Warrior Daughter
Page 38
Skaaha's nudity is indicative of normal practice. Despite fine clothes, jewellery, armour, shields and elaborate helmets, models show warriors naked apart from weapons. Classical writers record that they often fought wearing only gold tores and armlets. Roman legions faced naked, blue ‘painted’ warriors in Scotland, nudity continued by later Highlanders. Privacy was unknown. Houses had no internal walls. Women wore nothing under those skirts raised in that universal gesture of dominance or contempt. Later stone Sheela-na-gigs expose vulvas with similar attitude.
Spiritual beliefs shape societies, but druids left no records, deliberately. Warrior Daughter incorporates all that's known about them. They cherished certain groves, springs, caves and streams, and celebrated the natural world. Votive deposits found in waterways suggest ancestor memorial, grief, mourning, hope or aspiration. Burial was rare. Goods from the few period graves relate to the deceased, just as they do today. Caesar said druids taught reincarnation, and enforced the law by excluding wrongdoers from festivals and society – the basis for those outsiders who attack Skaaha.
Caesar also wrote that druids received oral tuition for twenty years: ‘They hold various lectures and discussions on astronomy, on the extent and geographical distribution of the globe, on the different branches of natural philosophy, and on many problems connected with religion.’ While Romans distinguish druid, male, from priestess, women druids raise Ireland's Finn and advise Queen Medb. Strabo describes ‘priestesses who were seers… grey-haired, clad in white, with flaxen cloaks fastened on with clasps’ killing prisoners. Tacitus writes of ‘black-robed women with dishevelled hair like Furies, brandishing torches’ and ‘druids lifting their hands to heaven’ who decry the Romans at Ynys Mon. Siculus wrote that druids threw themselves between two armies to bring peace.
The Hebridean islands, where Skaaha lived, may be the centre of druidism, claimed by classical writers to be in Britain. Iona is one of those islands. The heart of Christianity in Scotland, its ancient Gaelic name is Island of Druids. There is a pantheon of Celtic gods who appear to derive from admired people who are mythologized after death, like saints, with supernatural powers. But there is no evidence of worship, no temples, no great idols, despite superb craftsmanship and buildings. Instead, druids held four major fire festivals which mark the agricultural year and celebrate the great triple goddess.
Bride, Danu and Carlin, or Brigid, Anu and Cailleach, embody primeval ideas, representing creation, war or life-struggle, and death. Bride, which means High One, was creator and source of knowledge. The Hebrides are named as hers. There are several Kilbrides, Bride Stones and wells. Widely known in Europe, a fine first-century AD bronze statue of her was found at Dinéault in France. As a competing creator trinity, what she represented was rapidly neutered by adoption into later Christian belief as St Brigid or St Bride.
The fourth festival, Lunasa (Lughnasadh), celebrates Telsha (Tailtui), the foster-mother. Legend says her foster-son, Lugh, set up her celebration and, with dubious logic, he later becomes one of many sun gods, in August when it's failing. In life, Lugh was a heroic warrior, probably attached to the existing first harvest festival with its child-fostering link to the autumn moon ‘fostering’ sunlight. Writing Warrior Daughter, it seemed obvious that Telsha was a second aspect of the central warrior-mother in Bride's three stages of life.
Just as solar feasts became Easter and Christmas, the festivals of Beltane, Lunasa, Sowen (Samhain) and Imbolc also linger. At miners' Gala days, a young May Queen fronts the proceedings, complete with consort. In August, Highland games proliferate. At Hallowe'en, people still dress in disguise to entertain as ‘guisers’. Images of death abound. The crone rules, complete with broomstick, black garb and coned hat. The fire, a few days later, still burns an effigy. In spring, on her traditional 2 February date, Bride's eternal flame has become Candlemas.
Druids dealt with time. Equinoxes and solstices aren't easy to discern. The expertise to date them, and predict eclipses, existed long before the Iron Age, charted in four Bronze Age gold ‘hats’ or cones. Calendar time, kept by the moon, needed corrective help, as its cycle averages 29.5 days. To prevent seasons creeping round, every third year lasted thirteen moons, the Ghost Moon of Skaaha's birth. In the Coligny calendar, the extra moon is counted twice every five years, eleven times in thirty, in autumn then in spring.
