Who were those Celts, of whose race the Irish are to-day perhaps the most striking representatives, and upon whose past the ancient literature of Ireland can best throw light?
Like the Greeks, like the Romans, like the English, this great people, which once ruled over a fourth of Europe, sprang from a small beginning and from narrow confines. The earliest home of the race from which they spread their conquering arms may be said, roughly speaking, to have lain along both banks of the upper Danube, and in that portion of Europe comprised to-day in the kingdoms of Bavaria and Würtemberg and the Grand Duchy of Baden, with the country drained by the river Maine to the east of the Rhine basin. In other words, the Celtic race and the Celtic language sprang from the heart of what is to-day modern Germany, and issuing thence established for over two centuries a vast empire held together by the ties of political unity and a common language over all North-west and Central Europe.
The vast extent of the territory conquered and colonised by the Celts, and the unity of their speech, may be conjectured from an examination of the place-names of Celtic origin which[Pg 2] either still exist or figure as having existed in European history.[1]
The Celts seem to have been first known to Greek—that is, to European history—under the semi-mythological name of the Hyperboreans,[2] an appellation which remained in force from the sixth to the fourth century before Christ. The name Celt or Kelt[3] first makes its appearance towards the year 500 B.C., in the geography of Hecat?us of Miletum, and is thereafter used successively by Herodotus, Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle, and from that time forward it seems to have been employed by the Greek scholars and historians as a generic term whereby to designate the Celts of the Continent.
Soon afterwards the word Galatian came also into use,[4] and was used as a synonym for Celt. In the first century B.C., however, the discovery was made that the Germans and the Celts, who had been hitherto confounded in the popular estimation, were really two different peoples, a fact which Julius C?sar was almost the first to point out. Diodorus Siculus,[Pg 3] accordingly, struck by this discovery, translates C?sar's Gallus or Gaul by the word Celt, and his Germanus or German by the word Galatian, while the other Greek historian, Dion Cassius, does the exact opposite, calling the Celts "Galatians," and the Germans "Celts"! The examples thus set, however, were the result of ignorance and were never followed. Plutarch treats the two words as identical, as do Strabo, Pausanias and all other Greek writers.
The word Celt itself is probably of very ancient origin, and was, no doubt, in use 800 or 1,000 years before Christ.[5] It cannot, however, be proved that it is a generic Celtic name for the Celtic race, and none of the present Celtic-speaking races have preserved it in their dialects. Jubainville derives it, very doubtfully I should think, from a Celtic root found in the old Irish verb "ar-CHELL-aim" ("I plunder") and the old substantive to-CHELL ("victory"); while he derives Galatian from a Celtic substantive now represented by the Irish gal[6] ("bravery"). This latter word "Galatian" is one which the German peoples never adopted, and it appears to have only come into use subsequently to their revolt against their Celtic masters. After the break-up of the Celtic Empire it was employed to designate the eastern portion of the race, while the inhabitants of Gaul were called Celt? and those of Spain Celtici or Celtiberi, but the Greeks called all indifferently by the common name of Galatians.
The Romans termed the Celts Galli, or Gauls, but they used the geographical term Gallia, or Gaul, in a restricted sense, first for the country inhabited by the Celts in North[Pg 4] Italy upon their own side of the Alps, and after that for the Celtic territory conquered by Rome upon the other side of the Alps.
The Germans appear to have called the Celts Wolah, a name derived from the Celtic tribe the Volc?, who were so long their neighbours, out of which appellation came the Anglo-Saxon Wealh and the modern English "Welsh."
