There are no Celts. No such people have ever existed. There was no Celtic nation, no territory, no tribe or single language. The name derived from the Greek word for “foreigners”, keltoi, revived by a 17th-century Welsh antiquarian, Edward Llwyd. He assumed that people who spoke related languages must originally have been one race. All else is myth and conjecture, and a conviction shared by the Irish, Scots, Welsh and Cornish peoples that they are anything but English.
Yet, despite decades of academic debunking, the Celts refuse to die. Their lumping together as the “not English” peoples of the geographical entity known as the British Isles has been a toxin in the constitution of the United Kingdom, rendering it one of the few European states whose integrity is persistently unstable. Its Union fell apart in 1922, with the independence of the Irish Free State, and its permanence has again been questioned. There was an air of desperation to Charles III’s race round the three “nations” last month.
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