NEW MYTHOLOGIES
PSEUDOHISTORY AND THE LORE OF POETS
A sound magician is a demi-god.
—CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, DOCTOR FAUSTUS
SO FAR WE have looked at some four centuries of developing tradition. As seen, a certain orchestrated haziness is characteristic of the way in which saga-authors handled the native gods, and this could be exploited for literary effect. As with Manannán’s epiphany to Bran or that of Midir to the unhappy Eochaid Airem, the gods intrude and then are lost to sight, leaving the question of their nature and potency open. (If you do not know what a being is, you cannot guess what it intends to do to you.) Slipperiness combines unsettlingly with the capacity to overpower.
This haziness underlies the recurrence of phases of strenuous mythological revival in Irish literary history, in which attempts are made to tie the gods down within some new and less-ambiguous intellectual frame. The best known of these phases—the nineteenth-century Irish Revival—is examined later in this book, but some of its foundations were laid a millennium earlier, when the intellectual energies of Irish scholars were first galvanized by the prospect of clarifying the ancient past and the place of the gods within it.
HOW THE GAEL BECAME
This chapter investigates the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries in relation to Irish literary history, crossing the millennial divide. Irish military success in the later tenth century brought the Viking wars to an end and stabilized the political scene, enabling a many-faceted scholarly revival and reorganization of monastic learning.1 Works typical of the time clearly aimed to bolster Ireland’s cultural memory, so that we find attempts to rescue, reassess, and revive the writings of several centuries before. Irish largely replaced Latin as the language of scholarship, older sagas were redacted, and several large, famous manuscripts—effectively one-volume libraries of vernacular texts—were produced. In these are found the earliest extant copies of most of the treasures of the early medieval literature, so that what descends to us from that literature undoubtedly owes something to the tastes of the clerical compilers of the central Middle Ages.2
A crucial dimension of this cultural stocktake was the creation of a chronological narrative for the island’s past, which would integrate all the sources—biblical, native, and classical—known to Irish scholars.3 This seductive fabrication, often called the ‘synthetic history’, possessed two core strands, both of which revolved around the question of who had held power over the island. The first strand investigated the story of the Gaels and how they had come to Ireland, while the second tackled the story of the island’s pre-Gaelic inhabitants, imagined as a sequence of settlers or invaders. The gods were represented as the last pre-Gaelic, ‘prehistoric’ people to have wrested control over Ireland. This was a development of an idea which had been around since the eighth century at least: that there had once been a time, long ago, when the god-peoples had been in charge. Thomas Charles-Edwards points out that this looks like a procedure for denying pagan divinities any existence in the present—where Christian orthodoxy would have demanded that they be regarded as demons—by relegating them to an ‘innocuous past’.4 Thus distanced, they could be regarded safely, even with admiration, as figures of cultural significance.
I often use the term ‘pseudohistory’ here and in the title to this chapter, but not in a derogatory manner. Our contemporary sense of what history is (‘what really happened’) differs from that of medieval writers, who regularly shaped stories about the past involving blatantly artifical narratives and genealogies. The purpose of these stories was to explain and exemplify how the past related to the present, often by giving accounts of how peoples, places, and political institutions had come into being. For our purposes, the crucial innovation of the Irish pseudo- or synthetic history lay in its explicit insistence that the Túatha Dé had been a race of men and women—not gods, phantoms, unfallen human beings, half-fallen angels, nor any other form of theological exotica. The importance of this development can hardly be overstated, as a basic faith in the fundamental historicity of this narrative prevailed for centuries, so that it effectively became Ireland’s official framework for its native gods. They were to float within it, as though pickled in brine, until the middle of the nineteenth century.
After several centuries of development, the culmination of the synthetic history came in the final quarter of the eleventh century with Lebor Gabála Érenn (‘The Book of Invasions’). A highly influential Middle Irish prose-and-verse treatise, it was written in order to bridge the chasm between Christian world-chronology and the prehistory of Ireland.5 To the learned classes of medieval Ireland, as elsewhere, the primary source for ancient history was the Bible; its narrative had been explicated and expanded by early Christian writers who had established precise chronologies for biblical events. As part of this process figures from classical mythology such as Jason or Theseus—who were considered fully historical—were sometimes slotted into the timeline of the kings and high priests of Israel. A further important dimension to this medieval infilling of the Bible was the attempt to trace the descent of the various peoples of the world, past and present, all the way back to notional ancestors in the Book of Genesis. But here Ireland’s men of learning came to a dead end: they possessed a conspicuously lush body of traditions about the origins of the peoples of their own island, but could find no reference to the Irish either in scripture or the works of Christian world history. So who, they asked themselves, were they? And where had they come from?
All versions of Lebor Gabála provided the same basic answer (Fig. 4.1 and Fig. 4.2).6 There are two strands to the story, and the first begins with Noah. Thanks to the Flood he becomes the last common ancestor of humanity. His (non-biblical) granddaughter Cessair and her entourage of a hundred and fifty women and three men are the first human beings to arrive in Ireland. Desperately searching for shelter from the coming deluge, all of them drown—except for one Fintan mac Bóchra, who escapes in the form of a salmon and magically lives on in various forms for three and a half millennia. He thus becomes one of the most authoritative ‘ancient witnesses’ to the tradition.7
Cessair’s line thus comes to a dead end. After Cessair, the next settlers are the people of Partholón son of Sera, a distant descendant of Cessair’s uncle, Japhet, a son of Noah.8 The Partholonians are wiped out by plague, but in some versions, as with Fintan mac Bóchra, a single survivor escapes the catastrophe: this is Tuán mac Cairill, who also survives through the ages in successive animal guises.9
The next wave of settlers, the people of Nemed, descend from one of Partholón’s brothers. Nemed—originally meaning ‘sacral’—is the native word Irish law-tracts used for free persons of rank, but the semantic range of the term is exceedingly complex. When applied to a person (as here, presumably) it meant ‘dignitary’, but it could also refer to the legal inviolability or privilege attaching to such a person, and to the concept of sanctuary, and to a sacred place which offered such sanctuary; it should be noted that in the latter sense it was regularly used to mean ‘church’.10 Its use here underscores the belief among the Irish that their society’s roots went deep into the past. They imagined that Nemed’s descendants had introduced some of the island’s most enduring political and geographical institutions, including kingship itself, the siting of royal power at Tara, and the division of the country into provinces.
With the exception of a very few, Nemed’s kin are obliterated by the incoming tide during a seashore battle against the Fomorians—whose own origins, incidentally, were never fully agreed upon.11 Some of these bedraggled survivors make for Britain, where they become the ancestors of the Britons. Others find their way to Greece, where the Greeks enslave them and force them to hulk soil up mountains to create agricultural land. There they acquire a new name from the leather sacks they use for this task: Fir Bolg, ‘Bag Men’. After many generations these Bag Men throw off the Greek yoke and return, now subdivided into three groups, to resettle Ireland.
Meanwhile other remnants of Nemed’s scattered people head north. There they grow skilled in the magical arts and develop augmented, more-than-human capabilities; the later recensions add the detail that they pursued this intriguing curriculum in four mysterious cities. This race is the pseudohistory’s take on the god-peoples. In time, they too return to their ancestral Ireland, now under the rule of their relations, the Fir Bolg; distant kinship notwithstanding, the god-peoples defeat and dispossess them, taking the island for themselves.
So much for the first of Lebor Gabála’s two strands. The second strand follows the adventures of another people descended from Japhet, son of Noah, who are destined to become the Gaels. At the disaster of the Tower of Babel, a Scythian nobleman named Fénius Farsaid (‘Irishman the Pharisee’) extracted all the best bits of humanity’s jumbled languages and from them pieced together the world’s first artificial, ‘perfect’ language: Irish.12 (A typical piece of medieval Irish amour propre, that; Michael Clarke calls it ‘staggeringly self-assertive’.)13 It is Fénius Farsaid’s grandson, Goídel Glas, who gives his name to the people and their language, Goídelc, modern Gaeilge. After a series of peregrinations clearly modelled on those of the Israelites in the Book of Exodus, the descendants of Goídel Glas and his grandfather Fénius settle in what is now Spain and Portugal. From the top of a tower in Braganza, their king Bregon glimpses Ireland over the sea one winter’s evening—an oddly haunting detail. Later Bregon’s grandson Míl Espáine (‘Spanish Soldier’) invades the island and defeats the Túatha Dé. The Gaels, also known after Míl Espáine as the ‘sons of Míl’ (often ‘Milesians’ in later works), now rule Ireland, and the god-peoples in turn find themselves dispossessed.
This bare account fails to convey what it is actually like to read ‘The Book of Invasions’, suppressing the differences between recensions and giving little sense of the pseudohistorians’ complex chronologies or their Tolkienesque enthusiasm for the family trees of imaginary persons. (It must be admitted that Lebor Gabála—important though it is among medieval Irish writings—is not the place to seek for wrenching emotional force.) What it does highlight however is the manner, reminiscent of Romanesque architecture, in which simple, repeating structures are decorated with teeming surface detail. These governing structures are basically biblical—Exodus and Flood—and insistent leitmotifs include plagues, migrations, dispossessions, the colonizations of deserted lands, and the reduction of once-sovereign peoples to servile status under oppressive rulers.14
Versions of this pseudohistorical scheme seem to have emerged into the mainstream of Irish learning during the later 900s, when the lore of the professional poets began to influence monastic authors deeply and significantly.15 We do not know who gave it its lasting form as ‘The Book of Invasions’, but their task was complete by around 1075; the various recensions and subrecensions which rapidly followed were the work of many hands extending over the next two or three generations.
These scholars—busily rearranging, cross-referencing, and interpolating—looked for much of their immediate source material to didactic accounts of Irish history put into verse by a small number of poets during the late tenth and eleventh centuries.16 When compared with contemporary ideas of writing history, these early ideas and methods differed greatly; for us it is obvious to put faith in close scrutiny, the comparison of sources, and the evidence of eyewitnesses, but the redactors of Lebor Gabála preferred to conflate and layer variant traditions in a sedimentary, accretive mass. The prose-and-verse form of the treatise perfectly suited this approach, because the verse was basically primary and fixed, while the prose might not only allude to variant versions of a given incident, but also attempt to bring them into harmony.
The compilers of Lebor Gabála seem to have drawn from the work of four poets in particular. The earliest was the Armagh cleric Eochaid ua Flainn (d.1004), described in the Annals of Ulster as a ‘sage of poetry and historical tradition’, marking him out as a top scholar.17 His poetry seems to have been designed to accompany a pseudohistorical tract which was one of the major nuclei around which the original Lebor Gabála condensed. This tract must therefore have been in existence by 1004, when Eochaid died, and its contents can be distilled from Lebor Gabála as we have it.18 The second poet is a shadowy Connaught figure named Tanaide, who may have died c.1075.19 A major poem on the reigns of the various kings of the god-peoples is ascribed to him in the first and third recensions of Lebor Gábala, and his allusion to the familiar story of the loss and restoration of Núadu’s arm gives the flavour of the kind of didactic verse produced by the pseudohistorical school:
Noble slender Núadu ruled for seven years
over the fair-haired wolf-pack;
[that was] the eager fair-headed man’s reign
before coming into Ireland.
It is in grievous Mag Tuired, without predestined death,
the yoke of battle fell;
his kingly arm was severed
from the bright champion of the world.
Bres ruled seven years, no bright interval;
on account of his beauty, the lord of poems
held the kingship of the plain of tender nuts,
until the arm of Núadu was healed.20
And so on in this vein for another six quatrains; the kennings, stereotyped phrases, and asides on display here are all characteristic of the genre. To be fair to the poets, they were labouring under exacting and untranslatable metrical demands and the poems of Lebor Gabála are superb examples of the kind of learned versifications of historical memory in which they specialized. Nonetheless, it is easy to see why it was found desirable to attach a prose apparatus setting out the actual data under curation.21
The work of the third of the four poets, Gilla Cóemáin mac Gilla Samthainne (fl.1072), would not be especially relevant to the representation of the gods were it not that we know that he had something to do with an important prose tract, the Lebor Bretnach. This text provides crucial evidence for how the gods were imagined by the learned personnel of the period: Gilla Cóemáin may himself have been responsible for it.22 We will come to this tract in due course. The last of our four poets was not used, it seems, by the original compiler of Lebor Gabála. The distinguished scholar Flann Mainistrech, ‘of the Monastery’ (d.1056), was head of the monastic school at Monasterboice, in what is now Co. Louth.23 Poems of his were nonetheless rapidly incorporated into Lebor Gabála as it underwent recasting and interpolation, and some of them are of great importance. One, examined below, gleefully details how each god met his or her death.
These poets were the fountainhead for the national narrative which ‘The Book of Invasions’ made canonical. But what sources had these poets drawn upon in turn? The answer lies in the pre–Lebor Gabála development of the synthetic history. A core of ideas about the geographical origins and peregrinations of the Gaels—clearly involving at least some written and scholarly material, but still developing and shifting outline—seems to have been in existence before the tenth century. The Bible provided the major model for this kind of history, augmented by Christian authorities and biblical commentators; the pseudohistorians’ curious connection between the Gaels on the one hand and Spain, Greece, and Scythia on the other was derived from these latter sources. To a significant degree this connection was based on the kind of false etymologies loved by medieval scholars. The idea of a link between Ireland and Spain—whence Íth son of Bregon had first seen the Gaels’ future homeland—goes back to the encyclopedist Isidore of Seville, who thought of Spain as the ‘mother of races’ and had (wrongly) connected Hibernia and (H)iberia.24 Isidore also derived the Greeks from Noah’s son Japhet and ascribed Greek connections to the Gauls (Galli in Latin); because of the similarity of the names, Gaeldom’s men of learning soon took the latter to be a reference to themselves.25
Another example of this kind of ‘etymological history’ was the standard assertion (very odd to modern eyes) that the ancestors of the Irish had ultimately come from Scythia, an area notoriously vaguely imagined in the Middle Ages, but roughly to be identified with modern Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Scythia features in several early Irish sources as well as all versions of Lebor Gabála, and the connection was based merely on the resemblance between two Latin words, Scythae, ‘Scythians’, and Scotti, the normal term for the Irish.26 Even Míl Espáine, the ancestor of the invading Gaels and thus putative forefather of all the ethnic Irish, was an etymological figment. Transparently not originally a name, it is rather a translation of the Latin phrase for ‘a soldier of Spain’ (miles Hispaniae)—a form which actually occurs in the earliest pre–Lebor Gabála account of the wanderings of the Gaels to survive.27 It is a tribute to the ingenuity of Ireland’s learned classes that the huge edifice of ‘The Book of Invasions’ could be built upon such slight foundations.28
Irish pseudohistorical tradition is plainly a mare’s nest, but nonetheless the stages of its growth can be reconstructed.29 The point may not need labouring, but the story of successive invasions is demonstrably not pre-Christian; it developed gradually in early Christian Ireland.30 The very concept of a universal history of this kind belongs to medieval learning, not native tradition. But no race of people lacks a story about where they come from, and the original nucleus of the pseudohistory was the narrative of the coming of the Gaels.31 We know that material about the legendary ancestors of the Irish existed as early as the seventh century, because early poetry associated with Leinster mentions Ír, Éber and Éremón—figures who later appear among the grandsons of Míl Espáine in the story of the Gaelic takeover.32 Míl himself, however, could not have entered the tradition before the late seventh century—when, thanks to the writings of Isidore, the Irish first conceived of the Spanish-Irish connection—and so a good amount of soldering new material onto old was clearly going on.33
A rudimentary written account of the Gaels’ wanderings already existed by the ninth century, at least two centuries before the composition of Lebor Gabála. This can be verified because of an important didactic poem, known from its first line as Can a mbunadas na nGaedel (‘Whence Did the Irish Originate?’), which cannot have been composed later than 887, when its author, Máel Mura Othna, died.34 While we know the compiler of Lebor Gabála did not use this poem, minute details embedded in Lebor Gabála about the wanderings of the Gaels chime so closely with it that a single source must ultimately have fed into both; this source must therefore have been in existence, in written form, before 887.35
Crucially, ‘Whence Did the Irish Originate?’ does mention the godpeoples. It tells us that the Gaels, having travelled from Scythia via Spain, reached Ireland and found the Túatha Dé already there: there is no suggestion of older inhabitants. It also contains suggestions that the god-peoples began by being less than friendly, and though the phrasing is obscure we are clearly told that the Túatha Dé gave the men of the Gaels wives in exchange for their being allowed to keep half of the island. The poem does not actually make explicit, as documented elsewhere, that this means the half which lies beneath the earth’s surface, but this seems likely.36
This is striking on two levels. First, it is broadly compatible with the representation of the god-peoples in the Old Irish sagas, although it contains details of a primordial encounter between men and gods, which the sagas do not. One strand of saga-tradition had depicted the godpeoples as the island’s antediluvian aboriginals, still in residence because free from original sin and therefore invisible and immortal; this is precisely the situation in the third part of ‘The Wooing of Étaín’, for example. Secondly, there is no suggestion in Máel Mura’s poem that the god-peoples have shipped in from anywhere else: they are in their native place. This corresponds to the major ‘mythological’ sagas like ‘The Second Battle of Moytura’, and certainly before c.900 there seems to be no assertion anywhere that the Túatha Dé had been invaders.37 This—and the very mythological-looking idea of intermarriage between gods and Gaels—was emphatically excluded from the tradition by the compiler(s) of Lebor Gabála.
While the body of tradition about the migrations of the Gaels was clearly primary, by the mid-tenth century it had been gradually augmented by accounts of the preceding settlements or invasions. Traditions about the pre-Gaelic settlements spread like suckers from the rootstory of the Gaels. Partholón seems to have been worked in first.38 His name is the Irish version of ‘Bartholomew’ and learned Irishmen could read in Isidore that this was a Syriac name meaning ‘he who holds up the waters’.39 Accordingly, Partholón became mac Sera, ‘son of the Syrian’, and the first man to settle Ireland after the waters of the Flood subsided.40 Nemed seems to have been added next as another doublet of Míl, which results in three different invasions: Partholón, Nemed, and the Gaels under Míl.
