Celtic Myths and Legends (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

By T. W. Rolleston and Allison Carroll

Celtic origins, heroes, and stories spring to life in T. W. Rolleston’s classic work, Celtic Myths and Legends.   Spanning thousands of years and across thousands of miles, these myths and legends offer a glimpse into worlds long gone that continue to influence modern culture. 

The book includes classical accounts of Celtic tribes in Europe that describe their lives, the ancient gods and world of nature that they worshiped during and after their migrations to Britain and Ireland.  Rolleston also retells stories from the three major cycles of Irish legend and from the ancient Welsh corpus, interspersing these with erudite commentary that aids comprehension of this vast ancient world and its surviving literature. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411428942

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

CELTIC ORIGINS, HEROES, AND STORIES SPRING TO LIFE IN T. W. ROLLESTON’S classic work, Celtic Myths and Legends. Spanning thousands of years and across thousands of miles, these myths and legends offer a glimpse into worlds long gone that continue to influence modern culture. The book includes classical accounts of Celtic tribes in Europe that describe their lives, the ancient gods and world of nature that they worshiped, and their migrations to Britain and Ireland. Rolleston also retells stories from the three major cycles of Irish legend and from the ancient Welsh corpus, interspersing these with erudite commentary that aids comprehension of this vast ancient world and its surviving literature. The ancient tales illuminate the fantastic deeds of heroes such as Fionn Mac Cumhaill, Cuchulain, and King Arthur and beautifully recount such beloved stories as The Children of Lir and Dermot and Grania. Richly detailed illustrations by the talented Scottish Arts and Crafts artist Stephen Reid and a comprehensive glossary and index of persons and places further enhance Rolleston’s masterful storytelling, resulting in an engaging primer on one of the world’s oldest literatures and cultures. Celtic Myths and Legends carries the further distinction of being a product of the Irish Literary Revival, a progressive social and cultural movement of the early nineteenth century that inspired the preservation and retelling of Ireland’s ancient myths and legends as well as the creation of a new national literature.

Poet and scholar Thomas William Hazen Rolleston was born in 1857, when the effects of Ireland’s Great Famine were still palpable and the Irish diaspora was in full force. The fourth child of a wealthy Protestant family, Rolleston grew up on his family’s grand estate of Glasshouse in County Offaly in central Ireland and attended primary school at St. Columba’s College in Rathfarnham, County Dublin. He had an early affinity for poetry, and while at Trinity College, Dublin, he won the Vice Chancellor’s Prize for English Verse. He married twice and raised eight children and lived abroad, working as a successful journalist and linguistic scholar in both Germany and London. Rolleston is remembered as a leader of the Irish Literary Revival movement, an expert translator of Greek and German, a prolific scholar, and an extraordinary civic organizer. His most enduring work, Celtic Myths and Legends, remains popular because of its masterful blending of scholarship and storytelling, which brings to life the magical and heroic world of the ancient Celts.

Celtic Myths and Legends was first published under the title of Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race in 1911. This was a time of enormous political and cultural upheaval in Ireland as centuries of colonial English rule were heading to an end. Concurrently, distinguished literary leaders such as T. W. Rolleston, Lady Augusta Gregory, and William Butler Yeats rallied others with the idea that the future of Ireland could be both informed and inspired by a great national literature. The first Irish national theatre was born during this period, and manuscripts containing ancient Celtic myths and legends had already begun to be translated into English. This allowed writers to reformulate them for a modern audience with the express purposes of renewing pride in Ireland’s history and bridging the chasm between Catholics and Protestants. Many leaders of the Irish Literary Revival movement believed that Ireland, as well as its literature, must break away from English influences and establish both cultural and political independence. Rolleston’s goals for Celtic Myths and Legends ran somewhat counter to this, however.

In his introduction to Celtic Myths and Legends, Rolleston explains his belief that the people of Ireland and Britain are so greatly influenced by each other’s culture that it would be more beneficial for them to unite and identify themselves collectively as Anglo-Celtic rather than as Irish, Welsh, Scottish, or Anglo-Saxon (English). For Rolleston, It is for an Anglo-Celtic . . . people that this account of the early history, the religion, and the mythical and romantic literature of the Celtic race is written. Their very future depends upon an understanding of this history, Rolleston argues, because

. . . 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.

