THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE
BRITISH ISLANDS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE MYTHOLOGY
OF THE BRITISH
ISLANDS
AN INTRODUCTION TO
CELTIC MYTH, LEGEND
POETRY, AND ROMANCE
BY CHARLES SQUIRE
LONDON: BLACKIE AND SON LIMITED
50 OLD BAILEY, E.C. GLASGOW AND
DUBLIN MCMV
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREFACE
This book is what its author believes to be the only attempt yet made to
put the English reader into possession, in clear, compact, and what it
is hoped may prove agreeable, form, of the mythical, legendary, and
poetic traditions of the earliest inhabitants of our islands who have
left us written records—the Gaelic and the British Celts. It is true
that admirable translations and paraphrases of much of Gaelic mythical
saga have been recently published, and that Lady Charlotte Guest’s
translation of the _Mabinogion_ has been placed within the reach of the
least wealthy reader. But these books not merely each cover a portion
only of the whole ground, but, in addition, contain little elucidatory
matter. Their characters stand isolated and unexplained; and the details
that would explain them must be sought for with considerable trouble in
the lectures and essays of scholars to learned societies. The reader to
whom this literature is entirely new is introduced, as it were, to
numerous people of whose antecedents he knows nothing; and the effect is
often disconcerting enough to make him lay down the volume in despair.
But here he will at last make the formal acquaintance of all the chief
characters of Celtic myth: of the Gaelic gods and the giants against
whom they struggled; of the “Champions of the Red Branch” of Ulster,
heroes of a martial epopee almost worthy to be placed beside “the tale
of Troy divine”; and of Finn and his Fenians. He will meet also with the
divine and heroic personages of the ancient Britons: with their earliest
gods, kin to the members of the Gaelic Pantheon; as well as with Arthur
and his Knights, whom he will recognize as no mortal champions, but
belonging to the same mythic company. Of all these mighty figures the
histories will be briefly recorded, from the time of their unquestioned
godhood, through their various transformations, to the last doubtful,
dying recognition of them in the present day, as “fairies”. Thus the
volume will form a kind of handbook to a subject of growing
importance—the so-called “Celtic Renaissance”, which is, after all, no
more—and, indeed, no less—than an endeavour to refresh the vitality of
English poetry at its most ancient native fount.
The book does not, of course, profess to be for Celtic scholars, to
whom, indeed, its author himself owes all that is within it. It aims
only at interesting the reader familiar with the mythologies of Greece,
Rome, and Scandinavia in another, and a nearer, source of poetry. Its
author’s wish is to offer those who have fallen, or will fall, under the
attraction of Celtic legend and romance, just such a volume as he
himself would once have welcomed, and for which he sought in vain. It is
his hope that, in choosing from the considerable, though scattered,
translations and commentaries of students of Old Gaelic and Old Welsh,
he has chosen wisely, and that his readers will be able, should they
wish, to use his book as a stepping-stone to the authorities themselves.
To that end it is wholly directed; and its marginal notes and short
bibliographical appendix follow the same plan. They do not aspire to
anything like completeness, but only to point out the chief sources from
which he himself has drawn.
To acknowledge, as far as possible, such debts is now the author’s
pleasing duty. First and foremost, he has relied upon the volumes of M.
H. d’Arbois de Jubainville’s _Cours de Littérature celtique_, and the
Hibbert Lectures for 1886 of John Rhys, Professor of Celtic in the
University of Oxford, with their sequel entitled _Studies in the
Arthurian Legend_. From the writings of Mr. Alfred Nutt he has also
obtained much help. With regard to direct translations, it seems almost
superfluous to refer to Lady Charlotte Guest’s _Mabinogion_ and Mr. W.
F. Skene’s _Four Ancient Books of Wales_, or to the work of such
well-known Gaelic scholars as Mr. Eugene O’Curry, Dr. Kuno Meyer, Dr.
Whitley Stokes, Dr. Ernest Windisch, Mr. Standish Hayes O’Grady (to
mention no others), as contained in such publications as the _Revue
Celtique_, the _Atlantis_, and the _Transactions of the Ossianic
Society_, in Mr. O’Grady’s _Silva Gadelica_, Mr. Nutt’s _Voyage of
Bran_, _Son of Febal_, and Miss Hull’s _Cuchullin Saga_. But space is
lacking to do justice to all. The reader is referred to the marginal
notes and the Appendix for the works of these and other authors, who
will no doubt pardon the use made of their researches to one whose sole
object has been to gain a larger audience for the studies they have most
at heart.
Finally, perhaps, a word should be said upon that vexed question, the
transliteration of Gaelic. As yet there is no universal or consistent
method of spelling. The author has therefore chosen the forms which
seemed most familiar to himself, hoping in that way to best serve the
uses of others.
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CONTENTS
CHAP. Page
I. THE INTEREST AND IMPORTANCE OF CELTIC
MYTHOLOGY 1
II. THE SOURCES OF OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE
CELTIC MYTHOLOGY 8
III. WHO WERE THE “ANCIENT BRITONS”? 18
IV. THE RELIGION OF THE ANCIENT BRITONS AND
DRUIDISM 31
THE GAELIC GODS AND THEIR STORIES
V. THE GODS OF THE GAELS 47
VI. THE GODS ARRIVE 65
VII. THE RISE OF THE SUN-GOD 78
VIII. THE GAELIC ARGONAUTS 89
IX. THE WAR WITH THE GIANTS 107
X. THE CONQUEST OF THE GODS BY MORTALS 119
XI. THE GODS IN EXILE 132
XII. THE IRISH ILIAD 153
XIII. SOME GAELIC LOVE-STORIES 184
XIV. FINN AND THE FENIANS 201
XV. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE GODS 227
THE BRITISH GODS AND THEIR STORIES
XVI. THE GODS OF THE BRITONS 251
XVII. THE ADVENTURES OF THE GODS OF HADES 278
XVIII. THE WOOING OF BRANWEN AND THE BEHEADING
OF BRÂN 289
XIX. THE WAR OF ENCHANTMENTS 298
XX. THE VICTORIES OF LIGHT OVER DARKNESS 305
XXI. THE MYTHOLOGICAL “COMING OF ARTHUR” 312
XXII. THE TREASURES OF BRITAIN 336
XXIII. THE GODS AS KING ARTHUR’S KNIGHTS 354
XXIV. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE GODS 371
SURVIVALS OF THE CELTIC PAGANISM
XXV. SURVIVALS OF THE CELTIC PAGANISM INTO
MODERN TIMES 399
APPENDIX 419
INDEX 425
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THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE
BRITISH ISLANDS
CHAPTER I
THE INTEREST AND IMPORTANCE OF CELTIC
MYTHOLOGY
It should hardly be necessary to remind the reader of what profound
interest and value to every nation are its earliest legendary and
poetical records. The beautiful myths of Greece form a sufficing
example. In threefold manner, they have influenced the destiny of the
people that created them, and of the country of which they were the
imagined theatre. First, in the ages in which they were still fresh,
belief and pride in them were powerful enough to bring scattered tribes
into confederation. Secondly, they gave the inspiration to sculptor and
poet of an art and literature unsurpassed, if not unequalled, by any
other age or race. Lastly, when “the glory that was Greece” had faded,
and her people had, by dint of successive invasions, perhaps even ceased
to have any right to call themselves Hellenes, they have passed over
into the literatures of the modern world, and so given to Greece herself
a poetic interest that still makes a petty kingdom of greater account in
the eyes of its compeers than many others far superior to it in extent
and resources.
This permeating influence of the Greek poetical mythology, apparent in
all civilized countries, has acted especially upon our own. From almost
the very dawn of English literature, the Greek stories of gods and
heroes have formed a large part of the stock-in-trade of English poets.
The inhabitants of Olympus occupy, under their better-known Latin names,
almost as great a space in English poetry as they did in that of the
countries to which they were native. From Chaucer downwards, they have
captivated the imagination alike of the poets and their hearers. The
magic cauldron of classic myth fed, like the Celtic “Grail”, all who
came to it for sustenance.
