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The tantalising hope of truth

Myths and legends of the origins of tribes and nations are frustrating for historians. They may contain an element of truth, passed down orally over centuries, though garbled in the process, and disguised in fanciful embellishment. But how can a shred of truth be teased out of the web of fiction? Some seemingly implausible story may actually be true. We scoff at the inclusion of the names of gods in pedigrees. Yet could it be explained by ancestor-worship? Stories of origins in far distant lands are passed over as a mix-up of place-names. Yet population genetics is now showing the great distances some people moved in prehistory.

On the other hand, the seemingly plausible may have been invented for the very reason that it seemed plausible. Origin stories often derive a people from an eponymous ancestor. For example Saxo Grammaticus thought that the Danes were descended from two brothers called Dan and Angul. From Dan sprang the Danish kings, while Angul was the ancestor of the Anglian race of Denmark and later England. But he conscientiously notes that Dudo, the historian of Normandy, considered that the Danes were sprung and named from the Danai.^{1The Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus, book one (completed c.1208).} Both were surmising that peoples were named after ancestors, for that was a process that they understood. Clans might well be named for their founding father. Places were sometimes named after the person who settled there. So it was tempting to imagine that from every place-name, country-name or tribal name an ancestor could be conjured up. Then storytellers wove legends about him. A good example is the story of Romulus, supposed founder of Rome.

So we cannot even be certain that there is a fact to find by burrowing through layers of fiction. The safest course is to ignore all stories written down long after the supposed events they claim to record. The greater the length of time involved, the less likely a story is to be reliable in any way. Certainly no great weight should be placed on such stories, particularly where they contradict more reliable types of evidence. Legend can lead researchers badly astray. There have been persistent attempts by population geneticists to show that the Irish have their origin in Iberia, as the Irish legends say. At the opposite extreme, when geneticists linked Y-DNA haplogroup R1a with the origin and spread of the Indo-European languages,^{2e.g. R.S. Wells et al, The Eurasian Heartland: A continental perspective on Y-chromosome diversity, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 98 no. 18 (2001), pp.10244-10249.} they seemed unaware that they were treading in the footsteps of legend.

Deluge

One of the earliest written stories which influenced the way that Europeans thought about their ancestry is the deluge myth. So many cultures have preserved a flood myth that some authors toyed with the idea that it must be based on an actual apocalyptic event, a real flood that covered the whole world, but no such event has occurred during the time of mankind. Attention has therefore turned to local floods which might be the foundation for at least some of the best-known among these stories. The flooding of the Black and Caspian Seas at the end of the last Ice Age has been a popular choice. It certainly was dramatic, though not to the catastrophic degree that some have proposed. The problem is that the location and the date (about 10,000 BC) do not fit. The earliest flood stories are set on the river plains of Mesopotamia, after farmers had settled there about 6,000 BC. The flooding of the Black Sea, even if it had occurred closer to 7,000 BC, as William Ryan and Walter Pitman proposed in their popular book Noah's Flood (2000), would not have affected the cradle of agriculture, protected by the mountains south of the Black Sea, let alone forced farmers to migrate into Europe as they contended. The flood mainly spilled water onto the low-lying land to the north of the Black Sea, where there were no farmers at the time. The hunter-gatherer bands that roamed there no doubt retreated out of its path, but their mobile life-style would make that easy.^{3Valentina Yanko-Hombach, Allan S.Gilbert, Nicolae Panin and Pavel M. Dolukhanov (eds.), The Black Sea Flood Question (2007); L. Giosan, F. Filip and S. Constatinescu, Was the Black Sea catastrophically flooded in the early Holocene?, QuaternaryScience Reviews, vol. 28, nos. 1-2 (January 2009), pp.1-6.}

However some of these myths appear connected in the sense that one mythology has influenced another. The tale of Noah and his ark in Genesis, the first book of the Jewish Torah and Christian Old Testament, is notably similar to the flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh, a collection of stories first written down by the Sumerians. It recurs in Babylonian literature. The key elements are a devastating flood sent by a wrathful god to eradicate mankind, from which one chosen family (a different one in each version) survived by building a large boat at the deity's command; their descendants repopulate the world.^{4The Epic of Gilgamesh trans N. K. Sandars (1960), pp. 12-14, 17-18, 108-113.} A newly-translated version dated around 1,700 BC actually describes the shape and design of the craft, which turn out to be completely different from the ark of modern imaginings. It was to be circular, built of plaited palm fibre, waterproofed with bitumen, with cabins on it. Probably such circular craft were in common use on the rivers of Mesopotamia. Over a thousand years later skin-built coracles were seen there by Greek historian Herodotus.^{5Relic reveals Noah's ark was circular, The Guardian 1 January 2010; The History of Herodotus, tr. G. C. Macaulay (1890), book 1, section 194.}

