The Trouble with Celtic Mythology

 I’m okay? Ish. Stomach still bothers me, but I’m on medication for the week. Hope I stay this good in the next couple of weeks until the doctor’s appointments, at least.

Also hey, I reread both Fellowship of the Ring and The Graveyard Book this week! Next is Lord of Chaos, which in my head will always be ‘That one Wheel of Time with the 60 page prologue.’

Anyway this was sort of inspired by a Tumblr post.

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The Trouble With Celtic Mythology in Fantasy Fiction

The problem with Celtic mythology is… well, there’s more than one problem, if we’re being honest here.

Let’s start with this: “the Celts” describes a very large group of ancient peoples, not just those of the British Isles, which is probably what you think of when you hear the word ‘Celtic.’ Britain, Ireland, Spain, France, Switzerland, and Germany all had Celtic people in them at one point. The Galatians mentioned in the Bible? They probably weren’t Celtic by the time Paul was writing to them, but the name comes from a group of Celtic people. And they didn’t all believe the exact same things, or speak the exact same language. They were related, sure, and we can probably draw some conclusions because of that. But just because they’re related, doesn’t mean they’re the same. Orthodox Judaism is related to Islam and also Mormonism, but those three are all very different religions from each other. Likewise, the Celts in Switzerland didn’t believe the same as the Celts in Galatia, or the ones in Wales.

The two big chunks of literature we have on Celtic mythology are from Welsh and Ireland. We have bits and pieces from elsewhere, and we can extrapolate some, but not too much. Like, we know that the Scots are descended from the Gaels that settled in what would become Scotland, and theoretically they had similar beliefs. But we don’t know all the differences either. We know some; for instance, the Scottish had things like wulvers, and more water horses, in their myths, as well as the Seelie and Unseelie Courts. And there were already Picts living in Scotland; we’re still not sure what they believed, and how those beliefs affected the Gaels.

The second big problem we have with Celtic myth is that an awful lot of the Celtic peoples didn’t write down their religion, at least not in ways that have survived up into the modern age. I am sure that some scholar or another could give you reasons why much of their religion wasn’t written down--maybe it was lack of writing, maybe it was the belief that some things shouldn’t be written down, maybe it was because the priestly druid class liked to preserve their mysteries--but I don’t know that it matters for the purposes of this essay. Generally, they didn’t, and because of that we lost much of their stories and mythologies. We don’t have that much to work with! We do have some written stories from the pre-Christian Celtic era, but while we get some ideas of beliefs and deities, sometimes we just get stories and legendary cycles mixed with lives of saints and historical events.

The Romans recorded quite a lot about Celtic culture and beliefs, but historians question how accurate their records are. Did druids actually perform human sacrifice on the scale the Romans reported? Or was that trait embellished, or invented wholescale to make the Celts seem more “barbaric” and in need of Roman “civilization”? Not helping our understanding of Celtic religion is that the Romans just assumed that everyone, especially the Celts and the Germanic peoples, worshipped the same gods under different names, and assigned Roman deity names to other people’s religious figures because they decided they were close enough. Sometimes the names of Celtic deities, or at least Latinized versions of those names, got written down, but individual traits usually didn’t.

We have some actual stories, and those are from Christian writers, recording legends and folklore. Some of those have obvious religious figures, like Irish gods and the Welsh ruler of the underworld. But in many cases we don’t know much about the origins of the stories. There’s a tendency in certain circles to just assume all the stories are just downgraded, Christianized versions of old mythological stories, and that all the characters were actually gods. And then the traits that happen to pop up in those stories get assigned as deity patronages. That’s not necessarily fair, because for all we know, these could just be folktales. It’d be like claiming that people used to worship Tam Lin, or Cinderella, or Paul Bunyan. We just don’t know.

[The Tumblr post that kind of inspired this Note was specifically about taking Welsh stories out of context like this.]

So if you’ve ever wondered to yourself, “Why are Celtic mythology’s influences less often seen in fantasy fiction than Greek and Nordic?” you might have yourself an answer here. You see why this is difficult to adapt into a coherent mythology? Most fiction that deals directly and heavily with a Celtic mythology sticks tightly to Irish myths, where we have a better idea of who the gods were. But even then you’ll get weird distortions based on fringe New Age ideas. Flidais, for instance, appears in the Kevin Hearne novel Hounded, as the Irish goddess of hunting, like a sort of Celtic Artemis (but without the chastity so she can sleep with the hero, of course). It’s unclear if Flidais was ever actually a goddess, but she’s more associated with cattle than wild animals in her stories. And even weirder is Hearne’s characterization of Aenghus Mac Og, who he makes into a vengeful, angry jerkwad who wants to take over the world.

I think Vikingdom made more sense than that book.

It’s also frustrating because many writers assume that all Celtic cultures are the same. Hearne refers to the Irish gods as the Celtic gods, which isn’t quite true (and weird in a series where all myths are true). And there are plenty of adaptations of King Arthur stories that add Gaelic mythological elements and gods. Which isn’t bad, the idea of a crossover myth! I’d love to see Arthur and his war band duke it out with Fomorians! But it’s got to at least be acknowledged that there’s something a bit strange about a Welsh heroic figure hanging out with Irish gods.

You’ll notice that a lot of the really good fantasy fiction that does take on Celtic mythology isn’t as straightforward in the way it interacts with the texts. We don’t know all the facts on the myths, and that’s okay! We’ll just… sort of use the things we do know to tell a story, and admit that we’re making it up, rather than try to present a story as a sort of continuation of Celtic myth.

For instance, Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander is quite clearly based off of the Welsh stories, and rips many of the names and items and words right out of the Mabinogion. But that’s kind of it. They’re not adaptations of Welsh mythology, and use those ideas to make an original story. Yes, Gwydion is The Man, and Taliesin is an amazing bard, but Arawn Death Lord is now a Dark Lord-style villain, rather than the ruler of the underworld who really had no interest in taking over the world. There are very clearly godlike figures in the text, but the novels don’t really get into the details of how that all works because it’s not important to the protagonist and his story.

Or Song of the Sea, which certainly uses figures from Irish mythology, but again tries to tell an original story rather than be some sort of exposition on the myths. Mac Lir, Macha, and the Daoine Sidhe, are all Irish mythological figures, and yet the movie doesn’t really get into too much detail about whether these fairies are gods or what. It tells an original story about selkies and puts them into Irish myth as its own thing. The whole, “Let’s just make them all fairies” is a popular way of dealing with Irish myth in general.

And I’m not saying that fiction has to do this, if it wants to engage with Celtic myth; in fiction, I don’t know if I’d think that there are so many hard bound rules as such. But I think it’s… unwise, unless you’re deliberately telling a story meant to reflect New Age beliefs, to try to use that take on Celtic myth--that we can reconstruct the myths based off what we have, and we definitely know what those myths are, rather than the truth that we just don’t know, and we’re better off acknowledging that and letting ourselves tell original stories with these elements. Yeah, we have elements, but not enough to act like it’s a fully-developed theology in the same way that we have a more solid idea of how Greek myth worked (and even then, Greek mythology isn’t as cut-and-dry as Edith Hamilton would have you think).

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