in the Atlantic coastlands between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago, they are emerging as an indigenous people with a very ancient ancestry indeed. Ten thousand years ago, the last cold stage of the Ice Age was ending and the ice that had covered much of Britain and Ireland was melting back. After the long glacial episode, the islands were becoming habitable again. What happened then was that people living in refuges in northern Spain began to migrate northward, bay-hopping along the coast, to colonize the lands that were thawing out. These early migrants spread through exactly the areas that we now think of as Celtic—Galicia, Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, and Scotland—plus a margin along their eastern edges—northern Spain, the Bay of Biscay coast of France, Normandy, and the whole of England. This is where the Celtic ancestry of Britain (England included) came from—this ancient migration from the south.

The people we call Celts were the descendants of these Middle Stone Age hunters, gatherers, and fishermen, and of the New Stone Age farmers, pastoralists, and stone circle builders who succeeded them.

One of the stone circles, Stonehenge, has become an emblem of Celtic Britain. Modern Druids have claimed it as theirs, and we could question this entitlement, but this process of claiming and adopting has probably been repeated over and over again through time. Stonehenge was once thought to be the work of a Mycenaean architect, partly because of the similarity between the stone trilithons and the architecture of the great Lion Gate at Mycenae, built in 1250 BC, and there are carvings on the stones that seem to show a Mycenaean dagger. But now radiocarbon dates show that they were raised long before that, in 2500 BC. The earth circle round them dates from 3100 BC, and the totem poles that stood close by were raised in 8000–7000 BC. Stonehenge turns out to be a monument that was modified and developed repeatedly, by indigenous people, during the course of the long evolution of the Atlantic Celtic culture. The site witnessed and expressed the whole span of the Atlantic Celts’ prehistory.

Most of the big standing stones in the lands of the Atlantic Celts were raised in the Neolithic (3000– 2000 BC), some in the Bronze Age (2000–600 BC), and a small number in the Iron Age. They clearly speak of the bond the Atlantic Celts had developed with standing stones.

The megaliths that are known to belong to the Iron Age tend to be relatively small—man-height—and single monoliths only. Some are simple, tapering, and rounded pillars, others are fluted like Doric columns. Another group is low and rounded, almost cushion-shaped, like the Turoe Stone in County Galway.

The Christian Celts of later centuries remained interested in the earlier megaliths. They Christianized some of the old pagan stones, converting them by carving their tops into crude crosses. They even raised a brand-new family of megaliths: magnificently carved massive Celtic crosses such as Muireadach’s Cross at Monasterboice in Ireland.

Big standing stones were a part of the Atlantic Celtic consciousness all the way through.

Another link across this long span of time was made in 1996, when the remains of Cheddar Man were subjected to DNA analysis. Cheddar Man is the complete skeleton of a man who lived in Somerset in 7150 BC and when he died was buried in Gough’s Cave at Cheddar. It was found that this Stone Age man’s DNA was a close match with that of a local teacher, Adrian Targett. So, a man living and working at the Community School in Cheddar in the late twentieth century turned out to be a direct descendant of someone living in the same place more than 9,000 years before.

THE CELTS AND THE OCEAN

The Celts and their culture are also deeply embedded in their windswept, wave-washed, and rocky landscape. The Atlantic coastline has played a major role in shaping the coastal communities and producing a convergence of mindset. The smell of the sea saturated the lives and histories of these communities. They depended on the richly stocked waters for fish, and for the trade that they made possible. Tribes on opposite sides of the English Channel traded with each other, and trade led to other contacts, including treaties of mutual defense and intermarriage; kinship bonds developed. On the British side of the Channel, the Durotriges, the Iron Age tribe of Dorset, traded with the Coriosolites, who lived on the north coast of Brittany around what is now St. Malo. Coins minted by the Coriosolites have been found at Hengistbury, the Durotrigians’ main port in Christchurch Harbor. The trade route ran by way of the Channel Islands, immediately off the coast and directly between the Coriosolites’ territory and Dorset; coins of the Coriosolites tribe have been found on Jersey. There were lively cross-Channel contacts between 100 and 50 BC; trade that had been going on for 2,000 years. In 80 BC the Durotriges looked across to Gaul when they adopted not only coinage but the simple designs they put on their coins.

After 50 BC there was a downturn in cross-Channel trade, which narrowed the horizons of the Durotriges and left them in a backwater. This was partly a result of piecemeal Roman conquests in Gaul generally and political settlements that left the Hengistbury merchants high and dry. It was probably largely due to an embargo imposed on the Durotriges by Julius Caesar as a punishment for supporting the Armorican rising against him in 56 BC. The people of Iron Age Dorset had felt sufficiently strong kinship with their trading partners across the sea to send warriors in an attempt to stem the Roman invasion of Gaul.

The resistance to Rome was a failure in the end, but it shows the determination of the Durotriges to resist the might of Rome. When the armies of Claudius arrived in Britain 90 years later, the fiercely independent Durotriges were once more among those offering the most aggressive resistance. Even though they were conquered by Vespasian in AD 44, they were still able, 20 years later, during the revolt of another fiercely independent tribe, the Iceni under Boudicca, to offer a potential threat to Rome’s hold on southern Britain.

This snapshot of one tribe’s activities during the first centuries BC and AD shows how a community of Atlantic Celts functioned in relation to other tribes—and not just near neighbors. There were networks of relationships that spread far and wide, thanks to the all-embracing ocean.

