Project Gutenberg's Early Bardic Literature, Ireland, by Standish O'Grady
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Title: Early Bardic Literature, Ireland
Author: Standish O'Grady
Release Date: August 4, 2009 [EBook #8109]
Last Updated: February 4, 2013
Language: English
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*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EARLY BARDIC LITERATURE, IRELAND ***
Produced by Ar dTeanga Fein, and David Widger
EARLY BARDIC LITERATURE, IRELAND.
By Standish O'Grady
11 Lower Fitzwilliam Street, Dublin
Scattered over the surface of every country in Europe may be found
sepulchral monuments, the remains of pre-historic times and nations, and
of a phase of life will civilisation which has long since passed away. No
country in Europe is without its cromlechs and dolmens, huge earthen
tumuli, great flagged sepulchres, and enclosures of tall pillar-stones.
The men by whom these works were made, so interesting in themselves, and
so different from anything of the kind erected since, were not strangers
and aliens, but our own ancestors, and out of their rude civilisation our
own has slowly grown. Of that elder phase of European civilisation no
record or tradition has been anywhere bequeathed to us. Of its nature, and
the ideas and sentiments whereby it was sustained, nought may now be
learned save by an examination of those tombs themselves, and of the dumb
remnants, from time to time exhumed out of their soil—rude
instruments of clay, flint, brass, and gold, and by speculations and
reasonings founded upon these archaeological gleanings, meagre and
sapless.
For after the explorer has broken up, certainly desecrated, and perhaps
destroyed, those noble sepulchral raths; after he has disinterred the
bones laid there once by pious hands, and the urn with its unrecognisable
ashes of king or warrior, and by the industrious labour of years hoarded
his fruitless treasure of stone celt and arrow-head, of brazen sword and
gold fibula and torque; and after the savant has rammed many skulls with
sawdust, measuring their capacity, and has adorned them with some obscure
label, and has tabulated and arranged the implements and decorations of
flint and metal in the glazed cases of the cold gaunt museum, the
imagination, unsatisfied and revolted, shrinks back from all that he has
done. Still we continue to inquire, receiving from him no adequate
response, Who were those ancient chieftains and warriors for whom an
affectionate people raised those strange tombs? What life did they lead?
What deeds perform? How did their personality affect the minds of their
people and posterity? How did our ancestors look upon those great tombs,
certainly not reared to be forgotten, and how did they—those huge
monumental pebbles and swelling raths—enter into and affect the
civilisation or religion of the times?
We see the cromlech with its massive slab and immense supporting pillars,
but we vainly endeavour to imagine for whom it was first erected, and how
that greater than cyclopean house affected the minds of those who made it,
or those who were reared in its neighbourhood or within reach of its
influence. We see the stone cist with its great smooth flags, the rocky
cairn, and huge barrow and massive walled cathair, but the interest which
they invariably excite is only aroused to subside again unsatisfied. From
this department of European antiquities the historian retires baffled, and
the dry savant is alone master of the field, but a field which, as
cultivated by him alone, remains barren or fertile only in things the
reverse of exhilarating. An antiquarian museum is more melancholy than a
tomb.
But there is one country in Europe in which, by virtue of a marvellous
strength and tenacity of the historical intellect, and of filial
devotedness to the memory of their ancestors, there have been preserved
down into the early phases of mediaeval civilisation, and then committed
to the sure guardianship of manuscript, the hymns, ballads, stories, and
chronicles, the names, pedigrees, achievements, and even characters, of
those ancient kings and warriors over whom those massive cromlechs were
erected and great cairns piled. There is not a conspicuous sepulchral
monument in Ireland, the traditional history of which is not recorded in
our ancient literature, and of the heroes in whose honour they were
raised. In the rest of Europe there is not a single barrow, dolmen, or
cist of which the ancient traditional history is recorded; in Ireland
there is hardly one of which it is not. And these histories are in many
cases as rich and circumstantial as that of men of the greatest eminence
who have lived in modern times. Granted that the imagination which for
centuries followed with eager interest the lives of these heroes, beheld
as gigantic what was not so, as romantic and heroic what was neither one
nor the other, still the great fact remains, that it was beside and in
connection with the mounds and cairns that this history was elaborated,
and elaborated concerning them and concerning the heroes to whom they were
sacred.
On the plain of Tara, beside the little stream Nemanna, itself famous as
that which first turned a mill-wheel in Ireland, there lies a barrow, not
itself very conspicuous in the midst of others, all named and illustrious
in the ancient literature of the country. The ancient hero there interred
is to the student of the Irish bardic literature a figure as familiar and
clearly seen as any personage in the Biographia Britannica. We know the
name he bore as a boy and the name he bore as a man. We know the names of
his father and his grandfather, and of the father of his grandfather, of
his mother, and the father and mother of his mother, and the pedigrees and
histories of each of these. We know the name of his nurse, and of his
children, and of his wife, and the character of his wife, and of the
father and mother of his wife, and where they lived and were buried. We
know all the striking events of his boyhood and manhood, the names of his
horses and his weapons, his own character and his friends, male and
female. We know his battles, and the names of those whom he slew in
battle, and how he was himself slain, and by whose hands. We know his
physical and spiritual characteristics, the device upon his shield, and
how that was originated, carved, and painted, by whom. We know the colour
of his hair, the date of his birth and of his death, and his relations, in
time and otherwise, with the remainder of the princes and warriors with
whom, in that mound-raising period of our history, he was connected, in
hostility or friendship; and all this enshrined in ancient song, the
transmitted traditions of the people who raised that barrow, and who laid
within it sorrowing their brave ruler and, defender. That mound is the
tomb of Cuculain, once king of the district in which Dundalk stands
to-day, and the ruins of whose earthen fortification may still be seen two
miles from that town.
This is a single instance, and used merely as an example, but one out of a
multitude almost as striking. There is not a king of Ireland, described as
such in the ancient annals, whose barrow is not mentioned in these or
other compositions, and every one of which may at the present day be
identified where the ignorant plebeian or the ignorant patrician has not
destroyed them. The early History of Ireland clings around and grows out
of the Irish barrows until, with almost the universality of that primeval
forest from which Ireland took one of its ancient names, the whole isle
and all within it was clothed with a nobler raiment, invisible, but not
the less real, of a full and luxuriant history, from whose presence,
all-embracing, no part was free. Of the many poetical and rhetorical
titles lavished upon this country, none is truer than that which calls her
the Isle of Song. Her ancient history passed unceasingly into the realm of
artistic representation; the history of one generation became the poetry
of the next, until the whole island was illuminated and coloured by the
poetry of the bards. Productions of mere fancy and imagination these songs
are not, though fancy and imagination may have coloured and shaped all
their subject-matter, but the names are names of men and women who once
lived and died in Ireland, and over whom their people raised the swelling
rath and reared the rocky cromlech. In the sepulchral monuments their
names were preserved, and in the performance of sacred rites, and the
holding of games, fairs, and assemblies in their honour, the memory of
their achievements kept fresh, till the traditions that clung around these
places were inshrined in tales which were finally incorporated in the
Leabhar na Huidhré and the Book of Leinster.
Pre-historic narrative is of two kinds—in one the imagination is at
work consciously, in the other unconsciously. Legends of the former class
are the product of a lettered and learned age. The story floats loosely in
a world of imagination. The other sort of pre-historic narrative clings
close to the soil, and to visible and tangible objects. It may be legend,
but it is legend believed in as history never consciously invented, and
growing out of certain spots of the earth's surface, and supported by and
drawing its life from the soil like a natural growth.
Such are the early Irish tales that cling around the mounds and cromlechs
as that by which they are sustained, which was originally their source,
and sustained them afterwards in a strong enduring life. It is evident
that these cannot be classed with stories that float vaguely in an ideal
world, which may happen in one place as well as another, and in which the
names might be disarrayed without changing the character and consistency
of the tale, and its relations, in time or otherwise, with other tales.
Foreigners are surprised to find the Irish claim for their own country an
antiquity and a history prior to that of the neighbouring countries.
Herein lie the proof and the explanation. The traditions and history of
the mound-raising period have in other countries passed away. Foreign
conquest, or less intrinsic force of imagination, and pious sentiment have
suffered them to fall into oblivion; but in Ireland they have been all
preserved in their original fulness and vigour, hardly a hue has faded,
hardly a minute circumstance or articulation been suffered to decay.
The enthusiasm with which the Irish intellect seized upon the grand moral
life of Christianity, and ideals so different from, and so hostile to,
those of the heroic age, did not consume the traditions or destroy the
pious and reverent spirit in which men still looked back upon those
monuments of their own pagan teachers and kings, and the deep spirit of
patriotism and affection with which the mind still clung to the old heroic
age, whose types were warlike prowess, physical beauty, generosity,
hospitality, love of family and nation, and all those noble attributes
which constituted the heroic character as distinguished from the saintly.
The Danish conquest, with its profound modification of Irish society, and
consequent disruption of old habits and conditions of life, did not
dissipate it; nor the more dangerous conquest of the Normans, with their
own innate nobility of character, chivalrous daring, and continental grace
and civilisation; nor the Elizabethan convulsions and systematic
repression and destruction of all native phases of thought and feeling.
Through all these storms, which successively assailed the heroic
literature of ancient Ireland, it still held itself undestroyed. There
were still found generous minds to shelter and shield the old tales and
ballads, to feel the nobleness of that life of which they were the
outcome, and to resolve that the soil of Ireland should not, so far as
they had the power to prevent it, be denuded of its raiment of history and
historic romance, or reduced again to primeval nakedness. The fruit of
this persistency and unquenched love of country and its ancient
traditions, is left to be enjoyed by us. There is not through the length
and breadth of the country a conspicuous rath or barrow of which we cannot
find the traditional history preserved in this ancient literature. The
mounds of Tara, the great barrows along the shores of the Boyne, the raths
of Slieve Mish, and Rathcrogan, and Teltown, the stone caiseals of Aran
and Innishowen, and those that alone or in smaller groups stud the country
over, are all, or nearly all, mentioned in this ancient literature, with
the names and traditional histories of those over whom they were raised.
There is one thing to be learned from all this, which is, that we, at
least, should not suffer these ancient monuments to be destroyed, whose
history has been thus so astonishingly preserved. The English farmer may
tear down the barrow which is unfortunate enough to be situated within his
bounds. Neither he nor his neighbours know or can tell anything about its
ancient history; the removed earth will help to make his cattle fatter and
improve his crops, the stones will be useful to pave his roads and build
his fences, and the savant can enjoy the rest; but the Irish farmer and
landlord should not do or suffer this.
The instinctive reverence of the peasantry has hitherto been a great
preservative; but the spread of education has to a considerable extent
impaired this kindly sentiment, and the progress of scientific farming,
and the anxiety of the Royal Irish Academy to collect antiquarian trifles,
have already led to the reckless destruction of too many. I think that no
one who reads the first two volumes of this history would greatly care to
bear a hand in the destruction of that tomb at Tara, in which long since
his people laid the bones of Cuculain; and I think, too, that they would
not like to destroy any other monument of the same age, when they know
that the history of its occupant and its own name are preserved in the
ancient literature, and that they may one day learn all that is to be
known concerning it. I am sure that if the case were put fairly to the
Irish landlords and country gentlemen, they would neither inflict nor
permit this outrage upon the antiquities of their country. The Irish
country gentleman prides himself on his love of trees, and entertains a
very wholesome contempt for the mercantile boor who, on purchasing an old
place, chops down the best timber for the market. And yet a tree, though
cut down, may be replaced. One elm tree is as good as another, and the
thinned wood, by proper treatment, will be as dense as ever; but the
ancient mound, once carted away, can never be replaced any more. When the
study of the Irish literary records is revived, as it certainly will be
revived, the old history of each of these raths and cromlechs will be
brought again into the light, and one new interest of a beautiful and
edifying nature attached to the landscape, and affecting wholly for good
the minds of our people.
Irishmen are often taunted with the fact that their history is yet
unwritten, but that the Irish, as a nation, have been careless of their
past is refuted by the facts which I have mentioned. A people who alone in
Europe preserved, not in dry chronicles alone, but illuminated and adorned
with all that fancy could suggest in ballad, and tale, and rude epic, the
history of the mound-raising period, are not justly liable to this taunt.
