PALAMEDES AND THE CRANES

What interests me most in conducting this argument is the difference that is constantly appearing between the poetic and prosaic methods of thought. The prosaic method was invented by the Greeks of the Classical age as an insurance against the swamping of reason by mythographic fancy. It has now become the only legitimate means of transmitting useful knowledge. And in England, as in most other mercantile countries, the current popular view is that ‘music’ and old-fashioned diction are the only characteristics of poetry which distinguish it from prose: that every poem has, or should have, a precise single-strand prose equivalent. As a result, the poetic faculty is atrophied in every educated person who does not privately struggle to cultivate it: very much as the faculty of understanding pictures is atrophied in the Bedouin Arab. (T. E. Lawrence once showed a coloured crayon sketch of an Arab Sheikh to the Sheikh’s own clansmen. They passed it from hand to hand, but the nearest guess as to what it represented came from a man who took the sheikh’s foot to be the horn of a buffalo.) And from the inability to think poetically – to resolve speech into its original images and rhythms and re-combine these on several simultaneous levels of thought into a multiple sense – derives the failure to think clearly in prose. In prose one thinks on only one level at a time, and no combination of words needs to contain more than a single sense; nevertheless the images resident in words must be securely related if the passage is to have any bite. This simple need is forgotten, what passes for simple prose nowadays is a mechanical stringing together of stereotyped word-groups, without regard for the images contained in them. The mechanical style, which began in the counting-house, has now infiltrated into the university, some of its most zombiesque instances occurring in the works of eminent scholars and divines.

Mythographic statements which are perfectly reasonable to the few poets who can still think and talk in poetic shorthand seem either nonsensical or childish to nearly all literary scholars. Such statements, I mean, as: ‘Mercury invented the alphabet after watching the flight of cranes’, or ‘Menw ab Teirgwaedd saw three rowan-rods growing out of the mouth of Einigan Fawr with every kind of knowledge and science written on them’.The best that the scholars have yet done for the poems of Gwion is ‘wild and sublime’; and they never question the assumption that he, his colleagues and his public were people of either stunted or undisciplined intelligence.

The joke is that the more prose-minded the scholar the more capable he is supposed to be of interpreting ancient poetic meaning, and that no scholar dares to set himself up as an authority on more than one narrow subject for fear of incurring the dislike and suspicion of his colleagues. To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central humane system of thought. The present age is peculiarly barbaric: introduce, say, a Hebrew scholar to an ichthyologist or an authority on Danish place names and the pair of them would have no single topic in common but the weather or the war (if there happened to be a war in progress, which is usual in this barbaric age). But that so many scholars are barbarians does not matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to keep civilization alive. The scholar is a quarryman, not a builder, and all that is required of him is that he should quarry cleanly. He is the poet’s insurance against factual error. It is easy enough for the poet in this hopelessly muddled and inaccurate modern world to be misled into false etymology, anachronism and mathematical absurdity by trying to be what he is not. His function is truth, whereas the scholar’s is fact. Fact is not to be gainsaid; one may put it in this way, that fact is a Tribune of the People with no legislative right, but only the right of veto. Fact is not truth, but a poet who wilfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.

The story about Mercury and the cranes occurs in the Fables of Caius Julius Hyginus who, according to the well-informed Suetonius, was a native of Spain, a freedman of the Emperor Augustus, the Curator of the Palatine Library, and a friend of the poet Ovid. Like Ovid, Hyginus ended his life in Imperial disfavour. If he is the learned author of the Fables attributed to him, they have since been abbreviated and botched by unlearned editors; yet they are admitted to contain ancient mythological matter of great importance, not found elsewhere.

In his last Fable (277) Hyginus records:

There is no word here about Cadmus the Phoenician, who is usually credited with the invention of the Greek alphabet, the characters of which are indisputably borrowed from the Phoenician alphabet. The statement about Epicharmus reads nonsensically, unless ‘of Sicily’ is a stupid editorial gloss that has intruded into the text. Simonides was a well-known sixth-century BC Greek poet who used the Cadmean Greek alphabet and did introduce certain new characters into his manuscripts, later adopted throughout Greece; and Epicharmus of Sicily, the well-known writer of comedies who lived not long afterwards and was a member of the family of Asclepiads at Cos, evidently seemed to the editor of the Fables a likely co-worker with Simonides. The original legend, however, probably refers to another, far earlier, Epicharmus, an ancestor of the writer of comedies. The Asclepiads traced their descent to Apollo’s son Asclepius, or Aesculapius, the physician god of Delphi and Cos, and claimed to inherit valuable therapeutic secrets from him. Two Asclepiads are mentioned in the Iliad as having been physicians to the Greeks in the siege of Troy.

As for Palamedes, son of Nauplius, he is credited by Philostratus the Lemnian, and by the scholiast on Euripides’s Orestes, with the invention not only of the alphabet, but also of lighthouses, measures, scales, the disc, and the ‘art of posting sentinels’. He took part in the Trojan War as an ally of the Greeks and at his death was granted a hero-shrine on the Mysian coast of Asia Minor opposite Lesbos.

The Three Fates are a divided form of the Triple Goddess, and in Greek legend appear also as the Three Grey Ones and the Three Muses.

Thus, the first two statements made by Hyginus account for the ‘thirteen letters’ which, according to some authorities (Diodorus Siculus says) formed the ‘Pelasgian alphabet’ before Cadmus increased them to sixteen. Diodorus evidently means thirteen consonants, not thirteen letters in all, which would not have been sufficient. Other authorities held that there had been only twelve of them. Aristotle, at any rate gives the numbers of letters in the first Greek alphabet as thirteen consonants and five vowels and his list of letters corresponds exactly with the Beth-Luis-Nion, except that he gives Zeta for H-aspirate and Phi for F – but, in the case of Phi, at least, early epigraphic evidence is against him. This is not the only reference to the Pelasgian alphabet. Eustathius, the Byzantine grammarian, quotes an ancient scholiast on Iliad, II, 841 to the effect that the Pelasgians were called Dioi (‘divine’) because they along of all the Greeks preserved the use of letters after the Deluge – the Deluge meaning to the Greeks the one survived by Deucalion and Pyrrha. Pyrrha, ‘the red one’, is perhaps the Goddess-mother of the Puresati or Pulesati, the Philistines.

