The Celts or Celtic peoples were a collection of Indo-European peoples in Europe and Anatolia, identified by their use of Celtic languages and other cultural similarities. Major Celtic groups included the Gauls; the Celtiberians and Gallaeci of Iberia; the Britons, Picts, and Gaels of Britain and Ireland; the Boii; and the Galatians. The relation between ethnicity, language and culture in the Celtic world is unclear and debated; for example over the ways in which the Iron Age people of Britain and Ireland should be called Celts. In current scholarship, 'Celt' primarily refers to 'speakers of Celtic languages' rather than to a single ethnic group.
Abadín is a municipality in the province of Lugo, Galicia, Spain. It covers 196.1 km2 and has a population of 3,250 for a population density of 16.57/km2. It resides in the region of Terra Cha.
The Britons, also known as Celtic Britons or Ancient Britons, were the indigenous Celtic people who inhabited Great Britain from at least the British Iron Age until the High Middle Ages, at which point they diverged into the Welsh, Cornish, and Bretons. They spoke Common Brittonic, the ancestor of the modern Brittonic languages.
Mondoñedo is a small town and municipality in the Galician province of Lugo, Spain. As of 2009, the town has a population of 4,508. Mondoñedo occupies a sheltered valley among the northern outliers of the Cantabrian Mountains. Despite being the core of the region of A Mariña Central, it is the city with the fifth biggest population after Viveiro, Ribadeo, Foz and Burela.
The Gallaeci were a Celtic tribal complex who inhabited Gallaecia, the north-western corner of Iberia, a region roughly corresponding to what is now the Norte Region in northern Portugal, and the Spanish regions of Galicia, western Asturias and western León before and during the Roman period. They spoke a Q-Celtic language related to Northeastern Hispano-Celtic, called Gallaecian or Northwestern Hispano-Celtic. The region was annexed by the Romans in the time of Caesar Augustus during the Cantabrian Wars, a war which initiated the assimilation of the Gallaeci into Latin culture.
The Iberian Peninsula, where Galicia is located, has been inhabited for at least 500,000 years, first by Neanderthals and then by modern humans. From about 4500 BC, it was inhabited by a megalithic culture, which entered the Bronze Age about 1500 BC. These people would become the Gallaeci, and they would be conquered by the Roman Empire in the first and second centuries AD. As the Roman Empire declined, Galicia would be conquered and ruled by various Germanic tribes, notably the Suebi and Visigoths, until the 9th century. Then the Muslim conquest of Iberia reached Galicia, although they never quite controlled the area.
Britonia is the name of a Romano-British settlement on the northern coast of the Iberian peninsula at the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain. The area is roughly that of the northern parts of the modern provinces of A Coruña and Lugo in the autonomous community of Galicia, Spain.
The Diocese of Mondoñedo-Ferrol is a Latin diocese of the Catholic Church in Spain. It is the northernmost of the four suffragan dioceses in the ecclesiastical province of the Metropolitan Archdiocese of Santiago de Compostela, which covers Galicia in the northwest of Spain. The area had previously been home to Britonia, a settlement founded by expatriate Britons in the wake of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain. Britonia was represented by the diocese referred to as Britonensis ecclesia in sources from the 6th and 7th centuries.
Province of Mondoñedo One of the seven provinces which existed in Galicia from the 15th Century till 1833; from that date onwards the number of provinces were reduced to four, and the entire Province of Mondoñedo was first divided into two halves and later absorbed and assimilated into the existing provinces of Lugo and A Coruña.
Foz is a town and municipality in the A Mariña Central comarca in the Galician province of Lugo. It has been historically linked to the Ancient Province of Mondoñedo and also linked to the arrival of Briton immigrants during the Dark Ages fleeing by sea from the British Isles. It has 9800 inhabitants. It borders the coastal municipalities of Burela and Barreiros, and the inland municipalities of Lourenzá, Mondoñedo, O Valadouro, Alfoz, and Cervo.
Barreiros is a municipality in the province of Lugo, in the autonomous community of Galicia, Spain. It belongs to the comarca of A Mariña Oriental. This municipality is closely linked to the history of the province from pre-Roman times. It has a geographical range extending from the valleys to the mountains and from the plains to the coast with high cliffs and long beaches.
A Pastoriza is a municipality in the province of Lugo, in the autonomous community of Galicia, Spain. It belongs to the comarca of Terra Chá. It has a population of 3,911 and an area of 175 km². The most important river in Galicia and one of the most plentiful rivers of Spain begins here, the Miño River.
Brittia (Βριττία), according to Procopius, was an island known to the inhabitants of the Low Countries under Frankish rule, corresponding both to a real island used for burial and a mythological Isle of the Blessed, to which the souls of the dead are transported.
Metopius was a churchman in Galicia, Spain, in the 7th century. He served as bishop of Britonia, and represented his see at the Fourth Council of Toledo in 633. The diocese of Britonia had been established for the Celtic Britons who had settled in the region en masse during the previous century, and Metopius' attendance of the Council of Toledo demonstrates its survival in the 7th century.
Sonna of Britonia (?–646–?) was a medieval Britonian priest in Galicia who signed at the Seventh Council of Toledo.
The MacMhuirich bardic family, known in Scottish Gaelic as Clann MacMhuirich and Clann Mhuirich, and anglicised as Clan Currie was a prominent family of bards and other professionals in 15th to 18th centuries. The family was centred in the Hebrides, and claimed descent from a 13th-century Irish bard who, according to legend, was exiled to Scotland. The family was at first chiefly employed by the Lords of the Isles as poets, lawyers, and physicians. With the fall of the Lordship of the Isles in the 15th century, the family was chiefly employed by the chiefs of the MacDonalds of Clanranald. Members of the family were also recorded as musicians in the early 16th century, and as clergymen possibly as early as the early 15th century.
The Juvencus Manuscript is one of the main surviving sources of Old Welsh. Unlike much Old Welsh, which is attested in manuscripts from later periods and in partially updated form, the Welsh material in the Juvencus Manuscript was written in the Old Welsh period itself; the manuscript provides the first attestation of many Welsh words.
Sovereignty goddess is a scholarly term, almost exclusively used in Celtic studies. The term denotes a goddess who, personifying a territory, confers sovereignty upon a king by marrying or having sex with him. Some narratives of this type correspond to folk-tale motif D732, the Loathly Lady, in Stith Thompson's Motif-Index. This trope has been identified as 'one of the best-known and most frequently studied thematic elements of Celtic myth'. It has also, however, been criticised in recent research for leading to "an attempt to prove that every strong female character in medieval Welsh and Irish tales is a souvenir of a Celtic sovereignty goddess".
Proto-Celtic paganism was the beliefs of the speakers of Proto-Celtic and includes topics such as the mythology, legendry, folk tales, and folk beliefs of early Celtic culture. By way of the comparative method, Celtic philologists, a variety of historical linguist, have proposed reconstructions of entities, locations, and concepts with various levels of security in early Celtic folklore and mythology. The present article includes both reconstructed forms and proposed motifs from the early Celtic period.
