Originally published in 1911, “Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race” by Thomas William Rolleston is a relevant historical work and noteworthy addition for students of ancient Celtic lore..

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MYTHS & LEGENDS OF THE CELTIC RACE

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Queen Maev

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T. W. ROLLESTON

MYTHS & LEGENDS
OF THE CELTIC RACE

CONSTABLE – LONDON

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[pg 8]

British edition published by Constable and Company Limited, London

First published 1911 by George G. Harrap & Co., London

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[pg 9]

PREFACE

The Past may be forgotten, but it never dies.
The elements which in the most remote times
have entered into a nation’s 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 nation’s
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 passing
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 Islands—a people
which from that centre has spread its dominions over
so vast an area of the earth’s surface—has 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
[pg 10]

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 unique—it
is precisely this blend which gives to this people the
fire, the élan, 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 passion 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
[pg 11]
nigrescence’ there is good reason to believe that
Lancashire, West Yorkshire, Staffordshire, Worcestershire,
Warwickshire, Leicestershire, Rutland, Cambridgeshire,
Wiltshire, Somerset, and part of Sussex
are as Keltic as Perthshire and North Munster; that
Cheshire, Shropshire, Herefordshire, Monmouthshire,
Gloucestershire, Devon, Dorset, Northamptonshire,
Huntingdonshire, and Bedfordshire are more so—and
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.

The National Museum in Dublin contains many
superb examples of Irish decorative art in gold, bronze,
[pg 31]
and enamels, and the “strong Celtic tinge” of which
Mr. Romilly Allen speaks is as clearly observable there
as in the relics of Hallstatt or La Tène.

Everything, then, speaks of a community of culture,
an identity of race-character, existing over the vast
territory known to the ancient world as “Celtica.”

Celts and Germans

But, as we have said before, this territory was by no
means inhabited by the Celt alone. In particular we have
to ask, who and where were the Germans, the Teuto-Gothic
tribes, who eventually took the place of the Celts
as the great Northern menace to classical civilisation?

They are mentioned by Pytheas, the eminent Greek
traveller and geographer, about 300 B.C., but they play
no part in history till, under the name of Cimbri and
Teutones, they descended on Italy to be vanquished by
Marius at the close of the second century. The ancient
Greek geographers prior to Pytheas know nothing of
them, and assign all the territories now known as
Germanic to various Celtic tribes.

The explanation given by de Jubainville, and based
by him on various philological considerations, is that
the Germans were a subject people, comparable to those
“un-free tribes” who existed in Gaul and in ancient
Ireland. They lived under the Celtic dominion, and
had no independent political existence. De Jubainville
finds that all the words connected with law and
government and war which are common both to the
Celtic and Teutonic languages were borrowed by the
latter from the former. Chief among them are the
words represented by the modern German Reich,
empire, Amt, office, and the Gothic reiks, a king, all
of which are of unquestioned Celtic origin. De
Jubainville also numbers among loan words from Celtic

[pg 32]
the words Bann, an order; Frei, free; Geisel, a hostage;
Erbe, an inheritance; Werth, value; Weih,
sacred; Magus, a slave (Gothic); Wini, a wife (Old
High German); Skalks, Schalk, a slave (Gothic);

Hathu, battle (Old German); Helith, Held, a hero,
from the same root as the word Celt; Heer, an army
(Celtic choris); Sieg, victory; Beute, booty; Burg, a
castle; and many others.

The etymological history of some of these words is
interesting. Amt, for instance, that word of so much
significance in modern German administration, goes back
to an ancient Celtic ambhactos, which is compounded of
the words ambi, about, and actos, a past participle derived
from the Celtic root AG, meaning to act. Now ambi
descends from the primitive Indo-European mbhi, where
the initial m is a kind of vowel, afterwards represented
in Sanscrit by a. This m vowel became n in those
Germanic words which derive directly from the primitive
Indo-European tongue. But the word which is
now represented by amt appears in its earliest Germanic
form as ambaht, thus making plain its descent from the
Celtic ambhactos.

Again, the word frei is found in its earliest Germanic
form as frijo-s, which comes from the primitive Indo-European
prijo-s. The word here does not, however,
mean free; it means beloved (Sanscrit priya-s). In
the Celtic language, however, we find prijos dropping
its initial p—a difficulty in pronouncing this letter was
a marked feature in ancient Celtic; it changed j, according
to a regular rule, into dd, and appears in modern
Welsh as rhydd=free. The Indo-European meaning
persists in the Germanic languages in the name of the
love-goddess, Freia, and in the word Freund, friend,

Friede, peace. The sense borne by the word in the
sphere of civil right is traceable to a Celtic origin,
[pg 33]
and in that sense appears to have been a loan from Celtic.

The German Beute, booty, plunder, has had an
instructive history. There was a Gaulish word bodi
found in compounds such as the place-name Segobodium
(Seveux), and various personal and tribal names,
including Boudicca, better known to us as the “British
warrior queen,” Boadicea. This word meant anciently

“victory.” But the fruits of victory are spoil, and
in this material sense the word was adopted in German,
in French (butin) in Norse (byte), and the Welsh
(budd). On the other hand, the word preserved its
elevated significance in Irish. In the Irish translation
of Chronicles xxix. 11, where the Vulgate original has
“Tua est, Domine, magnificentia et potentia et gloria et
victoria,” the word victoria is rendered by the Irish búaidh,
and, as de Jubainville remarks, “ce n’est pas de butin
qu’il s’agit.” He goes on to say: “Búaidh has preserved
in Irish, thanks to a vigorous and persistent
literary culture, the high meaning which it bore in the
tongue of the Gaulish aristocracy. The material sense
of the word was alone perceived by the lower classes of
the population, and it is the tradition of this lower
class which has been preserved in the German, the
French, and the Cymric languages.”18

Two things, however, the Celts either could not or
would not impose on the subjugated German tribes—their
language and their religion. In these two great
factors of race-unity and pride lay the seeds of the
ultimate German uprising and overthrow of the Celtic
supremacy. The names of the German are different
from those of the Celtic deities, their funeral customs,
with which are associated the deepest religious conceptions
of primitive races, are different. The Celts, or
[pg 34]
at least the dominant section of them, buried their
dead, regarding the use of fire as a humiliation, to be
inflicted on criminals, or upon slaves or prisoners in
those terrible human sacrifices which are the greatest
stain on their native culture. The Germans, on the
other hand, burned their illustrious dead on pyres, like
the early Greeks—if a pyre could not be afforded for
the whole body, the noblest parts, such as the head
and arms, were burned and the rest buried.

Downfall of the Celtic Empire

What exactly took place at the time of the German
revolt we shall never know; certain it is, however,
that from about the year 300 B.C. onward the Celts
appear to have lost whatever political cohesion and
common purpose they had possessed. Rent asunder,
as it were, by the upthrust of some mighty subterranean
force, their tribes rolled down like lava-streams to the
south, east, and west of their original home. Some
found their way into Northern Greece, where they
committed the outrage which so scandalised their
former friends and allies in the sack of the shrine
of Delphi (273 B.C.). Others renewed, with worse
fortune, the old struggle with Rome, and perished
in vast numbers at Sentinum (295 B.C.) and Lake
Vadimo (283 B.C.). One detachment penetrated into
Asia Minor, and founded the Celtic State of Galatia,
where, as St. Jerome attests, a Celtic dialect was still
spoken in the fourth century A.D. Others enlisted as
mercenary troops with Carthage. A tumultuous war of
Celts against scattered German tribes, or against other
Celts who represented earlier waves of emigration and
conquest, went on all over Mid-Europe, Gaul, and
Britain. When this settled down Gaul and the British
Islands remained practically the sole relics of the Celtic
[pg 35]

empire, the only countries still under Celtic law and
leadership. By the commencement of the Christian era
Gaul and Britain had fallen under the yoke of Rome,
and their complete Romanisation was only a question of time.

Unique Historical Position of Ireland

Ireland alone was never even visited, much less
subjugated, by the Roman legionaries, and maintained
its independence against all comers nominally until
the close of the twelfth century, but for all practical
purposes a good three hundred years longer.

Ireland has therefore this unique feature of interest,
that it carried an indigenous Celtic civilisation, Celtic
institutions, art, and literature, and the oldest surviving
form of the Celtic language,19 right across the chasm
which separates the antique from the modern world,

[pg 36]
the pagan from the Christian world, and on into the full
light of modern history and observation.

The Celtic Character

The moral no less than the physical characteristics
attributed by classical writers to the Celtic peoples
show a remarkable distinctness and consistency. Much
of what is said about them might, as we should expect,
be said of any primitive and unlettered people, but there
remains so much to differentiate them among the races
of mankind that if these ancient references to the Celts
could be read aloud, without mentioning the name of the
race to whom they referred, to any person acquainted
with it through modern history alone, he would, I think,
without hesitation, name the Celtic peoples as the subject
of the description which he had heard.

Some of these references have already been quoted,
and we need not repeat the evidence derived from
Plato, Ephorus, or Arrian. But an observation of
[pg 37]

M. Porcius Cato on the Gauls may be adduced. “There
are two things,” he says, “to which the Gauls are
devoted—the art of war and subtlety of speech” (“rem
militarem et argute loqui”).

Cæsar’s Account

Cæsar has given us a careful and critical account
of them as he knew them in Gaul. They were, he
says, eager for battle, but easily dashed by reverses.
They were extremely superstitious, submitting to their
Druids in all public and private affairs, and regarding
it as the worst of punishments to be excommunicated
and forbidden to approach thu ceremonies of religion:

The Gauls were eager for news, besieging merchants
and travellers for gossip,20 easily influenced, sanguine,

[pg 38]
credulous, fond of change, and wavering in their
counsels. They were at the same time remarkably
acute and intelligent, very quick to seize upon and
to imitate any contrivance they found useful. Their
ingenuity in baffling the novel siege apparatus of the
Roman armies is specially noticed by Cæsar. Of their
courage he speaks with great respect, attributing their
scorn of death, in some degree at least, to their firm
faith in the immortality of the soul.21 A people who
in earlier days had again and again annihilated Roman
armies, had sacked Rome, and who had more than
once placed Cæsar himself in positions of the utmost
anxiety and peril, were evidently no weaklings, whatever
their religious beliefs or practices. Cæsar is not
given to sentimental admiration of his foes, but one
episode at the siege of Avaricum moves him to
immortalise the valour of the defence. A wooden
structure or agger had been raised by the Romans
to overtop the walls, which had proved impregnable
to the assaults of the battering-ram. The Gauls
contrived to set this on fire. It was of the utmost
moment to prevent the besiegers from extinguishing
the flames, and a Gaul mounted a portion of the wall
above the agger, throwing down upon it balls of tallow
and pitch, which were handed up to him from within.
He was soon struck down by a missile from a Roman
catapult. Immediately another stepped over him as he
lay, and continued his comrade’s task. He too fell,
[pg 39]
but a third instantly took his place, and a fourth; nor
was this post ever deserted until the legionaries at
last extinguished the flames and forced the defenders
back into the town, which was finally captured on the
following day.

Strabo on the Celts

The geographer and traveller Strabo, who died
24 A.D., and was therefore a little later than Cæsar, has
much to tell us about the Celts. He notices that their
country (in this case Gaul) is thickly inhabited and well
tilled—there is no waste of natural resources. The
women are prolific, and notably good mothers. He
describes the men as warlike, passionate, disputatious,
easily provoked, but generous and unsuspicious, and
easily vanquished by stratagem. They showed themselves
eager for culture, and Greek letters and science
had spread rapidly among them from Massilia; public
education was established in their towns. They fought
better on horseback than on foot, and in Strabo’s time
formed the flower of the Roman cavalry. They dwelt
in great houses made of arched timbers with walls of
wickerwork—no doubt plastered with clay and lime,
as in Ireland—and thickly thatched. Towns of much
importance were found in Gaul, and Cæsar notes the
strength of their walls, built of stone and timber.
Both Cæsar and Strabo agree that there was a very
sharp division between the nobles and priestly or
educated class on the one hand and the common
people on the other, the latter being kept in strict
subjection. The social division corresponds roughly,
no doubt, to the race distinction between the true
Celts and the aboriginal populations subdued by them.
While Cæsar tells us that the Druids taught the immortality
of the soul, Strabo adds that they believed in
[pg 40]
the indestructibility, which implies in some sense the
divinity, of the material universe.

The Celtic warrior loved display. Everything that
gave brilliance and the sense of drama to life appealed
to him. His weapons were richly ornamented, his
horse-trappings were wrought in bronze and enamel, of
design as exquisite as any relic of Mycenean or Cretan
art, his raiment was embroidered with gold. The
scene of the surrender of Vercingetorix, when his
heroic struggle with Rome had come to an end on
the fall of Alesia, is worth recording as a typically
Celtic blend of chivalry and of what appeared to the
sober-minded Romans childish ostentation.22 When
he saw that the cause was lost he summoned a tribal
council, and told the assembled chiefs, whom he had
led through a glorious though unsuccessful war, that
he was ready to sacrifice himself for his still faithful
followers—they might send his head to Cæsar if they
liked, or he would voluntarily surrender himself for
the sake of getting easier terms for his countrymen.
The latter alternative was chosen. Vercingetorix then
armed himself with his most splendid weapons, decked
his horse with its richest trappings, and, after riding
thrice round the Roman camp, went before Cæsar and
laid at his feet the sword which was the sole remaining
defence of Gallic independence. Cæsar sent him to
Rome, where he lay in prison for six years, and was
finally put to death when Cæsar celebrated his triumph.

But the Celtic love of splendour and of art were
mixed with much barbarism. Strabo tells us how the
warriors rode home from victory with the heads of
[pg 41]
fallen foemen dangling from their horses’ necks, just as
in the Irish saga the Ulster hero, Cuchulain, is represented
as driving back to Emania from a foray into
Connacht with the heads of his enemies hanging from
his chariot-rim. Their domestic arrangements were
rude; they lay on the ground to sleep, sat on couches
of straw, and their women worked in the fields.

Polybius

A characteristic scene from the battle of Clastidium
(222 B.C.) is recorded by Polybius. The Gæsati,23 he
tells us, who were in the forefront of the Celtic
army, stripped naked for the fight, and the sight of
these warriors, with their great stature and their fair
skins, on which glittered the collars and bracelets of
gold so loved as an adornment by all the Celts, filled
the Roman legionaries with awe. Yet when the day
was over those golden ornaments went in cartloads to
deck the Capitol of Rome; and the final comment of
Polybius on the character of the Celts is that they, “I
say not usually, but always, in everything they attempt,
are driven headlong by their passions, and never submit
to the laws of reason.” As might be expected,
the chastity for which the Germans were noted was
never, until recent times, a Celtic characteristic.

Diodorus

Diodorus Siculus, a contemporary of Julius Cæsar and
Augustus, who had travelled in Gaul, confirms in the
main the accounts of Cæsar and Strabo, but adds some
[pg 42]
interesting details. He notes in particular the Gallic
love of gold. Even cuirasses were made of it. This
is also a very notable trait in Celtic Ireland, where an
astonishing number of prehistoric gold relics have been
found, while many more, now lost, are known to have
existed. The temples and sacred places, say Posidonius
and Diodorus, were full of unguarded offerings of
gold, which no one ever touched. He mentions the
great reverence paid to the bards, and, like Cato, notices
something peculiar about the kind of speech which
the educated Gauls cultivated: “they are not a talkative
people, and are fond of expressing themselves in
enigmas, so that the hearer has to divine the most part
of what they would say.” This exactly answers to the
literary language of ancient Ireland, which is curt and
allusive to a degree. The Druid was regarded as the
prescribed intermediary between God and man—no one
could perform a religious act without his assistance.

Ammianus Marcellinus

Ammianus Marcellinus, who wrote much later, in
the latter half of the fourth century A.D., had also visited
Gaul, which was then, of course, much Romanised.
He tells us, however, like former writers, of the great
stature, fairness, and arrogant bearing of the Gallic
warrior. He adds that the people, especially in
Aquitaine, were singularly clean and proper in their
persons—no one was to be seen in rags. The Gallic
woman he describes as very tall, blue-eyed, and singularly
beautiful; but a certain amount of awe is mingled
with his evident admiration, for he tells us that while
it was dangerous enough to get into a fight with a
Gallic man, your case was indeed desperate if his wife
with her “huge snowy arms,” which could strike like
catapults, came to his assistance. One is irresistibly
[pg 43]
reminded of the gallery of vigorous, independent,
fiery-hearted women, like Maeve, Grania, Findabair,
Deirdre, and the historic Boadicea, who figure in the
myths and in the history of the British Islands.

Rice Holmes on the Gauls

The following passage from Dr. Rice Holmes’
“Cæsar’s Conquest of Gaul” may be taken as an admirable
summary of the social physiognomy of that part
of Celtica a little before the time of the Christian era,
and it corresponds closely to all that is known of the
native Irish civilisation:

Weakness of the Celtic Policy

Yet this native Celtic civilisation, in many respects
so attractive and so promising, had evidently some
defect or disability which prevented the Celtic peoples
from holding their own either against the ancient
civilisation of the Græco-Roman world, or against the
rude young vigour of the Teutonic races. Let us
consider what this was.

[pg 45]

The Classical State

At the root of the success of classical nations lay the
conception of the civic community, the res
publica, as a kind of divine entity, the foundation of
blessing to men, venerable for its age, yet renewed in
youth with every generation; a power which a man
might joyfully serve, knowing that even if not remembered
in its records his faithful service would
outlive his own petty life and go to exalt the life
of his motherland or city for all future time. In this
spirit Socrates, when urged to evade his death sentence
by taking the means of escape from prison which his
friends offered him, rebuked them for inciting him to
an impious violation of his country’s laws. For a
man’s country, he says, is more holy and venerable
than father or mother, and he must quietly obey the
laws, to which he has assented by living under them all
his life, or incur the just wrath of their great Brethren,
the Laws of the Underworld, before whom, in the
end, he must answer for his conduct on earth. In a
greater or less degree this exalted conception of the
State formed the practical religion of every man among
the classical nations of antiquity, and gave to the State
its cohesive power, its capability of endurance and of progress.

Teutonic Loyalty

With the Teuton the cohesive force was supplied
by another motive, one which was destined to mingle
with the civic motive and to form, in union with it—and
often in predominance over it—the main political
factor in the development of the European nations.
This was the sentiment of what the Germans called

Treue, the personal fidelity to a chief, which in very
[pg 46]
early times extended itself to a royal dynasty, a
sentiment rooted profoundly in the Teutonic nature,
and one which has never been surpassed by any
other human impulse as the source of heroic self-sacrifice.

Celtic Religion

No human influences are ever found pure and
unmixed. The sentiment of personal fidelity was not
unknown to the classical nations. The sentiment of
civic patriotism, though of slow growth among the
Teutonic races, did eventually establish itself there.
Neither sentiment was unknown to the Celt, but there
was another force which, in his case, overshadowed and
dwarfed them, and supplied what it could of the
political inspiration and unifying power which the
classical nations got from patriotism and the Teutons
from loyalty. This was Religion; or perhaps it
would be more accurate to say Sacerdotalism—religion
codified in dogma and administered by a priestly caste.
The Druids, as we have seen from Cæsar, whose
observations are entirely confirmed by Strabo and by
references in Irish legends,25 were the really sovran
power in Celtica. All affairs, public and private, were
subject to their authority, and the penalties which
they could inflict for any assertion of lay independence,
though resting for their efficacy, like the mediæval interdicts
of the Catholic Church, on popular superstition

[pg 47]
alone, were enough to quell the proudest spirit. Here
lay the real weakness of the Celtic polity. There
is perhaps no law written more conspicuously in the
teachings of history than that nations who are ruled
by priests drawing their authority from supernatural
sanctions are, just in the measure that they are so ruled,
incapable of true national progress. The free, healthy
current of secular life and thought is, in the very nature
of things, incompatible with priestly rule. Be the creed
what it may, Druidism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, or
fetichism, a priestly caste claiming authority in temporal
affairs by virtue of extra-temporal sanctions is inevitably
the enemy of that spirit of criticism, of that influx of
new ideas, of that growth of secular thought, of human
and rational authority, which are the elementary conditions
of national development.

The Cursing of Tara

A singular and very cogent illustration of this truth
can be drawn from the history of the early Celtic
world. In the sixth century A.D., a little over a
hundred years after the preaching of Christianity by
St. Patrick, a king named Dermot MacKerval26 ruled
in Ireland. He was the Ard Righ, or High King, of
that country, whose seat of government was at Tara, in
Meath, and whose office, with its nominal and legal
superiority to the five provincial kings, represented the
impulse which was moving the Irish people towards a
true national unity. The first condition of such a unity
was evidently the establishment of an effective central
authority. Such an authority, as we have said, the
High King, in theory, represented. Now it happened
that one of his officers was murdered in the discharge
of his duty by a chief named Hugh Guairy. Guairy
[pg 48]

was the brother of a bishop who was related by
fosterage to St. Ruadan of Lorrha, and when King
Dermot sent to arrest the murderer these clergy found
him a hiding-place. Dermot, however, caused a search
to be made, haled him forth from under the roof of
St. Ruadan, and brought him to Tara for trial. Immediately
the ecclesiastics of Ireland made common
cause against the lay ruler who had dared to execute
justice on a criminal under clerical protection. They
assembled at Tara, fasted against the king,27 and laid
their solemn malediction upon him and the seat of
his government. Then the chronicler tells us that
Dermot’s wife had a prophetic dream:

The fair tree was the Irish monarchy, the twelve
hewers were the twelve Saints or Apostles of Ireland,
and the one who laid it low was St. Ruadan. The plea
of the king for his country, whose fate he saw to be
hanging in the balance, is recorded with moving force
and insight by the Irish chronicler:29

[pg 49]

But Ruadan said, “Desolate be Tara for ever and
ever”; and the popular awe of the ecclesiastical malediction
prevailed. The criminal was surrendered, Tara
was abandoned, and, except for a brief space when a
strong usurper, Brian Boru, fought his way to power,
Ireland knew no effective secular government till it
was imposed upon her by a conqueror. The last
words of the historical tract from which we quote are
Dermot’s cry of despair:

This remarkable incident has been described at some
length because it is typical of a factor whose profound
influence in moulding the history of the Celtic
peoples we can trace through a succession of critical
events from the time of Julius Caesar to the present
day. How and whence it arose we shall consider later;
here it is enough to call attention to it. It is a factor
which forbade the national development of the Celts,
in the sense in which we can speak of that of the
classical or the Teutonic peoples.

What Europe Owes to the Celt

Yet to suppose that on this account the Celt was not a
force of any real consequence in Europe would be altogether
a mistake. His contribution to the culture of
the Western world was a very notable one. For some
four centuries—about A.D. 500 to 900—Ireland was
[pg 50]
the refuge of learning and the source of literary and
philosophic culture for half Europe. The verse-forms
of Celtic poetry have probably played the main part in
determining the structure of all modern verse. The
myths and legends of the Gaelic and Cymric peoples
kindled the imagination of a host of Continental poets.
True, the Celt did not himself create any great architectural
work of literature, just as he did not create a
stable or imposing national polity. His thinking and
feeling were essentially lyrical and concrete. Each
object or aspect of life impressed him vividly and
stirred him profoundly; he was sensitive, impressionable
to the last degree, but did not see things in their
larger and more far-reaching relations. He had little
gift for the establishment or institutions, for the service
of principles; but he was, and is, an indispensable and
never-failing assertor of humanity as against the
tyranny of principles, the coldness and barrenness of
institutions. The institutions of royalty and of civic
patriotism are both very capable of being fossilised
into barren formulae, and thus of fettering instead of
inspiring the soul. But the Celt has always been a
rebel against anything that has not in it the breath of
life, against any unspiritual and purely external form
of domination. It is too true that he has been over-eager
to enjoy the fine fruits of life without the long
and patient preparation for the harvest, but he has
done and will still do infinite service to the modern
world in insisting that the true fruit of life is a
spiritual reality, never without pain and loss to be
obscured or forgotten amid the vast mechanism of a
material civilisation.

CHAPTER II: THE RELIGION OF THE CELTS

Ireland and the Celtic Religion

We have said that the Irish among the Celtic
peoples possess the unique interest of having
carried into the light of modern historical research
many of the features of a native Celtic civilisation.
There is, however, one thing which they did not carry
across the gulf which divides us from the ancient world—and
this was their religion.

It was not merely that they changed it; they left it
behind them so entirely that all record of it is lost.
St. Patrick, himself a Celt, who apostolised Ireland
during the fifth century, has left us an autobiographical
narrative of his mission, a document of intense interest,
and the earliest extant record of British Christianity;
but in it he tells us nothing of the doctrines he came to
supplant. We learn far more of Celtic religious beliefs
from Julius Cæsar, who approached them from quite
another side. The copious legendary literature which
took its present form in Ireland between the seventh
and the twelfth centuries, though often manifestly
going back to pre-Christian sources, shows us, beyond
a belief in magic and a devotion to certain ceremonial
or chivalric observances, practically nothing resembling
a religious or even an ethical system. We know that
certain chiefs and bards offered a long resistance to
the new faith, and that this resistance came to the
arbitrament of battle at Moyrath in the sixth century,
but no echo of any intellectual controversy, no matching
of one doctrine against another, such as we find, for
instance, in the records of the controversy of Celsus
with Origen, has reached us from this period of change
and strife. The literature of ancient Ireland, as we
[pg 52]
shall see, embodied many ancient myths; and traces
appear in it of beings who must, at one time, have been
gods or elemental powers; but all has been emptied
of religious significance and turned to romance and
beauty. Yet not only was there, as Cæsar tells us, a
very well-developed religious system among the Gauls,
but we learn on the same authority that the British
Islands were the authoritative centre of this system;
they were, so to speak, the Rome of the Celtic religion.

What this religion was like we have now to consider,
as an introduction to the myths and tales which more
or less remotely sprang from it.

The Popular Religion of the Celts

But first we must point out that the Celtic religion
was by no means a simple affair, and cannot be summed
up as what we call “Druidism.” Beside the official
religion there was a body of popular superstitions and
observances which came from a deeper and older source
than Druidism, and was destined long to outlive it—indeed,
it is far from dead even yet.

The Megalithic People

The religions of primitive peoples mostly centre on,
or take their rise from, rites and practices connected
with the burial of the dead. The earliest people inhabiting
Celtic territory in the West of Europe of
whom we have any distinct knowledge are a race
without name or known history, but by their sepulchral
monuments, of which so many still exist, we can learn
a great deal about them. They were the so-called
Megalithic People,30 the builders of dolmens, cromlechs,
and chambered tumuli, of which more than three
[pg 53]
thousand have been counted in France alone. Dolmens
are found from Scandinavia southwards, all down the
western lands of Europe to the Straits of Gibraltar, and
round by the Mediterranean coast of Spain. They
occur in some of the western islands of the Mediterranean,
and are found in Greece, where, in Mycenæ,
an ancient dolmen yet stands beside the magnificent
burial-chamber of the Atreidae. Roughly, if we draw
a line from the mouth of the Rhone northward to
Varanger Fiord, one may say that, except for a few
Mediterranean examples, all the dolmens in Europe
lie to the west of that line. To the east none are
found till we come into Asia. But they cross the
Straits of Gibraltar, and are found all along the North
African littoral, and thence eastwards through Arabia,
India, and as far as Japan.

