If
you’re reading this, that probably means you’ve purchased a copy of the latest Cthulhu
Invictus sourcebook from Golden Goblin Press: Britannia and Beyond,
a Call of Cthulhu guide to Britannia, Caledonia and Hibernia in the
Roman era. Thanks for your support of the book, and your interest in the subject.
Here,
I’ve detailed some of the thinking that went into writing my chapter, which is
focused on Iron-Age Ireland during the Antonine period, as well as describing and
detailing some of the many sources which informed my work.
Before
proceeding, I should acknowledge that I am neither an academic nor Irish (my
great-great-grandmother Ellen Brady was born in Country Clare, emigrating to
Australia after losing her family in An Gorta Mór, but that definitely doesn’t
make me Irish-Australian – I’m Australian through and through, for better or
worse).
In
writing about Ireland in the Roman era for Britannia and Beyond, I drew
instead on a great love for Irish music, history, mythology and culture,
fostered by three visits to Ireland to date (including two extended visits in
2019 and 2022) as well as several decades’ experience of writing and running
tabletop roleplaying games.
Irish
scholars will doubtless be horrified at some of the elisions I have made in
writing this chapter, for which I can only apologise. Some Irish readers may
also have cause for complaint; all I can offer are my apologies if I’ve got
anything seriously wrong. Feedback and constructive criticism are also welcome.
My
primary purpose in writing the Hibernia chapter was to be as historically
accurate as possible (albeit reflecting the fact that I’m a professional
writer, not a trained historian) while also providing a vivid, vibrant and
hopefully inspiring setting for Cthulhu Invictus games set in Ireland. This
is, after all, intended primarily an aid to collective storytelling rather than a
history book – in which case I can only hope experts in Irish prehistory and
mythology, as well as any Irish readers generally, will forgive any mistakes or
distortions.
History
vs Pseudohistory
One
of the earliest decisions I made in writing my chapter was to ignore the patchwork
pseudo-historical sources that allegedly detail Irish history from the creation
of the world through to the medieval period.
While
they’re undoubtedly entertaining, the ‘histories’ detailed in Lebor GabálaÉrenn (‘The Book of Invasions), Annála na gCeithre Máistrí (‘Annals
of the Four Masters’) and related sources are largely works of fiction – though
some would argue that they may nonetheless contain the occasional grain of
truth.
Even Táin Bó Cuailnge (‘The Cattle Raid of Cooley’), which was
once claimed to be “a window on the Iron Age” (to quote K. H. Jackson’s The
Oldest Irish Tradition, 1964) is now generally believed to be heavily
embellished, with countless classical allusions and references grafted onto its
early oral core. This was known to be the case even in the Medieval period,
with one of the transcribers of the Book of Leinster circa 1160 AD (which
contains the most complete version known of the Táin) calling the events
he had studiously copied “poetic figments”.
To
quote J.P. Mallory’s In Search of the Irish Dreamtime: Archaeology &
Early Irish Literature (Thames & Hudson, 2016) regarding the Táin:
“If we return to
the subject of historicity, we should realise by now that while we might argue
that mediaeval scribes may have believed that they were recording history, it
is probably fairer to say that at very best, they imagined they were writing
stories ‘based on actual events’. When they reached either within their memory
or on the shelves of their scriptorium for a choice simile from classical
literature, or wanted to gild their descriptions of their Secondary World with
material drawn from the Bible, Latin literature, or what Brother Brendan had
seen in one of the palaces of the Merovignians, they knew full well that they
were not writing out eyewitness accounts of past events. After all, in their
translations of Latin literature they did not hesitate to occasionally
Hibernicize their descriptions of weapons, clothes and burial.
“In the end the
early mediaeval Irish literati created a Secondary World that they passed off
as the Irish Iron Age. That they did a superb job is evident in the centuries
of scholars who have argued whether this imagined world was a real document
from Ireland's prehistoric past.”
Consequently, the Hibernian chapter of Britannia
and Beyond focuses to the best of my ability on historical fact as it is
known (with a caveat: much of the prehistory of ancient Ireland remains
frustratingly illusive) rather than dwelling on the stories of Ireland’s
settlement by Noah’s granddaughter Cessair and subsequent invaders the Muintir
Partholóin, Nemedians, Fir Bolg and Milesians.
Where such elements are included, e.g. as references
to the Tuatha dé Danann and their monstrous rivals the Fomóire, they have been
given an appropriately Lovecraftian twist.
