As we saw in the page on archaeology, the idea of a ‘Celtic’ Ireland is usually thought of as being synonymous with the Iron Age – a period spanning from approximately 700 BCE through to the arrival of the first Christians in around 400 CE. With the introduction of ‘Celtic’ technology and art styles (producing a ‘Celtic’ material culture), it’s generally assumed that the Iron Age also saw the introduction of a Celtic language – assuming that hadn’t happened already (in the tail end of the Bronze Age, perhaps, with the new language then facilitating the introduction of new technologies; it’s a bit of a chicken and egg sort of situation here).
It’s thought that Ireland had come to be known by a name of Celtic origin by around the sixth century BCE, as reported by various Greek authors of that day and age.14 In the fourth century BCE Ireland was given the name Iérnē (written Ἰέρνη) by a Greek geographer named Pytheas of Massalia (Massalia being a Greek colony situated in the modern Marseille, France), and this name was then rendered as Hibernia in Latin, which is how the Romans referred to the island from that point onwards. Pytheas’ work hasn’t survived, and nor have any of the earlier Greek accounts that talked about Ireland; we only know of these names from other sources that refer to these works.
Assuming the name for Ireland that was recorded by the Greeks in the sixth century BCE was supplied to them by the Irish themselves, this shows us that a Celtic language was being spoken in Ireland at a pretty early point in Ireland’s Iron Age – as we might hope, all things considered. The likelihood that this was a native name – not a name that the Celtic Gauls or Britons, or any other speakers of a Celtic language might have given to Ireland, for example – is supported by a map that was produced in the second century CE, which gives a similar sort of name to Ireland that’s also recognisably Celtic in origin.
This map of Ireland was drawn up by a Graeco-Egyptian mathematician, geographer, cartographer (and many other things) named Ptolemy (who died c. 170 CE), as part of a much larger project to map the entire known world in his day and age. Ptolemy’s approach to this mammoth cartographical effort didn’t involve his sailing the world so he could visit every single place and make a first hand record of each country. Instead, he drew on a mixture of the most up-to-date information he could find about Ireland’s topography, which was provided by merchants and sailors who did have at least some first-hand knowledge of Ireland’s geography, and then he referred to older maps or sources – including Pytheas’ maps (from 500 years beforehand) – that recorded the names of various places from those periods.
On the whole, the map has a few quirky features (like the situation Scotland has going on, as you can see in the image below, where the country is effectively turned on its side), but his map of Ireland, specifically, is invaluable for the fact that it includes not just a few place-names, but also the names of a number of rivers, promontories, hill-forts, and the names of various ‘tribes’ or peoples:
Most of these names are definitively Celtic in origin, although not all of them are necessarily easy to parse, linguistically speaking. It’s possible that some of the names just aren’t Celtic in origin – evidence of an older, non-Celtic language that may have still been spoken, or had been preserved in the place-names, at the very least, perhaps. The name that Ptolemy gave for the island as a whole is definitively Celtic, however, and it fits in perfectly with the Greek name that had been given to it, as far back as the sixth century BCE. It also points to a neat linguistic fit with the name that the medieval Irish used for Ireland, and the modern form that’s still used in the Irish language today – Éire (which is derived from the goddess Ériu, who gave her name to Ireland).
Éire can be traced back to a Proto-Goidelic form, *Īweriū. Going back a bit further, *Īweriū can be derived from the Proto-Celtic *Φīwerjon-, which is itself derived from the Proto-Indo-European *piHwerjon-. The Greek forms of Iérnē (as Pytheas gave it) or Iouerníā (or Ἰουερνία in Greek), as Ptolemy gave it (where the ου/ou stands for w – just as we see in *Īweriū) are both clearly derived from the native name for Ireland, as it known in the fourth century BCE or second century CE; they are a perfect fit, and so this confirms to us (as we’d hoped earlier) that a Celtic language was being spoken in Ireland as early as the sixth century CE.
As we discussed earlier when we talked about the origins and evolution of Irish, we don’t know exactly when Primitive Irish first emerged – we only know that it was being spoken by the fourth century, when the Irish started to carve inscriptions in an alphabet they’d invented. This means the Celtic names (or, more accurately, the Greek renderings of the Celtic names) that are recorded on Ptolemy’s map may therefore reflect Primitive Irish place-names, or Early Goidelic ones, perhaps. In either case, though, our timeline is pretty much assuming that a definitively Irish language was being spoken in Ireland by the time Ptolemy drew his map.
Considering the mishmash of old and contemporary sources that Ptolemy had drawn on, however, the map as a whole doesn’t necessarily reflect a single linguistic landscape. It’s not a snapshot of a single point in time, but a mixture of names from different eras, and – potentially – different languages that were spoken at different times. These names are also filtered through a Greek lens, so some things may have got a bit lost in translation, so to speak. All in all, we have to view this map with caution, for all of these reasons and many more.
