The Mammoth Book of Celtic Myths and Legends (4 page)

It is fascinating that Arthur has now become part of a world folklore, but is no longer seen through Celtic eyes as a great champion fighting against the ancestors of the
English. Indeed, Arthur has become an archetypal English king, with the additions of European medieval chivalry, courtly love and a whole host of appendages that did not appear in the original
stories.

Similarly, the romance of Tristan and Iseult has also left its Celtic homeland to become part of a wider European cultural myth. Tristan was the nephew of King Mark of Cornwall, and Iseult the
daughter of an Irish King of Munster. The origins now matter little, as the story has been recorded in hundreds of different versions in practically every European language – the earliest,
outside of the Celtic orbit, being in French, German and English. Joseph Bédier (
Le Roman de Tristan par Thomas
, Paris, 1902) maintained that all the known Tristan stories could be
traced back to one extant manuscript written by Beroul, about whom nothing is known, in the middle of the twelfth century. Bédier argues that Beroul, writing in French, was translating from
a Breton source who probably derived it from a Cornish source.

The saga is, of course, one of the world’s greatest love stories. The central motif is the traditional Celtic elopement tale, known in Irish as
aithedha,
of which there are many
famous examples, such as the story of Deirdre and that of Gráinne. In the Tristan and Iseult case, the elopement is of the king’s new wife with her lover, the king’s nephew. Many
of the essential characteristics of the tale are to be found in other Celtic elopement tales.

Interestingly, we find that there was a real King Mark and a real Tristan in Cornwall. Castle Dore, Mark’s “castle”, is two miles north of Fowey; it is an earthwork
fortification dating back to the second century
BC
and was inhabited in the sixth century. A mile or so from Fowey, towards Par and near the disused entrance to Menabilly
House, there is an engraved stone dated to the mid-sixth century. The accepted reading of the Latin inscription is
Drustaus
(
or Drustanus
) hic iacit Cunomori filius – here lies
Drustanus, son of Cunomorus.

Philologically, the name Drustanus equates with Tristan.
King Mark’s full name in the records is given as “Marcus Cunomorus”. The name Mark does not come
from the Roman
praenomen
“Marcus” but from the Celtic word for horse: in Cornish
Margh,
in Breton
Marc’h
and in Welsh
March.
Cunomorus means
“hound of the sea”. The
Life of St Pol de Léon,
written about
AD
880 by Urmonek, a monk of Landévennec in Brittany, not only refers to the
king as having “ears like a horse” but explains that Marc’h was also called “Cunomorus”.

Returning to the important fact given in the inscription at Fowey – how much more poignant this elopement tale would be if Tristan, indeed, had eloped with his stepmother!

The first complete Celtic language version of the Tristan and Iseult story only survives from the sixteenth century. This is in Welsh.

In the current collection of retellings, I have chosen to introduce the tales with a recreation of the Celtic “creation myth” –
The Ever-Living Ones –
and
attempted to delete the Christian glosses added to it when it was first written down. I have incorporated into this the elements from
Cath Maige Tuired
(The Battle of Mag Tuired), arguably
the most important tale in the “Mythological Cycle”, in which the gods and goddesses of Danu fight with evil Fomorii (Under-Sea Dwellers). There are two early versions of this, one
surviving in a sixteenth century copy, while the second version survives in a manuscript
c.
1650.

The stories given in the
Leabhar Gábhala
(The Book of Invasions, often given in the old form
Lebor Gabála Erenn
), which is found in the Leabhar Laignech of the
twelfth century, is the nearest to the Celtic origin myth that we have. The
Leabhar Gábhala
tells of the mythical invasions of Ireland, including that of the “Ever-Living
Ones”, the Children of Danu or “The Tuatha Dé Danaan”.

In the Irish creation myth, the Christian writers made Cesair the granddaughter of the biblical Noah. Her parents are Bith and Birren and they set out in three ships to find a place which would
escape the Deluge. Only one ship survives and lands at Corca Dhuibhne, on the Dingle Peninsula in Co. Kerry. There are fifty women and three men. As well as Bith,
there is Ladra
the pilot and Fionntan. When Bith and Ladra die, Fionntan, left alone with the women, feels inadequate and flees. He and the women eventually perish. Among the variants of this tale is the story
that one of the women had a magic cask which, when opened, flowed for so long that water covered the earth and drowned them.

