How the Irish Saved Civilization

by Thomas Cahill

  Ailil responds hotly that he has two kings for brothers and that he “let them rule because they were older, not because they are better than I am in grace and giving. I never heard, in all Ireland, of a province run by a woman except this one, which is why I came and took the kingship here.”

  “It still remains,” says Medb between her teeth, “that my fortune is greater than yours.”

  “You amaze me. No one has more,” shouts Ailil, gesturing grandly, “than I have, and I know it!”

  All right, then, they must take inventory! That very night:

  the lowliest of their possessions were brought out to see who had more property and jewels and precious things: their buckets and tubs and iron pots, jugs and wash-pails and vessels with handles. Then their finger-rings, bracelets, thumb-rings, and gold treasures were brought out, and their cloths of purple, blue, black, green and yellow, plain grey and many-colored, yellow-brown, checked and striped. Their herds of sheep were taken in off the fields and meadows and plains. They were measured and matched, and found to be the same in numbers and size. Even the great ram leading Medb’s sheep, the worth of one bondmaid by himself, had a ram to match him leading Ailil’s sheep.

  From pasture and paddock their teams and herds of horses were brought in. For the finest stallion in Medb’s stud, worth one bondmaid by himself, Ailil had a stallion to match. Their vast herds of pigs were taken in from the woods and gullies and waste places. They were measured and matched and noted, and Medb had one fine boar, but Ailil had another. Then their droves and free-wandering herds of cattle were brought in from the woods and wastes of the province. These were matched and measured and noted also, and found to be the same in number and size. But there was one great bull in Ailil’s herd, that had been a calf of one of Medb’s cows—Finnbennach was his name, the White Horned—and Finnbennach, refusing to be led by a woman, had gone over to the king’s herd. Medb couldn’t find in her herd the equal of this bull, and her spirits dropped as though she hadn’t a single penny.

  How do we come by this extraordinary encounter? Can we depend, at all, on its accuracy?

  I have been quoting from the first scene of the Irish prose epic Tain Bo Cuailnge, The Cattle Raid of Cooley. There are several versions, none of them complete, the earliest dating to the eighth century. This scene comes to us from a twelfth-century manuscript, translated masterfully from the ancient Irish by the contemporary Irish poet Thomas Kinsella. The manuscript tradition, however, is based on an earlier oral tradition that may go back to the time of Christ. And though we can hardly claim to have this royal conversation word for word, the oral-scribal tradition witnesses that such a conversation may well have been the impetus for the rest of the epic action of the Tain.

  Medb calls for the chief messenger, Mac Roth, and asks where the match of Ailil’s bull might be found. “I know where to find such a bull and better,” Mac Roth tells her, “in the province of Ulster, in the territory of Cuailnge, in Daire mac Fiachna’s house. Donn Cuailnge is the bull’s name, the Brown Bull of Cuailnge.”

  “Go there, Mac Roth,” orders Medb. “Ask Daire to lend me Donn Cuailnge for a year. At the end of the year he can have fifty yearling heifers in payment for the loan, and the Brown Bull of Cuailnge back. And you can offer him this too, Mac Roth, if the people of the country think badly of losing their fine jewel, the Donn Cuailnge: if Daire himself comes with the bull I’ll give him a portion of the fine Plain of Ai equal to his own lands, and a chariot worth thrice seven bondmaids, and my own friendly thighs on top of that.”

  The reader is not surprised when Daire graciously accepts this deal! Unfortunately, Daire’s generous hospitality to Mac Roth’s party undoes the agreement, for “they were given the best of good food and kept supplied with the festive fare until they grew drunk and noisy.” The messengers then get into a verbal duel about whether Medb’s forces could have taken the Brown Bull from Ulster by force, had Daire not agreed to the transaction. Daire’s steward enters the room just as one boasts: “We would have taken it anyway, with or without his leave!”

  With that, the deal is off. “And only it isn’t my habit,” smolders Daire after he has learned of the drunken boast, “to murder messengers or travelers or any other wayfarers, not one of you would leave here alive.”

