PENGUIN REFERENCE
MYTHS AND LEGENDS OF THE CELTS
Dr James MacKillop is an eminent scholar of Celtic history and culture, having been Visiting Fellow in Celtic Languages at Harvard University, Professor of English at the State University of New York, Visiting Professor at the Université de Rennes and President of the American Conference for Irish Studies. His many publications include the Dictionary of Celtic Mythology (1998), Fionn mac Cumhaill (1986) and Irish Literature: A Reader (1987, 2005). He is based in Syracuse, New York.
JAMES MACKILLOP
Myths and Legends of the Celts
PENGUIN BOOKS
For Molly E. and Colin K.
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 2005
Published in paperback 2006
4
Copyright © James MacKillop, 2005
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-194139-4
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
PART ONE
Contexts
1 Names in the Dust: Searching for Celtic Deities
2 Remnants of Celtic Religion
3 Sacred Kingship in Early Ireland
4 Goddesses, Warrior Queens and Saints
5 Calendar Feasts
6 Otherworlds
PART TWO
Irish Myths
7 Irish Beginnings: the Lebor Gabála Érenn
8 The Irish Mythological Cycle
9 The Ulster Cycle, Part I
10 The Ulster Cycle, Part II: Cúchulainn and the Táin
11 The Fenian Cycle
12 The Cycles of the Kings
PART THREE
Welsh and Oral Myths
13 British Roots and Welsh Traditions
14 Survivals in the Oral Traditions of Celtic Lands
Select Bibliography
Leading Names and Terms in Celtic Mythology
Index
Acknowledgements
Two valued friends read the typescript as it was being prepared and made countless useful suggestions. They are James E. Doan of Nova Southeastern University and Richard Marsh of Legendary Tours in Dublin. Lucy McDiarmid of Villanova University provided vital information at the inception of the project. Linda McNamara of Inter-Library Loan services at Onondaga Community College found obscure volumes even when they were not stocked by the Widener Library or the Library of Congress. David Lloyd of LeMoyne College gave critical advice on Welsh pronunciation.
The author and publisher would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce illustrations: Maiden Castle, Tara, The Uffington Horse (plates 1, 2, 13), copyright reserved Cambridge University Collection of Air Photographs; The Coligny Calendar (plate 3), Cliché Ch. Thioc, Musée gallo-romain de Lyon, France; Hallstatt Excavations, The Battersea Shield, The Gundestrup Cauldron, Miniature wagon from Mérida, Heads at Entremont (plates 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 14, 16), copyright © akg-images/Erich Lessing; The Book of Durrow (plate 5), copyright © The Board of Trinity College Dublin; The god Sucellus (plate 11), copyright © The Art Archive/Centre Archéologique de Glanum Saint-Rémy-de-Provence/Dagli Orti; The goddess Epona (plate 12), copyright © The Art Archive/Musée Alésia Alise Sainte Reine France/Dagli Orti; and Sheela-na-gigs in Kilpeck (plate 15), copyright © English Heritage.
Introduction
FINDING THE ‘CELTS’
A word of uncommon resonance and ambiguity, ‘Celt’ may be the most poetic form ever given to us by scholars. Its root is easily traced to the Greek Keltoí that implies ‘hidden’, or the people hidden from the view of the more civilized. Not until about AD 1700 did learned people begin to apply the term ‘Celtic’ to the family of languages then spoken on the northwestern fringes of Europe: Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Cornish and Breton. This origin in scholarly rather than spoken discourse explains why there is always some question about how it should be pronounced, with the cognoscenti always favouring the hard c ‘kelt’ for etymological reasons instead of the soft c ‘selt’ as one might expect from the usual pattern in English.
To complicate matters, the people we call Celts did not use the term at all until modern times and had no other expression to denote a linguistic community among themselves. The Greeks initially used Keltoí to indicate an ancient Gaulish people, distant ancestors of the French, north of what is today Marseille. Gradually, classical commentators began to apply the term to peoples speaking apparently kindred languages, from the Galatians of Asia Minor to the Gallaeci of the Iberian Peninsula in the west. In Julius Caesar’s commentaries (first century BC), the Greek-derived Latin term Celtae was confined to the people of middle Gaul or central France, but other Romans used it to denote many of the continental populations we now describe as Celtic-speaking. Surprisingly, neither the Greek Keltoí nor the Latin Celtae referred to the populations of the British Isles, and no word in Old Irish or Old Welsh implies that speakers of those languages perceived a relationship between the two. When referring to themselves the several Celts often used terms incorporating the phoneme gal-, as in Gallia (Gaul), Galatia, Galicia (regions of both Spain and Poland) and Portugal.
