Stones of Aran (12 page)

There is one view of the Dún that sometimes, for me, sets it in the most rarely accessible regions of romance, and that is from a point below the cliffs which may be reached by following the terrace that forms a balcony above Poll na bPéist westwards to the corner of the next bay. This is An Sunda Caoch or Blind Sound, which curves so deeply into the low-lying waist of Árainn that from a distance out to sea it appears to be a sound leading between two islands; it is said that a sailing vessel that made this mistake found itself caught on a lee shore and was wrecked in the bay. Here it is that the sea will some day break through and divide the island—the belief recurs in Aran folklore and, I have been told, in Aran people's dreams. In fact in 1640, according to Roderic O'Flaherty, “Upon an extraordinary inundation, the sea, overpowering that bank, went across that island to the north-west,” which must mean to the bay of Port Mhuirbhigh only half a mile away on the north coast. But the cliffs around Blind Sound still stand ninety feet high at their lowest, and whether or not there is any truth in that old record, the Aran prophecy of the division of the island will only be justified in a geological timescale that will long have made all our lore and our nightmares irrelevant.

The terrace leading on from Poll na bPéist dwindles into a ledge where it turns with the cliff into Blind Sound, and it is from this corner that one suddenly sees the Dún exalted, on the crest of the headland opposite. For the cliffs treble in height as they
encircle
the farther arc of the bay, and the dramatic change of scale projects one's gaze into legendary perspectives. If the setting sun is riding into the bay on the backs of the waves, illuminating the vastness of the opposing precipice in golden detail, while the
solemn recession of promontories beyond goes back step by step into rose-petal impalpability on the western horizon, then the
setting
is definitive: Dún Aonghasa, heavy with centuries, dreams upon a pinnacle of another world.

This other world can only be that of Celtic myth, a wide
western
province of the human mind. Here, at the grandest level of
interpretation
, the primal elements such as light and darkness, the air, the depths of the earth and sea, establish their dominions and hierarchies through battles and matings, as gods and goddesses. In another reading, some of these warriors and lovers turn out to be our great-grandparents, while others, much diminished, still lurk in the corners of our fields and minds as the fairy host, the
púca,
the leprechaun, the banshee and other reminders of the precarious nature of the equilibrium achieved by those cosmogonic politics. Aonghas, the legendary leader of the Fir Bolg and founder of the Dún, figures in various written mediaeval reconstructions of this much more ancient body of traditions, and principally in
Lebor
Gabála
Érenn,
“The Book of the Taking (i.e. conquest) of Ireland.” This tangled tale of the early invasions of Ireland was put together by degrees from the eighth to the fifteenth century by monastic scribes, who had learned to look at the old Gaelic lore, their birthright, with the eyes of Christendom. In order to make head or tail of even Aonghas's limited role in this pseudo-history one has to realize the potency and complexity of the material its compilers had to work on, and the ideological urges behind their highly creative treatment of it.

The pantheon of prehistoric Celtic religion had included many deities representing natural forces, some of whom would have been worshipped under a variety of names in different parts of Europe; many Celtic tribes were named from deities probably
regarded
as ancestors, and over a period of centuries the tribes had been stirred by mass migrations under the pressure of Teutonic peoples and the Romans. Thus the traditions of the Celtic
inhabitants
of Ireland in the early years of this era would have been full of battles and invasions led by beings of unearthly power, and
were incorporated in a vast, many-layered mythology in which dim memories of real events merged with symbolic accounts of the origins of the natural and social orders, a rambling, repetitious, contradictory palace of echoes in which every question about the present could be answered by the past. The Irish-speaking and Church-trained scribes brought powerful but alien tools of thought to bear on this oral lore, both unifying and distorting it: the art of writing, a sense of chronological history, a revelation of one God who superseded all others. Exposed to the light of Christianity the nature-deities had dwindled into heroes, witches and ogres, and now dates had to be ascribed to their existences. The resultant scheme of history had to be convincingly rooted in the Bible story, and to branch out into the genealogies by which the dominant families, under whom the scribes worked, justified their status.
Lebor
Gabála
is a summation of this giant task of simultaneous elucidation and mystification.

The principal families of the Early Historical period, and
especially
the Uí Néill dynasty of Tara, claimed to belong to a stock called the Goidel, and the main business of
Lebor
Gabála
is to trace the descent of this people from the Creation to their arrival in Ireland, and thence down to the compiler's own era. However, Ireland was not empty when the Goidel came, and so the narrative breaks off at that point and goes back to the time of Noah, in
order
to follow out the histories of various peoples, including the Fir Bolg, said to have invaded Ireland before its definitive “taking” by the Goidel. Each of these waves of precursors had already been
extinguished
or expelled, with insignificant exceptions, apart from the last of them, the Tuatha Dé Danann, and these were
eliminated
by the Goidel. The book can then proceed with its
demonstration
that everyone who matters in Ireland is a Goidel.

As the Bible tell us, Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham and Japhet. Ham, accursed because he saw his father drunk and naked, sired the Canaanites and other benighted races. Shem's
descendants
included Abraham, and the Bible follows their story, while
Lebor
Gabála
follows the offspring of Japhet, which include not
only the Goidel but all the other inhabitants of Ireland since the Flood. Altogether the three sons fathered seventy-two peoples, who shared one language until they tried to build their way up to Heaven by the Tower of Babel and God frustrated their purposes by giving them seventy-two different languages. One of Japhet's great-grandsons extracted a language from the confusion to pass on to his own grandson, Goidil, from whom both language (Goidelic, Gaelic) and race (Goidel, Gael) are named.

