Selected Writings of John V. Kelleher on Ireland and Irish America

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Author: John V. Kelleher

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collection of eighteen critical essays and twenty-six translations spanning the career of one of the founding intellects of Irish Studies, the Selected Writings of John V. Kelleher on Ireland and Irish America consists of five accessible sections. The first gathers Kelleher’s essays on the most widely known Irish cultural phenomenon— the literary renaissance of the early twentieth century. Part two contains his judicious assessments of Irish literature in its post-Revolutionary phase. The third section includes Kelleher’s insightful essays on the experience of the Irish in America. The fourth section contains essays that examine early Irish literature and culture, opening with a benchmark essay for Irish Studies, “Early Irish History and Pseudo-History,” which was read at the inaugural meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies in 1961. The collection ends by reprinting Kelleher’s translations and adaptations of poems in Old, Middle, and Modern Irish, illustrating his command of the language at every stage. John V. Kelleher is a professor emeritus of Irish Studies at Harvard University, where he taught for over forty years. He has written groundbreaking essays on the earliest Old Irish corpus of annals, genealogies, and heroic tales; on ideas of Celticism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; on the Irish Renaissance accomplishments of William Butler Yeats and James Joyce; and on the fiction of Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faolain. His essays have defined terms and set boundaries for the study of the immigrant and ethnic cultures of Irish America. Charles Fanning is a professor of English and history, as well as the director of Irish and Irish Immigration Studies, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His books include The Irish Voice in America: 250 Years of Irish-American Fiction, The Exiles of Erin: NineteenthCenturyIrish-AmericanFiction,andFinleyPeterDunneandMr.Dooley:TheChicagoYears.Hehas editedNewPerspectivesontheIrishDiaspora,JamesT.Farrell’sChicagoStories,StudsLonigan,and Mr.DooleyandtheChicagoIrish.

Southern Illinois University Press P.O. Box 3697 Carbondale, IL 62902-3697 www.siu.edu/~siupress

Selected Writings of John V. Kelleher on Ireland and Irish America

“SelectedWritingsofJohnV.KelleheronIrelandandIrishAmericarepresentstheessenceofthought and learning of one of the outstanding scholars in Irish Studies. They are highly original and many of them are germinal. Professor Kelleher brings his unparalleled knowledge of the Irish annals and sagas to bear on various dimensions of Irish Studies. This outstanding volume is graced by a very fine introduction by the editor, Charles Fanning, which puts Professor Kelleher’s life and work into historical perspective.”—Emmet Larkin, University of Chicago

Cover illustration: Photo by Brigid Kelleher McCauley

Irish Studies

Selected Writings of

John V. Kelleher Ireland Irish America on

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Edited by Charles Fanning

ISBN 0-8093-2482-2

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Printed in the United States of America

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Southern Illinois University Press

7/19/05, 12:40 PM

Selected Writings of John V. Kelleher on Ireland and Irish America

Selected Writings of

John V. Kelleher on Ireland and

Irish America Edited by Charles Fanning

Southern Illinois University Press Carbondale and Edwardsville

Copyright © 2002 by John V. Kelleher Introduction copyright © 2002 by Charles Fanning All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 05 04 03 02 4 3 2 1 Publication partially funded by Irish and Irish Immigration Studies, Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Excerpt from “Professor Kelleher and the Charles River” by Desmond O’Grady is reprinted by kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press, Loughcrew, Oldcastle, County Meath, Ireland. From The Headgear of the Tribe (1979). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kelleher, John V., 1916– [Essays. Selections] Selected writings of John V. Kelleher on Ireland and Irish America / edited by Charles Fanning. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. English literature—Irish authors—History and criticism. 2. American literature—Irish American authors—History and criticism. 3. Irish literature—History and criticism. 4. Irish Americans in literature. 5. Ireland—In literature. 6. Ireland—Civilization. I. Fanning, Charles. II. Title. ISBN 0-8093-2481-4 (alk. paper) ISBN 0-8093-2482-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) PR8714 .K45 2002 820.9'9417—dc21 2002020932 Printed on recycled paper. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. ∞

The Charles River reaps here like a sickle. April Light sweeps flat as ice on the inner curve Of the living water. Overhead, far from the wave, a dove White gull heads inland. The spring air, still Lean from winter, thaws. Walking, John Kelleher and I talk on the civic lawn. West, to our left, past some trees, over the ivy walls, The clock towers, pinnacles, the pillared university yard, The Protestant past of Cambridge New England selfconsciously dead In the thawing clay of the Old Burying Ground. Miles East, over the godless Atlantic, our common brother, Ploughing his myth-muddy fields, embodies our order. But here, while the students row by eights and fours on the river— As my father used to row on the Shannon when, still a child, I’d cross Thomond Bridge every Sunday, my back to the walled And turreted castle, listening to that uncle Mykie deliver His version of history—I listen now to John Kelleher Unravel the past a short generation later. —Desmond O’Grady, from “Professor Kelleher and the Charles River”

Contents Editor’s Acknowledgments ix Editor’s Introduction xi P A RT O N E . Irish Renaissance Literature and Culture 1. Matthew Arnold and the Celtic Revival 3 2. Yeats’s Use of Irish Materials 24 3. Irish History and Mythology in James Joyce’s “The Dead” 40 4. Identifying the Irish Printed Sources for Finnegans Wake 57 5. The Perceptions of James Joyce 73 P A RT T WO . Post-Renaissance Irish Writing 6. Irish Literature Today [1945] 85 7. Ireland That Was 98 8. Sean O’Faolain 103 P A RT T H R E E . Irish America 9. Mr. Dooley and the Same Old World 111 10. Irish-American Literature, and Why There Isn’t Any 126 11. Edwin O’Connor and the Irish-American Process 136 12. A Long Way from Tipperary 146 13. Irishness in America 150 P A RT F O U R . Early Irish History and Literature Key to Abbreviations in the Essays of Part Four 158 14. Early Irish History and Pseudo-History 159 15. The Rise of the Dál Cais 173 16. Humor in the Ulster Saga 187 17. The Táin and the Annals 205 18. The Battle of Móin Mhór, 1151 229 P A RT F I V E . Translations and Adaptations from the Irish Index 279

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Editor’s Acknowledgments

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or introducing me to her father, I will always be grateful to Brigid Kelleher McCauley. For lo these many years, Brigid and her husband, Pat McCauley, have been wonderful friends to me and my family. Since our early twenties, they have also been heartening models for married adulthood, for which I welcome the chance to thank them here. Southern Illinois University Carbondale continues to be blessed with Irish Studies graduate students of great intelligence and enthusiasm. For their help with this project in so many ways, I thank SIUC graduate assistants Eva Roa White and Jennifer Rea. Special thanks are due to Elizabeth Brymer of Southern Illinois University Press, my friend and former student and the best of editors.

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Editor’s Introduction

J

ohn V. Kelleher was born on March 8, 1916, in the northeastern Massachusetts mill town of Lawrence, to a family with roots in nineteenth-century Ireland.The nearest connection was a grandmother who had left for America in 1870.The son of a contractor, Kelleher attended Dartmouth College on scholarships. While there, he hiked in the New Hampshire woods, boxed and played handball, and read widely and deeply in history and literature, including all things Irish. Friends recall that by his senior year he knew more about Ireland than any of his teachers. After graduating from college with distinction in 1939, he was made a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard, a prestigious scholarly group that grants its members fully subsidized freedom to pursue their ideas. While a Junior Fellow, he studied the Irish language with Professor Kenneth Jackson and achieved wider acclaim by delivering the Lowell Lectures on the subject of modern Irish literature in the fall of 1942. He was then twenty-six years old. During World War II, Kelleher served at the Pentagon as a member of an elite unit whose job was cracking Axis codes. He was in Military Intelligence, Far East, Economic Branch, in charge of the Korean Desk. After the war, he returned to his scholarship and began a teaching career as Professor of Modern Irish History and Literature at Harvard. Early in 1946, with his friend Richard Ellmann, he went to Ireland for the first time. They toured the country, mostly by bicycle, and met Irish writers and intellectuals, among them Mrs.William ButlerYeats, Maud Gonne, Jack B.Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, Brian O’Nolan, C. P. Curran, and Samuel Beckett, as well as Michael O’Donovan (Frank O’Connor) and Sean O’Faolain, who became Kelleher’s good friends. John Kelleher held Harvard’s Chair in Irish Studies until his retirement in 1986. He was a renowned teacher for forty years at Harvard, and his lectures, seminars, and conference papers inspired and encouraged many students and fellow professors in the study of Irish history and literature. His learned advocacy of interdisciplinary teaching and scholarship was crucial in the creation of the field of Irish Studies.

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Kelleher’s student Roger Rosenblatt, the journalist and essayist, has recalled that “as soon as I began listening to him, I realized that I had stumbled upon the goods: the teacher who loses sleep over ideas.” Rosenblatt fills out his teacher’s portrait as follows: He would never speak of abstractions such as honor, loyalty, fairness, and reason. He believed in particulars, facts—that if a decent mind paid attention to the facts, it might wind up worth something someday.This attitude rested in a man not naturally open-minded; when Kelleher changed his mind, you heard the padlocks snap. Yet that was his underlying lesson: virtue requires resistance. He used to quote an Irish proverb: Strife is better than loneliness, which I came to understand as meaning that the honest mind can never be lonely. . . . He taught me that the world is full of subplots, mixed motives, deceits, heroics, all piled high in a generous puzzle. He taught me that if one stays alert to the motions of the world, it is possible to see a great deal, occasionally including things that no one else has seen before.1 As a publishing scholar, Kelleher’s great achievement has been his extraordinary essays, which have always a gem-like precision of thought and a striking conciseness of expression, leavened with wit, humor, and colloquial directness. It is no exaggeration to say that his essays are as insightful and provocative as many other people’s books. Indeed, within Irish Studies, they have often been the catalyst for other people’s books. Furthermore, the most remarkable feature of Kelleher’s scholarship has been his magisterial command of the entire range of Irish cultural studies in both Irish and English. He has written germinal essays on the earliest Old Irish corpus of annals, genealogies, and heroic tales, on ideas of “Celticism” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, on the Irish Renaissance accomplishments of William Butler Yeats and James Joyce, and on the fiction of his friends Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faolain. Moreover, he has written path-breaking essays that have defined terms and set boundaries for the study of the immigrant and ethnic cultures of Irish America. The opening section of this collection gathers essays on the most widely known Irish cultural phenomenon—the literary “renaissance” of the earlytwentieth century. In “Matthew Arnold and the Celtic Revival,” Kelleher negotiates with brilliance, grace, and wit the minefields of turn-of-thecentury race theories, Irish-English politics and nationalisms, the reputations in the 1890s of Arnold and William Butler Yeats, and the mixed blessings of the Celtic Revival for subsequent literature in Ireland. As for the modern movement’s literary giants Yeats and Joyce, Kelleher has produced pioneering essays that have led the way into much valuable scholarship on the ways in xii


which both were Irish writers. The example of these essays provided an invaluable corrective to the wholesale appropriation of Yeats and Joyce into “British Literature” survey courses through the first wave of paperback anthologies that hit the burgeoning college textbook market in the 1960s. In “Yeats’s Use of Irish Materials,” Kelleher engages the vexed and complicated subject of just how much the poet knew of the Irish language and traditional Irish culture. Because he knows so well both early Irish texts and the nineteenth-century versions with which Yeats was familiar, he is able to examine the distorting and transforming power of Yeats’s mind at play among these ideas and images. Similarly, in “Irish History and Mythology in James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’,” Kelleher reveals that the famous last story of Dubliners is modeled on the Old Irish saga “The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel.” No one else had spotted this, and for good reason. No one before John Kelleher had read and thought so deeply about both ends of the fifteen-hundredyear spectrum of Irish literature. For good measure, this essay also includes a wonderfully illuminating depiction of Gretta and Gabriel Conroy as turnof-the-century Irish characters solidly rooted in their place and time. Kelleher again drew on his great knowledge of Irish history, mythology, and saga to address the daunting challenge of “Identifying the Irish Printed Sources for Finnegans Wake.” This essay also gives us his brief, sage summary of his objections to the Wake, along with his location of the places where the book “redeems [its] promise with such brilliance that one’s imagination leaps at the possibilities inherent in the method.” Finally, springing from his own first reading (at age twenty) of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Kelleher provides a consummate short assessment, and one of the most useful of any length, in “The Perceptions of James Joyce.” Part Two contains Kelleher’s assessments of Irish literature “in its postRevolutionary phase.” In two essays—one on “Irish Literature Today,” done on the spot in 1945, the year before he first visited Ireland, the second, “Ireland That Was,” a 1978 retrospective of that first visit—he casts a sweeping eye over the Irish cultural scene in the wake of the 1916 Rising, the Revolution and the Civil War, and the establishment of the Free State. Here are vibrant portraits of the dramatis personae of literary Ireland in the 1930s and early 1940s: Austin Clarke, Frank O’Connor, Sean O’Casey, Patrick Kavanagh, Liam O’Flaherty, Flann O’Brien, Sean O’Faolain. In a third essay, published in 1957, Kelleher reckoned up novels, stories, histories, and criticism to argue that Sean O’Faolain was “the most distinguished living Irish writer.” Part Three collects essays about the experience of the Irish in America. In “Mr. Dooley and the Same Old World,” Kelleher initiated serious discussion of nineteenth-century Irish-American literature by explaining the xiii


greatness of Finley Peter Dunne, the first writer of genius to emerge from that culture. Published in the Cork journal Irish Writing, “Irish-American Literature, and Why There Isn’t Any” develops for an Irish audience the outline of Irish-American life before and after the “big change” that took place at about 1900. In “Edwin O’Connor and the Irish-American Process,” Kelleher combines a moving tribute to his close friend Ed O’Connor, who had died suddenly, with an obituary for the second and third generation Irish ethnic culture in which both men had been raised. “A Long Way from Tipperary” focuses on “the Irish-Yankee confrontation” as “the richest stillunrealized tragicomedy in American history,” and “Irishness in America” dates the end of “the heroic age of the Irish in America” to boxer John L. Sullivan’s 1892 defeat at the hands of “Gentleman Jim” Corbett.These two short pieces constitute an incisive and eloquent summary of the nineteenth-century accomplishment and the twentieth-century dénouement of an American immigrant culture. John Kelleher’s central ongoing scholarly work since the 1960s has been what he has described as “a lifetime affair with early Irish history, a matter of mistaking a mountain for a good-sized molehill, due to the surrounding fog.” His aim has been to bring to greater coherence understanding of the Irish annals and genealogies, which comprise the remarkably abundant historical record of early Ireland. In this work of staggering complexity, a number of benchmark essays have appeared. Always in his scholarship, the controlling method is the application of common sense and the human perspective to some of the least tractable shards of written evidence produced by any European culture. Part Four of this collection opens with a defining essay for the field of Irish Studies, Kelleher’s “Early Irish History and PseudoHistory,” which was read at the inaugural meeting of the American Committee (now Conference) for Irish Studies in 1961. Here he surveyed the work of the preceding hundred years in Irish Studies, pointed out strengths and weaknesses, and called for concerted, interdisciplinary scholarship.To exemplify such effort, he focuses on pre-Norman Ireland and articulates the still stimulating and controversial thesis that “up to 910 all the [Irish] annals are but selective versions of one common source, a text very likely composed in that year and both fuller and more national in its purview than any of the recensions derived from it.” Four more of Kelleher’s essays on early Ireland follow. In “The Rise of the Dál Cais” he presents ideas that he sees as “much at odds with my earlier estimate of Uí Néill relations with Munster” in the previous essay on “Early Irish History and Pseudo-History.” In this second piece, he traces the rise to consolidating power of one of more than twenty tribes that shared the ground of Munster from the eighth through the tenth centuries.This progress xiv


led toward the assumption by the Dál Cais of the overkingship of Ireland, “plainly an event of revolutionary import in Irish history.” Juxtaposing these two essays illustrates a great mind at work—both the hard-headed scholarship demanded by the annalistic materials and the intellectual energy required for revision of earlier perspectives.“One lives and learns,” is his own mordant remark. Next, “Humor in the Ulster Saga” proposes a central insight—the existence of satire and parody in the most important cycle of Old Irish tales. With crisp common sense, Kelleher concludes that “the Irish writers of the eighth century were fully as intelligent as we are and, in their own context, quite as witty and sophisticated.” In “The Táin and the Annals,” he uses the largest coherent chunk of Irish epic writing, Táin Bó Cuailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), and the relevant Irish annals to gloss each other. A model of interdisciplinary scholarship, this essay features a further advancement of Kelleher’s position on the origins and history of annalistic writing, which he grounds in the recoverable realities of early Irish literature, geography, politics, and family. Finally, “The Battle of Móin Mhór, 1151” contains an elegant extrapolation from a single isolated quatrain to the broadest themes of kingship and society in twelfth-century Ireland. In sorting out two centuries of confusing warfare, Kelleher once more illustrates the scope and depth of his analysis of the annals.2 In Part Five of this collection are gathered Kelleher’s “translations and adaptations” of poems in Old, Middle, and Modern Irish. Illustrating his command of the language at every stage, the original texts date from A.D. 573 to Dunquin, County Kerry, in the 1920s. Much admired by scholars and artists alike, these poems previously appeared in his book Too Small for Stove Wood, Too Big for Kindling: Collected Verse and Translations, which was published in 1979 by Dublin’s famed Dolmen Press. It is indeed appropriate that Southern Illinois University Press be the publisher of these writings of Professor John V. Kelleher, for this eminent scholar has donated the heart of his working library in Irish history, literature, and the social sciences to the Morris Library of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.The two thousand volumes in the Kelleher Collection, many of them heavily annotated, constitute a uniquely valuable resource that will allow new generations of students to follow to the roots, and then to build upon, the accomplishments of this founding intellect of Irish and Irish immigration studies in the United States. It is to be hoped that the pieces collected here will encourage the same outcome.

Notes 1. Roger Rosenblatt,“Mentors: The Teachings of Mr. Kelleher,” Esquire ( June 1986): 264. xv

Editor’s Introduction 2. Other essays by Kelleher indispensable for scholars of early Ireland include the following.“The Pre-Norman Irish Genealogies” (Irish Historical Studies 16 [1968]: 138– 53) places the lists of Irish kings and nobles preserved in the manuscripts Rawlinson B. 502 and the Book of Leinster in the plausibly human context of Uí Néill family propaganda. “Uí Maine in the Annals and Genealogies to 1225” (Celtica 9 [1971]: 61– 112) tracks, verifies, and glosses the references to an Irish clan of the second rank of importance who happened to live close enough to the monastery at Clonmacnoise to have their affairs chronicled by the monks. The result is a fascinating view of history from a bit below the salt.

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Part One Irish Renaissance Literature and Culture

Irish Renaissance Literature and Culture

2

Matthew Arnold and the Celtic Revival

1 Matthew Arnold and the Celtic Revival

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hen Matthew Arnold set out to describe the characteristics of Celtic literature and to analyze its effects, he paid the Celtic world the first valuable compliment it had received from an English source in several hundred years. However, the compliment, though enthusiastic, was guarded. Arnold noted this literature as the source of much of the lightness and brightness that rescued English literature from the heavy dullness of its Teutonic origin. He did not suggest that it rivaled English or classical literature in stature, or that any attempt should be made to revive it as a living mode. He took care, too, to be modest in his praise of its excellencies, to claim no more for it than could easily be justified—and this perhaps was his greatest service to the Celtic cause; for if he had shown too much enthusiasm, the audience he addressed would likely have dismissed his entire essay as another example of crackpot philo-Celticism. So carefully did he seem to measure and balance his thesis that the lectures became a contemporary classic of criticism, and in another generation had become the accepted doctrine, not only on Celtic literature, but on the literature of the Celtic Revival which Arnold had not contemplated. For all practical purposes it is the doctrine commonly accepted today. The influence of Arnold’s praise can be judged from the ease with which the Celtic Revival won popular critical support. As a literary movement the Revival began to be prominent in the early 1890s. At about the turn of the First published in Walter Jackson Bate, ed. Perspectives of Criticism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950. 197–221.

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century it became a large movement with a great many writers working within its boundaries; and nearly all, late or early, who were identified with it had a remarkably easy time getting themselves accepted. Even at the beginning, when its language and themes were awkward or unfamiliar, its authors obscure young people, it got unusually good notices and sympathetic handling in the English press. This cordiality lasted the life of the Revival—that is to say, for the quarter century between 1890 and the outbreak of the Irish Revolution—and it was expressed in almost exactly the same terms at the end as at the beginning. In other words, the critics had come by what they considered a satisfactory estimate of the movement as soon as it appeared and later saw no reason to alter their decision substantially. As might be suspected from so general an agreement, no one of the contemporary critics had laid down the terms of the appraisal himself. Rather they were accepting in this, as in so much else, a commentary of Arnold’s. And let it be noted, Arnold’s commentary has gone virtually uncontradicted since it was made, in 1866. This long immunity from criticism is one of the strangest things about the essay. From the start it must have been plain to Celtic scholars that Arnold, though a sympathetic partisan of their work, was not very well qualified to discuss it, at least in such sweepingly general terms. Then, too, not content with discussing literature, he had gone on to describe and pass judgment on the Celtic character in terms more kindly than complimentary. Though he assessed his own qualifications very modestly indeed, his modesty was not reflected in the way he cut up or retouched the passages he quoted to prove his points. And there was much that must have been plain irritating at any time about his calm assumption that the Anglo-Saxon, for all his faults, was head and shoulders above the Celt in any trait or talent that really counted in this world. Since most of the Celtic scholars were Celts themselves—or Germans, and in this essay Arnold seemed insultingly patronizing to the German character, or lack of it—it is really surprising that the publication of the essay, in 1867, was not followed at once by a series of competent rebuttals. As it was, no one did fire the shot at him. Apart from a polite footnote of Whitley Stokes’s modifying one of Arnold’s statements and Alfred Nutt’s mild strictures in his critical edition of the essay, published in 1910, no one seems to have called Arnold to question for anything he said on the subject. Indeed, till this day, though it probably would be hard to find anyone to support Arnold’s thesis, the only plain opposition to it is contained in John Bull’s Other Island, where Shaw proves that every characteristic Arnold thought as typically Celtic is typically English, and, of course, vice versa. And Shaw does not mention Arnold either in the introduction or the play.

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There are plenty of reasons for this hands-off attitude, any of which might be sufficient to account for it.The most obvious is that those competent to criticize the essay at the time it appeared were not impressed by it or thought it too wide of the mark to discuss. Afterwards, it would be thought of as out of date and forgotten. There is, too, the fact that Arnold was sympathetic, which for the time made him unique of his kind and generation and one to be treated gently. But I think the most likely explanation is that the Celts and their few friends saw him only as one more of those perennial British reformers, kindly, innocent, and slightly foolish, who have always been ready to take a shot at solving the Anglo-Celtic question or some aspect of it without hurting anybody. Such Englishmen are always given free run in the Celtic provinces. It is well known that they don’t bite. Arnold was particularly that sort of Englishman. Besides On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), he published, in the early 1880s, two essays on Irish problems, one dealing with Gladstone’s Land Act of 1881, the other with a subject he knew a good deal more about: the educational system in Ireland. He was always cautious—one never knew in those years when the latest round of concession and coercion would be punctuated with a blast of Fenian dynamite—but it is plain that he felt the basic question could be solved by sound British sense, a little fair give-and-take, and hands clasped all round. Maybe he was right. Those ideas were never fully tried. But the trouble with all those who thought like Arnold, and it is to England’s credit that they were very many, is that they seem never to have considered seriously the third alternative to the kiss or the kick, that of letting the Irish have the limited independence and national recognition they were fighting for. Arnold really meant what he said about the Celts; and as we shall see, that meant no separation from England, no throwback from the millennial advance of British progress. Present circumstances aside, it was for the Celts’ own good that they should be absorbed by the Anglo-Saxon society that ruled them. Arnold could be sympathetic, particularly to that which touched his poetic sensibilities; but as a trueborn Englishman he would stand for no damned foolishness. To the Irish, who were less inclined to ignore the present circumstances, Arnold’s political and racial ideas could only seem a weary staleness. Wellintentioned Englishmen had been saying the same things about reason and light for a long time now, but they did not seem to affect the government of Ireland. Every concession the Irish won had to be fought for, no matter who agreed that it was obviously justified. The number of necessary concessions yet to be won was immense. And who in Ireland could take seriously the man who, in 1866, had come up with this whopper:

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The sensuousness of the Greek made Sybaris and Corinth, the sensuousness of the Latin made Rome and Baiae, the sensuousness of the Latinised Frenchman makes Paris; the sensuousness of the Celt proper has made Ireland.1 The Irishman proper of 1866, sensuously tightening his belt after a meal of sour milk and potatoes, could only reply that he hadn’t quite made this Ireland all by himself and turn his thoughts back to landlordism, rents, potatoes, rents, and landlords. The chances are that, until 1892 or after, nobody in Ireland paid any serious attention to what Arnold had to say on any Celtic or Irish subject. After 1892 a great many young men did; but then the circumstances of Irish life were much changed; and Arnold was dead and not likely to contradict the young men’s interpretation of his ideas. That the Celtic Revival and Arnold’s plain influence on it came then shows, if you like, that in 1866 Arnold had been far in advance of his time. More likely it shows that he had been talking without any realistic observation in mind. Certainly he had neither predicted nor advocated a Celtic Revival: quite the contrary. Certainly it is plain that he had no notion of the circumstances under which literature of the type he described could prosper and become influential in the modern world.Very likely he would have been annoyed by the whole thing, at least until it had proved its merits, when his fair mind would have brought him to praise it as he praised all fine things. But he died in 1888. The Celtic Revival expressed the mood of its time, and in Ireland that mood was established by the Parnellite disaster and by the double failure of the Fenian movement, first in its attempt at open rebellion, culminating in 1867, then in the involvement of the Fenian rank and file in the collapse of Parnell’s party in 1891.The Fenian failure meant the end for a long time of effective revolutionary action. Parnell’s fall, after he had brought the country so near to Home Rule, took away all real hope that the constitutional movement would get to its goal of a separate legislature for Ireland at any time in the near future. At least as important was the fact that the political split, coupled with the very substantial and continuing land reforms won in the 1880s, had changed the spirit of the peasantry from the most radical in Europe to the caution of newly established or anticipant petty proprietors. There would be no further serious action in Ireland until these new gains had been consolidated, and until a new generation, brought up to a large share of political freedom, would declare for more. That it would so declare was by no means certain. The advance of Irish prosperity from the 1880s onward was real and tangible. Rackrenting, pauperism, recurrent famine had at last come to an end. For the first time in centuries the Irish peasant and small farmer could look 6


beyond this year’s crop and plan for security. The economic basis of freedom was being established, which meant that if another bout of rebellion came Ireland would have some staying power, would not have to depend solely on the hope that a sudden fierce blow might catch England involved in greater difficulties and compel her to let Ireland go by default. For all that, the mood of the strictly orthodox Nationalists was low.The older Fenians, those who like John O’Leary had refused to go along with Davitt and Parnell in combining land agitation with the political movement, had always insisted that to solve the land question before achieving the political solution would be to destroy the fighting spirit of the peasantry. Now it seemed as if they had been right.There was plenty of passion in Ireland in the years immediately following the Parnellite disaster, but it was no longer pure—it had been infected by materialistic motives. Truly the golden age of 1798 and 1848 and the silver age of 1867 had passed, and the iron age had come.While Redmond and Dillon and Healy and O’Brien squabbled and fought for the leadership none could fill, the romance of Irish patriotism seemed to dim and wink out.Year followed dull prosperous year, each adding new thousands to the lists of small holders, and with every year the response to the old slogans became feebler and more prosaic, till at last Yeats would write, Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, It’s with O’Leary in the grave, mourning at once the greatest Fenian spirit and the apparent loss of all that that spirit had coveted. What no one seemed to reflect upon was the plain truth that Irish romanticism had always been a middle-class notion and that this iron age was establishing a middle-class Ireland.With the rise of prosperity from the 1880s on, and the spread of education, the audience receptive to romantic nationalism was greatly increased.This was apparent enough in 1916, when a few hundred men could rise “in the name of God and of the dead generations,” taking on the armed might of England in what they knew was a blood sacrifice; and when, in the same year, after the leaders had been executed, most of the country took up the challenge and accepted the consequences of revolution. Among the leaders of that rising were schoolteachers, minor poets, Gaelic enthusiasts, their heads full of Yeats’s poetry and all the heroic antiquity his school had evoked. Yet Yeats himself was the last to recover from the shock of the Rising. He wrote the O’Leary poem in 1913. The question of his responsibility for Easter Week, 1916, dogged him to the end of his life, cropping up more and more insistently in his verse till the Last Poems are full of it. 7


