The Celts - an introduction

When one hears the word "Celts", most people think of Ireland. But actually the first Celtic period is called "Hallstatt period" - and Hallstatt is a place in my homecountry, Austria. Before there were Celts in Ireland, there were Celts all over Europe. It's just that long after there were Celts in all of Europe, there were Celts in Ireland. Because everywhere else the Romans had conquered them.

My boss in the Celtic Village on the Kulm (a mountain close to my house) often said during guided tours: "The Celts are called Celts because of the cold that always prevails up here." Which was a joke (that works better in German for the resemblance of the words Kelte and Kälte), of course, but every now and then some visitors nodded with a serious face to it.

And actually the Celts were not called Celts at all - at least they didn't call themselves that too often, as far as we know. The Greeks gave (part of) them the name keltoi. Caesar, on the other hand, called a large part of them Gauls (see his propaganda work De bello gallico).

And, strictly speaking, "the Celts" did not exist at all. They were not a state, not a nation, not even a people. There is no great DNA commonality that would let the people of that era be called a "race" or group; no king, emperor or other ruler they all recognized, no proof of citizenship. And yet we - myself included - call them "the Celts."

It can be described more as a culture that was different from the Roman one. Comparable to our "Western culture" in contrast to Islam, for example. We in the West watch the same TV series, wear the same fashion labels, eat the same fast food, whether in Vienna, Paris, New York or Los Angeles, while India has its Bollywood, the Japanese quite different rules of life, the Middle East its burka. Today, of course, with globalization, individual cultures are adapting more and more to one another - just as, shortly before our era, there were probably no longer so clear boundaries between Celts, Romans and Germanic peoples in terms of their everyday lives. After all, the Celts were, among other things, great traders and in many Celtic graves everyday objects are clearly of Greek or Etruscan origin. And they also married among each other and fathered Roman-Celtic-Germanic descendants (to what extent this was always entirely voluntary can be questioned).

What united this Celtic culture?

First of all a common language. Whether all the tribes living north of the Alps at that time really spoke the same language or whether it is more comparable to the fact that today English is something like a "world language", we do not know. Because we don't have any written records of the Celts themselves (and certainly no tape recordings), since they didn't write down anything about their culture (also something that unites all these tribes). And I write deliberately, "about their culture", because they could write, they were not illiterate (even if the Greeks make them out to be barbarians - the word barbarian coming from barbare, which onomatopoeically represents that these people speak a language you don't understand). They wrote letters of commerce and contracts, but in Greek or Latin.

Furthermore, they were united by a preference for a certain fashion, which was very different from that of the Romans and Greeks. In contrast to the Roman and Greek skirt wearers, they dressed in pants, so-called braccae (the English word breeches comes from it) and loved plaid fabrics. (more about fashion in a later post, also about Celtic words in today's languages).

And also their spirituality united them and distinguished them from the Romans and Greeks. Not only did they have an Olympus full of gods like the Greeks, for them everything was "divine". Every tree, every well ... They did not yet distinguish between material and immaterial world, it seems, but stood firmly with both feet in both realms. And they had, in addition to this world, the Otherworld, to which one went when one died here. Died here, born there, died there, born here. Of course, this made them not afraid of death, it made them fearless warriors, who would jump into a battle even naked.

And what also distinguished them from the Romans was their physical size. Caesar describes them as being of great stature, the women as well as the men. This may be relative, of course, because the Romans were rather short, but we know from grave finds of Celts who were well over six feet.

How do we know anything at all about the Celts, if they didn't write anything down? Well, we don't know much, it must be said. Compared to other peoples, like the Romans for example, our knowledge about the Celts is still small (which makes it exciting and easy for an author to write about them - not like my novel about the end of the First World War, where already a date error of one day could have led to heavy criticism).

Written information about them can only be found in reports of the Romans and Greeks. Which is to be taken with caution in both cases. Caesar - our main Roman source - wrote his reports about the Gauls not for pleasure, but to get the Senate to finance his campaigns. I wonder if everything was truthful? (nowadays, of course, no politician would describe another state as dangerous, in need to be liberated or under suspicion of terrorism, just to be able to conquer the petroleum resources there... Or?). With the Greeks who were rather merchants who wrote about those suppliers beyond the Alps, it was possibly more an advertising catalog (like "buy clothes sewn by poor African women, who finance the life of their families in their mud huts with it").

In recent years, however, our knowledge has been increasing enormously due to excavations. Whereby also they are to be regarded cautiously in my opinion. Not the excavations, but the conclusions from them. For example: from wooden houses at best the stumps of the upright beams remain in the ground and from this then learned people deduce how these houses looked. A floor plan is not such a problem, but everything above ground level? That depends then also very much on the common doctrine and the conceptions of the scholars. There is no original pictorial material that would show us whether / how many / how large windows such houses had, whether the roof was steep or flat, the walls painted / plastered / rough. One then uses comparative material of today's living indigenous peoples, but maybe the Celts were completely different to a tribe living in the Brazilian jungle or the Mongolian steppe? Also the Romans had their underfloor heating (the hypocaust), which nobody had after them for a long time and for people of the Middle Ages it was probably beyond their imagination.

Experimental archaeology today tries to approach ancient times and to try out what might have worked and how, based on the findings that one has. Nevertheless, one must not forget that even if these archaeologists live "like Celts" for weeks, they are people of today, with today's knowledge and today's world view. And interpret their finds accordingly. We simply can't transform ourselves into a Celt (we usually don't even manage to transform ourselves into a better version of ourselves). And often "knowledge" is then reinterpreted after a few years. Suddenly the druid found was a woman after all, which was simply sociopolitically unthinkable at the time of the excavation. Or one discovers by trial and error that this or that excavation piece could only have worked if a certain part was mounted at the other end after all.

I always imagine that in many centuries someone will excavate a cemetery of the present time. In our country, people are buried without shoes (because leather rots so badly). If one then found many such graves, one will say, the Austrians knew no footwear, they walked barefooted, so it must have been warm the whole year or they were underdevelopped or it was a religious thing, so that they were in good contact with the energies of the earth. Cardiac pacemakers lying somewhere in the chest of a skeleton might be interpreted as cult objects (because by then medicine will have quite different solutions for heart failure).

But after all, we have plastic. It will give a lot of information about us for a very long time (in an audition monologue I loved in my acting days, it said, "God gave us plastic so that we would know what eternity is."). The Celts knew only natural materials, many of which (fortunately, says the earth) rot - and so will always shroud themselves in mystery for us ...