An Introduction to Celtic Mythology
by Alexei Kondratiev, illustrations by Mercy E. Van Vlack
The Celtic peoples have long been famous for storytelling, and the rich
imagery of their tales has had a profound influence on European literature
in general, from the courtly romances of the Middle Ages to the science fiction
and fantasy of today. Yet even apart from their considerable entertainment
value, the stories have always played an important role in transmitting the
core values of Celtic culture to their audiences, and in teaching them the
cultures basic beliefs about the origins of the world, of society, and of
social customs. While today we are most familiar with this material in the
literary form it was given in the Middle Ages by the learned classes of
Ireland and Wales, it would originally have been presented to Celtic
communities as a part of their ritual activities either in the shape of
the formal storytelling that took place on winter nights in many parts of
the Celtic world; or as an accompaniment to (and explanation of) the rituals
that marked the turning of the seasons and the stages in the agricultural cycle;
or within the context of an individuals life passages, such as birth,
coming of age, marriage and death. Professional storytellers learned hundreds of
different stories, choosing and embellishing them in response to the needs
of specific audiences.
Traditional Celtic society was composed of three primary occupational
classes, to ensure the proper exercise of what Indo-Europeanist scholars
have come to call the three functions necessary to the survival of a community.
The First Function deals with the basic values of a society, with what is
right and wrong, true and false, permitted and forbidden: it thus includes
clergy (who administer the communitys dealings with the gods and the
Otherworld), poets (in so far as their art is seen as sacred), legal experts
(who discover what is right, and have the final word on it), and
loremasters (who are their communitys memory, knowing all the precedents
that have established current laws and customs). The Second Function has to
do with defending the community, and is thus the duty of the warrior class,
who need to cultivate a particular kind of ethos to be successful in their
calling. The Third Function assures the material survival and well-being of
the community, and so is the province of farmers, merchants, healers, etc.,
and deals with everything that promotes wealth, physical health and
fertility: because all these activities are so dependent on the environment,
the Third Function is very much preoccupied with relating to the
unpredictable, mysterious nature of the Land. Each of these classes in early
Celtic society had a body of mythological lore that was aimed directly at
its specific concerns.
First-function mythology is about the origins of things: how the world
came to be; where the ancestors came from, and how genealogy relates them to
people today; how social customs began, and why it is important to maintain
them. When the Celtic peoples were Christianised in the 5th and 6th
centuries many of these stories which were intimately related to pre-Christian gods
and their worship came into conflict with the new religion; yet it was
difficult to discard them completely, since so much of the native legal and
political system was based on them. In Ireland the learned class embarked on
the project of updating the lore to make it conform to the Christian
world-view, and the result (produced between the 9th and 12 th centuries)
was the immense compendium known as Lebor Gabála Érenn (the Book of the
Conquests of Ireland). It substitutes the Creation story from Genesis for
whatever variant of the Indo-European creation myth had been current before
that, and takes pains to correlate its chronology with that of the Bible and
of the Classical world. However, it also preserves a great deal of earlier
material, since many of the characters are recognisable as gods whose names
were recorded on the Continent in Roman times. A particularly rich section
of the plot concerns the fifth invasion, the Tuatha Dé Danann (figures with
magical powers, who excel in crafts), and their conflict with the greedy and
uncouth Fomorians. This correlates with the conflict between the gods of
culture and the gods of nature, which is a major theme of Indo-European
mythology in general. Scholars have sometimes called the material based on
the Lebor Gabála the Mythological Cycle, and there are other well-known
stories related to it, such as Cath Maige Tuired (the Battle of Maigh
Tuireadh). Theres evidence that the Celts of Britain attempted a similar
reworking of their native lore during the early Middle Ages, but not as much
of it has survived: mainly the Latin accounts of Nennius and Geoffrey of
Monmouth, and the later Welsh summary called Brut y Brenhinoedd. However,
the cycle of colourful Welsh tales called Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi (the
Four Branches of the Mabinogi), probably composed in the 12th century, features
characters and themes reminiscent of what we have in the Irish Mythological
Cycle, and probably reflects a much-transformed survival of similar
pre-Christian lore.
The mythology of the Second Function is intended to serve as a model for
the warrior class by focusing on the exploits of ideal warriors. In Ireland
the figure who emerged as the undisputed paragon in such stories was the
hero Cú Chulainn, who was said to have lived in Ulster around the time of Christ.
The stories about him tell of his extraordinary conception and birth (he is
born three times before he is truly rooted in the physical world, and his
Otherwordly father is the god Lúgh); the gaining of his adult name (at the
age of seven he kills the fierce hound belonging to the smith Culann, and
promises to fulfill that hounds duty himself, thus becoming Hound of
Culann); his first taking up of arms (when he first undergoes the
riastradh or warp-spasm that makes him invincible on the battlefield),
his winning of his bride, Éimhear (which involves his training and
initiation by the warrior-woman Scáthach); his gaining of the championship of Ulster
(through the intervention of an Otherworld figure, Cú Roí Mac Dáire); his
many adventures; and his spectacular death. The centerpiece of his exploits
is Táin Bó Cualnge (the Cattle Raid of Cooley), which tells of Queen Maeve
of Connaughts invasion of Ulster to steal a famous bull, and of Cú
Chulainns primal role in repelling the invasion. The Táin is a fine
example of second-function lore, as its main focus is the behaviour of
aristocratic warriors on the field of battle. One of the main themes is the
constant competition between the warriors for primacy in their social
hierarchy, as well as the need to always save face, regardless of the
emotional cost involved (Cú Chulainn kills his own son in such a situation).