Even though we can say the names on Ptolemy’s map may be Celtic, then, we don’t know which Celtic language(s) they represent. In particular, at least a few writers have argued that some of the place-names point to evidence of a Goidelic language (especially the names in the north), while other have argued that – at best – the names are suggestive of Brythonic (the Celtic language spoken in Britain at this point in time) origins or influences.15 Quite often, though, these arguments reflect a certain degree of bias and assumptions from the author about how a ‘Celtic’ language (or several Celtic languages) got to Ireland in the first place. For example, there’s a people listed as the ‘Brigantes’ on the east coast of Ireland, and – just visible on the version of the map shown above – this is a name that can also be found in Britain (roughly corresponding with the north of England, into southern Scotland). The Irish Brigantes is roughly located in the Leinster area, which is the province Brigit – who many believe is a saint who was based on an older goddess – came from. In Britain, meanwhile, we have independent confirmation of this Brigantes tribe from Romano-British inscriptions that are roughly contemporary with Ptolemy’s own map. These inscriptions show us the Brigantes worshipped an eponymous goddess, Briganita, and considering the fact that there are two population group group with the same name in Ireland and Britain, we might suppose that they’re ultimately the same people – a people who worshipped a goddess named Brigantia, who established a colony across the water at some point. The question is, did the British Brigantes colonise Ireland, bringing their goddess with them (who then became known as Brigit), or was it the other way round?16
This is a question that’s still up for debate even today. It inevitably has implications about the origins of Brigit, because her name is a clear linguistic cognate with the British goddess Brigantia. At the most basic level, this means that the names of Brigit and Brigantia are both derived from the same linguistic root – they basically mean the same thing – and this means the goddesses could represent more culturally specific forms of an earlier ‘Celtic’ goddess.17 If we’re seeing evidence of colonisation here, then presumably one of these goddesses made it across the water, where she was then venerated by the locals. The most we can say beyond this, however, is that over time, as the Irish language changed, the ‘Irish Brigantia’ – whatever her origins – came to be known as ‘Brigit.’ Under the influence of Christianity, she may then eventually have became a saint.
In the south-west of the map Ptolemy lists a people named the Iverni (or Ierne), which is an obviously earlier form of ‘Érainn’ (to linguists, anyway) – the people who are known to have lived there in the medieval period. These Iverni derived their name from the same root as Éire and Ériu, so just as the Brigrantes were named for Brigantia, the Iverni, and ultimately the Irish as a whole, were named after Ériu.18
Over to the east of Ireland, a little further north from the Brigantes, there’s a river noted down by Ptolemy, which he called the Buvinda. Linguists will get excited about this name, because it obviously represents an early form of the river Boyne – a name that’s still in use today.19 As the myths have it, the river was named after the goddess who created it – Bóand – and so again, just as we’ve seen with the Brigantes (and Brigit), and the Iverni (and Ériu), this river name hints the presence of a definitively ‘Celtic’ – a definitively Irish – goddess from a relatively early date in Ireland.
We could go on here and discuss the other names that we can see on the map, but what we’ve seen so far is enough to make our point: Despite the problems (potential or actual) with Ptolemy’s map, his work has given us invaluable insights into the Irish landscape of the second century CE, providing us not only with evidence of Ireland’s political geography at an early date – showing us that the patchwork of kingdoms that’s so integral to medieval society (and its myth and literature) really does have pre-Christian roots – but also hinting at some of the gods and goddesses who were embedded in that landscape, and with the people associated with specific locales.
The exact same thing can be said of the ogam inscriptions, which may only be a few centuries older than Ptolemy’s map, and so that’s what we’ll be turning our attention to now.
References
14 John T. Koch (Ed.), Celtic Culture: A Historical Enclyclopedia (2006), 714; 915.
15 See: ‘Ireland in the Iron Age: Map of Ireland by Claudius Ptolemaeus c. AD 150,’ in Archaeology Ireland (2003); Patrizia de Bernardo Stempel, ‘Pre-Celtic, Old Celtic layers, Brittonic and Goidelic in ancient Ireland,’ in Language contact in the place-names of Britain and Ireland (2007).
16 See: ‘Ireland in the Iron Age: Map of Ireland by Claudius Ptolemaeus c. AD 150,’ in Archaeology Ireland (2003).
17 So in theory there was a goddess known to the early Celts, perhaps known as Brigantia, or something like it. As this early Celtic culture (and its associated religion) spread to places like Britain and Ireland, knowledge of this goddess then also spread, and the locals venerated her. After some time, the people of Britain and Ireland came to know and understand this goddess in their own way. As their language and culture evolved, so did their perception – and even the name – of their goddess, until they became two rather distinct deities. They may have retained some similarities, of course, but in the end they’re also quite different from one another, and from their ‘Celtic’ original.
This explanation assumes a theoretical ‘original’ goddess, who made her way to these two different locations via completely separate avenues of transmission, but of course that doesn’t have to be the case here. If the Brigantes did colonise a part of Ireland’s east coast, they could have brought Brigantia’s cult with her, and once established there, the culture and language and religion evolved, and so did the Irish perception of this Brigantia, who eventually became Brigit… And so we again end up with two different deities, who ultimately share the same roots. Or, of course, if could have been the other way round – from Ireland to Britain.
18 T. F. O’Rahilly, ‘On the Origin of the Names Érainn and Ériu,’ in Ériu 14 (1946).
19 John T. Koch, Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia (2006), 217; Grigory Bondarenko, Studies in Irish Mythology (2014), 198: “According to de Bernardo Stempel, this is the old ‘comparative compound’ meaning ‘white as a cow’ (referring either to the river or to the corresponding goddess) which was later reinterpreted as ‘white cow’ after the reversal of the order of constituents.” Séamus Mac Mathúna, ‘The Relationship of the Chthonic World in Early Ireland to Chaos and Cosmos,’ in Borsje (et al), Celtic Cosmology: Perspectives from Ireland and Scotland (2014), 61; John Waddell, Archaeology and Celtic Myth: An Exploration (2014), 21.
Eòlas 