Dolmens, Cromlechs, and Tumuli

A dolmen, it may be here explained, is a kind of
chamber composed of upright unhewn stones, and
roofed generally with a single huge stone. They are

usually wedge-shaped
in plan, and traces of
a porch or vestibule
can often be noticed.
The primary intention
of the dolmen was to
represent a house or
dwelling-place for the
dead. A cromlech
(often confused in
popular language with
the dolmen) is properly
a circular arrangement of standing stones, often
with a dolmen in their midst. It is believed that most
[pg 54]
if not all of the now exposed dolmens were originally
covered with a great mound of earth or of smaller stones.
Sometimes, as in the illustration we give from Carnac,
in Brittany, great avenues or alignments are formed of
single upright stones, and these, no doubt, had some
purpose connected with the ritual of worship carried
on in the locality. The later megalithic monuments,
as at Stonehenge, may be of dressed stone, but in all
cases their rudeness of construction, the absence of any
sculpturing (except for patterns or symbols incised on
the surface), the evident aim at creating a powerful impression
by the brute strength of huge monolithic masses,
as well as certain subsidiary features in their design
which shall be described later on, give these megalithic
monuments a curious family likeness and mark them
out from the chambered tombs of the early Greeks,
of the Egyptians, and of other more advanced races.
The dolmens proper gave place in the end to great
chambered mounds or tumuli, as at New Grange, which
we also reckon as belonging to the Megalithic People.
They are a natural development of the dolmen. The
early dolmen-builders were in the neolithic stage of
culture, their weapons were of polished stone. But
in the tumuli not only stone, but also bronze, and even
iron, instruments are found—at first evidently importations,
but afterwards of local manufacture.

Origin of the Megalithic People

The language originally spoken by this people can
only be conjectured by the traces of it left in that of
their conquerors, the Celts.31 But a map of the distribution
or their monuments irresistibly suggests the
idea that their builders were of North African origin;
that they were not at first accustomed to traverse the

[pg 55]
sea for any great distance; that they migrated westwards
along North Africa, crossed into Europe where
the Mediterranean at Gibraltar narrows to a strait of a
few miles in width, and thence spread over the western
regions of Europe, including the British Islands, while
on the eastward they penetrated by Arabia into Asia. It
must, however, be borne in mind that while originally,
no doubt, a distinct race, the Megalithic People came
in the end to represent, not a race, but a culture.
The human remains found in these sepulchres, with
their wide divergence in the shape of the skull, &c.,
clearly prove this.32 These and other relics testify to the
dolmen-builders in general as representing a superior
and well-developed type, acquainted with agriculture,
pasturage, and to some extent with seafaring. The
monuments themselves, which are often of imposing
size and imply much thought and organised effort in
their construction, show unquestionably the existence,
at this period, of a priesthood charged with the care of
funeral rites and capable of controlling large bodies of
men. Their dead were, as a rule, not burned, but
buried whole—the greater monuments marking, no
doubt, the sepulchres of important personages, while
the common people were buried in tombs of which no
traces now exist.

The Celts of the Plains

De Jubainville, in his account of the early history of
the Celts, takes account of two main groups only—the
Celts and the Megalithic People. But A. Bertrand, in
his very valuable work “La Religion des Gaulois,”
distinguishes two elements among the Celts themselves.
There are, besides the Megalithic People, the two groups
[pg 56]
of lowland Celts and mountain Celts. The lowland
Celts, according to his view, started from the Danube
and entered Gaul probably about 1200 B.C. They
were the founders of the lake-dwellings in Switzerland,
in the Danube valley, and in Ireland. They knew the
use of metals, and worked in gold, in tin, in bronze, and
towards the end of their period in iron. Unlike the
Megalithic People, they spoke a Celtic tongue,33 though
Bertrand seems to doubt their genuine racial affinity
with the true Celts. They were perhaps Celticised
rather than actually Celtic. They were not warlike;
a quiet folk of herdsmen, tillers, and artificers. They
did not bury, but burned their dead. At a great settlement
of theirs, Golasecca, in Cisalpine Gaul, 6000 interments
were found. In each case the body had been
burned; there was not a single burial without previous
burning.

This people entered Gaul not (according to Bertrand),
for the most part, as conquerors, but by gradual infiltration,
occupying vacant spaces wherever they found them
along the valleys and plains. They came by the passes
of the Alps, and their starting-point was the country of
the Upper Danube, which Herodotus says “rises among
the Celts.” They blended peacefully with the Megalithic
People among whom they settled, and did not
evolve any of those advanced political institutions which
are only nursed in war, but probably they contributed
powerfully to the development of the Druidical system
of religion and to the bardic poetry.

[pg 57]

The Celts of the Mountains

Finally, we have a third group, the true Celtic group,
which followed closely on the track of the second. It
was at the beginning of the sixth century that it first
made its appearance on the left bank of the Rhine.
While Bertrand calls the second group Celtic, these he
styles Galatic, and identifies them with the Galatæ of
the Greeks and the Galli and Belgæ of the Romans.

The second group, as we have said, were Celts of the
plains. The third were Celts of the mountains. The
earliest home in which we know them was the ranges
of the Balkans and Carpathians. Their organisation
was that of a military aristocracy—they lorded it over
the subject populations on whom they lived by tribute
or pillage. They are the warlike Celts of ancient history—the
sackers of Rome and Delphi, the mercenary
warriors who fought for pay and for the love of warfare
in the ranks of Carthage and afterwards of Rome.
Agriculture and industry were despised by them, their
women tilled the ground, and under their rule the
common population became reduced almost to servitude;
“plebs pœne servorum habetur loco,” as Caesar tells us.
Ireland alone escaped in some degree from the oppression
of this military aristocracy, and from the sharp dividing
line which it drew between the classes, yet even there a
reflexion of the state of things in Gaul is found, even
there we find free and unfree tribes and oppressive and
dishonouring exactions on the part of the ruling order.

Yet, if this ruling race had some of the vices of untamed
strength, they had also many noble and humane
qualities. They were dauntlessly brave, fantastically
chivalrous, keenly sensitive to the appeal of poetry, of
music, and of speculative thought. Posidonius found
the bardic institution flourishing among them about
[pg 58]

100 B.C.,and about two hundred years earlier Hecatæus of
Abdera describes the elaborate musical services held by
the Celts in a Western island—probably Great Britain—in
honour of their god Apollo (Lugh).34 Aryan of the
Aryans, they had in them the making of a great and progressive
nation; but the Druidic system—not on the
side of its philosophy and science, but on that of its
ecclesiastico-political organisation—was their bane, and
their submission to it was their fatal weakness.

The culture of these mountain Celts differed markedly
from that of the lowlanders. Their age was the age of
iron, not of bronze; their dead were not burned (which
they considered a disgrace), but buried.

The territories occupied by them in force were
Switzerland, Burgundy, the Palatinate, and Northern
France, parts of Britain to the west, and Illyria and
Galatia to the east, but smaller groups of them must
have penetrated far and wide through all Celtic territory,
and taken up a ruling position wherever they went.

There were three peoples, said Cæsar, inhabiting
Gaul when his conquest began; “they differ from
each other in language, in customs, and in laws.”
These people he named respectively the Belgæ, the
Celtæ, and the Aquitani. He locates them roughly, the
Belgæ in the north and east, the Celtæ in the middle,
and the Aquitani in the west and south. The Belgæ
are the Galatæ of Bertrand, the Celtæ are the Celts,
and the Aquitani are the Megalithic People. They
had, of course, all been more or less brought under
Celtic influences, and the differences of language which
Cæsar noticed need not have been great; still it is
noteworthy, and quite in accordance with Bertrand’s
views, that Strabo speaks of the Aquitani as differing
markedly from the rest of the inhabitants, and as

[pg 59]
resembling the Iberians. The language of the other
Gaulish peoples, he expressly adds, were merely
dialects of the same tongue.

The Religion of Magic

This triple division is reflected more or less in all
the Celtic countries, and must always be borne in mind
when we speak of Celtic ideas and Celtic religion, and
try to estimate the contribution of the Celtic peoples to
European culture. The mythical literature and the
art of the Celt have probably sprung mainly from the
section represented by the Lowland Celts of Bertrand.
But this literature of song and saga was produced by a
bardic class for the pleasure and instruction of a proud,
chivalrous, and warlike aristocracy, and would thus
inevitably be moulded by the ideas of this aristocracy.
But it would also have been coloured by the profound
influence of the religious beliefs and observances
entertained by the Megalithic People—beliefs which
are only now fading slowly away in the spreading daylight
of science. These beliefs may be summed up in
the one term Magic. The nature of this religion of
magic must now be briefly discussed, for it was a
potent element in the formation of the body of myths
and legends with which we have afterwards to deal.
And, as Professor Bury remarked in his Inaugural
Lecture at Cambridge, in 1903:

[pg 60]

The ultimate root of the word Magic is unknown,
but proximately it is derived from the Magi, or priests
of Chaldea and Media in pre-Aryan and pre-Semitic
times, who were the great exponents of this system of
thought, so strangely mingled of superstition, philosophy,
and scientific observation. The fundamental
conception of magic is that of the spiritual vitality of all
nature. This spiritual vitality was not, as in polytheism,
conceived as separated from nature in distinct divine
personalities. It was implicit and immanent in nature;
obscure, undefined, invested with all the awfulness of a
power whose limits and nature are enveloped in impenetrable
mystery. In its remote origin it was doubtless,
as many facts appear to show, associated with the
cult of the dead, for death was looked upon as the resumption
into nature, and as the investment with vague
and uncontrollable powers, of a spiritual force formerly
embodied in the concrete, limited, manageable, and
therefore less awful form of a living human personality.
Yet these powers were not altogether uncontrollable.
The desire for control, as well as the suggestion of the
means for achieving it, probably arose from the first
rude practices of the art of healing. Medicine of
some sort was one of the earliest necessities of man.
And the power of certain natural substances, mineral
or vegetable, to produce bodily and mental effects
often of a most startling character would naturally
be taken as signal evidence of what we may call the

“magical” conception of the universe.35 The first
magicians were those who attained a special knowledge
of healing or poisonous herbs; but “virtue” of some
sort being attributed to every natural object and phenomenon,
[pg 61]
a kind of magical science, partly the child of
true research, partly of poetic imagination, partly of
priestcraft, would in time spring up, would be codified
into rites and formulas, attached to special places and
objects, and represented by symbols. The whole
subject has been treated by Pliny in a remarkable
passage which deserves quotation at length:

Pliny on the Religion of Magic

“In the East, doubtless, it was invented—in Persia
and by Zoroaster.36 All the authorities agree in this.
[pg 62]
But has there not been more than one Zoroaster?…
I have noticed that in ancient times, and indeed almost
always, one finds men seeking in this science the
climax of literary glory—at least Pythagoras, Empedocles,
Democritus, and Plato crossed the seas, exiles,
in truth, rather than travellers, to instruct themselves
in this. Returning to their native land, they vaunted
the claims of magic and maintained its secret doctrine….
In the Latin nations there are early traces of it,
as, for instance, in our Laws of the Twelve Tables37 and
other monuments, as I have said in a former book. In
fact, it was not until the year 657 after the foundation
of Rome, under the consulate of Cornelius Lentulus
Crassus, that it was forbidden by a senatus consultum

to sacrifice human beings; a fact which proves that up
to this date these horrible sacrifices were made. The
Gauls have been captivated by it, and that even down
to our own times, for it was the Emperor Tiberius who
suppressed the Druids and all the herd of prophets
and medicine-men. But what is the use of launching
prohibitions against an art which has thus traversed
the ocean and penetrated even to the confines of
Nature?” (Hist. Nat. xxx.)

Pliny adds that the first person whom he can
ascertain to have written on this subject was Osthanes,
who accompanied Xerxes in his war against the Greeks,
and who propagated the “germs of his monstrous art”
wherever he went in Europe.

Magic was not—so Pliny believed—indigenous either
in Greece or in Italy, but was so much at home in
Britain and conducted with such elaborate ritual that

[pg 63]
Pliny says it would almost seem as if it was they
who had taught it to the Persians, not the Persians to them.

Traces of Magic in Megalithic Monuments

The imposing relics of their cult which the Megalithic
People have left us are full of indications of their
religion. Take, for instance, the remarkable tumulus
of Mané-er-H’oeck, in Brittany. This monument was
explored in 1864 by M. René Galles, who describes it
as absolutely intact—the surface of the earth unbroken,
and everything as the builders left it.38 At the entrance
to the rectangular chamber was a sculptured slab, on
which was graven a mysterious sign, perhaps the totem
of a chief. Immediately on entering the chamber was
found a beautiful pendant in green jasper about the
size of an egg. On the floor in the centre of the
chamber was a most singular arrangement, consisting of
a large ring of jadite, slightly oval in shape, with a
magnificent axe-head, also of jadite, its point resting on
the ring. The axe was a well-known symbol of power
or godhead, and is frequently found in rock-carvings of
the Bronze Age, as well as in Egyptian hieroglyphs,
Minoan carvings, &c. At a little distance from these
there lay two large pendants of jasper, then an axe-head
in white jade,39 then another jasper pendant. All
these objects were ranged with evident intention en suite,
forming a straight line which coincided exactly with
one of the diagonals of the chamber, running from
north-west to south-east. In one of the corners of the
chamber were found 101 axe-heads in jade, jadite, and

[pg 64]
fibrolite. There were no traces of bones or cinders, no
funerary urn; the structure was a cenotaph. “Are
we not here,” asks Bertrand, “in presence of some
ceremony relating to the practices of magic?”

Chiromancy at Gavr’inis

In connexion with the great sepulchral monument
of Gavr’inis a very curious observation was made by

M. Albert Maitre, an inspector of the Musée des Antiquités
Nationales. There were found here—as commonly
in other megalithic monuments in Ireland and
Scotland—a number of stones sculptured with a singular
and characteristic design in waving and concentric lines.
Now if the curious lines traced upon the human hand
at the roots and tips of the fingers be examined under
a lens, it will be found that they bear an exact resemblance
to these designs of megalithic sculpture. One
seems almost like a cast of the other. These lines on
the human hand are so distinct and peculiar that, as is
well known, they have been adopted as a method of
identification of criminals. Can this resemblance be

[pg 65]
the result of chance? Nothing like these peculiar
assemblages of sculptured lines has ever been found
except in connexion with these monuments. Have we
not here a reference to chiromancy—a magical art much
practised in ancient and even in modern times? The
hand as a symbol of power was a well-known magical
emblem, and has entered largely even into Christian
symbolism—note, for instance, the great hand sculptured
on the under side of one of the arms of the Cross of
Muiredach at Monasterboice.

Holed Stones

Another singular and as yet unexplained feature
which appears in many of these monuments, from

Western Europe to
India, is the presence
of a small hole bored
through one of the
stones composing the
chamber. Was it an
aperture intended for
the spirit of the dead?
or for offerings to
them? or the channel through which revelations from
the spirit-world were supposed to come to a priest or
magician? or did it partake of all these characters?

Holed stones, not
forming part of a
dolmen, are, of
course, among the
commonest relics
of the ancient cult,
and are still venerated
and used in
practices connected
[pg 66]
with child-bearing, &c. Here we are doubtless to
interpret the emblem as a symbol of sex.

Stone-Worship

Besides the heavenly bodies, we find that rivers, trees,
mountains, and stones were all objects of veneration
among this primitive people. Stone-worship was particularly
common, and is not so easily explained as the
worship directed toward objects possessing movement
and vitality. Possibly an explanation of the veneration
attaching to great and isolated masses of unhewn stone
may be found in their resemblance to the artificial
dolmens and cromlechs.40 No superstition has proved
more enduring. In A.D. 452 we find the Synod of
Arles denouncing those who “venerate trees and wells
and stones,” and the denunciation was repeated by
Charlemagne, and by numerous Synods and Councils
down to recent times. Yet a drawing, here reproduced,
which was lately made on the spot by Mr. Arthur Bell41
shows this very act of worship still in full force in Brittany,
and shows the symbols and the sacerdotal organisation
of Christianity actually pressed into the service of this
immemorial paganism. According to Mr. Bell, the
clergy take part in these performances with much
reluctance, but are compelled to do so by the force of
local opinion. Holy wells, the water of which is supposed
to cure diseases, are still very common in Ireland,

[pg 67]

and the cult of the waters of Lourdes may, in spite of
its adoption by the Church, be mentioned as a notable
case in point on the Continent.

Cup-and-Ring Markings

Another singular emblem, upon the meaning of which
no light has yet been thrown, occurs frequently in connexion

with megalithic monuments. The accompanying
illustrations show examples of it. Cup-shaped
hollows are made in the surface of the stone, these are
often surrounded with concentric rings, and from the
cup one or more radial lines are drawn to a point outside
the circumference of the rings. Occasionally a
system of cups are joined by these lines, but more frequently
they end a little way outside the widest of the
rings. These strange markings are found in Great
Britain and Ireland, in Brittany, and at various places in
[pg 68]
India, where they are called mahadéos.42 I have also
found a curious example—for such it appears to be—in
Dupaix’ “Monuments of New Spain.” It is reproduced
in Lord Kingsborough’s “Antiquities of Mexico,”
vol. iv. On the circular top of a cylindrical stone,
known as the “Triumphal Stone,” is carved a central
cup, with nine concentric circles round it, and a duct or
channel cut straight from the cup through all the
circles to the rim. Except that the design here is richly
decorated and accurately drawn, it closely resembles a
typical European cup-and-ring marking. That these
markings mean something, and that, wherever they are
found, they mean the same thing, can hardly be doubted,
but what that meaning is remains yet a puzzle to antiquarians.
The guess may perhaps be hazarded that
they are diagrams or plans of a megalithic sepulchre.
The central hollow represents the actual burial-place.
The circles are the standing stones, fosses, and ramparts
which often surrounded it; and the line or duct drawn
from the centre outwards represents the subterranean
approach to the sepulchre. The apparent “avenue”

intention of the duct is clearly brought out in the
varieties given below, which I take from Simpson. As

the sepulchre was also a
holy place or shrine, the
occurrence of a representation
of it among other
carvings of a sacred character
is natural enough; it
would seem symbolically
to indicate that the place
was holy ground. How far this suggestion might
apply to the Mexican example I am unable to
say.

[pg 69]

The Tumulus at New Grange

One of the most important and richly sculptured of
European megalithic monuments is the great chambered
tumulus of New Grange, on the northern bank of the
Boyne, in Ireland. This tumulus, and the others which
occur in its neighbourhood, appear in ancient Irish
mythical literature in two different characters, the union
of which is significant. They are regarded on the one
hand as the dwelling-places of the Sidhe (pronounced
Shee), or Fairy Folk, who represent, probably, the deities
of the ancient Irish, and they are also, traditionally, the
burial-places of the Celtic High Kings of pagan Ireland.
The story of the burial of King Cormac, who was
supposed to have heard of the Christian faith long
before it was actually preached in Ireland by St. Patrick
and who ordered that he should not be buried at the
royal cemetery by the Boyne, on account of its pagan
associations, points to the view that this place was the
centre of a pagan cult involving more than merely the
interment of royal personages in its precincts. Unfortunately
these monuments are not intact; they were
opened and plundered by the Danes in the ninth
century,43 but enough evidence remains to show that
they were sepulchral in their origin, and were also
associated with the cult of a primitive religion. The
most important of them, the tumulus of New Grange,
has been thoroughly explored and described by Mr.
George Coffey, keeper of the collection of Celtic antiquities
in the National Museum, Dublin.44 It appears
from the outside like a large mound, or knoll, now overgrown
with bushes. It measures about 280 feet across,

[pg 70]

at its greatest diameter, and is about 44 feet in height.
Outside it there runs a wide circle of standing stones
originally, it would seem, thirty-five in number. Inside
this circle is a ditch and rampart, and on top of this
rampart was laid a circular curb of great stones 8 to 10
feet long, laid on edge, and confining what has proved to
be a huge mound of loose stones, now overgrown, as
we have said, with grass and bushes. It is in the interior
of this mound that the interest of the monument
lies. Towards the end of the seventeenth century some
workmen who were getting road-material from the
mound came across the entrance to a passage which led
into the interior, and was marked by the fact that the
boundary stone below it is richly carved with spirals and
lozenges. This entrance faces exactly south-east. The
passage is formed of upright slabs of unhewn stone
roofed with similar slabs, and varies from nearly 5 feet
to 7 feet 10 inches in height; it is about 3 feet wide, and
runs for 62 feet straight into the heart of the mound.
Here it ends in a cruciform chamber, 20 feet high, the
roof, a kind of dome, being formed of large flat stones,
overlapping inwards till they almost meet at the top, where
a large flat stone covers all. In each of the three recesses
of the cruciform chamber there stands a large
stone basin, or rude sarcophagus, but not traces of any
burial now remains.

Symbolic Carvings at New Grange

The stones are all raw and undressed, and were
selected for their purpose from the river-bed and elsewhere
close by. On their flat surfaces, obtained by
splitting slabs from the original quarries, are found the
carvings which form the unique interest of this strange
monument. Except for the large stone with spiral
carvings and one other at the entrance to the mound,

[pg 71]
the intention of these sculptures does not appear to have
been decorative, except in a very rude and primitive
sense. There is no attempt to cover a given surface
with a system of ornament appropriate to its size and
shape. The designs are, as it were, scribbled upon the
walls anyhow and anywhere.45 Among them everywhere
the spiral is prominent. The resemblance of some of
these carvings to the supposed finger-markings of the
stones at Gavr’inis is very remarkable. Triple and
double spiral are also found, as well as lozenges and
zigzags. A singular carving representing what looks
like a palm-branch or fern-leaf is found in the west
recess. The drawing of this object is naturalistic, and
it is hard to interpret it, as Mr. Coffey is inclined to do,
as merely a piece of so-called “herring-bone” pattern.46

A similar palm-leaf design, but with the ribs arranged
at right angles to the central axis, is found in the
neighbouring tumulus of Dowth, at Loughcrew, and
in combination with a solar emblem, the swastika, on a
small altar in the Pyrenees, figured by Bertrand.

The Ship Symbol at New Grange

Another remarkable and, as far as Ireland goes,
unusual figure is found sculptured in the west recess at
New Grange. It has been interpreted by various critics
as a mason’s mark, a piece of Phoenician writing, a
group of numerals, and finally (and no doubt correctly)
by Mr. George Coffey as a rude representation of a ship
with men on board and uplifted sail. It is noticeable
that just above it is a small circle, forming, apparently,
part of the design. Another example occurs at Dowth.

[pg 72]

The significance of this marking, as we shall see, is
possibly very great. It has been discovered that on certain

stones in the tumulus of Locmariaker,
in Brittany,47 there occur a
number of very similar figures, one
of them showing the circle in much
the same relative position as at
New Grange. The axe, an Egyptian
hieroglyph for godhead and
a well-known magical emblem, is
also represented on this stone.

Again, in a brochure by Dr. Oscar
Montelius on the rock-sculptures of
Sweden48 we find a reproduction (also
given in Du Chaillu’s “Viking Age”)
of a rude rock-carving showing a
number of ships with men on board,
and the circle quartered by a cross—unmistakably
a solar emblem—just

above one of them. That
these ships (which, like
the Irish example, are
often so summarily represented
as to be mere
symbols which no one
could identifiy as a ship
were the clue not given
by other and more
elaborate representations) were drawn so frequently in
conjunction with the solar disk merely for amusement
or for a purely decorative object seems to me most
[pg 73]

improbable. In the days of the megalithic folk a
sepulchral monument, the very focus of religious ideas,
would hardly have been covered
with idle and meaningless scrawls.
“Man,” as Sir J. Simpson has well
said, “has ever conjoined together
things sacred and things sepulchral.”
Nor do these scrawls, in
the majority of instances, show
any glimmering of a decorative
intention. But if they had a symbolic intention, what
is it that they symbolise?

The Ship Symbol in Egypt

Now this symbol of the ship, with or without the actual
portrayal of the solar emblem, is of very ancient and
[pg 74]
very common occurrence in the sepulchral art of Egypt.
It is connected with the worship of R?, which came in fully
4000 years B.C. Its meaning as an Egyptian symbol is
well known. The ship was called the Boat of the Sun.
It was the vessel in which the Sun-god performed his
journeys; in particular, the journey which he made
nightly to the shores of the Other-world, bearing with
him in his bark the souls of the beatified dead. The

Sun-god, R?, is sometimes represented by a disk, sometimes
by other emblems, hovering above the vessel or
contained within it. Any one who will look over the
painted or sculptured sarcophagi in the British Museum
will find a host of examples. Sometimes he will find
representations of the life-giving rays of R? pouring down
upon the boat and its occupants. Now, in one of the
Swedish rock-carvings of ships at Backa, Bohuslän, given
by Montelius, a ship crowded with figures is shown
beneath a disk with three descending rays, and again
another ship with a two-rayed sun above it. It may
be added that in the tumulus of Dowth, which is close
to that of New Grange and is entirely of the same character
and period, rayed figures and quartered circles,
obviously solar emblems, occur abundantly, as also at
Loughcrew and other places in Ireland, and one other
ship figure has been identified at Dowth

[pg 75]

In Egypt the solar boat is sometimes represented as
containing the solar emblem alone, sometimes it contains
the figure of a god with attendant deities, sometimes it

contains a crowd of passengers
representing human
souls, and sometimes the
figure of a single corpse on
a bier. The megalithic carvings
also sometimes show
the solar emblem and sometimes
not; the boats are sometimes filled with figures
and are sometimes empty. When a symbol has once
been accepted and understood, any conventional or
summary representation of it is sufficient. I take it

that the complete form of
the megalithic symbol is
that of a boat with figures
in it and with the solar
emblem overhead. These
figures, assuming the foregoing
interpretation of
the design to be correct,
must clearly be taken
for representations of
the dead on their way to the Other-world. They
cannot be deities, for representations of the divine
powers under human aspect were quite unknown to
the Megalithic People, even after the coming of the
Celts—they first occur in Gaul under Roman influence.
But if these figures represent the dead, then we have
clearly before us the origin of the so-called “Celtic”
doctrine of immortality. The carvings in question are
pre-Celtic. They are found where no Celts ever penetrated.
Yet they point to the existence of just that
Other-world doctrine which, from the time of Cæsar
[pg 76]

downwards, has been associated with Celtic Druidism,
and this doctrine was distinctively Egyptian.

The “Navetas”

In connexion with this subject I may draw attention to
the theory of Mr. W.C. Borlase that the typical design
of an Irish dolmen was intended to represent a ship.
In Minorca there are analogous structures, there popularly
called navetas (ships), so distinct is the resemblance.
But, he adds, “long before the caves and navetas of
Minorca were known to me I had formed the opinion
that what I have so frequently spoken of as the ‘wedge-shape’
observable so universally in the ground-plans of
dolmens was due to an original conception of a ship.
From sepulchral tumuli in Scandinavia we know actual
vessels have on several occasions been disinterred. In
cemeteries of the Iron Age, in the same country, as
well as on the more southern Baltic coasts, the ship
was a recognised form of sepulchral enclosure.”49 If
Mr. Borlase’s view is correct, we have here a very
strong corroboration of the symbolic intention which
I attribute to the solar ship-carvings of the Megalithic
People.

The Ship Symbol in Babylonia

The ship symbol, it may be remarked, can be traced
to about 4000 B.C. in Babylonia, where every deity had
his own special ship (that of the god Sin was called
the Ship of Light), his image being carried in procession
on a litter formed like a ship. This is thought
by Jastrow50 to have originated at a time when the sacred
cities of Babylonia were situated on the Persian Gulf,
and when religious processions were often carried out
by water.

