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Season of the Celts

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Golethia Pennington
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« on: January 17, 2008, 09:04:14 pm »



Season of the Celts
Photograph by Jim Richardson

The May Queen comes out for a fiery night of parading and dancing in Edinburgh, Scotland, on the eve of Beltane, the ancient Celtic festival that heralds the start of summer on May 1. Before the night is over, the queen will take the Green Man, following close behind her, as her consort, a symbolic act of fertility—and a signal for the partying to begin. Along the Atlantic shores of Europe, from Scotland down to Spain, modern Celts are conducting a scavenger hunt of the past, discovering festivals, music, sacred sites, languages, and art styles that go back more than 2,000 years, when Celtic tribes dominated most of Europe. From these scraps emerges a fresh, high-spirited identity—call it Celtitude—that is making itself seen and heard on Europe's edge.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0603/feature3/gallery1.html
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Golethia Pennington
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« Reply #1 on: January 17, 2008, 09:05:14 pm »



The Hard Way
Photograph by Jim Richardson

With bare hands and steel nerves, teammates pull down a wild horse at La Rapa das Bestas, or the Cropping of the Beasts, a festival held in Vimianzo, Galicia, in northwestern Spain. The tradition of wrestling horses to the ground in order to trim their manes and tails goes back, say Galicians, to Celts who settled the Iberian Peninsula by the seventh century B.C. Though the Romans eventually vanquished the Celts, their heritage has persisted in northwestern Spain, aided by later migrations from other parts of the Celtic realm. Someone from Ireland or Wales or Brittany who hikes the damp coastline dotted with circular ruins, stops in village taverns to hear bagpipe music, or finds a church with a holy well beside it, would swear that Galicia almost feels like home.

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Golethia Pennington
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« Reply #2 on: January 17, 2008, 09:06:14 pm »



The Big Stage Awaits
Photograph by Jim Richardson

A group of young step dancers from Ireland practices minutes before performing in a stadium of 10,000 spectators at the Festival Interceltique in Lorient, France. Musicians, dancers, and singers from all the Celtic regions come to this seaport city in Brittany each August to participate in Europe's largest Celtic festival.
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Golethia Pennington
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« Reply #3 on: January 17, 2008, 09:07:13 pm »



Communing
Photograph by Jim Richardson

Parishioners at Kirk Maughold church on the Isle of Man catch up on news beneath an image of the Celtic saint who spread Christianity on the island in the Irish Sea. St. Maughold belonged to the flock of holy men, mostly from Ireland, who from the fifth through the 12th centuries A.D. sailed along the Atlantic coast to plant their faith in pagan communities. Some of the early monastic centers and churches, like Kirk Maughold, sprang up on or near ritual sites used by the pre-Christian Celts.
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Golethia Pennington
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« Reply #4 on: January 17, 2008, 09:08:26 pm »



Sheep's Paradise
Photograph by Jim Richardson

A shepherd and his companions break for the view as they gather sheep on the rugged highlands of Snowdonia National Park in northern Wales.  While the trails belong to sheep and trekkers these days, Celtophiles wonder if the legendary Arthur, the Celtic chief, once traveled in these mountains.  Almost every region in the modern Celtic realm claims a piece of the Arthur saga. Welsh tradition asserts the soothsayer Merlin first revealed his magical gifts at a hill fort at the foot of Snowdon mountain and that Arthur is buried nearby on the face of Lliwedd peak.


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Golethia Pennington
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« Reply #5 on: January 17, 2008, 09:10:04 pm »



Outsider status has helped Celtic languages and culture endure. 



Except for a few regions in Ireland, the Welsh stand apart in retaining their old unaccompanied, un-anglicized place names, particularly in the north and west. Here is the best defended outpost of Celtic speech: Nearly 600,000 people, roughly a fifth of the population, can speak Welsh, the beneficiaries of a nationalist movement that has used language as a rallying cry since the 1960s. The old language bubbles up in schools, pubs, grocery stores, and on television. The English name for Wales comes from the Anglo-Saxon word wealas, meaning foreigners, a description many Welsh today would turn on its head and apply to the English themselves.
 
Besides language, what gives the Celtic Welsh a chest-pounding feel of home is heroic history—and Wales is thick with it: walled towns, roofless churches, spiral-engraved standing stones, holy wells, crumbling hill forts, all proclaiming a past age of Celtic dominance.
 
The history that stirs the hottest passions among Welsh Celts belongs to medieval times, when Welsh leaders resisted the ultimately successful invasions of the English kings. Those heroic days seemed as fresh as an open wound to David Petersen as he drove me through the Towy River Valley in southwestern Wales. I had met the ponytailed Petersen before at the Festival Interceltique, the pan-Celtic music event in Lorient, Brittany, where he headed the Welsh delegation. When I heard him call the Union Jack a "butcher's apron," I knew I'd found a Celtic troublemaker.
 
Petersen, a Celtic commentator and sculptor, wanted to show me one of the latest patriotic monuments to the Welsh cause. He was in a pugnacious mood, befitting the son of a former heavyweight champ. Jabbing his finger right and left as we sped through the mellow valley, Petersen bloodied the English face on the landscape. He angrily corrected a few anglicized names of towns; pointed out the ruins of Welsh castles while ignoring the bulkier, fixed-up English ones; and, slowing down beside a modest piece of pastureland, complained that no marker identified this ground as the site of the glorious Battle of Coed Llathen. Here, in 1257, Welsh troops crushed the invading English army of King Henry III. "A new map of this area has left the battlefield out," Petersen said in disbelief. "The effing nerve of the authorities to tell us that this has no historical value."
 
Wheeling into a car park in the center of Llandovery, an old market town, Petersen reached the point of his harangue: On a rise, sharing space with the broken walls of a castle, stood a warrior's statue. Helmet, spear, flowing cloak, shield, and broadsword—the costume of war gleamed in stainless steel. But where there should have been a face and a body inside the medieval uniform, empty space stared out.
 
The 16-foot-high (five-meter-high) statue represents Llywelyn ap Gruffydd Fychan, a "brave nobody," Petersen said. When English troops stormed the area in 1401, looking for the army of Welsh rebel Owain Glyndŵr, the local Lord Llywelyn led the enemy in the wrong direction, buying time for Glyndŵr to escape. As punishment for his subterfuge, Llywelyn was executed in the town square. "The English took his stomach out and cooked it in front of him," Petersen said. The empty cloak symbolizes the horrific form of death.
 
Petersen knows the full story behind the raising of the statue on the 600th anniversary of Llywelyn's execution. His sons Toby and Gideon designed and built the locally commissioned monument. Back at the car we found a £30 ($50) parking ticket on the windshield. Petersen snatched it up, cursed the authorities, and vowed to fight the ticket. He had no choice: A Ghost of Wales Past was looking over his shoulder.

 
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0603/feature3/index.html
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