Some
fragments of Iron Age Ireland doubtless remain in the Irish epics, and certainly
they can provide considerable inspiration for the individual Keeper, but
overall, I chose to minimalise my reliance on such texts as much as possible.
That
said, certain aspects of this imagined Irish Iron Age are simply too good to
ignore. Which is why, despite the evidence for chariots in the period being
“meagre at best,” (Mallory’s In Search of the Irish Dreamtime again,
Chapter Eight) I simply couldn’t resist including rules for chariot combat in
my chapter, even if the description of Cú Chulainn’s “scythed chariot” in the Táin
“certainly appears to be a borrowed literary device onto which has been
heaped a mountain of fantastic description” (Mallory, ibid).
Concerning
continuity
My
next hurdle was to ascertain whether or not I should stick faithfully to what was
previously written about Ireland for Call of Cthulhu to date. While
writing the earliest drafts of the Hibernia chapter in early 2021, I managed to
obtain a second-hand copy of Colin Dunlop’s excellent Miskatonic University
monograph Mysteries of Ireland (Chaosium, 2012) and also a copy of
Chaosium’s Strange Aeons II (2010), containing Eckhard Huelshoff’s
Irish-set scenario ‘To Hell or Connaught’.
As
a guide to Ireland in the 1920s Mysteries of Ireland is excellent,
though I disagreed with Dunlop’s decision to identity the monstrous, misshapen
Fomorians with H.P. Lovecraft’s Deep Ones. Dunlop’s identification is presumably
inspired by Peter Tremayne’s chilling short story ‘Daoine Domhain’ in Aisling
and other Irish Tales of Terror (Brandon, 1992), but from a linguistic
perspective, there are a few key reasons why such an identification feels wrong
to me.
Firstly,
the Fomorians or Fomori (Old Irish: Fomóire) were previously identified with
the ocean only because of a linguistic error.
As
noted by Dáithí O hOgáin in The Lore of Ireland: An Encyclopaedia of Myth,
Legend and Romance (The Boydell Press, 2006):
“Their
designation (earlier, Fomoiri) meant ‘underworld phantoms’, but from a
confusion of the archaic word mor or mór
(phantom) with muir (sea) they came to be known as sea pirates.”
(This
reference to sea pirates did make me briefly consider creating a dying tribe of
degenerate Neanderthals or similar early humans eking out a living on an island
or islands off Hibernia’s west coast, who periodically raid the mainland in
search of food or mates to replenish their bloodstock and which are called
Fomorians by those they raid, but I quickly abandoned the idea – primarily
because I was already well over my word count. If the idea appeals to the
Keeper, they are welcome to reinstate it.)
Similarly,
Patricia Monaghan in The Encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology and Folklore
(Facts on File, 2003) notes:
“Earlier
interpretations of them [the Fomorians] as sea monsters or pirates have been
discounted as based on false etymology, for the mor
in their names is not the word for ‘sea’ but for ‘phantom’. More commonly they
are now interpreted as the remnant ghosts of ancient divinities whose people,
subjugated in early invasions, remained in Ireland and intermingled (and
intermarried) with the invaders.”
This
notion of the Formori being “the remnant ghosts of ancient divinities” and
“underworld phantoms,” coupled with French linguist and literary scholar’s
Marie-Louise Sjoested linking the Fomorians to “the powers of chaos, ever
latent and hostile to cosmic order,” in Gods and Heroes of the Celts
(Methuen, 1949) led me to identify the Fomóire with Lovecraft’s chthonic Great
Old Ones, monstrous beings out of time whose memories linger on as horror-haunted
myth even in the Antoine Period.
 |
| The Fomorians, as depicted by John Duncan (1912). |
I also chose to ignore the events and characters of Huelshoff’s
‘To Hell or Connaught’ scenario in Strange Eons II, though for more
personal reasons, given that the scenario casts the players of members of
Cromwell’s invading New Model Army of 1649.
When
the scenario begins, the investigators are relaxing after ‘conquering’
Drogheda, with Huelshoff completely glossing over the massacre of thousands of
men, women and children by Cromwell’s troops after the town’s walls were
breached. Frankly, I find the whole scenario a trifle offensive – if nothing
else, it suggests the author has at best a shallow knowledge of Irish history,
at worst a belief that Cromwell’s invasion was somehow a ‘civilising force’
rather than a repugnant act of colonialism.
Huelshoff’s
decision to focus on a shape-shifting Serpent Man (a former enemy of St Patrick)
as the scenario’s primary protagonist also rankled, given I wished to downplay
the prominence of Serpent Men in my chapter where possible.