[pg 77]

The Symbol of the Feet

Yet there is reason to think that some of these symbols
were earlier than any known mythology, and were,
so to say, mythologised differently by different peoples,
who got hold of them from this now unknown source.
A remarkable instance is that of the symbol of the Two
Feet. In Egypt the Feet of Osiris formed one of the

portions into which his body was cut up, in
the well-known myth. They were a symbol
of possession or of visitation. “I have come
upon earth,” says the “Book of the Dead”
(ch. xvii.), “and with my two feet have taken
possession, I am Tmu.” Now this symbol
of the feet or footprint is very widespread.
It is found in India, as the print of the foot of Buddha,51

it is found sculptured on dolmens in Brittany,52 and it
occurs in rock-carvings in Scandinavia.53 In Ireland it
passes for the footprints of St. Patrick or St. Columba.
Strangest of all, it is found unmistakably in Mexico.54
Tyler, in his “Primitive Culture” (ii. p. 197) refers
to “the Aztec ceremony at the Second Festival of the
Sun God, Tezcatlipoca, when they sprinkled maize flour
before his sanctuary, and his high priest watched till
he beheld the divine footprints, and then shouted to
announce, ‘Our Great God is come.’?”

The Ankh on Megalithic Carvings

There is very strong evidence of the connexion of
the Megalithic People with North Africa. Thus, as
[pg 78]

Sergi points out, many signs (probably numerical) found
on ivory tablets in the cemetery at Naqada discovered

by Flinders Petrie are to be met with on
European dolmens. Several later Egyptian
hieroglyphic signs, including the famous Ankh,
or crux ansata, the symbol of vitality or resurrection,
are also found in megalithic carvings.55
From these correspondences Letourneau drew
the conclusion “that the builders of our megalithic
monuments came from the South, and were
related to the races of North Africa.”56

Evidence from Language

Approaching the subject from the linguistic side,
Rhys and Brynmor Jones find that the African origin—at
least proximately—of the primitive population of
Great Britain and Ireland is strongly suggested. It is
here shown that the Celtic languages preserve in their
syntax the Hamitic, and especially the Egyptian type.57

Egyptian and “Celtic” Ideas of Immortality

The facts at present known do not, I think, justify
us in framing any theory as to the actual historical
relation of the dolmen-builders of Western Europe with
the people who created the wonderful religion and
civilisation of ancient Egypt. But when we consider
all the lines of evidence that converge in this direction
it seems clear that there was such a relation. Egypt
was the classic land of religious symbolism. It gave to
[pg 79]
Europe the most beautiful and most popular of all its
religious symbols, that of the divine mother and child58.
I believe that it also gave to the primitive inhabitants of
Western Europe the profound symbol of the voyaging
spirits guided to the world of the dead by the God of
Light.

The religion of Egypt, above that of any people
whose ideas we know to have been developed in times
so ancient, centred on the doctrine of a future life.
The palatial and stupendous tombs, the elaborate ritual,
the imposing mythology, the immense exaltation of the
priestly caste, all these features of Egyptian culture
were intimately connected with their doctrine of the
immortality of the soul.

To the Egyptian the disembodied soul was no
shadowy simulacrum, as the classical nations believed—the
future life was a mere prolongation of the present;
the just man, when he had won his place in it, found
himself among his relatives, his friends, his workpeople,
with tasks and enjoyments very much like those of
earth. The doom of the wicked was annihilation; he
fell a victim to the invisible monster called the Eater of
the Dead.

Now when the classical nations first began to take
an interest in the ideas of the Celts the thing that principally
struck them was the Celtic belief in immortality,
which the Gauls said was “handed down by the
Druids.” The classical nations believed in immortality;
but what a picture does Homer, the Bible of
the Greeks, give of the lost, degraded, dehumanised
creatures which represented the departed souls of men!
Take, as one example, the description of the spirits of
the suitors slain by Odysseus as Hermes conducts them
to the Underworld:

[pg 80]

The classical writers felt rightly that the Celtic idea
of immortality was something altogether different from
this. It was both loftier and more realistic; it implied
a true persistence of the living man, as he was at present,
in all his human relations. They noted with surprise
that the Celt would lend money on a promissory note for
repayment in the next world.60 That is an absolutely
Egyptian conception. And this very analogy occurred
to Diodorus in writing of the Celtic idea of immortality—it
was like nothing that he knew of out of Egypt.61

The Doctrine of Transmigration

Many ancient writers assert that the Celtic idea of
immortality embodied the Oriental conception of the
transmigration of souls, and to account for this the
hypothesis was invented that they had learned the
doctrine from Pythagoras, who represented it in classical
antiquity. Thus Cæsar: “The principal point of their
[the Druids'] teaching is that the soul does not perish,
and that after death it passes from one body into
another.” And Diodorus: “Among them the doctrine
of Pythagoras prevails, according to which the souls of
men are immortal, and after a fixed term recommence
[pg 81]
to live, taking upon themselves a new body.” Now
traces of this doctrine certainly do appear in Irish
legend. Thus the Irish chieftain, Mongan, who is an
historical personage, and whose death is recorded about
A.D. 625, is said to have made a wager as to the
place of death of a king named Fothad, slain in a battle
with the mythical hero Finn mac Cumhal in the third
century. He proves his case by summoning to his aid
a revenant from the Other-world, Keelta, who was the
actual slayer of Fothad, and who describes correctly
where the tomb is to be found and what were its
contents. He begins his tale by saying to Mongan,

“We were with thee,” and then, turning to the assembly,
he continues: “We were with Finn, coming from
Alba….” “Hush,” says Mongan, “it is wrong of
thee to reveal a secret.” The secret is, of course, that
Mongan was a reincarnation of Finn.62 But the evidence
on the whole shows that the Celts did not hold this
doctrine at all in the same way as Pythagoras and the
Orientals did. Transmigration was not, with them, part
of the order of things. It might happen, but in general
it did not; the new body assumed by the dead clothed
them in another, not in this world, and so far as we
can learn from any ancient authority, there does not
appear to have been any idea of moral retribution
connected with this form of the future life. It was not
so much an article of faith as an idea which haunted the
imagination, and which, as Mongan’s caution indicates,
ought not to be brought into clear light.

However it may have been conceived, it is certain
that the belief in immortality was the basis of Celtic
Druidism.63 Caesar affirms this distinctly, and declares
[pg 82]
the doctrine to have been fostered by the Druids rather
for the promotion of courage than for purely religious
reasons. An intense Other-world faith, such as that
held by the Celts, is certainly one of the mightiest of
agencies in the hands of a priesthood who hold the
keys of that world. Now Druidism existed in the
British Islands, in Gaul, and, in fact, so far as we know,
wherever there was a Celtic race amid a population of
dolmen-builders. There were Celts in Cisalpine Gaul,
but there were no dolmens there, and there were no
Druids.64 What is quite clear is that when the Celts
got to Western Europe they found there a people with
a powerful priesthood, a ritual, and imposing religious
monuments; a people steeped in magic and mysticism
and the cult of the Underworld. The inferences, as I
read the facts, seem to be that Druidism in its essential
features was imposed upon the imaginative and sensitive
nature of the Celt—the Celt with his “extraordinary
aptitude” for picking up ideas—by the earlier population
of Western Europe, the Megalithic People,
while, as held by these, it stands in some historical
relation, which I am not able to pursue in further
detail, with the religious culture of ancient Egypt.
Much obscurity still broods over the question,
and perhaps will always do so, but if these
[pg 83]

suggestions have anything in them, then the Megalithic
People have been brought a step or two out of the
atmosphere of uncanny mystery which has surrounded
them, and they are shown to have played a very important
part in the religious development of Western
Europe, and in preparing that part of the world for the
rapid extension of the special type of Christianity which
took place in it. Bertrand, in his most interesting
chapter on “L’Irlande Celtique,”65 points out that very
soon after the conversion of Ireland to Christianity, we
find the country covered with monasteries, whose complete
organisation seems to indicate that they were really
Druidic colleges transformed en masse. Cæsar has told
us what these colleges were like in Gaul. They were
very numerous. In spite of the severe study and
discipline involved, crowds flocked into them for the
sake of the power wielded by the Druidic order, and
the civil immunities which its members of all grades
enjoyed. Arts and sciences were studied there, and
thousands of verses enshrining the teachings of Druidism
were committed to memory. All this is very like what
we know of Irish Druidism. Such an organisation
would pass into Christianity of the type established in
Ireland with very little difficulty. The belief in magical
rites would survive—early Irish Christianity, as its
copious hagiography plainly shows, was as steeped in
magical ideas as ever was Druidic paganism. The
belief in immortality would remain, as before, the
cardinal doctrine of religion. Above all the supremacy
of the sacerdotal order over the temporal power would
remain unimpaired; it would still be true, as Dion
Chrysostom said of the Druids, that “it is they who
command, and kings on thrones of gold, dwelling in
[pg 84]
splendid palaces, are but their ministers, and the
servants of their thought.”66

Cæsar on the Druidic Culture

The religious, philosophic, and scientific culture
superintended by the Druids is spoken of by Cæsar
with much respect. “They discuss and impart to the
youth,” he writes, “many things respecting the stars
and their motions, respecting the extent of the universe
and of our earth, respecting the nature of things, respecting
the power and the majesty of the immortal
gods” (bk. vi. 14). We would give much to know
some particulars of the teaching here described. But
the Druids, though well acquainted with letters, strictly
forbade the committal of their doctrines to writing; an
extremely sagacious provision, for not only did they
thus surround their teaching with that atmosphere of
mystery which exercises so potent a spell over the
human mind, but they ensured that it could never be
effectively controverted.

Human Sacrifices in Gaul

In strange discord, however, with the lofty words of
Cæsar stands the abominable practice of human sacrifice
whose prevalence he noted among the Celts. Prisoners
and criminals, or if these failed even innocent victims,
probably children, were encased, numbers at a time, in
huge frames of wickerwork, and there burned alive to
win the favour of the gods. The practice of human
sacrifice is, of course, not specially Druidic—it is found
in all parts both of the Old and of the New World at a
certain stage of culture, and was doubtless a survival
from the time of the Megalithic People. The fact that
it should have continued in Celtic lands after an otherwise
[pg 85]
fairly high state of civilisation and religious culture
had been attained can be paralleled from Mexico and
Carthage, and in both cases is due, no doubt, to the
uncontrolled dominance of a priestly caste.

Human Sacrifices in Ireland

Bertrand endeavours to dissociate the Druids from
these practices, of which he says strangely there is “no
trace” in Ireland, although there, as elsewhere in
Celtica, Druidism was all-powerful. There is little
doubt, however, that in Ireland also human sacrifices
at one time prevailed. In a very ancient tract, the

“Dinnsenchus,” preserved in the “Book of Leinster,” it
is stated that on Moyslaught, “the Plain of Adoration,”
there stood a great gold idol, Crom Cruach (the Bloody
Crescent). To it the Gaels used to sacrifice children
when praying for fair weather and fertility—“it was
milk and corn they asked from it in exchange for their
children—how great was their horror and their
moaning!”67

And in Egypt

In Egypt, where the national character was markedly
easy-going, pleasure-loving, and little capable of fanatical
exaltation, we find no record of any such cruel rites in
the monumental inscriptions and paintings, copious as
is the information which they give us on all features of
the national life and religion.68 Manetho, indeed, the
[pg 86]
Egyptian historian who wrote in the third century B.C.,
tells us that human sacrifices were abolished by Amasis I.
so late as the beginning of the XVIII Dynasty—about
1600 B.C. But the complete silence of the other
records shows us that even if we are to believe Manetho,
the practice must in historic times have been very rare,
and must have been looked on with repugnance.

The Names of Celtic Deities

What were the names and the attributes of the
Celtic deities? Here we are very much in the dark.
The Megalithic People did not imagine their deities
under concrete personal form. Stones, rivers, wells,
trees, and other natural objects were to them the
adequate symbols, or were half symbols, half actual
embodiments, of the supernatural forces which they
venerated. But the imaginative mind of the Aryan
Celt was not content with this. The existence of personal
gods with distinct titles and attributes is reported
to us by Caesar, who equates them with various figures
in the Roman pantheon—Mercury, Apollo, Mars, and
so forth. Lucan mentions a triad of deities, Æsus,
Teutates, and Taranus69; and it is noteworthy that in
these names we seem to be in presence of a true Celtic,
i.e., Aryan, tradition. Thus Æsus is derived by
Belloguet from the Aryan root as, meaning “to be”,
which furnished the name of Asura-masda (l’Esprit Sage)
to the Persians, Æsun to the Umbrians, Asa (Divine
Being) to the Scandinavians. Teutates comes from a
Celtic root meaning “valiant”, “warlike”, and indicates
[pg 87]

a deity equivalent to Mars. Taranus (? Thor), according
to de Jubainville, is a god of the Lightning (taran
in Welsh, Cornish, and Breton is the word for
“thunderbolt”). Votive inscriptions to these gods
have been found in Gaul and Britain. Other inscriptions
and sculptures bear testimony to the existence in
Gaul of a host of minor and local deities who are
mostly mere names, or not even names, to us now. In
the form in which we have them these conceptions bear
clear traces of Roman influence. The sculptures are
rude copies of the Roman style of religious art. But
we meet among them figures of much wilder and
stranger aspect—gods with triple faces, gods with
branching antlers on their brows, ram-headed serpents,
and other now unintelligible symbols of the older faith.
Very notable is the frequent occurrence of the cross-legged
“Buddha” attitude so prevalent in the religious
art of the East and of Mexico, and also the tendency,
so well known in Egypt, to group the gods in triads.

Caesar on the Celtic Deities

Caesar, who tries to fit the Gallic religion into the
framework of Roman mythology—which was exactly
what the Gauls themselves did after the conquest—says
they held Mercury to be the chief of the gods, and
looked upon him as the inventor of all the arts, as the
presiding deity of commerce, and as the guardian of
roads and guide of travellers. One may conjecture that
he was particularly, to the Gauls as to the Romans, the
guide of the dead, of travellers to the Other-world,
Many bronze statues to Mercury, of Gaulish origin,
still remain, the name being adopted by the Gauls, as
many place-names still testify70. Apollo was regarded
[pg 88]
as the deity of medicine and healing, Minerva was the
initiator of arts and crafts, Jupiter governed the sky,
and Mars presided over war. Cæsar is here, no doubt,
classifying under five types and by Roman names a large
number of Gallic divinities.

The God of the Underworld

According to Cæsar, a most notable deity of the
Gauls was (in Roman nomenclature) Dis, or Pluto, the
god of the Underworld inhabited by the dead. From
him all the Gauls claimed to be descended, and on this
account, says Cæsar, they began their reckoning of the
twenty-four hours of the day with the oncoming of
night.71 The name of this deity is not given. D’Arbois
de Jubainville considers that, together with Æsus,
Teutates, Taranus, and, in Irish mythology, Balor and
the Fomorians, he represents the powers of darkness,
death, and evil, and Celtic mythology is thus interpreted
as a variant of the universal solar myth, embodying the
conception of the eternal conflict between Day and Night.

The God of Light

The God of Light appears in Gaul and in Ireland as
Lugh, or Lugus, who has left his traces in many place-names
such as Lug-dunum (Leyden), Lyons, &c. Lugh
appears in Irish legend with distinctly solar attributes.
When he meets his army before the great conflict with
the Fomorians, they feel, says the saga, as if they beheld
the rising of the sun. Yet he is also, as we shall see,
a god of the Underworld, belonging on the side of his
mother Ethlinn, daughter of Balor, to the Powers of
Darkness.

[pg 89]

The Celtic Conception of Death

The fact is that the Celtic conception of the realm
of death differed altogether from that of the Greeks and
Romans, and, as I have already pointed out, resembled
that of Egyptian religion. The Other-world was not a
place of gloom and suffering, but of light and liberation.
The Sun was as much the god of that world as he was or
this. Evil, pain, and gloom there were, no doubt, and no
doubt these principles were embodied by the Irish Celts
in their myths of Balor and the Fomorians, of which
we shall hear anon; but that they were particularly
associated with the idea of death is, I think, a false
supposition founded on misleading analogies drawn
from the ideas of the classical nations. Here the Celts
followed North African or Asiatic conceptions rather
than those of the Aryans of Europe. It is only by
realising that the Celts as we know them in history,
from the break-up of the Mid-European Celtic empire
onwards, formed a singular blend of Aryan with non-Aryan
characteristics, that we shall arrive at a true
understanding of their contribution to European history
and their influence in European culture.

The Five Factors in Ancient Celtic Culture

To sum up the conclusions indicated: we can, I
think, distinguish five distinct factors in the religious
and intellectual culture of Celtic lands as we find them
prior to the influx of classical or of Christian influences.
First, we have before us a mass of popular superstitions
and of magical observances, including human sacrifice.
These varied more or less from place to place, centring
as they did largely on local features which were regarded
as embodiments or vehicles of divine or of diabolic
power. Secondly, there was certainly in existence a

[pg 90]
thoughtful and philosophic creed, having as its central
object of worship the Sun, as an emblem of divine
power and constancy, and as its central doctrine the
immortality of the soul. Thirdly, there was a worship
of personified deities, Æsus, Teutates, Lugh, and others,
conceived as representing natural forces, or as guardians
of social laws. Fourthly, the Romans were deeply
impressed with the existence among the Druids of a
body of teaching of a quasi-scientific nature about
natural phenomena and the constitution of the universe,
of the details of which we unfortunately know practically
nothing. Lastly, we have to note the prevalence of a
sacerdotal organisation, which administered the whole
system of religious and of secular learning and literature,72
which carefully confined this learning to a privileged
caste, and which, by virtue of its intellectual supremacy
and of the atmosphere of religious awe with which it was
surrounded, became the sovran power, social, political,
and religious, in every Celtic country. I have spoken of
these elements as distinct, and we can, indeed, distinguish
them in thought, but in practice they were inextricably
intertwined, and the Druidic organisation pervaded and
ordered all. Can we now, it may be asked, distinguish
among them what is of Celtic and what of pre-Celtic
and probably non-Aryan origin? This is a more
difficult task; yet, looking at all the analogies and
probabilities, I think we shall not be far wrong in
assigning to the Megalithic People the special doctrines,
the ritual, and the sacerdotal organisation of Druidism,
and to the Celtic element the personified deities, with
the zest for learning and for speculation; while the
popular superstitions were merely the local form assumed
by conceptions as widespread as the human race.

[pg 91]

The Celts of To-day

In view of the undeniably mixed character of the
populations called “Celtic” at the present day, it is
often urged that this designation has no real relation
to any ethnological fact. The Celts who fought with
Caesar in Gaul and with the English in Ireland are, it
is said, no more—they have perished on a thousand
battlefields from Alesia to the Boyne, and an older
racial stratum has come to the surface in their place.
The true Celts, according to this view, are only to be
found in the tall, ruddy Highlanders of Perthshire and
North-west Scotland, and in a few families of the old
ruling race still surviving in Ireland and in Wales. In
all this I think it must be admitted that there is a large
measure of truth. Yet it must not be forgotten that
the descendants of the Megalithic People at the present
day are, on the physical side, deeply impregnated with
Celtic blood, and on the spiritual with Celtic traditions
and ideals. Nor, again, in discussing these questions
of race-character and its origin, must it ever be assumed
that the character of a people can be analysed as one
analyses a chemical compound, fixing once for all its
constituent parts and determining its future behaviour
and destiny. Race-character, potent and enduring though
it be, is not a dead thing, cast in an iron mould, and thereafter
incapable of change and growth. It is part of the
living forces of the world; it is plastic and vital; it has
hidden potencies which a variety of causes, such as a felicitous
cross with a different, but not too different, stock, or—in
another sphere—the adoption of a new religious or
social ideal, may at any time unlock and bring into action.

Of one thing I personally feel convinced—that the
problem of the ethical, social, and intellectual development
of the people constituting what is called the
[pg 92]
“Celtic Fringe” in Europe ought to be worked for
on Celtic lines; by the maintenance of the Celtic
tradition, Celtic literature, Celtic speech—the encouragement,
in short, of all those Celtic affinities of which this
mixed race is now the sole conscious inheritor and
guardian. To these it will respond, by these it can be
deeply moved; nor has the harvest ever failed those
who with courage and faith have driven their plough
into this rich field. On the other hand, if this work is
to be done with success it must be done in no pedantic,
narrow, intolerant spirit; there must be no clinging to
the outward forms of the past simply because the Celtic
spirit once found utterance in them. Let it be remembered
that in the early Middle Ages Celts from Ireland
were the most notable explorers, the most notable
pioneers of religion, science, and speculative thought in
Europe.73 Modern investigators have traced their footprints
of light over half the heathen continent, and the
schools of Ireland were thronged with foreign pupils who
could get learning nowhere else. The Celtic spirit was
then playing its true part in the world-drama, and a greater
it has never played. The legacy of these men should
be cherished indeed, but not as a museum curiosity;
nothing could be more opposed to their free, bold, adventurous
spirit than to let that legacy petrify in the hands
of those who claim the heirship or their name and fame.

The Mythical Literature

After the sketch contained in this and the foregoing
chapter of the early history of the Celts, and of the forces
[pg 93]
which have moulded it, we shall now turn to give an
account of the mythical and legendary literature in which
their spirit most truly lives and shines. We shall not
here concern ourselves with any literature which is not
Celtic. With all that other peoples have made—as in
the Arthurian legends—of myths and tales originally
Celtic, we have here nothing to do. No one can now
tell how much is Celtic in them and how much is not.
And in matters of this kind it is generally the final
recasting that is of real importance and value. Whatever
we give, then, we give without addition or reshaping.
Stories, of course, have often to be summarised,
but there shall be nothing in them that did not come
direct from the Celtic mind, and that does not exist
to-day in some variety, Gaelic or Cymric, of the Celtic
tongue.

CHAPTER III: THE IRISH INVASION
MYTHS

The Celtic Cosmogony

Among those secret doctrines about the “nature
of things” which, as Cæsar tells us, the Druids
never would commit to writing, was there anything
in the nature of a cosmogony, any account of the
origin of the world and of man? There surely was. It
would be strange indeed if, alone among the races of
the world, the Celts had no world-myth. The spectacle
of the universe with all its vast and mysterious phenomena
in heaven and on earth has aroused, first the
imagination, afterwards the speculative reason, in every
people which is capable of either. The Celts had both
in abundance, yet, except for that one phrase about the
“indestructibility” of the world handed down to us by
Strabo, we know nothing of their early imaginings or
their reasonings on this subject. Ireland possesses a
copious legendary literature. All of this, no doubt,
assumed its present form in Christian times; yet so
much essential paganism has been allowed to remain in
it that it would be strange if Christian influences had led
to the excision of everything in these ancient texts that
pointed to a non-Christian conception of the origin of
things—if Christian editors and transmitters had never
given us even the least glimmer of the existence of such
a conception. Yet the fact is that they do not give it;
there is nothing in the most ancient legendary literature
of the Irish Gaels, which is the oldest Celtic literature
in existence, corresponding to the Babylonian conquest
of Chaos, or the wild Norse myth of the making of
Midgard out of the corpse of Ymir, or the Egyptian
creation of the universe out of the primeval Water by
Thoth, the Word of God, or even to the primitive folklore

[pg 95]
conceptions found in almost every savage tribe.
That the Druids had some doctrine on this subject it is
impossible to doubt. But, by resolutely confining it to
the initiated and forbidding all lay speculation on the
subject, they seem to have completely stifled the mythmaking
instinct in regard to questions of cosmogony
among the people at large, and ensured that when their
own order perished, their teaching, whatever it was,
should die with them.

In the early Irish accounts, therefore, of the beginnings
of things, we find that it is not with the World that
the narrators make their start—it is simply with their own
country, with Ireland. It was the practice, indeed, to
prefix to these narratives of early invasions and colonisations
the Scriptural account of the making of the
world and man, and this shows that something of the
kind was felt to be required; but what took the place
of the Biblical narrative in pre-Christian days we do
not know, and, unfortunately, are now never likely to
know.

The Cycles of Irish Legend

Irish mythical and legendary literature, as we have it
in the most ancient form, may be said to fall into four
main divisions, and to these we shall adhere in our
presentation of it in this volume. They are, in chronological
order, the Mythological Cycle, or Cycle of the
Invasions, the Ultonian or Conorian Cycle, the Ossianic
or Fenian Cycle, and a multitude of miscellaneous tales
and legends which it is hard to fit into any historical
framework.

The Mythological Cycle

The Mythological Cycle comprises the following
sections:

[pg 96]

With the Milesians we begin to come into something
resembling history—they represent, in Irish legend, the
Celtic race; and from them the ruling families of Ireland
are supposed to be descended. The People of
Dana are evidently gods. The pre-Danaan settlers or
invaders are huge phantom-like figures, which loom
vaguely through the mists of tradition, and have little
definite characterisation. The accounts which are given
of them are many and conflicting, and out of these we
can only give here the more ancient narratives.

The Coming of Partholan

The Celts, as we have learned from Caesar, believed
themselves to be descended from the God of the Underworld,
the God of the Dead. Partholan is said to have
come into Ireland from the West, where beyond the
vast, unsailed Atlantic Ocean the Irish Fairyland, the
Land of the Living—i.e., the land of the Happy Dead—
was placed. His father’s name was Sera (? the West).
He came with his queen Dalny74 and a number of companions
of both sexes. Ireland—and this is an imaginative
touch intended to suggest extreme antiquity—was
then a different country, physically, from what it is now.
There were then but three lakes in Ireland, nine rivers,
and only one plain. Others were added gradually
[pg 97]
during the reign of the Partholanians. One, Lake
Rury, was said to have burst out as a grave was being
dug for Rury, son of Partholan.

The Fomorians

The Partholanians, it is said, had to do battle with a
strange race, called the Fomorians, of whom we shall
hear much in later sections of this book. They were a
huge, misshapen, violent and cruel people, representing,
we may believe, the powers of evil. One of these was
surnamed Cenchos, which means The Footless, and thus
appears to be related to Vitra, the God of Evil in Vedantic
mythology, who had neither feet nor hands. With a
host of these demons Partholan fought for the lordship
of Ireland, and drove them out to the northern seas,
whence they occasionally harried the country under its
later rulers.

The end of the race of Partholan was that they were
afflicted by pestilence, and having gathered together on
the Old Plain (Senmag) for convenience of burying
their dead, they all perished there; and Ireland once
more lay empty for reoccupation.

The Legend of Tuan mac Carell

Who, then, told the tale? This brings us to the
mention of a very curious and interesting legend—one
of the numerous legendary narratives in which these
tales of the Mythical Period have come down to us.
It is found in the so-called “Book of the Dun Cow,” a
manuscript of about the year A.D. 1100, and is entitled
“The Legend of Tuan mac Carell.”

St. Finnen, an Irish abbot of the sixth century, is
said to have gone to seek hospitality from a chief named
Tuan mac Carell, who dwelt not far from Finnen’s
monastery at Moville, Co. Donegal. Tuan refused
[pg 98]
him admittance. The saint sat down on the doorstep
of the chief and fasted for a whole Sunday,75 upon which
the surly pagan warrior opened the door to him.
Good relations were established between them, and the
saint returned to his monks.

“Tuan is an excellent man,” said he to them; “he
will come to you and comfort you, and tell you the old
stories of Ireland.”76

This humane interest in the old myths and legends
of the country is, it may here be observed, a feature as
constant as it is pleasant in the literature of early Irish
Christianity.

Tuan came shortly afterwards to return the visit of
the saint, and invited him and his disciples to his
fortress. They asked him of his name and lineage, and
he gave an astounding reply. “I am a man of Ulster,”

he said. “My name is Tuan son of Carell. But once
I was called Tuan son of Starn, son of Sera, and my
father, Starn, was the brother of Partholan.”