Rolleston’s desire to unite Celts and Anglo-Saxons, or Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, through promotion of the concept of an Anglo-Celtic cultural identity was unlikely to have been well received, even by the Irish Protestant aristocracy with whom he associated. It stood in direct opposition to the goals of Rolleston’s colleague in the Gaelic League and the future first president of Ireland, Douglas Hyde, who published a pamphlet titled The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland.

While the Gaelic League promoted the revival of the Irish language, Rolleston held that Irish was an unsuitable medium for both ancient and modern expression until Hyde assisted him with a translation experiment in 1896. Various passages, including a scientific one, were translated from English into Irish by Hyde and then back into English by another Gaelic League scholar, Eoin MacNeill. Such little difficulty was had with these translations that Rolleston backed away from the idea that Irish could not succeed as a modern language, although he held on longer to another unpopular idea: that Irish literature is best presented in the English language.

Irish writers at this time frequently mixed politics with art, and some who began as friends ended up as enemies. The early friendship between Rolleston and Yeats, for example, was marked by collaboration and mutual admiration. Rolleston was the first to publish Yeats’ poetry in the Dublin University Review in 1885 and aided him with the founding of the Rhymer’s Club, a social group for poets. They collaborated on the founding of the Irish Literary Society, and both were members of the Gaelic League. Yeats later criticized Rolleston for allowing too many Unionists (those who desired Ireland to remain a part of Great Britain) to become members of the National Literary Society in Dublin, an organization to which they both belonged. And, while Yeats professed admiration for Rolleston’s organizing skills, as well as for his fine manners and great physical beauty, he concluded later in life that Rolleston was his first public disappointment, most likely because of their differing views on how Ireland could overcome centuries of English rule and cultural influence. Rolleston in turn grew disillusioned with Yeats and others whom he believed were bringing divisive sectarian ideologies into the Gaelic League, an organization Rolleston hoped would serve as a unifying force between Catholics and Protestants. But in 1925, when Rolleston had been dead for five years, Yeats was still so enamored with Rolleston’s poem The Dead at Clonmacnoise that he quoted from it during an Irish Senate debate about historical preservation, declaring that the poem was beautiful enough to inspire people from faraway lands to travel to Ireland just to see the monastic ruins at Clonmacnoise.

Rolleston would have been honored, as he deeply loved Ireland and collaborated with many writers, politicians, and civic organizations during a lifetime full of efforts to heal and preserve Ireland. Some of his accomplishments in this area include helping to found the Irish Literary Society in London (whose goal was to create and promote new Irish literature) and assisting with the creation of the Library of Ireland scheme designed to publish and promote Irish books. Rolleston had a longtime friendship with the famous Irish poet, painter, and champion of the Irish agricultural cooperative movement George William Russell (known by the pen name Æ), as well as with the great Irish poet and nationalist John O’Leary. Rolleston’s interest in supporting Irish economic development and his friendship with Sir Horace Plunkett, a leader of the Irish cooperative movement, led to collaboration in the founding and managing of the Irish Agricultural Organization Society.

Rolleston also became involved in the Arts and Crafts movement as a lecturer, and helped protect the loss of Irish handcrafts such as glassmaking, tweed making, and lace making through his work as the first managing director of the Irish Industries’ Society. In 1904, Rolleston was responsible for the Irish Historic Loan collection exhibition at the St. Louis World’s Fair. This collection included pieces such as the Ardagh Chalice, St. Patrick’s Bell, and the Cross of Cong. Care for these treasures required Rolleston to travel to the United States for four months, providing him with ample opportunity to observe what interested him about America, including public education, business, politics, and even crime, which he lectured about upon his return to Ireland.

His son, C. H. Rolleston, lovingly details the many and varied ways that T. W. Rolleston contributed to the Irish nation in his 1939 biography of his father, titled Portrait of an Irishman. From this work, one gains a picture of Rolleston’s extensive contributions as a journalist, editor, and civic organizer, as well as his prolific scholarship, poetry, and linguistic work. He describes Rolleston as having an indefatigable intellect and a boundless zest for life, balancing years of academic study and civic leadership with a wide range of hobbies, including amateur photography, archery, bicycling, boxing, carpentry, playing the zither, sketching, building his own canoe and rowing it around the coast of Ireland, and studying botany. T. W. Rolleston was also a dedicated father, who most enjoyed working from the comforts of his own study at home, surrounded by his beloved family.

