In
The Last of the Celts (New Haven/London:
Yale UP, 2004), Marcus Tanner offers an extended
eulogy, stripped of sentimentality, for the languages
of those peoples predating the Anglo-Saxons in Britain.
The sheer timespan of that last clause, from our
21st century perspective, shows how durable has
been the legacy of a language-group that we don’t
even know the true name for—only that many
of us descend from varied ethnicities who shared
related systems of communication, dating back thousands
of years. Even the name Celt is a Greek invention.
Defining the Celtic, then, depends upon its clash
with the foreigner; so much that Cornwall and Wales
owe their names to what the Saxons called the ‘Other’,
those outside the common-wealth, those un-familiar,
those pushed back to, as a Cornish author lamented
over two hundred years ago, ‘about the cliff
and the sea’.
Notice
that Tanner, in looking for the remnants of those
who speak or revive Celtic languages, differentiates
speech from the material culture of the six nations
he explores. He visits the Scots Isles, Conamara,
West Belfast, the Isle of Man, North and South Wales,
Brittany, and finally the outlying colonies in Canada’s
Maritimes and Argentina’s Patagonia. While
he finds music, say in Cape Breton, vibrant, there
Scots Gaelic, despite the murmur of tourist brochures,
will be far less heard—spoken by at most 500
people. Brittany and Galway certainly cater to cultural
tourism, and hawk their Keltic Krafts diligently,
but in these more ancient redoubts, too, Tanner
records endemic indifference to language perpetuation.
Over and over, he notes, outsiders—those who
have taken as adults to learning Celtic languages—find
themselves resented, marginalised, or dismissed
by natives embarrassed to speak to strangers, ashamed
of their own lack of fluency, or determined to let
their language die a quiet death in their homes
rather than in public.
The
conclusions he raises will depress those for whom
cultural revivals portend linguistic renaissance.
The strongest part of the book, in fact, is its
introduction. Tanner sketches how, since the entry
of clerical control from Rome in early mediaeval
times, revivals have occurred! Monks eager to draw
a lineage rooted in native genealogies manufactured
branches for those grafting papal foliage onto arguably
indigenous Catholic varietals.
Anglo-Saxon
and Norman invaders invented Celtic origins for
their dynasties and legends; Reformers and Romanticists
followed after Catholicism had succumbed to first
Protestants and then the cult of nature—these
in turn sought antiquarian justification for their
authority. Finally, the New Age/Wicca/ecological
movements have manufactured a spuriously feminist,
magickal, and pacifist kingdom in which an alienated
urban, affluent, Western European consumer can recapture
a realm of vegan, polysexual, pagan lifestyles.
Tanner,
whose previous The Irish Wars: the struggle for
a nation’s soul: 1500-2000 offered readers
a popular, well-researched history, here delves
into issues motivated by his own father, a Welsh-speaker
who had left his homeland and intermarried in London.
Tanner, vowing to decipher his family’s gravestones,
eventually learns some Welsh and later Scots Gaelic,
and embarks on his quest. But we already know what
to expect. His preface concludes rueing the label
given the Celts by so many for so long: dreamers
denied political victory, quaint and charming, shunted
off to live as Tolkienesque ‘eternal elves
of the West’. He does not mention that even
the elves left at the end of the 3rd age.
And
it seems that the Celts too are departing, and their
ancient tongues, upon which the philologist JRR
Tolkien in part had invented his own array of fictional
but linguistically correct tongues, will be as removed
from our future reality as those of Middle-Earth’s.
People may learn Breton as they do Elvish or Esperanto,
but as a community language, Tanner predicts, it
will be as dead as Manx or the three debated re-versions
of Cornish.
He
ends his forward with a poignant panorama. The Celtic
sea ebbs, first into pools, now into puddles. Where
can we immerse when these last splashes dessicate
and evaporate?
For,
as Tanner’s scholarship demonstrates, no continuous
territory remains over which a Celtic language is
spoken. We see this in the broken Gaeltachtaí,
the loss of Welsh and Scots regional cohesion, the
disappearance of any Breton-speaking heartland,
and the nearly extinct numbers of speakers of Welsh
in Patagonia and Gaelic in Canada. On the other
hand, many whom Tanner interviews simply shrug that
this demonstrates a Darwinian natural selection.