The Welsh Christian creation myth is found in the medieval
Trioedd Ynys Prydain,
a collection of triads which served as a mnemonic device for cataloguing a variety of facts and precepts.
It speaks of Llyon-Llion, the Lake of the Waves, which overflows due to Addanc, a monster who lives in the lake. He is finally disposed of by being hauled from his lair by the oxen of Hu Gadarn. In
some versions, he is killed by Peredur. However, he creates the overflow and thereby the Deluge. Indeed, he seems to be cognate with Griva who has a similar role in Hindu Deluge myth. Nefyed Naf
Nefion then builds a ship, in which Dwyvan and his wife Dwyvach escape. Nefyed is cognate to the Irish Nemed, who is said to have arrived in Ireland after the Deluge.

While there are hints of a pre-Christian origin, especially with the story of Addanc, other sources compare more with
The Churning of the Ocean
in which many comparative figures to Celt
myth also appear, such as Dhanu; Surabhi, the divine cow; the Tree of Knowledge; Dhanvantari – the equivalent of the Irish Dian Cécht, the physician of the gods; and others.

In many ways, the
Leabhar Gábhala
is the equivalent of the Hindu
Mahabharata.
It was necessary, therefore, to check other references, make comparisons with similar origin
myths in the
Vedas
and in other Indo-European myths, in order to clarify points which have been lost in the bowdlerisation by the Christian scribes. Thus, it was my intention to return the
story to its original pre-Christian Celtic vibrancy.

The pre-Christian themes certainly are in evidence in the
Leabhar Gábhala
and also in the
Dindsenchas,
a collection of sagas which explain the meaning of place-names, the
oldest version being found in the
Leabhar Laignech
from texts first recorded from the ninth to twelfth centuries. In fact, there are three versions of the
Dindsenchas,
surviving in
over forty manuscripts.

Each one of the six surviving Celtic peoples is represented here by six stories. I have prefaced each section and given some essential sources for the tales of that country.
Some of them will be familiar to some ardent followers of Celtic myth and legend but others, I hope, will not be so familiar. I have tried to seek out some new tales and new versions.

It should be noted that seven of the stories included in this collection were first published in
The Giant Book of Myths and Legends,
edited by Mike Ashley, Magpie Books, London, 1995.
These stories appeared there under my fiction-writing pseudonym of Peter Tremayne and were:
The Ever-Living Ones; The Sons of Tuireann; Island of the Ocean God; The Shadowy One; Bran and
Branwen; Tewdrig, Tyrant of Treheyl
and
The Destruction of Ker-Ys.
My thanks to Mike Ashley and Nick Robinson of Magpie Books, for allowing them to be reprinted in the current
volume.

In Celtic mythology and legend, one enters a fascinating world of fantasy, which is remote from the world of Greek and Latin myths, but which holds a strange resonance with Hindu myths. Even
though the insular Celts have spent at least three millennia in their north-west homelands, separated from their Indo-European parent, it is curious that there is a warmth and lightness rather than
the brooding bleakness that permeates the sagas of the Germanic and Nordic cultures. It is hard to believe, at times, that we are considering a north-west European culture. A bright, happy spirit
pervades even the tragedies. There is a spirit of eternal optimism. Even in the tragedy of
The Children of Lir
there is nothing
final
about the end.

Death is never the conqueror and we are reminded that the ancient Celts were one of the first cultures to evolve a sophisticated doctrine of the immortality of the soul, in a form of
reincarnation. Their teaching was of such interest to the Classical world that scholars of the Greek Alexandrian school are divided as to whether Pythagoras, via his Thracian servant Zalmoxis,
borrowed the concept or whether Zalmoxis had taught it to the Celts. However, on examination, the Celtic theory of immortality and reincarnation was unlike the theory expounded by Pythagoras.

