Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference)

by James MacKillop

  Two spring goddesses attracted extensive cults in Roman Britain – Sulis and Coventina. With worship centred at Bath, Sulis was a native deity whose cult merged with that of the Roman Minerva, a process described in Chapter 2. Although some scholars have asserted that Sulis was originally male, she is referred to as dea [goddess] in Roman commentaries, and the much-photographed surviving bronze head of Sulis depicts an unmistakably female face. As with Coventina, Sulis patronized both eye ailments and female disorders. The model bronze and ivory breasts found at Bath may have been worn as amulets by mothers until their infants were weaned and then given in thanksgiving to Sulis for having encouraged lactation. But Sulis was also a scold. Found at her shrine are 130 defixiones or curse tablets. These are sheets of pewter or lead inscribed with messages to the goddess filled with complaints against bullies and perceived enemies with requests for retribution. Such curse tablets also exist in the Mediterranean world, but here they beseech a healing goddess to invert her beneficent powers.

  Like Sulis, Coventina’s worship was focused on one particular site, namely what is now Carrawburgh on Hadrian’s Wall, although evidence of her cult can be found as far afield as southern Gaul and northwestern Spain. A well-preserved stone relief portrays her flanked by two nymphs, which may be a triple image of the goddess herself, as she is also nymphlike. Precious tributes are found at her shrine, including 16,000 coins, finger rings, brooches and decorative pins, such as appear at sites of other healing deities, including Aesculapius or Asclepius. There is little direct evidence, however, to prove she was a healing goddess and she may have been what Lindsay Allason-Jones (1989) calls an ‘all-rounder’ goddess, a kind and generous protector against all the evils afflicting mankind.

  HAGS

  A woman’s beauty can be counted on to catch the eye of the beholder. So will a woman’s ugliness. During most of modern literature, beginning at least with Provençal troubadours of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the reader has become used to the simple equation that beauty equals desirability and that ugliness invites disdain and rejection. Early Irish and Welsh narrative tradition presents more complex portraits. Men still prefer the company of beautiful women, but a woman’s role within a story is not complete with a mere assessment of her appearance. The ill-favoured hags of the sovereignty stories, cited in Chapter 3, reward most generously the prospective kings who make love to them. Similarly, the gorgeous Welsh Blodeuedd (whose name means ‘flower face’, Chapter 13) turns out to be a catastrophic mate, filled with deceit and treachery. We cannot know the implications of a pretty or an ugsome face, whether benign or malevolent, until we see how the persona behind it completes her role in the narrative.

  A woman’s ugliness can contribute to her arresting dramatic entrance, such as that of the seer Cailb in the pre-eleventh-century story Togail Bruidne Da Derga [The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel]. Da Derga, Conaire and all the guests are seated when, after sunset, a lone woman asks to be let in. The narrator then pauses for a paragraph on her surreal hideousness: shins as dark as a stag beetle and as long as a weaver’s beam; her ‘lower hair’ reaches to her knees and her lips are on one side of her head. Entering and proclaiming herself Cailb the seer, she rebuffs a challenge to the apparent meaninglessness of her name by standing on one foot, holding up one hand and chanting in one breath the thirty-two different names she can bear, including Badb. Her appearance, the assembly learns, foreshadows the fearsomeness of her prophecy that all present will be destroyed except for what the birds can carry off in their claws.

  The Irish hero Cúchulainn usually has an easy time with prominent beauties but encounters mighty adversaries among the ugly. The Scottish druidess Dornoll takes Cúchulainn as student in her martial instruction and falls deeply in love with him. His resistance to her wins her continuing enmity. Cúchulainn takes instruction with the amazonian Scáthach on the Isle of Skye, after which he encounters a grotesque one-eyed hag while travelling along a narrow ridge. She is Éis Énchenn, who first commands and then begs that he get out of her way. When he complies, clinging only by his toes, she strikes him, trying to knock him down the cliff. He counters with his thrusting salmon leap, severing her head.

  The hero Fionn mac Cumhaill also faces frightful female adversaries. The three ugly daughters of Conarán try to punish Fionn and some companions for violating the taboo of hunting without permission, by entrapping them in a cave. Fionn’s former enemy Goll mac Morna saves them by killing the three sisters.