“Tell us the history of Ireland,” then said Finnen,
and Tuan began. Partholan, he said, was the first of
men to settle in Ireland. After the great pestilence
already narrated he alone survived, “for there is never
a slaughter that one man does not come out of it to tell
the tale.” Tuan was alone in the land, and he wandered
about from one vacant fortress to another, from
rock to rock, seeking shelter from the wolves. For
twenty-two years he lived thus alone, dwelling in waste
places, till at last he fell into extreme decrepitude and
old age.

[pg 99]
saw him from the cliffs, and kept avoiding him. I was
long-haired, clawed, decrepit, grey, naked, wretched,
miserable. Then one evening I fell asleep, and when
I woke again on the morrow I was changed into a stag.
I was young again and glad of heart. Then I sang of
the coming of Nemed and of his race, and of my own
transformation…. ‘I have put on a new form, a
skin rough and grey. Victory and joy are easy to me;
a little while ago I was weak and defenceless.’?”

Tuan is then king of all the deer of Ireland, and so
remained all the days of Nemed and his race.

He tells how the Nemedians sailed for Ireland in a
fleet of thirty-two barks, in each bark thirty persons.
They went astray on the seas for a year and a half, and
most of them perished of hunger and thirst or of shipwreck.
Nine only escaped—Nemed himself, with four
men and four women. These landed in Ireland, and
increased their numbers in the course of time till
they were 8060 men and women. Then all of them
mysteriously died.

Again old age and decrepitude fell upon Tuan, but
another transformation awaited him. “Once I was
standing at the mouth of my cave—I still remember it
—and I knew that my body changed into another form.
I was a wild boar. And I sang this song about it:

“That is what I said. Yea, of a surety I was a wild
boar. Then I became young again, and I was glad. I
[pg 100]
was king of the boar-herds in Ireland; and, faithful to
any custom, I went the rounds of my abode when I
returned into the lands of Ulster, at the times old age
and wretchedness came upon me. For it was always
there that my transformations took place, and that is
why I went back thither to await the renewal of my body.”

Tuan then goes on to tell how Semion son of
Stariat settled in Ireland, from whom descended the
Firbolgs and two other tribes who persisted into
historic times. Again old age comes on, his strength
fails him, and he undergoes another transformation; he
becomes “a great eagle of the sea,” and once more
rejoices in renewed youth and vigour. He then tells
how the People of Dana came in, “gods and false gods
from whom every one knows the Irish men of learning
are sprung.” After these came the Sons of Miled, who
conquered the People of Dana. All this time Tuan
kept the shape of the sea-eagle, till one day, finding
himself about to undergo another transformation, he
fasted nine days; “then sleep fell upon me, and I was
changed into a salmon.” He rejoices in his new life,
escaping for many years the snares of the fishermen,
till at last he is captured by one of them and brought
to the wife of Carell, chief of the country. “The
woman desired me and ate me by herself, whole, so
that I passed into her womb.” He is born again, and
passes for Tuan son of Carell; but the memory of his
pre-existence and all his transformations and all the
history of Ireland that he witnessed since the days of
Partholan still abides with him, and he teaches all these
things to the Christian monks, who carefully preserve
them.

This wild tale, with its atmosphere of grey antiquity
and of childlike wonder, reminds us of the transformations
of the Welsh Taliessin, who also became an eagle,
[pg 101]
and points to that doctrine of the transmigration of the
soul which, as we have seen, haunted the imagination
of the Celt.

We have now to add some details to the sketch of
the successive colonisations of Ireland outlined by Tuan
mac Carell.

The Nemedians

The Nemedians, as we have seen, were akin to the
Partholanians. Both of them came from the mysterious
regions of the dead, though later Irish accounts, which
endeavoured to reconcile this mythical matter with
Christianity, invented for them a descent from Scriptural
patriarchs and an origin in earthly lands such as Spain or
Scythia. Both of them had to do constant battle with
the Fomorians, whom the later legends make out to be
pirates from oversea, but who are doubtless divinities
representing the powers of darkness and evil. There
is no legend of the Fomorians coming into Ireland, nor
were they regarded as at any time a regular portion of
the population. They were coeval with the world itself.
Nemed fought victoriously against them in four great
battles, but shortly afterwards died of a plague which
carried off 2000 of his people with him. The
Fomorians were then enabled to establish their tyranny
over Ireland. They had at this period two kings,
Morc and Conann. The stronghold of the Formorian
power was on Tory Island, which uplifts its wild cliffs
and precipices in the Atlantic off the coast of Donegal—a
fit home for this race of mystery and horror. They
extracted a crushing tribute from the people of Ireland,
two-thirds of all the milk and two-thirds of the children
of the land. At last the Nemedians rise in revolt.
Led by three chiefs, they land on Tory Island, capture
Conann’s Tower, and Conann himself falls by the
[pg 102]
hand of the Nemedian chief, Fergus. But Morc at
this moment comes into the battle with a fresh host,
and utterly routs the Nemedians, who are all slain but
thirty:

The thirty survivors leave Ireland in despair.
According to the most ancient belief they perished
utterly, leaving no descendants, but later accounts,
which endeavour to make sober history out of all these
myths, represent one family, that of the chief Britan,
as settling in Great Britain and giving their name to
that country, while two others returned to Ireland, after
many wanderings, as the Firbolgs and People of Dana.

The Coming of the Firbolgs

Who were the Firbolgs, and what did they represent
in Irish legend? The name appears to mean “Men of
the Bags,” and a legend was in later times invented to
account for it. It was said that after settling in Greece
they were oppressed by the people of that country,
who set them to carry earth from the fertile valleys up
to the rocky hills, so as to make arable ground of the
latter. They did their task by means of leathern bags;
but at last, growing weary of the oppression, they made
boats or coracles out of their bags, and set sail in them for
Ireland. Nennius, however, says they came from Spain,
for according to him all the various races that inhabited
Ireland came originally from Spain; and “Spain”

with him is a rationalistic rendering of the Celtic words
designating the Land of the Dead.77 They came in three
[pg 103]
groups, the Fir-Bolg, the Fir-Domnan, and the Galioin,
who are all generally designated as Firbolgs. They
play no great part in Irish mythical history, and a certain
character of servility and inferiority appears to attach to
them throughout.

One of their kings, Eochy78 mac Erc, took in marriage
Taltiu, or Telta, daughter of the King of the “Great
Plain” (the Land of the Dead). Telta had a palace at the
place now called after her, Telltown (properly Teltin).
There she died, and there, even in mediæval Ireland,
a great annual assembly or fair was held in her honour.

The Coming of the People of Dana

We now come to by far the most interesting and
important of the mythical invaders and colonisers of
Ireland, the People of Dana. The name, Tuatha De
Danann, means literally “the folk of the god whose
mother is Dana.” Dana also sometimes bears another
name, that of Brigit, a goddess held in much honour
by pagan Ireland, whose attributes are in a great
measure transferred in legend to the Christian St.
Brigit of the sixth century. Her name is also found
in Gaulish inscriptions as “Brigindo,” and occurs in
several British inscriptions as “Brigantia.” She was the
daughter of the supreme head of the People of Dana,
the god Dagda, “The Good.” She had three sons, who
are said to have had in common one only son, named
Ecne—that is to say, “Knowledge,” or “Poetry.”79

Ecne, then, may be said to be the god whose mother
was Dana, and the race to whom she gave her name are
the clearest representatives we have in Irish myths of
[pg 104]
the powers of Light and Knowledge. It will be remembered
that alone among all these mythical races
Tuan mac Carell gave to the People of Dana the name
of “gods.” Yet it is not as gods that they appear in
the form in which Irish legends about them have now
come down to us. Christian influences reduced them
to the rank of fairies or identified them with the fallen
angels. They were conquered by the Milesians, who
are conceived as an entirely human race, and who had
all sorts of relations of love and war with them until
quite recent times. Yet even in the later legends a
certain splendour and exaltation appears to invest the
People of Dana, recalling the high estate from which
they had been dethroned.

The Popular and the Bardic Conceptions

Nor must it be overlooked that the popular conception
of the Danaan deities was probably at all times
something different from the bardic and Druidic, or in
other words the scholarly, conception. The latter, as
we shall see, represents them as the presiding deities of
science and poetry. This is not a popular idea; it is
the product of the Celtic, the Aryan imagination, inspired
by a strictly intellectual conception. The common
people, who represented mainly the Megalithic element
in the population, appear to have conceived their deities
as earth-powers—dei terreni, as they are explicitly called
in the eighth-century “Book of Armagh”80—presiding,
not over science and poetry, but rather agriculture,
controlling the fecundity of the earth and water, and
dwelling in hills, rivers, and lakes. In the bardic
literature the Aryan idea is prominent; the other is to
be found in innumerable folk-tales and popular observances;
but of course in each case a considerable amount

[pg 105]
of interpenetration of the two conceptions is to be met
with—no sharp dividing line was drawn between them
in ancient times, and none can be drawn now.

The Treasures of the Danaans

Tuan mac Carell says they came to Ireland “out of
heaven.” This is embroidered in later tradition into a
narrative telling how they sprang from four great cities,
whose very names breathe of fairydom and romance—Falias,
Gorias, Finias, and Murias. Here they learned
science and craftsmanship from great sages one of whom
was enthroned in each city, and from each they brought
with them a magical treasure. From Falias came
the stone called the Lia Fail, or Stone of Destiny, on
which the High-Kings of Ireland stood when they were
crowned, and which was supposed to confirm the election
of a rightful monarch by roaring under him as he took
his place on it. The actual stone which was so used at
the inauguration of a reign did from immemorial times
exist at Tara, and was sent thence to Scotland early in
the sixth century for the crowning of Fergus the Great,
son of Erc, who begged his brother Murtagh mac Erc,
King of Ireland, for the loan of it. An ancient prophecy
told that wherever this stone was, a king of the
Scotic (i.e., Irish-Milesian) race should reign. This is
the famous Stone of Scone, which never came back to
Ireland, but was removed to England by Edward I. in
1297, and is now the Coronation Stone in Westminster
Abbey. Nor has the old prophecy been falsified, since
through the Stuarts and Fergus mac Erc the descent
of the British royal family can be traced from the
historic kings of Milesian Ireland.

The second treasure of the Danaans was the invincible
sword of Lugh of the Long Arm, of whom we
shall hear later, and this sword came from the city of
[pg 106]
Gorias. From Finias came a magic spear, and from
Murias the Cauldron of the Dagda, a vessel which had
the property that it could feed a host of men without
ever being emptied.

With these possessions, according to the version given
in the “Book of Invasions,” the People of Dana came
into Ireland.

The Danaans and the Firbolgs

They were wafted into the land in a magic cloud,
making their first appearance in Western Connacht.
When the cloud cleared away, the Firbolgs discovered
them in a camp which they had already fortified at
Moyrein.

The Firbolgs now sent out one of their warriors,
named Sreng, to interview the mysterious new-comers;
and the People of Dana, on their side, sent a warrior
named Bres to represent them. The two ambassadors
examined each other’s weapons with great interest. The
spears of the Danaans, we are told, were light and
sharp-pointed; those of the Firbolgs were heavy and
blunt. To contrast the power of science with that of
brute force is here the evident intention of the legend,
and we are reminded of the Greek myth of the struggle
of the Olympian deities with the Titans.

Bres proposed to the Firbolg that the two races should
divide Ireland equally between them, and join to defend it
against all comers for the future. They then exchanged
weapons and returned each to his own camp.

The First Battle of Moytura

The Firbolgs, however, were not impressed with the
superiority of the Danaans, and decided to refuse their
offer. The battle was joined on the Plain of Moytura,81
[pg 107]
in the south of Co. Mayo, near the spot now called
Cong. The Firbolgs were led by their king, mac Erc,
and the Danaans by Nuada of the Silver Hand, who
got his name from an incident in this battle. His hand,
it is said, was cut off in the fight, and one of the skilful
artificers who abounded in the ranks of the Danaans
made him a new one of silver. By their magical and
healing arts the Danaans gained the victory, and the
Firbolg king was slain. But a reasonable agreement
followed: the Firbolgs were allotted the province of
Connacht for their territory, while the Danaans took the
rest of Ireland. So late as the seventeenth century the
annalist Mac Firbis discovered that many of the inhabitants
of Connacht traced their descent to these same
Firbolgs. Probably they were a veritable historic race,
and the conflict between them and the People of Dana
may be a piece of actual history invested with some of
the features of a myth.

The Expulsion of King Bres

Nuada of the Silver Hand should now have been
ruler of the Danaans, but his mutilation forbade it, for
no blemished man might be a king in Ireland. The
Danaans therefore chose Bres, who was the son of a
Danaan woman named Eri, but whose father was unknown,
to reign over them instead. This was another
Bres, not the envoy who had treated with the Firbolgs
and who was slain in the battle of Moytura. Now Bres,
although strong and beautiful to look on, had no gift of
kingship, for he not only allowed the enemy of Ireland,
the Fomorians, to renew their oppression and taxation
in the land, but he himself taxed his subjects heavily
too; and was so niggardly that he gave no hospitality
to chiefs and nobles and harpers. Lack of generosity
and hospitality was always reckoned the worst of vices
[pg 108]
in an Irish prince. One day it is said that there came
to his court the poet Corpry, who found himself housed
in a small, dark chamber without fire or furniture, where,
after long delay, he was served with three dry cakes and
no ale. In revenge he composed a satirical quatrain on
his churlish host:

Poetic satire in Ireland was supposed to have a kind
of magical power. Kings dreaded it; even rats could
be exterminated by it.82 This quatrain of Corpry’s was
repeated with delight among the people, and Bres had
to lay down his sovranty. This was said to be the
first satire ever made in Ireland. Meantime, because
Nuada had got his silver hand through the art of his
physician Diancecht, or because, as some versions of
the legend say, a still greater healer, the son of
Diancecht, had made the veritable hand grow again
to the stump, he was chosen to be king in place of
Bres.

The latter now betook himself in wrath and resentment
to his mother Eri, and begged her to give him
counsel and to tell him of his lineage. Eri then
declared to him that his father was Elatha, a king of
the Fomorians, who had come to her secretly from
over sea, and when he departed had given her a ring,
bidding her never bestow it on any man save him
whose finger it would fit. She now brought forth
the ring, and it fitted the finger of Bres, who went
[pg 109]
down with her to the strand where the Fomorian lover
had landed, and they sailed together for his father’s
home.

The Tyranny of the Fomorians

Elatha recognised the ring, and gave his son an
army wherewith to reconquer Ireland, and also sent
him to seek further aid from the greatest of the
Fomorian kings, Balor. Now Balor was surnamed
“of the Evil Eye,” because the gaze of his one eye
could slay like a thunderbolt those on whom he looked
in anger. He was now, however, so old and feeble
that the vast eyelid drooped over the death-dealing eye,
and had to be lifted up by his men with ropes and
pulleys when the time came to turn it on his foes.
Nuada could make no more head against him than
Bres had done when king; and the country still groaned
under the oppression of the Fomorians and longed for
a champion and redeemer.

The Coming of Lugh

A new figure now comes into the myth, no other
than Lugh son of Kian, the Sun-god par excellence
of all Celtica, whose name we can still identify in many
historic sites on the Continent.83 To explain his appearance
we must desert for a moment the ancient manuscript
authorities, which are here incomplete, and have to
be supplemented by a folk-tale which was fortunately
discovered and taken down orally so late as the nineteenth
century by the great Irish antiquary, O’Donovan.84
[pg 110]
In this folk-tale the names of Balor and his daughter
Ethlinn (the latter in the form “Ethnea”) are
preserved, as well as those of some other mythical
personages, but that of the father of Lugh is faintly
echoed in MacKineely; Lugh’s own name is forgotten,
and the death of Balor is given in a manner inconsistent
with the ancient myth. In the story as I give
it here the antique names and mythical outline are
preserved, but are supplemented where required from
the folk-tale, omitting from the latter those modern
features which are not reconcilable with the myth.

The story, then, goes that Balor, the Fomorian king,
heard in a Druidic prophecy that he would be slain by
his grandson. His only child was an infant daughter
named Ethlinn. To avert the doom he, like Acrisios,
father of Danae, in the Greek myth, had her imprisoned
in a high tower which he caused to be built on a
precipitous headland, the Tor M?r, in Tory Island.
He placed the girl in charge of twelve matrons, who
were strictly charged to prevent her from ever seeing
the face of man, or even learning that there were any
beings of a different sex from her own. In this
seclusion Ethlinn grew up—as all sequestered princesses
do—into a maiden of surpassing beauty.

Now it happened that there were on the mainland
three brothers, namely, Kian, Sawan, and Goban the
Smith, the great armourer and artificer of Irish myth,
who corresponds to Wayland Smith in Germanic
legend. Kian had a magical cow, whose milk was so
abundant that every one longed to possess her, and he
had to keep her strictly under protection.

Balor determined to possess himself of this cow.
One day Kian and Sawan had come to the forge to
have some weapons made for them, bringing fine steel
for that purpose. Kian went into the forge, leaving
[pg 111]
Sawan in charge of the cow. Balor now appeared on
the scene, taking on himself the form of a little redheaded
boy, and told Sawan that he had overheard the
brothers inside the forge concocting a plan for using all
the fine steel for their own swords, leaving but common
metal for that of Sawan. The latter, in a great rage,
gave the cow’s halter to the boy and rushed into the
forge to put a stop to this nefarious scheme. Balor
immediately carried off the cow, and dragged her across
the sea to Tory Island.

Kian now determined to avenge himself on Balor,
and to this end sought the advice of a Druidess named
Bir?g. Dressing himself in woman’s garb, he was
wafted by magical spells across the sea, where Bir?g, who
accompanied him, represented to Ethlinn’s guardians
that they were two noble ladies cast upon the shore
in escaping from an abductor, and begged for shelter.
They were admitted; Kian found means to have access
to the Princess Ethlinn while the matrons were laid by
Bir?g under the spell of an enchanted slumber, and
when they awoke Kian and the Druidess had vanished
as they came. But Ethlinn had given Kian her love,
and soon her guardians found that she was with child.
Fearing Balor’s wrath, the matrons persuaded her that
the whole transaction was but a dream, and said nothing
about it; but in due time Ethlinn was delivered of
three sons at a birth.

News of this event came to Balor, and in anger and
fear he commanded the three infants to be drowned in
a whirlpool off the Irish coast. The messenger who
was charged with this command rolled up the children
in a sheet, but in carrying them to the appointed place
the pin of the sheet came loose, and one of the children
dropped out and fell into a little bay, called to this day
Port na Delig, or the Haven of the Pin. The other two
[pg 112]
were duly drowned, and the servant reported his
mission accomplished.

But the child who had fallen into the bay was
guarded by the Druidess, who wafted it to the home
of its father, Kian, and Kian gave it in fosterage to his
brother the smith, who taught the child his own trade
and made it skilled in every manner of craft and handiwork.
This child was Lugh. When he was grown to
a youth the Danaans placed him in charge of Duach,
“The Dark,” king of the Great Plain (Fairyland, or the

“Land of the Living,” which is also the Land of the
Dead), and here he dwelt till he reached manhood.

Lugh was, of course, the appointed redeemer of the
Danaan people from their servitude. His coming is
narrated in a story which brings out the solar attributes
of universal power, and shows him, like Apollo, as the
presiding deity of all human knowledge and of all
artistic and medicinal skill. He came, it is told, to
take service with Nuada of the Silver Hand, and when
the doorkeeper at the royal palace of Tara asked him
what he could do, he answered that he was a carpenter.

“We are in no need of a carpenter,” said the doorkeeper;
“we have an excellent one in Luchta son of
Luchad.” “I am a smith too,” said Lugh. “We
have a master-smith,” said the doorkeeper, “already.”

“Then I am a warrior,” said Lugh. “We do not
need one,” said the doorkeeper, “while we have
Ogma.” Lugh goes on to name all the occupations
and arts he can think of—he is a poet, a harper, a man
of science, a physician, a spencer, and so forth, always
receiving the answer that a man of supreme accomplishment
in that art is already installed at the court of
Nuada. “Then ask the King,” said Lugh, “if he has
in his service any one man who is accomplished in every
one of these arts, and if he have, I shall stay here no
[pg 113]
longer, nor seek to enter his palace.” Upon this Lugh
is received, and the surname Ildánach is conferred upon
him, meaning “The All-Craftsman,” Prince of all the
Sciences; while another name that he commonly bore
was Lugh Lamfada, or Lugh of the Long Arm. We
are reminded here, as de Jubainville points out, of the
Gaulish god whom Caesar identifies with Mercury,

“inventor of all the arts,” and to whom the Gauls put
up many statues. The Irish myth supplements this
information and tells us the Celtic name of this deity.

When Lugh came from the Land of the Living he
brought with him many magical gifts. There was the
Boat of Mananan, son of Lir the Sea God, which knew
a man’s thoughts and would travel whithersoever he
would, and the Horse of Mananan, that could go alike
over land and sea, and a terrible sword named Fragarach
(“The Answerer”), that could cut through any mail.
So equipped, he appeared one day before an assembly
of the Danaan chiefs who were met to pay their tribute
to the envoys of the Fomorian oppressors; and when
the Danaans saw him, they felt, it is said, as if they
beheld the rising of the sun on a dry summer’s day.
Instead of paying the tribute, they, under Lugh’s
leadership, attacked the Fomorians, all of whom were
slain but nine men, and these were sent back to tell Balor
that the Danaans defied him and would pay no tribute
henceforward. Balor then made him ready for battle,
and bade his captains, when they had subdued the
Danaans, make fast the island by cables to their ships
and tow it far northward to the Fomorian regions of
ice and gloom, where it would trouble them no longer.

The Quest of the Sons of Turenn

Lugh, on his side, also prepared for the final combat;
but to ensure victory certain magical instruments were
[pg 114]
still needed for him, and these had now to be obtained.
The story of the quest of these objects, which incidentally
tells us also of the end of Lugh’s father, Kian,
is one of the most valuable and curious in Irish legend,
and formed one of a triad of mythical tales which were
reckoned as the flower of Irish romance.85

Kian, the story goes, was sent northward by Lugh to
summon the fighting men of the Danaans in Ulster to
the hosting against the Fomorians. On his way, as he
crosses the Plain of Murthemney, near Dundalk, he
meets with three brothers, Brian, Iuchar, and Iucharba,
sons of Turenn, between whose house and that of Kian
there was a blood-feud. He seeks to avoid them by
changing into the form of a pig and joining a herd
which is rooting in the plain, but the brothers detect
him and Brian wounds him with a cast from a spear.
Kian, knowing that his end is come, begs to be allowed
to change back into human form before he is slain.
“I had liefer kill a man than a pig,” says Brian, who
takes throughout the leading part in all the brothers’
adventures. Kian then stands before them as a man,
with the blood from Brian’s spear trickling from his
breast. “I have outwitted ye,” he cries, “for if ye
had slain a pig ye would have paid but the eric [blood-fine]
of a pig, but now ye shall pay the eric of a man;
never was greater eric than that which ye shall pay;
and the weapons ye slay me with shall tell the tale to
the avenger of blood.”

“Then you shall be slain with no weapons at all,”
[pg 115]
says Brian, and he and the brothers stone him to death
and bury him in the ground as deep as the height of a
man.

But when Lugh shortly afterwards passes that way
the stones on the plain cry out and tell him of his
father’s murder at the hands of the sons of Turenn.
He uncovers the body, and, vowing vengeance, returns
to Tara. Here he accuses the sons of Turenn before
the High King, and is permitted to have them executed,
or to name the eric he will accept in remission of that
sentence. Lugh chooses to have the eric, and he names
it as follows, concealing things of vast price, and involving
unheard-of toils, under the names of common
objects: Three apples, the skin of a pig, a spear, a
chariot with two horses, seven swine, a hound, a
cooking-spit, and, finally, to give three shouts on a hill.
The brothers bind themselves to pay the fine, and
Lugh then declares the meaning of it. The three
apples are those which grow in the Garden of the Sun;
the pig-skin is a magical skin which heals every wound
and sickness if it can be laid on the sufferer, and it is a
possession of the King of Greece; the spear is a magical
weapon owned by the King of Persia (these names, of
course, are mere fanciful appellations for places in the
mysterious world of Faëry); the seven swine belong to
King Asal of the Golden Pillars, and may be killed and
eaten every night and yet be found whole next day;
the spit belongs to the sea-nymphs of the sunken Island
of Finchory; and the three shouts are to be given on
the hill of a fierce warrior, Mochaen, who, with his sons,
are under vows to prevent any man from raising his
voice on that hill. To fulfil any one of these enterprises
would be an all but impossible task, and the brothers
must accomplish them all before they can clear themselves
of the guilt and penalty of Kian’s death.

[pg 116]

The story then goes on to tell how with infinite
daring and resource the sons of Turenn accomplish one
by one all their tasks, but when all are done save the
capture of the cooking-spit and the three shouts on the
Hill of Mochaen, Lugh, by magical arts, causes forgetfulness
to fall upon them, and they return to Ireland
with their treasures. These, especially the spear and
the pig-skin, are just what Lugh needs to help him
against the Fomorians; but his vengeance is not complete,
and after receiving the treasures he reminds the
brothers of what is yet to be won. They, in deep
dejection, now begin to understand how they are played
with, and go forth sadly to win, if they can, the rest of
the eric. After long wandering they discover that the
Island of Finchory is not above, but under the sea.
Brian in a magical “water-dress” goes down to it, sees
the thrice fifty nymphs in their palace, and seizes the
golden spit from their hearth. The ordeal of the Hill
of Mochaen is the last to be attempted. After a
desperate combat which ends in the slaying of Mochaen
and his sons, the brothers, mortally wounded, uplift
their voices in three faint cries, and so the eric is
fulfilled. The life is still in them, however, when they
return to Ireland, and their aged father, Turenn, implores
Lugh for the loan of the magic pig-skin to heal them;
but the implacable Lugh refuses, and the brothers and
their father die together. So ends the tale.

The Second Battle of Moytura

The Second Battle of Moytura took place on a plain
in the north of Co. Sligo, which is remarkable for the
number of sepulchral monuments still scattered over it.
The first battle, of course, was that which the Danaans
had waged with the Firbolgs, and the Moytura there
referred to was much further south, in Co. Mayo.
[pg 117]
The battle with the Fomorians is related with an
astounding wealth of marvellous incident. The craftsmen
of the Danaans, Goban the smith, Credné the
artificer (or goldsmith), and Luchta the carpenter, keep
repairing the broken weapons of the Danaans with
magical speed—three blows of Goban’s hammer make
a spear or sword, Luchta flings a handle at it and it
sticks on at once, and Credné jerks the rivets at it with
his tongs as fast as he makes them and they fly into
their places. The wounded are healed by the magical
pig-skin. The plain resounds with the clamour of
battle:

The Death of Balor

The Fomorians bring on their champion, Balor,
before the glance of whose terrible eye Nuada of the
Silver Hand and others of the Danaans go down.
But Lugh, seizing an opportunity when the eyelid
drooped through weariness, approached close to Balor,
and as it began to lift once more he hurled into the eye
a great stone which sank into the brain, and Balor lay
dead, as the prophecy had foretold, at the hand of his
grandson. The Fomorians were then totally routed,
and it is not recorded that they ever again gained any
authority or committed any extensive depredations in
Ireland. Lugh, the Ildánach, was then enthroned in
place of Nuada, and the myth of the victory of the solar
[pg 118]
hero over the powers of darkness and brute force is
complete.

