Celt (spearhead)

“ That is just the expansive, eager Celtic nature; the head in the air, snuffing and snorting; a proud look and a high stomach, as the Psalmist says, but without any such settled savage temper as the Psalmist seems to impute by those words. For good and for bad, the Celtic genius is more airy and unsubstantial, goes less near the ground, than the German. The Celt is often called sensual; but it is not so much the vulgar satisfactions of sense that attract him as emotion and excitement ”

“ Joyous music concludes in a minor key or is broken by a sudden note of pathos. The Celtic bards sang of war, but though the [36] heroes always went forth bravely to battle it has been recorded that they “always fell.” Victories are less frequently celebrated than defeats are mourned. The glory of the Celt was vast and transcendent, but from minstrel-times it was a fading glory. Work as the history-weavers might with the golden shuttles of romance their tears mingled with the gleaming strands, and the tissue as it left the loom was a medley of broken lights and shadows. ”

“ Even the extravagance and exaggeration of the sentimental Celtic nature has often something romantic and attractive about it, something which has a sort of smack of misdirected good. The Celt, undisciplinable, anarchical, and turbulent by nature, but out of affection and admiration giving himself body and soul to some leader, that is not a promising political temperament, it is just the opposite of the Anglo-Saxon temperament, disciplinable and steadily obedient within certain limits, but retaining an inalienable part of freedom and self-dependence ”

“ The main characteristics indeed of the Celt are all hers disinter- estedness, melancholy, wildness, a way ward force and passion, for ever wooed by sounds and sights to which other natures are insensible by murmurs from the earth, by colours in the sky, by tones and accents of the soul, that speak to the Celtic sense as to no other. ' We shall never build the Parthenon,' said Renan of his own Breton race ; ' marble is not for us ; but we know how to grip the heart and the soul ; we have an art of piercing that belongs to us alone ”

“ A point worthy of mention is the position which stone celts hold in the folk-lore and superstitious beliefs of many lands. In the West of England the country folks believe the weapons fell originally from the sky as “thunderbolts,” and that the water in which they are boiled is a specific for rheumatism. In the North and Scotland they are preservatives against cattle diseases. In Brittany a stone celt is thrown into a well to purify the water. In Sweden they are regarded as a protection against lightning. ”

“ In the comparatively petty art of ornamentation, in rings, brooches, crosiers, relic-cases, and so on, he has done just enough to show his delicacy of taste, his happy temperament; but the grand difficulties of painting and sculpture, the prolonged dealings of spirit with matter, he has never had patience for. Take the more spiritual arts of music and poetry. All that emotion alone can do in music the Celt has done; the very soul of emotion breathes in the Scotch and Irish airs ”

“ On the other side of the water, the workers had many more issues at heart than in the Highlands. So the Highland Celt and the Irish Celts did not quite understand one another; an animated correspondence ensued in private and in the press. The Irish press was divided in its opinion on ‘Celtic,’ because the writers were not of one mind among themselves in their methods of working towards the one end all Celts have at heart. There were those, who being ardent Nationalists regarded the Celtic literary movement as one with the political, or as greatly coloured by it. ”

“ The fate of the Celt in the Highlands has been far different. There he has found himself437 in a region of mountains too rugged and lofty for cultivation, save along their bases, and too continuous to permit easy access from one district to another, yet not sufficiently impassable to prevent the sudden irruption of some hostile clan of mountaineers, carrying with it slaughter and spoliation. Shut in among long, narrow, and deep glens, he has cultivated their strips of alluvium, but has too often found the thin stony soil to yield but a poor return for his labour. ”

“ The verse-forms of Celtic poetry have probably played the main part in determining the structure of all modern verse. The myths and legends of the Gaelic and Cymric peoples kindled the imagination of a host of Continental poets. True, the Celt did not himself create any great architectural work of literature, just as he did not create a stable or imposing national polity. His thinking and feeling were essentially lyrical and concrete. Each object or aspect of life impressed him vividly and stirred him profoundly ”

