More on Irish Vampires – Foras Feasa ar Éirinn

I have frequently discussed the myth of the Irish vampire in the past.

Basically, this newly-manufactured myth claims that the Irish author of Dracula, Bram Stoker, was influenced by a substantial body of vampire lore in Irish tradition and that this lore goes back hundreds of years.

Where did these stories about Irish vampires come from and what evidence exists for them? I intend to go through these claims and debunk them one by one. The first claim (chronologically) is that there is evidence for the Irish vampire tradition in Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (A Basis of Knowledge About Ireland), the history of Ireland written in the Irish language by Seathrún Céitinn (anglice Geoffrey Keating) in the 17^th century.

Haining and Tremayne (who I will discuss in detail later) in their 1997 book, The Undead, claim that this work contains an account of vampirism:

It has been suggested by the prolific Irish author and novelist Cathal Ó Sándair (1922-1996) in ‘Dracula Domharfa’ (Dracula the Immortal), Irish Times, 18 May 1993, that while at Trinity College, Bram undoubtedly came across and read Seathrún Céitinn’s Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, the History of Ireland, written between 1629 and 1631. Dr Céitinn dwelt on the subject of the neamh-mhairbh (the Un-Dead) in Volume I, Chapter 10.

Is this true? Well, we can dispense with this nonsense very easily and very quickly, by quoting the relevant passages in Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, in both the original Irish and in an English translation. The passage deals with the great magicians of Irish mythology, the Tuatha Dé Danann, who were living in Greece on their travels when the country was attacked by the Syrians. The Tuatha Dé Danann used magic to reanimate corpses to fight for their Greek hosts:

Tárla mu’n am soin go dtáinig cobhlach mór ó chrích na Siria, do dhéanamh cogaidh ar lucht críche Ateniensis go mbíadh cathughadh laitheamhail eadorra; agus an drong do marbhtaoi do na h-Ateniensis is iad bhíodh ar a bhárach ag cathughadh re lucht na Siria. Tré dhraoidheacht Tuaithe Dé Danann do-ghníthí an siabhradh soin: óir do chuiridís deamhna is na corpaibh ceudna d’á dtoghluasacht. Agus mar thugadar lucht na Siria sin d’á n-aire, téidhid do dhéanamh comhairle re n-a ndraoi féin. Ráidhis an draoi riu, faire do chur ar láthair nó ar ionad an ármhaigh, agus cuaille do bhior caorthainn do sháthadh tré mheidhe gach mairbh do bhíodh ag aitheirghe chuca, agus má’s deamhna do-ghníodh a gcoirp do thoghluasacht go gclaochluidhfithí i gcrumhaibh fo cheudóir de sin iad; agus damadh é a n-aithbheodhadh dá ríribh do-ghníthí, nach géabhdaois na coirp truailleadh ná claochlódh chuca. Tigid lucht na Siria do chur an chatha ar a bhárach, agus maoidhtear rompa, agus sáithid na cleatha caorthainn tré sna marbhaibh amhail ro ráidh an draoi riu, agus do rinneadh crumha dhíobh do láthair; agus lingid lucht na Siria fótha iar sin d’á n-óirleach.

It happened about that time that a great fleet came from the country of Syria to make war on the people of the Athenian country, so that there was daily warfare between them; and those of the Athenians who would be slain, it is they who would be on the morrow fighting with [i.e. against] the people of Syria. That necromancy used to be done through the art magic of the Tuatha Dé Danann: for they would put demons into the same bodies to restore them. And when the people of Syria became aware of this, they go to take counsel with their own druid. The druid says to them, to set a watch on the site or on the place of the battle-field, and to thrust a stake [of a spit] of quicken-tree through the trunk of every dead person who would be rising up against them; and if it were demons who would cause their bodies to revive, that they would be from that immediately turned into worms, while, if it were really their revival that had been brought about, the bodies would not suffer change or corruption. The people of Syria come to join battle on the morrow, and it is won by them, and they thrust the stakes of ash through the dead, as the druid had told them, and presently worms were made of them: and the people of Syria fell on the others after that, slaughtering them.

As you will see, there is no reference to the word neamh-mharbh (plural neamh-mhairbh) in this text, which is unsurprising given that its first recorded use was in the 1930s. The dead are referred to as bodies or as the dead. There is no reference to them drinking blood and they are not regarded as vampires. And while the staking of the dead to kill them might make us think of vampirism, such anomalous burial practices are found in many countries and cultures. Bodies have been found with stones wedged in their mouths, others with stakes through them at crossroads, yet others buried face down and others with bolts or nails through their ankles or hips to stop them walking. These traditions are not exclusively Irish and they certainly aren’t all aimed at vampires, only at unhappy spirits who might choose to leave the grave and go for a walk.

The County Derry story of Abhartach (which I will deal with next) is not mentioned at all in Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, as many of these garbled accounts of Irish vampirism wrongly claim. It is of no relevance that Foras Feasa ar Éirinn or its English translation might have been seen by Stoker in Trinity College Library, because Foras Feasa contains no reference at all to vampirism or to Abhartach.

