a bag, “domhnoin," deep, and “gái," a spear. The Firbolgs were the "men of the bag": the Greeks had subjected them in Thrace to great hardship and slavery, obliging them to dig earth and raise mould, and to carry it in leather-sacks and place it on rocks to make a fruitful soil; and it was out of the sacks that they made the hide-bound boats for travelling to the Irish Sea. With the like futility the name of the Damnonians was derived from the pits which they dug in the Thracian hills to get mould for the "men of the bag"; and the title of the "FirGaillian," another of the legendary tribes, was taken from the long spears that they bore for the protection of their brethren as they worked. We have been told by persons of great learning and power of research that "it is not difficult to recognise in this tradition the people who worked the tin by digging in the soil and transporting it in bags to their hide-covered boats"; and it is added, that the "traditions" of the physical appearance of the early Irish colonists will lead us to the same conclusion.1 If we ask for the source of these last-named traditions, we are referred to the "Genealogies" of MacFirbis, from which a quotation was made in the last preceding chapter. O'Curry cites passages to the following effect from its strange rambling preface. The white-skinned warriors, brown-haired, bounteous and brave, are the descendants "of the sons of Miledh in Erinn." "Every one who is fair, revengeful and big, and every plunderer, and every musical person, and professor of music and entertainment, and all who are adepts in Druidism and magic, these are the children of the Tuatha Dè Damann in Erinn." But every 1 Skene, Celtic Scotland, i. 177. See ante, p. 139. peasant who listened to the history knew well enough, or thought he knew, that the fair, revengeful tribe had fled to the secret palaces inside "the fairy-hills"; for there were no mortal affinities in the Tribe of Gods, or "Plebs Deorum," as their early worshippers had called the personified powers of nature. Let us pass, however, to the picture of "the men of the bag, the pit, and the spear," to judge for ourselves whether it fairly represents, as we are told, the Silures of the Severn Valley, and "the lowest type of the Irish people." "Every one who is black-haired and a tattler, guileful, tale-telling, noisy, and contemptible, every wretched, mean, strolling, unsteady, harsh, and inhospitable person, every slave, and every mean thief, these are the sons of the Fir-Bolg, of the Fir-Gailiun, and of the FirDomhnan in Erinn." On the other hand, we are told by Mr. Skene, that the black cloaks and goats' beards of the men in the Tin Islands are to be taken in a non-natural sense. "They seem to be an exaggerated and distorted representation of the darkness of the complexion, and the curled hair attributed to the Silures."2 And Cornwall itself is turned into an archipelago of Hesperides lying out at sea away from the Damnonian shore; and the plain words of the old Greek travellers are twisted into these obscure meanings to suit Camden's geography, and to preserve the apparent value of "notions prevailing among the people themselves of their ethnology, their supposed descent, and their mutual relation to each other." We have shown our reasons for rejecting the authority of such false traditions. But it would not be proper to 1 Skene, Celtic Scotland, i. 179. 3 Camden, Britannia (Gough), 1112. 2 Ibid, 167. pass from the subject without noticing the ethnological table which has been constructed by those who attach a real importance to the existence of these ancient rumours. The following may be taken as a fair summary of the classification in question :-1 1. The Neolithic Tribes. A people possessing the physical characteristics of the Iberians had spread at one time over the whole of Great Britain and Ireland. Their representatives were a. The tin-workers of Cornwall and the Scilly Islands, who traded with Spain: b. The tribe of the Silures in South Wales: c. The people called the Firbolg in the legendary history of Ireland. 2. The Celtic Peoples. The people of the round-headed skulls, otherwise called the Celtic Race. They are divided into two chief branches, marked respectively by their Gaelic and British forms of language, both branches having originally belonged to one race. Each of these great branches is taken to have been further subdivided, as follows: A. The Gaelic branch is thus subdivided :- (a.) A fair-skinned, large-limbed, and red-haired race, represented in Britain by the people of the interior, whom the Romans thought to be indigenous, and who were afterwards called the Picts or painted people : (b.) “In the legendary history of Ireland, they are represented by the Tuatha Dè Danann, and by the 1 The summary is abridged from Skene's Celtic Scotland, i. 164, 226, 227, the same words being used as nearly as possible. 'Cruithnigh," a name which was the Irish equivalent of the Latin Picti, and was applied to the Picts of Scotland, and to the people who preceded the Scots in Ulster." (c.) A fair-skinned, brown-haired race, "of a less Germanic type," represented by the Milesians in the legendary history, and after the fourth century, called the Scots. B. The British branch. This branch is taken to have extended itself over the whole of the regions which were formed into the Roman province. The people "resembled the Gauls in their physical appearance." They were subdivided into the following varieties: 1. Those whose language afterwards appears as the Cornish : 2. Those whose language afterwards appears as the Welsh. 1 According to the Irish legends, it was in the reign of Eireamhnon the Milesian, that the Cruitnigh, or Picts, "a people from Thrace," landed at Wexford Harbour, but were driven to the neighbouring Caledonian shores. The chief interest in the story lies in the clue which it affords to the methods of its manufacture. These Picts are called the children of Gleoin Mac Ercol, that is (says Mr. Skene), the children of Gelonus the son of Hercules, and they were named Agathyrsi. These are obvious allusions to Virgil's "Pictosque Gelonos," Georg. ii. 115, and to the painted Agathyrsi of Herodotus. Latham quotes a passage from a tenth-century Life of St. Vodoal, which places the matter beyond a doubt. Blessed Vodoal was sprung from the arrow-bearing nation of the Geloni, who are believed to have come from Scythia. Concerning whom the poet writes, pictosque Gelonos,' and from that time till now they are called Picts." Ethnol. Brit. Isl. 256. Compare the "sagittiferi Geloni," Æneid. viii. 725. The usual derivation for "Cruitnigh" is a word for corn or grain, which appears in the Manx language as curnaght, and in Gaelic as cruitneaght. Fitz-Gerald, Anc. Irish, Fraser (1875), xii. 99. "The We have preferred the view that the dark tribes were descended from a people or peoples of unknown affinities, established in both islands as early as the Neolithic Age, and that the fair round-headed tribes came from a people related to the Finnish nations of the Baltic; and there seems to be evidence that, though the lineage of these latter tribes has never been completely traced, they were at any rate distinct from the fair oval-headed men, “la race aryenne à tête allongée," to which belonged the true Celts and the kindred stocks in Scandinavia and Germany.1 We shall endeavour to show the presence down to late times of societies deriving their origin from these preCeltic stocks, partly by the evidence of the eye-witnesses who have left accounts of their manners and physical appearance, and partly by an examination of those points of language and local custom which the best authorities on those subjects have taken to be survivals from the earliest inhabitants of Britain. As to language, we must trust to those who (in the words of Professor Rhŷs) are engaged in the laborious but not impossible task of deciphering "the weather-worn history" of the Celtic tongues. By the help of wellestablished rules of phonology the search for the origin of the verbal and grammatical forms in Welsh and Irish has already been carried out with great success: "some of the most stubborn words of the vernacular have been forced, one after another, to surrender the secrets of their pedigree;" while others can only be explained on the theory 1 Congrès Celtique (St. Brieuc, 1867), 358. Compare "British Barrows," 646, 656, 712; Archæol. xxxvii. 432, xlii. 175, 460; Proc. Royal Inst. 1870, p. 118. 2 Lectures on Welsh Philology, 6, 89. |