Until very modern times, history was the one absorbing pursuit of the
Irish secular intellect, the delight of the noble, and the solace of the
vile.
At present, indeed, the apathy on this subject is, I believe, without
parallel in the world. It would seem as if the Irish, extreme in all
things, at one time thought of nothing but their history, and, at another,
thought of everything but it. Unlike those who write on other subjects,
the author of a work on Irish history has to labour simultaneously at a
two-fold task—he has to create the interest to which he intends to
address himself.
The pre-Christian period of Irish history presents difficulties from which
the corresponding period in the histories of other countries is free. The
surrounding nations escape the difficulty by having nothing to record. The
Irish historian is immersed in perplexity on account of the mass of
material ready to his hand. The English have lost utterly all record of
those centuries before which the Irish historian stands with dismay and
hesitation, not through deficiency of materials, but through their excess.
Had nought but the chronicles been preserved the task would have been
simple. We would then have had merely to determine approximately the date
of the introduction of letters, and allowing a margin on account of the
bardic system and the commission of family and national history to the
keeping of rhymed and alliterated verse, fix upon some reasonable point,
and set down in order, the old successions of kings and the battles and
other remarkable events. But in Irish history there remains, demanding
treatment, that other immense mass of literature of an imaginative nature,
illuminating with anecdote and tale the events and personages mentioned
simply and without comment by the chronicler. It is this poetic literature
which constitutes the stumbling-block, as it constitutes also the glory,
of early Irish history, for it cannot be rejected and it cannot be
retained. It cannot be rejected, because it contains historical matter
which is consonant with and illuminates the dry lists of the chronologist,
and it cannot be retained, for popular poetry is not history; and the task
of distinguishing In such literature the fact from the fiction—where
there is certainly fact and certainly fiction—is one of the most
difficult to which the intellect can apply itself. That this difficulty
has not been hitherto surmounted by Irish writers is no just reproach. For
the last century, intellects of the highest attainments, trained and
educated to the last degree, have been vainly endeavouring to solve a
similar question in the far less copious and less varied heroic literature
of Greece. Yet the labours of Wolfe, Grote, Mahaffy, Geddes, and
Gladstone, have not been sufficient to set at rest the small question,
whether it was one man or two or many who composed the Iliad and Odyssey,
while the reality of the achievements of Achilles and even his existence
might be denied or asserted by a scholar without general reproach. When
this is the case with regard to the great heroes of the Iliad, I fancy it
will be some time before the same problem will have been solved for the
minor characters, and as it affects Thersites, or that eminent artist who
dwelt at home in Hyla, being by far the most excellent of leather cutters.
When, therefore, Greek still meets Greek in an interminable and apparently
bloodless contest over the disputed body of the Iliad, and still no end
appears, surely it would be madness for any one to sit down and gaily
distinguish true from false in the immense and complex mass of the Irish
bardic literature, having in his ears this century-lasting struggle over a
single Greek poem and a single small phase of the pre-historic life of
Hellas.
In the Irish heroic literature, the presence or absence of the marvellous
supplies no test whatsoever as to the general truth or falsehood of
the tale in which they appear. The marvellous is supplied with greater
abundance in the account of the battle of Clontarf, and the wars of the
O'Briens with the Normans, than in the tale in which is described the
foundation of Emain Macha by Kimbay. Exact-thinking, scientific France has
not hesitated to paint the battles of Louis XIV. with similar hues; and
England, though by no means fertile in angelic interpositions, delights to
adorn the barren tracts of her more popular histories with apocryphal
anecdotes.
How then should this heroic literature of Ireland be treated in connection
with the history of the country? The true method would certainly be to
print it exactly as it is without excision or condensation. Immense it is,
and immense it must remain. No men living, and no men to live, will ever
so exhaust the meaning of any single tale as to render its publication
unnecessary for the study of others. The order adopted should be that
which the bards themselves deter mined, any other would be premature, and
I think no other will ever take its place. At the commencement should
stand the passage from the Book of Invasions, describing the occupation of
the isle by Queen Keasair and her companions, and along with it every
discoverable tale or poem dealing with this event and those characters.
After that, all that remains of the cycle of which Partholan was the
protagonist. Thirdly, all that relates to Nemeth and his sons, their wars
with curt Kical the bow-legged, and all that relates to the Fomoroh of the
Nemedian epoch, then first moving dimly in the forefront of our history.
After that, the great Fir-bolgic cycle, a cycle janus-faced, looking on
one side to the mythological period and the wars of the gods, and on the
other, to the heroic, and more particularly to the Ultonian cycle. In the
next place, the immense mass of bardic literature which treats of the
Irish gods who, having conquered the Fir-bolgs, like the Greek gods of the
age of gold dwelt visibly in the island until the coming of the Clan
Milith, out of Spain. In the sixth, the Milesian invasion, and every
accessible statement concerning the sons and kindred of Milesius. In the
seventh, the disconnected tales dealing with those local heroes whose
history is not connected with the great cycles, but who in the fasti
fill the spaces between the divine period and the heroic. In the eighth,
the heroic cycles, the Ultonian, the Temairian, and the Fenian, and after
these the historic tales that, without forming cycles, accompany the
course of history down to the extinction of Irish independence, and the
transference to aliens of all the great sources of authority in the
island.
This great work when completed will be of that kind of which no other
European nation can supply an example. Every public library in the world
will find it necessary to procure a copy. The chronicles will then cease
to be so closely and exclusively studied. Every history of ancient Ireland
will consist of more or less intelligent comments upon and theories formed
in connection with this great series—theories which, in general,
will only be formed in order to be destroyed. What the present age demands
upon the subject of antique Irish history—an exact and scientific
treatment of the facts supplied by our native authorities—will be
demanded for ever. It will never be supplied. The history of Ireland will
be contained in this huge publication. In it the poet will find endless
themes of song, the philosopher strange workings of the human mind, the
archeologist a mass of information, marvellous in amount and quality, with
regard to primitive ideas and habits of life, and the rationalist
materials for framing a scientific history of Ireland, which will be
acceptable in proportion to the readableness of his style, and the mode in
which his views may harmonize with the prevailing humour and complexion of
his contemporaries.
Such a work it is evident could not be effected by a single individual. It
must be a public and national undertaking, carried out under the
supervision of the Royal Irish Academy, at the expense of the country.
The publication of the Irish bardic remains in the way that I have
mentioned, is the only true and valuable method of presenting the history
of Ireland to the notice of the world. The mode which I have myself
adopted, that other being out of the question, is open to many obvious
objections; but in the existing state of the Irish mind on the subject, no
other is possible to an individual writer. I desire to make this heroic
period once again a portion of the imagination of the country, and its
chief characters as familiar in the minds of our people as they once were.
As mere history, and treated in the method in which history is generally
written at the present day, a work dealing with the early Irish kings and
heroes would certainly not secure an audience. Those who demand such a
treatment forget that there is not in the country an interest on the
subject to which to appeal. A work treating of early Irish kings, in the
same way in which the historians of neighbouring countries treat of their
own early kings, would be, to the Irish public generally, unreadable. It
might enjoy the reputation of being well written, and as such receive an
honourable place in half-a-dozen public libraries, but it would be
otherwise left severely alone. It would never make its way through that
frozen zone which, on this subject, surrounds the Irish mind.
On the other hand, Irishmen are as ready as others to feel an interest in
a human character, having themselves the ordinary instincts, passions, and
curiosities of human nature. If I can awake an interest in the career of
even a single ancient Irish king, I shall establish a train of thoughts,
which will advance easily from thence to the state of society in which he
lived, and the kings and heroes who surrounded, preceded, or followed him.
Attention and interest once fully aroused, concerning even one feature of
this landscape of ancient history, could be easily widened and extended in
its scope.
Now, if nothing remained of early Irish history save the dry fasti
of the chronicles and the Brehon laws, this would, I think, be a perfectly
legitimate object of ambition, and would be consonant with my ideal of
what the perfect flower of historical literature should be, to illuminate
a tale embodying the former by hues derived from the Senchus Mor.
But in Irish literature there has been preserved, along with the fasti
and the laws, this immense mass of ancient ballad, tale, and epic, whose
origin is lost in the mists of extreme antiquity, and in which have been
preserved the characters, relationships, adventures, and achievements of
the vast majority of the personages whose names, in a gaunt nakedness,
fill the books of the chroniclers. Around each of the greater heroes there
groups itself a mass of bardic literature, varying in tone and statement,
but preserving a substantial unity as to the general character and the
more important achievements of the hero, and also, a fact upon which their
general historical accuracy may be based with confidence, exhibiting a
knowledge of that same prior and subsequent history recorded in the fasti.
The literature which groups itself around a hero exhibits not only an
unity with itself, but an acquaintance with the general course of the
history of the country, and with preceding and succeeding kings.
The students of Irish literature do not require to be told this; for those
who are not, I would give a single instance as an illustration.
In the battle of Gabra, fought in the third century, and in which Oscar,
perhaps the greatest of all the Irish heroes heading the Fianna Eireen,
contended against Cairbry of the Liffey, King of Ireland, and his troops,
Cairbry on his side announces to his warriors that he would rather perish
in this battle than suffer one of the Fianna to survive; but while he
spoke—
"Barran suddenly exclaimed—
'Remember Mall Mucreema, remember Art.
"'Our ancestors fell there
By force of the treachery of the Fians;
Remember the hard tributes,
Remember the extraordinary pride.'"
Here the poet, singing only of the events of the battle of Gabra, shows
that he was well-acquainted with all the relations subsisting for a long
time between the Fians and the Royal family. The battle of Mucreema was
fought by Cairbry's grandfather, Art, against Lewy Mac Conn and the Fianna
Eireen.
Again, in the tale of the battle of Moy Leana, in which Conn of the
Hundred Battles, the father of this same Art, is the principal character,
the author of the tale mentions many times circumstances relating to his
father, Felimy Rectmar, and his grandfather, Tuhall Tectmar. Such is the
whole of the Irish literature, not vague, nebulous, and shifting, but
following the course of the fasti, and regulated and determined by
them. This argument has been used by Mr. Gladstone with great confidence,
in order to show the substantial historical truthfulness of the Iliad, and
that it is in fact a portion of a continuous historic sequence.
Now this being admitted, that the course of Irish history, as laid down by
the chroniclers, was familiar to the authors of the tales and heroic
ballads, one of two things must be admitted, either that the events and
kings did succeed one another in the order mentioned by the chroniclers,
or that what the chroniclers laid down was then taken as the theme of song
by the bards, and illuminated and adorned according to their wont.
The second of these suppositions is one which I think few will adopt. Can
we believe it possible that the bards, who actually supported themselves
by the amount of pleasure which they gave their audiences, would have
forsaken those subjects which were already popular, and those kings and
heroes whose splendour and achievements must have affected, profoundly,
the popular imagination, in order to invent stories to illuminate
fabricated names. The thing is quite impossible. A practice which we can
trace to the edge of that period whose historical character may be proved
to demonstration, we may conclude to have extended on into the period
immediately preceding that. When bards illuminated with stories and
marvellous circumstances the battle of Clontarf and the battle of Moyrath,
we may believe their predecessors to have done the same for the earlier
centuries. The absence of an imaginative literature other than historical
shows also that the literature must have followed, regularly, the course
of the history, and was not an archaeological attempt to create an
interest in names and events which were found in the chronicles. It is,
therefore, a reasonable conclusion that the bardic literature, where it
reveals a clear sequence in the order of events, and where there is no
antecedent improbability, supplies a trustworthy guide to the general
course of our history.
So far as the clear light of history reaches, so far may these tales be
proved to be historical. It is, therefore, reasonable to suppose that the
same consonance between them and the actual course of events which
subsisted during the period which lies in clear light, marked also that
other preceding period of which the light is no longer dry.
The earliest manuscript of these tales is the Leabhar [Note: Leabar na
Heera.] na Huidhré, a work of the eleventh century, so that we may feel
sure that we have them in a condition unimpaired by the revival of
learning, or any archaeological restoration or improvement. Now, of some
of these there have been preserved copies in other later MSS., which
differ very little from the copies preserved in the Leabhar na Huidhré,
from which we may conclude that these tales had arrived at a fixed state,
and a point at which it was considered wrong to interfere with the text.
The feast of Bricrind is one of the tales preserved in this manuscript.
