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THE HIGH DEEDS OF FINN
AND OTHER BARDIC ROMANCES OF ANCIENT IRELAND
by
T. W. ROLLESTON
With an Introduction by Stopford A. Brooke, M.A. LL.D.
And with Sixteen Illustrations by Stephen Reid
New York
Thomas Y. Crowell & Company
Publishers
AR
CRAOIBH CONNARTHA NA GAEDHILGE
I NGLEANN FHAIDHLE BRONNAIM AN LEABHAR SEO:
BEANNACHT AGUS BUAIDH
LIBHSE GO DEO
Preface
The romantic tales here retold for the English reader belong neither
to the category of folk-lore nor of myth, although most of them
contain elements of both. They belong, like the tales of Cuchulain,
which have been similarly presented by Miss Hull,[1] to the bardic
literature of ancient Ireland, a literature written with an artistic
purpose by men who possessed in the highest degree the native culture
of their land and time. The aim with which these men wrote is also
that which has been adopted by their present interpreter. I have not
tried, in this volume, to offer to the scholar materials for the study
of Celtic myth or folk-lore. My aim, however I may have fulfilled it,
has been artistic, not scientific. I have tried, while carefully
preserving the main outline of each story, to treat it exactly as the
ancient bard treated his own material, or as Tennyson treated the
stories of the MORT D'ARTHUR, that is to say, to present it as a fresh
work of poetic imagination. In some cases, as in the story of the
Children of Lir, or that of mac Datho's Boar, or the enchanting tale
of King Iubdan and King Fergus, I have done little more than retell
the bardic legend with merely a little compression; but in others a
certain amount of reshaping has seemed desirable. The object in all
cases has been the same, to bring out as clearly as possible for
modern readers the beauty and interest which are either manifest or
implicit in the Gaelic original.
[1] CUCHULAIN, THE HOUND OF ULSTER. By Eleanor Hull.
For stories which are only found in MSS. written in the older forms of
the language, I have been largely indebted to the translations
published by various scholars. Chief among these (so far as the
present work is concerned) must be named Mr Standish Hayes
O'Grady--whose wonderful treasure-house of Gaelic legend, SILVA
GADELICA, can never be mentioned by the student of these matters
without an expression of admiration and of gratitude; Mr A.H. Leahy,
author of HEROIC ROMANCES OF IRELAND; Dr Whitly Stokes, Professor Kuno
Meyer, and M. d'Arbois de Jubainville, whose invaluable CYCLE
MYTHOLOGIQUE IRLANDAIS has been much in my hands, both in the original
and in the excellent English translation of Mr R.I. Best. Particulars
of the source of each story will be found in the Notes on the Sources
at the end of this volume. In the same place will also be found a
pronouncing-index of proper names. I have endeavoured, in the text, to
avoid or to modify any names which in their original form would baffle
the English reader, but there remain some on the pronunciation of
which he may be glad to have a little light.
The two most conspicuous figures in ancient Irish legend are
Cuchulain, who lived--if he has any historical reality--in the reign
of Conor mac Nessa immediately before the Christian era, and Finn son
of Cumhal, who appears in literature as the captain of a kind of
military order devoted to the service of the High King of Ireland
during the third century A.D. Miss Hull's volume has been named after
Cuchulain, and it is appropriate that mine should bear the name of
Finn, as it is mainly devoted to his period; though, as will be seen,
several stories belonging to other cycles of legend, which did not
fall within the scope of Miss Hull's work, have been included here.[2]
All the tales have been arranged roughly in chronological order. This
does not mean according to the date of their composition, which in
most cases is quite indiscoverable, and still less, according to the
dates of the MSS. in which they are contained. The order is given by
the position, in real or mythical history, of the events they deal
with. Of course it is not practicable to dovetail them into one
another with perfect accuracy. Where a story, like that of the
Children of Lir, extends over nearly a thousand years, beginning with
the mythical People of Dana and ending in the period of Christian
monasticism, one can only decide on its place by considering where it
will throw most light on those which come nearest to it. In this, as
in the selection and treatment of the tales, there is of course room
for much difference of opinion. I can only ask the critic to believe
that nothing has been done in the framing of this collection of Gaelic
romances without the consideration and care which the value of the
material demands and which the writer's love of it has inspired.
T.W. ROLLESTON
[2] There is one important tale of the Finn cycle, the _Pursuit
of Dermot and Grania_, which I have not included. I have
omitted it, partly because it presents the character of Finn in
a light inconsistent with what is said of him elsewhere, and
partly because it has in it a certain sinister and depressing
element which renders it unsuitable for a collection intended
largely for the young.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
COIS NA TEINEADH
BARDIC ROMANCES
I. THE STORY OF THE CHILDREN OF LIR
II. THE QUEST OF THE SONS OF TURENN
III. THE SECRET OF LABRA
IV. KING IUBDAN AND KING FERGUS
V. THE CARVING OF MAC DATHO'S BOAR
VI. THE VENGEANCE OF MESGEDRA
VII. THE STORY OF ETAIN AND MIDIR
VIII. HOW ETHNE QUITTED FAIRYLAND
THE HIGH DEEDS OF FINN
IX. THE BOYHOOD OF FINN MAC CUMHAL
X. THE COMING OF FINN
XI. FINN'S CHIEF MEN
XII. THE TALE OF VIVIONN THE GIANTESS
XIII. THE CHASE OF THE GILLA DACAR
XIV. THE BIRTH OF OISÍN
XV. OISÍN IN THE LAND OF YOUTH
THE HISTORY OF KING CORMAC
XVI. 1. THE BIRTH OF CORMAC
2. THE JUDGMENT OF CORMAC
3. THE MARRIAGE OF KING CORMAC
4. THE INSTRUCTIONS OF THE KING
5. CORMAC SETS UP THE FIRST MILL IN ERINN
6. A PLEASANT STORY OF CORMAC'S BREHON
7. THE JUDGMENT CONCERNING CORMAC'S SWORD
8. THE DISAPPEARANCE OF CORMAC
9. DESCRIPTION OF CORMAC
10. DEATH AND BURIAL OF CORMAC
NOTES ON THE SOURCES
PRONOUNCING INDEX
ILLUSTRATIONS
"FINN HEARD FAR OFF THE FIRST NOTES OF THE FAIRY HARP" (Frontispiece)
"THERE SAT THE THREE MAIDENS WITH THE QUEEN"
"THEY MADE AN ENCAMPMENT AND THE SWANS SANG TO THEM"
"BEAR US SWIFTLY, BOAT OF MANANAN, TO THE GARDEN OF THE HESPERIDES"
"THERE DWELT THE RED-HAIRED OCEAN-NYMPHS"
"THEY ALL TROOPED OUT, LORDS AND LADIES, TO VIEW THE WEE MAN"
"FERGUS GOES DOWN INTO THE LAKE"
"A MIGHTY SHOUT OF EXULTATION AROSE FROM THE ULSTERMEN"
"THEY ROSE UP IN THE AIR"
"SHE HEARD HER OWN NAME CALLED AGAIN AND AGAIN"
"AND THAT NIGHT THERE WAS FEASTING AND JOY IN THE LONELY HUT"
"THEY RAN HIM BY HILL AND PLAIN"
"DERMOT TOOK THE HORN AND WOULD HAVE FILLED IT"
"'FOLLOW ME NOW TO THE HILL OF ALLEN'"
"THEY RODE UP TO A STATELY PALACE"
"THE WHITE STEED HAD VANISHED FROM THEIR EYES LIKE A WREATH OF MIST"
Introduction
Many years have passed by since, delivering the Inaugural Lecture of
the Irish Literary Society in London, I advocated as one of its chief
aims the recasting into modern form and in literary English of the old
Irish legends, preserving the atmosphere of the original tales as much
as possible, but clearing them from repetitions, redundant
expressions, idioms interesting in Irish but repellent in English,
and, above all, from absurdities, such as the sensational fancy of the
later editors and bards added to the simplicities of the original
tales.
Long before I spoke of this, it had been done by P.W. Joyce in his OLD
CELTIC ROMANCES, and by Standish O'Grady for the whole story of
Cuchulain, but in this case with so large an imitation of the Homeric
manner that the Celtic spirit of the story was in danger of being
lost. This was the fault I had to find with that inspiring book,[3]
but it was a fault which had its own attraction.
[3] I gave this book--_The History of Ireland_ (HEROIC
PERIOD)--to Burne-Jones in order to interest him in Irish myth
and legend. "I'll try and read it," he said. A week afterwards
he came and said--"It is a new world of thought and pleasure
you have opened to me. I knew nothing of this, and life is
quite enlarged. But now, I want to see all the originals. Where
can I get them?"
I have only spoken of prose writing above. But in poetry (and in
Poetry well fitted to the tales), this work had already been done
nobly, and with a fine Celtic splendour of feeling and expression, by
Sir Samuel Ferguson.
Since then, a number of writers have translated into literary English
a host of the Irish tales, and have done this with a just reverence
for their originals. Being, in nearly every case, Irish themselves,
they have tried, with varying success, to make their readers realize
the wild scenery of Ireland, her vital union with the sea and the
great ocean to the West, those changing dramatic skies, that mystic
weather, the wizard woods and streams which form the constant
background of these stories; nor have they failed to allure their
listeners to breathe the spiritual air of Ireland, to feel its
pathetic, heroic, imaginative thrill.
They have largely succeeded in their effort. The Irish bardic tales
have now become a part of English literature and belong not only to
grown up persons interested in early poetry, in mythology and
folk-customs, but to the children of Ireland and England. Our new
imaginative stories are now told in nurseries, listened to at evening
when the children assemble in the fire-light to hear tales from their
parents, and eagerly read by boys at school. A fresh world of
story-telling has been opened to the imagination of the young.
This could not have been done in the right way if it had not been for
the previous work of Celtic scholars in Ireland, and particularly on
the Continent, in France and Germany. Having mastered medieval Irish,
they have translated with careful accuracy many of the ancient tales,
omitting and changing nothing; they have edited them critically,
collating and comparing them with one another, and with other forms of
the same stories. We have now in English, French, and German the exact
representation of the originals with exhaustive commentaries.
When this necessary work was finished--and it was absolutely
necessary--it had two important results on all work of the kind Mr
Rolleston has performed in this book--on the imaginative recasting and
modernizing of the ancient tales. First, it made it lawful and easy
for the modern artist--in sculpture, painting, poetry, or imaginative
prose--to use the stories as he pleased in order to give pleasure to
the modern world. It made it lawful because he could reply to those
who objected that what he produced was not the real thing--"The real
thing exists; you will find it, when you wish to see it, accurately
and closely translated by critical and competent scholars. I refer you
to the originals in the notes to this book. I have found the materials
of my stories in these originals; and it is quite lawful for me, now
that they have been reverently preserved, to use them as I please for
the purpose of giving pleasure to the modern world--to make out of
them fresh imaginative work, as the medieval writers did out of the
original stories of Arthur and his men." This is the defence any
re-caster of the ancient tales might make of the _lawfulness_ of his
work, and it is a just defence; having, above all, this use--that it
leaves the imagination of the modern artist free, yet within
recognized and ruling limits, to play in and around his subject.
