The Mammoth Book of Celtic Myths and Legends (2 page)

The discovery of iron smelting by the Celts around the start of the first millennium
BC
gave them a superiority over their neighbours. Celtic smithies assumed a new role
in society and artisans were considered among the nobility. With iron spears, swords, shield fittings, axes, saws, hammers and billhooks, the Celts started their expansion through the previously
impenetrable forests of northern Europe. As an agricultural society, they had a new weapon to tame the earth in the iron ploughshare. The Celts were even able to develop threshing machines. Their
iron axes and saws helped them to build roads throughout Europe. It is interesting that the Old Irish word for a road was
slighe,
from
sligim
, “I hew”. Overpopulation and,
perhaps, conflict between tribes seems a reasonable cause for the start of the Celtic expansion from their original homelands.

Some Celtic tribes had already crossed the Alps and settled in the Po Valley by the 7th century
BC
. They came into conflict with the Etruscan empire and pushed it back
south of the Appenines. The Senones tribe crossed the Appenines, searching for land to settle on, around 390
BC
. They encountered resistance from the Etruscans and then the
new overlords of the Etruscans – Rome itself.

The Celtic Senones defeated the Roman legions at the battle of Allia and marched on Rome, occupying the city for seven months before the Roman Senate agreed to pay a ransom to free their city.
The Senones settled on the eastern seaboard of Italy around Ancona. This turbulent period appears in Celtic mythological tales and was recorded by
Geoffrey of Monmouth in his
Historia Regum Britanniae
(History of the Kings of Britain) in the twelfth century; this work popularised the Arthurian sagas.

Practically a hundred years after the defeat of the Romans, Celtic tribes pushed into the Greek peninsula, defeating the armies that had once conquered the known world for Alexander. They
defeated the combined armies of Greece at Thermopylae and then marched on to the holy shrine of Delphi, which they sacked.

The Celts (as
Keltoi
) had first emerged into recorded history, so far as surviving records show, in the writings of Greek travellers and historians in the sixth century
BC
. Herodotus of Halicarnassus says that a merchant from Samos, named Colaeus, landed at the mouth of the Tartessus, the modern river Guadalquivir, just north of Cadiz in Spain, about
630
BC
. He found Celts were long settled throughout the Iberian peninsula and exploiting the silver mines of the region. This was the first known encounter between the
Greeks and the Celts and Greek merchants began a thriving business with the Celtic mine-owners in the area. The first historical accounts of the Celts came from the pens of Herodotus of
Halicarnassus and Hecataeus of Miletus.

By the third century
BC
, the Celtic peoples had reached their greatest expansion. They were domiciled from the west in Ireland to the east on the central plain of Turkey
(the Celtic “commonwealth” of Galatia, which became the first non-Jewish peoples to accept Christianity and to whom Paul wrote a famous epistle), and north from Belgium, which is still
named after the Celtic “Belgae”, south through France (what was then Gaul) through the Iberian peninsula as far south as Cadiz, and also across the Alps into the Po Valley (Cisalpine
Gaul) and along the Danube Valley. Switzerland is still designated by the name of the Celtic people who lived there – the Helvetii. Thrace had become a Celtic kingdom for a century or so, and
isolated Celtic groups were to be found into Poland and Russia, as far as the Sea of Azov.

It should be pointed out that, by this time, there were several Celtic dialects – not all Celts spoke the same Celtic language which had further sub-divided.

The tide of the Celtic expansion began to turn in the first century
BC
with the rise of Rome’s great military empire. Then the expansions of the
Slavs and finally the Germanic peoples pushed the Celts back, so that today, the survivors of that once vast Celtic civilisation are now confined to the north-west periphery of Europe. They had
survived into modern times as the Irish, the Manx and the Scottish (speaking Goidelic or Q-Celtic) and the Welsh, Cornish and Breton (speaking Brythonic or P-Celtic).

Linguists argue that the form of Celtic we term as Goidelic is the more archaic branch of Celtic. It is suggested that around the seventh century
BC
, the Celtic languages
subdivided, when the form which we called Brythonic emerged. From a Goidelic parent, Brythonic modified and evolved in several ways.

