English and Welsh

The enormous popularity, to which place-names and other records bear witness, of the Cad/Chad group of names or name elements in early England must be held to indicate the adoption of a name as such. The anglicization of its form (from which the Chad variety proceeds) further supports this view. The West-Saxon royal genealogy begins with the 'Celtic' name Cerdic, and contains both Cadda/Ceadda and Ceadwalla. Leaving aside the problems which this genealogy presents to historians, a point to note in the present context is not so much the appearance of late British names in a supposedly 'Teutonic' royal house, as their appearance in a markedly anglicized form that must be due to their being borrowed as names, and to their accommodation like ordinary loan-words to English speech-habits. One deduction at least can be safely made: the users of these names had changed their language and spoke English, not any kind of British. [2] In themselves these names prove only that foreign names like foreign words were easily and early adopted by the English. There is, of course, no doubt that the view of the process which established the English language in Britain as a simple case of 'Teutons' driving out and dispossessing 'Celts' is altogether too simple. There was fusion and confusion. But from names alone without other evidence deductions concerning 'race' or indeed language are insecure.

So it was again when new invaders came to Britain. In later times it cannot be assumed that a man who bore a 'Danish' name was (in whole or part) of Scandinavian 'blood' or language, or even of Danish sympathies. Ulfcytel is as Norse a name as Ceadwalla is British, yet it was borne by a most valiant opponent of the Danes, the alderman of East Anglia, of whom it is recorded that the Danes themselves said that no man on Angelcynne had ever done them more damage in fighting. [3] Not every Brián and Niál in Iceland had Irish blood in his veins.

Mixture of peoples is, of course, one of the ways in which the borrowing of names takes place. Mothers have, no doubt, always played an important part in this process. Yet one should reflect that even when the adoption of a name was due in the first instance to, say, intermarriage, this may have been an event of small general importance. And once a name has been adopted it may spread quite independently. When we come to patrilinear surnames it is obvious that these may multiply without any addition to the 'blood' to which their etymology would seem to testify, indeed rather with the extinction of it as an effective ingredient in the make-up, physical or mental, of the bearers of the name.

I am not a German, though my surname is German (anglicized like Cerdic) – my other names are Hebrew, Norse, Greek, and French. I have inherited with my surname nothing that originally belonged to it in language or culture, and after 200 years the 'blood' of Saxony and Poland is probably a negligible physical ingredient.

I do not know what Mr O'Donnell would have said to this. I suspect that to him anyone who spoke a Celtic language was a Celt, even if his name was not Celtic, but anyone who had a Celtic name was a Celt whatever he spoke; and so the Celts won on both the swings and the roundabouts.

But if we leave such terms as Celtic and Teutonic (or Germanic) aside, reserving them for their only useful purpose, linguistic classification, it remains an evident conclusion from history that apart from language the inhabitants of Britain are made of the same 'racial' ingredients, though the mixing of these has not been uniform. It is still patchy. The observable differences are, however, difficult or impossible to relate to language.

The eastern region, especially in the south-east (where the breach with the Continent is narrowest), is the area where the newer layers lie thicker and the older things are thinner and more submerged. So it must have been for many ages, since this island achieved more or less its present peculiar shape. So, if these parts arc now considered the most English, or the most Danish, they must once have been the most Celtic, or British, or Belgic. There still endures the ancient pre-English, pre-Roman name of Kent.

For neither Celtic nor Germanic forms of speech belong in origin to these islands. They arc both invaders, and by similar routes. The bearers of these languages have clearly never extirpated the peoples of other language that they found before them. This, however, is, I think, an interesting point to note, when we consider the present position (that is, all that has followed since the fifth century a.d.): there is no evidence at all for the survival in the areas which we now call England and Wales of any pre-Celtic speech. [4] In place-names we may find fragments of long-forgotten Neolithic or Bronze Age tongues, celticized, romanized, anglicized, ground down by the wear of time. It is likely enough. For if pre-English names, especially of mountains or rivers, survived the coming of the North Sea pirates, they may as well have survived the coming of the Celtic Iron Age warriors. Yet when the place-names expert hazards a pre-Celtic origin, it in fact only means that from our defective material he cannot devise any etymology fit to print.

