The Ark

What has become of the Celtic peoples whose culture spanned Europe from the Atlantic to the Black Sea?

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Does the current interest in Celtic nationalism, music and the arts signal the beginning of a revival or the last flicker of a dying culture. Marcus Tanner, author of The Last of the Celts, investigates Celtic history and contemporary communities to come up with the answer.

Rachael Kohn: Hello, I'm Rachael Kohn, and on The Ark today, the Celtic revival. Celtic music, books, artwork, jewellery, it's a mini industry, but it's also a spiritual movement. But what has it got to do with the Celtic languages spoken by the people of Brittany, Wales, Cornwall, Scotland, Ireland, Nova Scotia in Canada, and Patagonia in Argentina?

Not enough, says Marcus Tanner, in his recent book The Last of the Celts. He mourns the rapid loss of the Gaelic language since the 19th century and the rise of a Celticism which he suspects is less than what it purports to be.

Marcus Tanner: It's happening all over the English-speaking world, it's not an English phenomenon, it's an English-speaking phenomenon, and you can even see it in France.

It's I think bound up with a search for an identity, people feel they don't have an identity, or they feel they have a homogenised white identity that's not attractive and appealing. The institutional churches in which many people have worshipped, they're also seen as lacking this strong cultural identity, and I think Celtic spirituality offers people a less orthodox way of reaching out for otherness, for God or for some spiritual kind of meaning in their lives. And I'd say you should see it in the same context as the way people are reaching out for alternative medicine.

It's not that they're giving up with the orthodox treatments, you know, and you could call the churches the orthodox treatments, but they want something complementary.

Rachael Kohn: Well what about Ireland? Could the rise in Celtic spirituality be an answer to the Catholic and the Protestant churches that have failed to find a resolution to their conflict? Is it a kind of alternative spirituality?

Marcus Tanner: Well that's a very interesting point. One of the reasons why churchmen are so interested in this, the Celtic saints and the Celtic church and trying to get back to what it was all about, is because of course, it reaches back beyond a time when these divisions sprung up and divided people so badly, and yes, I think it reflects a kind of disappointment with the way orthodox Protestantism and Catholicism have failed really to come together in any meaningful way, or bring people together.

So when people join the Celtic spiritual quest, they're able to come together on issues that pre-date any of the kind of stuff that happened at the Reformation and after that, which left people feeling divided and embittered.

Rachael Kohn: Well there's a kind of irony there, because on the one hand there is a look to the past. But I also get a strong sense from your study that Celtic revivals are kind of vehicles for the aspirations of a group or a generation at that particular moment in time.

Marcus Tanner: Well yes that does precisely, because really we don't know that much about it, so all sorts of things can be attached to Celtic spirituality.

One of the fun sides of doing this book was going into the British Library and looking at all the vast list of books which had the word 'Celtic' stuck onto them. And I found books on Celtic sex, Celtic herbs, Celtic cooking, I mean, you name it. It has become a bit of a vehicle anyone can ride really, and I think that's one of the reasons why yes, it's both backward-looking, but also in a sense that's why it's also very popular in America and in California because those are very forward-looking societies.

But it doesn't really carry much baggage, the word Celtic in itself. One of my worries, which I express in the book, is that it's become a very devalued word, a word empty of any real significance. It's a word that's come to mean alternative and feel good, and not orthodox, and not institutional.

Rachael Kohn: Yes. Well in your book you mention several Celtic revivals in history. Tell us, who initiated the first Celtic revival?

Marcus Tanner: There have been so many of them, but I think you can really take it right back to the immediate centuries after the conquest of England by the Angles and the Saxons, these Germanic tribes. Almost immediately you have this feeling of nostalgia that a better church existed before the one we have now. And I think that's really the leitmotiv of all the Celtic revivals, there's always this feeling that if we go back, we find something better and purer. We very soon have these Lives of Saints being written, which attributed extraordinary miracles to various Celtic saints, and they were used by people I think really for much the same reason that you have Celtic revivals now.

