#pictish

Celts and Mandos: a real case study

I've been getting quite a few e-mails about the Mandalorian culture feature in Insider #86 in the last few days, and I'm glad people are enjoying it. Maybe it's time to explain some of the rationale behind the social structure and attitudes that I ascribed to the Mando ade. Most common question: are they Spartans?

Actually, no. A lot of parallels, but no more than you'd expect of any society with militaristic roots and a hard life.

Look further north. Ever heard of the Picts?

They were an ancient British people who fought against the Roman invaders. (Yeah, I know the Romans did a lot for us, but let's not go there.) We now think of them as a sub-branch of the Celts - an interesting term to define in itself - and the Romans saw them as a warrior race. They were never defeated on their home territory.

They weren't an ethnic group, but a shared culture, a loose group of various tribes and clans that ganged up to sort out the invaders. They were big on tattoos, too. The Romans wrote the history books, of course - the Picts had no written language anyway - and they left out the bit about the non-warrior side of Pictish life.

Although the Picts had no armour - they fought naked, which must have had its interesting moments - I reckon our Mandos would have fitted in fine among them and the wider Celtic culture.

They had this dual nature, the warrior and the poet, fuelled by the occasional drink and often prone to sentimentality and melancholy sing-songs. If you add in the heavy faux Scots accents of the Mandos from the Marvel comic days, you'll see why my immediate subconscious image of them drew heavily on their Celtic vibe. It was just perfect. The netra gal was obligatory by that stage.

The Celts weren't a single ethnic group any more than the Picts were: if you saw today's excellent UK Channel 4 documentary about the Celts (which prompted this blog) then you'll have seen the DNA investigation that showed the people we think of as Celtic, such as the Irish, don't share genetic markers any more than the rest of the former Celtic world does.

The extraordinary thing about the Celts (and so the sub-group known as Picts) was that they spoke one language right across Europe and shared a lot of other cultural elements like art, even though there was no migration of population, something shown by the DNA tests. And yet they had so much in common that we think of them today as one people.

There's one more aspect of their way of life that makes the Picts and the Celts in general dead ringers for our Mandos. They really weren't into central government. They were loose groups of clans who sometimes fought among themselves, generally got along fine, but came together as one army when some upstart like Julius Caesar decided to get in their collective face.

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But back to Mandos. Not every military society is based on Sparta, strange as that may seem. In fact, the Mandos don't have much in common with the real Spartans at all. (Forget the Hollywood crapola on Sparta - check out the serious historical research. In fact, ignore every historical movie ever made, even the good ones, but especially ignore the ones starring Mel Gibson.)

Seeing as there wasn't much established about our favourite armour-wearing lads and lasses when I came to the SW table, I had a nearly blank page to play with - all I had to work with was that they were once nomadic mercenaries, they adopted some kind of culture from nonhuman aliens, they had clans, their leader seemed to be a bit irrelevant to their daily lives (Jango was never around much...) and one of their leaders, Shysa, had a cheesy pseudo-Scots-Irish accent in the comics...

A slightly anarchic, non-centralized, fightin' people? Sounded pretty Celtic to me. Since I went down that path, I've learned more about the Celts (especially the Picts), and the more I learn, the more I realise what a dead ringer for Mandos they are. But more of how that happened later...

Celts are a good fit with the kind of indomitable, you-can't-kill-'em-off vibe of the Mandos. Reviled by Rome as ignorant savages with no culture or science, and only fit for slaughter or conquest, the Celts were in fact much more civilized than Rome even by modern standards.

They also kicked Roman arse on the battlefield, and were very hard to keep in line, so Rome did what all lying, greedy superpowers do when challenged: they demonised and dehumanised the enemy. (They still used them in their army, of course, but that's only to be expected.)

While Rome was still leaving its unwanted babies to die on rubbish dumps - a perfectly acceptable form of family planning to this "civilisation" - and keeping women as chattels devoid of rights, the barbarian Celts had a longstanding legal system that not only gave women what we would think of as equal rights, but also protected the rights of the elderly, children, and the disabled.

They had a road network across Europe and worldwide trade long before the Romans ever got their act together. And their science - well, their astronomical calculations were so sophisticated that it takes computers to do the same stuff today.