The Mammoth Book of Celtic Myths and Legends Read online

  PETER BERRESFORD ELLIS is a foremost authority on the Celts and the author of many books in the field including The Celtic Empire (1990), Celt and Saxon (1993), Celt and Greek (1997), Celt and Roman (1998) and The Ancient World of the Celts (1998).Under the pseudonym Peter Tremayne he is the author of the bestselling Sister Fidelma murder mysteries set in Ireland in the seventh Century.

  Praise for Celtic Myths and Legends

  ‘For those interested in our Celtic past this selection will be a tremendous source of enjoyment and instruction.’

  Contemporary Review

  ‘The introduction is the most comprehensive and lucid explanation of Celtic lore.’ Alan Lambert, The New Humanity

  ‘Peter Berresford Ellis brings to bear not only his extensive knowledge of the source material but also his acclaimed skills of storytelling to produce an original and enthralling collection.’

  Ipswich Evening News

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  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  3 The Lanchesters

  162 Fulham Palace Road

  London W6 9ER

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First hardback edition published in the UK

  as The Chronicles of the Celts by Robinson, 1999

  This paperback edition published by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2002

  Copyright © Peter Berresford Ellis 1999, 2002

  The right of Peter Berresford Ellis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN 13: 978-1-84119-248-2

  ISBN 10: 1-84119-248-1

  eISBN: 978-1-78033-363-2

  Printed and bound in the EU

  10 9 8 7 6 5

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 The Ever-Living Ones

  Ireland: Preface

  2 The Sons of Tuirenn

  3 The Children of Lir

  4 The Love of Fand

  5 Lochlann’s Son

  6 The Poet’s Curse

  7 Cellachain of Cashel

  Isle of Man: Preface

  8 Island of the Ocean God

  9 Y Chadee

  10 The Ben-Varrey

  11 Poagey Liaur jeh Caillagh

  12 The Lossyr-ny-Keylley

  13 Gilaspick Qualtrough

  Scotland: Preface

  14 The Shadowy One

  15 Princess of the Fomorii

  16 Maighdean-mhara

  17 Conall Cròg Buidhe

  18 The Kelpie

  19 Geal, Donn and Critheanach

  Wales: Preface

  20 Bran and Branwen

  21 Math fab Mathonwy

  22 Llyn-y-Fan-Fach

  23 Bedd Gellert

  24 The Quest for Olwen

  25 The Dream of Rhonabwy

  Cornwall: Preface

  26 Tewdrig, Tyrant of Treheyl

  27 The Lord of Pengersick

  28 The Bukkys

  29 Jowan Chy-an-Horth

  30 Nos Calan Gwaf

  31 An Lys-an-Gwrys

  Brittany: Preface

  32 The Destruction of Ker-Ys

  33 N’oun Doaré

  34 The Anaon

  35 Koadalan

  36 The King of Bro Arc’hant

  37 Prinsez-a-Sterenn

  Recommended Further Reading

  Index

  This volume is respectfully dedicated to the memory of my good friend, mentor and guide in matters Celtic – Pádraig O Conchúir (1928–1997).

  I was a listener in the woods,

  I was a gazer at the stars,

  I was not blind where secrets were concerned,

  I was silent in a wilderness,

  I was talkative among many,

  I was mild in the mead-hall,

  I was stern in battle,

  I was gentle towards allies,

  I was a physician of the sick,

  I was weak towards the feeble,

  I was strong towards the powerful,

  I was not parsimonious lest I should be burdensome,

  I was not arrogant though I was wise,

  I was not given to vain promises though I was strong,

  I was not unsafe though I was swift,

  I did not deride the old though I was young,

  I was not boastful though I was a good fighter,


  I would not speak about any one in their absence,

  I would not reproach, but I would praise,

  I would not ask, but I would give.

  Cormac Mac Cuileannáin

  King and Poet of Cashel, AD 836–908

  Introduction

  The mythology, legends and folklore of the Celtic peoples are among the oldest and most vibrant of Europe. The Celts were, in fact, the first European people north of the Alps to emerge into recorded history. They were delineated from their fellow Europeans by virtue of the languages which they spoke and which we now identify by the term “Celtic”.

