Red Branch Chronicles

Celtic Gods

Ancient Celts did not believe in a monotheistic god but in a pantheon of nature. Gods protected the clan and gave strength in war while Goddesses protected the home and brought fertility. Gods also controlled the natural elements and had to be propitiated through offerings and sacrifices. Human and animal sacrifice were offered although the former was rare and only in times of great need.

Strength, Power and Fertility represented a special trinity of the Gods for the Irish Celts. Druids designated special places of worship to Gods and Goddesses adjacent to water and groves of trees, usually oak.

Among the gods were:

Brigit – Goddess of learning and fertility and healing powers, later adopted by the Irish branch of Christianity under the same name.

Lugh mac Ethnenn – One of the principal Celtic gods of the Tuatha Dé Danann; He was the divine father of Sétanta. He is god of the harvest, a sun god. Lugnasa was the festival held in his honour, halfway between the summer solstice and autumn equinox. In the Táin, he casts a spell on Deichtine after she swallows the mayfly and goes to Brúgh na Bóinne for the winter solstice where Sétanta is conceived.

The Morrígna – were the triple goddesses associated with and personified by, the frenzied havoc of war. They fought on the side of the mythical Tuatha De Danann against both the Fir Bolg and the Formorions. Using their magic, the three sisters / daughters would incite fear and confusion among one side or the other, causing many to fall, in fear, on their own weapons.

Badb—meaning “crow“— (scaldy crow) was one of a trio of war goddesses making up the Mórrígna. One of the “Great Queens” or war goddess, Badb often assumed the form of a screaming crow, causing fear and confusion among warriors in order to move the tide of battle to her favoured side. Badb would also appear before a battle to foreshadow the extent of the carnage to come or to predict the death of certain warriors. Her wailing cries, similar to the cries of the later “bean-sídhe” (banshee) popular in Irish folklore was common among the dead on the battlefield.

Macha – Together with Badb and Nemain, she made up the trio of war/fertility goddesses, known as the Mórrígna in the Tuatha Dé Danann. In the Táin, she tries to seduce Sétanta but is rejected (it is not for a woman’s arse that I undertook this fight, he claimed) and she cursed him threefold; Sétanta wounded her threefold but she tricks him into curing her threefold. Daughter of Sainrith mac Imbaith, and consort to Crunniuc, son of Agnoman, she was the one to lay the original curse on the Ulaidh. Macha was often associated with horses – Sétanta was born at the same time as the colts, one of which was called the Grey of Macha or Liath Macha

Nemain – was the third war spirit of the trinity, and, in the Táin, attacks Medb’s army after they had already been harassed by Sétanta. She sometimes appears as a bean nighe, the weeping washer, by a river, washing the clothes or entrails of a doomed warrior.

Together with her sisters, they often appeared decorated with “mast” of acorn crops – a synonym for human heads harvested by the trio.

Non Sense

I mentioned some time ago in one of these blogs that I still had some of the writings and scribblings from my early days. I started to recently read a journal I had kept while I was living in Grevenbroich, a small town in North Rhine Westphalia, Germany, in the mid seventies. I must have been pretty bored as this was an attempt on my part, sometime in April 1976, to write a nonsense “epic” – although it never got beyond these 17 lines.

I used a stanza from Part VI of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, as follows:

Like one, that on a lonesome road

Doth walk in fear and dread,

And having once turned round, walks on,

And turns no more his head;

Because he knows, a frightful fiend

Doth close behind him tread.

and substiituted words from a German dictionary picked out at random, provided they (more or less) fitted the stresses in the original verse.

Here goes the first stanza .

Bresche dach bis on schnuller schnock

rast quitt in torte and miltz,

for chroming duft heissed laub

nieds on, siet wieges solist dem stiltz

Regung pegels a mitlied mond

Drohne gang, bebot kuhl dritz.

The second stanza of eleven lines was also based on the metre of another poem – kudos to anyone who can identify the original upon which my “version” was based.

In Zyankaliden, tuch mitlied mond

a laufly kneten hell, dross ell

ran dalf, the ranzen skonto, drond

duft abrufs denkbar less to phfond,

eld to a fachless kell.

So Bresche fuss wehrs of emsig gruft

mit hilfs and judes, kern starkéd frag;

und, ulk ver wartens, schirm with bellious recks

goss haffered moty an orden, pecing lenk,

und bund dur egrebs, garbren as the secs

kostliching hafy alts of tivery.

