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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Early Bardic Literature, Ireland.  
+by Standish O'Grady
+
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+Title: Early Bardic Literature, Ireland.  
+
+Author: Standish O'Grady
+
+Release Date: May, 2005  [EBook #8109]
+[This file was first posted on June 15, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: US-ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, EARLY BARDIC LITERATURE, IRELAND.   ***
+
+
+
+
+Credit: Ar dTeanga Fein (www.adft.org)
+
+
+
+EARLY BARDIC LITERATURE, IRELAND.
+
+by
+
+Standish O'Grady
+
+11 Lower Fitzwilliam Street, Dublin
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Scattered over the surface of every country in Europe may be found
+sepulchral monuments, the remains of pre-historic times and
+nations, and of a phase of life will civilisation which has long
+since passed away. No country in Europe is without its cromlechs
+and dolmens, huge earthen tumuli, great flagged sepulchres, and
+enclosures of tall pillar-stones. The men by whom these works were
+made, so interesting in themselves, and so different from anything
+of the kind erected since, were not strangers and aliens, but our
+own ancestors, and out of their rude civilisation our own has
+slowly grown. Of that elder phase of European civilisation no
+record or tradition has been anywhere bequeathed to us. Of its
+nature, and the ideas and sentiments whereby it was sustained,
+nought may now be learned save by an examination of those tombs
+themselves, and of the dumb remnants, from time to time exhumed out
+of their soil--rude instruments of clay, flint, brass, and gold,
+and by speculations and reasonings founded upon these archaeological
+gleanings, meagre and sapless.
+
+For after the explorer has broken up, certainly desecrated, and
+perhaps destroyed, those noble sepulchral raths; after he has
+disinterred the bones laid there once by pious hands, and the urn
+with its unrecognisable ashes of king or warrior, and by the
+industrious labour of years hoarded his fruitless treasure of stone
+celt and arrow-head, of brazen sword and gold fibula and torque;
+and after the savant has rammed many skulls with sawdust, measuring
+their capacity, and has adorned them with some obscure label, and
+has tabulated and arranged the implements and decorations of flint
+and metal in the glazed cases of the cold gaunt museum, the
+imagination, unsatisfied and revolted, shrinks back from all that
+he has done. Still we continue to inquire, receiving from him no
+adequate response, Who were those ancient chieftains and warriors
+for whom an affectionate people raised those strange tombs? What
+life did they lead? What deeds perform? How did their personality
+affect the minds of their people and posterity? How did our
+ancestors look upon those great tombs, certainly not reared to be
+forgotten, and how did they--those huge monumental pebbles and
+swelling raths--enter into and affect the civilisation or religion
+of the times?
+
+We see the cromlech with its massive slab and immense supporting
+pillars, but we vainly endeavour to imagine for whom it was first
+erected, and how that greater than cyclopean house affected the
+minds of those who made it, or those who were reared in its
+neighbourhood or within reach of its influence. We see the stone
+cist with its great smooth flags, the rocky cairn, and huge barrow
+and massive walled cathair, but the interest which they invariably
+excite is only aroused to subside again unsatisfied. From this
+department of European antiquities the historian retires baffled,
+and the dry savant is alone master of the field, but a field which,
+as cultivated by him alone, remains barren or fertile only in
+things the reverse of exhilarating. An antiquarian museum is more
+melancholy than a tomb.
+
+But there is one country in Europe in which, by virtue of a
+marvellous strength and tenacity of the historical intellect, and
+of filial devotedness to the memory of their ancestors, there have
+been preserved down into the early phases of mediaeval civilisation,
+and then committed to the sure guardianship of manuscript, the hymns,
+ballads, stories, and chronicles, the names, pedigrees, achievements,
+and even characters, of those ancient kings and warriors over whom
+those massive cromlechs were erected and great cairns piled. There
+is not a conspicuous sepulchral monument in Ireland, the traditional
+history of which is not recorded in our ancient literature, and of
+the heroes in whose honour they were raised. In the rest of Europe
+there is not a single barrow, dolmen, or cist of which the ancient
+traditional history is recorded; in Ireland there is hardly one
+of which it is not. And these histories are in many cases as rich
+and circumstantial as that of men of the greatest eminence who have
+lived in modern times. Granted that the imagination which for
+centuries followed with eager interest the lives of these heroes,
+beheld as gigantic what was not so, as romantic and heroic what was
+neither one nor the other, still the great fact remains, that it
+was beside and in connection with the mounds and cairns that this
+history was elaborated, and elaborated concerning them and
+concerning the heroes to whom they were sacred.
+
+On the plain of Tara, beside the little stream Nemanna, itself
+famous as that which first turned a mill-wheel in Ireland, there
+lies a barrow, not itself very conspicuous in the midst of others,
+all named and illustrious in the ancient literature of the country.
+The ancient hero there interred is to the student of the Irish
+bardic literature a figure as familiar and clearly seen as any
+personage in the Biographia Britannica. We know the name he bore as
+a boy and the name he bore as a man. We know the names of his
+father and his grandfather, and of the father of his grandfather,
+of his mother, and the father and mother of his mother, and the
+pedigrees and histories of each of these. We know the name of his
+nurse, and of his children, and of his wife, and the character of
+his wife, and of the father and mother of his wife, and where they
+lived and were buried. We know all the striking events of his
+boyhood and manhood, the names of his horses and his weapons, his
+own character and his friends, male and female. We know his
+battles, and the names of those whom he slew in battle, and how he
+was himself slain, and by whose hands. We know his physical and
+spiritual characteristics, the device upon his shield, and how that
+was originated, carved, and painted, by whom. We know the colour of
+his hair, the date of his birth and of his death, and his
+relations, in time and otherwise, with the remainder of the princes
+and warriors with whom, in that mound-raising period of our
+history, he was connected, in hostility or friendship; and all this
+enshrined in ancient song, the transmitted traditions of the people
+who raised that barrow, and who laid within it sorrowing their
+brave ruler and, defender. That mound is the tomb of Cuculain, once
+king of the district in which Dundalk stands to-day, and the ruins
+of whose earthen fortification may still be seen two miles from
+that town.
+
+This is a single instance, and used merely as an example, but one
+out of a multitude almost as striking. There is not a king of
+Ireland, described as such in the ancient annals, whose barrow is
+not mentioned in these or other compositions, and every one of
+which may at the present day be identified where the ignorant
+plebeian or the ignorant patrician has not destroyed them. The
+early History of Ireland clings around and grows out of the Irish
+barrows until, with almost the universality of that primeval forest
+from which Ireland took one of its ancient names, the whole isle
+and all within it was clothed with a nobler raiment, invisible, but
+not the less real, of a full and luxuriant history, from whose
+presence, all-embracing, no part was free. Of the many poetical and
+rhetorical titles lavished upon this country, none is truer than
+that which calls her the Isle of Song. Her ancient history passed
+unceasingly into the realm of artistic representation; the history
+of one generation became the poetry of the next, until the whole
+island was illuminated and coloured by the poetry of the bards.
+Productions of mere fancy and imagination these songs are not,
+though fancy and imagination may have coloured and shaped all their
+subject-matter, but the names are names of men and women who once
+lived and died in Ireland, and over whom their people raised the
+swelling rath and reared the rocky cromlech. In the sepulchral
+monuments their names were preserved, and in the performance of
+sacred rites, and the holding of games, fairs, and assemblies in
+their honour, the memory of their achievements kept fresh, till the
+traditions that clung around these places were inshrined in tales
+which were finally incorporated in the Leabhar na Huidhre and the
+Book of Leinster.
+
+Pre-historic narrative is of two kinds--in one the imagination is
+at work consciously, in the other unconsciously. Legends of the
+former class are the product of a lettered and learned age. The
+story floats loosely in a world of imagination. The other sort of
+pre-historic narrative clings close to the soil, and to visible and
+tangible objects. It may be legend, but it is legend believed in as
+history never consciously invented, and growing out of certain
+spots of the earth's surface, and supported by and drawing its life
+from the soil like a natural growth.
+
+Such are the early Irish tales that cling around the mounds and
+cromlechs as that by which they are sustained, which was originally
+their source, and sustained them afterwards in a strong enduring
+life. It is evident that these cannot be classed with stories that
+float vaguely in an ideal world, which may happen in one place as
+well as another, and in which the names might be disarrayed without
+changing the character and consistency of the tale, and its
+relations, in time or otherwise, with other tales.
+
+Foreigners are surprised to find the Irish claim for their own
+country an antiquity and a history prior to that of the
+neighbouring countries. Herein lie the proof and the explanation.
+The traditions and history of the mound-raising period have in
+other countries passed away. Foreign conquest, or less intrinsic
+force of imagination, and pious sentiment have suffered them to
+fall into oblivion; but in Ireland they have been all preserved in
+their original fulness and vigour, hardly a hue has faded, hardly a
+minute circumstance or articulation been suffered to decay.
+
+The enthusiasm with which the Irish intellect seized upon the grand
+moral life of Christianity, and ideals so different from, and so
+hostile to, those of the heroic age, did not consume the traditions
+or destroy the pious and reverent spirit in which men still looked
+back upon those monuments of their own pagan teachers and kings,
+and the deep spirit of patriotism and affection with which the
+mind still clung to the old heroic age, whose types were warlike
+prowess, physical beauty, generosity, hospitality, love of family
+and nation, and all those noble attributes which constituted the
+heroic character as distinguished from the saintly. The Danish
+conquest, with its profound modification of Irish society, and
+consequent disruption of old habits and conditions of life, did not
+dissipate it; nor the more dangerous conquest of the Normans, with
+their own innate nobility of character, chivalrous daring, and
+continental grace and civilisation; nor the Elizabethan convulsions
+and systematic repression and destruction of all native phases of
+thought and feeling. Through all these storms, which successively
+assailed the heroic literature of ancient Ireland, it still held
+itself undestroyed. There were still found generous minds to
+shelter and shield the old tales and ballads, to feel the nobleness
+of that life of which they were the outcome, and to resolve that
+the soil of Ireland should not, so far as they had the power to
+prevent it, be denuded of its raiment of history and historic
+romance, or reduced again to primeval nakedness. The fruit of this
+persistency and unquenched love of country and its ancient
+traditions, is left to be enjoyed by us. There is not through the
+length and breadth of the country a conspicuous rath or barrow of
+which we cannot find the traditional history preserved in this
+ancient literature. The mounds of Tara, the great barrows along the
+shores of the Boyne, the raths of Slieve Mish, and Rathcrogan, and
+Teltown, the stone caiseals of Aran and Innishowen, and those that
+alone or in smaller groups stud the country over, are all, or
+nearly all, mentioned in this ancient literature, with the names
+and traditional histories of those over whom they were raised.
+
+There is one thing to be learned from all this, which is, that we,
+at least, should not suffer these ancient monuments to be
+destroyed, whose history has been thus so astonishingly preserved.
+The English farmer may tear down the barrow which is unfortunate
+enough to be situated within his bounds. Neither he nor his
+neighbours know or can tell anything about its ancient history; the
+removed earth will help to make his cattle fatter and improve his
+crops, the stones will be useful to pave his roads and build his
+fences, and the savant can enjoy the rest; but the Irish farmer
+and landlord should not do or suffer this.
+
+The instinctive reverence of the peasantry has hitherto been a
+great preservative; but the spread of education has to a
+considerable extent impaired this kindly sentiment, and the
+progress of scientific farming, and the anxiety of the Royal Irish
+Academy to collect antiquarian trifles, have already led to the
+reckless destruction of too many. I think that no one who reads the
+first two volumes of this history would greatly care to bear a hand
+in the destruction of that tomb at Tara, in which long since his
+people laid the bones of Cuculain; and I think, too, that they
+would not like to destroy any other monument of the same age, when
+they know that the history of its occupant and its own name are
+preserved in the ancient literature, and that they may one day
+learn all that is to be known concerning it. I am sure that if the
+case were put fairly to the Irish landlords and country gentlemen,
+they would neither inflict nor permit this outrage upon the
+antiquities of their country. The Irish country gentleman prides
+himself on his love of trees, and entertains a very wholesome
+contempt for the mercantile boor who, on purchasing an old place,
+chops down the best timber for the market. And yet a tree, though
+cut down, may be replaced. One elm tree is as good as another, and
+the thinned wood, by proper treatment, will be as dense as ever;
+but the ancient mound, once carted away, can never be replaced any
+more. When the study of the Irish literary records is revived, as
+it certainly will be revived, the old history of each of these
+raths and cromlechs will be brought again into the light, and one
+new interest of a beautiful and edifying nature attached to the
+landscape, and affecting wholly for good the minds of our people.
+
+Irishmen are often taunted with the fact that their history is yet
+unwritten, but that the Irish, as a nation, have been careless of
+their past is refuted by the facts which I have mentioned. A people
+who alone in Europe preserved, not in dry chronicles alone, but
+illuminated and adorned with all that fancy could suggest in
+ballad, and tale, and rude epic, the history of the mound-raising
+period, are not justly liable to this taunt. Until very modern
+times, history was the one absorbing pursuit of the Irish secular
+intellect, the delight of the noble, and the solace of the vile.
+
+At present, indeed, the apathy on this subject is, I believe,
+without parallel in the world. It would seem as if the Irish,
+extreme in all things, at one time thought of nothing but their
+history, and, at another, thought of everything but it. Unlike
+those who write on other subjects, the author of a work on Irish
+history has to labour simultaneously at a two-fold task--he has to
+create the interest to which he intends to address himself.
+
+The pre-Christian period of Irish history presents difficulties
+from which the corresponding period in the histories of other
+countries is free. The surrounding nations escape the difficulty by
+having nothing to record. The Irish historian is immersed in
+perplexity on account of the mass of material ready to his hand.
+The English have lost utterly all record of those centuries before
+which the Irish historian stands with dismay and hesitation, not
+through deficiency of materials, but through their excess. Had
+nought but the chronicles been preserved the task would have been
+simple. We would then have had merely to determine approximately
+the date of the introduction of letters, and allowing a margin on
+account of the bardic system and the commission of family and
+national history to the keeping of rhymed and alliterated verse,
+fix upon some reasonable point, and set down in order, the old
+successions of kings and the battles and other remarkable events.
+But in Irish history there remains, demanding treatment, that other
+immense mass of literature of an imaginative nature, illuminating
+with anecdote and tale the events and personages mentioned simply
+and without comment by the chronicler. It is this poetic literature
+which constitutes the stumbling-block, as it constitutes also the
+glory, of early Irish history, for it cannot be rejected and it
+cannot be retained. It cannot be rejected, because it contains
+historical matter which is consonant with and illuminates the dry
+lists of the chronologist, and it cannot be retained, for popular
+poetry is not history; and the task of distinguishing In such
+literature the fact from the fiction--where there is certainly fact
+and certainly fiction--is one of the most difficult to which the
+intellect can apply itself. That this difficulty has not been
+hitherto surmounted by Irish writers is no just reproach. For the
+last century, intellects of the highest attainments, trained and
+educated to the last degree, have been vainly endeavouring to solve
+a similar question in the far less copious and less varied heroic
+literature of Greece. Yet the labours of Wolfe, Grote, Mahaffy,
+Geddes, and Gladstone, have not been sufficient to set at rest the
+small question, whether it was one man or two or many who composed
+the Iliad and Odyssey, while the reality of the achievements of
+Achilles and even his existence might be denied or asserted by a
+scholar without general reproach. When this is the case with regard
+to the great heroes of the Iliad, I fancy it will be some time
+before the same problem will have been solved for the minor
+characters, and as it affects Thersites, or that eminent artist
+who dwelt at home in Hyla, being by far the most excellent of
+leather cutters. When, therefore, Greek still meets Greek in an
+interminable and apparently bloodless contest over the disputed
+body of the Iliad, and still no end appears, surely it would be
+madness for any one to sit down and gaily distinguish true from
+false in the immense and complex mass of the Irish bardic
+literature, having in his ears this century-lasting struggle over a
+single Greek poem and a single small phase of the pre-historic life
+of Hellas.
+
+In the Irish heroic literature, the presence or absence of the
+marvellous supplies _no test whatsoever_ as to the general truth or
+falsehood of the tale in which they appear. The marvellous is
+supplied with greater abundance in the account of the battle of
+Clontarf, and the wars of the O'Briens with the Normans, than in
+the tale in which is described the foundation of Emain Macha by
+Kimbay. Exact-thinking, scientific France has not hesitated to
+paint the battles of Louis XIV. with similar hues; and England,
+though by no means fertile in angelic interpositions, delights to
+adorn the barren tracts of her more popular histories with
+apocryphal anecdotes.
+
+How then should this heroic literature of Ireland be treated in
+connection with the history of the country? The true method would
+certainly be to print it exactly as it is without excision or
+condensation. Immense it is, and immense it must remain. No men
+living, and no men to live, will ever so exhaust the meaning of any
+single tale as to render its publication unnecessary for the study
+of others. The order adopted should be that which the bards
+themselves deter mined, any other would be premature, and I think
+no other will ever take its place. At the commencement should stand
+the passage from the Book of Invasions, describing the occupation
+of the isle by Queen Keasair and her companions, and along with it
+every discoverable tale or poem dealing with this event and those
+characters. After that, all that remains of the cycle of which
+Partholan was the protagonist. Thirdly, all that relates to Nemeth
+and his sons, their wars with curt Kical the bow-legged, and all
+that relates to the Fomoroh of the Nemedian epoch, then first
+moving dimly in the forefront of our history. After that, the great
+Fir-bolgic cycle, a cycle janus-faced, looking on one side to the
+mythological period and the wars of the gods, and on the other, to
+the heroic, and more particularly to the Ultonian cycle. In the
+next place, the immense mass of bardic literature which treats of
+the Irish gods who, having conquered the Fir-bolgs, like the Greek
+gods of the age of gold dwelt visibly in the island until the
+coming of the Clan Milith, out of Spain. In the sixth, the Milesian
+invasion, and every accessible statement concerning the sons and
+kindred of Milesius. In the seventh, the disconnected tales dealing
+with those local heroes whose history is not connected with the
+great cycles, but who in the _fasti_ fill the spaces between the
+divine period and the heroic. In the eighth, the heroic cycles, the
+Ultonian, the Temairian, and the Fenian, and after these the
+historic tales that, without forming cycles, accompany the course
+of history down to the extinction of Irish independence, and the
+transference to aliens of all the great sources of authority in the
+island.
+
+This great work when completed will be of that kind of which no
+other European nation can supply an example. Every public library
+in the world will find it necessary to procure a copy. The
+chronicles will then cease to be so closely and exclusively
+studied. Every history of ancient Ireland will consist of more or
+less intelligent comments upon and theories formed in connection
+with this great series--theories which, in general, will only be
+formed in order to be destroyed. What the present age demands upon
+the subject of antique Irish history--an exact and scientific
+treatment of the facts supplied by our native authorities--will be
+demanded for ever. It will never be supplied. The history of
+Ireland will be contained in this huge publication. In it the poet
+will find endless themes of song, the philosopher strange workings
+of the human mind, the archeologist a mass of information,
+marvellous in amount and quality, with regard to primitive ideas
+and habits of life, and the rationalist materials for framing a
+scientific history of Ireland, which will be acceptable in
+proportion to the readableness of his style, and the mode in which
+his views may harmonize with the prevailing humour and complexion
+of his contemporaries.
+
+Such a work it is evident could not be effected by a single
+individual. It must be a public and national undertaking, carried
+out under the supervision of the Royal Irish Academy, at the
+expense of the country.
+
+The publication of the Irish bardic remains in the way that I have
+mentioned, is the only true and valuable method of presenting the
+history of Ireland to the notice of the world. The mode which I
+have myself adopted, that other being out of the question, is open
+to many obvious objections; but in the existing state of the Irish
+mind on the subject, no other is possible to an individual writer.
+I desire to make this heroic period once again a portion of the
+imagination of the country, and its chief characters as familiar in
+the minds of our people as they once were. As mere history, and
+treated in the method in which history is generally written at the
+present day, a work dealing with the early Irish kings and heroes
+would certainly not secure an audience. Those who demand such a
+treatment forget that there is not in the country an interest on
+the subject to which to appeal. A work treating of early Irish
+kings, in the same way in which the historians of neighbouring
+countries treat of their own early kings, would be, to the Irish
+public generally, unreadable. It might enjoy the reputation of
+being well written, and as such receive an honourable place in
+half-a-dozen public libraries, but it would be otherwise left
+severely alone. It would never make its way through that frozen
+zone which, on this subject, surrounds the Irish mind.
+
+On the other hand, Irishmen are as ready as others to feel an
+interest in a human character, having themselves the ordinary
+instincts, passions, and curiosities of human nature. If I can
+awake an interest in the career of even a single ancient Irish
+king, I shall establish a train of thoughts, which will advance
+easily from thence to the state of society in which he lived, and
+the kings and heroes who surrounded, preceded, or followed him.
+Attention and interest once fully aroused, concerning even one
+feature of this landscape of ancient history, could be easily
+widened and extended in its scope.
+
+Now, if nothing remained of early Irish history save the dry
+_fasti_ of the chronicles and the Brehon laws, this would, I think,
+be a perfectly legitimate object of ambition, and would be
+consonant with my ideal of what the perfect flower of historical
+literature should be, to illuminate a tale embodying the former by
+hues derived from the Senchus Mor.
+
+But in Irish literature there has been preserved, along with the
+_fasti_ and the laws, this immense mass of ancient ballad, tale,
+and epic, whose origin is lost in the mists of extreme antiquity,
+and in which have been preserved the characters, relationships,
+adventures, and achievements of the vast majority of the personages
+whose names, in a gaunt nakedness, fill the books of the
+chroniclers. Around each of the greater heroes there groups itself
+a mass of bardic literature, varying in tone and statement, but
+preserving a substantial unity as to the general character and the
+more important achievements of the hero, and also, a fact upon
+which their general historical accuracy may be based with
+confidence, exhibiting a knowledge of that same prior and
+subsequent history recorded in the _fasti_. The literature which
+groups itself around a hero exhibits not only an unity with itself,
+but an acquaintance with the general course of the history of the
+country, and with preceding and succeeding kings.
+
+The students of Irish literature do not require to be told this;
+for those who are not, I would give a single instance as an
+illustration.
+
+In the  battle of Gabra, fought in the third century, and in which
+Oscar, perhaps the greatest of all the Irish heroes heading the
+Fianna Eireen, contended against Cairbry of the Liffey, King of
+Ireland, and his troops, Cairbry on his side announces to his
+warriors that he would rather perish in this battle than suffer one
+of the Fianna to survive; but while he spoke--
+
+             "Barran suddenly exclaimed--
+             'Remember Mall Mucreema, remember Art.
+
+            "'Our ancestors fell there
+              By force of the treachery of the Fians;
+              Remember the hard tributes,
+              Remember the extraordinary pride.'"
+
+Here the poet, singing only of the events of the battle of Gabra,
+shows that he was well-acquainted with all the relations subsisting
+for a long time between the Fians and the Royal family. The battle
+of Mucreema was fought by Cairbry's grandfather, Art, against Lewy
+Mac Conn and the Fianna Eireen.
+
+Again, in the tale of the battle of Moy Leana, in which Conn of the
+Hundred Battles, the father of this same Art, is the principal
+character, the author of the tale mentions many times circumstances
+relating to his father, Felimy Rectmar, and his grandfather, Tuhall
+Tectmar. Such is the whole of the Irish literature, not vague,
+nebulous, and shifting, but following the course of the _fasti_,
+and regulated and determined by them. This argument has been used
+by Mr. Gladstone with great confidence, in order to show the
+substantial historical truthfulness of the Iliad, and that it is in
+fact a portion of a continuous historic sequence.
+
+Now this being admitted, that the course of Irish history, as laid
+down by the chroniclers, was familiar to the authors of the tales
+and heroic ballads, one of two things must be admitted, either that
+the events and kings did succeed one another in the order mentioned
+by the chroniclers, or that what the chroniclers laid down was then
+taken as the theme of song by the bards, and illuminated and
+adorned according to their wont.
+
+The second of these suppositions is one which I think few will
+adopt. Can we believe it possible that the bards, who actually
+supported themselves by the amount of pleasure which they gave
+their audiences, would have forsaken those subjects which were
+already popular, and those kings and heroes whose splendour and
+achievements must have affected, profoundly, the popular
+imagination, in order to invent stories to illuminate fabricated
+names. The thing is quite impossible. A practice which we can trace
+to the edge of that period whose historical character may be proved
+to demonstration, we may conclude to have extended on into the
+period immediately preceding that. When bards illuminated with
+stories and marvellous circumstances the battle of Clontarf and the
+battle of Moyrath, we may believe their predecessors to have done
+the same for the earlier centuries. The absence of an imaginative
+literature other than historical shows also that the literature
+must have followed, regularly, the course of the history, and was
+not an archaeological attempt to create an interest in names and
+events which were found in the chronicles. It is, therefore, a
+reasonable conclusion that the bardic literature, where it reveals
+a clear sequence in the order of events, and where there is no
+antecedent improbability, supplies a trustworthy guide to the
+general course of our history.
+
+So far as the clear light of history reaches, so far may these
+tales be proved to be historical. It is, therefore, reasonable to
+suppose that the same consonance between them and the actual course
+of events which subsisted during the period which lies in clear
+light, marked also that other preceding period of which the light
+is no longer dry.
+
+The earliest manuscript of these tales is the Leabhar [Note: Leabar
+na Heera.] na Huidhre, a work of the eleventh century, so that we
+may feel sure that we have them in a condition unimpaired by the
+revival of learning, or any archaeological restoration or
+improvement. Now, of some of these there have been preserved copies
+in other later MSS., which differ very little from the copies
+preserved in the Leabhar na Huidhre, from which we may conclude
+that these tales had arrived at a fixed state, and a point at which
+it was considered wrong to interfere with the text.
