Read Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) Online
Authors: James MacKillop
Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) (3 page)
No Welsh writing survives from the first millennium, although it certainly once existed, and the earliest Welsh codices date from a
century after the Irish. The oldest is
The Black Book of Carmarthen
(
c
. 1250), so named because of its cover and for a castle in southwestern Wales, followed by the
Book of Aneirin
(1265), named for the legendary sixth-century poet. Materials that we shall examine come mostly from the
White Book of Rhydderch
(
c
.1325) and the
Red Book of Hergest
(1382–1410) No pre-Renaissance materials are known to have existed in Manx, Cornish or Breton, and the earliest known from Scottish Gaelic is
The Book of the Dean of Lismore
(early sixteenth century). Its compiler, James MacGregor (
c
.1480–1551), unfortunately assumed that no one would ever read Scottish Gaelic and so transcribed the poetry in a phonological script as the words might sound to someone living in the Scottish Lowlands. The Scots language, a dialect of English spoken in the Lowlands, is unrelated to Scottish Gaelic.
While all these documents are revered today as treasures, they were not always so kindly treated. Cromwell’s soldiers in the seventeenth century cut up early Irish manuscripts to make tailors’ patterns. The Welsh
White Book of Hergest
was destroyed by fire in the nineteenth century. And
The Book of the Dun Cow
, lost for centuries, might not be known today at all if it had not turned up in a bookshop in 1837.
Meanwhile, the contents of the early collections receded from consciousness, since only a tiny handful of people could read Irish or Welsh, and most texts were unavailable in English or French translation. Given the poverty and social disesteem of Celtic-speaking peoples, there was little motive to make the texts available until the implications of James Macpherson’s
Ossian
phenomenon had settled in. Lady Charlotte Guest’s English translation of the Welsh
Mabinogion
(1838–49) attracted a wide readership, including the Poet Laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson. Translations from Old Irish could not begin until linguists, many of them German, recovered its grammar and vocabulary. The publications of the Ossianic Society (beginning 1853) and the establishment of learned journals such as
Revue Celtique
(1870–1934) put translations on library shelves but not necessarily into the hands of a wide readership. Standish James O’Grady, the first of many popularizers, injected colourful invention into what had been heavy-going scholarship with such works as
History of Ireland: The Heroic Period
(1878) and
Cuculain and His Contemporaries
(1880).
In another generation, William Butler Yeats, though he knew scant Irish, and Lady Gregory put figures from the earliest traditions on to the world stage.
The oldest written traditions, produced when only a tiny elite of the population was literate, must not be confused with what we now call ‘folklore’. A term almost as difficult to define as ‘mythology’, the word ‘folklore’ first appeared in 1856 after two generations of collectors, beginning in Germany, had gathered materials from the oral traditions of the unlettered peasantry. Oral traditions may or may not relate to older written traditions and are sometimes sharply at variance with one another, as with the character of Fionn mac Cumhaill, subject of an immense number of stories, both written and recited, for many centuries. Stories from oral tradition, further, may fall into worldwide patterns of motif and episode and make astounding parallels with stories from distant parts of the world (see Stith Thompson,
The Folktale
, New York, 1936; Los Angeles, 1977).
In the Celtic countries collectors of oral traditions almost invariably sought to disseminate their findings in English or French. Welsh collections appeared first, with William Earl’s
Welsh Legends
(1802) and William Howells’
Cambrian Superstitions
(1831). Among the first Irish compilations was
Researches in the South of Ireland
(1824) by Thomas Crofton Croker, the son of a British officer. Dozens of volumes would follow through the end of the twentieth century, and the Irish Folklore Commission (founded 1935) has more than half a million pages of oral transcription, and 10,000 hours of audio recordings. Work in other cultures emerged almost concurrently: Robert Hunt,
Popular Romances of the West of England
(1865) from Cornwall; François Marie Luzel,
Chants populaire da la Basse-Bretagne
, 2 vols (1868–74) from Brittany; and William Harrison,
A Mona Miscellany
(1869) from the Isle of Man. Two of the richest gatherings of oral narrative were found in Gaelic Scotland: John Francis Campbell,
Popular Tales of the West Highlands
, 4 vols (1861) and Archibald Campbell,
Waifs and Strays in Celtic Tradition
, 4 vols (1889–91).
