Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race - Knowledge Rush

2 Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race
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out of two Low-German tribes when we wish to indicate the
race-character of the British people. The use of it leads to such
absurdities as that which the writer noticed not long ago, when the
proposed elevation by the Pope of an Irish bishop to a cardinalate
was described in an English newspaper as being prompted by the
desire of the head of the Catholic Church to pay a compliment to
“the Anglo-Saxon race.”
The true term for the population of these islands, and for the
typical and dominant part of the population of North America,
is not Anglo-Saxon, but Anglo-Celtic. It is precisely in this
blend of Germanic and Celtic elements that the British people
are unique—it is precisely this blend which gives to this people
the fire, the élan, and in literature and art the sense of style,
colour, drama, which are not common growths of German soil,
while at the same time it gives the deliberateness and depth,
the reverence for ancient law and custom, and the passion for
personal freedom, which are more or less strange to the Romance
nations of the South of Europe. May they never become strange
to the British Islands! Nor is the Celtic element in these islands to
be regarded as contributed wholly, or even very predominantly,
by the populations of the so-called “Celtic Fringe.” It is now
well known to ethnologists that the Saxons did not by any means
exterminate the Celtic or Celticised populations whom they found
in possession of Great Britain. Mr. E.W.B. Nicholson, librarian
of the Bodleian, writes in his important work “Keltic Researches”
(1904):
“Names which have not been purposely invented to describe
race must never be taken as proof of race, but only as
proof of community of language, or community of political
organisation. We call a man who speaks English, lives
in England, and bears an obviously English name (such as
Freeman or Newton), an Englishman. Yet from the statistics
of ‘relative nigrescence’ there is good reason to believe that
Lancashire, West Yorkshire, Staffordshire, Worcestershire,