One of those limits is the preservation, in any remodelling of the
tales, of the Celtic atmosphere. To tell the Irish stories in the
manner of Homer or Apuleius, in the manner of the Norse sagas, or in
the manner of Malory, would be to lose their very nature, their soul,
their nationality. We should no longer understand the men and women
who fought and loved in Ireland, and whose characters were moulded by
Irish surroundings, customs, thoughts, and passions. We should not see
or feel the landscape of Ireland or its skies, the streams, the woods,
the animals and birds, the mountain solitudes, as we feel and see
them in the original tales. We should not hear, as we hear in their
first form, the stormy seas between Scotland and Antrim, or the great
waves which roar on the western isles, and beat on cliffs which still
belong to another world than ours. The genius of Ireland would desert
our work.
And it would be a vast pity to lose the Irish atmosphere in the
telling of the Irish tales, because it is unique; not only distinct
from that of the stories of other races, but from that of the other
branches of the Celtic race. It differs from the atmosphere of the
stories of Wales, of Brittany, of the Highlands and islands of
Scotland. It is more purely Celtic, less mixed than any of them. A
hundred touches in feeling, in ways of thought, in sensitiveness to
beauty, in war and voyaging, and in ideals of life, separate it from
that of the other Celtic races.
It is owing to the careful, accurate, and critical work of continental
and Irish scholars on the manuscript materials of Irish Law, History,
Bardic Tales, and Poetry; on customs, dress, furniture, architecture,
ornament, on hunting and sailing; on the manners of men and women in
war and peace, that the modern re-teller of the Irish tales is enabled
to conserve the Irish atmosphere. And this conservation of the special
Irish atmosphere is the second result which the work of the critical
scholars has established. If the re-writer of the tales does not use
the immense materials made ready to his hand for illustration,
expansion, ornament and description in such a way that Ireland, and
only Ireland, lives in his work from line to line, he is greatly to be
blamed.
Mr Rolleston has fulfilled these conditions with the skill and the
feeling of an artist. He has clung closely to his originals with an
affectionate regard for their ancientry, their ardour and their
distinction, and yet has, within this limit, used and modified them
with a pleasant freedom. His love of Ireland has instilled into his
representation of these tales a passion akin to that which gave them
birth. We feel, as we read, how deep his sympathy has been with their
intensity, their love of wild nature, their desire for beauty, their
interest in humanity and in character, their savagery and their
tenderness, their fairy magic and strange imaginations that suddenly
surprise and charm. Whenever anything lovely emerges in the tale, he
does not draw attention to it, but touches it with so artistic a
pencil that its loveliness is enhanced. And he has put into English
verse the Irish poems scattered through the tales with the skill and
the temper of a poet. I hope his book will win what it deserves--the
glad appreciation of old and young in England, and the gratitude of
Ireland.
The stories told in this book belong to three distinct cycles of Irish
story-telling. The first are mythological, and are concerned with the
early races that are fabled to have dwelt and fought in Ireland Among
these the Tuatha De Danaan were the final conquerors, and held the
land for two hundred years They were, it is supposed, of the Celtic
stock, but they were not the ancestors of the present Irish. These
were the Milesians (Irish, Scots or Gaelic who, conquering the Tuatha
De Danaan, ruled Ireland till they were overcome by the English.) The
stories which have to do with the Tuatha De Danaan are mythical and of
a great antiquity concerning men and women, the wisest and the best of
whom became gods, and who appear as divine beings in the cycle of
tales which follow after them They were always at war with a fierce
and savage people called Fomorians, whom they finally defeated and the
strife between them may mythically represent the ancient war between
the good and evil principles in the world.
In the next cycle we draw nearer to history, and are in the world not
of myth but of legend. It is possible that some true history may be
hidden underneath its sagas, that some of its personages may be
historical, but we cannot tell. The events are supposed to occur about
the time of the birth of Christ, and seventeen hundred years after
those of the mythical period. This is the cycle which collects its
wars and sorrows and splendours around the dominating figure of
Cuchulain, and is called the Heroic or the Red Branch or the Ultonian
cycle. Several sagas tell of the birth, the life, and the death of
Cuchulain, and among them is the longest and the most important--the
Táin--the _Cattle Raid of Cooley_.
Others are concerned with the great King Conor mac Nessa, and the most
known and beautiful of these is the sorrowful tale of Deirdré. There
are many others of the various heroes and noble women who belonged to
the courts of Conor and of his enemy Queen Maev of Connaght. The
_Carving of mac Datho's Boar_, the story of _Etain and Midir_, and the
_Vengeance of Mesgedra_, contained in this book belong to these
miscellaneous tales unconnected with the main saga of Cuchulain.
The second cycle is linked to the first, not by history or race, but
by the fact that the great personages in the first have now become the
gods who intervene in the affairs of the wars and heroes of the
second. They take part in them as the gods do in the Iliad and the
Odyssey. Lugh, the Long-Handed, the great Counsellor of the Tuatha De
Danaan, is now a god, and is the real father of Cuchulain, heals him
of his wounds in the Battle of the Ford, warns him of his coming
death, and receives him into the immortal land. The Morrigan, who
descends from the first cycle, is now the goddess of war, and is at
first the enemy and afterwards the lover of Cuchulain. Angus, The
Dagda, Mananan the sea-god, enter not only into the sagas of the
second cycle, but into those of the third, of the cycle of Finn. And
all along to the very end of the stories, and down indeed to the
present day, the Tuatha De Danaan appear in various forms, slowly
lessening in dignity and power, until they end in the fairy folk in
whom the Irish peasants still believe. They are alive and still
powerful in the third--the Fenian--cycle of stories, some of which are
contained and adorned in this book. In their continued presence is the
only connexion which exists between the three cycles. No personages of
the first save these of the gods appear in the Heroic cycle, none of
the Heroic cycle appears in the Fenian cycle. Seventeen hundred years,
according to Irish annalists, separate the first from the second, more
than two hundred years separate the second from the beginning of the
third.
The third cycle is called Fenian because its legends tell, for the
most part, of the great deeds of the Féni or Fianna, who were the
militia employed by the High King to support his supremacy, to keep
Ireland in order, to defend the country from foreign invasion. They
were, it seems, finally organized by Cormac mac Art, 227 A.D.(?) the
grandson of Conn the Hundred Fighter. But they had loosely existed
before in the time of Conn and his son Art, and like all mercenary
bodies of this kind were sometimes at war with the kings who employed
them. Finally, at the battle of Gowra, they and their power were quite
destroyed. Long before this destruction, they were led in the reign
of Cormac by Finn the son of Cumhal, and it is around Finn and Oisín
the son of Finn, that most of the romances of the Fenian cycle are
gathered. Others which tell of the battles and deeds of Conn and Art
and Cormac and Cairbre of the Liffey, Cormac's son, are more or less
linked on to the Fenians. On the whole, Finn and his warriors, each of
a distinct character, warlike skill and renown, are the main
personages of the cycle, and though Finn is not the greatest warrior,
he is their head and master because he is the wisest; and this
masterdom by knowledge is for the first time an element in Irish
stories.
If the tales of the first cycle are mythological and of the second
heroic, these are romantic. The gods have lost their dreadful, even
their savage character, and have become the Fairies, full often of
gentleness, grace, and humour. The mysterious dwelling places of the
gods in the sea, in unknown lands, in the wandering air, are now in
palaces under the green hills of Ireland, or by the banks of swift
clear rivers, like the palace of Angus near the Boyne, or across the
seas in Tir-na-n-Óg, the land of immortal youth, whither Niam brings
Oisín to live with her in love, as Morgan le Fay brought Ogier the
Dane to her fairyland. The land of the Immortals in the heroic cycle,
to which, in the story of _Etain and Midir_ in this book, Midir brings
back Etain after she has sojourned for a time on earth, is quite
different in conception from the Land of Youth over the far seas where
delightfulness of life and love is perfect. This, in its conception of
an unknown world where is immortal youth, where stormless skies, happy
hunting, strange adventure, gentle manners dwell, where love is free
and time is unmarked, is pure romance. So are the adventures of Finn
against enchanters, as in the story of the _Birth of Oisín_, of
_Dermot in the Country under the Seas_, in the story of the _Pursuit
of the Gilla Dacar_, of the wild love-tale of _Dermot and Grania_,
flying for many years over all Ireland from the wrath of Finn, and of
a host of other tales of enchantments and battle, and love, and
hunting, and feasts, and discoveries, and journeys, invasions,
courtships, and solemn mournings. No doubt the romantic atmosphere has
been deepened in these tales by additions made to them by successive
generations of bardic singers and storytellers, but for all that the
original elements in the stories are romantic as they are not in the
previous cycles.
Again, these Fenian tales are more popular than the others. Douglas
Hyde has dwelt on this distinction. "For 1200 years at least, they
have been," he says, "intimately bound up with the thought and
feelings of the whole Gaelic race in Ireland and Scotland." Even at
the present day new forms are given to the tales in the cottage homes
of Ireland. And it is no wonder. The mysterious giant forms of the
mythological period, removed by divinity from the sympathy of men; the
vast heroic figures of Cuchulain and his fellows and foes, their close
relation to supernatural beings and their doings, are far apart from
the more natural humanity of Cormac and Finn, of Dermot and Goll, of
Oisín and Oscar, of Keelta, and last of Conan, the coward, boaster and
venomous tongue, whom all the Fenians mocked and yet endured. They are
a very human band of fighting men, and though many of them, like Oisín
and Finn and Dermot, have adventures in fairyland, they preserve in
these their ordinary human nature. The Connacht peasant has no
difficulty in following Finn into the cave of Slieve Cullinn, where
the witch turned him into a withered old man, for the village where he
lives has traditions of the same kind; the love affairs of Finn, of
Dermot and Grania, and of many others, are quite in harmony with a
hundred stories, and with the temper, of Irish lovers. A closer, a
simpler humanity than that of the other cycles pervades the Fenian
cycle, a greater chivalry, a greater courtesy, and a greater
tenderness. We have left the primeval savagery behind, the
multitudinous slaughtering, the crude passions of the earlier men and
women; we are nearer to civilization, nearer to the common temper and
character of the Irish people. No one can doubt this who will compare
the _Vengeance of Mesgedra_ with the _Chase of the Gilla Dacar_.
The elaborate courtesy with which Finn and his chief warriors receive
all comers, as in the story of Vivionn the giantess, is quite new,
even medieval in its chivalry; so is the elaborate code of honour; so
also is, on the whole, the treatment of women and their relation to
men. How far this resemblance to medieval romance has been intruded
into the stories--(there are some in which there is not a trace of
it)--by the after editors and re-editors of the tales, I cannot tell,
but however that may be, their presence in the Fenian cycle is plain;
and this brings the stories into a kindlier and more pleasurable
atmosphere for modern readers than that which broods in thunderous
skies and fierce light over dreadful passions and battles thick and
bloody in the previous cycles. We are in a gentler world.