  Ugly women in early Welsh narrative also appear formidable initially, but, like their Irish sisters, they are bested by male figures. The women often gain control of fantastic cauldrons. The myth of the cauldron runs very deep in Celtic culture, beginning with the great treasures from the ancient world. The extensively studied Gundestrup Cauldron, recovered in Denmark (see pp. xix–xx, 38), is covered with artistic decoration that provides a kind of Rosetta Stone for the interpretation of early religion. Numerous cauldrons appear in both Welsh and Irish narrative, always with magical properties, such as bubbling inexhaustibly or offering unique powers; they are probably ancestors of the Arthurian Grail. The haggish Ceridwen, a shape-shifting witch, keeps a cauldron of knowledge at the bottom of Bala Lake in north Wales, hoping to reserve its powers for her children, the fair-faced daughter Creirwy or the hideous son Morfran. Three savoury drops intended for Morfran fall instead to Gwion Bach, granting to him unique powers of insight and superhuman wisdom. Ceridwen then pursues Gwion Bach and the two shift shapes until she at last consumes him as a grain of wheat. The grain impregnates Ceridwen, and nine months later she gives birth to Taliesin, the divinely inspired poet (see Chapter 13).

  In Branwen, the Second Branch of the Mabinogi, the ill-featured giantess Cymidei Cymeinfoll [W. bloated with war] becomes a personification of a cauldron of regeneration. Just as the cauldron could bring alive dead warriors, so she could create them by becoming pregnant and giving birth to fully armed soldiers every six weeks. The hero Matholwch incarcerates Cymidei and her husband Llassar Llaes Gyfnewid in an iron house, which he then burns. The couple escape and give the cauldron to Brân/Bendigeidfran, the deity later described as the ‘king of Britain’.

  Of all the females with ill-favoured visages, the one who generates the most extensive lore is Cailleach Bhéirre, known in English as the Hag of Beare, cited as a sovereignty figure at the end of Chapter 3. Named for the Beare Peninsula between Bantry Bay and the Kenmare River in west Co. Cork, she is linked to several locations in the south and west of Ireland and has similarly named counterparts in Gaelic Scotland and the Isle of Man. Undoubtedly first a goddess, she is featured in a poem of AD 900, where she is an old woman lamenting the loss of her youth, and she remained celebrated in both written and oral tradition up through the twentieth century. Somewhat sinister but wise, she came to be thought of as a nun in early Christian times; the word cailleach comes from the Latin for a veil, pallium. But she also speaks of having had many lovers, children, foster-children, as well as grandchildren and great-grandchildren; she never relates Christian wisdom.

  Her physical unattractiveness, rooted in her early associations with sovereignty, never contributes to a sense of villainy for the Cailleach Bhéirre. In the earliest traditions, she is thought to have taken many lovers while young, including the ferocious Fenian warrior Fothad Conainne. Later she was linked to landforms and attributed with powers that transformed animals into the standing stones surviving from Neolithic times. In Gaelic Scotland, where she was known as Cailleach Bheur, she had a blue face as the daughter of the pale winter sun and became a female spirit of the wilderness and the protectress of wild animals. In Scotland also she took a watery form known as Muileartach. In Ireland citations of her age became proverbial so that when people reached very advanced years they were said to be ‘as old as the Cailleach Bhéirre’. In her lamented lost loves, her crabbed promises of sovereignty to fearful but aspiring princes and her extreme longevity, she became an embodiment of human disappointmen
t, like us in everything except mortality.

  BEAUTIES

  Narrators of early Irish and Welsh literature had different expectations for beauty. It may be a transient quality, like youth, but we do not all share in it. Young heroes stand in awe of female beauty, sometimes in fear of it. Yet in some Celtic narratives are beautiful women who are much more than the apogee of male wish.

  There are, admittedly, some women who are little more than a pretty face, such as Olwen, focus of the quest by young Culhwch in the eleventh-century Welsh narrative in Arthurian setting, Culhwch and Olwen. The hero falls in love with Olwen without so much as seeing her; her name means ‘flower track’, because four white clovers spring up wherever she steps. To find her Culhwch must endure an exhausting quest and, after they meet, he must satisfy her father, the giant Ysbaddaden, by completing forty herculean tasks, culminating in the chaining of the great boar Twrch Trwyth. Meanwhile, the narrative offers few details about Olwen to suggest she will have much to share with Culhwch once he succeeds in winning her.

