Opinionated Celtic FAQs

2 Comments

• Bryan Hammersley

  November 25, 2020 at 4:17 am

  Dear Sir. The identification of Samhain with a Celtic New Year is not “pernicious”. The arguments for this originally put forward by Sir John Rhys are still valid. There is not knockdown proof of this, but it may still well have happened, at least in some parts of the Celtic world, so is not “pernicious”. Best wishes. Bryan Hammersley

  • Lisa Spangenberg

    February 17, 2021 at 9:57 am

    Rhys doesn’t actually make an argument; moreover, he couldn’t read Old Irish, and depends on truly wretched translations from the early 19th century. There isn’t anything at all in a Medieval Irish text that even approaches equating Samain with “a new year” in the context of what New Years means today.

    All the references to Samain are tied to the agrarian cycle. So yes, the constant references to Samain as a “New year” are in fact pernicious, because, like you, they are relying on less than scholarly data from folklorists like Rhys, who couldn’t read Irish, and struggled with Medieval Welsh, and Franzer of Golden Baugh, who couldn’t even read Middle English or Latin accurately, never mind Welsh or Irish, and lumped together Medieval, Classical, and modern folklore higgledy-piggledy, often without even citing (or having) an actual primary source.

    It’s also pernicious to keep taking early Irish data and unilaterally applying it to “Celtic.”

    Nor am I alone in my assertion; this is the what any informed, educated scholar who can read the primary sources will say.

    Other actions that are pernicious are people who automatically assume scholars are male.