Another more modern romantic element in the Fenian legends is the
delight in hunting, and that more affectionate relation of men to
animals which always marks an advance in civilization. Hunting, as in
medieval romance, is one of the chief pleasures of the Fenians. Six
months of the year they passed in the open, getting to know every part
of the country they had to defend, and hunting through the great woods
and over the hills for their daily food and their daily delight. The
story of the _Chase of the Gilla Dacar_ tells, at its beginning, of a
great hunting and of Finn's men listening with joy to the cries of the
hunters and the loud chiding of the dogs; and many tales celebrate the
following of the stag and the wild boar from early dawn to the
evening. Then Finn's two great hounds, Bran and Sceolaun, are loved by
Finn and his men as if they were dear friends; and they, when their
master is in danger or under enchantment wail like human beings for
his loss or pain. It is true Cuchulain's horses weep tears of blood
when he goes forth to his last battle, foreknowing his death; but they
are immortal steeds and have divine knowledge of fate. The dogs of
Finn are only dogs, and the relation between him and them is a natural
relation, quite unlike the relation between Cuchulain and the horses
which draw his chariot. Yet Finn's dogs are not quite as other dogs.
They have something of a human soul in them. They know that in the
milk-white fawn they pursue there is an enchanted maiden, and they
defend her from the other hounds till Finn arrives. And it is told of
them that sometimes, when the moon is high, they rise from their
graves and meet and hunt together, and speak of ancient days. The
supernatural has lessened since the heroic cycle. But it is still
there in the Fenian.
Again, the Fenian cycle of tales is more influenced by Christianity
than the others are. The mythological cycle is not only fully pagan,
it is primeval. It has the vastness, the savagery, the relentlessness
of nature-myths, and what beauty there is in it is akin to terror.
Gentleness is unknown. There is only one exception to this, so far as
I know, and that is in the story of _The Children of Lir_. It is
plain, however, that the Christian ending of that sorrowful story is a
later addition to it. It is remarkably well done, and most tenderly. I
believe that the artist who did it imported into the rest of the tale
the exquisite tenderness which fills it, and yet with so much
reverence for his original that he did not make the body of the story
Christian. He kept the definite Christian element to the very end, but
he filled the whole with its tender atmosphere.
No Christianity and very little gentleness intrude into the heroic
cycle. The story of Christ once touches it, but he who put it in did
not lose the pagan atmosphere, or the wild fierceness of the manners
of the time. How it was done may be read in this book at the end of
the story of the _Vengeance of Mesgedra_. Very late in the redaction
of these stories a Christian tag was also added to the tale of the
death of Cuchulain, but it was very badly done.
When we come to the Fenian cycle there is a well-defined borderland
between them and Christianity. The bulk of the stories is plainly
pagan; their originals were frankly so. But the temper of their
composers is more civilized than that of those who conceived the tales
of the previous cycles; the manners, as I have already said, of their
personages are gentler, more chivalrous; and their atmosphere is so
much nearer to that of Christianity, that the new Christian elements
would find themselves more at home in them than in the terrible
vengeance of Lugh, the savage brutality of Conor to Deirdré, or the
raging slaughterings of Cuchulain. So much was this the case that a
story was skilfully invented which linked in imagination the Fenian
cycle to a Christianized Ireland. This story--_Oisín in the Land of
Youth_--is contained in this book. Oisín, or Ossian, the son of Finn,
in an enchanted story, lives for 300 years, always young, with his
love in Tir-na-n-Óg, and finds on his return, when he becomes a
withered old man, St Patrick and Christianity in Ireland. He tells to
Patrick many tales of the Fenian wars and loves and glories, and in
the course of them paganism and Christianity are contrasted and
intermingled. A certain sympathy with the pagan ideas of honour and
courage and love enters into the talk of Patrick and the monks, and
softens their pious austerity. On the other hand, the Fenian legends
are gentled and influenced by the Christian elements, in spite of the
scorn with which Oisín treats the rigid condemnation of his companions
and of Finn to the Christian hell, and the ascetic and unwarlike life
of the monks.[4] There was evidently in the Fenian cycle of
story-telling a transition period in which the bards ran Christianity
and paganism in and out of one another, and mingled the atmosphere of
both, and to that period the last editing of the story of _Lir and his
Children_ may be referred. A lovely story in this book, put into fine
form by Mr Rolleston, is as it were an image of this transition
time--the story or _How Ethne quitted Fairyland_. It takes us back to
the most ancient cycle, for it tells of the great gods Angus and
Mananan, and then of how they became, after their conquest by the race
who live in the second cycle, the invisible dwellers in a Fairy
country of their own during the Fenian period, and, afterwards, when
Patrick and the monks had overcome paganism. Thus it mingles together
elements from all the periods. The mention of the great caldron and
the swine which always renew their food is purely mythological. The
cows which come from the Holy Land are Christian. Ethne herself is
born in the house of a pagan god who has become a Fairy King, but
loses her fairy nature and becomes human; and the reason given for
this is an interesting piece of psychology which would never have
occurred to a pagan world. She herself is a transition maiden, and,
suddenly finding herself outside the fairy world and lost, happens on
a monastery and dies on the breast of St Patrick. But she dies because
of the wild wailing for her loss of the fairy-host, whom she can hear
but cannot see, calling to her out of the darkened sky to come back to
her home. And in her sorrow and the battle in her between the love of
Christ and of Faerie, she dies. That is a symbol, not intended as such
by its conceiver, but all the more significant, of the transition
time. Short as it is, few tales, perhaps, are more deeply charged with
spiritual meaning.
[4] I speak here of the better known of the two versions of
this encounter of the pagan with the Christian spirit. There
are others in which the reconciliation is carried still
further. One example is to be found in the _Colloquy of the
Ancients_ (SILVA GADELICA). Here Finn and his companions are
explicitly pronounced to be saved by their natural virtues, and
the relations of the Church and the Fenian warriors are most
friendly.
Independent of these three cycles, but often touching them here and
there, and borrowing from them, there are a number of miscellaneous
tales which range from the earliest times till the coming of the
Danes. The most celebrated of these are the _Storming of the Hostel_
with the death of Conary the High King of Ireland, and the story of
the Boru tribute. Two examples of these miscellaneous tales of a high
antiquity are contained in this book--_King Iubdan and King Fergus_
and _Etain and Midir_. Both of them have great charm and
delightfulness.
Finally, the manner in which these tales grew into form must be
remembered when we read them. At first, they were not written down,
but recited in hall and with a harp's accompaniment by the various
bardic story-tellers who were attached to the court of the chieftain,
or wandered singing and reciting from court to court. Each bard, if he
was a creator, filled up the original framework of the tale with
ornaments of his own, or added new events or personages to the tale,
or mixed it up with other related tales, or made new tales altogether
attached to the main personages of the original tale--episodes in
their lives into which the bardic fancy wandered. If these new forms
of the tales or episodes were imaginatively true to the characters
round which they were conceived and to the atmosphere of the time,
they were taken up by other bards and became often separate tales, or
if a great number attached themselves to one hero, they finally formed
themselves into one heroic story, such as that which is gathered round
Cuchulain, which, as it stands, is only narrative, but might in time
have become epical. Indeed, the Táin approaches, though at some
distance, an epic. In this way that mingling of elements out of the
three cycles into a single Saga took place.
Then when Christianity came, the Irish who always, Christians or not,
loved their race and its stories, would not let them go. They took
them and suffused them with a Christian tenderness, even a Christian
forgiveness. Or they inserted Christian endings, while they left the
rest of the stories as pagan as before. Later on, while the stories
were still learned by the bards and recited, they were written down,
and somewhat spoiled by a luxurious use of ornamental adjectives, and
by the weak, roving and uninventive fancy of men and monks aspiring to
literature but incapable of reaching it.
However, in spite of all this intermingling and of the different forms
of the same story, it is possible for an intelligent and sensitive
criticism, well informed in comparative mythology and folklore, to
isolate what is very old in these tales from that which is less old,
and that in turn from that which is still less old, and that from what
is partly historical, medieval or modern. This has been done, with
endless controversy, by those excellent German, French, and Irish
scholars who have, with a thirsty pleasure, recreated the ancient
literature of Ireland, and given her once more a literary name among
the nations--a name which, having risen again, will not lose but
increase its brightness.
* * * * *
As to the stories themselves, they have certain well-marked
characteristics, and in dwelling on these, I shall chiefly refer, for
illustration, to the stories in this book. Some of these
characteristic elements belong to almost all mythological tales, and
arise from human imagination, in separated lands, working in the same
or in a similar way on the doings of Nature, and impersonating them.
The form, however, in which these original ideas are cast is, in each
people, modified and varied by the animal life, the climate, the
configuration of the country, the nearness of mountain ranges and of
the sea, the existence of wide forests or vast plains, of swift rivers
and great inland waters.
The earliest tales of Ireland are crowded with the sea that wrapt the
island in its arms; and on the west and north the sea was the mighty
and mysterious Ocean, in whose far infinities lay for the Irish the
land of Immortal Youth. Between its shining shores and Ireland,
strange islands--dwelt in by dreadful or by fair and gracious
creatures, whose wonders Maeldun and Brendan visited--lay like jewels
on the green and sapphire waters. Out of this vast ocean emerged also
their fiercest enemies. Thither, beyond these islands into the
Unknown, over the waves on a fairy steed, went Oisín with Niam;
thither, in after years, sailed St Brendan, till it seemed he touched
America. In the ocean depths were fair cities and well-grassed lands
and cattle, which voyagers saw through water thin and clear. There,
too, Brian, one of the sons of Turenn, descended in his water-dress
and his crystal helmet, and found high-bosomed maidens weaving in a
shining hall. Into the land beneath the wave, Mananan, the proud god
of the sea brought Dermot and Finn and the Fianna to help him in his
wars, as is told in the story of the _Gilla Dacar_. On these western
seas, near the land, Lir's daughters, singing and floating, passed
three hundred years. On other seas, in the storm and in the freezing
sleet that trouble the dark waves of Moyle, between Antrim and the
Scottish isles, they spent another three centuries. Half the story of
the Sons of Usnach has to do with the crossing of seas and with the
coast. Even Cuchulain, who is a land hero, in one of the versions of
his death, dies fighting the sea-waves. The sound, the restlessness,
the calm, the savour and the infinite of the sea, live in a host of
these stories; and to cap all, the sea itself and Mananan its god
sympathise with the fates of Erin. When great trouble threatens
Ireland, or one of her heroes is near death, there are three huge
waves which, at three different points, rise, roaring, out of the
ocean, and roll, flooding every creek and bay and cave and river round
the whole coast with tidings of sorrow and doom. Later on, in the
Fenian tales, the sea is not so prominent. Finn and his clan are more
concerned with the land. Their work, their hunting and adventures
carry them over the mountains and plains, through the forests, and by
the lakes and rivers. In the stories there is scarcely any part of
Ireland which is not linked, almost geographically, with its scenery.
