Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia

Abstract

Guilding reviews Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia edited by John T. Koch.

RR 2007/297 Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia Edited by John T. Koch ABC-Clio Santa Barbara, CA and Oxford 2006 5 vols. ISBN 978 1 85109 440 7 $485 Also available as an e-book (ISBN 978 1 85109 445 5; $530: printed set and e-book $770)

Keywords Encyclopaedias, Europe, History

Review DOI 10.1108/09504120710775633

Research into the world of Celtic studies for the educated general reader has hitherto been fraught with problems. On the one hand are the daunting scholarly works, full of difficulty for the non-specialist, from which information must be teased; on the other, the often insubstantial and inaccurate works emphasizing popular elements of a loosely-defined "Celtic" tradition where dubious information is presented as scholarship. John Koch, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Wales, reader at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies in Aberystwyth, and editor of an earlier work, The Celtic Heroic Age, has assembled work from leading researchers worldwide to produce the first encyclopedic treatment of the Celts, the largest linguistic and cultural group prior to the rise of Rome, in a comprehensive reference resource on Celtic culture and scholarship. It is both a quickreference for specialists and a basic resource for general readers, but one that bridges the divide between the over-complex and the simplistic.

Criticisms of this splendid work should perhaps be dealt with first. The index (referred to as a "quick-reference and glossary containing 10,000 entries") is neither a proper index nor a glossary and its limitations soon become obvious. Article titles appear in bold; other indexed terms do not refer to a page number but to an article title, giving a paragraph number if the article is lengthy. An article on Old Cornish vocabulary appears in the index under this heading and under Vocabulary, Old Cornish, but not under Cornish, which is where the reader would expect to find it. A number of other improvements could be made. Articles are signed, and there is a list of contributors, but no information is provided about them or the entries they wrote, in contrast to the wealth of information about the editor. The decision to use the original, rather than standard (English), form for names and titles is applied consistently (e.g. Teamhair for Tara, Alba for Scotland) and with the necessary references, though it can be a little contentious when applied retrospectively (e.g. Ó Gríofa, Art for Arthur Griffith), but a major weakness is that pronunciations are not indicated. This is a very obvious omission, surely, for its Anglophone readership; if it was too messy to do systematically, then a guide to pronunciation for the major languages would have sufficed. Finally, pursuing a lead from an article, though a wonderfully absorbing quest, leaves the reader juggling five volumes which can be rather awkward (perhaps a three-volume format would have been better); this is obviously not a problem with the electronic version.

The statistics are impressive. The five volumes contain 1,569 articles, ranging from about 50 to over 10,000 words (for instance agriculture), by 338 contributors supplemented by some 200 illustrations, including more than 50 maps. A comprehensive bibliography of over 7,000 items includes both original sources and the most significant and modern critical works. A unified table of contents is listed at the beginning of volume 1; each subsequent volume contains only its own contents. The double column format, type differentiation and well-spaced illustrations make it particularly easy on the eye.

The fruit of a five-year project, Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia surveys 3,000 years of history of the Celtic-speaking peoples from the late-Iron Age Hallstatt and La Tene periods to the twenty-first century. Ranging geographically from Turkey (Galatia) to Ireland, and citing evidence from archaeology, linguistic discoveries and the great classical historians to chart the westward migration of Celtic culture, the encyclopedia moves Celtic studies forward from a glorified historical linguistics to a cross-disciplinary body of scholarship, detailing not only its archaeological sites, major kingdoms and battles, key personalities, art, music, legends and literary works, as well as the manuscript sources, but also its continuing political development. So there is stress on political as well as physical geography and much space is given to the cultural movements and administrative devolution in the "Celtic regions" from the nineteenth century onwards. The emphasis on areas where the languages have survived, particularly in terms of the literary achievement, scholarship and nationalism of the last two centuries, is understandable, but this is not to the exclusion of those areas where the disappearance of the language or lack of full literary documentation (for instance the Iberian Peninsula, or the Balkans) mean that archaeology and historical linguistics are the focus of attention. The demise of the continental Celtic languages (with the exception of Brittany) and the survival of the insular ones (with the exception of Manx) in Wales, Scotland, Ireland and Cornwall are dealt with in great detail.

The prevailing scholarly approach reflected in the encyclopedia is one of "Celtoscepticism"; that is, the epithet is only applied to "people or countries that do, or once did, use Celtic languages". There is no discussion for instance of ethnology or genetics, and even at the level of artefacts classification as "Celtic" predicated on material culture seems to be downplayed by comparison with language. The same revisionism can be seen with regard to historical developments (the article on the Anglo-Saxon "conquest" reveals that the invasion hypothesis seems to have receded in the face of evidence of a very gradual process of language shift) and linguistics itself (the geographical demarcation for classification purposes of the p/q linguistic differentiation (isogloss) is now viewed as less important than was once assumed). Philological complexities cannot be simplified too much (and many of the language articles are fairly technical), yet despite this the work is surprisingly accessible to the general understanding. There are excellent entries on a huge number of different topics - names (the etymology of Excalibur), grammatical structure (the Hamito-Semitic hypothesis), modern media, (the television channels S4C and TG4 in Wales and Ireland respectively), ritual customs (the quaintly-named "Watery depositions"), literary genres (satire) - and much to delight the casual reader, for though written by and for scholars, the encyclopedia is not so gravely scholarly as to exclude an article on Asterix. It really cannot be recommended too highly.