  This linguistic group is a branch of the greater Indo-European family. The Indo-European family of languages encompasses most of the languages spoken in Europe, with a few notable exceptions such as Basque, Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian. The Indo-European group also covers Iran and northern India.

  Since the old classical language of India, Sanskrit, was identified in the eighteenth century, the concept of linguistic evolution and language relationships has become a science. What this means is that we can see from the linguistic relationship of the Indo-European languages that, at some point in remote antiquity, there was a single parent language, which we call Indo-European, for want of a better designation. This parent language diversified into dialects, as its speakers began to migrate from the geographic location where it was originally spoken. These dialects then became the ancestors of the present major European and Northern Indian language groups – Italic or Latin (now called Romance), Germanic, Slavonic, Baltic, Celtic, Iranian, Indo-Aryan and so forth.

  Even today, there remain relative forms of construction and vocabulary among the Indo-European languages which are not found in other languages: features which help us identify them as such. Features common to Indo-European include clear formal distinction of noun and verb, a basically inflective structure and decimal numeration. An experiment which demonstrates the relationship is to note the cardinal numbers – one to ten – in each Indo-European language and one will find the same sound values indicating the common parent.

  Where was the Indo-European parent originally spoken and when did it begin to break up? It is probable, and only probable, that the speakers of the parent tongue originated somewhere between the Baltic and the Black Sea. It also seems probable that the parent tongue was already breaking into dialects before waves of migrants carried them westward into Europe and eastward into Asia.

  The first Indo-European literature that we have records of is Hittite, a language spoken in what is now eastern Turkey. The Hittites formed an empire which eventually incorporated Babylonia and even briefly exerted authority over Egypt. Hittite writing emerged from 1900 BC and vanished around 1400 BC. Hittite literature survives on tablets written in cuneiform syllabics which were not deciphered until 1916.

  Scholars argue that the Celtic dialect of Indo-European, which became the parent of all Celtic languages, emerged at about 2000 BC. The Celtic peoples began to appear as a distinctive culture in the area of the headwaters of the Danube, the Rhine and the Rhône. In other words, in what is now Switzerland and South-West Germany.

  A study of early place names of this region show that rivers, mountains, woodland and even some of the towns, still retain the Celtic original. The three great rivers we have mentioned retain their Celtic names. The Danube, first recorded as the Danuvius, was named after the Celtic goddess Danu, whose name means “divine waters”. The Rhône, first recorded as Rhodanus, also incorporates the name of the goddess prefixed by the Celtic ro, or “great”. The Rhine, originally recorded as Rhenus, is a Celtic word for “sea way”.

  This is the area, then, where the Celts developed their distinctive culture. Archaeologists now date that identifiable culture through the medium of artifacts, called the Hallstatt Culture, from 1200 BC to 475 BC. This was so called because the first identifiable artifacts were found on the west bank of Lake Hallstatt in Upper Austria. Previously, archaeologists only dated the culture from 750 BC, but new finds have made them revise their dating. A later distinctive Celtic culture, developing out of Hallstatt, was called La Tène, from the finds found at La Tène on the northern edge of Lake Neuchatel.

  The discovery of iron smelting by the Celts around the start of the first millennium BC gave them a superiority over their neighbours. Celtic smithies assumed a new role in society and artisans were considered among the nobility. With iron spears, swords, shield fittings, axes, saws, hammers and billhooks, the Celts started their expansion through the previously impenetrable forests of northern Europe. As an agricultural society, they had a new weapon to tame the earth in the iron ploughshare. The Celts were even able to develop threshing machines. Their iron axes and saws helped them to build roads throughout Europe. It is interesting that the Old Irish word for a road was slighe, from sligim, “I hew”. Overpopulation and, perhaps, conflict between tribes seems a reasonable cause for the start of the Celtic expansion from their original homelands.

  Some Celtic tribes had already crossed the Alps and settled in the Po Valley by the 7th century BC. They came into conflict with the Etruscan empire and pushed it back south of the Appenines. The Senones tribe crossed the Appenines, searching for land to settle on, around 390 BC. They encountered resistance from the Etruscans and then the new overlords of the Etruscans – Rome itself.

  The Celtic Senones defeated the Roman legions at the battle of Allia and marched on Rome, occupying the city for seven months before the Roman Senate agreed to pay a ransom to free their city. The Senones settled on the eastern seaboard of Italy around Ancona. This turbulent period appears in Celtic mythological tales and was recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) in the twelfth century; this work popularised the Arthurian sagas.

