Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference)

by James MacKillop

  Lastly, not all islands are at sea. Expanses of flat land, plains, are like islands in that they offer the foot-traveller respite from rough ground. Perhaps that is why Mag Mell [pleasant plain] is sometimes portrayed at sea and sometimes on land. Bran passes it on his way to Emain Ablach in Imram Brain, where salmon romp like calves. At other times it is linked to the actual Mag Dá Cheó [plain of two mists], south of Medb’s fortress of Cruachain in what is today Co. Roscommon, or it may lie in the southwest of Ireland. Not only is its location variable, but it may have as many as three rulers. Usually the monarch of Mag Mell is the forthright Labraid Luathlám ar Claideb [swift hand on sword] whose beautiful wife’s name Lí Ban means ‘paragon of women’. She is her husband’s irresistible emissary to Cúchulainn in Serglige Con Culainn [The Sickbed of Cúchulainn] (see Chapter 10). Other attributed kings are Goll mac Doilb and Boadach.

  Just as there is no single ruler of Mag Mell so there is no personality to lay claim to the title ‘king of the otherworld’. Eochaid Iúil is the adversary of Labraid Luathlám of Mag Mell, but it is not clear where he reigns. Tethra of the demonic Fomorians has otherworldly resonances but he presides over no named realm. Neither does Eógan Inbir rule a happy kingdom, and he is diminished when his wife Bé Chuma cuckolds him with Gaidiar, the son of Manannán mac Lir. As his name appears more often in early texts than any of his rivals’, Manannán, the otherworldly sea god, usually bests them. He appears in the four major cycles of early Irish literature and roams the Irish Sea, touching upon Scotland, the Isle of Man and Ireland at will.

  PART TWO

  Irish Myths

  7

  Irish Beginnings: the Lebor Gabála Erenn

  PSEUDO-HISTORY

  We do not know how the Celts envisioned the beginning of their world. No cosmogony, cosmology or creation myth in a Celtic language survives to our time. There is no Celtic document to explain the origin of the universe as one finds in Hesiod’s Theogony among the Greeks or in the two Eddas from early Iceland. Classical commentators, including Julius Caesar (first century BC), testify that the Gauls had a cosmogony, but almost none of it can now be found. One line from the geographer Strabo (first century AD) speaks of the Gaulish belief in the indestructibility of the world. There is no trace of such beliefs in Irish, Welsh or Breton tradition, although John Shaw (1978) has found a story on the creation of the Milky Way Galaxy among the exiled Scottish Gaels in Nova Scotia (see Chapter 14). The most extensive origin story we have is Irish, and it does not address how the cosmos or humans came about but rather how different peoples, some of them fabulous, came to Ireland. This narrative, usually classed as a ‘pseudo-history’, is the Lebor Gabála Érenn (Modern Irish: Leabhar Gabhála), often translated as ‘The Book of Invasions’ or ‘The Book of Conquests’ or literally as ‘The Book of the Taking of Ireland’.

  For most readers the term ‘pseudo-history’ will be unfamiliar and sound unduly flippant or insulting. The compilers of the twelfth-century text of the Lebor Gabála thought they were writing a reliable record of human events but because of their credulous use of frequently fantastical sources they produced something very different. Several authors over different periods purported to synchronize myths, legends and genealogies from early Ireland with the framework of Biblical exegesis. Such stories as that of the Tower of Babel and Noah’s Flood are taken literally, and Ptolemy’s earth-centred vision of the cosmos orders the authors’ globe. Alwyn and Brinley Rees in Celtic Heritage (1961) describe it as a ‘laborious attempt to combine parts of native teaching with Hebrew mythology embellished with medieval legend’. Less charitably, Patrick K. Ford (1977) calls the Lebor Gabála a ‘masterpiece of muddled medieval miscellany’.

  The full five volumes of the Lebor Gabála appear to have grown over several centuries and were contributed to by many hands. Traces of identifiable but nameless poets appear from the ninth and tenth centuries, the final redaction coming after the eleventh century. Our oldest surviving version appears in the twelfth-century Book of Leinster. Compilers of the narrative do not demonstrate a profound knowledge of the Bible itself but rely instead on Biblical commentators and historians, especially Eusebius (third century AD), Orosius (sixth century), and Isidore of Seville (seventh century). The evidence of Latin learning has caused some modern commentators to suggest that there was once an original version in Latin from which the Irish text is derived, an assertion now largely dismissed.

