Who Were the Celts? Review

Throughout human history, various peoples have seemed to spontaneously appear on the world stage, spawning out of places referred to as cradles, wells, or springs of nations.  It’s such a fascinating concept that I’m working on a novella built around the idea, but realistically there were no such mythical places spawning new peoples fully formed; instead, these new cultures would seem to appear because our first evidence and awareness of them in the historical record comes when they brushed against one of the few civilizations that wrote things down: the Chinese or the Romans, in many cases.  Those doing the writing down, though, were not anthropologists, historians, or “modern” “experts.”  They were people like Julius Caesar, encountering new peoples in the lands he traversed and attempting to describe them in his Commentaries for an audience back home, which leaves a lot of ambiguity about just who these people he’s naming and encountering really were.

Historians are left attempting to piece together, from a combination of archeology, anthropology, ancient writings, artifacts, and, in modern times, genetic testing, just who these various cultures and peoples were.  It’s a tedious, imprecise process involving a great deal of guesswork and resulting in little consensus, not helped by the ambiguity of the terminology in question.  How should the term “Celts” even be considered?  Should we be looking for people who considered themselves “Celts” or considered themselves part of a cohesive culture that could be called “Celtic?”  Many times these names came from the civilizations that wrote things down, not from the people themselves.  Should it be based on a region, cultural trademarks, a shared language?  Genetic markers are an increasingly popular metric, but all of these forms of measurement of a culture’s extent are somewhat arbitrary, so historians are likely to continue disagreeing about just who these people were.

Duffy answers his titular question with a simple answer of “basically everyone,” which struck me immediately as being a bit overly broad and inclusive.  Other historians I’ve read or seen referenced consider the Celts best defined as the people and culture inhabiting the modern British Isles and northwestern Europe, but Duffy argues that there is evidence of a shared Celtic culture that extended across almost all of Europe.  From the evidence he presents, however, the fully-fledged Celtic culture was mostly confined to prominence in northwestern Europe, while its presence elsewhere was either impermanent, alongside other major cultural forces and peoples, or linked by a common protoculture that had characteristics which prevailed in the Celts as well as other European peoples.

Definitions aside, Who Were the Celts? is a decent survey work of Celtic culture stretching over about three thousand years, although its effort to be comprehensive can make it seem scattered at times.  This is not helped by the formatting, which is extremely staccato, with each section consisting of just a paragraph or two before jumping to another, sometimes only vaguely related topic, with little transition or logical organization to support the cohesiveness of the overall text.  Even if a strictly chronological presentation didn’t make the most sense, some kind of orderly presentation would have been appreciated.

There is also a certain distractedness to the book.  It has an odd fascination, maybe an obsession, with linking prominent modern personages with the Celts.  Entire segments of the book are dedicated to this, and references and asides litter even the segments that are decidedly premodern.  In such a slim volume, and purporting to answer such a broad question, these references detract from what I could have been learning about the Celts and undermine the author’s credibility.  My hope was for a serious scholarly work, not something trying to appeal to people who are only interested in learning that such-and-such celebrity has a distant ancestor who may have come from a Celtic region.  Combined with the almost deification of the Celtic culture (the Celts and all their successors are apparently natural-born poets, artists, scholars, engineers, authors, inventors, and could never be accused of any more barbarous traits), Who Were the Celts? never rises above the level of a shallow introduction.

Despite all of that, it does manage to have some redeeming traits.  Especially in the earlier sections, the book effectively exposes the reader to the basic outlines of Celtic culture and helps dispel some of the more common myths that surround that people.  Perhaps that is all that I should have expected; it is, after all, only a couple hundred pages.  If you think of it as a starting point for answering the titular question, rather than a complete, detailed, definitive, and thoroughly researched and supported scholarly conclusion, it’s a serviceable piece and a quick read.  If that’s what you’re looking for, then consider giving Who Were the Celts? a try.