The Mammoth Book of Celtic Myths and Legends
Available in:
- eBook
- Paperback
- Book info
- Sample
- Media
- Author updates
- Lists
Synopsis
Developed from an early oral storytelling tradition dating back to the dawn of European culture, this is one of the oldest and most vibrant of Europe's mythologies. From all six Celtic cultures - Irish, Scots, Welsh, Cornish, Manx and Breton - Peter Berresford Ellishas included popular myths and legends, as well as bringing to light exciting new tales which have been lying in manuscript form, untranslated and unknown to the modern general reader. The author brings not only his extensive knowledge of source material but also his acclaimed skills of storytelling to produce an original, enthralling and definitive collection of Celtic myths and legends - tales of gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines, magical weapons, fabulous beasts, and entities from the ancient Celtic world.
Release date: January 31, 2003
Publisher: Constable & Robinson Ltd
Print pages: 160
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
Reader buzz
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
Author updates
Close
The Mammoth Book of Celtic Myths and Legends
Peter Ellis
Also available
The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy
The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2000
The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 14
The Mammoth Book of Bridge
The Mammoth Book of British Kings & Queens
The Mammoth Book of Chess
The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy
The Mammoth Book of Endurance and Adventure
The Mammoth Book of Erotica (New Edition)
The Mammoth Book of Erotic Photography
The Mammoth Book of Fantasy
The Mammoth Book of Gay Erotica
The Mammoth Book of Great Detective Stories
The Mammoth Book of Gay Short Stories
The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories
The Mammoth Book of Hearts of Oak
The Mammoth Book of Historical Erotica
The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits
The Mammoth Book of How It Happened
The Mammoth Book of How It Happened in Britain
The Mammoth Book of International Erotica
The Mammoth Book of Jade the Ripper
The Mammoth Book of Jokes
The Mammoth Book of Legal Thrillers
The Mammoth Book of Lesbian Erotica
The Mammoth Book of Lesbian Short Stories
The Mammoth Book of Life Before the Mast
The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes
The Mammoth Book of Men O’War
The Mammoth Book of Murder
The Mammoth Book of Murder and Science
The Mammoth Book of New Erotica
The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures
The Mammoth Book of Private Lives
The Mammoth Book of Pulp Action
The Mammoth Book of Puzzles
The Mammoth Book of SAS & Elite Forces
The Mammoth Book of Seriously Comic Fantasy
The Mammoth Book of Sex, Drugs & Rode ’n’ Roll
The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels
The Mammoth Book of Soldiers at War
The Mammoth Book of Sword & Honour
The Mammoth Book of the Edge
The Mammoth Book of The West
The Mammoth Book of True Crime (New Edition)
The Mammoth Book of True War Stories
The Mammoth Book of UFOs
The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes
The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women
The Mammoth Book of War Correspondents
The Mammoth Book of Women Who Kill
The Mammoth Book of the World’s Greatest Chess Games
The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries
Introduction
The mythology, legends and folklore of the Celtic peoples are among the oldest and most vibrant of Europe. The Celts were, in fact, the first
European people north of the Alps to emerge into recorded history. They were delineated from their fellow Europeans by virtue of the languages which they spoke and which we now identify by the term
“Celtic”.
This linguistic group is a branch of the greater Indo-European family. The Indo-European family of languages encompasses most of the languages spoken in Europe, with a few notable exceptions
such as Basque, Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian. The Indo-European group also covers Iran and northern India.
Since the old classical language of India, Sanskrit, was identified in the eighteenth century, the concept of linguistic evolution and language relationships has become a science. What this
means is that we can see from the linguistic relationship of the Indo-European languages that, at some point in remote antiquity, there was a single parent language, which we call Indo-European,
for want of a better designation. This parent language diversified into dialects, as its speakers began to migrate from the geographic location where it was originally spoken. These dialects then
became the ancestors of the present major European and Northern Indian language groups – Italic or Latin (now called Romance), Germanic, Slavonic, Baltic, Celtic, Iranian, Indo-Aryan and so
forth.