More on Cave Hill and Gulliver’s Travels

In this blog, my primary target has been the fake etymology of Daniel Cassidy but I have touched on a number of other phoney memes about Ireland and Irish such as the silly claim that Swift was inspired to write Gulliver’s travels by the appearance of Belfast’s Cave Hill, which looks like a sleeping giant. Extensions of this myth say that Swift also took the name Lilliput from a farm in North Belfast as the name for his nation of tiny people and that Lilliput Street commemorates this farm. According to many sources, the name Lilliput in Belfast goes back to before the time when Swift lived in the area.

The truth is quite different, as I have said before. Swift did live in Kilroot near Carrickfergus for about two years between 1694 and 1696, and had a relationship with a girl called Jane Waring from Waring Street in Belfast, so he undoubtedly travelled into the town through the area around Lilliput Street, and Cave Hill does look a little like a sleeping giant. However, he did not write Gulliver’s Travels until the 1720s (it was published in 1726) and there is absolutely no evidence that Swift had Cave Hill in mind when he wrote about his giants.

In fact, the idea that Swift was inspired by Cave Hill is very recent, though not quite as recent as I initially thought. When I posted on this in 2022, the earliest reference to it that I was able to find was from an article in the Scotsman in 2004. However, when I checked again recently, I found an article from 1973 by George McBride in a Ballymena newspaper which said: “It is possible that the Cave Hill, the outline of which indeed resembles the profile of a sleeping giant overlooking Belfast Lough, gave birth to the idea for a sleeping Gulliver in the land of the little people of Lilliput.” This article was added to the archive in the autumn of 2023, which is why I hadn’t seen it before.

Even though it is thirty years older than I thought, there is still a huge gap between the 1690s when Swift lived in the area and the first reference to this claim. Experts on Swift and his work tend to make the point that Swift was influenced by the French writer Rabelais, whose satirical works about the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel are much more obvious as inspirations. For example, Oxford Quick Reference says about Rabelais that he had a widespread influence on English literature, particularly on S. Butler, Swift, Sterne, Peacock, and Joyce. Whole articles have been written on the subject, such as Eddy’s 1922 essay, Rabelais, a Source for Gulliver’s Travels. And then there is Marion Graz Carr’s 1924 work, A Comparison of the “Gargantua” and “Pantagruel” of Rabelais with Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels.” Just Google Swift and Rabelais and you will find hundreds of references.

I should also point out that a much-loved book on the history of Belfast, As I Roved Out by Cathal O’Byrne, first published in 1946, has articles on Swift and Varina and on Cave Hill. O’Byrne does not link the outline of Cave Hill with Gulliver’s Travels in either article. If it had been “a thing” back then, I have no doubt that O’Byrne would have heard about it and mentioned it. His silence shows that the claim simply hadn’t been invented back then.

As for the idea that Lilliput Farm in Belfast was the inspiration for the name Lilliput in Gulliver’s Travels, this is only possible if Lilliput Farm was called that in the 1690s. This is often claimed on the internet and by self-appointed local historians in Belfast but if we look for evidence, there is none. The earliest reference to Lilliput as a place in the Belfast area seems to be (it’s not absolutely certain that it’s the one in the Belfast area but seems likely) a reference in the Belfast Newsletter to an auction of furniture at the house of Hercules Heyland at Lilliput in 1786. There are quite a few references to Lilliput House and its garden in the early 19^th century too, and this is definitely in the right area of the city. It seems to have been a nursery or garden and seed suppliers at that time.

However, 1786 is sixty years after Gulliver’s Travels was published. It seems likely to me that someone chose to build a house and call it Lilliput because they were a fan of Swift or because they were small or the house was small – for some whimsical reason which hasn’t been recorded. If that’s the case, it wasn’t the only one. There was a Lilliput Lodge in Limerick in the early 19^th century. There is also a Lilliput House at Nure in County Westmeath which was named after Swift’s creation in the 18^th century. There are probably many other Lilliputs named after Gulliver’s Travels rather than the other way round.

There is also the question that Lilliput doesn’t sound like an Irish placename. There aren’t any places anywhere in Ireland (apart from the occasional Lilliput named after Swift’s book) with the element Put in them, to the best of my knowledge, and the same goes for Lilli. They aren’t common elements with Irish Gaelic equivalents like kill or maghera or bally or knock…

So, if Swift didn’t get the name of Lilliput from a place in Belfast, where did he get it? Well, experts on Swift have speculated about that one. The answer seems to be that the Lilli- is a childish rendering of little, which makes perfect sense. As for the put, this word was a common slang term meaning a stupid fellow or a blockhead in Swift’s day. Swift was an opponent of slang and actually mentioned the word put as one of the words people shouldn’t use in an article he wrote in the Tatler in 1710! In other words, Lilliput would be the kingdom of the little fools.

