Taliesin's Map

The Aspects of Óðinn Compared to the Irish Gods This article will be a summary of our previous conclusions regarding Óðinn. It relies on our previous articles, and these can be referenced to supply more thorough evidence for each point. As is natural with this sort of summary of a complex issue, each point will remain highly debatable and necessarily incomplete, and further refinement of the details of the question at hand should be encouraged. When comparing the Norse myths of Óðinn to the Irish mythology as a whole, one thing is difficult to ignore, and it is an enormous key to understanding Celtic myth in its relation to the Norse: Óðinn shares myths with several Irish deities. While other Irish gods can often have close to a one-to-one correspondence to Norse counterparts, in the case of Óðinn it takes in the range of 5-7 Irish deities to cover all the mythic roles found in that dominant Germanic god.  We find that Óðinn seems to have, at least in part, the same root mythos ...

The Climactic Spear Throwing Scenes of Celtic Myth:  Lugh as Yudhishthira-Mitra and Balor as one of the Rudras   The Spear of Lugh If we look at the Welsh myths, the spear-throwing motif appears in quite a simple and direct form. There is one main spear-throwing sequence, found in “Math fab Mathonwy” from the Mabinogion , where Gronw Pebr pierces Lleu Llaw Gyffes with a special spear, and then after a space Lleu returns and kills Gronw with his own thrown spear. This thrown spear of Lleu accomplishes two distinct tasks. Firstly, it ends the conflict, the “mini-war,” that has arisen from the adultery of Blodeuwedd and Gronw. We can see indeed that to pursue Gronw, Lleu has to martial the warriors of his kingdom, to cross a body of water, and to confront Gronw who is among his own men, just as if two armies were facing off for battle. We have shown previously how exactly and uncannily this sequence parallels the events of the Trojan War as found in the Iliad , so that we fe...

  Old Man Nestor and The High Priest of the Word Now that we have a strong sense of this High Priest of the Word, we can proceed to addressing the question of the Iliad hero Nestor. Scholar Douglas Frame has in recent years forwarded a thesis that connects Nestor, known as Hippota Nestor , or Horseman Nestor, to the Vedic Asvins, also known as Nasatyas. Hippota Nestor would then linguistically parallel Asvin Nasatya , both meaning loosely “Horseman Saviour.” Frame shows how the name Nestor comes from a shared root with the Sanskrit Nasatya , while Hippota means the same thing as Asvin . The shared root connecting Nestor and Nasatya is nes- , denoting “bringing back to light and life,” as Frame puts it. In his earlier work, Frame's original thesis had been that this simlarity was merely a linguistic remnant showing a shared Indo-European concept which had been associated with the root nes -, rather than necessarily making Nestor and the Asvins equivalents. However, in his more re...