The Mammoth Book of Celtic Myths and Legends

by Peter Berresford Ellis

  There is an irony here, in that a young Celtic warrior of the Insubres from Mediolanum (Milan) in the Po Valley, taken prisoner when the Romans defeated the Celts at Telamon in 222 BC, became a slave in Rome and was given the name Caecilius Statius. He learnt Latin and then became the chief comic dramatist of his day. Some forty-two titles of his works are known but only fragments survive. He was one of the earliest literary “Roman” writers. Many other Celts helped to make Latin a major literary vehicle.

  A problem in Celtic terms seems to be that there was some pre-Christian religious prohibition on the Celts writing extensively in their own language. This was due to the mystic significance which the pagan Celts placed on words. However, it did not appear to prevent individual Celts, such as Caecilius Statius, using Latin as a medium for literary expression. However, it is why we had to wait until the Christian period before we saw a flowering of Celtic literature.

  Irish became the third literary language of Europe, after Greek and Latin. Professor Calvert Watkins of Harvard University pointed out that both Greek and Latin literatures were written by people using the language as a lingua franca and not as their mother tongue. It could be argued, he says, that “Irish has the oldest vernacular literature of Europe”.

  When the Celtic myths, as represented in Old Irish and Old Welsh, came to be written down, Christianity had taken a firm hold and those who were writing the stories tended to be Christian scribes working in religious houses. Therefore there was a tendency to bowdlerise the more ancient stories about the gods and goddesses. The priests of the former pagan religion were denigrated as wizards and sorcerers. A Christian veneer was given to the pagan vibrancy of the myths and tales. Even the gods and goddesses were demoted into Other-world spirits and entities and even fairies.

  Lugh Lámhfada, Lugh of the Long Hand, the senior of the gods and patron of all arts and crafts, was eventually demoted into Lugh-chromain, “stooping Lugh”, and from there Anglicized into “leprechaun”.

  Because of this Christian bowdlerisation of the stories, some scholars have argued that our knowledge of Celtic mythology is highly fragmentary. In its strictest sense, mythology would refer to the sum total of religious narratives which are thought to interpret and affirm the cultural experience of a people, as well as religious and social institutions. Dr Bernhard Maier is inclined to believe that the medieval records are no true reflection of pre-Christian Celtic mythology. I would venture that, examining these stories from an Indo-European viewpoint, the pre-Christian motifs can be discerned.

  It is from the Irish tradition that we have our oldest mythological tales and sagas. Dr Georges Dottin has argued that “it is probable that the most ancient pieces of epic literature of Ireland were written before the middle of the seventh century; but how long previously they had been preserved by oral tradition – this is a point difficult to estimate”.

  The fact that many of the surviving Irish tales show some remarkable resemblances to themes, stories and even names in the sagas of the Indian Vedas, written in Sanskrit at the start of the first millennium BC, shows just how ancient they may be. The being which emerges as the Mother Goddess of the Celts – whose name is given as Danu and sometimes Anu in Old Irish, and is cognate with Dôn in Old Welsh, as well as surviving in the epigraphy of the Continental Celts – also emerges in the literature of Vedas, Persia and in Hittite myth. The name Danu means “divine waters”. River names throughout Europe acknowledge her.

  The story associated with the Danuvius – arguably, the first great Celtic sacred river – has similarities with myths about the Boyne (from the goddess Boann) and Shannon (from the goddess Sionan) in Ireland. More importantly, it bears a resemblance to the story of the Hindu goddess Ganga. Both Celts and Hindus worshipped in the sacred rivers and made votive offerings there. In the Vedic myth of Danu, the goddess appears in the famous Deluge story called The Churning of the Ocean.

  The Irish texts are, in fact, probably the best demonstration of those seeking tangible evidence of Indo-European cultural origins. Time and again we see remarkable resemblances between Irish culture on the western fringe of Europe and Hindu culture in India. Even the language of the Old Irish law texts, the Fenéchus or Brehon Laws, and the Vedic Laws of Manu, show an original point of origin, both in concept and, even more amazingly, in vocabulary.

