Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race - Knowledge Rush

122 Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race[147][148]in this respect. The Danaans are much nobler and more exaltedbeings, as they figure in the bardic literature, than the fairies intowhich they ultimately degenerated in the popular imagination;they may be said to hold a position intermediate between theseand the Greek deities as portrayed in Homer. But the true worshipof the Celts, in Ireland as elsewhere, seems to have been paid,not to these poetical personifications of their ideals of powerand beauty, but rather to elemental forces represented by actualnatural phenomena—rocks, rivers, the sun, the wind, the sea.The most binding of oaths was to swear by the Wind and Sun, orto invoke some other power of nature; no name of any Danaandivinity occurs in an Irish oath formula. When, however, in thelater stages of the bardic literature, and still more in the popularconceptions, the Danaan deities had begun to sink into fairies, wefind rising into prominence a character probably older than thatascribed to them in the literature, and, in a way, more august. Inthe literature it is evident that they were originally representativesof science and poetry—the intellectual powers of man. But inthe popular mind they represented, probably at all times andcertainly in later Christian times, not intellectual powers, butthose associated with the fecundity of earth. They were, asa passage in the Book of Armagh names them, dei terreni,earth-gods, and were, and are still, invoked by the peasantry toyield increase and fertility. The literary conception of them isplainly Druidic in origin, the other popular; and the popular anddoubtless older conception has proved the more enduring.But these features of Irish mythology will appear better in theactual tales than in any critical discussion of them; and to thetales let us now return.The Milesian Settlement of IrelandThe Milesians had three leaders when they set out for theconquest of Ireland—Eber Donn (Brown Eber), Eber Finn (FairEber), and Eremon. Of these the first-named, as we have seen,was not allowed to enter the land—he perished as a punishment