The basic change was the famous substitution of “Q”, the sound now represented by a hard “C”, into “P”. To give a simple example, the word for
“son” in Irish is
mac,
in Welsh this became
map
and in modern Welsh is shortened to
ap.
“Everyone”, or
cách
, in Old Irish, is
paup
in Old Welsh. The word for a “feather” in Old Irish,
clúmh,
became
pluf
in Old Welsh. Thus the “Q” is substituted for the “P” and hence the
identification of “P” and “Q” Celtic and perhaps the origin of the phrase about “minding your ‘p’s’ and ‘q’s’ ”.

Language repression and persecution has nearly destroyed the Celtic languages. Census returns and estimations show that, out of the sixteen millions now living in the Celtic areas, only some
two-and-a-half million speak a Celtic language. In studying Celtic mythology, it is essential to study the Celtic languages in which that mythology is first recorded.

Although our first surviving inscription in a Continental Celtic language dates from the sixth century
BC
, and we have over two hundred inscriptions mainly from the
fourth and third centuries
BC
, Celtic mythology was not recorded until the Christian era: and then only in the insular Celtic languages, mainly Irish and Welsh.

At one point, the Coligny calendar was regarded as the longest text in a Celtic language from pre-Christian times. In August 1983, a text of 160 words on a lead tablet was found
in Larzac, which dates to the first century
BC
. More recently, two bronze tablets, one containing 200 words in Celtic and apparently a legal document, were found
at Botoritta, the ancient site of Contrebia Belaisca near Saragossa, Spain. These are said to be dated back to the second and first centuries
BC
. The argument that the
ancient Celts were illiterate, so often put forward, is patently a false one.

To put the surviving Celtic inscriptions into context, we should point out that, while our first surviving Latin inscription dates from the sixth century, as does the first surviving Celtic
inscription, few Latin inscriptions are to be found before the third century
BC
. As a literary language, Latin did not develop until the second century
BC
.

There is an irony here, in that a young Celtic warrior of the Insubres from Mediolanum (Milan) in the Po Valley, taken prisoner when the Romans defeated the Celts at Telamon in 222
BC
, became a slave in Rome and was given the name Caecilius Statius. He learnt Latin and then became the chief comic dramatist of his day. Some forty-two titles of his works are known
but only fragments survive. He was one of the earliest literary “Roman” writers. Many other Celts helped to make Latin a major literary vehicle.

A problem in Celtic terms seems to be that there was some pre-Christian religious prohibition on the Celts writing extensively in their own language. This was due to the mystic significance
which the pagan Celts placed on words. However, it did not appear to prevent individual Celts, such as Caecilius Statius, using Latin as a medium for literary expression. However, it is why we had
to wait until the Christian period before we saw a flowering of Celtic literature.

Irish became the third literary language of Europe, after Greek and Latin. Professor Calvert Watkins of Harvard University pointed out that both Greek and Latin literatures were written by
people using the language as a
lingua franca
and not as their mother tongue. It could be argued, he says, that “Irish has the oldest
vernacular
literature of Europe”.

When the Celtic myths, as represented in Old Irish and Old Welsh, came to be written down, Christianity had taken a
firm hold and those who were writing the stories tended to
be Christian scribes working in religious houses. Therefore there was a tendency to bowdlerise the more ancient stories about the gods and goddesses. The priests of the former pagan religion were
denigrated as wizards and sorcerers. A Christian veneer was given to the pagan vibrancy of the myths and tales. Even the gods and goddesses were demoted into Other-world spirits and entities and
even fairies.

Lugh Lámhfada, Lugh of the Long Hand, the senior of the gods and patron of all arts and crafts, was eventually demoted into
Lugh-chromain,
“stooping Lugh”, and from
there Anglicized into “leprechaun”.

Because of this Christian bowdlerisation of the stories, some scholars have argued that our knowledge of Celtic mythology is highly fragmentary. In its strictest sense, mythology would refer to
the sum total of religious narratives which are thought to interpret and affirm the cultural experience of a people, as well as religious and social institutions. Dr Bernhard Maier is inclined to
believe that the medieval records are no true reflection of pre-Christian Celtic mythology. I would venture that, examining these stories from an Indo-European viewpoint, the pre-Christian motifs
can be discerned.