Stoic philosophy was one of Rolleston’s earliest interests. When he was twenty-four years old, he translated the Encheiridion of the philosopher Epictetus from Greek into English (1881). This book made its way into the hands of Walt Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass Rolleston had translated into German in 1880. Whitman carried Rolleston’s translation of the Encheiridion with him for many years, and a mutual admiration led them to a correspondence. Along with luminaries such as Oscar Wilde, Standish O’Grady, and Bram Stoker, Rolleston was a contributor to the Trinity College classical literary magazine Kottabos. Rolleston also edited and wrote the introduction to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Philosophical View of Reform and a biography of the Irish Protestant nationalist Thomas Davis. Rolleston also wrote A Life of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, which told of Lessing’s contributions to the Enlightenment, and two shorter publications, Ireland and Poland: A Comparison and Ireland’s Vanishing Opportunities. Rolleston spent two years writing a more personal philosophical treatise investigating the origins of the universe titled Parallel Paths: A Study of Biology, Ethics, and Art, which received acclaim in Germany. Rolleston’s interest in philosophy, literature, and art extended even into the realm of Indian culture, and he utilized his organizing skills to help found the India Society in London around 1910. The goals of the society were to promote the aesthetic culture of India, and as the first secretary, Rolleston raised funds, offered his home for meetings, and promoted the Society’s work in influential circles of society in London.

Rolleston composed poetry as well as studied it throughout much of his life. His better-known poems include Sea Spray, The Grave of Rury, and The Dead at Clonmacnoise. The Rhymer’s Club published his poems in 1892 and 1894, and John O’Leary published him in his Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland (1888). In 1909 a collection of his poems and translations was published under the title Sea Spray. One of Rolleston’s other major contributions to the Irish Literary Revival movement was a collaboration with his father-in-law, Stopford Brooke, that produced one of the first anthologies of Irish verse, A Treasury of Irish Poetry in the English Tongue, in 1900. This collection required the collaboration of many Irish poets and contained 315 Irish poems brought together for the first time.

Rolleston’s experience writing and editing poetry was a great asset as he set about editing and retelling selected Celtic romances, myths, and legends. In 1910, he put together a collection of Irish romantic tales called The High Deeds of Finn and Other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland; and in 1911-1913, he published English translations of Richard Wagner’s famous trilogy of poems, Tannhauser, Parcival, and Lohengrin. All of these works are filled with art of extraordinary beauty. Scottish artist Stephen Reid created numerous Arts and Crafts-inspired illustrations for Celtic Myths and Legends, as well as for The High Deeds of Finn. These detailed illustrations bring to life the gods and heroes of the Celtic people while displaying distinctive aspects of Celtic art and adornment, such as richly decorated and enameled weapons, clothing, and jewelry. Sketches, paintings, and photographs of Megalithic stone monuments such as Newgrange in Ireland (c. 3200 BC) and Carnac in Brittany (c. 4500 BC- 3300 BC) further enrich the artistic element of Celtic Myths and Legends by depicting the mystery and wonder these legacies inspire.

Rolleston had a keen interest in Megalithic and Celtic archaeology and culture, and he dedicates the first two chapters of Celtic Myths and Legends to detailing what was known in the early 1900s in both areas. While it is now known that monuments such as Newgrange and Stonehenge existed for at least one thousand years before the Celtic invasions, scholars during Rolleston’s lifetime were interested in exploring ways in which the Celts might be linked to the builders of these monuments through inherited religious practices, artistic images, and even language. This section of the book may seem extraneous but it provides the reader with a glimpse into the world that the Celts inherited and into the state of Celtic scholarship in the early 1900s. Rolleston’s brief description of what he calls the true Celtic race, their physical and personality attributes, and his original choice of a title for this work (Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race) may also seem odd to the modern reader, but in the early 1900s other authors, such as Seamus MacManus, who wrote The Story of the Irish Race (1921), utilized the term race without the intention of creating a sense of superiority based upon physical attributes but instead with the goal of creating a sense of cultural unity based much more upon language, history, and an inspiring heroic past.

Other aspects of Rolleston’s scholarship are less problematic, and he adeptly utilizes accounts by Ptolemy, Caesar, Strabo, Diodorus, and Pliny to paint a picture of the Celtic tribes who began to migrate west from Central and Eastern Europe from around 500 BC. He describes their clothing, jewelry, villages, armor, aspects of their physical being and character, and clues about their religious beliefs and practices, as well as their ancient veneration for nature, especially for stones, rivers, mountains, and trees. Rolleston relies heavily on the works of Celtic archaeologists and scholars such as Dr. Whitley Stokes, H. d’Arbois de Jubainville, Dr. T. Rice Holmes, Patrick Joyce, and A. H. Leahy throughout the entire book, but especially here. With their help, Rolleston is able to provide a concise summary of ancient Celtic culture that stands today, describing it as marked by a belief in an afterlife full of light and liberation, by the practice of magic and human sacrifice, a worship of the sun, and a powerful learned class dedicated to knowledge of both religion and the natural world.