Even the ancient gods have retired from the coast to live in the
pleasant green hills or by the wooded shores of the great lakes or in
hearing of the soft murmur of the rivers. This business of the sea,
this varied aspect of the land, crept into the imagination of the
Irish, and were used by them to embroider and adorn their poems and
tales. They do not care as much for the doings of the sky. There does
not seem to be any supreme god of the heaven in their mythology.
Neither the sun nor the moon are specially worshipped. There are
sun-heroes like Lugh, but no isolated sun-god. The great beauty of the
cloud-tragedies of storm, the gorgeous sunrises and sunsets, so
dramatic in Ireland, or the magnificence of the starry heavens, are
scarcely celebrated. But the Irish folk have heard the sound of the
wind in the tree-tops and marked its cold swiftness over the moor, and
watched with fear or love the mists of ocean and the bewilderment of
the storm-driven snow and the sweet falling of the dew. These are
fully celebrated.
These great and small aspects of Nature are not only celebrated, they
are loved. One cannot read the stories in this book without feeling
that the people who conceived and made them observed Nature and her
ways with a careful affection, which seems to be more developed in the
Celtic folk than elsewhere in modern Europe. There is nothing which
resembles it in Teutonic story-telling. In the story of _The Children
of Lir_, though there is no set description of scenery, we feel the
spirit of the landscape by the lake where Lir listened for three
hundred years to the sweet songs of his children. And, as we read of
their future fate, we are filled with the solitude and mystery, the
ruthlessness and beauty of the ocean. Even its gentleness on quiet
days enters from the tale into our imagination. Then, too, the
mountain-glory and the mountain-gloom are again and again
imaginatively described and loved. The windings and recesses, the
darkness and brightness of the woods and the glades therein, enchant
the Fenians even when they are in mortal danger. And the waters of the
great lakes, the deep pools of the rivers, the rippling shallows, the
green banks, the brown rushing of the torrents, are all alive in the
prose and song of Ireland. How deep was the Irish love of these
delightful things is plain from their belief that "the place of the
revealing of poetry was always by the margin of water." And the Salmon
of Knowledge, the eating of which gave Finn his pre-eminence, swam in
a green pool, still and deep, over which hung a rowan tree that shed
its red berries on the stream. Lovely were the places whence Art and
Knowledge came.
Then, as to all good landscape lovers, the beasts, birds, and insects
of Nature were dear to these ancient people. One of the things Finn
most cared for was not only his hounds, but the "blackbird singing on
Letterlee"; and his song, on page 114, in the praise of May, tells us
how keen was his observant eye for animal life and how much it
delighted him. The same minute realisation of natural objects is
illustrated in this book when King Iubdan explains to the servant the
different characteristics of the trees of the forest, and the mystic
elements that abide in them. It was a habit, even of Teutonic poets,
to tell of the various trees and their uses in verse, and Spenser and
Drayton have both done it in later times. But few of them have added,
as the Irish story does, a spiritual element to their description, and
made us think of malign or beneficent elements attached to them. The
woodbine, and this is a strange fancy, is the king of the woods. The
rowan is the tree of the magicians, and its berries are for poets. The
bramble is inimical to man, the alder is full of witchcraft, and the
elder is the wood of the horses of the fairies. Into every tree a
spiritual power is infused; and the good lords of the forest are loved
of men and birds and bees.
Thus the Irish love of nature led them to spiritualise, in another way
than mythical, certain things in nature, and afterwards to humanise,
up to a certain point, the noble implements wrought by human skill out
of natural materials. And this is another element in all these
stories, as it is in the folk-lore also of other lands. In the tale of
the Sons of Turenn, the stones of the wayside tell to Lugh the story
of the death of his father Kian, and the boat of Mananan, indwelt by a
spirit, flies hither and thither over the seas, obeying the commands,
even the thought, of its steersman. The soul of some famed spears is
so hot for slaughter that, when it is not being used in battle, its
point must stand in a bath of blood or of drowsy herbs, lest it
should slay the host. The swords murmur and hiss and cry out for the
battle; the shield of the hero hums louder and louder, vibrating for
the encouragement of the warrior. Even the wheels of Cuchulain's
chariot roar as they whirl into the fight. This partial life given to
the weapons of war is not specially Celtic. Indeed, it is more common
in Teutonic than in Celtic legend, and it seems probable that it was
owing to the Norsemen that it was established in the Hero tales of
Ireland.
This addition of life, or of some of the powers of life, to tree and
well and boulder-stone, to river and lake and hill, and sword and
spear, is common to all mythologies, but the special character of each
nation or tribe modifies the form of the life-imputing stories. In
Ireland the tree, the stream were not dwelt in by a separate living
being, as in Grecian story; the half-living powers they had were given
to them from without, by the gods, the demons, the fairies; and in the
case of the weapons, the powers they had of act or sound arose from
the impassioned thoughts and fierce emotions of their forger or their
wielder, which, being intense, were magically transferred to them. The
Celtic nature is too fond of reality, too impatient of illusion, to
believe in an actual living spirit in inanimate things. At least, that
is the case in the stories of the Hero and the Fenian Cycles.[5]
[5] Everything, on the contrary, in the Mythological Cycle is
gifted with life, all the doings and things of nature are
represented as the work of living creatures; but it is quite
possible that those in Ireland who made these myths were not
Celts at all.
What the Irish of the Heroic, and still more of the Fenian Cycle, did
make in their imagination was a world, outside of themselves, of
living spiritual beings, in whose actuality they fully believed, and
in whom a great number of them still believe. A nation, if I may use
this term, dwelt under the sea. Another dwelt in the far island of the
ocean, the Isle of the Ever-Young. Another dwelt in the land, in the
green hills and by the streams of Ireland; and these were the ancient
gods who had now lost their dominion over the country, but lived on,
with all their courtiers and warriors and beautiful women in a country
underground. As time went on, their powers were dwarfed, and they
became small of size, less beautiful, and in our modern times are less
inclined to enter into the lives of men and women. But the Irish
peasant still sees them flitting by his path in the evening light, or
dancing on the meadow round the grassy mound, singing and playing
strange melodies; or mourns for the child they have carried away to
live with them and forget her people, or watches with fear his
dreaming daughter who has been touched by them, and is never again
quite a child of this earth, or quite of the common race of man.
These were the invisible lands and peoples of the Irish imagination;
and they live in and out of many of the stories. Cuchulain is lured
into a fairy-land, and lives for more than a year in love with Fand,
Mananan's wife. Into another fairy-land, through zones of mist,
Cormac, as is told here, was lured by Mananan, who now has left the
sea to play on the land. Oisín, as I have already said, flies with
Niam over the sea to the island of Eternal Youth. Etain, out of the
immortal land, is born into an Irish girl and reclaimed and carried
back to her native shore by Midir, a prince of the Fairy Host. Ethne,
whose story also is here, has lived for all her youth in the court of
Angus, deep in the hill beside the rushing of the Boyne.
These stories are but a few out of a great number of the loves and
wars between the men and women of the human and the fairy races.
Curiously enough, as the stories become less ancient, the relations
between men and the fairies are more real, more close, even more
affectionate. Finn and the Fianna seem to be almost in daily
companionship with the fairy host--much nearer to them than the men of
the Heroic Cycle are to the gods. They interchange love and music and
battle and adventure with one another. They are, for the most part,
excellent friends; and their intercourse suffers from no doubt. It is
as real as the intercourse between Welsh and English on the
Borderland.
There was nothing illusive, nothing merely imaginary, in these fairy
worlds for the Irish hero or the Irish people. They believed the lands
to be as real as their own, and the indwellers of fairyland to have
like passions with themselves. Finn is not a bit surprised when
Vivionn the giantess sits beside him on the hill, or Fergus when King
Iubdan stands on his hand; or St Patrick when Ethne, out of fairyland,
dies on his breast, or when he sees, at his spell, Cuchulain, dead
some nine hundred years, come forth out of the dark gates of Sheol,
high in his chariot, grasping his deadly spear, driven as of old by
his well-loved charioteer, drawn by the immortal steeds through the
mist, and finally talking of his deeds and claiming a place in the
Christian heaven--a place that Patrick yields to him. The invisible
worlds lived, loved, and thought around this visible world, and were,
it seems, closer and more real to the Celtic than to other races.
But it was not only these agreeable and lovely folk in pleasant
habitations whom the Irish made, but also spirits of another sort, of
lesser powers and those chiefly malignant, having no fixed
dwelling-place, homeless in the air and drifting with it, embodying
the venomous and deadly elements of the earth and the angers and
cruelty of the sea, and the hypocrisy of them all--demons, some of
whom, like the stepmother of the children of Lir, have been changed
from men or women because of wicked doings, but the most part born of
the evil in Nature herself. They do what harm they can to innocent
folk; they enter into, support, and direct--like Macbeth's
witches--the evil thoughts of men; they rejoice in the battle, in the
wounds and pain and death of men; they shriek and scream and laugh
around the head of the hero when he goes forth, like Cuchulain, to an
unwearied slaughter of men. They make the blight, the deadly mist, the
cruel tempest. To deceive is their pleasure; to discourage, to baffle,
to ruin the hero is their happiness. Some of them are monsters of
terrific aspect who abide in lakes or in desolate rocks, as the
terrible tri-formed horse whom Fergus mac Leda conquered and by whom
he died.
Naturally, as a link between these supernatural worlds and the natural
world, there arose a body of men and women in Irish legend who, by
years of study, gained a knowledge of, and power over, the
supernatural beings, and used these powers for hurt to the enemies of
their kingdom, or for help to their own people. Some were wise,
learned, and statesmanlike, and used their powers for good. These were
the high Druids, and every king had a band of them at his court and in
his wars. They practiced what the Middle Ages called white magic.
Others were wizards, magicians, witches, who, like the children of
Cailitin, the foes of Cuchulain, or the three mutilated women whom
Maev educated in evil craft to do evil to her foes, or the dread band
that deceived Cuchulain into his last ride of death, practised black
magic--evil, and the ministers of evil. Magic, and the doing of it,
runs through the whole of Irish story-telling, and not only into pagan
but also into Christian legend; for it was easy to change the old gods
into devils, to keep the demonic creatures as demons, to replace the
wise Druids by the priests and saints, and the wizards by the heretics
who gave themselves to sorcery. Thus the ancient supernaturalism of
the Irish has continued, with modern modifications, to the present
day. The body of thought is much the same as it was in the days of
Conor and Finn; the clothing is a bit different.
