I can help you out with the Breton. I’ll pm you.
I think the starting point for Orkney lore is Ernest W. Marwick’s book, now back in print and available through Amazon. There’s very little Celtic about the Orkneys except the name (orc is cognate with pork; my favorite theory is that it means “young that come in litters,” and that the Orkneys are the little of kittens that go with Caithness, based on the cat-word).
UCLA for both, in the Folklore program, now no longer extant. Teaching opportunities have been limited. Most departments look askance at a weird Ph.D., especially when there are a gazillion underemployed English Ph.D.s or Anthropology Ph.D.s to work in English or Anthropology departments. Colleagues with the Ph.D. in Celtic Lang & Lit from Harvard report the same issue. Nevertheless I’ve had chances to teach Celtic courses five or six times over a twelve-year teaching career (so, about 5% of my teaching), and I can sneak Celtic topics into British literature survey courses. Twice I’ve had students take semester-long independent studies with me, for which I did not get paid because I was either part-time faculty or visiting faculty.
Your google-fu is not lacking. I’m trying to launch an online M.A. in Celtic because I think there are a lot of people in your situation, and though there are scores of good Celticists, it’s basically only Berkeley and Harvard that have more than 2 broad-spectrum Celticists on staff in the entire U.S., and a few other places like Boston U. & Notre Dame that have good Irish Studies programs.
When traveling to other countries, I’ve always made some attempt to learn a few fundamental words and phrases before going (please, thank you, where’s the bathroom, may I have a beer…). With most of the European languages, I could work from written material and a pronunciation guide. With Japanese, I didn’t bother with written at all - just learned from phonetic spellings.
I became fascinated with Scots Gaelic, but my brain really has trouble connecting the written language to the spoken. I futzed around with a “learn Scots Gaelic” CD for a while, and I have a lot of difficulty using written Gaelic as a reference for spoken because the pronunciation rules are so complex and strange to a native English speaker. And it’s hard to just work on the written language when I can’t pronounce the words in my head.
It would probably be better if I had a Gaelic-speaking friend to practice on, but I don’t – and I live in a small town with no highlander/islander types around.
Do I just need to buckle down and spend a few weeks really studying the rules, or is there an “easy start” approach?
Any recommendations?
It’s probably not fair for me to make this assessment since I’ve only read a few samples of it but saying the Mabinogion is “very weird” is an understatement. Multi-mega-trippy is probably more accurate. It makes you wonder what kind of powerful natural hallucinogens they had back then to come up with that stuff.
Do you know my some Gods or people in Celtic lore have hollowed out backs? I apologize if you answered this a couple years ago when I asked this about a broader group of people.
Pronouncing Scottish Gaelic is the worst, from the perspective of English literacy. What I did was factor it out, a little at a time. There’s a few distinct weird concepts (again, from an Anglo-centric perspective):
- Broad / slender (foo vs. few)
- Aspirated / unaspirated (pot vs. spot)
- The H problem (pre-aspiration, with “h” heard where it’s not written, and then the fact that “h” itself just changes the pronunciation of the preceeding consonant)
Once you’ve got these down, it gets a lot more manageable. Particularly #2: once you train yourself to hear the distinction between aspirated and unaspirated the Scottish system makes a little more sense. This site is a pretty good reference, and breaks it down into manageable chunks.
The question sounds vaguely familiar. I don’t know of any.
Thing is, to have an American say “I’m Irish” or “I’m Italian” may seem oddly fixated on ethnicity, but it really isn’t. I mean, all those Deutsch who live in Deutschland and speak Deutsch aren’t fixated on their ethnicity, are they?
The fact is that America is a country of immigrants, many of them fairly recent immigrants. Many of us have parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents from various countries around the world. If a Chinese guy immigrates to the Unites States, and marries another Chinese immigrant, is it wrong for their children to be Chinese as well as American? If you were Irish and moved to England, you’d still be Irish, right?
And many immigrants didn’t come over here and just adopt Anglo-American customs. My grandfather was born in the United States, but his family lived in a town were everyone spoke german. They decided when he was about 5 to stop speaking german at home anymore. A couple of years ago I realized that this would have been around the time of WWI, when a huge wave of de-germanification happened. Germans are the second largest source of immigrants to America after the English, but German identity was consciously downplayed around WWI. My grandfather who spoke german at home as a child never identified as “german-american”, but my grandmother, his wife, was very consciously “irish-american” with all the typical baggage that you can easily imagine.
Nowadays people tend to identify as “American”, but these euro-American ethnic enclaves and communites are much more recent than some people imagine.
This assumption is flawed. You might, but your children wouldn’t necessarily. I have a good friend whose mother is from Ireland. My friend is from Wales and identifies as Welsh. She does not identify as Irish, half-Irish, part Irish, or Irish Welsh; she just says that her mother is Irish. I could say the same about several Welsh people with English parents. It’s possible to acknowledge the heritage without claiming the identity or feeling a connection. I’m not saying that everyone is like this, just that I’ve know enough to question the assumption.
