If I say or write the phrase “Celtic art”, you know exactly what I mean. The word “Celt”, or “Celtic”, instantly conjures an image as recognisable as “Greek” or “Roman”. The twining tendrils found in the Book of Kells, the fabulously elaborate vellum Gospel made in County Meath in the 8th or 9th century; a patterned stone cross; the trinkets on sale at an Edinburgh gift shop, interlaced designs woven into tea towels, printed on to mugs, worked into affordable jewellery. And the St Patrick’s Day Parade in New York, a festival of Celtic identity, when even the city’s bagels are dyed green.
Yet the new exhibition at the British Museum – presented in association with National Museums Scotland – sets out to demonstrate that “Celt” is the Schrödinger’s cat of identities. It exists, because we can see it before our eyes; and yet, it does not exist, because in all likelihood the people we now call Celts never defined themselves that way. Those step-dancers and baton-twirlers who stride through the streets of New York and London every 17 March are attaching themselves to an identity retrospectively adopted in the past couple of hundred years.
Content from our partners
