Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) Read Online Free PDF
Author: James MacKillop
range of early Welsh and Irish tradition in Alwyn and Brinley Rees’s
Celtic Heritage
(1961). The Rees brothers purport to discern an underlying unity in early Welsh and Irish social and political organization as well as in large bodies of narrative.
From the 1960s through to the beginning of the twenty-first century, one commonly sees citations to Dumézil in Celtic scholarship, but the ideas of rival theorists continue to enter discourse. These include the structuralists, notably Claude Lévi-Strauss, who emphasize the presence of a worldwide pattern of opposition between certain terms and categories, such as wilderness/village, upstream/downstream, raw/ cooked, etc. Rivalling them but with more lasting influence are the formalists, Vladimir Propp and Walter Berkert, who relate both myth and folktale to biological and cultural ‘programmes of action’ whose incidence is, again, found worldwide.
PART ONE
Contexts
1
Names in the Dust
Searching for Celtic Deities
SCRUTINIZING THE INSCRUTABLE CELTS
Most readers of this book probably already have some background in classical mythology. They will find it handy in keeping straight allusions to Artemis, Aphrodite and Hephaestus as well as knowing that those Greek Olympians had counterparts named Diana, Venus and Vulcan among the Romans. Those names appear again and again in discussion of Celtic mythology, especially the older traditions. Yet a knowledge of classical mythology is also likely to set expectations that Celtic traditions cannot fulfil. Any student can read enough from ancient sources about, say, Artemis-Diana, that she seems to be a knowable figure. Dozens of representations in art illustrate aspects of Artemis’s character, her coolness and hauteur or her athleticism. We can speak about her presumed personality the way we can about a character in fiction or dramatic literature. This is not true of the earliest Celtic figures that survive only in partially destroyed statues, badly weathered inscriptions or cryptic passages in unsympathetic classical commentaries. We get a fuller picture if a deity’s cult was widespread, but often the modern reader is in the position of the palaeontologist trying to extrapolate the image of an early hominid from a piece of jawbone, a femur and a knuckle.
As for the ancient Celts of the continent and Britain, we have moved beyond the blinkered vision of the Romans. Until recently, we tended to see all their battles and enemies through Roman eyes. The imperialist cliché portrayed the Celts, like other ‘barbarians’, as crude, disorderly and improved by domination, whereas the Romans were seen as cosmopolitan, orderly and effective law-givers. Recent archaeological evidence prompts revision of this model. The widespread Celtic population thrived with a complex social organization of great noble houses and a system of clients and patrons, often in urban settings. Celtic standards of craftsmanship, especially in metals, equalled and surpassed those of the early Romans. Numerically superior, the Celts reached an apogee of cultural expression and political expansion just before the rise of Rome. In 390 BC the Celts sacked Rome itself, not to occupy it or make it a fiefdom but rather just as a show of aggressive force. In 279 BC they apparently sacked the Greek shrine of Delphi. But in little more than another fifty years, in 225 BC , the Romans annihilated a Gaulish army at Telamon, along the western shore on the road to Pisa, slaughtering perhaps 40,000 and taking another 10,000 prisoner. The imperial tide would be halted now and again but never reversed. Ultimately the social and cultural similarity of the Gauls to the Romans hastened the absorption of conquered peoples into the empire.
Even though they did not give us their history, our accumulated knowledge of the ancient Celts, surviving and rediscovered, now fills several fat volumes. Continental Celts divided into two cultural provinces, the eastern, centred on the Danube
Celtic Heritage
(1961). The Rees brothers purport to discern an underlying unity in early Welsh and Irish social and political organization as well as in large bodies of narrative.
From the 1960s through to the beginning of the twenty-first century, one commonly sees citations to Dumézil in Celtic scholarship, but the ideas of rival theorists continue to enter discourse. These include the structuralists, notably Claude Lévi-Strauss, who emphasize the presence of a worldwide pattern of opposition between certain terms and categories, such as wilderness/village, upstream/downstream, raw/ cooked, etc. Rivalling them but with more lasting influence are the formalists, Vladimir Propp and Walter Berkert, who relate both myth and folktale to biological and cultural ‘programmes of action’ whose incidence is, again, found worldwide.
PART ONE
Contexts
1
Names in the Dust
Searching for Celtic Deities
SCRUTINIZING THE INSCRUTABLE CELTS
Most readers of this book probably already have some background in classical mythology. They will find it handy in keeping straight allusions to Artemis, Aphrodite and Hephaestus as well as knowing that those Greek Olympians had counterparts named Diana, Venus and Vulcan among the Romans. Those names appear again and again in discussion of Celtic mythology, especially the older traditions. Yet a knowledge of classical mythology is also likely to set expectations that Celtic traditions cannot fulfil. Any student can read enough from ancient sources about, say, Artemis-Diana, that she seems to be a knowable figure. Dozens of representations in art illustrate aspects of Artemis’s character, her coolness and hauteur or her athleticism. We can speak about her presumed personality the way we can about a character in fiction or dramatic literature. This is not true of the earliest Celtic figures that survive only in partially destroyed statues, badly weathered inscriptions or cryptic passages in unsympathetic classical commentaries. We get a fuller picture if a deity’s cult was widespread, but often the modern reader is in the position of the palaeontologist trying to extrapolate the image of an early hominid from a piece of jawbone, a femur and a knuckle.
As for the ancient Celts of the continent and Britain, we have moved beyond the blinkered vision of the Romans. Until recently, we tended to see all their battles and enemies through Roman eyes. The imperialist cliché portrayed the Celts, like other ‘barbarians’, as crude, disorderly and improved by domination, whereas the Romans were seen as cosmopolitan, orderly and effective law-givers. Recent archaeological evidence prompts revision of this model. The widespread Celtic population thrived with a complex social organization of great noble houses and a system of clients and patrons, often in urban settings. Celtic standards of craftsmanship, especially in metals, equalled and surpassed those of the early Romans. Numerically superior, the Celts reached an apogee of cultural expression and political expansion just before the rise of Rome. In 390 BC the Celts sacked Rome itself, not to occupy it or make it a fiefdom but rather just as a show of aggressive force. In 279 BC they apparently sacked the Greek shrine of Delphi. But in little more than another fifty years, in 225 BC , the Romans annihilated a Gaulish army at Telamon, along the western shore on the road to Pisa, slaughtering perhaps 40,000 and taking another 10,000 prisoner. The imperial tide would be halted now and again but never reversed. Ultimately the social and cultural similarity of the Gauls to the Romans hastened the absorption of conquered peoples into the empire.
Even though they did not give us their history, our accumulated knowledge of the ancient Celts, surviving and rediscovered, now fills several fat volumes. Continental Celts divided into two cultural provinces, the eastern, centred on the Danube