Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) Read Free

Brittany is much stronger, despite or perhaps because of a lack of long-term governmental support. More recent policies in both Britain and France have favoured preserving the languages. Scottish Gaelic continues in the mainland Highlands and is the dominant language on some of the islands in the Hebrides, as well as in areas of Nova Scotia in Canada. Cornish became extinct in the mid-eighteenth century, and the last Manx speaker died in 1974. Enthusiastic revivalists continue to learn, to speak and to sing, and to teach all the Celtic languages.

SOURCES OF OUR KNOWLEDGE
    The ancient Celts left us scant written materials but many more artifacts than was once supposed. Unsympathetic, often patronizing Greeks and Romans wrote about the Celts in great detail. After the fall of the Roman empire and the coming of Christianity and monasticism, surviving Celtic peoples established their own written traditions, at first in Ireland and later in Wales. After Henry VIII’s suppression of the monasteries in the sixteenth century, enlightened nobles and other patrons occasionally sponsored the recording of popular narratives and poetry. Later in the nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, learned travellers collected narratives in the field, often from unlettered storytellers. Among students of Celtic myth and culture, these several streams are known by different names. Materials uncovered by archaeologists are called ‘the physical evidence’. Each year there are more and more finds, many of them causing us to redefine earlier suppositions. Declining in influence are the writings of Greek and Roman observers, usually called the ‘classical commentators’, now thought to be biased and short-sighted; their pronouncements are increasingly seen to be at variance with the physical evidence. All texts in Celtic languages since the introduction of Christianity are sometimes described as the ‘vernacular evidence’, as if these were inferior to what is known from the ancient world. The older written records, especially as found in the great medieval codices, such as
The Book of the Dun Cow
or
The Red Book of Hergest
, may be dubbed ‘literary tradition’. Materials from unlettered sources are called ‘oral tradition’, sparing us the nuisance of deciding whether the item at hand is a folktale, a legend or an instructive fable. Both narratives and characters, notably the Irish Fionn mac Cumhaill, appear in contrasting portraits in literary and oral traditions.
    Knowledge of early Europe was stumbled upon before it was ever methodically sought out. Early discoveries such as Hallstatt, Austria (1846), are rightly named ‘finds’. Little more than a decade later (1858), enlightened amateurs plumbed the underwater site at La Tène in Switzerland. Prominent ruins such as Tintagel in Cornwall and ringforts such as Maiden Castle in Dorset became tourist attractions. More telling was the large bronze calendar (first century BC ) found at Coligny in eastern France, giving detailed information on a 64-month period in the most extensive of all surviving early examples of written Gaulish. The text suggests continuity with later Celtic languages; the autumn new year, known as
sam(h) ain
in Irish, is here
samonios
. Émile Espérandieu (1857–1939) led the search for further inscriptions, resulting in sixteen volumes of data published over fifty-nine years (1907–66). By the end of the twentieth century, researchers had examined more than a hundred sites in France, the Low Countries, Germany and the Danube valley, the burial mound at Hochdorf and the Gaulish ‘city’ of Alésia yielding abundantly. We even know a great deal about Celtic diet and personal grooming, thanks to the discovery of Lindow Man (1984), the body of a young, apparently sacrificial victim, preserved intact in a Cheshire peat bog, his last meal undigested.
The ever-mounting physical evidence of the ancient Celts portrays a society governed by laws, with