It's a sort of search for a better world that existed in the past and which we can't recover.

Rachael Kohn: Well it's certainly far more interesting if your saints have such miraculous powers attached to them.

Marcus Tanner: Yes, exactly.

Rachael Kohn: Where does King Arthur figure in the Celtic pantheon of saints? Was he part of another Celtic revival?

Marcus Tanner: Well absolutely, because of course, many people think that Oh, it was the Celts that kept alive the idea of Arthur, the Celtic champion who fought against the Anglo-Saxons, and who was then in later centuries, becomes a sort of mythical figure, and then you have all the legends surrounding him.

But in fact, when you look at the history, what's interesting is that it's the conquerors, it's the Anglo-Saxons, and it's the Normans who followed the Anglo-Saxons who become tremendously interested in Arthur, and I think it's because once the Celtic lands of Britain, the Welsh in particular, the Cornish, were vanquished and subdued, once they weren't threatening they became part of this almost folklore, harmless, something that could be borrowed and used by the new ruling culture.

In fact it was the Normans and the rulers of England who propagated the extraordinary stories about Arthur. And they're the ones who passed it around. And then it went back to places like Wales and was circulated there. So it took a very strange route, the way the legend of Arthur circulated round Britain, and then all the way through Europe. We know that it was being read in Cyprus in the 13th and 14th century, as well as in France and in England.

Rachael Kohn: Perhaps the most unexpected appropriators of the Celtic revival were the reformers, the 16th century Protestants. Now you wouldn't expect them to be too enamoured of Druids in robes and monks and so forth, which is the usual image of the Celts.

Marcus Tanner: Yes, well they weren't enamoured of the Druids and the monks, but they were very enamoured of the Celtic church, similar to the reasons I've just been talking about, the better world that existed before our corrupt world.

What they took out of the Celtic church was a non-hierarchical, non-Papal church. It was a very simple church, and what the reformers were interested in was simplicity of worship and simplicity of doctrine, clearing away what they considered the clutter of late mediaeval Catholic devotion. So they found plenty that interested them in the Celtic church, and especially of course the idea that there was no Pope.

Rachael Kohn: I guess no discussion of the Celts is complete without mention of Matthew Arnold, the 19th century Professor of Poetry at Oxford. What did he have to say about the Celts and why was he so persuasive?

Marcus Tanner: I think he's been immensely important in shaping our modern 20th and now 21st century understanding of the Celts, simply because his essays on the Celts put forward this idea that the Celts are dreamers, they are the artists of society.

But although his picture of Celts is very attractive, the other side of it is that of course these artists and these dreamers have no constructive part to play in our society. All the serious business of living is to be done by the boring Teutonic, Germanic peoples, in other words, the English. The Welsh and the Scots and the Irish are there to be muses and inspirers, playing lovely music and reading their beautiful poems. And it was very interesting that although Arnold professed to be such a great admirer of this artistic side to the Celtic nature, he strongly disapproved of people actually speaking Welsh, and he said the sooner this language disappears as an everyday language, the better.

And I think that double-edged attitude towards Celtic revivalism, which Arnold exemplified, survives today; people love the folkloric side of it all. But if you actually go into a shop in Wales today, and the shopkeepers don't talk to you in English, you'll find you can often be in a confrontational situation, and people say, 'Don't you speak English?' you know, that's the real world then.

Rachael Kohn: Indeed. Well was that what was happening in the 1960s, with the hippies and the folk song revival, was a kind of Celtic revival too?

Marcus Tanner: Well it was, but I think again, it's this Celticism into which anyone reads what they want to read, reacting against institutions and orthodoxy. But did it really boost the language? Did it really boost the self-esteem of these cultures? Some of the artists might have done but I would say as a phenomenon, not really.

Rachael Kohn: It seems to be a vehicle then for any political movement, I mean at that time the folksong movement was actually a vehicle for anti-war sentiments.