Even today, there remain relative forms of construction and vocabulary among the Indo-European languages which are not found in other languages: features which help us
identify them as such. Features common to Indo-European include clear formal distinction of noun and verb, a basically inflective structure and decimal numeration. An experiment which demonstrates
the relationship is to note the cardinal numbers – one to ten – in each Indo-European language and one will find the same sound values indicating the common parent.
Where was the Indo-European parent originally spoken and when did it begin to break up? It is probable, and only probable, that the speakers of the parent tongue originated somewhere between the
Baltic and the Black Sea. It also seems probable that the parent tongue was already breaking into dialects before waves of migrants carried them westward into Europe and eastward into Asia.
The first Indo-European literature that we have records of is Hittite, a language spoken in what is now eastern Turkey. The Hittites formed an empire which eventually incorporated Babylonia and
even briefly exerted authority over Egypt. Hittite writing emerged from 1900 BC and vanished around 1400 BC. Hittite literature survives on tablets
written in cuneiform syllabics which were not deciphered until 1916.
Scholars argue that the Celtic dialect of Indo-European, which became the parent of all Celtic languages, emerged at about 2000 BC. The Celtic peoples began to appear as
a distinctive culture in the area of the headwaters of the Danube, the Rhine and the Rhône. In other words, in what is now Switzerland and South-West Germany.
A study of early place names of this region show that rivers, mountains, woodland and even some of the towns, still retain the Celtic original. The three great rivers we have mentioned retain
their Celtic names. The Danube, first recorded as the Danuvius, was named after the Celtic goddess Danu, whose name means “divine waters”. The Rhône, first recorded as Rhodanus,
also incorporates the name of the goddess prefixed by the Celtic ro, or “great”. The Rhine, originally recorded as Rhenus, is a Celtic word for “sea way”.
This is the area, then, where the Celts developed their distinctive culture. Archaeologists now date that identifiable culture through the medium of artifacts, called the
Hallstatt Culture, from 1200 BC to 475 BC. This was so called because the first identifiable artifacts were found on the west bank of Lake Hallstatt
in Upper Austria. Previously, archaeologists only dated the culture from 750 BC, but new finds have made them revise their dating. A later distinctive Celtic culture,
developing out of Hallstatt, was called La Tène, from the finds found at La Tène on the northern edge of Lake Neuchatel.
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”.
This concept of “reaching out to protect the tribe or people” is one found many in Indo-European myths. In the Vedas, the sky-god was called Dyaus and is recorded in the
Rig Veda as one who stretches forth a long hand. This is cognate with deus in Latin, dia in Irish and devos in Slavonic. It means, significantly, “bright one”.
Presumably it has a sun-deity significance.
In the Vedas, we find Dyaus was called Dyaus-Pitir – Father Dyaus; in Greek this became Zeus – also a father god; in Latin Jovis-Pater – Father Jove. Julius Caesar
observed that the Celts had a Dis-Pater – a father god and we certainly find an Irish reference to Ollathair – the All-Father. He is a sky god and Lugh is given this role. Lugh
also appears in Welsh myth as Lleu. Significantly, the name means “Bright one” and the Irish god is Lugh Lámhfada (Lugh of the Long Hand) while his Welsh
counterpart is Lleu Llaw Gyffes (Lleu of the Skilful Hand).
The goddess Boann, whose name means “cow white”, gave her name to the River Boyne; she was mother to Aonghus Óg, the love god, and was called guou-uinda, or cow finder.
Now this appears, almost exactly the same, in the Vedic name Govinda, which was an epithet for the god Krishna. Govinda is still used by Hindus as a name today.
The motifs of the sacred cow or bull are easily found in Celtic, particularly in Irish myths, as well as Vedic or Hindu myths. The Gaulish god Esus equates with Asura (the powerful) and, as
Asvapati, it is an epithet for Indra. The Gaulish Ariomanus is also cognate with the Vedic Aryaman.