+
+The feast of Bricrind is one of the tales preserved in this
+manuscript. The author of the tale in its present form, whenever he
+lived, composed it, having before him original books which he
+collated, using his judgment at times upon the materials to his
+hand. At one stage he observes that the books are at variance on a
+certain point, namely, that at which Cuculain, Conal the
+Victorious, and Laery Buada go to the lake of Uath in order to be
+judged by him. Some of the books, according to the author, stated
+that on this occasion the two latter behaved unfairly, but he
+agreed with those books which did not state this.
+
+We have, therefore, a tale penned in the eleventh century, composed
+at some time prior to this, and itself collected, not from oral
+tradition, but from books. These considerations would, therefore,
+render it extremely probable that the tales of the Ultonian period,
+with which the Leabhar na Huidhre is principally concerned, were
+committed to writing at a very early period.
+
+To strengthen still further the general historic credibility of
+these tales, and to show how close to the events and heroes
+described must have been the bards who originally composed them, I
+would urge the following considerations.
+
+With the advent of Christianity the mound-raising period passed
+away. The Irish heroic tales have their source in, and draw their
+interest from, the mounds and those laid in them. It would,
+therefore, be extremely improbable that the bards of the Christian
+period, when the days of rath and cairn had departed, would modify,
+to any considerable extent, the literature produced in conditions
+of society which had passed away.
+
+Again, with the advent of Christianity, and the hold which the new
+faith took upon the finest and boldest minds in the country, it is
+plain that the golden age of bardic composition ended. The loss to
+the bards was direct, by the withdrawal of so much intellect from
+their ranks, and indirect, by the general substitution of other
+ideas for those whose ministers they themselves were. It is,
+therefore, probable that the age of production and creation, with
+regard to the ethnic history, ceased about the fifth and sixth
+centuries, and that, about that time, men began to gather up into a
+collected form the floating literature connected with the pagan
+period. The general current of mediaeval opinion attributes the
+collection of tales and ballads now known as the Tan-Bo-Cooalney to
+St. Ciaran, the great founder of the monastery of Clonmacnoise.
+
+But if this be the case, we are enabled to take another step in the
+history of this most valuable literature. The tales of the Leabhar
+na Huidhre are in prose, but prose whose source and original is
+poetry. The author, from time to time, as if quoting an authority,
+breaks out with verse; and I think there is no Irish tale in
+existence without these rudimentary traces of a prior metrical
+cycle. The style and language are quite different, and indicate two
+distinct epochs. The prose tale is founded upon a metrical
+original, and composed in the meretricious style then in fashion,
+while the old metrical excerpts are pure and simple. This is
+sufficient, in a country like Ireland in those primitive times, to
+necessitate a considerable step into the past, if we desire to get
+at the originals upon which the prose tales were founded.
+
+For in ancient Ireland the conservatism of the people was very
+great. It is the case in all primitive societies. Individual,
+initiative, personal enterprise are content to work within a very
+small sphere. In agriculture, laws, customs, and modes of literary
+composition, primitive and simple societies are very adverse to
+change.
+
+When we see how closely the Christian compilers followed the early
+authorities, we can well believe that in the ethnic times no mind
+would have been sufficiently daring or sacrilegious to alter or
+pervert those epics which were in their eyes at the same time true
+and sacred.
+
+In the perusal of the Irish literature, we see that the strength of
+this conservative instinct has been of the greatest service in the
+preservation of the early monuments in their purity. So much is
+this the case, that in many tales the most flagrant contradictions
+appear, the author or scribe being unwilling to depart at all from
+that which he found handed down. For instance, in the "Great Breach
+of Murthemney," we find Laeg at one moment killed, and in the next
+riding black Shanglan off the field. From this conservatism and
+careful following of authority, and the _littera scripta_, or word
+once spoken, I conclude that the distance in time between the prose
+tale and the metrical originals was very great, and, unless under
+such exceptional circumstances as the revolution caused by the
+introduction of Christianity, could not have been brought about
+within hundreds of years. Moreover, this same conservatism would
+have caused the tales concerning heroes to grow very slowly once
+they were actually formed. All the noteworthy events of the hero's
+life and his characteristics must have formed the original of the
+tales concerning him, which would have been composed during his
+life, or not long after his death.
+
+I have not met a single tale, whether in verse or prose, in which
+it is not clearly seen that the author was not following
+authorities before him. Such traces of invention or decoration as
+may be met with are not suffered to interfere with the conduct of
+the tale and the statement of facts. They fill empty niches and
+adorn vacant places. For instance, if a king is represented as
+crossing the sea, we find that the causes leading to this, the
+place whence he set out, his companions, &c., are derived from the
+authorities, but the bard, at the same time, permits himself to
+give what seems to him to be an eloquent or beautiful description
+of the sea, and the appearance presented by the many-oared galleys.
+And yet the last transcription or recension of the majority of the
+tales was effected in Christian times, and in an age characterised
+by considerable classical attainments--a time when the imagination
+might have been expected to shake itself loose from old restraints,
+and freely invent. _A fortiori_, the more ancient bards, those of
+the ruder ethnic times, would have clung still closer to authority,
+deriving all their imaginative representations from preceding
+minstrels. There was no conscious invention at any time. Each cycle
+and tale grew from historic roots, and was developed from actual
+fact. So much may indeed be said for the more ancient tales, but
+the Ultonian cycle deals with events well within the historic
+period.
+
+The era of Concobar Mac Nessa and the Red Branch knights of Ulster
+was long subsequent to the floruerunt of the Irish gods and their
+Titan-like opponents of this latter period, the names alone can be
+fairly held to be historic. What swells out the Irish chronicles to
+such portentous dimensions is the history of the gods and giants
+rationalised by mediaeval historians. Unable to ignore or excide
+what filled so much of the imagination of the country, and unable,
+as Christians, to believe in the divinity of the Tuatha De Danan
+and their predecessors, they rationalised all the pre-Milesian
+record. But the disappearance of the gods does not yet bring us
+within the penumbra of history. After the death of the sons of
+Milesius we find a long roll of kings. These were all topical
+heroes, founders of nations, and believed, by the tribes and tribal
+confederacies which they founded, to have been in their day the
+chief kings of Ireland. The point fixed upon by the accurate and
+sceptical Tiherna as the starting-point of trustworthy Irish
+history, was one long subsequent to the floruerunt of the gods; and
+the age of Concobar Mac Nessa and his knights was more than two
+centuries later than that of Kimbay and the foundation of Emain
+Macha. The floruit of Cuculain, therefore, falls completely within
+the historical penumbra, and the more carefully the enormous, and
+in the main mutually consistent and self-supporting, historical
+remains dealing with this period are studied, the more will this be
+believed. The minuteness, accuracy, extent, and verisimilitude of
+the literature, chronicles, pedigrees, &c., relating to this
+period, will cause the student to wonder more and more as he
+examines and collates, seeing the marvellous self-consistency and
+consentaneity of such a mass of varied recorded matter. The age,
+indeed, breathes sublimity, and abounds with the marvellous, the
+romantic, and the grotesque. But as I have already stated, the
+presence or absence of these qualities has no crucial significance.
+Love and reverence and the poetic imagination always effect such
+changes in the object of their passion. They are the essential
+condition of the transference of the real into the world of art.
+AEval, of Carriglea, the fairy queen of Munster, is one of the most
+important characters in the history of the battle of Clontarf, the
+character of which, and of the events that preceded and followed
+its occurrence, and the chieftains and warriors who fought on one
+side and the other, are identical, whether described by the bard
+singing, or by the monkish chronicler jotting down in plain prose
+the fasti for the year. The reader of these volumes can make such
+deductions as he pleases, on this account, from the bardic history
+of the Red Branch, and clip the wings of the tale, so that it may
+with him travel pedestrian. I know there are others, like myself,
+who will not hesitate for once to let the fancy roam and luxuriate
+in the larger spaces and freer airs of ancient song, nor fear that
+their sanity will be imperilled by the shouting of semi-divine
+heroes, and the sight of Cuculain entering battles with the Tuatha
+De Danan around him.
+
+I hope on some future occasion to examine more minutely the
+character and place in literature of the Irish bardic remains, and
+put forward here these general considerations, from which the
+reader may presume that the Ultonian cycle, dealing as it does with
+Cuculain and his contemporaries, is in the main true to the facts
+of the time, and that his history, and that of the other heroes who
+figure in these volumes, is, on the whole, and omitting the
+marvellous, sufficiently reliable. I would ask the reader, who may
+be inclined to think that the principal character is too chivalrous
+and refined for the age, to peruse for himself the tale named the
+"Great Breach of Murthemney." He will there, and in many other
+tales and poems besides, see that the noble and pathetic interest
+which attaches to his character is substantially the same as I have
+represented in these volumes. But unless the student has read the
+whole of the Ultonian cycle, he should be cautious in condemning a
+departure in my work from any particular version of an event which
+he may have himself met. Of many minor events there are more than
+one version, and many scenes and assertions which he may think of
+importance would yet, by being related, cause inconsistency and
+contradiction. Of the nature of the work in which all should be
+introduced I have already given my opinion.
+
+For the rest, I have related one or two great events in the life of
+Cuculain in such a way as to give a description as clear and
+correct as possible of his own character and history as related by
+the bards, of those celebrated men and women who were his
+contemporaries and of his relations with them, of the gods and
+supernatural powers in whom the people then believed, and of the
+state of civilisation which then prevailed. If I have done my task
+well, the reader will have been supplied, without any intensity of
+application on his part--a condition of the public mind upon which
+no historian of this country should count--with some knowledge of
+ancient Irish history, and with an interest in the subject which
+may lead him to peruse for himself that ancient literature, and to
+read works of a more strictly scientific nature upon the subject
+than those which I have yet written. But until such an interest is
+aroused, it is useless to swell the mass of valuable critical
+matter, which everyone at present is very well content to leave
+unread.
+
+In the first volume, however, I have committed this error, that I
+did not permit it to be seen with sufficient clearness that the
+characters and chief events of the tale are absolutely historic;
+and that much of the colouring, inasmuch as its source must have
+been the centuries immediately succeeding the floruerunt of those
+characters, is also reliable as history, while the remainder is
+true to the times and the state of society which then obtained. The
+story seems to progress too much in the air, too little in time and
+space, and seems to be more of the nature of legend and romance
+than of actual historic fact seen through an imaginative medium.
+Such is the history of Concobar Mac Nessa and his knights--historic
+fact seen through the eyes of a loving wonder.
+
+Indeed, I must confess that the blaze of bardic light which
+illuminates those centuries at first so dazzled the eye and
+disturbed the judgment, that I saw only the literature, only the
+epic and dramatic interest, and did not see as I should the
+distinctly historical character of the age around which that
+literature revolves, wrongly deeming that a literature so noble,
+and dealing with events so remote, must have originated mainly or
+altogether in the imagination. All the borders of the epic
+representation at which, in the first volume, I have aimed, seem to
+melt, and wander away vaguely on every side into space and time. I
+have now taken care to remedy that defect, supplying to the unset
+picture the clear historical frame to which it is entitled. I will
+also request the reader, when the two volumes may diverge in tone
+or statement, to attach greater importance to the second, as the
+result of wider and more careful reading and more matured
+reflection.
+
+A great English poet, himself a severe student, pronounced the
+early history of his own country to be a mere scuffling of kites
+and crows, as indeed are all wars which lack the sacred bard, and
+the sacred bard is absent where the kites and crows pick out his
+eyes. That the Irish kings and heroes should succeed one another,
+surrounded by a blaze of bardic light, in which both themselves and
+all those who were contemporaneous with them are seen clearly and
+distinctly, was natural in a country where in each little realm or
+sub-kingdom the ard-ollav was equal in dignity to the king, which
+is proved by the equivalence of their cries. The dawn of English
+history is in the seventh century--a late dawn, dark and sombre,
+without a ray of cheerful sunshine; that of Ireland dates reliably
+from a point before the commencement of the Christian era luminous
+with that light which never was on sea or land--thronged with
+heroic forms of men and women--terrible with the presence of the
+supernatural and its over-arching power.
+
+Educated Irishmen are ignorant of, and indifferent to, their
+history; yet from the hold of that history they cannot shake
+themselves free. It still haunts the imagination, like Mordecai at
+Haman's gate, a cause of continual annoyance and vexation. An
+Irishman can no more release himself from his history than he can
+absolve himself from social and domestic duties. He may outrage it,
+but he cannot placidly ignore. Hence the uneasy, impatient feeling
+with which the subject is generally regarded.
+
+I think that I do not exaggerate when I say that the majority of
+educated Irishmen would feel grateful to the man who informed them
+that the history of their country was valueless and unworthy of
+study, that the pre-Christian history was a myth, the post-Christian
+mere annals, the mediaeval a scuffling of kites and crows, and the
+modern alone deserving of some slight consideration. That writer
+will be in Ireland most praised who sets latest the commencement
+of our history. Without study he will be pronounced sober and
+rational before the critic opens the book. So anxious is the Irish
+mind to see that effaced which it is conscious of having neglected.
+
+There are two compositions which affect an interest comparable to
+that which Ireland claims for her bardic literature, One is the
+Ossian of MacPherson, the other the Nibelungen Lied.
+
+If we are to suppose Macpherson faithfully to have written down,
+printed, and published the floating disconnected poems which he
+found lingering in the Scotch highlands, how small, comparatively,
+would be their value as indications of antique thought and feeling,
+reduced then for the first time to writing, sixteen hundred years
+after the time of Ossian and his heroes, in a country not the home
+of those heroes, and destitute of the regular bardic organisation.
+The Ossianic tales and poems still told and sung by the Irish
+peasantry at the present day in the country of Ossian and Oscar,
+would be, if collected even now, quite as valuable, if not more so.
+Truer to the antique these latter are, for in them the cycles are
+not blended. The Red Branch heroes are not confused with Ossian's
+Fianna.
+
+But MacPherson's Ossian is not a translation. In the publications
+of the Irish Ossianic poetry we see what that poetry really was--
+rude, homely, plain-spoken, leagues removed from the nebulous
+sublimity of MacPherson.
+
+With regard to the other, the Germans, who naturally desire to
+refer its composition to as remote a date as possible, and who
+arguing from no scientific data, but only style, ascribe the
+authorship of the Nibelungen to a poet living in the latter part of
+the twelfth century. Be it remembered, that the poem does not
+purport to be a collection of the scattered fragments of a cycle,
+but an original composition, then actually imagined and written. It
+does not even purport to deal with the ethnic times. _Its heroes
+are Christian heroes. They attend Mass._ The poem is not true, even
+to the leading features of the late period of history in which it
+is placed, if it have any habitat in the world of history at all.
+Attila, who died A.D. 450, and Theodoric, who did not die until the
+succeeding century, meet as coevals.
+
+Turn we now from the sole boast of Germany to one out of a hundred
+in the Irish bardic literature. The Tan-bo-Cooalney was transcribed
+into the Leabhar na Huidhre in the eleventh century a manuscript
+whose date has been established by the consentaneity of Irish,
+French, and German scholarship. Mark, it was transcribed, not
+composed. The scribe records the fact:--
+
+  "Ego qui scripsi hanc historian aut vero fabulam, quibusdam fidem
+  in hac historia aut fabula non commodo."
+
+The Tan-bo-Cooalney was therefore _transcribed_ by an ancient
+penman to the parchment of a still existing manuscript, in the
+century before that in which the German epic is presumed, from
+style only, and in the opinion of Germans, to have been _composed_.
+
+The same scribe adds this comment with regard to its contents:--
+
+  "Qaedam autem poetica figmenta, quaedam ad delectationem
+  stultorum."
+
+Such scorn could not have been felt by one living in an age of
+bardic production. That independence and originality of thought,
+which caused Milton to despise the poets of the Restoration, are
+impossible in the simple stages of civilisation. The scribe who
+appended this very interesting comment to the subject of his own
+handiwork must have been removed by centuries from the date of its
+compilation. That the tale was, in his time, an ancient one, is
+therefore rendered extremely probable, the scribe himself
+indicating how completely out of sympathy he is with this form of
+literature, its antiquity and peculiar archaeological interest
+being, doubtless, the cause of the transcription.
+
+Again, a close study of its contents, as of the contents of all the
+Irish historic tales, proves that in its present form, whenever
+that form was superadded, it is but a representation in prose of a
+pre-existing metrical original. Under this head I have already made
+some remarks, which, I shall request the reader to re-peruse [Note:
+Pages 23 to 27]
+
+Once more, it deals with a particular event in Irish history, and
+with distinct and definite kings, heroes, and bards, who flourished
+in the epoch of which it treats. In the synchronisms of Tiherna, in
+the metrical chronology of Flann, in all the various historical
+compositions produced in various parts of the country, the main
+features and leading characters of the Tan-bo-Cooalney suffer no
+material change, while the minor divergencies show that the
+chronology of the annals and annalistic poems were not drawn from
+the tale, but owe their origin to other sources. Moreover, this
+epic is but a portion of the great Ultonian or Red Branch cycle,
+all the parts of which pre-suppose and support one another; and
+that cycle is itself a portion of the history of Ireland, and
+pre-supposes other preceding and succeeding cyles, preceding and
+succeeding kings. The event of which this epic treats occurred at
+the time of the Incarnation, and its characters are the leading
+Irish kings and warriors of that date. Such is the Tan-bo-Cooalney.
+
+This being so, how have the English literary classes recognised, or
+how treated, our claim to the possession of an antique literature
+of peculiar historical interest, and by reason of that antiquity, a
+matter of concern to all Aryan nations? The conquest has not more
+constituted the English Parliament guardian and trustee of Ireland,
+for purposes of legislation and government, than it has vested the
+welfare and fame of our literature and antiquities in the hands of
+English scholarship. London is the headquarters of the intellectualism
+and of the literary and historical culture of the Empire. It is the
+sole dispenser of fame. It alone influences the mind of the country
+and guides thought and sentiment. It can make and mar reputations.
+What it scorns or ignores, the world, too, ignores and scorns. How
+then has the native literature of Ireland been treated by the
+representatives of English scholarship and literary culture? Mr.
+Carlyle is the first man of letters of the day, his the highest
+name as a critic upon, and historian of, the past life of Europe.
+Let us hear him upon this subject, admittedly of European
+importance.
+
+Miscellaneous Essays, Vol. III., page 136. "Not only as the oldest
+Tradition of Modern Europe does it--the Nibelungen--possess a high
+antiquarian interest, but farther, and even in the shape we now see
+it under, unless the epics of the son of Fingal had some sort of
+authenticity, it is our oldest poem also."
+
+Poor Ireland, with her hundred ancient epics, standing at the door
+of the temple of fame, or, indeed, quite behind the vestibule out
+of the way! To see the Swabian enter in, crowned, to a flourish of
+somewhat barbarous music, was indeed bad enough, but Mr. MacPherson!
+
+They manage these things rather better in France, _vide passim_ "La
+Revue Celtique."
+
+Of the literary value of the bardic literature I fear to write at
+all, lest I should not know how to make an end. Rude indeed it is,
+but great. Like the central chamber of that huge tumulus [Note: New
+Grange anciently Cnobgha, and now also Knowth.] on the Boyne,
+overarched with massive unhewn rocks, its very ruggedness strikes
+an awe which the orderly arrangement of smaller and more reasonable
+thoughts, cut smooth by instruments inherited from classic times,
+fails so often to inspire. The labour of the Attic chisel may be
+seen since its invention in every other literary workshop of
+Europe, and seen in every other laboratory of thought the
+transmitted divine fire of the Hebrew. The bardic literature of
+Erin stands alone, as distinctively and genuinely Irish as the race
+itself, or the natural aspects of the island. Rude indeed it is,
+but like the hills which its authors tenanted with gods, holding
+dells [Note: Those sacred hills will generally be found to have
+this character.] of the most perfect beauty, springs of the most
+touching pathos. On page 33, Vol. I., will be seen a poem [Note:
+Publications of Ossianic Society, page 303, Vol. IV.] by Fionn upon
+the spring-time, made, as the old unknown historian says, to prove
+his poetic powers--a poem whose antique language relegates it to a
+period long prior to the tales of the Leabhar na Huidhre, one
+which, if we were to meet side by side with the "Ode to Night," by
+Alcman, in the Greek anthology, we would not be surprised; or those
+lines on page 203, Vol. I., the song of Cuculain, forsaken by his
+people, watching the frontier of his country--
+
+      "Alone in defence of the Ultonians,
+       Solitary keeping ward over the province"
+
+or the death [Note: Publications of Ossianic Society, Vol. I.] of
+Oscar, on pages 34 and 35, Vol. I., an excerpt condensed from the
+Battle of Gabra. Innumerable such tender and thrilling passages.
+
+To all great nations their history presents itself under the aspect
+of poetry; a drama exciting pity and terror; an epic with unbroken
+continuity, and a wide range of thought, when the intellect is
+satisfied with coherence and unity, and the imagination by extent
+and diversity. Such is the bardic history of Ireland, but with this
+literary defect. A perfect epic is only possible when the critical
+spirit begins to be in the ascendant, for with the critical spirit
+comes that distrust and apathy towards the spontaneous literature
+of early times, which permit some great poet so to shape and alter
+the old materials as to construct a harmonious and internally
+consistent tale, observing throughout a sense of proportion and a
+due relation of the parts. Such a clipping and alteration of the
+authorities would have seemed sacrilege to earlier bards. In
+mediaeval Ireland there was, indeed, a subtle spirit of criticism;
+but under its influence, being as it was of scholastic origin, no
+great singing men appeared, re-fashioning the old rude epics; and
+yet, the very shortcomings of the Irish tales, from a literary
+point of view, increase their importance from a historical. Of
+poetry, as distinguised from metrical composition, these ancient
+bards knew little. The bardic literature, profoundly poetic though
+it be, in the eyes of our ancestors was history, and never was
+anything else. As history it was originally composed, and as
+history bound in the chains of metre, that it might not be lost or
+dissipated passing through the minds of men, and as history it was
+translated into prose and committed to parchment. Accordingly, no
+tale is without its defects as poetry, possessing therefore
+necessarily, a corresponding value as history. But that there was
+in the country, in very early times, a high and rare poetic culture
+of the lyric kind, native in its character, ethnic in origin,
+unaffected by scholastic culture which, as we know, took a
+different direction; that one exquisite poem, in which the father
+of Ossian praises the beauty of the springtime in anapaestic
+[Note: Cettemain | cain ree! | ro sair | an cuct |
+"He, Fionn MacCool, learned the three compositions which distinguish
+the poets, the TEINM LAEGHA, the IMUS OF OSNA, and the DICEDUE
+DICCENAIB, and it was then Fionn composed this poem to prove
+his poetry." In which of these three forms of metre the Ode to
+the spring-time is written I know not. Its form throughout is
+distinctly anapaestic.--S. O'G.] verse, would, even though it
+stood alone, both by the fact of its composition and the fact
+of its preservation, fully prove.
+
+Much and careful study, indeed, it requires, if we would compel
+these ancient epics to yield up their greatness or their beauty, or
+even their logical coherence and imaginative unity--broken,
+scattered portions as they all are of that one enormous epic, the
+bardic history of Ireland. At the best we read without the key. The
+magic of the names is gone, or can only be partially recovered by
+the most tender and sympathetic study. Indeed, without reading all
+or many, we will not understand the superficial meaning of even
+one. For instance, in one of the many histories of Cuculain's many
+battles, we read this--
+
+"It was said that Lu Mac AEthleen was assisting him."
+
+This at first seems meaningless, the bard seeing no necessity for
+throwing further light on the subject; but, as we wander through
+the bardic literature, gradually the conception of this Lu grows
+upon the mind--the destroyer of the sons of Turann--the implacably
+filial--the expulsor of the Fomoroh--the source of all the
+sciences--the god of the Tuatha De Danan--the protector and
+guardian of Cuculain--Lu Lamfada, son of Cian, son of Diancect, son
+of Esric, son of Dela, son of Ned the war-god, whose tomb or
+temple, Aula Neid, may still be seen beside the Foyle. This
+enormous and seemingly chaotic mass of literature is found at all
+times to possess an inner harmony, a consistency and logical unity,
+to be apprehended only by careful study.
+
+So read, the sublimity strikes through the rude representation.
+Astonished at himself, the student, who at first thinks that he has
+chanced upon a crowd of barbarians, ere long finds himself in the
+august presence of demi-gods and heroes.
+
+A noble moral tone pervades the whole. Courage, affection, and truth
+are native to all who live in this world. Under the dramatic image
+of Ossian wrangling with the Talkend, [Note: St. Patrick, on account
+of the tonsured crown.] the bards, themselves vainly fighting against
+the Christian life, a hundred times repeat through the lips of Ossian
+like a refrain--
+
+      "We, the Fianna of Erin, never uttered falsehood,
+       Lying was never attributed to us;
+       By courage and the strength of our hands
+       We used to come out of every difficulty."
+
+Again: Fergus, the bard, inciting Oscar to his last battle--in that
+poem called the Rosc Catha of Oscar:--
+
+      "Place thy hand on thy gentle forehead
+       Oscar, who never lied."
+[Note: Publications of Ossianic Society, p. 159; vol. i.]
+
+And again, elsewhere in the Ossianic poetry:--
+
+      "Oscar, who never wronged bard or woman."
+
+Strange to say, too, they inculcated chastity (see p. 257; vol.
+i.), an allusion taken from the "youthful adventures of Cuculain,"
+Leabhar na Huidhre.
+
+The following ancient rann contains the four qualifications of a
+bard:--
+
+      "Purity of hand, bright, without wounding,
+       Purity of mouth, without poisonous satire,
+       Purity of learning, without reproach,
+       Purity, as a husband, in wedlock."
+
+Moreover, through all this literature sounds a high clear note of
+chivalry, in this contrasting favourably with the Iliad, where no
+man foregoes an advantage. Cuculain having slain the sons of Neara,
+"thought it unworthy of him to take possession of their chariot and
+horses." [Note: P. 155; vol. i.] Goll Mac Morna, in the Fenian or
+Ossianic cycle, declares to Conn Cedcathah [Note: Conn of the
+hundred battles.] that from his youth up he never attacked an enemy
+by night or under any disadvantage, and many times we read of
+heroes preferring to die rather than outrage their geisa. [Note:
+Certain vows taken with their arms on being knighted.]
