Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference)

by James MacKillop

  The oldest written traditions, produced when only a tiny elite of the population was literate, must not be confused with what we now call ‘folklore’. A term almost as difficult to define as ‘mythology’, the word ‘folklore’ first appeared in 1856 after two generations of collectors, beginning in Germany, had gathered materials from the oral traditions of the unlettered peasantry. Oral traditions may or may not relate to older written traditions and are sometimes sharply at variance with one another, as with the character of Fionn mac Cumhaill, subject of an immense number of stories, both written and recited, for many centuries. Stories from oral tradition, further, may fall into world-wide patterns of motif and episode and make astounding parallels with stories from distant parts of the world (see Stith Thompson, The Folktale, New York, 1936; Los Angeles, 1977).

  In the Celtic countries collectors of oral traditions almost invariably sought to disseminate their findings in English or French. Welsh collections appeared first, with William Earl’s Welsh Legends (1802) and William Howells’ Cambrian Superstitions (1831). Among the first Irish compilations was Researches in the South of Ireland (1824) by Thomas Crofton Croker, the son of a British officer. Dozens of volumes would follow through the end of the twentieth century, and the Irish Folklore Commission (founded 1935) has more than half a million pages of oral transcription, and 10,000 hours of audio recordings. Work in other cultures emerged almost concurrently: Robert Hunt, Popular Romances of the West of England (1865) from Cornwall; François Marie Luzel, Chants populaire da la Basse-Bretagne, 2 vols (1868–74) from Brittany; and William Harrison, A Mona Miscellany (1869) from the Isle of Man. Two of the richest gatherings of oral narrative were found in Gaelic Scotland: John Francis Campbell, Popular Tales of the West Highlands, 4 vols (1861) and Archibald Campbell, Waifs and Strays in Celtic Tradition, 4 vols (1889–91).

  INTERPRETATIONS AND REINTERPRETATIONS

  As soon as texts became available, readers noted parallels between Celtic and classical heroes, so that Cúchulainn was quickly dubbed the ‘Irish Heracles’. Matthew Arnold (1865) thought that the storytellers of the Mabinogion had plundered ancient myth just as medieval peasants had filched cut stones from Roman ruins to build their cottages. Yet it took many years before the several Celtic traditions, ancient and vernacular, written and oral, could be discussed at the same time or be constituted a ‘mythology’. The ancient Celtic gods, not creatures of extensive narratives, relate only occasionally and obliquely to the characters in stories recorded in post-Christian times. Because of their bulk and antiquity, as well as the prestige given them in the generation of William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), early Irish narratives attracted the most scrutiny and generated the most interpretation. Nonetheless, as late as the mid-twentieth century, editors often preferred terms like ‘early Irish literature’ or ‘Old Irish sagas and legends’ rather than ‘Celtic mythology’. The word ‘literature’ makes no assumption about the origin or function of narrative; ‘legend’ and ‘saga’ presume some rooting in fact or history. To call Celtic materials ‘mythology’ implies that they can stand comparison with stories of the Olympians, or of Achilles, Oedipus and Orpheus; increasingly, informed commentators have shown that they can.

  As ‘mythology’ is a word of Greek origin (from mythos: ‘word, speech or story’), it could be argued that only Greek stories are genuinely myths, just as real champagne comes only from France. So many stories are now deemed ‘myth’, from the Icelandic Prose Edda to those of the gods of the African Yoruba or Oceanic Maori, not to mention idiomatic uses like the ‘myth’ of King Kong, that the word has become almost impossible to define, or impossible to define simply and without many qualifications. We know a myth when we see it, and we know it is different from history. A myth is an anonymous, traditional story, usually originating in a pre-literate society, concerned with deities, heroes or ancestors who embody dimly perceived truths whose roots are in our innermost being. Some myths may explain the origin of the cosmos or of ourselves, or how living relates to dying, or why the weather changes. This explanatory function, aetiology, is not unique to myth and may also be found in religious dogma. Sometimes ‘myth’ can be defined as ‘other people’s religion’. That is because when we call a story a ‘myth’ we imply that someone, at some time, paid it great heed, which cannot always be said of the ‘folktale’.

