The story of early Gaelic literature

THE STORY OF
EARLY GAELIC LITERATURE

" Ogygia too, in Greek, is equivalent to Insula Perantiq<ia,'
that is ' Very-ancient Island.' And a fitting name is that for
Erin, because it was far in the past that she was first inhabited,
and because perfect is the exact knowledge which her Shanachies
possess of the records of her ancients from the beginning of the
ages, generation after generation."

— From the Irish of se^tUUtl C^ICinj;.

THE STORY OF EARLY
GAELIC LITERATURE

BY

DOUGLAS HYDE, LL.D., M.R.I.A.

(An Cb|tAOibhtn -Aoibhinn)

President of the Gaelic League. Author of " VeAt)4|i Sj^eului-
^eA^CA," "Beside the Fire," " Love Songs of Connacht," &c.

T. FISHER UNWIN LTD
LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACR

First pu

^lished

1894

Second J

m press ion

1900

Third

,,

1903

Fourth

,,

1905

Fifth

• 1

1910

Sixth

II

1920

[All Rights Reserved]

ITI-A^t t)iiArj-ch«inihtie a|\ mo 6Aiffoi5,

CllAti-A1|t oltAtil 'OlA'OACCA.

TO THE MEMORY OF MY LATE D-EAR FRIENDS.

THE REV E USE BY D, CLEAVER,

OF DOLGELLY, NORTH WALES, AND

FATHER JAMES KEEGAN

O? ST. LOUIS, U.S.A., WHOSE LIFE-LONG, FAR-REACHING,

PERSISTENT AND UNSELFISH EFFORTS

TO STEM THE EVER-INCREASING ANGLICISATION

OF OUR RACE,

HAVE EARNED THE WARM GRATITUDE OF ALL THOSE

IRISHMEN

WHO DO NOT DESIRK TO SEE OUR ANCIENT IRISH NATION

SINK INTO A WEST BRITAIN.

8^6883

PREFACE.

i3[iHEN Trelawny the friend
of Byron and Shelley,
who himself played so
romantic a part in the
revival of Greece, after-
wards surveyed dispassionately the almost miraculous
emergence of that nation from the blackest night
into the warm day, he thus pointed the moral as it
appeared to him : " no people," he said, " if they
retain their name and language need despair." That
pledge of liberty, that guarantee of nationality,
Ireland like Greece possessed — possessed even
wrhen Trelawny wrote — but possesses no more
Whoever takes the trouble to acquaint himself

via PRIFACB.

with the history of the life and death of our language
and literature, which after a luxuriant and Steady
growth lasting from the very dawn of Irish history,
has, almost in our own day, been stricken and de-
cayed like some secular elm, blighted by disease
within a single season, can hardly avoid being im-
pressed with the instability of human tongues. Not
that the history of mankind is not full of such
instances, but it has nothing of the kind to show
in modern times so startling, so wholesale, and so
rapid, as this sudden extinguishing of one of the
finest, most perfect, and best-preserved of the great
Aryan languages. It has gone — this most important
of- those units which go to constitute the nationality
of the Clann-na-nGael ; gone, as a day in the late
autumn sometimes gives way to night with scarce any
intervening twilight; gone with its songs, ballads,
poems, folk-lore, romances and literature.

It is at this literature, which flourished so long
and was extinguished so suddenly, that I desire to
glance in this little volume; it is, roughly speaking,
the literature of the entire Irish race down to the

PREFACE. IX

year 1600, of ninety-nine hundreths of the race down
to the year 1 700, and after that of an ever-diminish
ing portion of it, which was attenuated to about one-
half at the time of the Great Famine, after which
death-blow, if the Celts did not quite "go with a
vengeance," as the Tirnes boasted, their literature,
songs, traditions, and language did.

It would be obviously impossible within the limits
of this small book to attempt anything like an ex-
haustive catalogue of the literature produced in Irish^
or of the names of Irish writers. Such a catalogue
and such a list, if carefully compiled, would be of
the greatest value, but would perhaps hardly be
suitable for the more popular series of the " Irish
Library." I shall here merely attempt to give some
general idea of our literature and its history, touch-
ing lightly on its more salient features and most
striking names, and illustrating it by a few extracts
from the original in prose and verse, which may
serve as samples of Gaelic style.

The moment the English reader embarks on the
sea of native Irish literature, he finds 'himself in

X PREFAOB.

absolutely unknown waters. It is not merely that
the style, the phraseology, the turns of speech, the
entire metrical system, are as unlike English as
though the whole of England lay between the two
countries, but its allusions are to things and times
and events and cycles and dynasties, strange and
unknown to him, and he thus finds himself suddenly
launched into a new world, whose existence was by
him perfectly unsuspected. He is beset on every
side by allusions which he cannot understand, similes
he cannot grasp, and ideas which are strange to him.
Of course, after a little familiarity with our manu-
script literature, he will learn that such a term as
" descendant of the race of Lopus " means a vulgar
upstart, that an " Ossian after the Fenians" is an
ancient left alone in this world by kith, kin and
contemporaries, that the " plain of Felim " is another
name for Ireland, that to be descended from the
" Three Collas " is to be of the Ultonian race, in other
words, a Northern, that the " sons of Ir and of Ere-
mhdin " mean the Irish stock, and so on. Nor is this
^11. The now familiar topographical system of conn-

PREFACE. XI

ties will not avail him in the least He will have to
leam that Conn's Half and Edghan's Half mean
Connacht-and-Ulster and Munster-and-Leinster re-
spectively, he will have to acquaint himself with the
hitherto unheard-of districts of Bregia, Oriel, Hy"
Many, the Decies, Ofaly, Breffny, the Paoracha, and
the rest. The O'Conors of Connacht he may have
known before, but will he recognize them under the
title of the Siol Murray ; the MacDonnells of Antrim
may be familiar to him, but will he know them under
the patronymic of the Race of Colla Uais? Will
he understand that the tribe of E6ghan M6r repre-
sent the MacCarthys of Munster, or know that the
Cinel Conaill are the sept that gave to the Irish
race the great Red Hugh? If he learns to speak
Irish he will never hear of anything less than the
^^five provinces," he will find Ireland called not
only Eire but Banba and Fola, names he never
heard before; and an Englishman learning; our
language and embarking on our literature might
nearly as well find himself in Russia. This lends
to Irish literature a peculiar value and a great en-

XU PREFACE.

chantment, for its fibres to the latest day of its life
were twined deep down in the soil of Ireland,
knit inseparably to the ancient history, mythology,
topography and romance of the island. But it also
had this disadvantage: that the moment the Irish
language and literature ceased to be the preponder-
ating language and literature in Ireland, they died
away with unparalleled rapidity, because they were
so utterly unlike, so diametrically opposed to what
men were now beginning to learn and to study.
Had there been any resemblance, had there been
the least community between the two, they might
have lived somewhat longer side by side. But as
things were, those who had once got hold of English*
in most cases, refused to undergo the mental labour
of cultivating the mother tongue, and the very gene-
ral idea that to speak Irish " ruined one's English "
helped to prevent a generation of bi-linguists from
arising. .And this was in one way natural enough,
for there are some dozen and a half of sounds alone
in the Irish language which are not in the English,
and which no speaker of English or of the Romance

PREPAOB. Xlll

languages only, could master without trouble. Let
us glance at the course of the two literatures side
by side.

Before the beginnkig of the seventeenth century
no work of any size had ever been undertaken in
Ireland by dny Englishman, with the exception of
Spenser's View, Hanmer's Chronicle, and Campion^s
Historie* The seventeenth century itself which
saw such terrific and annihilating blows struck against
the Gael, was nevertheless a most productive one in
literature, and during at least the first half of it, the

* Spenser's View was written In 1596, but was not published
tiU 1633. Campion's Historic of Ireland was written twenty-
five years earlier, but was only published in the same year as
Spenser's View. I am not sure that Hanmer was published
before 1633 either, in which year Sir James Ware put all three
into print, Stanihurst does not fall within the scope of my state-
ment, for he was an Irishman. His De Rebus in Hibemid
gestis saw the Kght at Antwerp in 1584. Fynes Moryson's
Itinerary, of which about one-third is dedicated to Ireland,
was first published in 16 17, but was written long before, though
probably not in Ireland. The first English translation from an
Irish prose work was, as far as I know, Conal Macgeoghegan's
Annals of Clonmacnois made about 1627— a work which I hope
will see the light before the end of the year. The first translation
of an Irish poetical work was O' Kearney's metrical version of
O'Dugan's Kin^ of the race of Etbhear, a most wretched affair,

b

flV PREFACE.

Irish tried hard to keep abreast of the rest of Europe
Many of the great writers in this century used Irish
exclusively, as did Keating, the O'Clerys, Duald
MacFirbirs, O'Mulloy, O'Hussey, and a host of
others. Some, again, of equal literary fame super
added Latin to Irish, as though foreseeing that the
native language might not be cultivated in the future
as it had been in the past, and hence Ward, Colgan,
0*Sullivan Beare, Father Lynch, Florence O'Mul-
conry, Father White, and Roderick O'Flaherty wrote
either in Latin or in both Irish and Latin There
were even then, however, men of English descent
but Irish birth, men of the Pale, rising up, in whom
English blood and Irish nurture contrasted curiously.
Ussher and Ware were the most distinguished of
these, and they, though not unfamiliar with Irish, as
far as was necessary for literary purposes, made use
jci their writings only of Latin and English. Towards
the end of the century some even of the Catholic
Irish are found using English, as Peter Walsh, Nicho-
las French and Hugh O'Reilly, but these were al]
without exception men who had lived much at court.

PBEFAGB XV

and were rather politicians than authors. After that
came Molyneux, born in Dublin, son of a Crom-
wellian, and he was the forerunner of the Swifts
and Grattans and Floods, who in the eighteenth
century dwarfed for the first time in Ireland the
Gaelic race. Of course it was not difficult to dwarf
them under the conditions of that age, since all the
best Gaelic families of the foar provinces in whom
lay the educated brain of the nation, had been rooted
out, slain, or banished, a^d all those who were left
were deprived bylaw of almost every chance of better-
ing themselves, and above all had their life-possibili-
ties stifled at the birth by being deprived of education.
And as the eighteenth century, filled for the Irish
nation with pain and shame, agony and degradation,
dragged itself slowly through, all eyes were fixed on
our brilliant Grattans and Floods, on our House in
College Green, on Charlemont and his Volunteers,
and the Gaelic race seemed to be effaced from the
earth. But it was not so. During all this time the
dwarfed, unnoticed, unheeded Gael, the bone and
sinew of the Irish nation, the fathers of those men

Xn PREPACB.

who outside of North-East Ulster to-day are the Irish
nation, had a system of education of their own, a
large if furtively-produced literature and a race of
poets, who in one thing at least, in the exquisite deli-
cacy of their ear, and in the rhythm and music of their
language far surpassed even the palmiest days of
their predecessors, and produced the most sensuous
attempt at conveying music in language that th^
world probably ever witnessed With the nineteenth
century came eclipse. The first half of it, up to the
Great Famine, found the bulk of the nation still
Gaelic, and produced several poets in Connacht and
Munster, the latter half little or nothing, and it
would seem reserved for this coming century, unless
the most vigorous effort of which our race is capable
be at once made, to catch the last tones of that beau-
tiful unmixed Aryan language which, with the excep-
tion of that glorious Greek which has now renewed
its youth Hke the eagle, has left the longest, most
luminous, and most consecutive literary track behind
it of any of the vernacular tongues of Europe.

As one might be prepared to expect, a literature so

pitoFACB xvti

widely cultivated and of so long a growth, branched
out into many different directions and embraced as
wide a diversity of style as English itself. There is
certainly no one leading feature which one could ven-
ture to call " Irish " more than another Yet it is
common of late to hear of English authors who have
" caught the Irish style/' of a poem or ballad being
" quite in the Irish style," and so on. The truth is
that there were dozens of different literary movements
in the language, each characterized by a something of
its own. There is the style of the older sagas and
annals, which is distinguished by its brief, plain, in-
telligible and straightforward sentences. There is
the style of the later saga : declamatory, thunderous,
adjectival There is the style of Keating, smooth
complex, Latin-like, the sentences unrolling them-
selves slowly and passing on to their stately and
polished close. There is the style of the bardic
schools, which I might denominate, if it were not a
bull, as condensation running riot, and perhaps if any
style more than another deserves the appellation of
Irish it is this. We have the sensible style of the

XVm PREFAOk

seventeenth century poets who were the first to break
themselves loose from the fetters of the schools. We
have the style of our later poetry, nebulous with
Swinburnian diffuseness, almost cloying with five-fold
Swinbumian melody. We have the semi-epic style
of the Ossianic epopee, a happy medium betweer
bardic condensation and Lyric diffuseness. Any
attempt to reproduce these modes in English must
always prove completely inadequate, because it is
likely that there never was a language whose litera-
ture so largely depended upon the sound of its
vocables as the Irish, and hence, important as the
getting of Irish literature into the English tongue
must be, it is of far more importance, from a literary
and aesthetic stand-point, to diffuse a knowledge of
the tongue itself in which it is written.

Everyone knows now, or ought to know, that Irish
is, like Greek, Latin and Sanscrit, a pure Aryan lan-
guage, and a highly-inflected and very beautiful one
also. Had it not been for Aughrim, the Boyne, and
the Penals laws, it would undoubtedly now be the
language of all Ireland, and liave probably produced

PREFAda, XIX

a splendid modem literature. The numerous conti-
nental scholars who have studied it (and who now
freely admit that old Irish ranks near to Sanscrit in
importance for the philologist) all speak of it in terms
of highest praise, and one German has said that had
it continued to be cultivated down to the present
day., it would — flexible as it is — have been found as
equal to the wants and emergencies of modern life
as German itself. As it is, the language has not re-
ceived even a trace of fair play, not having been
spoken in law courts, camps, or colleges since the first
half of the seventeenth century, up to which time it
had been cultivated with more assiduity than almost
any other European tongue, and was quite able to hold
its own with any language in the world. During the
eighteenth century it ceased to be spoken or written
by scientists and men of learning, or to put things
more plainly, the men who spoke it were unable to
produce men of science or learning since they were
by law deprived of education. This being so, the
Irish language has not kept abreast of the last century
and a half, and has not, like other languages, produced
vernacular names for scientific, political, banking,

XX PREFACE.

engineering; or mathematical terms. That it could
have done so with the greatest ease is certain, and
since the small attempt made within the last few
years to rake a few live cinders out of the expiring
Gaelic fire, Irish has been found to supply quite
readily most of the terms required by this fin de
si'ecle life, thanks to • its power of forming word-
combinations,* in which it scarcely falls short of
Greek and German.

The causes which brought about the extinction of

* Thus such words as HUn-chUirecuh for secretary of a meet-
ing, gal-charbad or cdiste-iarainn for train, bSthar-iarainn for
railroad, teachtaireacht-teinntigh for telegram (or sgeul-ar-hhirr-
bcUa\ dd-rothdn and tri-rothdn for bicycle and tricycle, have
become quite natural as it were, to the members of the Gaelic
League, who make it their rule to converse in Irish. These
phrases which may now be regarded as stereotyped, mean liter-
ally secret-clerk, steam-chariot , oi iron-coach , iron-road, lightning-
message, or story-on-top'of-a-sticky — this last an ancient and pro-
verbial phrase probably first used about Ogams cut on sticks
planted upright in the ground — two-wheeleeny three-wkeeleen, etc.
In one respect Irish is both weaker and stronger than German,
for it only takes kindly to word-combinations, when the first
word is a monosyllable. This of course diminishes its power
of expression, but vastly increases its gracefulness. The Gaelic
League (rooms, 4 College Green, Dublin ; Secretary, Mr. John
MacNeill, annual subscription, 5s.) is now doing its utmost
to keep our language, Ireland's noblest heritage, alive in those
districts whtre it is still spoken. But it is a matter not iat indi-
vidual effort but for a nation to move in.

PRBFAOB. XXi

our language over so large a part of the country,
may be classed under several headings as political
religious, and social, and were, in every respect, very
complex. To attempt to trace them out — as I sin-
cerely hope they shall some day be traced — would be
sure to arouse violent animosities at present, and
would be a task unsuited for this brief preface. One
cause for, slighting the Irish language is the grotesque
misconception that there is nothing to read in it.
One of the stereotyped, unvarying, never-failing
objections to its study in the mouth, not only of
West-Britons but of many good Irishmen, is to be
found in the assertion that it contains no literature.
How in the face of all that foreign scholars have
done and are doing, in the face of the Revue Celtique,
in the face of the Gaelic Journal^ in the face of the
end of the nineteenth century such a popular fallacy
still obtains wide-spread credence, is astounding. That
it should be believed in England, Scotland, Wales,
even Europe, that the Irish had no literature is easily
conceivable, but that Irishmen themselves — the unique
and predominant glory of whose race, if they only

Xni PBHFAOE.

knew it, in their literature — should believe they have
none, is as remarkable as the action of literary men of
note highly-esteemed in Ireland, who until recently
deliberately discouraged all attempts at its cultivation.

This little sketch of the history of our literature is
intended as a sort of answer to those who still repeat
that there is no literature in Irish; but the best
answer would be to ask them to walk into the Royal
Irish Academy in Dawson Street and look at the
long rows and piles of Irish MSS. on the shelves
there, requesting them to remember that as many
more may be seen in Trinity College, the British
Museum, Maynooth College, the Bodleian, and else-
where, so that if they were all printed they would
probably fill 1,200 or 1,400 octavo volumes, perhaps
even more.

Only three writers of English • have attempted to

• It has no doubt often been done by Gaelic writers whose
works and very names are lost. We know that at least one such
great compilation was made about 1660 by the last hereditary
historian of Lower Connacht, Duald MacFirbis, who says in his
yet extant book of Genealogies that it required a large work to
give the names merely of the Gaelic writers with the titles of their
tracts. The loss of MacFirbis's work is an irreparable calamity.

i»REFACE. XXlil

give any account of the more important works con-
tained in this vast literature, they are Bishop Nichol-
son, Edward O'Reilly, and Eugene O'Curry. The
first of these was an Englishman, created Archbishop
of Cashel, and — like Bishop Bedell — one of the ex-
cessively few out of the hordes of the English clerical
place-men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
who attempted either to understand the country and
its people, or to give back something for all they took.
His Irish Historical Library ^ published in 1724, is
a very painstaking attempt to give a catalogue of
Irish historical books and manuscripts, quite surpris-
ing, considering the circumstances under which the
bishop compiled it

In 1820 O'Reilly, who, three years before this,
had published his great Irish Dictionary, produced
his " Chronological Account of nearly four hundred
Irish [Gaelic] Writers, commencing with the earliest
account of Irish history, and carried down to the
year of our Lord, 1750, with a descriptive catalogue
of such of their works as are still extant in verse or
prose, consisting of ud wards of one thousand sepa-

XXIV PREFAC*.

rate tracts." This valuable book, which has been
long out of print, is the only attempt ever made at
a complete list of Irish Gaelic writers. It is of course
exceedingly defective, but yet a wonderful compila-
tion for O'Reilly to have accomplished single-handed,
considering the way in which Irish manuscripts were
at that time dispersed in private hands, or stored in
inaccessible libraries, unarranged and uncatalogued.
I do not think it would be difficult for a worker in
the same field at the present day to double the num-
ber of writers named by O'Reilly. Unfortunately, of
what is perhaps the most valuable part of our litera-
ture, our anonymous epics, ballads, and romances,
he gives no account whatsoever. A full history of our
Irish writers, conducted on O'Reilly's method, would
be a book of national importance, but since the death
of O'Curry Ireland has, I fear, seen no man equally
qualified to undertake it

This great scholar himself was the third and last
person to attempt something like a chronological
survey of early Irish literature. He devotes no less
than 130 pages of his Manners and Customs to the

PRSFAOX. XXV

history of Education and Literature in Ancient Erinn^
mentioning the most important poets from the earliest
times to the eleventh century.

The present slight attempt to sketch the story o*
our native literature carries us down to about the
close of the Danish invasions. The Middle and
Modem Irish period, with the history of the Bar
die schools, the story of the development of our
poetry, an explanation of our system of metric, and
an account of the more modem romances, would
require a volume or two volumes to themselves.

In conclusion, I have to thank my friends, Father
Eugene O'Growney and Mr, David Comyn, the
former for so kindly placing at my disposal his
unpublished lectures on Early Irish Christian Litera-
ture, and the latter for the loan of rare books and
valuable MSS.| and much other kind assistance.

CONTENTS

I. Early Use of Letters among the

Irish ... ... ... ... i

II. Early Irish Learning »•• »•• la

III. Some Early Native Poets ... 23

IV. Importance of Old Irish Literature 41
V. Early Irish Romances ... ... 55

VI. The Mythological Cycle ... 60

VII. The Red Branch or Heroic Cycle 68

VIIL The Fenian Cycle ... ... 82

IX. Who were the Fenians? ... ... 96

X. Miscellaneous Sages ..• ... 107

XL The Ossianic Poems ••* ... 121

XII. The Irish Annals ... ... 136

XIII. The Early Christian Writers ... 145

XIV. The Danish Period •.. -. 159

THE STORY OF
EARLY GAELIC LITERATURE.

CHAPTER I.

EARLY USE OF LETTERS AMONG THE IRISH.

HE first question which
confronts us in our sketch
of Irish literature is : When
did we begin to have an
Irish literature? The an-
swer is difficult ; it depends
upon that other question :
When did the Irish begin to use an alphabet and
to write ? The existing alphabet, which has been
used from the time of St. Patrick at least, is onlji
a modification of the Roman one, and it may fairly
be surmised that the general introduction of it into

9

t /, iTHE STOUT OF mnu^ GAIJLIO LITBRaTTJRS.

Ireland is due to Christian missionaries. There is
no reason, however, for supposing that it was St.
Patrick or any other saint who introduced it. There
must have been many isolated persons in Ireland in
the fourth century, if not before, who were acquainted
with the Roman letters. St. Chrysostom, in his
'* Demonstration that Christ is God," written in the
year 387, mentions that already churches and altars
had been erected in the British Islands, and St.
Jerome, in his Commentary on the Epistle to the
Ephesians, written about 392, abuses in his usual
slashing style the Irishman, Celestius, who had been
criticizing some of that Saint's writings. " Stolidissi-
mus," he calls him, "et Scotorum pultibus praegra-
vatus," which freely translated means that he was
"a great omadhaun, and had his wits as heavy as
his paunch from eating Irish stirabout." Genna-
dius,* however, writing about one hundred years
later, mentions that this same Irishman, Celestius,
while still a youth, wrote three epistles in the form
of little books, to his parents, who must, I sup-
pose, in fairness be assumed to have been able to
read them. Already, from the beginning of the third
century at the least, says Zimmer in his Keltische
Studien, British missionaries were at work in the south
of Ireland. The account in the Acta Sanctorum of
Declan Bishop of Waterford, said to have been
born in 347, and of Ailbe, another southern bishop
who met St. Patrick, is looked upon by Zimmer as
perfectly true so far as it relates to the actual existence
of these pre-Patrician bishops ; and Bede, in his his-
tory, distinctly says that Palladius was sent from

• See the preface to O'Donovaii's Grammar, but I have been
unable to verify the quotatioo.

BARLT USB Of LETTERS AMONG THB IRISH. 3

Rome, ad Scottos in Christum credentes — **to the Irish
who believed in Christ/*

But it may be objected, Ireland had the Ogam*
alphabet, and may have produced a previous literature
written in it. This is indeed a very important but an
immensely difficult question. Monsieur d'Arbois de
Jubainville, who has studied our literary antiquities to
greater purpose than perhaps anyone else, seems
inclined to believe in the antiquity of this alphabet.
Discussing the story of St. Patrick's setting a Latin

* I have often heard this word pronounced of late as Oggam,
which is certainly wrong. In later times the " g '* often became "as-
pirated," and was not pronounced. The Munstermen pronounced
the word as if written ugham (?>., 00m, rhyming with room) ; in
Connacht it would have been most likely pronounced ** ome,"
rhyming to home, but the best pronunciation of it in either Irish
or English is to leave the "g** unaspirated, and pronounce it
as if rhyming to rogue *em, or pSg ^am.

This alphabet, as everyone knows, consisted of a number of
short lines, straight or slanting, drawn through over or under,
one long line. Thus, four short straight cuts or lines to the right
of or below the long line stand for S, above they mean C ; pass-
ing through the long line, half on one side and half on the other,
they mean E. These straight lines being easily cut with a chisel
on stone, continued long in use. They do not seem to have been
common to the whole ** Irish " race, but to some southern branch
of it, for out of about 170 Ogam inscriptions not more than a
score are found outside Kerry, Cork, and Waterford. Yet there
is no trace in our literature of the power of writing Ogams hav-
ing been a special peculiarity of any sect or of any place, and
they are in our literature as freely attributed to Ulster, where
none are found, as to Munster, where they abound. Many have
been translated with comparative ease, and their language seems
like that of the Gaulish inscriptions, Maq{ as the genitive of
Mac, etc. Others again seem to defy translation, and all kinds of
attempts have been made to unriddle them, treating them as
though they were written in cypher. We have also several
specimens of Ogams cut on small articles, such as gold or
leaden ornaments, sufficient to show that their use was by no
ipeans confined to pillar or grave stones.

4 THE STORY OP EARLY GAELIC LITERATURE.

alphabet before Fiach the day he was consecrated,
Rnd of Fiach's being able to read Psalms within the
following four-and-twenty hours, he remarks that the
story is just possible, since Fiach should have known
the Ogam alphabet, and except for the form of the
letters it and the Latin alphabet were the same.
Others, however, have asserted that the Ogam alphabet
is not an alphabet at all, but is only a cryptic post-
Christian way of writing the Latin letters. One thing
is certain, that the Ogam alphabet continued in use
for inscriptions on pillar and tombstones until a com-
paratively late period, probably until the Danish
invasions were over. Even supposing this alphabet
to have been indigenous and pre-Christian, still,
though it may have been used by the ollavs and poets
to perpetuate tribe names and genealogies, it must
have been too rude a contrivance to produce anything
like a flourishing literature. It is, however, as far as
we know, only with the coming of Patrick ^ that Ire-

* The Confession and Epistle attributed to St. Patrick, and
partly found in the Book of Armagh, a codex dating from the
year 812, are by Whitley Stokes and many other writers ad-
mitted as genuine. Giraldus Cambrensis, too, speaks of ( Top.
Hib.f ch. 33) " Patrick and CoUimkille, whose books, written
in Irish, are still extant amongst them," i.e., the Irish. The
term used by Giraldus, however, Hibernici scripti, may per-
haps mean written in Irish characters. Yet Patrick himself
appears to say that he originally wrote in Irish, ^^ sermo et
loquela mea translata est in linquam alienam sicut facile potest
probari ex saliva script iirce niece, '^ i.e., ** My words and lan-
guage have been translated into another tongue, as may easily
be judged from my beslavered writing." I'here has, how-
ever, been an attack lately made upon the genuineness of St.
Patrick's writings in an article by J. V. Pflugk-IIarttung in the
Neues Heidelberger Jahrbuch, Jahrgang III., Heft I., 1893, in
which he tries to prove by internal evidence that both Confession
^nd Epistle, especially the former, are somewhat later than St

tABLt USE OP LETTERS AMOIJQ THE IRISH. J

land may be said to have become, properly speaking,
a literary country. The churches and monasteries
established by him soon became so many nuclei of
learning, and from the end of the fifth century a know-
ledge of letters had completely permeated the island.
So suddenly does this appear to have taken place,
and so rapidly does Ireland seem to have produced a
flourishing literature of laws, poems, and sagas, that it
is difficult or impossible not to believe that our people
had before this arrived at a very high state of indi-
' genous culture. *' I assert," says Dr. Sigerson, speak-
ing of the laws at the revision of which St. Patrick is
said to have assisted, " that, speaking biologically,
such laws could not emanate from any race whose
brains had not been subject to the quickening influ-
ences of education for many generations." But
indeed it is pretty certain that even the pre-Christian
Irish were not by any means uncultured. Already in
the first century Tacitus could write of our island that
its ports and harbours were well known through merch-
ants and commerce.* Its earliest saga literature, too,
is absolutely Pagan both in subject and tone, leading
one very much to wonder how the abundance of
heathen incidents with which it abounds could have
been preserved had the pre-Christian bards possessed

Patrick's time. Yet he, too, seems to believe in the antiquity of the
Irish Ogam characters. St. Patrick mentions that after his flight
from Ireland he saw a man coming as it were from that countrj
with innumerable letters to him, whereupon the critic remarks
that it is hard to understand how Patrick came by the idea that
a man could bring him ** innumerable letters from the heathen
Ireland of that time, where, except for Ogams and inscribed
stones (aiisstr Oghams unci Skulpturzeichen), the art of writing
was yet unknown." This is going much too far.
* Agi'icola^ ch. 24.

6 THE STORt OP EARLY OAELIO LITERATURE,

no Other than oral methods of transmitting their know-
ledge. We must remember, too, that several of the
old Irish romances which relate to exclusively Pagan
times and Pagan transactions, and which were prob-
ably existing in very nearly their present forms as
early as the seventh century, refer to Ogam writing,
and such written messages as could not have been
conveyed by mere picture signs, but to missives of
more intricate import.*

While the present Irish names for books, reading,
writing, letters, pens, and parchment f are certainly
derived from the Latin, it appears that there were
also older words in use designating the ancient writing
materials of the Gael. Thus the Dialogue of the
Sages records how Diarmuid mac Fergus Cerrbhebii

* See O'Curry's MS, Mat.y p. 463, where he has collected the
earliest account of Pagan writing from our oldest MSS.

Thus we find in the Book of Leinster a story about Core,
son of a Pagan King of Munster, who was exiled by his father.
He fled to Scotland, to the Court of King Feradach, and not
knowing how the king might receive him, hid in a wood
near by. The king's poet, however, met and recognised him,
having seen him before that in Ireland ; and noticed an Ogam
written on the prince's shield. ** Who was it that befriended
you with that Ogam," asked the poet, ** for it was not good luck
which he designed for you ? " **Why," asked the prince, *' what
does it contain ? '* " What it contains," said the poet, ** is this :
that if by dayiyou arrive at the Court of Feradach the King, your
head shall be struck off before night ; if it be at night you arrive,
that your head shall be struck off before morning. " The classical
scholar need hardly be reminded of the striking resemblance
between this and the o-^^uara \vypa, which, according to
Homer, Prnetus gave the unsuspecting Bellerophon to bring to
the King of Lycia :

ypd^sas iy wlvaKi ittvkt^ Qv^o<pQ6pa voWA.

fT^eabhar, l^igheadh, scriobhadh, litreacha, peann, meam-
ram.

JiARLY USE 0^ LETTERS AkONQ THE IRISH. J

orders the words of Caoilte and Ossian to be inscribed
on Tamhlorgaibh fileadh^ or *' the headless-staffs " (as
O'Curiy translates it) "of poets," and it was done
accordingly. The poets appear in most ancient timef
to have carried square staffs, upon the lines and angles
of which they wrote, or rather cut or scratched with a
knife in the Birch-Alder alphabet, or in other words in
Ogam characters, and if, as O'Curry has surmised, the
" tablet-staff" of the poet was really of the nature of a
fan which could close up in the shape of a square
stick, we may well imagine the almost superstitious
reverence which in rude times must have attached
itself, and which as we know did attach itself to the
man who could carry about in his hand the whole
history and genealogy of his race, and probably the
catch-words of innumerable poems and the skeletons
of highly-prized narratives.

Amongst the many accounts of pre-Christian writ-
ing there is one so curious that I shall give it in
extenso,*

The Story of Baile mac Buain, the Sweet
Spoken.

"Buain's only son was Baile .f He was specially
beloved by Aillinn,J the daughter of Lewy Farriga,
— but some say she was the daughter of Owen, son of
Dathi — and he was specially beloved not of her only,
but of every one who ever heard or saw him, on
account of his delightful stories.

** Now Baile and AiUinn made an appointment to

* O'Curry found this piece in the MS. marked H. 3. 18. in
Trinity College, Dublin, and has printed it at page 472 of his
Manuscript Materials,

t Pronounced Balla or BoUa.

X Pronounced Al-yinn.

8 THE STORY OF EARLY GAELIC LITERATURB.

meet at Rosnaree, on the banks of the Boyne in
Bregia. And he came from Emania, in the north, to
meet her, passing over Sheve Fuad and Muirtheimhne
to Trdigh niBaile [Dundalk], and here he and his
troops unyoked their chariots, sent their horses out
to pasture, and gave themselves up to pleasure and
happiness.

^ And while they were there they saw a horrible
spectral personage coming towards them from the
south. Vehement was his step and his rapid progress.
The way he sped over the earth might be compared
to the darting of a hawk down a cliff or to wind from
off the green sea, and his left was towards the land
[/>., he came from the south along the shore].

" * Go meet him,' said Baile, * and ask him where
he goes, or whence he comes, or what is the cause of
his haste.'

•* * From Mount Leinster I come, and I go back now
to the north, to the mouth of the River Bann ; and I
have no news but of the daughter of Lewy, son of
Fergus, who had fallen in love with Baile mac
Buain, and was coming to meet him. But the youths
of Leinster overtook her, and she died from being
forcibly detained, as Druids and fair prophets had
prophecied, for they foretold that they would never
meet in life, but that they would meet after death and
not part for ever. There is my news.* And he
darted away from them like a blast of wind over the
green sea, and they were not able to detain him.

