INTRODUCTION

HE best thing I ever did was to meet my wife. That happened many years ago in Cill Airne (Killarney), Ireland, where, fortuitously, we were both attending the annual Feile Pan Cheilteach, an international Celtic festival of song, dance, talk and merrymaking. Night after night was filled with music, as we sang our heads off in Cornish, Welsh or Irish, or listened to the playing of the piobaireachd (‘pibroch’) in the piping competition, or watched those Irish girls in the embroidered dresses and green satin cloaks, with their faces set in concentration and their upper bodies stiff as trees, and their heels and toes clacking like little hammers. I have heard a Scots traditional singer, Mary-Ann Kennedy, sing Eilean a Cheo (‘Misty Isle*) with such simplicity and grace that it was impossible not to weep at the beauty of it. I have seen Brenda Wootton, a dear friend now departed, follow one of Dick Gendall’s haunting Cornish songs with a belly-shaking rendition of Tishomingo Blues. I remember, on one occasion, that the ferry back from Brittany was delayed and we had to spend a night sitting in the waiting room at Roscoff, while a lone Scots piper, swaying gently from the few drams he had taken to sustain himself, walked up and down the tiled floor playing Scotland the Brave (or something quite like it) without pause for five and a half hours. I remember a night in Lorient, Brittany, when my small male-voice choir. An Tryskell, arrived at a village sports centre to give a concert, advertised for seven o’clock. At around nine o’clock, when we had just about given up hope, a bereted, Gauloise-smoking caretaker, accompanied by a small spotted dog, came to unlock the building. By about ten o’clock, a couple of hundred people had sauntered over, after finishing their long dinners and bottles of vin de table. By three in the morning, we were really singing. By five in the morning, we had discovered that not only are Cornish and Breton very close sister languages, but that if you wait long enough, and slake your thirst

Sufficiently while you are waiting, they become one and the same language; indeed, that any language in the world at all is quite intelligible.

After such experiences, I think I can be forgiven for having developed an enduring enthusiasm for the vigour of Celtic culture. The Celts adore merriment, and they adore sadness; what they cannot abide is the dullness of the in-between. They are happy enough with the bustle of cities - talk to the lads and lasses who work the little passenger ferries in Boston Harbour - but they have a deeply ingrained passion for the quietness of wild places, the lonely moor, the long and narrow road winding down to the sea, the heather-drenched glens, the little islands where the black cattle come down to the beach and stand in the shallow waves. They revel in change, flux, movement. They like the weather that is coming, not the weather that is here, the fresh dampness in the wind, or seeing the rain as it comes, what the Irish call ‘smoke on the mountain’, or the first nip of frost, or the early morning dew curling into little wisps of steam in the strong sunlight of spring. They like loneliness and sorrow; they like company, and the craic (lively conversation), and singing through the night until you fall asleep in your chair.

All this culture comes from somewhere. It has nothing to do with race because there is no such thing as a Celtic race. Anyone who starts talking about ‘the Celtic blood’ is talking dangerous nonsense. It does have a lot to do with history, with language, with religiosity if not actually with religion, and with a sense of place and the numinous. This book attempts to explore one aspect of Celtic culture, namely the Celtic pursuit, in many different forms, of governance by a king or queen. It is not intended as any kind of polemic in favour of royalty or the monarchy; if anything, my personal political views tend towards republicanism and disestablishmentarianism. There is a very broad spectrum of experience to be found within this apparently narrow topic. There is a great deal of difference between a brutish, petty king of the Arvemi tribe in pre-conquest Gaul and an effete, kilted, feather-capped lord of the nineteenth-century Scottish Highlands, yet they do have some things in common. In this volume, I hope to discover at least in part what were the enduring qualities and characteristics which made the Celtic kingdoms, in their many different forms, such significant contributors to the world.