death." With dragging steps he toiled uphill a little way, his good
sword Durendala in one hand, and in the other his horn Olifant. Under
a little clump of pines were some rough steps hewn in a boulder of
marble leading yet higher up the hill, and these Roland would have
climbed, but his throbbing heart could no more, and again he fell
swooning on the ground. A Saracen who, out of fear, had feigned death,
saw him lying there and crawled out of the covert where he lay
concealed.
"It is Roland, the nephew of the Emperor!" he joyously thought, and in
triumph he said to himself, "I shall bear his sword back with me!" But
as his Pagan hand touched the hilt of the sword and would have torn it
from Roland's dying grasp, the hero was aroused from his swoon. One
great stroke cleft the Saracen's skull and laid him dead at Roland's
feet. Then to Durendala Roland spoke:
"I surely die; but, ere I end,
Let me be sure that thou art ended too my friend!
For should a heathen grasp thee when I am clay,
My ghost would grieve full sore until the judgment day!"
More ghost than man he looked as with a mighty effort of will and of
body he struggled to his feet and smote with his blade the marble
boulder. Before the stroke the marble split asunder as though the
pick-axe of a miner had cloven it. On a rock of sardonyx he strove to
break it then, but Durendala remained unharmed. A third time he
strove, and struck a rock of blue marble with such force that the
sparks rushed out as from a blacksmith's anvil. Then he knew that it
was in vain, for Durendala would not be shattered. And so he raised
Olifant to his lips and blew a dying blast that echoed down the cliffs
and up to the mountain tops and rang through the trees of the forest.
And still, to this day, do they say, when the spirit of the warrior
rides by night down the heights and through the dark pass of
Roncesvalles, even such a blast may be heard, waking all the echoes
and sounding through the lonely hollows of the hills.
Then he made confession, and with a prayer for pardon of his sins and
for mercy from the God whose faithful servant and soldier he had been
unto his life's end, the soul of Roland passed away.
"... With hands devoutly joined
He breathed his last. God sent his Cherubim,
Saint Raphael, Saint Michel del Peril.
Together with them Gabriel came.--All bring
The soul of Count Rolland to Paradise.
Aoi."
Charlemagne and his army found him lying thus, and very terrible were
the grief and the rage of the Emperor as he looked on him and on the
others of his Douzeperes and on the bodies of that army of twenty
thousand.
"All the field was with blod ouer roun"--"Many a good swerd was broken
ther"--"Many a fadirles child ther was at home."
By the side of Roland, Charlemagne vowed vengeance, but ere he avenged
his death he mourned over him with infinite anguish:
"'The Lord have mercy, Roland, on thy soul!
Never again shall our fair France behold
A knight so worthy, till France be no more!
* * * * *
How widowed lies our fair France, and how lone!
How will the realms that I have swayed rebel,
Now thou art taken from my weary age!
So deep my woe that fain would I die too
And join my valiant Peers in Paradise,
While men inter my weary limbs with thine!'"
A terrible vengeance was the one that he took next day, when the
Saracen army was utterly exterminated; and when all the noble dead had
been buried where they fell, save only Roland, Oliver, and Turpin, the
bodies of these three heroes were carried to Blaye and interred with
great honour in the great cathedral there.
Charlemagne then returned to Aix, and as he entered his palace, Aude
the Fair, sister of Oliver, and the betrothed of Roland, hastened to
meet him. Where were the Douzeperes? What was the moaning murmur as of
women who wept, that had heralded the arrival in the town of the
Emperor and his conquering army? Eagerly she questioned Charlemagne of
the safety of Roland, and when the Emperor, in pitying grief, told
her:
"Roland, thy hero, like a hero died," Aude gave a bitter cry and fell
to the ground like a white lily slain by a cruel wind. The Emperor
thought she had fainted, but when he would have lifted her up, he
found that she was dead, and, in infinite pity, he had her taken to
Blaye and buried by the side of Roland.
Very tender was Charlemagne to the maiden whom Roland had loved, but
when the treachery of Ganelon had been proved, for him there was no
mercy. At Aix-la-Chapelle, torn asunder by wild horses, he met a
shameful and a horrible death, nor is his name forgotten as that of
the blackest of traitors. But the memory of Roland and of the other
Douzeperes lives on and is, however fanciful, forever fragrant.