There is one curious characteristic distinguishing, from its very earliest appearance, the Celtic language from its Indo-European sisters: this is the loss of the letter p both at the beginning of a word and when it is placed between two vowels.[7] This dropping of the letter p had already given to the Celtic language a special character of its own, at the time when breaking forth from their earliest home the Celts crossed the Rhine and proceeded, perhaps a thousand years before Christ, to establish themselves in the British Isles. The Celts who first colonised Ireland said, for instance, atir for pater, but they had not yet experienced, nor did they ever experience, that curious linguistic change which at a later time is assumed to have come over the Celts of the Continent and caused them to not only recover their faculty of pronouncing p, but to actually change into a p the Indo-European guttural q. Their descendants, the modern Irish, to this very day retain the primitive word-forms which had their origin a thousand years before Christ. So much so is this the case that the Welsh antiquary Lhuyd, writing in the last century, asserted, and with truth, that there were "scarce any words in the Irish besides what are borrowed from the Latin or some other language that begin with p, insomuch that in an ancient alphabetical vocabulary I have by me, that letter is omitted."[8] Even with the introduction of Christianity and[Pg 5] the knowledge of Latin the ancient Irish persisted in their repugnance to this letter, and made of the Latin Pasch-a (Easter) the word Cásg, and of the Latin purpur-a the Irish curcur.
But meantime the Continental Celts had either—as Jubainville seems to think—recovered their faculty for pronouncing p, or else—as Rhys believes—been overrun by other semi-Celts who, owing to some strong non-Aryan intermixture, found q repugnant to them, and changed it into p. This appears to have taken place prior to the year 500 B.C., for it was at about this time that they, having established themselves round the Seine and Loire and north of the Garonne, overran Spain, carrying everywhere with them this comparatively newly adopted p, as we can see by their tribal and place-names. They appeared in Italy sometime about 400 B.C.,[9] founded their colony in Galatia about 279 B.C., and afterwards sent another swarm into Great Britain, and to all these places they bore with them this obtrusive letter in place of the primitive q, the Irish alone resisting it, for the Irish represented a first off-shoot from the cradle of the race, an off-shoot which had left it at a time when q represented p, and not p q. Hence it is that Welsh is so full of the p sound which the primitive Irish would never adopt, as a glance at some of the commonest words in both languages will show.
English: Son tree head person worm feather everyone.
Welsh: Map prenn pen nep pryv pluv paup.
Irish: Mac crann cenn nech cruiv cluv[10] cách.
So that even the Irish St. Ciaran becomes Piaran in Wales.[11]
[Pg 6]
The Celts invaded Italy about the year 400 B.C., and stormed Rome a few years later. They were at this time at the height of their power. From about the year 500 to 300 B.C. they appear to have possessed a very high degree of political unity, to have been led by a single king,[12] and to have followed with signal success a wise and consistent external policy. The most important events in their history during this period were the three successful wars which they waged—first against the Carthaginians, out of whose hands they wrested the peninsula of Spain; secondly in Italy against the Etruscans, which ended in their making themselves masters of the north of that country; and thirdly against the Illyrians along the Danube. All of these wars were followed by large accessions of territory. One of the most striking features of their external policy during this period was their close alliance with the Greeks, whose commercial rivalry with the Ph?nicians naturally brought them into relations with the Celtic enemies of Carthaginian power in Spain, relations from which they reaped much advantage, since the necessity of making head against the Celtic invaders of Spain must have seriously crippled the Carthaginian power, at the very time when, as ally of the Persians, she attacked the Greeks in Sicily, and lost the battle of Himera on the same day that the Persians lost that of Salamis. Greek writers of the fourth century speak of the Celts as practising justice, of having nearly the same manners and customs as the Greeks, and they notice their hospitality to Grecian strangers.[13] Their war with the Etruscans in North Italy completed the ruin of an hereditary enemy of[Pg 7] the Greeks,[14] and their war with the Illyrians no doubt largely strengthened the hands of Philip, the father of Alexander the Great, and enabled him to throw off the tribute which the Illyrians had imposed upon Macedonia. Nor did Alexander himself embark upon his expedition into Asia without having first assured himself of the friendship of the Celts. He received their ambassadors with cordiality, called them his friends, and received from them a promise of alliance. "If we fulfil not our engagement," said they, "may the sky falling upon us crush us, may the earth opening swallow us up, may the sea overflowing its borders drown us," and we may well believe that these were the very words used by the Celtic chieftains when we find in an Irish saga committed to writing about the seventh century[15] the Ulster heroes swearing to their king when he wished to leave his wing of the battle to repel the attacks of a rival, and saying, "heaven is over us and earth is under us and sea is round about us, and unless the firmament fall with its star-showers upon the face of the earth, or unless the earth be destroyed by earthquake, or unless the ridgy, blue-bordered sea come over the expanse (?) of life, we shall not give one inch of ground."