Did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot? It had—and not only the play Cathleen Ni Houlihan, but his poetry, and all that he had preached in his earlier years. That he conceived of the poet’s role as that of patriot and creative nationalist was clear enough, in 1892, when he had written: May not we men of the pen hope to move some Irish hearts and make them beat true to manhood and to Ireland? Will not the day come when we shall have again in Ireland . . . men like the men of ’48, who lived by the light of noble books and the great traditions of the past? Amidst the clash of party against party we have tried to put forward a nationality that is above party.2 For many reasons—among them its date—that is a most important statement in regard to the Celtic Revival. It shows how soon Yeats had recognized what the character of Irish literature must be after Parnell.The poet’s nationalism is henceforth “above party.” He is to be like the men of 1848, like Thomas Davis who had founded the Young Ireland school that still dominated Irish writing, and like them he is to appeal to Irish hearts through the “great traditions of the past.” Yet the poet would no longer be bound by Young Ireland’s forms, however much he hoped to stand within their tradition. In the same year Yeats got the provisional committee of the Irish Literary Society to issue an appeal that amounted to a declaration of independence from Young Ireland: In recent years we have heard much of the material needs of Ireland, and little or nothing of her intellectual and literary . . . Without an intellectual life of some kind we cannot long preserve our nationality. Every Irish national movement of recent years has drawn a great portion of its power from the literary movement started by Davis, but that movement is over, and it is not possible to live forever upon the past. A living Ireland must have a living literature.3 That once firmly stated—though the older writers shortly afterwards tried to retract it—the new movement was begun. All that remained was to determine the style of the new literature and what it should be about. That had practically determined itself. After the double defeat of the constitutional and revolutionary movements, to go on writing the sort of balladry in which Young Ireland had specialized for fifty years was so impossible that it could be taken for granted the new poetry would be almost diametrically opposite in tone, if not in purpose. If Irish nationalism was not to lose heart, too many failures had to be explained and justified for poetry to go 8


on appealing to long past victories that had never seemed to win anything, anyway, no matter how enthusiastically one remembered them now. Irish self-confidence had received a terrible jolt. It could not restore itself with stale assurances—assurances that amounted to hearty repetition of the belief that one good Irishman could lick any ten Englishmen, providing only that he were fighting in the good cause and was not hamstrung by treachery.A more subtle rationale than this was needed to hearten a nation that was now used to defeating itself. Poetry in Ireland would have to accept the atmosphere of defeat as its first ingredient; and out of defeat and melancholy it must somehow make the ultimate victory not only credible but expected. With that we return to Arnold and his description of the Celts, their literature, and their character. Twenty-six years had passed since he had lectured at Oxford on the study of Celtic literature, twenty-five, since he had published the lectures. They were now well known to everyone interested in the subject, and certainly no Irish writer would be ignorant of them. At the same time, it is useless to look for significant statistics on Arnold’s influence in Ireland. It would be too painful for an evangelizing Celt to admit, even to himself, that he had got any substantial share of his gospel from an Englishman—even a good Englishman, now dead.Yeats in his essay “The Celtic Element in Literature,” first published in 1897, does “not think any of us who write about Ireland have built any argument upon [Arnold’s ideas].”4 We may still have our suspicions about it. Of course, it may have been entirely accidental that the Celtic Revival reproduced, element for element, Arnold’s picture of Celtic literature, with the difference that every weakness Arnold deplored in the Celt and his works has now become a strange characteristic strength. Or it may be that the Revival did revive the true qualities of Celtic literature and that Arnold had been uncannily right in his estimate of those qualities. Neither is very likely. That the resemblance between Arnold’s idea and the ideas of the Revival was accidental might possibly be true. The second possibility is certainly wrong. Celtic Revival literature does not resemble Celtic literature very much at all; and Arnold’s knowledge of the subject was neither wide nor trustworthy. For that matter, with the exception of Douglas Hyde—and his work was only adjunct to the Revival—Yeats and his followers did not know much about Celtic literature either. And there is the real connection. There would likely be little to choose between Arnold’s Celtic knowledge in 1866 and Yeats’s knowledge in the 1890s.Yeats had collected folk stories in the Irish-speaking west; he had spent much of his youth in Sligo; he had read most Anglo-Irish literature and knew the principal heroic tales in one English redaction or another. And he was an Irishman. Arnold had 9


none of these advantages, but he had read many of the best books and apparently all the worst books on Celtic literature and history, and he had a pretty fair nose for what was ridiculous or unsound. He appreciated good scholarship. He could recognize from a distance the worth of a great scholar like Eugene O’Curry. Better still, though he felt that the era of genuine Celtic studies had just dawned, he could give intelligent praise, across sixty or a hundred and sixty years, to great collectors like Owen Jones and Edward Lhuyd. In the Study the range of his learning is unobtrusively apparent: he quoted from or referred to some thirty books, covering nearly every branch of the subject then studied and including the works of French and German Celticists. (His firsthand knowledge of several of these books is not certain, since his quotations from them can also be found in others on the list.) Few English or American critics who have dealt with a Celtic topic have been so well prepared to speak—which is still not much of a compliment. Examination of his sources gives us another significant fact. With very few exceptions the books are all about Celtic literature or culture. As nearly as one can make out from his references and remarks, he seems to have read—in translation, of course, for he knew no Celtic language—very little of the literature itself. Of Welsh he had read Lady Guest’s Mabinogion and possibly Williams ap Ithel’s translation of Brut y Tywysogion, though he only quotes from the preface to that; for Breton he had Villemarqué’s French translations and Tom Taylor’s English translation from Villemarqué.The rest of his quotations are from selections given in critical or descriptive works, that chiefly used being D.W. Nash’s Taliesin; or,The Bards and Druids of Britain (1858) and, as a distant second and the source of nearly every Irish passage, O’Curry’s Lectures on the Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History (1861). In all, a singularly small foundation for comment on the native literature of three countries and several provinces. Next most remarkable is his free handling of what he had read. Take, for instance, that string of passages from the Mabinogion, through which, in the fifth lecture, he leads up to his illustration of Celtic “magic.”The last two passages and Arnold’s comment may be given here. I indicate in parentheses Lady Guest’s words where Arnold has changed them; his wordings are italicized. “And early in the day Geraint and Enid (they) left the wood, and they came to an open country, with meadows on one hand and mowers mowing the meadows. And there was a river before them, and the horses bent down and drank the water. And they went up out of the river by a steep bank (lofty steep), and there they met a slender stripling with a satchel about his neck, (but they knew not what it was); and he had a small blue pitcher in his hand, and a bowl on the mouth of the pitcher.” 10


And here the landscape, up to this point so Greek in its clear beauty, is suddenly magicalised by the romance touch:— “And they (he) saw a tall tree by the side of the river, one half of which was in flames from the root to the top, and the other half was green and in full leaf.”5 The fault with Arnold’s comment and the point he is making here is that the landscape is not thus “magicalised” for Enid and Geraint. The first passage is from the story of “Geraint the Son of Erbin,” and the second is from the preceding story in the collection, “Peredur the Son of Evrawc.” There are many pages in between the passages.6 It is also interesting that Yeats, in the “Celtic Element in Literature,” quoted twice from the same string of passages, emphasizing the one about the burning tree, and in both instances with Arnold’s wording. To be sure, he acknowledged his source, but may we guess that, in 1897, he knew no more about Welsh literature than Arnold had known, or knew it chiefly from Arnold? This is by no means a unique example of how Arnold stacked his cards. When he was convinced that a “Celt-lover” had written nonsense, he was not above embellishing the nonsense on his own, to make the poor man more ridiculous than he was. He certainly did it to Algernon Herbert, to whom he credits a worse translation than Herbert had actually used;7 and there is in the first lecture a passage ascribed to Sharon Turner which conflicts with what Turner had to say and which I have not been able to find in Turner’s book, A Vindication of the Genuineness of the Ancient British Poems (1803).8 Indeed, after an examination of the Study, it seems fairly reasonable to conclude that Arnold had made up his mind about Celtic literature before he consulted most of his material on it. How else can one explain his bland insistence that Macpherson’s Ossian, for all that it was a fraud, still had “a residue with the very soul of Celtic genius in it”?9 Alfred Nutt pointed out that if Arnold had known any of the genuine Gaelic poems attributed to Oisin he would have noticed—and presumably have admitted—the utter difference in tone. Oisin, as Nutt truly said, does not weep about going forth interminably to battle and as consistently falling; rather, he does the knocking down and he enjoys it very much. Nutt, however, underestimated Arnold’s resistance to what conflicted with the criteria he had himself established. At the end of the third lecture, quoting from Henry Morley’s English Writers, where Morley spoke of “Oisin’s dialogues with St. Patrick,” Arnold changed the spelling to “Ossian.”10 His reasons for preferring Macpherson are, I think, easy enough to understand. Macpherson gave him what he wanted and what he felt ought to be right. Ossian fits Arnold’s formula for Celticity far better than any authentic Celtic poetry would—as in turn Arnold’s formula fitted the needs 11


of the Celtic Revivalists better than did the history of any Irish period since the coming of Christianity. And once more we are indebted to Nutt for reminding us that Ossian reflects, through Macpherson’s mind, the atmosphere of melancholy and defeat that pervaded the Scotch Highlands after 1745.11 We have then a reasonably clear recurrence of a similar emotional tone, first in Scotland in the mid-eighteenth century, thereafter in Macpherson, then in that part of Arnold’s temperament which sensed the world as a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight Where ignorant armies clash by night, and at last in the general feeling of disheartenment in Ireland after Parnell. And at no point in the series is real Celtic literature brought in for the primary effect.The concern is always with the present emotion and the conception it leads to. The emotions are similar and decisive. Before we come to Arnold’s formula, it is but fair that we consider his motives in writing the Study of Celtic Literature. In his recent Matthew Arnold: A Study in Conflict, E. K. Brown has shown very clearly that the motives were generous and sincere: his strictures on Celtic weaknesses, part of the “strategy of disinterestedness.” There is no doubt that he does dispel distrust, that he does preserve the appearance of disinterestedness; but, on the other hand, he does clutch at every shred of evidence he can find to sustain his argument—his dependence on current theories of race must now appear astonishingly uncritical—he is in his heart an advocate for the Celt and not a dispassionate judge.The disinterestedness is one of strategy rather than of essential disposition. He wishes to know the Celt; he wishes no less to exalt him.12 To all of which we can agree, except for his clutching at “every shred of evidence.” If one means only such evidence as would bolster the Celtic claim to greatness, it is true. If one means evidence concerning Celtic literature, it is not true. Arnold took astonishingly little pains about that, and by no means for lack of evidence. For Irish literature alone the amount of recent, scholarly translation available in the 1860s was very considerable.Yet all his Irish references can be traced to four sources, two of which are more grammatical than literary. I refer to O’Curry’s Manuscript Materials, mentioned before as the chief Irish source; to Whitley Stokes’s Three Irish Glossaries (1862), from which he took the etymology of triath, “the sea,” which he 12


misspells as traith;13 and to Johann Kaspar Zeuss’s Grammatica Celtica (1853), from which he quoted two prefatory footnotes and Zeuss’s discussion of the destitutio tenuium as a measure for the age of linguistic forms.The fourth is probably Stokes’s early edition of the “Felire of Angus the Culdee,” published in India in 1863, which is likely the source of the two stanzas from the “Leabhar Breac” poem on Angus quoted in the fifth lecture. It must readily be admitted that, as an argument for recognition of Celtic worth, the Study of Celtic Literature is a fine, large-hearted plea. More the pity that the title is so irrelevant. The formula, when we get to it, is not so distinctively Arnold’s own as one might expect from the very Arnoldesque approach to it. As most of the illustrations of Celtic poetry in the Study are from Nash’s Taliesin, so many of the touchstones are from Renan’s “La Poésie des races celtiques” (1859). The mixture is Arnold’s, mixed at his common-sensical British best. Renan had observed the Celts in Brittany and on a flying trip to Wales, and Arnold, plainly without an eye to the Irish vote, reminded his audience that Renan had not seen the Celt at his least tamed. M. Renan with his eyes fixed on the Bretons and the Welsh is struck with the timidity, the shyness, the delicacy of the Celtic nature . . . He talks of the douce petite race naturellement chrétienne, his race fière et timide, à l’extérieur gauche et embarrassée. But it is evident that this description, however well it may do for the Cymri, will never do for the typical Irishman of Donnybrook fair. Again, M. Renan’s infinite délicatesse de sentiment qui caractérise la race Celtique, how little that accords with the popular conception of an Irishman who wants to borrow money!14 But at once he adds that “sentiment” is the key word for the Celtic nature, the word “which marks where the Celtic races really touch and are one.” And with that, he is off—without, however, quite warning his audience that he uses “sentimentality” in a double sense, both as the French sentimentalité and in a special meaning of his own: “Sentimental,—always ready to react against the despotism of fact,” a phrase taken from Henri Martin’s chapter on the Celts in his Histoire de France (1855–1860).15 Its effect, too, was as double as its meaning. It gave the Celt an “organisation quick to feel impressions, and feeling them very strongly; a lively personality . . . keenly sensitive to joy and sorrow,” but at the same time it deprived him of “balance, measure, and patience . . . the eternal conditions . . . of high success.”16 “The Celtic genius,” Arnold thought, had “sentiment as its main basis, with love of beauty, charm, and spirituality for its excellence, ineffectualness and self-will for its defect.”17 It contrasted sharply and, one must ad13


mit, not altogether favorably against German “steadiness with honesty” and English “energy with honesty.” Much as Arnold appreciated Celtic passion, he did not think the Celts could do much with it, for in business and politics it became evident that “the skillful and resolute appliance of means to end which is needed both to make progress in material civilisation, and also to form powerful states, is just what the Celt has least turn for.”18 “Sensuousness” betrayed them: the sensuousness of the Celt proper that had made Ireland. Even in the realm of art failure dogged them for the same reasons. In . . . poetry which the Celt has so passionately, so nobly loved; poetry where emotion counts for so much, but where reason, too, reason, measure, sanity, also count for so much,—the Celt has shown genius, indeed, splendid genius; but even here his faults have clung to him, and hindered him from producing great works . . . he has only produced poetry with an air of greatness investing it all, and sometimes giving . . . to short pieces, or to passages . . . singular beauty and power. The Celt had not patience for the “steady, deep-searching survey,” the “firm conception of the facts of human life,” on which true art was based. So he runs off into technic, where he employs the utmost elaboration, and attains astonishing skill; but in the contents of his poetry you have only so much interpretation of the world as the first dash of a quick, strong perception, and then sentiment, infinite sentiment, can bring you.19 So much then for the deficiencies of Celtic poetry.They were hardly what must have attracted Arnold’s interest. He had as much again to say of its excellencies; and though he may have annoyed patriotic Celts by appropriating all these virtues for English verse, he was charmingly particular about acknowledging where they had come from. “Celtic poetry,” he said, seems to make up to itself for being unable to master the world and give an adequate interpretation of it, by throwing all its force into style, by bending language at any rate to its will, and by expressing the ideas it has with unsurpassable intensity, elevation and effect.20 And this style was itself induced by what it had to control: the penetrating passion and melancholy bred into the Celts by their “sensuous nature, their manifold striving, their adverse destiny, their immense calamities,” and issuing in what Arnold could only call Titanism.21 There was still more, for this Titanism might have created a deep and deeper gloom ending in a 14


depression too compacted for poetical release; and this, Arnold pointed out, had not happened. Celtic literature had a “lightness and brightness” as native as its gloom: a radiance magical in its effect. “Magic is the word to insist upon,—a vivid and near interpretation of nature,”22 an observation that went beyond faithful description of observed fact, beyond even the Greek interpretation where clarity of vision is implemented by an additional human radiance, to a perception of an interior and wayward life in the object itself, so that Celtic interpretation became as much a venture into magical revelation as into description. Here, then, was a thoughtful analysis of Celtic literature, made with sympathy and good will—though with notably insufficient evidence—and published twenty-five years before the appearance of the Celtic school in English. It provided even the dullest critic with a set of tools guaranteed to give the measurements of any work called “Celtic”; and the critics used it gratefully when the need and opportunity came. So did the young Irish and Scottish authors whose work, the critics noticed, could thus be measured. The writers did not use it, however, precisely in its original form: they had to reinterpret and get rid of Arnold’s strategical qualifications. The virtues he praised could be accepted at face value; the faults and weaknesses he deplored had to be explained and, in the explanation, be shown as hidden but distinctive merits. After all, it was hardly fair that the English should wreck Celtic life and then complain of its lack of wholeness. More than a thousand years of steady, energetic Teutonic mayhem stood between the unbroken Celtic world and modernity. It would be enough, therefore, for Arnold to note the grace and indestructible vitality of the Celtic spirit— Celtic competence was not his proper concern. It might be, as he said, that the steady Teuton or energetic Anglo-Saxon, blessed with balance, measure, and patience, was responsible for “doors that open, windows that shut, razors that shave, coats that wear, and a thousand more such good things.”23 What had the Celt to do with these or these to do with the Celt while Ireland remained unfree? The intense spirituality of the Celt could not be shackled to such material concerns: magic and mechanics do not go together. (Besides, as Sinn Fein began presently to argue, Ireland had only to be free, and then the world would see such watches, razors, coats, and household appliances as were never seen before.) As for Arnold’s queer suggestion (it was really a remarkable insight, considering how little he knew of it) that Celtic poetry was wanting architectonicé, what did he expect? Was there—as any indignant patriot could ask—but one structure for great poetry, one manner of indicating that the poet’s survey and conception of the facts of human life were steady, deep search15


ing, and firm? It was quite true that the Celtic poet did not imitate the heavy didacticism of the English. He didn’t need to. His audience preferred the thing “half-said,” their quick response completing his subtly sketched allusion. Or so the neo-Celt of 1890 might argue, forgetting, if he had ever known, the tedious acres of bardic verse stretching out to a gray garrulous infinity. At the same time, it is significant that those who essayed the “Celtic mode” did not often attempt any of the larger forms. Irish poetry has till now remained pretty much content with the lyric, the shorter poem of any type, satisfied apparently to depend for its effects, as Arnold said it did, on “quick, strong perception,” style, and intensity. Besides these, there was his charge of “ineffectualness and self-will.” The latter seemed to require little apology. If the Celt was self-willed, he had a right to be; it was not for the humdrum Saxon to pass on that. Ineffectualness was a more pointed indictment, for it could not, on the face of it, be easily denied—particularly by a people who had just wrecked the most powerful political movement they had ever had. It was, as a matter of fact, never really disposed of by the Celtic Revivalists. About as close as they got to a satisfactory answer was the romanticized paradoxical statement of Celtic wisdom and spirit, a way of hinting that the Celt was defeated by his own superiority. That device was, as we shall see, a favorite with the lesser poets and poetesses. Of course, in speaking of formulas and conventions, we must understand that the convention of the Celtic school was not an elaborate, well-defined set of rules for the sure and easy production of “Celtic” literature. Rather, such a convention is a sort of lowest common denominator, made up of those elements most frequently to be found in the work of a group of writers who are related in a general way by elements of style and choice of subject. And since those authors who begin such a convention and contribute most to it are usually those most independent of it, it is not among the works of the best Irish writers that we must look for the most complete and indicative examples. It is the minor bards, the imitators, who may write little individually, but whose numbers are as the sands of the sea or the stars on a winter’s night, who can give us the convention entire in a sigh. Yeats, for instance, though he created most of the elements of the convention, never wrote a perfect Celtic Revival poem or play—though some of his early things come pretty close to it. AE’s opalescent language of vision and his hazy pantheon of Celtic divinities were widely borrowed: his concern with spiritual discipline and human liberty and decency did not fit into any nationalistic school. Lady Gregory had too much common sense and humor. Synge had too much reserve.They could not, in any case, be bothered with exploiting a particular literary mode beyond the point of diminishing re16


turns, and what was good in the Revival was very soon worked out. In 1904 Yeats discovered Padraic Colum, and the new generation began to speak, to the surprise of all, in terms of “peasant realism.”After that the Celtic mode was the property of the third-string writers. There are many reasons why we do not find the pure convention in Yeats’s work at any period of his life. The most obvious, of course, is that he was too big to be contained by it. As important is that he disagreed with Arnold on perhaps the most important detail of Arnold’s description of Celtic literature. He held that the “mystery and magic charm” Arnold had so praised was not simply the product of the Celtic imagination, with its “passionate, turbulent, indomitable reaction against the despotism of fact”—it was not even specifically Celtic. When Matthew Arnold wrote it was not easy to know as much as we know now of folk song and folk belief, and I do not think he understood that our “natural magic” is but the ancient religion of the world, the ancient worship of nature and that troubled ecstasy before her, that certainty of all beautiful places being haunted, which it brought into men’s minds.24 That being so, the magic and mystery could not be evoked, the obscurely preserved fragments of the ancient belief recovered, by any vague Celticism. They could be interpreted and understood only by analogy with European and Oriental occult lore, derived presumably from the same antiquity. And only when they had thus been given meaning could they be used again for sure poetical effect. That belief and the laborious practice it called for gave Yeats’s poetry the discipline and intensity of symbolistic suggestion that increasingly distinguished it, a richness that could not be imitated without equal skill and labor. It was not successfully imitated, but it could be counterfeited—and the counterfeiting resulted in the fanciest hogwash ever manufactured in Ireland. In scores of slim green volumes the discovery of popular Celtic mysticism was celebrated. It was a great time for the feeble-minded: never before had it been so easy and practicable to be wise without wisdom, visionary without visions, acutely sensitive without feeling. As mentioned before, the romanticized paradox was the secret means. Equipped with it, the common or garden Irish poet began to hear the inaudible, see the invisible, comprehend the unintelligible, apparently with no more elaborate qualification for all this than his presumably Celtic paternity. (Scotsmen could do all this, too, as “Fiona Macleod” demonstrated.) And presently it began to be done on a grand scale, for about this time the last of Arnold’s Celtic touchstones was brought up and set in place. That was Titanism, which Arnold had de17


fined as that “vein of piercing regret and passion . . . [which] Macpherson’s Ossian carried in the last century . . . like a flood of lava through Europe.”25 Most of the lesser poets seem to have mistaken it, however, as an appellation for sheer size. The nine-foot Gaelic hero came into vogue: A fighting man he was, Guts and soul; His blood as hot and red As that on Cain’s hand-towel. ........................... I’ve seen him swing an anvil Fifty feet, Break a bough in two, And tear a twisted sheet. And the music of his roar— Like oaks in thunder cleaving; Lips foaming red froth, And flanks heaving. God! A goodly man, A Gael, the last Of those who stood with Dan On Mullach-Maist! 26 That, incidentally, is by a poet who wrote some of the loveliest and most tender lyrics in the literature, when he eschewed the convention and worked his own vein. By this time, the convention had become so elaborate and so embarrassingly empty that it was beyond even the salutary aid of parody. One cannot parody the funny; and despite the fierce patriotism that undoubtedly justified this poetry in the minds of its creators, it could no longer be taken seriously by those not drunk on the same brew. Or could it? There is one really skillful poem of this mode which still survives as an established anthology piece—used to illustrate the Celtic Revival, though it was written, not by one of the Dublin group, but by a young New Yorker. I refer to Shaemas O’Sheel’s “They Went Forth to Battle But They Always Fell,” a poem published in 1911 and written in a style and with a smooth facility Yeats might have envied twenty years before. In three stanzas it reproduces practically the entire formula. All of Arnold’s Celtic 18


touchstones are there: Titanism and magic and piercing melancholy and doomed bravery and ineffectualness and verbal sensuality and splendid dream-haunted failure and the exquisite spiritual sensitivity of the Celt. And there is sentiment, “infinite sentiment,” too, though perhaps not of the sort Arnold meant. The title is that quotation from Ossian with which Arnold had headed his lectures. For the meaning it will probably be enough to quote the second stanza: It was a secret music that they heard, A sad sweet plea for pity and for peace; And that which pierced the heart was but a word, Though the white breast was red-lipped where the sword Pressed a fierce cruel kiss, to put surcease On its hot thirst, but drank a hot increase. Ah, they by some strange troubling doubt were stirred, And died for hearing what no foeman heard.27 Here then is the new view of Irish history which explains defeat and removes its sting. It suggests that Irish were beaten not because they were divided, or badly led, or armed with obsolete weapons, or even seriously outnumbered, but because they were distracted by more important, if less pressing, matters: matters indeed so profound that only a Celt could understand them or even be aware of them, and then only when he was not attending to business.They were beaten because, in other words, they were fey, doomed by their own spiritual sensitivity. One notes that the music or the word that did the dirty work was inaudible to the crass but competent enemy.Yet there was nothing weak or cowardly about the fallen.The poem goes on to imply that once they got over being doomed, by, for instance, being dead, they could conquer even the powers of darkness: Yet they will scatter the red hordes of Hell, Who went to battle forth and always fell. A heartening statement for those who were now preparing themselves for the last revolt. And considering the odds these rebels faced, and the bravery with which they faced them, it would be a poor thing for outraged sense to begrudge them what comfort such poetry may have given.We need note it here only as the ultimate expression of the train of ideas Arnold had so carefully, so moderately, set going, in a different age, on a different theme. Except of course as a theological problem, moral responsibility in the chain of cause and effect, it has almost nothing whatever to do with what Arnold had said or thought—as Arnold certainly would have had nothing to do with it. 19


One can only repeat that he had not predicted or desired a Celtic literary revival. He had wanted the Celts fully to enter the Anglo-Saxon cultural and political system, bringing with them their great spiritual and artistic gifts. His lectures were in large part a plea that they be welcomed as coequal citizens, valued for the qualities they alone possessed and without which, he felt, English literature and English life would lack savor. It was a noble intent. It did not, however, have much to do with the literature which was his ostensible subject, or induce him to go beyond a cursory inspection of that literature. What he saw of it, he probably saw steadily and saw whole; but he saw only fragments, and the picture he drew, while distantly recognizable, lacks depth and outline. He seems, for instance, totally unaware of that quality of reserved emotion that gives the best Gaelic poetry a whiplash sting, particularly when, as in so many of the poems translated by Frank O’Connor, it is set down in language so severely objective as to seem at first impassive. On the other hand, one would never gather from what he says of it that much Celtic poetry is very dull stuff indeed. He saw the technical intricacy of standard Celtic verse, without, however, seeing that inspiration could be killed by the tradition that required this mathematical intricacy, or, rather, be smothered by it before birth. But then Celtic dullness was not part of his argument. Since the argument came first, one may question whether he would have cared for, or used, fuller information. He did not, at any rate, seek it out. And yet, in the Study of Celtic Literature we are dealing with the observations of a great critic.The book can never be unconsidered by anyone dealing with the subject or be taken lightly or—in the end—be read with anything but recurrent admiration. Whether or not one agrees with his estimate of Celtic literature, one’s own estimate is bound to be affected by his, as it is affected also by Yeats’s. When the great critic or the great writer speaks on literature, we must listen with avid attention. It does not matter how much or how little he knows. We do not listen to him, hoping for information. We listen for insight. If he knew more, he would probably see into more, and that would be better; but we are grateful for what we can get. It is thus with Joyce in the Portrait of the Artist when he explains why he, as a young man, rejected what the Celtic Revival admired: “The broken lights of Irish myth . . . the myth upon which no individual mind had ever drawn out a line of beauty . . . its unwieldy tales that divided against themselves as they moved down the cycles.”28 It is thus with Arnold. Does it matter, in the end, how much they knew? Certainly, all the scholarly interpretation in the world, so long as it is uncombined with the genuine critical faculty, can never by itself give us the insights we need for an artistic valuation.The field of Celtic

20


studies has not been particularly blessed with the critical gift. Arnold’s book is still unique—a fact which he would undoubtedly have deplored. As for the Celtic Revival, the period it spans brought about an enormous improvement in the quality of Irish writing. It saw, too, the secure establishment of an Irish literature in English.This, however, was not an effect of the Celtic convention: it was the result of Yeats’s insistence on that care and finish and economy which had been conspicuously missing from Irish writing up until that time. By precept and example he forced the Irish writers to learn the tools of their trade, to respect their words and emotions, to say what they had to say and no more. For the first time in English, Irish poetry could lay a general claim to “intensity, elevation, and effect.” There were two great writers, Yeats and Synge, and a dozen fine ones associated with the Revival in the years when it won international respect. When its convention withered and grew stale, the withering did not affect the tradition of excellent workmanship that they had created. At its peak— and the peak came early—the Celtic convention was embodied in a great deal of fine writing.The inanity we have examined was the later phase, when nearly every writer worth his salt had outgrown it or deserted it. One thing was sure. No longer would there be one or two good Irish writers in each generation, working alone, without sympathy or a sound native canon of style, doomed to idiosyncracy, wasting their sweetness in a howling desert of rhetoric and easy tears. If the Celtic convention played any part in ending that over-prolonged condition, it justified itself a thousand times.

