Ancient Celtic Fantasy

 I couldn’t think of another idea for this week. Actually that’s not quite true--on Thursday evening I had a great idea, but as happens sometimes, I thought I would remember it without writing it down and I did not.

But I recently reread The Paradise War and The Field of Swords, one of which is a fantasy novel based off of Celtic mythology and the other of which deals with Caesar’s conquest of Gaul and the Roman invasion of Britain. 

[Also I’m sporking Hexed on ImpishIdea and that book sucks.]

So my mind jumped to this.

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On Celtic Fantasy

So let’s say you went through my ideas for what Greek and Roman-themed fantasy stories might be like, and you decide my opinion is still worth listening to. Well okay then. If you were to make a fantasy story in which the setting was based off of Celtic culture, what would it look like? In this case you have a very wide range-- “Celtic” is a label slapped onto a group of people that occupied a very large part of Europe at one point or another. Most people read it as “Irish,” or “Irish and Scottish and maybe Welsh” if they’re generous. But there were Celtic peoples living in what is now France, Spain, and Germany at one point or another. The Galatians that Paul wrote letters to are believed to have at one point been a Celtic-speaking group of people, and they lived in what became Turkey.

So yeah. 

Here are some things that I might expect to see in a fantasy that took cues from historical Celtic cultures. Obviously, these are suggestions, rather than demands (if they were demands I don’t know who I’d be making them to). But I think they’re at least things that people should be paying attention to.

Nobody Writes or Reads

Look, before the printing press, mass literacy was rarely a thing in Europe. I’d argue it’d be very impractical to even try. But in general, not a lot of people could read outside of the clergy in the medieval period. Now I don’t know how common it was in Roman or Greek society though. The Celts though? Almost all the sources we have from them are by other groups during their time or Christianized Celts. The pagan Celts did not write a lot of things down. So we have very little about their culture in their own words, having to go off of what other people said.

There IS Ogham, what’s sometimes called “tree writing” but most people can’t read it. We’re still not sure what the Pictish Ogham says because attempts to translate it just give us nonsense. The only ones who could read it were the druids.

So unless your protagonist is a druid/fantasy equivalent member of the priestly caste, they’re probably not going to be reading or writing a lot, unless another culture has come in and made them learn it (in a different language, probs). That is simply not how these people thought about transmitting information. Stories and legends would have been recited and memorized rather than written down, which probably means a lot of regional variations as time goes on. Probably explains why Celts had so many different but related gods all over the place. And libraries? Yeah, no. If there were, they definitely wouldn’t have been available to anyone other than druids.

Speaking of them.

The Druids Run Everything

A thing you see as a common part of historical fiction and fantasy settings is that religion… doesn’t play a huge role in people’s lives or mindsets? And this bugs me. If they’re there, the priests are generally just odd old codgers desperately scheming for power. And yeah, I’m not saying that never happened in real life, but what’s really odd in these stories is that everyone seems to know it and ignores them. If you’re doing Celtic fantasy, you have to understand this: the druids run everything.

One of the conflicts of Song of Albion by Stephen Lawhead is that after interacting with an Englishman from our world, one of the princes of Albion decides that he should inherit his father’s crown once his old man dies. But that’s not how it works in Albion, because the bards/druids decide who gets to be king next from a group of candidates. Skipping this process is considered something very much like blasphemy.

Fantasy stories treat druids very often like magicians or wizards. And that’s not bad for fantasy. But remember that druids were the scholars, judges, bards, and priests of their people. It’s not that no one else had knowledge, but the druids were the ones who had the most, and for that reason they were left to make all the important decisions.

If you have Celtic fantasy, the druids, or druid-equivalents, should be the top caste. Maybe not officially, in the sense that there are warriors and royals who take the top spots, but the druids are the ones making a lot of the major decisions, and the ones the kings consult for prophecies and nature and how the gods think of things.

Keep that in mind if you write a druid protagonist (and please make him or her better than Atticus).

Look, when the Romans got to conquering the Celts, they targeted the druids specifically because they were the ones who helped organize resistance. They killed them real hard, as much as they could.

And on the subject of Roman invasion:

Stories of Resistance

Arthur fighting the Saxons. Vercingetorix fighting the Romans. Boudicca fighting the Romans. Many of the cultural heroes that we see among the Celts are people who became famous for fighting off their would-be conquerors. And sometimes they failed--the Romans still took a huge chunk of Britain, after all, and Gaul fell to Rome. And whether or not there was an Arthur, the Saxons dominated most of Britain until the Norman Conquest. But those people were memorialized by their people because they resisted.