The Lycians of Asia Minor are described by Herodotus as having come from Crete; so are their neighbours the Carians, who claimed to be kin to the Lydians and Mysians and spoke much the same barbaric, that is to say, non-Greek language. The Carians, formerly members of the Minoan Empire, had dominated the Aegean between the fall of Cnossos in 1400 BC and the Dorian invasion of 1050 BC. Herodotus found the Lycians the least Grecianized of these four nations and recorded that they reckoned descent through the mother, not the father. Female independence of male tutelage and matrilinear descent were characteristic of all peoples of Cretan stock; and the same system survived in parts of Crete long after its conquest by the Greeks. Firmicus Maternus reported it in the fourth century AD.1 The Lydians retained another vestige of the system – girls habitually prostituted themselves before marriage, and then disposed of their earnings and their persons as they thought fit.

Palamedes, then, ruled over the Mysians, who were of Cretan stock, but he had a Greek father; his name means perhaps ‘Mindful of the Ancient One’, and he assisted the Three Fates (the Three Muses) in the composition of the Greek alphabet. But it was well known to the ancients, as it is to us, that all the inventions credited to Palamedes originated in Crete. It follows that a Greek alphabet, based on a Cretan not a Phoenician model, was raised from five vowels and thirteen consonants to five vowels and fifteen consonants, by Epicharmus, an early Asclepiad.

But why did Hyginus not specify the eleven consonants of Palamedes, as he specified the original seven letters and the additions by Epicharmus and Simonides? We must first find out why he quotes Beta and Tau as the two consonants invented by the Three Fates at the same time as the five vowels.

Simonides, a native of Ceos, introduced into Athens, where he was domiciled, the double-consonants Psi and Xi, the distinction between the vowels Omicron and Omega (short and long O), and the distinction between the vowels Eta and Epsilon (long and short E). These changes were not, however, publicly adopted there until the archonship of Euclides (403 BC). To Eta, when thus distinguished from Epsilon, was allotted the character H, which had hitherto belonged to the aspirate H; and the aspirate H became merely a ‘rough breathing’, a miniature decrescent moon, while its absence in a word beginning with a vowel was denoted by a ‘smooth breathing’, a crescent moon. The Digamma F (which had a V sound) had disappeared as an Attic character long before the time of Simonides; and in many words was supplanted by the letter Phi, invented to represent the FF sound which had hitherto been spelt PH. But the Digamma was retained for some generations longer by the Aeolian Greeks and disappeared among the Dorians (the last to use it) during this same archonship of Euclides – at about the same time, in fact, as Gwydion and Amathaon won the Battle of the Trees in Britain.

This is a queer business. Though it is possible that the V sound had altogether dropped out of ordinary Greek speech and that therefore the Digamma F was an unnecessary letter, this is by no means certain; and the aspirate H was certainly still an integral part of the language. Why then was the aspirate supplanted by Eta? Why was a new character not found for the Eta sound? Why were the unnecessary double-consonants Psi, previously written Pi-Sigma, and Xi, previously written Kappa-Sigma, introduced at the same time? Only religious doctrine can have accounted for this awkward change.

One of the reasons is given in the same fable. Hyginus connects the four additional letters of Simonides with Apollo’s zither – Apollo in cithaera ceteras literas adjecit. This means, I think, that each of the seven strings of the zither, originally Cretan but brought from Asia Minor to Greece about 676 BC by Terpander of Lesbos, now had a letter allotted to it, and that twenty-four, the new number of letters in the alphabet, had a sacred significance in the therapeutic music with which Apollo and his son Aesculapius were honoured in their island shrines. Simonides, it must be noted, belonged to a Cean bardic guild in the service of Dionysus who, according to Plutarch, a priest of Delphian Apollo, was ‘also at home in Delphi’. Both Apollo and Dionysus, as we have seen, were gods of the solar year. So were Aesculapius and Hercules; and this was an age of religious amalgamation.

Hyginus says that the original thirteen-consonant alphabet was taken by Mercury into Egypt, brought back by Cadmus into Greece, and thence taken by Evander the Arcadian into Italy, where his mother Carmenta (the Muse) adapted them to the Latin alphabet of fifteen letters. He describes this Mercury as the same one who invented athletic games: in other words, he was a Cretan, or of Cretan stock. And Mercury in Egypt was Thoth, the God whose symbol was a crane-like white ibis, who invented writing and who also reformed the calendar. The story begins to make good historical sense. Hyginus has perhaps drawn it from an Etruscan source: for the Etruscans, or Tyrrhenians, were of Cretan stock, and held the crane in reverence. Cranes fly in V-formation and the characters of all early alphabets, nicked with a knife on the rind of boughs – as Hesiod wrote his poems – or on clay tablets, were naturally angular.

So Hyginus knew that the five vowels of the Arcadian alphabet belonged to an earlier religious system than the seven vowels of the Classical Greek alphabet, and that in Italy these seven vowels were sacred to the Goddess Carmenta; also that in Italy a six-consonant sacred alphabet was used some six centuries before the Greek twenty-four-letter ‘Dorian’ alphabet from which all Italian alphabets – Etruscan, Umbrian, Oscan, Faliscan and Latin – are known to derive. In this, Hyginus is supported by Pliny who states positively in his Natural History that the first Latin alphabet was a Pelasgian one. He does not mention his authority but it was probably Gnaeus Gellius, the well-informed second-century BC historian, whom he quotes in the same passage as holding that Mercury first invented letters in Egypt and that Palamedes invented weights and measures. One must assume from the lack of inscriptional evidence in support of Hyginus’s record that this alphabet was confined, as the Beth-Luis-Nion originally was, to use in deaf-and-dumb signalling. About Carmenta we know from the historian Dionysus Periergetes that she gave oracles to Hercules and lived to the age of 110 years. 110 was a canonical number, the ideal age which every Egyptian wished to reach and the age at which, for example, the patriarch Joseph died. The 110 years were made up of twenty-two Etruscan lustra of five years each; and 110 years composed the ‘cycle’ taken over from the Etruscans by the Romans. At the end of each cycle they corrected irregularities in the solar calendar by intercalation and held Saecular Games. The secret sense of 22 – sacred numbers were never chosen haphazardly – is that it is the measure of the circumference of the circle when the diameter is 7. This proportion, now known as pi, is no longer a religious secret; and is used today only as a rule-of-thumb formula, the real mathematical value of pi being a decimal figure which no-one has yet been able to work out because it goes on without ever ending, as does, in a neat recurrent sequence. Seven lustra add up to thirty-five years, and thirty-five at Rome was the age at which a man was held to reach his prime and might be elected Consul. (The same age was fixed upon by a Classically-minded Convention as the earliest at which an American might be elected President of the United States.) The nymph Egeria, the oak-queen who instructed King Numa of Rome, was ‘the fourth Carmenta’. If the age of each Carmenta – or course of Sibylline priestesses – was 110 years, Numa reigned not earlier than 330 years after Evander’s arrival in Italy, the traditional date of which is some sixty years before the Fall of Troy, i.e., 1243 BC.

