thing, from the literary standpoint, which can befall any people is
to have revealed to it some new treasure-house of literature. This
treasure-house may be stored with the writings of another people in
the present, or else with the writings of a buried past. But a few
generations ago, in that innocent age when Blackstone could speak of
the “Goths, Huns, Franks, and Vandals”--incongruous gathering--as
“Celtic” tribes, the long-vanished literatures of the ancestors of
the present European nations, the epics, the sagas, the stories in
verse or prose, were hardly known to, or regarded by, their educated
and cultivated descendants. Gradually, and chiefly in the nineteenth
century, these forgotten literatures, or fragments of them, were
one by one recovered. They are various in merit and interest, in
antiquity and extent--“Beowulf,” the Norse sagas, the “Kalevala,”
the “Nibelungenlied,” the “Song of Roland,” the Arthurian cycle of
romances. In some there is but one great poem; in some all the
poems or stories are of one type; in others, as in the case of the
Norse sagas, a wide range of history, myth, and personal biography
is covered. In our own day there has at last come about a popular
revival of interest in the wealth of poems and tales to be found in the
ancient Celtic, and especially in the ancient Erse, manuscripts--the
whole forming a body of prose and poetry of great and well-nigh unique
interest from every standpoint, which in some respects can be matched
only by the Norse sagas, and which has some striking beauties the like
of which are not to be found even in these Norse sagas.
For many decades German, French, Irish, and English students have
worked over the ancient Celtic texts, and recently many of the
more striking and more beautiful stories have been reproduced or
paraphrased in popular form by writers like Lady Gregory and Miss
Hull, Lady Gregory showing in her prose something of the charm which
her countrywoman Emily Lawless shows in her poems “With the Wild
Geese.” It is greatly to be regretted that America should have done so
little either in the way of original study and research in connection
with the early Celtic literature, or in the way of popularizing and
familiarizing that literature, and it is much to be desired that,
wherever possible, chairs of Celtic should be established in our
leading universities. Moreover, in addition to the scholar’s work
which is especially designed for students, there must ultimately be
done the additional work which puts the results of the scholarship at
the disposal of the average layman. This has largely been done for
the Norse sagas. William Morris has translated the “Heimskringla”
into language which, while not exactly English, can nevertheless be
understood without difficulty--which is more than can be said for his
translation of “Beowulf”--and which has a real, though affectedly
archaic, beauty. Dasent has translated the “Younger Edda,” the “Njala
Saga,” and the “Saga of Gisli the Outlaw.” It is pleasant for Americans
to feel that it was Longfellow who, in his “Saga of King Olaf,”
rendered one of the most striking of the old Norse tales into a great
poem.
It is difficult to speak with anything like exactness of the relative
ages of these primitive literatures. Doubtless in each case the
earliest manuscripts that have come down to us are themselves based
upon far earlier ones which have been destroyed, and doubtless, when
they were first written down, the tales had themselves been recited,
and during the course of countless recitations had been changed and
added to and built upon, for a period of centuries. Sometimes, as in
the “Song of Roland,” we know at least in bare outline the historical
incident which for some reason impressed the popular imagination
until around it there grew up a great epic, of which the facts have
been twisted completely out of shape. In other instances, as in the
“Nibelungenlied,” a tale, adaptable in its outlines to many different
peoples, was adapted to the geography of a particular people, and to
what that people at least thought was history; thus the Rhine becomes
the great river of the “Nibelungenlied,” and in the second part of
the epic the revenge of Krimhild becomes connected with dim memories
of Attila’s vast and evanescent empire. The “Song of Roland” and the
“Nibelungenlied” were much later than the earliest English, Norse, and
Irish poems. Very roughly, it may perhaps be said that, in the earliest
forms at which we can guess, the Irish sagas were produced, or at least
were in healthy life, at about the time when “Beowulf” was a live saga,
and two or three centuries or thereabouts before the early Norse sagas
took a shape which we would recognize as virtually akin to that they
now have.
These Celtic sagas are conveniently, though somewhat artificially,
arranged in cycles. In some ways the most interesting of these is the
Cuchulain cycle, although until very recently it was far less known
than the Ossianic cycle--the cycle which tells of the deeds of Finn and
the Fianna. The poems which tell of the mighty feats of Cuchulain, and
of the heroes whose life-threads were interwoven with his, date back
to a purely pagan Ireland--an Ireland cut off from all connection with
the splendid and slowly dying civilization of Rome, an Ireland in which
still obtained ancient customs that had elsewhere vanished even from
the memory of man.
Thus the heroes of the Cuchulain sagas still fought in chariots driven
each by a charioteer who was also the stanch friend and retainer of
the hero. Now, at one time war chariots had held the first place in
the armies of all the powerful empires in the lands adjoining the
Mediterranean and stretching eastward beyond the Tigris. Strange
African tribes had used them north and south of the Atlas Mountains.