  Inevitably, the reader of the Lebor Gabála must wonder if there is some tiny grain of fact at the bottom of it all or whether the entire venture is built on moonbeams. The succession of different invasions of the island, culminating with the all-too-mortal Milesians, suggests a parallel with the Four Ages of Man outlined by the Greek Hesiod in Works and Days (c. seventh century BC). The narrative also provides a setting for the first cycle of Old Irish literature, which we now call ‘The Mythological’. A key text of that cycle, Cath Maige Tuired [The (Second) Battle of Mag Tuired/Moytura], extends the action of the Lebor Gabála and is also discussed in this chapter, below. Yet the classification ‘pseudo-history’ reminds us that the Lebor Gabála was once thought a reliable record. Some of the most important historians before modern times struggled to coordinate the Lebor Gabála history to fit with information gathered elsewhere, including Geoffrey Keating (c.1580–c.1645/50), Micheál Ó Cléirigh (1575-c.1645) of the Annals of the Four Masters, and Roderick O’Flaherty (1629–1718). Even the conscientious post-Enlightenment figure Charles O’Conor (1710–91) thought the Lebor Gabála narrative could be accommodated with more trustworthy documents. In the later twentieth century John V. Kelleher of Harvard University devoted decades to solving the text’s many riddles and also encouraged two generations of graduate students to work with shorter sections by using all the resources of modern technology, scrupulously edited manuscripts and more abundant data. Their efforts support the view that certain episodes in the Lebor Gabála contain distant echoes of events that can be demonstrated to have occurred. The same, of course, can be said of numerous medieval legends as well as later folktales.

  To a degree, the Lebor Gabála resembles the earlier passages in the Chronicles compiled by Raphael Holinshed (1577), source for Shakespeare’s King Lear and other dramas, or legend dressed up as history. A key difference is that whereas Holinshed contains the fanciful merging with the documentable record as it becomes available, in the Lebor Gabála early imaginative narrative is contorted to fit a framework inherited from biblical commentators. The text always comes with dates.

  Human history begins with the biblical Flood, which commentators date at 2900 BC or in the supposed ‘year of the world’ 1104 Anno Mundi (abbreviated AM). Dates for all events in the Lebor Gabála vary a great deal, as medieval authorities could not agree on the date of Creation: the Anglo-Saxon historian known as the Venerable Bede (seventh century) argued for 3952 BC and the Septuagints, Greek-speaking Jewish scholars (third century BC), determined 5200 BC, while later authorities opted for 4004 BC. The ancestors of the Irish are known as the Scoti, a people presumed to have originated in Scythia (coextensive with modern Ukraine) who took their name from a daughter of the pharaoh of Egypt known as Scota or Scotia. In fact Scoti is a variant of Scotti, one of several names the historical Romans gave to peoples in ancient Ireland. Sixth-century historical migrations from Ulster to Argyll caused that name to be applied to what we now call Scotland. The Lebor Gabála portrays the Scoti as fellow exiles in Egypt with the Hebrews, whose leader Moses invites them to join the Exodus. This passage may be the source of the long-standing canard that the Irish are a lost tribe of Israel. While in Egypt the Scoti invent their own language. One Fénius Farsaid is described as being present at the separation of languages at Babel and leaving instructions to his grandson, Goídel Glas, to forge the Irish language out of the seventy-two tongues then in existence. The name makes play on the Old Irish word for the Irish language Goídelc.

  The invasions or conquests of the title are found in the iteratio
n of six successive waves of migration to Ireland, named for their leaders or dominant groups: (i) Cesair, (ii) Partholonians, (iii) Nemedians, (iv) Fir Bolg, (v) Tuatha Dé Danann, and (vi) Milesians, as well as the bellicose seafarers, the Fomorians, who are at war with most of the others. With linguistic inconsistency, the Partholonians, Nemedians, Fomorians and Milesians are cited by their English plural form, and the Fir Bolg and Tuatha Dé Danann by Irish forms. Of the seven groups only the last, the Milesians, are mortals, while the other six are either divine or removed to some degree from the human.

