The Celtic Revival: What the Victorians Made

If you have read much of this site you will have noticed a pattern, because I keep having to write the same paragraph.

The Ogham tree calendar was invented in 1948. The handfasting trial marriage cannot be traced past the late eighteenth century. The Green Man was named in 1939. Most clan tartan attribution comes from a forgery published in 1842. The Cailleach and Brìde seasonal pairing is from a book of 1917. The eightfold wheel of the year was assembled in the mid twentieth century. The language of flowers is a Parisian publishing craze of 1819. Carmina Gadelica is a Victorian literary reworking of genuinely collected material. Celtic knotwork construction is a reconstruction of 1951.

Nine articles, nine corrections, and they are not nine separate errors. They are one thing, and it is time to name it.

What it was

The Celtic Revival is the long movement, running from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, in which the Celtic past was recovered, reconstructed, romanticised and in substantial part invented.

It was not a conspiracy and mostly not a fraud. It was scholars, poets, painters, collectors, antiquarians and enthusiasts, most of them sincere, some of them brilliant, working on a genuine inheritance that was visibly disappearing, and filling the gaps with what they thought ought to have been there.

The result is the Celtic world most people carry in their heads. Almost everything sold, taught, tattooed or celebrated as ancient Celtic tradition today passes through it.

Where it starts: Ossian

In 1760 a young Highlander called James Macpherson published Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland. Over the next three years he produced Fingal and Temora, presented as translations of a great epic cycle by Ossian, a third-century Gaelic bard.

The effect across Europe is difficult to overstate. Goethe put Ossian into Werther. Napoleon carried a copy on campaign. Mendelssohn wrote the Hebrides Overture. Ossian gave Europe its image of the Celtic north: mist, heroism, melancholy, ruined hall and grey sea, and that image has never gone away.

It was substantially Macpherson's own work. He had genuine Gaelic ballad material and he had collected in the Highlands, but he composed, combined, expanded and invented on a large scale, and he never produced the manuscripts he claimed. A committee of the Highland Society of Scotland, reporting in 1805, concluded roughly that: real traditional material, heavily worked.

Ossian is the founding act of the Celtic Revival and it sets the pattern for everything after it. Genuine fragments, honestly loved, filled out into a whole, then presented as the whole.

The druids get invented

The parallel English strand is stranger and it produced consequences that are still with us.

• William Stukeley, an antiquarian of real ability, published Stonehenge, A Temple Restor'd to the British Druids in 1740 and Abury in 1743, attributing the megalithic monuments to the druids. The monuments predate the druids by two thousand years or more, but the association stuck so completely that it is still the first thing most people say about Stonehenge.
• Edward Williams, a Glamorgan stonemason who took the bardic name Iolo Morganwg, held the first Gorsedd of Bards on Primrose Hill in 1792 and produced an enormous body of Welsh manuscript material, bardic ritual, druidic doctrine and triads. Much of it he wrote himself. The modern Welsh Eisteddfod ceremonies descend from him.

Between them they gave us the archdruid, the white robes, the solstice ceremony and the druids of Stonehenge. The one genuine ancient source on druids and mistletoe, Pliny's single paragraph, has its own article on this site, and it contains none of that.

The invention of Scotland

Scotland's version ran on the same rails and with more at stake.

• Walter Scott did more than any other individual to create the image of Scotland the world now holds, and in 1822 he stage-managed the state visit of George IV to Edinburgh as a tartan pageant, with the Hanoverian king in a kilt and flesh-coloured tights. Clan chiefs were required to turn up in clan tartan, and where no clan tartan existed one was rapidly supplied.
• The Vestiarium Scoticum followed in 1842, published by two brothers styling themselves Sobieski Stuart and claiming Stuart descent, purporting to reproduce clan tartans from a medieval manuscript. There was no manuscript. It is the source of a great deal of what is now sold as ancient clan tradition, and the tartan article deals with it in detail.
• White heather as a luck charm is Victorian. Balmoralism, the whole aesthetic of stag, thistle, tartan and glen, is a court fashion of the 1850s that became a national identity.

Why it worked: the vacuum

Here is the argument that matters, and it is the one this site keeps circling.

• The Celtic Revival flourished precisely because the thing it romanticised was being destroyed at the same time. The dates line up too well to be coincidence. Culloden is 1746. The Act of Proscription banning Highland dress runs from 1747 to 1782. Macpherson publishes Ossian in 1760, within a generation of the ban, in the middle of the destruction of the culture he claimed to be translating. The Clearances run from roughly 1750 to 1860. Scott's pageant is 1822. The Vestiarium is 1842. Carmichael begins collecting in 1860.
• Landowners who had cleared their estates of people attended balls in tartan. The romance was at its most enthusiastic in exactly the decades when the reality was being dismantled, and it was frequently promoted by the same class doing the dismantling. The Silences sets out what that did to the record.

That is why the inventions took hold so completely. There was a hole where a living tradition had been, and something was going to fill it. What filled it was mostly written by educated men in Edinburgh and London who admired the Highlands and had rarely lived there.