And, just as the Irish language doesn’t need a Cassidy to make it interesting or important, the Belfast Hills have more than enough going for them without a fake association with Swift. They are stunningly beautiful and they are full of genuine history. So let’s just ditch all this newly-manufactured fakery and stick to the facts!

Comments on CassidySlangScam

OK, for my first post of the year 2024, I want to discuss a question I have touched on before but never really spelled out clearly, the question of what kinds of comments get answered on this blog. Because, the fact is, many comments get transferred to the trash fairly quickly. As I’ve said before, this isn’t some open public space, a democracy wall where every dimwit and lunatic has a right to scrawl stupidities at will, so I vet new comments and discard any I don’t like. No doubt the authors of the rejected messages will assume that I am afraid to engage in debate with them because of their superior knowledge and logic. I can assure you that nothing could be further from the truth.

So, if you want to post a comment and get it answered on this blog, here’s how to do it.

Firstly, make sure what you are saying makes sense. And I don’t mean, make a coherent, logical, non-crazy argument. I mean, write something that is actually intelligible enough to be answered. You would be amazed at how often comments don’t have a verb, or where it’s completely unclear who or what they’re referring to. It also helps if you can spellcheck them, as comments peppered with basic spelling mistakes look ugly and it’s less likely that I will spend any of my valuable time answering them if you can’t even be bothered doing that.

However, sometimes a comment can be grammatically correct but completely empty of content. Someone tried to post a comment on my post on Irish and Jamaican Slang with the words “Sounds like simply you don’t like what he’s saying because he’s white.” I mean, what am I supposed to say? Am I expected to argue with an idiot about not being a racist? It seems to me that just ignoring people who are FOS is probably a better policy.

And above all, if you expect me to spend my time answering you, then ASK A QUESTION or PROVIDE INFORMATION. If you believe that I have got it wrong about Irish influence on Jamaican English, don’t just say “You’ve got it wrong, everyone knows that Jamaican English is full of Irish words.” If you think they exist, provide a list. I can’t argue with you about these words if I don’t know what they are.

I don’t know how many comments have languished in the Trash folder, but it’s a lot, and while I don’t think their authors spent a lot of time thinking about them or researching before they sent them, whatever effort they did expend was a waste of their time, not of mine. So if you want a debate rather than just hurling some random and unheeded abuse in cyberspace, follow the rules above. All serious comments will be considered.

Bliain Úr Faoi Mhaise!

Happy New Year to all the readers who have stopped by to read about Cassidy’s linguistic hoax in 2023. And there have been a lot of them. The figures are just shy of 20,000, which is less than last year but more than 2021 or 2019. A respectable figure, given that Cassidy is no longer in print, in the news, or regarded by anyone with a brain as a serious scholar.

Bliain Úr Faoi Mhaise do na léitheoirí go léir a thug cuairt ar an tsuíomh seo le léamh faoi chur i gcéill teangeolaíoch Cassidy sa bhliain 2023. Agus ní dream beag iad. Bhí giota beag níos lú ná 20,000 amas nó cuairt ar an tsuíomh i mbliana, giota beag níos lú ná an bhliain seo caite ach níos mó ná 2021 nó 2019. Méid measartha maith, má ghlactar san áireamh nach bhfuil leabhar Cassidy i gcló a thuilleadh, nach mbíonn trácht ar bith airsean ná ar a chuid fantaisíochtaí sna meáin, agus nach dóigh le duine ar bith a bhfuil ciall aici nó aige gur scoláire iontaofa a bhí ann.

Nollaig Shona!

Is dócha go mbíonn gach aon duine gnóthach ag an Nollaig agus ní taise domsa é. Níl an t-am agam teachtaireacht fhada a scríobh ach gabhaim buíochas le gach duine a thug tacaíocht don bhlag seo in 2023. Bíodh Nollaig den scoth agaibh agus guím gach rath oraibh sa Bhliain Úr.

I suppose everybody is busy at Christmas and I certainly am. I don’t have time to write a long message but I would like to thank all those who have supported this blog in 2023. Have a wonderful Christmas and I wish you every success in the New Year.

The Not So Mighty Quinn

For a while now, I have been intending to write an article on Bob Quinn’s Atlantean theories. Quinn originally worked for RTÉ (the Irish state broadcasting service) and then became an independent film-maker. He was briefly famous for his high-profile disagreements with RTÉ on various issues and he has his place in the history of Irish culture because of a number of films (not my taste, but certainly significant). One of them, Poitín, was the first feature film ever made entirely in the Irish language.

If he had stuck to these things, I would have a generally positive view of him. Unfortunately, he is also well-known for three films produced in 1983, The Atlantean Trilogy, in which he posits various theories about links between Irish culture and North Africa, claiming that scholars have downplayed the vast influence of trading and other contacts up the Atlantic coasts of Western Europe from North Africa. This ‘thesis’ was then advanced further in two books, Atlantean, published in 1986, and The Atlantean Irish: Ireland’s Oriental and Maritime Heritage, published in 2005. These are not really two different books. The 2005 book is a revised and expanded and illustrated version of the 1986 work.

