What exactly were the Celts or Gauls and did they ever form a single nation or proto-nation?
Celtic is a language group. You know how there's that thread on "the Turkic people" elsewhere on the forums? Yeah, this is the same thing. There were significant groups of people who spoke Celtic languages in the Iron Age in Iberia, the British Isles, France, northern Italy, Bohemia, Thrace, the Hungarian Plain and northern Serbia, and in central Anatolia. They were not politically linked whatsoever. The Celtic-speakers at Ankyra in the third century BC who lived in the famous Three Galatian Tribes would not have known anything of those in north-central Iberia in Numantia at the same time, much less had cultural and political dialogue. Within the group, there were of course many political subdivisions, usually referred to as tribes; there were many Gallic groups, of whom the Aeduoi and Auernoi are perhaps the most well known; these groups did not split evenly linguistically either. There was no common pantheon, insofar as there were any pantheons among any of the Celtic-speaking peoples.
It was once rather chic to refer to the Hallstatt and La Tène material cultures of Iron Age Europe as "Celtic" (and the Jastorf material culture as "Germanic"), but this has (thankfully) begun to fall by the wayside lately, because, as should be obvious, the kind of implements or decorations somebody uses does not affect his or her
language (or vice versa).
By the fourth century, most of the places in which people spoke Celtic languages had Latin-speaking inhabitants instead, with the only clear exceptions being Galatia (where they spoke Greek), Thrace (also Greek-speaking), and Ireland. It seems that most of the places where Celtic languages are spoken today - Galicia in Spain, Bretagne, Wales, Cornwall, and Scotland - may have got their Celtic language from Ireland in the centuries following the extinction of the Roman Empire in the West.
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