As soon as texts became available, readers noted parallels between Celtic and classical heroes, so that Cúchulainn was quickly dubbed the ‘Irish Heracles’. Matthew Arnold (1865) thought that the storytellers of the
Mabinogion
had plundered ancient myth just as medieval peasants had filched cut stones from Roman ruins to build their cottages. Yet it took many years before the several Celtic traditions, ancient and vernacular, written and oral, could be discussed at the same time or be constituted a ‘mythology’. The ancient Celtic gods, not creatures of extensive narratives, relate only occasionally and obliquely to the characters in stories recorded in post-Christian times. Because of their bulk and antiquity, as well as the prestige given them in the generation of William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), early Irish narratives attracted the most scrutiny and generated the most interpretation. Nonetheless, as late as the mid-twentieth century, editors often preferred terms like ‘early Irish literature’ or ‘Old Irish sagas and legends’ rather than ‘Celtic mythology’. The word ‘literature’ makes no assumption about the origin or function of narrative; ‘legend’ and ‘saga’ presume some rooting in fact or history. To call Celtic materials ‘mythology’ implies that they can stand comparison with stories of the Olympians, or of Achilles, Oedipus and Orpheus; increasingly, informed commentators have shown that they can.
As ‘mythology’ is a word of Greek origin (from
mythos
: ‘word, speech or story’), it could be argued that only Greek stories are genuinely myths, just as
real
champagne comes only from France. So many stories are now deemed ‘myth’, from the Icelandic
Prose Edda
to those of the gods of the African Yoruba or Oceanic Maori, not to mention idiomatic uses like the ‘myth’ of
King Kong
, that the word has become almost impossible to define, or impossible to define simply and without many qualifications. We know a myth when we see it, and we know it is different from history. A myth is an anonymous, traditional story, usually originating in a pre-literate society, concerned with deities, heroes or ancestors who embody dimly perceived truths whose roots are in our innermost being. Some myths may explain the origin of the
cosmos or of ourselves, or how living relates to dying, or why the weather changes. This explanatory function, aetiology, is not unique to myth and may also be found in religious dogma. Sometimes ‘myth’ can be defined as ‘other people’s religion’. That is because when we call a story a ‘myth’ we imply that someone, at some time, paid it great heed, which cannot always be said of the ‘folktale’.
While the struggle to define ‘mythology’ more fully could easily fill this entire volume, of greater concern is what people have thought was contained in the material presented in the next several chapters. The earliest perception was that it was all history or related to history. The great Irish historian Geoffrey Keating (
c
.1580–
c
.1645/50) thought Cúchulainn and Fionn mac Cumhaill were flesh and blood human beings, an assumption still uttered popularly at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Certain historical figures, such as St Patrick or the Welsh Macsen Wledig (d.
AD
388), may appear in early narratives many observers would describe as ‘mythological’. But we can scarcely hope to find an historical antecedent to explain the resonance of personages such as the Irish Deirdre and Balor of the Evil Eye or the Welsh Rhiannon and Pwyll. The notion that gods and heroes of myth were somehow inflated out of living people is called euhemerism, after Euhemerus the Sicilian rhetorician (fourth century
BC
); the relation between myth and history is, as we shall see, infinitely more complex.
