The story of the Irish nation

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CHAPTER PAGE

I The Gaelic Period: Pagan 5

II The Gaelic Period: Christian .... 30

Chapter I The Gaelic Period I Pagan

ON a fine day in the Wicklow Mountains you can survey half Ireland. You can look as far north as the lovely Mourne range in Ulster, and on the other hand as far south as the tip of Wexford, framed in a bright sea.

To take in the full scope of the Irish story you must climb to some similar height in imagination, some height from which narrow boundaries are released, and the prospect becomes emotionally open. To find this eminence, it is perhaps best to go back a few thousand years. Here it is no longer history, as we know it nationally and politically, that takes us by the hand. It is the much calmer genius of science.

From this remote period one can construct no certain narrative. There is only the wavering accent of tradition, the hint of geology and anthropology, the literal "footprints on the sands of time." But by great luck we happen to have preserved in Gaelic the oldest existing body of Northern literature. From this literature we are able to judge or guess at the types of men who stand on the sky-line of Irish history.

This Gaelic past is of intense interest, not only because so many records and memorials of it exist, but because the Irish people to-day are in such vivid relation to their past. Like all invaded and suppressed peoples, they have been repeatedly informed that their past is wild, obscure, and barbaric; they have been encouraged to forget it. But the past swings the future into being. The present key to Ireland is in the Gaelic period which flourished so nobly in pagan times, and so generously in the Christian period that followed Patrick. This civilization, however, is not monstrously peculiar or archaic. The Irish are not racially separate from Europe. Their history is a vital part of European history. By an accident of political and economic suppression the Irish people have been forced for centuries to turn all their energies into making a fight for survival. But, for centuries, like a river that has been dammed and forced out of its channel, the Irish nation has at last pushed through its unnatural obstacle, established its continuity, and begun to flow in freedom. Hence the head-waters of Gaelic civilization are more important to examine than ever.

To begin with the earlier human inhabitants of Ireland, it is by no means established that they were all of one racial stock. It was dark Mediterranean people, we are told, who worshiped around the glacial boulders which still remain. It was broad-headed "Beaker" people who erected the great burial mounds and laboriously decorated the memorial stones. These prehistoric inhabitants of Ireland are hardly discernible. They are vaguely known as Iberians and as Picts.

Descendants of early tribes — wiry, black- haired Sicilian-like — are still to be met in stony Connacht. Perhaps these are "Iberians. " Once it was supposed that the famous chronologies of the pagan kings had historical value and gave a clue to the pre-Celtic Irish, but it now appears that their lists of dates and monarchs were compiled on the model of the Old Testament after Christianity had come to Ireland. But much is to be inferred from the unwritten records — from the burial mounds and the big memorial stones and the Druidical circles which are still, to our wonderment, sprinkled over Ireland. On a stone at New Grange there is to be seen the spiral that came from the JEgean, traced by some pre-Celtic hand about 1500 b. c. Near-by in royal Meath are the many hillocks which the fear and awe of a later age raised to the Old Men. Under a seventy-foot mound at New Grange, with a circle of stones outside, one may now climb down to the mysterious set of chambers in which the pre-Celtic chiefs were first buried. Here, up to the time of Christianity, the pagan kings were laid, sometimes in urns and sometimes lengthwise and sometimes standing up, in full armor and face toward the enemy.

The early race of men came to be called Firbolg, or "men of the bags." In these bags, it is recorded, the Greeks, so-called, compelled the Firbolg to haul loam for their hillside gardens. Revolting against their slavery, the Firbolg escaped from their Mediterranean masters, making boats out of their bags.

However dim this legend, the first man of the present surviving type certainly came to Ireland oversea, so one may fairly picture the Firbolg sailing to their new country as Lucan pictured the Briton:

Is woven first into a little boat ; Then, clothed in bullock's hide, upon the billow Of a proud river lightly doth it float Under the waterman: So on the lakes of overswelling Po Sails the Venetian; and the Briton so On the outspread ocean.

Here, as so often, the poet is the antique historian. On the west coast of Ireland the little boat "clothed in bullock's hide" is still in use.

