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Who Were the Celts? (And where are they now?)

© Laura Harrison McBride

Who were the Celts? These days, most people think of a bunch of red-haired folks whose ancestors came from Ireland. The Celts, most people think, are those ancient, pagan hordes whose genes ended up in New York cops, Fortune 500 board chairmen, Sister Mary 'Terror' who rapped your knuckles in grade school, and a platoon of highly regarded pop bands singing everything from the traditional tunes first compiled in the 18th century in Ireland (The Chieftains) to young siblings dressed all in black singing Celtic Rock (The Corrs).

These are the modern stereotypes familiar to most North Americans, and no wonder. The Celts were, in fact, widely dispersed throughout the western world and, if archaeologists are correct, wandered all the way from the slopes of the Himalayas to North America, and long before the Potato Famine at that. The Irish monk, St. Brendan, is said to have sailed to Newfoundland in a leather boat in the mid-sixth century. But some believe there are Bronze Age Celtic artifacts in New Hampshire: the Bronze Age lasted from approximately 2,700 to 700 BCE, depending on locale. (Find more information on this controversial issue at http://www.wolflodge.org/visibiliti/meti...

When antiquity’s famous peripatetic author, Herodotus, wrote about the Keltoi in about 450 BCE, he described a race of tall, well-muscled, long-boned and light-haired people. When Julius Caesar later wrote about the Gallic Wars (58-52 BCE), he described the ferocity of the large and well-muscled Celtic combatants. Note that in Rome, the terms Gaul and Gallic were synonymous with Celt or Keltoi. (The statue called “The Dying Gaul,” sculpted contemporaneously from life, is another hint that this was so. The statue can currently be seen at The Capitoline in Rome, or online at http://sights.seindal.dk/sight/766_Juliu...

In 387 B.C., the Celts sacked Rome, scaring the tunics off the leather-shielded Romans by hurling themselves at the Romans clad only in blue paint and weapons, with their light hair molded into fearsome spikes by the application of lime and grease. (Iron Age sculpting gel!) The Celts rarely took prisoners, preferring to behead those they had vanquished. They are said by many sources to have hung the heads above the doors to their dwellings, like so many hunting trophies.

That the Celts were bellicose is evident in these early texts, but the extent of their other abilities—notably in metalworking, wagon-making and, later, horsemanship—has been revealed during the past hundred years or so through excavations of their villages across central Europe and into the British Isles.

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