Song of Ireland

by Juilene Osborne-McKnight

  However, the Lebhor Gabhala is currently the source of major controversy in the archaeological branch of Celtic studies (the other branches being anthropology and mythology, anthropology containing language and culture, mythology containing folklore, legends, myths, stories, and songs). So in those fields of study, how can we “know” exactly what happened in or around 500 BC in a culture that kept no written records? Evidence. Thus, archaeology. Currently, the archaeological evidence does not fit the legend. At least not precisely.

  Archaeology deals with artifacts, the sifted detritus of a past culture. And nowhere in Ireland can anyone find evidence of a massive invasion from Spain. There is, however, evidence of a rather advanced culture moving into Ireland at this time and taking up residence next to an already existing group. At the Hill of Tara, the seat of Ireland’s high kings, archaeologists have found Roman artifacts such as wine goblets, lead seals, and glass vessels. This would indicate a well-traveled trading culture.

  Anthropologically speaking, there is no question that the Celtic language and culture came to dominate Ireland. Linguists tell us that a language can come to dominate only if large groups of people predominate in a certain area over a long period of time.

  While archaeologists are the “crime scene investigators” of historical study, folklorists and mythologists work from a basic premise: that inside each story is a core element of the “real”—real people, real events, real history.

  For the storyteller, finding that “core” in the Milesian “invasion” becomes one of degree. All stories are embellished. Scale back the embellishment; remove the embroidery. What if the original “invasion” force was basically a single clan and its circle? Their language and culture would come to dominate as the clan grew, if the clan was sophisticated, if the news of the new location filtered throughout the Celtic world. Successive waves of immigrants would further increase that cultural dominance.

  So who were these Milesians of legend? Well, we know that Goidelic-speaking Celts began to migrate and settle across the Iberian Peninsula of Spain during the Bronze Age. (Goidelic is the form of Gaelic which includes the Irish, Scots, and Manx languages.) By the seventh century BC, Greek mariners had established numerous trading harbors with these Celtiberians, and these Spanish Celts also traded with Phoenicians and Etruscans. There was, for example, a thriving silver trade among the Greeks and the Celtic tribes of a king named Arganthonios and his tribe of silver miners near the Tartessus River in southern Iberia.

  Near the Douro River in Spain, Celts of the Arevaci tribe built the city of Numantia, which covered twenty hectares and boasted houses of stone, huge multistory stone brochs or towers, and a planned city street system. Evidently the prosperity of these people arose from their mining of copper, tin, gold, and silver and their production and trade of fine jewelry and weaponry throughout the civilized world.

  Nowhere was the Celtic influence more predominant than in the northwest corner of Spain. According to Galician travel guides, the first city founded by the Celts in this region was Saefes in the tenth century BC. In the region that is today called Galicia, an ancient Celt named Breogan or Breogam built a lighthouse tower by the sea and founded the ancient Celtic city of Brigantia. The weather and topography of Galicia are much like those of Ireland, and even today that region of the world retains its Celtic identity.

  These Celts spread their culture throughout the region, building cas-troes or circular stone hill fortifications with multiple ditches (similar raths or ring-forts were built for hundreds of years afterward in Ireland). Likewise dolmens, two upright stones with a slanted capstone, or lintel, are similar in both Spain and Ireland. The Galaeci worshipped creation in forest cathedrals with their druids; had a fluid but general concept of numerous tripartite gods throughout the Celtic world; understood the idea of an eternal soul; cremated their dead; played a special bagpipe called the gaita (listen to Carlos Nunez—his music is so eerie and beautiful that it will raise the hairs on your arms); rode domesticated horses; herded cattle; made rye bread; and were generally known for their unique combination of delicate artistry and advanced warrior skills (as were all the Celts on the European continent). In fact, the Celtiberians were so renowned for their warrior skills that they served as mercenaries in the Carthaginian army and as cavalry in the Roman army.

  Eventually their settlements were abandoned around 400 BC. This may have been because of war, or it may have been because of a plague that traveled through Greece in 430 BC. Even if the plague had not reached Galicia, it would surely have curtailed or ruined the trade lanes. Perhaps more Galicians traveled to Ireland on the heels of these catastrophes; we do not know.

