Irish Myth

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Just to say I'm currently writing something up and I'll put it up here on the Pub as a PDF when I'm finished.

It'll basically be a setting book for Traveller, with skills altered for the setting and different careers. Rolling up a character will be typical Traveller. There'll be two sections at the start about society and myth. At the pace I'm going it will be mid-May!

Title is Fánaí - Historical Adventure in Medieval Ireland.

(Fánaí
is Gaelic for Traveller/Wanderer)

fc3a1nac3ad.jpg
 
Just thought some people might find this interesting for an example of the sort of attitudes still around:
 
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Just thought some people find this interesting for an example of the sort of attitudes still around:

This reminds me of the book A Field Guide to the Littlepeople by Nancy Arrowsmith.

She wrote it in German back in the 70s based on folklore but it seems that a number of people take what she presents rather light-heartedly as real history.
 
Just to say I'm currently writing something up and I'll put it up here on the Pub as a PDF when I'm finished.

It'll basically be a setting book for Traveller, with skills altered for the setting and different careers. Rolling up a character will be typical Traveller. There'll be two sections at the start about society and myth. At the pace I'm going it will be mid-May!

Title is Fánaí - Historical Adventure in Medieval Ireland.

(Fánaí
is Gaelic for Traveller/Wanderer)

View attachment 8506
I've worked a good bit on this and it would have been easy to simply write up the monsters I know and put them in a little document. However instead I've read about 200 books written over the last 600 years and spoken to several traditional storytellers (seanchaí) to get as many monsters and magic stuff as I can.

This has resulted in a lot of material and monsters (> 1000) that I now have to pair down to something readable. The monsters range from the cool (a giant 40 foot shadow with red eyes that only you can see and is always half a mile away and exudes hate, but never does anything until one day about a week after it shows up it violently kills you) to the dumb (a giant green cow that comes out of the sea and vomits smaller cows that annoy people by making "meep, meep" type sounds).
 
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I hope you considering going the KS route. With good art this could be truly epic. Seriously, I smell a sleeper hit.
 
I'll throw it up here first for a perusal and it'll probably be a slow enough development. I've spoken to a good few local artists, mainly people who do art for tourist booklets and displays at Celtic sites and some local comics, for if I ever go for a proper book. One was excited about doing Queen Méibh discharging her toxic menstrual flood, I think some of that extremity would be needed but wouldn't be sure where to draw the line. (I like it but many don't) Lots of collating to do first!

As a funny story one of the monsters was killed by Lancelot du Lac (Lansalóid in Irish), when I asked the storyteller "Oh you mean Lancelot from King Arthur" the answer was in complete seriousness "No he was Irish, probably a cousin of Fionn MacCumhail in Britain for a stint" :grin:
 
As with Norse Mythology, there is a HUGE difference in mythology between pre Christian and Post Christian tellings of the tales. This seems very post Christian, which is why there is less association with Elves than you found.

In Pre Christian tellings, there were different entities that all became one form of man or another and conformed to Christian mythology. It was almost as if the Missionaries tried to make it all fit into a neat little box so that their stuff sounded better.

For example... Giants weren't originally giant sized and were spirits of the land in general. Christians made them actual or literal Gigantes to fit with the evil of Goliath and other Christian baddies.
 
To add to what I said since the Edit button is laggy...

An example of this is Middle Easter Djinn. The pre Muslim Djinn were shapeshifting spirits of a people like man. After the Muslims Abrahamized (Is that a word) them, they became Demons of fire and air. Their whole origin, essence, and mythology changed.
 
As with Norse Mythology, there is a HUGE difference in mythology between pre Christian and Post Christian tellings of the tales. This seems very post Christian, which is why there is less association with Elves than you found.
FWIW Séadna Séadna has talked about this in detail in the past, so he's very aware of these issues. He had a very interesting set of posts about the evolving notions of faeries over time.
 
FWIW Séadna Séadna has talked about this in detail in the past, so he's very aware of these issues. He had a very interesting set of posts about the evolving notions of faeries over time.
Good to know. Was it on here he wrote about it?
 
Interestingly enough, my book of folklore use Aes Sìd, and ties them directly to the Tuatha De Danaan, and diminished spirits (but not dead, more like gods) The words mean "People of the Hills." It also expounds upon them and essentially makes them the closest thing the ancients* British isles had to "elves" at least in myths of the time period. The scholarship is unclear in the book it has references, but I'm unable to access them at this time. It was written in 1954, but also had a newer version in 94, that followed the same concepts. It also includes mentions of Poc Sidhe, Cu Sidhe and others tied to that using sidhe as the evolution of the latter word above after the Aes part is dropped. (*As opposed to the Liosalfar/Dockalfar of Norse myth)

Though different takes are very cool, and newer studies may indeed differ from those older accounts.
 