This scenario is precisely what appears in the earliest account of the Irish invasion histories to have survived. It is not an Irish text, but a Welsh one, the Historia Brittonum (‘History of the Britons’), composed in Latin by an unknown cleric somewhere in Gwynedd c.829/30.41 Its author devotes some time to the origins of the inhabitants of his neighbouring island, and says that he has taken his information from ‘the most learned of the Irish.’42 His account is recognizably a kind of proto-Lebor Gabála and it is a crucial witness to the early development of the synthetic history. For the author of the Historia Brittonum, there were only three sets of Ireland’s invaders: ‘Partholomus’, ‘Nemedius’, and the miles Hispaniae—Míl Espáine.43
The standard first settlement—the company of Cessair—is absent from the Historia Brittonum. As mentioned, Cessair’s settlement is a kind of stillbirth, and it seems to have been a very late addition to the tradition and continued to be of doubtful canonicity for some time.44 It is interesting, therefore, that she may nonetheless be of some antiquity. John Carey has plausibly suggested that she was originally a Leinster figure, perhaps a goddess associated with the confluence of the rivers Nore, Barrow and Suir near Waterford, one of the most impressive features of Ireland’s hydrology.45 If this is so, we can observe antique material still being incorporated into the synthetic history long after it had already assumed its basic shape. Also conspicuous by its absence in the Historia Brittonum is the invasion of the Túatha Dé. It is this absence that brings us at last to a consideration of the position of the god-peoples within the pseudohistory, and within Lebor Gabála in particular.
It has long been clear to scholars that the gods were the last major group to be incorporated into the synthetic history, which is hardly surprising. Nemed and Partholón had no currency outside pseudohistorical tradition, but there existed a substantial body of independent material about the god-peoples that varied conspicuously in detail and tone, which made them awkward to assimilate.
There is both direct and indirect evidence for the process of integration. Direct evidence includes the absence of the gods in the list of invasions in Historia Brittonum, c.830, as just noted; significantly, they are also omitted in a ninth-century set of synchronisms preserved in the Book of Ballymote. (A ‘synchronism’ matches up the lives or reigns of different persons, establishing who was contemporary with whom.)46 Further evidence is visible within Lebor Gabála itself, which carefully makes Ireland’s various invasions keep time with ‘world empires’—the Assyrians, Persians, and so on. The Túatha Dé are the only race whose reign does not synchronize with such an empire, and this points to their having been belatedly spliced into the scheme.
Indirect evidence for the late integration of the gods is provided by one of the notorious perversities of Irish mythology: confusingly, its gods fight not one, but two ‘Battles of Moytura’.47 In chapter 3, we examined the second of these, which features the conflict between the godpeoples and the Fomorians and has deep roots in Indo-European mythology. The first battle, on the other hand, is the conflict in which the incoming god-peoples defeated their predecessors, the Fir Bolg. The scholarly consensus has long been that the second battle, because of its obviously archaic roots, is the original, while the first is merely an uninspired doublet. It seems likely that the idea of a battle between the Túatha Dé and the Fir Bolg was a rationalizing invention of the pseudohistorical school, intended to supplant the tradition of a mythological conflict between the gods and the Fomorians. This may have been part and parcel of stripping the god-peoples of their supernatural status, but it had been made necessary by the fact that the Túatha Dé had been shoehorned into the narrative of successive invasions. Instead of the Gaels defeating the Fir Bolg, the Túatha Dé—now wedged between the two—had to play both roles, vanquishing the Fir Bolg on the one hand before themselves being vanquished by the incoming Gaels on the other. We will investigate the sheer oddness of this scenario in mythological terms later, for it has the ethnic Irish inflicting military defeat upon their own gods. But in retaining the ancient tradition of a Túatha Dé victory at Moytura, while redefining the vanquished as the human Fir Bolg rather than the supernatural Fomorians, the pseudohistorians no doubt felt that they had arrived at a tidy solution. Unfortunately for them (but fortunately for students of mythology) the Fomorians’ defeat by the god-peoples was clearly tenacious in tradition and impossible to uproot.48 This explains the doubling of the Moytura battles in Lebor Gabála as we have it.
It seems that the initial integration of the gods into the scheme of invasions probably took place late in the ninth century, and indeed ‘The Second Battle of Moytura’ may originally have been composed as a grand restatement of the traditional doctrine in the face of an ersatz version intended to supplant it.49 The second battle was in turn absorbed into the structure of the pseudohistory during the eleventh century: the poems of Eochaid ua Flann and Tanaide only mention the first battle, but Flann Mainistrech knew of both, significantly terming them the ‘first’ and the ‘great’ battles of Moytura, respectively.50 Carey points out that saga tradition added lustre to stretches of Lebor Gabála here; in Recension I, for example, the narrative of the second, or ‘great’, battle is significantly less dry than that of the first. There is some evidence that the idea of the ‘first’ battle against the Fir Bolg never really took off in Irish tradition outside the pseudohistorical school: a lacklustre Middle Irish saga on the subject appears to be an attempt to promote the story in literary circles.51
WHO, WHEN, AND WHERE
Here we must turn to what Lebor Gabála actually says about the reign of the Túatha Dé. The account of their sovereignty over Ireland falls into three sections. The first is a description of their invasion and defeat of the Fir Bolg—the ‘first battle’ of Moytura. The second provides a list of their kings; last comes an account of their genealogies. These three subsections look like they were originally separate tracts, and this tells us much about how Lebor Gabála was assembled. It suggests that the pseudo-historians scoured all available sources for information about the godpeoples, including glossaries and scholarly miscellanies, and that they patched these testimonia into the text more or less wholesale.
The first section ushers the gods onto the stage of Irish history. There is considerable variation in both detail and tone between the recensions, although they all agree that the god-peoples arrived and defeated the Fir Bolg in the first battle of Moytura. They arrive from the North—the most ill-omened direction in medieval thought. In some versions it is said that the sun and moon grew dark at their arrival, perhaps a disquieting preecho of the Crucifixion, the pivotal catastrophe of biblical history.52 And whereas all previous peoples had reached Ireland by ship, the Túatha Dé arrive via a stagey special effect and make an aerial landing in clouds of black vapour:
The descendants of Bethach son Iarbonél the Prophet son of Nemed were in the northern islands of the world, learning magic and knowledge and sorcery and cunning, until they were pre-eminent in arts of the heathen sages. They are the Túatha Dé Danann who came to Ireland.
It is thus that they came: in dark clouds. They landed on the mountains of Conmaicne Réin in Connaught and they put a darkness upon the sun for three days and nights. Battle or kingship they demanded of the Fir Bolg. Battle was fought between them, the first battle of Moytura, in which a hundred thousand of the Fir Bolg fell. After that they took the kingship of Ireland.53
Conmaicne Réin, site of the Túatha Dé touchdown, is an area east of the Shannon and comprises parts of Counties Leitrim and Longford.54 The god-peoples were meant to be descendants of Nemed, like the Fir Bolg, but this tradition makes them the medieval equivalent of eerie, technologically superior extraterrestrials.55 Continuing in the same tone, the second recension also adds that they had been in Greece, where they had put their knowledge to use infusing demonic spirits into corpses in order to help their Athenian allies in a war against the Philistines.56 Curiously to modern eyes, this actually strengthens the pseudohistorians’ attempt to classify the Túatha Dé as human rather than divine: that men and women might acquire the knowledge to force demons to do their will was a classic prop of the medieval explanation for magic.57
Other versions of Lebor Gabála present their arrival in a more positive light, with them travelling in ships they then burned in order to make it impossible to turn tail and flee: the clouds of inky vapour had only been their vessels going up in smoke.58 Significantly, this rationalizing version was secondary: the motif of the Túatha Dé’s supernatural arrival seems to have been the older of the two. We know this because something close to it appears in a text called Scél Tuáin meic Chairill (‘The Tale of Tuán son of Cairell’), composed towards the end of the ninth century. The tale provides an account of the various invasions as witnessed by the ancient Tuán—the shapeshifting sole survivor of the Partholonians—and imparted by him to a saint, Finnia of Moville, who is going about converting the people of Ulster to Christianity. The text is crucial because it gives us a snapshot of an intermediate stage in the integration of the god-peoples into the synthetic history. It shows that around the year 900, the god-peoples were already thought of as one in the sequence of invaders, but that they had not (yet) been redefined as human descendants of Nemed in the way that had become orthodox a century or two later. Tuán speculates uneasily:
Beothecht son of Iordanen took this island from the people that were in it. Of them are the Gáilióin, and the Túatha Dé and Andé, whose origin the men of learning do not know; but they thought it likely that they are some of the exiles who came to them from heaven.59
Here the Túatha Dé are still identified as fallen angels: presumably the idea of exile from heaven has influenced the uncanny motif of landing from the sky. A century or so later, the pseudohistorian Eochaid ua Flainn was still batting the arguments this way and that:
Their numbers were sufficient, whatever impelled them;
they alighted, with horror, in warlike manner,
in their cloud, evil wars of spectres,
upon the mountains of Conmaicne in Connaught.
Without [?concealment they came] to skilful Ireland,
without ships, a savage journey;
the truth concerning them was not known beneath the starry
heaven—whether they were of heaven or of earth.
If from the demons, it is devils
that comprised the troop of … famous exiles,
a blaze [?] [drawn up] in ranks and hosts;
if from men, they were Bethach’s offspring.60
This looks like dithering, but it is rather a learned poet’s scrupulous setting out of variant opinions, before allowing himself to reach his conclusion—the opposite to that of the ‘Tale of Tuán’—and avow: ‘they belong properly among mortals.’ This is the first datable assertion in Irish tradition of the plain humanity of the former divinities; it was to become the standard pseudohistorical doctrine.
CITIES, SAGES, AND TREASURES
How did the pseudohistorians imagine that the Túatha Dé—apparently mere human beings—had acquired such power? Other versions of Lebor Gabála add more details about the arrival of the Túatha Dé, some declaring that they had learned their magical arts at the feet of four sages in four mysterious cities in the north of the world, whence they had brought four ‘treasures’ to Ireland.61 This famous passage is worth quoting:
Four cities in which they used to learn knowledge and lore and devilry: these are their names, Falias and Goirias and Findias and Muirias. From Falias was brought the Stone of Fál which is in Tara, which used to cry out beneath every king who used to take control of Ireland. From Goirias was brought the spear which Lug had: a battle would never go against the man who had it in hand. From Findias was brought Núadu’s sword: no one might escape from it—from the moment when it was drawn from its battle-scabbard, there was no resisting it. From Muirias was brought the Dagda’s cauldron: no group of people would go from it unsatisfied. Four sages in those cities: Mórfhesa, who was in Falias, Esrus who was in Goirias, Uiscias who was in Findias, Semias who was in Muirias. Those are the four poets (filidh), with whom the Túatha Dé Danann used to learn knowledge and lore.62
This was to become a vital part of the body of lore associated with the Túatha Dé, and it would capture the imagination of a number of writers who gave the gods their Anglo-Irish afterlife. Those set on interfusing Ireland’s traditions into western hermeticism—W. B. Yeats in particular—were forcibly struck by the apparent symbolism here, which seemed to evoke the four elements of natural philosophy and esoteric doctrine.
This dimension of the gods’ reception is discussed later, but the reader may wonder whether the medieval texts themselves actually point to any particular symbolism. We cannot push back the date of this tradition much before c.1100, for neither the four cities nor the four sages occur anywhere before Lebor Gabála, and only one of the four talismanic objects—the Stone of Fál—is significant in earlier texts.63 While there is always the chance that the treasures, sages, and cities represent a sounding from oral tradition, it is more likely they are late eleventh-century creations by the pseudohistorical school, which had an urgent need to invest the god-peoples with the trappings of hidden knowledge. This is because the power of the Túatha Dé posed a problem in exact proportion to their humanity. The key to the anecdote therefore is to appreciate that it partially explains how the Túatha Dé could have been human, as pseudohistorical doctrine had come to insist, and yet have exhibited the supranormal powers which tradition invariably accorded them.64 It is tellingly bound up with the god-peoples’ northern sojourn and descent from Nemed; there was no need for magical academies in the north when the gods were regarded as indigenous to Ireland, nor when they were seen as fallen angels, since magical expertise was intrinsic to demons. The pseudohistorians’ solution to this bind was one that was particularly apt to comfort intellectuals: the assertion that knowledge itself is power.
One of the strongest arguments that the tradition is a late creation is the fact that the scenario of sages and cities closely resembles that of the educational structure of the eleventh-century Irish church. Schools were located in different monastic towns, each headed by one of the learned scholars termed scribae or fir léginn in the Annals.65 The sages Uiscias, Semias, Esrus, and Mórfhesa would thus be reflections in a distorting mirror of those responsible for Lebor Gabála itself, the class of experts in biblical and native historical tradition: we saw that the version quoted above actually calls the four sages filidh, ‘learned poets’, though other accounts use the word fissid, ‘seer’, or druí, ‘druid’, emphasizing that theirs is specifically pagan knowledge, and that their curriculum, involving the black arts, is decidedly unwholesome.66 The miraculous heirlooms associated with each city look like demonic—or at the very least ironic—counterparts to the venerated relics associated with major ecclesiastical foundations.67 This is a version of the nonhistorical idea, attested as far back as Muirchú’s seventh-century ‘Life of Patrick’, that Irish paganism had been Christianity’s evil twin, complete with unholy, quasi-scriptural books and a learned priesthood teaching diabolical doctrine.68 It is possible that the–ias endings of some of the names were concocted to echo the names inscribed on many an ogam stone: learned medieval scholars were able to read these, and though in many cases the language would have been opaque to them, they would certainly have recognized that they were looking at personal names of great antiquity.69
There is uncertainty behind the true meanings of the cities, sages, and treasures in the Túatha Dé (Table 4.1).70 In theory, there is nothing intrinsically improbable about the idea that the four cities should echo the four elements, which formed part of mainstream medieval cosmology and were perfectly well known in Ireland.71 ‘Warm’ and ‘marine’ cities and a ‘watery’ sage look promising for elemental correspondences; but ‘watery’ Uiscias is not associated with the ‘marine’ city, Muirias, and there are other difficulties making these names fit.
TABLE 4.1. THE CITIES, SAGES, AND TREASURES OF THE TÚATHA DÉ
City |
Sage |
Treasure |
Falias fál, ‘hedge’? |
Mórfhesa ‘Greatness of Wisdom’ |
Stone of Fál |
Goirias gor, ‘fire, warmth’ |
Esrus esrus, ‘means, channel, opportunity’ |
Spear of Lug |
Muirias muir, ‘sea’ |
Semias cf. séim, ‘slender, transparent’? |
The Dagda’s Cauldron |
Findias find, ‘fair, bright’ |
Uiscias cf. uisce, ‘water’ |
Sword of Núadu |
In all, the balance of probabilities is that the tradition of the Túatha Dé’s cities, sages, and treasures was a creation of the pseudohistorical movement itself, rather than an old—let alone pre-Christian—concept. The array of names seems designed to evoke and underscore the godpeoples’ heathen knowledge, as a strategy for explaining their power after they had been humanized and historicized.72 It is also noteworthy that it accords with a demonstrable high medieval interest in depicting the acquisition of magical learning. The pseudohistorian Geoffrey of Monmouth’s mid-twelfth-century account of the magical isle of Avalon is a classic example, and provides a feminine equivalent for the cities of the Túatha Dé. He describes the island as kind of women’s college headed by Morgen (Morgan le Fay), who teaches astrology to her eight sisters and who, like the god-peoples, is able to fly through the air. As with Semias, Uiscias, Esrus, and Mórfhesa, Morgen’s sisters have names which smack of antiquity (phony Greek, in their case) so that we read of Moronoe, Mazoe, Glitonea, and the like.73 As often with Irish mythology, apparent relics of heathen lore turn out to reflect intellectual and literary currents which were widespread in medieval Christendom.
GENEALOGIES
The second section of the Túatha Dé interlude in ‘The Book of Invasions’ is a chronological list of their kings with the lengths of their reigns—Núadu (seven years), Bres (also seven), Núadu again (twenty), Lug (forty), the Dagda (eighty), Delbaeth (ten), Fíachu son of Delbaeth (ten), and then the three grandsons of the Dagda, Mac Cuill, Mac Cécht, and Mac Gréine (twenty-seven, or an average of nine each).74
This part of the text need not detain us greatly. The earliest version is spare, though later ones stitch in a brief roll call of some of the Túatha Dé’s more minor personnel at this point.75 The regnal periods suggest symbolism: notably as the era of the god-peoples reaches its zenith, the kings’ reigns double in length, not once but twice: twenty, forty, eighty. Blatantly artificial though this is, we may still discern an echo here of the Dagda’s original mythological eminence as the ‘supreme father’: his kingship is the longest, after which things begin to fall away. It is also striking that the three longest reigns belong to figures who are all securely former gods, while those of minor and shadowy figures such as Fíachu and Delbaeth are shorter. The fundamental pseudohistorical doctrine that the god-peoples’ sovereignty over Ireland was merely a phase is underscored by this numerical pattern of increase, apogee, and ebb.
