Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference)

by James MacKillop

  The most resilient figure from Cornish oral tradition to have made its way into English discourse is the pixie, an adaptation of the earlier piskie. The more historical spelling ‘piskie’ has been so displaced by the more familiar ‘pixie’ that it is no longer recognizable to most readers, but somewhat different phenomena are denoted by the different forms. In the collections of Hunt and Bottrell, the piskie (also pigsie) is a wizened-looking, weird old man who threshes grain. He may mislead folks through a ‘piskie-ride’ on horseback. The term ‘pixie’ was known in English at least sixty years before Hunt and Bottrell and derives from traditions in Somerset and Devon as well as Cornwall, perhaps carried to neighbouring counties by Cornish migrants. These pixies, even when they rise to mortal size, have definable characteristics: they are red-headed, with pointed ears, turned-up noses and short faces. They are usually seen naked, are known to squint, and like to steal horses at night. Like other figures in English oral tradition, Puck or Robin Goodfellow, they are fond of giving wrong directions or misleading travellers. This association gives us the still useful English word ‘pixilated’, adapted from ‘pixie-led’.

  While most Cornish stories are episodic or extended anecdotes, the one known as ‘The Giants of Morvah’ may once have stretched to epic length. Nineteenth-century storytellers report that its many complex details and turns of plot required three nights to recite, but only a précis has been recorded. Morvah of the title is one of Cornwall’s most significant archaeological sites on the windswept northern slopes of the Land’s End promontory, four miles northeast of the town of St Just, in the far west of the county. Standing stones at Morvah include the granite Men-an-Tol [holed stone], a spectacular annular or doughnut-shaped megalith once thought to have curative properties. It is an area where Cornish language and folk customs survived until the latest date. Morvah was also the scene of an annual fair on the first Sunday in August, a counterpart to Lughnasa celebrations in Ireland. ‘The Giants of Morvah’ was recited at the fair. Teasingly, the story contains elements suggesting a possible link to the Irish hero Lug Lámfhota, whose worship lies at the root of Lughnasa.

  There are four giants in the story, Tom the protagonist, Jack his visitor and later friend, and two who are unnamed. One summer’s night when Tom is driving his wagon home, he finds his way blocked by a huge stone and so takes a short-cut across what he thinks is common land. It is not. The resident giant challenges him for trespassing and uproots an elm tree with which to beat Tom. Without losing his composure, Tom overturns his wagon, removing the axle and wheel to use as weapons against the giant. The ground shakes with their blows, but just as exhaustion is about to overtake Tom, he triumphs. He hears people dancing around festive fires but knows he must bury the giant and take possession of his castle and land. A woman named Joan whom Tom had known bathes his wounds, and together they take possession of the castle, which brims with jewels and golden treasure. They live together happily for many years and produce several children of which the oldest is a beautiful daughter named Genevra (variant of Jennifer, Guinevere, etc.). Like the giant before him, Tom tries to keep the curious away from his treasures.

  The serenity of Tom and his happy family does not last. One morning another giant smashes through the front gate with a hammer in his hand. It is Jack the tinkard, with a toolbag on his back. Tin had long been mined in Cornwall, and a handler of tin, a tinker or ‘tinkard’, does not carry the questionable status that calling bears in Ireland. Impatient that Tom’s desire for safety has blocked the road to St Ives, Jack challenges him to combat in wrestling or by slinging stones. Tom responds with a thrust of his axle wheel, but Jack wields his staff so quickly it looks like a spinning wheel. Soon Tom’s weapon is flying over a fence. Rather than gloat at his prowess, Jack offers his friendship and demonstrates that he has many talents, like Lug in his epithet Samildánach [many-skilled]. Jack makes a bow from an elm sapling and quickly slays ten animals for Tom and Joan’s larder.