Evander was banished from Arcadia because he had killed his father; and this implies the supersession of the Triple Goddess, Carmenta or Thetis, by Olympian Zeus. Thetis was the Aeolian Greek name for Carmenta, at whose prompting Evander had struck the blow; and for a king to kill his father (or kingly predecessor) at the prompting of his Goddess mother was common in Italy and Greece at that period. The traditional reason for Partholan’s Danaan invasion of Ireland and Brutus’s Dardanian invasion of Britain is the same: both were banished for parricide. The date, 1243 BC, corresponds with that given by the later Greeks for the Achaean invasion, namely 1250 BC. This was not the original invasion but, apparently, a southward movement, under Dorian pressure, of Achaeans settled in North-western Greece. The story of Pelias and Neleus, sons of Poseidon who dispossessed the Minyans of Iolcos in Thessaly and Pylos in the Western Peloponnese, refers to this invasion which resulted in the institution of Olympianism.

But has not the story of the invention of the pre-Cadmean alphabet of Palamedes, which was taken to Italy by Evander the Arcadian before the Dorian invasion of Greece, been lying concealed all this time in the confusingly iconotropic myth of Perseus and the Gorgon Medusa? Cannot the Palamedes story be recovered intact by the simple method of restoring the Perseus myth to iconographic form, and then re-interpreting the iconographs which compose it?

The myth is that Perseus was sent to cut off the head of the snaky-locked Gorgon Medusa, a rival of the Goddess Athene, whose baleful look turned men into stone; and that he could not accomplish the task until he had gone to the three Graeae, ‘Grey Ones’, the three old sisters of the Gorgons who had only one eye and one tooth between them, and by stealing eye and tooth had blackmailed them into telling him where the grove of the three nymphs was to be found. From the three nymphs he then obtained winged sandals like those of Hermes, a bag to put the Gorgon’s head into, and a helmet of invisibility. Hermes also kindly gave him a sickle; and Athene gave him a mirror and showed him a picture of Medusa so that he would recognize her. He threw the tooth of the Three Grey Ones, and some say the eye also, into Lake Triton, to break their power, and flew on to Tartessus where the Gorgons lived in a grove on the borders of the ocean; there he cut off the sleeping Medusa’s head with the sickle, first looking into the mirror so that the petrifying charm should be broken, thrust the head into his bag, and flew home pursued by other Gorgons.

The three Nymphs must be understood as the Three Graces, that is to say, the Triple Love-Goddess. The Graeae were also known as the Phorcides, which means the daughters of Phorcus, or Orcus, and according to the Scholiast on Aeschylus had the form of swans – which is probably an error for cranes, due to a misreading of a sacred picture, since cranes and swans, equally sacred birds, are alike in flying in V-formation. They were, in fact, the Three Fates. Phorcus, or Orcus, became a synonym for the Underworld; it is the same word as porcus, a pig, the beast sacred to the Death-goddess, and perhaps as Parcae, a title of the Three Fates, usually called Moirae, ‘the distributors’. Orc is ‘pig’ in Irish; hence the Orcades, or Orkneys, abodes of the Death-goddess. Phorcus was also reputedly the father of the Gorgon Medusa, whom the Argives in Pausanias’s day described as a beautiful Libyan queen decapitated by their ancestor Perseus after a battle with her armies, and who may therefore be identified with the Libyan snake-goddess Lamia (Neith) whom Zeus betrayed and who afterwards killed children.

Imagine the pictures on a vase. First, a naked young man cautiously approaching three shrouded women of whom the central one presents him with an eye and a tooth; the other two point upwards to three cranes flying in a V-formation from right to left. Next, the same young man, wearing winged sandals and holding a sickle, stands pensively under a willow tree. (Willows are sacred to the Goddess, and cranes breed in willow groves.) Next, another group of three beautiful young women sit side by side in a grove with the same young man standing before them. Above them three cranes fly in the reverse direction. One presents him with winged sandals, another with a bag, the third with a winged helmet. Next, various sea-monsters are shown and a helmeted Sea-goddess, with a trident, holding a mirror in which a Gorgon’s face is reflected; and the young man is seen flying, bag and sickle in hand, towards a grove with his head turned to look at the mirror. From the bag peeps out the Gorgon’s head. The tooth and eye are painted, enlarged, on either side of him, so that he seems to have thrown them away. He is followed by three menacing winged women with Gorgon faces.

This completes the pictures on the vase and one comes again to the first group.

The myth in its familiar form, like that of Zeus’s betrayal of Lamia, is descriptive of the breaking of the Argive Triple Goddess’s power by the first wave of Achaeans, figured as Perseus, ‘the destroyer’. But the original meaning of the iconographs seems to be this: Mercury, or Hermes, or Car, or Palamedes, or Thoth, or whatever his original name was, is given poetic sight by the Shrouded Ones (his mother Carmenta, or Maia, or Danaë, or Phorcis, or Medusa, or whatever her original name was, in her prophetic aspect of the Three Fates) and the power to take omens from the flight of birds; also the power to understand the alphabetic secret represented by the cranes. The tooth was a divinatory instrument, like the one under which Fionn used to put his thumb – after eating the salmon of knowledge – whenever he needed magical counsel. Carmenta has invented the alphabet, but is assigning the thirteen consonants to her son, while keeping the five vowels sacred to herself. He goes off with his sickle, which is moon-shaped in her honour, like the sickle which the Gallic Arch-Druid subsequently used for cutting mistletoe; and will presently cut the first alphabet twig from the grove; in front of which the Goddess, unshrouded now, and playing the nymph not the crone, is discovered sitting in gracious trinity. She gives him as his regalia a winged helmet and winged sandals, symbolizing the swiftness of poetic thought, and a bag in which to keep his letters well hidden.

