Early Bardic Literature, Ireland. by Standish O\'Grady
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Standish O\'Grady >> Early Bardic Literature, Ireland.
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EARLY BARDIC LITERATURE, IRELAND.
by
Standish O'Grady
11 Lower Fitzwilliam Street, Dublin
Scattered over the surface of every country in Europe may be found
sepulchral monuments, the remains of pre-historic times and
nations, and of a phase of life will civilisation which has long
since passed away. No country in Europe is without its cromlechs
and dolmens, huge earthen tumuli, great flagged sepulchres, and
enclosures of tall pillar-stones. The men by whom these works were
made, so interesting in themselves, and so different from anything
of the kind erected since, were not strangers and aliens, but our
own ancestors, and out of their rude civilisation our own has
slowly grown. Of that elder phase of European civilisation no
record or tradition has been anywhere bequeathed to us. Of its
nature, and the ideas and sentiments whereby it was sustained,
nought may now be learned save by an examination of those tombs
themselves, and of the dumb remnants, from time to time exhumed out
of their soil--rude instruments of clay, flint, brass, and gold,
and by speculations and reasonings founded upon these archaeological
gleanings, meagre and sapless.
For after the explorer has broken up, certainly desecrated, and
perhaps destroyed, those noble sepulchral raths; after he has
disinterred the bones laid there once by pious hands, and the urn
with its unrecognisable ashes of king or warrior, and by the
industrious labour of years hoarded his fruitless treasure of stone
celt and arrow-head, of brazen sword and gold fibula and torque;
and after the savant has rammed many skulls with sawdust, measuring
their capacity, and has adorned them with some obscure label, and
has tabulated and arranged the implements and decorations of flint
and metal in the glazed cases of the cold gaunt museum, the
imagination, unsatisfied and revolted, shrinks back from all that
he has done. Still we continue to inquire, receiving from him no
adequate response, Who were those ancient chieftains and warriors
for whom an affectionate people raised those strange tombs? What
life did they lead? What deeds perform? How did their personality
affect the minds of their people and posterity? How did our
ancestors look upon those great tombs, certainly not reared to be
forgotten, and how did they--those huge monumental pebbles and
swelling raths--enter into and affect the civilisation or religion
of the times?
We see the cromlech with its massive slab and immense supporting
pillars, but we vainly endeavour to imagine for whom it was first
erected, and how that greater than cyclopean house affected the
minds of those who made it, or those who were reared in its
neighbourhood or within reach of its influence. We see the stone
cist with its great smooth flags, the rocky cairn, and huge barrow
and massive walled cathair, but the interest which they invariably
excite is only aroused to subside again unsatisfied. From this
department of European antiquities the historian retires baffled,
and the dry savant is alone master of the field, but a field which,
as cultivated by him alone, remains barren or fertile only in
things the reverse of exhilarating. An antiquarian museum is more
melancholy than a tomb.
But there is one country in Europe in which, by virtue of a
marvellous strength and tenacity of the historical intellect, and
of filial devotedness to the memory of their ancestors, there have
been preserved down into the early phases of mediaeval civilisation,
and then committed to the sure guardianship of manuscript, the hymns,
ballads, stories, and chronicles, the names, pedigrees, achievements,
and even characters, of those ancient kings and warriors over whom
those massive cromlechs were erected and great cairns piled. There
is not a conspicuous sepulchral monument in Ireland, the traditional
history of which is not recorded in our ancient literature, and of
the heroes in whose honour they were raised. In the rest of Europe
there is not a single barrow, dolmen, or cist of which the ancient
traditional history is recorded; in Ireland there is hardly one
of which it is not. And these histories are in many cases as rich
and circumstantial as that of men of the greatest eminence who have
lived in modern times. Granted that the imagination which for
centuries followed with eager interest the lives of these heroes,
beheld as gigantic what was not so, as romantic and heroic what was
neither one nor the other, still the great fact remains, that it
was beside and in connection with the mounds and cairns that this
history was elaborated, and elaborated concerning them and
concerning the heroes to whom they were sacred.