As a word merely denoting ancient, extinct languages, ‘Celtic’ was fairly widely known to informed English writers at an early date; Milton uses it in Paradise Lost (1667). But the notion that it could also describe the living languages of impoverished and despised peoples on the periphery of Europe was slow in coming. George Buchanan was ignored when he asserted (1582) that Scottish Gaelic was derived from ancient Celtic. In France, however, where the national history begins with the story of Gaulish resistance to Roman rule, several commentators discerned a survival or archaic language among the Bretons on their isolated peninsula in the northwest. Paul-Yves Pezron was much more persuasive in arguing for the continuity between ancient and modern in Antiquité de la nation et la langue des Celtes in 1703. Working concurrently with Pezron, the Welsh-born Edward Lhuyd or Lloyd (c. 1660–1709), Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, had been studying the minority languages of the British Isles in the field. His Archaeologia Britannia (1707) introduced the
word ‘Celtic’ in its modern definition into widespread use.
In little more than a half century almost any reader could be expected to have seen the word ‘Celtic’, following the hoopla accompanying James Macpherson’s specious ‘translations’, The Poems of Ossian (1760–64). A young Highland Scottish schoolmaster, Macpherson purported to derive the Poems (produced in prose translation) from ancient Celtic documents, which later investigation proved to have been adapted from recent Scottish Gaelic ballads. Although so prolix that they cannot be read today without sustained ardour, The Poems of Ossian became an international rage, attracting admiration from such diverse figures as Thomas Jefferson and Johann von Goethe, who translated them into German. This created a fashion for the ‘Ossianic’, of haunted, rugged landscapes peopled by fatalistic, fair-haired warriors in chariots, which affected all the arts. At least thirty operas were composed on themes from The Poems of Ossian, and Ossian’s image was idealized on hundreds of canvases. The name of Ossian’s father, Fingal, was known across Europe by 1829 when Felix Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture was nicknamed the ‘Fingal’s Cave Overture’. The name of Ossian’s son Oscar became so popular in Germany and Scandinavia that it was eventually borne by a succession of Danish kings. Concurrent with and related to Macpherson came the so-called Celtic Revival in English literature, 1760–1800, led by such Anglo-Welsh writers as Thomas Gray, whose poem ‘The Bard’ (1757) helped make that word, known in both Welsh and Irish, idiomatic in English.
Bards, crags, mists, harps, golden-tressed maidens, forgotten but recoverable magical feats: such was the Celtic world for the Romantic era. Antiquarianism, led often by enthusiasts rather than by what we would call archaeologists, began to turn attention to the Celtic fringe of northwestern Europe. Wide-eyed speculation attributed to the druids, priests of ancient Celtic religion described by Roman commentators, virtually all pre-Roman monuments, including the pre-Celtic (we now know) Stonehenge. It was also a time when a plaintive longing for a past more beautiful than the present prompted more sober-sided scholars to search out and translate the neglected texts of earlier Celtic tradition. Charlotte Brooke’s Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789) established that Old Irish texts actually existed, even while the infatuation with Macpherson’s chicanery and his even more bogus imitators drew attention to other traditions. Mid-way between sobriety and moonshine was Iolo Morganwg (né Edward Williams), a laudanum-addicted stonemason, who invented a society of poets and musicians, Gorsedd Beirdd Ynys Prydain (literally, the Throne/Assembly of Bards of the Isle of Britain); it was purportedly based on ancient models, to foster the culture and literature of Wales against the encroachments of the utilitarian Saxons. From this movement came the revival of the eisteddfod (1819), a nationalist popular celebration of traditional culture that would be imitated under other names – such as the Irish feis and Scottish Gaelic mòd – in other Celtic countries. A well-born Breton admirer of Macpherson and Morganwg, Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué, gathered native materials for Barzaz Breiz (Breton Bards) in 1839. Although yet another pseudo-medievalist, his conscientiousness and superior grasp of the language furnished texts to launch the modern, written literary tradition in Breton.
All this led the word ‘Celtic’ to agglutinate connotations not yet supported by any evidence recovered from the ancient world, before there had been a single archaeological dig at any Celtic site. Because the reservoirs of Celtic culture were removed from the centres of modern civilization, not Dublin but Connemara, not Edinburgh but the Hebrides, not Paris but Finistère, and the Celtic languages had survived against odds for untold aeons, many observers found it easy to attribute to the Celts whatever was the opposite of advanced technological, commercial society. If Western culture at large was growing more materialistic, then the Celts must be more spiritual. Through this idealized inversion, the economic and sociological liabilities of poverty and isolation – hand-made utensils, amateur entertainments, unfashionable dress, slack work habits – came to be perceived as edifying assets.
Despite the modern deflation of romantic puffery, the origins of the Celtic languages are indeed still lost in the mists of early history. Imaginative speculation purports to find roots as far away as central Asia and northern China, but Celtic is certainly a branch of the Indo-European family of languages, which includes the Slavic, Germanic and Romance languages. It is necessarily more arduous to trace the language of a pre-literate society than it is to uncover physical evidence. Searching is made more difficult by the Celts’ lack of a single, self-conscious ethnic identity or any unifying physical characteristics; Virgil (first century BC), memorably, saw them as tall and blond, but elsewhere they were reported shorter and darker. The Celts appear to have had something in common in terms of religion and social structure as well as material culture, but with wide variability.
