The New Journal - "Eire Apparent" Volume 39, Number 3; November 2006
Pick up a sword and shield—it's "Live Like a Celt Day." By Ben Lasman
It's nine a.m. on a frigid Saturday morning, and Cyril May cannot find his cow horn. The bony-faced, pony-tailed director of Yale Recycling and co-founder of the Celtic Learning Project hurls jagged spearheads, torc necklaces, and homemade leather buckles across a frosty lawn in an attempt to locate the errant bovine accessory. "Cattle were very important to the Celts," he says, brandishing a Beanie Baby bull and mooing for emphasis. "This is what they used for currency."
At the Ancient Order of Hibernian's Hall in Meriden, Connecticut, Cyril and his fellow volunteers—mostly middle-aged, bundled in layers of polar fleece and traditional tartan tunics—arrange artifacts and shirts in preparation for the arrival of local families at today's "Live Like a Celt Day," an event intended to teach children about the Celtic tradition. Hibernian's Hall, dull gray and plastered with bulletins for upcoming poker nights and potluck suppers, evokes a mutated Winnebago, its rooms jutting out at unpredictable angles. The half-wilted lawn is strewn with primitive accoutrements and bordered by squat, tarp-strewn sheds. In the parking lot around back, a battered dumpster has been proudly pasted with a glittery shamrock. Today's event marks the first official collaboration between the Ancient Order of Hibernians, an Irish Catholic fraternal society established in 1565, and the Celtic Learning Project. Yet, despite its obsession with history, none of its members knows when the Celtic Learning Project began. "We started organizing sometime in the past five or ten years," offers Betty, one of the group's founders.
The members are here today thanks to Cyril. "He came down here one night to tell a story," remembers Stanley, a fellow member of the Order dressed in a green Jets sweatshirt and covered in blue face-paint, "and I thought it would be great to have him do something like that for the kids." Although performing Celtic talescomprises a large portion of the Learning Project's activities, Cyril often has to edit the legends for younger audiences: "These stories aren't rated X," he says. "But they are usually rated R."
Dan, a blacksmith affiliated with the Ancient Celtic Clans reenactment group, woke at five this morning to make the three-hour drive from his home in upstate New York. His day of living like a Celt begins with building an open tent on the grass and hollowing out a shallow divot in the earth to act as his furnace. He cradles a tiny iron cube in his calloused hands. "That's my anvil," he says, resting the lump atop a log jammed vertically into the ground, "The Celts liked it because it was highly portable."
A specialist in what he calls "experimental archaeology," Dan meets with fellow enthusiasts weekly. Using items disinterred from excavations as models, the blacksmith and his assistants painstakingly recreate artifacts from scratch, producing functional and accurate facsimiles for use in re-enactments and artisanal demonstrations. According to Dan, when anthropologists discovered a carnax, or centuries-old horn, in an Irish bog, a Scottish trombonist spent an estimated 10,000 pounds constructing a working model of the instrument. "We'd love to get one of those," Dan says, a wistful expression crossing his face.
As the Society's resident artist, Betty specializes in fabricating its painted shields and wire neckbands. "Once, we painted figures of Boudicca and Cuchullin with the faces cut out so kids could get their photo-graphs taken," she recalls. "They like that male-female thing." While there is no comparable setup at today's event, Betty has devised an equally compelling assortment of interactive stations to teach the many facets of antediluvian Celtic existence: "The Fort," a trampoline-sized, waist-high ring draped in cloth and flanked by a minute, wooden loom, borders the concrete parking lot. On the far side of the Hibernian Society's grass, two women prepare a grill for demonstrations of ancient Irish cooking.
As the blacksmith assembles his bellows, a primordial wheeze echoes from behind the tent: Cyril has found his horn. "It sounds like a dying bull moose with asthma," he says, laughing as he holds the instrument at arm's length. The dissonant fanfare has attracted the attention of the volunteers, who form a semi-circle around the trumpeter. With his team assembled, Cyril begins to divide up responsibilities. Stanley organizes a nature walk along the perimeter of the yard. Frank, the taciturn, mustachioed leader of the Meriden Hibernians, stands next to the blacksmith's hutch with his arms crossed. "You want a skirt, Frank?" Cyril asks, offering him a plaid tunic. Frank does not want a skirt.
Cyril instructs a massive, white-bearded man to hide in the tract of woods bordering the property. "Lawrence is our raider," Cyril ex-plains as the burly individual walks off towards the foliage, eventually taking cover behind a young sap-ling that manages to conceal about a third of his girth. He will not move from this position for the next two hours.
