The word ‘Celtic’ is primarily a linguistic term which is applied to a closely related group of dialects referred to as ‘Indo-European’. There is little doubt that the Celtic tribes of Europe were composed of different physical types, and that Celtic speech was adopted by or imposed upon large numbers of subjects. The Celts became dominant over most of Central Europe, and various groups of Celtic-speaking peoples migrated from there to other parts of the continent. When the Roman empire expanded, her legions came into direct confrontation with this “Celtic” heartland, and Caesar’s famous ‘Gallic Wars’ (58-51 BC) not only gives us a personal account of Gaul (modern-day France, Belgium, northern Italy and part of Germany) but of how the Romans extinguished its independence. It was quite possibly in response to Roman expansion that some Celtic-speaking groups crossed from continental Europe to the British Isles.

Yet the Roman destruction of Celtic power had been preceded by another, far more fundamental encounter. The intrusion of the Celts themselves into Europe must have been, as Professor Thomas Markey noted, “one of the most wrenching cultural collisions of all time, the clash between Indo-Europeans and non-Indo-Europeans in early Western Europe.”

What of the pre-Celtic inhabitants of Ireland? Markey pointed out that “Ireland was the final stronghold of the Megalithic peoples in the West, and the Celts who subsequently settled there were the last Indo-Europeans to come into contact with them.” These pre-Celtic people obviously didn’t disappear, but survived, and remained as the majority population. As Francis Byrne noted: “The earlier, non-Indo-European, population, of course, survived under the Celtic overlordship. One group in particular, known to the P-Celts as Pritani and to the Irish as Cruithni, survived into historical times as the Picts or ‘painted people’ of Scotland. The Cruithni were numerous in Ulster too, and the Loíges of Leinster and possibly the Ciarraige of Connacht and north Kerry belonged to the same people.”

Although it is now clear that the Celts were relative latecomers to Ireland, and that when they arrived here they most probably did so in small numbers, their presence has been accorded a remarkable prominence, not the least because of their introduction of a new language. The 1984 seminar held by the Irish Association of Professional Archaeologists, attended not only by archaeologists but representatives from linguistics and environmental studies, deliberated on the theme ‘The origins of the Irish’, and the moderator of the seminar pointed out: “An Irishman was defined as one who spoke either the earliest form of the Irish language or a language immediately ancestral to it. Such a definition then pertains to the appearance of Irish-speaking Celts and is not… to be confused with the arrival of the first people in Ireland.”

Thus the earlier, majority population of Ireland, who had inhabited the island for a greater length of time than that which separates the Celts from us today, were denied the epithet ‘Irish’ in favour of the Celts. The ‘earliest form of the Irish language’ referred to was not, as one might reasonably suppose, that spoken by the original inhabitants, but the specific language, now known as Gaelic, introduced by an incoming Celtic minority.

As far back as 1906 Eoin McNeill, founder of the Gaelic League and one of the most eminent of Irish historians, believed that his research had finally penetrated through the academic obsession with the Celts to allow us to acknowledge the vital part played in our heritage by the original inhabitants. He wrote that “the hitherto current account of pre-Christian Ireland has belittled and overclouded the vast majority of the Irish people for the glorification of a dominant minority,” and he felt he could now safely assert that “the one outcome of [these] studies has been to restore the majority to the historical place of honour from which they have been ousted for a thousand years.” He had obviously spoken too soon. The Celts have certainly contributed richly to the cultural legacy of the Irish, yet they are only one aspect of a heritage which is more ancient and varied than people are generally aware.

Ironically, it is through the very languages introduced by Indo-European peoples such as the Celts that we are now beginning to learn more about the pre-Celtic peoples who were finally to adopt such languages as their own. Heinrich Wagner wrote: “It is likely that the [Celtic invasions] did not involve large numbers of Indo-European-speaking peoples, a view which has led a number of scholars, including myself, to believe that in the British Isles Indo-European language as imposed by small bands of Celtic-speaking invaders from the Continent must have been influenced strongly by the speaking habits of a predominantly non-Celtic population.” So Gaelic would eventually become, not a pure Celtic language, but, as David Green described it, “simply the linguistic expression of the Irish people… a language made in Ireland.”

The 5th and 6th centuries in particular are known to have been a period of unusually rapid development in the Gaelic language, as shown by the contrast between the general language of Ogham inscriptions and the earliest Old Gaelic known from manuscripts. There is little doubt that this was due to the widespread adoption of the Gaelic speech by the original inhabitants and the passage of older words and grammatical forms into Gaelic. By this time, therefore, Gaelic had become, according to Heinrich Wagner, “one of the most bizarre branches of Indo-European” since “in its syntax and general structure it has many features in common with non-Indo-European languages.” These included Semitic and Hamitic influences.

Linguistic analysis is today affording us new insights into this intermingling of peoples. In studying the various branches of ‘Indo-European’, scholars had of necessity to define what it actually is — its permissible vocabulary and grammar — and thereby define what it is not — its impermissible vocabulary and grammar. This ‘impermissible vocabulary and grammar’ was obviously that borrowed from the pre-Indo-European inhabitants of Europe. As Thomas Markey explains: “No Indo-European language displays an acceptably Indo-European word for ‘apple’, a fruit that was an invaluable part of a primitive diet. The apple was presumably unknown to Indo-Europeans in their primordial homeland, wherever that was… We may conclude that, as nomadic herdsmen, the Indo-Europeans borrowed the apple, along with terms for it, from the Megalithic farmers… We now know that something like twenty-eight percent of the Germanic lexicon, including such common words as English folk, have non-Indo-European origins. The language handbooks that have been accepted as the standard for decades are now badly in need of extensive revisions.”

This linguistic study, according to Markey, has meant that “We are now equipped with a potent filter device, a negative definer of non-Indo-European in the West [and] the silence that has long surrounded the pre-Indo-Europeans has finally been made to speak.” Markey was able to identify certain fundamental differences between the two cultures. Pre-Indo-European society was of a matrifocal, non-stratified nature, based on a sedentary, horticultural lifestyle, where there existed advanced boat building and navigational techniques as well as a sophisticated knowledge of astronomy. Indo-European society, on the other hand, was of a patrifocal, stratified nature, with a nomadic lifestyle based on animal husbandry, and where there was a lack of boatbuilding and navigational techniques and only a rudimentary knowledge of astronomy. As Markey concludes: “Clearly, the Megalithic peoples gave more than they got. They lost their language, while the Indo-Europeans pillaged it for loans… The invader was technologically inferior to the resident.”

It was the discovery of iron around 800 BC which was to allow these Indo-European peoples to initiate a major technological revolution of their own, and Europe was to enter its Iron Age.

To be continued