But there are other memorials of the bagmen. There is a legend that they fought a great battle for survival against powerful new-comers in County Mayo, near Cong. On this ground to-day there are five groups of stone circles, besides a number of burial cairns, which may indicate a battle-field or simply a cemetery. One of these cairns, however, has always been known as the "Cairn of the One Man." Eochy, the king of the Firbolg, was bathing in the opening of an underground river that still connects Lough Mask and Lough Corrib. Three of the enemy came upon him and demanded his surrender, but before they had taken him his own body-servant arrived and, at the cost of his life, fought and slew all three. The legend declares that in this "Cairn of the One Man," the king, with great honor, buried his servant. And when this grave was opened, in the middle of last century, by Sir William Wilde, father of Oscar Wilde, a single urn was found inside which once had held a man's bones.

The Firbolg, then, were the primitive stock, and when the Celts or Gaels came oversea to Ireland about 350 b. c. (in the so-called Iron Age), they were met, as Pilgrim Fathers always seem to be met, by a group of "natives." These natives of 350 b. c. have left no trace whatever of their language in Ireland, and no certain picture of their appearance and social habit, but enough is known about them to make it clear that they were definitely less far advanced than the fighting Celts to whom they succumbed.

Almost immediately after the arrival of the Celts, these older inhabitants seem to have become bottomdog. The Celts were bigger men, they had bigger and better boats, they were better clad — above all, they had better implements both for fighting and working. The result, in the dim age of which we speak, was the subjection of the early tribes.

Who were the Celts? They were a Nordic people, sprung from southeast of the Baltic. Some recent commentators, not without political bias, have denied that the Irish have ever had Celtic antecedents. They assert that the invaders of 350 b. c. were Alpine folk, round-headed and tall and fair ; more primitive than the Nordic type, though "plastic and imaginative and sympathetic." But the evidence of race, of the Gaelic language, and of the Latin classics points to the inclusion of Ireland within the range of that Celtic expansion which took place in the fourth century b. c.

The Firbolg, however, were not exterminated by the Celts or Gaels who came in the fourth century before Christ. Although it is certain from all the memorials of the North that these Gaelic contemporaries of the civilized Greeks were some hundreds of years behind the Greeks in culture, it is also certain that their state of culture was not primitive. They were far enough along, at any rate, to tax their subject peoples. But they did not kill off the Firbolg. What happened to the brave but less advanced type may, in a plain image, be suggested by the survival of frame dwellings in a modern city like New York. Even latterly a single frame dwelling may stand next to a sky-scraper, while in outlying districts the frame dwellings may persist in groups. The erection of the brownstone type of house suggests a later incursion — say the Norse — and the survival of this type in a variety of modifications and disguises indicates what may happen even with tenements of stone. As to the succession of human types, one thing seems clear; nothing, not even the skull, is unchangeable in size or shape, and too much may be inferred on the hypothesis that bone is fixed, like cast-iron. But history and tradition in Ireland do indicate that the Firbolg was subordinated, even though he was valued as a fighting conscript and gave the Heroic Cycles some of their noblest figures. The Firbolg generally was pushed into the hills, into the woods, into the less desirable lands and the less desirable work. Still, because his property descended through the female line, the Gael not only fought his way but married his way into supremacy: he took the Firbolg chieftainess to wife, and then her property went to the Gaelic sept in the natural course of descent. For the Gael came to Ireland with social ideas considerably in advance of those matriarchal tribes who at that time supplied the human groundwork of the British Isles. The Gael, we may assume as certain, was of the common Northern stock which is the racial basis of modern France, Belgium and Germany. And probably the clearest way to conceive the Irish nation is as part of this vast Northern adventure which became possible once the later inhabitants learned to use iron. The conquest of the Firbolg "by the Gael is now viewed with equanimity by all Irish historians. Yet historically speaking, the Gael was a ruthless oppressor. He belittled and misrepresented the people whom he conquered. It is a pity we do not possess a Firbolg history of the Gael.