After the defeat of Tara, The Tuatha Capitol, some of the defeated gods left Ireland for the west. Others, including Dagda, King of the gods, moved into the sidhs (The prehistoric burial mounds).

AFIK that is when they started to be called the Sidhe. And the Tuathans were the gods described closest to Elves.

BTW... that was paraphrased from a book called Irish Mythology on my bookshelf by Ward Rutherford in 1987. I looked it up in case I remembered it wrong (Been a long while)
 
Good to know. Was it on here he wrote about it?
Yup, check out the previous page. There's a wealth of information there. I didn't go through it all now, so I may be conflating some material that was posted in another thread, but it was all here.
 
An example of this is Middle Easter Djinn. The pre Muslim Djinn were shapeshifting spirits of a people like man. After the Muslims Abrahamized (Is that a word) them, they became Demons of fire and air. Their whole origin, essence, and mythology changed.


From what I've read the Islamic view of jinn is more complex than that, they are mentioned many times in the Koran, often alongside humans and Muhammad is said to be bringing God's message to both humans and jinn. There is even a famous sura about them. Islamic scholars debated the nature of jinn for hundreds of years but in general jinn were integrated into Islam and are still part of Middle-Eastern folk beliefs, on the BBC there is a podcast where a Middle-Eastern writer fondly recalls her grandmothers's belief and stories of jinn. I believe the Salafists are the biggest believers in jinn as 'demons' but that is a fairly modern sect that developed in the 19th century.
 
From what I've read the Islamic view of jinn is more complex than that, they are mentioned many times in the Koran, often alongside humans and Muhammad is said to be bringing God's message to both humans and jinn. There is even a famous sura about them. Islamic scholars debated the nature of jinn for hundreds of years but in general jinn were integrated into Islam and are still part of Middle-Eastern folk beliefs, on the BBC there is a podcast where a Middle-Eastern writer fondly recalls her grandmothers's belief and stories of jinn. I believe the Salafists are the biggest believers in jinn as 'demons' but that is a fairly modern sect that developed in the 19th century.
The Djinn are in so many different beliefs it's kind of amazing, and Islam is an incredibly diverse religion, so it would be more fair of me to say a version of Islam instead of all Islam.
I've heard of the Djinn as Brahma from Hinduism, I've heard of them in Buddism, Arabic folklore, and so on. I think they were originally a Zoroaster creation, but I could be wrong about that.
My only point with them was that they have changed so much from their origins that they are basically a being that shares a name and nothing else from one faith to the next.
 
Good to know. Was it on here he wrote about it?
To give a summary:

The vast majority of "Gods" described as such in popular accounts of Irish mythology are actually medieval creations and even for those that were gods originally it's almost impossible to recover their pre-Christian version. For even for those Gods that do extend back into the actual Celtic era are only present in stories that are post Christian creations.

For some reason we don't know (and probably never will) Christian monks in the North-East of the country were permitted by their superiors to use the pre-Christian gods as an allegory for mankind prior to the Adamic fall. These are our earliest written accounts of the gods where they appear as and have the powers associated with common Judeo-Hellenic ideas of mankind prior to the fall, not Indo-European polytheistic gods.

This then seems to have led to some kind of cultural acceptance of stories containing the gods and thus they appear in latter tales in the 8th-11th centuries. In this time the idea of the gods settled into a form accepted by the church. Namely that they were an ancient mortal race (noblest of our ancestors prior to Christianisation) with magics who due to their virtue were permitted some kind of purgatorial existence on Earth in Sidhe mounds. Similar to contempory ideas about what happened to Plato and Aristotle and other "noble pagans". However all of these tales are layer upon layers of political propaganda where this ancient race was used to motivate territorial claims in the present. Virtually none of the stories are actual genuine examples of polytheistic mythology.

By the later Middle Ages the bards are literally making up new Sidhe/Tuatha to fill out stories (e.g. this Sidhe mound needs a cook) or to place Irish characters in European Romances. A crazy example are Tuatha Dé Dannan claiming they had helped King Arthur etc.

