Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference)

by James MacKillop

  Conquered by the Romans, or by their allies, it was once assumed that the ancient continental Celtic languages had died out by the end of the Roman empire, although we now know that many pockets of Celtic speakers survived to a much later date, thus the existence of two widely separated regions named Galicia, in northwestern Spain and in southern Poland. A taste for bagpipes, nurtured by romantic nationalists, still flourishes in northern Spain. But the greatest reservoir of Celtic culture is Ireland, protected from invaders by large expanses of seawater and barely visible from Britain. The oldest written Irish records are in the ogam (modern ogham) alphabet, a native system of notched parallel lines that are the equivalents of Roman letters. Writing using the Roman alphabet, in both Latin and the native Irish language, was brought to the island in the early fifth century by Christian missionaries, usually associated with St Patrick. As Roman legions abandoned the province of Britain in the middle of the fifth century, the rule of law receded from much of Europe, and travellers had no protection on Roman roads. This meant that Mediterranean learning was introduced and was then isolated during what used to be titled the ‘Dark Ages’, AD 600–1000. The Irish monks of this period followed their own rules rather than those of St Benedict of Nursia (c.480–c.543), founder of European monasticism. Often living independently, they scattered themselves widely over the map of Europe, providing tutors to illiterate continental kings. If the story of St Brendan is to be believed, they came to the New World as well.

  There was no post-medieval Celtic nation until the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922, by which time the majority of that population had become English-speaking. Today only about 100,000 residents of the island of Ireland are fluent in the native language, despite intermittent support from the state to revive it. The situation in Wales and Brittany is much stronger, despite or perhaps because of a lack of long-term governmental support. More recent policies in both Britain and France have favoured preserving the languages. Scottish Gaelic continues in the mainland Highlands and is the dominant language on some of the islands in the Hebrides, as well as in areas of Nova Scotia in Canada. Cornish became extinct in the mid-eighteenth century, and the last Manx speaker died in 1974. Enthusiastic revivalists continue to learn, to speak and to sing, and to teach all the Celtic languages.

  SOURCES OF OUR KNOWLEDGE

  The ancient Celts left us scant written materials but many more artifacts than was once supposed. Unsympathetic, often patronizing Greeks and Romans wrote about the Celts in great detail. After the fall of the Roman empire and the coming of Christianity and monasticism, surviving Celtic peoples established their own written traditions, at first in Ireland and later in Wales. After Henry VIII’s suppression of the monasteries in the sixteenth century, enlightened nobles and other patrons occasionally sponsored the recording of popular narratives and poetry. Later in the nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, learned travellers collected narratives in the field, often from unlettered storytellers. Among students of Celtic myth and culture, these several streams are known by different names. Materials uncovered by archaeologists are called ‘the physical evidence’. Each year there are more and more finds, many of them causing us to redefine earlier suppositions. Declining in influence are the writings of Greek and Roman observers, usually called the ‘classical commentators’, now thought to be biased and short-sighted; their pronouncements are increasingly seen to be at variance with the physical evidence. All texts in Celtic languages since the introduction of Christianity are sometimes described as the ‘vernacular evidence’, as if these were inferior to what is known from the ancient world. The older written records, especially as found in the great medieval codices, such as The Book of the Dun Cow or The Red Book of Hergest, may be dubbed ‘literary tradition’. Materials from unlettered sources are called ‘oral tradition’, sparing us the nuisance of deciding whether the item at hand is a folktale, a legend or an instructive fable. Both narratives and characters, notably the Irish Fionn mac Cumhaill, appear in contrasting portraits in literary and oral traditions.