The Jews probably picked up the flood story during their captivity in Babylon. How the deluge passed into Greek myth is less obvious, but the story of Deucalion's Flood has clear similarities. The survivor this time was King Deucalion. His eldest son Hellen was thought to be the father of all the Greeks (the Hellenes).^{6R. Graves, The Greek Myths, 2nd edn. (1960), vol. 1, no. 38.}

Floods would be a perennial danger to riverine communities, such as the Mesopotamian settlements beside the Tigris and Euphrates. We can imagine one family managing to get aboard a craft with their breeding livestock and seeds, and so surviving a particularly shattering inundation. Since they would know little of the world beyond the land of the two rivers, it might indeed seem to them a world-changing event. We can imagine that the tale would be repeated over and over again in the following years. By the time it was written into Genesis, the deluge had been adapted to a different religion and acquired characters drawn from a different tribal genealogy.

Noah's brood

Genesis narrates a curious story of Noah's sons Shem, Ham and Japheth/Yefeth. When Ham, the father of Canaan, viewed Noah naked in his tent, Noah laid a curse upon Canaan, who was to be a slave to Shem and Japheth. This curse appears to be a rationalisation of the Israelite acquisition of the land of Canaan. The descendants of the three sons are often interpreted as the three supposed races of mankind: the Semites (Asian), the cursed Hamites (African) and the Japhethites (European). Yet Genesis 10 gives no support to this idea. The nations known to the Hebrews covered a small portion of the world we know today and almost all of them would be Caucasian under modern racial classification (though any concept of race is now disputed). Sub-Saharan Africa was barely known to them, while East Asia and the Americas were completely unknown. The Biblical offspring of Ham covered an impressive swathe of lands from Mesopotamia through Palestine to North East Africa. The Biblical Shem is presented as the forefather of the Assyrians, Elamites and Hebrews. Japheth's brood are supposed to be the more distant Indo-Europeans, who lived in a semi-circle around the Fertile Crescent: to the east were the Medes, to the north on the steppe ranged the Scythians and Cimmerians, while the Hellenes lay to the north-west in Greece, Ionia and Cyprus.^{7Thomas L. Brodie, Genesis as Dialogue (2001), p. 194; E. M. Yamauchi, Foes from the Northern Frontier (1982), p. 63; A. P. Ross, The Table of Nations in Genesis 10 – Its Content, Bibliotheca Sacra vol. 138 (1981), pp. 22-34.} Lakes of ink have been wasted in efforts to expand this array of nations to all the inhabitants of the world. Yet as Christianity spread across the Roman Empire, taking the origin stories of the Hebrews with it, nations wanted to place themselves within the Biblical world.

Milesian myth

The Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of the Taking of Ireland) has fascinated generations.^{8Lebor Gabála Érenn 'The Book of the Taking of Ireland', Irish Texts Society, Vols. 34, 35, 39, 41 and 44.} Compiled in the late 11th century, it tells a stirring story of invaders battling for Ireland. Like Geoffrey of Monmouth's fanciful 12th-century History of the Kings of Britain, with its tales of Arthur, it was accepted for centuries as an accurate history. Yet both have only legend and supposition to offer where they try to cover prehistory. So why would either book be taken seriously in today's more critical world? Within academia they are not. R. A. Stewart Macalister, who translated the Lebor Gabála Érenn into English, declared: There is not a single element of genuine historical detail, in the strict sense of the word, anywhere in the whole compilation.^{9R. A. Stewart Macalister (ed.), Lebor Gabála Érenn 'The Book of the Taking of Ireland', Irish Texts Society, Vol. 35, p.252.}

Yet there is that tantalising hope of some scrap to bridge the yawning gap in our knowledge. Celtic scholar Thomas Francis O'Rahilly (1883–1953) postulated four waves of invaders into Ireland, based partly on his interpretation of the Lebor Gabála Érenn.^{10T. F. O'Rahilly, Early Irish History and Mythology (1946).} The fourth and final invasion, he thought, brought the Gaelic-speakers. Thus far he follows the Lebor Gabála Érenn. But while O'Rahilly thought the Gaels came from southwest Gaul (now France), the 11th-century story tells of the final conquest of Ireland from Iberia by the Milesians, or sons of Míl Espáine (soldier of Spain). The Milesians are painted as the descendants of a Scythian prince called Fénius Farsaid, whose grandson created the Irish language. His descendants wandered the world for 440 years before settling in the Iberian peninsula, the story goes.