" When Baile heard this he fell dead without life,
and his tomb and his rath were raised, and his stone
set up, and his funeral games* were performed by
the Ultonians.

♦ Literally, ** Fair of Lamentation."

EARLY U31I OF LETTBR3 AMONG THE IRIStt. 9

"And a yew grew up through his grave, and the
form and shape of Baile's head was visible on the top
of it. — Whence the place is called Bailees Strand
[now Dundalk].

** Afterwards the same man went to the south to
where the maiden Aillinn was, and went into her
greeanaun or sunny chamber.

*** Whence comes the man whom we do not
know?' said the maiden.

** *From the northern half of Erin, from the mouth of
the Bann I come, and I go past this to Mount Leinster.'

" * You have news ? ' said the maiden.

** * I have no news worth mentioning now, only I
saw the Ultonians performing the funeral games and
digging the rath, and setting up the stone, and writing
the name of Baile mac Buain, the royal heir of
Ulster, by the side of the Strand of Baile, who died
while on his way to meet a sweetheart and a beloved
woman to whom he had given affection, for it was not
fated for them to meet in life, or for one of them
to see the other living.' And he darted out after
telling the evil news.

" And Aillinn fell dead, without life, and her tomb
was raised, etc. And an apple tree grew through
her grave and became a great tree at the end of seven
years, and the shape of Aillinn's head was upon its
top.

*' Now at the end of seven years, poets and prophets
and visioners cut down the yew which was over the
grave of Baile, and they made a poet's tablet of it, and
they wrote the visions and the espousals and the loves
and the courtships of Ulster in it. [The apple tree
which grew over the grave of Aillinn was also cut
down] and in like manner the courtships of Leinster
were written in it.

iO iHB STORr 01* EABLY QAELIO LITERATURE.

" There came a November Eve long afterwards, and
a festival was made to celebrate it by Art, the son of
Conn [of the Hundred Battles, High King of Ireland]
and the professors of every science came to that feast,
as was their custom, and they brought their tablets
with them. And these tablets also came there, and Art
saw them, and when he saw them he asked for them ;
and the two tablets were brought, and he held them
in his hands face to face. Suddenly the one tablet of
them sprang upon the other, and they became united
the same as a woodbine round a twig,* and it was not
possible to separate them. And they were preserved
like every other jewel in the treasury at Tara, until it
was burned by Dunlang, son of Enna, at the time that
he burnt the princesses at Tara, as has been said,

The apple tree of noble Aillinn
The yew of Baile — small inheritance —
Though they are introduced into poems
Unlearned people do not understand them.

And Ailbhb, daughter of Cormac, grandson of Conn
[of the Hundred Battles] said too,

What I liken Lumluine to
Is to the yew of Bailees rath,
What I liken the other to
Is to the apple-tree of Aillinn."

So far this strange tale. But poetic as it is, it yields
—unlike moet — its chief value when rationalized, for
as O'Curry remarks it was evidently invented to

* See a similar story about two trees at page 59 of my Love
Sengs of ConnachU

BARLt tJSB 05- LETTERS AMONG THE IRISH. II

account for some inscribed tablets in the reign of King
Art in the second century, which had— as we ourselves
have seen is the case with so many leaves of very old
manuscripts at this day — become fastened to each
other, so that they clung inextricably together and
could not be separated.

Now the massacre of the princesses at Tara hap-
pened according to the Four Masters in the year 241,
when the tablets were burnt. Hence, one of two
things must be the case ; the story must either have
originated before that date to account for the sticking
together of the tablets, or else some one must have
invented it long afterwards, that is, must, without
any apparent cause, have invented a story out of his
own head, as to how there were once on a time two
tablets made of trees which once grew on two tombs,
which were once fastened together before Art, son of
Conn, and which were soon afterwards unfortunately
burnt — a supposition, which, considering there were
then, ex hypothesis^ no adhering tablets to prompt
the invention, appears to be in the highest degree
improbable.

CHAPTER IL

EARLY IRISH LEARNING.

S: ITH the establishment ot
Christianity, Latin litera-
ture began to be studied
and Latin to be written in
Ireland. It never super-
seded Irish, however, as
either an epistolary or
literary medium, but the
native language was no doubt cultivated all the better
from having Latin used to some small extent, side by
side with it.

Books now began to be multiplied in Ireland, and
the trade of a scribe seems to have been a highly
honourable one. The Venerable Bede, himself an
Anglo-Saxon, tells us * how a multitude of his
countrymen, both nobles and common people, fled
out of England into Ireland during a time of plague,
about the year 664, and were warmly welcomed
by the Gaels, who took care that they should be pro-
vided with food every day, without payment, and
that they should have books to read, and also
that they should receive gratuitous instruction from

♦ Bcde, Hist,^ ill, 27.

BARLT IRISH LEARNING. 1 3

Irish masters. Books, then, must have already multi-
plied considerably when a host of hungry Anglo-
Saxons could thus be supplied with them, and with
gratuitous instruction as well, just as almost down to
our own day, — down in fact to the establishment of
our un-national national schools, — in pursuance of this
noble and truly Irish tradition, "poor scholars"
were freely supported by the people and helped in
their studies.

Columbanus, bom in Leinster, a.d. 543, who evan-
geHzed a great part of Burgundy and Switzerland, and
who was educated at the Monastery of Bangor, on
Belfast Lough, was as cultured a Latin scholar and
poet as could be met with in any part of Europe out-
side of Italy.* His Latin verses are marvellous for his
age and time. Irish monasteries and seats of learning
seem to have been sought out by vast numbers of
foreigners from the sixth to the ninth century.

Indeed, it has always appeared to me that, despite
its insular position, Ireland has during the course of its
history been as little insular and as little insulated in
the ethical sense of the word as any country in the
world. At one time our people were in close connec-
tion with Scandinavia and the north of Europe, at
another were close friends of the Spaniards, at another
scarcely a nob'e family in the kingdom who had not
one of its members in France, and now there is hardly
a family, rich or poor, which has not a friend or relative
in the New World to enlarge its mind and keep it

* ** It is sufficient," says Jubainville, *' to glance at the writings
of Columbanus to immediately recognize his marvellous superiority
over Gregory of Tours and the Gallo-Romans of his time. He
lived in close converse with the classical authors, as later on did
the learned men of the i6th century, whose equal he certainly is
not, but of whom he seems a sort of precursor,"

14 THE STORY OF BARLT GAELIC LITBRATU»1.

in touch with wider sympathies. And at this early
period during the sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth
centuries, there appears to have been a close and con-
stant connection in the way of trade, learning, and
emigration between Ireland and the south of Gaul.
We find Gaulish merchants at Clonmacnois on the
Shannon, in the centre of Ireland, selling wine to St.
Ciaran (Kieran), in the middle of the sixth century.
We find Columbanus enquiring at Nantes for a vessel
engaged in the Irish trade. Adamnan's treatise on
Holy Places was written from an account of them
given him by a Gaul who had travelled. Gaulish
sailors bring Columkille news of an Italian city
burned down. In the old Iiish poem on the Fair
of Carman, a Pagan institution which survived far
into Christian times, we find mention of the

•* Great market of the foreign Greeks,
Where gold and noble clothes were wont to be" *

— the foreign Greeks being doubtless the Greek-
speaking Gaulish merchants. In Ward's Life of St
Rumdel^ he quotes from the Litany of Aengus the
Culdee, a work at that time seven or eight hundred
years old, in which mention is made of the great
number of foreigners who found their way by sea to
Ireland between the years 500 and 800, including
Gauls, Saxons, Britons, Romans, Latins, and seven
Egyptian monks. In the days of St. Cuthaldus,
about the year 700, Gauls, Teutons, Swiss, and
Italians are found crowding to Lismore,f and there

* Margadh m6r na n Gall n Greugach
I m bionn or a's aird-eudach.
t Ussher, Antiquities^ Works, VI., 303, quoted by Professor
Stokes in Proceedings of the R.I. Academy ^ May, 1892, p. 191,
in an interesting article chiefly based upon Sullivan,

BABLT HUSH LBARNINa. 1$

appears during these centuries to have been a brisk
and increasing intercourse kept up between Ireland
and Gaul, not through England, but by an inde-
pendent sea route.

It was, of course, the fame of our native schools
which induced such crowds of scholars to visit them,
and the instruction imparted in the monasteries —
which seem to have been almost as much secular
colleges as ecclesiastical institutions — comprehended
a wide range of study, perfectly wonderful considering
how the darkness of the Middle Ages had already
set in over the struggles, agony and confusion of feudal
Europe. Greek, which had all but died out as a
liberal study elsewhere, was taught in Ireland.
Hebrew seems to have been studied in some univer-
sities. Virgil, Ovid, Terence, and most of the Latin
poets, were of course widely read. The art of Latin
verse must have been well taught, and it may easily be
supposed other studies such as arithmetic, grammar,
chronology, etc., were more than kept up to the level
of the times. Columbanus discusses points of Hebrew
scholarship, and Archbishop Ussher tells us that he
himself saw the Psalter of St. Camin of Inis Caltra in
Lough Derg, ** having a collection of the Hebrew
text placed on the upper part of each page, and with
brief scholia added on the outside margin ; " while
we have still extant a letter of St. Cummian of Durrow,
in the King's County, written in the year 634 to the
Abbot of I-Columkille, or lona, on which Professor
Stokes thus comments : " I call it a marvellous com-
position because of the vastness of its learning. It
quotes, besides the Scriptures and Latin authors,
Greek writers like Origen, Cyril, Pachomius the
head and reformer of Egyptian monasticism, and
Damascius, the last of the celebrated Neo-Platonic

1 6 THB STORT OP BABLT GAELIC LITERATURB.

philosophers of Athens, who lived about the year
500, and wrote all his works in Greek. Curnmian
discusses the calendars of the Macedonians, Hebrews
and Copts, giving us the Hebrew, Greek, and Egyp-
tian names of months and cycles, and tells us that
be had been sent as one of a deputation of learned
men a few years before to ascertain the practice of the
Church of Rome [with regard to Easter]. When they
came to Rome they lodged in one hostelry with a
Greek and a Hebrew, an Egyptian and a Scythian,
who told them that the whole world celebrated the
Roman and not the Irish Easter." This long letter,
remarks Stokes, proves the fact to demonstration that
in the first half of the seventh century th^re was a wide
range of Greek learning, not ecclesiastical merely, -
but chronological, astronomical, and pliilosophical,
away at Durrow, in the very centre of the Bog of
Allen. It also shows the eagerness with which the
earned Irish of that day strove to be abreast of
everything that was to be known, and the pains
they took not to remain in ignorance.

But was all this instruction thus imparted in the
many monasteries and schools of Ireland, conveyed to ^
the foreign students through the medium of the Irish
language ? It would appear so, for the very oldest
codices of gospels and other Latin books, preserved in
the libraries on the continent, are full of glosses and
words in Irish written on the margin or between the
lines, and it is these scanty remnants of eighth and
ninth century Irish which now go under the name of
Old Irish to distinguish it from the Middle Irish in
which most of our old literature is written ; and it is
these glosses which give the oldest form of the
language, and which, upon examination, proved of
§uch value, that in the hands of the great philologist

EARLY IRISH LEARNING. I)

Zeuss, they once and for all established the fact thaf
the Irish, like the Greeks, Teutons, and Sclavs, be-
longed to the Aryan race, or rather spoke a pure
Aryan language. It is highly probable that all the
students who flocked to Durrow, Lismore, Bangor,
and the other Irish schools, learned the language oj
the country, and possibly many of them found them-
selves as much attracted by the lore of the bards as
by the learning of the ecclesiastics. Few incomers
could have remained uninfluenced by bardic teaching
in a country where the man of song and his colleges
ranked almost as high in popular regard as the pro-
fessor of theology and his monastic institutions. We
know of at least one celebrated pupil who fell under
their influence, Aldfred, King of the Northumbrian
Saxons, who passed, as Bede tells us, his time in
study while in Ireland, and when leaving it wrote a
poem of 60 lines* in the Irish language and metre
which he must have learned from the bards, upon
what he had found there. Mangan made the follow-
ing translation of it for Montgomery more literally
than was his wont :—

Aldfred's Itinerary.
** I found in Innisfail the fair,
In Ireland, while in exile there,
Women of worth, both grave and gay men,
Many clerics and many laymen.

* O'Reilly states that it contained 96 lines, but I think this is
erroneous. Hardiman had a vellum copy of it, in which he said
the " character was ancient and very obscure." Aldfred was
called Flann Fionn by the Irish, and his mother was of Irish
descent. If this be really his poem, only modified in course of
transcription, — and it may very well be his, — the intention seems
to have been to pay for the hospitality he had received with a
song to the whole nation.

1 8 THE STORY OF EARLY GAELIC LITERATURE.

'* I travelled its fruitful provinces round,
And in every one of the five I found —
Alike in church and in palace hall —
Abundant apparel and food for all.

** Gold and silver I found, and money,
Plenty of wheat and plenty of honey.
I found God's people rich in pity ;
Found many a feast and many a city.

" I also found in Armagh the splendid,
Meekness, wisdom, and prudence blended :
Fasting as Christ hath recommended,
And noble councillors un transcended.

" I found in each great church moreover.
Whether on island or on shore,
Piety, learning, fond affection ;
Holy welcome and kind protection.

" I found the good lay monks and brothers
Ever beseeching help for others,
And in their keeping the holy word.
Pure as it came from Jesus the Lord.

" I found in Munster, unfettered of any,
Kings and queens and poets a many.
Poets well-skilled in music and measure ;
Prosperous doings, mirth and pleasure.

" I found in Connacht the just, redundance
Of riches, milk in lavish abundance;
Hospitality, vigour, fame,
In Cruachan's land of heroic name.
« 4^ ;ik « •

•* I found in Ulster, from hill to glen,
Hardy warriors, resolute men.
Beauty that bloomed when youth was gone,
And strength transmitted from sire to son.

EARLY IRI3H LBARNINa. XQ

" I found in Leinster the smooth and sleek,
From Dublin to Slewmargy^s peak,
Flourishing pastures, valour, health,
Song-loving worthies, commerce, wealth.

'* I found besides from Ara to Glea
In the broad rich country of Ossory,
Sweet fruits, good laws, for all and each,
Great chess-players, men of truthf'iil speeoh.

" I found in Meath's fair principality,
Virtue, vigour, and hospitality ;
Candour, joy fulness, bravery, purity-
Ireland's bulwark and security.

" I found strict morals in age and youth,
I found historians recording truth.
The things I sing of in verse unsmooth
I found them all — I have written sooth."

We have now seen to what a pitch classical learnin.e
arrived during the centuries which followed the intro-
duction of Christianity. How far was native literature
cultivated ?

Before attempting to answer this question we must
bear in mind two things ; first, the wholesale destruc-
tion of our native documents by the Danes and the
English ; secondly, the practise of altering the ortho-
graphy and even the words of old writers when the
language they employed was becoming obsolete. The
first of these things has so destroyed our literary
records that we can now only guess at what they once
were ; the second has rendered it nearly impossible
to tell whether a poem ascribed to a bard of the fourth
or fifth century, but itself written in the language of the

to THE STOBY OP EARLY OABLIO LITERATURK.

eleventh or twelfth or some still later century, is really
the work — modernized up to date — of the poet whose
composition it professes to be.

We must first glance at the list of lost books drawn
up by O'Curry, which may be supposed to have con-
tained our earliest literature. We find the poet Senchan
Toipeist, according to an account in a twelfth century
manuscript, the Book of Leinstei% complaining that the
only perfect record of the great Tain Bo Chuailgne or
Cattle-spoil of Cooley, had been taken to the East with
the Cuilmenn or great Skin Book. Now, Zimmer, who
made a special study of this story, and those best qua-
lified to judge, consider that the earliest redaction of
the great.Tain Bo story dates from the seventh century.
This legend about Senchan (a real historical poet
whose poems in praise of Columkille we still possess)
is probably equally old, and points to the early exist-
ence of a great skin book in which Pagan tales were
written, and which was then lost. This, of course, is
rather shadowy, but the next lost book is alluded to
in a no doubt genuine poem by Cuan O'Lochain,
about the year looo, in which he says that Cormac
mac Airt drew up the Saltair of Tara. Cormac being
a Pagan, could not have called his compilation a Saltair
or Psalterium, but it may have got the name after-
l^rards. All that this really proves is that in the year
rooo, there existed a book about the prerogatives of
Tara and the provincial kings, so old that the poet
Cuan O'Lochain was not afraid to ascribe it — no doubt
following tradition — to Cormac mac Airt, of the second
century. The next lost book is the Book of the Uacong-
bhail, upon which both the O'Clerys in their Book
of Invasions and Keating in his History, drew, and
which, according to O'Curry, still existed at Kildare as
latft as 1626. The next book is called the Cin of Drom

BARLt IRISH LEARNING. jll

Snechta. It is quoted in the Leabhar na h-Uidhre,*
or Book of the Dun Cow, a MS. of about the year
II GO, and often in the Book of Ballytnote^ and by
Keating, who, in quoting it, says, ** And it was before
the coming of Patrick to Ireland that that book
existed ; " while the Book of Leinsier^ compiled in the
middle of the twelfth century, has this note : ** [Ernin
son of] Duach, son of the King of Connacht, an
ollav and a prophet, and a professor in history, and
a professor in wisdom, it was he that collected the
genealogies and histories of the men of Erin into one
book, that is the Cin Droma Snechta." Now, there are
only two Duachs mentioned amongst the Kings of Con-
nacht, one a Pagan, grandson of Eochaidh Muighm-
hedhoin (Mwee-ve-on) who died ad. 379, and the
other, who died, according to the Four Masters, in 499.
In Keating's time the tradition evidently was that the
earlier of these was father of the author of the book.
Whichever it be, it still points to a high early civiliza-
tion. The only other supposition is that the writer of the
twelfth century note in the Book of Leinster deliberately
ascribed the then existing book — whose pedigree must
have been pretty well known — to someone who never
wrote it at all. This is possible ; is it probable ? It
is only probable on the supposition that the tenth and
twelfth century writers entered into a tacit conspiracy
to ascribe their books and records to the earliest source
possible, in order to increase their value. But as we
know that there were almost certainly books in Ireland
in St. Patrick's time, it seems highly unreasonable to
deliberately put down the statement in the Book of

♦Pronounced L*yowr (rhyming with "hour") na Heera.
hUidhre is the genitive feminine (Aodhar^ dun-coloured, and the
word bo, a cow, is understood

22 THS STORY OP EARLY GfaBLIG LITERATURE.

Leinster as a conscious invention, and the tradition of
Keating as worthless and of no weight. The next
books we find an account of, were said to have belonged
to St. Longarad, a contemporary of Columkille. The
scribe who wrote the glosses to the Festology of Aengus
the Culdee, said that these books existed still, but that
no man could read them, which he accounts for by
the tale that Columkille once paid Longarad a visit in
order to see his books, but that his host refused to
show them to him, and that then Columkille said,
" May your books be of no use after you, since you
have shown inhospitality about them." On account
of this the books became illegible after Longarad's
death. Aengus the Culdee lived about the year 800,
though Stokes thinks that the Festology^ or Calendar
of Saints, which passes under his name, could not
have been composed much before the end of the tenth
century. It is uncertain when the Scholiast wrote
his note about these books, but it also is very old. It
is plain, then, that at this time a number of illegible
books, illegible no doubt from age, existed ; and to
account for this illegibility the story of Columkille's
curse was invented. The Annals of Ulster quote
another book at the year 527, under the name of the
Book of St. Mochta, who was a disciple of St. Patrick.
They also quote the Book of Cuana, at the year 468,
and repeatedly afterwards down to the year 610, while
they record the death of Cuana, a scribe, at the year
738, after which no more quotations from Cuana^s book
occur. The following books, almost all of which
existed before the year iioo, are also, according to
O'Curry, alluded to in our old literature : — The Book of
Dubhdaleithe ; the Yellow Book of Slane ; the original
Lcabhar na h-Uidhre ; the Books of Eochaidh OTlan-
nagain ; a certain book known as the book eaten by

SABLT IRIS13 LBARNINO. 2 3

the poor people in the desert ; the Book of Inis an
Duin ; the short Book of Monasterboice ; the Books of
Flann of Monasterboice ; the Book of Flann of Dun-
given; the Book of Downpatrick; the Book of Derry;
the Book of Sdbhal Phdtraic ; the Black Book of St.
Molaga; the Yellow Book of St. Moling; the Yellow
Book of Mac Murrough ; the Book of Armagh (not
that now so called) ; the Red Book of Mac Egan ; the
Speckled Book of Mac Egan ; the Long Book of
Leithlin; the Books of O'Scoba of Clonmacnois; the
Z?«//of Drom Ceat; the Book of Clonsost; the Book
of Cluain Eidhneach in Leix; and one of the most valu-
able and often quoted of all, Cormac's great Saltair
of Cashel,* compiled by Cormac mac Cullinan, who

* " At what time this book was lost," says O'Curry, *' we have
no precise knowledge, but that it existed, though in a dilapidated
state in the year 1454, is evident from the fact that there is in
the Bodleian Library in Oxford (Laud, 610) a couy of such
portions of it as could be deciphered at that time, made by
Shawn O'Cleiy for Mac Rickard Butler. From the contents of
this copy, and from the frequent references to the original for
history and genealogies found in the Books of Ballymote, Lecan,
and others, it must have been an historical and genealogical com-
pilation of large size and great diversity." A legible copy of the
Saltair appears, however, to have existed at a much later dale.
I discovered a curious poem in an uncatalogued MS. in the
Royal Irish Academy, by one David Condon, written probably
about the year 1680, some time between the Cromweliian and
Williamite wars, in which he says : —

Salcaip, Chai-plt i-p 'Deayibh gup, leighea-p-'pa
Leabha|\ '^hleanna-'Dd-locha gan 56 ba teip. X)arn,
Leabhaii Oui'ohe Ttiuighleannl?) obaip, aoyxa, etc.,
1.^., ** Surely I have read the Saltair of Cashel, and the Book o.
Glendalough was certainly plain to me, and the Yellow Book of
Muighleann (=Moling ?), an ancient work, the Book of Molaga,
and the Lessons of Cionnfaola . . . and many more (books) alon|
with them which are not (now) found in Ireland." For this in-
teresting poem see my forthcoming Bdird agus Bdrdui^heacht

^4 THE STORr OF EARLY GAELIC LITERATURlS.

was at once King of Munster and ArcHtishop of
Cashel, and who fell in battle in 903, according to
the chronology of the Four Masters. These are prob-
ably only a very few indeed, of the books in which
our enormous early literature was contained, but which
have now perished almost to a page.

Where, then, may a few small and scanty branches
of what was once a mighty earth-shadowing tree be
still picked up ? The two MSS. of by far the most
importance in the way of miscellaneous literature, are
the Leabhar na h-Uidhre and the Book of Leinster,
transcribed about the year iioo and 11 50 respectively,
and after them the most important of our surviving
great parchment books, are the Book of Ballymote,
the Leabhar Breac, or Speckled Book, and the Book
of Lecan. After them, and of nearly equal importance
come a number of vellum books preserved in Trinity
College, Dublin, the British Museum, and the Bod-
leian at Oxford.

CHAPTER III.

SOME EARLY NATIVE? POETS.

vrOj^^ the poetry ascribed in our

• hJ^^mJ^^^^ oldest manuscripts to

Oi^SUv^^^lhP poets who lived either be-

^v^^Pav^PitJ^^ ^^^ ^^^ ^^^^ ^^ during the

viO»^>y>^^^^^ first six or eight centuries,

' ' * •'^^^^^W^i* and at the more scanty

prose remains of our early native literature. The
first poem written in Ireland is said to have
been the work of Amergin, who was brother of
Evir, Ir and Eremon, the first Milesian princes who
colonized Ireland many huiKireds of years before
Christ. The three short pieces of verse ascribed to
Amergin are certainly very ancient and very strange.
But, as the whole story of the Milesian invasion is
wrapped in mystery and is quite possibly only a
rationalized account of early Irish mythology {in
which the Tuatha De Danann, Firbolgs, and pos-
sibly Milesians, are nothing but the gods of the early
Irish euhemerized into men) no faith can be placed ia
the alleged date or genuineness of Amergin's verses.
They are, however, of interest, because as Irish tra-
dition has always represented them as being the first

iS THE STORY OP EARLY GAELIC LITBRATUR]B.

verses made in Ireland, so it may very well be that
they actually do present the oldest surviving lines in
any vernacular tongue in Europe except Greek.

The following is noticeable for its curious pantheistic
strain which reminds one strangely of the East : —

I am the wind which breathes upon the sea,

I am the wave of the ocean,

I am the murmur of the billows,

I am the ox of the seven combats,

I am the vulture upon the rock,

I am a beam of the sun,

I am the fairest of plants,

I am a wild boar in valour,

I am a salmon in the water,

I am a lake in the plain,

I am a word of vscience,

I am the point of the lance of battle,

I am the God who creates in the head

[/>., of man] the fire [/>., the thought].
Who is it who throws light into the meeting on the

mountain ?
Who announces the ages of the moon [If not I] ?
Who teaches the place where couches the sun [If

not I]?

The laws said to have been written by OUamh
Fodhla six or seven centuries before Christ, and those
fragments ascribed to Cimbaeth three centuries later,
may be passed over. Even the annalist Tighernach, in
the tenth century has said omnia ante Cimbatth incerta
sunt^^ or, *^all things up to the time of Cimbaeth

* Why Tigheai nach chose a comparatively unimportant name
like Cimbaeth as the starting point of true nistory is mysterioas
enough, for he was not the founder of a dynasty, or as £u: as we
know particularly remarkable in any way.

SOME ISARLt I^ATIVE POEtS. J 7

are uncertain." But, what shall we say of the poems
ascribed to Feirceirtne file^ accredited author of Uiri-
cept na nEigeas, his rival Neide, A thai me the Satirist,
(>ongal, son of Eochaidh Feidhlioch (Yohee Fail-
yuch), Lughar the poet of Meve Queen of Connacht,
all of whom lived according to our accounts before,
but not long before, the time of Christ's birth.
What are we to say further to the poems ascribed
to King Art the Solitary, Finn mac Cool,* Ossian
and Caoilte (Cweelt-ya) in the third century, to
the pieces in prose and verse of Cormac mac
Art^ monarch of Ireland, and OHoll Olum of the
same period? What shall we say of the poems
ascribed to Dubhihach (Duv-hach) O'Lugair, or of
Torna Eigeas in the fifth century ? All that can be
laid down with certainty is that the poems ascribed
to these writers as we find them in codices of the
twelfth and later centuries, are for the most part
couched in language too modern to hav^e been possibly
used by the supposed authors. In others again, in-
ternal evidence would appear to show that they
can hardly have been in their entirety the work of
the authors to whom they have been ascribed,! while

♦ Such names as Finn mac Cool, Ossian (in Irish Oisin, pro-
nounced Essheen), M^ve (in Irish Meddh, often curiously pro-
nounced '* Mou " in Connacht), Lewy (in Irish Lughaidh), and
a few more, have become so adopted into English that I have
let them stand. The Mac of these pre-Christian names should
best be spelt with a small m to show that it is not part of a
surname, but really means "son of." The name Art when
preceded by Mac becomes Airt in Irish, but I have not in«
fleeted it for fear of confusing the English reader.

t As in the poem in the Book of Leinster ascribed to O'Lugair,
circiter 430, printed by O'Curry, MS. Mat., p. 493, where the
poet speaking of EnnaCenselach's campaigns, says that they un-
f oked their steeds upon the rampart of *' Casil Cliaraig," Clerical
CasheL

28 THE STORY OP EABLt QABLIC LITKRATURB.

again, there are some in which the language seems
more ancient and the spirit purely Pagan. Of
most of them, however, it may safely be asserted that
their language, if the work of the supposed writers, has
been very much modified before it came down to us.

This modification of language is not uncommon in
literature, and takes place naturally ; but I doubt if
there ever was a literature in which it played the same
important part as in ours. Thus, let us take the story
of the Tain Bo Chuailgne, of which I shall have more
to say later on. The German philologist, Zimmer,
after long and careful study of the text as presented to
us in a manuscript of about the year iioo, came to
the conclusion, from the marks of old Irish inflexion
and so forth, which still remain in the eleventh century
text, that there had been two recensions of the story,
a pre-Danish — that is, a seventh or eighth century one,
and a post-Danish— that is, a tenth or eleventh century
one. Thus, the epic may have been originally com-
mitted to paper in the seventh century, modified in
the tenth, transcribed into the manuscripts in which
we have it in the eleventh and twelfth, and propagated
from that down to the eighteenth century in copies,
every one of which underwent more or less alteration
in order to render it more intelligible, and it was in
an eighteenth century manuscript, differing in few
essentials from the copy in the Book of Leinster^ that
I first read it. As the bards lived to please, so they
had to please to live. The popular mind only re-
ceives with pleasure and transmits with readiness
popular poetry upon the condition that it is intelli-
gible, and hence, granting that such a man as,
say, Finn mac Cool was a real historical personage,
it is perfectly possible that some of his poetry was
handed down from generation to generation amongst

SOMB EARLY NATIVB POETS. 29

the conservative Gael, and slightly altered or modi-
fied from time to time to make it more intelligible,
according as words died out and inflexions became
obsolete. The Oriental philologist of Oxford, Max
Miiller, in attempting to explain how myths arose
(according to his theory) from a disease of language,
thinks that during the transition period of which
he speaks there would be many words " understood
perhaps by the grandfather, familiar to the father, but
strange to the son, and misunderstood by the grand-
son." This is exactly what is taking place over half
Ireland at this very moment, and it is what has always
been at work amongst a people whose language and
literature go back with certainty for nearly 1,500 years.
Accordingly, before the art of writing became common,
ere yet expensive vellum MSS. and a highly-paid class
of historians, and schools of scribes, to a certain extent
stereotyped what they set down, it is altogether prob-
able that people who trusted to the ear and to memory
modified and corrupted, but still handed down, at least
some famous poems, like those ascribed to Amergin or
Finn mac Cool. That the Celtic memory for things
unwritten is long I have often perceived. I have heard
from peasants, stanzas composed by Donogha More
O'Daly, Abbot of Boyle, in the thirteenth century. I
have, from an illiterate peasant, recovered, in 1890, in
Roscommon, verses which had been jotted down in
phonetic spelling in Argyleshire by Macgregor, Dean
of Lismore, in the year 151 2, and which may have
been sung for hundreds of years before it struck the
fancy of the Highland divine to commit them to paper;*
and I have again heard verses in which the measure

* See my note on the story of Oscar du Fleau in Revue Celtique,
vol. 13, p. 42$.

30 THH STORY OF BARLT GAELIO LITER ATURB.

and sense were preserved, but found, on comparing
them with MSS.,that several obsolete words had been
altered to others that rhymed with them and were in-
telligible.* For these reasons I should be slow to
absolutely reject the authenticity of a poem simply
because the language is more modem than that of the
bard to whom it is ascribed could have been, and it
seems to me equally uncritical to either accept or
reject much of our earliest poetry, a good deal of
which may possibly be the actual (but linguisti-
cally modified) work of the supposed authors.
This modifying process is something akin to, but very
different in degree from Pope's rewriting of Dunne's
satires or Dryden's version of Chaucer, inasmuch as
it was certainly both unpremeditated and uninten-
tional. To better understand how this modification
may have taken place, let us examine a few lines of
the thirteenth century English poem, the "Brut of
Lay^mon."

" And swa ich habbe al niht

Of mine swevene swithe ithoht

For ich what to iwisse

Agan is al mi blisse."

These lines were, of course, intelligible to an ordinary
Englishman at the time. Gradually they l)ecame a
little modernized, thus : —

And so T have all night

Of min-e sweeven swith ythought

For I wat to ywiss

Agone is all my bliss.

Had these verses been preserved in folk-memory, they
must have undergone a still further modification as

• Cf. note on Bran's colour, at p. 277 of my Beside the Fire,

SOME EARLY NATIVE POETS. 3I

loon as the words sweeven (dream), swith (much) and
ywiss (certainty) began to grow obsolete, and we would
have the verse modified and mangled, perhaps some-
thing in this way,

And so I have all the night
Of my dream greatly thought
For I wot and I wis
That gone is all my bliss.

The words ^* I wot and I wis *' in the third line repre-
sent just about as much archaism as the popular me-
mory and taste will stand without rebeUing, but even
they might be discarded and the line handed down as

For indeed I know this
That gone is my bliss

or something equivalent. In fact, I would venture to
say that instances of modification of language in the
direction here hinted at, may be found in two out of
every three manuscripts in the Royal Irish Academy
to-day, and just in the same sense as the lines

For I wot and I wis
That gone is my bliss

are Layamon^s, so we may suppose

Dubthach missi mac do Lugaid

Laidech lantrait
M6 rue inmbreith etir Loegaire

Ocus Patraic*

♦ In more modern Irish,

Dubhthach mise, mac do Lughaid^

Laoi-each lan-traith
M^ rug an bhreith idir Laoghaire
Agus Pidraig.
/.#., " I am Dubhthach, son to I-ewy the lay-ful full- wise. It it

3«

THE STORY OP EARLY GAELIC LITERATURB.

to be the fifth century O'Lugair's, or

Leathaid folt fada frairli,
Forbrid canach fann fionn *

to be Finn mac Cool's.