While the ambassadors were drinking the young king asked them what was the thing they most feared, thinking, says the historian, that they would say himself, but their answer was quite different. "We fear no one," they said; "there is only one thing that we fear, which is, that the heavens may fall upon us; but the friendship of such a man as you we value more than everything," whereat the king, no doubt considerably astonished, remarked in a low voice to his courtiers what a vainglorious people these Celts were.[16]
[Pg 8]
All through the life of Alexander the Celts and Macedonians continued on good terms, and amongst the many envoys who came to Babylon to salute the youthful conqueror of Persia, appeared their representatives also. Some forty years later, however, this good understanding came to an end, and the Celts overthrew and slew in battle the Macedonian ruler Ptolemy Keraunos about 280 B.C.
With the Romans, as with the Greeks, the relations of the Celts were, during the fifth and fourth century B.C., upon the whole friendly, and their hostility to the Etruscans must have tended naturally to render them and the Romans mutual allies. The battle of Allia, fought on the 18th of July, 390 B.C., and the storming of Rome three days later, were a punishment inflicted on the Romans by the Celts in their exasperation at seeing the Roman ambassadors, contrary to the right of nations, assisting their enemies the Etruscans under the walls of Clusium, but these events appear to have been followed by a long peace.[17]
It is only in the third century B.C. that the hitherto victorious and widely-colonising Celts appear to have laid aside their internal political unity and to have lost their hitherto victorious tactics. The Germans, over whom they had for centuries domineered and whom they had deprived of their independence, rise against them about 300 B.C., and drive out their former conquerors from between the Rhine and[Pg 9] the Black Sea, from between the Elbe and the Maine. The Celts fall out with the Romans and are beaten at Sentinum in 295 B.C.; they ally themselves with their former enemies the Etruscans, and are again beaten in 283 B.C. and lose territory. They cease their alliance with the Greeks, and are guilty of the shameful folly of pillaging the temple of Delphi, an act of brigandage from which no good results could come, and from which no acquisition of territory resulted. They established a colony in Asia Minor in 278 B.C., successfully indeed, but absolutely cut off from the rest of the Celtic Empire, and such as in any federation of the Celtic tribes could only be a source of weakness. Again, about the same time, we see Celts driving out and supplanting Celts in the districts between the Rhine, the Seine, and the Marne. In 262 B.C. we find a body of three or four thousand Celts assisting their former foes the Carthaginians at the siege of Agrigentum, where they perish. Many of the Celts now took foreign service. It was at their instigation that the war of mercenaries broke out, which at one time brought Carthage to the very verge of destruction.
Only two centuries and a half, as Jubainville remarks, had elapsed since the Celts had conquered Spain from the Ph?nicians, and only a hundred and thirty years since they had taken Rome, but their victorious political unity had already begun to break up and crumble, and now Rome and Carthage commenced that deadly duel in which the victor was destined to impose his sway upon the ruins of the Celtic Empire as well as on that of Alexander—impose it, in fact, upon all the world then known to the Greeks, except only the extreme east.
One of the circumstances which must have helped most materially to break up the Celtic Empire was the successful revolt of the Germans against their former masters. The relation of the German to the Celtic tribes is very obscure and puzzling. The ancient Greek historians of the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries B.C., who tell us so much about the[Pg 10] Celts, know absolutely nothing of the Germans. As early as the year 500 B.C. Hecat?us of Miletum is able to name three peoples and two cities of India. But of the Germans, who were so much nearer to Marseilles than the nearest point of India is to the most eastern Greek colony, he says not a word. Ephorus, in the fourth century, knows of only one people to the extreme west, and they are the Celts, and their immediate neighbours are the Scythians. He knows of no intermediate state or nation. Where, then, were the Germans?
