Celtic Myth & legend

The Druids were the caretakers of Celtic culture.  When he came into contact with the Druids during his conquest of Celtic Gaul, Julius Caesar confirmed their religious role:

The Druids officiate at the worship of the gods, regulate public and private sacrifices, and give rulings on all religious questions.  Large numbers of young men flock to them for instruction, and are held in great honour by the people.

Had it not been for the Celtic religious ban on committing the wisdom and learning of the Druids to the written word, our understanding of the Celtic Pantheon would be much greater today than it is.

Alas too few texts have survived the savagery and wanton destruction directed at the Celts over the centuries especially during the emergence of the modern nation states of England and France and the wholesale destruction in Ireland during its occupation. The surviving written Celtic source documents are due to accidents of history and geography, mainly Irish and Welsh in origin. The Folkloric traditions of all the Six Nations augment the written record and provide an important source of our knowledge of the Celtic pantheon.

This article is the second part of our survey of the Gods and Goddesses of the Celtic Pantheon. Read Part I here.

Celtic Mythology is a foundation stone supporting, along with the language, music and dance, our collective Celtic identity.  “The Oxford “Dictionary of Celtic Mythology” by Dr. James MacKillop can be considered one of our primary reference texts. The author is a former Professor of English at Syracuse University, former visiting Fellow in Celtic Languages at Harvard University and is past president of the American Conference for Irish Studies.

Published by Oxford University Press in 1998, this work boasts over 4,000 alphabetised entries on deities, sacred places and the personalities associated with the Celtic revival and ancient texts. The entries are presented in a range from succinct definitions to comprehensive narratives. Included is a brief and lucid “Pronunciation Guide” to the modern Celtic languages. The modern Celtic tongues have branched  over the millennia in to two language groups.  This guide sets apart the Goidelic pronunciations of Manx, Scottish Gaelic and Irish versus that of the Brythonic pronunciations of Cornish, Breton and Welsh.

Celtic Mythology is rooted in the Oral traditions of the six Celtic nations and in surviving manuscripts.  Too few texts have survived the savagery and wanton destruction directed at the Celts over the centuries during the emergence of the modern nation states of England and France. The surviving written Celtic source documents are due to accidents of history and geography, mainly Irish and Welsh in origin.  The reasons for this are deftly placed into context by MacKillop in the introduction: “The phrase ‘Celtic texts’ in this volume refers primarily to those written in the Irish and Welsh languages.  Irish is the oldest written vernacular in Europe, with a literary tradition possibly beginning in the sixth century, with the coming of the Christian scribes, that has produced hundreds of narratives. Written Irish-language literary traditions survived the coming of the Anglo-Normans (1169), the flight of the native aristocracy (1607), Cromwellian pogroms (the 1650s) and in to the eighteenth century. Welsh literary traditions, for all its artistic splendour begins several centuries later, long after Christianity was well established and exists in much smaller volume.  A third, much more modest written tradition exists in Gaelic Scotland, related to old Irish...and continued by distinguished seventeenth and eighteenth century bards.”

The Tuatha Dé Danann forms a significant feature in Irish, Scottish and Manx mythology. They are Celtic pre-Christian gods with supernatural ability and were of great importance to Gaelic people. They belong to the Otherworld (Aos Si) community whose world was reached through mists, hills, lakes, ponds, wetland areas, caves, ancient burial sites, cairns and mounds.  Their association with ancient Neolithic and Bronze Age burial mounds is probably linked to the importance these sites had for the people of pre-history. They were places of communal interment for what many believe to be the ancestors of the Celts of northwest Europe. Their story was passed on for many centuries in oral tradition. Many of these legends were recorded in a collection of poems and texts, some dating from the third century AD, and compiled in the eleventh century by Christian scholars in such works as the Leabhar Gabhála Éireann known in English as The Book of Invasions.

The name Tuatha Dé is thought to derive from old Irish Gaelic meaning ‘people of the gods’. The word ‘Danaan’ seems then to have been added later by Christian scribes. This was thought to be in order to differentiate the Tuatha Dé (people of the gods) known to the Gaels of Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man as part of their own pantheon, from the Israelites (people of god) highlighted in Christian teaching. The word Danaan is believed to come from old Gaelic literature; Dana being a Celtic female figure and goddess. The idea of waves of ‘invasions’ into Ireland was also probably further developed in an attempt by monastic scholars to create a history of Ireland that would also suggest some kind of link to one of the lost tribes of Israel.

“Celtic Myths and Legends”, by Peter Berresford Ellis, is an entertaining 600 pages of 37 mythic tales drawn from the legends and folklore of the six Celtic nations.  This work benefits immensely from the story telling prowess of the author who is also author of the “Sister Fidelma” historical mysteries under his pseudonym of Peter Tremayne.

In addition to the tales based on folkloric tradition, the author gives the reader a grounding in the Mythology of the Celtic peoples and an overview of the Celtic languages in the 22 page introduction.  An introduction which deftly places into context the ancient roots of Celtic mythology and in doing so supports the premise that certain aspects of Celtic Myth are windows to the very beginnings of Indo-European culture.  Ellis continues with a concise summary of the linguistic development and divergence of the mother tongue into the two Celtic language groups of Brythonic (Welsh, Breton and Cornish) versus that of the Goidelic (Irish, Scottish and Manx).

Linguists argue that the form of Celtic we term Goidelic is the more archaic branch of Celtic.  It is suggested that around the 7th century BC, the Celtic languages subdivided, when the form which we call Brythonic emerged. From a Goidelic parent, Brythonic modified and evolved in several ways.