Myths and legends of the Celtic race (original) (raw)

British Ethnogenesis: A Late Antique Story

Celts, Romans, Britons: Classical and Celtic influence in the Construction of British Identities, 2020

This chapter will deal with the origin of the people known as the Britons as defined under the headword 'Briton, n.1. A member of one of the Brittonic-speaking peoples originally inhabiting all of Britain south of the Firth of Forth, and in later times spec. Strathclyde, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany' in the OED, rather than the neologistic sense which has gradually displaced it and become more common since the late seventeenth century as applied to inhabitants or citizens of Great Britain or the United Kingdom. The principal argument here will be that this identity came into being in the course of Late Antiquity (i.e. c.  300-700). Parts of this argument will contest the essentialist view that medieval British culture represents a direct continuity from pre-Roman identity on the island, which, it is suggested, would have been far from homogenous. Equally, however, this argument will contest the view that the medieval Britons were the direct cultural heirs of the Romano-British population. Britishness, like Englishness, was a product of the fragmentation of the Western Roman Empire. : It has long been recognized that medieval Britons derived their culture from a mixture of Roman and Celtic heritage. Whilst Welsh, for example, is classed as a Celtic language it contains more than 900 words borrowed from Latin during Antiquity, including terms for quite prosaic items such as 'fish', in sharp contrast to the mere dozen or so words borrowed from Celtic into Old English. The British language also displayed a greatly simplified morphosyntactical structure, as compared to its contemporary Celtic cousin Old Irish, which was probably brought about by a degree of creolization between Latin and the Celtic dialects it encountered in Britain.¹ In this chapter I will look at both the way in which British identity was constructed out of Roman and Celtic elements, and the way in which the Late Antique Britons understood that relationship. I will argue, inter alia, that from as early as the mid-sixth century, when Gildas, writing in Latin, attempted to reconstruct recent history from fragmentary sources, the relationship between Romano-British of the imperial era and the people who self-identified as Britons ¹ Charles-Edwards (2013) 75-115.

The Names for Britain and Ireland Revisited

Beiträge zur Namenforschung, 2009

Discussions on the provenance of the names of Britain (Albion and Prydain) and Ireland (Ériu / Íriu) have occupied the attention of scholars since the end of the nineteenth century down to the present day. Suggestions as to the origin have included a variety of languages ranging from Celtic to Hamito-Semitic. This article suggests a simpler solution in seeking to show that the foregoing names belong together in a single concept. Zusammenfassung: Beiträge zur Erklärung der Namen Britanniens (Albion und Prydain) und Irlands (Ériu / Íriu) haben Wissenschaftler seit Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum heutigen Tag beschäftigt und haben dabei eine keltische sowie eine hamito-semitische Herkunft vorgeschlagen. Dieser Beitrag bietet eine Lösung an, die die obigen Namen in einem einfachen Zusammenhang verbindet.