EARLY SAGA AND ROMANCE
During the golden period of the Greek and Roman genius no one ever
wrote a romance. Epics they left behind them, and history, but the
romance, the Danish saga, the Irish _sgeul_ or _úrsgeul_ was unknown.
It was in time of decadence that a body of Greek prose romance
appeared, and with the exception of Petronius' semi-prose "Satyricon,"
and Apuleius' "Golden Ass," the Latin language produced in this line
little of a higher character than such works as the Gesta Romanorum.
In Greece and Italy where the genial climate favoured all kinds of
open-air representations, the great development of the drama took the
place of novelistic literature, as it did for a long time amongst the
English after the Elizabethan revival. In Ireland, on the other hand,
the dramatic stage was never reached at all, but the development of the
_úrsgeul_, romance, or novel, was quite abnormally great. I have seen
it more than once asserted, if I mistake not, that the dramatic is an
inevitable and an early development in the history of every literature,
but this is to generalise from insufficient instances. The Irish
literature which kept on developing--to some extent at least--for over
a thousand years, and of which hundreds of volumes still exist, never
evolved a drama, nor so much, as far as I know, as even a miracle play,
although these are found in Welsh and even Cornish. What Ireland did
produce, and produce nobly and well, was romance; from the first to the
last, from the seventh to the seventeenth century, Irishmen, without
distinction of class, alike delighted in the _úrsgeul_.
When this form of literature first came into vogue we have no means
of ascertaining, but the narrative prose probably developed at a very
early period as a supplement to defective narrative verse. Not that
verse or prose were then and there committed to writing, for it is said
that the business of the bards was to learn their stories by heart.
I take it, however, that they did not actually do this, but merely
learned the incidents of a story in their regular sequence, and that
their training enabled them to fill these up and clothe them on the
spur of the moment in the most effective garments, decking them out
with passages of gaudy description, with rattling alliterative lines
and "runs" and abundance of adjectival declamation. The bards, no
matter from what quarter of the island, had all to know the same story
or novel, provided it was a renowned one, but with each the sequence
of incidents, and the incidents themselves were probably for a long
time the same; but the language in which they were tricked out and the
length to which they were spun depended probably upon the genius or
bent of each particular bard. Of course in process of time divergences
began to arise, and hence different versions of the same story. That,
at least, is how I account for such passages as "but others say that it
was not there he was killed, but in," etc., "but some of the books say
that it was not on this wise it happened, but," and so on.
It is probable that very many novels were in existence before the
coming of St. Patrick, but highly unlikely that they were at that time
written down at full length. It was probably only after the country
had become Christianised and full of schools and learning that the
bards experienced the desire of writing down their sagas, with as much
as they could recapture of the ancient poetry upon, which they were
built. In the Book of Leinster, a manuscript of the twelfth century,
we find an extraordinary list of no less than 187 of those romances
with THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY of which an ollamh had to be acquainted.
The ollamh was the highest dignitary amongst the bards, and it took him
from nine to twelve years' training to learn the two hundred and fifty
prime stories and the one hundred secondary ones along with the other
things which were required of him. The prime stories--combinations of
epic and novel, prose and poetry--are divided in the manuscripts into
the following romantic catalogue:--Destructions of fortified places,
Cow spoils (_i.e._, cattle-raiding expeditions), Courtships or wooings,
Battles, Cave-stories, Navigations, Tragical deaths, Feasts, Sieges,
Adventures, Elopements, Slaughters, Water-eruptions, Expeditions,
Progresses, and Visions. "He is no poet," says the Book of Leinster,
"who does not synchronise and harmonise all the stories." We possess,
as I have said, the names of 187 such stories in the Book of Leinster,
and the names of many more are given in the tenth-or eleventh-century
tale of Mac Coisè; and all the known ones, with the exception of one
tale added later on, and one which, evidently through an error in
transcription, refers to Arthur instead of Aithirne, are about events
prior to the year 650 or thereabouts. We may take it, then, that this
list was drawn up in the seventh century.
