Alice Roberts

If you have Western European ancestry, odds are strong that you have some Celtic ancestry in there. Who are the Celts? What can we know about them?

Alice Roberts wrote The Celts: Search for a Civilization as a companion book to her BBC2 television three-part series The Celts: Blood, Iron, and Sacrifice (https://youtu.be/zA-itb5NwDU?si=gTOPnkXeqObpdt4g ; not the greatest quality, caveat emptor). I read the book and then watched the series, and feel as if both prove helpful and beneficial, and in that order.

The reason why the television series proves important involves the Celts and the nature of the evidence: they did not leave us with a collection of texts. We have some stories and myths from the British and Irish Isles which were written down far later but seem to preserve some of the Celtic stories, and that which was written about the Celts, primarily by the Greeks and Romans who encountered them. Most of what we know from the Celts themselves comes as a result of archaeological explorations: sites and burials. Thus, the visual medium proves very helpful in getting a good mental picture of what we can know about the Celts.

The television series, understandably according to the nature of the medium, is more straightforward in its presentation. Each episode is framed by one of the three great battles between Rome and Celtic people: Brennus and the Celtic defeat and destruction of Rome in 387 BCE; Julius Caesar defeating Vercingetorix at Alesia in modern-day France in 52 BCE; Boudica’s revolt and its violent suppression in Britain in 60 or 61 CE. All of the various sites and discoveries which are profiled in the book are presented, although in different orders: the Hallstatt salt mines, the fort at Heuneburg, the Hochdorf Prince, torcs of the Snettisham Hoard, evidence of La Tène and the La Tène culture, the Tartessian inscriptions of the 8th century BCE, the Celtic dispersion into Galatia and the evidence at Gordion, the “Dying Gaul” and the Vachères Warrior, the Gunderstrup Cauldron, the Glauberg Warrior, the Bettebühl Princess, bog people and possible sacrifice of kings by the Druids, and the like.

The show presents all of this data and these discoveries and suggests almost a seamless whole: the Celts as people sharing a language family spread across Portugal, Spain, France, Great Britain, Ireland, the Alpine regions of Switzerland, Italy, and Austria, and parts of southern Germany at least, from at least 800 BCE and the end of the European Bronze Age and enduring, at least in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany, until modern times.

What seems confidently set forth in the television series is presented with a lot more apprehension and many more questions in the book. The same evidence is there: Greek and Roman narratives; archaeological discoveries; linguistic data; myths and stories which likely reflect at least some authentic Celtic memory.

The basic claim seems pretty audacious: since archaeological and DNA data do not suggest anything like the major disruptions in Western Europe as took place with the Yamnaya and the Corded Ware Culture of the early 3rd millennium BCE, and the Germanic and various steppe people migrations of the 1st millennium CE, most of what we understand as Western Europe was therefore populated by various tribes of people known to the Greeks and Romans as the Celts. Evidence of a Celtic language can be perceived in Tartessian inscriptions ca. 800 BCE in Portugal; Celtic languages persist in Brittany and the British and Irish Isles; and Celtic aspects of names can still be discerned in place names in Western Europe. To this end, whatever material culture remains are discovered in Western Europe from the Bronze and Iron Ages are thus associated with the Celts and as Celtic.

The Tartessian inscription evidence is fascinating and begs the question: if some people of Celtic heritage around 2700 years ago perceived some benefit in the idea of writing, and even worked to modify Phoenician to add vowels and suit their purposes, what happened? People deemed Celtic by the Greeks and Romans manifestly had interactions with Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans; the fort at Heuneburg featured a Phoenician style not otherwise in evidence in Western Europe. Thus they associated, to some degree, with people who wrote and had writing, and some of them even tinkered with writing. So why did they not develop their own writing system and write things down?

The question is live and active because these questions which arise about who the Celts are and how they would understand themselves will be nearly impossible to answer because we have so little evidence of anything in their own voice. We can note points of cultural and linguistic connections between the Iberian Peninsula and the British and Irish Isles; we can see the archaeological evidence from France and the Alpine regions of central Europe which come from places which will have people deemed Celtic. They all probably did speak an Indo-European language, and their languages might all have been in what we deem the Celtic family. We do know they lived in various tribes, and so ostensibly would have some points of cultural continuity but also discontinuity.

