by Bryan Sykes
The Romans first with Julius Caesar came
Including all the Nations of that Name
Gauls, Greeks and Lombards; and by Computation
Auxiliaries or slaves of ev’ry Nation
With Hengist, Saxons; Danes with Sueno came
In search of Plunder, not in search of Fame
Scots, Picts and Irish from the Hibernian shore:
And Conquering William brought the Normans O’re.
All these their Barb’rous offspring left behind
the dregs of Armies, they of all Mankind;
Blended with Britons, who before were here,
of whom the Welch ha’blest the Character.
From the amphibious Ill-born Mob began
That vain ill-natured thing, an Englishman.
But dissenting voices were definitely in the minority, and the myth grew and grew, finding a new outlet in the development of the African slave trade. Though European attitudes to black people and a readiness to exploit them for personal gain were nothing new, the resurgent racial pride which accompanied the growth of the Teutonic myth encouraged further victimization. While there may have been some uncertainty about the purity of the Saxon pedigree within England, there could be no cause for doubt that black Africans had no claims whatsoever to the Teutonic bloodline with its attendant virtues of enterprise, independence and high moral character.
During the eighteenth century, the myth had grown to such prominence that it was scarcely, if ever, questioned. It attained an invincibility equal to that of the Arthurian legends of Geoffrey’s History 500 years earlier. But now its effects were felt not just in Britain, but throughout the world. The influential French political philosopher Baron de Montesquieu wrote in 1734 that the English political system came straight from the forests of Germany, imported and elaborated by their Saxon descendants. Even the great Scottish philosopher David Hume, who constantly required evidence as the foundation for any belief, accepted without question the purity of the German race first expressed so long ago by Tacitus. Thomas Jefferson, one of the draftsmen of the Declaration of Independence, who became the third President of the United States, wrote in 1774 that it was the Saxon ancestry of the American colonists that gave them a natural right to build for themselves a free and independent state, liberated from British colonial rule.
The triumph of the Teutonic myth was almost complete as its popularity reached its peak during the nineteenth century. Indeed the superiority and self-belief with which its adherents cloaked themselves was central to the construction and administration of the British Empire. The myth gave to the Englishmen abroad the absolute conviction that their ancient Saxon pedigree imbued them with inherited qualities of honour and leadership, and the political institutions to go with it, that were far superior to any in the world. Bolstered with that ingrained sense of destiny the English did, indeed, rule the world – for a while.
But the triumph of the myth came at a price. The growing sense of racial superiority among the English set them increasingly at odds with the other inhabitants of the Isles, the Welsh and the Scots on the British mainland, and with the Irish. The simple racism of the myth collapsed all three into the same denomination, ‘the Celts’, and poured scorn on them.
By now, science had been harnessed to the myth in an enthusiastic attempt to build a solid frame to underpin its more extravagant assumptions. And when science and racism are mixed, the cocktail becomes increasingly volatile. At the end of his rambling book The Races of Men, published in 1850, Robert Knox MD, surgeon and enthusiast for the new science of comparative anatomy, concludes after 350 pages of Saxon worship and Celtic insult that, ‘The Celtic Race must be forced from this soil. England’s safety requires it.’ This outrageous suggestion, as it appears to us now, was completely in tune with the prevailing view, if not of an actual genocide, then certainly of cultural and spiritual suppression. In a superbly argued defence of the value of Celtic literature, published in 1867, the literary critic Matthew Arnold quotes a leader from The Times on the subject of the Welsh language:
The Welsh language is the curse of Wales. Its prevalence, and the ignorance of English have excluded, and even now exclude, the Welsh people from the civilisation of their English neighbours. An Eisteddfod [the annual Welsh literary and musical festival] is one of the most mischievous and selfish pieces of sentimentalism which could possibly be perpetrated. It is simply a foolish interference with the natural progress of civilisation and prosperity. If it is desirable that the Welsh should talk English, it is monstrous folly to encourage them in a loving fondness for their old language. Not only the energy and power, but the intelligence and music of Europe have come mainly from Teutonic sources, and this glorification of everything Celtic, if it were not pedantry would be sheer ignorance. The sooner all Welsh specialists disappear from the face of the earth, the better.