If the source for Irish and Welsh heroes was not actual human beings, the next place to look was to forgotten or repressed ancient gods. Sir John Rhŷs’s lectures known under the short title
Celtic Heathendom
(1886) first sought to recover pagan knowledge ignored or perhaps distorted by Christian scribes. There was much to support his central thesis. The god the Romans designated Gaulish Mercury could be identified from place names as Lugos or Lugus, as the Gauls themselves would have known him. Lugos, in turn, can be linked to the Irish Lug Lámfhota and the Welsh Lieu Llaw Gyffes. As illuminating as Rhŷs’s efforts were, he worked before some key texts became available, and he tended to push his thesis harder than subsequent research would support. Though
Celtic Heathendom
is little cited today, he influenced two generations of scholars, among them W. J. Gruffydd in
Math Vab Mathonwy
(1928) and
Rhiannon
(1953), and the prolific Irish commentators Myles Dillon and Gerard Murphy. The
inclination to find lost divinities behind any number of warriors or kings also infuses T. F. O’Rahilly’s monumental
Early Irish History and Mythology
(1946). Although a scholar of breath-stopping erudition, O’Rahilly nevertheless erred in seeing the early history of Ireland as a contest between invaders speaking languages from rival families of Celtic languages, a controversial idea in his own lifetime and one largely dismissed today.
More recent scholarship downplays the pagan origins theory in favour of the classical influences flowing from the early monasteries. Kim McCone, in the aptly titled
Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature
(1990), and Donnchadh Ó Corráin and others in
Sages, Saints and Storytellers
(1989) advance compelling evidence in support of their views. The strength of this interpretation is that it relies more on available texts in the Celtic languages and in Latin instead of on simulacra postulated from shards of what was once presumed to have existed. As we absorb these new insights, however, we may have to redefine the mythical roots of Celtic mythology. Not all old stories in either Irish or Welsh had comparable status in the traditions that produced them. And some parallels with classical culture are now believed to have been introduced by Christian scribes. This reverses the earlier perception that the echoes of classical culture were introduced by pagan storytellers, were coincidental or were derived from some kind of universal consciousness.
As with other mythologies, Celtic narratives have been subject to successive schools of interpretation growing out of the intellectual movements of the past 150 years. Psychological theorists discern a unified imagination that overrides culture and language and emanates from the universality of human experience. The followers of both Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung find mythology to be the product of the unconscious mind. For Freudians, mythology can be traced to stages in the predictable steps that each human must follow from birth to maturation. For Jungians mythology derives from the collective unconscious inherited by each human being, regardless of language, colour or social station.
Though the weight of his ideas has not been felt as heavily elsewhere, few theorists have been so influential on Celtic studies as has Georges Dumézil (1898–1986), an Indo-Europeanist and historian given more
to Roman and German traditions. Sometimes designated the ‘New Comparative Mythology’, Dumézil’s theories draw on the French tradition that seeks a sociological context for both religion and myth, asserting that mythology embodies a system of symbols encoding the rules of society. In Dumézil’s view, early Indo-European societies, including the Celtic, were divided into three parts according to social function. These were the numerically smaller priestly and warrior classes and the larger producing class. Each group regarded itself as having been ordained to its particular class by a mythological origin. Although Dumézil himself devoted only a portion of one volume to early Ireland,
Le troisième Souverain
(1949), his ideas were brought to bear on a wide range of early Welsh and Irish tradition in Alwyn and Brinley Rees’s
Celtic Heritage
(1961). The Rees brothers purport to discern an underlying unity in early Welsh and Irish social and political organization as well as in large bodies of narrative.
From the 1960s through to the beginning of the twenty-first century, one commonly sees citations to Dumézil in Celtic scholarship, but the ideas of rival theorists continue to enter discourse. These include the structuralists, notably Claude Lévi-Strauss, who emphasize the presence of a worldwide pattern of opposition between certain terms and categories, such as wilderness/village, upstream/downstream, raw/ cooked, etc. Rivalling them but with more lasting influence are the formalists, Vladimir Propp and Walter Berkert, who relate both myth and folktale to biological and cultural ‘programmes of action’ whose incidence is, again, found worldwide.