Why do I dislike Quinn’s Atlantean theory so much? I can assure you that it’s not because I am racist or xenophobic and I imagine the same is true for most of Quinn’s critics. My dislike for Quinn is for the same reasons as my disdain for Cassidy and a host of other pseudo-scholars. His ‘research’ is egotistical, narcissistic and completely devoid of merit. Being stupid is not a crime, and I am as capable of stupidity as the next person. The difference is, that I am unlikely to shoot my mouth off about a subject where I have absolutely no specialist knowledge at all. Humility is not Quinn’s strong point and his assumption that he is ahead of the curve (“What’s this! My thesis on Ireland and North Africa was not supposed to become respectable for at least another decade!”) and that the academic world will eventually catch up and come around to his way of thinking just seems deluded and intensely irritating to me.

If you are looking for a good, comprehensive review of the 2005 book, try the one by archaeologist Richard Warner (available here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261780104_THE_ATLANTEAN_IRISH_IRELAND’S_ORIENTAL_AND_MARITIME_HERITAGE_by_Bob_Quinn).

In this post, I will just jot down some notes about why Quinn was so totally and abysmally wrong about all of this stuff, and how guillible and incompetent Quinn himself and many of his apologists are. I won’t do it comprehensively or systematically because that would entail having to read his book again from cover to cover and believe me, I have much better things to do with my time.

So, what is Quinn’s argument? He seems to be saying (and I agree with Florian Blaschke that it is hard to be sure what he is saying because he himself doesn’t seem to have a very clear idea) that mainstream scholarship has downplayed the influence of movements down the Atlantic coasts of Western Europe and North Africa in spreading various aspects of culture.

However, in doing so, he also threw his lot in with a largely discredited archaeological theory called Celtoscepticism but he doesn’t know enough about language to really understand it.

Because of Quinn’s complete ignorance of linguistics and his dilettante half-knowledge of Celtoscepticism, he thinks that the decision to describe the Irish language and the literature and mythology associated with it as Celtic is random and not rooted in evidence. Indeed, he implies that the decision to make Irish a part of the Indo-European world was possibly a racist decision, and that a mind unimpeded by bigotry could just as easily have categorised Irish with Arabic and Hebrew.

This is nonsense. The fact is that the languages still spoken in Ireland and Wales and other areas of the Celtic Fringe are clearly classifiable as Indo-European, because their vocabulary and grammar link them to other Indo-European languages in Europe and in Asia. And they belong to a sub-group of the Indo-European languages which linguists call Celtic, which includes these still surviving languages as well as extinct languages of Western Europe like Gaulish and Lepontic. We know this because we have inscriptions in these languages and place names, tribal names and personal names from areas where Gaulish and Lepontic were spoken and they are obviously similar.  Just to give a couple of examples, the city of Lyons was originally called Lugudunum. This is the same as the Irish word for fortress, dún, with the name of a Celtic god who is still commemorated in Ireland in the name of the festival of Lughnasa (modern spelling Lúnasa), which is the Irish name for the month of August. Dumnorix, the chieftain of the Aedui who fought Caesar has a name meaning the same as the Irish domhan-rí (older spelling domhan-righ), meaning ‘world-king’. These are a couple of random examples out of thousands. Do some research on line and you will quickly realise that I’m right.

Apart from total ignorance, Quinn draws on an eclectic range of claims to bolster his idea that Irish culture is not Celtic. One that has been promoted by many Celtosceptics is that the term Celtic in this sense is quite new and that Celtic peoples had no awareness of their Celtic identity until recently. This is perfectly true but irrelevant.  The first to use the term Celtic and realise that these languages were related was Buchanan in the 16th century (not Lhuyd in the 18th, as Quinn claims). Some Celtosceptics also dislike the term Celtic for political reasons, and Quinn seems to regard it as part of the toxic narrow-minded vision of Irishness which arose from the Gaelic Revival. However, why single out Celtic? The term Germanic is used by linguists and to some extent by archaeologists in relation to (for example) the Jastorf Culture. I would have thought that the term Germanic was considerably more toxic and compromised than Celtic, but for some reason the Celtosceptics (generally British archaeologists) are not as vociferous about it as they are about the use of Celtic. (I also think that one thing five of the surviving Celtic peoples have in common is being patronised or worse by the English, so attempts by English archaeologists to tell us how to define our past or our identity are both misplaced and ill-advised. There’s also some hypocrisy to Cunliffe supporting Quinn and his ‘Atlanteans’ while rejecting the term Celtic. Can you think of a more compromised term than Atlantean? Tinfoil helmets at the ready, lads!)

Other people seem to think that believing in the existence of a Celtic linguistic and cultural group in the ancient world and including Ireland and Britain means that we believe in a Celtic Aryan race with distinct characteristics. I don’t and I never have.