The fittest languages remain, English, French, or
Spanish in these cases. Why, after all, keep a minority
language as a curiousity when no monoglots still
exist in any Celtic tongue? What’s the value,
economically, educationally, emotionally, of holding
on to an unwieldy, unremunerative, and unattractive
heirloom?
I
examined in recent Blanket essays two books
that addressed the survival of Irish within a climate.
Tanner differs from James McCloskey’s Voices
Silenced? and the contributors to Ciaran MacMurchaidh’s
‘Who Needs Irish?’ by answering these
titular questions with, respectively, ‘yes,
sooner or later’ and ‘not many, as numbers
show’. The appeal of Celtic as an antidote
to English materialism, advanced by writers as diverging
as Matthew Arnold and Peter Berresford Ellis (see
his The Celtic Revolution for a countercultural,
radical 1970s take on the issue of language within
the Celtic Fringe political campaigns then), for
Tanner, rings hollow. It’s as silly as expecting
elves to sail back.
His
chapters on Ireland, as with his previous book,
lumber on, wallowing in far too much historical
summary. He starts promisingly, looking into An
Spideal and contrasting a diligent ‘blow-in’’s
efforts to raise his family using Gaelic vs. the
bemused reactions of the native folks. But such
vignettes remain underdeveloped, for within a purportedly
Conamara-based chapter, we are taken into the whole
damned history of our nation once again. I know
that readers do not necessarily know what we, scanning
The Blanket, probably can be expected to
already have imbibed about our nation’s past,
but these pages didn’t add much to my own mental
treasure-house. His spin on Dan O’Connell,
however, I found sharp: his sphinx-like quality,
in Tanner’s phrase, allows the Liberator to
weaken his Irish-language origins as a pragmatic
preparation for what the Free State will further
in their shared goal of national power at the expense
of its native dúchas.
This
leads to the best insight in the whole book, on
pg. 98. Unlike 19c European revivals of languages
(e.g. Finnish, Hungarian, Slovene, Czech, Baltic
varieties), Irish failed to catch fire after 1922
because its revival happened too late. Why? TV,
tourism, and technology did it in. Earlier, local
clergy, patriotic leaders, and the pressure to conform
all aided shifts away from German within much of
Central Europe. (Tanner’s first book was about
a trip at the end of the Cold War around such hinterlands,
and he lived in the Balkans, having written from
and on Croatia in the 1990s). For Saorstát
Eireann, the Anglo-American hegemony already
was far too advanced. The media penetrated, fashions
altered, and emigration encouraged giving in to
a more Westernised attitude that discarded Celtic
languages as the passions of the scholar, the city-dweller,
or the day-tripper—certainly not those of the
peasant. This class distinction, so often found
in those who headed 20c Celtic revivalism no matter
where in the six nations, distanced those speakers
whom it meant to encourage from those who brought,
often in stiffly learned diction and stilted exchanges,
the encouragement.
This
legacy continues in, Tanner contends, today’s
‘Celtic culture’ sold to visitors. Depressing
scenes of spirited music but nearly no political
activism nor linguistic continuity at well-attended
festivals all over the Celtic fringe attest to this
disjunction. Both its sellers and its buyers, Tanner
implies, are trapped. It’s junk, he snarls,
repackaged for those who destroy the very purity
the natives live off of and the culture pollutes.
They trade in our stereotypes, while the ground
for these once-pristine images erodes like the Celtic
shore. This theme-park existence, Tanner suggests,
is false. I add: perhaps a comparison to Star Trekkies
conversing in Klingon or Tolkienists chatting in
Entish, then, shows the context in which Celtic
culture will survive in future generations?
The
chapter winds on. I raised an eyebrow at one contention:
the IRA ‘was always entirely Catholic in its
membership and support’ over its existence,
Tanner affirms (122). He differentiates it from
other separatist movements that have tried to include
those from across a sectarian or national divide.
I leave his claim for those better qualified than
I to examine, but I can think of Jewish and Protestant
members in the ‘old’ IRA. Perhaps he means
only the most recent incarnation of the IRA, but,
again, the whole Sticky-INLA diversion from the
Provos will, in my opinion, qualify—or verify--this
‘factoid’. Maybe within the Provos such
a purportedly Catholic monolithical representation
has been achieved, but certainly, as contributors
to The Blanket have proclaimed, this’d
have to tally many ‘Catholic atheists and agnostics,’
to vary the well-known punchline.