“ It is the practice to speak of the dark-complexioned people of France, Great Britain and Ireland as “black Celts,” although the ancient writers never applied the term “Celt” to any dark-complexioned person. To them great stature, fair hair, and blue or grey eyes were the characteristics of the Celt. The philologists have added to the confusion by classing as “Celtic” the speeches of the dark-complexioned races of the west of Scotland and the west of Ireland. But, though usage has made it convenient in this work to employ the term, “Celtic” cannot be properly applied to what is really “Gaelic.” ”

“ Fig. 15 shows a type of celt rare in Ireland. It is a good example of the axe-shaped implement; it is 33⁄4 inches long, and about the same across the cutting edge. Fig. 16 is a fine specimen of the long narrow quadrangular celt: it is 53⁄8 inches in length and 13⁄8 inches in breadth. It is very rare in Ireland, and but a few specimens have been found in the country. Some of these socketed celts are so diminutive that they could not have served for chopping212 of any kind. Fixed at the end of a wooden handle, they might, no doubt, well answer the purpose of chisels. ”

“ Let them consider that they are inextricably bound up with us, and that, if the suggestions in the following pages have any truth, we English, alien and uncongenial to our Celtic partners as we may have hitherto shown ourselves, have notwithstanding, beyond perhaps any other nation, a thousand latent springs of possible sympathy with them. Let them consider that new ideas and forces are stirring in England, that day by day these new ideas and forces gain in power, and that almost every one of them is the friend of the Celt and not his enemy. ”

“ These attributes belong chiefly to the Literary Celt of latter-day conception—the Celt of Arnold and Renan, and other writers following in their wake, who have woven misty impressions of a people whom they have met as strangers, and never really understood. Celtic literature is not a morbid literature. In Highland poetry there is more light than shadow, much symbolism, but no vagueness ”

“ The nation at large had a vast store of folk-poetry, full of all the poetical characteristics of the Celt, and it was this very poetry, despised as it was, that became ultimately the groundwork of the new literature. ”

“ Some supposed that he had fled to the mountains of Brecknock, others to Cardigan; some, again, that he had attached himself to Griffith ap Rhys, who was traversing South Wales, stirring up disaffection and preparing for a general rising of the Welsh against their oppressors.
Yet hardly half a dozen men desired that he should be taken, and thus free themselves from death. The great and heroic virtue of the Celt lies in his devotion to his chief, for whom he is ready at once to lay down his life. ”

“ But cupidity has not been the only foe that the Celt’s ancient manuscript literature has had to contend with. The ignorance and indifference of many into whose hands it fell have also played their part;—a tailor was seen last century in the Hebrides cutting down Gaelic manuscripts for patterns. More fatal than ignorance has been the active depreciation of a hostile church operating on the animosity of a rival race. It is only now—a thousand years after the era of the ancient Celtic Church—that scholars and unprejudiced historians have succeeded in showing us a little of it. ”

“ The Celtic genius, on the other hand, may claim to be itself magnetic, not dependent on vivification from without, and this I take it is one main reason why we may affirm that the qualities of the Celt are of a different type from those of the Saxon, that they bear another image and superscription, a special mint mark of their own among the mental endowments of the nations of the earth. ”

“ The original was found at Coton, Cambridgeshire, in 1863. The type is the same as that of Fig. 35; but in this case the celt is polished all over. The butt-end is ground to a semicircular outline, but is, like the sides, rounded. The same is the case with some of the thicker celts of the form last described. A celt of much the same character, but with the sides apparently rather flatter (71/3 inches) , was found at Panshanger, Herts. [8] One (5 inches) , from the Isle of Wight, is in the British Museum. ”

“ THE TROUT STREAM
"An Earth-born coolness
Coloured with the sky." 13But it is probably true that when one has said that the typical Celt is seldom an Imperialist, a great landowner, a brewer, a cabinet minister, or (in Wales, at least) a member of the Salvation Army, one has exhausted the list of his weaknesses; and that not greatly wanting to be one of these things, he has endeared himself to those to-day who have set their hearts on gold and applause and have not gained them, and those few others who never sought them. ”

