Few cultural movements have transformed a nation’s sense of itself as profoundly as the Celtic revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Beginning with the antiquarian labors of a handful of scholars in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, and culminating in the great literary and artistic movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the revival rediscovered the older Celtic heritage, transformed it into a central element of the national and cultural identity of the modern Celtic peoples, and laid the intellectual and political foundations for the modern cultural institutions that continue to shape the Celtic identity of the modern nations and the Celtic presence in modern popular culture.
This page is part of the broader survey of Celtic legacy today and examines the antiquarian background of the revival, the controversial figure of James Macpherson and the Ossianic controversy, the work of Edward Lhuyd and the Welsh antiquarians, the literary and artistic achievements of the Irish and Welsh revivals, the founding of the modern Eisteddfod and the Gorsedd, and the broader European context of the Romantic Celt.
The Antiquarian Background
The modern rediscovery of the Celtic past began in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when antiquarian scholars in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland began to collect and study the older manuscript traditions of their regions. The work of these scholars, who were often clergymen, lawyers, and physicians with a passionate interest in the past, was the foundation on which the later Celtic revivals would be built. The great collectors of the seventeenth-century Irish tradition included Sir James Ware, whose Antiquities of Ireland made the Irish manuscript tradition available to a wider audience for the first time.
The most important of the nineteenth-century Irish scholars was Eugene O’Curry, whose great edition of the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish and his pioneering work on the Brehon law and the Book of the Dun Cow laid the foundations of modern Irish Celtic studies. O’Curry, working in the 1830s and 1840s in the pay of the British government, transcribed and translated a vast body of Irish manuscript material that was being lost through the negligence of the great monastic and cathedral libraries. The other towering figure of the early Irish scholarly revival was John O’Donovan, whose translations of the Annals of the Four Masters and his work on the Irish placenames provided the basic historical and geographical reference works for the later scholars.
Edward Lhuyd and the Welsh Antiquarians
The Welsh antiquarian tradition was particularly strong from the early eighteenth century onward. The great eighteenth-century scholar Edward Lhuyd, in his Archaeologia Britannica of 1707, made one of the first systematic comparisons of the Celtic languages and demonstrated their kinship with continental Celtic. Lhuyd’s work was the foundation on which the later comparative study of the Celtic languages was built, and his classification of the Celtic languages into P-Celtic (Brythonic) and Q-Celtic (Goidelic) is the basic division still used by scholars today.
The publication of the Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales in 1801-1807 brought the medieval Welsh literary tradition to a wider audience. The Myvyrian Archaiology, edited by Owen Jones, William Owen Pughe, and Edward Williams (better known as Iolo Morganwg), was a vast compilation of the older Welsh literary and historical texts. The translation of the Mabinogion into English by Lady Charlotte Guest in 1838-1849 was one of the great achievements of nineteenth-century Welsh scholarship. Guest produced a translation of the medieval Welsh tales that captured both the literal sense and the literary quality of the originals, and her work made the Mabinogion available to a worldwide audience for the first time.
Iolo Morganwg and the Forging of the Welsh Past
Iolo Morganwg (Edward Williams, 1747-1826) is one of the most brilliant and most controversial figures of the Welsh revival. Iolo was a poet, a forger, a scholar, and a political radical who, in the course of a long and prolific life, produced a body of work that transformed the Welsh sense of the past. His contributions to Welsh poetry and to Welsh historical scholarship were substantial: he edited the Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, he wrote a vast body of original poetry, and he was a central figure in the literary and political life of late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Wales.
Iolo is best known, however, for his forgeries. In the course of his scholarly work, he produced a series of documents that he claimed were ancient — poems attributed to the medieval Welsh bards, a reconstruction of the ancient Druidic religion, a system of Gorsedd ritual that he claimed derived from the Druids of pre-Roman Britain. Many of these forgeries were not exposed until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The work of Iolo Morganwg raises profound questions about the nature of the Celtic revival. The Gorsedd of Bards, which he founded or substantially reconstructed, has become a central institution of the modern Eisteddfod and a central element of modern Welsh national identity, but it is based, in substantial part, on Iolo’s invention rather than on genuine ancient tradition. Whether we regard Iolo’s work as a brilliant act of cultural creation or as a shameful act of intellectual fraud is, a question of perspective, and the modern assessment of his work is more nuanced than either simple condemnation or simple approval.
