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Irish mythology
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Irish mythology is the mythology of Ireland, which is part of the corpus of Celtic mythology.
The surviving sources allow us to divide the corpus of texts of Irish mythology into four main cycles: the mythological, the Ulad, the Cycle of Finn (or Ossian) and the royal, or historical.
In addition, there is a certain amount of materials that are not included in the cycles.
Content
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1 Ireland is the "most Celtic" country 2 Sources of the Sagas 2.1 The mythological cycle of the Sagas 2.2 The Ulad cycle of the Sagas 2.3 The cycle of Finn, or Ossian 2.4 The royal or historical cycle
3 Sources 4 Literature 4.1 Sources on the Internet
5 Links
Ireland is the "most Celtic" country[edit / edit wiki text]
The main problem in the study of Celtic mythology is that very few reliable sources of it have come down to us.
Basically, we judge about the Celts and their culture by what was written by ancient researchers.
The attitude to such evidence is, of course, cautious, since it is very difficult to distinguish what is truly Celtic in such evidence, and what is alluvial, since the Celts were defeated by Rome, and Gaul was quickly Romanized.
The ancient authors themselves were not devoid of a certain bias and evaluated what they saw according to their ideas about the gods and the heavenly hierarchy.
In this sense, the position of Ireland is special, since it was not conquered by the Romans, and therefore was freed from the influence of an alien culture.
Another problem could be the process of adopting Christianity (IV V centuries), since Christianization has always been accompanied by the displacement of pagan culture.
Fortunately, the Irish sagas that have come down to us are practically devoid of any noticeable Christian influence.
For this reason, when studying Celtic mythology, the corpus of Irish legends is of the greatest interest.
Sources of sagas[edit / edit wiki text]
The origin of the Irish sagas is not fully clarified.
It is even debatable that at first they existed in oral form, and then, with the arrival of Christianity in Ireland, they were written down (and not invented) by monks.
In any case, the recording of Celtic sagas that form an epic was perhaps the greatest cultural achievement of medieval Ireland.
The most ancient of these surviving manuscripts is the "Book of the Brown Cow" (Con. XI beginning. XII century.), which got its name for the parchment on which it was written.
It is kept in the library of the Royal Irish Academy.
Less ancient are the "Book of Leinster" (beginning of the XII century, the library of Trinity College Dublin) and the Rawlinson manuscript B 502 (Rawl.)
(The Bodley Library of the University of Oxford).
At the same time, most of the materials date back to a much earlier time than the time of the creation of these m Linguistic analysis shows that some prose passages date back to the VII century, and some of the poems could have been written in the VI century.
There is also a collection of four manuscripts that appeared in the west of Ireland in the late XIV early XV century: "The Yellow Book of Lecan", "The Great Book of Lecan", "The Book of Ui Main", and "The Ballymote Book".
The first of them contains part of the earliest known version of the theft of a bull from Kualnge and is stored at Trinity College.
The other three are at the Royal Academy.
It is worth paying attention to other manuscripts of the XV century, (for example, "The Book of Fermoy") and later syncretic works, such as" Foras Feasa ar Éirinn "("History of Ireland") by Geoffrey Keating (ca.1640), especially considering that the later compilers may have had the now extinct manuscripts.
It should be borne in mind, however, that most of the manuscripts were created by Christian monks who experienced ambivalent feelings: the desire to perpetuate the native culture and religious confrontation with pagan beliefs; as a result of this cognitive dissonance, some gods were euphemized.
Later sources could also contain a propaganda component, since they were intended to create their own Irish history, which could withstand comparison with the mythical origin of the British invaders from the founders of Rome, spread by Galfrid of Monmouth and others.
There was also a pronounced tendency to fit Irish genealogies to the diagrams of Greek or biblical genealogies known at that time.
Previously, it was considered indisputable that medieval Irish literature preserved the ancient tradition in the form of the oral culture of the ancient Celts, which has practically not changed over the centuries.
Kenneth Jackson described the Ulad cycle as a "window into the Iron Age", and Garrett Olmsted tried to draw parallels between the "Stealing of the Bull from Kualnge" and the iconography of the Gundestrup Cauldron.
However, this position has been challenged by"revisionist" philologists, who believe that most of the texts were created during the Christian era as a deliberate imitation of the epic of classical literature that came with Latin.
Revisionists found in the" Theft of the Bull from Cualnge "fragments, as it seemed to them, influenced by the "Iliad", and pointed out the fact of the existence of "Togail Troi", a very early Irish adaptation of the" Aeneid "contained in the" Book of Leinster", and also drew attention to the fact that the material culture of the text, as a rule, is closer to the time of writing the text than to the distant past.
The only thing they agreed on was that the text material should be studied more critically.
Mythological cycle of sagas[edit / edit wiki text]
This is a special cycle, since its sagas are sometimes considered as cosmogonic myths of the Celts, that is, myths about the creation of the world, although in this case we are not talking about such grandiose stories as the birth of the universe, like Babylonian and Scandinavian legends, but only about the design of the present appearance of Ireland and the tribes that inhabited it.
The mythological cycle has been preserved the least well of all four cycles.
The most important sources are the "Old Places" and the "Book of Captures".
Other sagas of the cycle are "The Dream of Angus", "The Matchmaking to Etain" and"The (Second) Battle of Mag Tuired", as well as one of the most famous Irish sagas "The Tragedy of the Children of Lear".
"The Book of Captures — is a pseudo history of Ireland, tracing the ancestry of the Irish back to the time before Noah.
The history of the country is presented in the form of a series of invasions, or "captures" of Ireland by various successive arriving peoples.
