Early Irish Myths and Sagas (3 page)

Relatively few of the names from Gaulish inscriptions reappear in Ireland – given the decentralized nature of Gaulish religion, this is not surprising. Lug is the major figure in ‘The Second Battle of Mag Tured’, but in the stories included in this volume he appears prominently only as the father of Cú Chulaind. The Macc Óc is a central character in both ‘The Wooing of Étaín’ and ‘The Dream of Óengus’, but he has been so thoroughly euhemerized that there is no trace of the Gaulish Maponos; and such names as the Dagdae, Mider, Bóand, Étaín. Cáer Ibormeith, Medb and Cú Ruí have no apparent continental counterparts. Many of the quasi-divine figures in these tales are associated with animals or with natural features. The name Bóand, for example, means ‘white cow’; but Bóand is also the Irish name of the river Boyne. At the outset of ‘The Wooing of Étaín’, Bóand sleeps with the Dagdae, whose other name, Echu, means ‘horse’; Frank O’Connor saw this ‘love affair’ between a horse god and a cow goddess as a reconciliation between Bronze Age invaders and the indigenous Neolithic civilization, which gives some idea of how old these stories might be.
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Like Rhiannon in ‘Pwyll Lord of Dyved’, Macha of ‘The Labour Pains of the Ulaid’ is a euhemerized horse goddess; and the same may be conjectured of Étaín, whose epithet Echrade means ‘horse troop’. A number of the Síde appear as birds: Mider and Étaín leave Temuir as swans, and Óengus (Mider’s foster-son) and Cáer Ibormeith return to Bruig na Bóinde as swans; Conare Már’s unnamed father discloses himself to Mess Búachalla in the form of a bird; and Fand and Lí Ban first present themselves to Cú Chulaind as birds.

Strabo’s testimony, the evidence of lavish grave goods
buried with the wealthy, and the identification of the Boyne burial mounds as the dwelling place of the Síde all suggest that the Irish did believe in a life after death. But the Irish otherworld was not simply an anticipated joyful afterlife; it was also – even primarily – an alternative to reality, a world that the hero might enter upon the invitation of a king or a beautiful woman. Inasmuch as this otherworld, no matter how beautiful, is not quite human (there is, for example, no winter), the hero never stays; but the alternative – and thus the tension – is always present.

Finally, there is the language, as beautiful and elusive as any aspect of Irish culture. Just as the Celts were a distinct Indo-European entity, so their languages formed an independent branch of the Indo-European language tree; nonetheless, Celtic is more like Italic (that is, the Romance languages) than it is like any of the other Indo-European language groups, and many place and personal names in Gaulish are very similar to those in Latin. For example, the Gaulish suffix
-rix
(as in Vercingetorix) is the counterpart of the Latin word
rex
, both meaning ‘king’.

In the British Isles, the Celtic languages divided into two groups, one spoken primarily in Britain (and comprising Welsh and, eventually, Cornish and Breton), the other spoken primarily in Ireland (and comprising Irish Gaelic and, eventually, Scottish Gaelic and Manx Gaelic). The most obvious (though not necessarily the most important or fundamental) difference between the two groups is that Indo-European
q
^u
became
p
in the British languages (the word for ‘four’ was
petwar
) and
c
in the Irish group (‘four’ was
cethair
).

At the time our stories are purported to have taken place – which is to say any time before the fourth century – the Irish language probably looked a good deal like Gaulish and not so very different from Latin. By the time these stories were being written down, however – and this could have
begun as early as the seventh century – drastic changes had taken place: many final syllables had dropped away, many medial vowels had disappeared and many medial consonants had been simplified or lightened. Thus, the word for ‘horse’,
equus
in Latin, had become
ech
in Ireland at this time. The language of the tales, then, is quite different from that of the time they describe; and this makes the correlation of the stories’ proper names with those in earlier sources (such as Ptolemy’s geography) even more difficult. Although the syntax of the new language was straightforward, the morphology was not: regular verb conjugations often looked wildly irregular, and word roots occasionally disappeared altogether. The principles of phonetic change were aesthetic rather than semantic; the resultant language was soft and subtle, verb poor but noun-and-adjective rich, static and yet vital.

Irish literature – meaning whatever was written down in Irish – of this time encompassed a broad area, including history, genealogy and law tracts; but it is poetry and narrative prose that are relevant to the early Irish myths and sagas. The earliest poetry was alliterative and syllabic, with end-rhyme appearing later. In Welsh literature, there are epics told entirely through the medium of verse – the
Gododdin
, for example; in Ireland, however, the storytelling medium is invariably prose. Some of the very archaic poetry is essential to the tales in which it appears; thus, the rhetorics in the early part of ‘The Cattle Raid of Cúailnge’ help to clarify the relationship among Ailill, Medb and Fergus.
¹¹
The poetry in ‘The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu’, on the other hand, reinforces the narrative, adds detail – mostly descriptive – and provides weight; but it could be
omitted without loss of sense. Conceivably these myths/sagas were at one time recited entirely in verse; what remains, however, is largely decorative.