  While the struggle to define ‘mythology’ more fully could easily fill this entire volume, of greater concern is what people have thought was contained in the material presented in the next several chapters. The earliest perception was that it was all history or related to history. The great Irish historian Geoffrey Keating (c.1580–c.1645/50) thought Cúchulainn and Fionn mac Cumhaill were flesh and blood human beings, an assumption still uttered popularly at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Certain historical figures, such as St Patrick or the Welsh Macsen Wledig (d. AD 388), may appear in early narratives many observers would describe as ‘mythological’. But we can scarcely hope to find an historical antecedent to explain the resonance of personages such as the Irish Deirdre and Balor of the Evil Eye or the Welsh Rhiannon and Pwyll. The notion that gods and heroes of myth were somehow inflated out of living people is called euhemerism, after Euhemerus the Sicilian rhetorician (fourth century BC); the relation between myth and history is, as we shall see, infinitely more complex.

  If the source for Irish and Welsh heroes was not actual human beings, the next place to look was to forgotten or repressed ancient gods. Sir John Rhŷs’s lectures known under the short title Celtic Heathendom (1886) first sought to recover pagan knowledge ignored or perhaps distorted by Christian scribes. There was much to support his central thesis. The god the Romans designated Gaulish Mercury could be identified from place names as Lugos or Lugus, as the Gauls themselves would have known him. Lugos, in turn, can be linked to the Irish Lug Lámfhota and the Welsh Lieu Llaw Gyffes. As illuminating as Rhŷs’s efforts were, he worked before some key texts became available, and he tended to push his thesis harder than subsequent research would support. Though Celtic Heathendom is little cited today, he influenced two generations of scholars, among them W. J. Gruffydd in Math Vab Mathonwy (1928) and Rhiannon (1953), and the prolific Irish commentators Myles Dillon and Gerard Murphy. The inclination to find lost divinities behind any number of warriors or kings also infuses T. F. O’Rahilly’s monumental Early Irish History and Mythology (1946). Although a scholar of breath-stopping erudition, O’Rahilly nevertheless erred in seeing the early history of Ireland as a contest between invaders speaking languages from rival families of Celtic languages, a controversial idea in his own lifetime and one largely dismissed today.

  More recent scholarship downplays the pagan origins theory in favour of the classical influences flowing from the early monasteries. Kim McCone, in the aptly titled Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature (1990), and Donnchadh Ó Corráin and others in Sages, Saints and Storytellers (1989) advance compelling evidence in support of their views. The strength of this interpretation is that it relies more on available texts in the Celtic languages and in Latin instead of on simulacra postulated from shards of what was once presumed to have existed. As we absorb these new insights, however, we may have to redefine the mythical roots of Celtic mythology. Not all old stories in either Irish or Welsh had comparable status in the traditions that produced them. And some parallels with classical culture are now believed to have been introduced by Christian scribes. This reverses the earlier perception that the echoes of classical culture were introduced by pagan storytellers, were coincidental or were derived from some kind of universal consciousness.

  As with other mythologies, Celtic narratives have been subject to successive schools of interpretation growing out of the intellectual movements of the past 150 years. Psychological theorists discern a unified imagination that overrides culture and language and emanates from the universality of human experience. The followers of both Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung find mythology to be the pr
oduct of the unconscious mind. For Freudians, mythology can be traced to stages in the predictable steps that each human must follow from birth to maturation. For Jungians mythology derives from the collective unconscious inherited by each human being, regardless of language, colour or social station.

  Though the weight of his ideas has not been felt as heavily elsewhere, few theorists have been so influential on Celtic studies as has Georges Dumézil (1898–1986), an Indo-Europeanist and historian given more to Roman and German traditions. Sometimes designated the ‘New Comparative Mythology’, Dumézil’s theories draw on the French tradition that seeks a sociological context for both religion and myth, asserting that mythology embodies a system of symbols encoding the rules of society. In Dumézil’s view, early Indo-European societies, including the Celtic, were divided into three parts according to social function. These were the numerically smaller priestly and warrior classes and the larger producing class. Each group regarded itself as having been ordained to its particular class by a mythological origin. Although Dumézil himself devoted only a portion of one volume to early Ireland, Le troisième Souverain (1949), his ideas were brought to bear on a wide range of early Welsh and Irish tradition in Alwyn and Brinley Rees’s Celtic Heritage (1961). The Rees brothers purport to discern an underlying unity in early Welsh and Irish social and political organization as well as in large bodies of narrative.