  What feminists call ‘the male gaze’ is often in evidence, as it is elsewhere in Western culture. Consider the lip-smacking delight in the description of Étaín (also Éodoin, anglicized as Aideen), who is the living standard by which every other beauty is judged. It appears in the eighth- to ninth-century narrative Tochmarc Étaíne [The Wooing of Étaín], which will be considered at length in Chapter 8.

  As white as the snow of one night was each of her two arms, and as red as the foxglove of the mountain was each of her two cheeks. As blue as the hyacinth was each of her two eyes; delicately red her lips; very high, soft and white her two shoulders. Tender, smooth and white were her two wrists; her fingers long and very white; her nails pink and beautiful. As white as snow or as the foam of a wave was her side, slender, long and soft as silk. Soft, smooth and white were her thighs; round and small and firm and white were her two knees; as straight as a rule were her two ankles; slim and foam-white were her two feet. Fair and beautiful were her two eyes; her eyebrows blackish blue like the shell of a beetle. It was she the maiden who was the fairest and the most beautiful that the eyes of man had ever seen…

  (Cross and Slover, 1936: 83)

  Étaín’s way in love is not easy. She is pursued by Midir, who already has a wife, the jealous Fuamnach. She transforms Étaín into an insect only for her to be born again as a younger Étaín more than 1,000 years later.

  A woman’s beauty is never a static or indifferent property. Mugain, the strumpet wife of Conchobar mac Nessa, king of Ulster, bares her breasts to effect change in a warrior’s behaviour. She and her maidens reveal themselves to Cúchulainn, the Ulster champion, ostensibly to stifle his battle fury. Instead he is so startled and embarrassed, or, alternatively, consumed with passion, upon seeing the women that it requires three vats of icy water to cool him down. Countless warriors, especially in the Fenian Cycle, are lured by beautiful women who are later revealed to be transformed animals, especially deer, or lead the warriors to enchanted residences [bruidne in Irish] in which they become entrapped. The golden-haired Niam (Modern Irish: Niamh) leads the Fenian hero Oisín to Tír na nÓg, the land of eternal youth, where he feels he has made only a short sojourn but returns to the land of mortals greatly aged (see Chapter 11).

  Beauty implies more than romantic invitation or sexual promise. In Serglige Con Culainn [The Sickbed of Cúchulainn] the hero, while sleeping next to a pillar stone, dreams of two beautiful women, one dressed in green, the other in red. Laughing all the while, the two women begin to whip him, at first playfully and then so severely that the strength drains from his body, thus the ‘sickbed’ of the title. After a year passes, they are revealed to be two sisters, Lí Ban [paragon of women] and Fand [tear], both already married to powerful husbands. Lí Ban says she means no further harm and only wishes Cúchulainn’s friendship, but also his assistance in fighting her husband’s enemies. After the hero sends his charioteer, Láeg, to go with Lí Ban to investigate the invitation, he agrees and makes short work of three monstrous villains. Later, however, he spends an extended period of lovemaking with Fand, bringing him into conflict with his own wife, Emer (see pp. 212–15).

  Writing in the early twentieth century, Rudolf Thurneysen remarked that whereas men had a choice of routes to high reputation and honour, the inescapable conclusion to be derived from the reading of early Irish literature is that the honour of women was conceived of primarily as sexual. A woman may boast of her chastity or fidelity, whereas a man never does. Similarly, a woman’s unfaithfulness, the possibility that she may love someone other than her mate or bear the child of a man not her husband, was a subject of deep regret or horror, rather than of mere scandal as it would be in later centuries.

  So it is with the two Welsh beauties whose stories appear in the context of the Mabinogi (see pp. 271–83), Rhiannon and Blodeuedd. Perhaps because it falls so euphoniously on the ears of English-speakers, Rhiannon is among the best known names of early Celtic tradition but knowledge of who she is does not seem widely dispersed, even among women bearing the name in contemporary society. By no means a witch, she is one of the main female characters in the first, Pwyll, and third, Manawydan, branches of the Mabinogi.

