sections:
There have been four occasions in history when the Celts emerged from their homelands and changed the world. The first – what we have called the Invasion of the Sword – saw Celtic warriors blaze through Europe, northern Africa and parts of Asia, c. 500 B.C.-400 A.D., drawing in the ethnic borders of these areas. The second – described here as the Invasion of the Boat – was the Celtic Diaspora, c. 400-600 A.D., one of the biggest evacuations of a civilian population in European history, when as many as a million Celts from Britain fled disaster, taking Celtic ideas, customs and kingdoms to new homes on the Continent. The third, the Invasion of the Cross, c. 600-1000 A.D., involved scores of Celtic monks – Irish for the most part – travelling in Italy, France and Germany, monks who were crucial in moulding medieval Christianity. The fourth, c. 1000-1300 A.D. was, finally, what we have termed the Invasion of the Lyre, when Breton and Welsh bards, also travelling in foreign lands, made Celtic legends – Arthur, Lancelot, Tristan… – an international literary currency.
The importance and effects of these four invasions can be seen in many features of modern life – for example, certain peculiarities of French syntax, the act of Confession in the Catholic Church… But it is also there in the very fault-lines of our history. So the ancient Celts limited Roman expansion into northern Europe and created a common northern European culture. The Invasion of the Boat produced a ‘Little Britain’ (Brittany) that once covered a quarter of France and which would act as a jumping off point for the Invasion of the Cross and the Lyre. Emigrant Celtic monks tipped the balance in favour of European Christianity in the ninth century when Viking dragon boats threatened to destroy the Church in the north. And the arrival of the Arthurian and kindred legends on the continent has been credited with ‘the birth of the individual’ in the twelfth century.
Typically Celticists concentrate on the Celts’ ‘mystery’ and ‘marginality’. But by looking instead at their talent for projecting themselves we see this people when they are at their most visible and most interesting. A narrative is possible instead of the usual series of contrite mays, mights and maybes. And every invasion is sown with entertaining culture-clash stories as the Celts come hard up against realities other than their own: a proud Celtic chief shows a disgusted Greek visitor his collection of decapitated heads; Celtic refugees fight Arab jihadists in northern Spain; Celtic monks sell wisdom in a Belgian fish market; while a crowd of medieval Bretons stone French tourists who have the temerity to suggest that king Arthur was nothing more than a fairytale.
The four invasions, though covering different centuries and varying subject matter, will dovetail together – neither the second, third or fourth invasion would have taken place without the invasion before – and give a sense of Celtic history from the earliest times to the thirteenth century. Then in the fifth and final part of the book I ask whether the Celts have ever, since the days of the bards, managed again to influence decisively the course of European or world history. The conclusion, it is suggested, must be ‘no’. But in looking at their later failures we take the story onto 2006. By the time the book is finished the reader should have an excellent overview of the whole history of this people.
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