After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Dark Side of the Celts: Whicker Men and trophy heads

Episode Date: March 23, 2026

The Ancient Celts: feared in battle, guided by Druids, and bound together by ritual.Long before Rome pushed north, Celtic peoples ruled forests, hilltops, and river valleys. But in this episode we'll be discussing the darker aspects of this ancient civilisation...We are very lucky to be joined by Professor Ronald Hutton as our guest. Ronald is a returning fan favourite having been on numerous episodes of After Dark, including the Origins of Halloween and the Execution of Charles I.This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. Produced by Tomos Delargy. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.You can now watch After Dark on Youtube! www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Looking for more shady and sinister stories, sign up to History Hit. You can join us to explore the tragic life of the Bronties or discover the chilling story of Burke and Hair. Plus, with your History Hit subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe to start exploring the past. The ancient Celts, a patchwork of tribes that spread across Europe, feared in battle, guided by druids and bound together by ritual. Long before Rome pushed north, Celtic peoples ruled forests, hilltops and river valleys. They built fortified settlements, forged weapons of iron and lived in a world where warfare and worship were inseparable. To the Celts, power was not political, it was spiritual.

And welcome to After Dark, I'm Anthony, and as you may have noticed, I am Madilus and have been for the last few episodes and will be for a short time to come yet because she is trekking in the Andes on discovery missions that will change the world. But until then, you have me and a plethora of incredible guests to navigate the historical terrain that we're about to discover today. And in this episode, we will be talking about the dark side of the Celts, the rituals, the violence and the dangers that shaped these ancient societies. And who would we rather have to help us navigate that particular terrain than Professor Ronald Hutton, who is, of course, a returning guest and a fan favourite. And Professor Hutton is at the University of Bristol and specialises in early modern Britain, British folklore, pre-Christian religion and modern paganism. Professor Hutton, welcome back to After Dark. Thank you very much. I am a bit of plethora. It's delightful to be. It is, this is a really interesting one for me, right? Because we're going to be talking about the Celts.

And somebody had the nerve to say about middle-aged Celts earlier. And I don't know if I quite fit that category just yet. But we're not too far from it. Yeah, yeah, just about. But this is something culturally that we in Ireland grow up with. This idea of our Celtic, you know, DNA, our background. It is something that we carry with us. But actually, I often wonder if we know.

what we're really carrying with us and actually how much Celt we are. So that's part of what we're going to get into today. But the first question I want to ask you is the most broad question so we can start from a very broad vantage point. And that is, who were the ancient Celts? Anthony Mochre, be a Celt. Be bold, be brave, be confident as a Celt. The problem is that the term Celtic was used by the mid-20th century for three different things, which only overlap. They weren't the same. And they came from different periods. There's an ethnic connotation in that the Greeks and Romans used the word Celts vaguely for people living north of the Alps. But they couldn't quite agree on who up there were Celts. The only thing they seem to have

agreed upon is that anybody from what's now the British Isles were not Celts. there's also a term used for language groups, the Celtic languages, which was coined by Welshman at the end of the 17th century. And finally, it's used for a style of curvy, loopy art. Yes. And that's a 19th century coinage. So there's layers of what to be a Celt and what has Celtic lingers. means. You spoke there about the kind of geographical elements. You talked about there being kind of a religious or a decorative element to it as well, all of these things. But am I writing

in saying that today where we find claims of Celtic ancestry is mainly in Ireland, obviously, Wales, in Scotland, and then in the Cornish people and the Manx people as well. And then in Britain, Is that the main geographical location of where people are claiming Celtic descent today? You've collected the lot of Celts in that catalogue. A collection of Celts? Yes. Some people would admit the people of Northwest Spain, the Galicians, to the family. But they themselves are dubious about their identity in this regard. Archetypically, after about 30 years of recent argument between academics. We can reach something like a new consensus that the term Celtic can be applied resolutely to peoples who speak what we call the Celtic languages. And they are exactly the people

who think of themselves and be thought of as Celts in the modern world. And they have a continuous identity as such and history from the Middle Ages onwards, from the early Middle Ages. The big problem is that largely, I say largely, there are some holdouts against this, but they tend not to be in Britain, or even in Ireland. But the holdouts are against the revision of a cultural package that got put together in the minds of academics in the early 20th century. It is not older than that. There'd still be people alive when the package was ditched who were born when it was taken. taking shape. And this is to see a unified ethnic group, the Celts, around 2,000,000, years ago, stretching across Europe from Ireland, Turkey, and taking in the whole of what's now France and southern journey, Austria, and other lands on the way, including northern