  In Irish history, the most famous son of the Spanish Celts was Milesius or Mil (whose original Celtic name was Golamh). According to the legends, he served as a mercenary chieftain for the king of Scythia and married his daughter. One theory says that the Milesians were originally Scythians, whose tribes stretched from the Carpathian Mountains to the Don River. The Scythians were known as stunning horsemen and nomadic wagon travelers. Scythians and Celts may indeed be ancestrally related.

  Later, Milesius served the pharaoh of Egypt (who at this time was actually Cambysis of Persia, this worthy having overthrown the last native Egyptian pharaoh, Psamtek III); married the pharaoh’s daughter Scota; and by his two wives fathered numerous sons, some versions of the legend saying seven, some nine.

  This period in history was a sophisticated one in the countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea (the Romans’ Internum Mare, later Mare Nostrum, “Our Sea”). The democratic Greek city-states were well known for their learning, advanced philosophies, and high culture, for their ships and trade, complex architecture, beautiful physical adornment, and sexual sophistication (or decadence, depending upon the period and your particular cultural viewpoint).

  Nearby Rome had declared itself a republic in 509 BC and continued to practice that form of government until 44 BC, when the age of emperors (and Rome’s eventual decline) began.

  The clan of Mil, then, would have been very sophisticated indeed, well traveled, probably fairly fluent in four or five languages, accustomed to sophisticated thought and government patterns, and certainly familiar with advanced fashion and architecture—full dwellers in the highly civilized Aegean culture of the time.

  Why then did the Milesians decide to return to wild Galicia? Did Mil tire of war? Did he run into trouble in Egypt? And when they had returned to Spain, why journey from there to even more remote and less civilized Ireland, at that time an unnamed dot in the Atlantic Ocean? There, of course, lies mystery, for we can know the food and clothing and vessels of the ancients, we can know their wars and migrations, but their “quest” motivations, the reasoning of their hearts and minds, was known only to them and is lost to us forever. There, of course, is the doorway for the storyteller.

  Practically speaking, although the Celtiberians themselves possessed boats, both coracles (round wickerwork vessels covered with hide and often navigated with a pole) and curraghs (longer and wider fishing vessels), it is unlikely that they would have used either of these vessels to travel the open sea to Ireland, or even to hug the coasts. We are told that the Veneti of western France were actually Celtic sailors who manned very large boats, but the Galicians did not. Such boats as theirs were not equipped for sea travel and would have had to hug the coastline and try to cross the channel with the weather. Too, their little vessels could never have carried the Galaeci horses, which were precious. It is much more likely that the sons of Mil would have used the services of people who regularly plied the sea and knew its vagaries, hence the Greeks.

  It is when the Milesians reached Ireland that legend begins to intersect with myth. For there, in Ireland, the Milesians would first encounter the Tuatha de Danaan, the Children of Danu, whose mythical leaders would become the adopted gods of the early Irish Celts and whose tribe would dwell with the Irish, even unto this day, as their “little people” or “other people.
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  Who were they?

  All cultures have myths of the little people. For the Welsh they were the Fair Folk; to my Seneca Indian friends, the jo-ge-oh; to the Ojibwe friends of my childhood, the manitou; to the Hawaiians, the menahune. In most cultures these little people share some traits. Sometimes they function as “tricksters,” causing travelers to become lost, stealing items or even babies, rearranging households. Oftentimes, they are agents of great good, repaying kindness with good luck, by doing household chores, or even by bestowing wealth. In many of the myths, time does not pass normally among these others; Americans will recognize that concept in the Rip Van Winkle tale of little men who dwell in the Catskill Mountains of New York.

  This timeshift is, in fact, one of the most difficult aspects in the myths of the Irish little people, the De Danaan, because we are told that some humans could pass back and forth between the real world and the “time-stretched” world of the Danaans and return unscathed, while others would return to real time only to age suddenly, turning from youth to old age in a matter of moments. How to solve or explain this timeshift in the myth and its uneven application to travelers in that realm?

  How also to explain that the ancient myths abound with stories of “fairy children,” humans who are stolen from their own families to be raised among the little people, sometimes replaced in their cradles by fairy babies or “changelings”? Why would the little people do such a thing, and what purpose would it serve?

