No Celts

No Celts. There never was such a people. There was never a single Celtic country, territory, tribe or language. The name comes from the Greek word for “stranger”. Keltoy, Resurrected by the 17th-century Welsh antiquarian Edward Lloyd^e century He assumed that peoples who spoke languages ​​closely related to each other must have originally formed a single people. All else is fable and conjecture, and the belief among the Irish, Scots, Welsh, and Cornish that they are nothing but English.

And yet, despite decades of academic work showing otherwise, the Celts refuse to die. Their integration into the “non-English” population of the geographical entity known as the British Isles has poisoned the composition of the United Kingdom, one of the few states in Europe. Integrity is constantly unstable. Its union collapsed with the independence of the Irish Free State in 1922 [devenu la république d’Irlande en 1949]And so is its durability He asked again [par les velléités indépendantistes en Écosse et les nationalistes nord-irlandais]. [En septembre]Charles III’s tour of the three “nations” was somewhat desperate.

Theory of Double Invasion

Since the time of Llwyd, many believe that a massive invasion of “Celts” took place at some point in II.^e or i^R millennium BC, probably via the North Sea. Excavation took place on 19th^e century in Austria and Switzerland seemed to provide evidence of a single European civilization extending from Asia Minor in the east to Portugal in the west. The theory is that she completely occupied the British Isles. After the fall of the Roman Empire, V.^e century of our era.

Then the Celts were replaced by the “Anglo-Saxons”, other peoples from the European continent, by an invasion so destructive that within a few generations the inhabitants of England spoke an unspoken language. Long Celtic: Old English. This story of an archipelago with a dual cultural heritage created by two different invasions and subjugations has been popular for decades.

Filling the chronological gap

Over time, scholars have come to regard both invasions as imaginary. Since the 1950s, JRR Tolkien — Old Professor of English at Oxford — There is only an absurdity in the idea of ​​a Celtic people, “A Bag of Tricks” And one “Legendary Twilight”, Before making adorable hobbits out of them. Beginning in the 1990s, anthropologist Malcolm Chapman ruled that the Celts had been invented. “Filling a Chronological Gap”. The term has now caused confusion and it would be better if it were banned.

With the development of DNA-supported archaeology, in the 1990s, the debate seemed over. Despite occasional internal migrations, there is no evidence of invasions or population changes. The inhabitants of the British Isles mostly traveled from Iberia to the Atlantic coast at the end of the last ice age. Barry Cunliffe, archaeologist and historian of Celtic culture, these “Sea People” The various islands adopted versions of a language that spread across the island “Iberian Celtic” through trade, probably during the Bronze Age. According to him, these people were not Celts, but “Celtic speakers”, However, he later regretted not baptizing them instead “Atlantic speakers”.

This left open the question of whether Celtic languages ​​had spread throughout the British Isles. DNA shows that it’s possible these people spoke a version of the language they always spoke, where the eastern shores of the islands were settled mostly from northern Europe. In other words, a proto-Germanic language of the people occupying the edge of the North Sea.