The First Charm Of Making

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The First Charm of Making

Anall nathrak, Urthvas beth’ud Dagiel dienve. Not being a film-goer, I first encountered this ‘charm’ at a sweat-lodge where, by getting us all to chant it over and over, the Druid in charge used it very effectively to carry us back into the past, in an atmosphere charged with undeniable magic and power. Later he showed the film Excalibur in which the charm was uttered, and explained that he had not been able to find anyone who knew what it meant, though various conflicting ideas were doing the rounds. He said he believed it was Cornish, and showed me some laboured and unconvincing efforts that had been made to translate it as if it had been that language. At the time I knew no Cornish and only a little Irish, but during the chanting I’d been struck by a sort of certainty that the word Nathrak in the first phrase of the ‘charm’ was a collapsed form of the Irish Na hAthaireacha, which means ‘The Fathers’. When I got home I studied the whole text, and to my utter amazement, I found it to be perfectly intelligible Irish, even with my (then) beginner’s Irish and an ordinary modern Collin’s Gem Irish/English Dictionary, and more so now that I know a good deal more of the language than I did then. What astounded me about it was that although the Druid who gave it to me had searched the web diligently and made every effort to discover its meaning, he had not been able to find a single scholar who had discerned the very obvious fact that it was written in plain, simple old-fashioned Irish. I believe he even said that among the vast team of scholars and researchers who had contributed their knowledge to the making of the film Excalibur there was not one who had

suggested the very obvious Irish translation that I’m about to give. The reason I was astounded was that this was my first encounter with what I have come to diagnose as profound Goidelophobia affecting, indeed, hindering and distorting, Celtic studies at top academic levels. I had observed what I call Celtophobia in such cumbersome classics of scholarship as the Oxford Dictionary, but had no idea how entrenched the whole thing is. I have met with great hostility, rudeness, and even verbal cruelty, from Celtic scholars on lists on the web, whenever I’ve suggested Goidelic interpretations of evidence which clearly lends itself to them, in preference to what are often distortive and sometimes tautological Welsh or Roman interpretations. I’m used to it now and no longer astounded. Since then I’ve done a year and a half of the Cornish Language Association’s Cornish language course, and it’s incredible to me that anyone who knew any Cornish would imagine that this ‘charm’ was Cornish at all. But you are no doubt yet to be convinced, so I’ll let you see my evidence in a word by word interpretation of the text. Anall = Hither

In modern Irish, it means ‘hither’ or ‘here from there’. nathrak = The Fathers This breaks down into ‘na’ the plural definite article and athaireacha meaning fathers. In modern Irish an h is inserted between na and a following initial vowel, but various usages are found in old texts. The Irish nathair, pl nathracha meaning ‘snake’ is derived from it via a kenning too subtle and complex to explain in this article. It has political connotations which don’t seem to apply in this context, so I’m choosing the simplest, most direct interpretation, which is, moreover, supported by the rest of the text. urth- = on it

either uirth(i) modern Irish for ‘on her’ or ‘on it’ if ‘it’ is a feminine noun, or orth(u), ‘on them’ respectively. Since the only noun it could refer to is beth (later in the same line), which is singular and might be feminine, I’m translating it as ‘on it’ vas = will be transliterates into bheas, meaning ‘will be’ beth = town Beith has been used for the name of an ogham, and is Irish for a birch tree. In Irish it also survives as beatha which is difficult to translate as it means life, livelihood, food-supply and life-style, implying much more than this. Beith is pronounced something like ‘beh’ these days, and beatha is pronounced like ‘beh-ha’ the ‘th’ being silent at the end of a word and either silent or reduced to an ‘h’ between vowels within a word, depending on where you come from. But spellings usually represent sounds that were once pronounced, so beith, the first syllable of beatha and this beth were probably all once pronounced almost alike and are possibly the same word. It is cognate with the Hebrew Beth (their neighbour Galilee was a Goidelic Celtic nation) meaning a house, representing a school of philosophy or a cultural, political, religious and academic centre (Bethlehem, Elizabeth, Beth-El). In Britain and Gaul it occurs as Bed in Bedivere and Bedford. It is a direct relative of the English Path. I’m translating it as ‘cultural centre’, bearing in mind that it probably carried the whole range of connotations listed above under bheatha plus those listed under Beth. ‘ud = yonder úd means ‘yonder’ now and there’s no reason to believe it didn’t back then. dath- = dye means colour or dye, and is cognate with dye.

giel = guild gCiel, a variant of cill. Sometimes translated as ‘church’ as in Columcille and sometimes as a political unit or institution, it occurs also as Kil in Kildare, Killarney etc. it is cognate with the English ‘guild’. It’s a q-Celtic form of the P-Celtic baile, the English palace, and the Welsh Pwyll. dienve = will be done this is the modern déan meaning do, or doing, plus a variant of -f(a)idh which in modern Irish is a suffix denoting future tense. Déanfidh is pronounced den-fi.

