by Frank Gannon
Speaking of “Mug Nuadat,” the Irish approach to names is a lot different than the American. My name, “Francis Xavier Gannon,” passes for an “Irish name.” But a really Irish name is something like “Aoife Cullinane.” And Irish people pronounce a lot of names much differently than you might think. “Kathleen” is always “Katt-lean,” for instance. You come across unpronounceable first names like “Ciaran” (“Key-er-un”), “Aine” (“own-ya”), and “Siobahn (“shy-von”) on a regular basis. When confronted with an unpronounceable Gaelic name, I found a simple solution. Speak fast and slur.
They’re used to a language called Celtic (KELL-TIC). I had heard it was dead but I was assured by several people in Ireland that it is as alive as Britney Spears. It’s spoken in small areas all over the world, but in Ireland it’s still used in Donegal, Mayo, and Galway.
Gaelic is a language that is actually growing in usage. The Irish government subsidizes it, and it’s in many school curricula in Ireland. If you want to get a long, difficult-to-follow argument, ask someone in Ireland why “Gaelic” is called “Irish” in many parts of Ireland, and “Gaelic” in some others. Like the people everywhere I’ve been, these people are very touchy on the subject of language.
I was never a very good speller. In the statewide spelling bee, an event in which my brother qualified for the finals, I went out on the word “whip,” which I spelled “wip.” For me, spell-check is a great invention. In Ireland, however, good spellers have my unreserved awe.
Consider the word “winter,” a simple little word used in everyday speech. In Gaelic “winter” is spelled “geimbreadh.” It is pronounced something like “Ja-year-ee.” The winner of a Gaelic spelling competition is a child who may, in time, rule the world.
Giant Irish Stones
The past in Ireland isn’t remote because every few minutes you seem to come across something really old. In America really old is the Liberty Bell. But in Ireland really old is really old. There are literally thousands of megalithic monuments in Ireland, and there are many towers and churches that are over a thousand years old. I live near Atlanta. In Atlanta they have plans to tear things down by the time they are finished building. But in Ireland you are continually drawn back into the past every time you turn a corner.
Ireland is an archaeologist’s dream. When we first started rambling around and we came to some ancient giant stones that looked like Stonehenge, we stopped and had a look. After a while we were passing them by. If you drive for twenty minutes the odds are you are going to encounter some megalithic tomb.
There are so many of these partly because much of Ireland has been left pretty much alone. I am relatively sure that all megalithic work has vanished from, say, New Jersey. Where I grew up Stonehenge would have been imploded a long time ago.
People really aren’t sure why these giant things were built in the first place. It seems likely that there was some religious meaning behind the massive things. The sheer size of the things is amazing. I was told that some of the stones weigh a hundred tons.
Paulette and I used one for something that they are often used for today: human sacrifice. Just kidding. We had our picture taken in front of it. The massive thing is called Crevy-keel. It’s in Sligo. Right now I bet somebody from America is standing in front of it smiling.
At night these massive things take on a different aspect, as if some gigantic thing is about to appear and sit down next to his giant rock table. A lot of archaeologists have pointed out that these massive stone groups are often placed in a way that links them to astronomical movement. The ancient people weren’t mysteriously “advanced” like in those shows narrated by Leonard Nimoy. The ancient Irish just spent a lot of time looking at the sky, looking at “the big picture.”
Ireland itself seems to lead you to look at things from a different, more distant perspective. In Ireland my little human life suddenly seemed very, very brief.
Taking the long approach (very long) yields another perspective on Ireland. Looking at things from God’s perspective, Ireland is sort of a saucer without a teacup. The Irish, like their friendly neighbors, have made the “tea” into a constant, and they are constantly using it as a metaphor.
As God sits down to his afternoon repast, He looks over at Ireland and sees the cup and permanently raises it to His lips. He takes a sip. If you are a deist, he leaves the cup out in the Cosmos somewhere and takes a nap. Maybe this is something else, but the middle of Ireland is a sort of round, flat circle in the middle, surrounded by a little ridge of mountains.
It hasn’t always been God’s teacup and saucer. A million and a half years ago, Ireland was linked to Europe and covered with ice. Before that it was actually probably attached to North America. But, as the eons sped by, it got a little warmer, and Ireland, now an island, floated off to begin the saucer portion of its life and to become its own little place, Planet Green.
Around ten thousand years ago the first people arrived, strolling over the few tiny land bridges that connected Ireland to what is now Europe. (If it had stayed attached to Europe, things might be very different. Today, Irish people might like Jerry Lewis movies, like to think of names for cheese, drink a lot of red wine, and make existential comments. “Irish Cooking” might no longer be the answer in the “thinnest book” joke. There might have been no “pomme de terre” famine.)
Extremely early Irish history is pretty misty. There are, however, a few things left that serve as clues. There are, for instance, lots of remains of the ancient giant deer they call the Irish elk. It seems safe to say that ancient Ireland was covered with these deer. The oldest traces of Irish human life are in Ulster, in the valley of the river Boyne. The original inhabitants of Ireland were, it is believed, hunter-gatherers, who lived near the ocean and used some very primitive tools, and, of course, built giant stone tombs.
