Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference)

by James MacKillop

  BIRDS, ANIMALS, FISH

  The Celts, like all humans, have seen analogues for their values and themselves in their fellow mortals, feathered, furred and finned. The impulse to view the hawk as embodying the predatory motive in humans, or the fox as incarnating the wily, is hardly unique to any culture. In the oral traditions recorded in Celtic countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, virtually every creature found in Europe is assigned some human attribute or value to enrich a narrative. In many instances a hare or a cow in a Breton or Scottish Gaelic story is no different from counterparts in other European languages. Yet in other instances, such as those concerning the crane, the boar or the salmon, we can see echoes from the earliest materials: animals carved on Iron Age altars, or figures of zoomorphic gods, where animal characteristics are given to human forms. Even in ancient culture, though, not every representation is of the same value; some are divine or totemistic, others merely decorative. Our intention here is to single out the birds, animals and fish who appear continuously over the centuries.

  From the earliest times, even the proto-Celtic Urnfield period, c.1500–800 BC, Celtic art shows a marked preference for water birds of different kinds. A cormorant appears to be drawing a chariot holding the sun. Other water birds pull a chariot in which idols are seated. Ducks are shown beside a solar wheel or forming the prow and stern of a boat carrying the sun-disc. Swans and cygnets, together with the non-aquatic ravens, decorate a horse-prod or flesh fork from Iron Age Ireland, found at Dunaverney. Some commentators see in these examples associations with a cult of the sun in its healing powers.

  More significant are the long-legged wading birds, the egret and the crane, which can resemble one another in badly worn 3,000-year-old icons. The egret, distinguished by long white tail-feathers, appears in Urnfield icons and most prominently in triplet form at a temple of the Gaulish god Esus. A common pairing puts an egret on the back of a bull, an important cult animal, as we shall see. But the egret does not survive so visibly in later vernacular tradition.

  The crane, with its long bill, fared better, perhaps because of the perception that the bird was a transformed human. Julius Caesar (first century BC) reported that the ancient Britons refused to eat the crane’s flesh under the impression cranes had been human in a previous life. Giraldus Cambrensis (twelfth century) reported the same taboo in Ireland. The crane is also found in Urnfield iconography, at the temple of Esus, and may also be paired with bulls, but it appears dozens of times in vernacular, especially Irish, narrative, often metamorphosed and magical. One Aífe, lover of Ilbrec, was transformed into a crane by Iuchra, a jealous rival. Living as an amphibian for 200 years, she inhabited the realm of Manannán mac Lir, the sea god, sometimes seen as her ‘husband’. When she died, Manannán made her skin into the renowned crane bag, containing marvellous artistic treasures.

  Known in Irish as the corrbolg, the crane bag is at once one of the most mysterious and most commented-upon artefacts in early Irish tradition. Two heroes were thought to have owned it at different times: Lug Lámfhota and Fionn mac Cumhaill. Some modern commentators see the crane bag as part of an origin myth of language and consequently of poetry. Initially Manannán filled the crane bag with items peculiarly precious to him: his own knife and shirt, the king of Scotland’s shears, the king of Lochlainn’s helmet, the bones of Assal’s swine and the girdle of the great whale’s back. The substance and contents of the bag imply to some modern readers that it should also have contained the letters of the ogham alphabet. Used for inscriptions before the introduction of Christianity, ogham employs stick-like ciphers, each of them the counterpart of a letter of the Roman alphabet, as suggested by the legs of flying cranes. This association of the crane and the crane bag with writing became more widely known during the era of the influential Irish literary journal, The Crane Bag, 1977–81, which reprinted the story in each issue.

  The crane is not always benign, however. In ancient belief, those cranes who were not transformed humans were thought stingy and disagreeable. A soldier passing such a crane on his way to battle was doomed. Linked with this perception is the medieval Irish portrait of glám dícenn [poet’s execration]. A poet used this as a verbal weapon of war, by standing like a crane on one leg, with one eye closed and one arm extended. A victim of glám dícenn might have his face blistered or lose his life.

