by J. M. Synge
AN IRISH HISTORIAN
THIS VOLUME IS the fourth published by the Irish Texts Society, and in some ways the most important that they have brought out. It contains the text of the Dionbhrollach (breastplate or introduction) of Keating’s history, with the first portion of the history itself, edited, with a translation, by Mr. David Comyn, who is already well known for his work in Gaelic literature. The members of the Irish Texts Society intend to publish the remainder of the history in several succeeding volumes, which will then form the first complete edition of this important work, and be of the greatest service to students of Irish literature and history. A considerable portion of Keating’s text was edited and translated by Halliday, in 1811, but his work is now hard to procure, and students who have not access to a good library — that is a good number of Irish-speaking students — have had to put up with a chance volume of one of the translations, or with a small part of the history edited by P. W. Joyce, and the introduction, which was edited by Mr. Comyn himself a year or two ago, for the Gaelic League. The present edition will probably become the standard edition of Keating’s history — by far his most considerable work — and both the editor and the Irish Texts Society are to be congratulated on their undertaking. The notes to the whole edition are to be published in a final volume, so that it is not yet possible to judge of this important section of the editor’s work, but the text appears to have been very carefully edited, and the translation, if not always as pliant to the movement of Keating’s language as could be wished, is faithfully and plainly written. It is to be regretted that Mr. Comyn has not given more attention to Keating’s biography in his preface, where he brings together a few localities and dates without stating on what authority they are placed. He says, in passing, that a full biography of Keating is still a desideratum, but it may be doubted whether there are materials enough for such a work, and the preface to this edition would have been an excellent place to collect the facts that can be known. In another way the preface, or the tone of the preface, is perhaps open to criticism. Mr. Comyn, although he writes with caution, is too inclined to treat Keating as a serious historian — he seems to compare Keating’s way of dealing with his materials with the way Dr. Liddell deals with early Roman history — instead of taking him frankly as a quaint, half-mediaeval writer with no notion of history in the modern sense of the word. In the later part of Keating’s work — with which we are not dealing at present — he has to do with comparatively modern times, and his pages are sometimes of direct historical value, but the early part contained in this volume is chiefly useful for the information it gives about MSS., to which Keating had access, but which have since perished.
In another way, however, this work has historical interest of a high order. All through the introduction, and here and there in the history itself, there are passages which give wonderfully vivid glimpses of the way a learned Irishman at the beginning of the seventeenth century saw Ireland in her relation to England and Europe. Keating differs very considerably from other Irish writers of his time, and he can interpret for us, better than anyone else, a certain attitude of early Irish culture. Apart from his natural talent he owes a good deal to his foreign studies — he passed through a college at Bordeaux after taking Orders in his own country — which gave him a knowledge of the outside prosperity of the world with which to compare the things he saw in Ireland, while in a purely intellectual sense the intercourse he must have had with men who had been in touch with the first scholarship in Europe was of great use in correcting the narrowing influence of a simply Irish tradition. A comparison of the general expression of Keating’s work with that of the annalists of his time recalls, in a curiously remote way, the difference that can be felt between the work of Irish writers of the present day who have spent part of their life in London or Paris, and the work of men who have not left Ireland. Keating’s originality can be noticed in the freedom and plaintive dignity of his style as fully as in the comparative width of his views. In one place in the introduction he appeals to the reader to believe him rather than the English chroniclers, in this passage, which I translate a little differently from Mr. Comyn, in order to keep closer to Keating’s tone:
I am old, and a number of these people are young. I have seen and I understand the head-books of (Irish) history, and they have not seen them, and if they had seen them they would not have understood anything. It was not for hatred or love of any tribe beyond another, nor at the order of anyone, nor in hope to get gain out of it, that I took in hand to write the history of Ireland, but because I thought it was not fitting that a country like Ireland for honour, and races as honourable as every race that inhabited it, should be swallowed up without any word or mention to be left about them.
This note can be felt in several other passages, one of which is perhaps worth quoting:
If it happens, indeed, that the land is praised by every historian who has written about Ireland, the people are dispraised by every new foreign historian who has written about them, and the thing that stirred me up to write this history of the Irish is the greatness of the pity I felt at the plain injustice that is done to them by these writers, if only, indeed, they had given their true report about the Irish, I do not know why they should not have been put in comparison with any race in Europe, in three things, as they are in bravery, in learning, and in being steadfast to the Catholic faith....
These passages may be compared with Spenser’s judgment that the Irish ‘are now accounted the most barbarous nation in Christendom’. Keating’s view is likely to have been quite as partial as Spenser’s, yet the way he expresses it, and, indeed, this whole work, with its quaint learning and dignity, shows that one class at least in Ireland was far removed from barbarity. In another way the traditional knowledge of old or, at least, of middle Irish, which Keating shares with the Four Masters, Duald MacFirbis, and others, proves that an independent intellectual life existed in Ireland till that time, quite apart from the shifting political life that is seized by historians.