"... Roland, and Olyvere,
And of the twelve Tussypere,
That dieden in the batayle of Runcyvale;
Jesu lord, heaven king,
To his bliss hem and us both bring,
To liven withouten bale!"
Sir Otuel.
THE CHILDREN OF LIR
"Silent, O Moyle, be the roar of thy water;
Break not, ye breezes, your chain of repose;
While murmuring mournfully, Lir's lonely daughter
Tells to the night-star her tale of woes."
Moore.
They are the tragedies, not the comedies of the old, old days that are
handed down to us, and the literature of the Celts is rich in tragedy.
To the romantic and sorrowful imagination of the Celts of the green
island of Erin we owe the hauntingly piteous story of the children of
Lir.
In the earliest times of all, when Ireland was ruled by the Dedannans,
a people who came from Europe and brought with them from Greece magic
and other arts so wonderful that the people of the land believed them
to be gods, the Dedannans had so many chiefs that they met one day to
decide who was the best man of them all, that they might choose him to
be their king. The choice fell upon Bodb the Red, and gladly did every
man acclaim him as king, all save Lir of Shee Finnaha, who left the
council in great wrath because he thought that he, and not Bodb,
should have been chosen. In high dudgeon he retired to his own place,
and in the years that followed he and Bodb the Red waged fierce war
against one another. At last a great sorrow came to Lir, for after an
illness of three days his wife, who was very dear to him, was taken
from him by death. Then Bodb saw an opportunity for reconciliation
with the chief whose enemy he had no wish to be. And to the
grief-stricken husband he sent a message:
"My heart weeps for thee, yet I pray thee to be comforted. In my house
have I three maidens, my foster-daughters, the most beautiful and the
best instructed in all Erin. Choose which one thou wilt for thy wife,
and own me for thy lord, and my friendship shall be thine forever."
And the message brought comfort to Lir, and he set out with a gallant
company of fifty chariots, nor ever halted until he had reached the
palace of Bodb the Red at Lough Derg, on the Shannon. Warm and kindly
was the welcome that Lir received from his overlord, and next day, as
the three beautiful foster-daughters of Bodb sat on the same couch as
his queen, Bodb said to Lir:
"Behold my three daughters. Choose which one thou wilt."
And Lir answered, "They are all beautiful, but Eve is the eldest, so
she must be the noblest of the three. I would have her for my wife."
That day he married Eve, and Lir took his fair young wife back with
him to his own place, Shee Finnaha, and happy were both of them in
their love. To them in course of time were born a twin son and a
daughter. The daughter they named Finola and the son Aed, and the
children were as beautiful, as good, and as happy as their mother.
Again she bore twins, boys, whom they named Ficra and Conn, but as
their eyes opened on the world, the eyes of their mother closed on
pleasant life forever, and once again Lir was a widower, more bowed
down by grief than before.
The tidings of the death of Eve brought great sorrow to the palace of
Bodb the Red, for to all who knew her Eve was very dear. But again the
king sent a message of comfort to Lir:
"We sorrow with thee, yet in proof of our friendship with thee and our
love for the one who is gone, we would give thee another of our
daughters to be a mother to the children who have lost their mother's
care."
And again Lir went to the palace at Loch Derg, the Great Lake, and
there he married Eva, the second of the foster-daughters of the king.
At first it seemed as if Eva loved her dead sister's children as
though they were her own. But when she saw how passionate was her
husband's devotion to them, how he would have them to sleep near him
and would rise at their slightest whimper to comfort and to caress
them, and how at dawn she would wake to find he had left her side to
see that all was well with them, the poisonous weed of jealousy began
to grow up in the garden of her heart. She was a childless woman, and
she knew not whether it was her sister who had borne them whom she
hated, or whether she hated the children themselves. But steadily the
hatred grew, and the love that Bodb the Red bore for them only
embittered her the more. Many times in the year he would come to see
them, many times would take them away to stay with him, and each year
when the Dedannans held the Feast of Age--the feast of the great god
Mannanan, of which those who partook never grew old--the four children
of Lir were present, and gave joy to all who beheld them by their
great beauty, their nobility, and their gentleness.