"The Antiquity of places" is a grandiose work on the onomastics of early Ireland, setting out in the form of a sequence of poems the legends about the names of various memorable places.
It includes a lot of important information about the characters and stories of the Mythological cycle, including the Battle of Taltiu, in which the Tuata de Danann (one of the most exciting tribes in Ireland) were defeated by the Milesians.
It is important to note that in the Middle Ages, the Tuatha De Danan were considered not so much as gods, but as the shape shifting magical population of Golden Age Ireland.
Texts such as the Book of Captures and the Battle of Mag Tuired represent them as kings and heroes of the distant past, completing the cycle with stories of their death.
However, there is strong evidence, both in the texts and in other Celtic sources, that they were once considered as deities.
The sagas of the Tuata de Danann make up the vast majority of the Mythological Cycle.
The Uladsky cycle of sagas[edit / edit wiki text]
The settlement cycle is formed around the beginning of the Christian era, most of the actions take place in the regions of Ulster and Connacht.
This cycle consists of a series of heroic stories concerning the life of Conchobar mac Ness, King of Ulster, the great hero Cuchulainn, son of Lugh, their friends, lovers and enemies.
The cycle is named after the Ulads, the population of the north eastern part of Ireland, the action of the stories unfolds around the royal court in Emain Mache, near the modern city of Armagh.
The settlements are closely connected with the Irish colony in Scotland, part of Cuchulainn's training takes place there.
The cycle consists of stories of births, childhood and training, courtship, battles, feasts and deaths of heroes and depicts a military society in which war is a sequence of single skirmishes, and wealth is measured mainly in the number of cattle.
These stories are usually written in prose.
The central work of the cycle is the Theft of a bull from Kualnge.
Other important texts of the Ulad cycle are the tragic death of the only son of Aife, the Feast of Brikren and the Destruction of the House of Da Derg.
A well known part of this cycle is the Exile of the Sons of Usneh, better known as the tragedy of Deirdre and the source of plays by John Sing, William Yeats and Vincent Woods.
In some respects, this cycle is close to the mythological one.
Some of the characters of the mythological arise in the Uladsky, in the same form of magic that has changed the form.
Although some characters, such as Medb or Ku Roi, we can suspect that they were once deities, and Cuchulainn often shows superhuman perfection, the characters are mortal and embedded in a certain time and place.
If the mythological cycle corresponds to the Golden Age, then the Uladsky cycle corresponds to the Age of Heroes.
The cycle of Finn, or Ossian[edit / edit wiki text]
These sagas also tell about heroes, but if in the sagas of the Ulad cycle the heroes are mostly single, then this cycle of sagas is dedicated to the camaraderie of warriors and their pleasure from being in the "chosen society of beautiful young warriors".
The central saga in this group of stories is "The Pursuit of Diarmaid and Graine", dedicated to love and the tragic death of lovers.
Perhaps such a change of mood in the sagas is due to the fact that the heyday of the cycle coincides with the spread in Europe of courtly poetry of troubadours and trouveurs, as well as novels of the Arthurian type.
Royal or historical cycle[edit / edit wiki text]
The sagas of the last, royal, cycle tell not so much about kings, but about the kingdom as an idea, about the dynasties of different regions of Ireland, the change of royal houses and their destinies.
This cycle includes stories about such kings as Conaire the Great, Conn of a Hundred Battles, Cormac mac Art, Niall the Nine Hostages or Domnall mac Aeda.
Sources[edit / edit wiki text]
Literature[edit / edit wiki text]
Shirokova N. S. Myths of the Celtic peoples M.: Astrel: AST: Transitkniga, 2005 — - 431 (1) p.: ill — - (Myths of the peoples of the world).
ISBN 5-17-019444-7 (AST Publishing House LLC), ISBN 5-271-08709-3 (Astrel Publishing House LLC), ISBN 5-9578-0397-9 (Transitkniga LLC).
McCulloch John Arnott.
Religion of the ancient Celts / Translated from the English by S. P. Yevtushenko.
- Moscow: ZAO Tsentrpoligraf, 2004 — - 336 p. ISBN 5-9524-1303 X Rolleston Thomas.
Myths, legends and legends of the Celts.
/ Translated from the English by E. V. Glushko.
- M.: ZAO Tsentrpoligraf, 2004 — - 349 p. ISBN 5-9524-1063-4 Celtic Mythology / Translated from English by S. Golova and A. Golova.
- Moscow: Eksmo Publishing House, 2004 — - 640 p.
ISBN 5-699-01165 X
Sources on the Internet[edit / edit wiki text]
Overview of Irish sources
Links[edit / edit wiki text]
Online library of irl.
sag.
Russian.
yaz.
Irish Myths in the paintings of J. Fitzpatrick
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Celts Ancient Celts
Celtology People Name • Gaels • Britons • Picts • Gauls • Celtiberians • See also: Pre Celtic population of Western Europe Places Gaelic Ireland • Dal Riada / Alba • Prehistoric Ireland • Prehistoric Wales • Prehistoric Scotland • British Iron Age / Roman Britain / Sub Roman Britain •
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Modern
Renaissance Modern Celtic Nations * Pan Celticism (Celtic Congress • Celtic League) • Music • Neo Paganism (Reenactment) Languages Proto Celtic language • Insular (British • Goidelskie) * Continental (Celtiberian • Gaulish • Galatian • Lepontian) • Q Celtic and P Celtic languages Holidays Samhain / Kalan Gaeav • Imbolk/Candlemass • Beltane/Kalan Mai • Lughnasad Lists Celts • Tribes • Gods • List of Celtic loanwords
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Category: Irish Mythology
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