  From the 1960s through to the beginning of the twenty-first century, one commonly sees citations to Dumézil in Celtic scholarship, but the ideas of rival theorists continue to enter discourse. These include the structuralists, notably Claude Lévi-Strauss, who emphasize the presence of a world-wide pattern of opposition between certain terms and categories, such as wilderness/village, upstream/downstream, raw/ cooked, etc. Rivalling them but with more lasting influence are the formalists, Vladimir Propp and Walter Berkert, who relate both myth and folktale to biological and cultural ‘programmes of action’ whose incidence is, again, found world-wide.

  PART ONE

  Contexts

  1

  Names in the Dust

  Searching for Celtic Deities

  SCRUTINIZING THE INSCRUTABLE CELTS

  Most readers of this book probably already have some background in classical mythology. They will find it handy in keeping straight allusions to Artemis, Aphrodite and Hephaestus as well as knowing that those Greek Olympians had counterparts named Diana, Venus and Vulcan among the Romans. Those names appear again and again in discussion of Celtic mythology, especially the older traditions. Yet a knowledge of classical mythology is also likely to set expectations that Celtic traditions cannot fulfil. Any student can read enough from ancient sources about, say, Artemis-Diana, that she seems to be a knowable figure. Dozens of representations in art illustrate aspects of Artemis’s character, her coolness and hauteur or her athleticism. We can speak about her presumed personality the way we can about a character in fiction or dramatic literature. This is not true of the earliest Celtic figures that survive only in partially destroyed statues, badly weathered inscriptions or cryptic passages in unsympathetic classical commentaries. We get a fuller picture if a deity’s cult was widespread, but often the modern reader is in the position of the palaeontologist trying to extrapolate the image of an early hominid from a piece of jawbone, a femur and a knuckle.

  As for the ancient Celts of the continent and Britain, we have moved beyond the blinkered vision of the Romans. Until recently, we tended to see all their battles and enemies through Roman eyes. The imperialist cliché portrayed the Celts, like other ‘barbarians’, as crude, disorderly and improved by domination, whereas the Romans were seen as cosmopolitan, orderly and effective law-givers. Recent archaeological evidence prompts revision of this model. The widespread Celtic population thrived with a complex social organization of great noble houses and a system of clients and patrons, often in urban settings. Celtic standards of craftsmanship, especially in metals, equalled and surpassed those of the early Romans. Numerically superior, the Celts reached an apogee of cultural expression and political expansion just before the rise of Rome. In 390 BC the Celts sacked Rome itself, not to occupy it or make it a fiefdom but rather just as a show of aggressive force. In 279 BC they apparently sacked the Greek shrine of Delphi. But in little more than another fifty years, in 225 BC, the Romans annihilated a Gaulish army at Telamon, along the western shore on the road to Pisa, slaughtering perhaps 40,000 and taking another 10,000 prisoner. The imperial tide would be halted now and again but never reversed. Ultimately the social and cultural similarity of the Gauls to the Romans hastened the absorption of conquered peoples into the empire.

  Even though they did not give us their history, our accumulated knowledge of the ancient Celts, surviving and rediscovered, now fills several fat volumes. Continental Celts divided into two cultural provinces, the eastern, centred on the Danube valley, being more influenced by Greek culture. We can place by name the domains of up to a hundred Celtic tribes and peoples. Some of those peoples may be studied in abundant detail, such as the Aedui of what is now eastern France, who were first allied with the Romans before being crushed in rebellion against them. Other names reappear on the modern map. The Swiss refer to their country as Helvetia after the ancient Helvetii of the Alps, just as the modern Belgians take their name, if not their ethnicity, from the Belgae. We have excavated large proto-cities such as Alésia and Bibracte in what is now eastern France, and Manching in southern Germany, the latter’s defensive wall measuring four miles. Individual faces emerge from records, such as Abaris the Hyperborean (sixth century BC), possibly the earliest druid, who conversed with Pythagoras.

