Celtic Literature Read Online

. ” - DP.]

{0b}  See particularly pp. 9, 10, 11, of the following essay.

{4}  Lord Strangford remarks on this passage:- ‘Your Gomer and your Cimmerians are of course only lay figures, to be accepted in the rhetorical and subjective sense.  As such I accept them, but I enter a protest against the “genuine tongue of his ancestors.”  Modern Celtic tongues are to the old Celtic heard by Julius Cæsar, broadly speaking, what the modern Romanic tongues are to Cæsar’s own Latin.  Welsh, in fact, is a detritus; a language in the category of modern French, or, to speak less roughly and with a closer approximation, of old Provençal, not in the category of Lithuanian, much less in the category of Basque.  By true inductive research, based on an accurate comparison of such forms of Celtic speech, oral and recorded, as we now possess, modern philology has, in so far as was possible, succeeded in restoring certain forms of the parent speech, and in so doing has achieved not the least striking of its many triumphs; for those very forms thus restored have since been verified past all cavil by their actual discovery in the old Gaulish inscriptions recently come to light.  The phonesis of Welsh as it stands is modern, not primitive its grammar, - the verbs excepted, - is constructed out of the fragments of its earlier forms, and its vocabulary is strongly Romanised, two out of the six words here given being Latin of the Empire.  Rightly understood, this enhances the value of modern Celtic instead of depreciating it, because it serves to rectify it.  To me it is a wonder that Welsh should have retained so much of its integrity under the iron pressure of four hundred years of Roman dominion.  Modern Welsh tenacity and cohesive power under English pressure is nothing compared with what that must have been.’

{14}  Here again let me have the pleasure of quoting Lord Strangford:- ‘When the Celtic tongues were first taken in hand at the dawn of comparative philological inquiry, the tendency was, for all practical results, to separate them from the Indo-European aggregate, rather than to unite them with it.  The great gulf once fixed between them was narrowed on the surface, but it was greatly and indefinitely deepened.  Their vocabulary and some of their grammar were seen at once to be perfectly Indo-European, but they had no case-endings to their nouns, none at all in Welsh, none that could be understood in Gaelic; their phonesis seemed primeval and inexplicable, and nothing could be made out of their pronouns which could not be equally made out of many wholly un-Aryan languages.  They were therefore co-ordinated, not with each single Aryan tongue, but with the general complex of Aryan tongues, and were conceived to be anterior to them and apart from them, as it were the strayed vanguard of European colonisation or conquest from the East.  The reason of this misconception was, that their records lay wholly uninvestigated as far as all historical study of the language was concerned, and that nobody troubled himself about the relative age and the development of forms, so that the philologists were fain to take them as they were put into their hands by uncritical or perverse native commentators and writers, whose grammars and dictionaries teemed with blunders and downright forgeries.  One thing, and one thing alone, led to the truth: the sheer drudgery of thirteen long years spent by Zeuss in the patient investigation of the most ancient Celtic records, in their actual condition, line by line and letter by letter.  Then for the first time the foundation of Celtic research was laid; but the great philologist did not live to see the superstructure which never could have been raised but for him.  Prichard was first to indicate the right path, and Bopp, in his monograph of 1839, displayed his incomparable and masterly sagacity as usual, but for want of any trustworthy record of Celtic words and forms to work upon, the truth remained concealed or obscured until the publication of the Gramatica Celtica.  Dr. Arnold, a man of the past generation, who made more use of the then uncertain and unfixed doctrines of comparative philology in his historical writings than is done by the present generation in the fullest noonday light of the Vergleichende Grammatik, was thus justified in his view by the philology of the period, to which he merely gave an enlarged historical expression.  The prime fallacy then as now, however, was that of antedating the distinction between Gaelic and Cymric Celts.’

{25}  Dr. O’Conor in his Catalogue of the Stowe MSS. (quoted by O’Curry).

{26}  O’Curry.

{29}  Here, where Saturday should come, something is wanting in the manuscript.

{66}  See Les Scythes, les Ancêtres des Peuples Germaniques et Slaves, par F. G. Bergmann, professeur à la faculté des Lettres de Strasbourg: Colmar, 1858.  But Professor Bergmann’s etymologies are often, says Lord Strangford, ‘false lights, held by an uncertain hand.’  And Lord Strangford continues: - ‘The Apian land certainly meant the watery land, Meer-Umschlungon, among the pre-Hellenic Greeks, just as the same land is called Morea by the modern post-Hellenic or Romaic Greeks from more, the name for the sea in the Slavonic vernacular of its inhabitants during the heart of the middle ages.  But it is only connected by a remote and secondary affinity, if connected at all, with the avia of Scandinavia, assuming that to be the true German word for water, which, if it had come down to us in Gothic, would have been avi, genitive aujôs, and not a mere Latinised termination.  Scythian is surely a negative rather than a positive term, much like our Indian, or the Turanian of modern ethnologists, used to comprehend nomads and barbarians of all sorts and races north and east of the Black and Caspian seas.  It is unsafe to connect their name with anything as yet; it is quite as likely that it refers to the bow and arrow as to the shield, and is connected with our word to shoot, sceótan, skiutan, Lithuanian szau-ti.  Some of the Scythian peoples may have been Anarian, Allophylic, Mongolian; some were demonstrably Aryan, and not only that, but Iranian as well, as is best shown in a memoir read before the Berlin Academy this last year; the evidence having been first indicated in the rough by Schaffarik the Slavonic antiquary.  Coins, glosses, proper names, and inscriptions prove it.  Targitaos (not -tavus) and the rest is guess-work or wrong.  Herodotus’s Ταβιτι for the goddess Vesta is not connected with the root div whence Dêvas, Deus, &c., but the root tap, in Latin tep (of tepere, tepefacere), Slavonic tepl, topl (for tep or top), in modern Persian tâb.  Thymele refers to the hearth as the place of smoke (θυω, thus, fumus), but familia denotes household from famulus for fagmulus, the root fag being equated with the Sansk. bhaj, servira.  Lucan’s Hesus or Esus may fairly be compared with the Welsh Hu Gadarn by legitimate process, but no letter-change can justify his connection with Gaisos, the spear, not the sword, Virgil’s gæsum, A. S. gár, our verb to gore, retained in its outer form in gar-fish.  For Theuthisks lege Thiudisks, from thiuda, populus; in old high German Diutisk, Diotisk, popularis, vulgaris, the country vernacular as distinguished from the cultivated Latin; hence the word Dutch, Deutsch.  With our ancestors theód stood for nation generally and getheóde for any speech.  Our diet in the political sense is the same word, but borrowed from our German cousins, not inherited from our fathers.  The modern Celtic form is the Irish tuath, in ancient Celtic it must have been teuta, touta, of which we actually have the adjective toutius in the Gaulish inscription of Nismes.  In Oscan we have it as turta, tuta, its adjective being handed down in Livy’s meddix tuticus, the mayor or chief magistrate of the tuta.  In the Umbrian inscriptions it is tota.  In Lithuanian tauta, the country opposed to the town, and in old Prussian tauta, the country generally, en Prusiskan tautan, im Land zu Preussen.’

