Author: tom@thomasalexander.net

Our trip to Ireland was full of surprises. For one I had mistakenly thought Irish culture was similar to English culture and the original Irish language was similar to English. (Click here for a good summary on the Irish language). I got quite obsessed with tracking down where the Irish descended from. It took me more time than I guessed to figure this out because most websites assumed that the reader would be satisfied with the answer that they are Gaelic. But what does Gaelic really mean? Gaelic Ireland on Wikipedia gives us a good summary but still fails to tell us where the Irish originated from. For this I finally found this reference in Wikipedia. The Gales traced their origin to an ancestor named ‘ Goidel Glas’ who was a Scythian Prince. (Scythian according to the Encycopedia Britannica is defined as ‘member of a nomadic people, originally of Iranian stock, known from as early as the 9th century bce who migrated westward from Central Asia to southern Russia and Ukraine in the 8th and 7th centuries bce.’ ) And Goidel Glas was the son of an Egyptian princess. They are then believed to have been wandering from place to place for hundreds of years; they spent time in Egypt, Crete, Scythia, the Caspian Sea and Getulia, before arriving in Iberia, where their king, Breogán, is said to have founded Galicia. The Gaels are then said to have sailed to Ireland via Galicia in the form of the Milesians. And then of course the usual plundering and invasions and intermixing of races led to the Anglo-Normans and the Vikings to put in their contribution to the Irish race. There you have it lads!