Another characteristic of the stories, especially in the mythological
period, is the barbaric brutality which appears in them. Curiously
mingled with this, in direct contrast, is their tenderness. These
extreme contrasts are common in the Celtic nature. A Gael, whether of
Ireland or the Western Isles, will pass in a short time from the
wildest spirits, dancing and singing and drinking, into deep and grim
depression--the child of the present, whether in love or war; and in
the tales of Ireland there is a similar contrast between their
brutality and their tenderness. The sudden fierce jealousy and the
pitiless cruelty of their stepmother to the children of Lir is set
over against the exquisite tenderness of Fionnuala, which pervades the
story like an air from heaven. The noble tenderness of Deirdre, of
Naisi and his brothers, in life and death, to one another, is lovelier
in contrast with the savage and treacherous revenge of Conor. The
great pitifulness of Cuchulain's fight with his dear friend Ferdia,
whom he is compelled to slay; the crowning tenderness of Emer's
recollective love in song before she dies on Cuchulain's dead body,
are in full contrast with the savage hard-heartedness and cruelties of
Maev, and with the ruthless slaughters Cuchulain made of his foes, out
of which he seems often to pass, as it were, in a moment, into
tenderness and gracious speech. Even Finn, false for once to his
constant courtesy, revenges himself on Dermot so pitilessly that both
his son and grandson cry shame upon him.
Of course this barbaric cruelty is common to all early periods in
every nation; and, whenever fierce passion is aroused, to civilised
nations also. What is remarkable in the Irish tales is the
contemporary tenderness. The Vikings were as savage as the Irish, but
the savagery is not mingled with the Irish tenderness. At last, when
we pass from the Hero Cycle into the Cycle of Finn, there is scarcely
any of the ancient brutality to be found in the host of romantic
stories which gather round the chivalry of the Fenians.
There are other characteristics of these old tales on which I must
dwell. The first is the extra-ordinary love of colour. This is not a
characteristic of the early German, English or Scandinavian poems and
tales. Its remarkable presence in Scottish poetry, at a time when it
is scarcely to be found in English literature, I have traced elsewhere
to the large admixture of Celtic blood in the Lowlands of Scotland. In
early Irish work it is to be found everywhere. In descriptions of
Nature, which chiefly appear in the Fenian Cycle and in Christian
times, colour is not as much dwelt on as we should expect, for nowhere
that I have seen is it more delicate and varied than under the Irish
atmosphere. Yet, again and again, the amber colour of the streams as
they come from the boglands, and the crimson and gold of the
sunsetting, and the changing green of the trees, and the blue as it
varies and settles down on the mountains when they go to their rest,
and the green crystal of the sea in calm and the dark purple of it in
storm, and the white foam of the waves when they grow black in the
squall, and the brown of the moors, and the yellow and rose and
crimson of the flowers, and many another interchanging of colour, are
seen and spoken of as if it were a common thing always to dwell on
colour. This literary custom I do not find in any other Western
literature. It is even more remarkable in the descriptions of the
dress and weapons of the warriors and kings. They blaze with colour;
and as gold was plentiful in Ireland in those far-off days, yellow and
red are continually flashing in and out of the blue and green and rich
purple of their dress. The women are dressed in as rich colours as the
men. When Eochy met Etain by the spring of pure water, as told in this
book, she must have flashed in the sunlight like a great jewel. Then,
the halls where they met and the houses of the kings are represented
as glorious with colour, painted in rich patterns, hung with woven
cloths dyed deep with crimson and blue and green and yellow. The
common things in use, eating and drinking implements, the bags they
carry, the bed-clothing, the chess-men, the tables, are embroidered or
chased or set with red carbuncles or white stones or with interlacing
of gold. Colour is everywhere and everywhere loved. And where colour
is loved the arts flourish, as the decorative arts flourished in
Ireland.
Lastly, on this matter, the Irish tale-tellers, even to the present
day, dwell with persistence on the colour of the human body as a
special loveliness, and with as much love of it as any Venetian when
he painted it. And they did this with a comparison of its colour to
the colours they observed in Nature, so that the colour of one was
harmonised with the colour of the other. I might quote many such
descriptions of the appearance of the warriors--they are
multitudinous--but the picture of Etain is enough to illustrate what I
say--"Her hair before she loosed it was done in two long tresses,
yellow like the flower of the waterflag in summer or like red gold.
Her hands were white as the snow of a single night, and her eyes as
blue as the dark hyacinth, and her lips red as the berries of the
rowan-tree, and her body as white as the foam of the sea-waves. The
radiance of the moon was in her face and the light of wooing in her
eyes." So much for the Irish love of colour.[6]
[6] I give one example of the way colour was laid on to animals
just for the pleasure of it. "And the eagle and cranes were red
with green heads, and their eggs were pure crimson and blue";
and deep in the wood the travellers found "strange birds with
white bodies and purple heads and golden beaks," and afterwards
three great birds, "one blue and his head crimson, and another
crimson and his head green, and another speckled and his head
gold."
Their love of music was equally great; and was also connected with
Nature. "The sound of the flowing of streams," said one of their
bardic clan, "is sweeter than any music of men." "The harp of the
woods is playing music," said another. In Finn's Song to May, the
waterfall is singing a welcome to the pool below, the loudness of
music is around the hill, and in the green fields the stream is
singing. The blackbird, the cuckoo, the heron and the lark are the
musicians of the world. When Finn asks his men what music they thought
the best, each says his say, but Oisín answers, "The music of the
woods is sweetest to me, the sound of the wind and of the blackbird,
and the cuckoo and the soft silence of the heron." And Finn himself,
when asked what was his most beloved music, said first that it was
"the sharp whistling of the wind as it went through the uplifted
spears of the seven battalions of the Fianna," and this was fitting
for a hero to say. But when the poet in him spoke, he said his music
was the crying of the sea-gull, and the noise of the waves, and the
voice of the cuckoo when summer was at hand, and the washing of the
sea against the shore, and of the tide when it met the river of the
White Trout, and of the wind rushing through the cloud. And many other
sayings of the same kind this charming and poetic folk has said
concerning those sweet, strong sounds in Nature out of which the music
of men was born.
Again, there is not much music in the Mythological Tales. Lugh, it is
true, is a great harper, and the harp of the Dagda, into which he has
bound his music, plays a music at whose sound all men laugh, and
another so that all men weep, and another so enthralling that all fall
asleep; and these three kinds of music are heard through all the
Cycles of Tales. Yet when the old gods of the mythology became the
Sidhe,[7] the Fairy Host, they--having left their barbaric life
behind--became great musicians. In every green hill where the tribes
of fairy-land lived, sweet, wonderful music was heard all day--such
music that no man could hear but he would leave all other music to
listen to it, which "had in it sorrows that man has never felt, and
joys for which man has no name, and it seemed as if he who heard it
might break from time into eternity and be one of the immortals." And
when Finn and his people lived, they, being in great harmony and union
with the Sidhe, heard in many adventures with them their lovely music,
and it became their own. Indeed, Finn, who had twelve musicians, had
as their chief one of the Fairy Host who came to dwell with him, a
little man who played airs so divine that all weariness and sorrow
fled away. And from him Finn's musicians learnt a more enchanted art
than they had known before. And so it came to pass that as in every
fairy dwelling there was this divine art, so in every palace and
chieftain's hall, and in every farm, there were harpers harping on
their harps, and all the land was full of sweet sounds and
airs--shaping in music, imaginative war, and sorrows, and joys, and
aspiration. Nor has their music failed. Still in the west and south of
Ireland, the peasant, returning home, hears, as the evening falls from
the haunted hills, airs unknown before, or at midnight a wild
triumphant song from the Fairy Host rushing by, or wakes with a dream
melody in his heart. And these are played and sung next day to the
folk sitting round the fire. Many who heard these mystic sounds became
themselves the makers of melodies, and went about the land singing and
making and playing from village to village and cabin to cabin, till
the unwritten songs of Ireland were as numerous as they were various.
Moore collected a hundred and twenty of them, but of late more than
five hundred he knew not of have been secured from the people and from
manuscripts for the pleasure of the world. And in them lives on the
spirit of the Fianna, and the mystery of the Fairy Host, and the long
sorrow and the fleeting joy of the wild weather in the heart of the
Irish race.
[7] This word is pronounced Shee, and means "the folk of the
fairy mounds."
As to the poetry of Ireland, that other Art which is illustrated in
this book, so fully has it been dwelt on by many scholars and critics
that it needs not be touched here other than lightly and briefly. The
honour and dignity of the art of poetry goes back in Irish mythology
to a dim antiquity. The ancient myth said that the nine hazels of
wisdom grew round a deep spring beneath the sea, and the hazels were
the hazels of inspiration and of poetry--so early in Ireland were
inspiration and poetry made identical with wisdom. Seven streams of
wisdom flowed from that fountain-head, and when they had fed the world
returned to it again. And all the art-makers of mankind, and of all
arts, have drunk of their waters. Five salmon in the spring ate of the
hazel nuts, and some haunted the rivers of Ireland; and whosoever,
like Finn, tasted the flesh of these immortal fish, was possessed of
the wisdom which is inspiration and poetry. Such was the ancient Irish
conception of the art of poetry.
It is always an art which grows slowly into any excellence, and it
needs for such growth a quieter life than the Irish lived for many
centuries. Poems appear but rarely in the mythological or heroic
cycles, and are loosely scattered among the prose of the bardic tales.
A few are of war, but they are chiefly dirges like the Song of Emer
over the dead body of Cuchulain, or that of Deirdre over
Naisi--pathetic wailings for lost love. There is an abrupt and pitiful
pain in the brief songs of Fionnuala, but I fancy these were made and
inserted in Christian times. Poetry was more at home among the Fianna.
The conditions of life were easier; there was more leisure and more
romance. And the other arts, which stimulate poetry, were more widely
practised than in the earlier ages. Finn's Song to May, here
translated, is of a good type, frank and observant, with a fresh air
in it, and a fresh pleasure in its writing. I have no doubt that at
this time began the lyric poetry of Ireland, and it reached, under
Christian influences, a level of good, I can scarcely say excellent,
work, at a time when no other lyrical poetry in any vernacular existed
in Europe or the Islands. It was religious, mystic, and chiefly
pathetic--prayers, hymns, dirges, regrets in exile, occasional stories
of the saints whose legendary acts were mixed with pagan elements, and
most of these were adorned with illustrations drawn from natural
beauty or from the doings of birds and beasts--a great affection for
whom is prominent in the Celtic nature. The Irish poets sent this
lyric impulse into Iceland, Wales, and Scotland, and from Scotland
into England; and the rise of English vernacular poetry instead of
Latin in the seventh and eighth centuries is due to the impulse given
by the Irish monasteries at Whitby and elsewhere in Northumbria. The
first rude lyric songs of Cædmon were probably modelled on the hymns
of Colman.
One would think that poetry, which arose so early in a nation's life,
would have developed fully. But this was not the case in Ireland. No
narrative, dramatic, didactic, or epic poetry of any importance arose,
and many questions and answers might be made concerning this curious
restriction of development. The most probable solution of this problem
is that there was never enough peace in Ireland or continuity of
national existence or unity, to allow of a continuous development of
any one of the arts into all its forms. Irish poetry never advanced
beyond the lyric. In that form it lasted all through the centuries; it
lasts still at the present day, and Douglas Hyde has proved how much
charm belongs to it in his book on the _Love Songs of Connacht_.
