Germanic - Celtic relationship?

@Traitorfish, you may be overstating the case. Opening lines of Caesar's De Bello Gallico start by defining them as a lingustic group and differentiating them from Germans, though differentiating them also from Belgae (related group) and Aquitanians (proto-Basques).

You should read Murray Pittock's Celtic Identity and the British Image and some of his other works. Celticness as a romantic identity is a proxy for resistance to Britishness, so is viciously attacked by proponents of Britishness in a variety of forms, including the counter-myth (framed as myth-busting). As a result, there are lots of establishment 'myth-busters' saying all Celticness is invented and such stuff, but actually it is usually fairly easy to tell the difference between Roman- and post-Roman-era Celtic-speakers and Germanic speakers based on names (e.g. personal names, Calgacos (swordsman) or Argentocoxos ('silver leg') versus Sigeric (victory+wealth/authority/ruler) or Alaric (everything+wealth/authority/ruler)).

but actually it is usually fairly easy to tell the difference between Roman- and post-Roman-era Celtic-speakers and Germanic speakers based on names (e.g. personal names, Calgacos (swordsman) or Argentocoxos ('silver leg') versus Sigeric (victory+wealth/authority/ruler) or Alaric (everything+wealth/authority/ruler)).

Click to expand...

Well, the problem is that names don't always indicate language. Looking at names can be sometimes misleading. For example during WW1 there was a certain German guy named Bolko von Richthofen. His name Bolko doesn't mean that he was Slavic. Another German guy in WW1 was Hyacinth Graf Strachwitz von Gross-Zauche und Camminetz - but he wasn't ethnically Greek (even though he had a Greek name, Hyacinth). People whose name is Francis are not all Italians (even though name Francis is of Italian origin). If your name is Paul, it doesn't mean that you are an ethnic Roman person (even though Paul is a Roman name). Not every single John and Joseph are Jewish (even though both names are of Hebrew origins). Etc., etc. In 1921 among German-speaking Silesians most popular names were Paul, Josef, Franz and Karl and among Polish-speaking Silesians in 1921 most popular names were Paweł, Józef, Franciszek and Karol. Same names. But it doesn't mean that those groups were ethnically Romano-Jewish-Italian-Frankish (Karol / Karl are of Frankish origin).

Our "Slavic" Bolko (distant relative of the Red Baron):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolko_von_Richthofen

Our "Greek" Hyacinth (with his incredibly long surname):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyacinth_Graf_Strachwitz_von_Groß-Zauche_und_Camminetz

Examples I quoted above are mostly modern, but already in the Middle Ages in Europe names didn't indicate language, because huge number of names was common for entire Christendom. Paul was in use long after Roman ethnicity ceased to exist. Etc.

Names don't indicate language particularly well in modern era (Donald Tusk is not, for instance, a Gaelic speaker), but they do in the early middle ages and ancient world (with some known patterns of exceptions, for instance Roman names taken by non-Italian clients of Roman aristocratic patrons). Anyway, that's not the point, the point is that Germanic and Celtic linguistic features are distinguishable.

Pangur Bán;13366017 said:

@Traitorfish, you may be overstating the case. Opening lines of Caesar's De Bello Gallico start by defining them as a lingustic group and differentiating them from Germans, though differentiating them also from Belgae (related group) and Aquitanians (proto-Basques).

You should read Murray Pittock's Celtic Identity and the British Image and some of his other works. Celticness as a romantic identity is a proxy for resistance to Britishness, so is viciously attacked by proponents of Britishness in a variety of forms, including the counter-myth (framed as myth-busting). As a result, there are lots of establishment 'myth-busters' saying all Celticness is invented and such stuff, but actually it is usually fairly easy to tell the difference between Roman- and post-Roman-era Celtic-speakers and Germanic speakers based on names (e.g. personal names, Calgacos (swordsman) or Argentocoxos ('silver leg') versus Sigeric (victory+wealth/authority/ruler) or Alaric (everything+wealth/authority/ruler)).

Click to expand...

What is the scholarly consensus on the genetic heritage of the English?
I was led to believe that many English originated from the Jutes, Angles and Saxons but I've read a few things which suggest their impact was massively overstated. They seemed to conclude that the vast majority of English natives share ancestors with other British nations stretching as far back as the last ice age. Any "celtic fringe" was a bit overstated (Genetically).

Names don't indicate language particularly well in modern era (Donald Tusk is not, for instance, a Gaelic speaker), but they do in the early middle ages and ancient world (with some known patterns of exceptions, for instance Roman names taken by non-Italian clients of Roman aristocratic patrons).

Click to expand...

