The Celts

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A bog in northern Jutland gave up, in 1891, a great silver bowl that had been taken apart and laid in the peat: thirteen panels of hammered and gilded plate, beaten into a crowded procession of gods and beasts. A horned figure sits cross-legged holding a torc in one hand and a ram-headed serpent in the other; a file of warriors marches toward a vat into which a giant dips a man head-first; elephants and lions that no Jutland metalworker had ever seen press in among the bulls. The Gundestrup cauldron was made somewhere in the lower Danube around the first or second century BCE, and almost everything about it is argued over — its workshop, its iconography, even whether the hands that raised it were Thracian or Celtic. What is not in doubt is that it belongs to a world that the Greeks and Romans knew, feared, and described, and that the medieval Irish would remember long after it had passed: the world of the peoples the classical authors called Keltoi and Galli.

The Gundestrup cauldron (lower Danube, c. 200 BCE – 100 CE), National Museum of Denmark. Photo by Malene Thyssen, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

A name out of Greek, a people out of the ground

The word came first from the Greeks. The geographer Hecataeus of Miletus, writing about 517 BCE, set down Keltoi for the barbarian people living inland from the Greek colony of Massalia, and Herodotus a couple of generations later placed them at the headwaters of the Danube and beyond the Pillars of Heracles — the far western edge of the world as Greeks then mapped it. To the Romans these same peoples were Galli, Gauls, and the Greeks who watched their armies pour into the Balkans called them Galatai. The names were never quite interchangeable, and they were almost always names given from outside. The one ancient writer who reports the people naming themselves is Julius Caesar, who in the opening of his commentaries on the Gallic war says that those whom the Romans call Gauls call themselves, in their own tongue, Celtae. That single line carries a great deal of weight, because it is nearly the only place where the label and a self-description meet.

Behind the names lies a problem of matching words to things. The peoples the Greeks called Celts left no extended literature of their own and no account of their own origins; they enter history described by strangers and recovered, otherwise, only from the ground. Modern archaeology ties the historical Celts to two successive material cultures of central Europe. The first is the Hallstatt culture, the early Iron Age horizon of roughly 800 to 450 BCE, named for an Austrian salt-mining valley whose cemetery filled with the iron swords and gold of a warrior elite. Out of its western zone, around the middle of the fifth century BCE, grew the second: the La Tène culture, named for a site on Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland where votive deposits of weapons and tools were dredged from the shallows in the nineteenth century. It is the La Tène horizon, spreading across the continent from about 450 BCE, that the classical sources describe and that scholars most confidently call Celtic. The equation is an inference — a people known from texts, mapped onto an assemblage known from objects — and it has held up well, but it is worth remembering that it is an equation, made by later hands, and not something the Iron Age announced about itself.

What held this world together was not a state. There was never a Celtic empire, never a single king or capital, never a unified people in the sense Rome was a people. There was instead a constellation of tribes — the Aedui and Arverni and Helvetii of Gaul, the Boii who gave their name to Bohemia, the Galatian Tolistobogii and Tectosages and Trocmii far to the east, and scores of others — sharing a family of related Celtic languages, a broadly similar material culture, a warrior aristocracy, and a common religious world, while as often warring among themselves as acting in concert. The Celts were a civilization in the way a language family is a family: real, traceable, bound by deep kinship, and yet decentralized to the point that no member of it ever ruled the rest.

The flowering line and the warrior’s world

If one thing makes the case for a single Celtic culture by sight rather than argument, it is the art. La Tène style is one of the great original idioms of European antiquity, and it is instantly recognizable: tendrils and palmettes borrowed from Greek and Etruscan ornament and then bent, abstracted, set spinning until the borrowed leaf dissolves into pure flowing line. The curves run and double back; faces emerge from foliage and vanish again; a sword scabbard, a bronze flagon, a gold torc terminal becomes a field of restless, asymmetrical, never-quite-resolving movement. It is an art that almost never settles into a still, frontal image — the opposite instinct from the Mediterranean traditions it fed on — and it spread, with remarkable consistency, from Ireland to the Danube. A craftsman in first-century Britain and a craftsman in third-century Hungary worked recognizably the same visual language.

The Hallstatt core, the La Tène expansion, and the maximum extent of Celtic settlement, from Iberia and Ireland to Galatia in central Anatolia. Map by QuartierLatin1968 and others, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The objects that carry this art are also the objects that carry the social order. Chief among them is the torc, the rigid twisted neck-ring of gold or electrum that the classical sources and the graves agree was the mark of rank and, on the battlefield, of the warrior who scorned to cover his body. The hoard found at Snettisham in Norfolk held scores of them, the finest a rope of twisted gold strands ending in great cast terminals, buried in the first century BCE; the dying Gaul of the famous Hellenistic sculpture wears one and nothing else. Around the torc gathers the whole picture the Greeks and Romans drew of Celtic society: a world of mounted aristocrats and chariots, of single combat and boasting, of vast feasts at which rank was eaten as well as spoken.