It has had a long, long history; it has passed through many phases; it
has sung of love and sorrow, of national wars and hopes, of Ireland
herself as the Queen of Sorrow, of exile regrets from alien shores, of
rebellion, of hatred of England, of political strife, in ballads sung
in the streets, of a thousand issues of daily life and death--but of
world-wide affairs, of great passions and duties and fates evolving in
epic or clashing in drama, of continuous human lives in narrative
(except in prose), of the social life of cities or of philosophic
thought enshrined in stately verse, it has not sung. What it may do in
the future, if Irish again becomes a tongue of literature in lofty
poetry, lies on the knees of the gods. I wish it well, but such a
development seems now too late. The Irish genius, if it is to speak in
drama, in narrative poetry or in an epic, must speak, if it is to
influence or to charm the world beyond the Irish shore, in a
world-language like English, and of international as well as of Irish
humanity.
These elements on which I have dwelt seem to me the most distinctive,
the most Irish, in the Tales in this book. There are many others on
which a more minute analysis might exercise itself, phases of feeling
concerning war or love or friendship or honour or the passions, but
these are not specially Irish. They belong to common human nature, and
have their close analogies in other mythologies, in other Folk-tales,
in other Sagas. I need not touch them here. But there is one element
in all the Irish tales which I have not yet mentioned, and it brings
all the others within its own circumference, and suffuses them with
its own atmosphere. It is the love of Ireland, of the land itself for
its own sake--a mystic, spiritual imaginative passion which in the
soul of the dweller in the country is a constant joy, and in the heart
of the exile is a sick yearning for return. There are not many direct
expressions of this in the stories; but it underlies the whole of
them, and it is also in the air they breathe. But now and again it
does find clear expression, and in each of the cycles we have
discussed. When the sons of Turenn are returning, wounded to death,
from the Hill of Mochaen, they felt but one desire. "Let us but see,"
said Iuchar and Iucharba to their brother Brian, "the land of Erin
again, the hills round Telltown, and the dewy plain of Bregia and the
quiet waters of the Boyne and our father's Dún thereby, and healing
will come to us; or if death come, we can endure it after that." Then
Brian raised them up; and they saw that they were now near by under
Ben Edar; and at the strand of the Bull they came to land. That is
from the Mythological Cycle.
In the Heroic Cycle it appears in the longing cry for return to
Ireland of Naisi and his brothers, which drives them out of Alba to
their death; but otherwise it is rarely expressed. In the Fenian Cycle
it exists, not in any clear words, but in a general delight in the
rivers, lakes, woods, valleys, plains, and mountains of Ireland. Every
description of them, and of life among them, is done with a loving,
observant touch; and moreover, the veil of magic charm is thrown over
all the land by the creation in it of the life and indwelling of the
fairy host. The Fianna loved their country well.
When Christianity came, this deep-set sentiment did not lessen. It
grew even stronger, and in exile it became a passion. It is
illustrated by the songs of deep regret and affection Columba made in
Iona, from whose rocky shores he looked day after day towards the west
while the mists rose over Ireland. One little story of great beauty
enshrines his passion. One morning he called to his side one of his
monks, and said, "Go to the margin of the sea on the western side of
our isle; and there, coming from the north of Ireland, you will see a
voyaging crane, very weary and beaten by the storms, and it will fall
at your feet on the beach. Lift it up with pity and carry it to the
hut, nourish it for three days, and when it is refreshed and strong
again it will care no more to stay with us in exile, but to fly back
to sweet Ireland, the dear country where it was born. I charge you
thus, for it comes from the land where I was born myself." And when
his servant returned, having done as he was ordered, Columba said,
"May God bless you, my son. Since you have well cared for our exiled
guest, you will see it return to its own land in three days." And so
it was. It rose, sought its path for a moment through the sky, and
took flight on a steady wing for Ireland. The spirit of that story has
never died in the soul of the Irish and in their poetry up to the
present day.
Lastly, as we read these stories, even in a modern dress, an
impression of great ancientry is made upon us, so much so that some
scholars have tried to turn Finn into a mythical hero--but if he be as
old as that implies, of how great an age must be the clearly mythic
tales which gather round the Tuatha de Danaan? However this may be,
the impression of ancientry is deep and agreeable. All myths in any
nation are, of course, of a high antiquity, but as they treat of the
beginning of things, they mingle an impression of youth with one of
age. This is very pleasant to the imagination, and especially so if
the myths, as in Ireland, have some poetic beauty or strangeness, as
in the myth I have referred to--of the deep spring of clear water and
the nine hazels of wisdom that encompass it. This mingling of the
beauty of youth and the honour of ancientry runs through all the Irish
tales. Youth and the love of it, of its beauty and strength, adorn and
vitalize their grey antiquity. But where, in their narrative, the
hero's youth is over and the sword weak in his hand, and the passion
less in his and his sweetheart's blood, life is represented as
scarcely worth the living. The famed men and women die young--the sons
of Turenn, Cuchulain, Conall, Dermot, Emer, Deirdre, Naisi, Oscar.
Oisín has three hundred years of youth in that far land in the
invention of which the Irish embodied their admiration of love and
youth. His old age, when sudden feebleness overwhelms him, is made by
the bardic clan as miserable, as desolate as his youth was joyous.
Again, Finn lives to be an old man, but the immortal was in him, and
either he has been born again in several re-incarnations (for the
Irish held from time to time the doctrine of the transmigration of
souls), or he sleeps, like Barbarossa, in a secret cavern, with all
his men around him, and beside him the mighty horn of the Fianna,
which, when the day of fate and freedom comes, will awaken with three
loud blasts the heroes and send them forth to victory. Old as she is,
Ireland does not grow old, for she has never reached her maturity. Her
full existence is before her, not behind her. And when she reaches it
her ancientry and all its tales will be dearer to her than they have
been in the past. They will be an inspiring national asset. In them
and in their strange admixture of different and successive periods of
customs, thoughts and emotions (caused by the continuous editing and
re-editing of them, first in oral recitation and then at the hands of
scribes), Ireland will see the record of her history, not the history
of external facts, but of her soul as it grew into consciousness of
personality; as it established in itself love of law, of moral right,
of religion, of chivalry, of courtesy in war and daily life; as it
rejoiced, and above all, as it suffered and was constant, in suffering
and oppression, to its national ideals.
It seems as if, once at least, this aspect of the tales of Ireland was
seen by men of old, for there is a story which tells that heaven
itself desired their remembrance, and that we should be diverted and
inspired by them. In itself it is a record of the gentleness of Irish
Christianity to Irish heathendom, and of its love of the heroic past.
For one day when Patrick and his clerks were singing the Mass at the
Rath of the Red Ridge, where Finn was wont to be, he saw Keelta, a
chief of the Fianna, draw near with his companions, and Keelta's huge
hounds were with him. They were men so tall and great that fear fell
on the clerks, but Patrick met with and asked their chieftain's name.
"I am Keelta," he answered, "son of Ronan of the Fianna." "Was it not
a good lord you were with," said Patrick, "Finn, son of Cumhal?" And
Keelta said, "If the brown leaves falling in the wood were gold, if
the waves of the sea were silver, Finn would have given them all
away." "What was it kept you through your lifetime?" said Patrick.
"Truth that was in our hearts, and strength in our hands, and
fulfilment in our tongues," said Keelta. Then Patrick gave them food
and drink and good treatment, and talked with them. And in the morning
the two angels who guarded him came to him, and he asked them if it
were any harm before God, King of heaven and earth, that he should
listen to the stories of the Fianna. And the angels answered, "Holy
Clerk, these old fighting men do not remember more than a third of
their tales by reason of the forgetfulness of age, but whatever they
tell write it down on the boards of the poets and in the words of the
poets, for it will be a diversion to the companies and the high people
of the latter times to listen to them."[8] So spoke the angels, and
Patrick did as he bade them, and the stories are in the world to this
day.
[8] This is quoted with a few omissions, from Lady Gregory's
delightful version, in her _Book of Saints and Wonders_, of an
episode in _The Colloquy of the Ancients_ (Silva Gadelica).
STOPFORD A. BROOKE
ST PATRICK'S DAY, 1910
COIS NA TEINEADH
(_By the Fireside._)
Where glows the Irish hearth with peat
There lives a subtle spell--
The faint blue smoke, the gentle heat,
The moorland odours, tell
Of long roads running through a red
Untamed unfurrowed land,
With curlews keening overhead,
And streams on either hand;
Black turf-banks crowned with whispering sedge,
And black bog-pools below;
While dry stone wall or ragged hedge
Leads on, to meet the glow
From cottage doors, that lure us in
From rainy Western skies,
To seek the friendly warmth within,
The simple talk and wise;
Or tales of magic, love and arms
From days when princes met
To listen to the lay that charms
The Connacht peasant yet.
There Honour shines through passions dire,
There beauty blends with mirth--
Wild hearts, ye never did aspire
Wholly for things of earth!
Cold, cold this thousand years--yet still
On many a time-stained page
Your pride, your truth, your dauntless will,
Burn on from age to age.
And still around the fires of peat
Live on the ancient days;
There still do living lips repeat
The old and deathless lays.
And when the wavering wreaths ascend,
Blue in the evening air,
The soul of Ireland seems to bend
Above her children there.
BARDIC ROMANCES
CHAPTER I
The Story of the Children of Lir
Long ago there dwelt in Ireland the race called by the name of De
Danaan, or People of the Goddess Dana. They were a folk who delighted
in beauty and gaiety, and in fighting and feasting, and loved to go
gloriously apparelled, and to have their weapons and household vessels
adorned with jewels and gold. They were also skilled in magic arts,
and their harpers could make music so enchanting that a man who heard
it would fight, or love, or sleep, or forget all earthly things, as
they who touched the strings might will him to do. In later times the
Danaans had to dispute the sovranty of Ireland with another race, the
Children of Miled, whom men call the Milesians, and after much
fighting they were vanquished. Then, by their sorceries and
enchantments, when they could not prevail against the invaders, they
made themselves invisible, and they have dwelt ever since in the Fairy
Mounds and raths of Ireland, where their shining palaces are hidden
from mortal eyes. They are now called the Shee, or Fairy Folk of
Erinn, and the faint strains of unearthly music that may be heard at
times by those who wander at night near to their haunts come from the
harpers and pipers who play for the People of Dana at their revels in
the bright world underground.
At the time when the tale begins, the People of Dana were still the
lords of Ireland, for the Milesians had not yet come. They were
divided it is said, into many families and clans; and it seemed good
to them that their chiefs should assemble together, and choose one to
be king and ruler over the whole people. So they met in a great
assembly for this purpose, and found that five of the greatest lords
all desired the sovranty of Erin. These five were Bóv the Red, and
Ilbrech of Assaroe, and Lir from the Hill of the White Field, which is
on Slieve Fuad in Armagh; and Midir the Proud, who dwelt at Slieve
Callary in Longford; and Angus of Brugh na Boyna, which is now
Newgrange on the river Boyne, where his mighty mound is still to be
seen. All the Danaan lords saving these five went into council
together, and their decision was to give the sovranty to Bóv the Red,
partly because he was the eldest, partly because his father was the
Dagda, mightiest of the Danaans, and partly because he was himself the
most deserving of the five.