On the plain of Tara, beside the little stream Nemanna, itself
famous as that which first turned a mill-wheel in Ireland, there
lies a barrow, not itself very conspicuous in the midst of others,
all named and illustrious in the ancient literature of the country.
The ancient hero there interred is to the student of the Irish
bardic literature a figure as familiar and clearly seen as any
personage in the Biographia Britannica. We know the name he bore as
a boy and the name he bore as a man. We know the names of his
father and his grandfather, and of the father of his grandfather,
of his mother, and the father and mother of his mother, and the
pedigrees and histories of each of these. We know the name of his
nurse, and of his children, and of his wife, and the character of
his wife, and of the father and mother of his wife, and where they
lived and were buried. We know all the striking events of his
boyhood and manhood, the names of his horses and his weapons, his
own character and his friends, male and female. We know his
battles, and the names of those whom he slew in battle, and how he
was himself slain, and by whose hands. We know his physical and
spiritual characteristics, the device upon his shield, and how that
was originated, carved, and painted, by whom. We know the colour of
his hair, the date of his birth and of his death, and his
relations, in time and otherwise, with the remainder of the princes
and warriors with whom, in that mound-raising period of our
history, he was connected, in hostility or friendship; and all this
enshrined in ancient song, the transmitted traditions of the people
who raised that barrow, and who laid within it sorrowing their
brave ruler and, defender. That mound is the tomb of Cuculain, once
king of the district in which Dundalk stands to-day, and the ruins
of whose earthen fortification may still be seen two miles from
that town.
This is a single instance, and used merely as an example, but one
out of a multitude almost as striking. There is not a king of
Ireland, described as such in the ancient annals, whose barrow is
not mentioned in these or other compositions, and every one of
which may at the present day be identified where the ignorant
plebeian or the ignorant patrician has not destroyed them. The
early History of Ireland clings around and grows out of the Irish
barrows until, with almost the universality of that primeval forest
from which Ireland took one of its ancient names, the whole isle
and all within it was clothed with a nobler raiment, invisible, but
not the less real, of a full and luxuriant history, from whose
presence, all-embracing, no part was free. Of the many poetical and
rhetorical titles lavished upon this country, none is truer than
that which calls her the Isle of Song. Her ancient history passed
unceasingly into the realm of artistic representation; the history
of one generation became the poetry of the next, until the whole
island was illuminated and coloured by the poetry of the bards.
Productions of mere fancy and imagination these songs are not,
though fancy and imagination may have coloured and shaped all their
subject-matter, but the names are names of men and women who once
lived and died in Ireland, and over whom their people raised the
swelling rath and reared the rocky cromlech. In the sepulchral
monuments their names were preserved, and in the performance of
sacred rites, and the holding of games, fairs, and assemblies in
their honour, the memory of their achievements kept fresh, till the
traditions that clung around these places were inshrined in tales
which were finally incorporated in the Leabhar na Huidhré and the
Book of Leinster.
Pre-historic narrative is of two kinds--in one the imagination is
at work consciously, in the other unconsciously. Legends of the
former class are the product of a lettered and learned age. The
story floats loosely in a world of imagination. The other sort of
pre-historic narrative clings close to the soil, and to visible and
tangible objects. It may be legend, but it is legend believed in as
history never consciously invented, and growing out of certain
spots of the earth's surface, and supported by and drawing its life
from the soil like a natural growth.
Such are the early Irish tales that cling around the mounds and
cromlechs as that by which they are sustained, which was originally
their source, and sustained them afterwards in a strong enduring
life. It is evident that these cannot be classed with stories that
float vaguely in an ideal world, which may happen in one place as
well as another, and in which the names might be disarrayed without
changing the character and consistency of the tale, and its
relations, in time or otherwise, with other tales.
Foreigners are surprised to find the Irish claim for their own
country an antiquity and a history prior to that of the
neighbouring countries. Herein lie the proof and the explanation.