It is curious to follow the various ways in which Keating works out his defence. On one hand, he says that Ireland is a kingdom apart by herself, like a little world, which no foreigner can understand, and, on the other hand, he tries to keep Ireland in union with the general history of the world as it was then received. Thus he sets off some of his fanciful genealogies by quoting similar things from English history. ‘Here follows’, he says in one place, ‘an example from a British author, where he gives the pedigree to Adam of a king who was over Britain, from which the reader will allow that it was possible for the Gaels to do the same thing.’
The best defence, however, is, he thinks, to be found in the records he quotes from, and if, as I have said, the personal note is a chief interest in this work, it must not be thought that the history itself is without a certain attractiveness. At the least it gives a general view of the legends in which the Irish, at an early date, mixed together a mass of native tradition, and the new biblical and classical history which had been brought to them from the continent. A good deal of this matter may be set at the side of the stories in Geoffrey of Monmouth where he traces the Trojan and Roman origin of the British, but there is also a large portion that deals with legends founded on a mythological basis.
In the succeeding volumes of the history, Mr. Comyn will have a less well known portion of the work to deal with, and their interest will be proportionately greater. It is to be hoped that the Irish Texts Society will be able to bring them out without much delay.
CELTIC MYTHOLOGY
A USEFUL TASK has been done in bringing out an English version of this important work on Celtic mythology. The translation, due to Mr. Richard Irvine Best, has been carried out with so much care and taste that the reader who turns to it instead of to the original will lose nothing, or almost nothing, in so doing, while in the few pages of notes added to this edition he will find some interesting information brought together from other works on the subject. In a sense it is, perhap
s, a little to be regretted that M. D’Arbois de Jubainville has chosen to put his work in the form of a discussion of the Irish myths, as they are found in the Book of Invasions (the Leabhar Gabhala, a twelfth-century account of the mythical colonisations of Ireland), for in following this plan he has had to begin with rather unattractive material, where the thread of Irish myth is much obscured by pseudo-classical or Biblical adaptations. A good deal, however, can be put forward in support of the plan he has adopted. ‘We hope,’ he says, in the introduction, that it will be considered in our favour that we have respected the ancient order in which Ireland has long since classified the fabulous tales that constitute the traditional form of her mythology. In substituting for this arrangement, consecrated by the ages, a newer and more methodical classification we should have broken to pieces in our hands the very picture we wished to hold up to view.
However that may be, the interest and value of the work are beyond dispute. Some of the views it gives, such as the estimate of early Celtic pantheism and its relation to the system of Scotus Erigena, have been questioned by other authorities, but as a general introduction to Irish mythology this work seems likely to take a place nearly as high as that of the Grammatica Celtica of Zeuss in the kindred subject of Celtic philology. M. D’Arbois de Jubainville has supplemented this volume by several others of great value, which, with his work in the Revue Celtique, have greatly helped to raise Old Irish studies to the place they now occupy. Probably to this day few persons among the general reading public are aware that philologists, especially continental philologists, are beginning to find Old Irish nearly, or quite, as important in the study of certain portions of Aryan grammar — Latin etymology, for instance — as Sanscrit itself; or to take a case nearer our present subject, that Irish mythology has been found to give, with the oldest mythology that can be gathered from the Homeric poems, the most archaic phase of Indo-European religion.
To illustrate the Greek kinship of these Irish legends, which is of a nature to interest many who are not mythologists, one instance may be given. In the early Irish myths a god is met with who is known as Lug the Long-handed, a name that is also found in Gaul in the first portion of the place-name Lugudunum, which has given us Lyon in modern French. This god Lug is a Celtic Hermes, and in one of the legends that relate to him he kills, with a stone, a certain god of night, Balor, just as Hermes kills the Argos. Here is the point of interest. Balor is also in some degree a counterpart of the Chimaera, and in his name we have the ‘Belleros’, which gives us ‘Bellero-phontes’ (the slayer of Belleros), or ‘Bellero-phon’, both Balor and Belleros being akin to the Greek verb ‘ballo’ (to throw), as the Chimaera kills by throwing out a stream of fire, and Balor by an evil eye, which M. D’Arbois connects with the thunderbolt.
With relationships of this sort, some of which are perhaps open to criticism, but which are always suggestive, this volume is filled. There is, however, another connection in which, perhaps, Irish myths throw a still more interesting light on the history of European culture. The Lug just mentioned is sometimes associated with another god, the Dagda, whose name M. D’Arbois interprets as ‘Good god’, and thus connects him with the Latin divinity known as the Bona Dea. The Dagda owns a magic cauldron, which is spoken of on several occasions in common with the sword of Lug, and two other talismans. The cauldron, or one like it, is also found in the possession of Manannan mac Lir, an Irish sea god, and again, in Welsh romance, in the story of Branwen, daughter of Llyr, where it has the power of restoring the dead to life. It has been suggested, and it is far from impossible, that this cauldron is, or corresponds to, the early pagan germ from which sprang the legend, or a share of the legend, of the Holy Grail. Whether this is so or not, the Arthurian poetry proper — La Matière de Bretagne — had, to some extent at the least, a Celtic origin, and the study of these Irish myths with this connection in one’s mind, is one of the most entrancing branches of scholarship. M. D’Arbois has dealt, for the most part, with anterior Greek or Indian relationships, but in his works we can get better, perhaps, than elsewhere a consecutive view of Irish mythology itself, with which one must grow familiar before it is possible to estimate its place in European archaeology. The Irish Mythological Cycle is in some ways his most important volume, and it may be said once more that this excellent translation is exceedingly welcome. The volume is printed and published in Dublin.