All were content with this, save only Lir, who thought himself the
fittest for royal rule; so he went away from the assembly in anger,
taking leave of no one. When this became known, the Danaan lords would
have pursued Lir, to burn his palace and inflict punishment and
wounding on himself for refusing obedience and fealty to him whom the
assembly had chosen to reign over them. But Bóv the Red forbade them,
for he would not have war among the Danaans; and he said, "I am none
the less King of the People of Dana because this man will not do
homage to me."
Thus it went on for a long time. But at last a great misfortune befell
Lir, for his wife fell ill, and after three nights she died. Sorely
did Lir grieve for this, and he fell into a great dejection of spirit,
for his wife was very dear to him and was much thought of by all folk,
so that her death was counted one of the great events of that time.
Now Bóv the Red came ere long to hear of it, and he said, "If Lir
would choose to have my help and friendship now, I can serve him well,
for his wife is no longer living, and I have three maidens, daughters
of a friend, in fosterage with me, namely, Eva and Aoife[9] and Elva,
and there are none fairer and of better name in Erin; one of these he
might take to wife." And the lords of the Danaans heard what he said,
and answered that it was true and well bethought. So messengers were
sent to Lir, to say that if he were willing to yield the sovranty to
Bóv the Red, he might make alliance with him and wed one of his
foster-children. To Lir, having been thus gently entreated, it seemed
good to end the feud, and he agreed to the marriage. So the following
day he set out with a train of fifty chariots from the Hill of the
White Field and journeyed straight for the palace of Bóv the Red,
which was by Lough Derg on the river Shannon.
[9] Pronounced Eefa.
Arriving there, he found about him nothing but joy and glad faces, for
the renewal of amity and concord; and his people were welcomed, and
well entreated, and handsomely entertained for the night.
[Illustration: "There sat the three maidens with the Queen"]
And there sat the three maidens on the same couch with the Danaan
Queen, and Bóv the Red bade Lir choose which one he would have to
wife.
"The maidens are all fair and noble," said Lir, "but the eldest is
first in consideration and honour, and it is she that I will take, if
she be willing."
"The eldest is Eva," said Bóv the Red, "and she will wed thee if it be
pleasing to thee." "It is pleasing," said Lir, and the pair were
wedded the same night. Lir abode for fourteen days in the palace of
Bóv the Red, and then departed with his bride, to make a great
wedding-feast among his own people.
In due time after this Eva, wife of Lir, bore him two fair children at
a birth, a daughter and a son. The daughter's name was called
Fionnuala of the Fair Shoulder, and the son's name was Hugh. And
again she bore him two sons, Fiachra and Conn; and at their birth she
died. At this Lir was sorely grieved and afflicted, and but for the
great love he bore to his four children he would gladly have died too.
When the folk at the palace of Bóv the Red heard that, they also were
sorely grieved at the death of their foster-child, and they lamented
her with keening and with weeping. Bóv the Red said, "We grieve for
this maiden on account of the good man we gave her to, and for his
friendship and fellowship; howbeit our friendship shall not be
sundered, for we shall give him to wife her sister, namely Aoife."
Word of this was brought to Lir, and he went once more to Lough Derg
to the palace of Bóv the Red and there he took to wife Aoife, the fair
and wise, and brought her to his own home. And Aoife held the children
of Lir and of her sister in honour and affection; for indeed no one
could behold these four children without giving them the love of his
soul.
For love of them, too, came Bóv the Red often to the house of Lir, and
he would take them to his own house at times and let them spend a
while there, and then to their own home again. All of the People of
Dana who came visiting and feasting to Lir had joy and delight in the
children, for their beauty and gentleness; and the love of their
father for them was exceeding great, so that he would rise very early
every morning to lie down among them and play with them.
Only, alas! a fire of jealousy began to burn at last in the breast of
Aoife, and hatred and bitter ill-will grew in her mind towards the
children of Lir. And she feigned an illness, and lay under it for the
most of a year, meditating a black and evil deed. At last she said
that a journey from home might recover her, and she bade her chariot
be yoked and set out, taking with her the four children. Fionnuala was
sorely unwilling to go with her on that journey, for she had a
misgiving, and a prevision of treachery and of kin-slaying against her
in the mind of Aoife. Yet she was not able to avoid the mischief that
was destined for her.
So Aoife journeyed away from the Hill of the White Field, and when she
had come some way she spoke to her people and said, "Kill me, I pray
ye, the four children of Lir, who have taken the love of their father
from me, and ye may ask of me what reward ye will." "Not so," said
they, "by us they shall never be killed; it is an evil deed that you
have thought of, and evil it is but to have spoken of it."
When they would not consent to her will, she drew a sword and would
have slain the children herself, but her womanhood overcame her and
she could not. So they journeyed on westward till they came to the
shores of Loch Derryvaragh, and there they made a halt and the horses
were outspanned. Aoife bade the children bathe and swim in the lake,
and they did so. Then Aoife by Druid spells and witchcraft put upon
each of the children the form of a pure white swan, and she cried to
them:--
"Out on the lake with you, children of Lir!
Cry with the water-fowl over the mere!
Breed and seed of you ne'er shall I see;
Woeful the tale to your friends shall be."
Then the four swans turned their faces towards the woman, and
Fionnuala spoke to her and said, "Evil is thy deed, Aoife, to destroy
us thus without a cause, and think not that thou shalt escape
punishment for it. Assign us even some period to the ruin and
destruction that thou hast brought upon us."
"I shall do that," said Aoife, "and it is this: in your present forms
shall ye abide, and none shall release you till the woman of the South
be mated with the man of the North. Three hundred years shall ye be
upon the waters of Derryvaragh, and three hundred upon the Straits of
Moyle between Erinn and Alba,[10] and three hundred in the seas by
Erris and Inishglory, and then shall the enchantment have an end."
[10] Scotland. Inishglory is an island in the Bay of Erris, on
the Mayo coast.
Upon this, Aoife was smitten with repentance, and she said, "Since I
may not henceforth undo what has been done, I give you this, that ye
shall keep your human speech, and ye shall sing a sad music such as no
music in the world can equal, and ye shall have your reason and your
human will, that the bird-shape may not wholly destroy you." Then she
became as one possessed, and cried wildly like a prophetess in her
trance:--
"Ye with the white faces! Ye with the stammering
Gaelic on your tongues!
Soft was your nurture in the King's house--
Now shall ye know the buffeting wind!
Nine hundred years upon the tide.
"The heart of Lir shall bleed!
None of his victories shall stead him now!
Woe to me that I shall hear his groan,
Woe that I have deserved his wrath!"
Then they caught and yoked her horses, and Aoife went on her way till
she reached the palace of Bóv the Red. Here she and her folk were
welcomed and entertained, and Bóv the Red inquired of her why she had
not brought with her the children of Lir.
"I brought them not," she replied, "because Lir loves thee not, and he
fears that if he sends his children to thee, thou wouldst capture them
and hold them for hostages."
"That is strange," said Bóv the Red, "for I love those children as if
they were my own." And his mind misgave him that some treachery had
been wrought; and he sent messengers privily northwards to the Hill of
the White Field. "For what have ye come?" asked Lir. "Even to bring
your children to Bóv the Red," said they. "Did they not reach you with
Aoife?" said Lir. "Nay," said the messengers, "but Aoife said you
would not permit them to go with her."
Then fear and trouble came upon Lir, for he surmised that Aoife had
wrought evil upon the children. So his horses were yoked and he set
out upon his road south-westward, until he reached the shores of Loch
Derryvaragh. But as he passed by that water, Fionnuala saw the train
of horsemen and chariots, and she cried to her brothers to come near
to the shore, "for," said she, "these can only be the company of our
father who have come to follow and seek for us."
Lir, by the margin of the lake, saw the four swans and heard them
talking with human voices, and he halted and spoke to them. Then said
Fionnuala: "Know, O Lir, that we are thy four children, and that she
who has wrought this ruin upon us is thy wife and our mother's sister,
through the bitterness of her jealousy." Lir was glad to know that
they were at least living, and he said, "Is it possible to put your
own forms upon you again?" "It is not possible," said Fionnuala, "for
all the men on earth could not release us until the woman of the South
be mated with the man of the North." Then Lir and his people cried
aloud in grief and lamentation, and Lir entreated the swans to come on
land and abide with him since they had their human reason and speech.
But Fionnuala said, "That may not be, for we may not company with men
any longer, but abide on the waters of Erinn nine hundred years. But
we have still our Gaelic speech, and moreover we have the gift of
uttering sad music, so that no man who hears it thinks aught worth in
the world save to listen to that music for ever. Do you abide by the
shore for this night and we shall sing to you."
So Lir and his people listened all night to the singing of the swans,
nor could they move nor speak till morning, for all the high sorrows
of the world were in that music, and it plunged them in dreams that
could not be uttered.
Next day Lir took leave of his children and went on to the palace of
Bóv the Red. Bóv reproached him that he had not brought with him his
children. "Woe is me," said Lir, "it was not I that would not bring
them; but Aoife there, your own foster-child and their mother's
sister, put upon them the forms of four snow-white swans, and there
they are on the Loch of Derryvaragh for all men to see; but they have
kept still their reason and their human voice and their Gaelic."
Bóv the Red started when he heard this, and he knew that what Lir had
said was true. Fiercely he turned to Aoife, and said, "This treachery
will be worse, Aoife, for you than for them, for they shall be
released in the end of time, but thy punishment shall be for ever."
Then he smote her with a druid wand and she became a Demon of the Air,
and flew shrieking from the hall, and in that form she abides to this
day.
[Illustration: "They made an encampment and the swans sang to them"]
As for Bóv the Red, he came with his nobles and attendants to the
shores of Loch Derryvaragh, and there they made an encampment, and the
swans conversed with them and sang to them. And as the thing became
known, other tribes and clans of the People of Dana would also come
from every part of Erinn and stay awhile to listen to the swans and
depart again to their homes; and most of all came their own friends
and fellow-pupils from the Hill of the White Field. No such music as
theirs, say the historians of ancient times, ever was heard in Erinn,
for foes who heard it were at peace, and men stricken with pain or
sickness felt their ills no more; and the memory of it remained with
them when they went away, so that a great peace and sweetness and
gentleness was in the land of Erinn for those three hundred years that
the swans abode in the waters of Derryvaragh.
But one day Fionnuala said to her brethren, "Do ye know, my dear
ones, that the end of our time here is come, all but this night only?"
Then great sorrow and distress overcame them, for in the converse with
their father and kinsfolk and friends they had half forgotten that
they were no longer men, and they loved their home on Loch
Derryvaragh, and feared the angry waves of the cold northern sea. But
early next day they came to the lough-side to speak with Bóv the Red
and with their father, and to bid them farewell, and Fionnuala sang to
them her last lament. Then the four swans rose in the air and flew
northward till they were seen no more, and great was the grief among
those they left behind; and Bóv the Red let it be proclaimed
throughout the length and breadth of Erin that no man should
henceforth presume to kill a swan, lest it might chance to be one of
the children of Lir.