But as the love that all others gave to the four children of Lir grew,
the hatred of Eva, their stepmother, kept pace with it, until at
length the poison in her heart ate into her body as well as her soul,
and she grew worn and ill out of her very wickedness. For nearly a
year she lay sick in bed, while the sound of the children's laughter
and their happy voices, their lovely faces like the faces of the
children of a god, and the proud and loving words with which their
father spoke of them were, to her, like acid in a festering wound. At
last there came a black day when jealousy had choked all the flowers
of goodness in her heart, and only treachery and merciless cruelty
remained. She rose from her couch and ordered the horses to be yoked
to her chariot that she might take the four children to the Great Lake
to see the king, her foster-father. They were but little children, yet
the instinct that sometimes tells even a very little child when it is
near an evil thing, warned Finola that harm would come to her and to
her brothers were they to go. It may also have been, perhaps, that she
had seen, with the sharp vision of a woman child, the thing to which
Lir was quite blind, and that in a tone of her stepmother's voice, in
a look she had surprised in her eyes, she had learned that the love
that her father's wife professed for her and for the others was only
hatred, cunningly disguised. Thus she tried to make excuses for
herself and the little brothers to whom she was a child-mother, so
that they need not go. But Eva listened with deaf ears, and the
children said farewell to Lir, who must have wondered at the tears
that stood in Finola's eyes and the shadow that darkened their blue,
and drove off in the chariot with their stepmother.
When they had driven a long way, Eva turned to her attendants: "Much
wealth have I," she said, "and all that I have shall be yours if you
will slay for me those four hateful things that have stolen from me
the love of my man."
The servants heard her in horror, and in horror and shame for her they
answered: "Fearful is the deed thou wouldst have us do; more fearful
still is it that thou shouldst have so wicked a thought. Evil will
surely come upon thee for having wished to take the lives of Lir's
innocent little children."
Angrily, then, she seized a sword and herself would fain have done
what her servants had scorned to do. But she lacked strength to carry
out her own evil wish, and so they journeyed onwards. They came to
Lake Darvra at last--now Lough Derravaragh, in West Meath--and there
they all alighted from the chariot, and the children, feeling as
though they had been made to play at an ugly game, but that now it was
over and all was safety and happiness again, were sent into the loch
to bathe. Joyously and with merry laughter the little boys splashed
into the clear water by the rushy shore, all three seeking to hold
the hands of their sister, whose little slim white body was whiter
than the water-lilies and her hair more golden than their hearts.
It was then that Eva struck them, as a snake strikes its prey. One
touch for each, with a magical wand of the Druids, then the low
chanting of an old old rune, and the beautiful children had vanished,
and where their tiny feet had pressed the sand and their yellow hair
had shown above the water like four daffodil heads that dance in the
wind, there floated four white swans. But although to Eva belonged the
power of bewitching their bodies, their hearts and souls and speech
still belonged to the children of Lir. And when Finola spoke, it was
not as a little timid child, but as a woman who could look with sad
eyes into the future and could there see the terrible punishment of a
shameful act.
"Very evil is the deed that thou hast done," she said. "We only gave
thee love, and we are very young, and all our days were happiness. By
cruelty and treachery thou hast brought our childhood to an end, yet
is our doom less piteous than thine. Woe, woe unto thee, O Eva, for a
fearful doom lies before thee!"
Then she asked--a child still, longing to know when the dreary days of
its banishment from other children should be over--"Tell us how long a
time must pass until we can take our own forms again."
[Illustration: ONE TOUCH FOR EACH, WITH A MAGICAL WAND OF THE DRUIDS]
And, relentlessly, Eva made answer: "Better had it been for thy peace
hadst thou left unsought that knowledge. Yet will I tell thee thy
doom. Three hundred years shall ye live in the smooth waters of Lake
Darvra; three hundred years on the Sea of Moyle,[11] which is
between Erin and Alba; three hundred years more at Ivros Domnann[12]
and at Inis Glora,[13] on the Western Sea. Until a prince from the
north shall marry a princess from the south; until the Tailleken (St.
Patrick) shall come to Erin, and until ye shall hear the sound of the
Christian bell, neither my power nor thy power, nor the power of any
Druid's runes can set ye free until that weird is dreed."
As she spoke, a strange softening came into the evil woman's heart.