Many Irish megalithic tombs are covered with what seem to be symbols. There are whorls and spirals and all sorts of elaborate embellishments. No one knows the exact meaning of these things, but there are lots of speculative explanations. The people must have had some belief system, and these structures must have meant something to them, but all of that is lost.
These giant tombs originally contained multiple dead people, and these are actually the oldest man-made constructions in the world. They are older than the pyramids, and about one thousand years older than Stonehenge. Whatever else is true about them, the ancient Irish honored their dead.
Early Irish history sounds like a great number of invasions, but most historians think that it was much more peaceful than the word “invasion” usually connotes. Different groups came and stayed, but there wasn’t massive carnage. If there can be peaceful invasions, that’s what Ireland experienced.
Each group of new people brought innovations and changes, and the culture changed in very small increments. Most of the invaders spoke variations of the same language, so early in Ireland’s history you don’t find anything like 1066 in England, where a whole new culture takes over.
The Bronze Age in Ireland was very long, almost fifteen centuries, and there are a lot of amazing ancient Irish bronze weapons and ornaments. By 100 B.C. Ireland was dominated by a race called the “Fir Bolg.” The “Fir Bolg” were replaced by the people that are still there, “the Celts.” (When you are in Ireland do not pronounce the word Selts. I did and was told by an Aran Islander that “The Selts are a basketball team; the Kelts are a people.”)
By looking at Irish myths of this era scholars have pieced together a general picture. In Irish mythology, kings are always “marrying” divine entities, usually described as “goddesses.” The goddesses guide the kings. By 150 B.C. the Celts were the dominant group, but it was far from a unified country. The Celts are described in history books as fair-skinned, with red hair. Their language was, like English, Germanic. Eventually several distinct dialects evolved. The variety called by linguists “Q-Celts” is the one that prevailed. The English language is ancient in Ireland. Despite what so
me people say, English as a language is not something that was “imposed” on the people by outsiders.
The Celts were, like most ancient people, polytheistic. They had over four hundred gods. Some of them have well-known Greek equivalents. The Irish god Esus is something close to Hermes, the messenger god, and Taranis (“thunder”) was the head god, and Irish version of Zeus. There was a god for almost every natural phenomenon, and the land itself was deified, as were the larger rivers. It was pantheistic, but there were a few gods that seem to have little to do with nature.
The Celts were not a tightly unified group. There were little tribes and bands that were self-contained and sometimes fought with each other. A band was called a tuath. Frequently, a tuath had its own god. The Celts that settled in central Europe were a powerful military force with a reputation for absolute ruthless savagery in battle. The Irish version of the Celts highly valued military force, but they seem to have been a bit mellower than their continental variety.
They had pretty much a common culture. They seem to have liked exaggerated figures of speech, and had an odd tendency to categorize things in terms of threes. (This habit of mind recalls the old myth about Saint Patrick using the three-petaled shamrock to teach about the Trinity: three Beings in one God.)
The Irish mythological version of the old days goes something like this: The three sons of King Mileadth, aka “the Milesians” invaded Ireland about the time of Alexander the Great and defeated the Tuatha De Danann, who had earlier defeated the Fir Bolg. Around 100 B.C. the Gaels arrived, and, from then on, all of the Gaelic kings tried to trace their lineage back to the “Milesians.” The arrival of the Gaels, again, wasn’t an invasion. They just blended in with the Celts. After a while the Gaels were actually called Celts.
The structure of the civilization that the ancient Irish developed sounds, to many people (and me), strangely appealing. Their system, whatever else it is, is the sort of thing that (except for slavery and an occasional human sacrifice here and there) sounds “good on paper.” Once in a while an “outsider” politician in America will cite that ancient Irish system as a good model. I think that Norman Mailer alluded to the system a few times during his bizarre run for mayor of New York in the sixties. Jimmy Breslin, his running mate and a certified mick, may have been an influence.
The societal and legal order went something like this:
There were several social classes: Among them were the Brehons, who were the judges and lawmakers. The Brehons were forbidden to have any economic interests in the system. They didn’t really “own” anything, but they had a high social position, and their needs were taken care of by society. They were truly “disinterested.” There was no need for campaign finance reform.
Under the Brehon Law, a man was judged as a member of a tribe and a family. Justice was meted out to various groups without much consideration of a person as an individual. The only people who were treated that way under the law were the “men of Art and Learning.” This lack of recognition of the individual and his rights was definitely a shortcoming of the system.
The symbols of wealth were cattle and land. Land could not be transferred, however. The same family held the same lands whatever the members of that family might do. Land was unlosable; cattle, however, could be sold or lost. Slavery was widely practiced, as it was almost everywhere else in the world at that time. There was capital punishment. There was also banishment, which was, under the conditions, almost as bad as a death sentence. One person would have had a brutally hard time surviving without the society even though most of the population lived quite apart from each other.