Italy. And they were seen as having common languages, common art style, common culture. This has been abandoned. It really doesn't hang together. You can see, if you like, a kind of rainbow, a spectrum of cultures stretching across that area before the Romans conquered most of it. But it's not a unified ethnic and linguistic group or even a cultural group. So on the whole, we tend to scrap the term Celts for that. Yeah. And people still speak of Celtic art, but we now realize that a lot of other art at the time is displaying the same features. And therefore, there is absolutely no doubt that the term Celtic is appropriate for a group of languages simply because it's been used for so long. And it's a precise definition.

And then it can embody the tremendous cultural identity and gifts to the world of the Celtic-speaking peoples since the early Middle Ages, often under acute pressure from other peoples, Germanic or Romance-speaking peoples, above all the British and the French. And their ability to preserve their identity as themselves through such a history, which at very best is one of relentless cultural pressure. And at the very worst is one of horrific persecution in places and times approaching genocide. So the Celts of the present day can wear their Celticity with pride. And have in a good one and a half millennia of continuous existence and identity behind them. The problem is only if you try and stretch across most of Europe

over 2,000 years ago. Now, you talked about this idea of persistence and the Celtic people overcoming, persisting, enduring despite some of these incursions that have happened over different millennia. One of the things that I want to feed into here then is whether or not one of the ways in which this survival has endured is because of a stereotype that is linked to cultures of violence when we hear about the Celts. I can conjure up an image in my head of somebody with wild hair, half-painted blue face and, you know, almost naked charging at a group of far more civilized invaders. How real is that when we talk about Celtic people? Let's say in the in the Atlantic archipelago or the former British Isles?

The stereotype of the Celt in modern times is not really linked to violence so much as unrulyness. After all, the kind of violence disposed of by the Roman legions was sensational, acute, catastrophic, that they could slaughter people in huge numbers, but they marched in step. They were mechanically equipped. And so they look far more akin to modern industrial warfare than the primeval. So by contrast, we see the peoples whom the Romans and Greeks described as Celts, which is a kind of short term for anybody whom they haven't yet conquered living north of the Alps, is they are emotional, ungoverned, unruly, can't even.

even comb their hair, paint themselves, odd colours, run into battle naked. We can unpack all of those particular labels. It's an ethnic stereotype. Yes. Produced by hostile peoples. But it gets a new lease of life under the Victorians. And I'll especially finger Matthew Arnold here, who was so brilliant to getting everybody to believe it. He was actually trying to get the Victorian English and Scots, Lolan Scots,

to take the Celtic-speaking peoples and their descendants seriously, not to disparage them by saying it's a partnership of peoples. And what the English and the Lolan Scots, the Germanic peoples, remember Lolan Scots speak a Germanic language, squads, breed Scots, is they're good at maths, sciences, building, rationality, structured government, taxation, welfare. And what the Celts are, who are kind of unreasonable, undisciplined, unorganizable, is they're really, really good at art and literature.

They live with their emotions. They live close to nature. They reconnect the urbanized, industrialized, Germanic peoples, with their natural roots and their imaginative life. Without them, the Germanic peoples would die imaginatively, creatively. So the moody, emotional, creative Celt is absolutely essential to civilization in the British family of peoples. But of course, it does mean they can't rule themselves.

Funny that, isn't it? Yes, yes. There has to be a payoff here for a Brit. Yeah, no, I'm suddenly feeling more moody, dramatic, artistic. Celtic Kels is suddenly feeling far more my lane of Celticism than potentially any kind of warrior Celticism. I, by the way, I'm half Slav. Ah.

The Germanic peoples have actually parodied the Slavs in just the same way. You know, emotional, undisciplined, can't rule themselves, that sort of thing. Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah, it's that they can't be trusted with their own, with the outcome of their own civilizations. Yeah, but aren't they wonderful? But they're lovely. They're great for a poem. Tell me this then, in this melee of different things coming together to form these peoples, depending on where we're encountering them, there is one thing that I have encountered again and again, which is I'm not sure how realistic this was across Celtic peoples or whether it was very specific to Wales, I think.