  Rhiannon’s persona is much older than the medieval text, however. She appears to be derived from the pre-Christian goddess hypothesized as Rigantona and also Epona, the horse goddess. Her pedigree within the Mabinogi also implies supernatural status as she is thought to be the daughter of the king of Annwfn, the otherworld; her name may mean maid of Annwfn. Rhiannon’s first appearance in the narrative is almost cinematic, when she rides in on a white horse, dazzling Pwyll [sense, wisdom, discretion], prince of Dyfed, who instantly falls in love with her. After some confusion about whom she should marry, made worse by Pwyll’s feckless behaviour, they are wed, after which she dispenses precious gifts, evoking her divine origin as a bountiful deity. When she produces a son on May Eve (see Chapter 5), he is stolen, and Rhiannon is falsely accused of the infant’s murder. Her punishment is public penance for seven years, during which time she must sit by the horse-block near the palace gate, offering all visitors a ride on her back. Later she is proved innocent, and the child, now called Pryderi [care, anxiety], is returned to her. When he is full grown, in the Third Branch, Pryderi promises his mother to his comrade-in-arms, Manawydan. A magical mist then lays waste the kingdom, leaving alive only Pryderi and his wife and Rhiannon and her husband. This evil work is revealed to have come from an enchanter, Llwyd, an ally of one of Rhiannon’s former disappointed suitors. Llwyd is then forced to restore Dyfed to its verdancy. At the end of her story, Rhiannon is still a queen. Despite the false accusations against her, humiliations and other misuse, she always retains her sexual honour.

  In that regard her opposite number is Blodeuedd, wife and betrayer of Lleu Llaw Gyffes in Math, the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi. After his mother Arianrhod said he should have no wife of any race, Lleu’s cohorts, the magician Gwydion (secretly Lleu’s own father) and his great-uncle Math, contrive a gorgeous female figure from the flowers of oak, broom and meadowsweet. Her name is Blodeuedd, literally ‘Flower Face’. She brings her husband little pleasure, however. While Lleu is absent she falls in love with a passing hunter, Gronw Pebyr, with whom she plots to kill her husband. As Lleu is invulnerable under normal circumstances, Blodeuedd must find secret means by which he might be taken. She tricks Lleu into a position that exposes him to Gronw, who tries unsuccessfully to kill him. Learning of her treachery and betrayal, Gwydion transforms Blodeuedd into an owl, ominous bird of the night.

  Two beautiful young Irish women escape from dominating men and pay heavy prices for their independence, but their narratives take a different tone from those in the Mabinogi. They flee the ageing, powerful men to whom they were betrothed and assert their own form of honour by cleaving to younger lovers they select for themselves. They are Deirdre (or Derdriu, etc.) from the Ulster Cycle and Gráinne from the Fenian Cycle (see pp. 234�
��7). While their tales share striking parallels, they are also separated by profound differences that depict Deirdre as the more attractive personality. Certainly her adventures and subsequent downfall have been portrayed more often in English-language adaption since 1870, in poetry, drama, fiction, even opera, so that Deirdre is now popularly the best known name of any from early Celtic traditions.

  Deirdre’s story was widely known over many centuries. It is found in two medieval versions, a third from the early nineteenth century and several folk variants from both Ireland and Gaelic Scotland. It was also seen as a fore-tale of the great Irish epic, Táin Bó Cuailnge [The Cattle Raid of Cooley].

  Fedlimid, the chief bard of Ulster at the court of King Conchobar mac Nessa, becomes the father of a baby girl, Deirdre. Even before her birth, the court druid Cathbad prophesies that the girl-child will grow to be a woman of wonderful beauty, but that she will also cause great enmity, leading to the destruction of Ulster. On hearing the druid’s words, several courtiers demand that she be killed, but Conchobar (anglicized Conor) does not wish this. Instead, he fosters her secretly until she is of marriageable age so that he might then take her as his wife.

  The girl is raised in isolation from society, with only the company of a few women, notably Leborcham, a poet and confidante. One day the two of them observe a visiting Conchobar skinning a recently killed calf in the snow. A raven perches nearby, drinking the calf’s blood. Deirdre exclaims at the juxtaposition of the three colours, white snow, red blood and black raven. She declares that the man she marries will have this colouring, and Leborcham responds that such a man exists: with white skin, red cheeks and black hair. He lives nearby, Noise (also Naoise, etc.), a nephew of Conchobar and a son of Uisnech.