INTRODUCTION

"An air is more lasting than the voice of the birds,
A word is more lasting than the riches of the world."

The truth of this Irish proverb strikes us forcibly as we glance through any such collection of Gaelic poetry as this, and consider how these lays, the dates of whose composition extend from the eighth to the present century, have been preserved to us.

On the border of some grave manuscript, such as a Latin copy of St. Paul's Epistles or a transcript of Priscian, a stray quatrain may be found jotted down by the tired scribe, recording in impromptu verse his delight at the note of a blackbird whose song has penetrated his cell, his amusement at the gambols of his cat watching a mouse, or his reflections on a piece of news brought to him by some wandering monk, about the terror of the viking raids, or a change of dynasty "at home in Ireland."

Several of our Ossianic poems are taken from a manuscript of lays collected in 1626–27 in and about the Glens of Antrim, and sent out to while away the tedium of camp life to an Irish officer serving in the Low Countries, who wearied for the poems and stories of his youth. The religious hymns of Murdoch O'Daly (Muredach Albanach), called "the Scot" on account of his affection for his adopted country, though he was born in Connaught, are preserved in a collection of poems gathered in the Western Highlands, many Irish poems, even from so great a distance as Munster, being found in it.

The Saltair na Rann or "Psalter of the Verses," the most important religious poem of ancient Ireland, is preserved in one copy only. It seems as though a miracle had sometimes intervened to guard for later generations some single version of a valuable tract at home or abroad; but it is a miracle which we could have wished to have taken place more often, when we reflect upon the large number of manuscripts forever lost to us.

Many of the most beautiful of the ancient poems, as well as of the popular songs, are anonymous; they are frequently found mixed up with material of the most arid description, genealogies, annals, or miscellaneous matter. It is easier to guess from the tone of the poems under what mood of mind they were composed than to tell exactly who wrote them. Even when they come down to us adorned with the name of some well-known saint or poet, we have an uncertain feeling about the accuracy of the ascription, when we find a poem whose language cannot be earlier than the tenth or eleventh century confidently connected with a writer who lived two or three centuries earlier. In some cases, no doubt, the versions we possess, though modernised in language and rhythm, are in reality old; in others the ascription probably bears witness to the desire of the author or his public to win esteem for his work by adorning it with some famous name. Some of these poems, of which only one copy has come down to us, were, however, well known in an earlier day, and are quoted in old tracts on Irish metric as examples of the metres used in the bardic schools. It is evident that though standards of taste may change, the recognition of what is really beautiful in poetry remains as a settled instinct in man's nature. Many of those poems which now appeal most strongly to ourselves took rank as verses of acknowledged merit nearer to the time of their composition. This we can deduce from their use as examples worthy of imitation in these mediæval Irish text-books, where the names of songs we still admire are quoted as specimens of good poetry.

It is remarkable that a very large proportion of fine poetry comes to us from the period of the Norse invasions, a time which we are accustomed to think of as one continuous series of wars, raids, and burnings; but which, if we may judge by what has come down to us of its verse, shows us that the Irish gentleman of that day had ideas of refinement that raise him far above the mere fighting clansman; his critical view of literature was a severe one. The fine freedom shown in many of these poems is surprising, both as regards the sentiments and the metres. They possess a mastery of form that argues a high cultivation, not only of the special art of poetry, but of the whole intellectual faculties of the writers.

