Ireland is an island of stories, some of which stretch back over many centuries and have their roots in a tradition that goes back even further. Many of these legends have close associations with particular places. This book retells just some of these legends and links them with the places from which they grew. Place and story are inextricably bound together, and so in the arrangement of the stories I have followed a geographical sequence rather than the traditional division into four cycles.
However, these traditional divisions do provide a useful context in which to gain a sense of the richness of the world of the Celtic legends. The first of these, the Mythological Cycle, tells the tale of the very origins of human life in Ireland. The stories deal with the successive invasions of the island, the great battles between the tribes of the Tuatha Dé Danann (the divine people of the goddess Danu) and the Fomorians, the demonic tribe who competed with them for control of Ireland. They also include the stories of the Sídh (those mythical beings which share human passions but not human sickness and age), such as that of the lovers Midhir and Étaín. The second cycle is the Ulster Cycle, which has at its heart the great epic of the Táin Bó Cuailgne, (The Cattle Raid of Cooley). The central story of the battle between Conchobhar, king of Ulster, and Maeve, queen of Connacht, encompasses the exploits of the great hero, Cú Chulainn. This cycle includes associated stories such as that of Deirdre. There has been much dispute between scholars about the period in which the Ulster Cycle is set. Conchobhar, King of Ulster, was said to have lived in the first century AD, and the nature of the society portrayed – warrior-like and tribal – seems close to our perceptions of the Celtic Iron Age. But Maeve, for example, has her roots as a goddess figure much further back in time, as do many of the figures woven into the tapestry of the stories. Similar uncertainty surrounds the stories of the Fianna Cycle. These stories deal with Fionn and his hunter companions, including the epic pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne. The Fianna Cycle stories take place in the natural world rather than in the courts of the kings, and the ‘fian’ actually existed as a group of young warriors who lived in small groups outside society. The stories are set at the time of Cormac Mac Airt, who was said to have reigned as high king in the third century AD, but the genesis of the figure of Fionn is probably far older than this. The fourth cycle, known as the Historical Cycle or the Cycle of the Kings, has its stories set in a later period, and some of the characters involved are based on actual historical characters living in a Christian society. However, here, as in all the legends, different worlds and different periods intertwine and historical characters drift in and out of the landscape of legend. It is impossible to establish a clear and consistent chronology, all the more so as the stories were written down many centuries after they had already had a long history as part of an oral tradition. This oral tradition indicates that while extant texts date from no earlier than the eleventh and twelfth centuries, many of the stories were originally written down up to four centuries earlier. The Ulster Cycle tales may have been written down as early as the seventh century and they portray a world that is undeniably pre-Christian in its ethos. Irish literature is the earliest vernacular literature in western Europe and, while scholars have argued over the historical existence of its heroes, and queens and kings, whatever human existence these characters may have had has long been concealed under the layers of a thousand re-tellings. I therefore make no apologies for telling these stories once again in contemporary language, or for the slight liberties I have taken with some of the texts. Every society retells its myths in a slightly different form and the texts we have of the tales are the products of a medieval Christian society where the stories were recorded by clerics who added their own gloss to the versions they wrote.
Having said this, I must add that the amount of loving effort the scribes put into producing and preserving these beautiful manuscripts indicates how important these stories were to their society. And through all their re-tellings the stories retain a distinctive sense of the sacredness of the natural, sensual world; they celebrate it in its entirety, from the joy of the blackbird’s song in spring to the cold beauty of winter. St Colmcille is said to have been more frightened by the sound of the axe in his beloved oak grove at Derry than of death and hell, and early Irish lyrics, many written by monks, include many lovely celebrations of the natural world. This close connection with the natural world and with the features of the landscape is also found in the poems of the Dindshenchas, the lore of places, which gives us the stories associated with the names of particular places and is a major source for Irish legends. Other important sources are the Leabhar Gabhála Éireann – commonly known as The Book of Invasions, and the Leabhar Laighean – The Book of Leinster, both compiled in the twelfth century, together with the Leabhar na hUidhre or The Book of the Dun Cow which is late eleventh or very early twelfth century. The original texts are inaccessible to all but Gaelic scholars but it is worth looking at some of the translations to get a sense of the complexity and beauty of the original language.