The myth was boosted by early genetic studies, which found high levels of Y-DNA R1b in both countries. It was later realised that R1b is found over a wide swathe of Western Europe. Worse still for the romantic image of Míl Espáine was the discovery that the subclades of R1b common in Ireland (L21 and M222) were somewhere between extremely rare and non-existent in Iberia.

The tale attempts to fit the Gaels into a biblical setting. Iafeth [Japheth] is pictured as the patriarch of the nations of Asia Minor, Armenia, Media, the People of Scythia; and of him are the inhabitants of all Europe. This was standard thinking for Christian writers of the time, following the Jewish historian Josephus (37-c.100 AD) and Isidore of Seville (c.560-635). Increasingly complex genealogies from Noah were created.^{11Susan Reynolds, Medieval origines gentium and the community of the realm, History, vol. 68 (1983), pp. 375-90.}

Picts and Scots

An interesting detail from the Lebor Gabála Érenn is that Fénius Farsaid is Scythian. A Scythian origin was also claimed in medieval times by the Picts and Scots of Scotland. Genetics give no support to this idea. Ancient DNA has shown that the Y-chromosome haplogroup predominant among the Scythians was R1a1. The descendants of the Picts and Scots are notably high in subclades of R1b. Linguistics gives no support to it either. The ancient Scythians spoke an Iranian language whose only similarity to the the various Celtic languages of Britain lies in their shared Indo-European parentage. So whatever the origin of these ideas, the Celts of the British Isles do not descend from the people known in Classical times as Scythian.

The names Pict and Scot were apparently nicknames bestowed by the Romans. They are not mentioned before the Roman conquest of Britain. The Celts of Britain and Ireland had tribal names, recorded soon after 100 AD by the geographer Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemaeus).^{12Ptolemy, The Geography, book II, chapters 1 and 2.} Some northern tribes had the same names as tribes further south. Very probably the Cornovii in Caithness were related to the Cornovii of western England and later Cornwall, while the Damnonii sound like the same tribe as Dumnonii of south-west England. The Brigantes of south-eastern Ireland may have been related to the large tribe of the same name in central Britain. We cannot always assume a relationship, as people tended to use similar types of names for themselves, but the picture is one of Celtic cultures spread across the whole of the British Isles.

The name British Isles has a long history. Latin and Greek versions appear in the earliest Classical texts referring to these islands. Ptolemy records the names of the two largest islands of the group: Aluion (Albion) and Iouernia (Hibernia), as did earlier Greek and Carthaginian explorers.^{13J.B. Harley and D. Woodward, The History of Cartography vol. 1: Cartography in prehistoric, ancient, and medieval Europe and the Mediterranean (1987), p.192; D.W. Roller, Through the pillars of Herakles: Greco-Roman exploration of the Atlantic (2006), pp. 28.}

Into that picture intruded the Romans, scooping the province of Britannia out of this Celtic domain. So Albion became Britain. The name Albion was actually out of date among the Romans by Ptolemy's day, though it perhaps retained some currency in northern Britain, where the Kingdom of Alba arose long afterwards. The Romans created a divide between north and south Britain, perpetuated into our own day. So one could say that Scotland was created by the Romans. There is no reason to suppose that the people beyond Roman lines were much different originally from the people taken into the Empire.

Scoti or Scotti was the Roman name for the Irish, Gaelic-speaking raiders who fell upon Britannia from time to time, while the Picti were the northern British beyond Roman jurisdiction. No surviving Roman source explains those names, but Isidore of Seville claimed that both refer to the use of dye to create tattoos.^{14The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. and trans. S.A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach and O. Bergho (2006), pp. 198, 386 (IX.ii.103 and XIX.xxiii.7).} This is plausible for Picti, which would mean painted people in Latin, but the etymology of Scoti is unknown. It seems that these names were eventually adopted by the peoples themselves, along with Christianity, which used Latin as its lingua franca and had a clerical elite educated in Roman history.