When the mighty, conquering kings of Egypt made their forays into
Syria, and there encountered the Hittite hosts, the decisive feature in
each battle was the shock between the hundreds of chariots arrayed on
each side. The tyranny of Sisera rested on his nine hundred chariots of
iron. The Homeric heroes were “tamers of horses,” which were not ridden
in battle, but driven in the war chariots. That mysterious people,
the Etruscans, of whose race and speech we know nothing, originally
fought in chariots. But in the period of Greek and Roman splendor
the war chariot had already passed away. It had seemingly never been
characteristic of the wild Teuton tribes; but among the western Celts
it lingered long. Cæsar encountered it among the hostile tribes when he
made his famous raid into Britain; and in Ireland it lasted later still.
The customs of the heroes and people of the Erin of Cuchulain’s time
were as archaic as the chariots in which they rode to battle. The
sagas contain a wealth of material for the historian. They show us a
land where the men were herdsmen, tillers of the soil, hunters, bards,
seers, but, above all, warriors. Erin was a world to herself. Her
people at times encountered the peoples of Britain or of Continental
Europe, whether in trade or in piracy; but her chief interest, her
overwhelming interest, lay in what went on within her own borders.
There was a high king of shadowy power, whose sway was vaguely
recognized as extending over the island, but whose practical supremacy
was challenged on every hand by whatever king or under-king felt the
fierce whim seize him. There were chiefs and serfs; there were halls
and fortresses; there were huge herds of horses and cattle and sheep
and swine. The kings and queens, the great lords and their wives, the
chiefs and the famous fighting men, wore garments crimson and blue and
green and saffron, plain or checkered, and plaid and striped. They had
rings and clasps and torques of gold and silver, urns and mugs and
troughs and vessels of iron and silver. They played chess by the fires
in their great halls, and they feasted and drank and quarrelled within
them, and the women had sun-parlors of their own.
Among the most striking of the tales are those of the “Fate of the Sons
of Usnach,” telling of Deirdrè’s life and love and her lamentation for
her slain lover; of the “Wooing of Emer” by Cuchulain; of the “Feast
of Bricriu”; and of the famous Cattle-Spoil of Cooley, the most famous
romance of ancient Ireland, the story of the great raid for the Dun
Bull of Cooley. But there are many others of almost equal interest;
such as the story of MacDatho’s pig, with its Gargantuan carouse of the
quarrelsome champions; and the tale of the siege of Howth.
In these tales, which in so many points are necessarily like the
similar tales that have come down from the immemorial past of the
peoples of kindred race, there are also striking peculiarities that
hedge them apart. The tales are found in many versions, which for the
most part have been enlarged by pedantic scribes of aftertime, who
often made them prolix and tedious, and added grotesque and fantastic
exaggerations of their own to the barbaric exaggerations already in
them, doing much what Saxo Grammaticus did for the Scandinavian tales.
They might have been woven into some great epic, or at least have
taken far more definite and connected shape, if the history of Ireland
had developed along lines similar to those of the other nations of west
Europe. But her history was broken by terrible national tragedies and
calamities. To the scourge of the vikings succeeded the Anglo-Norman
conquest, with all its ruinous effects on the growth of the national
life. The early poems of the Erse bards could not develop as those
other early lays developed which afterward became the romances of
Arthur and Roland and Siegfried. They remain primitive, as “Beowulf” is
primitive, as, in less measure, “Gisli the Outlaw” is primitive.
The heroes are much like those of the early folk of kindred
stock everywhere. They are huge, splendid barbarians, sometimes
yellow-haired, sometimes black- or brown-haired, and their chief title
to glory is found in their feats of bodily prowess. Among the feats
often enumerated or referred to are the ability to leap like a salmon,
to run like a stag, to hurl great rocks incredible distances, to toss
the wheel, and, like the Norse berserkers, when possessed with the fury
of battle, to grow demoniac with fearsome rage. This last feat was
especially valued, and was recognized as the “heroes’ fury.” As with
most primitive peoples, the power to shout loudly was much prized, and
had a distinct place of respect, under the title of “mad roar,” in
any list of a given hero’s exhibitions of strength or agility; just as
Stentor’s voice was regarded by his comrades as a valuable military
asset. So, when the slaughter begins in Etzel’s hall, the writer of the
Nibelung lay dwells with admiration on the vast strength of Diederick,
as shown by the way in which his voice rang like a bison horn,
resounding within and without the walls. Many of the feats chronicled
of the early Erse heroes are now wholly unintelligible to us; we can
not even be sure what they were, still less why they should have been
admired.