The relationship between peoples and the sea helps us to understand what has been called the longue durée: the underlying consistencies that bind communities together and the persistent rhythms that influence their development across long periods of time. The peoples of the Atlantic façade shared common values and beliefs over thousands of years, and this sharing was conditioned to a great extent by their unique habitat on rocky coastlines looking out across the ocean.

A simple Breton verse sums it up:

At sea, all is anguish.

At sea, all is prayer.

To this day, some of the islanders living on the small islands off the Irish coast depend on boats to get them about, yet they do not learn to swim. They surrender to fatalism when they see someone in difficulties in the sea because the sea is claiming its own. “But,” as an Aran islander once said, “we do only be drownded now and again.”

TWO KINDS OF IRON AGE CELTS

In 500 BC, there were two communities of Celts, the central European Celts and the Atlantic Celts, leading parallel lives. How much contact was there between the two?

The arrival in Britain of distinct artistic styles that can be related to the styles prevailing in central Europe shows that there was contact. The similarities of style are so strong that they formed the basis of the idea of migration. Now it is thought more likely that only small numbers of people were on the move, perhaps traders and a small number of migrants, yet these movements were enough to take stylistic ideas from one area to the other.

The western Celts interacted with successive European cultures: the Hallstatt, La Tène, and Belgic cultures within the Iron Age, then the Roman civilization, and then the cultures of the Jutes, Angles, Saxons, and Vikings. On the Atlantic fringe, sometimes the culture of the western Celts spread far and wide, making a continuously identifiable Atlantic culture. On occasions this culture was continuous with the central European culture, so that a very extensive culture area was formed. At other times it shrank to relatively small pockets, cells, or refuges.

The waxing and waning of other cultures have sometimes inhibited the development of Celtic culture; at other times they have stimulated it. There was a long period of stasis and conservatism in Europe in the Bronze Age. Much of what happened was a response to the more dynamic and aggressive cultures of south-eastern Europe. In Anatolia (modern Turkey) there was the great Hittite Empire, and adjacent to that were the thriving Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations of the Aegean region. In about 1200 BC the Hittite Empire collapsed. The Minoan civilization was already weakened and subsumed by the Mycenaean civilization, then that too collapsed. Whether these collapses were to do with fundamental inherent weaknesses—time-bombs embedded within the cultures—or were precipitated by invasions or raids from outside, perhaps by the mysterious Sea Peoples, archeologists continue to debate. What is certain is that the pace of cultural development in Europe was suddenly no longer wholly governed from its south-eastern threshold.

The collapse of the Hittite Empire meant that the secrets of ironworking, which had until then been a Hittite monopoly, spread across Europe. The “barbarians” of Europe learned a new technology, which involved beating bronze into thin sheets that could be made into cups, shields, and helmets. They also acquired a taste for wine, which led to an opening of trade routes south to the Mediterranean so that wine could be acquired. Finally, the opening of contact between northern and southern Europe led to a fruitful interchange of ideas between the two regions.

The Bronze Age Europeans who underwent these major changes were the Urnfielders: the people who were the central European (Iron Age) Celts’ immediate precursors.

Even within the Iron Age, what happened in central Europe was affected by what was happening in, and to, Greece. In 540 BC the Phocaean Greeks were in conflict with Carthage, and the two forces fought for supremacy in the western Mediterranean region in a sea battle off the Italian coast. The Carthaginians won and blockaded Greek trade in the Mediterranean. This in turn meant that the Celtic communities developing north of the Alps were cut off from Greek goods, and therefore from Greek models and standards. Those trading relationships were not recovered for 50 years. When they were, developments in Iron Age Celtic culture had taken it elsewhere. A new and more advanced Celtic culture was evolving, the La Tène culture, with a focus on the Rhône and middle Marne valleys.

Later, in the first century BC, came the major inhibiting force of Rome, as the Roman Empire spread northward and westward into the territories of the Celts, conquering, subduing, and Romanizing.

REAL PEOPLE

When the Romans left Britain in the fifth century AD, the Dark Age Celts (the Romanized Britons left behind) had a new battle for survival on their hands, this time against an incursion of Anglo-Saxon invaders.

This was the time of Arthur, the legendary Arthur, the Dark Age Celtic king who rallied the Britons and led them into battle, halting the westward advance of the Saxons across Britain for a quarter of a century, until he too fell in battle at Camlann in 547—if indeed he existed. There are some who believe that he really did. If so, how many of the stories about him are true?

There is a wide spectrum of views about Arthur. Some people believe that he was everything the legends of the high Middle Ages say he was—a noble, true, and Christian king who rallied the native Britons at a time when they were being overwhelmed by the westward march of the Saxons. Others believe that he never existed at all, that there was no such king, and that he was invented in retrospect long after the British struggle for survival had been lost. Was he perhaps a typically Celtic keening for a lost might-have-been history?

King Arthur does seem to represent the essence of Celticness in the same way as a bagpipe lament. Complex and enigmatic, resonant with visionary ideals, noble failure, and a wistful nostalgia for what might have been, his story represents a dark, vibrant, inspiring, and wonderful past that we desperately want to believe in.

For centuries, myth, mystery, magic, and mysticism have been associated with the Celts. I hope this book will satisfy any curiosity regarding that spiritual side of the Celtic personality. But it is also important to remind ourselves that the Celts ate and drank and lived in houses, worked for their living, played music, told stories, and liked playing games. This everyday side needs to be sketched in, however lightly, to round out the picture of a remarkable, inventive, and longenduring people—a real people, as real as we are.