  Shown the treasures in Tom’s castle, Jack is less impressed with the gold and jewels but more taken with the bits and pieces that he could use in his own work. He uses them to fashion a pearl necklace that he places on Genevra’s head when he takes his place beside her at table. To honour Genevra further, Jack does battle with a second unnamed giant at Morvah. He takes the stone cover off an old mineshaft and his adversary falls down it. Jack thus becomes the possessor of the Morvah giant’s treasures. He weds Genevra during a huge feast on the first Sunday in August. In each successive year the anniversary is celebrated, with Jack teaching friends and relations skills they did not know existed. In time the commemoration grows to such an extent that it seems more like a fair, Morvah Fair, than a wedding anniversary.

  BRITTANY

  The name ‘Brittany’ (cf. Fr. Bretagne) enjoys a strange euphony in our ears. This is true despite – perhaps because – the region is so little known in the English-speaking world. The ancient name for the peninsula jutting out from northern France was Armorica, a term still occasionally seen in print. The current name, which means literally ‘Little Britain’, commemorates a migration of Brythonic-speaking peoples from the island of Great Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries. Modern Bretons see themselves as descended from the ancient Britons, although their gene pool gains from many other peoples, including the ancient Gauls pushed westward by the advancing Franks. Why the Britons should have left Britain has been subject to much interpretation. An earlier view that they were driven out by predatory Saxon invaders now seems less likely. More prosaic reasons like famine and economic hardship are more probable. In Welsh tradition the emigrants from Britain were led by St Cynan Meiriadog (or Meriodoc), who was rewarded with tracts of land for his service to the Roman emperor known to the Britons as Macsen Wledig. First composed of a series of culturally related petty kingdoms, Brittany was an independent duchy through the Middle Ages until 1532. It remained a mostly Breton-speaking province of France until Napoleonic times, when it was divided into five (later four) départements. Despite the efforts of sometimes violent nationalist groups, the four départements remain integrated into the rest of the nation, but important cultural distinctions remain. New houses, for example, must by law be constructed in Breton style, with black slate roofs and cream stucco walls. Urban industrial workers retain deep enthusiasm for traditional Breton dress and folk dances. And though records are inconclusive, several hundred thousand people still speak the Breton language. The name for Brittany in the Breton language is Breizh.

  The Welsh ecclesiastical traveller Giraldus Cambrensis (c.1146-1223) tells us that spoken Breton was more closely related to the Cornish of his day than to the Welsh. Modern linguistic analysis confirms his observation. In recent centuries Breton has made many borrowings from Welsh, but contemporary spoken Breton and Welsh are not mutually comprehensible. Neither early Welsh literary development nor written Cornish, like the miracle plays, seems to have had much influence on Breton writers. The Anglo-Norman Marie de France (fl. c.1160–90) introduced a purported Breton narrative form, the lai or lay, to mainstream European literature. Many of her lais, in addition, employ Breton themes. Several Arthurian stories have Breton settings, such as the forest of Brocéliande, where Merlin was imprisoned, and Arthurian figures are reshaped in Breton form, for example Perceval as Peronnik. Giraldus also speaks of many ‘tale-telling Bretons and their singers’, but no Breton literature of any kind is known before 1450.

  Written Breton literature did not commence for almost another 400 years when Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué (1815–96) produced Barzaz Breiz [Breton Bards] in 1839. As an admirer of James Macpherson’s spurious Poems of Ossian, as well as of the Welsh charlatan Iolo Morganwg (1747–1826), La Villemarqué looks like a pseudo-medievalist to the modern sceptical eye. Although his poems and stories lacked the antiquity of the originals of his contemporary Lady Charlotte Guest’s translations in The Mabinogion (1838–49), and he was a bowdlerizer, La Villemarqué was a better linguist than Macpherson and m
ore faithful to sources in oral tradition. His texts are still used today in university courses in Breton literature.