  When Mac Roth recounts this outcome to Medb, she announces genially: “We needn’t polish the knobs and knots in this, Mac Roth. It was well known it would be taken by force if it wasn’t given freely. And taken it will be.” Medb assembles a vast army, which under her command sets out forthwith for Cuailnge to capture the Brown Bull. En route they will be met not by the forces of Ulster, who have been laid low by mysterious pangs, but by one champion only, the boy Cuchulainn.

  The first thing that will probably strike any modern reader who opens the Tain is what a rough, strange world this is, both simple and full of barbaric splendor. Here is no deliberation or subtlety, no refinement or ambiguity. We know immediately that we are at a far remove from Virgil, Cicero, Plato, and the whole literary tradition of the classical world, excepting perhaps Homer. The characters of the Tain do not think profoundly; they do not seem to think at all. But they do act—and with a characteristic panache and roundedness that easily convinces us of their humanity.

  And none more rounded than Medb. How different a queen she is from Dido. One cannot see Medb languishing for a lover—or for anything. If Augustine was the first self-conscious man, Medb—at the other end of the consciousness spectrum—is prereflective. Her ready speech, moreover, is characteristically Irish. We can imagine her sharp first sentence (“What put that in your mind?”) on the lips of many a character in modern Irish drama—and this opens up to us an astonishing continuity: from prehistoric Ireland to the present day.

  The sexual frankness of these characters is unlike anything in classical literature, even in the folk epics of Homer. We would need to reach all the way back to the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh to find anything comparable. Medb’s offer of “her own friendly thighs” to seal the bargain with Daire is obviously thrown in casually. And it is just as obvious that Medb is not in the remotest sense a needy woman—the very phrase would curdle before her! Rather, in early Irish literature both men and women openly admire one another’s physical endowments and invite one another to bed without formality.

  In another story, Derdriu—Deirdre of the Sorrows—passes Noisiu on the rampart of Emain Macha, the chief seat of the Ulster kings. They have never seen each other before. Of Derdriu, the king’s druid, Cathbad, had prophesied that

  High queens will ache with envy

  to see those lips of Parthian-red

  opening on her pearly teeth,

  and see her pure perfect body.

  Though Noisiu knows that she is pledged to the old king and that there is a curse on her, he cannot help himself: “That is a fine heifer going by.”

  “As well it might,” Derdriu shoots back. “The heifers grow big where there are no bulls.”

  “You have the bull of this province all to yourself—the king of Ulster.”

  “Of the two, I’d pick a game young bull like you.”

  Guess what happens next.

  Similarly, there is recorded in another story of the Tain cycle this conversation between the boy Cuchulainn, the Irish Achilles, and Emer, the girl he comes to woo:

  “May your road be blessed!” cries Emer on his approach.

  “May the apple of your eye see only good,” returns Cuchulainn. Then, peering down her dress: “I see a sweet country. I could rest my weapon there.”

  The tasks the hero must perform before this sweet country is open to him are laid out by Emer herself—not by her father, as would be the case in a continental fairy tale:

  “No man will travel this country until he has killed a hundred men at every ford from Scenmenn ford on the river Ailbine, to Banchuing … where the frothy Brea makes Fedelm leap.”

  “In that sweet country I’ll rest my weapon.”

  “
No man will travel this country until he has done the feat of the salmon-leap carrying twice his weight in gold, and struck down three groups of nine men with a single stroke, leaving the middle man of each nine unharmed.”

  “In that sweet country I’ll rest my weapon.”

  “No man will travel this country who hasn’t gone sleepless from Samain [Hallowe’en], when summer goes to its rest, until Imbolc [Candlemas or Groundhog Day], when the ewes are milked at spring’s beginning; from Imbolc to Beltaine [May Day] at the summer’s beginning and from Beltaine to Bron Trogain, earth’s sorrowing autumn.”

  “It is said and done.”

  Well, they may not be civilized, but they certainly are confident—and this confidence is one of the open-handed pleasures of early Irish literature. We have no trouble imagining these people, both men and women, riding hard on horseback, drawing the blood of their enemies, leaping about in muscular dancing, and passing the damp Irish night in vigorous coupling. Even their sorrows and deaths are tossed off with a shrug, though they understand tragedy and receive it as convulsively as any people. “For the great Gaels of Ireland,” wrote G. K. Chesterton,

  Are the men that God made mad.

