EARLIEST ALLUSIONS TO IRELAND FROM FOREIGN SOURCES
Of all the tribes of the Celts, and indeed of all their neighbours in
the west of Europe, the children of Milesius have been at once blessed
and cursed beyond their fellows, for on the shores of their island
alone did the Roman eagle check its victorious flight, and they alone
of the nations of western Europe were neither moulded nor crushed into
his own shape by the conqueror of Gaul and Britain.
Undisturbed by the Romans, unconquered though shattered by the
Norsemen, unsubdued though sore-stricken by the Normans, and still
struggling with the Saxons, the Irish Gael alone has preserved a record
of his own past, and preserved it in a literature of his own, for a
length of time and with a continuity which outside of Greece has no
parallel in Europe.
His own account of himself is that his ancestors, the Milesians, or
children of Miledh,[1] came to Ireland from Spain about the year 1000
B.C.,[2] and dispossessed the Tuatha De Danann who had come from the
north of Europe, as these had previously dispossessed their kinsmen the
Firbolg, who had arrived from Greece.
Such a suggestion, however, despite the continuity and volume of Irish
tradition which has always supported it, appears open to more than
one rationalistic objection, the chiefest being that the voyage from
Spain to Ireland would be one of some six hundred miles, hardly to be
attempted by the early Irish barks composed of wickerwork covered with
hides, fragile crafts which could hardly hope to live through the rough
waters of the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic on a voyage from Spain, or
through the Mediterranean and the Atlantic on a voyage from Greece.
On the other hand, if we assume that our ancestors passed over from
Gaul into Britain and thence into Ireland, we shall find it fit in
with many other facts. To begin with, the voyage from Gaul to Britain
is one of only some two and twenty miles, and from Britain to Ireland,
at its narrowest point, is hardly twelve. The splendid physique,
too, of the Irish,[3] which is now alas! sadly degenerated through
depression, poverty, famine, and the rooting out of the best blood,
but which has struck during the course of history such numerous foreign
observers, seems certainly to connect the Irish by a family likeness
with the Gauls, as these have been described to us by the Romans, and
not with the Greeks or the swarthy, sun-burnt Iberians. Tacitus also,
writing less than a century after Christ, tells us that the Irish in
disposition, temper, and habits, differ but little from the Britons,
and we find in Britain, North Gaul, and Germany, tribes of the same
nomenclature as several of those Irish tribes whose names are recorded
by Ptolemy about the year 150.[4]
On the one hand, then, we have the ancient universal Irish traditions,
backed up by all the authority of the bards, the annalists and the
shanachies, that the Milesians--who are the ancestors of most of the
present Irish--came to Ireland direct from Spain; and, on the other
hand, we have these rationalistic grounds for believing that Ireland
was more probably peopled from Gaul and Britain. The question cannot
here be carried further, except to remark that in an age ignorant of
geography the term Spain may have been used very loosely, and may
rather have implied some land oversea, rather than any particular
land.[5]
If Ireland were not--thanks to her native annalists, her autochtonous
traditions and her bardic histories--to a great extent independent
of classical and foreign authors, she would have fared badly indeed,
so far as history goes, lying as she does in so remote a corner of
the world, and having been untrodden by the foot of recording Greek
or masterful Roman. There are, however, some few allusions to the
island to be found, of which, perhaps, the earliest is the quotation
in Avienus, who writing about the year 380 mentions the account of
the voyage of Himilco, a Phœnician,[6] to Ireland about the year 510
B.C., who said in his account that Erin was called "Sacra"[7] by the
ancients, that its people navigated the vast sea in hide-covered
barks, and that its land was populous and fertile. In the Argonautics
of the pseudo-Orpheus, which may have been written about 500 B.C.,
the Iernian[8]--that is apparently the Irish--Isle is mentioned.
