Albion's seed

“The Celts” is a perhaps controversial book by archeologist Alice Roberts, with a foreword by TV personality Neil Oliver. It's an off-shoot to a BBC program I haven't seen. Roberts believes that most of what we think we know about the ancient Celts is quite simply wrong.

In the standard scenario, the Celts are identified with the Iron Age Hallstatt and La Tène cultures in Central Europe, which later expanded to northern Italy, Gaul and the British Isles. Thus, the “classical” Celtic peoples in Britain, Brittany and Ireland were just the Western fringe of a larger continental Celtic population. In this scenario, language, culture and people neatly followed each other. Cultural change was seen as the result of foreign invasion and population displacement.

The new vision is very different. The original homeland of the Celts (as in “having a Celtic language”) may have been the mercantile Bronze Age city-state of Tartessos in southern Spain! Part of a vast trading network, the Tartessians may have influenced the native population of the British Isles already during this time. This is how Celtic language was introduced in Britain and Ireland – not through a foreign migration/invasion, but due to peaceful economic contacts with the original inhabitants. Hallstatt and La Tène were probably not “Celtic” at all in this scenario, being instead Germanic or proto-Germanic cultures whose ideas spread across Europe during the Iron Age, influencing the linguistically Celticized populations of the Atlantic coast. These may in turn have influenced the language of the Central Europeans.

Roberts is extremely critical of the ancient literary sources, Greek and Roman, mentioning the Celts and their Druid priesthood. I get the impression that she believes in essentially none of it. She is somewhat more positive towards Celtic mythology, apparently because archeologists can see a certain continuity from the Iron Age to the Middle Ages in terms of mythological motifs. Note however, that this is a continuity between the Central European Celts (who may not have been Celts in the linguistic sense) and the British or Irish Celts. A topic not explored in the book is the “Celtic” presence in Sinkiang in Inner Asia.

I found “The Celts” extremely interesting. Previously, Hallstatt and La Tène were just names to me, now they are cultures with a distinct identity. They were clearly “high” cultures, especially Hallstatt. The rise and fall of civilizations is fascinating, but also somewhat disconcerting. The shape-shifting and shamanic aspects of “Celtic” (or is it something else) religion are also fascinating. It's also worth noting that the book, despite its multi-culturalist feel, can nevertheless be spun in a very different way, if you feel like it. After all, if Roberts is right, most modern Brits and Irish really are natives, not immigrants, and culture can change even without mass migration. And while Tarshish may have been the Celtic Ur-Heimat, in a certain sense, Albion was its first seed…