This eradication of pre-Indo-European language is interesting, even if its cause or causes remain uncertain. It might be thought to reflect a natural superiority of Indo-European kinds of language; so that the first bringers of that type of speech were eventually completely successful linguistically, while successors bringing languages of the same order, contesting with their linguistic peers, were less so. But even if one admits that languages (like other art-forms or styles) have a virtue of their own, independent of their immediate inheritors – a thing which I believe – one has to admit that other factors than linguistic excellence contribute to their propagation. Weapons, for instance. While the completion of a process may be due simply to the fact that it has gone on for a very long time.

But whatever the success of the imported languages, the inhabitants of Britain, during recorded history, must have been in large part neither Celtic nor Germanic: that is, not derived physically from the original speakers of those varieties of language, nor even from the already racially more mixed invaders who planted them in Britain.

In that case they arc and were not either 'Celts' or 'Teutons' according to the modern myth that still holds such an attraction for many minds. In this legend Celts and Teutons are primeval and immutable creatures, like a triceratops and a stegosaurus (bigger than a rhinoceros and more pugnacious, as popular palaeontologists depict them), fixed not only in shape but in innate and mutual hostility, and endowed even in the mists of antiquity, as ever since, with the peculiarities of mind and temper which can be still observed in the Irish or the Welsh on the one hand and the English on the other: the wild incalculable poetic Celt, full of vague and misty imaginations, and the Saxon, solid and practical when not under the influence of beer. Unlike most myths this myth seems to have no value at all.

According to such a view Beowulf, though in English, must, I should say, be far more Celtic – being full of dark and twilight, and laden with sorrow and regret – than most things that I have met written in a Celtic language.

Should you wish to describe the riding to hunt of the Lord of the Underworld in Celtic* fashion (according to this view of the word), you would have to employ an Anglo-Saxon poet. It is easy to imagine how he would have managed it: ominous, colourless, with the wind blowing, and a wóma in the distance, as the half-seen hounds came baying in the gloom, huge shadows pursuing shadows to the brink of a bottomless pool. We have, alas! no Welsh of a like age to compare with it; but we may glance none the less at the White Book of Rhydderch (containing the so-called Mabinogion). This manuscript, though its date is of the early fourteenth century, no doubt contains matter composed long before, much of which had come down to the author from times still more remote. In it at the beginning of the mabinogi of Pwyll Prince of Dyfed we read how Pwyll set out to hunt in Glyn Cuch:

2

The names from which Cerdic and Ceadwalla were derived may be assumed to have had some such late British form as Car [a]dic and Cadwallon. In the West-Saxon forms the accent was shifted back to accord with the normal Germanic initial stress. In Ceadwalla, and probably in Cerdic, the initial с had been fronted, and the pronunciation intended was probably nearer modern English ch than k. The genealogy begins with Cerdic in the sense that this name is given to the ancestor of the later kings who first landed in Britain in a.d. 495 (according to the Chronicle) at a place called Cerdices orа. The relation of this account to real events is debatable. The borrowing of names must at least indicate close contacts. If Cerdic actually existed, the family to which he belonged can hardly have come first to Britain in his time. But when we come to Cadda in the fourth generation after Cerdic, and Ceadwalla in the sixth (in the late seventh century), the situation is quite different.

3

After the Battle of Thetford in 1004: hi næfre wyrsan handplegan on Angelcynne ne gemetton þonne Ulfcytel him to brohte (Chronicle С and D).

4

Scotland presents different problems, which do not concern us, except as affording a glimpse of the fact that the celticizing in language of this island was at least as complicated a process as that which eventually produced 'English'. Of the survival of a pre-Celtic and non-Indo-European language in 'Pictland' the most recent discussion is that of Professor Jackson in ch. vi of The Problem of the Picts (ed. F. Wainwright, 1955).