The book and the television series do well at presenting what evidence we have for the people who inhabited what we know as Western Europe from around 1000 BCE until the Roman conquest, and in many respects beyond. We know they were called the Celts, a term which seems to refer to “warriors,” and had tribal names and associations. They likely spoke languages in the same language family and perhaps remained mostly mutually intelligible. We know there were religious figures known as Druids but can only speculate about much of what “Celtic religion” would have been. We see significant material remains demanding significant cultural complexity, presenting undeniable evidence of civilization. But our understanding remains limited, and questions will remain live and open.… (lisätietoja)

A difficult to like and difficult to access book. I couldn’t really see where it was pitched. I quite like the writing style and initial introduction had me intrigued, but it was difficult to follow as an audiobook and I do wonder whether having pictures of the different types of horticulture and agriculture that was on, the authors mind would’ve been really useful. I think there’s a lot here that’s worth listening to and I think that anyone with an interesting environmental science will also enjoy this. There is also an audience here for people who have an interest in the near future, and in particular, the effects of climate change on that.… (lisätietoja)

Anatomical Oddities is an attractive nonfiction book that is something of a niche read. It would likely be most appreciated by someone who’s both an anatomy and an etymology enthusiast. Author Alice Roberts, a specialist in human anatomy and physiology, explores the human body and traces “stories of discovery in human anatomy.” She features over fifty structures (drawing on multiple body systems), often explaining how those structures function, and giving careful consideration to their names. She notes that around two thirds of medical terms are Greek, usually passed through a Latin filter, and sometimes through an Arabic one. (During the Dark Ages, 500-1100 AD, it was Muslim scholars who preserved medical and scientific knowledge.)

The names of some body parts point to what those things look like, and the use of metaphors is common. Hence we have the kidney’s glomerulus, a knot of capillaries (tiny blood vessels), involved in filtering the blood and producing raw urine. Glomerulus is the diminutive form of “glomus”, Latin for “a ball of yarn”, which is pretty much what this structure looks like. Other anatomical names tell what structures do. For example, a ligament—from the Latin noun “ligamentum”, a binding or bandage—binds bones together. Finally, some of our body parts are named after those who discovered them. Within the shafts of long bones, networks of blood vessels run through longitudinal channels, called Haversian canals, named after British physican Clopton Havers. Using a microscope, he’d discovered pores, evidence of those channels. No, he couldn’t see the blood vessels in them, and he believed that they allowed oil from the marrow to permeate the bone . . . but still, he did identify those channels in the late 17th century.

I’m not clear about the author’s criteria for the selection of her oddities. Some of the body parts featured didn’t strike me as particularly unusual. Why were sphincters— donut-shaped rings of muscle that can relax (and open) or tighten (and close)— included? We humans have quite a few, but I fail to see what so odd about them. The duodenum, the first part of the small intestine, into which partially digested food from the stomach is emptied, also doesn’t seem overly remarkable either. Was it because of the name, from the Latin meaning “twelve each”? The Greek physician Herophilus (353-280) apparently discovered that this structure was 12 finger-widths in length.

This brings me to one of my main complaints about the book. I am interested in etymology, but the author really goes into the weeds at times. Her discussion of the origin of the word thyroid, from the Greek “thyreos”, is a case in point:

“The word thyreos means a ‘door-shaped’ shield—coming from a hypothetical Proto-Indo-European word dhwer, which becomes duvara in Old Persian and the more familiar dor in Old English. The leading consonant changes in Latin to give us forum—for a public space, outdoors.”

Some sections read a little too much like anatomy textbook entries. Unlike the images found in good anatomy texts, however, the illustrations here are poor. They’re too small and lack detail. While I do have some knowledge of human anatomy, it’s not recent, and the densely detailed descriptions were sometimes hard going. I had to check for clearer online anatomical images to help me understand them. I can’t imagine attempting to read this book without any prior knowledge of anatomical features or terms. (I have no complaints about the author’s own imaginative artistic renderings of body parts. They’re quite delightful and make a very nice addition.)

There’s a wealth of information in this book, some of it quite fascinating, but I’m afraid that reading it was a bit more work than expected. I can’t say I found it consistently enjoyable.

Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for providing me with an advance reading copy for review purposes.… (lisätietoja)