The explanation lies, according to Jubainville, in this, that even before this period the German had been conquered by the Celt and become subordinated to him. The Greek historians knew of no independent state bordering upon the Scythians except the Celtic Empire alone, because none such existed. In the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., and perhaps as early as the seventh and sixth, the Germans had been subdued and had lost their independence. How and when this took place we can only conjecture, but we have philological reasons for believing that the two races had come into mutual contact at a very early date, probably as early as the eleventh century B.C. The early German name for the Rhine, for instance, Rīno-s, comes directly from the primitive Indo-European form Reino-s and not from the Celtic Rēno-s, which shows that the Germans had reached that river at a time when the Celts who lived along it still called it Reinos, not Rēnos. The Celts afterwards changed the primitive ei into ē, and from their carrying the form réin[18] with them into Ireland, they had probably done this as early as the ninth or tenth century B.C., for, as we have shown, the Celts who inhabited Ireland have preserved the very oldest forms of the Celtic speech.
On the other hand the Celts always called that Germanic tribe who accompanied the Cimbri by the name of Teutoni, thus showing that they first came in contact with them at a[Pg 11] date anterior to the phonetic law which introduced the so-called explosive consonants into German, and which caused the root Teutono (preserved intact by the Celts) to be turned into Theudono. From this it follows that the German and Celtic peoples were in touch with one another at a very remote period.
The long subordination of the German to the Celt has left its marks deeply behind it, for his "language had remained uncultivated during ages of slavery, had been reduced to the condition of a patois, and had forced the explosive consonants to submit to modifications of sound, the analogues of which appear in the Latin and Celtic languages during their decadence many centuries after those modifications of sound had deformed the language of the Germans."[19]
"In fine the Germanic has created for itself a place apart, amongst the other Indo-European languages, though the excessive poverty of its conjugation, which only knows three tenses—the present tense and two past tenses—and which has lost in particular the imperfect or secondary present, the future, and the sigmatic aorist, and which has not had strength to regain those losses by the aid of new composite tenses, with the exception of its dental preterite. The Celtic has preserved the three tenses which the Germanic has lost."[20]
The Celtic language is in a manner allied to that of Italy, as is shown by its grammar, and out of all the circle of Indo-European languages the Latin comes nearest to it, and it and the Latin possess certain grammatical characteristics in common which are absent from the others.[21] To account for these we may[Pg 12] assume what may be called an Italo-Celtic period, prior, probably, to the establishment of the Italian races in Italy, perhaps some twelve hundred years before Christ.
On the other hand such mutual influence as Celtic and German have exercised upon each other is restricted merely to the vocabularies of the languages, for when these races came in contact with each other the two tongues had been already completely formed, and the grammar of the one could no longer be affected by that of the other.
That there existed a kind of Celto-Germanic civilisation is easily proved by the number of words common to each language which are not found in the other Indo-European tongues, or which if they occur in them, are found bearing a different meaning. The two peoples, the dominant Celts and the subject Germans, obeyed the same chiefs and fought in the same armies, and naturally a certain number of words became common to both. It is noticeable, however, that none of the terms relating to either gods or priests or religious ceremonies bear in either language the slightest resemblance to one another. It was probably this difference of religion which preserved the conquered people from being assimilated, and which was ultimately the cause of the successful uprising of the servile tribes.
The words which are common to the Germanic and the Celtic languages belong either to the art of government, political institutions, and law, or else to the art of war. These d'Arbois de Jubainville divides into two classes—those which can be phonetically proved to be of Celtic origin, and those which, though almost certainly of Celtic origin, yet cannot be proved to be so to actual demonstration. Such important German words[22] as Reich and Amt are beyond all doubt Celtic loan-words,[Pg 13] as are probably such familiar vocables as Bann, frei, Eid, Geisel, leihen, Erbe, Werth,[23] all terms relating to law and government, imposed on or borrowed by the conquered Germans. From the Celts come also all such words concerning war and fighting as are common to both nations, such as Held, Heer, Sieg, Beute. From the Celts too come names of domiciles, as Burg, Dorf, Zaun, also of localities as Land, Flur, Furt, and the English wood, and of domestic aids as Pferd, Beil, and the Anglo-Saxon V?r (a torque). They too seem to have been the first in Northern Europe to have practised the art of medicine, for from the Celtic comes the Gothic lēkeis—English leech.[24] Certain other domestic words, such as Eisen, Loth, and Leder, both races have in common.
