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Blood of the Isles
Mar. 27th, 2018 11:12 amAn interesting quote from Blood of the Isles by Brian Sykes – the book I’m reading right now which is mostly interesting for its firm premise that there isn’t actually much difference between England and the rest of the British Isles – genetically, at any rate.
It also discusses the notion of ‘the celt’:
“So where did the Celt come from? Indeed, where does the notion that the Celts ever existed as a separate people, capable of acting together, moving together and arriving somewhere, actually stem from? The notion, oddly enough, is a surprisingly recent one. It began to take shape in the years around 1700 when Edward Lluyhd, from Owestry on the Welsh border, became the director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Lluyd travelled widely in Ireland, Wales and the Scottish Highlands, collecting antiquities and manuscripts for the museum and recording the folklore of the lands he visited. On his travels he noticed the similarities between Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Irish and Scots Gaelic and the ancient languages of Gaul. In his book, Archaeologia Britannica, published in 1707, he was first to group these languages together and embrace them under the generic term of Celtic. He was also the first to point out that the languages belonged to two distinct sets, distinguished from each other by their pronunciation. The harsher consonants of Breton, Cornish and Welsh (as in ‘ap’, meaning ‘son of’) led Lluyd to call these the P-Celtic languages, while the softer sounds of Irish and Scots Gaelic (as in ‘mac’ with the same meaning) were referred to by Lhuyd as Q-celtic. Having found a language family it was all to easy to invent a people and Lluyd very soon constructed a historical explanation of how this linguistic continuity may have come about. He suggested…Irish Britons moved to the Isles but were pushed into Scotland and northern Britain by a second wave of Gauls from France who then occupied Wales and southern England.
…Edward Lluyd, though he helped create the concept of the Celtic people, did not invent the word. It makes its first appearance as ‘Keltoi’ in ancient Greek, where it is used as a derogatory catch-all name for strangers and foreigners, people from another place. Uncivilized, rough and uncouth, not ‘one of us’. By the time Julius Caesar wrote his ‘Gallic Wars’ around 60 BC, the people of Gaul, according to Caesar, called themselves ‘Celts’. So while the Greeks used ‘Keltoi’ to refer to outsiders coming from beyond the limits of the civilized Mediterranean world, the name itself might originally have come from one or more of the tribes themselves. For the Romans, the terms Celt and Gaul were pretty much interchangeable, used to describe the inhabitants of their territories in France and northern Italy and to tell them apart from the real enemy – the Germans.
However, when we come to the people of Britain and Ireland during the Roman period, nobody called them Celts. They called them a lot of things, but not Celts. Neither is there any record of anyone from the Isles using the word Celt to describe themselves until the eighteenth century.”
It’s a very interesting book. I know Brian Sykes and his notions of genetic archaeology are not without their own problems or questionable theories, but he is always worth a read, and I have to admit, ‘Seven Daughters of Eve’ is already one of my top slightly guilty pleasures. ‘Blood of the Isles’ is going totally the same way.
Other revelation from this book – the English, the Irish and the Scots are all very similar in terms of being about 70-ish% descended from the Neolithic inhabitants of the Isles. The only hold outs are the Welsh, who are a bold 80%+ descended from the original Britons. I think that means that the end of the last ice age was the last time any significant number of people really wanted to move to North Wales.
It also discusses the notion of ‘the celt’:
“So where did the Celt come from? Indeed, where does the notion that the Celts ever existed as a separate people, capable of acting together, moving together and arriving somewhere, actually stem from? The notion, oddly enough, is a surprisingly recent one. It began to take shape in the years around 1700 when Edward Lluyhd, from Owestry on the Welsh border, became the director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Lluyd travelled widely in Ireland, Wales and the Scottish Highlands, collecting antiquities and manuscripts for the museum and recording the folklore of the lands he visited. On his travels he noticed the similarities between Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Irish and Scots Gaelic and the ancient languages of Gaul. In his book, Archaeologia Britannica, published in 1707, he was first to group these languages together and embrace them under the generic term of Celtic. He was also the first to point out that the languages belonged to two distinct sets, distinguished from each other by their pronunciation. The harsher consonants of Breton, Cornish and Welsh (as in ‘ap’, meaning ‘son of’) led Lluyd to call these the P-Celtic languages, while the softer sounds of Irish and Scots Gaelic (as in ‘mac’ with the same meaning) were referred to by Lhuyd as Q-celtic. Having found a language family it was all to easy to invent a people and Lluyd very soon constructed a historical explanation of how this linguistic continuity may have come about. He suggested…Irish Britons moved to the Isles but were pushed into Scotland and northern Britain by a second wave of Gauls from France who then occupied Wales and southern England.
…Edward Lluyd, though he helped create the concept of the Celtic people, did not invent the word. It makes its first appearance as ‘Keltoi’ in ancient Greek, where it is used as a derogatory catch-all name for strangers and foreigners, people from another place. Uncivilized, rough and uncouth, not ‘one of us’. By the time Julius Caesar wrote his ‘Gallic Wars’ around 60 BC, the people of Gaul, according to Caesar, called themselves ‘Celts’. So while the Greeks used ‘Keltoi’ to refer to outsiders coming from beyond the limits of the civilized Mediterranean world, the name itself might originally have come from one or more of the tribes themselves. For the Romans, the terms Celt and Gaul were pretty much interchangeable, used to describe the inhabitants of their territories in France and northern Italy and to tell them apart from the real enemy – the Germans.
However, when we come to the people of Britain and Ireland during the Roman period, nobody called them Celts. They called them a lot of things, but not Celts. Neither is there any record of anyone from the Isles using the word Celt to describe themselves until the eighteenth century.”
It’s a very interesting book. I know Brian Sykes and his notions of genetic archaeology are not without their own problems or questionable theories, but he is always worth a read, and I have to admit, ‘Seven Daughters of Eve’ is already one of my top slightly guilty pleasures. ‘Blood of the Isles’ is going totally the same way.
Other revelation from this book – the English, the Irish and the Scots are all very similar in terms of being about 70-ish% descended from the Neolithic inhabitants of the Isles. The only hold outs are the Welsh, who are a bold 80%+ descended from the original Britons. I think that means that the end of the last ice age was the last time any significant number of people really wanted to move to North Wales.