This idea of the cult of the severed head, or actually possibly more specifically the skull. Is that really something that we see preserved archaeologically? The question of the cult of the severed head in Iron Age Northwest Europe is a vexed one. Because on the one hand, the idea of it comes very specifically from one rather wonderful person. somebody who was not actually an academic, but who was a foundationally great scholar. And that's Anne Ross, who wrote this breathtakingly good book, Pagan Celtic Britain. It was good for its time, which was the 60s, the late 60s. And it was she who had the idea that the Celts, which in her day were still believed to be a confederacy of peoples or related.

stretching across Europe, had a cult of the head severed or otherwise. And this is still possible because heads are important in Celtic art. And you do find skulls preserved in various ritual structures from the Iron Age. But you also find long bones, thigh and... arm bones preserved in the same context. It isn't just skulls. And Anne was particularly keen on a particularly large collection of stoneheads, carved stoneheads, which are found over England and in bits of whales, and which were dated vaguely to the Iron Age at that time. Problem there is they are now most of them conclusively dated to the 16th, 17th centuries, although they may have had a

ritual function then in being protective. On the other hand, they also had a humorous function. For example, quite a number of them have a hole drilled in the corner or the center of the mouth. And back in Anne's Day, it was thought this was for libations of mead or beer to feed the deity of whom this was an image. We're now pretty sure that these were receptacles for clay pipes. Perfect. And people would them throw balls to try and knock the pipe out. So an awful edifice of belief bites the dust with the redating.

The remaining heads, most of them are simply undated. They may be Iron Age, but they may not be. So we're left with the skulls and the bones because there are bones as well skulls and a lot of iron age deposits. It's not a particular cult of the head, but also heads remain pretty common. And this could be because they were something sacred about them, the repository of wisdom, of life. Or it could be simply that some peoples in northwestern Europe collected them as trophies. And we do have a literary source, Posidonius, a Greek traveller who toured what's now France, it was then Gore, a few hundred years before the Christian common era. And he said that

over the southern two-thirds of what's now France, the tribes would collect the heads of their unsuccessful enemies and preserve them in vats of oil. And they'd bring them out at dinner parties to display to their guests, you know, like family China. Games night. Yes, that's exactly right. But we don't know which is which, whether there's any sacred significance or this is because of head hunting. There is a display and intimidation factor here as well as pride in family heirlooms of deceased enemies. When a hill fort at Breeden Hill, which is the hill that sticks out of the area of the M5 between Tewkesbury and Worcester on the right-hand side, There's a photon there from the Iron Age, and it had timber gates which crashed in flames about a hundred years before the common era, carrying with them the severed heads who'd been stuck on the pointed tops of the gate timbers. Which is fairly clearly a kind of welcome to would-be enemies showing what's going to happen to.

It's interesting, isn't it? Because as you're describing that, Ronald, it really strikes me. you know, the heads are being displayed, as you're hinting there, in the, all throughout the early modern period, in very similar ways in that kind of deterrent, or this is an example of what might happen to you. And we never really say in that case, oh, they had the cult of the severed head. But it's that idea that because we don't necessarily know

or because there are some gaps to fill in, that we've slightly mythologized some of that practice in terms of what they might have. been doing. So I find that really interesting. But speaking of mythologies that are coming into these peoples and these cultures, druids, are druids, Celts? Is this a sect within Celticism? Is this a totally separate group of people? What is the intersection and what's the relationship between Celticism or the Celtic people and druids? The druids are a point at which the ancient idea of Celts and the sustained and respectable idea of Celts as people speaking Celtic

languages and having cultures that evolved since the Middle Ages. They come into one here because Druid is simply the term used by people speaking Celtic languages for a specialist in religion and or magic. I see. But it's very broadly defined. So in the Roman descriptions of pre-Roman Gaul, that's now France, which the Romans conquered, the druids are a highly trained and organized suprera tribal priesthood who take 20 years of education and have a common meeting altogether in the centre of Gaul, irrespective of their tribes, and are regarded as very powerful and very wise. We don't know if any of this is true.

It all comes from one commentator, Caesar, or possibly from some unknown person finishing Caesar's book after Caesar got knifed. Whereas in medieval Irish literature, druid is simply a term for anybody who's working magic. Now, there are full-time magicians who are therefore full-time druids. And they're very important.

But anybody who works magic seems to become a druid at the time at which they're working magic. The rest of the time they're a blacksmith or a poet, a king or something else. So it's a lot more porous. And I think it's quite important not to impose Caesars or pseudo-Cesar's, possibly bogus picture of an Iron Age Gallic, Gaulish society

upon Ireland or vice versa, not to mix the two together in one big melting pot and produce a composite picture of druids that may never have existed across the whole Celtic world. And do we know what types of practice or what types of magic they're engaging in? Is this land-based, is this seasonal-based?

