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Some of the elements in these "Celtic" icons are in reality imports into the artistic repertoires of Celtic craftspeople. Interlace, for instance, as found in The Book of Kells was borrowed in the seventh century AD from Germanic and Mediterranean artists: you won't find interlace in Iron Age Celtic art. Not everything that artists from Celtic cultures do or make is necessarily "ancient" or native. Lowland tunes get adapted by Gaelic song writers to the demands of Gaelic words; the idea of the modern drama gets adapted by Saunders Lewis to articulate a modern Welsh outlook on life; the Welsh-speaking artist Iwan Bala creates stark, expressionist images that certainly don't say Celt to anyone.
Can we speak then about Celtic culture, in the face of such diversity? What do, say, Iron Age artistic masterpieces, such as the Battersea Shield or the Deskford Carnyx, medieval literary masterpieces, such as Táin Bó Cuailnge or The Mabinogion, medieval sculpture and mansucripts such as the Hilton of Cadboll stone or The Book of Durrow, and modern poetry such as that of Sorley MacLean and Bobi Jones, have in common? On the face of it, very little. But that is because we tend to over- generalise. Should all Scots poetry be like Robert Burns? Should all English painting be like Constable's? Should all Italian music sound like Verdi? Do Americans only eat hamburgers?
What defines Celtic culture at all times and in all places, is that it is produced by people who speak languages that we would now call Celtic. That covers a lot of time - some 2,600 years since the first identifiable inscription in a Celtic language (in Northern Italy, by the way) - and a lot of space, from Shetland in the seventh century AD, to Turkey in the third century BC.
Needless to say, over that time and space, Celtic-speaking peoples responded to different ideas, developed different tastes and experienced localised outbreaks of genius. The wonderful, abstract yet suggestive designs found engraved on the backs of mirrors in Iron Age Britain, such as the Desborough Mirror, are a product of the local genius of southern British artists. Only Ireland could have produced the Ulster Cycle. Only Gaelic Scotland could have produced the poetry of Donnchadh Bàn Mac an t-Saoir, or the haunting lament by the widow of Gregor MacGregor of Glenstrae, Griogail Cridhe.
But at the roots of all these cultures, bound into the languages themselves, are certain shared perceptions, a common past, and a certain commonality of social order and expectations. One society or another will, of course, conform or diverge from this shared background in different ways as a result of its own history, its own external contacts, or its own landscape. But there is a stock of shared ideas from which they are diverging.
The centrality of poetry, poets and praise is just one link among these peoples. There are others we might add. But it does remind us of the primary mode of carrying shared inheritance among the Celtic peoples - a shared inheritance which produces, always, new and different and varied works of genius. This inheritance is carried, not in knotwork, or tunes, still less in blood and DNA. What links the Celtic peoples, of past, present, and future together is their languages and the ideas, images and outlooks held within them. Perhaps the archaeologists should read some poetry.
* Thomas Clancy is a lecturer in the department of Celtic at Glasgow University.
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