CHAPTER V.
ORIGIN OF THE GAELS.—DIFFICULTIES OF ITS INVESTIGATION.—NOT ELUCIDATED BY ANY RECORDS, NOR YET BY TRADITIONS.—ARGUMENTS FROM THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE BRITISH AND GAELIC LANGUAGES.—THE BRITISH LANGUAGE SPOKEN IN GAUL.—THE GAELIC NOT KNOWN TO BE SPOKEN IN ANY PART OF THE CONTINENT.—LHUYD'S DOCTRINE.—THE HIBERNIAN HYPOTHESIS.—THE CALEDONIAN HYPOTHESIS.—POSTULATES.
The origin of the Britons has been a question of no great difficulty. They could not well have come from the west, because Britain lies almost on the extremity of the ancient world; so we look towards the continent of Europe, and find, exactly opposite to the Britons, the Gauls, speaking a mutually intelligible language. On this we rest, just pausing for a short time to dispose of one or two refinements on the natural inference.
But if no such language as that of the ancient Gauls, a language closely akin to the British, had been discovered, the ethnologist would have been put to straits; indeed, he would have had to be satisfied with saying that Gaul was the likeliest part of Europe for the Britons to have come from. No more. A strong presumption is all he would have obtained. The similarity, however, of the languages has helped him.
Now the difficulty which has just been noticed[84] as a possible one in the investigation of the origin of the Britons, is a real one in the case of the Gaels. The exact parallel to the Gaelic language cannot be found on any part of the continent. Hence, whilst the British branch of the Keltic is found in both England and Gaul,—on the continent as well as in the Islands,—the Gaelic is limited to the British Isles exclusively. Neither in Gaul itself, nor the parts either north or south of Gaul can any member of the Gaelic branch be found.
Even within the British Islands the Gaelic is limited in its distribution. There is no British in Ireland, and no Gaelic in South Britain. In Scotland both the tongues occur, the Gaelic being spoken north of the British. Now this position of the Gaelic to the west and north of the British increases the difficulty—since it is cut off from all connexion with the continent, and unrepresented by any continental tongue.
The history, then, of the Gaels is that of an isolated branch of the Keltic stock; and it is this isolation which creates the difficulties of their ethnology. No historical records throw any light upon their origin—a statement which the most sanguine investigator must admit. But tradition, perhaps, is less uncommunicative. Many investigators believe this. For my own part I should only be glad to be able to do so. As[85] it is, however, the arguments of the present chapter will proceed as if the whole legendary history of Ireland and Scotland, so far as it relates to the migrations by which the islands were originally peopled by the Gaels, were a blank—the reasons for the scepticism being withheld for the present. But only for the present. In the seventh chapter they will be given as fully as space allows.
The present arguments rest wholly upon a fact of which the importance has more than once been foreshadowed already, and which the reader anticipates. Let us say, for the sake of illustration, that the British and Gaelic differ from each other as the Latin and Greek. The parallel is a rough one, but it will suffice as the basis of some criticism.
Languages thus related cannot be in the relation of mother and daughter, i.e., the one cannot be derived from the other, as the English is from the Anglo-Saxon, or the Italian from the Latin. The true connexion is different. It is that of brother and sister, rather than of parent and child. The actual source is some common mother-tongue; a mother-tongue which may become extinct after the evolution of its progeny. Hence, in the particular case before us, the Gaelic and British must have developed themselves, each independently of the other, out of some common[86] form of speech. And the development must have taken place within the British Islands; the doctrine being that out of a language which at some remote period was neither British nor Gaelic, but which contained the germs of both, the western form of speech took one form, the southern another—the results being in the one case the British, in the other the Gaelic, tongue.