Myths & Legends of the Celtic Race Part 1

Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race.

by Thomas William Rolleston.

PREFACE

The Past may be forgotten, but it never dies. The elements which in the most remote times have entered into a nations composition endure through all its history, and help to mould that history, and to stamp the character and genius of the people.

The examination, therefore, of these elements, and the recognition, as far as possible, of the part they have actually contributed to the warp and weft of a nations life, must be a matter of no small interest and importance to those who realise that the present is the child of the past, and the future of the present; who will not regard themselves, their kinsfolk, and their fellow-citizens as mere transitory phantoms, hurrying from darkness into darkness, but who know that, in them, a vast historic stream of national life is pa.s.sing from its distant and mysterious origin towards a future which is largely conditioned by all the past wanderings of that human stream, but which is also, in no small degree, what they, by their courage, their patriotism, their knowledge, and their understanding, choose to make it.

The part played by the Celtic race as a formative influence in the history, the literature, and the art of the people inhabiting the British Islandsa people which from that centre has spread its dominions over so vast an area of the earths surfacehas been unduly obscured in popular thought. For this the current use of the term Anglo-Saxon applied to the British people as a designation of race is largely responsible.

Historically the term is quite misleading. There is nothing to justify this singling out of two Low-German tribes when we wish to indicate the race-character of the British people. The use of it leads to such absurdities as that which the writer noticed not long ago, when the proposed elevation by the Pope of an Irish bishop to a cardinalate was described in an English newspaper as being prompted by the desire of the head of the Catholic Church to pay a compliment to the Anglo-Saxon race.

The true term for the population of these islands, and for the typical and dominant part of the population of North America, is not Anglo-Saxon, but Anglo-Celtic. It is precisely in this blend of Germanic and Celtic elements that the British people are uniqueit is precisely this blend which gives to this people the fire, the _lan_, and in literature and art the sense of style, colour, drama, which are not common growths of German soil, while at the same time it gives the deliberateness and depth, the reverence for ancient law and custom, and the pa.s.sion for personal freedom, which are more or less strange to the Romance nations of the South of Europe. May they never become strange to the British Islands! Nor is the Celtic element in these islands to be regarded as contributed wholly, or even very predominantly, by the populations of the so-called Celtic Fringe. It is now well known to ethnologists that the Saxons did not by any means exterminate the Celtic or Celticised populations whom they found in possession of Great Britain. Mr. E.W.B. Nicholson, librarian of the Bodleian, writes in his important work Keltic Researches (1904):

Names which have not been purposely invented to describe race must never be taken as proof of race, but only as proof of community of language, or community of political organisation. We call a man who speaks English, lives in England, and bears an obviously English name (such as Freeman or Newton), an Englishman. Yet from the statistics of relative nigrescence there is good reason to believe that Lancashire, West Yorkshire, Staffordshire, Worcestershire, Warwickshire, Leicestershire, Rutland, Cambridgeshire, Wiltshire, Somerset, and part of Suss.e.x are as Keltic as Perthshire and North Munster; that Cheshire, Shropshire, Herefordshire, Monmouthshire, Gloucestershire, Devon, Dorset, Northamptonshire, Huntingdonshire, and Bedfordshire are more soand equal to North Wales and Leinster; while Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire exceed even this degree, and are on a level with South Wales and Ulster.(1)

It is, then, for an Anglo-Celtic, not an Anglo-Saxon, people that this account of the early history, the religion, and the mythical and romantic literature of the Celtic race is written. It is hoped that that people will find in it things worthy to be remembered as contributions to the general stock of European culture, but worthy above all to be borne in mind by those who have inherited more than have any other living people of the blood, the instincts and the genius of the Celt.

CHAPTER I: THE CELTS IN ANCIENT HISTORY

*Earliest References*

In the chronicles of the cla.s.sical nations for about five hundred years previous to the Christian era there are frequent references to a people a.s.sociated with these nations, sometimes in peace, sometimes in war, and evidently occupying a position of great strength and influence in the Terra Incognita of Mid-Europe. This people is called by the Greeks the Hyperboreans or Celts, the latter term being first found in the geographer Hecatsus, about 500 B.C.(2)

Herodotus, about half a century later, speaks of the Celts as dwelling beyond the pillars of Hercules_i.e._, in Spainand also of the Danube as rising in their country.