Although one might hope to be on firmer ground when dealing with the physical places and the man-made structures associated with the stories, in reality the situation is almost as confusing. Structures such as burial chambers and earthen mounds have been neatly classified by archaeologists, but as in the stories, scholarship can classify but cannot fully explain. Some of the sites visited in this book show evidence of settlement as far back as 5,000 years ago, dating from the New Stone Age or Neolithic period; while in other cases the structures are as late as the tenth century. A great many of the sites show evidence of layer upon layer of settlement, and in many cases there is no consensus as to what their purpose was. The only generalisations that can be made are that many of the structures mentioned in the book were used as tombs of one kind or another, or at least show evidence that burials were carried out there, while others seem to be places where the community gathered for defence or celebration.
The categories used by archaeologists divide the period of prehistory into various time spans. These divisions are based on cultural change rather than strictly on timescale, and sometimes vary from place to place – for example, one community might still be living a Neolithic (i.e. New Stone Age) existence while another nearby might be using bronze and have developed corresponding social structures.
Human occupation in Ireland dates from 9,000 years ago when people lived by hunting, fishing and gathering wild plants. This way of life was fairly widespread over Ireland at sites such as Mount Sandel, County Derry, and Ballyferriter, County Kerry. The hunter-gatherers left no traces of field monuments although a controversial date from a passage-grave in Carrowmore in Sligo suggests that they may have begun to build monuments for their dead by the end of the Mesolithic period.
It was the people of the Neolithic period who left their mark on the early landscape, as they settled down to till the land and rear cattle. The great walled fields in north Mayo known as the Céide Fields indicate how they organised their land and how important stock-rearing was to their society. They honoured their ancestors and the dead, and some of the most spectacular Megalithic tombs in Europe are the work of the early farming community in Ireland. There are about 1,450 of these monuments, and many of them became the focus of the lore of places and of the stories which are the subjects of this book. The most famous of them are at the Bend of the Boyne (Brú na Bóinne), now a UNESCO World Heritage site with the greatest collection of Neolithic art in Europe. The great cult centre at Tara, County Meath, also has its origins in Neolithic times and has continued for millennia to be a sacred place and a setting for stories of gods and kings. The hundreds of portal dolmens which dot the landscape and are often known locally as Leaba Dhiarmada agus Gráinne, are another legacy of the Stone Age builders.
The Bronze Age from c.2000BC brought to Ireland’s society the use of metal and the beginnings of trade. This was a warlike society, but also a very creative one, which crafted exquisite weapons and jewellery in gold and bronze. Such wealth needs to be defended, so structures such as the great hill-forts began to be built – Dún Aonghusa on the Aran Islands had its beginnings in this period. Standing stones and stone circles were ritual sites for these Bronze Age people and the first crannógs, or defensive lake-dwellings were built.
Around 300BC the first Celts arrived in Ireland and ushered in the Iron Age. Hillforts continued to be built and the coast was fringed with defensive promontory forts. Royal sites which also served as great cult and tribal centres were built and are still impressive today. These are at Tara in County Meath, Rathcroghan in County Roscommon, Dún Ailinne in County Kildare and Emhain Macha in County Armagh. They are the buildings of an aristocratic, tribal and violent society which has clear connections with the world portrayed in the Táin. This society is one where certain values are held in common, particularly courage, strength, generosity and faithfulness to one’s companions and to one’s tribe. It is a multi-theistic society, where heroes swear by the gods their people swear by. It is one where music, poetry and rich colours were held in high regard, as were feasting, fighting, racing, hunting and hospitality. In general, however, the attempts that have been made to match the evidence of archaeology or actual historical events with the accounts of the history of Ireland in the Leabhar Gabhála or the Táin have met with little success. There are no clear patterns and neat correspondences; rather, the world of the stories is a world that is larger inside than it is outside, and where time may be circular as well as linear, possessing the shape-shifting, mutable qualities of the Sídh.