Torcs from the Snettisham hoard (Norfolk, c. 75 BCE), British Museum. Photo by the Portable Antiquities Scheme / Helen Etheridge, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

Two details from those feasts pass, uncannily, from the classical record into the Irish one. The Greek philosopher Posidonius traveled in southern Gaul around 90 BCE, and the long fragments of his lost ethnography — preserved by Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, and Athenaeus — describe a custom by which the bravest man at a feast received the choicest joint of meat, and that any rival who claimed it settled the matter by single combat. Centuries later and at the far Atlantic edge, the Irish sagas tell of exactly this: the curadmír, the “champion’s portion,” fought over at the feast of Bricriu and at Mac Da Thó’s hall, where heroes carve up a great pig and very nearly themselves over who deserves the best cut. The agreement is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that the insular and continental worlds shared a real cultural inheritance and not merely a label.

The other shared detail is darker. Posidonius reports — and Diodorus and Strabo repeat — that Celtic warriors cut off the heads of the enemies they killed, hung them from the necks of their horses, and nailed the most distinguished to the doorposts of their houses; the heads of the greatest foes they embalmed in cedar oil and kept in chests to show their guests. Excavation has borne the practice out: at the Gaulish sanctuaries of Roquepertuse and Entremont in southern France, niches cut to hold human skulls and pillars carved with severed heads were found, and recent chemical analysis of skull fragments from Le Cailar has detected the very embalming resins the classical authors described. In the Irish material the head-taking returns again, ennobled into heroic convention — Cú Chulainn carrying triple trophies home in his chariot before he is old enough to grow a beard. The cult of the severed head, in which the head was held to be the seat of the person and a thing of power in itself, runs through Celtic religion from the Gaulish shrines to the Welsh tale of Brân the Blessed, whose buried head guards the island of Britain.

The druids and the soul that does not die

At the center of that religion stood a learned class, and almost everything that can be said of them comes through Roman eyes. Caesar gives the fullest account: among the Gauls, he says, two orders held all honor, the knights and the druids, and the druids were the keepers of sacred things — they conducted public and private sacrifice, ruled on questions of religion, sat as judges in disputes over inheritance and boundaries and murder, and trained the young, some of whom spent as much as twenty years in their schools. They committed nothing of their doctrine to writing, Caesar adds, thinking it improper to entrust their lore to letters, though they used the Greek alphabet for ordinary affairs; the whole of it was held and passed by memory, in verse.

It is Caesar, too, who records the teaching that drew the most fascination then and since: the druids wished above all to instill the conviction that souls do not perish but pass, after death, from one body into another, and that this belief, by setting aside the fear of death, was the great spur to courage. The doctrine is reported again by Strabo, by Diodorus, and by the poet Lucan, and the Greeks could not help reaching for the obvious comparison — several of them flatly link druidic teaching to Pythagoras, whose followers held the same teaching about the wandering of the soul. Whether the Celtic belief was a true reincarnation of the kind the Indian traditions developed, or a passage to an otherworld imagined as another country rather than another womb, the sources do not let us decide; the Irish tales, with their figures reborn across centuries and their living crossings into the hollow hills, preserve something of both. What is clear is that the Celtic dead were not thought simply to end. The classical writers were unanimous that this people did not fear death as others did, and traced the fearlessness to a confidence about the soul that the druids taught.

The druids worked in groves, not temples. The Roman sources speak of sacred clearings, of oak and mistletoe — Pliny the Elder describes the white-robed druid cutting mistletoe from an oak with a golden sickle on the sixth day of the moon — and of sacrifice, including, in the hostile Roman telling, human sacrifice in great burning images. Here the record must be read carefully: the Romans had every motive to paint the druids as savage, and the suppression of the druids under the early emperors was a political act dressed as moral revulsion. What the sources agree on, beneath the polemic, is a priesthood that was also a judiciary and a university, holding a vast oral wisdom about the gods, the calendar, the stars, and the fate of the soul, and standing at the head of a religion of the turning year. That year was marked, in the insular tradition that survives, by the great festivals — the fires of Beltane at the start of summer, the thinning of the worlds at Samhain when the dead and the dwellers in the hollow hills came near — though these names reach us through medieval Irish texts, and how much of their detail is genuinely ancient is not always recoverable.

Conquest, and survival at the edge

The Celtic world was at its widest in the third century BCE, and it was already being pressed from every side. In 390 BCE a Gaulish army had sacked Rome itself, a humiliation the Romans never forgot. In 279 BCE Celtic war-bands plundered into Greece and assaulted the sanctuary at Delphi; the next year three of their tribes crossed into Asia Minor and carved out a territory in the central Anatolian highland around modern Ankara that took their name — Galatia, the Celts in the East. They held it, as a distinct people speaking a Celtic tongue, for centuries: the apostle Paul addressed a letter to their descendants, and as late as the end of the fourth century CE Saint Jerome remarked that the Galatians of Ancyra still spoke a language much like that of the Treveri of the Rhineland. A single Celtic speech, recognizably one, ran from the gates of Anatolia to the mouth of the Rhine.

