Survivals of the Celtic Paganism
Chapter XXV Survivals of the Celtic Paganism Into Modern Times
The fall of the Celtic state worship began earlier in Britain than in her sister island. Neither was it Christianity that struck the first blow, but the rough humanity and stern justice of the Romans. That people was more tolerant, perhaps, than any the world has ever known towards the religions of others, and gladly welcomed the Celtic gods—as gods—into its own diverse Pantheon. A friendly Gaulish or British divinity might at any time be granted the so-to-speak divine Roman citizenship, and be assimilated to Jupiter, to Mars, to Apollo, or to any other properly accredited deity whom the Romans deemed him to resemble. It was not against the god, but against his worship at the hands of his priests, that Roman law struck. The colossal human sacrifices of the druids horrified even a people who were far from squeamish about a little bloodshed. They themselves had abolished such practices by a decree of the senate before Caesar first invaded Britain,558 and could not therefore permit within their empire a cult which slaughtered men in order to draw omens from their death-agonies.559 Druidism was first required to be renounced by those who claimed Roman citizenship; then it was vigorously put down among the less civilized tribes. Tacitus tells us how the Island of Mona (Anglesey)—the great stronghold of druidism—was attacked, its sacred groves cut down, its altars laid level, and its priests put to the sword.560 Pliny, recording how the Emperor Tiberius had “suppressed the druids”, congratulates his fellow-countrymen on having put an end, wherever their dominion extended, to the monstrous customs inspired by the doctrine that the gods could take pleasure in murder and cannibalism.561 The practice of druidism, with its attendant barbarities, abolished in Britain wherever the long Roman arm could reach to strike, took refuge beyond the Northern Wall, among the savage Caledonian tribes who had not yet submitted to the invader’s yoke. Naturally, too, it remained untouched in Ireland. But before the Romans left Britain, it had been extirpated everywhere, except among “the Picts and Scots”.
Christianity, following the Roman rule, completed the ruin of paganism in Britain, so far, at least, as its public manifestations were concerned. In the sixth century of our era, the monkish writer, Gildas, is able to refer complacently to the ancient British religion as a dead faith. “I shall not”, he says, “enumerate those diabolical idols of my country, which almost surpassed in number those of Egypt, and of which we still see some mouldering away within or without the deserted temples, with stiff and deformed features as was customary. Nor will I cry out upon the mountains, fountains, or hills, or upon the rivers, which now are subservient to the use of men, but once were an abomination and destruction to them, and to which the blind people paid divine honour.”562 And with the idols fell the priests. The very word “druid” became obsolete, and is scarcely mentioned in the earliest British literature, though druids are prominent characters in the Irish writings of the same period.
The secular arm had no power in Scotland and in Ireland, consequently the battle between Paganism and Christianity was fought upon more equal terms, and lasted longer. In the first country, Saint Columba, and in the second, Saint Patrick are the personages who, at any rate according to tradition, beat down the druids and their gods. Adamnan, Abbot of Iona, who wrote his Vita Columbæ in the last decade of the seventh century, describes how, a century earlier, that saint had carried the Gospel to the Picts. Their king, Brude, received him contemptuously, and the royal druids left no heathen spell unuttered to thwart and annoy him. But, as the power of Moses was greater than the power of the magicians of Egypt, so Saint Columba’s prayers caused miracles more wonderful and more convincing than any wrought by his adversaries. Such stories belong to the atmosphere of myth which has always enveloped heroic men; the essential fact is that the Picts abandoned the old religion for the new.
A similar legend sums up the life-work of Saint Patrick in Ireland. Before he came, Cromm Cruaich had received from time immemorial his yearly toll of human lives. But Saint Patrick faced the gruesome idol; as he raised his crozier, we are told, the demon fell shrieking from his image, which, deprived of its soul, bowed forward to the ground.
It is far easier, however, to overthrow the more public manifestations of a creed than to destroy its inner vital force. Cromm Cruaich’s idol might fall, but his spirit would survive—a very Proteus. The sacred places of the ancient Celtic religion might be invaded, the idols and altars of the gods thrown down, the priests slain, scattered, or banished, and the cult officially declared to be extinct; but, driven from the important centres, it would yet survive outside and around them. The more civilized Gaels and Britons would no doubt accept the purer gospel, and abandon the gods they had once adored, but the peasantry—the bulk of the population—would still cling to the familiar rites and names. A nobler belief and a higher civilization come, after all, only as surface waves upon the great ocean of human life; beneath their agitations lies a vast slumbering abyss of half-conscious faith and thought to which culture penetrates with difficulty and in which changes come very slowly.
We have already shown how long and how faithfully the Gaelic and Welsh peasants clung to their old gods, in spite of all the efforts of the clerics to explain them as ancient kings, to transform them into wonder-working saints, or to ban them as demons of hell. This conservative religious instinct of the agricultural populations is not confined to the inhabitants of the British Islands. The modern Greeks still believe in nereids, in lamias, in sirens, and in Charon, the dark ferryman of Hades.563 The descendants of the Romans and Etruscans hold that the old Etruscan gods and the Roman deities of the woods and fields still live in the world as spirits.564 The high altars of the “Lord of the Mound” and his terrible kin were levelled, and their golden images and great temples left to moulder in abandonment; but the rude rustic shrine to the rude rustic god still received its offerings. It is this shifting of the care of the pagan cult from chief to peasant, from court to hovel, and, perhaps, to some extent from higher to lower race, that serves to explain how the more primitive and uncouth gods have tended so largely to supplant those of higher, more graceful mien. Aboriginal deities, thrust into obscurity by the invasion of higher foreign types, came back to their own again.
For it seems plain that we must divide the spiritual population of the British Islands into two classes. There is little in common between the “fairy”, strictly so-called, and the unsightly elf who appears under various names and guises, as pooka, leprechaun, brownie, knocker, or bogle. The one belongs to such divine tribes as the Tuatha Dé Danann of Gaelic myth or their kin, the British gods of the Mabinogion. The other owes his origin to a quite different, and much lower, kind of imagination. One might fancy that neolithic man made him in his own image.
None the less has immemorial tradition wonderfully preserved the essential features of the Celtic nature-gods. The fairy belief of the present day hardly differs at all from the conception which the Celts had of their deities. The description of the Tuatha Dé Danann in the “Dialogue of the Elders” as “sprites or fairies with corporeal or material forms but indued with immortality” would stand as an account of prevailing ideas as to the “good people” to-day. Nor do the Irish and Welsh fairies of popular belief differ from one another. Both alike live among the hills, though in Wales a lake often takes the place of the “fairy mound”; both, though they war and marry among themselves, are semi-immortal; both covet the children of men, and will steal them from the cradle, leaving one of their own uncanny brood in the mortal baby’s stead; both can lay men and women under spells; both delight in music and the dance, and live lives of unreal and fantastic splendour and luxury. Another point in which they resemble one another is in their tiny size. But this would seem to be the result of the literary convention originated by Shakespeare; in genuine folktales, both Gaelic and British, the fairies are pictured as of at least mortal stature.565
But, Aryan or Iberian, beautiful or hideous, they are fast vanishing from belief. Every year, the secluded valleys in which men and women might still live in the old way, and dream the old dreams, tend more and more to be thrown open to the modern world of rapid movement and rapid thought. The last ten years have perhaps done more in this direction than the preceding ten generations. What lone shepherd or fisherman will ever see again the vision of the great Manannán? Have the stable-boys of to-day still any faith left in Finvarra? Is Gwyn ap Nudd often thought of in his own valleys of the Tawë and the Nedd? It would be hard, perhaps, to find a whole-hearted believer even in his local pooka or parish bogle.
It is the ritual observances of the old Celtic faith which have better weathered, and will longer survive, the disintegrating influences of time. There are no hard names to be remembered. Things may still be done for “luck” which were once done for religion. Customary observances die very slowly, held up by an only half acknowledged fear that, unless they are fulfilled, “something may happen”. We shall get, therefore, more satisfactory evidence of the nature of the Celtic paganism by examining such customs than in any other way.
We find three forms of the survival of the ancient religion into quite recent times. The first is the celebration of the old solar or agricultural festivals of the spring and autumn equinoxes and of the summer and winter solstices. The second is the practice of a symbolic human sacrifice by those who have forgotten its meaning, and only know that they are keeping up an old custom, joined with late instances of the actual sacrifices of animals to avert cattle-plagues or to change bad luck. The third consists of many still-living relics of the once universal worship of sacred waters, trees, stones, and animals.
Whatever may have been the exact meaning of the Celtic state worship, there seems to be no doubt that it centred around the four great days in the year which chronicle the rise, progress, and decline of the sun, and, therefore, of the fruits of the earth. These were: Beltaine, which fell at the beginning of May; Midsummer Day, marking the triumph of sunshine and vegetation; the Feast of Lugh, when, in August, the turning-point of the sun’s course had been reached; and the sad Samhain, when he bade farewell to power, and fell again for half a year under the sway of the evil forces of winter and darkness.