Notes References to On the Study of Celtic Literature are to the first edition (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1867), referred to below as Celtic Literature. 1. Celtic Literature, pp. 105–6. 2. The first quoted lines by Yeats are from “September 1913,” Responsibilities (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916, 1944); the second quoted lines are from “Man and the Echo,” Last Poems and Plays (copyright 1940 by George Yeats). The prose is from W. B.Yeats, Letters to the New Ireland, ed. Horace Reynolds (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934), pp. 156–57. 3. Quoted in W. P. Ryan, The Irish Literary Revival (London, 1894), pp. 127–28. 4. W. B.Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil (London, 1907), p. 272. 5. Celtic Literature, p. 161. 6. Lady Charlotte Guest, The Mabinogion (London, 1838–49). The first passage is from 2:112–13; the second, from 1:344. 7. Celtic Literature, p. 37. In Britannia after the Romans (London, 1836), 2:6, Herbert gives the translation as follows: “Without the ape, heb eppa, says Taliesin, without the milch-cow’s stall, without the world’s incomplete rampart (go-vur), the world would be desolate.” He gives it again with slightly different wording in An Essay on the Neodruidic

21

Irish Renaissance Literature and Culture Heresy in Britannia, part 1 (London, 1838), p. 113.The translation Arnold cites is actually from Edward Davies, The Mythology and Rites of the British Druids (London, 1809), appendix xii, p. 568. It concludes with the line “not requiring the cuckoos to convene the appointed dance over the green,” which does not appear in either of Herbert’s versions. 8. See Celtic Literature, pp. 39–40, where Arnold credits the following passage to Turner: “The strange poem of Taliesin, called the Spoils of Annwn, implies the existence (in the sixth century, he means) of mythological tales about Arthur; and the frequent allusion of the old Welsh bards to the persons and incidents which we find in the Mabinogion, are further proofs that there have been such stories in circulation amongst the Welsh.” I have not, after a careful search, been able to find this passage in Turner’s book. Arnold was trying to prove that Turner was tainted with the “Celt-lover’s” gulslibility. Where Turner does discuss the “Spoils of Annwn” his tone is quite different from that of the above passage. Cf. his Vindication, p. 238: If its allusions are at all historical, they are too much involved in mythology to be comprehended. In [Taliesin’s] mead/song, there is a connected train of thought. In the following poem [“The Spoils of Annwn”], all connection of thought seems to have been studiously avoided. And Turner adds in a footnote: It is, however, fair to remark, that if the Mabinogion and all the Welsh remains were to be accurately studied, it is probable, that enough might be gathered from them to elucidate some of the allusions of Taliesin to the opinions, tales, and traditions of his date. This would make intelligible many passages now obscure. 9. Celtic Literature, pp. 152–53. 10. Ibid., p. 96. The quotation is from English Writers, vol. 1, part i, p. 80. 11. The Study of Celtic Literature, by Matthew Arnold, with introduction, notes, and appendix by Alfred Nutt (London, 1910), p. 90n. Nutt credits the idea to Smart in his Macpherson. 12. E. K. Brown, Matthew Arnold: A Study in Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 110–11. 13. Celtic Literature, p. 83, cited from Three Irish Glossaries, p. xix n. The misspelling occurs in all editions of Celtic Literature, including Nutt’s. 14. Celtic Literature, p. 100. 15. Ibid., p. 102. The phrase occurs in Histoire de France, I, 36. 16. Ibid., p. 102. 17. Ibid., p. 115. 18. Ibid., p. 106. 19. Ibid., p. 104. 20. Ibid., p. 144. 21. Ibid., p. 152. 22. Ibid., pp. 161–62. 23. Ibid., p. 111. 24.Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil, p. 275. 22

Matthew Arnold and the Celtic Revival 25. Celtic Literature, p. 152. 26. Seosamh MacCathmhaoil (Joseph Campbell),“The Fighting Man,” The Mountainy Singer (Boston: The Four Seas Company, 1919). 27. From Jealous of Dead Leaves, by Shaemas O’Sheel (New York: Boni and Liveright, Inc., 1928). 28. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Modern Library edition, 1928), p. 210.

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2 Yeats’s Use of Irish Materials

I

n my experience the three questions students most regularly ask about Yeats’s poetry are, what does “lebeen-lone” mean? and who or what is Clooth-na-Bare? and what is a good book that will explain all the references in Yeats’s work to Irish history and mythology and folklore and things like that? This last one is the only one of the questions that can be answered easily. There isn’t any such book. If there were, it would look like the Encyclopaedia Britannica, except that it would have six or seven volumes of index. The reason such a work, if adequately thorough, would have to be so big is not because of the amount of Irish material Yeats used, but because of the way he used it. Actually he did not employ a great number of Irish themes or borrow characters or incidents from many Irish tales and sagas. He used only a small and, on the whole, not a very rich selection, mostly taken from books he had read in the late 1880s and in the 1890s. During the remainder of his lifetime the amount and variety and richness of the material available to him in scholarly translation increased dramatically, and a number of tales were published for the first time, which one might think he would have seized on, so close were they to the tone of his later work; yet he seemed unaware of them or indifferent to them. In the 1930s his interest was obviously restimulated by Frank O’Connor’s translations of Irish poetry which he helped prepare for the Cuala Press; and in the Last Poems there is a great explicit resurgence of his Irishness. Curiously, though, much of what comes bubbling to the surface in those lyrics must have been buried in his memory, unthought of, for more than fifty years. First published in Tri-Quarterly 4 (1965): 115–25.

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Yeats’s Use of Irish Materials

The fact is, of course, that usually we must deal not with Yeats’s ultimate sources, but with his memory of his sources. This in turn means that we must try to understand what his memory was like. Obviously it was capacious and retentive. Obviously, too, it was a creative memory.What it yielded up was apt to reappear transformed—often, I expect, quite out of recognition—and mostly enriched or improved. Mostly, but not always. As we all know, there is some rather embarrassing evidence that his memory could also work badly and could trip him up just when he was stalking most nobly, as it did in the first version of “To a Young Beauty,” when he mistook “Beaujolet” for the name of a French painter, or in the first version of “Pardon Old Fathers,” where he put his Butler ancestors in the wrong army at the Battle of the Boyne. But these are extreme instances and not typical. Generally it would be better to speak, not of a tendency toward error, but of a gift for what one might call literary ionization. A random literary fact crossing Yeats’s sphere of influence was very apt to pick up an extra particle or to lose one and to emerge with a distinctive Yeatsian spin. To the intense annoyance of some of his more rigoristic Irish readers, Irish facts were peculiarly subject to this sort of alteration. Take for example, “lebeen-lone.” You will recall that it is used by the old crane of Gort in the poem “The Three Beggars.” “Though to my feathers in the wet I have stood here from break of day, I have not found a thing to eat For only rubbish comes my way. Am I to live on lebeen-lone?” Muttered the old crane of Gort. “For all my pains on lebeen-lone?” The term was first called to my attention nineteen years ago in Dublin by a man who wanted me to put my young friend Mr. Ellmann straight on one thing, that whatever else Yeats was—and as far as the man was concerned Yeats could have been anything he wanted to be—but whatever else he was, he wasn’t genuinely Irish. No true Irish poet would stoop to invent Irish, fake Irish words that meant nothing at all. Needless to say, he adduced examples. And needless to say, a couple of the chief examples—and in fact there were not many—were “lebeen-lone” and “Clooth-na-Bare.” Ten years or so later, when I had become fairly certain that I knew what the term did mean, I asked the greatest living Irish scholar about it, a man who had known Yeats well. He replied that he had often wondered himself what Yeats had had in mind, and had indeed meant to ask him about it. Now 25


he felt the question was forever insoluble.Though obviously meant as Irish, “lebeen-lone” was simply impossible, whether as one word or two. The scholar’s quandary is a good example of the danger of approaching a small problem with over-adequate means for solving it. Had his own knowledge of Irish been less full and exact he would have had little difficulty. What balked him was his trained expectation that words in any language must obey that language’s grammar. He failed because he tried to read “lebeen-lone” as Irish. It is not. It is Yeatsian Irish. But in fact the solution scarcely requires Irish at all. If the reader would look directly at the poem and refrain momentarily from hunting for deep meanings, the meaning of “lebeen-lone” would be reasonably clear.The part of the poem in which the crane appears is a frame for the central lyric which is concerned with King Guaire and the three beggars. The frame-poem concludes: “Maybe I shall be lucky yet, Now they are silent,” said the crane. “Though to my feathers in the wet I’ve stood as I were made of stone And seen the rubbish run about, It’s certain there are trout somewhere And maybe I shall take a trout If but I do not seem to care.” Setting aside the fact that the poem as a whole is concerned with a problem in Zen Buddhism, and that both the crane and the beggars lack satori or enlightenment which King Guaire possesses, the crane’s immediate problem is that he is unable to catch a good-sized fish, a trout. Since he is hungry but not starving, since, though he doesn’t think much of it, he has at least “lebeen-lone” to live on, I submit that one can figure out what “lebeenlone” stands for. The crane means that he can get nothing but minnows or fingerlings to eat, a thin diet for so big a bird. He ought to express this as “lone lebeenee,” though it is doubtful that any native speaker of Irish, human or avian, ever used the term. Instead, being a Yeatsian crane, he employs an impermissible, though phonetically pleasing inversion and leaves off the genitive-plural ending. His “lone” is plainly Irish lón: food, fare, provender. “Lebeen” represents leidhbín, a little rag or strip, which by extension is used for any very small fish. The nominative and genitive plural is leidhbíní. How Yeats got the term is of course unknown. He was quite a fisherman and may well have heard leidhbín used for minnow. Or it may be that when he was writing the poem he asked Lady Gregory how to say in Irish 26


“a diet of minnows,” and was told that lón leighbíní would do. Since this would not fit the meter, he would then, I presume, have “run it” through the “mill of the mind,” ground off the awkward ending, reversed the remainder to iambic, and set it down without expectation of difficulty or intent to deceive. There is also the possibility that he made the compound himself. In both 1898 and 1899, in letters written from Coole Park, he mentioned that he was then studying Gaelic.This would mean that he had at least some practice in using an Irish dictionary, so that “lebeen-lone” may not have been beyond his capacity. At any rate, so far from being a mere invention or proof of an all too cavalier attitude toward the national language, the term represents an unusually earnest endeavor on Yeats’s part to supply an authentic Irish touch. Somebody must have told him that he had not succeeded this time either, for apart from names, placenames, and an occasional translated idiom, “lebeen-lone” seems to have been his last attempt at Irish. Meanwhile, for the last fifty-two years, it has lent a pleasing extra touch of mystery to a fine poem. If “lebeen-lone” is thus only a sort of half-mistake, and not a very complicated one, what about “Clooth-na-Bare”? Admittedly this is really impossible in Irish, but is it simply an ignorant howler, or is it an invention, or is it a deliberate alteration of a known term? And if it is deliberate, what is the purpose? Now, clooth is not an Irish word. It is not even an Irish sound; the “th” would be silent.Yet from the very first it must have seemed annoyingly plain to many Irish readers what Yeats was getting wrong. Even the gentle Thomas MacDonagh, one of the few younger Irish writers whom Yeats genuinely liked and admired, was irritated and complained in his Literature in Ireland (1916) that nothing is gained, surely, by that extraordinary perversion of the Irish name of the Old Woman of Beare, Cailleach na Béara. The word clooth is not Irish; it has no meaning. Even for others than Irish scholars the right word would have served as well. And—if it be not too Philistine a question—would not: “And over the grave of the Hag of Beare,” Have been better in this poem in English? Indeed MacDonagh was so upset that he got the name wrong himself. It is Cailleach Bhéara rather than Cailleach na Béara. Unconsciously he has accepted Yeats’s unwarranted insertion of the genitive article. However, his translation is right. Back there somewhere behind clooth is the Hag or the Old Woman of Beare. 27


The name first occurs in “The Hosting of the Sidhe,” a poem written in 1893 and used as an introductory for The Celtic Twilight, published in the same year. The Host is riding from Knocknarea And over the grave of Clooth-na-Bare . . . She is also mentioned in “The Untiring Ones,” a chapter of The Celtic Twilight, but since this passage is quoted by Yeats in a note which I will cite presently, we may pass it by for the moment. The third and, I believe, the last mention of Clooth-na-Bare is in the third stanza of the third and final version of the poem now called “Red Hanrahan’s Song About Ireland.” A version of the poem was originally published in 1894. Clooth-na-Bare was not put in till 1903, and then no longer as a person but apparently as the name of a mountain: The yellow pool has overflowed high up on Clooth-na-Bare . . . It is interesting to find Yeats still playing with the name as late as 1903, for we may be sure that MacDonagh was by no means the first to complain about it; and in the note I mentioned above, which appears in The Wind Among the Reeds, in 1899,Yeats seems definitely on the defensive.The note, and I would like to quote it extensively, reads as if its real purpose were to take the reader who is puzzled by Clooth-na-Bare gently by the hand and lead him up the airy mountain and down the rushy glen till he is far, far away and thinking about something else entirely. Indeed the note is so jampacked with error and innovation that for a long while I thought Yeats had simply made it up, that he was offering one invention to prove the authenticity of another. But I was wrong. As a matter of fact, he is not simply on the defensive either. He is on what might be called the offensive-defensiveevasive-creative, a type of play in which he always showed remarkable skill. The note, which can also be found on pages 800–802 of the Variorum Yeats, is much too long to quote in full. I will begin somewhat more than half-way through. Knocknarea is in Sligo, and the country people say that Maeve, still a great queen of the western Sidhe, is buried in the cairn of stones on it. Here, by the way, I must interpose to say that the country people may have said that and they may not.Their name for the cairn was Meascán Meidhbhe, a name also applied to the cairn on Muckish mountain in Donegal, and meaning, “Maeve’s Butterpat.” In either case the name has about the same associative value as any Lover’s Leap or Devil’s Punchbowl in this country, which is to say, practically none at all. But to go on— 28


I have written of Clooth-na-Bare in “The Celtic Twilight.” She “went all over the world, seeking a lake deep enough to drown her faery life, of which she had grown weary, leaping from hill to hill, and setting up a cairn of stones wherever her feet lighted, until, at last, she found the deepest water in the world in little Lough Ia, on the top of the bird mountain, in Sligo.” Here again I must pause to warn you not to waste your time studying maps of Sligo, looking for little Lough Ia or the “bird mountain.” You will not find either. Back behind these lies Lough Dagea (Loch dá ghédh), “the lake of the two geese,” on Slieve Daeane (Sliabh dá én), “the mountain of the two birds,” about halfway between Sligo and Collooney and at the western end of Lough Gill. Why Yeats should be so vague about the names, I do not understand. He must certainly have been familiar with the mountain, whether or not he had actually climbed to the lake. Then comes his source: “I forget, now, where I heard this story, but it may have been from a priest at Collooney.” Frankly, I have strong doubts about the priest.You will find in other early instances that Yeats’s source is an old woman at Ballysodare, or a pilot at the Rosses, or a manuscript which he has mislaid but which, he seems to recollect, contained the information now presented. The implication is that, though you must often take Yeats’s unsupported word, you can do so safely, for he gets his lore direct from the people and from the tattered Gaelic manuscripts that pass from hand to hand among them. The rest of the note I will give without interruption. Clooth-na-Bare would mean the old woman of Bare, but is evidently a corruption of Cailleac Bare, the old woman Bare, who, under the names Bare, and Berah, and Beri, and Verah, and Dera, and Dhira, appears in the legends of many places. Mr. O’Grady found her haunting Lough Liath high up on the top of a mountain of the Fews, the Slieve Fuadh, or Slieve G-Cullain of old times, under the name of the Cailleac Buillia. He describes Lough Liath as a desolate moon-shaped lake, with made wells and sunken passages upon its borders, and beset by marsh and heather and gray boulders, and closes his “Flight of the Eagle” with a long rhapsody upon mountain and lake, because of the heroic tales and beautiful old myths that have hung about them always. He identifies the Cailleac Buillia with that Meluchra who persuaded Fionn to go to her amid the waters of Lough Liath and so changed him with her enchantments, that, though she had to free him because of the threats of the Fiana, his hair was ever afterwards as white as snow. To this day the Tribes of the Goddess Danu that are in the 29


waters beckon to men, and drown them in the waters; and Bare, or Dhira, or Meluchra, or whatever name one likes the best, is, doubtless, the name of a mistress among them. Meluchra was the daughter of Cullain; and Cullain Mr. O’Grady calls, upon I know not what authority, a form of Lir, the master of waters. The people of the waters have been in all ages beautiful and changeable and lascivious, or beautiful and wise and lonely, for water is everywhere the signature of the fruitfulness of the body and of the fruitfulness of dreams. The white hair of Fionn may be but another of the troubles of those that come to unearthly wisdom and earthly trouble, and the threats and violence of the Fiana against her, a different form of the threats and violence the country people use, to make the Tribes of Danu give up those that are “away.” Bare is now often called an ugly old woman; but Dr. Joyce says that one of her old names was Aebhin, which means beautiful. Aebhen was the goddess of the tribes of northern Leinster; and the lover she had made immortal, and who loved her perfectly, left her, and put on mortality, to fight among them against the stranger, and died on the strand of Clontarf. This profusion, though rich and melting, does not lack structure.Through it runs a clear, if unstated argument. We are given ten other names for this supernatural creature—Cailleac Bare, Bare, Berah, Beri,Verah, Dera, Dhira, Cailleac Buillia, Meluchra, and Aebhin—and who then would be so illiberal as to refuse to allow an eleventh, Clooth-na-Bare? Admittedly clooth is preposterous as Irish. But what does it matter? So are most of the other names; and in any case one does not look for pedantic accuracy from the folk or from priests in out-of-the-way places like Collooney.Yet note that you are not to regardYeats himself as either gullible or untrained. He can cite learned sources and literary examples—in this case Standish O’Grady and Patrick Weston Joyce, historian, song-collector, folklorist, onomatologist, and Irish grammarian. He can proffer rationalizations such as were the mark of scientific folklorists in the 1890s. And to all he can add a still deeper level of interpretation, one singular to himself, from his own knowledge of the occult. All these we can see. What is not revealed to us is that the bulk of the note is paraphrased closely from pages 126 to 131 of W. G. Wood-Martin’s Pagan Ireland, published in 1895, from which I need quote but one sentence: Prominent in Irish folk-lore are two celebrated “hags,” Aine or Aynia, and Bhéartha (Vera), variously styled Vera,Verah, Berah, Berri, Dirra, and Dhirra. Even the citation of Dr. Joyce is from Wood-Martin.Yeats, incidentally, quotes it wrongly, though he must have had the book in front of him as he wrote. 30


But more still is borrowed from Wood-Martin. We need but turn to his History of Sligo, County and Town, and in the third volume, published in 1892, we will discover the source of the story that Yeats offers us, so vastly improved, in The Celtic Twilight. On the mountain overlooking the scene of this catastrophe lived a giantess named Veragh. She was so tall that she could easily wade the rivers and lakes in Ireland. One day, however, when trying to cross Loch-da-ghedh, it proved to be beyond her depth, and she was drowned; but her house on the mountain still remains, and is styled Calliagha-Veragh. This lake has the reputation of being the deepest in the County Sligo. In a footnote Wood-Martin adds that “Calliagh-a-Veragh is the denuded cist of a carn.” Here then is where Yeats got his Clooth-na-Bare who went all over the world seeking water deep enough to drown her faery life of which she had grown weary, and who at last found the deepest water in the world in little Lough Ia.You can also find that most of the confusion in Yeats’s note and in his poetry about whether Clooth-na-Bare is a placename or a personal name, and, if the latter, whether it means the “hag of Beare” or a hag whose name is Beare or any of seven or eight increasingly remote variants of that syllable—that all this confusion is inherent in Wood-Martin’s books, of which one can only say that they are the sort of amateur pseudo-scholarship that Yeats would choose to forage from.They seem to have no groundrules; and perhaps wisely, considering the Yeatsian vagaries of his spelling of Irish words and names,Wood-Martin is very stingy about acknowledging his sources. Nevertheless, one of the sources can be clearly identified, a short article on folklore published in 1852, in the second volume of the Transactions of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society (now the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland). The author was Nicholas O’Kearney, who also edited and translated the Fenian tale Feis Tighe Chonáin for the second volume of the Transactions of the Ossianic Society, in 1855, and supplied with it a long, rambling, and highly diverting introduction which was not only known to Yeats, but positively mined by him when he was working up his knowledge of the Irish faeries. (Incidentally, in our own time, the same introduction has supplied one of the more mysterious arcana in Robert Graves’s The White Goddess.) Yeats also knew the article on folklore, very likely having read it, and perhaps even copied it, in 1887, when he was gathering materials for his first anthology, Irish Fairy and Folk Tales.1 In the note, though he seems to be paraphrasing Wood-Martin, he is at one point clearly referring 31


back to the article. Recall what he says about the “people of the waters” and how “Bare, or Dhira, or Meluchra . . . is, doubtless, the name of the mistress among them.” Then mark this from O’Kearney: Anna, or Anec, was a Carthagenian goddess; and Juno was especially worshipped at Carthage; but Diana, or the moon, was Juno, according to Catullus:— Tu lucina dolentibus, Juno dicta puerpuris. And the same poet makes his Diana—a singular coincidence with the functions attributed to our Aine, and her sister Milucradh, or the Cailleach Biorar—mistress of rivers, or waters . . . Earlier O’Kearney explained his Cailleach Biorar as . . . Milucradh of Sliabh Guillean, better known among the peasantry as the Cailleach Biorar (i.e. the old woman who frequents the water) of Loch Dagruadh, on that mountain, and the daughter of Cuillean, or Guillean, from which that mountain is supposed to have derived its name. In Yeats’s note this identification of Meluchra with Cailleach Biorar (whom Yeats calls Cailleac Buillia as a compromise with O’Grady’s version, “Callia-Bullia”) is melded with a paraphrase of the rhapsody from The Flight of the Eagle and is thus by implication attributed to O’Grady, but so far as I can discover O’Grady does not mention it in any of his books. Even if he did write of it in some article unknown to me, his source would be O’Kearney; and it would seem that Yeats’s knowledge of O’Kearney was at least as good as O’Grady’s and certainly fresher. The matter need not be pursued further. Of the four men involved, only O’Kearney knew Irish and only O’Kearney, you may be sure, got any significant amount of lore directly from the people. On the level of what all accepted as scholarship the other three,Yeats,Wood-Martin, and O’Grady, were so alike in their handling of particulars that we can hardly distinguish among them. Each was impressionistic and inconsistent in his attempts to render Irish names. Each trusted his own too fallible memory. Each was reckless with fact and ready to plump for the most colorful, rather than the most reasonable, among possible interpretations. And on that count O’Kearney was one with the others.Yet, though the substance of Yeats’s note is mainly a frustrating mishmash of misremembered misquotation of bad nineteenth-century pseudo-learning, at the very bottom there is a stratum of genuine folk-belief. When we reach that stratum, however, we do not find Clooth-na-Bare. 32


We find fragmentary recollections of “hag” stories. Hag stories are a widely known type of rather low-level folklore, possibly degenerated from myth and generally pretty vague. Most purport to tell how some feature of the landscape—an island, a ravine, a lake, a cairn, a dolmen—came to be where it is or got its name. The hag is usually a fierce giantess, often endowed with immensely long life. This is not the sort of figure with whom a poet of Yeats’s tastes and genius could do much of anything. But in fact he had to deal with one. Up there on Slieave Daeane, right in the middle of his own chosen landscape where he then intended that all his poetry should be set, was a lake and a cist associated with a hag, popularly known, if we can both trust and correct Wood-Martin, as Cailleach a’ Bhéara. Neither the name nor the story was at all graceful. Something had to be done; and something was. Clooth-na-Bare, and her story as retold by Yeats, is little more than a tidying up of inconvenient fact. Possibly he intended at that time to develop both further and to incorporate them constructively into the ostensibly traditional but, in fact, largely new-woven mythology with which he was investing the Sligo countryside. However, he did not. And it is interesting to observe that by 1908, when he was revising The Celtic Twilight for his Collected Works, he had apparently forgotten where Loch Dagea was, for in a brief revision of the note, complete with new misspellings, he is obviously puzzled about where he got “Lough Ia.” Doubtless Clooth-na-Bare should be Cailleac Bare, which would mean the old Woman Bare. Bare or Bere or Verah or Dera or Dhera was a very famous person, perhaps the mother of the gods herself. A friend of mine found her, as he thinks, frequenting Lough Leath, or the Grey Lake on a mountain of the Fews. Perhaps Lough Ia is my mishearing, or the storyteller’s mispronunciation of Lough Leath, for there are many Lough Leaths.2 Given this remarkable drift from former positions, it is not at all surprising to find that “Clooth-na-Bare” is next used, in “Red Hanrahan’s Song,” as the name of the mountain. But there is something here more remarkable still. The suggestion that “Bare . . . was . . . perhaps the mother of the gods herself ” can only be explained by Yeats’s fantastic memory reaching back, perhaps twenty years, to his reading of O’Kearney’s article in which, you will recall, the Carthagenian Anec is equated with Juno who is equated with Diana who is equated with the Irish Aine who is the sister of Milucradh who is the Cailleach Biorar, the mistress of the waters. Anyway, by 1908, it did not much matter who or where Clooth-na-Bare was, for Yeats’s poetry had entered a new phase and was set in a new landscape, the country around Coole Park in south County Galway. 33


But to return to the question of Yeats’s memory—it is evident that he easily forgot what did not interest him or what he saw no likely use for. Equally plain is the tenacity of his memory for what did interest him and the fact that what he recollected came back to his consciousness refashioned for the sort of use he alone could put it to. He was not concerned with knowledge for its own sake or with pointless accuracy, though he appreciated the persuasive value of being able to seem accurate. In his essays and autobiography he showed himself a master of the art of exposition by means of the rhetorical question which, when uttered in sufficiently lofty a tone, not only puts the burden of proof upon the reader, but puts him on the defensive as well.Yet admitting all this, admitting too that he made his full share of plain, ordinary mistakes, one must never fall into the error of imagining that he was an ignorant man or that he did not know what he was doing. He knew a great deal on a great many subjects. And he knew something which is better than any amount of mere information—he knew his job. Like any other poet he dealt with certain ideas or dilemmas over and over again. He has, for instance, dozens of what one can call “Second Coming” poems, as many before he developed A Vision as after. Just about as frequent is “The Choice” poem in which he faces up to the apparent contradiction between his mysticism and his art.After all, if a man truly understands mysticism, believes truly in God and the immortality of the soul, his duty is to make his soul, to strive single-mindedly for salvation, and not to be distracted by poetry which must be of this world and addressed to this world. Yeats’s choice, whether it be in the poem of that name or “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” or “Vacillation” or any of the others, is always to decide for poetry and to accept the consequences. If poetry wins in that struggle, we can be sure that poetry will also win in any struggle with his Irish material. If the facts of Irish history stand in his way, if the actuality of the Irish myths and sagas as he finds them prove awkward for his purposes, he will alter them. He was always quite right to do so. Had he been afraid to follow his own sense of what the job required, of the primacy of form over matter in poetry, not only modern literature, but Ireland herself would now be the poorer. In any case, he could usually remodel his material without doing violence to its natural context because his knowledge of things Irish was actually broad, detailed, and enlivened by much thought. Our difficulty now in identifying all the sources for any of his Irish poems or plays is not so much because he changed what he borrowed, but because there are so many minute particulars to account for and so many slight, yet well-informed readjustments and re-evaluations. In the 1890s and the early years of this century there were plenty of other poets in Ireland who tried to imitate him or who attempted to work with like themes and like materials. None suc34


ceeded as he did. It was not only that they lacked his imagination. They didn’t know as much. He got the broad basis of his Irish knowledge very early and very suddenly. He began as any young Anglo-Irish poet might in the 1880s by imitating Shelley and Spenser and by borrowing Indian trappings from Edwin Arnold. In 1886 he met John O’Leary, the Fenian leader. By the end of the year he was an Irish poet. In September 1887, he published “King Goll,” now “The Madness of King Goll,” an Irish poem which works. The chief elements in its composition can be readily identified: the story of the madness of Suibhne from Book IV of Sir Samuel Ferguson’s long narrative Congal (1872); the episode of Goll, the boy-king of Ulster, in Kuno Meyer’s edition of the Fenian tale, the Battle of Ventry (1885), and, perhaps as catalyst, an article by Standish O’Grady on the death of King Magnus Barefoot in a raid on Ulster, in 1093, published in the Irish Fireside in February 1887.To name these, however, is only to say what the larger building blocks were before they were reshaped and fitted together in a wholly new unity. It does not account for the fine details that cement the structure or for the imagination that conceived it. Above all, that sort of research does not tell us what the poem is about. To see what the poem is about and to understand why it works will be made easier if we compare Yeats’s early achievement with Ferguson’s achievement as a poet. Ferguson, whose dates are 1810–86, was a poet, a solicitor, and a scholar. For some years before his death he was deputy-keeper of the public records in Dublin. He was friendly with most of the Irish antiquarians, had published learnedly on Ogham, and knew far more about Irish history and legendary materials than Yeats was ever to know. Moreover, he had a fine poetic gift, especially evidenced in half a dozen really beautiful translations of Irish songs but also proved repeatedly in his personal poetry. Yeats, when he was starting out, read all of Ferguson’s work, and he went on borrowing from it all his life long. His late play The Herne’s Egg is another reminiscence of Congal. In the Last Poems the unusual meter of “High Talk”— Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye . . . is the rhythm of Ferguson’s “Cashel of Munster”— I’d wed you without herds, without money or rich array . . . as you can easily test for yourself by singing both to the tune we know as “The Riddle Song.” In The Pot of Broth Yeats tried and failed to improve on Ferguson’s “Pastheen Finn.” His play On the King’s Threshold derived from 35


