Читать книгу Irish History: People, places and events that built Ireland - Neil Hegarty - Страница 10

Ireland is famously a ‘Celtic’ nation, sharing strong cultural and linguistic traits with other ‘Celtic’ societies in Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany, and the Isle of Man – but what does ‘Celtic’ actually mean? The term is a vexed one: it first entered common use during a period of rising nationalism in nineteenth-century Ireland and became a useful means to distinguish Irish culture from that of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England. As for the facts, it was long claimed that Ireland was occupied by waves of Celtic invaders arriving from central Europe around 500 BC, who supplanted the existing culture that had developed in the course of the preceding centuries. In addition, legend speaks of a period in deepest antiquity, when the ‘Milesians’ sailed to Ireland from Iberia to do battle with the Tuatha dé Danaan, the existing inhabitants of the land. But recent research reveals no such invasion: instead, newcomers arrived steadily from across the sea, acclimatizing and adapting to life in an already populated land, and adding their experience to the cultural mix – but, crucially, not erasing the civilization that had gone before. ‘Celtic’, then, is a useful mark of cultural identity, rather than a concept rooted firmly in historical fact.