AT ONE level, The Celtic Myths that Shape the Way We Think, by an associate professor of global medieval literature at the University of Oxford, can be taken as a debunking of the widespread loose use of the adjective “Celtic”, applied to early native Christianity as much as to mythology, to give it a warm, ancient, misty, appealing glow.

After observing that “most popular uses of the word are liable to make professionals sigh,” he clearly demonstrates how almost all that we think of as coming from an early golden age of Celtic myth and literature in the so-called Dark Ages in fact derives from learned and predominantly clerical authors writing in the high Middle Ages. He also seeks to dispel the misconception that there was a particular bond between “Celtic” peoples, citing the story of Branwen, which is all about the Irish and Welsh tearing each other apart in a calamitous and genocidal war.

But this book is more than just another academic diatribe against popular misplaced Celticity. Mark Williams is at pains to acknowledge that the Welsh and Irish myths that are the subject of his scholarly and richly illustrated study have their own integrity and vitality.

He is particularly interested in their re-workings in modern times to serve political and cultural purposes, some of them rather surprising, such as the appropriation of the charismatic primal Irish hero Cú Chulainn by the Ulster Volunteer Force as a proto-Protestant loyalist separatist. “These stories”, he writes, “are neither as mystical nor as far from us as they have been thought to be, and they have the potential to act as a rich resource for creative ventures in the year to come.”

Among his more original and intriguing findings is the extent to which the medieval clerical intelligentsia fashioned the supposedly primal myths of Ireland and Wales to play down their pagan elements and make them more palatable and acceptable for a Christian readership. Pagan gods and goddesses were transformed into fairies to “decontaminate” them and it was also suggested that fairies were the descendants of the children that Adam and Eve had conceived in Eden before the Fall. Strong connections were made between Cú Chulainn and Christ, and between another Irish warrior hero, Finn, and St Patrick.

More, indeed, might have been said in this book about the Christianising of pagan myths and stories: there is nothing on the immrama, the Old Irish tales recounting heroic sea journeys to the otherworld, and the much disputed question whether they are primarily pagan or Christian in their origin and message. But for those interested in the power, pliability, and potency of Irish and Welsh mythology, this book has much to offer.

As its subtitle suggests, The Celts: A sceptical history seeks to debunk the idea of a distinct Celtic people or culture. In tracing the relations between the English, Irish, Welsh, and Scots, and ending with a plea for federalism, its author follows in the footsteps of his father, the Welsh Congregational minister and Princeton professor, Daniel Jenkins, who wrote a superb and seminal study, The British: Their identity and religion, in 1975.

While sharing his father’s enthusiasm for and knowledge of Wales, which receives the most detailed and nuanced coverage of the four UK nations in this book, Simon Jenkins does not seem to have inherited his expertise in church history, and there are significant omissions and errors in his treatment of this area.

He is, for example, wrong to say that it was only in the 17th century that scholars began to see the British Isles as possessing a collective Celtic past, and this through identification of a common linguistic root. It was, in fact, in the 16th century that the word Celtae was first used by Protestant clerics to describe what they took to be a distinct Celtic (and British) Christian identity defined over and against Roman (and Continental) Christianity.

Jenkins’s grasp of Scottish history is somewhat shaky. His dating of Ninian is suspect and would be contested by most modern scholars, as would his unequivocal assertion that the Union Jack was named after King James VI & I. Columba wrote no “vivid account of his life”. The word Argyll does not mean “east Gael”, but, rather, the border region or margin of the Gaels. David I did not move the capital of Scotland from Scone to Edinburgh: he maintained it in Dunfermline, and it did not move to Edinburgh for nearly 300 years.

More seriously, Jenkins buys into the now largely discredited myth, based on Bede’s account, of the significance of the Synod of Whitby, and, in contrast to his overall scepticism about the use of the word, writes about “the ancient Celtic church” as if it were a distinct entity standing against the Roman Church.

His failure to consult recent academic work makes for some dated and unfounded assertions, especially in regard to the early ecclesiastical history of the British Isles. It is a pity that he did not take more care over the religious dimension of the story that he otherwise deftly weaves around the “Celtic” inhabitants of the British Isles and their relationship with the English.

The Revd Dr Ian Bradley is Emeritus Professor of Cultural and Spiritual History at the University of St Andrews. His most recent book is Coffin Roads: Journeys to the West (Birlinn, 2022).

The Celtic Myths that Shape the Way We Think
Mark Williams
Thames & Hudson £20
(978-0-500-25236-9)
Church Times Bookshop £18

The Celts: A sceptical history
Simon Jenkins
Profile Books £16.99
(978-1-78816-880-9)
Church Times Bookshop £15.29