There were a lot of “wars,” but these wars were really more like ancient “lawsuits.” Many of them seem to have been settled by judges and agreements. Bloodshed was rare.
If you read contemporary accounts of the era, the amazingly lofty language that is used really makes an impression. Mundane things are given an almost cosmic dimension. The accounts sound like King Arthur and his court or The Lord of the Rings, but the reality was probably much different. It you look at the way life was really lived (the typical life lived in a little cavelike dwelling), you are astounded at the Irish tendency to make everything sound much more “profound” than it really is. Centuries later, when James Joyce turned a working day in Dublin into an epic Homeric journey, he was, in a way, doing something typically “Irish.” An Irishman from this era would be very comfortable with Joyce’s “inflation” of everyday events.
There were several clearly defined classes. The priests were, of course, the Druids. The Fili were poets, storytellers, and historians. Most of the other people belonged to either the free noble class or the unfree peasants, who were slaves, laborers, and workingmen.
The law was called “gavelkind.” Under this system, even though families stayed on the same piece of land forever, land could not be privately “owned.” Like the Native Americans, the ancient Irish saw land as something that God “rents” to us. Families had rights to the land they worked, but this was not ownership.
The noble class, operating under the direction of the Brehons, elected the “king.” And that’s pretty much the skeleton of the system.
Except for a few problems, this was a remarkably facile system, and it worked very well for a long time. One aspect of this society that is fascinating (and almost unique among ancient people) is the high position that women occupied in the culture. They also placed a great value on learning, and eloquence was considered a great gift from the gods. (The twentieth century is, in literature, pretty much Ireland’s century, but words have always been very close to the Irish heart. My uncle John told me that there was a writer in every pub in Ireland, and I think he was pretty close.)
The warrior class was required to observe something similar to the Arthurian code of courtly behavior. One part of the oath requires a Celtic warrior to never back down if he is confronted by fewer than ten foes. Even in their codes they like to inflate things.
Around A.D. 200, a man named Conn Ced-cathach established the kingdom of Munster in the south of Ireland. His descendant, Niall, is often regarded as the first king (Ard Ri) of Ireland, but he wasn’t a king in the usual sense. His word wasn’t law throughout Ireland. But his descendants were the dominant force in Ireland until Brian Boru at the end of the tenth century.
The period usually called the Dark Ages, the time from the fall of Rome to the crowning of Charlemagne, is, for many, Ireland’s Golden Age. Ireland was arguably the intellectual center of the world in the seventh and eighth centuries.
It is a long time since the days of gavelkind, but today’s Ireland also seems, in a way, much more civilized than America. If George Bush the first went to the West of Ireland, he would see a “kinder and gentler” place.
Civilization in Northern Ireland is, of course, always on the verge of complete collapse. In the rest of Ireland (which is the only real “Ireland”), things are very peaceful. The crime rate is very low, much lower than in America. The Irish people I met in Atlanta all shared one common reaction to America: It’s amazingly violent in the land of the free!
In the rural parts of Ireland crime seems almost absent, but I became aware of one social problem. There is a whole disenfranchised group of people in Ireland that exist almost completely outside the law. One of the puzzling problems of western Ireland is, it seems, “the tinkers.” When first introduced to the term, Paulette and I, Yanks that we are, did not know what a tinker was. We both thought a “tinker” was a guy who fixed small things. That is the origin of the term “tinker,” but in Ireland it now means something much darker.
The Tinkers
Bridie Levins, one of our many landladies, told us that she usually keeps her front door open.
“Unless, of course,” she told me with some gravity, “the tinkers are coming.”
I nodded as if I understood.
“And of course, I have to take the flowers in,” she said without any further explanation, as if everyone in his right m
ind would know why you had to bring in the flowers when the tinkers were about.
All through our stay in the west, the tinkers were alluded to. People would say things like, “Be sure you’re out of there by four. I hear there are some tinkers coming in around four.” And, “Don’t park your car there, a bunch of tinkers are going to be passing by.” And, “You don’t want to be going to that place. That’s a tinker hangout.”
But no one told me what the hell the tinkers were, and why I should be so wary of them. Were they the Irish equivalent of the Hells Angels? The Celtic Crips? One afternoon, I had my chance to find out.
It was a cold, overcast day in Moat, a little village near the middle of Ireland. I was in a pub when I got the word. Some tinkers were about to arrive. I noticed the streets seemed emptier than usual. It was like high noon. Soon, I thought, these tinkers will come riding in. Although I still did not know what the tinkers were, I did not feel very Gary Cooperish.
The town clock tolled twelve times.
Tinker time.
There were two large cops (whom Irish people refer to as “the guard”) standing at a corner, and I decided to ask them straight up about the tinkers. If they didn’t know, who would?
“Excuse me, Officer,” I asked. “What’s the deal with the tinkers?”
“I wouldn’t worry about them, sir,” he said. “We’ll be having two other guards down here in an hour. And we’ve been in touch with some other guard in the area, so I don’t think we’ll have any trouble at all.”
With that, he crossed the street. A boy with his arm in a sling had overheard what I had asked the cop, and he offered an opinion.