Aristotle knew that they dwelt beyond Spain, that they had captured Rome, and that they set great store by warlike power. References other than geographical are occasionally met with even in early writers.

h.e.l.lanicus of Lesbos, an historian of the fifth century B.C., describes the Celts as practising justice and righteousness. Ephorus, about 350 B.C., has three lines of verse about the Celts in which they are described as using the same customs as the Greekswhatever that may meanand being on the friendliest terms with that people, who established guest friendships among them. Plato, however, in the Laws, cla.s.ses the Celts among the races who are drunken and combative, and much barbarity is attributed to them on the occasion of their irruption into Greece and the sacking of Delphi in the year 273 B.C. Their attack on Rome and the sacking of that city by them about a century earlier is one of the landmarks of ancient history.

The history of this people during the time when they were the dominant power in Mid-Europe has to be divined or reconstructed from scattered references, and from accounts of episodes in their dealings with Greece and Rome, very much as the figure of a primval monster is reconstructed by the zoologist from a few fossilised bones. No chronicles of their own have come down to us, no architectural remains have survived; a few coins, and a few ornaments and weapons in bronze decorated with enamel or with subtle and beautiful designs in chased or repouss workthese, and the names which often cling in strangely altered forms to the places where they dwelt, from the Euxine to the British Islands, are well-nigh all the visible traces which this once mighty power has left us of its civilisation and dominion. Yet from these, and from the accounts of cla.s.sical writers, much can be deduced with certainty, and much more can be conjectured with a very fair measure of probability. The great Celtic scholar whose loss we have recently had to deplore, M. dArbois de Jubainville, has, on the available data, drawn a convincing outline of Celtic history for the period prior to their emergence into full historical light with the conquests of Csar,(3) and it is this outline of which the main features are reproduced here.

*The True Celtic Race*

To begin with, we must dismiss the idea that Celtica was ever inhabited by a single pure and h.o.m.ogeneous race. The true Celts, if we accept on this point the carefully studied and elaborately argued conclusion of Dr. T.

Rice Holmes,(4) supported by the unanimous voice of antiquity, were a tall, fair race, warlike and masterful,(5) whose place of origin (as far as we can trace them) was somewhere about the sources of the Danube, and who spread their dominion both by conquest and by peaceful infiltration over Mid-Europe, Gaul, Spain, and the British Islands. They did not exterminate the original prehistoric inhabitants of these regionspalolithic and neolithic races, dolmen-builders and workers in bronzebut they imposed on them their language, their arts, and their traditions, taking, no doubt, a good deal from them in return, especially, as we shall see, in the important matter of religion. Among these races the true Celts formed an aristocratic and ruling caste. In that capacity they stood, alike in Gaul, in Spain, in Britain, and in Ireland, in the forefront or armed opposition to foreign invasion. They bore the worst brunt of war, of confiscations, and of banishment. They never lacked valour, but they were not strong enough or united enough to prevail, and they perished in far greater proportion than the earlier populations whom they had themselves subjugated. But they disappeared also by mingling their blood with these inhabitants, whom they impregnated with many of their own n.o.ble and virile qualities. Hence it comes that the characteristics of the peoples called Celtic in the present day, and who carry on the Celtic tradition and language, are in some respects so different from those of the Celts of cla.s.sical history and the Celts who produced the literature and art of ancient Ireland, and in others so strikingly similar. To take a physical characteristic alone, the more Celtic districts of the British Islands are at present marked by darkness of complexion, hair, &c. They are not very dark, but they are darker than the rest of the kingdom.(6) But the true Celts were certainly fair. Even the Irish Celts of the twelfth century are described by Giraldus Cambrensis as a fair race.

*Golden Age of the Celts*

But we are antic.i.p.ating, and must return to the period of the origins of Celtic history. As astronomers have discerned the existence of an unknown planet by the perturbations which it has caused in the courses of those already under direct observation, so we can discern in the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ the presence of a great power and of mighty movements going on behind a veil which will never be lifted now. This was the Golden Age of Celtdom in Continental Europe. During this period the Celts waged three great and successful wars, which had no little influence on the course of South European history. About 500 B.C. they conquered Spain from the Carthaginians. A century later we find them engaged in the conquest of Northern Italy from the Etruscans. They settled in large numbers in the territory afterwards known as Cisalpine Gaul, where many names, such as _Mediolanum_ (Milan), _Addua_ (Adda), _Viro-dunum_ (Verduno), and perhaps _Cremona_ (_creamh_, garlic),(7) testify still to their occupation. They left a greater memorial in the chief of Latin poets, whose name, Vergil, appears to bear evidence of his Celtic ancestry.(8) Towards the end of the fourth century they overran Pannonia, conquering the Illyrians.

