Saxons, Vikings, and Celts

by Bryan Sykes

  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 t
o 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

  In the green and white Fair Corrie.

  Coire Lagain is a high place in the Cuillin Hills of Skye, hemmed in by hundreds of feet of the steep rock ramparts that protect the high ridge. But this is not at all a romanticized description of the land, for the poem goes on to another familiar theme which permeates the culture of the Highlands–that of loss and unquestionable sadness.

  Multitude of springs and fewness of young men

  today, yesterday and last night keeping me awake:

  the miserable loss of our country’s people

  clearing of tenants, exile, exploitation

  and the great island is seen with its winding shores

  a hoodie-crow squatting on each dun

  black soft squinting hoodie-crows

  who think themselves all eagles.

  The loss which Sorley mourns in this and other poems is at once the people forced to leave their homes during the notorious Highland Clearances in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and also the language, Gaelic, which was the language of his poems. At first he wrote in Gaelic and English but in 1933, when he was twenty-two, he decided to write only in Gaelic and he destroyed those of his English works that he could lay his hands on.

  Gaelic and her cousin tongues are a strong unifying force of the Celtic lands. Their fortunes, in Scotland, in Ireland, in Wales and also in Brittany, are a barometer of the self-confidence of the people who call themselves Celts. Since Celtic was a linguistic definition in the first place, this seems only appropriate.

  In Skye, as in many parts of the Highlands, there is a palpable sense of a Gaelic revival, a renaissance in poetry and music and above all in the language. The steady decline in Gaelic speakers–it is spoken as a first tongue by only a few thousand people in the Hebrides, most of them in middle age or beyond–has been halted by the welcome introduction in 1986, after decades of lobbying, of Gaelic-medium education in primary schools, where all lessons are given in that language. Most children whose parents have the choice opt for lessons in the Gaelic stream rather than the English alternative. Now Skye children can go right the way through school being taught in Gaelic and, in recent years, go on to tertiary education in Gaelic at the world’s first Gaelic College at Sabhal Mor Ostaig in Sleat on the southernmost of Skye’s many peninsulas. Whether this very hard-fought initiative will reverse the decline in the language in the long term remains to be seen, but I have never visited a higher education institute anywhere in the world that is so brimming with confidence and enthusiasm for its mission in life.

  Sabhal Mor kindly allowed me to use their library for my research–a library with what must be the best view in the world. Sabhal Mor (pronounced Sall More and meaning simply ‘Big Barn’ in Gaelic) is perched on a promontory overlooking the Sound of Sleat; the view takes in the distant outline of Ardnamurchan and the sands of Morar to the south and up to the hills above Glenelg and Kyle of Lochalsh to the north. But straight ahead, across 3 miles of blue and wind-blown sea, are the mountains of Knoydart, yellow and brown in the autumn setting sun. Knoydart, between the secret lochs of Nevis and Hiourn, was once a prosperous community of twenty-seven crofting townships and 3,500 people. Now it is empty, save for a cluster of white houses I can see on the shore at Airor. The Knoydart estate was cleared of people in the 1840s by the landlord, Sir Ranald McDonnell of Glengarry, to make way for the more profitable sheep. This is an all too familiar story in the Highlands, though nowhere was as thoroughly cleansed as Knoydart, and it has been vividly recounted many times. Here is one from Neil Gunn, a Scottish novelist of the early twentieth century:

  As always the recollection is dominated by dramatic images–the ragged remnants of a once proud peasantry hounded from the hills by the factors and police were driven aboard disease-ridden ships bound for outlandish colonies, their families broken, their ministers compliant and the collective agony sounded by the pibroch and the wailing of pathetic humanity.

  By and large, the English were blamed for this human trans-location and spiritual genocide, not that the landlords were themselves English but came from a heavily anglicized Scottish aristocracy who spent most of their time in London. Still the Celtic identity, in Ireland, Wales and Scotland, and the language, defines itself in part at least as being ‘not English’. That is not to say it is an aggressive demarcation, and as an Englishman with very little Gaelic living on Skye I have never been made to feel less than welcome.

