Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (42 page)

As for Medb, she dies when her nephew, using a sling, hits her in the head with a lump of hard cheese.

How does eating a mythical fish make you really smart?

For years, mothers told children to eat fish. “Brain food,” they always called it. It was advice not lost on Finn MacCool, an Irish superhero who stars in the Fenian
*
Cycle of tales, set in the province of Leinster around 200 CE. One popular legend tells how MacCool came to possess great wisdom by burning his thumb while cooking the Salmon of Knowledge. Yes, you read that right. MacCool is a young man working for the Druidic poet Finnegas, when he is given a fish to cook. But it is no ordinary fish. The Salmon of Knowledge possesses all the world’s wisdom, and the bard Finnegas has spent seven years trying to catch it. When the old poet gives the boy the fish with instructions on how to cook it, he warns young MacCool not to eat even a bite. But while cooking the fish, MacCool burns his thumb and puts it in his mouth to ease the pain. Finnegas realizes immediately that the boy will gain all the knowledge, and tells him to eat the rest of the magical salmon. From that day on, MacCool needs only put his thumb in his mouth when he has a problem, and the solution is revealed.

The Fenian Cycle includes other stories featuring MacCool. Among the most famous and popular stories is “The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne,” a bittersweet tale of lost love in which MacCool is about to marry Grainne, the beautiful daughter of an Irish king. But when Grainne sees one of MacCool’s warriors, Diarmuid, at her wedding ceremony, she instantly falls in love, leaves her fiancé at the altar, and elopes with her new beau.

With a band of his best warriors, the Fianna, MacCool sets off in pursuit of the lovers, and much of the story describes the adventures of Diarmuid and Grainne as they flee MacCool, aided by Oenghus, the god of love. The chase goes on for sixteen years until the jilted MacCool relents and pardons the lovers, who settle down at Tara, legendary seat of Irish kings.

One day, Diarmuid is mortally wounded by a magical boar on a hunt with MacCool. MacCool has the power to save his friend’s life simply by giving him water. But as he cups his hands and fills them with the water, it trickles through his fingers, and Diarmuid dies.

The tales in the Fenian Cycle also focus on MacCool’s son, Oisin, and his grandson, Oscar. In one of the most prominent of these tales, Oisin, a handsome warrior-poet, is hunting when he encounters Niamh, the goddess of the Irish otherworld. The two are smitten and gallop off together to the Land of Forever Young—a place where sorrow, pain, and old age are unknown. The lovers have a child there, but Oisin is homesick for Ireland and misses his family. Niamh agrees to let him return and gives him her magic horse. But it comes with one condition: he must not dismount.

Once back in Ireland, Oisin realizes that three hundred years have passed since he left. Stopping to help some men move a boulder, he falls from his horse and immediately ages the three hundred lost years, crumbling in the dust. In another, clearly Christianized version of the story, Oisin ages horribly but does not die. Instead, he meets St. Patrick and Oisin recounts the stories of his father, compiled in another Irish collection,
The Interrogation of the Old Men
(c. 1200 CE).

As legendary Irish figures, both Finn MacCool and Oisin appear in the works of writers of generations of great Irish writers, notably in the poem “The Wanderings of Oisin” (1889) by William Butler Yeats. Perhaps most famous of all, Finn MacCool is the model for the character of Finn in James Joyce’s experimental novel
Finnegans Wake
(1939).

What do the Celts have to do with Halloween?

In one of the legends of Finn MacCool, his first act as the guardian of the king’s palace at Tara is to rid the court of the malicious goblin Aillen, who set fire to the palace every year at the festival of Samhain (pronounced
sow-in
). Celebrated from the night of October 31 to November 1, this New Year festival traditionally marked the end of summer and the harvest as well as the beginning of the dark, cold winter. It was a time of year often associated with death, when animals were brought in from the fields and slaughtered.