We first hear of Gaels in Scotland in the Kingdom of Dál Riata, which spanned North-Eastern Ireland and Western Scotland in the late 6th and early 7th century. Whether there were Gaelic-speakers in western Scotland from the first arrival of the Celts, cut off from the Picts by the mountainous spine of Scotland, or whether the Scots invaded from Ireland is a matter of dispute. What is clear is that the Gaelic-speaking Scots eventually overcame the Picts to unify Scotland.^{15E. Campbell, Were the Scots Irish?, Antiquity, 75 (2001), pp. 285–292; E. H. Nicoll (ed.), A Pictish Panorama: The story of the Picts, and a Pictish bibliography (1995).} So in searching for their origins, the Scots relied on an earlier version of the Fénius Farsaid story. The Welsh compilation put together c. 830 AD by Nennius gives two separate accounts of early Irish history. One consists of waves of invasion from Iberia. The other is a story of a Scythian of noble birth, and his wanderings with his family - only 42 years in this version - before they reached Spain. There they increased and multiplied over many years until they passed into Ireland, and the district of Dalrieta.^{16Nennius, History of the Britons (Historia Brittonum) in Six Old English Chronicles, ed. J. A. Giles. (1848).}

The Declaration of Arbroath (1320) used this story of Scottish ancestry to boost a claim to Scottish independance:

... We know and from the chronicles and books of the ancients we find that among other famous nations our own, the Scots, has been graced with widespread renown. They journeyed from Greater Scythia by way of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Pillars of Hercules, and dwelt for a long course of time in Spain among the most savage tribes, but nowhere could they be subdued by any race, however barbarous. Thence they came, twelve hundred years after the people of Israel crossed the Red Sea, to their home in the west where they still live today. The Britons they first drove out, the Picts they utterly destroyed, and, even though very often assailed by the Norwegians, the Danes and the English, they took possession of that home with many victories and untold efforts...

It suited the Scottish nobility of the time to claim utter destruction of the Picts. It seems highly unlikely that every Pict was in fact exterminated, but they were no longer an independent people after 900 AD.

The Venerable Bede, writing in 731 AD, preserved an origin story for them.

It is related that the Pictish race from Scythia sailed out into the ocean in a few warships and were carried by the wind beyond the furthest bounds of Britain, reaching Ireland and landing on its northern shores. There they found the Irish race and asked permission to settle among them, but their request was refused. ...The Irish answered that the island would not hold them both; but, said they, we can give you some good advice as to what to do. We know of another island not far from our own, in an easterly direction, which we often see in the distance on clear days. If you will go there, you can make a settlement for yourselves; but if anyone resists you, make use of our help. And so the Picts went to Britain and proceeded to occupy the northern parts of the island, because the Britons had seized the southern regions.^{17Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, The Greater Chronicle, Bede's Letter to Egbert, ed. J. McClure and R. Collins (1994), p. 10.}

This story had come down to Bede through a Classical filter. It is permeated with the Roman view of Picts and Britons as separate and different, one outside and the other inside the Roman Empire. However we have a clue that the Picts did not take that view. First in the list of kings in the 10th-century Pictish Chronicle is Cruidne.^{18Chronicles of the Picts, Chronicles of the Scots, and other Early Memorials of Scottish History, ed. W.F. Skene (1867), p.172.} Cruithni is the plural of the medieval Irish word Cruithin, meaning Briton. Once again we find the assumption that a people descend from an eponymous founder.

An origin for the Picts in Scythia - a place so far distant - seemed so nonsensical that some commentators have assumed that Bede was confusing Scythia with Scandia.^{19Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, The Greater Chronicle, Bede's Letter to Egbert, ed. J. McClure and R. Collins (1994), p. 362; D. Miles, The Tribes of Britain (2005), p. 9.} Yet the location of Scythia - north of the Black and Caspian Seas - was carefully described in sources available to Bede, including the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville.^{20The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. and trans. S.A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach and O. Bergho (2006), p. 288 (XIV.iii.31).}

The recurring Scythians

Scythia crops up again in the origin myth of the Franks. The earliest detailed source on the Franks - the Germanic people who took over post-Roman France so effectively that it is named after them - is Gregory of Tours (d.594). He recorded in his History of the Franks that Many relate that they came from Pannonia [roughly modern Slovenia] and all dwelt at first on the bank of the Rhine, and then crossing the Rhine they passed into Thuringia [Central Germany].^{21Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, trans. E. Brehaut (1916), book 2, chapter 9.} The Franks seem actually to have been a confederation of tribes. Yet one in particular looms large in their origin stories. Gregory of Tours records it obliquely. When Clovis was baptised, he was adjured by the officiating bishop to Gently bend your neck, Sigamber; worship what you burned; burn what you worshipped.^{22Ibid, book 2, chapter 31.} The Sicambri lived around the lower Rhine in what is now the Netherlands in the 2nd century AD.^{23Claudius Ptolemy, The Geography, book 2, chap. 10.} The Chronicle of Fredegar, which includes an abridged version of the History of the Franks, added a note that the Franks believed the Sicambri to be a tribe of Scythian or Cimmerian descent. Herodotus tells us that the fierce Scythian nomads from the eastern steppes drove the Cimmerians out of the Pontic-Caspian steppe.^{24Herodotus, The Histories, trans. A. de Sélincourt with an introduction and notes by J. M. Marincola (2002), p.244.} So an origin among the Scythians or Cimmerians points to the same area north of the Black and Caspian Seas.

