Drinking was but a pretext for the really important businessthe talk, the stream of spoken language that was the source of all knowledge and all understanding. I ought not to live as I do, neglecting the wants of my own soul. With changes in topography, climate, cultivation patterns, language, culture, race, politics, and economics come changes in the role of drink and other intoxicants. At the farthest frontier of the Roman Empire, within the ancient Celtic warrior cultures in the wastes of ancient Britain, we move well away from the theater of ideas and into the theater of the most vivid action. There, meadfermented honey and waterhas replaced the fruit of the vine as the elixir of choice.
Celtic art owes much to Celtic thirst.
Maria Tymoczko, professor of comparative literature and an authority on Irish and Celtic literature, quotes this famous line by Celtic scholar Stewart Piggott when asked for a comment on the role of alcoholic beverages in ancient Britain. Piggott was referring, Tymoczko explains, to the high level of artistic expression with which the wandering Celts fashioned all manner of cauldrons, pitchers, cups, and other drinking vessels. But the observation also is applicable to Celtic literature. In the earliest poems of the great Welsh bardic tradition, which memorialize one extravagantly gory battle after another, the mead flows as copiously as the blood. It is the great folk tradition of drink, and it is captured in a small but exquisiteand surprisingly contemporary study by now retired UMass professor of anthropology Barbara Kerewski Halpern.