And here’s the “translation”

Bresche goes out on a lonesome night

great sword in hand and shield,

for searching through darkened lands

remains in his thoughts, as long as dealt

cards let a frightful fiend

serve death, because all yield.

In Zyankaliden, did the fearful fiend

a lonely castle hold, where all

that pass, the wretched fief men groan

through hard toil, more or less, to them

came a joyless fall.

So Bresche comes out of his bright land

with arms and nerves, dresséd proper;

and, prepared by his strength, with courageous skills

for he hoped many an honour, winning fame

and many fine prizes, just like the heroes

following many deeds of bravery.

I think the reason I never continued with the “epic” was that, despite having just finished a BA in Old & Middle English, Language and Literature, I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember any other poetry upon which to base my nonsense.

So much for my attempt to join the ranks of the nonsense poets of Edward Lear, Mervin Peake and Lewis Carroll!

Eclectic?

I think I have always used the word eclectic (deriving ideas, style, or taste from a broad and diverse range of sources, according to the dictionary) about myself.

Certainly, looking back over a lifetime of CV’s and resumes, it seems to have been a word I frequently used to describe myself or my approach to particular tasks.

I don’t even know if it is true or not. Maybe I just used that word because it sounded rather grand and is a bit hard to disprove.

Anyway, the reason I mention it is I’ve looked at the books I’ve read recently and I suppose eclectic would sum it up

Spring Muslin by Georgette Heyer – undoubtedly the queen of the “regency” style novels, this was certainly not the bodice ripper I remember my sisters reading back in the sixties, far more “refayned” – it might have been the Angelique series by Sergeanne Colon that I was thinking of, but what a delightful read. Superbly well written and such a frivolous story – the equivalent of several glasses of champagne.

The Company of Strangers by Robert Wilson – a fairly serious espionage thriller, in the cold style of John Le Carré, spanning more than half a century. Set in wartime Germany, and neutral Portugal, Cold war Germany and back in peaceful Britain, a substantial read with perhaps just a little too much emphasis on the street names and localities of Lisbon and its environs.

First Response by Stephen Leather – an edge of the seat ride but a little too … I don’t know but I remember the first Tom Clancy novel I read and it was just a series of repetions whereby Enemy X deployed half a dozen tanks and the Good Guys countered with a dozen tanks and the bad guys came back with a supersonic aerial attack only to be repulsed by other super dooper planes and so on. I’m not saying that First Response was like that, well maybe I am but it all seemed a bit clinical and auto pilot.

Fin Gall by James Nelson all about Vikings raiding Ireland and coming across the mythical Three Crowns of destiny, Quite well written and especially the details with regard to sailing but somehow lacking in substance.

Medieval Memories by Manuel Werner – an excellent premise, a survivor of the battle of Poitiers in the 100 Years war is discovered alive and brings his singular fighting skills to the modern world of big business. A great idea but, to my mind, badly written and sloppily edited and I would have liked more medieval details about the battle of Poitiers.

Sentence of Marriage by Shayne Parkinson – a depressing portrayal of life in a small New Zealand farming community in the 1870’s or so where a dreary, drippy little goody good-shoes is taken advantage of by a smooth talker.

So, two thrillers, two romances, two historical fictions – maybe not as much variety as I had thought.

First of all, I am a bit surprised at how few books I’ve actually read in the last few months but I suppose that is a by product of having thrown myself into my blog which, to be honest, takes up quite a bit more time that I had initially envisaged.

Anyway, the other reason why I seem to be reading so few novels is that I, in fact, am reading a huge amount of stuff on-line as I research for my next novel.

Initially, it was just going to be a fairly short “novella” – Three Spears – detailing the death of Sétanta, aka Cu Chulainn, sometime after the Táin had completed. But then I started to dig a bit deeper and read more translations from the collection of MS collectively known as the Ulster Cycle and I began to get a bit bogged down, so much so that I had to give myself a deadline of the end of May to finish researching and reading about the incident known as “Bricriu’s Feast” or “Fled Bricrend”.

Anyway, I made my deadline, ending up with more than 10,000 words in notes alone and gave myself another month to collect and read the original sources (in translation) for the next episode and it was only yesterday that I conceived of a way to make isolated incidents revolving around Sétanta’s life story become more real but more of that later.

To go back to books, it is the first of June today, let’s see what kind of reading I come up with this month.

Today is also the first day of winter and it looks absolutely gorgeous. A high, clear deep blue sky and it’s time to go out for a cycle.