  The swan, a symbol of beauty, good luck, and travel to a world beyond the physical, appears even more frequently than the crane in both ancient culture and later narrative tradition. Somewhat contradictorily, the swan may represent both purity and sexual energy, the latter based on its long, phallic neck and observed proclivity for frequent coitus. Again found in Urnfield and Hallstatt (800–600 BC) cultures, the swan is represented in art surviving all over Europe. Swans draw a wheeled cauldron (seventh–sixth centuries BC) found at Orastie, Romania. At Alésia in eastern France, three mothers appear in a sculpture with three children, while a fourth child is seated in a boat and accompanied by a swan.

  The best-known Irish swan narrative is Oidheadh Chlainne Lir [The Tragic Story of the Children of Lir] in which the four fostered children, Áed, Finnguala, Fiachra and Conn, are put under a spell by their cruel stepmother Aífe. They must live as swans in three exiles, each of 300 years’ duration. In other Irish literary cycles, a flock of destructive swans ravages the area around Emain Macha, Co. Armagh, at the time of the hero Cúchulainn’s conception. These swans wear chains of gold and silver, as does Cáer Ibormeith, beloved of Angus Óg in Aislinge Oenguso [The Dream of Angus], when she is metamorphosed into a swan. Men as well as women may in these tales take swan form, as Mongán of the Irish Cycles of the Kings does. So does the otherworldly Midir in the third part of the ninth-century Irish story, Tochmarc Étaíne [The Wooing of Étaín], after he wins an amorous embrace from the beautiful Étaín and takes swan form to fly through the smoke hole in the roof.

  The boar, declares Anne Ross in her authoritative Pagan Celtic Britain (1967), ‘is, without doubt, the cult animal par excellence of the Celts’. Citations abound in every aspect of Celtic culture, from the eleventh century BC to the present. On one of the greatest treasures of Celtic religion, the Gundestrup Cauldron found in Denmark, we may see two warriors with boar-crests on their helmets while two demi-gods hold small boars aloft. A British tribe of Roman times called themselves the Orci or ‘people of the boar’. The boar was found all over Europe in early times and was, along with the bear, the most aggressive and ferocious animal a person was likely to encounter. Esteemed for its physical strength and heroic defence when cornered, the boar was a prize prey for hunters. The meat of the boar, called ‘the hero’s portion’, was given prestige at banquets – thus the animal could link war and hunting as well as feasting and hospitality. The boar’s skin was thought appropriate dress for a warrior, and a boar’s head appears on the crest of the Clan MacKinnon from Gaelic Scotland.

  Deification and personification of the boar would follow. A Gaulish god named Moccus, equated by the Romans with Mercury, epitomized the power of the boar. Yet there was also a Romano-Gaulish sow deity named Arduinna, associated with the Ardennes Forest. Neither of these attracted huge cults and both seem pale compared to the boar figures in vernacular tradition, even in Ireland where the boar became extinct as early as the twelfth century. An encounter with a boar kills the hero of the Irish Fenian Cycle, Diarmait Ua Duibne, an episode echoing Adonis’s fatal boar hunt in classical mythology. Diarmait’s boar is his own half-brother; Diarmait’s father Donn had killed a bastard son whose spirit was transformed into the animal. Orc Triath was an otherworldly boar or pig in Irish tradition; and the similar-sounding Torc Triath was king of the boars in the pseudo-history Lebor Gabála [Book of Invasions]. Elsewhere in the Lebor Gabála, the purported narrator of the story, the survivor Tuan mac Cairill, who tells of the different invasions to St Finnian of Moville, is transformed into a boar, among other things. Otherworldly boars are found as well in Welsh tradition under the name of T
wrch Trwyth and in Brittany as Tourtain. Boars are also featured prominently in the Mabinogi, the exemplar of medieval Welsh literature. In the third branch, Manawydan, a gleaming white boar leads Pryderi, the blameless hero who appears in all four branches, into an enclosure from which he cannot escape. In the fourth branch, Math, the magician Gwydion takes the form of a boar and his brother Gilfaethwy a sow so that together they may produce the tall piglet, Hychdwn Hir.