The Celts taught that death is only a change of place and that life goes on, with all its forms and goods, in the Other-world. When a soul dies in this world, it is reborn in
the Otherworld and when a soul dies in the Otherworld, it is reborn in this one. Thus birth was greeted with mourning and death with exaltation and celebration. These customs were regarded with
some surprise by the Greeks and Latins. And from such ancient customs there survived until modern times the Irish funereal celebrations of the wake.

It is important to remember that, for the ancient Celts, the soul reposed in the head. Thus the cult of “head collecting” was used by the Romans to denigrate the Celts. The ancient
Celts would take and keep the heads of those people they respected, embalming them with cedar oil, and thus paying reverence to great souls. They were not, as some have claimed, head
hunters.
Only the heads of those already slain in battle, friend or foe, were taken as trophies: and always people worthy of respect. Sometimes the heads were placed in sanctuaries or, more often, were
placed in the sacred Celtic rivers as votive offerings.

Even in London, signs of this Celtic practice have been found. Countless skulls from the Celtic period were found in the River Thames and in Walbrook, a brook running into the Thames. Scholars
have argued whether Tacitus, who first records the Latin form of the name
Londinium
was recording this from the Celtic
Lugdunum
(fortress of Lug) or from another Celtic word, a word
still surviving in the Irish root,
londo
– the wild place. London, as a Celtic trading town of the Trinovantes, stood on the north bank of the Thames, or
Tamesis,
as it was
recorded.
Tamesis
means “the dark river”, cognate with the Sanskrit
Tamesa,
meaning exactly the same. Now the River Tamesa is a tributary of the Ganges, a sacred river of
the Hindus, in which votive offerings were placed.

Is it any surprise, therefore, that we find many rich votive offerings and skulls placed in the Thames by the ancient Celts? Celtic coins, weapons such as swords and shields, exquisite jewellery
and other objects were thrown into the Thames and indeed the Walbrook. Whatever the origin of London’s Celtic name, we have many other Celtic names
associated with the
city, not least the names of some of its ancient gates, such as Ludgate.

More important, to the argument of the river’s site for votive offerings, is Billingsgate on the River Thames. The Saxons, when they arrived, recorded it as
Bilesgata,
the gate of
Bíle. The Celts originally regarded Bíle as the sacred oak, Danu’s consort, and he, in time, became the god who took the souls on their journey from this world to the
Otherworld.

Celts often deposited their dead in the sacred river, as do the Hindus in the Ganges, and would escort the dead on their journey to the Otherworld through Bíle’s gate into the
“dark river” at the end of which was their rebirth. Death always came before rebirth, hence darkness before light, in both Celtic and Hindu religions. Hence the Celts counted time by
the night followed by the day, and their new year was at the
Samhain
(approximating to the night of October 31 and day of November 1). So the new year started with the dark period.

Among the votive pieces in the Walbrook, there was found a pipe-clay statuette of a female Celtic goddess. Could this have been of Danu, “the divine waters”, herself?

How did Walbrook receive its name from the Anglo-Saxons, and does it have anything to do with that point of the river as the place where most votive offerings have been found? The original
Celtic inhabitants of London were obviously loath to leave this sacred spot and clung there even after the Anglo-Saxon conquest. They remained long enough for the Anglo-Saxons to designate the
brook as
Weala-broc,
the brook of the foreigners – i.e.
Welisc
(Welsh), or foreigners, that being the name the Anglo-Saxons gave to the indigenous Britons.

Celtic mythology is essentially a heroic one but while the Irish stories belong to a more ancient “Heroic Age”, the Welsh stories have received the gloss of a more medieval courtly
quality. The deities in Celtic myth tend to be the ancestors of the people rather than their creators, a point that Julius Caesar observed and commented on; these deities, as well as the human
heroes and heroines, are no mere physical beauties with empty heads. Their intellectual attributes have to equal their physical capabilities. They are all totally human
and
subject to all the natural virtues and vices. No sin is exempt from practice by the gods or humans.

In the later folklore, when the deities were being relegated into fairies or evil Otherworld folk, as Christianity grew more dictatorial in its judgment of ancient customs and beliefs, the
heroes and heroines had to pit their wits more often than their brawn against the “evil magic” of such creatures. Often, when trying to escape a prophesied fate, they would simply bring
that fate upon themselves.