It was also considered a time of great danger. During the festival, the barriers between the worlds of the living and the dead were broken, “the curtain was drawn back,” and spirits from the “other world” could walk the earth. On the night of October 31, the spirits of the dead caused mischief and damaged crops. But their presence wasn’t all bad—they made it easier for the Druids to make predictions about the future.

Like many Celtic festivals, Samhain spurred the Druids to build huge sacred bonfires, sacrifice animals, and gather people together to burn crops in honor of the Celtic gods. During this fire festival, the Celts wore masks and costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell each other’s fortunes.

Are you starting to get the picture? “Trick or treat for UNICEF” and “Elvira, Queen of the Night” got started two thousand years ago, at a pagan Irish bonfire.

When the Samhain celebration was over, the Celts relit their hearth fires from the sacred bonfire, to help protect them during the coming winter. Some scholars believe that the Lindow Man (see above) may have been a symbolic stand-in executed in a ritual slaying of the king, who was killed three times—by garroting, clubbing, and stabbing—during the feast of Samhain.

By 43 CE, the majority of Celtic territory was under Roman control. During the next four centuries, two Roman festivals were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain. The first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple, and the tradition of “bobbing” for apples that is practiced nowadays on Halloween is just one more vestige of our pagan past.

Of course, then as now, some Christians took a dim view of all this pagan frivolity. By the 800s, the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands. In the seventh century, Pope Boniface IV designated November 1 as All Saints’ Day, a time to honor saints and martyrs. Presumably the pope was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead—masking it (get it?) with a related, but Church-sanctioned holiday. The celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English
Alholowmesse
, meaning all saints’ day) and the night before it, the night of Samhain, came to be called All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween. Even later, in 1000 CE, the church named November 2 All Souls’ Day, a day to honor the dead. It was celebrated in a fashion similar to Samhain, with great bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels, and devils. Together, the three celebrations—the eve of All Saints’ Eve, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day—were called Hallowmas. A similar convergence of native pagan beliefs and Catholicism around these dates took place during the Spanish conquest of Mexico and produces the “Hispanic Halloween,” Día de los Muertos (“the Day of the Dead”) (See chapter 9, What is the “Day of the Dead”?)

Another significant Celtic holiday was Beltane. Held on May 1 and heralding the arrival of summer and the planting season, Beltane was celebrated as a day of fiery purification when, the Celts believed, the fairies were especially active. In Roman Britain, Beltane was merged with a Roman festival called Floralia, which also honored the goddess of springtime, Flora. Eventually, the Celtic and Roman holidays were fused into May Day, a celebration that may date back to even older springtime festivals from ancient Egypt and India.

The modern image of May Day conjures up a merry vision of vernal innocence—children gaily dancing around a Maypole festooned with bright-colored ribbons and flowers. But originally, Beltane was a fertility festival, and the giant Maypole was an undisguised and unashamed phallic symbol. It was often the occasion for young men and women to turn their thoughts to more than just love. In a pre-Christian world, there were fewer moral constraints about sex, and lovers left the Beltane bonfires to wander off into the woods. Although the holiday was cleaned up into its G-rated version in Christian Europe, the May Day festival was not a tradition that appealed to America’s Puritan Fathers, who must have had long memories of its pagan past. That is why May Day never took hold in early America while it continued to be more widely celebrated in Europe.

What is the
Mabinogion?

Apart from these Irish myths and legends, the other significant body of Celtic literature was preserved in Wales, where the oldest myths were not written down for centuries. Again, it is probably a case of a Christian-era writer retelling these stories from his own point of view. Nonetheless, most of what is known of Welsh mythology is contained in a collection that is called
The Four Branches of the Mabinogi
, commonly known as the
Mabinogion
, compiled sometime in the twelfth century. These stories describe the mythical history of Wales, and many of the gods who appear in the Welsh mythology resemble the Tuatha Dé Danaan in Irish mythology. The suggestion is that Irish Celts may have migrated to Britain and brought their mythology with them. The stories are significant, because they offer the only view of earlier Welsh myths and include the first early references to characters and tales that would later evolve into the legend of King Arthur.

