What Does Celtic Even Mean? From the Ancient Celts to the Celtic Nations of Today
Channel: Celtic History Decoded
Date: 16/07/2023

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What Does Celtic Even Mean? From the Ancient Celts to the Celtic Nations of Today

Chapters:
0:00 What Does Celtic Even Mean? 
4:03 Celtic Languages 
5:30 Who Were the Ancient Celts?

Sources:

Barry Cunliffe – The Ancient Celts (2018: Oxford University Press)

Celts - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celts 

Celt: Britannica - https://www.britannica.com/topic/Kenyah 

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) Official Trailer #2 - Orlando Bloom Movie HD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbfMDwc4azU 

Philology - https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/philology

Celtic nations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_nations 

Julius Caesar – The Conquest of Gaul (Penguin Classics) 

What does Celtic even mean and is it still relevant today? In a famous speech in the 1960s to an academic audience mostly filled with Celtic specialists, J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of the Lord of the Rings books, remarked that “Celtic of any sort… is a magic bag, into which anything may be put, and out of which anything may come… Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not so much a twilight of the gods but as of the reason.” 

Although his remarks referred to linguistic etymologies specifically, as, after all, Tolkien was a Philologist, who studied language in oral and written historical sources, his eloquent and poetic remarks on Celtic raise an important question: what does Celtic even mean?

The first reference to the Celts came in 517 BC, when the Greek geographer, Hecataeus of Miletus, referred to a people living near Massilia (modern-day Marseille) in southern Gaul as the Κελτοί (Keltoi). Shortly after, in the 5th century BC, the Greek historian Herodotus again referred to the Keltoi, this time referring to peoples living around the source of the Danube in modern southwest Germany and in the far west of Europe. 
The etymology of Keltoi is debated. Some say it comes from a Indo-European word meaning stranger or enemy. Others say it comes from variations of the Indo-European word *kʲel, meaning to hide, to heat or to impel. Others suggest it meant the people or descendants of "the hidden one," noting that certain Gauls claimed descent from an underworld god. Yet others suggest it meant “the tall ones.” 

Despite its debated meaning, one important point to note is that the word Celt was the name the ancient Celts used for themselves, quite refreshing considering that the Romans and the Greeks coined the names of so many ancient peoples and we often don’t know what they called themselves. The Celts however called themselves Celts. 

That is perhaps one reason why the word Celtic has a magical quality to it as Tolkien said: it’s a direct connection to an ancient civilization that many people in Western Europe are connected too, and it’s a word that would have had a deep meaning to the ancient Celts. In the opening line to Caesar’s Commentaries on the Conquest of Gaul, the brutal Roman conquest that wiped out large parts of Celtic civilisation, Caesar wrote that: 

“Gaul comprises three areas, inhabited respectively by the Belgae, the Aquitani, and a people who call themselves Celts, though we call them Gauls.” 

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