On the topic of 'the celtic nations'

[annwfyn]

I just read a rant on LJ, in which someone said (and I quote) "I am not Native American, but I am of Great Celtic descent* and and the rising Christian Europeans** did the same thing to those people as they did to the Native Americans***. That is why it angers me"

Now, obviously there are a number of problematic things about this statement. However, the one thing in this which really irritates me is the following.

THE IRISH AND CHUNKS OF THE SCOTS WERE CHRISTIAN BEFORE THE FRICKING ANGLO-SAXONS WERE! THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH WAS PARTIALLY FORMED BY MISSIONARIES FROM IONA IN SCOTLAND. THERE WAS AN IRISH DELEGATION AT THE SYNOD OF WHITBY.

(yes, those capital letters do mean I'm shouting)

For some reason there is this demented faith amongst a certain type of American than the collective peoples of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and Brittony (actually, I think they mostly forget about the Cornish and the Bretons. Probably because the Bretons are French) were the Native Americans of Europe. Really, they weren't!

Scotland was a sovereign nation until the 17th century when it's king became king of England as well. It always had its own aristocracy. Ireland had its own episcopal church structure when England was run by large men called 'Wulfgar' who were busy worshippping Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. There was a lovely wealthy Christian church in Ireland until the pagan Vikings decided to come and pillage with gay abandon, thus destroying almost all the written records of that period (the vikings basically created the concept of the 'dark ages' by destroying all the records of this period, meaning we know next to nothing beyond a few single documents and a few bits and pieces from the oral tradition). Do any Americans rant about how the Evil Pagans destroying their lovely Celtic culture?

No? Instead they whitter inanely about some nebulous 'European culture' which allegedly came and colonized them.

Why?

Why do people feel the need to go there.

Gah!




*I don't think anyone has told him that 'Great Celtic' is not an ethnicity.

**I also think someone needs to explain that 'European' is also not a homogenous cultural grouping.

***I think he means 'make them Christian and then kill them. I must say, as a White Anglo-Saxon Christian I'm shocked to hear this. How could we have let our standards fall since the 5th century? Why are the Welsh not safely locked away on a reservation right now?

Comments

[madwitch.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but he also thinks that the Celts were peace loving, fluffy bunny noble savages (which is how he sees the NAs), who communed with the Earth and loved each other.

He's amazingly funny, and I am contemplating joing communities just to wind him up every time he calls himself a 'Great Celt', because I know more than he does. :-D

[riksowden.livejournal.com]

"The Celts were peaceful, noble primitives"

"What, you mean a different bunch to the group who killed and enslaved each other, and anyone else who got close enough - and were just unlucky not to be as big, aggressive and well armed as the Scandinavians (or Romans), nor close-knit enough to really be much of a threat in terms of Empire?"

"Err"

"Tit"

[madwitch.livejournal.com]

He really thinks that, there's been a small group of people of Celtic descent showing quite clearly that they are, indeed, of Celtic descent in response to that. Except without actual stabbings, as it is the Internet.

He quite obviously has no idea what he's talking about. His rant was originally about the evil that is Thanksgiving, and how he wants to live on a Reservation with that noble, peaceable savage, the Native American, oh how evil are the Europeans, etc. When asked to SHUT THE HELL UP by some NAs, he said no. Which says everything you need to know about this guy.

[riksowden.livejournal.com]

I told you about Sean Prather getting irate at me when we were at Stonehenge, no?

He was going "oh yeah, i can feel my celtic roots" (he thinks he's Irish, despite being from Seattle for at least 3 generations).

When i pointed out it wasn't a Celtic site he wasn't amused!

But yes, the above is 'special'.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

*giggles*

What? Did he think the Irish had snuck over to Wiltshire to build it?

[riksowden.livejournal.com]

Also, i went to the Museum of the Native American in Washington DC...it was the most hippy place i've ever seen! There was a lot of good stuff in there, and a lot of stuff that actually made me quite glad to be British (rather than, you know, Spanish or American - at least we were only a bit mean, and actually abided by the treaties we made...mostly).

Interesting stuff - but a very definate bias (though almost all museums have one that you can sense - things like the British Museum's "here is cool stuff we plundered from across the world!" seem a lot more honest than others mind!).

[wildrogue.livejournal.com]

British Museum, also known as 'What we looted on our holidays'.

[lawrencegillies.livejournal.com]

Additionally, the Anglo-Saxon "invasion" of Romano-British (Celtic may be a stretch for what was later to be England) was a lot more peaceful than previously thought. The Saxons were invited in as a mercenary people, and were then used by Britons against other Britons, and there was much more peaceful assimilation that popularly believed, with a great deal of intermarriage.

True enough, the Welsh are a conquered people, as you point out, the Scots were not (at least until that whole jacobite thing) a feat partly due to the length of the Scottish coastline and the difficulty min blockading it as the Welsh had been, if I remember correctly.

I think that you're right in pointing out the lack of a cohesive "European" culture. The only common element to a large part of Europe, the former Roman Empire was the Church

There was a great deal of competition between the Celtic and Roman Churches, and there were missionaries from Ireland working in Britain well before St Augustine landed, he just had the sense to work from the top of society down.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

You know, there's a whole world of debate about the Anglo-Saxon 'invasion'. You're walking into THREE MILLION YEARS of stroppy archaeologists debating, with GREAT HORDES OF SAXONS on one side and three men in a longboat, all called 'Sven' on the other.

I personally keep getting confused. I was quite keen on the three men in a longboat, all called 'Sven' theory for ages, and cited things like 'unchanged boundary lines of settlements' and 'farms having the same freaking fields right through the transition period', until some damn geneticist did a study which indicated that the population of southern England had WAY more in common, genetically, with the population of Friesland in Germany than they do with the population of North Wales, which kinda suggested a definite influx of people.