At last, however, its potency became somewhat exhausted. Alien and
exotic to English soil, it degenerated slowly into a convention. In the
shallow hands of the poetasters of the eighteenth century, its figures
became mere puppets. With every wood a “grove”, and every rustic maid a
“nymph”, one could only expect to find Venus armed with patch and
powder-puff, Mars shouldering a musket, and Apollo inspiring the
versifier’s own trivial strains. The affectation killed—and fortunately
killed—a mode of expression which had become obsolete. Smothered by just
ridicule, and abandoned to the commonplace vocabulary of the inferior
hack-writer, classic myth became a subject which only the greatest poets
could afford to handle.
But mythology is of such vital need to literature that, deprived of the
store of legend native to southern Europe, imaginative writers looked
for a fresh impulse. They turned their eyes to the North. Inspiration
was sought, not from Olympus, but from Asgard. Moreover, it was believed
that the fount of primeval poetry issuing from Scandinavian and Teutonic
myth was truly our own, and that we were rightful heirs of it by reason
of the Anglo-Saxon in our blood. And so, indeed, we are; but it is not
our sole heritage. There must also run much Celtic—that is, truly
British—blood in our veins.[1] And Matthew Arnold was probably right in
asserting that, while we owe to the Anglo-Saxon the more practical
qualities that have built up the British Empire, we have inherited from
the Celtic side that poetic vision which has made English literature the
most brilliant since the Greek.[2]
We have the right, therefore, to enter upon a new spiritual possession.
And a splendid one it is! The Celtic mythology has little of the heavy
crudeness that repels one in Teutonic and Scandinavian story. It is as
beautiful and graceful as the Greek; and, unlike the Greek, which is the
reflection of a clime and soil which few of us will ever see, it is our
own. Divinities should, surely, seem the inevitable outgrowth of the
land they move in! How strange Apollo would appear, naked among
icebergs, or fur-clad Thor striding under groves of palms! But the
Celtic gods and heroes are the natural inhabitants of a British
landscape, not seeming foreign and out-of-place in a scene where there
is no vine or olive, but “shading in with” our homely oak and bracken,
gorse and heath.
Thus we gain an altogether fresh interest in the beautiful spots of our
own islands, especially those of the wilder and more mountainous west,
where the older inhabitants of the land lingered longest. Saxon conquest
obliterated much in Eastern Britain, and changed more; but in the West
of England, in Wales, in Scotland, and especially in legend-haunted
Ireland, the hills and dales still keep memories of the ancient gods of
the ancient race. Here and there in South Wales and the West of England
are regions—once mysterious and still romantic—which the British Celts
held to be the homes of gods or outposts of the Other World. In Ireland,
not only is there scarcely a place that is not connected in some way
with the traditionary exploits of the “Red Branch Champions”, or of Finn
and his mighty men, but the old deities are still remembered, dwarfed
into fairies, but keeping the same attributes and the same names as of
yore. Wordsworth’s complaint[3] that, while Pelion and Ossa, Olympus and
Parnassus are “in immortal books enrolled”, not one English mountain,
“though round our sea-girt shore they rise in crowds”, had been “by the
Celestial Muses glorified” doubtless seemed true to his own generation.
Thanks to the scholars who have unveiled the ancient Gaelic and British
mythologies, it need not be so for ours. On Ludgate Hill, as well as on
many less famous eminences, once stood the temple of the British Zeus. A
mountain not far from Bettws-y-Coed was the British Olympus, the court
and palace of our ancient gods.
It may well be doubted, however, whether Wordsworth’s contemporaries
would have welcomed the mythology which was their own by right of birth
as a substitute for that of Greece and Rome. The inspiration of classic
culture, which Wordsworth was one of the first to break with, was still
powerful. How some of its professors would have held their sides and
roared at the very notion of a British mythology! Yet, all the time, it
had long been secretly leavening English ideas and ideals, none the less
potently because disguised under forms which could be readily
appreciated. Popular fancy had rehabilitated the old gods, long banned
by the priests’ bell, book, and candle, under various disguises. They
still lived on in legend as kings of ancient Britain reigning in a
fabulous past anterior to Julius Caesar—such were King Lud, founder of
London; King Lear, whose legend was immortalized by Shakespeare; King
Brennius, who conquered Rome; as well as many others who will be found
filling parts in old drama. They still lived on as long-dead saints of
the early churches of Ireland and Britain, whose wonderful attributes
and adventures are, in many cases, only those of their original
namesakes, the old gods, told afresh. And they still lived on in
another, and a yet more potent, way. Myths of Arthur and his cycle of
gods passed into the hands of the Norman story-tellers, to reappear as
romances of King Arthur and his Knights of the Table Round. Thus spread
over civilized Europe, their influence was immense. Their primal poetic
impulse is still resonant in our literature; we need only instance
Tennyson and Swinburne as minds that have come under its sway.
This diverse influence of Celtic mythology upon English poetry and
romance has been eloquently set forth by Mr. Elton in his _Origins of
English History_. “The religion of the British tribes”, he writes, “has
exercised an important influence upon literature. The mediæval romances
and the legends which stood for history are full of the ‘fair
humanities’ and figures of its bright mythology. The elemental powers of
earth and fire, and the spirits which haunted the waves and streams
appear again as kings in the Irish Annals, or as saints and hermits in
Wales. The Knights of the Round Table, Sir Kay and Tristrem and the bold
Sir Bedivere, betray their mighty origin by the attributes they retained
as heroes of romance. It was a goddess, ‘_Dea quaedam phantastica_’, who
bore the wounded Arthur to the peaceful valley. ‘There was little
sunlight on its woods and streams, and the nights were dark and gloomy
for want of the moon and stars.’ This is the country of Oberon and of
Sir Huon of Bordeaux. It is the dreamy forest of Arden. In an older
mythology, it was the realm of a King of Shadows, the country of Gwyn ap
Nudd, who rode as Sir Guyon in the ‘Fairie Queene’—
‘And knighthood took of good Sir Huon’s hand,
When with King Oberon he came to Fairyland’.”[4]
To trace Welsh and Irish kings and saints and hermits back to “the
elemental powers of earth and fire, and the spirits that haunted the
woods and streams” of Celtic imagination, and to disclose primitive
pagan deities under the mediæval and Christian trappings of “King
Arthur’s Knights” will necessarily fall within the scope of this volume.
But meanwhile the reader will probably be asking what evidence there is
that apocryphal British kings like Lear and Lud, and questionable Irish
saints like Bridget are really disguised Celtic divinities, or that the
Morte D’Arthur, with its love of Launcelot and the queen, and its quest
of the Holy Grail, was ever anything more than an invention of the
Norman romance-writers. He will demand to know what facts we really
possess about this supposed Celtic mythology alleged to have furnished
their prototypes, and of what real antiquity and value are our
authorities upon it.
The answer to his question will be found in the next chapter.
-----
Footnote 1:
“There is good ground to believe”, writes Mr. E. W. B. Nicholson,
M.A., the librarian of the Bodleian Library, in the preface to his
recently-published _Keltic Researches_, “that Lancashire, West
Yorkshire, Staffordshire, Worcestershire, Warwickshire,
Leicestershire, Rutland, Cambridgeshire, Wiltshire, Somerset, and part
of Sussex, are as Keltic as Perthshire and North Munster; that
Cheshire, Shropshire, Herefordshire, Monmouthshire, Gloucestershire,
Devon, Dorset, Northamptonshire, Huntingdonshire, and Bedfordshire are
more so—and equal to North Wales and Leinster; while Buckinghamshire
and Hertfordshire exceed even this degree and are on a level with
South Wales and Ulster. Cornwall, of course, is more Keltic than any
other English county, and as much so as Argyll, Inverness-shire, or
Connaught.”
Footnote 2:
_The Study of Celtic Literature._
Footnote 3:
In a sonnet written in 1801.
Footnote 4:
Elton: _Origins of English History_, chap. X.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER II
THE SOURCES OF OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE
CELTIC MYTHOLOGY
We may begin by asserting with confidence that Mr. Elton has touched
upon a part only of the material on which we may draw, to reconstruct
the ancient British mythology. Luckily, we are not wholly dependent upon
the difficult tasks of resolving the fabled deeds of apocryphal Irish
and British kings who reigned earlier than St. Patrick or before Julius
Caesar into their original form of Celtic myths, of sifting the
attributes and miracles of doubtfully historical saints, or of
separating the primitive pagan elements in the legends of Arthur and his
Knights from the embellishments added by the romance-writers. We have,
in addition to these—which we may for the present put upon one side as
secondary—sources, a mass of genuine early writings which, though
post-Christian in the form in which they now exist, none the less
descend from the preceding pagan age. These are contained in vellum and
parchment manuscripts long preserved from destruction in mansions and
monasteries in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and only during the last
century brought to light, copied, and translated by the patient labours
of scholars who have grappled with the long-obsolete dialects in which
they were transcribed.
