Sources | Celtic Myths | Origins

We reach for the Celts through the parchments of Christian monks¹, and Greek ² and Roman historians ³ but still we grasp at phantoms of truth. The mythic invasions, cycles of life and death, war and famine, the true story is the spread of a people across Europe⁴, trying to understand their world, and take command of it.

Unlike the Greeks, with their great epics, or the Norse with their Eddas the Celtic tradition remained oral so we see their beliefs through the writings of others, stripped of their religious meaning and reduced to animalistic wonder, so it is often difficult to see the form of Celtic belief as they would have understood it themselves⁵.

Origins of the Celts

Originating in Europe, they were probably the Keltoi⁶, just north of the cultural nexus of the Ancient Greeks⁷, and their artefacts have been found further East in what was then known as Anatolia⁸, now modern Turkey, before mass migration through Europe brought them to Gaul (roughly, modern France). At their height they had spread across the continent of Europe, and sacked Rome in 390 BC⁹, but by 84 AD The Roman Empire pushed them back, eventually subjugating them in Gaul, destroying their culture, and forcing them further West, into Spain¹⁰ then up to Ireland¹¹ where they fled to relative safety across the cold waters of the Irish Sea.

Although the diverse and nomadic nature of the what we now call the Celts creates some difficulties it is clear that many legends and deities were common to all tribes associated with them. In various guises gods were closely associated with the functions of the world, usually representing cycles of life. Amongst the many, The Dagda appears to be the god of life and death, approximating the head of the pantheon, such as an Odin or a Zeus. Lugh, or Lug, was a sun god with skills in the arts, war and healing. Morrigan was essential to the harvest, but manifested as a terrifying trio of deities in the heart of war, where she was the most fierce of all the gods.

The Celts indeed were war-like but also great lovers of music, with many war chants and battle songs to bear their great deeds of conquest ¹². They were united by their language, and broad beliefs, without focusing on an earthly country¹³, nation-state¹⁴, or a city-state. ¹⁵ This drives significant differences between their mythologies and those of the Greco-Romans, or further back to the Egyptians and the Sumerians whose own supernatural beliefs were bound into their monolithic settlements¹⁶.

The Celts were farmers, soldiers and free spirits, they build forts and traded extensively, but at their core were sophisticated, knowledgeable spiritual forces, the druids¹⁷. These teachers, lawmakers and gurus, were said to possess magical powers, offering a connection back to the mythical invasions, cities and treasures of the past. Whatever the truth of their influence, the druids were the the guiding minds of the tradition.

The Thuatha dé Danann

The supernatural, as magic, played a powerful role in Celtic thought. The battle between the light and the dark, day and night, life and death, preoccupied them. Their mythic invasions of ancient Ireland brought the Tuatha dé Danann¹⁸, whose magical powers, while no match for their powerful, earthy successors, the Milesians¹⁹, heralded a vision of the otherworld in the mounds and hidden castles of Ireland, into which the people, at their death, would drift. The dé Danann, although represented as High Kings and Queens in later literature formed the pantheon of Gods in the Celtic tradition; they became the origin of the fairy folk, and thus the fairy stories of the Victorian era, which combined with the Teutonic tales of the Northern Europe²⁰ to become a powerful source of inspiration in popular modern literature. ²¹

For the Irish Celts, with the four mythic sequences of gods, kings and warriors – the Mythological, Ulster, Historical and Fenian Cycles – their tales are full of heroism, romance, courage and fearlessness²². But the Mabinogion, with its interpretations of the Welsh canon²³, and tales from Brittany in France, The Isle of Man and Cornwall have their own variants. The Mabinogion has a particular interest though because it teases us with the origins for the Tales of the King Arthur²⁴ with its sorcery, love-torn feuds and places beyond (The Isle of Avalon).²⁵), an Otherworld common throughout Celtic mythology. This is not an underworld as such, but lives alongside, as the dé Danann did, in the rivers and the trees, the bogs and the mists, in castles and isles that ghost through the light, disappearing with the morning dew. This is the ‘Land of the Forever Young’, Tír Na Nóg²⁶ with its four magical cities²⁷ and their talismanic treasures²⁸.