  Professor Myles Dillon, in Celts and Aryans: Survivals of Indo-European Speech and Society (1975) has pointed out that “parallelism between the Irish and Hindu law-books, both of them the work of a privileged professional class, is often surprisingly close; it extends not merely to form and technique but even to diction”. As Professor Calvert Watkins of Harvard has argued, of all the Celtic linguistic remains, Old Irish represents an extraordinarily archaic and conservative linguistic tradition within the Indo-European field. Its nominal and verbal systems, he says, are a far truer reflection of Indo-European than Classical Greek or Latin and the structure of Old Irish can be compared only with that of Vedic Sanskrit or Hittite of the Old Kingdom.

  The Vedas, four books of learning composed in North India, in the period 1000–500 BC, are named from the Sanskrit root vid, meaning “knowledge”. This same root occurs in Old Irish as uid, meaning “observation, perception and knowledge”. Most people will immediately recognise it as one of the two roots of the compound Celtic word Druid – dru-vid, arguably meaning “thorough knowledge”.

  To demonstrate some of the similarities of vocabulary between Old Irish and Sanskrit, we may refer to the following: arya (freeman) in Sanskrit, from which that much maligned word Aryan comes from. In Old Irish, the cognate is aire meaning “a noble”. Naib (good) in Sanskrit is cognate with noeib (holy) in Old Irish and from which the word naomh (saint) comes.

  Minda (physical defect) in Sanskrit is cognate with menda (“one who stammers”) in Old Irish. Namas (respect) in Sanskrit is cognate with nemed (respect or privilege) in Old Irish. Badhura (deaf) in Sanskrit is cognate with bodhar (deaf) in Old Irish. As a matter of interest, this word was borrowed from Irish into English in the 18th century to become the English word “bother”.

  Most easily recognisable is the word raj (king) which is cognate with the Irish rí and this word is demonstrated also in the Continental Celtic rix and the Latin rex. Most Indo-European languages, at one time, used this concept. However, the Germanic group developed another word, i.e. cyning, koenig and king. But English did not abandon it altogether, for that ancient word for king is still to be found in the etymology of reach. The Indo-European concept was of a king as one “who reaches or stretches out his hand to protect his people”.

  This concept of “reaching out to protect the tribe or people” is one found many in Indo-European myths. In the Vedas, the sky-god was called Dyaus and is recorded in the Rig Veda as one who stretches forth a long hand. This is cognate with deus in Latin, dia in Irish and devos in Slavonic. It means, significantly, “bright one”. Presumably it has a sun-deity significance.

  In the Vedas, we find Dyaus was called Dyaus-Pitir – Father Dyaus; in Greek this became Zeus – also a father god; in Latin Jovis-Pater – Father Jove. Julius Caesar observed that the Celts had a Dis-Pater – a father god and we certainly find an Irish reference to Ollathair – the All-Father. He is a sky god and Lugh is given this role. Lugh also appears in Welsh myth as Lleu. Significantly, the name means “Bright one” and the Irish god is Lugh Lámhfada (Lugh of the Long Hand) while his Welsh counterpart is Lleu Llaw Gyffes (Lleu of the Skilful Hand).

  The goddess Boann, whose name means “cow white”, gave her name to the River Boyne; she was mother to Aonghus Óg, the love god, and was called guou-uinda, or cow finder. Now this appears, almost exactly the same, in the Vedic name Govinda, which was an epithet for the god Krishna. Govinda is still used by Hindus as a name today.

  The motifs of the sacred cow or bull are easily found in Celtic, particularly in Irish myths, as well as Vedic or Hindu myths. The Gaulish god Esus equates with Asura (the powerful) and, as Asvapati, it is
an epithet for Indra. The Gaulish Ariomanus is also cognate with the Vedic Aryaman.

  The horse rituals, once common to the Indo-Europeans, are found in Irish myth and ritual as well as in the Vedic sources. The kingship ritual of the symbolic union of horse and ruler survives in both. This must date back to the time when the Indo-Europeans domesticated horses, a development which allowed them not only to commence their initial expansions but to become more proficient in their agricultural and pastoral and warrior life. Horses meant power.

  In Ireland, the ritual of the symbolic union of a mare with the king survived for a long time and was mentioned by Giraldus Cambrensis in his Topographia Hibernica, in the eleventh century. In India, a similar symbolic ritual of a union of a stallion and queen survived, as we see in the myth of Saranyu in the Rig Veda.