The Harp of the Dagda

A curious little incident bearing on the power which
the Danaans could exercise by the spell of music may
here be inserted. The flying Fomorians, it is told, had
made prisoner the harper of the Dagda and carried him
off with them. Lugh, the Dagda, and the warrior
Ogma followed them, and came unknown into the
banqueting-hall of the Fomorian camp. There they
saw the harp hanging on the wall. The Dagda called
to it, and immediately it flew into his hands, killing
nine men of the Fomorians on its way. The Dagda’s
invocation of the harp is very singular, and not a little
puzzling:

The allusion to summer and winter suggests the
practice in Indian music of allotting certain musical
modes to the different seasons of the year (and even to
different times of day), and also an Egyptian legend
referred to in Burney’s “History of Music,” where the
three strings of the lyre were supposed to answer
respectively to the three seasons, spring, summer, and
winter.88

When the Dagda got possession of the harp, the tale
goes on, he played on it the “three noble strains”
[pg 119]
which every great master of the harp should command,
namely, the Strain of Lament, which caused the hearers
to weep, the Strain of Laughter, which made them
merry, and the Strain of Slumber, or Lullaby, which
plunged them all in a profound sleep. And under
cover of that sleep the Danaan champion stole out and
escaped. It may be observed that throughout the
whole of the legendary literature of Ireland skill in
music, the art whose influence most resembles that of a
mysterious spell or gift of Faëry, is the prerogative of
the People of Dana and their descendants. Thus in
the “Colloquy of the Ancients,” a collection of tales
made about the thirteenth or fourteenth century, St.
Patrick is introduced to a minstrel, Cascorach, “a handsome,
curly-headed, dark-browed youth,” who plays so
sweet a strain that the saint and his retinue all fall
asleep. Cascorach, we are told, was son of a minstrel
of the Danaan folk. St. Patrick’s scribe, Brogan, remarks,

“A good cast of thine art is that thou gavest us.”
“Good indeed it were,” said Patrick, “but for a twang
of the fairy spell that infests it; barring which nothing
could more nearly resemble heaven’s harmony.”89
Some of the most beautiful of the antique Irish
folk-melodies,—e.g., the Coulin—are traditionally supposed
to have been overheard by mortal harpers at the revels
of the Fairy Folk.

Names and Characteristics of the Danaan Deities

I may conclude this narrative of the Danaan conquest
with some account of the principal Danaan gods and
their attributes, which will be useful to readers of the
subsequent pages. The best with which I am acquainted
is to be found in Mr. Standish O’Grady’s “Critical
[pg 120]
History of Ireland.”90 This work is no less remarkable
for its critical insight—it was published in 1881,
when scientific study of the Celtic mythology was little
heard of—than for the true bardic imagination, kindred
to that of the ancient myth-makers themselves, which
recreates the dead forms of the past and dilates them
with the breath of life. The broad outlines in which
Mr. O’Grady has laid down the typical characteristics
of the chief personages in the Danaan cycle hardly
need any correction at this day, and have been of much
use to me in the following summary of the subject.

The Dagda

The Dagda M?r was the father and chief of the
People of Dana. A certain conception of vastness
attaches to him and to his doings. In the Second
Battle of Moytura his blows sweep down whole ranks
of the enemy, and his spear, when he trails it on the
march, draws a furrow in the ground like the fosse
which marks the mearing of a province. An element
of grotesque humour is present in some of the records
about this deity. When the Fomorians give him food
on his visit to their camp, the porridge and milk are
poured into a great pit in the ground, and he eats it
with a spoon big enough, it was said, for a man and
a woman to lie together in it. With this spoon he
scrapes the pit, when the porridge is done, and shovels
earth and gravel unconcernedly down his throat. We
have already seen that, like all the Danaans, he is a
master of music, as well as of other magical endowments,
and owns a harp which comes flying through
the air at his call. “The tendency to attribute life to
inanimate things is apparent in the Homeric literature,
but exercises a very great influence in the mythology
[pg 121]
of this country. The living, fiery spear of Lugh; the
magic ship of Mananan; the sword of Conary M?r,
which sang; Cuchulain’s sword, which spoke; the Lia
Fail, Stone of Destiny, which roared for joy beneath
the feet of rightful kings; the waves of the ocean,
roaring with rage and sorrow when such kings are in
jeopardy; the waters of the Avon Dia, holding back
for fear at the mighty duel between Cuchulain and
Ferdia, are but a few out of many examples.”91 A
legend of later times tells how once, at the death of a
great scholar, all the books in Ireland fell from their
shelves upon the floor.

Angus ?g

Angus ?g (Angus the Young), son of the Dagda,
by Boanna (the river Boyne), was the Irish god of
love. His palace was supposed to be at New Grange,
on the Boyne. Four bright birds that ever hovered
about his head were supposed to be his kisses taking
shape in this lovely form, and at their singing love
came springing up in the hearts of youths and
maidens. Once he fell sick of love for a maiden whom
he had seen in a dream. He told the cause of his
sickness to his mother Boanna, who searched all Ireland
for the girl, but could not find her. Then the Dagda
was called in, but he too was at a loss, till he called to
his aid B?v the Red, king of the Danaans of Munster—the
same whom we have met with in the tale of the
Children of Lir, and who was skilled in all mysteries
and enchantments. B?v undertook the search, and after
a year had gone by declared that he had found the
visionary maiden at a lake called the Lake of the
Dragon’s Mouth.

[pg 122]

Angus goes to B?v, and, after being entertained by
him three days, is brought to the lake shore, where he
sees thrice fifty maidens walking in couples, each couple
linked by a chain of gold, but one of them is taller than
the rest by a head and shoulders. “That is she!”
cries Angus. “Tell us by what name she is known.”
B?v answers that her name is Caer, daughter of Ethal
Anubal, a prince of the Danaans of Connacht. Angus
laments that he is not strong enough to carry her off
from her companions, but, on B?v’s advice, betakes
himself to Ailell and Maev, the mortal King and Queen
of Connacht, for assistance. The Dagda and Angus
then both repair to the palace of Ailell, who feasts them
for a week, and then asks the cause of their coming.
When it is declared he answers, “We have no authority
over Ethal Anubal.” They send a message to him,
however, asking for the hand of Caer for Angus, but
Ethal refuses to give her up. In the end he is besieged
by the combined forces of Ailell and the Dagda, and
taken prisoner. When Caer is again demanded of him
he declares that he cannot comply, “for she is more
powerful than I.” He explains that she lives alternately
in the form of a maiden and of a swan year and
year about, “and on the first of November next,” he
says, “you will see her with a hundred and fifty other
swans at the Lake of the Dragon’s Mouth.”

Angus goes there at the appointed time, and cries to
her, “Oh, come and speak to me!” “Who calls me?”
asks Caer. Angus explains who he is, and then finds
himself transformed into a swan. This is an indication
of consent, and he plunges in to join his love in the
lake. After that they fly together to the palace on the
Boyne, uttering as they go a music so divine that all
hearers are lulled to sleep for three days and nights.

Angus is the special deity and friend of beautiful
[pg 123]
youths and maidens. Dermot of the Love-spot, a
follower of Finn mac Cumhal, and lover of Grania, of
whom we shall hear later, was bred up with Angus in
the palace on the Boyne. He was the typical lover of
Irish legend. When he was slain by the wild boar of
Ben Bulben, Angus revives him and carries him off to
share his immortality in his fairy palace.

Len of Killarney

Of B?v the Red, brother of the Dagda, we have
already heard. He had, it is said, a goldsmith named
Len, who “gave their ancient name to the Lakes of
Killarney, once known as Locha Lein, the Lakes of Len
of the Many Hammers. Here by the lake he wrought,
surrounded by rainbows and showers of fiery dew.”92

Lugh

Lugh has already been described.93 He has more
distinctly solar attributes than any other Celtic deity;
and, as we know, his worship was spread widely over
Continental Celtica. In the tale of the Quest of the
Sons of Turenn we are told that Lugh approached the
Fomorians from the west. Then Bres, son of Balor,
arose and said: “I wonder that the sun is rising in the
west to-day, and in the east every other day.” “Would
it were so,” said his Druids. “Why, what else but
the sun is it?” said Bres. “It is the radiance of the
face of Lugh of the Long Arm,” they replied.

Lugh was the father, by the Milesian maiden
Dectera, of Cuchulain, the most heroic figure in Irish
legend, in whose story there is evidently a strong
element of the solar myth.94

[pg 124]

Midir the Proud

Midir the Proud is a son of the Dagda. His
fairy palace is at Bri Leith, or Slieve Callary, in Co.
Longford. He frequently appears in legends dealing
partly with human, partly with Danaan personages,
and is always represented as a type of splendour in his
apparel and in personal beauty. When he appears
to King Eochy on the Hill of Tara he is thus
described:95

[pg 125]

Lir and Mananan

Lir, as Mr. O’Grady remarks, “appears in two
distinct forms. In the first he is a vast, impersonal
presence commensurate with the sea; in fact, the
Greek Oceanus. In the second, he is a separate person
dwelling invisibly on Slieve Fuad,” in Co. Armagh.
We hear little of him in Irish legend, where the attributes
of the sea-god are mostly conferred on his son,
Mananan.

This deity is one of the most popular in Irish
mythology. He was lord of the sea, beyond or under
which the Land of Youth or Islands of the Dead were
supposed to lie; he therefore was the guide of man to
this country. He was master of tricks and illusions,
and owned all kinds of magical possessions—the boat
named Ocean-sweeper, which obeyed the thought of
those who sailed in it and went without oar or sail, the
steed Aonbarr, which could travel alike on sea or land,
and the sword named The Answerer, which no armour
could resist. White-crested waves were called the
Horses of Mananan, and it was forbidden (tabu) for
the solar hero, Cuchulain, to perceive them—this indicated
the daily death of the sun at his setting in the
western waves. Mananan wore a great cloak which
was capable of taking on every kind of colour, like
the widespread field of the sea as looked on from
a height; and as the protector of the island of Erin
it was said that when any hostile force invaded it
they heard his thunderous tramp and the flapping
of his mighty cloak as he marched angrily round and
round their camp at night. The Isle of Man, seen
dimly from the Irish coast, was supposed to be the
throne of Mananan, and to take its name from this
deity.

[pg 126]

The Goddess Dana

The greatest of the Danaan goddesses was Dana,

“mother of the Irish gods,” as she is called in an early
text. She was daughter of the Dagda, and, like him, associated
with ideas of fertility and blessing. According
to d’Arbois de Jubainville, she was identical with the
goddess Brigit, who was so widely worshipped in
Celtica. Brian, Iuchar, and Iucharba are said to have
been her sons—these really represent but one person,
in the usual Irish fashion of conceiving the divine
power in triads. The name of Brian, who takes the
lead in all the exploits of the brethren,98 is a derivation
from a more ancient form, Brenos, and under this
form was the god to whom the Celts attributed their
victories at the Allia and at Delphi, mistaken by
Roman and Greek chroniclers for an earthly leader.

The Morrigan

There was also an extraordinary goddess named the
Morrigan,99 who appears to embody all that is perverse
and horrible among supernatural powers. She delighted
in setting men at war, and fought among them herself,
changing into many frightful shapes and often hovering
above fighting armies in the aspect of a crow. She met
Cuchulain once and proffered him her love in the guise
of a human maid. He refused it, and she persecuted
him thenceforward for the most of his life. Warring
with him once in the middle of the stream, she turned
herself into a water-serpent, and then into a mass of
water-weeds, seeking to entangle and drown him. But
he conquered and wounded her, and she afterwards

[pg 127]
became his friend. Before his last battle she passed
through Emain Macha at night, and broke the pole of
his chariot as a warning.

Cleena’s Wave

One of the most notable landmarks of Ireland was the
Tonn Cliodhna, or “Wave of Cleena,” on the seashore
at Glandore Bay, in Co. Cork. The story about Cleena
exists in several versions, which do not agree with each
other except in so far as she seems to have been a
Danaan maiden once living in Mananan’s country, the
Land of Youth beyond the sea. Escaping thence with
a mortal lover, as one of the versions tells, she landed
on the southern coast of Ireland, and her lover, Keevan
of the Curling Locks, went off to hunt in the woods.
Cleena, who remained on the beach, was lulled to sleep
by fairy music played by a minstrel of Mananan, when
a great wave of the sea swept up and carried her back
to Fairyland, leaving her lover desolate. Hence the
place was called the Strand of Cleena’s Wave.

The Goddess Ainé

Another topical goddess was Ainé, the patroness
of Munster, who is still venerated by the people
of that county. She was the daughter of the Danaan
Owel, a foster-son of Mananan and a Druid. She
is in some sort a love-goddess, continually inspiring
mortals with passion. She was ravished, it was said,
by Ailill Olum, King of Munster, who was slain in
consequence by her magic arts, and the story is repeated
in far later times about another mortal lover,
who was not, however, slain, a Fitzgerald, to whom she
bore the famous wizard Earl.100 Many of the aristocratic
[pg 128]
families of Munster claimed descent from this union.
Her name still clings to the “Hill of Ainé” (Knockainey),
near Loch Gur, in Munster. All the Danaan
deities in the popular imagination were earth-gods, dei
terreni, associated with ideas of fertility and increase.
Ainé is not heard much of in the bardic literature,
but she is very prominent in the folk-lore of the
neighbourhood. At the bidding of her son, Earl
Gerald, she planted all Knockainey with pease in a
single night. She was, and perhaps still is, worshipped
on Midsummer Eve by the peasantry, who carried
torches of hay and straw, tied on poles and lighted, round
her hill at night. Afterwards they dispersed themselves
among their cultivated fields and pastures, waving the
torches over the crops and the cattle to bring luck and
increase for the following year. On one night, as told
by Mr. D. Fitzgerald,101 who has collected the local traditions
about her, the ceremony was omitted owing to the
death of one of the neighbours. Yet the peasantry at
night saw the torches in greater number than ever
circling the hill, and Ainé herself in front, directing and
ordering the procession.

“On another St. John’s Night a number of girls had
stayed late on the Hill watching the cliars (torches) and
joining in the games. Suddenly Ainé appeared among
them, thanked them for the honour they had done her,
but said she now wished them to go home, as they wanted
the hill to themselves. She let them understand whom she
[pg 129]
meant by they, for calling some of the girls she made
them look through a ring, when behold, the hill
appeared crowded with people before invisible.”

“Here,” observed Mr. Alfred Nutt, “we have the
antique ritual carried out on a spot hallowed to one of
the antique powers, watched over and shared in by
those powers themselves. Nowhere save in Gaeldom
could be found such a pregnant illustration of the
identity of the fairy class with the venerable powers
to ensure whose goodwill rites and sacrifices, originally
fierce and bloody, now a mere simulacrum of their
pristine form, have been performed for countless ages.”102

Sinend and the Well of Knowledge

There is a singular myth which, while intended to
account for the name of the river Shannon, expresses
the Celtic veneration for poetry and science, combined
with the warning that they may not be approached
without danger. The goddess Sinend, it was said,
daughter of Lodan son of Lir, went to a certain well
named Connla’s Well, which is under the sea—i.e., in
the Land of Youth in Fairyland. “That is a well,”

says the bardic narrative, “at which are the hazels
of wisdom and inspirations, that is, the hazels of
the science of poetry, and in the same hour their fruit
and their blossom and their foliage break forth, and
then fall upon the well in the same shower, which raises
upon the water a royal surge of purple.” When
Sinend came to the well we are not told what rites or
preparation she had omitted, but the angry waters broke
forth and overwhelmed her, and washed her up on the
Shannon shore, where she died, giving to the river its
name.103 This myth of the hazels of inspiration and
[pg 130]
knowledge and their association with springing water
runs through all Irish legend, and has been finely
treated by a living Irish poet, Mr. G.W. Russell, in
the following verses:

The Coming of the Milesians

After the Second Battle of Moytura the Danaans held
rule in Ireland until the coming of the Milesians, the
sons of Miled. These are conceived in Irish legend as
an entirely human race, yet in their origin they, like
the other invaders of Ireland, go back to a divine and
mythical ancestry. Miled, whose name occurs as a god
in a Celtic inscription from Hungary, is represented as
a son of Bilé. Bilé, like Balor, is one of the names of
the god of Death, i.e., of the Underworld. They come
from “Spain”—the usual term employed by the later
rationalising historians for the Land of the Dead.

The manner of their coming into Ireland was as
follows: Ith, the grandfather of Miled, dwelt in a great
tower which his father, Bregon, had built in “Spain.”
One clear winter’s day, when looking out westwards
from this lofty tower, he saw the coast of Ireland in
the distance, and resolved to sail to the unknown land.

[pg 131]

He embarked with ninety warriors, and took land at
Corcadyna, in the south-west. In connexion with this
episode I may quote a passage of great beauty and
interest from de Jubainville’s “Irish Mythological
Cycle”:104

“According to an unknown writer cited by Plutarch,
who died about the year 120 of the present era, and
also by Procopius, who wrote in the sixth century A.D.,
‘the Land of the Dead’ is the western extremity of
Great Britain, separated from the eastern by an impassable
wall. On the northern coast of Gaul, says the
legend, is a populace of mariners whose business is to
carry the dead across from the continent to their last
abode in the island of Britain. The mariners, awakened
in the night by the whisperings of some mysterious
voice, arise and go down to the shore, where they find
ships awaiting them which are not their own,105 and, in
these, invisible beings, under whose weight the vessels
sink almost to the gunwales. They go on board, and
with a single stroke of the oar, says one text, in one
hour, says another, they arrive at their destination,
though with their own vessels, aided by sails, it would
have taken them at least a day and a night to reach the
coast of Britain. When they come to the other shore
the invisible passengers land, and at the same time the
unloaded ships are seen to rise above the waves, and a
voice is heard announcing the names of the new arrivals,
who have just been added to the inhabitants of the
Land of the Dead.

“One stroke of the oar, one hour’s voyage at most,
suffices for the midnight journey which transfers the
[pg 132]
Dead from the Gaulish continent to their final abode.
Some mysterious law, indeed, brings together in the
night the great spaces which divide the domain of the
living from that of the dead in daytime. It was the
same law which enabled Ith one fine winter evening to
perceive from the Tower of Bregon, in the Land of the
Dead, the shores of Ireland, or the land of the living.
The phenomenon took place in winter; for winter is a
sort of night; winter, like night, lowers the barriers
between the regions of Death and those of Life; like
night, winter gives to life the semblance of death, and
suppresses, as it were, the dread abyss that lies between
the two.”

At this time, it is said, Ireland was ruled by three
Danaan kings, grandsons of the Dagda. Their names
were MacCuill, MacCecht, and MacGrené, and their
wives were named respectively Banba, Fohla, and Eriu.
The Celtic habit of conceiving divine persons in triads
is here illustrated. These triads represent one person
each, and the mythical character of that personage is
evident from the name of one of them, MacGrené, Son
of the Sun. The names of the three goddesses have
each at different times been applied to Ireland, but that
of the third, Eriu, has alone persisted, and in the dative
form, Erinn, is a poetic name for the country to this
day. That Eriu is the wife of MacGrené means, as de
Jubainville observes, that the Sun-god, the god of Day,
Life, and Science, has wedded the land and is reigning
over it.

Ith, on landing, finds that the Danaan king, Neit,
has just been slain in a battle with the Fomorians, and
the three sons, MacCuill and the others, are at the
fortress of Aileach, in Co. Donegal, arranging for a
division of the land among themselves. At first they
[pg 133]

welcome Ith, and ask him to settle their inheritance.
Ith gives his judgment, but, in concluding, his admiration
for the newly discovered country breaks out:
“Act,” he says, “according to the laws of justice, for
the country you dwell in is a good one, it is rich in
fruit and honey, in wheat and in fish; and in heat and
cold it is temperate.” From this panegyric the Danaans
conclude that 1th has designs upon their land, and they
seize him and put him to death. His companions,
however, recover his body and bear it back with them
in their ships to “Spain”; when the children of Miled
resolve to take vengeance for the outrage and prepare
to invade Ireland.

They were commanded by thirty-six chiefs, each
having his own ship with his family and his followers.
Two of the company are said to have perished on the
way. One of the sons of Miled, having climbed to the
masthead of his vessel to look out for the coast of
Ireland, fell into the sea and was drowned. The other
was Skena, wife of the poet Amergin, son of Miled,
who died on the way. The Milesians buried her when
they landed, and called the place “Inverskena” after
her; this was the ancient name of the Kenmare River
in Co. Kerry.

“It was on a Thursday, the first of May, and the
seventeenth day of the moon, that the sons of Miled
arrived in Ireland. Partholan also landed in Ireland
on the first of May, but on a different day of the week
and of the moon; and it was on the first day of May,
too, that the pestilence came which in the space of one
week destroyed utterly his race. The first of May was
sacred to Beltené, one of the names of the god of
Death, the god who gives life to men and takes it
away from them again. Thus it was on the feast day
[pg 134]
of this god that the sons of Miled began their conquest
of Ireland.”106

The Poet Amergin

When the poet Amergin set foot upon the soil of
Ireland it is said that he chanted a strange and mystical
lay:

De Jubainville, whose translation I have in the main
followed, observes upon this strange utterance:

“There is a lack of order in this composition, the
ideas, fundamental and subordinate, are jumbled together
without method; but there is no doubt as to the meaning:
the filé [poet] is the Word of Science, he is the
god who gives to man the fire of thought; and as
science is not distinct from its object, as God and Nature
are but one, the being of the filé is mingled with the
[pg 135]

winds and the waves, with the wild animals and the
warrior’s arms.”107

Two other poems are attributed to Amergin, in which
he invokes the land and physical features of Ireland to
aid him:

The Judgment of Amergin

The Milesian host, after landing, advance to Tara,
where they find the three kings of the Danaans
awaiting them, and summon them to deliver up the
island. The Danaans ask for three days’ time to consider
whether they shall quit Ireland, or submit, or give
battle; and they propose to leave the decision, upon
their request, to Amergin. Amergin pronounces judgment—“the
first judgment which was delivered in
Ireland.” He agrees that the Milesians must not take
their foes by surprise—they are to withdraw the length
of nine waves from the shore, and then return; if
they then conquer the Danaans the land is to be fairly
theirs by right of battle.

The Milesians submit to this decision and embark
on their ships. But no sooner have they drawn off for
this mystical distance of the nine waves than a mist and
storm are raised by the sorceries of the Danaans—the
coast of Ireland is hidden from their sight, and they
wander dispersed upon the ocean. To ascertain if it is
[pg 136]
a natural or a Druidic tempest which afflicts them, a man
named Aranan is sent up to the masthead to see if the
wind is blowing there also or not. He is flung from
the swaying mast, but as he falls to his death he cries
his message to his shipmates: “There is no storm
aloft.” Amergin, who as poet—that is to say, Druid—takes
the lead in all critical situations, thereupon chants
his incantation to the land of Erin. The wind falls,
and they turn their prows, rejoicing, towards the shore.
But one of the Milesian lords, Eber Donn, exults in
brutal rage at the prospect of putting all the dwellers in
Ireland to the sword; the tempest immediately springs
up again, and many of the Milesian ships founder,
Eber Donn’s being among them. At last a remnant of
the Milesians find their way to shore, and land in the
estuary of the Boyne.

The Defeat of the Danaans

A great battle with the Danaans at Telltown109 then
follows. The three kings and three queens of the
Danaans, with many of their people, are slain, and the
children of Miled—the last of the mythical invaders of
Ireland—enter upon the sovranty of Ireland. But the
People of Dana do not withdraw. By their magic art
they cast over themselves a veil of invisibility, which
they can put on or off as they choose. There are two
Irelands henceforward, the spiritual and the earthly.
The Danaans dwell in the spiritual Ireland, which is
portioned out among them by their great overlord, the
Dagda. Where the human eye can see but green
mounds and ramparts, the relics of ruined fortresses or
sepulchres, there rise the fairy palaces of the defeated
divinities; there they hold their revels in eternal sunshine,
nourished by the magic meat and ale that give
[pg 137]
them undying youth and beauty; and thence they
come forth at times to mingle with mortal men in love
or in war. The ancient mythical literature conceives
them as heroic and splendid in strength and beauty. In
later times, and as Christian influences grew stronger,
they dwindle into fairies, the People of the Sidhe;110
but they have never wholly perished; to this day the
Land of Youth and its inhabitants live in the imagination
of the Irish peasant.

The Meaning of the Danaan Myth

All myths constructed by a primitive people are
symbols, and if we can discover what it is that they
symbolise we have a valuable clue to the spiritual
character, and sometimes even to the history, of the
people from whom they sprang. Now the meaning of
the Danaan myth as it appears in the bardic literature,
though it has undergone much distortion before it
reached us, is perfectly clear. The Danaans represent
the Celtic reverence for science, poetry, and artistic skill,
blended, of course, with the earlier conception of the
divinity of the powers of Light. In their combat with
the Firbolgs the victory of the intellect over dulness
and ignorance is plainly portrayed—the comparison of
the heavy, blunt weapon of the Firbolgs with the light
and penetrating spears of the People of Dana is an
indication which it is impossible to mistake. Again, in
their struggle with a far more powerful and dangerous
enemy, the Fomorians, we are evidently to see the
combat of the powers of Light with evil of a more
positive kind than that represented by the Firbolgs.
The Fomorians stand not for mere dulness or
[pg 138]
stupidity, but for the forces of tyranny, cruelty, and
greed—for moral rather than for intellectual darkness.

The Meaning of the Milesian Myth

But the myth of the struggle of the Danaans with
the sons of Miled is more difficult to interpret. How
does it come that the lords of light and beauty, wielding
all the powers of thought (represented by magic and
sorcery), succumbed to a human race, and were dispossessed
by them of their hard-won inheritance?
What is the meaning of this shrinking of their powers
which at once took place when the Milesians came on
the scene? The Milesians were not on the side of the
powers of darkness. They were guided by Amergin,
a clear embodiment of the idea of poetry and thought.
They were regarded with the utmost veneration, and
the dominant families of Ireland all traced their descent
to them. Was the Kingdom of Light, then, divided
against itself? Or, if not, to what conception in the
Irish mind are we to trace the myth of the Milesian
invasion and victory?

The only answer I can see to this puzzling question
is to suppose that the Milesian myth originated at a
much later time than the others, and was, in its main
features, the product of Christian influences. The
People of Dana were in possession of the country, but
they were pagan divinities—they could not stand for
the progenitors of a Christian Ireland. They had
somehow or other to be got rid of, and a race of less
embarrassing antecedents substituted for them. So the
Milesians were fetched from “Spain” and endowed
with the main characteristics, only more humanised, of
the People of Dana. But the latter, in contradistinction
to the usual attitude of early Christianity, are
treated very tenderly in the story of their overthrow.
[pg 139]
One of them has the honour of giving her name to the
island, the brutality of one of the conquerors towards
them is punished with death, and while dispossessed
of the lordship of the soil they still enjoy life in the
fair world which by their magic art they have made
invisible to mortals. They are no longer gods, but
they are more than human, and frequent instances
occur in which they are shown as coming forth from
their fairy world, being embraced in the Christian fold,
and entering into heavenly bliss. With two cases of
this redemption of the Danaans we shall close this
chapter on the Invasion Myths of Ireland.

The first is the strange and beautiful tale of the
Transformation of the Children of Lir.

The Children of Lir

Lir was a Danaan divinity, the father of the sea-god
Mananan who continually occurs in magical tales of
the Milesian cycle. He had married in succession two
sisters, the second of whom was named Aoife.111 She
was childless, but the former wife of Lir had left him
four children, a girl named Fionuala112 and three boys.
The intense love of Lir for the children made the stepmother
jealous, and she ultimately resolved on their
destruction. It will be observed, by the way, that the
People of Dana, though conceived as unaffected by
time, and naturally immortal, are nevertheless subject
to violent death either at the hands of each other or
even of mortals.