The author of the tale in its present form, whenever he lived, composed
it, having before him original books which he collated, using his judgment
at times upon the materials to his hand. At one stage he observes that the
books are at variance on a certain point, namely, that at which Cuculain,
Conal the Victorious, and Laery Buada go to the lake of Uath in order to
be judged by him. Some of the books, according to the author, stated that
on this occasion the two latter behaved unfairly, but he agreed with those
books which did not state this.
We have, therefore, a tale penned in the eleventh century, composed at
some time prior to this, and itself collected, not from oral tradition,
but from books. These considerations would, therefore, render it extremely
probable that the tales of the Ultonian period, with which the Leabhar na
Huidhré is principally concerned, were committed to writing at a very
early period.
To strengthen still further the general historic credibility of these
tales, and to show how close to the events and heroes described must have
been the bards who originally composed them, I would urge the following
considerations.
With the advent of Christianity the mound-raising period passed away. The
Irish heroic tales have their source in, and draw their interest from, the
mounds and those laid in them. It would, therefore, be extremely
improbable that the bards of the Christian period, when the days of rath
and cairn had departed, would modify, to any considerable extent, the
literature produced in conditions of society which had passed away.
Again, with the advent of Christianity, and the hold which the new faith
took upon the finest and boldest minds in the country, it is plain that
the golden age of bardic composition ended. The loss to the bards was
direct, by the withdrawal of so much intellect from their ranks, and
indirect, by the general substitution of other ideas for those whose
ministers they themselves were. It is, therefore, probable that the age of
production and creation, with regard to the ethnic history, ceased about
the fifth and sixth centuries, and that, about that time, men began to
gather up into a collected form the floating literature connected with the
pagan period. The general current of mediaeval opinion attributes the
collection of tales and ballads now known as the Tân-Bo-Cooalney to St.
Ciaran, the great founder of the monastery of Clonmacnoise.
But if this be the case, we are enabled to take another step in the
history of this most valuable literature. The tales of the Leabhar na
Huidhré are in prose, but prose whose source and original is poetry. The
author, from time to time, as if quoting an authority, breaks out with
verse; and I think there is no Irish tale in existence without these
rudimentary traces of a prior metrical cycle. The style and language are
quite different, and indicate two distinct epochs. The prose tale is
founded upon a metrical original, and composed in the meretricious style
then in fashion, while the old metrical excerpts are pure and simple. This
is sufficient, in a country like Ireland in those primitive times, to
necessitate a considerable step into the past, if we desire to get at the
originals upon which the prose tales were founded.
For in ancient Ireland the conservatism of the people was very great. It
is the case in all primitive societies. Individual, initiative, personal
enterprise are content to work within a very small sphere. In agriculture,
laws, customs, and modes of literary composition, primitive and simple
societies are very adverse to change.
When we see how closely the Christian compilers followed the early
authorities, we can well believe that in the ethnic times no mind would
have been sufficiently daring or sacrilegious to alter or pervert those
epics which were in their eyes at the same time true and sacred.
In the perusal of the Irish literature, we see that the strength of this
conservative instinct has been of the greatest service in the preservation
of the early monuments in their purity. So much is this the case, that in
many tales the most flagrant contradictions appear, the author or scribe
being unwilling to depart at all from that which he found handed down. For
instance, in the "Great Breach of Murthemney," we find Laeg at one moment
killed, and in the next riding black Shanglan off the field. From this
conservatism and careful following of authority, and the littera
scripta, or word once spoken, I conclude that the distance in time
between the prose tale and the metrical originals was very great, and,
unless under such exceptional circumstances as the revolution caused by
the introduction of Christianity, could not have been brought about within
hundreds of years. Moreover, this same conservatism would have caused the
tales concerning heroes to grow very slowly once they were actually
formed. All the noteworthy events of the hero's life and his
characteristics must have formed the original of the tales concerning him,
which would have been composed during his life, or not long after his
death.
I have not met a single tale, whether in verse or prose, in which it is
not clearly seen that the author was not following authorities before him.
Such traces of invention or decoration as may be met with are not suffered
to interfere with the conduct of the tale and the statement of facts. They
fill empty niches and adorn vacant places. For instance, if a king is
represented as crossing the sea, we find that the causes leading to this,
the place whence he set out, his companions, &c., are derived from the
authorities, but the bard, at the same time, permits himself to give what
seems to him to be an eloquent or beautiful description of the sea, and
the appearance presented by the many-oared galleys. And yet the last
transcription or recension of the majority of the tales was effected in
Christian times, and in an age characterised by considerable classical
attainments—a time when the imagination might have been expected to
shake itself loose from old restraints, and freely invent. A fortiori,
the more ancient bards, those of the ruder ethnic times, would have clung
still closer to authority, deriving all their imaginative representations
from preceding minstrels. There was no conscious invention at any time.
Each cycle and tale grew from historic roots, and was developed from
actual fact. So much may indeed be said for the more ancient tales, but
the Ultonian cycle deals with events well within the historic period.
The era of Concobar Mac Nessa and the Red Branch knights of Ulster was
long subsequent to the floruerunt of the Irish gods and their Titan-like
opponents of this latter period, the names alone can be fairly held to be
historic. What swells out the Irish chronicles to such portentous
dimensions is the history of the gods and giants rationalised by mediaeval
historians. Unable to ignore or excide what filled so much of the
imagination of the country, and unable, as Christians, to believe in the
divinity of the Tuátha De Danan and their predecessors, they rationalised
all the pre-Milesian record. But the disappearance of the gods does not
yet bring us within the penumbra of history. After the death of the sons
of Milesius we find a long roll of kings. These were all topical heroes,
founders of nations, and believed, by the tribes and tribal confederacies
which they founded, to have been in their day the chief kings of Ireland.
The point fixed upon by the accurate and sceptical Tiherna as the
starting-point of trustworthy Irish history, was one long subsequent to
the floruerunt of the gods; and the age of Concobar Mac Nessa and his
knights was more than two centuries later than that of Kimbay and the
foundation of Emain Macha. The floruit of Cuculain, therefore, falls
completely within the historical penumbra, and the more carefully the
enormous, and in the main mutually consistent and self-supporting,
historical remains dealing with this period are studied, the more will
this be believed. The minuteness, accuracy, extent, and verisimilitude of
the literature, chronicles, pedigrees, &c., relating to this period,
will cause the student to wonder more and more as he examines and
collates, seeing the marvellous self-consistency and consentaneity of such
a mass of varied recorded matter. The age, indeed, breathes sublimity, and
abounds with the marvellous, the romantic, and the grotesque. But as I
have already stated, the presence or absence of these qualities has no
crucial significance. Love and reverence and the poetic imagination always
effect such changes in the object of their passion. They are the essential
condition of the transference of the real into the world of art. AEval, of
Carriglea, the fairy queen of Munster, is one of the most important
characters in the history of the battle of Clontarf, the character of
which, and of the events that preceded and followed its occurrence, and
the chieftains and warriors who fought on one side and the other, are
identical, whether described by the bard singing, or by the monkish
chronicler jotting down in plain prose the fasti for the year. The reader
of these volumes can make such deductions as he pleases, on this account,
from the bardic history of the Red Branch, and clip the wings of the tale,
so that it may with him travel pedestrian. I know there are others, like
myself, who will not hesitate for once to let the fancy roam and luxuriate
in the larger spaces and freer airs of ancient song, nor fear that their
sanity will be imperilled by the shouting of semi-divine heroes, and the
sight of Cuculain entering battles with the Tuátha De Danan around him.
I hope on some future occasion to examine more minutely the character and
place in literature of the Irish bardic remains, and put forward here
these general considerations, from which the reader may presume that the
Ultonian cycle, dealing as it does with Cuculain and his contemporaries,
is in the main true to the facts of the time, and that his history, and
that of the other heroes who figure in these volumes, is, on the whole,
and omitting the marvellous, sufficiently reliable. I would ask the
reader, who may be inclined to think that the principal character is too
chivalrous and refined for the age, to peruse for himself the tale named
the "Great Breach of Murthemney." He will there, and in many other tales
and poems besides, see that the noble and pathetic interest which attaches
to his character is substantially the same as I have represented in these
volumes. But unless the student has read the whole of the Ultonian cycle,
he should be cautious in condemning a departure in my work from any
particular version of an event which he may have himself met. Of many
minor events there are more than one version, and many scenes and
assertions which he may think of importance would yet, by being related,
cause inconsistency and contradiction. Of the nature of the work in which
all should be introduced I have already given my opinion.
For the rest, I have related one or two great events in the life of
Cuculain in such a way as to give a description as clear and correct as
possible of his own character and history as related by the bards, of
those celebrated men and women who were his contemporaries and of his
relations with them, of the gods and supernatural powers in whom the
people then believed, and of the state of civilisation which then
prevailed. If I have done my task well, the reader will have been
supplied, without any intensity of application on his part—a
condition of the public mind upon which no historian of this country
should count—with some knowledge of ancient Irish history, and with
an interest in the subject which may lead him to peruse for himself that
ancient literature, and to read works of a more strictly scientific nature
upon the subject than those which I have yet written. But until such an
interest is aroused, it is useless to swell the mass of valuable critical
matter, which everyone at present is very well content to leave unread.
In the first volume, however, I have committed this error, that I did not
permit it to be seen with sufficient clearness that the characters and
chief events of the tale are absolutely historic; and that much of the
colouring, inasmuch as its source must have been the centuries immediately
succeeding the floruerunt of those characters, is also reliable as
history, while the remainder is true to the times and the state of society
which then obtained. The story seems to progress too much in the air, too
little in time and space, and seems to be more of the nature of legend and
romance than of actual historic fact seen through an imaginative medium.
Such is the history of Concobar Mac Nessa and his knights—historic
fact seen through the eyes of a loving wonder.
Indeed, I must confess that the blaze of bardic light which illuminates
those centuries at first so dazzled the eye and disturbed the judgment,
that I saw only the literature, only the epic and dramatic interest, and
did not see as I should the distinctly historical character of the age
around which that literature revolves, wrongly deeming that a literature
so noble, and dealing with events so remote, must have originated mainly
or altogether in the imagination. All the borders of the epic
representation at which, in the first volume, I have aimed, seem to melt,
and wander away vaguely on every side into space and time. I have now
taken care to remedy that defect, supplying to the unset picture the clear
historical frame to which it is entitled. I will also request the reader,
when the two volumes may diverge in tone or statement, to attach greater
importance to the second, as the result of wider and more careful reading
and more matured reflection.
A great English poet, himself a severe student, pronounced the early
history of his own country to be a mere scuffling of kites and crows, as
indeed are all wars which lack the sacred bard, and the sacred bard is
absent where the kites and crows pick out his eyes. That the Irish kings
and heroes should succeed one another, surrounded by a blaze of bardic
light, in which both themselves and all those who were contemporaneous
with them are seen clearly and distinctly, was natural in a country where
in each little realm or sub-kingdom the ard-ollav was equal in dignity to
the king, which is proved by the equivalence of their cries. The dawn of
English history is in the seventh century—a late dawn, dark and
sombre, without a ray of cheerful sunshine; that of Ireland dates reliably
from a point before the commencement of the Christian era luminous with
that light which never was on sea or land—thronged with heroic forms
of men and women—terrible with the presence of the supernatural and
its over-arching power.
Educated Irishmen are ignorant of, and indifferent to, their history; yet
from the hold of that history they cannot shake themselves free. It still
haunts the imagination, like Mordecai at Haman's gate, a cause of
continual annoyance and vexation. An Irishman can no more release himself
from his history than he can absolve himself from social and domestic
duties. He may outrage it, but he cannot placidly ignore. Hence the
uneasy, impatient feeling with which the subject is generally regarded.
I think that I do not exaggerate when I say that the majority of educated
Irishmen would feel grateful to the man who informed them that the history
of their country was valueless and unworthy of study, that the
pre-Christian history was a myth, the post-Christian mere annals, the
mediaeval a scuffling of kites and crows, and the modern alone deserving
of some slight consideration. That writer will be in Ireland most praised
who sets latest the commencement of our history. Without study he will be
pronounced sober and rational before the critic opens the book. So anxious
is the Irish mind to see that effaced which it is conscious of having
neglected.
There are two compositions which affect an interest comparable to that
which Ireland claims for her bardic literature, One is the Ossian of
MacPherson, the other the Nibelungen Lied.