Aristotle knew about it too. Ierne, he says, is a very large island
beyond the Celts. Strabo, writing soon after the birth of Christ,
describes its position and shape, also calling it Ierne, but according
to his account--which he acknowledges, however, that he does not make
on good authority--it is barely habitable and its people are the
most utter savages and cannibals.[9] Hibernia, says Julius Cæsar, is
esteemed half the size of Britain and is as distant from it as Gaul
is. Diodorus, some fifty years before Christ, calls it Iris, and says
it was occupied by Britons.[10] Pomponius Mela, in the first century
of our era, calls Ireland Iverna, and says that "so great was the
luxuriance of grass there as to cause the cattle to burst"! Tacitus a
little later, about the year 82, telling us how Agricola crossed the
Clyde and posted troops in that part of the country which looked toward
Ireland, says that Hibernia "in soil and climate, in the disposition,
temper, and habits of its people, differed but little from Britain, and
that its approaches and harbours were better known through traffic and
merchants."[11]
Ptolemy, writing about the year 150, unconsciously bears out to some
extent what Tacitus had said of Ireland's harbours being better known
than those of Britain, for he has left behind him a more accurate
account of Ireland than of Britain, giving in all over fifty Irish
names, about nine of which have been identified, and mentioning the
names of two coast towns, seven inland towns, and seventeen tribes,
some of which, as we have said, nearly resemble the names of tribes in
Britain and North Gaul. Solinus, about A.D. 238, is the first to tell
us that Hibernia has no snakes--observe this curious pre-Patrician
evidence which robs our national saint of one of his laurels--saying,
like Pomponius Mela, that it has luxurious pastures, and adding the
curious intelligence that, "warlike beyond the rest of her sex, the
Hibernian mother places the first morsel of food in her child's mouth
with the point of the sword." Eumenius mentions the Hibernians about
the year 306 in his panegyric on Constantine, saying that until now
the Britons had been accustomed to fight only Pictish and Hibernian
enemies. In 378 Ammianus Marcellinus mentions the Irish under the name
of Scots, saying that the Scotti and Attacotti[12] commit dreadful
depredations in Britain, and Claudian a few years later speaks rather
hyperbolically of the Irish invasion of Britain; "the Scot (_i.e._, the
Irishman)," he says, "moved all Ierne against us, and the Ocean foamed
under his hostile oars--a Roman legion curbs the fierce Scot, through
Stilicho's care I feared not the darts of the Scots--Icy Erin wails
over the heaps of her Scots."[13] The Irish expeditions against both
Gaul and Britain became more frequent towards the end of the fourth
century, and at last the unfortunate Britons, driven to despair, and
having in vain appealed to the now disorganised Romans to aid them,
sooner than stand the fury of the Irish and Picts threw themselves into
the arms of the Saxons.[14]
It is towards the middle or close of the fourth century that we come
into much closer historical contact with the Irish, and indeed we know
with some certainty a good deal about their internal history, manners,
laws, language, and institutions from that time to the present. Of
course if we can trust Irish sources we know a great deal about them
for even seven or eight hundred years before this. The early Irish
annalist, Tighearnach,[15] who died in 1088, and who had of course
the records of the earliest Irish writers--so far as they had escaped
extinction by the Danes--before his eyes when he wrote, and who quotes
frequently and judiciously from Josephus, St. Jerome, Bede, and other
authors, was of opinion, after weighing evidence and comparing Irish
with foreign writers, that the _monumenta Scotorum_, or records of
the Irish prior to Cimbaeth (_i.e._, about 300 B.C.) were uncertain.
This means that from that time forwards he at least considered that
the substance of Irish history as handed down to us might, to say the
least of it, be more or less relied upon. Cimbaeth was the founder of
Emania, the capital of Ulster, the home of the Red Branch knights,
which flourished for 600 years and which figures so conspicuously in
the saga-cycle of Cuchulain.
What then--for we pass over for the present the colonies of Partholan,
the Tuatha De Danann, and the Nemedians, leaving them to be dealt with
among the myths--have our native bards and annalists to say of these
six or seven centuries? As several of the best and greatest of Irish
sagas deal with events within this period, we can--if bardic accounts,
probably first committed to writing about the sixth or seventh century
may at all be trusted--to some extent recall its leading features, or
reconstruct them.
[1] Milesius is the ordinary Latinised form of the Irish Miledh; the
real name of Milesius was Golamh, but he was surnamed Miledh Easpáin,
or the Champion of Spain. He himself never landed in Ireland.
[2] 1016 according to O'Flaherty, in the eighth century B.C. according
to Charles O'Conor of Belanagare, but as far back as 1700 B.C.
according to the chronology of the "Four Masters." Nennius, the Briton
who wrote in the time of Charlemagne, gives two different accounts
of the landing of the Irish, one evidently representing the British
tradition, and the other that of the Irish themselves, of which he says
_sic mihi peritissimi Scotorum nunciaverunt_. Both these accounts make
the Irish come from Spain, the first being that three sons of a certain
Miles of Spain landed in Ireland from Spain at the third attempt.
