HOW FAR CAN NATIVE SOURCES BE RELIED ON?
It must next be considered what amount of reliance can be placed upon
the Irish annals and annalists, who have preserved to us our early
history. If, in those few cases where we happen to have some credible
external evidences of early events, we find our native annalists
notoriously at variance with such evidences, our faith in them must of
necessity be shaken. If, on the other hand, we find them to coincide
fairly well with these other accounts taken from foreign sources, we
shall be inclined to place all the more reliance on their accuracy when
they record events upon which no such sidelights can be thrown.
Now, from the nature of the case, it is exceedingly difficult,
considering how isolated Ireland was while evolving her own
civilisation, and considering how little in early ages her internal
affairs clashed with those of Europe, to find any specific events of
which we have early external evidence. We can, for instance, apart
from our own annals and poems, procure no corroborative evidence of
the division of Ireland between Conn and Owen, of the destruction of
Emania by the Three Collas, or of the battle of Gabhra. But despite the
silence upon Irish affairs of ancient foreign writers, we have luckily
another class of proof of the highest possible value, brought to light
by the discoveries of modern science, and powerfully strengthening
the credibility of our annals. This is nothing less than the record
of natural phenomena. If we find, on calculating backwards, as modern
science has enabled us to do, that such events as the appearance of
comets or the occurrence of eclipses are recorded to the day and hour
by the annalists, we can know with something like certainty that these
phenomena _were recorded at the time of their appearance by writers
who observed them_, whose writings must have been actually consulted
and seen by those later annalists, whose books we now possess. Nobody
could think of saying of natural phenomena thus accurately recorded,
as they might of mere historical narratives, that they were handed
down by tradition only, and reduced to writing for the first time many
centuries later. Now it so happens that the Annals of Ulster, annals
which treat of Ireland and Irish history from about the year 444,
but of which the written copy dates only from the fifteenth century,
contain from the year 496 to 884, as many as 18 records of eclipses
and comets which agree exactly even to the day and hour with the
calculations of modern astronomers. How impossible it is to keep such
records unless written memoranda are made of them by eye-witnesses,
is shown by the fact that Bede, born himself in 675, in recording the
great solar eclipse which took place only eleven years before his own
birth is yet two days astray in his date; while, on the other hand, the
Ulster annals give not only the correct day but the correct hour--thus
showing that Cathal Maguire, their compiler, had access either to the
original or to a copy of the original account of an eye-witness.[1]
Again, we occasionally find the early records of the two great
branches of the Celtic race, the Gaelic and the Cymric, throwing a
mutual light upon each other. There exists, for instance, an ancient
Irish saga, of which several versions have come down to us, a saga
well known in Irish literature under the title of the Expulsion of
the Dési,[2] which, according to Zimmer--than whom there can be no
better authority--was, judging from its linguistic forms, committed
to writing in the eighth century. The Dési were a tribe settled in
Bregia, in Meath, and the Annals[3] tell us that the great Cormac mac
Art defeated them in seven battles, forcing them to emigrate and seek
new homes. This composition describes their wanderings in detail. Some
of the tribe we are told migrated to Munster, whilst another portion
crossed the Irish Sea and settled down in that part of South Wales
called Dyfed, under the leadership of one Eochaidh [Yohy], thence
called "from-over-sea." There Eochaidh with his sons and grand-children
lived and died, and propagated themselves to the time of the writer,
who states that they were then--at the time he wrote--ruled over by one
Teudor mac Regin, king of Dyfed, who was then alive, and whose pedigree
is traced in fourteen generations up to the father of that Eochaidh who
had led them over in Cormac mac Art's time. Taking a generation as 33
years, and starting with the year 270, about the time of the expulsion
of the Dési, we find that Teudor Mac Regin should have reigned about
the year 730, and the Irish saga must have been written at this time,
which agrees with Zimmer's reckoning, although his computation is based
on purely linguistic grounds. That school of interpreters who decry
all ancient Irish history as a mixture of mythology and fiction, and
who can see in Cormac mac Art only a sun-god, would probably ascribe
the expulsion of the Dési and other records of a similar nature to
the creative imagination of the later Irish, who, they hold, invented
their genealogies as they did their history. But in this case it
happens by the merest accident that we _have_ collateral evidence of
these events, for in a Welsh pedigree of Ellen, mother of Owen, son
of Howel Dda, preserved in a manuscript of the eleventh century, this
same Teudor is mentioned, and his genealogy traced back by the Welsh
scribe; the names of eleven of his ancestors, corresponding--except for
inconsiderable orthographical differences--with those preserved in the
ancient Irish text.
"When we consider," says Dr. Kuno Meyer, "that these Welsh names
passed through the hands of who knows how many Irish scribes, one must
marvel that they have preserved their forms so well;" and he adds, "in
the light of this evidence alone, I have no hesitation in saying that
the settlement of an Irish tribe in Dyfed during the latter half of
the third century must be considered a well-authenticated fact."[4]
Dr. Reeves cites another remarkable case of undesigned coincidence
which strongly testifies to the accuracy of the Irish annalists. In
the Antiphonary of Bangor, an ancient service book still preserved on
the Continent, we find the names of fifteen abbots of the celebrated
monastery of Bangor--at which the heresiarch Pelagius was probably
educated--and these fifteen abbots are recorded by the same names and
in the same order as in the Annals; "and this undesigned coincidence,"
says Reeves, "is the more interesting because the testimonies are
perfectly independent, the one being afforded by Irish records which
never left the kingdom, and the other by a Latin composition which has
been a thousand years absent from the country where it was written."
