This interesting volume stems from an interdisciplinary Oxford conference held in 2016. In a sense its theme is even more timely now, with increasing tensions within the union of the United Kingdom and renewed awareness of separateness and specifically Scottish and Welsh identities. The book brings together not just classical and Celtic influences but also evidence from history, archaeology, languages and literatures ancient, medieval and modern. It emphasises interaction and hybridity against ‘essentialist’ claims and myths of ‘splendid Celtic isolation’ of the kind popularised in Ernest Renan's discussion of the poetry of the Celtic races. In effect it challenges some of the excesses and improbable continuities over some 3,000 years of romantic Celticism as represented, for example, in R. O'Driscoll's substantial edited collection The Celtic Consciousness (1982).
The present book consists of an introductory overview and ten chronologically arranged chapters by different contributors, with a massive and very useful bibliography. A slightly meagre four-page index does not quite reflect the full range and interest of the material discussed. The volume takes us from Troy to Tolkien, considering Welsh, Irish and Scottish traditions and engagements with the matter of Rome and (sometimes) Greece. Long ago E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger in their collection of essays The Invention of Tradition (1983) reminded us that revived or invented ‘tradition’ often substitutes for effective continuity.
In that spirit the first chapter, A. Woolf's discussion of ‘British Ethnogenesis: a Late Antique Story’, is sceptical about claims of direct cultural continuities extending from pre-Roman Britain, that is, Britain south of the Firth of Forth, into the Middle Ages and beyond. Woolf uses the evidence of some 900 Latin loan-words in Welsh from antiquity to illustrate the extent to which medieval British culture and identity absorbed and depended on Roman as well as Celtic elements. He points out that the very word ‘Welsh’ (Old English wealas) and its linguistic ancestors were originally applied (mainly) to Roman-ruled or Roman-related peoples. For Woolf the key period for identity formation is late antiquity, from the fourth to the seventh centuries. But even then the notion of a single coherent identity for ‘Britain’ or even for ‘England’ is problematic. Woolf interestingly proposes two Britains, which may even be an underestimate. Opinion varies; the evidence, archaeological and linguistic rather than textual, is sparse and subject to interpretation; the issues and the geography are complex. All this can make the discussion sometimes hard to follow. Maps could perhaps have helped.
M.D.J. Bintley's chapter, ‘Romans, Britons, and the Construction of “Anglo-Saxon” Identity’, operates on more familiar ground. He draws evidence from Old English poems and other writings to suggest that, despite Romano-Celtic hybridity and what might actually have happened in Britain after Rome fell, there was a perception by the time of Bede of difference from the Roman era, which was exploited in the construction of ethnic and cultural identity. The recurring reference in the poems to Roman ruins as hauntingly alien, the ancient work of giants, signals that sense of difference.
Both H. Fulton's ‘Origins and Introductions: Troy and Rome in Medieval British and Irish Writing’ and P. Schwyzer's ‘The Politics of British Antiquity and the Descent from Troy in the Early Stuart Era’ remind us of the alleged links, unknown to Homer or Virgil but claimed by Nennius and Geoffrey of Monmouth, between defeated Troy and Celtic in Britain. These centre on the mythical figure of Brutus or Brut, grandson (or great-grandson) of the proto-Roman Trojan refugee Aeneas. Brut's alleged arrival in Britain bestowed ancient prestige on British Celts by linking them with the Romans and sanctioned imagining London as the new Troy (‘Troynovant’), built from the ashes of the ancient city, a conceit adopted by seventeenth-century writers such as Thomas Dekker and Thomas Heywood. There was also early interest in the Troy story in Ireland, not as an origin legend so much as a literary model of heroic, indeed epic conflict and adventure. The Irish appropriation of the matter of Troy in the early medieval Togail Troí and Don Tres Troi, the latter recently edited by Brent Miles for the Irish Texts Society, freely Hibernicises by applying Irish terms such as ard-ri (High King) to Trojan figures.
M. Pía Coira discusses ‘Greek Gaels, British Gaels: Classical Allusion in Early-Modern Scottish Gaelic Poetry’. This study pays particular attention to formal court panegyric with its praise of the aristocratic warrior and acknowledges the role of Ireland in seventeenth-century classically-influenced Scottish Gaelic writing, but there is perhaps more to be said. The ambiguity of the Latin Scotia, early applied to Ireland as well as to partly Irish-settled Scotland, led to acrimonious rival appropriations of writers in Latin, most notably the neo-Platonist theologian John Scottus Eriugena, not mentioned here, who was in fact Irish. Irish indignation surfaced again in the eighteenth century when Macpherson's largely bogus sub-Homeric ‘Ossian’ poems claimed a Scottish pedigree for Irish material ultimately derived from the Fionn cycle and the Ulster cycle. This chapter also notes, intriguingly, how Jacobite rhetoric in Gaelic political poetry could deploy Trojans as English and Greeks as Gaels.
