Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference)

by James MacKillop

  Spectacularly beautiful but mostly unarable land, the Highlands have been so obscured by more than two centuries of romance set among their misty crags that few readers perceive how impoverished they have been and how cut off from the mainstream of European culture. There were almost no roads in the Highlands until the eighteenth century and thus few wheeled vehicles. Individuals did not own land, which was held by powerful clan chiefs, much like medieval lords. In 1745–6, many Highlanders supported a disastrous rebellion to restore the Stuart pretender, Prince Charles Edward or ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’, to the thrones of Scotland and England. The misguided effort ended in the last battle fought in Great Britain, at Culloden Moor, in April 1746, a catastrophe for Highland culture. In the subsequent repression of the rebels, traditional dress was forbidden and the Gaelic language vehemently discouraged. In time the clan chiefs, most of whom now resided in distant cities, decided that flocks of sheep would be more profitable on their lands than humans were, and so began the Clearances. These led to the destruction of tenants’ cottages and the driving off of the inhabitants, often at gunpoint. They were put on ships and settled in distant lands, such as Canada and Australia. In their famous walking tour of the Highlands in the 1770s, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell described an exotic, semi-savage population living in debilitating poverty. On entering villages they were greeted by barefoot, begging children, their faces blackened by living in smoky stone cottages without chimneys. Today the Highland population still residing on traditional lands is a tiny fraction of the whole of Scotland, about 270,000 people in a nation of nearly 6 million.

  Although Scottish Gaelic literary tradition has been Christian since the establishment of the monastery of Iona in the Inner Hebrides by St Colum Cille (d. 597), it did not produce great ecclesiastically fostered medieval collections of written narratives as Ireland and Wales did. Scottish Gaelic marginal notes appear in the Latin texts of the Gospels in The Book of Deer (1131–53) but more substantial writing in the language did not appear until early modern times with The Book of the Dean of Lismore (1512–26). Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century bards, patronized by clan chiefs, left substantial written records of their carefully wrought poetry. But the great body of narrative lore was passed down through oral tradition of the illiterate peasantry and not recorded until the nineteenth century. Among the great collections are John Francis Campbell’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands, 4 vols. (1861), and Archibald Campbell’s Waifs and Strays in Celtic Tradition, 4 vols. (1889–91). In these and other volumes we find familiar Irish characters such as Cúchulainn, Deirdre, Fergus, Angus Óg and especially Fionn mac Cumhaill. When James Macpherson uncovered Fionn and Oisín in Scottish Gaelic ballads sometime before 1760 and fashioned Fingal and Ossian from them, he clearly did not perceive their Irish provenance. Scottish Gaelic texts often replicate narratives found in Irish, sometimes transforming earlier stories but also embroidering new episodes onto old patterns. Further, different themes command priority in Scotland, especially an interest in second sight.

  From the Scottish Gaelic dà shealladh [two sights], second sight or clairvoyance is a widespread phenomenon in traditional belief. A person with the power is known as a taibhsear, best translated as ‘seer’. Among the Irish the Fenian hero Diorruing is credited with such ability. A generic model would have the taibhsear behold a phantom funeral cortège passing along a road, escorting the body of a man still in robust health with no thought of death, only to have the person die shortly after this vision. What is seen in second sight need not be dour or gloomy, but in Scotland that is usually the case. A person endowed with dà shealladh does not cause unpleasant events to take place or receive any joy in having them come to pass.

  The most celebrated Scottish Gaelic possessor of second sight is known, fittingly, as ‘Sombre Kenneth’. Despite the intense belief in his historicity and dozens of websites proclaiming his prophecies into the Internet age, there is only skimpy evidence that there ever was such a person. He is usually known in English by the late coinage ‘Brahan Seer’, after Brahan Castle, about fifteen miles northwest of the city of Inverness. If he lived he would have been known in Gaelic as Coinneach Odhar Fiosaiche, ‘Sombre Kenneth of the Prophecies’. Some sources boldly give his name as Kenneth MacKenzie because he is thought to have been part of Clan MacKenzie, but as a Gaelic speaker he is unlikely ever to have been addressed under this English form. Anglicized phonetic renderings like ‘Kenneth Oaur’ or ‘Owir’ are more probable.