The third and final subsection before the story of the Gaels resumes consists of the genealogies of the Túatha Dé, and it provides an inventory of the god-peoples with their various attributes. This part of Lebor Gabála has long been a happy hunting ground for those bent on excavating an Irish pantheon, because it contains some transparently old material and shows a clear relationship to the sagas. It is also fearsomely complex, and it is important to remember how fundamental the tracing of lineages was to the workings of power and hierarchy in early Ireland. There could be no nobility without the details of descent. Setting out the family tree of the god-peoples underlined their realness and provided a chain of relationships extending back into the mythical past. That said, the gods are never identified as the ancestors of any group among the Irish—the role of forebear having been entirely usurped by the artificial figure of Míl Espáine—even though the ideal that the Gaels and the gods had intermarried had been implied by Máel Mura, and presumably represented the most ancient tradition.76
The gods’ characters are basically consistent with their roles in the sagas, with a couple of striking exceptions. In contrast to ‘The Second Battle of Moytura’, there is no evidence in Lebor Gabála that Bres, son of Elatha, was thought to be a Fomorian, and his father is a fully paid-up member of the god-peoples. Another example of the closeness of this section to the world of the sagas is the fact that one early recension gives a précis of the story we know from the late medieval tale ‘The Tragic Deaths of the Children of Tuireann’ (Oidheadh Chloinne Tuireann), in which Lug punishes his father’s killers with inventive sadism.77
The genealogies of the Túatha Dé form the most unstable section of the text, incorporating more fluctuations of detail than any other. A sense of long-standing debate about the identities and family relations of the gods is occasionally felt, as in this account of the divine physician, Dian Cécht:
Dían Cécht had three sons, Cú and Cethen and Cían—and Míach was his fourth son, although many do not count him—plus his daughter Etan the poetess, and his other daughter Airmed the physician, and Coirpre the poet, son of Etan.78
‘Many do not count him’: how should variations of this sort be accounted for? This particular case strongly supports the argument in chapter 3 that Míach, son of Dían Cécht, was an artificial invention of the author of ‘The Second Battle of Moytura’, and that it took time for him to be integrated into the tradition. In other cases it looks as though the various recensions of Lebor Gabála were drawing on at least two, probably more, separate soundings from oral tradition.79 (Tellingly, sometimes the same bits of data—that so-and-so, the son of such-and-such, was responsible for this or that, for example—pop up in different words in different sections of the text: this is just what one would expect if the sources lay in oral tradition.) To the shapers of Lebor Gabála, the genealogies of the gods were not like an antique vase that had been carefully passed down; rather they resembled a series of patterned fragments which could be assembled in different ways, using different and more or less obvious kinds of glue. And while these blocks of oral material seem to have been broadly similar in outline, they clearly diverged in detail. All versions of the text agree, for example, that Coirpre ‘the Poet’ was the son of Dían Cécht’s daughter Etan, but they vary wildly over the identity of his father.80
Thus the family tree of the god-peoples was clearly in a certain amount of flux—and small wonder, for the entire unwieldy edifice had become very complex by this stage, with a host of secondary figures assembled around a core of ex-divinities. New members of the Túatha Dé could materialize from many sources, not least the misinterpretation of toponyms as personal names many centuries after the demise of Irish paganism. Two of the most famous, the goddesses Ériu and Banba (both of whom give their names to Ireland itself) just might be of this type, as the names seem to mean ‘abundant land’ and ‘plain of low hills’ respectively, betraying no hint of divinity. Rather suspiciously for a supposedly ancient Irish goddess, the name Banba itself seems to be a borrowing from a late form of the British language well on its way to becoming Welsh.81
The densest growth was at the top of the family tree, at the artificial join where the pseudohistorians had been obliged to graft familiar figures like the Dagda into the kindred of Nemed, and so on back to Noah. This scheme predated Lebor Gabála, which nevertheless sets it out fairly clearly. The major grafting point was a shadowy figure named Tait son of Taburn, supposed to have lived seven generations after his forefather Nemed and to have been the last common ancestor of all the Túatha Dé. From Tait there are still several generations before we arrive at any recognizable names. The core idea was that Tait’s son Aldui (or Allae) had sired five sons, and it is from these that the various sub-branches of the god-peoples descend. The Dagda was Aldui’s great-great-grandson, via Néit, Delbaeth, and Elatha; his brothers and children look like a selfcontained and presumably very old unit, which groups most of the figures likely to be reflexes of genuinely pre-Christian gods.
As previously discussed, the pseudohistorians were most likely connecting blocks of orally sourced material here, which explains the blatantly artificial quality of most of the figures. Genealogically speaking, figures like Tait and Aldui are there simply to connect ‘A’ with ‘B’: they possess a merely notional existence and it seems unlikely that much in the way of narrative was ever attached to them. Nonetheless, the pseudohistorians deliberately borrowed names with mythological cachet in order to assemble the pedigree. This deliberate borrowing is most striking in the lineage of the Dagda, who is the most important member of the Túatha Dé in terms of paternity; it may be that his line of descent back to Tait son of Taburn is the earliest to be fabricated. His father, Elatha, ‘Poetic Art’, is not implausible as a theonym. His grandfather Delbaeth has the same name as one of the Dagda’s brothers, and the name—possibly to do with ‘shaping’ or even ‘shaping fire’—sounds archaic, so that he may reflect some lost deity.82
Further back is Néit, the Dagda’s great-grandfather. A figure bearing this name is attested in ‘Cormac’s Glossary’ as a war-god, husband of the goddess Nemain, associated with the Morrígan. Mythological data in early glossaries cannot necessarily be taken at face value, but in this case the entry is revealing and may well simply be true: ‘Néit i.e., a god of war among the pagan Irish. Nemain uxor illius, i.e., that one’s wife.’83 This is linguistically plausible, and there is no particular reason to doubt that an ancient deity underlies the figure.84 However, the entry probably refers to another Néit in the family tree: the Dagda’s uncle. This younger Néit is indeed depicted as the husband of the three war-goddesses; the older Néit looks therefore like an artificial duplication brought in to extend the family tree upwards and backwards.85 When hunting for the mythological core of the genealogies, doubling of names in this manner is a useful diagnostic sign of artificiality: in the pedigrees of medieval Irish nobles, a small number of common names constantly recur, but for obvious reasons this should not be characteristic of divine names.86
GODS AND POETS
It is of the first significance for the gods that the pseudohistorical doctrines were put into their authoritative form by poets. Much of the material about the gods in Lebor Gabála seems to have ultimately derived from the lore of the filid, and thus reflects their methods and preoccupations.87 We saw that the gods could function as exemplars for the professions who made up the áes dána ‘people of talent’: the filid, as the most socially elevated of the áes dána, seem to have used the gods to conceptualize aspects of their own profession in an especially rich manner.88
On the surface, this might seem to entail a paradox; we saw earlier in this study that the professional poets had deeply identified with the Christian religion, and that historically their order derived from the fateful encounter between native schemes of learning and Christian literacy. According to hagiographical legend, when Patrick came before the court of Lóegaire mac Néill, supposed high king of Tara, the only people to rise in respect before the saint were a poet and his pupil. The story tells us that the filid were concerned to represent themselves as an ancient order with roots in the deep past, but an order whose members had instantly perceived the truth of Christianity and readily accepted it.89
The filid did more than simply rehearse fables about the god-peoples in the secular storytelling for which they were responsible; rather they seem to have made them part of the way in which they imagined and transmitted their own schemes of knowledge.90 To be a fili was to be a highly-trained professional, marked out by a course of study which involved (in Elva Johnston’s words) ‘oral knowledge, literate skills, and mnemonic training’.91 They were expert in the grammatical analysis of the Irish language, in the highly formalized rules of poetic composition, and in training the memory to encompass the vast body of historical and legendary story, precedent, and genealogy which it was their business to know.92
In all these areas—both those to do with patronage and those to do with pedagogy—it is fairly easy to see how the native gods could be of use to the filid. A swift overview is necessary here before we look at how specific divinities were deployed. First and most important, filidecht—the art of the fili—was intrinsically secular, and because pagan gods were by definition out of place in the ecclesiastical sphere, they could function as useful markers of secularity.93
Secondly, it was essential to the filid’s identity to assert that their profession was an ancient, time-hallowed aspect of native culture, though this was not literally true.94 The venerable and the obscure were their stock in trade, and these were spheres associated with the godpeoples, imagined to have ruled Ireland in the deep past. This was especially true in the realm of language, for the ability to speak in an allusive and cryptic form of ‘poet’s Irish’ marked someone out as a fili.95 A commentary on ‘The Scholar’s Primer’, that crucial compendium of early Irish grammatical studies, provides a telling example. Ireland’s various ancient peoples are said to have used different terminology for the grammatical genders of masculine, feminine, and neuter; it is the most obscure and archaic terms—moth, toth, and traeth—that are ascribed to the god-peoples.96
Thirdly, the art of the professional poet involved a degree of mental facility and verbal fluency that depended on a well-trained memory and long practice. Memory for medieval intellectuals was analogous to what we nowadays call the imagination: it was not just the rote cramming of facts, but a mode and precondition of artistic creativity.97 Professional mind-training and poetic inspiration were inseparable, because their poetry was not primarily the expression of an individual poet’s personality, but, first and foremost, a display of repertoire and technique. Only when that technique had been thoroughly mastered could a kind of miraculous ease be attained, an ease which underpinned the individual poet’s claim to speak with authority.
It is an observable tendency for things involving inspiration to accrue supernatural tropes and personifications, which is why poets today still speak of their muse. That intellectual and artistic facility makes one godlike is a metaphor which the filid seem to have taken quite a long way; the name for one of the grades of their profession was deán, ‘godling’.98 (Compare the way we use the term ‘diva’—literally ‘goddess’—or the way that members of the Academie française are elevated to a pantheon of immortels.) Essentially, there is some evidence that the filid used the native gods to symbolize the more mysterious dimensions of their art, and to mark it out as an esoteric and hoarded form of knowledge that defined learned poets as a separate and special group within early Irish society.99
I have spent some time discussing the nature of filidecht in order to make it clear that it was a system of learning couched in terms defined by Elva Johnston as ‘at once pragmatic and mythopoetic, especially at the intersection between learning and composition’.100 As storytellers, the filid were skilled at adapting stories of the native gods to new circumstances; it should be no surprise if they also used such vivid figures to encapsulate complex abstractions in concrete terms. ‘Mythopoeia’—the self-conscious making of myths—is indeed the correct term, for the filid’s use of the gods was no hangover from Irish paganism. Rather, it was a framing of the scholarly in terms of the supernatural, enabled by medieval scholars’ intense and characteristic fondness for personification and allegory.101 The impression that emerges—and again this echoes observations made in previous chapters—is that the professional poets of pre-Norman Ireland put versions of the pagan deities of their ancestors to work as a kind of symbolic or allegorical pantheon. Here begins—let me clearly signal—a more speculative part of my argument, though it builds on the work of others; it is detachable from what has gone before.
‘THE GODS OF SKILL’
Several among the god-peoples bear names that explicitly connect them with the arts: one very obvious example is Credne, the divine bronzeworker, whose name etymologically means the ‘skilled one’ and is related to cerd, ‘art, skill, artisan’.102
A tighter core of divinities, however, seems to have been specifically associated with the filid’s own arts of language (Fig. 4.3). Elatha, generally identified as the father of the Dagda, is also a noun meaning ‘skill, art, science, branch of learning’—particularly poetry. According to John Carey, Ogma, another of Elatha’s sons, was ‘associated with the literary lore of the native intelligentsia’ as inventor of the ogam alphabet, supposedly named after him. Carey remarks of these figures that ‘Elatha is consistently associated with Bress, Ogmae, the Dagdae, and the more shadowy Delbaeth; he is evidently another figure in what we may call the “pantheon of skill”’.103 (It is striking that the author of ‘The Second Battle of Moytura’ nonetheless felt able to radically rearrange this symbolic family, making Elatha a Fomorian for the purposes of his tale.)104
Within this poetic pantheon the goddess Brigit, daughter of the Dagda and wife of Bres, was apparently of considerable significance. She is a paradoxical and unique figure in the mythology, characterized by curious bifurcations of identity. Even her name has two forms, Brigit and Bríg; she seems to be both one entity and also a trio of sisters. Most famously of all she most likely bears some connection to her Christian namesake, Brigit of Kildare, Ireland’s most beloved female saint. (Scholars have found the precise nature of this connection impossible to unravel, and debate continues as to whether it actually exists at all.)105 The strange split in the goddess is starkly visible in the sources. She makes one, and only one, appearance in an actual narrative, ‘The Second Battle of Moytura’, in which her role is to lament the killing of her son Rúadán. At the same time, ‘Cormac’s Glossary’ lauds her divinity in the most exalted and specific terms used of any Irish goddess.106 This famous entry is worth quoting in full; italics indicate a change from Irish to Latin.
Brigit, i.e., a female poet, daughter of the Dagda. She is Brigit the female sage of poetry (or woman of poetic skill), i.e., Brigit a goddess whom the filid used to worship. For very great and very splendid was her application to the art [frithgnam]. Therefore they used to call her goddess of poets, whose sisters were Brigit the female physician and Brigit woman of smithcraft, daughters of the Dagda, from whose names almost all the Irish used to call Brigit a goddess.107
This rich description articulates a special imaginative connection between Brigit as supremely skilled poet and the professional poets who ‘used to’ worship her. The tense is significant: this bit of lore can only have come down to the glossary’s compiler from the filid themselves, and their devotion to Brigit the goddess is clearly not meant to be a matter of contemporary custom in the literal sense. It is also important not to overestimate the narrator’s enthusiasm: two of the three explicit statements of Brigit’s divine status are couched in Latin, a shift of register which, as previously mentioned, often indicates a desire on the part of the glossator to put distance between himself and what is being said. It is tellingly similar to the famous entry on Manannán mac Lir, in which the opening description of Manannán’s skill at sea as a merchant is in Irish, while the assertion that the Irish and Britons had called him ‘god of the sea’ is in Latin.108
Therefore, it is possible that Bríg/Brigit and Bres were a highly significant pair of symbols to the filid, although evidence for this is indirect. It is necessary here to read against the grain of the surviving material, in which Brigit is oddly fugitive and Bres seems to have been wrenched out of his traditional role and reshaped as the archetypal bad king. Their importance is underlined by their children, a mysterious trio known as the trí dé dána (‘The Three Gods of Skill’). While the name is resonant, they are wavering and confused figures in the tradition as it has come down to us. Informed guesswork suggests that they began as a kind of concentrated personification of the áes dána, and may originally have been identified as the three ‘craft-gods’ par excellence: Goibniu the blacksmith, Credne the bronze-worker, and Luchta or Luchtaine, the wright.109 Later, various mix-ups seem to have got in the way. The term dána, ‘of skill’, was misunderstood as the name of a goddess, so that the three gods became her sons instead of Brigit’s. They also became identified—not least in Lebor Gabála—with another (rather nasty) threesome, Brian, Iuchar, and Iucharba, the sons of Tuirenn. It is this trio who conspire to murder Lug’s father Cían, and they are brutally punished for it.110 Despite this ambiguity, Carey astutely states that ‘it is most reasonable to see Bríg and the trí dé as figures belonging to the elaborate repertoire of imagery employed by the professional poets… Bres, closely linked with them… is to be assigned to the same context’.111 Thus we can reconstruct a micro-pantheon of allegorical gods associated especially with verbal skills, not as a survival of paganism, but as part of the literary lore of early Christian Ireland’s secular intelligentsia.
Two minor Túatha Dé figures, Ollam and his son Aí, make the connection with poetry more overt. The father’s name (‘most supreme’) was the standard term for a master-poet: it remains the Irish word for ‘professor’. The son’s simply means ‘inspired poetry’, from a root *awe-, ‘breath, wind, blow’, which has a very long history in Indo-European poetic vocabulary.112 A Middle Irish birth tale about Aí provides an allegory for how the art of poetry came into existence in Ireland. Ollam, son of Delbaeth, is the brother of Fíachna, one of the Túatha Dé kings of Ireland. One day as they sit together, a ‘great gust of wind’—recall the etymology of aí—blows over the house. The king’s druid interprets this to mean that a ‘wonderful art’ equal in dignity to kingship will be born into Ireland, embodied in the king’s unborn nephew, Ollam’s son. The baby is born, and Fíachna tries to have him killed, but is prevented. The newborn infant then miraculously speaks, demanding all the rights and rewards owed to poets by kings in the name of Fíachna’s honour:
My territory, my couple,
a cauldron of provisions with a vat;
let division of gifts be granted by the king of Mugna;
a vessel, a cup,
a chariot, an ivory-hilted sword,
thirty cows, a quern of the
war-bands of Fíachna.
‘It will be given’, said Fíachna. ‘What name will be given to the boy now?’ ‘Let him be called Aí’, said the druid. It was from this that poetic craft (aí airchetail) was so called, that is, from Aí, son of Ollam. And that was the first poetical composition, spoken by Aí, son of Ollam.113
Only the filid can be responsible for this story, which underscores their high status and indispensible place within the social hierarchy. (Ollam, Aí’s father, is said to have half the house and an equal number of retainers to his royal brother: poets are placed here on an equal footing with kings.) Once again this presents a clear example of personages in the mythic time of the god-peoples being deployed to legitimize, explain, and personify elements of the poets’ profession and repertoire.
The father/son pairing of Ollam and Aí raises further questions about the purposes served by the genealogies in Lebor Gabála. These formed a part of the text likely to have been sourced from oral tradition among the filid, which suggests that the pedigrees of the gods were memorized not only because the filid needed to be able to remember and recite stories about the Túatha Dé—crucial though that was—but also because they found family trees a useful way to visualize the branches and interrelations of native learning. Because the filid placed so much weight on the importance of human inspiration, the figure of Aí is again illuminating. The story of Aí’s conception might be compared with a statement from an obscure Old Irish tract included within an eighth-century law text, Bretha Nemed, that filidecht subdivides into ‘music’ (séis), ‘hearing’ (clúas), and ‘voice’ (guth). These combine with ‘breath’ (anál) to yield ‘inspired poetry’, aí.114 This is an account of the origins of inspiration in a very different vein, without personification, but it is easy to see how it could lend itself to being packaged in the form of a family tree. The implication is that metaphor—specifically personification—could allow grammatica to be figured as genealogy.
Further support is lent by a fascinating work from the ninth or tenth century, Immacallam in dá Thúarad (‘The Colloquy of the Two Sages’).115 Composed by or for the filid, it seems to have been a text in which they took much pleasure.116 It depicts a competition between Ferchertne, a seasoned poet, and his teenage-prodigy rival, Néde.117 It is a rich display of the ways in which the filid visualized their own repertoire in the period—far richer than can be discussed here—because it presents two fictional filid showing off their command of the specialized jargon of their profession.118 Some of their exchange remains impenetrable, but the general impression is that the ability to allude to recherché lore and penetrate mythological metaphors marked one out as a qualified member of the filid club.119 Much of the lore in the ‘Colloquy’ is metapoetic: it is difficult poetry about how difficult poetry is.