With her guilty object in view, Aoife goes on a
journey to a neighbouring Danaan king, B?v the Red,
taking the four children with her. Arriving at a
lonely place by Lake Derryvaragh, in Westmeath, she
[pg 140]
orders her attendants to slay the children. They
refuse, and rebuke her. Then she resolves to do it
herself; but, says the legend, “her womanhood overcame
her,” and instead of killing the Children she
transforms them by spells of sorcery into four white
swans, and lays on them the following doom: three
hundred years they are to spend on the waters of Lake
Derryvaragh, three hundred on the Straits of Moyle
(between Ireland and Scotland), and three hundred on
the Atlantic by Erris and Inishglory. After that, “when
the woman of the South is mated with the man of
the North,” the enchantment is to have an end.

When the children fail to arrive with Aoife at the
palace of B?v her guilt is discovered, and B?v changes
her into “a demon of the air.” She flies forth shrieking,
and is heard of no more in the tale. But Lir and
B?v seek out the swan-children, and find that they have
not only human speech, but have preserved the characteristic
Danaan gift of making wonderful music. From
all parts of the island companies of the Danaan folk
resort to Lake Derryvaragh to hear this wondrous
music and to converse with the swans, and during that
time a great peace and gentleness seemed to pervade
the land.

But at last the day came for them to leave the
fellowship of their kind and take up their life by the
wild cliffs and ever angry sea of the northern coast.
Here they knew the worst of loneliness, cold, and
storm. Forbidden to land, their feathers froze to the
rocks in the winter nights, and they were often buffeted
and driven apart by storms. As Fionuala sings:

[pg 141]

Fionuala, the eldest of the four, takes the lead in all
their doings, and mothers the younger children most
tenderly, wrapping her plumage round them on nights
of frost. At last the time comes to enter on the third
and last period of their doom, and they take flight for
the western shores of Mayo. Here too they suffer
much hardship; but the Milesians have now come into
the land, and a young farmer named Evric, dwelling on
the shores of Erris Bay, finds out who and what the
swans are, and befriends them. To him they tell their
story, and through him it is supposed to have been
preserved and handed down. When the final period
of their suffering is close at hand they resolve to fly
towards the palace of their father Lir, who dwells, we
are told, at the Hill of the White Field, in Armagh, to
see how things have fared with him. They do so;
but not knowing what has happened on the coming of
the Milesians, they are shocked and bewildered to find
nothing but green mounds and whin-bushes and nettles
where once stood—and still stands, only that they cannot
see it—the palace of their father. Their eyes are holden,
we are to understand, because a higher destiny was in
store for them than to return to the Land of Youth.

On Erris Bay they hear for the first time the sound
of a Christian bell. It comes from the chapel of a
hermit who has established himself there. The swans
are at first startled and terrified by the “thin, dreadful
[pg 142]
sound,” but afterwards approach and make themselves
known to the hermit, who instructs them in the faith,
and they join him in singing the offices of the Church.

Now it happens that a princess of Munster, Deoca,
(the “woman of the South”) became betrothed to a
Connacht chief named Lairgnen, and begged him as a
wedding gift to procure for her the four wonderful
singing swans whose fame had come to her. He asks
them of the hermit, who refuses to give them up, whereupon
the “man of the North” seizes them violently by
the silver chains with which the hermit had coupled them,
and drags them off to Deoca. This is their last trial.
Arrived in her presence, an awful transformation befalls
them. The swan plumage falls off, and reveals, not,
indeed, the radiant forms of the Danaan divinities,
but four withered, snowy-haired, and miserable human
beings, shrunken in the decrepitude of their vast old
age. Lairgnen flies from the place in horror, but the
hermit prepares to administer baptism at once, as death
is rapidly approaching them. “Lay us in one grave,”

says Fionuala, “and place Conn at my right hand and
Fiachra at my left, and Hugh before my face, for there
they were wont to be when I sheltered them many
a winter night upon the seas of Moyle.” And so it
was done, and they went to heaven; but the hermit, it
is said, sorrowed for them to the end of his earthly
days.113

In all Celtic legend there is no more tender and
beautiful tale than this of the Children of Lir.

The Tale of Ethné

But the imagination of the Celtic bard always played
with delight on the subjects of these transition tales,
[pg 143]
where the reconciling of the pagan order with the
Christian was the theme. The same conception is
embodied in the tale of Ethné, which we have now to
tell.

It is said that Mananan mac Lir had a daughter who
was given in fosterage to the Danaan prince Angus,
whose fairy palace was at Brugh na Boyna. This is the
great sepulchral tumulus now called New Grange, on the
Boyne. At the same time the steward of Angus had
a daughter born to him whose name was Ethné, and
who was allotted to the young princess as her handmaiden.

Ethné grew up into a lovely and gentle maiden, but
it was discovered one day that she took no nourishment
of any kind, although the rest of the household fed as
usual on the magic swine of Mananan, which might be
eaten to-day and were alive again for the feast to-morrow.
Mananan was called in to penetrate the
mystery, and the following curious story came to light.
One of the chieftains of the Danaans who had been on
a visit with Angus, smitten by the girl’s beauty, had
endeavoured to possess her by force. This woke in
Ethné’s pure spirit the moral nature which is proper to
man, and which the Danaan divinities know not. As
the tale says, her “guardian demon” left her, and an
angel of the true God took its place. After that event
she abstained altogether from the food of Faëry, and
was miraculously nourished by the will of God. After
a time, however, Mananan and Angus, who had been on
a voyage to the East, brought back thence two cows
whose milk never ran dry, and as they were supposed
to have come from a sacred land Ethné lived on their
milk thenceforward.

All this is supposed to have happened during the
reign of Eremon, the first Milesian king of all Ireland,
[pg 144]
who was contemporary with King David. At the time
of the coming of St. Patrick, therefore, Ethné would
have been about fifteen hundred years of age. The
Danaan folk grow up from childhood to maturity, but
then they abide unaffected by the lapse of time.

Now it happened one summer day that the Danaan
princess whose handmaid Ethné was went down with
all her maidens to bathe in the river Boyne. When
arraying themselves afterwards Ethné discovered, to her
dismay—and this incident was, of course, an instance
of divine interest in her destiny—that she had lost the
Veil of Invisibility, conceived here as a magic charm
worn on the person, which gave her the entrance to the
Danaan fairyland and hid her from mortal eyes. She
could not find her way back to the palace of Angus, and
wandered up and down the banks of the river seeking
in vain for her companions and her home. At last
she came to a walled garden, and, looking through the
gate, saw inside a stone house of strange appearance
and a man in a long brown robe. The man was a
Christian monk, and the house was a little church or
oratory. He beckoned her in, and when she had told
her story to him he brought her to St. Patrick, who
completed her adoption into the human family by
giving her the rite of baptism.

Now comes in a strangely pathetic episode which
reveals the tenderness, almost the regret, with which
early Irish Christianity looked back on the lost world
of paganism. As Ethné was one day praying in the
little church by the Boyne she heard suddenly a
rushing sound in the air, and innumerable voices, as
it seemed from a great distance, lamenting and calling
her name. It was her Danaan kindred, who were still
seeking for her in vain. She sprang up to reply, but
was so overcome with emotion that she fell in a swoon
[pg 145]
on the floor. She recovered her senses after a while,
but from that day she was struck with a mortal sickness,
and in no long time she died, with her head upon the
breast of St. Patrick, who administered to her the last
rites, and ordained that the church should be named
after her, Kill Ethné—a name doubtless borne, at the
time the story was composed, by some real church on
the banks of Boyne.114

Christianity and Paganism in Ireland

These, taken together with numerous other legendary
incidents which might be quoted, illustrate well the attitude
of the early Celtic Christians, in Ireland at least,
towards the divinities of the older faith. They seem to
preclude the idea that at the time of the conversion of
Ireland the pagan religion was associated with cruel
and barbarous practices, on which the national memory
would look back with horror and detestation.

CHAPTER IV: THE EARLY MILESIAN KINGS

The Danaans after the Milesian Conquest

The kings and heroes of the Milesian race now
fill the foreground of the stage in Irish legendary
history. But, as we have indicated, the Danaan
divinities are by no means forgotten. The fairyland in
which they dwell is ordinarily inaccessible to mortals,
yet it is ever near at hand; the invisible barriers may
be, and often are, crossed by mortal men, and the Danaans
themselves frequently come forth from them; mortals
may win brides of Faëry who mysteriously leave them
after a while, and women bear glorious children of
supernatural fatherhood. Yet whatever the Danaans
may have been in the original pre-Christian conceptions
of the Celtic Irish, it would be a mistake to suppose
that they figure in the legends, as these have now come
down to us, in the light of gods as we understand this
term. They are for the most part radiantly beautiful,
they are immortal (with limitations), and they wield
mysterious powers of sorcery and enchantment. But
no sort of moral governance of the world is ever for
a moment ascribed to them, nor (in the bardic literature)
is any act of worship paid to them. They do not die
naturally, but they can be slain both by each other and by
mortals, and on the whole the mortal race is the stronger.
Their strength when they come into conflict (as frequently
happens) with men lies in stratagem and illusion;
when the issue can be fairly knit between the rival
powers it is the human that conquers. The early
kings and heroes of the Milesian race are, indeed, often
represented as so mightily endowed with supernatural
power that it is impossible to draw a clear distinction
between them and the People of Dana in this respect.
[pg 147]
The Danaans are much nobler and more exalted beings,
as they figure in the bardic literature, than the fairies
into which they ultimately degenerated in the popular
imagination; they may be said to hold a position
intermediate between these and the Greek deities as
portrayed in Homer. But the true worship of the
Celts, in Ireland as elsewhere, seems to have been paid,
not to these poetical personifications of their ideals of
power and beauty, but rather to elemental forces represented
by actual natural phenomena—rocks, rivers, the
sun, the wind, the sea. The most binding of oaths
was to swear by the Wind and Sun, or to invoke some
other power of nature; no name of any Danaan divinity
occurs in an Irish oath formula. When, however, in
the later stages of the bardic literature, and still more
in the popular conceptions, the Danaan deities had
begun to sink into fairies, we find rising into prominence
a character probably older than that ascribed to them
in the literature, and, in a way, more august. In the
literature it is evident that they were originally representatives
of science and poetry—the intellectual powers
of man. But in the popular mind they represented,
probably at all times and certainly in later Christian
times, not intellectual powers, but those associated with
the fecundity of earth. They were, as a passage in the
Book of Armagh names them, dei terreni, earth-gods,
and were, and are still, invoked by the peasantry to
yield increase and fertility. The literary conception of
them is plainly Druidic in origin, the other popular;
and the popular and doubtless older conception has
proved the more enduring.

But these features of Irish mythology will appear
better in the actual tales than in any critical discussion
of them; and to the tales let us now return.

[pg 148]

The Milesian Settlement of Ireland

The Milesians had three leaders when they set out
for the conquest of Ireland—Eber Donn (Brown Eber),
Eber Finn (Fair Eber), and Eremon. Of these the
first-named, as we have seen, was not allowed to enter
the land—he perished as a punishment for his brutality.
When the victory over the Danaans was secure the
two remaining brothers turned to the Druid Amergin
for a judgment as to their respective titles to the
sovranty. Eremon was the elder of the two, but Eber
refused to submit to him. Thus Irish history begins,
alas! with dissension and jealousy. Amergin decided
that the land should belong to Eremon for his life, and
pass to Eber after his death. But Eber refused to
submit to the award, and demanded an immediate
partition of the new-won territory. This was agreed
to, and Eber took the southern half of Ireland, “from
the Boyne to the Wave of Cleena,”115 while Eremon
occupied the north. But even so the brethren could
not be at peace, and after a short while war broke out
between them. Eber was slain, and Eremon became
sole King of Ireland, which he ruled from Tara, the
traditional seat of that central authority which was
always a dream of the Irish mind, but never a reality of
Irish history.

Tiernmas and Crom Cruach

Of the kings who succeeded Eremon, and the battles
they fought and the forests they cleared away and the
rivers and lakes that broke out in their reign, there is
little of note to record till we come to the reign of
Tiernmas, fifth in succession from Eremon. He is said
[pg 149]
to have introduced into Ireland the worship of Crom
Cruach, on Moyslaught (The Plain of Adoration116), and
to have perished himself with three-fourths of his
people while worshipping this idol on November Eve,
the period when the reign of winter was inaugurated.
Crom Cruach was no doubt a solar deity, but no figure
at all resembling him can be identified among the
Danaan divinities. Tiernmas also, it is said, found the
first gold-mine in Ireland, and introduced variegated
colours into the clothing of the people. A slave might
wear but one colour, a peasant two, a soldier three, a
wealthy landowner four, a provincial chief five, and an
Ollav, or royal person, six. Ollav was a term applied to
a certain Druidic rank; it meant much the same as
“doctor,” in the sense of a learned man—a master of
science. It is a characteristic trait that the Ollav is
endowed with a distinction equal to that of a king.

Ollav F?la

The most distinguished Ollav of Ireland was also a
king, the celebrated Ollav F?la, who is supposed to
have been eighteenth from Eremon and to have reigned
about 1000 B.C. He was the Lycurgus or Solon of
Ireland, giving to the country a code of legislature,
and also subdividing it, under the High King at Tara,
among the provincial chiefs, to each of whom his proper
rights and obligations were allotted. To Ollav F?la is
also attributed the foundation of an institution which,
whatever its origin, became of great importance in
Ireland—the great triennial Fair or Festival at Tara,
where the sub-kings and chiefs, bards, historians, and
musicians from all parts of Ireland assembled to make
up the genealogical records of the clan chieftainships, to
enact laws, hear disputed cases, settle succession, and so
[pg 150]
forth; all these political and legislative labours being
lightened by song and feast. It was a stringent law
that at this season all enmities must be laid aside; no
man might lift his hand against another, or even institute
a legal process, while the Assembly at Tara was
in progress. Of all political and national institutions
of this kind Ollav F?la was regarded as the
traditional founder, just as Goban the Smith was the
founder of artistry and handicraft, and Amergin of
poetry. But whether the Milesian king had any more
objective reality than the other more obviously mythical
figures it is hard to say. He is supposed to have
been buried in the great tumulus at Loughcrew, in
Westmeath.

Kimbay and the Founding of Emain Macha

With Kimbay (Cimbaoth), about 300 B.C., we come to
a landmark in history. “All the historical records of
the Irish, prior to Kimbay, were dubious”—so, with
remarkable critical acumen for his age, wrote the
eleventh-century historian Tierna of Clonmacnois.117
There is much that is dubious in those that follow, but
we are certainly on firmer historical ground. With
the reign of Kimbay one great fact emerges into light:
we have the foundation of the kingdom of Ulster at
its centre, Emain Macha, a name redolent to the Irish
student of legendary splendour and heroism. Emain
Macha is now represented by the grassy ramparts of
a great hill-fortress close to Ard Macha (Armagh).
According to one of the derivations offered in Keating’s
“History of Ireland,” Emain is derived from eo, a bodkin,
and muin, the neck, the word being thus equivalent to

[pg 151]
“brooch,” and Emain Macha means the Brooch of
Macha. An Irish brooch was a large circular wheel of
gold or bronze, crossed by a long pin, and the great
circular rampart surrounding a Celtic fortress might
well be imaginatively likened to the brooch or a
giantess guarding her cloak, or territory.118 The legend
of Macha tells that she was the daughter of Red Hugh,
an Ulster prince who had two brothers, Dithorba and
Kimbay. They agreed to enjoy, each in turn, the
sovranty of Ireland. Red Hugh came first, but on his
death Macha refused to give up the realm and fought
Dithorba for it, whom she conquered and slew. She
then, in equally masterful manner, compelled Kimbay
to wed her, and ruled all Ireland as queen. I give
the rest of the tale in the words of Standish O’Grady:

“The five sons of Dithorba, having been expelled
out of Ulster, fled across the Shannon, and in the west
of the kingdom plotted against Macha. Then the
Queen went down alone into Connacht and found the
brothers in the forest, where, wearied with the chase,
they were cooking a wild boar which they had slain,
and were carousing before a fire which they had kindled.
She appeared in her grimmest aspect, as the war-goddess,
red all over, terrible and hideous as war itself
but with bright and flashing eyes. One by one the
brothers were inflamed by her sinister beauty, and one
by one she overpowered and bound them. Then she
lifted her burthen of champions upon her back and
returned with them into the north. With the spear of
her brooch she marked out on the plain the circuit of
the city of Emain Macha, whose ramparts and trenches
[pg 152]
were constructed by the captive princes, labouring like
slaves under her command.”

“The underlying idea of all this class of legend,”
remarks Mr. O’Grady, “is that if men cannot master
war, war will master them; and that those who
aspired to the Ard-Rieship [High-Kingship] of all
Erin must have the war-gods on their side.”119

Macha is an instance of the intermingling of the
attributes of the Danaan with the human race of which
I have already spoken.

Laery and Covac

The next king who comes into legendary prominence
is Ugainy the Great, who is said to have ruled not only
all Ireland, but a great part of Western Europe, and to
have wedded a Gaulish princess named Kesair. He
had two sons, Laery and Covac. The former inherited
the kingdom, but Covac, consumed and sick with envy,
sought to slay him, and asked the advice of a Druid
as to how this could be managed, since Laery, justly
suspicious, never would visit him without an armed
escort. The Druid bade him feign death, and have
word sent to his brother that he was on his bier ready
for burial. This Covac did, and when Laery arrived
and bent over the supposed corpse Covac stabbed him
to the heart, and slew also one of his sons, Ailill,120 who
attended him. Then Covac ascended the throne, and
straightway his illness left him.

Legends of Maon, Son of Ailill

He did a brutal deed, however, upon a son of
Ailill’s named Maon, about whom a number of legends
[pg 153]

cluster. Maon, as a child, was brought into Covac’s
presence, and was there compelled, says Keating, to
swallow a portion of his father’s and grandfather’s
hearts, and also a mouse with her young. From the
disgust he felt, the child lost his speech, and seeing
him dumb, and therefore innocuous, Covac let him go.
The boy was then taken into Munster, to the kingdom
of Feramorc, of which Scoriath was king, and remained
with him some time, but afterwards went to Gaul, his
great-grandmother Kesair’s country, where his guards
told the king that he was heir to the throne of Ireland,
and he was treated with great honour and grew up into
a noble youth. But he left behind him in the heart of
Moriath, daughter of the King of Feramorc, a passion
that could not be stilled, and she resolved to bring him
back to Ireland. She accordingly equipped her father’s
harper, Craftiny, with many rich gifts, and wrote for
him a love-lay, in which her passion for Maon was set
forth, and to which Craftiny composed an enchanting
melody. Arrived in France, Craftiny made his way to
the king’s court, and found occasion to pour out his lay
to Maon. So deeply stirred was he by the beauty and
passion of the song that his speech returned to him
and he broke out into praises of it, and was thenceforth
dumb no more. The King of Gaul then equipped him
with an armed force and sent him to Ireland to regain
his kingdom. Learning that Covac was at a place near
at hand named Dinrigh, Maon and his body of Gauls
made a sudden attack upon him and slew him there
and then, with all his nobles and guards. After the
slaughter a Druid of Covac’s company asked one of
the Gauls who their leader was. “The Mariner”
(Loingseach), replied the Gaul, meaning the captain of
the fleet—i.e., Maon. “Can he speak?” inquired the
Druid, who had begun to suspect the truth. “He
[pg 154]
does speak” (Labraidh), said the man; and henceforth
the name “Labra the Mariner” clung to Maon son of
Ailill, nor was he known by any other. He then
sought out Moriath, wedded her, and reigned over
Ireland ten years.

From this invasion of the Gauls the name of the
province of Leinster is traditionally derived. They were
armed with spears having broad blue-green iron heads
called laighne (pronounced “lyna”), and as they were
allotted lands in Leinster and settled there, the province
was called in Irish Laighin (“Ly-in”) after them—the
Province of the Spearmen.121

Of Labra the Mariner, after his accession, a curious
tale is told. He was accustomed, it is said, to have his
hair cropped but once a year, and the man to do this
was chosen by lot, and was immediately afterwards put
to death. The reason of this was that, like King Midas
in the similar Greek myth, he had long ears like those
of a horse, and he would not have this deformity known.
Once it fell, however, that the person chosen to crop
his hair was the only son of a poor widow, by whose
tears and entreaties the king was prevailed upon to let
him live, on condition that he swore by the Wind and
Sun to tell no man what he might see. The oath was
taken, and the young man returned to his mother. But
by-and-by the secret so preyed on his mind that he fell
into a sore sickness, and was near to death, when a wise
Druid was called in to heal him. “It is the secret that
[pg 155]
is killing him,” said the Druid, “and he will never be
well till he reveals it. Let him therefore go along the
high-road till he come to a place where four roads meet.
Let him there turn to the right, and the first tree he
shall meet on the road, let him tell his secret to that,
and he shall be rid of it, and recover.” So the youth
did; and the first tree was a willow. He laid his lips
close to the bark, whispered his secret to it, and went
home, light-hearted as of old. But it chanced that
shortly after this the harper Craftiny broke his harp and
needed a new one, and as luck would have it the first
suitable tree he came to was the willow that had the
king’s secret. He cut it down, made his harp from it,
and performed that night as usual in the king’s hall;
when, to the amazement of all, as soon as the harper
touched the strings the assembled guests heard them
chime the words, “Two horse’s ears hath Labra the
Mariner.” The king then, seeing that the secret was
out, plucked off his hood and showed himself plainly;
nor was any man put to death again on account of this
mystery. We have seen that the compelling power of
Craftiny’s music had formerly cured Labra’s dumbness.
The sense of something magical in music, as though
supernatural powers spoke through it, is of constant
recurrence in Irish legend.

Legend-Cycle of Conary M?r

We now come to a cycle of legends centering on, or
rather closing with, the wonderful figure of the High
King Conary M?r—a cycle so charged with splendour,
mystery, and romance that to do it justice would require
far more space than can be given to it within the limits
of this work.122

[pg 156]

Etain in Fairyland

The preliminary events of the cycle are transacted
in the “Land of Youth,” the mystic country of the
People of Dana after their dispossession by the Children
of Miled. Midir the Proud son of the Dagda, a Danaan
prince dwelling on Slieve Callary, had a wife named
Fuamnach. After a while he took to himself another
bride, Etain, whose beauty and grace were beyond
compare, so that “as fair as Etain” became a proverbial
comparison for any beauty that exceeded all other
standards. Fuamnach therefore became jealous of her
rival, and having by magic art changed her into a
butterfly, she raised a tempest that drove her forth from
the palace, and kept her for seven years buffeted hither
and thither throughout the length and breadth of Erin.
At last, however, a chance gust of wind blew her through
a window of the fairy palace of Angus on the Boyne.
The immortals cannot be hidden from each other, and
Angus knew what she was. Unable to release her
altogether from the spell of Fuamnach, he made a sunny
bower for her, and planted round it all manner of
choice and honey-laden flowers, on which she lived as
long as she was with him, while in the secrecy of the
night he restored her to her own form and enjoyed her
love. In time, however, her refuge was discovered by
Fuamnach; again the magic tempest descended upon
her and drove her forth; and this time a singular fate
was hers. Blown into the palace of an Ulster chieftain
named Etar, she fell into the drinking-cup of Etar’s
wife just as the latter was about to drink. She was
swallowed in the draught, and in due time, having
[pg 157]
passed into the womb of Etar’s wife, she was born as
an apparently mortal child, and grew up to maidenhood
knowing nothing of her real nature and ancestry.

Eochy and Etain

About this time it happened that the High King of
Ireland, Eochy,123 being wifeless and urged by the nobles
of his land to take a queen—“for without thou do
so,” they said, “we will not bring our wives to the
Assembly at Tara”—sent forth to inquire for a fair and
noble maiden to share his throne. The messengers
report that Etain, daughter of Etar, is the fairest maiden
in Ireland, and the king journeys forth to visit her. A
piece of description here follows which is one of the
most highly wrought and splendid in Celtic or perhaps
in any literature. Eochy finds Etain with her maidens
by a spring of water, whither she had gone forth to
wash her hair:

“A clear comb of silver was held in her hand, the
comb was adorned with gold; and near her, as for
washing, was a bason of silver whereon four birds had
been chased, and there were little bright gems of
carbuncles on the rims of the bason. A bright purple
mantle waved round her; and beneath it was another
mantle ornamented with silver fringes: the outer
mantle was clasped over her bosom with a golden
brooch. A tunic she wore with a long hood that
might cover her head attached to it; it was stiff and
glossy with green silk beneath red embroidery of gold,
and was clasped over her breasts with marvellously
wrought clasps of silver and gold; so that men saw
the bright gold and the green silk flashing against the
sun. On her head were two tresses of golden hair,
[pg 158]

and each tress had been plaited into four strands; at
the end of each strand was a little ball of gold. And
there was that maiden undoing her hair that she might
wash it, her two arms out through the armholes of her
smock. Each of her two arms was as white as the
snow of a single night, and each of her cheeks was as
rosy as the foxglove. Even and small were the teeth
in her head, and they shone like pearls. Her eyes
were as blue as a hyacinth, her lips delicate and
crimson; very high, soft and white were her shoulders.
Tender, polished and white were her wrists; her
fingers long and of great whiteness; her nails were
beautiful and pink. White as snow, or the foam of a
wave, was her neck; long was it, slender, and as soft as
silk. Smooth and white were her thighs; her knees
were round and firm and white; her ankles were as
straight as the rule of a carpenter. Her feet were slim
and as white as the ocean’s foam; evenly set were her
eyes; her eyebrows were of a bluish black, such as you
see upon the shell of a beetle. Never a maid fairer
than she, or more worthy of love, was till then seen by
the eyes of men; and it seemed to them that she must
be one of those that have come from the fairy mounds.”124

The king wooed her and made her his wife, and
brought her back to Tara.

The Love-Story of Ailill

It happened that the king had a brother named
Ailill, who, on seeing Etain, was so smitten with her
beauty that he fell sick of the intensity of his passion
and wasted almost to death. While he was in
this condition Eochy had to make a royal progress
[pg 159]

through Ireland. He left his brother—the cause of
whose malady none suspected—in Etain’s care, bidding
her do what she could for him, and, if he died, to bury
him with due ceremonies and erect an Ogham stone
above his grave.125 Etain goes to visit the brother; she
inquires the cause of his illness; he speaks to her in
enigmas, but at last, moved beyond control by her
tenderness, he breaks out in an avowal of his passion.
His description of the yearning of hopeless love is a
lyric of extraordinary intensity. “It is closer than the
skin,” he cries, “it is like a battle with a spectre, it
overwhelms like a flood, it is a weapon under the sea,
it is a passion for an echo.” By “a weapon under the
sea” the poet means that love is like one of the secret
treasures of the fairy-folk in the kingdom of Mananan—as
wonderful and as unattainable.

Etain is now in some perplexity; but she decides,
with a kind of naïve good-nature, that although she is
not in the least in love with Ailill, she cannot see a
man die of longing for her, and she promises to be
his. Possibly we are to understand here that she was
prompted by the fairy nature, ignorant of good and
evil, and alive only to pleasure and to suffering. It
must be said, however, that in the Irish myths in
general this, as we may call it, “fairy” view of morality
is the one generally prevalent both among Danaans and
mortals—both alike strike one as morally irresponsible.