  CESAIR, PARTHOLONIANS, NEMEDIANS, FIR BOLG

  The first two invasions are more contrived and less grounded than the subsequent four. A woman comes from the Middle East for the first invasion in a story mixing pious credulity and teasings of sexual fantasy. Cesair (also Cessair, Ceasair, etc.) is the daughter of Bith, a son of Noah, and Birren, who escapes to Inis Fáil [Isle of Destiny, i.e. Ireland] just before the Flood. The disgrace of being denied entry to the Ark causes her to flee her homeland. In an alternative version, she is the daughter of Banba, one of the eponymous goddesses of Ireland. Forty days before the Flood, she arrives at Dún na mBarc on Bantry Bay in County Cork with fifty women and three men. Initially the women are supposed to be divided among the men in hopes that they will populate the island. Two of the men die, leaving the task to Fintan mac Bóchra, ‘husband’ of Cesair and a patron of poets, who feels inadequate to it and flees in the form of a salmon. Left alone, Cesair dies of a broken heart. The unnamed narrator of the story explains the origin of many obscure place names by tracing them to members of Cesair’s retinue. Cold-eyed modern commentators have argued that the etymologies are invented and inserted in the narrative.

  Ireland is empty for 312 years after the death of Cesair, and thus after the Flood, when the beneficent and industrious Partholonians, after seven years’ wandering, land during Beltaine at Inber Scéne, which may be in Co. Kerry in southwest Ireland or Donegal Bay in the northwest. They settle first in the northwest near the falls of Assaroe but later clear four plains, introduce agriculture and are the first to divide Ireland into four parts. Nature welcomes them when seven lakes erupt of their own accord. Among their settlements is the plain of Mag nElta (anglicized Moynalty), coextensive with modern metropolitan Dublin.

  These second invaders are named for their leader Partholón, another person with a Biblical pedigree. He is a descendant of Magog, who lived in the twenty-first year of the Patriarch Abraham. Additionally, he is a ‘prince of Greece’, who murders his own parents, costing himself one eye and bringing a lifelong propensity for bad luck. He is, despite this, ‘chief of every craft’. Whether Partholón is Greek or Hebrew, his name is certainly not Irish, as the letter P was unknown in the earliest versions of the Irish language. The name is most likely borrowed from the Hebrew Apostle’s name Bartholomew, which St Jerome and Isidore of Seville incorrectly glossed as ‘son of him who stays the waters’, i.e. a survivor of the Flood.

  The Partholonians flourish for 5 20 years and rise to a population of 9,000, many of whom have developed characters, such as Partholón’s three brothers, Eólas [knowledge], Fios [intelligence] and Fochmarc [inquiring]. Other specific names are attributed to the first teacher, first innkeeper and first physician. Others introduce gold, cattle-raising and jurisprudence. One Malaliach brews the first ale, later used in divination, ritual and sacrifice. Not all Partholonian innovations are so happy. Partholón’s wife Dealgnaid seduces a servant in the first instance of adultery in Irish literature. In one version Partholón flies into a rage, but in another he is placated by his wife’s verse protest that she should not have been left alone with great temptation.

  Although the Partholonians do battle with the hated Fomorians, their victory does not extinguish the enemy. The Fomorians are sea pirates who use Irish offshore islands as bases for depredation. A hundred and twenty years after Partholón’s death at Tallaght, near modern Dublin, all but one of his people die during a plague in one week in the month of May. According to a variant text, that one survivor is Tuan mac Cairill (sometimes mac Stairn), who lives on to the time of St Colum Cille (c. 521–93/97) to tell the history of the invasions.

  Thirty years after the extinction of the Partholonians, the Nemedians arrive, people who also improve the landscape. Like their predecessors, the Nemedians take their name from a leader with a biblical pedigree; Nemed is descended from Magog and a son of Japheth but still described as a ‘Scythian’. It is from Scythia that the Nemedians depart in thirty-four ships, all but one of which is lost when the party greedily pursues a tower of gold seen at sea. The remaining ship wanders the world for a year before arriving in Ireland at a time and place not made specific.

  Least remarkable and romanticized of the invaders, the Nemedians seem initially to be a shadow of the Partholonians. Four new lakes erupt during their occupation, and they advance civilization by clearing twelve plains and building two fortresses, one in Antrim, the other in Armagh. The latter is named for their queen Macha [Ir. Ard Macha: height of Macha], one of three important figures to bear that name. One of their druids, Mide, eponym for the kingdom of Mide, lights the first fire at Uisnech at the centre of Ireland; it blazes for seven years and lights every chief’s hearth.

