Early Bardic Literature, Ireland Part 1

Early Bardic Literature, Ireland.

by Standish O'Grady.

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 pa.s.sed 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, bra.s.s, 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 n.o.ble 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 h.o.a.rded 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 ma.s.sive 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 ma.s.sive 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 guardians.h.i.+p of ma.n.u.script, the hymns, ballads, stories, and chronicles, the names, pedigrees, achievements, and even characters, of those ancient kings and warriors over whom those ma.s.sive 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 circ.u.mstantial 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 ill.u.s.trious 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 s.h.i.+eld, 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 friends.h.i.+p; 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 mult.i.tude 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 n.o.bler 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 t.i.tles lavished upon this country, none is truer than that which calls her the Isle of Song. Her ancient history pa.s.sed 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 a.s.semblies 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 circ.u.mstance 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 n.o.ble attributes which const.i.tuted 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 n.o.bility 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 a.s.sailed the heroic literature of ancient Ireland, it still held itself undestroyed. There were still found generous minds to shelter and s.h.i.+eld the old tales and ballads, to feel the n.o.bleness 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 sh.o.r.es 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 astonis.h.i.+ngly 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. .h.i.therto 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 n.o.ble, 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 ma.s.s 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 ma.s.s 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 const.i.tutes the stumbling-block, as it const.i.tutes 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 distinguis.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.serted 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 ma.s.s 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 h.e.l.las.

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 pa.s.sage 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 ja.n.u.s-faced, looking on one side to the mythological period and the wars of the G.o.ds, and on the other, to the heroic, and more particularly to the Ultonian cycle. In the next place, the immense ma.s.s of bardic literature which treats of the Irish G.o.ds who, having conquered the Fir-bolgs, like the Greek G.o.ds 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 s.p.a.ces 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 ma.s.s 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, pa.s.sions, 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 ma.s.s of ancient ballad, tale, and epic, whose origin is lost in the mists of extreme antiquity, and in which have been preserved the characters, relations.h.i.+ps, 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 ma.s.s 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 ill.u.s.tration.

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 princ.i.p.al character, the author of the tale mentions many times circ.u.mstances relating to his father, Felimy Rectmar, and his grandfather, Tuhall Tectmar. Such is the whole of the Irish literature, not vague, nebulous, and s.h.i.+fting, 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 circ.u.mstances 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 ma.n.u.script 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 ma.n.u.script.

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 princ.i.p.ally 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 subst.i.tution 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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.