Some of these poems are strangely modern, even fin de siècle in their tone. The poem of the "Old Woman of Beare" has often been compared to Villon's "Regrets de la Belle Heaulmière ja parvenue à viellesse," or to Béranger's "Grand'mère." But the Irish poem is far more artistically wrought than either of these comparatively modern poems. For in the ancient verses, the old woman is set, a lonely and forsaken figure, against the background of the ebbing tide, and the slow throbs of her heart, worn with age and sin, beat in unison with the retreating motion of the wave. There is also a further significance in the poem which we must not miss. It is the earliest of the long series of allegorical songs in which Ireland is depicted under the form of a woman; though, unlike her successors of a later day, she is here represented, not as a fair maiden, a Grainne Mhaol, or Kathleen ni Houlahan, or Little Mary Cuillenan, but as an aged joyless hag, forlorn and censorious, bemoaning the loss of bygone pleasures, and the gravity of her nun's veil. The "Cailleach Bheara," the "Hag" or "Nun of Beare" is known in many place-names in Ireland. It is on Slieve na Callighe, or the "Hill of the Hag" or "Nun," in Co. Meath that the great cairns and tumuli of Lough Crew are found; it was evidently, like the neighbourhood of the Boyne, a place of pagan sanctity; and such names as Tober na Callighe Bheara, the "Well of the Hag of Beare," are found in different parts of the country. The "Hag of Beare" seems to be symbolic of pagan Ireland, regretting the stricter regime of Christianity, and the changes that time had brought about. The curious legend which prefaces the poem suggests the same idea. She is said to have seen seven periods of youth, and to have outlived tribes and races descended from her. For a hundred years of old age she wore the veil of a nun. "Thereupon old age and infirmity came upon her." We catch the same note of regret for the days of paganism through many legends and poems. It is mystical and veiled in such stories as that of "King Murtough and the Witch-woman"; it is fierce, but also often touched by the grotesque, in the innumerable colloquies between Patrick and Oisín (Ossian), the last of the ancient pagan heroes. But in all this there is a note of apology. It is not so outspoken in its revolt against the new system of life and thought as are the Norse chronicles and the Icelandic Sagas. After all, Christianity was an accomplished thing; quietly but persistently it took its place, sweeping into its fold chiefs and common folk alike. No resistance could stop this universal progress. And the literary man or the peasant, dwelling on his early legends, the outcome of a state of thought passed or passing away, dared only half-heartedly bemoan the former days, when wars and raids, the "Creach" and the "Táin" were the highest way of life for a brave man, and no Christian doctrine of forgiveness of enemies and charity to foes had come in to perplex his thoughts and confuse their issues. The Raid remained, it was an essential part of actual life; and burnings and wars went on as before, but they were no longer, theoretically, at least, matters to win praise and honour, they were condemned beforehand by the Christian ethic. A chief, to hold his own, must still throw open doors of hospitality to his tribe, must dispense largesse to all-comers, must gather about his board the neighbours and dependents in riotous assemblies and festivals. But all this the Christian monk and priest looked upon with suspicion; they bade him fill his thoughts with a future Kingdom, rather than with the earthly one to which he had been born, and to keep his soul in humble readiness by prayers and fastings, by seclusion and self-sacrifice. The great disjointure is everywhere apparent; chiefs are seen flying from their plain duties to their clans in order to win a heavenly chiefdom, not of this world; kings retire into hermitages, and whole villages take on the aspect and system of life of the monastery. To escape a network of religious service so closely spread throughout the country was impossible; all that the half-convinced could do was to relieve his soul in legend and song and jest. Hence the large amount of this literature of protest, coming to us curiously side by side with poems breathing the very spirit of religious devotion, the work of peaceful recluse or retired monk.

For the movement had its other aspect. If the warrior or chief resigned much in becoming a Christian monk, there is no doubt that he gained as well. Contemporaneous religious poetry in the Middle Ages is elsewhere overshadowed by the cast of theologic thought. The "world" from which the saint must flee is no mere symbol, denoting the perils of evil courses; it is the actual visible earth, its hills and trees and flowers, and the beauty of its human inhabitants that are in themselves a danger and a snare. St. Bernard walking round the Lake of Geneva, unconscious of its presence and blind to its loveliness, is a fit symbol of the tendency of the religious mind in the Middle Ages. Sin and repentance, the fall and redemption, hell and heaven, occupied the religious man's every thought; beside such weighty themes the outward life became almost negligible. If he dared to turn his mind towards it at all, it was in order to extract from it some warning of peril, or some allegory of things divine. In essence, the "world" was nothing else than a peril to be renounced and if possible entirely abandoned.

