Celtic Myths

Bill Price

• Publisher: Pocket Essentials
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781842432433
• eBook ISBN: 9781842435564
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Social Sciences

Fragments of the rich and complex mythology of the ancient Celts of pre-Roman Europe were preserved in the monasteries of early Christian Ireland and in stories first written down in medieval Wales. The exploits of Cúlchulainn and Fionn mac Cumhaill and of Deirdre and Rhiannon have their roots in the Iron Age and have come down to us from the tales of Celtic bards and storytellers. The myths relate epic stories of heroic ancestors, when the divine and mortal realms were intimately bound up with each other and gods and goddesses inhabited the natural world. The stories are rich with religious symbolism and give an idea of how the Celts perceived the world in which they lived. They also tell of the lives of the people themselves—kings and queens, husbands and wives, warriors and farmers. Along the Atlantic coast of Western Europe aspects of the oral culture of the Celts persisted against the tide of history and into the modern age. The languages and traditions of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man, Cornwall, and Brittany, together with the surviving myths, provide glimpses back into the Celtic world and are a continuing connection to a culture otherwise known through archaeology and the accounts of classical authors.

The Irish Cycles

Overview

In all there are about 150 written stories which together make up the corpus of Irish mythology. All of these are contained in ten manuscripts, written from the twelfth century to the fourteenth century. Linguistic evidence suggests some of the stories were copied into the extant manuscripts from earlier manuscripts dating back to the seventh century, none of which now survive. One of the reasons for this is the turbulent history of Ireland in the ninth and tenth centuries, when the country in general and the monasteries in particular were the objects of frequent Viking raids. The Vikings were, of course, looking for any thing valuable and would not have been particularly interested in monastic manuscripts unless they were illuminated, but, in the chaos of these times, a large number of manuscripts were lost.

The most important manuscripts we still have are the monastic codices, large leather-bound volumes mostly containing sheets of vellum, a type of parchment made from calf or sheep skin. The later codices are made up of sheets of paper. The manuscripts they contain are by no means all mythological stories. They are a miscellany, apparently in no particular order, of whatever the scribes who wrote in them considered of interest at the time.

The earliest surviving of these codices is known as The Book of the Dun Cow (Lebor na hUidre), originally created in the monastery of Clonmacnoise in County Offaly, not far from Athlone in the middle of Ireland, and is now held in the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin. The codex gets its name from a story saying that its vellum was made from a cow, presumably dun in colour, owned by St Ciaran of Clonmacnoise, who founded the monastery in 545. The codex itself can be dated with some degree of authority to the beginning of the twelfth century and it would appear unlikely that leaves of vellum would not have been used until more than 500 years after they were made.

In the majority of cases, the scribes of these early manuscripts remain anonymous but, in the case of The Book of the Dun Cow, it is possible to put a name to the man who first wrote in it and was responsible for about 60% of the content. He wrote his name in the margin of one of the leaves in the course of a pen test. These were processes known by the Latin name probationes pennae, in which a scribe who had cut a new pen, from a goose or a reed, tested it to check it was writing properly before using it for the actual manuscript work. This particular scribe was called Máel Muire mac Céileachair who, it is known from a later chronicle, came from a long line of clerics at Clonmacnoise, going back almost to the date of the monastery's foundation. We also know he was killed in a Viking raid on the monastery in 1106, so obviously most of the manuscripts in the codex were written before this date.

Before the codex came into the possession of the Royal Irish Academy in 1844 it appears to have had a rough life, having been damaged on a number of occasions. It now contains 67 leaves of vellum, but clearly was much larger at some point in its history. Some of the stories it contains are incomplete and there must have been others which have been lost entirely. As it is, it contains the earliest known version of the Táin, along with numerous other stories, such as 'The Wooing of Étain' (Tochmarc Étaine) and 'The Voyage of Bran' (Imramm Brain).

The other major early source of stories is known as The Book of Leinster (Lebor Laignech) and is now held in the library of Trinity College Dublin. Although it is not possible to be as precise about its history as that of The Book of the Dun Cow, it is generally held to date from about 1160 and to have come from a monastery in County Wexford. It is in better condition than the codex from Clonmacnoise, but is still thought to be missing some leaves. It contains, amongst many other things, the most complete known version of the Táin, as well as The Book of Invasions and a large collection of bardic verse known as 'The Metrical Dindshenchas'. Bardic verse was composed by the filid as part of their duties to the household where they worked and usually consisted of praise poems to the head of the house, together with complicated genealogies and items of news. A large body of these poems has survived, although much of it is obscure and would require serious scholarship to unravel what is being related.