Romanticization

Another theme is worth highlighting: the intimate sanctity of the land and the people, manifested in the sacred marriage between the mythic kings and Queens, the renewal of the land by the harvest, and the harvest of slaughter in battle by Morrigan; here the land and the people are bound in the imperative of destiny,²⁹ and the dire consequences of betrayal: there is no escape in a cyclical world view where all deeds are known before they are done, and all matter returns to the land to be judged, re-birthed and renewed.

The lure of the Otherworld (Avalon), the totemic significance of marriage and harvest, these powerful Celtic themes influenced the Tales of Arthur and were adapted by Christianity in the late Middle Ages into the concept of chivalry as a civilizing force against barbarism³⁰, the godliness of royal marriage, and the just cause of war, influencing much of western thought during a crucial period in European history. After Keating’s great “History of Ireland” in the 1600s, much later, in the 19thC the poet W.B Yeats was part of a Celtic dawn which tried to rescue the origins of the Irish from the clutches of the colonial British, and Christian heritage, but played its own part in the romanticization of ancient origin, with his dramatic poetic imagery of Sluagh Sidhe (the Fairy Host) or Marcra Sidhe (the Fairy Cavalcade), the one more benign than the other. 

The Celts, for all the disputes about their origin, the confusion of names, the tortuous translation by conquering Romans, and Christian monks, appropriation by Victorian fairy storytellers and lyrical nationalists, the fugitive ghosts of Celtic mythology remain vital and thrilling today.

The Great Deluge and Beyond

The fascination of ancient history is the mix of mythology, religion and archeology. As with all evidence-based disciplines, from physics and biology to anthropology the latest theory is only as good as the latest discovery as we delve deeper into our past, and out into the universe. For the Celts this leaves so much space for the imagination because their widespread migrations have left footprints across most of the populated world during the Iron and Middle Ages. Although their influence today is clear in studies of genetic markers and all forms of fantastic literature their oral traditions leave them exposed exclusively to the interpretations of others, without a voice of their own.

For instance, for the determinedly Christian-minded the Celts, based on readings of Genesis 10 and supported by Keating’s mythic ‘History of Ireland’ in the 1640s, the people we call the Celts are derived from the family of Japreth, one of Noah’s three sons after The Great Deluge³¹. The medieval Christian church tried its best to assimilate the cultures it encompassed, and with the origins of the Celtic people so uncertain, offered a carefully placed link to events in the Christian Bible, which in a society guided exclusively by the religious was an essential component of order and security. ³²

Connections

For my own writing the myths and traditions of the Celts are as central as the concepts of quantum entanglement, fields of time, and the ancient pre-eternal forces of Babylonian mythology. The names of various characters in the books, particular the Echoes Trilogy (Echoes in Time, Echoes of Light and Echoes End), with Luz, Morrigan and Finn, are prominently Celtic in origin, but the Sidhe (contemporaneous descendents of the Thuada dé Danann, and so named after the legendary mounds in Ireland which are marked as entrances to the Otherworld, Tír Na Nóg), with their mischievous, devious amorality, take a primary role in the binding of an ancient creature, for the sole purpose of preserving their future. The books play with concepts of light and dark, teasing behind the stereotypes of good vs evil to play with the origins of chaos, the reason for the order of the things, and the consequences of multi-universes. The Celts, with their earthly pre-occupations and indulgent self-gratifications are a satisfying counterpoint to the universal forces of pre-eternity, time and space that thread through the seven novels and 12 short stories so far, a canon of tales expanding into a universe of storytelling, with plans for release from mid-2018 onwards.

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Images in this post are sourced from Wikimedia Commons. The header is the beautiful painting ‘The Riders of the Sidhe’ by John Duncan in 1911, complete with its romanticised vision of Irish myth. The illuminated manuscripts are by the Flemish scribe and painter Simon Marmion, of the 1450s AD,  the silver panel (probably made from smelted Roman coins) is an inside panel from the Gundestrup cauldron, found in a bog in Denmark but featuring scenes of Celtic and Near-Eastern mythology and revealing some evidence of the migration of the Celts from somewhere near the Black Sea. The carving, created in the mid-1300s can be found at the Louvre in Paris; it shows Gawain, one of King Arthur’s knights, “on a dangerous bed”! The final image is another from Simon Marmion’s illuminated manuscripts, illustrating Noah’s Ark with symbols that occur both in the Christian Bible of the time, but also familiar to the Babylonians of the second millennium BC in the Epic of Gilgamesh and The Dream of Atrahasis. 