What it also did, honestly

I do not want this article to be a sneer, because the Revival is not only a story of invention and a good deal of what this site rests on comes from it.

• Alexander Carmichael actually saved something. Whatever he did to the wording, and Robertson's 1976 study shows he did a great deal, he went out into the Gàidhealtachd for fifty years and wrote down charms, blessings, work songs and customs from people whose grandchildren would not know them. Without him a large part of what we have would be gone.
• Patrick Geddes and The Evergreen in Edinburgh in the 1890s, and the painters of the Scottish Celtic Revival, John Duncan above all, made genuinely good work and connected the movement to living Scottish art rather than to fantasy alone.
• The Irish Revival produced Yeats, Lady Gregory, the Abbey Theatre and a national literature, and fed directly into independence.
• The Gaelic language movement grew out of the same soil. An Comunn Gàidhealach was founded in 1891. The teaching, publishing and broadcasting that keep Scottish Gaelic alive today have their roots in Revival-era conviction that the language was worth saving.
• And George Bain, reconstructing knotwork method in 1951, did something scholarly and generous with what he found.

The Revival preserved as well as invented, and the two are not always separable in the same person on the same page.

The map

This is what the site's corrections look like laid out together.

Each of those has its own article here. This is the thing they have in common.

How to hold it

Three positions are available and only one of them is any good.

• Denial. Insist it is all ancient. Comfortable, and it collapses the moment anyone checks.
• Rejection. Throw out everything touched by the Revival. This sounds rigorous and it is actually impossible, because that would include most of Carmina Gadelica, the whole of modern knotwork, the eightfold wheel, and a large part of what any of us were taught. It also throws away real material for the sin of having been transmitted by romantics.
• Dating. Use it, love it, and know when it was made.

The third is what this site does. A tradition you can date is not a lesser tradition. It is a tradition you actually understand.

Bain's knotwork is a magnificent piece of scholarship and I would rather know that than believe in an unbroken line of monks. The eightfold wheel is a useful structure and it is from the 1950s. Carmina Gadelica is a treasury and it is Carmichael's prose. The Cailleach and Brìde make a beautiful pair and Mackenzie put them together in 1917.

None of that is diminished by being said out loud. What is diminished is the version where you have to avoid looking.

And a last thought about who did it

There is a particular irony in the Celtic Revival that is worth sitting with.

It was largely the work of people who loved the Highlands and did not live in them, writing in English about a Gaelic culture, at the exact historical moment when the Gaelic-speaking people of the Highlands were being removed from the land.

The people who actually held the tradition were, in the main, not writing books. They were being cleared, emigrating, or answering a collector's questions in a language he was translating out of.

That is not a reason to discard what the Revival produced. It is a reason to keep asking, of any claim about Celtic tradition, whose voice is this, and when.

Which is, in the end, the only method this site has.

Sources

• Hutton, R. (2009). Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain. Yale University Press. The essential book on the invention of the druids, and the model for this article.
• Hutton, R. (1999, rev. 2019). The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford University Press.
• Hutton, R. (1996). The Stations of the Sun. Oxford University Press.
• Trevor-Roper, H. (1983). The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland. In E. Hobsbawm & T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge University Press. Overstated in places and vigorously contested; still the starting point.
• Macpherson, J. (1760–1763). Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Fingal, Temora. Available via Internet Archive.
• Report of the Committee of the Highland Society of Scotland into the Nature and Authenticity of the Poems of Ossian (1805).
• Stafford, F. (1988). The Sublime Savage: James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian. Edinburgh University Press.
• Stukeley, W. (1740). Stonehenge, A Temple Restor'd to the British Druids.
• Constantine, M. A. (2007). The Truth Against the World: Iolo Morganwg and Romantic Forgery. University of Wales Press.
• Anton, A. E. (1958). "Handfasting" in Scotland. Scottish Historical Review, 37, 89–102.
• Robertson, H. (1976). Studies in Carmichael's Carmina Gadelica. Scottish Gaelic Studies, 12(2).
• Cheape, H. (1991, rev. 2006). Tartan: The Highland Habit. National Museums Scotland.
• Womack, P. (1989). Improvement and Romance: Constructing the Myth of the Highlands. Macmillan. Underrated and directly on the argument of this article.
• Devine, T. M. (2018). The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed. Allen Lane.
• Raglan, Lady (1939). The Green Man in Church Architecture. Folklore, 50(1), 45–57.
• Graves, R. (1948). The White Goddess. Faber.
• Bain, G. (1951). Celtic Art: The Methods of Construction.
• Carmichael Watson Project, University of Edinburgh.
• The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal (1895–96), Patrick Geddes, via Internet Archive.

Related: [How to Read an Esoteric Claim]; [The Silences]; [Mistletoe and the In-Between]; [Ogham]; [Handfasting and the Red Thread]; [Tartan: Scotland's Colour Code]; [The Quarter Days]; [Knotwork and Illumination]; [Brìde]; [The Cailleach]; [Sacred Colour]; [The Language of Flowers]