Bog Myrtle & Peat

Do you know about Blodeuwedd the flower girl, who was transformed into an owl? I didn’t. I only learned about the Mabinogion a couple of years ago, and my introduction was crisply academic. In a seminar hosted by the Ted Hughes Society, the Crow poems were linked to ancient Welsh folklore in ways which threw an entirely new light on a favourite pattern of images. I was poleaxed, not only by the realisation that this massive store of ancient Welsh legends existed, but also that I had been through my entire education without a single nod in its direction. 

The Mabinogion is indispensably enormous. I was enraptured by tales of Prince Pwyll and Macsen Wledig, and having missed the chance to grow up with these stories, I was determined to amend that absence in my own son’s life. So we spent a period poring over children’s renditions of the Mabinogion, many of which were richly ornamented with exciting illustrations. These had been pared back for kids, not least because the original tales are deeply confusing and illusory. They work for children as fantastical excursions into a world of warriors, dragons and wizards – but it would actually be quite difficult to provide adequate illustration for stories which approach an almost hallucinatory, psychedelic splendour. You’d have to pity the illustrator who is tasked with relating a chase sequence during which the two protagonists transform themselves into “rain” or “the flash of light from a sword”. This stuff is the real deal – a heavy thump of imagination from a lost and ancient world.

In his book Dreamtime, the Kerry-born philosopher John Moriarty looked in detail at the Mabinogion, working around theories of pre-Christian Celtic psychology. He was driving to isolate the point at which modernity began in Ireland and the Atlantic fringe, and he asks uneasy questions about what Christianity did to our understanding of the world. As he considers this break-point and the final departure from “the old ways”, he repeatedly comes back to an idea that Welsh and Irish mysticism is actually part of a vast Eurasian culture of consciousness and belief. In this, he’s mirroring writers like WB Yeats and Robert Graves who were also preoccupied with unifying theories of folklore and mythology.

Engaging with strands of ancient Celticism, Yeats was determined to reach the roots of a truly indigenous Irish imagination, and he worked hard to peer beyond the arrival of Christianity to a kind of ancient Eurasian commonality which linked the coast of western Ireland to the steaming, technicolour swirl of the river Ganges. Many writers have produced fascinating work on this theme, but it’s just so hard to swallow the idea that Ireland and India could ever be part of the same ancient tradition. The distances are too vast; the threads so narrow and precarious that it all seems like a wonderful, impossible dream. But there is something to it. 

Everybody in Galloway knows about the Torrs Cap. Before the Galloway Hoard was discovered, it was our archaeological main event. Dug out of a loch near Castle Douglas in the 1820s, the little cap was designed to be worn by a horse. It has eyeholes and long, back-curved horns which sweep away behind the wearer’s head. Archaeologists reckon the Torrs helmet is from the Bronze Age, and they’ve linked motifs on the object to a kind of artwork produced by the La Tene people – continental Celts from a time before the Romans swept north from modern Italy. It’s an exciting piece of history, not least because the helmet was given to Sir Walter Scott and placed on display at Abbotsford for many years in the early nineteenth century.

But during a recent trip to the National Museum of Kazakhstan in Astana, the Torrs helmet sprang to mind as I walked through a display of Scythian ethnography. Working on the basis of numerous archaeological finds on the great steppes of Central Asia, horsemen (and horses) had been found to wear very similar headgear two thousand years before the birth of Christ. The same back-curved horns were on display; the same eyeholes, decorations and aesthetics were on show in a museum four thousand miles away from a leaky loch in Scotland. 

It’s important to say that while it’s easy to make this connection, the reality is completely misleading. Most of what we know about the Torrs helmet is wrong, and there’s evidence that the distinctive horns are not only a later addition, but they originally faced the other way. The Torrs helmet is emphatically not a connection between Kazakh nomads and Galloway Celts, but it did start a chain of thought working in the back of my mind. Because while this was a dud, other links are more compelling. I showed photographs of Scythian goldwork to a knowledgeable friend who suggested that they looked Celtic. They do, and not without reason. Scythian ornaments were often cast and moulded by Greek goldsmiths on the Black Sea who belonged to a European tradition of metalwork. It’s a long way to leap from Castle Douglas to the edge of Mongolia – but it’s not so far to jump to Greece. 

In his book “The Celts; a Sceptical History”, Simon Jenkins worked hard to disprove the idea of a single Celtic people in Europe. His theory is simple; the Celts are far too complex and miasmic to be described with any cohesion – particularly in retrospect when so many competing interests have tampered with the narrative over the intervening millennia. We sometimes want to believe in them, but the reality is so broad and insubstantial that it’s meaningless – quoting Tolkein, “The fabulous Celtic twilight …[is] a magic bag into which anything could be tossed and anything retrieved”.

But if it wasn’t the Celts, there are signs of movement across the vast space between Central Asia and Western Europe. Shadowy people with mystical names emerge and recede from the archaeological record – particularly the Yamnayans, who spread west around 2,500 years BC. It’s impossible to substantiate these moods and movements – but in a stirring of people and ideas from east to west, the idea of English as an indo-european language begins to feel more credible – and the notion of shared imagination, language and culture steadily thickens into a credible rope of possibility.

Although it’s much later in the archaeological record, it’s telling that a pot which was dug out of the ground near Castle Douglas is currently on display as one of the top exhibits in a British Museum exhibition about the Silk Roads. The pot was made in Zoroastrian Persia during the 6^th Century and was buried near Glenlochar with a weight of Viking gold and Chinese silk in the 9^th Century as part of the Galloway Hoard. This discovery only heightens a sense of global dialogue which feels at odds with more recent geographies. And it seems steadily more possible that if the Mabinogion is laced with references to roman culture and medieval French courtly tradition, it could easily have been influenced by ever older and more distant voices.

It feels like Yeats and Moriarty were right, and it’s possible that if the birth of Jesus Christ has been presented as “the start of things”, it also led to a dramatic fracturing of broader, more dynamic systems – and an extraordinary narrowing of horizons. Perhaps it’s now impossible to prove this idea of ancient commonality one way or another. The evidence is so old, and even the clearest arguments are based on the faintest trends. But there’s a reason why so many writers have gravitated around these ideas – the connections feel viable, and doubts are salved by the fact that we often want it to be true.