The Last of the Celts

Rating:
Summary: Celtic Traces
Review: "There is something sad and troubling about the death of a language," because language represents a particular way of regarding the world, and when the language goes, that way of looking at the world goes, too. If this is true, then the book containing this sentiment, _The Last of the Celts_ (Yale University Press) by Marcus Tanner is a very sad book indeed. Tanner has included the stories of the Celts of different regions; of course, the people still remain, but since the languages involved are being lost, an important part of being Celtic is being lost as well. Examined in fascinating detail, with historical research and with interviews of relict speakers, are the Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Cornish, and Breton tongues. The author's father spoke fluent Welsh to his contemporary family, but did not teach it to his children, and Tanner got interested in learning some of the language. He researched about why it had faded, and his interests grew to take in all the non-English speakers of Britain and Ireland and the non-French speakers of Northern France. In many ways, the decline of the languages and genuine Celtic culture is ironic, since Celtic is big. Celtic religion is supposed to be a throwback to a time when people were in tune with nature, valued women, and were not priggish. You can buy Celtic crosses and prayer plaques. You can go to shows like Riverdance or its spin-offs, and you can hear what the world considers Celtic music (pipe, fiddle, harp) on public radio. These are all just the latest style of Celtic revival, for there have been revivals for different reasons for centuries. People like the New Age-y aspects of Celtic culture, but this is a mere marketing device; real Celtic societies and their languages are doomed. Some are gone forever already, and some are in the process, as "the Celtic sea, having retreated into disconnected pools, reduces to puddles."

All the Hebrides have lost their isolation. One islander notes another drain on Gaelic: "What TV did was to bring a new member into the living room who spoke only English." Television has split families, with one generation constantly using Gaelic and the succeeding generation using English. An Irish-speaker near Galway says, "The language of the playground is no longer Irish." For all the resilience of pipe and fiddle music in the pubs, the younger set sings along to Madonna at karaoke. Religion plays a role in almost all the stories here, sometimes promoting and sometimes restricting native languages. In Northern Ireland, where everything seems to have a confrontational religious side, the Protestants have little interest in their Celtic heritage because the Gaelic language is central to Catholic republican culture. The slow death of the Cornish language was not regarded much until the Celtic revival of the 1890's. The language was revived well over a century after the last speaker had died, and because there was so little knowledge of what the original language was like. when experts came up with competing descriptions of sound, vocabulary, and grammar, there was only confusion and misspent efforts at cultural revival. The Bretons were doing well at the beginning of the last century, but hitched their feelings of separation from France to Nazism, allowing the French to suppress almost all Breton cultural activity after the war. Another odd history is of the Welsh settlers to Argentina in 1865. Their descendants have continued their traditions in the Welsh-looking Patagonian village of Gaiman, where they "do good business serving out Welshness to visiting coach parties of Argentine and foreign tourists."

They are doing better than most of the quietly expiring Celtic cultures profiled here. The current romanticization and popularization of Celtic religion, music, and ecological devotion will not help to stop the inevitable decline of these once-vital languages and societies. Tanner has no remedy, for there is none. He has, instead, produced a book to document the loss which has occurred for centuries but is faster now. It is a lively, sympathetic and poignant tour of disappearing worlds.


Rating:
Summary: not hopeless.
Review: I was very pleased to see this book look at the subject in a realisic light for a change rather than the government propaganda assuring all Celts that their cultures are safe.

I do disagree with Tanner and the first reviewer though: things can be turned around but politicians stand in the way of many initiatives as their re-election hopes destroy their integrity.

Matt, Welsh and Scottish guy, knows the situation far to well.

Rating:
Summary: A gloomy survey of the ebb of the Celtic tide
Review: Marcus Tanner offers an extended eulogy, stripped of sentimentality, for the languages of those peoples predating the Anglo-Saxons in Britain. The sheer timespan of that last clause, from our 21st century perspective, shows how durable has been the legacy of a language-group that we don't even know the true name for-only that many of us descend from varied ethnicities who shared related systems of communication, dating back thousands of years. Even the name Celt is a Greek invention. Defining the Celtic, then, depends upon its clash with the foreigner; so much that Cornwall and Wales owe their names to what the Saxons called the `Other', those outside the common-wealth, those un-familiar, those pushed back to, as a Cornish author lamented over two hundred years ago, `about the cliff and the sea'.

