One way of taking objects from the everyday world and transporting them to the Otherworld was to make them unrealistically large. This might apply to a whole object or just a part of it. Making an image of an animal, otherwise in true proportions, and giving it abnormally large horns was a way of transforming it into something Otherworldly.
The Cerne Giant in Dorset is well-known for his very large phallus, and the exaggeration has often been seen as proof that the figure was made as a fertility figure, but in this we have been misled. It was only during a scouring as recently as 1909 that the phallus was lengthened—before that it was in perfect proportion with the rest of the figure. This may have been done as a joke by the laborers who were given the job of cleaning the figure, but it is more likely to have been a mistake. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there was a ring representing the Giant’s navel immediately above the phallus. Overgrown with grass, these two features could easily have been joined by mistake. Either way, the present head of the phallus is exactly where the navel was until 1909. But there are genuine examples of Celtic phallic exaggeration, such as the bronze relief of a naked man found at Woodeaton in Oxfordshire.
Another common form of exaggeration was repeating an image, especially in triplicate (see Miniaturization, Rule of Three; Places: Cerne Abbas).
GIANT
Giants and ogres are an integral part of later Celtic legend (see Myths: Comorre the Cursed, Morven, the Prop of Brittany, Tom and the Giant). Some of the giants, such as the colossal Bran the Blessed, clearly were once gods. Bran was so big that no house could contain him, and so big that he was able to wade across the Irish Sea from Wales to Ireland. He was enormously strong, but he was benign. His decapitated head chatted amiably and brought a blessing wherever it was carried; it protected Britain from invaders so long as it was safely lodged in London (see Myths: Branwen).
The huge hill figure depicting the Cerne Giant was originally intended as an icon of the Iron Age protector god of Dorset, though he has been interpreted subsequently in all sorts of different ways (see Cerne Abbas).
Aggressive, short-tempered giants are stock characters in medieval storytelling. The Giant of Grabbist was a stone-throwing giant, but he was also actively benevolent. He once lifted a boat that was in difficulties at sea and set it down safely in harbor. The Giant of Grabbist is slightly comical, and as the storytelling tradition developed, giants became steadily more grotesque and foolish. Increasingly, they became figures of fun.
The Giant of Carn Galva in Cornwall was a kindly giant. He was more playful than warlike. Giants were responsible for placing rocking-stones (“logan-stones”) on top of the granite tors of the English West Country. The Carn Galva Giant put in place the rocking-stone on the westernmost hill-top, so that he could rock himself to sleep as he watched the sun sink into the sea in the west. Nearby is a pile of roughly cube-shaped boulders that the giant used to build up and then kick down again as a pastime, like a bored child playing with building blocks. His main occupation was to protect the people of Morvah and Zennor from attack by the Titans who lived on Lelant Hills. The Giant of Carn Galva never killed any of the Morvah people except one, and that was by accident, in play.
The giant was fond of a young man from Choon, who used to walk up to the hilltop occasionally, just to see how the giant was getting on, to cheer him up and play a game of bob to pass the time. One afternoon, the giant was so pleased with the game they had played that when the young man from Choon threw down his quoit ready to go home, the giant tapped him good-naturedly on the shoulder with the tips of his fingers. “Be sure to come again tomorrow, son, and then we’ll have another good game!”
But the young man dropped dead at his feet—the giant had broken his skull with his gentle tap. When the giant realized his young friend was dead, he cradled his body in his arms and sat down on the big, square rock at the foot of the hill, rocking himself to and fro. He wailed and cried louder than the noise of the breakers on the cliffs. “Oh, why didn’t they make the shell of your noddle stronger? It’s as soft as a piecrust and made too thin by half! And how shall I pass the time without you here to play bob with me, and hide-and-seek?” The giant pined away for seven years before he died of a broken heart.
The landscape detail included in stories such as this one help to explain how the stories evolved and why they persisted. They gave people an explanation of strangely shaped landforms that otherwise were a total mystery to them.