Etain now arranges a tryst with Ailill in a house
outside of Tara—for she will not do what she calls her
“glorious crime” in the king’s palace. But Ailill on
the eve of the appointed day falls into a profound
[pg 160]
slumber and misses his appointment. A being in his
shape does, however, come to Etain, but merely to
speak coldly and sorrowfully of his malady, and departs
again. When the two meet once more the situation
is altogether changed. In Ailill’s enchanted sleep his
unholy passion for the queen has passed entirely away.
Etain, on the other hand, becomes aware that behind the
visible events there are mysteries which she does not
understand.

Midir the Proud

The explanation soon follows. The being who came
to her in the shape of Ailill was her Danaan husband,
Midir the Proud. He now comes to woo her in his true
shape, beautiful and nobly apparelled, and entreats her
to fly with him to the Land of Youth, where she can
be safe henceforward, since her persecutor, Fuamnach,
is dead. He it was who shed upon Ailill’s eyes the
magic slumber. His description of the fairyland to
which he invites her is given in verses of great
beauty:

The Land of Youth

I have given this remarkable lyric at length because,
though Christian and ascetic ideas are obviously
discernible in it, it represents on the whole the pagan
and mythical conception of the Land of Youth, the
country of the Dead.

Etain, however, is by no means ready to go away
with a stranger and to desert the High King for a man
“without name or lineage.” Midir tells her who he
is, and all her own history of which, in her present
incarnation, she knows nothing; and he adds that it
was one thousand and twelve years from Etain’s birth
in the Land of Youth till she was born a mortal child
to the wife of Etar. Ultimately Etain agrees to return
with Midir to her ancient home, but only on condition
that the king will agree to their severance, and with
this Midir has to be content for the time.

A Game of Chess

Shortly afterwards he appears to King Eochy, as
already related,127 on the Hill of Tara. He tells the
king that he has come to play a game of chess with
him, and produces a chessboard of silver with pieces of
gold studded with jewels. To be a skilful chess-player
was a necessary accomplishment of kings and nobles in
[pg 162]
Ireland, and Eochy enters into the game with zest.
Midir allows him to win game after game, and in payment
for his losses he performs by magic all kinds of
tasks for Eochy, reclaiming land, clearing forests, and
building causeways across bogs—here we have a touch
of the popular conception of the Danaans as earth
deities associated with agriculture and fertility. At
last, having excited Eochy’s cupidity and made him
believe himself the better player, he proposes a final
game, the stakes to be at the pleasure of the victor
after the game is over. Eochy is now defeated.

“My stake is forfeit to thee,” said Eochy.

“Had I wished it, it had been forfeit long ago,”
said Midir.

“What is it that thou desirest me to grant?” said
Eochy.

“That I may hold Etain in my arms and obtain a
kiss from her,” said Midir.

The king was silent for a while; then he said: “One
month from to-day thou shalt come, and the thing thou
desirest shall be granted thee.”

Midir and Etain

Eochy’s mind foreboded evil, and when the appointed
day came he caused the palace of Tara to be surrounded
by a great host of armed men to keep Midir
out. All was in vain, however; as the king sat at the
feast, while Etain handed round the wine, Midir, more
glorious than ever, suddenly stood in their midst.
Holding his spears in his left hand, he threw his right
around Etain, and the couple rose lightly in the air
and disappeared through a roof-window in the palace.
Angry and bewildered, the king and his warriors rushed
out of doors, but all they could see was two white
swans that circled in the air above the palace, and then
[pg 163]
departed in long, steady flight towards the fairy mountain
of Slievenamon. And thus Queen Etain rejoined
her kindred.

War with Fairyland

Eochy, however, would not accept defeat, and now
ensues what I think is the earliest recorded war with
Fairyland since the first dispossession of the Danaans.
After searching Ireland for his wife in vain, he summoned
to his aid the Druid Dalan. Dalan tried for a
year by every means in his power to find out where she
was. At last he made what seems to have been an
operation of wizardry of special strength—“he made
three wands of yew, and upon the wands he wrote an
ogham; and by the keys of wisdom that he had, and
by the ogham, it was revealed to him that Etain was in
the fairy mound of Bri-Leith, and that Midir had borne
her thither.”

Eochy then assembled his forces to storm and
destroy the fairy mound in which was the palace of
Midir. It is said that he was nine years digging up
one mound after another, while Midir and his folk
repaired the devastation as fast as it was made. At
last Midir, driven to the last stronghold, attempted a
stratagem—he offered to give up Etain, and sent her
with fifty handmaids to the king, but made them all so
much alike that Eochy could not distinguish the true
Etain from her images. She herself, it is said, gave
him a sign by which to know her. The motive of the
tale, including the choice of the mortal rather than the
god, reminds one of the beautiful Hindu legend of
Damayanti and Nala. Eochy regained his queen, who
lived with him till his death, ten years afterwards, and
bore him one daughter, who was named Etain, like
herself.

[pg 164]

The Tale of Conary M?r

From this Etain ultimately sprang the great king
Conary M?r, who shines in Irish legend as the supreme
type of royal splendour, power, and beneficence, and
whose overthrow and death were compassed by the
Danaans in vengeance for the devastation of their sacred
dwellings by Eochy. The tale in which the death of
Conary is related is one of the most antique and
barbaric in conception of all Irish legends, but it has
a magnificence of imagination which no other can rival.
To this great story the tale of Etain and Midir may be
regarded as what the Irish called a priomscel, “introductory
tale,” showing the more remote origin of the
events related. The genealogy of Conary M?r will
help the reader to understand the connexion of events.

                   Eochy=Etain.
                        |
        Cormac, King=Etain Oig (Etain the younger).
        of Ulster.  |
                    |
Eterskel, King=Messbuachalla (the cowherd's fosterling).
of Erin.      |
              |
         Conary M?r.

The Law of the Geis

The tale of Conary introduces us for the first time
to the law or institution of the geis, which plays henceforward
a very important part in Irish legend, the
violation or observance of a geis being frequently the
turning-point in a tragic narrative. We must therefore
delay a moment to explain to the reader exactly
what this peculiar institution was.

Dineen’s “Irish Dictionary” explains the word geis
[pg 165]
(pronounced “gaysh”—plural, “gaysha”) as meaning
“a bond, a spell, a prohibition, a taboo, a magical
injunction, the violation of which led to misfortune and
death.”128 Every Irish chieftain or personage of note
had certain geise peculiar to himself which he must not
transgress. These geise had sometimes reference to a
code of chivalry—thus Dermot of the Love-spot, when
appealed to by Grania to take her away from Finn, is
under geise not to refuse protection to a woman. Or they
may be merely superstitious or fantastic—thus Conary,
as one of his geise, is forbidden to follow three red horsemen
on a road, nor must he kill birds (this is because, as
we shall see, his totem was a bird). It is a geis to the
Ulster champion, Fergus mac Roy, that he must not
refuse an invitation to a feast; on this turns the Tragedy
of the Sons of Usnach. It is not at all clear who imposed
these geise or how any one found out what his personal

geise were—all that was doubtless an affair of the
Druids. But they were regarded as sacred obligations,
and the worst misfortunes were to be apprehended from
breaking them. Originally, no doubt, they were regarded
as a means of keeping oneself in proper relations
with the other world—the world of Faëry—and were
akin to the well-known Polynesian practice of the
“tabu.” I prefer, however, to retain the Irish word
as the only fitting one for the Irish practice.

The Cowherd’s Fosterling

We now return to follow the fortunes of Etain’s
great-grandson, Conary. Her daughter, Etain Oig, as
we have seen from the genealogical table, married
Cormac, King of Ulster. She bore her husband no
children save one daughter only. Embittered by her
[pg 166]

barrenness and his want of an heir, the king put away
Etain, and ordered her infant to be abandoned and
thrown into a pit. “Then his two thralls take her to a
pit, and she smiles a laughing smile at them as they were
putting her into it.”129 After that they cannot leave her
to die, and they carry her to a cowherd of Eterskel,
King of Tara, by whom she is fostered and taught “till
she became a good embroidress and there was not in
Ireland a king’s daughter dearer than she.” Hence the
name she bore, Messbuachalla (“Messboo´hala”), which
means “the cowherd’s foster-child.”

For fear of her being discovered, the cowherds keep
the maiden in a house of wickerwork having only a
roof-opening. But one of King Eterskel’s folk has the
curiosity to climb up and look in, and sees there the
fairest maiden in Ireland. He bears word to the king,
who orders an opening to be made in the wall and the
maiden fetched forth, for the king was childless, and
it had been prophesied to him by his Druid that a
woman of unknown race would bear him a son. Then
said the king: “This is the woman that has been
prophesied to me.”

Parentage and Birth of Conary

Before her release, however, she is visited by a
denizen from the Land of Youth. A great bird comes
down through her roof-window. On the floor of the
hut his bird-plumage falls from him and reveals a
glorious youth. Like Danaë, like Leda, like Ethlinn
daughter of Balor, she gives her love to the god. Ere
they part he tells her that she will be taken to the
king, but that she will bear to her Danaan lover a son
[pg 167]
whose name shall be Conary, and that it shall be
forbidden to him to go a-hunting after birds.

So Conary was born, and grew up into a wise and
noble youth, and he was fostered with a lord named
Desa, whose three great-grandsons grew up with him
from childhood. Their names were Ferlee and Fergar
and Ferrogan; and Conary, it is said, loved them well
and taught them his wisdom.

Conary the High King

Then King Eterskel died, and a successor had to be
appointed. In Ireland the eldest son did not succeed
to the throne or chieftaincy as a matter of right, but
the ablest and best of the family at the time was
supposed to be selected by the clan. In this tale we
have a curious account of this selection by means of
divination. A “bull-feast” was held—i.e., a bull was
slain, and the diviner would “eat his fill and drink its
broth”; then he went to bed, where a truth-compelling
spell was chanted over him. Whoever he saw in his
dream would be king. So at Ægira, in Achæa, as Whitley
Stokes points out, the priestess of Earth drank the fresh
blood of a bull before descending into the cave to prophesy.
The dreamer cried in his sleep that he saw a
naked man going towards Tara with a stone in his sling.

The bull-feast was held at Tara, but Conary was
then with his three foster-brothers playing a game on
the Plains of Liffey. They separated, Conary going
towards Dublin, where he saw before him a flock of
great birds, wonderful in colour and beauty. He drove
after them in his chariot, but the birds would go a
spear-cast in front and light, and fly on again, never
letting him come up with them till they reached the
sea-shore. Then he lighted down from his chariot and
took out his sling to cast at them, whereupon they
[pg 168]
changed into armed men and turned on him with
spears and swords. One of them, however, protected
him, and said: “I am Nemglan, king of thy father’s
birds; and thou hast been forbidden to cast at birds,
for here there is no one but is thy kin.” “Till to-day,”
said Conary, “I knew not this.”

“Go to Tara to-night,” said Nemglan; “the bull-feast
is there, and through it thou shalt be made king.
A man stark naked, who shall go at the end of the
night along one of the roads to Tara, having a stone
and a sling—’tis he that shall be king.”

So Conary stripped off his raiment and went naked
through the night to Tara, where all the roads were
being watched by chiefs having changes of royal raiment
with them to clothe the man who should come according
to the prophecy. When Conary meets them they
clothe him and bring him in, and he is proclaimed
King of Erin.

Conary’s Geise

A long list of his geise is here given, which are said
to have been declared to him by Nemglan. “The
bird-reign shall be noble,” said he, “and these shall be
thy geise:

Conary then entered upon his reign, which was
marked by the fair seasons and bounteous harvests
always associated in the Irish mind with the reign
of a good king. Foreign ships came to the ports.
Oak-mast for the swine was up to the knees every
autumn; the rivers swarmed with fish. “No one slew
another in Erin during his reign, and to every one in
Erin his fellow’s voice seemed as sweet as the strings of
lutes. From mid-spring to mid-autumn no wind disturbed
a cow’s tail.”

Beginning of the Vengeance

Disturbance, however, came from another source.
Conary had put down all raiding and rapine, and his
three foster-brothers, who were born reavers, took it ill.
They pursued their evil ways in pride and wilfulness, and
were at last captured red-handed. Conary would not
condemn them to death, as the people begged him to do,
but spared them for the sake of his kinship in fosterage.
They were, however, banished from Erin and bidden
to go raiding overseas, if raid they must. On the seas
they met another exiled chief, Ingcel the One-Eyed, son
of the King of Britain, and joining forces with him they
attacked the fortress in which Ingcel’s father, mother, and
brothers were guests at the time, and all were destroyed
in a single night. It was then the turn of Ingcel to ask
their help in raiding the land of Erin, and gathering a
host of other outlawed men, including the seven Manés,
sons of Ailell and Maev of Connacht, besides Ferlee,
Fergar, and Ferrogan, they made a descent upon Ireland,
taking land on the Dublin coast near Howth.

[pg 170]

Meantime Conary had been lured by the machinations
of the Danaans into breaking one after another of
his geise. He settles a quarrel between two of his serfs
in Munster, and travelling back to Tara they see the
country around it lit with the glare of fires and wrapped
in clouds of smoke. A host from the North, they
think, must be raiding the country, and to escape it
Conary’s company have to turn right-handwise round
Tara and then left-handwise round the Plain of Bregia.
But the smoke and flames were an illusion made by the
Fairy Folk, who are now drawing the toils closer round
the doomed king. On his way past Bregia he chases
“the evil beasts of Cerna”—whatever they were—“but
he saw it not till the chase was ended.”

Da Derga’s Hostel and the Three Reds

Conary had now to find a resting-place for the night,
and he recollects that he is not far from the Hostel of
the Leinster lord, Da Derga, which gives its name to
this bardic tale.131 Conary had been generous to him
when Da Derga came visiting to Tara, and he determined
to seek his hospitality for the night. Da Derga dwelt
in a vast hall with seven doors near to the present town
of Dublin, probably at Donnybrook, on the high-road to
the south. As the cavalcade are journeying thither an
ominous incident occurs—Conary marks in front of them
on the road three horsemen clad all in red and riding
on red horses. He remembers his geis about the “three
Reds,” and sends a messenger forward to bid them fall
behind. But however the messenger lashes his horse
he fails to get nearer than the length of a spear-cast
to the three Red Riders. He shouts to them to turn
back and follow the king, but one of them, looking over
his shoulder, bids him ironically look out for “great

[pg 171]
news from a Hostel.” Again and again the messenger
is sent to them with promises of great reward if they
will fall behind instead of preceding Conary. At last
one of them chants a mystic and terrible strain. “Lo,
my son, great the news. Weary are the steeds we ride
—the steeds from the fairy mounds. Though we are
living, we are dead. Great are the signs: destruction
of life; sating of ravens; feeding of crows; strife of
slaughter; wetting of sword-edge; shields with broken
bosses after sundown. Lo, my son!” Then they ride
forward, and, alighting from their red steeds, fasten them
at the portal of Da Derga’s Hostel and sit down inside.
“Derga,” it may be explained, means “red.” Conary
had therefore been preceded by three red horsemen to
the House of Red. “All my geise,” he remarks forebodingly,

“have seized me to-night.”

Gathering of the Hosts

From this point the story of Conary M?r takes on
a character of supernatural vastness and mystery, the
imagination of the bardic narrator dilating, as it were,
with the approach of the crisis. Night has fallen, and
the pirate host of Ingcel is encamped on the shores of
Dublin Bay. They hear the noise of the royal cavalcade,
and a long-sighted messenger is sent out to discover what
it is. He brings back word of the glittering and multitudinous
host which has followed Conary to the Hostel.
A crashing noise is heard—Ingcel asks of Ferrogan
what it may be—it is the giant warrior mac Cecht striking
flint on steel to kindle fire for the king’s feast. “God
send that Conary be not there to-night,” cry the sons of
Desa; “woe that he should be under the hurt of his
foes.” But Ingcel reminds them of their compact—he
had given them the plundering of his own father
and brethren; they cannot refuse to stand by him in the

[pg 172]
attack he meditates on Conary in the Hostel. A glare
of the fire lit by mac Cecht is now perceived by the
pirate host, shining through the wheels of the chariots
which are drawn up around the open doors of the Hostel.
Another of the geise of Conary has been broken.

Ingcel and his host now proceed to build a great cairn
of stones, each man contributing one stone, so that there
may be a memorial of the fight, and also a record of
the number slain when each survivor removes his stone
again.

The Morrigan

The scene now shifts to the Hostel, where the king’s
party has arrived and is preparing for the night. A
solitary woman comes to the door and seeks admission.
“As long as a weaver’s beam were each of her two shins,
and they were as dark as the back of a stag-beetle. A
greyish, woolly mantle she wore. Her hair reached to
her knee. Her mouth was twisted to one side of her
head.” It was the Morrigan, the Danaan goddess of
Death and Destruction. She leant against the doorpost
of the house and looked evilly on the king and his
company. “Well, O woman,” said Conary, “if thou
art a witch, what seest thou for us?” “Truly I see
for thee,” she answered, “that neither fell nor flesh of
thine shall escape from the place into which thou hast
come, save what birds will bear away in their claws.”
She asks admission. Conary declares that his geis

forbids him to receive a solitary man or woman after
sunset. “If in sooth,” she says, “it has befallen the
king not to have room in his house for the meal and
bed of a solitary woman, they will be gotten apart
from him from some one possessing generosity.” “Let
her in, then,” says Conary, “though it is a geis of
mine.”

[pg 173]

Conary and his Retinue

A lengthy and brilliant passage now follows describing
how Ingcel goes to spy out the state of affairs in
the Hostel. Peeping through the chariot-wheels, he
takes note of all he sees, and describes to the sons of
Desa the appearance and equipment of each prince and
mighty man in Conary’s retinue, while Ferrogan and
his brother declare who he is and what destruction he
will work in the coming fight. There is Cormac, son
of Conor, King of Ulster, the fair and good; there are
three huge, black and black-robed warriors of the
Picts; there is Conary’s steward, with bristling hair,
who settles every dispute—a needle would be heard
falling when he raises his voice to speak, and he bears
a staff of office the size of a mill-shaft; there is the
warrior mac Cecht, who lies supine with his knees
drawn up—they resemble two bare hills, his eyes are
like lakes, his nose a mountain-peak, his sword shines
like a river in the sun. Conary’s three sons are there,
golden-haired, silk-robed, beloved of all the household,
with “manners of ripe maidens, and hearts of brothers,
and valour of bears.” When Ferrogan hears of them
he weeps and cannot proceed till hours of the night
have passed. Three Fomorian hostages of horrible
aspect are there also; and Conall of the Victories with
his blood-red shield; and Duftach of Ulster with
his magic spear, which, when there is a premonition
of battle, must be kept in a brew of soporific
herbs, or it will flame on its haft and fly forth raging
for massacre; and three giants from the Isle of Man
with horses’ manes reaching to their heels. A strange
and unearthly touch is introduced by a description of
three naked and bleeding forms hanging by ropes from
the roof—they are the daughters of the Bav, another
[pg 174]
name for the Morrigan, or war-goddess, “three of
awful boding,” says the tale enigmatically, “those are
the three that are slaughtered at every time.” We
are probably to regard them as visionary beings, portending
war and death, visible only to Ingcel. The
hall with its separate chambers is full of warriors, cup-bearers,
musicians playing, and jugglers doing wonderful
feats; and Da Derga with his attendants dispensing
food and drink. Conary himself is described as a youth;

“the ardour and energy of a king has he and the
counsel of a sage; the mantle I saw round him is even
as the mist of May-day—lovelier in each hue of it than
the other.” His golden-hilted sword lies beside him—a
forearm’s length of it has escaped from the
scabbard, shining like a beam of light. “He is the
mildest and gentlest and most perfect king that has
come into the world, even Conary son of Eterskel …
great is the tenderness of the sleepy, simple man till
he has chanced on a deed of valour. But if his fury
and his courage are awakened when the champions of
Erin and Alba are at him in the house, the Destruction
will not be wrought so long as he is therein … sad
were the quenching of that reign.”

Champions at the House

Ingcel and the sons of Desa then march to the attack
and surround the Hostel:

“Silence a while!” says Conary, “what is this?”

“Champions at the house,” says Conall of the Victories.

“There are warriors for them here,” answers Conary.

“They will be needed to-night,” Conall rejoins.

One of Desa’s sons rushes first into the Hostel. His
head is struck off and cast out of it again. Then the
great struggle begins. The Hostel is set on fire, but
[pg 175]
the fire is quenched with wine or any liquids that are
in it. Conary and his people sally forth—hundreds
are slain, and the reavers, for the moment, are routed.
But Conary, who has done prodigies of fighting, is athirst
and can do no more till he gets water. The reavers by
advice of their wizards have cut off the river Dodder,
which flowed through the Hostel, and all the liquids in
the house had been spilt on the fires.

Death of Conary

The king, who is perishing of thirst, asks mac Cecht
to procure him a drink, and mac Cecht turns to Conall
and asks him whether he will get the drink for the
king or stay to protect him while mac Cecht does it.
“Leave the defence of the king to us,” says Conall,
“and go thou to seek the drink, for of thee it is
demanded.” Mac Cecht then, taking Conary’s golden
cup, rushes forth, bursting through the surrounding
host, and goes to seek for water. Then Conall, and
Cormac of Ulster, and the other champions, issue forth
in turn, slaying multitudes of the enemy; some return
wounded and weary to the little band in the Hostel,
while others cut their way through the ring of
foes. Conall, Sencha, and Duftach stand by Conary
till the end; but mac Cecht is long in returning,
Conary perishes of thirst, and the three heroes then
fight their way out and escape, “wounded, broken, and
maimed.”

Meantime mac Cecht has rushed over Ireland in
frantic search for the water. But the Fairy Folk, who
are here manifestly elemental powers controlling the
forces of nature, have sealed all the sources against him.
He tries the Well of Kesair in Wicklow in vain; he goes
to the great rivers, Shannon and Slayney, Bann and
Barrow—they all hide away at his approach; the lakes
[pg 176]

deny him also; at last he finds a lake, Loch Gara in
Roscommon, which failed to hide itself in time, and
thereat he fills his cup. In the morning he returned
to the Hostel with the precious and hard-won draught,
but found the defenders all dead or fled, and two of
the reavers in the act of striking off the head of Conary.
Mac Cecht struck off the head of one of them, and
hurled a huge pillar stone after the other, who was
escaping with Conary’s head. The reaver fell dead on
the spot, and mac Cecht, taking up his master’s head,
poured the water into its mouth. Thereupon the head
spoke, and praised and thanked him for the deed.

Mac Cecht’s Wound

A woman then came by and saw mac Cecht lying
exhausted and wounded on the field.

“Come hither, O woman,” says mac Cecht.

“I dare not go there,” says the woman, “for horror
and fear of thee.”

But he persuades her to come, and says: “I know
not whether it is a fly or gnat or an ant that nips me
in the wound.”

The woman looked and saw a hairy wolf buried as
far as the two shoulders in the wound. She seized it
by the tail and dragged it forth, and it took “the full
of its jaws out of him.”

“Truly,” says the woman, “this is an ant of the
Ancient Land.”

And mac Cecht took it by the throat and smote it on
the forehead, so that it died.

“Is thy Lord Alive?”

The tale ends in a truly heroic strain. Conall of the
Victories, as we have seen, had cut his way out after
the king’s death, and made his way to Teltin, where he
[pg 177]
found his father, Amorgin, in the garth before his
d?n. Conall’s shield-arm had been wounded by thrice
fifty spears, and he reached Teltin now with half a
shield, and his sword, and the fragments of his two
spears.

“Swift are the wolves that have hunted thee, my
son,” said his father.

“’Tis this that has wounded us, old hero, an evil
conflict with warriors,” Conall replied.

“Is thy lord alive?” asked Amorgin.

“He is not alive,” says Conall.

“I swear to God what the great tribes of Ulster
swear: he is a coward who goes out of a fight alive
having left his lord with his foes in death.”

“My wounds are not white, old hero,” says Conall.
He showed him his shield-arm, whereon were thrice fifty
spear-wounds. The sword-arm, which the shield had not
guarded, was mangled and maimed and wounded and
pierced, save that the sinews kept it to the body without
separation.

“That arm fought to-night, my son,” says Amorgin.

“True is that, old hero,” says Conall of the
Victories. “Many are they to whom it gave drinks of
death to-night in front of the Hostel.”

So ends the story of Etain, and of the overthrow of
Fairyland and the fairy vengeance wrought on the
great-grandson of Eochy the High King.

CHAPTER V: TALES OF THE
ULTONIAN CYCLE

The Curse of Macha

The centre of interest in Irish legend now shifts
from Tara to Ulster, and a multitude of heroic
tales gather round the Ulster king Conor
mac Nessa, round Cuchulain,132 his great vassal, and the
Red Branch Order of chivalry, which had its seat in
Emain Macha.

The legend of the foundation of Emain Macha has
already been told.133 But Macha, who was no mere
woman, but a supernatural being, appears again in connexion
with the history of Ulster in a very curious tale
which was supposed to account for the strange debility
or helplessness that at critical moments sometimes fell,
it was believed, upon the warriors of the province.

The legend tells that a wealthy Ulster farmer named
Crundchu, son of Agnoman, dwelling in a solitary place
among the hills, found one day in his d?n a young
woman of great beauty and in splendid array, whom he
had never seen before. Crundchu, we are told, was a
widower, his wife having died after bearing him four
sons. The strange woman, without a word, set herself
to do the houshold tasks, prepared dinner, milked the
cow, and took on herself all the duties of the mistress
of the household. At night she lay down at Crundchu’s
side, and thereafter dwelt with him as his wife;
and they loved each other dearly. Her name was
Macha.

One day Crundchu prepared himself to go to a great
fair or assembly of the Ultonians, where there would
be feasting and horse-racing, tournaments and music, and
merrymaking of all kinds. Macha begged her husband
[pg 179]

not to go. He persisted. “Then,” she said, “at least
do not speak of me in the assembly, for I may dwell
with you only so long as I am not spoken of.”

It has been observed that we have here the earliest
appearance in post-classical European literature of the
well-known motive of the fairy bride who can stay with
her mortal lover only so long as certain conditions are
observed, such as that he shall not spy upon her, ill-treat
her, or ask of her origin.

Crundchu promised to obey the injunction, and went
to the festival. Here the two horses of the king
carried off prize after prize in the racing, and the people
cried: “There is not in Ireland a swifter than the
King’s pair of horses.”

“I have a wife at home,” said Crundchu, in a
moment of forgetfulness, “who can run quicker than
these horses.”

“Seize that man,” said the angry king, “and hold
him till his wife be brought to the contest.”

So messengers went for Macha, and she was brought
before the assembly; and she was with child. The
king bade her prepare for the race. She pleaded her
condition. “I am close upon my hour,” she said.
“Then hew her man in pieces,” said the king to his
guards. Macha turned to the bystanders. “Help
me,” she cried, “for a mother hath borne each of you!
Give me but a short delay till I am delivered.” But
the king and all the crowd in their savage lust for
sport would hear of no delay. “Then bring up the
horses,” said Macha, “and because you have no pity a
heavier infamy shall fall upon you.” So she raced
against the horses, and outran them, but as she came
to the goal she gave a great cry, and her travail
seized her, and she gave birth to twin children. As
she uttered that cry, however, all the spectators felt

[pg 180]
themselves seized with pangs like her own and had no
more strength than a woman in her travail. And Macha
prophesied: “From this hour the shame you have
wrought on me will fall upon each man of Ulster. In
the hours of your greatest need ye shall be weak and
helpless as women in childbirth, and this shall endure
for five days and four nights—to the ninth generation
the curse shall be upon you.” And so it came to pass;
and this is the cause of the Debility of the Ultonians
that was wont to afflict the warriors of the province.

