misrepresentation of celtic national identity in film

[fooboo]

name='GRAEME']...especially London, Guv'nor.

Dick Van Dyke comes to mind for some reason...lol

[fooboo]

name='smiffy']I'll Second that Steve

I just did.

[smiffy]

name='fooboo']I just did.

[silverwhistle]

name='GRAEME']The Scots LOVE Braveheart!

No. Those of us who are historians despise and detest the bloody thing. It was a nasty, fascistic piece of machismo, from a man who seems addicted to that sort of thing…

[silverwhistle]

"celtic national identity"



But what is it?



"Celtic" is essentially only meaningful as a linguistic category. It's been annexed as a label, especially since the Romantic era of the late 18-early 19C, to all kinds of things. As Neal Ascherson reported in Sunday's Observer, there are now even young Czechs wanting to identify themselves as Celtic to dissociate themselves from their Slavic linguistic affinity (which includes the Russians, of course). In Britain, it's often been remarked that England is more 'Celtic' and Scotland less so than current myth-making tends to pretend. Here in Scotland, a fake, 'Highlandised' identity – largely the creation of Scott and 19C Balmorality – steamrollers over regional distinctions, elements of Brythonic, Angle, Scandinavian and Norman heritage, and smothers, even in Highland culture, the strong Norse elements. (My father's first name, in Gaelic, is a Gaelicised spelling of "Wrath of Thor".) It seems to me a lot of this manufacturing of identity is about selling things, whether (at its most benign) it's wishy-washy New Age music marketed as Celtic Moods or (more sinisterly) morally dubious, physically impossible notions of so-called 'ethnic purity'.



You need to take apart the concept, and then look at how it's been used/abused.



(Incidentally, Colin McArthur's Brigadoon, Braveheart & the Scots is an excellent book on Hollywood and Highlandism.)



Funnily, I was pondering issues around cultural identity the other day, after browsing in the An Comunn bookshop in Partick. The staff were chatting in Gaelic; despite attempts, I never got far with learning the language, although my great-grandfather was a native speaker. I realised I had felt more at home in Asti, in Monferrato (where I was mistaken for Swiss, because a shop assistant realised I understood French as well as Italian). But I was humming to myself the tune of William Ross's Oran Eile… then segued into Arnaut Daniel's En cest sonet coind'e lèri. (Ross was an 18C Gaelic poet from Gairloch in Ross-shire; Daniel, a 12C Occitan trobador.) My cultural identity is as much, if not more, bound up with trobar, and with the culture of the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Occitan), than with Gaelic; also with Russian culture. And at the same time, I can look to the 20C Gaelic poet, MacLean, who (via the early work of Ezra Pound) referred to the trobadors in some of his work, and think also of Rognvald Kali, the 12C Earl of Orkney, who wrote songs to the Lady Ermengarda of Narbonne. Everything connects.



We are lucky, I think, in our time, in that we can construct our own cultural identities, to reflect who we are as individuals, and not just by some accident of birth. It seems to me very limiting to define oneself or one's cultural identity by just one single thread in the fabric of one's being. So I'm wary of definitions that seem to be one-dimensional/reductionist in this way.

[penfold]

You're on form tonight, Doc. You should have taken the name 'Daughter of the Wrath of Thor' , it has quite a resonance to it ...and before you reply, I do know how much 'The Silver Whistle' means to you...

[sippog]

name='silverwhistle']It seems to me very limiting to define oneself or one's cultural identity by just one single thread in the fabric of one's being. So I'm wary of definitions that seem to be one-dimensional/reductionist in this way.

Isn't it true though that the less substance there is to a myth, the more desperately people seek to cling to it. I think Hitler understood that when he fostered the fairy-tale of "ein volk"



I tend to agree with Shaw's theory about a place and a culture being the primary things that shape you: for example the wonderful speech in "John Bull's Other Island" about the effect of Ireland and the climate on a person.



I don't have a drop of Irish blood in me but I went to school there for five years and I know, for better or worse, it irredeemably changed my psyche. (I often quip that I'm Irish "by contamination" but substantially it's true.)

[silverwhistle]

name='penfold']



You're on form tonight, Doc. You should have taken the name 'Daughter of the Wrath of Thor' , it has quite a resonance to it ...and before you reply, I do know how much 'The Silver Whistle' means to you...

Thanks! Dad and I both have Thor's Hammer pendants. I got him a pewter one; mine is amber. I got it at an airport shop in Copenhagen or Stockholm, when I was lecturing on the Russian river cruises. I couldn't help but think that some of my distant Scandinavian progenitors may have taken some of the same routes, by river from the Baltic down to 'Micklegarth' – the Great City, Constantinople.



Yes: the more I've got into genealogy (on all sides of my family), the clearer it is how silly it is to define oneself by it, or by geographical accident of birth. I'm standard British mongrel: Scots (all down the West: Sutherland, Islay, Bute, Ayrshire, Lanarkshire), English (Yorkshire to Kent, Norfolk to Staffordshire), Irish (Antrim Protestants and Mayo Catholics), possibly a bit of Welsh (one Hughes, from Shropshire), possibly (judging by facial features in some old family photos on my mother's side) a hint of African or Afro-Caribbean; going back further, judging by names alone, Gaelic, Norse, Angle, Norman-French. But the cultural influences that make me the person I am are more wide-ranging: a Classical education, a passion for the Romance languages, mediæval European cultures, and Russian; a household in which we played everything from opera to Spanish and Latin-American music, and 1950s Bollywood playback singers on 78s Dad got in India when he was in the Merchant Navy.



I suppose I see myself first and foremost as European, in the broadest sense, but I don't like the idea of pinning oneself down more narrowly.

[silverwhistle]

name='sippog']Isn't it true though that the less substance there is to a myth, the more desperately people seek to cling to it. I think Hitler understood that when he fostered the fairy-tale of "ein volk".

I think the desire to cling to that kind of myth tends to reflect feelings of insecurity, personally or (as in the case you mention) at a wider national level. In adolescence, I felt the attraction of the 'Celtic identity' thing quite strongly: in part, it was a deliberate separation of myself from my mother, with whom I have little in common educationally/socially, and who tends to treat other family members as non-autonomous extensions of herself. But it was cutting off one's nose to spite one's face, culturally.

[penfold]

Nothing so exotic....Fathers Father, long line (16thC) of Oxfordshire yeoman farmers with huntin'shootin' type hobbies; Fathers Mother, Victorian London Middle classes; Mothers Father, long line of peripatetic stonemasons, the tradition claiming descendancy from Hereward; and Mothers Mother, very long line of Good honest Hampshire peasantry; this implies a probable ancestry in the Anglo-saxon peoples, as the Hampshire dialect is/was very Teutonic. Not sure about Hutchins/Hutchings though..the -ing suffix sounds OE to me. Needless to say, this is the ancestral path I've chosen..I'm very interested in English rural tradition, song, what's left of the culture. Anyone have a Dictionary of Surnames handy?? But I'm not nationalist about it...I know enough about the history of these islands to know that to claim racial and cultural purity is ridiculous...but I do have a (probably illusory) sense of roots. 1500 years in Hampshire will do for me.