  It is important to realize that “little people” need not literally mean little. “Other” people can range in size from the diminutive through human size to giants. We are probably more accurate to call them “other” as opposed to “little” because whatever their size or appearance, they are other than human. Very few cultures exist that do not have some sense of the presence—and interference—of the “other.” At the most basic psychological level, such stories indicate the deep-seated human need for the “other,” the wish to not be alone in the world. Such a need might serve to explain the bug-eyed alien abduction stories that abound in modern times.

  Or are they just stories?

  The myth of the Irish Danu is a complex and multifaceted story. They came to Ireland: (1) perhaps from Greece, (2) perhaps from a city beneath the sea, (3) on cloud ships that simply appeared over Ireland, much to the consternation of the hunter-gatherer people who dwelled there.

  One permutation of the myth indicates that they were an ancient race who settled at various places around the world, serving as architects and designers, inspiring or assisting with the construction of pyramids and sarsen circles, palaces and temples, and serving as wisdom-keeper figures in various religious myths. One group (our own for the purposes of this story) first settled on an island off the coast of Greece, but when that island sank into the sea, these people migrated to Ireland. Historically, a volcanic eruption and earthquake of massive proportions did occur around 1500 BC in the Mediterranean Sea in the vicinity of Thrace and the island of Santorini, taking a large portion of the latter to the bottom of the sea. This may be the Atlantis of legend. In mythological time, it caused the Danu to flee north.

  We do know that the pyramids of Egypt and Stonehenge are actually contemporaneous, both being under construction around 3000 BC. This is actually one of the interesting sources of controversy in the current debates. For many years, scholars claimed that the stone circles of Ireland and the British Isles could not have been erected by the Celts, who came to those areas later. Previous scholars had claimed that they were Celtic structures serving druidic religious and calendrical purposes. Current scholarly argument goes back and forth between claims for the people who dwelled in those areas prior to Celtic arrival and the Celts themselves, the idea being that their arrival was not much later after all.

  Then who did erect them? It was great fun to speculate on an entirely new set of architects for all ancient structures, though such speculation falls, of course, into the realm of fantasy.

  The obvious complexity of such structures has also led both scholars and mythologists to contemplate their possible metaphysical significance. Certainly such structures do possess a sense of transition, of cathedral, of gathered awe. We may never know their specific original purposes.

  However, the Danaans themselves were deeply metaphysical according to the mythology. They considered themselves Children of Danu, a mother goddess who presided over all of the creative forces of life—childbirth, fire, poetry, spring lambs, song, women, language. Danu had a tripartite aspect: she is referred to in the myths as Brid/Anu/Dana and is beautiful, loving, protective of her children. So powerful and enduring a figure is she that in later times in Ireland she was permuted into Brigid and then in Christian times into Saint Brigid, known in Ireland as the Mary of the Gaels and reputed to have been the midwife at the birth of Christ.

  Evidently the Milesians of Spain arrived in Ireland without knowledge of her and later adopted her as their primary female deity. They also adopted as deities characters in the Danaan pantheon who were chieftains or skilled warriors: Dagda, a provider who became known as the “good god”; Ogma, an orator who became known as the “honey-mouthed god”; Lugh, the all-craftsman who came to be known as the son of the Sun; and so on.

  Perhaps it was the attributes of these De Danaan that caused the Milesians to elevate them to godly status, for the Danu themselves seemed to hold their mother creator in her three aspects as the only god of the universe.

  However, like human beings, the Danu were not immune to either evil or bad behavior. According to the myths, Dian Cecht the physician did have his son executed for re-creating the arm of Nuada, though some of the versions say that it was jealousy that caused his anger, that he killed his son with four blows to the head and subsequently destroyed his daughter’s pharmaceutical gardens.

