Tuesday 30 July 2013

Brooching the subject...(Or, The Celts, La Tene and mythology)

The term 'Celts' is a much used phrase. It neatly sums up a race that we are very familiar with from mythology. Unfortunately, there is little history to follow the myth. Who were the 'Celts'? Well, nobody unfortunately. It's a catch-all phrase to group together many disparate and unique ethnicities and tribes, but it loosely covers the inhabitants of pre-Roman Britain, and especially Ireland. Even though the people in Ireland had nothing at all to do with the people in Pre-Roman Britain...

So why 'Celts'? Is this a Roman thing? Not really, the Romans talked about the 'Britons' but they meant the tribes inhabiting the South of modern England, not Ireland, Scotland or Wales so much. Their catch-all term was 'barbarian' which applied to anyone who didn't speak Latin. The phrase was actually Greek in origin, a 'barbarian' was someone who didn't speak Greek (i.e. his language was gibberish to Greek ears and sounded like 'bar bar bar'.) Ironically, Greeks once applied the term to the native inhabitants of Italy, including the Romans themselves.

So why 'Celts'? Well, here is why:


In the 3rd Century BC, a powerful cultural force swept through the peoples of Northern Europe. It seems to have had as its epicentre a small but rich settlement on the banks of a Swiss lake. It is known to have traded with the Mediterranean world. It has come to be called 'La Tene'. La Tene is an elusive concept, but at its heart it's an artistic movement that influenced the development of even the most basic items, like this lovely bronze brooch from around the 2nd Century BC found in Wiltshire. Its flowing lines, loops and zoomorphic styles have come to define what we think of as 'Celtic', but we have assigned it a race of its own, and a fairly strict geographic location. We should not. La Tene was more like the hippy revolution of the sixties than a group of people. And who knows what people in 2,000 years time will make of that...

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