His team in place, Cyril claps his hands to his sides and heads off in the direction of his green van. "Time to get pretty pretty!" he ex-claims, dropping to one knee to lace up his leather shoes before tossing on a red knee-length tunic and fastening a sword to the right side of his belt. "You would think that a warrior would want his blade hanging from the left," he says, pulling the sheath across his waist and drawing the weapon with practiced ferocity. "But," he continues, pulling the cutlass back to its original position, "Archeaological evidence from Celtic burial grounds suggests that soldiers would actually wear theirswords here, on the right." Lifting his holster to chest level, Cyril pulls the blade horizontally across his abdomen and grins, demonstrating a plausible reason for the placement. "This is my theory." A female volunteer wearing a pink baseball cap and smoking a cigarette seems unimpressed. "Maybe they were all just left-handed," she says.
The ultimate goal of the Celtic Learning Project is to create a living history museum, like Colonial Williamsburg. But despite their fanatical devotion to historical verisimilitude, an undercurrent of modernity haunts the enterprise. Prior to the families' arrivals, Cyril fumbles with a digital camera, erasing pictures to free up space on the memory card. None of Cyril's regalia—his cloak, sword and torc—is actually Irish in origin; every piece is an American reproduction. "We have to take liberties with the Celts because we just don't know," he remarks. But behind the recreated tools, the tar-tan tunics, and the petite anvils lies a more fundamental irony. The Celts left little behind because they were unable to secure their own posterity. "The Celts lost, historically," Cyril says. "The Romans defeated them." Minor historical inaccuracies aside, "Live Like a Celt Day" is meant to introduce children to the lifestyle of the Celts. "We really don't know how many people will show up," confides Frank, "We put ads in our newsletter and in the town paper, but there's no way of guessing who will turn out."
Behind him, a minivan pulls into the parking lot and lurches to a halt. The first family of the day has arrived.
Six children come to "Live Like a Celt Day." That number dwindles to five when one boy complains that the traditional costume thrust upon him is too scratchy. Attendance, however, does not seem to concern Cyril. He blows his horn to gather the modest crowd—now outfitted in tunics and face paint—for a nature walk along the outskirts of the yard. "Station One," set up along the embankment of a drainage ditch, depicts the Celtic reverence for streams and salmon. Cyril shows a computer printout of a fish to the kids. "Does anyone know what the salmon meant to the Celts?" Con-nor, a homeschooled eight-year-old who just finished studying ancient Irish history, has the correct answer: "Knowledge."
Moving on to the next stage of the walk, Cyril explains the importance of animals to the Celtic tribes. "Can anyone spot the fox in the woods?" he asks, motioning towards the thorny underbrush. "I see," calls Connor, pointing into the woods where Stanley has set up a cardboard replica of a fox. After congratulating Connor, Cyril remarks that wolves used to live in the Connecticut woods, but be-came largely extinct due to hunting. "Is there a fake wolf?" asks a little blonde girl with glasses, scanning the forest intently.
As the group arrives on the far end of the lawn, Cyril begins to lead the children into the trees. "Be on the lookout for raiders," he warns portentously. Several tense seconds pass before Lawrence bursts forth from the leaves, waving a stick and roaring. A little girl screams. "Kill `em all," bellows the faux-barbarian, charging from his hideout. "We'll enslave the children and kill the rest!" Cyril ushers the children from the underbrush and runs with them into the yard. His prey out of reach, Lawrence pivots and lumbers dejectedly back into the woods.
Once the children have caught their breath, the lesson continues. Cyril explains that for Celts, the wheel was a symbol for war. "Does anyone think they know why?" he asks. Connor's hand shoots up. "Maybe because they thought war was a cycle that never ended and always kept happening," he says. Cyril looks to the adults mingling on the outskirts of the parking lot: "We've got a philosopher here." He had always thought it was because the Celts rode chariots into battle.
In the meantime, Betty has prepared bowls of oatmeal to demonstrate how the Celts might have made crackers. As the kids sit on a concrete ledge facing the grill, she arranges her cooking utensils and describes the history of classic Irish cuisine. "Behold the ancient Celtic Tupperware," she announces, producing a plastic container full of biscuits from a nearby box and placing it before her audience. The children, apparently less concerned with learning the process than eating lunch, pound oatmeal into paste and shake mason jars filled with cream. "We don't know how the Celts actually made butter," whispers Cyril to Dan, "But this is fun for the kids."
As one little girl peruses the stack of Celtic-themed coloring books for sale, her mother asks Cyril how she can pay him for his services. "Pay me?" the robed educator laughs. "Pay me in cattle, of course.
TNJ
Ben Lasman is a freshman in Berkeley College.
November 2006