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Updated: May 28, 2025
This was a desperate state of things, on which Lowell comments: "Let any housewife of our day, who does not find the Keltic element in domestic life so refreshing as to Mr. Arnold in literature, imagine a household with one wild Pequot woman, communicated with by signs, for its maid of all work, and take courage.
The Keltic songs were carried all over France by Breton bards, to whose music and rhymes, with only a general idea of the subjects, the neo-Latin-speaking Franks listened with the sort of stolid satisfaction with which English or Germans of a hundred years ago listened to Italians singing Metastasio's verses.
The incidents of their quest, the agonies wrought by their sight, their mission as inviters of sympathetic interest, and the failure of a hero to achieve a work of succor because of failure to show pity, are all elements in Keltic Quester and Quest stories, which antedate Christianity. Kundry, the loathly damsel and siren, has her prototypes in classic fable and romantic tale.
This nonsense about Keltic and Teutonic is no more science than Lombroso's extraordinary assertions about criminals, or palmistry, or the development of religion from a solar myth.
The relics of this appellation are found in the German "Welschland," the name given to Italy, because the northern part of that peninsula had a Keltic population, in Wallachia, in the Walloons of the Netherlands, who have lately assumed the old Latinized name of Belgians, and in the Welsh of our own Wales.
The likeness between the languages of the Saxons and the Kipchak-Tartars is striking; and the Keltic, which still exists in Brittany and in Wales, is the best proof that their inhabitants are descendants of the Tartar nation. Whatever Pinkerton and others may say, the modern Rajput warriors do not answer in the least the description Hippocrates gives us of the Scythians.
Fairyland, in good sooth, was this country of the Keltic tales; and there is a sort of symbolical significance in the fact of its lawgiver Merlin, and its emperor Arthur, being both of them not dead, like Sigurd, like Dietrich, like Charlemagne and Roland, but lying in enchanted sleep.
His brother Geoffrey had married Constance of Brittany, and their son Arthur, named after the Keltic hero, had been urged as a rival claimant for the English throne. Shakespeare has not exaggerated the cruel fate of this boy, whose monstrous uncle really purposed having his eyes burnt out, being sure that if he were blind he would no longer be eligible for king.
"On the battlefield," she murmured sleepily. He groaned, and once more his impatient twistings snatched the blanket away. "Oh damn the Keltic imagination! Why can't you get a grip on things and be practical?" Once more she was wide-awake, laughing with intense enjoyment. "I can't see what there is to laugh at," he protested.
Only Jeannie Deans really met her requirements as a "part" and she left much to be desired in the way of romance and beauty. Most often she was young Lochinvar or Rob Roy; sometimes Coeur de Lion led her on full-blooded adventure. There were quaint old books of Norse and Keltic legend, musty, leather-bound books with wood-cut illustrations and long "s's" in the printing.
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