The Celts: A Modern History

By Ian Stewart

Princeton University Press 2025

Given that his 500-page new book The Celts: A Modern History is in large part about the ethnology and philology of pan-Celticism in the last 300 years, Ian Stewart’s offhand mention in his Preface that writing his book was “a lot of fun” might seem at first a bit of fun, if not a sign of delusion. But something of that fun actually peeks through quite often in this sweepingly authoritative study.

Stewart lays his scene with an outline of the sprawling, elusive history of the Celts but also, and more fascinatingly, the many byzantine ways that history has been shaped and used by every nation that wants to claim it for their own. “It was imperative that national mythologies be based upon a glorious past,” Stewart writes, “and here the Celts entered the equation, though their utility varied in England, Wales, and Scotland.” (If you’re missing Ireland on that list, fear not: the Irish – Celtic connection receives special attention as the account goes on). Stewart studies identification of and with the idea of Celtic identity over a wide swath of countries and a great span of time, pulling in everybody from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Edward Said, and although he enthuses that he could easily spend a lifetime on the subject, he usually seems to have read everything.

To spotlight the usefully mutable nature of Celticism in the rear-view mirror, he quotes TH Huxley at his long-winded insightful best in one whopper of a sentence:

If the writer means to be civil, the Celt is taken to be a charming person, full of wit and vivacity and kindliness, but, unfortunately, thoughtless, impetuous, and unstable, and having standards of right and wrong so different from those of the Anglo-Saxon that it would be absurd, not to say cruel, to treat him in the same way; or if the instructor of the public is angry he talks of the Celts as if he were a kind of savage, out of whom no good ever has come or ever will come, and whose proper fate is to be kept as a hewer of wood and a drawer of water for his Anglo-Saxon master.

And as for our own writer, Stewart is clear: “To put my cards on the table,” he writes, “I hope to have avoided the ‘ancient, deep-seated, almost wholly unconscious English prejudice against ‘Celts’ and all their works’ by being American (and therefore gripped by a different set of prejudices entirely).” Those prejudices, such as they are, enliven an already brisk story that runs through the Celtifying efforts of Matthew Arnold, WB Yeats, and the uncle of Charles de Gaulle. Compulsively, almost mordantly, these histories keep looping back and back to the Irish, the modern exponent that would perhaps have most deeply confused the actual ancient Celts, whoever the Hell they were. “There were many self-identified British Celts who considered the Irish to be uniquely troublesome, not because they were Celts but because they were Irish,” Stewart writes. “Moreover, many of those who denigrated the Irish had a more benign view of the other Celtic populations in Britain and France.”

A more benign view. Readers will embrace so diplomatic an author, and this big, dense book will serve most of those readers not only as the grandest possible report on the current state of Celtic studies but as, one can only hope, a death-knell to the kinds cheaply sentimental pseudo-histories that usually haunt this subject.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News