Quinn also raises the question of substrates in the Insular Celtic languages, the idea that the Celtic languages contain the ghosts of other languages or another language that were once spoken in Ireland or Britain or wherever the Insular Celtic languages first developed, so for example, the VSO word order of our language is said to match Arabic or Hebrew. The fact is, we don’t know how fixed the word order of languages is and how easy it is for them to change, or what knock-on effects such a change might have on the rest of the grammar and an examination of the non-Indo-European vocabulary in Irish and Welsh doesn’t suggest any Hamito-Semitic substrate. In other words, the substrate idea is interesting but lacks any compelling evidence. If it were as strong an influence as Quinn claims, it should be immediately apparent, with hundreds of solid and obvious examples, which is not the case.

And even if there were a non-Celtic and non-Indo-European substrate in Irish, this wouldn’t mean that Irish is not a Celtic or Indo-European language, as Quinn claims. He actually says as much himself without realising. When he explains what a linguistic substrate is, he uses the example of certain substrate features from Irish in Hiberno-English, such as the use of phrases like ‘I’m after seeing him’ (tá mé tar éis é a fheiceáil). But Hiberno-English is a Germanic language with a slight Celtic influence. It isn’t a Celtic language. Ergo, a substrate doesn’t dictate the entire nature or categorisation of the language.

There are other cases where Quinn’s writing style is impenetrable and where its vagueness is deliberate, masking a lack of knowledge of the subject. For example, look at this sentence:

The human genome researches of Dr Dan Bradley of Trinity College point to Connacht as a concentrated source of ancient genetic markers, suggesting a remarkable continuity of habitation.

I am guessing what he is trying to say here. I have to guess, because what he actually wrote means nothing. “A concentrated source of ancient genetic markers?” Well, bedad! I think what he is referring to here is the fact that varieties of the R1b y-line haplogroup are found in nearly 100% of males in parts of the west of Ireland. These are not particularly ancient (compared to many other haplogroups) and ‘a concentrated source’ is a bizarre way of expressing it. The fact is that the DNA of people in the West of Ireland is remarkably homogeneous. This doesn’t usually mean that it is ancient or imply continuity. You would expect MORE variety closer to the source of a group of people, just as Africans have a much greater variety in their DNA than those of us with ancestry outside of Africa. We now know (and in his defence, Quinn could not have known this when the article was written) that there was an almost blanket replacement of the population of Ireland at the end of the Neolithic, as steppe pastoralists moved into western and northern Europe, largely replacing a people who were probably descended from Middle Eastern farmers and looked Middle Eastern. The movement of the steppe people (the Beaker People) was complicated and partly involved Iberia. But there is no doubt that it DOES NOT suggest a north African origin for the Irish people, except the Neolithic farmers who are a fraction of our genetic heritage. (And who arrived via the north coast of the Mediterranean and through Central Europe, which does NOT support Quinn’s idea of Atlantean links to North Africa.)

This general sloppiness and incompetence is found scattered throughout the book. The Irish word crios does not come from Críostaí (or criosdaí as he misspells it) and the suggestion would make any real scholar laugh out loud. (This is an oft-repeated folk-etymology about the origin of the crios, but it is obviously not true.) Neither does the word mummer come from Mohammedan, or troubadour from Arabic (though in fairness to him, that is also claimed by a small minority of academics).

However, nowhere is his inadequacy as a researcher more obvious than in his discussion of the word shamrock. He claims that he found out while looking at some door panels in the National Library in Cairo that shamrakh is the Arabic for a trefoil plant. Strangely, if you put the words Arabic, shamrock and shamrakh into the search box on a newspaper archive, you will find that there are dozens of short articles in British and Irish newspapers from the year 1878 onwards (such as the Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail in 1878), usually published around St Patrick’s Day, which repeat this claim that the Arabic for a trefoil is shamrakh. They either state that this is a curious coincidence or link it to the Lost Tribes of Israel.

The question is, of course, did Quinn really find this in a library in Cairo or did he find it in a newspaper in a library in Dublin? And how can we be sure that the information about shamrakh is correct? I have been unable to find any confirmation that shamrakh means a trefoil in Arabic and Quinn certainly doesn’t give any evidence. No references to Arabic dictionaries. He asked someone. In a library. In Cairo, apparently. But didn’t feel that confirming this with an actual Arabic dictionary reference would help his case.

I should also point out that shamrock is from the Irish seamróg, the feminine diminutive of seamair, meaning clover. In other words, it means little clover, and is 100% Irish, so even if shamrakh does mean a trefoil in Arabic, it is no more than a coincidence.

Of course, DNA science has now come on leaps and bounds, so we now know that Quinn was talking rubbish and that there is no evidence for the idea of strong north African (or indeed, Iberian) genetic links. The vast majority of our genes and our culture came via Britain from mainland Europe and we can prove it. So why is this shite still being recycled and discussed by morons as if it had any validity? The answer is in the question – more specifically, in that word MORONS.

The Boys From County Hell

I have a fondness for horror movies. I find them a welcome release from the real-life horrors we see every day on the news. Anyway, I watched a couple of Irish-themed offerings recently: Unwelcome and The Boys From County Hell.