The pivotal moment comes when Néde, the young poet, is asked about his ancestry. He rattles off a family tree for his professional mastery which goes all the way back to the Túatha Dé:
I am son of Poetry,
Poetry son of Scrutiny,
Scrutiny son of Meditation,
Meditation son of Great Knowledge,
Great Knowledge son of Enquiry,
Enquiry son of Investigation,
Investigation son of Great Knowledge,
Great Knowledge son of Great Sense,
Great Sense son of Understanding,
Understanding son of Wisdom,
Wisdom, son of the Three Gods of Skill.120
This passage can be read as an account of how learned poetry percolates through the mind, couched in a genealogical metaphor which interfaces with the Túatha Dé at the top of the pedigree. We saw earlier that the ‘Three Gods of Skill’ are said—in a gloss on this very text, in fact—to be Bres’s sons by Brigit, daughter of the Dagda, whom ‘Cormac’s Glossary’ described as the poets’ special patron.121 Elizabeth Boyle has emphasized the degree to which the interpretion of texts on a figurative level was inculcated by the mode of education shared by ecclesiastical scholars and secular men of learning up to the beginning of the twelfth century. This mode of education may well have played a role in fostering a fondness for the use of mythological metaphors among the filid in the ninth and tenth centuries, flowering as vivid personifications and didactic allegories; some implications are explored below.122
In the ‘Colloquy’ it is clear that Néde intends his poetic family tree to be taken metaphorically: it describes a concatenation of mental processes proper to a mind trained in filidecht and he is keen to make that plain.123 Other texts of a later date offer parallels. For example, from c.1200, Echtra Cormaic i Tir Tairngiri (‘Cormac’s Adventure in the Land of Promise’) provides an elaborate description of an otherworldly well from which five streams flow. In the story the god Manannán explains to Cormac that he is looking at the ‘fountain of knowledge’, and the five streams are the five senses. Human knowledge amounts to drinking from the streams or from the well itself: only those who possess ‘many arts’—that is, the learned classes—drink from both. Here again the workings of the trained human mind—the processes of perception, cognition, and creativity—are being allegorized through extended mythological metaphors.124
The overall control and influence of the filid on the role of the native gods in Irish culture emerges clearly, and the Lebor Gabála genealogies may allow us to catch an echo of the mnemonic devices which the filid employed to encode information. Certainly they remembered complex pedigrees for the gods; they deployed them in allegories of native schemes of knowledge; they emphasized their order’s connection to the past in which these beings had been taken as divine; and they probably also intended certain stories to be read figuratively. But it should be stressed that the filid were not atavistic semi-pagans. One poem (quoted earlier) ascribed to Eochaid ua Flainn makes this ringingly clear via a long list of the god-peoples’ major personages:
It is clear that the one who wiped them from their land,
from the royal plain, was the Son of God; I proclaim [it].
despite the valour of their deeds in their bright division
their race does not remain in Ireland.
It is Eochaid, without fury of enchantments [?],
Who arranges their fair divisions;
Apart from knowledge of the companies we declare,
though we enumerate them, we do not worship them.125
The filid’s habit of working individual deities or chains of deities into figurative or allegorical representations of knowledge may help to explain a well-known oddity. As we saw earlier, the late ninth- or early tenth-century ‘Tale of Tuán mac Cairell’ describes the arrival of the ‘Túatha Dé and Andé’ as a mysterious race of semi-demonic ‘exiles from heaven’.126 Andé means ‘non-gods’, and in Lebor Gabála we find the same idea: ‘their men of skill (áes dána) were gods… but their farming people (áes trebtha) were non-gods.’ Scholars have spilled much ink over this, positing two categories of deity in ancient Irish paganism: high gods associated with the products of culture and a group of lesser gods associated with agriculture. Some force is added to this picture because it closely resembles Norse mythology, which also features two types of god, the lofty Æsir and earthy Vanir.
But there is no need to look back into a hypothetical past. What seems more likely is that this statement represents a doctrine of the filid, according to which the basic division of Irish society into the skilled professionals and those involved in husbandry has been couched in terms of one of their favourite metaphors: to possess a skill is to be godlike. This has then been retrofitted onto the Túatha Dé, from where the statement then comes that some of the gods were not gods at all. Far from being a relic of Irish paganism, the concept of ‘gods and non-gods’ is probably a development of the early Christian period, reflecting the gods’ shift from divinities to members of a society imagined as similar to that of early Ireland.
‘THE SEVEN PRIMARY SKILLED ONES’
As a kind of hangover of the outmoded idea that the filid were ‘Christian druids’—a phrase guaranteed to bring the specialist out in hives—there is a tendency to imagine that the order of professional poets and men of letters remained basically the same between the sixth and eleventh centuries. Scholars have demonstrated that this was not the case, and that the role of the learned poets within the literate landscape was always changing. In short, it is possible that while the filid did not believe in the likes of the Dagda or Brigit as gods—‘though we enumerate them, we do not worship them’—from the middle of the ninth century they became increasingly attached to them as allegories, mnemonics, and images of that within their body of learning which was not shared with ecclesiastical scholars.127 The gods added to the aura of romantic antiquity which it had become convenient for the filid to stress, and ‘pagan’ supernatural tropes were invoked in order to underline their supposed roots in the ancient past and so assert their professional distinctiveness.
If this is so, then the potential ramifications are thought provoking. As noted earlier, Elizabeth Boyle has stressed that reading for non-literal levels of meaning was an essential part of the training of the learned, and that it arose directly from the way the Bible was interpreted. She makes the case that Irish men of learning wrote, on occasion, as they had been taught to read, by implanting layers of metaphorical meaning into vernacular texts. And if the gods—once the religious framework of Irish paganism had faded—were available to the literati for recycling as a stock of metaphors and personifications, then we are faced with the fundamental problem that we have no way to gauge how conservative or radical that process was for any particular divinity.128 In other words, the fact that some among the filid seem to have thought in terms of a ‘pantheon of skill’—including probable former deities like Brigit and Ogma—may not be a holdover from Irish paganism; instead it might be a development entirely of medieval scholarship, and thus tell us literally nothing about how those gods had been envisaged in the pre-Christian era.129 Further research is needed, but this disheartening possibility must be regarded seriously.
On the other hand, there is certainly evidence that there were different schools of thought about the gods and their pedigrees among the filid, although it is difficult to say whether this was down to variation over time or between poetic authorities in different parts of Ireland. We find hints in two places that some filid thought in terms of a special group of seven or eight ‘skilled’ gods with whom they were prone to identify, hinting at conceptual or metaphorical structures within the patheon itself. Again, this is probably not ancient: Lebor Gabála is full of groups of eight, largely thanks to the biblical story of Noah in which eight human beings took ship on the Ark.130 Seven is also a crucial number in the Bible, and in medieval Christendom: we have the seven days of creation, the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, the seven sacraments, and so on.
In some versions of Recension II of Lebor Gabála, the Túatha Dé are said to have followed Bethach son of Iarbonél and ‘seven subsidiary leaders’. These are termed the seven sons of Ethliu/Ethlenn, normally the name of Lug’s Fomorian mother; this turns the normal genealogy into nonsense because the seven are revealed as not just Lug, but also the Dagda, Dían Cécht, Credne, Luchtaine, Núadu, and Goibnenn.131 It is possible that the female name Ethlenn (genitive of Ethliu) has become confused with Elatha (‘Art’, genitive Elathan), father of the Dagda.132 The ‘seven sons of Elatha’ would still be unusual in terms of the normal family tree, but not freakish.133
This group of eight is reminiscent of one that occurs in Lebor Bretnach (‘The British Book’), a late eleventh-century Irish translation of the Latin Historia Brittonum, which (as seen earlier) contains a crucial version of the invasions-schema. Dating to the early ninth century, it attests to a time when the Túatha Dé had not yet been integrated into its structure. When medieval scholars—perhaps in Ireland, but possibly in Scotland—translated the Historia into Irish, they updated its version of the pseudohistory and inserted the god-peoples into what was by then their conventional place.134 Some versions of Lebor Bretnach attribute the translation to Gilla Cóemáin (fl.1072), one of the four authoritative Lebor Gabála poets; the version of the god-peoples in Lebor Bretnach differs in significant ways from that text. Either Gilla Cóemáin was not the translator, or his views changed.
The major oddity is that Lebor Bretnach focuses in on a pared-down pantheon consisting of only the seven prímelathnaig (‘chief skilled ones’) among the Túatha Dé.135 Intriguingly, the list differs slightly from that in Recension II of Lebor Gabála, comprising Ogma, Etan, the Dagda, Dían Cécht, Credne, Luchtaine, Lug, and Goibnenn. Etan—the only female—has been added, while Núadu had been lost. The passage is in a mixture of Latin and Irish, and is worth quoting because it is so rare to see the native gods referred to with Latin attributes:
After that the plebes deorum [god-peoples], i.e. the Túatha Dé Danann, conquered Ireland. Among them there were the chief skilled ones: Etan; Luchtaine Artifex [the Artificer]; Credne Figulus [the Craftsman]; Dían (Cécht) Medicus [the Physician]—Etan moreover was filia eius [his daughter], i.e., the fostermother of the poets; Goibnenn Faber [the Smith]; Lug son of Eithne, who possessed all the arts; the great Dagda, son of Elatha, son of Delbaeth, the king; Ogma, the king’s brother—he it was who invented the alphabet of the Irish.136
Putting this together, we can tentatively posit that the filid were prone to identify the after-images of certain gods as the patrons and personifications of the particular professional skills proper to the áes dána. Possibly—but by no means necessarily—they were building on genuinely ancient elements in particular cases. However, as their order increasingly risked complete assimilation into the ranks of the ecclesiastical literati, foregrounding the native gods may have been a strategy to bolster their archaic mystique and distinct identity. By the mid-eleventh century, and probably much earlier, there are signs that this concept had developed into the idea of an exclusive club of seven or eight allegorical gods who were specifically the prototypes and originators of the major áes dána professions.137 In Recension II of Lebor Gabála, the list of the seven divinities is immediately followed by the statement that:
… they studied knowledge and the art of the filid, for every secret of skilful art, and every technique in medicine, and every tradesecret in poetry—all indeed derive their origin from the Túatha Dé Danann.138
Effectively, these figures became culture heroes for the filid on some level, the primordial finders-out of human resource. This reflects the general obsession of Irish men of learning with accuracy regarding origin stories. The accounts we have betray the fact that we are looking at the lore of the poets—and not other áes dána professions like physicians—specifically because poetic divinities are to the fore. The Lebor Bretnach octad, either written by or perhaps dedicated to Gilla Cóemáin, is bookended by two such deities, Etan the female poet and Ogma the inventor of ‘the letters of the Irish’.
Might it be possible to glimpse the outline of the filid’s cognitive ideology here? It is striking that the eight Lebor Bretnach divinities can be divided into three categories: those who have to do with shaped speech (Etan, Ogma, and perhaps the Dagda, given his connection with magic, for which there were specific metres); those who have to do with crafts (Credne, Luchtaine, Goibnenn); and one who represents medicine (Dían Cécht).139 One god—the multitasking Lug—rounds the list off as Minister without Portfolio.140 This precisely mirrors the division embodied by the three Brigits, daughters of the Dagda, in ‘Cormac’s Glossary’: Brigit the female poet, Brigit the female smith, and Brigit the female physician. Indeed there is a conspicuous resonance between Etan and Brigit: in Lebor Bretnach Etan is muime na filed (‘the foster-mother of the filid’), just as in ‘Cormac’s Glossary’ Brigit was ‘a goddess whom the filid used to worship’. The glossary’s triple Brigit and Lebor Bretnach’s octad of deities both seem to embody a division of the arts into three basic branches.141 Brigit and Etan—divine women sharing a particular care for the filid—emerge as central to the enterprise.
This suggests that the same ideological elements recurred in different combinations, due perhaps to regional variation amongst the filid. This may be reflected in the entry on Brigit quoted above, for it is important to remember that Irish glossaries—not least ‘Cormac’s Glossary’ itself—were largely Munster creations, and the accounts of mythological beings that they contain may, in some cases, reflect specifically southern understandings of these characters. Nowhere else is Brigit so richly described, and in the absence of independent evidence from other texts we cannot assume that the account of her importance given there would have been universally recognized. Indeed, the entry itself seems to imply the contrary, saying that almost all the Irish recognized Brigit as a goddess. This may be southern overstatement, but it might be that Brigit—who embodies the threefold division of the arts, but is particularly patroness of the filid and sometimes also mother of the ‘Three Gods of Art’—was to the poets of Munster what Etan (poetess, mother of Coirbre the poet, and ‘foster-mother of the filid’), daughter of Dían Cécht, was further north.142 Once again it is important to remember that in terms of medieval Irish writings, what we currently have is likely to be a fraction of what probably once existed; the possibility that our understanding of Irish mythological figures is seriously skewed by mere accidents of survival must always be reckoned with.143
ÓENGUS , SON OF THE DAGDA
Among all these poetic allegories, one figure is strikingly absent: another child of the Dagda, Óengus, the Mac Óc. While the reader might expect him to be numbered among the seven (or eight) ‘primary skilled ones’, or associated with Brigit, Bres, and Elatha as one of the filid’s ‘pantheon of skill’, he does not appear.144 He is a notable personality in the literature: as already noted, he plays a role in ‘The Wooing of Étaín’, and he is the central character of one of the most mysterious of the Old Irish sagas, Aislinge Óenguso (‘The Dream of Óengus’), perhaps composed in the eighth century.145 There he appears as a passive figure, thrown into dazed stupefaction by a vision of a beautiful girl, whom—after much difficulty and with a lot of help—he finds once again.
There are (I maintain) important dimensions to ‘The Dream of Óengus’ that have not yet been fully understood, but there is no space to examine them here.146 The point for our purposes is that the Óengus of the sagas undergoes a profound emotional transformation on the one hand, but is a crafty, verbally sly figure on the other; he is adept at getting other people (and himself) into, and out of, difficult scrapes. Homer’s adjective for the hero Odysseus—polutropos, ‘of many twists and turns’—would fit Óengus well. Strikingly, two of the god’s schemes depend on play with literal and metaphorical meanings, which brings him into the filid’s realm of language and figuration. He craftily gains the Bruig by insisting that ‘a day and a night’ means ‘all time’, because ‘it is in days and nights that the world is spent’.147 He also advises his father on how to kill the parasitic Cridenbél, who has been demanding daily that the Dagda hand over to him ‘the three best bits’ of his dinner. Cridenbél expects bits of meat, but on Óengus’s advice the Dagda hides three gold coins in the food—his ‘best bits’ only in a rather limited sense—which clog up Cridenbél’s stomach and kill him.148
Poetry involves play between surface and depth, the literal and the metaphorical, and Óengus appears in at least one story, perhaps others, as an allegorical personage connected with this aspect of the art. This is blatant in a Middle Irish anecdote, Bó Bithblicht meic Lonán (‘The Son of Lonán’s Perpetually-Milkable Cow’).149 In it Flann mac Lonáin—a perfectly historical poet of some distinction, who was killed in 896—meets a huge, loutish churl, to whom he ends up owing a cow.150 The churl will only be satisfied with a cow that gives endless milk, and after a year he shows up at Flann’s house with four heavies, all of them armed with woodcutting tools, to demand it. They are unpleasant guests, beating the household’s women, servants, and dogs. Flann asks the churl for his name, which he gives as Fidbadach son of Fid Rúscach (‘Woodsman son of Bark-Covered Wood’). In a panic—for, needless to say, no perpetually milkable cow is to hand—Flann composes a poem reflecting on his predicament. Then comes the inevitable denouement :
It was then the churl said: ‘That’s the cow always rich in milk that I have sought—for poetry is always “rich in milk”, and I who have come to you am Óengus, son of Bóand, the Mac Óc, and no churl am I.’151
That Óengus is supposed to have some deep connection with poetry is clear in the text’s relentless punning on the word fid, ‘wood, tree’, which also means ‘letter of the ogam alphabet’, and so stands for filidecht itself.152 The churl’s name, ‘Woodsman son of Bark-Covered Wood’, might equally be rendered as ‘Man of Ogam Letters, son of Poetic Letter’.153 Flann frets about his guest ‘destroying the trees’, for Óengus carries a billhook, used for cutting small branches; in fact he does quite the opposite and (metaphorically) is a guardian and tender of the letters. The lesson Óengus imparts is about metaphor—‘poetry is a cow that is never dry’—which embodies the god’s own speciality, namely the ability to exploit the gap between the literal and the figurative.
Óengus is never involved in verse-making in the sagas that survive, but there are certain striking points of similarity between his experiences in ‘The Dream of Óengus’ and descriptions of poetic composition from the Gaelic world. In the story of Flann’s encounter with the disguised god, the poet is irked by the time his unpleasant guest spends lounging abed: ‘… awful his lying in his bed… fierce his length of time in the bed’.154 Likewise, in ‘The Dream of Óengus’, the god languishes in bed pining for love of the woman he has so fleetingly glimpsed. From eighteenth-century Scottish sources—admittedly very late evidence—we know that Gaelic poets habitually composed in darkness, lying on their beds for extended periods.155 Evidence that this was the custom among the filid in early Ireland is lacking, though Joseph Nagy points out that ‘Cormac’s Glossary’ describes a ritual which involves the fili awaiting inspiration by covering his face with his hands and lying down to sleep.156
It is possible that the filid might have interpreted (or shaped, or both) the depiction of the god’s sufferings in ‘The Dream of Óengus’ as a metaphor for the process of poetic composition itself. There are strong points of similarity. First, the saga gives us a fugitive vision which cannot be forced to return by an act of will, followed by an intermediary period of inarticulate, bedbound stupor, plus consultation with authorities of greater knowledge. At the last comes exaltation: the god’s recovery of his vision-woman and full possession of that which initially had been fleeting.157 If the saga was not originally intended as an allegory of poetic composition, it might have been irresistible to the poets of later centuries to read it as one. This would no doubt have helped to foster an image of Óengus as a patron of their profession.
Elusive but intriguing hints that Óengus was used by the filid to symbolize the subjective experience of composing verse are found in other places. The best evidence for this comes from a famous anecdote in ‘Cormac’s Glossary’. It recounts a male ‘Spirit of Poetry’ appearing to the arch-fili Senchán Torpéist, chief ollam of Ireland.158 A mysterious youth, shouting at them from the beach, insists on accompanying Senchán and his entourage of filid and apprentice poets on their trip to the Isle of Man. His appearance is inventively revolting:
He had a hideous shape; first of all, when he used to put his finger to his forehead a gush of foul pus would come from his ears down to his neck. There was suppuration [?] from the crown of his head down to the gristle of his two shoulders. Everyone who saw him thought that it was the upper layer of his brain that had broken through his skull. Each of his two eyes were as round as a blackbird’s egg, as black as death, as quick as a fox.159
As the whole company approach Man, they see ‘a great, old, grey-haired woman upon the rock’, combing the beach for seaweed. Unknown to Senchán and his retinue, she is a long-lost Irish poet. Senchán is unable to cap the riddling half-quatrain that the woman calls out to him, and instead the hideous lad answers, telling the old woman that it is him, rather than Senchán, that she should address. Thanks to the lad’s intervention, Senchán realises who the old woman is and arranges for her to bathe and be dressed in finery as befits her high status. But it is the end of the brief narrative that is most significant; while all this happens the ugly lad has undergone a metamorphosis, becoming ‘a youth with golden yellow hair, wavy as the scrollings on harps. He was clad in royal apparel, and had the finest appearance ever seen on any man.’160 He circles Senchán and his retinue clockwise, and vanishes. The glossator explains, switching to Latin midsentence: ‘… he has never appeared since that time. Thus there is no doubt that he was the Spirit of Poetry [poematis spiritus].’