They were so still, those white creatures who gazed up at her with
eager, beseeching eyes, through which looked the souls of the little
children that once she had loved. They were so silent and piteous, the
little Ficra and Conn, whose dimpled baby faces she often used to
kiss. And she said, that her burden of guilt might be the lighter:
"This relief shall ye have in your troubles. Though ye keep your human
reason and your human speech, yet shall ye suffer no grief because
your form is the form of swans, and you shall sing songs more sweet
than any music that the earth has ever known."
Then Eva went back to her chariot and drove to the palace of her
foster-father at the Great Lake, and the four white swans were left on
the lonely waters of Darvra.
When she reached the palace without the children, the king asked in
disappointment why she had not brought them with her.
"Lir loves thee no longer," she made answer. "He will not trust his
children to thee, lest thou shouldst work them some ill."
But her father did not believe her lying words. Speedily he sent
messengers to Shee Finnaha that they might bring back the children who
ever carried joy with them. Amazed, Lir received the message, and when
he learned that Eva had reached the palace alone, a terrible dread
arose in his heart. In great haste he set out, and as he passed by
Lake Darvra he heard voices singing melodies so sweet and moving that
he was fain, in spite of his fears, to stop and listen. And lo, as he
listened, he found that the singers were four swans, that swam close
up to where he stood, and greeted him in the glad voices of his own
dear children. All that night he stayed beside them, and when they had
told him their piteous tale and he knew that no power could free them
till the years of their doom were accomplished, Lir's heart was like
to break with pitying love and infinite sorrow. At dawn he took a
tender leave of them and drove to the house of Bodb the Red. Terrible
were the words of Lir, and dark was his face as he told the king the
evil thing that Eva had done. And Eva, who had thought in the madness
of her jealousy that Lir would give her all his love when he was a
childless man, shrank, white and trembling, away from him when she saw
the furious hatred in his eyes. Then said the king, and his anger was
even as the anger of Lir:
"The suffering of the little children who are dear to our souls shall
come to an end at last. Thine shall be an eternal doom."
And he put her on oath to tell him "what shape of all others, on the
earth, or above the earth, or beneath the earth, she most abhorred,
and into which she most dreaded to be transformed."
"A demon of the air," answered the cowering woman.
"A demon of the air shalt thou be until time shall cease!" said her
foster-father. Thereupon he smote her with his druidical wand, and a
creature too hideous for men's eyes to look upon, gave a great scream
of anguish, and flapped its black wings as it flew away to join the
other demons of the air.
Then the king of the Dedannans and all his people went with Lir to
Lake Darvra, and listened to the honey-sweet melodies that were sung
to them by the white swans that had been the children of their hearts.
And such magic was in the music that it could lull away all sorrow and
pain, and give rest to the grief-stricken and sleep to the toil-worn
and the heavy at heart. And the Dedannans made a great encampment on
the shores of the lake that they might never be far from them. There,
too, as the centuries went by, came the Milesians, who succeeded the
Dedannans in Erin, and so for the children of Lir three hundred years
passed happily away.
Sad for them and for Lir, and for all the people of the Dedannans, was
the day when the years at Darvra were ended and the four swans said
farewell to their father and to all who were so dear to them, spread
their snowy pinions, and took flight for the stormy sea. They sang a
song of parting that made grief sit heavy on the hearts of all those
who listened, and the men of Erin, in memory of the children of Lir
and of the good things they had wrought by the magic of their music,
made a law, and proclaimed it throughout all the land, that from that
time forth no man of their land should harm a swan.
Weary were the great white wings of the children of Lir when they
reached the jagged rocks by the side of the fierce grey sea of Moyle,
whose turbulent waves fought angrily together. And the days that came
to them there were days of weariness, of loneliness, and of hardship.
Very cold were they often, very hungry, and yet the sweetness of their
song pierced through the vicious shriek of the tempest and the sullen
boom and crash of the great billows that flung themselves against the
cliffs or thundered in devouring majesty over the wrack-strewn shore,
like a thread of silver that runs through a pall. One night a tempest
drove across and down the Sea of Moyle from the north-east, and lashed
it into fury. And the mirk darkness and the sleet that drove in the
teeth of the gale like bullets of ice, and the huge, irresistible
breakers that threshed the shore, filled the hearts of the children of
Lir with dread. For always they had desired love and beauty, and the
ugliness of unrestrained cruelty and fury made them sick at soul.