Little is known about this powerful learned class, the Druids, who existed wherever Celtic culture subsisted and who appear frequently in Celtic myth and legend. Their secretive oral tradition allowed for very few of their teachings to survive, although contemporary accounts depict them as practitioners of human sacrifice and believers in the immortality of the soul and possibly in reincarnation. Rolleston points out correctly that Caesar provides the most reliable detail about the Druids, although Rolleston himself strays into the realm of conjecture by concluding that Druids did not exist among the Celtic people who lived without stone monuments such as dolmens. Rolleston’s conclusion that Druidism in its essential features was imposed upon the . . . Celt . . . by the earlier population of Western Europe, the Megalithic People (whom he links with ancient Egypt) is also outdated. This explains, however, why Rolleston dedicates so many pages to exploring similarities between ship symbols carved onto stone monuments across Europe with ship symbols in ancient Egypt.

Rolleston in fact proposes a North African origin for the Megalithic people of Ireland and Britain, and as a source for Celtic ideas about the immortality of the soul. Modern Celtic scholars are more likely to trace the origins of the Celtic people to India, as does Peter Berresford Ellis, in the introduction to his modern book of the same title, Celtic Myths and Legends (1999). Berresford Ellis and Rolleston agree, however, that the oldest surviving Celtic tales are the Irish tales, and for this reason, they deserve special attention because they provide clues to the most ancient aspects of Celtic culture and religion. Rolleston therefore dedicates a great portion of his storytelling efforts to retelling tales from the major Irish cycles, which he divides into five sections: 1) the Irish Invasion Myths, 2) the Early Milesian Kings, 3) Tales of the Ultonian Cycle, 4) Tales of the Ossianic Cycle, and 5) the Voyage of Maeldun.

The first and oldest Irish cycle presented in Celtic Myths and Legends is the Mythological Cycle, which enumerates the successive migrations of ancient peoples such as the Firbolgs, the Tuatha De Dannon, and the Milesians into Ireland and includes tales that describe ancient gods and goddesses such as Lugh, the Morrigan, and Áine. Rolleston retells the famous story The Children of Lir as a part of this cycle, as well as tales about the early Milesian kings and King Eochy’s war with Fairyland to win back his wife, Étain. The most important source for the Mythological Cycle is a late eleventh-century manuscript called the Lebor na hUidre, or the Book of the Dun Cow. The Book of the Dun Cow is also an essential source for the other Irish cycles, as is the early twelfth-century manuscript the Leabhar Laignech or Book of Leinster. Despite these many sources, Berresford Ellis points out in his Celtic Myths and Legends (1999) that there remain potentially hundreds of untranslated and uncatalogued Irish tales in libraries and archives, such as the Regensburg archive in Vienna, that one day could allow for further understanding and updating.

The second Irish cycle is the Ultonian or Red Branch Cycle, which expounds the deeds of the Irish Red Branch Order of warriors, including Cuchulain and the Ulster king, Conor mac Nessa, whom they served. Cuchulain remains one of Ireland’s most beloved heroes, and numerous tales about him and other well-loved heroines such as Queen Maev and Deirdre make this cycle especially enjoyable to read. The Irish Book of Lismore, a fifteenth-century manuscript, is one of the most important sources for the stories in this cycle.

The third Irish cycle is the Fenian or Ossianic Cycle, which tells of the hero Fionn Mac Cumhaill and his son, Oisin, and the Fianna (a warrior-poet class) who served the High King, Cormac mac Art. The tragic love story of Dermot and Grania is included here, as is an excerpt from the epic Táin Bó Cúailnge, more popularly known as The Cattle Raid of Cooley. Rolleston points out in this section that there are opposing themes in the surviving tales about Finn—some glorify him while others belittle him; this is thought to be a result of rivalries that existed between clans within the Fianna.

The Irish section of Celtic Myths and Legends finishes with a presentation of one of the oldest and most important romantic Irish tales, The Voyage of the Maeldun (c. ninth century). This story tells of Maeldun’s quest to avenge his father’s death, the strange adversaries he faces on successive islands, and his Christian forgiveness of his father’s slayer. Rolleston calls this a wonder-voyage and notes that this particular story served as inspiration for the other surviving voyage tales, as well as for one of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poems, The Voyage of Maeldune (1880).