What was the geographic distribution/range of Celtic religion like? I know of an early image of Cernunnus or two, that are very Roman empire in style and I think from France. Do the religion and ethnicity pretty much correspond, or were there non-ethnic-celts who participated in that religion? What was the mainland Europe situation, I guess, in terms of celtic ethnic range and religious range?
I don’t think it’s really possible to answer this. We know that some deities (e.g. Epona) were incorporated into the Roman pantheon; some (e.g. Apollo Grannus) were equated with Roman deities; some (e.g. Lugos) had pretty near pan-Celtic distribution, but the vast majority of divine names and images are either very localized or else their relationship with the big picture is not clear.
Religion and ethnicity correspond in the sense that if you’re a pre-Christian Celt, your primary identity is probably tribal, and you worship as the other people in your tribe do. There seem to have been a few religious ideas that were widespread, many inherited from the Indo-Europeans and thus more or less shared with the Greeks, Romans, and Norse.
I’ve read that ancient Irish had a religious taboo against using written language. True?
What about the Irish myths that they arrived by ship from Spain? I’ve read that there’s much linguistic evidence supporting this, but am never quite sure whether my Googling takes me to reputable scholars or just cranks! (And is the consensus now that the extinct Q-Celtic Iberian language is closer to Irish than to Gaulish?)
From that link, an interesting “productionnotes.pdf” can be accessed. However two separate migrations are conflated.
Ireland was populated about 10,000 years ago by people perhaps close genetically to today’s Basque. But I don’t think anyone believes those earliest Irish spoke Celtic. The arrival of the Celtic-speaking ruling caste was much more recent, perhaps (very roughly) 3000 years ago. (As is often the case, this small “ruling caste” brought new religion, culture and language to the indigeneous Irish, but may have contributed only modestly to the gene pool.)
The Ireland / Spain connection is problematic. On the one hand, in the prehistoric past, Ireland does seem to have had stronger connections to the lands along the Atlantic coast than to the interior of France. I rely on Barry Cunliffe (an archaeologist) for most of my knowledge about this, as it’s pre-Celtic. It’s only sensible that the genetics follows the trade routes, but again, pre-Celtic. (I don’t think anyone seriously thinks that “Celtic” is any sort of meaningful genetic grouping.)
As far as the pseudohistorical connection between Ireland and Spain, as described in the Book of the Taking of Ireland (Lebor Gabála, also translated as Book of Invasions etc.), that could be anything from genuine deep history to “well, we had to come from somewhere: flip a coin, Britain or overseas.” At the time when the Romans were first in Britian, and trading with Ireland, there were still Celtic languages spoken in Iberia. Someone might have recognized similarities in either language or customs or religion. Celtiberian is not closer to Irish than Gaulish; if anything, Celtiberian and Gaulish are closer to each other than either is to Irish. In terms of the Celtic family tree, Celtiberian diverged from the other languages earliest, then Gaulish, then Irish (Goidelic) from Welsh (Brythonic).
Maybe. We have plenty of inscriptional writing (ogham) to show that they weren’t above writing as a concept, but everything we know about the pre-Christian priests (druids) suggests that (1) they were in charge of maintaining lore (history, genealogy, literature, mythology, law), and (2) they placed a great emphasis on oral tradition. In Britain and Ireland it was the poets who continued this loremaster role. Even until quite late training as a poet in Ireland was intense and largely oral. Convenient, really; if you can read, you can read anything, but if you have to memorize, you can only get information from people who are willing to teach you. It’s a good way to control knowledge. The evidence of the taboo comes from Caesar, who is writing about the Gauls rather than the Irish, but we know the Irish had a powerful class of poets. We know their poets cultivated deliberately obscure language and were held to have magic powers. So I’d say there was probably a prohibition against writing certain kinds of things rather than writing full stop.
Is the word for god in Celtic “Ta” or “Thau” or “Thaw” or anything like that?
Some places write that the old Druids had a ceremony where they’d remove the branches of a tree to make it look like a T, and the inscribe “Thau” on it. And also the names of three gods. Something you know anything about?
Do you think the Shamrock was an ancient Celtic symbol before it became Christian?
Do you think that Celtic Folklore is the whitest possible area of study?
No, not even close. You don’t have to be white to be Celtic, for one thing. For another thing, the Celtic peoples were pretty heavily involved in the maritime cultures out of Bristol and Nantes and have both influenced and been influenced by some pretty non-white cultures for hundreds of years. Folklore is universal, so there’s nothing especially white about that, either. I do think Celtic folklore is perceived as a very white area within the academy, and thus not as worthy of study as either high-culture white stuff (the Western Canon) or non-white stuff, which is why both Celtic & folklore are marginalized within the academy.
ETA: The Celtic nations have also got something pretty big in common with the developing world, which is a history of colonialism at the hands of Western European nations. Some of the ways the Irish, Welsh, and Bretons have been characterized are as lazy, dark-complected musically inclined people who speak gibberish and have too many children. That’s been used against many a non-white group, as well!