Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) by James MacKillop Read Free Book Online Page B

follows her as she flees toward the sea.
    The third Irish river goddess, commemorated in James Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake
(1939), is Anna Livia Plurabelle, the spirit of Dublin’s River Liffey. Contained in the name is an allusion to Ana/Anu, the older goddess. Joyce did not invent the figure, as is commonly supposed. He did contrive the nonce word ‘Plurabelle’ [more than one beauty] and added it to ‘Anna Livia’, a popular pseudo-Latinization of
Abhainn na Life
, the River of the Liffey, the plain in which Dublin is situated. As with so many names in
Finnegans Wake
, this one contains within it several cross-linguistic puns. During the 1990s a statue and fountain of Anna Livia Plurabelle on Dublin’s O’Connell Street met with public ridicule and was replaced with the Millennium Spire. An earlier name for the river was
Ruirteach
[rough, tempestuous].

BIRDS, ANIMALS, FISH
    The Celts, like all humans, have seen analogues for their values and themselves in their fellow mortals, feathered, furred and finned. The impulse to view the hawk as embodying the predatory motive in humans, or the fox as incarnating the wily, is hardly unique to any culture. In the oral traditions recorded in Celtic countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, virtually every creature found in Europe is assigned some human attribute or value to enrich a narrative. In many instances a hare or a cow in a Breton or Scottish Gaelic story is no different from counterparts in other European languages. Yet in other instances, such as those concerning the crane, the boar or the salmon, we can see echoes from the earliest materials: animals carved on Iron Age altars, or figures of zoomorphic gods, where animal characteristics are given to human forms. Even in ancient culture, though, not every representation is of the same value; some are divine or totemistic, others merely decorative. Our intention here is to single out the birds, animals and fish who appear continuously over the centuries.
    From the earliest times, even the proto-Celtic Urnfield period,
c
.1500–800 BC , Celtic art shows a marked preference for water birds of different kinds. A cormorant appears to be drawing a chariot holding the sun. Other water birds pull a chariot in which idols are seated. Ducks are shown beside a solar wheel or forming the prow and stern of a boat carrying the sun-disc. Swans and cygnets, together with the non-aquatic ravens, decorate a horse-prod or flesh fork from Iron Age Ireland, found at Dunaverney. Some commentators see in these examples associations with a cult of the sun in its healing powers.
    More significant are the long-legged wading birds, the egret and the crane, which can resemble one another in badly worn 3,000-year-old icons. The egret, distinguished by long white tail-feathers, appears in Urnfield icons and most prominently in triplet form at a temple of the Gaulish god Esus. A common pairing puts an egret on the back of a bull, an important cult animal, as we shall see. But the egret does not survive so visibly in later vernacular tradition.
    The crane, with its long bill, fared better, perhaps because of the perception that the bird was a transformed human. Julius Caesar (first century BC ) reported that the ancient Britons refused to eat the crane’s flesh under the impression cranes had been human in a previous life. Giraldus Cambrensis (twelfth century) reported the same taboo in Ireland. The crane is also found in Urnfield iconography, at the temple of Esus, and may also be paired with bulls, but it appears dozens of times in vernacular, especially Irish, narrative, often metamorphosed and magical. One Aífe, lover of Ilbrec, was transformed into a crane by Iuchra, a jealous rival. Living as an amphibian for 200 years, she inhabited the realm of Manannán mac Lir, the sea god, sometimes seen as her ‘husband’. When she died, Manannán made her skin into the renowned crane bag, containing marvellous artistic treasures.
Known