Baile in Scáil
Baile in Scáil [ 'balʴe in skaːlʴ ] (“The prophecy of the phantom”, “The vision of the ghost”) is the name of a story in the Historical Cycle of Irish Mythology that is believed to have originated in the 11th century. It has come down to us in two manuscripts from the 15th and 16th centuries.
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Before his coronation, King Conn Cétchathach steps on the magical stone Lia Fáil on the wall of Tara Castle , which then screams out loud. The king's bard explains that the number of screams from the stone indicates the number of the royal descendants of Conn. A magical mist suddenly falling in (cf. Fíth-fáth ) takes the two of them into the otherworld , to a plain with a golden tree. A rider leads them to a house that is inhabited by a beautiful young woman, the personified "rule over Ireland " ( flaithi Érenn ). The rider is Lugh and he announces the names of the future High Kings while the woman seated on a crystal throne hands Conn a gold mug of beer for each named. The bard writes these names down in Ogam script on four yew sticks . At that moment they both find themselves in Tara Castle.
Birkhan names researchers (J. Weisweiler, M. Dillon) who tried to prove a linguistic connection between laith ("beer") and flaith ("rule").
See also
literature
- Helmut Birkhan : Celts. Attempt at a complete representation of their culture. Publishing house of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna 1997, ISBN 3-7001-2609-3 .
- Bernhard Maier : Lexicon of Celtic Religion and Culture (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 466). Kröner, Stuttgart 1994, ISBN 3-520-46601-5 .
Web links
- Chapter Early life in the article Conn of the Hundred Battles , in the English language Wikipedia
- James MacKillop: A dictionary of Celtic mythology , Oxford University Press, 2004
- Baile Chuinn Chétchathaig in the English language Wikipedia