History
Antiquarian researches into the Celtic culture and history of Great Britain and Ireland gathered pace from the late 17th century, with people like Owen Jones in Wales and Charles O'Conor in Ireland. The key surviving manuscript sources were gradually located, edited and translated, monuments identified and published, and other essential groundwork in recording stories, music and language done. The Welsh antiquarian and author Iolo Morganwg fed the growing fascination in all things Celtic by founding the Gorsedd, which (along with his writings) would in turn spark the Neo-druidism movement. Interest in Scottish Gaelic culture greatly increased during the onset of the Romantic period in the late 18th century, with James Macpherson's Ossian achieving international fame, along with the novels of Sir Walter Scott and the poetry and song lyrics of the London-based Irishman Thomas Moore, Byron's friend and executor. Throughout Europe, the Romantic movement inspired a great revival of interest in folklore, folk tales, and folk music; even Beethoven was commissioned to produce a set of arrangements of Scottish folk-songs. As elsewhere, in what was then the United Kingdom of the whole archipelago, this encouraged and fed off a rise in nationalism, which was especially intense in Ireland.
In the mid-19th century the revival continued, with Sir Samuel Ferguson, the Young Ireland movement and others in Ireland, and a great army, now almost entirely forgotten, of popularizing writers of folk tales, dubious works of history, and other material at work in all the nations with a claim to be Celtic. At the same time, archaeological and historical work was beginning to make progress in constructing a better understanding of Celtic history. Interest in ornamental Celtic art developed, and Celtic motifs began to be used in all sorts of contexts, including architecture, drawing on works like the Grammar of Ornament by (another) Owen Jones. Imitations of the ornate Insular penannular brooches of the 7-9th centuries were worn by Queen Victoria among others from the late 1840s, many produced in Dublin by West & Son and other makers. Celtic motifs continue to be used in many popular contexts such as tattoos.
Read more about this topic: Celtic Revival
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“You that would judge me do not judge alone
This book or that, come to this hallowed place
Where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon;
Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace;
Think where man’s glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)