+
+A noble literature indeed it is, having too this strange interest,
+that though mainly characterised by a great plainness and
+simplicity of thought, and, in the earlier stages, of expression,
+we feel, oftentimes, a sudden weirdness, a strange glamour shoots
+across the poem when the tale seems to open for a moment into
+mysterious depths, druidic secrets veiled by time, unsunned caves
+of thought, indicating a still deeper range of feeling, a still
+lower and wider reach of imagination. A youth came once to the
+Fianna Eireen encamped at Locha Lein [Note: The Lakes of
+Killarney.], leading a hound dazzling white, like snow. It was the
+same, the bard simply states, that was once a yew tree, flourishing
+fifty summers in the woods of Ioroway. Elsewhere, he is said to
+have been more terrible than the sun upon his flaming wheels. What
+meant this yew tree and the hound? Stray allusions I have met, but
+no history. The spirit of Coelte, visiting one far removed in time
+from the great captain of the Fianna, with a different name and
+different history, cries:--
+
+      "I was with thee, with Finn"--
+
+giving no explanation.
+
+To MacPherson, however, I will do this justice, that he had the
+merit to perceive, even in the debased and floating ballads of the
+highlands, traces of some past greatness and sublimity of thought,
+and to understand, he, for the first time, how much more they meant
+than what met the ear. But he saw, too, that the historical origin
+of the ballads, and the position in time and place of the heroes
+whom they praised, had been lost in that colony removed since the
+time of St. Columba from its old connection with the mother
+country. Thus released from the curb of history, he gave free rein
+to the imagination, and in the conventional literary language of
+sublimity, gave full expression to the feelings that arose within
+him, as to him, pondering over those ballads, their gigantesque
+element developed into a greatness and solemnity, and their
+vagueness and indeterminateness into that misty immensity and weird
+obscurity which, as constituent factors in a poem, not as
+back-ground, form one of the elements of the false sublime. Either
+not seeing the literary necessity of definiteness, or having no
+such abundant and ordered literature as we possess, upon which to
+draw for details, and being too conscientious to invent facts,
+however he might invent language, he published his epics of Ossian--
+false indeed to the original, but true to himself, and to the
+feelings excited by meditation upon them. This done, he had not
+sufficient courage to publish also the rude, homely, and often
+vulgar ballads--a step which, in that hard critical age, would have
+been to expose himself and his country to swift contempt. The
+thought of the great lexicographer riding rough-shod over the poor
+mountain songs which he loved, and the fame which he had already
+acquired, deterred and dissuaded him, if he had ever any such
+intention, until the opportunity was past.
+
+MacPherson feared English public opinion, and fearing lied. He
+declared that to be a translation which was original work, thus
+relegating himself for ever to a dubious renown, and depriving his
+country of the honest fame of having preserved through centuries,
+by mere oral transmission, a portion, at least, of the antique
+Irish literature. To the magnanimity of his own heroes he could not
+attain:--
+
+      "Oscar, Oscar, who feared not armies--
+       Oscar, who never lied."
+
+Of some such error as MacPherson's I have myself, with less excuse,
+been guilty, in chapters xi. and xii., Vol. I., where I attempt to
+give some conception of the character of the Ossianic cycle. The
+age and the heroes around whom that cycle revolves have, in the
+history of Ireland, a definite position in time; their battles,
+characters, several achievements, relationships, and pedigrees;
+their Duns, and trysting-places, and tombs; their wives, musicians,
+and bards; their tributes, and sufferings, and triumphs; their
+internecine and other wars--are all fully and clearly described in
+the Ossianic cycle. They still remain demanding adequate treatment,
+when we arrive at the age of Conn [Note: See page 20.], Art, and
+Cormac, kings of Tara in the second and third centuries of the
+Christian era. All have been forgotten for the sake of a vague
+representation of the more sublime aspects of the cycle, and the
+meretricious seductions of a form of composition easy to write and
+easy to read, and to which the unwary or unwise often award praise
+to which it has no claim.
+
+On the other hand, chapter xi. purports only to be a representation
+of the feelings excited by this literature, and for every assertion
+there is authority in the cycle. Chapter xii., however, is a
+translation from the original. Every idea which it contains, except
+one, has been taken from different parts of the Ossianic poems, and
+all together expressthe graver attitude of the mind of Ossian
+towards the new faith. That idea, occurring in a separate paragraph
+in the middle of the page, though prevalent as a sentiment
+throughout all the conversations of Ossian with St. Patrick, has
+been, as it stands, taken from a meditation on life by St.
+Columbanus, one of the early Irish Saints--a meditation which, for
+subtle thought, for musical resigned sadness, tender brooding
+reflection, and exquisite Latin, is one of the masterpieces of
+mediaeval composition.
+
+To the casual reader of the bardic literature the preservation of
+an ordered historical sequence, amidst that riotous wealth of
+imaginative energy, may appear an impossibility. Can we believe
+that forestine luxuriance not to have overgrown all highways, that
+flood of superabundant song not have submerged all landmarks? Be
+the cause what it may, the fact remains that they did not. The
+landmarks of history stand clear and fixed, each in its own place
+unremoved; and through that forest-growth the highways of history
+run on beneath over-arching, not interfering, boughs. The age of
+the predominance of Ulster does not clash with the age of the
+predominance of Tara; the Temairian kings are not mixed with the
+contemporary Fians. The chaos of the Nibelungen is not found here,
+nor the confusion of the Scotch ballads blending all the ages into
+one.
+
+It is not imaginative strength that produces confusion, but
+imaginative weakness. The strong imagination which perceives
+definitely and realises vividly will not tolerate that obscurity so
+dear to all those who worship the eidola of the cave. Of each of
+these ages, the primary impressions were made in the bardic mind
+during the life-time of the heroes who gave to the epoch its
+character; and a strong impression made in such a mind could not
+have been easily dissipated or obscured. For it must be remembered,
+that the bardic literature of Ireland was committed to the custody
+of guardians whose character we ought not to forget. The bards were
+not the people, but a class. They were not so much a class as an
+organisation and fraternity acknowledging the authority of one
+elected chief. They were not loose wanderers, but a power in the
+State, having duties and privileges. The ard-ollav ranked next to
+the king, and his eric was kingly. Thus there was an educated body
+of public opinion entrusted with the preservation of the literature
+and history of the country, and capable of repressing the
+aberrations of individuals.
+
+But the question arises, Did they so repress such perversions of
+history as their wandering undisciplined members might commit?
+Too much, of course, must not reasonably be expected. It was an
+age of creative thought, and such thought is difficult to control;
+but that one of the prime objects and prime works of the bards, as
+an organisation, was to preserve a record of a certain class of
+historical facts is certain. The succession of the kings and of the
+great princely families was one of these. The tribal system, with
+the necessity of affinity as a ground of citizenship, demanded such
+a preservation of pedigrees in every family, and particularly in
+the kingly houses. One of the chief objects of the triennial feis
+of Tara was the revision of such records by the general assembly of
+the bards, under the presidency of the Ard-Ollav of Ireland. In the
+more ancient times, such records were rhymed and alliterated, and
+committed to memory--a practice which, we may believe on the
+authority of Caesar, treating of the Gauls, continued long after
+the introduction of letters. Even at those local assemblies also,
+which corresponded to great central and national feis of Tara, the
+bards were accustomed to meet for that purpose. In a poem [Note:
+O'Curry's Manners and Customs, Vol. I., page 543.], descriptive of
+the fair [Note: On the full meaning of this word "fair," see Chap.
+xiii., Vol. I.] of Garman, we see this--
+
+      "Feasts with the great feasts of Temair,
+       Fairs with the fairs of Emania,
+       Annals there are verified."
+
+In the existing literature we see two great divisions. On the one
+hand the epical, a realm of the most riotous activity of thought;
+on the other, the annalistic and genealogical, bald and bare to the
+last degree, a mere skeleton. They represent the two great
+hemispheres of the bardic mind, the latter controlling the former.
+Hence the orderly sequence of the cyclic literature; hence the
+strong confining banks between which the torrent of song rolls down
+through those centuries in which the bardic imagination reached its
+height. The consentaneity of the annals and the literature
+furnishes a trustworthy guide to the general course of history,
+until its guidance is barred by _a priori_ considerations of a
+weightier nature, or by the statements of writers, having sources
+of information not open to us. For instance, the stream of Irish
+history must, for philosophical reasons, be no further traceable
+than to that point at which it issues from the enchanted land of
+the Tuatha De Danan. At the limit at which the gods appear, men and
+history must disappear; while on the other hand, the statement of
+Tiherna, that the foundation of Emain Alacha by Kimbay is the first
+certain date in Irish history, renders it undesirable to attach
+more historical reality of characters, adorning the ages prior to
+B.C. 299, than we could to such characters as Romulus in Roman, or
+Theseus in Athenian history.
+
+I desire here to record my complete and emphatic dissent from the
+opinions advanced by a writer in Hermathena on the subject of the
+Ogham inscriptions, and the introduction into this country of the
+art of writing. A cypher, i.e., an alphabet derived from a
+pre-existing alphabet, the Ogham may or may not have been. I
+advance no opinion upon that, but an invention of the Christian
+time it most assuredly was not. No sympathetic and careful student
+of the Irish bardic literature can possibly come to such a
+conclusion. The bardic poems relating to the heroes of the ethnic
+times are filled with allusions to Ogham inscriptions on stone, and
+contain some references to books of timber; but in my own reading I
+have not met with a single passage in that literature alluding to
+books of parchment and to rounded letters.
+
+If the Ogham was derived from the Roman characters introduced by
+Christian missionaries, then these characters would be the more
+ancient, and Ogham the more modern; books and Roman characters
+would be the more poetical, and inscriptions on stone and timber in
+the Ogham characters the more prosaic. The bards relating the lives
+and deeds of the ancient heroes, would have ascribed to their times
+parchment books and the Roman characters, not stone and wood, and
+the Ogham.
+
+In these compositions, whenever they were reduced to the form in
+which we find them to-day, the ethnic character of the times and
+the ethnic character of the heroes are clearly and universally
+observed. The ancient, the remote, the archaic clings to this
+literature. As Homer does not allude to writing, though all
+scholars agree that he lived in a lettered age, so the old bards do
+not allude to parchment and Roman characters, though the Irish
+epics, as distinguished from their component parts, reached their
+fixed state and their final development in times subsequent to the
+introduction of Christianity.
+
+When and how a knowledge of letters reached this island we know
+not. From the analogy of Gaul, we may conclude that they were
+known for some time prior to their use by the bards. Caesar tells
+us that the Gaulish bards and druids did not employ letters for the
+preservation of their lore, but trusted to memory, assisted,
+doubtless, as in this country, by the mechanical and musical aid of
+verse. Whether the Ogham was a native alphabet or a derivative
+from another, it was at first employed only to a limited extent.
+Its chief use was to preserve the name of buried kings and heroes
+in the stone that was set above their tombs. It was, perhaps,
+invented, and certainly became fashionable on this account,
+straight strokes being more easily cut in stone than rounded or
+uncial characters. For the same reason it was generally employed by
+those who inscribed timber tablets, which formed the primitive
+book, ere they discovered or learned how to use pen, ink, and
+parchment. The use of Ogham was partially practised in the
+Christian period for sepultural purposes, being venerable and
+sacred from time. Hence the discovery of Ogham-inscribed stones in
+Christian cemeteries. On the other hand, the fact that the majority
+of these stones are discovered in raths and forts, i.e., the tombs
+of our Pagan ancestors, corroborates the fact implied in all the
+bardic literature, that the characters employed in the ethnic times
+were Oghamic, and affords another proof of the close conservative
+spirit of the bards in their transcription, compilation, or
+reformation of the old epics.
+
+The full force of the concurrent authority of the bardic literature
+to the above effect can only be felt by one who has read that
+literature with care. He will find in all the epics no trace of
+original invention, but always a studied and conscientious
+following of authority. This being so, he will conclude that the
+universal ascription of Ogham, and Ogham only, to the ethnic times,
+arises solely from the fact that such was the alphabet then
+employed.
+
+If letters were unknown in those times, the example of Homer shows
+how unlikely the later poets would have been to outrage so
+violently the whole spirit of the heroic literature. If rounded
+letters were then used, why the universal ascription of the late
+invented Ogham which, as we know from the cemeteries and other
+sources, was unpopular in the Christian age.
+
+Cryptic, too, it was not. The very passages quoted in Hermathena
+to support this opinion, so far from doing so prove actually the
+reverse. When Cuculain came down into Meath on his first [Note:
+Vol. I., page 155.] foray, he found, on the lawn of the Dun of the
+sons of Nectan, a pillar stone with this inscription in Ogham--"Let
+no one pass without an offer of a challenge of single combat." The
+inscription was, of course, intended for all to read. Should there
+be any bardic passage in which Ogham inscriptions are alluded to as
+if an obscure form of writing, the natural explanation is, that
+this kind of writing was passing or had passed into desuetude at
+the time that particular passage was composed; but I have never met
+with any such. The ancient bard, who, in the Tan-bo-Cooalney,
+describes the slaughter of Cailitin and his sons by Cuculain,
+states that there was an inscription to that effect, written in
+Ogham, upon the stone over their tomb, beginning thus--"Take
+notice"--evidently intended for all to read. The tomb, by the way,
+was a rath--again showing the ethnic character of the alphabet.
+
+In the Annals of the Four Masters, at the date 1499 B.C., we read
+these words:--
+
+"THE FLEET OF THE SONS OF MILITH CAME TO IRELAND TO TAKE IT FROM
+THE TUATHA DE DANAN," i.e., the gods of the ethnic Irish.
+
+Without pausing to enquire into the reasonableness of the date, it
+will suffice now to state that at this point the bardic history of
+Ireland cleaves asunder into two great divisions--the mythological
+or divine on the one hand, and the historical or heroic-historical
+on the other. The first is an enchanted land--the world of the
+Tuatha De Danan--the country of the gods. There we see Mananan with
+his mountain-sundering sword, the Fray-garta; there Lu Lamfada, the
+deliverer, pondering over his mysteries; there Bove Derg and his
+fatal [Note: Every feast to which he came ended in blood. He was
+present at the death of Conairey Mor, Chap. xxxiii., Vol. I.]
+swine-herd, Lir and his ill-starred children, Mac Manar and his
+harp shedding death from its stricken wires, Angus Og, the
+beautiful, and he who was called the mighty father, Eochaidht
+[Note: Ay-o-chee, written Yeoha in Vol. I.] Mac Elathan, a land
+populous with those who had partaken of the feast of Goibneen, and
+whom, therefore, weapons could not slay, who had eaten [Note: In
+early Greek literature the province of history has been already
+separated from that of poetry. The ancient bardic lore and
+primaeval traditions were refined to suit the new and sensitive
+poetic taste. No commentator has been able to explain the nature of
+ambrosia. In the genuine bardic times, no such vague euphuism would
+have been tolerated as that of Homer on this subject. The nature of
+Olympian ambrosia would have been told in language as clear as that
+in which Homer describes the preparation of that Pramnian bowl for
+which Nestor and Machaon waited while Hecamede was grating over it
+the goat's milk cheese, or that in which the Irish bards described
+the ambrosia of the Tuatha De Danan, which, indeed, was no more
+poetic and awe-inspiring than plain bacon prepared by Mananan from
+his herd of enchanted pigs, living invisible like himself in the
+plains of Tir-na-n-Og, the land of the ever-young. On the other
+hand, there is a vagueness about the Feed Fia which would seem to
+indicate the growth of a more awe-stricken mood in describing
+things supernatural. The Faed Fia of the Greek gods has been
+refined by Homer into "much darkness," which, from an artistic
+point of view, one can hardly help imagining that Homer nodded as
+he wrote.] at the the table of Mananan, and would never grow old,
+who had invented for themselves the Faed Fia, and might not be seen
+of the gross eyes of men; there steeds like Anvarr crossing the wet
+sea like a firm plain; there ships whose rudder was the will, and
+whose sails and oars the wish, of those they bore [Note: Cf. The
+barks of the Phoenicians in the Odyssey.]; there hounds like that
+one of Ioroway, and spears like fiery flying serpents. These are
+the Tuatha De Danan [Note: A mystery still hangs over this
+three-formed name. The full expression, Tuatha De Danan, is that
+generally employed, less frequently Tuatha De, and sometimes, but
+not often, Tuatha. Tuatha also means people. In mediaeval times the
+name lost its sublime meaning, and came to mean merely "fairy," no
+greater significance, indeed, attaching to the invisible people of
+the island after Christianity had destroyed their godhood.], fairy
+princes, Tuatha; gods, De; of Dana, Danan, otherwise Ana and the
+Moreega, or great queen; mater [Note: Cormac's Glossary] deorum
+Hibernensium--"well she used to cherish [Note: Scholiast noting
+same Glossary.] the gods." Limitless, this divine population,
+dwelling in all the seas and estuaries, river and lakes, mountains
+and fairy dells, in that enchanted Erin which was theirs.
+
+But they have not started into existence suddenly, like the gods of
+Rome, nor is their genealogy confined to a single generation like
+those of Greece. Behind them extends a long line of ancestors, and
+a history reaching into the remotest depths of the past. As the
+Greek gods dethroned the Titans, so the Irish gods drove out or
+subjected the giants of the Fir-bolgs; but in the Irish mythology,
+we find both gods and giants descended from other ancient races of
+deities, called the Clanna Nemedh and the Fomoroh, and these a
+branch of a divine cycle; yet more ancient the race of Partholan,
+while Partholan himself is not the eldest.
+
+The history of the Italian gods is completely lost. For all that
+the early Roman literature tells us of their origin, they may have
+been either self-created or eternal. Rome was a seedling shaken
+from some old perished civilisation. The Romans created their own
+empire, but they inherited their gods. They supply no example of
+an Aryan nation evolving its own mythology and religion. Regal
+Rome, as we know from Niebuhr, was not the root from which our
+Rome sprang, but an old imperial city, from whose ashes sprang
+that Rome we all know so well. The mythology of the Latin writers
+came to them full-grown.
+
+The gods of Greece were a creation of the Greek mind, indeed; but
+of their ancestry, i.e., of their development from more ancient
+divine tribes, we know little. Like Pallas, they all but start into
+existence suddenly full-grown. Between the huge physical entities
+of the Greek theogonists and the Olympian gods, there intervenes
+but a single generation. For this loss of the Grecian mythology,
+and this substitution of Nox and Chaos for the remote ancestors of
+the Olympians, we have to thank the early Greek philosophers, and
+the general diffusion of a rude scientific knowledge, imparting a
+physical complexion to the mythological memory of the Greeks.
+
+In the theogony of the ancient inhabitants of this country, we have
+an example of a slowly-growing, slowly-changing mythology, such as
+no other nation in the world can supply. The ancestry of the Irish
+gods is not bounded by a single generation or by twenty. The Tuatha
+De Danan of the ancient Irish are the final outcome and last
+development of a mythology which we can see advancing step by step,
+one divine tribe pushing out another, one family of gods swallowing
+up another, or perishing under the hands of time and change, to
+make room for another. From Angus Og, the god of youth and love and
+beauty, whose fit home was the woody slopes of the Boyne, where it
+winds around Rosnaree, we count fourteen generations to Nemedh and
+four to Partholan, and Partholan is not the earliest. As the bards
+recorded with a zeal and minuteness, so far as I can see, without
+parallel, the histories of the families to which they were
+adscript, so also they recorded with equal patience and care the
+far-extending pedigrees of those other families--invisible indeed,
+but to them more real and more awe-inspiring--who dwelt by the
+sacred lakes and rivers, and in the folds of the fairy hills, and
+the great raths and cairns reared for them by pious hands.
+
+The extent, diversity, and populousness of the Irish mythological
+cycles, the history of the Irish gods, and the gradual growth of
+that mythology of which the Tuatha De Danan, i.e., the gods of the
+historic period, were the final development, can only be rightly
+apprehended by one who reads the bardic literature as it deals with
+this subject. That literature, however, so far from having been
+printed and published, has not even been translated, but still
+moulders in the public libraries of Europe, those who, like myself,
+are not professed Irish scholars, being obliged to collect their
+information piece-meal from quotations and allusions of those who
+have written upon the subject in the English or Latin language. For
+to read the originals aright needs many years of labour, the Irish
+tongue presenting at different epochs the characteristics of
+distinct languages, while the peculiarities of ancient caligraphy,
+in the defaced and illegible manuscripts, form of themselves quite
+a large department of study. Stated succinctly, the mythological
+record of the bards, with its chronological decorations, runs thus:--
+
+AGE OF KEASAIR.
+
+2379 B.C. the gods of the KEASAIRIAN cycle, Bith, Lara, and
+Fintann, and their wives, KEASAIR, Barran and Balba; their sacred
+places, Carn Keshra, Keasair's tomb or temple, on the banks of the
+Boyle, Ard Laran on the Wexford Coast, Fert Fintann on the shores
+of Lough Derg.
+
+About the same time Lot Luaimenich, Lot of the Lower Shannon, an
+ancient sylvan deity.
+
+AGE OF PARTHOLAN AND THE EARLIEST FOMORIAN GODS.
+
+2057 B.C. a new spiritual dynasty, of which PARTHOLAN was father
+and king. Though their worship was extended over Ireland, which is
+shown by the many different places connected with their history,
+yet the hill of Tallaght, ten miles from Dublin, was where they
+were chiefly adored. Here to the present day are the mounds and
+barrows raised in honour of the deified heroes of this cycle,
+PARTHOLAN himself, his wife Delgna, his sons, Rury, Slaney, and
+Laighlinni, and among others, the father of Irish hospitality,
+bearing the expressive name of Beer. Now first appear the Fomoroh
+giant princes, under the leadership of curt Kical, son of Niul, son
+of Garf, son of U-Mor--a divine cycle intervening between KEASAIR
+and PARTHOLAN, but not of sufficient importance to secure a
+separate chapter and distinct place in the annals. Battles now
+between the Clan Partholan and the Fomoroh, on the plain of Ith,
+beside the river Finn, Co. Donegal, so called from Ith [Note: See
+Vol. I, p. 60], son of Brogan, the most ancient of the heroes,
+slain here by the Tuatha De Danan, but more anciently known by some
+lost Fomorian name; also at Iorrus Domnan, now Erris, Co. Mayo,
+where Kical and his Fomorians first reached Ireland. These battles
+are a parable--objective representations of a fact in the mental
+history of the ancient Irish--typifying the invisible war waged
+between Partholanian and Fomorian deities for the spiritual
+sovereignty of the Gael.
+
+AGE OF THE NEMEDIAN GODS AND SECOND CYCLE OF THE FOMORIANS.
+
+1700 B.C. age of the NEMEDIAN divinities, a later branch of the
+PARTHOLANIAN _vide post_ NEMEDIAN pedigree. NEMEDH, his wife Maca
+(first appearance of Macha, the war goddess, who gave her name to
+Armagh, i.e., Ard Macha, the Height of Macha), Iarbanel; Fergus,
+the Red-sided, and Starn, sons of Nemedh; Beothah, son of Iarbanel;
+Erglann, son of Beoan, son of Starn; Simeon Brac, son of Starn;
+Ibath, son of Beothach; Britan Mael, son of Fergus. This must be
+remembered, that not one of the almost countless names that figure
+in the Irish mythology is of fanciful origin. They all represent
+antique heroes and heroines, their names being preserved in
+connection with those monuments which were raised for purposes of
+sepulture or cult.
+
+Wars now between the Clanna Nemedh and the second cycle of the
+Fomoroh, led this time by Faebar and More, sons of Dela, and
+Coning, son of Faebar; battles at Ros Freachan, now Rosreahan,
+barony of Murresk, Co. Mayo, at Slieve Blahma [Note: Slieve
+Blahma, now Slieve Bloom, a mountain range famous in our mythology;
+one of the peaks, Ard Erin, sacred to Eire, a goddess of the Tuatha
+De Danan, who has given her name to the island. The sites of all
+these mythological battles, where they are not placed in the
+haunted mountains, will be found to be a place of raths and
+cromlechs.] and Murbolg, in Dalaradia (Murbolg, i.e., the
+stronghold of the giants,) also at Tor Coning, now Tory Island.
+
+FIRBOLGS AND THIRD CYCLE OF THE FOMOROH.
+
+1525 B.C. Age of the FIRBOLGS and third cycle of the Fomorians,
+once gods, but expulsed from their sovereignty by the Tuatha De
+Danan, after which they loom through the heroic literature as
+giants of the elder time, overthrown by the gods. From the FIRBOLGS
+were descended, or claimed to have descended, the Connaught
+warriors who fought with Queen Meave against Cuculain, also the
+Clan Humor, appearing in the Second Volume, also the heroes of
+Ossian, the Fianna Eireen. Even in the time of Keating, Irish
+families traced thither their pedigrees. The great chiefs of the
+FIR-BOLGIC dynasty were the five sons of Dela, Gann, Genann,
+Sengann, Rury, and Slaney, with their wives Fuad, Edain, Anust,
+Cnucha, and Libra; also their last and most potent king, EOCAIDH
+MAC ERC, son of Ragnal, son of Genann, whose tomb or temple may be
+seen to-day at Ballysadare, Co. Sligo, on the edge of the sea.
+
+The Fomorians of this age were ruled over by Baler Beimenna and
+his wife Kethlenn. Their grandson was Lu Lamada, one of the
+noblest of the Irish gods.
+
+The last of the mythological cycles is that of the Tuatha De Danan,
+whose character, attributes, and history will, I hope, be rendered
+interesting and intelligible in my account of Cuculain and the Red
+Branch of Ulster.