If we are to suppose Macpherson faithfully to have written down, printed,
and published the floating disconnected poems which he found lingering in
the Scotch highlands, how small, comparatively, would be their value as
indications of antique thought and feeling, reduced then for the first
time to writing, sixteen hundred years after the time of Ossian and his
heroes, in a country not the home of those heroes, and destitute of the
regular bardic organisation. The Ossianic tales and poems still told and
sung by the Irish peasantry at the present day in the country of Ossian
and Oscar, would be, if collected even now, quite as valuable, if not more
so. Truer to the antique these latter are, for in them the cycles are not
blended. The Red Branch heroes are not confused with Ossian's Fianna.
But MacPherson's Ossian is not a translation. In the publications of the
Irish Ossianic poetry we see what that poetry really was—rude,
homely, plain-spoken, leagues removed from the nebulous sublimity of
MacPherson.
With regard to the other, the Germans, who naturally desire to refer its
composition to as remote a date as possible, and who arguing from no
scientific data, but only style, ascribe the authorship of the Nibelungen
to a poet living in the latter part of the twelfth century. Be it
remembered, that the poem does not purport to be a collection of the
scattered fragments of a cycle, but an original composition, then actually
imagined and written. It does not even purport to deal with the ethnic
times. Its heroes are Christian heroes. They attend Mass. The poem
is not true, even to the leading features of the late period of history in
which it is placed, if it have any habitat in the world of history at all.
Attila, who died A.D. 450, and Theodoric, who did not die until the
succeeding century, meet as coevals.
Turn we now from the sole boast of Germany to one out of a hundred in the
Irish bardic literature. The Tân-bo-Cooalney was transcribed into the
Leabhar na Huidhré in the eleventh century a manuscript whose date has
been established by the consentaneity of Irish, French, and German
scholarship. Mark, it was transcribed, not composed. The scribe records
the fact:—
"Ego qui scripsi hanc historian aut vero fabulam, quibusdam fidem
in hac historiâ aut fabulâ non commodo."
The Tân-bo-Cooalney was therefore transcribed by an ancient penman
to the parchment of a still existing manuscript, in the century before
that in which the German epic is presumed, from style only, and in the
opinion of Germans, to have been composed.
The same scribe adds this comment with regard to its contents:—
"Qaedam autem poetica figmenta, quaedam ad delectationem
stultorum."
Such scorn could not have been felt by one living in an age of bardic
production. That independence and originality of thought, which caused
Milton to despise the poets of the Restoration, are impossible in the
simple stages of civilisation. The scribe who appended this very
interesting comment to the subject of his own handiwork must have been
removed by centuries from the date of its compilation. That the tale was,
in his time, an ancient one, is therefore rendered extremely probable, the
scribe himself indicating how completely out of sympathy he is with this
form of literature, its antiquity and peculiar archaeological interest
being, doubtless, the cause of the transcription.
Again, a close study of its contents, as of the contents of all the Irish
historic tales, proves that in its present form, whenever that form was
superadded, it is but a representation in prose of a pre-existing metrical
original. Under this head I have already made some remarks, which, I shall
request the reader to re-peruse [Note: Pages 23 to 27]
Once more, it deals with a particular event in Irish history, and with
distinct and definite kings, heroes, and bards, who flourished in the
epoch of which it treats. In the synchronisms of Tiherna, in the metrical
chronology of Flann, in all the various historical compositions produced
in various parts of the country, the main features and leading characters
of the Tân-bo-Cooalney suffer no material change, while the minor
divergencies show that the chronology of the annals and annalistic poems
were not drawn from the tale, but owe their origin to other sources.
Moreover, this epic is but a portion of the great Ultonian or Red Branch
cycle, all the parts of which pre-suppose and support one another; and
that cycle is itself a portion of the history of Ireland, and pre-supposes
other preceding and succeeding cyles, preceding and succeeding kings. The
event of which this epic treats occurred at the time of the Incarnation,
and its characters are the leading Irish kings and warriors of that date.
Such is the Tân-bo-Cooalney.
This being so, how have the English literary classes recognised, or how
treated, our claim to the possession of an antique literature of peculiar
historical interest, and by reason of that antiquity, a matter of concern
to all Aryan nations? The conquest has not more constituted the English
Parliament guardian and trustee of Ireland, for purposes of legislation
and government, than it has vested the welfare and fame of our literature
and antiquities in the hands of English scholarship. London is the
headquarters of the intellectualism and of the literary and historical
culture of the Empire. It is the sole dispenser of fame. It alone
influences the mind of the country and guides thought and sentiment. It
can make and mar reputations. What it scorns or ignores, the world, too,
ignores and scorns. How then has the native literature of Ireland been
treated by the representatives of English scholarship and literary
culture? Mr. Carlyle is the first man of letters of the day, his the
highest name as a critic upon, and historian of, the past life of Europe.
Let us hear him upon this subject, admittedly of European importance.
Miscellaneous Essays, Vol. III., page 136. "Not only as the oldest
Tradition of Modern Europe does it—the Nibelungen—possess a
high antiquarian interest, but farther, and even in the shape we now see
it under, unless the epics of the son of Fingal had some sort of
authenticity, it is our oldest poem also."
Poor Ireland, with her hundred ancient epics, standing at the door of the
temple of fame, or, indeed, quite behind the vestibule out of the way! To
see the Swabian enter in, crowned, to a flourish of somewhat barbarous
music, was indeed bad enough, but Mr. MacPherson!
They manage these things rather better in France, vide passim "La
Révue Celtique."
Of the literary value of the bardic literature I fear to write at all,
lest I should not know how to make an end. Rude indeed it is, but great.
Like the central chamber of that huge tumulus [Note: New Grange anciently
Cnobgha, and now also Knowth.] on the Boyne, overarched with massive
unhewn rocks, its very ruggedness strikes an awe which the orderly
arrangement of smaller and more reasonable thoughts, cut smooth by
instruments inherited from classic times, fails so often to inspire. The
labour of the Attic chisel may be seen since its invention in every other
literary workshop of Europe, and seen in every other laboratory of thought
the transmitted divine fire of the Hebrew. The bardic literature of Erin
stands alone, as distinctively and genuinely Irish as the race itself, or
the natural aspects of the island. Rude indeed it is, but like the hills
which its authors tenanted with gods, holding dells [Note: Those sacred
hills will generally be found to have this character.] of the most perfect
beauty, springs of the most touching pathos. On page 33, Vol. I., will be
seen a poem [Note: Publications of Ossianic Society, page 303, Vol. IV.]
by Fionn upon the spring-time, made, as the old unknown historian says, to
prove his poetic powers—a poem whose antique language relegates it
to a period long prior to the tales of the Leabhar na Huidhré, one which,
if we were to meet side by side with the "Ode to Night," by Alcman, in the
Greek anthology, we would not be surprised; or those lines on page 203,
Vol. I., the song of Cuculain, forsaken by his people, watching the
frontier of his country—
"Alone in defence of the Ultonians,
Solitary keeping ward over the province"
or the death [Note: Publications of Ossianic Society, Vol. I.] of Oscar,
on pages 34 and 35, Vol. I., an excerpt condensed from the Battle of
Gabra. Innumerable such tender and thrilling passages.
To all great nations their history presents itself under the aspect of
poetry; a drama exciting pity and terror; an epic with unbroken
continuity, and a wide range of thought, when the intellect is satisfied
with coherence and unity, and the imagination by extent and diversity.
Such is the bardic history of Ireland, but with this literary defect. A
perfect epic is only possible when the critical spirit begins to be in the
ascendant, for with the critical spirit comes that distrust and apathy
towards the spontaneous literature of early times, which permit some great
poet so to shape and alter the old materials as to construct a harmonious
and internally consistent tale, observing throughout a sense of proportion
and a due relation of the parts. Such a clipping and alteration of the
authorities would have seemed sacrilege to earlier bards. In mediaeval
Ireland there was, indeed, a subtle spirit of criticism; but under its
influence, being as it was of scholastic origin, no great singing men
appeared, re-fashioning the old rude epics; and yet, the very shortcomings
of the Irish tales, from a literary point of view, increase their
importance from a historical. Of poetry, as distinguised from metrical
composition, these ancient bards knew little. The bardic literature,
profoundly poetic though it be, in the eyes of our ancestors was history,
and never was anything else. As history it was originally composed, and as
history bound in the chains of metre, that it might not be lost or
dissipated passing through the minds of men, and as history it was
translated into prose and committed to parchment. Accordingly, no tale is
without its defects as poetry, possessing therefore necessarily, a
corresponding value as history. But that there was in the country, in very
early times, a high and rare poetic culture of the lyric kind, native in
its character, ethnic in origin, unaffected by scholastic culture which,
as we know, took a different direction; that one exquisite poem, in which
the father of Ossian praises the beauty of the springtime in anapaestic
[Note: Cettemain | cain ree! | ro sair | an cuct |﹃He, Fionn MacCool,
learned the three compositions which distinguish the poets, the TEINM
LAEGHA, the IMUS OF OSNA, and the DICEDUE DICCENAIB, and it was then Fionn
composed this poem to prove his poetry.﹄In which of these three forms of
metre the Ode to the spring-time is written I know not. Its form
throughout is distinctly anapaestic.—S. O'G.] verse, would, even
though it stood alone, both by the fact of its composition and the fact of
its preservation, fully prove.
Much and careful study, indeed, it requires, if we would compel these
ancient epics to yield up their greatness or their beauty, or even their
logical coherence and imaginative unity—broken, scattered portions
as they all are of that one enormous epic, the bardic history of Ireland.
At the best we read without the key. The magic of the names is gone, or
can only be partially recovered by the most tender and sympathetic study.
Indeed, without reading all or many, we will not understand the
superficial meaning of even one. For instance, in one of the many
histories of Cuculain's many battles, we read this—
"It was said that Lu Mac AEthleen was assisting him."
This at first seems meaningless, the bard seeing no necessity for throwing
further light on the subject; but, as we wander through the bardic
literature, gradually the conception of this Lu grows upon the mind—the
destroyer of the sons of Turann—the implacably filial—the
expulsor of the Fomoroh—the source of all the sciences—the god
of the Tuátha De Danan—the protector and guardian of Cuculain—Lu
Lamfáda, son of Cian, son of Diancéct, son of Esric, son of Dela, son of
Ned the war-god, whose tomb or temple, Aula Neid, may still be seen beside
the Foyle. This enormous and seemingly chaotic mass of literature is found
at all times to possess an inner harmony, a consistency and logical unity,
to be apprehended only by careful study.
So read, the sublimity strikes through the rude representation. Astonished
at himself, the student, who at first thinks that he has chanced upon a
crowd of barbarians, ere long finds himself in the august presence of
demi-gods and heroes.
A noble moral tone pervades the whole. Courage, affection, and truth are
native to all who live in this world. Under the dramatic image of Ossian
wrangling with the Talkend, [Note: St. Patrick, on account of the tonsured
crown.] the bards, themselves vainly fighting against the Christian life,
a hundred times repeat through the lips of Ossian like a refrain—
"We, the Fianna of Erin, never uttered falsehood,
Lying was never attributed to us;
By courage and the strength of our hands
We used to come out of every difficulty."
Again: Fergus, the bard, inciting Oscar to his last battle—in that
poem called the Rosc Catha of Oscar:—
"Place thy hand on thy gentle forehead
Oscar, who never lied."
[Note: Publications of Ossianic Society, p. 159; vol. i.]
And again, elsewhere in the Ossianic poetry:—
"Oscar, who never wronged bard or woman."
Strange to say, too, they inculcated chastity (see p. 257; vol. i.), an
allusion taken from the "youthful adventures of Cuculain," Leabhar na
Huidhré.
The following ancient rann contains the four qualifications of a bard:—
"Purity of hand, bright, without wounding,
Purity of mouth, without poisonous satire,
Purity of learning, without reproach,
Purity, as a husband, in wedlock."
Moreover, through all this literature sounds a high clear note of
chivalry, in this contrasting favourably with the Iliad, where no man
foregoes an advantage. Cuculain having slain the sons of Neara,﹃thought
it unworthy of him to take possession of their chariot and horses.﹄[Note:
P. 155; vol. i.] Goll Mac Morna, in the Fenian or Ossianic cycle, declares
to Conn Cedcathah [Note: Conn of the hundred battles.] that from his youth
up he never attacked an enemy by night or under any disadvantage, and many
times we read of heroes preferring to die rather than outrage their geisa.
