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THE MYTHOLOGY OF ANCIENT

BRITAIN AND

IRSELAND

CHAPTER I

THE CELTS AND THEIR MYTHOLOGY

‘

THE Mythology of Ancient Britain and Ireland.’

This title will possibly at first sight suggest to

the reader who has been brought up to consider

himself essentially an Anglo-Saxon only a few

dim memories of

Tiw,

Woden,

of Thunor

(Thor), and of

Prig,

those Saxon deities who have

beclueathed

to us the names of four of the days of

our week1

Yet the traces of the English gods are

comparatively few in Britain, and are not found

at all in Ireland, and, at any rate, they can be

better studied in the Teutonic countries to which

they were native than in this remote outpost of

their influence. Preceding the Saxons in Britain

by many centuries were the Celts-the ‘Ancient

Britons ‘-who themselves possessed a rich

mytho-

Tiwesdreg,

Wddnesdsg,

Thnnresdceg

(later, Thurresdsg),

and Frigedsg.

Sster(n)esdzeg

is adapted from the Latin,

Saturni

dies.

MYTHOLOGY OF ANCIENT BRITAIN

logy, the tradition of which, though obscured, has

never been quite lost. In such familiar names as

‘

Ludgate,’ called after a legendary ‘good king

Lud’

who was once the Celtic god

LlQdd;

popular folk and fairy tales

;

in the stories of

Arthur and his knights, some of whom are but

British divinities in disguise

;

and in certain of

the wilder legends of our early saints, we have

fragments of the Celtic mythology handed down

tenaciously by Englishmen who had quite as

much of the Celt as of the Saxon in their blood.

To what extent the formerly prevalent belief

as to the practical extinction of the Celtic in-

habitants of our islands at the hands of the

Saxons has been reconsidered of late years may

be judged from the dictum of one of the most

recent students of the subject, Mr. Nicholson, in

the preface to his Keltic

Researches.l

‘There is

good ground to believe,’ he says,

‘

that Lancashire,

West Yorkshire, Staffordshire, Worcestershire,

Warwickshire, Leicestershire,

Rutland,

Cambridge-

shire, Wiltshire, Somerset, and part of Sussex, are

as Keltic as Perthshire and North Munster

;

that

Cheshire, Shropshire, Herefordshire,

Monmouth-

Keltic Researches:

&u&es

in the

History

and

Dikbution

of the Ancient

Goidelic

Language and Peoples, by Edward

Williams Byron Nicholson, M.A.

;

London, 1904.

THE CELTS AND THEIR MYTHOLOGY

shire, Gloucestershire, Devon, Dorset,

North-

amptonshire, Huntingdonshire, and Bedfordshire

are more so-and equal to North Wales and

Leinster

;

while Buckinghamshire and

Hertford-

shire 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.’ If these statements are

well founded, Celt and Teuton must be very

equally woven into the fabric of the British

nation.

But even the Celts themselves were not the

first inhabitants of our islands. Their earliest

arrivals found men already in possession. We

meet with their relics in the ‘long barrows,’ and

deduce from them a short, dark, long-skullcd race

of slight physique and in a relatively low stage of

civilisation.

Its origin is uncertain, and so is all

we think we know of it, and, though it must have

greatly influenced Aryan-Celtic custom and myth,

it would be hard to put a finger definitely upon

any point where the two different cultures have

met and blended.

We know more about its conquerors. Accord-

ing to the most generally accepted theory,

there were two main streams of Aryan

emigra-

MYTHOLOGY OF ANCIENT BRITAIN

tion from the Continent into a non-Aryan Britain,

both belonging to the

same

linguistic branch of the

Indo-European stock-the Celtic-but speaking

variant dialects of that tongue-Goidelic, or Gaelic,

and Brythonic, or British. Of these the Goidels

were the earlier, their first settlers having arrived

at some period between 1000 and 500 B.C., while

the Brythons, or

Britt6nes,

seem to have appeared

about the third century B.C., steadily encroaching

upon and ousting their forerunners. With the

Brythons must be considered the

Belgze,

who

made, still later, an extensive invasion of Southern

Britain, but who seem to have been eventually

assimilated to, or absorbed in, the Brythons, to

whom they were, at any rate linguistically, much

a1~in.l

In physique, as well as in language, there

was probably a difference between the Brythons

and the Goidels, the latter containing some ad-

mixture of the broad-headed stock of Central

Europe, and it is thought also that the Goidels

must have become in course of time modified by

admixture with the dark, long-skulled non-Aryan

race.

The Romans appear to have

recognised

more than one type in Britain, distinguishing

between the inhabitants of the coast regions

Rhfs,

Celtic

Britaiy,

1904, and

Rh@

and Brynmor-Jones,

The

Welsh

People, 1906.

THE CELTS AND THEIR MYTHOLOGY

nearest to France, who resembled the

Gauls,

and

the ruddy-haired, large-limbed natives of the

North, who seemed to them more akin to the

Germans.

To these may be added certain people

of West Britain, whose dark complexions and

curly hair caused

Tacitus

to regard them as

immigrants from Spain, and who probably belonged

either wholly or largely to the aboriginal

st0ck.l

We have no records of the clash and

counter-

clash of savage warfare which must, if this theory

be taken as correct, have marked, first, the con-

quest of the aborigines by the Goidels, and

afterwards the displacement of the Goidels by

the later branches of the Celts. Nor do we

know when or how the Goidels crossed from

Britain to Ireland. All that we can state with

approximate certainty is that at the time of the

Roman domination the Brythons were in posses-

sion of all Britain south of the Tweed, with the

exception of the extreme West, while the Goidels

had most of Ireland, the Isle of Man, Cumberland,

North and South Wales, Cornwall, and Devon, as

well as, in the opinion of some authorities, the

.West

Highlands of Scotland,2 the primitive dark

Tacitus,

Ayricola,

chap, xi.

