Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) Read Online Free PDF Page A

first sought to recover pagan knowledge ignored or perhaps distorted by Christian scribes. There was much to support his central thesis. The god the Romans designated Gaulish Mercury could be identified from place names as Lugos or Lugus, as the Gauls themselves would have known him. Lugos, in turn, can be linked to the Irish Lug Lámfhota and the Welsh Lieu Llaw Gyffes. As illuminating as Rhŷs’s efforts were, he worked before some key texts became available, and he tended to push his thesis harder than subsequent research would support. Though
Celtic Heathendom
is little cited today, he influenced two generations of scholars, among them W. J. Gruffydd in
Math Vab Mathonwy
(1928) and
Rhiannon
(1953), and the prolific Irish commentators Myles Dillon and Gerard Murphy. The inclination to find lost divinities behind any number of warriors or kings also infuses T. F. O’Rahilly’s monumental
Early Irish History and Mythology
(1946). Although a scholar of breath-stopping erudition, O’Rahilly nevertheless erred in seeing the early history of Ireland as a contest between invaders speaking languages from rival families of Celtic languages, a controversial idea in his own lifetime and one largely dismissed today.
More recent scholarship downplays the pagan origins theory in favour of the classical influences flowing from the early monasteries. Kim McCone, in the aptly titled
Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature
(1990), and Donnchadh Ó Corráin and others in
Sages, Saints and Storytellers
(1989) advance compelling evidence in support of their views. The strength of this interpretation is that it relies more on available texts in the Celtic languages and in Latin instead of on simulacra postulated from shards of what was once presumed to have existed. As we absorb these new insights, however, we may have to redefine the mythical roots of Celtic mythology. Not all old stories in either Irish or Welsh had comparable status in the traditions that produced them. And some parallels with classical culture are now believed to have been introduced by Christian scribes. This reverses the earlier perception that the echoes of classical culture were introduced by pagan storytellers, were coincidental or were derived from some kind of universal consciousness.
    As with other mythologies, Celtic narratives have been subject to successive schools of interpretation growing out of the intellectual movements of the past 150 years. Psychological theorists discern a unified imagination that overrides culture and language and emanates from the universality of human experience. The followers of both Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung find mythology to be the product of the unconscious mind. For Freudians, mythology can be traced to stages in the predictable steps that each human must follow from birth to maturation. For Jungians mythology derives from the collective unconscious inherited by each human being, regardless of language, colour or social station.
    Though the weight of his ideas has not been felt as heavily elsewhere, few theorists have been so influential on Celtic studies as has Georges Dumézil (1898–1986), an Indo-Europeanist and historian given more to Roman and German traditions. Sometimes designated the ‘New Comparative Mythology’, Dumézil’s theories draw on the French tradition that seeks a sociological context for both religion and myth, asserting that mythology embodies a system of symbols encoding the rules of society. In Dumézil’s view, early Indo-European societies, including the Celtic, were divided into three parts according to social function. These were the numerically smaller priestly and warrior classes and the larger producing class. Each group regarded itself as having been ordained to its particular class by a mythological origin. Although Dumézil himself devoted only a portion of one volume to early Ireland,
Le troisième Souverain
(1949), his ideas were brought to bear on a wide