Irish Bardic History
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TDK / The Druid King
INTRODUCTION OF THE BARDIC
HISTORY OF IRELAND
DAWN.
There is not perhaps in existence a product of the
human mind so extraordinary as the Irish annals. From
a time dating for more than three thousand years before
the birth of Christ, the stream of Hibernian history
flows down unintei-rupted, copious and abounding,
between accurately defined banks, with here and there
picturesque meanderings, here and there flowers lolling
on those delusive waters, but never concealed in mists
or lost in a marsh. As the centuries wend their way, king
succeeds king with a regularity most gratifying, and
fights no battle, marries no wife, begets no children,
does no doughty deed of which a contemporaneous note
was not taken, and which has not been incorporated in
the annals of his country. To think that this mighty
fabric of recorded events, so stupendous in its dimensions,
so clean and accurate in its details, so symmetrical and
elegant, should be after all a mirage and delusion, a gorgeous
bubble, whose glowing rotundity, whose rich
hues, azure, purple, amethyst and gold, vanish at a
touch and are gone, leaving a sorry remnant over
which the patriot disillusionized may grieve.
Early Irish history is the creation mainly of the bards. )(
23
24 STANDISH O GRADY
Romances and poems supplied the great blocks with which
the fabric was reared. These the chroniclers fitted into
their places, into the interstices pouring shot-rubbish,
and grouting. The bardic intellect, revolving round
certain ideas for centuries, and round certain material
facts, namely, the mighty barrows of their ancestors,
produced gradually a vast body of definite historic lore,
life-like -kings and heroes, real-seeming queens. The
mechanical intellect followed with perspicuous arrangement,
with a thirst for accuracy, minuteness, and
verisimilitude. With such quarrymen and such builders
the work went on apace, and anon a fabric huge rose like
an exhalation, and like an exhalation its towers and
pinnacles of empurpled mist are blown asunder and
dislimn.
Doubtless the legendary blends at some point with
the historic narrative. The cloud and mist somewhere
condense into the clear stream of indubitable fact. But
how to discern under the rich and teeming m3rthus of the
bards, the course of that slender and doubtful rivulet,
or beneath the piled rubbish and dust of the chroniclers,
discover the tiny track which elsewhere broadens into
the highway of a nation's history. In this minute, circumstantial,
and most imposing body of history, where
the certain legend exhibits the form of plain and probable
narrative, and the certain fact displays itself with a mythical
flourish, how there to fix upon any one point and say
here is the first truth. It is a task perilous and perplexing.
Descartes commenced his investigations into the
nature of the soul, by assuming the certainty of his
IRISH BARDIC HISTORY 25
I
own existence. Standing upon this adamantine foothold,
he sought around him for ground equally firm,
which should support his first step in the quagmire of
metaphysics. But in the early Irish history, what one
solid and irrefutable fact appears upon which we can
put foot or hand and say, " This, at all events, is certain ;
this that I hold is not mist ; this that I stand on is neither
water nor mire '
' ? Running down the long list of Milesian
kings, chiefs, brehons, and bards, where first shalt we pause,
arrested by some substantial form in this procession
of empty ghosts—how distinguish the man from the
shadow, when over all is diffused the same concealing
mist, and the eyes of the living and the dead look with
the same pale glare ? Eocha of the heavy sighs, how shall
we certify or how deny the existence of that melancholy
man, or of Tiernmas, who introduced the worship of
fire ? , Lara of the ships, did he really cross the sea to
Gaul, and return thence to give her name to Leinster, and
beget Leinster kings ? Ugainey More, did he rule to the
Torrian sea, holding sea-coast towns in fee, or was he a
prehistoric shadow thrown into the past from the stalwart
figure of Niall of the Hostages ? Was Morann a real
Brehon, or fabulous as the collar that threatened to
strangle him in the utterances of unjust judgments ?
Was Ferkeirtney a poet, having flesh and bones and blood,
and did Bricrind, the satirist, really compose those
bitter ranns for the Ultonians ? or were both as ghostly
as the prime druid, Amergin, who came into the island
with the sons of Milesius, and in a manner beyond all
praise, collected the histories of the conquered peoples ?
