Hey Veeky Forums. I'm Welsh and know pretty much nothing about our history...

Hey Veeky Forums. I'm Welsh and know pretty much nothing about our history. Can someone help me out and tell me about the Celts? Why is there fuckall documented about the Celtic people?

Irishman reporting in! We simply didn't leave much behind or documented anything. I suppose our ancestors passed knowledge on oraly and not by paper and pen.

Are Irish girls that flat?

Ahh that's pretty disappointing. The concept and idea of druids is really fascinating, I guess we'll never really know for sure what they did.

Isn't human and animal sacrifice a pretty sure thing among scholars regarding druids?

In a very brief TL;DR

Celts in the UK can be split into two groups - Gaels and Britons

Gaels include the Irish, Scottish and Manx who speak variants of Gaelic

Britons include the Welsh, Cornish and Bretons who speak Brythonic.

The Brythonic Celts used to rule the entirety of Britain. They were split into dozens of tribes and followed what is now called Druidism. Common features included headhunting, animal and human sacrifice, worship of nature and a powerful priest class called the druids.

Julius Caesar invaded Britain and conquered all the Brythonic tribes (Britons) in 'England.' They were Romanized and later became Christians.

When the Western Empire fell, the Britons no longer had the protection and security of an empire protecting them. Gaels from Ireland and Pictish tribes from Scotland kept raiding and attacking them.

The Britons invited over the Anglo-Saxons from Germany to fight for them as mercenaries. The Anglo-Saxons quickly realised how bad things were for the Britons and took over their land, creating what is now called 'England' (Land of the Angles)

The Britons who weren't killed by the Anglo-Saxons fled to the edges of Briton and founded kingdoms in Wales, Cornwall and parts of Scotland. The Britons in Wales became known as the Welsh (an Anglo-Saxon word that means 'foreigner') and basically survived in the mountains until they were annexed by the English.

I forgot to mention that some of the Britons fled to Brittany in France. Their language is mutually intelligible with Cornish and very close to Welsh as well.

Well put.

As for the Gaels;

The Gaels came from Ireland and spoke an entirely different language from the Britons. We don't know much about their religion or legends, other than that they were a warrior culture who engaged in a lot of piracy and raiding.

The Gaels were mostly irrelevant until after the Western Empire fell. They started raiding the shit out of Britain and actually formed their own kingdom in what is now Scotland, called Dal Riata.

At the time, Scotland was controlled by the Picts. We don't know what kind of Celts the Picts were because there's almost no information about their language or culture. Most historians believe the Picts were also Britons but spoke a different language from the Welsh.

The Gaels eventually conquered the Picts and created the kingdom of Scotland. Scotland quickly became a separate entity from Ireland because Ireland wasn't a united kingdom - it was split up into minor counties.

Both Scotland and Ireland suffered heavily from viking raids alongside warring with the English.

Scotland eventually started speaking English instead of Gaelic because of growing influence from Lowland Scots. Lowlanders were Anglo-Saxons who lived in Scotland and eventually became the political elite.

When Scotland formed the United Kingdom with England, those that still spoke Gaelic were heavily repressed and sent off to America. Ireland was eventually annexed by Great Britain and the same treatment was applied there. That's why America has so many Irish-Americans.

Today Gaelic is a minority language in both Scotland and Ireland but it's making a revival. Gaelic speakers are still the majority of certain rural areas of both countries like the Outer Hebrides and the 'Gaeltacht' in Ireland

Only in the front ;^)