But the Irish monk showed no such inclination, suffered no such terrors. His joy in nature grew with his loving association with her moods. He refused to mingle the idea of evil with what God had made so good. If he sought for symbols, he found only symbols of purity and holiness. The pool beside his hut, the rill that flowed across his green, became to his watchful eye the manifestation of a divine spirit washing away sin; if the birds sang sweetly above his door, they were the choristers of God; if the wild beasts gathered to their nightly tryst, were they not the congregation of intelligent beings whom God Himself would most desire? The friendly badgers or foxes of the wood that came forth, undismayed by the white or brown-robed figure who seemed to have taken up his lasting abode amongst them, became to his mind fellow-monks, authorised members of his strange community. Amongst his feathered and furred associates, he read his Psalms and Hours in peace; sang his periodic hymn to St. Hilary or St. Brigit, and performed his innumerable genuflexions and "cross-vigils." Here, from time to time, he poured forth in spontaneous song his joy in the life that he had elected as his own. When King Guaire of Connaught stands at the door of the hermitage in which his brother Marvan had taken refuge from the bustle of court life, and asks him why he had sacrificed so much, Marvan bursts forth into a poem in praise of his hermit life, and the King is fain to confess that the choice of the recluse was the wiser one; when St. Cellach of Killala is dragged into the forest by his comrades and threatened with death, not even the sight of the four murderers lying at his feet with swords ready drawn in their hands to slay him can prevent him from greeting the Dawn in a beautiful song.

The saint who, like St. Finan, lived shut up within his cell, in many cases lost his mental balance, and degenerated into a mere Fakir, winning heaven by the miseries of his self-imposed mortifications; but the monk who trusted himself to untrammelled intercourse with nature, preserved his underlying sanity. For whether or no the hundreds of daily genuflexions were performed, the patch of ground around the solitary's cell must be ploughed or sown or reaped; the apples must be gathered or the honeysuckles twined. The salmon or herring must be netted or angled for. Thus nature and its needs kept the hermit on the straight and simple paths of physical and mental healthfulness, however he might try to escape into a wilderness of his own imaginings.

The early poetry, we feel, is on the whole joyous; whether pagan or Christian in tone, it arises from a happy heart. The pagan is more robust, more vigorous; the Christian gentler and more reflective; but alike they are free from the mournful note of despair that throws a settled gloom over much of the later literature.

The Ossianic poems have quite a distinctive tone; in them we catch the abounding energy belonging to the days of the hunt of the wild native boar or stag, when all the country was one open hunting-ground, fit for men whose ideal was that of the sportsman and the warrior. Besides romantic tales, we have a whole body of poetry, loosely strung together under the covering name of Oisín, or Ossian, and usually ascribed to him or to Fionn mac Cumhall, his father and chief, dealing with the themes of war and of the chase. They are often in the nature of the protest of the fighting and hunting-man against the claims of religion. He is perpetually proclaiming that the sounds and sights of the forest and seashore are more dear to him than any others, and when he is called upon to give the first place to the duties of religion, placed before him, as it usually is, in its most enfeebling aspect, he raises the stout protest that the hunting-horn has greater attractions for him than the tinkling bell which calls to prayer.

There is the ring of the obstinate pagan about such verses; and many poems are wholly occupied by an unholy wrangling between the representative of the old order, Oisín, and the representative of the new, St. Patrick. The poems themselves probably date from a far later period than either.

More healthy are the true hunting songs. Many of these are in praise of the Isle of Arran, in the Clyde, a favourite resort during the sporting-season both for the Scottish and Irish huntsman. In the poem we have called "The Isle of Arran," from the "Colloquy of the Ancient Men," the charm of the Isle is well described. We have in it the same pure joy in natural scenery that we find in the poems of the religious hermits, but the tone is manlier and more emphatic.

