Alternative Histories

This chapter suggests that Celts and Celticism are key themes in the legendarium of J.R.R. Tolkien, and furthermore that while his fiction is not ‘Classical reception’ in the conventional sense, our understanding of it is enriched if we read it not simply as a work of fantasy, but as a series of alternative histories, in which relations between various traditional ethnic groups of Europe are imaginatively recreated. It is proposed that various of Tolkien’s fictional peoples may be identified as ‘crypto-Celts’, ‘crypto-Romans’, and ‘crypto-Saxons’, and that he uses these crypto-peoples as means of considering the different ways in which real-world peoples interact. The implications of this for Tolkien’s views on ‘Englishness’ and ‘Britishness’ are considered, and the widespread belief that Tolkien regularly deals with hypostatized ethnic or national groups is challenged. Emphasis is given rather to the importance in his work of contact and mixture between groups, and his implicit critique of Romantic notions of Heimat. Particular attention is also paid to groups or individuals who function as ‘crypto-Roman Catholics’, and their importance for Tolkien’s vision of a re-Catholicized England.

Greek Gaels, British Gaels

This chapter explores the use of Classical allusions in early-modern Scottish Gaelic poetry, and the two distinct ways in which they connected with the Scottish Gaels’ understanding of Britishness. Gaelic Scotland and Gaelic Ireland shared the same field of literary reference, with Ireland as the fountainhead. Consequently, Classical reception in Scottish Gaelic literature owed much to Classical reception in Ireland. However, once Scotland became part of the kingdom of Britain, and particularly in the Jacobite period, poets began to deploy new Classical allusions, in which a shift in type and purpose can be detected, designed to address contemporary political circumstances. A sense of Gaelic Britishness, and a specific understanding of what it meant to be British, developed in Gaelic Scotland in the seventeenth century. Classical allusion played a meaningful role in its expression through poetic discourse right up to the aftermath of Culloden, the final Jacobite defeat.

Origins and Introductions

The chapter compares different uses of the legend of Troy as a ‘Trojan preface’ to historical and literary texts in medieval England, Wales, and Ireland. Typically used to introduce narratives of nationalist significance, the ‘Trojan preface’ forms a distinctive genre that functioned to establish or confirm myths of national origin. The work of early historians such as Henry of Huntingdon and Geoffrey of Monmouth provides examples of the uses of Troy to construct a particular kind of English identity. In Welsh and Irish texts, the Trojan legend was inserted as a chronological milestone which aligned the ethnic histories of Wales (or Britain) and Ireland with world events. The legacy of Rome was another source of English identity which worked to exclude the early British people and their descendants, the Welsh. Rome was also an important point of reference for the Welsh and Irish, who established their claim to ancient lineage through literary references to Britain under the Romans and through adaptations of Latin epic. The ambiguity of Troy, represented by Aeneas as a figure of both heroic endeavour and treacherous betrayal, is addressed in different ways by English, Welsh, and Irish writers. The chapter ends with a discussion of the Trojan prefaces in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chaucer’s House of Fame, suggesting that these prefaces are motivated comments on the questionable historical construction of English identity.

British Ethnogenesis

This chapter will argue that the ethnogenesis of the Britons was a process which occurred within the Late Antique period. Whilst commentators from Gildas onwards imagined the Britons to have existed as an identifiable group from time immemorial, it is argued here that they arose out of a growing division between more and less Romanized groups within the British provinces, as changes in the way Rome managed its frontiers led to the emergence of semi-barbarian devolved polities close to the limes. It is further argued that it was against these groups in Britain, the cultural forebears of the Welsh, that the provincials of the south-east required aid from the Saxons. Essentialist ideas about ethnicity, from the time of Gildas onwards, have obscured this process.

Moderns of the Past, Moderns of the Future

This chapter complements the volume’s focus on Celtic–Classical interactions within the notion of Britishness by examining the role of such a dialogue in Ireland’s attempts to extricate itself from the British Empire, and by emphasizing the part that Irish scholars and poets have played in shaping Celtic, Roman, and British identities. It focuses on the Revivalist translator and neurologist, George Sigerson (1836–1925), whose comparative reading of ‘Celtic’ and Latin poetry set out to prove an Irish influence on Latin verse, on the one hand by arguing that Cicero was directly influenced in his poetry by a Celtic druid, and on the other by proving that the author of the first Latin biblical epic of Late Antiquity was Irish. The chapter examines these arguments for the forgotten Celticization of Rome in the light of colonial mimicry, before asking how Sigerson put his theories of the postcolonial power of cross-linguistic influence into practice in his own translation strategy. It concludes by highlighting the lasting implications of Sigerson’s call for a new way of reading texts across languages, attuned to verbal and stylistic echoes and so able to dismantle any strict divide between the Celtic and the Classical.