Hither from the fathers: upon will be beth yonder dye-guild done Hither from the fathers (comes word): There will be upon yonder town a dye (processing) guild established Now it is evident that this is not a charm at all, but a political directive of perfectly sane, rational and practical intention. Set up a factory. Nothing more nor less. It’s difficult to date but it should be possible. It’s probably not all that old, not old enough to be ‘Arthurian’ by a few centuries, but old enough for ‘the fathers’ to be a political entity and for the words ‘guild’ and ‘giel’ to retain cognizance of each other. Whatever, this scrap of old Gaelic is worth much more as an archaeological trace than a charm could be. Small and fleeting as it may be, we are afforded through it a glimpse into the past more intelligible than we could have got from any charm. A charm could have been recently formulated or translated from a now undiscoverable original language, it would anyway be unlocatable in time and place and would yield no clue as to which culture it came from or what kind of civilization it may have had. This scrap is not the sort of thing that anyone would translate into a Gaelic language from any other and so was probably taken from an original

text, which was almost certainly produced by an Irish speaking culture in the course of its own affairs. To me, that makes it very important. It should be being seriously studied instead of being let float about in the hope that some amateur like me might crack it. And if it had been seriously studied, it wouldn’t have been found ‘untranslatable’ by people who consider themselves serious scholars of old Celtic languages! The Wyverne goes off her face about slovenly Celtic scholarship: . It’s downright irresponsible! The mentality that insisted that this was a basically untranslatable piece of ancient Celtic is related to that of those within the Goidelophobic hegemonies that are currently asserting (wrongly) that there was no Goidelic Celtic spoken in Britain at the time of the Roman invasion and precious little since, and even that the Q-/P- split happened quite suddenly in Scotland during the late dark ages. But there is strong linguistic evidence that Q- forms, P-forms, and a variety of other forms such as S-, T- and decapitated forms in Saxon, Dutch, Flemish and other Germanic languages; and hybrids and dialects of all these were intermingling freely in all the Celtic nations from Serbia to Ireland, from Galilee to Germania, and certainly including Britain, long before Rome’s advance. There were schools and companies of scholars, artists, artisans and priests, poets, musicians and philosophers, some of them itinerant, some of them belonging to guilds, monasteries and military establishments, ensuring a constant mingling and mixing of all these forms of language. In addition, their marriage customs often involved the massmarrying of a hundred or so men to an equal number of women from another locality with other customs and forms of the language if not another language altogether. The wife of a Cornish man ( “an den”, pronounced just like “Dane”) is

called a “gwreg”, pronounced very like Greek, and we’re reminded of the mass marriage between the Breton Knight Tirant lo Blanc and the eligible bachelors of his country and Carmesina, the daughter of the Greek king whose people he had helped to save from the Turks, with all her eligible damsels, which took place in Tirant’s homeland, despite the tragic death of the foremost bride and groom. There are furthermore mountains of evidence for marriages of this kind in the ancient languages of Europe, as well as in ancient literature and oral tradition. Languages appear to have been distributed not according to geographical borders but according to these schools and companies, and intermingling ethnic groups. A linen weaver’s guild in England would speak a language continuous with one in Germany, while an English Bardic school nearby would find them both almost if not quite unintelligible. In addition, seaports and international trade centres represented yet more alien cultures including Moorish, Turkish, Spanish, Basque and Latin-speaking groups, Lascars, Chinese, and Africans, Indians, Native North Americans and more. Further research might show that the most dominant groups in England were Brythonic and Goidelic, and not quite mixing, indeed, intermittently hostile to each other, with a sizable population of Flemish farmers, Dutch artisans, and militarised Saxons firmly established long before the Anglo-Saxon invasion which followed the expulsion of the defeated Romans. And this situation seems likely to have persisted well into the Middle Ages and perhaps right up to relatively recent times, with first Anglo-Saxon, then Norman French and then the English which the Normans promoted over Anglo-Saxon, being only superficially the ‘dominant’ language, the language of literacy. (Anglo Saxon is clearly NOT ancestral to Chaucer’s English, but became extinct without political backing, along with all the other languages spoken in England at that time. The apparent extinctions of these other languages is very sudden because of the difficulty of

getting an education except in the dominant language, and of getting literature in a despised language valued enough to survive, but the actual extinction occurs very slowly. Chaucer’s English is not the result of a blending of Norman French with Anglo-Saxon, but with a pre-existing but eclipsed ancient form of English.) It was a feature of English country towns only half a century ago that two towns within walking distance had mutually unintelligible dialects, with not only Germanic features distinguishing them from the English that has evolved from the still easily intelligible Chaucerian English which, as the speech of the gentry, was spread rather thinly over them, and aligning them with Dutch, Flemish, and - dare we say it? - Anglo Saxon tongues. These began to fade in earnest as education for children became first accessible and later compulsory, and was always conducted in the English of the gentry. And tucked away among these ‘dialects’ were pockets also of dialects heavily laced with Gaelic, and there was more Q-Celtic that the scholars are letting on, and not just in northern parts of England, but here and there throughout, and also in Cornwall and Wales. So this text, which has been so charmingly misrepresented as the Charm of Making, need not necessarily have come from Ireland itself. It seems to have come from a settled industrious centre governed from afar by ‘The Fathers’. Although many abysmally bad translations of Old Irish verse and other texts perpetuate a false view of pre-RomanChristian Ireland as a war-ravaged wilderness of wasteful, savage, boastful wild-people, given over wholly to superstition, sorcery and malice, my readings reveal a civilised, industrious nation of pious prayerful people with mild, just laws and conscientious attitudes, and a great love and tenderness towards animals and children. Just who ‘The Fathers’ were remains a matter for further research. Perhaps part of the answer may be discovered by careful analysis of the serpent/dragon/snake kennings so common in Celtic mythology and lore.

The Peace of the Grove upon you. /|\

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