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Click Treble Clef for streaming musical background from Riverdance. Requires Real Player 5.0, a free download. |
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The Celts, Chapter 1
Who, Where, and When?
The average person, when in a conversation about the Celts, usually thinks of Ireland and the Irish people. Thinking a bit further, he may include the Scots and the Welsh, more rarely Cornwall, the Isle of Man, and the Bretons on the northwest peninsula of France. Concerning timespan, he may think back a century and a half to the Irish potato famine of 1845-46, or yet earlier to the Irish monks throughout medieval Europe. That only scratches the surface of Celtic history, however, and most people of European ancestry are surprised to discover they have Celtic roots. The books appearing on the left side of these web pages are good sources for information in depth about the Celts and readers are encouraged to spend some time reading them. In addition, at the very bottom of this page appear the URLs of several websites that treat on various aspects of the Celts. |
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Amazingly enough, among those most expert on the subject, there is no general agreement on who the Celts really are, that is, a clearcut way of defining this people, nor on where they first arose, nor even on when their history began. Most historians, when considering who correctly to include as Celts, fall into a reductionist frame of mind. The linguists exclude certain groups because they were assumed not to have used the Celtic language, itself going back to "Old European" and the roots of the Indo-European language. Others, more spatially oriented, feel that some tribes were too far removed geographically from the center of Celtic activity and thus need be discarded. Thus, the tribes living on the east side of the Rhine river are, for some writers, Germanic and not Celtic. Other writers consider the Germanic tribes as the most Celtic of all tribes, standard-bearers, so to speak, of Celtic values. | |||||||||||||||
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Those writers who put great emphasis
on warfare and battles note that tribe "X" made war against tribe "Y" at some point in the past
and assume that either X or Y cannot, therefore, be
Celtic. They ignore that the history of the Celts has been a history of continual battle,
quite often between clearly defined Celtic tribes. Celts have faced Celts on the field of battle,
sometimes to their own astonishment, when complex alliances or mercenary roles forced them to
fight their own kindred. Turning to the 'when' of the Celts, some writers see them as an
European people, a composite of a turbulent mixing of various tribes not earlier than 1000
BC. Others, in searching for much more ancient roots, have traced the source of Celtic mind
and blood much farther east into Eurasia, and at an era much further removed.
 Click to enlarge Because of this uncertainty about the Celts we will adopt a convention as follows: We will speak of the "Celts" when we mean the people generally included in the modern restricted definition (The Irish, the Welsh, the Scots, and the Bretons), whereas we will speak of the "Alba-Boreans" (our own copyrighted term) when we mean the much larger group of humans, including the Celts, both past and present, who are Northland people and are like the Celts in major respects. Thus, if the reader's ancestors came from France, Germany, northern Italy, the western 2/3ds of Spain, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Jugoslavia, Russia, and/or the Ben-Lux countries, he has a raincheck claim to Celtic heritage. But in our expanded definition of the Celt-like Alba-Boreans as a cultural phenomenon, we must add Norway, Sweden, Finland, Lappland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Siberia as well. As one writer has put
it, "the Celts (and in a larger sense, the Alba-Boreans) are thus
assumed to be among the descendants of the early Indo-European settlers of the Continent who
first populated the Danube valley in the middle of the third millennium B.C. and then spread
north and westward." But, as we will find, this is still only part of the story. Just how
widespread were the proto-Celts (those we designate the 'Alba-Boreans') millennia ago? There is
the problem of the recently-discovered skeleton of Caucasian appearance, thought to be circa 7,300 B.C.,
discovered in the State of Washington, U.S.A., now called the "Kennewick Man" (discussed in a later
chapter), an even older female Caucasoid skeleton found in Idaho, U.S.A, and of the mummies - undoubtably of Celtic origin -
recently unearthed in central China. In addition, there exist legends of blond giants who long
ago visited South America and Polanesia as 'teachers of how to live.' In any case, the strange depth of imagery, creative
force, and spiritual vitality of the Celtic mind have been, and remain today, one of Mankind's
most dynamic elements, producing great music, art, engineering, and scientific
discovery. |
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Here are some links to Celtic sites:
http://www-users.
dragon.net.au/~manxman/Celts/historycelts.htm
http://www.unc.edu/~dverkerk/celtic/
celtic.html
http://www.
geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/1808/history_of_the_celts.htm
http://scrtec.org/track/tracks/f00383
.html
http://bally.fortunecity.com/
dublin/179/celtic.htm
http://cvb.
drawbridge.com/music/moors/paganinfo/reading_right.html
http://ancienthistory.about.com/msub13.
htm
http://194.205.1.2/creative/
celtic/history/hist01.htm