Others of Robert E. Howard’s characters, like the medieval Irish warrior Turlogh Dubh, show similar influences, and Howard’s stories of the (entirely fictional) Pictish king Bran Mak Morn—whose patronymic derives from Conán Maol’s—showcase his interest in Irish and Scottish history as well as his familiarity with then-contemporary archaeological theories about the racial history of Scotland and Ireland. Howard’s interest was shared, though less effusively, by his contemporary H.P. Lovecraft, with whom Howard shared a lengthy correspondence that began, as Duncan Sneddon points out, when Howard noticed Lovecraft’s use of a Scottish Gælic phrase in his story “The Rats in the Walls.”
Tolkien, Howard, and Lovecraft are only three of many examples: ideas about Celticness have permeated the fantasy genre in all its forms, sometimes explicitly embraced and sometimes absorbed by osmosis as simply part of fantasy’s genre conventions. As Cox has observed, “Celticity holds an ever-present position in fantasy media, but in so doing it becomes effectively invisible because it becomes associated with the fantasy genre rather than any particular source culture.” This then drives writers and audiences to turn back to what they consider “authentic” sources—often wildly out of date or simply made up—of “Celtic” tradition in order to supplement what they perceive as the “generic” æsthetic resources of fantasy. Cox describes this as a “double exposure”:
By forgetting the already Celtic milieu of modern fantasy’s origins, as traced through Arthurian legends, popularly translated texts such as the Mabinogion, and Tolkien himself, modern fantasy continues to look to Irish and Welsh cultures for mysticism, exoticism and otherness, overlaying on top of that tradition another layer of perceptions of Celticity. And, because the fantasy genre’s values encourage research but little criticism of that research beyond seeking ‘originals,’ medieval, early modern and romantic interpretations of Irish, Welsh and other Celtic cultures become folded into the mix and further entrenched in popular imagination.
Against this backdrop, one might assume that writers in Celtic languages would have no interest in fantasy. Speakers of Scottish Gælic, Welsh, Irish, Manx, Cornish, and Breton are, turning again to Iain Crichton Smith, “real people in a real place,” with real and pressing political concerns and with their own literary and æsthetic traditions. As early as the 1910s, the Gælic scholar and writer Calum Mac Phàrlain categorically rejected “sgeul air ni nach gabhadh tachairt” (“a story about something that could not happen,” as the easiest kind of story to create but also as fundamentally worthless: “mur bi sgeul de ’n t-seòrsa sin fìor ealanta, cha’n fhiach e; a chionn, cha’n eil aobhar ann ach a thaisbeanadh ealain” (“if a story of this kind is not truly artful, it is worthless, because it has no purpose except to show off its art”). Mac Phàrlain goes on to dismiss the “seann sgeòil” (“old stories”) of Gælic tradition as falling into this category, lacking the artfulness to justify them; he urges writers and storytellers to focus their attention on “gnothuichean an latha ’n diugh” (“matters of today”) .
Posted 67 days ago.