There are obvious similarities between this anecdote and the story of Flann mac Lonán’s encounter with Óengus. Both turn on the manifestation of a loathsome man to a distinguished fili, in a way that puts them out or makes life difficult for them. In both, the man is revealed as supernatural and connected with poetry itself, though in neither case is this obvious to begin with. And in both tales something is achieved: in his desperation Flann composes a rather splendid poem, and the lost female poet is recognized and recovered from her exile.
On the other hand, each story has an element the other lacks: only the glossary anecdote shows us the importuning figure’s transformation from hideous to divine. Likewise, the story of Flann makes it explicit that the fierce churl is Óengus, but in the Glossary anecdote the identification is only implicit. (Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha notes that half of the manuscript versions actually identify the ‘Spirit of Poetry’ as Christ.)161 That said, as far back as 1927 Robin Flower made the connection between the two anecdotes and noted the similarity between the story of the Spirit and Modern Irish tales in which Óengus lends his help in an initially disruptive or mischievous form.162 The Spirit’s great beauty—for which Óengus is famed—also fits. In short, scholars have noted that in both these anecdotes we are dealing with the mythopoetic aspects of poetry.163 It is hard (hideous, churlish) until one attains facility; then it becomes something divine. They are stories not just about poetry but about how it feels to train as a poet.164
Taken together, these anecdotes may help to make sense of one of the most puzzling of all medieval Irish references to a native god. Under the year 1084, the normally laconic Annals of Tigernach contain a bizarre entry, which unsettlingly reads as though it could have been written by the Yeats of The Celtic Twilight.165 In a swerve from the usual annalistic focus on battles and deaths, we learn of:
A great pestilence in this year, which killed a quarter of the men of Ireland. It began in the south, and spread throughout the four quarters of Ireland. This is the causa causans of that pestilence, namely demons that came out of the northern isles of the world, namely three battalions, and in each battalion there were three thousand and thirty, as Óengus Óc, the son of the Dagda, related to Mac Gilla Lugáin, who used to frequent the síd-mound every year at Samain. And he himself beheld at Maistiu one battalion of them which was destroying Leinster. In the same way they were seen by Mac Gilla Lugáin’s son, and wherever their heat and fury reached, there their venom was taken, for there was a sword of fire out of the gullet of each of them, and every one of them was as high as the clouds of heaven, so that is the cause of this pestilence.166
That a god should convey supernatural insight to a mortal was a staple of the earliest Irish narrative prose. But on the face of it Mac Gilla Lugáin’s interview with the Mac Óc seems to be accepted by the annalist as not only as a genuine occurrence, but also as contemporary. It is also accepted that the Mac Óc’s intelligence is accurate—he really does identify the cause of the plague. The implications of this passage are, at first glance, startling, and commentators have on the whole not known quite how to take it, given that it seems to confirm the persistence of pagan practices in eleventh-century Ireland. Edel Bhreathnach says this passage helps us to ‘begin to experience a ritual culture, replicated in so many other societies, that existed outside, and was feared by those who sought to control social and religious mores in early Irish society’.167 The archaeologist John Waddell is impressed that Mac Gilla Lugáin ‘should still apparently be a regular and persistent visitor to the otherworld mound of Óengus at the great feast of Samhain, when he evidently communed with the son of the Dagda’.168
Must this enigmatic passage be taken so literally? It is strange that a Clonmacnoise cleric should have unhesitatingly accepted that there were those among his contemporaries who had spoken with pagan deities; stranger still that those deities should be considered to be in some sense on our side. An alternative way to look at it might be as follows. The evidence examined above tells us that it was entirely possible in the Middle Irish period (c.900-1200) to compose an anecdote in which a famous poet encountered—and was enlightened by—the god Óengus, probably reflecting a habit of using that deity to allegorize the difficulties and rewards of the filid’s profession. Might Mac Gilla Lugáin—of whom nothing is known—have been a fili? There is nothing in the annalentry that suggests this explicitly. On the other hand, the story depicts him as the possessor of supernatural vision (etymologically fili means ‘seer’), inherited by his son; the practice of filidecht ran in families. Furthermore, all of this takes place when some among the professional poets were deliberately playing up their connections with the pre-Christian past. There is no reason to think that the names of every significant medieval Irish poet are known to us, and every reason to think that they are not. Therefore, it is tempting to suggest that Mac Gilla Lugáin, whoever he was, was no half-pagan throwback, but an assertively secular fili who composed an account of contemporary travails within a demonstrably pre-existent subgenre which we might call ‘The Poet’s Encounter with Óengus’. If there was once a text called ‘The Colloquy of Mac Gilla Lugáin and the Mac Óc’, we will never know. Perhaps Mac Gilla Lugáin’s ostentatious innovation was composing an autobiographical text, whereas for Senchán Torpéist and Flann mac Lonán, the stories of their supernatural encounters were the creation of later generations for whom they were revered figures. In short, this profoundly odd annal-entry may have a more precise cultural context than has been recognized, and its affinities should be recognized as being fundamentally literary, not literal.
It is time to pull some strands of this argument together before continuing. As the story of Mac Gilla Lugáin suggests, it is important again to emphasize that using ex-divinities in this way as symbols, rhetorical personifications, and allegories was not paganism. It might, in fact, have been a long way from Irish paganism as it actually had once been. Instead it was a kind of meta-mythology for intellectuals, a local analogy to the myriad ways that the classical deities were put to use by poets and thinkers throughout the Middle Ages, and beyond. Unquestionably devout Christian poets regularly used the Greek and Roman gods as figures of speech, allegories, or useful fictions, while scholars massaged Christian monotheism to find a place for the ancient gods as beings of genuine power. Invoking Apollo or the Muses is a classic example of the former process; in the latter case, one thinks of the power medieval thinkers ascribed to the planetary deities and to the goddess Natura, nature personified.169 Irish poets, I suggest, were more than capable of similarly sophisticated strategies with their own native gods, although the measure of actual existence they accorded to Brigit (for example) is probably irrecoverable, and indeed may have varied between individuals.
DEAD GODS
That ends the more speculative phase of my argument in this chapter. The inclusion of the gods within the national pseudohistory—and especially within its culmination, Lebor Gabála—was an attempt to finally uproot an idea which clearly retained currency in some quarters, namely that the Túatha Dé were in some sense more than human, or not human at all, and were still a going concern. One of the words I have bandied about is ‘euhemerism’, the theory that pagan gods had merely been exceptional men and women. But the pseudohistorians left out a central prop of that theory, for while they asserted that the Túatha Dé had indeed been human, nowhere do we find the idea that ignorant pagans had mistakenly worshipped these distinguished and long-dead persons as gods.170
As the influence of the pseudohistorical movement grew we find attempts to distinguish the god-peoples from the pagan gods of the Irish. In the ninth-century Tripartite Life of Patrick, the saint casts down a great idol of the pagan Irish, known as Cenn Crúach, ‘Bloody Head’; the demon who inhabits the image promptly appears, but Patrick curses him and casts him into hell.171 There is no evidence that Cenn Crúach was once a genuine Irish deity. He is never numbered among the Túatha Dé, who (as seen) are never depicted as the recipients of human worship; this, in contrast, is Cenn Crúach’s main function. In the dindshenchas the idol, under the variant name Crom Crúach (‘Bloody Crookback’), is said to have stood on Mag Slécht (‘The Plain of Prostration’) in Co. Cavan, and to have been propitiated with the sacrifice of first-born children in exchange for good yields of milk and grain.172 This sinister figure is plainly inspired by biblical images of bloodthirsty pagan deities like Moloch, just as depictions of druids in early Irish saints’ lives owe more to the biblical priests of Ba’al, opponents of the prophet Elijah, than to native tradition.173
In the eleventh century, not all learned poets seem to have been equally enthuasiatic about the mythopoetic tropes that their profession had embraced. Some filid, after all, identified closely with clerical learning and operated in a monastic milieu: it was perfectly possible to be both a fili and a cleric. Those who took this view emphasized the humanity of the god-peoples trenchantly. The poet Tanaide wrote:
The Túatha Dé Donann, under concealment,
men who did not observe the faith;
young hounds of the territory which does not decay,
men of the flesh and blood of Adam.174
In keeping with this insistence on the Túatha Dé’s humanity, some learned poets described stories about how they had died out. A Middle Irish text, Senchas na Relec (‘The Historical Lore of the Burial Grounds’), expounded the places where the various grandees of the Túatha Dé had been buried.175 Óengus’s great síd-mound at Bruig na Bóinne is identified as their tomb, and the otherworldly hill is re-imagined as a vast vault of ancient bones. In dindshenchas tradition, another of the great mounds of the Boyne necropolis, Knowth, was identified as the burial place of one Bua or Buí, Lug’s wife.176 A dindshenchas poem on the Bruig addresses the landscape around Newgrange itself, putting the gods—its onetime inhabitants—in hell:
You hide a bold and kind brood,
O plain of the son of the swift Dagda [i.e. of Óengus],
who did not perform the worship of the great God;
it is worse for them where they are in torment.
They vanish, you remain:
every believing [i.e. Christian] band rides around you;
as for them, their wisdom has deceived them;
you shall attain a noble age.177
Uncompromising as this is, an even more acid statement in this direction was made by the prolific Flann Mainistrech (d.1056), a scholar-poet whom we know to have been interested in Senchas na Relec. A top scholar of the great monastic school at Monasterboice in Co. Louth (as we saw), his work was not one of the original sources for Lebor Gabála, but was soon incorporated into it.178 Flann is a good example of a clerical fili, much admired for his ability to versify his immense historical scholarship.179 He was deeply embedded within the world of the monastery, and his impatience with the pseudo-pagan trappings and mythological tropes adopted by some professional poets is palpable in his poetry. He has left us a bravura poem which details in thirty-eight stanzas how every member of the Túatha Dé came to an unpleasant end. In my view, it is one of the most peculiar things ever produced in medieval Ireland, its triumphalist vision of the defeat of the pagan gods standing as a weird preecho of Milton’s poem ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, which has the demonic classical deities foisted from their temples by the birth of the saviour.180 Flann’s poem has usually been dismissed as aridly dogmatic—an attempt by a vehement euhemerist to discredit the idea of native gods—but this is to ignore the streak of black humour which runs through it. The poem is as much satire as historical scholarship: each death is ironic and depicts the Túatha Dé as doomed, spiteful, and self-absorbed.
A few examples will serve. Coirpre the Poet, son of Etan, feebly expires of sunstroke—a ray, perhaps, from Christ the ‘Sun of Justice’. Flann has Dían Cécht the physician and Goibnenn the smith—both significantly named in healing charms—die ‘of painful sickness’, while Credne, who deals with precious metalwork, drowns while on a mission to loot gold from Spain. Bé Chuille and Dinann, the sorceresses of the Túatha Dé, are hexed to death by ‘the dusky demons of the air’, while the unlucky Óengus drowns in the mouth of the Boyne. His own mother Bóand, goddess of that river, is clearly powerless to save him.181
Flann’s poem is more subtle than it sounds, partly because it includes some stories which are otherwise unknown or obscure, although they nevertheless are probably traditional. For example, readers will never know why Ainge (or Áine), a daughter of the Dagda, ‘died for the love that she gave to Banba’ (or, possibly, ‘to Ireland’): it is a lost story. Evidence from elsewhere confirms that Flann almost certainly did not invent the story that Lug murdered Cermait Milbél, a son of the Dagda, because of jealousy over his wife. So much for divine imperviousness; it is difficult to imagine that anything like this was part of pre-Christian Irish mythology, but the story may already have been of considerable antiquity by Flann’s day, and may possibly have existed in saga-form.182 Other textual evidence confirms that there were stories of killings among the Túatha Dé; the tale of the sons of Tuirenn is one, as is the burning alive of Midir’s wife Fúamnach by Manannán. But Flann intensifies the violence here, mockingly depicting the gods as a people in the process of tearing themselves apart.183 Flann makes the god-peoples into wayward exempla of envy, rage, jealousy and lust—but most of all he makes them inept, in what may be a calculated rebuke by one fili to his colleagues’ ‘pantheon of skill’. Deeply identified with the pseudohistorical movement and given the admiring title senchaid, ‘historian’, Flann’s didactic agenda in the poem is to assert not only the humanity of the Túatha Dé, but also their ultimate damnation. Flann emphatically puts a Christian framework around the pre-Christian past, which is why the redactors of the ‘Book of Invasions’ drew on his poetry; but he did not hold back from passing judgment upon it.
DANU, DONAND, DANANN
Here we come to a major point. Aficionados of Irish mythology will have noticed that this book so far has avoided using the most famous name for the native pantheon, Túatha Dé Danann, ‘The Peoples of the Goddess Danu’. The reason is that this name is not ancient: it is a development of the central Middle Ages, and is related to the crystallization of the gods’ place in the pseudohistory. Old Irish texts had standardly referred to the kin of the Dagda simply as the ‘god-people’ or ‘god-peoples’ (túath/túatha dé), or sometimes as the ‘god-men’ (fir dé); there are no articles in any of these phrases. But during the 900s a new name—Túatha Dé Donand— came into use, which, by about 1200, had mutated into Túatha Dé Danann, the form familiar to us today.
It is not entirely clear what motivated the development of this new terminology. What can be said is that the new name was transparently the creation of the learned classes, rather than being a popular or folk usage that suddenly spread into the written record. That this new, artificial name rapidly and completely replaced the old one suggests that by the tenth century, talk of ‘god-peoples’ had come to seem problematic. It is likely that the old name túatha dé presented the learned with a double affront: not only did it underline the fact that Óengus, Midir, and so on were pagan gods—a fact the learned had never forgotten, as the glossaries testify—but Túath Dé was also the standard Irish term for the Israelites, the biblical ‘People of God’.184 Quite apart from the fact that it was probably a source of mental dissonance to use identical terms for both God’s chosen people and the pagan divinities, the framers of the national pseudohistory had gone to great lengths to figure the Gaels, not the gods, as the counterparts of the Israelites. Like the Israelites, the story of the ancestral Gaels included both an exodus from Egypt and a meandering journey to a promised land.
FIG. 4.4. The Paps Mountains, Co. Kerry—the breasts of the ‘mother of the Irish gods’? Photo: Gerard Lovett.
Tacking the proper name Donand onto the phrase túatha dé seems to be a method of safely corralling the old gods in the distant past: instead of the disquieting ‘god-peoples’ they were now the ‘peoples of the deity Donand’, more circumscribed because more specific.185 But no trace of narrative tradition about this Donand is found in any source. That the nature and identity of this personage is almost a complete blank suggests that it may have been a deliberate attempt at inducing mental estrangement, redefining the familiar Túatha Dé as distant and difficult. Later, in the eleventh century, Eochaid ua Flainn referred to her in passing as ‘Donand, mother of the gods’; before this it is not even clear that Donand was thought to be female, even though the usual rendering of the phrase in English translates dé, ‘deity’, as ‘goddess’.186
Where, then, did Donand come from, and why do we always take her to be female? The explanation is technical, and two factors are in play. Carey suggests that the ‘Three Gods of Skill’—trí dé dána—are fundamental.187 An original phrase like ‘the people of the gods of skill’ (túatha dé dána) seems to have hybridized with tribal names involving the element Domnann. This form occurs corrupted as Donann, and indeed occurs combined with dé, ‘god’, in the proper name mac dé Domnand, applied to the Fomorian king Indech in ‘The Second Battle of Moytura’: this explains the o- in the first syllable of Donand. This scenario is tentative, but its sheer untidiness lends plausibility in the context of the furiously creative redaction of tradition undertaken by learned personnel in the tenth century.188
This still does not tell us who this Donand was imagined to be. Celtic scholars have traditionally striven to identify her with a goddess named ‘Ana’, mentioned in ‘Cormac’s Glossary’, around the year 900. This figure—mater deorum hibernensium, ‘the mother of the Irish gods’, according to the glossary—is certainly impressive: the glossary tells us that spectacular twin hills near Killarney in Co. Kerry were regarded as her breasts, ‘as the story goes’—ut fabula fertur—quite understandably, one might add, evoking as they do the form of a vast recumbent woman (Fig. 4.4). Even more strikingly, Ana ‘used to feed the gods well’, though whether with her cooking or her breast milk is not clear.189
The air of plausibility in all this is tantalizing. Cormac’s ‘Ana’ is clearly a latinization of a name which would have been Anu in Old Irish (Anann in the genitive case), and technically the nominative of the name Danann should have been the similar-looking *Danu. Add to all this the fact that river names across Celtic Europe contain the root *dan- (the Danube is the most famous example), and that Indian mythology has a goddess of heavenly waters named Dānu, and it is little wonder that scholars have enthusiastically set about reconstructing an ancient Celtic and Indo-European river-goddess of maternal bounty.190
However, a series of major difficulties stand in the way of this evocative picture. First, equating the glossary’s Ana with *Danu is tricky, because nowhere is Danu actually attested. The earliest form of the name attached to the Túatha Dé was plainly Donand, with an -o-; the form Danann was a later development. If this name were connected to Cormac’s Ana we might expect the -a- to have been there from the start. Also our texts are unanimous that the nominative case of these names was identical to the genitive—it is always Donand, Danann—and not the required *Donu, *Danu, which are reconstructions by modern philologists.191 Finally, Ana has no connection with rivers or water in the glossary entry.
This tangle indicates two things: first, the origins and development of the mysterious Donand are not fully recoverable, and secondly the idea that Irish paganism knew a divine matriarch named Danu cannot now be maintained. The compilers of ‘Cormac’s Glossary’ may have been quite correct that there had once been a goddess called Anu or Ana associated with the Paps mountains, since it beggars belief to think that the pre-Christian Irish would not have associated so impressively breasted a landscape with a female deity. On the other hand, it is suspicious that so important a figure as the glossary’s ‘mother of the Irish gods’ should go unmentioned in the early sagas, teeming as they are with former gods and goddesses. This raises the possibility that Ana/Anu may have simply been a local Munster figure, less familiar or even unknown elsewhere in Ireland.