Many of these volumes are curious miscellanies. Usually the one book of
a great house or monastic community, everything was copied into it that
the scholar of the family or brotherhood thought to be best worth
preserving. Hence they contain matter of the most diverse kind. There
are translations of portions of the Bible and of the classics, and of
such then popular books as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s and Nennius’ Histories
of Britain; lives of famous saints, together with works attributed to
them; poems and romances of which, under a thin disguise, the old Gaelic
and British gods are the heroes; together with treatises on all the
subjects then studied—grammar, prosody, law, history, geography,
chronology, and the genealogies of important chiefs.
The majority of these documents were put together during a period which,
roughly speaking, lasted from the beginning of the twelfth century to
the end of the sixteenth. In Ireland, in Wales, and, apparently, also in
Scotland, it was a time of literary revival after the turmoils of the
previous epoch. In Ireland, the Norsemen, after long ravaging, had
settled peacefully down, while in Wales, the Norman Conquest had
rendered the country for the first time comparatively quiet. The
scattered remains of history, lay and ecclesiastical, of science, and of
legend were gathered together.
Of the Irish manuscripts, the earliest, and, for our purposes, the most
important, on account of the great store of ancient Gaelic mythology
which, in spite of its dilapidated condition, it still contains, is in
the possession of the Royal Irish Academy. Unluckily, it is reduced to a
fragment of one hundred and thirty-eight pages, but this remnant
preserves a large number of romances relating to the old gods and heroes
of Ireland. Among other things, it contains a complete account of the
epical saga called the _Táin Bó Chuailgné_, the “Raiding of the Cattle
of Cooley”, in which the hero, Cuchulainn, performed his greatest feats.
This manuscript is called the Book of the Dun Cow, from the tradition
that it was copied from an earlier book written upon the skin of a
favourite animal belonging to Saint Ciaran, who lived in the seventh
century. An entry upon one of its pages reveals the name of its scribe,
one Maelmuiri, whom we know to have been killed by robbers in the church
of Clonmacnois in the year 1106.
Far more voluminous, and but little less ancient, is the Book of
Leinster, said to have been compiled in the early part of the twelfth
century by Finn mac Gorman, Bishop of Kildare. This also contains an
account of Cuchulainn’s mighty deeds which supplements the older version
in the Book of the Dun Cow. Of somewhat less importance from the point
of view of the student of Gaelic mythology come the Book of Ballymote
and the Yellow Book of Lecan, belonging to the end of the fourteenth
century, and the Books of Lecan and of Lismore, both attributed to the
fifteenth. Besides these six great collections, there survive many other
manuscripts which also contain ancient mythical lore. In one of these,
dating from the fifteenth century, is to be found the story of the
Battle of Moytura, fought between the gods of Ireland and their enemies,
the Fomors, or demons of the deep sea.
The Scottish manuscripts, preserved in the Advocates’ Library at
Edinburgh, date back in some cases as far as the fourteenth century,
though the majority of them belong to the fifteenth and sixteenth. They
corroborate the Irish documents, add to the Cuchulainn saga, and make a
more special subject of the other heroic cycle, that which relates the
not less wonderful deeds of Finn, Ossian, and the Fenians. They also
contain stories of other characters, who, more ancient than either Finn
or Cuchulainn, are the Tuatha Dé Danann, the god-tribe of the ancient
Gaels.
The Welsh documents cover about the same period as the Irish and the
Scottish. Four of these stand out from the rest, as most important. The
oldest is the Black Book of Caermarthen, which dates from the third
quarter of the twelfth century; the Book of Aneurin, which was written
late in the thirteenth; the Book of Taliesin, assigned to the
fourteenth; and the Red Book of Hergest, compiled by various persons
during that century and the one following it. The first three of these
“Four Ancient Books of Wales” are small in size, and contain poems
attributed to the great traditional bards of the sixth century, Myrddin,
Taliesin, and Aneurin. The last—the Red Book of Hergest—is far larger.
In it are to be found Welsh translations of the British Chronicles; the
oft-mentioned Triads, verses celebrating famous traditionary persons or
things; ancient poems attributed to Llywarch Hên; and, of priceless
value to any study of our subject, the so-called Mabinogion, stories in
which large portions of the old British mythology are worked up into
romantic form.
The whole bulk, therefore, of the native literature bearing upon the
mythology of the British Islands may be attributed to a period which
lasted from the beginning of the twelfth century to the end of the
sixteenth. But even the commencement of this era will no doubt seem far
too late a day to allow authenticity to matter which ought to have
vastly preceded it. The date, however, merely marks the final redaction
of the contents of the manuscripts into the form in which they now
exist, without bearing at all upon the time of their authorship.
Avowedly copies of ancient poems and tales from much older manuscripts,
the present books no more fix the period of the original composition of
their contents than the presence of a portion of the _Canterbury Tales_
in a modern anthology of English poetry would assign Chaucer to the
present year of grace.
This may be proved both directly and inferentially.[5] In some
instances—as in that of an elegy upon Saint Columba in the Book of the
Dun Cow—the dates of authorship are actually given. In others, we may
depend upon evidence which, if not quite so absolute, is nearly as
convincing. Even where the writer does not state that he is copying from
older manuscripts, it is obvious that this must have been the case, from
the glosses in his version. The scribes of the earlier Gaelic
manuscripts very often found, in the documents from which they
themselves were copying, words so archaic as to be unintelligible to the
readers of their own period. To render them comprehensible, they were
obliged to insert marginal notes which explained these obsolete words by
reference to other manuscripts more ancient still. Often the mediæval
copyists have ignorantly moved these notes from the margin into the
text, where they remain, like philological fossils, to give evidence of
previous forms of life. The documents from which they were taken have
perished, leaving the mediæval copies as their sole record. In the Welsh
Mabinogion the same process is apparent. Peculiarities in the existing
manuscripts show plainly enough that they must have been copied from
some more archaic text. Besides this, they are, as they at present
stand, obviously made up of earlier tales pieced together. Almost as
clearly as the Gaelic manuscripts, the Welsh point us back to older and
more primitive forms.
The ancient legends of the Gael and the Briton are thus shown to have
been no mere inventions of scholarly monks in the Middle Ages. We have
now to trace, if possible, the date, not necessarily of their first
appearance on men’s lips, but of their first redaction into writing in
approximately the form in which we have them now.
Circumstantial evidence can be adduced to prove that the most important
portions both of Gaelic and British early literature can be safely
relegated to a period of several centuries prior to their now-existing
record. Our earliest version of the episode of the _Táin Bó Chuailgné_,
which is the nucleus and centre of the ancient Gaelic heroic cycle of
which Cuchulainn, _fortissimus heros Scotorum_, is the principal figure,
is found in the twelfth-century Book of the Dun Cow. But legend tells us
that at the beginning of the seventh century the Saga had not only been
composed, but had actually become so obsolete as to have been forgotten
by the bards. Their leader, one Senchan Torpeist, a historical
character, and chief bard of Ireland at that time, obtained permission
from the Saints to call Fergus, Cuchulainn’s contemporary, and a chief
actor in the “Raid”, from the dead, and received from the resurrected
hero a true and full version. This tradition, dealing with a real
personage, surely shows that the story of the _Táin_ was known before
the time of Senchan, and probably preserves the fact, either that his
version of Cuchulainn’s famous deeds became the accepted one, or that he
was the first to reduce it to writing. An equally suggestive
consideration approximately fixes for us the earliest redaction of the
Welsh mythological prose tales called the “Mabinogion”, or, more
correctly speaking, the “Four Branches of the Mabinogi”.[6] In none of
these is there the slightest mention, or apparently the least knowledge,
of Arthur, around whom and whose supposed contemporaries centres the
mass of British legend as it was transmitted by the Welsh to the
Normans. These mysterious mythological records must in all probability,
therefore, antedate the Arthurian cycle of myth, which was already being
put into form in the sixth century. On the other hand, the characters of
the “Four Branches” are mentioned without comment—as though they were
personages with whom no one could fail to be familiar—in the supposed
sixth-century poems contained in those “Four Ancient Books of Wales” in
which are found the first meagre references to the British hero.
