There's
bull-running and there's bull-running. At one extreme, there's
the sort where there's far more chance of a spectator or two being
killed than the bull. Thirteeen so far this year, as you know. At the other
extreme is the sort where a lone bull is chased by hordes of
pedestrians and horse-riders and hacked at with knives and lances
until it bleeds to death. Or until someone gives it the coup-de-grace
with a dagger in the back of the neck, severing the spinal cord.
Such is the Fiesta de Toro de La Vega, near Tordesillas in Castilla y
León. Understandably, many thousands of people protested in Madrid
recently against what few would deny is a barbarity. But the local
(socialist) mayor has refused to stop it and accused of 'blackmail'
those who've offered free music festivals in the city to replace this
'popular event' and to keep the city's coffers filled with tourist
euros. Only in Spain? More here and here, if you can bear it. Don't
watch the video if you're sensitive.
As regards
the saner/less insane form of bullfighting/goading - la corrida
- it's reported that the latest surveys show
that over 90% of Spaniards are against both this and any kind of event
in which bulls are deliberately tortured, and want to see
them banned. Frankly, I would have thought the afficionados
of la corrida would also like to see the end of the Fiesta de
Toro de La Vega, given that it jeopardises everything. Presumably,
though, they see a ban as the thin edge of the wedge.
HT to my
friend Dwight - incidentally a proud aficionado of la corrida
but not the Toro de la Vega event - for these favourite Spanish words
of a guiri, who gives their various context(s):-
Leche
Polvo
Resaca
Botellón
Verguenza
Friolero
Caluroso
Desvelado
Agujetas
Details here.
The
left-wing British newspaper, The Guardian, today rails against
right-wing politicians who take out of context or distort the sayings
of saint Jeremy of Corbyn. No one on the left would ever do that, of
course. For example with Mrs Thatcher's (in)famous comment about
there being 'no such thing as society'. God forfend!
Finally .
. . The Celts: There's an superb-sounding exhibition about to start in London. Here's
the full text of a Times article today on this. Three things jump
out:- 1. There were, indeed, "Celts" all over continental
Europe, including northern Spain and Portugal: 2. The last thing the
'Celts' of England, Ireland and Scotland were was Celts; and 3. The
name was highjacked relatively recently by 'nationalist' peoples who
wanted to differentiate themselves from others. Usually their rulers.
As with Galicians and the Spanish, of course. As someone says: "The word
Celts suddenly seemed very handy.
Enjoy!
Celt
up! Everything you need to know about a dynamic culture
A major new
exhibition takes us on a tour of Celtic art, from a 500BC sandstone
warrior to a modern-day football shirt
With his stylised
features, geometric tunic, his strange, three-pronged necklace and
even stranger headdress that looks like Mickey Mouse ears, this
life-sized, red sandstone warrior looks like some sort of ancient
South American. Towering on massive legs at nearly two metres and
with a downward curve to his carved mouth, he looks terrifying. What
he does not look, at all, is Celtic. Which he is. At least he was.
It’s complicated.
The Glauberg warrior
was buried in about 500 BC alongside a young Celtic prince about 20
miles northeast of what is now Frankfurt. He is one of the earliest
items at an exhibition opening later this month at the British
Museum, Celts: Art and Identity. He is a striking part of a story
that goes back 2,500 years and stretches across Europe from Portugal
to Turkey as well as into Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and Ireland.
Of course there have
been exhibitions about Celts before. What is different about this
one, says co-curator Julia Farley, is the sheer breadth of time and
geography it covers, from 500BC to the present day. The exhibition
will attempt to show how the meaning of the word “Celt” has been
redefined over the centuries, and how that identity is expressed in
art.
It will include Iron
Age objects such as the Snettisham Great Torc, a heavy gold necklace
in the museum’s collection, and the magnificent silver Gundestrup
Cauldron from Denmark, decorated with images of Celtic people (the
first time the object has travelled to Britain). Later items include
the 8th-century St Chad Gospels — a stunning, intricately decorated
Bible — and stone medieval crosses. There will even be a Celtic
football shirt and a Korean manga comic with beefy moustachioed
characters inspired by the Celtic stereotype that prevails today. Yet
as our sandstone warrior tells us, Celts haven’t always been what
we think they are.
“The world
‘Celtic’ or ‘Celt’ has been redefined in the past 300 years
and it has taken on a meaning which isn’t quite the meaning it
originally had to the people who first used it,” says Farley.
Around 500 BC, she explains, the Ancient Greeks started recording
people whom they called “Celtoi” as marauding through parts of
Europe. A map at the start of the exhibition shows those areas
cutting right across the continent, but these Celts are conspicuously
absent from Britain and Ireland.
Yet as Farley
explains, “The Ancient Greeks and Romans are talking from the
perspective of the classical Mediterranean and so they see these
people as moving war-bands. Some authors use the word as a
broad-brush term for everybody living across this swathe of temperate
Europe; they’re like, ‘Yep, to the north, that’s Celts.’ It’s
not their own term and it’s not one that’s used with any
particularly accurate definition or consistency.”
We now know that
those “Celts” weren’t a defined, single people. “If we look
at the evidence of their houses, how they bury their dead, how they
dressed themselves, you see a real mosaic of quite different
communities all across that area,” says Farley.
So hang on, if the
Celts — who you could argue weren’t really Celts because they
probably didn’t even call themselves Celts and weren’t even the
same Celts — were spread out across Europe but not in Britain or
Ireland, how did we end up calling what we call Celts, Celts? We
must, says Farley, fast forward to the 1400s “because during the
later Roman period right through into the 1400s, nobody is using the
word Celts”. The word was rediscovered, she says, when the
classical texts were translated and reprinted after the invention of
the printing press in 1440.
