Eric Bourdon - Blog
Celtic art and monsters coming to UK…

Don’t panic, they’re not really ‘Celtic’ !…

Silver Gundestrup cauldron from northern Denmark
© John Lee / The National Museum of Denmark

Source : From monsters to manga : golden age of art by the Celtic race that never was, by Maev Kennedy, 10 July 2015

Julia Farley, the London curator, said the museums hoped to explode the view that the Celts were a distinct race who kept moving west from eastern Europe until they ended up stranded to this day in Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

[…] the term “Celt” was used by the ancient Greeks to refer to anyone in Europe north of the Mediterranean. “The word Celt was used to describe what people were not – not Roman, not Viking, not Mediterranean, not metropolitan or imperial”, MacGregor [the British Museum’s director] said. “The name Celt is a badge of otherness.”

[…]

If they had no common language or shared bloodlines, what united the people for 2,500 years was art, spectacular pieces showing humans and animals tangled together like spaghetti – and an element of what Farley called “weirdness”, including helmets for both men and horses which transformed them into horned monsters.

Celts : British Museum, London, 24 Sept. 2015 – 31 Jan. 2016, National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, 10 Mar. – 25 Sept. 2016