Even taking into account the often strident and provocative language of a Times leader, it is a chilling piece.
The decline of the myth’s supremacy came as the nineteenth century drew to a close. In a parallel with the undermining of the factual basis of Arthurian legend and the ancient succession of British kings recounted in Geoffrey’s History, the absolute belief in the Teutonic myth suffered a similar fate. There was no single scholar assassin like Polydore Vergil, but rather a series of snipers. One of these, the literary critic J. M. Robertson, concluded that, far from being the heralds of a superior race honed to perfection in the forests of Germany, the first Saxons were ‘pagan, non-literate and barbaric, heroes of a northern society so disorganized that they had little concept of national, racial or political loyalties’.
But it was political developments in Germany, rather than Britain, that finally sealed the fate of the Teutonic myth. Not surprisingly, Germans also favoured the good light the myth cast on their own racial purity and superiority with the almost genetically linked qualities of freedom and independence. Also keen to distance themselves from Rome, German scholars had worked in a parallel effort to reinforce their independence with a racially based justification. It was in the late nineteenth century that the German origin myth first became firmly attached to the concept of the Aryan.
The creator of the Aryan myth was a German linguist, Max Müller, working in Oxford as a Professor of Modern Languages. Müller did more than anyone to create this myth by falling into the trap of unquestioningly conflating language with race – a temptation which even contemporary scholars often seem quite unable to resist. As a linguist, Müller was very well aware of the similarities of the major European languages to Sanskrit and Persian. This similarity hinted at a common origin and led directly to the concept, widely accepted today, of an ‘Indo-European’ language family. The language family was originally known as ‘Aryan’, from the Sanskrit word meaning ‘noble’. Müller took the natural but unjustified step of mutating this theory of language to a theory of race. He concluded that there must have been, as well as an original Aryan language, an original Aryan people. That most promiscuous and malignant of racial myths was born. As his career progressed, Müller came to doubt his invention and by 1888, to his credit, he positively rejected it. But it was too late. The genie was out of the bottle.
As we have seen throughout this chapter, the career of a myth depends far less on its factual accuracy than on its congruence with contemporary political ambition, and the fervour with which people believe it. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Germany, through its Chancellor Bismarck and later under Kaiser Wilhelm, recruited the Aryan myth, with its closely linked connotations of German racial superiority, to justify its own campaign of imperial expansion. These ambitions soon became a direct threat to the British Empire, also fuelled by the same myth. Enthusiasm among the British for the close affiliation with Germany that was so much part of the Teutonic myth rapidly dwindled as the two countries became enemies. Not surprisingly, after the First World War it vanished completely.
The growing distaste of the British d
id nothing to halt the rise and rise of the Aryan myth in Germany itself. The Nazis, now seeing themselves the sole inheritors of Aryan racial superiority, exploited it ruthlessly against their ‘enemies’ both within and without. Nothing underlines the dreadful power and the dreadful danger of racial myth more than the smoke rising from the chimneys of Belsen and Dachau, Treblinka and Auschwitz.
3
THE RESURGENT CELTS
As I write, the 2006 World Cup Finals draw closer and one of the few remaining expressions of English patriotic nationalism is beginning to show itself. The red cross of St George on the white background of the English flag is seen hanging from first-floor windows and fluttering from the rear windows of speeding cars. Supermarkets have ‘Come on England’ signs hanging above the aisles. If the 2004 European Cup Finals are anything to go by, the flags will be hastily taken down as soon as England are knocked out of the competition. Even the appointment of a foreign manager to the English football team is received with only mild remonstrations. That, and the enthusiasm surrounding the victory over Australia in the Ashes test series in the 2005 cricket season, is about all you are likely to see these days. The English national day, St George’s Day – 23 April – is barely celebrated. The new ethnic myth is not to be found on the Saxon streets of London, but in the Celtic west. On St Patrick’s Day – 17 March – the streets of Dublin and of New York are packed with parades and partygoers. While the Teutonic myth has submerged beneath the surface, if only for the time being, the Celtic myth grows stronger as each year passes.