Next, she is revealed as Athene, the Goddess of Wisdom, who was born on the shores of Lake Triton in Libya and seems to have been originally, before her monstrous rebirth from Father Zeus’s head, the Libyan Triple Goddess Neith, whom the Greeks called Lamia, or Libya. Peeping from his bag there is now a Gorgon’s head, which is merely an ugly mask assumed by priestesses on ceremonial occasions to frighten away trespassers; at the same time they made hissing noises, which accounts for Medusa’s snake locks. There never was a real Gorgon (as J. E. Harrison was the first to point out); there was only a prophylactic ugly face formalized into a mask. The ugly face at the mouth of the bag symbolizes that the secrets of the alphabet, which are the real contents, are not to be divulged or misused. A Gorgon’s mask was similarly put on the doors of all ovens and kilns in ancient Greece to frighten away the bogeys (and inquisitive children) who might spoil the baking. The winged ‘Gorgons’ in this picture are escorting, not pursuing, Mercury: they are the Triple Goddess again who, by wearing these ritual masks, is protecting him from profane eyes. She is also shown on the earth holding out her mirror with a Gorgon’s face reflected in it, to protect him in his poetic flight. He is taking the bag to Tartessus, the Aegean colony on the Guadalquivir; whence presumably the Milesians would carry it to Ireland. Gades, now Cadiz, the principal city of Tartessus, is said by the Augustan historian Velleius Paterculus to have been founded in 1100 BC, thirteen years before the foundation of Utica in North Africa. Perseus’ flight was displayed in gold and silver inlay on the Shield of Hercules, as extravagantly described by Hesiod; who places it between a scene of the Muses singing to a lyre near a dolphin-haunted sea, and one of the Three Fates standing outside a populous seven-gated city. If this city is his own seven-gated Thebes, then the icon which Hesiod has misread is a Boeotian variant of the Mercury myth, and the hero with the tasselled alphabet-bag and the attendant Gorgons is Cadmus the Theban.

Mercury arrived safely at Tartessus, to judge from a cryptic remark by Pausanias (I, 35, 8) that ‘there is a tree at Gades that takes diverse forms’, which seems to refer to the tree-alphabet. Gades (Cadiz) is built on Leon, an island of Tartessus; the older city was on the western shore and included a famous temple of Cronos mentioned by Strabo. It is likely that the island was once, like Pharos, both a sepulchral island and a trading depôt. Pherecydes guessed that it was the original ‘Red Island’, Erytheia, over which three-bodied Geryon ruled, but on the insufficient ground that the pasture there was very rich and that Hercules had an ancient shrine on the eastern shore. Pausanias (X, 4, 6) records the more plausible legend that Leon was originally owned by the Giant Tityus who, as will be shown in Chapter Sixteen, was really Cronos – the god of the middle, or fool’s finger, consigned to Tartarus by Zeus. (Titias whom Hercules killed and Tityus whom Zeus killed are doublets.)

The shrine of Hercules seems to have been set up by the colonists of 1100 BC, some four hundred years before Phoenician colonists came there from Tyre, having been ordered by an oracle to settle near the Pillars of Hercules. The Phoenicians subsequently worshipped Cronos as Moloch and Hercules as Melkarth. Strabo quotes Poseidonius for holding that the Pillars of Hercules were not, as was vulgarly supposed, the two heights of Gibraltar and Ceuta, but two pillars set up before his shrine; and I have suggested in my King Jesus (Chapter XVI) that such columns were connected with the secret of the Pelasgian alphabet. So it is likely that the pre-Phoenician Hercules of Tartessus was Palamedes, or the lion-skinned God Ogmios: whom the Irish credited with the invention of the alphabet that they ‘had out of Spain’ and whom Gwion, in his Elegy on ‘Ercwlf’, celebrates as a planter of alphabetic pillars. The people of Tartessus were famous in Classical times for the respect they paid to old men, and Ogmios according to Lucian was represented as an aged Hercules. That the Gorgons lived in a grove at Tartessus can mean only that they had an alphabetic secret to guard. This Ogmian Hercules was also worshipped by the early Latins. King Juba II of Mauretania, who was also an honorary duumvir of Gades, is quoted by Plutarch (Roman Questions 59) as his authority for saying that Hercules and the Muses once shared an altar because he had taught Evander’s people the alphabet. This tallies with Hyginus’s account of how Carmenta, the Triple Muse, taught Evander, and Dionysus Periergetes’ account of how she ‘gave oracles to Hercules’.

Isidore, Archbishop of Seville, who died in 636 AD, wrote an encyclopaedic work called Twenty Books Concerning Origins or Etymologies, based on a wide, if uncritical, study of Christian and pagan literature, which is the most valuable repository of Iberian tradition extant. In it he treats of the invention of the alphabet. He does not present Palamedes or Hercules or Ogma or Mercury or Cadmus as the original benefactor, but the Goddess herself and names Greece as the land of origin: 

Inachus, a river-god and legendary king of Argos, was the father both of the Goddess Io, who became Isis when she reached Egypt, and of the hero Phoroneus, founder of the Pelasgian race, who has been already identified with the God Bran, alias Cronos. Isidore was a compatriot of Hyginus (who reported the legend of Mercury’s return to Greece from Egypt with the Pelasgian alphabet); he distinguishes the Egyptian alphabet both from the hieroglyphic and demotic scripts, and ascribes the invention of the ordinary Greek alphabet to the Phoenicians.

What material Mercury’s bag was made of, can be discovered in the parallel myth of Manannan, son of Lyr, a Goidelic Sun-hero, predecessor of Fionn and Cuchulain, who carried the Treasures of the Sea (i.e., the alphabet secret of the Peoples of the Sea) in a bag made of the skin of a crane; and in the myth of Mider, a Goidelic Underworld-god, corresponding with the British Arawn (‘Eloquence’) King of Annwm, who lived in a castle in Manannan’s Isle of Man with three cranes at his gate whose duty was to warn off travellers, croaking out: ‘Do not enter – keep away – pass by!’ Perseus’s bag must have been a crane-bag, for the crane was sacred to Athene and to Artemis, her counterpart at Ephesus, as well as being the inspiration for Hermes’s invention of letters. The flying Gorgons, then, are cranes with Gorgon-faces,1 and watch over the secrets of the crane-bag, itself protected by a Gorgon head. It is not known what sort of a dance the Crane Dance was that, according to Plutarch, Theseus introduced into Delos except that it was performed around a horned altar and represented the circles that coiled and uncoiled in the Labyrinth. My guess is that it imitated the fluttering love-dance of courting cranes, and that each movement consisted of nine steps and a leap. As Polwart says in his Flyting with Montgomery (1605):