Of these great solar periods, the first and the last were, naturally, the most important. The whole Celtic mythology seems to revolve upon them, as upon pivots. It was on the day of Beltaine that Partholon and his people, the discoverers, and, indeed, the makers of Ireland, arrived there from the other world, and it was on the same day, three hundred years later, that they returned whence they came. It was on Beltaine-day that the Gaelic gods, the Tuatha Dé Danann, and, after them, the Gaelic men, first set foot on Irish soil. It was on the day of Samhain that the Fomors oppressed the people of Nemed with their terrible tax; and it was again at Samhain that a later race of gods of light and life finally conquered those demons at the Battle of Moytura. Only one important mythological incident—and that was one added at a later time!—happened upon any other than one of those two days; it was upon Midsummer Day, one of the lesser solar points, that the people of the goddess Danu took Ireland from its inhabitants, the Fir Bolgs.
The mythology of Britain preserves the same root-idea as that of Ireland. If anything uncanny took place, it was sure to be on May-day. It was on “the night of the first of May” that Rhiannon lost, and Teirnyon Twryf Vliant found, the infant Pryderi, as told in the first of the Mabinogion.566 It was “on every May-eve” that the two dragons fought and shrieked in the reign of “King” Lludd.567 It is on “every first of May” till the day of doom that Gwyn son of Nudd, fights with Gwyrthur son of Greidawl, for Lludd’s fair daughter, Creudylad.568 And it was when she was “a-maying” in the woods and fields near Westminster that the same Gwyn, or Melwas, under his romance-name of Sir Meliagraunce, captured Arthur’s queen, Guinevere.569
The nature of the rites performed upon these days can be surmised from their pale survivals. They are still celebrated by the descendants of the Celts, though it is probable that few of them know—or would even care to know—why May Day, St. John’s Day, Lammas, and Hallowe’en are times of ceremony. The first—called “Beltaine” in Ireland, “Bealtiunn” in Scotland, “Shenn da Boaldyn” in the Isle of Man, and “Galan-Mai” (the Calends of May) in Wales—celebrates the waking of the earth from her winter sleep, and the renewal of warmth, life, and vegetation. This is the meaning of the May-pole, now rarely seen in our streets, though Shakespeare tells us that in his time the festival was so eagerly anticipated that no one could sleep upon its eve.570 At midnight the people rose, and, going to the nearest woods, tore down branches of trees, with which the sun, when he rose, would find doors and windows decked for him. They spent the day in dancing round the May-pole, with rude, rustic mirth, man joining with nature to celebrate the coming of summer. The opposite to it was the day called “Samhain” in Ireland and Scotland, “Sauin” in Man, and “Nos Galan-gaeof” (the Night of the Winter Calends) in Wales. This festival was a sad one: summer was over, and winter, with its short, sunless days and long, dreary nights, was at hand. It was the beginning, too, of the ancient Celtic year,571 and omens for the future might be extorted from dark powers by uncanny rites. It was the holiday of the dead and of all the more evil supernatural beings. “On November-eve”, says a North Cardiganshire proverb, “there is a bogy on every stile.” The Scotch have even invented a special bogy—the Samhanach or goblin which comes out at Samhain.572
The sun-god himself is said to have instituted the August festival called “Lugnassad” (Lugh’s commemoration) in Ireland, “Lla Lluanys” in Man, and “Gwyl Awst” (August Feast) in Wales; and it was once of hardly less importance than Beltaine or Samhain. It is noteworthy, too, that the first of August was a great day at Lyons—formerly called Lugudunum, the dún (town) of Lugus. The midsummer festival, on the other hand, has largely merged its mythological significance in the Christian Feast of St. John.
The characteristic features of these festivals give certain proof of the original nature of the great pagan ceremonials of which they are the survivals and travesties.573 In all of them, bonfires are lighted on the highest hills, and the hearth fires solemnly rekindled. They form the excuse for much sport and jollity. But there is yet something sinister in the air; the “fairies” are active and abroad, and one must be careful to omit no prescribed rite, if one would avoid kindling their anger or falling into their power. To some of these still-half-believed-in nature-gods offerings were made down to a comparatively late period. When Pennant wrote, in the eighteenth century, it was the custom on Beltaine-day in many Highland villages to offer libations and cakes not only to the “spirits” who were believed to be beneficial to the flocks and herds, but also to creatures like the fox, the eagle, and the hoodie-crow which so often molested them.574 At Hallowe’en (the Celtic Samhain) the natives of the Hebrides used to pour libations of ale to a marine god called Shony, imploring him to send sea-weed to the shore.575 In honour, also, of such beings, curious rites were performed. Maidens washed their faces in morning dew, with prayers for beauty. They carried sprigs of the rowan, that mystic tree whose scarlet berries were the ambrosial food of the Tuatha Dé Danann.
In their original form, these now harmless rural holidays were undoubtedly religious festivals of an orgiastic nature-worship such as became so popular in Greece in connection with the cult of Dionysus. The great “lords of life” and of the powers of nature that made and ruled life were propitiated by maddening invocations, by riotous dances, and by human sacrifice.
The bonfires which fill so large a part in the modern festivals have been casually mentioned. Originally they were no mere feux de joie, but had a terrible meaning, which the customs connected with them preserve. At the Highland Beltaine, a cake was divided by lot, and whoever drew the “burnt piece” was obliged to leap three times over the flames. At the midsummer bonfires in Ireland all passed through the fire; the men when the flames were highest, the women when they were lower, and the cattle when there was nothing left but smoke. In Wales, upon the last day of October, the old Samhain, there was a slightly different, and still more suggestive rite. The hill-top bonfires were watched until they were announced to be extinct. Then all would race headlong down the hill, shouting a formula to the effect that the devil would get the hindmost. The devil of a new belief is the god of the one it has supplanted; in all three instances, the custom was no mere meaningless horse-play, but a symbolical human sacrifice.
A similar observance, but of a more cruel kind, was kept up in France upon St. John’s Day, until forbidden by law in the reign of Louis the Fourteenth. Baskets containing living wolves, foxes, and cats were burned upon the bonfires, under the auspices and in the presence of the sheriffs or the mayor of the town.576 Caesar noted the custom among the druids of constructing huge wicker-work images, which they filled with living men, and set on fire, and it can hardly be doubted that the wretched wolves, foxes, and cats were ceremonial substitutes for human beings.
An ingenious theory was invented, after the introduction of Christianity, with the purpose of allowing such ancient rites to continue, with a changed meaning. The passing of persons and cattle through flame or smoke was explained as a practice which interposed a magic protection between them and the powers of evil. This homœopathic device of using the evil power’s own sacred fire as a means of protection against himself somewhat suggests that seething of the kid in its mother’s milk which was reprobated by the Levitical law; but, no doubt, pagan “demons” were considered fair game. The explanation, of course, is an obviously and clumsily forced one; it was the grim druidical philosophy that—to quote Caesar—“unless the life of man was repaid for the life of man, the will of the immortal gods could not be appeased” that dictated both the national and the private human sacrifices of the Celts, the shadows of which remain in the leaping through the bonfires, and in the numerous recorded sacrifices of cattle within quite recent times.
Mr. Laurence Gomme, in his Ethnology in Folklore, has collected many modern instances of the sacrifices of cattle not only in Ireland and Scotland, but also in Wales, Yorkshire, Northamptonshire, Cornwall, and the Isle of Man.577 “Within twenty miles of the metropolis of Scotland a relative of Professor Simpson offered up a live cow as a sacrifice to the spirit of the murrain.”578 In Wales, when cattle-sickness broke out, a bullock was immolated by being thrown down from the top of a high rock. Generally, however, the wretched victims were burned alive. In 1859 an Isle of Man farmer offered a heifer as a burnt offering near Tynwald Hill, to avert the anger of the ghostly occupant of a barrow which had been desecrated by opening. Sometimes, even, these burnt oblations were offered to an alleged Christian saint. The registers of the Presbytery of Dingwall for the years 1656 and 1678 contain records of the sacrifices of cattle upon the site of an ancient temple in honour of a being whom some called “St. Mourie”, and others, perhaps knowing his doubtful character, “ane god Mourie”.579 At Kirkcudbright, it was St. Cuthbert, and at Clynnog, in Wales, it was St. Beuno, who was thought to delight in the blood of bulls.580
Such sacrifices of cattle appear mainly to have been offered to stay plague among cattle. Man for man and beast for beast, was, perhaps, the old rule. But among all nations, human sacrifices have been gradually commuted for those of animals. The family of the O’Herlebys in Ballyvorney, County Cork, used in olden days to keep an idol, “an image of wood about two feet high, carved and painted like a woman”.581 She was the goddess of smallpox, and to her a sheep was immolated on behalf of anyone seized with that disease.
