From The myths of Avalon by Kari Sperring
“[T]here's that great sacred cow, the myth of the strong, equal, Celtic woman. Of all the arguments I've got into over the years about 'what everyone knows' about early mediaeval Ireland and Wales, this is the commonest. And the one that winds me up most. I tend to refer to it as Celtic Druidical Princess Crap. Because, frankly, it is.
[...] At about this point, most modern people say, 'Oh, but, what about Boudicca and Cartimandua, Mebh (Maeve) and Scathach, Rhiannon and Morgan? They were queens and warriors and druidesses.' If I'm really lucky, they'll go on to explain to me that all the things I've said are down to interference and reorganisation of 'proper' Celtic culture (always a monolith in this argument) by the church. 'It was St Patrick. He made the women unequal. But the old sources show that really they were equal to the men, before him.'
The 'old sources' are the same sources I'm talking about, read, usually, through the lens of Jean Markale and his successors. What Markale, and other promulgators of this myth did was this: they gathered together every source they could find mentioning women, from across several countries and cultures which they chose to call 'Celtic' and dating anywhere from the 5th century to the nineteenth, set them down side by side as all equally valid and reliable, and then picked out the examples of women that looked good, that gave this 'equal, powerful' image. Most things that contradicted it were thrown away as 'Christian-influenced' and thus inauthentic. As historical methodology goes, this leaves a lot to be desired.
For one thing, not all sources are equal. A late source - from the eighteenth century, say - cannot be expected to be as reliable and accurate as an early one. The later the source, the more chances there are of errors and reworkings and introduction of materials from elsewhere. Wales is not Ireland, nor is Brittany Wales, and southern France is none of them. Peoples who speak related languages, even mutually comprehensible ones, often differ quite noticeably from each other in culture. And then, most of these sources are written. Writing, in the Celtic countries, is an artefact of the introduction of Christianity. There are many people - few of them historians - who believe you can take an early text, the Mabinogi, say, and go through it and pick out the 'Christian' influences, leaving behind a 'pagan' core. Alas, it's not that simple. Certainly, some things are more overtly Christian than others - you can see this most clearly in law codes, where laws derived from Biblical precedent sit alongside laws that clearly reflect native practice. But this does not mean that one strand is necessarily older than the other, and even if one is, that strand is seldom the one you want it to be.”