Then came Rome, and the contraction. Cisalpine Gaul, the Celtic country of the Po valley, was absorbed first. Transalpine Gaul fell to Julius Caesar between 58 and 51 BCE, a conquest he narrated himself and which ended at Alesia with the surrender of the Arvernian war-leader Vercingetorix; the campaign, by the ancient figures, killed or enslaved a great part of the population. Britain followed under Claudius and his successors, the conquest punctuated by the druids’ last stand on the island of Anglesey, cut down by Roman troops, and by the great revolt of the Iceni under their queen Boudica. Within the empire the Celtic gods did not vanish so much as merge — Gaulish deities paired with Roman ones, native names surviving beneath Latin, the horse-goddess Epona riding into the Roman cavalry’s devotions. But the languages receded, the druidic schools were broken, and the distinctive culture survived as a living thing only where Rome’s reach failed and where, later, the Germanic and Slavic migrations did not reach: at the Atlantic edge.

That edge is where the Celtic languages live still — in Ireland, in Gaelic Scotland, in Wales, in Cornwall, on the Isle of Man, and in Brittany across the Channel, the last settled by Britons fleeing the Anglo-Saxon advance. And it is from that edge that the great body of Celtic mythology comes down to us, because it was the Christian monks of early medieval Ireland and Wales who wrote it. This is the crucial caution in reading the surviving tales. The Irish texts — the Lebor Gabála Érenn or “Book of Invasions,” the cycles of the Tuatha Dé Danann and their war with the Fomorians, the deeds of the many-skilled Lugh and the earthy father-god the Dagda and the battle-goddess the Morrigan — were set down centuries after Ireland’s conversion, by literate Christians who frankly reshaped the old gods. In the Lebor Gabála the divine races are recast as successive waves of human settlers, kings and invaders fitted into a chronology descended from Noah; the process scholars call euhemerism, the turning of gods into ancestral men. What the monks preserved is precious and is genuinely old in its bones, but it is not a pagan scripture taken down intact. It is a Christian literature remembering, and remaking, an older world.

The afterlife of a word

There is a final turn, and it is the liveliest debate in the field. The classical writers applied Keltoi and Galli to the peoples of Gaul, Iberia, the Danube, and Anatolia — but never, in any surviving text, to the inhabitants of Britain and Ireland. The islanders are not called Celts by any ancient author. The word “Celtic” was first stretched to cover them by scholars of the early modern period: the Scottish historian George Buchanan in the sixteenth century, and decisively the Welsh naturalist and linguist Edward Lhuyd, whose Archaeologia Britannica of 1707 grouped the languages of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany into a single family and called it Celtic, on the reasonable linguistic ground that they descend from the same ancient speech as Gaulish. From the languages the name spread to the peoples, and from there to a whole idea of a “Celtic” race and temperament.

This is the root of what is now called Celtoskepticism: the argument, pressed hardest by Simon James and others from the 1990s, that the unified “Celtic” people of the Atlantic islands is in large part a construction of the eighteenth century and after, a category that the Iron Age inhabitants of Britain and Ireland would not have recognized and never used of themselves. The skeptics do not deny that those peoples spoke Celtic languages or shared real cultural traits — the Roman historian Tacitus already noted that the Britons resembled the Gauls in customs and worship — but they insist that “Celt” as an ethnic identity for the islanders is modern, retrojected onto an Iron Age that knew nothing of it. The counter-argument holds that a shared language family, a shared art, and shared institutions like the champion’s portion amount to a real cultural unity whatever the ancients did or did not call it. The matter is genuinely undecided, and it cuts to the foundation of the whole subject: it asks whether “the Celts,” as a single people stretching to the Atlantic, is a discovery or an invention.

Onto that contested ground fell the Celtic Revival. From the later eighteenth century — fed partly by forgeries, like the Welsh antiquarian Iolo Morganwg’s fabricated bardic lore and the Scottish “Ossian” poems of James Macpherson — and swelling through the nineteenth into a full Romantic and nationalist movement, “Celtic” became a byword for the mystical, the artistic, the wild and twilight-haunted, set against the industrial and the Anglo-Saxon. In Ireland the Revival fused with the drive for independence; Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats gathered the old tales into a national literature, and the gods of the Tuatha Dé Danann walked again as symbols of a reawakening nation. Out of the same current grew modern Druidry and, later, Neo-Pagan movements that take the festivals of the turning year as living rites. Almost none of this reaches back unbroken to the Iron Age; it is reception, a deliberate and powerful reimagining. But it gave the word “Celtic” a second life as large as its first — so that the same name now points at once to a flowering line of bronze and gold dredged from European bogs, a priesthood that taught the soul’s passage from body to body, and a modern sensibility that found, in the half-recovered fragments of all of it, something it needed to believe was still its own.

→ Related: Druids · Gaul · Hallstatt Culture · The Tuatha De Danann · The Fomorians · The Dagda · Lugh · The Morrigan · Brigid Goddess · Nuada · Tara Hill · Newgrange · Uisneach · Emain Macha · Reincarnation · Immortality · Soul · The Norse · Pythagoras · Iron Age · Epona