These beautiful flagons were found in the Rhineland, at the border of France and Germany, and dated to the Golden Age of Athens down south...a time when unidentified peoples were living in northern Europe. Greek historians called them keltoi, which is where our word ‘Celt’ originated; but as historical terms/concepts go, it’s about as vague and useless a term as any. These were people who lived in...France? Germany? The British Isles? Scandinavia, perhaps? And had customs like...well, we don’t know. Strong, characteristic schools of design, as you can see from these flagons; also, presumably they liked to drink. (MacGregor makes a bigger deal out of the ancient tradition of hard-drinking northerners than I would...but then, I’m probably one of them.) He also points out that they must have had strong trade networks, since the materials used to make these flagons come from all over, including red coral from the sea. But no matter how good they were at trade, they didn’t write, so since they didn’t record their own history, all we’ve got is two cultural appropriations of them: what the Greek writers said about them (very little) and the late 18th-century fantasy that developed, from Ossian through Yeats, about misty twilit melancholy Celtic beauty. What JRR Tolkien described, in a long letter he wrote while trying to get the Lord of the Rings published, as “that fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic.”
While it’s true that there’s a standard modern trope of beauty associated with this bit of cultural appropriation—in my mind I go to the recent cartoon film The Book of Kells, or the footage from Highlander that accompanies Queen’s “Who wants to live forever,” or my favorite scene from the LOTR films, where Elrond prophecies Arwen’s future as a 5000 year-old widow—it was invented, as an alternative to their real world, by Scottish, Welsh, Irish, and British writers trying to deal with living in the world’s biggest, most ruthless empire. We’ll see where we get to with this trope, in the years to come. Reinventing history seems to me a bit irresponsible, even if the results for art are pretty.
Dd
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