“This is a time
when you’re getting much more clearly defined, emerging nation
states in Europe; people are wanting to tell local histories. Before
that, when they’d been talking about the histories of people in
Europe, they’re really drawing on the Bible — so which of the
sons of Noah settled where is a real question — and myths like the
Aeneid. But those stories aren’t specific to a particular area, and
once people start wanting to tell the story of their nation in the
deep past, that’s not good enough. But they don’t have many
written histories to draw on until they start reprinting these
classical texts.”
The word “Celts”,
she says, suddenly seemed very handy. “It becomes almost a
catch-all term for the pre-Roman inhabitants of a lot of western
Europe, and it’s first used to refer to inhabitants of Scotland and
Ireland by [the humanist scholar] George Buchanan in 1582.”
Then, in the early
1700s, with the discovery of linguistic similarities between the
indigenous languages spoken in Ireland, the northern and western
coast of Britain and in Brittany, a term was needed to cover this
loose family of languages. “So they use the name Celtic. I think
it’s because the word got attached to those languages, which came
to stand so much for the distinctive heritage of those regions, that
the words Celts and Celtic started to be used to mean something that
creates a sense of difference from the English and the French. Where
the ancient authors used to refer to the Celts and where we think of
the Celtic nations as being today, is almost completely different —
the only overlap is in Brittany. It is a word that has changed its
meaning.”
From a word used to
differentiate the other to a word used to differentiate the self. If
you’re reading this in, say, Edinburgh and feeling self-conscious
about the Celtic band above your bicep, don’t be alarmed. “I get
quite cross when people say that this [newer definition] is wrong,
because it’s not wrong — words change and evolve,” says Farley.
“The word Celt has been redefined to mean that distinctive history,
identity, that family of languages of those regions. It has genuinely
come to mean that and it does refer to a genuine, deeply rooted
regional distinctiveness. That is real, and if we hadn’t given it
the name Celtic, it would have had another name. It’s just a
question of recognising that the word has been used in different
ways.”
This idea of a
culture defined by its deliberate differentiation from its neighbours
is one that comes up often in the show: a Greek helmet from about 460
BC, with its simple lines and inscription dedicating it to Zeus is
contrasted with a Celtic helmet from the same period with, yes,
massive spiky horns that, if worn in battle, must have freaked out
the opposition something rotten. Yet it is most apparent in Celtic
art.
A Scottish Celtic
bracelet from the Roman period sits alongside a native Roman bracelet
of the same time: both take the form of a snake, but while the Roman
piece is slender and naturalistic, the Celtic piece is chunky and
only suggests the form of the animal. “They start making this
chunky, funky jewellery only after the Roman invasion of southern
Britain, and some of these, which are bronze, are probably being made
from melted down Roman coinage,” Farley says. “So they’re
taking something foreign and making it into their own distinctive
local style of jewellery.” A punchy way of showing the invaders
what you thought of their wall.
The artistic style
is a thread that does run through the Celtic tradition, whatever that
means, with a curious consistency. Farley and her co-curator Rosie
Weetch are anxious to clarify that there is no single “Celtic art”
and to emphasise the point that it does change across time and area.
When pressed, however, Farley does admit that there are certain
aspects to nearly all Celtic art that mark it out.
“When we were
writing our labels for the show and we were asked to distil Celtic
art down to three words, we said ‘abstract, ambiguous and swirly’,”
she says. “It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, but that actually
does kind of cover it.” It is abstract rather than naturalistic,
often drawing on organic forms but in a very stylised or exaggerated
way.
“If you think of
the way that they portray animals, they’re doing it differently, so
they might be interlaced beasts in the early medieval period, whereas
in the Iron Age they’re reduced down to the most basic elements of
flowing lines — that idea of taking the natural and simplifying it
is something that does very much follow through and is a real
differentiator from the classical aesthetic of accurate portrayal,”
says Farley.
The designs
themselves are often hugely complex, “as if they are designed to
draw the eye in and keep you looking at it”, says Farley. “There’s
often something quite ambiguous about the designs. They can often be
viewed as an abstract pattern or, if you know what you’re looking
for, you can start to see hidden faces and beasts.”
A beautiful shield
boss from about 350-150BC that was found on the bed of the Thames
near Wandsworth in the 19th century seems to be decorated with
winding leaves, but suddenly you see two stylised water birds
stretching around its outer edge. The swirls that you see everywhere
are thought to have had magical properties — they appear on
everything from the back of a scabbard sheath (where it could not be
seen) to the breastplate on an 8th-century depiction of Christ. “It
suggests that those motifs themselves might have had magical
properties,” says Farley. “It’s been called by various people
studying this art ‘a technology of enchantment’.”
Although the style
is reinvented according to whatever influences are around — in the
earliest period the art will transform Greek motifs such as the
palmette, so that it might suggest a strange face, as on one of the
flagons in the show, or in the early medieval period it might embrace
something like interlace — these common elements remain.
Farley points to an
art nouveau poster for the Glasgow School of Fine Art, which will be
in the exhibition. “They’re drawing on Celtic elements but also
on Japanese aesthetics. But that to me doesn’t make it less Celtic,
because that’s just a modern version of what Celtic people have
been doing throughout this whole time period, which is taking
traditional motifs, combining them with something new and reinventing
it, but in a way which is true to that aesthetic of abstract and
ambiguous design.” To abstract, ambiguous and swirly you might also
add cosmopolitan and modern. The Celts live on.
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