  For all their wars are merry,

  And all their songs are sad.

  The Irish are part of a larger ethnic grouping called the Celts (preferably pronounced with a hard “c”), who first entered western consciousness about 600 B.C.—only a century and a half after the legendary founding of the City of Rome—when, like the German barbarians long after them, they crossed the Rhine. One branch of the Celtic tree settled in present-day France and became the Gauls, whom Julius Caesar would conquer in the century before Christ and who in their Romanized phase would produce the effete Ausonius. A cognate tribe settled the Iberian peninsula and became great sea traders; indeed, traces of the buildings of these Iberian Celts may have been found as far afield as New Hampshire—which would make the Celts the first Europeans to reach the Americas. In the third century B.C., Celts invaded the Greek world, advancing as far south as Delphi and settling in present-day Turkey, where, as the Galatians (note the similarity of consonantal sounds in “Celt,” “Gaul,” and “Galatian”), they were recipients of one of Paul’s letters. Siblings of the Gaulish Celts crossed to Britain as early as 400 B.C., becoming the Britons, who nine centuries later, in the time of Augustine and Patricius, would be gradually pushed by the Angles and Saxons into Cornwall, where they would become the Cornish, and into Wales, where they would become the Welsh. It is from these British Celts that the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table would spring. Echoes of the language they spoke may be heard today in the form of modern Welsh and Breton, which belong to the same linguistic group as Gaulish.

  About 350 B.C., some fifty years after Celtic tribes began their invasion of Britain, they reached Ireland. Some, no doubt, came by way of Britain, but it is most likely that those who gained ascendancy were Iberian Celts, whose language was somewhat different from that of the British invaders. These became in time the Irish; and the language they spoke belongs not to the Brythonic branch of Welsh and Breton but to a Celtic branch called Goidelic by scholars—whose present-day shoots are the last living Gaelic tongues: Irish and Scots Gaelic. Ireland itself is the only Celtic nation-state in our world, all the other Celts having been absorbed by larger political entities.

  In the Irish foundation myth, the sons of Mil, survivors of the Great Flood through their descent from Noah, reach Ireland from Spain and wrest it from a tribe called Tuatha De Danaan, the People of the Goddess Danu. The connection to Noah can only be the result of later monkish tinkering with the original material—somehow, the Irish had to be connected to things biblical. But there is little reason to doubt the Iberian connection. We have evidence that the Tuatha De Danaan have some historical reality, as well: we know that Ireland was peopled before the arrival of the Celts in the fourth century B.C. and that an earlier people had built the great barrows and magnificently carved tumuli that dot the Irish landscape to this day. In the foundation myth, the Tuatha De Danaan are preternaturally skilled in building and craftsmanship. These taller, otherworldly beings eventually devolve into “the little people,” the fairies and leprechauns of later Irish legend, whose spirits haunt the tombs and fairy mounds they once built. “The little people” is a euphemism—rather like the prehistoric phrase le bon dieu—meant to disguise the speaker’s fear of something unfamiliar and much larger than himself. It is possible that this flickering phenomenon of the little people represents the afterglow of Irish guilt over their exploitation of more artful aborigines.

  Even at this early stage of their development, the Irish were intoxicated by the power of words. Every noble Irish family maintained a family of ancestral poets. The sons of Mil were accompanied by their poet, Amhairghin, who, stepping off the boat that brought him to the Irish shore, proclaimed:

  I am an estuary into the sea.

  I am a wave of the ocean.

  I am the sound of the sea.

  I am a powerful ox.

  I am a hawk on a cliff.

  I am a dewdrop in the sun.

  I am a plant of beauty.

  I am a boar for valour.

  I am a salmon in a pool.

  I am a lake in a plain.

  I am the strength of art.

  One problem with this Irish prehistoric material is that we cannot date it with any precision. From the Celtic invasion in the fourth century B.C. to the invasion of books nine centuries later, after which the traditional oral lore began to be written down, we are looking at a timeless Ireland. We can presume that Amhairghin’s poem, at least in its current form, is not actually as old as the Celtic invasion, but we cannot be sure how old it is. We can date the action of the Tain perhaps to the first century of our era, perhaps to a century or so later, but there is no way of knowing when this episode or that was added to the strand of narrative.