Both of these films are basically folk-horror. Unwelcome is about the Redcaps or Fir Dhearga, while The Boys From County Hell is concerned with the modern fakelore myth associating the County Derry revenant Abhartach with vampirism.

I have little to say about Unwelcome. I really didn’t enjoy it at all. It was a complete waste of good actors and I fast-forwarded to the end because it just bored me. The folkloric element was rubbish as well, as it concerned Redcaps (a mythical being associated with the Scottish borders) who are equated by the film-makers with the Fir Dhearga, the Red Men, who are a type of mischievous leprechaun in Irish mythology. At one point, an actress talks about Fear Dearg rather than putting it into the plural as Fir Dhearga. I happen to know that that particular actress speaks fluent Irish, so what went wrong there? However, apart from being bored, my main complaints about Unwelcome would be its representation of Ireland and the representation of the monsters. I don’t know where it was filmed but (apart from a few drone shots) I would guess it was somewhere in the south of England. It just didn’t look Irish at all to me. Also, other reviewers have commented on the Fraggle Rock/Muppets appearance of the Scottish/Irish goblins, which were more comical than scary. Anyway, my verdict on Unwelcome is – it’s not welcome back on my TV.

I have already commented here in great detail about the ridiculous ‘Irish vampire’ memes, which pretend that Dracula is the Irish for bad blood or that there is an ancient Irish word for a vampire, neamh-mharbh, and that Stoker lifted his Dracula ideas from the ancient Irish legend of Abhartach. All of which is shite. While the film The Boys From County Hell is entirely based on this spurious piece of County Derry fakelore, and I started off with a determination to hate it because of that, I grudgingly have to admit that it was far from the worst horror film I’ve ever seen. It’s a bit uneven in terms of pacing and sometimes the serious elements and the comedy elements sit uncomfortably with each other. However, the script is superior to most horror films and the characterisation is very sharp, especially the relationship between the protagonist and his emotionally stunted father. It also has a Derry Girl in a prominent role. (As does Unwelcome, to be fair, though I thought she was wasted in her role there, as were all the other actors.) The vampire, when he does make his shadowy appearance, has more than a nod to Nosferatu and is quite effectively scary. By all means watch it. You’ll probably enjoy it, as I did. (Not quite as much as Cocaine Bear, but I still thought it was better than average.)

Just remember when you watch it that the story of Abhartach being a vampire was invented about twenty years ago by a hack who also wrote books claiming that Sweeny Todd and Spring-Heeled Jack were genuine historical characters!

More on Conspiracy Theorists

I have hardly contributed to the blog this year, largely because I have been too busy.

However, I still have a deep interest in pseudo-scholarship and pseudo-archaeology. Recently, I read some articles and watched some material about Afrocentrism and more specifically, the crazy claim that the Olmecs of Mexico were Sub-Saharan Africans. This was promoted by a number of Afrocentric “scholars” such as Ivan van Sertima (though to be fair, even some Afrocentrists find van Sertima’s lack of scholarship an embarrassment).

One of the items I watched online was a piece on Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages entitled “Olmecs Have Indigenous Origins”, which does a nice job of debunking this puerile nonsense. I happened to read some of the comments below and came across this, from someone called Ross Williams:

I’ve got a question for the academics … why was a female Australian Aboriginal woman’s bones found in the middle of the amazon rainforest around a campfire in sediment that is dug from layers dating thousands of years before Americas first indigenous peoples? Check that shit out and get back to me with how all this history fits together so tidily. Experts eh… pfft maybe at what you CHOOSE to research. The rest that doesn’t fit is just said to be unreliable or inaccurate. Blind Freddy round the corner can see that it don’t fit. Smug academics. “Oh just watch a child play with building materials long enough and they’ll build something we can relate to a pyramid”. “It’s one of the most basic standard structures etc. etc….”

… GTFOH

Get the fuck outta here yourself, Ross! I need hardly say that the claim Williams is making is horseshit. There was no Australian Aboriginal woman in the Amazon. However, I keep an eye on the main news stories relating to prehistory and DNA, so I know where he got this nonsense from. Check out this article from New Scientist:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2184840-indigenous-peoples-in-the-amazon-and-australia-share-some-ancestry/

Basically, this article says that certain peoples in the Amazon, especially certain tribes speaking Tupi and related languages, have a strong DNA signal that resembles Australian Aborigines, though the “Australian” bit is only a small fraction of their overall genome. This is not because Aboriginal people hitched a lift on a UFO or on a fleet belonging to some ancient super-civilisation. The experts are still mulling over exactly what it does mean, but the main theory is that there was a people in Asia who went one direction into the Americas and the other direction to Australia. This has caused a great stir because it seems to prove that there were at least two separate waves of migration into the Americas, because most Native Americans don’t have this Australian-type DNA. (Ross Williams may also have been referring to the Botocudo skulls, which does involve the discovery of bones but is even less of a match to the scenario outlined by him: see https://www.nature.com/news/dna-study-links-indigenous-brazilians-to-polynesians-1.12710)

In other words, Ross Williams’ claim is a misinterpretation and misrepresentation of genuine facts. Much of the pseudoscientific nonsense which has filled up the internet is of a similar type.