Welsh myth and legend are also included in this collection, and Rolleston reviews the development of the historical and mythical King Arthur as well as the Grail story in both Brittany and in Britain, critically examining the sources for these stories, and retelling the ones he deems best representative of ancient Celtic culture and values. These include just a few Arthurian stories, an early Grail tale called The Tale of Peredur, and the great Welsh tales of Bran and Branwen and Pryderi and Manawyddan. Rolleston draws from and explores many primary and secondary sources for this chapter, including the important fourteenth-century medieval Welsh manuscript collection translated by Lady Charlotte Guest, the Mabinogion, as well as Marie de France’s translations of ancient Breton stories that reference Arthur (c. 1150). Rolleston compares the Irish and Welsh myths and legends, pointing out not only that the Welsh stories appear to be heavily influenced by later medieval values, such as chivalry, but also that in the Irish romances, romantic love for women seems to be nearly completely absent, with the women in fact serving more frequently as the pursuers of the men (such as in the stories of Deirdre and Graina).

Rolleston also describes the existence of an important Welsh source, the Barddas, compiled by a bard called Llewellyn Sion in the sixteenth-century. Although many scholars discount the usefulness of the Barddas, Rolleston believes it has some value as potentially providing one of the earliest pictures of Celtic teaching on the origin and organization of the universe. This picture includes a world in which God is part of everything, and exists with an opposing principle of destruction called Cythrawl. Rolleston considered it important that we at least know about the Barddas, for at the time that he wrote, he knew of no other surviving Celtic writing about the origins of the universe. Rolleston does not forget the famous magician Merlin, and he traces his origins to the deity Myrddin, once worshiped at Stonehenge, and the origins of King Arthur to the god Artaius, although as mentioned, the Arthurian legends overall receive little attention in Celtic Myths and Legends, and the Breton legends even less. Myths and legends originating from the Isle of Man, Cornwall, and Scotland also do not receive the attention that they would in modern collections of Celtic myth and legend.

Still, Rolleston provides us access to an enormous body of work in a pleasurably comprehensible volume. He has created an exhaustive survey for the reader, using his unique skills as a philosopher, translator, poet, and writer to create a compilation that contains many of the major tales important to a basic understanding of Celtic myth and legend. Rolleston’s controversial goal for Celtic Myths and Legends to create support for a new cultural designation, the Anglo-Celtic culture, does not diminish the book’s success. It remains in print along with other valuable renditions of Celtic myths, legends, and folklore put together by luminous contemporaries such as Charles Squire, Padraic Colum, Douglas Hyde, and Lady Augusta Gregory. Rolleston’s Celtic Myths and Legends still stands as a shining example of a labor of love produced in the service of Ireland.

Allison Carroll holds a Master of Letters degree with first-class honors in medieval history from the University of St. Andrews and studied at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and at the University of California at San Diego. She is a teacher and writer in California.

CHAPTER ONE

THE CELTS IN ANCIENT HISTORY

EARLIEST REFERENCES

IN THE CHRONICLES OF THE CLASSICAL NATIONS FOR ABOUT FIVE hundred years previous to the Christian era there are frequent references to a people associated with these nations, sometimes in peace, sometimes in war, and evidently occupying a position of great strength and influence in the Terra Incognita of Mid-Europe. This people is called by the Greeks the Hyperboreans or Celts, the latter term being first found in the geographer Hecatæus, about 500 BC.¹

Herodotus, about half a century later, speaks of the Celts as dwelling beyond the pillars of Hercules—i.e., in Spain—and also of the Danube as rising in their country.

Aristotle knew that they dwelt beyond Spain, that they had captured Rome, and that they set great store by warlike power. References other than geographical are occasionally met with even in early writers. Hellanicus of Lesbos, an historian of the fifth century BC, describes the Celts as practising justice and righteousness. Ephorus, about 350 BC, has three lines of verse about the Celts in which they are described as using the same customs as the Greeks—whatever that may mean—and being on the friendliest terms with that people, who established guest friendships among them. Plato, however, in the Laws, classes the Celts among the races who are drunken and combative, and much barbarity is attributed to them on the occasion of their irruption into Greece and the sacking of Delphi in the year 273 BC. Their attack on Rome and the sacking of that city by them about a century earlier is one of the landmarks of ancient history.

