The Mammoth Book of Celtic Myths and Legends (3 page)

This concept of “reaching out to protect the tribe or people” is one found many in Indo-European myths. In the
Vedas,
the sky-god was called Dyaus and is recorded in the
Rig Veda
as one who stretches forth a long hand. This is cognate with deus in Latin,
dia
in Irish and
devos
in Slavonic. It means, significantly, “bright one”.
Presumably it has a sun-deity significance.

In the
Vedas
, we find Dyaus was called Dyaus-Pitir – Father Dyaus; in Greek this became Zeus – also a father god; in Latin Jovis-Pater – Father Jove. Julius Caesar
observed that the Celts had a Dis-Pater – a father god and we certainly find an Irish reference to
Ollathair
– the All-Father. He is a sky god and Lugh is given this role. Lugh
also appears in Welsh myth as Lleu. Significantly, the name means “Bright one” and the Irish god is Lugh Lámhfada (Lugh of the Long
Hand) while his Welsh
counterpart is Lleu Llaw Gyffes (Lleu of the Skilful Hand).

The goddess Boann, whose name means “cow white”, gave her name to the River Boyne; she was mother to Aonghus Óg, the love god, and was called
guou-uinda,
or cow finder.
Now this appears, almost exactly the same, in the Vedic name Govinda, which was an epithet for the god Krishna. Govinda is still used by Hindus as a name today.

The motifs of the sacred cow or bull are easily found in Celtic, particularly in Irish myths, as well as Vedic or Hindu myths. The Gaulish god Esus equates with Asura (the powerful) and, as
Asvapati, it is an epithet for Indra. The Gaulish Ariomanus is also cognate with the Vedic Aryaman.

The horse rituals, once common to the Indo-Europeans, are found in Irish myth and ritual as well as in the Vedic sources. The kingship ritual of the symbolic union of horse and ruler survives in
both. This must date back to the time when the Indo-Europeans domesticated horses, a development which allowed them not only to commence their initial expansions but to become more proficient in
their agricultural and pastoral and warrior life. Horses meant power.

In Ireland, the ritual of the symbolic union of a mare with the king survived for a long time and was mentioned by Giraldus Cambrensis in his
Topographia Hibernica,
in the eleventh
century. In India, a similar symbolic ritual of a union of a stallion and queen survived, as we see in the myth of Saranyu in the
Rig Veda.

Another important aspect found in common is the “Act of Truth” which Professor Myles Dillon has discussed so well in “The Hindu Act of Truth in Celtic Tradition”
(
Modern Philology,
February, 1947). The ancient Irish text
Auraicept Moraind
could well be mistaken as a passage from the
Upanishad.
The symbolism in Irish myth of
Mochta’s Axe, which, when heated in a fire of blackthorn, would burn a liar but not harm someone telling the truth; or Luchta’s iron, which had the same quality; or Cormac Mac
Art’s cup – three lies would cause it to fall apart and three truths would make it whole again: all have their counterparts in the
Chandogya Upanishad.

Even terms relating to cosmology may be seen to have comparisons in Celtic and Vedic culture. The similarities of the Hindu calendar and Celtic calender – the latter
example being the Coligny calendar, found in 1897 – have been seen to be remarkably close. Dr Garrett Olmsted, who has made the most recent examination of the calendar, points out that the
calendar’s original computation and its astronomical observations and calculations put its origin to 1100
BC
. There is also evidence from the early tracts that the
Celts practised a form of astrology based on the twenty-seven lunar mansions, or
nakshatras,
as the modern Hindus still do, and not the Western form which was, of course, imported from
Babylonia via Greece.

So the most exciting thing about the study of Celtic linguistics and mythology is that we are not just pursuing the cultural origins of the Celts, we are actually pushing back the boundaries of
our knowledge of an all Indo-European culture. The comparisons of language, myths, cultural philosophies and social structure, mathematics and calendrical studies (for the ancient Celts were
foremost in this field) with Hindu and Hittite, lead one irrevocably towards a developing picture of the common Indo-European roots whose progeny now spreads through Europe, Asia Minor to North
India.