The stories contained in these two manuscripts, and in later ones such as The Yellow Book of Lecan and The Great Book of Lecan, offer different versions of the same myths. These different versions are known as recensions. The version of the Táin in The Book of the Dun Cow is, for example, known as Recension 1 because it is the earliest. Most modern English translations make use of a number of the recensions in an attempt to give as full a rendering of the narrative of the story as possible from all the sources.

The myths themselves are usually divided into groups of stories which have similar themes and these groupings are known as the cycles. This has nothing to do with the way the stories were ordered in the codices, which mostly appears to be random, but is the result of the work of German academics in the nineteenth century, who deciphered the Old Irish grammar of the stories, allowing them to be translated, and recognised those stories with common themes. We now recognise four cycles; the Ulster Cycle, the Fenian Cycle, the Mythological Cycle and the Cycles of Kings, sometimes known as the Historical Cycle. To take one example, the Ulster Cycle consists of about 80 stories in all which concern the heroic deeds of the Ulaid, the people of the north east of Ireland who gave their name to the province. Most, but by no means all, concern the life of Cúchulainn and the seemingly endless number of fights he got into.

As well as the four cycles, there are a number of stories which do not readily fit with the themes and these are usually considered separately. These are sometimes characterised as the Echtrae, stories concerning a hero's adventures in the Otherworld, and the Immrama, the voyage stories.

The Ulster Cycle

The 80 stories of the Ulster Cycle vary widely in length, from those of a page or two of prose to the longest, the Táin, which is what we might now think of as book length. Because of its length and its central position in the canon of Irish literature, the Táin will be examined separately in a later section. This section considers the Ulster Cycle in general and a number of the stories in particular.

The stories revolve around the exploits of the nobility and warrior classes of the Ulaid, the people of Ulster, and their king Conchobar mac Nessa, who rules from Emain Macha, now known in English as the archaeological site of Navan Fort. As well as the heroic deeds of Cúchulainn, the stories feature a number of other recurring characters. Fergus mac Róich is another heroic warrior who, in line with Ulaid tradition, has taken Cúchulainn into his house hold as a foster son, as he has done Conall Cernach and Ferdiad. The stories of all these, along with a host of others, intertwine with recurrent themes and actions which reveal other aspects of the characters' lives. Despite these common themes, the stories, or at least the ones we have, don't form a continuous narrative. They are more like a string of related, but separate, episodes.

It has been suggested that the stories originally recounted actual events, occurring at a specific time in history, which, if strict definitions were being followed, would make them legends rather than myths. In a few of the stories, such as 'The Death of Conchobar', the time scale of events is actually given in the text, relating them to the death of Christ, but this would appear to have been an addition of the monastic scribes who wrote the stories down. These scribes are sometimes referred to in the academic literature as the 'redactors' because of their presumed role in shaping the stories for the Christian era within which they worked.

The language of the stories can be linguistically related to the seventh century, but many are apparently some centuries older than this as the descriptions given in the texts often relate to the Iron Age. The warriors fight in single combat, as champions of their respective people. They engage each other with swords and spears, sometimes from the backs of chariots drawn by two horses and driven by a charioteer. The archaeological record has yet to show any evidence of chariots in Ireland in this period, although this may say more about the state of our knowledge than the actual situation and, as Barry Cunliffe puts it, 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence'.25 Despite such qualifications, there can be little doubt that the stories are, in essence, pre-Christian. Kings are advised by druids, seers tell of the events of a story, usually involving the inevitable downfall of one of the protagonists, and poets and story tellers hold powerful positions in the courts of the kings, equivalent to that of the druids. Kenneth Jackson famously described the stories as being 'windows on the Iron Age'26 and there is an element of truth in this although, again, the work of the redactors also has to be considered.

One of the best known of the stories, other than the Táin, is 'The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu', not least because it concerns the tragic heroine Deirdre, one of the most powerful of all female characters in Irish literature. Jeffrey Gantz, in the introduction to his translation of the story, describes it as 'one of the finest stories ever written in Ireland' and goes on to say that it:

... evinces much of what Irish literature is: romantic, idealistic, stylized and yet vividly, even appallingly concrete. Most of all, it exemplifies the tension between reality and fantasy that characterizes all Celtic art.27

The story begins with Conchobar and the Ulaid drinking in the house of the king's storyteller whose wife is pregnant. When she stands up to go to bed, the unborn child screams out, so loudly all the men can hear it over the noise of their drunken revelry. Cathbad, a druid, feels the woman's stomach and makes a prediction, saying, in one of the sections of verse in the story:

In the cradle of your womb there cried out a woman with twisted yellow hair and beautiful grey green eyes.