Marcus Tanner: Yes, and I think a kind of loose Celtic nationalism has attached itself to it, and of course the '60s was the decade when you get modern Celtic nationalism becoming an important force in Britain. The Welsh Nationalists and Scottish Nationalists, and even just more extant, you have little nationalist parties in Cornwall, in the Isle of Man, plus of course over the water you have the much stronger phenomenon of republic nationalists in Northern Ireland which has a very strong Celtic mythology attached to it. So that's another phenomenon that's worth investigating in itself.

So yes, the '60s did see a sort of revival of that kind of Celtic political nationalism. But again, I wonder whether it's really kept alive in a meaningful way the languages and cultures.

Rachael Kohn: Well then your travels in contemporary Celtic communities, what were the most fascinating examples of Celticism? Did you find authentic expressions of it?

Marcus Tanner: I suppose one of the most interesting trips was to Patagonia, because the way that the Welsh speaking Welsh emigrants have kept alive their language at the bottom of Argentina, has got to be the most interesting thing I saw in travelling around all those countries for about a year and a half, simply because it's a bizarre geography, climate and everything, and to see the kind of culture that I have seen in the valleys of central Wales lifted and transplanted thousands and thousands of miles away down there into a Spanish speaking environment. That's got to be the most interesting example of Celtic culture staying alive, just about.

Rachael Kohn: Absolutely. Well do any of the churches see Celtic spirituality as a kind of guarantee of their future?

Marcus Tanner: They're reaching for it, partly because of the disillusion that there is very present certainly in the Anglican church, and in the Catholic church I think in the English speaking countries at any rate. They have encouraged people to think that yes, if they look back to this older, simpler, Celtic style of worship they can recover a kind of self-confidence which they've lost.

That is quite a powerful movement in the churches, and I think it's a good movement, as long as people don't read too much into this Celtic church, of which we can only know relatively little, so to an extent it has to be, it's an act of the imagination recovering this church, or these values.

Rachael Kohn: Are you in search of Celtic spirituality for yourself, Marcus Tanner, Welshman?

Marcus Tanner: Well I have to say that when I went to I think it's a 5th or 6th century ruined monastic community off the south-west coast of Ireland, that was such a powerful - it's called Skellig Michael, it's a sort of rock that just juts out of the sea, and to think that people were worshipping there for eight centuries before the Norman invaders got to Ireland, and that they lived this life of such frugality, living off seabirds essentially, you cannot visit a place like that and not feel impressed by the strength of that tradition.

Rachael Kohn: And it wasn't necessarily a very soft and gentle one, was it?

Marcus Tanner: Not at all. What we do know about Celtic spirituality is that it was pretty tough, and when modern writers assume that the Celtic church was a bit more easygoing about sex, for example, which is one of the common themes you'll see in these books on what people say is Celtic spirituality, in fact what we know about the Celtic church is that it was extremely puritanical.

And I would say, and I did say in this book, that I thought the real heirs of the Celtic church were not necessarily the kind of feel-good spiritual gurus who call themselves Celtic, but those very hardline churches that you'll find in the Gaelic-speaking areas of Scotland and in Welsh-speaking Wales, Methodists and Calvinists, and I think they're probably truer to the spirit of their long, long, long ago ancestors than some of the people who call themselves Celtic.

Rachael Kohn: That might just spark an anti-Celtic revival.

Marcus Tanner: Well maybe if they went to some of those churches they wouldn't feel so keen to appropriate the word 'Celtic'. But yes, they're tough, they're tough places.

Rachael Kohn: The real Celts, not the faeries at the bottom of the garden!

Marcus Tanner's book is The Last of the Celts, and he was speaking to me from London. Check out our website for details.

THEME

Guests

Marcus Tanner
is the former assistant foreign editor of the Independent in the UK. He is the author of Croatia: A Nation Forged in War (1997) and Ireland's Holy Wars: The Struggle for a Nation's Soul 1500-2000 (2001). He is currently on the teaching staff at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in Belgrade.

Publications

Title: The Last of the Celts
Author : Marcus Tanner
Publisher: Yale University Press, 2004