Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 8.djvu/154

 IRELAND

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IRELAND

hundred and fifty of these prime sagas and one hun- dred secondary ones. The manuscripts themselves divide the prime sagas into the following romantic categories, from the very names of which we may get a glance at the genius of the early Gael, and form some conception of the tragic nature of his epic: — Destruc- tion of Fortified Places. Cow Spoils (i. e. Cattle-raids), Courtships or Wooings, Bat ties, Stories of Caves, Navi- gations, Tragical Deaths, Feasts, Sieges, Adventures of Travel, Elopements, Slaughters, Water-eruptions, Expeditions, Progresses, and ^'isions. "He is no poet", says the "Book of Leinster", "who does not synchronize and harmonize all these stories."

In addition to the names of 187 .sagas in that book, there exist the names of many more that occur in the tenth or eleventh century tale of MacCoise, and all the known ones, with the exception of one added later and another in which there is evidently an error of tran- scription, refer to events prior to the vear 650 or there- abouts. We may take it then that tlie list was drawn up in the seventh century. Who were the authors of these sagas? That is a question that cannot be an- swered. There is not a trace of authorsliip remaining, if, indeed, authorship be the right word for what is far more likely to have been the gradual growth of stories, ■woven around racial or tribal or even family history, and, in some cases, around incidents of early Celtic mythology, thus forming stories which were ever being told and retold, burnished up and added to by pro- fessional poets and saga-tellers, and which were, some of them, handed down for perhaps countless genera- tions before they were ever put on parchment or be- fore lists of their names and contents were made by scholars. Those which recount ancient tribal events or dynastic wars were probably much exaggerated, magnified, and undoubtedly distorted during the course of time; others, again, of more recent growth, give us perhaps fairly accurate accounts of real events.

It seems quite certain that, as soon as Christianity had pervaded the island, and bardic schools and col- leges had been formed alongside of the monasteries, there was no class of learning more popular than that which taught the great traditionary doings, exploits, and tragedie,s of the various tribes and families and races of Ireland. Then the peregrinations of the bards and the inter-communication between their col- leges must have propagated throughout all Ireland any local traditions that were worthy of preservation. The very essence of the national life of the island was embodied in these stories, but, unfortunately, few only out of their once enormous number have sur\'ived to our days, and even these are mostly mutilated or preserved in mere digests. Some, liowever, exist at nearly full length, though probably in no case are they written down in the ancient vellums in just the same manner as they would have been recounted by the professional poet, for the writers of most of the early vellums were not the poets but generally Christian monks, who took an interest and a pride in preserving the early memorials of their race, and who cultivated the native language to such an amazing degree that at a very early period it was used alongside of Latin, and soon almost displaced it, even in the domain of the Church itsi'lf. This patriotism of the Irish monks and this early cult ivat ion of the vernacular are the more re- markable when we know that it is the very rever.se of what tocik (ilace throughout the rest of Europe, where the almost exclusive use of Latin by the Church was the principal means of destroying native and pagan tradition. In spite, however, of the irreparable losses inflicted ui)on the Irish race by the Northmen from the end of the eighth till the middle of the elev- enth century, and of the ravages of the Normans after their so-calied conquest, and of the later and more ruthless destructions wrought wholesale and all over the islaiul by the Klizabethan and Cromwellian Eng- lish, O'Curry was able to a.ssert that the contents of

the strictly historical tales known to him would be suf- ficient to fill up 4000 large quarto pages. He com- putes that the tales belonging to the Ossianic and Fe- nian cycle would fill 3000 more, and that, in addition to the.se, the miscellaneous and imaginative sagas, which arc neither historical nor Fenian, would fill 5000, not to speak of the more recent and novel-like produc- tions of the later Irish.

Pagan Literature and Christian Sentiment. — The bulk of the ancient stories and some of the ancient poems were probably, as we have seen, committed to w'riting by the monks in the seventh century, but are themselves substantially pagan in origin, conception, and colouring. And yet there is scarcely one of them in which some Christian allusion to heaven, or hell, or the Deity, or some Biblical subject, does not appear. The reason of this seems to be that, when Christianity had succeeded in gaining the upper hand over pagan- ism, a kind of tacit compromise jvas arrived at, by means of which the bard, and the J^M (i. e. poet), and the representatives of the old pagan learning were permitted by the sympathetic clerics to propagate their stories, tales, poems, and genealogies, at the price of tacking on to them a little Christian admix- ture, just as the vessels of some feudatory nations are compelled to fly at the mast-head the flag of the suze- rain power. But so badly has the dovetailing of the Christian into the pagan part been performed in most of the oldest romances that the pieces come away quite separate in the hands of even the least skilled analyser, and the pagan substratum stands forth en- tirely distinct from the Christian accretion. Thus, for example, in the evidently pagan saga called the "Wooing of Etain", we find the description of the pagan paradise given its literary passport, so to speak, by a cunningly interwoven allusion to Adam's fall. Etain was the wife of one of the Tuatha De Danann, who were gods. She is reborn as a mortal — the pagan Irish seem, like the Gaulish druids, to have believed in metempsychosis — and weds the King of Ireland. Her former husband of the Tuatha De Danann race still loves her, follows her into her life as a mortal, and tries to win her back by singing to her a captivating description of the glowing unseen land to which he would lure her. "O lady fair, would'st thou come with me", he cries, "to the wondrous land that is ours", and he describes how "the crimson of the fox- glove is in every brake — a beauty of land the land I speak of, youth never grows into old age there, warm sweet streams traverse the country ", etc. ; and then the evidently pagan description of this land of the gods is made passable by an added verse in which we are adroitly told that, though the inhabitants of this glorious country saw everyone, yet nobody saw them, "because the cloud of Adam's wrongdoing has con- cealed us".

It is this easy analysis of early Irish literature into its ante-Christian and its post-Christian elements which lends to it an absorbing interest and a great value in the history of European thought. For, when all spurious accretions have been stripped off, we find in it a genuine picture of ])agan life in Eurojie, such as we look for in vain elsewhere. "The Cluirch adopted [in Ireland] towards Pagan sagas the same inK-^ilion tliat it adopted towards Pagim law. . . . I .see no sultlcient ground for douliting that really genuine pictures of a pre-Chri.stian culture arei)reserved tousin the indivi<l- ual sagas" (Windisch, JriseheTexte, I, 2.')N). "'I'hesaga originated in Pagan and was jimpagated in Christian times, and that too without its .seeking fresh nutri- ment, as a rule, from Christian elements. But we must ascribe it to the influence of (Christianity that what is specifically Pagan in Irish saga is blurred over and forced into the background. And yet there exist many whose contents are plainly mythological. The ('hristian monks were cei-tairdy ""( llif first who re- duced theancient sagas to fixed form, but lateron they