Travel and Transport

Transport options were fairly limited in Iron Age Ireland. There were no paved roads although at its simplest, trackways of single planks laid end to end across boggy surfaces would have been used by single pedestrians. A more stable surface would consist of tightly packed bundles of hazel or birch twigs laid in thick layers across boggy and marshy land. More elaborate were “hurdle” trackways which consisted of woven panels of brushwood placed end to end, over which logs and crude planks were laid sideways.

Excavation in a peat bog in 1994 uncovered the Corlea trackway, the largest trackway of its kind to be uncovered in Europe, extending as it did for more than a kilometre in a NW – SE direction before turning to a SW direction for a further kilometre.

Near the village of Keenagh in County Longford, Ireland, the trackway dates from approx. 148 BCE and consists of packed hazel, birch and oak planks placed lengthways. The upper surface of the

Photo taken ar Corlea Visitor Centre by author.

trackway was up to four metres in width with planks laid side by side on top of parallel beams and must have been used for wheeled transport.

Hundreds of oak trees would have been felled, trimmed and then labouriously split by pounding in wooden wedges along the natural grain of the wood until the trunk split into two halves, each half being then further split into crude planks. Such a major construction project of the time would have involved hundreds of people and, unlike other bog trackways or “toghers” catering to the needs of local farmers moving animals and goods across country, may have been part of a larger communication

network.

Photo taken at Corlea visitor Centre by author

Overland journeys were made on foot or on horseback or in heavy 4-wheeled wagons, pulled by oxen.

Despite my inclusion of chariots in my novel, Raiding Cúailnge, no archeological evidence has been found to support the use of chariots inIron Age, Celtic ireland although chariot use was widespread among European Celts.

Light, fast two-wheeled chariots were often decorated with bronze and enamel fittings and were pulled by two horses yoked together and controlled by up to five terret rings through which the reins passed, setting the angle at which the charioteer could pull on the reins.

Chariots were usually open, front and back, with double hooped sides of woven wicker, joined to a flat, springy base of interwoven rawhide strips. The base, upon which the warrior would stand, was suspended within the frame of the body, thus providing a very rough form of suspension, similar to the stage coaches used so much later in the Wild West of the USA.

Wheels had twelve wooden spokes on a fixed axel. The outer part of the wheel was the rim and the wheel itself was fashioned either by using an ash sapling which was bent and shaped until it required the requisite shape or made with six felloes. A felloe was an arc cut from a board of timber with each one abutting its neighbour. Iron was forged into a hoop and put on the wheel while still hot and as it cooled, it contracted and tied all components of the wheel together.

Coracles, small circular boats, designed for rivers and lakes, were made of cow leather stretched over a latticed wooden frame and were powered and steered by a single oarsman standing erect leaving room for one or two people only. Larger, sea-going boats had removable oars and a mast for the sail.

Stuffed

I started off, way back now in March, swearing to get on top of all this cyber stuff – social media communication – and I launched myself bravely into Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and WordPress as well as continuing to write and market my first book, Raiding Cúailnge, start research for my second book – tentatively titled “Three Spears” and actually live a normal life with all that entails – getting up in the morning, feeding the chickens, pottering around in the garden, going for a short cycle, endlessly devising the shortest and flattest routes between home and other points and all the other humdrum aspects of daily life.

And I’m stuffed.

I’ve just about managed to continue WordPress and my three blogs – Celtic Trivia, Book Stuff and Curves- and start scribbling notes for Three Spears but I am afraid everything else has gone by the board. I just don’t seem to have the time to do them all and certainly I can’t remember the last time I bothered to look at Twitter or LinkedIn.

As for Facebook …

I remember a knowledgeable guru told me that I should narrow my focus and concentrate on just one aspect of social media. “Make it yours” he told me sternly and he opined that I should focus on Facebook.

Well, of course I didn’t and I suppose it is too late now given that I seem to have poured my energy into WordPress. I think it is the fact that WordPress remains a bit similar to the hole in a tree down in the local park (which I cycle past). I post stuff here and I feel it is the same as if I stuff it into a hole in the tree and I have no idea if anyone ever reads it or bothers to look at it but for some obscure reason, I enjoy shoving a nugget into the bole of the tree and leaving it there for someone to discover – posthumously!

Whereas with Facebook, I feel constrained in some way I haven’t fully analysed as yet. I think it all comes down to that vague, unidentifiable fear I mentioned ages ago – hmm, on Facebook or on Word Press? I am sure it is just a question of tightening up a nut here and a screw there and making a few fine adjustments to the way I present my Facebook page but at the moment – although I haven’t checked for weeks – I feel inundated with Facebook things – are they posts, tweets, messages, mails? – with the whole world constantly updating their whatever it is and uploading new photos of themselves – I can tell because I get a constant barrage of beeps and whistles from my mobile phone telling me that I “can’t be a man ‘cos (I) don’t smoke the same cigarettes as (you)” – thank you Nanker Phelge.