Of the many poems said to have been produced
during the period we are here speaking of, none can
be properly called epics or even epopees. There are
few continued efforts, and the majority of the pieces
though valuable for a great many reasons to students,
would hardly interest an English reader when trans-
lated. The fact is, that, such a vast amount of our early
literature being lost, we can only judge of what it was
like through the shorter pieces which have been
preserved, and even these short pieces read rather
jejune and barren in English, because of the extraor-
dinary condensation of the original — a condensation
which was brought about largely by the necessity of
conforming to the most rigid rules of versification.
In order to see beauty in the most ancient Irish
verse it is absolutely necessary to read it in the
original, so as to perceive and appreciate the alli-
teration and other tours de force which appear in
every line. These verses, for instance, which M^ve,
daughter of Conan, is said to have pronounced
over Cuchorb, her husband, in the first century,
appear bald enough in a literal translation : —

Moghcorb's son conceals renown,
Well sheds he blood by his spears,

I who delivered judgment between Lewy and Patrick." Traith
is the only obsolete word here.

* In modern Irish, leathnuighidh folt fada fi-aoch^ i.e , leath'
nuighidh fraoch folt fada, foirbridh (fdsaidh) canach (ceatt-
nabhdn) fann fionn, i.4. , steads heath its long hair, flourishes
he feeble fair cotton-£rass.

801IE BARLT NATIVE POETS, 33

A stone over his grave — 'tis a pity —
Who carried battle over Cliii Mdil.

My noble king, he spoke not falsehood,
His success was certain in every danger,
As black as a raven was his brow
As sharp was his spear as a razor, etc.

One might read this kind of thing for ever in a trans-
lation without being struck by anything more than
some occasional curiosa felicitas of phrase or pictur-
esque expression, and one would never suspect that
the original was so polished and complicated as it
really is. Here are these two verses done into the
exact versification of the original, in which interlinear
vowel-rhymes, alliterations, and -all the other require-
ments of the Irish are preserved and marked : —

Mochorb's son of Fiercest Fame
KNown his Name for bloody toil

To his Gory Grave is Gone,

He who Shone o'er Shouting Moyle.

Kindly King who Liked not Lies
Rash to Rise to Fields of Fame,

Raven-Black his Brows of fear,

Razor-Sharp his Spear of flame,* etc.

This specimen of Irish metre may help to place our
early poetry in another light, for its beauty too often

♦ Here is the first verse of this in the original. The old Irish
is quite unintelligible to a modern. I have here modernized
the spelling : —

Mac Mogachoirb Cheileas Clu

Cun fearas Cru thar a ghaibh

Ail uas a Ligi — budh Liach —

Baslaide Chliath thar Cliii Mdil.
The rhyming words do not make perfect rhyme as in English,
but pretty nearly so, du^ cru. liach^ cliath^gdibh^ mdil^

V

34 THE 8T0RT OF EARLY QABLIC LITBRATURB.

depends less upon the intrinsic substance of the
thought than upon the external elegance of the
frame-work. We must understand this in order to do
justice to our very early native literature, for if any
one imagines that he will find there long-sustained
epics or narrative poems after the manner of the
Iliad or Odyssey, or even the Nibelungenlied, or
the Song of Roland, he will be very much mis-
taken. It consists rather of eulogies, elegies, historical
poems, and lyrics, few of them of very great length,
and still fewer capable of greatly interesting an
English reader in a translation. Occasionally we
meet with touches of nature-poetry of which the
Gael has always been excessively fond. Here is a ten-
tative translation made by O' Donovan of a part of the
first poem which Finn mac Cool is said to have com-
posed after his eating of the salmon of knowledge : — •

" May-day, delightful time ! How beautiful the
colour ! The blackbirds sing their full lay. Would
that Laighay were here ! The cuckoos sing in con-
stant strains. How welcome is ever the noble brilli-
ance of the seasons ! On the margin of the branching
woods the summer swallows skim the stream. The
swift horses seek the pool. The heath spreads out its
long hair. The weak fair bog-down grows. Sudden
consternation attacks the signs ; the planets, in their
courses running exert an influence ; the sea is lulled
to rest ; flowers cover the earth.'*

The language of this poem is so old as to be in
parts unintelligible, yet he would t)e a bold man who
would ascribe with certainty the authorship of it to
Finn mac Cool in the third century, or the elegy on
Quchorb to Mfeve, daughter pf Coijan — 9, contempo-

SOME EARLY NATIVE POETS. 35

rary of Virgil and Horace. And yet all the history of
this M^ve is known and recorded with much apparent
plausibiHty, and with many collateral circumstances
connecting her with the men of her time. It is the
same with Finn mac Cool. How much of this is real
historical tradition, how much is later invention?
How far can we look upon these verses as genuine ?
How far can we look on Finn mac Cool as an actual
character ? Must we at once dismiss such an idea ? Of
this I shall have something to say in another chapter.

In the meantime let us for the present dismiss this
oldest poetry of ours, and turn to some of the most
ancient prose which purports to have been composed
during the same period — that is, from long before the
Christian era to the coming of St. Patrick. The prose
books which have come down to us as emanating from
that period are not numerous. They consist for the
most part of very obscure fragments of laws and law-
codes.

One piece, however, is sufficiently interesting to
make it worth while giving some account of it. This
is the "Teagasg Flatha," or ** Instructions to a
Prince," alleged to have been written by Cormac mac
Art for his son, Cairbre of the Liffey. Both Cormac
and his son Cairbre are very great personages indeed
in the romantic history of Ireland. Cormac was the
son of Art the Lonely, and the grandson of Con of
the Hundred Battles, and it was he who made still
wider the breach with Finn mac Cool and the
Fenians, which finally ended in a death struggle
between them and the monarchy, in which Cairbre,
— for whose instruction this book was written — was
slain, and the Fenians, on the other side, almost
exterminated to a man. At this time, however, we
find Cairbre sitting at the feet of his father and learq-

36 THE STORY OF BARLT GAELIC LITBRATXJBJD.

ing Wisdom — Pagan wisdom, of course, and Pagan
morality, but wisdom knows neither creed nor race.
The entire piece, which is of some length, is written
Oy way of question and answer. Cairbre first puts his
question to his father Cormac, and then Cormac
proceeds to answer it. Here is a specimen :—

The Instruction of a Prince.

"O grandson of Con, O Cormac," said Cairbre,
" what is good for a king ? "

"That is plain," said Cormac, " It is good for him
to have patience and not to dispute, self-govern-
ment without anger, affability without haughtiness,
diligent attention to history, strict observance of
covenants and agreements, strictness mitigated by
mercy, in the execution of the laws/' etc., etc. He
proceeds thus — " It is good for him (to make) fertile
land, to invite ships, to import jewels of price across
sea, to purchase and bestow raiment, (to keep)
vigorous swordsmen for protecting his territories, (to
make) war outside his own territories, to attend the
sick, to discipline his soldiers ... let him en-
force fear, let hirn perfect peace, (let him give) much
of methaglin and wine, let him pronounce just judg-
ments of light, let him speak all truth, for it is
through the truth of a king that God gives favour-
able seasons."

" O grandson of Con, O Cormac," said Cairbre,
" What is good for the welfare of a country ? ''

" That is plain," said Cormac, " frequent con-
vocations of sapient and good men to investigate its
affairs, to abolish each evil and retain each whole-
some institution, to attend to the precepts of the
elders, let every assembly be convened according to
law, let the law be in the hands of the nobles, let the

SOME EARLY NATIVE POBTd. ^^

chieftains be upright and unwiHing to oppress the
poor," etc., etc.

A more interesting passage is the following : —

**0 grandson of Con, O Cormac, what are the
duties of a prince at a banqueting house ?"

*' A prince, on Samhan's Day (Nov. i) should light
his lamps and welcome his guests with clapping of
hands, procure comfortable seats, the cup bearers
should be respectable and active in the distribution of
meat and drink. Let there be moderation of music,
short stories, a welcoming countenance, a failte for
the learned, pleasant conversations, etc. These are
the duties of the prince, and the arrangement of the
banqueting house."

After this follows a question which was asked often
enough during the period of the Brehon law, and
which for over a thousand years scarcely received
another answer.

Cairbre asks, *' For what qualification is a king
elected over countries and tribes of people ? " and
Cormac in his answer embodies the idea of every
clan in Ireland in their practical choice of a leader : —

" From the goodness of his shape and family, from
his experience and wisdom, from his prudence and
magnanimity, from his eloquence, and bravery in
battle, and from the number of his friends."

After this comes a long description of the qualifi-
cations of a prince, and Cairbre after hearing it
naturally puts this question — " O descendant of
Con, what was thy deportment when a youth?" To
which question he receives the following rather strik-
ing answer : —

** I was cheerful at the banquet of the Meecuarta,*

*Midhchuarta, "house of the circulation of mead," was the
aame of a magnificent central building at Tara.

^8 THE STORt OP EARLY GABLtC LITERATURE.

fierce in battle, but vigilant and circumspect. I was kind
to friends, a physician to the sick, merciful towards the
weak, stern towards the headstrong. Although pos-
sessed of knowledge I was inclined towards taciturnity.
Although strong I was not haughty. I mocked not
the old, although I was young. I was not vain,
although I was valiant. When I spoke of a person in
his absence I praised, not defamed, him, for it is by
these customs that we are known to be courteous and
civilised {riaghalach)."

There is an extremely beautiful answer given later
on by Cormac to the rather simple question of his
son, — " O grandson of Con, what is good for
me?"

" If thou attend to my command," answers Cormac,
" thou wilt not mock the old, although thou art young,
nor the poor although thou art well-clad, nor the lame
although thou art agile, nor the blind although thou
art clear-sighted, nor the feeble although thou art
strong, nor the ignorant although thou art learned.
Be not slothful, nor passionate, nor penurious, nor
idle, nor jealous, for he who is so is an object of hatred
to God as well as to man."

" O grandson of Con," asks Cairbre in another
place, "I would fain know how I am to conduct
myself among the wise and among the foolish, among
friends and among strangers, among old and among
young?" And to this question his father gives the
following notable response : —

** Be not too knowing nor too simple, be not proud,
be not inactive, be not too humble nor yet haughty ;
be not talkative but be not too silent ; be not timid
neither be severe. For if thou shouldst appear too
knowing thou wouldst be satirised and abused ; if too
simple thou wouldst be imposed upon ; if too proud

Some early naDive fOETd. 39

thou would St be shunned : if too humble thy dignity
would suffer ; if talkative thou wouldst not be deemed
/earned ; if too severe thy character would be de-
famed ; if too timid thy rights would be encroached
npon."

To the curious question, " O grandson of Con,
what are the most lasting things in the world?" the
equally curious answer is returned, ** Grass, copper,
and yew.*' Of women King Cormac has nothing good
to say. Possibly monarchs, from Solomon down, have
not been in a position to judge the sex impartially or
objectively. At least to the question, " O grandson
of Con, how shall I distinguish the characters of
women ? " the following bitter answer is given : —

" I know them, but I cannot describe them. Their
counsel is foolish, they are forgetful of love, most head-
strong in their desires, fond of folly, prone to enter
rashly into engagements, given to swearing, proud to
be asked in marriage, tenacious of enmity, cheerless
at the banquet, rejectors of reconciliation, prone to
strife, of much garrulity — until evil be good, until hell
be heaven, until the sun hide his light, until ihe stars
of heaven fall, women will remain as we have stated.
Woe to him, my son, who desires or serves a bad
woman, woe to every one who has got a bad wife."

This Christian allusion to heaven and hell, and some
other passages, show that the tract as we have it at
present, despite a certain Pagan flavouring in parts,
cannot be in its entirety the work of King Art or
of his son, but it may very well be the embodi
ment and extension of an early genuine Pagan
discourse; because after Christianity had succeeded
in gaining the upper hand over Paganism, a kind
of tacit compromise seems to have been arrived
at, by means of which the baids and filfes and lepre-

AO THE STORY OF EARLY GAELIC LITERATURE.

sentatives of the old Pagan learning were allowed to
continue to propagate their stories, tales, poems, and
genealogies at the price of tacking on to them a little
Christian admixture, just as the vessels of some feuda-
tory nation are compelled to fly at the mast-head the
flag of the suzerain power. But so badly has the
dove-tailing of the Christian on to the Pagan part
been performed in most of the oldest romances, that
the pieces come away quite separate in the hands
of even the least skilled analyser, and the Pagan
substratum stands forth entirely distinct from the
Christian accretion.

CHAPTER IV.

IMPORTANCE OF OLD IRISH LITERATURE

; r is this easy analysis of our early litera-
ture into its ante-Christian and its post-
Christian elements which makes it so
valuable. For when all spurious accretions
have been stripped off, we find in our
most ancient tales a genuine picture of
Pagan life in Europe, for which we look
in vain elsewhere. In fact, he jvho would
examine the early state of society over a
large part of our continent is forced to
see it through coloured glasses, in other words to view
it through the prejudiced medium of the Greeks and
Romans, to whom everyone outside of themselves was
a barbarian. He has no other means of estimat-
ing what were the social life, feelings, and modes of
thought, of those great races who inhabited so large
a part of the old world, Gaul, Belgium, North
Italy, parts of Germany, Spain, Switzerland, and the
British Isles, who burned Rome in its infancy, who
plundered Greece, and who colonized Asia Minor.
But, in the early Irish romances and historical tales

4^ ^raE STORY Oi? EARLY GAELIC LITBRATURSU

he sees come to light another standard, by which to
measure ; through this early Irish peep-hole he gets a
vivid picture of the life and manners of the race in one
of its strongholds, from which he may conjecture, and
even assume a good deal with regard to the others.

That the pictures of social life and early society
drawn in the Irish romances represent phases not
common to the Irish alone, but to large portions of
that Celtic race which once owned half Europe, may
be surmised with something like certainty from the
way in which characteristics of the " Celts," barely
mentioned by Greek and Roman writers, re-appear
amongst ourselves in all the intimate detail and fond
expansion of romance. Let us glance at a few.

Posidonius, who was a friend of Cicero and wrote
some hundred years before Christ, mentions that there
was a custom at that time in Gaul, of fighting at a
feast for the best bit which was to be given to the most
valiant warrior. The custom thus briefly noticed by
this writer might be passed unheeded by the ordinary
reader, but not so by the Irish one. He will remem-
ber the ^early romances of his race, in which the
curadh-mir, or " heroes-bit " figures. He will remem
ber that it is upon this custom one of the most
celebrated of ancient Irish romances — the Feast o\
Bricriu — hinges. It opens thus : Bricriu was one who
always delighted in setting the Ultonians by the ears
and provoking blows, quarrels, and jealousy wherever
he went. Upon this occasion he had built a new and
magnificent house. " The dining hall " says the
eleventli century text of this certainly pre-Christian
story, " was built like that of the High King at Tara.
From the hearth to the wall were nine beds, and each
of the side "walls was thirty-five feet high and covered
with ornaments of gilt bronze. Against one of the side

tMPORtANCB OP OLD IRISH LITERATURBl. 4^

walls of that palace was reared a royal bed destined
for Conor,* King of Ulster, which looked down upon
all the others. It was ornamented with precious stones,
carbuncles, and other gems of great value. The gold
and silver, and all sorts of jewellery which covered that
bed shone with such splendour that the night was as
brilliant as the day." The story goes on to relate how
when Bricriu had finished building his new palace and
had laid by a great store of provisions, furniture, bed-
coverings, and everything necessary, he started off to
visit Conor, King of Ulster, at his Court in Emania.f
"To Conor," says our history, **he addressed his
speech, and to the rest of the Ultonians.+ *' Come
visit me," said he, "you will have a feast which I offer
you." "I consent," said Conor, "if the Ultonians

* In the old texts this name is written Concobar, in the modem
language Conchubhair, which is, strange to say, usually pro-
nounced not " Cun-hoo-war" or " Cun-hoor" as spelt (whence
the English form Conor), but Cruch-hoor (the ch is guttural)
whence Banim's " Crohore of the Bill-hook." I have preferred
to keep the English form Conor, but in ancient times the b was
certainly pronounced, though there are traces of its pronunciation
being lost as early as the twelfth century. With curious conser-
vatism it has been retained to this day in the spelling. Zimmei
says he finds it spelt Conchor in the twelfth century book,' the
Liber Landavensis^ from which of course, Cnochor followed by
easy metathesis, but as **cn " is pronounced in the West of Ireland
as *' or " (Cf. qxoc qio for cnoc cno, etc. ) the present pronunciation
arose.

The conservatism of Irish spelling is wonderful. Zimmer re-
marks elsewhere {Keltische Studien,Yit.i\.\,, ^\) that "already
in the oldest Middle Irish MSS. from the beginning of the twelfti
century, the orthography, as far as the consonants go, is purely
historical, and one which represents the speech of the seventh
century, or of even a still earlier period/*

t In Irish Emain-Macha, generally Latinized Emania.

X I.e.y **the people of Ulster,'' from Ultonia, the Latin form
of the Irish Uladh« Ulster.

44 ^fHB STORY 0^ EARLt GAELIC LltiBRATUR^.

do." But, Fergus mac Eoy and the other nobles of
Ulster replied : " we will not go, for if we do go to
take part in the feast to which we are invited, Bricriu
would excite quarrels amongst us, and the number of
the dead amongst us would be greater than the number
of the living." "If ye do not come to me," said
Bricriu, " what I shall do to ye shall be still worse."
**What then will you do?" asked Conor, *^ if the
Ultonians do not come?" "I shall excite," said
Bricriu, " quarrels amongst the kings, the chiefs, the
illustrious warriors, and the young nobles ; they shall
kill each other amongst themselves if they come not
to drink ale at my feast." '* We shall never kill
ourselves for you," said Conor. Bricriu answered,
" I shall embroil fathers and sons ; they shall slay each
other mutually. If I succeed not in bringing you to
my house I shall put discord between the mothers
and the daughters. If I succeed not in bringing you
with me I shall provoke a quarrel between the two
breasts of every woman ; their breasts shall crush
one the other. They shall rot; they shall die."

" Verily," said Fergus mac Roy, " it is better for
us to go."

'* Let the question be deliberated on," said Sencha,*
son of Ailill, *' let a small number of chiefs examine
and see if it be good to accept the invitation."

" It would be wrong," said Conor, *' not to study the
matter in council."

The nobles then proceeded to discuss the matter,
and they arrived at the conclusion to adopt the
advice of Sencha, ** but," said Sencha, ** since

* Sencha is the wise man par excellence, the Nestor of the
Ultonian cycle of tales. He was a lawyer and Brehon, and
always spoke wisdom and made up quarrels.

niPORTANCS 09 OLD IRiaH LirBTEtATTJItB. 45

ye must go to Bricriu, choose ye sureties who
shall guarantee his good conduct, and place round
him eight men with swords, who shall surround him
every time he issues from the house, and that super-
vision of him shall commence from the time ot his
showing you the preparations of his feast." Conor's
son brought this answer to Bricriu, and told him
of the discussion that had preceded it. "I am
satisfied," said Bricriu; "let it be so."

The Ultonians thereupon set out from Emania,
each band round its chief, each company round its
prince, and each battalion round its king ; and noble
and splendid was the march of the warriors and
heroes as they advanced towards the palace of
Bricriu.

The story goes on to relate how Bricriu planned in
his own mind how to excite a quarrel amongst the
Ultonians despite their precautions, and how he
secretly took Lewy the Vanquisher aside, and after
much flattering asked him why it was that he did not
always receive the curadh-mir^ or hero's bit, at
Emania. " If it is I who should have it," said Lewy,
" I shall have it."

** I shall make you obtain first place amongst the
warriors of Ireland," said Bricriu, " if you follow my
counsel. If you get the hero's bit at my house now,
you shall also get it at Emania. You will do well to
obtain the hero's bit in my house."

After this he describes what his munificent curadh-
mir consisted of — a seven-year-old pig and a seven-
year-old cow that had been fed on milk and corn and
the finest food since their birth, a hundred cakes of
corn cooked with honey, — and every four cakes took
one sack of corn to make it, — and a vat of wine large
enough to hold three of the warriors of the Ultonians,

46 THE STORY OP BABLT GAELIC LITBRATURB.

" Since, then," said Bricriu, " it is you who are the
best of the warriors of Ulster, it is to you they ought
to give that morsel, and it is for you I have desired
it; consequently, when the last day's feast is ready,
let your charioteer rise up and demand it, and it is to
you the hero's morsel shall be given."

** There shall be men slain on that day," answered
Lewy, ^* or my wish shall be gratified."

Afterwards Bricriu went in search of Conall Cear-
nach, and bestowed much flattery upon him, telling
him that to himself the hero's bit shall be given.
Bricriu, remarks the narrator, had flattered Lewy
well: he flattered Conall Cearnach twice as much.
Afterwards he sought Cuchulain, and so won upon
him that the great hero exclaimed — " I swear it by the
oath men swear in my nation, he shall be without a
head who shall come to dispute the hero's bit with
me."

Upon this opening, and the decision about the hero-
bit, depends all the subsequent romance.

Such is the air of reality which the Irish reciter
throws round the old manners and customs of the
race, and such the ruddy covering of flesh and blood
in which we find the dry bones of Posidonius and
Caesar revived in the old Irish literature.

Again, we see in Caesar that the Gauls did not
fight in chariots when he invaded them ; although it
is recorded that they did so fight two hundred years
before his time, even as the Persians fought against the
Greeks, and as the Greeks themselves must have done
still further back. But in Ireland we find this epic
mode of warfare in full force. Every great man has
bis charioteer; they fight from their cars as in Homeric

mPORTANCB OF OLD IRISH UTBRATURB. 47

days, and much is told us of both steeds, chariot, and
driver. In the romance of Bricriu's Feast it is the
three charioteers of the three warriors who claim the
hero's bit for their masters, since these are apparently
ashamed to make the first move themselves. The
charioteer was more than a mere servant. Cuchulain
sometimes called his charioteer "friend" or "master"
(popa), and, on the occasion of his fight with Ferdia,
desires him, in case he (Cuchulain) should show signs
of yielding, to "excite, reproach, and speak evil to
me, so that the ire of my rage and anger shall grow the
more on me ; but if he give ground before me, thou
shalt laud me and praise me and speak good words
to me, that my courage may be the greater," and this
command his friend and charioteer punctually exe-
cuted.

The chariot itself is in many places graphically
described. Here is how its approach is portrayed in
the Tdin : — " It was not long," says the chronicler,
" until Ferdia's charioteer heard the noise approach-
ing, the clamour and the rattle and the whistling and
the tramp and the thunder and the clatter and the
roar, namely, the shield-noise of the light shields, and
the hissing of the spears and the loud clangour of the
swords and the tinkling of the helmet, and the ringing
of the armour, and the friction of the arms ; the
danghng of the missive weapons, the straining of the
ropes, and the loud clattering of the wheels, and the
creaking of the chariot, and the trampling of the
horses, and the triumphant advance of the cham-
pion and the warrior towards the ford approaching
him."

In the romance called the "Intoxication of the
Ultonians," it is mentioned that they drove so fast m
rtie wake of Cuchulain that " the iron wheels of the

4$ THE STORY OF EARLY GAELIO LITERATURE.

chariots cut the roots of the immense trees." Here is
how the romancist describes the advance of such a
body upon Tara-Luachra : —

" Not long were they there, the two watchers and the
two druids, until a full fierce rush of the first band
broke hither past the glen. Such was the fury with
which they advanced that there was not left a spear on
a rack nor a shield on a spike nor a sword in an
armoury in Tara-Luachra that did not fall down.
From every house on which was thatch in Tara-
Luachra it fell in immense flakes. One would think
that it was the sea that had come over the walls and
over the corners of the world upon them. The forms
of countenances were changed, and there was chatter-
ing of teeth in Tara-Luachra within. The two druids
fell in fits and in faintings and in paroxysms, one of
them out over the wall, and the other over the wall
inside."

Descriptions like this are constantly occurring in
the tales, and enable us to better realise the heroic
period of warfare, and to fill up in our imagination
many a long-regretted lacuna in our knowledge of
primitive Europe.

"Those philosophers" (says Diodorus Siculus, a
Greek writer of the Augustine age, speaking of the
Druids) ^Mike the lyric poets called bards, have a
great authority both in affairs of peace and war;
friends and enemies listen to them. Also when the
two armies are in presence of one another, and
swords drawn and spears couched, they throw them-
selves into the midst of the combatants and appease
them as though they were charming wild beasts.
Thus, even amongst the most savage barbarians anger
subn^its to the rule of wisdom, and the god of war

IMPOBTANCB OP OLD IRISH LITBIIATURB. 49

pays homage to the Muses." To show that the
manners and customs of the Keltoi or Celts of whom
Diodorus speaks were in this respect identical with
those of their Irish cousins (or brothers), and to give
another instance of the warm light shed by Irish
literature upon the early customs of Western Europe,
I shall convert the abstract into the concrete by a
page or two from an Irish romance, not an old one,*
but one which, no doubt, preserves many original
traditionary traits. In this story Finn mac Coolf
at a great feast in his castle at Allen, asks GoU about
some tribute which he claimed, and is dissatisfied at
the answer of Goll, who may be called the Ajax of
the Fenians. After that there arose a quarrel at the
feast, the beginning of which is thus graphically
portrayed : —

*' Goll," said Finn, ** you have acknowledged in that
speech that you came from the city of Beirbhe to the
battle of Cnoca, and that you slew my father there,
and it is a bold and disobedient thing of you to tell
me that," said Finn.

" By my hand, O Finn,'* said Goll, " If you were
to dishonour me as your father did, I would give you
the same payment that I gave Cool."

*'Goll," said Finn, ^* I would be well able not to
let that word pass with you, for I have a hundred
vahant warriors in my following for every one that is
in yours."

" Your fatlier had that also," said Goll, " and yet I

* I translated this from a manuscript in my possession made
by one Patrick O'Prunty (an ancestor probably of Charlotte
Bronte) in 1763. Mr. Standish Hayes O'Grady has since pub-
lished a somewhat different text of it.

t In Irish Fiona mac Ciimhail, pronounced Finn (or Fewn in
Munster) mac Coo-will or CooU

50 THE STORY OP EARLY OABLIO LITBRATURB.

avenged my dishonour on him, and I would do the
^ame to you if you were to deserve it of me."

White-skinned Carroll O'Baoisgne* spoke, and
'tis what he said — " O Goll," said he, " there is many
a man/' said he, ** to silence you and your people in
the household of Finn mac Cool.'*

Bald, cursing Conan mac Morna spoke, and 'tis
what he said — '* I swear by my arms of valour," said
he, "that Goll, the day he has least men, has a man
and a hundred in his household, and not a man of
them but would silence you."

"Are you one of those, perverse, bald-headed
Conan ? " said Carroll.

" I am one of them, black-visaged, nail-torn, skin-
scratched, little-strength Carroll," says Conan, " and
I would soon prove it to you that Cool was in the
wrong.''

It was then that Carroll arose, and he struck a
daring fist, quick and ready, upon Conan, and there
was no submission in Conan's answer, for he struck
the second fist on Carroll in the middle of his face
and his teeth.

After this the chronicler relates how first one joined
in and then another, until at last all the adherents of
Goll and Finn, and even the captains themselves
are hard at work. *' After that," he adds, "bad was
the place for a mild smooth-fingered woman, or a
weak or infirm person, or an aged long-lived elder."
This fight continued " from the beginning of the
night till the rising of the sun in the morning,"
and was only stopped — ^just as Diodorus says, battles
were stopped — by the intervention of the bards. " It

♦ Pronounced Bweesg-n^i, the tripthong aoi is always pro-
nounced like ee in Irish

IMPORT AXCE OF OLD IRISH LITERATURfi. 5 I

was then,'* says the romancist, "that the prophesying
poet of the pointed words, that guerdon-ful good man
of song, Fergus Finnbhedil, rose up, and all the
Fenians' men of science along with him, and they sang
their hymns and good poems, and their perfect lays
to those heroes to silence and to so^'ten them. It was
then they ceased from their slaughtering and maiming,
on hearing the music of the poets, and they let their
weapons fall to earth, and the poets took up their
weapons and they went between them, and grasped
them with the grasp of reconciliation." When the
palace was cleared it was found that i,ioo of Finn's
people had been killed between men and women, and
eleven men and fifty women of Goll's party.

Caesar speaks of the numbers who frequented the
schools of the Druids in Gaul. " It is said," he adds,
" that they learn there a great number of verses, and
that is why some of these pupils spend twenty years in
learning. Jt is not, according to the Druids, permis-
sible to entrust verses to writing, although they use
the Greek alphabet in all other affairs, public and
private." Of this prohibition to commit their verses
to paper we have no trace, so far as I know, in our
literature, but the accounts of the early bardic schools
entirely bear out the description here given of them by
Caesar, and again show the solidarity of custom which
seems to have existed between the various Celtic
tribes. According to our early manuscripts, it took
from nine to twelve years for a student to take
the highest degree at the baidic schools, and in
many cases where the pupil failed to master suffi-
ciently the subjects of the year, he had prob-
ably to spend two over it, so that it is quite
possible that some might easily spend twenty years

52 THE STORY OP EARLY QABLIO LITER ATURB.

over their learning before arriving at the high-
est degree. And much of this learning was, as
Caesar notes, in verse. All our earlier law tracts
appear to have been so, and even all our earliest
romances. There is a very interesting account extant
called the " Proceedings of the Great Bardic Associa-
tion," which leads up to the epic of the Tain Bo
Chuailgne, the greatest of the Irish romances,
according to which this great tale was at one
time lost, and the great Bardic Institution was
commanded to hunt for and recover it The fact of
its being said that the perfect tale was lost for ever,
" and that only a fragmentary and broken form of it
would go down to posterity," undoubtedly means, as
has been pointed out by Sullivan, "that the filhng
up the gaps in the poem by prose narrative is
meant." In point of fact the tale, as we have it
now, consists half of verse and half of prose. .
Nor is this peculiar to the Tain. All our oldest
and many of our modern tales are composed in this
way. In most or all cases the verse is of a more
archaic character, and more difficult than the prose.
In very many romances an expanded prose narra-
tive of several pages is followed by a more con-
densed poem saying the same thing. So much did
the Irish at last come to look upon it as a matter
of course that every romance should be interspersed
with poetry, that even writers of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, who consciously invented their
stories, as a modern novelist invents his, have inter-
spersed their pieces with passages in verse as did
Comyn in his Turlough Mac Stairn ; as did the author
of the Son of Ill-counsel, the author of the Parlia-
ment of Clan Lopus, and others. We may perhaps
take it, then, that in the earliest days all our romances

mPORTANCB OF OLD IRISH LITERATURE. 53

were composed in verse, and learned by heart by the
students — possibly before the alphabet was known at
all ; afterwards, when lacunae occurred through defec-
tive memory on the part of the reciter, he filled up the
gaps with prose. Those who committed to paper our
earliest tales wrote down as much of the old poetry as
they could recollect or had access to, and wrote the
connecting narrative in prose. Hence, it soon came
to pass that if a story pretended to any antiquity, it
must be interspersed with verses ; and at last it hap-
pened that the Irish taste became so conformed to
this style of writing, that authors adopted it, as I have
said, even in the seventeenth and eighteenth century.

This chapter has been written with a view to show
that the study of Irish literature is one elevated above
mere provinciality or even nationality. I wish to show
that those of the great nations of to-day, whose ances-
tors were mostly Celts, but whose language, literature,
and traditions have completely disappeared, can best
form an idea of their own past of which nothing exists,
by studying the records of the Irish past, of which such
a quantity still remains. When we find so much of the
brief information given us by the classical writers con-
cerning the Celts with whom they came in contact, not
only borne out, but so amply illustrated by old Irish lite-
rature, it is not very rash to argue that, in other matters too,
the races bore to each other a very close resemblance.

Much more could be advanced upon this point, as
that the four Gallo-Roman inscriptions to Brigantia
found in Great Britain, are really to Brigit,a goddess
of the Irish, that the Brennus who burned Rome, 390
years B.C., and the Brennus who stormed Delphi
no years later, were only the god Brian,* son of the

♦ WHo also figures in the "Three Sorrows of Story- telling."

54 THE STORY OF BARiiT GAELIC LltERATURSS.

goddess Brigit, under whose tutelage the Gaels
marched, that Lugu-dunum, afterwards Lug-dunum,
now Lyon, is so-called from the god Lugh the Long-
handed, to whom two Celtic inscriptions are found, one
in Spain, one in Switzerland ; but enough has been
said upon this point, and those who are curious upon
the matter may look up the erudite pages of Monsieur
de Jubainville, to whom all Irishmen should owe a
lasting debt of gratitude for the more than Gallic
uminousness with which he has sought to disen-
tangle the web of our early mythology.

CHAPTER V.

JfiARLY IRISH ROMANCES.

\ URING 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 lirsgeul
was unknown. It was
in time of decadence
that a body of Greek
prose romance appeared, and the Latin language
produced in this line little of a higher character than
such books as the Gesfa Romanorum, In Greece
and Italy, where the genial climate favoured all kinds
of open air representations the great development ot
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 lirsgeul, romance, or novel, was

56 THE STORY OF EARLY aABLIO LITER ATtTRift.

quite abnormally great. One of our popular lecturers
has asserted, if I mistake not, that the dramatic is an
inevitable, and I think he says, an early development in
the history of every literature, but this is to generalize
from insufficient instances. The Irish literature which
kept on developing — to some extent at least — for over
a thousand years, and of which 1,000 volumes still
exist, never evolved a drama, nor, as far as I know,
so much as 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
iirsgeuL

When this form of literature first came into vogue
we have no means of ascertaining, but narrative prose
was probably developed at a very early period as a
supplement to defective narrative verse ; not that it
were then and there committed to writing, for it
appears 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 inci-
dents of a story in their regular sequence, and that
their training enabled them to fill them 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 with 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 ; with each the sequence of incidents, and
the incidents themselves, were probably for a longtime
the same, but the language in which they were tricked
out and the length to which they were spun, depended

&ARLY IRISH ROMANCES. 57

probably upon the genius or bent of each particular
bard. Of course in process of time divergences began
to arise, and hence came different versions of the same
story. That, at least, is how I account for such pas-
sages 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 that wise it happened but thus," and
so on.