The third form of Celtic pagan survival is found in numerous instances of the adoration of water, trees, stones, and animals. Like the other “Aryan” nations, the Celts worshipped their rivers. The Dee received divine honours as a war-goddess with the title of Aerfon, while the Ribble, under its name of Belisama, was identified by the Romans with Minerva.582 Myths were told of them, as of the sacred streams of Greece. The Dee gave oracles as to the results of the perpetual wars between the Welsh and the English; as its stream encroached either upon the Welsh or the English side, so one nation or the other would be victorious.583 The Tweed, like many of the Greek rivers, was credited with human descendants.584 That the rivers of Great Britain received human sacrifices is clear from the folklore concerning many of them. Deprived of their expected offerings, they are believed to snatch by stealth the human lives for which they crave. “River of Dart, River of Dart, every year thou claimest a heart,” runs the Devonshire folk-song. The Spey, too, requires a life yearly,585 but the Spirit of the Ribble is satisfied with one victim at the end of every seven years.586
Evidence, however, of the worship of rivers is scanty compared with that of the adoration of wells. “In the case of well-worship,” says Mr. Gomme, “it may be asserted with some confidence that it prevails in every county of the three kingdoms.”587 He finds it most vital in the Gaelic counties, somewhat less so in the British, and almost entirely wanting in the Teutonic south-east. So numerous, indeed, are “holy wells” that several monographs have been written solely upon them.588 In some cases these wells were resorted to for the cure of diseases; in others, to obtain change of weather, or “good luck”. Offerings were made to them, to propitiate their guardian gods or nymphs. Pennant tells us that in olden times the rich would sacrifice one of their horses at a well near Abergeleu, to secure a blessing upon the rest.589 Fowls were offered at St. Tegla’s Well, near Wrexham, by epileptic patients.590 But of late years the well-spirits have had to be content with much smaller tributes—such trifles as pins, rags, coloured pebbles, and small coins.
With sacred wells were often connected sacred trees, to whose branches rags and small pieces of garments were suspended by their humble votaries. Sometimes, where the ground near the well was bare of vegetation, bushes were artificially placed beside the water. The same people who venerated wells and trees would pay equal adoration to sacred stones. Lord Roden, describing, in 1851, the Island of Inniskea, off the coast of Mayo, asserts that a sacred well called “Derrivla” and a sacred stone called “Neevougi”, which was kept carefully wrapped up in flannel and brought out at certain periods to be publicly adored, seemed to be the only deities known to that lone Atlantic island’s three hundred inhabitants.591 It sounds incredible; but there is ample evidence of the worship of fetish stones by quite modern inhabitants of our islands. The Clan Chattan kept such a stone in the Isle of Arran; it was believed, like the stone of Inniskea, to be able to cure diseases, and was kept carefully “wrapped up in fair linen cloth, and about that there was a piece of woollen cloth”.592 Similarly, too, the worship of wells was connected with the worship of animals. At a well in the “Devil’s Causeway”, between Ruckley and Acton, in Shropshire, lived, and perhaps still live, four frogs who were, and perhaps still are, believed to be “the devil and his imps”—that is to say, gods or demons of a proscribed idolatry.593 In Ireland such guardian spirits are usually fish—trout, eels, or salmon thought to be endowed with eternal life.594 The genius of a well in Banffshire took the form of a fly, which was also said to be undying, but to transmigrate from body to body. Its function was to deliver oracles; according as it seemed active or lethargic, its votaries drew their omens.595 It is needless to multiply instances of a still surviving cult of water, trees, stones, and animals. Enough to say that it would be easy. What concerns us is that we are face to face in Britain with living forms of the oldest, lowest, most primitive religion in the world—one which would seem to have been once universal, and which, crouching close to the earth, lets other creeds blow over it without effacing it, and outlives one and all of them.
It underlies the three great world-religions, and still forms the real belief of perhaps the majority of their titular adherents. It is characteristic of the wisdom of the Christian Church that, knowing its power, she sought rather to sanctify than to extirpate it. What once were the Celtic equivalents of the Greek “fountains of the nymphs” were consecrated as “holy wells”. The process of so adopting them began early. St. Columba, when he went in the sixth century to convert the Picts, found a spring which they worshipped as a god; he blessed it, and “from that day the demon separated from the water”.596 Indeed, he so sanctified no less than three hundred such springs.597 Sacred stones were equally taken under the ægis of Christianity. Some were placed on the altars of cathedrals, others built into consecrated walls. The animal gods either found themselves the heroes of Christian legends, or where, for some reason, such adoption was hopeless, were proclaimed “witches’ animals”, and dealt with accordingly. Such happened to the hare, a creature sacred to the ancient Britons,598 but now in bad odour among the superstitious. The wren, too, is hunted to death upon St. Stephen’s Day in Ireland. Its crime is said to be that it has “a drop of the de’il’s blood in it”, but the real reason is probably to be found in the fact that the Irish druids used to draw auguries from its chirpings.
We have made in this volume some attempt to draw a picture of the ancient religion of our earliest ancestors, the Gaelic and the British Celts. We have shown what can be gathered of the broken remnants of a mythology as splendid in conception and as brilliant in colour as that of the Greeks. We have tried to paint its divine figures, and to retell their heroic stories. We have seen them fall from their shrines, and yet, rising again, take on new lives as kings, or saints, or knights of romance, and we have caught fading glimpses of them surviving to-day as the “fairies”, their rites still cherished by worshippers who hardly know who or why they worship. Of necessity this survey has been brief and incomplete. Whether the great edifice of the Celtic mythology will ever be wholly restored one can at present only speculate. Its colossal fragments are perhaps too deeply buried and too widely scattered. But, even as it stands ruined, it is a mighty quarry from which poets yet unborn will hew spiritual marble for houses not made with hands.
“Dead were the men
Of Banba’s host, without happy strength,
Around Tigernmas, the destructive man in the North,
From the worship of Cromm Cruaich—’twas no luck for them.
“For I have learnt,
Except one-fourth of the keen Gaels
Not a man alive—lasting the snare!
Escaped without death in his mouth.”
—Dr. Kuno Meyer’s translation of the Dinnsenchus of Mag Slecht.
—Arthurian Legend, p. 156.
Notes
1. “There is good ground to believe”, writes Mr. E. W. B. Nicholson, M.A., the librarian of the Bodleian Library, in the preface to his recently-published Keltic Researches, “that Lancashire, West Yorkshire, Staffordshire, Worcestershire, Warwickshire, Leicestershire, Rutland, Cambridgeshire, Wiltshire, Somerset, and part of Sussex, are as Keltic as Perthshire and North Munster; that Cheshire, Shropshire, Herefordshire, Monmouthshire, Gloucestershire, Devon, Dorset, Northamptonshire, Huntingdonshire, and Bedfordshire are more so—and equal to North Wales and Leinster; while Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire exceed even this degree and are on a level with South Wales and Ulster. Cornwall, of course, is more Keltic than any other English county, and as much so as Argyll, Inverness-shire, or Connaught.”
2. The Study of Celtic Literature.
3. In a sonnet written in 1801.
4. Elton: Origins of English History, chap. X.
5. Satisfactory summaries of the evidence for the dates of both the Gaelic and Welsh legendary material will be found in pamphlets No. 8 and 11 of Mr. Nutt’s Popular Studies in Mythology, Romance, and Folklore.
6. Rhys: Studies in the Arthurian Legend, chap. I.
7. See chap. XVI of this book—“The Gods of the Britons”.
8. Lecture II.
9. Huxley: On Some Fixed Points in British Ethnology. 1871.
10. Sergi: The Mediterranean Race.
11. Gomme: The Village Community. Chap. IV—“The non-Aryan Elements in the English Village Community”.
12. Tacitus: Agricola, chap. XI.
13. Strabo: Geographica, Book IV, chap. V.
14. Tacitus, op. cit.
15. Rhys: The Early Ethnology of the British Islands. Scottish Review. April, 1890.
16. Caesar: De Bello Gallico, Book I, chap. I.
17. Rhys: Scottish Review. April, 1890.
18. Op. Caesar, op. cit.
19. Tacitus: Agricola, chap. XI.
20. Caesar: De Bello Gallico, Book V, chap. XII.
21. Elton: Origins of English History, chap. VII.
22. See “La Civilisation des Celtes et celle de l’Épopée Homérique”, by M. d’Arbois de Jubainville, Cours de Littérature Celtique, Vol. VI.
23. See Elton: Origins of English History, chap. VII.
24. Caesar: De Bello Gallico, Book IV, chap. XXXIII.
25. From the Táin Bó Chuailgné. The translator is Mr. Standish Hayes O’Grady.
26. Tochmarc Emire—the Wooing of Emer—an old Irish romance.
27. Sometimes spelt “Conachar”, and pronounced Conhower or Connor.
28. The Wooing of Emer.
29. Caesar: De Bello Gallico, Book V, chap. XXI, and various passages in Book VII.
30. Ibid., chap. XIV.
31. See Schrader: Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples, pp. 138, 272.
32. A description of the Druidical cult of the mistletoe is given by Pliny: Natural History, XVI, chap. XCV.
33. See Frazer: The Golden Bough, chap. IV.
34. Caesar: De Bello Gallico, Book VI, chaps. XIII, XIV. But for a full exposition of what is known of the Druids the reader is referred to M. d’Arbois de Jubainville’s Introduction à l’Étude de la Littérature Celtique, Vol. I of his Cours de Littérature Celtique.
35. Caesar: De Bello Gallico, Book VI, chap. XIII.
36. Pliny: Natural History, XXX.
37. See chap. XII, The Irish Iliad.
38. Rhys: Celtic Britain, chap. II. See also Gomme: Ethnology in Folk-lore, pp. 58-62; Village Community, p. 104.
39. Abundant evidence of this is contained in Pausanias’ Description of Greece.
40. Caesar: De Bello Gallico, Book VI, chap. XIV.
41. The Wooing of Emer.
42. It is contained in the Book of the Dun Cow, and has been translated or commented upon by Eugene O’Curry (Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish), De Jubainville (Cycle Mythologique Irlandais), and Nutt (Voyage of Bran).