If you want to do a fantasy setting based off of the Celts, why not have them be faced with invaders? Because the Celts lived in a lot of Europe and had to face off against invasions from the Germanic and Norman peoples. Mind you, those Celts were fighting each other quite a lot, and they probably took their lands from conquering other peoples (this is pointed out in Field of Swords). In many cases, leaders had to convince former enemies to put their differences aside, either by force or diplomacy, to stand up to the invaders.

People like those kinds of story in fantasy, and thankfully they fit quite well in 

Casual Ableism

Nuada, king of the Tuatha de Danann, the old gods of Ireland, lost his hand (or arm) in battle. And guess what? It was then declared that he could no longer be king, because it was ruled that the king could not have any physical imperfection. It didn’t matter that the man was a BEAST in battle, that he was a good king; what mattered was that he no longer fit the physical criteria. He was labeled a cripple and cast out of the throne.

Spoiler alert: he gets it back when Nuada gets an artificial hand, for which he’s known as Nuada Silverhand.

And no, maybe these same standards don’t apply to humans the way it did to gods. But you know what? That’s pretty darn screwed up, that losing a hand made him an outcast. The Norse didn’t have this problem: Odin lost an eye, and Tyr lost a hand, and neither of them lost their job because of it. But apparently to the people of ancient Ireland, this was a dealbreaker for their god monarchs. You could not be top god with an “imperfection.”

Rough.

Water Monsters

One of the things that does really disappoint me with Song of Albion is that the Otherworld just seems like our world? In the sense that it’s just our world magnified, despite being based off of Celtic myth. The invasion of supernatural monsters is explicitly a very strange thing going on. There aren’t a lot of magical creatures like giants and giant cats going around, when those are practically a dime a dozen in Celtic myth.

Especially when it comes to water. Kelpies? Afancs? Nucklevee? Mither of the sea? Selkies? Jenny Greenteeth? These are all monsters associated with water. I have a suspicion that the Gaels of Scotland were scared of water. And also maybe horses. There are a bajillion monsters associated with rivers and the sea, and most of them are trying to drown you because that’s a horrible way to die.

The Loch Ness Monster is from Scotland, remember. And the Fomorians, the giant enemies of the Tuatha de Danann? They’re often associated with the sea.

If you’re doing Celtic fantasy, put in some giants and a monster boar or something, sure. Go ahead. But more than that, you’ve got to put a ton of water monsters all over the place. Because that was where all the monsters hung out, apparently, desperately trying to convince people to ride them or take a dip so they could drown and eat them. Maybe they appear as horses, maybe they appear as beautiful seducers, but there should be a few of them around, and a savvy protagonist would have heard of them at least.

And finally.

The Fae

The Fae. The Faeries. The Fair Folk. The Little People. The Lords and Ladies. The Daoine Sidhe. The Twylyth Teg.

You absolutely must address the Fae in a story dealing heavily with Celtic myth. I’m not saying they have to take front and center; they don’t. But there has to be an acknowledgement of the Fae and how they relate to the setting. What are they? Are they downgraded gods? Nature spirits? Half-fallen angels? Maybe they’re children of the gods, like in Iron Druid. Maybe they’re another party invested in what’s going on like in Prydain Chronicles. Later books in Dresden Files implies that they’re the descendants/successors of the Celtic gods. Discworld has the elves as interdimensional raiders, of a sort. In Invisible Library (which isn’t really related to Celtic myth that much but oh well) they’re archetypal story characters, and the closer they stick to their archetype and more well known they are, the more powerful they are.

You definitely don’t have to go off of how faeries are portrayed in modern fantasy, and you don’t even have to hue to much to how they’re portrayed in the mythology. But they absolutely must be addressed, must be a part of the setting. They’ve become such a large part of the idea of Celtic myth. And one of the ways to show that a setting is a magical world is that it has a race of magical beings apart from humans that inhabit it.

Are they like physical beings, but just not human? Are they spiritual beings? Are they benevolent? Are they malevolent? Are they both? Remember that the idea of faeries being split into friendly Seelie and unfriendly Unseelie Courts goes back to Scottish folklore. Figure out what the Fae are doing, how they’re different from humans, and how your characters relate (or don’t!) to them.

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