The Last of the Celts [Hardcover]

Marcus Tanner (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0300104642 | ISBN-13: 978-0300104646 | Publication Date: September 10, 2004

What has become of the Celtic peoples whose culture once spanned Europe from the Atlantic to the Black Sea? Does the current faddish interest in Celtic nationalism, music, and arts signal the beginning of a revival for Celtic communities, or the last flicker of a dying culture? Award-winning author Marcus Tanner has journeyed throughout the Celtic world—from the wilds of Northwest Scotland to the Isle of Man, from Brittany to Patagonia, and from Boston to Cape Breton—seeking to discover the Celtic past and what remains of authentic Celtic culture today.
Weaving together extensive historical research with first-hand observations of Celtic people in far-flung communities, Tanner finds that talk of a Celtic revival is largely misplaced. He describes the fading prospects of those who have maintained a Celtic identity in the face of powerful pressures to assimilate. Despite great public interest in all things “Celtic,” the threats to the world’s remaining Celtic communities, their language, and their culture are relentless. A distinct Celtic identity may not survive, Tanner fears, and such a loss would impoverish us all.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"[T]here is nothing that the British or the French love more than a good old Celtic revival," writes Tanner. But the recent renaissance of interest in all things Celtic is "vacuous," he continues, a mere mask for the rapid disappearance of genuine Celtic culture in the British Isles and Brittany. In this lively book, which is part travelogue and part social history, independent historian Tanner (Ireland's Holy Wars) records the results of his world travels in search of the remaining vestiges of Celtic culture. As he moves from Scotland and Belfast to Wales, Cornwall and Cape Breton, he discovers that English has replaced Celtic languages and that modernization has erased many of the remaining Celtic rituals and practices. He provides not only a portrait of modern society in flux in these regions but also a picture of each society's rich history. Tanner finds that Celtic music has become the vehicle for preserving the distinctive features of the Celtic past, although some musical spectacles that purport to preserve the culture, such as Riverdance, are more faux Celtic than the real thing. Tanner particularly laments the disappearance of such languages as Welsh, for without a living language, proverbs and other sayings that preserve a people's folkways are lost forever. This thoughtful book provides a very different, less optimistic perspective on today's Celtic revival.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

“In this lively book, which is part travelogue and part social history, independent historian Tanner records the results of his world travels in search of the remaining vestiges of Celtic culture. . . . He provides not only a portrait of modern society in flux in these regions but also a picture of each society’s rich history. . . . [A] thoughtful book.”—Publishers Weekly

“[A] lively and thought-provoking exploration of [the Celtic languages] status today.”—Michael Kenney, Boston Globe

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (September 10, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300104642
• ISBN-13: 978-0300104646
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,677,951 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Celtic Traces, November 6, 2004

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Last of the Celts (Hardcover)

"There is something sad and troubling about the death of a language," because language represents a particular way of regarding the world, and when the language goes, that way of looking at the world goes, too. If this is true, then the book containing this sentiment, _The Last of the Celts_ (Yale University Press) by Marcus Tanner is a very sad book indeed. Tanner has included the stories of the Celts of different regions; of course, the people still remain, but since the languages involved are being lost, an important part of being Celtic is being lost as well. Examined in fascinating detail, with historical research and with interviews of relict speakers, are the Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Cornish, and Breton tongues. The author's father spoke fluent Welsh to his contemporary family, but did not teach it to his children, and Tanner got interested in learning some of the language. He researched about why it had faded, and his interests grew to take in all the non-English speakers of Britain and Ireland and the non-French speakers of Northern France. In many ways, the decline of the languages and genuine Celtic culture is ironic, since Celtic is big. Celtic religion is supposed to be a throwback to a time when people were in tune with nature, valued women, and were not priggish. You can buy Celtic crosses and prayer plaques. You can go to shows like Riverdance or its spin-offs, and you can hear what the world considers Celtic music (pipe, fiddle, harp) on public radio. These are all just the latest style of Celtic revival, for there have been revivals for different reasons for centuries. People like the New Age-y aspects of Celtic culture, but this is a mere marketing device; real Celtic societies and their languages are doomed. Some are gone forever already, and some are in the process, as "the Celtic sea, having retreated into disconnected pools, reduces to puddles."

All the Hebrides have lost their isolation. One islander notes another drain on Gaelic: "What TV did was to bring a new member into the living room who spoke only English." Television has split families, with one generation constantly using Gaelic and the succeeding generation using English. An Irish-speaker near Galway says, "The language of the playground is no longer Irish." For all the resilience of pipe and fiddle music in the pubs, the younger set sings along to Madonna at karaoke. Religion plays a role in almost all the stories here, sometimes promoting and sometimes restricting native languages. In Northern Ireland, where everything seems to have a confrontational religious side, the Protestants have little interest in their Celtic heritage because the Gaelic language is central to Catholic republican culture. The slow death of the Cornish language was not regarded much until the Celtic revival of the 1890's. The language was revived well over a century after the last speaker had died, and because there was so little knowledge of what the original language was like. when experts came up with competing descriptions of sound, vocabulary, and grammar, there was only confusion and misspent efforts at cultural revival. The Bretons were doing well at the beginning of the last century, but hitched their feelings of separation from France to Nazism, allowing the French to suppress almost all Breton cultural activity after the war. Another odd history is of the Welsh settlers to Argentina in 1865. Their descendants have continued their traditions in the Welsh-looking Patagonian village of Gaiman, where they "do good business serving out Welshness to visiting coach parties of Argentine and foreign tourists."