+
+Irish history has suffered from rationalism almost more than from
+neglect and ignorance. The conjectures of the present century are
+founded upon mediaeval attempts to reduce to verisimilitude and
+historical probability what was by its nature quite incapable of
+such treatment. The mythology of the Irish nation, being relieved
+of the marvellous and sublime, was set down with circumstantial
+dates as a portion of the country's history by the literary men of
+the middle ages. Unable to excide from the national narrative those
+mythological beings who filled so great a place in the imagination
+of the times, and unable, as Christians, to describe them in their
+true character as gods, or, as patriots, in the character which
+they believed them to possess, namely, demons, they rationalized
+the whole of the mythological period with names, dates, and ordered
+generations, putting men for gods, flesh and blood for that
+invisible might, till the page bristled with names and dates, thus
+formulating, as annals, what was really the theogony and mythology
+of their country. The error of the mediaeval historians is shared
+by the not wiser moderns. In the generations of the gods we seem to
+see prehistoric racial divisions and large branches of the Aryan
+family, an error which results from a neglect of the bardic
+literature, and a consequently misdirected study of the annals.
+
+As history, the pre-Milesian record contains but a limited supply
+of objective truths; but as theogony, and the history of the Irish
+gods, these much abused chronicles are as true as the roll of the
+kings of England.
+
+These divine nations, with their many successive generations and
+dynasties, constitute a single family; they are all inter-connected
+and spring from common sources, and where the literature permits
+us to see more clearly, the earlier races exhibit a common
+character. Like a human clan, the elements of this divine family
+grew and died, and shed forth seedlings which, in time, over-grew
+and killed the parent stock. Great names became obscure and passed
+away, and new ones grew and became great. Gods, worshipped by the
+whole nation, declined and became topical, and minor deities
+expanding, became national. Gods lost their immortality, and were
+remembered as giants of the old time--mighty men, which were of
+yore, men of renown.
+
+      "The gods which were of old time rest in their tombs,"
+
+sang the Egyptians, consciously ascribing mortality even to gods.
+Such was Mac Ere, King of Fir-bolgs. His temple [Note: Strand near
+Ballysadare, Co. Sligo], beside the sea at Iorrus Domnan [Note:
+Keating--evidently quoting a bardic historian], became his tomb.
+Daily the salt tide embraces the feet of the great tumulus, regal
+amongst its smaller comrades, where the last king of Fir-bolgs was
+worshipped by his people. "Good [Note: Temple--vide post.] were the
+years of the sovereignty of Mac Ere. There was no wet or
+tempestuous weather in Ireland, nor was there any unfruitful year."
+Such were all the predecessors of the children of Dana--gods which
+were of old times, that rest in their tombs; and the days, too, of
+the Tuatha De Danan were numbered. They, too, smitten by a more
+celestial light, vanished from their hills, like Ossian lamenting
+over his own heroes; those others still mightier, might say:--
+
+     "Once every step which we took might be heard throughout the
+   firmament. Now, all have gone, they have melted into the air."
+
+But that divine tree, though it had its branches in fairy-land, had
+its roots in the soil of Erin. An unceasing translation of heroes
+into Tir-na-n-og went on through time, the fairy-world of the
+bards, receiving every century new inhabitants, whose humbler human
+origin being forgotten, were supplied there with both wives and
+children. The apotheosis of great men went forward, tirelessly; the
+hero of one epoch becoming the god of the next, until the formation
+of the Tuatha De Danan, who represent the gods of the historic
+ages. Had the advent of exact genealogy been delayed, and the
+creative imagination of the bards suffered to work on for a couple
+of centuries longer, unchecked by the historical conscience,
+Cuculain's human origin would, perhaps, have been forgotten, and he
+would have been numbered amongst the Tuatha De Danan, probably, as
+the son of Lu Lamfada and the Moreega, his patron deities. It was,
+indeed, a favourite fancy of the bards that not Sualtam, but Lu
+Lamfada himself, was his father; this, however, in a spiritual or
+supernatural sense, for his age was far removed from that of the
+Tuatha De Danan, and falling well within the scope of the historic
+period. Even as late as the time of Alexander, the Greeks could
+believe a great contemporary warrior to be of divine origin, and
+the son of Zeus.
+
+When the Irish bards began to elaborate a general history of their
+country, they naturally commenced with the enumeration of the elder
+gods. I at one time suspected that the long pedigrees running
+between those several divisions of the mythological period were the
+invention of mediaeval historians, anxious to spin out the national
+record, that it might reach to Shinar and the dispersion. Not only,
+however, was such fabrication completely foreign to the genius of
+the literature, but in the fragments of those early divine cycles,
+we see that each of these personages was at one time the centre of
+a literature, and holds a definite place as regards those who went
+before and came after. These pedigrees, as I said before, have no
+historical meaning, being pre-Milesian, and therefore absolutely
+prehistoric; but as the genealogy of the gods, and as representing
+the successive generations of that invisible family, whose history
+not one or ten bards, but the whole bardic and druidic organisation
+of the island, delighted to record, collate, and verify--those
+pedigrees are as reliable as that of any of the regal clans. They
+represent accurately the mythological panorama, as it unrolled
+itself slowly through the centuries before the imagination and
+spirit of our ancestors accurately that divine drama, millennium--
+lasting, with its exits and entrances of gods. Millennium-lasting,
+and more so, for it is plain that one divine generation represents
+on the average a much greater space of time than a generation of
+mortal men. The former probably represents the period which would
+elapse before a hero would become so divine, that is, so
+consecrated in the imagination of the country, as to be received
+into the family of the gods. Cuculain died in the era of the
+Incarnation, three hundred years, if not more, before the country
+even began to be Christianised, yet he is never spoken of as
+anything but a great hero, from which one of two things would
+follow, either that the apotheosis of heroes needed the lapse of
+centuries, or that, during the first, second, third, and fourth
+centuries, the historical conscience was so enlightened, and a
+positive definite knowledge of the past so universal, that the
+translation of heroes into the divine clans could no longer take
+place. The latter is indeed the more correct view; but the reader
+will, I think, agree with me that the divine generations, taken
+generally, represent more than the average space of man's life. To
+what remote unimagined distances of time those earlier cycles
+extend has been shown by an examination of the tombs of the lower
+Moy Tura. The ancient heroes there interred were those who, as
+Fir-bolgs, preceded the reign of the Tuath De Danan, coming long
+after the Clanna Nemedh in the divine cycle, who were themselves
+preceded by the children of Partholan, who were subsequent to the
+Queen Keasair. Such then being the position in the divine cycle of
+the Fir-bolgs, an examination of the Firbolgic raths on Moy Tura
+has revealed only implements of stone, proving demonstratively that
+the early divine cycles originated before the bronze age in
+Ireland, whenever that commenced. Those heroes who, as Fir-bolgs,
+received divine honours, lived in the age of stone. So far is it
+from being the case, that the mythological record has been extended
+and unduly stretched, to enable the monkish historians to connect
+the Irish pedigrees with those of the Mosaic record, that it has, I
+believe, been contracted for this purpose.
+
+The reader will be now prepared to peruse with some interest and
+understanding one or two of the mythological pedigrees. To these I
+have at times appended the dates, as given in the chronicles, to
+show how the early historians rationalised the pre-historic record.
+
+Angus Og, the Beautiful, represents the Greek Eros. He was surnamed
+Og, or young; Mac-an-Og, or the son of youth; Mac-an-Dagda, son of
+the Dagda. He was represented with a harp, and attended by bright
+birds, his own transformed kisses, at whose singing love arose in
+the hearts of youths and maidens. To him and to his father the
+great tumulus of New Grange, upon the Boyne, was sacred.
+
+      "I visited the Royal Brugh that stands
+       By the dark-rolling waters of the Boyne,
+       Where Angus Og magnificently dwells."
+
+He was the patron god of Diarmid, the Paris of Ossian's Fianna, and
+removed him into Tir-na-n-Og, when he died, having been ripped by
+the tusks of the wild boar on the peaks of Slieve Gulban.
+
+Lu Lamfada was the patron god of Cuculain. He was surnamed Ioldana,
+as the source of the sciences, and represented the Greek Apollo.
+The latter was argurgurotoxos [Transcriber's Note: Greek in the
+original], but Lu was a sling bearing god. Of Fomorian descent
+on the mother's side, he joined his father's people, the Tuatha
+De Danan, in the great war against the Fomoroh. He is principally
+celebrated for his oppression of the sons of Turann, in vengeance
+for the murder of his father.
+
+ANGUS OG, (circa 1500 B.C.)           LU LAMFADA, (circa 1500 B.C.)
+   son of                                son of
+THE DAGDA, (Zeus)                     Cian,
+   son of                                son of
+Elathan,                              Diancect, (god the healer)
+   son of                                son of
+Dela,                                 Esric,
+   son of                                son of
+Ned,                                  Dela,
+   son of                                son of
+Indaei,                               Ned,
+   son of                                son of
+                                      Indaei,
+                                         son of
+                       ALLDAEI.
+
+Amongst other Irish gods was Bove Derg, who dwelt invisible in
+the Galtee mountains, and in the hills above Lough Derg. The
+transformed children alluded to in Vol. I. were his grand-children.
+It was his goldsmith Len, who gave its ancient name to the Lakes of
+Killarney, Locha Lein. Here by the lake he worked, surrounded by
+rainbows and showers of fiery dew.
+
+Mananan was the god of the sea, of winds and storms, and most
+skilled in magic lore. He was friendly to Cuculain, and was invoked
+by seafaring men. He was called the Far Shee of the promontories.
+
+BOVE DERG (circa 1500 B.C.)           MANANAN (circa 1500 B.C.)
+   son of                                son of
+Eocaidh Garf,                         Alloid,
+   son of                                son of
+Duach Temen,                          Elathan,
+   son of                                son of
+Bras,                                 Dela,
+   son of                                son of
+Dela,                                 Ned,
+   son of                                son of
+Ned,                                  Indaei,
+   son of                                son of
+Indaei,
+   son of
+                       ALLDAEI.
+
+The Tuatha De Danan maybe counted literally by the hundred, each
+with a distinct history, and all descended from Alldaei.
+
+From Alldaei the pedigree runs back thus:--
+
+               Alldaei
+                 son of
+               Tath,
+                 son of
+               Tabarn,
+                 son of
+               Enna,
+                 son of
+               Baath,
+                 son of
+               Ebat,
+                 son of
+               Betah,
+                 son of
+               Iarbanel,
+                 son of
+        NEMEDH (circa 1700 B.C.)
+
+Nemedh, as I have said, forms one of the great epochs in the
+mythological record. As will be seen, he and the earlier Partholan
+have a common source:--
+
+NEMEDH
+   son of
+Sera,
+   son of
+Pamp,
+   son of
+Tath,                                 PARTHOLAN (2000 B.C.)
+   son of                                son of
+                   Sera,
+                     son of
+                   Sru,
+                     son of
+                   Esru,
+                     son of
+                   Pramant.
+
+The connection between Keasair, the earliest of the Irish gods, and
+the rest of the cycle, I have not discovered, but am confident of
+its existence.
+
+How this divine cycle can be expunged from the history of Ireland I
+am at a loss to see. The account which a nation renders of itself
+must, and always does, stand at the head of every history.
+
+How different is this from the history and genealogy of the Greek
+gods which runs thus:--
+
+         The Olympian gods,
+             Titans,
+         Physical entities, Nox, Chaos, &c.
+
+The Greek gods, undoubtedly, had a long ancestry extending into the
+depths of the past, but the sudden advent of civilisation broke up
+the bardic system before the historians could become philosophical,
+or philosophers interested in antiquities.
+
+But the Irish history corrects our view with regard to other
+matters connected with the gods of the Aryan nations of Europe
+also.
+
+All the nations of Europe lived at one time under the bardic and
+druidic system, and under that system imagined their gods and
+elaborated their various theogonies, yet, in no country in Europe
+has a bardic literature been preserved except in Ireland, for no
+thinking man can believe Homer to have been a product of that rude
+type of civilisation of which he sings. This being the case, modern
+philosophy, accounting for the origin of the classical deities by
+guesses and _a priori_ reasonings, has almost universally adopted
+that explanation which I have, elsewhere, called Wordsworthian, and
+which derives them directly from the imagination personifying the
+aspects of nature.
+
+     "In that fair clime, the lonely herdsman, stretched
+      On the soft grass through half a summer's day,
+      With music lulled his indolent repose,
+      And in some fit of weariness if he,
+      When his own breath was silent, chanced to hear
+      A distant strain far sweeter than the sounds
+      Which his poor skill could make, his fancy fetched,
+      Even from the blazing chariot of the sun,
+      A beardless youth who touched a golden lute
+      And filled the illumined groves with ravishment--
+      ***
+              "Sunbeams upon distant hills,
+      Gliding apace with shadows in their train,
+      Might, with small help from fancy, be transformed
+      Into fleet oreads, sporting visibly."
+
+This is pretty, but untrue. In all the ancient Irish literature we
+find the connection of the gods, both those who survived into the
+historic times, and those whom they had dethroned, with the raths
+and cairns perpetually and almost universally insisted upon. The
+scene of the destruction of the Firbolgs will be found to be a
+place of tombs, the metropolis of the Fomorians a place of tombs,
+and a place of tombs the sacred home of the Tuatha along the shores
+of the Boyne. Doubtless, they are represented also as dwelling in
+the hills, lakes, and rivers, but still the connection between the
+great raths and cairns and the gods is never really forgotten. When
+the floruit of a god has expired, he is assigned a tomb in one of
+the great tumuli. No one can peruse this ancient literature without
+seeing clearly the genesis of the Irish gods, _videlicet_ heroes,
+passing, through the imagination and through the region of poetic
+representation, into the world of the supernatural. When a king
+died, his people raised his ferta, set up his stone, and engraved
+upon it, at least in later times, his name in ogham. They
+celebrated his death with funeral lamentations and funeral games,
+and listened to the bards chanting his prowess, his liberality, and
+his beauty. In the case of great warriors, these games and
+lamentations became periodical. It is distinctly recorded in many
+places, for instance in connection with Taylti, who gave her name
+to Taylteen and Garman, who gave her name to Loch Garman, now
+Wexford, and with Lu Lamfada, whose annual worship gave its name to
+the Kalends of August. Gradually, as his actual achievements became
+more remote, and the imagination of the bards, proportionately,
+more unrestrained, he would pass into the world of the supernatural.
+Even in the case of a hero so surrounded with historic light as
+Cuculain we find a halo, as of godhood, often settling around him.
+His gray warsteed had already passed into the realm of mythical
+representation, as a second avatar of the Liath Macha, the grey
+war-horse of the war-goddess Macha. This could be believed, even
+in the days when the imagination was controlled by the annalists
+and tribal heralds.
+
+The gods of the Irish were their deified ancestors. They were not
+the offspring of the poetic imagination, personifying the various
+aspects of nature. Traces, indeed, we find of their influence over
+the operations of nature, but they are, upon the whole, slight and
+unimportant. From nature they extract her secrets by their
+necromantic and magical labours, but nature is as yet too great to
+be governed and impelled by them. The Irish Apollo had not yet
+entered into the sun.
+
+Like every country upon which imperial Rome did not leave the
+impress of her genius, Ireland, in these ethnic times, attained
+only a partial unity. The chief king indeed presided at Tara, and
+enjoyed the reputation and emoluments flowing to him on that
+account, but, upon the whole, no Irish king exercised more than a
+local sovereignty; they were all reguli, petty kings, and their
+direct authority was small. This being the case, it would appear to
+me that in the more ancient times the death of a king would not be
+an event which would disturb a very extensive district, and that,
+though his tomb might be considerable, it would not be gigantic.
+
+Now on the banks of the Boyne, opposite Rosnaree, there stands a
+tumulus, said to be the greatest in Europe. It covers acres of
+ground, being of proportionate height. The earth is confined by a
+compact stone wall about twelve feet high. The central chamber,
+made of huge irregular pebbles, is about twenty feet from ground to
+roof, communicating with the outer air by a flagged passage.
+Immense pebbles, drawn from the County of Antrim, stand around it,
+each of which, even to move at all, would require the labour of
+many men, assisted with mechanical appliances. It is, of course,
+impossible to make an accurate estimate of the expenditure of
+labour necessary for the construction of such a work, but it would
+seem to me to require thousands of men working for years. Can we
+imagine that a petty king of those times could, after his death,
+when probably his successor had enough to do to sustain his new
+authority, command such labour merely to provide for himself a
+tomb. If this tomb were raised to the hero whose name it bears
+immediately after his death, and in his mundane character, he must
+have been such a king as never existed in Ireland, even in the late
+Christian times. Even Brian of the Tributes himself, could not have
+commanded such a sepulture, or anything like it, living though he
+did, probably, two thousand years later than that Eocaidh Mac
+Elathan, whenever he did live. There is a _nodus_ here needing a
+god to solve it.
+
+Returning now to what would most likely take place after the
+interment of a hero, we may well imagine that the size of his tomb
+would be in proportion to the love which he inspired, where no
+accidental causes would interfere with the gratification of that
+feeling. Of one of his heroes, Ossian, sings--
+
+    "We made his cairn great and high
+     Like a king's."
+
+After that there would be periodical meetings in his honour, the
+celebration of games, solemn recitations by bards, singing his
+aristeia [Transcriber's Note: Greek in the original]. Gradually
+the new wine would burst the old bottles. The ever-active,
+eager-loving imagination would behold the champion grown to
+heroic proportions, the favourite of the gods, the performer of
+superhuman feats. The tomb, which was once commensurate with the
+love and reverence which he inspired, would seem so now no longer.
+The tribal bards, wandering or attending the great fairs and
+assemblies, would disperse among strangers and neighbours a
+knowledge of his renown. In the same cemetery or neighbourhood
+their might be other tombs of heroes now forgotten, while he,
+whose fame was in every bardic mouth in all that region, was
+honoured only with a tomb no greater than theirs. The mere king
+or champion, grown into a topical hero, would need a greater tomb.
+
+Ere long again, owing to the bardic fraternity, who, though coming
+from Innishowen or Cape Clear, formed a single community, the
+topical hero would, in some cases, where his character was such as
+would excite deeper reverence and greater fame, grow into a
+national hero, and a still nobler tomb be required, in order that
+the visible memorial might prove commensurate with the imaginative
+conception.
+
+Now all this time the periodic celebrations, the games, and
+lamentations, and songs would be assuming a more solemn character.
+Awe would more and more mingle with the other feelings inspired by
+his name. Certain rites and a certain ritual would attend those
+annual games and lamentations, which would formerly not have been
+suitable, and eventually, when the hero, slowly drawing nearer
+through generations, if not centuries, at last reached Tir-na-n-Og,
+and was received into the family of the gods, a religious feeling
+of a different nature would mingle with the more secular
+celebration of his memory, and his rath or cairn would assume in
+their eyes a new character.
+
+To an ardent imaginative people the complete extinction by death of
+a much-loved hero would even at first be hardly possible. That the
+tomb which held his ashes should be looked upon as the house of
+the hero must have been, even shortly after his interment, a
+prevailing sentiment, whether expressed or not. Also, the feeling
+must have been present, that the hero in whose honour they
+performed the annual games, and periodically chanted the
+remembrance of whose achievements, saw and heard those things that
+were done in his honour. But as the celebration became greater and
+more solemn, this feeling would become more strong, and as the
+tomb, from a small heap of stones or low mound, grew into an
+enormous and imposing rath, the belief that this was the hero's
+house, in which he invisibly dwelt, could not be avoided, even
+before they ceased to regard him as a disembodied hero; and after
+the hero had mingled with the divine clans, and was numbered
+amongst the gods, the idea that the rath was a tomb could not
+logically be entertained. As a god, was he not one of those who had
+eaten of the food provided by Mananan, and therefore never died.
+The rath would then become his house or temple. As matter of fact,
+the bardic writings teem with this idea. From reason and
+probability, we would with some certainty conclude that the great
+tumulus of New Grange was the temple of some Irish god; but that it
+was so, we know as a fact. The father and king of the gods is
+alluded to as dwelling there, going out from thence, and returning
+again, and there holding his invisible court.
+
+      "Behold the _Sid_ before your eyes,
+       It is manifest to you that it is a king's mansion."
+[Note: O'Curry's Manuscript Materials of Irish History, page 505.]
+
+      "Bove Derg went to visit the Dagda at the Brugh of Mac-An-Og."
+[Note: "Dream of Angus," Revue Celtique, Vol. III., page 349.]
+
+Here also dwelt Angus Og, the son of the Dagda. In this, his spiritual
+court or temple, he is represented as having entertained Oscar and
+the Ossianic heroes, and thither he conducted [Note: Publications of
+Ossianic Society, Vol. III., page 201.] the spirit of Diarmid, that
+he might have him for ever there.
+
+In the etymology also we see the origin of the Irish gods. A grave
+in Irish is Sid, the disembodied spirit is Sidhe, and this latter
+word glosses Tuatha De Danan.
+
+The fact that the grave of a hero developed slowly into the temple
+of a god, explains certain obscurities in the annals and
+literature. As a hero was exalted into a god, so in turn a god sank
+into a hero, or rather into the race of the giants. The elder gods,
+conquered and destroyed by the younger, could no longer be regarded
+as really divine, for were they not proved to be mortal? The
+development of the temple from the tomb was not forgotten, the
+whole country being filled with such tombs and incipient temples,
+from the great Brugh on the Boyne to the smallest mound in any of
+the cemeteries. Thus, when the elder gods lost their spiritual
+sovereignty, and their destruction at the hands of the younger took
+the form of great battles, then as the god was forced to become a
+giant, so his temple was remembered to be a tomb. Doubtless, in his
+own territory, divine honours were still paid him; but in the
+national imagination and in the classical literature and received
+history, he was a giant of the olden time, slain by the gods, and
+interred in the rath which bore his name. Such was the great Mac
+Erc, King of Fir-bolgs.
+
+Again, when the mediaeval Christians ceased to regard the Tuatha De
+Danan as devils, and proceeded to rationalise the divine record as
+the ethnic bards had rationalised the history of the early gods;
+the Tuatha De Danan, shorn of immortality, became ancient heroes
+who had lived their day and died, and the greater raths, no longer
+the houses of the gods, figure in that literature irrationally
+rational, as their tombs. Thus we are gravely informed [Note:
+Annals of Four Masters.] that "the Dagda Mor, after the second
+battle of Moy Tura, retired to the Brugh on the Boyne, where he
+died from the venom of the wounds inflicted on him by Kethlenn"--
+the Fomorian amazon--"and was there interred." Even in this passage
+the writer seems to have been unable to dispossess his mind quite
+of the traditional belief that the Brugh was the Dagda's house.
+
+The peculiarity of this mound, in addition to its size, is the
+spaciousness of the central chamber. This was that germ which, but
+for the overthrow of the bardic religion, would have developed into
+a temple in the classic sense of the word. A two-fold motive would
+have impelled the growing civilisation in this direction. A desire
+to make the house of the god as spacious within as it was great
+without, and a desire to transfer his worship, or the more esoteric
+and solemn part of it, from without to within. Either the absence
+of architectural knowledge, or the force of conservatism, or the
+advent of the Christian missionaries, checked any further
+development on these lines.
+
+Elsewhere the tomb, instead of developing as a tumulus or barrow,
+produced the effect of greatness by huge circumvallations of earth,
+and massive walls of stone. Such is the temple of Ned the war-god,
+called Aula Neid, the court or palace of Ned, near the Foyle in
+the North. Had the ethnic civilisation of Ireland been suffered to
+develop according to its own laws, it is probable that, as the
+roofed central chamber of the cairn would have grown until it
+filled the space occupied by the mound, so the open-walled temple
+would have developed into a covered building, by the elevation of
+the walls, and their gradual inclination to the centre.
+
+The bee-hive houses of the monks, the early churches, and the round
+towers are a development of that architecture which constructed the
+central chambers of the raths. In this fact lies, too, the
+explanation of the cyclopean style of building which characterizes
+our most ancient buildings. The cromlech alone, formed in very
+ancient times the central chamber of the cairn; it is found in the
+centre of the raths on Moy Tura, belonging to the stone age and
+that of the Firbolgs. When the cromlech fell into disuse, the
+arched chamber above the ashes of the hero was constructed with
+enormous stones, as a substitute for the majestic appearance
+presented by the massive slab and supporting pillars of the more
+ancient cromlech, and the early stone buildings preserved the same
+characteristic to a certain extent.
+
+The same sentiment which caused the mediaeval Christians to
+disinter and enshrine the bones of their saints, and subsequently
+to re-enshrine them with greater art and more precious materials,
+caused the ethnic worshippers of heroes to erect nobler tombs over
+the inurned relics of those whom they revered, as the meanness of
+the tomb was seen to misrepresent and humiliate the sublimity of
+the conception. But the Christians could never have imagined their
+saints to have been anything but men--a fact which caused the
+retention and preservation of the relics. When the Gentiles exalted
+their hero into a god, the charred bones were forgotten or ascribed
+to another. The hero then became immortal in his own right; he had
+feasted with Mananan and eaten his life-giving food, and would not
+know death.
+
+When the mortal character of the hero was forgotten, his house or
+temple might be erected anywhere. The great Raths of the Boyne--a
+place grown sacred from causes which we may not now learn--
+represented, probably, heroes and heroines, who died and were
+interred in many different parts of the country.
+
+To recapitulate, the Dagda Mor was a divine title given to a hero
+named Eocaidh, who lived many centuries before the birth of Christ,
+and in the depths of the pre-historic ages. He was the mortal scion
+or ward of an elder god, Elathan, and was interred in some unknown
+grave--marked, perhaps, by a plain pillar stone, or small
+insignificant cairn.
+
+The great tumulus of New Grange was the temple of the divine or
+supernatural period of his spiritual or imagined career after
+death, and was a development by steps from that small unremembered
+grave where once his warriors hid the inurned ashes of the hero.
+
+What is true of one branch of the Aryan family is true of all.
+Sentiments of such universality and depth must have been common to
+all. If this be so, the Olympian Zeus himself was once some rude
+chieftain dwelling in Thrace or Macedonia, and his sublime temple
+of Doric architecture traceable to some insignificant cairn or
+flagged cist in Greece, or some earlier home of the Hellenic race,
+and his name not Zeus, but another; and Kronos, that god whom he,
+as a living wight, adored, and under whose protection and favour he
+prospered.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, EARLY BARDIC LITERATURE, IRELAND.   ***
+
+This file should be named 7ebli10.txt or 7ebli10.zip
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Early Bardic Literature, Ireland.  