It is probable that very many novels were in exist-
ence before the coming of St. Patrick, but highly
improbable that they were at that time written down
at full length. It was I think only after the country
had become Christianised and full of schools of learn-
ing, 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 early twelfth
century, we find in a list the names of 187 of those ro-
mances, with 350 of which an ollamh (ollav) 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 250 prime stories
and the too secondary ones, along with the other
things which were required of him. The prime sto-
ries,— the novels of the time, for they were nothing
more nor less, — are divided in the manuscripts into
the following romantic catalogue: — Destructions oj
Fortified Places, Cow Spoils (/>., cattle raiding ex-
peditions), 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 LeinsUr^ "who does not
synchronize and harmonise all the stories." We
have, as I have said, the oames of 187 such stories

5 8 THE STORY OF BABLT GAELIC LITKRATURfi.

in that book, and the names of many more are given
in the tenth or eleventh century tale of Mac Coise,
and all the known ones, with the exception of one
tale added later on, and one which evidently through
an error in transcription is made to refer to Arthur in-
stead 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 racial tribal and family history, mixed with
Celtic mythology, thus forming stories which were
ever being told and retold, and polished up, and
added to, and which were — some of them — handed
down for perhaps countless generations ; others re-
count historical tribal or family doings, magnified
during the course of time; others again of more
recent date give us perhaps fairly accurate accounts
of real events. I take it that as 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 pro-
pagated local tradition throughout all Ireland.

The very essence of the national life of Erin was
embodied in these stories, but unfortunately few only
out of the enormous mass have survived down to
our day, and these mostly mutilated or preserved
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

feARLY IRISH ROMANCBa. §^

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 4,000 of the
enormous pages -of the Four Masters. He computed
that the tales about Finn, Ossian, and the Fenians
would alone fill another 3,000 pages. In addition
to these we have an extraordinary number of ima-
ginative stories, neither historical nor Fenian, such
as the Three Sorrows of Story-telling and the like,
sufficient to fill 5,000 pages more, not to speak of
the more recent novel-like productions of the later
Irish.

Omitting for the present local and tribal stories,
we find that there are three great classes of national
romance or saga, common to the whole nation. These
are, first, the mythological cycle about the Tuatha
de Danann, Firbolgs, Fomorians, the Dagda, etc.,
secondly, the Cycle of Cuchulain and the Red
Branch, and thirdly, the Fenian or Ossianic cycle.
We must discuss each of these separately. To these
three we might possibly add a fourth cycle, which exists
not indeed on paper, but in the popular recollection,
that of the Elves or Fairies. We thus come by a re-
gular dwarfing process from Gods to Heroes (Sat/Aoi/cc),
from Heroes to Men, and from Men to Elves. Oi
these last, however, we shall have nothing to say in this
volume.*

* I have collected some thirty stories in Irish amongst the
peasantry, the nucleus of a Fairy Cycle.

CHAPTER VL

THE MYTHOLOGICAL CYCLE.

HE Stories which fall under
the head of the mythological
cycle are both fewer in num-
ber and more confused in sub-
stance than those of the other
two cycles. To antiquarians
and etymologists, however,
they are the most interesting
of all, for it is in them we find the clearest traces of
the old Irish pantheon. In other words we can, to a
certain extent, make acquaintance with the gods of the
early Irish, as we make acquaintance with those of
Greece, Rome, and Scandinavia, in classical literature
and northern saga. We cannot do this at first sight as
we can with the classical gods. On the contrary, one
might read through Irish literature and scarcely see
that it contained a mythology at all. The reason of this
is that at a very early period the Irish forgot that these
beings and races of whom they still continued to tell,
were the gods and demi-gods of their ancestors, until
at last their historians came to speak of them as
though they were ordinary tribes and ordinary men.

THE MTTHOLOaiCAL CYCLB. 6 1

rhis process of treatment is called Euhemerism from
a Greek writer of the fourth century, B.C., named
Euhemerus who attempted to do the same thing by
the Greeks. Occasionally, indeed, a fairy being,
generally a Tuatha de Danann stands out in the or-
dinary romances, as Angus of the Brugh in Diarnmid
and Grainne^ who saves his protege Diarmuid very
much like a Deus ex machina, and who when that
hero is at length slain brings him to his palace of the
Brugh on the Boyne, and says, *' since I cannot restore
him to life I will send a soul into him so that he may
talk to me every day." But, upon the whole, while
there occurs a good deal about wizardry and the Shee*
men and women who inhabit the fairy shees or hills,
and the incantations of Druids, there is little or nothing
about a so-called race of gods, for the simple reason that
the gods came to be treated as men, and the Firbolgs,
Fomorians, P'ir-Domnans, Fir-Galeons, Tuatha de
Danann s, etc., are spoken of, both by annalists and his-
torians, as ordinary human tribes. Indeed, Keating in
enumerating the chief men of the Tuatha de Dananns
the Dagda, Manannan and the rest, actually adds **and
these were their three goddesses, Badb, Macha, and
Morighan," quite unsuspicious of the probable fact
that the Dagda himself was a kind of Irish Jupiter
and Manannan an Irish Neptune, just as much gods
of the ancient Irish as the Morighan (the war-goddess)
herself. Of course, all these races and names are
fitted into the annals each in a place — I suppose I
must call it an invented place — of its own, and the
intervals filled up with the names of kings who are

* The Irish sidhe^ equivalent to " Fairy" ; these were gene-
rally believed to be the Tuatha de Dananns who disappeared
from before the Milesians and lived inside the hills.

62 THB STORT OP EARLY GAELIC LITERATURB.

«aid to have reigned over Erin and died. The
Dagda himself dies, slain in the battle of North
Moytura by a spear cast at him by Kethlen,^* the
wife of Balor the Fomorian of the Evil Eye, from
whom Enniskillen is said to take its name. The
great Lugh or Lughaidh,* from whom Lyons (Lug-
dunum), no doubt, takes its name, and to whom are
found early Celtic inscriptions is slain also. So is
Manannan, so is Ogma — no doubt the Gaulish Her-
acles * O^^mios ' — and so are the rest, like so many
human beings. But all this arose, first from the
rationalizing or euhemerizing tendencies of the early
Irish, and secondly from the desire of the mediae val-
ists to trace back the history and kings of Ireland
to Adam, after the fashion of the Hebrew pedigrees
with which the introduction of Christianity made
them acquainted.

The mythological cycle of tales tells us how the
Nemedians, or children of Nemedh, colonized Ireland,
and how they were oppressed by the Fomorians, who
are generally described as African sea-robbers, and
how the two races nearly exterminated each other at
the fight round the tower of Conning on Tory Island.f
Some of the Nemedians survived and fled away, taking
refuge in Greece ; and a couple of hundred years later,
being driven out of Greece, they came back again,
calling themselves Firbolg, />., " sack" or '*bag men."
It was after they had held the island in peace for thirty
or forty years that the celebrated Tuatha de Danann
came in. They, too, were Nemedians who had left
Ireland after that same fight at Conning's Tower. They,
too, like the Firbolg, had been-— some say in Greece — for

• Pronounced Kellen and Le\vy.

t The account in Nennius is something different

THE MYTHOLOGICAL CTCLB. 63

a period of exile, which endured about thirty-five years
longer than that of the Firbolg. On their return to
Ireland they found the Firbolg there before them,
and were greatly surprised to hear them talk the same
Gaelic language as themselves. They offered to
divide the island, but the Firbolg would not have it,
so the de Dan an ns fought the battle of North Moytura
with them, and beat them. Thirty years later they
fought the second battle of South Moytura against the
Fomorians, who had once more waxed strong, and
beat them also. They held the island after this
for about two hundred years, until the coming of the
Scots or Gaels, or Milesians, as they are variously
called, who in their turn beat the Tuatha de Dananns,
and reigned here in their stead until conquered by
the English.* The first and second battles of
Moytura t are told at length in two prose epics, both

♦ It is worth noting in this place, as a mark of the persistent
continuity of our history, that after being beaten here the Firbo'ig
fled to the islands, and colonized Aran and Islay ard Rachlin
and the Hebrides. Long afterwards, at the time when Ireland
was divided into five provinces, the Cruithnigh or Picts drove
them out of ihe islands, and they were forced to come back to
Ireland to Cairbre Niafer, King of Leinster, who allotted them a
territory, but put such a ra.ck rent upon them, that they were
glad to fly into Connacht, where Ollioll and M^ve, the king and
queen who figure in the Ultonian cycle, gave them a free
grant of land, and there Duald Mac Firbis, two hundred and
fifty years ago found their descendants in plenty. According to
some accounts, however, the Firbolg were never at any time
wholly driven out of Connacht, and if they are a real race they
still form the basis of the population there. Maine Mor, ancestor
of the O'Kellys is said to have wrested from them the territory of
Ui Maine (part of Roscommon and Galway) in the 6th century.

t When the oldest lists of romances were drawn up there was
only one battle of Moytura known, or at least mentioned, that
was evidently the ona against the Fomorians, now called the
second battle. In the more recent list contained in the Intro-

04 THE STORY OF EARLY trABLIO LITBRATURB.

of them interesting ; the second especially so, it being
the account of the battle in which the Tuatha de
Danann defeated the Fomoiians, after a seven-year
preparation for the fight. There are traits in this
account which evidently show the mythological origin
of all the characters. Just as the most contradictory ac-
counts of Zeus are met with in Greek mythology, some
glorifying him as reigning in Olympus supreme over
gods and men, others representing him as playing low
and indecent tricks tranformed in the guise of a cuckoo
or a bull, so we find the Dagda (whose real name is said
to have been Eochaidh* the Ollamh) at one time high-
king of the whole de Danann race, and organizer of
victory, and at another in a far less dignified and
clearly mythological position. Here, for instance, is
the account of his visit to the camp of the Fomorians,
in order to cause them to lose time and to put them
off with talk until the de Danann should liave their
armaments ready. I give this passage not at all as a
specimen of one of the most interesting romances of
the cycle that we have, but simply as a proof of how
the mythological character of the heroes, though
nearly lost throughout many parts of the tale, is clearly
preserved in this, where the great Dagda is seen, like
Zeus at times, in a most unprepossessing position.

'MVhen the Dagda f had come to the camp of the
Fomorians he demanded a truce, and he obtained it.
The Fomorians prepared a porridge for him ; it was

duction to the Senchus M6r (p. 46, Master of the Rolls Series)
there is mention made of both battles. There is only a single
copy of each of these stories known to be extant — of how many
fine stories has even the last copy perished !

* Yohee the oUav, or ullav.

f Jubainville thinks this name = Dago-d6vo-s, " the Good God.**

THE MYTHOLOGICAL CYCLE. 65

to ridicule him they did this, for he greatly loved
porridge. They filled for him the king's cauldron,
which was five hand-breadths in depth. They threw
into it eighty pots of milk and a proportionate quan-
tity of meal and fat, with goats and sheep and swine,
which they got cooked along with the rest. Then
they poured the broth into a hole dug in the ground,

* Unless you eat all that's there,' said Indech to him,

* you shall be put to death, we don't want you to be
reproaching us, and we must satisfy you." The Dagda
took the spoon ; it was so great that in the hollow of
it a man and a woman might be contained. The
pieces which went into that spoon were halves of
salted pigs and quarters of bacon. The Dagda said,

* Here is good eating, if the broth be as good as its
odour,' and as he carried the spoonful to his mouth,
he said, " The proverb is true that the good cooking
is not spoiled by the bad pot.**

" When he had finished he scraped the ground with
his finger to the very bottom of the hole to take what
remained of it, and after that he went to sleep to
digest his soup. His stomach was greater than the
greatest cauldron in large houses, and the Fomorians
mocked at him.

"He went away, and came to the bank of the Eba.
He did not walk with ease, so large was his stomach.
He was dressed in very bad guise. He had a cape
which scarcely reached below his shoulders. Beneath
that cloak was seen a brown mantle, which descended
no lower than his hips. It was cut away above, and
very large in the breast. His two shoes were of horses
skin, with the hair outside. He held a wheeled fork,

* Thus perilously translated by Jubainville. Stokes does not
attempt it.

f

66 THE STORY OP EARLY OAHLIC LriBRATUUK.

which would have been heavy enough for eight men,
and he let it trail behind him. It dug a furrow deep
enough and large enough to become the frontier mearn
between two provinces. Therefore it is called the
track of the Dagda's club."

In the Tuatha de Danann cycle we discern clearly
enough the figures of Badhb (Birc) the Irish Bellona,
Dianc^cht the Esculapius, Ogma the strong man, who
is, of course, the Gaulish god Ogmius, of whom Lucian
gives so curious an account, and whom he equates at
once with Hermes and Heracles, although he is with
us figured as a powerful rather than as a persuasive
man ; Brian and his brothers ; Lugh the Longhanded,
otherwise called the Ildana, or man of many sciences,
the Irish Apollo ; Brigit, the Goddess of Poets, or the
Irish muse, from whose identity many attributes have
doubtless passed over to the credit of her namesake,
the Nun of Kildare ', Dana, the mother of the gods,
who was married to Bres the Fomorian, and appears
identical with Brigit ; Manannan, the Gaelic Nep-
tune, and many others. All this early history, if not
wholly mythological, and the outcome of a past belief
in a race of good Gods (the Tuatha de Dananns) and
bad spirits (the Fomorians, etc.) is certainly closely
bound up with it, and Jubainville sees in the coloniza-
tion of Partholan, the children of Nemedh, and the
Tuatha de Dananns, an Irish version of the Greek ages
>f gold, silver and brass, just as he sees in the Chimaera
otherwise Bellerus, the monster slain by Bellerophon,
another version of Balar of the Evil Eye, the fire which
comes out of the Chimaera's throat, and the deadly
beam shot from Balar's evil eye, both, it seems pro-
bable, originally typifying the lightning. But into
intricacies of mythology this is no place to ramble .

THE MYTHOLOGICAL CYCLE. 67

O^Donovan, indeed, thought that the de Dananns
were a real race of men. So much of our oldest topo-
graphical nomenclature is connected with them, and
so many still-remaining tumuli are ascribed to them,
that he says, "these monuments are of the most re-
mote antiquity, and prove that the Tuatha de Dananns
were a real people, though their history is so much
wrapped up in fable and obscurity," but he himself
has given us the best of reasons for believing that they
were not a real people, in this statement, " it seems
very strange that our genealogists trace the pedigree of
no family living for the last thousand years to any of
the kings or chieftains of the Tuatha de Dananns,
while several families of the Fir-Bolgic descent are
mentioned in Hy-Many and other parts of Connacht."

CHAPTER VII.

THE RED BRANCH OR HEROIC CYCLE.

HE mythological tales dealt
with peoples, with dynasties,
with, possibly, the struggle
between good and evil prin-
ciples; there is over it all a
shadowy sense of vague-
ness, of vastness, of uncer-
tainty. The heroic cycle,
on the other hand, deals with the history of the
Milesians themselves within a brief but well-defined
period, and the romances relating to it are sharply
drawn, numerous and ancient, many of them fine in
both conception and execution. Here we seem for
the first time to find ourselves upon historical ground
Cuchulain, Conor mac Nessa, Fergus mac Roy, Naesi
and D^irdre, M^ve, and Conall Cearnach have about
them all the circumstantiality which is wanting to
the dim, mist-magnified, and distorted forms of the
mysterious Dagda, Nuada, Bres, Balar, Dana, and
iheir fellows. Not that the mysterious is not ap-

THE RED BRANCH OR HEROIC CYCLK. 6g

parent in this cycle also. Cuchulain's birth, his
courtship, to some extent his death, are mysterious
enough, as is the metempsychosis of the souls which
finally settled in the wondrous bulls which occasioned
the great war, as is the sickness of the Ultonians, and
much more. But these are excrescences no more
affecting the conduct of the history than do the ac-
tions of the gods affect the war round Troy ; events
are sufficiently motivated upon reasonable human
grounds, and there is a higher air of reality about
them. This is as it should be, for, according to the
annalists, over seventeen hundred years had elapsed
since the events recorded in the last cycle took place,
and the characters who now make their appearance
are about contemporaneous with the birth of Christ.*
Of this period, the great event is the long war
between Connacht and Ulster, brought about by the
Hiurder of the sons of Usnach, a war which included
the attempt of M^ve, Queen of Connacht, to plunder
Cuailgne in Louth. All the Irish world f knows the
story of D^irdre, which gave rise to the great war —
how Conor, King of Ulster, obeying a prophecy.

* ITie Tuatha de Danann had, according to the Four
Masters, conquered Ireland Anno Mundi circiter 3303, and
Eochaidh Feidhleach, the father of the great Meve, Queen of
Connacht, came to the throne a.m. 5058. He died in 5069, t,e.f
a little more than a hundred years before the birth of Christ.

t Yet when in Trinity College, a few years ago, the subject —
the first Irish subject for twenty-seven years — set for the Vice-
Chancellor's prize in English verse was *' Deirdre," it was found
that the students did not know what that word meant, or what
Deirdre was, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral. So true
it is that, despite all the efforts of Davis and his fellows, there
are yet two natioas in Ireland. Trinity College might to some
extent bridge the gap if she would, but she has not even at-
tempted it.

;6 T?HB STORY OP EARLY GAELIC ilTlBRATURk

reared her in a solitary rath apart from all human
beings, designing to make her his own wife when of
age ; how the maiden became enamoured of Naesi,
who fled with her to Alba, along with his two brothers ;
how Conor lured them back again by Fergus mac
Roy, who pledged them his word that no harm was
intended for them ; how the king, having craftily sepa-
rated Fergus from them, slew them, and the son of
Fergus with them ; and how Fergus, in bitter indigna-
tion at his pledged word being broken, attacked and
burned Conor's capital, Emania, and finally retired
into Connacht, whence he kept up incessant mcursions
upon Ulster, with the aid of the Connacht warriors, for
nearly ten years. The slaughter of the sons of Usnach
and the melancholy death of D^irdre is one of the
most pathetic tales of this cycle.

By far the greatest and most important of these
romances, however, is that of Move's excursion to carry
off the bull of Cuailgne in Louth ; this is the well-
known Tain Bo Cuailgne, or Cattle-spoiling of Cooley,
and it is one which throws much light upon early Irish
society and manners. Like most of the tales belong-
ing to this cycle, it is eminently Pagan in tone and
conception. Indeed, the heroic cycle had been pretty
well crystallised into form by the seventh century, and
the romances had Dy that time substantially assumed
the shape in which we now find them.

This celebrated story opens with a conversation
between Mbve, Queen of Connacht, and OiUoll, her
husband, which ends in a dispute as to which of them
is the richest. There was no modern Married
Woman's Property Act in force, but Irish women
seem to have been at all times much more sympatheti-
cally treated by the Celtic tribes than by the harder
and more stern races of Teutonic and northern blood,

tHB BEt> BRAKCH OB HEROIC CtCLfe.

71

and Irish ladies seem to have been free to enjoy their
own property and dowries. The story, then, begins
with this dispute as to which, husband or wife, be the
richer in this world's goods, and the argument at last
becomes so heated that the pair decide to have all
their possessions brought together to compare them
one with the other, and judge by actual observa-
tion which is the most valuable. They collected ac-
cordingly, jewels, bracelets, metal, gold, silver, flocks,
herds, ornaments, etc., and found that, in point of
wealth, they were much the same, but that there was
one great bull called the Finn-bheannach, or White-
horned, who was really calved by one of Move's cows,
but being endowed with a certain amount of intelli-
gence, considered it disgraceful to be under a woman,
and so had gone over to Oilioirs herds. With him
M^ve had nothing that could compare. She made en-
quiry, however, and found out from her chief courier
that there was in the district of Cuailgne, in Louth,
(Mbve lived at Cruachan, now Croghan, in Roscom-
mon) a most celebrated bull called the Dun Bull of
Cuailgne, belonging to a chieftain of the name of Dar^
To him, accordingly, she sends an embassy, request-
ing the loan of the bull for one year, and promising
fifty heifers in return. Darb was quite willing, and
promised to lend the animal. He was, in fact, pleased,
and treated the embassy generously, giving them good
lodging and plenty of food and drink — too much
drink, in fact. The fate of nations is said to often
hang upon a thread. On this occasion that of Ulstei:
and Connacht depended upon a drop more or less
absorbed by one of the ten men who constituted
Move's embassy. This man took, unfortunately, a
drop too much, and Dare's steward coming in at the
moment, heard him say that it was small thanks to

72 THE STORY OF EARLY GAELIC LITERATURE.

his master to give his bull, " For if he hadn't given
it we'd have taken it." That word decided the fate
of provinces. The steward, indignant at such an
outrage, ran and told his master, and Darb swore
that now he would send no bull, and swore too,
but that the ten men were envoys he would have
hanged them. With indignity they were dismissed,
and returned empty-handed, to Move's boundless
indignation. She in her turn swore she would have
the bull in spite of Darb. She immediately sent
out to collect her armies, and invited Leinster and
Munster to join her. She was, in fact, able to muster
most of the three provinces to march against Ulster
to take the bull from Dar^, and in addition she had
Fergus mac Roy and about 1,500 Ulster warriors who
had never returned to their homes, nor forgiven Conor
for the murder of the sons of Usnach. She crossed
the Shannon at Athlone, and marched on to Kells,
within a few miles of Ulster, and there she pitched
her standing camp. She was accompanied by her
husband and her daughter, who was the fairest among
women. Her mother bad secretly promised her
hand to every leader in her army, in order to nerve
them to greater feats of arms.

It so chanced that the territory upon whose border
they were now encamped belonged to the great
Cuchulain himself, at this time not much more than
a youth, and it was within his patrimony that Dar^
lived, who was owner of the Dun Bull, Cuchulain
alone stepped forth to meet the armies of Connacht,
and endeavoured to delay them by challenging them
to a series of single combats with himself, in which he
was always victorious, until M^ve tired of this, hurled
her entire army upon Ulster, carried off the Dun
Cow, and ravaged the country up to the gates of

IHE RED BRANCH OR HEROIC CtCLl. 73

Emania, Conor's capital, thereby fulfilling the pro-
phecy of Deirdre : —

• Woe to Eman, roof and wall,

Woe to the Red Branch, hearth and hall,
Tenfold woe and black dishonour
To the foul and false Clan Conor.

The most interesting incident in the romance is the
single combat between Cuchulain and his old friend
Ferdiad, who very much against his will was in spite
of himself persuaded by Move's importunities and
promises, and also the hope of gaining her beautiful
daughter, to fight his ancient comrade.

Here is a description of the conduct of the two
warriors after their first day's fighting.

The Fight at the Ford.

"They ceased fighting;* they threw their weapons
away from them into the hands of their charioteers.
Each of them approached the other forthwith and
each put his hand round the other's neck and gave
him three kisses. Their horses were in the same
paddock that night, and their charioteers at the
same fire ; and their charioteers spread beds ot
green rushes for them with wounded men's pil-
lows to them. The professors of healing and curing
came to heal and cure them, and they appUed herbs,

* I follow here for the most part the translation given by
Sullivan in his addenda to O'Curry's Manners and Customs^ but
it is an exceedingly faulty and defective one, from an accurately
linguistic point of view ; however, even if a few words are mis-
translated or their sense mistaken, it is quite immaterial here.
Windisch is said to have finished a complete translation of the
Tain, but it has not yet appeared anywhere. See, however.
Max Netlau's texts of the Ferdiad episadf* in vak. to and II of
the Revue Celtique,

74 THE STORY OF BARLt GAELIC LITER ATURfi.

and plants of healing and curing, to their stabs and
their cuts and their gashes, and to all their wounds.
Of every herb and of every healing and curing plant
that was put to the stabs and cuts and gashes, and to
all the wounds of Cuchulain, he would send an equal
portion from him, westward over the Ford to Ferdiad,
so that the men of Erin might not be able to say,
should Ferdiad fall by him, that it was by better
means of cure that he was enabled to kill him.

" Of each kind of food and of palatable pleasant
intoxicating drink that was sent by the men of Erin to
Ferdiad, he would send a fair moiety over the ford
northwards to Cuchulain, because the purveyors of
Ferdiad were more numerous than the purveyors of
Cuchulain. All the men of Erin were purveyors to
Ferdiad for beating off Cuchulain from them, but the
Bregians only were purveyors to Cuchulain, and they
used to come to converse with him at dusk every night.
They rested there that night.'*

The narrative goes on to describe the next day^s
fighting which was carried on from their chariots " with
their great broad spears," and which left them both in
such evil plight that the professors of healing and
curing " would do nothing more for them, because oi
the dangerous severity of their stabs and their cuts and
their gashes and their numerous wounds, than to apply
witchcraft and incantations and charms to them to
staunch their blood and their bleeding and their gory
wounds." Their meeting on the next day follows.

" They arose early the next morning, and came for-
ward to the field of battle. Cuchulain perceived an ill-
visaged and a greatly lowering cloud on Ferdiad that
day. * Badly dost thou appear to-day, O Ferdiad,
said Cuchulain, * thy hair has become dark this day
and thine eye has become drowsy, and thine own

*HB REJD BRANCH OR HEROIC CYOLB. 7$

form and features and appearance have departed from
thee/ * It is not from fear or terror of thee that I am
so this day ; ' said Ferdiad, * for there is not in Erin
this day a champion that I could not subdue.' And
Cuchulain was complaining and bemoaning, and he
spake these words, and Ferdiad answered :

CUCHULAIN.

' Oh^ Ferdiad is it thou
Wretched man thou art I trow,
By a guileful woman won
To hurt thine old companion.'

FERDIAD.

• Oh, Cuchulain, fierce of fight,
Man of wounds and man of might,
Fate constrains each one to stir
Moving towards his sepulchre.' " ^

The lay is then given, each of the heroes reciting a
verse in turn, and it is very possibly upon these lays
that the prose narrative is built up. The third day's
fighting is then described in which the warriors used
their " heavy hard-smiting swords," or rather swords
that gave " blows of size." The story then continues:

** They cast away their weapons from them into the
hands of their charioteers, and though it had been the
meeting, pleasant and happy, griefless and spirited of
two men that morning, it was the separation, mournful,
sorrowful, dispirited of the two men that night.

*' Their horses were not in the same enclosure that

♦ This is the metre of the original. The last lines are literally
*' A man is constrained to come unto the sod where his final
grave shall be." The metre of the last line is wrong in the LL.
version of the original.

76 THE StORY OF EARLY GAELIC LITERATURE.

night. Their charioteers were not at the same fire.
They rested that night there.

*' Then Ferdiad arose early next morning, and went
Jorward alone to the ford of battle, for he knew that
that day would decide the battle and the fight, and he
knew that one of them would fall on that day there,
or that they both would fall.

Ferdiad displayed many noble, wonderful, varied feats
on high that day which he never learned with any other
person, neither with Scathach, nor with Uathach nor
with Aif^, but which were invented by himself that
day against Cuchulain.

" Cuchulain came to the ford and he saw the noble,
varied, wonderful, numerous feats which Ferdiad dis
plays on high. * I perceive there my friend Laeg '
(said Cuchulain to his charioteer) 'the noble,
varied, wonderful, numerous feats which Ferdiad dis-
plays on high, and all these feats will be tried on me
in succession, and, therefore it is, that if it be I who
shall begin to yield this day, thou art to excite, re-
proach, and speak evil to me, so that the ire of my rage
and anger shall grow the more on me. If it be I who
prevail, then thou shalt laud me, and encourage me,
and speak good words to me, that my courage may be
greater.'* * It shall so be done indeed, O Cuchu^
lain,' said Laeg.

"And it was then Cuchulain put his battle-suit of

* A common trait, even in modern Gaelic' tales, as in the story
of Illann, son of the King of Spain, where his sweetheart urges
him to the battle by chanting his pedigree, and in Campbell's
story of Conall Gulban, where the daughter of the King of
Lochlann urges her bard to exhort her champion in the fight
lest he be defeated, and to give him Brosnachadh file fir-ghlic,
*.^., the urging of a truly wise poet.

THE RED BRANCH 0!t HEROIC CYCLE. 77

battle, and of combat, and of fight on him, and he
displayed noble, varied, wonderful, numerous feats on
high on that day, that he never learned from anybod)
else, neither with Scathach, nor with Uathach, nor with
Aife ; Ferdiad saw those feats and he knew they would
be plied against him in succession.

" * What weapons shall we resort to, O Ferdiad ? '
said Cuchulain. *To thee belongs thy choice of
weapons till night,' said Ferdiad.

*' * Let us try the Ford Feat, then,' said Cuchulain.

" * Let us, indeed,' said Ferdiad. Although Ferdiad
thus spoke his consent, it was a cause of grief to him
to speak so, because he knew that Cuchulain was used
to destroy every hero and every champion who con-
tended with him in the Feat of the Ford.

" Great was the deed, now, that was performed on
that day at the ford — the two heroes, the two warriors,
the two champions of Western Europe, the two gift
and present and stipend-bestowing hands of the north-
west of the world, the two beloved pillars of the valour
of the Gael, and the two keys of the bravery of the
Gael, to be brought to fight from afar through the
instigation and intermeddling of Aihll and Mbve.

" Each of them began to shoot at other with their
missive weapons from the dawn of early morning till
the middle of midday. And when midday came the
ire of the men waxed more furious, and each of them
drew nearer to the other. And then it was that Cuchu-
lain on one occasion sprang from the brink of the ford
and came on the boss of the shield of Ferdiad son of
Daman, for the purpose of striking his head over the
rim of his shield from above. And it was then that
Ferdiad gave the shield a blow of his left elbow and
cast Cuchulain from him like a bird on the brink of
the ford. Cuchulain sprang from the brink of the ford

78 THE STORY OF EARLY OAELIC LITBRATURS.

again till he came on the boss of the shield of Ferdiad
son of Daman, for the purpose of striking his head
over the rim of the shield from above. Ferdiad gave
the shield a stroke of his left knee, and cast Cuchulain
from him like a little child on the brink of the ford.

" Laeg [his charioteer] perceived that act. * Alas,
indeed,' said Laeg, * the warrior who is against thee
casts thee away as a lewd woman would cast her child.
He throws thee as foam is thrown by the river. He
grinds thee as a mill would grind fresh malt. He
pierces thee as the felling axe would pierce the oak.
He binds thee as the woodbine binds the tree. He
darts on thee as the hawk darts on small birds, so that
henceforth thou hast nor call, nor right, nor claim to
valour or bravery to the end of time and life, thou little
fairy phantom,' said Laeg.

" Then up sprang Cuchulain with the rapidity of the
wind and with the readiness of the swallow, and \yith
the fierceness of the dragon and the strength of the
lion into the troubled clouds of the air the third time,
and he alighted on the boss of the shield of Ferdiad
son of Daman to endeavour to strike his head over the
rim of his shield from above. And then it was the
warrior gave the shield a shake, and cast Cuchulain
from him into the middle of the ford, the same as if
he had never been cast off at all.

"And it was then that Cuchulain's first distortion
came on, and he was filled with swelling and great
fulness, like breath in a bladder, until he became a
terrible, fearful, many-coloured, wonderful Tuaig, and
he became as big as a Fomor, or a man of the sea,
the great and valiant champion, in perfect height over
Ferdiad.*

* Compare this with th? Berserker rage of th^ Northmeij,

THB RED BRANCH OR HEROIC CTCLB, yg

" So close was the fight they made now that their
heads met above and their feet below and their arms in
the middle over the rims and bosses of their shields. So
close was the fight they made that they cleft and loos-
ened their shields from their rims to their centres. So
close was the fight which they made that they turned
and bent and shivered their spears from their joints to
their hafts ! Such was the closeness of the fight which
they made that the Bocanachs and Bananachs and wild
people of the glens and demons of the air screamed
from the rims of their shields, and from the hilts of
their swords, and from the hafts of their si)ears. Such
was the closeness of the fight which they made that
they cast the river out of its bed and out of its course,
so that it might have been a reclining and reposing
couch for a king or for a queen in the middle of the
ford, so that there was not a drop of water * in it unless
it dropped into it by the trampling and the hewing
which the two champions and the two heroes made in
the middle of the ford. Such was the intensity of the
fight which they made, that the stud of the Gaels
darted away in fright and shyness, with fury and mad-
ness, breaking their chains and their yokes, their ropes
and their traces, and that the women and youths and
small people and camp-followers, and non-combatants
of the men of Erin broke out of the camp south-
westwards.

" They were at the edge-feat of swords during the
time. And it was then that Ferdiad found an un-
guarded moment upon Cuchulain, and he gave him a
stroke of the straight-edged sword, and buried it in his

* Cf. the common Gaelic folk-lore formula, " they would
make soft of the hard and hard of the soft, and bring cold springs
or fresh water out of the hard rock with their wrestling.''

