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UK Holidays - The Last of the Celts
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List Price: $22.00
Our Price: $17.16
Your Save: $ 4.84 ( 22% )
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Manufacturer: Yale University Press
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 909.04916
EAN: 9780300115352
ISBN: 0300115350
Label: Yale University Press
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 432
Publication Date: 2006-03-30
Publisher: Yale University Press
Studio: Yale University Press
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Editorial Reviews:
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Travelling throughout the remote Celtic world, award-winning author Marcus Tanner describes the relentless pressure on Celtic communities to assimilate and warns that a distinct Celtic identity may not survive for another generation—a sobering loss that would impoverish us all.
"Tanner has concluded we must resign ourselves to the fact that Celticism is done, over, finis. He proves it in a very good and special book that every prodigal and true Celt should read and try to prove wrong."—Malachy McCourt, Washington Post Book World
"Lively. . . . [A] thoughtful book."—Publishers Weekly
"An exceptional journey into the remarkable cultural history of the Celtic people. . . . [Tanner’s] experience reads like a travelogue and an insightful history with an emphasis on cultural heritage."—Raymond L. Flynn, Boston Sunday Herald
"[An] angry, elegiac and meticulously researched book."—Christian Century
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Good, Despite Deceptive Premise.
Comment: The author writes eloquently about the decline of a culture that by and large was a 16th-18th century creation by the likes of George Buchanan. He correctly points out that the decline came just as much from within as from without.
Nontheless, I highly enjoyed the detailed analysis. "However, I still recommend Malcolm Chapman's Celts: The Construction Of A Myth" & John Collis' "The Celts: Origins, Myths, & Reinventions" as a balance to Mr. Tanner's fine book."
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Celtic Past, Present & Future
Comment: Tanner has written a remarkable survey of the present-day Celtic nations and their generally dying languages. His description of survivals of pre-Christian rites and religion among the Celts might have benefited from reference to James Frazer's 1922 work The Golden Bough; these survivals among Celts were and are paralleled by survivals elsewhere in Europe and beyond. A non-English writer might have said a little more about the effect on the Irish nation of the Great Famine (and London officials' inattention to it), as well as government's repression of the Scottish Highlanders after 1745. His pessimism about chances for future survival of Celtic languages is well founded. As he says, however, Cornish is making something of a comeback, and last year, when Mr. Tanner's book was published, a Member of Parliament swore allegance to the Queen in Cornish for the first time. (Tanner notes that the Liberals are strong in Cornwall; he might have noted that all four Members of Parliament from Cornwall are Liberal Democrats.)
The above are only minor comments on a fine, well written book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: An interesting and important viewpoint
Comment: Although I argue with the title of the book the author makes a strong case concerning the encroachments on that which makes Celtic culture unique. Although I could make alternative arguements that Celtic culture has morphed into what is now modern Europe, the author is concerned with such things as the dying Celtic languages and customs. The case he makes is quite a strong and convincing one. Pan-Celticists hang on to you hats but don't huff and puff just yet. The author is concerned with the destruction of what we have come to know as Celtic culture but to my mind this in no way runs contrary to the evidence that much of Europe actually sprung from Celtic culture and a fair-minded person should not see this book as an attack on those theories.
This is more of a call to arms and a much needed one.
Customer Rating:
Summary: fantastic
Comment: This is a fantastic book which stands out among so many other romanticized works on the Celtic world. Occasionally, it seems as if the author's desire to discredit romantic views of Celtic culture move past healthy cynicism to outright negativism. I am thinking specifically of his chapter on western Ireland. Frankly, however, "the Irish mystique" is well due for some deflating. This willingness to criticize well-loved myths is generally very refreshing, and it does not diminish his obvious love of these country's cultures and history.
"Last of the Celts" should also be admired for the author's focus on ALL of the Celtic world (aside, arguably, from Galacia). How often does one have occasion to read about the Isle of Man and Cornwall alongside "giants" of the Celtic world like Ireland and Scotland? For me, the chapters on these overlooked places were the highlight of the book, as the Celtic identities of these places are real, but not as well defined or as obvious as those in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland.