The
Serpent Men have already been described as playing a prominent role in nearby
Caledonia in Stuart Boon’s excellent Shadows Over Scotland (Cubicle 7,
2011) so it felt repetitive to award them so similar a role in Ireland in the
Roman period. Nor did I wish to suggest St Patrick’s ‘driving the snakes out of
Ireland’ was in any way a metaphor for a battle against the Serpent Men, given
the regrettable destruction of the pagan way of life that followed Patrick’s
eventual return to Ireland circa 433 AD. And speaking of St Patrick…
Where
is Crom Cruach?
The
dark god Crom Cruach (Old Irish: Cromm Crúaich) was allegedly a pagan god of
ancient Ireland propitiated by blood sacrifice, and whose idol (located on Magh
Slécht aka ‘The Plain of Prostrations’ in County Cavan) was said to be cast
down by Patrick himself.
In
the guise of a monstrous deity, Crom Cruach also appears in the comic book
series Sláine (1983 – 2019) and the acclaimed Cartoon Saloon animation, The
Secret of Kells (2009), among other more recent sources.
 |
| Crom Cruah in Cartoon Saloon's The Secret of Kells. |
However,
historical evidence for the existence of Crom Cruach is thin. St Patrick
himself makes no mention of this deity and its demon-haunted idol in his 5th
century Confessio – an unusual oversight, one would think. Nor are the deity
and Patrick’s battle with it mentioned in two important 7th century biographies
about Saint Patrick. In fact the existence of the idol and Patrick’s battle
with its attendant demon do not appear until considerably later in the
mediaeval period.
Referencing
the growing influence of ‘the pseudohistorical movement’ that spawned the likes
of Lebor Gabála Érenn (‘The Book of Invasions’), Mark Williams’ Ireland’s
Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth (Princeton University Press,
2016) notes:
“In the ninth-century
Tripartite Life of Patrick, the saint casts down a great idol of the pagan
Irish, known as Cenn Crúach (‘Bloody Head); the demon who inhabit the image
properly appears, but Patrick curses him and casts him into Hell. There is no
evidence that Cenn Crúach was once a genuine Irish deity. He is never numbered
amongst the Túatha Dé, who (as seen) are never depicted as the recipients of
human worship; this, in contrast, is Cenn Crúach’s main function.”
Williams
continues:
“In the dindshenchas
[early Irish texts recounting the origins of place-names and traditions
concerning events and characters associated with the places in question] the
idol, under the variant name Crom Crúach (‘Bloody Crookback’) is said … to have
been propitiated with the sacrifice of first-born children in exchange for good
yields of milk and grain. This sinister figure is plainly inspired by Biblical
images of bloodthirsty pagan deities like Moloch, just as depictions of druids
in early Irish saints’ lives owe more to the Biblical priests of Ba’al,
opponents of the prophet Elijah, than to native tradition.”
Consequently,
I have chosen to ignore the existence of Crom Cruach and its cult in my
interpretation of prehistoric Ireland. Keepers wishing to include the existence
of such a cult, and whichever Lovecraftian deity might be behind it, are of
course welcome to reinstate it as required.
Anachronisms
One
of the greatest challenges in writing about prehistoric Ireland is that there’s
so little documented history to draw from. Unlike continental Europe and the
UK, where the historical record begins with the Roman invasion, Irish
prehistory extends from the Palaeolithic, or Old Stone Age, all the way through
to the coming of Christianity circa 400 AD. Consequently, without written
records to draw upon, a certain degree of imagination is required when writing
about the Irish peoples circa 145 AD.
For
this reason, I’ve extrapolated from a number of later sources in order to
describe the fundamentals of Irish society in the Roman period; anachronisms
abound in my chapter as a result.
My
reference to Brehon law is a prominent example. The earliest examples of
codified Brehon law date from the 7th and 8th centuries AD, far later than the
historical period in which Britannica and Beyond is set – but frankly,
without wholesale invention of an imagined Irish society of the day, I felt I
had little choice.
Creatively
and historically, this decision also felt justified given there are suggestions
that Brehon law may provide “a somewhat blurred window on the pre-Christian
legal system” of Ireland, to quote David D. Friedman (Legal Systems VeryDifferent From Ours, independently published, 2019).