  Knowledge of early Europe was stumbled upon before it was ever methodically sought out. Early discoveries such as Hallstatt, Austria (1846), are rightly named ‘finds’. Little more than a decade later (1858), enlightened amateurs plumbed the underwater site at La Tène in Switzerland. Prominent ruins such as Tintagel in Cornwall and ringforts such as Maiden Castle in Dorset became tourist attractions. More telling was the large bronze calendar (first century BC) found at Coligny in eastern France, giving detailed information on a 64-month period in the most extensive of all surviving early examples of written Gaulish. The text suggests continuity with later Celtic languages; the autumn new year, known as sam(h) ain in Irish, is here samonios. Émile Espérandieu (1857–1939) led the search for further inscriptions, resulting in sixteen volumes of data published over fifty-nine years (1907–66). By the end of the twentieth century, researchers had examined more than a hundred sites in France, the Low Countries, Germany and the Danube valley, the burial mound at Hochdorf and the Gaulish ‘city’ of Alésia yielding abundantly. We even know a great deal about Celtic diet and personal grooming, thanks to the discovery of Lindow Man (1984), the body of a young, apparently sacrificial victim, preserved intact in a Cheshire peat bog, his last meal undigested.

  The ever-mounting physical evidence of the ancient Celts portrays a society governed by laws, with complex social structures and a relatively strict morality. We now have detailed information about domestic accommodations, dress, diet, artisanship, agriculture and, especially, funerary rites. Abundant physical representation of what appear to be anthropomorphic deities often survives in sharp relief. The face of a god or goddess cannot, however, always be matched with a name. And even when we have names, some coordinated with those of classical commentators, we lack the narrative setting to make the Celtic deity a figure of action, as we do with Greek and Roman traditions.

  Most discussed of the physical evidence is the celebrated Gundestrup Cauldron, named for the village of the Jutland Peninsula, Denmark, where it was found in a peat bog in 1880. Standing 14 inches high, 25.5 inches in diameter, capable of holding 28.5 gallons, the cauldron is made of 96 per cent pure silver, was originally gilded and weighs nearly 20 pounds. Ornate, detailed figures, some demonstrably of Celtic origin, such as its ram-headed snakes and the boar-headed war trumpet, decorate the seven outer and five inner plates, all of which are separable. Animals appear along with ordinary mortals and gods, conventionally seen as larger than human. A female deity flanked by wheels, as if riding in a cart, evokes Queen Medb of Connacht, as she is seen in medieval Irish narrative. A tall divine figure holding a man over a vat evokes the ferocious Teutates of Gaulish religion, accepting a human sacrifice. And, most impressively, a horned god, seated in what almost looks like a yogi’s full lotus position, can now be identified with Cernunnos, a lord of nature, animals, fruit, grain and prosperity. Known elsewhere in more than thirty representations, Cernunnos may have been a principal god of the Continental Celts.

  The succession of images on the cauldron, armed infantry and cavalry, a sacred tree, a spotted leopard, a small acolyte in a bull-horned helmet offering a chariot or cart wheel to the bust of a bearded god, all tease out the possibility of a narrative. Most scholars discern no continuity in the imagery, but one, Garrett Olmstead, has argued provocatively that the figures on the Gundestrup Cauldron can be seen as an anticipation of the episodes in the Táin Bó Cuailnge [The Cattle Raid of Cooley], the great epic of early Irish literature, of which Queen Medb is a leading figure.

  Each new discovery of even the smallest artifact, together with each new evaluation of the physical record, enlarges our grasp of ancient Celtic life. This new knowledge tends to circumscribe and diminish what we have received from the ancient written record in Greek and Latin, the several dozen writers known as the classical commentators. Learned men in Athens and Rome seemed so familiar with the presence of the Celts that they felt no need to expla
in or contextualize any observations about them. Ephorus (fourth century BC) classified the Celts as one of the four principal barbarian peoples, along with the Scythians of eastern Europe, the Persians of Asia and the Libyans of Africa. The Greek ‘Father of History’, Herodotus (c.485–428 BC), recorded much of the Celts, as did the Roman historians Livy (58 BC-AD 17) and Tacitus (AD 55–117), whose purview included Roman Britain during the rule of his father-in-law Julius Agricola (AD 78–84). The philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BC) cited the Celts when discussing bravery. More valuable are the asides and digressions of Polybius (204–122 BC), who gives details of Celtic dress and living conditions as well as depicting the selfless heroism of raiders preying upon the Italian peninsula. Abundant particulars, despite his heavy-handed condescension, may be found in the Geography of the Greek Strabo (58 BC-AD 24) who lived in Rome. He found the Celts ‘war-mad’, though not fundamentally of evil character. Despite their strength and courage, Strabo wrote, the Celts were easily outwitted by their more cool-headed enemies.