Despite the long subjection of the Germans they never lost their language, nor were they assimilated by the conquering race, a fate from which they were probably preserved, as we have said, by the complete difference of their sacred customs. There is hardly one name in all the Teutonic theogony which even faintly resembles a Celtic one.[25] Their funeral rites were different,[Pg 14] the Germans burning, but the Celts burying their dead. Their systems of priesthood were absolutely different, that of the Celts being always an institution distinct from the kingship, while that of the Germans was for centuries vested in the head of the tribe or family. The priests of the Germans, even after the functions of priesthood had been severed from those of kingship, still exercised criminal jurisdiction, and even in the army a soldier could not be punished without their sanction. On the other hand the milder druids of the Celts appear to have never taken part in the judgment of delinquents against the State. C?sar makes no mention of their ever acting as judges in criminal cases. The culprit guilty or treason was not put to death by them but by the citizens—ab civitate.[26]
It was about the year 300 B.C. that the German tribes, so long incorporated with the Celts, at last rose against their masters and broke their yoke from off their necks. They succeeded in dislodging the Celts from the country which lies between the Rhine and the North Sea, between the Elbe and the basin of the Maine. It was in consequence of this blow that the Celtic Belg? were obliged to withdraw from the right bank of the Rhine to the left, and to occupy the country between it, the Seine, and the Marne, whilst other tribes settled themselves along the Rhine, and others again marched upon Asia Minor and founded their famous colony of Galatia in the extreme east of Europe, to whom, over three centuries later, St. Paul addressed his epistle, and whose descendants were found by St. Jerome in the fourth century still speaking Celtic.[27]
[Pg 15]
It is no longer necessary to follow the fortunes of the Continental Celts, to trace the history of their Galatian colony, to tell how they lost Spain, to recount the exploits of Marius and Sylla, the wars of C?sar, the heroic struggle of Vercingetorix, the division of Gaul by Octavius, the oppression of the Romans, and finally the inroads of the barbaric hordes of Visigoths, Burgundians, and Francs. It is sufficient to say that already in the third century of our era Gaul had lost every trace of its ancient Celtic organisation, and in its laws, habits, and civil administration had become purely Roman. The upper classes had, like the Irish upper classes of this and of the last century, thrown aside every vestige of Gaulish nationality, and piqued themselves upon the perfection with which they had Romanised themselves, as the Irish upper classes do upon the thoroughness with which they have become Anglicised. They threw aside their Gaulish names to adopt others more consonant to Latin ears, as the Irish are doing at this moment. Above all they prided themselves upon speaking only the language of their conquerors, and like so many of the Irish of to-day they derided their ancient language as lingua rustica. It, however, banished from the mouths of the nobles and officials, lived on in the villages and rural parts of Gaul, as it has to this day done in Ireland, until the sixth century, when it finally gave ground and retired into the mountains and wastes of Armorica, where it coalesced with the Welsh which the large colony of British brought in with them when flying from the Saxon, and where it, in the[Pg 16] Cymraeg form of it, is still spoken by a couple of million people.[28]
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[1] Take, for instance, the Celtic word dúno-n, Latinised dunum, which is the Irish dún "castle" or "fortress," so common in Irish topography, as in Dunmore, Dunsink, Shandun, &c. There are over a dozen instances of this word in France, nearly as many in Great Britain, more than half a dozen in Spain, eight or nine in Germany, three in Austria, a couple in the Balkan States, three more in Switzerland, one at least (Lug-dun, now Leyden) in the Low Countries, one in Portugal, one in Piedmont, one in South Russia.
Celtic was once spoken from Ireland to the Black Sea, although the population who can now speak Celtic dialects is not more than three or four millions. As for Celtic arch?ological remains "on les trouve tant dans nos musées nationaux (en particulier au Musée de Saint Germain) que dans les collections publiques de la Hongrie, de l'Autriche, de la Hesse, de la Bohême, du Würtemburg, du pays de Bade, de la Suisse, de l'Italie." (Bertrand and Reinach, p. 3).
[2] ?περβορε?ο?.
[3] Κελτ??. The Greeks, the Latins, and the Celts themselves pronounced Kelt, as do the modern Germans. It is against the genius of the French language to pronounce the c hard, but not against that of the English, who consequently had better say Kelt.
[4] Γαλατη?.