8o THE STORY OP BARLl JABLIO LITERATURE.

body until his blood fell into his girdle, until the ford
became reddened with the gore from the body of the
battle-warrior. Cuchulain could not endure this, for
Ferdiad continued his unguarded stout strokes, and his
quick strokes, and his tremendous great blows at him.
And he asked Laeg, son of Riangabhra, for the Gae
Bulg. The manner of that was this : it used to be set
down the stream and cast from between the toes [///.,
in the cleft of the foot], it made the wound of one spear
in entering the body, but it had thirty barbs to open,
and could not be drawn out of a person^s body until it
was cut out. And when Ferdiad heard the Gae Bulg
mentioned he made a stroke of the shield down to
protect his lower body. ' Cuchulain thrust the unerring
thorny spear off the centre of his palm over the rim of
the shield, and through the breast of the skin-protecting
armour, so that its further half was visible after pierc-
ing his heart in his body. Ferdiad gave a stroke of
his shield up to protect the upper part of his body,
though it was " th? relief after the danger." The
servant set the Gae Bulg down the stream, and
Cuchulain caught it between the toes of his foot, and
he threw an unerring cast of it at Ferdiad till it passed
through the firm deep iron waistpiece of wrought iron,
and broke the great stone which was as large as a
mill-stone in three, and passed through the protections
of his body into him, so that every crevice and every
cavity of him was filled with its barbs.

" * That is enough now, indeed,' said Ferdiad, * I
fall of that. Now indeed may I say that I am sickly
after thee, and not by thy hand should I have fallen,'
and he said : [Here follow verses.]

" Cuchulain ran towards him after that and clasped
his two arms about him, and lifted him with his ariris

THE RED BRANCH OR HEROIC CYCLE. 8 1

and his armour and his clothes across the ford north-
ward, in order that the slain should be by the ford on
the north, and not by the ford on the west, with the
men of Erin.

" Cuchulain laid Ferdiad down there, and a trance
and faint and weakness fell then on Cuchulain over
Ferdiad. * Good, O Cuchulain,' said Laeg, ' rise up
now for the men of Erin are coming upon us, and it
is not single combat they will give thee since Ferdiad,
son of Daman, son of Dar^ has fallen by thee.'

" * Friend,' said he, * what availeth me to arise after
him that hath fallen by me ? ' "

The Conception of Conor, the Wooing of Emer, the
Death of Conlaoch, Cuchulain's Rearing, Mac Datho's
Swine, the Siege of Howth, the Intoxication of the
Ultonians, Bricriu's Banquet, Emer's Jealousy and
Cuchulain's Pining, the Death of the Children of
Usnach, the Death of Cuchulain, the Red Rout of
Conall Cearnach, are amongst the best-known tales
belonging to this cycle.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE FENIAN CYCLE.

UCHULAIN'S
life and love
and death, entranced the
ears of the great for many
centuries; and into hun-
dreds of bright eyes tears
of pity had for a thousand
years been conjured up by
the pathetic tones of bards
reciting the fate of her who perished for the sons of
Usnach. The wars of M^ve and Conor mac Ness?.
were household words in the hall of Muircheartach oi
the Leather Cloaks, and in the Palace at the Head of
the Weir — Brian Boru's Kincora. "Whosoever loved
what was great in conception, and admired the broad
§weep of the epic, called upon his bards to recite him

THE FENIAN CYCLE. 83

the loves, the wars, the valour, and the deaths of the
Red Branch Knights.*

But there was yet another era consecrated in story-
telHng, another age of history, peopled by other
characters, in which the households of many chief-
tains, and no doubt many even of the chiefs them-
selves delighted.

This was the body of romances that were woven
around Conn of the Hundred Battles, his son Art
the Lonely, his grandson Cormac mac Art, and his
great grandson Cairbre of the Liffey. This cycle of
romance may be called the " Fenian " cycle, as dealing
to some extent with Finn mac Cool and his Fenian |

* Moore's genius has stereotyped amongst us the term Red
Branch Knight, which, however, has too much flavour of the
mediaeval about it. The Irish is curadh, "hero." The Irish for
knight in the appellation White Knight, Knight of the Glen,
etc., is Ridire (pronounced Rid-lr-yS, in Connacht often Rud-ir-
yS) which is really a mediaeval term, evidently borrowed from the
German Ritter, i.e.^ Rider. The Red Branch heroes never appear
on horseback, but always in chariots.

+ Monre helped to bring this word into common use under the
form of Finnian in his melody: *' The wine cup is circling in
Alvin's Hall." It is probable that he derived the word from
Finn, and meant by it "followers of Finn Mac Cool." The
Irish word is Fiann (pronounced Fee-an) and has nothing to do
with Finn Mac Cool. In the genitive it is na-Feine (na-
Fayna). It is a noun of multitude, and means ihe Fenian body
in general. The individual Fenian was called F^innidhe, ix»y
a member of the Fenian force. The bands of militia were called
Fianna ( Feeana). The English translation of Keating, made
early in the last century by Dermod O'Connor, does not use the
term '* Fenian" at all, but translates it by " Irish Militia." Nor
does O'llalloran, in 1778, when he published his history seem to
have known the word. We find Miss Brooke, however, as early
as 1796, using the term Fenian in the following lines : —

* ' He cursed in rage the Fenian chief.
And all the Fenian race."

84 THE STORY OP BABLV VJABLIO MTBRATURB.

militia, or the " Ossianic " cycle since Ossian, Finn's
son, is supposed to have been the author of many of
the poems which belong to it.

In point of time, as reckoned by the Irish annalists
and historians, the men of the Fenian cycle lived
something about 200 years later than those of the
Cuchulain era,* and in none of the romances do we
see even the faintest confusion or sign of intermingling
the characters belonging to the different cycles. One of
the surest proofs— if proof were needed — that Mac
Pherson's brilliant " Ossian " had no Gaelic original, is
the way in which the men and events of the two
separate cycles are jumbled together.

As the war between Ulster and Connacht, which
followed the death of the children of Usnach, is the
great historic event which serves as basis to so many
of the Red Branch romances, so the principal thread
of history round which many of the Fenian stories group
themselves, is the gradual and slowly-increasing enmity
which proclaimed itself between the High Kings of
Erin and their Fenian cohorts, resulting at last in the
battle of Gowra, the fall of the High King, and the
destruction of the Fenians.

Thus, in the Battle of Cnucha is related how Cool,t
the father of Finn, made war upon Conn of the Hun-

And Halliday in his edition of Keating, published in 1808, also
talks in a foot-note of " Fenian heroes." It was John O'Mahony,
he Head- Centre, a brilliant Irish scholar, who first, by a happy
Inspiration, connected the I.R.B., or its equivalent, with the
ancient Irish militia, and by calling them Fenians, perpetuated
for all time an ancient historic memory.

♦ Cormac mac Art came to the throne a.d. 227, according to
the Four Masters, a.d. 213 according to Keating.

tin Irish Ciimhal, but **mh" in the middle of a word is
sounded as " v " or ** w," hence the word is pronounced Coowal,
or more shortly. Cool.

THE FENIAN OYOLB. 85

dred Battles because be had raised Crimhthan [Crivhan]
of the Yellow Hair to the throne of Leinster, and how
he obtained the aid of the Munster princes in the war.
At the battle of Cnucha, or Castleknock, near CooPs
rath, — now Rathcoole, some ten miles from Dublin, —
Cool was routed and slain by the celebrated Connacht
champion, Aedh mac Morna, who lost an eye in the
battle and was thenceforth called GoU (or the blind)*
mac Morna. Many of the Munster Fenians followed
Cool in this battle, and we find here the broadening
rift between the Fenians of Munster and of Connacht,
which ultimately tended to bring about the dissolution
of the v/hole body.

Again we find in the fine tale called the Battle of
Moy Muchruime, how Finn, through spite at his father
Cool being thus killed by Conn of the Hundred Battles,
kept out of the way when Conn's son Art was fi2;hting
the great battle of Moy Muchruime, and gave him no
assistance.

And again it was partly because Finn kept out of
the way on that occasion that Conn's great grandson
fought the battle of Gowra against Finn's son Ossian,
and his grandson Oscar, a battle which put an end to
Fenian power for ever.

Of many of these tales we find two redactions, that
of the old vellum MSS. and that of the modern paper
ones, the latter being as a rule much more lengthy and
decorative. I suspect, however, that in most cases
only condensed versions of romances were committed
to the most ancient books, writing being then less
common, and vellum rarer and more expensive, and
that the bards whose business it was to recite them,

* The word is long obsolete. GoU is a stock character in
Fenian folk-lore.

86 THE STORY OF EARLY GAELIC LiTfiRATURfi.

lengthened and adorned them for themselves while in
the act of oral delivery. Here, for instance, is a spe-
cimen of a passage written at full length in the more
modern paper books, but slurred over or wholly disre-
garded in the old vellum ones; it is the sailing of
Cool, Finn's father, to Ireland, to take the throne of
Leinster. I translate this from a modern manuscript
of the battle of Cnucha in my own possession, as a
good instance of the decorative and in places in-
flated style of the later redactions of many of the
Fenian sagas.

The Sailing of Cool.

•* Now the place where Cool chanced to be at that
time was between the islands of Alba and the deserts
of Fionn-Lochlan, for he was hunting and deer-stalk-
ing there. And the number of those who were with the
overthrowing hero, Cool, in that place, .was thrice fifty
champions of his own near men ; and he heard at that
tfme that his country was left without any good king
to defend it, and that Cauheer More"^' [King of Lein-
ster] had fallen on the field of battle, and that there was
no hero to keep the country. Thereupon those chief-
tains were of a mind to proceed unto the isolated
green isle of Erin, there to maintain with valour and
might the red-hand province of Leinster. And joy-
fully proceeded they straight forwards towards their
ship.

**And there tTiey quickly and expeditiously launched
the towering wide-wombed broad-sailed bark, the
freighted full-wide fair-broad firm-roped vessel, and
they grasped their shapely well-formed broad-bladed
well-prepared oars, and they made a powerful sea-

• In Irish Calhaoir M6r.

THE FENIAN CYCLE, Sj

great dashing dry-quick rowing over the broad hollow-
deep full-foamed pools [of the sea], and over the
rash-billowed vehement hollow-broken rollers, so that
they shot their shapely ship under the junt house of
each fair rock, in the shallows, nigh to the rough-
bordered margin of the Eastern lands, over the smooth-
less great-foaming lively-waved arms of the sea, so that
each fierce, broad, constant foaming, bright- spotted,
white- broken drop that the heroes left upon the sea-
pool with that rapid rowing formed [themselves] like
great torrents upon soft mountains.

"When that valiant powerful company perceived the
moaning of the loud billowy waves, and the breaking
forth of the ocean from her barriers, and the swelling
of the abyss from her places, and the loud convulsion
of the sea from her smooth streams, it was then they
hoisted the variegated tough-cordaged sharp-pointed
mast in the centre of the galley narrow-cornered and
broad-bosomed, and they raised aloft their fair greatly-
shining well-answering truly-wrought quick-cordaged
sail, upon the mast with much speed. And when
the great foundation-blasts of the angry wind touched
the even upright-standing, sword-straight masts, and
when the huge-flying, loud-voiced, broad-bordered
sails swallowed the wind attacking them suddenly with
sharp voice, that stout, strong, active, powerful crew
rose up promptly and quickly, and everyone went
straight to his work with speed and promptitude, and
they stretched forth their ready, courageous, white-
coloured, brown-nailed hands most valiantly to the
tackling, till they let the wind in loud sharp fast voice-
bursts into the shrouds of the mast, so that the ship
gave an eager, very quick, vigorous leap forward, right
straight into the salt-ocean, till they arrived in the
delightfully-clear, cold-pooled, plaintive- whistling, joy-

88 THE STORY O'F EARLY OAELIO LITBRAXURJB.

fully-calling reaches of the sea, and the dark sea rose
speedily around them in desperate, daring, flood-
ful doisleana, in commingling ridges, and in rough-
grey, proud-tongued, gloomy-grim, blue-capacious
valleys, and in impetuous showers-topped wombs (of
water) ; and the great merriment of the cold wind was
answered by the chieftains, strong-workingly, stout-
enduringly, truly-powerfully, and they proceeded to
manage and attend the high-ocean, until at last the
strong and powerful sea overcame the intention of the
high wind, and the murmur and giddy voice of the
deep was humbled by that great rowing, till the sea
became restful, smooth, and very calm behind thern,
until they took port and harbour at Inver-Cholpa,
which is at this time called Drogheda."

Even those stories in which little or no mention is
made of the Fenians, as the Battle of Moy L^ana,
between Conn of the Hundred Battles and Owen More,
in which Conn won for himself the sovereignty of the
whole island, and slew his rival, may be included in
this so called "Fenian" cycle, as well as such com-
pletely fabulous tales as Cormac mac Art's Branch,
and the like, because they deal with the same era and
the same characters.

The Fenian tales and poems are extraordinarily
numerous, and their conception and characteristics
are, in general, quite different from those relating to
the Red Branch. They have not the same wide
sweep, the same vastness and stature, the same weird-
ness, as the older cycle. They are more modern in
conception and surroundings ; there is no mention of
the war chariot which is so important a factor in the
older cycle, or if it is mentioned it plays no part. The
Fe^ijans fight on foot or horseback, and in their saga-
cycle we meet mention of helmets and sometimes oC

TAB PBNIAN CTCLB. 89

luireachs or mail-coats. Things are on a smaller scale,
and exaggeration does not run all through the stories,
but is confined to parts, and is set off by much oif
what is trivial and humorous. As the Tain Bo
Chuailgne is the greatest tale in the first cycle, so the
pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne* is perhaps the best
executed of those in the second, but even it is defaced
by several exaggerated incidents which have little or
no bearing on the story. The lengthy piece called
the Dialogue of the Ancients contained in the Book
of Lis more is, from a social and topographical point of
view, the most valuable.

The Fenian tales became in later times the dis-
tinctly popular ones. They were far more of the
people and for the people than those of the Red
Branch. They were most intimately bound up with
the life and thought and feelings of the whole Gaelic
race, high and low, both in Ireland and Scotland,
and the development of Fenian Saga, for a period of
one thousand two hundred or one thousand five hun-
dred years, is one of the most remarkable examples
in the world of continuous literary evolution. I use
the word evolution advisedly, for there was probably
not a century from the seventh to the eighteenth in
which new stories, poems, and redactions of sagas
concerning Finn and the Fenians were not invented
and put in circulation, while to this very day many

♦ Pronounced Graan-ya. This story has had the good fortune
to have been edited twice in Irish and English, and also trans-
lated into English by Dr. Joyce, who, however, omits the cynical
but very characteristic conclusion. This story was only known
to exist. in quite modern MSS. but I recently discovered a fine
copy written about the year 1660, among Dr, Reeve's MSS. about
half of which were secured the other day by the Royal IrisU
Academy

00 tHB STORT OF EARLY GAELIC LITBRATUJEIB.

Stories never committed to manuscript are current
about them amongst the Irish and Scotch Gaelic-
speakmg populations. We have found no such steady
interest evinced by the people in the Red Branch
romances, and in attempting to collect Irish folk-lore

1 have found next to nothing about Cuchulain and
his contemporaries, but vast quantities about Finn,
Ossian, Oscar, Goll, and Conan. The one cycle,
antique in tone, language, and surroundings, was
that of the chiefs, the great men, and the bards, the
other — at least in later times — more that of the un-
bardic classes and of the people.

I do not mean to say that many of the Cuchulain
stories were not copied into modern MSS. and circu-
lated freely among the people all over Ireland during
the eighteenth century and the beginning of this, es-
pecially Cuchulain's training, Conlaoch's (his son's)
death, the Fight at the Ford, and others ; but these
appear never to have put out shoots and blossoms
from themselves, and to have generated new and yet
again new stories, as did the ever-youthful Fenian
tales ; nor do they appear to have equally entwined
themselves at this day round the popular imagina-
tion.

A striking instance of how the Ossianic tale con-
tinued to develop down to the eighteenth century
was supplied me the other day when examining the
Reeves collection. I there came upon a story in
a Louth MS., written, I think, in the last century,
which seemed to me to contain one of the latest
developments of Ossianic saga. It is called The
Adventures of Dubh mac Deaghla [D'yala] and it tells
of how a prophet was born of the race of Eireamh6in,
" and all say," adds the writer, ** that it was he was the
Druid who prophesied to Fiacha Sreabhtuinne (Srav-

THE PBNUJf CYCLfi. ^T

dnna) that he would fall in the battle of Dubh-Cumair
by the three brothers Caireall, Muircach, and Aedh."''^
He also ** prophesied to the race of Toole that Cairbre
of the Liffey was that far branching tree which was to
spread round about through the great circuit of Erin,
around which smote the powerful wind from the south-
west, overthrowing it wholly to the ground — which
wind meant the Fenians, as had been announced by
the smith's daughter." f The Fenians, it seems, heard
that Torna had prophesied about them, and intended
to kill him ; and he and his family had to emigrate to
Britain. From this he sends a letter, in true epistol-
atory style, to an old friend of his, one Conor, son of
Dathach, beginning **dear friend " — an evident mark I
think of seventeenth, or possibly eighteenth century
authorship, for there are no letters, so far as I know,
written in this style in the older literature, and this
piece evidently follows a Latin or a Spanish, or pos-

* These MSS., 54 volumes in number, had belonged to Mr.
Mac Adam, Editor of the Ulster Journal of Archaology^ from
whom Bisliop Reeves bought them for ;i{^ioo. Many of them had
before that belonged to O'Reilly, the lexicographer, and some of
them are mentioned in Whitelaw and Walsh's History of Dublin
as then existing in the city. On the lamented death of that great
scholar they were put up to auction, when the Royal Irish Aca-
demy bought 32 of the volumes, the rest being unfortunately
scattered again to the four winds of heaven. For his exertions
and generosity in securing even so many of these MSS., especially
those which at first sight looked least important, but which con-
tained treasures of folk-lore and folk-song, the Hon. Treasurer,
Rev. Maxwell Close, has placed Irish-speaking Ireland under
yet another debt of gratitude to him. It is ivot always that which
is most ancient which is also most valuable from either a literary
or a national stand-point, nor is a manuscript necessarily value-
less because it has no philological importance.

tThis is in allusion to the romance of Moy Muchruime,
where we read of the prophecy and what followed.

92 THE STOUT OF EARLY GAELIC LITERATURE.

sibly even an English model. However this may be,
Torna's letter asks Conor for news of the situation,
and in time receives the following answer : —

The Letter.

** To Torna son of Dubh, our dear
friend in Glen Fuinnse in Britain
in Saxony.

" Thy affectionate missive was read by me as soon
as it arrived and it had been a cause of joy to me,
were it not for the way we are at Tara at this mo-
ment.

" Por we never felt until the Munster Fenians came
and encamped at the marsh of Old Raphoe and
Treibhe to the south-west. The warriors of Leinster
also and Baoisgnidh, together with Clan Ditribh and
Clan Boirchne^ were to the south of them, towards the
bottom of the stream of Gowra, and on the west
towards the old fort of M^ve ; and that same evening
the king, having received an account of the encamping
of the Fenians, urges messengers secretly to Connacht,
to the clan of Conal Cruachna, that they might come,
along with all the king's friends from the western border
of Erin. And other messengers he despatches to
Scotland for the clan of Garaidh Gliinmhar, desiring
Oscar of the blue javelin, Aedh, Argal, and Airtre to
come from abroad without delay, and that secretly.

** On the early morning of the morrow, before the
stars of the air retired, the king urged the Druids of
Tara against the Fenians, to argue with them, and ask
what was the cause of their rebelling in this guise, of
who it was with whom they had now come to do
battle, because they appeared not in habiliments of
peace or friendship, but a blush of anger appeared in

THE i'J8NlAir OTOLB. 93

the face and countenance of every several man of
them.

" * And there is another unlawful thing of which ye
are guilty,' said the Druids, Svhich shows that ye
have broken the vow of allegiance and obedience to
your king, in that ye have come in array and garb of
battle to the door of his fortress without receiving his
leave or advice, without giving him notice or warning.
To what art [point of the compass] do ye travel, or
on what have ye set your mind [that ye act not] as is
the right and due of a prince's subjects, and as was
always before this the habitude of the bands that came
before ye, and as it shall be with honest people till the
end of the world ! '

" However, now, the druids are a-preaching to them
and casting at them bold storm-showers of reproofs,
by way of retarding them till the coming back of the
messengers who went abroad, for the son of Cool is not
amongst them to excite them against us ; and we hope
that they will remain thus until help come to us. For
this is the eleventh day since the Druids went from us,
and our watchmen, who observe what approaches and
what departs, disclose all tidings to us, and they are
ever a-listening to the loud argument of the Druids and
the captains against one another. Moreover, the desire
of the Fenians to make a rapid assault upon Tara is the
less from their having heard that Cairbr6 was gone on
his royal round to Diin Sreabhtainne to visit Fiacha,*
though he is really not gone there, but to a certain

* Fiacha was the king's son, and succeeded him in the
sovereignty. He vi^as finally slain by his nephews, the celebrated
Three Col las — they who afterwards burned Emania and caused
the sun of the Ultonian dynasty and the Red Branch knights,
after blazing in splendour for over 700 years, to set in blood
and flame, never to rise again.

94 i'HB STORY OF EARLY GAELIC LITERATURE.

place under cover of night with his women and the
royal jewels of Tara. And it was lucky for him that
he did not go to Diin Sreabhtain-ne, for the Fenians
had sent Coirioll, and nine mighty men with him, to
plunder Diin Sreabhtainne. In that, however, they
miscarried, for Fiacha^s tutor was gone off before
that with his pupil, by order of the king, to the same
place where the women were. That, however, we
shall pursue no further at present.
"But it is easy for you, who are knowledgeable, to form
a judgment upon the state in which the inhabitants of
a country must be, over which a whelming calamity is
about to fall. Let me leave off. And here we send
our affectionate greeting to you, and to ye all, with the
hope of some time seeing you in full health, but I have
small hope of it.

** From your faithful friend till death, Conor,
son of Dathach, in Tara, the royal fortress
of Erin. Written the 20th day of the month
of March, in the year of the age of the world
* * * *" [the figures in the MS. are not
clear, and I cannot read them].

The romance, which is a long one, is chiefly occu-
pied with the events relating to the family of Dubh
mac Deaghla in Britain. But later on in the book the
Conor who despatched this letter turns up, and gives
in person a most vivid description of the battle of
Gowra, and the events which followed his letter.

I have only instanced and quoted from this com-
paratively unimportant story as showing one of the
very latest developments of Fenian literature, and as
proving how thoroughly even tlie seventeenth and
eighteenth century Gaels realized and were impreg-

THE FENIAN CYCLB.

95

nated with the spirit of the Fenian cycle, and also as
a peculiar specimen of what rarely happens in literature,
but is always of great interest when it does happen —
a specimen of unconscious saga develc^jug into semi-
conscious romance*

CHAPTER IX,

WHO WERE THE FENIANS?

^HE vigorous strides made of
late in the study of compara-
tive folk-lore has awakened
renewed interest in the ques-
tion who or what were the
Fenians ; and so much has
been lately said and written
about this that I cannot afford, even in this light sketch
of Gaelicl iterature, to pass it by, even though the
inquiry prove a dry one. Those who think it so may
skip this chapter.

The question we are now confronted with is this :
May not the principal characters of the Cuchulain and
Ossianic saga cycles, so far from being real historical
personages, never have existed at all ; may they not be
either creatures of the imagination, or else may not the
stories about them be ancient mythological tales of

WHO WERE THE FENIANS 1 9)

Tribe gods, who are here euhemerized that is repre*
scnted as men?

This question is not yet satisfactorily set at rest ani
may never be.

Of course all the Irish annalists and historians from
Tighearnach, who died a.d. 1088, down to the Foul
Masters and Keating, and from that down to Eugene
O' Curry, accepted unhesitatingly the genuine historical
character of these sagas, and believed in the accounts
handed down of the cause and date of Finn's death.
The but-slightly-critical Keating, sensible even in his
day, that objections as to the historical character of
Finn and his contemporaries might be raised, goes
out of his way — which he does not do for Cuchu-
lain, probably regarding his historical character as
above suspicion — to make these rationalistic remarks.
*' Now I hold it untrue," he says, " for any person
to assert that Finn and the Fenians never had exist-
ence. For in testimony of their having really existed
we have still remaining the three sorts of proof
whereby all historical facts whatsoever are tried, ex-
cept those recorded in Holy Writ. These are, firstly
common oral tradition handed down from father to
son ; secondly, ancient written documents ; and
thirdly, ancient landmarks and monumental remains.
We have ever heard and are constantly hearing it re-
peated from mouth to mouth that Finn and the Fenians
once had existence, and again our ancient books re-
cord their adventures very fully, and we still have
living witnesses of their existence in the ancient names
attached to the localities and monumental remains
called after them, as Finn's Seat upon Slievenamon,
called after Finn o Baoisgne, Glen Garaidh, called
after Garaidh Black-knee, son of M6rna, which lies iri
"iji Fathaidh, and Diarmuid and Grainne's Bed in U'

^

98 THE STORY OF BARLT GABLIO LITBRATURft.

Fiacrach Aidhnfe, now called O'Shaughnessy's Country,
and so likewise of numbers of other localities through-
out Ireland.

" But if any person should say that a great deal of
what has been told about the Fenians is incredible, in
that I hold him to be perfectly correct. But there was
no country where men did not write untrue stories in
the days of Paganism. 1 could even point out many
stories of that kind, such as the * Knight of the Sun,' *
and similar ones, that were composed even in the times
of the Faith, though there is no country where true and
credible histories were not written at the same time
And thus though many fabulous and romantic tales
such as the Battle of Ventry, the Fort of the Quicken
Tree, the Flight of the Giolla Deachar and such like,
have been written upon Finn and the Fenians for
pastime's sake, it is certain that many true and credible
histories have been written of them also."

After this Keating gives a full description of the
Fenians, and asserts that they were nothing more than
a standing militia maintained by the Irish kings, and
not remarkable for size or stature.

O'Curry following Keating, says of Finn, "much
that has been narrated of his exploits is no doubt
apocryphal enough, but Finn himself is an undoubtedly
liistorical character, and that he existed about the
time at which his appearance is recorded in the annals,
is as certain as that Julius Caesar lived and ruled at
the time stated on the authority of the Roman
historians." "Das," mildly comments the ever-cour-
teous Windisch, " ist zu viel gesagt " — " that is going
a little too far." He himself, however, has written,
" the Church adopted towards Pagan sagas the same

* I do not remember ever meelinp- this romance.

WHO WERB THE PENIAN3 > ^g

position that it did towards Pagan law. ... I
see then no sufficient ground for doubting that really
genuine pictures of a pre-Christian culture are preserved
to us in the individual sagas, pictures which of course
are in some places blurred, and in others painted over
by a different hand,** and again commenting upon the
way in which some of the Finn stories seem in their
facts and colouring dependent upon the Cuchulain ones,
he says, "of course it in no way follows from this that
Finn was not an historical personage and never lived.*
And again on the voyage of the Sons of Usnach, he
remarks, " the saga originated in Pagan and was pro-
pagated in Christian times, and that, too, without its
seeking fresh nutriment, as a rule, from Christian
elements. But we must ascribe it to the influence of
Christianity that what is specifically Pagan in Irish
saga is blurred over and forced into the background.
And yet there exist many whose contents are plainly
mythological. The Christian monks were certainly
not the first who reduced the ancient sagas to fixed
form, but later on they copied them faithfully, and pro-
pagated them, after Ireland had been converted to
Christianity." ^ Zimmer, too, who stands side by side
with Windisch ahead of all others amongst the Celtic
scholars of Germany, has spoken thus in his Keltische
Studten^\ ** Nothing," he says, "except a spurious
criticism which takes for original and primitive the
most palpable nonsense of which middle Irish writers
of the twelfth and sixteenth centuries are guilty with
regard to their own antiquity which is in many respects
strange and foreign to them — nothing but such a
criticism can on the other hand make the attempt to

* Windisch, Irische Texte, I., pp. 6i, 62, 151 and 253.
f II. Heft, p. 159,

100 THh STORY OP EARLY GAELIC LITERATURE.

doubt of the historical character of the chief persons
of the saga cycles. For we believe Medbh, Conchobar
mac Nessa, Cuchulain, and Finn mac Cumhail are
exactly as much historical personalities as Arminius
or Dietrich of Bern, or Etzel, and their date is just as
well determined as that of the above meiitioned heroes
and kings who are glorified in song by the Germans,
even though in the case of Irish heroes and kings
external witnesses are wanting." M. Jubainville again,
who amongst French Celticists is fhe master of those
who know, and who has done more than all other men
to popularise Celtic studies, expresses himself thus : —
" We have no reason to doubt of the reality of the
persons who play the principal role in this cycle (of
Cuchulain) ; " * and of the story of the Boru tribute,
which took place about the year 90, he says agam : —
' " Le recit a pour base des faits rdels, quoique certains
details aient €t6 crees par I'imagination." Last year,
it is true, Zimmer developed a theory that Finn was
really a Norseman, and that the Fenian cycle is in fact
posterior to the Norse invasion, but this paradoxical
theory has broken down, or at least has carried with
it none of the other great Celtic savants. Mr. Alfred
Nutt, on the other hand, has come to the conclu-
sion, in his learned and interesting essay on the
Development of the Fenian Saga, appended to the
Gaelic Folk and Hero Tales collected by Maclnnes,
that the whole groundwork of the Ossianic tales is
mythical. "Every Celtic tribe," says Mr. Nutt,
"possessed traditions both mythical and historical,
the former of substantially the same character, the
latter necessarily varying. Myth and history acted
and reacted upon each other, and produced heroic

* Introduction ct V^tudc de la Lit&ature Celtique^ p. 287.

Who were the ^^ntans?; ' it^i.

saga, which may be defined as myth tinged and
distorted by history. The largest element is as a rule
suggested by myth, so that the varying heroic sagas of
the various portions of a race have alv/ays a great deal
in common. These heroic sagas, together with the
official or semi-official mythologies of the pre-Christian
Irish are the subject-matter of the annals. They were
thrown into a purely artificial chronological shape by
men familiar with Biblical and classic history. A
framework was thus created into which the entire mass
of native legend was gradually fitted, whilst the genealo-
gies of the race were modelled, or it may be remodelled
in accord with it. In studying the Irish sagas, we
may banish entirely from our mind all questions as to
the " truth of the early portions of the annals. The
subject-matter of the latter is mainly mythical, the
mode in which it has been treated is literary. What
residuum of historic truth may still survive can be but
infinitesimal." According to this theory of Mr. Nutt's,
both the Cuchulain and the Ossianic sagas were
originally nothing but tribal myths, and probably
myths belonging to different Gaelic tribes.* The
deities of which they treated became in process of
time euhemerised or regarded as real men, not deities,
and in addition to this the legends were probably
mixed up eventually with the exploits of some real
men living in Ireland, and so the matter for innumer-
able tales, extending in their genesis and growth for
over a period of a thousand years, was prepared.
There is yet another hypothesis of which Dr. Skene

* My friend Mr. Larminie, who seems to have adopted this
theory, ascribes the universally-known ever-popular Fenian stories
to the original inhabitants of Ireland and Scotland, and the cycle
of the Red Branch to the dominant Aryan -speaking race, a most
luminous suggestion if Mr. Nutt's theory be true. See his IVesH
of Ireland Folk-talaK

iOii liiE STO;ti:f QP ^ARL^ GAELIC LltBRATURE.

and Mr. Mac Ritchie, and perhaps the great folk-
lorist, Iain Campbell of I slay, were champions — that
the Fenians were a non-Celtic race of men, allied to or
identical with the Picts of history.

The actual data that we have to go upon in estima-
ting the genesis and development of the Fenian tales
have been lucidly collected by Mr. Nutt. They are,
as far as is known at present, as follows : — Gilla Caem-
hain the poet, who died in 1072, says that it was
fifty-seven years after the battle of Moy Muchruime
that Finn was treacherously killed '* by the spear-
points of Uirgriu's three sons." This would make Finn's
death take place in 252, for Moy Muchruime was
fought, according to the Four Masters, in a.d. 195.
Tigearnach, the annalist, who died in 1088, writes
that Finn was killed in a.d. 283 **by Aichleach, son
of Duibhdrean, and the sons of Uirgriu, of the
Luaighni of Tara, at Ath-Brea upon the Boyne.**
The poet Cinaeth O'Hartagain, who died in a.d. 985,
wrote — " By the Fiann of Luagne was the death of
Finn at Ath-Brea upon the Boyne." All these men
in the tenth and eleventh centuries certainly believed
Finn to have been a real man.

The two oldest miscellaneous Irish MSS. which we
have are the Leabhar na h-Uidhre and the Book of
Leinsfer, The Leabhar na h-Uidhre was compiled
from older MSS. towards the close of the eleventh
century, and the Book of Leinster some fifty years
later. What then do we find in these MSS. about
Finn and the Fenians? The oldest of them contains
a copy of the famous poem of the bard Dalian Forgaill
in praise of St. Columkille, which was so ancient in the
middle of the eleventh century that it required to be
glossed. In this gloss made, perhaps, in the eleventh
century, but very possibly long before, there is a poem
oa winter ascribed to Finn, grandson of Baoisgne,

WHO WERE THE FENIANS ) 103

that is our Finn mac Cool, and in the same com
mentary we find an explanation of the words " diu "=
long, and " derc "=eye, in proof of which this verse
is quoted, "As Grainne,'^ says the commentator
** daughter of Cormac, said to Finn,

" There lives a man
On whom I would love to gaze long
For whom I would give the whole world,
All, all, though it is a delusion."