Is it something that they're trying to control the area around them? Is it healing? Is it all of the above? Are we left with any proof as to what they're doing there? The record is disappointingly bad. of actual records of druid rituals or spells.

In fact, the main one we have is from the destruction of Dardegas Hostel, which is one of the most stunning Irish medieval stories. And it's a rite called the Tarvesh, the Bulldream, which describes how they say a man, but we take that as being a druid, become the context. when you want to get a vision, in this case to choose the next king, you sacrifice or just kill a white bull, and then you get the man concerned to gorge upon a kind of Irish stew without the potatoes of the meat. And having bloated himself, then go to sleep on the hide of the bull. and he will then have a dream

and that dream will be prophetic to identify the new king. It all sounds very convincing being medieval Irish literature we have no idea whether this is an authentic memory of a druidic ritual which it might well be

or whether it was just a bright idea on the part of the fillet, the olive, the bard who was composing that particular tale. It's tantalizing in a way because I remember those stories growing up about the lying and the remnants of the bull and they were definitely around

just as kind of oral tradition. But we were definitely talking around those topics in school. Another thing that I recognize from the druid practice is this idea of, when I saw this, I went, that can't be right, but the idea of the wicker man and what is potentially happening there.

And it's this large, well, supposedly this large wicker statue in which the druids would sacrifice humans and animals for burning. Now, this is coming from somebody you've already warned us about Ronald, which is, of course, Julius Caesar or somebody adjacent to him. And in that it says there were figures of vast size, the limbs of which formed of osiers, they fill with living men which being set on fire,

the men perish enveloped in the flames. And he frames the ritual as within broader sacrificial beliefs saying, Gauls, think that unless the life of a man be offered for the life of a man, the mind of the immortal gods cannot be rendered propitious.

So how skeptical should we be of this particular description that's left to us by Julius Caesar or Caesar adjacent. We can be pretty skeptical about the ancient descriptions of the wicker man. And we can also trace a complete and straightforward descent from Julius Caesar, or at least Caesar's book, and Christopher Leon Drag in the 1970s movie. Yeah. Caesar actually conquered Gore. So he would have encountered its native peoples in their pre-Roman

condition and been pretty reliable. But the description of the wicker man, as we call it, in Caesar's description of Gore, is in a self-contained section that doesn't sound like the style of the rest of the book. and actually what Caesar says in the rest of the book is sometimes contradicted by this passage and vice versa. So it looks like an insertion. And we know that Caesar never actually finished the book, the Gallic War. It was completed after his death by another writer who hadn't accompanied Caesar to Gore. And so there's a possibility that the writer concerned decided to liven up Caesar's narrative. by inserting this description of Gaul based upon less reliable sources.

So what looks like an eyewitness account of a culture may be nothing of the kind. There are later references to human sacrifices conducted by druids, one of which includes the wicker man motif in writers a bit later, diodorus, Siculus, Strabo, they're Greek writers who never went near Gaul. And indeed, the description of the wicker man may have been taken from Caesar or pseudo-Cesar. So the evidence is distinctly suspect, but it not only was taken as gospel by everybody who was impressed by the Romans, which was practically everybody in Europe until the 20th century, or even the late. 20th century. But also by Christians, to whom the idea of pagan priests as being died to the elbows

and human sacrifice, was a traditional motif. And that's why the wicker man became very popular. It became very popular in particular because of one bestseller, which was a history of Britain produced by a lawyer called Islet Sam's, pretty well forgotten now, in the 1670s. And the great thing about it was it was illustrated. Really great pictures. And one of the pictures was of the wicker man. And every time you see a picture of the wicker man now on a tea towel, I have one, or reproduced in books. And as you see it in the film, The Wicker Man, it's taken from the...

this illustration to Islet Sam's book. So, you know, a picture, it says, is worth a thousand words. And certainly in impact, this particular picture proves that truth. Well, I have an image that was a perfect segue into this part for me, Ronald, because I've got a picture of an 18th century illustration from a tour in Wales, written by Thomas Pennant. And without a doubt, this is also influenced by your late 17th century image that you're talking about. And I'll just describe it here for listeners, and we'll put this on the YouTube and on social media as well.