[5] As is proved, according to Jubainville, by its having made its way into German before the so-called Laut-verschiebung took place, to the laws of which it submitted, for out of Celtis, the feminine form of it, they have made Childis, as in the Frank-Merovingian Bruni-Childis or Brunhild, and the old Scandinavian Hildr, the war-goddess.
[6] This was actually a living word as recently as ten years ago. I knew an old man who often used it in the sense of "spirit," "fire," "energy": he used to say cuir gal ann, meaning do it bravely, energetically. This was in the county Roscommon. I cannot say that I have heard the word elsewhere.
[7] Thus the Greek ?π?ρ, Latin s-uper, German über is ver in ancient Celtic (for in Old Irish, ar in the modern language), platanus becomes litano-s (Irish leathan), παρ? becomes are, and so on.
[8] Lhuyd's "Comparative Etymology," title i. p. 21. Out of over 700 pages in O'Reilly's Irish dictionary only twelve are occupied with the letter p.
[9] Probably for the second time. MM. Bertrand and Reinach seem to have proved that the Cisalpine peoples of North Italy who were under the dominion of the Etruscans were Celtic in manners and costume, and probably in language also. See "Les Celtes dans les vallées du P? et du Danube." Chapter on La Gaule Cisalpine.
[10] Rather "cruimh" and "clumh," the mh being pronounced v.
[11] In this matter of labialism Greek stands to some small extent with regard to Latin, as Welsh to Irish. Nor is Latin itself exempt from it; compare the labialised Latin sept-em with the more primitive Irish secht.
[12] See Livy's account of Ambicatus, who seems to have been a kind of Celtic Charlemagne, or more probably the equivalent of the Irish ard-righ. Livy probably exaggerates his importance.
[13] Cf. the remarkable verses quoted by d'Arbois de Jubainville of Scymnus of Chio, following Ephorus:
"Χρ?νται δ? Κελτο? το?? ?θεσιν ?Ελληνικο??
?χοντε? ο?κει?τατα πρ?? τ?ν ?Ελλ?δα
δι? τ?? ?ποδοχ?? τ?ν ?πιξενουμ?νων."
[14] By this war the newly-arrived bands drove out the Etruscan aristocracy and took its place, ruling over a population of what were really their Celtic kinsmen.
[15] The Táin Bo Chuailgne.
[16] [Κελτο??] ?π?πεμψε, τοσο?τον ?πειπ?ν ?τι ?λαζ?νεσ Κελτο? (Arrian, bk. i. chap. iv.).
[17] See Livy, book v. chap, xxxvi.: "Ibi, jam urgentibus Romanam urbem fatis, legati contra jus gentium arma capiunt, nec id clam esse potuit, quum ante signa Etruscorum tres nobilissimi fortissimi-que Roman? juventutis pugnarent. Tantum eminebat peregrina virtus. Quin etiam Q. Fabius erectus extra aciem equo, ducem Gallorum, ferociter in ipsa signa Etruscorum incursantem, per latus transfixum hasta, occidit: spolia-que ejus legentem Galli agnovere, perque totem aciem Romanum legatum esse signum datum est. Omissa inde in Clusinos ira, receptui canunt minantes Romanis." It was the refusal of the Romans to give satisfaction for this outrage that first brought the Gauls upon them.
Jubainville rejects as fabulous the self-contradicting accounts of Livy about Roman wars with the Celts during the next forty years after the storming of Rome.
[18] Réin=a primitive rēni. It occurs in the Amra Colum-cilli, meaning "of the sea."
[19] D'Arbois de Jubainville's "Premiers Habitants de l'Europe," book iii. chap. iii. §15.
[20] D'Arbois de Jubainville, ibid.
[21] "Some of the oldest and deepest morphological changes in Aryan speech are those which affect the Celto-Italic language. Such are the formation of a new passive, a new future, and a new perfect. Hence it is believed that the Celto-Italic languages may have separated from the rest while the other Aryan languages remained united." Taylor's "Origin of the Aryans," p. 257. Mr. Taylor is here alluding to the passive in r and the future in bo, but my friend, M. Georges Dottin, in his laborious and ample volume published last year, "Les désinences en R," has shown that the r-passives, at least, are, in Italic and Celtic, independent creations.