  Relatively few Breton narratives have any currency outside Brittany, but the best-known of them has also been widely known within Breton tradition, surviving in three versions. Its usual Breton title is Kêr Is [City of Is], known in English as ‘The Legend of the City of Ys’. One of a half-dozen flood legends in Celtic languages, the story explains how a once sinful city came to be submerged beneath the Bay of Douarnenez in southwest Brittany. Turning on the central theme of pagan excess in conflict with Christian restraint, its three permutations always include at least three characters. The first is Gradlon (or Gralon) Meur [the great], a pious and saintly king who protects his city by building a dike. His name is still much associated with the city of Quimper (Bret. Kemper), where his statue sits between the two towers of the cathedral. Second is his beautiful, wilful and lascivious daughter Dahut (also Dahud, Ahé, Ahés), who brings grief to the kingdom. And third is the abbé Guénolé, an historical figure credited with founding the first monastery in Brittany at Landévennec in the fifth century.

  In his youth, King Gradlon had practised the old faith. When he took a wife, it was thought in his kingdom that she was not of this world. After the birth of her daughter, Dahut, the wife returns to the sea whence she came. While hunting one day with his men, Gradlon happens upon a pious hermit in the woods, Corentin (or Korentin), who appears to have no food to feed his guests. The hermit then performs a miracle that deeply impresses the king. He takes a minnow from a well and cuts it in half with his knife. The half he keeps becomes the basis of a bounteous feast, with fish, meat and fruit in abundance. The half of the fish returned to the water grows whole again so that Corentin can repeat the miracle on another occasion. Thunderstruck at what he has seen, Gradlon declares himself for the new faith, Christianity, and sees to it that Corentin is installed as bishop in Quimper. Churches, chapels and cloisters begin to appear, and under Corentin’s urging Gradlon passes new laws curbing fleshly excesses and promoting temperance, virtue and restraint instead.

  Dahut is displeased with this turn of events, finding the new Quimper joyless. Her father calls her tone blasphemous. Changing the subject, she complains that she lives too far from the ocean. She begs her father to build her a city by the sea and says she will then be content. And so Gradlon spares no expense to meet her wishes, constructing the new city of Ys with spacious public squares and tall white towers. Bishop Corentin notes that Ys lacks churches and, to Dahut’s chagrin, Gradlon adds them. The king’s daughter recommends other additions. Seeing that Ys has been built on low ground, she asks that her father construct a protective dike, with sluices that can be opened to fill the city’s needs. He complies.

  In the oldest and simplest version of the story, Dahut secretly entertains her lover, and the two of them, driven to frenzy by wine, steal Gradlon’s key to open the sluice gates, flooding the city.

  The more familiar second version has much more to say about Ys as a commercial centre given to luxury and debauchery. To ensure her dominance over the churches Gradlon has built, Dahut consults the pagan sisterhood of the isle of Sein, women who still worship the old gods. They conjure up the korrigans, small but lustful creatures who seek carnal relations with innocent Christians and are also magnificent builders. They fashion a new castle for Dahut, both elegant and imposing, that towers over Gradlon’s church. Before long the church is nearly abandoned, with weeds pushing up between the stones at its door. Learning of this, as well as of Dahut’s fostering of public practice of the seven capital sins, abbé Guénolé is filled with loathing and disgust. Taking the tone of the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, Guénolé foretells the ruin of the City of Ys.

  A small boy named Kristof sets in motion some of the forces working against Ys. After casting stones in the water with a crooked stick, the boy catches a magical fish who offers riches in exchange for his liberty. With her usual haughtiness, Dahut mocks this exchange, and so the fish responds with a magical spell upon her, making her pregnant with a son who can claim no father. About a year later, Dahut’s father Gradlon puts his daughter, Kristof and the baby boy in a cask and sets them out to sea, where yet another city with palaces appears. Ys remains in danger, however, because Kristof has magically removed a protective oak.

  Although Gradlon is nominally king of Ys, his paternal indulgence to Dahut means that she sets the tone for the city, especially the moral tone. With the help of the korrigans, she contrives that Ys may become a lure for unwary sailors, capsizing their ships nearby so that they may be looted by the immoral city’s depraved denizens. Each night she takes a new lover whose face is covered in a black silken mask. When she tires of his attentions, she ties a fatal knot in the mask’s strings, leading to the painful death of the rejected gigolo. This pattern continues until she receives a suitor unlike any of the others. Dressed all in red he refuses to wear her black mask and meets her bare-faced. Charming her with his impudence, he tells her that he will make her his bride in his palace of fire with columns of smoke, if only she gives him what he wants: the key to the sluices in the dike. She responds that this is impossible for the key is tied around her father’s shoulder. Then, with much stealth, she retrieves the key and gives it to the stranger, but when she reaches up to touch his cheek he is no longer there.