  Another important aspect found in common is the “Act of Truth” which Professor Myles Dillon has discussed so well in “The Hindu Act of Truth in Celtic Tradition” (Modern Philology, February, 1947). The ancient Irish text Auraicept Moraind could well be mistaken as a passage from the Upanishad. The symbolism in Irish myth of Mochta’s Axe, which, when heated in a fire of blackthorn, would burn a liar but not harm someone telling the truth; or Luchta’s iron, which had the same quality; or Cormac Mac Art’s cup – three lies would cause it to fall apart and three truths would make it whole again: all have their counterparts in the Chandogya Upanishad.

  Even terms relating to cosmology may be seen to have comparisons in Celtic and Vedic culture. The similarities of the Hindu calendar and Celtic calender – the latter example being the Coligny calendar, found in 1897 – have been seen to be remarkably close. Dr Garrett Olmsted, who has made the most recent examination of the calendar, points out that the calendar’s original computation and its astronomical observations and calculations put its origin to 1100 BC. There is also evidence from the early tracts that the Celts practised a form of astrology based on the twenty-seven lunar mansions, or nakshatras, as the modern Hindus still do, and not the Western form which was, of course, imported from Babylonia via Greece.

  So the most exciting thing about the study of Celtic linguistics and mythology is that we are not just pursuing the cultural origins of the Celts, we are actually pushing back the boundaries of our knowledge of an all Indo-European culture. The comparisons of language, myths, cultural philosophies and social structure, mathematics and calendrical studies (for the ancient Celts were foremost in this field) with Hindu and Hittite, lead one irrevocably towards a developing picture of the common Indo-European roots whose progeny now spreads through Europe, Asia Minor to North India.

  Celtic mythology, the legends and oral storytelling traditions, constitute one of the brightest gems of European culture. It is both unique and dynamic. It is a mythology and folklore which should be as well-known and valued as its sister Indo-European cultures of Greece and Rome. Perhaps it should be prized that much more because it gives us a direct path back to the dim origins of civilisation in this part of the world.

  The oldest surviving complete manuscript books that provide the sources for Irish mythology date from the twelfth century. There are, of course, earlier fragmentary texts. The oldest complete sources are the Leabhar na hUidre, known as the Book of the Dun Cow, the Leabhar Laignech, or Book of Leinster, and an unnamed book known simply by its Bodleian Library reference, Rawlinson Manuscript B502. They represent the tip of an extraordinary rich literary mountain. And the textural remains of Middle Irish literature have not even been exhausted.

  Professor Kuno Meyer, in his introduction to the beautiful tale Liadain and Curithir: A Love Story (1900), listed four hundred sagas and tales in these manuscript books known to scholars. To this he added a further hundred texts which had been discovered since he had started to make his list. He then added a possible further fifty to a hundred tales which could be in repositories still undiscovered. In all, he believed that there were some five to six hundred tales of which only a hundred and fifty had been translated and annotated at the time when he was writing. Eleanor Hull, in her introduction to The Cuchullin Saga in Irish Literature (1898) made a similar estimation.

  It is quite extraordinary that this figure has not changed much during the last century. This means that there are great libraries of Irish manuscripts still uncatalogued, let alone examined, in various libraries and archives, such as that of the Regensburg archive in Vienna.

  Of course, Old Irish was the standard literary language throughout the Gaelic-speaking world, until the late medieval period. The spoken language of the Manx and the Scots had begun to diverge from the standard during the sixth and seventh centuries AD. Therefore the myths and legends of Ireland, the Isle of Man and Scotland are often the same, sometimes differentiated by local embellishments. The evidence shows that bards and storytellers wandered freely from one country to another plying their craft. We have an account of the chief bard of Ireland, Seanchán Torpeist (ca AD 570–647) arriving on the Isle of Man with his entourage and entering into a literary contest there. Yet an identifiable Manx written literature, as distinct from Irish, did not emerge until the seventeenth century.

  It was not until the sixteenth century that a distinctive Scottish Gaelic literature began to emerge from that shared with Ireland. The Book of the Dean of Lismore (Lismore in Argyll) was a miscellany compiled in 1516 and included sagas of the Fianna of Fionn Mac Cumhaill and other stories. However, like the Isle of Man, the main wealth of mythological and legendary traditions lay in a continued oral tradition, which was only extensively committed to writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then predominantly in English translations.

