Pre-Viking Ireland Video: A Political Survey

[Daco Celtic]

Lecture on Pre-Viking Ireland

[TheOldNorth]

I think that though some later groups obviously pasted their genealogies to earlier ones, and some things are fictitious, that most of the Annals are likely based in either fact or old mythology. CuChulainn and Lugh are obviously mythical as are the Tuatha De Danann and Formorians, but figures such as Conn and Niall may have likely been real. I mean Oral tradition is a powerful thing that is not simply like a game of telephone like some like to think, as these people drilled these stories into their heads word for word, barely changing over tens of generations. Just look at the Illiad, the Trojan war likely did happen and we know this because we've found Troy, and thus the stories of the war where held mostly intact (with the addition of some divine intervention of course) for 500 years of no writing.
Surely the Irish could do the same...

[Token]

I think that though some later groups obviously pasted their genealogies to earlier ones, and some things are fictitious, that most of the Annals are likely based in either fact or old mythology. CuChulainn and Lugh are obviously mythical as are the Tuatha De Danann and Formorians, but figures such as Conn and Niall may have likely been real. I mean Oral tradition is a powerful thing that is not simply like a game of telephone like some like to think, as these people drilled these stories into their heads word for word, barely changing over tens of generations. Just look at the Illiad, the Trojan war likely did happen and we know this because we've found Troy, and thus the stories of the war where held mostly intact (with the addition of some divine intervention of course) for 500 years of no writing.
Surely the Irish could do the same...

Cú Chulainn was probably an actual Indo-European chieftain back in the Bronze Age steppe based on the similarities between his saga and Shahnameh's legendary Persian hero Rostam. His name was probably not Cú Chulainn though

[TheOldNorth]

Cú Chulainn was probably an actual Indo-European chieftain back in the Bronze Age steppe based on the similarities between his saga and Shahnameh's legendary Persian hero Rostam. His name was probably not Cú Chulainn though

I've heard theories that he is simply another interpretation of his father Lugh, or a retelling of Lugh's story in a more christian acceptable format

[Daco Celtic]

bump. i totally forgot that I posted this.

[Grace O'Malley]

The latest dna study by Trinity does point to some memory in legends and place names.

The final piece of the puzzle that the researchers reported was neither archaeological nor genetic, but folkloric. An account of Irish place names written around 1100, the authors write, tells a tale of a King Bressal, who slept with his sister. The result was that Dowth, the burial mound next to Newgrange, was called Fertae Chuile, or the Mound of Sin.

The idea that a folk memory could preserve history 4,000 years old may seem preposterous, but there were also folk tales that gods built the passage tombs to affect the solar cycle. And yet Newgrange, with its solar alignment, was covered by earth during the Middle Ages. It was excavated, and the orientation to the winter solstice discovered at the beginning of the 20th century.

The myths may be muddled, but the tale of the solar cycle had some basis in fact, as it turned out, and so, it may be, did the story of royal incest.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/17/s...cest-tomb.html