  As soon as the key enters its slot, the sea begins to rush into the city. Guénolé raises the alarm in Gradlon’s palace and urges the king to flee on his steed Morvarc’h [horse of the sea] before they are all inundated. Still the doting father, Gradlon pulls up his worthless daughter behind him as he sets off at a gallop. The water is seething and foaming at Morvarc’h’s fetlocks, ready to submerge them both, when a voice from behind calls out to him, ‘Throw the demon you carry into the sea if you do not wish to perish.’ At that moment Dahut falls from Morvarc’h, and the water recedes, allowing Gradlon to escape and to reach Quimper safely. Ys is now submerged, but Dahut lingers on as a siren-like mermaid, calling out to sailors about to be shipwrecked.

  Roles are substantially changed in a third version, known only in ballad tradition. This time Gradlon leads the people in extravagance and debauchery, and freely gives the key to Dahut, who misuses it. Once again she survives as a mermaid who haunts the waters at Douarnenez.

  The popularity of the story in Breton oral tradition invites a wide array of variants. The City of Ys may also be located on the Étang de Laval on the desolate shores of the Bay of Trépassés [the dead]. A later narrative appendix describing an underwater church whose bell was still ringing but which would emerge on a clear morning inspired Claude Debussy’s piano prelude La Cathédrale engloutie [the sunken cathedral] (1910). That same popularity has made the corruption of Ys proverbial, as in the Breton slurring pun on the name of the French capital, par Is, from the Breton par [like], that is, Paris = ‘like Ys’.

  GALICIA AND ASTURIAS

  Chapter 7 reminds us that the historical links between early Ireland and Spain as depicted in the Lebor Gabála, once dismissed as pure fantasy, have been substantiated by recent scientific study. Research into national DNA patterns shows that the two countries are indeed closely connected. Upon a closer look, however, the tie is more than genetic. Barry Cunliffe in The Ancient Celts (1997) traces archaeological links between Spain and Ireland going back as far as the fourth millennium BC. Language once supplied another bridge, now vanished. Celtic speakers flourished in the Iberian Peninsula for several centuries before their culture was overcome by the Romans. The most significant numbers were in the northwest corner, the former province of Gallaecia, where Latin displaced the native language after the third century AD. That region is coextensive with the modern provinces of Galicia in the far northwest and Asturias its neighbour to the east. The pre-eminent twentieth-century specialist in Galician folklore, Vicente Risco (1884–1963), reckoned that Galician culture was basically Latin, but with a Celtic soul.

  Evidence from early Iberi
an tradition supports the vision of Spain found in the Lebor Gabála. An early tower did indeed stand in the harbour of La Coruña, which could have served as the model for the one which Breogan builds and Íth climbs to see Ireland on the horizon. Lost now, it was replaced in the second century AD by the oldest working Roman lighthouse, known as the Tower of Hercules. Hundreds of abandoned castros, small defended Celtic-era towns consisting of round stone houses dating from as early as 1000 BC, can be found throughout the area. ‘Céltigo’ turns up frequently as a name for a village or rural district. Monte Pindo, a pink granite mountain on the Atlantic coast near Fisterra in Galicia, is also known as Olimpo Celta, ‘the Celtic Olympus’.

  Galicia’s claim for a place at the Celtic table seems not yet to have entered a wider consciousness, but the case continues to be made. Traditional music groups from Galicia such as Milladoiro find a warm welcome at Pan-Celtic festivals. The distinguished Galician literary figure Leandro Carré Alvarellos (1888–1976) has argued that the legends of his home province reflect a Celtic culture and psychology, and the Irish academic Elizabeth Frances Keating has devoted a book, Afinidades Culturais entre Galicia e Irlanda (1990) to these cultural affinities.