Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference)

by James MacKillop

  The links are not to be found with lengthy narratives, such as the Táin Bó Cuailnge or the Mabinogi. Instead, better examples are seen in older oral tradition, especially when malign figures fit well with the Church’s efforts to demonize Celtic inheritance. Such a personage is the lavandeira nocturna, a male devil in female disguise who tries to seduce young women. A counterpart in the north is the ‘washer at the ford’, who is found in all six traditions under a variety of names, bean nighe in Gaelic Scotland and tunnerez noz in Brittany. The washer is also an aspect of the Irish war goddesses Badb and Mórrígan. She is a death omen, sometimes gorgeous and weeping, sometimes hideous and grimacing, who washes bloody garments at the ford of a river and turns to tell the beholder that they are his or hers.

  A close parallel with Ireland and other Celtic countries is the phantom funeral. In Irish folk belief, people who have been ‘taken’ by the fairies are not dead but can sometimes be seen in fairy processions, the sluagh sídhe or slua sí [fairy host] or the sluagh/slua na marbh [host of the dead] from which they might be rescued. A fairy funeral can foretell the death of a person known to the viewer. The Santa Compaña [Holy Company] in Galicia and the huestia [host] and gente buena [good people] in Asturias, complete with coffin, priest and mourners bearing candles, are likewise ghostly funeral processions presaging death.

  The xana is a Galician and Asturian otherworld woman responsible for changelings. Typically, a mother is working outdoors with her infant nearby, but when she returns home in the evening she notices that the child is different. The xana (var. inxana), who lives in a cave, has taken the human mother’s toddler and replaced it with her own. One remedy, collected in 1985 near Llanes on the Asturian coast, is for the mother to bring the xana’s child to the mouth of the cave and shout, ‘Inxana Mora, take your child and give me mine.’

  Irish fairies are associated with mounds or ringforts or earthen circles sometimes called ‘daneforts’ for their supposed connection with Danish Vikings. In Galicia and Asturias the otherworld denizens of ancient monuments, especially the castros, are called mouros (cf. standard Spanish moros). The word is believed to be a corruption of the regional word for ‘dead person’, morto (Spanish muerto), and not related to the Moorish conquest. The mouros are nearly always associated with hidden treasure, usually gold, which makes them close cousins of the Irish leprechaun.

  The Irish fairy known as the púca often takes the form of a ferocious-looking but ultimately harmless large black dog with fiery red eyes; a Scottish Gaelic variant, the cú síth, is dark green rather than black. The urco of Galicia is also a fierce-looking large black dog, with the addition of long ears and horns and a piercing howl but without the red eyes. It always presages misfortune.

  Other examples bring together verbal formulae more specific than motifs and tale types that might be found in many European countries. In one of the better-known Irish tales, the fairies reward a good hunchback when he adds ‘and Wednesday’ to their monotonous song that goes ‘Monday, Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday’. A bad hunchback tries to emulate him by abruptly breaking into the fairies’ revels with ‘and Thursday and Friday’, and is then saddled with the first hunchback’s hump.

  The Galician parallel, collected in Verín in the early twentieth century, shows the characteristic demonizing of fairy lore. A woman disguises herself as a witch by painting wrinkles on her face and wearing smoked glasses, mounting a broom and flying to Seville to join a witches’ Sabbath. She finds them dancing in a circle and singing, ‘Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, three; / Thursday, Friday, Saturday, six.’ The intruder adds, ‘and Sunday, seven’, and all the witches vanish in a puff of smoke.

  List of Illustrations

  1. MAIDEN CASTLE

  The hillfort in Dorset is the best preserved of more than 3,000 Iron Age settlements in Britain, but is somewhat misnamed. The man-made hill was never primarily a fort nor was it ever a castle. The ‘maiden’ derives from the early British mai dun: great hill.

  2. TARA

  County Meath’s celebrated hill may never have been the court of early Irish epic or the palace of nineteenth-century romance, but it was long a centre of religious ceremony sacred to Medb, considered a goddess in pre-Christian time.