26 STANDISH O'GRADY
Or do we wrong that venerable man whose high-soundin
name clung for ages around the estuary of the Oboka.
One thing at all events we cannot deny—^that the
national record is at least lively. Clear noble shapes
of kings and queens, chieftains, brehons, and bards
gleam in the large rich light shed abroad over the
triumphant progress of the legendary tale. We see
Ddns snow-white with roofs striped crimson and blue,
chariots cushioned with noble skins, with bright bronze
wheels and silver poles and yokes. The lively-hearted,
resolute steeds gallop past, bearing the warrior and his
charioteer with the loud clangour of rattling spears and
darts. As in some bright young dawn, over the dewy
grass, and in the light of the rising sun, superhuman in
size and beauty, their long, yellow hair curling on their
shoulders, bound around the temples with tores of gold,
clad in white linen tunics, and loose brattas of crimson
silk fastened on the breast with huge wheel brooches of
gold, their long spears musical with running rings ; with
naked knees and bare crown, they cluster round their
kings, the chieftains and knights of the heroic age of
Ireland.
The dawn of history is like the dawn of the day. The
night of the pre-historic epoch grows rare, its dense weight
is relaxed ; flakes of fleeting and uncertain light wander
and vanish' ; vague shapes of floating mist reveal themselves,
gradually assuming form and colour ; faint hues
of crimson, silver, and gold strike here and there, and the
legendary dawn grows on. But the glory of morn though
splendid is unsubstantial ; the glory of changing and
IRISH BARDIC HISTORY 27
empurpled mist—vapours that conceal the solid face of
nature, the hills, trees, streams, and the horizon, holding
between us and the landscape a concealing veil, through
whose close woof the eye cannot penetrate, and over all a
weird strange light.
In the dawn of the history of all nations we see this
deceptive light, those glorious and unearthly shapes ;
before Grecian history, the gods and demigods who
fought around Ilium ; before Roman, the strong legends
of Virginius and Brutus ; in the dawn of Irish history,
the Knights of the Red Branch, and all the glory that
surrounded the Court of Concobar Mac Nessa, High
King of the Ultonians.
But of what use these concealing glories, these cloudy
warriors, and air-built palaces ? Why not pass on at
once to credible history ?
A nation's history is made for it by circumstances,
and the irresistible progress of events ; but their legends,
they make for themselves. In that dim twilight region,
where day meets night, the intellect of man, tired by contact
with the vulgarity of actual things, goes back for
rest and recuperation, and there sleeping, projects its
dreams against the waning night and before the rising of
the sun.
The legends represent the imagination of the country ;
they are that kind of history which a nation desires to
possess. They betray the ambition and ideals of the
people, and, in this respect, have a value far beyond
the tale of actual events and duly recorded deeds, which
are no more history than a skeleton is a man. Nay, too. X
28 STANDISH O'GRADY
they have their own reality. They fill the mind with an
adequate and satisfying pleasure. They present a
rhythmic completeness and a beauty not to be found in
the fragmentary and ragged succession of events in
time. Achilles and Troy appear somehow more real
than Histiaeus and Miletus, Cuculain and Emain Macha
than Brian Borom and Kincorih,
Such is the effect produced by a sympathetic and
imaginative study of the bardic literature, the critical
faculty being for a time held in abeyance, but with its
inevitable reappearance and reassertion of its rights, that
gorgeous world, with all its flashing glories, dissolves
like a dream, or is held together only by a resolute suppression
of all disturbing elements. If we endeavour
to realise, vividly and as a whole, the early ages and
personages of Irish history, piercing below the annals,
studying them in connection with the imaginative literature,
using everywhere a strict and critical eye, and
demanding that verisimilitude and underlying harmony
which we look for in modern historical romance,
imagination itself wavers and fails. Here is a splendid
picture, complete in all its pai-ts, fully satisfying the
imagination ; but yonder is another, and the two will
not harmonize ; or here is a fact stated, and the picture
contradicts the fact. So contemplated, the historic track,
clear and definite in the annals, viewed through the
medium of the bardic literature, is doubtful and elusive
in the extreme. Spite its splendid appearance in the
annals, it is thin, legendary, evasive. Looked at with
the severe eyes of criticism, the broad walled highway