  Most informative of all the classical commentators is the Syrian-born Stoic philosopher Posidonius (c.135–51 BC), who had lived in southern Gaul for a period, freeing him from reliance on self-serving travellers’ reports. His surviving ethnographical observations comprise only an 86-page booklet in modern editions (1960, 1985), a goad to remind us of what he might have told us in still further commentary now lost. We know that Chapter 23 of his lost History, prepared before the first Transalpine War (131–125 BC), contained extensive, profound information, as a summary of it appears in such later writers as Strabo, Diodorus Siculus (first century BC) and Athenaeus (fl. AD 230). Some of Posidonius’ commentaries strike parallels in early Irish and Welsh literature, especially his anticipation of bardic institutions and his description of the ‘champion’s portion’, a ceremony at banquets which awarded the choicest portion of pork to the most exalted hero present.

  Posidonius’ views also inform the war commentary of Julius Caesar (100–44 BC), although they are not credited. Best remembered today as the introductory texts for beginning Latin students, Caesar’s seven-volumed De Bello Gallico [Gallic War] nonetheless gives some of the closest observations we have of religious practices, notably of the druids, as well as Celtic social divisions. He perceived a Gaulish pantheon, with gods ranked according to function, but he called them by what he felt to be their Roman equivalents. Thus Gaulish Mercury stands ahead of Gaulish Apollo or Gaulish Jupiter. This became the imperial convention we now designate interpretatio Romana [Roman interpretation], leading to centuries of speculation over the true identity of Gaulish Mercury, Gaulish Apollo, etc. (see Chapter 2). Despite being one of the most partisan of writers (he was among the Celts to conquer them, 58–51 BC), Caesar revealed surprising sympathy for the common people, whom he found living like slaves, crushed with debts and taxes and abjectly subservient to powerful equites (knights or barons).

  Ireland was known in the ancient world only in the geography of Ptolemy (second century AD), yet it affords a bridge between the earliest traditions and later survivals. By-passed by the Romans and the invading plunderers who followed them, the Irish retained their early family structures, social organization, and systems of inheritance and property for more than another millennium. We read about how this world was ordered in the Brehon Laws, named for the judges or brehons (Old Irish breithem) of early Ireland. Brehon Law has little in common with Roman Law, which lies at the foundation of law in most modern European states, but it does find parallels in the laws of the Welsh king Hywel Dda (d. 950).

  Christianity had come to Ireland by the early 400s, before the collapse of Roman rule, and with it literacy, both in classical languages and also in Irish using Roman script. Thus during the bleak centuries between the Romans and the rise of medieval culture, Irish monasteries were the only places in Europe, north of Constantinople, where one might study Latin and Greek. During these heroic centuries of early Irish Christianity, Irish clergymen recorded many of the narratives discussed in this volume. Appearing first in documents now lost, they were later copied in the great medieval codices. Writing in Irish developed from the sixth to twelfth centuries, when native or Celtic monasticism flourished, but diminished after 1170, when monastic rule came under the domination of such continental orders as the Cistercians and the Dominicans. Surviving Welsh manuscripts, also produced by monks, date from later centuries, many of the oldest materials having been destroyed.

  The great codices are leather-bound volumes made first of vellum, a parchment made of the skins of lambs, calves or young goats, and later of heavy paper. Each codex contains an assortment of narratives and other texts, in both the native language and Latin, assembled by the monks of a single community, such as Clonmacnoise on the Shannon River. Some codices are the work of a single hand. Internal evidence implies that many twelfth-century and later texts were copied from lost originals dating from centuries earlier. Most are designed to be attractive to the eye, though not so lavishly decorated as the earlier Book of Durrow (seventh century) or Book of Kells (eighth-ninth centuries), which are illuminated Gospels. Although the codices are cited here by their English titles, many learned commentators prefer their original Irish or Welsh titles, such as The Book of the Dun Cow = Lebor na h Uidre; some scholars elect the disconcerting familiarity of citing the collection’s Irish initials such as LU for Lebor na hUidre.

  Materials appear within codices almost haphazardly, so that portions of great narratives such as the Táin Bó Cuailnge [Cattle Raid of Cooley], Lebor Gabála [Book of Invasions] or Mabinogi, might be spread over different collections. Sometimes, as in the case of the Táin, the narrative survives with significant variations from one codex to another.