*Alliances with the Greeks*

All these wars were undertaken in alliance with the Greeks, with whom the Celts were at this period on the friendliest terms. By the war with the Carthaginians the monopoly held by that people of the trade in tin with Britain and in silver with the miners of Spain was broken down, and the overland route across France to Britain, for the sake of which the Phocans had in 600 B.C. created the port of Ma.r.s.eilles, was definitely secured to Greek trade. Greeks and Celts were at this period allied against Phnicians and Persians. The defeat of Hamilcar by Gelon at Himera, in Sicily, took place in the same year as that of Xerxes at Salamis. The Carthaginian army in that expedition was made up of mercenaries from half a dozen different nations, but not a Celt is found in the Carthaginian ranks, and Celtic hostility must have counted for much in preventing the Carthaginians from lending help to the Persians for the overthrow of their common enemy. These facts show that Celtica played no small part in preserving the Greek type of civilisation from being overwhelmed by the despotisms of the East, and thus in keeping alive in Europe the priceless seed of freedom and humane culture.

*Alexander the Great*

When the counter-movement of h.e.l.las against the East began under Alexander the Great we find the Celts again appearing as a factor of importance.

In the fourth century Macedon was attacked and almost obliterated by Thracian and Illyrian hordes. King Amyntas II. was defeated and driven into exile. His son Perdiccas II. was killed in battle. When Philip, a younger brother of Perdiccas, came to the obscure and tottering throne which he and his successors were to make the seat of a great empire he was powerfully aided in making head against the Illyrians by the conquests of the Celts in the valleys of the Danube and the Po. The alliance was continued, and rendered, perhaps, more formal in the days of Alexander.

When about to undertake his conquest of Asia (334 B.C.) Alexander first made a compact with the Celts who dwelt by the Ionian Gulf in order to secure his Greek dominions from attack during his absence. The episode is related by Ptolemy Soter in his history of the wars of Alexander.(9) It has a vividness which stamps it as a bit of authentic history, and another singular testimony to the truth of the narrative has been brought to light by de Jubainville. As the Celtic envoys, who are described as men of haughty bearing and great stature, their mission concluded, were drinking with the king, he asked them, it is said, what was the thing they, the Celts, most feared. The envoys replied: We fear no man: there is but one thing that we fear, namely, that the sky should fall on us; but we regard nothing so much as the friendship of a man such as thou. Alexander bade them farewell, and, turning to his n.o.bles, whispered: What a vainglorious people are these Celts! Yet the answer, for all its Celtic bravura and flourish, was not without both dignity and courtesy. The reference to the falling of the sky seems to give a glimpse of some primitive belief or myth of which it is no longer possible to discover the meaning.(10) The national oath by which the Celts bound themselves to the observance of their covenant with Alexander is remarkable. If we observe not this engagement, they said, may the sky fall on us and crush us, may the earth gape and swallow us up, may the sea burst out and overwhelm us. De Jubainville draws attention most appositely to a pa.s.sage from the Tin Bo Cuailgne, in the Book of Leinster(11), where the Ulster heroes declare to their king, who wished to leave them in battle in order to meet an attack in another part of the field: Heaven is above us, and earth beneath us, and the sea is round about us. Unless the sky shall fall with its showers of stars on the ground where we are camped, or unless the earth shall be rent by an earthquake, or unless the waves of the blue sea come over the forests of the living world, we shall not give ground.(12) This survival of a peculiar oath-formula for more than a thousand years, and its reappearance, after being first heard of among the Celts of Mid-Europe, in a mythical romance of Ireland, is certainly most curious, and, with other facts which we shall note hereafter, speaks strongly for the community and persistence of Celtic culture.(13)