The nine steps prove her sacred to the Triple Goddess; and so does her neck, feathered white and black with reddish skin showing through, or (in the case of the Numidian, or Balearic, crane) with red wattles. Cranes make their spectacular migrations from the Tropic of Cancer to the Arctic Circle and back twice yearly, flying in chevron formation with loud trumpetings at an enormous height; and this must have attached them to the Hyperborean cult as messengers flying to the other world which lies at the back of the North Wind. But Thoth who invented hieroglyphs, was symbolized by the ibis, another wader also sacred to the moon; and the Greeks identified Thoth with Hermes, conductor of souls and messenger of the gods, whom Pherecydes addressed as ‘ibis-shaped’. So Hermes is credited with having invented the alphabet after watching the flight of cranes, and the crane takes on the scholarly attributes of the ibis, which did not visit Greece.

A peculiarity of wading birds such as the crane and heron is that, when they have speared a quantity of small fish in a river ready to take home to their young, they arrange them on the bank with the tails set together in the form of a wheel, which was formerly the symbol of the sun, and of the king’s life. This must have astonished the ancients as it astonished me as a boy when I saw a heron doing it in the Nantcoll River in North Wales: but naturalists explain the arrangement as merely intended to make the fish more easily picked up and carried home. In ancient Ireland the association of the crane with literary secrets is suggested by the augury given by its sudden appearance: a cessation of war; for one of the poet’s main functions was to part combatants, and he himself took no part in battle. In Greece the crane was associated with poets not only in the story of Apollo’s metamorphosis into ‘a crane, a Thracian bird’ – meaning the red-wattled Numidian crane which visited the Northern Aegean – but in the story of Ibycus, the sixth-century BC Greek erotic poet who, having spent the best part of his life in the island of Samos, was one day set upon by bandits in a lonely place near Corinth and mortally wounded. He called upon a passing flock of cranes to avenge his death and soon afterwards the cranes hovered over the heads of the audience in the Corinthian open-air theatre; whereupon one of the murderers, who was present, cried out: ‘Look, the avengers of Ibycus!’ He was arrested and made a full confession.

To sum up the historical argument. A Greek alphabet which consisted of thirteen, and later fifteen, consonants and five vowels sacred to the Goddess, and which was ultimately derived from Crete, was current in the Peloponnese before the Trojan War. It was taken to Egypt – though perhaps only to the port of Pharos – and there adapted to Semitic use by Phoenician traders who brought it back into Greece some centuries later when the Dorians had all but destroyed the Mycenaean culture. The characters with their Semitic names were then adapted to the existing Epicharmian system contained in the so-called Pelasgian characters and usually called Cadmean, perhaps because they were current in Boeotian Cadmea. Later, Simonides, a devotee of Dionysus, modified the Cadmean alphabet in conformity with some obscure religious theory.

This is a plausible account. The history of the Greek alphabet has come to light in the last few years. It is now known to have originated in Cretan hieroglyphs, which by late Minoan times had been reduced to something between an alphabet and a syllabary of fifty-four signs: only four more than the Sanskrit system allegedly invented by the Goddess Kali, each letter of which was one of the skulls in her necklace. The Mycenaeans borrowed this Cretan system and did their best to adapt it to the needs of Greek. Messrs Ventris and Chadwick, who in 1953 solved the secret of the Mycenaean Linear Script B (1450–1400 BC) found it to consist of about eighty-eight different phonetic signs. It had also been introduced in earlier, more cumbrous, forms into Cyprus, Caria and Lycia. (In the Iliad, VI, 168 ff. occurs the story of how Bellerophon left Argos and handed the King of the Lycians a tablet covered with signs.) From the sixteenth century BC onward three or four attempts were made to simplify the various syllabaries then current in the near East into pure alphabets. The most successful of these was the Phoenician, from which the ‘Cadmean’ Greek characters derive. The Semitic princes of Syria wrote Assyrian cuneiform in their correspondence with the Pharaohs of Egypt until the twelfth century BC, but their merchants had long before been using the Phoenician alphabet, in which one third of the characters was borrowed from the Cretan system – though whether directly from Crete or indirectly through Greece or Asia Minor is doubtful – the remainder from Egyptian hieroglyphs.

There is nothing to show that the Phoenicians invented the principle of reducing a syllabary to letters; and according to Professor Eustace Glotz’s Aegean Civilization the names of such Phoenician characters as are not Semitic names for the objects represented in the corresponding Egyptian hieroglyphs cannot be explained in terms of any Semitic language, while their forms are clearly derived from the Cretan lineal script. The Semites, though good business men, were not an inventive people, and the unexplained names of the letters are therefore likely to be Greek. The Danaan Greeks probably simplified the Cretan syllabary into a sacred alphabet and passed it on to the Phoenicians – though confiding only the abbreviations of the letter-names to them and altering the order of letters so as not to give away the secret religious formula that they spelt out. The earliest Phoenician inscription is on a potsherd found at Bethshemeth in Palestine dating from the sixteenth century BC. The Palaio-Sinaitic and Ras Shamra alphabets may have been composed in emulation of the Phoenician; they were based on cuneiform, not on Cretan or Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Egyptians had been working towards an alphabet concurrently with the Cretans and it is difficult to say who first achieved the task; it was probably the Egyptians.

Now it is remarkable that the names of several letters in the Irish Beth-Luis-Nion correspond more exactly with their counterparts in the Hebrew alphabet, which is Phoenician, than with their Classical Greek counterparts. 

On the other hand the remaining Greek letters correspond closely enough with their Hebrew counterparts, while the Irish letters are wholly different.

It looks as if the Irish alphabet was formed before the Classical Greek, and that its letter-names correspond with those of the Epicharmian alphabet which Evander brought to Italy from Danaan Greece. It may even have kept the original order of letters.

