The Question of the Celts

Yesterday afternoon The Covenant of the Goddess (COG) posted the following video onto their FaceBook page (I am unable to embed it), which features Prof. Simon James who insists the Celts inhabiting the British Isles "never existed"....at least not before 1700 CE when archaeologists, he alleges, coined the term as a blanket ethnonym for the cultures inhabiting the districts of the Atlantic (James, pp. 17).  According to him, the Celts are a modern invention that was imposed onto the evidence by early scholars!  This view has also been adopted and brandished by Prof. John Collis who capitulates that it is academically improper to use the term "Celtic" in any sense merely because it covers scientific disciplines that cover different temporal area (he alleges, by inference, that these disciplines must remain unrelated): linguistics, Iron Age material culture, and medieval literature.  These two studies, however, have been treated as though they are mainstream and reflective of current academic thought by one other Pagan academic luminary, Prof. Ronald Hutton, who opined that, "[d]uring the 1990s historians and prehistorians have lost faith in the concept of a Celtic cultural province covering much of ancient Europe", noting that our understanding of the Celts had "been called into question during the past thirty years" (Hutton, pp. 2).  By addressing a Pagan audience in this way, Prof. Hutton comes across as directing this new narrative, even tacitly implying that it is  an accepted fact by the majority of specialists in the field of Celtic Studies and Archaeology.  However, perhaps to Hutton's chagrin, even Prof. James admits that:  "At the moment this rejection of the Celts is not generally shared by specialists in other fields, or by many archaeologists outside the United Kingdom, and is fiercely opposed by some" (James, pp. 16).  The fringe nature of these respective hypotheses must be thoroughly underscored!   When I queried Dr. Eamonn "Ned" Kelly--the Keeper of Irish Antiquities--about this fringe trend to disregard the concept of the Celts he assured me that the work of these scholars (Collis and James) is utterly worthy of dismissal because the authors are so clearly laboring under some sort of post-imperial trauma and that they evince an unashamed political bias that unquestionably taints their views!  Why Prof. Hutton would at least imply that these fringe views are mainstream remains uncertain.  Regardless, it is evident that Prof. Hutton has taken a shine to the work of two peripheral scholars and that he has grossly over-exagerated the merit and the legitimacy of their work.  However, even Prof. James ironically laments that, "'ideological bias' is obvious in the [academic] papers which do not reflect our own views" (James, pp. 44).  He also commits, throughout his poorly reasoned exegesis, some rather egregious Logical Fallacies, such as Appeal to Authority by making a claim of a respective scientific field for which he offers no corroborative citations to substantiate his vague allegations which he then infers ought to be accepted at face value alone (James, pp. 94).  When confronted with patently ridiculous narratives of this sort we must remind ourselves that there is an unfortunately concerted effort within British academia to utterly divorce England, culturally, from its ancient pagan past, particularly from its native Celtic heritage!

Sources:

• Collis, John.  The Celts: Origins, Myths & Inventions.  Gloucestershire: Tempus, 2003.
• Hutton, Ronald.  "The Festival of Lammas".  The Cauldron: Witchcraft, Paganism & Folklore.  No. 113 (August 2004): pp. 2-4.
• James, Simon.  The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention?.  Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1999. 
• Ó hÓgáin, Dáithí.  "Celtic Folklore and Mythology".  Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music, and Art.  2nd edn.  Charlie T. McCormick and Kim White, eds.  3 vols.  Oxford: ABC-Clio, 2011: pp. 239-246.
• ---.  The Sacred Isle: The Belief and Religion in Pre-Christian Ireland.  Cork: The Collins Press, 1999.