Greek historian Diodorus Siculus described ancient Celtic people who inhabited the rocky northern British Isles in the last centuries B.C. as looking a bit like wood demons.
With hair thick and shaggy like a horse’s mane, he said, their beards and mustaches covered much of their mouths and acted like a sieve whenever they ate or drank. Diodorus also described the queer-at-the-time Celtic battle techniques like calling out enemies for one-on-one combat and trying to intimidate them in song, or hanging the heads of fallen foes, like modern day deer skull and antlers trophies above the door of their hutch following a high profile kill.
Diodorus was also astonished by their outlandish garb — brightly colored and embroidered shirts, checkered and striped cloaks and so on.
Coming to the Bainbridge branch of the Kitsap Regional Library Sept. 12, Lake Bay-based modern day historian Tames Alan will be donning that ancient-style garb and making a presentation on her researched impressions of the everyday life among the Celtic people.
Later in the month she will present “From the Streets of Shakespeare to the Court of Elizabeth” at two other KRL branches.
“I come out in the skivvies of the time period, and I teach social history — What did you eat? What did you wear? What was it like to go to the doctor? — those kind of daily life things,” Alan said.
Alan has been giving these “Living History Lectures” — spanning cultures from Victorian and Celtic to Elizabethian among others — for nearly two decades. She has spoken to a spectrum of listeners across the country from school kids to women’s groups and even the Romance Writers of America.
“So much history is taught in names, dates and battles … that’s what the history books are going to talk about,” she said. “I try to bring those eras alive through what daily people did.”
Her program on the pre-Christian Celts is called “Learning Among the Oak Groves — Look at Celtic Life.” She said one of the most important lessons that modern day society could learn from these ancient Celts is the inclusiveness of their tribes.
There were no orphans, she said, because everyone belonged to the tribe. There was no social caste system that discriminated based on gender, class, appearance or anything else. Whatever was the best asset you could bring to the tribe would be what you would do.
For instance, if a woman was an adept hunter, Alan said, she would hunt. Same if a man was an incredible weaver which was widely considered “women’s work.”
“Something else (we) can learn is that everybody is entitled to their education,” she said. “(The Celts) would find out what you had an aptitude for and then encourage you to follow that.”
Alan will also touch on the Druids, the priestly class of the Celts who were the religious ceremony leaders in addition to being philosophers, scientists, lore-masters and men and women of Gaul who revered nature and linked the Celtic peoples with their numerous gods.
She will also discuss the Bards — lyricist, poet, scholar musicians who carried on the Celtic traditions and lore through memorization and recitation — another binding factor of the close-knit Celtic tribes.
“They had their own thriving culture, yet they were contemporary with what was happening in Rome and Greece and these other places,” Alan said. “The Celtic culture really reached its height when the rest of Europe was in the Dark Ages.”
For those who can trace their family lineage back to the British Isles in the Dark Ages, this program should give insight into how their ancestors lived many centuries ago.