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Links

• Life of Geoffrey Keating, the author of Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, a history of Ireland from the creation of the world to the invasions of the Norman French in the twelfth century.
• Text of Lebor Gabála Érenn, ‘The History of Ireland’ by Geoffrey Keating.
• More details about the 11th Century Lebor Gabála Érenn, ‘The Book of Invasions’.  
• An interesting piece about the uncertain reliability of Nennius’ Historia Brittonum. 
• A really useful breakdown of the linguistic origins of the name Celts, Keltoi, the Gauls and Galatians can be found here.
• More about the Celtic God Dagda here. 
• The Celtic God Lugh here.
• …and the Celtic Goddess Morrigan here.
• For more on the ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’ by W.B Yeats, take a look at the terrific Shenandoah website.
• Here’s more about the Roman historian Tacitus.
• An excellent website with extensive notes on the Mabinogion.
• Lady Charlotte Guest at the Library of Wales.
• A history of the Scythians from the brilliant British Museum exhibition of 2017.
• A useful description of the excavations of burial sites in Hungary showing the intimacy of the Scythian and Celtic cultures.
• Annd here’s article about Gilgamesh and the Babylonian Flood story.

1. Seathrún Céitinn (Geoffrey Keating) a 17thC priest historian, had the most influence on the popular imagination with his epic text of 1644 AD, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, ‘The History of Ireland’. Keating drew on older monkish sources such as the 9thC Historia Brittonum (‘History of the Britons’) by Welsh priest Nennius in 829–830 AD which locates the roots of the purported Celtic invasions from Iberia, and Lebor Gabála Érenn (‘The Book of Invasions’), the earliest edition of which is 11thC. Keating is the first to use the generic term Celt in his romanticised tales of the Irish, offering a constructed past equivalent to the Old Testament, with its exiles and heroism, triumph and suffering.
2. In 1stC BC Parthenius, an Ionian Greek from Nicea in Anatolia (modern Turkey) invented a version of the myth of Hercules as the father of the Keltoi during the 10th of his mythical labours, the rescue of the cattle of Geryon.
3. Caesar’s military record of the Gallic Wars in 57 AD spoke of the Galli (as the Romans called the Celts), as great warriors, emphasising their military prowess to demonstrate his own great power to defeat such a fierce enemy.
4. The origin of those who we we call the Celts derives from regions around the source of the Danube at the Black Sea, and along the length of the river to the site of La Tène in Switzerland where significant archeological evidence dating from the 5th to the 1st Centuries BC brings us rich detail of their disparate culture.
5. In many ways the Celtic mythologies, their pantheon and themes are similar to the ancient Greeks, but they seemed not to settle in great cities as the Greeks did, neither creating written histories nor literary works, so their influence has been communicated through the entertaining but dubious tales of Keating in particular, and those who elaborated on his work in the 19thC, creating fairyfolk and epic stories from the mists and invasions of an ancient Ireland.
6. The Keltoi were a tribe associated with the Greek peninsular and the Istros (later called Danubius by the Romans), and reported as such by the Greek Historian of the 4thC BC Heroditus.
7. in the planes of Asia Minor and the Balkans the Celts in their earliest manifestation seem to have risen in the years after 1000 BC migrating and fighting their way in all directions. They seem to be closely associated with the the Scythians who were similarly nomadic, fierce fighters, creators of muscular, ornate jewellery and whose oral traditions have left their history to mentions through the eyes of the Greek, Roman and Christian writers.
8. In ancient antiquity Anatolia had been acquired by the Greeks, was a key trade route for goods between Europe and the East, housed the celebrated ancient Library of Pergamon, and had been the home of the ancient Hittites,
9. they came to loot, then left without settling, which the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians and the Babylonians before them would have been more inclined to do
10. already populated by various tribes of Iberians (originally from Phoenicia and Greece) and Celtiberians migrated from the Eastern Europe
11. from Calaeci, (or modern Galicia), to the land the Romans later called Hibernia or Scotia (modern Scotland being called Calendonia because of the Pictish tribe the Caledonii).
12. Tacitus, the illustrious Roman Historian of the 1st Century AD reported various instances of the Gallic songs in the wars in Europe
13. such as the Persians from their geographic nation of Persia.
14. such as the Babylonians and their locus around the capital city of Babylon
15. such as the Athenian Greeks