Anyway, the point is that while I struggle to continue with the triad of blogs on WordPress as well as continuing to work on Three Spears, I just don’t seem to have the time to mess around on FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+ and I have yet to make a hash of Tumblr, Instagram and Gawd knows what else I can ignore!

Genres and Writing

I mentioned somewhere previously that I had started “work’ on my next novel. After all, you can’t really call yourself an author unless you have about half a dozen trilogies to your name so … anyway I began. Scribbling away in my new notepad as well as in MS Word – actually I like a notebook and pen. Oh don’t let me go down that path the endless discussion between writing with paper and pen as opposed to on a keyboard. People come to blows over things like that, I understand. Anyway, I will just say let me get on with my vapid scribblings on my hand-scuffed vellum, bleached ox-hide covered notebook. Anyway the point is that I was going through notes and points of views and characters and settings – and all the various possibilities of beginning a novel or a story (there are apparently something like 10,000,000,00, 000 moving possibilities within the first ten moves in a chess game. Actually, there are one hundred and sixty-nine million, five hundred and eighteen thousand, eight hundred and twenty-nine followed by twenty-one ciphers and no, I haven’t counted them myself. In fact I don’t even know how to play chess – Oh, Gawd, another learning curve?).

Anyway, I am discovering it is the same with a book beginning. I can start anywhere I like and in whatever genre suits my purpose. Reading the translations of the early Irish documents from the 8th century and is preserved in The Book of the Dun Cow (c. 1100) I found myself bursting out laughing at various points at the machinations of the characters and the tongue in cheek descriptions given by some unknown clerics back centuries ago. Maybe I’ll make a new genre, or at least add to the corpus of humour historical. I bow down to the past master – The Flashman creator, what a ripper. I love him, but I am not attempting to make my characters in any way the same as Harry Flashman but …

Anyway, the point is – a new genre – Historical Humour / Humorous Hisorica?

Do I have it in me to be a funny man?

Bards, Druids and Knowledge

In a society which valued oral traditions over the written word, story-tellers or a seanachi and bards played a vital role in linking disparate groups and providing a common identity through shared stories and histories. A bard learned all the different types of poetry and memorized hundreds of songs, poems and legends. They also learned how to play instruments and to read and write although music and poetry was never written down. A bard was the first step taken towards becoming a druid which could take up to twenty years learning by heart the verses and stories. Such sacred knowledge was considered too important to be written down, hence the current lack of information as to the exact role that druids played.

Druid meant “Knowledge of the Oak” which, along with Mistletoe, was considered sacred. Special groves of oak trees provided sanctified, sacrificial area for rites central to the Celtic way of life. What those rites were is impossible to know, given that nothing was ever written down. I imagine druids performed sacrifices and rituals which might actually match the self same rituals we often undergo in our lifetimes – births, deaths, anniversaries, celebration of the seasons and so on. Whether they had a more sinister side as in human sacrifice, I suppose it is possible but certainly not the norm.

Mistletoe was believed to have magical powers and, when growing on an oak tree, must only be cut with a golden sickle.

Druids believed some days were luckier than others and would confer powerful totems of strength, fertility and power, as represented by wild boars, elks and wolves, on warriors.

What medical knowledge current within the Roman Empire would also have been known in Iron Age Ireland. Medical practices such as using maggots to eat wounded and diseased flesh would have been commonplace while boiling willow branches to make a bitter tisane containing some of the pain killing properties of modern day aspirin would be well known. Spider webs and certain types of mosses were packed into and over wounds and apparently acted in some sort of anti-biotic way while valuable and imported Cedar oil was used by the druids to preserve human heads.

Times and Seasons

I should have posted this about a week ago as the time was germane to the topic but here goes now anyway.

The Iron Age Celts counted time in terms of nights rather than days and the passing of moons rather than months while the celebration of Féis, or festivals, at regular intervals marked the passing of the years.

The most commonly observed féis included:

Bealtaine (May 1) which was observed by lighting bonfires, the smoke of which had purifying powers and was used to kill pests on cattle. I think it might also have been an early harvest time but i couldn’t swear to it.

