Sorry. I
can’t do the Celtic creation. It would have been great to do given the
proximity to St. Patrick’s Day, but not a lot of their mythology actually
survived. What are out there are recreations based on fragments or speculation.
We just don’t have enough surviving text for a complete picture.
The reasons
are complex in history, starting with the Roman incursions starting from the
time of Julius Caesar. He conquered the Gaulic tribes easily enough, but never
managed to quell Britannia. Each time he tried, he never managed to subdue the
people, and the Romans were known for particular harshness with their enemies.
Conquered territories such as Gaul were left relatively at peace so long as
they didn’t have their culture destroyed repeatedly. The Romans conquered
everything below Scotland, putting up Hadrian’s Wall for demarcation. So, for
approximately 350 years, the Romans fought, on-and-off, with the Celtic tribes.
Christian assimilation came later,
which would cause a corruption of the mythology in favor of the Christian
mythos. But given that Christianization happened throughout Europe, and many
mythologies survived—particularly the Norse which happened around the same time
period—I think also that the Celts didn’t pass on their mythology in writing,
primarily.
Ireland was largely untouched by
the Romans, though there were trade relations, so the Romanization doesn’t account
for the lack of mythology from those people. Most remaining evidence of
mythology is archaeological rather than in texts. I believe that the
archaeology was accompanied by oral tradition, and the Celts as a people simply
didn’t embrace writing to the extent other cultures did. If anything, Roman
conquest would have brought the strong tradition of writing to the tribes, but
the insular Celtic tribes of Scotland and Ireland were never conquered. And
because the Britons were so steadfast in the resistance to Roman conquest for
so long, it’s not surprising that a degree of destruction accompanied it.
However, creation myths,
particularly Continental European myths, have several patterns including
polytheism, the presence of chaos/darkness/void, elemental interactions,
construction out of a god’s or giant’s body, among other ideas.
And, interestingly enough, I have
discovered a group who has sought to reconstruct the creation myth using
fragmentary sources and these mythological patterns. So instead of my analysis
of a myth, you can read an expert recreation of material most likely to be
found in this Celtic
Creation Myth.