The fact that he was so capable of conquest and oppression links him with northen Europe. And historically it is desirable to remember the European — Southeast Baltic — cradle of the Gael, because for many centuries the Gael continued to be an element in the life of the Continent. It is easy to see, in our own time, how the whole fortune of a modern people may change in a few years, how their social margin may be wiped out and their main fight become the primitive fight to survive. That was the case of the Irish Gael after 1600 a. d., and to a great extent after 1200. But at the time when the Continent of Europe had the least cultural margin of its own, in the chaos of the fifth and sixth centuries, it was the Irish Gael's turn to contribute. During that period, as a consequence of the conversion by St. Patrick, the Gael was a supreme factor in the life of the Continent. It is impossible, on this account, to comprehend the true story of the Irish nation unless one keeps realizing the fluidity of boundaries that now seem to be fixed and the flexibility of channels that now seem to be rigid. The Gael is a European not only in stock but in cultural history. To think of him as separate and isolated is to make him unintelligible.

To return to 350 b. c. The physical Ireland to which the Gaels pushed forward under Continental pressure was a fair, fertile land, with probably the same moist climate it has to-day. Like the rest of the Northern world, it swarmed with forest. When the Picts came Meath alone seems to have been cleared. In the shade of its great woods of oak and ash and hazel and holly, the fox, the red wolf, the boar, the bear, the deer, and perhaps the elk were still at large. But one may suppose that the Gaels were rejoiced to find grassy plateaus from which they edged the Firbolg away ; and clear rivers leaping with salmon, and "fishy pools," and sandy shores where boats could easily be beached. The wild swan, we may imagine, swam in the silences of inland lakes. The wild geese flew over Ireland on their journey south. On high hills there were places for Druid worship and sacrifice, and on a plain in Cavan a place for the idol Cromm Cruach, god of the sun, whom the pagan multitudes adored.

A very old Gaelic poem, ascribed to Finn mac Cool (Finn mac Cumhail), may be quoted to suggest the country that surrounded and delighted the Gael. "May-Day, delightful time! How beautiful the color; the blackbirds sing their full lay; would that Leahy (Laighaig) were here! The cuckoos sing in constant strains. How welcome is the ever-noble brilliance of the seasons ! On the margin of the branching woods the summer swallows skim the stream. The swift horses seek the pool. The heath spreads out its long hair, the weak, fair bog-down grows. Sudden consternation attacks the signs ; the planets, in their courses running, exert an influence ; the sea is lulled to rest, flowers cover the earth."

From the Irish literature that now remains, thousands of pages of which are still unpublished and many not yet translated into English, it is not impossible to suppose the kind of life which these pre-Christian groups enjoyed. Each of these groups which occupied the fair lands of Ireland circled socially round the dominant local chief and his family. And the group in itself formed a community with a social structure which was fairly proof against internal change. The Firbolg, in the first place, seem to have been in most cases "unf ree." They were not slaves ; that lot was reserved for the males and females who were captured in raids or for the general captives of war. But the Firbolg, excellent fighters though they were, formed subject communities to do the mechanical work which the pastoral Gaels apparently scorned, and to pay tribute, after the fashion of subject communities. The bronze rivet-folk, the shield-folk, the chariot-folk, the wheelfolk, the plow-folk, were castes of Firbolg, and it is suggested that the tameless tinkers of Ireland to-day may be a survival of this type of community life. Everywhere, except in Ossory and in Down and Antrim, the Firbolg succumbed. But besides the "unfree" Firbolg, with their fairs and possible exchange of wives, there were serfs who were too poor to own cattle. They merely had the use of cattle in return for servitude.

Wealth was then, as now, in the hands of a ruling class. As the "pillow-talk" of king and queen in the epic tale of the Raid of Cooley (County Louth) informs us, wealth consisted of aheep and herds, of horses and steeds and studs, of droves of swine "driven from woods and shelving glens and wolds," of pails and caldrons and iron-wrought vessels, of jugs and eared pitchers, of apparel of kingly colors — purple and blue and black and green and yellow and vari-colored — and rings and thumb-rings and bracelets and golden treasures, probably from the rich alluvial gold of Arklow. Slave-women, who were worth three cows or five bullocks, were also part of the wealth of that harsh Queen Maeve of Connacht who went to war for a bull.