The history of this people during the time when they were the dominant power in Mid-Europe has to be divined or reconstructed from scattered references, and from accounts of episodes in their dealings with Greece and Rome, very much as the figure of a primæval monster is reconstructed by the zoologist from a few fossilised bones. No chronicles of their own have come down to us, no architectural remains have survived; a few coins, and a few ornaments and weapons in bronze decorated with enamel or with subtle and beautiful designs in chased or repoussé work—these, and the names which often cling in strangely altered forms to the places where they dwelt, from the Euxine to the British Islands, are well-nigh all the visible traces which this once mighty power has left us of its civilisation and dominion. Yet from these, and from the accounts of classical writers, much can be deduced with certainty, and much more can be conjectured with a very fair measure of probability. The great Celtic scholar whose loss we have recently had to deplore, M. d’Arbois de Jubainville, has, on the available data, drawn a convincing outline of Celtic history for the period prior to their emergence into full historical light with the conquests of Cæsar,² and it is this outline of which the main features are reproduced here.

THE TRUE CELTIC RACE

To begin with, we must dismiss the idea that Celtica was ever inhabited by a single pure and homogeneous race. The true Celts, if we accept on this point the carefully studied and elaborately argued conclusion of Dr. T. Rice Holmes,³ supported by the unanimous voice of antiquity, were a tall, fair race, warlike and masterful,⁴ whose place of origin (as far as we can trace them) was somewhere about the sources of the Danube, and who spread their dominion both by conquest and by peaceful infiltration over Mid-Europe, Gaul, Spain, and the British Islands. They did not exterminate the original prehistoric inhabitants of these regions—palæolithic and neolithic races, dolmen-builders, and workers in bronze—but they imposed on them their language, their arts, and their traditions, taking, no doubt, a good deal from them in return, especially, as we shall see, in the important matter of religion. Among these races the true Celts formed an aristocratic and ruling caste. In that capacity they stood, alike in Gaul, in Spain, in Britain, and in Ireland, in the forefront of armed opposition to foreign invasion. They bore the worst brunt of war, of confiscations, and of banishment. They never lacked valour, but they were not strong enough or united enough to prevail, and they perished in far greater proportion than the earlier populations whom they had themselves subjugated. But they disappeared also by mingling their blood with these inhabitants, whom they impregnated with many of their own noble and virile qualities. Hence it comes that the characteristics of the peoples called Celtic in the present day, and who carry on the Celtic tradition and language, are in some respects so different from those of the Celts of classical history and the Celts who produced the literature and art of ancient Ireland, and in others so strikingly similar. To take a physical characteristic alone, the more Celtic districts of the British Islands are at present marked by darkness of complexion, hair, &c. They are not very dark, but they are darker than the rest of the kingdom.⁵ But the true Celts were certainly fair. Even the Irish Celts of the twelfth century are described by Giraldus Cambrensis as a fair race.

GOLDEN AGE OF THE CELTS

But we are anticipating, and must return to the period of the origins of Celtic history. As astronomers have discerned the existence of an unknown planet by the perturbations which it has caused in the courses of those already under direct observation, so we can discern in the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ the presence of a great power and of mighty movements going on behind a veil which will never be lifted now. This was the Golden Age of Celtdom in Continental Europe. During this period the Celts waged three great and successful wars, which had no little influence on the course of South European history. About 500 BC they conquered Spain from the Carthaginians. A century later we find them engaged in the conquest of Northern Italy from the Etruscans. They settled in large numbers in the territory afterwards known as Cisalpine Gaul, where many names, such as Mediolanum (Milan), Addua (Adda), Viro-dunum (Verduno), and perhaps Cremona (creamh, garlic),⁶ testify still to their occupation. They left a greater memorial in the chief of Latin poets, whose name, Vergil, appears to bear evidence of his Celtic ancestry.⁷ Towards the end of the fourth century they overran Pannonia, conquering the Illyrians.

