Storytelling in the Celtic Tradition

By: Ira Allen

First composed in Ireland, possibly as early as 300 BC, the Celtic world-stories were passed from generation to generation in the oral, druidic tradition until the 5th century AD, by which time the druidic priesthood had largely decayed. Bards and wandering minstrels picked up the stories, taking creative license in much the same way that Homer and others are thought to have done with the cycle of stories that eventually became the Iliad and the Odyssey.

The Celtic world-stories and myths were first written down by Irish Christian monks in the 7th century, recorded in fragmentary, legal-minded fashion, in an instance of early Christianity’s near-obsession with note-taking and classification. They have been carried into the modern era by generations of bards, and by generations of classifying Christians, who were still transcribing original Celtic myths as late as the 18th century. In its emphasis on magical orality, the Celtic spiritual path is akin to certain Native American traditions, such as the Lakota and Navajo medicine men and women who told magical stories, as well as to the Greek storytellers and the Old Norse saga-singers.

Celtic spirituality is something of a catch-all term, encompassing several different traditions within Ireland and Wales (where the classifying impulse set in much later, with Welsh monks recording the first myths only in the 13th and14th centuries). It refers to five basic story cycles, four in Ireland and one in Wales. The Irish cycles, translated into English in the early 1900s by Miss Eleanor Hull and Lady Gregory, begin with the Mythological Cycle, which offers rather a brutal series of stories about a very intermingled group of men and gods.

One tale, "The Children of Lir," features Lir, father of the sea god Mananan and of three human boys and of one human girl. A wicked stepmother absconds with the human children and turns them into swans for 900 years. When they are eventually returned to a human state, nearly 1000 years later, they survive only long enough to be baptized and then die, since human beings cannot live that long. This ending was likely modified after the Christianizing Roman invasion.

In a still bloodier myth, "The Death of Conary," Conary’s servant runs to fetch him water during a battle and returns too late, to find two pirates hacking Conary’s head from his lifeless corpse. The servant, mac Cecht, puts the water to the severed head’s lips, and the head thanks him. Subsequently, in a rather bizarre twist, the exhausted mac Cecht retires from the field and is found by an old woman, who pulls a hairy wolf from one of his wounds.

The following three cycles run further and further into the era of Christianity, from the Ulster and Fenian Cycles to the Historical Cycle. This final cycle is comprised of stylized and Christianized stories, and, as one observer has noted, "is the fag-end of Irish-Celtic myth…what happens when monks get hold of your culture."

The Welsh-Celtic tales, collected in The Mabinogian, have a somewhat similar history and composition. They combine early versions of what would later be collected as the Arthurian Legend, and are seen by many as the basis for Celtic spirituality. Beginning with four stories about early British kings, warriors, and wizards—and their interactions with visitors from The Otherworld, a key concept in Celtic spirituality, meeting the same need for a sense of life beyond what we can see everyday as Heaven and Hell do in the Christian tradition—the cycle moves on to four pre-chivalrous folk tales before concluding with three stories that would be recognizable today as Arthurian legends. Only in these final three tales do notions of courtly chivalry become important; in the earlier stories, a harsher, more militaristic kind of code reigns supreme, although a close connection with the natural world is understood to be vital throughout all the stories in this cycle.

In present times as in past, these myths are routinely embellished and even reconceived as individual Celtic and druidic communities try to make their stories meaningful in a constantly changing world. Today, over 33,000 individuals in the United States identify themselves as Druids, subscribing to a world view that mirrors the lessons of the old tales—as they have been told and re-told over the centuries—as closely as possible.