Ferguson’s The Tain Quest. Earlier still his Fergus in “Fergus and the Druid” and in the song from The Countess Cathleen came recognizably from Ferguson’s “The Abdication of Fergus Mac Roy.” And we may be sure that the hope Yeats expressed in “To Ireland in the Coming Times,” lines never altered in that much-revised poem— Nor may I less be counted one With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson . . . was sincerely meant. We may also be sure that he knew that Ferguson had failed and that he knew why. In his later life Ferguson put his large knowledge and considerable gifts into a series of long verse-retellings of the sagas. His most ambitious effort was Conary, based on “The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel,” a huge turbulent story compared with which the late and rather paltry Fenian ballad that served as the model for Yeats’s The Wanderings of Oisin looks pale indeed. Of course, Ferguson had to edit the stories he took over. No one then could expect contemporary readers to accept the wild fantasy, the exaggeration, the occasional incoherence, or the sheer bloodiness that so often characterize the tales as they are found in the old manuscripts. These Ferguson would cut out, and, when necessary for the structure and continuity, he would substitute passages of his own invention and would provide his characters with motivations his readers could understand. He solved all sorts of problems as he went along. But he did not solve, or perhaps even recognize, the biggest problem of all, the question of why anybody should bother to plow his way through an edited or bowdlerized retelling of an old story in modern verse when he can read the story itself or a full translation of it. Even if he had seen the problem, the chances are that he would not have accepted Yeats’s solution, to break up the old stories and to recast them as personal statement. Ferguson could never have brought himself to do that; he had too much scholarly respect for his sources.As a result, in those lengthy narratives he succeeded mildly as a scholar and failed mildly but definitely as a poet. I am afraid that no one reads those poems now, except mild, respectful scholars looking for Yeats’s sources. There can be no greater contrast with Ferguson’s unfortunate caution than Yeats’s handling of the greatest of all Irish legends in the five plays he wrote about Cú Chulainn. These plays date from 1904 to 1938 and are a sort of spiritual autobiography. They are written at long intervals and out of chronological order and thus show anything but a consistent line of development.Yet despite any number of inconsistencies, all the wide variation of style, the plays as a group have an unmistakable unity. In them Yeats brooded longest and most intensely upon a single theme, the theme most 36


central to all Celtic literature, the nature of the hero; and because it takes a heroic imagination to visualize and depict a hero, he could fairly claim Cú Chulainn as an image for himself. The unity of the plays is personal, the continuity of what a man learns about himself from decade to decade, always changing, always the same. For Yeats that meant always tragic, always gay, always indomitable. The plays do not, of course, keep more than within intermittent hailing distance of the legends they are supposed to reflect. It was naturally quite in order that when Yeats first wrote of Cú Chulainn, in 1892, in the poem “The Death of Cuchullin,” he should kill him off. But that is not all.Though, as Yeats well knew, the Cú Chulainn of saga died at twenty-seven,Yeats made him an old man. Properly Cú Chulainn had only one son, Conla, whom he killed at Baile’s Strand, not recognizing him till the death wound had been given. The boy’s mother was Aife, a Scottish woman-warrior. Yeats makes him son of Cú Chulainn’s wife Emer, who, in the stories, had no children. And for some inscrutable reason he renamed the boy Finmole.The poem remained substantially like that till 1924.Then, five years after he had written The Only Jealousy of Emer in which, according to his invention, Cú Chulainn was saved from death by Emer’s renunciation of his love, Yeats revised the poem, gave it an inconclusive ending and a new title,“Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea,” and for some wholly inscrutable reason renamed the boy himself Cú Chulainn. In the plays he shelved the question by not naming the boy at all. Thinking of the old tales, our minds may boggle at the spectacle of a Cú Chulainn Senior fighting with a Cú Chulainn Junior, but we must respectfully note that in 1924 that side of Yeats’s imagination which created Clooth-na-Bare was neither dead nor intimidated. Of course he was never intimidated by his source material. The plays prove that to the very end.The last, The Death of Cuchulain, shows him unintimidated by the precedents set by himself in the earlier days of the series, yet to my mind, though thrown together pell-mell and not finally corrected, it is the most magnificent of them all, the play in which his concept of the hero triumphs most surely. The fullest single study of what he did with his borrowings from early Irish literature is Birgit Bjersby’s The Interpretation of the Cuchulain Legend in the Works of W. B.Yeats (Upsala University, 1950).A more indicative title would be The Recreation of the Cuchulain Legend, for in fact what he did was to create anew.Without explanation or apology he assumed exactly the same freedom that had been assumed twelve or thirteen hundred years ago by the man or men who first wrote of Cú Chulainn; and so he achieved a somewhat comparable result.They had taken God knows what drifting fragments of outmoded pagan mythology, tribal history, ancient hero-tales—and we 37


have no way of knowing what sort of central figure, apparently a god, Setanta—re-imagined the whole, bound it into rude epic in rude imitation of the Aeneid, and so created an epic and an epic hero. Their creation plainly captured the mind of a people who had accepted Christianity, and who perhaps were not altogether happy about it, and established for them the enduring image of the ancestral hero. It is significant that we do not know what the epic was like in its first form. It was reworked continually, century after century, revised, added to, inflated, parodied, re-imagined— which is but to say that it remained alive, that in each generation, as long as the stories circulated, men at once accepted Cú Chulainn as the supreme Irish hero and yet tried to bring him nearer to their own immediate needs. One thing is clear, a strong idea of the hero was a need. Because Yeats felt the same need, just as strongly, and because he insisted on a live Cú Chulainn, a Cú Chulainn who could speak to his age, his creation can, I believe, teach us more about the Cú Chulainn of medieval and pre-medieval Irish literature than we could ever learn through mere scholarship. Great literature is written and is best interpreted by great poets, not by professors. The lesson, however, is not easy to decipher, especially if the great poet is given to snarling-up the evidence. You may ask, then, whether, considering what he does to them, you should bother to search out and read his Irish sources. I would say, on the whole, yes; but while you are working onYeats do not get distracted by the sources. Read them, if you can discover them, to see for yourself what captured his attention, what set his imagination to work along its own characteristically devious paths.You will find that they are well worth reading, especially in the light that he in turn sheds upon them. That is not the only light by which the old tales can and should be read, but for seeing and understanding them as literature it is certainly the strongest we presently possess. Finally, I would point out that Yeats himself was never in any doubt about his own methods or the paltriness of some of his materials. He speaks of them bluntly enough in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” that great poem written to complain that he could no longer write poetry— Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. The slut being Cathleen Ni Houlihan, the soul of Ireland—the junk, all magically transformed into the sword, the cauldron, the spear, the stone 38


brought by the Tuatha De Danann from the mythical cities of Falias, and Gorias, and Finias, and rich Murias. Sheer magic. What mortal else could do it?

Notes 1. Yeats’s knowledge of these sources is discussed by Russell Alspach in “Some Sources of Yeats’s The Wanderings of Oisin,” PMLA 58 (September 1943), 861 ff., and in “Yeats’s The Grey Rock,” Journal of American Folklore (January 1950), 57–71. 2. The final clause is an unfortunate guess on Yeats’s part. No Lough Liath is given in Hogan’s Onomasticon Goedelicum or in P.W. Joyce’s Irish Names of Places. On the oneinch to the mile Ordnance Survey map showing Slieve Gullion (No. 59.“Castleblayney”) the lake near the summit is called “Calliagh Berra’s Lake.”

39


3 Irish History and Mythology in James Joyce’s “The Dead”

T

hanks to Richard Ellmann’s definitive biography of James Joyce we know quite a lot about the genesis and writing of “The Dead,” the concluding story in Dubliners. Joyce wrote no other short stories after it, but in a letter ( January 6, 1907) to his brother Stanislaus, from Rome, in which he first referred to “The Dead,” he mentioned it as one of five stories “all of which . . . I could write if circumstances were favorable.” The others, which seem not to have been attempted, were “The Last Supper,” “The Street,” “Vengeance,” and “At Bay.”1 It must have been immediately thereafter that “The Dead” took precedence in his thought, for in a letter written only five days later he remarked that the news of the controversy in Dublin over The Playboy of the Western World had “put me off the story I ‘was going to write’—to wit, The Dead.”2 Shortly afterwards he decided to give up his job as a bank cashier in Rome and return to Trieste, which on March 5, 1907, he did. Apparently he worked at the story intermittently in the ensuing months. In July his fortunes reached their lowest ebb. There was no money but what the much-burdened Stanislaus earned; Nora Joyce bore her second child in the pauper ward of the city hospital; and Joyce himself came down with a bout of rheumatic fever from which he was two months recovering. Till near the end of August he could do nothing but think. Then he began to work again on the story, and had it substantially completed by the 6th of September. A few days later he dictated the ending to Stanislaus. As Ellmann points out, “the atmosphere of fatigue, of weariness, of swooning” First published in the Review of Politics 27: 3 ( July 1965): 414–33.

40

James Joyce’s “The Dead”

that marks the final passages was no doubt influenced by Joyce’s own weakened condition.3 A still more important observation of Ellmann’s is that the enforced period of inactivity was decisive for Joyce.“During his illness and the three months that followed, he plotted his literary life for the next seven years.”4 The chief work of those years, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was begun immediately, and the first three chapters, almost three-fifths of the book, were completed by April 1908. Obviously he wrote rapidly and firmly, following out a clear conception of the intricate symbolistic structure that so markedly differentiates A Portrait from Stephen Hero. We may, I think, safely reckon that “The Dead,” as completed, comes out of the same period of gestation and is much closer in technique to A Portrait than to the earlier stories in Dubliners. In other words, it too is intricate and symbolistic beneath a surface of what seems calm, controlled naturalism—which may be why no interpretation of it has been wholly satisfactory to most students. Because Stanislaus not only wrote down the ending but must have heard the story discussed at every point along the line, any remark of his about it is significant. In his Recollections of James Joyce he observed that the stories in Dubliners deal successively with various aspects of life in Dublin—adolescent, sporting, amorous, political, religious, and the lives of petty employees both married and celibate. His synopsis of “The Dead” is short and conventional, except for the first three sentences: The last story, which serves as the final chorus of the book, presents holiday life, the celebration of Christmas. In England and Ireland ghost stories are still told about the fire at Christmas time . . . The story “The Dead” is also, in its way, a story of ghosts, of the dead who return in envy of the living.5 It is my feeling that the implications of this aspect of the story have not been fully explored. I may also add that I am quite aware that in discussing them I may, like many another explorer, be triumphantly discovering more than exists or even what isn’t there at all. But when did that consideration ever give an eager critic pause? I want to make clear, too, that I do not think “The Dead” is primarily a ghost story. Like its companion stories it is chiefly naturalistic, and ninetenths of its meaning lies on that level. There is no reason to assume that Michael Furey is actually a ghost. He was a young consumptive who died long ago in Galway. He had been in love with Gretta and had caught his death of cold, standing in the garden in the rain, looking up at her window. Now he exists in her memory, and exists strongly because she believes he died for love of her. Inadvertently Gabriel evokes that memory and makes 41


the devastating discovery that as Gretta’s lover he has always had a competitor who had been capable of an intensity of love of which Gabriel knows he himself has never been capable. Now he too is haunted by that memory, haunted and defeated.That of course is only the end. Before that is the long, complete, and marvellously indirect preparation which enables the reader fully to appreciate Gabriel’s vulnerability and despair. But all of this is plain even on the first reading, and for any other writer but Joyce to bring it forth so powerfully and poignantly would be quite enough. For most readers it is enough.Yet for others there has always been some factor of uncertainty left over to nag. In his chapter on “The Backgrounds of ‘The Dead’” Ellmann has documented far more about the sources, the characters, the personal and familial memories that Joyce utilized for the story than anyone would have thought discoverable, and he has shown brilliantly how these elements were transmuted in Joyce’s imagination.There are, however, some points on which I think his criticism inclines too strongly toward naturalistic interpretation. There is also the possibility that Joyce may have regarded the surface story with an even more uncompromising realism than his critics have allowed. For that let us remember that Gabriel’s discovery takes place in the small hours of the morning and that Gabriel is a man in early middle age who has had a long, busy, and rather exhausting day and evening. Furthermore, his unexpected success with the dinner speech has worked up in him an unusual feeling of excitement and expectation. His reaction toward despair is thereby much magnified. No tired man is normal at three in the morning, least of all after having had the emotional wind knocked out of him. If we can imagine that Gabriel had first found out about Michael Furey one restful Sunday afternoon at home in Monkstown, his feelings would likely be quieter and much less despairing. Indeed it is worthwhile trying to continue the story in our imaginations and to guess what role Michael Furey will play in the lives and thoughts of Gretta and Gabriel a year hence. Likely enough, the memory of him will endure, but now merely as one of many memories which both share. Gretta, as no doubt for years past, will think of him when not preoccupied with the children, Gabriel, the maid, tomorrow’s menu, the new curtains for the living room, and so on and so on. Gabriel may remember about once a week, always of course with some mortification, but not necessarily with very much. This, to be sure, is a detestable way to treat a short story. If customary, it would make the writing of most short stories nearly impossible.Yet it must be noted that in Ulysses Joyce goes to some trouble to indicate that the Conroys are still, in 1904, a well-known jog-trot married couple. Molly Bloom asks what Gretta Conroy had on, and Bloom remembers that Father Conroy, 42


the curate at Star of the Sea Church, Sandymount, is Gabriel’s brother. References to the last illness and death of Julia Morkan, Gabriel’s aunt and Stephen Dedalus’s grandaunt, show that the Christmas party in “The Dead” must be dated to the early 1890s, from which it would seem plain that Gabriel and Gretta have survived the dozen or more years intervening without noticeable catastrophe.6 At least, I can see no other purpose to this series of references. They are certainly deliberate on Joyce’s part, as is the definite location of the Morkan residence at 15 Usher’s Island, and they may perhaps warn us not to be overdramatic about the “death” suffered by Gabriel in the Gresham Hotel. Conversely, I hold that the famous sentence in the last paragraph of the story, “The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward,” is not to be interpreted literally. I cannot agree with Ellmann that the “context and phrasing of the sentence suggest that Gabriel is on the edge of sleep, and half-consciously accepts what he has hitherto scorned, the possibility of an actual trip to Connaught.” Neither can I agree that, though “paradoxically linked also with the past and the dead,” the “special meaning” of the west in the story is “the place where life had been lived simply and passionately,” the “primitive, untutored, impulsive country from which Gabriel had felt himself alienated before.”7 For Gabriel the west always has distasteful implications. The context of the sentence is thoughts of death and of the dead, of a whole country swooning deathwards under the falling snow.There is, moreover, in the phrasing an insistence, an immediacy— “The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward”—which does not accord with Gabriel’s contemplating an actual trip to Connacht at some future date. This time is now. Both the journey and its direction are metaphorical. No matter how emotionally distraught, a Dubliner would scarcely think of setting out on a not immediately necessary trip to Galway in the middle of winter. Instead, I would argue that the sentence is one of several points where the surface story gives way suddenly beneath us and we find ourselves on a different level of meaning and imagination. There are, I think, three such subsidiary levels whose function is to provide an eerie, ominous reverberation as between present and past, passing life and all-devouring death, mundane reality and myth. It is this suggestive reverberation that gives “The Dead” its peculiar ghostliness. In a ghost story the existence of an otherworld must be implied, a realm where the dead continue somehow as individual beings, as ghosts. Usually it is by some inadvertent impiety on the part of the living that ghosts are summoned from the otherworld. When encountered they are almost always hostile to the living. It is baleful to be haunted. The three reverberatory planes are, I think, a symbolistic level on which 43


Death is personified in Mr. Browne, who is otherwise just an ill-conditioned bore; a level of reference to early nineteenth-century Catholic Dublin, the Dublin of Gabriel’s grandfather, Patrick Morkan, the starch-miller of Back Lane, and of his great contemporary, Daniel O’Connell,“the Liberator,” both of whom are unwittingly offended by Gabriel; and finally a series of strong though incomplete references to the Old Irish saga Togail Bruidhne Dá Derga, “The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel.”8 Because this third level, though in many ways the remotest from the surface story, is the most definitely exemplified, we may deal with it first. The initial hint is given when Gabriel, following Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, into the pantry to leave his overcoat, smiles “at the three syllables she had given his surname.” Her accent is Dublin lower-class; she intrudes a vowel in his name and calls him, not “Mr. Conroy,” but “Mr. Connery.” Conroy derives from the Irish name Cú Roí; Connery is from the quite different Conaire. The tragic hero of “The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel” is Conaire Már mac Eterscél, king of Tara, who is killed by reavers, some of them his own kin, in a hostel (actually the Celtic otherworld) located to the east or south of Dublin on the River Dodder. The ultimate cause of his death is a nemesis inherited through the female line. In Finnegans Wake Joyce makes large use of the saga. Most likely he first read Whitley Stokes’s edition and translation as it appeared in Revue Celtique in 1901 and 1902, around which time, as Stanislaus tells us in My Brother’s Keeper, Joyce studied Irish “for a year or two” under the influence of his friend George Clancy, the Davin of A Portrait of the Artist.9 The description of Davin in the Portrait gives a rather romantic account of how he had acquired his knowledge of Irish myth. “ . . . His nurse had taught him Irish and shaped his rude imagination by the broken lights of Irish myth. He stood toward the myth upon which no individual mind had ever drawn out a line of beauty and to its unwieldy tales that divided themselves as they moved down the cycles in the same attitude as towards the Roman catholic religion, the attitude of a dull witted loyal serf.10 We may unhesitatingly dismiss the suggestion. In the nineteenth century the great tales and myths were known only through scholarly editions or, in the 1880s and 1890s, in a few popular retellings of which no Irish nurse would ever have heard. Clearly, however, Joyce knew enough to venture an uncomplimentary generic description which, while not accurate for most of the tales, does fit “The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel,” the surviving texts of which give us only an often chaotic amalgamation of older versions.The tale is indeed unwieldy and hard to summarize; but since in “The 44


Dead” Joyce only used certain elements—very likely, those he could remember in Trieste, in 1907—we need consider only what is relevant. Conaire is a good and blameless king whose reign consequently is famous for peace and plenty. The peace is broken only by the depredations of his three foster-brothers, whom he is compelled to exile.They go overseas, ally themselves with a Saxon pirate, Ingcel, and are induced to join him in a raid on Ireland. The reavers land at Howth and start to burn the adjoining country. Just at this time Conaire is returning from a journey to Munster, where he has first sinned by breaking two of his nine tabus. Unasked he has settled a quarrel between two of his vassals, and he has stayed more than nine nights away from Tara. Now, as he approaches Tara with his retinue, the fairies (that is to say, the gods) throw a mist of illusion over the land so that it appears full of warring men and ill-omened horrors, and the country about Tara is seen as in flames. Conaire’s companions urge him to turn back southward and seek lodging in Da Derga’s hostel. In complying, more of his tabus are broken, including those against going righthandwise round Tara and lefthandwise round Mag Breg. Others, shortly to be broken, are that three reds shall not go before him to the house of Red, that he shall not sleep in a house from which firelight may be seen outside after sunset or the light from inside be seen outside, and that after sunset a house in which he is shall not be entered by a company of one man or one woman. He crosses the Liffey by the hurdle ford, Ath Cliath, from which Dublin takes its Irish name. (The ford, incidentally, is thought to have been located just downstream from Usher’s Island.) Thereupon three red horsemen on red horses appear on the road before him, will listen to no entreaties to let Conaire precede them, and ride singing into the hostel. Since Da Derga means the “Red God,” there is another tabu gone. The hostel itself is a building with nine doors but only one doorcover, so that the light from outside shines into it. As Da Derga sees Conaire coming, he lights a fire within, and eight rays shine out through the open doorways.When Conaire has been seated in the hostel a lone woman, the witch Cailb, comes in, stands in the doorway, and gives Conaire the evil eye. “Well, O Woman,” says Conaire, starting a conversation in which he is worsted. She gives augury of his doom, demands hospitality, ignores all pleas that his last tabu be respected, and takes her place within. Afterwards the reavers come south from Howth, land at Merrion Strand, and come up to attack the hostel which has been thoroughly spied out by Ingcel. There is a tremendous fight. Conaire is killed or dies of thirst. His severed head is set on a pillar stone within the hostel, and there sings a song of thanks to his sidesman, Mac Cecht, who has gone all over Ireland seeking water to quench Conaire’s thirst. 45


Everyone of course knows that Joyce was fond of weaving into his work parallels with myth, saga, and epic. It is, however, a mistake to assume, when such a parallel is identified, that it must be complete. It rarely is. Even Ulysses does not reflect the entirety of the Odyssey. In Finnegans Wake wonders can be done with a mere hint of resemblance. Usually Joyce is content with a few salient indications as, for example, in the well-known sketch-parody of Dante’s Divine Comedy in the story “Grace.” The same, I think, holds for “The Dead” and “The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel.” The shadowy similarity between Gabriel Conroy and Conaire Már is enough for Joyce’s purposes which by their very nature must be suggestive rather than explicit. The points of resemblance, I would say, are these. First, and faintest, it would appear that Gabriel teaches Romance languages in University College, Dublin. “Mac Eterscél,” Conaire’s patronymic, means “son of the interpreter.” Second, coming up to the party from Monkstown, Gabriel may symbolically break Conaire’s tabu against going righthandwise round Tara and lefthandwise round Mag Breg, for he would pass Bray Road in Stillorgan on his left and Tara Street on his right. Third, there are a party of one man and a party of one woman in the house in which he is after sunset: Freddy Malins, who arrives solus after Gabriel, and Miss Ivors, who leaves by herself and has presumably come by herself. I would suggest that Miss Ivors, a Gaelic enthusiast with prominent brown eyes which she fixes on Gabriel and a not-to-be-put-off manner, functions symbolically as Cailb. She makes a set at Gabriel, completely unnerves him, insists that he join a party planning a summer trip to the Aran Islands, and very nearly succeeds in ruining his entire evening. It is to be noted in their conversation that four of Gabriel’s replies begin “Well,” perhaps echoing Conaire’s fatal “Well, O Woman” to Cailb. Next we may consider Conaire’s tabu that “three reds shall not go before thee to Red’s house.” Gabriel goes from Usher’s Island to the Gresham Hotel with three companions, Bartell D’Arcy, the tenor, Gretta who has bronze hair and is dressed in salmon and terra-cotta, and Miss O’Callaghan, who I take to be the “red-faced young woman, dressed in pansy” that had made herself useful at the party by calling dancers to the quadrilles. I am not sure of this latter identification, and I can discover nothing reddish about Bartell D’Arcy, but I think the combination of three, redness, and singing may suffice for the parallel. In any case, the Gresham Hotel of that period would suit admirably as a surrogate Da Derga’s hostel. It was red brick; there were eight windows and a single door on the street level and nine windows on each of the two upper stories.11 It would seem to have been chosen deliberately by Joyce since, of comparable hotels, it was by no means nearest to Usher’s Island. 46


The clincher, I feel, is the tabu “Thou shalt not sleep in a house from which firelight is manifest outside after sunset, and in which light is manifest from without.” When Gabriel and Gretta arrive at the Gresham the hotel is in darkness. Something has gone wrong with the lighting.The old porter—Da Derga?—lights a candle in the office and shows them to their room upstairs. There, curiously, Gabriel insists that he take the candle away, telling him,“‘We don’t want any light.We have light enough from the street.And I say,’ he added, pointing to the candle,‘you might remove that handsome article, like a good man.’” The porter, surprised at the “novel idea,” slowly complies. The light which had shone out through the windows is then gone; the “ghastly light from the street lamp” shines in, the only illumination.The emphasis of the passage points to the tabu. Were there no extra implication to be made, Gabriel could simply have blown the candle out. There are other possible analogues between the story and the saga. For example, as Gabriel leaves his aunts’ house he looks northeastward, where “A dull, yellow light brooded over the houses and the river; and the sky seemed to be descending . . .The lamps were still burning redly in the murky air and, across the river, the palace of the Four Courts stood out menacingly against the heavy sky.” Here I think we have Tara seen against the fairy fires as Conaire approaches from the south. Certainly the “palace” of the Four Courts is suggestive, the more so since one of the chief functions of an Irish king was as ultimate judge in law. Still another analogy may have to do with Conaire’s special tabu against hunting birds.When the news comes to him of the death of the preceding king, he is on the plain of Liffey, west of Dublin, with his brothers. He starts for Tara in his chariot, and as he comes to Ath Cliath a birdflock appears before him. He hunts them, casting at them from his chariot, but they stay ahead of him till they are on the sea. Then he uses his sling. The birds then “quit their birdskins and turn upon him with spears and swords. One of them protected him and addressed him, saying, ‘I am Némglan, king of thy father’s birds: and there is no one here that should not be dear to thee because of his father or mother.’ ‘Till today,’ says Conaire, ‘I knew not this.’” He had not known that his real father was not Eterscél but a god who had come to his mother in the shape of a bird. As a mortal Conaire is his mother’s son—as Gabriel is definitely his mother’s son. In “The Dead” the tabu may be hinted at when Gabriel is called from his reverie to carve at the table. “‘Here I am, Aunt Kate!’ cried Gabriel, with sudden animation, ‘ready to carve a flock of geese, if necessary’”; and perhaps again by Miss Ivors’s ominous first words to him, “I have a crow to pluck with you.” Finally, there is the possibility that Mr. Browne, who, as I argue, represents Death himself, may also stand both for the east wind that blows west47


ward and brings colds and for Ingcel, the Saxon pirate, who leads the reavers. When we last see Browne he is dressed like a Russian, surely Eastern enough, in a “long green overcoat with mock astrakhan cuffs” and an “oval fur cap.” He tells Mary Jane, “I’d like nothing better this minute than a rattling fine walk in the country or a fast drive with a good spanking goer between the shafts.” Earlier in the story, Gabriel, explaining why he and Gretta have decided to spend the night in a hotel rather than take a cab back to Monkstown, recalls last year’s trip home: “ . . . Cab windows rattling all the way, and the east wind blowing in after we passed Merrion. Very jolly it was. Gretta caught a dreadful cold.” The recurrence of the word “rattling” is suggestive. And it was from Merrion Strand that the reavers launched their attack on the hostel. But now to the level relating to old Catholic Dublin. It is perhaps linked with the mythological level through Gabriel’s mother. As we have noted, he is his mother’s son. His father is mentioned once,T. J. Conroy of the Port and Docks. We know only his name (Irish and Catholic), his job (good indeed, for the Port and Docks Board was very much an Anglo-Irish preserve), and his Monkstown address (again very good for a middle-class Catholic in the nineteenth century). It is quite clear that Gabriel’s mother, Ellen Morkan, was a strong, socially ambitious woman. In marrying T. J. Conroy she made the then enormous leap from Stoneybatter to Monkstown, and her sullen opposition to Gabriel’s marriage may be read in terms of further social ambitions thereby frustrated. Had he married according to her choice, he would no doubt have gone even farther southeastward to the social heaven of the “Kingstown Dalkey line,” where dwell Mary Jane’s most prized pupils, those who must not see Freddy Malins drunk. It was the mother who gave her sons their fancy names, Gabriel and Constantine, and who saw to it that Constantine became a priest and that Gabriel had his degree from the Royal University.The undominant parent, poor T. J., is as dim a figure as Conaire’s putative father, Eterscél. Gabriel owes to his mother nearly all that he is or has, Gretta excepted, but it must be noted that he has not inherited her ambition or her snobbery. His own son is plain Tom, no doubt named after T. J. He does not think of cutting his aunts or avoiding the annual chore of presiding at the Christmas dinner though obviously he never enjoys the party and is uncomfortably aware that the other men present are a step or two below him in dress and culture. It is to his credit, too, that he married for love despite his formidable mother’s opposition. In fact, he is a decent, kindly man of inadequate self-confidence, easily abashed, always expecting failure, and always misunderstanding women. He thinks himself rebuffed by Lily though she is only grumbling about the prospective men in her own life. He totally 48


misinterprets Miss Ivors’s set at him and the reason for her abrupt departure. Most fatally he misreads his wife’s mood as they leave the party—but that, after all, is many a good man’s fault. What he doesn’t realize about Miss Ivors is that she has a crush on him and, being a woman, naturally wants to do him over, to outfit him with her own nationalist and Gaelic enthusiasms, to rescue him from the deracinated backwater where he now revolves and launch him into the mainstream of national life—not of course that she would ever admit her own motives, even within the privacy of her own mind. But though Gabriel would never have had the drive or the self-assurance to make it to Monkstown and the college on his own, that is where he belongs. His tastes are palely European. He reviews books for the Unionist Daily Express, without thought of its politics: whence Miss Ivors’s semiplayful accusation of West Britonism. His holidays are spent cycling in France and Belgium. He would never dream of going to the Aran Islands with Miss Ivors and her fellow Gaels of the Gael or expect to find there any pure, passionate, and primitive wellspring of ancestral vitality. For him, obviously, the west of Ireland is only the fag end of a dead country in which he unconsciously feels suffocated, though it is not till she has badgered him past endurance that he breaks out, as much to his own surprise as hers, with his true feelings. “‘O, to tell you the truth,’ retorted Gabriel suddenly, ‘I’m sick of my own country, sick of it!’” Therewith he sins. All the others at the party, except for Mr. Browne, are Irish and Catholic and, however perfunctory their sentiments, nationalists. Only Gabriel is alienated, cut off from his roots. Moreover, he is now in that part of the city where Catholics, his own ancestors among them, emerging from the century of defeat and helotry in which they were sunk after Limerick and Aughrim, stood up, straightened their backs, and moved into the modern world. It was by their work, thrift, and pride that the foundations were laid for all that Catholics like himself now enjoy. His grandfather had kept a starch mill in Back Lane, a famous place in Catholic history. There, from 1628 to 1630, the Jesuits maintained the only Catholic college in Ireland previous to the one in which Gabriel now teaches. In the eighteenth century the site was occupied by Tailors Hall, where, in 1792, the Catholic Association convened what their enemies contemptuously called “the Back Lane Parliament” and demanded and got the Relief Act, passed in 1793, by which all the remaining punitive clauses of the Penal Code were abolished and Catholics were admitted to the franchise and university degrees. Clearly Back Lane is not to be treated lightly. Gabriel sins again when he tells the story about his grandfather and the old mill-horse, Johnny. He tells it with what he no doubt feels as affectionate jocularity, but he calls the old man a “glue-boiler” and makes gentle fun of his naive pomposity. The grand49