They are doing better than most of the quietly expiring Celtic cultures profiled here. The current romanticization and popularization of Celtic religion, music, and ecological devotion will not help to stop the inevitable decline of these once-vital languages and societies. Tanner has no remedy, for there is none. He has, instead, produced a book to document the loss which has occurred for centuries but is faster now. It is a lively, sympathetic and poignant tour of disappearing worlds.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A gloomy survey of the ebb of the Celtic tide, December 6, 2004

By 

John L Murphy "Fionnchú" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Last of the Celts (Hardcover)

Marcus Tanner offers an extended eulogy, stripped of sentimentality, for the languages of those peoples predating the Anglo-Saxons in Britain. The sheer timespan of that last clause, from our 21st century perspective, shows how durable has been the legacy of a language-group that we don't even know the true name for-only that many of us descend from varied ethnicities who shared related systems of communication, dating back thousands of years. Even the name Celt is a Greek invention. Defining the Celtic, then, depends upon its clash with the foreigner; so much that Cornwall and Wales owe their names to what the Saxons called the `Other', those outside the common-wealth, those un-familiar, those pushed back to, as a Cornish author lamented over two hundred years ago, `about the cliff and the sea'.

Notice that Tanner, in looking for the remnants of those who speak or revive Celtic languages, differentiates speech from the material culture of the six nations he explores. He visits the Scots Isles, Conamara, West Belfast, the Isle of Man, North and South Wales, Brittany, and finally the outlying colonies in Canada's Maritimes and Argentina's Patagonia. While he finds music, say in Cape Breton, vibrant, there Scots Gaelic, despite the murmur of tourist brochures, will be far less heard-spoken by at most 500 people. Brittany and Galway certainly cater to cultural tourism, and hawk their Keltic Krafts diligently, but in these more ancient redoubts, too, Tanner finds growing indifference to the language's perpetuation. Over and over, he notes, outsiders-those who have taken as adults to learning Celtic languages-find themselves resented, marginalised, or dismissed by natives embarrassed to speak to strangers, ashamed of their own lack of fluency, or determined to let their language die a quiet death in their homes rather than in public.

The conclusions he raises will depress those for whom cultural revivals portend linguistic renaissance. The strongest part of the book, in fact, is its introduction. Tanner notes how, since the entry of clerical control from Rome in early mediaeval times, revivals have occurred! Monks eager to draw a lineage rooted in native genealogies manufactured branches for those grafting papal foliage onto arguably indigenous Catholic varietals.

Anglo-Saxon and Norman invaders invented Celtic origins for their dynasties and legends; Reformers and Romanticists followed after Catholicism had succumbed to first Protestants and then the cult of nature-these in turn sought antiquarian justification for their authority. Finally, the New Age/Wicca/ecological movements have manufactured a spuriously feminist, magickal, and pacifist kingdom in which an alienated urban, affluent, Western European consumer can recapture a realm of vegan, polysexual, pagan lifestyles.

But we already know what to expect. His preface concludes rueing the label given the Celts by so many for so long: dreamers denied political victory, quaint and charming, content to live as Tolkienesque `eternal elves of the West'. He does not mention that even the elves left at the end of the 3rd age.

And it seems that the Celts too are departing, and their ancient tongues, upon which the linguist JRR Tolkien in part had invented his own array of fictional but linguistically correct tongues, will be as removed from our future reality as those of Middle-Earth's. People may learn Breton as they do Elvish or Esperanto, but as a community language, Tanner predicts, it will be as dead as Manx or the three debated re-versions of Cornish.
He ends his forward with a poignant panorama. The Celtic sea ebbs, first into pools, now into puddles. Where can we immerse when these last splashes dessicate and evaporate?

For, as Tanner's scholarship (if too often rather undigested; names-dates-clerical minutiae diminishes the pace of much of this book--down one star) demonstrates, no continuous territory remains over which a Celtic language is spoken. We see this in the broken Gaeltachtaí, the loss of Welsh and Scots regional cohesion, the disappearance of any Breton-speaking heartland, and the nearly extinct numbers of speakers of Welsh in Patagonia and Gaelic in Canada. On the other hand, many whom Tanner interviews simply shrug that this demonstrates a Darwinian natural selection. The fittest languages remain, English, French, or Spanish in these cases. Why, after all, keep a minority language as a curiousity when no monoglots still exist in any Celtic tongue? What's the value, economically, educationally, emotionally, of holding on to an unwieldy, unremunerative, and unattractive heirloom?

(P.S. For guardedly more optimistic views on the future of Irish, see James McCloskey's Voices Silenced and Ciaran MacMurcaidh's Who Needs Irish? An earlier, more optimistic survey joining the Celtic fringe language revivals to 60s/70s activism was taken by Peter Berresford Ellis, The Celtic Revolution, from the Welsh publishers Y Lolfa. See also their The Welsh Extremist, by Ned Thomas.)

(Excerpted from "Eternal elves of the West" via the on-line journal from Belfast, The Blanket.)

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An interesting and important viewpoint, May 23, 2005

By 

Hallstatt Prince (MA. USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Last of the Celts (Hardcover)

Although I argue with the title of the book the author makes a strong case concerning the encroachments on that which makes Celtic culture unique. Although I could make alternative arguements that Celtic culture has morphed into what is now modern Europe, the author is concerned with such things as the dying Celtic languages and customs. The case he makes is quite a strong and convincing one. Pan-Celticists hang on to you hats but don't huff and puff just yet. The author is concerned with the destruction of what we have come to know as Celtic culture but to my mind this in no way runs contrary to the evidence that much of Europe actually sprung from Celtic culture and a fair-minded person should not see this book as an attack on those theories.
This is more of a call to arms and a much needed one.