Early Irish Myths and Sagas

One day, in winter, Derdriu’s foster-father was outside, in the snow, flaying a weaned calf for her. Derdriu saw a raven drinking the blood on the snow, and she said to Lebarcham ‘I could love a man with those three colours: hair like a raven, cheeks like blood and body like snow.’

‘The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu’ (p. 260)

This passage, from one of the finest stories ever written in Ireland, evinces much of what Irish literature is: romantic, idealistic, stylized and yet vividly, even appallingly, concrete. Most of all, it exemplifies the tension between reality and fantasy that characterizes all Celtic art. In Ireland, this art has taken many forms: illumination (the books of Durrow and Kells), metal work (the Ardagh Chalice and the Tara Brooch), sculpture (the stone crosses at Moone and Clonmacnois), architecture (the Rock of Cashel and the various round towers), music (Turlough O’Carolan). But this tension manifests itself particularly in the literature of Ireland, and most particularly in the myths/sagas – no more precise description is possible, at least for the moment – that survive in Irish manuscripts dating back to the twelfth century.

There are many reasons why this should be so. To begin with, these stories originated in the mists of Irish prehistory (some elements must predate the arrival of the Celts in
Ireland), and they developed through the course of centuries until reaching their present manuscript state; consequently, they manage to be both archaic and contemporary. Their setting is both historical Ireland (itself an elusive entity) and the mythic otherworld of the Síde (Ireland’s ‘faery people’, who live in burial mounds called ‘síde’ and exhibit magical powers), and it is not always easy to tell one from the other. Many of the characters are partially euhemerized gods – that is, they are gods in the process of becoming ordinary mortals – so that, again, it is not easy to tell divine from human.

At bottom, this tension between reality and fantasy is not accidental to the circumstances of literary transmission and formation but rather an innate characteristic, a gift of the Celts. The world of the Irish story is graphic: blood spurts not only from the calf flayed for Derdriu but also from the lips of Anlúan as his head is thrown across a table (in ‘The Tale of Macc Da Thó’s Pig’); the ‘hero’ of ‘Bricriu’s Feast’ is tossed from the balcony of his house on to a garbage heap; the warriors of Ulaid (the Irish name for Ulster) are all but roasted in an iron house (in ‘The Intoxication of the Ulaid’). Yet this story-world is also magically bright and achingly beautiful. Two pairs of lovers – Mider and Étaín (in ‘The Wooing of Étaín), and Óengus and Cáer Ibormeith (in ‘The Dream of Óengus’) – turn into swans. The hero of ‘The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel’ can dispatch several hundred foes without even reaching for his Weapons; Macc Da Thó’s pig is so large that forty oxen can be laid across it. Myth obtrudes upon reality at every turn. In ‘The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel’, a bird descends through a skylight, sheds his bird outfit and sleeps with the woman Mess Búachalla, thus fathering the story’s hero, Conare Már; in ‘The Wooing of Étaín’, Mider’s wife, Fúamnach, turns her rival Étaín into a scarlet fly; in ‘The Wasting Sickness of Cú Chulaind’. Cú Chulaind is horsewhipped and then healed
by two women from the otherworld (shades of the German women in Fellini’s
Casanova
). In these Irish stories, then, the pride and energy of reality are allied with the magic and beauty of fantasy – and the result is infused with a rare degree of idealism. In the otherworld of ‘The Wooing of Étaín’, not only are bodies white as snow and cheeks red as foxglove, but there is no ‘mine’ or ‘yours’.

