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Myths of Celtic and Gothic Origin: an Introduction

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Myths of Celtic and Gothic Origin: an Introduction Myths of Celtic and Gothic Origin: An Introduction Joanne Parker ‘Celtic’ or ‘Gothic’: such words refer both to ancient tribes and to modern styles. We associate entire arrays of ethnotypes, mentalities and characteris- tics with them. ‘Celtic’ connotes New Age ambient harp music, spirituality, wayward fantasy, otherworldliness; ‘Gothic’ stands either for lofty upward- soaring cathedrals with flying buttresses and ogive arches, for dark, echoing music played by funereal rock bands, for the spiky black-letter font used in old German books, or for creepy monks in old-fashioned horror fiction. The tribal or linguistic meaning of ‘Celt’ or ‘Goth’ is equally slippery. ‘Celtic’ today refers to a set of Iron-Age tribes whose material culture is known from the excavations at Halstatt in Austria and La Tène in Switzerland. But Gauls, ancient Britons, modern Welsh, Gaels, and other ethnicities are also habitu- ally classed as ‘Celts’ although their main linguistic branches are not mutually intelligible and their taxonomic positioning in the European cultural and lin- guistic palette is anything but straightforward. The Celts are, to a large extent, a systemic construct and assumed identity of the past two or three centuries.1 As for the Gothic tribes and the Gothic language: today we use the term to describe the barbarians who skirmished with Roman forces in the third century in the area around what is now Transylvania, the Black Sea, the Danube and the Carpathian Mountains and who by the fourth century commanded an area covering what we now think of as the southern post-Soviet states.2 However, it seems likely that ‘Gothic’ was simply ‘a new name for old barbarians’.3 Tacitus’ Germania (AD98) names over 40 Germanic tribes but never mentions Goths, while other historians from the same period write of Scythians (from Scythia, the area around modern Romania from which the Goths are believed to have originated) but never use the word Goth. And within a few decades of ‘Goths’ appearing in the pages of history, they were being sub-divided into Visigoths and Ostrogoths, or ‘Tervingi’ (forest people) and ‘Greutingi’ (shore people). So, 1 See Michael Chapman, The Celts: The Construction of a Myth (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992); Terence Brown (ed.), Celticism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996). 2 For more on this see Nick Groom, The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 1. 3 Groom, The Gothic, p. 2. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004306387_00� 2 Parker as in the case of the Celts, it is far from easy to confidently identify who the Goths were.4 Yet for all this bewildering semantic incontinence, the terms ‘Celtic’ and ‘Gothic’ have been used over the centuries with a specific bandwidth of cul- tural reference, a deliberate and precise evocation of descent and heritage in mind. Both refer to a Northern tradition outside Graeco-Roman antiquity, and as such the appellations served to oppose the cultures and countries of Northern Europe from the Romance or Latinate ones that emerged from the Roman Empire. In this negative signification (non-Roman, non Latin; northern European, rooted in tribal, pagan societies, those either attacked by Rome or attacking Rome) they had a specific ethnic identity and served, over the centuries, to focus a pattern of identifications and values for northern- European humanists, antiquaries, intellectuals and artists, ultimately drawing on Caesar’s descriptions of Gaul and Tacitus’ descriptions of Germania. Celtic fancy, Gothic brawn or furor Teutonicus: it was all opposed to Roman rational- ism and pragmatism; and the tribal origins of these nations, whom even their Roman foes respected for their frugal virtues and strong moral fibre, came to stand as cherished role models of the Northern nations emerging as European powers after the Renaissance—from Boadicea to Beowulf, from Ossian to Asterix. The eleven essays in this book chart some of the curious, unexpected, and var- ied ways in which the Celts and the Goths were appropriated and reinvented in Britain and other European countries through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries—becoming not just mythologised races, but also lending their names to abstract principles and entire value systems. Over the course of the last two decades, many individual studies have appeared, focusing on particular aspects of the reception history of the Celts or the Goths—several of them by contributors to this volume. Noteable titles include Tom Duggett’s Gothic Romanticism (2010), John Collis’s Celts: Origins and Reinventions (2003), Nick Groom’s The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction (2013) and Ronald Hutton’s Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain (2009). As the essays in this collection collectively highlight, though, the relationships between the two phenomena of ‘Celticism’ and ‘Gothicism’ still remains an area for further research. No one book can hope to provide a comprehensive study of two cultural trends across more than three hundred years—each of which is already multi- faceted in its own right. However, the essays collected together here—ranging from broad surveys to very specific case-studies—should together begin to 4 See Groom, The Gothic, pp. 2–3..
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