43. Caesar: De Bello Gallico, Book VI, chap. XVI.
44. The following translation was made by Dr. Kuno Meyer, and appears as Appendix B to Nutt’s Voyage of Bran. Three verses, here omitted, will be found later as a note to chap. XII—“The Irish Iliad”.
45. The first King of the Milesians. The name is more usually spelt Eremon.
46. The Rennes Dinnsenchus has been translated by Dr. Whitley Stokes in Vol. XVI of the Revue Celtique.
47. Told in the Tripartite Life of Saint Patrick, a fifteenth-century combination of three very ancient Gaelic MSS.
48. The Hibbert Lectures for 1886. Lecture II—“The Zeus of the Insular Celts”.
49. Pronounced Baltinna.
50. Diodorus Siculus: Book II, chap. III.
51. Pronounced Sowin.
52. It has been suggested that this title is an attempt to reproduce the ancient British word for “bards”.
53. Diodorus Siculus: Book II, chap. III.
54. Hibbert Lectures, 1886. Lecture I—“The Gaulish Pantheon”.
55. See Rhys: Lectures on Welsh Philology, pp. 426, 552, 653.
56. Pronounced Tooăha dae donnann.
57. Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, 1886. Lecture VI—“Gods, Demons, and Heroes”.
58. Ibid.
59. De Jubainville: Le Cycle Mythologique Irlandais, chap. V.
60. De Jubainville: Cycle Mythologique Irlandais, chap. IX.
61. From the fifteenth-century Harleian MS. in the British Museum, numbered 5280, and called the Second Battle of Moytura.
62. Harleian MS. 5280.
63. “In Munster was worshipped the goddess of prosperity, whose name was Ana, and from her are named the Two Paps of Ana over Luachair Degad.” From Coir Anmann, the Choice of Names, a sixteenth-century tract, published by Dr. Whitley Stokes in Irische Texte.
64. Attributed to Cormac, King-Bishop of Cashel.
65. Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, 1886—“The Zeus of the Insular Celts”.
66. Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, 1886—“The Gaulish Pantheon”.
67. Pharsalia, Book I, l. 444, &c.:
“Et quibus immitis placatur sanguine diro
Teutates, horrensque feris altaribus Hesus;
Et Taranis Scythicae non mitior ara Dianae”.
68. Iliad, Book V.
69. Op. cit., Book XIV.
70. It commemorates the battle of Magh Rath.
71. The word is approximately pronounced Bive or Bibe.
72. For a full account of these beings see a paper by Mr. W. M. Hennessey in Vol. I of the Revue Celtique, entitled “The Ancient Irish Goddess of War”.
73. De Jubainville: Le Cycle Mythologique. Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, p. 154. The Coir Anmann, however, translates it “Fire of God”.
74. The Second Battle of Moytura. Harleian MS. 5280.
75. The story is told in the Book of Leinster.
76. Now called “Trinity Well”.
77. See chap. XIV—“Finn and the Fenians”.
78. Book of Leinster. A paraphrase of the story will be found in O’Curry’s Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish, Vol. II, p. 143.
79. See chap. XV—“The Decline and Fall of the Gods”.
80. Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, p. 331.
81. Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, p. 331.
82. See chap. XI—“The Gods in Exile”.
83. See chap. VIII—“The Gaelic Argonauts”.
84. Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, p. 524.
85. Pronounced Bove.
86. Lêr—genitive Lir.
87. Pronounced Dianket. His name is explained, both in the Choice of Names and in Cormac’s Glossary, as meaning “God of Health”.
88. Standish O’Grady: The Story of Ireland, p. 17.
89. Pronounced Luga or Loo.
90. Pronounced Lavāda.
91. Translated by O’Curry in Atlantis, Vol. III, from the Book of Lismore.
92. Chap. VIII—“The Gaelic Argonauts”.
93. Chap. VII—“The Rise of the Sun-God”.
94. Rhys: Celtic Britain, chap. VII.
95. De Jubainville: Cycle Mythologique, chap. V.
96. Rhys: “The Mythographical Treatment of Celtic Ethnology”, Scottish Review, Oct. 1890.
97. De Jubainville: Cycle Mythologique, chap. V. Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, pp. 90, 91.
98. Pronounced Ecca or Eohee.
99. Gomme: Ethnology in Folklore, chap. III—“The Mythic Influence of a Conquered Race”.
100. Elton: Origins of English History, note to p. 136.
101. It has been contended that the Fenians were originally the gods or heroes of an aboriginal people in Ireland, the myths about them representing the pre-Celtic and pre-Aryan ideal, as the sagas of the Red Branch of Ulster embodied that of the Celtic Aryans. The question, however, is as yet far from being satisfactorily solved.
102. The Coronation Stone, by William Forbes Skene.
103. See History and Antiquities of Tara Hill.
104. Our authorities for the details of this war between the Tuatha Dé Danann and the Fir Bolgs are the opening verses of the Harleian MS. 5280, as translated by Stokes and De Jubainville, and Eugene O’Curry’s translations, in his MS. Materials of Ancient Irish History and his Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish, from a manuscript preserved at Trinity College, Dublin.
105. Now called Benlevi.
106. See Dr. James Fergusson: Rude Stone Monuments, pp. 177-180.
107. Lough Corrib, Its Shores and Islands, by Sir William R. Wilde, chap. VIII.
108. De Jubainville: Cycle Mythologique Irlandais, p. 156.
109. The principal sources of information for this chapter are the Harleian MS. 5280 entitled The Second Battle of Moytura, of which translations have been made by Dr. Whitley Stokes in the Revue Celtique and M. de Jubainville in his L’Épopée Celtique en Irlande, and Eugene O’Curry’s translation in Vol. IV. of Atlantis of the Fate of the Children of Tuirenn.
110. Pronounced Kian.
111. Pronounced Ildāna.
112. The Curlieu Hills, between Roscommon and Sligo.
113. Croagh Patrick.
114. The estuary of the Shannon.
115. This story of the Fate of the Children of Tuirenn is mentioned in the ninth-century “Cormac’s Glossary”. It is found in various Irish and Scottish MSS., including the Book of Lecan. The present re-telling is from Eugene O’Curry’s translation, published in Atlantis, Vol. IV.
116. Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, pp. 390-396.
117. A part of County Louth, between the Boyne and Dundalk. The heroic cycle connects it especially with Cuchulainn. Pronounced Mŭrthemna or Mŭrhevna.
118. There is known to have been a hill called Ard Chein (Cian’s Mound) in the district of Muirthemne, and O’Curry identifies it tentatively with one now called Dromslian.
119. Pronounced Pēzar.
120. Pronounced Dobar.
121. Pronounced Asal.
122. Pronounced Irōda.
123. Pronounced Fincāra.
124. The Hill (cnoc) of Midkēna.
125. A mythical country inhabited by Fomors.
126. See chap. VI—“The Gods Arrive”.
127. Ibid.
128. See chap. VI—“The Gods Arrive”.
129. See chap. XI—“The Gods in Exile”.
130. Ibid.
131. Petrie: Hist. and Antiq. of Tara Hill.
132. The country seems to have been identified with Norway or Iceland.
133. Pronounced Midkēna.
134. The other two are “The Fate of the Children of Lêr”, told in chap. XI, and “The Fate of the Sons of Usnach”, an episode of the Heroic Cycle, related in chap. XIII.
135. This chapter is, with slight interpolations, based upon the Harleian MS. in the British Museum numbered 5280, and called the Second Battle of Moytura, or rather from translations made of it by Dr. Whitley Stokes, published in the Revue Celtique, Vol. XII, and by M. de Jubainville in his L’Épopée Celtique en Irlande.
136. I have interpolated this picturesque passage from the account of a fight between the Tuatha Dé Danann and the Fomors in the “Fate of the Children of Tuirenn”. O’Curry’s translation in Atlantis, Vol. IV.
137. This translation was made by Eugene O’Curry from an ancient vellum MS. formerly belonging to Mr. W. Monck Mason, but since sold by auction in London. See his Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish, Lecture XII, p. 252.
138. See Fergusson: Rude Stone Monuments, pp. 180, &c.
139.? Bagpipes.
140. Book of Fermoy. See Revue Celtique, Vol. I.—“The Ancient Irish Goddess of War”.
141. It may be noted that, according to Welsh legend, the ancestors of the Cymri came from Gwlâd yr Hâv, the “Land of Summer”, i.e. the Celtic Other World.
142. De Bello Gallico, Book VI, chap. XVIII.
143. De Jubainville: Cycle Mythologique, chap. X. Rhys: Hibbert Lectures—“The Gaulish Pantheon”.
144. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Britonum, Book I, chap. II.
145. Contained in the Book of Leinster and other ancient manuscripts.
146. Now called the Kenmare River.
147. This poem and the three following ones, all attributed to Amergin, are said to be the oldest Irish literary records.