The traditions of these early Irish stories originated with the Celts, an Indo-European group who are the ancestors of the Irish, the Scots, the Welsh, the Cornish, the Bretons and the people of the Isle of Man. When and where this group first appeared is, rather fittingly, an elusive, even controversial, question. The conservative view, and perhaps the most prevalent, is that the Celts surfaced with the beginning of the Iron Age in Europe, roughly 1000
B.C.
; and this is certainly the earliest period in which the archaeological testimony affords positive proof. Myles Dillon and Nora Chadwick, however, propose to date the first Celtic settlements of the British Isles to the early Bronze Age (
circa
1800
B.C.
) and to identify the Beaker Folk as Celts.
¹
Leon E. Stover and Bruce Kraig go further still: comparing the Classical descriptions of the Iron Age Celts with what they infer from burials at Stonehenge and Únětice (a cemetery near Prague), they propose to classify ‘the Wessex and Únětician warriors as formative Celts’ and conclude by claiming that the Celts ‘emerged as a dominant people in Europe by the beginning of the third millennium
B.C.
’
²
The controversy is largely semantic. Wessex as presented by Stover and Kraig does look like an early form of what is described by Posidonius and Caesar, but then so does the heroic society of Homer’s
Iliad
, and of course there is no linguistic evidence at all.
Presumably, from the beginning of the third millennium on there developed, in Europe and subsequently in Britain and Ireland, heroic societies that gradually became, both culturally and linguistically, Celtic.

In any event, by the beginning or the early part of the first millennium
B.C.
, the Celts clearly had emerged, not as a subset of their Slavic or Germanic or Italic neighbours but as a discrete Indo-European ethnic and cultural group; moreover, during the course of that millennium, they became the dominant people in non-Mediterranean Europe. From their homeland (probably in Bohemia), they expanded westward into France and Spain and, eventually, Britain and Ireland; southward into Italy; and eastward into Turkey, where they became the Galatians of St Paul. These early Celts took with them not only their chariots and their iron swords but also a distinctive geometric/linear art, called Hallstatt (after an important cemetery in Austria). By 500
B.C.
, a new art form had sprung up, this called La Tène (after a site in Switzerland); much less restrained than its predecessor, La Tène is a kind of baroque development, all curves and spirals and luxuriant plant and animal outgrowths. At this time, too, the Celts began to come under notice of the Classical authors: Herodotos, writing in the mid-fifth century, described the
Keltoí
as tall (by Mediterranean standards) and with light skin and hair and eyes, boastful and vainglorious but demonic in battle, childlike and ostentatious but hospitable, fond of hunting and feasting and music and poetry and glittering jewellery and bright colours; and his impressions were confirmed by subsequent accounts, particularly those attributed to Posidonius in the first century
B.C.
³

With their energy and warlike temperament, the Celts were able to expand quickly; by 390
B.C.
, they had sacked Rome, and by 279
B.C.
, Delphi. Many tribes settled in France, where the Romans called them Gauls, but their numbers also
included the Boii (Bologna, Bohemia), the Belgae (Belgium) and the Helvetii (Switzerland); moreover, their settlements included Lutetia Parisiorum (Paris), Lugudunum (Lyon), Vindobona (Vienna) and Mediolanum (Milan), and they also named the Sequana (Seine) and the Danuvia (Danube). Unfortunately, Celtic tribal free-spiritedness was no match for Roman civic organization. Caesar’s defeat of Vercingetorix, at Alesia in 52
B.C.
, signalled the decline of the Celts’ hegemony in Europe; thereafter, they were overrun and assimilated. As a distinct entity, Celtic language and culture disappeared in Europe (though of course their influence persisted); in Great Britain, the Celtic tribes were driven back into Scotland, Wales and Cornwall (from where they eventually reclaimed Brittany) by the numerous incursions of Romans, Angles/Saxons and Normans.

Ireland was a different story. By virtue of its westerly and isolated geographic position, this island remained free of Roman colonization; thus, Irish society did not change appreciably until the advent of Christianity (in the fifth century) and the arrival of Viking raiders (some time thereafter). Consequently, the culture of the Iron Age Celts survived in Ireland long after it had been extinguished elsewhere. It is this conservatism that makes the early Irish tales, quite apart from their literary value, such a valuable repository of information about the Celtic people.

As elusive as the date of the Celts’ emergence in Europe is the date of their arrival in Ireland. Such megalithic tombs as Knowth, Dowth and New Grange, which now appear to date from the middle of the fourth millennium, testify to the presence of an indigenous, pre-Celtic culture; but how soon afterwards Celts – even formative Celts – appeared is open
to controversy. If the Bell-Beaker people are viewed as proto-Celts, then one might say that they – assuming they reached Ireland as well as Britain – represent the beginnings of Celtic culture in Ireland; against this, archaeological evidence of large-scale immigration to Ireland between 2000 and 600
B.C.
is wanting. If the indigenous population evolved into a Celtic one at the behest of a small number of aristocratic invaders, however, no such large-scale immigration would have been necessary. In any event, we know that Celts of the Hallstatt type reached Ireland by the middle of the sixth century and that Celts continued to migrate to Ireland and Britain until the time of the Belgic invasion in the first century
B.C.

