John Waddell’s new book, a beautifully illustrated historiography of Celtic Iron Age studies, is a very valuable addition to the literature. To begin, Waddell discusses Celtic identity as debated territory, stating that, for him, a Celt is someone who speaks a Celtic language: allowing the term its broadest definition. Despite this, the book is most focused on pre-Roman Iron Age Europe.
Chapter 1 integrates early Irish texts (7th-11th centuries) with the origins of Celtic linguistics (16th-18th centuries) in an elegant discussion of 11th-century genealogies that document an Irish descent from three migratory groups (Galeóin, Fir Domnann, and Fir Bolg). Settlement by Míl from Spain was also recorded: ‘the people who came to Ireland before the Gaels’, their own origins being in Scythian Europe.
In Chapter 2, Waddell presents the 16th-century translation of De Bello Gallico as a turning point from which George Buchanan (1506-1582) links pre-Latin languages in Britain and Gaul, and between Ireland and Spain. There is a very fine run-through of ‘eccentric’ 18th-century Celtic studies – viewed as a struggle between early scholarship and the creativity of Romanticism.
