Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) by James MacKillop
Authors: James MacKillop
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in Irish as the
corrbolg
, the crane bag is at once one of the most mysterious and most commented-upon artefacts in early Irish tradition. Two heroes were thought to have owned it at different times: Lug Lámfhota and Fionn mac Cumhaill. Some modern commentators see the crane bag as part of an origin myth of language and consequently of poetry. Initially Manannán filled the crane bag with items peculiarly precious to him: his own knife and shirt, the king of Scotland’s shears, the king of Lochlainn’s helmet, the bones of Assal’s swine and the girdle of the great whale’s back. The substance and contents of the bag imply to some modern readers that it should also have contained the letters of the ogham alphabet. Used for inscriptions before the introduction of Christianity, ogham employs stick-like ciphers, each of them the counterpart of a letter of the Roman alphabet, as suggested by the legs of flying cranes. This association of the crane and the crane bag with writing became more widely known during the era of the influential Irish literary journal,
The Crane Bag
, 1977–81, which reprinted the story in each issue.
The crane is not always benign, however. In ancient belief, those cranes who were not transformed humans were thought stingy and disagreeable. A soldier passing such a crane on his way to battle was doomed. Linked with this perception is the medieval Irish portrait of
glám dícenn
[poet’s execration]. A poet used this as a verbal weapon of war, by standing like a crane on one leg, with one eye closed and one arm extended. A victim of
glám dícenn
might have his face blistered or lose his life.
The swan, a symbol of beauty, good luck, and travel to a world beyond the physical, appears even more frequently than the crane in both ancient culture and later narrative tradition. Somewhat contradictorily, the swan may represent both purity and sexual energy, the latter based on its long, phallic neck and observed proclivity for frequent coitus. Again found in Urnfield and Hallstatt (800–600 BC ) cultures, the swan is represented in art surviving all over Europe. Swans draw a wheeled cauldron (seventh–sixth centuries BC ) found at Orastie, Romania. At Alésia in eastern France, three mothers appear in a sculpture with three children, while a fourth child is seated in a boat and accompanied by a swan.
The best-known Irish swan narrative is
Oidheadh Chlainne Lir
[The Tragic Story of the Children of Lir] in which the four fostered children, Áed, Finnguala, Fiachra and Conn, are put under a spell by their cruel stepmother Aífe. They must live as swans in three exiles, each of 300 years’ duration. In other Irish literary cycles, a flock of destructive swans ravages the area around Emain Macha, Co. Armagh, at the time of the hero Cúchulainn’s conception. These swans wear chains of gold and silver, as does Cáer Ibormeith, beloved of Angus Óg in
Aislinge Oenguso
[The Dream of Angus], when she is metamorphosed into a swan. Men as well as women may in these tales take swan form, as Mongán of the Irish Cycles of the Kings does. So does the otherworldly Midir in the third part of the ninth-century Irish story,
Tochmarc Étaíne
[The Wooing of Étaín], after he wins an amorous embrace from the beautiful Étaín and takes swan form to fly through the smoke hole in the roof.
The boar, declares Anne Ross in her authoritative
Pagan Celtic Britain
(1967), ‘is, without doubt, the cult animal
par excellence
of the Celts’. Citations abound in every aspect of Celtic culture, from the eleventh century BC to the present. On one of the greatest treasures of Celtic religion, the Gundestrup Cauldron found in Denmark, we may see two warriors with boar-crests on their helmets while two demi-gods hold small boars aloft. A British tribe of Roman times called themselves the Orci or ‘people of the boar’. The boar was found all over Europe in early times and was, along with the bear, the most aggressive and
corrbolg
, the crane bag is at once one of the most mysterious and most commented-upon artefacts in early Irish tradition. Two heroes were thought to have owned it at different times: Lug Lámfhota and Fionn mac Cumhaill. Some modern commentators see the crane bag as part of an origin myth of language and consequently of poetry. Initially Manannán filled the crane bag with items peculiarly precious to him: his own knife and shirt, the king of Scotland’s shears, the king of Lochlainn’s helmet, the bones of Assal’s swine and the girdle of the great whale’s back. The substance and contents of the bag imply to some modern readers that it should also have contained the letters of the ogham alphabet. Used for inscriptions before the introduction of Christianity, ogham employs stick-like ciphers, each of them the counterpart of a letter of the Roman alphabet, as suggested by the legs of flying cranes. This association of the crane and the crane bag with writing became more widely known during the era of the influential Irish literary journal,
The Crane Bag
, 1977–81, which reprinted the story in each issue.
The crane is not always benign, however. In ancient belief, those cranes who were not transformed humans were thought stingy and disagreeable. A soldier passing such a crane on his way to battle was doomed. Linked with this perception is the medieval Irish portrait of
glám dícenn
[poet’s execration]. A poet used this as a verbal weapon of war, by standing like a crane on one leg, with one eye closed and one arm extended. A victim of
glám dícenn
might have his face blistered or lose his life.
The swan, a symbol of beauty, good luck, and travel to a world beyond the physical, appears even more frequently than the crane in both ancient culture and later narrative tradition. Somewhat contradictorily, the swan may represent both purity and sexual energy, the latter based on its long, phallic neck and observed proclivity for frequent coitus. Again found in Urnfield and Hallstatt (800–600 BC ) cultures, the swan is represented in art surviving all over Europe. Swans draw a wheeled cauldron (seventh–sixth centuries BC ) found at Orastie, Romania. At Alésia in eastern France, three mothers appear in a sculpture with three children, while a fourth child is seated in a boat and accompanied by a swan.
The best-known Irish swan narrative is
Oidheadh Chlainne Lir
[The Tragic Story of the Children of Lir] in which the four fostered children, Áed, Finnguala, Fiachra and Conn, are put under a spell by their cruel stepmother Aífe. They must live as swans in three exiles, each of 300 years’ duration. In other Irish literary cycles, a flock of destructive swans ravages the area around Emain Macha, Co. Armagh, at the time of the hero Cúchulainn’s conception. These swans wear chains of gold and silver, as does Cáer Ibormeith, beloved of Angus Óg in
Aislinge Oenguso
[The Dream of Angus], when she is metamorphosed into a swan. Men as well as women may in these tales take swan form, as Mongán of the Irish Cycles of the Kings does. So does the otherworldly Midir in the third part of the ninth-century Irish story,
Tochmarc Étaíne
[The Wooing of Étaín], after he wins an amorous embrace from the beautiful Étaín and takes swan form to fly through the smoke hole in the roof.
The boar, declares Anne Ross in her authoritative
Pagan Celtic Britain
(1967), ‘is, without doubt, the cult animal
par excellence
of the Celts’. Citations abound in every aspect of Celtic culture, from the eleventh century BC to the present. On one of the greatest treasures of Celtic religion, the Gundestrup Cauldron found in Denmark, we may see two warriors with boar-crests on their helmets while two demi-gods hold small boars aloft. A British tribe of Roman times called themselves the Orci or ‘people of the boar’. The boar was found all over Europe in early times and was, along with the bear, the most aggressive and
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