148. Book of Taliesin, poem VIII, in Skene’s Four Ancient Books of Wales, Vol. I, p. 276.
149. De Jubainville: Cycle Mythologique. See also the Transactions of the Ossianic Society, Vol. V.
150. Translated by Professor Owen Connellan in Vol. V of the Transactions of the Ossianic Society.
151. The original versions of this and the following charm are from De Jubainville: Cycle Mythologique Irlandais, the later from Professor Owen Connellan’s translations in Vol. V of the Transactions of the Ossianic Society. “Some of these poems”, explains the Professor, “have been glossed by writers or commentators of the Middle Ages, without which it would be almost impossible now for any Irish scholar to interpret them; and it is proper to remark that the translation accompanying them is more in accordance with this gloss than with the original text.”
152. De Jubainville: Cycle Mythologique Irlandais, p. 269.
153. See chap. IV—“The Religion of the Ancient Britons and Druidism”.
154. Tennyson: Idylls of the King: The Passing of Arthur.
155. See Wood-Martin: Traces of the Elder Faiths of Ireland, Vol I, pp. 213-215.
156. The following verses are taken from Dr. Kuno Meyer’s translation of the romance entitled The Voyage of Bran, Son of Febal, published in Mr. Nutt’s Grimm Library, Vol. IV.
157. The Plain of Sports.
158. The Happy Plain.
159. Pronounced Shee Finneha.
160. Pronounced Shee Bove.
161. Pronounced Shee Assaroe.
162. Pronounced Finnvar.
163. Pronounced Far-shee.
164. O’Curry: Lectures on the MS. Materials of Ancient Irish History, Appendix, p. 505.
165. See Fergusson: Rude Stone Monuments, pp. 200-213.
166. O’Curry: MS. Materials, p. 505.
167. Fergusson: Rude Stone Monuments, p. 209.
168. This story is contained in the Book of Leinster.
169. Pronounced Ilbrec.
170. This story, called the Dream of Angus, will be found translated into English by Dr. Edward Müller in Vol. III. of the Revue Celtique, from an eighteenth-century MS. in the British Museum.
171. Pronounced Aive.
172. Pronounced Aiva.
173. Pronounced Alva.
174. Now called “North Channel”.
175. The Peninsula of Erris, in Mayo.
176. A small island off Benmullet.
177. See chap. XIV—“Finn and the Fenians”.
178. An island off the coast of Mayo. Its lonely crane was one of the “Wonders of Ireland”, and is still an object of folk-belief.
179. Pronounced Kemoc.
180. This famous story of the Fate of the Children of Lêr is not found in any MS. earlier than the beginning of the seventeenth century. A translation of it has been published by Eugene O’Curry in Atlantis, Vol. IV, from which the present abridgment is made.
181. Pronounced Dara.
182. A poetical name for Ireland.
183. Translated by O’Curry, Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish, Lecture IX, p. 192, 193.
184. Iliad, Book XX.
185. The story of Mider’s revenge and Conairé’s death is told in the romance Bruidhen Dá Derga, “The Destruction of Da Derga’s Fort”, translated by Dr. Whitley Stokes, Eugene O’Curry, and Professor Zimmer from the original text.
186. “There came
Tigernmas, the prince of Tara yonder,
On Hallowe’en with many hosts,
A cause of grief to them was the deed.
187. Nutt: Voyage of Bran, p. 164.
188. See chap. XI—“The Gods in Exile”.
189. Pronounced Maive.
190. The story of the Tragical Death of King Conchobar, translated by Eugene O’Curry from the Book of Leinster, will be found in the appendix to his MS. Materials of Irish History, and (more accessible) in Miss Hull’s Cuchullin Saga.
191. The name is best pronounced Cŭhoolin or Cuchullin (ch as in German).
192. The descent of the principal Red Branch Heroes from the Tuatha Dé Danann is given in a table in Miss Hull’s Introduction to her Cuchullin Saga.
193. Conchobar is called a terrestrial god of the Ultonians in the Book of the Dun Cow, and Dechtiré is termed a goddess in the Book of Leinster.
194. He is last heard of as chief cook to Conairé the Great, a mythical king of Ireland.
195. In the Book of Leinster.
196. For a description of Navan Fort see a paper by M. de Jubainville in the Revue Celtique, Vol. XVI.
197. Cuchulainn, the Irish Achilles. By Alfred Nutt. Popular Studies in Mythology, Romance, and Folklore, No. 8.
198. See a series of interesting parallels between Cuchulainn and Heracles in Studies in the Arthurian Legend, chap. IX and X.
199. The Táin Bó Chuailgné. Translated by Standish Hayes O’Grady.
200. The Irish romances relating to Cuchulainn and his cycle, nearly a hundred in number, need hardly be referred to severally in this chapter. Of many of the tales, too, there exist several slightly-varying versions. Many of them have been translated by different scholars. The reader desiring a more complete survey of the Cuchulainn legend is referred to Miss Hull’s Cuchullin Saga or to Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne.
201. Pronounced Avair.
202. Usually identified, however, with the Isle of Skye.
203. Pronounced Eefa.
204. A literal translation by Miss Winifred Faraday of the Táin Bo Chuailgné from the Book of the Dun Cow and the Yellow Book of Lecan has been published by Mr. Nutt—Grimm Library, No. 16.
205. Pronounced Cooley.
206. This prophecy (here much abridged) is, in the original, in verse.
207. Finnavár.
208. “Bellows-dart”, apparently a kind of harpoon. It had thirty barbs.
209. It is contained in the Book of the Dun Cow story called the “Phantom Chariot”.
210. See chap. XX—“The Victories of Light over Darkness”.
211. Pronounced Conla.
212. A kind of mystic prohibition or taboo; singular, geis.
213. Now called Dundalk.
214. Pronounced Lewy.
215. Pronounced Glen na Mower.
216. The romance of the Wooing of Emer, a fragment of which is contained in the Book of the Dun Cow, has been translated by Dr. Kuno Meyer, and published by him in the Archæological Review, Vol. I, 1888. Miss Hull has included this translation in her Cuchullin Saga. Another version of it from a Bodleian MS., translated by the same scholar, will be found in the Revue Celtique, Vol. XI.
217. This story, known as the Sick-Bed of Cuchulainn, translated into French by M. d’Arbois de Jubainville, will be found in his L’Épopée Celtique en Irlande, the fifth volume of Cour de Littérature Celtique. Another translation, into English, by Eugene O’Curry is in Atlantis, Vols. I and II.
218. For the full story of Baile and Ailinn see Dr. Kuno Meyer’s translation in Vol. XIII of the Revue Celtique.
219. There are not only numerous translations of this romance, but also many Gaelic versions. The oldest of the latter is in the Book of Leinster, while the fullest are in two MSS. in the Advocates’ Library at Edinburgh. The version followed here is from one of these, the so-called Glenn Masáin MS., translated by Dr. Whitley Stokes, and contained in Miss Hull’s Cuchullin Saga.
220. Pronounced Naisi.
221. Pronounced Usna.
222. It will be found in full in Miss Hull’s Cuchullin Saga. The version there given was first translated into French by M. Ponsinet from the Book of Leinster.
223. The translations of Fenian stories are numerous. The reader will find many of them popularly retold in Lady Gregory’s Gods and Fighting Men. Thence he may pass on to Mr. Standish Hayes O’Grady’s Silva Gadelica; the Waifs and Strays of Celtic Tradition, especially Vol. IV; Mr. J. G. Campbell’s The Fians; as well as the volumes of the Revue Celtique and the Transactions of the Ossianic Society.
224. See O’Curry’s translation in Appendix CXXVIII to his MS. Materials.
225. The story, found in the Book of the Dun Cow, appears in French in De Jubainville’s Épopée Celtique.
226. This famous story is told in several MSS. of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. For translations see Dr. Whitley Stokes, Irische Texte, and Standish Hayes O’Grady, Transactions of the Ossianic Society, Vol. III.
227. In Gaelic spelling, Fionn mac Cumhail.
228. Pronounced Fēna.
229. O’Curry: MS. Materials, Lecture XIV, p. 303.
230. Pronounced Coul or Cooal.
231. Agalamh na Senórach. Under the title The Colloquy of the Ancients, there is an excellent translation of it, from the Book of Lismore, in Standish Hayes O’Grady’s Silva Gadelica.
232. O’Grady: Silva Gadelica.
233. Hibbert Lectures, p. 355.
234. See The Enumeration of Finn’s Household, translated by O’Grady in Silva Gadelica.
235. For a good account, see J. G. Campbell’s The Fians, pp. 10-80.
236. In more correct spelling, Oisin, and pronounced Usheen or Isheen.
237. Pronounced Kylta or Cweeltia.
238. Pronounced Gaul.
239. Pronounced Dermat O’Dyna.
240. Pronounced Grania.
241. Pronounced Baskin.
242. Now Castleknock, near Dublin.
243. Pronounced Demna.
244. This and other “boy-exploits” of Finn mac Cumhail are contained in a little tract written upon a fragment of the ninth century Psalter of Cashel. It is translated in Vol. IV of the Transactions of the Ossianic Society.
245. Campbell’s Fians, p. 22.
246. See chap. XI—“The Gods in Exile”.
247. From the Colloquy of the Ancients in O’Grady’s Silva Gadelica.
248. It is translated in Vol. VI of the Transactions of the Ossianic Society.
249. Pronounced Brăn, not Brān.
250. Pronounced Skōlaun or Scolaing.
251. A fine translation of the Pursuit of Diarmait and Grainne has been published by S. H. O’Grady in Vol. III of the Transactions of the Ossianic Society.