Another incidental proof of the accuracy of early Irish literary
records is afforded by the fact that on the few occasions where the
Saxon Bede, when making mention of some Scot, _i.e._, Irishman, gives
also the name of his father, this name coincides with that given by the
annals.
We may, then, take it, without any credulity on our part, that Irish
history as drawn from native sources may be very well relied upon
from about the middle of the fourth century. Beyond that date, going
backwards, we have no means at our disposal for checking its accuracy
or inaccuracy, no means of determining the truth of such events as
the struggle between Conn and Owen, between the Fenian bands and the
High-king, between Ulster under Conor and Connacht under Mève, no
means of determining the actual existence of Conairé the Great, or of
Cuchulain, or of the heroes of the Red Branch, or of Finn mac Cúmhail
[Cool] and his son Ossian and his grandson Oscar. Is there any solid
ground for treating these things as objective history?
It has been urged that it is unphilosophic of us and was unphilosophic
of the annalist Tighearnach to fix the reign of Cimbaeth[5] [Kimbæ],
who built Emania, the capital of Ulster, some three hundred years
before Christ, as a terminus from which we may begin to place some
confidence in Irish accounts, seeing that the Annals carry back the
list of Irish kings with apparently equal certainty for centuries past
him, and back even to the coming of the Milesians, which took place
at the lowest computation some six or seven hundred years before. All
that can be said in answer to this, is to point out that there must
have been hundreds of documents existing at the time when Tighearnach
wrote, "the countless hosts of the illuminated books of the men of
Erin," as his contemporary Angus called them--records of the past which
he was able to examine and consult, but which we are not. Tighearnach
was a professed annalist, "a modern but cautious chronicler,"[6] and
for his age a very well-instructed man, and it seems evident that he
would not have placed the founding of Emania as a terminus _a quo_ if
he had not inferred rightly or wrongly that native accounts could be
fairly trusted from that forward. It certainly creates some feeling
of confidence to find him pushing aside as uncertain and unproven the
arid roll of kings so confidently carried back for hundreds of years
before his starting-point. The historic sense was well developed in
Tighearnach, and he no doubt discredited these far-reaching claims
either because he could not find sufficiently early documentary
evidence to corroborate them, or more likely because such accounts as
he had access to, began to contradict one another and were unable to
stand any scrutiny from this time backwards. With him it was probably
largely a question of documents. But this brings us at once to the
question, when did the Irish learn the use of letters and begin to
write, to which we shall turn our attention in a future chapter.
[1] Nor is this mere conjecture; it is fully borne out by the annals
themselves, which actually give us their sources of information. Thus
under the year 439, we read that "Chronicon magnum (_i.e._, The Senchas
Mór) scriptum est"; at 467 and 468, the compiler quotes "Sic in Libro
Cuanach inveni"; at 482, "Ut Cuana scripsit"; in 507, "Secundum librum
Mochod"; in 628, "Sicut in libro Dubhdaleithe narratur," &c.
[2] "Indarba inna nDési."
[3] _See_ "Four Masters," A.D. 265.
[4] See Kuno Meyer's paper on the "Early Relations between the Gael and
Brython," read before the Hon. Society of Cymmrodorion, May 28, 1896.
[5] To start with Cimbaeth as Tighearnach does "is just as uncritical
as to take the whole tale of kings from the very beginning," says Dr.
Atkinson, in his preface to the Contents of the facsimile Book of
Leinster; and he adds, "if the kings who are supposed to have lived
about fifteen centuries before Christ are mere figments, which is
tolerably certain, there is little more reason for believing in the
kings who reigned after Christ prior to the introduction of writing
with Christianity (_sic_) into the island,"--an unconvincing _sorites!_
One hundred and thirty-six pagan and six Christian kings in all reigned
at Tara according to the fictions of the Bards.
[6] Dr. Whitley Stokes' "Tripartite Life of St. Patrick," vol. i.
p. cxxix. "That Tighearnach had access to some library or libraries
furnished with books of every description is manifest from his numerous
references; and the correctness of his citations from foreign authors,
with whose works we are acquainted may be taken as a surety for the
genuineness of his extracts from the writings of our own native authors
now lost." For the non-Irish portions of his annals Tighearnach used,
as Stokes has shown, St. Jerome's "Interpretatio Chronicæ Eusebii
Pamphili," the seven books of the history of Paulus Orosius, "The
Chronicon, or Account of the Six Ages of the World," in Bede's Works,
"The Vulgate," "The Etymologarium," "Libri XX of Isodorus Hispalensis,"
Josephus' "Antiquities of the Jews," probably in a Latin translation,
and perhaps the lost Chronicon of Julius Africanus.