Who were the Celts? Where did they come from? Were they one tribe or several? It depends who you ask.
or Simon Jenkins, the 79-year-old journalist and historian, there is no uncertainty. “There is no one tribe of Celts because the Celts never existed,” he says from his home in central London. “They’re an invention.” This is the central argument of the former Times of London editor’s latest book, The Celts: A Sceptical History.
One of the first references to a Celtic people is in the work of the Greek historian Herodotus around 430 BC. The father of European history described Keltoi as a barbarian Iron Age tribe who spread through western and central Europe. The Romans later clashed with these tribes in northern Italy and referred them as Galli or Gallia.
These early references contain many gaps and biased assumptions. Greeks and Romans viewed Celts with great hostility and as racially and culturally inferior. There is also a lack of consistent archaeological and written evidence from the period, leaving scholars and historians with more questions than answers.
Many scholars and historians claim an ancient Celtic civilisation can be traced to three overlapping cultural groups: the Late Bronze Age Urnfield culture around the upper Danube (from 1300 BC); Hallstatt culture (1200-450 BC) in Austria and La Tène (450-50 BC) in Switzerland. The latter’s distinctive features included ironworking, depositing weapons in tombs and stylised art, and it is said to have spanned from Ireland to Romania.
Jenkins is not convinced. “Gathering myriad people who once inhabited Europe together under one name to suit a nationalist [historical agenda] is a fantasy.”
He then raises the so-called Celtic invasion theory. This is the claim that the Celts invaded Britain some time around 450 BC, overcoming the Anglo-Saxons and imposing on them a new Celtic civilisation and a new Celtic language. In A Concise History of Mining (1980), Cedric Errol Gregory wrote about how “successive waves of Celts invaded Britain from the European continent, and had no trouble subduing the English tribes, using advanced weapons of iron”.
Jenkins mocks this thesis, which he calls “invasion neurosis”. “The British Isles were occupied some time after the end of the last Ice Age [around 12,000 years ago] by climate migrants moving up the Atlantic shore from the Iberian Peninsula, and we’ve been there ever since,” he says with confidence. He cites analysis of DNA from ancient skeletons, which suggested that 70pc of Britons alive at the turn of the 20th century were descended from the same people that had inhabited the British Isles in the Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age.
But what about language? It is, after all, a defining characteristic of Celtic identity. Four of the six Insular Celtic languages — Irish, Welsh, Gaelic and Breton — are still described as living languages. If, as Jenkins suggests, there was no Celtic invasion in 450 BC, how did these variations of Celtic languages make their way from continental Europe into Britain and Ireland?
“The Celtic languages moved up the Atlantic shore, from the Iberian Peninsula, where Celto-Indo-European clearly originated,” he says. “Several variations of Celtic language were then adopted by existing people in the British Isles, probably in the late Bronze Age [2100-800 BC] when they encountered a variety of languages spreading across Europe that accompanied the growth of trade in metals.”
These tongues, loosely related within the proto-Celtic Indo-European group, “were assumed to have permeated every corner of the British Isles at least down to the period of the Roman occupation [which began in AD 43]. But these people were not invading, they were moving and trading — so there were no Celts, just sociable sailors.”
Jenkins claims that a misleading link between language and a unified Celtic culture began to gain momentum from numerous scholars in Britain at the turn of the 17th century. Among them was Edward Lhuyd. The Welsh naturalist, botanist and linguist classified Irish, Scots Gaelic, Welsh, Cornish and Breton as a unified linguistic group: Celtic. His thesis became received wisdom.
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“This theory suggested that if you speak a language, you must be a tribe, and therefore you must have invaded that country for the language to thrive there,” Jenkins says. “But there is simply no evidence for this.”
Consider, Jenkins adds, people who speak a Romance language such as Spanish or French; they do not define themselves ethnically as members of a Romance people. The same linguistic and cultural criteria must be true of “Celts”, he says.
“The languages of England eventually merged into one language: English,” he says. “But the languages on the Celtic side of the British Isles never merged to became one language. So that’s the main difference — language.
“It’s not a difference of race, or peoples, but of language adopted, well after the islands were occupied by earlier peoples.”
Jenkins says theories “lumping the Celts together” as one distinctive culture and people gained traction in the late 19th century, when British imperialism was at the height of its powers and racial hierarchy was very much in vogue. Crucially, Anglo-Saxon culture and the English language were seen as vastly superior to all others.
“The English have always regarded ‘the Celts’ — dare I use that word — as inferior,” Jenkins says.
“The idea of one Celtic people has made it easier for the English to demean the individual identities of the Welsh, the Scottish and the Irish. This continues to fuel many of the prejudices and misconceptions that divide the peoples of the British Isles to this day.”
‘The Celts: A Sceptical History’ is published by Profile Books
