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The First Charm of Making

Anall nathrak,
Urthvas beth’ud
Dagiel dienve.
Not being a film-goer, I first encountered this ‘charm’ at a
sweat-lodge where, by getting us all to chant it over and
over, the Druid in charge used it very effectively to carry us
back into the past, in an atmosphere charged with
undeniable magic and power. Later he showed the film
Excalibur in which the charm was uttered, and explained that
he had not been able to find anyone who knew what it
meant, though various conflicting ideas were doing the
rounds. He said he believed it was Cornish, and showed me
some laboured and unconvincing efforts that had been made
to translate it as if it had been that language. At the time I
knew no Cornish and only a little Irish, but during the
chanting I’d been struck by a sort of certainty that the word
Nathrak in the first phrase of the ‘charm’ was a collapsed
form of the Irish Na hAthaireacha, which means ‘The
Fathers’. When I got home I studied the whole text, and to
my utter amazement, I found it to be perfectly intelligible
Irish, even with my (then) beginner’s Irish and an ordinary
modern Collin’s Gem Irish/English Dictionary, and more so
now that I know a good deal more of the language than I did
then.

What astounded me about it was that although the Druid

who gave it to me had searched the web diligently and made
every effort to discover its meaning, he had not been able to
find a single scholar who had discerned the very obvious fact
that it was written in plain, simple old-fashioned Irish. I
believe he even said that among the vast team of scholars
and researchers who had contributed their knowledge to the
making of the film Excalibur there was not one who had
suggested the very obvious Irish translation that I’m about to
give.

The reason I was astounded was that this was my first

encounter with what I have come to diagnose as profound
Goidelophobia affecting, indeed, hindering and distorting,
Celtic studies at top academic levels. I had observed what I
call Celtophobia in such cumbersome classics of scholarship
as the Oxford Dictionary, but had no idea how entrenched
the whole thing is. I have met with great hostility, rudeness,
and even verbal cruelty, from Celtic scholars on lists on the
web, whenever I’ve suggested Goidelic interpretations of
evidence which clearly lends itself to them, in preference to
what are often distortive and sometimes tautological Welsh
or Roman interpretations. I’m used to it now and no longer
astounded.

Since then I’ve done a year and a half of the Cornish

Language Association’s Cornish language course, and it’s
incredible to me that anyone who knew any Cornish would
imagine that this ‘charm’ was Cornish at all.

But you are no doubt yet to be convinced, so I’ll let you see my evidence in a word by
word interpretation of the text.

Anall = Hither
In modern Irish, it means ‘hither’ or ‘here from there’.

nathrak = The Fathers

This breaks down into ‘na’ the plural definite article and
athaireacha meaning fathers. In modern Irish an h is inserted
between na and a following initial vowel, but various usages
are found in old texts. The Irish nathair, pl nathracha
meaning ‘snake’ is derived from it via a kenning too subtle
and complex to explain in this article. It has political
connotations which don’t seem to apply in this context, so
I’m choosing the simplest, most direct interpretation, which
is, moreover, supported by the rest of the text.

urth- = on it
 either uirth(i) modern Irish for ‘on her’ or ‘on it’ if ‘it’ is a
feminine noun, or orth(u), ‘on them’ respectively. Since the
only noun it could refer to is beth (later in the same line),
which is singular and might be feminine, I’m translating it as
‘on it’

vas = will be
transliterates into bheas, meaning ‘will be’

beth = town
Beith has been used for the name of an ogham, and is Irish
for a birch tree. In Irish it also survives as beatha which is
difficult to translate as it means life, livelihood, food-supply
and life-style, implying much more than this. Beith is
pronounced something like ‘beh’ these days, and beatha is
pronounced like ‘beh-ha’ the ‘th’ being silent at the end of a
word and either silent or reduced to an ‘h’ between vowels
within a word, depending on where you come from. But
spellings usually represent sounds that were once
pronounced, so beith, the first syllable of beatha and this
beth were probably all once pronounced almost alike and are
possibly the same word. It is cognate with the Hebrew Beth
(their neighbour Galilee was a Goidelic Celtic nation)
meaning a house, representing a school of philosophy or a
cultural, political, religious and academic centre (Bethlehem,
Elizabeth, Beth-El). In Britain and Gaul it occurs as Bed in
Bedivere and Bedford. It is a direct relative of the English
Path. I’m translating it as ‘cultural centre’, bearing in mind
that it probably carried the whole range of connotations
listed above under bheatha plus those listed under Beth.

‘ud = yonder
úd means ‘yonder’ now and there’s no reason to believe it
didn’t back then.

dath- = dye
means colour or dye, and is cognate with dye.
 giel = guild
gCiel, a variant of cill. Sometimes translated as ‘church’ as
in Columcille and sometimes as a political unit or institution,
it occurs also as Kil in Kildare, Killarney etc. it is cognate with
the English ‘guild’. It’s a q-Celtic form of the P-Celtic baile,
the English palace, and the Welsh Pwyll.

dienve = will be done

this is the modern déan meaning do, or doing,
plus a variant of -f(a)idh which in modern Irish is a suffix
denoting future tense. Déanfidh is pronounced den-fi.