[Note: Certain vows taken with their arms on being knighted.]
A noble literature indeed it is, having too this strange interest, that
though mainly characterised by a great plainness and simplicity of
thought, and, in the earlier stages, of expression, we feel, oftentimes, a
sudden weirdness, a strange glamour shoots across the poem when the tale
seems to open for a moment into mysterious depths, druidic secrets veiled
by time, unsunned caves of thought, indicating a still deeper range of
feeling, a still lower and wider reach of imagination. A youth came once
to the Fianna Eireen encamped at Locha Lein [Note: The Lakes of
Killarney.], leading a hound dazzling white, like snow. It was the same,
the bard simply states, that was once a yew tree, flourishing fifty
summers in the woods of Ioroway. Elsewhere, he is said to have been more
terrible than the sun upon his flaming wheels. What meant this yew tree
and the hound? Stray allusions I have met, but no history. The spirit of
Coelté, visiting one far removed in time from the great captain of the
Fianna, with a different name and different history, cries:—
"I was with thee, with Finn"—
giving no explanation.
To MacPherson, however, I will do this justice, that he had the merit to
perceive, even in the debased and floating ballads of the highlands,
traces of some past greatness and sublimity of thought, and to understand,
he, for the first time, how much more they meant than what met the ear.
But he saw, too, that the historical origin of the ballads, and the
position in time and place of the heroes whom they praised, had been lost
in that colony removed since the time of St. Columba from its old
connection with the mother country. Thus released from the curb of
history, he gave free rein to the imagination, and in the conventional
literary language of sublimity, gave full expression to the feelings that
arose within him, as to him, pondering over those ballads, their
gigantesque element developed into a greatness and solemnity, and their
vagueness and indeterminateness into that misty immensity and weird
obscurity which, as constituent factors in a poem, not as back-ground,
form one of the elements of the false sublime. Either not seeing the
literary necessity of definiteness, or having no such abundant and ordered
literature as we possess, upon which to draw for details, and being too
conscientious to invent facts, however he might invent language, he
published his epics of Ossian—false indeed to the original, but true
to himself, and to the feelings excited by meditation upon them. This
done, he had not sufficient courage to publish also the rude, homely, and
often vulgar ballads—a step which, in that hard critical age, would
have been to expose himself and his country to swift contempt. The thought
of the great lexicographer riding rough-shod over the poor mountain songs
which he loved, and the fame which he had already acquired, deterred and
dissuaded him, if he had ever any such intention, until the opportunity
was past.
MacPherson feared English public opinion, and fearing lied. He declared
that to be a translation which was original work, thus relegating himself
for ever to a dubious renown, and depriving his country of the honest fame
of having preserved through centuries, by mere oral transmission, a
portion, at least, of the antique Irish literature. To the magnanimity of
his own heroes he could not attain:—
"Oscar, Oscar, who feared not armies—
Oscar, who never lied."
Of some such error as MacPherson's I have myself, with less excuse, been
guilty, in chapters xi. and xii., Vol. I., where I attempt to give some
conception of the character of the Ossianic cycle. The age and the heroes
around whom that cycle revolves have, in the history of Ireland, a
definite position in time; their battles, characters, several
achievements, relationships, and pedigrees; their Dûns, and
trysting-places, and tombs; their wives, musicians, and bards; their
tributes, and sufferings, and triumphs; their internecine and other wars—are
all fully and clearly described in the Ossianic cycle. They still remain
demanding adequate treatment, when we arrive at the age of Conn [Note: See
page 20.], Art, and Cormac, kings of Tara in the second and third
centuries of the Christian era. All have been forgotten for the sake of a
vague representation of the more sublime aspects of the cycle, and the
meretricious seductions of a form of composition easy to write and easy to
read, and to which the unwary or unwise often award praise to which it has
no claim.
On the other hand, chapter xi. purports only to be a representation of the
feelings excited by this literature, and for every assertion there is
authority in the cycle. Chapter xii., however, is a translation from the
original. Every idea which it contains, except one, has been taken from
different parts of the Ossianic poems, and all together expressthe graver
attitude of the mind of Ossian towards the new faith. That idea, occurring
in a separate paragraph in the middle of the page, though prevalent as a
sentiment throughout all the conversations of Ossian with St. Patrick, has
been, as it stands, taken from a meditation on life by St. Columbanus, one
of the early Irish Saints—a meditation which, for subtle thought,
for musical resigned sadness, tender brooding reflection, and exquisite
Latin, is one of the masterpieces of mediaeval composition.
To the casual reader of the bardic literature the preservation of an
ordered historical sequence, amidst that riotous wealth of imaginative
energy, may appear an impossibility. Can we believe that forestine
luxuriance not to have overgrown all highways, that flood of superabundant
song not have submerged all landmarks? Be the cause what it may, the fact
remains that they did not. The landmarks of history stand clear and fixed,
each in its own place unremoved; and through that forest-growth the
highways of history run on beneath over-arching, not interfering, boughs.
The age of the predominance of Ulster does not clash with the age of the
predominance of Tara; the Temairian kings are not mixed with the
contemporary Fians. The chaos of the Nibelungen is not found here, nor the
confusion of the Scotch ballads blending all the ages into one.
It is not imaginative strength that produces confusion, but imaginative
weakness. The strong imagination which perceives definitely and realises
vividly will not tolerate that obscurity so dear to all those who worship
the eidola of the cave. Of each of these ages, the primary impressions
were made in the bardic mind during the life-time of the heroes who gave
to the epoch its character; and a strong impression made in such a mind
could not have been easily dissipated or obscured. For it must be
remembered, that the bardic literature of Ireland was committed to the
custody of guardians whose character we ought not to forget. The bards
were not the people, but a class. They were not so much a class as an
organisation and fraternity acknowledging the authority of one elected
chief. They were not loose wanderers, but a power in the State, having
duties and privileges. The ard-ollav ranked next to the king, and his eric
was kingly. Thus there was an educated body of public opinion entrusted
with the preservation of the literature and history of the country, and
capable of repressing the aberrations of individuals.
But the question arises, Did they so repress such perversions of history
as their wandering undisciplined members might commit? Too much, of
course, must not reasonably be expected. It was an age of creative
thought, and such thought is difficult to control; but that one of the
prime objects and prime works of the bards, as an organisation, was to
preserve a record of a certain class of historical facts is certain. The
succession of the kings and of the great princely families was one of
these. The tribal system, with the necessity of affinity as a ground of
citizenship, demanded such a preservation of pedigrees in every family,
and particularly in the kingly houses. One of the chief objects of the
triennial feis of Tara was the revision of such records by the general
assembly of the bards, under the presidency of the Ard-Ollav of Ireland.
In the more ancient times, such records were rhymed and alliterated, and
committed to memory—a practice which, we may believe on the
authority of Caesar, treating of the Gauls, continued long after the
introduction of letters. Even at those local assemblies also, which
corresponded to great central and national feis of Tara, the bards were
accustomed to meet for that purpose. In a poem [Note: O'Curry's Manners
and Customs, Vol. I., page 543.], descriptive of the fair [Note: On the
full meaning of this word "fair," see Chap. xiii., Vol. I.] of Garman, we
see this—
"Feasts with the great feasts of Temair,
Fairs with the fairs of Emania,
Annals there are verified."
In the existing literature we see two great divisions. On the one hand the
epical, a realm of the most riotous activity of thought; on the other, the
annalistic and genealogical, bald and bare to the last degree, a mere
skeleton. They represent the two great hemispheres of the bardic mind, the
latter controlling the former. Hence the orderly sequence of the cyclic
literature; hence the strong confining banks between which the torrent of
song rolls down through those centuries in which the bardic imagination
reached its height. The consentaneity of the annals and the literature
furnishes a trustworthy guide to the general course of history, until its
guidance is barred by a priori considerations of a weightier
nature, or by the statements of writers, having sources of information not
open to us. For instance, the stream of Irish history must, for
philosophical reasons, be no further traceable than to that point at which
it issues from the enchanted land of the Tuátha De Danan. At the limit at
which the gods appear, men and history must disappear; while on the other
hand, the statement of Tiherna, that the foundation of Emain Alacha by
Kimbay is the first certain date in Irish history, renders it undesirable
to attach more historical reality of characters, adorning the ages prior
to B.C. 299, than we could to such characters as Romulus in Roman, or
Theseus in Athenian history.
I desire here to record my complete and emphatic dissent from the opinions
advanced by a writer in Hermathena on the subject of the Ogham
inscriptions, and the introduction into this country of the art of
writing. A cypher, i.e., an alphabet derived from a pre-existing alphabet,
the Ogham may or may not have been. I advance no opinion upon that, but an
invention of the Christian time it most assuredly was not. No sympathetic
and careful student of the Irish bardic literature can possibly come to
such a conclusion. The bardic poems relating to the heroes of the ethnic
times are filled with allusions to Ogham inscriptions on stone, and
contain some references to books of timber; but in my own reading I have
not met with a single passage in that literature alluding to books of
parchment and to rounded letters.
If the Ogham was derived from the Roman characters introduced by Christian
missionaries, then these characters would be the more ancient, and Ogham
the more modern; books and Roman characters would be the more poetical,
and inscriptions on stone and timber in the Ogham characters the more
prosaic. The bards relating the lives and deeds of the ancient heroes,
would have ascribed to their times parchment books and the Roman
characters, not stone and wood, and the Ogham.
In these compositions, whenever they were reduced to the form in which we
find them to-day, the ethnic character of the times and the ethnic
character of the heroes are clearly and universally observed. The ancient,
the remote, the archaic clings to this literature. As Homer does not
allude to writing, though all scholars agree that he lived in a lettered
age, so the old bards do not allude to parchment and Roman characters,
though the Irish epics, as distinguished from their component parts,
reached their fixed state and their final development in times subsequent
to the introduction of Christianity.
When and how a knowledge of letters reached this island we know not. From
the analogy of Gaul, we may conclude that they were known for some time
prior to their use by the bards. Caesar tells us that the Gaulish bards
and druids did not employ letters for the preservation of their lore, but
trusted to memory, assisted, doubtless, as in this country, by the
mechanical and musical aid of verse. Whether the Ogham was a native
alphabet or a derivative from another, it was at first employed only to a
limited extent. Its chief use was to preserve the name of buried kings and
heroes in the stone that was set above their tombs. It was, perhaps,
invented, and certainly became fashionable on this account, straight
strokes being more easily cut in stone than rounded or uncial characters.
For the same reason it was generally employed by those who inscribed
timber tablets, which formed the primitive book, ere they discovered or
learned how to use pen, ink, and parchment. The use of Ogham was partially
practised in the Christian period for sepultural purposes, being venerable
and sacred from time. Hence the discovery of Ogham-inscribed stones in
Christian cemeteries. On the other hand, the fact that the majority of
these stones are discovered in raths and forts, i.e., the tombs of our
Pagan ancestors, corroborates the fact implied in all the bardic
literature, that the characters employed in the ethnic times were Oghamic,
and affords another proof of the close conservative spirit of the bards in
their transcription, compilation, or reformation of the old epics.
The full force of the concurrent authority of the bardic literature to the
above effect can only be felt by one who has read that literature with
care. He will find in all the epics no trace of original invention, but
always a studied and conscientious following of authority. This being so,
he will conclude that the universal ascription of Ogham, and Ogham only,
to the ethnic times, arises solely from the fact that such was the
alphabet then employed.
If letters were unknown in those times, the example of Homer shows how
unlikely the later poets would have been to outrage so violently the whole
spirit of the heroic literature. If rounded letters were then used, why
the universal ascription of the late invented Ogham which, as we know from
the cemeteries and other sources, was unpopular in the Christian age.
Cryptic, too, it was not. The very passages quoted in Hermathena to
support this opinion, so far from doing so prove actually the reverse.
