attention all Celtic fantasy/historical novel writers!

[lagilman]

Everything you know about British and Irish ancestry is wrong.

Fascinating. Accurate? Who knows. But fascinating. And opens even more doors to frolic through....

Comments

[lizbetann]

Hmmm. I find many of his comments interesting... largely because it proves how little I know about what quote "most people" unquote know. I can't imagine an anthropologist in the last twenty years making a serious claim that pre-Roman or post-Roman pre-Saxon Britain was more than a loosely related cultural unit -- and by "cultural unit", I mean like being able to usefully describe something as "European", not "French," or "German" or Italian.

And I'd heard on some Discovery or somesuch channel about the whole, "Um, the genetic heritage didn't get completely overwritten by the Saxon hordes." They found somewhere Somerset-way what I think were the oldest human remains that they have found thus far in Britain. A nearby grammar school did a class project where they took DNA from every student and matched it to the DNA recovered from the bones. One person actually matched as a descendant -- the teacher of the class. Which is a long and rambling and anecdotal way of pointing out that while the people in charge moved around some, most of the peasants stayed put -- and survived.

Wow, I've spent all day doing research. Can you tell? *looks wryly at self*

[lagilman]

"Most people know" what they were taught in grade school and junior high, which is the last time they read anything on the topic unless they're going for a further degree.

And that doesn't even begin to go into the damage that Celtic Fantasy/Prehistory has done to the impressionable psyches of an entire generation-plus....

[djonn]

To channel Spock: fascinating. Confusing as heck, but fascinating.

The thing is, on a quick reading I have trouble mapping the threads of his core genetic argument against the cultural and linguistic characteristics of the relevant resident populations.

As far as I can tell, he's (mostly) not trying to assert that the ancient populations of the British Isles didn't speak the same languages we think they did, or that their folklore and myth was different from what we understand it to have been. And the languages and folklore and myth are all what they are -- and are pretty firmly linked to the resident population of the British Isles. He is simply arguing that the pre-resident populations came from different places than we thought they did, based on the genetics.

Now, depending on exactly when in history/prehistory he's arguing for all this to have happened (I didn't get a good sense of the time scale on my first pass), you get some potentially amusing conflicts arising from the supposed new genetic data and the folkloric record -- as a for-instance, the commingled Arthurian/Grail/Mabinogian cycles are pretty firmly fixed, geographically, in the British Isles and parts of France, with nods to Roman influences. How does this square with the premise -- if I understand this correctly -- that the tellers of the Arthurian/Mabinogian tales were genetically Basque?

As Fagin says in Oliver, "I think I'd better think it out again!"

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OTOH, coming from the opposite direction entirely -- one of my first thoughts on glancing over the current item is that it sounds like it might interface in an interesting way with the entirely separate but equally exotic theory that Homer's mythical Troy was, in fact, located not in Greece but in England! I first encountered this theory as a major plot element of a Clive Cussler thriller (!), but it turned out he'd based the idea on a real book by a real (if eccentric) European scholar, who's got a Web site here detailing the premise.