- Introduction -
ethnically definable groups. The three main categories of evidence for the ancient
Celts may overlap or correlate in certain respects, but each contains its own para-
meters specific to itself.
Ancient literary sources, archaeological evidence and, to a lesser extent, language,
all contrive to present us with a picture of a Celtic world which, in its heyday (the
later first millennium BC), stretched from Ireland and Spain in the west and Scotland
in the north to Czechoslovakia in the east and northern Italy in the south and even
beyond Europe to Asia Minor. But we need to examine the nature of that Celtic
culture and how it expanded from its original central European heartlands. When
we speak of Celtic expansion over Europe, how far do we perceive this in terms of
vast folk movements? Classical writers refer to marauding bands of Celts sacking
Rome in the early fourth century BC, Delphi in the early third century, and to the
establishment of the Celtic Galatians in Asia Minor at the same time. But some Celtic
expansion was surely the result of the spread of fashions, ideas and traditions at least
as much as of actual ethnic Celts.
A problem which is of the same order of magnitude as the origin of the Celts is
what happened to this great European culture. The Roman Empire in the west
disintegrated during the fifth century AD and with that collapse of centralized power
the Celts also apparently disappeared from all but a few peripheral regions in the
extreme west. The areas of Europe previously under Roman influence, and in which
Celtic and Roman culture had merged, were overrun by a new Germanic culture
which seems largely to have obliterated Celtic tradition in central Europe, Gaul and
much of Britain. But it is questionable how different these 'free' Germanic peoples
were, in ethnic terms, from the original Celts, although they spoke a different
language. After the collapse of Roman power, the western areas that had been on the
fringe of Celtic tradition became its focus and remain its focus: Ireland, Scotland,
Wales and Brittany. Only there (together with Cornwall and the Isle of Man) did
Celtic languages survive, and it is these areas which, during the later first and earlier
second millennium AD, produced a vernacular Celtic mythic tradition on the one
hand, and literary and archaeological evidence for early western Christianity on the
other.
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