Occasionally a fiercer note creeps into the hunter's mood. The chase of the boar and deer was not without its dangers. Winter, and the unfriendly clan hard by, or the lean prowling wolf at night, were real terrors to the small companies encamped on the open hill-side or in the forest. Though the warrior in peaceful times loved the chase of swine and stag, his hand had done and was always ready to do sterner work when opportunity offered. The poem "Chill Winter" has a note of almost savage exultation; the old fighter turns from his present perils and discomforts to remember the warrior onslaughts which had left the glen below him silent, and its once happy inhabitants cold in death; colder, as he gladly reflects, than even he himself feels on this chill winter's night. It is the voice of the ancient warrior, who thought no shame of slaying, but thanked God when he had knocked down his fellow. Whether he, in his turn, were the undermost man, or whether he escaped, he cared not at all.

Two difficulties face the modern reader in coming for the first time upon genuine Irish literature, whether poetry or prose. The first is the curious feeling that we are hung between two worlds, the seen and the unseen; that we are not quite among actualities, or rather that we do not know where the actual begins or where it ends. Even in dealing with history we may find ourselves suddenly wafted away into some illusory spirit-world with which the historian seems to deal with the same sober exactness as in detailing any fact of ordinary life. The faculty of discerning between the actual and the imaginary is absent, as it is absent in imaginative children; often, indeed, the illusory quite overpowers the real, as it does in the life of the Irish peasant to-day.

There is, in most literatures, a meeting-place where the Mythological and the Historic stand in close conjunction, the one dying out as the other takes its place. Only in Ireland we never seem to reach this point; we can never anywhere say, "Here ends legend, here begins history." In all Irish writing we find poetry and fact, dreams and realities, exact detail and wild imagination, linked closely hand in hand. This is the Gael as revealed in his literature. At first we are inclined to doubt the accuracy of any part of the story; but, as we continue our examination, we are surprised at the substantial correctness of the ancient records, so far as we are able to test them, whether on the historical or on the social side. The poet is never wholly poet, he is also practical man; and the historian is never wholly chronicler and annalist, he is also at the back of his mind folklorist, lover of nature, dreamer. It is the puzzle and the charm of Ireland.

A good example of this is the very beautiful anonymous Irish poem, rich in poetic imagery, addressed to Ragnall or Reginald, son of Somerled, lord of the Isles from 1164–1204. This poem, written for an historical prince, begins with a description of the joys of the fairy palace, "Emain of the Apples," whence this favoured prince is supposed by the poet to have issued forth:

The poet's mind wanders from the ancient Emain, capital of Ulster, to the allegorical Emain, the dwelling of the gods or fairy-hosts, who were thought of as inhabiting the great tumuli on the Boyne; again, he transplants his fairy-land to the home of Ragnall, and seems to place it in Mull or the Isle of Man, which was indeed the especial abode of Manannan, the Ocean-god and Ruler of Fairy-land.

We recognise that this is fine poetry, but we feel also that it needs a specialised education thoroughly to understand it. The world from which it hails is not our world, and to comprehend it we must do more than translate, we must add notes and glossary at every line; but no poetry, especially poetry under the initial disadvantage of a translation, could retain its qualities under such treatment.

In all the ancient verse we meet with these obstacles. Even much of the most imaginative Ossianic poetry becomes too difficult from this point of view for the untrained reader.

Take the fine poem detailing the history of the Shield of Fionn. Poetic addresses to noted weapons are common enough, and are not confined to Irish literature; but the adventures of this shield pass beyond the ordinary uses of human battles, and enter the realm of mythology. The very name given to it, the "Dripping Ancient Hazel," carries us into a world of poetic imagination.

[Pg xxviii]

Or take again the strange mythological poem of the "Crane-bag," made out of the skin of a wandering haunted crane, which had once been a woman; condemned for "two hundred white years" to dwell in "the house of Manannan," i.e. in the wastes of the ocean, ever seeking and never finding land. When the wanderings came to an end, and the unhappy Crane-woman died, Manannan (the Ocean-god) made of her skin a bag into which he put "every precious thing he had; the shirt of Manannan and his knife, the girdle of Goibniu (the Vulcan of Irish legend); the king of Scotland's shears, the king of Lochlann's helmet, and the bones of the swine of Asal—these were the treasures that the Crane-bag held. … When the sea was full, its treasures were seen in its midst; when the fierce sea was on ebb, the Crane-bag was empty." The story has the impress of great age, and manifold changes; it belongs to the period when the gods were not yet transformed into human beings, but were still primæval elemental powers, impersonations of fire and light and water, and the wisdom that is above mankind. But the link is lost, and the story remains a suggestion only, vague and indistinct. As an image of the hollow ocean, holding the treasures of the Sea-god, the idea is, however, full of force and beauty.[3]