It is, however, held by others that the Goidels of Scotland

did not reach that country (from Ireland) before the Christian

era.

MYTHOLOGY OF ANCIENT BRITAIN

race being still found in certain portions of Ireland

and of West Britain, and in Scotland north of the

Grampian Hills.

It is the beliefs, traditions, and legends of these

Goidels and Brythons, and their more unmixed

descendants, the modern Gaels and Cymry, which

make up our mythology. Nor is the stock of

them by any means so scanty as the remoteness

and obscurity of the age in which they were still

vital will probably have led the reader to expect.

We can gather them from six different sources:

(1) Dedications to Celtic divinities upon altars

and votive tablets, large numbers of which have

been found both on the Continent and in our

own islands

;

(2) Irish, Scottish, and Welsh manu-

scripts which, though they date only from

medi-

aeval times, contain, copied from older documents,

legends preserved from the pagan age

;

(3)

So-

called

hist,ories

-notably that of Geoffrey of

Monmouth, written in the twelfth

century-

which consist largely of mythical matter dis-

guised as a record of the ancient British kings

;

(4) Early hagiology, in which the myths of gods

of the pagan Goidels and Brythons have been

taken over by the ecclesiasts and fathered upon

the patron saints of the Celtic Church

;

(5) The

groundwork of British bardic tradition upon

THE CELTS AND THEIR MYTHOLOGY

which the Welsh, Breton, and Norman minstrels,

and, following them, the romance-writers of all

the more

civilised

European countries founded

the Arthurian cycle

;

(6) And lastly, upon folk

tales which, although but lately reduced to

writing, are probably as old, or even older, than

any of the other sources.

A few lines must here be spared to show the

reader the nature of the mediaeval manuscripts

just mentioned. They consist of larger or smaller

vellum or parchment volumes, into which the

scribe of a great family or of a monastery labori-

ously copied whatever lore, godly or worldly, was

deemed most worthy of perpetuation. They thus

contain very varied matter :-portions of the Bible

;

lives of saints and works attributed to them;

genealogies and learned treatises

;

as well as the

poems of the bards and the legends of tribal

heroes who had been the gods of an earlier age.

The most famous of them are, in Irish, the Books

of the Dun Cow, of Leinster, of Lecan, of

Bally-

mote, and the Yellow Book of Lecan; and in

Welsh, the so-called

‘

Four Ancient Books of

Wales’-the Black Book of Carmarthen, the

Book of Aneurin, the Book of Taliesin, and the

Red Book of Hergest-together with the White

Book of Rhydderch. Taken as a whole, they date

MYTHOLOGY OF ANCIENT BRITAIN

from the beginning of the twelfth century to the

end of the sixteenth

;

the oldest being the Book

of the Dun Cow, the compiler of which died in

the year 1106. But much of their substance is

far older-can, indeed, be proved to ante-date the

seventh century-while the mythical tales and

poems must, even at this earlier age, have long

been traditional. They preserve for us, in how-

ever distorted a form, much of the legendary lore

of the Celts.

The Irish manuscripts have suffered less sophis-

tication than the Welsh. In them the gods still

appear as divine and the heroes as the pagans

they were

;

while their Welsh

congeners

pose as

kings or knights, or even as dignitaries of the

Christian Church. But the more primitive, less

adulterated, Irish myths can be brought to throw

light upon the Welsh, and thus their accretions

can be stripped from them till they appear in

their true guise. In this way scholarship is

gradually unveiling a mythology whose appeal is

not merely to our patriotism. In itself it is often

poetic and lofty, and, in its disguise of Arthurian

romance, it has influenced modern art and litera-

ture only less potently than that mighty inspira-

tion-the mythology of Ancient Greece.

CHAPTER II

THE GODS OF THE CONTINENTAL CELTS

BUT before approaching the myths of the Celts of

Great Britain and Ireland, we must briefly glance

at the mythology of the Celts of Continental

Europe, that Gallia from which Goidels and

Brythons alike came. From the point of view of

literature the subject is barren; for whatever

mythical and heroic legends the Gauls once had

have perished. But there have been brought to

light a very large number not only of dedicatory

inscriptions to, but also of statues and bas-reliefs

of, the ancient gods of Gaul. And, to afford us

some clue amid their bewildering variety, a certain

amount of information is given us by classic

writers, especially by Julius Caesar in his Com-

mentaries on the Gallic War.

He mentions five chief divinities of

t,he

Gauls,

apparently in the order of their reputed power.

First of all, he says, they worship Mercury, as

inventor of the arts and patron of travellers and

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摘要：

THEMYTHOLOGYOFANCIENTBRITAINANDIRSELANDCHAPTERITHECELTSANDTHEIRMYTHOLOGY‘THEMythologyofAncientBritainandIreland.’ThistitlewillpossiblyatfirstsightsuggesttothereaderwhohasbeenbroughtuptoconsiderhimselfessentiallyanAnglo-SaxononlyafewdimmemoriesofTiw,ofWoden,ofThunor(Thor),andofPrig,thoseSaxondeitiesw...

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