*The Sack of Rome*

We have mentioned two of the great wars of the Continental Celts; we come now to the third, that with the Etruscans, which ultimately brought them into conflict with the greatest power of pagan Europe, and led to their proudest feat of arms, the sack of Rome. About the year 400 B.C. the Celtic Empire seems to have reached the height of its power. Under a king named by Livy Ambicatus, who was probably the head of a dominant tribe in a military confederacy, like the German Emperor in the present day, the Celts seem to have been welded into a considerable degree of political unity, and to have followed a consistent policy. Attracted by the rich land of Northern Italy, they poured down through the pa.s.ses of the Alps, and after hard fighting with the Etruscan inhabitants they maintained their ground there. At this time the Romans were pressing on the Etruscans from below, and Roman and Celt were acting in definite concert and alliance. But the Romans, despising perhaps the Northern barbarian warriors, had the rashness to play them false at the siege of Clusium, 391 B.C., a place which the Romans regarded as one of the bulwarks of Latium against the North. The Celts recognised Romans who had come to them in the sacred character of amba.s.sadors fighting in the ranks of the enemy. The events which followed are, as they have come down to us, much mingled with legend, but there are certain touches of dramatic vividness in which the true character of the Celts appears distinctly recognisable. They applied, we are told, to Rome for satisfaction for the treachery of the envoys, who were three sons of Fabius Ambustus, the chief pontiff. The Romans refused to listen to the claim, and elected the Fabii military tribunes for the ensuing year. Then the Celts abandoned the siege of Clusium and marched straight on Rome. The army showed perfect discipline. There was no indiscriminate plundering and devastation, no city or fortress was a.s.sailed. We are bound for Rome was their cry to the guards upon the walls of the provincial towns, who watched the host in wonder and fear as it rolled steadily to the south. At last they reached the river Allia, a few miles from Rome, where the whole available force of the city was ranged to meet them. The battle took place on July 18, 390, that ill-omened _dies Alliensis_ which long perpetuated in the Roman calendar the memory of the deepest shame the republic had ever known. The Celts turned the flank of the Roman army, and annihilated it in one tremendous charge. Three days later they were in Rome, and for nearly a year they remained masters of the city, or of its ruins, till a great fine had been exacted and full vengeance taken for the perfidy at Clusium. For nearly a century after the treaty thus concluded there was peace between the Celts and the Romans, and the breaking of that peace when certain Celtic tribes allied themselves with their old enemy, the Etruscans, in the third Samnite war was coincident with the breaking up of the Celtic Empire.(14)

Two questions must now be considered before we can leave the historical part of this Introduction. First of all, what are the evidences for the widespread diffusion of Celtic power in Mid-Europe during this period?

Secondly, where were the Germanic peoples, and what was their position in regard to the Celts?

*Celtic Place-names in Europe*

To answer these questions fully would take us (for the purposes of this volume) too deeply into philological discussions, which only the Celtic scholar can fully appreciate. The evidence will be found fully set forth in de Jubainvilles work, already frequently referred to. The study of European place-names forms the basis of the argument. Take the Celtic name _Noviomagus_ composed of two Celtic words, the adjective meaning new, and _magos_ (Irish _magh_) a field or plain.(15) There were nine places of this name known in antiquity. Six were in France, among them the places now called Noyon, in Oise, Nijon, in Vosges, Nyons, in Drme. Three outside of France were Nimgue, in Belgium, Neumagen, in the Rhineland, and one at Speyer, in the Palatinate.

The word _dunum_, so often traceable in Gaelic place-names in the present day (Dundalk, Dunrobin, &c.), and meaning fortress or castle, is another typically Celtic element in European place-names. It occurred very frequently in France_e.g., Lug-dunum_ (Lyons), _Viro-dunum_ (Verdun). It is also found in Switzerland_e.g., Minno-dunum_ (Moudon), _Eburo-dunum_ (Yverdon)and in the Netherlands, where the famous city of Leyden goes back to a Celtic _Lug-dunum._ In Great Britain the Celtic term was often changed by simple translation into _castra_; thus _Camulo-dunum_ became Colchester, _Brano-dunum_ Brancaster. In Spain and Portugal eight names terminating in _dunum_ are mentioned by cla.s.sical writers. In Germany the modern names Kempton, Karnberg, Liegnitz, go back respectively to the Celtic forms _Cambo-dunum, Carro-aunum,_ _Lugi-dunum_, and we find a _Singi-dunum,_ now Belgrade, in Servia, a _Novi-dunum_, now Isaktscha, in Roumania, a _Carro-dunum_ in South Russia, near the Dniester, and another in Croatia, now Pitsmeza. _Sego-dunum_, now Rodez, in France, turns up also in Bavaria (Wurzburg), and in England (_Sege-dunum,_ now Wallsend, in Northumberland), and the first term, _sego_, is traceable in Segorbe (_Sego-briga_) in Spain. _Briga_ is a Celtic word, the origin of the German _burg_, and equivalent in meaning to _dunum_.