+by Standish O'Grady
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
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+Title: Early Bardic Literature, Ireland.  
+
+Author: Standish O'Grady
+
+Release Date: May, 2005  [EBook #8109]
+[This file was first posted on June 15, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, EARLY BARDIC LITERATURE, IRELAND.   ***
+
+
+
+
+Credit: Ar dTeanga Fein (www.adft.org)
+
+
+
+EARLY BARDIC LITERATURE, IRELAND.
+
+by
+
+Standish O'Grady
+
+11 Lower Fitzwilliam Street, Dublin
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Scattered over the surface of every country in Europe may be found
+sepulchral monuments, the remains of pre-historic times and
+nations, and of a phase of life will civilisation which has long
+since passed away. No country in Europe is without its cromlechs
+and dolmens, huge earthen tumuli, great flagged sepulchres, and
+enclosures of tall pillar-stones. The men by whom these works were
+made, so interesting in themselves, and so different from anything
+of the kind erected since, were not strangers and aliens, but our
+own ancestors, and out of their rude civilisation our own has
+slowly grown. Of that elder phase of European civilisation no
+record or tradition has been anywhere bequeathed to us. Of its
+nature, and the ideas and sentiments whereby it was sustained,
+nought may now be learned save by an examination of those tombs
+themselves, and of the dumb remnants, from time to time exhumed out
+of their soil--rude instruments of clay, flint, brass, and gold,
+and by speculations and reasonings founded upon these archaeological
+gleanings, meagre and sapless.
+
+For after the explorer has broken up, certainly desecrated, and
+perhaps destroyed, those noble sepulchral raths; after he has
+disinterred the bones laid there once by pious hands, and the urn
+with its unrecognisable ashes of king or warrior, and by the
+industrious labour of years hoarded his fruitless treasure of stone
+celt and arrow-head, of brazen sword and gold fibula and torque;
+and after the savant has rammed many skulls with sawdust, measuring
+their capacity, and has adorned them with some obscure label, and
+has tabulated and arranged the implements and decorations of flint
+and metal in the glazed cases of the cold gaunt museum, the
+imagination, unsatisfied and revolted, shrinks back from all that
+he has done. Still we continue to inquire, receiving from him no
+adequate response, Who were those ancient chieftains and warriors
+for whom an affectionate people raised those strange tombs? What
+life did they lead? What deeds perform? How did their personality
+affect the minds of their people and posterity? How did our
+ancestors look upon those great tombs, certainly not reared to be
+forgotten, and how did they--those huge monumental pebbles and
+swelling raths--enter into and affect the civilisation or religion
+of the times?
+
+We see the cromlech with its massive slab and immense supporting
+pillars, but we vainly endeavour to imagine for whom it was first
+erected, and how that greater than cyclopean house affected the
+minds of those who made it, or those who were reared in its
+neighbourhood or within reach of its influence. We see the stone
+cist with its great smooth flags, the rocky cairn, and huge barrow
+and massive walled cathair, but the interest which they invariably
+excite is only aroused to subside again unsatisfied. From this
+department of European antiquities the historian retires baffled,
+and the dry savant is alone master of the field, but a field which,
+as cultivated by him alone, remains barren or fertile only in
+things the reverse of exhilarating. An antiquarian museum is more
+melancholy than a tomb.
+
+But there is one country in Europe in which, by virtue of a
+marvellous strength and tenacity of the historical intellect, and
+of filial devotedness to the memory of their ancestors, there have
+been preserved down into the early phases of mediaeval civilisation,
+and then committed to the sure guardianship of manuscript, the hymns,
+ballads, stories, and chronicles, the names, pedigrees, achievements,
+and even characters, of those ancient kings and warriors over whom
+those massive cromlechs were erected and great cairns piled. There
+is not a conspicuous sepulchral monument in Ireland, the traditional
+history of which is not recorded in our ancient literature, and of
+the heroes in whose honour they were raised. In the rest of Europe
+there is not a single barrow, dolmen, or cist of which the ancient
+traditional history is recorded; in Ireland there is hardly one
+of which it is not. And these histories are in many cases as rich
+and circumstantial as that of men of the greatest eminence who have
+lived in modern times. Granted that the imagination which for
+centuries followed with eager interest the lives of these heroes,
+beheld as gigantic what was not so, as romantic and heroic what was
+neither one nor the other, still the great fact remains, that it
+was beside and in connection with the mounds and cairns that this
+history was elaborated, and elaborated concerning them and
+concerning the heroes to whom they were sacred.
+
+On the plain of Tara, beside the little stream Nemanna, itself
+famous as that which first turned a mill-wheel in Ireland, there
+lies a barrow, not itself very conspicuous in the midst of others,
+all named and illustrious in the ancient literature of the country.
+The ancient hero there interred is to the student of the Irish
+bardic literature a figure as familiar and clearly seen as any
+personage in the Biographia Britannica. We know the name he bore as
+a boy and the name he bore as a man. We know the names of his
+father and his grandfather, and of the father of his grandfather,
+of his mother, and the father and mother of his mother, and the
+pedigrees and histories of each of these. We know the name of his
+nurse, and of his children, and of his wife, and the character of
+his wife, and of the father and mother of his wife, and where they
+lived and were buried. We know all the striking events of his
+boyhood and manhood, the names of his horses and his weapons, his
+own character and his friends, male and female. We know his
+battles, and the names of those whom he slew in battle, and how he
+was himself slain, and by whose hands. We know his physical and
+spiritual characteristics, the device upon his shield, and how that
+was originated, carved, and painted, by whom. We know the colour of
+his hair, the date of his birth and of his death, and his
+relations, in time and otherwise, with the remainder of the princes
+and warriors with whom, in that mound-raising period of our
+history, he was connected, in hostility or friendship; and all this
+enshrined in ancient song, the transmitted traditions of the people
+who raised that barrow, and who laid within it sorrowing their
+brave ruler and, defender. That mound is the tomb of Cuculain, once
+king of the district in which Dundalk stands to-day, and the ruins
+of whose earthen fortification may still be seen two miles from
+that town.
+
+This is a single instance, and used merely as an example, but one
+out of a multitude almost as striking. There is not a king of
+Ireland, described as such in the ancient annals, whose barrow is
+not mentioned in these or other compositions, and every one of
+which may at the present day be identified where the ignorant
+plebeian or the ignorant patrician has not destroyed them. The
+early History of Ireland clings around and grows out of the Irish
+barrows until, with almost the universality of that primeval forest
+from which Ireland took one of its ancient names, the whole isle
+and all within it was clothed with a nobler raiment, invisible, but
+not the less real, of a full and luxuriant history, from whose
+presence, all-embracing, no part was free. Of the many poetical and
+rhetorical titles lavished upon this country, none is truer than
+that which calls her the Isle of Song. Her ancient history passed
+unceasingly into the realm of artistic representation; the history
+of one generation became the poetry of the next, until the whole
+island was illuminated and coloured by the poetry of the bards.
+Productions of mere fancy and imagination these songs are not,
+though fancy and imagination may have coloured and shaped all their
+subject-matter, but the names are names of men and women who once
+lived and died in Ireland, and over whom their people raised the
+swelling rath and reared the rocky cromlech. In the sepulchral
+monuments their names were preserved, and in the performance of
+sacred rites, and the holding of games, fairs, and assemblies in
+their honour, the memory of their achievements kept fresh, till the
+traditions that clung around these places were inshrined in tales
+which were finally incorporated in the Leabhar na Huidhré and the
+Book of Leinster.
+
+Pre-historic narrative is of two kinds--in one the imagination is
+at work consciously, in the other unconsciously. Legends of the
+former class are the product of a lettered and learned age. The
+story floats loosely in a world of imagination. The other sort of
+pre-historic narrative clings close to the soil, and to visible and
+tangible objects. It may be legend, but it is legend believed in as
+history never consciously invented, and growing out of certain
+spots of the earth's surface, and supported by and drawing its life
+from the soil like a natural growth.
+
+Such are the early Irish tales that cling around the mounds and
+cromlechs as that by which they are sustained, which was originally
+their source, and sustained them afterwards in a strong enduring
+life. It is evident that these cannot be classed with stories that
+float vaguely in an ideal world, which may happen in one place as
+well as another, and in which the names might be disarrayed without
+changing the character and consistency of the tale, and its
+relations, in time or otherwise, with other tales.
+
+Foreigners are surprised to find the Irish claim for their own
+country an antiquity and a history prior to that of the
+neighbouring countries. Herein lie the proof and the explanation.
+The traditions and history of the mound-raising period have in
+other countries passed away. Foreign conquest, or less intrinsic
+force of imagination, and pious sentiment have suffered them to
+fall into oblivion; but in Ireland they have been all preserved in
+their original fulness and vigour, hardly a hue has faded, hardly a
+minute circumstance or articulation been suffered to decay.
+
+The enthusiasm with which the Irish intellect seized upon the grand
+moral life of Christianity, and ideals so different from, and so
+hostile to, those of the heroic age, did not consume the traditions
+or destroy the pious and reverent spirit in which men still looked
+back upon those monuments of their own pagan teachers and kings,
+and the deep spirit of patriotism and affection with which the
+mind still clung to the old heroic age, whose types were warlike
+prowess, physical beauty, generosity, hospitality, love of family
+and nation, and all those noble attributes which constituted the
+heroic character as distinguished from the saintly. The Danish
+conquest, with its profound modification of Irish society, and
+consequent disruption of old habits and conditions of life, did not
+dissipate it; nor the more dangerous conquest of the Normans, with
+their own innate nobility of character, chivalrous daring, and
+continental grace and civilisation; nor the Elizabethan convulsions
+and systematic repression and destruction of all native phases of
+thought and feeling. Through all these storms, which successively
+assailed the heroic literature of ancient Ireland, it still held
+itself undestroyed. There were still found generous minds to
+shelter and shield the old tales and ballads, to feel the nobleness
+of that life of which they were the outcome, and to resolve that
+the soil of Ireland should not, so far as they had the power to
+prevent it, be denuded of its raiment of history and historic
+romance, or reduced again to primeval nakedness. The fruit of this
+persistency and unquenched love of country and its ancient
+traditions, is left to be enjoyed by us. There is not through the
+length and breadth of the country a conspicuous rath or barrow of
+which we cannot find the traditional history preserved in this
+ancient literature. The mounds of Tara, the great barrows along the
+shores of the Boyne, the raths of Slieve Mish, and Rathcrogan, and
+Teltown, the stone caiseals of Aran and Innishowen, and those that
+alone or in smaller groups stud the country over, are all, or
+nearly all, mentioned in this ancient literature, with the names
+and traditional histories of those over whom they were raised.
+
+There is one thing to be learned from all this, which is, that we,
+at least, should not suffer these ancient monuments to be
+destroyed, whose history has been thus so astonishingly preserved.
+The English farmer may tear down the barrow which is unfortunate
+enough to be situated within his bounds. Neither he nor his
+neighbours know or can tell anything about its ancient history; the
+removed earth will help to make his cattle fatter and improve his
+crops, the stones will be useful to pave his roads and build his
+fences, and the savant can enjoy the rest; but the Irish farmer
+and landlord should not do or suffer this.
+
+The instinctive reverence of the peasantry has hitherto been a
+great preservative; but the spread of education has to a
+considerable extent impaired this kindly sentiment, and the
+progress of scientific farming, and the anxiety of the Royal Irish
+Academy to collect antiquarian trifles, have already led to the
+reckless destruction of too many. I think that no one who reads the
+first two volumes of this history would greatly care to bear a hand
+in the destruction of that tomb at Tara, in which long since his
+people laid the bones of Cuculain; and I think, too, that they
+would not like to destroy any other monument of the same age, when
+they know that the history of its occupant and its own name are
+preserved in the ancient literature, and that they may one day
+learn all that is to be known concerning it. I am sure that if the
+case were put fairly to the Irish landlords and country gentlemen,
+they would neither inflict nor permit this outrage upon the
+antiquities of their country. The Irish country gentleman prides
+himself on his love of trees, and entertains a very wholesome
+contempt for the mercantile boor who, on purchasing an old place,
+chops down the best timber for the market. And yet a tree, though
+cut down, may be replaced. One elm tree is as good as another, and
+the thinned wood, by proper treatment, will be as dense as ever;
+but the ancient mound, once carted away, can never be replaced any
+more. When the study of the Irish literary records is revived, as
+it certainly will be revived, the old history of each of these
+raths and cromlechs will be brought again into the light, and one
+new interest of a beautiful and edifying nature attached to the
+landscape, and affecting wholly for good the minds of our people.
+
+Irishmen are often taunted with the fact that their history is yet
+unwritten, but that the Irish, as a nation, have been careless of
+their past is refuted by the facts which I have mentioned. A people
+who alone in Europe preserved, not in dry chronicles alone, but
+illuminated and adorned with all that fancy could suggest in
+ballad, and tale, and rude epic, the history of the mound-raising
+period, are not justly liable to this taunt. Until very modern
+times, history was the one absorbing pursuit of the Irish secular
+intellect, the delight of the noble, and the solace of the vile.
+
+At present, indeed, the apathy on this subject is, I believe,
+without parallel in the world. It would seem as if the Irish,
+extreme in all things, at one time thought of nothing but their
+history, and, at another, thought of everything but it. Unlike
+those who write on other subjects, the author of a work on Irish
+history has to labour simultaneously at a two-fold task--he has to
+create the interest to which he intends to address himself.
+
+The pre-Christian period of Irish history presents difficulties
+from which the corresponding period in the histories of other
+countries is free. The surrounding nations escape the difficulty by
+having nothing to record. The Irish historian is immersed in
+perplexity on account of the mass of material ready to his hand.
+The English have lost utterly all record of those centuries before
+which the Irish historian stands with dismay and hesitation, not
+through deficiency of materials, but through their excess. Had
+nought but the chronicles been preserved the task would have been
+simple. We would then have had merely to determine approximately
+the date of the introduction of letters, and allowing a margin on
+account of the bardic system and the commission of family and
+national history to the keeping of rhymed and alliterated verse,
+fix upon some reasonable point, and set down in order, the old
+successions of kings and the battles and other remarkable events.
+But in Irish history there remains, demanding treatment, that other
+immense mass of literature of an imaginative nature, illuminating
+with anecdote and tale the events and personages mentioned simply
+and without comment by the chronicler. It is this poetic literature
+which constitutes the stumbling-block, as it constitutes also the
+glory, of early Irish history, for it cannot be rejected and it
+cannot be retained. It cannot be rejected, because it contains
+historical matter which is consonant with and illuminates the dry
+lists of the chronologist, and it cannot be retained, for popular
+poetry is not history; and the task of distinguishing In such
+literature the fact from the fiction--where there is certainly fact
+and certainly fiction--is one of the most difficult to which the
+intellect can apply itself. That this difficulty has not been
+hitherto surmounted by Irish writers is no just reproach. For the
+last century, intellects of the highest attainments, trained and
+educated to the last degree, have been vainly endeavouring to solve
+a similar question in the far less copious and less varied heroic
+literature of Greece. Yet the labours of Wolfe, Grote, Mahaffy,
+Geddes, and Gladstone, have not been sufficient to set at rest the
+small question, whether it was one man or two or many who composed
+the Iliad and Odyssey, while the reality of the achievements of
+Achilles and even his existence might be denied or asserted by a
+scholar without general reproach. When this is the case with regard
+to the great heroes of the Iliad, I fancy it will be some time
+before the same problem will have been solved for the minor
+characters, and as it affects Thersites, or that eminent artist
+who dwelt at home in Hyla, being by far the most excellent of
+leather cutters. When, therefore, Greek still meets Greek in an
+interminable and apparently bloodless contest over the disputed
+body of the Iliad, and still no end appears, surely it would be
+madness for any one to sit down and gaily distinguish true from
+false in the immense and complex mass of the Irish bardic
+literature, having in his ears this century-lasting struggle over a
+single Greek poem and a single small phase of the pre-historic life
+of Hellas.
+
+In the Irish heroic literature, the presence or absence of the
+marvellous supplies _no test whatsoever_ as to the general truth or
+falsehood of the tale in which they appear. The marvellous is
+supplied with greater abundance in the account of the battle of
+Clontarf, and the wars of the O'Briens with the Normans, than in
+the tale in which is described the foundation of Emain Macha by
+Kimbay. Exact-thinking, scientific France has not hesitated to
+paint the battles of Louis XIV. with similar hues; and England,
+though by no means fertile in angelic interpositions, delights to
+adorn the barren tracts of her more popular histories with
+apocryphal anecdotes.
+
+How then should this heroic literature of Ireland be treated in
+connection with the history of the country? The true method would
+certainly be to print it exactly as it is without excision or
+condensation. Immense it is, and immense it must remain. No men
+living, and no men to live, will ever so exhaust the meaning of any
+single tale as to render its publication unnecessary for the study
+of others. The order adopted should be that which the bards
+themselves deter mined, any other would be premature, and I think
+no other will ever take its place. At the commencement should stand
+the passage from the Book of Invasions, describing the occupation
+of the isle by Queen Keasair and her companions, and along with it
+every discoverable tale or poem dealing with this event and those
+characters. After that, all that remains of the cycle of which
+Partholan was the protagonist. Thirdly, all that relates to Nemeth
+and his sons, their wars with curt Kical the bow-legged, and all
+that relates to the Fomoroh of the Nemedian epoch, then first
+moving dimly in the forefront of our history. After that, the great
+Fir-bolgic cycle, a cycle janus-faced, looking on one side to the
+mythological period and the wars of the gods, and on the other, to
+the heroic, and more particularly to the Ultonian cycle. In the
+next place, the immense mass of bardic literature which treats of
+the Irish gods who, having conquered the Fir-bolgs, like the Greek
+gods of the age of gold dwelt visibly in the island until the
+coming of the Clan Milith, out of Spain. In the sixth, the Milesian
+invasion, and every accessible statement concerning the sons and
+kindred of Milesius. In the seventh, the disconnected tales dealing
+with those local heroes whose history is not connected with the
+great cycles, but who in the _fasti_ fill the spaces between the
+divine period and the heroic. In the eighth, the heroic cycles, the
+Ultonian, the Temairian, and the Fenian, and after these the
+historic tales that, without forming cycles, accompany the course
+of history down to the extinction of Irish independence, and the
+transference to aliens of all the great sources of authority in the
+island.
+
+This great work when completed will be of that kind of which no
+other European nation can supply an example. Every public library
+in the world will find it necessary to procure a copy. The
+chronicles will then cease to be so closely and exclusively
+studied. Every history of ancient Ireland will consist of more or
+less intelligent comments upon and theories formed in connection
+with this great series--theories which, in general, will only be
+formed in order to be destroyed. What the present age demands upon
+the subject of antique Irish history--an exact and scientific
+treatment of the facts supplied by our native authorities--will be
+demanded for ever. It will never be supplied. The history of
+Ireland will be contained in this huge publication. In it the poet
+will find endless themes of song, the philosopher strange workings
+of the human mind, the archeologist a mass of information,
+marvellous in amount and quality, with regard to primitive ideas
+and habits of life, and the rationalist materials for framing a
+scientific history of Ireland, which will be acceptable in
+proportion to the readableness of his style, and the mode in which
+his views may harmonize with the prevailing humour and complexion
+of his contemporaries.
+
+Such a work it is evident could not be effected by a single
+individual. It must be a public and national undertaking, carried
+out under the supervision of the Royal Irish Academy, at the
+expense of the country.
+
+The publication of the Irish bardic remains in the way that I have
+mentioned, is the only true and valuable method of presenting the
+history of Ireland to the notice of the world. The mode which I
+have myself adopted, that other being out of the question, is open
+to many obvious objections; but in the existing state of the Irish
+mind on the subject, no other is possible to an individual writer.
+I desire to make this heroic period once again a portion of the
+imagination of the country, and its chief characters as familiar in
+the minds of our people as they once were. As mere history, and
+treated in the method in which history is generally written at the
+present day, a work dealing with the early Irish kings and heroes
+would certainly not secure an audience. Those who demand such a
+treatment forget that there is not in the country an interest on
+the subject to which to appeal. A work treating of early Irish
+kings, in the same way in which the historians of neighbouring
+countries treat of their own early kings, would be, to the Irish
+public generally, unreadable. It might enjoy the reputation of
+being well written, and as such receive an honourable place in
+half-a-dozen public libraries, but it would be otherwise left
+severely alone. It would never make its way through that frozen
+zone which, on this subject, surrounds the Irish mind.
+
+On the other hand, Irishmen are as ready as others to feel an
+interest in a human character, having themselves the ordinary
+instincts, passions, and curiosities of human nature. If I can
+awake an interest in the career of even a single ancient Irish
+king, I shall establish a train of thoughts, which will advance
+easily from thence to the state of society in which he lived, and
+the kings and heroes who surrounded, preceded, or followed him.
+Attention and interest once fully aroused, concerning even one
+feature of this landscape of ancient history, could be easily
+widened and extended in its scope.
+
+Now, if nothing remained of early Irish history save the dry
+_fasti_ of the chronicles and the Brehon laws, this would, I think,
+be a perfectly legitimate object of ambition, and would be
+consonant with my ideal of what the perfect flower of historical
+literature should be, to illuminate a tale embodying the former by
+hues derived from the Senchus Mor.
+
+But in Irish literature there has been preserved, along with the
+_fasti_ and the laws, this immense mass of ancient ballad, tale,
+and epic, whose origin is lost in the mists of extreme antiquity,
+and in which have been preserved the characters, relationships,
+adventures, and achievements of the vast majority of the personages
+whose names, in a gaunt nakedness, fill the books of the
+chroniclers. Around each of the greater heroes there groups itself
+a mass of bardic literature, varying in tone and statement, but
+preserving a substantial unity as to the general character and the
+more important achievements of the hero, and also, a fact upon
+which their general historical accuracy may be based with
+confidence, exhibiting a knowledge of that same prior and
+subsequent history recorded in the _fasti_. The literature which
+groups itself around a hero exhibits not only an unity with itself,
+but an acquaintance with the general course of the history of the
+country, and with preceding and succeeding kings.
+
+The students of Irish literature do not require to be told this;
+for those who are not, I would give a single instance as an
+illustration.
+
+In the  battle of Gabra, fought in the third century, and in which
+Oscar, perhaps the greatest of all the Irish heroes heading the
+Fianna Eireen, contended against Cairbry of the Liffey, King of
+Ireland, and his troops, Cairbry on his side announces to his
+warriors that he would rather perish in this battle than suffer one
+of the Fianna to survive; but while he spoke--
+
+             "Barran suddenly exclaimed--
+             'Remember Mall Mucreema, remember Art.
+
+            "'Our ancestors fell there
+              By force of the treachery of the Fians;
+              Remember the hard tributes,
+              Remember the extraordinary pride.'"
+
+Here the poet, singing only of the events of the battle of Gabra,
+shows that he was well-acquainted with all the relations subsisting
+for a long time between the Fians and the Royal family. The battle
+of Mucreema was fought by Cairbry's grandfather, Art, against Lewy
+Mac Conn and the Fianna Eireen.
+
+Again, in the tale of the battle of Moy Leana, in which Conn of the
+Hundred Battles, the father of this same Art, is the principal
+character, the author of the tale mentions many times circumstances
+relating to his father, Felimy Rectmar, and his grandfather, Tuhall
+Tectmar. Such is the whole of the Irish literature, not vague,
+nebulous, and shifting, but following the course of the _fasti_,
+and regulated and determined by them. This argument has been used
+by Mr. Gladstone with great confidence, in order to show the
+substantial historical truthfulness of the Iliad, and that it is in
+fact a portion of a continuous historic sequence.
+
+Now this being admitted, that the course of Irish history, as laid
+down by the chroniclers, was familiar to the authors of the tales
+and heroic ballads, one of two things must be admitted, either that
+the events and kings did succeed one another in the order mentioned
+by the chroniclers, or that what the chroniclers laid down was then
+taken as the theme of song by the bards, and illuminated and
+adorned according to their wont.
+
+The second of these suppositions is one which I think few will
+adopt. Can we believe it possible that the bards, who actually
+supported themselves by the amount of pleasure which they gave
+their audiences, would have forsaken those subjects which were
+already popular, and those kings and heroes whose splendour and
+achievements must have affected, profoundly, the popular
+imagination, in order to invent stories to illuminate fabricated
+names. The thing is quite impossible. A practice which we can trace
+to the edge of that period whose historical character may be proved
+to demonstration, we may conclude to have extended on into the
+period immediately preceding that. When bards illuminated with
+stories and marvellous circumstances the battle of Clontarf and the
+battle of Moyrath, we may believe their predecessors to have done
+the same for the earlier centuries. The absence of an imaginative
+literature other than historical shows also that the literature
+must have followed, regularly, the course of the history, and was
+not an archaeological attempt to create an interest in names and
+events which were found in the chronicles. It is, therefore, a
+reasonable conclusion that the bardic literature, where it reveals
+a clear sequence in the order of events, and where there is no
+antecedent improbability, supplies a trustworthy guide to the
+general course of our history.
+
+So far as the clear light of history reaches, so far may these
+tales be proved to be historical. It is, therefore, reasonable to
+suppose that the same consonance between them and the actual course
+of events which subsisted during the period which lies in clear
+light, marked also that other preceding period of which the light
+is no longer dry.
+
+The earliest manuscript of these tales is the Leabhar [Note: Leabar
+na Heera.] na Huidhré, a work of the eleventh century, so that we
+may feel sure that we have them in a condition unimpaired by the
+revival of learning, or any archaeological restoration or
+improvement. Now, of some of these there have been preserved copies
+in other later MSS., which differ very little from the copies
+preserved in the Leabhar na Huidhré, from which we may conclude
+that these tales had arrived at a fixed state, and a point at which
+it was considered wrong to interfere with the text.