When Cuculain came down into Meath on his first [Note: Vol. I., page 155.]
foray, he found, on the lawn of the Dûn of the sons of Nectan, a pillar
stone with this inscription in Ogham—"Let no one pass without an
offer of a challenge of single combat." The inscription was, of course,
intended for all to read. Should there be any bardic passage in which
Ogham inscriptions are alluded to as if an obscure form of writing, the
natural explanation is, that this kind of writing was passing or had
passed into desuetude at the time that particular passage was composed;
but I have never met with any such. The ancient bard, who, in the
Tân-bo-Cooalney, describes the slaughter of Cailitin and his sons by
Cuculain, states that there was an inscription to that effect, written in
Ogham, upon the stone over their tomb, beginning thus—"Take notice"—evidently
intended for all to read. The tomb, by the way, was a rath—again
showing the ethnic character of the alphabet.
In the Annals of the Four Masters, at the date 1499 B.C., we read these
words:—
﹃THE FLEET OF THE SONS OF MILITH CAME TO IRELAND TO TAKE IT FROM THE
TUÁTHA DE DANAN,﹄i.e., the gods of the ethnic Irish.
Without pausing to enquire into the reasonableness of the date, it will
suffice now to state that at this point the bardic history of Ireland
cleaves asunder into two great divisions—the mythological or divine
on the one hand, and the historical or heroic-historical on the other. The
first is an enchanted land—the world of the Tuátha De Danan—the
country of the gods. There we see Mananan with his mountain-sundering
sword, the Fray-garta; there Lu Lamfada, the deliverer, pondering over his
mysteries; there Bove Derg and his fatal [Note: Every feast to which he
came ended in blood. He was present at the death of Conairey Mor, Chap.
xxxiii., Vol. I.] swine-herd, Lir and his ill-starred children, Mac Mánar
and his harp shedding death from its stricken wires, Angus Og, the
beautiful, and he who was called the mighty father, Eochaidht [Note:
Ay-o-chee, written Yeoha in Vol. I.] Mac Elathan, a land populous with
those who had partaken of the feast of Goibneen, and whom, therefore,
weapons could not slay, who had eaten [Note: In early Greek literature the
province of history has been already separated from that of poetry. The
ancient bardic lore and primaeval traditions were refined to suit the new
and sensitive poetic taste. No commentator has been able to explain the
nature of ambrosia. In the genuine bardic times, no such vague euphuism
would have been tolerated as that of Homer on this subject. The nature of
Olympian ambrosia would have been told in language as clear as that in
which Homer describes the preparation of that Pramnian bowl for which
Nestor and Machaon waited while Hecamede was grating over it the goat's
milk cheese, or that in which the Irish bards described the ambrosia of
the Tuátha De Danan, which, indeed, was no more poetic and awe-inspiring
than plain bacon prepared by Mananan from his herd of enchanted pigs,
living invisible like himself in the plains of Tir-na-n-Og, the land of
the ever-young. On the other hand, there is a vagueness about the Feed Fia
which would seem to indicate the growth of a more awe-stricken mood in
describing things supernatural. The Faed Fia of the Greek gods has been
refined by Homer into "much darkness," which, from an artistic point of
view, one can hardly help imagining that Homer nodded as he wrote.] at the
the table of Mananan, and would never grow old, who had invented for
themselves the Faed Fia, and might not be seen of the gross eyes of men;
there steeds like Anvarr crossing the wet sea like a firm plain; there
ships whose rudder was the will, and whose sails and oars the wish, of
those they bore [Note: Cf. The barks of the Phoenicians in the Odyssey.];
there hounds like that one of Ioroway, and spears like fiery flying
serpents. These are the Tuátha De Danan [Note: A mystery still hangs over
this three-formed name. The full expression, Tuátha De Danan, is that
generally employed, less frequently Tuátha De, and sometimes, but not
often, Tuátha. Tuátha also means people. In mediaeval times the name lost
its sublime meaning, and came to mean merely "fairy," no greater
significance, indeed, attaching to the invisible people of the island
after Christianity had destroyed their godhood.], fairy princes, Tuátha;
gods, De; of Dana, Danan, otherwise Ana and the Moreega, or great queen;
mater [Note: Cormac's Glossary] deorum Hibernensium—"well she used
to cherish [Note: Scholiast noting same Glossary.] the gods." Limitless,
this divine population, dwelling in all the seas and estuaries, river and
lakes, mountains and fairy dells, in that enchanted Erin which was theirs.
But they have not started into existence suddenly, like the gods of Rome,
nor is their genealogy confined to a single generation like those of
Greece. Behind them extends a long line of ancestors, and a history
reaching into the remotest depths of the past. As the Greek gods dethroned
the Titans, so the Irish gods drove out or subjected the giants of the
Fir-bolgs; but in the Irish mythology, we find both gods and giants
descended from other ancient races of deities, called the Clanna Nemedh
and the Fomoroh, and these a branch of a divine cycle; yet more ancient
the race of Partholan, while Partholan himself is not the eldest.
The history of the Italian gods is completely lost. For all that the early
Roman literature tells us of their origin, they may have been either
self-created or eternal. Rome was a seedling shaken from some old perished
civilisation. The Romans created their own empire, but they inherited
their gods. They supply no example of an Aryan nation evolving its own
mythology and religion. Regal Rome, as we know from Niebuhr, was not the
root from which our Rome sprang, but an old imperial city, from whose
ashes sprang that Rome we all know so well. The mythology of the Latin
writers came to them full-grown.
The gods of Greece were a creation of the Greek mind, indeed; but of their
ancestry, i.e., of their development from more ancient divine tribes, we
know little. Like Pallas, they all but start into existence suddenly
full-grown. Between the huge physical entities of the Greek theogonists
and the Olympian gods, there intervenes but a single generation. For this
loss of the Grecian mythology, and this substitution of Nox and Chaos for
the remote ancestors of the Olympians, we have to thank the early Greek
philosophers, and the general diffusion of a rude scientific knowledge,
imparting a physical complexion to the mythological memory of the Greeks.
In the theogony of the ancient inhabitants of this country, we have an
example of a slowly-growing, slowly-changing mythology, such as no other
nation in the world can supply. The ancestry of the Irish gods is not
bounded by a single generation or by twenty. The Tuátha De Danan of the
ancient Irish are the final outcome and last development of a mythology
which we can see advancing step by step, one divine tribe pushing out
another, one family of gods swallowing up another, or perishing under the
hands of time and change, to make room for another. From Angus Og, the god
of youth and love and beauty, whose fit home was the woody slopes of the
Boyne, where it winds around Rosnaree, we count fourteen generations to
Nemedh and four to Partholan, and Partholan is not the earliest. As the
bards recorded with a zeal and minuteness, so far as I can see, without
parallel, the histories of the families to which they were adscript, so
also they recorded with equal patience and care the far-extending
pedigrees of those other families—invisible indeed, but to them more
real and more awe-inspiring—who dwelt by the sacred lakes and
rivers, and in the folds of the fairy hills, and the great raths and
cairns reared for them by pious hands.
The extent, diversity, and populousness of the Irish mythological cycles,
the history of the Irish gods, and the gradual growth of that mythology of
which the Tuátha De Danan, i.e., the gods of the historic period, were the
final development, can only be rightly apprehended by one who reads the
bardic literature as it deals with this subject. That literature, however,
so far from having been printed and published, has not even been
translated, but still moulders in the public libraries of Europe, those
who, like myself, are not professed Irish scholars, being obliged to
collect their information piece-meal from quotations and allusions of
those who have written upon the subject in the English or Latin language.
For to read the originals aright needs many years of labour, the Irish
tongue presenting at different epochs the characteristics of distinct
languages, while the peculiarities of ancient caligraphy, in the defaced
and illegible manuscripts, form of themselves quite a large department of
study. Stated succinctly, the mythological record of the bards, with its
chronological decorations, runs thus:—
AGE OF KEASAIR.
2379 B.C. the gods of the KEASAIRIAN cycle, Bith, Lara, and Fintann, and
their wives, KEASAIR, Barran and Balba; their sacred places, Carn Keshra,
Keasair's tomb or temple, on the banks of the Boyle, Ard Laran on the
Wexford Coast, Fert Fintann on the shores of Lough Derg.
About the same time Lot Luaimenich, Lot of the Lower Shannon, an ancient
sylvan deity.
AGE OF PARTHOLAN AND THE EARLIEST FOMORIAN GODS.
2057 B.C. a new spiritual dynasty, of which PARTHOLAN was father and king.
Though their worship was extended over Ireland, which is shown by the many
different places connected with their history, yet the hill of Tallaght,
ten miles from Dublin, was where they were chiefly adored. Here to the
present day are the mounds and barrows raised in honour of the deified
heroes of this cycle, PARTHOLAN himself, his wife Delgna, his sons, Rury,
Slaney, and Laighlinni, and among others, the father of Irish hospitality,
bearing the expressive name of Beer. Now first appear the Fomoroh giant
princes, under the leadership of curt Kical, son of Niul, son of Garf, son
of U-Mor—a divine cycle intervening between KEASAIR and PARTHOLAN,
but not of sufficient importance to secure a separate chapter and distinct
place in the annals. Battles now between the Clan Partholan and the
Fomoroh, on the plain of Ith, beside the river Finn, Co. Donegal, so
called from Ith [Note: See Vol. I, p. 60], son of Brogan, the most ancient
of the heroes, slain here by the Tuátha De Danan, but more anciently known
by some lost Fomorian name; also at Iorrus Domnan, now Erris, Co. Mayo,
where Kical and his Fomorians first reached Ireland. These battles are a
parable—objective representations of a fact in the mental history of
the ancient Irish—typifying the invisible war waged between
Partholanian and Fomorian deities for the spiritual sovereignty of the
Gael.
AGE OF THE NEMEDIAN GODS AND SECOND CYCLE OF THE FOMORIANS.
1700 B.C. age of the NEMEDIAN divinities, a later branch of the
PARTHOLANIAN vide post NEMEDIAN pedigree. NEMEDH, his wife Maca
(first appearance of Macha, the war goddess, who gave her name to Armagh,
i.e., Ard Macha, the Height of Macha), Iarbanel; Fergus, the Red-sided,
and Starn, sons of Nemedh; Beothah, son of Iarbanel; Erglann, son of
Beoan, son of Starn; Siméon Brac, son of Starn; Ibath, son of Beothach;
Britan Mael, son of Fergus. This must be remembered, that not one of the
almost countless names that figure in the Irish mythology is of fanciful
origin. They all represent antique heroes and heroines, their names being
preserved in connection with those monuments which were raised for
purposes of sepulture or cult.
Wars now between the Clanna Nemedh and the second cycle of the Fomoroh,
led this time by Faebar and More, sons of Dela, and Coning, son of Faebar;
battles at Ros Freachan, now Rosreahan, barony of Murresk, Co. Mayo, at
Slieve Blahma [Note: Slieve Blahma, now Slieve Bloom, a mountain range
famous in our mythology; one of the peaks, Ard Erin, sacred to Eiré, a
goddess of the Tuátha De Danan, who has given her name to the island. The
sites of all these mythological battles, where they are not placed in the
haunted mountains, will be found to be a place of raths and cromlechs.]
and Murbolg, in Dalaradia (Murbolg, i.e., the stronghold of the giants,)
also at Tor Coning, now Tory Island.
FIRBOLGS AND THIRD CYCLE OF THE FOMOROH.
1525 B.C. Age of the FIRBOLGS and third cycle of the Fomorians, once gods,
but expulsed from their sovereignty by the Tuátha De Danan, after which
they loom through the heroic literature as giants of the elder time,
overthrown by the gods. From the FIRBOLGS were descended, or claimed to
have descended, the Connaught warriors who fought with Queen Meave against
Cuculain, also the Clan Humor, appearing in the Second Volume, also the
heroes of Ossian, the Fianna Eireen. Even in the time of Keating, Irish
families traced thither their pedigrees. The great chiefs of the
FIR-BOLGIC dynasty were the five sons of Dela, Gann, Genann, Sengann,
Rury, and Slaney, with their wives Fuad, Edain, Anust, Cnucha, and Libra;
also their last and most potent king, EOCAIDH MAC ERC, son of Ragnal, son
of Genann, whose tomb or temple may be seen to-day at Ballysadare, Co.
Sligo, on the edge of the sea.
The Fomorians of this age were ruled over by Baler Beimenna and his wife
Kethlenn. Their grandson was Lu Lamáda, one of the noblest of the Irish
gods.
The last of the mythological cycles is that of the Tuátha De Danan, whose
character, attributes, and history will, I hope, be rendered interesting
and intelligible in my account of Cuculain and the Red Branch of Ulster.
