John Francis Campbell (1821–1885)

Abstract

Each Celtic nation (Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall and Mannin) has had its catalyst: a man who took it upon himself to go among his own people to record what they knew of themselves and their forebears, and then to set about organising what he had collected with all the scholarship he could muster. The Scots humanist, George Buchanan, is credited with having been the first to realise that all Celtic languages had a common origin. By his collection of placenames from all the Celtic-speaking territories, from Ireland to the Black Sea, he set Celtic scholarship on the right track. His work was published in Edinburgh in 1582 and it was a good beginning. But the real founder of modern Celtic scholarship was Edward Llhuyd, who travelled through all the countries of the 'Celtic fringe' and collected material, often in the nick of time, which he published in Oxford in 1707. Because of his interest he was arguably the main link between some of the last traditional custodians of mediaeval Celtic learning and lore and the scholars who followed him. The Abbe Paul-Yves Pezron was rather less scientific in his approach to Celtic matters, but he did lay the foundation of the great eighteenth-century Celtic vogue. He has been called the 'inventor of the modern Celts, and thus of Celticism. His European outlook did much to break down the feeling of isolation among the Celtic peoples. The German philosopher Leibnitz followed on Pezron's researches to place Celtic within the framework of European languages. His work was to attract the attention of Johann Kaspar Zeuss, who turned from German history to Celtic philological studies. His great book Grammatica Celtica (1853) started off a line of distinguished European scholars who specialised in Celtic philology extending to the present day. But the study of Celtic languages left the yolk of the Celtic egg largely untouched, and it was left to the Scot James Macpherson to hint that behind a language was another world which reflected the history of the very people who had preserved their unique identity in their traditions. Macpherson's work, supposedly based on 'Ossianic' compositions, set Europe ablaze with romanticism, an unwitting achievement which affected the literary output of Goethe, Vincenzo Monti, Lord Byron, Lamartine, and Chateaubriand. Even Napoleon was described by Anatole France as 'un reveur enivr6 d'Ossian'; a frequent criticism of Napoleon's speeches was that 'I1l ossianait'. All this interest created by Macpherson still did little to draw attention to the commonalty of deltic folk, though in each of the Celtic countries there were men who were collecting songs, lore and traditions almost in a vacuum. What they collected had still to be found a niche in the framework of the folklore of the common peoples of the world.