Celtic mythology, the legends and oral storytelling traditions, constitute one of the brightest gems of European culture. It is both unique and dynamic. It is a mythology and folklore which
should be as well-known and valued as its sister Indo-European cultures of Greece and Rome. Perhaps it should be prized that much more because it gives us a direct path back to the dim origins of
civilisation in this part of the world.

The oldest surviving complete manuscript books that provide the sources for Irish mythology date from the twelfth century. There are, of course, earlier fragmentary texts. The oldest complete
sources are the
Leabhar na hUidre,
known as the Book of the Dun Cow, the
Leabhar Laignech,
or Book of Leinster, and an unnamed book known simply by its Bodleian Library reference,
Rawlinson Manuscript B502. They represent the tip of an extraordinary rich literary mountain.
And the textural remains of Middle Irish literature have not even been
exhausted.

Professor Kuno Meyer, in his introduction to the beautiful tale
Liadain and Curithir: A Love Story
(1900), listed four hundred sagas and tales in these manuscript books known to scholars.
To this he added a further hundred texts which had been discovered since he had started to make his list. He then added a possible further fifty to a hundred tales which could be in repositories
still undiscovered. In all, he believed that there were some five to six hundred tales of which only a hundred and fifty had been translated and annotated at the time when he was writing. Eleanor
Hull, in her introduction to
The Cuchullin Saga in Irish Literature
(1898) made a similar estimation.

It is quite extraordinary that this figure has not changed much during the last century. This means that there are great libraries of Irish manuscripts still uncatalogued, let alone examined, in
various libraries and archives, such as that of the Regensburg archive in Vienna.

Of course, Old Irish was the standard literary language throughout the Gaelic-speaking world, until the late medieval period. The spoken language of the Manx and the Scots had begun to diverge
from the standard during the sixth and seventh centuries
AD
. Therefore the myths and legends of Ireland, the Isle of Man and Scotland are often the same, sometimes
differentiated by local embellishments. The evidence shows that bards and storytellers wandered freely from one country to another plying their craft. We have an account of the chief bard of
Ireland, Seanchán Torpeist
(ca
AD
570–647) arriving on the Isle of Man with his entourage and entering into a literary contest there. Yet an identifiable
Manx written literature, as distinct from Irish, did not emerge until the seventeenth century.

It was not until the sixteenth century that a distinctive Scottish Gaelic literature began to emerge from that shared with Ireland.
The Book of the Dean of Lismore
(Lismore in Argyll) was
a miscellany compiled in 1516 and included sagas of the Fianna of Fionn Mac Cumhaill and other stories. However, like the Isle of Man, the main wealth of
mythological and
legendary traditions lay in a continued oral tradition, which was only extensively committed to writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then predominantly in English
translations.

Welsh began to emerge from its common British Celtic parent, along with Cornish and Breton, in the fifth and sixth centuries
AD
. It is in Welsh that the main early
Brythonic myths and legends have survived. The Welsh material is nowhere near as extensive nor as old as the Irish tales and sagas. While Welsh was certainly flourishing as a literary language by
the eighth century
AD
, apart from fragmentary remains, the oldest book wholly in Welsh is
Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin,
the Black Book of Carmarthen, dated to the thirteenth
century. Among the poems it contains are a few on the Myrddin (Merlin) legends. But the mythological texts are preserved in two sources:
Llyfr Gwyn Rhydderch,
the White Book of Rhydderch
(1300–1325), and
Llyfr Coch Hergest,
the Red Book of Hergest (1375–1425). The stories in these two books constitute what is called in Welsh the
Mabinogi,
or in English
“The Four Branches of the Mabinogion”.

The
Mabinogi
consists of eleven tales and romances. There is evidence that at least three tales originated from a period far earlier than the surviving written texts.
Culhwch and
Olwen,
for example, which is given in the current volume as
The Quest for Olwen
, reflects a period of style, vocabulary and custom of at least two centuries earlier.

Like the Irish, the Welsh produced a wealth of manuscript archive material during the later medieval period. The best introduction to this is Andrew Breeze’s
Medieval Welsh
Literature
(1997). This book presents the controversial thesis that several of the
Mabinogi
tales were actually written by a Welsh princess named Gwenllian who was killed in battle
against the Anglo-Normans in 1136–37.I have discussed this in my preface to the Welsh tales.

