The Modern Celts

Abstract

Much that I have already said about the definition of ethnic groups must be taken, mutatis mutandis, to apply to the modern Celts. In passing from antiquity to the modern day, I have taken a detour via Gerald of Wales, and in so doing I have bowed to modern retrospective definition of what a Celt is: in modern parlance the Welsh are Celts, although Gerald would not have called them so. I would otherwise have had to leave the Celts in antiquity, and rejoin them in this chapter, in the eighteenth century, with nothing but a gulf in between. For there were, over this period, no Celts in north-western Europe; nobody called themselves, or anybody else, Celts (with the few fantastic scholarly exceptions, to which we shall come). I could have pursued the career of the Byzantine keltoi, down to their presumed conceptual disappearance with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks; it is again a measure of the limitations of our historical vision, that this would seem an entirely different subject, interesting though it might be.