Although we don’t have any writing from the pagan Irish people’s own hands – sort of (we’ll get to that) – we are lucky enough to have a huge amount of historical sources that were written down in manuscripts from a relatively early period, around the sixth or seventh century or so (depending on who you ask). Once again, we’re concentrating mainly on the Irish here because this is where we find the very earliest evidence, which is most helpful to us here. The historical sources that were produced in the Isle of Man and Scotland are either much later, and not quite as helpful to us, or they were produced in monasteries in the very early medieval period when they were, to all intents and purposes, as much a part of the Irish world as Ireland itself was.
In the very earliest period, these manuscripts were mainly (if not entirely) produced in an ecclesiastical setting, with monks working night and day to write down all kinds of things. They not only concentrated on writing down religious works – producing beautifully and elaborately decorated gospels (like the Book of Kells – which may actually have been made in Scotland), collections of psalms, penitentials, and apocrypha – they also kept detailed annals, genealogies, glossaries, law tracts, and scientific texts (tackling subjects ranging from astronomy to materia medica), as well as (and most importantly, perhaps) a huge amount of myths, legends, and lore.
In the margins and blank spaces of these manuscripts, the monks also squeezed in little notes and comments about whatever it was they were writing about, sometimes mentioning additional details that seem to have been missing from the text they were copying from, or taking a short break to jot down a complaint about their massive hangovers, cramped hands, and tired eyes. Sometimes they might write down a little poem, to amuse themselves, or else they used the space left on a page to note down prayers and charms – spells (as we might call them today – they weren’t necessarily thought of in that way at the time) that were meant to heal various ailments, cure impotence (or, conversely, aid celibacy), or ensure a long life, etc.
The very earliest scribes started off writing things down in Latin (the language of the Church), but it wasn’t too long before the Irish monks who worked in the scriptoria chose to write down myths and legends, and many other texts and documents, in their own language.
This shift from writing in Latin to preferring their own language was unusual enough in itself, at the time, but even more unusual was the fact that these monks really didn’t seem to be all that bothered by the obviously pagan content they were often writing about. At times, they even explicitly acknowledged the fact that certain mythological figures – who featured larger than life in so many of their stories – really were gods: We see the Dagda’s name being explained as meaning he is ‘the Good God,’ because he’s so good at so many things (or everything, really). We see his great-grandfather, Néit, being described as a god of combat to the Irish, along with the Dagda’s daughter, Brigit, being identified as a goddess of poets and poetry, with two sisters of the same name who are said to be a physician and a blacksmith. There’s also Dían Cécht, the physician-god, and these names are all to be found in the same source.1 Other sources agree with these descriptions, and elsewhere, meanwhile, we find figures like Badb being acknowledged as a wife of Néit, and as a goddess of battle (complementing her husband’s rôle).2
We even see some deities lending their names to law tracts (which typically focus on legal matters relating to their profession), or they might called upon in the charms that were scribbled down in the margins and spaces left in manuscripts – in particular, Goibniu the smith, Dían Cécht the physician, Lug, and the daughters of Flidais – although there’s a valid question about whether or not they were still seen as divinities in their own right by this point in time (around the eleventh century or so).3 They more than likely weren’t viewed as gods by this time; people didn’t have to worship them for people to still think that they – or (perhaps more to the point) the charms they were invoked in – to have power. The same argument applies as to why deities like Dían Cécht, or Luchtne, Crédne Cerd, or Goibniu, had law tracts named after them.
The weight of tradition itself was powerful enough, and so they could have just been called upon because that’s simply how it was done – and had always been done, since pagan times. People stuck to what they knew, and what they believed worked. The charms that call upon the names of various gods are invariably intended for healing – curing a headache, preventing or curing an infection, or dealing with eye problems – and they probably had such staying power, surviving a wholesale change in religion, because there weren’t really any alternatives. In the absence of antibiotics or modern painkillers, they found their own solutions.4
It was in this choice to reframe the gods as anything but gods that they managed to survive on the pages of those medieval manuscripts. In doing so, they preserved their myths, which were revised and updated as they were written down. In spite of the changes that were made, they can still tell us things about various pagan beliefs and practices, just like those law tracts and charms that have survived. For example, the myths and other kinds of sources mention the four main festivals of the pre-Christian calendar – Imbolc, Beltaine, Lugnasad, and Samain5 – which gives us our own festival calendar to work with. We get glimpses of cosmological beliefs, like the concept of the three realms – of land, sea, and sky – as opposed to the Christian heaven and earth. We learn that the gods are a part and parcel of the land around us, one god living here, another living there. We find hints of traditional blessings that were given – wishing ‘every good’ upon someone instead of offering a ‘blessing’ upon them; the Old Irish word for blessing, bendacht, is a Latin loanword, so it only came into use as a result of Christian influence.