How and in what form they arrived is even more uncertain. According to Lebor Gabála (The Book of Invasions), our earliest copy of which dates from the twelfth century, Ireland was subjected to six invasions, those of Cessair, Partholón, Nemed, the Fir Bolg, the Túatha Dé Danand and the sons of Mil Espáne. Irish history being what it is, the particulars of the Lebor Gabála account are open to question; what matters is that Ireland was, or was felt to have been, settled by a succession of different tribes. That these people actually arrived in separate waves – as opposed to filtering in more or less continuously – is moot; but the early tales do reflect the existence of different ethnic groups.

The Ireland of these tales is apportioned into four provinces, called, perversely,
cóiceda
, or ‘fifths’: Ulaid (Ulster), Connachta (Connaught), Lagin (Leinster) and Mumu (Munster). The fifth province was probably Mide (Meath), though there is also a tradition, probably artificial, that Mumu was once two provinces. Either this fifth province was original and disappeared (while the word
cóiced
persisted), or else the original four provinces became five after the emergence of a new power centre. Mide, which encompassed both Bruig
na Bóinde (New Grange) and Temuir (Tara), is the setting for the early mythological tales, and this argues for its status as an original province. On the other hand, Mide was also the territory of the Uí Néill, who by the fourth century had supplanted the Ulaid as the dominant power in Ireland; this argues for its being a later addition. Moreover, the name Mide, which means ‘middle’, looks palpably artificial – of course, the entire province set-up may be artificial.

In any case, there are, in the stories of this volume, four centres of action. Mide, with its numerous burial mounds, is the setting for the early mythological tales. It is peopled by the Túatha Dé Danand (the People of the Goddess Danu), who, though presented by Lebor Gabála as a wave of invaders, appear in these tales as the denizens of the other-world, the Síde. They interact freely with the ordinary people of the mythological stories, and they also appear in some of the more historical tales. Ulaid, with its capital of Emuin Machae (near present-day Armagh), is the primary setting for the historical (insofar as any of the Irish tales are historical) sagas of the Ulster Cycle; its king is Conchubur son of Ness, but its champion is the mythic hero Cú Chulaind. The arch-enemies of the Ulaid (province names apply to the people as well) are the Connachta, who have their capital at Crúachu, in the west of Ireland. These people may Well have originally occupied Mide, for their queen, Medb, is often identified as the daughter of the king of Temuir, and she may once have been a fertility goddess. It also seems more logical that Ulaid’s foe should have been centred in adjacent Mide rather than in the distant west; and this in fact would have been true if the Ulster Cycle tales reflect the historical conflict between the Ulaid and the emerging Uí Néill of Mide. The tradition that the Connachta were the enemies of the Ulaid coupled with the fact that Connachta was now the name of Ireland’s western province would have
given the storytellers sufficient reason to move Medb and her husband, Ailill, from Temuir to Crúachu. Finally, there are the people of Mumu; they play a more peripheral role in the Ulster Cycle, but the king Cú Ruí son of Dáre does figure prominently in several tales.

When the events related in these stories might have taken place is yet another mystery. The Alexandrian geographer Ptolemy, who wrote in the second century
A.D.
but is believed to have drawn upon sources at least two hundred years older, provides evidence that Ireland was then Celtic-speaking; however, few of his names – and they are restricted both in number and in location – suggest those of our stories, so that one might suppose the people of these stories (insofar as they were real) had not yet appeared. At the other end, the milieu of the tales predates the advent of Christianity, while the circumstances of the Ulster Cycle must predate the Uí Néill appropriation of Emuin Machae. Kenneth Jackson has placed the formation of the Ulster tradition somewhere between the second century
B.C.
and the fourth century
A.D.
, which seems entirely reasonable.