The earliest form of transmission must have been oral. Storytelling was a favourite entertainment among the Celts, and one version of ‘The Voyage of Bran’ states that Mongan (an Ulaid king who died about
A.D.
625) was told a story by his
fili
(a kind of poet) every winter night from Samuin to Beltene. Presumably, the storytellers did not memorize entire tales – rather, they memorized the outlines and filled in the details extemporaneously. Eventually, perhaps as early as the seventh century, the tales began to be transcribed; and thereby two processes, rather opposite in effect, were initiated. In many cases, tales are reworked and acquire a literary veneer; this is certainly true of the Book of Leinster opening to ‘The Cattle Raid of Cúailnge’, and it would seem to apply to ‘The Cattle Raid of Fróech’ and to the concluding section of ‘The Wasting Sickness of Cú Chulaind’. But these same tales have also deteriorated considerably by the time they reach our earliest (twelfth-century) surviving manuscripts. This deterioration is not likely to have originated with the storytellers themselves, for a long tale would naturally be prolonged over several evenings (which would be in the storyteller’s interest, since during that time he would be enjoying his host’s hospitality); and in any case, as James Delargy has pointed out, no audience would ‘have listened very long to the story-teller if he were to recite tales in the form in which they have come down to us’.
¹²
The people who wrote these stories down, however, were – for the most part – not literary artists; and of course, they lacked the incentive of an appreciative (and remunerative) audience. Banquet-hall transcription cannot have been easy, and the scribe doubtless grew weary before the storyteller did; consequently, it is not surprising that spelling is erratic,
that inconsistencies abound (this could also result from a story-teller’s attempting to conflate multiple traditions) and that many tales deteriorate after a promising beginning. Some formulaic passages, such as in ‘The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel’, are represented simply by ‘et reliqua’. As manuscripts were recopied, moreover, additional errors inevitably appeared. Some areas are manifestly corrupt, and in the case of the archaic poetic sections it seems doubtful whether the scribes understood what they were writing. All this is hardly surprising – just consider the problems attendant upon the texts of Shakespeare’s plays, only four hundred years old – but it should be remembered that what survives in the manuscripts, however beautiful, is far from representative of these stories at their best.

The language of these tales varies considerably as to date; but at its oldest, and allowing for some degree of deliberate archaism, it appears to go back to the eighth century; one may assume the tales were being written down at least then, if not earlier. Unfortunately, Scandinavian raiders were legion in Ireland at this time, and they tended to destroy whatever was not worth taking away; consequently, very few manuscripts predating
A.D.
1000 have survived. Among the missing is the Book of Druimm Snechtai, which belonged to the first part of the eighth century and included ‘The Wooing of Étaín’, ‘The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel’ and ‘The Birth of Cú Chulaind’.

Of the manuscripts that have survived, the two earliest and most important for these tales belong to the twelfth century. Lebor na huidre (The Book of the Dun Cow) is so called after a famous cow belonging to St Cíaran of Clonmacnois; the chief scribe, a monk named Máel Muire, was
slain by raiders in the Clonmacnois cathedral in 1106. Unfortunately, the manuscript is only a fragment: though sixty-seven leaves of eight-by-eleven vellum remain, at least as much has been lost. Lebor na huidre comprises thirty-seven stories, most of them myths/sagas, and includes substantially complete versions of ‘The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel’, ‘The Birth of Cú Chulaind’, ‘The Wasting Sickness of Cú Chulaind’ and ‘Bricriu’s Feast’ as well as an incomplete ‘Wooing of Étaín’ and acephalous accounts of ‘The Intoxication of the Ulaid’ and ‘The Cattle Raid of Cúailnge’.

The second manuscript, which is generally known as the Book of Leinster, is much larger, having 187 nine-by-thirteen leaves; it dates to about 1160 and includes in its varied contents complete versions of ‘The Cattle Raid of Fróech’, ‘The Labour Pains of the Ulaid’, ‘The Tale of Macc Da Thó’s Pig’ and ‘The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu’ as well as an unfinished and rather different ‘Intoxication of the Ulaid’ and a complete, more polished ‘Cattle Raid of Cúailnge’. Two later manuscripts also contribute to this volume: the Yellow Book of Lecan, which offers complete accounts of ‘The Wooing of Étaín’ and ‘The Death of Aífe’s Only Son’ and dates to the fourteenth century; and Egerton 1782, which includes ‘The Dream of Óengus’ and has the date 1419 written on it.