  A substantial body of oral traditions in Scottish Gaelic about the person and prophecies of the Brahan Seer began to gather in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This lore has been widely known from the Outer Hebrides in the west, across the Isle of Skye and the former shire of Inverness to eastern Ross-shire, especially the peninsula in the Moray Firth known as the Black Isle. At the centre of this lore is the episode of the Earl of Seaforth’s sojourn in Paris in 1663, in which Coinneach, still at home, reveals the absent nobleman’s adultery. No record of the Brahan Seer and his prophecies appears in print until Thomas Pennant’s A Tour in Scotland (1769), a century later. Now that the Seer has become a recognized phenomenon, modern scholars have scoured documents for references to him, and what they find is inconvenient to his legend. One ‘Kennoch Owir’ was prosecuted for witchcraft, on 23 January 1577, on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, eighty-six years before the Seaforth revelations.

  Elizabeth Sutherland (1985) has concluded that while there may have been a man known as Coinneach Odhar, in oral tradition this has become a collective name for a number of taibhsears, and that the named persona has drawn a whole prophetic tradition to it. A representative pronouncement that defines that personal vision is the often repeated, ‘The Highland people will become so effeminate as to flee their native country before an army of sheep.’ The depopulation of the Highlands was, of course, the central tragedy of Gaelic history. And while the calamity of Culloden could eventually be romanticized, the departure of whole families from a once warlike people, not always through the forced Clearances, evoked only bitterness and shame. Frequent citation of the Brahan Seer within Gaelic oral tradition colours the tone of all adjacent stories. He is also said to have foreseen, in more surreal language, the building of the Caledonian Canal linking Loch Ness and the sea. We have no assurance, however, that any such prophecies were ever uttered. The words of the Brahan Seer began to appear in newspapers in the late 1850s and were not collected in book form until 1877. Even if we could prove that a vision predated the described event, there is no way of knowing if Coinneach Odhar was the originator of it.

  Persistent as interest in the Brahan Seer has been, his persona is hardly a unique phenomenon. Some of his gloomier utterances have been traced to Norse antecedents, perhaps derived from the large number of Scandinavians who settled in Gaelic Scotland. Some part of the lore surrounding him is probably derived from that of the thirteenth-century Scottish poet called Thomas the Rhymer, who is credited with living with the Queen of the Fairies and predicting the death of Alexander III, the Battle of Bannockburn and the union of Scotland and England. In his retention of a band of true believers into the twenty-first century the Brahan Seer also invites comparison with the French astrologer usually known as Nostradamus (1503–66). The prophecies of both include highly gnomic language requiring some interpretation in order to be applied to any event. Yet some of the Brahan Seer’s visions are quite specific, especially those dealing with the family of the Earl of Seaforth, including birth deformities of children, family tragedies and the eventual extinction of the line. All of these came to pass. Further ‘proof’ of the Brahan Seer’s veracity appears from time to time in the press. He is thought to have said, ‘When the ninth bridge cross the Ness, there will be fire, flood and calamity.’ That ninth bridge was built in 1987. Within two years there was a disastrous fire: the Piper Alpha oil rig exploded in the North Sea, killing 167 workers. This was followed by flood when the 127-year-old rail bridge acro
ss the Ness was washed away. And lastly calamity: Pan Am flight 123 crashed on Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 279 and burning portions of the town. In the next decade we see fulfilment of a more benign vision: ‘When men in horseless carriages go under the sea to France, then Scotia shall rise anew from all oppression.’ The tunnel under the English Channel opened in spring, 1994. And the Scottish Parliament, closed for nearly 300 years, reopened in July, 1999.

  NOVA SCOTIA

  The furthest flung, newest and least studied canton of the Celtic world lies in the Canadian Maritime province of Nova Scotia. Large numbers of impoverished, landless Gaelic-speaking Highlanders were settled there from the late eighteenth century through to the middle of the nineteenth. They came from the former shires of Inverness, Argyll and Ross, both the mainland and the Hebridean Islands. Some were victims of the Clearances. Whereas Irish, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic were once spoken, written and published elsewhere in North America, only in Nova Scotia did a widespread oral tradition flourish, one that has persisted until the twenty-first century. The 1900 census recorded 100,000 speakers, most of them born in the province. This Gàidhealtachd [Gaelic-speaking region] encompassed most of Cape Breton Island and the mainland counties south of the Cumberland Strait.

