Ancient History of Ireland 🇮🇪 Newgrange, Celts, Vikings ☘️

the Emerald Isle has children all over the world mainly millions of people in the UK and the USA whose ancestors emigrated in the late 19th century I am English but I have some Irish ancestors too in this film I will discover a castle they used to live in but first I will explain the entire ancient history of Ireland from the Neolithic to the Viking Age get ready for a good craic my lads [Music] our journey starts in the famous Valley of the Boyne a river named after a Celtic goddess born whose name means white cow and she was the mother of a god of youthful male virility named Angus who Celtic folklore holds was buried in the Neolithic tomb called Newgrange the valley has several extraordinary Neolithic chambered tombs including this one called doubt no doubt the most famous though and certainly one of the most importantly Olympic monuments in the entire world is Newgrange it predates the celts to whom it just appeared like any burial mound by thousands of years and 5,200 years old it is among the oldest and most magnificent structures of the megalith culture which spread out from northwest France over the Neolithic along with a people who had their origins in Anatolia they were the first farmers in Britain and Ireland early construction at Stonehenge began a couple of hundred years after Newgrange the same Neolithic race built all the stone circles in the British Isles including the standing stones of Stenness which are roughly contemporary with Newgrange and the Ring of Brodgar both in the opening islands north of Scotland which I visited ten years ago please excuse the shaky old footage they are adjacent to a passage tomb of the same type as Newgrange called mace how this tomb is aligned to the winter solstice so about its interior is illuminated by the Sun on just one day of the year exactly the same as at Newgrange which is a team Isles away newgrange's unique white quartz facade is a somewhat controversial modern reconstruction using all the stones that were found on site they were imported from 30 miles away and are not there by mistake but we can't really know how they were employed in the original tomb [Music] the monument is skirted by huge stones and those at the rear and the front of the tomb are decorated with beautifully preserved Neolithic artwork we can speculate what their spiral shapes meant but we can be sure these have nothing to do with Celtic artwork of later millennia as I will explain later similar spiral shapes are found on the interior of other Irish passage tombs both in the passages and in the tombs themselves and Newgrange is no exception [Music] these megalithic people had no metal they worked only with bone wood and rocks these spherical stones are found in Irish Neolithic tombs but we don't know what they are is this for measuring depth or is it a religious item the answers died with the race that made them in Dublin we can find some answers as to what happened to the Neolithic Irish here at the National Museum of Archaeology is a beautiful and impressive collection of early gold and bronze work created by the race which replaced the previous inhabitants of Britain and Ireland about four and a half thousand years ago archaeologists call their culture the Bell beaker culture and it spans from the end of the Neolithic right into the Bronze Age these people are the ancestors of the modern Irish people but they were not Celts yet most of them entered Britain from Holland and soon after spread into Ireland all of North Western Europe from Holland to Ireland was genetically and culturally fairly homogeneous in the Bronze Age and it is likely they all spoke the same indo-european language and were culturally related to the Celts of the Iron Age they had an indo-european patriarchal and solar culture too these son wheels were sewn onto their clothing the exact same things show up in England two from the same time the bika folk introduced the skill of goldsmithing to the British Isles and they clearly regarded gold as a sacred substance it was a male-dominated culture in which women were married off to other tribes but some women had high social status which is reflected in their impressive gold jewelry like these earrings these gold spheres from a necklace [Music] or these amber bead necklaces which were imported from the Baltic most likely Denmark [Music] and most of these things are found in Britain too but about 80% of gold Lila like these that have been discovered all came from Ireland so there was obviously already a regional culture developing here the Irish pelvic people exported their goal to Britain but they also imported gold from Cornwall but we don't really understand why their ideas of value and currency were completely alien to ours [Music] the late bronze age gold work gets more advanced and demonstrates greater technical skill [Music] bronze weapons hoards also became more common reflecting the marshal and warlike culture of the bronze age Irish [Music] [Music] but even though there was at least a 90 percent population replacement of the Neolithic people by the bell beaker folk there was still some cultural continuity in Ireland few things illustrate this continuity as clearly as the archaeological complex at the Hill of Tara which has remained mythologically significant throughout the Celtic and medieval times and is still special for modern Irish people many of the mounds here date back to the Neolithic but the myths surrounding the monuments all relate to IH beliefs and Celtic gods recorded in medieval literature one such Neolithic passage tomb is known as the mound of the hostages which is like a mini Newgrange it is aligned to the sunrise on sar1 which indicates the Irish Celtic calendar was in fact based at least in part on pre-celtic Irish beliefs from the Neolithic the tomb is named after the mythical Iron Age High King of Ireland Niall of the Nine Hostages who took members of other royal families hostage which is very indo-european but archaeologically the tomb was not used much in the Iron Age in fact we do find stone and bone items from the Neolithic people who built it and then later evidence of the indo-european invaders the bell beaker people interring both funerary urns and also entire bodies of hundreds of people all through the Bronze Age showing they had fully