This verse quoted as containing two words which
required explanation in or before the eleventh century,
pre-supposes the story of Diarmuid and Grainne. In
addition to this we have in the same manuscript the
apparently historical story of the " Cause of the Battle
of Cnucha." We have also the story of Mongan, an
Ulster King of the seventh century, according to the
annalists, who declared that he was not what men took
him to be, the son of the mortal Fiachna, but of the
god, Manannan Mac Lir, and a re-incarnation of the
great Finn, and calls back from the grave the famous
Fenian Caoilte to prove it. This account is strongly re-
lied upon by Mr. Nutt, to prove the wild mythological
nature of the Finn story, but it is by no means unique
in Irish literature, for we find the celebrated Tuan
mac Cairrill had a second birth also, and the great
Cuchulain too has his parentage ascribed to the god
Lugha, not to Sualtam, his reputed father. Supposing
Finn to have been a real historical character of the ^
third century, there would be nothing absolutely extra-
ordinary in the story arising in half- Pagan times that
Mongan, also an historical character, was a re-incarna-
tion of Finn.*

• It is however, certainly curious that Cinaeth O'Hartagain)

104 T^^ STORT OF EARLY GAELIC LITERATURE,

In the second oldest miscellaneous manuscript, the
Book of Leinster^ the references to Finn and the
Fenians are much more numerous, containing three
poems ascribed to Ossian, Finn's son, five poems as-
cribed to Finn himself, two poems ascribed to Caoilte
the Fenian poet, a poem ascribed to one of Finn's
followers, allusions to Finn in a poem by one Gilla
in Chomded, and in a poem by another bard, pas-
sages about Finn from the Dindsenchas or topogra-
phical tract, the account of the Battle of Cnamhross,
in which Finn helps the Leinstermen against King
Cairbre, the genealogy of Finn, and the genealogy
of Diarmuid O Duibhne.

Again in the *' Glossary" ascribed, and probably

who died a.d. 985, should have mentioned the name Mongan
just before his lines on Finn.

Mongan a diadem of all generations

Fell by the Fiann of Kintyre,

By the Fiann of Luagne was the death of Fiiin,

At Ath-Brea on the Boyne.

Mongan, according to the eleventh century MS., was the con-
temporary of Dalian Forgaill, who died about the year 600,
while Mongan, the Ulster King, was slain in 622. There is no
real discrepancy in all this, and up to this point the annalistic
scheme hangs fairly well together ; but there is, says Mr. Nutt,
one passage in the twelfth century Book of Leinster, which shows
extraordinary disregard of all historical notions by making Finn
interview St. Moling about the Boru tribute. There is, however,
even here no historical confusion, for so far from calling him St.
Moling, he is described as one of three foster brothers of Finn,
and called Moling the Swift. The whole passage, however, is a
clumsy invention, for first Finn sees a vision of angels that are
to come, and afterwards another warrior sees a vision of priests
saying Mass on the spot where they wdlre then assembled, and
Moling himself among the number. The whole passage is one
£)f those ill-blending patched-up Christian passages by the tacking
on of which to themselves, the Pagan stories received their permit
from the Church.

WHO WERE THE FENIANS? lOj

truly, to Cormac, King-Bishop ofCashel, a.d. 837-903^
there are two allusions to Finn, one of which refers to
the unfaithfulness of his wife. .This, indeed, is not
contained in the oldest copy, but Whitley Stokes,
than whom there can be no better authority, believes
these allusions to belong to the older portion of the
Glossary, a work which is probably much interpolated.

But, there is yet another proof of the antiquity of
the Finn stories which Mr. Nutt does not not(3, and
in some respects it is the most important and con-
clusive of all. For if^ as D'Arbois de Jubainville has
I think proved, the list of one hundred and eighty-
seven historic tales contained in the Book of
Zeinster, was really drawn up at the end of the
seventh or beginning of the eighth century, we
find that even then Finn or his contemporaries were
the subjects of or figure in several of them, as in the
story of the Courtship of Ailbhe, daughter of King
Cormac mac Art, by Finn ; 'the Battle of Moy Much-
ruime, where King Art, Cormac's father, was slain ;
the Cave of Bin Edair, where Diarmuid and Grdinne
took shelter when pursued by Finn ; the Adventures
of Finn in Derc Fearna (the Cave of Dunmore) a lost
tale ; the Elopement of Grainne with Diarmuid, and
perhaps one or two more.

Thus, Finn is sandwiched in as a real person
along with his other contemporaries, not only in tenth
and eleventh century annalists and poets, but is also
made the hero of historic romances as early as the
seventh or eighth century. Side by side in our
seventh-eight century list with the battle of Moy Mu-
chruime, we find the battle of Moy Rath. We have
both stories at full length, still preserved to us ; both
are couched in the same sort of language and coloured
with the same Hterary pigments. The last, the battle

io6 THB STORY OF EARLY GAELIC LITERATURE. '

of Moy Rath, we know to be historical ; it can be
proved; why should not the first be also ? It is true
Aat the one took place four hundred and thirty-eight
years before the other, but the treatment of both is
absolutely identical, and it is the merest accident
that we happen to have external evidence for
the latter and not for the former. If Finn is to be
regarded as a myth, as a deity euhemerized, then must
not Conn of the Hundred Battles and E6ghan [Owen]
M6r, and all the rest go too ? And yet Conn and Owen
seem to have had an objective existence, since it was
their struggle for supremacy in the second century which
divided Ireland into the universally known divisions
called Conn's half and Owen's half, whose bards wrote
against each other so late as the year 1600, their lays
on that occasion being collected in the celebrated
book of poems^ called the *^ Contention of the Bards."
In other words I do not see anything to differentiate
the case of Finn from that of the kings and heroes
who were also the subjects of bardic stories, and
whose deaths are recorded in the annals, except the
accident that the creative imagination of the later
Gaels happened to seize upon him, and make him
and his contemporaries the nucleus of a vast litera-
ture, instead of some other earlier or later group of,
perhaps, equally deserving warriors. Finn has now
become to all ears a pan-Gaelic champion just as
Arthur became a Brythonic one.

CHAPTER X.

MISCELLANEOUS SAGAS.

iESIDES the three cycles of
stories of which I have spoken,
there exist a large number
of independent sagas, dealing,
some with pre-Christian
events, others with events
of the early middle ages.
Out of the hundred and eighty-
seven stories whose names are re-
corded in the Book of Leinster,
about 1 20 seem to have utterly vanished ; of the others,
many of which, however, are preserved only in the
baldest and most condensed form, some four or
five relate to the Fenian cycle, some eighteen to the
Cuchulain stories, some eight or nine — mostly pre-
served in the brief and colourless digests of the Book
of Invasions— SlIQ mythological, and about twenty-one

loS THE STOilY 0^ EARLY GAELIC LITERATURJii.

are miscellaneous. Some of these latter are of the
highest interest, antiquity, and importance. Of these,
the Storming of the Bruidhean (Breean) or Court of
Da Derga, is, if not the best conceived, yet as far as
its text goes, the oldest and most important saga we
have, with the exception of the Tain Bo Chuailgne.
These two stories, substantially dating from the
seventh century, and perhaps formed into shape long
before that time, are preserved in the oldest miscel-
laneous MSS. which we possess, and throw more
light upon Pagan manners, customs, and institutions,
than perhaps any other.*

As for the period in which the story of the Court of
Da Derga is laid, it is about coincident with that of the
Red Branch cycle, only it does not deal with Emania
and the Red Branch, but with Leinster, Tara, and the
High King of Erin there resident. The High King
at this time was Conaire the "Great," rightly so-
called, if we may believe our Annals, for he had
been a just, magnanimous, and, above all, fortunate
ruler of ali Ireland for fifty years.f So just was

* There is an almost complete copy of this saga in the Leabhar
na-h-Uidhre, a MS. of about the year iioo. Like the T^in Bo
Chuailgne, it has never been published even in a translation. The
language is even harder and more archaic than that of the Tain.
I have principally drawn upon 0'Curry*s description of it, for I
confess that I can only guess at the meaning of a great part
of the original. Were all Europe searched, the scholars who
could give an adequate translation of it might be counted on
the fingers of both hands — if not of one.

+ According to the Four Masters, he was slain in A.M. 5161
[t.e., 38 B.C.], after a reign of 70 years. ** It was in the reign o^
Conair4" the Four Masters add, *'that the Boyne annually cast
its produce ashore at Inver Colpa. Great abundance of nuts
were annually found upon the Boyne and the Buais. The cattle
were without keeping in Ireland in his reign, on account of the
greatness of the peace and concord. His reign was not thunder-

MISCBLLANBOUS SA0A8. I09

he and so strict, that he had sent into banishment
a number of lawless and unworthy persons who had
troubled his kingdom. Among these were his own
five foster-brothers, whom he was reluctantly com-
pelled to send into exile along with the others. These
people all turned to piracy, and plundered the coasts
of England, Scotland, and even Ireland, whenever they
found an opportunity of making a successful raid upon
the unarmed inhabitants. It so happened that the
son of the King of Britain, one Ingcel, also of Irish
extraction, had been banished by his father for his
crimes, and was now making his living in much the
same way as the predatory Irishmen. These two
parties having met, being drawn together by a fellow-
feeling and their common lawlessness, struck up a
friendship and made a loague with one another, thus
doubling the strength of each. Soon after this the High
King found himself in the south, called thither to
settle, according to his wont, some dispute between
two rival chiefs. His business ended, he was leisurely
taking his way, with his retinue, back again to his
royal seat, when on entering the borders of Meath
he beheld the whole country towards Tara a sheet
of flame and rolling smoke. Terrified at this, and
divining that the banished pirates had made a de-
scent in his absence, he turned aside and took the
great road that, leading from Tara to Dublin, passed
thence into the heart of Leinster. Pursuing this road,
the King crossed the Liffey in safety, and made for
the Bruighean (Bree-an), or Court of Da Derga, on

producing or stormy. It was little but the trees bent under the
greatness of their fruit." This notion of connecting good seasons
with good rulers was very common in Ireland. We find traces
pf it as late as the sixteenth century.

I to THE STORY OF EARLY GAELIC LTTBRATURl.

the road close to the river Dothar or Dodder, called
ever since, " Boher-na-breena,"* the "road of the
court," close to Tailacht, not far from Dublin. This
was one of the six great courts of universal hospitality
in Erin, and Da Derga, its master, was delighted and
honoured by the visit from the High King.

The pirates having plundered Tara took to their
vessels, and having laden them with their spoils were
now under a favourable breeze running along the sea
coast towards the Hill of Howth, when they perceived
from afar the king's company making in their chariots
for Dubhn along the great high road. One of his own
foster-brothers was the first to recognize that it was the
High King who was there. He was kept in view and
seen at last to enter Da Derga's great court of hospitality.
The pirates ran their ships ashore to the south of the
Liffey, and Ingcel the Briton set off as a spy to examine
the court and the number of armed men about it, to
see if it might not be possible to surprise and plunder
it during the night On his return he is questioned
by his companions as to what he saw, and by this
simple device — familiar to all poets from Homer
down — we are introduced to the principal charac-
ters of the court, and are shown what the retinue
of a High King consisted of, in the sixth or seventh
century, about which time the saga probably took de-
finite form, or in the second or third century, if we
are to suppose the traits there preserved to be more
archaic than the composition of the tale itself. We
have here a minute account of the king and the
court and the company, with their costumes, insignia

* A constant rendezvous for pedestrians and bicyclists froir
Dublin, not one in ten thousand of whom know the origin of th"
name or its history.

MISCELLANEOUS SA0A8. lit

and appearance. We see the king and his sons, his
nine pipers or wind-instrument players, his cup-
bearers, his chief druid-juggler, his three principal
charioteers, their nine apprentice charioteers, his
hostages the Saxon princes, his equerries and out-
riders, his three judges, his nine harpers, his three
ordinary jugglers, his three cooks, his three poets, his
nine guardsmen, and his two private table attendants.
We see Da Derga the lord of the court, his three door-
keepers, the British outlaws and the king's private
drink-bearers. Here is the description of the king
himself :

" I saw there a couch," contmued Ingcel, " and its
ornamentation was more beautiful than all the other
couches of the court ; it is curtained round with silver
cloth, and the couch itself is richly ornamented. I
saw three persons on it. The outside two of them
were fair, both hair and eyebrows, and their skin whiter
than snow. Upon the cheeks of each was a beautiful
ruddiness. Between them in the middle was a noble
champion. He has in his visage the ardour and
action of a sovereign, and the wisdom of an historian.
The cloak which I saw upon him can be likened only
to the mist of a May morning. A different colour and
complexion are seen in it each moment, more splendid
than the other is each hue. I saw in the cloak in front
of him a wheel-broach of gold, that reaches from his chin
to his waist. Like unto the shine of burnished gold
is the colour @f his hair. Of all the human forms of the
world that I have seen his is the most splendid.* I
saw his gold-hilted sword laid down near him. There

* Keating says that according to some, Conaire reigned only
thirty years, and from this eulogium on his shapeliness the author
3f ^e Saga seems to have followed this tradition.

112 THK STORY OP EARLY QAELIO LITERATURE.

was the breadth of a man's hand of the sword exposed
out of the scabbard. From that hand's breadth the
man who sits at the far end of the house could see
even the smallest object by the light of that sword. '-'
More melodious is the melodious sound of that sword
than the melodious sounds of the golden pipes which
play music in the royal house. . . . The noble warrior
was asleep with his legs upon the lap of one of the
men, and his head in the lap of the other. He
awoke afterwards out of his sleep, and spoke these
words:

* I have dreamed of danger-crowding phantoms,
A host of creeping, treacherous enemies,
A combat of men beside the Dodder,
And early and alone the king of Tara was killed.' "

This man whom Ingcel had seen was no other
than the High King.

The account of the juggler is also curious :
" I saw there," continued Ingcel, " a large champion
in the middle of the house. The blemish of baldness
was upon him. Whiter than the cotton of the moun-
tains is every hair that grows upon his head. He had
ear-clasps of gold in bis ears and a speckled white
cloak upon him. He had nine swords in his hands,
and nine silvery shields, and nine balls of gold. He
throws every one of them up into the air and not one
falls to the ground, and there is but one of them at a
time upon his palm, and Uke the buzzing of bees on a
beautiful day was the motion of each passing the other."

* The allusion is evidently to a bright steel sword in an age
of bronze. Perhaps the music referred to means the vibration of
the steel when struck. The ** sword of light" is a coinmo]i:>,
feature in Gaelic folk-lore,

MISCELLANEOUS SAGAS. II5

" Yes,'* said Ferrogain [the foster brother], " I re-
cognise him : he is Tulchinne, the royal druid of the
King of Tara. He is Conaird's juggler* — a man of
great power is that man."

Da Derga himself is thus described : — " I saw
another couch there, and one man on it, with two pages
in front of him, one fair, the other black-haired. The
champion himself had red hair, and had a red cloak
near him. He had crimson cheeks and beautiful deep
blue eyes, and had on him a green cloak. He wore
also a white under-mantle and collar beautifully inter-
woven, and a sword with an ivory hilt was in his hand;
and he supplies every couch in the court with ale and
food, and he is incessant in attending upon the whole
company. Identify that man ? "

" I know that man," said he, " that is Da Derga him-
self. It was by him the court was built, and since he
has taken up residence in it its doors have never been
closed, except the side to which the wind blows — it is
to that side only that a door is put. Since he has
taken to housekeeping, his boiler has never been
taken off the fire, but continues ever to boil food for
the men of Erin. And the two who are in front of
him are two boys, foster sons of his ; they are the two
sons of the King of Leinster."

Not less interesting is the true Celtic hyperbole in
Ingcel's description of the jesters : — " I saw there
three jesters at the fire. They wore three dark grey
cloaks, and if all the men of Erin were in one place,
and though the body of the mother or the father ot
each man of them were lying dead before him, not
one of them could refrain from laughing at them."

* ** Cleasamhnach," from cleas^ a trick, a common word
still.

J

\

114 THE STORY OP EARLY GAELIC LITERATURE.

In the end the pirates decided on making their
attack. They marched swiftly and silently across the
Dublin mountains, surrounded and surprised the court,
slew the High King caught there in their trap, and
butchered most of his attendants.

After this tale of Da Derga come a host of sagas, all
calling for some recognition in a chapter devoted to
an account of miscellaneous story. Of these, one of
the most important, though neither the longest nor
the most interesting, is the account of the Boromean
or Boru tribute, a large fragment of which is pre-
served in the Book of Leinster, a MS. of about the
year 1150.

When Tuathal or Toole, called Techtmhar^ or " the
Possessor," was High King of Ireland, he had two
handsome daughters, and the King of Leinster asked
one of them in marriage, and took and brought home
to his palace the elder as his wife. This was as it
should be, for at that time it was not customary for
the younger to be married "before the face of the
elder.'' The Leinstermen, however, said to their
king that he had left behind the better girl of the
two. Nettled at this the king went again to Tara,
and told Tuathal that his daughter was dead, and
asked for the other. The High King then gave him
his second daughter, with the courteous assurance —
" had I one-and-fifty daughters they were thine."
When he brought back the second daughter to his
palace in Leinster, she, like another Philomela, dis-
covered her sister alive and before her. Both died,
one of shame and the other of grief. When news
of this reached Tara, steps were taken to punish the
King of Leinster. Connacht and Ulster led a great
hosting with twelve thousand men into Leinster to

MISCELLANEOUS SAGAS. II5

plunder it The High King, too, marched from Tara
through Maynooth to Naas, and encamped there. The
Leinstermen first beat the Ultonians and killed theii
king, but all the invading forces having combined, de-
feated them and slew the bigamist monarch. They then
levied the blood-tax, which was as follows :— Fifteen
thousand cows, fifteen thousand swine, fifteen thousand
wethers, the same number of mantles, silver chains,
and copper cauldrons, together with one great copper
reservoir to be set in Tara's house itself, in which could
fit twelve pigs and twelve kine. In addition to this,
they had to pay thirty red-eared cows with calves of
the same colour, with halters and spancels of bronze
and bosses of gold.

Mai, the successor of Tuathal, again levied this tri-
bute, so did Felim the lawgiver. **Then," says the
history, ** after many battles FeUm's son. Conn, lifted it.
Conn's son-in-law Conair^ took it, then Art [son of
Conn] began to reign, and demanded the Boru tri-
bute, but never secured it without a battle. Art's son,
Cormac, lifted it, and so, one year, did Fergus Black-
tooth."

The account being evidently a Leinster compilation
passes lightly over the occasions on which the tribute
was levied, but deals lovingly upon those where the re-
sistance was successful, especially the battle of Cnamh-
ros, or Bone-wood, where Finn and the Fenians helped
the Leinstermen against Carbry of the Liffey, and on
the battle of Diin-bolg, or Sack-fort, where the
celebrated King of Leinster, Brandubh, destroyed the
High King of Ireland and his army.

The ruse whereby he got rid of the men of Ulster
who had come with the High King, is first described,
and afterwards the preparations the men of Leinster
made for battle. It was by acting on Bishop Aidan's

\l6 THE STORY OP EARLY GAELIC LITERAfUKll.

advice that Brandubh, the Leinster king, was success-
ful.*

The Battle of Cnamhros.

** * Let the very greatest of candles,' said the
bishop, "be dipped in the outer ditch of the rath,
let twelve hundred teams, of twelve oxen each, be
brought to the king; upon these teams let white
creels be laid which shall hold a great number of
warriors who shall be covered with straw, and over all
let there be placed a real layer of provisions. Let a
hundred and fifty unbroken horses be brought thee
moreover, and let bags be fastened to their tails, for
the purpose of stampeding the horse-herds of the King
of Ireland, and let the bags be filled with pebbles.
Let that great taper with the cauldron round its head
shading it, go before thee until thou gain the centre
of the High King's camp. In the meantime send the
High King a message to say that to-night the provisions
of Leinster will be supplied to him.' "

[The further movements of Brandubh, the Leinster
king are then described, and how he slew in single
combat the chief over the stud of the High King. Then
continues the narrative — the Leinster king said :]

" * Can I get,' said he, * a man to go spy out the
encampment and the king, and who shall be there
waiting for us till we arrive; and there shall be a
certain fee for that— -Heaven from Leinster's clerics,
if he be killed, and if he escape his own land-district

* Standish Hayes O'Grady has published the text of the Bom
tribute in his recent SzVva Gadeh'ca, accompanied by a masterly
and graphic translation. I give my own translation here, how-
ever, though for no better reason than that I had the trouble of
making it.

MISOBLLANBOUS SAGAS. II7

free to him, and a place at my table to himself and
those who come after him.'

" * ril go there/ said R6n' Cerr, son of Dubanach,
son of the King of Imale. 'Give me now/ said he,
' a calf s blood and some rye dough that they be rubbed
over me. Give me, too, an ample cowl and wallet.'
Thus was it done, so that he was like any leper. A
wooden leg was given him, and he placed his knee
into its cleft.

" In this guise he departed, and a sword beneath
his dress, and came to the place where were the nobles
of Erin in the door of the tent of Aedh mac
Ainmireach the High King. They asked tidings of
him, and Hwas what he said that he was after coming
from Kill Bhelat. * I went since morning,' said he,
' to Leinster's encampment and came back, and my
hut and my quern, and my great spade, and my church
were destroyed [in my absence].'

" * Twenty milch cows from me to pay for that,' said
the King of Erin, *if I escape out of this hosting;
and do you go over now to yon tent, and the place
of nine men to you, and the tenth of my share, and the
fragments of the household. What are the Leinster-
men doing ? ' said the king.

" * They are preparing food for you, and ye never got
food ye shall be more satiated with ! They are boil-
ing their swine and their beeves and their fat-hogs.'

" * Curse on them for it,' cried the men of the race
of Owen and Conall.

*' * Two warrior's eyes in the leper's head is what I
see,** said the king.

" * Woe to you and to your confidence in holding the

* The bitter double entendre in the last answer of the leper
had evidently roused the king's suspicions.

Il8 THE STORY OF EARLY GAELIC LITERATURE.

kingship of Erin, if it be at my eyes that fear comes
on you ! *

*' *Not so at all,* said the king, *but let one go now
for Dubhdiin, King of Oriel/

" Thereafter Dubhddn arrived, and the King of Erin
said to him, * Go,* said the King of Erin, * and
OriePs battalion with thee to the foot of Ai{6 south-
ward, and to the cruadahhall and keep watch there
that Leinster make no camp-assault upon us.' They
accordingly proceeded as Aedh the High King ordered
them."

[After a good deal of matter bearing on the High
King's past history, the narrative returns to Brandubh
and the Leinstermen in the following terms :]

" Now about Brandubh ; his horse-herds and ox-
teams are shouted at, and he drew up his battalions
and he marched forward with the darkness of night until
the men of Oriel heard the trot-trot and the roar of
the great host, and the snorting of the horse-herds,
and the puffing of the oxen under the waggons. The
men of Oriel rose up under arms. * Who is here ? '
said the men of Oriel.

" * Easy told,' was the answer, * the gillies of
Leinster with food for the King ot Erin.'

'^ The men of Oriel rose up, and the hand that each
m^n would put down, he would find either a pig or
a beef under it. * It's true for them,' said the King
of Oriel, * let them pass by.' * Let us go too,' said
the men of Oriel, * let not our share of the victuals be
forgotten.' The men of Oriel accordingly proceeded
to their encampment huts.

" The men of Leinster went on to * the hill of the
candle' in the very middle of the King of Erin's
camp, and there thoy take the cauldron from about the
candle.

lilSCMiLANEOUS SA0A8. ii^

" * What light is that I see ? ' said the king.

** * Easy told/ said the leper, * it's the arrival of the
provisions.'

" The leper arose, knocked off his wooden leg, and
reached his hand to his sword. Their loads were
taken off the ox-teams and the horses were let loose
amongst the steeds of the men of Erin, so that they
went into a stampede and broke down both huts and
tents of the men of Erin. The Leinstermen rose up
out of their baskets like a deluging river over cliffs, in
their grasp their sword-hilts, by their straps their shields,
on their sides their mail.

" * Who is here ? ' cried the men of Clan Conall and
Clan Owen.

" * The dealers out of the food,* said the leper.

" * God bless us,' said each man, * why they are a
multitude ! *

" Up rose the men of Clan Conall and Clan Owen,
and though they did, they were like hands thrust into a
nest of serpents. A^pen of spears and shields were
made by them round the King of Erin, and he was
forced on his steed and carried by them to the * Gap
of Shields.' The shields of the men of Erin, were
cast away by them and abandoned at the mouth of
that gap [and hence its name]. R6n Cerr [the pre-
tended leper] makes a rush at the King of Erin, and
Kills nine men in his efforts to get at him. Then
Dubhdun, King of Oriel, came between them, and he
and R6n Cerr fight, and Dubhdiin falls by him. R6n
Cerr again makes an assault on the King of Erin, and
Fergus, son of Flaithri, King of Tulach Og, comes be-
tween them, and Fergus falls by R6n Cerr. After that
R6n Cerr again makes a rush for the king and seizes
him by the leg and drags him down towards him from
off his horse, and takes his head off him on the * flag

ISiO THE STORY OF EARLY GAELIC LITDRATURIJ,

of bone-bruising.' Then he seizes his wallet and
pours the food-scraps out of it and puts the head into
it, and gets him away secretly to the mountain plains
and remains there till morning.

" Howsoever, Leinster follows after Conn's half [i.e.,
the Northerns], and makes a red-killing of them.
On the morrow each arrived after slaughter and
triumphs to the spot where Brandubh was, and R6n
Cerr, too, comes and lays down before him the head of
Aedh mac Ainmireach, the High King of Ireland. So
that is the battle of Bolgdiln fought for the Boru
tribute. In that battle Bee mac Cuanach was slain."

The following sagas and romances are amongst those
which may be classed as miscellaneous : — The Court-
ship of Etain; The Courtship of Crunn's Wife; The
Battle of Moy Rath;* The Voyage of Maelduin;t The
Voyage of the Sons of O'Corra ; J The Tragical Death
of Maelfathartaigh (Mael-faharty) son of Ronan (king
of Leinster, a.d. 6io) ; The Elopement of Ere, daugh-
ter of Loarn ; The Slaughter of Cairbr^ Cat-head by
the Free Clans of Erin ; The Battle of Ath Cumair ;
The Triumphs of Congal Clairingneach ; The Love
of Dubhlucha for Mongan ; The Expedition of Daithi
(last Pagan King of Ireland) to the Alps ; The Progress
of the Deisi from Tara ; The Dream of Mac Cong-
linn^ ;§ The Plunder of the City of Mael Mil-sgo-
thach, a sort of allegory, and others.

* Published in 1842 by O'Donovan for the Archaeological Society.

+ Translated, but not quite literally, by Dr. Joyce in his Early
Celtic Romances t from which Tennyson took the subject of his
well-known poem, "The Voyage of Maeldune."

X Translated in Dr. Joyce's last Edition.

\ A curious tenth or twelfth century burlesQU« r^^atly
edited by Kuna Meyer

CHAPTER XL

THE OSSIANIC POEMS.

1 D E by side with the numerous
prose stories which fall under the
head of ** Fenian," exists an enor-
mous mass of poems, chiefly nar-
rative, of a minor epic type, inter-
mingled with others whose basis
is a semi-dramatic dialogue between St. Patrick and
Ossian. This poet was fabled to have lived in Tir-na-
n-6g* or the "land of the ever-young," for three hun-
dred years, thus surviving all the Fenians, and living
to hold colloquy with St. Patrick. The Ossianic poems
are extraordinarily numerous, and if they were all col-
lected would probably amount to some fifty thousand
lines — the much-lamented Father Keegan estimated
them once, but I think hardly correctly, at one hun-
dred thousand. They are written in rather irregular
metres, for the most part imitations of Deibhidh and

* Pronounced "fncer na noguCy^ "nct^^ue'^ rhyming to

^ rogue.'* ^

122 tHE StORY OF EARLT GAELIC LITbJRATUft]5.

Rannaigheacht Mh6r,* chiefly the latter, and were, even
down to our own time, exceedingly popular in both
Ireland and the Scotch Highlands, in which last
country Campbell of Islay made the great collection,
chiefly from oral sources, which he called Leabhar na
Feinne or the Book of the Fenians.

Some of the Ossianic poems relate the exploits of
the Fenians ; others describe conflicts between some
of that body and dragons ; others tell of fights with
monsters and with strangers come from across the
sea ; others detail how Finn and his companions suf-
fered from the enchantments of wizards, and the eftbrts
made to release them ; one enumerates the Fenians
who fell at Cnoc-an-air ; another gives the names of
some three hundred of the Fenian hounds ; another
gives Ossian's account of his three hundred years in
the Land of the Young and his return ; many more
consist largely of semi-humourous dialogues between
the Saint and the old warrior ; another is called Os-
sian's madness; another is Ossian's account of the
Battle of Gowra which made an end of the Fenians,
and so on.f

The Lochlannachs or Norsemen figure very largely
in these poems, and it is quite evident that most of
them — at least in the modern form in which we now
nave them — are post-Norse productions. The fact
that the language in which they have for the most part

* For an explanation of these metres, pronounced D'ye wee
and " Ran-ee-ught Wore," see my forthcoming Bdird agus Bdr-
duigheacht.

t Standish Hayes O'Grady in his preface to the third volume
of the Ossianic Society's publications gives the names of thirty-
five of these poems, amounting to between ten and eleven
thousand lines, but many are omitted from this list. In the
fragmentary Dialogtie of the Sages alone there are very nearly
two thousand lines of verse mingled with the prose story.

THE OSSlANIC POEMS. 1 23

come down to us is popular and modern, does not
prove much one way or the other, for these small epics
which, more than any other part of Irish literature, were
handed down from father to son and propagated orally,
have had their language unconsciously adjusted from
age to age so as to leave them intelligible to their
hearers. As a consequence the metres have in many
places also suffered, and the old Irish system, which
required a certain number of syllables in each line,
has shown signs of fusing gradually with the new
Irish system which only requires so many accented
syllables.

It is, however, perfectly possible — as has been sup-
posed byi I think, Mr. Nutt and others — that after the
terrible shock given to the island by the Northmen,
this people usurped in our ballads the place of some
older mythical race, and Prof. Rhys was I believe at
one time of opinion that Lochlann, as spoken of in
these ballads, originally meant merely the country of
lochs and seas, and that the Lochlann ers were a sub-
marine mythical people like the Fomorians.

The spirit of banter with which St. Patrick and the
Church is treated and in which the fun just stops short
of irreverence, is a mediaeval, not a primitive trait; more
characteristic, thinks Mr. Nutt, of the twelfth than of
any succeeding century. We all remember the inimi-
table felicity with which that great English-speaking
Gael, Sir Walter Scott,* has caught this Ossianic tone
in the lines which Hector Mclntyre repeats for the
Antiquary : —

Patrick the psalm-singer.

Since you will not listen to one of my stories,

* Both the Buccleugh Scotts and the other four branches of the
name were originally Gaelic-speaking Celts.

124 THE STORY OF EARLY GAELIC LITBRATURJB.

Though you never heard it before,

I am sorry to tell you,

You are little better than an ass.

To which the Saint, to the infinite contempt of the
unbelieving Oldbuck, is made to respond : —

Upon my word, son of Fingal,
While I am warbling the psalms,
The clamour of your old woman's tales,
Disturbs my devotional exercises.

Whereat the heated Ossian retorts : —

Dare you compare your psalms

To the tales of the bare-armed Fenians,

I shall think it no great harm

To wring your bald head from your shoulders.

Here, however, is a real specimen from the Irish which
will give some idea of the style of dialogue between
the pair. St. Patrick with exaggerated episcopal seve-
rity, having Ossian three quarters starved, quite blind,
and wholly kt his mercy, desires him not to speak
of Finn or the Fenians.

OSSIAN.

Alas ! O Patrick, I did think that God would not
be angered thereat. I think long, and it is a great woe
to me, not to speak of the way of Finn of the Deeds.

PATRICK.

Speak not of Finn nor of the Fenians, for the Son of
God will be angry with thee for it, He would never let
thee into His fort, and He would not send thee the
bread of each day.

THE OSSIANIC POEMS. 1 25

OSSIAN.

Were I to speak of Finn and of the Fenians, between
us two, O Patrick the new, but only not to speak loud,
he would never hear us mentioning them.

PATRICK.

Let nothing whatever be mentioned by thee except-
ing the offering of God, or if thou talkest continually
of others, thou indeed shalt not go to the house of the
saints.

OSSIAN.

I will O Patrick do his will. Of Finn or of the Fenians
I shall not talk, for fear of bringing anger upon them,
O Cleric, since it be God's wont to be angry.

In another poem St. Patrick denounces with still
greater vigour.

PATRICK.

Finn is in hell in bonds, *' the pleasant man who
used to bestow gold," in penalty of his disobedience to
God, he is now in the house of pain in sorrow. . . .

Because of the amusement he had with the hounds,
and for attending the (bardic) schools each day, and
because he took no heed of God, Finn of the Fenians
is in bonds. . . .

Misery attend thee, old man, who speakest words of
madness, God is better for one hour than all the
Fenians of Erin.

OSSIAN.

O Patrick of the crooked crozier, who makest me
that impertinent answer, thy crozier would be in atoms
were Oscar present.

Were my son Oscar and God hand to hand on

126 THE STORY OP EARLY GAELIC LITERATURE.

Knock na-veen, if I saw my son down, it is then I
would say that God was a strong man.

How could it be that God and His clerics could be
better men than Finn, the chief King of the Fenians,
the generous one who was without blemish ?

All the qualities that you and your clerics say are
according to the rule ot the king of the stars, Finn's
Fenians had them all, and they must be now stoutly
seated in God's heaven.

Were there a place, above or below, better than
heaven, 'tis there Finn would go, and all the Fenians
he had. . . .