Note the hysterical assault on the integrity of the ‘experts’, whoever they are. After all, who does Williams think discovered this Australian DNA? The prestigious alternative archaeology institutions established by Graham Hancock? Because as far as I know, Hancock has never invested his money in such research. He prefers spending it on blow, holidays and not having to earn a real living so that he can continue to write books about his holidays and the weird ideas he dreamed up while on holiday and/or stoned.

The people who discovered this Australian-type DNA in Amazon populations were mainstream scholars and what we know about this is being expanded and developed by other mainstream academics.

Another interesting aspect to this is that Williams seems to think that Australian DNA in the Amazon has a bearing on supposed African settlement in Mexico. Just like anti-Vaxxers, who frequently believe completely contradictory things (Covid doesn’t exist; Covid was designed in a Chinese lab; Covid is caused by 5G; Covid is being used to reset our society and kill millions etc. etc.) but as long as they all agree the Government is lying, they can all protest together happily, in spite of the fact that they don’t really know what they’re protesting about. In other words, to a dumbass conspiracy-theorist, anything that they think damages or weakens the mainstream consensus is proof that they’re right, even if what it proves is nothing whatever to do with their own preferred theory.

Unfortunately, that’s the world we live in. A place where the internet actually makes it very easy to find the truth but provides so many distractions and colourful fantasies that many stupid people simply don’t bother looking for it.

Blindboy and the Atlanteans

I have to confess, I’m not a huge fan of Blindboy Boatclub. It’s not that I have any problem with his politics or social beliefs and I think ‘Horse Outside’ was a great song. However, readers of this blog might remember the incident a few years back when The Rubberbandits issued a list of words brought by Irish immigrants to America, which was composed entirely of lying Cassidese nonsense. When challenged to retract the garbage they had just injected into cyberspace, they countered that there was no need because people would have seen the objections online, which shows a certain arrogance on their part and a worrying naivety about how things work on the internet. (Since then, they’ve actually deleted it.)  

Anyway, I am still thinking about doing a piece on Bob Quinn’s Atlantean, so I have been doing a little background reading. I was looking for any real evidence of a musical connection between Ireland and North Africa, so when I noticed that Blindboy has done a podcast on this subject, I decided to listen to it.

It wasn’t great. For someone who claims to be fascinated by history and to work hard doing his research, there is precious little evidence of that in the podcast itself. He starts off with one of the central pieces of ‘evidence’ used by Quinn in his book, a 19th century article which questions whether Irish is spoken in North Africa. Obviously, the correct answer to this is ‘No, let’s talk about something else’.

The author of this Victorian article talks about how sometime in the 1790s a group of Tunisian sailors came ashore in Antrim and conversed with locals who could only speak Irish.  While Blindboy eventually comes to the conclusion that he doesn’t believe that this happened and that it is lumping the Irish together with other colonised peoples (which is probably right – he does have some bullshit sensors), there are other things you could say about it. How many Tunisian ships found their way to Antrim during the Napoleonic Wars? And how many other examples can you find of fake claims of mutual intelligibility? Lots, because it’s a kind of urban myth. For example, there’s the story about the Bronte/O’Prunty family being raided by Welsh soldiers in the 1790s and being able to speak to them. (Which couldn’t have happened, because Welsh and Irish are too different.) Or the story about Francis Xavier being able to understand Japanese using his Basque. (Also batshit crazy because they’re two unrelated languages.)

Anyway, he spends way too much time blathering about these baseless anecdotes (which is what they are) and doesn’t look up what linguistic and historical fact tells us about the Tamazight or Berber people. They didn’t speak Irish, or any form of Celtic. There are no mysterious Celtic-like words recorded in their language which would indicate that anybody there once spoke a form of Irish or Celtic.

He brings in the Lebor Gabála or Book of Invasions, which he describes as a book written in the 400s. Later he calls it a book written in 400. Not according to Wikipedia, which says it’s a book written in the 11th century. Apart from the odd bit of ogham, there were no writers and no writings in Ireland in 400 AD. But apparently, Blindboy just FUCKING LOVES history. Hmmm.

And so it continues. He harps on about the well-known fact of a Barbary monkey skull being found at Navan fort, dating to between 390 BC and 20 BC. (He says skeleton but it was only a skull, so we don’t know if there was ever a live monkey in Iron Age Ireland.) Personally, I don’t find this so remarkable. Items like gems and silk were traded vast distances in ancient times. Why not pets?