Among the heroes stood the men of wisdom, as wisdom was in the early
world, a vulpine wisdom of craft and cunning and treachery and
double-dealing. Druids, warlocks, sorcerers, magicians, witches appear,
now as friends, now as unfriends, of the men of might. Fiercely the
heroes fought and wide they wandered; yet their fights and their
wanderings were not very different from those that we read about in
many other primitive tales. There is the usual incredible variety of
incidents and character, and, together with the variety, an endless
repetition. But these Erse tales differ markedly from the early Norse
and Teutonic stories in more than one particular. A vein of the
supernatural and a vein of the romantic run through them and relieve
their grimness and harshness in a way very different from anything
to be found in the Teutonic. Of course the supernatural element often
takes as grim a form in early Irish as in early Norse or German; the
Goddess with red eyebrows who on stricken fields wooed the Erse heroes
from life did not differ essentially from the Valkyrie; and there
were land and water demons in Ireland as terrible as those against
which Beowulf warred. But, in addition, there is in the Irish tales
an unearthliness free from all that is monstrous and horrible; and
their unearthly creatures could become in aftertime the fairies of the
moonlight and the greenwood, so different from the trolls and gnomes
and misshapen giants bequeathed to later generations by the Norse
mythology.
Still more striking is the difference between the women in the Irish
sagas and those, for instance, of the Norse sagas. Their heirs of the
spirit are the Arthurian heroines, and the heroines of the romances of
the Middle Ages. In the “Song of Roland”--rather curiously, considering
that it is the first great piece of French literature--woman plays
absolutely no part at all; there is not a female figure which is
more than a name, or which can be placed beside Roland and Oliver,
Archbishop Turpin and the traitor Ganelon, and Charlemagne, the mighty
emperor of the “barbe fleurie.” The heroines of the early Norse and
German stories are splendid and terrible, fit to be the mothers of a
mighty race, as stern and relentless as their lovers and husbands. But
it would be hard indeed to find among them a heroine who would appeal
to our modern ideas as does Emer, the beloved of Cuchulain, or Dierdrè,
the sweetheart of the fated son of Usnach. Emer and Deirdrè have
the charm, the power of inspiring and returning romantic love, that
belonged to the ladies whose lords were the knights of the Round Table,
though of course this does not mean that they lacked some very archaic
tastes and attributes.
Emer, the daughter of Forgall the Wily, who was wooed by Cuchulain,
had the “six gifts of a girl”--beauty, and a soft voice, and sweet
speech, and wisdom, and needlework, and chastity. In their wooing the
hero and heroine spoke to one another in riddles, those delights of the
childhood of peoples. She set him journeys to go and feats to perform,
which he did in the manner of later knight errants. After long courting
and many hardships, he took Emer to wife, and she was true to him and
loved him and gloried in him and watched over him until the day he went
out to meet his death. All this was in a spirit which we would find
natural in a heroine of modern or of mediæval times--a spirit which it
would be hard to match either among the civilizations of antiquity, or
in early barbarisms other than the Erse.
So it was with Deirdrè, the beautiful girl who forsook her betrothed,
the Over-King of Ulster, for the love of Naisi, and fled with him and
his two brothers across the waters to Scotland. At last they returned
to Ireland, and there Deirdrè’s lover and his two brothers were slain
by the treachery of the king whose guests they were. Many versions of
the Songs of Deirdrè have come down to us, of her farewell to Alba and
her lament over her slain lover; for during centuries this tragedy
of Deirdrè, together with the tragical fate of the Children of Lir
and the tragical fate of the Children of Tuirenn, were known as the
“Three Sorrowful Tales of Erin.” None has better retained its vitality
down to the present day. Even to us, reading the songs in an alien
age and tongue, they are very beautiful. Deirdrè sings wistfully of
her Scottish abiding-place, with its pleasant, cuckoo-haunted groves,
and its cliffs, and the white sand on the beaches. She tells of her
lover’s single infidelity, when he came enamoured of the daughter of a
Scottish lord, and Deirdrè, broken-hearted, put off to sea in a boat,
indifferent whether she should live or die; whereupon the two brothers
of her lover swam after her and brought her back, to find him very
repentant and swearing a threefold oath that never again would he prove
false to her until he should go to the hosts of the dead. She dwells
constantly on the unfailing tenderness of the three heroes; for her
lover’s two brothers cared for her as he did:
“Much hardship would I take,
Along with the three heroes;
I would endure without house, without fire,
It is not I that would be gloomy.
“Their three shields and their spears
Were often a bed for me.
Put their three hard swords
Over the grave, O young man!”
For the most part, in her songs, Deirdrè dwells on the glories and
beauties of the three warriors, the three dragons, the three champions
of the Red Branch, the three that used to break every onrush, the three
hawks, the three darlings of the women of Erin, the three heroes who
were not good at homage. She sings of their splendor in the foray, of
their nobleness as they returned to their home, to bring fagots for the
fire, to bear in an ox or a boar for the table; sweet though the pipes
and flutes and horns were in the house of the king, sweeter yet was it
to hearken to the songs sung by the sons of Usnach, for “like the sound
of the wave was the voice of Naisi.”
