The Coming of the Celts, AD 1860: Celtic Nationalism in Ireland and Wales by Caoimhín De Barra

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Coming of the Celts, AD 1860: Celtic Nationalism in Ireland and Wales by Caoimhín De Barra David Lloyd The Coming of the Celts, AD 1860: Celtic Nationalism in Ireland and Wales, by Caoimhín De Barra, pp. 360. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. $45. In the Second Branch of the medieval Welsh prose masterpiece, The Four Branches of The Mabinogi, Bendigeidfran, king of Britain, sits with his retinue on the rock of Harlech in north Wales, looking across the Irish Sea. In the "once-upon-a-time" world of this branch of The Mabinogi, Welsh-speaking Britons rule the entire "Island of the Mighty." They sight thirteen ships approaching, bearing Matholwch, king of Ireland, journeying to the Island of the Mighty in peace. The Irish explain to Bendigeidfran that Matholwch "came to ask for Branwen [Bendigeidfran's sister]. . . . And if it pleases you, he wishes to bind the Island of the Mighty and Ireland together, so they would be stronger" (This is the account given in John Bollard's The Mabinogi: Legend and Landscape of Wales, 2006). Matholwch and Bendigeidfran converse—as do their retinues—without a mention of a language or cultural barrier. The marriage goes forward, with the union of the Irish and the Welsh-speaking Britons made manifest in Gwern, Matholwch and Branwen's son. But suspicion, jealousy, and both real and imagined grievances intervene, climaxing in the death of Gwern and cataclysmic war in Ireland. Written in the medieval period but drawing from more ancient sources, this branch of The Mabinogi offers a microcosm of the complex historic relationship between the Irish and the Welsh: close neighbors speaking cognate languages, familiar rivals simultaneously separated and connected by a narrow strip of water, frequent visitors to and combatants on each other's lands, joined and sundered by their distinct cultures and (eventual) national yearnings. In the modern era, their differences were accentuated by separate religious and socio-economic development and by the decline of the Irish language in comparison with Welsh. The ancient and ongoing history of these interactions is the subject of Caoimhín De Barra's The Coming of the Celts, AD 1860: Celtic Nationalism in Ireland [End Page 156] and Wales. De Barra demonstrates that although Ireland and Wales never came close to enacting a Pan-Celtic union such as that undertaken by Matholwch and Bendigeidfran, they nevertheless significantly affected each other's national and cultural development through to the present. With particular attention to the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, De Barra documents for readers "a sustained flow of commentary and ideas between Ireland and Wales that significantly shaped both countries' modern development." Until recently, scholars had settled on an origin story for populations of the British Isles speaking Celtic languages—the notion that, culturally and genetically, the British Celts were descendants of Celts who had once dominated central Europe. Without question, the Irish and Welsh languages are related, perhaps derived from a common insular Celtic language that divided into two branches: Goidelic (Irish, Manx, and Scots Gaelic) and Brythonic (Welsh, Cornish, and Breton). One need only compare the Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge with the Welsh Four Branches of The Mabinogi to identify similarities in material culture and social organization (such as the practice of sending children to "foster parents" for their upbringing and to strengthen social and political relationships). But De Barra presents recent research that undermines the origin story sketched out above, positing instead that the idea of the "Celt" was created and promulgated in the nineteenth century, based on studies of Celtic languages by the seventeenth-century linguists Paul Yves Pezron (1609–1706) and Edward Lhuyd (1660–1709). Such recent genetic studies as "The Fine-Scale Structure of the British Population" (2015) do not establish a shared gene pool among Celts of Ireland and Britain. There is little evidence of an invasion of Britain by European Celts but "considerable continuity between Bronze Age Britain and Ireland and the Iron Age that followed." Indeed, rather than being a longstanding cultural reality, according to De Barra (and scholars De Barra cites, such as Simon James), the...