QUESTIONS

1. Who were the Celts and when did they arrive in Ireland?
2. Explain who were the dominant people in Ireland in the late Bronze Age when the Celts arrived.
3. How long did the Celts dominate Ireland?
4. When did writing arrive in Ireland?
5. How do stories depict Ireland?
6. What is a tuatha and a ráth?
7. Who introduced Christianity into Ireland and when?
8. Why were monasteries important?
9. Were family relationship important?
10. Discuss the importance of the learned class.

ANSWERS

1. The Celts were an ancient Indo-European population. The term originally denoted a group of languages, but later it was transferred to the speakers. The Celts inhabited originally an area comprising Bavaria, Switzerland, Bohemia and Austria: then they spread into northern Italy, Spain, France and Great Britain. They arrived in Ireland around 500 B.C. They also sacked Rome in the 4th century B.C. and raided Greece. The Romans called them Galli, the Greek Keltoi.
2. The Celts were not the first settlers in Ireland. In 6000 B.C. at the end of the Ice Age, a group of immigrants arrived from Scotland. They lived a primitive life based on hunting. Later, they discovered farming and breeding and started to use stone implements. In 2000 B.C. (the Bronze Age) another population settled in Ireland. They were able metalworkers of gold and copper. Their existence is proved by the artistic gold ornaments they made, now in Dublin National Museum. They were the dominant population when the Celts arrived.
3. The Celts dominated Ireland for nearly a thousand years. They absorbed influences from many surrounding cultures (indigenous populations, Christianity).
4. The Celts could not write until the advent of Christianity (mid 5th C. A.D.). missionaries brought also the Latin alphabet with them. For this reason, there are few evidences of the Celtic civilization before the fifth century A.D.
5. Stories depict an Ireland subdivided into five kingdoms. Every kingdom was divided into tuatha; thus, the whole of Ireland was made up of 100-150 petty kingdoms with few thousands people in each. The main kingdoms were frequently at war, especially Connacht and Ulster, but armed conflicts were short. The unity of the country was mainly social and cultural.
6. Tuathas were the small kingdoms into which Celtic Ireland was subdivided. Raths were the ordinary homesteads: they consisted in a sort of ringfort erected on a hill and surrounded by a circular rampart. Raths were the ëring fortsì of today's Ireland.
7. Christianity was introduced into Ireland by St. Patrick in the middle of the 5th C. A.D. Christianity would be relevant in Ireland's culture. The mixing of Christianity and Celtic culture created a conservative society.
8. Monasteries were centres of religion and culture. Books were copied, translated, collected inside monasteries. Monasteries were also the only largely-populated centres before the arrival of the Vikings.
9. Yes, they were. The family (derbhfhrine) was very important in Medieval Celtic society and was composed by all the descendent from a great grandfather. In particular, all the members of the royal family could be eligible to the throne; this method ensured that an incapable person would not become king, but also gave rise to conflicts between two equally qualified heirs.
10. The learned class was called Aos Dána and was made up of lawyers, judges, craftsmen, artisans and poets. Poets were called filì and were considered the successor of the ancient Druids. They composed praise-poems for the king and were richly recompensed. When they were not satisfied with the honorarium, they had recourse to satire. Therefore, they were feared both for the sharpness of the tongue and for their presumed skills as seers and visionaries. The learned professions tended to become hereditary since it was easier and less expensive to learn a job from a relative rather than an external teacher. Besides, few people were learned at that time.