The genealogies – the earliest of which have been dated from around the seventh to the twelfth centuries – aren’t a particularly thrilling read, for the most part, but when we really look at them we do start to find deities popping up all over the place, as distant ancestors who somehow found themselves being embedded in the lineages of various dynasties. This, combined with a few other key pieces of evidence (see Linguistics) suggests that people may well have seen themselves as descendants of certain deities – deities who, as a founder of their people and a sort of ‘ultimate ancestor,’ were therefore also heavily invested in the welfare and general fate of their descendants. Throughout the genealogies we find various iterations of Núadu being mentioned, though his epithet may vary (depending on which dynasty or people are claiming him), and we also see the Dagda receiving a mention or two, as well as Manannán, Lug, Flidais, and a number of other less recognisable deities, too.6
The penitentials outline penances for certain kinds of actions or behaviours that were deemed sinful and pagan – the use of charms and spells was commonplace but ‘officially’ condemned in the early Christian period, while the practice of polygyny (where a man has more than one wife) was heavily frowned upon by the Church – and much complained about as a pagan hangover – but it remained a legal practice until the twelfth century, when the Anglo-Norman conquest brought a lot of changes to Ireland.7 The early law tracts, pre-conquest, talk about the rights and protections that druids could claim, and although the druids were obviously finding themselves in rather reduced circumstances at the time the law tracts were being written down (in the seventh and eighth centuries), the fact that they were mentioned at all shows us there were enough of them still around that it was worth the bother of defining their legal rights.8
The use of milk in baptisms (instead of holy water) was condemned by the Church in the eleventh century, because of its pagan roots, while St Patrick is said to have banned the practice of imbas forosnai (‘knowledge that illuminates’) and teinm láida (‘illumination of song’) – rites that were performed by professional poets in the pursuit of inspiration , for their art – because he deemed them ‘a denial of baptism.’ In effect – again – they were just too pagan, and too incompatible with the new faith to be allowed to continue in a Christian world.9
Of course, just because the Church claimed certain practices were pagan in origin, that didn’t necessarily, automatically mean those claims were true. We also have to remember that even if the scribes weren’t shying away from talking about pagan things, that doesn’t mean they necessarily understood what they were talking about. Sometimes, they may have had a pro-Christian agenda – talking about the ‘bad’ old pagan days because this new Christian era is so superior. We’re saved! That sort of thing didn’t necessarily require an accurate portrayal of the pagan things they were talking about, it just needed to seem accurate enough to scare people straight, as it were. The aim here wasn’t necessarily to convert the pagan (depending on the timeframe we’re dealing with, there may not have been any around anymore), but to encourage those who were already Christian to stay on the right path.
Sometimes they projected a sort of de facto Christianity onto figures who were being portrayed as historical individuals from a bygone (and explicitly pre-Christian) era, as if the pre-Christian Irish had really been Christians all along, even before the whole Jesus-dying-for-our-sins episode actually happened. As if they were just hanging around, doing Christian things even though they hadn’t heard the Good News yet. What may be presented as inherently ‘pagan’ in these kinds of stories, then, tends to look an awful lot like Christianity, because the scribes wanted to portray their history (or prehistory, more to the point) in the best possible light. They wanted to be the most Christian of Christians, before there were even Christians, because they were truly God’s chosen. So – to return to our point here – there are any number of reasons for the scribes to have got certain details ‘wrong,’ whether by accident or design, and all of this means we can’t take anything at face value.10
Basically: The myths as they’ve come down to us today aren’t fossils. They’re not something we can dig up and look at as a beautifully preserved relic, pure and unchanged from the golden era of Ireland’s pre-Christian past. They don’t represent versions of a story that are purely pagan, and they’re not to be taken as gospel. They may represent spiritual truths to us in a rather general sense, and they might convey a sense of who the gods are and what they’re like, but we have to think of the stories as a product of their time, as well.