But we have a very giant figure with a very human face, actually, very, very human face, probably, what, five times the size of the other humans. Well, not others, because this isn't a human, but the humans depicted in this image. And it is gigantic. It is probably about four or five people. An arm is about four or five people wide. and the body looks like a cage for all intensive purposes. Obviously, we know it's made from Wicker or we're being told in this image that it is. And it is stuffed.

And that's the only word I can use, really, stuffed with people, squirming, wriggling. There's arms and legs protruding from the cage that they're held in. Then down on the bottom, there is a man who looks like he is trying to run away as quickly as he possibly can because he is setting light to the right-hand foot, which of course then will engulf the whole thing. And then looking on, we have scantily clad women. We have religious figures, someone who looks quite druidic, actually. And it is a very arresting, very arresting image,

but it's interesting how long and how deep these ideas go, but it also speaks to this idea that you talked about at the time. talked Ronald about the brutality that other civilizations almost insisted that the Celts and the Druids had to have had and that, you know, we are more civilized than this. We would never do this. It's rather, it's pretty gruesome. Does the illustration, which you've just described, having one of the two feet a trap door still open with somebody being stuffed in. Yes.

You're looking at Islet Sam's illustration. Right. This is where it's coming from. Yes, there's a little ladder up into a door that's still open where people have just gone in. Yeah, absolutely. They're being fed into it to meet their darkened doom. Let's talk a little bit about the Irish Celtic tradition,

then specifically because I want to talk about the fact that this is somewhat different than the Celtic tradition in mainland Britain because the Romans never invade Ireland and it's also then some of these traditions are encapsulated in the two of the Danin which is written at approximately the 11th century but has much, much older oral storytelling roots. I want to turn to Morrigan specifically.

potentially dark figure. Can you explain to us who she is for people who may not know? I'll explain with delight who the Oregon is. We're friends. We have relations. She and I. She is the very best known, especially at the present day, of the Irish War goddesses. But there are quite a number of them. In fact, there are over 40 names in the tales, although we can relax a bit because only five of them are named regularly. And indeed only one more is named more than once. The others have names that are well known to experts in medieval Irish literature, where they appear as frequently as the Morrigan.

But they tend to be forgotten now by the public. Because the Morrigan has other dimensions. that the other war goddesses lack, because all the other war goddesses do is incite slaughter, prophecy slaughter and enjoy slaughter. They start trouble as well as really enjoying it. Whereas the Morrigan does more things than that, she is a prophetess of great things in general, including the good times, the bad times and the end of the world. She is amorous.

She mates with the dachda, the good god, and enjoys it so much. They've already met, this is a date. She's ready for him when he turns up. And she enjoys it so much that inspired by this, she then goes off and murders the king of an opposing army in order to give the people of the dachda, who are also her own people, but kind of more important to the dachda. the ability to win a major battle. And also she propositions the Ulster hero par excellence, Cujulin. Cujulin being a brat, a moody late adolescent.

With a hurley. Yes, with a sideline in homicide. Yes. No, actually a central profession in homicide. Cohollen rudely rejects most propositions. Yes. And she then attempts to get vengeance by killing him and he beats her off. But she also looks after people.

She helps a druid win his sweetheart in one minor story. In other stories, she actually gets married to the doctor. They settle down in the Bruna Boenia. And they have a family. It all sounds quite domestic. You have medieval place names like the Morrigan's half and the Morrigan's cooking pot. You know, the Morrigan at home. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

What is that? Yeah. Yes. And she gives luck to people. She gives them victory and battle. I think that's how I would know her most. That's what her legacy is to me mostly is a luck thing, yeah. Yes.

So if you want to strip it down to its essentials, really what most of the other war goddesses do what all of the other war goddess do is mostly spread panic. Yes. They make a hundred warriors die of fright by flying above their camp and screaming at night. They enjoy watching people suffer and die, whereas the Morrigan gives the opposite panic instead or maybe as well, which is the Riastra, the battle frenzy, when warriors lose their fear completely and give themselves up to combat. Now, this is not unique. I think she's the extreme north-western corner. Yeah, the not a north-western corner of a complex of similar goddesses who are found across Europe.