appropriated this religious and funerary monument of the previous inhabitants of Ireland [Music] this very indo-european early Bell because stone axe was found inside the mound of the hostages many of the megalithic tombs despite having been damaged during the passage of time were reused for Belle Baku burials this practice which was quite frequent in the megalithic tombs of Iberia has been interpreted as an attempt of the incipient beaker elites to legitimate their position in order to do so they would have created a fictitious genealogy to link themselves to the sacred lineage of the ancestors near to the Mount is this phallic stone which many believe is the legendary Leah fall or Stone of Destiny which was used as an inauguration stone for the Celtic kings of Ireland the Celts believed it was put here by their gods that toward a Danone however it originally stood at the entrance of the mound of the hostages and said it was moved in Victorian times [Music] all about the Hill of Tara we see evidence of the enduring pagan beliefs that persist among modern Irish people votive offerings and ribbons court cloudy's are tied to the surrounding trees which are held as sacred due to their proximity to this ancient place not all of the secrets of Ireland's past are in burial mounds some lurk in the depths of the dank and stinking bogs [Music] Bogg offerings and burials first occurred in Denmark during the Stone Age they increase in frequency during the Bronze Age but in the Iron Age when Celtic culture arrived in Ireland we start to see bog bodies and offerings here too but we shouldn't assume this is the same ritual as in Iron Age England the Denmark this is old crone man discovered in 2003 he died between 362 and 175 BC his nipples had been mutilated before he was killed st. patrick related that the celtic pagans of ireland had to suck the king's nipples as an act of fealty and this reveals that the nipples of the King were an important aspect of Irish kingship and so mutilation of them would be a way of D consecrating a formally sacred King this is the theory espoused by M Kelly a former keeper of Antiquities at this National Museum this is clonycavan man and his nipples were also mutilated [Music] Kelly relates this to the perennial in the European concept of the heroes gammas or sacred marriage between a sky god and an earth mother in many religions which is reflected in the right of indo-european kingship when the Kings right to rule is predicated on his marriage to the land itself which his just rule would ensure was fruitful and would bring prosperity to its people if harvests failed or the cattle got sick the king would take some of the blame and he might end up in a bog with his nipples cut to bits however it isn't just Celtic bodies we find in Irish bogs this is Ralegh on man an idol made from you would almost certainly a God dating to the late bronze age it is very hard to tell if this represents an enduring custom of the Bell bigger people or a new custom from the first Celts in Ireland because the custom of making such idols and leaving them in box actually dates back to Ice Age Russia and is very persistent I mean this one was found in the marshes of East London and is made of Scots pine and dates the time the Bell maker people first arrived in Britain the hole was used to insert a piece which is lost and many of these idols have emphasized male or female genitalia these ones came from East Yorkshire and date of roughly the time the Celts first arrived around 600 BC so they must be Celtic this is broaden Berg Idol was found in Denmark and is widely regarded as relating to the cult of the Germanic God English Frey due to its phallus [Music] these oak idols from North Germany are associated with the Iron Age Germanic religion too however other bog idols are associated with the early Celts of Germany's health stat culture evidently the early Celtic and Germanic religions had a lot in common this is an enormous lump of bog butter bogs in Denmark and Ireland were once used to preserve butter since there is no oxygen in the bog and therefore bacteria can't make it go rotten so we don't really know if this butter was an offering to the gods or if someone just forgot where they left it it was kept inside this churn the first Celts arrived in Ireland from Britain sometime at the start of the Iron Age around 700 BC they had their origins in the unlit ISA culture of Central Europe which evolved into the house that and then Latin cultures I made a whole video on the origin of the celts already if you want to learn more about that there wasn't a massive population replacement in Ireland like there was with the beaker people 2,000 years earlier but Irish people all started speaking a new Celtic language perhaps enforced by a new foreign elite the Celts brought the iron age to Ireland but Bruns was still in news - this is a Celtic bronze horde from Ireland these look a bit like hand grenades were they made by the proto IRA religion in Ireland changed and synchronized with Celtic customs from Britain and the continent this multi-faced stone head from County cavern represents a multi-faceted God gods are depicted with multiple faces in many indo-european religions such as sweat of it of the Slavs Janus of the Romans and many Hindu gods the stone had resembles many others found in Celtic Britain and France the torque is also a clear sign of Celtic culture gold remained important in Celtic Ireland and this talk would have been a symbol of power just as they were for Celts on the continent this Irish sword pummel with a head also looks just like others found in cool this ritual instrument decorated with latane star art closely resembles the lerz of the nordic bronze edge and may reflect enduring culture exchange not only with Celtic Central Europe but also with Scandinavia this gold boat was part of the brighter horde it may have been a votive deposit to the Celtic sea god man anon [Music] Christianity reached Ireland about time with the fall of the Roman Empire conversion was relatively peaceful compared to other parts of Northern Europe which seems to have aided in the preservation of pre-christian Irish legends which were integrated with the new faith where pagan deities like Brigid were made into Saints the Irish were converted by missionaries from Britain but when pagan anglo-saxons took over