The authenticity of Skaaha's world is supported by archaeology: from the Wetwang female chariot burial to excavated mounds, roundhouses, caves and those specifically Scottish brochs, from skulls trepanned for unknown reasons whose owners lived on afterwards, to bog bodies quite clearly killed for some extreme crime. Although well populated, the only discovered grave on Skye from the period is a young woman's at High Pasture Cave near Kilbride, where Beltane is set. Cremation and excarnation, as practised in similarly rocky Tibet, seem the most likely forms of disposal.
I'm immensely grateful to those who so carefully dig up the past, to anthropologists such as Peggy Reeves Sanday and Jill Nash, the staff of Skye's museum and tourist offices, bird experts on Mull, and to Ian Armit, whose book, The Archaeology of Skye and the Western Isles, has been invaluable. Again, I'm in debt to Rennie McOwan for instantly supplying his article, ‘Skye's Warrior Queen’. Thanks are due to my two sisters and eldest son, for their assistance as researchers during our time on the island, and to my good friend and fellow poet, Aonghas Macneacail, for first telling me of Skaaha and Eefay, about whom he has written a radio monologue and opera libretto.
I drew Skaaha's life from legend by exchanging mythical elements for likely facts, and have shown, through the oral tradition of storytelling in the novel, how that process originally did the opposite. But it's the island which inspires, with its long history part revealed and much obscured, a place where the mist of time is as real as that fog rolling down over the Cuillins. Doon Beck (Dun Beag) and other brochs can still be visited, now remnants of their former glory, their builders, purpose and how life was lived inside their dark walls to be guessed at and not known, like Skaaha herself. Warrior Daughter is my version of her early life, a story drawn from historical legend to bring from the shadows a woman, amazing and mysterious as the culture and land she inhabited.
Reference for Locality
The Archaeology of Skye and the Western Isles, Ian Armit: Edinburgh University Press 1996
Scotland – Archaeology and Early History, Graham and Anna Ritchie: EU Press 1991
Skye – The Island and its Legends, Otta Swire: Birlinn 2006
Isle of Skye – Rambler's Guide, Chris Townsend: Collins 2001
The Mediaeval Castles of Skye and Lochalsh, Roger Miket and David L. Roberts: Birlinn 2007
Ordinance Survey and Nicolson's maps of Skye
Additional Reading
The Ancient Celts, Barry Cunliffe: Oxford University Press 1997
A Brief History of the Druids, Peter Berresford Ellis: Robinson Publishing 2002
Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland before the Romans, Francis Pryor: Harper Perennial 2004
The Druids: Celtic Priests of Nature, Jean Markale: Inner Traditions 1999
The Histories, Cornelius Tacitus: Penguin, Classics edition 2005
Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology
Maiden Warriors & Other Sons, Carol J. Clover: Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 85, 1986
‘Mythologie de la Brigitte’, J. Christmann: Bulletin de la Société de Mythologie Française, No. 157, 6. Feb 2007, Actes du Congrès de Château-Chinon
Women in Roman Britain, Lindsay Allason-Jones: Council for British Archaeology 2006
A Group of Scottish Women, Harry Graham: Duffield & Company 1908
‘The Development of Christian Society in Early England’, Tim Bond: Britannia Internet Magazine 1996
Warrior Women: An Archaeologist's Search for History's Hidden Heroines, Jeannine Davis-Kimball: Little, Brown and Company 2004
Women Warriors: A History, David E. Jones: Potomac Books Inc. 2005
; Battle Cries and Lullabies: Women in War from Prehistory to the Present, Linda Grant De Pauw: University of Oklahoma Press 2000
Chieftain or Warrior Priestess?, Jeannine Davis-Kimball: Archaeology, Sept./Oct. 1997
Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy, Peggy Reeves Sanday: Cornell University Press 2002
Matriliny and Modernisation: The Nagovisi of South Bougainville, Jill Nash: New Guinea Research Unit 1974
‘What Do Men Want?’, Syed Zubair Ahmed: New York Times 1994
Sex in History, Gordon Rattray Taylor: 1954 (Book1/2: Mediaeval Sexual Behaviour)
On-line Texts
Ulster Cycle – comment and translations: http://en.wiki pedia.org/wiki/Ulster_Cycle
Celts – history and extensive links: http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Celt
The Gallic Wars, Julius Caesar – translation: http://classics.mit.edu/Caesar/gallic.html
The Pan-Celtic Goddess, Brigantia (Most High): http://www.celtnet.org.uk/gods_b/brigantia.html
Ancient Nomads, Female Warriors and Priestesses, Jeannine Davis-Kimball: Centre for the Study of Eurasian Nomads, 1998: http://popgen.well.ox.ac.uk/eurasia/htdocs/davis.html