Visit any of the multitude of tourist gift shops in Ireland or the west of Scotland and you are immediately confronted by what is best described as the Celtic brand. Silver brooches with naturalistic intertwining tendrils; amethysts set in the centre of ‘Celtic’ crosses, the arms embossed with intricate ‘Celtic’ knotwork; reproductions of fabulously illustrated early Christian illuminated manuscripts. Though they are often imported from China, these are a tangible part of the material expression of the Celt, one that is recruited to market this part of the Isles throughout the world. It is also a brand that is understood by local people and expressed particularly strongly in music and, in a different way, in sport. One of the largest music festivals in Scotland is called ‘Celtic Connections’. Home-grown bands subscribe in many ways, even in their names. Runrig, a very successful band from Skye off the north-west coast of Scotland, is named after an old land-usage system and recalls the frugal life of peasant farmers. In sport, football teams declare their links to the myth and none more so than the world-famous Glasgow side Celtic, locked in perpetual and often bitter rivalry with Glasgow Rangers. In rugby there is a vigorous Celtic League comprising teams from Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
The brand is supported by the cultural glue of the Gaelic language, which binds the west of Scotland with Ireland and, in a slightly different form, with Wales, Cornwall and Brittany. But perhaps the dominant feature of the Celtic brand is that it joins the west together and deliberately separates it from the rest of the Isles and the perceived domination of the English. It is important for the modern Celt to be different.
Even though Celtishness is today mainly expressed in language, music, sport and other cultural pursuits, there lurks beneath it an unspoken belief in some form of ancient Celtic race whose descendants live on today. Could genetics test this assumption? Is there a genetic basis for this underlying belief in a race, or races, of ancient Celts and can we show it by sifting through the genes of today’s ‘Celts’? Or is Celtishness a purely cultural phenomenon, at once sincerely felt and eagerly exploited but with no underlying biological framework?
If behind the paraphernalia of the Celtic brand there really does lie some grain of substance in the notion of a Celtic people, this immediately begs the question of when they arrived in the Isles and where they came from. Indeed, where does the notion that the Celts ever existed as a separate people, capable of acting together, moving together and arriving somewhere, actually stem from? The notion, oddly enough, is a surprisingly recent one. It began to take shape in the years around 1700 when Edward Lhuyd, from Oswestry on the Welsh border, became the director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Lhuyd travelled widely in Ireland, Wales and the Scottish Highlands, collecting antiquities and manuscripts for the museum and recording the folklore of the lands he visited. On his travels he noticed the similarities between Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Irish and Scots Gaelic and the ancient languages of Gaul. In his book Archaeologia Britannica, published in 1707, he was the first to group these languages together and embrace them under the generic term of Celtic. He was also the first to point out that the languages belonged to two distinct sets, distinguished from each other by their pronunciation. The harsher consonants of Breton, Cornish and Welsh (as in ap, meaning ‘son of’) led Lhuyd to call these the P-Celtic languages, while the softer sounds of Irish and Scots Gaelic (as in mac with the same meaning) were referred to by Lhuyd as Q-Celtic. Having found a language family, it was all too easy to invent a people and Lhuyd very soon constructed a historical explanation of how this linguistic continuity may have come about. He suggested that, first of all, Irish Britons moved to the Isles, but were pushed into Scotland and northern Britain by a second wave of Gauls from France, who then occupied Wales and the south and west of England.