“ Dumfriesshire, and is now in the Antiquarian Museum at Edinburgh. It is represented in Fig. 25.
[61]
Another decorated celt of the same character, though with different ornamentation, is shown in Fig. 26. The curved hands on the faces are formed of lines with dots between, and the sides have a kind of fern-leaf pattern upon them, like that on the winged celt from Trillick, Fig. 98. The original was found at Dams, Balbirnie, [237] Fifeshire.
Fig. 26.—Dams. 1⁄2————Fig. 27.—Ballinamallard. 1⁄2
A very large number of flat celts of the simplest form have been found in Ireland. ”

“ A simple seeker for truth has a hard time between the two. An illustration or so will make clear what I mean. First let us take the Celt-lovers, who, though they engage one’s sympathies more than the Celt-haters, yet, inasmuch as assertion is more dangerous than denial, show their weaknesses in a more signal way. A very learned man, the Rev. Edward Davies, published in the early part of this century two important books on Celtic antiquity. The second of these books, The Mythology and Rites of the British Druids, contains, with much other interesting matter, the charming story of Taliesin. ”

“ There is nothing to show that these men of the old drift-period ever ground a stone implement to an edge. Thus their stone implements were far inferior to the neatly-shaped and sharp-edged ground celts of the later Stone Age, Fig. 54 a, Fig. 56 a. The word celt used for the various chisel-like instruments of rude and ancient tribes is a convenient term, taken from Latin celtis, a chisel, in the Vulgate translation of Job xix. ”

“ The celt to the left, in the centre, is slightly indented on either side, and, as will be shown elsewhere in this book, such forms are not rare in New England. Five of these celts have straight sides. It is not necessary that the sides should be equidistant from each other, or that the poll should be exactly as wide as the blade, in order that celts may be classified as having straight sides. By straight sides, I mean sides which may be either sloping or straight, yet not curved. A tapering celt, a celt with a flaring edge and other forms may or may not have straight sides.
258
Fig. ”

“ Not only are relics of La Tène culture found in Ireland, but the oldest Irish epics celebrate tall, fair-haired, grey-eyed heroes, armed and clad in Gallic fashion, who had come from the continent. The Celts in Italy, in the Balkan, in France and in Britain, overspread the Indo-European peoples, who differed from themselves but slightly in speech. The Celts represented Indo-European q by p, whilst the Greeks, Illyrians, Thracians, Ligurians, and aborigines of France, Britain and Ireland represented it by k, c or qu. The Umbrian-Sabellian tribes had the same phonetic peculiarity as the Celts. ”

“ The celt, the knife, the lance and arrow-heads, and other weapons and implements, can be traced in an uninterrupted progressive series from the oldest and rudest palæolithic specimens, up to the highly-finished ones of polished stone, and through these into the age of metals, and into historic times and the actual implements of existing savage races. It is impossible to doubt that one of the palæolithic celts from St. Acheul or St. Prest is as truly a work of the human hand, guided by human intelligence, as a modern axe ”

“ One of hexagonal section and socket from a hoard found on Earsley Common, [484] Yorkshire, in 1735, is engraved as having no loop.
Celts without loops are not uncommon in France, and are often found of small size in Denmark. [485]
Socketed celts have rarely if ever been found with interments in barrows in Britain. Sir R. Colt Hoare mentions “a little celt” as having been found with a small lance, and a long pin with a handle, all of bronze, near the head of a skeleton, in a barrow on Overton Hill, [486] near Abury, Wilts. ”

“ A flat celt found in Staffordshire, [118] Plot takes to be the head of a Roman securis with which the Popæ slew their sacrifices.
Rowland, [119] in his “Mona Antiqua Restaurata,” 1723, suggested that looped palstaves fastened by a thong to a staff might be used as war flails.
The imaginative Dr. Stukeley, in the year 1724, communicated to the Society of Antiquaries a discourse on the use of celts, which is to be found in the Minute Book of the Society. An abstract of it is given by Mr. Lort [120] in his paper subsequently mentioned. [32] Dr. ”