The traditions and history of the mound-raising period have in
other countries passed away. Foreign conquest, or less intrinsic
force of imagination, and pious sentiment have suffered them to
fall into oblivion; but in Ireland they have been all preserved in
their original fulness and vigour, hardly a hue has faded, hardly a
minute circumstance or articulation been suffered to decay.
The enthusiasm with which the Irish intellect seized upon the grand
moral life of Christianity, and ideals so different from, and so
hostile to, those of the heroic age, did not consume the traditions
or destroy the pious and reverent spirit in which men still looked
back upon those monuments of their own pagan teachers and kings,
and the deep spirit of patriotism and affection with which the
mind still clung to the old heroic age, whose types were warlike
prowess, physical beauty, generosity, hospitality, love of family
and nation, and all those noble attributes which constituted the
heroic character as distinguished from the saintly. The Danish
conquest, with its profound modification of Irish society, and
consequent disruption of old habits and conditions of life, did not
dissipate it; nor the more dangerous conquest of the Normans, with
their own innate nobility of character, chivalrous daring, and
continental grace and civilisation; nor the Elizabethan convulsions
and systematic repression and destruction of all native phases of
thought and feeling. Through all these storms, which successively
assailed the heroic literature of ancient Ireland, it still held
itself undestroyed. There were still found generous minds to
shelter and shield the old tales and ballads, to feel the nobleness
of that life of which they were the outcome, and to resolve that
the soil of Ireland should not, so far as they had the power to
prevent it, be denuded of its raiment of history and historic
romance, or reduced again to primeval nakedness. The fruit of this
persistency and unquenched love of country and its ancient
traditions, is left to be enjoyed by us. There is not through the
length and breadth of the country a conspicuous rath or barrow of
which we cannot find the traditional history preserved in this
ancient literature. The mounds of Tara, the great barrows along the
shores of the Boyne, the raths of Slieve Mish, and Rathcrogan, and
Teltown, the stone caiseals of Aran and Innishowen, and those that
alone or in smaller groups stud the country over, are all, or
nearly all, mentioned in this ancient literature, with the names
and traditional histories of those over whom they were raised.
There is one thing to be learned from all this, which is, that we,
at least, should not suffer these ancient monuments to be
destroyed, whose history has been thus so astonishingly preserved.
The English farmer may tear down the barrow which is unfortunate
enough to be situated within his bounds. Neither he nor his
neighbours know or can tell anything about its ancient history; the
removed earth will help to make his cattle fatter and improve his
crops, the stones will be useful to pave his roads and build his
fences, and the savant can enjoy the rest; but the Irish farmer
and landlord should not do or suffer this.
The instinctive reverence of the peasantry has hitherto been a
great preservative; but the spread of education has to a
considerable extent impaired this kindly sentiment, and the
progress of scientific farming, and the anxiety of the Royal Irish
Academy to collect antiquarian trifles, have already led to the
reckless destruction of too many. I think that no one who reads the
first two volumes of this history would greatly care to bear a hand
in the destruction of that tomb at Tara, in which long since his
people laid the bones of Cuculain; and I think, too, that they
would not like to destroy any other monument of the same age, when
they know that the history of its occupant and its own name are
preserved in the ancient literature, and that they may one day
learn all that is to be known concerning it. I am sure that if the
case were put fairly to the Irish landlords and country gentlemen,
they would neither inflict nor permit this outrage upon the
antiquities of their country. The Irish country gentleman prides
himself on his love of trees, and entertains a very wholesome
contempt for the mercantile boor who, on purchasing an old place,
chops down the best timber for the market. And yet a tree, though
cut down, may be replaced. One elm tree is as good as another, and
the thinned wood, by proper treatment, will be as dense as ever;
but the ancient mound, once carted away, can never be replaced any
more. When the study of the Irish literary records is revived, as
it certainly will be revived, the old history of each of these
raths and cromlechs will be brought again into the light, and one
new interest of a beautiful and edifying nature attached to the
landscape, and affecting wholly for good the minds of our people.
