Madam, - During last Summer's silly season, Paul Gillespie and Bob Quinn did a thorough hatchet job on the notion of a Celtic invasion. Now Fintan O'Toole wheels out the dead horse for another flogging ( Weekend Review, February 3rd). Nobody denies that there were people in Ireland 2,000 years ago, that they belonged to many different groups or tribes, that their ancestors had necessarily come from abroad, and that they came from different places and at different times.
We have some idea of their origins because one dominant group, the Goidels, successfully adopted literacy and were thus able to record a number of arrival legends in the Lebor Cabála (Book of Invasions).
The tales told in this book may be "taller than Roman spears", but they are written in a language cognate with those spoken by Ancient Britons, Gauls, Celtiberians, Galatae, etc.
How could Goidelic have become dominant in Ireland if there had been no immigration of Goidels?
What are we to call the extended family of tribes who spoke these related languages? Neither the Goidels nor any of the others called themselves Celts, but many peoples don't use the name by which others know them - Finns, Dutch, Hungarians, Greeks, for example. Edward Lhuyd, as a classicist, knew that "Kelton" was what the Greeks called the tribe at the eastern end of the diaspora and he extended the name to the whole linguistic family. He was right to eschew "Gallic" as too narrow; "British" even more so, and liable to be confused with Britain the state. What other term would have been appropriate?
Could any linguistic term have escaped the ethnic/racial connotations with which "Celtic" was saddled in the 19th century and which now so offend revisionists? - Yours, etc,
MICHAEL DRURY, Avenue Louise, Brussels, Belgium.