Mythology has always been—and will probably
always be—a favorite source of creative fuel for writers of all kind. Essayists use it as a cultural lens, poets
draw on the iconography for meaning, and fiction-writers are forever enamored with its breadth of unique
material. If you're casually familiar with any particular
mythology, chances are it's because a writer has adapted or appropriated something from
it. A lot of the major world mythologies get this
treatment over and over, ending up in film after film, game after game, story after story. Even if you've never done any research on
Greek, Egyptian, or Norse mythology, it's probably a safe bet that you still at least
sort of recognize some of this stuff. One way or another, through the channels of
popular media, it's made its way to you. Unfortunately, despite everything it has to
offer, Irish mythology doesn't usually get that opportunity. Which is... interesting, because we find that
the apparent reasons it's often eschewed are also the reasons that people ought to be writing
about it. Before we go any further though, you should
know that almost all of Irish mythology as we know it comes not from pagan Irish tradition,
but from the writings of Christian scribes during a climate of feverish conversion. We talked about the effect of this in last
year's video, but suffice to say that the accuracy of their transcriptions is probably...
questionable at best. Accurate or no, the old manuscripts are teeming
with worthy material, ripe for your creative human brains to mold. Between the Mythological, Ulster, Fennian,
and Historical cycles—which together make up Irish mythology—we find the Mythological
cycle to be the closest in form to the other major mythologies. So in this video, we'll be focusing exclusively
on the Irish Mythological cycle. So, the immediate question: why doesn't anyone
know about this? Why doesn't it get the attention that the
others do? Well, one of the first major differences we
noticed between Irish mythology and the others was the strange approach to the supernatural. Where gods, magic, and miracles often come
from a clear source and serve a clear purpose in mythological tales, the opposite tends
to be true for Irish mythology. To start, the Irish progenitor gods are shrouded
in mystery. Danu and Domnu—the sister goddesses who
raise the Tuatha De Danann and birthed the Fomorians, respectively—are hardly mentioned
in the original texts at all. So unlike, say, Greek mythology, where the
gods are carefully organized and explained, the divine lineage here is a bit vague, unconcerned
with quantifying or defining the ineffable. Irish mythology is mostly concerned with the
activities of mortals. That's not to say that the stories lack fantastical
or magical elements, though. Far from it. In fact, the magic in these stories is so
abundant that it almost feels arbitrary. It's no surprise in the Book of Invasions
when Fintan—husband of Ireland's first settler, Cessair—reacts to the stress of caring for
a tribe of 49 other women by jumping into a river and just... turning into a salmon. Y'know. Like you do. "Spontaneous salmon" is actually a decent
representation of how magic seems to work in Irish mythology. A lot of the time, characters just do stuff. At the tail end of the Book of Invasions,
one of the Milesian men—Amergin—is able to quell a storm created by the Tuatha De
Danann by reciting verse at it. They just do stuff, and it's great. But we'll get back to this in a minute. Another reason Irish mythology hasn't quite
spread in the same way as its peers might be the fact that a lot of information is just...
missing from it. Not necessarily pivotal plot arcs or anything
like that—nothing that would make it incoherent—it just lacks a lot of the background details
that more meticulously-archived mythologies tend to have. For instance, in our research, we were never
able to find anything that amounts to an Irish creation myth. The stories just seem to grant that the world
always was. The closest thing they have to an actual origin
story is the tale of Ireland's first settler, Cessair. And even her story is riddled with holes. The question of where she came from is handily
addressed by the Christian scribes, who say that she was the daughter of Noah and that
she travelled to Ireland to escape the great flood after being denied a place on the ark. Even still, that doesn't explain weirdness
of the two ships she lost at sea, and how the party aboard the one ship that made shore
was comprised of 49 women and three men, two of whom ended up dying, and one of whom—as
we mentioned—spontaneously animorphed into a salmon. Even stranger, we never get much information
about the classic villains of Irish mythology: The Fomorians. They always seem to be around to battle with
Ireland's various settlers. They come into conflict with the tribes of
Partholon and Nemed, the Fir Bolg, and most famously, the Tuatha De Danann, but even after
all of that, we never quite get a feel for what exactly they are. Powerful, mysterious beings who are capable
of things like raising tidal waves to wipe out an entire people, or—in the case of
the Formoragh champion, Balor—raze landscapes to cinders just by looking at them. You'd think there'd be more information about
such a present, formidable adversary, but that's Irish mythology for you. And that's not even the most significant gap
in the mythos. What perplexes us most is the origin of the
Tuatha De Danann—the god-like race around whom the majority of the stories center. Their tale begins with the tribe of Nemed,
who, after weathering plagues and warfare with the Fomorians, eventually disperse out
into the world. Some travel inland to Britain, some go south
to Greece, and finally, in so many words, the remainder of them set off "into the north
of the world." What exactly that means... eh, who can say? But I guess one things led to another and,
somehow, they end up in the presence of the goddess Danu, who sends them to learn in the
four mystical cities of knowledge: Gorias, Finias, Murias, and Falias. When they eventually return to Ireland, they
return as gods—the Tuatha De Danann. And just... nobody knows why. This might sound like a criticism of the mythology,
but it isn't meant to be. In fact, these vagaries are one of our favorite
things about it. We like to think of the informational gaps
like footholds for a creative mind. Again, though, we'll come back to this. The final possible snag we can really see
