Do you fancy playing an online game as an ancient celt in the worldof the Mabinogion? Nexus are developing a computer game called ”Mabinogi” in which you can play online with thousands of other people also trying to survive and better themselves. These types of games are known as MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game), the most famous probably being World of Warcraft. The English closed beta of this game has been started and so we can only wait to start hearing the news of its success or failure. It is an anime style game, with a version scheduled for release on the XBox.

I”m not a computer gamer, but my son informs me that this is a very exciting release and enables its players to accomplish some ”pretty neat” things – such as aging. I notice that players can create their own music and their online personas can play it – virtual bards, I guess.

In-game characters age over the course of weeks, and can engage in numerous activities besides the hack and slash of gameplay. Alternate games include actual music composition, cooking, farming, and working with a spouse to maintain a household.

says www.massively.com. A slightly worrying aspect to the imminent launch of this game is that it already appears to have been hacked – see here.

I would appreciate if any of our members who do have experience of this type of modernmedia as well as being fans of Celtic Myth would comment in the Modern Survivals section of our forums.

To me, it is good to see Celtic Myth still being re-told but how far away fro the core can we take the symbols and stories without losing its unique identity? I don”t know.

The Guardian carries an article about the preserved body of a man found in a peat bog in 1984 being taken from the British Museum back to near where he was found for a temporary stay at Manchester Museum. It says: Lindow Man is to return to close to the spot where he met an appalling death almost 2,000 years ago, skull smashed in, strangled, stabbed, and finally dumped face down into the bog pool which preserved the evidence of his last terrible hours.

He has been one of the star exhibits at the British Museum since his discovery in 1984 by peat cutters at Lindow Moss in Cheshire, transfixing visitors who gaze into his leathery, contorted face and startlingly preserved hair and eyelashes. The museum is now sending him on a year-long loan to Manchester Museum.

I think the date of his death tells us that this man was either a celt or involved with celtic society and the existence of these ”bog people” has been a mystery to scientists since they were first discovered. Thinking of the old rhyme that goes “Three times dead, smash him in the head”, I notice that our man here had been ”killed” three times. He had been strangled, ”smashed in the head” and stabbed. I”ve long had a theory that willing sacrifices were offered to water by the celts (just think of all the weapons and other valuable items offered to lakes, the story of Excalibur and so on) and this chap was probably one such sacrifice.

The article goes on to say:

Like many of the others found across Europe he was a healthy man in the prime of life, although he had the beginnings of osteoporosis in his spine, and intestinal parasites. The remains of his one surviving hand have neatly trimmed nails and fingertips with no sign of the wear of hard manual labour.

The jury really is still out on these bodies,” curator Jody Joy said, “whether they were aristocrats, priests, criminals, outsiders, whether they went willingly to their deaths or whether they were executed – but Lindow was a very remote place in those days, an unlikely place for an ambush or a murder.

A remote settlement that probably found survival very difficult. A grown man with no signs of manual labour who was not ambushed or murdered. I seem to remember reading in ”The Golden Bough” by Frazer about Scapegoats and the ”King for a Year” idea of early societies. It all seems to point to a willing sacrifice who was treated as a very special person and then sacrificed at a time when the tribe was in dire straits.

OK, so I”m just guessing.. but if this is right the real tragedy is not how this man died but what exactly happened to the tribe to cause his death? As a side-note, I don”t remember many tales of sacrifice occuring within Celtic Myths – perhaps there used to be evidence and perhaps we are looking once again at early monkish censorship?

The Film The Water Horse that premiered last week in the USA , is a tale about a little boy who takes home an enchanted egg and suddenly finds himself face to face with the mythical Nessie, the famous monster of Scotland”s Loch Ness. It seems that sea and lake monsters appear with regularity in myths and legends of the Celtic Countries.Ireland has two lake monsters of note, a recent discovery in Muckross Lake in Killarney, Co. Kerry. and one in Lough Ree on the River Shannon in the County of Westmeath.

The monster in Lough Ree has been there for a while. A passage from the life of St. Mochua of Balla tells of a hunting party refusing to pursue a stag that had fled to an island on account of “a horrible monster that infested the lake, and was accustomed to destroy swimmers.” One hunter decided to chance a swim and arrived on the island without incident, but “as he was returning the beast devoured him.!!

Cornwall has in the ancient language of Cornwall, the name MORGAWR, meaning ”Sea Giant”, describes an enormous marine monster which lives in the waters of Falmouth Bay. A lake monster from Welsh mythology, the Afanc can also be traced through references in British and Celtic folklore .Sometimes described as taking the form of a crocodile, giant beaver or dwarf, it is also said to be a demonic creature. The Afanc was said to attack and devour anyone who entered its waters.The Afanc has been variously known as the Addanc, Adanc, Addane, Avanc, Abhac and Abac. Several sites in Wales lay claim to its domain, among them Llyn Llion, Llyn Barfog ad Llyn-yr-Afanc (the Afanc Pool), a lake in Bews-y-Coed. I was unable to find any Lake or Sea monsters in Brittany, So if you know of any please let us know.

There”s a really small island just off the coast of Wales, i.e. between Ireland and Wales, the heart of Celtic territory, that grows one of the rarest apple trees in the word. It is calleed Ynys Enlli in Welsh, or Bardsey Island in English. This mile and a half long island has a long history of Celtic Christianity, shown by its wonderful monastery, and obviously has far older connections. icWales has this to say about the discovery of the world’s rarest Apple tree: ONE of the world’s rarest trees has become a must-have for green-fingered Welsh patriots.

Nearly 10 years ago a birdwatcher noticed an apple tree growing beside a house on Bardsey, off the Lln Peninsula, and alerted Welsh orchard expert Ian Sturrock.”One of the world’s leading authorities on apple species, based in Kent, later declared it the rarest apple tree in the world.”Some legends have it that Merlin, from Arthurian myth, is buried here and some that Ynys Enlii is actually the Isle of Glass. The Celtic Otherworld is often thought to lie in the west, and for those living on the mainland a trip to the island to die would be a pilgrimage for many celts, as we are informed by the Bardsey Apple site. Others state confidently that this is the Isle of Avalon (the Island of Apples) that Arthur travels to when he dies. This is a striking coincidence and not far from probability.Fascinating, isn”t it? I wonder how many other links we will find between the earliest myths and later Arthurian derivatives. Good news from the Isle of the Bards.I originally encountered this story from the blog of Jason Pitzl-Waters, pagan podcaster of the Darker Shade of Pagan podcast.

Well, it seems like only yesterday that we decided that starting the Show would be a good idea and here we are configuring the website. There is still quite a bit of learning to do before we are ready to open the site up to our audience but it”s coming on in leaps and bounds.

The recording studio is now complete, set up and ready for the episodes and we”re just waiting for the first scripts to appear. That means we have to get writing! We”re both very excited about the whole project and hope our listeners are going to enjoy listening to the stories as much as we are enjoying getting them to you.

More later…