To her brothers Finola said: "Beloved ones, of a surety the storm must
drive us apart. Let us, then, appoint a place of meeting, lest we
never look upon each other again."
And, knowing that she spoke wisely and well, the three brothers
appointed as their meeting-place the rock of Carricknarone.
Never did a fiercer storm rage on the sea between Alba and Erin than
the storm that raged that night. Thunderous, murky clouds blotted out
stars and moon, nor was there any dividing line between sky and sea,
but both churned themselves up together in a passion of destruction.
When the lightning flashed, it showed only the fury of the cruel seas,
the shattered victims of the destroying storm. Very soon the swans
were driven one from another and scattered over the face of the angry
deep. Scarcely could their souls cling to their bodies while they
struggled with the winds and waves. When the long, long night came to
an end, in the grey and cheerless dawn Finola swam to the rock of
Carricknarone. But no swans were there, only the greedy gulls that
sought after wreckage, and the terns that cried very dolorously.
Then great grief came upon Finola, for she feared she would see her
brothers nevermore. But first of all came Conn, his feathers all
battered and broken and his head drooping, and in a little Ficra
appeared, so drenched and cold and beaten by the winds that no word
could he speak. And Finola took her younger brothers under her great
white wings, and they were comforted and rested in that warm shelter.
"If Aed would only come," she said, "then should we be happy indeed."
And even as she spoke, they beheld Aed sailing towards them like a
proud ship with its white sails shining in the sun, and Finola held
him close to the snowy plumage of her breast, and happiness returned
to the children of Lir.
Many another tempest had they to strive with, and very cruel to them
were the snow and biting frosts of the dreary winters. One January
night there came a frost that turned even the restless sea into solid
ice, and in the morning, when the swans strove to rise from the rock
of Carricknarone, the iron frost clung to them and they left behind
them the skin of their feet, the quills of their wings, and the soft
feathers of their breasts, and when the frost had gone, the salt water
was torture for their wounds. Yet ever they sang their songs, piercing
sweet and speaking of the peace and joy to come, and many a
storm-tossed mariner by them was lulled to sleep and dreamt the happy
dreams of his childhood, nor knew who had sung him so magical a
lullaby. It was in those years that Finola sang the song which a poet
who possessed the wonderful heritage of a perfect comprehension of the
soul of the Gael has put into English words for us.
"Happy our father Lir afar,
With mead, and songs of love and war:
The salt brine, and the white foam,
With these his children have their home.
In the sweet days of long ago,
Soft-clad we wandered to and fro:
But now cold winds of dawn and night
Pierce deep our feathers thin and light.
* * * * *
Beneath my wings my brothers lie
When the fierce ice-winds hurtle by;
On either side and 'neath my breast
Lir's sons have known no other rest."
Fiona Macleod (William Sharp).
Only once during those dreary three hundred years did the children of
Lir see any of their friends. When they saw, riding down to the shore
at the mouth of the Bann on the north coast of Erin, a company in
gallant attire, with glittering arms, and mounted on white horses, the
swans hastened to meet them. And glad were their hearts that day, for
the company was led by two sons of Bodb the Red, who had searched for
the swans along the rocky coast of Erin for many a day, and who
brought them loving greetings from the good king of the Dedannans and
from their father Lir.
At length the three hundred years on the Sea of Moyle came to an end,
and the swans flew to Ivros Domnann and the Isle of Glora in the
western sea. And there they had sufferings and hardships to bear that
were even more grievous than those that they had endured on the Sea of
Moyle, and one night the snow that drifted down upon them from the ice
was scourged on by a north-west wind, and there came a moment when the
three brothers felt that they could endure no more.
But Finola said to them:
"It is the great God of truth who made both land and sea who alone can
succour us, for He alone can wholly understand the sorrows of our
hearts. Put your trust in Him, dear brothers, and He will send us
comfort and help."
Then said her brothers: "In Him we put our trust," and from that
moment the Lord of Heaven gave them His help, so that no frost, nor
snow, nor cold, nor tempest, nor any of the creatures of the deep
could work them any harm.
When the nine hundred years of their sorrowful doom had ended, the
children of Lir joyously spread their wings and flew to their father's
home at Shee Finnaha.