According to what the Irish told him they reached Ireland from Spain
1,002 years after flying from Egypt.
[3] Even Giraldus Cambrensis, that most bigoted of anti-Irishmen,
could nevertheless write thus of the natives in the twelfth century.
"In Ireland man retains all his majesty. Nature alone has moulded the
Irish, and as if to show what she can do has given them countenances
of exquisite colour, and bodies of great beauty, symmetry, and
strength." This testimony agrees with what Cæsar says of the Celts of
Gaul, whose large persons he compares with the short stature of the
Romans, and admires their _mirifica corpora_. Strabo says of a Celtic
tribe, the Coritavi, "to show how tall they are, I myself saw some of
their young men at Rome, and they were taller by six inches than any
one else in the city." The Belgic Gauls are uniformly described as
tall, large-limbed, and fair, and Silius Italicus speaks of the huge
limbs and golden locks of the Boii who gave their name to Bavaria
(Boio-varia) and to Bohemia (Boio-haims). They were probably the
ruling race in Gaul, but the type is now very rarely seen there, the
aristocratic Celts having been largely wiped out by war, as in Ireland,
and having when shorn of their power become amalgamated with the
Ligurians and other pre-Celtic peoples.
[4] As the Brigantes, Menapii, and Cauci.
[5] Buchanan the Scotchman (1506-81), having urged some of these
objections against the Irish tradition, is thus fairly answered by
Keating, writing in Irish, about half a century after Buchanan's death:
"The first of these reasons," says Keating (to prove that the Irish
came from Gaul), "he deduces from the fact that Gaul was formerly so
populous that the part of it called Gallia Lugdunensis would of itself
furnish 300,000 fighting men, and that it was therefore likely that it
had sent forth some such hordes to occupy Ireland, as were the tribes
of the Gauls. My answer to that is that the author himself knew nothing
of the specific time at which the Sons of Miledh arrived in Ireland,
and that he was consequently perfectly ignorant as to whether France
was populous or waste at that epoch. And even though the country were
as populous as he states, when the Sons of Miledh came to Ireland, it
does not follow that we must necessarily understand that _it_ was the
country whence they emigrated; for why should it be supposed to be more
populous at that time than Spain, the country they really did come
from?"
[6] Aristotle, too, mentions the discovery by the Phoenicians, of an
island supposed to be Ireland, rich in forest and river and fruit,
which, however, this account would make out to have been uninhabited:
ἐν τῇ θαλάσσῃ τῇ ἔξω ῾Ηρακλείων στηλῶν φάσὶν ὑπό Καρχηδονίων νῆσον
εὑρεθῆναι ἐρήμην, ἔχουσαν ὕλην τε παντοδαπῇ καὶ ποταμὸυς πλωτὸυσ, καὶ
τοῖς λοιποῖς καρποῖς θαυμαστὴν, ἀπέχουσαν δὲ πλειόνων ἡμερῶν, etc.
Ireland was splendidly wooded until after the Cromwellian wars, and
not unfrequently we meet allusions in the old literature to the first
clearances in different districts, associated with the names of those
who cleared them.
[7] Sacra is apparently a translation of ῾Ιερα = Eiriu, old form of
Eire now called Erin, which last is really an oblique case.
[8] νήσοισιν ᾿Ιερνἰσιν, and νήσον ᾿Ιερνἰδα. The names by which Ireland
and its inhabitants were known to the writers of antiquity are very
various, as ᾿Ιουέρνια, ᾿Ιουέρνοι, Juverna, Juberna, Iverna, Hibernia,
Hibernici, Hibernienses, Jouvernia, Οὐερνία, ᾿Ιουρνία and even Vernia
and Βερνια. St. Patrick in his confessions calls the land Hyberione
and speaks of Hibernæ Gentes and "filii Scotorum." There can be little
doubt that Aristotle's ᾿Ιέρνη, the νῆσον ᾿Ιερνίδα of the Argonautics
and Diodorus' ῎Ιρις represent the same country. Here are Keating's
remarks on it: "An t-aonmhadh hainm déag Juvernia do réir Ptolomeus, no
Juverna do réir Sholinuis, no Ierna do réir Claudianus, no Vernia do
réir Eustatius; measaim nach bhfuil do cheill san deifir atá idir na
h-ughdaraibh sin do leith an fhocail-se Hibernia, acht nár thuigeadar
créad ó ttáinig an focal féin 7 dá réir sin go ttug gach aon fo leith
amus uaidh féin air, agus is de sin tháinig an mhalairt úd ar an
bhfocal." (_See_ Haliday's "Keating," p. 119.)