Next up was Lugnasa aka Lughnasadh and Lughnasa. (Aug. 1) which was the festival marking the beginning of the harvest season. Originally it was held on or about halfway between the summer solstice and autumn equinox. The festival itself is named after the god Lugh. It involved great gatherings that included druidic ceremonies, ritual athletic contests (most notably the Tailteann Games, Áenach Tailten which were held at Tailtin in County Meath), feasting, matchmaking and trading while community rites included an offering of the first of the grain crops, a feast of the new food and of bilberries, the sacrifice of a bull and a ritual dance-play. Much of this would have taken place on top of hills and mountains.

Samhain (Nov. 1) was the start of the Celtic year and was, again, a time for sacrifices and community gatherings. Rememberance of spirits of the dead was a prominent feature while the festival also marked the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter or the “darker half” of the year, the time when cattle were brought back down from the summer pastures and when livestock were slaughtered for the winter. As at Bealtaine, special bonfires were lit. These were deemed to have protective and cleansing powers.

Finally, Imbolc (Feb. 1) marked the beginning of spring and fertility, renewal and purification and the yearly cycle continued its round.

Interestingly, in the fifth Century when St. Patrick brought Christianity to Ireland, rather than trying to stamp out these “pagan” festivals, the early church commandeered them – Samhain becoming All Souls Day and Easter taking over Bealtaine. St. Paddy himself used the sun symbol of the god Lugh superimposed on the Christian cross to make what is widely known now as the “celtic cross”.

A follow -up to “A Rod for my Own Back”

I think I mentioned some time before that I really needed to be goaded, cajoled and pushed into doing things because my natural indolence often pre-empts unilateral action on my part.

Anyway, even though I was slaving away on my book –Raiding Cúailnge – for years, I had neither a title not any real idea of getting it published. And then a friend of mine – we had been friends since we were seven years old when I broke my collar bone sliding in my school socks down his linoleum covered hallway – contacted me from Nantes, where he had been living for the last twenty years or so, to announce, out of the blue, that his book was being published. It was like a bucket of icy water thrown in my face. The cheek of him – to write – and publish a book before I had gotten around to doing one. Anyway, the immediate result was that it galvanised me into action and within a short space of time – well, probably two years, I had chosen a title and finished off my rambling novel based on old Irish manuscripts about Ireland’s legendary hereo, Cú Chulainn.

Anyway, Michael – although for some reason I always refer to him as Mick – asked me to write a review of it on Amazon and I scribbled something like “if your friends are loud and boozy, this is the book to give them if you like a mix of Pink Panther style crime and mystery” or something like that.

So, his book – initially a real paper and cover book but now also available as an E-Book – is called The Full Stop Artist by Michael O’Reilly Kennedy and is available on Amazon.

A different style to mine I’d have to admit – I’m more of the plodding historical kind while if you were a fly on the wall during one of the weird dinner parties with which The Full Stop Artist is punctuated, then you would end up as a drunken – and probably – squashed smear.

Iron Age Trade

It is easy to assume that groups of people – tribes, clans and so on – were isolated in the Iron Age. In fact, the opposite was true – trade routes were well established connecting Ireland, Britain and continental Europe. Rome was the only game in town, spreading across North Africa, Mauretania, Cyrenaica, Arabia, Mesopotamia, Parthia, Scythia, Sarmatia, Germania, Gaul and Hispania. There was no Internet, not even a Telex or a news agency but there was the empire and its administrators, its quantity surveyors and its salesmen, purveying its values and influencing its colonies and satellites.

There was a common understanding – and appreciation – of the value of things. “Why do you, with all these grand possessions, still covet our poor huts?” was an apparent lament of the oul’ Brits when Caesar arrived in 55 BCE or something like that. I take that to mean that the Brits had some understanding of what the empire stood for and had prominent citizens and traders visiting huge cites which dwarfed their own, possibly, more humble dwellings. Big fish in small ponds suddenly made aware – but so far ignored – that there were bigger fish in larger ponds.

Anyway, inevitably, people traveled, spreading news, ideas and culture and bringing with them desirable trade items – spices, scents, slaves, ivory from North Africa used for armor (see the account of Ferdia’s armor in The Táin) while the far flung western isle had, at least, both wolf hounds and gold.

Extensive trade was long established with Gaulish Europe along settled sea routes while movement between the east coast of Ireland and what is now Scotland, Wales and England was common. Contact was probably less frequent with Greece, Scythia, Parthia, but shared knowledge – pottery, smelting – could never be unlearned while commodities like copper, tin, enamel, tortoiseshell, Tyrian purple dye from Murex glands, Falernian wine and slaves were common – but expensive – items.