Foxglove her purple pink cheeks, the colour of snow her flawless cheeks, brilliant her Parthian-red lips.

A woman over whom there will be great strife among the chariot-warriors of Ulaid.28

The storyteller's wife gives birth to a girl, who is called Deirdre, and Conchobar takes her to his house to raise her to become his companion. One winter day, while she is in Conchobar's house, she sees her foster father skinning a calf and watches while a raven drinks the blood spilled in the snow and says 'I could have a man with those three colours: with hair like a raven, cheeks like blood and body like snow.'

Naoise, one of the three sons of Uisliu, is such a man and, when the two meet, after initially mistaking her for a heifer, he begins to sing to her. The rest of the Ulaid, knowing the prophecy, are enraged and a great fight breaks out. Naoise and Deirdre flee Emain Macha, along with his two brothers and their large retinues. They find sanctuary with a king in Scotland, but, when the king hears of the great beauty of Deirdre, be begins to plot the death of Naoise. Conchobar hears of this and sends word to Naoise and Deirdre to come back to Emain Macha. They agree to go back when their safety has been guaranteed by Fergus mac Róich, Durthact and Conchobar's son Cormac, who all go to Scotland to escort them home.

As they are on the way Conchobar instructs people to offer Fergus constant hospitality and, together with Durthact and Cormac, Fergus is duty bound to accept. Naoise and Deirdre thus get back to Emain Macha without their guarantors and, immediately, Naoise is killed by a spear thrown by Éogan, the son of Durthact. The Ulaid kill the other two sons of Uisliu and Deirdre is forced to stand by Conchobar and become his consort. Fergus gets back after this has all happened and is outraged at this terrible slight to his honour. A terrible fight breaks out, in which one of Conchobar's sons is killed, and afterwards Fergus goes into exile in Connacht with 3,000 of his men, where he will be when the events of the Táin are played out.

Deirdre lives with Conchobar for a year but, in the whole time she is with him, she never smiles or laughs and is often found holding her head in her hands in her grief for the death of Naoise. Conchobar asks her whom she hates most and she says she hates both him and Éogan in equal measure. Conchobar replies that she must now spend a year with Éogan. The following day he takes her to meet Éogan in his chariot but, on the way, she leans out over the side and commits suicide by smashing her head against a rock.

This story is not at all typical of the stories in the Ulster Cycle. Cúchulainn does not feature at all and throughout the story Conchobar, who is normally depicted as a benevolent leader, is shown up as a grasping old man, jealous of the youth and good looks of Naoise which have attracted the woman he covets. One way of looking at it is to think of it as an example of a well known plot in mythology – that in which an old king, fighting against his declining powers, rages against the younger king who will soon replace him and clashes with him over the attentions of a woman, in this case Deirdre, who is a goddess in human form.

The story of Deirdre may not be typical, but the same could not be said for 'Briccriu's Feast'. In what is one of the longer stories, Briccriu, who is something of a troublemaker and not unlike the classic trickster characters from many mythologies around the world, organises a great feast and goads three of Ulster's great champions, Lóegaire Búadach, Conall Cernach and Cúchulainn, into an unseemly competition to decide who will get the champion's cut, the choicest portions of meat and the seat at Conchobar's right hand.At first Briccriu's plan is thwarted by Conchobar's poet, who is a wise man and suggests dividing the champion's cut equally between the three warriors so that there will be no need for an argument.

Briccriu switches tack by going to each of the warrior's wives in turn before they have arrived at the feast and telling them that the first to enter his house will show she has a higher standing than the other two. The three women meet on the way to the feast and each one, not realising the others are at the same game, tries to get to Briccriu's house first, gradually walking faster and faster until they are all running as fast as they can. Lóegaire and Conal break down the door so their two wives can get in together and Cúchulainn breaks through the wall, half knocking the house down in the process, in an attempt to get his wife in first. Briccriu, understandably, is not happy about all the damage to his house, but the poet, acting as peacemaker again, gets Cúchulainn to fix it. This he does by flying into a rage, as he does before going into battle, picking the whole house up and putting it back down where it is supposed to be.