  3. THE COLIGNY CALENDAR

  These bronze first-century BC plates contain the oldest writing in any Celtic language. The sixteen columns represent a five-year cycle, complete with calendar festivals and days thought to bring good or ill fortune.

  4. HALLSTATT EXCAVATIONS

  The discovery in 1846 of this early Iron Age cemetery in Upper Austria confirmed the existence of assuredly Celtic culture that predated the Romans. This is just one of a series of detailed illustrations that were made of the burials there. ’Hallstatt’ now denotes the style of an epoch of Celtic art.

  5. THE BOOK OF DURROW

  This illuminated manuscript of the Gospels was created c.660–680: more than a century and a quarter before the better-known Book of Kells. The book was found at Durrow, County Offaly, Ireland, and its distinctive artwork, especially the rondels, is a legacy from pre-Christian tradition.

  6. THE BATTERSEA SHIELD

  Red glass inlays on copper facing distinguish this shield found in the Thames at Battersea. The shield is of uncertain date (100 BC–AD 100?) and its outline identical to those from elsewhere in the Celtic world.

  7. THE GUNDESTRUP CAULDRON

  Although perhaps constructed in the Balkans (fourth to third centuries BC?) and found in Denmark, the silver vessel embraces the richest display of early Celtic iconography that we have. It stands 14 inches tall, lies 25.5 inches in diameter and holds 28.5 gallons.

  8. GUNDESTRUP DETAIL: CERNUNNOS

  An antlered divinity is widely known in pre-Roman Celtic Europe, but his name survives from only one inscription. He is seen here in the conventional half-lotus pose with two tores, one around his neck and the other in his hand.

  9. GUNDESTRUP DETAIL: HUMAN SACRIFICE OR REBIRTH

  This may represent Teutates, one of the three principal divinities of Gaul, who, according to Roman commentary, accepted drowned human victims. But perhaps this scene depicts a dead man about to be regenerated through immersion.

  10. GUNDESTRUP DETAIL: TARANIS

  Wheel symbolism, conventionally associated with the sun, predates the Celts at Hallstatt by half a millennium, but continues in Celtic iconography. Taranis, the Gaulish god of thunder, often seen with wheel imagery, may be depicted in this panel.

  11. THE GOD SUCELLUS

  Cult partner of Nantosuelta, Sucellus, ‘the good striker’, was worshipped in Gaul and Britain. Opinion is divided about the hammer always seen in his hand: perhaps a weapon, cooper’s tool, fencing instrument, wand or sceptre.

  12. THE GODDESS EPONA

  Epona, whose name means ‘horse’, was the focal point of one of the most widespread cults that ranged from what is now Britain to Serbia, through Rome to North Africa. She also appears in Apuleius’ Latin proto-novel Metamorphoses, III, 27 (second century AD)

  13. THE UFFINGTON HORSE

  At 365 feet (112 metres), the horse was cut through turf to underlying chalk. The graceful design resembles horses found on pre-Roman British coins. Often thought to depict Epona, the horse was actually more likely to have been constructed before her cult came to Britain.

  14. MINIATURE WAGON FROM MÉRIDA

  This charming miniature from pre-Roman Spain foreshadows the boars of Irish and Welsh literature, such as Twrch Twryth hunted by Culwch or the unnamed boar pursued by Fionn and Diarmait. Mérida was later the Roman capital of Iberia.

  15. SHEELA-NA-GIGS IN KILPECK

  The meaning of these outwardly obscene figures is much contended: were they cautions against lust or patronesses of fertility? Their Hiberno-English name is of no help: it means ‘Sheila of the breasts’, but the figure’s breasts are not prominent.

  16. HEADS AT ENTREMONT

  Evidence of the darker side of the early Celts survives at Entremont in P
rovence, where a shrine from the second century BC displays human heads plus models of heads. The heads of heroes were thought to possess talismanic powers.

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