Cutting Through the Celtic Twilight

Cutting Through the Celtic Twilight


"Facks are chiels that winna ding."
[Facts are things that cannot be shifted.]
    __ Scots proverb


  The reappreciation of the Celtic tradition in the nineteenth century led to an overly romantic view known as the 'Celtic twilight.'  Professor J.R.R. Tolkein once remarked that 'anythng is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not so much a twilight of the gods as of the reson.'  It is a very dangerous place to inhabit, this twilight, as the poet W. B. Yeats discovered; he, who had himself been instrumental in the formation of that twilight, hit the hard iron of reality during the savage Irish civil war, writing in "The Stare's Nest by My Window":

"We had fed the heart on fantasies,

The heart's grown brutal from the fare;

More substance in our enmities

Than in our love."

   Many of the popular myths and fantasies that have been woven around the Celts - some self-fabricated - have been designed largely to mantle the unpalatable facts of conquest, colonization and cultural diminishment. Romantic traditions are tales that both colonizers and the colonized have spun after the event. The living, transformative myths are those that speak to us in all eras and conditions. But the minute we listen to romantic traditions, with their victimhood and inadequacy thinkly veiled by bombast and boast, we mire in a quicksand that will suck us out of reality into a jealous cauldron where bitter nationalism and retributive terrorism can be brewed.

"Take a hard look at the romantic traditions concerning your own people. What enemies to the common good are lurking behind them?"

[From: "The Celtic Spirit" by Caitlin Matthews]