At Peel Castle on the Isle of Man is the legendary grave of the first king of Eubonia, the ancient name of the island. It is 30 feet (9m) long.
THE GRAIL QUEST
The magic cup is a common element in Celtic folk-tales. In Finn MacCoul and the Bent Grey Lad, the hero is sent off to look for the “quadrangular cup of the Fenians,” which the King of Lochlann has stolen. The cup has supernatural qualities. Any drink you could wish for may be drunk from it. This is similar to the magic cup given to Huon of Bordeaux by King Oberon.
In another Irish tale, there is a cup that can cure the dumb. The enamel-decorated glass tumbler known as the Luck of Edenhall brings good luck, but if the cup is broken, the luck runs out. In a similar way, the family that possesses and looks after the cup of Ballafletcher on the Isle of Man may expect good luck, prosperity, and peace; but if the cup is damaged there are serious consequences.
The Holy Grail legend is the daughter of two parents and four grandparents. The mother is a Christian legend, and the father is a Celtic myth. There are two Christian origins for the cup. It may be the sacred cup from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper, or it may be the one used to catch the blood that ran from his wounds at the Crucifixion; either way, it is a sacred cup intimately associated with the last hours in the life of Jesus. There are, symmetrically, two Celtic origins. One is the magic cauldron of Celtic gods: a cauldron that is never empty and keeps everyone replete. The other is the magic chalice that gives spiritual power and kingly authority.
Invariably, when people talk about the Holy Grail as a physical object, they mean the cup associated with Jesus. But in medieval storytelling, somehow all four of these ideas come indeterminately stirred together to produce a misty apparition, an Otherworldly chalice that can only be seen under certain favorable conditions, and then only by the pure and the deserving.
It is said that an incomplete wooden cup, called the Nanteos Cup, and preserved in private ownership in Wales, represents the actual cup described in Christian legend.
This cup, said to be made of olivewood, has its own provenance story, which some may believe and some may not. Robert de Boron’s Joseph of Arimathea describes Joseph as bringing the cup to Britain. It arrived at Glastonbury, where it went into the care of the monks of Glastonbury Abbey. But then much depends on whether you believe the other stories that are told about Glastonbury. After the Dissolution, some of the monks from Glastonbury took refuge in Strata Florida Abbey near Tregaron in Ceredigion. When that abbey closed, it is said that the cup was left in the care of the Stedman family, the local landowners, and subsequently passed through marriage to the Powells of Nanteos Mansion near Aberystwyth.
The Nanteos Cup is thought by experts to be a medieval mazer bowl. It resided for many years at Nanteos Mansion, but went with the last member of the Powell family when they moved out in the 1950s. Two independent examinations of the cup have shown that it is made of wych elm, not olivewood, and that it probably dates from about 1400.
The story of the Nanteos Cup is attractive, but unsupported by any evidence. The Grail seems to remain elusive, just out of reach. That was the nature of the legendary Grail too.
The Grail legends of the Arthurian romances represent something very deep-seated in Celtic thought: the dangerous and eventful journey, the adventure, and the quest. The knights of King Arthur are striving to find the Holy Grail in exactly the same way that Everyman in medieval Christian Europe was supposed to be striving to find his own personal salvation.
So the Grail becomes a symbol not just of pure spirit, but the purest spirit, and the quest for it becomes the quest for spiritual wholeness, the quest for a personal salvation.
THE GREEN MAN
A sculpture or drawing of a face surrounded by leaves or even made from leaves. Some Green Man faces have leaves for hair and leaves for a beard. The face is almost always male. Sometimes branches or vines sprout from the mouth or nostrils, and the shoots may bear flowers or fruit. The Green Man is mainly found as an architectural ornament on churches.
