The only possible reaction is weariness

As many of you know, although I am a librarian now, I used to be in academia. Before moving into librarianship, I did a PhD in medieval Irish literature, and was, during that time, pretty firmly ensconced in Celtic Studies academia — a multidisciplinary field that covers languages, history, literature and material culture, ranging in time from prehistory to the contemporary era.

We get a lot of cranks contacting us — people convinced they have evidence for a real, historical King Arthur, neopagans who think there is extensive evidence for pre-Christian 'Celtic' religious beliefs and practices documented in medieval literary texts (which is a whole other story, but suffice it to say the evidence is thin), Cornish nationalists who want to coopt us in their language revival debates, and so on. Most of the time, it causes a bit of grumbling and sighing, but it's relatively harmless, we do our best to gently correct these people's misapprehensions, and they wander off.

Unfortunately, there's also the far right.

( Cut for discussion of far-right nationalism )