For
similar reasons I’ve included basic descriptions of early Irish family and
tribal structures (such as the fine and túath) which date from the
same period as Brehon Law; I also referenced the existence of five Irish
provinces rather than the modern four (referencing politician/historian Eoin
MacNeill’s claim that Éire’s division into five provinces is “the oldest
certain fact in the political history of Ireland”) despite the anachronistic nature
of such details. I can only hope that my decision to do so is not too jarring
for any Irish readers or experts in Irish history who peruse Britannica and
Beyond.
The
Irish language
The
use of contemporary Irish language in the chapter is something I definitely
wish I could have addressed had I more time and greater access to Ancient Irish-speaking
academics during my research and writing.
The
Irish language has gone through several phases to end up with the language we hear
today. Its antecedents are Ancient or Primitive Irish (circa 5th century AD), Old
Irish (6th century), Middle Irish (10th century) and
Classical Modern Irish (1200-1600 AD) which eventually evolved into the Modern
Irish spoken today. But what language was spoken in Hibernia circa 145 AD?
The
clumsy phrase “Proto-Irish” may have to suffice to describe the Goidelic
language of this period. Given this language was at an early stage of
development, having only split from the Proto-Celtic language relatively recently
in game terms (circa 900 BC) I’ve also theorised that Goidelic speakers of
Proto-Irish may be able to communicate with the Brythonic speakers of southern
Britannia (i.e. Roman-era Wales, Cornwall and England) provided they can roll an
extreme Language (Own) success, but that even then certain nuances of the
conversation would be lost. Linguistic experts will doubtless be rolling their
eyes at this point – sorry!
The
bottom line is that I’ve gone with contemporary Irish language as a rule, when
Irish words were required, given that I didn’t have access to a student of
Ancient Irish until late 2022, well after I’d submitted the third draft of my
chapter to the Golden Goblin powers-that-be.
What
else was left out?
The
short answer to this question is: “so much”. My original brief for the Hibernia
chapter requested a 5,000 chapter. The first draft I submitted was 7,956 words
(not including NPC statistics). After considerable cutting and rewriting, the
final draft I submitted to editors Jeffrey Moeller, Lisa Padol and Matthew Pook
was still over 7,300 words. My apologies to publisher Oscar Rios and the editorial
triumvirate for my verbosity, and my thanks for their forbearance!
One
element I excised between the first and final drafts was intended to contrast
the negative stereotypes of Hibernia referenced in the Classical world (with which more literate Invictus investigators may well be familiar) with more
contemporary findings discovered thanks to the science of archaeogenetics.
This
quote from the ancient Greek geographer and historian Stabo, from his Geographica
(first published circa 7 BC) nicely illustrates that intention:
“Concerning this
island I have nothing certain to tell, except that its inhabitants are more
savage than the Britons, since they are man-eaters as well as heavy eaters,
and since, further, they count it an honourable thing, when their fathers die,
to devour them, and openly to have intercourse, not only with the other women,
but also with their mothers and sisters; but I am saying this only with the
understanding that I have no trustworthy witnesses for it…”
Hibernia
has long been the subject of wild speculation in the Roman world, although surprisingly,
Strabo’s apparent calumnies have recently been shown to have some basis in
fact.
DNA
testing of skeletal remains from the Newgrange passage tomb (the results of
which were published
in Nature in June 2020) revealed that
at least one member of the Neolithic elite entombed circa 3,200 BCE was the
result of first-degree incest. Distant
relatives of the same man were also entombed in the Neolithic cemeteries of
Carrowmore and Carrowkeel on the far side of the country, suggesting the
existence of a ruling dynasty whose members ruled Ireland for at least 500
years – and also recalling the ritual
incest practiced by Egyptian royal families circa
1,550 BCE to 1,292 BCE
 |
| UNESCO World Heritage site Newgrange. Photograph: Photo: Ezra Nahmad. |
By
the Antonine period, salacious stories such as those told by Strabo are still
widely shared by Roman historians and geographers throughout the Empire,
although the Hibernians of the day led vastly different lives to those of
their Neolithic forebears.
Strabo’s
quote was one of several I had to drop from the Hibernia chapter in order to
reduce the word count and focus on more immediate aspects of Roman-era Irish
life. For example, there were several references I found to homosexuality being
practiced among the Celts without any hint of the shame associated with the
practice in the Roman Empire, whose citizens
viewed “any form of [sexual] passivity as unmanly and fundamentally
incompatible with the conquering warrior ethos required by the expansionist
Roman state”. (In other words, the Romans thought that being the top in a
male-male relationship was fine but being a bottom was shameful.)
These
quotes include:
“It is well known
that all the Celts are fond of disputes and that homosexuality is not
considered shameful amongst them.”
