"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 Coelte, 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 Duns, 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 Tuatha 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 Dun 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
Tan-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
TUATHA 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 Tuatha 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 Manar 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 Tuatha 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
Tuatha De Danan [Note: A mystery still hangs over this three-formed
name. The full expression, Tuatha De Danan, is that generally employed,
less frequently Tuatha De, and sometimes, but not often, Tuatha. Tuatha
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, Tuatha; 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 Tuatha 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 Tuatha 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:--