  Given the relative poverty of Gaelic-speakers in the hinterlands of a remote province, traditions there were little heeded by the majority culture. Official disdain helped suppress the language until the late twentieth century when most native speakers had died off. Conventional observation held that Cape Bretoners, or ‘Capers’, had scant literature meriting much attention. Recent study corrects this misapprehension. Margaret MacDonell’s The Emigrant Experience: Songs of Highland Emigrants in North America (1982) shows how a highly sophisticated, disciplined Gaelic literary culture extended uninterrupted from Scotland to Nova Scotia and smaller settlements in Ontario and North Carolina. Despite the emphasis on adapting to a new environment, the texts MacDonell examines include continuing references to Scottish experience and place-names, such as Strathglass, Gairloch and Islay. Their isolation and linguistic separateness foster a striking cultural conservatism in Nova Scotian Highland settlers.

  The ambience of the Scottish homeland is more evident among the tales of unlettered Gaelic speakers, with references to kings and castles never seen in the New World. Adventures of Irish heroes such as Cúchulainn, Fionn mac Cumhaill, Oscar and Diarmait (also known in Gaelic Scotland) are extended in a land of herring fisheries and maple trees. Some of the traditions that migrated to Nova Scotia, however, are not recorded in Scotland. Their existence supports the documentable pattern that archaic survivals are found at the periphery of a given cultural area. Most of the Highlanders in Nova Scotia emigrated before folklore and folktales were thought worth recording.

  Recording of Gaelic lore in Nova Scotia did not begin until the twentieth century, and the storyteller with the most extensive repertory, Joe Neil MacNeil (1908–97), was not interviewed until the 1970s. The Harvard-trained scholar John Shaw transcribed, edited and translated his stories in Tales Until Dawn (1987) when MacNeil was in advanced years. A fragment not included in the collection gives what is possibly the only item of cosmology from the Celtic world. In it the origin of the Milky Way galaxy is depicted as emerging from two trees separated by a loch, as if to complete an arch between them. The narrator places this episode within the well-known Ulster story of Deirdre, here spelled ‘Deirdire’. Her lover here is named Nois [Noise], one of the ‘Children of Uisneach’ [Uisnech]. In this variant the sons of Uisneach are killed in a great, unnamed battle, after which Deirdire falls into the grave with the men. The bodies of the two lovers are exhumed and reburied on either side of the burial mound. Soon a tree grows from each grave and rises until the two join. This arouses a great deal of vengeful malice in an unnamed king, who orders that the trees be cut down. Soon another pair of trees grows and joins until the king has them cut down as well. This sequence of events recurs repeatedly until the king decides to have the bodies placed on either side of a loch, a distance too great for the trees to span. Between the trees a cluster of stars gathers in a light trail, Sgrìob Chlann Uisnich [track of the Children of Uisneach]. Shaw reports having also heard this phrase elsewhere in Gaelic Nova Scotia.

  Elements in the three-word Gaelic phrase invite speculative interpretation. Uisnech, along with its associations in the patrimony of Noise and his brothers, is also a prominent hill in Co. Westmeath, an omphalos of pre-Christian Ireland. The druid Mide lit the first fire in Ireland there.

  THE ISLE OF MAN

  A widely known folktale has it that Fionn mac Cumhaill once tore a huge sod of earth from the province of Ulster, thus creating Lough Neagh, and hurled it into the Irish Sea where the sod became the Isle of Man. Thirty-two miles off the coast of Ireland, the Isle of Man has closer cultural ties to Leinster than to nearby Ulster. Further, the island tends to be rocky, not sandy like the shores of Lough Neagh. Metaphorically, however, the story has something useful to impart. The Isle of Man is not the discrete cultural entity that its quasi-independence would imply. It is a 220-square-mile Crown Dependency of the United Kingdom with its own parliament, the Tynwald, and its own banking laws. Until 1974, when the last native speaker died, it had its own language called Manx or Manks. Ancient monuments, such as neolithic chambered tombs and Bronze Age cairns and ringforts, correlate with Irish design. The earliest people of the Isle of Man came from both Britain and Ireland; later there was extensive Norse settlement. For a while in the Middle Ages, the Norse rulers of Man extended their power into the Hebrides in the west of Gaelic Scotland. The Manx language unmistakably derives from Old Irish but has more in common with Scottish Gaelic than with Modern Irish. Its real distinction lies in its being written in English phonetics. The Irish hero Fionn mac Cumhaill, for example, becomes Finn McCooil on Man, while his son Oisín is Oshin. In the Manx language, the Isle of Man is known as Mannin or Ellan Vannin.