  Figuring even more prominently than the boar on the Gundestrup Cauldron is an antlered zoomorphic figure, squatting in a position which resembles the half lotus in yoga. We call this figure, rather glibly, Cernunnos [the horned one], as his name is known from only one inscription, but his physical representation is so widespread that he was surely an important god of the continental Celts, or, on the assertion of some commentators, the principal god. With a man’s body and the horns of a stag, he is the lord of nature, animals, fruit, grain and prosperity. Representations of Cernunnos are found from pre-Roman times but are even more frequent during Roman occupation, especially in north-central Gaul. He is always shown with the torc or neck ring, a common artefact of Celtic religion also found around the neck of the warrior depicted in the statue of the Dying Gaul (third century BC). He may or may not be bearded and is often accompanied by ram-headed serpents. Then again, our knowledge of Cernunnos is so tenuous that he may not be a divinity at all but rather a shaman-like priest with antlers affixed to his head.

  Both the stag and the hornless deer, stag or doe, were important cult animals. As monarch of the northern forests, the stag was admired for its speed, grace and sexual prowess during the rutting season. Shed in autumn and growing again in spring, the antlers re-enact the growing season. Their hardness evokes erect male genitalia; carved antlers were used to make phallic amulets. Carvings in the Camonica Valley of the Italian Alps link the stag with sun imagery. In early Irish tradition stags might also be associated with women. Flidais, the Diana-like early goddess of wild things, is also mistress of stags. The war-goddess Mórrígan might also take the form of the stag. In Gaelic Scotland, where deer were and continue to be prevalent, there are indications of deer worship in the Lochaber region. The sianach is a deer-monster in Scottish Gaelic oral tradition.

  In early Irish and Welsh narratives, deer appear most often in two modes, as enticers of mortals to the otherworld and as transformed beings. The great Irish hero Fionn mac Cumhaill often hunts an enchanted stag who is the metamorphosed god Donn. With the coming of Christianity, the stag became a guide for souls seeking heaven and was so represented in cemeteries. As for transformation, both mortals and fairies might become deer, willingly or unwillingly. One Irish story depicts a jealous woman turning one hundred girls into deer. Perhaps the strangest of these transformations comes in a poem attributed to St Patrick (fifth century) titled in English ‘The Deer’s Cry’ or ‘St Patrick’s Breastplate’. The saint uses a power called féth fíada to turn himself and a companion named Benén into wild deer so that they may escape ambush while on their way to evangelize Tara, the royal hill in the Boyne Valley. Their adversaries see only a deer with a fawn.

  Some fawns, on the other hand, may be warlike, like the Irish Fenian hero Oisín, the principal son of Fionn mac Cumhaill. To conceive him, Fionn sleeps with the deer-woman, Sadb, thus explaining Oisín’s name, the diminutive of os [deer], meaning ‘little deer’ or fawn. Within the bulk of Fenian narratives the character of Oisín manifests no hints of zoomorphism, but in later tales he is the one invited to enjoy a 300-year love affair with a beautiful damsel, Niam, in the otherworld, as in Micheál Coimín’s Laoi Oisín i dTír na nÓg [The Lay of Oisín in the Land of Youth], c. 1750. The persona of Oisín was also the basis for James Macpherson’s creation Ossian in the Poems of Ossian (1760–63).

  The name of the horse goddess Epona has long had a certain cachet and is likely to be among the first a beginning reader would encounter in discussions of the Celtic world. That arises in part from her popular but unsupported association with the superb Uffington White Horse in Oxfordshire, one of the earth’s largest pictorial works of art. With a distinctive taut, curvilinear style, the figure, 364 ft long, was cut through the sod to the underlying layer of white chalk about 50 BC. Unfortunately, surviving evidence suggests that the cult of Epona did not arrive in Britain until after the coming of the Romans almost 100 years later in AD 43. Epona’s cult originated in eastern Gaul near Alésia prior to its spread to Britain; inscriptions and statues commemorating her are more numerous than for any other goddess. She is usually shown on horseback, sometimes sidesaddle, often clothed but occasionally nude and nymph-like. Her name is sometimes given in plural form, Eponabus, perhaps explained by the triplication of her form as found at Hogonange in the Moselle Valley. Roman commentators noted her popularity with the cavalry, who erected her statue in stables. She was the only Celtic deity ever placed in the Roman pantheon, where she was remembered on 18 December.