  Practically a hundred years after the defeat of the Romans, Celtic tribes pushed into the Greek peninsula, defeating the armies that had once conquered the known world for Alexander. They defeated the combined armies of Greece at Thermopylae and then marched on to the holy shrine of Delphi, which they sacked.

  The Celts (as Keltoi) had first emerged into recorded history, so far as surviving records show, in the writings of Greek travellers and historians in the sixth century BC. Herodotus of Halicarnassus says that a merchant from Samos, named Colaeus, landed at the mouth of the Tartessus, the modern river Guadalquivir, just north of Cadiz in Spain, about 630 BC. He found Celts were long settled throughout the Iberian peninsula and exploiting the silver mines of the region. This was the first known encounter between the Greeks and the Celts and Greek merchants began a thriving business with the Celtic mine-owners in the area. The first historical accounts of the Celts came from the pens of Herodotus of Halicarnassus and Hecataeus of Miletus.

  By the third century BC, the Celtic peoples had reached their greatest expansion. They were domiciled from the west in Ireland to the east on the central plain of Turkey (the Celtic “commonwealth” of Galatia, which became the first non-Jewish peoples to accept Christianity and to whom Paul wrote a famous epistle), and north from Belgium, which is still named after the Celtic “Belgae”, south through France (what was then Gaul) through the Iberian peninsula as far south as Cadiz, and also across the Alps into the Po Valley (Cisalpine Gaul) and along the Danube Valley. Switzerland is still designated by the name of the Celtic people who lived there – the Helvetii. Thrace had become a Celtic kingdom for a century or so, and isolated Celtic groups were to be found into Poland and Russia, as far as the Sea of Azov.

  It should be pointed out that, by this time, there were several Celtic dialects – not all Celts spoke the same Celtic language which had further sub-divided.

  The tide of the Celtic expansion began to turn in the first century BC with the rise of Rome’s great military empire. Then the expansions of the Slavs and finally the Germanic peoples pushed the Celts back, so that today, the survivors of that once vast Celtic civilisation are now confined to the north-west periphery of Eu
rope. They had survived into modern times as the Irish, the Manx and the Scottish (speaking Goidelic or Q-Celtic) and the Welsh, Cornish and Breton (speaking Brythonic or P-Celtic).

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

  The basic change was the famous substitution of “Q”, the sound now represented by a hard “C”, into “P”. To give a simple example, the word for “son” in Irish is mac, in Welsh this became map and in modern Welsh is shortened to ap. “Everyone”, or cách, in Old Irish, is paup in Old Welsh. The word for a “feather” in Old Irish, clúmh, became pluf in Old Welsh. Thus the “Q” is substituted for the “P” and hence the identification of “P” and “Q” Celtic and perhaps the origin of the phrase about “minding your ‘p’s’ and ‘q’s’ ”.

  Language repression and persecution has nearly destroyed the Celtic languages. Census returns and estimations show that, out of the sixteen millions now living in the Celtic areas, only some two-and-a-half million speak a Celtic language. In studying Celtic mythology, it is essential to study the Celtic languages in which that mythology is first recorded.

  Although our first surviving inscription in a Continental Celtic language dates from the sixth century BC, and we have over two hundred inscriptions mainly from the fourth and third centuries BC, Celtic mythology was not recorded until the Christian era: and then only in the insular Celtic languages, mainly Irish and Welsh.

  At one point, the Coligny calendar was regarded as the longest text in a Celtic language from pre-Christian times. In August 1983, a text of 160 words on a lead tablet was found in Larzac, which dates to the first century BC. More recently, two bronze tablets, one containing 200 words in Celtic and apparently a legal document, were found at Botoritta, the ancient site of Contrebia Belaisca near Saragossa, Spain. These are said to be dated back to the second and first centuries BC. The argument that the ancient Celts were illiterate, so often put forward, is patently a false one.

  To put the surviving Celtic inscriptions into context, we should point out that, while our first surviving Latin inscription dates from the sixth century, as does the first surviving Celtic inscription, few Latin inscriptions are to be found before the third century BC. As a literary language, Latin did not develop until the second century BC.