+
+The feast of Bricrind is one of the tales preserved in this
+manuscript. The author of the tale in its present form, whenever he
+lived, composed it, having before him original books which he
+collated, using his judgment at times upon the materials to his
+hand. At one stage he observes that the books are at variance on a
+certain point, namely, that at which Cuculain, Conal the
+Victorious, and Laery Buada go to the lake of Uath in order to be
+judged by him. Some of the books, according to the author, stated
+that on this occasion the two latter behaved unfairly, but he
+agreed with those books which did not state this.
+
+We have, therefore, a tale penned in the eleventh century, composed
+at some time prior to this, and itself collected, not from oral
+tradition, but from books. These considerations would, therefore,
+render it extremely probable that the tales of the Ultonian period,
+with which the Leabhar na Huidhré is principally concerned, were
+committed to writing at a very early period.
+
+To strengthen still further the general historic credibility of
+these tales, and to show how close to the events and heroes
+described must have been the bards who originally composed them, I
+would urge the following considerations.
+
+With the advent of Christianity the mound-raising period passed
+away. The Irish heroic tales have their source in, and draw their
+interest from, the mounds and those laid in them. It would,
+therefore, be extremely improbable that the bards of the Christian
+period, when the days of rath and cairn had departed, would modify,
+to any considerable extent, the literature produced in conditions
+of society which had passed away.
+
+Again, with the advent of Christianity, and the hold which the new
+faith took upon the finest and boldest minds in the country, it is
+plain that the golden age of bardic composition ended. The loss to
+the bards was direct, by the withdrawal of so much intellect from
+their ranks, and indirect, by the general substitution of other
+ideas for those whose ministers they themselves were. It is,
+therefore, probable that the age of production and creation, with
+regard to the ethnic history, ceased about the fifth and sixth
+centuries, and that, about that time, men began to gather up into a
+collected form the floating literature connected with the pagan
+period. The general current of mediaeval opinion attributes the
+collection of tales and ballads now known as the Tân-Bo-Cooalney to
+St. Ciaran, the great founder of the monastery of Clonmacnoise.
+
+But if this be the case, we are enabled to take another step in the
+history of this most valuable literature. The tales of the Leabhar
+na Huidhré are in prose, but prose whose source and original is
+poetry. The author, from time to time, as if quoting an authority,
+breaks out with verse; and I think there is no Irish tale in
+existence without these rudimentary traces of a prior metrical
+cycle. The style and language are quite different, and indicate two
+distinct epochs. The prose tale is founded upon a metrical
+original, and composed in the meretricious style then in fashion,
+while the old metrical excerpts are pure and simple. This is
+sufficient, in a country like Ireland in those primitive times, to
+necessitate a considerable step into the past, if we desire to get
+at the originals upon which the prose tales were founded.
+
+For in ancient Ireland the conservatism of the people was very
+great. It is the case in all primitive societies. Individual,
+initiative, personal enterprise are content to work within a very
+small sphere. In agriculture, laws, customs, and modes of literary
+composition, primitive and simple societies are very adverse to
+change.
+
+When we see how closely the Christian compilers followed the early
+authorities, we can well believe that in the ethnic times no mind
+would have been sufficiently daring or sacrilegious to alter or
+pervert those epics which were in their eyes at the same time true
+and sacred.
+
+In the perusal of the Irish literature, we see that the strength of
+this conservative instinct has been of the greatest service in the
+preservation of the early monuments in their purity. So much is
+this the case, that in many tales the most flagrant contradictions
+appear, the author or scribe being unwilling to depart at all from
+that which he found handed down. For instance, in the "Great Breach
+of Murthemney," we find Laeg at one moment killed, and in the next
+riding black Shanglan off the field. From this conservatism and
+careful following of authority, and the _littera scripta_, or word
+once spoken, I conclude that the distance in time between the prose
+tale and the metrical originals was very great, and, unless under
+such exceptional circumstances as the revolution caused by the
+introduction of Christianity, could not have been brought about
+within hundreds of years. Moreover, this same conservatism would
+have caused the tales concerning heroes to grow very slowly once
+they were actually formed. All the noteworthy events of the hero's
+life and his characteristics must have formed the original of the
+tales concerning him, which would have been composed during his
+life, or not long after his death.
+
+I have not met a single tale, whether in verse or prose, in which
+it is not clearly seen that the author was not following
+authorities before him. Such traces of invention or decoration as
+may be met with are not suffered to interfere with the conduct of
+the tale and the statement of facts. They fill empty niches and
+adorn vacant places. For instance, if a king is represented as
+crossing the sea, we find that the causes leading to this, the
+place whence he set out, his companions, &c., are derived from the
+authorities, but the bard, at the same time, permits himself to
+give what seems to him to be an eloquent or beautiful description
+of the sea, and the appearance presented by the many-oared galleys.
+And yet the last transcription or recension of the majority of the
+tales was effected in Christian times, and in an age characterised
+by considerable classical attainments--a time when the imagination
+might have been expected to shake itself loose from old restraints,
+and freely invent. _A fortiori_, the more ancient bards, those of
+the ruder ethnic times, would have clung still closer to authority,
+deriving all their imaginative representations from preceding
+minstrels. There was no conscious invention at any time. Each cycle
+and tale grew from historic roots, and was developed from actual
+fact. So much may indeed be said for the more ancient tales, but
+the Ultonian cycle deals with events well within the historic
+period.
+
+The era of Concobar Mac Nessa and the Red Branch knights of Ulster
+was long subsequent to the floruerunt of the Irish gods and their
+Titan-like opponents of this latter period, the names alone can be
+fairly held to be historic. What swells out the Irish chronicles to
+such portentous dimensions is the history of the gods and giants
+rationalised by mediaeval historians. Unable to ignore or excide
+what filled so much of the imagination of the country, and unable,
+as Christians, to believe in the divinity of the Tuátha De Danan
+and their predecessors, they rationalised all the pre-Milesian
+record. But the disappearance of the gods does not yet bring us
+within the penumbra of history. After the death of the sons of
+Milesius we find a long roll of kings. These were all topical
+heroes, founders of nations, and believed, by the tribes and tribal
+confederacies which they founded, to have been in their day the
+chief kings of Ireland. The point fixed upon by the accurate and
+sceptical Tiherna as the starting-point of trustworthy Irish
+history, was one long subsequent to the floruerunt of the gods; and
+the age of Concobar Mac Nessa and his knights was more than two
+centuries later than that of Kimbay and the foundation of Emain
+Macha. The floruit of Cuculain, therefore, falls completely within
+the historical penumbra, and the more carefully the enormous, and
+in the main mutually consistent and self-supporting, historical
+remains dealing with this period are studied, the more will this be
+believed. The minuteness, accuracy, extent, and verisimilitude of
+the literature, chronicles, pedigrees, &c., relating to this
+period, will cause the student to wonder more and more as he
+examines and collates, seeing the marvellous self-consistency and
+consentaneity of such a mass of varied recorded matter. The age,
+indeed, breathes sublimity, and abounds with the marvellous, the
+romantic, and the grotesque. But as I have already stated, the
+presence or absence of these qualities has no crucial significance.
+Love and reverence and the poetic imagination always effect such
+changes in the object of their passion. They are the essential
+condition of the transference of the real into the world of art.
+AEval, of Carriglea, the fairy queen of Munster, is one of the most
+important characters in the history of the battle of Clontarf, the
+character of which, and of the events that preceded and followed
+its occurrence, and the chieftains and warriors who fought on one
+side and the other, are identical, whether described by the bard
+singing, or by the monkish chronicler jotting down in plain prose
+the fasti for the year. The reader of these volumes can make such
+deductions as he pleases, on this account, from the bardic history
+of the Red Branch, and clip the wings of the tale, so that it may
+with him travel pedestrian. I know there are others, like myself,
+who will not hesitate for once to let the fancy roam and luxuriate
+in the larger spaces and freer airs of ancient song, nor fear that
+their sanity will be imperilled by the shouting of semi-divine
+heroes, and the sight of Cuculain entering battles with the Tuátha
+De Danan around him.
+
+I hope on some future occasion to examine more minutely the
+character and place in literature of the Irish bardic remains, and
+put forward here these general considerations, from which the
+reader may presume that the Ultonian cycle, dealing as it does with
+Cuculain and his contemporaries, is in the main true to the facts
+of the time, and that his history, and that of the other heroes who
+figure in these volumes, is, on the whole, and omitting the
+marvellous, sufficiently reliable. I would ask the reader, who may
+be inclined to think that the principal character is too chivalrous
+and refined for the age, to peruse for himself the tale named the
+"Great Breach of Murthemney." He will there, and in many other
+tales and poems besides, see that the noble and pathetic interest
+which attaches to his character is substantially the same as I have
+represented in these volumes. But unless the student has read the
+whole of the Ultonian cycle, he should be cautious in condemning a
+departure in my work from any particular version of an event which
+he may have himself met. Of many minor events there are more than
+one version, and many scenes and assertions which he may think of
+importance would yet, by being related, cause inconsistency and
+contradiction. Of the nature of the work in which all should be
+introduced I have already given my opinion.
+
+For the rest, I have related one or two great events in the life of
+Cuculain in such a way as to give a description as clear and
+correct as possible of his own character and history as related by
+the bards, of those celebrated men and women who were his
+contemporaries and of his relations with them, of the gods and
+supernatural powers in whom the people then believed, and of the
+state of civilisation which then prevailed. If I have done my task
+well, the reader will have been supplied, without any intensity of
+application on his part--a condition of the public mind upon which
+no historian of this country should count--with some knowledge of
+ancient Irish history, and with an interest in the subject which
+may lead him to peruse for himself that ancient literature, and to
+read works of a more strictly scientific nature upon the subject
+than those which I have yet written. But until such an interest is
+aroused, it is useless to swell the mass of valuable critical
+matter, which everyone at present is very well content to leave
+unread.
+
+In the first volume, however, I have committed this error, that I
+did not permit it to be seen with sufficient clearness that the
+characters and chief events of the tale are absolutely historic;
+and that much of the colouring, inasmuch as its source must have
+been the centuries immediately succeeding the floruerunt of those
+characters, is also reliable as history, while the remainder is
+true to the times and the state of society which then obtained. The
+story seems to progress too much in the air, too little in time and
+space, and seems to be more of the nature of legend and romance
+than of actual historic fact seen through an imaginative medium.
+Such is the history of Concobar Mac Nessa and his knights--historic
+fact seen through the eyes of a loving wonder.
+
+Indeed, I must confess that the blaze of bardic light which
+illuminates those centuries at first so dazzled the eye and
+disturbed the judgment, that I saw only the literature, only the
+epic and dramatic interest, and did not see as I should the
+distinctly historical character of the age around which that
+literature revolves, wrongly deeming that a literature so noble,
+and dealing with events so remote, must have originated mainly or
+altogether in the imagination. All the borders of the epic
+representation at which, in the first volume, I have aimed, seem to
+melt, and wander away vaguely on every side into space and time. I
+have now taken care to remedy that defect, supplying to the unset
+picture the clear historical frame to which it is entitled. I will
+also request the reader, when the two volumes may diverge in tone
+or statement, to attach greater importance to the second, as the
+result of wider and more careful reading and more matured
+reflection.
+
+A great English poet, himself a severe student, pronounced the
+early history of his own country to be a mere scuffling of kites
+and crows, as indeed are all wars which lack the sacred bard, and
+the sacred bard is absent where the kites and crows pick out his
+eyes. That the Irish kings and heroes should succeed one another,
+surrounded by a blaze of bardic light, in which both themselves and
+all those who were contemporaneous with them are seen clearly and
+distinctly, was natural in a country where in each little realm or
+sub-kingdom the ard-ollav was equal in dignity to the king, which
+is proved by the equivalence of their cries. The dawn of English
+history is in the seventh century--a late dawn, dark and sombre,
+without a ray of cheerful sunshine; that of Ireland dates reliably
+from a point before the commencement of the Christian era luminous
+with that light which never was on sea or land--thronged with
+heroic forms of men and women--terrible with the presence of the
+supernatural and its over-arching power.
+
+Educated Irishmen are ignorant of, and indifferent to, their
+history; yet from the hold of that history they cannot shake
+themselves free. It still haunts the imagination, like Mordecai at
+Haman's gate, a cause of continual annoyance and vexation. An
+Irishman can no more release himself from his history than he can
+absolve himself from social and domestic duties. He may outrage it,
+but he cannot placidly ignore. Hence the uneasy, impatient feeling
+with which the subject is generally regarded.
+
+I think that I do not exaggerate when I say that the majority of
+educated Irishmen would feel grateful to the man who informed them
+that the history of their country was valueless and unworthy of
+study, that the pre-Christian history was a myth, the post-Christian
+mere annals, the mediaeval a scuffling of kites and crows, and the
+modern alone deserving of some slight consideration. That writer
+will be in Ireland most praised who sets latest the commencement
+of our history. Without study he will be pronounced sober and
+rational before the critic opens the book. So anxious is the Irish
+mind to see that effaced which it is conscious of having neglected.
+
+There are two compositions which affect an interest comparable to
+that which Ireland claims for her bardic literature, One is the
+Ossian of MacPherson, the other the Nibelungen Lied.
+
+If we are to suppose Macpherson faithfully to have written down,
+printed, and published the floating disconnected poems which he
+found lingering in the Scotch highlands, how small, comparatively,
+would be their value as indications of antique thought and feeling,
+reduced then for the first time to writing, sixteen hundred years
+after the time of Ossian and his heroes, in a country not the home
+of those heroes, and destitute of the regular bardic organisation.
+The Ossianic tales and poems still told and sung by the Irish
+peasantry at the present day in the country of Ossian and Oscar,
+would be, if collected even now, quite as valuable, if not more so.
+Truer to the antique these latter are, for in them the cycles are
+not blended. The Red Branch heroes are not confused with Ossian's
+Fianna.
+
+But MacPherson's Ossian is not a translation. In the publications
+of the Irish Ossianic poetry we see what that poetry really was--
+rude, homely, plain-spoken, leagues removed from the nebulous
+sublimity of MacPherson.
+
+With regard to the other, the Germans, who naturally desire to
+refer its composition to as remote a date as possible, and who
+arguing from no scientific data, but only style, ascribe the
+authorship of the Nibelungen to a poet living in the latter part of
+the twelfth century. Be it remembered, that the poem does not
+purport to be a collection of the scattered fragments of a cycle,
+but an original composition, then actually imagined and written. It
+does not even purport to deal with the ethnic times. _Its heroes
+are Christian heroes. They attend Mass._ The poem is not true, even
+to the leading features of the late period of history in which it
+is placed, if it have any habitat in the world of history at all.
+Attila, who died A.D. 450, and Theodoric, who did not die until the
+succeeding century, meet as coevals.
+
+Turn we now from the sole boast of Germany to one out of a hundred
+in the Irish bardic literature. The Tân-bo-Cooalney was transcribed
+into the Leabhar na Huidhré in the eleventh century a manuscript
+whose date has been established by the consentaneity of Irish,
+French, and German scholarship. Mark, it was transcribed, not
+composed. The scribe records the fact:--
+
+  "Ego qui scripsi hanc historian aut vero fabulam, quibusdam fidem
+  in hac historiâ aut fabulâ non commodo."
+
+The Tân-bo-Cooalney was therefore _transcribed_ by an ancient
+penman to the parchment of a still existing manuscript, in the
+century before that in which the German epic is presumed, from
+style only, and in the opinion of Germans, to have been _composed_.
+
+The same scribe adds this comment with regard to its contents:--
+
+  "Qaedam autem poetica figmenta, quaedam ad delectationem
+  stultorum."
+
+Such scorn could not have been felt by one living in an age of
+bardic production. That independence and originality of thought,
+which caused Milton to despise the poets of the Restoration, are
+impossible in the simple stages of civilisation. The scribe who
+appended this very interesting comment to the subject of his own
+handiwork must have been removed by centuries from the date of its
+compilation. That the tale was, in his time, an ancient one, is
+therefore rendered extremely probable, the scribe himself
+indicating how completely out of sympathy he is with this form of
+literature, its antiquity and peculiar archaeological interest
+being, doubtless, the cause of the transcription.
+
+Again, a close study of its contents, as of the contents of all the
+Irish historic tales, proves that in its present form, whenever
+that form was superadded, it is but a representation in prose of a
+pre-existing metrical original. Under this head I have already made
+some remarks, which, I shall request the reader to re-peruse [Note:
+Pages 23 to 27]
+
+Once more, it deals with a particular event in Irish history, and
+with distinct and definite kings, heroes, and bards, who flourished
+in the epoch of which it treats. In the synchronisms of Tiherna, in
+the metrical chronology of Flann, in all the various historical
+compositions produced in various parts of the country, the main
+features and leading characters of the Tân-bo-Cooalney suffer no
+material change, while the minor divergencies show that the
+chronology of the annals and annalistic poems were not drawn from
+the tale, but owe their origin to other sources. Moreover, this
+epic is but a portion of the great Ultonian or Red Branch cycle,
+all the parts of which pre-suppose and support one another; and
+that cycle is itself a portion of the history of Ireland, and
+pre-supposes other preceding and succeeding cyles, preceding and
+succeeding kings. The event of which this epic treats occurred at
+the time of the Incarnation, and its characters are the leading
+Irish kings and warriors of that date. Such is the Tân-bo-Cooalney.
+
+This being so, how have the English literary classes recognised, or
+how treated, our claim to the possession of an antique literature
+of peculiar historical interest, and by reason of that antiquity, a
+matter of concern to all Aryan nations? The conquest has not more
+constituted the English Parliament guardian and trustee of Ireland,
+for purposes of legislation and government, than it has vested the
+welfare and fame of our literature and antiquities in the hands of
+English scholarship. London is the headquarters of the intellectualism
+and of the literary and historical culture of the Empire. It is the
+sole dispenser of fame. It alone influences the mind of the country
+and guides thought and sentiment. It can make and mar reputations.
+What it scorns or ignores, the world, too, ignores and scorns. How
+then has the native literature of Ireland been treated by the
+representatives of English scholarship and literary culture? Mr.
+Carlyle is the first man of letters of the day, his the highest
+name as a critic upon, and historian of, the past life of Europe.
+Let us hear him upon this subject, admittedly of European
+importance.
+
+Miscellaneous Essays, Vol. III., page 136. "Not only as the oldest
+Tradition of Modern Europe does it--the Nibelungen--possess a high
+antiquarian interest, but farther, and even in the shape we now see
+it under, unless the epics of the son of Fingal had some sort of
+authenticity, it is our oldest poem also."
+
+Poor Ireland, with her hundred ancient epics, standing at the door
+of the temple of fame, or, indeed, quite behind the vestibule out
+of the way! To see the Swabian enter in, crowned, to a flourish of
+somewhat barbarous music, was indeed bad enough, but Mr. MacPherson!
+
+They manage these things rather better in France, _vide passim_ "La
+Révue Celtique."
+
+Of the literary value of the bardic literature I fear to write at
+all, lest I should not know how to make an end. Rude indeed it is,
+but great. Like the central chamber of that huge tumulus [Note: New
+Grange anciently Cnobgha, and now also Knowth.] on the Boyne,
+overarched with massive unhewn rocks, its very ruggedness strikes
+an awe which the orderly arrangement of smaller and more reasonable
+thoughts, cut smooth by instruments inherited from classic times,
+fails so often to inspire. The labour of the Attic chisel may be
+seen since its invention in every other literary workshop of
+Europe, and seen in every other laboratory of thought the
+transmitted divine fire of the Hebrew. The bardic literature of
+Erin stands alone, as distinctively and genuinely Irish as the race
+itself, or the natural aspects of the island. Rude indeed it is,
+but like the hills which its authors tenanted with gods, holding
+dells [Note: Those sacred hills will generally be found to have
+this character.] of the most perfect beauty, springs of the most
+touching pathos. On page 33, Vol. I., will be seen a poem [Note:
+Publications of Ossianic Society, page 303, Vol. IV.] by Fionn upon
+the spring-time, made, as the old unknown historian says, to prove
+his poetic powers--a poem whose antique language relegates it to a
+period long prior to the tales of the Leabhar na Huidhré, one
+which, if we were to meet side by side with the "Ode to Night," by
+Alcman, in the Greek anthology, we would not be surprised; or those
+lines on page 203, Vol. I., the song of Cuculain, forsaken by his
+people, watching the frontier of his country--
+
+      "Alone in defence of the Ultonians,
+       Solitary keeping ward over the province"
+
+or the death [Note: Publications of Ossianic Society, Vol. I.] of
+Oscar, on pages 34 and 35, Vol. I., an excerpt condensed from the
+Battle of Gabra. Innumerable such tender and thrilling passages.
+
+To all great nations their history presents itself under the aspect
+of poetry; a drama exciting pity and terror; an epic with unbroken
+continuity, and a wide range of thought, when the intellect is
+satisfied with coherence and unity, and the imagination by extent
+and diversity. Such is the bardic history of Ireland, but with this
+literary defect. A perfect epic is only possible when the critical
+spirit begins to be in the ascendant, for with the critical spirit
+comes that distrust and apathy towards the spontaneous literature
+of early times, which permit some great poet so to shape and alter
+the old materials as to construct a harmonious and internally
+consistent tale, observing throughout a sense of proportion and a
+due relation of the parts. Such a clipping and alteration of the
+authorities would have seemed sacrilege to earlier bards. In
+mediaeval Ireland there was, indeed, a subtle spirit of criticism;
+but under its influence, being as it was of scholastic origin, no
+great singing men appeared, re-fashioning the old rude epics; and
+yet, the very shortcomings of the Irish tales, from a literary
+point of view, increase their importance from a historical. Of
+poetry, as distinguised from metrical composition, these ancient
+bards knew little. The bardic literature, profoundly poetic though
+it be, in the eyes of our ancestors was history, and never was
+anything else. As history it was originally composed, and as
+history bound in the chains of metre, that it might not be lost or
+dissipated passing through the minds of men, and as history it was
+translated into prose and committed to parchment. Accordingly, no
+tale is without its defects as poetry, possessing therefore
+necessarily, a corresponding value as history. But that there was
+in the country, in very early times, a high and rare poetic culture
+of the lyric kind, native in its character, ethnic in origin,
+unaffected by scholastic culture which, as we know, took a
+different direction; that one exquisite poem, in which the father
+of Ossian praises the beauty of the springtime in anapaestic
+[Note: Cettemain | cain ree! | ro sair | an cuct |
+"He, Fionn MacCool, learned the three compositions which distinguish
+the poets, the TEINM LAEGHA, the IMUS OF OSNA, and the DICEDUE
+DICCENAIB, and it was then Fionn composed this poem to prove
+his poetry." In which of these three forms of metre the Ode to
+the spring-time is written I know not. Its form throughout is
+distinctly anapaestic.--S. O'G.] verse, would, even though it
+stood alone, both by the fact of its composition and the fact
+of its preservation, fully prove.
+
+Much and careful study, indeed, it requires, if we would compel
+these ancient epics to yield up their greatness or their beauty, or
+even their logical coherence and imaginative unity--broken,
+scattered portions as they all are of that one enormous epic, the
+bardic history of Ireland. At the best we read without the key. The
+magic of the names is gone, or can only be partially recovered by
+the most tender and sympathetic study. Indeed, without reading all
+or many, we will not understand the superficial meaning of even
+one. For instance, in one of the many histories of Cuculain's many
+battles, we read this--
+
+"It was said that Lu Mac AEthleen was assisting him."
+
+This at first seems meaningless, the bard seeing no necessity for
+throwing further light on the subject; but, as we wander through
+the bardic literature, gradually the conception of this Lu grows
+upon the mind--the destroyer of the sons of Turann--the implacably
+filial--the expulsor of the Fomoroh--the source of all the
+sciences--the god of the Tuátha De Danan--the protector and
+guardian of Cuculain--Lu Lamfáda, son of Cian, son of Diancéct, son
+of Esric, son of Dela, son of Ned the war-god, whose tomb or
+temple, Aula Neid, may still be seen beside the Foyle. This
+enormous and seemingly chaotic mass of literature is found at all
+times to possess an inner harmony, a consistency and logical unity,
+to be apprehended only by careful study.
+
+So read, the sublimity strikes through the rude representation.
+Astonished at himself, the student, who at first thinks that he has
+chanced upon a crowd of barbarians, ere long finds himself in the
+august presence of demi-gods and heroes.
+
+A noble moral tone pervades the whole. Courage, affection, and truth
+are native to all who live in this world. Under the dramatic image
+of Ossian wrangling with the Talkend, [Note: St. Patrick, on account
+of the tonsured crown.] the bards, themselves vainly fighting against
+the Christian life, a hundred times repeat through the lips of Ossian
+like a refrain--
+
+      "We, the Fianna of Erin, never uttered falsehood,
+       Lying was never attributed to us;
+       By courage and the strength of our hands
+       We used to come out of every difficulty."
+
+Again: Fergus, the bard, inciting Oscar to his last battle--in that
+poem called the Rosc Catha of Oscar:--
+
+      "Place thy hand on thy gentle forehead
+       Oscar, who never lied."
+[Note: Publications of Ossianic Society, p. 159; vol. i.]
+
+And again, elsewhere in the Ossianic poetry:--
+
+      "Oscar, who never wronged bard or woman."
+
+Strange to say, too, they inculcated chastity (see p. 257; vol.
+i.), an allusion taken from the "youthful adventures of Cuculain,"
+Leabhar na Huidhré.
+
+The following ancient rann contains the four qualifications of a
+bard:--
+
+      "Purity of hand, bright, without wounding,
+       Purity of mouth, without poisonous satire,
+       Purity of learning, without reproach,
+       Purity, as a husband, in wedlock."
+
+Moreover, through all this literature sounds a high clear note of
+chivalry, in this contrasting favourably with the Iliad, where no
+man foregoes an advantage. Cuculain having slain the sons of Neara,
+"thought it unworthy of him to take possession of their chariot and
+horses." [Note: P. 155; vol. i.] Goll Mac Morna, in the Fenian or
+Ossianic cycle, declares to Conn Cedcathah [Note: Conn of the
+hundred battles.] that from his youth up he never attacked an enemy
+by night or under any disadvantage, and many times we read of
+heroes preferring to die rather than outrage their geisa. [Note:
+Certain vows taken with their arms on being knighted.]
