The literature of the Celts : its history and romance / by Magnus Maclean.

  • Magnus MacLean
Date:
1902
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The literature of the Celts : its history and romance / by Magnus Maclean. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    hair. Their remains have been found in caves, and in what are known to science as the Neolithic or Stone Age barrows. And they present types of humanity widely differing from the succeeding so-called Aryans.1 But beyond their material survivals, and the people who were supposed to have been descended from them, there is absolutely no record of these vanished races. T hey belong to pre-historic times. So do the Celts in great part, but unlike their prede- cessors they have emerged in history, and projected them- selves on its pages to this day. They have stepped out of the impenetrable haze, and appear at the opening of the written drama of Europe. History finds them for the first time located about the upper reaches of the Danube, in the lands corresponding to modern Bavaria, Wurtemburg, Baden, and the country drained by the Maine to the east of the Rhine. The idea of an ingress from Asia has lately been abandoned. Research seems to have effectively exploded it.2 They were barbarians from our point of view, not savages ; not civilised, but apparently a good stage onward from earlier types. It was they who gave names to many of the rivers and mountains of Europe—“ names which are poems,” says Matthew Arnold, “ and which imitate the pure voices of nature.” Hyperboreans they seemed to have been called by the original Greeks, but since the time of Hecataeus and Herodotus, that is, from about 500 B-c-> they came to be known to the classic writers as icekrau or rceXroL—a name which at that early period the Greeks applied in- discriminately to all the people of north and west Europe who were not Iberians. 1 “In Europe the ancient races were all, according to Schaafliausen, ‘lower in the scale than the rudest living savages,’ they must therefore have differed to a certain extent from any existing race.”—Darwin’s Descent of Man, chap. vii. p. 281. 2 “There is no proof of any migration of Asiatics into Europe west of the basin of the Dnieper down to the time of Attila.”—Huxley.
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