father, you will recall, had decided one day to “drive out with the quality to a military review in the park.” Gabriel’s rash account continues: “So the old gentleman, as I said, harnessed Johnny and put on his very best tall hat and his very best stock collar and drove out in grand style from his ancestral mansion somewhere near Back Lane, I think.” Everyone laughed, even Mrs. Malins, at Gabriel’s manner and Aunt Kate said: “O now, Gabriel, he didn’t live in Back Lane, really. Only the mill was there.” “Out from the mansion of his forefathers,” continued Gabriel,“he drove with Johnny. And everything went on beautifully until Johnny came in sight of King Billy’s statue: and whether he fell in love with the horse King Billy sits on or whether he thought he was back again in the mill, anyhow he began to walk round the statue.” Gabriel paced in a circle round the hall in his goloshes amid the laughter of the others. “Round and round he went,” said Gabriel, “and the old gentleman who was a very pompous old gentleman, was highly indignant. ‘Go on, sir! What do you mean sir! Johnny! Johnny! Most extraordinary conduct! Can’t understand the horse!’” The anecdote, which is rewarded with “peals of laughter,” has all sorts of implications of which Gabriel seems unaware. Grinling Gibbons’s equestrian statue of William III stood on a high pedestal at the western extremity of College Green, facing Dublin Castle. It was erected in 1701 and finally removed in 1929, after it had been blown up twice.Till the 1830s the statue was the center of the annual Orange celebration of the Battle of the Boyne, a ceremony usually designed as much to insult the Catholics and provoke their impotent rage as to honor the memory of the king who “saved us from Popery and the Pretender, from brass money and wooden shoes.” Catholic resentment, growing progressively less impotent, was expressed by daubing the statue with tar and grease, placing straw riders apillion behind His Majesty, and once by attempting to file off his head. The prudent discontinuation of the Orange ceremonies would have been very gratifying to men like old Patrick Morkan. They would have understood the reason, a new grudging respect for the Catholic strength organized and consolidated by Daniel O’Connell. But for them the statue was the symbol of much more than dwindling Orange belligerence. It commemorated the victory of Protestant and English in the Williamite Wars, a victory heralded by the Boyne but confirmed, in 1691, at Aughrim, with the defeat of the last Irish army that took the 50


field. After Aughrim there was only the last defense of Limerick, then the final surrender, the broken treaty, and the subjugation of the Irish. In the Penal Ireland that followed they were hewers of wood and drawers of water to the conquerors, so thoroughly beaten they seemed almost in love with defeat. That, I think, is what we may take the horse, Johnny, to represent as he plods round and round the statue, loving it, serving it as if he were back at the grinding mill. And Patrick Morkan, for whom all that is or should be past, a man determined to assert himself with the best, is dismayed by such conduct.That is no way for any Irish creature, even a horse, to act nowadays. Telling the story from hearsay, Gabriel mistells it. He hasn’t the key. He presents the old man as a comic figure, quaint and a little absurd, and never stops to consider how much he owes to Back Lane and the mill and Patrick Morkan. Unwittingly he evokes the old man’s ghost and unintentionally insults it. Like Conaire he begins to break his tabus. Inevitably retribution follows. Gabriel’s mood is of course abnormal. The unexpected success of his after-dinner speech has awakened in him a youthful gaiety quite counter to his customary somewhat pessimistic timidity. His caution has vanished with his fears. He narrates and acts out the anecdote with a boldness equivalent, for so low-keyed a man, to the hubris that overcomes a tragic hero hurrying blindly to his fate, and in this state he misreads all the signals. The offended dead are already at work. In the room above, stirred by some unexplained impulse, Bartell D’Arcy has begun to sing “The Lass of Aughrim.” Looking up, Gabriel sees Gretta standing on the stairs, listening. He gazes at her, full of love and admiration. There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow a symbol of. And he thinks, if he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude and call the picture Distant Music—himself unaware of from what distance and what shadows the music comes.When a little later, standing in the hallway about to depart, he sees that there is color on her cheeks and that her eyes are shining, a sudden tide of joy comes leaping out of his heart for he imagines, poor foolish man, that her mood is a mirror of his. In fact, she is full of tears, remembering Michael Furey, whose song that was and who died for love of her so long ago in Galway.This night there is to be another defeat associated with Aughrim. By now the orchestration of the story has grown elaborate; hints and motifs pour upon us from every side.As Gabriel and Gretta leave with Bartell D’Arcy and Miss O’Callaghan good-nights are said all around in a conver51


sational passage so banal not even an English lady-novelist could beat it for pointless naturalism. “Well, good-night, Aunt Kate, and thanks for the pleasant evening.” “Good-night, Gabriel. Good-night, Gretta!” “Good-night, Aunt Kate, and thanks ever so much. Good-night Aunt Julia.” “O, good-night, Gretta, I didn’t see you.” “Good-night, Mr. D’Arcy. Good-night, Miss O’Callaghan.” “Good-night, Miss Morkan.” “Good-night, again.” “Good-night, all. Safe home.” “Good-night. Good-night.” Count them up. There are thirteen. The four walk along the quays to the corner of Winetavern Street, where they get a cab. Apart from the name, so appropriate for a way station on a journey to the hostel, the street was once famous for its coffinmakers. Now an ominous word we have noted before recurs funereally. Gabriel “was glad of [the cab’s] rattling noise as it saved him from conversation . . . The horse galloped along wearily, dragging his old rattling box after his heels . . .” And suddenly there is a curious repetition of the anecdote, complete with horse and statue—though here it is Daniel O’Connell’s statue—and capped by another unwitting impertinence to the mighty dead. As the cab drove across O’Connell Bridge Miss O’Callaghan said: “They say you never cross O’Connell Bridge without seeing a white horse.” “I see a white man this time,” said Gabriel. “Where?” asked Mr. Bartell D’Arcy. Gabriel pointed to the statue, on which lay patches of snow. Then he nodded familiarly to it and waved his hand. “Good-night, Dan,” he said gaily. There can be little doubt of what Joyce intends here. The white horse and the white man recall Johnny and old Patrick Morkan, both of whom when at work would normally be white from head to foot with the dust of pulverized rice. Poor Gabriel! He has sinned the third time, and there is no escape for him. This of course by no means exhausts Joyce’s evocations of old Dublin. Stoneybatter, where the Morkans had lived before they moved to Usher’s Island, is part of the ancient Slighe Cualann, the road from Tara to Cuala, that Conaire followed as he came south to Ath Cliath and the hostel. As 52


for Usher’s Island itself, Joyce obviously chose it deliberately. The Misses Morkan, as Ellmann shows, are modelled on Joyce’s grandaunts, Mrs. Callanan and Mrs. Lyons, who kept “The Misses Flynns’ School,” where they taught voice and piano, dancing and politeness. It seems now that everybody, including Joyce’s sister, May Joyce Monaghan, who was Ellmann’s informant in these matters, accepts 15 Usher’s Island, the address given in Ulysses, as the right one. Actually the school was just across the river at 16 Ellis’s Quay.12 Joyce had good reasons for changing the location of the school. Usher’s Island sounds better than Ellis’s Quay. Moreover, the name Ussher is that of one of the greatest families of Protestant Dublin, notable for bishops, archbishops, antiquarians, scholars, a founder and provost of Trinity College, an astronomer, and an admiral.The quay itself was a fashionable quarter to the very end of the eighteenth century, chiefly occupied by Moira House, the most splendid residence in the city. Except that, by the 1820s, Moira House had sunk to the Mendicity Institution, what could better betoken the inexorable advance of the once-proscribed Catholics into the very citadel of their enemies than a Christmas party given by the Morkans on Usher’s Island to Conroys and Malinses, O’Callaghans, D’Arcys, Furlongs, Higginses, Dalys, Powers, and Kerrigans, with one lone Protestant, the bumptious Browne, as the unwanted tilly. A more practical reason for selecting Usher’s Island is the view. Gabriel, it will be remembered, twice looks northwest from the windows toward the snow-laden trees and snow-capped Wellington Monument in Phoenix Park. From Ellis’s Quay the best that could be managed would be a southwesterly view and a much less romantic prospect, Guinness’s Brewery. The brewery lies just west of Usher’s Island. It was built in the 1870s on what till then had been open land, St. James’s Fields; and as old maps of the city show, the fields were crossed from east to west by a road or path called either Galway Walk or Lord Galway’s Walk. Considering all the emphasis in the story about going west, going to Galway, it would be odd if this bit of lore were absent from Joyce’s mind. It may rightly be objected that at the time Joyce was working on the story in Trieste his letters indicate that he had very few Irish books or maps with him. Moreover, he complained in a letter of 1906 that Dublin was already growing hazy in his memory. I doubt it ever really grew hazy. I doubt that his memory, particular and capacious as a bard’s, ever relinquished anything once learned from books, from observation, or from his father, whose knowledge of Dublin was as intimate and curious as his own. Already he was imploring his Aunt Josephine to send him bundles of minutiae—newspapers, clippings, tram tickets, tram schedules, anything at all. He wished 53


for a map of Dublin and for Gilbert’s History, by which he meant that incredible old grab-bag of junk and jewels, John T. Gilbert’s A History of Dublin, in three volumes, published between 1854 and 1859. He certainly knew and used the book later; and it is safe to guess that he wished for it in 1906 because he already knew it. But there is scarcely need to speculate. When he wrote the earlier stories in Dubliners, it is clear that he already knew every hole, corner, and cranny of the city, and much of its intimate history as well. The first three chapters of A Portrait, written immediately after “The Dead,” could not have depicted the city and its environs more accurately if they had been composed in Mooney’s pub. I lack time to discuss the third sublevel of the story. It is by far the most constant and complicated of the three. In any case, most of you are at least partly aware of it—the symbolistic meanings of the snow, of whiteness, of shadow and shade, of west and going west, of the discussion at the dinner table of dead singers and of old operas like Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia and the Italian tenor who sang five encores to Yes, Let Me Like a Soldier Fall. A lot of it is both patent and funny, like the talk of Freddy Malins going to the Trappist monastery at Mount Melleray to take the cure, talk which turns into a half-argument between Mary Jane and Mr. Browne about why the monks sleep in their coffins and which concludes “As the subject had grown lugubrious it was buried in a silence of the table . . .” It is significant too that several people have colds or bronchial trouble, that the air is stale, that there is constant reference to gas and gaslight, that Michael Furey who died of consumption worked in the gasworks—in other words, that health and life are being attacked through the respiratory tract. And who is the villain? Mr. Browne, I declare.13 Note this little passage, as the party wait downstairs in the hallway while Browne and Freddy Malins are outside trying to hail a cab. “Close the door, somebody. Mrs. Malins will get her death of cold.” “Browne is out there, Aunt Kate,” said Mary Jane. “Browne is everywhere,” said Aunt Kate, lowering her voice. Mary Jane laughed at her tone. “Really,” she said archly, “he is very attentive.” “He has been laid on here like the gas,” said Aunt Kate in the same tone, “all during the Christmas.” He has indeed.We can transpose to the old rhyme, “Death is here; Death is there; Death is busy everywhere.” And we may remember that when Aunt Julia, a woman already death-stricken, is going to sing she enters leaning upon Browne’s arm, smiling and hanging her head, and is escorted to the piano amid “an irregular musketry of applause.” She sings Arrayed for the 54


Bridal, and when she is finished, Browne extends his open hand toward her and announces, “Miss Julia Morkan, my latest discovery!” Like Gabriel, Gretta, and the aunts, Browne also merits a final mention in Ulysses. Bloom at the funeral, walking through Glasnevin cemetery, thinks, “Must be an infernal lot of bad gas round the place. Butchers for instance: they get like raw beefsteak.Who was telling me? Mervyn Browne.” Browne would know. He is an expert. In conclusion I want to emphasize once more that I consider almost nothing of what I have spoken of today as primary to the story. It is all atmospherics—a mysterious electric tension in the air, vague mutterings offstage, pale wandering flashings of St. Elmo’s fire—at first faint and infrequent, then ever stronger and quicker as the story moves toward its climax. I think all readers sense that there is more going on, or seeming to go on, in the story than can readily be accounted for, things subtle and disturbing. But what else could be expected of a masterwork that begins with the allusive word “Lily” and ends inexorably upon “dead.”

Postscript (Later Observations) The time is probably the end of the Christmas season, the Twelve Days. (Notice that the cabman wishes Gabriel a prosperous New Year. Notice too that Freddy had taken the pledge on New Year’s Eve.) The party would then be on the night of January 5th, and Gabriel and Gretta would arrive at the hotel in the small hours of the 6th, the feast of the Epiphany.The ending is, in the Joycean sense, a great epiphany. The gospel for Epiphany is Matthew 2:1–12, which describes the westward journey of the Wise Men from the East. Gabriel is the angel who will announce the Last Judgment and the end of the world. —J.V. K.

Notes Paper read at Conference on Irish Studies sponsored by the American Committee for Irish Studies and the Department of English and Division of General Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana, April 25, 1964. 1. For this quotation I am indebted to Professor Richard Ellmann, who allowed me to read the galleys of his edition of Joyce’s letters, soon to be published by Cape. In his James Joyce (New York, 1959), p. 238, another unwritten story,“Catharsis,” is mentioned along with these. 2. Ibid., p. 248. 3. Ibid., p. 274. 4. Ibid. 5. Recollections of James Joyce (New York: James Joyce Society, 1950), p. 20. 55

Irish Renaissance Literature and Culture 6. Cf. Ulysses (New York, 1946), p. 654, where Stephen watching Bloom light the fire thinks of other fires which had been lighted in his presence. The second and third recollections are “of his father, Simon Dedalus, in an unfurnished room of his first residence in Dublin, number thirteen Fitzgibbon Street: of his godmother Miss Kate Morkan in the house of her dying sister Miss Julia Morkan at 15 Usher’s Island.” For these see the Portrait of the Artist (New York, 1928), pp. 71, 74. In the latter Kate is not named and Julia, now senile, is called Ellen, but they are clearly the same persons as the Kate and Julia of “The Dead.” Since the Joyces moved to Fitzgibbon Street early in 1893, when James was eleven (which would agree with Stephen’s age in this section of the Portrait), and since Ellen’s ( Julia’s) senility is apparently of recent origin, it would appear that the latest date for the party in “The Dead” would be the Christmas season of 1892. 7. James Joyce, p. 258. 8. Stokes’s translation is available in a somewhat abridged form in Cross and Slover’s Ancient Irish Tales (New York, 1936). Probably the most easily found text of it is in the last volume of Dr. Eliot’s famous Five Foot Shelf. 9. P. 171. See also p. 123. 10. Portrait, p. 210. 11.There is a picture of the hotel, taken about the beginning of the century, on the second page of The City and County Dublin, a photographic album published by William Lawrence (Dublin, n.d.). 12. Unfortunately the collection of Dublin directories in Widener Library at Harvard is woefully incomplete. From a full set it should be possible to trace the careers of Joyce’s great-grandfather, Patrick Flynn, the starch manufacturer, and his daughters, the Misses Flynn, who were the models for Kate and Julia Morkan. In 1821 Patrick’s mill was at 157 Francis Street and 49 Thomas Street; in 1827 at 50 Back Lane; in 1831 at 50 and 51 Back Lane; and in 1852 at 79 Thomas Street and 13 and 14 John Street, West. All these addresses are in the same neighborhood. In Thom’s directory for 1860 we find “Flynn, Misses the, teachers of the pianoforte and singing, 16 Ellis’s quay,” and at the same address “Flynn, Patrick, starch and blue manufacturer, and commission agent.” In 1878 the Misses Flynn are still there, but Patrick and his mill are gone. The Misses Flynn are at the same address in 1886 but are gone by 1905. There was a competing “musical academy and ladies’ intermediate school” at 12 Usher’s Island, run by Miss Mary Glannan. It is noticed as early at 1878 and as late as 1915. 13. As Ellmann shows, Browne was a real person, a Protestant who had married a first cousin of Joyce’s mother. He was named “Mervyn Achdale Browne” and “combined the profession of music teacher with that of agent for a burglary insurance company” (James Joyce, p. 255). In the directories his middle name is given as Archdall. In 1878 he was listed as “teacher of pianoforte and singing” at 55 Mountjoy Street but two years later was gone from that address. In 1907 he was listed under Professors of Music and as living at 14 Royal Terrace, Clontarf. In 1915 he was still at that address but was no longer listed as Professor of Music. None of the notices of insurance agents in the directories give his name. In 1900–01 the Joyces lived at 8 Royal Terrace, the home described at the beginning of the last chapter of the Portrait. The chances are that Joyce knew Browne well, and that Browne had the mortuary interests betokened in Bloom’s recollection of him and that would eminently fit his symbolic role in “The Dead.” 56

Sources for Finnegans Wake

4 Identifying the Irish Printed Sources for Finnegans Wake

A

great deal of excellent work has been done on the identification of literary allusions in Finnegans Wake; James S. Atherton’s The Books at the Wake comes particularly to mind, but there are any number of other works which also identify books used or consulted by Joyce. This paper, then, can only be a small, late addendum to that body of scholarship. Perhaps smaller even than I think, for considering how much Joycean criticism I have not read, it may well be that nearly every point I make here has already been made by somebody else. If that be the case, it but indicates that Joycean studies have now attained the status of a fully fledged science. Nowadays one gets the impression that every scientific discovery, no matter how small and unimportant, is made more or less simultaneously by four independent teams of researchers, in each case with the same triumph and excitement. There will be little triumph or excitement here, however. In the best of circumstances it is difficult to prove that Joyce used a particular book for a particular word or passage in Finnegans Wake or, if obviously it was the source, that he knew it at first-hand and did not merely hear of it from some informant or temporary assistant. With most Irish allusions the difficulty is compounded by the fact that Joyce was born, raised, and schooled in Ireland and that his fantastic memory was stored with all kinds of Irish lore, literary and popular. How then are we to say of any apparent reference to an Irish book that Joyce actually looked at the book while working on the Wake or that he remembered having read it when he was young or that he just knew of

First published in Irish University Review 1 (1971): 161–77.

57


it in the way that each of us knows the title or general substance of many books he has not read? We can be sure only under certain rare conditions. We know for instance that he read Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s The House by the Churchyard because he asked Frank Budgen to get him a second copy in 1933 and that very early on he was using S. Czarnowski’s Le culte des héros et ses conditions sociales: Saint Patrick héros national de l’Irlande (Paris, 1919) which he recommended warmly to Harriet Weaver.1 Once in a while there is unmistakable evidence, as when Atherton shows that Joyce unwittingly copied a misprint in John S. Crone’s Concise Dictionary of Irish Biography (Dublin, 1928), and sometimes in his handling of a theme or topic the details employed point unquestionably to a single book; but there are thousands of Irish allusions in the Wake, and not many can be shown to satisfy any of these conditions. A fairly good example is “ . . . trying to undo with his teeth the knots made by his tongue” (288.7); this is from the Irish proverb Is minic a cheanglóchadh do theanga rud ná sgaoilfeadh t’fhiacla (“It is often your tongue would tie a knot that your teeth would not untie.”) I think he got it from D. J. O’Donoghue’s The Humour of Ireland (London, 1895), where it is the first among the “Selected Irish Proverbs” with which the book closes. O’Donoghue gives it as “A man ties a knot with his tongue that his teeth will not loosen.” But can we be sure of the source? Not much else in the book is reflected in Finnegans Wake and nothing that Joyce could not have easily found elsewhere or that he would not be likely to know anyway, like Samuel Lover’s “Barney O’Hea,” the chorus of which is paraphrased in the Wake (453.6) but which Joyce probably sang in the cradle. As for the proverb itself, it may have passed over into popular Anglo-Irish, and Joyce may have had it from his father, who by all accounts was a geyser of proverbial sayings and catch-phrases. The score so far is love-all.2 An equally satisfying example partly relates to The House by the Churchyard, many of whose characters, including Lieutenant Fireworker O’Flaherty, are named in a passage beginning on line 8 of page 80. Further down the page, on line 28, we find “Posidonius O’Fluctuary! Lave that bloody stone as it is!”This, and the much earlier “That you could fell an elmstree twelve urchins couldn’t ring round and hoist high the stone that Liam failed” (25.31), may constitute uncomplimentary observations on Liam O’Flaherty’s “The Stone,” one of his less successful short stories. It is about an old man, once the village champion, who tries to lift a stone the young men use as a test of strength and dies from the exertion. In Thomas E. Connolly’s The Personal Library of James Joyce only one of O’Flaherty’s books is mentioned, a signed copy of Red Barbara and Other Stories:The Mountain Tavern, Prey, the Oar, published in 1928. “The Stone” is in the collection titled The Mountain Tavern, published in 1929. It is not in 58


the indexes to periodical literature and so probably appeared for the first time in the latter book. Connolly points out that only a remnant of Joyce’s library has been preserved. Did Joyce read the story? Are the lines cited above a comment on it? He could have. They may be. I do not know. The “stone that Liam failed” is clearly also a reference to the mythical Lia Fáil, the “Stone of Destiny,” and Atherton locates a stone in The House by the Churchyard. These may be enough to account for the lines. My interpretation depends on the fact that I have read O’Flaherty’s story and can thus see apparent references to it in the Wake. This brings us again to difficulties that are sometimes insufficiently considered by exegetes. The major themes in the Wake are generally patent enough by the second or third reading because they emerge from extended narration. The small meanings, however, often based on very little content and not developed by much restatement, remain shadowy. Furthermore, our purposes in reading the book and Joyce’s in writing it are not the same.We want to clarify, to bring out meanings. He labored to keep the meanings half hidden, often with too much success, and to make them allusive in several directions rather than definitive in any one. Then, too, there is the lamentable fact that once we get used to his method it works nearly as well for us as it did for him. It is no trouble at all for us to give a phrase or line a subtle twist that makes it fit our knowledge, not his. Or again, what is just as dangerous, we may put too much emphasis on what we do recognize. Imagine that there were an American Finnegans Wake read chiefly by Irishmen. In this the Irish reader would inevitably come across phrases like “Surrender! I have not yet begun to fight!” and “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” and “You may fire when ready, Gridley.” He would deduce correctly that these belonged to American naval history, to him a dark subject; but, nothing daunted, he would go to the library and plough his way through three or four large nautical volumes. After due study he would be able to identify the first speaker of each phrase and to describe the thrilling circumstances in which it was uttered. In all probability he would then publish a learned article on American naval history in the American Finnegans Wake. The trouble would be that by this time he would know far more about the subject than the author had ever known, and his interpretations of the phrases and estimate of their significance in the text would be correspondingly disproportionate. In fact, the author, our American Joyce, would mostly have gathered the phrases out of the air, as all Americans gather them, and would have used them lightly and satirically as indicative of our vague, popular national mythology. Even if he had once read them, it would in all likelihood have been many years before, in school, in Muzzey’s History of the United States, a book from which no able-bodied man or woman of my 59


generation recollects anything clearly except the fact of Muzzey’s Saharan dryness. For that matter, what Irishman of Joyce’s generation ever recollected anything very substantial from P. W. Joyce’s A Child’s History of Ireland, a book as inescapable in his youth as Muzzey’s was thirty-five years ago? Yet in either case how easily disconnected items and names and phrases come welling to the surface of the memory if but the word “history” be invoked—Tippecanoe and Tyler Too or Tottenham in his boots, the Gadsden Purchase or the Declaratory Act, Fifty-four Forty or Fight or the Four F’s— all readily useful for rough suggestions of historical periods or to add coloration or even just to carry a recurrent rhythm in either Finnegans Wake, the actual or the hypothetical. I am far from suggesting that Joyce’s knowledge of Irish history was limited to this sort of fragmentary, half-proverbial lore. History is a great theme in the Wake and, to my mind, one of the most successfully handled. Joyce had a real feeling for history, especially with regard to its blind and usually tragic recurrences.Thus some of the most strongly repeated patterns in the book are historical—patterns of battle, of invasion and resistance to invasion, of the rise and fall of cities and states, and of rebellions and civil war— and as with most of the constituent patterns the Irish exemplifications are usually primary. Another great theme is the degeneration or absorption of history into folk myth. Therefore he used both kinds of information, what he gleaned from books and what he simply remembered.We, unless we are as familiar with Irish popular lore as he was, must have great difficulty in distinguishing between the two kinds and in determining accurately the various applications he makes of them. Some periods of Irish history are reflected quite thoroughly in the Wake. Others are noticed only with an image or two, like the often-repeated depiction of the warring earls of Ormond and Kildare shaking hands through a hole cut in the door of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, in 1492, which is made to stand both for a temporary truce between Shaun and Shem and, in epitome, for the long rivalries that characterized Irish aristocratic home rule in the fifteenth century. Joyce’s source for the incident was most likely D. A. Chart’s The Story of Dublin. It is significant that Chart does not mention the year 1492, for if he had Joyce would probably have made even greater use of the incident. Chart’s book of course can account for only a few of the references to historical and pseudo-historical events earlier than the eighteenth century; some in fact, though they relate to Ireland, are not drawn from Irish sources. For example: Sapphrageta and Consciencia were undecidedly attached to me but the maugher machrees and the auntieparthenopes my schwalby words 60


with litted spongelets set their soakye pokeys and botchbons afume . . . (542.19) Underlying this is a stratagem described at the end of the fourth book of the Historie Danice of Saxo Grammaticus (1150?–1220?), which is also recounted by Meredith Hanmer (1543–1604) in his Chronicle of Ireland, first published by Ware in 1633 and later reprinted in Ancient Irish Histories (Dublin, 1809). Here is Hanmer’s English version of the story: In the time of Augustus Caesar, a little before the birth of our Saviour, Fridelenus King of Denmarke, puffed up with pride, through some fortunate successes, arrived in Ireland, laid siege to the Citie of Dublin, and finding it not so easie a matter to achieue, fell to policie; he caught certaine Swallowes that bred in the Citie, tyed fire to their wings, who flying to their nests, fired the houses; while the Citizens endeavoured to quence the fire, the Danes entred the Citie, and wanne it. (Ancient Irish Histories, II, 35) It is likely that Joyce got this directly from Saxo, either from the Latin text or from one of the English translations, for instance by FrederickYork Powell (1894) or Oliver Elton (1905), although there is also the possibility that he read Hanmer. The number and the kind of his many references to Irish history, however, show that he also used at least one general history of Ireland. Atherton, in his discussion of the six, and possibly seven or eight, historians of Ireland, including Giraldus Cambrensis, named by Joyce on pages 573–74 of the Wake, suggests that “(a cooler blend, D’Alton insists)” (572.36) signifies the Reverend Edward Alfred Dalton, author of The History of Ireland from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (2nd ed., London 1910), a fairly uncritical work in six volumes. He is wrong on one count. The historians named are older figures, and D’Alton, with the apostrophe, denotes John D’Alton (1792–1867), author of Lives of the Archbishops of Dublin, History of the County of Dublin and King James’ Irish Army List. E. A. Dalton had no apostrophe in his surname.Yet it is very probable that Joyce did use the latter’s work, both because it could account for so much of what is touched on in the Wake and because it offers a fairly likely source for one significant phrase in the following passage: . . . and our folk had rest from Blackheathen and the pagans from the prince of pacis: what was trembling sod quaked no more, what were frozen loins were stirred and lived . . . (549.6) The ultimate source, which I doubt that Joyce ever saw, is an entry for the year 1145 in the Annals of the Four Masters: 61


Coccadh mór isin mbliadhainsi co mboí Ere ina fód crithaigh. (“Great war in this year, so that Ireland was a trembling sod.”) Dalton quotes it in his second volume, page 165. It is also quoted in Goddard Henry Orpen’s Ireland under the Normans, I, 53 (Oxford, 1911), but I can see no sign that Joyce ever read that rather formidable work. As for the many references to the Vikings in Ireland, to the violation of the altar of Clonmacnois by Ota, wife of Turgeis, to the battle of Clontarf and the Brian saga generally, Joyce was probably indebted to James Henthorn Todd’s edition of Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh (“The War of the Gaedhil with the Gaill”) (London, 1867).Though all of this material is detailed, frequently with direct quotations from Todd’s book, in more popular and easily accessible histories, the large number of allusions to this particular period may well indicate that Joyce did use Cogadh Gaedhel re Gaillaibh. And as Atherton notes, he also used Charles Haliday’s The Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin (1881). He must have known that book for a long time—it is reflected in Stephen’s view of Dublin from the North Bull in the fourth chapter of the Portrait of the Artist. Turning from history to Irish myth and saga, we find that in the Wake Joyce makes passing reference to quite a number of tales, but extended use of very few. Since another speaker will discuss the Fionn cycle in the Wake, I will not comment on that except to note that Lady Gregory’s Gods and Fighting Men (1904), from which he may have got some or even most of the Fenian tales he employed, also contains enough of the mythological cycle and Lebor Gabála to account for most of his allusions to the Fir Bolg,Tuatha Dé Danann, and the Gaelic invaders. Indeed . . . their Elderships the Oldens from the four coroners of Findrias, Murias, Gorias and Falias, Messoirs the Coarbs, Clive Sollis, Galorius Kettle, Pobiedo Lancey and Pierre Dusort, (219.10) is almost certainly taken from the very first page of her book, where she tells how the Tuatha Dé Danann came from the four northern cities, Falias, Gorias, Finias, and Murias, bringing with them their four treasures, the Sword of Light, the inexhaustible cauldron, the Spear of Victory, and the Stone of Destiny. In the eleventh chapter of the Wake there are several references, though none explicit enough to quote here, to the saga Togail Bruidne Dá Derga (“The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel”). As I have shown elsewhere, Joyce most likely read this in Whitley Stokes’s edition and translation which appeared in Revue Celtique in 1901 and 1902 and used it as a hidden parallel to the action of his story “The Dead.”3 A very short myth which Joyce cites quite explicitly is derived from Eoin 62


