A new exhibition coming to London and Edinburgh explores a people united only by their otherness – and weirdness



An exhibition of the glorious works of art created by the Celts is being created jointly by the British Museum and National Museums Scotland – the first on the subject in more than 40 years.

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Although millions of people across the world proudly identify as Celtic, sporting swirling jewellery and tattoos as badges of honour, the British Museum’s director, Neil MacGregor, said the term “Celt” was used by the ancient Greeks to refer to anyone in Europe north of the Mediterranean.

“The word Celt was used to describe what people were not – not Roman, not Viking, not Mediterranean, not metropolitan or imperial,” MacGregor said. “The name Celt is a badge of otherness.”

MacGregor, whose Scottish ancestors include Gaelic and English speakers, said he identified as “partly Celtic”.



Fraser Hunter, curator for the exhibition in Scotland, is about to return to excavate a site where a metal detector found a 2,000-year-old collar and brooch only last year.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Balmaclellan mirror from south-west Scotland, AD80-250.

He said that although some believe the word Celt may come from a northern European language, since it has no Greek or Roman root, there is no evidence that the people who made the beautiful intricate gold collars, bronze helmets and shields ever called themselves Celts.

The term was used again in the middle ages, but only became common in the romantic 19th-century revival of interest in the art and culture – which endures to this day.

The exhibition will include Japanese manga trading cards with Celtic designs, and a Marvel comic with a cover featuring a rampaging Celtic warrior – Cuchulainn the Irish Wolfhound.

Hunter recently responded to an urgent request from a Californian tattooist for a JPEG of a Celtic design from his museum: the craftsman attached a photograph of the half-tattooed leg he was struggling to complete.

Julia Farley, the London curator, said the museums hoped to explode the view that the Celts were a distinct race who kept moving west from eastern Europe until they ended up stranded to this day in Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

The two museums are also sending out a small touring exhibition, featuring two glorious iron age mirrors, one found at Holcombe in Devon in a settlement which lay below a Roman villa, and one found at Balmaclellan in Galloway, Scotland.

If they had no common language or shared bloodlines, what united the people for 2,500 years was art, spectacular pieces showing humans and animals tangled together like spaghetti – and an element of what Farley called “ weirdness”, including helmets for both men and horses which transformed them into horned monsters.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hunterston brooch from south-west Scotland, AD700-800.

The origin of many of the pieces is as complex as the arguments about ethnicity: one superb silver cauldron coming to the exhibition shows people with collars, helmets and weapons like those in the collections of the two museums – but was found in Denmark, traditionally regarded as north of the Celtic world, and may have been made in Eastern Europe.

The exhibition will include loans from many countries including a magnificent processional cross from the National Museum of Ireland, and one of the most spectacular pieces of gold work ever found, 64 strands woven together into the 1kg weight of the Snettisham torc, a neck ornament of twisted metal found by a ploughman in 1950.

However many of the finds and the research take the exhibition right up to date: the four Blair Drummond gold torcs were found by a metal detectorist on his very first outing in 2009.



They demonstrate the connectedness of the Celtic world, Hunter said: two are Scottish-Irish in style, one French and one much more Mediterranean.



The site was excavated by the Scottish museum’s archaeologists, who found they were no accidental loss or booty: they had been buried wrapped in cloth in a wooden shrine sunk into a bog, a valuable offering to appease presumably remarkably avaricious gods.



• Celts, British Museum, London, 24 September 2015-31 January 2016; National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, 10 March-25 September 2016