IRISH BARDIC HISTORY Zg
of the old historians, on which pass many noble figures
of kings and queens, brehons, bards, kerds and warriors,
legislators and druids, real-seeming antique shapes of
men and women, marked by many a earn, piled above
heroes, illustrious with battles, elections, conventions,
melts away into thin air. The glare of bardic light flees
away ; the broad, firm highway is torn asunder and
dispersed ; even the narrow, doubtful track is not seen ;
we seem to foot it hesitatingly, anxiously, from steppingstone
to stepping-stone set at long distance in some
quaking Cimmerian waste. But all around, in surging,
tumultuous motion, come and go the gorgeous, unearthly
beings that long ago emanated from bardic minds, a most
weird and mocking world. Faces rush out of the darkness,
and as swiftly retreat again. Heroes expand into giants,
and dwindle into goblins, or fling aside the heroic form
and gambol as buflFoons ; gorgeous palaces are blown
asunder like a smoke-wreath ; kings, with wand of silver
and ard-roth of gold, move with all their state from century
to century ; puissant heroes, whose fame reverberates
through and sheds a glory over epochs, approach and
coalesce ; battles are shifted from place to place and century
to century ; buried monarchs reappear, and run a
new career of glory. The explorer visits an enchanted
land where he is mocked and deluded. Everything
seems blown loose from its fastenings. All that should
be most stable is whirled round and borne away like foam
or dead leaves in a storm.
But with the cessation of this creative bardic energy,
yvhat a deposit and residuum for the annalists. Consider
30 STANDISH O GRADY
the great work of the Four Masters, as it treats of this
period, that strange sarcophagus filled with the imagined
dust of visionary hosts. There lies a vast silent land, a
land of the dead, a vast continent of the dead, lit with
pale phosphoric radiance. The weird light that surges
round us elsewhere has passed away from that land. The
phantasmal energy has ceased there—the transmutation
scenes that mock, the chaos, and the whirlwind. There,
too, at one time, the same phantasmagoria prevailed,
real-seeming warriors thundered, kings glittered, kerds
wrought, harpers harped, chariots rolled. But all that has
passed away. Reverent hands, to whom that phantasmal
world was real, decently composed and laid aside in due
order the relics and anatomies of those airy nations,
building over each hero his tomb, and setting up his
gravestone, piously graving the year of .his death and
birth, and his battles. There they repose in their
multitudes in ordered and exact numbers and relation,
reaching away into the dim past to the edge of the great
deluge, and beyond it ; there the Queen Ceasair and her
comrades, pre-Noachian wanderers ; there Fintann,
who lived on both sides of the great flood, and roamed
the depths when the world was submerged ; there
Partholanus and his ill-starred race—the chroniclers
know them all ; there the children of Nemed in their
own Golgotha, their stones all carefully lettered, these
not so ancient as the rest, only three thousand years
before the birth of Christ ; there the Clan Fomor, a
giant race, and the Firbolgs with their correlatives,
Fir-Domnan and Fir-Gaileen—the Tuatha De Danan,
IRISH BARDIC HISTORY 3!
whom the prudent annalist condemns to a place amongst
the dead—a divine race they will not die—they flee afar,
preferring their phantasmal life ; even the advent of the
Talkend will not slay them, though their glory suffers
eclipse before the new faith. The children of Milith
are there with their long ancestry reaching to Egypt and
the Holy Land—Heber, Heremon, Amergin, Ir, with all
their descendants, each beneath his lettered stone
;
Tiernmas and Moh Corb, Ollav Fohla, their lines descending
through many centuries ; all put away and
decently composed for ever. No confusion now, no
dissolving scenes or aught that shocks and disturbs, no
conflicting events and incredible re-appearances.
Chronology is respected. The critical and historical
intellect has provided that all things shall be done rightly
and in order, that the obits and births and battles should
be natural and imposing, and worthy of the annals of an
ancient people.
And thus, regarding the whole from a point of view
sufiiciently remote, a certain epic completeness and
harmony characterizes that vast panoramic succession
of ages and races.
STANDISH O'GRADY
Selected Essays
and Passages
1905
Reference Link:
The original of this book is in
tine Cornell University Library.
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the United States on the use of the text.
http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924009202007