The horse rituals, once common to the Indo-Europeans, are found in Irish myth and ritual as well as in the Vedic sources. The kingship ritual of the symbolic union of horse and ruler survives in
both. This must date back to the time when the Indo-Europeans domesticated horses, a development which allowed them not only to commence their initial expansions but to become more proficient in
their agricultural and pastoral and warrior life. Horses meant power.
In Ireland, the ritual of the symbolic union of a mare with the king survived for a long time and was mentioned by Giraldus Cambrensis in his Topographia Hibernica, in the eleventh
century. In India, a similar symbolic ritual of a union of a stallion and queen survived, as we see in the myth of Saranyu in the Rig Veda.
Another important aspect found in common is the “Act of Truth” which Professor Myles Dillon has discussed so well in “The Hindu Act of Truth in Celtic Tradition”
(Modern Philology, February, 1947). The ancient Irish text Auraicept Moraind could well be mistaken as a passage from the Upanishad. The symbolism in Irish myth of
Mochta’s Axe, which, when heated in a fire of blackthorn, would burn a liar but not harm someone telling the truth; or Luchta’s iron, which had the same quality; or Cormac Mac
Art’s cup – three lies would cause it to fall apart and three truths would make it whole again: all have their counterparts in the Chandogya Upanishad.
Even terms relating to cosmology may be seen to have comparisons in Celtic and Vedic culture. The similarities of the Hindu calendar and Celtic calender – the latter
example being the Coligny calendar, found in 1897 – have been seen to be remarkably close. Dr Garrett Olmsted, who has made the most recent examination of the calendar, points out that the
calendar’s original computation and its astronomical observations and calculations put its origin to 1100 BC. There is also evidence from the early tracts that the
Celts practised a form of astrology based on the twenty-seven lunar mansions, or nakshatras, as the modern Hindus still do, and not the Western form which was, of course, imported from
Babylonia via Greece.
So the most exciting thing about the study of Celtic linguistics and mythology is that we are not just pursuing the cultural origins of the Celts, we are actually pushing back the boundaries of
our knowledge of an all Indo-European culture. The comparisons of language, myths, cultural philosophies and social structure, mathematics and calendrical studies (for the ancient Celts were
foremost in this field) with Hindu and Hittite, lead one irrevocably towards a developing picture of the common Indo-European roots whose progeny now spreads through Europe, Asia Minor to North
India.
Celtic mythology, the legends and oral storytelling traditions, constitute one of the brightest gems of European culture. It is both unique and dynamic. It is a mythology and folklore which
should be as well-known and valued as its sister Indo-European cultures of Greece and Rome. Perhaps it should be prized that much more because it gives us a direct path back to the dim origins of
civilisation in this part of the world.
The oldest surviving complete manuscript books that provide the sources for Irish mythology date from the twelfth century. There are, of course, earlier fragmentary texts. The oldest complete
sources are the Leabhar na hUidre, known as the Book of the Dun Cow, the Leabhar Laignech, or Book of Leinster, and an unnamed book known simply by its Bodleian Library reference,
Rawlinson Manuscript B502. They represent the tip of an extraordinary rich literary mountain. And the textural remains of Middle Irish literature have not even been
exhausted.
Professor Kuno Meyer, in his introduction to the beautiful tale Liadain and Curithir: A Love Story (1900), listed four hundred sagas and tales in these manuscript books known to scholars.
To this he added a further hundred texts which had been discovered since he had started to make his list. He then added a possible further fifty to a hundred tales which could be in repositories
still undiscovered. In all, he believed that there were some five to six hundred tales of which only a hundred and fifty had been translated and annotated at the time when he was writing. Eleanor
Hull, in her introduction to The Cuchullin Saga in Irish Literature (1898) made a similar estimation.
It is quite extraordinary that this figure has not changed much during the last century. This means that there are great libraries of Irish manuscripts still uncatalogued, let alone examined, in
various libraries and archives, such as that of the Regensburg archive in Vienna.
