by Megli
This introduction is longer and more complex than that which I wrote for the Four Branches of the Mabinogi. The reason for this is that whilst with ‘Welsh myth’ we are basically talking about five or six tales, with ‘Irish myth’ we are talking about a total tally of stories well into triple figures.
The literature and culture of medieval Ireland (from c. 450-1500) are of great beauty but also extreme complexity, and it is unfortunately difficult for modern druids to get an accurate sense of their scope and range. This is all the more the case if the pagan reader confines herself to books about Irish literature and myth written by other pagans and druids. There is, alas, not a single book by a pagan writer on the subject that I could recommend with an easy conscience. Almost all are filled with inaccuracies and outright fantasy. (Some suggested reading is given below.)
Part of the problem is the language: medieval Irish is one of the more fearsomely difficult European tongues, with subtle pronunciation rules and shifting spellings over the centuries. Someone with a good working knowledge of Modern Welsh will be able to read the Mabinogion with a bit of application, but modern Irish or Scottish Gaelic speakers are not generally able to read their own early tales.
So, what are we looking at, when we talk about ‘Irish myth’? The answer is a series of literary tales in prose, and some poetic compositions, composed in the Irish language from the end of the 7th century onwards, though they survive in manuscripts which are several centuries later. Most of the prose tales, at least in the early period, favour a terse, elliptical manner, which gradually shifts to a much more flowery style by 1200 or so. Neither style will be particularly familiar to the average English-speaking reader. Most of the earlier tales are short, averaging a few pages or more. A few, like ‘The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel’ are the size of a modern short-story, and one, the great ‘Cattle Raid of Cúailnge’ (known as the Táin) is comparable in size to a short modern novel.
Now, the old-fashioned view was that these Irish myths and sagas represented written versions of immemorial pagan oral tales, somewhat altered, and that they were a good quarrying ground for reconstructions of pre-Christian Irish religion and culture. According to this view, the scribes who wrote down the ancestors of our surviving texts were recording more-or-less dodgy versions of the pre-Christian tales of their forebears. This is the view which tends to be repeated by modern pagans, and you often hear people saying that the tales have been ‘corrupted’ by ‘Christian monks’, with the implication that a bit of judicious scraping will reveal the ‘true’, pagan story beneath a top layer of Christian crud.
However, this is not the prevailing view among professionals who work on these stories and the culture they emerge from, and hasn’t been for fifty years. A new wave of scholarship broke decades ago, and as a result of its findings the very nature of early Irish culture was re-envisioned.
Essentially, it has been convincingly argued that the native poetic and literary class of Ireland, the filid, were in no sense druids disguised under a threadbare Christian cloak, as had once been thought. Rather they were part of a single, complex, synthesised culture with Christianity at its heart. According to this view, a fusion between native and ecclesiastical learning took place early in Ireland, in the 500s and 600s. The ability to write – inseparable from ecclesiastical, scriptural learning – rapidly became a prerequisite for the filid. It seems we are wrong to imagine a kind of ‘two cultures’ situation, with the native poets continuing with their orally-transmitted and essentially pre-Christian tales, whilst the monasteries educated their inhabitants in scriptural exegesis and a variant of the standard syllabus of late antiquity. This was not the case. Rather, they overlapped a great deal, and the native culture was systematically and constructively pressed into the service of the Church.
Unusually for medieval Europe, there was a high opinion of the vernacular; though the compositions we have start out in the early period as mainly Latin, as time goes on they become mainly Irish. Indeed in a text called ‘The Scholar’s Primer’, originally from around 700 but added to over the centuries, we find an extraordinary origin legend for the Irish language. In this story, after human language is confused at the Tower of Babel, a man called Fénius (‘Irishman’) takes all the best bits from the various new tongues and creates a constructed language out of them – Irish. This bizarre legend places Irish not only as effectively superior to the sacred languages of Hebrew, Greek and Latin, but makes Irish a re-creation of the perfect language spoken before Babel, and thus in Paradise. It’s a very bold and wry move.
So. We now think that the filid and the ecclesiastical scholars are on one and the same, literate educational continuum. It’s perfectly possible that they were often, in human terms, relations: of two noble brothers, one might go into the Church, and one might become a professional poet. Both would have shared knowledge of scripture, Latin, and have been Christians. Both had a hand in the creation of a wonderfully complex pseudohistory for Ireland, in which the pagan past of the island could be imagined as ‘their’ Old Testament, with the arrival of Patrick paralleling the career of Elijah, or, more daringly, the advent of Jesus.
It’s absolutely clear that the ecclesiastically educated – the literate ‘mandarin’ class of the monastic townships – valued their native culture highly. But they didn’t look at it as a modern anthropologist might do, aiming to preserve it without interference. Rather they aimed and succeeded in absorbing the pre-Christian past into the Christian present, by, for example, remodelling once-mythic tales on Biblical patterns. A favourite device in stories was to have pagan figures from the ancient past miraculously live on to encounter Christian saints or historical personages, who then authenticate and find a valued place for their stories under the new dispensation. So St Patrick encounters the hero Cú Chulainn, the poet Senchán encounters Fergus Mac Róich.
