See Places: Lindow Moss.
WRITING
Celts were reluctant writers. They rarely wrote records of any kind. The Anglo-Saxon colonists in England famously kept a summary record of their history, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but the Celts appear to have felt no need to make such a self-account. They do not speak to us directly and this makes them less accessible to us. What we know about them we know through archeology or through the writings of contemporary literate societies. We know about the Gauls and the Britons thanks to the writings of Roman historians and commentators.
The Druids passed on their knowledge by reciting it from memory. Because knowledge was of divine origin, it had to be kept secret, reserved only for transmission to novice Druids. Here we can see why the Druids shied away from writing. They were not ignorant of writing; writing was available. The Minoans and Mycenaeans had developed well-established written scripts by 1500 BC, and the Romans were great documenters of everything that happened. The Druids, and the Celts generally, chose not to write their knowledge down, which to us is a great loss, but to them it meant that they could control who had access to it and who did not. They excluded us by refusing to write down what they knew.
The Celts did use writing for commercial transactions, and when they did they used the Greek alphabet. One Greek usage came to be what has been described as a Gallic-Latin spelling habit. A Greek “X” was used to represent the Celtic “ch” sound, as in the Scottish loch, especially when followed by the letter “t.” This is seen in inscription from Gaul, such as TIOCOBREXTIO on the Coligny calendar. In South Shields in Britain there is the inscription ANEXTIOMARO. It also crops up on some coins of the British King Tasciovanus in the form TAXCIAV [ANOS] in about 20 BC-AD 10. This custom suggests a deliberate modification of the Roman alphabet, using Greek, by Celtic scholars, to accommodate phonetic values that existed in Celtic speech but not in Latin.
It is also an exciting possibility that writing was rather more common in the Celtic world than we may have thought. There is evidence that papyrus may have been imported into Britain in the period between the invasions of Julius Caesar and Claudius. If the British were importing papyrus, it can only have been for the production of documents; both imply a higher level of literacy and more widespread literacy in Britain than we normally allow for.
The situation in Ireland seems to have been quite different, with a society that was wholly or almost wholly illiterate, though with elaborate systems of oral transmission. It was only from about the fourth century AD that the Irish adopted Ogham as an inscriptional alphabet.
The annals recording the pedigrees of Celtic aristocrats were written down from the fifth century AD, probably under the influence of Rome. It seems probable that the genealogies were committed to memory and recited from time to time, and so passed from generation to generation orally.
The Welsh and English chronicles seem to base the structure and subject matter of their earliest entries on the Irish Annals. The Welsh Annals for the fifth and sixth centuries have 18 out of the 22 earliest entries copied straight from the Irish Annals. The Irish pedigrees were more developed, more complete, and more ancient than any other in Europe. This may be a reflection of Ireland’s freedom from Roman invasion; the Celtic way of life was allowed to continue uninterrupted. An astonishing 20,000 named Irish people are known from the Irish Annals, from the period before AD 900.
PART 2
Celtic Places
World History
