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Early fact and fantasy 17
the whole question of the overuse of a simplistic ‘invasion hypothesis’ would be critically evaluated in both Britain and Ireland. In Ireland a belief in Celtic immigrants has a long history going back many centuries and the notion that they were a special people would play a crucial and role in the formation of a national identity in more modern times. They assumed a romanticized and idealized character. For instance, the remarkable politician, poet and romantic nationalist Thomas D’Arcy McGee (1825–68) would write in his well- known poem on ‘The Celts’:
Long ago, beyond the misty space Of twice a thousand years In Erin old there dwelt a mighty race Taller than Roman spears. Like oaks and towers they had a giant grace, Were fleet as deers, With winds and waves they made their ’biding place, These western shepherd seers. 4
Unfortunately, history is all but silent on this ‘mighty race’ in ancient Ireland. While Greek and Roman writers have much to say about the Celtic peoples of old in Continental Europe, there are only a few tantalizingly brief references to those early Celts who lived in Ireland on edge of the known world. Fragments of an account of a voyage to the Atlantic from the Greek colony of Massalia in southern France are preserved. Known as the Massaliote Periplus, this was a sea journey by an adventurous Greek seafarer from present-day Marseille, through the Strait of Gibraltar, the Pillars of Hercules as they were called, into the ‘Outer Sea’ and along the coasts of western Europe. It may have been written shortly before 500 BC but survives only in part in quotations in Latin verse in the Ora Maritima of the Roman writer Rufius Festus Avienus of the late fourth century AD . This periplus or manual for navigators recorded the existence of the islands of Iernē and Albion, Greek forms of the earliest known names of Ireland and Britain. One section of this navigational aid mentions a place called the Oestrymnides, believed by some commentators to be islands off the coast of Brittany, or perhaps the Isles of Scilly, and from this location the author declared:
From here it is a two-day voyage to the Sacred Isle, For by this name the ancients called the island.
It lies rich in turf among the waves, Thickly populated by the Hierni . Nearby lies the island of the Albiones.
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