He mentions Bob Quinn’s theories and says that in DNA terms, Quinn is wrong, because the DNA evidence now tells us that the Irish came from Iberia. This podcast was made in June, 2021. In 2018, the world of European prehistory was rocked by a paper in Nature which completely reversed the paradigm that had existed beforehand about an Iberian origin for the Irish. The theory that Northern Europe was repopulated from the south after the Ice Age turned out to be totally wrong. In reality, genetic evidence shows there was a near-total genetic replacement of the Irish population (around 90%, and a major replacement in the rest of Europe) by a population originating on the Steppes. This change roughly corresponds (at least in Ireland) with the Bell Beaker Culture. It also seems to correspond with the arrival of the Indo-European languages in Europe. This is probably the biggest story in our knowledge of European prehistory EVER. Why, three years after it broke, is the history-loving Blindboy completely unaware of it? Probably because he wastes too much of his time on FUCKIN’ FASCINATIN’ shite like Atlantean and How The Irish Invented Slang instead of the real stories that are revolutionising our knowledge of the past.

Finally, more than halfway through, he gets to the issue of similarities between Irish music and Berber music. And it wasn’t worth waiting for, I can tell you. He plays a sample of a Berber singer and then another sample of a sean-nós singer. They sound a little alike to me but there would be no problem recognising which is which. As he later admits, the Berber singer sounds a little like the Muslim call to prayer. He talks about melisma, which is the technique of singing one syllable using a number of ornamental notes. To me, this seems to be a fairly natural thing to do when singing. I don’t think it necessarily implies any great cultural contact. And if it does, many people have said that sean-nós is based on Christian liturgical music, which undoubtedly originated in the Middle East (as did Christianity, of course) and there is every chance that Muslim music and Christian liturgical music come from a shared root, which means that there is no mystery about any similarity.

Anyway, there’s more old bullshit. Some Berbers have a clan name that sounds like Magill. Wow! That proves they’re Irish!!! And there’s a mound called Msoura in Morocco which looks a bit like Newgrange and other ‘Celtic sites’. Newgrange? Celtic? What exactly is Celtic about Newgrange? Msoura is believed to be about 2000 years old, unlike Newgrange which is far older, dating back to before (as far as we know) there were any Indo-European speakers, including Celtic speakers, in Ireland.

Then he talks about Quinn’s terrible book and series, Atlantean, and how hard done by Quinn was. Apparently, Blindboy has historian friends who roll their eyes when Quinn is mentioned but the Blindboy thinks the way Quinn was treated was really unfair and that a lot of this response is down to racism. I’ve heard this argument before, not surprisingly, from Quinn himself. For example, here’s a piece from Wikipedia: He also asserts that a close-minded, elitist attitude among academics prevents a more sympathetic appraisal of his work. More controversially, he maintains that critics of his work are guilty of an unconscious racism, or in his own words, of being afraid of the idea that Irish people might have ‘a touch of the tar’ about them.

Which is utter garbage. The defence ‘if you disagree with me, you must be a racist’ is infantile, and cowardly, and intellectually lazy, and just so typical of pseudo-scholars. Cassidy did the same thing. Anyone who disagreed with Cassidy was immediately branded an Anglophile and a hater of the Irish.

Blindboy then says that although Quinn’s ideas might be 80% bullshit, there is the other 20% which contains bizarre coincidences that need to be looked at properly. Again, all pseudo-scholars and bullshit-merchants tend to come out with the same arguments, including this one. Personally, I am not seeing anything worth having in Quinn’s work, let alone 20%, but even if it does exist, would you be as kind about a mainstream history book that is four-fifths garbage? If an author has a fascinating theory, shouldn’t THE AUTHOR just make a bit of effort to present the facts they’re sure of rather than presenting something mixed with loads of total nonsense?

And finally, Blindboy says that we should examine it because if it proves it’s bullshit, then that is helpful. Yes, I would agree that establishing that something is bullshit is useful. But my argument would be that if something is badly done, why should sceptics be the ones to establish its crappiness?  If there’s any truth to the theory, someone will eventually do the research properly and establish that fact. Proper books will be written, by real scholars. So the responsibility is on Daniel Cassidy, or Graham Hancock, or Gavin Menzies or Bob Quinn to fact-check their own work and present something that isn’t full of crap. It’s not up to us to sift through the crap in hopes of finding something of value and it’s deeply unwise to waste your time looking for diamonds in a dungheap or encourage others to do so.

In other words, Blindboy, I would start listening to your eye-rolling historian friends (especially if it’s Liam Hogan) rather than going for nonsense because it’s SO FUCKIN’ FASCINATIN’. Develop those bullshit sensors! Learn to recognise pseudoscience and pseudohistory and common or garden bullshit and learn to think rationally and encourage other people to do the same.

Just look at what happened to Russell Brand, who turned into a conspiracy-loving, red-pill popping, rabbithole-exploring whackjob. I’m sure there’s a lot of money in that kind of thing, Blindboy, but is it really what you want to spend your life doing?

Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig

Guím gach rath agus sonas ar léitheoirí an bhlaig seo ar an lá speisialta seo.

I wish every success and happiness to the readers of this blog on this special day.