  Known to the ancient geographer Ptolemy (second century AD) as Manavia, and to the Romans as Mona, the Isle of Man has a peripheral presence in many early Irish narratives. The sea god Manannán mac Lir takes his name from the Isle of Man, rather than the other way round, as was once thought. Manannán’s realm, Emain Ablach, which has no specific place on the map, is sometimes confused with Man. The otherworldly realm of Dún Scáith and the shaggy-haired warriors known as the Fir Fálgae are speciously associated with the Isle of Man. Absent from the Isle, however, was a native tradition of learning, ecclesiastical or secular, to record Man’s traditions in medieval times. Manx was not a written language until the translation of The Book of Common Prayer (c.1625). After some isolated references in the eighteenth century, disciplined collection of Manx lore did not begin until after the middle of the nineteenth century with William Harrison’s Mona Miscellany (1869), Edward Callow’s The Phynodderree (1882) and Arthur Moore’s Folk-Lore of the Isle of Man (1891).

  The most distinctive figure in Manx oral tradition, and virtually the only one with any currency in the wider English-speaking world, is the solitary fairy known as the fenodyree or phynodderree. The name, never capitalized, may be spelled in nine or ten different ways, testimony to the figure’s persistence in the popular mind and his reappearance before different collectors over time. He is an individual rather than a class, and is often portrayed naked but covered with body hair. In most of European lore, the solitary fairy, as opposed to the trooping fairy, is usually ominous and malignant. Not so this Manx figure. The fenodyree, like the Scottish brownie, can be helpful by performing tasks requiring formidable strength and endurance, such as carrying a huge block of marble a long distance or harvesting an entire field of crops. Admired for this second generous task, he may be known by the complimentary epithet yn foldyr gastey [the nimble mower]. At some earlier point he bore the name uddereek, suggestive of handsomeness, but he was transformed into his familiar but ugly persona for courting a mortal girl from Glen Alden. The fenodyree’s hairy legs suggest to some commentat
ors a parallel with the satyr of classical tradition, but he lacks the requisite sexual aggression. Sometimes the fenodyree is ascribed a wife, with whom he often quarrels. Sometimes he is capable of mischief. When one imprudent man invokes the fenodyree to cure his little red cow he is disappointed with the results. Indeed, the fenodyree can summon powers to heal the little animal, but he also carries it off in the end.

  CORNWALL

  Occupying a long narrow peninsula in southwestern Britain, Cornwall suffers from being thought of as a tourist destination. W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan set their Pirates of Penzance (1879) in the Cornish resort town to imply what a familiar and domesticated place it had become. The extinction of the Cornish language in the eighteenth century has diminished a sense of separateness from the rest of England. The modern county, coextensive with the former duchy of Cornwall, is known in the Cornish language as Kernow. Still known from many documents, as well as from contemporary attempts to ‘revive’ it, Cornish is a Brythonic cousin of Welsh and Breton. As with Scottish Gaelic and Manx, Cornish lacked a learned tradition in medieval times, although the area had been evangelized by Irish monks beginning in the sixth century. Many Arthurian legends are set in Cornwall, notably the story of Tristan, Iseult and King Mark, and some of them take Cornish form. The best known word from the language is ‘Jennifer’, the Cornish form of ‘Guinevere’ or the Welsh ‘Gwenhwyfar’ [white, smooth], once a characteristic woman’s name there. The Gospels began to be translated in the tenth century, and the Cornish mystery plays of the fifteenth century are much admired as supreme examples of late medieval drama. Despite some odd snatches in Edward Lhuyd’s Archaeologia Britannica (1707), collections of Cornish oral tradition did not appear until a century after the death of the language when stories were known only in English form. These collections were by Robert Hunt, Popular Romances of the West of England (1865) and William Bottrell, Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall (1870).