[9] ᾿Ιέρνη περὶ ἧς οὐδὲν λέγειν σαφὲς, except that the inhabitants are
ἀνθρωποφάγοι and πολυφάγοι! Τούς τε πατέρας τελευτἧσαντας κατεσθίειν ἐν
καλᾡ τιθέμενοι. He adds, however, ταῦτα δ᾿ὁύτω λέγομεν ὡς οὐκ ἔχοντες
ἀξιοπίστους μάρτυρας (Book IV., ch. v.). In another passage he shows
how utterly misinformed he must have been by saying that Ἰερνη was
ἀθλίως δέ διὰ ψύχος ὀικουμένην ὥστε τὰ ἐπέκεινα νομίζειν ἀοίκητα (II.
5). Elsewhere he calls the inhabitants ἀγριώτεροι τῶν Βρετανῶν.
[10] τῶν Βρεττανῶν, τοὺς κατοικοῦντας την ὀνομαζομένην Ἴριν.
[11] "Solum cœlumque et ingenia cultusque hominum haud multum a
Britannia differunt; in melius aditus portusque per commercia et
negociatores cogniti." This employment of _in_ before _melius_ is
curious, and the passage, which Diefenbach in his Celtica malignly
calls the "Lieblings-stelle der irischen Schriftsteller," is not
universally accepted as meaning that the harbours of Ireland were
better known than those of Great Britain; but when we consider the
antiquarian evidence for ancient Irish civilisation, and that in
artistic treatment, and fineness of manufacture Irish bronzes are fully
equal to those of Great Britain, and her gold objects infinitely more
numerous and every way superior, there seems no reason to doubt that
the text of Tacitus must be translated as above, and not subjected to
such forced interpretations as that the harbours and approaches of
Ireland were better known _than the land itself!_
[12] "Picti Saxonesque et Scotti et Attacotti Britannos aerumnis
vexavere continuis." These Attacotti appear to have been an Irish
tribe. There is a great deal of controversy as to who they were. St.
Jerome twice mentions them in connection with the Scots (_i.e._, the
Irish): _Scotorum et Atticotorum ritu_, they have their wives and
children in common, as Plato recommends in his Republic! (Migne's
edition, Book I., p. 735.) He says that he himself saw some of them
when he was young, "_Ipse adolescens in Gallia viderim Attacottos,
Scotorum_ (one would expect _Attacotorum_) _natio uxores proprias
non habet._" The name strongly resembles Cæsar's Aduatuci and
Diodorus's Ατουατικοὶ and certainly appears to be same as the Gaelic
Aitheach-Tuatha, so well known in Irish history, a name which O'Curry
translates by "rent-paying tribes," probably of non-Milesian origin.
These rose in the first century against their Milesian masters and
massacred them. If as Thierry thinks the east and centre of Gaul were
Gaelic speaking, they too may have had their Aitheach-Tuatha, which
may have been a general name for certain non-Celtic tribes reduced by
the Celts. According to the Itinerarium of Ricardus Corinensis quoted
by Diefenbach, Book III., there were Attacotti along the banks of
the Clyde: "_Clottæ ripas accolebant Attacotti, gens toti aliquando
Britanniæ formidanda._"
[13] "Scotorum cumulos flevit glacialis Ierne" ("glacialis," of course,
only when looked at from a southern point of view. Strabo, as we have
seen, said the island was scarcely habitable from cold).
"--Totam quum Scotus Iernen
Movit et infesto spumavit remige Tethys."
It is probably mere hyperbole of Claudian to say that the Roman chased
the Irish out to sea,
"--nec falso nomine Pictos
Edomuit, Scotumque vago mucrone secutus
Fregit Hyperboreas velis audacibus undas."
[14] These appear in Britain in the middle of the fifth century, in 449
according to the Saxon Chronicle, which is probably _substantially_
correct.
[15] Pronounced "Teear-nach."