Namer of the Gaels and Father of Their Tongue
Goídel Glas is the ancestor from whom all Gaelic peoples take their name. Every Irish, Scottish, and Manx Gaelic speaker is, in the mythological account, his descendant. He lived not in Ireland but in Egypt, at the court of Pharaoh, in the generation of Moses — and he never saw the island his descendants were fated to inhabit.
A serpent bit him at Pharaoh’s court when he was young. The wound was nearly fatal. Moses healed it — but the healing left a permanent green mark on his neck, and Moses delivered with the cure a prophecy: his descendants would one day settle a land where no serpent could live. That land was Ireland. The mark gave him his name. Goídel — the Gael. Glas — green, the colour of the scar.
He also created the Gaelic language. After the confusion of Babel, seventy-two languages scattered across the world. Goídel took the best element from every one of them and combined them into a single tongue: Irish. The claim is straightforward — Gaelic is not just one of Babel’s fragments. It is the best of all of them, deliberately assembled by their ancestor.
The genealogical line from Goídel Glas to the Milesians who finally reached Ireland is long, passing through Scythia and Spain across many generations. Goídel is the root of it all. His mother was Scota — an Egyptian princess, the first of two women of that name in the Milesian genealogy — and his father was Nél, a Scythian prince who had come to serve at Pharaoh’s court. The wound in Egypt, the green scar, the prophecy, the language: all of it begins with him.
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