252. Pronounced Navin or Nowin.
253. The mountain-ash, or rowan.
254. Now called Benbulben. It is near Sligo.
255. Pronounced Gavra.
256. See O’Grady’s Silva Gadelica.
257. Pronounced Nee-av.
258. The Lay of Oisin in the Land of Youth, translated by Brian O’Looney for the Ossianic Society—Transactions, Vol. IV. A fine modern poem on the same subject is W. B. Yeats’ Wanderings of Oisin.
259. See the Transactions of the Ossianic Society. They are generally called the Dialogues of Oisin and Patrick.
260. The story, contained in the Book of the Dun Cow, is called The Phantom Chariot. It has been translated by Mr. O’Beirne Crowe, and is included in Miss Hull’s Cuchulinn Saga.
261. See Elton, Origins of English History, pp. 269-271.
262. Caius Julius Solinus, known as Polyhistor, chap. XXIV.
263. It is appended to his translation of the tale of the Exile of the Children of Usnach in Atlantis, Vol. III.
264. See Cusack’s History of Ireland, pp. 160-162.
265. I.e. from Heaven.
266. Thomas D’Arcy M‘Gee: Poems, p. 78, “The Gobhan Saer”.
267. Larminie: West Irish Folk-Tales, pp. 1-9.
268. Pronounced Ildāna.
269. It is told in Rhys’s Hibbert Lectures, pp. 314-317.
270. For still other folk-tale versions of this same myth see Curtin’s Hero Tales of Ireland.
271. A Donegal story, collected by Mr. David Fitzgerald and published in the Revue Celtique, Vol. IV, p. 177.
272. The paper is called “Sea-Magic and Running Water”.
273. Moore: Folklore of the Isle of Man.
274. See an article in the Dublin University Magazine for June, 1864
275. The story is among those told by Lady Wilde in her Ancient Legends of Ireland, Vol. I, pp. 77-82.
276. Dublin University Magazine, June, 1864.
277. Pronounced Cleena.
278. Pronounced Evin.
279. See Fitzgerald, Popular Tales of Ireland, in Vol. IV of the Revue Celtique.
280. Dublin University Magazine, June, 1864.
281. For stories of these two Norman-Irish heroes, see Crofton Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland.
282. Lady Guest’s Mabinogion, a note to Math, the Son of Mathonwy.
283. The Story of Lludd and Llevelys. See chap. XXIV—“The Decline and Fall of the Gods”.
284. Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, p. 128.
285. See a monograph by the Right Hon. Charles Bathurst: Roman Antiquities in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire.
286. chap. XXIV—“The Decline and Fall of the Gods”.
287. Hibbert Lectures, pp. 178, 179.
288. So translated by Lady Guest. Professor Rhys, however, renders it, “in whom God has put the instinct of the demons of Annwn”. Arthurian Legend, p. 341.
289. Lady Guest’s Mabinogion. Note to “Kulhwch and Olwen”.
290. Black Book of Caermarthen, poem XXXIII. Vol. I, p. 293, of Skene’s Four Ancient Books.
291. I have taken the liberty of omitting a few lines whose connection with their context is not very apparent.
292. Gwyn was said to specially frequent the summits of hills.
293. This line is Professor Rhys’s. Skene translates it: “Whilst I am called Gwyn the son of Nudd”.
294. I have here preferred Rhys’s rendering: Arthurian Legend, p. 364.
295. A name for Hades, of unknown meaning.
296. Dormarth means “Death’s Door”. Rhys: Arthurian Legend, pp. 156-158.
297. Rhys has it:
“Dormarth, red-nosed, ground-grazing—
On him we perceived the speed
Of thy wandering on Cloud Mount.”
298. Rhys: Arthurian Legend, p. 383. Skene translates: “I am alive, they in their graves!”
299. Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, p. 561.
300. Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, pp. 561-563.
301. Dyer: Studies of the Gods in Greece, p. 48.
Gwyn, son of Nudd, had a brother, Edeyrn, of whom so little has come down to us that he finds his most suitable place in a foot-note. Unmentioned in the earliest Welsh legends, he first appears as a knight of Arthur’s court in the Red Book stories of “Kulhwch and Olwen”, the “Dream of Rhonabwy”, and “Geraint, the Son of Erbin”. He accompanied Arthur on his expedition to Rome, and is said also to have slain “three most atrocious giants” at Brentenol (Brent Knoll), near Glastonbury. His name occurs in a catalogue of Welsh saints, where he is described as a bard, and the chapel of Bodedyrn, near Holyhead, still stands to his honour. Modern readers will know him from Tennyson’s Idyll of “Geraint and Enid”, which follows very closely the Welsh romance of “Geraint, the Son of Erbin”.
302. Rhys—who calls him “a Cambrian Pluto”: Lectures on Welsh Philology, p. 414.
303. Book of Taliesin, XLIII. The Death-song of Dylan, Son of the Wave, Vol. I, p. 288 of Skene.
304. Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, p. 387.
305. Rhys: Celtic Folklore, p. 210.
306. i.e. The Lion with the Steady Hand.
307. See Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, note to p. 237.
308. Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, p. 240.
309. Retold from the Mabinogi of Math, Son of Mathonwy, in Lady Guest’s Mabinogion.
310. The Iolo Manuscripts: collected by Edward Williams, the bard, at about the beginning of the nineteenth century—The Tale of Rhitta Gawr.
311. See Chapter VII—“The Rise of the Sun-God”.
312. Rhys: Studies in the Arthurian Legend, p. 130.
313. Rhys: Arthurian Legend, p. 130.
314. The old Irish tract called Coir Anmann (the Choice of Names) says: “Manannan mac Lir... the Britons and the men of Erin deemed that he was the god of the sea”.
315. Iolo MSS., stanza 18 of The Stanzas of the Achievements, composed by the Azure Bard of the Chair.
316. See note to chap. XXII—“The Treasures of Britain”.
317. Mabinogi of Branwen, Daughter of Llyr.
318. Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, p. 245.
319. Book of Taliesin, poem XLVIII, in Skene’s Four Ancient Books of Wales, Vol. I, p. 297.
320. The Verses of the Graves of the Warriors, in the Black Book of Caermarthen. See also Rhys: Arthurian Legend, p. 347.
321. Rhys: Studies in the Arthurian Legend, p. 160.
322. Mabinogi of Manawyddan, Son of Llyr.
323. Book of Taliesin, poem xiv, Vol. I, p. 276, of Skene.
324. Rhys: Studies in the Arthurian Legend, p. 48 and note.
325. See a paper in the Edinburgh Review for July, 1851—“The Romans in Britain”.
326. It is said that the “Old King Cole” of the popular ballad, who “was a merry old soul”, represents the last faint tradition of the Celtic god.
327. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Book III, chap. I.
328. Morte Darthur, Book I, chap. XVI.
329. For full account of Gaulish gods, and their Gaelic and British affinities, see Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, I and II—“The Gaulish Pantheon”.
330. Rhys: Studies in the Arthurian Legend, p. 282.
331. It is constantly so-called by the fourteenth-century Welsh poet, Dafydd ab Gwilym, so much admired by George Borrow.
332. This chapter is retold from Lady Guest’s translation of the Mabinogi of Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed.
333. Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, p. 678.
334. Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, p. 123 and note. Clûd was probably the goddess of the River Clyde. See Rhys: Arthurian Legend, p. 294.
335. Pronounced Pridaíry.
336. Retold from Lady Guest’s translation of the Mabinogi of Branwen, the Daughter of Llyr.
337. Rhys—Lectures on Welsh Philology—compares Matholwch with Mâth, and the story, generally, with the Greek myth of Persephoné.
338. A bardic name for Britain.
339. This personage may have been the same as the Gaulish god Taranis. Mention, too, is made in an ancient Irish glossary of “Etirun, an idol of the Britons”.
340. This spot, called by a twelfth-century Welsh poet “The White Eminence of London, a place of splendid fame”, was probably the hill on which the Tower of London now stands.
341. The island of Gresholm, off the coast of Pembrokeshire.
342. The Gododin of Aneurin, as translated by T. Stephens. Branwen is there called “the lady Bradwen”.
343. See note to Branwen, the Daughter of Llyr in Lady Guest’s Mabinogion.
344. Tennyson: Idylls of the King—“Guinevere”.
345. Retold from Lady Guest’s translation of the Mabinogi of Manawyddan, the Son of Llyr.
346. Saxon Britain—England.
347. Or the Celtic Elysium, “a mythical country beneath the waves of the sea”.
348. See the Spoiling of Annwn, quoted in chap. XXI—“The Mythological ‘Coming of Arthur’”.
349. Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, pp. 250-251.
350. Book of Taliesin VIII, Vol. I, p. 276, of Skene. I have followed Skene’s translation, with the especial exception of the curious line referring to the bean, so translated in D. W. Nash’s Taliesin. If a correct rendering of the Welsh original, it offers an interesting parallel to certain superstitions of the Greeks concerning this vegetable.
351. Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, note to p. 245.