An ancient Irish tradition supplementing that of Ogma Sunface’s invention of the Ogham alphabet is recorded in Keating’s History of Ireland:

Though at first sight this is a nonsense story, cooked up from scraps of monkish tradition (such as the miraculous translation of the Hebrew Scriptures by seventy-two scholars, each working separately for seventy-two days on the Isle of Pharos and all producing identically the same version) the closer one looks at it the more interestingly it reads. ‘Magh Seanair near Athens’ suggests that the mention of Babel has led some monk to amend an obscure text by making the event take place on the Magh Seanair, ‘Plain of Shinar’, in Mesopotamia and assuming that another Athens lay near. That the alphabet was invented in Greece (Achaea) is insisted upon in The Hearings of the Scholars, though Achaea has been corrupted to ‘Accad’ in some manuscripts and to ‘Dacia’ in others, and the whole account is given a very monkish twist. The original, I think, was ‘Magnesia near Athens’ meaning Magnesia in Southern Thessaly. It was described as ‘near Athens’ presumably to distinguish it from other Pelasgian Magnesias – the Carian one on the Meander River, and the Lydian one on the Hermus, connected with the myth of the Titan Tityos, from which in ancient times Hercules sent a colony to Gades in Spain. The three persons in the story, Gadel, Caoith and Feniusa Farsa are perhaps recognizable in Greek translation. Caoith as Coieus the Hyperborean grandfather of Delphic Apollo; Gadel as a tribe from the river Gadilum, or Gazelle, in Paphlagonia from which Pelops the Achaean began his travels; Feniusa Farsa as Foenus ho Farsas (‘the vine-man who joins together’) or Foeneus father of Atalanta, the first man to plant a vineyard in Greece. According to Greek legend, this Foeneus, or ‘Oeneus’ when he lost his initial digamma, was a son of Aegyptus and came from Arabia, which perhaps means Southern Judaea; exactly the same account is given by the Irish bards of Feniusa Farsa, who was turned out of Egypt ‘for refusing to persecute the Children of Israel’, wandered in the wilderness for forty-two years and then passed northward to the ‘Altars of the Philistines by the Lake of Willows’ – presumably Hebron in Southern Judaea, celebrated for its fish-pools and stone altars – thence into Syria, after which he appears in Greece. Foeneus’s queen was Althaea, the Birth-goddess associated with Dionysus; and it is known that foinos, wine, is a word of Cretan origin.

Why is Feniusa Fars – who was an ancestor of the Irish Milesians – described as a Scythian, a grandson of Magog, and founder of the Milesian race? Gog and Magog are closely connected names. ‘Gogmagog’, Gog the Son of Gog – was the name of the giant whom ‘Brut the Trojan’ is said to have defeated at Totnes in Devonshire in his invasion of Britain at the close of the second millennium. But from where did Gog mac Gog originate? The answer is to be found in Genesis, X, 2 where Magog is described as a son of Japhet (who figures in Greek myth as Iapetus the Titan, the father by the goddess Asis of Atlas, Prometheus and Epimetheus) and as a brother of Gomer, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech and Tiras – who are generally agreed to have been the Cimmerians, the Medians, the Ionians, the Tiberenians, the Moschians and the Tyrrhenians. The Moschians and the iron-working Tibarenians were tribes of the south-eastern Black Sea region; the wandering Black Sea tribe of Cimmerians eventually became the Cymry; the Ionians ranked as Greeks in historical times but were perhaps Aegean immigrants into Greece from Phoenicia; the Tyrrhenians were an Aegean tribe some of whom emigrated from Lydia to Etruria, others to Tarsus (St. Paul’s city) and Tartessus in Spain; the Medians claimed descent from the Pelasgian goddess Medea. Gog is identified with the northern tribe of Gagi mentioned in an inscription of Amenhotep III, and ‘Gogarene’, in Strabo’s day, was the name of a part of Armenia lying to the east of the territory of the Moschians and Tibarenians. Magog’s grandfather was Noah, and Noah’s Ararat was in Armenia, so that Magog is usually held to stand for Armenia; though Josephus interprets the word as meaning ‘the Scythians’, which was an inclusive name for all the Black Sea tribes of his day. The ‘King Gog of Meshech and Tubal’ mentioned in Ezekiel, XXXVIII, 17 is now generally identified with Mithradates VI of Pontus, whose kingdom included the country of the Moschians and Tibarenians.

The history of Foeneus is concerned with certain mass emigrations from Canaan. Canaanites are referred to in the Greek myth of ‘Agenor, or Chnas, King of Phoenicia’, brother of Pelasgus, Iasus and Belus, and father of Aegyptus and Danäus; Agenor invaded Greece and became King of Argos. His was probably the invasion that drove the Tuatha dé Danaan out of Greece. Agenor had other sons, or affiliated tribes, besides Foeneus, Aegyptus and Danäus. These were Cadmus (a Semitic word meaning ‘of the East’), who seized part of what afterwards became Boeotia; Cylix, who gave his name to Cilicia; Phoenix, who remained in Phoenicia and became completely Semitized; Thasus, who emigrated to the island of Thasos, near Samothrace; and Phineus, who emigrated to Thynia, near Constantinople, where the Argonauts are said to have found him preyed on by Harpies. The Amorites, a part of whom lived in Judaea, were also Canaanites, according to Genesis, X, and in the time of the Hebrew Prophets kept up the old Aegean customs of mouse-feasts, king-crucifixion, snake-oracles, the baking of barley-cakes in honour of the Queen of Heaven, and pre-marital prostitution; but they had early become Semitized in language. In Genesis the original Canaanite empire is described as extending as far south as Sodom and Gomorrah at the extreme end of the Dead Sea. This must be a very early legend, for according to Genesis, XIV the Canaanites were expelled from their southern territory by the Elamites – an invasion that can be dated to about 2300 BC

The historical sense of the Agenor myth is that towards the end of the third millennium BC, an Indo-European tribal confederacy – part of a huge horde from central Asia that overran the whole of Asia Minor, Greece, Italy and Northern Mesopotamia – marched down from Armenia into Syria, thence into Syria and Canaan, gathering allies as it went. Some tribes under rulers known to the Egyptians as the Hyksos broke into Egypt about 1800 BC and were expelled with difficulty two centuries later. The flow and ebb of this mass-movement of tribes, which was complicated by Semitic invasions from across the Jordan, dislodged from Syria, Canaan and the Nile Delta numerous peoples that worshipped the Great Goddess under such titles as Belili, or Baalith, and Danaë, and the Bloody One (Phoenissa). One body whose chief religious emblem was the vine marched, or sailed, along the South Coast of Asia Minor, halted awhile in Milyas, the old name for Lycia, invaded Greece a little before the arrival there of the Indo-European Achaeans from the north, and occupied Argos in the Peloponnese, the chief shrine of the Horned Moon-goddess Io. The Cadmean invasion came later: it seems that a Canaanite tribe originally known as the Cadmeans, or Easterners, had occupied the mountainous district on the frontier of Ionia and Caria, which they called Cadmea; whence they crossed the Aegean and seized the coastal strip facing Euboea, excellent as a naval base, which was thereafter also called Cadmea.