The Ossianic Controversy
The publication of James Macpherson’s Ossian poems in the 1760s, and the controversy that followed, was one of the defining events of the Celtic revival. Macpherson, a young Scottish schoolmaster from the Highlands, claimed that the Fingal of 1761 and the Temora of 1763 were translations of an ancient Gaelic epic composed by the third-century bard Ossian, the son of the warrior Fionn mac Cumhaill. The poems were an immediate sensation in Britain and on the continent of Europe, and they were translated into most of the major European languages within a few years of their publication.
The authenticity of the Ossian poems was challenged almost from the moment of their publication. Samuel Johnson was the most famous skeptic, and the general consensus of modern scholarship is that the Ossian poems, although they drew on genuine Gaelic traditions, were substantially the invention of Macpherson himself.
The importance of the Ossian poems, however, is not exhausted by the question of their authenticity. The Ossian poems were the first major literary work in English to draw on the older Gaelic tradition, and they were the foundation on which the later literary image of the Highlands was built. The Ossian poems are the founding text of the modern image of the Celtic world, and their influence on the Celtic identity of the modern nations has been substantial.
The Irish Literary Revival
The Irish literary revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the most celebrated of the modern Celtic revivals and the one that had the greatest immediate political and cultural effect. The movement, centered on the figure of W. B. Yeats, included writers such as Lady Gregory, J. M. Synge, Douglas Hyde, George William Russell (AE), and many others, and it produced a body of work in poetry, prose, drama, and criticism that was central to the cultural program of the Irish nationalism that culminated in the founding of the Irish Free State in 1922.
The institutional framework of the Irish literary revival was substantial. The Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge), founded in 1893 by Douglas Hyde and Eoin MacNeill, was the central organization for the preservation and the promotion of the Irish language. The Irish Literary Society, founded in London in 1891, was the center of the English-language wing of the revival. The National Literary Society, founded in Dublin in 1892, was the focus of the Irish-language movement. The Abbey Theatre, founded in 1904 by Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Edward Martyn, was the dramatic vehicle of the revival.
The work of the Irish literary revival drew on the older Irish literary tradition — the Táin Bó Cúailnge, the Fenian cycle, the Mythological cycle, the early Irish lyric poetry — and on the contemporary scholarly work of scholars such as Standish Hayes O’Grady, Whitley Stokes, and Kuno Meyer. The translations and adaptations of the older tales by Lady Gregory, Douglas Hyde, and others made them available to a wide English-speaking audience, and Yeats’s poems and plays, drawing on the same material, gave the older tradition a modern literary form.
The political effect of the Irish literary revival was substantial. The cultural program of the revival, with its emphasis on the Irish language, the older Irish literature, and the distinctively Irish elements of Irish identity, was a major element in the formation of the Irish nationalism that produced the Easter Rising of 1916 and the eventual establishment of the Irish Free State. The revivalists themselves were divided on the question of political nationalism: Yeats was a Unionist for much of his life, and Lady Gregory’s politics were conservative. But the cultural work of the revival provided the intellectual and emotional framework within which the later political movement would develop.
The Welsh Eisteddfod and the Gorsedd
The Welsh Eisteddfod, the great national festival of Welsh poetry and music, has its origins in the medieval period, but it was transformed in the nineteenth century into a major cultural institution. The transformation of the Eisteddfod into a national institution was the work of the Gwyneddigion society, the Cymreigyddion society, and the Cambrian societies, all of which promoted the Welsh language, literature, and culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The key figure in the transformation of the Eisteddfod was Iolo Morganwg, whose reconstructed Gorsedd of Bards, with its elaborate ceremony of the invocation of the Celtic gods and its ritual of the bardic chair, the bardic crown, and the bardic medal, became the central ritual of the modern Eisteddfod. The first Eisteddfod under the Gorsedd was held at Carmarthen in 1819.