The story of the Goidel continues in a form closely modelled on that of the Israelites: both peoples are invited into Egypt but are oppressed there, both are delivered by their respective leaders (who in one version actually meet). The subsequent wanderings of the Goidel are more wide-ranging than those of the Israelites
under
Moses, however. They are expelled from Scythia after their leader Mil (from whom they are often called the Milesians) kills the king there; they withstand the lure of the Sirens, like
Odysseus
, by filling their ears with wax; they fight with the Amazons. Eventually they reach “three-cornered Spain” and take it by force, and build a city there with a tower to protect it, and “from that tower was Ireland seen on a winter's evening.”

Whereas the story so far is evidently a Christian and
classicizing
concoction, the next few sections treating of the earlier
inhabitants
of Ireland come from sources much closer to Celtic myths of the origins of things. The first person ever to land in Ireland was a woman, Cessair, with a band of fifty women and three men; she had been warned by Noah about the Flood and had sailed here to avoid it. On landing the women were divided between the three men, one of whom, Fintan, flees before his responsibilities. This breaks Cessair's heart and she dies, and then all the rest are drowned by the Flood except for Fintan, who hides in a cave and survives to write the poem that tells us of this history. It seems that this legend was a flood-myth in its own right—the name of Cessair's father is Bith which means “life” or “world,” and Fintan is the son of Bochna, “ocean.” But it has been disrespectfully chopped about to fit in with the Noah story.

The second invasion was that of Partholon, a descendant of Japhet. His people clear some of the plains of Ireland, and certain lakes burst forth in their time. They fight the Fomorians, a race of one-legged, one-armed, one-eyed demons led by Cichol
Clapperleg
. This was the first battle to be fought in Ireland, it lasted a week and “not a man was slain there because it was a magic
battle
.” However, Partholon was wounded and died not long
afterwards
of the venom of the wound. Perhaps some ancient ritual underlies this story, representing the daily or annual warfare
between
pro-human and anti-human forces: the sun or the summer growth of vegetation and plenty, against darkness, winter and want. Eventually all nine thousand of his people die of the plague, again over the space of a week, and this clears the stage for the third invasion, that of Nemed.

Nemed, another descendant of Japhet, came from “the Greeks of Scythia” with his four sons. He fights repeated battles against the Fomorians, and like Partholon he clears various plains in Ireland, further lakes burst forth, and he dies of the plague. His progeny have to pay exorbitant taxes to the Fomorians in wheat and milk, and eventually attack the Fomorian stronghold, a tower in the sea. The tide comes in during the battle and drowns all the remaining Nemedians except for one shipload of thirty warriors. One of these, Britan, fathers the British nation. Another goes to Greece and his progeny returned after two hundred years of
servitude
there; they are, at last, the Fir Bolg. The descendants of a third Nemedian go to “the northern islands of the world” to learn druidry and heathenism and devilish knowledge, and come back to Ireland two hundred and fifty years later as the Tuatha Dé Danann. They expel the Fir Bolg, but are themselves defeated by the Goidel. Long afterwards the Fir Bolg return, and their
adventures
bring them to Aran; but in the long run they are of no
consequence
and the history of the Goidel continues unperturbed by them, to the times in which that history was written down. Nevertheless, these incursions of a people marginal to the
historical
scheme are the most interesting part of
Lebor
Gabála
especially
when read, as it were, in the shadow of Dún Aonghasa, and so I will follow the fortunes of the Fir Bolg in more detail.

Lebor
Gabála
offers various explanations of how that branch of the Nemedians who underwent servitude in Greece came to be called Fir Bolg, which seems at first sight to mean “men of bags.” Either they took bags of clay with them from Ireland because the King of Greece gave them a noisesome territory full of noxious reptiles, and the soil of Ireland is lethal to such pests; or the Greeks made them carry up bags of earth to spread on rocky flags and make flowery plains; or they eventually made long currachs out of their bags in which to sail back to Ireland. More recent
explanations
of the name are perhaps less naïve but even more
various
, as we shall see.

The return of the Fir Bolg from Greece was the fourth “taking” of Ireland, which they ruled for thirty-seven years under nine
successive
kings. The last of these was Eochu:

This Golden Age was ended by the coming of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the branch of Nemed's progeny that had studied
wizardry
in the north of the world.
Lebor
Gabála
argues with itself as to whether they were men or demons:

Nevertheless the anti-pagan scribes cannot quite suppress the wondrousness of this troupe, and their deeds as recounted in
Lebor
Gabála
and in many other legends make it certain that they were deities of the Celtic religion. Their name means “the people of the goddess Donu”; their leader on arrival was Nuada, probably to be identified with a god Nodens who was worshipped at the Romano-British temple of Lydney in Gloucestershire; another of their number was Ogma, probably the Gaulish god Ogmios; the most famous of them was Lug, the Welsh Llew, whose nature as a sky-god shines through all his deeds and who has left his name on various towns such as Lyons, Laon and Leiden which grew from centres of his worship. Lug's successor was the Dagda Mór, the Great Good God, and his daughter was Brigid, a fire-goddess from whom the tribe of Brigantes took their name, and whom
tradition
has converted into a Christian saint of particularly
luminous
legend.