The great Scottish New Year fire festival is tonight.
UPDATE:
A laid back, scholarly discussion. Sections include "Redding the House," "First Footing," and "Setting Things on Fire." The Protestants are the bad guys. The Edinburgh fireworks are impressive.
More of a small-town approach:
I thought you might like what I ran across today listen to YouTubes about the archaeology and language of prehistory Celitc cultures along the the Atlantic Seaway. The big international Celtic festival is in Brittany in August every year. Looks festive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festival_Interceltique_de_Lorient
ReplyDeleteWithout having to cross the Atlantic for one, I thought you might like the Cape Breton Celtic festival they have every year mid-October. I've never been myself. The timing would take you through a lot of the New England and Maritime foliage, and you can break up a cold motorcycle trip by taking the ferry across to NS from Portland.
https://celtic-colours.com/
Not only Scotland and Ireland, but Welsh, Cornish, Manx, Breton and even Galician/Asturian contributions. I am told that there is a bagpipe and tartan tradition throughout that area, though you have to squint a bit to see in in the continental European incarnations. Those areas were much more related to each other than to inland Europe until 500 BC, and even after they had more shared culture until recently. The Scandinavians mostly moved by river through Central and Eastern Europe to get their Mediterranean contact and may not have had as much contact with those Celts either until much later, when their boats got better after about 800AD. They saw a bit of the Scots and the Orkneys, though even that was fairly late.
That might be a rather pleasant ride.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting, how much these cultures are interrelated (or not); I've been working through an analysis of Celtic / Germanic mythology that strongly indicates powerful, Stone Age similarities in the mythic forms. Of course myths have many overlapping elements, one culture to another; you can find similarities in Egyptian and Indian myths, which may or may not indicate that there's an underlying connection that dates back to proto-Indo-European times.
It's also surprising how much genetics doesn't change in spite of invasions and contact. You'd think it would; the first generation is half-whatever, and then three-quarters, etc. But men tend to do the voyaging historically, and women convey more of the genetic heritage on the X chromosome than men do, and perhaps other things are in play we don't fully understand. In any case, Britain is found to have a genetic heritage not very different from its Stone Age one in spite of Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Danish, and Norman invasions; as far as we can tell, a lot more than one might expect is maintained.
Scotland is one whose history I know somewhat. The Romans fought the Picts, who appear to have intermarried with Gaels from Ireland (the 'Scotti') who settled first in the Western isles. The Picts had a female-line inheritance system, which meant that their daughters inherited property when they married Scottish sons, who also inherited property; Pictish sons received none from Scottish brides, and so eventually the Scottish men had all the land and power. The Vikings came to the coasts and the Isles, and stayed for centuries; the nobility after the Norman Conquest were partly Scandinavian too, Anglo-Normans who intermarried with the Scottish nobility.
Yet of course the Celtic ends up being linked with the French through this very Norman, i.e. Scandinavian conquest. It's the Anglo-Normans who have property in both France and now Britain who revive the Celtic Arthurian stories to provide a mythic justification for a kingdom spanning the isle and the Celtic continental lands as well. The French fell in love with the literature a century afterwards and spread it across Europe, elaborating it to millions of words; Malory, writing two centuries later than that, refers with pride to his French-language sources, though he is far closer to the root as a knight of the English throne.