Michael Clarke goes further, and suggests that the lofty description of Ana/Anu in ‘Cormac’s Glossary’ may itself owe more to medieval learning than to pagan religion, and result from a monastic scholar musing learnedly on the goddess Cybele, mother of the classical gods. Irish intellectuals knew of Cybele from Virgil’s Aeneid, where she puts in a brief appearance in Book 7, as well as from other sources. Clarke says that ‘it is possible to posit a precise chain of influence from Servius’ Vergilian commentary and the Etymologies of Isidore, two texts that we know influenced the learned compilers of the Irish glossaries. Servius notes that Cybele of Mount Ida is the same as Earth, which is “the mother of the gods”, mater deorum.’192 He also quotes Isidore, Irish scholars’ favourite source for the learning of Mediterranean antiquity, who describes Cybele in striking terms:
They imagine the same one as both Earth and Great Mother… She is called Mother, because she gives birth to many things; Great, because she generates food; Kindly, because she nourishes all living things through her fruits.193
This, as Clarke notes, is so close to the Irish glossary entry that it is hard to avoid the suspicion that the ‘personality’ of the goddess Ana—‘who used to feed the gods well’—has been cooked up in imitation of the classical deity. That Clarke’s analysis may be right is suggested by a distinctive oddity in the ‘Ana’ entry: while traces of the activities of divine beings are constantly detected in the landscape in Irish tradition, nowhere else is a natural feature described as part of a divinity’s body. This is rare even for the better-attested gods of classical tradition, with the signal exception of the great mother-goddesses of the eastern Mediterranean, of whom Cybele, the ‘Mountain Mother’, came to be the most prominent. Ana/Anu is simply not on the same scale or plane of representation as síd-beings like Midir or Óengus, and it is telling that the Paps of Ana were imagined (by the early thirteenth century at the latest) as a pair of síd-mounds, the separate and unconnected dwellings of different otherworldly rulers.194 (It so happens that we pay a disconcerting visit to the inside of one of her breasts in the following chapter.)195 This discrepancy could be accounted for by seeing Ana as a remnant of an older, more chthonian kind of divinity, though there is no way to prove this; equally, Clarke could be correct in arguing that she is a invention of the early Middle Ages. It is worth noting that his view does not explain where the name ‘Ana/Anu’ comes from, however: perhaps it once attached to some genuine legendary figure associated with the Paps, and that this was all the compilers of the glossary knew of her. Certainly synthesizing a mother-goddess by using information drawn from the classical Cybele might reflect Munster scholars’ desire to dignify their province by crediting it with a grand mythological personage. Yet again—in what is emerging as a leitmotif of this book—an apparently plausible pre-Christian deity evaporates in front of us, just at the moment we seemed to have caught a convincing glimpse.
Clarke’s argument has alarming implications for the integrity of the Irish pantheon. If Irish men of learning were capable of cross-cultural mapping of this kind—and it seems clear that they were—then the possibility that the Irish gods were influenced by those of Greece and Rome during the medieval period must always be borne in mind. In other words, the more we know about early Irish learned culture, the less we can say with confidence about ancient Irish paganism. Tellingly, Ana/Anu/Anann becomes more shadowy as the Middle Ages progress: we find her identified with the war-goddesses and also with Ériu, or Ireland, as though the learned were unsure about where to place her.
The coinage Túatha Dé Donand distinguished the gods from the Israelites and subtly took the edge off their divinity, but at the expense of making an oddly insubstantial goddess central to the pantheon. The effect is a feeling of disconnection or lacuna. Nor does the ‘Mother of the Irish Gods’ ever meet her counterpart, the ‘Supreme Father’, the Dagda. Indeed the Dagda, vividly characterized in the sagas and certainly a genuine ex-deity, somehow contrasts with and evades the shadowy mother-goddess, attested only in the recondite, Latin-tinged lore of glossaries and the poetry of learned pseudohistorians. Bold but unconvincing attempts have been made by scholars to identify our elusive goddess with the Morrígan, with whom the Dagda is observed boisterously coupling in ‘The Second Battle of Moytura’; this is presumably out of a sense that the pantheon’s ‘Great Mother’ and ‘Great Father’ belong together.196 It is preferable, rather, to resist the lure of reconstructing lost myths and instead to see their failure to connect as symbolic of the tension between the inherited and the artificial in the new mythology of the pseudohistorical school.
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
Like the unknown first compiler of Lebor Gabála, my role in this chapter has been to effect a synthesis out of a mass of data originally expounded by others, and it is time to consider some larger patterns.
Scholars have long lamented that Irish myth is not really a mythology in the usual Indo-European way: archaic elements have been inextricably interwoven with biblical and medieval material. This mythopoetic tendency accelerated remarkably in the late tenth and eleventh centuries, with the result that in this period ‘Irish mythology’ actually came into existence as a distinct cultural category. The great edifice of the national pseudohistory allotted to the gods their own era of eminence in the deep past, with a list of personnel and a clear timeline; it was at this point too that they acquired their lasting name, Túatha Dé Danann.
Ecclesiastical literati in the period had become more and more interested in the lore of the filid, and as they built up a narrative of the national past, they foraged from the professional poets’ genealogies, images, and ideas about the native gods. The filid in turn—anxious about losing their distinctiveness and being absorbed into clerical ranks—may increasingly have begun to use the gods to personify and allegorize aspects of their own intellectual curriculum, as well as to underscore the secular status of their profession.
The effect of the pseudohistory was paradoxical. On the one hand, it gave solidity to the fluid ontology of the gods by defining them as human magic-workers and tracing their descent from Noah. As intrinsically native figures, with no connection to the Bible, working the gods into the pseudohistory was a remarkable achievement; Ireland was now furnished with a new national myth that fused the natural and supernatural. On the other hand, the result was unwieldy and unstable, continuously expanding by the copious accretion of authorities.
The influence of the doctrines of Lebor Gabála on Irish letters, though substantial, was patchy. The idea that the gods had died out (or were among the damned) never took hold in most narrative genres, and some simply ignored it. The whole point of the synthetic history had been to connect the story of Ireland’s ancient past to that of the rest of the world, but the native god-peoples were unavoidably parochial: until the nineteenth century no one outside Ireland and Scotland took any notice of the Túatha Dé Danann. A case in point is the twelfth-century Cambro-Norman cleric Gerald of Wales, who gives a rundown of the Irish account of the past in his Topographia Hiberniae (‘Topography of Ireland’). He sensibly asks how anything could be known about the fate of Cessair, because, after all, she and all her company drowned. ‘Perhaps some record of these events was found inscribed on stone or a tile, as we read was the case with the art of music before the Flood’, he drily comments.197 Gerald clearly had access to a chronology of the invasions because he describes Cessair, Partholón, Nemed, the Fir Bolg, and the Milesians in full. In contrast, he passes over the Túatha Dé Danann so quickly that one could miss them altogether: they are described as ‘another branch of the descendants of Nemedius’—Nemed—and that is it.198 All the adventures and achievements of the god-peoples are compressed into a single colourless clause. Gerald clearly felt the historical narrative of the Irish past was worth recording, but it seems he could summon up no interest in the doings of the Túatha Dé. To an outsider, the Irish gods were so native as to be beneath notice—a pattern that prevailed for centuries to come.
1 This is a vast topic; the best introduction to the intellectual background is M. Herbert, ‘Crossing Historical and Literary Boundaries: Irish Written Culture Around the Year 1000’, in P. Sims-Williams and G. A. Williams (eds.), Crossing Boundaries/Croesi Ffiniau (Aberystwyth, 2007) [= CMCS 53/4 (2007)], 87–101; see also L&IEMI, 130.
2 A substantial recent study is Schlüter, History or Fable?
3 On the increasing importance of chronology in Irish learning during the tenth century, see M. Ní Mhaonaigh, ‘The literature of medieval Ireland, 800–1200’, CHIL, i., 46, and P. J. Smith, ‘Early Irish Historical Verse, the Evolution of a Genre’, in P. Ní Chatháin & M. Richter (eds.), Ireland and Europe in the Early Middle Ages: Texts and Transmission/Irland und Europa im früheren Mittelalter: Texte und Überlieferung (Dublin, 2002), 326–41, 335.
4 ECI, 200–1.
5 Literally ‘the book of the taking/settling/conquest of Ireland’. ‘The Book of Invasions’ is conventional in English, but Lebor Gabála is also common and I use both here. Best introductions both by John Carey: The Irish National Origin-Legend: Synthetic Pseudohistory [Quiggin Pamphlets on the Sources of Mediaeval Gaelic History 1, 1994], and ‘Lebor Gabála and the legendary history of Ireland’, in H. Fulton (ed.), Medieval Celtic Literature and Society (Dublin, 2005), 32–48. The (very problematic) edn. is Lebor Gabála Érenn, ed. & trans. R. A. S. Macalister (5 vols., London, 1938–56, repr. London, 1993), henceforth LGE. John Carey (A new introduction to Lebor Gabála Érenn, the Book of the Taking of Ireland, edited and translated by R. A. Stewart Macalister (Dublin, 1993)) assesses Macalister’s edn., while R. M. Scowcroft (‘Leabhar Gabhála, Part I: The Growth of the Text’, Ériu 38 (1987), 81–142) offers a helpful skeleton key to using it (139–42). Carey has himself produced an indispensable critical edition and translation of Recension I (‘Lebar Gabála, Recension I’ [unpublished PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1983]); the general reader will find it easier to get hold of his revised translation of the same recension in CHA, 226–71.
6 The diagrams downplay the differences between versions, especially over the various time-spans. Lebor Gabála is probably the single most complex work to survive from medieval Ireland: it continually attracted new material, so that within a century of its composition it had already been recast into three different recensions, plus a welter of subrecensions, each of which added, subtracted, and rearranged material, sometimes cross-pollinating with each other. This is evidence of the treatise’s immediate impact and popularity, but as a result it has proved impossible for scholars to edit a single ‘original’ text of Lebor Gabála, and Macalister’s five-volume edition is simultaneously indispensible and unusable. Further, the tract’s mutations are so technical as to be impossible to summarize for the general reader. Extremely briefly, each recension of Lebor Gabála grew from the conflation of older ones, and the text(s) grew idiosyncratically from copy to copy. The recensions relate as follows. The earliest, c.1075, seems to have been a truncated version known as the Míniugud. Then, apparently at much the same time, Recension I emerged, which added a selection of material to the Míniugud and was closely related to it. Recension II is a revision of Recension I, completed very soon after Recension I itself; not only did Recension II borrow passages from a version of Míniugud, it also attached the whole Míniugud text as an appendix. Recensions I and II (in various sub-versions) were then repeatedly expanded by borrowings from each other and from external sources, until they were eventually fused together as Recension III, perhaps at the end of the twelfth century. An early modern version by Mícheál Ó Cléirigh comprises Recension IV, which is not relevant here. The details of how these four recensions are embodied in the surviving manuscript witnesses are complex and cumbersome. See Carey, ‘Lebar Gabála, Recension I’, 19–20, and R. M. Scowcroft, ‘Mediaeval Recensions of the Lebor Gabála’, in J. Carey (ed.), Lebor Gabála Érenn: textual History and Pseudohistory (London, 2009), 1–20.
7 See E. Nic Cárthaigh, ‘Surviving the Flood: Revenants and Antediluvian Lore in Medieval Irish Texts’, in K. Cawsey & J. Harris, Transmission and Transformation in the Middle Ages: Texts and Contexts (Dublin, 2007), 40–64.
8 Medieval learned tradition made Japhet the ancestor of the peoples of Europe—later antiquarian scholars sometimes termed the languages of Europe the ‘Japhetic’ tongues after him—and the Irish considered themselves no exception: all subsequent inhabitants of the island were said to be of Japhet’s line.
9 Tuán is mentioned in Recension I but this may be a later addition; otherwise he is not known in Lebor Gabála outside the composite Recension III. See J. Carey, ‘Scél Tuáin meic Chairill’, Ériu 35 (1984), 93–111, fn. 28.
10 See K. McCone, ‘Notes on the Text and Authorship of the Early Irish Bee-Laws’, CMCS 8 (Winter, 1984), 45–50, at 48–9, reviewing Bechbretha, ed. & trans. Charles-Edwards & Kelly, in which the term nemed is discussed on 107–9.
11 See S. Rodway, ‘Mermaids, Leprechauns, and Fomorians: a Middle Irish Account of the Descendants of Cain’, CMCS 59 (Summer, 2010), 1–17, and M. Clarke, ‘The lore of the monstrous races in the developing text of the Irish Sex aetates mundi’, CMCS 63 (Summer, 2012), 15–50. John Carey (‘Lebar Gabála, Recension I’, 57) notes that the Fir Bolg seem to somehow summon the Fomorians when they begin to alter the Irish landscape.
12 This itself was an idea of some antiquity, as old as the seventh century; it is found in the central core of that fountainhead of quasi-scientific vernacular grammatica in Ireland, ‘The Scholar’s Primer’ (Auraicept na n-Éces). For the text of the episode, see A. Ahlqvist, The Early Irish Linguist: An Edition of the Canonical Part of the Auraicept na nÉces (Helsinki, 1983), 47, lines 2–10; see also J. Carey, ’The Ancestry of Fénius Farsaid’, Celtica 21 (1990), 104–12.
13 M. Clarke, ‘Linguistic Education and Literary Creativity in Medieval Ireland’, in P. Ronan (ed.), Cahiers de l’ Institut de Linguistique et des Sciences des Langues 38 (Lausanne, 2013), 37–70, 50.
14 This dimension of the text’s deep structure has been admirably examined by Scowcroft, who notes that these themes were also commonplaces of medieval Irish political reality; see ‘Leabhar Gabhála, Part II: The Growth of the Tradition’, Ériu 39 (1988), 1–66, at 21.
15 L&IEMI, 145.
16 See Carey, ‘Lebar Gabála, Recension I’, 17–20.
17 This dating for Eochaid ua Flainn depends on taking him to be the same man as the similarly-named Eochaid ua Flannucáin, a long-standing view which, while not proven, seems to be gaining ground; see Carey, ‘Lebar Gabála, Recension I’, 50–1, and (more recently) M. Ó Mainnín, ‘Eochaid Ua Flainn agus Eochaid Ua Flannucáin: Súil Úr ar an bhFianaise’, Léann 2 (2009) 75–105.
18 Scholars term this lost—or submerged—tract ‘α’, and is one of the primary two branches descended from a single canon, known as ω: proto-α must therefore be before 1004, Eochaid’s obit. This α formed the core of both Míniugud and Recension I, though not of Recension II, which accessed ω via a different intermediary.
19 All identifying details about Tanaide are late and problematic. He may have belonged to a branch of the Uí Maelchonaire and to have held the ardollamnacht, the ‘toppoethood’, of Connaught; see Carey, ‘Lebar Gabála, Recension I’, 52–4. The date of Tanaide’s floruit is difficult to determine beyond it belonging somewhere in the first three quarters of the eleventh century; note Scowcroft’s scepticism, ‘Leabhar Gabhála, Part II’, 4 fn.6.
20 The translation is John Carey’s (CHA, 275); earlier trans. and original text in his ‘Lebar Gabála, Recension I’, 294–5, 138.
21 The poets wrote in a mode known as dán direch, ‘strict-metre syllabic poetry’, and often in variations on a fiendish seven-syllable metre called deibhidhe, which required complex internal and final rhyme and alliterative ornament.
22 On Gilla Coemáin (or Cóemáin) mac Gilla Samthainne note P. J. Smith, Three Historical Poems ascribed to Gilla-Cóemáin: a Critical Edition of the Work of an Eleventh Century Irish Scholar [Studien und Texte zur Keltologie 8] (Münster, 2007).
23 See Carey, ‘Lebar Gabála, Recension I’, 54, and M. Ní Mhaonaigh, ‘Flann Mainistrech’, in S. Duffy (ed.), Medieval Ireland: an encyclopedia (Abingdon & New York, 2005), 180–1. Nineteen of Flann’s poems survive, amongst other works, for which see L&IEMI, 139, fn.51.
24 Carey, The Irish National Origin-Legend, 23.
25 B. Jaski, ‘“We are of the Greeks in our origin”: new perspectives on the Irish origin legend’, CMCS 46 (2003), 1–53.
26 See J. Carey, ‘The Ancestry of Fénius Farsaid’, Celtica 21 (1990), 108.
27 This is the Historia Brittonum (‘History of the Britons’), discussed below, 142–3. For Míl (sometimes Míled), see Scowcroft, ‘Leabhar Gabhála, Part II’, 19.
28 It is sometimes excitably claimed that genetic analysis—which shows a link between the inhabitants of Ireland and those of the present day Basque country—points to the historical truth of Lebor Gabála. As the idea of the Ireland-Spain connection can be conclusively shown to be a learned development of the seventh century, this is a coincidence—particularly as the same genetic markers are also very common in Britain. For a witty recent account by a scholar au fait with the archaeology, genetic analysis, and medieval literature, see J. P. Mallory, The Origins of the Irish (London & New York, 2013), especially chapter seven.
29 The most detailed statement about the development of the various recensions and the relation of their manuscript witnesses is Scowcroft, ‘Leabhar Gabhála, Part I’.
30 Though note J. Carey, ‘Native elements in Irish pseudohistory’, in D. Edel, Cultural Identity and Cultural Integration: Ireland and Europe in the Early Middle Ages (Dublin, 1995), 45–60.
31 See ECI, 580, for evidence that the Irish in the earliest period did not think of themselves as one people with a single common ancestor, underscoring the fact that the pseudohistory is a medieval development.
32 See Carey, Irish National Origin-Legend, 9–10; see CHA, 56–7 for these early poems.
33 Elva Johnston points out that the fiction of descent from Míl as a common ancestor became more and more central in the ninth and tenth centuries AD, and can be seen as a response to the presence of the Vikings in Ireland. For the first time the Irish were having to live at close quarters with groups who were culturally and ethnically different from themselves, and among Ireland’s elites this constellated a sense of collective identity in the form of shared ancestry; see L&IEMI, 86–7.