Well - even in Early Middle Ages they don't indicate language with 100% accuracy. But I agree that names is still one of main tools to "predict" language before the era of parochial records or censuses. Certainly if a person had a name of X origin, then the likelihood that he or she spoke X language was high. But we should remember that this doesn't work all the times, and sometimes a person with name of X origin could be of Y ethnicity. Statistically speaking, names did indicate language, or ethnicity, or origin of a person in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages. But sometimes there were exceptions from this rule.

Thanks for the advice Domen, but if you reread my post I've already covered that stuff.

Quackers said:

What is the scholarly consensus on the genetic heritage of the English?
I was led to believe that many English originated from the Jutes, Angles and Saxons but I've read a few things which suggest their impact was massively overstated. They seemed to conclude that the vast majority of English natives share ancestors stretching as far back as the last ice age. Any "celtic fringe" was a bit overstated (Genetically).

Click to expand...

This is a hot question. Problem is that medieval and early modern people saw the world in terms of a series of pristine races, where linguistic and biological characteristics were bundled up in one package, and then by tracing the spread of the names of such groups, or the spread of a language, you were essentially seeing the spread of biological groups at the expense of others.

Now we know that the names of people and languages can spread with very little population spread.

As for modern opinions, it depends who you ask. Basically, after the withdrawal of the Romans, a language like the Germanic of Frisia spread in southern Britain, centuries later England has aristocrats (i.e. the men who formed the ethnic polities like the Kent and East Anglia) who seem to think they come from Scandinavia and northern Germany; make of that what you will.

The bulk of the female population is probably unaffected. Only controversy is how much these Germanic guys killed British (i.e. Welsh) guys .

Interestingly, though, the genealogy of the Gewisse, the group that eventually formed England, has some guys with Welsh names as ancestor figures (e.g. Cerdic / Ceredig) ... so even these pretendy Scandinavian aristos may actually be British in origin.

What is the scholarly consensus on the genetic heritage of the English?

Click to expand...

There is no such consensus so far. On Historum.com Forums there have been several lengthy threads about this (even though discussing genetics is officially forbidden on that forum - but apparently only for some users, while others can do it without getting banned, because moderators close their eyes).

One user on Historum.com - Occidentalis - posted this map, claiming that it shows the distribution of allegedly "Saxon" male gene (but if this gene is really "Saxon", then this map begs explanation why there is so little of this gene in Denmark and in Northern Germany, while such a huge amount in Ireland):

http://historum.com/european-histor...iety-people-25.html#post1890985?postcount=245



================================

Some intense debates on whether the English are more Anglo-Saxon or more Romano-Briton in these two links below:

http://historum.com/ancient-history/62516-anglo-saxon-ruling-elite-like-normans-britain.html

http://historum.com/ancient-history/26316-anglo-saxon-invasion.html

http://historum.com/european-histor...among-other-northern-europeans-germanics.html

http://historum.com/european-history/72961-english-really-germanic-society-people.html

http://historum.com/european-history/73305-native-english-people-not-really-germanic.html

http://historum.com/european-history/67849-what-origin-celts.html

================================

The main problem is that it is sometimes really hard to establish where did a particular gene originate, where was its "first concentration", and how did it spread (and also did it spread from A to B or from B to A, or from C to A and B). In doing this, we must remember that correlation doesn't always imply causation.

================================

Anyway - the theory about just a tiny Saxon warrior elite migrating to Britain, can be excluded, in my opinion.

There had to be a significant Anglo-Saxon immigration to Britain, numbering dozens of thousands people at least. But of course the issue what percent of ancestry of modern English people is Anglo-Saxon remains open to discussion. Whether it is 10% or 50% of the total contribution, for example.

Stephen Oppenheimer claims it is just 5%. Heinrich Haerke claims it is up to 50% or more in case of males. Quite a large discrepancy:


Link to video.

We also need to remember that there was as well immigration from Ireland during the same period as Anglo-Saxon immigration.

Were Irish Gaels (including ancestors of Scots who founded the Dál Riata Kingdom) genetically the same as Celtic Britons? I don't think so.

Some Irish tribes also migrated to Wales:



http://archive.archaeology.org/0107/abstracts/scotland.html

(...)

So far as we know, the only people already living in Scotland in A.D. 400 were the Picts, who were first mentioned by Roman writers in A.D. 297. This was in connection with an attack along Hadrian's Wall, in which the Picts had the help of Irish (Scotti) allies, so connections across the Irish Sea must have already been strong.

(...)

A.D. 400. Settlers from the Irish petty kingdom of Dál Riata were beginning to establishing themselves in what would later be called Scotland. Picts were well established north of other Celtic speakers except perhaps on the west coast and in the Hebrides.