Such considerations as these throw back, with reasonable certainty, the
existence of the Irish and Welsh poems and prose tales, in something
like their present shape, to a period antedating the seventh century.
But this, again, means only that the myths, traditions, and legends were
current at that to us early, but to them, in their actual substance,
late date, in literary form. A mythology must always be far older than
the oldest verses and stories that celebrate it. Elaborate poems and
sagas are not made in a day, or in a year. The legends of the Gaelic and
British gods and heroes could not have sprung, like Athena from the head
of Zeus, full-born out of some poet’s brain. The bard who first put them
into artistic shape was setting down the primitive traditions of his
race. We may therefore venture to describe them as not of the twelfth
century or of the seventh, but as of a prehistoric and immemorial
antiquity.
Internal evidence bears this out. An examination of both the Gaelic and
British legendary romances shows, under embellishing details added by
later hands, an inner core of primeval thought which brings them into
line with the similar ideas of other races in the earliest stage of
culture. Their “local colour” may be that of their last “editor”, but
their “plots” are pre-mediæval, pre-Christian, pre-historic. The
characters of early Gaelic legend belong to the same stamp of
imagination that created Olympian and Titan, Æsir and Jötun. We must go
far to the back of civilized thought to find parallels to such a story
as that in which the British sun-god, struck by a rival in love with a
poisoned spear, is turned into an eagle, from whose wound great pieces
of carrion are continually failing.[7]
This aspect of the Celtic literary records was clearly seen, and
eloquently expressed, by Matthew Arnold in his _Study of Celtic
Literature_.[8] He was referring to the Welsh side, but his image holds
good equally for the Gaelic. “The first thing that strikes one”, he
says, “in reading the _Mabinogion_ is how evidently the mediæval
story-teller is pillaging an antiquity of which he does not fully
possess the secret: he is like a peasant building his hut on the site of
Halicarnassus or Ephesus; he builds, but what he builds is full of
materials of which he knows not the history, or knows by a glimmering
tradition merely: stones ‘not of this building’, but of an older
architecture, greater, cunninger, more majestical.” His heroes “are no
mediæval personages: they belong to an older, pagan, mythological
world”. So, too, with the figures, however euhemerized, of the three
great Gaelic cycles: that of the Tuatha Dé Danann, of the Heroes of
Ulster, of Finn and the Fenians. Their divinity outshines their
humanity; through their masks may be seen the faces of gods.
Yet, gods as they are, they had taken on the semblance of mortality by
the time their histories were fixed in the form in which we have them
now. Their earliest records, if those could be restored to us, would
doubtless show them eternal and undying, changing their shapes at will,
but not passing away. But the post-Christian copyists, whether Irish or
Welsh, would not countenance this. Hence we have the singular paradox of
the deaths of Immortals. There is hardly one of the figures of either
the Gaelic or the British Pantheon whose demise is not somewhere
recorded. Usually they fell in the unceasing battles between the
divinities of darkness and of light. Their deaths in earlier cycles of
myth, however, do not preclude their appearance in later ones. Only,
indeed, with the closing of the lips of the last mortal who preserved
his tradition can the life of a god be truly said to end.
-----
Footnote 5:
Satisfactory summaries of the evidence for the dates of both the
Gaelic and Welsh legendary material will be found in pamphlets No. 8
and 11 of Mr. Nutt’s _Popular Studies in Mythology, Romance, and
Folklore_.
Footnote 6:
Rhys: _Studies in the Arthurian Legend_, chap. I.
Footnote 7:
See chap. XVI of this book—“The Gods of the Britons”.
Footnote 8:
Lecture II.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER III
WHO WERE THE “ANCIENT BRITONS”?
But, before proceeding to recount the myths of the “Ancient Britons”, it
will be well to decide what people, exactly, we mean by that loose but
convenient phrase. We have, all of us, vague ideas of Ancient Britons,
recollected, doubtless, from our school-books. There we saw their
pictures as, painted with woad, they paddled coracles, or drove scythed
chariots through legions of astonished Romans. Their Druids,
white-bearded and wearing long, white robes, cut the mistletoe with a
golden sickle at the time of the full moon, or, less innocently
employed, made bonfires of human beings shut up in gigantic figures of
wicker-work.
Such picturesque details were little short of the sum-total, not only of
our own knowledge of the subject, but also of that of our teachers.
Practically all their information concerning the ancient inhabitants of
Britain was taken from the Commentaries of Julius Caesar. So far as it
went, it was no doubt correct; but it did not go far. Caesar’s interest
in our British ancestors was that of a general who was his own
war-correspondent rather than that of an exhaustive and painstaking
scientist. It has been reserved for modern archæologists, philologists,
and ethnologists to give us a fuller account of the Ancient Britons.
The inhabitants of our islands previous to the Roman invasion are
generally described as “Celts”. But they must have been largely a mixed
race; and the people with whom they mingled must have modified to
some—and perhaps to a large—extent their physique, their customs, and
their language.
Speculation has run somewhat wild over the question of the composition
of the Early Britons. But out of the clash of rival theories there
emerges one—and one only—which may be considered as scientifically
established. We have certain proof of two distinct human stocks in the
British Islands at the time of the Roman Conquest; and so great an
authority as Professor Huxley has given his opinion that there is no
evidence of any others.[9]
The earliest of these two races would seem to have inhabited our islands
from the most ancient times, and may, for our purpose, be described as
aboriginal. It was the people that built the “long barrows”; and which
is variously called by ethnologists the Iberian, Mediterranean, Berber,
Basque, Silurian, or Euskarian race. In physique it was short, swarthy,
dark-haired, dark-eyed, and long-skulled; its language belonged to the
class called “Hamitic”, the surviving types of which are found among the
Gallas, Abyssinians, Berbers, and other North African tribes; and it
seems to have come originally from some part either of Eastern,
Northern, or Central Africa. Spreading thence, it was probably the first
people to inhabit the Valley of the Nile, and it sent offshoots into
Syria and Asia Minor. The earliest Hellenes found it in Greece under the
name of “Pelasgoi”; the earliest Latins in Italy, as the “Etruscans”;
and the Hebrews in Palestine, as the “Hittites”. It spread northward
through Europe as far as the Baltic, and westward, along the Atlas
chain, to Spain, France, and our own islands.[10] In many countries it
reached a comparatively high level of civilization, but in Britain its
development must have been early checked. We can discern it as an
agricultural rather than a pastoral people, still in the Stone Age,
dwelling in totemistic tribes on hills whose summits it fortified
elaborately, and whose slopes it cultivated on what is called the
“terrace system”, and having a primitive culture which ethnologists
think to have much resembled that of the present hill-tribes of Southern
India.[11] It held our islands till the coming of the Celts, who fought
with the aborigines, dispossessed them of the more fertile parts,
subjugated them, even amalgamated with them, but certainly never
extirpated them. In the time of the Romans they were still practically
independent in South Wales. In Ireland they were long unconquered, and
are found as allies rather than serfs of the Gaels, ruling their own
provinces, and preserving their own customs and religion. Nor, in spite
of all the successive invasions of Great Britain and Ireland, are they
yet extinct, or so merged as to have lost their type, which is still the
predominant one in many parts of the west both of Britain and Ireland,
and is believed by some ethnologists to be generally upon the increase
all over England.
The second of the two races was the exact opposite to the first. It was
the tall, fair, light-haired, blue- or gray-eyed, broad-headed people
called, popularly, the “Celts”, who belonged in speech to the “Aryan”
family, their language finding its affinities in Latin, Greek, Teutonic,
Slavic, the Zend of Ancient Persia, and the Sanscrit of Ancient India.
Its original home was probably somewhere in Central Europe, along the
course of the upper Danube, or in the region of the Alps. The “round
barrows” in which it buried its dead, or deposited their burnt ashes,
differ in shape from the “long barrows” of the earlier race. It was in a
higher stage of culture than the “Iberians”, and introduced into Britain
bronze and silver, and, perhaps, some of the more lately domesticated
animals.