  The horse, not native to Europe, was introduced about the eighth century BC in the Iron Age and quickly became associated with the aristocratic warrior elite. Horses were seen in continental Celtic culture only a short time before they began to be employed in sacrifices and ritual practices, as when drawing their funerary chariots, and sometimes interred with humans. Not surprisingly, then, the horse may be linked with deities other than Epona, such as the Gaulish Rudiobus, who is honoured with a beautifully preserved bronze statue (first century BC) found in the Loire Valley, western France. Rudiobus may be an aspect of Gaulish Mars (see Chapter 2) rather than a native god. Celtic Jupiter and Celtic Apollo also had associations with the horse, the former in huge columns where the sky god and sun god would appear on horseback. Horse figurines appear as votive offerings at the healing springs of Celtic Apollo (also worshipped as Belenus).

  Owning horses may have been an uncommon luxury in the remote British Isles after the fall of the Roman empire, one of the reasons the horse is conspicuously absent in the heroic tales of Fionn mac Cumhaill, for example. The horse, nevertheless, remained in high esteem. As the swiftest of terrestrial travellers, it could be associated with the courses of the heavens of the sun. The Irish hero Cúchulainn has two prized horses, Liath Macha and Dubh Sainglenn or Saingliu. The second most common man’s name in early Ireland, Eochaid/ Eochu, means something like ‘horse rider’ or ‘fighter on horseback’. According to Giraldus Cambrensis’s twelfth-century Topographia Hibernia, a medieval Irish ritual required the slaughter of a white mare and the would-be king’s supposed sexual union with it, an act that would assure his achievement of sovereignty (see Chapter 3). In early Irish and Welsh narrative the pairing of the horse with different women rings with sexual resonance. At the beginning of the action of the epic Táin Bó Cuailnge [The Cattle Raid of Cooley], the pregnant Macha (one of three women to bear this name) is forced to run a humiliating footrace with the horses of King Conchobar mac Nessa. At issue is her husband Crunniuc’s boast that she can outrun any steed. Breathlessly, she does cross the finish line first, and then collapses in mortal agony, giving birth to twins, cursing all the men of Ulster to suffer the pangs of childbirth (Ir. ces noínden Ulad) for five days and four nights at the time of their greatest difficulty (see Chapter 9).

  Echoes of Epona and the shadowy early British goddess Rigantona survive in the sonorously named Rhiannon, one of the major female characters in the Welsh Mabinogi, appearing in the first and third branches. When Rhiannon rides by on a white horse, Pwyll, prince of Dyfed (southern Wales) is so bedazzled by her that he resolves to make her his wife. When Rhiannon after a few years of marriage produces a son, the infant is stolen on the night of his birth, May Eve, a fateful day on the Celtic calendar. She is falsely accused of the child’s murder and is forced into a mortifying but telling public penance: she must sit by the horse block outside the palace gate for seven years, offering all visitors a ride on her back. In time, the son is found, identified and returned to her, after which she gives him the name Pryderi. In the third branc
h of the Mabinogi, Pryderi, risen to power, promises his still beautiful mother, Rhiannon, to a powerful comrade-in-arms, Manawydan. Rhiannon and Pryderi are some of the few to survive a deadly mist that devastates Dyfed.

  As both continental and insular Celts were cattle-raising and cattle-driving peoples, their ready use of bovine imagery bespeaks profound veneration and reverence. In this they were not unlike other early Europeans. Prehistoric cave paintings at Lascaux in France and Bronze Age mosaics in Crete long predate Celtic artistic expression. A small bronze figurine of a bull with extended, implicitly aggressive horns was found at Hallstatt (seventh century BC), and comparable figures appear in different parts of the Celtic world over the next several centuries. The Gundestrup Cauldron features two images of bulls, one of a slain carcass on the base plate, and another in which three sword-wielding warriors assault three larger-than-life bulls, their inflated stature implying supernatural rank. Abundant evidence of bull sacrifice survives in Iron Age graves and is later testified to by Pliny the Elder in Natural History (first century AD). Romanized Gauls worshipped a three-horned bull named Tarvos Trigaranus, examples of which survive in Trier, Germany, and at the Cluny Museum in Paris. Forty other figures of triple-horned bulls survive at such well-known sites as Glanum in Provence and the ringfort of Maiden Castle in Dorset. Figures of bulls are carved in stone near Burghead, northeastern Scotland.