FROM OLD FRESCOES AND STONE SCULPTURE

Ancient Irish Archer, Kings and Harper

In this pastoral life, as might be expected, the great men were the men of personal strength and beauty and pride and skill. When even the petty king traveled in state he was accompanied always by his judges and poets, by harpers and pipe and horn players, by jugglers and fools, besides his soldiers and stewards and servants. Sport and hospitality were as much a part of his life as war. His lawful occupations, as the old rule laid them down in later times, were legislation on

Monday, chess on Tuesday, seeing the coursing of grayhounds on Wednesday, the pleasures of love on Thursday, horse- racing on Friday, delivering judgment on Saturday, and on Sunday feasting and aledrinking and distributing ale. These activities have a flavor of the time and place about them, and yet, with the inclusion of the laying of corner-stones, they might bring to mind the limited sovereignty of Edward VII.

In the habitation of Ireland by free Gaels, their unfree dependents, and their slaves there was no immediate need for a strong central government. Government centralized for military reasons was attempted in pagan times but not secured. It was hard to secure because it was still possible for compact political agencies like the sept, or group of kinsmen, to be self-sufficient, like small shops before the trusts came. Now, looking backward, we can see how "primitive" the Gaelic septs were, just as by hindsight it will some day very likely be agreed all around that it was wasteful for each railway in 1922 to try to keep its independence. But to the Gaels who occupied Ireland in pre-Christian days the main reason they rode to Tara in their chariots with their poets and judges and retainers was to enjoy the enormous triennial assembly in a festival spirit, with tradition and ceremonial in their mind rather than the modern idea of representative government. The hard political problems were not central in an age in which wealth was agricultural, an age content with wooden bridges or fords and a few good roads and houses built from the timber or wattles with which Ireland was so well supplied. The really pressing conflicts concerned tangible wealth and provincial military power. By what new local combinations could a proud and mettlesome chief hope to aggrandize himself at the expense of his natural or acquired enemies? That was the sort of problem that had point. Until the Strangers came with such strategy that they could grip all pastoral Ireland willy-nilly, the need to combine was not clear. When the necessity was felt to be actual, the Gaels did attempt to centralize. Perhaps because they had never lived in towns and had therefore missed the quick though dangerous adaptability that comes with many contacts and easy associations, they persisted in the old ways long after the European world had learned new modes. This conservatism, joined with their pride in the fighting character of their leaders, was probably one element in determining their subsequent fortunes.

Another fact of serious social consequence, as Professor MacNeill defines, was the way in which the sept or true family or derbfine was organized in relation to the kingship.

A derbfine or true family was not grouped according to the modern idea of the married couple and their offspring. The Gaelic family took in all the immediate kinsmen of four generations, the head of the sept being reckoned the great-grandfather, whether living or not. Birth and death were consequently of essential importance to the derbfine. When the first son was born to the fourth generation a new great-grandfather was thus created, and consequently a new unit or derbfine. When any male member of the four generations died his holdings went into the family pool and were redivided among every one according to prescription. In case of the kingship, any male member of the derbfine was in line of succession, the monarch being elected by all who were eligible. The bad consequence of this law of succession, as Professor MacNeill points out, was the drive it gave to those men whose fathers and grandfathers had not held the kingship to seize the kingship for themselves and thus "keep it in the family."

There was much conflict in early Irish history, and most of it sprang from this system. Powerful men gambled with life rather than resign themselves to an inferior role in their family's district. And where so much depended on the chances of mortality, men's minds naturally tended to elevate the value of power rather than the value of life. To kill a man, as with all Aryans, asked for vengeance, not justice. . There was, besides, the provocation that came to fighting men from living near other fighting men whose wealth consisted in cattle and sheep. There were innumerable disputes, a few entirely lawless and wanton, but most of them due to the lack of a code supported by force and to the fierce personal partisanships of the septs. The conflicts of territorial chiefs were possible at any time down to the sixteenth century. But there were long periods of tranquillity and order during the whole Gaelic period, and at least one great effort to consolidate the position of the high-king. A professional soldiery, with its promise of order and threat of dominance, was missing in Ireland. It existed so long as the plundering of Britain and Gaul was profitable. But later this fighting militia disappeared, and with it royal Tara, "home of .the warrior-bands."

