..."ancient Celtic" is meaningless as a descriptor because it spanned like 1000 years and western Europe and several disparate cultures *and didn't leave written records*.
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Replying to @NeolithicSheep @popelizbet
From the follow on what they appear to mean is "early medieval Ireland" and for things concerning kingship in early Ireland you want
@AdmiralHip who knows all the things even if she won't admit it.1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes -
Replying to @NeolithicSheep @popelizbet
I don’t know all the things but I know this: don’t use Celtic as an ethnonym for early med Irish, it’s nonsense. Satirists were...sort of respected but they weren’t like all powerful king destroyers. They were respected in a disrespectful way, if that makes any sense.
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As far as interracial or class marriages, I mean, that’s true enough but women from outside of the tuath (the home territory, it’s a difficult term) generally were of lower status and their sons were often too. Not always but often.
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There was social mobility of a sort but we don’t have marriage records so we can’t exactly see how it happened. The law tracts are difficult and contradictory and their enforcement is seen often as being impossible b/c many seem absurd to us now.
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Also ancient Celts, meaning, people speaking Celtic languages pre-500 BCE let’s say, we don’t know jack shit about their laws past what the Romans and Greeks wrote about. So, unhelpful and probably inaccurate.
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Polygamy was very common, usually had a head wife (cetmuinter) and maybe a second wife and then a legal concubine, for a powerful king. There were women satirists. Their children didn’t have much status.
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But again most of this info is from legal texts which used legends and myths, or saga texts. How society operated is something very hard to uncover. How much can we trust? In any event, it was not friendly to women like pop history would have you think.
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“Money” or however you want to think of monetary value without actual coinages is the cumal, which is the value of one female slave, equal to the value of three cows.
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And yes, there is the kingly ideal of bodily perfection, but most of what we know about that is that kings who were disliked? They were said to be disfigured only retroactively. How much that was adhered to, in a society where kings fought each other all the time? Well.
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The only example in text of this happening to a real historical king was Congal Caech who was stung in the eye by a bee. But I doubt that was his downfall. He was killed in battle by a rival king. So there is the ideal vs reality.
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