Speaking
of the IRA, Tanner moves to West Belfast in a brief
chapter that glances at the Culturlann and talks
to Mairtin Ó Muilleoir at some length to
exemplify the liveliest gaeltacht in Ireland. But,
I contend, Tanner ignores the role of Shaws Road,
the determination from the 1970s, and Jailic,
in jump-starting this energy. A reader gets too
little sense that young children are being educated
in Irish, although the role of Lá
receives much attention. He credits nearly all of
the dynamism to the Shinners; he talks with Pobal’s
Janet Mullar, who wants to attract tourists to the
urban outpost of an teanga gaelach. Tanner
correctly acknowledges the tendency of the language
to be identified with the republicans nearly exclusively,
while quoting from Padraig Ó Snodaigh’s
Hidden Ulster to remind us that of the origins
of the language revival, until the 1850s, within
the Presbyterian movement in Belfast. This whole
chapter, once again, bogs down in material about
the United Irishman and 19c factionalism that could
have been edited down in favour of broader interviews
beyond a quick junket escorted about by SF.
The
remainder of the volume covers other regions, with
grim correspondences. The Manx, on pg. 148, confront
a wave of incomers from England fleeing urban blight
and racial tensions. Tourism combined with holiday
homes owned by our century’s version of ‘rotten
boroughs’ or ‘absentee landlords’,
drive up home prices beyond range of the locals.
They, unlike their Celtic ancestors, are driven
away from cliff and sea, for these views are too
dear to be left affordable to merely a native gaze.
On pg. 279, since prices in Cornwall and Wales along
the coast have skyrocketed due to the Sasanach,
now technology allows British the convenience of
taking the ferry over to retire upon far cheaper
parcels along the gentrifying vistas of Brittany.
There, the language has not been taught to any substantial
younger folks since WWII. Only 6% of Breton speakers
are under the age of 40; 64% are over 60. The language
advisor for Finistere quips:
Previously,
a Welsh pundit in Tanner’s pages made a similar
apercu: his language, he mused, sidles towards the
edges, spoken ‘among consenting adults’.
The lack of continuity, repeated in Tanner’s
descriptions, serves to minimize the efforts brought
by many well-meaning mature learners to master Celtic
languages. As the efforts in Belfast show (even
though unremarked by Tanner), without the choice
to sustain a community language—rather than
one merely spoken at home to intimates—Celtic
languages face doom when not passed on to the next
generation. If only ten or fifteen years pass, James
McCloskey has noted, with a gap between elders and
youth picking up the language, then the language
as a publicly demonstrated way of communication
can die. Tanner and McCloskey both cite the example
of California’s fifty native languages extant,
none of which will be passed on to more than a handful
of speakers to come.
As
Tanner’s own father demonstrates, the appeal
of the outside world counteracts that of the community
and its language. An observer of the Welsh colony
in Patagonia chuckled back in the 19th century that
any good-looking Argentine woman would ‘make
roast meat of the heart’ of the most committed
Welsh-language activist, and all of the efforts
to build among the semi-desert wastes a new Cymru
would eventually crumble before such allure.
For
the Welsh remaining there, they have kept their
evangelical faith, but now sing its praises in Spanish.
For the Scots, the Manx, and the Welsh, biblical
translation cemented for a time resistance to international
threat—whether the Latinate rituals of an alien
pope or the anglicised temptations of a larger secularism
that isolation could for a while forestall. Eventually,
emigration, the media, and the loss of faith erode
the language even if the tunes recover. They can
be re-learned, but the language cannot be reconstituted
as a community language from such remnants. The
attempts of Manx and Cornish prove this fate. Its
sincere learners may speak to a few hundred others,
but, as a Nova Scotia professor of Gaelic reminds
us, 30,000 are needed for a daily language. Irish
is arguably at this communal level now. Welsh speakers
number in the hundreds of thousands, as do Bretons,
but they too face endless incursions by holiday
makers and inflation that drives their ability to
remain in their scenic areas away into those more
favoured by capital(s).
In
closing, Tanner cites Mark Abley’s wider linguistic
itinerary in Spoken Here (2003). Abley finds
that Yiddish fades. Its loss leaves not only a shrivelled
vocabulary but a void once filled by gestures, body
language, and facial expressions over centuries
cued along with the speaker’s litany of verbal
expressions. Think of a sean-nos singer’s
pose, and what’s lost in translation from Irish.
Irrevocably, Tanner agrees, Celtic tides keep ebbing.