A.D. 500. Departure of Roman legions in A.D. 407 left Britain to Picts, other Celtic speakers, and growing numbers of Irish settlers. Enough Scotti were in place by A.D. 490 to allow them to move the seat of Dál Riata from across the Irish Sea.

A.D. 600. Colum Cille left Ireland and established a monastery on Iona in 563. From this time on expansion of the Irish Scotti was assisted in part by the spread of Christianity.

A.D. 700. As the Scottish presence in Britain grew, so did that of the Angles and Saxons, many the descendants of Roman mercenaries. Angle settlements expanded south and east of Scottish territory.

A.D. 800. As both Angle and Scottish communities grew, small Norse settlements began to appear in the islands of Orkney and the Outer Hebrides.

(...)

Click to expand...

The bulk of the female population is probably unaffected. Only controversy is how much these Germanic guys killed British (i.e. Welsh) guys.

Click to expand...

This depends. Because when on Historum.com I argued that Anglo-Saxon invaders were probably "taking" a lot of local females, one user who supports the theory about massive Anglo-Saxon immigration - Authun - claimed that Anglo-Saxons were monogamous, and he quoted Tacitus describing customs of some Germanic tribes 400 years earlier than Anglo-Saxon migrations as his source. Well, I pointed out that this is not a good source, because it is much earlier, describes different tribes, and actually Tacitus in another excerpt admitted that despite monogamy being the rule, elites of the society often had multiple wifes.

But if they were really monogamous, and if they came with their own women (as people who support massive immigration rather than arrival of just a warrior elite claim), then the space for intermarriages becomes limited. Of course there could be many instances of extra-marital interbreeding.

In Britain the main problem is how few traces (if any) Britons left in Old English language and culture. Even if biologically the English are largely descendants of Britons, linguistically Britons didn't manage to contribute anything significant, no loanwords, etc. (which is very strange if we assume that Anglo-Saxons were a tiny ruling class, rather than a large part of population which applied an Apartheid-like social system, or even slavery, to local Britons).

Today English language has a lot of Latin and French loanwords, but they were adopted much later, not from Romano-Britons.

Estimates of how many Anglo-Saxons migrated to Britain range e.g. from 15,000 "warrior elite" (Higham) to 200,000 "men, women and children" (Härke), etc. So there is no consensus on how many immigrants were there, just like there is no consensus on how numerous was population of post-Roman Britain.

But just 15,000 Anglo-Saxon warriors (without women and children) is unlikely. There had to be more immigrants - after all, French-speaking invaders since year 1066 came in similar, small numbers, yet they did not manage to change the ethno-linguistic landscape, unlike Anglo-Saxons had done earlier.

On the other hand, anything above 200,000 is not going to be a reasonable estimate. So many people migrating across the sea ??? Very unlikely.

Of course according to Härke, immigration was not a single event, but lasted for 100 or more years and those people were coming in many waves.

I suppose there were many analogies between Germanic-Celtic relationship in Britain and Germanic-Slavic relationship in what is now East Germany. An example: "God, prevent this land from ever again falling into its former state, don't let the Slavs to expell German settlers and to start tilling it again." - wrote Jaromar II, Prince of Rügen:

Jaromar II (1218 - 1260)

In 1256 after settling German peasants near Barth (Kreis Vorpommern-Rügen), Jaromar expelled Slavs from their farms and prohibited them from tilling the soil - he ordered them to feed their families from forests and pastures instead.

Funny thing is, Jaromar II was a Germanized Slav himself. But so was one of Hitler's favourite archaeologists, G. Kossina.

Self-hating Slav. It's usually those with weakest claims to membership who're the most ardent exponents of an ethnic group's exclusivity.

Many in Scotland after it was conquered by Britain took up 'Teutonism' as an ideology, believing that the Picts were actually Gothic speakers and so Scotland was a Teutonic country that should hate Celtic-speakers. Ironically most of these guys had Gaelic names and/or lived in Gaelic-named locations a few miles from actual Gaelic speakers.

Self-hating Slav. It's usually those with weakest claims to membership who're the most ardent exponents of an ethnic group's exclusivity.

Click to expand...

Exactly! I watched an interview with a certain guy who survived WW2 and he said that during Nazi occupation, Volksdeutsche (Non-Germans with or without some drop of German ancestry, who signed the Volksliste) were "100 times worse than Germans". There were four categories of Volksdeutsche - depending on how much (if any) of German ancestry a person had. Categories I and II were actually counted as Germans, III and IV as pro-German collaborators.