Early Irish churchmen weren’t just guiltily scribbling down some pagan tales, but were consciously engaged in the project of creating a national literature, intrinsically tied up with the acquisition of Christianity. The Christian religion had brought to Ireland not only writing (the ogam alphabet apart), but specifically Latin writing and Latin literature. The Irish took to Latin like the proverbial ducks to water, and many early Irish Churchmen were accomplished stylists in the language. So recent scholarship has emphasised that the whole idea of creating written, prose literature is an idea that came with Christianity and was deeply bound up with it. (There were of course oral poets before the conversion.) The tales that survive from early medieval Ireland need to be read in this context – as drawing on ancient material, but cleverly crafting it with great artistry to produce something new and relevant to contemporary educated people, aristocrats and pseudohistorians, both secular and of the Church. They don’t have Christian ‘accretions’, which can be sloughed off by the determined pagan: the texts are fundamentally products of an unusually self-conscious and creative early medieval Christian culture. It’s like a tapestry: the pictures we see in the tapestry are inseparable from the wool from which the cloth is woven. We can’t simply unpick the bits we don’t like – the whole thing would just unravel.
It will be apparent that modern druids don’t like this idea much; the whole project of reconstructing pre-Christian Irish religion depends on old, outdated scholarship, and the tendency to demonise ‘the Christian monks’ who composed these texts. It’s thanks to them that we have these wonderful tales at all, and I would suggest politely that it would be nice if druids would read them contextually for what they actually are, rather than for what they would like them to be.
* * *
It’s common to divide Irish medieval tales into four basic groups for convenience. These four groups are as follows:
- The Ulster Cycle, focusing on the Ulstermen, their King Conchobor mac Nessa and the hero Cú Chulainn.
- The Finn Cycle, describing the adventures of Fionn mac Cumaill (Finn mac Cool) and his band of warriors, the Fíanna.
- The King Sagas and associated historical narratives which detail the careers of numerous semi-legendary Irish rulers, chief among them the great Cormac mac Airt, the so-called ‘Irish Solomon’
- And finally the Mythological Cycle, the constituent tales of which feature a high proportion of characters presumed to be former gods.
These categories are fundamentally practical rather than theoretical, a way of imposing a map upon a sprawling and complex body of medieval story, and they exclude the very substantial amount of hagiographical, apocryphal and biblical material extant in early Irish, as well as the numerous versions of classical Latin texts translated into, or reshaped in, Irish. However, it is a useful map – as long as the map is not mistaken for the terrain.
I hope I am not betraying my deep love of these stories by confessing that great swathes of this material are likely to be deeply boring to the casual pagan reader. The King Sagas (with noble exceptions) seem to me to be the worst for this kind of thing – like the more tortuous bits of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales, only with even more contradictions, plot-holes, and unfamiliar names, rambling on and on ad nauseam.
The Ulster Cycle, on the other hand, contains some of the best tales – the disquieting mixture of low farce and Machiavellian real politik in ‘The Story of Mac Dathó’s Pig’, for example, or the grandeur, pathos, and epic sweep of the Táin, or the bitchy, knockabout comedy of ‘Bricriu’s Feast’.
The Finn Cycle is high medieval, with its greatest and most wistful tale, the novel-length ‘Tales of the Elders of Ireland’ being composed around 1200. These are wonderful, autumnal stories, belonging to a more refined and romantic world than the brutal headhunting and ultra-violence of the Ulster Cycle.
The Mythological Cycle is not large, and basically consists of about ten tales, including ‘The Battle of Moytura’, ‘Óengus’s Dream’, ‘The Wooing of Étain’ and a few others. Again I must emphasise that it is not at all clear to what degree these medieval stories reflect pre-Christian myth. I think Ronald Hutton probably has it about right when he says that these stories probably preserve the names and the personalities of some of the pre-Christian Irish gods and goddesses, but are unlikely to give us an accurate idea of the ‘plots’ of the ancient myths. They have been creatively reshaped to a very great degree. Further it is clear that not all the gods of the pre-Christian Irish made it into the medieval tales. For example, the Old Irish name of a particular people from Munster makes it clear that they had once worshipped a deity they called Loigodewa, ‘Calf-goddess’: but no such personage appears in the medieval stories. There were presumably hundreds of local gods and goddesses in Ireland whose names are forever lost to us. In other words, and very simply, these stories, precious and beautiful as they are, do not give us an accurate picture of the mythology of the pre-Christian Irish. They also tell us next to nothing about ritual and ceremony, or about the druids; certainly, druids appear frequently in the stories, but their portrayal has been deeply affected by the imagery of wizards and pagan priests in the Bible. The subtle blend of native and foreign in these early Irish stories is much more complicated and delicate than most druids and Celtic pagans realise, and many of the things which strike us as most ‘pagan’ are in fact often drawn from Christian sources, imaginatively adapted.
So, my personal feeling is that the best thing to do is to enjoy these wonderful tales as precisely that, stories, with an awareness of and respect for the profound complexity of the culture from which they emerged. When it comes to taking motifs and characters from these tales for druidic ritual or theology, they should be marked with a very large ‘Handle with Caution’!
- Early Irish Myths and Sagas, trans. J. Gantz
Useful translations of many early tales, but sadly not ‘The Battle of Moytura’ - The Irish Literary Tradition, J. Caerwyn Williams
Old-fashioned but useful. - The Táin, trans. C. Carson
A wonderful new translation of this great epic tale. - Tales of the Elders of Ireland, trans. A. Dooley and H. Roe
- Over Nine Waves, M. Heaney
A good, poetic retelling by a responsible writer, and includes a version of ‘The Battle of Moytura’ - And (heavyweight!) A New History of Ireland 1: Prehistoric and Early Ireland, ed. D. Ó Cróinín.
Several high-standard and lengthy chapters by different scholars on the literature, language, culture, and archaeology of Ireland before the Vikings.