Conor mac Nessa

The chief occasion on which this Debility was manifested
was when Maev, Queen of Connacht, made the
famous Cattle-raid of Quelgny (Tain Bo Cuailgné),
which forms the subject of the greatest tale in Irish
literature. We have now to relate the preliminary
history leading up to this epic tale and introducing its
chief characters.

Fachtna the Giant, King of Ulster, had to wife
Nessa, daughter of Echid Yellow-heel, and she bore him
a son named Conor. But when Fachtna died Fergus
son of Roy, his half-brother, succeeded him, Conor
being then but a youth. Now Fergus loved Nessa,
and would have wedded her, but she made conditions.
“Let my son Conor reign one year,” she said, “so that
his posterity may be the descendants of a king, and I
consent.” Fergus agreed, and young Conor took the
throne. But so wise and prosperous was his rule and
so sagacious his judgments that, at the year’s end, the
people,as Nessa foresaw, would have him remain king;
and Fergus, who loved the feast and the chase better
than the toils of kingship, was content to have it so,
and remained at Conor’s court for a time, great,
honoured, and happy, but king no longer.

[pg 181]

The Red Branch

In his time was the glory of the “Red Branch” in
Ulster, who were the offspring of Ross the Red, King
of Ulster, with collateral relatives and allies, forming
ultimately a kind of warlike Order. Most of the Red
Branch heroes appear in the Ultonian Cycle of legend,
so that a statement of their names and relationships may
be usefully placed here before we proceed to speak of their
doings. It is noticeable that they have a partly supernatural
ancestry. Ross the Red, it is said, wedded
a Danaan woman, Maga, daughter of Angus ?g.134 As
a second wife he wedded a maiden named Roy. His
descendants are as follows:

Maga === Ross the Red === Roy
      |                |
      |                +-----+
      |                      |
   Fachtna === Nessa    Fergus mac Roy
  the Giant |
            |
            |
         Conor mac
           Nessa

But Maga was also wedded to the Druid Cathbad, and
by him had three daughters, whose descendants played
a notable part in the Ultonian legendary cycle.

                      Cathbad === Maga
                               |
    +--------------------+-----+-------------+
    |                    |                   |
Dectera[*] === Lugh    Elva === Usna    Finchoom === Amorgin
            |                |                    |
            |          +-----+-----+              |
            |          |     |     |              |
         Cuchulain   Naisi Ainlé Ardan       Conall of the
                                              Victories

  [*]Dectera also had a mortal husband, Sualtam, who passed as
     Cuchulain's father.

[pg 182]

Birth of Cuchulain

It was during the reign of Conor mac Nessa that the
birth of the mightiest hero of the Celtic race, Cuchulain,
came about, and this was the manner of it. The maiden
Dectera, daughter of Cathbad, with fifty young girls,
her companions at the court of Conor, one day disappeared,
and for three years no searching availed to
discover their dwelling-place or their fate. At last one
summer day a flock of birds descended on the fields
about Emain Macha and began to destroy the crops
and fruit. The king, with Fergus and others of his
nobles, went out against them with slings, but the birds
flew only a little way off, luring the party on and on till
at last they found themselves near the Fairy Mound of
Angus on the river Boyne. Night fell, and the king
sent Fergus with a party to discover some habitation
where they might sleep. A hut was found, where they
betook themselves to rest, but one of them, exploring
further, came to a noble mansion by the river, and on
entering it was met by a young man of splendid appearance.
With the stranger was a lovely woman, his wife,
and fifty maidens, who saluted the Ulster warrior with
joy. And he recognised in them Dectera and her
maidens, whom they had missed for three years, and in
the glorious youth Lugh of the Long Arm, son of
Ethlinn. He went back with his tale to the king, who
immediately sent for Dectera to come to him. She,
alleging that she was ill, requested a delay; and so the
night passed; but in the morning there was found in
the hut among the Ulster warriors a new-born male
infant. It was Dectera’s gift to Ulster, and for this
purpose she had lured them to the fairy palace by the
Boyne. The child was taken home by the warriors and
was given to Dectera’s sister, Finchoom, who was then
[pg 183]
nursing her own child, Conall, and the boy’s name was
called Setanta. And the part of Ulster from Dundalk
southward to Usna in Meath, which is called the Plain
of Murthemney, was allotted for his inheritance, and in
later days his fortress and dwelling-place was in Dundalk.

It is said that the Druid Morann prophesied over the
infant: “His praise will be in the mouths of all men;
charioteers and warriors, kings and sages will recount
his deeds; he will win the love of many. This child
will avenge all your wrongs; he will give combat at
your fords, he will decide all your quarrels.”

The Hound of Cullan

When he was old enough the boy Setanta went to
the court of Conor to be brought up and instructed
along with the other sons of princes and chieftains. It
was now that the event occurred from which he got the
name of Cuchulain, by which he was hereafter to be
known.

One afternoon King Conor and his nobles were going
to a feast to which they were bidden at the d?n of
a wealthy smith named Cullan, in Quelgny, where
they also meant to spend the night. Setanta was to
accompany them, but as the cavalcade set off he was in
the midst of a game of hurley with his companions and
bade the king go forward, saying he would follow later
when his play was done. The royal company arrived
at their destination as night began to fall. Cullan
received them hospitably, and in the great hall they
made merry over meat and wine while the lord of the
house barred the gates of his fortress and let loose
outside a huge and ferocious dog which every night
guarded the lonely mansion, and under whose protection,
it was said, Cullan feared nothing less than the onset of
an army.

[pg 184]

But they had forgotten Setanta! In the middle of
the laughter and music of the feast a terrible sound
was heard which brought every man to his feet in an
instant. It was the tremendous baying of the hound
of Cullan, giving tongue as it saw a stranger approach.
Soon the noise changed to the howls of a fierce combat,
but, on rushing to the gates, they saw in the glare of
the lanterns a young boy and the hound lying dead
at his feet. When it flew at him he had seized it by
the throat and dashed its life out against the side-posts
of the gate. The warriors bore in the lad with rejoicing
and wonder, but soon the triumph ceased, for there
stood their host, silent and sorrowful over the body of
his faithful friend, who had died for the safety of his
house and would never guard it more.

“Give me,” then said the lad Setanta, “a whelp of
that hound, O Cullan, and I will train him to be all to
you that his sire was. And until then give me shield
and spear and I will myself guard your house; never
hound guarded it better than I will.”

And all the company shouted applause at the generous
pledge, and on the spot, as a commemoration of his
first deed of valour, they named the lad Cuchulain,135
the Hound of Cullan, and by that name he was known
until he died.

Cuchulain Assumes Arms

When he was older, and near the time when he
might assume the weapons of manhood, it chanced one
day that he passed close by where Cathbad the Druid
[pg 185]
was teaching to certain of his pupils the art of divination
and augury. One of them asked of Cathbad
for what kind of enterprise that same day might be
favourable; and Cathbad, having worked a spell of
divination, said: “The youth who should take up
arms on this day would become of all men in Erin
most famous for great deeds, yet will his life be short
and fleeting.” Cuchulain passed on as though he
marked it not, and he came before the king. “What
wilt thou?” asked Conor. “To take the arms of
manhood,” said Cuchulain. “So be it,” said the king,
and he gave the lad two great spears. But Cuchulain
shook them in his hand, and the staves splintered and
broke. And so he did with many others; and the
chariots in which they set him to drive he broke to
pieces with stamping of his foot, until at last the king’s
own chariot of war and his two spears and sword were
brought to the lad, and these he could not break, do
what he would; so this equipment he retained.

His Courtship of Emer

The young Cuchulain was by this grown so fair and
noble a youth that every maid or matron on whom he
looked was bewitched by him, and the men of Ulster
bade him take a wife of his own. But none were
pleasing to him, till at last he saw the lovely maiden
Emer, daughter of Forgall, the lord of Lusca,136 and he
resolved to woo her for his bride. So he bade harness
his chariot, and with Laeg, his friend and charioteer,
he journeyed to D?n Forgall.

As he drew near, the maiden was with her companions,
daughters of the vassals of Forgall, and she
was teaching them embroidery, for in that art she
excelled all women. She had “the six gifts of

[pg 186]
womanhood—the gift of beauty, the gift of voice,
the gift of sweet speech, the gift of needlework, the
gift of wisdom, and the gift of chastity.”

Hearing the thunder of horse-hoofs and the clangour
of the chariot from afar, she bade one of the maidens
go to the rampart of the D?n and tell her what she
saw. “A chariot is coming on,” said the maiden,
“drawn by two steeds with tossing heads, fierce and
powerful; one is grey, the other black. They breathe
fire from their jaws, and the clods of turf they throw
up behind them as they race are like a flock of birds
that follow in their track. In the chariot is a dark, sad
man, comeliest of the men of Erin. He is clad in a
crimson cloak, with a brooch of gold, and on his back
is a crimson shield with a silver rim wrought with
figures of beasts. With him as his charioteer is a tall,
slender, freckled man with curling red hair held by a
fillet of bronze, with plates of gold at either side of his
face. With a goad of red gold he urges the horses.”

When the chariot drew up Emer went to meet
Cuchulain and saluted him. But when he urged his
love upon her she told him of the might and the
wiliness of her father Forgall, and of the strength of
the champions that guarded her lest she should wed
against his will. And when he pressed her more she
said: “I may not marry before my sister Fial, who is
older than I. She is with me here—she is excellent
in handiwork.” “It is not Fial whom I love,” said
Cuchulain. Then as they were conversing he saw the
breast of the maiden over the bosom of her smock,
and said to her: “Fair is this plain, the plain of the
noble yoke.” “None comes to this plain,” said she, “who
has not slain his hundreds, and thy deeds are still to do.”

So Cuchulain then left her, and drove back to Emain
Macha.

[pg 187]

Cuchulain in the Land of Skatha

Next day Cuchulain bethought himself how he could
prepare himself for war and for the deeds of heroism
which Emer had demanded of him. Now he had
heard of a mighty woman-warrior named Skatha, who
dwelt in the Land of Shadows,137 and who could teach
to young heroes who came to her wonderful feats of
arms. So Cuchulain went overseas to find her, and
many dangers he had to meet, black forests and desert
plains to traverse, before he could get tidings of Skatha
and her land. At last he came to the Plain of Ill-luck,
where he could not cross without being mired in its
bottomless bogs or sticky clay, and while he was
debating what he should do he saw coming towards
him a young man with a face that shone like the sun,138

and whose very look put cheerfulness and hope into
his heart. The young man gave him a wheel and told
him to roll it before him on the plain, and to follow
it whithersoever it went. So Cuchulain set the wheel
rolling, and as it went it blazed with light that shot like
rays from its rim, and the heat of it made a firm path
across the quagmire, where Cuchulain followed safely.

When he had passed the Plain of Ill-luck, and
escaped the beasts of the Perilous Glen, he came to the
Bridge of the Leaps, beyond which was the country of
Skatha. Here he found on the hither side many sons
of the princes of Ireland who were come to learn feats
of war from Skatha, and they were playing at hurley
on the green. And among them was his friend Ferdia,
son of the Firbolg, Daman; and they all asked him of
[pg 188]
the news from Ireland. When he had told them all
he asked Ferdia how he should pass to the d?n of
Skatha. Now the Bridge of Leaps was very narrow
and very high, and it crossed a gorge where far
below swung the tides of a boiling sea, in which
ravenous monsters could be seen swimming.

“Not one of us has crossed that bridge,” said
Ferdia, “for there are two feats that Skatha teaches
last, and one is the leap across the bridge, and the
other the thrust of the Gae Bolg.139 For if a man step
upon one end of that bridge, the middle straightway
rises up and flings him back, and if he leap upon it he
may chance to miss his footing and fall into the gulf,
where the sea-monsters are waiting for him.”

But Cuchulain waited till evening, when he had
recovered his strength from his long journey, and then
essayed the crossing of the bridge. Three times he
ran towards it from a distance, gathering all his powers
together, and strove to leap upon the middle, but three
times it rose against him and flung him back, while his
companions jeered at him because he would not wait
for the help of Skatha. But at the fourth leap he lit
fairly on the centre of the bridge, and with one leap
more he was across it, and stood before the strong
fortress of Skatha; and she wondered at his courage
and vigour, and admitted him to be her pupil.

For a year and a day Cuchulain abode with Skatha,
and all the feats she had to teach he learned easily, and
last of all she taught him the use of the Gae Bolg, and
gave him that dreadful weapon, which she had deemed
no champion before him good enough to have. And
the manner of using the Gae Bolg was that it was
thrown with the foot, and if it entered an enemy’s
[pg 189]
body it filled every limb and crevice of him with its
barbs. While Cuchulain dwelt with Skatha his friend
above all friends and his rival in skill and valour was
Ferdia, and ere they parted they vowed to love and
help one another as long as they should live.

Cuchulain and Aifa

Now whilst Cuchulain was in the Land of the Shadows
it chanced that Skatha made war on the people of the
Princess Aifa, who was the fiercest and strongest of the
woman-warriors of the world, so that even Skatha
feared to meet her in arms. On going forth to the
war, therefore, Skatha mixed with Cuchulain’s drink a
sleepy herb so that he should not wake for four-and-twenty
hours, by which time the host would be far on
its way, for she feared lest evil should come to him ere
he had got his full strength. But the potion that
would have served another man for a day and a night
only held Cuchulain for one hour; and when he waked
up he seized his arms and followed the host by its
chariot-tracks till he came up with them. Then it is
said that Skatha uttered a sigh, for she knew that he
would not be restrained from the war.

When the armies met, Cuchulain and the two sons
of Skatha wrought great deeds on the foe, and slew six
of the mightiest of Aifa’s warriors. Then Aifa sent
word to Skatha and challenged her to single combat.
But Cuchulain declared that he would meet the fair
Fury in place of Skatha, and he asked first of all what
were the things she most valued. “What Aifa loves
most,” said Skatha, “are her two horses, her chariot
and her charioteer.” Then the pair met in single
combat, and every champion’s feat which they knew
they tried on each other in vain, till at last a blow of
Aifa’s shattered the sword of Cuchulain to the hilt.
[pg 190]
At this Cuchulain cried out: “Ah me! behold the
chariot and horses of Aifa, fallen into the glen!” Aifa
glanced round, and Cuchulain, rushing in, seized her
round the waist and slung her over his shoulder and
bore her back to the camp of Skatha. There he flung
her on the ground and put his knife to her throat.
She begged for her life, and Cuchulain granted it on
condition that she made a lasting peace with Skatha,
and gave hostages for her fulfilment of the pledge.
To this she agreed, and Cuchulain and she became not
only friends but lovers.

The Tragedy of Cuchulain and Connla

Before Cuchulain left the Land of Shadows he gave
Aifa a golden ring, saying that if she should bear him
a son he was to be sent to seek his father in Erin so
soon as he should have grown so that his finger would
fit the ring. And Cuchulain said, “Charge him under
geise that he shall not make himself known, that he
never turn out of the way for any man, nor ever
refuse a combat. And be his name called Connla.”

In later years it is narrated that one day when King
Conor of Ulster and the lords of Ulster were at a
festal gathering on the Strand of the Footprints they
saw coming towards them across the sea a little boat of
bronze, and in it a young lad with gilded oars in his
hands. In the boat was a heap of stones, and ever and
anon the lad would put one of these stones into a sling
and cast it at a flying sea-bird in such fashion that it
would bring down the bird alive to his feet. And
many other wonderful feats of skill he did. Then
Conor said, as the boat drew nearer: “If the grown
men of that lad’s country came here they would surely
grind us to powder. Woe to the land into which that
boy shall come!”

[pg 191]

When the boy came to land, a messenger, Condery,
was sent to bid him be off. “I will not turn back for
thee,” said the lad, and Condery repeated what he had
said to the king. Then Conall of the Victories was
sent against him, but the lad slung a great stone at him,
and the whizz and wind of it knocked him down, and
the lad sprang upon him, and bound his arms with the
strap of his shield. And so man after man was served;
some were bound, and some were slain, but the lad
defied the whole power of Ulster to turn him back, nor
would he tell his name or lineage.

“Send for Cuchulain,” then said King Conor. And
they sent a messenger to Dundalk, where Cuchulain
was with Emer his wife, and bade him come to do
battle against a stranger boy whom Conall of the
Victories could not overcome. Emer threw her arm
round Cuchulain’s neck. “Do not go,” she entreated.
“Surely this is the son of Aifa. Slay not thine only
son.” But Cuchulain said: “Forbear, woman! Were
it Connla himself I would slay him for the honour of
Ulster,” and he bade yoke his chariot and went to the
Strand. Here he found the boy tossing up his weapons
and doing marvellous feats with them. “Delightful
is thy play, boy,” said Cuchulain; “who art thou and
whence dost thou come?” “I may not reveal that,”

said the lad. “Then thou shalt die,” said Cuchulain.
“So be it,” said the lad, and then they fought with
swords for a while, till the lad delicately shore off a
lock of Cuchulain’s hair. “Enough of trifling,” said
Cuchulain, and they closed with each other, but the
lad planted himself on a rock and stood so firm that
Cuchulain could not move him, and in the stubborn
wrestling they had the lad’s two feet sank deep into
the stone and made the footprints whence the Strand
of the Footprints has its name. At last they both fell
[pg 192]
into the sea, and Cuchulain was near being drowned, till
he bethought himself of the Gae Bolg, and he drove
that weapon against the lad and it ripped up his belly.
“That is what Skatha never taught me,” cried the lad.
“Woe is me, for I am hurt.” Cuchulain looked at him
and saw the ring on his finger. “It is true,” he said;
and he took up the boy and bore him on shore and
laid him down before Conor and the lords of Ulster.

“Here is my son for you, men of Ulster,” he said.
And the boy said: “It is true. And if I had five years
to grow among you, you would conquer the world on
every side of you and rule as far as Rome. But since
it is as it is, point out to me the famous warriors that
are here, that I may know them and take leave of them
before I die.” Then one after another they were brought
to him, and he kissed them and took leave of his father,
and he died; and the men of Ulster made his grave and
set up his pillar-stone with great mourning. This was
the only son Cuchulain ever had, and this son he slew.

This tale, as I have given it here, dates from the ninth
century, and is found in the “Yellow Book of Lecan.”
There are many other Gaelic versions of it in poetry
and prose. It is one of the earliest extant appearances
in literature of the since well-known theme of the
slaying of a heroic son by his father. The Persian
rendering of it in the tale of Sohrab and Rustum has
been made familiar by Matthew Arnold’s fine poem.
In the Irish version it will be noted that the father is
not without a suspicion of the identity of his antagonist,
but he does battle with him under the stimulus of that
passionate sense of loyalty to his prince and province
which was Cuchulain’s most signal characteristic.

To complete the story of Aifa and her son we have
anticipated events, and now turn back to take up the
thread again.

[pg 193]

Cuchulain’s First Foray

After a year and a day of training in warfare under
Skatha, Cuchulain returned to Erin, eager to test his
prowess and to win Emer for his wife. So he bade
harness his chariot and drove out to make a foray upon
the fords and marches of Connacht, for between Connacht
and Ulster there was always an angry surf of
fighting along the borders.

And first he drove to the White Cairn, which is on
the highest of the Mountains of Mourne, and surveyed
the land of Ulster spread out smiling in the sunshine
far below and bade his charioteer tell him the name
of every hill and plain and d?n that he saw. Then
turning southwards he looked over the plains of Bregia,
and the charioteer pointed out to him Tara and Teltin,
and Brugh na Boyna and the great d?n of the sons of
Nechtan. “Are they,” asked Cuchulain, “those sons
of Nechtan of whom it is said that more of the men of
Ulster have fallen by their hands than are yet living
on the earth?” “The same,” said the charioteer.

“Then let us drive thither,” said Cuchulain. So,
much unwilling, the charioteer drove to the fortress of
the sons of Nechtan, and there on the green before it
they found a pillar-stone, and round it a collar of
bronze having on it writing in Ogham. This Cuchulain
read, and it declared that any man of age to bear arms
who should come to that green should hold it geis for
him to depart without having challenged one of the
dwellers in the d?n to single combat. Then Cuchulain
flung his arms round the stone, and, swaying it backwards
and forwards, heaved it at last out of the earth
and flung it, collar and all, into the river that ran hard
by. “Surely,” said the charioteer, “thou art seeking for
a violent death, and now thou wilt find it without delay.”

[pg 194]

Then Foill son of Nechtan came forth from the
d?n, and seeing Cuchulain, whom he deemed but a lad,
he was annoyed. But Cuchulain bade him fetch his
arms, “for I slay not drivers nor messengers nor
unarmed men,” and Foill went back into the d?n.
“Thou canst not slay him,” then said the charioteer,
“for he is invulnerable by magic power to the point or
edge of any blade.” But Cuchulain put in his sling a
ball of tempered iron, and when Foill appeared he
slung at him so that it struck his forehead, and went
clean through brain and skull; and Cuchulain took his
head and bound it to his chariot-rim. And other sons
of Nechtan, issuing forth, he fought with and slew by
sword or spear; and then he fired the d?n and left it
in a blaze and drove on exultant. And on the way he
saw a flock of wild swans, and sixteen of them he
brought down alive with his sling, and tied them to
the chariot; and seeing a herd of wild deer which his
horses could not overtake he lighted down and chased
them on foot till he caught two great stags, and with
thongs and ropes he made them fast to the chariot.

But at Emain Macha a scout of King Conor came
running in to give him news. “Behold, a solitary
chariot is approaching swiftly over the plain; wild
white birds flutter round it and wild stags are tethered
to it; it is decked all round with the bleeding heads of
enemies.” And Conor looked to see who was approaching,
and he saw that Cuchulain was in his battle-fury,
and would deal death around him whomsoever he met;
so he hastily gave order that a troop of the women of
Emania should go forth to meet him, and, having
stripped off their clothing, should stand naked in the
way. This they did, and when the lad saw them,
smitten with shame, he bowed his head upon the
chariot-rim. Then Conor’s men instantly seized him

[pg 195]
and plunged him into a vat of cold water which had
been made ready, but the water boiled around him and
the staves and hoops of the vat were burst asunder.
This they did again and yet again, and at last his fury
left him, and his natural form and aspect were restored.
Then they clad him in fresh raiment and bade him in
to the feast in the king’s banqueting-hall.

The Winning of Emer

Next day he went to the d?n of Forgall the Wily,
father of Emer, and he leaped “the hero’s salmon leap,”
that he had learned of Skatha, over the high ramparts
of the d?n. Then the mighty men of Forgall set on
him, and he dealt but three blows, and each blow slew
eight men, and Forgall himself fell lifeless in leaping
from the rampart of the d?n to escape Cuchulain.
So he carried off Emer and her foster-sister and two
loads of gold and silver. But outside the d?n the
sister of Forgall raised a host against him, and his
battle-fury came on him, and furious were the blows he
dealt, so that the ford of Glondath ran blood and the
turf on Crofot was trampled into bloody mire. A
hundred he slew at every ford from Olbiny to the
Boyne; and so was Emer won as she desired, and he
brought her to Emain Macha and made her his wife,
and they were not parted again until he died.

Cuchulain Champion of Erin

A lord of Ulster named Briccriu of the Poisoned
Tongue once made a feast to which he bade King
Conor and all the heroes of the Red Branch, and
because it was always his delight to stir up strife among
men or women he set the heroes contending among
themselves as to who was the champion of the land of
Erin. At last it was agreed that the championship
[pg 196]
must lie among three of them, namely, Cuchulain,
and Conall of the Victories and Laery the Triumphant.
To decide between these three a demon named The
Terrible was summoned from a lake in the depth of
which he dwelt. He proposed to the heroes a test of
courage. Any one of them, he said, might cut off his
head to-day provided that he, the claimant of the
championship, would lay down his own head for the
axe to-morrow. Conall and Laery shrank from the
test, but Cuchulain accepted it, and after reciting a
charm over his sword, he cut off the head of the demon,
who immediately rose, and taking the bleeding head in
one hand and his axe in the other, plunged into the lake.

Next day he reappeared, whole and sound, to claim
the fulfilment of the bargain. Cuchulain, quailing but
resolute, laid his head on the block. “Stretch out
your neck, wretch,” cried the demon; “’tis too short
for me to strike at.” Cuchulain does as he is bidden.
The demon swings his axe thrice over his victim,
brings down the butt with a crash on the block, and
then bids Cuchulain rise unhurt, Champion of Ireland
and her boldest man.

Deirdre and the Sons of Usna

We have now to turn to a story in which Cuchulain
takes no part. It is the chief of the preliminary tales
to the Cattle-spoil of Quelgny.

There was among the lords of Ulster, it is said,
one named Felim son of Dall, who on a certain day
made a great feast for the king. And the king came
with his Druid Cathbad, and Fergus mac Roy, and
many heroes of the Red Branch, and while they were
making merry over the roasted flesh and wheaten cakes
and Greek wine a messenger from the women’s apartments
[pg 197]
came to tell Felim that his wife had just borne
him a daughter. So all the lords and warriors drank
health to the new-born infant, and the king bade Cathbade
perform divination in the manner of the Druids
and foretell what the future would have in store for
Felim’s babe. Cathbad gazed upon the stars and drew
the horoscope of the child, and he was much troubled;
and at length he said: “The infant shall be fairest
among the women of Erin, and shall wed a king, but
because of her shall death and ruin come upon the
Province of Ulster.” Then the warriors would have
put her to death upon the spot, but Conor forbade
them. “I will avert the doom,” he said, “for she
shall wed no foreign king, but she shall be my own
mate when she is of age.” So he took away the child,
and committed it to his nurse Levarcam, and the name
they gave it was Deirdre. And Conor charged Levarcam
that the child should be brought up in a strong
d?n in the solitude of a great wood, and that no young
man should see her or she him until she was of
marriageable age for the king to wed. And there she
dwelt, seeing none but her nurse and Cathbad, and
sometimes the king, now growing an aged man, who
would visit the d?n from time to time to see that all
was well with the folk there, and that his commands
were observed.

One day, when the time for the marriage of Deirdre
and Conor was drawing near, Deirdre and Levarcam
looked over the rampart of their d?n. It was winter,
a heavy snow had fallen in the night, and in the still,
frosty air the trees stood up as if wrought in silver,
and the green before the d?n was a sheet of unbroken
white, save that in one place a scullion had killed a calf
for their dinner, and the blood of the calf lay on the
snow. And as Deirdre looked, a raven lit down from
[pg 198]
a tree hard by and began to sip the blood. “O nurse,”
cried Deirdre suddenly, “such, and not like Conor,
would be the man that I would love—his hair like the
raven’s wing, and in his cheek the hue of blood, and
his skin as white as snow.” “Thou hast pictured a
man of Conor’s household,” said the nurse. “Who is
he?” asked Deirdre. “He is Naisi, son of Usna,140 a
champion of the Red Branch,” said the nurse. Thereupon
Deirdre entreated Levarcam to bring her to speak
with Naisi; and because the old woman loved the girl
and would not have her wedded to the aged king, she
at last agreed. Deirdre implored Naisi to save her
from Conor, but he would not, till at last her entreaties
and her beauty won him, and he vowed to be hers.
Then secretly one night he came with his two brethren,
Ardan and Ainlé, and bore away Deirdre with Levarcam,
and they escaped the king’s pursuit and took ship for
Scotland, where Naisi took service with the King of
the Picts. Yet here they could not rest, for the king
got sight of Deirdre, and would have taken her from
Naisi, but Naisi with his brothers escaped, and in the
solitude of Glen Etive they made their dwelling by the
lake, and there lived in the wild wood by hunting
and fishing, seeing no man but themselves and their
servants.