The second difficulty, which is closely connected with the first, lies in the retention of the ancient and unfamiliar nomenclature; the old geographical and family names, which have dropped out of actual use, being everywhere found in the poetry.

Scotland is still Alba in Irish, as it was in the sixth century; Éire (gen. Érinn) is the ordinary name for Ireland, not only in poetry, as is commonly supposed, but in the living language of the country. But it has besides an abundance of specially poetic names, such as Inisfail, "the island of Destiny," Banba, Fodla, &c., connected with early legends, and these, if we are to understand the poetry, we must accustom ourselves to.

England is still to-day the land of the Saxons to the Gael, and its inhabitants are the "Sassenachs"; the Irishman persists in disregarding the coming of the Angles. We may talk of the extinction of the Gaelic tongue, but in his poetry, as in every place-name of stream or hill or townland all over the country, it is about us still. In the poetry we are back in Gaelic Ireland; the old tribal distinctions, the old clan names, meet us on every page. What does the modern man know of Leth Cuinn or Leth Mogha, the ancient divisions of the North and South, or of the stories which gave them birth? What of Magh Breagh or Magh Murtheimne? What of Emain Macha and Kincora? Who, again, are the Clann Fiachrach or the Eoghanacht, or the Children of Ir or Eiber? Even before the much later titles of Thomond and Desmond, of Tyrconnell and Tyrowen he is somewhat at a loss.

But to the bard the past is always present, the ancient nomenclature is never extinct. The legend which caused the River Boyne to be called "The forearm of Nuada's wife," or the tumuli on its banks to be thought of as the "Elfmounds of the wife of Nechtan," are familiar to him; and to enter into the spirit of the mythological poetry we must know something of Irish folklore and tradition. Many of these expressions have a high imaginative significance, as when the sea is called the "Plain of Ler" (the elder Irish Sea-god), or its waves are "the tresses of Manannan's wife" or the "Steeds of Manannan."

Of the large body of bardic poetry we have been unable to give an adequate representation, partly from considerations of space, but also because we are not yet, until a larger quantity of this poetry has been published, able to estimate its actual poetic value. Much fine poetry by the historic bards undoubtedly exists, but we have as yet only a few published fragments to choose from. The first specimen we give, Teigue Dall O'Higgin's appeal to O'Rourke of the Bulwarks (na murtha), must stand as an example of much similar poetry in and about his own day.

The call to union against England or against some local enemy sounds loud and constant in the bardic poems. There is much anti-English poetry; poetry which has for its object the endeavour to unite for a single purpose the chiefs who had split up the provinces into small divisions under separate leaders, each fighting for his own hand.

To stir up the lagging or too peaceful chief was one of the prime duties of the bard; to address to him congratulations on his accession, or to bewail him when he died, was his official function; and to judge by the quantity of paper covered with these laudatory effusions and elegies, he performed his task with punctilious care. It was likely that he would do so, for the fees for a poem that gave satisfaction were substantial. We miss the family bard in these days; there is no one at hand to praise indifferently all that we do.

The bardic poetry attracted the genius of Mangan, and his "Farewell to Patrick Sarsfield" and O'Hussey's "Ode to the Maguire," are not only fine poetry, but excellent representations of two of the finest of the bardic poems. Elsewhere in his poems, we have usually too much Mangan to feel that the tone of the original is faithfully conveyed. His soaring poem, "The Dark Rosaleen," can hardly be said to represent the Irish "Roisín Dubh," of which, for purposes of comparison, we give a literal rendering; beautiful as Mangan's poem is, it has to our mind lost something of the exquisite grace of the original.