ALLIANCES WITH THE GREEKS

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

ALEXANDER THE GREAT

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

In the fourth century Macedon was attacked and almost obliterated by Thracian and Illyrian hordes. King Amyntas II was defeated and driven into exile. His son Perdiccas II was killed in battle. When Philip, a younger brother of Perdiccas, came to the obscure and tottering throne which he and his successors were to make the seat of a great empire he was powerfully aided in making head against the Illyrians by the conquests of the Celts in the valleys of the Danube and the Po. The alliance was continued, and rendered, perhaps, more formal in the days of Alexander. When about to undertake his conquest of Asia (334 BC) Alexander first made a compact with the Celts who dwelt by the Ionian Gulf in order to secure his Greek dominions from attack during his absence. The episode is related by Ptolemy Soter in his history of the wars of Alexander.⁸ It has a vividness which stamps it as a bit of authentic history, and another singular testimony to the truth of the narrative has been brought to light by de Jubainville. As the Celtic envoys, who are described as men of haughty bearing and great stature, their mission concluded, were drinking with the king, he asked them, it is said, what was the thing they, the Celts, most feared. The envoys replied: We fear no man: there is but one thing that we fear, namely, that the sky should fall on us; but we regard nothing so much as the friendship of a man such as thou. Alexander bade them farewell, and, turning to his nobles, whispered: What a vainglorious people are these Celts! Yet the answer, for all its Celtic bravura and flourish, was not without both dignity and courtesy. The reference to the falling of the sky seems to give a glimpse of some primitive belief or myth of which it is no longer possible to discover the meaning.⁹ The national oath by which the Celts bound themselves to the observance of their covenant with Alexander is remarkable. If we observe not this engagement, they said, may the sky fall on us and crush us, may the earth gape and swallow us up, may the sea burst out and overwhelm us. De Jubainville draws attention most appositely to a passage from the "Táin Bo Cuailgne, in the Book of Leinster,¹⁰ where the Ulster heroes declare to their king, who wished to leave them in battle in order to meet an attack in another part of the field: Heaven is above us, and earth beneath us, and the sea is round about us. Unless the sky shall fall with its showers of stars on the ground where we are camped, or unless the earth shall be rent by an earthquake, or unless the waves of the blue sea come over the forests of the living world, we shall not give ground."¹¹ This survival of a peculiar oath-formula for more than a thousand years, and its reappearance, after being first heard of among the Celts of Mid-Europe, in a mythical romance of Ireland, is certainly most curious, and, with other facts which we shall note hereafter, speaks strongly for the community and persistence of Celtic culture.¹²

THE SACK OF ROME

We have mentioned two of the great wars of the Continental Celts; we come now to the third, that with the Etruscans, which ultimately brought them into conflict with the greatest power of pagan Europe, and led to their proudest feat of arms, the sack of Rome. About the year 400 BC the Celtic Empire seems to have reached the height of its power. Under a king named by Livy Ambicatus, who was probably the head of a dominant tribe in a military confederacy, like the German Emperor in the present day, the Celts seem to have been welded into a considerable degree of political unity, and to have followed a consistent policy. Attracted by the rich land of Northern Italy, they poured down through the passes of the Alps, and after hard fighting with the Etruscan inhabitants they maintained their ground there. At this time the Romans were pressing on the Etruscans from below, and Roman and Celt were acting in definite concert and alliance. But the Romans, despising perhaps the northern barbarian warriors, had the rashness to play them false at the siege of Clusium, 391 BC, a place which the Romans regarded as one of the bulwarks of Latium against the North. The Celts recognised Romans who had come to them in the sacred character of ambassadors fighting in the ranks of the enemy. The events which followed are, as they have come down to us, much mingled with legend, but there are certain touches of dramatic vividness in which the true character of the Celts appears distinctly recognisable. They applied, we are told, to Rome for satisfaction for the treachery of the envoys, who were three sons of Fabius Ambustus, the chief pontiff. The Romans refused to listen to the claim, and elected the Fabii military tribunes for the ensuing year. Then the Celts abandoned the siege of Clusium and marched straight on Rome. The army showed perfect discipline. There was no indiscriminate plundering and devastation, no city or fortress was assailed. We are bound for Rome was their cry to the guards upon the walls of the provincial towns, who watched the host in wonder and fear as it rolled steadily to the south. At last they reached the river Allia, a few miles from Rome, where the whole available force of the city was ranged to meet them. The battle took place on July 18, 390, that ill-omened dies Alliensis which long perpetuated in the Roman calendar the memory of the deepest shame the republic had ever known. The Celts turned the flank of the Roman army, and annihilated it in one tremendous charge. Three days later they were in Rome, and for nearly a year they remained masters of the city, or of its ruins, till a great fine had been exacted and full vengeance taken for the perfidy at Clusium. For nearly a century after the treaty thus concluded there was peace between the Celts and the Romans, and the breaking of that peace when certain Celtic tribes allied themselves with their old enemy, the Etruscans, in the third Samnite war was coincident with the breaking up of the Celtic Empire.¹³

Two questions must now be considered before we can leave the historical part of this introduction. First of all, what are the evidences for the widespread diffusion of Celtic power in Mid-Europe during this period? Secondly, where were the Germanic peoples, and what was their position in regard to the Celts?

