The Celts - Who Were They?
The lands occupied by Celtic peoples, whose existence can be traced over more than 25 centuries, were vast. Celts occupied land in modern day Eastern Europe, Greece, Spain, Northern Italy, Western Europe, England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland.
The Celtic people have mystified anthropologists and historians for generations. They were a non- literate culture whose history and literature was preserved through oral tradition. The only written records of their civilization are the texts left by classical authors, the first of which appear circa 500 BCE. These accounts, inaccurate as they may be, are important in that they demonstrate that the Celts came into cultural contact, and sometimes competition, with the Greeks as well as the Romans.
Who were the Celts? The issue is further obscured by the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Romantics. Clumping all of the Celtic peoples into one homogeneous family with a single ethnic identity, the Romantics exalted the idea of the "noble savage." The notion of the "romantic highlander" and the modern conception of the druids are based on these romanticized images of Celtic history and culture.
Modern nationalist writers such as William Butler Yeats in Ireland and Sir Walter Scott in Scotland used such idealized portraits as the basis of a new pan-Celtic movement that offered resistance to the modernization and imperialism of Victorian Britain.