Hither from the fathers: upon will be beth yonder dye-guild

done

Hither from the fathers (comes word): There will be upon

yonder town a dye (processing) guild established

Now it is evident that this is not a charm at all, but a political

directive of perfectly sane, rational and practical intention.
Set up a factory. Nothing more nor less. It’s difficult to date
but it should be possible. It’s probably not all that old, not
old enough to be ‘Arthurian’ by a few centuries, but old
enough for ‘the fathers’ to be a political entity and for the
words ‘guild’ and ‘giel’ to retain cognizance of each other.
Whatever, this scrap of old Gaelic is worth much more as an
archaeological trace than a charm could be. Small and
fleeting as it may be, we are afforded through it a glimpse
into the past more intelligible than we could have got from
any charm. A charm could have been recently formulated or
translated from a now undiscoverable original language, it
would anyway be unlocatable in time and place and would
yield no clue as to which culture it came from or what kind of
civilization it may have had. This scrap is not the sort of
thing that anyone would translate into a Gaelic language
from any other and so was probably taken from an original
 text, which was almost certainly produced by an Irish
speaking culture in the course of its own affairs. To me, that
makes it very important. It should be being seriously studied
instead of being let float about in the hope that some
amateur like me might crack it. And if it had been seriously
studied, it wouldn’t have been found ‘untranslatable’ by
people who consider themselves serious scholars of old
Celtic languages!

The Wyverne goes off her face about slovenly Celtic

scholarship:
.

It’s downright irresponsible!

The mentality that insisted that this was a basically
untranslatable piece of ancient Celtic is related to that of
those within the Goidelophobic hegemonies that are
currently asserting (wrongly) that there was no Goidelic
Celtic spoken in Britain at the time of the Roman invasion
and precious little since, and even that the Q-/P- split
happened quite suddenly in Scotland during the late dark
ages. But there is strong linguistic evidence that Q- forms,
P-forms, and a variety of other forms such as S-, T- and
decapitated forms in Saxon, Dutch, Flemish and other
Germanic languages; and hybrids and dialects of all these
were intermingling freely in all the Celtic nations from Serbia
to Ireland, from Galilee to Germania, and certainly including
Britain, long before Rome’s advance.

There were schools and companies of scholars, artists,

artisans and priests, poets, musicians and philosophers,
some of them itinerant, some of them belonging to guilds,
monasteries and military establishments, ensuring a
constant mingling and mixing of all these forms of language.
In addition, their marriage customs often involved the mass-
marrying of a hundred or so men to an equal number of
women from another locality with other customs and forms
of the language if not another language altogether. The wife
of a Cornish man ( “an den”, pronounced just like “Dane”) is
 called a “gwreg”, pronounced very like Greek, and we’re
reminded of the mass marriage between the Breton Knight
Tirant lo Blanc and the eligible bachelors of his country and
Carmesina, the daughter of the Greek king whose people he
had helped to save from the Turks, with all her eligible
damsels, which took place in Tirant’s homeland, despite the
tragic death of the foremost bride and groom. There are
furthermore mountains of evidence for marriages of this kind
in the ancient languages of Europe, as well as in ancient
literature and oral tradition.

Languages appear to have been distributed not according to

geographical borders but according to these schools and
companies, and intermingling ethnic groups. A linen
weaver’s guild in England would speak a language
continuous with one in Germany, while an English Bardic
school nearby would find them both almost if not quite
unintelligible. In addition, seaports and international trade
centres represented yet more alien cultures including
Moorish, Turkish, Spanish, Basque and Latin-speaking
groups, Lascars, Chinese, and Africans, Indians, Native North
Americans and more. Further research might show that the
most dominant groups in England were Brythonic and
Goidelic, and not quite mixing, indeed, intermittently hostile
to each other, with a sizable population of Flemish farmers,
Dutch artisans, and militarised Saxons firmly established
long before the Anglo-Saxon invasion which followed the
expulsion of the defeated Romans.

And this situation seems likely to have persisted well into the
Middle Ages and perhaps right up to relatively recent times,
with first Anglo-Saxon, then Norman French and then the
English which the Normans promoted over Anglo-Saxon,
being only superficially the ‘dominant’ language, the
language of literacy. (Anglo Saxon is clearly NOT ancestral to
Chaucer’s English, but became extinct without political
backing, along with all the other languages spoken in
England at that time. The apparent extinctions of these
other languages is very sudden because of the difficulty of
 getting an education except in the dominant language, and
of getting literature in a despised language valued enough to
survive, but the actual extinction occurs very slowly.
Chaucer’s English is not the result of a blending of Norman
French with Anglo-Saxon, but with a pre-existing but eclipsed
ancient form of English.)

It was a feature of English country towns only half a century

ago that two towns within walking distance had mutually
unintelligible dialects, with not only Germanic features
distinguishing them from the English that has evolved from
the still easily intelligible Chaucerian English which, as the
speech of the gentry, was spread rather thinly over them,
and aligning them with Dutch, Flemish, and - dare we say it?
- Anglo Saxon tongues. These began to fade in earnest as
education for children became first accessible and later
compulsory, and was always conducted in the English of the
gentry. And tucked away among these ‘dialects’ were
pockets also of dialects heavily laced with Gaelic, and there
was more Q-Celtic that the scholars are letting on, and not
just in northern parts of England, but here and there
throughout, and also in Cornwall and Wales.

So this text, which has been so charmingly misrepresented

as the Charm of Making, need not necessarily have come
from Ireland itself. It seems to have come from a settled
industrious centre governed from afar by ‘The Fathers’.
Although many abysmally bad translations of Old Irish verse
and other texts perpetuate a false view of pre-Roman-
Christian Ireland as a war-ravaged wilderness of wasteful,
savage, boastful wild-people, given over wholly to
superstition, sorcery and malice, my readings reveal a
civilised, industrious nation of pious prayerful people with
mild, just laws and conscientious attitudes, and a great love
and tenderness towards animals and children. Just who ‘The
Fathers’ were remains a matter for further research. Perhaps
part of the answer may be discovered by careful analysis of
the serpent/dragon/snake kennings so common in Celtic
mythology and lore.
The Peace of the Grove upon you.

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