Russia, Cradle of the Gael

The pseudohistorical doctrines that the early Gaels had close relations with the Israelites, that their ancestry connects them with ancient Egypt, and that they came to Ireland from Spain, have been variously exploited for propaganda purposes over the centuries — the last of these traditions, indeed, is still widely believed to reflect an actual Iron Age migration. The idea that the Gaels were Greeks has received less attention, although a recent extended study by Bart Jaski has gone some way toward redressing the balance. But there is another doctrine which has, so far as I can tell, played no part in constituting contemporary ideas of Irish identity: the assertion that the first patriarch of the Gaels was the ruler of Scythia — roughly speaking the regions lying to the north of the Black Sea, including what are now Russia and Ukraine. This idea can be traced back at least as far as the eighth century: how and why did it originate? In this paper I will review the conjectures which have so far been put forward as answers to this question, and will consider the associations which the concept ‘Scythian' had in the sources on which the Irish scholar(s) responsible for originating the doctrine are likeliest to have drawn. The paper will proceed to look at the ways in which Scythia was imagined by the medieval Irish. Lebor Gabála gives us some notion of the geography of Scythia and of the lands adjacent to it: this can be supplemented from ancient sources, and from Irish geographical writings. There is also an intriguing account of dynastic warfare in Scythia extending over several generations, until the proto-Gaels were finally driven into exile: this is evidently modeled on the alternating kingship of the Northern and Southern Uí Néill in Ireland, suggesting at least one way in which the Irish thought of the Scythians as primeval counterparts of themselves, and of Scythia as a sort of ‘Ireland in the east’. Finally, I intend to look at Irish scholarship in the early modern period, to see whether access to the new learning had any impact on the conception of Scythian origins. As is well known, the easternmost extension of Irish peregrinatio brought Gaelic monks to Kiev in the eleventh century. Little is known of their mission, and it can probably be adequately explained simply in terms of the adventurous restlessness of the peregrini themselves. It is tempting, however, to imagine that a part of their motivation may have been — as it was when their English missionary counterparts sought out the ‘Old Saxons’ — a desire to bring light to the land of their own origins.