The Coming of the Celts, AD 1860: Celtic Nationalism in Ireland and Wales , by Caoimh�n De Barra (review)

Abstract

The Coming of the Celts, AD 1860: Celtic Nationalism in Ireland and Wales, Caoimhín De Barra (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), 372 pages. Caoimhín De Barra’s The Coming of the Celts is a well-considered examination of the often-ambivalent relationship between the respective promoters of Welsh and Irish language, literature and culture in the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. De Barra, a member of the History Faculty at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, sees the language movements in Wales and Ireland both as part of the general development of romantic bourgeois nationalism that flourished among smaller, or divided, nationalities in nineteenth-century Europe and also as an often-failed attempt to discover political and cultural commonalities between the two countries, and the other Celtic nations, commonalities that sometimes simply didn’t exist. There were two significant fault lines separating the Welsh and Irish language movements. The first was mutual unintelligibility between speakers of the two major divisions among the six modern Celtic languages, the Goidelic languages (Irish and Scottish Gaelic, descended from a high Medieval form of Irish – two languages that are mutually understandable) and the Brittonic languages (Welsh and Breton, descended from a Celtic language spoken in Wales and West Britain in late antiquity – languages that are unintelligible both to speakers of the Goidelic languages and to speakers of the two major Brittonic tongues). Two other Celtic languages, Cornish (a Brittonic language) and Manx (a Goidelic language), died out, primarily in the eighteenth century (with remnants of Manx surviving until a few generations ago), but these languages recently have been revived as sometimes precocious hobby-languages by scholars and enthusiasts, through the examination of historic texts. While older ‘Irish’ and ‘Welsh’ thus are the primary historic progenitors of their respective modern language groups, these two languages developed mostly in isolation from one another and thus proved poor vehicles for a unified ‘Celtic’ consciousness and collective cultural/political programmes. Such programmes preoccupied a relatively small number of Pan-Celtic supporters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but their goals usually were hazy and unrealisable – the product of collective undefined goodwill as much as anything. Also, five of the six modern Celtic nations had Studies • volume 108 • number 431 360 Autumn 2019: Book Reviews Studies_layout_AUTUMN-2019.indd 128 21/08/2019 09:14 English as a well-established first language by the period in question, which tended to isolate the Bretons, who often were among the more enthusiastic of the Pan-Celts. Finally, while the later Gaelic League in Ireland had a political and cultural programme that was decidedly Modernist and forwardlooking , attempting to update the Irish language in contemporary settings, the Scottish, Welsh and Breton Pan-Celts too often (to the Irish, at least) seemed preoccupied with a ‘Golden’ past and too concerned with externals like Druidical ceremonies and national costumes. A second point of division, one repeatedly alluded to by De Barra but never considered in sufficient depth, was religious. Welsh speakers during the time in question were largely evangelical Calvinistic Methodist dissenters, extremely suspicious of Roman Catholicism, while members of the Irish language movement were mostly (at least cultural) Catholics. This religious division led to suspicion and a certain cultural revulsion between the two groups, more often coming from the Welsh than the Irish side of things, which sometimes proved a difficulty in efforts at mutual programmatic development. Both ‘primordial’ languages, however, survived periods of significant religious change in the twentieth century, with the Welsh national conversion from Protestant evangelicalism to the increasingly secular socialism of the Labour Party; and the general Irish detachment from Catholicism after the clerical sexual-abuse crisis of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The development of the nationalist impulse in each of the four major Celtic nations during the last half of the nineteenthcentury went hand-in-hand with a movement toward pan-Celtic appreciation, if not unity, perhaps inspired by the example of Italian and German unification. This impulse, while recurring and popular on the surface, ultimately was a failure. While there might have been distant linguistic connections between the two primary Celtic-language groups somewhere on the continent...