British Imperialist and/or Avatar of Welshness?

The WWI recruitment drive in Wales was extraordinarily successful. One strand in the propaganda that encouraged young Welsh men to enlist was the example of Caractacus, the ancient British leader who according to Tacitus had fought against the ancient Romans in Wales and, after capture, had delivered a defiant speech to the Emperor Claudius. Inaugurated by a stage play in Welsh by Beriah Gwynfe Evans, performed at a school in Abergele in 1904, there was an Edwardian craze in Wales for amateur theatrical performances by schoolchildren starring Caractacus. The trend was encouraged by the identification of Lloyd George with the ancient warrior, especially after his ‘People’s Budget’ had won the fervent support of the working classes. Once war was declared, the Caractacus performances in Wales became transparently connected with recruitment, morale, and fund-raising for the war effort. Small Welsh children across the class spectrum were still performing such plays while their elder brothers were dying in the trenches of France.

Celts and Romans on Tour

This chapter explores the presence of Romans and Britons in the tour literature of late-eighteenth-century Britain. It argues that the deeply ingrained narratives of Classical authors such as Caesar and Tacitus offered many tourists a framework not only for reading the past in the landscape, but also the present, as the recollection of former conflicts in situ stimulated questions of loyalty and cultural diversity within a recently ‘united’ Britain. An examination of a selection of tourist accounts from the 1770s to the early 1800s shows how certain key texts, notably Thomas Pennant’s Tours of Wales and Scotland, set the historical agenda for many decades, and reveals how the power dynamics of that ancient Classical/Celtic conflict could be usefully re-animated in different contemporary political contexts.

The Politics of British Antiquity and the Descent from Troy in the Early Stuart Era

By the early Stuart era, English scholars and statesmen had largely abandoned belief in medieval Welsh traditions regarding the Trojan Brutus and the British empire ruled by his descendants, choosing instead to rely on Classical descriptions of British antiquity. Yet in defiance of this historiographical turn, the themes of Trojan descent and ancient empire enjoyed a remarkable popular renaissance in the first half of the seventeenth century. Despite Geoffrey of Monmouth’s banishment from the realm of serious history, the Descent from Troy was arguably known, accepted, and publicly celebrated by more people in the early Stuart era than at any point in the past. Focusing on texts including Michael Drayton’s topographical epic Poly-Olbion, Anthony Munday’s civic pageant The Triumphes of Reunited Britannia, and the anonymous broadside Troynovant Must Not be Burnt, this chapter explores a range of factors that help account for this late efflorescence of the British History, including James VI and I’s unsuccessful campaign for closer union between England and Scotland, and the local priorities of communities in Wales and London.

Hadrian’s Wall

This chapter addresses the recent afterlife of Hadrian’s Wall, focusing on the use of this monument in debates about English and Scottish nationhood, and in particular the frequently recurring idea that modern political developments might lead to the re-building of this ancient frontier work. The use of this Roman Wall, which formed the boundary of a substantial ancient empire, as a marker of national identity is evidently problematic, although it draws on the dualistic concept of a division between barbarian northern Celts and civilized southern Britons that originated with Classical writers addressing the Roman conquest of Britain, and has been periodically revived at points of conflict and division throughout British history. The chapter ends by suggesting possible interpretive strategies that can accommodate both the Wall’s unavoidable history as a symbol of ethnic and national division, and its (perhaps underappreciated) significance as a transnational monument.

Romans, Britons, and the Construction of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Identity

This chapter argues that early English writing and material culture manipulated and manufactured British and Roman identities in the formation of an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ identity between the eighth and eleventh centuries. Historical and literary works present a narrative in which the British were conquered or pushed to the fringes of society, despite the coexistence of ample evidence for inter-group cooperation and collaboration. At the same time, other cultural productions sought to emphasize the incorporation—and continuation—of various aspects of Romanitas. Interrogating a range of textual and material evidence, this chapter presents an overview of the various approaches to ‘British’ and ‘Roman’ identity that are visible in early English culture. It gives special consideration to one of the most prominent stages on which this negotiation took place: the former towns of Roman Britain.