Irishmen are often taunted with the fact that their history is yet
unwritten, but that the Irish, as a nation, have been careless of
their past is refuted by the facts which I have mentioned. A people
who alone in Europe preserved, not in dry chronicles alone, but
illuminated and adorned with all that fancy could suggest in
ballad, and tale, and rude epic, the history of the mound-raising
period, are not justly liable to this taunt. Until very modern
times, history was the one absorbing pursuit of the Irish secular
intellect, the delight of the noble, and the solace of the vile.
At present, indeed, the apathy on this subject is, I believe,
without parallel in the world. It would seem as if the Irish,
extreme in all things, at one time thought of nothing but their
history, and, at another, thought of everything but it. Unlike
those who write on other subjects, the author of a work on Irish
history has to labour simultaneously at a two-fold task--he has to
create the interest to which he intends to address himself.
The pre-Christian period of Irish history presents difficulties
from which the corresponding period in the histories of other
countries is free. The surrounding nations escape the difficulty by
having nothing to record. The Irish historian is immersed in
perplexity on account of the mass of material ready to his hand.
The English have lost utterly all record of those centuries before
which the Irish historian stands with dismay and hesitation, not
through deficiency of materials, but through their excess. Had
nought but the chronicles been preserved the task would have been
simple. We would then have had merely to determine approximately
the date of the introduction of letters, and allowing a margin on
account of the bardic system and the commission of family and
national history to the keeping of rhymed and alliterated verse,
fix upon some reasonable point, and set down in order, the old
successions of kings and the battles and other remarkable events.
But in Irish history there remains, demanding treatment, that other
immense mass of literature of an imaginative nature, illuminating
with anecdote and tale the events and personages mentioned simply
and without comment by the chronicler. It is this poetic literature
which constitutes the stumbling-block, as it constitutes also the
glory, of early Irish history, for it cannot be rejected and it
cannot be retained. It cannot be rejected, because it contains
historical matter which is consonant with and illuminates the dry
lists of the chronologist, and it cannot be retained, for popular
poetry is not history; and the task of distinguishing In such
literature the fact from the fiction--where there is certainly fact
and certainly fiction--is one of the most difficult to which the
intellect can apply itself. That this difficulty has not been
hitherto surmounted by Irish writers is no just reproach. For the
last century, intellects of the highest attainments, trained and
educated to the last degree, have been vainly endeavouring to solve
a similar question in the far less copious and less varied heroic
literature of Greece. Yet the labours of Wolfe, Grote, Mahaffy,
Geddes, and Gladstone, have not been sufficient to set at rest the
small question, whether it was one man or two or many who composed
the Iliad and Odyssey, while the reality of the achievements of
Achilles and even his existence might be denied or asserted by a
scholar without general reproach. When this is the case with regard
to the great heroes of the Iliad, I fancy it will be some time
before the same problem will have been solved for the minor
characters, and as it affects Thersites, or that eminent artist
who dwelt at home in Hyla, being by far the most excellent of
leather cutters. When, therefore, Greek still meets Greek in an
interminable and apparently bloodless contest over the disputed
body of the Iliad, and still no end appears, surely it would be
madness for any one to sit down and gaily distinguish true from
false in the immense and complex mass of the Irish bardic
literature, having in his ears this century-lasting struggle over a
single Greek poem and a single small phase of the pre-historic life
of Hellas.
In the Irish heroic literature, the presence or absence of the
marvellous supplies _no test whatsoever_ as to the general truth or
falsehood of the tale in which they appear. The marvellous is
supplied with greater abundance in the account of the battle of
Clontarf, and the wars of the O'Briens with the Normans, than in
the tale in which is described the foundation of Emain Macha by
Kimbay. Exact-thinking, scientific France has not hesitated to
paint the battles of Louis XIV. with similar hues; and England,
though by no means fertile in angelic interpositions, delights to
adorn the barren tracts of her more popular histories with
apocryphal anecdotes.
