The St. Austin Review

Sample Article:  Who Are the Celts?

The Celts: A Modern History by Ian Stewart (Princeton University Press) is not, despite what the title might suggest, a history, modern or otherwise, of the Celts. It is instead a history of the idea of “the Celts”, which is indeed a modern one. Before the early eighteenth century, there was no suggestion that the peoples we now know as “the Celts”—the Irish, Scots, Welsh, Bretons, Cornish, and Manx—had anything to do with the Celtae or Keltoi of Classical writers.
The latter lived, or were said to have lived, in what is now France, Iberia, and the vicinity of the Alps including Northern Italy, with irruptions to sack Rome in 387 B.C. and assail the Greek shrine of Delphi in 279 B.C. They eventually established a colony at the opposite end of Europe from the Emerald Isle, in Anatolia in what is now Turkey. These were the Galatians to whom St. Paul addressed his Epistle. Archaeologically they are known from, or at least generally connected with, the Urnfeld culture of Southern Germany, and its successors, Hallstatt, named from finds in Austria and La Tène, named after a site in Switzerland.  Some artifacts attributable to these cultures have been found in the British Isles, but most authorities consider the cultures themselves to be of Central European origin.