There are many popular notions about Ireland which are best explained by reference to this prehistoric period in which the life of Ireland is simply the life of a congeries of small, comfortable, prosperous, belligerent chieftaincies. One is the famous myth that a handful of Spaniards wrecked on the shores of Ireland after the dispersal of the Armada became thereafter the fathers of innumerable and consistently black-haired descendants. These black-haired people are now reckoned to come from the Picts or Pretani (Britanni), of whom Professor MacNeill speaks. Another notion is that which Lord Salisbury indulged when he spoke of the "Celtic fringe." His image was meant to convey the fact that the Celtic traces in the British Isles were around the rim of a territory which some superior group had wiped clean. This theory, supported by Rhys, now seems to be upset. The Hottentots, the "miserable shell-eaters" of that remote age, appear to have been the unfortunate Pretani. The Gaelic "fringe" in western Britain, in Argyllshire, in Wales, and in Cornwall, was an embroidery, not a remnant. It came from fresh Irish settlements after the collapse of Roman power in Britain. The classic name for the Irish Gaels was Scoti, or raiders. Ireland, known as Eiru, Eire, Iverne, Ierne, Hibernia, Ire-land, was also known as Scotia Major. (Scotland, of course, was Scotia Minor, named after the Irish who colonized and Christianized it.) The fame or ill-fame of the Irish Gaels as raiders and plunderers traveled into Gaul as well as to Britain. It was one of the reasons later advanced by Milton toward justifying the counter-incursion of the Normans.

From these authentic raids of the Gaels we may approach the actual history that precedes the coming of Patrick. But first we must admit the dimness that surrounds Ireland and Britain even as late as the beginning of the Christian era.

It has been brilliantly said, "If communications had been more easy, Queen Maeve might have entertained Caesar Augustus in her palace at Rathcrogan, while the fame of Finn MacCool might have added to the apprehensions of Aurelian." (Grenville A. J. Cole.) This cross-section in chronology suggests how the illumination of history, so vivid in Mesopotamia and Egypt and Greece and later Rome, palpitates and pales as one follows the horizontal line to the North. The dimness is utterly impenetrable at a time when the world is already radiant in the South. Where were our ancestors when the Sumerians were writing their tablets? How advanced were they when Socrates played the fine light of reason on gods and men in the glowing Athenian shade? It is only by the aid of happily surviving heroic legends and justly compensated tradition that scholars venture to build up the Gaelic past before the time of Patrick. And yet the secrets of the race have been in good keeping in the hands of Irish poets. Each year, as scholarship improves, the magnificent epics of Ireland yield up one clue after another to prehistoric Gaelic civilization, and the age of historical disclosure is not over. It was only in 1868 that the superb "Ardagh" chalice was brought to light by a man digging potatoes at a rath in County Limerick; it dates probably from the ninth century. It was only in 1850 that a wayfarer picked up on the strand at Bettystown, near Drogheda, the admirable "Tara" brooch. Somewhere, perhaps, in a buried shrine, there may still lie hidden in Kildare that glorious manuscript which the emotional Gerald de Barri declared to have been decorated by angels ! Time, at any rate, favors our enlightenment on this flowering Gaelic period.

The failure of the Romans to conquer Ireland is, in a sense, a landmark of Irish history. By their conquest of half-naked and primitive Britain the Romans came in sight of Ireland, but they never attempted to extend their empire across the Irish Sea. They lacked the extra legion which would have enabled them to tackle the Gaels. The Gaels, on their side, were undoubtedly aware of the nearness of that formidable imperial power. And the outside contact of the Gaels with the Roman empire has left a few records in writing and in material form. Once they had established a footing in Alba (Alp-a, now Scotland), the Gaels advanced toward the Roman wall in the north ; Ulster built a defensive rampart after that model in the third centurj\ The Gaels harried the Roman colony before the downfall of the empire, but later, when the "barbarians" came sweeping from the east in the fourth century, a division called the First Scots (apparently including Gaels and pre-Gaels) fought with the Romans "to defend the line of the Rhine." New colonies of Celts about the same time settled in that accessible region of Leinster around Dublin which Belgae and Norsemen and Normans and Saxons have always made

their own.