The stories concerning Cú Chulainn and his contemporaries at the court of
king Conchobhar Mac Nessa of Ulster are often referred to collectively as
the Ulster Cycle. No similar material has survived in Welsh, but the famous
poems attributed to the bard Llywarch Hen seem originally to have been part
of a long saga about the tragic destiny of a warrior family.
The stories that comprised third-function lore the mythology of the
farmers, the people who lived close to the land also dealt with warriors,
but warriors of a very different sort. The warrior-bands called Fianna were
composed of people who had cut themselves off from mainstream society (often
because they had no hope of gaining wealth or status within it) and created
a counterculture of their own. They had renounced allegiance to their
birth-kin, retaining allegiance only to each other. They served as
mercenaries for tribal rulers, but for much of the year they lived by
hunting and gathering in the wilderness. It was this intimacy with the land, this
ability to survive away from human settlements, that made them relevant to
the concerns of third-function people. Living on the border between culture
and nature, they felt at home in both, and were bound by neither. This
disregard for boundaries meant that (in the stories about them) they often
interacted with creatures from the Otherworld, and could assume the shapes
of the animals they hunted. Most of the surviving stories are about Fionn Mac
Cumhaill and his band of Fenians from Leinster (scholars often call this the
Leinster Cycle), who are also in the service of the High King. In contrast
to the aristocratic warriors of the Ulster Cycle , who are all competing for
the same roles and thus behave in similar ways, Fionn Mac Cumhaills men are
all drawn as individuals: Oisín the poet and mystic, Diarmuid the lover,
Caoilte the conciliator, Conán the boastful but cowardly bully, the
scrupulously fair Oscar, and so on. Part of the delight of the stories is
how these diverse and contrasting personalities manage to cooperate in order to
ensure the groups survival. They also embody the third-function ideals of
generosity and hospitality.
Traditional Gaelic storytellers refer to this body of material as
Fiannaíocht. Since it was a type of lore associated with common people,
there wasnt as much incentive to write it down as there was for the
aristocratic lore, and we dont find very many such stories in the earliest
period of Irish literature. After the 11th century, however, when Southern
dynasties held the High Kingship, Fiannaíocht gained prestige as a
specifically Southern lore and thus a counterweight to the Ulster cycle and
its Northern associations, and literary treatments of Fenian stories were
produced. The most famous compilation of these stories is the 12th-century
Agallamh na Seanórach (The Conversation of the Elders), which has Oisín
and Caoilte return from the Otherworld to an Ireland long after their own time,
where they reminisce about their former lives in the presence of St Patrick.
This conceit became a fixture of the later verse ballads about Fionn Mac
Cumhaill (such as those collected in the Duanaire Finn), where it is
assumed that the speaker is Oisín addressing St. Patrick. While other
stories relating to this material are to be found in Late Mediaeval and Early Modern
manuscripts, by far the greater part of extant Fiannaíocht was collected
over the past two and a half centuries from oral tradition in both Ireland
and Scotland.
In Wales and the other Brythonic countries somewhat similar stories are
told about King Arthur and his men. Although in some stories Arthurs role
as king is pre-eminent, Arthurian lore still retains a sense that his origin
was as the leader of a guerrilla band, not unlike the Fianna; and the adventures
his men undergo have a similar quality of Otherworldly testing. Both Fionn
and Arthur have ambiguous death-stories, with many storytellers leaving open
the possibility that they might return as saviour-heroes in the hour of
greatest need.
These three broad categories of lore by no means exhaust the variety of
stories related to Celtic mythology. We also have a body of lore called
dinnsheanchas, which explains the origins of place-names, rehearsing the
communitys memory by bringing the landscape to life. There are stories
about idealised ancient Irish kings, like Niall of the Nine Hostages and Conn of
the Hundred Battles, exemplifying the virtues proper to a king (and of
course some of the Welsh stories about Arthur serve this purpose as well). There
are tales where one travels to the Otherworld by crossing the sea in a ship, and
where the traveller seems to get a glimpse of the afterlife; many of these
stories (called iomramha) are given a very Christian spiritual message,
but at least one of them (The Voyage of Mael Dúins Curragh) is full of
outlandish imagery that may have more ancient origins, and has been called a
Celtic Book of the Dead. And there are tales of quests for healing of
an individual or an entire land in which a hero journeys to an Otherworldly
place where, after much perilous testing, a female figure gives him the
means to renewed life. The stories of this last type developed into the Grail
Quest romances of the Middle Ages, but they are still an important feature of the
oral tradition of Celtic countries, particularly Brittany.
All of this lore is a central and irreplaceable part of the cultural
heritage of the Celtic peoples, and deserves to be widely known and
appreciated today.