Fifty Years of Celtic Philology

Abstract

I am going to talk this evening about the progress of studies in Celtic philology over the last fifty years. The period of half a century has this advantage, for myself, that it takes us back to 1926, and that since I began the study of Celtic under the Chadwicks in I931, at the age of 21, I can remember almost all of it at first hand. Thus, I can remember a time when the very word 'Celtic' was still regarded almost as a joke, at any rate in England; at least, the idea was not taken seriously. No doubt there were various causes for this, and among them the ancient, deep-seated, almost wholly unconscious English prejudice against 'Celts' and all their works. One result has been that Celtic has found almost no official place in the English universities, and that with a very few exceptions English scholars therefore have not taken any serious interest in Celtic studies. They were hardly encouraged to do so by the fact that there was obviously no career for them in the university world a situation which unfortunately still obtains to the present. Meanwhile, outside England and to quite a considerable degree inside it, there has been in the last ten years or so a very remarkable growth of interest in Celtic among the young, among university students and others in the non-Celtic countries, however uninterested their seniors may be. This began much earlier in the United States, where intelligent people are always much more ready than hidebound Europeans are to take peripheral subjects on their own merits if they are intrinsically interesting. Not to mention Europe, this more liberal attitude to Celtic studies has spread more recently to Canada, Australia, and even Russia, Finland, and Japan. This is something one warmly applauds of course, but it can bring with it certain inconveniences. For one thing, the great Ph.D. business outside the Celtic countries has woken up to the fact that here is an almost untilled field, a rich hunting ground for thesis subjects previously almost entirely unexploited. Since the supervisors and examiners may have little or no knowledge of Celtic, nor the candidates either, and they do not realize how unfitted for the task they are, the results may be rather disastrous, particularly if published. Celtic studies are peculiarly dangerous for the amateur, but there has recently been an unfortunate tendency for scholars, even good scholars, in other fields such as the history of Roman Britain, post-Roman archaeology and history, or in the study of English place-names, to venture rashly into the Celtic field where they are not qualified to do so. This is apparently on the principle that 'After all, no one knows anything about Celtic anyway, so why shouldn't I have a stab?'. Unluckily for them, some people do know something about Celtic. The result has too often been that where Celtic seems to impinge on their own subject, the writers just mentioned dream up and publish ideas which the Celticist knows to be absurd speculations, which nevertheless tend to be taken for fact when a sufficient number of other unqualified