16. The Sumerians, the Chinese and the Ancient Egyptians built their civilisation around cities alongside their great rivers.
17. Combining the roles of leader and spiritual guide the druids have been infantalised in the last two centuries, with hints of madness, and frivolous parlour tricks but in a society where the majority are illiterate and impulsive those with the wisdom of age, and common sense can provide effective stewardship. The habit of the Celts, according to the Roman historian Pliny, to worship in oak groves hints at the origin of the Druidic name which might have derived from the Greek dryas, ’tree bearing acorns, oak, another link to the likely origins as the Keltoi.
18. Literally ’Tribe of the Gods’, ‘People of Danu’ or ‘Children of Danu’ being a Goddess linked to the river (Istor, Danubious) Danube, where the dé Danann’s ancestral roots lie. The dé Danann brought great powers of art and science, interpreted as magic, and became the source of the Tír Na Nóg, the Land of the Ever Young, the Otherworld where those who pass from life reside forever.
19. These were the final mythical invaders of Ireland, although it is likely that they too came up from Iberia and settled, becoming the ethnic root of the Irish people, and close to to the historical group we call the Celts. According to legend, after many battles The ‘Sons of Mil’ came to an accommodation with the Thuada dé Danann, taking the land, but ceding the Otherworld, the lands underneath and alongside to the old Gods, the dé Danann.
20. The dark tales of which the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson were refashioned by the likes of Andrew Lang in his fairy tale collections of the early 1900s
21. The influence on Tolkein and high fantasy, and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter is obvious but the darker elements combine with the horror and alchemic science of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to create the rich fragmentation of modern fantastic fiction.
22. These cycles are collections of tales gathered by Irish Christian monks in 11th, 12th and 15th centuries, preserved in various states of disrepair in the University library of Trinity College in Dublin. ‘The Book of the Dun Cow’ (c. 1100), ‘The Book of Leinster’ (c.1160), and the more complete ‘Yellow Book of Lecan’ (14thC) are are either wonders of the medieval imagination, or genuine attempts to report strong local traditions, depending on your point of view.
23. Translated into English and published in 1849 by Lady Charlotte Guest these are tales based on much earlier texts which themselves were collected and edited from earlier oral traditions: ‘The Red Book of Hergest’ was written between 1375-1425 by the scribe Hywel Fychan fab Hywel Goch of Fuellt, and contains the four branches and other romances of the Mabinogion; the ‘White Book of Rhydderch’ was probably written in the 1350s, in Ceridigion, Mid-Wales under the patronage of the Abbey of Strata Florida. Both books were originally written in middle Welsh which is a linguistic branch of Celtic, Common Brythonic, spoken in the British Isles before the invasions of the Saxons, Angles and Norse, closely associated with Cornish and Breton regions.
24. In one of the romances, Culhwch and Olwen, a reference to Arthur as a mythical, quasi-historical figure is mentioned, with Gawain, Guinevere and Kay Culhwch and Olwen. These are probably based on the earlier texts of Chrétien de Troyes whose work entertained the French aristocracy of the 1160s offering romantic, chivalric interpretations of old British and Celtic tales
25. Being the origin of Arthur’s sword, and his final resting place this can be understood as analogous to the Otherworlds of Tír Na Nóg, and the four Isles of the Thuada dé Danann
26. where they wait for the passage of the living, close to a Valhalla, a core concept of Norse legend, another animalistic pre-Christian religion.
27. Fálias, Goirias, Muirias and Fionnias
28. , Stone of Fál, Sword of Light, the cauldron of the Dagda and Spear of Lúgh
29. a core concept for ancient peoples at the mercy of nature, invasion and slavery.
30. Chrétien de Troyes tales brought a new courtesy, a prettified form of heroism, informed by Christian courtly values, while the illuminated manuscripts of the medieval historians such as Geoffrey of Monmouth with his colossal ‘History of British Kings’ in 1136 AD, another core source of the legends of Arthur, adapted the needs of the Christian Church to their rewrites of ancient Celtic mytho-historia.
31. actually Gomer, one of Japreth’s seven sons, and perhaps Magog too.
32. The kingdoms across Europe were consumed by their power squabbles for land and influence while new threats emerged from the East. The new religion of Islam erupted in the Holy Land and brought with it a great concentration of superior scientific knowledge emerging from the libraries and universities of Baghdad, with the culture and mathematics of China and the Indian sub-continent, also evident from the increasing flow of trade across the known world.