The passing of the great race; or, The racial basis of European history

by Madison Grant

The blond Nordic element to-day is very marked in Ireland as in England. It is derived, to some extent, from the early invaders of Celtic speech, but the Goidelic element has been very largely absorbed in Ireland as in western England and in Scotland by the Iberian substratum of the population and is found to-day rather in the form of Nordic characters in brunets than in the entirely blond individuals who represent later and purer Nordic strains.

The figures for recruits taken some decades ago in the two countries would indicate that the Irish as a whole are considerably lighter in eye and darker in hair color than are the English. The combination of black Iberian hair with blue or gray Nordic eyes is frequently found in Ireland and also in Spain and in both these countries is justly admired for its beauty, but it is by no means an exclusively Irish type.

The tall, blond Irishmen are to-day chiefly Danish with the addition of English, Norman and Scotch elements, which have poured into the lesser island for a thousand years and have imposed the English speech upon it. The more primitive and ancient elements in Ireland have always shown great ability to absorb newcomers and during the Middle Ages it was notorious that the Norman and English colonists quickly sank to the cultural level of the natives.

In spite of the fact that Paleoliths have not been found there some indications of Paleolithic man appear in Ireland both as single characters and as individuals. Being, like Brittany, situated on the extreme western outposts of Eurasia, it has more than its share of generalized and low types surviving in the living populations and these types, the Firbolgs, have imparted a distinct and very undesirable aspect to a large portion of the inhabitants of the west and south and have greatly lowered the intellectual status of the population as a whole. The cross between these elements and the Nordics appears to be a bad one and the mental and cultural traits of the aborigines have proved to be exceedingly persistent and appear especially in the unstable temperament and the lack of coordinating and reasoning power, so often found among the Irish. To the dominance of the Mediterraneans mixed with Pre-Neolithic survivals in the south and west are to be attributed the aloofness of the island from the general trend of European civilization and its long adherence to ancient forms of religion and even to Pre-Christian superstitions.

In England, the same two ethnic elements are present, namely the Nordic and the Mediterranean. There is, especially in Wales and in the west central counties of England, a large substratum of ancient Mediterranean blood but the later Nordic elements are everywhere superimposed upon it.

Scotland is by race Anglian in the Lowlands and Norse in the Highlands with underlying Goidelic and Brythonic elements, which are exceedingly hard to identify. The Mediterranean strain is marked in the Highlands and is frequently associated with tall stature.

This brunetness in Scotland is, of course, derived from the same underlying Mediterranean stock which we have found elsewhere in the British Islands.

The inhabitants of Scotland before the arrival of the Celtic-speaking Nordics seem to have been the Picts, whose language was almost surely Non-Aryan. Judging from the remnants of Anaryan syntax in the Goidelic and to a lesser degree in the Cymric languages, Pictish was related to the Anaryan Berber tongues still spoken in North Africa. No trace of this Pre-Aryan syntax is found in English.

Where one race imposes a new language on another, the change is most marked in the vocabulary while the ancient usage in syntax or the construction of sentences is the more apt to survive and these ancient forms often give us a valuable clew to the aboriginal speech. This same Anaryan syntax is particularly marked in the Irish language, a condition which fits in with the other Pre-Aryan usages and types found there.

This divergence between the new vocabulary and the ancient habits of syntax is probably one of the causes of the extreme splitting up of the various branches of the Aryan mother tongue.