Celtic
22 findings, grouped by tradition.
Celtic21
- TriquetraIn 1903 J. Romilly Allen, cataloguing Scotland's early Christian stones, judged the triquetra 'purely ornamental' outside Meigle and Llanfrynach, with 'not the least foundation' for a Trinity meaning.
- TriskelionNewgrange's tri-spiral dates to a tomb built around 3200 BC; knowth.com places it 'at least 2500 years before the Celts reached Ireland'.
- Awen'Flowing spirit' is not what awen means. It is William Owen's etymology in his Welsh and English Dictionary of 1793, which split the word into aw, 'a flowing', and en, 'a spirit'. Owen himself defined awen as genius, the muse.
- Dara KnotThe knot is usually said to be named from doire, 'oak tree', but Ó Dónaill's Irish dictionary of 1977 gives doire as an oak-wood or grove. The oak itself is dair, genitive darach.
- OghamNo stone glosses its letters as trees; that doctrine survives earliest in the Book of Ballymote, about 1391. The ogham tree calendar is Robert Graves's, 1948.
- The DruidsJohn Aubrey made Stonehenge a druid temple in manuscript. Edmund Gibson's 1695 Camden printed his view, and Stukeley spread it in 1740.
- SamhainThe Wheel of the Year that frames it today is modern: Aidan Kelly says he named its summer solstice and autumn equinox, Litha and Mabon, in 1974.
- Sheela na GigThe name came from Tipperary country people: in 1844 the Royal Irish Academy heard that the Rochestown figure had given it to all the others.
- TaliesinThe Historia Brittonum of about 830 names Taliesin only as a famed poet; the cauldron tale survives first in Elis Gruffudd's chronicle of about 1552.
- Imbas ForosnaiStokes's 1868 edition prints this article from the Yellow Book of Lecan copy, the glossary's expanded recension, among 'Additional Articles'.
- Auraicept na nÉces and the Ogham TractsThe tract does not insist on trees. In the Book of Ballymote text (Calder, 1917) the letters are named 'secundum alios' after Fénius Farsaid's noblest scholars and, by others, after forest trees 'metaphorically'.
- The Fae and the Fair FolkIn her February 1916 introduction, Gregory contrasted older accounts of fairies as gods with contemporary belief in fallen angels.
- The Banshee (Bean Sídhe)Wilde’s 1919 edition follows a banshee overseas to an O’Grady family in Canada.
- The LeprechaunNeither 'small body' nor Douglas Hyde's 'one-shoemaker' of 1888 may be right. In 2012 Jacopo Bisagni derived Old Irish luchorpán from the Latin Luperci, whom early Irish scholars misread as an ancient race. The revised eDIL entry now gives Latin lupercus, with a query.
- The SelkiesThe ballad cited for the stolen seal-skin wife, Child 113, The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry, does not tell that story. Taken down at Snarra Voe, Shetland, and printed in 1852, it has a male selkie father a son on an earthly nurse and foretell both their deaths.
- Merlin (Myrddin Wyllt)Geoffrey did not invent the fatherless boy who reads the dragons under Vortigern's tower. The Historia Brittonum dates itself by the fourth year of King Mermin, whose death the Welsh annals put in 844. There the boy says his name is Ambrosius; Geoffrey made him 'Merlinus, qui et Ambrosius dicebatur'.
- Morgan le FayMorgan's earliest appearance, the Vita Merlini of about 1148, makes her only Arthur's healer. Lucy Allen Paton noted in 1903 that in almost every later romance episode joining her to Arthur she schemes against him. Malory's book, finished in 1469–70, keeps both: the thief of Excalibur's scabbard sits in the barge to Avalon.
- The Green KnightGeorge Lyman Kittredge argued in 1916 that the beheading game comes from the Champion's Bargain ending the Irish saga Fled Bricrend, begun in Lebor na hUidre around 1100. In its ending, kept whole only in a sixteenth-century Edinburgh copy, Cú Roí, disguised as a churl, spares Cú Chulainn and declares him champion.
- Druidry and the Gorsedd of 1792Iolo told readers in 1794 that the Welsh bards stood 'in an uninterrupted succession' from the druids. His proof was his own work: the National Library of Wales counts his 'Secret of the Bards' among his most accomplished forgeries, and in 1921 G. J. Williams proved Iolo wrote fourteen supposedly medieval cywyddau himself.
- VervainPliny credits divining with vervain to the Gauls and names the druids only for mistletoe, selago and samolus. Philemon Holland's 1601 translation made the Gauls druids.
- FoxgloveMother Hutton, said to have sold Withering the foxglove secret, comes from a 1928 Parke-Davis advertisement. Withering names only an old woman in Shropshire.
Modern Druidry1