CELTIC PLACE-NAMES IN EUROPE

To answer these questions fully would take us (for the purposes of this volume) too deeply into philological discussions, which only the Celtic scholar can fully appreciate. The evidence will be found fully set forth in de Jubainville’s work, already frequently referred to. The study of European place-names forms the basis of the argument. Take the Celtic name Noviomagus, composed of two Celtic words, the adjective meaning new, and magos (Irish magh), a field or plain.¹⁴ There were nine places of this name known in antiquity. Six were in France, among them the places now called Noyon, in Oise, Nijon, in Vosges, Nyons, in Drôme. Three outside of France were Nimègue, in Belgium, Neumagen, in the Rhineland, and one at Speyer, in the Palatinate.

We are bound for Rome

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The word dunum, so often traceable in Gaelic place-names in the present day (Dundalk, Dunrobin, &c), and meaning fortress or castle, is another typically Celtic element in European place-names. It occurred very frequently in France—e.g., Lug-dunum (Lyons), Viro-dunum (Verdun). It is also found in Switzerland—e.g., Minno-dunum (Moudon), Eburo-dunum (Yverdon)—and in the Netherlands, where the famous city of Leyden goes back to a Celtic Lug-dunum. In Great Britain the Celtic term was often changed by simple translation into castra; thus Camulodunum became Colchester, Brano-dunum Brancaster. In Spain and Portugal eight names terminating in dunum are mentioned by classical writers. In Germany the modern names Kempton, Karnberg, and Lieg nitz go back respectively to the Celtic forms Cambo-dunum, Carro-annum, Lugi-dunum, and we find a Singi-dunum, now Belgrade, in Servia, a Novidunum, now Isaktscha, in Roumania, a Carro-dunum in South Russia, near the Dniester, and another in Croatia, now Pitsmeza. Sego-dunum, now Rodez, in France, turns up also in Bavaria (Wurzburg), and in England (Sege-dunum, now Wallsend, in Northumberland), and the first term, sego, is traceable in Segorbe (Sego-briga), in Spain. Briga is a Celtic word, the origin of the German burg, and equivalent in meaning to dunum.

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

The examples given are by no means exhaustive, but they serve to indicate the wide diffusion of the Celts in Europe and their identity of language over their vast territory. ¹⁵

EARLY CELTIC ART

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

The Celtic culture illustrated by the remains at Hallstatt developed later into what is called the La Tène culture. La Tène was a settlement at the northeastern end of the Lake of Neuchâtel, and many objects of great interest have been found there since the site was first explored in 1858. These antiquities represent, according to Dr. Evans, the culminating period of Gaulish civilisation, and date from round about the third century BC. The type of art here found must be judged in the light of an observation recently made by Mr. Romilly Allen in his Celtic Art (p. 13):

The great difficulty in understanding the evolution of Celtic art lies in the fact that although the Celts never seem to have invented any new ideas, they professed [sic; ? possessed] an extraordinary aptitude for picking up ideas from the different peoples with whom war or commerce brought them into contact. And once the Celt had borrowed an idea from his neighbours he was able to give it such a strong Celtic tinge that it soon became something so different from what it was originally as to be almost unrecognisable.

Now what the Celt borrowed in the art-culture which on the Continent culminated in the La Tène relics were certain originally naturalistic motives for Greek ornaments, notably the palmette and the meander motives. But it was characteristic of the Celt that he avoided in his art all imitation of, or even approximation to, the natural forms of the plant and animal world. He reduced everything to pure decoration. What he enjoyed in decoration was the alternation of long sweeping curves and undulations with the concentrated energy of close-set spirals or bosses, and with these simple elements and with the suggestion of a few motives derived from Greek art he elaborated a most beautiful, subtle, and varied system of decoration, applied to weapons, ornaments, and to toilet and household appliances of all kinds, in gold, bronze, wood, and stone, and possibly, if we had the means of judging, to textile fabrics also. One beautiful feature in the decoration of metal-work seems to have entirely originated in Celtica. Enamelling was unknown to the classical nations till they learned from the Celts. So late as the third