Origin stories and original people in Roman and Irish myths

Walker, Henry John (2025) Origin stories and original people in Roman and Irish myths. ACTA ANTIQUA ACADEMIAE SCIENTIARUM HUNGARICAE, 65 (3-4). pp. 497-516. ISSN 0044-5975

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Abstract

The ancient writers of Rome and Ireland were embarrassed by the early inhabitants of their country, the Aborigines of Italy and the Nations of the Goddess Danu in Ireland. The Romans were proud to belong to a bilingual Greco-Latin tradition, the Irish to a bilingual Latino-Irish tradition, and they interpreted their own myths through the global cultures of the Hellenistic and Christian worlds. The Roman myth of origin was based on Homer and on Hellenistic speculation; the Irish myth of origin derived from the Bible and Latin literature. This work of assimilation was difficult for the Christian Irish writers of the Middle Ages, because the previous inhabitants of Ireland were disgracefully pagan, the semi-divine Nations of the Goddess Danu. The Irish had to dismiss the Nations of the Goddess as human impostors, but in an extraordinary poem from the Voyage of Bran, their paganism is accepted as an alternative way of seeing the world.

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