The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #45881   Message #681417
Posted By: IanC
02-Apr-02 - 08:14 AM
Thread Name: Twa Corbies - transl. into Engl, please
Subject: RE: Twa Corbies - transl. into Engl, please
Quite important, but usually forgotten, is the fact that the "Germanic" tribes were, in fact, celtic tribes along with all the others to be found on the European mainland. The main difference was that they had not been conquered by the Roman empire. There was never any homogeneity of culture or religion, although neighbouring tribes were more similar in this way than those at some distance from each other.

Neither is there any justification for referring to some people in the British Isles (named, by the way, after the various tribal groupings living there before the coming of the "Anglo-Saxons") as "celts" or "celtic". Either they all are, or none of them are.

Scholars around 1800 were busy trying to prove that Scotland was different to England because it was a "Scandinavian" nation. Even as late as the second half of the C19th, Child (for example) seemed inclined to subscribe to this view. Now it seems to be the common view that "The English" are somehow different from the other "ethnic groupings" because of some historially observable fact. This is not so.

If you're looking for some kind of pure-blood "Celt", then your best bet would probably be the people of the Cambridgeshire fens in East Anglia who, until the C19th and often into the C20th, were highly interbred and often thought to be descendants of Boudicca's Iceni. They are short (the men are often less than 5ft tall), dark haired and quite shy people - I'm related to some of them. They also made up a large part of Cromwell's "New Model Army".

If you're looking for a different "Celtic" culture, then you're probably too late by about 1500 years (unless the surviving picts of C13th or C14th are what you're after). The whole thing is given the lie by the well commented and observable fact that English traditional music (for example) is nearer to both Irish and Scots cultures than they are to each other.

The genetic survey quoted by Shields Folk above is just objective evidence of what serious scholars already knew, that England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, are populated by people of seriously mixed race and culture.

Rant over (for the moment) :-)
Ian