Of course, Old Irish was the standard literary language throughout the Gaelic-speaking world, until the late medieval period. The spoken language of the Manx and the Scots had begun to diverge
from the standard during the sixth and seventh centuries AD. Therefore the myths and legends of Ireland, the Isle of Man and Scotland are often the same, sometimes
differentiated by local embellishments. The evidence shows that bards and storytellers wandered freely from one country to another plying their craft. We have an account of the chief bard of
Ireland, Seanchán Torpeist (ca AD 570–647) arriving on the Isle of Man with his entourage and entering into a literary contest there. Yet an identifiable
Manx written literature, as distinct from Irish, did not emerge until the seventeenth century.
It was not until the sixteenth century that a distinctive Scottish Gaelic literature began to emerge from that shared with Ireland. The Book of the Dean of Lismore (Lismore in Argyll) was
a miscellany compiled in 1516 and included sagas of the Fianna of Fionn Mac Cumhaill and other stories. However, like the Isle of Man, the main wealth of mythological and
legendary traditions lay in a continued oral tradition, which was only extensively committed to writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then predominantly in English
translations.
Welsh began to emerge from its common British Celtic parent, along with Cornish and Breton, in the fifth and sixth centuries AD. It is in Welsh that the main early
Brythonic myths and legends have survived. The Welsh material is nowhere near as extensive nor as old as the Irish tales and sagas. While Welsh was certainly flourishing as a literary language by
the eighth century AD, apart from fragmentary remains, the oldest book wholly in Welsh is Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin, the Black Book of Carmarthen, dated to the thirteenth
century. Among the poems it contains are a few on the Myrddin (Merlin) legends. But the mythological texts are preserved in two sources: Llyfr Gwyn Rhydderch, the White Book of Rhydderch
(1300–1325), and Llyfr Coch Hergest, the Red Book of Hergest (1375–1425). The stories in these two books constitute what is called in Welsh the Mabinogi, or in English
“The Four Branches of the Mabinogion”.
The Mabinogi consists of eleven tales and romances. There is evidence that at least three tales originated from a period far earlier than the surviving written texts. Culhwch and
Olwen, for example, which is given in the current volume as The Quest for Olwen, reflects a period of style, vocabulary and custom of at least two centuries earlier.
Like the Irish, the Welsh produced a wealth of manuscript archive material during the later medieval period. The best introduction to this is Andrew Breeze’s Medieval Welsh
The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy
The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2000
The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 14
The Mammoth Book of Bridge
The Mammoth Book of British Kings & Queens
The Mammoth Book of Chess
The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy
The Mammoth Book of Endurance and Adventure
The Mammoth Book of Erotica (New Edition)
The Mammoth Book of Erotic Photography
The Mammoth Book of Fantasy
The Mammoth Book of Gay Erotica
The Mammoth Book of Great Detective Stories
The Mammoth Book of Gay Short Stories
The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories
The Mammoth Book of Hearts of Oak
The Mammoth Book of Historical Erotica
The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits
The Mammoth Book of How It Happened
The Mammoth Book of How It Happened in Britain
The Mammoth Book of International Erotica
The Mammoth Book of Jade the Ripper
The Mammoth Book of Jokes
The Mammoth Book of Legal Thrillers
The Mammoth Book of Lesbian Erotica
The Mammoth Book of Lesbian Short Stories
The Mammoth Book of Life Before the Mast
The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes
The Mammoth Book of Men O’War
The Mammoth Book of Murder
The Mammoth Book of Murder and Science
The Mammoth Book of New Erotica
The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures
The Mammoth Book of Private Lives
The Mammoth Book of Pulp Action
The Mammoth Book of Puzzles
The Mammoth Book of SAS & Elite Forces
The Mammoth Book of Seriously Comic Fantasy
The Mammoth Book of Sex, Drugs & Rode ’n’ Roll
The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels
The Mammoth Book of Soldiers at War
The Mammoth Book of Sword & Honour
The Mammoth Book of the Edge
The Mammoth Book of The West
The Mammoth Book of True Crime (New Edition)
The Mammoth Book of True War Stories
The Mammoth Book of UFOs
The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes
The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women
The Mammoth Book of War Correspondents
The Mammoth Book of Women Who Kill
The Mammoth Book of the World’s Greatest Chess Games
The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries
Introduction
The mythology, legends and folklore of the Celtic peoples are among the oldest and most vibrant of Europe. The Celts were, in fact, the first
European people north of the Alps to emerge into recorded history. They were delineated from their fellow Europeans by virtue of the languages which they spoke and which we now identify by the term
“Celtic”.