  Of course, the main emigration of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, whether by the forced hand of the landlord or for the opportunities for a better life on offer in Glasgow and the other industrial towns of the Central Belt or the colonies, meant that as people left Scotland, and Ireland too, they arrived somewhere else. Estimates vary, but one set of figures has it that there are 28 million people of Scottish and 16 million of Irish descent spread throughout the world. Even if these figures are way off the mark, and they are conservative estimates, there are now far more Celts living overseas than in the Isles. Most made their homes in the New World, mainly the USA and Canada, but emigration to Australia, New Zealand and to a lesser extent South Africa adds millions to this list. In some places, like the southern part of South Island, New Zealand, the Scots practically took over the whole country and, tellingly, the principal town Dunedin has the Gaelic name for Edinburgh.

  Many emigrating Celts and their descendants did extremely well, of course, but ironically, given the circumstances of their leaving, they were also sometimes guilty of dispossessing the indigenous people of their tribal lands. As Paul Besu, a social anthropologist from University College London, writes:

  Scots pioneers in Victoria (Australia) were often land-grabbers and squatters who were notorious for their ruthlessness and the Scots, like the English, Welsh and Irish, played a full part in the harsh treatment of Aboriginal peoples. It was ironic that some of the most notoriously involved were Highlanders who themselves had suffered clearance and privation in the old country.

  Paul Besu was researching what it was that drew the descendants of these emigrants to search out their roots in Scotland and he interviewed people about their reasons for making these journeys from the other side of the world. Tens of thousands of Americans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders come to Scotland and Ireland every year to seek out and placate their innermost desires to see and feel the homelands of their ancestors. Of course there are comparable numbers of visitors on similar missions to England too, to reconnect, but theirs is a slightly different mission, perhaps less romantic and more matter of fact. The general causes of their emigration do not usually include being driven from the land.

  I have experienced the thirst for roots first hand through the company I set up to help people trace their origins using DNA. We have thousands of customers, many from precisely those locations that once received Scots and Irish emigrants. Often a DNA test will accompany a journey to the homeland and even when it does not, a DNA test which roots a person to Scotland or Ireland makes a living link between descendant and ancestor. It is all the more powerful as this talisman is carried across the generations in every cell of the body, as it was in the bodies of ancestors, including the ones who made the journeys ‘aboard disease-ridden ships bound for outlandish colonies’. It was there.

  There have been, as you may have suspected, plenty of theories about what draws people to search out their roots. Behind the sociology-speak, such as

  the contemporary quest for roots is a response to the trauma of displacement associated with migration which has become a global commonplace and individuals are able to conduct meaningful, morally defensible and authentic self-narratives from the ambiguities and discontinuities of their migrant histories, thus recovering a sense of being ‘at home’ in the ‘maelstrom’ of
modernity…

  are much pithier and more articulate reasons, as revealed in Paul Besu’s survey. An anonymous Australian from New South Wales simply said, ‘I want to be able to tell my children where their ancestors came from. It gives them a sense of belonging in a world that sometimes moves too fast.’

  Another Australian, improbably called Anne Roots, told Besu:

  I am a fourth-generation Australian but I know that the thread reaching back to the obscure past has never been broken. The process of evolution has failed to break the translucent thread that is mysteriously joined to the Isle of Skye. I cannot explain some of my experiences, or why I wanted to go to the Hebrides before I knew some of my forebears came from there. My only explanation is that the spirit of my ancestors kept calling me back.

  Janet, from Geelong, south of Melbourne, made the fascinating comparison when she visited her ancestral home of Paabay, an island in the Sound of Harris, that ‘to my mind the Celt, in a British context, is to the Anglo-Saxon what the Aboriginal, in an Australian context, is to the settler.’