In the Irish myth Caoith is described as a Hebrew. This must be a mistake: he was not one of the Habiru, as the Egyptians called the Hebrews, but probably a Pelasgian, a representative of the well-known priesthood of Samothrace, the Cabeiroi. The myth thus seems to refer to an agreement about a common use of letters reached at Magnesia in Mycenaean times by the Achaeans, typified by Gadel, the invaders of Greece; Canaanite invaders, typified by Feniusa Farsa; and the Pelasgian natives of Greece, typified by Caoith – all of whom were joined in a common reverence for the vine. The figure seventy-two suggests a religious mystery bound up with the alphabet; it is a number closely connected both with the Beth-Luis-Nion and the Boibel-Loth and associated in both cases with the number five (the number of the dialects).

Now, the most famous school of Greek antiquity was kept by Cheiron the Centaur, on the slopes of Mount Pelion in Magnesia. Among his pupils were Achilles the Myrmidon, son of Thetis the Sea-goddess, Jason the Argonaut, Hercules, and all the other most distinguished heroes of the generation before the Trojan War. He was renowned for his skill in hunting, medicine, music, gymnastics and divination, his instructors being Apollo and Artemis, and was accidentally killed by Hercules; after which he became the Bowman of the Greek Zodiac. He was evidently the heir to the Cretan culture which had reached Thessaly by the sheltered port of Iolcos, and to the independent Helladic culture. He is called ‘the son of Cronos’.

Perhaps we can make another identification here: of Feniusa Farsa with ‘Amphictyon’ the founder of the Amphictyonic League, or the League of Neighbours. Magnesia was a member of this ancient federation of twelve tribes – Athens was the most powerful – representatives of which met every autumn at Anthela near the pass of Thermopylae and every Spring at Delphi. ‘Amphictyon’ was a son of Deucalion (‘sweet wine’), whose mother was Pasiphaë the Cretan Moon-goddess, and of Pyrrha (‘the red one’), the Noah and Noah’s wife of Greece. He was himself ‘the first man ever to mix wine with water’. In characteristic style he married the heiress of Attica, Cranë – already mentioned as an aspect of the White Goddess – expelled his predecessor, and set up altars to Phallic Dionysus and the Nymphs. We know that Amphictyon was not his real name, for the League was really founded in honour of the Barley-goddess Demeter, or Danaë, in her character of President of Neighbours (‘Amphictyonis’) and the sacrifice at the autumn meetings was made to her: but it was the usual habit in Classical Greece, as it was in Classical Britain and Ireland, to deny women the credit of inventing or initiating anything important. So ‘Amphictyon’ was the male surrogate of Amphictyonis, just as ‘Don King of Dublin and Lochlin’ was of the Irish Goddess Danu; and as, I believe, the Giant Samothes, after whom Britain had its earliest name ‘Samothea’, was of the White Goddess, Samothea – for Samothes is credited by early British historians, quoting from the Babylonian Berossus, with the invention of letters, astronomy and other sciences usually attributed to the White Goddess. And since Amphictyon ‘joined together’ the various states and was a wise man, we may call him ‘Foeneus’ – or ‘Dionysus’.

The most ancient Greek account of the creation of the vine that has been preserved is that given by Pausanias (X, 38): how in the time of Orestheus son of Deucalion a white bitch littered a stick which he planted and which grew into a vine. The white bitch is obviously the Triple Goddess again: Amphictyonis. Of the Amphictyonic League eight tribes Pelasgian and, according to Strabo, Callimachus and the Scholiast on Euripides’s Orestes, it was originally regularized by Acrisius the grandfather of Perseus. But the composition of the League in Classical times was claimed to date from about 1103 BC, and it included the Achaeans of Phthiotis, who were not there in Acrisius’s day. The inference is that four Pelasgian tribes were extruded in successive Greek invasions.

St. Paul quoted a Greek proverb: ‘All Cretans are liars’. They were called liars for the same reason that poets are: because they had a different way of looking at things. Particularly because they remained unmoved by Olympian propaganda, which for the previous thousand years or so had insisted on an Eternal, Almighty, Just Father Zeus – Zeus who had swept away with his thunderbolt all the wicked old gods and established his shining throne for ever on Mount Olympus. The True Cretans said: ‘Zeus is dead. His tomb is to be seen on one of our mountains.’ This was not spoken with bitterness. All that they meant was that ages before Zeus became an Eternal Almighty God in Greece, he had been a simple old-fashioned Sun-king, annually sacrificed, a servant of the Great Goddess, and that his remains were customarily buried in a tomb on Mount Juktas. They were not liars. There was no father God in Minoan Crete and their account squares with the archaeological finds recently made on that very mountain. The Pelasgians of Leros had much the same reputation as the Cretans, but seem to have been even more obdurate in their attachment to ancient tradition, to judge from the Greek epigram: ‘The Lerians are all bad, not merely some Lerians, but every one of them – except Procles, and of course he is a Lerian too.’

The early Welsh and Irish historians are also generally regarded as liars because their ancient records are dated to uncomfortably early dates and do not square either with conventional Biblical dates or with the obstinate theory that until Roman times the inhabitants of all the British Isles were howling savages who had no native art or literature at all and painted themselves blue. The Picts and Britons certainly tattooed themselves, as the Dacians, Thracians and Mosynoechians did, with pictorial devices. That they used woad for the purpose is a proof of advanced culture, for the extraction of blue dye from the woad-plant, which the ancient Irish also practised, is an extremely complicated chemical process; the blue colour perhaps sanctified them to the Goddess Anu.1 I do not mean that these records have not undergone a great deal of careless, pious, or dishonest editing at every stage of religious development; but at least they seem to be as trustworthy as the corresponding Greek Records, and rather more trustworthy than the Hebrew – if only because ancient Ireland suffered less from wars than Greece or Palestine. To dismiss the Irish and Welsh as incoherent children has one great advantage: it frees the historian of any obligation to add Old Goidelic and Old Welsh to his multifarious other studies.