-
Strabo, Geographica
“…the Celts and
such other races as have openly held in honour passionate friendship between
males…”
-
Aristotle, Politics II
“Although their
wives are comely, they have very little to do with them, but rage with lust, in
outlandish fashion, for the embraces of males. It is their practice to sleep
upon the ground on the skins of wild beasts and to tumble with a catamite on
each side. And the most astonishing thing of all is that they feel no concern
for their proper dignity, but prostitute to others without a qualm the flower
of their bodies; nor do they consider this a disgraceful thing to do, but
rather when anyone of them is thus approached and refuses the favour offered
him, this they consider an act of dishonour.”
-
Diodorus Siculus, Library of
History
These
quotes inspired the creation of one of my NPCs, the Hibernian prince Cunovali
of the Ebdani, who despite having a bit of a thing for Roman men is also likely
to fly into a rage if his sexual advances are rebuffed by one of the
investigators.
Prehistory
vs myth
One
short section that was cut by the editors due to my exceeding the word count referred to the earliest known human
occupation of Ireland.
Previously,
the settlement of Ireland was believed to have begun in the Mesolithic (Middle
Stone Age) circa 7,000 BC. However, more recent discoveries have pushed that
date back considerably.
In 2016, evidence of a bear
bone showing evidence of knife cuts suggested humans
have inhabited Ireland as early as 12,500 years ago (circa 10,477 BC).
More
recently, the examination of reindeer bones that also exhibited
signs of butchery pushed that date back still further
to 33,000 years ago (circa 30,980 BC)
during the Palaeolithic, or Old Stone Age.
I can see why these details were cut – this deep
history is not really relevant to the Antonine period – but I felt it was worth
referencing enough to mention it here.
Another
lovely quote I’d originally included in the section regarding Irish bog bodies
also had to be excised from the Hibernia chapter:
“Some bogs are
quite shallow and pale submerged corpses might sometimes have remained clearly
visible, their places of interment perhaps regarded as a source of both
reverence and fear for the for the living. Over time, the Sphagnum acted on the
bog bodies … causing them to take on eerie, inhuman qualities: turning the skin
to deep brown leather and dyeing the hair red, as if the spirits of the
Otherworld were claiming the dead for their own.”
-
Miranda Aldhouse-Green, Bog Bodies
Uncovered (Thames & Hudson, 2015)
Aldhouse-Green’s
book on bog bodies is highly recommended as background for any Keeper setting Call
of Cthulhu games in northern Europe during the Iron Age; a wonderful
addition to a literature that also includes Danish archaeologist P.V. Glob’s foundational
text on the subject, The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved (Faber &
Faber, 1969, originally published by Gyldendal, 1965) which admittedly is now
somewhat out of date, and the somewhat speculative The Life and Death of a
Druid Prince by Anne Ross and Don Robins (Touchstone, 1991), which is
focused on the discovery of Lindow Man in England in 1984.
On
the subject of the Irish Otherworld, sadly by the time I’d detailed Ireland’s
history, society, martial culture, geography and other Hibernian elements for
my chapter, I didn’t have room for an extended section on Irish beliefs
regarding ghosts, the supernatural and the aes sídhe (the faeries).
However, given that the subject has been widely explored in numerous books to
date, and is also detailed in Chapter 10 of Britannia and Beyond, as
well as in the excellent Cthulhu Britannica: Folklore (Stuart Boon and
James Desborough, Cubicle 7, 2012) I hope that this deficiency can be forgiven.
Other
references
Ptolemy
of Alexandria’s map of Ireland (circa 140 AD) obviously provided me with the Romanised
names for many of the tribes, settlements and geographic features of Iron Age
Ireland.
Additional
scholarship by R. Darcy & William Flynn (‘Ptolemy's
map of Ireland: a modern decoding’, Irish
Geography, Volume 41, issue 1, 2008) gave further insights into a more
accurate identification of locations and landmarks than was possible in
Ptolemy’s day.
Similarly,
the essay ‘Ptolemy’s
tribes of Ireland (revised)’ by Martin Counihan (2019) helped
colour the descriptions of Ireland’s warring tribes, such as the “notoriously warlike”
Darini (which draws on Counihan’s suggestion of an etymological link between
their tribal name and “a corresponding Gaulish word meaning ‘agitated’, or ‘ardent’,
or ‘violent’”), the “boastful Velabri” (“Velabri meant something like
“the very boastful people” in a culture where boastfulness and arrogance were
regarded as noble virtues”) and the “famed horsemen the Ebdani”.