The earliest known example of a Green Man image with foliage coming from its mouth dates from France in about AD 400. There are earlier Green Man images than this, though. One has been found on an Irish stone carving dating from 300 BC. Gods wearing leafy crowns are shown in Iron Age carvings. One of the local Romano-Celtic gods in Gaul, Erriapus, is shown as a head emerging out of a mass of foliage.
Leaves were themselves religious cult objects. Leaves made of bronze or precious metal were left as offerings to the gods.
The Green Man is not an exclusively Celtic image. It occurs in other cultures, but it was enthusiastically adopted by the Celts for its rich symbolic value.
Some of the cleverest carvings seem at first sight to be only foliage; it is only after a moment or two that the foliage resolves into a human face. The image is that of a pagan nature-spirit: the wood-wose, or the wild man of the woods.
There are many variations and the Green Man is found in many different cultures. The image is clearly a vegetation deity and a symbol of rebirth and renewal every spring.
Whether the Green Man can be seen as a specific part of the Celtic belief system is hard to say. Certainly the mythological beliefs regarding him continued alongside medieval Christianity, and it is striking how often this unmistakably pagan image appears in churches, abbeys, and cathedrals. It may be that the creation of Green Man images went on alongside the pre-Christian pagan belief system too. The Green Man almost seems to represent a belief system in itself, a belief in the self-renewal of vegetation that transcends religion.
At the same time, there were several Celtic nature gods who had much in common with the Green Man. It is also significant that one Celtic god has a name that means “The Green Man” in both Latin and Celtic: Viridios.
The Green Man was transformed into a folk-dancing character in Jack in the Green. Ancient tree worship entailed venerating the tree itself. From there it was a short step to nominating a young man or young woman to stand in for the tree. Usually, some sort of light wicker frame was carried, slung from the shoulders, and the frame covered with leaves and small branches—the wicker cage ritual again, though this time without a death at its climax (see Religion: Wicker Giant). In this way the tree, now The Tree, was mobilized and could take part in dances and processions—be directly engaged in the festivities to celebrate the arrival of summer. These were the typical activities of May Morning. The Maypole dancing was a similar transformation of the act of dancing a ring dance around a tree; in Maypole dancing, the pole stands in for the tree. And these customs still continue in England (see Religion: Beltane).
On May Morning, one dancer from a Morris team dresses entirely in branches and leaves and, as Jack in the Green or The Tree, he whirls about, leading the Morris Men through the streets, deciding the route and conducting the dance. On May Morning 1967, I was Jack in the Green for the Oxford University Morris Men —an animated Green Man. The nature symbolism is obvious. Jack represents the new foliage of early summer: the ritual is a greeting to summer itself and the promise it brings.
After the Middle Ages, the Green Man was given a new lease of life as a
Decorative image, in stone, stained glass, and manuscripts, and on bookplates. A dramatic, modern 40-foot (12m) tall full-figure version of the Green Man by sculptor Toin Adams can be seen at the Custard Factory in Birmingham, England.
The self-renewing woodland spirit nature of the Green Man was an idea that was repeatedly transformed. We can see it in figures as different from one another as Peter Pan, Robin Hood, Father Christmas, and the Green Knight.
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HARE
All over Wales hares were regarded as heralds of death. There was a case in North Wales where a woman knew, before anyone had told her, that a certain person had died. The local clergyman asked her how she knew and she replied, “I know because I saw a hare come from towards his house and cross over the road before me.” She evidently believed the hare was the dead man.
In Wales there was a tradition that witches could turn themselves into hares (see Shapeshifting, Witchcraft). If a hare made an unexpected escape from the hounds, a huntsman might send his servants to see if some old woman, suspected of being a witch, had been out that morning.
It was also believed that witches could change other people into animals. An instance was quoted by Elias Owen, in his book Welsh Folklore, of such a transformation in Cardiganshire, where a man was turned into a hare by a witch.
There is speculation that the Druids used hares for prophecy, perhaps deliberately catching and then releasing them in order to watch exactly how and where they ran and then prophesying accordingly.
World History