MacNeill’s Celtic Ireland (1921), the only material he did take from that book. It is plainly discoverable in the following passages: He hath locktoes, this shortshins, and, Obeold that’s pectoral, his mammamuscles most mousterious. (15.31) . . . and his own blood and milk brother Frisky Shorty . . . (39.18) He had buckgoat paps on him, soft ones for orphans. Ho, Lord! Twins of his bosom. (215.27) . . . have his ignomen from prima signation of being Master Milchku, queerest man in the benighted queendom, and, adcraft aidant, how he found the kids. (241.21) Laid bare his breastpaps to give suck, to suckle me. Ecce Hagios Chrisman! (480.14) . . . if so be you may identify yourself with the him in you, that fluctuous neck merchamtur, bloodfadder and milkmudder. (496.24) There is of course some admixture here. “Milchku” in the fourth example is also Milchú moccu Buain, Saint Patrick’s master when he was a slave in Ulster, but for the rest see page 55 of MacNeill’s book, where he translates an annotation in the genealogy of the Ui Echach Muman, the Éoganacht rulers of south Munster: “Lugaid Cichech [i.e., having milk-breasts] reared the two sons of Crimthann, Aed and Laegaire, on his breasts. It was new milk he gave from his breast to Laegaire, and blood he gave to Aed. Each of them took after his nurture, the race of Aed being marked by fierceness in arms, the race of Laegaire by thrift.”4 And MacNeill observes that The myth of a milk-breasted man reappears in the pedigree of the Eoganacht of Ara Cliach, who have Fer Cichech,“the Breasted Man,” as an ancestor. The subject of the myth as quoted is evidently once more the god Lugh. Clearly enough this attracted Joyce’s attention because it exactly fitted his purposes. Twin sons of opposed natures, reared by a hermaphroditic god who gives each the sustenance that determines his temperament, provide a most pertinent exemplification of Shaun and Shem. I have long been con63


vinced that the ground level of the Wake in its mythological aspect is inhabited by the shadowy figure of a primitive hermaphroditic ancestor from whom all the later, more distinctly human, characters emanate. Two other works that furnished mythological themes are Jeremiah Curtin’s Hero-Tales of Ireland (1894), one of the classic collections of Irish folklore, and a very unclassical little pamphlet, W. S. Smith’s Gossip About Lough Neagh, published in Belfast in 1885.The latter contains a paltry little tale about how Finn MacCool—Fionn in his late comic degeneration to a mere giant—created Lough Neagh by scooping out its bed and then threw the huge lump of earth into the Irish Sea, where it formed the Isle of Man. Smith also makes much of the reputed petrifying qualities of Lough Neagh water, and he claims that a few years previously a group of Americans professed to have discovered Finn’s petrified body in the lake. In the Wake one of HCE’s gravesites is under Lough Neagh. I think Smith’s pamphlet is the source for a number of passages, particularly these: Landloughed by his neaghboormistress and perpetrified in his offsprung, sabes and suckers . . . (23.29) . . . made him, while his body still persisted, their present of a protem grave in Moyelta of the best Lough Neagh pattern, then as much in demand among misonesans as the Isle of Man today among limniphobes. (76.20) Other accuse him as lochkneeghed forsunkener . . . (241.23) Yet it is, this ale of man, for him, our hubuljoynted, just a tug and a fistful as for Culsen, the Patagoreyan, chieftain of chokanchuckers and his moyety joyant, under the foamer dispensation when he pullupped the turfeycork by the greats of gobble out of Lough Neagk. (310.30) From Curtin’s Hero-Tales Joyce took elements from at least two stories,“Elin Gow, the Swordsmith from Erin, and the Cow Glas Gainach” and “Mor’s Sons and the Herder from Under the Sea.” Of Glas Gainach we are told that she “is a cow that is better than a thousand cows, and her milk is nearly all butter.” And again,“Glas Gainach had milk for all; and when anyone came to milk her she would not stop, and there was never a vessel that she did not fill.” In the Wake this is reflected in . . . providencer’s divine cow to milkfeeding mleckman . . . (337.5) . . . Miss Enders, poachmistress and gay receiver ever for in particular to the Scotic Poor Men’s Thousand Gallon Cow Society . . . (412.23) 64


. . . the man what never put a dramn in the swags but milk from a national cowse. (615.26) The story of Mor and her sons is much more thoroughly absorbed into the text of the Wake and is thus harder to demonstrate by quotation. In his introduction to Hero-Tales Curtin offers a tentative reconstruction of the myth of Mor from the tale, from scattered proverbial sayings and from his own knowledge of the principles of folklore. Mór ní Ghréine,“Great, daughter of the Sun,” married Lír, “the sea.” They could not live together, so she came to land at Dunmore Head, at the end of the Dingle peninsula in Kerry, a few miles south of Sybil Head, and lived at Dunquin at the foot of Mount Eagle. “All she had came by the sea and went the same way.” She had sons of whom she was very proud, but they left her and went back to the sea, their father. “Left alone, all her power and property vanished; she withered, lost her strength, went mad, and then disappeared, no man knew whither.” Mór is a cloud. Her sons, Curtin thinks, are the raindrops, but they may also be thunder and lightning. It is easy to see how all this is worked into the Wake, where the basic symbol for the female is fresh water, first appearing as a cloud, Nuoveletta, and ultimately returning as a river to the fathering sea. Joyce to be sure changes the myth to fit his own purposes, but I have little doubt that he got it from Curtin’s book and that we owe to the story all the references to brinabride, as for instance in the song at the end of the twelfth chapter: O, come all ye sweet nymphs of Dingle beach to cheer Brinabride queen from Sybil surfriding In her curragh of shells of daughter of pearl and her silverymonnblue mantle round her. (399.3) As well of course as such passages as . . . just mentioning however that the old man of the sea and the old woman in the sky . . . (599.34) The single heroic tale that is most extensively employed in the Wake is an episode from the Táin Bó Cuailgne. This is Comrac Fir Diad ocus Conchulaind, the duel between Fer Diad and Cú Chulainn in a ford of the Glas Cruind, the river Dee at Ardee, in Louth. Cú Chulainn, singlehandedly defending Ulster against the host of the men of Ireland, has slain every champion sent against him. At last the wily Maeve, queen of Connacht, manages to persuade Fer Diad mac Damáin mic Dáire of the Fir Domnand to fight him, though he and Cú Chulainn have been shield-brothers since they were in Scotland together learning feats of arms from the Amazon 65


Scathach.5 Fer Diad is promised great rewards—much land free from all exactions, Maeve’s daughter Findabair, and even the gold brooch from Maeve’s mantle. Reluctantly he goes against Cú Chulainn, but he has some chance of winning because he is a giant warrior and because he is conganchnes, that is, he has a magical horn-skin or horn-armour impervious to all weapons.6 He also wields a famous sword with a hilt of tusk or ivory and wears a great battle-apron of smelted iron and huge stones. Cú Chulainn is even more reluctant than Fer Diad to fight his own shield-brother, but the safety of his province depends on him, and he must accept the challenge. They fight in the ford on three successive days; and for all his skill and valour the much smaller Cú Chulainn is grievously wounded again and again. At last, in great straits, he calls to his charioteer, Lóeg mac Riangabra, to send him the gaí Bulga, his magical spear. The gaí Bulga is the ultimate weapon. It cannot miss its target, and once in the enemy’s body it opens up into three or twenty-four or thirty or a hundred barbed points so that it cannot be withdrawn but must be pushed through or cut out. Moreover, it must be floated to the man who will wield it, caught in the foot and thrown by the foot. Before Cú Chulainn resorts to it he is overcome by his battle frenzy and distortion, his riastra, in which his body becomes wildly contorted and he swells to gigantic size. First he draws Fer Diad’s guard up by thrusting at him from above, then he catches the gaí Bulga in his foot and hurls it. In the Book of Leinster version of the Táin the blow is described thus: And the ga bulga went through the strong, thick apron of smelted iron and broke in three the great stone as big as a millstone and entered Fer Diad’s body through the anus and filled every joint and limb of him with its barbs.“That suffices,” said Fer Diad.“I have fallen by that (cast). But indeed strongly do you cast from your right foot. And it was not fitting that I should fall by you.”7 Cú Chulainn then lifts him up and carries him to the Ulster side of the ford and there sings four songs of lamentation over him. The story was very popular, and it was constantly added to. In later versions we find the duel triplicated. Not only do Cú Chulainn and Fer Diad fight, but their charioteers, also brothers, Lóeg and Id, sons of Riangarb, and a pair of brothers from faeryland, Dolph and Indolph, fight brother against brother in support of their respective champions. From first to last, however, despite all elaborations, the central interest of the tale remains the same, the high tragedy of the hero who must, in order to fulfill his duty and save his own people, fight and kill the friend dearest to his heart and who therefore fights reluctantly and wins with sorrow. Though the incidents of the tale grow increasingly grotesque, the tale itself never becomes comic or ignoble. 66


To one degree or another this tale is referred to in most of the conflicts or assaults in the Wake. As might be expected, Cú Chulainn and Fer Diad become Shem and Shaun; but Fer Diad, as the object of the assault, may also be the father, HCE, or, in a sexual aspect, a woman. Most particularly he is the Russian general who is shot by Buckley in the eleventh chapter. The identification involves a pun. The word conganchnes, “horn-skinned,” does not appear in modern Irish. It would, in any case, present considerable difficulties for word-play; instead, Joyce uses rúscanta, “covered with skin, rind, or bark,” as a pun on Russian. Indeed the identification is made quite circumstantial, as on 349.31, where the Russian general “wollops his mouther with a sword of tusk,” clearly Fer Diad’s weapon. Cú Chulainn may be either twin attacking the other or attacking HCE or making a sexual assault. He is also Buckley or Bulkeley, being a small, boylike figure (Irish buachaill, “boy,” whence the surname Ó Buachalla, anglicized Buckley) and because in his riastra he bulks hugely. As for the gaí Bulga, it has often been interpreted as the lightning-weapon taken from the old god by the young god and used against him. In the Wake it can be any weapon, however unlikely seeming. Many of the assaults are carried out with a “fender,” which like the gaí Bulga may be offender or defender according to the view of recipient or user. Or it may be a “turfing iron,” obviously the long handled loy with which Christy Mahon twice kills his father in The Playboy of the Western World. Or it can be a pipe, either as a long spearlike plumbing pipe or as the sort of pipe one smokes. If the latter, when one holds it by the bowl (in Irish, bolg) and points with the stem it looks like a pistol. Or it may be a watch which has three pointed hands— hour, minute, and second—and which is literally a revolver. A watch, too, is the ultimate weapon, for there is nothing more deadly than time. Or the gaí Bulga may be a penis which also thrusts in from below. Or finally it may be a harpoon for spearing HCE as the whale. More usually it has two or three of these aspects at once. There are so many examples of the assault with the gaí Bulga that I can only give a few here. In understanding these it helps to remember that Irish bolg can also mean “belly,” “bag,” “bladder,” or “quiver,” or indeed almost anything that is round or hollow. . . . Reade’s cutless centiblade, a loaded Hobson’s which left only twin alternatives . . . (63.2) . . . put a matchhead on an alpenstalk and set the living a fire; speared the rod and spoiled the lightning . . . (131.13) . . . when his depth charge bombed our barrel spillway . . . (255.11) 67


Hear where the bolgylines,Yseen here the puncture. So he done it. Luck! See her good. Well, well, well, well! O dee, O dee, that’s very lovely! (299.19) . . . woodint wun able rep of the triperforator awlrite blast through his pergaman hit him where he lived and do for the blessted selfchuruls . . . (303.21) And to hell with them driftbombs and bottom trailers! If my maily was bag enough I’d send you a toxis. (304.15) The illegallooking range or fender, alias turfing iron, a product of Hostages and Co, Engineers, changed feet several times as briars revalvered during the weaponswap. (518.15) The duel is usually subsumed in one or another involved account of the basic conflict which is of course all conflicts and has many other exemplifications. Once in a while, however, it emerges clearly enough as itself, as in That’s a goosey’s ganswer you’re for giving me, he is told, what the Deva would you do that for? (287.2) which is commented on in a footnote: Will you walk into my wavetrap? said the spiter to the shy. And again in a footnote on page 292: Where Buickly of the Glass and Bellows pumped the Rudge engineral. In these “Deva” and “the Glass” stand for the river Dee, or Glas Cruind, in which the fight takes place, and “Bellows” for Cú Chulainn’s bellows-feat, one of the tricks he learned from Scathach. Needless to say, bellows is bolg séidte. One cannot escape that word. In the Butt and Taff dialogue in the eleventh chapter Taff is Cú Chulainn, and so, since this is an attack by either twin upon the parent, is Butt. Taff has Cú Chulainn’s seven-pupilled eyes: . . . his bulgeglarying stargapers razzledazzlingly full of eyes, full of balls, full of holes, full of buttons, full of stains, full of medals, full of blickblackblobs. (339.19) Butt undergoes the riastra: . . . he changecors induniforms as he is lefting the gat out of the big: his face glows green, his hair greys white, his bleyes bcome broon to suite his cultic twalette. (344.10) 68


And the triplication of the duel by the additional fights between Lóeg and Id, Dolph and Indolph, is remarked in . . . whatwidth the psychopannies at the front and whetwadth the psuckofumbers beholden the fair, illcertain, between his bulchrichudes and the roshashanaral . . . (340.25) Finally we have the actual throwing of the gaí Bulga, with Taff crying: Papaist! Gambanman! Take the cawraidd’s blow! Yia! Your partridge’s last! (344.6) For “cawraidd’s blow” is of course both a coward’s blow, below the belt, and the most telling blow struck in the Táin, the cattle raid of Cooley. I would suggest that Joyce drew his information about the duel and the gaí Bulga from two books, though he may well have consulted others. He needed a text of the story which included the later additions. For that reason we can eliminate any number of books and learned articles, particularly Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne and Eleanor Hull’s The Cuchullin Saga, and settle for Joseph Dunn’s The Ancient Irish Epic Tale, Táin Bó Cúalgne (London: David Nutt, 1914) which gives the Book of Leinster text of the episode, with the fights of the charioteers and of Dolph and Indolph added from Egerton 106 and Egerton 209. I know no other book available to Joyce from which he could have got all this. The second book is Rudolph Thurneysen’s Die Irische Heldenund Königsage (Halle, 1921). Here Joyce would find the explanation of the name Fer Diad as meaning Mann des Rauchs, “Man of Smoke,” and the translation of conganchnes as Hornhaut, Hornhäutig. I think that is reflected in “Ho, he hath hornhide!” (403.13). In English the word is usually rendered “horn-skinned.” A third possibility that may account for the gaí Bulga as a harpoon is Julius Pokorny’s Irland, in which an argument was advanced for the existence of an Eskimo strain in the early Irish. Indeed, the name of the pre-Keltic inhabitants of Ireland, Fir Bholg, is derived from their use of the skin boat (bolg means bag, pouch; bladder, bellows, and also a ship’s hold) . . .The Gae bolga, that mysterious weapon of the Irish legendary hero Cú Chulainn, which was only used in water, was doubtless identical with the Eskimo harpoon, which is provided with a throwing-stick, and a seal-skin bladder. It was named after the bladder (bolg), which is tied to the harpoon by a long string, and serves to facilitate its recovery from the water. I quote from the English translation by Dr. Séana D. King, published as A History of Ireland in 1933. If Joyce saw the book it was most likely the original German edition of 1916. However, the weapon used against HCE in 69


his manifestation as a whale would inevitably be a harpoon, not necessarily Pokorny’s. Here I must present some objections to the Wake. They are simply personal judgments, but I feel that I have earned the right to offer them, having spent so much time on the book in years past, at least half of which I would be very happy to see refunded. When Joyce takes something great like Cú Chulainn’s duel with Fer Diad, he makes use, and can make use, only of the lesser elements, the mechanical aspects of the tale. Not for him the high tragedy, the desperate fury, the bitter sorrow which made the story a treasured favourite for century after century in early and medieval Ireland—those do not fit the method of the Wake. Instead we are given them back in parody and mocking comedy, a sort of immensely clever pop art depiction of the themes of tragedy, all very funny but in the long run curiously dissatisfying. And in Finnegans Wake all the running is long. The Wake is a big book, with 626 pages of difficult text, and we may realistically multiply these by a factor of five, or more likely of ten, if we are to compare the labor required of the reader with what he must invest in other great books of our age. Does the effort produce a commensurate result? The book promises to be a poetic, one-volume literary, mythological, religious, historical, social history of mankind. Occasionally it redeems that promise with such brilliance that one’s imagination leaps at the possibilities inherent in the method. I think of the final soliloquy of Anna Livia Plurabelle, that longing, lingering farewell of the dying wife and mother to those she loves and loathes and leaves and loses, and her mingled, mounting fear and joy as she returns to the fathering sea. This is the greatest passage in the Wake, pure poetry, and incidentally the clearest and most readily understood.The first chapter, too, in which all the major themes are set forth is great writing. The expression is densely complicated, but the themes are firmly manifested. Or again I would point to the high comedy of the learned professor’s lecture on the letter in the fifth chapter, where, with a sustained pyrotechnic display of Teutonic erudition, he discusses the paper, the pen, the stains, the punctures, the script, the spelling, the date, the address, the circumstances of discovery, the philology of the language or languages, and even the psychologies of the writer, the finder, and the intended recipients, elucidating everything except what the letter says.There are other passages, too, which I still read with pleasure and admiration after all these years. As a whole, however, the book does not live up to its initial promise. The deficiencies that are also inherent in the method and the habitual negativism of Joyce’s mind insure that generally nothing much happens. All too usually what might be made noble is not only wedded to its opposite, but is 70


interpenetrated by its opposite, so that we have neither light nor dark but a complexity of grayness. Tragedy is interfused with and weighted down by farce, sacrifice by self-concern, love by sly sexuality, generous imagination by carping nihilism.What should be firm statement is all too often obscured and fragmented by dubiously relevant word-play. Now that we have Richard Ellmann’s definitive biography of Joyce and his edition of Joyce’s letters, we can no longer escape seeing that in many long passages where it could formerly be assumed that the extended confessional aspect merely overlay deeper meanings which remained to be discovered, the confession is in fact the only consecutive meaning—a compulsive dance of the seven veils by a grave literary giant who also wanted to be revealed as a rather wicked fellow. Yet the naughtinesses admitted to are so sly and petty that I doubt any experienced confessor would give him more than five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys for penance, with a tired admonition to amend his life and be a good boy hereafter. For me, reading the Wake nowadays is like watching a huge, marvellously constructed aircraft, the unique final creation of a great designer, taxi along an endless airstrip. It always seems about to take off, and every once in a while it does make a hop of half a mile or so, but it never really soars, neither does it ever really crash, though occasionally it may seem to.There is a burst of smoke and flame, and parts of it fly off in all directions, but there is no actual catastrophe.The plane and its crew instantly reassemble themselves, and the taxiing resumes. As in human existence, there are great miseries and grandeurs now and then, along with the incessant follies, and great literature manages somehow to deal appropriately with them. I will admit that I may well be wrong thus to criticize the spectacle. After all, there is no other such plane—no other such book—none even remotely like this. In truth, however, after watching for many years I find I often get bored stiff, and my feet hurt.

Notes 1. Another mention of Le Fanu’s work may be . . . and snuffed out the ghost in the candle at his old game of haunt the sleepper. (295.8) This appears to refer to “Wicked Captain Walshawe of Wauling,” published anonymously in the Dublin University Magazine in 1869, identified as Le Fanu’s and reprinted by M(ontague) R(hodes) James in Madame Crowl’s Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery (London, 1923). Czarnowski’s book would have given Joyce most of the Patrician material he used in the Wake, and much else besides. It discusses the heroic legend of Patrick, the role of the filid in the development of the legend, early Irish depictions of death, and Irish 71

Irish Renaissance Literature and Culture social structure in the pagan and early Christian period. Still it seems likely that Joyce consulted more conventional works as well, like J. B. Bury’s The Life of St. Patrick and His Place in History (London, 1905). 2. How much Irish Joyce knew must remain a moot question. Puns in the Wake show that he could use an Irish dictionary and pronounce the words. In My Brother’s Keeper Stanislaus says that Joyce studied Irish for “a year or two” under the influence of George Clancy, the Davin of A Portrait. Thus he may have come across the proverb in Irish. Another possible legacy of that study may be what seem allusions to Owen Roe O’Sullivan’s bill of sale for a horse, written in English and alliterating throughout on “s,” e.g., “A strong, staunch, steady, stout, sinewy, safe, serviceable, strapping, supple, swift . . . steed . . .” This was printed in the introduction to Amhrán Eoghain Ruaidh Ui Shiúilleabháin (Dublin, 1901) by Fr Patrick Dinneen. It may be reflected in . . . with his highly curious mode of slipashod motion, surefoot, sorefoot, slickfoot, slackfoot . . . (426.35) and . . . and pfor to pfinish our pfun of a pfan coalding the keddle mickwhite; sure, straight, slim, sturdy, serene, synthetical, swift. (596.31) 3. “Irish History and Mythology in James Joyce’s ‘The Dead,’” Review of Politics 28 (July 1965), 414–33. [See that essay, reprinted just before this one.—Ed.] 4. MacNeill does not cite his source. It is The Book of Ballymote, 175 a 48–b 9. 5. Fer Diad’s name means “Man of Smoke son of the little Ox (or Stag) son of the Bull (?or Oak).” I think there may be a reference to it in And Jarl von Hoother had his hurricane hips up to his pantrybox, ruminating in his holdfour stomachs (Dare! O dare!) (22.22) “Dare! O Dare!” might mean “Bull! Grandson of bull!” I have a hunch that Caseous, one of the names for the Shem figure, may be a pun on “gaseous” and indicate Shem as Fer Diad, that is, the assaulted one. Scathach means “shadow.” I think this appears in the Wake, but I have not found it while combing the book this time. Also I cannot find the source for “Cowhowling” (547.22). This appears in some sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Anglo-Irish text as a phonetic spelling of Cú Chulainn. I thought it was in the Book of Howth (Cal. State Papers, Carew MSS.) But I failed to discover it there when I went to check up on it. 6. A good description of conganchnes as “horn-armour” is A strange man wearing abarrel. (351.2) 7. Táin Bó Cúalgne, ed. Cecile O’Rahilly (Dublin, 1967), p. 229.

72

The Perceptions of James Joyce

5 The Perceptions of James Joyce

I

f the day should come that I walk into the classroom, unfurl my opening lecture on Joyce, and find at the end of the hour that I had as well been talking about Alfred Lord Tennyson, I shall not be unduly surprised. No writer’s original fame lasts forever with the young. Joyce has already had an unusually long run with them; and though their interest shows no present signs of weakening, when it does fail it will likely fail suddenly. Everything in literature has its term, and, if worthy, its renewal.That the rediscovery of Joyce will occur, with full fanfare, within a generation after his rejection, may be taken as certain. However, that will be no affair of mine. Meanwhile, I predict with confidence that when the rest of Joyce’s books pass into temporary disfavor A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man will go on being read, possibly as much as ever, by youths from eighteen to twentytwo. They will read it and recommend it to one another just as lads their age do now, and for the same reasons. That is, they will read it primarily as useful and reassuring revelation—not as literature, for they will be blind to its irony and its wonderful engineering, the qualities Joyce most labored to give it. They will use it as a magic mirror: as boys of thirteen use Huckleberry Finn and as sixteen-going-on-seventeen looks into the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám for graceful corroboration of its own grim apprehension of The Meaning of Life. I should think it doubtful that Joyce had these readers in mind when he wrote the book, any more than FitzGerald foresaw for his nearly original poem its permanent audience of callow fatalists; but, like it or not, this is part of his achievement.

First published in the Atlantic 201.3 (March 1958): 82–90.