Such colonists were not, in the nature of things, objectionable. If the new-comers entered into the right alliances and lent military aid and paid tribute, they were as welcome in Irish politics as the "Polish vote" or the "Italian vote" or the "Irish vote" in twentieth-century American politics. Immigration and emigration were more frequent than usually recognized in the early centuries of this era, and the Norse-Irish, especialty, formed what might be termed dissolving combinations.

In the Gaelic land at home early history actively revolves around one central political theme — the strife of Ireland in changing from a state of five main divisions to a state of seven divisions and sub-kingships. Professor MacNeill says that the oldest certain fact in the political history of Ireland is the "pentarchy." Till 1833 the rock stood near Mullingar from which the five divisions of the country were traced, and the sept names that were identified with each of these divisions, either as kings or under-kings, are on record in the genealogies. Dr. Douglas Hyde, in his fascinating "Literary History of Ireland," gives us the names of these septs that were best known. In Leinster there were the O'Tooles, the O'Byrnes, MacMurroughs or

Murphys, O'Conor Falys, O'Gormans, and others, tracing back to a. d. 123. In Munster were the Mac- Carthys, O'Sullivans, O'Keefes, O'Callaghans, the MacNamaras and Clancys, the O'Carrolls, O'Meaghers, O'Haras, O'Garas, Caseys, and southern O'Conors. Ulster had the O'Neills and the O'Donnells. From Brian came the O'Conors, kings of Connacht, Mac- Dermots, O'Rorkes, O'Reillys, O'Flaherties, MacDonaghs, O'Shaughnesys. And these are by no means the last of the leading genealogies.

The boundaries of Ireland even now are under discussion; in the past, change was the rule rather than rigidity. From the time of Toole (Tuathal), who exacted the huge Borumha or Boru tribute from Leinster, to the time of Cormac mac Art there was probably a constant shifting of power. A new era came with Cormac mac Art (227-266). (Mac means son of, 0' means grandson of.) Working his way forward from his own home in Connacht across the central plain, Cormac established his kingly power over Meath. By seating his dynasty at Tara and making the king of Connacht the automatic successor to Tara, Cormac gave a trend to history which, in the century succeeding, was developed by the uniting of Connacht and Meath against Ulster and the break-up of that historic division. The domination of Munster, at the same time, was achieved by the powerful kings enthroned on the Rock of Cashel. Internal security seems now to have obtained for a considerable period. The highkings who came later, Niall of the Nine Hostages and Nath-i (also called Dathi), attest their dominance at home by their militant activity abroad. Niall was slain on board ship in the English Channel (404) by a Leinster prince, Nath-i killed in Gaul (429). NialPs many sons inherited or conquered small principalities throughout half Ireland. Vassal communities and communities that paid tribute were multiplied under this division of NialPs territory, which has given placenames still in use to countless districts in Ireland. Northeast Ulster, however, remained discordant and split into four sections. The men of South Leinster, at the same time, stood apart. Their mission was to recover by force the power which had belonged to them when a Leinster king reigned at Tara.

These dynastic struggles, apparently so meaningless, were the main political activity of the warring Gaels. But the conflicts of power that they indicate did not cease for many centuries. War rather than peace was the chief fact of existence. Love was the incentive and the reward of heroes, not of the tamer breed of men.

The barbarous Gaelic king is not a misty figure in the Gaelic past. An official word-portrait of Cormac at royal Tara fortunately remains for our edification. It is to be found in the "Book of Ballymote": "Beautiful was the appearance of Cormac in that assembly; flowing and slightly curling was his golden hair. A red buckler with stars and animals of gold and fastenings of silver upon him. A crimson cloak in wide descending folds around him, fastened at his neck with precious stones. A torque of gold around his neck. A white shirt with a full collar, and intertwined with red gold thread upon him. A girdle of gold, inlaid with precious stones, was around him. Two wonderful shoes of gold, with golden loops, upon his feet. Two spears with golden sockets in his hands, with many rivets of red bronze. And he was himself, besides, symmetrical and beautiful of form, without blemish or reproach."