The Identity of the Gaels

This book is about the origins of the Irish and Scottish surnames of millions of Americans and Canadians. Much of the genealogical and cultural legacy of our Irish and Scottish ancestors has not been made available to the common English-speaking culture of North America. This state of affairs reflects the fact that much good scholarly work bearing on the subject has been "locked way" in academic works, often very old, by either Irish or British authors dealing primarily with their own respective geographical or subject areas. Specialized information from diverse academic sources (long overlooked by North American writers) is presented here in a unified text for the benefit of Irish and Scottish Canadians and Americans.

Though prior to the seventeenth century Ireland and Scotland were in many ways a single cultural unit, scholars since have skirted this issue, along with the issue of past Irish and Scottish Gaelic tribalism, and this is probably a result of their not spending the time to break into the enigma of Gaelic language and culture. As a result, they have tried to categorize Ireland and Scotland separately, and generally as a backwater of English history. This book provides a fresh, historically accurate treatment of the subject by considering both Gaelic areas, Ireland and Scotland, at once, and in the light of the best modern information from such fields as anthropology, history, folklore, genealogy, heraldry, literature and linguistics.

A close affinity has always existed between Ireland and Scotland, especially northern Scotland. The native peoples of these places, the Irish on the one hand, and the Scottish Highlanders on the other, are known collectively as "the Gaels," and share as well the common heritage of the Gaelic culture and tongue. Because of its continuity with its lndo-European past, this culture could during its sixteenth-century heyday be described as the most ancient, the most unaffected, and the most unchanged and unchanging in all of Europe. The earliest literature and history of the Gaels are particularly interesting for they provide a unique window on the Iron Age. But the history of Gaeldom involves an apparent cultural paradox, for Gaelic society enjoyed many of the benefits of "civilization" without being itself "civilized" in the sense of being organized around concentrated population centers, or cities.

The basic organization of Gaelic society before the seventeenth century remained tribal; changes brought on by outside influences were secondary in nature and were generally adapted to the existing social order. Thus the society expressed the vitality of an unbroken connection with its most ancient origins until the power of the Gaelic tribes in Ireland and Scotland was broken by the English. The English facilitated their conquest of Gaeldom with great cruelty, conquering with bravery, political treachery and great military and logistical strength. The Gaelic people were completely disenfranchised and denied education as well. This struck at the very heart of Gaelic society, one of the truly great learned societies since ancient times. However, education did not entirely die. Traditions continued to be passed down, and some semiformal education continued in furtive "hedge row" schools, often run by priests on pain of death.

The Christian church in Gaelic Ireland and Scotland (the Celtic church) had a unique character, and maintained its independence and power from about the time of St. Patrick (ca. 400) to the coming of the Normans (ca. 1200). It was not fully submerged until after the end of the Gaelic period in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Celtic church was from the beginning very important both in missionary activity and in the advancement of learning in Europe. Indeed, many of the oldest European religious houses were founded by Gaelic saints, or had Gaelic pilgrims associated with their beginnings. Throughout history, Gaelic scholar-clerics continued to find a welcome at the courts and monasteries of the Continent. Gaelic missionary and monastic activity (sixth to twelfth centuries) also show a Gaelic wanderlust which is mirrored in the military sphere by Gaelic mercenaries of the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, who fought for hire under foreign lords, as antecedents to the so-called "Wild Geese" of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

During the nineteenth century, Gaels in great numbers were cleared from their once-healthy homeland to make way for British agriculture and livestock; the removal was a dirty business which the English rationalized by quaint economic theories proclaiming the Gaelic situation as "hopeless in any case". There was, however, a population explosion in Ireland at this time, and with the coming of the Great Potato Famine of the late 1840s in Ireland, millions of Gaels starved for want of potatoes, while the real agricultural fruit of the land passed on unhindered into England, as per British policy. No less tragic was the clearing of the loyal Highlanders of northern Scotland from the homes of their ancestors of a thousand years, to make way for sheep. On the brighter side of irony is the fact that there are, as a result of immigration (especially in North America), many millions more Gaels in the world community than could ever have been nurtured on the "old sod" of Ireland and Scotland alone.

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