A very simple example is this "goddess":

If you actually follow the citation chain the earliest claims of her being a goddess are from Lady Gregory and other Victorians. Essentially because they trusted their sources as being like Greek myth, i.e. a genuine account of polytheistic myth. In actuality Clíodhna first appears in a 14th century poem as an expansion for a local myth about a woman killing herself after her lover dies and it was just popular at the time to connect any such figure with this ancient past race of now entombed immortals.

In a the Middle Ages only the leaders and most qualified members of the Bardic order seemed to have retained the knowledge that some of the characters they wrote about had been gods. The average local Bard who composed and created most the characters had no idea of this.

However even the best Bards seem to be a bit confused between who was a native Celtic god or a Roman god, conceiving instead of some sort of jumbled "pagan past". This means even Jupiter, Venus, etc appear as members of the Tuatha Dé Dannan and many of our heroes are given the powers (and sometimes even the myths) of Achilles and Hercules to lend Bardic writing the respectability and renown of Greek literature.
 
I just stumbled on this today, and since it's related, I figured I'd post. I was just browsing DriveThruRPG and I noticed the GURPS Celtic Myth setting book. Thinking of this thread, I perused the publisher preview, wondering what Séadna Séadna would think. That's when I noticed; one of the co-authors was Jo Walton. Wow.

And reading the preview, I have a feeling that it might pass muster. It broke into a detailed discussion of gesas right at the jump. Ah how I miss the GURPS supplements. So many excellent titles.
 
To give a summary:

The vast majority of "Gods" described as such in popular accounts of Irish mythology are actually medieval creations and even for those that were gods originally it's almost impossible to recover their pre-Christian version. For even for those Gods that do extend back into the actual Celtic era are only present in stories that are post Christian creations.

For some reason we don't know (and probably never will) Christian monks in the North-East of the country were permitted by their superiors to use the pre-Christian gods as an allegory for mankind prior to the Adamic fall. These are our earliest written accounts of the gods where they appear as and have the powers associated with common Judeo-Hellenic ideas of mankind prior to the fall, not Indo-European polytheistic gods.

This then seems to have led to some kind of cultural acceptance of stories containing the gods and thus they appear in latter tales in the 8th-11th centuries. In this time the idea of the gods settled into a form accepted by the church. Namely that they were an ancient mortal race (noblest of our ancestors prior to Christianisation) with magics who due to their virtue were permitted some kind of purgatorial existence on Earth in Sidhe mounds. Similar to contempory ideas about what happened to Plato and Aristotle and other "noble pagans". However all of these tales are layer upon layers of political propaganda where this ancient race was used to motivate territorial claims in the present. Virtually none of the stories are actual genuine examples of polytheistic mythology.

By the later Middle Ages the bards are literally making up new Sidhe/Tuatha to fill out stories (e.g. this Sidhe mound needs a cook) or to place Irish characters in European Romances. A crazy example are Tuatha Dé Dannan claiming they had helped King Arthur etc.

A very simple example is this "goddess":

If you actually follow the citation chain the earliest claims of her being a goddess are from Lady Gregory and other Victorians. Essentially because they trusted their sources as being like Greek myth, i.e. a genuine account of polytheistic myth. In actuality Clíodhna first appears in a 14th century poem as an expansion for a local myth about a woman killing herself after her lover dies and it was just popular at the time to connect any such figure with this ancient past race of now entombed immortals.

In a the Middle Ages only the leaders and most qualified members of the Bardic order seemed to have retained the knowledge that some of the characters they wrote about had been gods. The average local Bard who composed and created most the characters had no idea of this.

However even the best Bards seem to be a bit confused between who was a native Celtic god or a Roman god, conceiving instead of some sort of jumbled "pagan past". This means even Jupiter, Venus, etc appear as members of the Tuatha Dé Dannan and many of our heroes are given the powers (and sometimes even the myths) of Achilles and Hercules to lend Bardic writing the respectability and renown of Greek literature.
Good stuff man. I hope im not coming across as argumentative btw.
 
I just stumbled on this today, and since it's related, I figured I'd post. I was just browsing DriveThruRPG and I noticed the GURPS Celtic Myth setting book. Thinking of this thread, I perused the publisher preview, wondering what Séadna Séadna would think. That's when I noticed; one of the co-authors was Jo Walton. Wow.

