The British Museum has trailed its big new autumn exhibition, “Celts: art and identity”, in partnership with the National Museums of Scotland. Opening in London in this month (Sept) and then moving to Edinburgh next year, director Neil MacGregor said the purpose of this exhibition is “to ask what ‘Celtic’ means and ‘who are the Celts?’”


Working as I do in the field of Celtic studies, I can’t help but feel a twinge of anxiety. These questions have been under the spotlight before, and the results have at times been contentious. To explain what I mean, let me strap myself into my intellectual DeLorean and prepare to go back to the future.


I suspect that few people in universities have seen the name of their field of teaching and research subjected to a sustained atack from the outside. That is what happened to the discipline variously called Celtic studies or sometimes just Celtic, especially in Britain and Ireland in the 1990s.


It started with sensible housecleaning of problematic terminology. This was primarily by archaeologists, who called into question the term “Celtic” for being used lazily and unthinkingly. They challenged the


80 September 2015


use of the term to describe art and artefacts, and extended this criticism to call into question the political and social motivation behind the use of the term more widely.


It was an uncomfortable time, especially as few of those doing the atacking seemed interested in the current fate or health of the modern Celtic languages. Indeed, those on both sides tended to avoid discussing the evidence of language, preferring to focus on art, archaeology, and whether people identified themselves as Celts. Since Celtic as a field of academic study is primarily one based in languages, this was a bit disheartening, and not a litle disenfranchising. It seemed we were being told we couldn’t use our own term for our discipline, but based on someone else’s type of evidence.


At the same time, there was another loss of confidence in what it might mean to be Celtic. People of my generation or older who studied Celtic languages were exposed to more than one of them at university, usually from different branches of the family – Scottish Gaelic speakers would study Welsh, for instance.


At the same time, there was another loss of confidence in what it might mean to be Celtic. People of my generation or older who studied Celtic languages were exposed to more than one of them at university, usually from different branches of the family – Scotish Gaelic speakers would study Welsh, for instance. We were also exposed to older periods of the languages, such as Middle Welsh or Old Irish. This made sense in a field born out of comparative linguistics – you learned the ins and outs of the languages by laying them side by side.


But in the 1990s and into the new millennium, things began to change. This was a time of radically declining numbers of native speakers, and a need to make these languages relevant and vital in the modern world. The “Celtic” project was increasingly rejected as not helpful to, for instance, revitalising Welsh or supporting Gaeltacht communities in Ireland.


It has become rarer to find young academics trained in more than one language as increasingly, partly due to


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