This linguistic group is a branch of the greater Indo-European family. The Indo-European family of languages encompasses most of the languages spoken in Europe, with a few notable exceptions
such as Basque, Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian. The Indo-European group also covers Iran and northern India.
Since the old classical language of India, Sanskrit, was identified in the eighteenth century, the concept of linguistic evolution and language relationships has become a science. What this
means is that we can see from the linguistic relationship of the Indo-European languages that, at some point in remote antiquity, there was a single parent language, which we call Indo-European,
for want of a better designation. This parent language diversified into dialects, as its speakers began to migrate from the geographic location where it was originally spoken. These dialects then
became the ancestors of the present major European and Northern Indian language groups – Italic or Latin (now called Romance), Germanic, Slavonic, Baltic, Celtic, Iranian, Indo-Aryan and so
forth.
Even today, there remain relative forms of construction and vocabulary among the Indo-European languages which are not found in other languages: features which help us
identify them as such. Features common to Indo-European include clear formal distinction of noun and verb, a basically inflective structure and decimal numeration. An experiment which demonstrates
the relationship is to note the cardinal numbers – one to ten – in each Indo-European language and one will find the same sound values indicating the common parent.
Where was the Indo-European parent originally spoken and when did it begin to break up? It is probable, and only probable, that the speakers of the parent tongue originated somewhere between the
Baltic and the Black Sea. It also seems probable that the parent tongue was already breaking into dialects before waves of migrants carried them westward into Europe and eastward into Asia.
The first Indo-European literature that we have records of is Hittite, a language spoken in what is now eastern Turkey. The Hittites formed an empire which eventually incorporated Babylonia and
even briefly exerted authority over Egypt. Hittite writing emerged from 1900 BC and vanished around 1400 BC. Hittite literature survives on tablets
written in cuneiform syllabics which were not deciphered until 1916.
Scholars argue that the Celtic dialect of Indo-European, which became the parent of all Celtic languages, emerged at about 2000 BC. The Celtic peoples began to appear as
a distinctive culture in the area of the headwaters of the Danube, the Rhine and the Rhône. In other words, in what is now Switzerland and South-West Germany.
A study of early place names of this region show that rivers, mountains, woodland and even some of the towns, still retain the Celtic original. The three great rivers we have mentioned retain
their Celtic names. The Danube, first recorded as the Danuvius, was named after the Celtic goddess Danu, whose name means “divine waters”. The Rhône, first recorded as Rhodanus,
also incorporates the name of the goddess prefixed by the Celtic ro, or “great”. The Rhine, originally recorded as Rhenus, is a Celtic word for “sea way”.
This is the area, then, where the Celts developed their distinctive culture. Archaeologists now date that identifiable culture through the medium of artifacts, called the
Hallstatt Culture, from 1200 BC to 475 BC. This was so called because the first identifiable artifacts were found on the west bank of Lake Hallstatt
in Upper Austria. Previously, archaeologists only dated the culture from 750 BC, but new finds have made them revise their dating. A later distinctive Celtic culture,
developing out of Hallstatt, was called La Tène, from the finds found at La Tène on the northern edge of Lake Neuchatel.
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”.
