The Sea Kingdoms: The History of Celtic Britain and Ireland (Hardcover)

Very importantly Moffat defines just what the term Celtic means. Celts are not defined by their race or by their place of birth; rather the Celts of Britain are a speech community. At one time an older version of Welsh was spoken all over the island of Britain and Irish Gaelic was the common tongue of Ireland; they were both cousin languages, sharing syntax and vocabulary, though later becoming mutually unintelligible. The very language of the Celts has often been at the core of their identity from early times, as the Celts have long believed that if their language fell from use that their nation - whether Welsh, Irish, or other - would from fade from history. The opponents of the Celts understood this and for centuries have attacked their language, seeking to eliminate its use from government, the courts, churches and schools, full well realizing that to fully dominate the Celts they had to be rid of their unifying and defining language. As the author summarizes; the war for Britain "was as much a war of words as of blood and steel."

Celts were also linked by the sea, hence the title of this book. For centuries the sea was a much better highway than land, and once the ocean linked a Celtic community that stretched to mainland Europe, including modern Portugal, Spain, and France. Indeed the sea was often the focus of much more effort than land, with castles once constructed more to guard stretches of sea rather than areas of land, and the powerful Lord of the Isles starting in the mid-14th century ruling his Sea Kingdom from a movable court at sea, with the islands of Islay and Tiree serving as an administrative center and granary respectively.

Very often we see in this book that the story of the Celtic peoples is the story for the war for Britain. The Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Normans, the English, and the British won that war he writes, a victory more or less complete by the end of the18th century. This is a history written by the victors; too often the side of the losers was not told, or improperly told, aided by the fact that the Celts were largely a non-literate (though not illiterate) culture, greatly valuing oral tradition but for the most part not embracers of the written word. Indeed Moffat spends much time analyzing the English and modern view that only written sources should be valued and oral sources are automatically suspect, a view that has cost the world a vast store of history, culture, and literature.

The Celtic lands were by no means completely non-literate; in a striking paradox the Irish monks were noted producers of written material, preserving much ancient Greek and Roman knowledge and literature that might have otherwise been lost. Indeed the saga of the Celtic and particularly Irish monks fills several fascinating chapters; members of this group may have even visited North America prior to Columbus.

Today the Celtic speech community is largely extinct. Cornish and Manx possess no native speakers, the ancient words only on the lips of enthusiasts. Scots Gaelic will likely become extinct within a generation and Irish is in decline as well; only Welsh shows any real strength. Efforts are being made to preserve the Celtic languages, not out of any "weird, woolly, quaint, or daft" dream of supplanting English, but merely to seek to preserve ancient traditions and knowledge of Celtic history and culture. Language preservation is all the more important when one realizes that Celtic history often lacks obvious ruins, with little to compare to say the Valley of the Kings or the Parthenon.

Perhaps even more damaging Moffat writes is that Celtic history is in serious dangerous of being reduced to quaint local color and comfortable entertainment, something more suited to the tourist trade and Hollywood than real history, and unfortunately much Celtic history that is known to the public is a fairly recent invention. The Highland Clearances of the 19th century saw the removal of thousands from the Scottish Highlands, leading to the myth - much embraced by many from Victorian painters to modern filmmakers - of the lonely, windswept, majestic wilderness that was an entirely artificial creation. The kilt most well known today is more properly called the feileadh beag or small kilt and is actually the creation of an 18th century English factory owner to aid employees in his ironworks; even the word kilt is from the Danish kilte, which means "to tuck up." Even the tradition of identifying certain tartan patterns (or setts) with certain clan names dates largely back to a book published in 1842 that was largely made-up. The much-loved Welsh tradition of the Gorsedd, a three-day convention of bards and druids, was mostly made up by Edward Williams (who later called himself Iolo Morgannwg), a skilled 18th century Welsh scholar who created much of what is popularly thought of about bards and particularly the Druids (though interweaving so much actual history, rituals, and literature that it has taken entire academic careers to distinguish fact from his fancy). Even when it became known that his (and that of another proponent of druidism, William Price) culture never really existed as such, many still embraced their efforts as part of a national Welsh revival and something decidedly un-English.

A fascinating book, covering many aspects of the Celts; from the bold Border Reivers to the real Rob Roy to Irish nationalism to Cornish wrestling.