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Joyce did complain that readers tended to forget the last four words of the title. He could have remarked, too, that the book was not the Self-Portrait of the Artist As aYoung Man. All too often it is read as if it were so named. Then the author himself is belabored for the sins and the more than occasional priggishness of his hero or, conversely, is credited with having possessed in youth the same astonishing clarity of purpose and action. Either assumption is unjust to Joyce. True, Stephen Dedalus is endowed with a personal history quite similar to his creator’s; his experiences are modeled on those Joyce himself suffered or enjoyed at that age; and as Joyce, writing the book, is the mature artist, so Stephen is a representation of the artist-by-nature as he discovers his vocation, defines his creed, and sets forth to practice it. There, I think, close resemblance ends. Joyce’s life happened to him as everyone’s life happens—at all hours and seasons, any old way, with chronic inconvenience. Stephen’s existence, though presented in rich detail, is at once the product and the illustration of deliberate composition in terms of a consciously created aesthetic. I remember that when I first encountered Stephen Dedalus I was twenty, and I wondered how Joyce could have known so much about me. That is what I mean by the sort of reading the book will continue to get, whatever literary fashion may decree. Perhaps about the third reading it dawned on me that Stephen was, after all, a bit of a prig; and to that extent I no longer identified myself with him. (How could I?) Quite a while later I perceived that Joyce knew that Stephen was a prig; that, indeed, he looked on Stephen with quite an ironic eye. So then I understood. At least I did until I had to observe that the author’s glance was not one of unmixed irony. There was compassion in it too, as well as a sort of tender, humorous pride. By this time I was lecturing on Joyce, and I was having a terrible time with the book. I could not coordinate what I had to say about it; and the students, as their papers showed, were mostly wondering how Joyce could have known so much about them—which was fortunate, for the lectures made very little sense, and it was well that the victims had their own discoveries to distract them. The trouble was, I was trying to examine separate parts of the book separately.There aren’t any separate parts. One might as well attempt to study a man’s gestures by pulling off his arm and dissecting it. The book is all of a piece, one organic whole. It is, as it were, written backwards and forwards and sideways and in depth, all at once. A score of premises is laid down in the first twenty-odd pages. From these, with deliberate and unobtrusive engineering, everything else is developed in the most natural-looking way possible. The same words or the same basic images in which the premise was expressed are used over and over again, development usually being 74


measured by the variations of context in which they occur or by new combinations of these identifying words and images. Described that way, the technique sounds dry as dust. Just some more damned symbolism. Unfortunately I can only suggest the vitality of Joyce’s method by illustrating it, and in so short a compass as this essay I can get an illustration only by dissecting it from its text. A curiously uncooperative man he always was. One early premise is the conjunction of red and green. Stephen, as a baby, has a song: O, the wild rose blossoms On the little green place. He sang that song. That was his song. O, the green wothe botheth. The song is an old sentimental favorite, Lily Dale. The second line ought to be “On the little green grave,” but this is a song taught to a very small child and so for grave is substituted the neutral place. What counts, however, is that as he sings it he confuses red and green into one image, the green rose. On the next page the colors are still in proximity but are now separate. Dante [his grandaunt] had two brushes in her press.The brush with the maroon velvet back was for Michael Davitt and the brush with the green velvet back was for Parnell. A little later in the chapter the child, now at boarding school, is coming down with a fever and finds it hard to study. He looks at his geography, where there is a picture of the earth amid clouds, which another boy, not he, had colored with crayons. He . . . looked wearily at the green round earth in the middle of the maroon clouds. He wondered which was right, to be for the green or for the maroon, because Dante had ripped the green velvet back off the brush that was for Parnell one day with her scissors and had told him that Parnell was a bad man. He wondered if they were arguing at home about that. That was called politics. There were two sides in it: Dante was on one side and his father and Mr. Casey were on the other side but his mother and Uncle Charles were on no side. He remembers the song, too. “But you could not have a green rose. But perhaps someplace in the world you could.” 75


At night, sick and very lonely, he dreams of going home for Christmas; and home is all in terms of a conjunction of green and red. There were lanterns in the hall of his father’s house and ropes of green branches.There were holly and ivy round the pierglass and holly and ivy, green and red, twined round the chandeliers.There were red holly and green ivy round the old portraits on the walls. Holly and ivy for him and for Christmas. This simple union of red and green—say, of emotion and vitality though that hardly expresses the whole meaning—is realized once more, for the last time, at the beginning of the famous Christmas dinner episode. A great fire, banked high and red, flamed in the grate and under the ivy twined branches of the chandelier the Christmas table was spread. But from there out, there are only the red of passion and the black of grief. The argument over Parnell and the bishops cannot be avoided or hushed. Dante, aflame with outraged pietism and heartburn, and the dark-faced Mr. Casey have it out uncontrollably.When Dante stamps from the room shouting, “Devil out of hell! We won! We crushed him to death! Fiend!,” the household, like Ireland itself, is split asunder, the soldierly Casey is weeping for his “dead king,” all color is crushed out of the scene—and though the reader, caught up by the wild emotionality, is not likely to remember, confidence in custom has been broken too. Before the argument, Stephen had been thinking how when dinner was ended the big plum pudding would be carried in, studded with peeled almonds and sprigs of holly, with bluish fire running around it and a little green flag flying from the top. The pudding is never brought in. Stephen will never see Ireland happily on top of its own world. Till the book reaches its climax, red and green remain apart.The dominant combination is red, black, and white: a false one for Stephen whether betokened by a red-faced priest with his white collar and black garb or by the dark hair and rosy complexion and white dress of E. C., the wrong girl for him. Meanwhile, half a dozen other themes are being developed through color, the most important being the white, gold, blue, and ivory of the Blessed Virgin to whom Stephen offers a dry and profitless devotion. The same four colors, though never all at once, indicate the image of beauty he must find among mortal women. The book has five chapters.The first four chronicle Stephen’s search for 76


his true identity. As the very first sentence informs us, he is not truly of the family into which he was born—there he is “baby tuckoo,” the cuckoo’s fledgling in the cowbird’s nest. He tries to find himself through obedience, through disobedience, through the family, through dream, through precocious sexuality, and finally and most earnestly through rigorous piety. Each attempt fails. He only learns in recurrent weariness and despair that he is not this, not that. Then suddenly, a little after he has refused to be trapped by vanity into falsely admitting a vocation for the priesthood, freedom possesses him. Freedom and expectation. He wanders out onto the strand at the north side of the river mouth, where presentiment had long since warned him he would meet his love. Bond after bond falls away from him. Weariness is banished. Joyfully he feels his final separation from all that does not truly and wholly pertain to himself. He knows with absolute certainty that he is approaching his destiny in the “wild heart of life.” Suddenly, too, color—all significant color—is around him, every hue transformed, red to russet and green to emerald. Almost on that instant he meets his Muse. A girl stood before him in midstream: alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane’s and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and softhued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird’s, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face. They look at each other without speaking. Then the girl withdraws her glance and begins to stir the water with her foot hither and thither, hither and thither: and a faint flame trembled on her cheek. Heavenly God! cried Stephen’s soul, in an outburst of profane joy. Here, then, the Virgin’s colors and green and red, the strand of seaweed and the flame upon the cheek, are fused with the bird imagery that continues throughout the book from “baby tuckoo” on the first page to Dedalus, the winged artificer, who is evoked in the final sentence. The whole thus created is greater than the sum of its parts and has a new and greater meaning. Stephen’s joy when he recognizes that meaning must be profane.The identity, the vocation, and the destiny here revealed to him are those of the art77


ist. They demand a dedication as absolute as that of the priest—directed, however, not to the sacred and infinite, but to that sensual reality which is the artist’s sole material. Now all that remains for Stephen to do is to free himself in actuality, work out the theology of his devotion, and after that, well, everything—with no flinching or excuses. It will be lucky for him that he has had at least this one moment of undiminished exultation. I chose color for my illustration because, though it is much more elaborate than I have managed to indicate, it is the simplest continuing imagery in the book and because it is resolved. Other images convey more and are harder to follow, especially those based on abstract concepts like sphericity, extension, or systole and diastole (whether as the ebb and flow of tides, or the lengthening and shortening of lines in the solution of an algebraic problem, or a reaching out to infinity and a swift instinctive recurrence to self). Nearly as difficult are pair-words like “difference” and “indifference,” or the notion of the “bounding line,” or what seems mere natural description like the falling of rain or light, or the smell of turf smoke, or mist and vapors rising, or, in every instance, the moon. The very aesthetic that Stephen outlines to his sounding board, Lynch of the withered soul, employs a vocabulary already saturated with meaning from repeated use. When he says The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails, we may note that fingernails have been pared before—and will be pared again, as in Ulysses, where Bloom looks out of the funeral coach, sees his wife’s seducer, and looks at his own nails to see if they are pared, which they are. This way of writing—I suppose we shall have to call it symbolism, though the word has been beaten shapeless—is, I believe, Joyce’s natural and most central method. It antedates the Portrait. There are hints of it in the first story in Dubliners; and in the last,“The Dead,” where the ubiquitous Mr. Browne is Death himself, it has already become systematic. At the same time, symbolism is never Joyce’s sole method; it is always employed in conjunction with means which, though they receive reinforcement from it, are themselves self-sustaining. Thus the Portrait functions well enough simply as a naturalistic novel. It was meant to. The book has several levels, each with a workable meaning of its own; and yet, since the containing form is the same for all levels, each meaning necessarily relates to the one overall statement.The irony that we remarked before depends on this. In the final chapter we have Stephen theorizing a little too positively about what he has not yet actually tried. 78


This is his priggishness which, if honesty is to be complete, is inescapably part of the statement too. Proudly Stephen declares what qualities—fortitude, discipline, detachment—characterize the true, and the very rare, artist. The novel, telling his story so intricately and simply, is the proof of those qualities.And the proof itself is a measure of how far Stephen has yet to travel, through how much discouragement and pain, before he can practice what he so confidently preaches. Again let us remember that this is not Stephen’s self-portrait. When the book is written Stephen no longer exists. Still, does even this achievement justify so much complexity? Or as the question is more usually put, has Joyce the right to demand so much of the reader? The answer, I think, is that he demands no more than the serious artist normally expects is due his work. All that he wrote can be validly appreciated as what it outwardly appears to be, because it is what it outwardly appears, as well as much else. His short stories, his play, his novels are all true specimens. As a matter of fact, he was aggrieved that readers, probing worriedly for deeper significances, should so consistently miss what lay on the surface. He pointed out in exasperation that Ulysses was, after all, a funny book. It is indeed. And if the reader gets the symbolic meanings but misses the fun, he has missed a good third of what the author was at pains to provide. Again, if the reader exploits the symbolism only for its meaning and fails to grasp its structural function, he has missed the deepest pleasure of all, the apprehension of pure form purely realized. Not that such form is always achieved. The Portrait is Joyce’s one perfected work, evenly sustained and controlled from end to end by a talent in calm dominion over its theme, its instruments, and itself.The books that followed were quite different. Joyce saw no point in doing the same job twice. In Ulysses he attempted much more, succeeded with more, and, I feel, produced a book spotted with failure. Finnegans Wake, in which he tried to encompass nearly all that he considered humanly applicable reality, succeeded almost beyond imagination and failed frequently and flatly. In neither case is the success contradicted by the failure which it outweighs quantitatively and morally—not to mention that the success could not be, and was not, predictable, being wholly novel. The quantity and novelty of Joyce’s achievement are obvious. Its moral quality is not so readily agreed on. Critics in a surprising variety have spoken as if the indifference Joyce enjoins upon the artist continues, with him, into a callous indifferentism toward all moral value. Some of his warmest admirers have sadly admitted his gamin irresponsibility and have sought cause or extenuation for it in the unideal circumstances of his life. A more frequent charge is “emptiness of content.” 79


If an artist is to be judged by the positiveness of his advice on politics, quotidian morality, education, or what have you, Joyce does not rank very high.There is, however, the possibility that his silence on these matters may have been due to modesty. As an artist he was anything but modest—he simply regarded himself as the best of the age—but I see little in his work to indicate that he felt that the gift of expression carried with it the duty to express quotable judgments on what he knew no more about than the next man. And there are times, as when I read Yeats on government or Shaw on child-rearing, when I think Joyce’s reticence is rather commendable. Often, though, it is a painful reticence. He was past master of the confessorial technique that confesses nothing because it blabs too much. He could rarely permit himself to write simply from the heart, though when he did—as in the ending of Finnegans Wake or in the poem “Ecce Puer,” on his father’s death and his grandson’s birth—a most poignant power was released. Such passages give the lie to his usual affectation of wearing his heart up his sleeve. Why, then, the affectation? Partly, perhaps, because his artistic discipline was primarily late-nineteenth century, art for art’s sake, absolute subordination of subject to form, and because his subject was usually his own, often bitterly unhappy experience.What impelled him, I think, to choose and continue such a discipline was not just his artistic proclivities or the fact that he grew up in a cultural province where that view of art and the artist was still high fashion, but rather that he had a very Irish nature (counter to another Irish nature) that instinctively chose mockery if the alternative was tears. It is useless to observe that tears might often have been better for his health or that there are many places in his work where open emotion could have been admitted without loss of integrity. He was what he was. He hated what he called the “whine” in Irish poetry. When he noticed the impulsive tear and smile mingled in Ireland’s eye his instinct was to give it a rough wipe. He did his best to keep his own eye dry in public. If he sometimes succeeded all too well, that was only what he intended. We must be careful not to confuse that innate stoicism with despair. He is not a comforting writer. He seems to have viewed life as a sort of epic drama composed of details almost indifferently tragic and farcical and acted by involuntary comedians, of whom he was himself one. If so, he could stand it and, when opportunity offered, enjoy it.There is one condition that holds true in art as in politics: you can’t ask favors from a man who wants none for himself. When Yeats declared in the Irish Senate that Joyce had “an heroic mind,” he made an understanding estimate. Joyce’s heroism was partly this toughness and partly that his mind drove continually beyond itself in an everwidening effort to define, through appropriate means, its own perceptions. 80


The nature of those perceptions can be seen clearly in the Portrait: secret relationships, impalpable yet vitally communicative, sensed as existing between man and man, age and age, world and man, and, of course, between word and word. Most of them could be expressed only indirectly through symbol for they are very curious relationships. Few are obvious. A lot of them would never occur to the reader independently; and after Joyce has pointed them out they still don’t occur. Some, like the endless punning upon mere sound in Finnegans Wake, can only be judged trivial and compulsive. Yet, time and again, just as the mind is about to turn away from some dull obscurity, one discovers that the artist has turned the trick, the commonest clay of experience made magically luminous with fresh meaning and oldest sympathy. And suddenly all the individual strands of technique and attitude subsumed in Joyce’s approach to his subject are seen moving together like muscles working under the skin, and the impact is multiple and one. We perceive what the adjective “organic” is supposed to indicate in a work of art. His failure is heroic too, a tremendous try that doesn’t come off. There is no mistaking it when it happens. Often enough when his skill fails, his taste fails with it, as in those god-awful gooey embarrassing soliloquies of the girl Isobel in Finnegans Wake or, again in the Wake, in long, long passages where ingenuity, mistaking itself for humor, produces the most intricate tedium achieved by non-Marxist man. But, turn the page, and you are back in the midst of magic and delight. Many a grave writer who never loses control cannot promise you that. To reveal the wonders of the great deep involves the risk of going overboard. Stop in them where one will, subtract from them what one will, by any measure Joyce’s works are those of a very big writer. Even the most narcissistic youth looking into the Portrait as his own must realize at last that the mirror owes something to its maker.Yet I discover that it can be long before one realizes whence Joyce’s bigness derives. The source is indicated in his recently published letters. For the most part these annotate what his formal writings have amply documented: his courage, independence, humor, honor, and his curiousness, for he was a very curious man. They also demonstrate, for the first time fully, how deeply seated was his possession of his virtues.The proof is in the letters he wrote to his only daughter when she was sinking into insanity, letters so compounded of easy fun and mortal agony and iron control that only the fun shows. Let any of us try that on for size. He was, it seems, a big man too.

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Part Two Post-Renaissance Irish Writing

Post-Renaissance Irish Writing

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Irish Literature Today [1945]

6 Irish Literature Today [1945]

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ow that Yeats is dead six years and AE nine, we can perhaps turn to Irish literature for an appraisal of its post-Revolutionary phase.Those two men, already grown to fame before the Revolution, so dominated the scene after it that all the younger men were obscured by them, and new work which was full of ability was made to seem trivial and immature in comparison with theirs. One cannot say they led the new generation; the difference of intent between their poetic fantasy and the younger men’s prose realism was too wide for that; they did, by their presence, by their founder’s authority, hinder the rise of new leaders. Yeats and AE were the grand old men of Irish literature; its pioneers, as no one else is likely ever to be. As they had had no serious competitors when young, so when old they had the preponderance of fame and experience on their side. An O’Flaherty or an O’Faolain might gain much by the work they had already accomplished; he could never have the naked freedom they had enjoyed.There can be many generations of explorers and many of settlers: there is only one of pioneers; and Irish literature is now a settled region. It is time to see how the settlers are making out. The latest reports are bad. Indeed it has been a long while since there has been a cheerful one. Sean O’Faolain, the most important Irish author living in Ireland, ended one of his editorials in the Bell with these words: The picture is tragic, but we must paint what we see. Yeats, Moore, Joyce, Shan Bullock, MacKenna, Gregory, AE, Higgins have all gone. No young men are appearing. If our leaders of opinion do not act quickly Irish literature will virtually cease to exist within ten years. First published in the Atlantic 175.3 (March 1945): 70–76.

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And Frank O’Connor, writing in Horizon on “The Future of Irish Literature,” confessed that he was unable to see any future for it. Theoretically, of course, it is possible for a writer to live in a country where his books are banned, where there are no magazines to print his work, where all power is in the hands of a fanatical and corrupt middle-class, and never, never emerge from his ivory tower. But like Whitman when he saw the oak tree growing alone, “I know I could not do it.” Such pessimism coming from these two men cannot be shrugged off. O’Faolain is one of the few Irish writers who have deliberately chosen to stay and fight it out in Ireland, though he might have found likelier rewards in almost any other direction. O’Connor has fought hard against much pressure to keep a secure foothold in Irish life.They have then the right to speak. They have won it many times over. If Irish literature can be said to have leaders, they and the poet Austin Clarke are its leaders. Of course the objection can immediately be raised that there are other and more famous living Irish authors than these. There are, but not in Ireland.The names O’Faolain listed in the Bell editorial are those of Irish writers who have died in the last fifteen years. He might have added another list as impressive: the names of the writers who have left Ireland, apparently for good.We should then have Liam O’Flaherty, Sean O’Casey, James Stephens, Oliver St. John Gogarty, Padraic Colum, Denis Johnston, and, if you wish, Francis Stuart, who chose Berlin. Even of the first list, Joyce, MacKenna, and AE, died in voluntary exile. And Moore’s connection with Irish literature was too brief and indeterminate to establish him securely as an Irish author; he belongs rather with Shaw and Wilde, Irish literary adventurers in England.When we are discussing the literature of a country not ravaged by war, we must look first to the books written within the country. The international writers do not yet reproduce themselves. The first difficulty the student of current Irish literature encounters is lack of evidence. It is hard to make sound generalizations on scanty facts, and in a literature where the books come in single spies at longer and longer intervals it is very hard to name general tendencies, except the obvious tendency toward extinction. There is no longer a main stream of Irish literature.There are drops of it. As far as I can see, the output of good literary writing in the last three years, aside from the poems and stories appearing in the Bell and the Dublin Magazine, consisted of four volumes of biography, three of autobiography, two novels, two books of short stories, a few plays, a few slim books of verse, and a traveler’s sketchbook. Not much for three years; and actually the distribution dwindles sharply 86


toward the present.There need be no complaint of the quality of this writing. It was generally good—and in several cases excellent, as in O’Faolain’s Great O’Neill and O’Casey’s Pictures in the Hallway. But a certain indefinable minimum of quantity is required to create or preserve a literature. In the best days Irish literature ever saw, it was not far above that minimum. Today it is definitely below it. Five or six books a year are not enough, especially when the incidence of biography and reminiscence is so high. That incidence, however, is not simply, as one might guess, a symptom of waning energies and fading purpose. Rather it indicates the recognition of a new set of problems to which Irish artists must face up if their work is to keep its substance. And that substance is not so easy to come by as before. Certainly one of the reasons for the quick general success of the Celtic Revival was the richness of its resources. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, folklorists, Gaelic scholars, and translators had uncovered a rich mine of prefashioned material for literature: the Gaelic legends and cycles, the colorful half-mythical history of ancient Ireland, an abundance of poetry, and the peasant myths and folk tales that served as a living bridge to that remote world. All this the Revival exploited until artists and audiences alike were surfeited with fairyland. Then came the Revolution, with its own compelling romance and legend acted out in daily drama. And as the Revolution broke down into civil war in 1922 and 1923, rage and disappointment created new passion that burst into words in O’Flaherty’s novels and O’Casey’s plays; and post-Revolutionary disillusionment in Ireland found ready understanding in the disillusioned post-war world. Thus for forty years the Irish artist very seldom had to think of what to write about. He had only to reach out and take all he could use from the common stock. Today the situation is different. He writes of a diminished reality. His Ireland is a little country in the butter and beef business. And if he is to make his material interesting, he must study it and think about it a great deal and then sustain his interpretation of it with a durable style. It is no wonder that the number of Irish artists has fallen off so sharply or that so many of those left are historians. Pioneers are hell on resources. That is one reason for their concern with history, but not the only one. In so far as there is any large public for Irish literature it is a public with a decided taste for the romantic and the Celtic, however spurious.Twenty years ago Donn Byrne readily outsold O’Flaherty and O’Casey. Nowadays the only Irish author whom publishers would consider a success is Maurice Walsh, who spreads on his Celtic romance—impartially Scotch or Irish, ancient or modern—with a shovel. O’Faolain, on the other hand, main87


tains a moderate prosperity only by working tirelessly as editor, reviewer, critic, and literary news-gatherer, at the same time that he is turning out his important novels and biographies. The others we would link with him are not well-off. They are not, then, realists and students of history for profit.Their motives are artistic, their resolution, moral.They are trying to give Ireland a literature wholly expressive of itself as it is today, in the belief that good health begins with candid self-recognition. And because most of them cannot see in standard romanticized Irish history any living roots of the country they know, they are trying to discover the history that actually did produce the small familiar democracy. What they have found is, for most, not a long history. It begins in the dark chaos of the eighteenth century and traces, for a century and a half, the rise of the people toward a share in what the world presently offers of political and economic freedom. If they look farther back than that, they see only the crumbling façade of the Gaelic order and the dispersal of the Gaelic nobles. Then, or before that collapse, there is no sign of the Irish people. Gaeldom was an order for aristocrats. The Gaelic bards would never sully their verse with a mention of the plebeians. Bardic literature has no fabliaux, no Langland, no Chaucer, nothing for the popular taste. And since about all that the average Irishman can know of his average ancestors under Gaeldom is that he must have had them, the democratically minded realists cannot work up a very passionate interest in their hypothetical doings. Rather they are convinced that their true creators are those very modern men like Tone and O’Connell, who gave them revolution as a weapon and modernity for a prize. For the rest the story is explicitly human, and humanly simple and involved. Nothing in it is of much importance unless it happens to many people. The victories are neither sudden nor often romantic—land acts, county council bills, extensions of franchise, increasing prosperity, and finally political independence.The tragedies are collective— the Potato Famine, the evictions, the loss or defection of leaders setting the movement back by a decade, the drain of emigration, civil war. Even such a tragedy as Parnell’s is the act and despair of the whole people, for he was downed by a momentum he could lead but not retard, and the mob that passed over his body wept bitterly for him. This is history conceived within a range that would have seemed meaninglessly narrow to the previous generation of writers. It lacks the supernatural. Its great dimension is width, the limit of its height is human stature, its heroes are inescapably mortal. Indeed Yeats did convict it of monotony and fragmentariness, saying that now we know the world “through abstractions, statistics, time tables, through images that refuse to compose themselves into 88


a clear design.”“A nation,” he said,“should be like an audience in some great theatre . . . watching the sacred drama of its own history; every spectator finding self and neighbour there, finding all the world there as we find the sun in the bright spot under the burning glass.” But the truth is that the clear design has not yet been composed. The drama is not complete, has indeed hardly reached a climax. For to win land and freedom does not mean to win all that goes with land and freedom.This march of a people was too swift to be elaborate.They had to concentrate on getting the big things first: the fundamentals of economic, political, and cultural freedom. Till after the Revolution they had little time for the details. When they were not fighting actively for something, they had to bend every last energy to the work of consolidating what had been gained last. Only recently have they won that peace and stability in which the subtler manifestations of a culture can grow. Until Irish society is complete, the drabness of life in a restricted, semi-rural country without large ambitions is the inescapable observation from which Irish realism must begin. Meanwhile, one should remember that whatever fuller synthesis will come in the future will depend no little bit on the ability and integrity of the Irish artists. In this interim of history, however, all his laudable integrity eases the Irish realist’s path not at all. It was easy to reveal the Irish to themselves as saints, warriors, and the sons of kings, as the Young Irelanders did; or as godlike poets and dreamers, as the Celtic Revival writers did—and make them like it. It is not so easy to draw them as rebellious peasants, brave but muddleheaded conspirators, and small-town burgesses—and make them like that, too.Then when one cites the justifying facts, the proof is commonly taken as a worse insult than the picture. Still, the greater difficulty is for the realist to satisfy himself. He is an Irishman and an artist and needs richness and color, passion and release, as much as any romantic who ever lived. To be barred from them by his own determination to “see the facts and understand the picture” is no comfort. The self-censorship hurts as much as the official one. And in faithfully drawing a paltry truth one often gets, with much effort, a paltry result. It is not the mere crabbedness of his material that hurts—in other countries realists have successfully conquered worse: it is its narrowness and poverty, uncomplemented by any opposing wealth.Yeats and Synge could go out among the cottages or wander on the roads to learn what the people had to say and then return to Coole Park, Lady Gregory’s manor house, to write. The present generation has no Coole Park. The big houses went in the Revolution, aristocratic Anglo-Irish drowned out by the floodtide of Irish democracy; and no native aristocracy has yet risen to replace them.“That,” says O’Faolain, 89


is our loss . . . It means that for many Irish writers life exists on a small number of planes and their stories are lighted only from a few angles . . . Regionalism is all very well when, as with Hardy or the Russians, it does not delimit one by a narrow circumference of values.When it does, it is in grave danger of making one’s work pure parish-pump. For it is . . . the consciousness of the existence of many modes of life, and some intimacy with them [that] heightens the treatment of any one mode of life, gives the sense of echo, reverberations wider than the scene displayed, as well as more color and more variety in a writer’s work taken as a whole. It is not only the lack of an O’Tolstoy that stands in the way of an Irish War and Peace. Yet these inherent difficulties, however severe, can be accepted in the spirit of Yeats’s recognition that “only the greatest obstacle that can be contemplated without despair, rouses the will to full intensity.” The realist’s selfdiscipline, the poverty of his material, are tests of his courage and imagination. If he meets them successfully, his work will be the better for it, hardened and refined by stiffer opposition than any critic can raise. The external difficulties, best represented by the literary censorship, have no such positive use. They are negative obstacles put up between the artist and his audience, not between the artist and his work, and for the present can be passed only if he subordinates his judgment to a pettifogging morality he despises.The censorship has had no effect on the character of Irish literature. Every Irish author of any standing is represented on the list of banned books; none has tried to placate the censors. If the censorship were lifted tomorrow, the only immediate results would be that much energy now wasted in fighting its stupidity could be applied to better purposes, and the Irish people would have a better chance to read what has been written particularly for them. Perhaps, too, the artist would be cheered by knowing that he was no longer regarded officially as a dangerous underworld type, to be spied on and harried for the public safety. For it is plain by now that the censor’s hand falls most heavily, not on the purveyor of obscenity, but on the non-conforming writer. He is indeed outlawed. The action against his book is taken in secret. He has no appeal from the decision of the Board. He cannot expect the justice of a speedy trial, for his book may be banned as soon as it appears, or not till after the important first three or four months. Often books have been on the market eight or ten years before they excited the censors’ horror. (A recent 90


example is that of E. L.Voynich’s The Gadfly, which got the axe after it had passed its fiftieth birthday.) But most maddening of all is his knowledge that the very law under which he is penalized has been openly perverted by the censors themselves. They have accepted the authority it bestows.They have consistently ignored its reservations.Thus it is not at all surprising that the Irish writers demand, as an alternative to the removal of the censorship, the strict enforcement of the Censorship of Publications Act of 1928. This was proposed, as one may discover from the Irish Parliamentary Debates for 1928–29, with many assurances of its limited nature. All the safeguards, the checks and balances, contained in it were harped on by its advocates. They pointed out that a book could be banned only if it was “in its general tendency indecent or obscene,” or if it advocated unnatural methods of birth control, and that in any case, the censors would be required to take into consideration the “literary or artistic merit of the work taken as a whole.” Since the Act went into effect, about fifteen hundred books have been proscribed, including just about every Irish novel worth reading. This rather wholesale activity of the Board—for beside the hundred books banned on a yearly average, the censors most likely consider some others they do not ban—has given rise to two popular beliefs. First, that the censors have taken to reading only the marked passages in the books sent to them, thus slighting the last-named safeguard. And second, that, as sometimes happens with men of conscious virtue when vested with public power, they have assumed a certain broad franchise over what they consider a too narrow law. That this second belief has some foundation a couple of quotations from a Senate debate on the censorship, in the fall of 1942, may indicate. In the midst of a tortuous speech, Professor Magennis, the chairman of the Board, suddenly became quite frank. The book in question, he said, was not condemned as indecent . . . It was banned for indecency within the meaning of the Act—a very important difference . . . As I was saying, if we disapprove of the sale and distribution of a book, the mode in which we convey that disapproval to the Minister, and ask the Minister to prohibit the sale and distribution of that book, is to report: “In its general tendency indecent.” A technicality! This is a revelation that must give great comfort to many an injured author. Privately, he can now understand, the censors consider him only a technical, not an actual, pornographer. But the Minister for Justice was not so soft as Professor Magennis. Bluff and hearty, he stood to his guns. Asked by a Senator what the law of the 91


state had to say about the safe period with regard to birth control, the Minister replied: I am not prepared to go into the Law of the State, but I repeat that I take full responsibility for the banning of this book.Whether the Board was technically and legally correct, whether the book in its general tendency was indecent or obscene, may be open to question, but on the ground that it was calculated to do untold harm I was perfectly satisfied it should be banned. Such self-assured, self-righteous extralegality on the part of public officials defending their administration of a law is certainly absurd. One might laugh at it as one laughs at some of the Board’s more overt blunders: the banning of Shaw’s Black Girl in Her Search for God, not for its controversial text—that would be illiberal—but for its illustrations; the banning of Kate O’Brien’s Land of Spices for one brief mention of possible homosexuality in one of the minor characters, though the book, a story of a young girl’s discovery of her religious vocation and of her later life in a convent, had been warmly reviewed in every English and American Catholic paper; the banning of Laws of Life, a manual of sex instruction for Catholics, which was found, too late, to have received the permissu superiorum of the Westminster Diocesan Council. But in the end the results are not funny. An author’s reputation and property are attacked without his being allowed any legal defense. He is smothered by a “gentlemen’s agreement” to which neither he nor his readers have agreed. The law has at last been subverted to the level of personal prejudice, with effects that are to be noted in the rampant activity of every smuthound and self-appointed censor in Ireland.The pharisaical motive behind it all is obvious—the more rigorous suppression of criticism than of vice. The artist’s protest against the whole stupid business has best been registered by O’Faolain: We believe that any unnecessary interference with the public will is not merely a tyranny but a folly. It removes responsibility from the hands of the community before the community has had any adequate opportunity to exercise its own quiet methods of control. It thereby pre-empts the activity of a healthy public opinion, and prevents that public opinion from (so to speak) growing by exercise. It kills the national conscience by giving it no scope to take or leave, to praise or condemn, to exercise its will or exercise its wisdom. By depriving morality of its freedom it reduces it to a machine without virtue. O’Faolain should know. For his fifteen years’ activity in the cause of a 92


healthy Irish public opinion he has received the censors’ accolade more than once, while his efforts have never been sustained by any corresponding measure of public support. He can have no pretty illusions about his relation to the community. In Ireland the artist and independent thinker must stand alone, comforted by no popular sympathy and understanding, drawing steadily on his own unincremented morale. He cannot appeal to the Irish ruling class, the pious Nationalists the Revolution put into power, for even before the Revolution Padraic Pearse recognized and described their peculiar bigotry— ”they challenge a great tyranny, but they erect their little tyrannies. ‘Thou shalt not’ is half the law of Ireland, and the other half is ‘Thou must.’” As for an appeal to the people, any Irish author knows too well that if the Irish people cared a damn about the censorship, it would stop. Yet for all these obstructions which Irish artists must consider—and perhaps the worst is this public apathy and distrust—the quality of actual performance is encouragingly high. Significantly, though, it is highest in the smaller forms: the short story and realistic comedy, and in poetry, the lyric and semi-ballad. There is no grandly successful Irish novel. Since O’Casey’s withdrawal the drama has been healthy and humorous—it is still uncensored—but pedestrian, with the two notable exceptions of Denis Johnston’s The Moon in the Yellow River and Paul Vincent Carroll’s Shadow and Substance. The death of F. R. Higgins, following so closely the death of Yeats, suddenly revealed the scarcity of poets in a country where poets had been as plentiful as journalists are elsewhere. And those who are left do not coalesce into a school. Their poems appear individually, with little reference to each other; and the absence of interplay and mutual criticism threatens a return of that provincial idiosyncrasy that plagued Irish poetry before Yeats taught it collaboration. Yet the bigger victories have not been lost by default. The three best recent Irish novels all attempt the composition of some such clear design as Yeats demanded, some bright focus of history, and their failure makes one suspect that the design is simply not there to be revealed. History seems to have delayed giving a verdict on which the artist can comment. Take, for example, the most forceful of these novels, O’Flaherty’s Famine. When it appeared, O’Faolain called it “Biblical.” “It is,” he wrote, the Irish “Exodus” in which there is no Moses to lead out the people of Israel, the starving Irish millions of the black forties to whom a moonstruck O’Connell was no help. It is characteristic of O’Flaherty that in Famine he lifts his theme out of the rut of despair by combining two of his best qualities—his power of describing natural phenomena, and his love for a big central figure to typify the things he hates or (as in this book) admires. 93