How then should this heroic literature of Ireland be treated in
connection with the history of the country? The true method would
certainly be to print it exactly as it is without excision or
condensation. Immense it is, and immense it must remain. No men
living, and no men to live, will ever so exhaust the meaning of any
single tale as to render its publication unnecessary for the study
of others. The order adopted should be that which the bards
themselves deter mined, any other would be premature, and I think
no other will ever take its place. At the commencement should stand
the passage from the Book of Invasions, describing the occupation
of the isle by Queen Keasair and her companions, and along with it
every discoverable tale or poem dealing with this event and those
characters. After that, all that remains of the cycle of which
Partholan was the protagonist. Thirdly, all that relates to Nemeth
and his sons, their wars with curt Kical the bow-legged, and all
that relates to the Fomoroh of the Nemedian epoch, then first
moving dimly in the forefront of our history. After that, the great
Fir-bolgic cycle, a cycle janus-faced, looking on one side to the
mythological period and the wars of the gods, and on the other, to
the heroic, and more particularly to the Ultonian cycle. In the
next place, the immense mass of bardic literature which treats of
the Irish gods who, having conquered the Fir-bolgs, like the Greek
gods of the age of gold dwelt visibly in the island until the
coming of the Clan Milith, out of Spain. In the sixth, the Milesian
invasion, and every accessible statement concerning the sons and
kindred of Milesius. In the seventh, the disconnected tales dealing
with those local heroes whose history is not connected with the
great cycles, but who in the _fasti_ fill the spaces between the
divine period and the heroic. In the eighth, the heroic cycles, the
Ultonian, the Temairian, and the Fenian, and after these the
historic tales that, without forming cycles, accompany the course
of history down to the extinction of Irish independence, and the
transference to aliens of all the great sources of authority in the
island.
This great work when completed will be of that kind of which no
other European nation can supply an example. Every public library
in the world will find it necessary to procure a copy. The
chronicles will then cease to be so closely and exclusively
studied. Every history of ancient Ireland will consist of more or
less intelligent comments upon and theories formed in connection
with this great series--theories which, in general, will only be
formed in order to be destroyed. What the present age demands upon
the subject of antique Irish history--an exact and scientific
treatment of the facts supplied by our native authorities--will be
demanded for ever. It will never be supplied. The history of
Ireland will be contained in this huge publication. In it the poet
will find endless themes of song, the philosopher strange workings
of the human mind, the archeologist a mass of information,
marvellous in amount and quality, with regard to primitive ideas
and habits of life, and the rationalist materials for framing a
scientific history of Ireland, which will be acceptable in
proportion to the readableness of his style, and the mode in which
his views may harmonize with the prevailing humour and complexion
of his contemporaries.
Such a work it is evident could not be effected by a single
individual. It must be a public and national undertaking, carried
out under the supervision of the Royal Irish Academy, at the
expense of the country.
The publication of the Irish bardic remains in the way that I have
mentioned, is the only true and valuable method of presenting the
history of Ireland to the notice of the world. The mode which I
have myself adopted, that other being out of the question, is open
to many obvious objections; but in the existing state of the Irish
mind on the subject, no other is possible to an individual writer.
I desire to make this heroic period once again a portion of the
imagination of the country, and its chief characters as familiar in
the minds of our people as they once were. As mere history, and
treated in the method in which history is generally written at the
present day, a work dealing with the early Irish kings and heroes
would certainly not secure an audience. Those who demand such a
treatment forget that there is not in the country an interest on
the subject to which to appeal. A work treating of early Irish
kings, in the same way in which the historians of neighbouring
countries treat of their own early kings, would be, to the Irish
public generally, unreadable. It might enjoy the reputation of
being well written, and as such receive an honourable place in
half-a-dozen public libraries, but it would be otherwise left
severely alone. It would never make its way through that frozen
zone which, on this subject, surrounds the Irish mind.
On the other hand, Irishmen are as ready as others to feel an
interest in a human character, having themselves the ordinary
instincts, passions, and curiosities of human nature. If I can
awake an interest in the career of even a single ancient Irish
king, I shall establish a train of thoughts, which will advance
easily from thence to the state of society in which he lived, and
the kings and heroes who surrounded, preceded, or followed him.
Attention and interest once fully aroused, concerning even one
feature of this landscape of ancient history, could be easily
widened and extended in its scope.