The Religion of the Ancient Celts | Page 7

The tall, blonde Teutonic type of the Row graves is dolichocephalic.
Was the Celtic type (assuming that Broca's "Celts" were not true Celts)
dolicho or brachy? Broca thinks the Belgæ or "Kymri" were
dolichocephalic, but all must agree with him that the skulls are too few
to generalise from. Celtic iron-age skulls in Britain are dolichocephalic,
perhaps a recrudescence of the aboriginal type. Broca's "Kymric" skulls
are mesocephalic; this he attributes to crossing with the short
round-heads. The evidence is too scanty for generalisation, while the
Walloons, perhaps descendants of the Belgæ, have a high index, and
some Gauls of classical art are broad-headed.[19]
Skulls of the British round barrows (early Celtic Bronze Age) are

mainly broad, the best specimens showing affinity to Neolithic
brachycephalic skulls from Grenelle (though their owners were 5
inches shorter), Selaigneaux, and Borreby.[20] Dr. Beddoe thinks that
the narrow-skulled Belgæ on the whole reinforced the meso- or
brachycephalic round barrow folk in Britain. Dr. Thurnam identifies the
latter with the Belgæ (Broca's Kymri), and thinks that Gaulish skulls
were round, with beetling brows.[21] Professors Ripley and Sergi,
disregarding their difference in stature and higher cephalic index,
identify them with the short Alpine race (Broca's Celts). This is
negatived by Mr. Keane.[22] Might not both, however, have originally
sprung from a common stock and reached Europe at different
times?[23]
But do a few hundred skulls justify these far-reaching conclusions
regarding races enduring for thousands of years? At some very remote
period there may have been a Celtic type, as at some further period
there may have been an Aryan type. But the Celts, as we know them,
must have mingled with the aborigines of Europe and become a mixed
race, though preserving and endowing others with their racial and
mental characteristics. Some Gauls or Belgæ were dolichocephalic, to
judge by their skulls, others were brachycephalic, while their fairness
was a relative term. Classical observers probably generalised from the
higher classes, of a purer type; they tell us nothing of the people. But
the higher classes may have had varying skulls, as well as stature and
colour of hair,[24] and Irish texts tell of a tall, fair, blue-eyed stock, and
a short, dark, dark-eyed stock, in Ireland. Even in those distant ages we
must consider the people on whom the Celts impressed their
characteristics, as well as the Celts themselves. What happened on the
Eurasian steppe, the hypothetical cradle of the "Aryans," whence the
Celts came "stepping westwards," seems clear to some, but in truth is a
book sealed with seven seals. The men whose Aryan speech was to
dominate far and wide may already have possessed different types of
skull, and that age was far from "the very beginning."
Thus the Celts before setting out on their Wanderjahre may already
have been a mixed race, even if their leaders were of purer stock. But
they had the bond of common speech, institutions, and religion, and

they formed a common Celtic type in Central and Western Europe.
Intermarriage with the already mixed Neolithic folk of Central Europe
produced further removal from the unmixed Celtic racial type; but
though both reacted on each other as far as language, custom, and
belief were concerned, on the whole the Celtic elements predominated
in these respects. The Celtic migration into Gaul produced further racial
mingling with descendants of the old palæolithic stock, dolichocephalic
Iberians and Ligurians, and brachycephalic swarthy folk (Broca's Celts).
Thus even the first Celtic arrivals in Britain, the Goidels, were a people
of mixed race, though probably relatively purer than the late coming
Brythons, the latest of whom had probably mingled with the Teutons.
Hence among Celtic-speaking folk or their descendants--short, dark,
broad-beaded Bretons, tall, fair or rufous Highlanders, tall
chestnut-haired Welshmen or Irishmen, Highlanders of Norse descent,
short, dark, narrow-headed Highlanders, Irishmen, and
Welshmen--there is a common Celtic facies, the result of old Celtic
characteristics powerful enough so to impress themselves on such
varied peoples in spite of what they gave to the Celtic incomers. These
peoples became Celtic, and Celtic in speech and character they have
remained, even where ancestral physical types are reasserting
themselves. The folk of a Celtic type, whether pre-Celtic, Celtic, or
Norse, have all spoken a Celtic language and exhibit the same old
Celtic characteristics--vanity, loquacity, excitability, fickleness,
imagination, love of the romantic, fidelity, attachment to family ties,
sentimental love of their country, religiosity passing over easily to
superstition, and a comparatively high degree of sexual morality. Some
of these traits were already noted by classical observers.
Celtic speech had early lost the initial p of old Indo-European speech,
except in words beginning with pt and, perhaps, ps. Celtic pare (Lat.
_præ_) became are, met with in Aremorici, "the dwellers by the sea,"
Arecluta, "by the Clyde," the region watered by the Clyde. Irish