England it was the Irish missionaries who helped to convert them and we can see Irish influence on these anglo-saxon manuscripts as a result but 400 years after the first Irish people converted to Christianity indo-european religion returned to the Emerald Isle in the late eighth century Vikings started raiding monasteries on the coasts of Britain and Ireland they hid Lindisfarne in England in 793 the Irish island of Rathlin was burned by the Vikings two years later the Vikings were Scandinavians who had preserved their ancestral pagan religion and still offered up sacrifices to idols of the old gods they soon came to Ireland in greater numbers with up to one hundred boats at a time and didn't go home after raiding but set up new coastal towns like Dublin and Cork they gradually mixed with the native Irish to form a new ethnic group the high burner Norse who had a significant influence on the country the high burner Norse influenced the Christian art violent the style of not work on this Irish crosa is not Celtic this is the late Norse Vener Ecostar [Music] and this silver brooch from rafen Island is clearly influenced by Viking style brooches even this holy relic Reeboks as pagan Norse tongue not work on it the next people to invade Ireland after the Vikings were the anglo-norman in the 12th century the Gaelic kings were replaced by Norman rulers like Richard lat wheat who arrived in Ireland with Henry ii and whose descendants became the Barons of fertile lands in Westmeath the Normans remained the aristocracy in Ireland until the 17th century when the Williamite was resulted in many anglo-norman families who had been loyal to james a second being replaced by protestants such as newcomers like my ancestor the darwish a born lawyer Richard Levin JH who was appointed Irish Solicitor General and Speaker of the House of Commons he later became Attorney General and Lord Chief Justice as a reward for his services in seventeen and four he received a baronetcy and Julie became Sir Richard Levin's he acquired the lands of the anglo-norman tweet family in Westmeath and build a mansion there near the ruins of an old Norman castle but one hundred years later his great-great grandson also named Richard commissioned a castle of their own with the levin's crest on the front gate built-in faux medieval gothic style it was intended to bestow the anglo-saxon family with the same historic links the past that then norman predecessors had held it's really appropriate that the castle look so spooky today because the records from the National folklore collection at University College Dublin reveal that the local people knew of ghosts from this castle who were my blood relatives these ghosts came from Sir Richard levingers mother's family the rain l's and anglo-norman family of barons in Ireland who were originated in Devon and whom I also descend from through Dame Eliza love Inge but the descriptions the common folk give of the supernatural creatures that dwelled on my ancestors land aren't just ghosts they have a distinctly ancient and indo-european quality long ago and killing on it was said coaches drove up and down the avenue and all the house was lit off with a ghost the priest of the parish put away the ghost and there's a room in the house that cannot be opened it could not be opened because the ants of mr. Reynold peered in it they all died at 18 years of age there was a ghost seen knocked her in avenues running through the ward he was called the BEC Adele it was supposed to have a false head in a man's body and the noise he made was like a man laughing [Music] mrs. M golfer of Fairmont Edward stone told me that at Ngoc Trinh castle near Mullingar can't arrest me we're a family of the Divine Chesney when a person of the family is going to die a big animal resembling a horse is seen put with horns on it has been seen several times and each time it has been seen a person in the family has died long ago Very's lived in a fort in your past crossroads every night the fairies will go down the lane way which leads to Ngoc Trinh at midnight they would have a chariot drawn without horses they would go up and down the lane in a lot of times there was a house built in their path one night the man that lived in the house was sick and he had two women minding him at 12 o clock the latch stirred and the two women were afraid and the voice said you are not brave soldiers [Music] here in Dublin the beautiful old Celtic star very stands behind which lie the graves of some of my ancestors two of my ancestors there side by side with wait on Nexen over there and here along here to my cousins from the Levant family who lived in castle Ngoc Trinh as did some of my lavon's ancestors the ones who my ancestors here the Miller family and Colonel Miller of the Irish Constabulary who married Francisco vanish from Castle Doctrine of course I missed some important parts of Irish history but the famine and the troubles but this channel is focused on ancient religion genetics and folklore so you'll have to look somewhere else for that information if you want to learn more about the Celts or the bell beaker folk then the good news is I have other videos about them which you ought to watch you can also access exclusive private videos which I make just for patrons if you sign up for either patreon or subscribe stuff for as little as the price of a pint per month the links for these are in the description if you support me you will be ensuring this channel continues to survive and celebrate ancient European history for years to come so thank you so much

Channel: Survive the Jive

Views: 646,121

Rating: 4.886528 out of 5

Keywords: history, religion, history of ireland, emerald isle, Newgrange, Celtic, Druids, Hill of Tara, Dublin Vikings, Norse Gaels, Gaelic, Hiberno Norse, Meath, Valley of the Boyne, ancient history, history documentary, Documentary on Irish History, Ancient Stories of Ireland, Archaeology, Archaeology in Ireland, Irish Archaeology, Gaelic Warlords, Vikings in Ireland, Saint Patrick, Land of Saints and Scholars, dord, ancient Irish music, Tuatha Dé Danann, in search of ancient ireland, ireland

Id: FDbDZ59z7p0

Length: 27min 27sec (1647 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 21 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Think-Platform]

Can you stop giving this white nationalist exposure?