Celts in Popular Culture: An Appeal

 Last semester (Autumn 2022), I had the tremendous opportunity to teach my very first entire course, Celts in Popular Culture at Saint Francis Xavier University in Antigonish Nova Scotia. I first audited the course back when I was doing my Master's there, and it felt quite poetic to begin the final year of Doctorate teaching that same class.

If it has not been very obvious, I (Emmet Taylor, the person who runs this blog for the Association), am deeply fascinated in modern representations of Celtic peoples and history. I wrote a blog post about Druids in Dungeons and Dragons (which became a conference paper), I have co-presented on the representation of Irish paganism in the most recent Assassins Creed, and I co-hosted an episode of our podcast on Far Right appropriation of Celtic materials. The conference paper I presented at the 2022 Association of Celtic Student's Conference discussed the modern reception of Longes mac nUislenn and Tóruigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne, which should appear again in next year or two.

I think, as a field, we should study popular culture as part of our responsibility as scholars to work with and reach out to the public (which I talked about here). It is a rewarding, exciting topic that allows us to connect with the public, build relationships beyond academia, and foster the interest of young people in our field. I should know. A misadventure with a tabletop role-playing game called Scion which included a chapter on Irish Myths, pushed me down the road that has left me here writing this blog post as an almost-Doctor in the field. As my tenure running the blog fast approaches its end, I wanted to use this chance to try to share my interest with you, reader, be you an undergraduate, post-grad, ECR, senior faculty, or an interested member of the public. So, today I hope you join me as I discuss two ideas (one from beyond the field and the other from within it) that I think would be fruitful for the field to explore.

In the field of Historical Game Studies, the idea of 'accuracy' has been much discussed. The question of 'should games [and other historical media] be accurate' has more-or-less been put to bed, with fascinating, fruitful new topics for discussion developing. Andrew J. Salvati and Jonathan M. Bullinger in 'Selective Authenticity and the Playable Past' discuss a fascinating concept, and while I will summarize the broader discussion, I encourage you to read it yourself (see the bibliography at the end). 

In this article, they argue that as historians we should view games (and by extension, media) from a slightly different perspective. They use the term 'Authenticity' to describe the process through which a piece of media creates the feeling that it is historically accurate, such as through the use of museum pieces and similar. This, it must be emphasized, is not necessarily true. A manufactured feeling, the sense of something, not truly the thing itself. The audience feels like what they are consuming is accurate because they see things within the media that fit their expectations for what history should look like.

Their discussion focuses on the video game series Call of Duty, but, for us in Celtic Studies, there are obvious analogies. The 'vaguely Celtic-ish blue tattoos' is a great example. While there is evidence of tattooing in early Celtic peoples (as argued by Erica Steiner who presented at the 2022 Celtic Student Association Conference), the color blue is doubtful, and is based on images of British Celtic peoples described in Classical sources. However, the popularity of these Classical histories has influenced how Celtic peoples more broadly are depicted in popular culture, with 'blue swirly tattoos' now a standard visual characteristic of Celtic peoples in popular culture. To the public, these tattoos conform to what they have passively internalized as a historic fact: Celts have swirly blue tattoos. Therefore, when they see a Celtic person in popular culture who has these tattoos, it is a marker of Authenticity. It makes an emotional appeal to their knowledge of historical fact, and makes them feel like this is historical. 

I think this is a particularly interesting avenue for discussing the representation of Celtic peoples in popular culture. What 'is Celtic'? What do people feel is Authentic? What elements manufacture a feeling of historic truth? There is probably something to be said that Assassin's Creed: Valhalla has a weird fascination with using Bronze Age museum pieces (some of which are Etruscan, not Irish) when creating what 9th century Ireland should look like. It positions Ireland as a strange, different place, locked away in a perpetual past rather than a member of the broader global middle ages.

A similar idea is discussed by Simon Rodway in 'The Mabinogi and the Shadow of Celtic Mythology,' where he discusses how Celtic peoples exist in a vague 'mush' in the minds of general audiences, particularly North American audiences. That Celtic peoples are denied both time and space, with any Celtic setting or character drawing on elements from across time and space, creating a pan-Celticness that never existed. Rodway uses character names in Rosemary Sutcliff's Frontier Wolf as a tremendous example of this. Set in the mid 4th century CE of Britain, one character has a appropriate name, while another has a modern Irish name, a third has a grammatically chimeric amalgam of Irish and Welsh names, and a fourth has a Hebrew name that is very popular Scotland when Sutcliff was writing in the 20th century. All of these things become 'Celtic' to an audience, with what 'Celtic' is becoming increasingly vague and unclear, with Celtic peoples denied their individuality and rendered down into a indefinable slurry. 

Rodway describes this concept as the 'Home Country Celt,' which he connects to another idea that may be more familiar to readers. The 'Hollywood Indian,' is a term used to refer to the nonsensical representation of Indigenous North American peoples in movies, where traditions, styles, names, and cultural practices from different peoples all across North America. This is remarkably similar to the 'Home Country Celt,' and as scholars of Celtic Studies, we have the opportunity to engage with a wealth of scholarship discussing this chimeric image of Indigenous North Americans to better understand the similarities, differences, and possible connections between these strange chimeric representations in popular culture.

While Celtic peoples and their history are popular in popular culture, we, so far, haven't studied the modern reception and remediation of these materials to the same degree that our sibling fields of Classical Studies, Norse Studies, Medieval Studies, and the like have. However, interest has been slowly building in past two decades. This year Lorena Allesandrini from Harvard presented on an adaption of Diarmaid and Gráinne at Fíanaigecht: 4th International Finn Cycle Conference. The MLA Conference had an entire session dedicated to the topic. And, as you can see in the schedule for our upcoming conference, several presenters are discussing representations of Celtic peoples in popular culture. It is a fruitful avenue for future scholarship that will help draw us back into engaging with the public, and where we can benefit from an abundance of prior scholarship from within and beyond the field.

Emmet Taylor

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Bibliography:

Salvati, Andrew J. and Jonathan M. Bullinger, 'Selective Authenticity and the Playable Past,' in Playing With the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013): 153-168.

Rodway, Simon. 'The Mabinogi and the Shadow of Celtic Mythology,' in Studia Celtica 52 (2018): 67-85.