Both Iberians and Celts were divided into numerous tribes, but there is
nothing to show that there was any great diversity among the former. It
is otherwise with the Celts, who were separated into two main branches
which came over at different times. The earliest were the Goidels, or
Gaels; the second, the Brythons, or Britons. Between these two branches
there was not only a dialectical, but probably, also, a considerable
physical difference. Some anthropologists even postulate a different
shape of skull. Without necessarily admitting this, there is reason to
suppose a difference of build and of colour of hair. With regard to
this, we have the evidence of Latin writers—of Tacitus,[12] who tells us
that the “Caledonians” of the North differed from the Southern Britons
in being larger-limbed and redder-haired, and of Strabo,[13] who
described the tribes in the interior of Britain as taller than the
Gaulish colonists on the coast, with hair less yellow and limbs more
loosely knit. Equally do the classic authorities agree in recognizing
the “Silures” of South Wales as an entirely different race from any
other in Britain. The dark complexions and curly hair of these Iberians
seemed to Tacitus to prove them immigrants from Spain.[14]
Professor Rhys also puts forward evidence to show that the Goidels and
the Brythons had already separated before they first left Gaul for our
islands.[15] He finds them as two distinct peoples there. We do not
expect so much nowadays from “the merest school-boy” as we did in
Macaulay’s time, but even the modern descendant of that paragon could
probably tell us that all Gaul was divided into three parts, one of
which was inhabited by the Belgae, another by the Aquitani, and the
third by those who called themselves Celtae, but were termed Galli by
the Romans; and that they all differed from one another in language,
customs, and laws.[16] Of these, Professor Rhys identifies the Belgae
with the Brythons, and the Celtae with the Goidels, the third people,
the Aquitani, being non-Celtic and non-Aryan, part of the great
Hamitic-speaking Iberian stock.[17] The Celtae, with their Goidelic
dialect of Celtic, which survives to-day in the Gaelic languages of
Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man, were the first to come over to
Britain, pushed forward, probably, by the Belgae, who, Caesar tells us,
were the bravest of the Gauls.[18] Here they conquered the native
Iberians, driving them out of the fertile parts into the rugged
districts of the north and west. Later came the Belgae themselves,
compelled by press of population; and they, bringing better weapons and
a higher civilization, treated the Goidels as those had treated the
Iberians. Thus harried, the Goidels probably combined with the Iberians
against what was now the common foe, and became to a large degree
amalgamated with them. The result was that during the Roman domination
the British Islands were roughly divided with regard to race as follows:
The Brythons, or second Celtic race, held all Britain south of the
Tweed, with the exception of the extreme west, while the first Celtic
race, the Goidelic, had most of Ireland, as well as the Isle of Man,
Cumberland, the West Highlands, Cornwall, Devon, and North Wales. North
of the Grampians lived the Picts, who were probably more or less
Goidelicized Iberians, the aboriginal race also holding out, unmixed, in
South Wales and parts of Ireland.
It is now time to decide what, for the purposes of this book, it will be
best to call the two different branches of the Celts, and their
languages. With such familiar terms as “Gael” and “Briton”, “Gaelic” and
“British”, ready to our hands, it seems pedantic to insist upon the more
technical “Goidel” and “Brython”, “Goidelic” and “Brythonic”. The
difficulty is that the words “Gael” and “Gaelic” have been so long
popularly used to designate only the modern “Goidels” of Scotland and
their language, that they may create confusion when also applied to the
people and languages of Ireland and the Isle of Man. Similarly, the
words “Briton” and “British” have come to mean, at the present day, the
people of the whole of the British Islands, though they at first only
signified the inhabitants of England, Central Wales, the Lowlands of
Scotland, and the Brythonic colony in Brittany. However, the words
“Goidel” and “Brython”, with their derivatives, are so clumsy that it
will probably prove best to use the neater terms. In this volume,
therefore, the “Goidels” of Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man are
our “Gaels” and the “Brythons” of England and Wales are our “Britons”.
We get the earliest accounts of the life of the inhabitants of the
British Islands from two sources. The first is a foreign one, that of
the Latin writers. But the Romans only really knew the Southern Britons,
whom they describe as similar in physique and customs to the Continental
Gauls, with whom, indeed, they considered them to be identical.[19] At
the time they wrote, colonies of Belgae were still settling upon the
coasts of Britain opposite to Gaul.[20] Roman information grew scantier
as it approached the Wall, and of the Northern tribes they seem to have
had only such knowledge as they gathered through occasional warfare with
them. They describe them as entirely barbarous, naked and tattooed,
living by the chase alone, without towns, houses, or fields, without
government or family life, and regarding iron as an ornament of value,
as other, more civilized peoples regarded gold.[21] As for Ireland, it
never came under their direct observation, and we are entirely dependent
upon its native writers for information as to the manners and customs of
the Gaels. It may be considered convincing proof of the authenticity of
the descriptions of life contained in the ancient Gaelic manuscripts
that they corroborate so completely the observations of the Latin
writers upon the Britons and Gauls. Reading the two side by side, we may
largely reconstruct the common civilization of the Celts.
Roughly speaking, one may compare it with the civilization of the
Greeks, as described by Homer.[22] Both peoples were in the tribal and
pastoral stage of culture, in which the chiefs are the great
cattle-owners round whom their less wealthy fellows gather. Both wear
much the same attire, use the same kind of weapons, and fight in the
same manner—from the war-chariot, a vehicle already obsolete even in
Ireland by the first century of the Christian era. Battles are fought
single-handed between chiefs, the ill-armed common people contributing
little to their result, and less to their history. Such chiefs are said
to be divinely descended—sons, even, of the immortal gods. Their
tremendous feats are sung by the bards, who, like the Homeric poets,
were privileged persons, inferior only to the war-lord. Ancient Greek
and Ancient Celt had very much the same conceptions of life, both as
regards this world and the next.
We may gather much detailed information of the early inhabitants of the
British Islands from our various authorities.[23] Their clothes, which
consisted, according to the Latin writers, of a blouse with sleeves,
trousers fitting closely round the ankles, and a shawl or cloak,
fastened at the shoulder with a brooch, were made either of thick felt
or of woven cloth dyed with various brilliant colours. The writer
Diodorus tells us that they were crossed with little squares and lines,
“as though they had been sprinkled with flowers”. They were, in fact,
like “tartans”, and we may believe Varro, who tells us that they “made a
gaudy show”. The men alone seem to have worn hats, which were of soft
felt, the women’s hair being uncovered, and tied in a knot behind. In
time of battle, the men also dispensed with any head-covering, brushing
their abundant hair forward into a thick mass, and dyeing it red with a
soap made of goat’s fat and beech ashes, until they looked (says
Cicero’s tutor Posidonius, who visited Britain about 110 B.C.) less like
human beings than wild men of the woods. Both sexes were fond of
ornaments, which took the form of gold bracelets, rings, pins, and
brooches, and of beads of amber, glass, and jet. Their knives, daggers,
spear-heads, axes, and swords were made of bronze or iron; their shields
were the same round target used by the Highlanders at the battle of
Culloden; and they seem also to have had a kind of lasso to which a
hammer-shaped ball was attached, and which they used as the Gauchos of
South America use their _bola_. Their war-chariots were made of wicker,
the wooden wheels being armed with sickles of bronze. These were drawn
either by two or four horses, and were large enough to hold several
persons in each. Standing in these, they rushed along the enemy’s lines,
hurling darts, and driving the scythes against all who came within
reach. The Romans were much impressed by the skill of the drivers, who
“could check their horses at full speed on a steep incline, and turn
them in an instant, and could run along the pole, and stand on the yoke,
and then get back into their chariots again without a moment’s
delay”.[24]
With these accounts of the Roman writers we may compare the picture of
the Gaelic hero, Cuchulainn, as the ancient Irish writers describe him
dressed and armed for battle. Glorified by the bard, he yet wears
essentially the same costume and equipment which the classic historians
and geographers described more soberly. “His gorgeous raiment that he
wore in great conventions” consisted of “a fair crimson tunic of five
plies and fringed, with a long pin of white silver, gold-enchased and
patterned, shining as if it had been a luminous torch which for its
blazing property and brilliance men might not endure to see. Next his
skin, a body-vest of silk, bordered and fringed all round with gold,
with silver, and with white bronze, which vest came as far as the upper
edge of his russet-coloured kilt.... About his neck were a hundred
linklets of red gold that flashed again, with pendants hanging from
them. His head-gear was adorned with a hundred mixed carbuncle jewels,
strung.” He carried “a trusty special shield, in hue dark crimson, and
in its circumference armed with a pure white silver rim. At his left
side a long and golden-hilted sword. Beside him, in the chariot, a
lengthy spear; together with a keen, aggression-boding javelin, fitted
with hurling thong, with rivets of white bronze.”[25] Another passage of
Gaelic saga describes his chariot. It was made of fine wood, with
wicker-work, moving on wheels of white bronze. It had a high rounded
frame of creaking copper, a strong curved yoke of gold, and a pole of
white silver, with mountings of white bronze. The yellow reins were
plaited, and the shafts were as hard and straight as sword-blades.[26]
In like manner the ancient Irish writers have made glorious the halls
and fortresses of their mythical kings. Like the palaces of Priam, of
Menelaus, and of Odysseus, they gleam with gold and gems. Conchobar,[27]
the legendary King of Ulster in its golden age, had three such “houses”
at Emain Macha. Of the one called the “Red Branch”, we are told that it
contained nine compartments of red yew, partitioned by walls of bronze,
all grouped around the king’s private chamber, which had a ceiling of
silver, and bronze pillars adorned with gold and carbuncles.[28] But the
far less magnificent accounts of the Latin writers have, no doubt, more
truth in them than such lavish pictures. They described the Britons they
knew as living in villages of bee-hive huts, roofed with fern or thatch,
from which, at the approach of an enemy, they retired to the local
_dún_. This, so far from being elaborate, merely consisted of a round or
oval space fenced in with palisades and earthworks, and situated either
upon the top of a hill or in the midst of a not easily traversable
morass.[29] We may see the remains of such strongholds in many parts of
England—notable ones are the “castles” of Amesbury, Avebury, and Old
Sarum in Wiltshire, Saint Catherine’s Hill, near Winchester, and Saint
George’s Hill, in Surrey—and it is probable that, in spite of the Celtic
praisers of past days, the “palaces” of Emain Macha and of Tara were
very like them.