The modern National Eisteddfod of Wales, held annually in different locations, is one of the largest cultural festivals in Europe, with attendance of 150,000 or more during the week of the festival. The festival, with its prose and verse competitions, its chairing and crowning of the bard, and its choral and instrumental music, is a central element of modern Welsh cultural identity. The festival a significant factor in the maintenance of the Welsh language, and the bilingual and the Welsh-medium competitions have given a public platform to a remarkable body of modern Welsh-language literature.
The Scottish Highland Revival
The Scottish Celtic revival was tied closely to the broader movement of Highland and Scottish national identity. The publication of the Ossian poems in the 1760s, although they were substantially Macpherson’s own invention, created an enormous European vogue for Highland and Gaelic culture, and the work of Sir Walter Scott in the early nineteenth century did much to popularize the idea of a distinctively Scottish and Highland identity.
The scholarly and literary work of the Scottish revival included the publications of the Highland Society, the founding of the Gaelic Society of Inverness in 1871, and the establishment of An Comunn Gàidhealach (the Gaelic Society) in 1891. The Mòd, the Scottish Gaelic cultural festival modeled on the Welsh Eisteddfod, was first held in Oban in 1892, and it has continued to be held annually in different locations.
The political dimension of the Scottish Celtic revival was tied to the broader Scottish national movement. The founding of the Scottish National Party in 1934, the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, and the Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act of 2005 were all, in part, products of the cultural and political work of the Scottish revival. The modern Scottish Gaelic literary tradition, supported by organizations such as Sabhal Mòr Ostaig on Skye, continues to this day.
The Breton and Cornish Revivals
The Breton revival of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was, in many ways, the most politically charged of the modern Celtic revivals. The work of the Breton scholars and writers, including Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué (whose Barzaz Breiz of 1839 was the Breton equivalent of Macpherson’s Ossian, although it is based on more genuine Breton tradition), François-Marie Luzel, and the later members of the Gorsedd of Brittany, helped to maintain a sense of Breton cultural identity in the face of intense pressure from the French state. The modern Breton movement, although divided politically, continues to support the Breton language and culture.
The Cornish revival, although more recent, has been substantial. The Cornish language, which had been extinct since the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, has been revived today, and the Cornish cultural identity has been expressed through the Gorsedh Kernow, the Cornish Gorsedd, the Cornish Language Board, and a substantial body of new literature in the revived language. The Manx revival, similarly, has seen the Manx language revived today, with the Bunscoill Ghaelgagh (the Manx-medium primary school) and the Tynwald, the parliament of the Isle of Man, playing central roles.
The European Context
The Celtic revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries cannot be understood in isolation from the broader European Romantic movement. The image of the “noble Celt” that was constructed in the period was a product of the same intellectual and cultural forces that produced the Romantic image of the “noble savage,” the “Gothic” past, and the medieval Christian.
The Celtic revival, in turn, contributed substantially to the broader European Romantic movement. The image of the “noble Celt” influenced the French revolutionaries, the German Romantics, and the English Romantics. The Ossian poems, in particular, were a major influence on the development of European Romanticism, and the image of the Celtic past that they constructed — misty, mysterious, melancholic, and heroic — has continued to influence the European imagination of the Celtic world.
Related Topics
- The Celtic identity of the modern nations is examined through the cultural and political movements of Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Brittany, Cornwall, and the Isle of Man.
- The Celtic influence on modern fantasy and popular culture is examined through literature, film, music, and the visual arts.
- The history of the Celtic civilization provides the chronological and cultural context for the modern legacy.
- The Celtic languages and oral tradition are central to the language revival movements that were a major part of the Celtic revival.
- The Celtic art and craftsmanship of the modern period, including the Arts and Crafts movement and the Celtic Revival in design, is closely connected to the literary and antiquarian work of the period.