Although the Cornish had produced written forms by the tenth century, nothing survives in Cornish that is reflective of the myths and legends of the
Mabinogi.
But, like the Goidelic
Celtic
seanachaidhe
or wandering storytellers or bards, the Brythonic Celts had their
cyfarwydd.
These bards were
constantly travelling between Wales, Cornwall and
Brittany, even down to Tudor times. Common characteristics in tales are to be found in all three countries.

It is arguable that an Arthurian poem, translated by John of Cornwall into Latin hexameters during the twelfth century, is a genuine translation from an earlier Cornish manuscript. Glosses in
Cornish on the manuscript date it to the tenth century. This is
The Prophecy of Merlin,
and the oldest surviving copy of this text is dated 8 October 1474. It is in the Vatican Library. It
belongs to the Arthurian cycle of tales.

The oldest text in Breton dates from 1450 and is
Dialog etre Arzur Roe d’an Bretounet ha Guynglaff
(Dialogue of Arthur, King of the Bretons). The work is of Breton provenance and
not merely a copy of the Welsh sagas or French or German extensions of the Arthurian tales.

By the end of the fifteenth century, it could be argued that Breton literature had started in earnest. Saints plays and other material were being written in Breton.
Buhez santaz Nonn hag he
nap Deuy
(The Life of St Nonn, Son of Devy) is one of the first major works of this tradition. But the main communication of the legends and sagas remained an oral tradition until 1839 when
Théodore Hersart de la Villemarqué published his ground-breaking
Barzaz Breiz: Chants Populates de la Bretagne,
an anthology of poems, ballads and folklore which first
introduced Breton folklore to a wider audience.

Whenever anyone mentions the Celtic myths and legends there are two subjects that always seem to spring to mind. The first is the Arthurian sagas and the second is the romance of Tristan and
Iseult.

Arthur was a sixth-century historical Celtic personality fighting for the independence of his people against the ravages of the Anglo-Saxons. He is first mentioned in a sixth century poem,
Y
Gododdin,
originally written in British Celtic in southern Scotland – then British Celtic speaking – but now claimed for Welsh literature. The Gododdin were a tribe whose capital
was at Edinburgh.

The Welsh chronicler Nennius, writing in the early ninth
century, also refers to Arthur and his battles and significantly calls him a warlord but not a king, pointing out
that the British Celtic kings appointed him leader in battle. The
Annales Cambriae,
compiled
c.
AD
955, also mention him and his great victory at Badon and his
death at Camlann. It was from Geoffrey of Monmouth (
c
. 1100–1155) in his Latin
Historia Regum Britanniae –
which he said was a translation from “a very ancient book
in the British tongue” – who began to develop Arthur as a mythical being. From here, Arthur headed off into European literature via the Norman poets, such as Wace and Chrétien de
Troyes and Layamon, who introduced Arthur to continental literatures.

It became clear, as I have argued in
Celt and Saxon: The Struggle for Britain
AD
410–937, that after the defeat of the historical Arthur by the Anglo-Saxons,
the British Celts would gather around their storytellers and these storytellers would tell sagas of the hero. Over the centuries, the historical deeds were lost in the mists of the storytelling.
Searching for new themes to enliven their sagas, the bards borrowed freely from many of the Irish tales associated with the popular Fionn Mac Cumhaill and his legendary warriors, the Fianna. Even
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
borrowed from the Cúchulainn saga. The story with the same motif appears in the
Feast of Bricriu
in which Cúchulainn plays the role later
assigned to Gawain.

Arthur and his knights actually appear in one of the Irish myths in which he steals the hound of Fionn Mac Cumhaill. Arthurian tales had a vogue in medieval Irish literature, but he never
replaced the popularity of Fionn Mac Cumhaill as the chief hero. However, at least twenty-five Arthurian tales in Irish have been identified from this period.

In Welsh mythology,
Culhwch and Olwen
is the earliest known fully-fledged Arthurian tale, which linguists claim dates several centuries before it was first written down, in the eleventh
century. There are three other later Arthurian tales in the
Mabinogi: The Lady of the Fountain, Peredur, Son of Efrawg
and
Gereint, Son of Erbin.
Arthur also appears as a character in
a tenth-century poem called
The Spoils of Annwn
which is a prototype for the Holy Grail legend.