The Norse one is Freya. The Roman one is Venus. The Greek one, not so much on the war side, but it's there, is Aphrodite. but spectacularly inana, alias Ishtar in the Near East, and probably Arnath Astati, Ashtat in Syria. What they all do is rather counter-intuitively to any modern hippie. They combine a sponsorship of war with a sponsorship of love and sex. And although nobody ever spells out why, everyone just knows.

news and nobody explained it. There is a similarity because both combat, which in those days is really single combat all over the battlefield and lovemaking are of dramatic engagement of bodies, which engage with vital fluids, and in which people lose themselves. They lose reason, they lose control. And so they may come from the same source, the ecstasy of sex and of... of the passion of love. This is one of the ways in which

we still hear about the morgan, I suppose, is because of the ways in which I'm talking about the Romans never conquered Ireland and so therefore certain things endure in different ways. But just to balance that out, Ronald, I wonder what the impact of Roman conquest is on the culture outside of Ireland. How immediate is that felt, that Roman presence felt?

The Roman presence takes time to seep into a culture, but the Romans have got a lot of that. Yeah. Hundreds of years. And you can see it in the archaeology. And it still presents us with a moral problem in Britain at the present day. Because for the first 200 years of Roman Britain, once you get away from the towns and the forts into the countryside, which is where 98% of the world. people live. It's an iron age culture. You don't have anything Roman about it at all. People are now being taxed in their produce and they're disarmed, but they're just doing what they've done

for a thousand years in the same way. When you come to the third or fourth centuries, particularly the fourth, it's changed. On the typical farmstead, you'll find Roman pottery, Roman utensils and Roman money. I mean, like small denomination, copper coins, but they're all there. So even the rural Brits have got thoroughly romanized. Yes. That, of course, at the present day, provides what would be a dilemma for novelists, playwrights, artists, if the two ever met from the, say,

at the different bits of Roman Britain. Because if you're looking at the first century, then the Romans are the villainous invaders. It's Carreptarchus. Above all, it's Budica, you know, the kind of Ur-British feminist, who are the figures with whom we sympathise. And the Romans are jackbooting their way onto our shores and building horrible new towns with dead straight new roads between them. Any protester would recognise a target there.

And establishing a uniform tyranny, in the words, of the Scotsman Calgarcas, who may or may not, and which may or may not have been invented by a Roman. The Romans created a desert and called it peace. But flip on 300 years, or 400 years, and it's Roman Britain, which is the civilized, Christian, safe, familiar area. It's the Anglo-Saxons, who are the verminous, hirsuit, heathen warriors coming over to race, and pillage and destroy and enslave. And it's characters like Arthur, and Orrelius and Euphiopened dragon, who are the defenders of Britain, the sympathetic figures. It's a schizophrenia in our attitudes, the Romans, which reflects a reality of a non-Romanized and thoroughly Romanized Romanized

Roman-Briton. That's interesting. Do you think that legacy of a Romanized Romanized Britain then is more with us in everyday life today than potentially the Celtic Britain that we've been talking about? Or do you think we have a strange mashup of the two things side by side here? Because sometimes I think it's way more blatant in Ireland and Scotland. And even when we're talking about language and that's going through such a huge revival in Ireland. Anyway, I can't speak to Scotland. But I think it might be the same. But the language is really making a comeback as we try to re-establish 100 plus years now after Ireland was no longer part of the British Empire. The language is now finding its feet again, as it did at the end of the 19th century.

Is it the Romanness that distinguishes Englishness from the current ideas of Englishness from those earlier Celtic iterations? Or is it just because history is difficult, right? And it all melds together. But how present, I suppose, is what I'm asking. How present is the Roman influence even today? History is difficult, but we shouldn't shirk its challenges. In one sense, Ireland is romanized at the present day.

Because if you walk through the streets of Dublin, you're looking at classical buildings in the Roman style. You're looking at columns on which national heroes stand. You're looking at sculptures of... mythical beings or historic beings, Mother Liffy, Anna Liffy, and people who are commemorated. This is a Roman style. And indeed, every time Ireland, or indeed anywhere in Europe goes urban, it Romanises. So we're all Romans in that sense.

But Celticity is at the heart of Irishness. And the more of it there is, the more attractive Ireland, Gallic Scot. Wales, Cornwall, Brittany, become to everybody else. You know, Gorimala Mahaggart. You're doing a grand job. I can't take personal responsibility. I do love a rule as it so happens. But this idea of the unruly Celt, there is something to be said for it, right?