34 Máel Mura, learned poet and historian, is an excellent and early example of preoccupations emerging in monastic circles. He was a member of the community of Othain (hence Othna), now Fahan, Co. Donegal; for his life, see J. Carey, ‘In search of Mael Muru Othna’, in E. Purcell & P. MacCotter, et al. (eds.) Clerics, Kings and Vikings: Essays on Medieval Ireland in Honour of Donnchadh Ó Corráin (Dublin, 2015), 429–39, and for the poem see L&IEMI, 129 fn. 203, and Scowcroft, ‘Leabhar Gabhála, Part II’, 8–9; no modern translation and commentary upon this crucial work exists, though a diplomatic Irish text can be found in R. I. Best, et al. (eds.), The Book of Leinster, formerly Lebar na Núachongbála [6 vols.] (Dublin, 1954–83), iii., 516–23.
35 Scowcroft, ‘Leabhar Gabhála, Part II’, 8–9.
36 Scowcroft, ‘Leabhar Gabhála, Part II’, 9, fn.19.
37 This includes ‘The Second Battle of Moytura’ if, as John Carey notes, we remove the pseudohistorical preamble about the origins of the Túatha Dé, which we know to be a later addition tacked onto the saga because its is clearly borrowed from Lebor Gabála; see G. Murphy, ‘Notes on Cath Maige Tuired’, Éigse 7 (1953–5), 195, and J. Carey, ‘Myth and Mythography in Cath Maige Tuired’, SC 24 (1989), 53–69, at 54. The first mention of them as invaders seems to be Scél Tuáin, c.900; see below, 147–8.
38 Tellingly, material about Íth—normally thought of as Míl’s father—is also found attached to Partholón, supposed to have lived thousands of years earlier. This strongly suggests that the story of Partholón had budded off from that of Míl.
39 Scowcroft, ‘Leabhar Gabhála, Part II’, 58.
40 Carey, Irish National Origin-Legend, 8.
41 See Charles-Edwards’ comments, W&TB, 437–8; see also L&IEMI, 85.
42 peritissimi Scottorum: see Historia Brittonum, ed. Th. Mommsen, Chronica Minora Saec. IV. V. VI. VII. [Monumenta Germaniae Historica AA 13] (Berlin, 1898), iii., 156. Useful text and translation in Nennius, British History, and the Welsh Annals, ed. & trans. J. Morris (London, 1980).
43 Later he does mention one Builc, having clearly misunderstood the ‘bags’ of the Fir Bolg as a personal name.
44 The learned Gilla Cóemáin can be observed changing his mind about Cessair, for example.
45 J. Carey, ‘The Origin and Development of the Cessair Legend’, Éigse 22 (1987), 37–48.
46 Scowcroft, ‘Leabhar Gabhála, Part II’, 29–30.
47 See G. Murphy, ‘Notes on Cath Maige Tuired’, Éigse 7 (1953–5), 191–8.
48 ‘Cormac’s Glossary’, c.900, gives an anecdote about the craft-gods Goibniu, Credne, and Luchta forging weapons for the battle, and assigns it to the senchus, ‘historical lore’ of Ireland: this may well be around the same time as the original composition of ‘The Second Battle’; Sanas Cormaic, ed. K. Meyer, Anecdota from Irish Manuscripts, ed. O. Bergin, R. I. Best, K. Meyer, & J. G. O’Keefe (Halle, 1912), iv., 83–4.
49 And which was effective; it may even have reactivated anxiety about gods as pagan figures, since Carey (‘Myth and Mythography’, 64, fn.57) notes that Núadu drops out as a personal name after the ninth to tenth centuries, ‘perhaps due to its “remythologization”’ in the saga. On the other hand, Óengus—equally once the name of a pagan god—continued to be popular.
50 Scowcroft, ‘Leabhar Gabhála, Part II’, 35–6.
51 This is ‘The Battle of Moytura at Cong’—‘Cath Maige Tuired Cunga’, ed. & trans. J. Fraser, Ériu 8 (1915), 1–63. The name reflects a rather desperate attempt to distinguish the first and second battles by relocating the first to a different Moytura, near Cong in Co. Mayo. The belatedness of the tradition of the ‘First Battle’ is underscored by the fact that it is alluded to in a text called ‘The Poem of the Forty Questions’ (Dúan in Chetharchat Cest), a series of abstruse mythological posers written in the eleventh century. This seems to be the first mention of the ‘First Battle’ outside the Lebor Gábala tradition, and the whole point (tellingly) is that the answers were not mainstream knowledge. See ‘Das Gedicht der Vierzig Fragen von Eochaid ua Cerin’, ed. & German trans. R. Thurneysen, ZCP 13 (1921) 130–6, 132, 135.
52 Details of manuscripts on this point in Scowcroft, ‘Leabhar Gabhála, Part I’, 109–10.
53 LGE, iv., 106, 108 (text); trans. here by Carey, CHA, 252–3, slightly altered; text in Carey, ‘Lebar Gabála, Recension I’, 129–30.
54 E. Hogan, Onomasticon Goedelicum . . . (Dublin, 1910), 289–90.
55 Or demons; Isidore (Etymologiae, 8.xi, 16–17) had associated fallen angels with atmospheric murkiness and imagined them as imprisoned for all time in the ‘lower air’; see below, 264.
56 LGE, iv., 138 (text), 139 (trans.).
57 See, for example, C. Saunders, Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval Romance (Woodbridge, 2010), 109–11.
58 See Scowcroft, ‘Leabhar Gabhála, Part I’, 109–10.
59 Translation by Carey, ‘Scél Tuáin meic Chairill’, 106; Irish text 102. For the phrase (Túatha) Dé and Andé (literally ‘gods’ and ‘non-gods’) see below, 168–9.
60 Trans. Carey, CHA, 254–5; text in Carey, ‘Lebar Gabála, Recension I’, 133–4, with his earlier trans., 289–90.
61 The earliest surviving version of Recension I, that in the Book of Leinster, does not mention the cities or sages, and of the treasures alludes only to the Stone of Fál. The textual background to the ‘four treasures’ tradition is complex, though the actual data involved is consistent. There are three versions. The first is that in the various manuscript versions of Recensions I (though, as said, not the earliest), II and III of Lebor Gabála itself, Scowcroft’s Recensions a, b, and c; see Scowcroft, ‘Growth of the Text’, 110. The second account of the treasures forms the preamble to the extant Middle Irish redaction of ‘The Battle of Moytura’ (CMT, 24, 25), which clearly draws on an interpolated version of Recension I (see Carey, ‘Myth and Mythography’, 54). The third account is a short prose anecdote and poem found in the Yellow Book of Lecan (c.1400) and elsewhere. It uniquely identifies the god-peoples’ northern home as Lochlann, which sometimes means Scandinavia and sometimes a more otherworldly or mythologized locale; see ‘The Four Jewels of the Tuatha Dé Danann’, ed. & trans. V. Hull, ZCP 18 (1930), 73–89.
62 This is from the version of Recension I in the fifteenth-century Book of Fermoy (LGE, iv., 106, 107). In some cases the accents are uncertain.
63 That said, the lúin—a legendary spear belonging to the Ulster hero Celtchair mac Uthechar—is strongly reminiscent of the spear of Lug, and may have inspired it. It appears in the originally ninth-century tale ‘The Phantom’s Frenzy’ (Baile in Scáil), for which see I&G, 16; we are told ‘it is the island of Fál from which it was brought.’ Fál became an alternative name for Ireland itself, but this passage implies that Fál is somewhere else, perhaps the Fomorian-inhabited Fál(gae) identified with the Isle of Man in the early text ‘The Siege of the Men of Fálgae’ (Forfess Fer Fálgae) (I&G, 32–3). Celtchair’s lúin is often wielded by other heroes; it is mentioned in a poem written in the mid-tenth century by Cináed ua hArtacáin and makes a vivid appearance in two tenth- or eleventhcentury sagas, ‘The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel’ and ‘The Intoxication of the Ulstermen’. ‘The Destruction’ alleges that the lúin was discovered ‘at the Battle of Moytura’, which may have inspired the tradition of the spear of Lug, most prominent of the Túatha Dé in that battle; see DDDH, 170, 207.
64 See the comments of Charles-Edwards, ECI, 200–1.
65 Cathrach—the word used for the ‘cities’ in the text—is the plural of cathair, the normal term for a monastic town.
66 See comments of E. A. Gray, ‘Cath Maige Tuired: Myth and Structure (1–24)’, Éigse 18 (1980–1), 189.
67 Kim McCone made the brilliant observation that the inspiration behind the tradition may have been biblical: in Judges 18 the Israelite Tribe of Dan (a name reminiscent of the standard name for the Irish gods, ‘Túatha Dé Danann’) take four cult objects from the house of Micah, just before the invasion of the Promised Land; as they are, as a tribe, prone to lapses into idolatry, their situation closely parallels that of the Túatha Dé. See K. McCone, ‘A Tale of Two Ditties: Poet and Satirist in Cath Maige Tuired’, in Ó Corráin et al. (eds.), Sages, Saints and Storytellers, 143.
68 See L&IEMI, 127, for fir léginn and the supremacy of particular monastic institutions, and 110, fn.112 for this representation of druids.
69 LGE, iv., 293; -ias in Primitive Irish was the characteristic ending of the genitive singular of feminine -ia stem nouns and of the nominative of masculine -io stems; it was common on ogam inscriptions because ‘[the stone] of X son of Y’ was the standard form for such inscriptions. But note also Macalister’s point that biblical names in -iah (Isaiah, Jeremiah) ended in -ias in the Vulgate, so the names like Semias and Uiscias might have felt simultaneously Old Testament and archaically native.
70 Because these are invented names, none of these interpretations are definite; at best one can guess the associations the words might have set up in the minds of contemporary readers.
71 For this knowledge in Ireland, see M. Smythe, Understanding the Universe in Seventh-Century Ireland (Woodbridge, 1996), 47–87.
72 A brave attempt to find coherent symbolism behind this tradition is provided by F. Le Roux, ‘Les Isles au Nord du Monde’, Hommages à Albert Grenier (3 vols., Brussels, 1962), ii., 1051–62, at 1060.
73 Geoffrey of Monmouth, Vita Merlini, ed. & trans. B. Clarke, Life of Merlin (Cardiff, 1973), 100–3, 206–8.
74 LGE, iv., 112–27.
75 Originally a separate anecdote; see ‘A Tuatha Dé Miscellany’, ed. & trans. J. Carey, BBCS 39 (1992), 24–45.
76 Note Julius Caesar’s statement that the Gauls believed they descended from the god Dis Pater, ‘Father Dis’ (P. Mac Cana, Celtic Mythology (London, 1968, revised edn. London, 1996), 36–9). Also note that the idea existed that some (subject) peoples were descended from the Fir Bolg, predecessors of the god-peoples—a clear sign of the gods’ late integration into pseudohistorical tradition; see L&IEMI, 43–84, 88.
77 See discussion of this tale below, 260–8.
78 LGE, iv., 122 (text), 123 (trans.).
79 Scowcroft is undoubtedly right that oral tradition among the literati is a likely source for this material, but we cannot wholly rule out a very early written tradition; as he notes, bare genealogical material of this sort looks much the same whether it is transmitted orally or in writing. See Scowcroft, ‘Leabhar Gabhála, Part I’, 93–4.
80 See CMT, 119–21. There was uncertainly around the name Etan: sometimes it is found in the form Étan, or even Étaín.
81 Ériu comes from *(p)iweriu, ‘fat/abundant [land]’, on which see G. R. Isaac, ‘A note on the name of Ireland in Irish and Welsh’, Ériu 59 (2009), 49–55; for Banba, see E. P. Hamp, ‘Varia I: 4. Banba again’, Ériu 24 (1973), 169–71. ‘Banba’ presumably referred originally to the rolling lands of northern Leinster, precisely the area in which influence from the neighbouring island was strong in the Roman and sub–Roman period.
82 S. P. MacLeod, ‘Mater Deorum Hibernensium: Identity and Cross-Correlation in Early Irish Mythology’, PHCC 18/19 (1998/1999), 340, fn.4.
83 Sanas Cormaic, ed. Meyer, 82.
84 The word can just mean ‘conflict, battle’, from a root *nanti- ‘be bold, aggressive’, to do with ‘living force’, probably related to nia, ‘champion, warrior’; see J. Vendryes, Lexique étymologique de l’irlandais ancien: lettres MNOP (Dublin, 1960), N7, and F. O. Lindeman, ‘Varia VI’, Ériu 50 (1999), 183–4.
85 ‘Cormac’s Glossary’ records further detail under the head phrase Bé Néit, ‘Néit’s Wife’, and puns on her name, Nemain, ‘Poison’, saying: ‘Néit’s Wife, i.e. Néit was her husband’s name; his woman was Nemain; that couple were indeed poisonous (neimnech)’ (Sanas Cormaic, ed. Meyer, 17). The same source (16) tells us that the phrase Bé Néit fort, ‘Néit’s Wife [be] upon you!’, was an Irish curse, perhaps much as people used to say ‘To the devil with you!’ There seems no reason to disbelieve this, and the expression might genuinely be very old.
86 See ECI, 631–2.
87 The role of the filid in Lebor Gabála has been noted; see Scowcroft, ‘Leabhar Gabhála, Part II’, 12; Johnston (L&IEMI, 138) notes that coimgne (perhaps ‘historical synchronization’) was part of role of the filid.
88 Useful discussion by L. Breatnach, ‘Poets and Poetry’, in K. McCone & K. Simms (eds.), Progress in Medieval Irish Studies (Maynooth, 1996), 65–78, at 76–7.
89 On this anecdote, see Kim McCone’s comments in PPCP, 90–2, 96–8.
90 On these see S. Mac Airt, ‘Filidecht and coimgne’, Ériu 18 (1958), 139–52.
91 L&IEMI, 144.
92 I draw here on Johnston’s analysis in L&IEMI, 134–62; T. Ó Cathasaigh, ‘Aspects of Memory and Identity in early Ireland’, in Eska (ed.), Narrative in Celtic tradition, 201–16; also L. Breatnach, ‘Satire, Praise, and the Early Irish Poet’, Ériu 56 (2006), 63–84.
93 L&IEMI, 156.
94 Language, especially metrics, is the classic example; a lot of filidecht involved what we would call linguistics, for which the medieval term was grammatica. The Irish language changed radically between 400 and 600, so that whatever linguistic conventions a pagan praise-poet followed at the turn of the fifth century must have differed in precise detail (though perhaps not so much in overall ‘feel’), to those followed by his Christian counterpart at the turn of the seventh.
95 L&IEMI, 147.
96 P. Russell, ‘Moth, toth, traeth: sex, gender and the early Irish grammarian’, in D. Cram, et al. (eds.), History of Linguistics 1996: selected papers from the Seventh International Congress on the History of the Language Sciences, Oxford, 12–17 September 1996 (Amsterdam, 1996), 203–16. Russell points out that etymologically the three terms are coarsely genital—interestingly so, given some sagas’ emphasis on the gods’ sexuality. The observation is significantly ascribed to Amairgen, legendary proto-fili.
97 I owe this point to Elva Johnston, L&IEMI, 163.
98 For the grade of deán, see L. Breatnach, Uraicecht na Ríar: the poetic grades in early Irish law (Dublin, 1987), 33–6, 39–41, 82, 99. Useful discussion of bardic grades in P. Sims-Williams & E. Poppe, ‘Medieval Irish literary theory and criticism’, in A. Minnis & I. Johnson, (eds.) The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (Cambridge, 2005), ii., 293–8.
99 L&IEMI, 162.
100 L&IEMI, 147.
101 Mythopoeia was to a degree always part of the learning of the filid; a good example is the ‘Cauldron of Poesy’, a text written c.700–50, which describes how poetic inspiration comes from the síd-mounds and (simultaneously) from God; see ‘The Cauldron of Poesy’ ed. & trans. L. Breatnach, Ériu 32 (1981), 45–93, at 67–9.
102 For Credne < *kride(s)nios, ‘Skilled One’, see E. P. Hamp, ‘Old Irish Credne, cerd, Welsh cerdd’, in J. T Koch, J. Carey, & P.-Y. Lambert (eds.), Ildánach, Ildírech: A Festschrift for Proinsias Mac Cana (Andover, 1999), 49–51.
103 Carey, ‘Myth and Mythography’, 57.
104 Carey remarks that ‘The notion of a “Fomorian Elatha” is due to the reinterpretation of Bres in CMT’ (‘Myth and Mythography’, 64, fn.44).
105 Lucid summary of points of doubt by N. Kissane in DIB, under ‘Brigit’. There is still another even more shadowy Bríg, identified as a female judge and counsellor in legal texts. It is not at all certain that she was imagined to be supernatural, and so she may or may not be the same as the daughter(s) of the Dagda; see Kelly, A Guide to Early Irish Law, 55, 187, 358.
106 CMT, 56, 57. The account contains a haunting line: ‘Bríg came and keened for her son. At first she shrieked; in the end, she wept.’ See ‘A Tuatha Dé Miscellany’, ed. Carey, 28, 30, 33–4, for Bríg/Brigit as the inventor of meaningful but non-verbal forms of speech (keening, whistling ‘as a signal at night’). The same source tells us that with this act Brigit invented keening, a form of vocal lament thought to be characteristically female. One wonders if the filid associated this with their own responsibility for poems of lament and mourning.
107 Sanas Cormaic, ed. Meyer, 15. Some manuscripts of the ‘Glossary’ add that Brigit derives from breoshaigit, ‘fiery arrow’, but this is a typical medieval etymology and not actually true; the real origin of the name is Celtic *Brigantī, meaning ‘Exalted One’.
108 See below, 251–2.
109 See CMT, 97, and EIH&M, 308ff.
110 See below, 260–8.
111 Carey, ‘Myth and Mythography’, 56.
112 Elada, elatha, DIL s.v., frequently renders Latin ars. Ollam was the standard term for the highest grade of learned poet, and literally means ‘master, greatest’, the superlative of oll, as in the Dagda’s title oll-athair, ‘Supreme Father’. Aí is cognate with Welsh awen, ‘poetic inspiration’, and Greek Aiolos, ‘god of winds’—the core idea of inspiration as divine afflatus, which this story seems to underscore; on the other hand a root to do with ‘seeing’ has been proposed, for which see C. Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (Oxford, 1995), 117.
113 Trans. of the verse by J. Carey, CHA, 222; text and trans. of the rest from J. Carney, ‘The Deeper Level of Early Irish Literature’, The Capuchin Annual (1969), 160–71, at 169–70; quoted in J. Radner, ‘“Men Will Die”: Poets, Harpers, and Women in Early Irish Literature’, in Celtic Language, Celtic Culture: A Festschrift for Eric P. Hamp (Van Nuys, CA, 1990), 172–86, at 173–4.