  Two resisters to Roman domination, one Gaulish, the other British, have so fired the imagination of readers over the centuries that they sometimes seem more mythical than historical. Vercingetorix (from the Latin ver: over; cinget: he surrounds, i.e. warrior; rex: king) led a heroic but ultimately futile resistance to Julius Caesar’s conquest. A prince of the Arverni people, he could not rally other nobles to his cause and instead commanded a rag-tag army of the people, who made him their king in 52 BC. His initial success led other peoples to join him until, in a fatal error, he allowed himself to be put under siege at Alésia. Forced to surrender, Vercingetorix was humiliated in display before Roman crowds, imprisoned, and eventually executed in 45 BC. Rediscovered in the Romantic nineteenth-century reinterpretation of ancient history, an aggressive, moustachioed Vercingetorix was commemorated by Napoleon III in a huge, heroic public monument at the modern village of Alise-Sainte Reine on the site of Alésia, 32 miles northwest of Dijon. Long cited in the French school curriculum as the first national hero, Vercingetorix’s struggle is so widely known to most French people that it has inspired a long-running comic strip, Asterix the Gaul. His British counterpart, the tall red-haired queen Boudicca, lives on in even greater esteem. Her name, spelled many ways, Boudica, Boadicia, Bunduca, Boadicea, etc., may mean ‘victory’ (cf. Old Irish búadach: victorious; Welsh buddagol: victorious). After the Romans killed her husband Prasutagus, they scourged Boudicca and mistreated her daughters. Infuriated, she led her own people, the Iceni of eastern Britain, and the neighbouring Trinobantes in a brutal if short-lived rebellion, during which her forces burned the cities of Colchester and London. When her fortunes declined, she took poison rather than be taken prisoner (c.AD 61). Her story has always been accessible as it appears in the works of Tacitus, the well-regarded historian, to whom she was a dangerous giantess. Her persona began to be reshaped in Renaissance drama and continues to expand in contemporary popular fiction. A victorious Boudicca is commemorated in a heroic nineteenth-century statue on Westminster Bridge, London (a more maternal rendering stands in City Hall, Cardiff, Wales).

  SUN AND SKY

  One of the few constants across cultures and climes, the sun engenders homage in many early religions as the author of life and the patron of healing and fertility. The wheel and the swastika, ubiquitous symbols of the sun, are found with e
arly settlements as far apart as Asia and North America. Veneration of the sun appears widely in late Stone Age and Bronze Age Europe, especially Scandinavia. The thirteenth-century BC Trundheim Chariot, found in Denmark, indicates attitudes and beliefs many generations before the advent of writing. It features a small bronze horse-drawn wagon containing a gilt sun-disc. Even without corroboration from other contemporary materials, we can infer the existence of processions and sun worship.

  Close observation of the sun’s apparent movement is evident in the construction of many passage-graves surviving in Celtic lands. The two best-known are Newgrange (3200 BC) at the bend of the Boyne River, near Slane, Co. Meath, Ireland, and Gavrinis (3500 BC), on a small island seven miles southwest of Vannes, Brittany. Both predate the coming of Celtic languages by almost two millennia and were built by indigenous populations whose survivors, evidence suggests, were absorbed into Celtic culture. A passage-grave consists of a large man-made mound over a stone passage leading to an interior chamber. Newgrange, now much frequented by tourists, varies between 260 ft (79 m) and 280 ft (85 m) in diameter, with a passage 62 ft (18.9 m) ending in a 20 ft (6 m) chamber measuring 17 ft by 21.5 ft (5.2 m by 6.5 m). Dark most of the year, the Newgrange passage is aligned so that the sun’s rays will penetrate the mound through the ‘roofbox’, a special aperture over the entrance, to illuminate the chamber dramatically and briefly at sunrise on the five days of the winter solstice, 19–23 December. Some other passage-graves, however, are aligned to the moon or other celestial features.