This co-authored book is based on the proceedings of a conference, 'Celtic Romanticism and the Gothic Revival', which was held at the University of Bristol on 15th to 16th January 2005.
'Celtic' and 'Gothic' both words refer today to both ancient tribes and modern styles. 'Celtic' is associated with harp music, native knitwear, and spirituality; 'Gothic' with medieval cathedrals, rock bands, and horror fiction. The eleven essays collected together here chart some of the curious and unexpected ways in which the Celts and the Goths were appropriated and reinvented in Britain and other European countries through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries - becoming not just mythologised races, but lending their names to abstract principles and entire value systems.
Contributed by experts in literature, archaeology, history, and Celtic studies, the essays range from broad surveys to specific case-studies, and together demonstrate the complicated interplay that has always existed between 'Celticism' and 'Gothicism'.
Author(s): Joanne Parker (ed.)
Series: National Cultivation of Culture, 11
Publisher: Brill
Year: 2016
Language: English
Pages: XII+258
Acknowledgements ix
List of Illustrations x
Notes on Contributors xi
Myths of Celtic and Gothic Origin: An Introduction / Joanne Parker 1
Part 1. The Gothic
1. Tribal Ancestors and Moral Role Patterns / Joep Leerssen 13
2. Eighteenth-Century Gothic before 'The Castle of Otranto' / Nick Groom 26
3. Johnson and the Teutonic Roots of English / Robert DeMaria, Jr. 47
4. Wordsworth’s Gothic Education / Tom Duggett 66
5. A Tale of Two Kings: The 'Celtic' Arthur and the 'Gothic' Alfred / Joanne Parker 97
Part 2. The Celtic
6. The Rediscovery of the British Druids / Ronald Hutton 119
7. Ossianism and the Arthurian Revival: The Case of Richard Hole’s 'Arthur; or the Northern Enchantment' (1789) / Dafydd Moore 134
8. Strange Meetings: the Romantic Poets and the Stone Circles of the Lake District / Tim Fulford 156
9. Reigning with Swords of Meteoric Iron: Archangel Michael and the British New Jerusalem / Amy Hale 174
10. From Pondal (1835–1917) to Cabanillas (1876–1956): Ossian and Arthur in the Making of a Celtic Galicia / Juan Miguel Zarandona 189
11. The Role of Alesia, Bibracte and Gergovia in the Mythology of the French State / John Collis 209
Select Bibliography 229
Index 250