One more example: the word _magos_, a plain, which is very frequent as an element of Irish place-names, is found abundantly in France, and outside of France, in countries no longer Celtic, it appears in Switzerland (_Uro-magus_ now Promasens), in the Rhineland (_Broco-magus_, Brumath), in the Netherlands, as already noted (Nimgue), in Lombardy several times, and in Austria.

The examples given are by no means exhaustive, but they serve to indicate the wide diffusion of the Celts in Europe and their ident.i.ty of language over their vast territory.(16)

*Early Celtic Art*

The relics of ancient Celtic art-work tell the same story. In the year 1846 a great pre-Roman necropolis was discovered at Hallstatt, near Salzburg, in Austria. It contains relics believed by Dr. Arthur Evans to date from about 750 to 400 B.C. These relics betoken in some cases a high standard of civilisation and considerable commerce. Amber from the Baltic is there, Phoenician gla.s.s, and gold-leaf of Oriental workmanship. Iron swords are found whose hilts and sheaths are richly decorated with gold, ivory, and amber.

The Celtic culture ill.u.s.trated by the remains at Hallstatt developed later into what is called the La Tne culture. La Tne was a settlement at the north-eastern end of the Lake of Neuchtel, and many objects of great interest have been found there since the site was first explored in 1858.

These antiquities represent, according to Dr. Evans, the culminating period of Gaulish civilisation, and date from round about the third century B.C. The type of art here found must be judged in the light of an observation recently made by Mr. Romilly Allen in his Celtic Art (p.

13):

The great difficulty in understanding the evolution of Celtic art lies in the fact that although the Celts never seem to have invented any new ideas, they possessed an extraordinary apt.i.tude for picking up ideas from the different peoples with whom war or commerce brought them into contact.

And once the Celt had borrowed an idea from his neighbours he was able to give it such a strong Celtic tinge that it soon became something so different from what it was originally as to be almost unrecognisable.

Now what the Celt borrowed in the art-culture which on the Continent culminated in the La Tne relics were certain originally naturalistic motives for Greek ornaments, notably the palmette and the meander motives.

But it was characteristic of the Celt that he avoided in his art all imitation of, or even approximation to, the natural forms of the plant and animal world. He reduced everything to pure decoration. What he enjoyed in decoration was the alternation of long sweeping curves and undulations with the concentrated energy of close-set spirals or bosses, and with these simple elements and with the suggestion of a few motives derived from Greek art he elaborated a most beautiful, subtle, and varied system of decoration, applied to weapons, ornaments, and to toilet and household appliances of all kinds, in gold, bronze, wood, and stone, and possibly, if we had the means of judging, to textile fabrics also. One beautiful feature in the decoration of metal-work seems to have entirely originated in Celtica. Enamelling was unknown to the cla.s.sical nations till they learned from the Celts. So late as the third century A.D. it was still strange to the cla.s.sical world, as we learn from the reference of Philostratus:

They say that the barbarians who live in the ocean [Britons] pour these colours upon heated bra.s.s, and that they adhere, become hard as stone, and preserve the designs that are made upon them.

Dr. J. Anderson writes in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland:

The Gauls as well as the Britonsof the same Celtic stockpractised enamel-working before the Roman conquest. The enamel workshops of Bibracte, with their furnaces, crucibles, moulds, polishing-stones, and with the crude enamels in their various stages of preparation, have been recently excavated from the ruins of the city destroyed by Caesar and his legions. But the Bibracte enamels are the work of mere dabblers in the art, compared with the British examples. The home of the art was Britain, and the style of the pattern, as well as the a.s.sociation in which the objects decorated with it were found, demonstrated with certainty that it had reached its highest stage of indigenous development before it came in contact with the Roman culture.(17)