In modern civilization almost the only place where a scholar can study at ease is a University. But at a University one has to be very careful indeed not to get out of step with one’s colleagues and especially not to publish any heterodox theories. Orthodox opinions are in general based on a theory of political and moral expediency, originally refined under Olympianism, which is the largest single gift of paganism to Christianity. Not only to Christianity. Twenty-five years ago, when I was Professor of English Literature at the Royal Egyptian University of Cairo, my colleague the blind Professor of Arabic Literature was imprudent enough to suggest in one of his lectures that the Koran contained certain pre-Mohammedan metrical compositions. This was blasphemy and a good excuse for his examination-funking students to go on strike. So the Rector called him to task and he was faced with the alternatives of losing his job and recantation. He recanted. In American Universities of the Bible Belt the same sort of thing often happens: some incautious junior professor suggests that perhaps the Whale did not really swallow Jonah and supports his view by quoting the opinions of eminent natural historians. He leaves at the end of the University year if not before. In England the case is not quite so bad, but bad enough. Sir James Frazer was able to keep his beautiful rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge, until his death by carefully and methodically sailing all round his dangerous subject, as if charting the coastline of a forbidden island without actually committing himself to a declaration that it existed. What he was saying-not-saying was that Christian legend, dogma and ritual are the refinement of a great body of primitive and even barbarous beliefs, and that almost the only original element in Christianity is the personality of Jesus. Recent researches that I have made into Christian origins, the history of the American Revolution, and the private life of Milton, three dangerous topics, have astonished me. How calculatedly misleading the textbooks are! Dog, Lapwing and Roebuck have long ago entered the service of the new Olympians.

To return to Dr. Macalister, who does not account for the thirteen-consonant Irish alphabet and assumes that the Druids possessed no alphabet before they formed the BLFSN alphabet from the Formello-Cervetri one. He does not brush aside the question, why the common name for all Irish alphabets was ‘Beth-Luis-Nion’ – which means that the original sequence began with BLN, not BLF – but makes a complicated postulate for which he has no epigraphic evidence. He suggests that the Druids of Southern Gaul chose out from the Formello-Cervetri list the letters:

and that this, their first alphabet of any sort lasted just long enough to give the Irish alphabet its name. He also suggests (without epigraphic evidence) that an intermediate alphabet was devised by a clever phonetician as follows:

before the order was finally settled (in Ireland at least) as:

plus five ‘diphthongs’, as he rather misleadingly calls the allusive vowel-combinations referring to the foreign letters, for which characters were found in five of the six supernumerary letters of the Formello-Cervetri alphabet. He does not deny that Beth, Luis and Nion are tree-names, but holds that as cipher equivalents of the Formello-Cervetri letter names, which he says must have retained their original Semitic names as late as the fifth century BC, they were chosen merely as having the correct initial, and suggests that L, Luis the rowan, might just as well have been the larch.

This argument might pass muster were it not that the Druids were famous for their sacred groves and their tree-cult, and that the old sequence of tree-letters was evidently of such religious importance that the later B.L.F.S.N. alphabet, with its misplacement of N, could never wipe out its memory. Dr. Macalister may regard the Beth-Luis-Nion Tree-Ogham as an ‘artificiality’; but the trees in it are placed in a seasonal arrangement which has strong mythological backing, whereas the original sequence which he postulates makes no sense at all after the first five letters, which are in the accepted order. For my part I cannot believe in his postulate; oak and elder cannot change places; it is not easy to overlook the Latin proverb that ‘it is not from every tree that a statue of Mercury can be carved’; and only in joke does anyone gather nuts, Coll, and may, Uavi, on a cold and frosty morning.

At some time, it seems, in the fifth century BC the characters of the Formello-Cervetri alphabet were borrowed by the Druids in Southern Gaul for the purpose of recording whatever was not protected by a taboo, and passed on by them into Britain and Ireland. The foreign letters which occur in it were added to an already existing secret alphabet, the Boibel-Loth, the letter-names of which formed a charm in honour of Canopic Hercules. But this does not prove that the Druids did not possess an earlier alphabet beginning with B.L.N., with entirely different letter-names bound up with the more barbaric religious cult commemorated in Amergin’s song and enshrined in a traditional tree-sequence of birch, rowan, ash, alder, willow, etc. Or that the historical tradition, at which Dr. Macalister indulgently smiles, that letters were known in Ireland many centuries before the Formello-Cervetri alphabet reached Italy, is a late fiction. If we can show that the BLFSN alphabet was a logical development from the BLNFS tree-alphabet and can connect it with a new religious dispensation, without having to invent intermediate forms for which there is no literary evidence, then everything will make poetic as well as prose sense. Religious necessity is always a far likelier explanation of changes in an alphabet than phonetic theory, to which alone Dr. Macalister attributes his hypothetic changes in the sequence of the Beth-Luis-Nion: for all right-minded people everywhere naturally oppose the attempts of scholarly phoneticians to improve their familiar ABC, the foundation of all learning and the first thing that they ever learned at school.

But is not the answer to our question to be found in The Battle of the Trees? What distinguishes the BLFSN from the BLNFS is that the letter N, Nion the ash, the sacred tree of the God Gwydion, has been taken out of the dead period of the year, where it is still in black bud, and put two months ahead to where it is in leaf, while Fearn the alder, the sacred tree of the God Bran, which marks the emergence of the solar year from the tutelage of Night, has been thrust back into Nion’s place. The BLFSN is the trophy raised by Gwydion over Bran. And is it not strange that a few years before the Battle of the Trees was fought in Britain and the letter F humbled, the Greeks had made a dead set against their F, only retaining it as a numerical sign for 6? More than this happened when the order of letters changed; Gwydion’s ash, N, took the place of the fifth consonant, Saille the willow, S, which was naturally sacred to Mercury, or Arawn; and Gwydion thereupon became an oracular god. Also, Amathaon who had evidently been a willow-god, S, took Bran’s place at F and became a fire-god in the service of his father Beli, God of Light. It only remained in this General Post for Bran to take over the maritime ash that Gwydion had relinquished and sail away on his famous voyage to one hundred and fifty islands; yet sailing was no novelty to him, the tradition preserved by Virgil being that the first boats that ever took to the water were alder-trunks.