Far different was the dwelling-place which the swans now came to, from
that which they had known on Loch Derryvaragh. On either side of them,
to north and south, stretched a wide coast far as the eye could see,
beset with black rocks and great precipices, and by it ran fiercely
the salt, bitter tides of an ever-angry sea, cold, grey, and misty;
and their hearts sank to behold it and to think that there they must
abide for three hundred years.
Ere long, one night, there came a thick murky tempest upon them, and
Fionnuala said, "In this black and violent night, my brothers, we may
be driven apart from each other; let us therefore appoint a
meeting-place where we may come together again when the tempest is
overpast." And they settled to meet at the Seal Rock, for this rock
they had now all learned to know.
By midnight the hurricane descended upon the Straits of Moyle, and the
waves roared upon the coast with a deafening noise, and thunder
bellowed from the sky, and lightning was all the light they had. The
swans were driven apart by the violence of the storm, and when at last
the wind fell and the seas grew calm once more, Fionnuala found
herself alone upon the ocean-tide not far from the Seal Rock. And thus
she made her lament:--
"Woe is me to be yet alive!
My wings are frozen to my sides.
Wellnigh has the tempest shattered my heart,
And my comely Hugh parted from me!
"O my beloved ones, my Three,
Who slept under the shelter of my feathers,
Shall you and I ever meet again
Until the dead rise to life?
"Where is Fiachra, where is Hugh?
Where is my fair Conn?
Shall I henceforth bear my part alone?
Woe is me for this disastrous night!"
Fionnuala remained upon the Seal Rock until the morrow morn, watching
the tossing waters in all directions around her, until at last she saw
Conn coming towards her, and his head drooping and feathers drenched
and disarrayed. Joyfully did the sister welcome him; and ere long,
behold, Fiachra also approaching them, cold and wet and faint, and the
speech was frozen in him that not a word he spake could be understood.
So Fionnuala put her wings about him, and said, "If but Hugh came now,
how happy should we be!"
In no long time after that they saw Hugh also approaching them across
the sea, and his head was dry and his feathers fair and unruffled, for
he had found shelter from the gale. Fionnuala put him under her
breast, and Conn under her right wing and Fiachra under her left, and
covered them wholly with her feathers. "O children," she said to them,
"evil though ye think this night to have been, many such a one shall
we know from this time forward."
So there the swans continued, suffering cold and misery upon the tides
of Moyle; and one while they would be upon the coast of Alba and
another upon the coast of Erinn, but the waters they might not leave.
At length there came upon them a night of bitter cold and snow such
as they had never felt before, and Fionnuala sang this lament:--
"Evil is this life.
The cold of this night,
The thickness of the snow,
The sharpness of the wind--
"How long have they lain together,
Under my soft wings,
The waves beating upon us,
Conn and Hugh and Fiachra?
"Aoife has doomed us,
Us, the four of us,
To-night to this misery--
Evil is this life."
Thus for a long time they suffered, till at length there came upon the
Straits of Moyle a night of January so piercing cold that the like of
it had never been felt. And the swans were gathered together upon the
Seal Rock. The waters froze into ice around them, and each of them
became frozen in his place, so that their feet and feathers clung to
the rock; and when the day came and they strove to leave the place,
the skin of their feet and the feathers of their breasts clove to the
rock, they came naked and wounded away.
"Woe is me, O children of Lir," said Fionnuala, "we are now indeed in
evil case, for we cannot endure the salt water, yet we may not be away
from it; and if the salt water gets into our sores we shall perish of
it." And thus she sang:--
"To-night we are full of keening;
No plumage to cover our bodies;
And cold to our tender feet
Are the rough rocks all awash.
"Cruel to us was Aoife,
Who played her magic upon us,
And drove us out to the ocean,
Four wonderful, snow-white swans.
"Our bath is the frothing brine
In the bay by red rocks guarded,
For mead at our father's table
We drink of the salt blue sea.
"Three sons and a single daughter--
In clefts of the cold rocks dwelling,
The hard rocks, cruel to mortals.
--We are full of keening to-night."
So they went forth again upon the Straits of Moyle, and the brine was
grievously sharp and bitter to them, but they could not escape it nor
shelter themselves from it. Thus they were, till at last their
feathers grew again and their sores were healed.
On one day it happened that they came to the mouth of the river Bann
in the north of Erinn, and there they perceived a fair host of
horsemen riding on white steeds and coming steadily onward from the
south-west "Do ye know who yon riders are, children of Lir?" asked
Fionnuala. "We know not," said they, "but it is like they are some
party of the People of Dana." Then they moved to the margin of the
land, and the company they had seen came down to meet them; and
behold, it was Hugh and Fergus, the two sons of Bóv the Red, and their
nobles and attendants with them, who had long been seeking for the
swans along the coast of the Straits of Moyle.
Most lovingly and joyfully did they greet each other and the swans
inquired concerning their father Lir, and Bóv the Red, and the rest of
their kinsfolk.
"They are well," said the Danaans; "and at this time they are all
assembled together in the palace of your father at the Hill of the
White Field, where they are holding the Festival of the Age of
Youth.[11] They are happy and gay and have no weariness or trouble,
save that you are not among them, and that they have not known where
you were since you left them at Lough Derryvaragh."
[11] A magic banquet which had the effect of preserving for
ever the youth of the People of Dana.
"That is not the tale of our lives," said Fionnuala.
After that the company of the Danaans departed and brought word of the
swans to Bóv the Red and to Lir, who were rejoiced to hear that they
were living, "for," said they, "the children shall obtain relief in
the end of time." And the swans went back to the tides of Moyle and
abode there till their time to be in that place had expired.
When that day had come, Fionnuala declared it to them, and they rose
up wheeling in the air, and flew westward across Ireland till they
came to the Bay of Erris, and there they abode as was ordained. Here
it happened that among those of mortal MEN whose dwellings bordered on
the bay was a young man of gentle blood, by name Evric, who having
heard the singing of the swans came down to speak with them, and
became their friend. After that he would often come to hear their
music, for it was very sweet to him; and he loved them greatly, and
they him. All their story they told him, and he it was who set it
down in order, even as it is here narrated.
Much hardship did they suffer from cold and tempest in the waters of
the Western Sea, yet not so much as they had to bear by the coasts of
the ever-stormy Moyle, and they knew that the day of redemption was
now drawing near. In the end of the time Fionnuala said, "Brothers,
let us fly to the Hill of the White Field, and see how Lir our father
and his household are faring." So they arose and set forward on their
airy journey until they reached the Hill of the White Field, and thus
it was that they found the place: namely, desolate and thorny before
them, with nought but green mounds where once were the palaces and
homes of their kin, and forests of nettles growing over them, and
never a house nor a hearth. And the four drew closely together and
lamented aloud at that sight, for they knew that old times and things
had passed away in Erinn, and they were lonely in a land of strangers,
where no man lived who could recognise them when they came to their
human shapes again. They knew not that Lir and their kin of the People
of Dana yet dwelt invisible in the bright world within the Fairy
Mounds, for their eyes were holden that they should not see, since
other things were destined for them than to join the Danaan folk and
be of the company of the immortal Shee.
So they went back again to the Western Sea until the holy Patrick
came into Ireland and preached the Faith of the One God and of the
Christ. But a man of Patrick's men, namely the Saint Mochaovóg,[12]
came to the Island of Inishglory in Erris Bay, and there built himself
a little church of stone, and spent his life in preaching to the folk
and in prayer. The first night he came to the island the swans heard
the sound of his bell ringing at matins on the following morn, and
they leaped in terror, and the three brethren left Fionnuala and fled
away. Fionnuala cried to them, "What ails you, beloved brothers?" "We
know not," said they, "but we have heard a thin and dreadful voice,
and we cannot tell what it is." "That is the voice of the bell of
Mochaovóg," said Fionnuala, "and it is that bell which shall deliver
us and drive away our pains, according to the will of God."
[12] Pronounced Mo-chweev-ogue.
Then the brethren came back and hearkened to the chanting of the
cleric until matins were performed. "Let us chant our music now," said
Fionnuala. So they began, and chanted a solemn, slow, sweet, fairy
song in adoration of the High King of Heaven and of Earth.
Mochaovóg heard that, and wondered, and when he saw the swans he spoke
to them and inquired them. They told him they were the children of
Lir. "Praised be God for that," said Mochaovóg. "Surely it is for your
sakes that I have come to this island above every other island that is
in Erinn. Come to land now, and trust in me that your salvation and
release are at hand."
So they came to land, and dwelt with Mochaovóg in his own house, and
there they kept the canonical hours with him and heard mass. And
Mochaovóg caused a good craftsman to make chains of silver for the
swans, and put one chain between Fionnuala and Hugh and another
between Conn and Fiachra; and they were a joy and solace of mind to
the Saint, and their own woe and pain seemed to them dim and far off
as a dream.
Now at this time it happened that the King of Connacht was Lairgnen,
son of Colman, and he was betrothed to Deoca, daughter of the King of
Munster. And so it was that when Deoca came northward to be wedded to
Lairgnen she heard the tale of the swans and of their singing, and she
prayed the king that he would obtain them for her, for she longed to
possess them. But Lairgnen would not ask them of Mochaovóg. Then Deoca
set out homeward again, and vowed that she would never return to
Lairgnen till she had the swans; and she came as far as the church of
Dalua, which is now called Kildaloe, in Clare. Then Lairgnen sent
messengers for the birds to Mochaovóg, but he would not give them up.
At this Lairgnen was very wroth, and he went himself to Mochaovóg, and
he found the cleric and the four birds at the altar. But Lairgnen
seized upon the birds by their silver chains, two in each hand dragged
them away to the place where Deoca was; and Mochaovóg followed them.
But when they came to Deoca and she had laid her hands upon the
birds, behold, their covering of feathers fell off and in their places
were three shrunken and feeble old men and one lean and withered old
woman, fleshless and bloodless from extreme old age. And Lairgnen was
struck with amazement and fear, and went out from that place.
Then Fionnuala said to Mochaovóg, "Come now and baptize us quickly,
for our end is near. And if you are grieved at parting from us, know
that also to us it is a grief. Do thou make our grave when we are
dead, and place Conn at my right side and Fiachra at my left, and Hugh
before my face, for thus they were wont to be when I sheltered them on
many a winter night by the tides of Moyle."
So Mochaovóg baptized the three brethren and their sister; and shortly
afterwards they found peace and death, and they were buried even as
Fionnuala had said. And over their tomb a stone was raised, and their
names and lineage graved on it in branching Ogham[13]; and lamentation
and prayers were made for them, and their souls won to heaven.
[13] See p. 133, _note_.
But Mochaovóg was sorrowful, and grieved after them so long as he
lived on earth.