Now, who were the authors of these couple of hundred romances? It is
a natural question, but one which cannot be answered. There is not
a trace of their authorship remaining, if authorship be the right word
for what I suspect to have been the gradual growth of race, tribal,
and family history, and of Celtic mythology, told and retold, and
polished up, and added to; some of them, especially such as are the
descendants of a pagan mythology, must have been handed down for
perhaps countless generations, others recounted historical, tribal,
or family doings, magnified during the course of time, others again
of more recent date, are perhaps fairly accurate accounts of actual
events, but all PRIOR TO ABOUT THE YEAR 650. I take it that so soon as
bardic schools and colleges began to be formed, there was no class of
learning more popular than that which taught the great traditionary
stories of the various tribes and families of the great Gaelic race,
and the intercommunication between the bardic colleges propagated local
tradition throughout all Ireland.
The very essence of the national life of Erin was embodied in these
stories, but, unfortunately, few out of the enormous mass have survived
to our day, and these mostly mutilated or in mere digests. Some,
however, exist at nearly full length, quite sufficient to show us what
the romances were like, and to cause us to regret the irreparable loss
inflicted upon our race by the ravages of Danes, Normans, and English.
Even as it is O'Curry asserts that the contents of the strictly
historical tales known to him would be sufficient to fill up four
thousand of the large pages of the "Four Masters." He computed that
the tales about Finn, Ossian, and the Fenians alone would fill another
three thousand pages. In addition to these we have a considerable
number of imaginative stories, neither historical nor Fenian, such as
the "Three Sorrows of Story-telling" and the like, sufficient to fill
five thousand pages more, not to speak of the more recent novel-like
productions of the later Irish.[1]
It is this very great fecundity of the very early Irish in the
production of saga and romance, in poetry and prose, which best
enables us to judge of their early-developed genius, and considerable
primitive culture. The introduction of Christianity neither inspired
these romances nor helped to produce them; they are nearly all anterior
to it, and had they been preserved to us we should now have the most
remarkable body of primitive myth and saga in the whole western world.
It is probably this consideration which makes M. Darmesteter say of
Irish literature: "real historical documents we have none until the
beginning of the decadence--a decadence so glorious, that we almost
mistake it for a renaissance since the old epic sap dries up only to
make place for a new budding and bourgeoning, a growth less original
certainly, but scarcely less wonderful if we consider the condition of
continental Europe at that date." The decadence that M. Darmesteter
alludes to is the rise of the Christian schools of the fifth and sixth
centuries, which put to some extent an end to the epic period by
turning men's thoughts into a different channel.
It is this "decadence," however, which I have preferred to examine
first, just because it does rest upon real historical documents, and
can be proved. We may now, however, proceed to the mass of saga, the
bulk of which in its earliest forms is pagan, and the spirit of which,
even in the latest texts, has been seldom quite distorted by Christian
influence. This saga centres around several periods and individuals:
some of these, like Tuathal and the Boru tribute, Conairé the Great
and his death, have only one or two stories pertaining to them. But
there are three cycles which stand out pre-eminently, and have been
celebrated in more stories and sagas than the rest, and of which
more remains have been preserved to us than of any of the others.
These are the Mythological Circle concerning the Tuatha De Dannan and
the Pre-Milesians; the Heroic, Ultonian, or Red-Branch Cycle,[2] in
which Cuchulain is the dominating figure; and the Cycle of Finn mac
Cúmhail, Ossian, Oscar, and the High-kings of Ireland who were their
contemporaries--this cycle may be denominated the Fenian or Ossianic.
[1] O'Curry was no doubt accurate, as he ever is, in this computation,
but there would probably be some repetition in the stories, with lists
of names and openings common to more than one, and many late poor ones.
[2] M. d'Arbois de Jubainville calls this the Ulster, and calls the
Ossianic the Leinster Cycle.