Then I was befuddled, for I like my archaeology through DNA testing, and am still pondering.

[lawrencegillies.livejournal.com]

I do quite like the idea of a reservation for the Welsh though

[riksowden.livejournal.com]

Isn't that called "Wales"? You can go there and watch them in their native muck ;)

[(Anonymous)]

Where is this person talking? I wish to satisfy my morbid curiousity..

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I got the link from stupid_free.

[ulaidhan.livejournal.com]

This sort of nonsense uses exactly the same type of racialist pseudo-history as the white supremacist history sites. There, you'll find Hannover being defined as "anti-German" for opposing Prussian attempts to conquer it (and as for their _daring_ to win a battle in the war of 1866), while the forces of history and destiny and right (and racist clap-trap) were so clearly on the side of their opponents.

It's a peculiarly stupid version of Whig history, in which everything is seen as a form of progress (or opposition to it), with pre-defined national identities acting as the motive forces in all history at all times.

It's the sort of thing that lets someone with one great-grandparent originating in Scotland announce "I am Scottish" and not see the slightest oddness or hypocrisy in their stance, nor understand why people who have, say, visited the place might find their claims a touch odd.

[ulaidhan.livejournal.com]

Oh... as a PS relevant to the overall title of this blog - a cruise ship seems to have struck an iceberg today. No fatalities, but it's expected to sink. ;)

[(Anonymous)]

That's the odd thing about going to the States - everyone defines themselves as Irish/German/Italian/native/african/insert non-US nationality here whilst to an external observer they appear to be all pretty much indistinguishable from one another.

[pmp.livejournal.com]

Ok, this one I don't get at all.

I think my response to someone like that is "who cares?"

I wonder how that reconciles with my views recently expressed on political correctness? Anyone fancy a go at trying to prove my views are entirely flimsy logical constructs that are self contradicting?

Kernow ha Breten Vyhan pow anan, tus anan!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[lexx-uk.livejournal.com]

The Cornish have only fought one major war with the English in the time of Henry VII.
Infact the both the Breton nations marched with there armys and faught on the side of England.
And both nations faught at Hastings for William.....hence one of the reasons the Nation was seperate from England.
We sadly lost our nation in parlementary reforms.....a fact we are still fighting and is currently in the European courts.

[madwitch.livejournal.com]

Also, the Synod of Whitby is cracking me up. Mainly because I'm used to Whitby just being full of goths. :-)

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

It was also dead important in terms of church history.

*nods nods nods*

Having done conversion period archaeology/history it's now been hammered into my head so firmly as 'place of monks' that every year I absent mindedly wonder why all these Goths I know insist on going there. :p

[jade-faith.livejournal.com]

Mostly, it was the Romans and the English giving the Celts crap. The Welsh language is in fact one of the oldest Indo-European languages, not to mention that it's fucking hard to learn!

I also read somewhere that the Celts emerged from ancient Phoenicia which in northern Canaan which later became Israel. That makes them as persecuted as the Jews! w00t!

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I'm informed by the welshman in my living room that Welsh isn't that hard to learn. I think he's just forgotten what it was actually like to learn it, for he is old, and his Welsh language classes happened when he was very young.

I'm also reminded of a conversation sea_of_flame and I once had on the difficulty of boyfriends from South Wales, where, as far as we can tell, they pronounce everything funny, so when you try to use your Welsh phrases, learned painstakingly from books, you get looked at funny and told 'you don't say it that way'.

[skinny-cartman.livejournal.com]

I didn't think native Britons were actually Celts anyway, seeing as Celts are a mid European people first mentioned by the Greeks as being north of them near the Danube in southern Germany.
and being genetically dissimilar to Britons who have a greater genetic similarity with the Atlantic peoples of say Iberia.

The use of Celts to describe Britons was a 17th century thing I think.
That isn't to say however that ancient britons didn't adapt themselves to a celtic type culture as seen through certain archaeology along the La Tene type style.

Whilst there have been numerous genetic studies on the backgrounds of people in the isles what it tends to show is that throughout the British Isles the ancient Briton genetics is still very strong, more so in Ireland and parts of mainland scotland (where one can also find genetic evidence of the Scotti moving in from Ireland in the west), wales etc. That in England but it always predominates the genetics even here.
Orkney and Shetland have large Norse genetic doses (but still under 50%) and the western Isles and Hebrides show even older genotypes than found in the rest of the country - suggesting they have remained pretty untouched even by "Celts" there and perhaps were the initial inhabitants that they displaced.

In so called Saxon areas like England the greatest input of foreign genetics is above the line of the Dane Law but again less than 50% (though it gets very near to this in places like East Anglia and the far north east).
Oddly there is very little trace of roman genetic heritage which suggests that this was more a cultural adaptation or that most actual romans left the country etc. The fact that romans tended to use none roman folks from across their empire might also be a factor of course.

Otherwise yeah totally agree with you the Irish culture was Christianized well before the saxon one and helped Christianize the saxons.

And the idea that Native americans were noble savages also amuses me.. seeing as America is an ecological catastrophe only outmatched by Australia compared to its pre-human state due in the main to Native practices..

[melsner.livejournal.com]

Let's pretend, for a moment, that the idiotic Great Celt Blogger was actually historically accurate.

"Hi, I'm a comfortable middle class white american. My ancestors were persecuted a thousand years ago, so I can totally relate to Native Americans who still on reservations in squalor and who still watch their culture die on a regular basis."

It's like saying, "Oh, you're dying of a gunshot wound? My great, great grandfather who I never met did too, so I can totally relate and lecture you."

[troubleinchina.livejournal.com]

Yes, very much so. *headdesk*