This concept of “reaching out to protect the tribe or people” is one found many in Indo-European myths. In the Vedas, the sky-god was called Dyaus and is recorded in the
Rig Veda as one who stretches forth a long hand. This is cognate with deus in Latin, dia in Irish and devos in Slavonic. It means, significantly, “bright one”.
Presumably it has a sun-deity significance.
In the Vedas, we find Dyaus was called Dyaus-Pitir – Father Dyaus; in Greek this became Zeus – also a father god; in Latin Jovis-Pater – Father Jove. Julius Caesar
observed that the Celts had a Dis-Pater – a father god and we certainly find an Irish reference to Ollathair – the All-Father. He is a sky god and Lugh is given this role. Lugh
also appears in Welsh myth as Lleu. Significantly, the name means “Bright one” and the Irish god is Lugh Lámhfada (Lugh of the Long Hand) while his Welsh
counterpart is Lleu Llaw Gyffes (Lleu of the Skilful Hand).
The goddess Boann, whose name means “cow white”, gave her name to the River Boyne; she was mother to Aonghus Óg, the love god, and was called guou-uinda, or cow finder.
Now this appears, almost exactly the same, in the Vedic name Govinda, which was an epithet for the god Krishna. Govinda is still used by Hindus as a name today.
The motifs of the sacred cow or bull are easily found in Celtic, particularly in Irish myths, as well as Vedic or Hindu myths. The Gaulish god Esus equates with Asura (the powerful) and, as
Asvapati, it is an epithet for Indra. The Gaulish Ariomanus is also cognate with the Vedic Aryaman.
The horse rituals, once common to the Indo-Europeans, are found in Irish myth and ritual as well as in the Vedic sources. The kingship ritual of the symbolic union of horse and ruler survives in
both. This must date back to the time when the Indo-Europeans domesticated horses, a development which allowed them not only to commence their initial expansions but to become more proficient in
their agricultural and pastoral and warrior life. Horses meant power.
In Ireland, the ritual of the symbolic union of a mare with the king survived for a long time and was mentioned by Giraldus Cambrensis in his Topographia Hibernica, in the eleventh
century. In India, a similar symbolic ritual of a union of a stallion and queen survived, as we see in the myth of Saranyu in the Rig Veda.
Another important aspect found in common is the “Act of Truth” which Professor Myles Dillon has discussed so well in “The Hindu Act of Truth in Celtic Tradition”
(Modern Philology, February, 1947). The ancient Irish text Auraicept Moraind could well be mistaken as a passage from the Upanishad. The symbolism in Irish myth of
Mochta’s Axe, which, when heated in a fire of blackthorn, would burn a liar but not harm someone telling the truth; or Luchta’s iron, which had the same quality; or Cormac Mac
Art’s cup – three lies would cause it to fall apart and three truths would make it whole again: all have their counterparts in the Chandogya Upanishad.
Even terms relating to cosmology may be seen to have comparisons in Celtic and Vedic culture. The similarities of the Hindu calendar and Celtic calender – the latter
example being the Coligny calendar, found in 1897 – have been seen to be remarkably close. Dr Garrett Olmsted, who has made the most recent examination of the calendar, points out that the
calendar’s original computation and its astronomical observations and calculations put its origin to 1100 BC. There is also evidence from the early tracts that the
Celts practised a form of astrology based on the twenty-seven lunar mansions, or nakshatras, as the modern Hindus still do, and not the Western form which was, of course, imported from
Babylonia via Greece.
So the most exciting thing about the study of Celtic linguistics and mythology is that we are not just pursuing the cultural origins of the Celts, we are actually pushing back the boundaries of
our knowledge of an all Indo-European culture. The comparisons of language, myths, cultural philosophies and social structure, mathematics and calendrical studies (for the ancient Celts were
foremost in this field) with Hindu and Hittite, lead one irrevocably towards a developing picture of the common Indo-European roots whose progeny now spreads through Europe, Asia Minor to North
India.
