the English and the ‘Other’
How do some of the icons of modern Celtic culture fit into the history of these lands? There is on ‘Foamy Custard’, by Bob Trubshaw, an article that gets right into the thick of things. It’s called the English and the ‘Other’.
There’s a bucket load of good information in there, and it’s pretty hard-hitting. It’s not negative, just right there – in your face; and more than anything explanatory.
“By the mid-nineteenth century the lore and customs of the ‘folk’ – now ingeniously perceived as both the peasants and the epitome of a nation – were regarded as being under threat. Sir Walter Scott and his European contemporaries thought that popular rural culture was a survival of an unbroken tradition that stretched back before Christianity.
The ‘folk’ were regarded as set apart from the gentility. While the elite social classes had culture, the common people had folklore and folk customs.
Edward Lhuwd’s pinoneer lingusitic studies published in 1707 labelled of a group of European languages as ‘Celtic’. The year is significant as this was when the Act of Union created the idea of a British nation.
After the Act of Union, political expediency in the eighteenth century invented the idea of ‘Britishness’ rather than English, Scottish or Welsh nationalism – superimposed on a mixed bag of English, Welsh and Scottish and more regional identities.
And being British meant being Protestant. Catholic France was clearly ‘Other’ throughout the eighteenth century, and Ireland increasingly became ‘Other’ as that century progressed.
During the nineteenth century several eminent historians began to foster the notion that everything good about English culture had its origins with the Germanic Anglo-Saxon settlers, who were thought to have exterminated the indigenous ‘Celtic’ Romano-British population.
‘Celtic’ was a convenient way of being ‘British’ but not English. The invention and widespread adoption of ‘Celticness’ in the eighteenth century is intimately linked with the invention and promotion of ‘Britishness’.
Walter Scott, at the request of George IV, had invented Scottish culture – tartans, bagpipes and Highland games; Lady Charlotte Guest was instrumental in providing a similarly ‘pre-packaged’ national identity of pointed black hats, red capes and harps for the Welsh. Iolo Morganwg earlier had invented Druidism – thinly-disguised Protestant theology transposed into the radical political philosophies prevalent in Wales at that time.
The nineteenth century nationalists developed what has now become an unimpregnable belief in a shared Celtic culture. This constructed common identity is, in essence, based on only one common characteristic – a sense of national identity that is defined by its ‘otherness’ to England.”
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There’s a lot in there to think about, and from an Australian perspective regards its national identity – and regards the term ‘Anglo-Celtic’. Makes you look at the components of Celtic festivals – look at the mix of Stones, Hats and Bagpipes…
It would be of little surprise to discover that the “discovery” of a Samhain start to the new year is another fiction that conforms to Trubshaw’s observations.