{68}  Lord Strangford observes here: - ‘The original forms of Gael should be mentioned - Gaedil, Goidil: in modern Gaelic orthography Gaoidheal where the dh is not realised in pronunciation.  There is nothing impossible in the connection of the root of this with that of Scot, if the s of the latter be merely prosthetic.  But the whole thing is in nubibus, and given as a guess only.’

{69}  ‘The name of Erin,’ says Lord Strangford, ‘is treated at length in a masterly note by Whitley Stokes in the 1st series of Max Müller’s lectures (4th ed.) p. 255, where its earliest tangible form is shown to have been Iverio.  Pictet’s connection with Arya is quite baseless.’

{82}  It is to be remembered that the above was written before the recent war between Prussia and Austria.

{84}  The etymology is Monsieur Henri Martin’s, but Lord Strangford says - ‘Whatever gai may be, it is assuredly not Celtic.  Is there any authority for this word gair, to laugh, or rather “laughter,” beyond O’Reilly?  O’Reilly is no authority at all except in so far as tested and passed by the new school.  It is hard to give up gavisus.  But Diez, chief authority in Romanic matters, is content to accept Muratori’s reference to an old High-German gâhi, modern jähe, sharp, quick, sudden, brisk, and so to the sense of lively, animated, high in spirits.’

{85}  Monsieur Henri Martin, whose chapters on the Celts, in his Histoire de France, are full of information and interest.

{97}  The above is really a sentence taken from the Cologne Gazette.  Lord Strangford’s comment here is as follows: - ‘Modern Germanism, in a general estimate of Germanism, should not be taken, absolutely and necessarily, as the constant, whereof we are the variant.  The Low-Dutch of Holland, anyhow, are indisputably as genuine Dutch as the High-Dutch of Germany Proper.  But do they write sentences like this one - informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum?  If not, the question must be asked, not how we have come to deviate, but how the Germans have come to deviate.  Our modern English prose in plain matters is often all just the same as the prose of King Alfred and the Chronicle.  Ohthere’s North Sea Voyage and Wulfstan’s Baltic Voyage is the sort of thing which is sent in every day, one may say, to the Geographical or Ethnological Society, in the whole style and turn of phrase and thought.’

The mass of a stock must supply our data for judging the stock.  But see, moreover, what I have said at p. 100.

{120}  Lord Strangford’s note on this is: - ‘The Irish monks whose bells and books were found in Iceland could not have contributed anything to the old Norse spirit, for they had perished before the first Norseman had set foot on the island.  The form of the old Norse poetry known to us as Icelandic, from the accident of its preservation in that island alone, is surely Pan-Teutonic from old times; the ar and method of its strictly literary cultivation must have been much influenced by the contemporary Old-English national poetry, with which the Norsemen were in constant contact; and its larger, freer, and wilder spirit must have been owing to their freer and wilder life, to say nothing of their roused and warring paganism.  They could never have known any Celts save when living in embryo with other Teutons.’

Very likely Lord Strangford is right, but the proposition with which he begins is at variance with what the text quoted by Zeuss alleges.

{133}  Rhyme, - the most striking characteristic of our modern poetry as distinguished from that of the ancients, and a main source, to our poetry, of its magic and charm, of what we call its romantic element, - rhyme itself, all the weight of evidence tends to show, comes into our poetry from the Celts.

{136}  Take the following attempt to render the natural magic supposed to pervade Tieck’s poetry: - ‘In diesen Dichtungen herrscht eine geheimnissvolle Innigkeit, ein sonderbares Einverständniss mit der Natur, besonders mit der Pflanzen - und Steinreich.  Der Leser fühlt sich da wie in einem verzauberten Walde; er hört die unterirdischen Quellen melodisch rauschen; wildfremde Wunderblumen schauen ihn an mit ihren bunten schnsüchtigen Augen; unsichtbare Lippen küssen seine Wangen mit neckender Zärtlichkeit; hohe Pilze, wie goldne Glocken, wachsen klingend empor am Fusse der Bäume;’ and so on.  Now that stroke of the hohe Pilze, the great funguses, would have been impossible to the tact and delicacy of a born lover of nature like the Celt, and could only have come from a German who has hineinstudirt himself into natural magic.  It is a crying false note, which carries us at once out of the world of nature-magic and the breath of the woods, into the world of theatre-magic and the smell of gas and orange-peel.





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