It is from the Irish tradition that we have our oldest mythological tales and sagas. Dr Georges Dottin has argued that “it is probable that the most ancient pieces of epic literature of
Ireland were written before the middle of the seventh century; but how long previously they had been preserved by oral tradition – this is a point difficult to estimate”.

The fact that many of the surviving Irish tales show some remarkable resemblances to themes, stories and even names in the sagas of the Indian
Vedas,
written in Sanskrit at the start of
the first millennium
BC
, shows just how ancient they may be. The being which emerges as the Mother Goddess of the Celts – whose name is given as Danu and sometimes Anu
in Old Irish, and is cognate with Dôn in Old Welsh, as well as surviving in the epigraphy of the Continental Celts – also emerges in the literature of Vedas, Persia and in Hittite myth.
The name Danu means “divine waters”. River names throughout Europe acknowledge her.

The story associated with the Danuvius – arguably, the first great Celtic sacred river – has similarities with myths about the Boyne (from the goddess Boann) and Shannon (from the
goddess Sionan) in Ireland. More importantly, it bears a resemblance to the story of the Hindu goddess Ganga. Both Celts and Hindus worshipped in the sacred rivers and made votive offerings there.
In the Vedic myth of Danu, the goddess appears in the famous Deluge story called
The Churning of the Ocean
.

The Irish texts are, in fact, probably the best demonstration of those seeking tangible evidence of Indo-European cultural origins. Time and again we see remarkable resemblances between Irish
culture on the western fringe of Europe and Hindu culture in India. Even the language of the Old Irish law texts, the
Fenéchus
or Brehon Laws, and the Vedic Laws of Manu, show an
original point of origin, both in concept and, even more amazingly, in vocabulary.

Professor Myles Dillon, in
Celts and Aryans: Survivals of Indo-European Speech and Society
(1975) has pointed out that “parallelism between the Irish and Hindu law-books, both of
them the work of a privileged professional class, is often surprisingly close; it extends not merely to form and technique but even to diction”. As Professor Calvert Watkins of Harvard has
argued, of all the Celtic linguistic remains, Old Irish represents an extraordinarily archaic and conservative linguistic tradition within the Indo-European field. Its nominal and verbal systems,
he says, are a far truer reflection of Indo-European than Classical Greek or Latin and the structure of Old Irish can be compared only with that of Vedic Sanskrit or Hittite of the Old Kingdom.

The
Vedas,
four books of learning composed in North India, in the period 1000–500
BC
, are named from the Sanskrit root
vid,
meaning
“knowledge”. This same root occurs in Old Irish as
uid,
meaning “observation, perception and knowledge”. Most people will immediately recognise it as one of the two
roots of the compound Celtic word Druid –
dru-vid
, arguably meaning “thorough knowledge”.

To demonstrate some of the similarities of vocabulary between Old Irish and Sanskrit, we may refer to the following:
arya
(freeman) in Sanskrit, from which that much
maligned word Aryan comes from. In Old Irish, the cognate is
aire
meaning “a noble”.
Naib
(good) in Sanskrit is cognate with
noeib
(holy) in Old Irish and from
which the word
naomh
(saint) comes.

Minda
(physical defect) in Sanskrit is cognate with
menda
(“one who stammers”) in Old Irish.
Namas
(respect) in Sanskrit is cognate with
nemed
(respect or
privilege) in Old Irish.
Badhura
(deaf) in Sanskrit is cognate with
bodhar
(deaf) in Old Irish. As a matter of interest, this word was borrowed from Irish into English in the 18th
century to become the English word “bother”.

Most easily recognisable is the word
raj
(king) which is cognate with the Irish
rí
and this word is demonstrated also in the Continental Celtic
rix
and the Latin
rex.
Most Indo-European languages, at one time, used this concept. However, the Germanic group developed another word, i.e.
cyning, koenig
and
king.
But English did not abandon
it altogether, for that ancient word for king is still to be found in the etymology of
reach.
The Indo-European concept was of a king as one “who reaches or stretches out his hand to
protect his people”.