Celticity and Storyteller Identity: The Use and Misuse of Ethnicity to Develop a Storyteller's Sense of Self

This paper looks at the self-representation of contemporary or revival storytellers claiming “Celtic” identity for themselves as storytellers, largely based on imagined traits of generic “Celtic” storytellers and storytelling styles, and content, which are conveyed via commercial images, suppositions about the Romantic era, and other mediated, second-hand or even erroneous sources. At the same time, such representations are compared with the self-representations of three traditional storytellers from Ireland and Scotland.