Because of this, a mental shift is needed to enter fully the world of the legends. The stories are the myths created by people – many people over a very long time – from their history and geography, from time and place. Myths have been described as the dreams of the tribe and, like dreams, they take what happens in time – history – and transfigure it. In this world, events may be inconsistent, even contradictory. Because they do not fit into a rational world view, in the light of day their importance can be denied. However, to live without myth is to live without the healing power of dreams and the imagination.
At the same time, the raw material on which the imagination works is rooted in time, in a specific place and in the physical features of the landscape. In the stories, this natural world merges with the world of the collective imagination. So, the emotional power of the stories adds resonance to our encounters with place, and place itself can embody a story in a similar way to that in which the ancient Irish could see a hill as a goddess, or a lake as the embodiment of a god. The word sídh can thus mean both a magical being and the mound in the earth where that being lives. A further shift in perception is needed to accept that the same member of the Sídh can have his or her home in many different places – the guardian spirits are very local ones. Many of the people of Ireland, well into the twentieth century, believed that certain trees and wells and hills were under the guardianship of their local otherworld being and each of these enchanted places was protected accordingly. There was an element of fear as well as awe in this relationship, for at certain times, notably at Samhain (Halloween) and Bealtaine (May Eve), you could slip easily from one world into the other.
Celtic wheel of the year.
This feeling of respect for the natural landscape and the ancient remains it holds is under threat. WB Yeats once said that ‘places may begin to seem the only hieroglyphics that cannot be forgotten’, but in present-day Ireland, the letters are being erased from the landscape. Driving through Ireland during the first two years of the new millennium, there were times when it felt as if the entire countryside had been placed under siege – home-made posters protested against plans for super-dumps, or satellite masts on historic hills, or road-widening schemes set to destroy ancient sites. Nor was all the violence against the landscape on the part of outsiders; land improvement is a particular threat to earthen monuments such as raths and we saw more than one beautiful place hosting its own private super-dump with its antiquities defaced by mindless vandalism. In some cases too, attempts to ‘develop’ a site as a tourist attraction had in fact damaged it beyond repair. There is a definite irony in encouraging people to visit sites which at present owe much of their appeal to the fact that they are largely unvisited. However, unless there is a deep communal appreciation of the worth of the places in this book, we can no longer afford the luxury of assuming that they will resist destruction. Recent reports indicate that, in spite of the legislation introduced to protect these monuments, the rate of their destruction is increasing rather than decreasing. In order for these places to survive, those with power over the landscape – whether they are local landowners or government departments – need to become guardians as well as exploiters, and this relationship needs to be supported by the whole community. There is a Greek myth about a character called Erysicthon, the Earth-Tearer. Erysicthon cut down a grove of sacred trees in order to build his banqueting hall. Demeter, goddess of the fertile fields, at first warned him gently against this sacrilege, but when he threatened her with his axe, she cursed him. He became eternally hungry, and never satisfied. In his greed, he ate filth and became thinner and thinner, hungrier and hungrier, poisoned by his own waste.
The hunger that we feel at this loss of contact with the natural world and its ancient stories is not a physical one, but a kind of spiritual and emotional starvation. Yet feeding this hunger may involve nothing more difficult than walking out into the landscape and looking at it with the eye of the imagination. The power of the human capacity to imagine, to see beyond, reaches us through century after century, and draws us again and again into the indivisible trinity of story, place and people. A landscape will survive as long as there are people to love it, and a story is never quite over as long as there are people to tell it.
When the Sons of Míl, one of the early peoples of Ireland, came to its shores, they asked their poet Amairgen to quiet the waves which were preventing them from landing. The poem with which he did this is an invocation of Ireland:
I invoke the land of Ireland:
Much-coursed be the fertile sea,
Fertile be the fruit-strewn mountain,
Fruit-strewn be the showery wood,
Showery be the river of waterfalls,
Of waterfalls be the lake of deep pools,
Deep-pooled be the hill-top well,
A well of tribes be the assembly,
An assembly of kings be Tara,
Tara be the hill of the tribes,
The tribes of the sons of Míl,
Of Míl the ships, the barks,