THERE ARE CONVENTIONAL English spellings and pronunciations for the names of the gods of Greece and Rome (we say Jupiter for Iuppiter), and for some members of the Norse pantheon; not so for the Irish divinities. This is a problem in as much as Irish and its sister language Scottish Gaelic can seem unpronounceable to those unfamiliar with the Gaelic spelling system, such as the hapless visitor to the Highlands or west of Ireland encountering Sgùrr a’ Ghreadaidh or Aonach Urmhumhan for the first time.
The coverage of this book means that many names might potentially be met with in their Old Irish, Middle Irish, Modern Irish, or (occasionally) Scottish Gaelic guises. All of these would be equally correct, but important shifts in pronunciation took place as Old Irish (roughly AD 600–900) morphed into Middle Irish (c.900–1200), which in turn developed into the Early Modern and Modern versions of the language. Scottish Gaelic also has idiosyncrasies of its own. Orthography too is a problem: for experts the difference between, say, Old Irish Bodb Derg—a fairy king of Connaught—and Early Modern Irish Bodhbh Dearg is superficial, but it may confuse other readers who do not expect names to develop supplementary vowels and h’s. To make matters worse, nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers in English often spelled medieval Irish names idiosyncratically: in the penultimate chapter of this book the sea-god Manannán (correctly so spelled) appears as Mananaan, Mannanan, and Manaunaun.
My own policy has been to choose a point in time—c.AD 875—and to keep names in the form which they had at that stage in the history of the language: later Old Irish. Some suggested pronunciations may therefore look odd to speakers of Modern Irish: in particular the pronunciation of d and g inside words has changed greatly with time, and Old Irish did not have the extra ‘epenthetic’ vowels heard in the modern pronunciation of words such as dearg (red), or gorm (blue). If no Old Irish form of a name is available, then the earliest attested form is given. This system has the advantage that a single Old Irish-based key to pronunciation can be provided, at least for most of the personal names. In a way, I would prefer to provide a fully accurate guide to all these names using the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet, but doing so would undermine the goal here, which is to provide a crib useable by the general reader. This key is not aimed at Celtic specialists, but rather at non-specialist readers, who should be able to at least approximate the names in a manner that has some historical justification.1 In a few cases (the names of some texts and manuscripts, for example), scholars use the modern rather than the medieval pronunciation, and I have followed this convention.
There are two difficult cases. The first is the youthful god Óengus, who is discussed extensively in this book. As he was a popular figure his name occurs in at least seven different forms in texts from which I quote: Middle Irish Aengus, Scottish Gaelic Aonghas, and anglicized Angus, Œngus, and Aongus—among others. The second is the term for the hollow mounds in which the gods were supposed to live: síd (plural síde) in Old Irish, along with later Irish forms such as sídhe/sidhe, Scottish Gaelic sìth, and anglicizations such as Shee or Shí. For clarity, I have sometimes used the tautology ‘síd-mounds’. In both cases the coverage of the book makes variation unavoidable, and I hope this will not cause marked discomfort; I have tried to signal it wherever possible.
As a final note for the general reader, I draw attention here to the convention that when an asterisk is placed before a word, it indicates that that word is a modern philological reconstruction of a lost form or root which is not actually attested in any surviving writing.
STRESS
In the following list, capital letters indicate where the stress falls in words of more than one syllable: almost always this is the first syllable. Monosyllablic names are always strongly stressed.
During the Old Irish period there was a gradual change in how vowels were pronounced in unstressed, i.e. non-initial, syllables. Early on they all sounded distinctly different, but later they all (with the exception of ‘u’) became a nondescript ‘uh’ sound, like the ‘a’ at the end of English sofa, technically called a schwa and written as ə in phonetic notation. This was particularly obvious at the ends of words: by about 875 the names Lóegaire and Banba―note the different final vowels—ended when spoken with identical ‘uh’ sounds of this sort.
The key uses the following five symbols:
i. |
ə |
the ‘uh’ sound at the end of sofa |
ii. |
ɣ |
a throaty gh sound, similar to the -ch in Scots loch but further back and down in the gullet. Not to be confused with the letter ‘y’ |
iii. |
kh |
the ch in Scots loch, spelled with a k- to avoid confusion with the ch in English child, a sound which did not occur in Old Irish |
iv. |
ð |
the th- sound at the start of those, that, and than, which is different from the th- sound at the beginning of thick, thin, or think |
v. |
ʸ |
indicates that the preceding consonant is ‘palatal’, that is, accompanied by a y-glide like the m in mew or the c in cute (contrast moo and coot). This often occurs at the end of a word: in a form like the place-name Crúachain, given in the key as KROO-əkh-ənʸ, the ʸ is there simply to indicate that the final consonant is pronounced like the first -n- in ‘onion’: it does not add a syllable. |
1 My policy is similar to that of Ann Dooley and Harry Roe in their translation Tales of the Elders of Ireland (Oxford, 1999), xxxiv–vii; their guide is easy to use and much more accurate for the medieval pronunciation than e.g. that in Marie Heaney’s (beautiful) Over Nine Waves: A Book of Irish Legends (London, 1994), 243–9, which is based, albeit inconsistently, on Modern Irish. The suggested pronunciations found in popular works on Celtic myth are usually wildly wrong. For Old Irish pronunciation rules using the IPA see T. Charles-Edwards, ECI, xvi-viii, plus Appendix 4 of Fergus Kelly’s A Guide to Early Irish Law (Dublin, 1988).