In The Celtic Revolution, Simon Young tries to place the Celts not on the fringes of European history, but at its centre. Instead of the traditional picture of a romantic culture in picturesque decline, he offers a portrait of a group of societies that “matter as the Greeks or Romans, the Etruscans or Carthaginians matter”.
Young argues that three events – the Celtic invasions of Italy in the 4th century BC; that of Greece in the 3rd; and the establishment of the Celtic-influenced state of Galatia in Asia Minor – contributed to the conditions necessary for the establishment of the Roman Empire that would eventually subsume most of the Celtic world. A lot of Young’s material is quasi-legendary, a fact that he scrupulously points out. Since no other material is available, however, the narrative always returns to these historically dubious tales.
From Rome, Young jumps ahead 600 years or so to chart the impact of the unique Irish monastic tradition on Christianity in Britain, France and even Italy, and the tradition of long voyages by monks, including those who settled in Iceland and the famous St Brendan. He offers little analysis, and his conclusion, which follows an account of the defeat of Irish influence at the Synod of Whitby, is a little optimistic about the long-term impact of these traditions.
Young’s last section deals with Arthurian literature, which evolved in the 12th century from Welsh stories about a Messiah-like national hero to a pan-European pop-culture phenomenon. He argues that this was unique in secular European literature. King Arthur and his knights provided lay audiences with an alternative to the Church’s stories of saints and biblical heroes. According to Young, it was possible that these stories, which might have contained elements left over from pagan legends, were viewed in the Celtic world not as competition to the Church’s teachings but as entertaining folk tales.
What, then, do these three historical episodes have to do with one another? Young doesn’t really try to answer this question. The obvious response, however, is “not very much”. Separated by centuries and occurring in very different cultural contexts, the only thing that connects them is that the people involved spoke related languages – and even that link is pretty tenuous in the case of the widespread European adoption of the Arthurian stories.
To be fair, Young isn’t trying to create a single grand narrative. He’s just pointing out a number of ways in which Celtic cultures have influenced the wider world. Although he insists that the disputed label of ‘Celtic’ is valid across all these periods, his own book does very little to suggest any cultural continuity. This is a good point as far as it goes, but it leaves us with a book which is basically just a lively, well-written collection of popular history articles rather than anything more.
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