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 Huidhre 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 Huidhre, 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 Huidhre,
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 Huidhre 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
Tan-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
Huidhre 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 Tuatha 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 Tuatha 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 Tan-bo-Cooalney was transcribed into
the Leabhar na Huidhre 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 historia aut fabula non commodo."
The Tan-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_.