Irish history has suffered from rationalism almost more than from neglect
and ignorance. The conjectures of the present century are founded upon
mediaeval attempts to reduce to verisimilitude and historical probability
what was by its nature quite incapable of such treatment. The mythology of
the Irish nation, being relieved of the marvellous and sublime, was set
down with circumstantial dates as a portion of the country's history by
the literary men of the middle ages. Unable to excide from the national
narrative those mythological beings who filled so great a place in the
imagination of the times, and unable, as Christians, to describe them in
their true character as gods, or, as patriots, in the character which they
believed them to possess, namely, demons, they rationalized the whole of
the mythological period with names, dates, and ordered generations,
putting men for gods, flesh and blood for that invisible might, till the
page bristled with names and dates, thus formulating, as annals, what was
really the theogony and mythology of their country. The error of the
mediaeval historians is shared by the not wiser moderns. In the
generations of the gods we seem to see prehistoric racial divisions and
large branches of the Aryan family, an error which results from a neglect
of the bardic literature, and a consequently misdirected study of the
annals.
As history, the pre-Milesian record contains but a limited supply of
objective truths; but as theogony, and the history of the Irish gods,
these much abused chronicles are as true as the roll of the kings of
England.
These divine nations, with their many successive generations and
dynasties, constitute a single family; they are all inter-connected and
spring from common sources, and where the literature permits us to see
more clearly, the earlier races exhibit a common character. Like a human
clan, the elements of this divine family grew and died, and shed forth
seedlings which, in time, over-grew and killed the parent stock. Great
names became obscure and passed away, and new ones grew and became great.
Gods, worshipped by the whole nation, declined and became topical, and
minor deities expanding, became national. Gods lost their immortality, and
were remembered as giants of the old time—mighty men, which were of
yore, men of renown.
"The gods which were of old time rest in their tombs,"
sang the Egyptians, consciously ascribing mortality even to gods. Such was
Mac Ere, King of Fir-bolgs. His temple [Note: Strand near Ballysadare, Co.
Sligo], beside the sea at Iorrus Domnan [Note: Keating—evidently
quoting a bardic historian], became his tomb. Daily the salt tide embraces
the feet of the great tumulus, regal amongst its smaller comrades, where
the last king of Fir-bolgs was worshipped by his people.﹃Good [Note:
Temple—vide post.] were the years of the sovereignty of Mac Ere.
There was no wet or tempestuous weather in Ireland, nor was there any
unfruitful year.﹄Such were all the predecessors of the children of Dana—gods
which were of old times, that rest in their tombs; and the days, too, of
the Tuátha De Danan were numbered. They, too, smitten by a more celestial
light, vanished from their hills, like Ossian lamenting over his own
heroes; those others still mightier, might say:—
"Once every step which we took might be heard throughout the
firmament. Now, all have gone, they have melted into the air."
But that divine tree, though it had its branches in fairy-land, had its
roots in the soil of Erin. An unceasing translation of heroes into
Tir-na-n-og went on through time, the fairy-world of the bards, receiving
every century new inhabitants, whose humbler human origin being forgotten,
were supplied there with both wives and children. The apotheosis of great
men went forward, tirelessly; the hero of one epoch becoming the god of
the next, until the formation of the Tuátha De Danan, who represent the
gods of the historic ages. Had the advent of exact genealogy been delayed,
and the creative imagination of the bards suffered to work on for a couple
of centuries longer, unchecked by the historical conscience, Cuculain's
human origin would, perhaps, have been forgotten, and he would have been
numbered amongst the Tuátha De Danan, probably, as the son of Lu Lamfáda
and the Moreega, his patron deities. It was, indeed, a favourite fancy of
the bards that not Sualtam, but Lu Lamfáda himself, was his father; this,
however, in a spiritual or supernatural sense, for his age was far removed
from that of the Tuátha De Danan, and falling well within the scope of the
historic period. Even as late as the time of Alexander, the Greeks could
believe a great contemporary warrior to be of divine origin, and the son
of Zeus.
When the Irish bards began to elaborate a general history of their
country, they naturally commenced with the enumeration of the elder gods.
I at one time suspected that the long pedigrees running between those
several divisions of the mythological period were the invention of
mediaeval historians, anxious to spin out the national record, that it
might reach to Shinar and the dispersion. Not only, however, was such
fabrication completely foreign to the genius of the literature, but in the
fragments of those early divine cycles, we see that each of these
personages was at one time the centre of a literature, and holds a
definite place as regards those who went before and came after. These
pedigrees, as I said before, have no historical meaning, being
pre-Milesian, and therefore absolutely prehistoric; but as the genealogy
of the gods, and as representing the successive generations of that
invisible family, whose history not one or ten bards, but the whole bardic
and druidic organisation of the island, delighted to record, collate, and
verify—those pedigrees are as reliable as that of any of the regal
clans. They represent accurately the mythological panorama, as it unrolled
itself slowly through the centuries before the imagination and spirit of
our ancestors accurately that divine drama, millennium—lasting, with
its exits and entrances of gods. Millennium-lasting, and more so, for it
is plain that one divine generation represents on the average a much
greater space of time than a generation of mortal men. The former probably
represents the period which would elapse before a hero would become so
divine, that is, so consecrated in the imagination of the country, as to
be received into the family of the gods. Cuculain died in the era of the
Incarnation, three hundred years, if not more, before the country even
began to be Christianised, yet he is never spoken of as anything but a
great hero, from which one of two things would follow, either that the
apotheosis of heroes needed the lapse of centuries, or that, during the
first, second, third, and fourth centuries, the historical conscience was
so enlightened, and a positive definite knowledge of the past so
universal, that the translation of heroes into the divine clans could no
longer take place. The latter is indeed the more correct view; but the
reader will, I think, agree with me that the divine generations, taken
generally, represent more than the average space of man's life. To what
remote unimagined distances of time those earlier cycles extend has been
shown by an examination of the tombs of the lower Moy Tura. The ancient
heroes there interred were those who, as Fir-bolgs, preceded the reign of
the Tuáth De Danan, coming long after the Clanna Nemedh in the divine
cycle, who were themselves preceded by the children of Partholan, who were
subsequent to the Queen Keasair. Such then being the position in the
divine cycle of the Fir-bolgs, an examination of the Firbolgic raths on
Moy Tura has revealed only implements of stone, proving demonstratively
that the early divine cycles originated before the bronze age in Ireland,
whenever that commenced. Those heroes who, as Fir-bolgs, received divine
honours, lived in the age of stone. So far is it from being the case, that
the mythological record has been extended and unduly stretched, to enable
the monkish historians to connect the Irish pedigrees with those of the
Mosaic record, that it has, I believe, been contracted for this purpose.
The reader will be now prepared to peruse with some interest and
understanding one or two of the mythological pedigrees. To these I have at
times appended the dates, as given in the chronicles, to show how the
early historians rationalised the pre-historic record.
Angus Og, the Beautiful, represents the Greek Eros. He was surnamed Og, or
young; Mac-an-Og, or the son of youth; Mac-an-Dagda, son of the Dagda. He
was represented with a harp, and attended by bright birds, his own
transformed kisses, at whose singing love arose in the hearts of youths
and maidens. To him and to his father the great tumulus of New Grange,
upon the Boyne, was sacred.
"I visited the Royal Brugh that stands
By the dark-rolling waters of the Boyne,
Where Angus Og magnificently dwells."
He was the patron god of Diarmid, the Paris of Ossian's Fianna, and
removed him into Tir-na-n-Og, when he died, having been ripped by the
tusks of the wild boar on the peaks of Slieve Gulban.
Lu Lamfáda was the patron god of Cuculain. He was surnamed Ioldana, as the
source of the sciences, and represented the Greek Apollo. The latter was
argurgurotoxos [Transcriber's Note: Greek in the original], but Lu was a
sling bearing god. Of Fomorian descent on the mother's side, he joined his
father's people, the Tuátha De Danan, in the great war against the
Fomoroh. He is principally celebrated for his oppression of the sons of
Turann, in vengeance for the murder of his father.
ANGUS OG, (circa 1500 B.C.) LU LAMFADA, (circa 1500 B.C.)
son of son of
THE DAGDA, (Zeus) Cian,
son of son of
Elathan, Diancéct, (god the healer)
son of son of
Dela, Esric,
son of son of
Ned, Dela,
son of son of
Indaei, Ned,
son of son of
Indaei,
son of ALLDAEI.
Amongst other Irish gods was Bove Derg, who dwelt invisible in the Galtee
mountains, and in the hills above Lough Derg. The transformed children
alluded to in Vol. I. were his grand-children. It was his goldsmith Len,
who gave its ancient name to the Lakes of Killarney, Locha Lein. Here by
the lake he worked, surrounded by rainbows and showers of fiery dew.
Mananan was the god of the sea, of winds and storms, and most skilled in
magic lore. He was friendly to Cuculain, and was invoked by seafaring men.
He was called the Far Shee of the promontories.
BOVE DERG (circa 1500 B.C.) MANANAN (circa 1500 B.C.)
son of son of
Eocaidh Garf, Alloid,
son of son of
Duach Temen, Elathan,
son of son of
Bras, Dela,
son of son of
Dela, Ned,
son of son of
Ned, Indaei,
son of son of
Indaei,
son of ALLDAEI.
The Tuátha De Danan maybe counted literally by the hundred, each with a
distinct history, and all descended from Alldaei.
From Alldaei the pedigree runs back thus:—
Alldaei
son of
Tath,
son of
Tabarn,
son of
Enna,
son of
Baath,
son of
Ebat,
son of
Betah,
son of
Iarbanel,
son of
NEMEDH (circa 1700 B.C.)
Nemedh, as I have said, forms one of the great epochs in the mythological
record. As will be seen, he and the earlier Partholan have a common
source:—
NEMEDH
son of
Sera,
son of
Pamp,
son of
Tath, PARTHOLAN (2000 B.C.)
son of son of
Sera,
son of
Sru,
son of
Esru,
son of
Pramant.
The connection between Keasair, the earliest of the Irish gods, and the
rest of the cycle, I have not discovered, but am confident of its
existence.
How this divine cycle can be expunged from the history of Ireland I am at
a loss to see. The account which a nation renders of itself must, and
always does, stand at the head of every history.
How different is this from the history and genealogy of the Greek gods
which runs thus:—
The Olympian gods,
Titans,
Physical entities, Nox, Chaos, &c.
The Greek gods, undoubtedly, had a long ancestry extending into the depths
of the past, but the sudden advent of civilisation broke up the bardic
system before the historians could become philosophical, or philosophers
interested in antiquities.
But the Irish history corrects our view with regard to other matters
connected with the gods of the Aryan nations of Europe also.
All the nations of Europe lived at one time under the bardic and druidic
system, and under that system imagined their gods and elaborated their
various theogonies, yet, in no country in Europe has a bardic literature
been preserved except in Ireland, for no thinking man can believe Homer to
have been a product of that rude type of civilisation of which he sings.
This being the case, modern philosophy, accounting for the origin of the
classical deities by guesses and a priori reasonings, has almost
universally adopted that explanation which I have, elsewhere, called
Wordsworthian, and which derives them directly from the imagination
personifying the aspects of nature.
"In that fair clime, the lonely herdsman, stretched
On the soft grass through half a summer's day,
With music lulled his indolent repose,
And in some fit of weariness if he,
When his own breath was silent, chanced to hear
A distant strain far sweeter than the sounds
Which his poor skill could make, his fancy fetched,
Even from the blazing chariot of the sun,
A beardless youth who touched a golden lute
And filled the illumined groves with ravishment—
***
"Sunbeams upon distant hills,
Gliding apace with shadows in their train,
Might, with small help from fancy, be transformed
Into fleet oreads, sporting visibly."
