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and to their preservation in written form. The Irish Christian monks became the conduit of ancient
knowledge, the filidh, and their success lay in their ability to create a seamless continuity between
the rich mythical traditions of pagan Ireland and full-blown Christianity.
From our point of view, the Leabhar Gabhála chronicles four mythical phases of immigration.
As you can imagine, all four involve great battles and heroic struggles as each wave of new
arrivals ousts the former occupants. The last of these phases was the invasion of Ireland by the
Gaels, bringers of the language and the alleged ancestors of today’s Celtic population. Indeed the
principal purpose of the Leabhar Gabhála is to explain the presence of the Gaels in Ireland.
According to the Leabhar, the Gaels were descended from the sons of Mil, also variously
known as Milesius and later by the, perhaps significant, epithet of Míle Easpain, or the ‘Soldier of
Spain’. Mil was killed on an expedition to avenge the death of a nephew who had been killed by
the Tuatha Dé Danaan, the previous occupiers and masters of Ireland. It was left to Mil’s three
sons, Eber, Eremon and Amairgen, to defeat the Tuatha and conquer Ireland. When the brothers
could not agree on the division of the island between them, Eber was killed by Eremon, who
became the first High King to reign at Tara. Mil’s wife, Scota, was also killed in the expedition and
the Gaels of Ireland, considering her to be their ancestral mother, called themselves Scots for that
reason. Certainly the Romans referred to them as Scotti as well as the more familiar Hibernii.
According to legend, the ultimate ancestor was one Fennius Farsa, a Scythian king who lost his
throne and fled to Egypt. Ancient Scythia was located north of the Black Sea in what is now the
eastern Ukraine, between the two great rivers, the Don and the Dnieper. Once in Egypt his son,
Nial, married the pharaoh’s daughter, and she had a son, Goidel. The whole family was banished
from Egypt for refusing to join in the persecution of the children of Israel and wandered throughout
northern Africa, finally crossing the Pillars of Hercules to settle in Spain, where they prospered.
Many years later, from a watchtower on a cliff top, one of Goidel’s descendants, Ith, saw a
land far off across the seas that he had not noticed before. ‘It is on winter evenings, when the air is
pure, that man’s eyesight reaches farthest,’ explains the account of the vision in the Leabhar
Gabhála. Although it is quite impossible ever to see Ireland from Spain, Ith wasn’t to know this
and he set sail with ninety warriors to explore the newly sighted country. He arrived at the mouth of
the River Kenmare, one of the deep indentations in the coast at the extreme south-west of Ireland.
From there, Ith tracked northwards until, at last, he encountered the Tuatha Dé Danaan, the race
who inhabited Ireland. The meeting went well at first until the Tuatha began to doubt Ith’s motives
for sailing to Ireland and, from his fulsome descriptions of the climate and the fertility of land and
sea, suspected that he intended to invade. They killed Ith, but spared his companions, who then
returned to Spain with their leader’s body. Ith’s uncle Mil vowed to avenge his nephew’s murder
and set sail with his eight sons and their wives, accompanied by thirty-six chieftains, each with a
ship full of warriors. With his sons at his side he defeated the Tuatha. Mil was himself killed in the
battle, but his sons survived. The defeated Tuatha Dé Danaan also chose their name from their own
ancestral mother, Dana. The Tuatha were a race of gods, each with their own special attributes and
each as colourful as any gods of the classical Greeks. After their defeat by the Milesians, the
Tuatha Dé Danaan fled to the Underworld and established a kingdom beneath the ground – a
kingdom from where they were still able to harass their conquerors by depriving them of corn and
milk, eventually forcing an agreement which divided Ireland into upper and lower parts and in
which the Tuatha Dé Danaan are to this day the guardians of the Underworld.