And reading the preview, I have a feeling that it might pass muster. It broke into a detailed discussion of gesas right at the jump. Ah how I miss the GURPS supplements. So many excellent titles.
I've read it before. In the long run I'd like to give it a proper Let's Read here, probably when I finish the Alpha Centauri one. In short though, as you'd expect from a GURPS supplement, it's excellent. I had to laugh at one sentence in the introduction:
Welsh is phonetic and is left unchanged, but Irish is far from phonetic
I had Welsh spelling explained to me over the course of an hour six years ago and today I can still more reliably predict the pronunciation of a word in Welsh than I can a written word in Irish I've never encountered in daily conversation despite speaking it all my life.

Good stuff man. I hope im not coming across as argumentative btw.
No worries at all. Going back to Norse myth as you mentioned it would be like not having the Prose and Poetic Eddas and only having
Saxo Grammaticus's Gesta Danorum (where Odin is a sorcerer from Byzantium). It shows all the same traits, gods are actually ancient heroes or magic people, they're all from Greece or Troy (because everything literate and intelligent is from Greece/Rome) etc.
Except have a bunch of Saxos operating over a couple of hundred years and cribbing on each other's political fanfiction, where it turns out the sorcerer Odin gave a village to his apprentice who was 100% historically real and just happens to be the ancestor of my patron currently laying claim to the village.
 
I've read it before. In the long run I'd like to give it a proper Let's Read here, probably when I finish the Alpha Centauri one. In short though, as you'd expect from a GURPS supplement, it's excellent. I had to laugh at one sentence in the introduction:

I had Welsh spelling explained to me over the course of an hour six years ago and today I can still more reliably predict the pronunciation of a word in Welsh than I can a written word in Irish I've never encountered in daily conversation despite speaking it all my life.


No worries at all. Going back to Norse myth as you mentioned it would be like not having the Prose and Poetic Eddas and only having
Saxo Grammaticus's Gesta Danorum (where Odin is a sorcerer from Byzantium). It shows all the same traits, gods are actually ancient heroes or magic people, they're all from Greece or Troy (because everything literate and intelligent is from Greece/Rome) etc.
Except have a bunch of Saxos operating over a couple of hundred years and cribbing on each other's political fanfiction, where it turns out the sorcerer Odin gave a village to his apprentice who was 100% historically real and just happens to be the ancestor of my patron currently laying claim to the village.

Odin as a Byszantium sorcerer... *shudder*. Different magical traditions for one. :tongue:

Its a bit of a passion of mine to take deep delves into mythology and there is a lot of clutter along the way. As my previously mentioned Djinn example... so much modern takes on it to wade through to get at the old tales (I was trying to find a name of for the Djinn city that inspired the City of Brass.)
The Poetic Eddas are also heavily contested as accurate. I am involved in quite a few different Norse reenactment and Asatru groups. There is a general consensus that the Poetic Eddas were a bit of a hack job on Norse mythology. This mainly stems from the fact that the stories do not actually align with the culture as historians have found it, and relies more on the misconception that the vikings were fur wearing and blood thirsty barbarians.
Also, Snorri Sturlson was a Christian which automatically puts a spin on it.
Finding real examples of the oral tradition is difficult to say the least and even the supposed oral history handed down by Heathens is expected to be altered over time.
 
Have you watched Jackson Crawford on youtube Faylar Faylar , he's got some great videos on Norse myth. He says that the greatest distortion Snorri put on the Norse myths was trying to make them consistent/logical, which comes from a Christian view of mythology being self-consistent and coherent. Something not present originally.
 
Have you watched Jackson Crawford on youtube Faylar Faylar , he's got some great videos on Norse myth. He says that the greatest distortion Snorri put on the Norse myths was trying to make them consistent/logical, which comes from a Christian view of mythology being self-consistent and coherent. Something not present originally.
Inconsistency and multiple accounts of the stories are two of the things I like best about Greek mythology. When I use it in a game, for instance the underrated Heroes of Olympus RPG from Task Force Games, I don't have to worry about whether my interpretation matches up as there is no one correct, approved, official version of any given myth.
 
Have you watched Jackson Crawford on youtube Faylar Faylar , he's got some great videos on Norse myth. He says that the greatest distortion Snorri put on the Norse myths was trying to make them consistent/logical, which comes from a Christian view of mythology being self-consistent and coherent. Something not present originally.
I have not, but I will check it out. Im a little behind on Issac Arthur still though :tongue:
 
I don't have to worry about whether my interpretation matches up as there is no one correct, approved, official version of any given myth.

Because the last thing you want is for the Myth police to come and arrest you for improper use of a myth :tongue:
 
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