  What hints we have suggest that Ireland was, during this entire period, a land outside of time—that, in fact, it changed little from the time of Amhairghin to the time of Augustine. This was an illiterate, aristocratic, seminomadic, Iron Age warrior culture, its wealth based on animal husbandry and slavery (the importance of both of which one cannot fail to notice in the Tain’s royal inventory). Such cultures have been known to exist for many hundreds of years without undergoing appreciable alteration. What normally changes them is outside influence, rather than inner dynamics; and Ireland, splendidly isolated in the Atlantic and largely beyond the traffic of civilization, suffered few intrusive influences. We can safely assume, therefore, that the world of Medb and Ailil was little different from the earlier Ireland that the Celtic invaders had made and that this world, in most respects, remained intact into the century of Rome’s fall. On this timeless island, one would have come in contact with a culture very like that of the British and continental Celts prior to their centuries of Roman influence. In this place and period, one might also have experienced a milieu something like such pre-Roman cultures as Homeric Greece, the India of the Mahabharata, and Sumer, with their common equipage of warhorses and warrior chariots and their common standards of heroic action.

  The Irish, like all the Celts, stripped before battle and rushed their enemy naked, carrying sword and shield but wearing only sandals and tore—a twisted, golden neck ornament. Just such a torc may be seen around the neck of the naked Dying Gaul, a Greek statue of the third century B.C. The Gaul’s tough hide has been pierced by a heart wound between his ribs, and he is bleeding to death. Sitting on the ground, he holds himself erect with a last effort of will. His face is a drama of both dignity and hopelessness, as he “casts a cold eye on life, on death.” The Romans, in their first encounters with these exposed, insane warriors, were shocked and frightened. Not only were the men naked, they were howling and, it seemed, possessed by demons, so outrageous were their strength and verve. Urged on by the infernal skirl of pipers, they presented to the unaccustomed and
throbbing Roman sensorium a multimedia event featuring all the terrors of hell itself.

  The Irish heroes were aware that they became possessed when confronted by the enemy and that their appearances could alter considerably, and they called this phenomenon the “warp-spasm.” When in the Tain the armies of Connacht are confronted by Ulster’s champion, the seventeen-year-old Cuchulainn, this is how he appears:

  The first warp-spasm seized Cuchulainn, and made him into a monstrous thing, hideous and shapeless, unheard of. His shanks and his joints, every knuckle and angle and organ from head to foot, shook like a tree in the flood or a reed in the stream. His body made a furious twist inside his skin, so that his feet and shins and knees switched to the rear and his heels and calves switched to the front. The balled sinews of his calves switched to the front of his shins, each big knot the size of a warrior’s bunched fist. On his head the temple-sinews stretched to the nape of his neck, each mighty, immense, measureless knob as big as the head of a month-old child. His face and features became a red bowl: he sucked one eye so deep into his head that a wild crane couldn’t probe it onto his cheek out of the depths of his skull; the other eye fell out along his cheek. His mouth weirdly distorted: his cheek peeled back from his jaws until the gullet appeared, his lungs and liver flapped in his mouth and throat, his lower jaw struck the upper a lion-killing blow, and fiery flakes large as a ram’s fleece reached his mouth from his throat. His heart boomed loud in his breast like the baying of a watch-dog at its feed or the sound of a lion among bears. Malignant mists and spurts of fire—the torches of Badb—flickered red in the vaporous clouds that rose boiling above his head, so fierce was his fury. The hair of his head twisted like the tangle of a red thornbush stuck in a gap; if a royal apple tree with all its kingly fruit were shaken above him, scarce an apple would reach the ground but each would be spiked on a bristle of his hair as it stood up on his scalp with rage. The hero-halo rose out of his brow, long and broad as a warrior’s whetstone, long as a snout, and he went mad rattling his shields, urging on his charioteer and harassing the hosts. Then, tall and thick, steady and strong, high as the mast of a noble ship, rose up from the dead centre of his skull a straight spout of black blood darkly and magically smoking like the smoke from a royal hostel when a king is coming to be cared for at the close of a winter day.