+
+A noble literature indeed it is, having too this strange interest,
+that though mainly characterised by a great plainness and
+simplicity of thought, and, in the earlier stages, of expression,
+we feel, oftentimes, a sudden weirdness, a strange glamour shoots
+across the poem when the tale seems to open for a moment into
+mysterious depths, druidic secrets veiled by time, unsunned caves
+of thought, indicating a still deeper range of feeling, a still
+lower and wider reach of imagination. A youth came once to the
+Fianna Eireen encamped at Locha Lein [Note: The Lakes of
+Killarney.], leading a hound dazzling white, like snow. It was the
+same, the bard simply states, that was once a yew tree, flourishing
+fifty summers in the woods of Ioroway. Elsewhere, he is said to
+have been more terrible than the sun upon his flaming wheels. What
+meant this yew tree and the hound? Stray allusions I have met, but
+no history. The spirit of Coelté, visiting one far removed in time
+from the great captain of the Fianna, with a different name and
+different history, cries:--
+
+      "I was with thee, with Finn"--
+
+giving no explanation.
+
+To MacPherson, however, I will do this justice, that he had the
+merit to perceive, even in the debased and floating ballads of the
+highlands, traces of some past greatness and sublimity of thought,
+and to understand, he, for the first time, how much more they meant
+than what met the ear. But he saw, too, that the historical origin
+of the ballads, and the position in time and place of the heroes
+whom they praised, had been lost in that colony removed since the
+time of St. Columba from its old connection with the mother
+country. Thus released from the curb of history, he gave free rein
+to the imagination, and in the conventional literary language of
+sublimity, gave full expression to the feelings that arose within
+him, as to him, pondering over those ballads, their gigantesque
+element developed into a greatness and solemnity, and their
+vagueness and indeterminateness into that misty immensity and weird
+obscurity which, as constituent factors in a poem, not as
+back-ground, form one of the elements of the false sublime. Either
+not seeing the literary necessity of definiteness, or having no
+such abundant and ordered literature as we possess, upon which to
+draw for details, and being too conscientious to invent facts,
+however he might invent language, he published his epics of Ossian--
+false indeed to the original, but true to himself, and to the
+feelings excited by meditation upon them. This done, he had not
+sufficient courage to publish also the rude, homely, and often
+vulgar ballads--a step which, in that hard critical age, would have
+been to expose himself and his country to swift contempt. The
+thought of the great lexicographer riding rough-shod over the poor
+mountain songs which he loved, and the fame which he had already
+acquired, deterred and dissuaded him, if he had ever any such
+intention, until the opportunity was past.
+
+MacPherson feared English public opinion, and fearing lied. He
+declared that to be a translation which was original work, thus
+relegating himself for ever to a dubious renown, and depriving his
+country of the honest fame of having preserved through centuries,
+by mere oral transmission, a portion, at least, of the antique
+Irish literature. To the magnanimity of his own heroes he could not
+attain:--
+
+      "Oscar, Oscar, who feared not armies--
+       Oscar, who never lied."
+
+Of some such error as MacPherson's I have myself, with less excuse,
+been guilty, in chapters xi. and xii., Vol. I., where I attempt to
+give some conception of the character of the Ossianic cycle. The
+age and the heroes around whom that cycle revolves have, in the
+history of Ireland, a definite position in time; their battles,
+characters, several achievements, relationships, and pedigrees;
+their Dûns, and trysting-places, and tombs; their wives, musicians,
+and bards; their tributes, and sufferings, and triumphs; their
+internecine and other wars--are all fully and clearly described in
+the Ossianic cycle. They still remain demanding adequate treatment,
+when we arrive at the age of Conn [Note: See page 20.], Art, and
+Cormac, kings of Tara in the second and third centuries of the
+Christian era. All have been forgotten for the sake of a vague
+representation of the more sublime aspects of the cycle, and the
+meretricious seductions of a form of composition easy to write and
+easy to read, and to which the unwary or unwise often award praise
+to which it has no claim.
+
+On the other hand, chapter xi. purports only to be a representation
+of the feelings excited by this literature, and for every assertion
+there is authority in the cycle. Chapter xii., however, is a
+translation from the original. Every idea which it contains, except
+one, has been taken from different parts of the Ossianic poems, and
+all together expressthe graver attitude of the mind of Ossian
+towards the new faith. That idea, occurring in a separate paragraph
+in the middle of the page, though prevalent as a sentiment
+throughout all the conversations of Ossian with St. Patrick, has
+been, as it stands, taken from a meditation on life by St.
+Columbanus, one of the early Irish Saints--a meditation which, for
+subtle thought, for musical resigned sadness, tender brooding
+reflection, and exquisite Latin, is one of the masterpieces of
+mediaeval composition.
+
+To the casual reader of the bardic literature the preservation of
+an ordered historical sequence, amidst that riotous wealth of
+imaginative energy, may appear an impossibility. Can we believe
+that forestine luxuriance not to have overgrown all highways, that
+flood of superabundant song not have submerged all landmarks? Be
+the cause what it may, the fact remains that they did not. The
+landmarks of history stand clear and fixed, each in its own place
+unremoved; and through that forest-growth the highways of history
+run on beneath over-arching, not interfering, boughs. The age of
+the predominance of Ulster does not clash with the age of the
+predominance of Tara; the Temairian kings are not mixed with the
+contemporary Fians. The chaos of the Nibelungen is not found here,
+nor the confusion of the Scotch ballads blending all the ages into
+one.
+
+It is not imaginative strength that produces confusion, but
+imaginative weakness. The strong imagination which perceives
+definitely and realises vividly will not tolerate that obscurity so
+dear to all those who worship the eidola of the cave. Of each of
+these ages, the primary impressions were made in the bardic mind
+during the life-time of the heroes who gave to the epoch its
+character; and a strong impression made in such a mind could not
+have been easily dissipated or obscured. For it must be remembered,
+that the bardic literature of Ireland was committed to the custody
+of guardians whose character we ought not to forget. The bards were
+not the people, but a class. They were not so much a class as an
+organisation and fraternity acknowledging the authority of one
+elected chief. They were not loose wanderers, but a power in the
+State, having duties and privileges. The ard-ollav ranked next to
+the king, and his eric was kingly. Thus there was an educated body
+of public opinion entrusted with the preservation of the literature
+and history of the country, and capable of repressing the
+aberrations of individuals.
+
+But the question arises, Did they so repress such perversions of
+history as their wandering undisciplined members might commit?
+Too much, of course, must not reasonably be expected. It was an
+age of creative thought, and such thought is difficult to control;
+but that one of the prime objects and prime works of the bards, as
+an organisation, was to preserve a record of a certain class of
+historical facts is certain. The succession of the kings and of the
+great princely families was one of these. The tribal system, with
+the necessity of affinity as a ground of citizenship, demanded such
+a preservation of pedigrees in every family, and particularly in
+the kingly houses. One of the chief objects of the triennial feis
+of Tara was the revision of such records by the general assembly of
+the bards, under the presidency of the Ard-Ollav of Ireland. In the
+more ancient times, such records were rhymed and alliterated, and
+committed to memory--a practice which, we may believe on the
+authority of Caesar, treating of the Gauls, continued long after
+the introduction of letters. Even at those local assemblies also,
+which corresponded to great central and national feis of Tara, the
+bards were accustomed to meet for that purpose. In a poem [Note:
+O'Curry's Manners and Customs, Vol. I., page 543.], descriptive of
+the fair [Note: On the full meaning of this word "fair," see Chap.
+xiii., Vol. I.] of Garman, we see this--
+
+      "Feasts with the great feasts of Temair,
+       Fairs with the fairs of Emania,
+       Annals there are verified."
+
+In the existing literature we see two great divisions. On the one
+hand the epical, a realm of the most riotous activity of thought;
+on the other, the annalistic and genealogical, bald and bare to the
+last degree, a mere skeleton. They represent the two great
+hemispheres of the bardic mind, the latter controlling the former.
+Hence the orderly sequence of the cyclic literature; hence the
+strong confining banks between which the torrent of song rolls down
+through those centuries in which the bardic imagination reached its
+height. The consentaneity of the annals and the literature
+furnishes a trustworthy guide to the general course of history,
+until its guidance is barred by _a priori_ considerations of a
+weightier nature, or by the statements of writers, having sources
+of information not open to us. For instance, the stream of Irish
+history must, for philosophical reasons, be no further traceable
+than to that point at which it issues from the enchanted land of
+the Tuátha De Danan. At the limit at which the gods appear, men and
+history must disappear; while on the other hand, the statement of
+Tiherna, that the foundation of Emain Alacha by Kimbay is the first
+certain date in Irish history, renders it undesirable to attach
+more historical reality of characters, adorning the ages prior to
+B.C. 299, than we could to such characters as Romulus in Roman, or
+Theseus in Athenian history.
+
+I desire here to record my complete and emphatic dissent from the
+opinions advanced by a writer in Hermathena on the subject of the
+Ogham inscriptions, and the introduction into this country of the
+art of writing. A cypher, i.e., an alphabet derived from a
+pre-existing alphabet, the Ogham may or may not have been. I
+advance no opinion upon that, but an invention of the Christian
+time it most assuredly was not. No sympathetic and careful student
+of the Irish bardic literature can possibly come to such a
+conclusion. The bardic poems relating to the heroes of the ethnic
+times are filled with allusions to Ogham inscriptions on stone, and
+contain some references to books of timber; but in my own reading I
+have not met with a single passage in that literature alluding to
+books of parchment and to rounded letters.
+
+If the Ogham was derived from the Roman characters introduced by
+Christian missionaries, then these characters would be the more
+ancient, and Ogham the more modern; books and Roman characters
+would be the more poetical, and inscriptions on stone and timber in
+the Ogham characters the more prosaic. The bards relating the lives
+and deeds of the ancient heroes, would have ascribed to their times
+parchment books and the Roman characters, not stone and wood, and
+the Ogham.
+
+In these compositions, whenever they were reduced to the form in
+which we find them to-day, the ethnic character of the times and
+the ethnic character of the heroes are clearly and universally
+observed. The ancient, the remote, the archaic clings to this
+literature. As Homer does not allude to writing, though all
+scholars agree that he lived in a lettered age, so the old bards do
+not allude to parchment and Roman characters, though the Irish
+epics, as distinguished from their component parts, reached their
+fixed state and their final development in times subsequent to the
+introduction of Christianity.
+
+When and how a knowledge of letters reached this island we know
+not. From the analogy of Gaul, we may conclude that they were
+known for some time prior to their use by the bards. Caesar tells
+us that the Gaulish bards and druids did not employ letters for the
+preservation of their lore, but trusted to memory, assisted,
+doubtless, as in this country, by the mechanical and musical aid of
+verse. Whether the Ogham was a native alphabet or a derivative
+from another, it was at first employed only to a limited extent.
+Its chief use was to preserve the name of buried kings and heroes
+in the stone that was set above their tombs. It was, perhaps,
+invented, and certainly became fashionable on this account,
+straight strokes being more easily cut in stone than rounded or
+uncial characters. For the same reason it was generally employed by
+those who inscribed timber tablets, which formed the primitive
+book, ere they discovered or learned how to use pen, ink, and
+parchment. The use of Ogham was partially practised in the
+Christian period for sepultural purposes, being venerable and
+sacred from time. Hence the discovery of Ogham-inscribed stones in
+Christian cemeteries. On the other hand, the fact that the majority
+of these stones are discovered in raths and forts, i.e., the tombs
+of our Pagan ancestors, corroborates the fact implied in all the
+bardic literature, that the characters employed in the ethnic times
+were Oghamic, and affords another proof of the close conservative
+spirit of the bards in their transcription, compilation, or
+reformation of the old epics.
+
+The full force of the concurrent authority of the bardic literature
+to the above effect can only be felt by one who has read that
+literature with care. He will find in all the epics no trace of
+original invention, but always a studied and conscientious
+following of authority. This being so, he will conclude that the
+universal ascription of Ogham, and Ogham only, to the ethnic times,
+arises solely from the fact that such was the alphabet then
+employed.
+
+If letters were unknown in those times, the example of Homer shows
+how unlikely the later poets would have been to outrage so
+violently the whole spirit of the heroic literature. If rounded
+letters were then used, why the universal ascription of the late
+invented Ogham which, as we know from the cemeteries and other
+sources, was unpopular in the Christian age.
+
+Cryptic, too, it was not. The very passages quoted in Hermathena
+to support this opinion, so far from doing so prove actually the
+reverse. When Cuculain came down into Meath on his first [Note:
+Vol. I., page 155.] foray, he found, on the lawn of the Dûn of the
+sons of Nectan, a pillar stone with this inscription in Ogham--"Let
+no one pass without an offer of a challenge of single combat." The
+inscription was, of course, intended for all to read. Should there
+be any bardic passage in which Ogham inscriptions are alluded to as
+if an obscure form of writing, the natural explanation is, that
+this kind of writing was passing or had passed into desuetude at
+the time that particular passage was composed; but I have never met
+with any such. The ancient bard, who, in the Tân-bo-Cooalney,
+describes the slaughter of Cailitin and his sons by Cuculain,
+states that there was an inscription to that effect, written in
+Ogham, upon the stone over their tomb, beginning thus--"Take
+notice"--evidently intended for all to read. The tomb, by the way,
+was a rath--again showing the ethnic character of the alphabet.
+
+In the Annals of the Four Masters, at the date 1499 B.C., we read
+these words:--
+
+"THE FLEET OF THE SONS OF MILITH CAME TO IRELAND TO TAKE IT FROM
+THE TUÁTHA DE DANAN," i.e., the gods of the ethnic Irish.
+
+Without pausing to enquire into the reasonableness of the date, it
+will suffice now to state that at this point the bardic history of
+Ireland cleaves asunder into two great divisions--the mythological
+or divine on the one hand, and the historical or heroic-historical
+on the other. The first is an enchanted land--the world of the
+Tuátha De Danan--the country of the gods. There we see Mananan with
+his mountain-sundering sword, the Fray-garta; there Lu Lamfada, the
+deliverer, pondering over his mysteries; there Bove Derg and his
+fatal [Note: Every feast to which he came ended in blood. He was
+present at the death of Conairey Mor, Chap. xxxiii., Vol. I.]
+swine-herd, Lir and his ill-starred children, Mac Mánar and his
+harp shedding death from its stricken wires, Angus Og, the
+beautiful, and he who was called the mighty father, Eochaidht
+[Note: Ay-o-chee, written Yeoha in Vol. I.] Mac Elathan, a land
+populous with those who had partaken of the feast of Goibneen, and
+whom, therefore, weapons could not slay, who had eaten [Note: In
+early Greek literature the province of history has been already
+separated from that of poetry. The ancient bardic lore and
+primaeval traditions were refined to suit the new and sensitive
+poetic taste. No commentator has been able to explain the nature of
+ambrosia. In the genuine bardic times, no such vague euphuism would
+have been tolerated as that of Homer on this subject. The nature of
+Olympian ambrosia would have been told in language as clear as that
+in which Homer describes the preparation of that Pramnian bowl for
+which Nestor and Machaon waited while Hecamede was grating over it
+the goat's milk cheese, or that in which the Irish bards described
+the ambrosia of the Tuátha De Danan, which, indeed, was no more
+poetic and awe-inspiring than plain bacon prepared by Mananan from
+his herd of enchanted pigs, living invisible like himself in the
+plains of Tir-na-n-Og, the land of the ever-young. On the other
+hand, there is a vagueness about the Feed Fia which would seem to
+indicate the growth of a more awe-stricken mood in describing
+things supernatural. The Faed Fia of the Greek gods has been
+refined by Homer into "much darkness," which, from an artistic
+point of view, one can hardly help imagining that Homer nodded as
+he wrote.] at the the table of Mananan, and would never grow old,
+who had invented for themselves the Faed Fia, and might not be seen
+of the gross eyes of men; there steeds like Anvarr crossing the wet
+sea like a firm plain; there ships whose rudder was the will, and
+whose sails and oars the wish, of those they bore [Note: Cf. The
+barks of the Phoenicians in the Odyssey.]; there hounds like that
+one of Ioroway, and spears like fiery flying serpents. These are
+the Tuátha De Danan [Note: A mystery still hangs over this
+three-formed name. The full expression, Tuátha De Danan, is that
+generally employed, less frequently Tuátha De, and sometimes, but
+not often, Tuátha. Tuátha also means people. In mediaeval times the
+name lost its sublime meaning, and came to mean merely "fairy," no
+greater significance, indeed, attaching to the invisible people of
+the island after Christianity had destroyed their godhood.], fairy
+princes, Tuátha; gods, De; of Dana, Danan, otherwise Ana and the
+Moreega, or great queen; mater [Note: Cormac's Glossary] deorum
+Hibernensium--"well she used to cherish [Note: Scholiast noting
+same Glossary.] the gods." Limitless, this divine population,
+dwelling in all the seas and estuaries, river and lakes, mountains
+and fairy dells, in that enchanted Erin which was theirs.
+
+But they have not started into existence suddenly, like the gods of
+Rome, nor is their genealogy confined to a single generation like
+those of Greece. Behind them extends a long line of ancestors, and
+a history reaching into the remotest depths of the past. As the
+Greek gods dethroned the Titans, so the Irish gods drove out or
+subjected the giants of the Fir-bolgs; but in the Irish mythology,
+we find both gods and giants descended from other ancient races of
+deities, called the Clanna Nemedh and the Fomoroh, and these a
+branch of a divine cycle; yet more ancient the race of Partholan,
+while Partholan himself is not the eldest.
+
+The history of the Italian gods is completely lost. For all that
+the early Roman literature tells us of their origin, they may have
+been either self-created or eternal. Rome was a seedling shaken
+from some old perished civilisation. The Romans created their own
+empire, but they inherited their gods. They supply no example of
+an Aryan nation evolving its own mythology and religion. Regal
+Rome, as we know from Niebuhr, was not the root from which our
+Rome sprang, but an old imperial city, from whose ashes sprang
+that Rome we all know so well. The mythology of the Latin writers
+came to them full-grown.
+
+The gods of Greece were a creation of the Greek mind, indeed; but
+of their ancestry, i.e., of their development from more ancient
+divine tribes, we know little. Like Pallas, they all but start into
+existence suddenly full-grown. Between the huge physical entities
+of the Greek theogonists and the Olympian gods, there intervenes
+but a single generation. For this loss of the Grecian mythology,
+and this substitution of Nox and Chaos for the remote ancestors of
+the Olympians, we have to thank the early Greek philosophers, and
+the general diffusion of a rude scientific knowledge, imparting a
+physical complexion to the mythological memory of the Greeks.
+
+In the theogony of the ancient inhabitants of this country, we have
+an example of a slowly-growing, slowly-changing mythology, such as
+no other nation in the world can supply. The ancestry of the Irish
+gods is not bounded by a single generation or by twenty. The Tuátha
+De Danan of the ancient Irish are the final outcome and last
+development of a mythology which we can see advancing step by step,
+one divine tribe pushing out another, one family of gods swallowing
+up another, or perishing under the hands of time and change, to
+make room for another. From Angus Og, the god of youth and love and
+beauty, whose fit home was the woody slopes of the Boyne, where it
+winds around Rosnaree, we count fourteen generations to Nemedh and
+four to Partholan, and Partholan is not the earliest. As the bards
+recorded with a zeal and minuteness, so far as I can see, without
+parallel, the histories of the families to which they were
+adscript, so also they recorded with equal patience and care the
+far-extending pedigrees of those other families--invisible indeed,
+but to them more real and more awe-inspiring--who dwelt by the
+sacred lakes and rivers, and in the folds of the fairy hills, and
+the great raths and cairns reared for them by pious hands.
+
+The extent, diversity, and populousness of the Irish mythological
+cycles, the history of the Irish gods, and the gradual growth of
+that mythology of which the Tuátha De Danan, i.e., the gods of the
+historic period, were the final development, can only be rightly
+apprehended by one who reads the bardic literature as it deals with
+this subject. That literature, however, so far from having been
+printed and published, has not even been translated, but still
+moulders in the public libraries of Europe, those who, like myself,
+are not professed Irish scholars, being obliged to collect their
+information piece-meal from quotations and allusions of those who
+have written upon the subject in the English or Latin language. For
+to read the originals aright needs many years of labour, the Irish
+tongue presenting at different epochs the characteristics of
+distinct languages, while the peculiarities of ancient caligraphy,
+in the defaced and illegible manuscripts, form of themselves quite
+a large department of study. Stated succinctly, the mythological
+record of the bards, with its chronological decorations, runs thus:--
+
+AGE OF KEASAIR.
+
+2379 B.C. the gods of the KEASAIRIAN cycle, Bith, Lara, and
+Fintann, and their wives, KEASAIR, Barran and Balba; their sacred
+places, Carn Keshra, Keasair's tomb or temple, on the banks of the
+Boyle, Ard Laran on the Wexford Coast, Fert Fintann on the shores
+of Lough Derg.
+
+About the same time Lot Luaimenich, Lot of the Lower Shannon, an
+ancient sylvan deity.
+
+AGE OF PARTHOLAN AND THE EARLIEST FOMORIAN GODS.
+
+2057 B.C. a new spiritual dynasty, of which PARTHOLAN was father
+and king. Though their worship was extended over Ireland, which is
+shown by the many different places connected with their history,
+yet the hill of Tallaght, ten miles from Dublin, was where they
+were chiefly adored. Here to the present day are the mounds and
+barrows raised in honour of the deified heroes of this cycle,
+PARTHOLAN himself, his wife Delgna, his sons, Rury, Slaney, and
+Laighlinni, and among others, the father of Irish hospitality,
+bearing the expressive name of Beer. Now first appear the Fomoroh
+giant princes, under the leadership of curt Kical, son of Niul, son
+of Garf, son of U-Mor--a divine cycle intervening between KEASAIR
+and PARTHOLAN, but not of sufficient importance to secure a
+separate chapter and distinct place in the annals. Battles now
+between the Clan Partholan and the Fomoroh, on the plain of Ith,
+beside the river Finn, Co. Donegal, so called from Ith [Note: See
+Vol. I, p. 60], son of Brogan, the most ancient of the heroes,
+slain here by the Tuátha De Danan, but more anciently known by some
+lost Fomorian name; also at Iorrus Domnan, now Erris, Co. Mayo,
+where Kical and his Fomorians first reached Ireland. These battles
+are a parable--objective representations of a fact in the mental
+history of the ancient Irish--typifying the invisible war waged
+between Partholanian and Fomorian deities for the spiritual
+sovereignty of the Gael.
+
+AGE OF THE NEMEDIAN GODS AND SECOND CYCLE OF THE FOMORIANS.
+
+1700 B.C. age of the NEMEDIAN divinities, a later branch of the
+PARTHOLANIAN _vide post_ NEMEDIAN pedigree. NEMEDH, his wife Maca
+(first appearance of Macha, the war goddess, who gave her name to
+Armagh, i.e., Ard Macha, the Height of Macha), Iarbanel; Fergus,
+the Red-sided, and Starn, sons of Nemedh; Beothah, son of Iarbanel;
+Erglann, son of Beoan, son of Starn; Siméon Brac, son of Starn;
+Ibath, son of Beothach; Britan Mael, son of Fergus. This must be
+remembered, that not one of the almost countless names that figure
+in the Irish mythology is of fanciful origin. They all represent
+antique heroes and heroines, their names being preserved in
+connection with those monuments which were raised for purposes of
+sepulture or cult.
+
+Wars now between the Clanna Nemedh and the second cycle of the
+Fomoroh, led this time by Faebar and More, sons of Dela, and
+Coning, son of Faebar; battles at Ros Freachan, now Rosreahan,
+barony of Murresk, Co. Mayo, at Slieve Blahma [Note: Slieve
+Blahma, now Slieve Bloom, a mountain range famous in our mythology;
+one of the peaks, Ard Erin, sacred to Eiré, a goddess of the Tuátha
+De Danan, who has given her name to the island. The sites of all
+these mythological battles, where they are not placed in the
+haunted mountains, will be found to be a place of raths and
+cromlechs.] and Murbolg, in Dalaradia (Murbolg, i.e., the
+stronghold of the giants,) also at Tor Coning, now Tory Island.
+
+FIRBOLGS AND THIRD CYCLE OF THE FOMOROH.
+
+1525 B.C. Age of the FIRBOLGS and third cycle of the Fomorians,
+once gods, but expulsed from their sovereignty by the Tuátha De
+Danan, after which they loom through the heroic literature as
+giants of the elder time, overthrown by the gods. From the FIRBOLGS
+were descended, or claimed to have descended, the Connaught
+warriors who fought with Queen Meave against Cuculain, also the
+Clan Humor, appearing in the Second Volume, also the heroes of
+Ossian, the Fianna Eireen. Even in the time of Keating, Irish
+families traced thither their pedigrees. The great chiefs of the
+FIR-BOLGIC dynasty were the five sons of Dela, Gann, Genann,
+Sengann, Rury, and Slaney, with their wives Fuad, Edain, Anust,
+Cnucha, and Libra; also their last and most potent king, EOCAIDH
+MAC ERC, son of Ragnal, son of Genann, whose tomb or temple may be
+seen to-day at Ballysadare, Co. Sligo, on the edge of the sea.
+
+The Fomorians of this age were ruled over by Baler Beimenna and
+his wife Kethlenn. Their grandson was Lu Lamáda, one of the
+noblest of the Irish gods.
+
+The last of the mythological cycles is that of the Tuátha De Danan,
+whose character, attributes, and history will, I hope, be rendered
+interesting and intelligible in my account of Cuculain and the Red
+Branch of Ulster.