Yeah, a lot of the British and the Germanic peoples of Europe are Celts when they're on holiday. Yeah, around a pool when they want to get the lounger clothes. to the pool, yeah. Suddenly they embrace their Celtic past. It's an interesting one, Ronald. It's interesting how these things bleed through and how the mythology goes on to inform what is either factual or what we want to believe. I was reading somewhere, no, I was watching somewhere recently that there was this idea that Celtic Ireland was a utopia for women, for instance. And there was a great historian online going that really wasn't the kid because they were trying to compare the idea of pre-colonised Ireland being this liberal, incredible place.

But the research she had done just didn't bear that out, that it actually was quite an oppressive place for women even then. And so I just wonder, as a way to depart from this, to what extent, in terms of that unrueliness that we're talking about, to what extent does dream-making? And we spoke about this when we talked about prehistoric Britain as well. well, but does dream-making fill in some of these gaps of Celticism? And actually, how appropriate is that in terms of what we do know about Celtic tradition? There is a particular magic, and I'm choosing the word deliberately, about medieval Celtic literature. It goes to places

and it does things which other medieval literatures don't, although there are overlaps. You know, the French romances of the 12th century are full of glittering, glamorous, magical, human-like but non-human beings called Faze, who correspond pretty well completely to Arthur Dadaan in the Irish literature at the same age. But I'm taking a punt here because I don't think anybody has articulated this before. But I would go further than people have done hitherto to suggest that the Irish and Welsh, and therefore possibly the Celtic cultures, have a different attitude to magic. That if you look at the literatures, it's kind of a neutral force which deities use in Ireland and humans can use, and it's totally respectable for them to do it.

And if they use it in a hostile way, then it's up to their opponents to deploy it against them. So you'll get your druids to curse each other if it's a political matter. Otherwise, in a private matter, you curse back. Whereas the other peoples of Europe, and it's pretty much a sellout, the Greeks, the Romans, the Germans, the Scandinavia, have an intense suspicion of magic as something furtive, anti-social, suspect, cheating. It's used by the bad guys in stories. In line that it's not. It's used by good and bad guys.

And really, it's all morally equivalent. It's just that it's used by villainous characters. It's used for bad purposes. And I think that is a genuine difference. And it's not just the Celtic-speaking. peoples as we define them now. It's the Egyptians. I don't think there's any connection between the two. But in Egypt likewise, magic was seen as a neutral force, Hecca, which kept the world going. And gods use it every day to be divine. It's how they operate the cosmos. But humans can learn it too.

And if they're really, really good, they become gods. Wow. And if you want to hex somebody, you just do it. And if you feel you're being hexed, you either hexed back or you go to a professional in the temple to do the hexing for you. There's no such thing as witchcraft in ancient Egypt to find in the negative sense. And there's not much of it in the Celtic-speaking peoples either, which is why when the notorious witch hunts of the early modern period, 16th, 17th centuries, come along. They're almost missing from all the Celtic-speaking areas. Yeah, we don't have them in the same way in Ireland at all. You have them in Ireland among Scottish and English settler communities.

Yes, yeah. And you have them in Wales in the more English-influenced areas, but hardly what is in its five executions, not all of which may be carried out in the whole of early modern Wales. The Isle of Man is the same. They have one execution that horrifies them so much. never tried again. And there, which trials are pretty well missing from the vast area of Highlands and Western Isles, Scotland. But in the Northern Isles, which are geographically about

the same and very close to the Highlands, you have a Norse culture, Scandinavian settlement. And they're appallingly intense areas for witch hunting, just like Norway, Denmark, Sweden. You're finding them there. Yeah. Well, I am off to reconnect with my Celtic magic roots for the afternoon. Well, I'm not. I'm a way to give a talk. Actually, it's far less glamorous than that. But either way, that's been so interesting in terms of how we are framing national identities today, Ronald. And thank you for bringing some of those points to After Dark. We have a few other episodes that you may remember that we had Ronald on. And that, of course, was histories from the early modern period when we were. talking about the execution of Charles I first. We also spoke to Ronald about the origins of Halloween and the history that, as we can see, they're tying in to some of the things we talked about today. So if you haven't listened to those episodes, do go back through the back catalogue, listen to them and learn about those different parts of history as well. Thank you,

as ever, for joining us on YouTube or on the podcast. And you can get in touch with us, of course, as ever on After Dark by sending an email to After Dark at Historyhit.com, where you can, of course, suggest a topic for a future episode. So do send those in. We do look at them and we do start to try and work them into the program as we can. Thank you for listening. And until next time, happy listening.