Human sacrifice in medieval Irish literature
By Jacqueline Borsje, ed. J.N. Bremmer (Leuven, 2007)
Introduction: The earliest reference to Celtic religion mentions human sacrifice. Sopater, a playwright from the late fourth century B.C.. writes about the Celts:
Among them it is the custom, whenever they win any success in battle, to sacrifice their captives to the gods…
Sopater supplies us with the main elements for a definition of human sacrifice: people kill certain other human beings for a specific reason as an offering to supernatural beings.
There are three types of written sources available that give information about so-called Celtic human sacrifice. First, Greek and Latin writings mention several types of human sacrifice purported to have been performed by various Celtic populations. Secondly, we have medieval texts from the inhabitants of countries, where a Celtic language is spoken: Ireland. Scoltand and Wales. Thirdly, folklore customs from these same countries from the last centuries have beensaid to be survivals of the practice of human sacrifice.
What strikes us immediately is that we have no direct witnesses from the Celts themselves: the information comes from Classical authors, Christian descendants of the Celts and modern scholarship. A survey and analysis of all these texts could easily fill a book , which is why the present paper is limited to the the literary motif of human sacrifice in medieval Irish literature? The other sources will be referred to only when relevant.
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27 Aug 2010
Tags: Celtic, Ireland, Literature
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Livestock in the Brehon Laws
O’Loan, J.
Agricultural History Review, Volume 7 part 2 (1959)
Abstract
In his conquest of Gaul (58-50 B.c.) Caesar liquidated most of the Celtic civilizations of western Europe, apart from those in Britain and Ireland. If the Celtic kingdoms of the continental mainland had any literature at the time of their downfall it perished then, and so the literary history of Celtic western Europe is almost exclusively dependent on surviving Irish documents. Considering the vicissitudes through which the majority of these passed, it is amazing that so many have survived. As a source of historical information, the most important, and in fact in its original source the earliest, body of this literature to survive is the Brehon Law tracts. A concise explanation of what these tracts are in nature and origin is given as follows by our best known authority, Dr D. A. Binchy.– “For centuries this ancient lore (Old Irish Law Tracts) was preserved orally in the native professional schools. Then in the seventh century–or perhaps even in the sixth–doubtless under the influence of the Christian monastic schools, it was committed to writing, and finally about the beginning of the eighth century it was embodied in a series of canonical texts which were henceforward regarded as sacrosanct and immutable, capable of being interpreted by later jurists but not of being altered. The pattern of society outlined in these ancient tracts goes back far beyond the eighth century- indeed to pre-Christian times, for though the Irish Laws… have a Christian facade their basic structure is pagan. ”
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13 Jan 2010
Tags: Celtic, Early Middle Ages, Ecclesiastical History, Ireland, Literature, Monasticism, Seventh century, Sixth Century
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Medievalism and Joan Grigsby’s The Orchid Door
Brother Anthony
Medieval and Early Modern English Studies, Volume 17 No. 1 (2009)
Abstract
The Celtic revival of the 1890s and the opening years of the 20th century was marked by a series of works, poems, fiction and dramas, published under the name of Fiona MacLeod, supposedly a peasant woman living in the Hebrides. In 1905 it was revealed that the author had in fact been William Sharp, a Scottish writer with no Celtic credentials. Joan Rundall, who grew up in the Scottish Lowlands, published poems in her Peatsmoke volume of 1919 that seem clearly to have been influenced by the works ascribed to Fiona MacLeod. Moving to Japan, then to Korea, she published further volumes as Joan S. Grigsby, first a collection of poems in part inspired by a medieval Japanese legend and finally a collection of medieval Korean poems. She was not the translator of these latter, but had adapted translations made by James Gale. Joan Grigsby’s poems show a clear relationship with Celtic medievalism, and at the same time they demand to be approached in a feminist perspective. There proves to be a close relationship between the two categories.
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6 Jan 2010
Tags: Celtic, Drama, Medievalism, Poetry, Scotland, Women’s Studies
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