352. Lady Guest’s translation in her notes to Kulhwch and Olwen.
353. The following episode is retold from Lady Guest’s translation of the Mabinogi of Mâth, Son of Mathonwy.
354. Now called Pen y Gaer. It is on the summit of a hill half-way between Llanrwst and Conway, and about a mile from the station of Llanbedr.
355. Said to have been at Rhuddlan Teivi, which is, perhaps, Glan Teivy, near Cardigan Bridge.
356. Poem XIX in the Black Book of Caermarthen, Vol. I, p. 309, of Skene.
357. “In Aber Gwenoli is the grave of Pryderi,
Where the waves beat against the land.”
358. A poem in praise of Geraint, “the brave man from the region of Dyvnaint (Devon)... the enemy of tyranny and oppression”, is contained in both the Black Book of Caermarthen and the Red Book of Hergest. “When Geraint was born, open were the gates of heaven”, begins its last verse. It is translated in Vol. I of Skene, p. 267.
359. Rhys: Arthurian Legend, p. 8.
360. Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, pp. 40-41.
361. Rhys: Arthurian Legend, p. 7.
362. “It is worthy of remark that the fame of Arthur is widely spread; he is claimed alike as a prince in Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, Cumberland, and the Lowlands of Scotland; that is to say, his fame is conterminous with the Brythonic race, and does not extend to the Gaels”.—Chambers’s Encyclopædia.
363. For Arthurian and Fenian parallels see Campbell’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands.
364. See chap. I of Rhys’s Arthurian Legend—“Arthur, Historical and Mythical”.
365. A triad in the Hengwrt MS. 536, translated by Skene. It was Trystan who was watching the swine for his uncle, while the swineherd went with a message to Essylt (Iseult), “and Arthur desired one pig by deceit or by theft, and could not get it.”
366. See note to chap. XXII—“The Treasures of Britain”.
367. Book of Taliesin, poem XXX, Skene, Vol. I, p. 256.
368. In a probably very ancient poem embedded in the sixteenth-century Welsh romance called Taliesin, included by Lady Guest in her Mabinogion.
369. “The existence of a sixth-century bard of this name, a contemporary of the heroic stage of British resistance to the Germanic invaders, is well attested. A number of poems are found in mediæval Welsh MSS., chief among them the so-called Book of Taliesin, ascribed to this sixth-century poet. Some of these are almost as old as any remains of Welsh poetry, and may go back to the early tenth or the ninth century; others are productions of the eleventh, twelfth, and even thirteenth centuries.”—Nutt: Notes to his (1902) edition of Lady Guest’s Mabinogion.
370. Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, p. 551.
371. “There can be little doubt but that the sixth-century bard succeeded to the form and attributes of a far older, a prehistoric, a mythic singer.”—Nutt: Notes to Mabinogion.
372. I have been obliged to collate four different translators to obtain an acceptable version of what Mr. T. Stephens, in his Literature of the Kymri, calls “one of the least intelligible of the mythological poems”. My authorities have been Skene, Stephens, Nash, and Rhys.
373. A form of the name Gwydion.
374. The name of Arthur’s ship.
375. Revolving Castle.
376. Four-cornered Castle.
377. The Cold Place.
378. Castle of Revelry.
379. Kingly Castle.
380. Glass Castle.
381. Castle of Riches.
382. Meaning is unknown. See chap. XVI—“The Gods of the Britons”.
383. Meaning is unknown. See chap. XX—“The Victories of Light over Darkness”.
384. Unless they should be “the yellow and the brindled bull” mentioned in the story of Kulhwch and Olwen.
385. Book of Taliesin, poem XIV. The translation is by Rhys: Arthurian Legend, p. 301.
386. Rhys: Arthurian Legend, p. 325.
387. Rhys: ibid., chap. I.
388. Malory’s Morte Darthur, Book II, chap. II.
389. Historia Britonum, Book VIII, chap. XX.
390. Rhys: Arthurian Legend, p. 169.
391. Rhys: ibid., p. 169.
392. Rhys: Arthurian Legend, p. 13.
393. Rhys: ibid., pp. 19-23.
394. Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, p. 168.
395. Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, p. 167.
396. See Rhys’s exposition of the mythological meaning of the Red Book romance of the Dream of Maxen Wledig, in his Hibbert Lectures, pp. 160-175.
397. Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, pp. 192-195.
398. Historia Britonum, Book VIII, chaps. IX-XII.
399. See chap. IV and Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, p. 194.
400. Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, pp. 158, 159.
401. Ibid., p. 155.
402. Plutarch: De Defectu Oraculorum.
403. The Seint Greal, quoted by Rhys: Arthurian Legend, pp. 61-62.
404. Rhys: Arthurian Legend, p. 59.
405. Elton: Origins of English History, p. 269.
406. Rhys: Arthurian Legend, p. 12.
407. Ibid., p. 70.
408. The name March means “horse”.
409. Morte Darthur. Book X, chap. XXVII.
410. Called Labraid Longsech.
411. Rhys: Arthurian Legend. See chap. XI—“Urien and his Congeners”.
412. Ibid., p. 260.
413. Ibid., p. 261.
414. Ibid., p. 256.
415. Red Book of Hergest, XII. Rhys: Arthurian Legend, pp. 253-256.
416. Rhys: Arthurian Legend, p. 247.
417. Ibid.
418. The Death-song of Owain. Taliesin, XLIV, Skene, Vol. I, p. 366.
419. Book of Taliesin, XXXII. Skene, however, translates the word rendered “evening” by Rhys as “cultivated plain”.
420. Rhys: Arthurian Legend, p. 345.
421. Both by Malory and Geoffrey of Monmouth.
422. Rhys: Arthurian Legend, p. 256.
423. See chap. XVIII—“The Wooing of Branwen and the Beheading of Brân”.
424. He is called Ogyrvran the Giant.
425. Rhys: Arthurian Legend, p. 326.
426. Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, pp. 268-269.
427. Rhys: Lectures on Welsh Philology, p. 306. But the derivation is only tentative, and an interesting alternative one is given, which equates him with the Persian Ahriman.
428. The enumeration of Arthur’s three Gwynhwyvars forms one of the Welsh triads.
429. Rhys: Arthurian Legend, p. 342.
430. See chap. XI—“The Gods in Exile”.
431. Rhys: Arthurian Legend, chap. II—“Arthur and Airem”.
432. In the mysterious Lancelot, not found in Arthurian story before the Norman adaptations of it, Professor Rhys is inclined to see a British sun-god, or solar hero. A number of interesting comparisons are drawn between him and the Peredur and Owain of the later “Mabinogion” tales, as well as with the Gaelic Cuchulainn. See Studies in the Arthurian Legend.
433. Morte Darthur, Book XXI, chap. I.
434. The fullest list of translated triads is contained in the appendix to Probert’s Ancient Laws of Cambria, 1823. Many are also given as an appendix in Skene’s Four Ancient Books of Wales.
435. Black Book of Caermarthen XIX, Vol. I, pp. 309-318 in Skene.
436. This is Professor Rhys’s translation of the Welsh line, no doubt more strictly correct than the famous rendering: “Unknown is the grave of Arthur”.
437. “History of the Britons”, § 50.
438. Geoffrey of Monmouth. Books IX and X, and chaps. I and II of XI.
439. Translated by Lady Guest in her Mabinogion.
440. See chap. XIV—“Finn and the Fenians”.
441. Chap. VIII—“The Gaelic Argonauts”.
442. The list will be found, translated from an old Welsh MS., in the notes to Kulhwch and Olwen, in Lady Guest’s Mabinogion.
443. Chap. VIII—“The Gaelic Argonauts”.
444. Pronounced Keelhookh.
445. The following pages sketch out the main incidents of the story as translated by Lady Guest in her Mabinogion.
446. In Welsh, Yspaddaden Penkawr.
447. I.e. She of the White Track. The beauty of Olwen was proverbial in mediæval Welsh poetry.
448. In his notes to his edition of Lady Guest’s Mabinogion. Published 1902.
449. So says the text. But a triad quoted by Lady Guest in her notes gives the “Three Paramount Prisoners of Britain” differently. “The three supreme prisoners of the Island of Britain, Llyr Llediath in the prison of Euroswydd Wledig, and Madoc, or Mabon, and Gweir, son of Gweiryoth; and one more exalted than the three, and that was Arthur, who was for three nights in the Castle of Oeth and Anoeth, and three nights in the prison of Wen Pendragon, and three nights in the dark prison under the stone. And one youth released him from these three prisons; that youth was Goreu the son of Custennin, his cousin.”
450. See Rhys: Celtic Folklore, chap. X—“Place-name Stories”.
451. The “big knife” was, we are told in the story, “a short broad dagger. When Arthur and his hosts came before a torrent, they would seek for a narrow place where they might pass the water, and would lay the sheathed dagger across the torrent, and it would form a bridge sufficient for the armies of the three islands of Britain, and of the three islands adjacent, with their spoil.”