+
+Irish history has suffered from rationalism almost more than from
+neglect and ignorance. The conjectures of the present century are
+founded upon mediaeval attempts to reduce to verisimilitude and
+historical probability what was by its nature quite incapable of
+such treatment. The mythology of the Irish nation, being relieved
+of the marvellous and sublime, was set down with circumstantial
+dates as a portion of the country's history by the literary men of
+the middle ages. Unable to excide from the national narrative those
+mythological beings who filled so great a place in the imagination
+of the times, and unable, as Christians, to describe them in their
+true character as gods, or, as patriots, in the character which
+they believed them to possess, namely, demons, they rationalized
+the whole of the mythological period with names, dates, and ordered
+generations, putting men for gods, flesh and blood for that
+invisible might, till the page bristled with names and dates, thus
+formulating, as annals, what was really the theogony and mythology
+of their country. The error of the mediaeval historians is shared
+by the not wiser moderns. In the generations of the gods we seem to
+see prehistoric racial divisions and large branches of the Aryan
+family, an error which results from a neglect of the bardic
+literature, and a consequently misdirected study of the annals.
+
+As history, the pre-Milesian record contains but a limited supply
+of objective truths; but as theogony, and the history of the Irish
+gods, these much abused chronicles are as true as the roll of the
+kings of England.
+
+These divine nations, with their many successive generations and
+dynasties, constitute a single family; they are all inter-connected
+and spring from common sources, and where the literature permits
+us to see more clearly, the earlier races exhibit a common
+character. Like a human clan, the elements of this divine family
+grew and died, and shed forth seedlings which, in time, over-grew
+and killed the parent stock. Great names became obscure and passed
+away, and new ones grew and became great. Gods, worshipped by the
+whole nation, declined and became topical, and minor deities
+expanding, became national. Gods lost their immortality, and were
+remembered as giants of the old time--mighty men, which were of
+yore, men of renown.
+
+      "The gods which were of old time rest in their tombs,"
+
+sang the Egyptians, consciously ascribing mortality even to gods.
+Such was Mac Ere, King of Fir-bolgs. His temple [Note: Strand near
+Ballysadare, Co. Sligo], beside the sea at Iorrus Domnan [Note:
+Keating--evidently quoting a bardic historian], became his tomb.
+Daily the salt tide embraces the feet of the great tumulus, regal
+amongst its smaller comrades, where the last king of Fir-bolgs was
+worshipped by his people. "Good [Note: Temple--vide post.] were the
+years of the sovereignty of Mac Ere. There was no wet or
+tempestuous weather in Ireland, nor was there any unfruitful year."
+Such were all the predecessors of the children of Dana--gods which
+were of old times, that rest in their tombs; and the days, too, of
+the Tuátha De Danan were numbered. They, too, smitten by a more
+celestial light, vanished from their hills, like Ossian lamenting
+over his own heroes; those others still mightier, might say:--
+
+     "Once every step which we took might be heard throughout the
+   firmament. Now, all have gone, they have melted into the air."
+
+But that divine tree, though it had its branches in fairy-land, had
+its roots in the soil of Erin. An unceasing translation of heroes
+into Tir-na-n-og went on through time, the fairy-world of the
+bards, receiving every century new inhabitants, whose humbler human
+origin being forgotten, were supplied there with both wives and
+children. The apotheosis of great men went forward, tirelessly; the
+hero of one epoch becoming the god of the next, until the formation
+of the Tuátha De Danan, who represent the gods of the historic
+ages. Had the advent of exact genealogy been delayed, and the
+creative imagination of the bards suffered to work on for a couple
+of centuries longer, unchecked by the historical conscience,
+Cuculain's human origin would, perhaps, have been forgotten, and he
+would have been numbered amongst the Tuátha De Danan, probably, as
+the son of Lu Lamfáda and the Moreega, his patron deities. It was,
+indeed, a favourite fancy of the bards that not Sualtam, but Lu
+Lamfáda himself, was his father; this, however, in a spiritual or
+supernatural sense, for his age was far removed from that of the
+Tuátha De Danan, and falling well within the scope of the historic
+period. Even as late as the time of Alexander, the Greeks could
+believe a great contemporary warrior to be of divine origin, and
+the son of Zeus.
+
+When the Irish bards began to elaborate a general history of their
+country, they naturally commenced with the enumeration of the elder
+gods. I at one time suspected that the long pedigrees running
+between those several divisions of the mythological period were the
+invention of mediaeval historians, anxious to spin out the national
+record, that it might reach to Shinar and the dispersion. Not only,
+however, was such fabrication completely foreign to the genius of
+the literature, but in the fragments of those early divine cycles,
+we see that each of these personages was at one time the centre of
+a literature, and holds a definite place as regards those who went
+before and came after. These pedigrees, as I said before, have no
+historical meaning, being pre-Milesian, and therefore absolutely
+prehistoric; but as the genealogy of the gods, and as representing
+the successive generations of that invisible family, whose history
+not one or ten bards, but the whole bardic and druidic organisation
+of the island, delighted to record, collate, and verify--those
+pedigrees are as reliable as that of any of the regal clans. They
+represent accurately the mythological panorama, as it unrolled
+itself slowly through the centuries before the imagination and
+spirit of our ancestors accurately that divine drama, millennium--
+lasting, with its exits and entrances of gods. Millennium-lasting,
+and more so, for it is plain that one divine generation represents
+on the average a much greater space of time than a generation of
+mortal men. The former probably represents the period which would
+elapse before a hero would become so divine, that is, so
+consecrated in the imagination of the country, as to be received
+into the family of the gods. Cuculain died in the era of the
+Incarnation, three hundred years, if not more, before the country
+even began to be Christianised, yet he is never spoken of as
+anything but a great hero, from which one of two things would
+follow, either that the apotheosis of heroes needed the lapse of
+centuries, or that, during the first, second, third, and fourth
+centuries, the historical conscience was so enlightened, and a
+positive definite knowledge of the past so universal, that the
+translation of heroes into the divine clans could no longer take
+place. The latter is indeed the more correct view; but the reader
+will, I think, agree with me that the divine generations, taken
+generally, represent more than the average space of man's life. To
+what remote unimagined distances of time those earlier cycles
+extend has been shown by an examination of the tombs of the lower
+Moy Tura. The ancient heroes there interred were those who, as
+Fir-bolgs, preceded the reign of the Tuáth De Danan, coming long
+after the Clanna Nemedh in the divine cycle, who were themselves
+preceded by the children of Partholan, who were subsequent to the
+Queen Keasair. Such then being the position in the divine cycle of
+the Fir-bolgs, an examination of the Firbolgic raths on Moy Tura
+has revealed only implements of stone, proving demonstratively that
+the early divine cycles originated before the bronze age in
+Ireland, whenever that commenced. Those heroes who, as Fir-bolgs,
+received divine honours, lived in the age of stone. So far is it
+from being the case, that the mythological record has been extended
+and unduly stretched, to enable the monkish historians to connect
+the Irish pedigrees with those of the Mosaic record, that it has, I
+believe, been contracted for this purpose.
+
+The reader will be now prepared to peruse with some interest and
+understanding one or two of the mythological pedigrees. To these I
+have at times appended the dates, as given in the chronicles, to
+show how the early historians rationalised the pre-historic record.
+
+Angus Og, the Beautiful, represents the Greek Eros. He was surnamed
+Og, or young; Mac-an-Og, or the son of youth; Mac-an-Dagda, son of
+the Dagda. He was represented with a harp, and attended by bright
+birds, his own transformed kisses, at whose singing love arose in
+the hearts of youths and maidens. To him and to his father the
+great tumulus of New Grange, upon the Boyne, was sacred.
+
+      "I visited the Royal Brugh that stands
+       By the dark-rolling waters of the Boyne,
+       Where Angus Og magnificently dwells."
+
+He was the patron god of Diarmid, the Paris of Ossian's Fianna, and
+removed him into Tir-na-n-Og, when he died, having been ripped by
+the tusks of the wild boar on the peaks of Slieve Gulban.
+
+Lu Lamfáda was the patron god of Cuculain. He was surnamed Ioldana,
+as the source of the sciences, and represented the Greek Apollo.
+The latter was argurgurotoxos [Transcriber's Note: Greek in the
+original], but Lu was a sling bearing god. Of Fomorian descent
+on the mother's side, he joined his father's people, the Tuátha
+De Danan, in the great war against the Fomoroh. He is principally
+celebrated for his oppression of the sons of Turann, in vengeance
+for the murder of his father.
+
+ANGUS OG, (circa 1500 B.C.)           LU LAMFADA, (circa 1500 B.C.)
+   son of                                son of
+THE DAGDA, (Zeus)                     Cian,
+   son of                                son of
+Elathan,                              Diancéct, (god the healer)
+   son of                                son of
+Dela,                                 Esric,
+   son of                                son of
+Ned,                                  Dela,
+   son of                                son of
+Indaei,                               Ned,
+   son of                                son of
+                                      Indaei,
+                                         son of
+                       ALLDAEI.
+
+Amongst other Irish gods was Bove Derg, who dwelt invisible in
+the Galtee mountains, and in the hills above Lough Derg. The
+transformed children alluded to in Vol. I. were his grand-children.
+It was his goldsmith Len, who gave its ancient name to the Lakes of
+Killarney, Locha Lein. Here by the lake he worked, surrounded by
+rainbows and showers of fiery dew.
+
+Mananan was the god of the sea, of winds and storms, and most
+skilled in magic lore. He was friendly to Cuculain, and was invoked
+by seafaring men. He was called the Far Shee of the promontories.
+
+BOVE DERG (circa 1500 B.C.)           MANANAN (circa 1500 B.C.)
+   son of                                son of
+Eocaidh Garf,                         Alloid,
+   son of                                son of
+Duach Temen,                          Elathan,
+   son of                                son of
+Bras,                                 Dela,
+   son of                                son of
+Dela,                                 Ned,
+   son of                                son of
+Ned,                                  Indaei,
+   son of                                son of
+Indaei,
+   son of
+                       ALLDAEI.
+
+The Tuátha De Danan maybe counted literally by the hundred, each
+with a distinct history, and all descended from Alldaei.
+
+From Alldaei the pedigree runs back thus:--
+
+               Alldaei
+                 son of
+               Tath,
+                 son of
+               Tabarn,
+                 son of
+               Enna,
+                 son of
+               Baath,
+                 son of
+               Ebat,
+                 son of
+               Betah,
+                 son of
+               Iarbanel,
+                 son of
+        NEMEDH (circa 1700 B.C.)
+
+Nemedh, as I have said, forms one of the great epochs in the
+mythological record. As will be seen, he and the earlier Partholan
+have a common source:--
+
+NEMEDH
+   son of
+Sera,
+   son of
+Pamp,
+   son of
+Tath,                                 PARTHOLAN (2000 B.C.)
+   son of                                son of
+                   Sera,
+                     son of
+                   Sru,
+                     son of
+                   Esru,
+                     son of
+                   Pramant.
+
+The connection between Keasair, the earliest of the Irish gods, and
+the rest of the cycle, I have not discovered, but am confident of
+its existence.
+
+How this divine cycle can be expunged from the history of Ireland I
+am at a loss to see. The account which a nation renders of itself
+must, and always does, stand at the head of every history.
+
+How different is this from the history and genealogy of the Greek
+gods which runs thus:--
+
+         The Olympian gods,
+             Titans,
+         Physical entities, Nox, Chaos, &c.
+
+The Greek gods, undoubtedly, had a long ancestry extending into the
+depths of the past, but the sudden advent of civilisation broke up
+the bardic system before the historians could become philosophical,
+or philosophers interested in antiquities.
+
+But the Irish history corrects our view with regard to other
+matters connected with the gods of the Aryan nations of Europe
+also.
+
+All the nations of Europe lived at one time under the bardic and
+druidic system, and under that system imagined their gods and
+elaborated their various theogonies, yet, in no country in Europe
+has a bardic literature been preserved except in Ireland, for no
+thinking man can believe Homer to have been a product of that rude
+type of civilisation of which he sings. This being the case, modern
+philosophy, accounting for the origin of the classical deities by
+guesses and _a priori_ reasonings, has almost universally adopted
+that explanation which I have, elsewhere, called Wordsworthian, and
+which derives them directly from the imagination personifying the
+aspects of nature.
+
+     "In that fair clime, the lonely herdsman, stretched
+      On the soft grass through half a summer's day,
+      With music lulled his indolent repose,
+      And in some fit of weariness if he,
+      When his own breath was silent, chanced to hear
+      A distant strain far sweeter than the sounds
+      Which his poor skill could make, his fancy fetched,
+      Even from the blazing chariot of the sun,
+      A beardless youth who touched a golden lute
+      And filled the illumined groves with ravishment--
+      ***
+              "Sunbeams upon distant hills,
+      Gliding apace with shadows in their train,
+      Might, with small help from fancy, be transformed
+      Into fleet oreads, sporting visibly."
+
+This is pretty, but untrue. In all the ancient Irish literature we
+find the connection of the gods, both those who survived into the
+historic times, and those whom they had dethroned, with the raths
+and cairns perpetually and almost universally insisted upon. The
+scene of the destruction of the Firbolgs will be found to be a
+place of tombs, the metropolis of the Fomorians a place of tombs,
+and a place of tombs the sacred home of the Tuátha along the shores
+of the Boyne. Doubtless, they are represented also as dwelling in
+the hills, lakes, and rivers, but still the connection between the
+great raths and cairns and the gods is never really forgotten. When
+the floruit of a god has expired, he is assigned a tomb in one of
+the great tumuli. No one can peruse this ancient literature without
+seeing clearly the genesis of the Irish gods, _videlicet_ heroes,
+passing, through the imagination and through the region of poetic
+representation, into the world of the supernatural. When a king
+died, his people raised his ferta, set up his stone, and engraved
+upon it, at least in later times, his name in ogham. They
+celebrated his death with funeral lamentations and funeral games,
+and listened to the bards chanting his prowess, his liberality, and
+his beauty. In the case of great warriors, these games and
+lamentations became periodical. It is distinctly recorded in many
+places, for instance in connection with Taylti, who gave her name
+to Taylteen and Garman, who gave her name to Loch Garman, now
+Wexford, and with Lu Lamfáda, whose annual worship gave its name to
+the Kalends of August. Gradually, as his actual achievements became
+more remote, and the imagination of the bards, proportionately,
+more unrestrained, he would pass into the world of the supernatural.
+Even in the case of a hero so surrounded with historic light as
+Cuculain we find a halo, as of godhood, often settling around him.
+His gray warsteed had already passed into the realm of mythical
+representation, as a second avatar of the Liath Macha, the grey
+war-horse of the war-goddess Macha. This could be believed, even
+in the days when the imagination was controlled by the annalists
+and tribal heralds.
+
+The gods of the Irish were their deified ancestors. They were not
+the offspring of the poetic imagination, personifying the various
+aspects of nature. Traces, indeed, we find of their influence over
+the operations of nature, but they are, upon the whole, slight and
+unimportant. From nature they extract her secrets by their
+necromantic and magical labours, but nature is as yet too great to
+be governed and impelled by them. The Irish Apollo had not yet
+entered into the sun.
+
+Like every country upon which imperial Rome did not leave the
+impress of her genius, Ireland, in these ethnic times, attained
+only a partial unity. The chief king indeed presided at Tara, and
+enjoyed the reputation and emoluments flowing to him on that
+account, but, upon the whole, no Irish king exercised more than a
+local sovereignty; they were all reguli, petty kings, and their
+direct authority was small. This being the case, it would appear to
+me that in the more ancient times the death of a king would not be
+an event which would disturb a very extensive district, and that,
+though his tomb might be considerable, it would not be gigantic.
+
+Now on the banks of the Boyne, opposite Rosnaree, there stands a
+tumulus, said to be the greatest in Europe. It covers acres of
+ground, being of proportionate height. The earth is confined by a
+compact stone wall about twelve feet high. The central chamber,
+made of huge irregular pebbles, is about twenty feet from ground to
+roof, communicating with the outer air by a flagged passage.
+Immense pebbles, drawn from the County of Antrim, stand around it,
+each of which, even to move at all, would require the labour of
+many men, assisted with mechanical appliances. It is, of course,
+impossible to make an accurate estimate of the expenditure of
+labour necessary for the construction of such a work, but it would
+seem to me to require thousands of men working for years. Can we
+imagine that a petty king of those times could, after his death,
+when probably his successor had enough to do to sustain his new
+authority, command such labour merely to provide for himself a
+tomb. If this tomb were raised to the hero whose name it bears
+immediately after his death, and in his mundane character, he must
+have been such a king as never existed in Ireland, even in the late
+Christian times. Even Brian of the Tributes himself, could not have
+commanded such a sepulture, or anything like it, living though he
+did, probably, two thousand years later than that Eocaidh Mac
+Elathan, whenever he did live. There is a _nodus_ here needing a
+god to solve it.
+
+Returning now to what would most likely take place after the
+interment of a hero, we may well imagine that the size of his tomb
+would be in proportion to the love which he inspired, where no
+accidental causes would interfere with the gratification of that
+feeling. Of one of his heroes, Ossian, sings--
+
+    "We made his cairn great and high
+     Like a king's."
+
+After that there would be periodical meetings in his honour, the
+celebration of games, solemn recitations by bards, singing his
+aristeia [Transcriber's Note: Greek in the original]. Gradually
+the new wine would burst the old bottles. The ever-active,
+eager-loving imagination would behold the champion grown to
+heroic proportions, the favourite of the gods, the performer of
+superhuman feats. The tomb, which was once commensurate with the
+love and reverence which he inspired, would seem so now no longer.
+The tribal bards, wandering or attending the great fairs and
+assemblies, would disperse among strangers and neighbours a
+knowledge of his renown. In the same cemetery or neighbourhood
+their might be other tombs of heroes now forgotten, while he,
+whose fame was in every bardic mouth in all that region, was
+honoured only with a tomb no greater than theirs. The mere king
+or champion, grown into a topical hero, would need a greater tomb.
+
+Ere long again, owing to the bardic fraternity, who, though coming
+from Innishowen or Cape Clear, formed a single community, the
+topical hero would, in some cases, where his character was such as
+would excite deeper reverence and greater fame, grow into a
+national hero, and a still nobler tomb be required, in order that
+the visible memorial might prove commensurate with the imaginative
+conception.
+
+Now all this time the periodic celebrations, the games, and
+lamentations, and songs would be assuming a more solemn character.
+Awe would more and more mingle with the other feelings inspired by
+his name. Certain rites and a certain ritual would attend those
+annual games and lamentations, which would formerly not have been
+suitable, and eventually, when the hero, slowly drawing nearer
+through generations, if not centuries, at last reached Tir-na-n-Og,
+and was received into the family of the gods, a religious feeling
+of a different nature would mingle with the more secular
+celebration of his memory, and his rath or cairn would assume in
+their eyes a new character.
+
+To an ardent imaginative people the complete extinction by death of
+a much-loved hero would even at first be hardly possible. That the
+tomb which held his ashes should be looked upon as the house of
+the hero must have been, even shortly after his interment, a
+prevailing sentiment, whether expressed or not. Also, the feeling
+must have been present, that the hero in whose honour they
+performed the annual games, and periodically chanted the
+remembrance of whose achievements, saw and heard those things that
+were done in his honour. But as the celebration became greater and
+more solemn, this feeling would become more strong, and as the
+tomb, from a small heap of stones or low mound, grew into an
+enormous and imposing rath, the belief that this was the hero's
+house, in which he invisibly dwelt, could not be avoided, even
+before they ceased to regard him as a disembodied hero; and after
+the hero had mingled with the divine clans, and was numbered
+amongst the gods, the idea that the rath was a tomb could not
+logically be entertained. As a god, was he not one of those who had
+eaten of the food provided by Mananan, and therefore never died.
+The rath would then become his house or temple. As matter of fact,
+the bardic writings teem with this idea. From reason and
+probability, we would with some certainty conclude that the great
+tumulus of New Grange was the temple of some Irish god; but that it
+was so, we know as a fact. The father and king of the gods is
+alluded to as dwelling there, going out from thence, and returning
+again, and there holding his invisible court.
+
+      "Behold the _Sid_ before your eyes,
+       It is manifest to you that it is a king's mansion."
+[Note: O'Curry's Manuscript Materials of Irish History, page 505.]
+
+      "Bove Derg went to visit the Dagda at the Brugh of Mac-An-Og."
+[Note: "Dream of Angus," Révue Celtique, Vol. III., page 349.]
+
+Here also dwelt Angus Og, the son of the Dagda. In this, his spiritual
+court or temple, he is represented as having entertained Oscar and
+the Ossianic heroes, and thither he conducted [Note: Publications of
+Ossianic Society, Vol. III., page 201.] the spirit of Diarmid, that
+he might have him for ever there.
+
+In the etymology also we see the origin of the Irish gods. A grave
+in Irish is Sid, the disembodied spirit is Sidhe, and this latter
+word glosses Tuátha De Danan.
+
+The fact that the grave of a hero developed slowly into the temple
+of a god, explains certain obscurities in the annals and
+literature. As a hero was exalted into a god, so in turn a god sank
+into a hero, or rather into the race of the giants. The elder gods,
+conquered and destroyed by the younger, could no longer be regarded
+as really divine, for were they not proved to be mortal? The
+development of the temple from the tomb was not forgotten, the
+whole country being filled with such tombs and incipient temples,
+from the great Brugh on the Boyne to the smallest mound in any of
+the cemeteries. Thus, when the elder gods lost their spiritual
+sovereignty, and their destruction at the hands of the younger took
+the form of great battles, then as the god was forced to become a
+giant, so his temple was remembered to be a tomb. Doubtless, in his
+own territory, divine honours were still paid him; but in the
+national imagination and in the classical literature and received
+history, he was a giant of the olden time, slain by the gods, and
+interred in the rath which bore his name. Such was the great Mac
+Erc, King of Fir-bolgs.
+
+Again, when the mediaeval Christians ceased to regard the Tuátha De
+Danan as devils, and proceeded to rationalise the divine record as
+the ethnic bards had rationalised the history of the early gods;
+the Tuátha De Danan, shorn of immortality, became ancient heroes
+who had lived their day and died, and the greater raths, no longer
+the houses of the gods, figure in that literature irrationally
+rational, as their tombs. Thus we are gravely informed [Note:
+Annals of Four Masters.] that "the Dagda Mor, after the second
+battle of Moy Tura, retired to the Brugh on the Boyne, where he
+died from the venom of the wounds inflicted on him by Kethlenn"--
+the Fomorian amazon--"and was there interred." Even in this passage
+the writer seems to have been unable to dispossess his mind quite
+of the traditional belief that the Brugh was the Dagda's house.
+
+The peculiarity of this mound, in addition to its size, is the
+spaciousness of the central chamber. This was that germ which, but
+for the overthrow of the bardic religion, would have developed into
+a temple in the classic sense of the word. A two-fold motive would
+have impelled the growing civilisation in this direction. A desire
+to make the house of the god as spacious within as it was great
+without, and a desire to transfer his worship, or the more esoteric
+and solemn part of it, from without to within. Either the absence
+of architectural knowledge, or the force of conservatism, or the
+advent of the Christian missionaries, checked any further
+development on these lines.
+
+Elsewhere the tomb, instead of developing as a tumulus or barrow,
+produced the effect of greatness by huge circumvallations of earth,
+and massive walls of stone. Such is the temple of Ned the war-god,
+called Aula Neid, the court or palace of Ned, near the Foyle in
+the North. Had the ethnic civilisation of Ireland been suffered to
+develop according to its own laws, it is probable that, as the
+roofed central chamber of the cairn would have grown until it
+filled the space occupied by the mound, so the open-walled temple
+would have developed into a covered building, by the elevation of
+the walls, and their gradual inclination to the centre.
+
+The bee-hive houses of the monks, the early churches, and the round
+towers are a development of that architecture which constructed the
+central chambers of the raths. In this fact lies, too, the
+explanation of the cyclopean style of building which characterizes
+our most ancient buildings. The cromlech alone, formed in very
+ancient times the central chamber of the cairn; it is found in the
+centre of the raths on Moy Tura, belonging to the stone age and
+that of the Firbolgs. When the cromlech fell into disuse, the
+arched chamber above the ashes of the hero was constructed with
+enormous stones, as a substitute for the majestic appearance
+presented by the massive slab and supporting pillars of the more
+ancient cromlech, and the early stone buildings preserved the same
+characteristic to a certain extent.
+
+The same sentiment which caused the mediaeval Christians to
+disinter and enshrine the bones of their saints, and subsequently
+to re-enshrine them with greater art and more precious materials,
+caused the ethnic worshippers of heroes to erect nobler tombs over
+the inurned relics of those whom they revered, as the meanness of
+the tomb was seen to misrepresent and humiliate the sublimity of
+the conception. But the Christians could never have imagined their
+saints to have been anything but men--a fact which caused the
+retention and preservation of the relics. When the Gentiles exalted
+their hero into a god, the charred bones were forgotten or ascribed
+to another. The hero then became immortal in his own right; he had
+feasted with Mananan and eaten his life-giving food, and would not
+know death.
+
+When the mortal character of the hero was forgotten, his house or
+temple might be erected anywhere. The great Raths of the Boyne--a
+place grown sacred from causes which we may not now learn--
+represented, probably, heroes and heroines, who died and were
+interred in many different parts of the country.
+
+To recapitulate, the Dagda Mor was a divine title given to a hero
+named Eocaidh, who lived many centuries before the birth of Christ,
+and in the depths of the pre-historic ages. He was the mortal scion
+or ward of an elder god, Elathan, and was interred in some unknown
+grave--marked, perhaps, by a plain pillar stone, or small
+insignificant cairn.
+
+The great tumulus of New Grange was the temple of the divine or
+supernatural period of his spiritual or imagined career after
+death, and was a development by steps from that small unremembered
+grave where once his warriors hid the inurned ashes of the hero.
+
+What is true of one branch of the Aryan family is true of all.
+Sentiments of such universality and depth must have been common to
+all. If this be so, the Olympian Zeus himself was once some rude
+chieftain dwelling in Thrace or Macedonia, and his sublime temple
+of Doric architecture traceable to some insignificant cairn or
+flagged cist in Greece, or some earlier home of the Hellenic race,
+and his name not Zeus, but another; and Kronos, that god whom he,
+as a living wight, adored, and under whose protection and favour he
+prospered.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, EARLY BARDIC LITERATURE, IRELAND.   ***
+
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