There were other Irish heroines of a more common barbarian type. Such
was the famous warrior-queen, Meave, tall and beautiful, with her
white face and yellow hair, terrible in her battle chariot when she
drove at full speed into the press of fighting men, and “fought over
the ears of the horses.” Her virtues were those of a warlike barbarian
king, and she claimed the like large liberty in morals. Her husband was
Ailill, the Connaught king, and, as Meave carefully explained to him in
what the old Erse bards called a “bolster conversation,” their marriage
was literally a partnership wherein she demanded from her husband an
exact equality of treatment according to her own views and on her own
terms; the three essential qualities upon which she insisted being that
he should be brave, generous, and completely devoid of jealousy!
Fair-haired Queen Meave was a myth, a goddess, and her memory changed
and dwindled until at last she reappeared as Queen Mab of fairyland.
But among the ancient Celts her likeness was the likeness of many a
historic warrior queen. The descriptions given of her by the first
writers or compilers of the famous romances of the foray for the Dun
Bull of Cooley almost exactly match the descriptions given by the Latin
historian of the British Queen Boadicea, tall and terrible-faced, her
long, yellow hair flowing to her hips, spear in hand, golden collar on
neck, her brightly colored mantle fastened across her breast with a
brooch.
Not only were some of Meave’s deeds of a rather startling kind, but
even Emer and Deirdrè at times showed traits that to a modern reader
may seem out of place, in view of what has been said of them above.
But we must remember the surroundings, and think of what even the real
women of history were, throughout European lands, until a far later
period. In the “Heimskringla” we read of Queen Sigrid, the wisest of
women, who grew tired of the small kings who came to ask her hand, a
request which she did not regard them as warranted to make either by
position or extent of dominion. So one day when two kings had thus come
to woo her, she lodged them in a separate wooden house, with all their
company, and feasted them until they were all very drunk, and fell
asleep; then in the middle of the night she had her men fall on them
with fire and sword, burn those who stayed within the hall and slay
those who broke out. The incident is mentioned in the saga without the
slightest condemnation; on the contrary, it evidently placed the queen
on a higher social level than before, for, in concluding the account,
the saga mentions that Sigrid said “that she would weary these small
kings of coming from other lands to woo her; so she was called Sigrid
Haughty thereafter.” Now, Sigrid was an historical character who lived
many hundred years after the time of Emer and Deirdrè and Meave, and
the simplicity with which her deed was chronicled at the time, and
regarded afterward, should reconcile us to some of the feats recorded
of those shadowy Erse predecessors of hers, who were separated from her
by an interval of time as great as that which separates her from us.
The story of the “Feast of Bricriu of the Bitter Tongue” is one of the
most interesting of the tales of the Cuchulain cycle. In all this cycle
of tales, Bricriu appears as the cunning, malevolent mischief-maker,
dreaded for his biting satire and his power of setting by the ears the
boastful, truculent, reckless, and marvellously short-tempered heroes
among whom he lived. He has points of resemblance to Thersites, to Sir
Kay, of the Arthurian romances, and to Conan, of the Ossianic cycle of
Celtic sagas. This story is based upon the custom of the “champion’s
portion,” which at a feast was allotted to the bravest man. It was a
custom which lasted far down into historic times, and was recognized
in the Brehon laws, where a heavy fine was imposed upon any person who
stole it from the one to whom it belonged. The story in its present
form, like all of these stories, is doubtless somewhat changed from
the story as it was originally recited among the pre-Christian Celts
of Ireland, but it still commemorates customs of the most primitive
kind, many of them akin to those of all the races of Aryan tongue in
their earlier days. The queens cause their maids to heat water for
the warriors’ baths when they return from war, and similarly made
ready to greet their guests, as did the Homeric heroines. The feasts
were Homeric feasts. The heroes boasted and sulked and fought as did
the Greeks before Troy. At their feasts, when the pork and beef, the
wheaten cakes and honey, had been eaten, and the beer, and sometimes
the wine of Gaul, had been drunk in huge quantities, the heroes,
vainglorious and quarrelsome, were always apt to fight. Thus in the
three houses which together made up the palace of the high king at
Emain Macha, it was necessary that the arms of the heroes should all
be kept in one place, so that they could not attack one another at the
feasts. These three houses of the palace were the Royal House, in which
the high king himself had his bronzed and jewelled room; the Speckled
House, where the swords, the shields, and the spears of the heroes were
kept; and the House of the Red Branch, where not only the weapons, but
the heads of the beaten enemies were stored; and it was in connection
with this last grewsome house that the heroes in the train of the High
King Conchubar took their name of the “Heroes of the Red Branch.”