[22] These loan-words "can hardly be later than the time of the Gaulish Empire founded by Ambicatus in the sixth century B.C. We gather from them that at this or some earlier period the culture and political organisation of the Teutons was inferior to that of the Celts, and that the Teutons must have been subjected to Celtic rule. It would seem from the linguistic evidence that the Teutons got from their Celtic and Lithuanian neighbours their first knowledge of agriculture and metals, of many weapons and articles of food and clothing, as well as the most elementary social, religious, and political conceptions, the words for nation, people, king, and magistrate being, for instance, loan-words from Celtic or Lithuanian."—Taylor's "Origin of the Aryans," p. 234.
[23] Also the Gothic word magus ("a slave"), old Irish mug, or mogh, liugan ("to swear"), Irish luigh, dulgs (a debt), Irish dualgus, &c.
[24] Irish liaig. The Finns again borrowed this word from the Germans. It is the root of the name Lee, in most Irish families of that surname, indicating that their ancestors practised leech-craft.
[25] Rhys indeed compares the great Teutonic sky-god Woden with the Welsh Gwydion and Thor with the Celtic Taranucus or Thunder-God, and is of opinion that a good deal of Teutonic mythology was drawn from Celtic sources—a theory which, when we consider how much the Germans are indebted to the Celts for their culture-terms, may well be true with regard to later mythological conceptions and mythological saga. However, it is now generally acknowledged that while all the nations of Aryan origin possess a common inheritance of language, any inheritance of a common mythology, if such exist at all, must be reduced to very small proportions. The complete difference between the names of the Indian, Hellenic, Italic, Teutonic, and Celtic gods is very striking.
[26] "De Bello Gallico," book vii. chap. iv.
[27] Which he speaks of as a mark of folly, in just the same tone as an Anglicised Hibernian does of the Irish-speaking of the native Celts. His words are worth quoting:—"Antiqu? stultiti? usque hodie manent vestigia. Unum est quod inferimus, et promissum in exordio reddimus, Galatas excepto sermone Gr?co quo omnis Oriens loquitur propriam linguam eamdem pene habere quam Treviros, nec referre si aliqua exinde corrumperint, cum et Aphri Ph?nicum linguam nonnulla ex parte mutaverint, et ipsa Latinitas et regionibus quotidie mutetur et tempore." His insinuation that they spoke their own language badly is also thoroughly Anglo-Hibernian, reminding one very much of Sir William Petty and others. See Jerome's preface to his "Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians," book vii. p. 429. Migne's edition. In another passage he is more complimentary, and calls them the Conquerors of the East and West—"Gallo-gr?cia [i.e., Galatia] in qua consederunt Orientis Occidentisque victores." See his "Epistle to Rusticus," book i. p. 935. Migne.
[28] Although Celtic has so long disappeared out of France with the exception of Armorica, it has left its traces deeply behind it upon the French language. This is also true even of linguistic sounds. "Tous les sons simples du fran?ais se retrouvent dans le breton, et tous ceux du breton à l'exception d'un seul (le ch ou le χ) sont aussi dans notre langue: l'u et l'e très-ouvert, l'e muet si rare partout ailleurs, le j pur inconnu à toute l'Europe, les deux sons mouillés du n et du l (comme dans les mots bataille et dignité) sont communs à la langue fran?aise et aux idiomes celtiques," says Demogeot. Even in French customary law there are "distinct and numerous traces" of old Gaulish habits and legislation, as Laferrière has pointed out in his history of the civil law of Rome and France. Nor is this to be in the least wondered at, when we remember that nineteen-twentieths of the modern French blood is computed to be that of the aboriginal races—Aquitanians, Celts, and Belg?; whilst out of the remaining twentieth "the descendants of the Teutonic invaders—Franks, Burgundians, Goths, and Normans doubtless contributed a more numerous element to the population than the Romans, who, though fewer in number than any of the others, imposed their language on the whole country" (see Taylor's "Origin of the Aryans," p. 204). The bulk of the French nation is probably pre-Celtic. The modern Frenchman does not at all resemble the Gallic type as described by the Greek and Roman writers.