At times, the myths might seem quite alien to us. They’re stories where heroes might casually rape a woman they encounter, and then go on to kill their own long-lost son because of a magical geis (a ‘sacred prohibition’) that they themselves had laid on their son shortly after his birth (a product of that rape), which prevents the boy from identifying himself to strangers. They’re stories where that same hero spends an entire season single-handedly defending a province because his fellow warriors are laid low by labour pains (as a result of a curse that was laid upon them by a goddess, Macha) when the province is most at need, and then, sometime later, is stopped dead in his tracks by the impressively bloody menstrual flow – or urine stream, depending on the translation – of the enemy. Speaking of which, they’re stories that might involve literal pissing matches (fun for all the family, for sure), or the prodigious amount of piss from an otherworldly horse might result in the creation of a loch. We might encounter fantastical dogs that vomit wine from one end while farting atomic streams of fire from the other. Lesbian sex might save a priest from his demonic prison, or an abbot might fall asleep on a hill one afternoon, only to wake up some time later as a beautiful young woman. Then, being rather unfazed by this turn of events, the abbot then ends up marrying, subsequently giving birth to seven children over the course of seven years, before finding themselves returning to their male (physical) form again.11
By their nature, myths are stories that deal with ‘the activities of divine beings,’12 so the Irish myths (as they’ve survived up to the present day) can contain pre-Christian elements. The problem is that these elements – the tales themselves – have been filtered through a Christian lens, and we can’t necessarily just pick out the obviously Christian bits of a story and assume that whatever’s left behind has therefore been stripped back to the ‘original,’ pure, authentically pagan version. Things are far more complicated than that, as Kim McCone has written about (as just one example we could point to).13 This might seem a bit disheartening, but even with an extremely conservative or overly skeptical attitude we can still get so much from these sources. As imperfect as the myths, tales, and other documents might be, without them we wouldn’t have nearly half as much as we do. Sometimes they might raise more questions than they answer, but that, too, is the beauty of them.
References
1 See Tochmarc Étaíne (‘The Wooing of Étaín’), Cath Maige Tuired (‘The Second Battle of Mag Tuired’), and Sanas Cormaic (‘Cormac’s Glossary’).
2 See Tochmarc Emire (‘The Wooing of Emer’).
3 For more on this, see John Carey’s Magic, Metallurgy and Imagination in Medieval Ireland: Three Studies (2019). The spell mentioning Lug is discussed in Jacqueline Borsje’s ‘A Spell Called Éle,’ in Ulidia 3 (link to pdf).
4 See John Carey’s Magic, Metallurgy and Imagination in Medieval Ireland (2019), and Ilona Tuomi et al (Eds.) Charms, Charmers and Charming in Ireland: From the Medieval to the Modern (2019).
5 See Tochmarc Emire, for example, where we find one of the earliest (and clearest) references to the festivals. Kuno Meyer, ‘The Wooing of Emer,’ in Archaeological Review 1 (1888), 232.
6 See for example: The genealogies in the Rawlinson B. 502 manuscript, and The Conception of Mongán.
7 See Donnchadh Ó Corráin’s ‘Marriage in Early Ireland,’ in Art Cosgrove (Ed.), Marriage in Ireland (1985).
8 Fergus Kelly’s A Guide to Early Irish Law (1988), 59-61.
9 See: Nora Chadwick’s ‘Imbas Forosnai,’ in Scottish Gaelic Studies 4:2 (1935).
10 This sort of thing has been covered by a lot of different writers, but in particular see: Kim McCone, Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature (1990)
11 The geis story – The Death of Aífe’s Only Son; single-handed defence of the province/menstrual flow – The Táin; the labour pains curse – The Debility of the Ulstermen; pissing match – The Death of Derbforgaill; horse piss – the dindshenchas (‘place-name lore’) of Loch Rí; atomic dog farts – The Acallam na Senórach; girl-on-girl action saves the day – Niall Frossach’s True Judgement; the otherworldly transgendering of ecclesiastics – Tadhg Ó Síocháin’s The Case of the Abbot of Drimnagh: A Medieval Irish Story of Sex-Change (2017).
In some cases several versions of the same story will exist, or the events may be referenced in a number of other tales, adding details to the over all tradition. To keep things simple I’ve provided pointers to only one version of each event that’s referenced. The links provided may not be the best or most up-to-date translations that are available, but they’re freely accessible and you can at least get the gist.
12 Mark Williams, The Celtic Myths That Shape the Way We Think (2021), 107.
13 Kim McCone, Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature (1990).
Eòlas 