The Celtic customs were, like the Homeric, those of the primitive world.
All land (though it may have theoretically belonged to the chief) was
cultivated in common. This community of possessions is stated by
Caesar[30] to have extended to their wives; but the imputation cannot be
said to have been proved. On the contrary, in the stories of both
branches of the Celtic race, women seem to have taken a higher place in
men’s estimation, and to have enjoyed far more personal liberty, than
among the Homeric Greeks. The idea may have arisen from a
misunderstanding of some of the curious Celtic customs. Descent seems to
have been traced through the maternal rather than through the paternal
line, a very un-Aryan procedure which some believe to have been borrowed
from another race. The parental relation was still further lessened by
the custom of sending children to be brought up outside the family in
which they were born, so that they had foster-parents to whom they were
as much, or even more, attached than to their natural ones.
Their political state, mirroring their family life, was not less
primitive. There was no central tribunal. Disputes were settled within
the families in which they occurred, while, in the case of graver
injuries, the injured party or his nearest relation could kill the
culprit or exact a fine from him. As families increased in number, they
became petty tribes, often at war with one another. A defeated tribe had
to recognize the sovereignty of the head man of the conquering tribe,
and a succession of such victories exalted him into the position of a
chief of his district. But even then, though his decision was the whole
of the law, he was little more than the mouthpiece of public opinion.
-----
Footnote 9:
Huxley: _On Some Fixed Points in British Ethnology_. 1871.
Footnote 10:
Sergi: _The Mediterranean Race_.
Footnote 11:
Gomme: _The Village Community_. Chap. IV—“The non-Aryan Elements in
the English Village Community”.
Footnote 12:
Tacitus: _Agricola_, chap. XI.
Footnote 13:
Strabo: _Geographica_, Book IV, chap. V.
Footnote 14:
Tacitus, _op. cit._
Footnote 15:
Rhys: _The Early Ethnology of the British Islands_. _Scottish Review._
April, 1890.
Footnote 16:
Caesar: _De Bello Gallico_, Book I, chap. I.
Footnote 17:
Rhys: _Scottish Review_. April, 1890.
Footnote 18:
Op. Caesar, _op. cit._
Footnote 19:
Tacitus: _Agricola_, chap. XI.
Footnote 20:
Caesar: _De Bello Gallico_, Book V, chap. XII.
Footnote 21:
Elton: _Origins of English History_, chap. VII.
Footnote 22:
See “_La Civilisation des Celtes et celle de l’Épopée Homérique_”, by
M. d’Arbois de Jubainville, _Cours de Littérature Celtique_, Vol. VI.
Footnote 23:
See Elton: _Origins of English History_, chap. VII.
Footnote 24:
Caesar: _De Bello Gallico_, Book IV, chap. XXXIII.
Footnote 25:
From the _Táin Bó Chuailgné_. The translator is Mr. Standish Hayes
O’Grady.
Footnote 26:
_Tochmarc Emire_—the _Wooing of Emer_—an old Irish romance.
Footnote 27:
Sometimes spelt “Conachar”, and pronounced _Conhower_ or _Connor_.
Footnote 28:
The _Wooing of Emer_.
Footnote 29:
Caesar: _De Bello Gallico_, Book V, chap. XXI, and various passages in
Book VII.
Footnote 30:
_Ibid._, chap. XIV.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER IV
THE RELIGION OF THE ANCIENT BRITONS AND
DRUIDISM
The ancient inhabitants of Britain—the Gaelic and British Celts—have
been already described as forming a branch of what are roughly called
the “Aryans”. This name has, however, little reference to race, and
really signifies the speakers of a group of languages which can be all
shown to be connected, and to descend remotely from a single source—a
hypothetical mother-tongue spoken by a hypothetical people which we term
“Aryan”, or, more correctly, “Indo-European”. This primeval speech,
evolved, probably, upon some part of the great plain which stretches
from the mountains of Central Europe to the mountains of Central Asia,
has spread, superseding, or amalgamating with the tongues of other
races, until branches of it are spoken over almost the whole of Europe
and a great portion of Asia. All the various Latin, Greek, Slavic,
Teutonic, and Celtic languages are “Aryan”, as well as Persian and other
Asiatic dialects derived from the ancient “Zend”, and the numerous
Indian languages which trace their origin to Sanscrit.
Not very long ago, it was supposed that this common descent of language
involved a common descent of blood. A real brotherhood was
enthusiastically claimed for all the principal European nations, who
were also invited to recognize Hindus and Persians as their long-lost
cousins. Since then, it has been conceded that, while the Aryan speech
survived, though greatly modified, the Aryan blood might well have
disappeared, diluted beyond recognition by crossing with the other races
whom the Aryans conquered, or among whom they more or less peacefully
settled. As a matter of fact, there are no European nations—perhaps no
people at all except a few remote savage tribes—which are not made up of
the most diverse elements. Aryan and non-Aryan long ago blended
inextricably, to form by their fusion new peoples.
But, just as the Aryan speech influenced the new languages, and the
Aryan customs the new civilizations, so we can still discern in the
religions of the Aryan-speaking nations similar ideas and expressions
pointing to an original source of mythological conceptions. Hence,
whether we investigate the mythology of the Hindus, the Greeks, the
Teutons, or the Celts, we find the same mythological groundwork. In
each, we see the powers of nature personified, and endowed with human
form and attributes, though bearing, with few exceptions, different
names. Like the Vedic brahmans, the Greek and Latin poets, and the Norse
scalds, the Celtic bards—whether Gaels or Britons—imagined the sky, the
sun, the moon, the earth, the sea, and the dark underworld, as well as
the mountains, the streams and the woods, to be ruled by beings like
their own chiefs, but infinitely more powerful; every passion, as War
and Love, and every art, as Poetry and Smithcraft, had its divine
founder, teacher, and exponent; and of all these deities and their
imagined children, they wove the poetical and allegorical romances which
form the subject of the present volume.