Everything calms down again, but the problem of who should get the champion's cut has not been resolved. At this point, you would think, sense might prevail, but it is a question of honour, a subject the three warriors take very seriously. They decide, rather surprisingly, to ask their arch-enemy, Queen Medb of Connacht, to help them find a solution and all the interested parties head off to see her. Ailill, Medb's consort, realises he has trouble on his hands when he is told about the problem. If he chooses one of the warriors, he will make the other two into his deadly enemies but, luckily for him, when the warriors are eating in his hall, three demonic cats are loosed into the hall with them. Lóegaire and Conall both escape the cats by climbing into the rafters, but Cúchulainn remains calm and carries on eating. Ailill thinks he has solved his problem and declares Cúchulainn the winner. The other two warriors, however, refuse to accept this and all three go back to Emain Macha with the problem still hanging over them.

More indecisive challenges follow so the three go to see the great warrior of Munster, Cú Roi, who is reputed to have magical powers. He sets them another challenge, to see who can prevent him getting into his own house. Cúchulainn is the winner once again but the other two will still not accept the outcome and they return to Emain Macha once more.

In the end, in a part of the story of a later date than the rest, a winner is found in a similar resolution to that of the fourteenth century English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. A giant comes to Emain Macha and challenges all three warriors to a beheading contest. Each one gets a turn to behead the giant with an axe, but, if he fails, the giant then gets to behead him. Lóegaire and Conall each strike the head off the giant but, on both occasions, the body of the giant gets up and carries away his head. The following day he returns, his head fully restored. When the giant demands his turn with the axe, neither Lóegaire nor Conal can be found but, when the same thing happens to Cúchulainn, he offers his neck to the axe. The giant takes the axe but uses the blunt end and, instead of cutting Cúchulainn's head off, just touches his exposed neck. Cúchulainn is declared the bravest of the three and the giant reveals himself to have been Cú Roi all the time. Finally, the hero takes the champion's portion.

Some commentators consider that the ending has been adapted to fit the story and that it is not its natural conclusion. The beheading theme is a familiar one from a number of other stories as well as from Sir Gawain, so may have been known to the redactors of 'Briccriu's Feast', who stitched it on to an otherwise unfinished narrative. Whatever the truth of the matter, the final scene does provide the story with a sense of completeness lacking in many of the other myths.

Another feature of this story is its use of humour, poking fun at the ridiculous lengths the warriors are prepared to go to prove themselves and protect their honour. They might be heroes, but that doesn't mean they are immune from being the butt of a few jokes. The use of three brothers – as Lóegaire Búadach, Conall Cernach and Cúchulainn effectively are – is a common feature of Celtic mythology, where the number three is important. A story in which three brothers compete with each other at tasks which have been set for them and in which the youngest one, in this case Cúchulainn, eventually comes out on top is also a universal one in mythology and storytelling in general.

'Briccriu's Feast' also features one of the first accounts of Cúchulainn going into a frenzy, or 'warp spasm' as Thomas Kinsella translates the Old Irish word ríastrad in his English version of the Táin. The war rage of the Celts was commented on by Julius Caesar in The Gallic Wars, where he describes warriors issuing challenges and boasts while working themselves up into a fury before going into battle in a characteristic all-out charge. When Cúchulainn does it, he becomes endowed with superhuman powers. In 'Briccriu's Feast', he is capable of lifting a whole house on his own and, in other stories, of going on a killing frenzy, slaughtering untold numbers of his enemies.

The Hound of Culann

Many of the stories in the Ulster Cycle relate episodes from Cúchulainn's life, some of these in different and conflicting versions, but almost all focusing on his abilities as the ultimate warrior of the Ulaid, not unlike Achilles in The Iliad. The story of his birth obviously does not tell of his heroic deeds, but it is full of symbolism, not all of it well understood now, about what is to come. In one version of the story, the Ulaid, including Conchobar and his sister Deichtine (sometimes said to be his daughter) are out hunting a flock of birds which have been eating their crops. Birds, in Celtic mythology, are intermediaries between this world and the Otherworld because they can cross between the earth and the sky, and their sudden appearance and direction of flight were used by druids as portents of the future.What the birds in the story are signifying is not clear today, although it probably would have been to a pre Christian audience.

The hunters followed the birds all day, ending up at Brugh na Bóinne, the Neolithic passage tombs at Newgrange, by nightfall, where they take shelter with a man and his very pregnant wife. During the night she gives birth to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• www.pocketessentials.com
• Introduction
• On Mythology
• The Celts
• The Spoken and Written Word
• The Irish Cycles
• Tales from Wales
• And the Rest
• Notes
• Bibliography