As a final comment: Ive only briefly been to Ireland, and never to any other part of the British Isles. Therefore, I cannot offer an alternate view of Celtic culture in these places. I have, however, lived in Brittany for two years. Marcus Tanner's long chapter on Brittany is far and away the best writing that Ive ever seen about the Bretons. The chapter is poetic and sad, particularly when he writes about the dwindling population of native speakers and their ambivalent feelings towards the death of their language. The author discusses weaknesses of the Breton cultural revival that are almost always downplayed or ignored. This is a fabulous book, and while it is full of criticisms, it is also full of love for the Celts and their customs, and their histories.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A gloomy survey of the ebb of the Celtic tide
Comment: Marcus Tanner offers an extended eulogy, stripped of sentimentality, for the languages of those peoples predating the Anglo-Saxons in Britain. The sheer timespan of that last clause, from our 21st century perspective, shows how durable has been the legacy of a language-group that we don't even know the true name for-only that many of us descend from varied ethnicities who shared related systems of communication, dating back thousands of years. Even the name Celt is a Greek invention. Defining the Celtic, then, depends upon its clash with the foreigner; so much that Cornwall and Wales owe their names to what the Saxons called the `Other', those outside the common-wealth, those un-familiar, those pushed back to, as a Cornish author lamented over two hundred years ago, `about the cliff and the sea'.
Notice that Tanner, in looking for the remnants of those who speak or revive Celtic languages, differentiates speech from the material culture of the six nations he explores. He visits the Scots Isles, Conamara, West Belfast, the Isle of Man, North and South Wales, Brittany, and finally the outlying colonies in Canada's Maritimes and Argentina's Patagonia. While he finds music, say in Cape Breton, vibrant, there Scots Gaelic, despite the murmur of tourist brochures, will be far less heard-spoken by at most 500 people. Brittany and Galway certainly cater to cultural tourism, and hawk their Keltic Krafts diligently, but in these more ancient redoubts, too, Tanner finds growing indifference to the language's perpetuation. Over and over, he notes, outsiders-those who have taken as adults to learning Celtic languages-find themselves resented, marginalised, or dismissed by natives embarrassed to speak to strangers, ashamed of their own lack of fluency, or determined to let their language die a quiet death in their homes rather than in public.
The conclusions he raises will depress those for whom cultural revivals portend linguistic renaissance. The strongest part of the book, in fact, is its introduction. Tanner notes how, since the entry of clerical control from Rome in early mediaeval times, revivals have occurred! Monks eager to draw a lineage rooted in native genealogies manufactured branches for those grafting papal foliage onto arguably indigenous Catholic varietals.
Anglo-Saxon and Norman invaders invented Celtic origins for their dynasties and legends; Reformers and Romanticists followed after Catholicism had succumbed to first Protestants and then the cult of nature-these in turn sought antiquarian justification for their authority. Finally, the New Age/Wicca/ecological movements have manufactured a spuriously feminist, magickal, and pacifist kingdom in which an alienated urban, affluent, Western European consumer can recapture a realm of vegan, polysexual, pagan lifestyles.
But we already know what to expect. His preface concludes rueing the label given the Celts by so many for so long: dreamers denied political victory, quaint and charming, content to live as Tolkienesque `eternal elves of the West'. He does not mention that even the elves left at the end of the 3rd age.
And it seems that the Celts too are departing, and their ancient tongues, upon which the linguist JRR Tolkien in part had invented his own array of fictional but linguistically correct tongues, will be as removed from our future reality as those of Middle-Earth's. People may learn Breton as they do Elvish or Esperanto, but as a community language, Tanner predicts, it will be as dead as Manx or the three debated re-versions of Cornish.
He ends his forward with a poignant panorama. The Celtic sea ebbs, first into pools, now into puddles. Where can we immerse when these last splashes dessicate and evaporate?
For, as Tanner's scholarship (if too often rather undigested; names-dates-clerical minutiae diminishes the pace of much of this book--down one star) demonstrates, no continuous territory remains over which a Celtic language is spoken. We see this in the broken GaeltachtaÃ, the loss of Welsh and Scots regional cohesion, the disappearance of any Breton-speaking heartland, and the nearly extinct numbers of speakers of Welsh in Patagonia and Gaelic in Canada. On the other hand, many whom Tanner interviews simply shrug that this demonstrates a Darwinian natural selection. The fittest languages remain, English, French, or Spanish in these cases. Why, after all, keep a minority language as a curiousity when no monoglots still exist in any Celtic tongue? What's the value, economically, educationally, emotionally, of holding on to an unwieldy, unremunerative, and unattractive heirloom?
(P.S. For guardedly more optimistic views on the future of Irish, see James McCloskey's Voices Silenced and Ciaran MacMurcaidh's Who Needs Irish? An earlier, more optimistic survey joining the Celtic fringe language revivals to 60s/70s activism was taken by Peter Berresford Ellis, The Celtic Revolution, from the Welsh publishers Y Lolfa. See also their The Welsh Extremist, by Ned Thomas.)
(Excerpted from "Eternal elves of the West" via the on-line journal from Belfast, The Blanket.)
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