These manuscripts do not, of course, date the stories they contain. Our earliest complete version of ‘The Wooing of Étaín’ appears in the fourteenth-century Yellow Book of Lecan, yet we have a partial account in the twelfth-century Lebor na huidre, and we know from the contents list of the Book of Druimm Snechtai that the tale was in written form by the early eighth century. What we do not know – and probably never will – is whether the Druimm Snechtai version was very different from the one in the Yellow Book
of Lecan, whether the tale assumed written form earlier than in the eighth century, and what the tale was like before it was first written down. Even the surviving manuscripts, which we are fortunate to have, are far from ideal: obscure words abound, some passages seem obviously corrupt, and there are lacunae and entire missing leaves.

Convention and tradition have classified the early Irish tales into four groups, called cycles: (1) the Mythological Cycle, whose protagonists are the Síde and whose tales are set primarily among the burial mounds of the Boyne Valley; (2) the Ulster Cycle, which details the (purportedly historical) exploits of the Ulaid, a few centuries before or after the birth of Christ; (3) the Kings Cycle, which focuses on the activities of the ‘historical’ kings; (4) the Find Cycle, which describes the adventures of Find mac Cumaill and his fíana and which did not achieve widespread popularity until the twelfth century. Although these categories are useful, it should be remembered that they are also modern (no particular arrangement is apparent in the manuscripts, while it seems that the storytellers grouped tales by type – births, deaths, cattle raids, destructions, visions, wooings, etc. – for ease in remembering) and artificial. Characters from one cycle often turn up in another: the Síde-woman Bóand is introduced as Fróech’s aunt in the Ulster Cycle’s ‘Cattle Raid of Fróech’; the otherworld-figure Manandán appears in the Ulster Cycle’s ‘Wasting Sickness of Cú Chulaind’ and in the Kings Cycle’s ‘Adventures of Cormac’; Ulaid warriors join the invaders in the Mythological Cycle’s ‘Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel’; Ailill and Medb, king and queen of Connachta, take part in the Mythological Cycle’s ‘Dream of Óengus’. Also, one should not suppose that the Mythological
Cycle is populated exclusively by deities or that the other cycles are inhabited exclusively by mortals: many of the ‘humans’ are barely euhemerized gods, many of the ‘gods’ behave much like humans, and the two groups are often difficult to distinguish.

The material of these tales encompasses both impacted myth and corrupted history. Although Irish mythology does evince the tripartism detected by Georges Dumézil in other Indo-European cultures (‘The Second Battle of Mag Tured’ is on one level an explanation of how the priests and warriors – Dumézil’s first two functions – wrested the secrets of agriculture from the third function, the farmers), its fundamental orientation seems more seasonal than societal, for the mythic subtexts of the tales focus on themes of dying kings and alternating lovers. (This strong pre-Indo-European element in Irish mythology probably derives both from the Celts’ innate conservatism and from the fringe position of Ireland in the geography of the Indo-European world.) These themes are stated most clearly in ‘The Wooing of Étaín’ and ‘The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu’. In the former story, Bóand passes from her husband, Elcmar, to the Dagdae (also called Echu) and then returns to Elcmar; Étaín goes from Mider to Óengus and back to Mider, from Echu Airem to Ailill Angubae and back to Echu, and from Echu Airem to Mider and back (in some versions) to Echu. In the latter tale, Derdriu passes from an old king, Conchubur, to a young hero, Noísiu, and back to Conchubur after Noísiu’s death; when Conchubur threatens to send her to Noísiu’s murderer, she kills herself. Sometimes, the woman’s father substitutes for the dying king (this variant appears in the Greek tales of Jason and Medea and Theseus and Ariadne): Óengus has to win Étaín away from her father in ‘The Wooing of Étaín’ and Cáer Ibormeith away from hers in ‘The Dream of Óengus’; Fróech has to win Findabair from Ailill and Medb – but
primarily, and significantly, from Ailill – in ‘The Cattle Raid of Fróech’, while Cú Chulaind has to win Emer from Forgall in ‘The Wooing of Emer’. Sometimes, the dying king is absent, and the regeneration theme is embodied in the wooing of a mortal hero by a beautiful otherworld woman (whom he often loses or leaves): Cáer Ibormeith seeks out Óengus in ‘The Dream of Óengus’, Macha comes to Crunniuc in ‘The Labour Pains of the Ulaid’, Fand appears to Cú Chulaind in ‘The Wasting Sickness of Cú Chulaind’. (This variant persists even into the Find Cycle, where Níam’s wooing of Oisín becomes the basis of Yeats’s ‘The Wanderings of Oisín’.) And sometimes the theme treats only of the dying king: in ‘The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel’, Conare Már is slain, at Samuin, in the hostel of a chthonic red god; in ‘The Intoxication of the Ulaid’, Cú Chulaind is nearly burnt, also at Samuin, in an iron house in the southwest of Ireland (where the House of Dond, an Irish underworld deity, was located). Centuries of historical appropriation and Christian censorship notwithstanding, these regeneration themes are never far from the narrative surface; and in their ubiquitousness is apparent their power.