Implicit in all of this is the concept that there existed one or more groups of Celts who moved around from one place to another, taking their language with them as they went. This is an idea in the grand tradition of migration as the sole explanation for cultural change – a tradition which until recently dominated not only linguistics but archaeology as well. A type of pottery or a particular burial ritual found in two different places was taken as proof that people from one moved to occupy the second. This type of reasoning drove archaeology for most of the twentieth century and became the standard dogma for the spread of any cultural change, be it language, weapon design, stone tools or even agriculture. In the last twenty years or so the pendulum of academic fashion has begun to swing to the other extreme, where nobody actually moves anywhere except to pass on their ideas and scurry back home.
But back to the Celts. Edward Lhuyd, though he helped create the concept of the Celtic people, did not invent the word. It makes its first appearance as Keltoi in ancient Greek, where it is used as a derogatory catch-all name for strangers and foreigners, people from another place. Uncivilized, rough, uncouth, not ‘one of us’. By the time Julius Caesar wrote his Gallic Wars, around 60 BC, the people of Gaul, according to Caesar, called themselves Celts. So while the Greeks used Keltoi to refer to outsiders, coming from beyond the limits of the civilized Mediterranean world, the name itself might originally have come from one or more of the tribes themselves. For the Romans, the terms Celt and Gaul were pretty much interchangeable, used to describe the inhabitants of their territories in France and northern Italy and to tell them apart from the real enemy – the Germans.
However, when we come to the people of Britain and Ireland during the Roman period, nobody called them Celts. They called them a lot of things, but not Celts. Neither is there any record of anyone from the Isles using the word Celt to describe themselves until the eighteenth century, after Edward Lhuyd had reinvented the term for his language family and then for the people who spoke it. If a Celt is someone who speaks one of the Celtic languages as defined by Lhuyd, then everyone in Britain and Ireland would have been a Celt when the Romans invaded. If a Celt is someone whose ancestors lived in the parts of the Isles where these languages are still spoken today, then the definition becomes much narrower and more akin to what the Celtic brand now represents. So, just as to the Greeks, there is no precise definition of Celt. It is amorphous, fluid, capable of many simultaneous meanings. To some, like the archaeologist Simon James, it is a shameless invention. In his angry polemic The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention?, James concludes that ‘The ancient Celts are an essentially bogus and recent invention’, an invention used most
recently for political purposes in the lead-up to Scottish and Welsh devolution. C. S. Lewis expressed the ambiguity and uncertainty in softer tones when he wrote, ‘anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not so much a twilight of the Gods but of reason.’
When it comes to getting hold of a definition of the Celt, or Celtic, a definition to be tested by genetics, I found myself struggling, enveloped in a mist of uncertainty and enigma. For sure there was the marketable expression of Celticity, the silver brooches, the tartan ties, the kilts. But these are caricatures of something much deeper. What it means to be Celtic, to feel Celtic, is very different. As is to be expected of him, Sir Walter Scott’s description of the Celtic Muse is highly sentimental. He writes in his novel Waverley:
To speak in the poetical language of my country, the seat of the Celtic muse is in the mist of the secret and solitary hill, and her voice is the murmur of the mountain stream. He who wooes her must love the barren rock more than the fertile valley and the solitude of the desert better than the festivity of the hall.
And yet there is something in what Scott says. The emotional, almost the physical, attachment to the land is central to the poetry of the Celt. Out of term time, when I am not required to be in Oxford, I live on the Isle of Skye. My house once belonged to Sorley Maclean, widely acclaimed as the greatest Gaelic poet of the twentieth century. In fact, that is where I am writing this chapter and it is in his old filing cabinet that the manuscript will remain until I send it off to be typed. Sorley’s poetry is rich in reference to the woods, the sea and the hills. In ‘The Cuillin’ he writes:
Loch of loches in Coire Lagain
Were it not for the springs of Coire Mhadaidh
The spring above all other springs