  Their singular distinction is in doing heroic battle against the predatory Fomorians, whom they defeat three times. A fourth encounter, however, is catastrophic, forcing the Nemedians to pay a humiliating annual tribute at Samain. Seeking vengeance, the Nemedians storm the Fomorian tower of Tor Conaind on Tory Island off Donegal. The Nemedian hero Fergus Lethderg slays the Fomorian champion Conand, but most of the rest of the brave fighters are slaughtered, only thirty surviving to be scattered around the world. The offspring of those survivors become members of later invasions, the Fir Bolg and the Tuatha Dé Danann. One, Britán Máel, lives in Scotland until the arrival of the Picts, when he moves south, giving his name to Britain and the British.

  Nemed’s son Starn is the ancestor of the fourth wave of invaders, the Fir Bolg, who suffer oppression in a far-off land known as ‘Greece’, where their forced labour includes carrying dirt in leather bags from the valleys to the bare hills above. Under their leader, Semion, a grandson of Starn, they turn their bags into ships and effect an escape, arriving in Ireland at Inber Domnann (Malahide Bay, north of Dublin) on the August feast of Lughnasa, 230 years after Starn’s departure. Their leader at that time is named Dela, whose five sons divide the island among themselves. As their predecessors had prepared Ireland for agriculture, they do not clear plains and no lakes are formed. Neither do they engage the vicious Fomorians. The Fir Bolg are, however, a military people. An early king Rinnal [cf. Ir. rinn: spear-point] is the first to employ weapons with iron heads.

  The name Fir Bolg is usually glossed as ‘men of Builg’, a plural form in Irish. The words are also pronounced as they would be in Irish with a schwa inserted between the I and the g: ‘feer BOL-eg’. The meaning of their name has been much disputed. The earlier folk etymology glossing the name as ‘men of the bags’ [Ir. bolg: bag], once dismissed, has recently gained new currency. Such bags would not be the ones cited in the narrative but ones that signal bellicosity through etymological routes. Within the Lebor Gabála they are thought to take their name from Bolg/Bolga, an ancestor deity. Another interpretation from the mid-twentieth century suggests that Bolg alludes to the Belgae, early historical invaders of Ireland speaking P-Celtic languages (ancient British, Welsh, Cornish, etc.).

  Although the Fir Bolg prevail for a mere thirty-seven years, their era is distinguished by the rule of a great and generous king, Eochaid mac Eirc, who establishes justice and provides that all rain will fall as dew and that every year will yield a harvest. Eochaid also initiates a festival in honour of his wife Tailtiu; the actual festival of that name continued to be celebrated in Co. Meath until the late eighteenth century and was revived briefly in the twentieth.

  The agricultural Fir Bolg meet their end at the hands of the
invading Tuatha Dé Danann at the First Battle of Mag Tuired (distinguished from the better known Second Battle of Mag Tuired – see below). Subsequently, they scatter to distant parts of the Gaelic world, such as Rathlin Island off Co. Antrim in Northern Ireland, the Scottish coast and the far west of Ireland. The imposing archaeological site Dún Aonghusa on Inishmore in the Aran Islands is thought to be named for a Fir Bolg leader. Under heavy caricature, the Fir Bolg persist in Irish and Scottish Gaelic folklore as grotesque helots and cave fairies.

  FOMORIANS

  While not a part of the sequence of six invaders, the malevolent Fomorians exude a sulphurous presence over long stretches of narrative in the Lebor Gabála. They also figure prominently in the action of Cath Maige Tuired [The (Second) Battle of Mag Tuired], but portrayals are not coordinate across the two texts. Learned opinion today sees the Fomorians as euhemerized sea deities, pre-Christian divinities who came to be thought of as human, especially as demonic pirates. Earlier commentators invented lineages for them from the materials at hand. Their conception predates both the composition of the Lebor Gabála and the advent of Christianity. Linking them to the Bible, ecclesiastical scribes explained the Fomorians as the progeny of Ham, Noah’s least favoured son. Later they were portrayed as giants or elves, or were seen with goat- or horseheads or other misshapen features. Historical experience contributed to their vilification as they took on the behaviour of sea-raiders from the north, first from the Scottish islands and more extensively from the Norse lands. Thus they are seen as wantonly cruel bullies, cutting off the noses of those who will not pay them tribute.