On the other hand, there were many people who were forced to sign it (in some regions it was compulsory - people were listed sometimes without even being informed), or signed it but still worked for Anti-Nazi resistance movement. There was such a satirical poem (rhymes lost in translation):

"A hundred years old man comes to an office,
with obvious pride he tries to prove,
that he had German ancestors in Poland - settlers,
therefore he has immediately become a German.
Someone asked him - why do you need this,
you are still going to kick the bucket soon.
Old man: A Pole is going to die, it is better if a German dies."

There were also many Anti-Nazi Germans, citizens of Poland, who refused to sign the Volksliste.

Domen said:

There was such a satirical poem (rhymes lost in translation):

"A hundred years old man comes to an office,
with obvious pride he tries to prove,
that he had German ancestors in Poland - settlers,
therefore he has immediately become a German.
Someone asked him - why do you need this,
you are still going to kick the bucket soon.
Old man: A Pole is going to die, it is better if a German dies."

Click to expand...

Heh, we have a similar joke over here, about an old Catholic converting to Protestantism on his death bed because, he reasoned, "it's better if one of them goes than of us".

Traitorfish said:

They fought wars between each other, but they also fought wars amongst themselves: "Celtic" and "Germanic" were categories imposed upon them by the Romans, not categories they invented for themselves. (The Romans weren't even entirely consistent "Celt" often just meant "barbarian on this side of the Rhine" and German "barbarian on that side of the Rhine", regardless of what languages people actually spoke, in part because individual chiefdoms might contain speakers of multiple languages.) These were societies organised into localised chiefdoms and dominated by a class of professional warriors, so low-key, localised warfare was a pretty much a constant feature of life, and if you lived by the Loire or the Elbe you were hardly going to lug yourself over to the Rhine just to carry out a few cattle-raids.

Click to expand...

Thanks again!, as usual, no further explanation needed.

Pangur Bán;13366017 said:

@Traitorfish, you may be overstating the case. Opening lines of Caesar's De Bello Gallico start by defining them as a lingustic group and differentiating them from Germans, though differentiating them also from Belgae (related group) and Aquitanians (proto-Basques).

You should read Murray Pittock's Celtic Identity and the British Image and some of his other works. Celticness as a romantic identity is a proxy for resistance to Britishness, so is viciously attacked by proponents of Britishness in a variety of forms, including the counter-myth (framed as myth-busting). As a result, there are lots of establishment 'myth-busters' saying all Celticness is invented and such stuff, but actually it is usually fairly easy to tell the difference between Roman- and post-Roman-era Celtic-speakers and Germanic speakers based on names (e.g. personal names, Calgacos (swordsman) or Argentocoxos ('silver leg') versus Sigeric (victory+wealth/authority/ruler) or Alaric (everything+wealth/authority/ruler)).

Click to expand...

A great insight indeed.
Was interested in the general relations between the Germanic speaking tribes and the Celtic ones, that's the basis of my original question and I think that, for the most part, was the question posed in the original thread.
There's no doubt, both, the Celts and Goth(Germans) were warlike peoples, they must have fought constantly, as much between themselves (for power and land) and each other (between the frontier tribes).
Heard that the Celts had the Romans beaten and marched up as far as the outskirts of Rome but upon seeing the great city they were in an absolute awe of it to the point that they accepted tribute offer from the Romans (to persuade them to turn back) and instead of attacking and razing the city (whose armies later on conquered their homeland) turned back, left their capital intact and let the Romans rebuild their military. All this prior to the eventual Roman conquest of the Gaels(Gaul), of course.

Pangur Bán;13366642 said:

Thanks for the advice Domen, but if you reread my post I've already covered that stuff.



This is a hot question. Problem is that medieval and early modern people saw the world in terms of a series of pristine races, where linguistic and biological characteristics were bundled up in one package, and then by tracing the spread of the names of such groups, or the spread of a language, you were essentially seeing the spread of biological groups at the expense of others.

Now we know that the names of people and languages can spread with very little population spread.

As for modern opinions, it depends who you ask. Basically, after the withdrawal of the Romans, a language like the Germanic of Frisia spread in southern Britain, centuries later England has aristocrats (i.e. the men who formed the ethnic polities like the Kent and East Anglia) who seem to think they come from Scandinavia and northern Germany; make of that what you will.

The bulk of the female population is probably unaffected. Only controversy is how much these Germanic guys killed British (i.e. Welsh) guys .

Interestingly, though, the genealogy of the Gewisse, the group that eventually formed England, has some guys with Welsh names as ancestor figures (e.g. Cerdic / Ceredig) ... so even these pretendy Scandinavian aristos may actually be British in origin.

Click to expand...

A hot question indeed!
Let us list all cultures an Englishman might be derived from (he might list as his possible background), coming to think of it this might be material for a new thread/poll, anyone willing to post it?