Notice that Tanner, in looking for the remnants of those who speak or revive Celtic languages, differentiates speech from the material culture of the six nations he explores. He visits the Scots Isles, Conamara, West Belfast, the Isle of Man, North and South Wales, Brittany, and finally the outlying colonies in Canada's Maritimes and Argentina's Patagonia. While he finds music, say in Cape Breton, vibrant, there Scots Gaelic, despite the murmur of tourist brochures, will be far less heard-spoken by at most 500 people. Brittany and Galway certainly cater to cultural tourism, and hawk their Keltic Krafts diligently, but in these more ancient redoubts, too, Tanner finds growing indifference to the language's perpetuation. Over and over, he notes, outsiders-those who have taken as adults to learning Celtic languages-find themselves resented, marginalised, or dismissed by natives embarrassed to speak to strangers, ashamed of their own lack of fluency, or determined to let their language die a quiet death in their homes rather than in public.

The conclusions he raises will depress those for whom cultural revivals portend linguistic renaissance. The strongest part of the book, in fact, is its introduction. Tanner notes how, since the entry of clerical control from Rome in early mediaeval times, revivals have occurred! Monks eager to draw a lineage rooted in native genealogies manufactured branches for those grafting papal foliage onto arguably indigenous Catholic varietals.

Anglo-Saxon and Norman invaders invented Celtic origins for their dynasties and legends; Reformers and Romanticists followed after Catholicism had succumbed to first Protestants and then the cult of nature-these in turn sought antiquarian justification for their authority. Finally, the New Age/Wicca/ecological movements have manufactured a spuriously feminist, magickal, and pacifist kingdom in which an alienated urban, affluent, Western European consumer can recapture a realm of vegan, polysexual, pagan lifestyles.

But we already know what to expect. His preface concludes rueing the label given the Celts by so many for so long: dreamers denied political victory, quaint and charming, content to live as Tolkienesque `eternal elves of the West'. He does not mention that even the elves left at the end of the 3rd age.

And it seems that the Celts too are departing, and their ancient tongues, upon which the linguist JRR Tolkien in part had invented his own array of fictional but linguistically correct tongues, will be as removed from our future reality as those of Middle-Earth's. People may learn Breton as they do Elvish or Esperanto, but as a community language, Tanner predicts, it will be as dead as Manx or the three debated re-versions of Cornish.
He ends his forward with a poignant panorama. The Celtic sea ebbs, first into pools, now into puddles. Where can we immerse when these last splashes dessicate and evaporate?

For, as Tanner's scholarship (if too often rather undigested; names-dates-clerical minutiae diminishes the pace of much of this book--down one star) demonstrates, no continuous territory remains over which a Celtic language is spoken. We see this in the broken Gaeltachtaí, the loss of Welsh and Scots regional cohesion, the disappearance of any Breton-speaking heartland, and the nearly extinct numbers of speakers of Welsh in Patagonia and Gaelic in Canada. On the other hand, many whom Tanner interviews simply shrug that this demonstrates a Darwinian natural selection. The fittest languages remain, English, French, or Spanish in these cases. Why, after all, keep a minority language as a curiousity when no monoglots still exist in any Celtic tongue? What's the value, economically, educationally, emotionally, of holding on to an unwieldy, unremunerative, and unattractive heirloom?

(P.S. For guardedly more optimistic views on the future of Irish, see James McCloskey's Voices Silenced and Ciaran MacMurcaidh's Who Needs Irish? An earlier, more optimistic survey joining the Celtic fringe language revivals to 60s/70s activism was taken by Peter Berresford Ellis, The Celtic Revolution, from the Welsh publishers Y Lolfa. See also their The Welsh Extremist, by Ned Thomas.)

(Excerpted from "Eternal elves of the West" via the on-line journal from Belfast, The Blanket.)