Like other nations, too, whether Aryan or non-Aryan, the Celts had,
besides their mythology, a religion. It is not enough to tell tales of
shadowy gods; they must be made visible by sculpture, housed in groves
or temples, served with ritual, and propitiated with sacrifices, if one
is to hope for their favours. Every cult must have its priests living by
the altar.
The priests of the Celts are well-known to us by name as the “Druids”—a
word derived from a root DR which signifies a tree, and especially the
oak, in several Aryan languages.[31] This is generally—though not by all
scholars—taken as proving that they paid an especial veneration to the
king of trees. It is true that the mistletoe—that strange parasite upon
the oak—was prominent among their “herbs of power”, and played a part in
their ritual;[32] but this is equally true of other Aryan nations. By
the Norse it was held sacred to the god Balder, while the Romans
believed it to be the “golden bough” that gave access to Hades.[33]
The accounts both of the Latin and Gaelic writers give us a fairly
complete idea of the nature of the Druids, and especially of the high
estimation in which they were held. They were at once the priests, the
physicians, the wizards, the diviners, the theologians, the scientists,
and the historians of their tribes. All spiritual power and all human
knowledge were vested in them, and they ranked second only to the kings
and chiefs. They were freed from all contribution to the State, whether
by tribute or service in war, so that they might the better apply
themselves to their divine offices. Their decisions were absolutely
final, and those who disobeyed them were laid under a terrible
excommunication or “boycott”.[34] Classic writers tell us how they
lorded it in Gaul, where, no doubt, they borrowed splendour by imitating
their more civilized neighbours. Men of the highest rank were proud to
cast aside the insignia of mere mortal honour to join the company of
those who claimed to be the direct mediators with the sky-god and the
thunder-god, and who must have resembled the ecclesiastics of mediæval
Europe in the days of their greatest power, combining, like them,
spiritual and temporal dignities, and possessing the highest culture of
their age. Yet it was not among these Druids of Gaul, with their
splendid temples and vestments and their elaborate rituals, that the
metropolis of Druidism was to be sought. We learn from Caesar that the
Gallic Druids believed their religion to have come to them, originally,
from Britain, and that it was their practice to send their “theological
students” across the Channel to learn its doctrines at their purest
source.[35] To trace a cult backwards is often to take a retrograde
course in culture, and it was no doubt in Britain—which Pliny the Elder
tells us “might have taught magic to Persia”[36]—that the sufficiently
primitive and savage rites of the Druids of Gaul were preserved in their
still more savage and primitive forms. It is curious corroboration of
this alleged British origin of Druidism that the ancient Irish also
believed their Druidism to have come from the sister island. Their
heroes and seers are described as only gaining the highest knowledge by
travelling to Alba.[37] However this may be, we may take it as certain
that this Druidism was the accepted religion of the Celtic race.
Certain scholars look deeper for its origin, holding its dark
superstitions and savage rites to bear the stamp of lower minds than
those of the poetic and manly Celts. Professor Rhys inclines to see
three forms of religion in the British Islands at the time of the Roman
invasion: the “Druidism” of the Iberian aborigines; the pure polytheism
of the Brythons, who, having come later into the country, had mixed but
little with the natives; and the mingled Aryan and non-Aryan cults of
the Goidels, who were already largely amalgamated with them.[38] But
many authorities dissent from this view, and, indeed, we are not obliged
to postulate borrowing from tribes in a lower state of culture, to
explain primitive and savage features underlying a higher religion. The
“Aryan” nations must have passed, equally with all others, through a
state of pure savagery; and we know that the religion of the Greeks, in
many respects so lofty, sheltered features and legends as barbarous as
any that can be attributed to the Celts.[39]
Of the famous teaching of the Druids we know little, owing to their
habit of never allowing their doctrines to be put into writing. Caesar,
however, roughly records its scope. “As one of their leading dogmas”, he
says, “they inculcate this: that souls are not annihilated, but pass
after death from one body to another, and they hold that by this
teaching men are much encouraged to valour, through disregarding the
fear of death. They also discuss and impart to the young many things
concerning the heavenly bodies and their movements, the size of the
world and of our earth, natural science, and of the influence and power
of the immortal gods.”[40] The Romans seem to have held their wisdom in
some awe, though it is not unlikely that the Druids themselves borrowed
whatever knowledge they may have had of science and philosophy from the
classical culture. That their creed of transmigration was not, however,
merely taken over from the Greeks seems certain from its appearance in
the ancient Gaelic myths. Not only the “shape-shifting” common to the
magic stories of all nations, but actual reincarnation was in the power
of privileged beings. The hero Cuchulainn was urged by the men of Ulster
to marry, because they knew “that his rebirth would be of himself”,[41]
and they did not wish so great a warrior to be lost to their tribe.
Another legend tells how the famous Finn mac Coul was reborn, after two
hundred years, as an Ulster king called Mongan.[42]
Such ideas, however, belonged to the metaphysical side of Druidism. Far
more important to the practical primitive mind are ritual and sacrifice,
by the due performance of which the gods are persuaded or compelled to
grant earth’s increase and length of days to men. Among the Druids, this
humouring of the divinities took the shape of human sacrifice, and that
upon a scale which would seem to have been unsurpassed in horror even by
the most savage tribes of West Africa or Polynesia. “The whole Gaulish
nation”, says Caesar, “is to a great degree devoted to superstitious
rites; and on this account those who are afflicted with severe diseases,
or who are engaged in battles and dangers, either sacrifice human beings
for victims, or vow that they will immolate themselves, and these employ
the Druids as ministers for such sacrifices, because they think that,
unless the life of man be repaid for the life of man, the will of the
immortal gods cannot be appeased. They also ordain national offerings of
the same kind. Others make wicker-work images of vast size, the limbs of
which they fill with living men and set on fire.”[43]
We find evidence of similarly awful customs in pagan Ireland. Among the
oldest Gaelic records are tracts called _Dinnsenchus_, in which famous
places are enumerated, together with the legends relating to them. Such
topographies are found in several of the great Irish mediæval
manuscripts, and therefore, of course, received their final
transcription at the hands of Christian monks. But these ecclesiastics
rarely tampered with compositions in elaborate verse. Nor can it be
imagined that any monastic scribe could have invented such a legend as
this one which describes the practice of human sacrifice among the
ancient Irish. The poem (which is found in the Books of Leinster, of
Ballymote, of Lecan, and in a document called the Rennes MS.)[44]
records the reason why a spot near the present village of Ballymagauran,
in County Cavan, received the name of Mag Slecht, the “Plain of
Adoration”.
“Here used to be
A high idol with many fights,
Which was named the Cromm Cruaich;
It made every tribe to be without peace.
“’Twas a sad evil!
Brave Gaels used to worship it.
From it they would not without tribute ask
To be satisfied as to their portion of the hard world.
“He was their god,
The withered Cromm with many mists,
The people whom he shook over every host,
The everlasting kingdom they shall not have.
“To him without glory
They would kill their piteous, wretched offspring
With much wailing and peril,
To pour their blood around Cromm Cruaich.
“Milk and corn
They would ask from him speedily
In return for one-third of their healthy issue:
Great was the horror and the scare of him.
“To him
Noble Gaels would prostrate themselves,
From the worship of him, with many manslaughters,
The plain is called “Mag Slecht”.
* * * * * * * * * *
“They did evil,
They beat their palms, they pounded their bodies,
Wailing to the demon who enslaved them,
They shed falling showers of tears.
* * * * * * * * * *
“Around Cromm Cruaich
There the hosts would prostrate themselves;
Though he put them under deadly disgrace,
Their name clings to the noble plain.
“In their ranks (stood)
Four times three stone idols;
To bitterly beguile the hosts,
The figure of the Cromm was made of gold.
“Since the rule
Of Herimon[45], the noble man of grace,
There was worshipping of stones
Until the coming of good Patrick of Macha.
“A sledge-hammer to the Cromm
He applied from crown to sole,
He destroyed without lack of valour
The feeble idol which was there.”
