by Alexander Shevlinn

 

The earliest historical references to the Celts commonly describe a tribal society devoted to warfare and religion. It is a clearly defined society which honours a warrior nobility as well as a learned class which commands authority through its scientists, lawmakers and religious men, in short, the Druids. This standard interpretation, only acceptable from the external perspectives of the classical Greeks and romans, is the only picture we have since continental Celtic learning did not embrace the art of writing. However, with the Chritianization of the insular Celts in Britain and Ireland, we receive a written self-portrait of Celtic society. It is the early Gaelic corpus of law, particularly, which tells us that Celtic learning was still in the hands of a prestigious elite, the Oes Dana. (‘men of art’)

“It is said that they the Druids commit to memory immense amounts of poetry, and so some of them commit to memory immense amounts of poetry, and so some of them continue their studies for twenty years. They consider it improper to commit their studies to writing, although they sue the Greek alphabet for almost everything else...They have also much knowledge of the stars and their motion, of the size of the world and of the earth, of natural philosophy, and of the powers and spheres of action of the immortal gods, which they discuss and hand down to their young students”.

We ought not to ignore Caesar’s reference to the Gaulish use of the Greek alphabet, for there is indeed archaeological evidence for a ‘state of conditional literacy...among the Gaulish upper classes’. The so-called Calendar of Coligny, arguably the most tangible example of druidic learning, raises an interesting question: Why was it written down, when surely its astronomical ideas belong more properly in the memory of the teacher, and his pupil? Perhaps the question is over ambitious, and without having any real facts, we can only draw our own conclusions to its authenticity.

It is in their capacity as educators, judicial administrators and priests, that the Druids represent the motive force behind the development of early Celtic learning. Remarked upon by both Greek and Roman writers, is the Gaulish respect for eloquence. Julius Caesar tells of a learned class committed to the maintenance of a strict oral tradition through which the highest of intellectual matters are pursued. The Greek academic, Lucian, reports on a Gaulish deity, ‘Ogmios’, who he identifies as a god of eloquence or language, apparently comparable to the Greek god ‘Hercules’ in terms of strength.

Archaeology may, however, offer a glimpse of what Stuart Piggot describes as ‘a state of conditional literacy...among the Gaulish upper classes’. Citing the so-called ‘Calendar of Coligny’ as an example of Celtic literacy, would suggest that provision had been made forthe occasional documentation of knowledge using an arrangement of borrowed Greek, or Latin characters. But occasional of ‘conditional’ literacy it can only have been give the lack of tangible evidence. In these early stages of Celtic learning, literacy achievement, it would seem, was not the intention. Piggot describes the situation as follows: “In the Celtic world, life the rest of barbarian Europe, was one of non-literate oral tradition, which was the time-honoured and socially approved more for the conservation of law, genealogy, story, song and myth in the vernacular”.

Roman political domination was to overwhelm Celtic cultural life both on the continent, and in Britain. In Ireland, however, many of the earliest Celtic traditions were allowed to survive unhindered by extinct political force. A social order, largely consistent with that in pre-Roman Gaul, maintained the state of a learned middle class. Again, there is evidence for a ‘state of conditional literacy’, for the early Irish Gaelic or Goidelic speakers had their own means of literary expression knows as ‘Ogham’. Proinsias Mac Cana explains this as a “system of writing based upon the Latin alphabet and consisting of strokes and notches cut upon wood or stone”. Extant stone inscriptions date from between the 4th and the 7th century.

It was during this period that the Gaelic world was to re-organise both its social order and its religious beliefs, and practices., With the coming of Christianity came the unprecendentive prestige of literacy, as the monastic schools of the Gaelic Church became centres of Christian learning, in both Latin and an embryonic Gaelic script. A body of customary law and lore, which had been preserved within an oral tradition, which was also committed to writing in perhaps the 6th or 7th century. The Druids, then, as a pagan priesthood and as custodians of an orally-administered system of law, did not fit into this new Christian, literate order.

From the early Gaelic corpus of law, we learn of a wide class of skilled functionaries, known as the ‘aes dana’, or ‘men of art’. Within this wide social layer of ‘craftsmen in things, word and thought’, the Druids seems to have been displaced by the ‘filid’, who Piggot describes as ‘the repositones of the oral tradition, not only of myth, legend, and family history, but of the formalised language and techniques of prosody in which these were preserved and transmitted, and the jurists responsible for customary law’. For the skilled wright, the jeweller, the historian or the lawyer to hold his respected position in society, depended much upon the patronage of a warrior aristocracy, rather than on the privileges of birthright.

With the displacement of a redundant pagan priesthood, and a growing acceptance of Christianity, Gaelic churchmen found a place among the aes dana. As contributors to the development of Celtic learning, these monastic scholars shared with the poets a liberty of movement which facilitated the standardisation of a written Gaelic language.It would appear that Old Irish, or more correctly Old Gaelic, while possible based on the vernacular Gaelic tongue of the seventh century, was essentially an artificial creation of those in control of the written art: the aes dana. From the early seventh to the late eight century, this universal standard language was maintained by the learned men of Ireland, Gaelic Scotland and Man.

Geographically, Iona occupies a central point on a line running south-east to north-east; from Cork to Sutherland. So when Norse invaders attacked the island monastery in 795 A.D., they struck at the heart of the Gaelic world. For a period of twenty years, the Annals of Iona record sustained Norse aggression, disrupting the religious and educational life of the monastery until its abandonment in 807 A.D.

The effect on the standard Old Gaelic language was clearly one of destabilisation, since its monastic custodians could offer no resistance to the educational havoc inflicted by the Norse men. In the words ofDavid Greene:

“The classical period of Old Irish was comparatively short for in 795 the Viking raids began and soon the monasteries were being plundered and burned, and many scholars were fleeing abroad. The time of troubles which followed is characterised by an extraordinary linguistic confusion”.

However linguistically incongruous the form, extant manuscripts from the Middle Irish, or Gaelic period (c. 900-1200 A.D.), reveal the persistence of a learned class in maintaining a standardised artificial language. O Cuiv remarks on this persistence:

“While the period may be marked by a certain pedantry and literacy conservatism, as the learned struggled to adhere to an increasingly remote norm, it was not a period in which the learned classes’ control of education and the written form was breaking down”.

As a consequence of the Norman invasion, the Gaelic Church in Ireland and Scotland, lost its administrative peculiarity as it was pulled into line with churches elsewhere in Europe. The Gaelic literate classes, the aes dana, it would seem, responded to this new influence by modifying their artificial language in a move away from the more archaic conventions of grammar. But no matter what classifications we apply to these evolutionary stages in written Gaelic, it was always just that: a written language whose development was policed by an elite learned class. This was to remain the case long after 1200 A.D.

Any account of early Celtic learning must, then, lead to a study of those who dominated the use of language. As an educational institution, the Druids upheld the rules of an oral tradition. The body of knowledge contained within that tradition would, therefore, have been transmitted through a language far removed from the vernacular speech of the people. The parallel existence of two languages is also a feature of early Gaelic learning, where an artificial written language was standardised and preserved by the aes dana, while the vernacular speech of the people was not restricted inits evolution. Therefore, from the earliest times till 1200 A.D. and beyond, Celtic learning was both conservative and exclusive.

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