Celtic mythology, the legends and oral storytelling traditions, constitute one of the brightest gems of European culture. It is both unique and dynamic. It is a mythology and folklore which
should be as well-known and valued as its sister Indo-European cultures of Greece and Rome. Perhaps it should be prized that much more because it gives us a direct path back to the dim origins of
civilisation in this part of the world.
The oldest surviving complete manuscript books that provide the sources for Irish mythology date from the twelfth century. There are, of course, earlier fragmentary texts. The oldest complete
sources are the Leabhar na hUidre, known as the Book of the Dun Cow, the Leabhar Laignech, or Book of Leinster, and an unnamed book known simply by its Bodleian Library reference,
Rawlinson Manuscript B502. They represent the tip of an extraordinary rich literary mountain. And the textural remains of Middle Irish literature have not even been
exhausted.
Professor Kuno Meyer, in his introduction to the beautiful tale Liadain and Curithir: A Love Story (1900), listed four hundred sagas and tales in these manuscript books known to scholars.
To this he added a further hundred texts which had been discovered since he had started to make his list. He then added a possible further fifty to a hundred tales which could be in repositories
still undiscovered. In all, he believed that there were some five to six hundred tales of which only a hundred and fifty had been translated and annotated at the time when he was writing. Eleanor
Hull, in her introduction to The Cuchullin Saga in Irish Literature (1898) made a similar estimation.
It is quite extraordinary that this figure has not changed much during the last century. This means that there are great libraries of Irish manuscripts still uncatalogued, let alone examined, in
various libraries and archives, such as that of the Regensburg archive in Vienna.
Of course, Old Irish was the standard literary language throughout the Gaelic-speaking world, until the late medieval period. The spoken language of the Manx and the Scots had begun to diverge
from the standard during the sixth and seventh centuries AD. Therefore the myths and legends of Ireland, the Isle of Man and Scotland are often the same, sometimes
differentiated by local embellishments. The evidence shows that bards and storytellers wandered freely from one country to another plying their craft. We have an account of the chief bard of
Ireland, Seanchán Torpeist (ca AD 570–647) arriving on the Isle of Man with his entourage and entering into a literary contest there. Yet an identifiable
Manx written literature, as distinct from Irish, did not emerge until the seventeenth century.
It was not until the sixteenth century that a distinctive Scottish Gaelic literature began to emerge from that shared with Ireland. The Book of the Dean of Lismore (Lismore in Argyll) was
a miscellany compiled in 1516 and included sagas of the Fianna of Fionn Mac Cumhaill and other stories. However, like the Isle of Man, the main wealth of mythological and
legendary traditions lay in a continued oral tradition, which was only extensively committed to writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then predominantly in English
translations.
Welsh began to emerge from its common British Celtic parent, along with Cornish and Breton, in the fifth and sixth centuries AD. It is in Welsh that the main early
Brythonic myths and legends have survived. The Welsh material is nowhere near as extensive nor as old as the Irish tales and sagas. While Welsh was certainly flourishing as a literary language by
the eighth century AD, apart from fragmentary remains, the oldest book wholly in Welsh is Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin, the Black Book of Carmarthen, dated to the thirteenth
century. Among the poems it contains are a few on the Myrddin (Merlin) legends. But the mythological texts are preserved in two sources: Llyfr Gwyn Rhydderch, the White Book of Rhydderch
(1300–1325), and Llyfr Coch Hergest, the Red Book of Hergest (1375–1425). The stories in these two books constitute what is called in Welsh the Mabinogi, or in English
“The Four Branches of the Mabinogion”.
The Mabinogi consists of eleven tales and romances. There is evidence that at least three tales originated from a period far earlier than the surviving written texts. Culhwch and
Olwen, for example, which is given in the current volume as The Quest for Olwen, reflects a period of style, vocabulary and custom of at least two centuries earlier.
Like the Irish, the Welsh produced a wealth of manuscript archive material during the later medieval period. The best introduction to this is Andrew Breeze’s Medieval Welsh
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
The Mammoth Book of Celtic Myths and Legends
Peter Ellis
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