  Welsh began to emerge from its common British Celtic parent, along with Cornish and Breton, in the fifth and sixth centuries AD. It is in Welsh that the main early Brythonic myths and legends have survived. The Welsh material is nowhere near as extensive nor as old as the Irish tales and sagas. While Welsh was certainly flourishing as a literary language by the eighth century AD, apart from fragmentary remains, the oldest book wholly in Welsh is Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin, the Black Book of Carmarthen, dated to the thirteenth century. Among the poems it contains are a few on the Myrddin (Merlin) legends. But the mythological texts are preserved in two sources: Llyfr Gwyn Rhydderch, the White Book of Rhydderch (1300–1325), and Llyfr Coch Hergest, the Red Book of Hergest (1375–1425). The stories in these two books constitute what is called in Welsh the Mabinogi, or in English “The Four Branches of the Mabinogion”.

  The Mabinogi consists of eleven tales and romances. There is evidence that at least three tales originated from a period far earlier than the surviving written texts. Culhwch and Olwen, for example, which is given in the current volume as The Quest for Olwen, reflects a period of style, vocabulary and custom of at least two centuries earlier.

  Like the Irish, the Welsh produced a wealth of manuscript archive material during the later medieval period. The best introduction to this is Andrew Breeze’s Medieval Welsh Literature (1997). This book presents the controversial thesis that several of the Mabinogi tales were actually written by a Welsh princess named Gwenllian who was killed in battle against the Anglo-Normans in 1136–37.I have discussed this in my preface to the Welsh tales.

  Although the Cornish had produced written forms by the tenth century, nothing survives in Cornish that is reflective of the myths and legends of the Mabinogi. But, like the Goidelic Celtic seanachaidhe or wandering storytellers or bards, the Brythonic Celts had their cyfarwydd. These bards were constantly travelling between Wales, Cornwall and Brittany, even down to Tudor times. Common characteristics in tales are to be found in all three countries.

  It is arguable that an Arthurian poem, translated by John of Cornwall into Latin hexameters during the twelfth century, is a genuine translation from an earlier Cornish manuscript. Glosses in Cornish on the manuscript date it to the tenth century. This is The Prophecy of Merlin, and the oldest surviving copy of this text is dated 8 October 1474. It is in the Vatican Library. I
t belongs to the Arthurian cycle of tales.

  The oldest text in Breton dates from 1450 and is Dialog etre Arzur Roe d’an Bretounet ha Guynglaff (Dialogue of Arthur, King of the Bretons). The work is of Breton provenance and not merely a copy of the Welsh sagas or French or German extensions of the Arthurian tales.

  By the end of the fifteenth century, it could be argued that Breton literature had started in earnest. Saints plays and other material were being written in Breton. Buhez santaz Nonn hag he nap Deuy (The Life of St Nonn, Son of Devy) is one of the first major works of this tradition. But the main communication of the legends and sagas remained an oral tradition until 1839 when Théodore Hersart de la Villemarqué published his ground-breaking Barzaz Breiz: Chants Populates de la Bretagne, an anthology of poems, ballads and folklore which first introduced Breton folklore to a wider audience.

  Whenever anyone mentions the Celtic myths and legends there are two subjects that always seem to spring to mind. The first is the Arthurian sagas and the second is the romance of Tristan and Iseult.

  Arthur was a sixth-century historical Celtic personality fighting for the independence of his people against the ravages of the Anglo-Saxons. He is first mentioned in a sixth century poem, Y Gododdin, originally written in British Celtic in southern Scotland – then British Celtic speaking – but now claimed for Welsh literature. The Gododdin were a tribe whose capital was at Edinburgh.

  The Welsh chronicler Nennius, writing in the early ninth century, also refers to Arthur and his battles and significantly calls him a warlord but not a king, pointing out that the British Celtic kings appointed him leader in battle. The Annales Cambriae, compiled c.AD 955, also mention him and his great victory at Badon and his death at Camlann. It was from Geoffrey of Monmouth (c . 1100–1155) in his Latin Historia Regum Britanniae – which he said was a translation from “a very ancient book in the British tongue” – who began to develop Arthur as a mythical being. From here, Arthur headed off into European literature via the Norman poets, such as Wace and Chrétien de Troyes and Layamon, who introduced Arthur to continental literatures.