This is pretty, but untrue. In all the ancient Irish literature we find
the connection of the gods, both those who survived into the historic
times, and those whom they had dethroned, with the raths and cairns
perpetually and almost universally insisted upon. The scene of the
destruction of the Firbolgs will be found to be a place of tombs, the
metropolis of the Fomorians a place of tombs, and a place of tombs the
sacred home of the Tuátha along the shores of the Boyne. Doubtless, they
are represented also as dwelling in the hills, lakes, and rivers, but
still the connection between the great raths and cairns and the gods is
never really forgotten. When the floruit of a god has expired, he is
assigned a tomb in one of the great tumuli. No one can peruse this ancient
literature without seeing clearly the genesis of the Irish gods, videlicet
heroes, passing, through the imagination and through the region of poetic
representation, into the world of the supernatural. When a king died, his
people raised his ferta, set up his stone, and engraved upon it, at least
in later times, his name in ogham. They celebrated his death with funeral
lamentations and funeral games, and listened to the bards chanting his
prowess, his liberality, and his beauty. In the case of great warriors,
these games and lamentations became periodical. It is distinctly recorded
in many places, for instance in connection with Taylti, who gave her name
to Taylteen and Garman, who gave her name to Loch Garman, now Wexford, and
with Lu Lamfáda, whose annual worship gave its name to the Kalends of
August. Gradually, as his actual achievements became more remote, and the
imagination of the bards, proportionately, more unrestrained, he would
pass into the world of the supernatural. Even in the case of a hero so
surrounded with historic light as Cuculain we find a halo, as of godhood,
often settling around him. His gray warsteed had already passed into the
realm of mythical representation, as a second avatar of the Liath Macha,
the grey war-horse of the war-goddess Macha. This could be believed, even
in the days when the imagination was controlled by the annalists and
tribal heralds.
The gods of the Irish were their deified ancestors. They were not the
offspring of the poetic imagination, personifying the various aspects of
nature. Traces, indeed, we find of their influence over the operations of
nature, but they are, upon the whole, slight and unimportant. From nature
they extract her secrets by their necromantic and magical labours, but
nature is as yet too great to be governed and impelled by them. The Irish
Apollo had not yet entered into the sun.
Like every country upon which imperial Rome did not leave the impress of
her genius, Ireland, in these ethnic times, attained only a partial unity.
The chief king indeed presided at Tara, and enjoyed the reputation and
emoluments flowing to him on that account, but, upon the whole, no Irish
king exercised more than a local sovereignty; they were all reguli, petty
kings, and their direct authority was small. This being the case, it would
appear to me that in the more ancient times the death of a king would not
be an event which would disturb a very extensive district, and that,
though his tomb might be considerable, it would not be gigantic.
Now on the banks of the Boyne, opposite Rosnaree, there stands a tumulus,
said to be the greatest in Europe. It covers acres of ground, being of
proportionate height. The earth is confined by a compact stone wall about
twelve feet high. The central chamber, made of huge irregular pebbles, is
about twenty feet from ground to roof, communicating with the outer air by
a flagged passage. Immense pebbles, drawn from the County of Antrim, stand
around it, each of which, even to move at all, would require the labour of
many men, assisted with mechanical appliances. It is, of course,
impossible to make an accurate estimate of the expenditure of labour
necessary for the construction of such a work, but it would seem to me to
require thousands of men working for years. Can we imagine that a petty
king of those times could, after his death, when probably his successor
had enough to do to sustain his new authority, command such labour merely
to provide for himself a tomb. If this tomb were raised to the hero whose
name it bears immediately after his death, and in his mundane character,
he must have been such a king as never existed in Ireland, even in the
late Christian times. Even Brian of the Tributes himself, could not have
commanded such a sepulture, or anything like it, living though he did,
probably, two thousand years later than that Eocaidh Mac Elathan, whenever
he did live. There is a nodus here needing a god to solve it.
Returning now to what would most likely take place after the interment of
a hero, we may well imagine that the size of his tomb would be in
proportion to the love which he inspired, where no accidental causes would
interfere with the gratification of that feeling. Of one of his heroes,
Ossian, sings—
"We made his cairn great and high
Like a king's."
After that there would be periodical meetings in his honour, the
celebration of games, solemn recitations by bards, singing his aristeia
[Transcriber's Note: Greek in the original]. Gradually the new wine would
burst the old bottles. The ever-active, eager-loving imagination would
behold the champion grown to heroic proportions, the favourite of the
gods, the performer of superhuman feats. The tomb, which was once
commensurate with the love and reverence which he inspired, would seem so
now no longer. The tribal bards, wandering or attending the great fairs
and assemblies, would disperse among strangers and neighbours a knowledge
of his renown. In the same cemetery or neighbourhood their might be other
tombs of heroes now forgotten, while he, whose fame was in every bardic
mouth in all that region, was honoured only with a tomb no greater than
theirs. The mere king or champion, grown into a topical hero, would need a
greater tomb.
Ere long again, owing to the bardic fraternity, who, though coming from
Innishowen or Cape Clear, formed a single community, the topical hero
would, in some cases, where his character was such as would excite deeper
reverence and greater fame, grow into a national hero, and a still nobler
tomb be required, in order that the visible memorial might prove
commensurate with the imaginative conception.
Now all this time the periodic celebrations, the games, and lamentations,
and songs would be assuming a more solemn character. Awe would more and
more mingle with the other feelings inspired by his name. Certain rites
and a certain ritual would attend those annual games and lamentations,
which would formerly not have been suitable, and eventually, when the
hero, slowly drawing nearer through generations, if not centuries, at last
reached Tir-na-n-Og, and was received into the family of the gods, a
religious feeling of a different nature would mingle with the more secular
celebration of his memory, and his rath or cairn would assume in their
eyes a new character.
To an ardent imaginative people the complete extinction by death of a
much-loved hero would even at first be hardly possible. That the tomb
which held his ashes should be looked upon as the house of the hero must
have been, even shortly after his interment, a prevailing sentiment,
whether expressed or not. Also, the feeling must have been present, that
the hero in whose honour they performed the annual games, and periodically
chanted the remembrance of whose achievements, saw and heard those things
that were done in his honour. But as the celebration became greater and
more solemn, this feeling would become more strong, and as the tomb, from
a small heap of stones or low mound, grew into an enormous and imposing
rath, the belief that this was the hero's house, in which he invisibly
dwelt, could not be avoided, even before they ceased to regard him as a
disembodied hero; and after the hero had mingled with the divine clans,
and was numbered amongst the gods, the idea that the rath was a tomb could
not logically be entertained. As a god, was he not one of those who had
eaten of the food provided by Mananan, and therefore never died. The rath
would then become his house or temple. As matter of fact, the bardic
writings teem with this idea. From reason and probability, we would with
some certainty conclude that the great tumulus of New Grange was the
temple of some Irish god; but that it was so, we know as a fact. The
father and king of the gods is alluded to as dwelling there, going out
from thence, and returning again, and there holding his invisible court.
"Behold the Sid before your eyes,
It is manifest to you that it is a king's mansion."
[Note: O'Curry's Manuscript Materials of Irish History, page 505.]
"Bove Derg went to visit the Dagda at the Brugh of Mac-An-Og."
[Note: "Dream of Angus," Révue Celtique, Vol. III., page 349.]
Here also dwelt Angus Og, the son of the Dagda. In this, his spiritual
court or temple, he is represented as having entertained Oscar and the
Ossianic heroes, and thither he conducted [Note: Publications of Ossianic
Society, Vol. III., page 201.] the spirit of Diarmid, that he might have
him for ever there.
In the etymology also we see the origin of the Irish gods. A grave in
Irish is Sid, the disembodied spirit is Sidhe, and this latter word
glosses Tuátha De Danan.
The fact that the grave of a hero developed slowly into the temple of a
god, explains certain obscurities in the annals and literature. As a hero
was exalted into a god, so in turn a god sank into a hero, or rather into
the race of the giants. The elder gods, conquered and destroyed by the
younger, could no longer be regarded as really divine, for were they not
proved to be mortal? The development of the temple from the tomb was not
forgotten, the whole country being filled with such tombs and incipient
temples, from the great Brugh on the Boyne to the smallest mound in any of
the cemeteries. Thus, when the elder gods lost their spiritual
sovereignty, and their destruction at the hands of the younger took the
form of great battles, then as the god was forced to become a giant, so
his temple was remembered to be a tomb. Doubtless, in his own territory,
divine honours were still paid him; but in the national imagination and in
the classical literature and received history, he was a giant of the olden
time, slain by the gods, and interred in the rath which bore his name.
Such was the great Mac Erc, King of Fir-bolgs.
Again, when the mediaeval Christians ceased to regard the Tuátha De Danan
as devils, and proceeded to rationalise the divine record as the ethnic
bards had rationalised the history of the early gods; the Tuátha De Danan,
shorn of immortality, became ancient heroes who had lived their day and
died, and the greater raths, no longer the houses of the gods, figure in
that literature irrationally rational, as their tombs. Thus we are gravely
informed [Note: Annals of Four Masters.] that "the Dagda Mor, after the
second battle of Moy Tura, retired to the Brugh on the Boyne, where he
died from the venom of the wounds inflicted on him by Kethlenn"—the
Fomorian amazon—"and was there interred." Even in this passage the
writer seems to have been unable to dispossess his mind quite of the
traditional belief that the Brugh was the Dagda's house.
The peculiarity of this mound, in addition to its size, is the
spaciousness of the central chamber. This was that germ which, but for the
overthrow of the bardic religion, would have developed into a temple in
the classic sense of the word. A two-fold motive would have impelled the
growing civilisation in this direction. A desire to make the house of the
god as spacious within as it was great without, and a desire to transfer
his worship, or the more esoteric and solemn part of it, from without to
within. Either the absence of architectural knowledge, or the force of
conservatism, or the advent of the Christian missionaries, checked any
further development on these lines.
Elsewhere the tomb, instead of developing as a tumulus or barrow, produced
the effect of greatness by huge circumvallations of earth, and massive
walls of stone. Such is the temple of Ned the war-god, called Aula Neid,
the court or palace of Ned, near the Foyle in the North. Had the ethnic
civilisation of Ireland been suffered to develop according to its own
laws, it is probable that, as the roofed central chamber of the cairn
would have grown until it filled the space occupied by the mound, so the
open-walled temple would have developed into a covered building, by the
elevation of the walls, and their gradual inclination to the centre.
The bee-hive houses of the monks, the early churches, and the round towers
are a development of that architecture which constructed the central
chambers of the raths. In this fact lies, too, the explanation of the
cyclopean style of building which characterizes our most ancient
buildings. The cromlech alone, formed in very ancient times the central
chamber of the cairn; it is found in the centre of the raths on Moy Tura,
belonging to the stone age and that of the Firbolgs. When the cromlech
fell into disuse, the arched chamber above the ashes of the hero was
constructed with enormous stones, as a substitute for the majestic
appearance presented by the massive slab and supporting pillars of the
more ancient cromlech, and the early stone buildings preserved the same
characteristic to a certain extent.
The same sentiment which caused the mediaeval Christians to disinter and
enshrine the bones of their saints, and subsequently to re-enshrine them
with greater art and more precious materials, caused the ethnic
worshippers of heroes to erect nobler tombs over the inurned relics of
those whom they revered, as the meanness of the tomb was seen to
misrepresent and humiliate the sublimity of the conception. But the
Christians could never have imagined their saints to have been anything
but men—a fact which caused the retention and preservation of the
relics. When the Gentiles exalted their hero into a god, the charred bones
were forgotten or ascribed to another. The hero then became immortal in
his own right; he had feasted with Mananan and eaten his life-giving food,
and would not know death.
When the mortal character of the hero was forgotten, his house or temple
might be erected anywhere. The great Raths of the Boyne—a place
grown sacred from causes which we may not now learn—represented,
probably, heroes and heroines, who died and were interred in many
different parts of the country.
To recapitulate, the Dagda Mor was a divine title given to a hero named
Eocaidh, who lived many centuries before the birth of Christ, and in the
depths of the pre-historic ages. He was the mortal scion or ward of an
elder god, Elathan, and was interred in some unknown grave—marked,
perhaps, by a plain pillar stone, or small insignificant cairn.
The great tumulus of New Grange was the temple of the divine or
supernatural period of his spiritual or imagined career after death, and
was a development by steps from that small unremembered grave where once
his warriors hid the inurned ashes of the hero.
What is true of one branch of the Aryan family is true of all. Sentiments
of such universality and depth must have been common to all. If this be
so, the Olympian Zeus himself was once some rude chieftain dwelling in
Thrace or Macedonia, and his sublime temple of Doric architecture
traceable to some insignificant cairn or flagged cist in Greece, or some
earlier home of the Hellenic race, and his name not Zeus, but another; and
Kronos, that god whom he, as a living wight, adored, and under whose
protection and favour he prospered.
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