Episode 117a: Introduction to the Ancient Celts

Description: I am very excited to be joined by Dr. Carly McNamara of the University of Glasgow to begin our series on the history of Christianity in the British Isles among the Celtic people. In this series we are going to delve way into the ancient past and move into the medieval period. Dr. McNamara will discuss archaeology, textual evidence and more to give us an in-depth look into the culture, religion and language of this fascinating people. In today’s episode, we will look at who are the “Celts,” where did they come from and what do we know about their origins.

About Today’s Guest:
Dr. Carolyn McNamara
On Twitter: @MedievalCarly
Education Evolved: @EducationEvolvd www.educationevolvedltd.com/
Links for Further Reading:
The Deskford Carnyx - includes a video which has the sounds that it could have produced, as played on a reconstruction www.nms.ac.uk/explore-our-collections/stories/scottish-history-and-archaeology/deskford-carnyx/
Jane Webster, ‘Ethnographic barbarity: colonial discourse and “Celtic Warrior Societies”’. In Roman Imperialism: Post-Colonial Perspectives, edited by J Webster and N Cooper. Leicester: Leicester Archaeology Monographs 3, pg. 111-123.
Barry Cunliffe, The Ancient Celts
Bernhard Maier, The Celts
John Koch, Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia

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•I am very excited to be joined by Dr. Carly McNamara of the University of Glasgow to begin our series on the history of Christianity in the British Isles among the Celtic people. In this series we are going to delve way into the ancient past and move into the medieval period. Dr. McNamara will discuss archaeology, textual evidence and more to give us an in-depth look into the culture, religion and language of this fascinating people. In today’s episode, we will look at who are the “Celts,” where did they come from and what do we know about their origins. If you have questions, comments or feedback, we would love to hear them. Send in your questions for Dr. McNamara to steve@atozhistorypage.com or connect on social media by searching for atozhistory.

Begin Transcript:
[00:00:00] Welcome to the first episode in a series on the Celts and Christianity and early medieval, Ireland and Northern Britain. We are going to dive into a fascinating story of a group of people that lived all over Europe. The counts have grabbed the interest of history fans throughout the history. We will explore the history of the camp.
And how that history helped to put a unique spin on Christianity. And this series is going to be very special. We are going to be guided through this history of the Celts and Celtic Christianity, which we will talk about that term with the help of Dr. Carli McNamara of the university of Glasgow, Scotland, Dr.
McNamara completed her PhD in Caltech with a focus on early medieval, Ireland and Scotland. Dr McNamara. Can you tell us a little bit of how you got interested in this particular subject? Sure. I [00:01:00] think, you know, as a child, I was really interested in stories and mythologies and that kind of got into classical Roman and Greek history like you do.
And through that, I kind of found Renaissance history and then backtrack a bit into the medieval period. And once I found myself there, I realized that. Rather interested in what was going on in Ireland and Britain and kind of places outside the Roman empire. And these are really places that we can kind of see some, you know, existence beyond, you know, Roman times or what we think of as the fall of the Western Roman empire.
And I find that really engaging. And so that's kind of how I've ended up here. That's so cool. I think I, I think that fascination and it's just going to help us so much with your expertise and your passion. It's going to really help us in this a great series. We have planned [00:02:00] today. We're going to start with.
Sort of a 10,000 foot introduction to the Celts, their place and time and geography. We'll also talk about their language, the archeology they left and behind their cultures, and just a general overview of who these people are as a people. So I guess the best place to maybe start off as what is the geographical range?
Area, we're kind of talking about here of where the, this people exist. Yeah. That's a great question. And I think it's really valuable to start there, especially considering when we, as maybe popular consumers of history, think of like, We're mostly thinking of, you know, Scotland and Ireland, but the reality of where they were goes as far as Anatolia in Turkey, in the east and down into the Spanish peninsula, Liberian, Sila, and modern day spin in Portugal.
Now we've got Celtic [00:03:00] language, of course, in Britain, you know, north and Marvin bay, England as well as Ireland. So they're really. All over this European continent and even into what we now think of as the middle east. And I think that's really valuable to help kind of break down that notion of where the Celts.
You know, they're in central Germany's, they're in Switzerland, they're just all over the place. And I think that's, what's really fascinating is that there's, it's a people that have such a why and spread geography, but we kind of attach that label counts to them. What does this word mean? Count mean and where does it come from?
Yeah, that's a great point as well. The word we think of today, Celts comes from a Greek word, Kel toy, which was a language marker that talk about people who seek this Celtic Kel toy language. And as far as what exactly that means in Greek, [00:04:00] we're really not sure. We do know that in Latin, they talked about gall as being the language and Gallic being the language there and you also get Caltech.
As the term and Caesar does tell us in his develop Gallico that the Celts did refer to themselves as kelp Tai. And we see that, um, fits in a bit with how Celtic languages work. We've got the bell jive as a tribe. So we kind of see that linguistic connection happening. Much deeper than that. Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of did that count name?
Is that something that the group, so are, do the scholars think that the Greeks took that name as something that they were using themselves? Or was that a name, a term that had a meaning in Greek? I think it's likely that it could have come from the Celts themselves. You know, if we're thinking of the Greeks and how they [00:05:00] engage with external peoples, we'll say, you know, they've got this term barbarian, which comes to us today.
We think of like Conan the barbarian. The visual image of that brings up for us, comes from the Greeks. And they were talking about all of these external peoples were barbarians because that's what the language sounded like to their ears. It just sounded like they were going bar bar bar bar bar. So it was this unintelligible.
So it, it makes sense to me to think that the kelp toy may have come out of the language itself. But again, we don't really have much evidence to get that deep into the knowledge, unfortunately. And speaking of the Greeks and the land and the Romans, we get a lot of our information from them. What are, how do we know, what are our sources for, for this people in this group?
Yeah. So that's another excellent question. Especially in the earliest times, all of our. [00:06:00] You know, textual evidence is going to come from Greek and Roman sources. It's not until hundreds of years later that we start to really see Celts writing about