452. Tennyson’s Idylls of the King; Guinevere.
453. Ibid. To the Queen.
454. Morte Darthur, Book I, chap. X.
455. Gresholm Island, the scene of “The Entertaining of the Noble Head”.
456. Morte Darthur, Book XX, chap. VIII.
457. Ibid., Book I, chap. III.
458. Morte Darthur, Book I, chap. VIII.
459. Ibid., Book I, chap. XVI.
460. Ibid., Book I, chap. II.
461. Ibid., Book IV, chap. IV.
462. Ibid., Book I, chap. XXIV.
463. Ibid., Book I, chap. II.
464. Ibid., Book II, chap. XVIII.
465. Ibid., Book V, chap. II; Book VIII, chap. IV; Book XIX, chap. XI.
466. Ibid., Book XI, chap. II.
467. Morte Darthur, Book XI, chap. II.
468. Ibid., Book XVII, chap. V.
469. Ibid., Book XI, chap. II.
470. Ibid., Book XII, chap. V.
471. Rhys: Arthurian Legend, p. 283.
472. Morte Darthur, Book IV, chap. XXIII.
473. Rhys: Arthurian Legend, p. 284 and note.
474. The subject is treated at length by Professor Rhys in his Arthurian Legend, chap. XII—“Pwyll and Pelles”.
475. Morte Darthur, Book II, chap. XV.
476. Morte Darthur, Book I, chap. XII.
477. Ibid., Book I, chap. XV.
478. Ibid., Book I, chap. IX.
479. Ibid., Book XIII, chap. XII.
480. Ibid., Book XIX, chap. XI.
481. Ibid., Book XIX, chap. II.
482. Ibid., Book XIII, chap. X.
483. Ibid., Book XIV, chap. IV.
484. Morte Darthur, Book XIV, chap. IV.
485. Rhys: Arthurian Legend, p. 11.
486. Op. cit., pp. 21-22.
487. Morte Darthur, Book IV, chap. XVIII.
488. Ibid., Book I, chap. VIII.
489. Rhys: Arthurian Legend, p. 23.
490. Morte Darthur, Book IV, chap. I.
491. See chap. XVII—“The Adventures of the Gods of Hades”.
492. Morte Darthur, Book IV, chap. I.
493. Ibid., Book I, chap. II.
494. Ibid., Book III, chap. XV.
495. Whose story is told by Tennyson in the Idylls, and by Malory in Book XVIII of the Morte Darthur.
496. Morte Darthur, Book XI, chaps. II and III.
497. See his Studies in the Arthurian Legend.
498. See chap. XXI—“The Mythological ‘Coming of Arthur’”.
499. Morte Darthur, Book XIX, chaps. I-IX.
500. Morte Darthur, Book XVII, chap. XX.
501. Ibid., Book II, chap. XVI; Book XI, chap. XIV.
502. See chap. V—“The Gods of the Gaels”.
503. See chap. XVIII—“The Wooing of Branwen and the Beheading of Brân”.
504. See chap. XXI—“The Mythological ‘Coming of Arthur’”.
505. See chap. XII—“The Irish Iliad”.
506. Chap. XXI—“The Mythological ‘Coming of Arthur’”.
507. Chap. XXI—“The Mythological ‘Coming of Arthur’”.
508. Rhys: Arthurian Legend, p. 305.
509. Morte Darthur, Book XI, chaps. II and IV.
510. Morte Darthur, Book XVI, chap. V.
511. Ibid., Book XI, chap. XIV; Book XII, chap. IV; Book XIII, chap. XVIII.
512. Not mentioned by Malory, but stated in the romance called Seint Greal.
513. Rhys: Arthurian Legend, pp. 276-277; 302.
514. Morte Darthur, Book IV, chap. XXIX.
515. Ibid., Book XVII, chap. XX, in which Sir Bors, Sir Percivale, and Sir Galahad are all fed from the Sangreal.
516. Rhys: Arthurian Legend, p. 162.
517. Ibid., p. 133.
518. Translated by Lady Guest in her Mabinogion, under the title of Peredur, the Son of Evrawc.
519. Rhys: Arthurian Legend, p. 169. But see whole of chap. VIII—“Galahad and Gwalchaved”.
520. The German romance Diu Krône, by Heinrich von dem Tûrlin.
521. Rhys: Arthurian Legend, p. 71.
522. See, for example, a folk-tale, pp. 117-123 in Rhys’s Celtic Folklore.
523. Stephens’s Preliminary Dissertation to his translation of Aneurin’s Gododin.
524. Iolo MSS., p. 471.
525. Iolo MSS., pp. 597-600.
526. Historia Britonum, Books IX, X, and chaps. I and II of XI.
527. Historia Britonum, Book XI, chap. II.
528. Ibid., Book IX, chap. IX.
529. Ibid., Book IX, chap. XII. They appear also as Guanius, King of the Huns, and Melga, King of the Picts, in Book V, chap. XVI.
530. Historia Britonum, Book III, chap. XIX.
531. Ibid., Book III, chap. XX.
532. I.e. London, under its traditionary earlier name, Troja Nova, given it by Brutus.
533. The Story of Lludd and Llevelys.
534. The name means “dwarfs”. Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, p. 606.
535. Historia Britonum, Book II, chap, X-XIV.
536. Alba, or North Britain.
537. Now Calais.
538. Rhys: Arthurian Legend, pp. 131-132.
539. Historia Britonum, Book III, chaps. I-X.
540. The same fabulous personage, perhaps, as the original of Rabelais’ Gargantua, a popular Celtic god.
541. Historia Britonum, Book III, Chaps. XI-XII.
542. See the Iolo MSS. The genealogies and families of the saints of the island of Britain. Copied by Iolo Morganwg in 1783 from the Long Book of Thomas Truman of Pantlliwydd in the parish of Llansanor in Glamorgan, p. 515, &c. Also see An Essay on the Welsh Saints by the Rev. Rice Rees, Sections IV and V.
543. Rhys: Arthurian Legend, pp. 261-262.
544. Iolo MSS., p. 474.
545. “The Welsh bards call Dwynwen the goddess, or saint of love and affection, as the poets designate Venus.” Iolo MSS.
546. Wirt Sikes: British Goblins, p. 350.
547. Iolo MSS., p. 523.
548. The Faerie Queene, Prologue to Book II.
549. Ibid., Book II, canto I, verse 6.
550. Published in Y Greal (London, 1805), and is to be found quoted in Rhys: Arthurian Legend, pp. 338, 339; also in Sikes: British Goblins, pp. 7-8.
551. A Relation of Apparitions of Spirits in the County of Monmouth and the Principality of Wales. Published at Newport, 1813.
552. Thistleton Dyer: Folklore of Shakespeare, p. 3.
553. Ibid., p. 4.
554. Ibid., p. 5.
555. Wirt Sikes: British Goblins, p. 12.
556. The Brython, Vol. I, p. 130.
557. Rhys: Celtic Folklore, pp. 171-172.
558. In the year 55 B.C.
559. Strabo, Book IV, chap. IV.
560. Annals, Book XIV, chap. XXX.
561. Natural History, Book XXX.
562. Gildas. See Six Old English Chronicles—Bohn’s Libraries.
563. Rennell Rodd: Customs and Lore of Modern Greece. Stuart Glennie: Greek Folk Songs.
564. Charles Godfrey Leland: Etruscan Roman Remains in Popular Tradition.
565. Rhys: Celtic Folklore, p. 670; Curtin: Tales of the Fairies and of the Ghost World; and Mr. Leland Duncan’s Fairy Beliefs from County Leitrim in Folklore, June, 1896.
566. The Mabinogi of Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed.
567. The story of Lludd and Llevelys.
568. Kulhwch and Olwen.
569. Morte Darthur, Book XIX, chaps. I and II.
570. Henry VIII, act V, scene 3.
571. Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, p. 514.
572. Ibid., p. 516.
573. A good account of the Irish festivals is given by Lady Wilde in her Ancient Legends of Ireland, pp. 193-221.
574. Pennant: A Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides, 1772.
575. Martin: Description of the Western Islands of Scotland, 1695.
576. Gaidoz: Esquisse de la Réligion des Gaulois, p. 21.
577. Gomme: Ethnology in Folklore, pp. 136-139.
578. Ibid., p. 137.
579. Mitchell: The Past in the Present, pp. 271, 275.
580. Elton: Origins of English History, p. 284.
581. Gomme: Ethnology in Folklore, p. 140.
582. The word Dee probably meant “divinity”. The river was also called Dyfridwy, i.e. “water of the divinity”. See Rhys: Lectures on Welsh Philology, p. 307.
583. Rhys: Celtic Britain, p. 68.
584. Rogers: Social Life in Scotland, chap. III, p. 336.
585. Folklore, chap. III, p. 72.
586. Henderson: Folklore of Northern Counties, p. 265.
587. Gomme: Ethnology in Folklore, p. 78.
588. Hope: Holy Wells of England; Harvey: Holy Wells of Ireland.
589. Sikes: British Goblins, p. 351.
590. Ibid., p. 329.
591. Roden: Progress of the Reformation in Ireland, pp. 51-54.
592. Martin: Description of the Western Islands, pp. 166-226.
593. Burne: Shropshire Folklore, p. 416.
594. Gomme: Ethnology in Folklore, pp. 92-93.
595. Ibid., p. 102.
596. Adamnan’s Vita Columbæ.
597. Dr. Whitley Stokes: Three Middle Irish Homilies.
598. Caesar: De Bello Gallico, Book V, chap. XII.