writers encountering when trying to create something based on Irish myth is the wealth
of conflicting material from different sources. Unlike most mythologies, which have primary
sources to draw on, just about all of Irish mythology comes from transliterations of transcriptions
of oral tradition. So there are bound to be some discrepancies
between interpretations, right? Seems at the outset like it should be a small
thing, but you'd be surprised how impactful this kind of minutia can turns out to be. Like, when Nemed's descendants escaped their
slavery in Greece and returned to Ireland, did they acquire the name "Fir Bolg"meaning
"men of the bag" because they carried sacks of soil on their backs whilst in slavery? Or was it because they carries sacks of soil
to Ireland in order to make the stony earth fertile? When the Tuatha De Danann returned to Ireland,
did they come on thirty ships which they burnt upon the shore? Or did they arrive in a rolling haze of black
clouds, without a ship to speak of? And perhaps most importantly: was Fintan the
only spontaneously-immortal salmon-man? Or did Tuan Mac Cairill—one of Patholon's
tribe—survive the plague that wiped out his tribe in the same super-bizarre fashion? These aren't necessarily difference that change
the mythology, but it's certainly possible that they'll change your perspective of it. Your experience will most likely be colored
by the specific nuances of second-hand source you use, and they are all second-hand sources. So, at the outset the mythology's supernatural
elements look vague, there are a lot of informational gaps, and it's host to a wealth of conflicting
details from various sources. Understandably, this probably deters a lot
of writers from using at as a conceptual basis for their work. But we see all of this as an opportunity. Irish mythology isn't rigid like the others. It's flexible. If the gods are mysterious and the magic is
arbitrary, paint them to fit a new picture. If information is missing, do what fiction-writers
do best and invent something to fill the gaps. And if the sources can't agree, abscond with
your favorite ideas and re-shape them. So that's our challenge this month, and to
that end we're going to write a sequel to last year's story, which you can listen to
by clicking here. If you want to give this a shot yourself,
feel free to post a short story on Tumblr with the tag "Keep Making Stuff Up," or click
the "submit" button at the end of the video. Finally, we'll be posting exclusive previews
and sneak peeks for all our videos this month on our Patreon, so if you're curious, a little
support goes a long way. Anyway, that's all for now. Thanks for watching, and keep making stuff
up! We'll see you... next week! Bye!
Funnily enough, the Japanese have quite the liking for Irish mythology. There was an even a Power Rangers clone with a Celtic mythology theme. I mean it was awful, but I appreciate the effort.
I think there was a fairly big comic book as well, Slane or Slain? (Sláine apparently, thanks google)
I remember playing an old Atari/Amiga turn based strategy game with that theme as well. You'd lead small groups of heroes on cattle raids against other tribes, unite Ireland, and defeat the Fomorians. Was good fun. Something like that would make a good niche Steam game.
Id absolutely love a vikings/GOT style show on Irish mythology.
I ask myself the same question, how did the Greeks get to monopolize the whole mythology market
"Fennian" cycle...
I think both the Ulster and the Fennian cycles have suffered a bit from the popularity of Arthurian legends, as there are many similarities. Deirdre and the sons of Usna, Diarmuid and Grainne, Tristan and Iseult, Guinevere and Lancelot - it's all the same story more or less. The Fianna are also very similar to the knights of Camelot - less christian and more craic, but very similar all the same.
The way it was taught when I was in school was a kind of mess of Christianised stuff and stuff presented without much context (Cu Chulainn killed yer man's dog, the Fianna could pick up a stick off the ground while running full belt, that lad sucks his thumb and becomes a genius).
There was no context or grandness given to the tales. They were told to us in school on the same level as Goldilocks so, to kid me, they lacked the same sense of scale as Greek or Arthurian myths.
As an adult, you can look up all this stuff on the different cycles but in our formative years we basically just got a bunch of disjointed fairy tales lobbed at us.
The religious aspects of Irish mythology also got a good doing over during Ireland's conversion to Christianity which always put a weird filter over everything to me.
But mainly because the cycles aren't often presented in a cohesive way to kids or teenagers the way Arthurian legends are. Early Irish culture always interested me, Brehon law and all that, but the mythology was always poorly presented.
Hopefully that's changed in schools since my time though.
Irish mythology is fucking awesome. I love when it's based on a tricky moral situation where the main character has to make a choice on how to proceed, before church bollox.
I also love that add where the dad is reading Irish myths to his kid at bedtime and when his kid opens the book, it's just blank pages.
Irish legends are the fucking best. They're proper epic.
I haven't read much Irish mythology but I noticed that a lot of stories he mentioned are similar to some legends in the A Song of Ice and Fire series. I know George R.R. Martin based a lot of the series on UK and Irish history so I wonder if he purposely included references to Irish mythology too.
In school we are introduced to the Canterbury Tales - I still remember the opening line of the Knight's Tale " A gentle knight was pricking on the plain"...but not to it's Irish equivalent. Irish is taught as an almost abstract language and Irish history is taught in a very political way and often is bad history.
Irish mythology and tbe annals are very diverse and is a huge secret. Everybody has heard of the Book of Kells so know that Irish monks wrote but we are not taught in schools, in any cohesive way about the legacy of literature that they left behind.
An Irish comic used to do a joke about the "Annals of the Four Masters " which started as "The first thing you have to know about the Four Masters is that there were six of them" .
Personally I blame the church fuckers hate competition