Part 1 (1/2)

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 Lancas.h.i.+re, West Yorks.h.i.+re, Staffords.h.i.+re, Worcesters.h.i.+re, Warwicks.h.i.+re, Leicesters.h.i.+re, Rutland, Cambridges.h.i.+re, Wilts.h.i.+re, Somerset, and part of Suss.e.x are as Keltic as Perths.h.i.+re and North Munster; that Ches.h.i.+re, Shrops.h.i.+re, Herefords.h.i.+re, Monmouths.h.i.+re, Gloucesters.h.i.+re, Devon, Dorset, Northamptons.h.i.+re, Huntingdons.h.i.+re, and Bedfords.h.i.+re are more soand equal to North Wales and Leinster; while Buckinghams.h.i.+re and Hertfords.h.i.+re 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 friends.h.i.+ps 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*