114 ‘An Old Irish Tract on the Privileges and Responsibilities of Poets’, ed. E. J. Gwynn, Ériu 13 (1940–2), 1–60, 220–36, at 5, 35–40, and 227–8.
115 Carey (‘Myth and Mythography’, 56) suggests a pre-ninth-century date; text ed. & trans. W. Stokes as ‘The Colloquy of the Two Sages’, RC 26 (1905), 4–64; this remains the standard edition.
116 L&IEMI, 171.
117 Important critical statements are M. Clarke, ‘Linguistic Education and Literary Creativity in Medieval Ireland’, Cahiers de l’Institut de Linguistique et des Sciences de Langage 38 (2013), 39–71; C. D. Wright, ‘From Monks’ Jokes to Sages’ Wisdom: The Joca Monachorum Tradition and the Irish Immacallam in dá Thúarad’, in M. Garrison, A. P. Orbán, & M. Mostert (eds.), Spoken and Written Language: Relations between Latin and the Vernacular Languages in the Earlier Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2013), 199–225; finally L. L. Patton, ‘Space and time in the Immacallam in dá Thuarad’, Folklore 103.1 (1992), 92–102. Note that C.-J. Guyonvarc’h’s off beat The Making of a Druid: Hidden Teachings from ‘The Colloquy of Two Sages’ (Rochester, VT, 2002, original French edn. 1999) provides bits of useful commentary but is also seriously misleading.
118 Jargons of this kind—verbal artfoms deliberately opaque to outsiders—were a common feature of medieval Irish privileged professions; note the title of R. C. Stacey’s book on legal performance, Dark Speech: The Performance of Law in Early Ireland (Philadelphia, PA, 2007), and see the remarks of J. Carey, ‘Obscure styles in medieval Ireland’, Mediaevalia 19 (1996), 23–39.
119 These are reminiscent in general feel, but not in detail, of the mythological kennings characteristic of Old Norse-Icelandic skaldic verse.
120 Stokes, ‘The Colloquy of the Two Sages’, 30, 31. ‘Great Knowledge’ occurs twice here, albeit in slightly different grammatical forms: it may not be a coincidence that the identical phrase was a sobriquet of the Dagda’s—as Ruad rofhessa, ‘Red One of Great Knowledge’—and this may be another sign that rhetorical personifications and mythological personages were closely aligned.
121 Quoted by Carey, ‘Myth and Mythography’, 56.
122 E. Boyle, ‘Allegory, the áes dána and the Liberal Arts in Medieval Irish Literature’, in Grammatica and the Celtic Vernaculars in the Medieval World, ed. D. Hayden & P. Russell [forthcoming, 2016]. This piece was kindly shown to me by the author before publication; as a result it is not possible to give page numbers.
123 The Irish habit of using the word mac(c), ‘son’, plus a noun to express professional identity may have made this especially easy: a mac léiginn, ‘son of reading’, was a clerical student, while a mac báis, ‘son of death’, was a plunderer, and so on. See below, 254.
124 Expertly discussed in Boyle, ‘Allegory, the áes dána and the Liberal Arts’, on which I draw here.
125 LGE, iv., 218; trans. Carey, CHA, 256. This poem suggests that in the later tenth century some among the learned poets had grown touchy about the importance of exgods in their intellectual repertoire, in the face of critics within the pseudohistorical movement.
126 See above, 147–8.
127 See the comments of John Carey, ‘The three things required of a poet’, Ériu 48 (1997), 41–58, 47, upon which I draw here.
128 Boyle quotes R. Mark Scowcroft (‘Abstract narrative in Ireland’, Ériu 46 (1995), 121–58, at 156–7): ‘Once organised paganism ceased, its idéologie would be rapidly dissipated by mythopoeia itself, the multiplication and variation of ancient traditions diluting (if not obscuring) their specifically religious associations, to provide the literati instead with a corpus of hidden learning and “implicit metaphor” as compelling and useful as classical mythology for the rest of medieval Christendom.’
129 Boyle makes this point about the depiction of the otherworld, but the principle works for the gods as well.
130 For Noachic octads spreading through Lebor Gabála, see Scowcroft, ‘Leabhar Gabhála, Part II’, 22–5.
131 In Middle Irish Goibnenn (the genitive case of Goibniu) increasingly came to replace the original nominative form: they are the same figure.
132 See comments of Gray, CMT, 120.
133 Clann Eladan (= Elathan), ‘the children of Elatha’, is used in Recension I of Lebor Gabála to refer to the Túatha Dé as a whole; see Carey, ‘Myth and Mythography’, 57.
134 T. O. Clancy, ‘Scotland, the “Nennian” Recension of the Historia Brittonum, and the Lebor Bretnach’, in S. Taylor (ed.), Kings, Clerics and Chronicles in Scotland, 500–1297 (Dublin, 2000), 87–107.
135 Note that the element elathnaig is the plural of elathnach, derived from elatha, ‘art’, which we have seen used as the name of the father of the Dagda.
136 Lebor Bretnach: the Irish version of the Historia Britonum ascribed to Nennius, ed. A. G. van Hamel (Dublin, 1932), §12; for a translation of the text see the older edition, Leabhar breathnach annso sis: the Irish version of the Historia Britonum, ed. & trans J. H. Todd, intro. & notes by A. Herbert (Dublin, 1848).
137 Also note the octad in The Annals of Inisfallen (MS. Rawlinson B. 503), ed. & trans. S. Mac Airt (Dublin, 1951), §31.
138 LGE, iv., 164, 165. Note in particular that Macalister prints (accurately) cach léire leghis, ‘every diligence of the physician’s art’ (nominative leiges, ‘medicine’), but translates as though the last word were from léigenn, ‘(ecclesiastical) reading’. This has the effect of suppressing the ideological basis of the statement.
139 For metres associated with magic such as díansheng (‘swift-slender’), see G. Murphy, Early Irish Metrics (Dublin, 1961), 21–5, and the poem ‘Túatha Dé Danann fo diamair’ attributed to Tanaide (LGE, iv., 222, 223), in which this metre is said to be a speciality of the Dagda. For medicine being associated with poetry note the term leiccerd, which means ‘poet’ but may literally be ‘physician-poet’ (liaig + cerd); see R. Thurneysen, Die irische Helden- und Königsage bis zum 17. Jahrhundert (Halle/Saale, 1921 [repnt. Hildersheim, 1980]), 71.
140 I owe the delightful suggestion that Lug’s normal epithet (sam)ildánach be translated ‘multitasking’ to J. F. Nagy, Mercantile Myth in Medieval Celtic Traditions [H. M. Chadwick Memorial Lecture 20] (Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic: University of Cambridge, 2011), 8.
141 See Kim McCone’s argument for an underlying threefold ideology of the arts, PPCP, 162–5.
142 We do not known where Gilla Cóemáin was from; the rest of his name, mac Gilla Shamthainne, suggests a devotion to St Samthann and thus a west-midlands origin, perhaps in the region of Clonbroney, Co. Longford.
143 It is worth noting here that Etan is actually at least as well attested a character as Bríg/Brigit: see the list of references in CMT, 124.
144 He is one of the eight in the Annals of Inisfallen octad; see above, 172, fn.137.
145 See T. Ó Cathasaigh, ‘Knowledge and power in Aislinge Óenguso’, originally in A. Alqvist & V. Čapková (eds.), Dán do oide: Essays in Memeory of Conn R. Ó Cléirigh (Dublin, 1997), 431–38, but reprt. in Boyd (ed.), Coire Sois, 165–72, at 166.
146 I hope to tackle this in an article in future, but for now I note the sheer weirdness of the saga, its (perhaps intentionally dreamlike) elision of normal categories. It takes place in an atmosphere of persistent ontological and chronological displacement. Óengus—a god—sees a supernatural woman as though he were a mortal hero like Connlae; and far from being located in the remote past of the god-peoples, the events take place (by implication) in the early first century AD, according to the normal timelines. The gods seem to be on familiar terms with mortals, making an alliance with Aillil and Medb and borrowing Conchobor’s physician. Compare Eochaid Airem’s total ignorance of who Midir is in the third part of ‘The Wooing of Étaín’, above, 97–8.
147 See above, 84. Note that in one (very brief) version, that in De Gabáil in tSíde, it is the Dagda who is tricked, whereas in the account in Tochmarc Étaíne, the Dagda himself advises Óengus to use this trick to obtain the Bruig from Elcmar. Translations in CHA, 145, 147.
148 CMT, 30, 31.
149 ‘Bó Bithblicht meic Lonán: eagrán de scéal faoi Fhlann mac Lonán’, ed. & trans. D. Clifford, Celtica 25 (2007), 9–39 [article in Irish but English translation of the text on 22–4]. I have lightly trimmed the translation. Older edn., ‘A story of Flann mac Lonáin’, ed. O. Bergin, in O. Bergin, et al. (eds.) Anecdota from Irish manuscripts (Dublin, 1907), i., 45–50.
150 L&IEMI, 151.
151 ‘Bó Bithblicht’, ed. & trans. Clifford, 24.
152 An ‘F’ is written in the MSS when the word fid (or variations on it) is used, as if to underscore the double meaning.
153 Bó Bithblicht’, ed. & trans. Clifford, 14, 27. Rúscach, ‘barky’ (there are no length marks in the manuscripts) might be taken as roscach, ‘poetic’, as Clifford notes.
154 ‘Bó Bithblicht’, ed. & trans. Clifford, 24.
155 J. F. Nagy, ‘Orality in Medieval Irish Narrative: An Overview’, Oral Tradition 1/2 (1986), 272–301, at 293–4.
156 Nagy, ‘Orality in Medieval Irish Narrative’, 294.
157 On stupor (socht) in the tale, see Ó Cathasaigh, ‘Knowledge and power’, in Boyd (ed.), Coire Sois, 168.
158 Sanas Cormaic, ed. Meyer, 90–4. On this story see P. Russell, ‘Poets, Power and Possessions in Medieval Ireland: Some Stories from Sanas Cormaic’, in J. Eska (ed.), Law, Literature and Society [CSANA Yearbook 7] (Dublin, 2008), 9–45, and note further major comments (plus text and translation) by M. Ní Dhonnchadha, ‘The Prull narrative in Sanas Cormaic’, in Carey, et al. (eds.), Cín Chille Cúile, 163–177. She notes (164) that this is a narrative deeply concerned with poets’ craft and hierarchies. Note also A. Dooley, ‘Early Irish literature and contemporary scholarly disciplines’, in R. Wall (ed.), Medieval and Modern Ireland (New Jersey, 1988), 68–71.
159 Drawing on Ní Dhonnchadha, ‘The Prull narrative’, 166.
160 Ní Dhonnchadha, ‘The Prull narrative’, 165, 167; she notes (173–5) is part of a late Middle Irish tale Tromdám Guaire, in which the figure of a lobar (‘diseased person, leper’) plays the role of Spirit of Poetry: he is not identified and does not transform, though he is later said to be St Caillín.
161 Ní Dhonnchadha, ‘The Prull narrative’, 176.
162 R. Flower, Catalogue of Irish manuscripts in the British Museum (London, 1926), ii., 340.
163 P. K. Ford, ‘The Blind, the Dumb, and the Ugly: Aspects of Poets and their Craft in Early Ireland and Wales’, CMCS 19 (1990), 27–40, 40.
164 A poem by Cináed ua hArtacáin (d. 975) also exemplifies a fondness for Óengus among the professional poets. His poem on the Brugh flatteringly (and irresistibly) conflated his patron Oengus mac Ócaín with Óengus mac Óc. See ‘Cinaed ua hArtacain’s poem on Brugh na Boinne’, ed. & trans. L. Gwynn, Ériu 7 (1914), 210–38.
165 See brief discussion in A&CM, 31.
166 The Annals of Tigernach, ed. & partial trans. W. Stokes, RC 17 (1896), 416–7; Maistiu is modern Mullaghmast, in Co. Kildare. The name of the personage varies (Gilla Lugan, Gilla Lugán, Mac Gilla Lugáin): I have followed Donnchadh Ó Corráin, NHI, i., 582.
167 Bhreathnach, Ireland and the Medieval World, 151.
168 A&CM, 31. See also the comments of Ó Corráin, NHI, i., 582.
169 See, e.g. Dante’s splendid invocation to the god Apollo (Paradiso 1.13–27), right at the heart of the greatest Christian poem of the Middle Ages, and imitated by Chaucer at the opening of Book 3 of The House of Fame. For Natura, see PB, 391–6, and B. Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, PA, 2002), 51–89.
170 Note the partial exception of Manannán, 251–2.
171 Bethu Phátraic: The Tripartite Life of Patrick, ed. K. Mulchrone (Dublin, 1939), 55–6; an old but useful collection of references is J. P. Dalton, ‘Cromm Cruaich of Magh Sleacht’, PRIA 36 (C) (1921–4), 23–67.
172 The Metrical Dindshenchus, ed. & trans. E. Gwynn (Dublin, 1906), iv., 18–23; J. Borsje, ‘Human sacrifice in medieval Irish literature’, in J. Bremmer (ed.), The Strange World of Human Sacrifice (Leuven & Dudley, MA, 2007), 31–54. Hutton (The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles, 155, 159), argues that Crom Crúach and related figures have been overlaid or inspired by the Christian Devil; he is more like the god Moloch of 2 Chronicles 28:3, 33:6, and Jeremiah 7:31, 19:2–6, but the two suggestions are not mutually exclusive.
173 See the comments of T. O’Loughlin, ‘Reading Muirchú’s Tara-event within its background as a biblical “trial of divinities”’, in J. Cartwright (ed.), Celtic Hagiography and Saints’ Cults (Cardiff 2003), 123–135.
174 LGE, iv., 220; trans. Carey, CHA, 256. For the spelling Donann, see below, 186–9.
175 Recent edn. and trans. provided by K. Kilpatrick in her ‘The historical interpretation of early medieval insular place-names’ [unpublished D.Phil thesis, University of Oxford, 2012], 393–404; much earlier edn. ‘Senchas na relec in so’, ed. & trans. J. O’Donovan, in G. Petrie, An Essay on the Origin and Uses of Round Towers of Ireland (1846), 97–101.
176 Ó Cathasaigh, in Boyd (ed.), Coire Sois, 155.
177 Metrical Dindshenchus ed. Gwynn, ii., 16, 17.
178 L&IEMI, 139.
179 L&IEMI, 141–3.
180 Useful discussion by E. Thanisch, ‘Flann Mainistrech’s Götterdämmerung as a Junction within Lebor Gabála Érenn’, Quaestio Insularis: Selected Proceedings of the Cambridge Colloquium in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic 13 (2013), 69–93.
181 LGE iv., 224–239, at 229–31.
182 Though Flann’s is the oldest reference to the killing of Cermait, an interesting late Middle Irish fragment edited by O. Bergin (‘How the Dagda Got his Magic Staff’, in R. S. Loomis (ed.), Medieval Studies in Memory of Gertrude Schoepperle Loomis (Paris, 1927), 399–406) makes it reasonably certain that the story was older; for obvious reasons Flann leaves out the fact that the story has a happy ending, in that the Dagda is eventually able to restore his son to life. This mythological episode was known to the bardic poet Gofraidh Fionn Ó Dálaigh (d.1385), who uses it touchingly in an elegy on the death of his own son (Bergin, ‘How the Dagda’, 400–1).
183 Some deaths he may have made up; others have been spun to emphasize their wretchedness. That the Boyne-goddess Bóand met her end in her own river is a clear example of the latter, as the story of her drowning seems to be quite old; see G. Toner, ‘Landscape and Cosmology in the Dindshenchas’, in J. Borsje, A. Dooley, et al. (eds.), Celtic Cosmology: Perspectives from Ireland and Scotland (Toronto, 2014), 268–83, at 279–80.
184 The ambiguity resides in the fact that dé is both the genitive singular and the genitive plural of the word día, ‘god’—so the ‘People of God’ and ‘people of [the] gods’ were formally identical.
185 Note the intermediary form Túath(a) Déa, ‘people(s) of the goddess’.
186 LGE, iv., 216, 217 (Donand, máthair na nDea).
187 J. Carey, ‘The Name “Tuatha Dé Danann”’, Éigse 18 (1981), 291–4; also his ‘Myth and Mythography’, 56.
188 MacLeod, ‘Mater Deorum Hibernensium’, 368, summarizes Carey’s argument with great concision.
189 Sanas Cormaic, ed. Meyer, 3.
190 See Mac Cana, Celtic Mythology, 84–6, where the case is made for a Celtic goddess *Danu/Donu; a still more maximal version of the old view is W. J. Gruffudd, ‘Donwy’, BBCS 7.1 (1933), 1–4, with references to European rivers containing the *dan- element. The reconstructed *Danu is often linked to the Welsh ancestor-figure Dôn, but J. T. Koch notes that the ‘phonology of these equations has never worked’ and that Danu ‘must be jettisoned’ (‘Some Suggestions and Etymologies Reflecting upon the Mythology of the Four Branches’, PHCC 9 (1989), 1–10, at 4–5).
191 On the assumption that Danann/Donann are the genitives of Old Irish n-stem nouns *Danu/*Donu; this is not unreasonable on the face of it, even though these forms are nowhere attested. The name of the smith-god Goibniu offers a potentially parallel example of the genitive form of an n-stem theonym being redefined in Middle Irish as a nominative, for by this stage he was usually referred to as Goibnenn.
192 Clarke, ‘Linguistic Education’, 52.
193 Clarke, ‘Linguistic Education’, 53; the Isidorian quotation is Etymologiae, 8.11.61. Clarke notes that Carolingian mythographic compilations identified Cybele as ‘mistress of mountains’, and the Paps are, if nothing else, two mountains.
194 See IIMWL, 45, and J. F. Nagy, The Wisdom of the Outlaw: the Boyhood Deeds of Finn in Gaelic Narrative Tradition (Berkeley, 1985), 168–9, 216.
195 The home of the fairy-woman Créde: see below, 213.
196 See MacLeod, ‘Mater Deorum Hibernensium’, 340–384, which accurately and usefully references all the allusions to Ana/Donand (etc.) but does so from an implictly reconstructionist perspective that tends to smooth over the difficulties which attend these figures.
197 Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernie, ed. J. J. O’Meara, PRIA 52 (C) (1948–50), 113–78, at 157.
198 Topographia Hibernie, ed. O’Meara, 160.