Patrick, enquire of God whether He recollects when
^he Fenians were alive, or hath He seen, east or west,
men their equal in the time of fight ?

Or hath He seen in His own country, though high
it be above our heads, in conflict, in battle, or in might,
a man who was equal to Finn ?

PATRICK.

exhausted with controversy, and curious for Ossian*s
story.]

Ossian, sweet to me thy voice,

Now blessings choice on the soul of Finn !
But tell to us how many deer

Were slain at Slieve-na-man finn.*

OSSIAN.

We, the Fenians, never used to tell untruth ; a lie
was never attributed to us. By truth and the strength
of our hands we used to come safe out of every danger.

* This is the usual metre of these poems, but I have translated
Sie mellifluous verses of the dialogue into prose, which always
conveys the sense better

THE OSSIANIC POBM&>. 1 27

There never sat cleric in church, though melodiously
ye may think they chant psalms, more true to his
word than the Fenians, the men who shrank never
from fierce conflicts.

O Patrick, where was thy God the day the two
came across the sea, who carried off the Qaeen of the
King of Lochlann in ships, by whom many fell here hi
conflict ?

Or when Tailc mac Treoin arrived, the man who
put great slaughter on the Fenians ? 'Twas not by
God the hero fell, but by Oscar in the presence of
all.

Many a battle, victory, and contest were celebrated
by the Fenians of Innisfail. I never heard that any
feat was performed by the King of Saints, or that He
reddened His hand.

PATRICK.

Let us cease disputing on both sides, thou withered
old man who art devoid of sense ; understand that
God dwells in heaven of the orders, and Finn and his
hosts are all in pain.

OSSIAN.

Great, then, would be the shame for God not to
release Finn from the shackles of pain, for if God
Himself were in bonds my chief would fight for him.

Finn never suffered in his day any one to be in pain
or difficulty without redeeming him by silver or gold,
or by battle and fight, until he was victorious.

It is a good claim I have against your God, me to
be amongst His clerics as I am, without food, without
clothing or music, without bestowing gold on bards.

Without bathing, without hunting, without Finn,
«rithout courting generous women, without sport,

128 THE STORY OP EARLY GAELIC LITERATURE.

without sitting in my place as was due, without learn
ing feats of agility and conflict, etc.

Many of these poems contain lyrical passages of
great beauty. Here, as a specimen, is Ossian's de-
scription of the things in which Finn used to take
delight. It is a truly lyrical passage, in the very best
style, rliyme, rhythm, and assonance all combined with
a most rich vocabulary of words expressive of sounds
nearly impossible to translate into English. It might
be thus attempted in verse, though not quite in the
metre of the original. Finn's pursuits, as depicted
here by Ossian, show him to have been, like all true
Gaels, a lover of Nature, and are quite in keeping with
his own poem on Spring ; his are indeed the tastes
of one of Matthew Arnold's " Barbarians " glorified.

Finn's Pastimes.

Oh, croaking Patrick, I curse your tale.

Is the king of the Fenians in hell this night ?

The heart that never was seen to quail,
That feared no danger and felt no spite.

What kind of a God can be yours, to grudge
Bestowing of food on him, giving of gold ?

Finn never refused either prince or drudge, —
Can his doom be in hell, in the house of cold ? *

• In the original —

-An eASCoijt nAC mAich te "Oia

Of! aY biAT)li -oo chAbhAi|tc "oo neAch?
tlio|t "ohiutrAish pionn cftetin n-A cutiAsli
Ifltionn t^tiAji niA Y e A uheActi.
Irish writers always describe hell as cold, not hot. This is
SQ even in Keating, the ** cold flag of hell."

THE OSSIAlTlO POEMS. 129

The desire of my hero who feared no foe,
Wa.s to listen all day to Drumderrig's sound,

To sleep by the roar of the Assaroe,
And to follow the dun deer round and round.

The warbling of blackbirds in Letter Lee,
The strand where the billows of Ruree fall,

The bellowing ox upon wild Moy-mee,
The lowing of calves upon Glen-da-VauL

The blast of a horn around Slieve Grot,
The bleat of a fawn upon Cua's plain,

The sea-bird's cry in a lonely spot,
The croak of the raven above the slain.

The thud of the waves on his bark afar,

The yelp of the pack as they round Drumliss,

The baying of Bran upon Knock-in-ar,
The murmur of fountains below Slieve Mis.

*
The call of Oscar upon the chase,*

The tongue of the hounds on the Fenians' plain,
Then a seat with the men of the bardic race —

Of these delights was my hero fain.

In the original —

5tA0T)li OfCAift A5 -otit -00 ftieits,

5ouhA 5A-otiA|t ^n tei|t5 ha bpAtiri
t)heiu1i 'rjfiA flitii"olie AtneAfs riA troAttiti

t)A h-e \\x\ "oe jlinAch a mhiAn.

miAii -oe mtiiAiiAibli OfCAi^ fheit,

bheirh A5 eifueAclic |te beim f^iActi,

Dtieich 1 jcAch A5 cof5A|t cnAmh
t>A h-6 fin X)e ^linAch a mhiAn

X30 THE STORY OF EARLY GAELIC LITERATURE.

But generous Oscar's supreme desire

Was the maddening clashing of shield to shield,

And the hewing of bones in the battle ire,
And the crash and the joy of the stricken field.

In entire accordance with this enthusiastic love of
Nature is Ossian's delightful ode to the blackbird of
Derrycarn, a piece which is generally found in the
MSS. standing by itself. Interpenetrated with the
same sensations of delight at the sights and sounds of
Nature are the following verses attributed to him,
which a Scotchman, Dean MacGregor, jotted down
in phonetic spelling, just as he heard them some 38c
years ago, doubtless from the recitation of some wan-
dering bard or harper : —

OssiAN Sano.

Sweet IS the voice in the land <^ the gold,*
And sweeter the music of birds that soar,

When the cry of the heron is heard on the wold.
And the waves break softly on Bundatrore.

Down floats on the murmuring of the breeze
The call of the cuckoo from Cossahun,

The blackbird is warbling among the trees,
And soft is the kiss of the warming sun.

* See p. 59 of the Gaelic part of Book of the Dean of Lismore.
The first verse runs thus in modem Irish : —

t)irjn 5t>ch "otjirje 1 "ociti atj oitt,

t)inn An stoji chAnAiX) riA h-e6iii
Dtnn An ntjAtlAn a ^ni-oh An cho|tn

t)inn An ;;onn 1 mt)«n-t)A-r|te6i|t.

THE OSSIANIC POEMS. IJl

The cry of the eagle of Assaroe

0*er the court of Mac Morne to me is sweet
And sweet is the cry of the bird below

Where the wave and the wind and the tall cliff meet.

Finn mac Cool is the father of me,
Whom seven battalions of Fenians fear.

When he launches his hounds on the open lea,
Grand is their cry as they rouse the deer.

Caoilte (Cweelt-ya) too, like his friends Finn and Os-
sian, seems to have been very impressionable to the
various moods of Nature- Here is the literal transla-
tion made by Standish Hayes O'Grady of his lyrical
description of Winter in the Dialogue of the Sages, or
" Colloquy of the Ancients," as O'Grady prefers to
translate it. " Upon the whole province," says the
prose introduction, " distress of cold settled, and heavy
snow came down, so that it reached men's shoulders
and the axle-trees of chariots, and of the russet forest
branches made a twisting-together, as it had been of
withes, so that men might not progress there," then
Caoilte made this lay.

A Winter Night.

Cold the winter night is, the wind is risen, the
nigh-couraged unquelled stag is on foot : bitter cold
to-night the whole mountain is, yet for all that the
ungovernable stag is belling.*

* This, like most of the 2,000 lines of poetry scattered through
the Colloquy, is in the Deibhidh (D'yewee) metre, and might
be thus translated into that metre in English : —

Cold the Wmter, cold the Wfnd,

The Raging stag is Ravin'd,

Though in one FlSLS the Floodgates clfng

•yhc Steaming Stafi^ is billing.

132 THE STORY OF EARLY GAELIC LITERATURB

The deer of Slievecarn of the gatherings commits
not his side to the ground, no less than he, the stag of
frigid Echtge's summit (who) catches the chorus of the
wolves.

I, Caoilte, with Brown Diarmuid and with keen
light-footed Oscar ; we too in the nipping night's wan-
ing end would listen to the music of the [wolf] pack.

But well the red deer sleeps that with his hide to
the bulging rock lies stretched — hidden as though
beneath the country's surface — all in the latter end
of chilly night, etc

There is a considerable thread of narrative running
through these poems, and connecting them in a kind
of series, so that several of them might be divided into
the various books of a Gaelic epic of the Odyssic type,
containing, instead of the wanderings and final restora-
tion of Ulysses, the adventures and final destruction of
the Fenians, except that the books would be rather
more disjointed. There is, moreover, splendid material
for an ample epic in the divisions between the Fenians
of Munster and Connacht, and the gradual estrange-
ment of the High King, leading up to the fatal Battle
of Gowra, but the material for this last exists chiefly
in prose texts, not in the Ossianic lays. It is very
strange and very unfortunate that, notwithstanding the
literary activity of Gaelic Ireland before and during
the Penal times, no Keating or Comyn or Curtin ever
attempted to redact the Ossianic poems and throw
them into that epic form into which they would so
easily and naturally have fitted. These pieces appear
to me of great value as showing the natural growth
and genesis of an epic, for we progressed just up to
the point of possessing a large mass of stray material and
Oiinor episodes versified by anonymous long-forgotten

THE OSSIANIC POEMS 13^

folk-poets, but never produced a mind critical enough
to reduce this mass to order, coherence, and stability,
and at the same time creative enough to supply the
necessary lacunae. Were it not that so much light
has by this time been thrown upon the natural genesis
of ancient national epics, one might be inclined to lay
down the theory that the Irish had evolved a scheme
of their own, peculiar to themselves, and different
altogether from the epic, a scheme in which the same
characters figure in a group of allied p9ems and
romances, each of which is perfect in itself, and^not
dependent upon the rest, a system afterwards devel-
oped in Tennyson's Idylls^ and one which might be
taken to be a natural result of the impatient Celtic
spirit which could not brook the restraints of the epic.

The Ossianic lays are almost the only narrative
poems which exist in the language, for although lyrical
elegiac, and didactic poetry abounds, the Irish never
produced, except in the case of the Ossianic epopees,
anything of importance in a narrative and ballad form,
anything, for instance, of the nature of the glorious
ballad poetry of the Scotch Lowlands.

The Ossianic metres, too, are the eminently epic
ones of Ireland, It was a great pity, and, to my
thinking, a great mistake, for Archbishop MacHale
not to have used them in his translation of Homer,
instead of attempting it in the metre of Pope's Iliad —
one utterly unknown to native Ireland.

I have already observed that great producers of
literature as the Irish always were, until this century,
they never developed a drama. The nearest approach
to such a thing is in these Ossianic poems. The
dialogue between St. Patrick and Ossian, of which
in most of the Ossianic poems, there is either more or

134 THE STORY OP EARLY GAELIC LITERATURE.

less, is quite dramatic in its form. Even the reciters
of the present day feel this, and I have heard the cen-
sorious, self-satisfied tone of Patrick, and the vin-
dictive whine of the half-starved old man, reproduced
with considerable humour by a reciter. But I think
it nearly certain — though just now I cannot prove it
— that in former days there was real acting and a
dialogue between two persons, one representing the
Saint and the other the old Pagan. It was from a less
promising beginning than this that the drama of
^schylus developed. But nothing could develop in
Ireland. Everything, time after time, was arrested in
its growth. Again and again the tree of Irish literature
put forth fresh blossoms, and before they could fully
expand they were nipped off. The conception of
bringing the spirit of Paganism and of Christianity
together in the persons of the last great poet and
warrior of the one, and the first great saint of the
other, was truly dramatic, and the spirit and hu-
mour with which it had been carried out in the
pieces which have come down to us, are a strong
presumption that under happier circumstances some-
thing very great would have developed from it. If
anyone is still found to repeat Macaulay's hackneyed
taunt about our race never having produced a great
poem, let him ask himself if it is Hkely that a country
where, for a hundred years after Aughrim and the
Boyne, teachers, who for long before that had been in
great danger, were systematically knocked on the head
or sent to a jail for teaching ; where children were seen
learning their letters with chalk on their fathers' tomb-
stones, other means being denied them; where the
possession of a manuscript might lead to the owner's
death or imprisonment, so that many valuable books
were buried in the ground or hidden to rot in walls —

toB OSSIANIC POEMS. I3S

whether such a country were a soil on which an epic
or anything else could flourish. How, in the face of
all this, the men of the eighteenth century preserved
in manuscript so much of the Ossianic poetry as they
did, and even re-wrote or redacted portions of it, as
Michael Comyn is said to have done to " Ossian in
the Land of the Young," is to me nothing short of
amazing.

Of the authorship of the Ossianic poems nothing is
known. In the Book of Leinster are three short
pieces ascribed to Ossian himself, and five to Finn,
and other old MSS. contain poems ascribed to Caoilte
(Cweelt-ya), Ossian's companion and fellow-survivor,
but of the great mass of the ten or twenty thousand lines
which we have in seventeenth and eighteenth century
MSS. there is not much which is placed in Ossian's
mouth at first hand, the pieces, as I have said, gener-
ally beginning with a dialogue, from which Ossian
proceeds to recount his tale. But this dramatic form
of the lay shows that no pretence was kept up of
Ossian's being the singer of his own exploits.* From
the paucity of the pieces attributed to him in the
oldest MSS., it is probable that the Gaelic race only
gradually singled him out as their typical Pagan poet
instead of Fergus or Caoilte or any other of his
alleged contemporaries, just as they singled out his
father, Finn, as the typical Pagan leader of their race ;
and it is likely that a large part of our Ossianic lay
and literature is post-Danish, while the great mass of
the Red Branch saga is in its birth many centuries
anterior to the Norsemen's invasion.

* One of the great German Scholars, I think Windisch, has
suggested that Ossian was first taken to be a poet from having
verses put into his mouth in the prose saga. However, the
same is quite as true of Caoilte and Fergus.

CHAPTER XII.

THE IRISH ANNALSt

O sketch of Irish literature
should omit some mention
of the Annals, dry and un-
literary as most of them are.
The Irish Annals, however,
are too important, from their
value, age and number; to be over-
looked. The greatest - though almost
the youngest — of them all, is the much
renowned Annals of the Four Mas-
ters. This mighty work is chiefly due
to the herculean labours of the learned
Franciscan, Brother Michael O'Clery, a
native of Donegal, born about the year,
1580, who was himself descended from a
long line, of scholars.* He and another
scion of Donegal, Aedh Mac an Bhaird, then guardians
of St. Anthony's in Louvain, contemplated the compi-

• For an account of how these O'Clery's came to Donegal
see the interesting preface to Father Murphy's splendid edition
of the Irish-Gaelic Lift of Red Hugh O^DonneU.

THE lEISH ANNALS. I37

lation and publication of a great collection of the lives
of the Irish Saints.

In furtherance of this idea, Michael O'Clery, with
the leave and approbation of his superiors, set out
from Louvain, and, coming to Ireland, travelled
through the whole length and breadth of it, from
abbey to abbey and friary to friary. Up and down,
high and low, he hunted for the ancient vellum books
and time-stained manuscripts, whose safety was even
then threatened by the ever-thickening political
shocks and spasms of that most distracted age.
These, whenever he found, he copied in an accurate
and beautiful hand-writing, and transmitted safely to
Louvain to his friend Mac an Bhaird, or "Ward," as
the name is now in English. Ward, unfortunately,
died before he could make use of the material thus
collected by O'Clery, but it was taken up by another
great Franciscan, Father John Colgan, who utilised
the work of his friend O'Clery by producing in 1645
two huge and splendid Latin quartos, the first called
the Trias Thaumaturgus, containing the lives of
Saints Patrick, Brigit, and Columkille, the second
containing all the lives which could be found of all
the Irish saints whose festivals fell between the ist of
January and the last of March.

Before O'Clery ever entered the Franciscan Order
he had been by profession an historian or antiquary,
and now, in his eager quest for ecclesiastical writings
and the lives of saints, his trained eye fell upon many
other documents which he could not neglect. These
were the ancient books and secular annals of the
nation, and the historical poems of the ancient bards.
He indulged himself to the full in this unique oppor-
tunity to become acquainted with so much valuable
material, and the results of his labours are two valuable

i^Z THE 8T0BT OF JBABLY GAELIC LITEBATUBi.

books, the Ji!Sim Rioghraidhe^* or Succession of Kings
in Ireland, which gives the name, succession, and
genealogy of the Kings of Ireland from the earliest
times down to the death of Malachy the Great in
1 02 2, giving at the same time the genealogies of the
early saints of Ireland down to the eighth century ; and
the Leabhar Gabhdla,* or Book of Invasions, which
contains an ample account of the successive coloniza-
tions of Ireland which were made by Partholan, the
Nemedians, the Tuatha de Dananns, etc., all drawn
from ancient books — for the most part now lost — and
digested and put together by the friar.

It was probably while engaged on this work that the
great scheme of compiling the Annals of Ireland
occurred to him. Ke found a patron and protector
in Fergal O'Gara, lord of Moy-Gara and Coolavin, and
with the assistance of five or six other antiquaries he
set about his task, in the secluded Convent of
Donegal, at that time governed by his own brother,
He began his work on the 22 nd of January, 1631.
and finished it on the loth of August, 1636; having
had, during all this time, his expenses and the ex-
penses of his fellow-labourers defrayed by the patriotic
lord of Moy-Gara.

It was Father Colgan who first gave this great work
the title under which it is now always spoken of —
The Annals of the Four Masters, Father Colgan,
in the preface to his Acta Sanctorum Hibernice^ after
recounting O'Clery's labours and his previous books,
goes on to give an account of this last one also, and
adds : " As in the three works before mentioned, so
in this fourth one, three [helpers of his] are eminently
to be praised — namely, Farfassa O'Mulconry, Pere-

♦ Pronounced " Raim Ru-ra-a*^ and **Vy0war Gaw-aul-a.^^

'l!iSE IRISH ANNALS.

I3§

grine * O'Clery, and Peregrine O'Duigenan, men of

consummate learning in the antiquities of the country,
and of approved faith. And to these were subsequently
added the co-operation of other distinguished anti-
quarians, as Maurice O'Mulconry, who for one month,
and Conary O'Clery, who for many months laboured
in its promotion. But since those Annals, which we
shall very frequently have occasion to quote in this
volume and in others following, have been collected
and compiled by the assistance and separate study of
so many authors, neither the desire of brevity would
permit us always to quote them individually, nor
would justice permit us to attribute the labour of
many to one, hence it sometimes seemed best to call
them the Annals of Donegal, for in our convent of
Donegal they were commenced and concluded. But
afterwards, for other reasons, chiefly for the sake of the
compilers themselves, who were four most eminent
masters in antiquarian lore, we have been led to call
them the Annals of the Four Masters. Yet we
said just now that more than four assisted in their
preparation ; however, as their meeting was irregular,
and but two of them during a short time laboured
in the unimportant and later part of the work, while
the other four were engaged on the entire production
at least up to the year 1267 (from which the first part,
and the most necessary one for us, is closed) we quote
it under their name."

" I explained to you," says Michael O'Clery in his

* The Irish Cucoigcriche, which, meaning "a stranger," has
been Latinised Peregrinus by Ward. I remember one of the
I' Estrange family telling me how one of the O'Cucoigrys had
once come to her father and asked him if he had any objection
to his translating his name for the fiiture into I'Estrange, both
names being identical in meaning 1

140 THE STORY OF EARLY GAELIC LITERATURE.

dedication to FergalO'Gara, after setting forth the scope
of the work "that I thought I could get the assistance
of the chroniclers for whom^ I had most esteem in
writing a book of annals, in which these matters might
be put on record, and that, should the writing of them
be neglected at present, they would not again be found
to be put on record or commemorated even to the
end of the world. All the best and most copious
books of annals that I could find throughout all Ireland
were collected by me — though it was difficult for me
to collect them into one place — to write this book in
your name and to your honour, for it was you who
gave the reward of their labour to the chroniclers, by
whom it was written, and it was the friars of Donegal
who supplied them with food and attendance."

The book is also provided with a kind of testimo-
nium from the Franciscan Fathers of the monastery
where it was written, stating who the compilers were,
and how long they had worked under their own eyes,
and what old books they had seen with them, etc. In
addition to this, Michael O'Clery carried it to the two
historians of greatest eminence in the South of Ireland,
Flann mac Egan, of Ballymacegan, in the County
Tipperary, and Conor mac Brody, of the County
Clare, and obtained their written approbation and
signatures, as well as those of the Primate of Ireland
and some others ; and thus provided he launched his
book upon the world.

It has been published, at least in part, three times —
first, down to the year 1171, the year of the Norman
Invasion, by the Rev. Charles O'Conor, grandson of
Charles O'Conor of Belanagare, Cardan's patron,
with a Latin translation ; and secondly, in English by
Owen Connellan from the year 11 7 1 to the end. But
the third publication of it — that by O'Donovan — was

THE IRISH ilNNALS I4I

the greatest work that any modem Irish scholar ever
accomplished. In it the Irish text, with accurate
English translation, and an enormous quantity of
notes, topographical, genealogical, and historical, are
given, and the whole is contained in seven huge quarto
volumes — a work of which any age or country might
be proud. So long as Irish history exists, the Annals
of the Four Masters will be read in O^Donovan's
translation, and the name of O'Donovan be insepar-
ably connected with those of the O'Clerys.

We have left ourselves but little space to notice the
contents of these Annals. Suffice it to say that, like
so many other compilations of the same kind, they
begin with the Deluge ; and they end up in the year
1 61 6. They give from the old books the reigns,
deaths, genealogies, etc., not only of the High Kings
but also of the provincial kings, chiefs, or heads of
distinguished families, men of science, and poets, with
their respective dates, going as near as they can go.
They record deaths and successions of saints, abbots,
bishops, and ecclesiastical dignitaries. They tell of
the foundation and occasionally of the overthrow of
countless churches, castles, abbeys, convents, and
religious institutions. They give meagre details of
battles and political changes, and occasionally quote
ancient verses in proof of facts. Towards the end the
dry summary of events becomes more garnished, and
in parts elaborate detail takes the place of meagre
facts. There is no event of Irish history, from the
birth of Christ to the beginning of the seventeenth
century, that the first enquiry of the student will not
be, " What do the Four Masters say about it ? " for
the great value of the work consists in this, that we
have here, in condensed form, the pith and substance
of the old books of Ireland which were then in existence

142 THE STORY OF EARLY GAELIC LITERATURE.

but which — as the Four Masters foresaw they would —
have long since perished. The facts and dates of the
Four Masters are not their own facts and dates. From
confused masses of very ancient matter they, with
labour and much sifting, drew forth their dates and
synchronisms, and harmonized their facts.

As if to emphasize the truth that they were onl}
redacting the Annals of Ireland from the most
ancient sources at their command, the Masters
wrote in an ancient bardic dialect full of such
idioms and words as were unintelligible even to the
men of their own day unless they had received a
bardic training. In fact they were learned men
writing for the learned, and this work was one of the
last efforts of the esprit de corps of the school-bred
shannachie which always prompted him to keep bardic
and historical learning a close monopoly amongst his
own class. Keating was Michael O'Clery's contem-
porary, but he wrote — and I consider him the first
Irish historian and trained scholar who did so — for
the masses not the classes, and he had his reward in
the thousands of copies of his popular history made
and read throughout all Ireland, while the copies
made of the Annals were quite few in comparison and
after the end of the 17 th century little read.

The old and valuable Annals of Tigheamach^ who
died about the year 1088 ; the Annals of Innisf alien ^
composed about a.d. 12 15, but according to O'Curry
commenced at least two centuries before that period ;
the Annals of Boyle^ beginning with the creation and
continued down to a.d. 1253 ; the Annals of Ulster,
covering the period from a.d. 431 to 1504 ; the Annals
of Loch Ce, continued from 1014 down to 1590; the
hsigmentSiry Annals of Bovle, from the year 1224 to

THE IRISH iNNJLLS. t43

1562 ; the Annals ofCiontnacnoiSi'^ continued down to
the year 1408 ; the fragmentary Annals published by
O'Donovan, and the celebrated Chronicon Scotorum
of Duald Mac Firbis, are the other principal Annals
of Ireland still existing.

Such books as The Wars of the Gall with the Gael^
which gives an account of the Danish Invasion and
the story of the battle of Clontarf, apparently told by
an eye-witness ; the History of the Wars of Thomondy
compiled about 1459, which tells all about the
O'Brien family, their Norman wars and their Gaelic

* Now known only through an English translation of it — soon,
I hope, to be published — made in 1627 by one Connla mac Ech-
agan, of Westmeath, for his friend and kinsman, Torlogh mac
Cochlan, lord of Delvin. The dedication is curious ; it runs in
a very German kind of fashion : —

** To the worthy and of great expectation young gentleman,
Mr. Terence Coghlan, his brother Connell Ma Geoghegan
wisheth long health with good success in all his affairs."

He says in his preface that formerly many septs lived in Ire-
land whose profession it was to chronicle and keep in memory
the state of the kingdom, but " now as they cannot enjoy that
respect and gain by their profession as heretofore they and their
ancestors received, they set nought by the said knowledge,
neglect their books, and choose rather to put their children to
learn English than their own native language, insomuch that
some of them suffer tailors to cut the leaves of the said books
(which their ancestors held in great account) and sew them in
long pieces to make their measures of, [so] that the posterities
are like to fall into more ignorance of any things which happened
before their time."

I should have thought Mac Echagan exaggerated a little here.
Certainly it was only after the Cromwellian wars that this state
of things became in the least general. It is very remarkable,
however, to see a Mac Echagan writing all this to a Mac Coghlan
in English, at a time when not one Gael in twenty knew a word
of that language. To write finely in English about the decay of
the Irish language is something we have long been accustomed
to ; this is certainly the first instance of it.

144 THE STORY OP EARtiT GAELIC LITERATURE.

and Norman neighbours, and the Book of Munster^
which is a history of the Southern Irish down to the
time of the Battle of Clontarf ; all these are more
properly books of history than Annals ; but as we have
no space to assign them a chapter to themselves, and
as many of them do not come under the heading of
early Irish literature, I content myself with mention-
ing them here ; and merely remark that not only are
they valuable for their facts, but are all of them books
of more interest — from a literary point of view — than
the Annals. As the Annals themselves, although
many of them are late compilations, are really only
digests of very ancient books now lost, I have thought
it as well to assign them a chapter in this place.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE KARLY CHRISTIAN WRITERS.

ITH Christianity there
came into Ireland — as into
every other country — a
new life, new ideals, a
new literature and a new
style, which subsisted for
many a long day, side by
side with Pagan ideals and Pagan literature.

There are several Irish Poems attributed to St.
Patrick himself, but with the exception of his cele-
brated Faedh Fiada or Cry of the deer, which may
very well be partly genuine, they are most of them
evidently post-Patrician, some — the alleged prophecies
— being grotesquely so. The Faedh Fiada consists of
eighty lines, short, like those of a litany, and full of
fervour. The legend is that when the saint was first
summoned to King Laoghaire's [Leary's] presence at
Tara, after having insulted him by kindling the Pas-
chal fire within sight of the palace, he was dismissed
for that time with scant courtesy, but was afterwards
sent for by the king to explain his " new way " to the
nobles assembled at Tara, In reality, however, the
king laid an ambuscade along the road by which he

I»

146 THE STORY OF EARLY GAELIC LITERATURE.

must come to the palace, intending to have him quietly
knocked on the head during the route, and everything
thus peacefully settled. Patrick, however, who was
accompanied by St. Benignus and eight companions,
assumed, with his followers, in the eyes of the intend-
ing murderers the form of deer, and thus came safe to
Tara ; and the hymn which he chanted as he went
along, has been ever since called the Faedh * Fiada or
Cry of the Deer. Most people are familiar with this
poem through Mangan's excellent but very diffuse
verse translation :—

At Tara to-day in this fateful hour

I place all Heaven with its power,

And the sun with its brightness,

And the snow with its whiteness.

And fire with all the strength it hath,

And lightning with its rapid wrath.

And the winds with their swiftness along their path,

And the sea with its deepness.

And the rocks with their steepness,

And the earth with its starkness.

All these I place

By God's Almighty help and grace,
Between myself and the power of darkness.

This celebrated hymn preserved to us in the nth
century manuscript called the Book of Hymns^ is the
first Christian strain heard in Ireland, which has come
floating to us down the ages, and for centuries it was
believed that the recitation of it was a strong defence
against danger of body and soul. To this day in
Aran and elsewhere is heard another similar hymn
the "Marthainn Phadraig," or life-giving prayer of

* The word Faedh is \ov^ obsolete*

THE EARLY CHRISTIAN WRITERS. 147

Patrick, to which the same protective virtue is
ascribed.

The most remarkable piece of Irish literature with
which the name of St. Patrick is connected is of
course the redaction of that division of the Brehon
Law called the Cain Phadraig, consisting of the
Senchus M6r or Great Tradition. This was an
attempt on Patrick's part to rewrite the body of Pagan
Law, or rather to expunge from it what was ultra-
Pagan and glaringly anti-Christian. The only way
in which he could accomplish his purpose was by
consenting to a joint committee of revisal, consisting
of three bishops, three kings, and three brehons. Ros
the chief File and Brehon of Ireland, first arranged
the code of previously existing laws, leaving them
ready for revision, and then St. Patrick with the
approbation of the joint committee expurgated them.
After St. Patrick had finished his work Ros the bard
"put a thread of poetry round it," that is, drew it all
up in verse, so that it might be the better remembered,
— a very antique trait indeed — and it is a remarkable
proof of the great antiquity of the Brehon Laws that
many parts of them, though printed as prose, might
be read as poetry, not the poetry of 8th century
schools, but a much older unrhymed rhythmical sort
of chant which I believe — and have elsewhere tried
to prove — was the precursor of the regular metres in
Erin. This is the account which has come down to
us prefixed to the oldest copies of the Laws, but
how much of it is truth and how much fiction I
shall not try to determine.

Columkille was also a poet. Poetry seems in fact
to have run in the blood of the Irish, both saints
and sinners, from the very earliest days until they

148 THE STORY OP EARLY OABLIC LITERATURE.

lost their language. The great Columkille was
even a bard of renown, and took himself such interest
in the bardic order that had it not been for his
very active interposition at Druim-Ceat they would
have fared badly indeed at the hands of the in-
furiated nobles and kings, whom they had so long
made their prey. This story of how he saved our
bards belongs to Irish history and is too well-known
to need recital. Besides the celebrated Latin hymn
called the "-Mtus" and others, Columkille is said
to have composed quite a quantity of Irish poems.
Of course it is very hard to tell how many of
the pieces ascribed to him are really his. Many of
them are evidently not the saint's work at all, but
others may very well have been so, though of course
much modified in transcription.

Columkille like Ossian and the Pagan Irish, was
enthusiastically alive to the beauty of Nature. If
— apart from form — there is one distinguishing note
more than another, peculiar to the literature of the
ancient — and to some extent of the modern — Gael,
it is his fondness for Nature in its various aspects.
He seems at times to have been perfectly intoxi-
cated with the mere pleasure of sensations derived
from scenery. Here, for instance, is one of Colum-
kille's poems which may very well be genuine. I
have ventured to translate it into something like
the original metre.

Columkille, cecinit

Oh Son of my God, what a pride what a pleasure

To plough the blue sea.
The waves of the fountain of deluge to measure

Dear Eire to thee.

THE EARLY CHRISTIAN WRITERS. 1 49

We are rounding Moy-n-Olurg, we sweep by its
head and
We plunge through Loch Foyle,
Whose swans could enchant with their music the
dead and
Make pleasure of toil.

The host of the gulls with a joyous commotion

And screaming and sport
Will welcome my own " Dewy Red " * from the ocean

Arriving in port

Oh Erin, were wealth my desire, what a wealth were

To gain far from thee,
In the land of the stranger, but there even health were

A sickness to me 1

Alas foi the voyage, oh high King of Heaven,

Enjoined upon me,
For that I on the red plain of bloody Cooldrevin t

Was present to see.

* The name of Columkille's boat The original runs thus,
modernized — I do not well understand the last words of the third
line : —

StuAgh T)A bhf AotteAti x)o bu-oh fAitre-Ach
tie feinm funcAch

X)A ftOlflC pOjIC TIA t?eA|t5 f AltUACh

An X)eA|i5-T)ttuchi;Ach.

t Better Anglicised Cooldrevna. This of course was the well-
known battle field where Columkille and the Ulster men fought
it out with the High King, after his quarrel about copying the
book. The penance enjoined on him by St. Moleesha of Aham-
lish, was that he should leave Ireland and convert as many souls
as there were soldiers slain at this battle. Hence his voyage to
I-Columkille or lona, and the great monastery he established
then.

150 THB STORY OF EARLY GAELIC LITERATURE.

How happy the son is of Dima ♦ ; no sorrow

For him is designed,
He is having, this hour, round his own kill in Durrow

The wish of his mind.

The sound of the wind in the elms, like the strings of

A harp being played,
The note of the blackbird that claps with the wings of

Delight in the glade.

With him in Rosgrencha the cattle are lowing

At earliest dawn,
On the "brink of the summer "t the pigeons are
cooing

And doves in the lawn.

Three things am I leaving behind me, the very

Most dear that I know*
Tir-Leedach I'm leaving, and Durrow and Derry,

Alas I must go 1

Yet my visit and feasting with Comgall have eased
me

At Cainneach's right hand,
And all but thy Government Erin has pleased me,

Thou waterfall land.