Here,
however, I took inspiration from Counihan while rejecting one of his
suggestions, which was that the people known as the ‘Ebdani’ should actually be
called the ‘Epdani’ (“Ep is simply the Gaulish or Brittonic
pronunciation of the Irish word ech, ‘horse’, so Ptolemy was referring
to the ‘cavaliers’”). There is no letter P in ancient Irish, so calling the Ebdani
the Epdani seemed problematic – thus I maintained Counihan’s suggestion
of this tribe being great horsemen but stuck with Ptolemy’s original spelling.
Concerning
the Celts
One
of the most challenging aspects of researching and writing this chapter was
what to do about the conundrum of the Celts.
The
claim that the disparate peoples of Ireland, Wales and Scotland (as well as the
Isle of Man, Brittany and Cornwall) are connected by their shared Celtic
language and heritage was first proposed in the 16th century.
In
The Origins of the Irish, Chapter Nine (Thames & Hudson, 2013), J. P.
Mallory writes: “…until the time of George Buchannan [Scottish poet &
scholar, 1506 to 1582], no-one in Ireland ever imagined that they shared any
particular kinship with their British neighbours…”
Buchanan
was the author of “a glorious polemic” which scorned the “psuedohistories
hitherto accepted as genuine,” according to Jean Manco’s Blood of the Celts (Thames
& Hudson, 2015).
“Using Classical sources which
recorded the Late Iron Age expansion of the Gauls, he reasoned that they also
spread into Britain. He not only recognized that place-names incorporating -brig
and -dunum were Celtic in origin, but argued for them being spread from
Gaul.” (Blood of the Celts, Chapter 10).
So
certainly there’s evidence for Celtic peoples in Britain. But what about
Ireland?
While
the concept of a ‘Celtic peoples’ has become deeply rooted in the popular
imagination, there is no archaeological evidence for either an invasion of
Ireland by the European Celts nor a mass migration of the Celts into Ireland.
 |
| Cú Chulainn Rising His Chariot into Battle, J.C. Lyendecker (1911). |
Instead,
what the DNA record shows is that the most recent influx of people into Ireland
occurred during the Bronze Age with the arrival of the Bell-Beaker People circa
3,000 to 2,500 BC. It was this wave of early farmers (whose origins lay in the
steppes north of the Black Sea) who supplanted the older Neolithic culture and
from who, according to paleogenetic research, some 88% of contemporary Irish
DNA derives.
So
from where does the Celtic influence in Irish culture derive? Modern research
suggests that the existing Irish aristocracy of the Iron Age (the descendants
of the Bell-Beaker people) began to adopt the international La Tène design
style they knew from trade, with language and other cultural signifiers
following – and then slowly the rest of the country adopted the same culture.
Or as the archaeologist Simon Jones once put it, “Celtic art … is not a marker
of ethnic identity but of status, wealth, and power”.
It’s
also been proposed that small groups of Celts – a small aristocratic warrior
class wielding superior, Iron Age weapons – did establish themselves in some
parts of the country, dominating, leading and eventually interbreeding with the
existing Bronze Age inhabitants, but never in numbers large enough to leave an
archaeological record.
Regardless
of which hypothesis is true, it’s also worth noting that “the Irish La Tène [culture]
was restricted to the northern two-thirds of the island while Munster was
engaged in an Iron Age that did not privilege the La Tène art style,” (Mallory,
The Origins of the Irish, Chapter Six) suggesting that perhaps small populations
of the older, Neolithic peoples of Ireland lingered longer in Ireland’s
south-west.
All
this considered, why do I also describe the Hibernians of the Antonine period
as Celtic and use a number of Celtic cultural signifiers and traditions (e.g.
clothing, religion and sexuality) in reference to the culture of the day?
The
simple answer is that it’s just easier that way. Think of it as a kind of
linguistic shorthand, even if it’s not entirely factual. All of which is why I
wrote in the Hibernia chapter that circa 500 BC, the Celts arrived in Ireland
and “settled the land almost by osmosis, via a cultural infusion of new language
and artforms rather than an active invasion”.
The
bottom line is: the Iron Age Irish arguably aren’t actually Celtic at all –
they’ve just adopted various Celtic cultural signifiers including art and
language – the latter possibly being a lingua franca that seems to have
been spoken up and down Europe’s Atlantic coast and remnants of which survive
in Ireland, Scotland and Wales to this day.
Apologies
to any readers whose Celtic dreams I’ve just shattered – and happy roleplaying
in Hibernia.