  More terrifying than bad “human” behavior is the presence among the Danu of a tripartite goddess called Morrigu. Her three aspects—Macha, Banbh, and Nemhain—live for the purposes of bringing hatred and war, death and carnage, panic and chaos into the world. Morrigu is pervasive and long-lived in Irish mythology, a shape-shifter who appears variously as a wolf, a raven, a fog, a heifer, an eel, an old hag, and a beautiful woman. She shows up in the first myths, is still wreaking havoc in the Cuchulainn legends in the first century AD, and is still sowing chaos in the Fionn legends of the third century AD. So powerful is Morrigu that by the time of the Arthurian legends she has conflated into a single person—Morgan le Fay, the dark sorceress who is responsible for the downfall of Camelot.

  Other than Morrigu, however, the Danu are reputed to have been quite beautiful. In physical appearance, they are described as being slender and tall, with golden or strawberry hair and compelling eyes. They are almost always surrounded by a nimbus of eerie blue or white light. They never grow old or sick, and although they can die, it is usually through warfare or attack, not sickness, and not until extreme old age.

  They dwell in huge cities below the ground and the sea, and their culture is reputed to be highly sophisticated. Moreover, the ancient story of Nuada indicates that these were people who not only knew how to create sophisticated and terrifying weapons, but had also mastered the art of limb regeneration, indicating at least a mastery of the processes of cell regeneration, DNA, etc.

  The legends tell us of three battles on the Plain of Mag Tuiread. The exact location of these battles is unclear, and several places in Ireland lay claim to the distinction. Some say that Cong in county Mayo is the proper location; it is a place riddled with dolmens, sarsen stones, and circles. Others claim that the battles took place in Sligo. Whatever the location, the Danu seemed to find it the only “safe” place for their battles, as they were not a warlike race, but rather a race who relied on subterfuge and illusion as the strongest weapons in their arsenal. There are, of course, hundreds of dolmens, passage graves, sarsen circles, and standing stones throughout Ireland. The pre-Christian people of Ireland believed that these were entrance
s to the otherworld, the country of the Danu. What would cause such a legend to arise? Even today in Ireland, numerous of these locations are reputed to be haunted; there are reports of fires and strange lights on the hillsides.

  The legends also speak widely of the fact that these people were often led by tripartite sister and brother groups. Mac Cuill, Mac Cecht, and Mac Grene as well as Banba, Fodla, and Eriu are specifically named in the tales. Ireland is named, of course, for Eriu.

  Eventually in Ireland, these “others” became an accepted presence, from the banshee (from bain sidhe or “woman of the other”) who attaches herself to human families and sings the impending death of a family member, to the widespread idea that eventually there were generations of intermarriage between the Irish and the Danu, creating a race of people who could travel in and out of their world and our world and who possessed, at the very least, some special psychic or healing abilities.

  Certainly the Danu’s truce with, care for, and adoption of the Fir Bolg has some historical status; the people of Connacht claimed to trace their history to the Fir Bolg all the way up until the eighteenth century. Too, the story of years without summer is also historically accurate. Beginning around 1159 BC there was no summer growth of trees for a period of eighteen years; a long cold nuclear winter may have been caused by a volcanic eruption in Iceland, or by comet debris. Modern movies which posit such a catastrophe do not seem to be far off the mark. People and animals starved; crops would not grow. In mythological time, this is when the Danu began rescuing and rebraiding the Hybrid Fir Bolg children of our story.

  Of course, the Tuatha de Danaan, the tribe of the Danu, dwell in Ireland still.

  The Milesians were, in all likelihood, a real and historical clan; much specific detail accrues to their travels. We also have three poems that are purportedly by Amergin, generally called the “Invocation,” the “Song,” and the “Challenge.” The “Song” and the “Challenge” contain many similar lines, so the two may actually be one poem that has been separated for content or theme. The “Invocation” is a celebration of Ireland. There are literally dozens of translations of these three poems. However, all three poems meditate on the interconnectedness of all life, on joy and sorrow. All three are written in a first-person voice in broken lines characteristic of ancient verse. Are they really Amergin’s words? Conventional wisdom would have it that they were written down by monks sometime after the eighth century, largely because the Celtic world did not permit writing. However, the Milesians were members of Aegean civilization, which highly valued written records and kept vast libraries of history and literature. Perhaps Amergin himself wrote the poems; perhaps not. If they are Amergin’s poems, they indicate a large soul, a man aware of the Braid that binds the universe. I would like to have known him.