The first of four tales in
The Four Branches of the Mabinogi
tells the story of Pwyll, his wife Rhiannon, and their son, Pryderi. The goddess Rhiannon—who is possibly a vestige of the Celtic horse goddess Epona—is betrothed against her will, and wants to marry Pwyll, a king in southwestern Wales. When she dresses in gold and rides past him on a white mare, Pwyll is smitten by her beauty. They eventually marry, and their son, Pryderi, is born. But right after his birth, the baby is stolen, and Rhiannon’s six attendants, in an attempt to clear themselves of any blame, kill a dog and smear its blood on Rhiannon’s lips. The queen is charged with murdering her son and is forced to sit outside her husband’s door, telling strangers of her crime and offering to carry them on her back, like a horse. In truth, Pryderi was never murdered but had been snatched and left near a stable. Raised by foster parents who eventually realize who he is, Pryderi is returned to his mother, and she is released from her punishment.

Links to Arthurian legend begin to appear in another part of
The Four Branches of the Mabinogi
. The tale of “Culhwhc and Olwen,” which dates to approximately 1100 CE, includes many names and places later connected to Arthur, among them a reference to a sword whose Welsh name—Caledvwlch—means “battle breach.” A weapon of great power, it was later identified with Excalibur, the legendary “sword in the stone.” There is also mention of Arthur’s father, Uthyr Pendragon, and his wife, Gwenhwyfar—later Anglicized as Guinevere. A reference to a cauldron, which, in some stories, acquired magical properties, is thought to be an old connection to the later idea of Arthur’s search for the Holy Grail and may hark back to the Irish cauldron of the god Daghda, which provided a never-ending source of food.

The first references to Arthur found in the
Mabinogion
probably emerged from even earlier Irish myths. Traditional Irish hero stories may have been merged with those of Wales, resulting in the first legends of Arthur, a character who was probably based on a powerful Celtic chief who lived in Wales during the 500s CE and led the battle against the invading Saxons. (Others have made a case that he lived during Roman times and led the revolt against Roman rule around 400 CE. The Romans withdrew from Britain in 410 CE.) In any case, the stories of Arthur were exported to Brittany, another Celtic bastion in France, around 1000, where the renowned Breton minstrels then helped spread the tales all over Europe.

The legend of Arthur that endures today is mostly derived from the traditions set down by Sir Thomas Malory (d. 1471), the English author who created the familiar Arthurian legend. No effete intellectual writer, Malory was a violent criminal who had committed robbery and murder. From 1451, he spent much of his life in prison, where he probably did most of his writing. Drawing from a variety of earlier legends and stories—such as an ancient “history” of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and a variety of other sources, including a group of eight romances originally called
The Book of King Arthur and His Noble Knights of the Round Table
—Malory’s legend of Arthur was printed with the more grandiose title
Morte d’Arthur
.

One of the central characters in Malory’s
Arthur
not found in the
Mabinogion
is Merlin, the wizard in Arthurian legend who brings about the king’s birth. In fact, Merlin’s origins go even deeper into a Celtic past, to a Welsh wizard named Myrddin. Many authorities believe the roots of Merlin’s character can be traced back to the Druidic tradition. Various traditions attributed great magical feats of power to Merlin, from overcoming dragons to the construction of Stonehenge. But his role in the Arthurian story—the magical bringing together of Arthur’s parents, the raising of Arthur, the placement of Excalibur in the stone—was first recorded in the twelfth century. Nor does the
Mabinogion
relate anything of the half-sister of Arthur, Morgan le Fay (or Morgaine, Morgana), who was presented as a healer and shape-shifter by Geoffrey of Monmouth. By the time of Thomas Malory, she is the cause of Arthur’s downfall. To round out the circle of Celtic connections, many scholars believe that Morgan is a version of the earlier Morrigan, the Celtic war goddess, who brought about the fall of Ireland’s great hero, Cuchulainn.