The fact is that the whole story of the origin of the Gaels in Scythia
or in Armenia, their wanderings by land and sea, their settlement in
Spain, and their landing in Ireland, is an artificial product of the
schools, and does not represent a primitive tradition. It must have
displaced the popular tradition. If so, can we find any surviving
traces of the older native account of the origin of the Irish Celts? I
think we can. We have seen that the Tuatha Dé Danann were an immortal
race. They were not all gods. We are expressly told that they were
gods and non-gods. They were _tuatha_, i.e., states or communities
like those of the ancient Irish people. Their chiefs were gods. When
they first came to Ireland, their king was Nuadu Silverhand. As a god,
Nuadu was worshipped also in Britain, as several inscriptions of the
Roman period testify. From him, according to several genealogical
tracts, the whole Gaelic population of Ireland was descended. Other
gods as well as Nuadu are clearly named in the ancient pedigrees.
We have seen how the divine race of the Tuatha De Danann came to
Ireland in the clouds of the air, without ship or boat, and alighted
on the Iron Mountain in the heart of the country. I have found
nothing to show clearly whether their human descendants, the Gaels,
were thought to have originated in Ireland or outside of it, except
perhaps one scrap of ancient tradition. It was from the northern parts
of Europe that the Tuatha De Danann came. The Gaels, according to the
learned legend already discussed, came from Spain to south-western
Ireland. There is, however, a totally distinct version of their
arrival, which says that they first arrived at the opposite corner, in
the north-east, in the locality of Fair Head. If this is genuine
tradition, it would follow that the Gaels, the offspring of the gods
they worshipped, were thought to have originated outside of Ireland,
somewhere in northern Europe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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