AN EPIC OF ULSTER
THIS VERSION OF the epic tales relating to Cuchulain, the Irish mythical hero, should go far to make a new period in the intellectual life of Ireland. Henceforward the beauty and wonder of the old literature is likely to have an influence on the culture of all classes, and to give a new impulse to many lukewarm Irishmen who have been unsympathetic towards their country because they were ignorant of her real tradition. The beauty of this old literature has been known to Celtic scholars all over Europe for a considerable time, but the works in which they have dealt with it are addressed to scholars only, and are too learned, and too expensive for general use. A step in advance was made a few years ago by Miss Hull, who collected and published most of the translated stories of the Cuchulain Saga, but the arrangement of her book was not quite adequately carried out, and the translations themselves had no uniformity of style. Now, however, Lady Gregory has made a new selection of these stories, and, basing her work on the published texts and the translations made by scholars, she has put them into a wonderfully simple and powerful language that resembles a good deal the peasant dialect of the west of Ireland. Considerable praise is due to the way in which she has accomplished this rather delicate task, but it can hardly be claimed for her, as Mr. Yeats seems to do in his preface to this book, that she has ‘discovered’ the language she uses. Some time ago Dr. Douglas Hyde used a very similar language in his translations of the ‘Love Songs of Connacht’, and more recently Mr. Yeats himself has written some of his articles on folklore with this cadence in his mind, while a few other writers have been moving gradually towards it. The intellectual movement that has been taking place in Ireland for the last twenty years has been chiefly a movement towards a nearer appreciation of the country people, and their language, so that it is not too much to say that the translation of the old MSS. into this idiom is the result of an evolution rather than of a merely personal idea.
The peasant note alone, however, does not explain all the passages of this book. The peasants of the west of Ireland speak an almost Elizabethan dialect, and in the lyrical episodes it is often hard to say when Lady Gregory is thinking of the talk of the peasants and when she is thinking of some passage in the Old Testament. In several chapters, again, there are pages where battles and chariot-fights are described with a nearly Eastern prolixity, in a rich tone that has the cadence of the palace, and not the cadence of men who are poor. This union of notes, fugitive as it is, forms perhaps the most interesting feature of the language of the book. The Elizabethan vocabulary has a force and colour that make it the only form of English that is quite suitable for incidents of the epic kind, and in her intercourse with the peasants of the west Lady Gregory has learned to use this vocabulary in a new way, while she carries with her plaintive Gaelic constructions that make her language, in a true sense, a language of Ireland.
Apart from the actual translation, Lady Gregory has had a difficult task in the arrangement of these stories, many of which have come down to us in a rather bewildering state. The epic of Cuchulain began to take shape in pagan Ireland probably in the same way as the Homeric stories grew up in ancient Greece. The Irish tales, however, were never co-ordinated, for before the Gaels reached a period relatively modern enough to demand a single narrative from the separate stories of the cycle, the early civilisation of the country was altered by the coming of Christianity and of the Northern pirates. There is still a good deal of obscurity about the early history of this literature, but it is fairly certain that the chief Cuchulain stories took their present form from the seventh to the ninth century, although they have been prese
rved in scattered MSS. written several centuries later. The tales in these MSS. continually overlap, and are often contradictory, so that in order to construct a literary version arrangement of a somewhat elaborate kind was needful. On the whole, although it would be possible to criticise certain details in her work, Lady Gregory has done what was required with tact and success.
When we turn to the subject matter of these stories we find a new world of romance. Everywhere wildness and vigour are blended in a strange way with impetuous tenderness, and with the vague misgivings that are peculiar to primitive men. Most of the moods and actions that are met with are more archaic than anything in the Homeric poems, yet a few features, such as the imperiousness and freedom of the women, seem to imply an intellectual advance beyond the period of Ulysses. The chief women of the cycle, Maeve, Queen of Connaught, and Emer, wife of Cuchulain, and Etain, the daughter of Etar, King of the Riders of the Sidhe, are described in many passages of great clearness and beauty. The heroes who fight beside or for these women, Conchubar, and Fergus and Conall Caernach, are all large and living figures, that no one who cares for any ancient literatureis likely to read of without delight.
The deeds of Cuchulain himself occupy, as may be supposed, a large portion of this book. In the first chapter we are told of his miraculous birth, and then the story goes on to the scene in his childhood where he kills a half magical watch-dog that had been let out on him by mistake, and takes the dog’s place — whence his name, ‘Cu’, i.e. dog (Greek kuôn) of’Culain’ owner of the dog — till another can be procured. Afterwards we have many episodes of his life, and at the end we see him when he is mortally wounded, and betrayed by magic, strapping himself up against a pillar stone so erectly that fear comes down on his enemies and they camp round at a distance till they see a crow light on his shoulder.