M.-A. Constantine's chapter on ‘Celts and Romans on Tour: Visions of Early Britain in Eighteenth-Century Travel Literature’ draws attention to the classically informed archaeological imagination and druidical fantasies of atrocity and victimhood that enhanced or distorted perceptions of Roman and Celtic remains, particularly in Wales, with some excursions to the Antonine Wall.
In milder vein E. Hall's ‘British Imperialist and/or Avatar of Welshness? Caractacus Performances in the Long Nineteenth Century’ engagingly considers the textual and musical afterlife of Caractacus, hero of British resistance to the Romans, taken up by William Mason and Edward Elgar among others in an increasingly imperial-minded Britain. However, he comes across more convincingly as a Welsh hero than a model imperialist since he was usually seen as the victim of an imperial power. A different Caractacus legend, not mentioned, gave him a daughter Claudia and a Roman son-in-law, Pudens, over-ingeniously linking him with St Paul and the poet Martial and making him represent not Welsh but emerging British identity in the early days of Christianity. There is no mention here of C.M. Doughty's forgotten Edwardian epic The Dawn in Britain, which engages with this and fancifully brings together Caractacus and family with Joseph of Arimathea.
While Roman settler influences on indigenous peoples, including Celts, can be demonstrated with evidence from archaeology and philology, the influences may not all have been one way. A. Currie's ‘Celtic-Romans in Ireland’ considers the views of the Irish neurologist and polymath George Sigerson, a minor participant in the Irish Literary Revival. Sigerson argued for Celtic influence on Latin literature. As Currie points out, his evidence does not really hold up as he depends heavily on the supposed Irishness of the fifth-century Christian Latin poet Caelius Sedulius, whose Carmen Paschale he admired and translated, unaware that this Sedulius, of unknown race, had been confused by a previous writer with the undoubtedly Irish ninth-century poet Sedulius Scottus. But one cannot help feeling that Sigerson's instinct may have been sounder than his evidence. It was in a sense anticipated by the nineteenth-century French scholar René Pichon, influenced by Renan, who attributed the tenderness of Virgil to Celtic influence, and this was picked up by the Arnoldian scholar-critic H.W. Garrod in his contribution to G.S. Gordon's collection of published lectures, English Literature and the Classics (1912).
P. Burton's consideration of ‘Alternative Histories: Crypto-Celts and Crypto-Romans in the Legendarium of J.R.R. Tolkien’ seems to be moving further into fantasy. But Tolkien was also a philologist and literary scholar, familiar with Welsh, an authority on Old English language and literature and editor of the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with its sources and analogues in Celtic tradition. Burton's intention is not in the least to reduce The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings to late-flowering examples of romantic Celticism, and he argues for an implicit racial hybridity rather than separatist racial politics in Tolkien's fiction, but perhaps the interpretative strategy of positing and attempting to reveal ‘crypto-Celtic’ identity runs the risk of endorsing instead transcending artificial ‘essentialist’ constructions of Celtic identity.
In the last chapter R. Hingley works hard to derive from Hadrian's Wall a timely significance, what he calls ‘An Allegory for British Disunity’, in the era of a resurgent Scottish National Party. There are entertaining examples of ahistorical (and ungeographical) appropriations of the wall as the boundary between England and Scotland and a metaphorical site of future contests about identity that still continue.
The riches disclosed here in connection with the Celtic-classical interface should stimulate further investigation. Welsh and Romano-Christian identity in the poetry of David Jones would repay attention. So would the Celtic afterlife of Herodotus: his rather vague references to Scythians and Celts were fused with Celtic tradition in the Irish Lebor Gabala and elsewhere to provide a Scytho-Celtic origin-legend that bypassed the Romans altogether.
Writing in Latin could reveal more about the interplay of the classical and the Celtic in identity formation. Schwyzer's chapter refers to the sixteenth-century Welshman Humphrey Llwyd's Latin treatise on the antiquities and geography of Britain, drawing on both Celtic and classical sources. This is a late example of a common practice since Latin came to the Celtic realms with Christianity and long remained the international language of learning. In consequence the classics and classically educated writers from St Augustine of Hippo to Isidore of Seville were appropriated by preachers and teachers, and British identities were proclaimed and argued over in Latin. The Irishman Donatus of Fiesole praised his country in Latin elegiacs in the ninth century, mentioning the absence of snakes, which had been attested in the third century by the geographical writer Gaius Iulius Solinus. There are references in this book to the Welsh-born Giraldus Cambrensis, who drew on the classics in order to be rude about Ireland in twelfth-century Latin, but better-informed rejoinders in the same language, including John Lynch of Galway's Cambrensis Eversus (1662), still need to be more fully explored.
The classical-Celtic interface also relates to the still-developing history of geography. There were rather vague references by the early Greek geographers and travel-writers to cannabalistic Celts and remote Atlantic islands known as Albion and Ierne. Some of this material had an underexplored afterlife in the work of eccentrically learned patriotic antiquarians such as Roderic O'Flaherty, author of Ogygia, seu Rerum Hibernicarum Chronologia (1685). The title invoked remote classical antiquity, with some help from Plutarch, as a way of conferring ancient, classical, dignity on Ireland. But such matters await another book as a companion to this one.