  Literary riches are unequally distributed. Pride of place among the Irish codices goes to The Book of the Dun Cow (begun before AD 1106), so named because it is thought to have been partly written on the hide of a cow that followed St Ciarán to his monastery at Clonmacnoise. The oldest codex entirely in Irish, The Book of the Dun Cow yields versions of the Táin, Fled Bricrenn [Briccriu’s Feast], Imram Brain [The Voyage of Bran], Tochmarc Étaíne [The Wooing of Étaín], and Fenian materials. The Book of Leinster ( 1150 and after), possibly the work of a single scribe at the monastery of Terryglass, Co. Tipperary, provides a second version of the Táin, a large portion of the Lebor Gabála and tales of Tara, an ancient ceremonial site. Putting aside the Latin Book of Armagh (AD 807–8), containing the complete New Testament and a life of St Patrick, most of the others were compiled almost consecutively in a 100-year span: The Book of Ballymote (c.1390), The Yellow Book of Lecan (c.1393), The Book of Lecan (1397–1418), The Book of Uí Maine (late fourteenth-early fifteenth century) and The Book of Fermoy (fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries).

  A written Irish tradition, often treating of themes and characters from pre-Christian times, persisted for several centuries after the age of the great early collections despite increasing English interference with native life and attempts to suppress the language. Such stories as Oidheadh Chlainne Tuireann [The Tragic Story of the Children of Tuireann], while cited as early as the tenth century, were still circulating in paper manuscripts at the end of the seventeenth. Repression of Catholic learning in Ireland meant that some work was continued abroad, such as the huge Duanaire Finn [Poem Book of Fionn], compiled 1626–7 at Louvain in the Spanish Netherlands, in what is today Belgium.

  No Welsh writing survives from the first millennium, although it certainly once existed, and the earliest Welsh codices date from a century after the Irish. The oldest is The Black Book of Carmarthen (c. 1250), so named because of its cover and for a castle in southwestern Wales, followed by the Book of Aneirin (1265), named for the legendary sixth-century poet. Materials that we shall examine come mostly from the White Book of Rhydderch (c.1325) and the Red Book of Hergest (1382–1410)

  No pre-Renaissance materials are known to have existed in Manx, Cornish or Breton, and the earliest known from Scottish G
aelic is The Book of the Dean of Lismore (early sixteenth century). Its compiler, James MacGregor (c.1480–1551), unfortunately assumed that no one would ever read Scottish Gaelic and so transcribed the poetry in a phonological script as the words might sound to someone living in the Scottish Lowlands. The Scots language, a dialect of English spoken in the Lowlands, is unrelated to Scottish Gaelic.

  While all these documents are revered today as treasures, they were not always so kindly treated. Cromwell’s soldiers in the seventeenth century cut up early Irish manuscripts to make tailors’ patterns. The Welsh White Book of Hergest was destroyed by fire in the nineteenth century. And The Book of the Dun Cow, lost for centuries, might not be known today at all if it had not turned up in a bookshop in 1837.

  Meanwhile, the contents of the early collections receded from consciousness, since only a tiny handful of people could read Irish or Welsh, and most texts were unavailable in English or French translation. Given the poverty and social disesteem of Celtic-speaking peoples, there was little motive to make the texts available until the implications of James Macpherson’s Ossian phenomenon had settled in. Lady Charlotte Guest’s English translation of the Welsh Mabinogion (1838–49) attracted a wide readership, including the Poet Laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson. Translations from Old Irish could not begin until linguists, many of them German, recovered its grammar and vocabulary. The publications of the Ossianic Society (beginning 1853) and the establishment of learned journals such as Revue Celtique (1870–1934) put translations on library shelves but not necessarily into the hands of a wide readership. Standish James O’Grady, the first of many popularizers, injected colourful invention into what had been heavy-going scholarship with such works as History of Ireland: The Heroic Period (1878) and Cuculain and His Contemporaries (1880). In another generation, William Butler Yeats, though he knew scant Irish, and Lady Gregory put figures from the earliest traditions on to the world stage.