Where had this idea come from? The written sources these authors drew on would be those preserved by the Church, few of which had anything good to say about the pagan Scythians. Classical writers saw the Scythians as barbarians. There is no Scythian equivalent to Homer to wreathe them in glory. If we see the aim of origin stories as ancestor-glorification, attempts to concoct an origin from the ancient Greeks, Trojans or Romans are much more comprehensible. The Franks provide an example of that too, since the Liber Historiae Francorum of 727 claims that the Sicambri were originally defeated Trojans fleeing to a territory close to the River Don and Sea of Azov (in Scythia), before their journey north.

Similarly Nennius attempted to burnish up the image of the Britons, which had suffered at the hands of Isidore of Seville. Isidore scathingly suggests that perhaps the British got that name by being brutes (brutus in Latin).^{25The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. and trans. S.A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach and O. Bergho (2006), p. 198 (IX.ii.102).} Nennius turned negative to positive by asserting that Britain derives its name from Brutus, a Roman consul, and then tells two muddled stories by which the Britons deduce their origin both from the Greeks and Romans.^{26Nennius, History of the Britons (Historia Brittonum) in Six Old English Chronicles, ed. J. A. Giles. (1848).} Geoffrey of Monmouth elaborated upon this story in his so-called History of the Kings of Britain (c.1135), which was one long exercise in fantasy writing for the greater glory of the nation.

By contrast an origin in Scythia seems to offer little in the way of glory. So it seems more likely that these Christian writers were trying to link up their nations with the Bible, in the tradition of Isidore of Seville, who has the Scythians as descendants of Magog, son of Japheth.^{27The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. and trans. S.A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach and O. Bergho (2006), p. 193 (IX.ii.27).} Yet why select the Scythians specifically as ancestors? Linguists and archaeologists have long pointed to the area north of the Black and Caspian Seas as the homeland of the Indo-European language family round 4,000-2,000 BC. This area was known as Scythia by the time of the Roman Empire. Yet it is hard to imagine that recollection of a journey taken thousands of years earlier could have survived orally for so long.

Odin of Asaland

Most curious of all is the tale of Odin in the Ynglinga Saga, part of the history of the kings of Norway written by the Icelandic poet Snorri Sturluson about 1225. Odin was the chief Norse god. Naturally we suppose that stories about the gods are set in a mythical realm. Yet the story of Odin is not only precise on geographical locations, but paints a picture of a man so revered that he was later worshipped as a god. This has set people wondering if there is some element of history to the tale, despite its weird and wonderful cladding, which includes giants and dragons. The story tells of Odin, chief of a country called Asaland, east of the River Don, which runs into the Black Sea.

Odin was a great and very far-travelled warrior, who conquered many kingdoms, and so successful was he that in every battle the victory was on his side. It was the belief of his people that victory belonged to him in every battle. It was his custom when he sent his men into battle, or on any expedition, that he first laid his hand upon their heads, and called down a blessing upon them; and then they believed their undertaking would be successful. His people also were accustomed, whenever they fell into danger by land or sea, to call upon his name; and they thought that always they got comfort and aid by it, for where he was they thought help was near. Often he went away so far that he passed many seasons on his journeys.^{28Heimskringla or The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway, trans. S. Laing (1844).}

Odin was also supposed to have great possessions in Turkland, south of a great mountain range which appears to be the Urals. Yet he left his domain with many of his people and wandered west to Russia, then south to Saxony, part of which which he conquered. Leaving some of his sons to rule that country, Odin took up residence on the Island of Fyn in Denmark. Perhaps feeling that some explanation was needed for this wanderlust, Snorri Sturluson (or the sources upon which he drew) sets the story in Roman times. The ever-expanding Roman Empire drove many chiefs to flee their domains, he notes. We are not told that Odin was one of them, but that he was granted foreknowledge, and the vision of his posterity dwelling in the northern half of the world.

Such is the perversity of the human mind that, while seeking a nugget of history amid the romance of myth and legend, we may be rather disappointed to find it. What if Odin the Wanderer was not the grand creature of fantasy, but a nomad of the steppes? Perhaps we should leave him to the sagas, along with Arthur, Robin Hood and other figures who will never be more than shadows in history, but live brightly in legend.

Notes

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