No doubt many a one has since echoed and echoes
to-day in his own mind these last two lines ; but
in many things Columkille has always appeared to
me from what we know of him — and that is a

* /.^., Cormac O'Liathain, the voyager.

t This is the literal translation of £e original, A|t bh^itiAcli

tHE EARLY CHRISTIAN WRITERS. 154

good deal, for we have his life in four books written
within a hundred years after his death by Adamnan,
one of his successors — to have been both in his
failings and his virtues the most typical of Irish-
men, at once sentimental and impulsive, an emi-
nent type of the race he came from. The story
of him and the heron is suggestive in its senti-
mental tenderness Because he saw the bird flying
across the water from the direction of Ireland and
alighting half frozen with cold and faint with flight
upon the rocky coast of lona, he sent out one of his
monks to go round the island and warm and cherish
and feed the bird, " because," said he weeping, " it
has come from the land I shall never see on earth
again." We see his extreme tenderness and love of
nature in all his poems, particularly in a long one begm
ning ** Delightful to be on Ben Edar," the Hill of
Howth, some verses of which I may thus translate : —

Delightful it is on Ben Edar to rest,

Before going over the white white sea.

The dash of the wave as it launches its crest

On the wind-beaten shore is delight to me,*

Delightful it is on Ben Edar to rest

When one has come over the white sea foam
His coracle cleaving her way to the west,
^ Through the sport of the waves as she beats for
home.

* Literally -.—Delightful to be on Ben Edar, before going over
the sea, white white, the dashing of the wave again «it it« face,
the bareness of the shore and its border.

Y^2 THE STORY OF !EARLY GAELIC LITERATUEE.

But now his coracle was not on its way to the
west but to the east, he is leaving not approaching
Erin: —

How swiftly we travel ! there is a grey eye
Looks back upon Erin, but it no more

Shall see while the stars shall endure in the sky,
Her women, her men, or her stainless shore.

From the plank of the oak where in sorrow I lie,

I am straining my sight through the water and
wind,

And large is the tear from the soft grey eye

Looking back on the land that it leaves behind.

How different is the land he is forced to leave
from that to which he must now betake him ; he is
going to meet sickness, famine and flint-hearted men,
ah ! how different is the western isle he leaves behind
him.

For oh I in the west now the apple is fair!

How many a Tanist, how many a king;
How many a sloe does the thorn tree bear,

In the acorned oaks how the young birds sing !

Melodious her clerics, melodious her birds.
Her children are gentle, her seniors wise,

Her men are illustrious, truthful in words.
Her women have virtues for love to prize.

He is the first example of the exiled Irishman
grieving for his native land and refusing to be com-
forted, " dedraidhthe," as John O'Mahony, when

BARLY CHRISTIAN WRITERS. 153

in New York, touchingly quoted or perhaps com
posed —

'OeoftAi-olictie 5^11 fsirh jAti fof
tniAnAi-o A -oui'it 'f A n-ouchchAf.*

In far off lands his love for his fellow Gael is
as hot, and his desire to return to his native soil
as poignant as that of the Fenian leader himself.

I give thee my blessing to carry fair youth,

And my benediction over the sea,
One sevenfold-half upon Erin in truth,

One half upon Alba the same to be.

To the nobles who gem the bright isle of the Gad
Carry this benediction over the sea,

And bid them not credit Moleesha's tale

And bid them not credit his words of me.

Were it not for the words of Moleesha's mouth
At the cross of Ahamlish, that sorrowful day,

I now should be warding from north and from south
Disease and distemper from Erin away.

Then take thee my blessing with thee to the west,
For my heart in my bosom is broken ; I fail ;

Should death of a sudden now pierce my breast
I should die of the love that I bear the Gael.

Saint Brigid, the third patron saint ^ of Ireland, is
said to have also written verses, with a rule for

* Exiles without rest or respite they long for their countiy
and their patrimony*

154 *^^^ 8?rOEY OF EAilLY Gi.El/10 LlTKEATUaa.

her nuns, and some other things. There certainly
is an antique semi-barbarous air about her poem
beginning : —

I should like a great lake of ale

For the king of the kings,

I should like the family of heaven

To be drinking it through time eternal, etc.

The Irish saints produced also a great number
of Latin hymns, the oldest of which is that of
Secundinus or Seachnall, a monk of foreign origin
who came to help St. Patrick. St. Fiacc's metrical
Life of St. Patrick, a poem of seventy lines, is, per-
haps, after the Deer's Cry, the oldest bit of Irish
religious verse existing, for Fiacc was St. Patrick's
pupil. Zimmer considers about half of this poem
genuine ; Thurneysen, however, — because it does not
agree with his theory of Irish metric — ^rejects it.

A great many ancient lives of the early saints
were written, chiefly written in Latin, by their succes-
sors, as the Life of St. Patrick ascribed to his disciple
St. Benignus, another to St. Ultan in Ardbraccan,
another to St. Eleran in the sixth century, Tire-
chan's life in the Book of Armagh^ and the Tri-
partite life. Adamnan's Life of Columkille ; a Life
of St. Brigit attributed to St. Ultan, and a life
of her written in Latin hexameters by one Caelan
— all these are worthy of mention. One of the most
voluminous Irish lives is that of St. Columkille com-
posed in Irish in 1532, at the command of Manus
O'Donnell, prince of Tirconnell, at the town now
called Lifford, which gives the contents of all the
old Latin and Irish lives which the compilers
could lay their hands upon.

THB EARtilr CHRISTIAN WRITERS. I55

The Voyage of St Brendan — who was born in
1^83 — is another remarkable book in its way, which
ivas at one time celebrated over Europe. The
saint was certainly a great traveller, as the numerous
places called after him all along the coast of Ire-
land and the west coast of Scotland, as far as lone
St. Kilda, show. The celebrated Navigatio St
Brendani was probably founded upon some actual
tradition, which was built up into a wildly fictitious
romance in the seventh or eighth century after the
fashion dear to the heart of Hibernian authors of
that age. It is not now found in Irish, but the
9th century MS. in the Vatican Library at Rome
is said to be evidently a literal translation from
the Gaelic. The Voyage of Maeldune and the
Voyage of the O^Corras are other popular specimens
of this kind of literature, the substance of the first
being evidently Pagan, and the latter probably
dating from the eleventh century.

The great colleges and monasteries of Moville,
in Donegal, founded by St. Finian, " the tutor of the
saints of Ireland," the same who quarrelled with
Columkille about the famous book; the school at
Clonard in Meath ; the school of St. Enda in Aran ;
Clonmacnois, founded by St. Kieran ; the schools of
Rahan and Lismore ; St. Kevin's school of Glenda-
lough ; St. Molaise's or Moleesha's school at Devenish
island in Lough Erne — it was he who pronounced
St. Columkille's banishment ; St. Moling's school at
Carlow; St. Fechin's at Fore, etc., were, outside
the bardic colleges, the principal teaching institutions
in the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries.

The ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries were
not as productive of Christian literature as might

156 THE STOBY OF EABLY GAELIC UTEBATURB.

have been expected, partly because of the mania
for emigration and missionary work which had at that
time so seized upon all the best minds of the Gael,
and still more on account of the Danish ravages
which had thoroughly disorganized the entire nation.
It was during these centuries that the Culdees*
flourished. They, too, had a number of institutions
throughout the island of which that of Tallaght
near Dublin is one of the best known. It was
here Angus the Culdee (after much solitary pre-
paration in the wilds called after him to-day
Disert-Enost or Angus's desert) entered in the
latter half of the 8th century and produced in
time his great "Feilir^" or Calendar. In this
work a stanza is given to each day of the year,
in connection with some saint — and wherever
possible with some Irish saint. It is all written
in a short and difficult though melodious metre,
here are the beginning stanzas translated exactly
into the measure of the original, each six-syllable
line ending in a dissyllabe : —

* In Irish " C6ite T)6," i.e. Servus Dei, a phrase used with
much latitude but in general denoting an ascetic monk, some-
times a missionary one. So far from being pre-Patrician Christians
as some have asserted, they seem to be of seventh or eighth
century origin. We find the Dominican monks of Sligo called
Culdees in a MS. of the year 1600. The Culdees of Scotland
having become lax in later times, married and established a kind
of spurious hereditary order. So much for CampbeU's pretty
lines in his Reulura : —

*• Peace to their souls, the pure CuldeeB
Were Albyn's earliest priests of God,

Ere yet an island of her seas
By foot of Saxon monk was trod."

t Angus, in Irish Aonghus, is generally pronounced ^neesh^
and is sometimes well anglicised " Eneas.

THE EARLY CHRISTIAN WRITERS, 157

Bless O Christ my speaking

King of heavens seven,
Strength and wealth and powei

In this HOUR be given ;

Given * O thou brightest

Destined not to sever,
Eling of angels glorious

And VICTORIOUS ever.

Ever o'er us shining

Light to mortals given.
Beaming daily, nightly

BRIGHTLY out of heaven, etc.

The Feilire is followed by a poem of five or
six hundred lines, and it and the poems connected
with it are perhaps the most extensive specimens of
early Irish poetry which we have. Whitley Stokes,
however, considers them to be of the tenth rather
than the eighth century, which would leave their
authorship doubtful. It was at Tallaght that Angus
is said to have produced his *' Saltair na rann," a poem
of some eight thousand lines, based (like Caedmon's
poems) on old Testament history, and also the
Martyrology of Tallaght He died at Clonenagh,
and one of his disciples composed over him that
brief elegy which Matthew Arnold, reading it only in
English, considered so perfectly felicitous in thought

* This tour deforce of beginning each succeeding stanza with
the same word that ends the preceding one, is common in Irish
where it is called Canachlonn^ and it is much used by Angus.
Irish prosody is fuU of original terms unborrowed from Latin,
and to my mind they tell strongly in favour of the theory of a
pre-Christian culture. ,

158 THE STORY OP EARLY GAELIC LITERATURE.

and expression. These centuries saw also a num-
ber of ecclesiastical documents take form, such as
treatises on the Mass, litanies to the Blessed Virgin,
and many other litanies, canons (some in verse, as
that of Fothadh the Canonist, claiming exemption
from military service for clerics, others in prose),
hymns, and many other writings, the most valuable of
which is beyond doubt the Book of Hymns preserved
in an eleventh century MS., most of the pieces being
indeed in Latin ; though with long Irish introductions
in prose. The hymns themselves are ''unquestionably
much older *' than the eleventh century, and accord-
ing to Windisch their language is that of the old
Irish glosses in Milan and Wiirzburg which Zeuss
look for the foundation of his Grammatica Ccltica.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE DANISH PERIOD.

HE first onfall of the Danes
seems to have been made
about the year 795, and
for considerably over two
centuries Erin was shaken
from shore to shore with
ever-recurring alarms, and
for many years every centre
of population lived in a state of terror, not knowing
what a day might bring forth. Monasteries and
colleges were burnt, numbers of invaluable books
were destroyed, gold and silver work carried oif,
and a state of unrest produced which must have
more learning in many parts of the island well-nigh
impossible.

It is probably owing to our round towers that even
so much of the past has been preserved to us. It
appears to be now pretty well agreed upon that
many of these towers were built as places of refuge
where men, women, and valuables might be saved

l6o THE STORY OF EARLY GAELIC LITERATURE.

from the e«rly incursions of the Danes, who, in
their rapid marches from the sea coast to raid the
land, could not sit down long enough in front o\
these stone piles to reduce them, lest the country
should be roused in the meantime and the retreat
to their ships cut off.

Strange to say despite the troubled condition of
Ireland during these two or three centuries, she
produced a large number of poets and scholars,
the impulse of the enthusiasm of the sixth and
seventh centuries being still strong upon her. Un-
questionably the greatest name amongst her men
of learning during this period was that of the
statesman, ecclesiastic, poet and scholar, Cormac
mac Culenan, who was at once King and Bishop
of Cashel,"^ and one of the most striking figures
in both the literal^ and political history of those
centuries.

To him we owe that most valuable relic of
antiquity called Cormac's Glossary, by far the oldest
attempt at a vernacular . dictionary made in any
language of modern Europe. Of course it has been
enlarged by subsequent writers, but the idea and
much of the matter remains Cormac's. In its original
conception it was meant to explain and elucidate
words and phrases which in the ninth centu y had
become obscure to Irish scholars, and, as mrght be
expected, it throws light on many Pagan custoims, on
history, law, romance and mythology. Cormac's
other great work was the compilation of the Saltair
ofCashel^ now most unhappily lost, but it appears
to have been a great work. In it was contained

* In Irish " Mac Cnileanndin ; '* it> was not he, however, who
built Cormac's Chapel at Cash«)U but Cormac MacCarthy, in the
twelfth century.

THE DANISH PERIOD. l6l

the Book of Rights drawn up for the readjustment
of the relations existing between princes and tribes, a
book still preserved. St. Benignus was said to have
originally composed in verse a complete statement
of the various rights, privileges and duties of the
High King, the provincial kings, and the local chief-
tains. This, like all our ancient and primitive laws, was
drawn up in verse so as to be thus stereotyped
for the future, and easily remembered at a time
when books were scarce. Cormac seems to have
enlarged, modified and brought it up to date, to
suit the changing times, and it was subsequently
redacted again in Brian Boromha's (Boru's) day, in
a sense favourable to Munster.

The King-Bishop was at once a remarkable man
and a distinguished scholar. He appears to have
known Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Danish, and to
have been one of the finest Old-Gaelic scholars
of his dayj and withal an accomplished poet.
He was slain in battle in the year 908 * under
circumstances so curiously described in the frag-
mentary annals edited by O' Donovan, that it may
be worth repeating here. He was, as we know
from other sources, betrothed to the Princess
Gormfhlaith or Gormly, daughter of Flann Sionna
King of Meath and High King of Ireland, but
determining to enter the Church he returned her
with her dowry to her father without consummating
the marriage; after which he took orders, and rose
in time to be Archbishop of Cashel as well as
King of Munster. It was in the year 908 that
Gormly was married against her will to Cearbhall
[Carroll], King of Leinster. Flann the High King,

* In 903, according to the Four Masters, who. however, at this
period antedate by five years

l62 THE STORY OF EARLY GAELIC LITERATURE.

with Carroll King of Leinster, now his son-in-law, pre-
pared to meet Munster and to assert by arms his
right to the presentation of the ancient church of
Monasterevan, but in reality it is likely that he
bore the King- Archbishop a grudge for his treat-
ment of his daughter Gormly. Here is the anna-
listic account of the sequel — it may remind the
classical reader a little of the death of Cyrus.

Death of Cormac mac Cullinan.*
"The great host of Munster was assembled by
the same two, that is Flaherty j [abbot of Mis-Cathaigh,
now Scattery (!) Island on the Shannon] and Cormac
[Mac Cullinan] to demand hostages of Leinster and
Ossory, and all the men of Munster were in the same
camp. . . . And noble ambassadors came from Lein-
ster from Carroll son of Muirigan [king of that province]
to Cormac first, and they delivered a message of
peace from the Leinstermen, />., one peace to be
in all Erin until May following (it being then the
second week in autumn), and to give hostages into
the keeping of Maenach, a holy, wise and pious
man, and of other pious men, and to give jewels
and much property to Cormac and Flaherty.

" Cormac was much rejoiced at being offered this
peace, and he afterwards went to tell it to Flaherty

* From the fragment copied by Duald mac Firbis in 1643 from
a vellum MS. of Mac Eagan of Ormond, a chief professor of the
old Brehon Law, a MS. which was so worn as to be in places
illegible at the time Mac Firbis copied it ; published by
O'Donovan for the Archaealogical Society. I have altered
O'Donovan's translation very slightly.

t/« Irish " -ptAichbheAttuAch." He was tak^n prisoner in
the battle, but released after about a year, having suffered no-
thing worse than " great abuse from the clergy of Leinster," and
subsequently became King of Munster himself, and reigned for
32 years-

THE DANISH PERIOD. 1 63

and how he was offered it from Leinster. When
Flaherty heard this he was greatly horrified, and
'twas what he said, * this shows,' said he, * the
littleness of thy mind and the feebleness of thy
nature, for thou art the son of a plebeian,' and he
said many other bitter and insulting words which
it would be too long to repeat.

" The answer which Cormac made him was, ' I
am certain,' Cormac said, ' of what the result of
this [obstinacy of yours] will be, a battle will be
fought, O holy man,' said he, *and [I] Cormac
shall be under a curse for it, and it is likely that
it will be the cause/ of death to thee [also].' And
when he had said this he came into his own tent
afflicted and sorrowful. And when he sat down
he took a basketful of apples and proceeded to
divide them amongst his people and said : * my
dear people,' he said, * I shall never give you
apples again from this out for ever.' ' Is it so,
O dear earthly lord,' said his people, *why art
thou sorrowful and melancholy with us ; it is often
thou hast boded evil for us.' 'It is ' [said Cor-
mac] * as I say, and yet dear people what melan-
choly thing have I said, for though I should not
distribute apples to you with my own hand, yet
there shall be some cnc of you in my place who
shall.' He afterwards o dered a watch to be set,
and he called to him the holy, pious and wise man,
Maenach, son of Siadhal [Shiel] the chief co-arb or
successor of Comhghall, and he made his confes-
sion and will in his presence, and he took the body
of Christ from his hand, and he resigned the world
in the presence of Maenach, for he knew that he
would be killed in battle, but he did not wish that
many others should know it He also ordered

164 THE STORY OP EARLT GAELIC LITERATURE.

that his body should be brought to Cloyne if con-
venient, but if not, to convey it to the cemetery oi
Diarmuid [grand] son of Aedh Roin where he had
studied for a long time. He was very desirous^
however, of being interred at Cloyne of Mac Lenia
Maenach, however, was better pleased to have him
interred at Disert-Diarmada, for that was one of
[Saint] Comhghairs towns, and Maenach was Comhg-
hall's successor. This Maenach, son of Shiel, was
the wisest man of his time, and he now exerted
himself much, to make peace, if it were possible,
between the men of Leinster and Munster.

"Many of the forces of Munster deserted un
restrained. There was great noise too, and dissen
sion in the camp of the men of Munster at this
time, for they heard that Flann, son of Malachy *
[High King of Ireland] was in the camp of the
Leinster men [helping them] with great forces of
foot and horse. It was then Maenach said, * good
men of Munster ' said he, * you ought to accept of
the good hostages I have offered you to be placed
in the custody of pious men till May next, namely,
the son of Carroll King of Leinster, and the son of
the King of Ossory.' All the men of Munster were
saying that it was Flaherty [the abbot] son of
lonmainen alone, who compelled them to go [to
fight] into Leinster.

" After this great complaint which they made, they
came over Slieve Mairg6 from the west to Leithgh-
linn Bridge. But Tibraide, successor of Ailbhe [of
Emly], and many of the clergy along with him,
tarried at Leithghlinn, and also the servants of the
army and the horses that carried the provisions.

* In /risk ** mAOitfheAchtx^nn," pronounced *' Mweelhauch-
lin," but generally contracted to " M'Lauchlin,"

THE DANISH PERIOD. 165

" After this trumpets were blown and signals for
battle were given by the men of Munster, and
they went forwards till they came to Moy-Ailbhe. *
Here they remained with their back to a thick wood
awaiting their enemies. The men of Munster divided
themselves into three equally large battalions, Flaherty
son of lonmainen and Ceallach son of Cearbhall [Car-
roll], King of Ossory, over the first division, Cormac
mac Cullenan, King of Munster, over the middle divi-
sion, Cormac son of Mothla, King of the Deisi, and
the King of Kerry and the kings of many other tribes
of West Munster over the third division. They
afterwards came on in this order to Moy-Ailbhe.
They were querulous on account of the numbers
of the enemy, and their own fewness. Those who
were knowledgeable, that is, those who were amongst
themselves, state that the Leinstermen and their
forces amounted to three times or four times the
number of the men of Munster or more. Unsteady
was the order in which the men of Munster came
to the battle. Very pitiful was the wailing which
was in the battle, as the learned who were in the
battle relate — the shrieks of the one host in the act
of being slaughtered, and the shouts of the other
host exulting over that slaughter. There were two
causes for which the men of Munster suffered so
sudden a defeat ; for Ceileachar the brother ol
Cingegan suddenly mounted his horse and said,
'nobles of Munster,' said he, *fly suddenly from
this abominable battle, and leave it between the
clergy themselves, who could not be quiet without
coming to battle,' and afterwards he suddenly fled

* The plain where this battle of Bealach Miighna or Baliagh-
moon was fought, is in the very south of the County Kildare,
about 2^ miles to the north of the town of Carlow.

166 the: story op early gaelic literature.

accompanied by great hosts. The other cause of
the defeat was : when Ceallach son of Carroll saw
the battalion in which were the chieftains of the
king of Erin cutting down his own battalion, he
mounted his own horse and said to his own people,

* mount your horses and drive the enemy before
you/ And though he said this, it was not to
really fight he said so, but to fly. Howsoever
it resulted from these causes that the Munster
battalions fled together. Alas ! pitiful and great
was the slaughter throughout Moy-Ailbhe afterwards.
A cleric was not spared more than a layman,
there they were all equally killed. When a
layman or a clergyman was spared it was not
out of mercy it was done, but out of covetousness,
to obtain a ransom from him, or to bring him
into servitude. King Cormac, however, escaped
in the van of the first battalion, but his horse
leaped into a trench and he tell off it. When a
party of his people who were flying perceived this,
they came to the king and put him up on his
horse again. It was then he saw a foster son of
his own, a noble of the Eoghanachts, Aedh by name,
who was an adept in wisdom and pious prudence
and history and Latin, and the king said to him,

* beloved son,' said he, *do not cling by me but
take thyself out of it as well as thou canst; I
told thee before, that I should be killed in this
battle.' A few remained with Cormac, and he
came forward along the way on horseback, and
the road was besmeared throughout with much
blood of men and horses. The hind feet of his
horse slipped on the slippery way in the track of
blood, and the horse fell right back and [Cormac's]
back and neck were both broken, and he said

THE DANISH PERIOD 167

when falling *In manus tuas, domine, commendo
spiritum meum,' and he gave up the ghost j and
the impious sons of malediction came and thrust
spears through his body and cut off his head.

"Although much was the slaying on Moy-Ailbhe
to the east of the Barrow, yet the prowess of Leinster
was not satisfied with it, but they followed up the
rout westwards across Slieve-Mairg6, and slew many
noblemen in that pursuit.

" In the very beginning of the battle Ceallach son
of Carroll King of Ossory, and his son were killed
at once. Dispersedly, however, others were killed
from that out, both laity and clergy. There were
many good clergymen killed in this battle as were
also many kings and chieftains. In it was slain
Fogartach, son of Suibhne [Sweeney], an adept in
philosophy and divinity, King of Kerry, and Ailell, son
of Edghan (Owen), the distinguished young sage and
high-born nobleman, and Caiman, abbot of Cenn-
Etigh, chief ollav of the judicature of Erin, and hosts
of others also, quos argum est scribere. . . .

" Then a party came up to Flann, having the
head of Cormac with them, and 'twas what they
said to Flann, * Life and health O powerful victorious
king, and Cormac's head to thee from us, and as
is customary with kings, raise thy thigh and put
this head under it, and press it with thy thigh.*
Howsoever, Flann spoke evil to them, it was not
thanks he gave them. ' It was an awful act,'
said he, ^ to have taken off the head of the holy
bishop, but, however, I shall honour it instead of
crushing it.' Flann took the head into his hand
and kissed it and carried thrice round him the
consecrated head of the holy bishop and true
martyr. The head was afterwards honourably

1 68 THE STORY OF BAELY GAELIC LITBRATOEB,

carried away from him to the body where Maenach
son of Siadhal [Shiel] successor of Comhghall was,
and he carried the body of Cormac to Castledermot
where it was honourably interred, and where it per-
forms signs and miracles.

" Why should not the heart repine and the mind
sicken at this enormous deed, the killing and the
mangling with horrid arms of this holy man, the
most learned of all who came or shall come of the
men of Erin for ever. The complete master of
Gaedhlic and Latin, the archbishop most pious
most pure, miraculous in chastity and prayer, a
proficient in law and in every wisdom, knowledge,
and science, a paragon of poetry and learning, a
head of charity and every virtue, a sage of educa-
tion, and head-king of the whole of the two Munster
provinces in his time ! *'

" Gormly the betrothed, but afterwards repudiated
bride of Cormac, was also a poet, and there are
many pieces ascribed to her. She was, as I men-
tioned, married to Carroll, King of Leinster, who was
severely wounded in this battle. He was carried
home to be cured in his palace at Naas, and Gormly,
the queen, was constant in her attendance on him.
One day, however, as Carroll was becoming convales-
cent he fell to exulting over the mutilation of Cormac
at which he had been present. The queen, who was
sitting at the foot of his bed, rebuked him for it, and said
that the body of a good man had been most unworthily
desecrated. At this Carroll, who was still confined to
bed, became angry and kicked her over with his foot
in the presence of all her attendants and ladies.

As her father the High King would do nothing
for her, when she besought him to wipe out the

1*HE DANISH PERIOD. 1 69

insult and procure her separation from her husband,
ner young kinsman, Niall Gliin-dubh or the Black-
kneed, took up her cause, and obtained for her a
divorce from her husband, and restoration of hef
dowry. When her husband was killed by the Danes
the year after that, she married Niall, who in time
succeeded to the throne as High King of all Ireland,
and who was one of the noblest of Irish monarchs.
He, too, was rinally slain by the Danes,* and the
monarchy passed away from the houses both of
her father and her husband^ and she, the daughter
of one High King, the wife of another, bewails in her
old age the poverty and neglect into which she had
fallen. She dreamt one night that King Niall
stood beside her, and she made a leap forwards
to clasp him in her arms, but struck herself against
the bed-post, and received a wound from which she
never recovered. Many of her poems are lamenta-
tions on her kinsman and husband Niall. They
seem to have been popular amongst the Highland as
well as the Irish Gaels. Here is a specimen jotted
down in phonetic spelling by the Scotch Dean
Macgregor, about the year 151 2.

Take grey monk thy foot away,

Lift it off the grave of Neill ;
Too long thou heapest up the clay,

O'er him who cannot feel, t

* King Niall is scarcely yet forgotten. This very year the
Celtic Literary Society of Dublin, organized a pilgrimage to his
grave on Tibradden Mountain in that county,
t The first verse runs thus in modern Gaelic : —
t)eiti A mhATiAijIi te-AC "oo chof

C65 -Anoif 1 "oe chAoibh 1l6itt»
If ^(3mh6|t chtii|tif "oo chji^

A^ An ue te tui"ohinn f^iti.
Sec p. 75 of the Gaelic part of MheBco^ of the Dean of Lismon,

170 THE STOEY OP EARLY GAELIC LITERATURE

Monk, why must thou pile the earth
0*er the couch of noble Neill,

Above my friend of gentle birth
Thou strik'st thy churlish heel

Leave his clay unpressed to-night,

Mournful monk of saddest voice ;

Beneath it lies my heart's delight
Who made me to rejoice.

Monk, remove thy foot, I say,

Tread not on the sacred ground,

Where Neill is shut from me away
In cold and narrow bound.

I am Gormly — king of men

Was my father, Flann the brave;

I charge thee stand thou not again,
Bold monk upon his grave.

Some other poets of great note flourished in
Ireland in the tenth and eleventh centuries, such
as Cormac " an Eigeas " who composed the cele-
brated poem to Muircheartach or Murtagh of the
leather cloaks'^ (son of the Niall so bitterly lamen-
ted by Gormly), on the occasion of his marching
round Ireland, when setting out from his palace at
ancient Oileach he returned to it again after levy-
ing tribute and receiving hostages from every king
and sub-king in Ireland. This great O'Neill well
deserved a poet's praise, for having taken Sitric,
the Danish Lord of Dublin, Ceallachan of Munster,
the King of Leinster, and the royal heir of Connacht
as hostages, he, understanding well that in the inter-
ests of Ireland the High Kingship should be 'upheld,
positively refused to follow the advice of his own
* HA 5cochAt cuotcmn.

THE DANISH PERIOD. I7I

clan and march, as they urged, on Tara to take
hostages from Donagh the High King, On the con-
trary, he actually sent of his own accord all those
that had been given him during his circuit to Donagh
as supreme monarch of Ireland. He, on his part,
not to be out-done in magnanimity, returned them
again to Murtagh with the message that he into
whose hands they had been delivered, was the proper
person to keep them. It was to commemorate this
that Cormac wrote his poem of 256 Hnes, beginning

A mhuiAcheA|tcAi5h mlieic neitl nAi|t
Uo jViAbViAif jiaIIa Itif e-pAit.

But the names of the poets Cinaeth or Kenneth
O'Hartigan and Eochaidh O'Flynn are the most
celebrated amongst those of the tenth century.
Allusions to and quotations from the first, who
died in 975 are frequent, and nine or ten of his
poems have been preserved perfect for us. Of
O'Flynn's pieces fourteen are enumerated by O'Reilly,
containing in the aggregate between seventeen and
eighteen hundred lines. In them we find in verse
the whole early and mythical history of Ireland.
We have for instance one poem on the invasion
of Partholan, and on the invasion of the Fomorians,
another on the division of Ireland between the
sons of Partholan, another on the destruction of
the tower of Conaing and the battles between the
Fomorians and Nemedians, another on the journey
of the Nemedians from Scithia and how some
emigrated to Greece and others to Britain after
the destruction of Canaing's tower, another on the
invasion of the sons of Milesius, another on the

*0 Muircheartach son of noble Niall,
Thou hast taken hostages of Inisfail.

172 THE STORY OlF EARLY GAELIC LITERATURE.

history of Emania built by Cimbaeth some 300
years before Christ, up to its destruction by the
three CoUas in the year 331. This poet in
especial may be said to have crystallised into verse
the mythic history of Ireland with the names and
reigns of the Irish kings, and to have thrown
them into the form of real history, but whether
all that he relates had taken solid shape and form
before he versified it anew, or whether, as some
imagine, he was really the first to collect the float-
ing tribe-legends and race myths, and cast them
into the historical shape in which later annalists
record them, by fitting them into a complete scheme of
genealogical history like that of the Old Testament,
is a question which it is hard at present to decide.

About this time too lived Mac Liag, who was
Brian Boru^s secretary, and who is said — erroneously
according to O'Curry — to have written a life of
Brian Boru, and an account of the wars of Brian
in Munster, along with a number of poems. His
name will be remembered through Mangan's beauti-
ful translation of his address to Kincora the seat
of Brian's palace.

Oh where, Kincora, is Brian the great,

And where is the iDeauty that once was thine,

Oh where are the princes and nobles that sate
To feast in thy halls and drink the red wine,
Where, O Kincora ?

They are gone, those heroes of royal birth.
Who plundered no churches, who broke no trust ;

^Tis weary for me to be living on earth,
When they, O Kincora, lie low in the dust,

Low, O Kincora.

THE DANISH PERIOD. 1 73

During all this period the bardic colleges were not
neglected, but continued to flourish as before, and to
cultivate side by side law, history, and poetry. The
prosody of the Irish language as reduced to form, and
taught by the ollavs, was something unique and won-
derful, nearly three hundred different metres being
recognized and practised.

To give any adequate account of these bardic schools
and of the course pursued in them, is unfortunately
impossible within the brief space at my disposal for
this short story of our early literature. That story I
have, roughly speaking, brought down to the Danish
Period, overlapping it indeed — from the necessity of
the case — in more than one chapter. I may now take
farewell of my readers in a few verses which may serve
as a specimen of one of the best-known metres, indeed
the great official one, of the Irish bards, the celebrated
Deibhidh"^ [D'yevvee]. This metre, with all the other
artificial measures of the schools, was lost in the seven-
teenth or eighteenth century, and these lines are the
first composed in it, in either Irish or English, for
over 150 years :—

* The following are the requirements of the above metre,
requirements which were pretty vigorously observed by the bards
in later times, though I think some of the points were not reduced
to rigid rule as early as the Danish period. There are four lines
in each rann, seven syllables in each line, two or more allitera-
tions of accented syllables in each line, the words which ends the
second and fourth lines must have a syllable more than that
which ends the first and third. If the accent falls on the ulti-
mate syllable of the first and third lines it must fall on the penult
of the second and fourth, if on the penultimate of the first and
third, it must fall on the antepenultimate of the second and
fourth. There must be co-arda or Irish rhyme between the last
words of the first and second lines, and the third and fourth, but
the third and fourth also require Irish-rhyme between two oi
more words in the middle of the line.

174 THE STORY OP EARLY GAELIC LlTERATURBv

Bound thee forth my Booklet quick
To greet the Polished Piiblic.
Writ— I \^EEN\ was not my Wish--
In L^^iV'unLoyely English.

Tell of ancient Times and m^n
(The Tale is Told not 6ften)
And to-D^ y the Dust lies thick
On Learned L^Fand Lyric.

Speak the deeds of Famous Finn
Of Conn and of Cu-chiilain
Tales of TIME recorded all
In Rann and fiHYME and annaL

Cairbr^ Killed among his men
The Fenian Fall so siidden,
OSSIANixom his Seat of S6ng
By FASHION WmXhd. Headlong.

All un Wot of now, I Wis

Our Ancient Epic riches,

Yet are SEEN, though BAD and sfct

Some GiLAD to QLEANz. relic.

Glad to Glean a relic, I,
Though Mock'd I be by Many,
Take my TALE to stranger men
The QAEL the Gael is fallen

cmocYi.

n /

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