Such, we gather from a tradition which we may deem authentic, was human
sacrifice in early Ireland. According to the quoted verse, one third of
the healthy children were slaughtered, presumably every year, to wrest
from the powers of nature the grain and grass upon which the tribes and
their cattle subsisted. In a prose _dinnsenchus_ preserved in the Rennes
MS.,[46] there is a slight variant. “’Tis there”, (at Mag Slecht), it
runs, “was the king idol of Erin, namely the Crom Croich, and around him
were twelve idols made of stones, but he was of gold. Until Patrick’s
advent he was the god of every folk that colonized Ireland. To him they
used to offer the firstlings of every issue and the chief scions of
every clan.” The same authority also tells us that these sacrifices were
made at “Hallowe’en”, which took the place, in the Christian calendar,
of the heathen _Samhain_—“Summer’s End”—when the sun’s power waned, and
the strength of the gods of darkness, winter, and the underworld grew
great.
Who, then, was this bloodthirsty deity? His name, _Cromm Cruaich_, means
the “Bowed One of the Mound”, and was evidently applied to him only
after his fall from godhead. It relates to the tradition that, at the
approach of the all-conquering Saint Patrick, the “demon” fled from his
golden image, which thereupon sank forward in the earth in homage to the
power that had come to supersede it.[47] But from another source we
glean that the word _cromm_ was a kind of pun upon _cenn_, and that the
real title of the “king idol of Erin” was _Cenn Cruaich_, “Head” or
“Lord” of the Mound. Professor Rhys, in his _Celtic Heathendom_,[48]
suggests that he was probably the Gaelic heaven-god, worshipped, like
the Hellenic Zeus, upon “high places”, natural or artificial. At any
rate, we may see in him the god most revered by the Gaels, surrounded by
the other twelve chief members of their Pantheon.
It would appear probable that the Celtic State worship was what is
called “solar”. All its chief festivals related to points in the sun’s
progress, the equinoxes having been considered more important than the
solstices. It was at the spring equinox (called by the Celts
“Beltaine”[49]) in every nineteenth year that, we learn from Diodorus
the Sicilian, a writer contemporary with Julius Caesar, Apollo himself
appeared to his worshippers, and was seen harping and dancing in the sky
until the rising of the Pleiades.[50] The other corresponding festival
was “Samhain”[51], the autumn equinox. As Beltaine marked the beginning
of summer, so Samhain recorded its end. The summer solstice was also a
great Celtic feast. It was held at the beginning of August in honour of
the god called Lugus by the Gauls, Lugh by the Gaels, and Lleu by the
Britons—the pan-Celtic Apollo, and, probably, when the cult of the
war-god had fallen from its early prominence, the chief figure of the
common Pantheon.
It was doubtless at Stonehenge that the British Apollo was thus seen
harping and dancing. That marvellous structure well corresponds to
Diodorus’s description of a “magnificent temple of Apollo” which he
locates “in the centre of Britain”. “It is a circular enclosure,” he
says, “adorned with votive offerings and tablets with Greek inscriptions
suspended by travellers upon the walls. The rulers of the temple and
city are called ‘Boreadæ’[52], and they take up the government from each
other according to the order of their tribes. The citizens are given up
to music, harping and chanting in honour of the sun.”[53] Stonehenge,
therefore, was a sacred religious centre, equally revered by and equally
belonging to all the British tribes—a Rome or Jerusalem of our ancient
paganism.
The same great gods were, no doubt, adored by all the Celts, not only of
Great Britain and Ireland, but of Continental Gaul as well. Sometimes
they can be traced by name right across the ancient Celtic world. In
other cases, what is obviously the same personified power of nature is
found in various places with the same attributes, but with a different
title. Besides these, there must have been a multitude of lesser gods,
worshipped by certain tribes alone, to whom they stood as ancestors and
guardians. “I swear by the gods of my people”, was the ordinary oath of
a hero in the ancient Gaelic sagas. The aboriginal tribes must also have
had their gods, whether it be true or not that their religion influenced
the Celtic Druidism. Professor Rhys inclines to see in the _genii
locorum_, the almost nameless spirits of well and river, mountain and
wood—shadowy remnants of whose cults survive to-day,—members of a
swarming Pantheon of the older Iberians.[54] These local beings would in
no way conflict with the great Celtic nature-gods, and the two worships
could exist side by side, both even claiming the same votary. It needs
the stern faith of monotheism to deny the existence of the gods of
others. Polytheistic nations have seldom or never risen to such a
height. In their dealings with a conquered people, the conquerors
naturally held their own gods to be the stronger. Still, it could not be
denied that the gods of the conquered were upon their own ground; they
knew, so to speak, the country, and might have unguessed powers of doing
evil! What if, to avenge their worshippers and themselves, they were to
make the land barren and useless to the conquerors? So that conquering
pagan nations have usually been quite ready to stretch out the hand of
welcome to the deities of their new subjects, to propitiate them by
sacrifice, and even to admit them within the pale of their own Pantheon.
This raises the question of the exact nationality of the gods whose
stories we are about to tell. Were they all Aryan, or did any of the
greater aboriginal deities climb up to take their place among the Gaelic
tribe of the goddess Danu, or the British children of the goddess Dôn?
Some of the Celtic gods have seemed to scholars to bear signs of a
non-Aryan origin.[55] The point, however, is at present very obscure.
Neither does it much concern us. Just as the diverse deities of the
Greeks—some Aryan and Hellenic, some pre-Aryan and Pelasgian, some
imported and Semitic—were all gathered into one great divine family, so
we may consider as members of one national Olympus all these gods whose
legends make up “The Mythology of the British Islands”.
-----
Footnote 31:
See Schrader: _Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples_, pp. 138,
272.
Footnote 32:
A description of the Druidical cult of the mistletoe is given by
Pliny: _Natural History_, XVI, chap. XCV.
Footnote 33:
See Frazer: _The Golden Bough_, chap. IV.
Footnote 34:
Caesar: _De Bello Gallico_, Book VI, chaps. XIII, XIV. But for a full
exposition of what is known of the Druids the reader is referred to M.
d’Arbois de Jubainville’s _Introduction à l’Étude de la Littérature
Celtique_, Vol. I of his _Cours de Littérature Celtique_.
Footnote 35:
Caesar: _De Bello Gallico_, Book VI, chap. XIII.
Footnote 36:
Pliny: _Natural History_, XXX.
Footnote 37:
See chap. XII, _The Irish Iliad_.
Footnote 38:
Rhys: _Celtic Britain_, chap. II. See also Gomme: _Ethnology in
Folk-lore_, pp. 58-62; _Village Community_, p. 104.
Footnote 39:
Abundant evidence of this is contained in Pausanias’ _Description of
Greece_.
Footnote 40:
Caesar: _De Bello Gallico_, Book VI, chap. XIV.
Footnote 41:
The _Wooing of Emer_.
Footnote 42:
It is contained in the Book of the Dun Cow, and has been translated or
commented upon by Eugene O’Curry (_Manners and Customs of the Ancient
Irish_), De Jubainville (_Cycle Mythologique Irlandais_), and Nutt
(_Voyage of Bran_).
Footnote 43:
Caesar: _De Bello Gallico_, Book VI, chap. XVI.
Footnote 44:
The following translation was made by Dr. Kuno Meyer, and appears as
Appendix B to Nutt’s _Voyage of Bran_. Three verses, here omitted,
will be found later as a note to chap. XII—“The Irish Iliad”.
Footnote 45:
The first King of the Milesians. The name is more usually spelt
Eremon.
Footnote 46:
The Rennes _Dinnsenchus_ has been translated by Dr. Whitley Stokes in
Vol. XVI of the _Revue Celtique_.
Footnote 47:
Told in the Tripartite Life of Saint Patrick, a fifteenth-century
combination of three very ancient Gaelic MSS.
Footnote 48:
The _Hibbert Lectures_ for 1886. Lecture II—“The Zeus of the Insular
Celts”.
Footnote 49:
Pronounced _Baltinna_.
Footnote 50:
_Diodorus Siculus_: Book II, chap. III.
Footnote 51:
Pronounced _Sowin_.
Footnote 52:
It has been suggested that this title is an attempt to reproduce the
ancient British word for “bards”.
Footnote 53:
_Diodorus Siculus_: Book II, chap. III.
Footnote 54:
_Hibbert Lectures_, 1886. Lecture I—“The Gaulish Pantheon”.
Footnote 55:
See Rhys: _Lectures on Welsh Philology_, pp. 426, 552, 653.
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THE GAELIC GODS AND THEIR
STORIES
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