The earliest Greek references to the Keltoí, then living along the Mediterranean coast, appear in documents from 560 to 500 BC. From such evidence modern scholars have determined that the first known Celts lived north of the Alps and in the Danube Valley, from the river’s origins in Germany through what is today Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. The Celtic goddess Danu (linked with Ana, Anu) may give her name to the river. Celtic culture is first noted during the Iron Age, that last epoch of pre-history between the Bronze Age and the beginning of written records. At one time commentators speculated that the Celtic languages were spoken by people of the Urnfield culture, c. 1500–800 BC, a late Bronze Age development distinguished by techniques for burial of the dead. This theory can no longer be supported, but motifs of Urnfield origin are found in the oldest identifiably Celtic cultural era, that named for Hallstatt in what is today Austria.
Lying east of Salzburg in the magnificent mountains of the Salzkammergut, Lake Hallstatt and the adjacent salt-mining complex are today remote from main routes of transportation. But in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages, their huge reserves of salt made them a destination for travellers seeking the only food preservative known at that time. This same salt preserved skeletons of 980 bodies and many artifacts buried with them, giving nineteenth-century scholars the first great trove of Celtic material culture, including clothing, leather sacks and wooden implements. This evidence gives us the name Hallstatt for a period of culture, not a tribe or an ethnic group. Settlement of the mines and the lake shore began as early as 1200 BC and continued to as late as 600 BC, while the influence of Hallstatt designs flourished in Celtic Europe from c.800 to 450 BC. After decades of study of such items as weapons, buckets, and human and animal figures, scholars have determined four phases of Hallstatt art, lettered A, B, C and D. Modern viewers tend to admire the technical skill of execution of Hallstatt artefacts rather than their aesthetic distinction. They are generally severely geometrical with only rare examples of plant patterns, although bird motifs appear, perhaps an influence from Italy. There is little influence from the Greeks. At the same time, Hallstatt art can be extravagant, almost baroque.
Superseding the chevrons, zigzags and right angles of the Hallstatt era were the spirals, S-shapes and swirling rounded patterns of the La Tène epoch, named for an archaeological site (la tène: the shallows) on the eastern end of Lake Neuchâtel, in western Switzerland. Though underwater, the La Tène site yielded even more than Hallstatt had: 400 brooches, 270 spears, 27 wooden shields, 170 swords, not to mention such votive offerings as pigs, dogs, chariots and human beings. The precise function of the La Tène site, whether sanctuary, battlefield or marketplace, has never been determined. Intense human activity began at the Lake Neuchâtel shallows about 500 BC and extended until the beginning of Roman domination, 200 BC and after. Motifs from the more sophisticated La Tène style, recorded in three phases, I, II, and III, permeated continental Celtic settlements more widely than had the Hallstatt, extending also to the British Isles, where its influence persisted through Christianization to the time of the Norman conquest of Ireland in AD 1169.
During the first millennium BC,
concurrent with the succession of Hallstatt and La Tène styles in art, came a decisive split into the two branches of the Celtic languages, usually described as the P-Celtic and Q-Celtic languages. The hard sound inherited from Indo-European that we represent with the letters qu-, for reasons unknown, came to be replaced by the sound of p-. We can illustrate this with contrasting examples from modern Q- and P- languages, Irish and Welsh, which still retain the same roots. The Irish word for head, ceann, is pen in Welsh. Likewise, mac, meaning son in Irish, is map in Welsh. At one time the split was thought to reflect migrations of different peoples across Europe, a position not supported by recent findings. Simple explanations are hard to come by. The substitution took place among peoples living in close proximity to one another as they migrated across Europe. As they settled in different areas either the P-Celt languages or the Q-Celts would become dominant while retaining trace patterns of the other family. Gaulish was largely P-Celtic with traces of Q-Celtic. The languages of ancient Britain were predominantly P-Celtic, as are the modern languages derived from them, sometimes designated Brythonic or Brittonic: Welsh, Cornish and Breton. Both Q-Celts and P-Celts settled in Ireland, with the Q-Celts becoming dominant. Q-Celtic invaders occupied much of Dyfed, in southern Wales, where their language was incorporated into the dominant language. Other Q-Celtic invaders, the Scotti, left northern Ireland for the islands and Highlands of Scotland where they established Scottish Gaelic, driving P-Celtic speakers into the Lowlands, where they became incorporated into populations speaking Scots or Lallans, related to English and thus part of the Germanic family of languages. Q-Celtic Irish settlers on the Isle of Man, sometimes dominated by Norse and Scottish rulers, spoke a language now known as Manx. Closely related, Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx are also known as the Goidelic languages after Goídel, the Old Irish word for the Irish people.
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