The Poetry of the Celtic Races

Overview

About sixty pages, an essay by Ernest Renan, first published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1854. Renan, himself a Breton, describes the character of the Celtic peoples as timid, melancholy, imaginative, devoted to a lost cause and to the ideal woman.

He surveys the Mabinogion, the Arthurian romances, the legends of the saints and the Breton folk poetry collected by La Villemarqué, and argues that the Celts gave European literature its romance and its feeling for nature. Matthew Arnold’s lectures on Celtic literature took the essay as their starting point.

What happens

Renan writes as a Breton. Renan, himself a Breton, opens by describing the character of the Celtic peoples from within, giving his account genuine insider authority rather than the detached ethnographic distance an outside observer might bring.

Characterizing Celtic temperament. Renan characterizes the Celts as timid, melancholy, imaginative, devoted to a lost cause and to the ideal woman, constructing a specifically national character type through sustained literary and legendary evidence.

Surveying the Mabinogion. Renan surveys the Mabinogion, the collection of medieval Welsh prose tales, treating this literary material as reliable evidence for the Celtic people’s genuine collective imaginative disposition and psychology.

The Arthurian romances. Renan extends his survey to the Arthurian romances, tracing how these narratives express and reinforce the melancholic, imaginative character he attributes to Celtic peoples more broadly.

Legends of the saints and folk poetry. Renan examines legends of the saints alongside Breton folk poetry collected by La Villemarqué, treating both religious and secular material as continuous expressions of the same underlying Celtic sensibility.

The claim about literary influence. Renan concludes that the Celts gave European literature its romance and its feeling for nature, staking a considerable claim for marginal Celtic culture’s formative influence on mainstream European literary tradition.

How to read it

Read Renan’s position as a Breton himself describing his own people’s character as giving this essay genuine insider authority rather than the detached ethnographic distance a non-Celtic observer would necessarily bring to characterizing an entire people’s temperament.

Pay close attention to how Renan’s characterization of the Celts as timid, melancholy, imaginative, devoted to a lost cause constructs a specifically national character type through literary and legendary evidence, treating these sources as windows into genuine collective psychology.

Notice how Renan’s claim that the Celts gave European literature its romance and its feeling for nature stakes out a considerable claim for marginal Celtic culture’s central formative influence on the continent’s dominant aesthetic inheritance.

Consider that Matthew Arnold’s own influential lectures on Celtic literature took this essay as their starting point, tracing a direct line of scholarly influence from Renan’s earlier speculative characterization through to Arnold’s considerably more institutionally consequential treatment.

Read this essay alongside Arnold’s own Study of Poetry to see how Renan’s speculative national characterization here anticipates and shapes Arnold’s later, more systematic account of poetry’s cultural and civilizational significance across different national literary traditions.

Questions it raises

• Does Renan’s insider position as a Breton strengthen his characterization of Celtic character, or does personal identification with the subject risk producing romanticized self-description rather than genuinely objective cultural analysis?
• How persuasive is Renan’s method of deriving a people’s psychological character from surveyed literary and legendary material? Does this approach adequately distinguish genuine collective disposition from simply the recurring themes particular storytellers happened to favor?
• What does characterizing the Celts as devoted to a lost cause suggest about how historical political defeat and marginalization can shape a people’s own self-understanding and cultural production across generations of literary and legendary transmission?
• How should a contemporary reader evaluate Renan’s considerable claim that the Celts gave European literature its romance and feeling for nature? Does this attribution hold up against alternative accounts crediting other cultural sources for these same literary qualities?
• Given that Matthew Arnold’s influential lectures took this essay as their starting point, what does this documented influence suggest about how nineteenth-century characterizations of national character shaped subsequent literary and cultural scholarship well beyond their original context?
• What does this essay’s continued relevance to discussions of Celtic identity and literary influence suggest about the durability, or the problems, of nineteenth-century national character theories more broadly when applied to contemporary understanding of cultural and literary history?