But does O’Flaherty succeed in lifting his theme out of the rut of despair? For an Irish reader perhaps, yes. He unconsciously adds the historical sequel and understands all that O’Flaherty intends to signify with his dimly drawn Young Irelanders and the escape of his central characters to America.The non-Irish reader does not have that outlet. Or even if he does know enough Irish history to add the historical sequel, his emotions are not engaged by what is not in the book. O’Flaherty put all his vigor into the writing of Famine, uniting for the first time the furious speed and brutality of his other novels and the loving sensitivity of his short stories, but he is so moved by the suffering of his own people that he too often lets a brief indication support what an explanation should carry. One feels that he wrote this book as an Irishman reads it, who grinds his teeth and curses and sweats and swears his way through it, supplying out of his own partisanship the conflict that hunger drowned out in the victims. Other readers cannot do that. To them this is not the Famine, but a famine. And they are oppressed and finally bored by the huge impersonality of the disaster. For O’Flaherty has succeeded almost too well in conveying the sense of doom—first as the threat, then as the terror of impact when the blight rots the potato stalks in the fields, and finally when the blight comes again in the second year and the people can only stand by dumbly and watch their food turn into a stinking pulp. To survive for the first year they have used up all their possible resources. Now, whether they stand together or alone, they can do nothing but wait for death or for an unfriendly government to save them. That O’Flaherty’s big central figure, Mary, does escape the holocaust— and with her, her husband and baby—and that they escape through the aid of an embryonic revolutionary group, no longer has the forceful significance the author intended. The courage and stubborn hope and endurance with which O’Flaherty endowed her diminish to merely individual importance against that endless background of death. And the other characters, all powerfully drawn, share the diminution proportionately. We begin to see what Yeats meant when he said that “passive suffering is not a theme for poetry.” The people, strongly alive at first, frantically alive later, at last become quiet and inarticulate as death comes near around them. In that dumbness the book ends. Even Mary and Martin escaping in the boat to America cannot talk of what they have left behind them.Their youth, their way of life, their people are dead behind them. In the few determined conspiring men without names who rescued them is the seed of the future: long relentless revolution against English control. But that seed is still hidden. Unless one knows the story of its growth, there is no purgation for the pity and terror O’Flaherty has so brilliantly 94


aroused. He has added a great deal to national art. He has failed of universality. The tragedy is universal. But escape to America, though historically authentic, is so singular as to seem the irrelevant work of a deus ex machina. For its own purposes, art must refine history to a clearer metal, as it refines everything else it uses. The other two novels—Sean O’Faolain’s Come Back to Erin and Frank O’Connor’s Dutch Interior—fail of greatness less grandly. For one thing, they have no such tremendous theme. For a second, neither history nor their own experience gives the authors an answer to the problem they attack— ”the problem of finding within the simplicity of the Irish world a way of life that does justice to the whole man.” O’Flaherty suffered as he wrote of the “great hunger,” but he suffered as a spectator. The evils O’Connor and O’Faolain describe are daily irritations: pious hypocrisy in the middle class, apathy among the people, puritanism in the Catholic clergy, nationalism gone sour from too long standing, and the stingy, shoddy willingness to get everything as cheap as the most cockeyed practicality will allow. In the environment they picture, isolation is the primary fact of life for every sensitive, open-spirited man.The politicians and puritans would isolate the whole country from the contagion of the venal, un-Irish world. The man finds himself alone in a little world of indifference and suspicion, where the difficulty of communication is heart-breaking. There is plenty of talk—but talk on terms: to be serious is to put yourself in danger of something’s being “got on” you. So you are witty. One can’t pin down wit. It is a grand defense. And behind the defense, or in front of it, loneliness grows by disappointment after disappointment until self-corrosion begins to tarnish each fresh personality.That provincial environment is anemically poor in developed personalities. It is rich in the number and variety of its “characters.” And, says Peter Devane, the secondary figure in Dutch Interior, “character is personality gone to seed . . . when ’tis all shaped and limited by circumstances and there isn’t a kick left in it . . . That’s what I am, mister—a character!” Yet for these men, too, there is the deus ex machina—the boat to America. And Frankie Hannafey, O’Faolain’s rebel hero, and Gus Devane, Peter’s much loved younger brother, take it, for America is still escape and nourishment and the promise of all that necessary richness Ireland does not afford. But America is not the answer now any more than it ever was. The Irishman must manage to survive in Ireland; all the wealth of the world will not make the transplanted man a whole man; he must grow from his own roots in his own country. So Gus and Frankie return, hungry for Ireland and its sweet peculiar flavor that outlasts the taste of disappointment and betrayal. 95


If only then the homecoming were met with an understanding as generous as the love that inspired it, there would be a resolution of the discord, for all that it would be on a minor key. But they return looking for the lovely Ireland time has distilled from memory and are overwhelmed on the spot by all the old frustration, all the cynical indifference from which they fled. Gus fights it for a while, hoping and half believing that his own enthusiasm will somehow break down the defenses and release the lively energy he knows exists; and it is only a final smashing betrayal that sends him flying again. Frankie stays—but for what? He fled as a hardened hungry rebel, a weapon of a man, whetted to a narrow blade by years on his keeping. In America, safe from the tension of the hunt, he drops his defenses bit by bit, tastes with a distrustful tongue of the gentler pleasures—poetry, music, the theater, unconstrained talk—and suddenly realizing the fact of his dependent humanity, lets go every restraint and wallows innocently in his soul’s food. But there is tawdriness as well as innocence in that abandon.The Kingdom of Heaven does not belong to big babies. And when he advances, half against his will, to the arms of his brother’s wife, freedom turns to cheapness—a particular kind of cheapness Irish poverty still does not allow. The fault, to be sure, is as much Ireland’s as his own. One cannot learn sure, selfreliant manhood in a country whose leaders try to keep it a kindergarten for the Children of Mary. But the damage is done.When he, too, returns to Ireland it is as neither rebel nor enthusiast, but only as a ruefully good-natured man who has no confidence of the right direction for himself or his country, a man who has discovered his humanity but lost his purpose. One more of too many. There is a great deal more to both books than I have accounted for: much insight, much humane knowledge, and, in most of O’Faolain’s novel and all of O’Connor’s, very adequate, beautiful writing. But their failure and the reasons for it are obvious enough. Dutch Interior is even more of a closed circuit than Famine; and like Famine it closes upon death by starvation, none the less bitter because it afflicts the heart instead of the belly. Come Back to Erin starts off with a firmly drawn picture of Ireland, progresses through an America described with a sympathetic objectivity amazing to find in a European novel, and, returning to Ireland, disperses rather than ends. It is almost as if O’Faolain had answered the reader’s “Well?” with a despairing “Well, what the hell?” But, if he does, his despair is not the despair of inanition. If these men have not solved the problem, they have given a full courageous statement of it. It should be understood to their credit that they have elected to fight where they stand, refusing the two routes of escape taken by most—emigration 96


or a return to the fairyland of the past. Like the man in O’Connor’s story “Uprooted,” they know that neither man nor nation can live on pap, no matter who proffers it.To go back to the cradle is to lie there a changeling. . . . he went into the kitchen. His mother, the coloured shawl about her head, was blowing the fire. The bedroom door was open and he could see his father in shirt sleeves kneeling beside the bed, his face raised reverently towards a holy picture, his braces hanging down behind. He unbolted the half-door, went through the garden and out on the road.There was a magical light on everything. A boy on a horse rose suddenly against the sky, a startling picture. Through the apple green light over Carriganassa ran long streaks of crimson, so still they might have been enamelled. Magic, magic, magic; he saw it as in a children’s picture book with all its colours intolerably bright; something he had outgrown and which he could never return to, while the world toward which he aspired was as remote and intangible as it had seemed in the despair of youth. It seemed as if only now, for the first time, was he leaving home, for the first time and forever, saying good-bye to it all. It may be that what O’Faolain fears, will happen—that within a few years Irish literature will disappear for lack of support and lack of substance, leaving unsolved the vital questions it has raised. I do not believe it will.The poverty, timidity, conservatism, and selfish defensiveness these writers have attacked are the defects of uncertain youth, not of niggardly old age.The young must at last go out into the world as thousands have gone before them—to find that, insensibly, experience brings courage, and courage manhood.And in the new home man builds then from his own resources, he finds the familiar magic he said good-bye to in the old. It is the artist’s unexpected reward.

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7 Ireland That Was

I

t was in Dublin, in 1946, that I had my first taste of literary recognition. I was walking down Grafton Street one afternoon when I came on Frank O’Connor standing on the curb in front of Bewley’s Oriental Cafe, talking with a severe-looking man who had his arms folded high on his chest. O’Connor called me over and introduced us.“Mr. Kelleher. Mr. Kavanagh.” Kavanagh looked at me without approval. “Kelleher. Hadn’t you an article in the Atlantic Monthly on Irish Literature?”1 I admitted I had. His look grew bleaker. “That,” he informed me, “was the worst article I ever read in my life.” “Now, now, don’t mind Paddy,” said O’Connor, soothingly. “What he means is that you didn’t say in it that all Irish poets were good-for-nothing hoors except Paddy Kavanagh.” Kavanagh dismissed the suggestion. “It wasn’t that at all. It was just that your article was full of untruths and insincerities. And I can’t stand untruths and insincerities.” Then he looked at me again and apparently decided that his remarks might be construed as ungracious, for he offered a form of amends. “Sure, what could you know about it anyway?” So there we were, till somehow the frieze dissolved: Kavanagh, with his head back and his arms still folded, staring sternly at a distant cornice; O’Connor glancing from one to the other of us with mingled embarrassment and amusement; and I, looking nowhere in particular, aware that now I could never tell Kavanagh how, when I was a sophomore, I had instantly memorized the first two poems of his that I discovered in the Dublin MagaFirst published in the New Republic 178 (February 18, 1978): 25–28.

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zine. That would surely strike him as another insincerity, if not indeed an untruth quickly manufactured for placation. Of course, I was much younger then and didn’t yet know that poets, even stern ones from south Ulster, seldom look gift praises in the teeth. His question, though, was more to the point than he perhaps realized. I had already offered a course on modern Irish literature a couple of times at Harvard. It was well arranged, for I had had good literature courses in college and knew just how to go about making one of my own. What you did was determine how the literature had begun and then show how it had developed, how, that is, the later writers derived from the earlier ones. If I may say so, the course was neat, logical, and persuasive. I have never had so satisfactory a one since. The writers whom I met in Ireland asked me about the course, listened with interest, and seemed generally to agree that it made sense. About the other writers, that is. For themselves, they hadn’t read the seminal books I had divined for them or had read them but disliked them or didn’t feel that they were seminal. If they told me what writers had influenced them, it turned out that scarcely any were Irish. O’Connor talked of Chekhov and Babel. Sean O’Faolain spoke of his early fascination with Hardy. I cycled out to Templeogue one rainy evening to visit Austin Clarke and sat in his library savoring my ignorance while he talked slowly about his debt to Paul Fort’s “submerged rhyme” and about looking to the Belgians—he mentioned Rodenbach and Verhaeren—because their problems were so much like those the Irish writers faced: writing about a small, divided, largely Catholic country in the language of a large neighboring country, and with success or failure decided in a foreign capital. On one matter all the writers were agreed—and God knows there weren’t many such matters—that I should understand and appreciate the importance of AE (George William Russell), whose name, by the way, was still automatically linked with Yeats’s in those days. AE was the one who had sought them out, talked with them, published them in the Irish Statesman, and helped them to get their books published. As for Yeats, only O’Connor had been intimate with him. The others agreed that it had been good to know that the literature possessed such a giant but that he had shown little interest in the younger men and had not been helpful. Clarke indeed maintained that for other Irish poetsYeats had been like a upas tree:“In his shadow it was so hard for us to grow.” I found it accepted too that no Irish writer could afford to show any strong influence of Yeats, Synge, or Joyce. To do so would be to forfeit all individuality. So there went the course. O’Connor needn’t have worried about my feeling miffed at Kavanagh. I was already thinking along those lines myself. 99


Richard Ellmann and I had come to Dublin together in March. For me it was the first return to Ireland since my grandmother had left in 1870. Dick had been there the year before, on leave from London, and had met Mrs.Yeats and a number of other people.The first day, when we had checked into the Shelbourne and I was still struggling with the conflict between what I had been seeing and the Dublin I had put together in my head from maps, photographs, and Ulysses, Dick showed his superior competence by making a phone call. Presently a slim man with a mustache, a bowler, an umbrella, and a dark overcoat appeared, sat on the edge of the bed, spoke rapidly for ten minutes, and left us with an invitation to dinner at his house that evening. That was Niall Montgomery. And that was how Ireland began opening up for me. Niall was an architect and almost secretively a man of letters. His father, Jimmy Montgomery, had been the last of the great Dublin wits. Lesser wits still helped themselves liberally to his sayings, one of the most quoted of which was his description of Lord Longford at the Gate Theatre, “the fat in the foyer.” Niall was (is) also widely admired for his wit, his talents, and his sure integrity.The latter quality, I expect, as well as his being his father’s son, was what won him the close friendship of Jack Yeats, the painter, the poet’s brother, a man of old-fashioned integrity himself. Once Niall brought me to a Thursday at Yeats’s studio in Fitzwilliam Square. The studio was a long, high-ceilinged room, bright, airy, and very neat. There were half-a-dozen guests, one of whom, Lord M——, was already talking about his horses when we came and, from the slightly glazed looks of the rest, had already been talking about them for quite some time. Since the only horses of my acquaintance had been Percherons and artillery mustangs, I drifted away to look at the picture on the easel and then behind the easel to look out over the square. There was another man behind the easel, a thin, quiet-spoken man who seemed glad to meet another refugee. Somehow our talk got onto the American army. He had driven an ambulance for the Americans in France. After chatting pleasantly for about twenty minutes he said he had to go, and we shook hands, and he said his name was Samuel Beckett. I had read his Murphy and More Pricks Than Kicks but hadn’t been able to make anything of either, so I could only nod. We came out from behind the easel and listened to a bit more of the same horses. Then Beckett left. After a little we left. Niall was fuming, as I followed him down the stairs. “People say M—— has no sense of humor, but did you ever hear anyone give such a bloody good imitation of a stupid man!” Niall was a fountain of memorable remarks. His friend Brian O’Nolan, aliter Flann O’Brien, aliter Myles na gCopaleen, was brilliantly funny with 100

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his pen but, at least as I saw him, rather shy and laconic in company. I only remember one thing he said. We were sitting at the counter in the old Dolphin Hotel one night eating bacon and colcannon. At least Niall and I were. O’Nolan had his head on his arms and seemed asleep. Niall was setting me right about Ireland. “You’ve got to realize that this is nothing but a completely capitalist country.” O’Nolan lifted his head. “Roman Capitalist,” he said, and put it down again. (A note of historical interest. The Dolphin, I was told, was where Irish coffee had been invented.The proprietor, Michael Nugent, had concocted it during the war as a way of disguising the taste of what was then called coffee. In 1946 its chief merit was the interesting difficulty of floating the cream onto but not into the liquid.) Through Niall, too, I got to know Constantine P. Curran, lawyer, artcollector, expert on Dublin plasterwork, and later the author of James Joyce Remembered, one of the two best books on Joyce that have been written, the other being Dick Ellmann’s biography. Con had been a classmate of Joyce’s at the university and, though he had lent him money and helped him in various ways, had miraculously remained a friend all Joyce’s life. Though a most gentle and civilized man, he was also shrewd and independent and had never kowtowed when Joyce grew famous. I remember him saying,“Jim, you know, was always talking about how they had betrayed him and had driven him out of Ireland. But I said to him, ‘Jim, how could they drive you out when they didn’t even know you were there?’” He mused a bit. “As for betrayal, if you were going to betray Jim Joyce you would have to get up very early in the morning.” He spoke quite without spite or envy, for he liked Joyce and, what was rare in Dublin then, had a true appreciation of his achievement. Other people of the same generation could honestly find that difficult. One evening at Con’s house A Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses were being discussed.A friend of Con’s, a dark, handsome, serious man seemed quite puzzled, but suddenly his face lit up. “Oh, I know now who you’re talking about, Con. Joyce the crammer.” “No,” said Con, “Joyce the writer, the novelist.” “Usen’t he wear a big black hat?” “Yes, he had a wide-brimmed felt he brought back from Paris when he went there first, in 1902.” “Joyce the crammer. I remember him going down Wicklow Street with the hat on him. He had a room in the Commercial Buildings and he was offering to cram for the Civil Service examinations.” With that Con remembered that indeed Joyce had briefly tried that trade, though with poor success.The man sat back satisfied. He was oriented now. 101


A while later Con was arguing in his gentle way that only someone who had been born in Dublin in the early 1880s, had been raised mostly north of the Liffey, had gone to Belvedere and University College, and had known the Jesuits there could really appreciate the accuracy of detail in Ulysses. The man listened with rising impatience and broke in again. “Con, you’re talking nonsense! You’re talking about that Joyce as if he was a Dubliner. I know he was born here. But I knew that family. Sure, the father was a Corkman; the grandfather was a Corkman; they were all Corkmen.That explains a good deal.” He turned to me, “Mr. Kelleher, I can tell from your name that your people were from Cork too. But I hope you will pardon me if I tell you that a Corkman is a man who will smile in your face and pee in your lap!” Cork, I might explain, is the Texas of Ireland—the southernmost county, the largest, and considered the braggingest. In Dublin it was especially resented, for it was generally believed that at least half the Civil Service was made up of Corkmen, all of whom work night and day and by every devious means to bring in more Corkmen, to the wrongful exclusion of all others. Sometime later, when I told this story to another Dublin friend, he professed shock. “My God, what a thing to say to you! But of course it’s true, you know.” Ah, me! Thirty-two golden years ago. And now all is changed, changed utterly, and not altogether in the direction of beauty, terrible or otherwise. But I must not get sentimental.There was plenty wrong with Ireland at that time, and a lot of the people I knew and admired found the going hard. Besides, I always keep in mind what Sean O’Faolain said to admonish me, one time when he thought I was indulging in some romantic nostalgia.“Will you understand that the good old days are always right now?” He was quite right. They were.

Note 1. This is the essay “Irish Literature Today,” printed just previously in the present volume.—Ed.

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8 Sean O’Faolain

T

hat Sean O’Faolain is the most distinguished living Irish writer is a true statement, but uninformative. In a small and somewhat intermittent literature “most distinguished living writer” is apt to be as dubious a term of praise as “the family beauty”—which may mean much or may not. A better description is that given by a young Texan reporter who interviewed him recently in Houston: “Mr. O’Faolain is a tall, erect, handsome Irishman who wears two pairs of glasses.” He does not wear both at once, but he does characteristically look at things two ways: as a susceptible romantic and as a cold-eyed realist always inquiring after facts and causes.This brings up a third short description,“first man of letters in Ireland today,” as his publishers often refer to him on book jackets. He is eminently the man of letters—creative writer, essayist, critic, editor, biographer, pamphleteer, and literary journalist—and he is also the first Ireland has ever had, or the first to do the whole job. He undertook the work twenty-five years ago, uninvited and unencouraged, fully aware of what he was getting himself in for; and the only intelligible explanation for his action is that he was then, and is still, the most confirmed romantic born in Ireland this century. His first book, the collection of short stories called Midsummer Night Madness, came out in 1932. He was then thirty-two years old, had a wife and child, and was earning his living as an English teacher in a normal school outside London. Edward Garnett wrote the preface for the book, alternating between praise of O’Faolain and rage against Ireland, which, Garnett First published in the Atlantic 199.5 (May 1957): 67–69.

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growled, ranked somewhere below Bulgaria on the literary map of Europe. He knew; he was from Ireland himself.There on the one hand was the new Irish state, culturally a desert and apparently intent on even greater aridity. And here was yet another young Irish writer, of delicate talent, with the richest feeling for the Irish landscape in every mood and weather, a rebel, a scholar, a Gaelic speaker—who had to depend on the English to publish what he wrote so poignantly about a country that did not give a damn for his like. “How typical!” As if to corroborate something about the title of his book, O’Faolain thereupon decided to go back to Ireland. He had been away six years, three in England, three in America, where he had been a Commonwealth Fellow at Harvard and had taught for a term at Boston College. Meanwhile he had kept in close touch with his native land, especially through AE and Frank O’Connor, and he had no sentimental illusions about the cultural scene he was re-entering. He couldn’t have had. Between 1921, when he had graduated from University College, Cork, and 1926, when he had left for Harvard, his experience of post-Revolutionary Ireland had been, to say the least, intimate. He had been a publisher’s commercial traveler, with the south and west of Ireland for his territory, and had not shot himself. During the Civil War of 1922–23 he had taken the Republican side and had served successively as a bomb maker, a guerrilla, director of propaganda for an I.R.A. division, and finally, for a few weeks in Dublin, as acting director of publicity for the whole Republican movement. That was an unsettling experience. “For the first time I met our leaders, and I said to myself, ‘My God, is this what we’ve got!’” And again: Though I was then about as ignorant a young man as you could find in the length and breadth of Europe . . . I had gumption enough to see, that if what we all knew between us about society or politics, in any intellectual sense, were printed consecutively it would not cover a threepenny bit, and that all we ever said, or ever published, with hardly an exceptional article, was . . . propaganda without any guiding concept. In that year I woke up. He was always waking up, but at the time there was not much for him to wake up to. He taught for a while at a secondary school in Clare, till one morning a teacher with whom he roomed sat up in bed, rubbed his gray thatch, and said, “Well, Sean. Today I’ve been twenty-five years on the job. Think of that!” Sean thought of it and quit. He went back to Cork, took two M.A.’s, in Irish and English, edited a small political-literary weekly, walked and talked with Frank O’Connor, who was now county librarian, wrote incessantly, and finally escaped. 104

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There were a few changes to note when he returned to Ireland in 1933. De Valera had just led the Republicans into office, where they were to remain uninterruptedly for sixteen years, at first cheered hopefully by O’Faolain, later hammered by him. Intellectual tone was now being set by the literary censorship, established in 1928; and for a kindly welcome-home the censors banned Midsummer Night Madness. More to the point was that the one magazine that could have printed his work,AE’s Irish Statesman, had folded in 1930, with the simultaneous lapse of AE’s energies and his American backers’ money. Of course O’Faolain expected all this. He knew that he would have to write for English and American papers; and since he already had a reputation in London as that sort of editor’s delight who can be counted on for better work than he is paid for, he knew he could support himself. His earnings, though, would inevitably be slimmer and his fame smaller than what he might have gained had he stayed in London and not chosen to identify himself with the literature of a country that now seemed resolutely receding from the attention of mankind. The reason for his return was very simple. He had no choice. His romanticism was always the decisive element in his personality; it was fixated upon Ireland; and it translated itself emotionally and intellectually as patriotism, a concern for tradition, and the urge to express the unexpressed potentialities of his own people. The same, of course, would be true for any other Irish writer. Where O’Faolain differs is in the peculiarly exact balance of his personality. In his creative writing his romanticism almost always dictates his subject.At that point an equal and opposite force, his realistic intelligence, comes into play and proceeds to deal with what it would never have chosen of its own accord, so that the quality of his work is determined by this double intransigence of emotional awareness and questioning mind, which, because neither can surrender, must somehow be reconciled. The reconciliation is not an easy process.The stories that best illustrate it are very quietly written, but behind them lies a great deal of other, more turbulent, writing, historical, critical, and polemic, in which the principles that underlie his comment upon life and upon Ireland are tested and defined.Through this other writing, too, his exasperation is given healthy positive discharge. If he is one of the few Irish writers who have not suffered from the pip, it is because his nature impels him to get plenty of exercise. Abroad he interprets Ireland and defends her. At home he kicks her soundly and often where long experience tells him it will do her most good. For that the nearest vantage is obviously the best. Naturally enough a large portion of the work he has addressed directly to Ireland is unknown here and will remain unknown. From 1940 to 1946 he edited The Bell, a monthly dedicated to two radical principles: the need 105


to encourage Irish writers and the need to pay them. During the war years The Bell and the Saturday literary page of the Irish Times were the only means of publication and payment open to most of the writers; and O’Faolain was the only editor to whom the beginner could submit his manuscripts and look for advice. It would be pleasant to record that his efforts saved Irish literature. Unfortunately its state now is worse than it was then. But though O’Faolain published little else of his own during those years, he did produce piecemeal in his articles and editorials the fullest analytic description of contemporary Ireland, and of its strengths, faults, and derivations, ever given. More than anything else these writings, close in manner and approach to the best eighteenth-century pamphleteering, justify his title as first Irish man of letters.They are all forceful, witty, and thoroughly informed. Reading them, however, one can understand why the leaders of Irish life never felt any need for a man of letters in the first place. At least, not this kind. Whether or not his American readers ever see this side of his work, and it is most unlikely that they should, it has a direct influence on what they do see. He is fond of quoting Newman’s “It is the whole man that moves.” O’Faolain moves with sureness because he has worked out and defined the understanding of Ireland to which his romanticism first impelled him.What makes humane sense in the quiet Irish chaos is an aid to perception anywhere—for proof see his Italian travel books, where the poor of Naples are the Cork poor of his own boyhood; and his excitement over E.C.A.-financed redistribution of land in the latifundia is both heightened and tempered by recollection of the Irish land wars. Also this search for understanding explains the outward peculiarity of his bibliography, for it has repeatedly driven him aside from what might seem the normal line of his development. Between 1933 and 1940 he published three novels, three various valuable failures. They fail, that is, as novels; as Irish literature, as examples of how some aspects of Irish life can properly be handled, they are firstrate. After each novel he wrote a biography.Two have been published here: King of the Beggars (1938) and The Great O’Neill (1942)—the lives of Daniel O’Connell, who created the modern Irish democracy in the nineteenth century and won Catholic emancipation, and Red Hugh O’Neill, native leader in the Elizabethan wars, who was at once the last Gaelic king and the first modern Irishman.The biographies are attempts to discover through history some answer to the problems that had foiled him in the novels. In one aspect they are successive backward projections of ascertainable continuity with the hope of calculating the present hidden directions of Irish life, assuming that these do not just go round and round. Otherwise they are a means of seeing just how a great figure does establish himself within the Irish limits and break through them. 106

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He did not find the answer to his problems as a novelist because his chief dilemma was half his own. He was not satisfied with either of the two obvious solutions to conflict in an Irish novel: frustration or the emigrant ship. His first novel had evaded the issue by ending with the outbreak of the Revolution, but that was only an evasion because he knew when he wrote the book that the Revolution had not produced the answer. His two later novels end upon compacted frustration. Reading the third, Come Back to Erin, one has the feeling that after laying down his pen O’Faolain began kicking the manuscript around the room. He had sent his main character abroad to learn about life as it is lived outside the parish and had then brought him back only to find that in the parish there was no possible role for a man no longer parochial. In other words, as a novelist he was beaten not by lack of talent—he has always had talent to spare and fling away— but by his too great demand upon a society intimate, homely, compact, and too rigidly narrow. That brings us to his short stories. His collected stories have just been published, twenty-seven of them; and for the first time the whole of his personality is represented in one book. So are many aspects of modern Ireland, hitherto unsung, for in the short stories he has freer and wider range than he could ever achieve in the novel. A novelist is always somewhat limited by representative society—what cannot be presented as representative must be explained, and explanation, if it be the least taste sociological, always injures art. In wider societies this is not so much of a problem: nearly anything goes because nearly everything does. In Ireland, since independence was won, the aristocratic big houses have gone or have become irrelevant, and the traditional peasant life, always the Irish artist’s deepest resource, has all but withered away, so that the representative range is now bounded by the small farmer and the strong farmer and, in the cities, by the lower middle-class and the middle middle-class.There are many exceptions, to be sure, but all are individual, none typical. In the short story the writer is under no such limitation.The focus is almost always on character, any character in any context. As his collected stories show, O’Faolain has taken freest choice of both. In his later stories he has chosen themes that would never have occurred to his youth. He is no longer distracted by Ireland. In his middle years his motto was “See the facts and understand the picture.” Having seen and understood, he now favors a maxim from Baudelaire, from the realism of that great romantic:“Every man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.” And he would add: every woman and every nation and every writer. So he writes now with much more of easy verve and play of humor, and with sharper judgment than ever upon all that, in the name of 107


romance or purity or safety, refuses life and the responsibility of living and loving. This judgment emerges most surprisingly in his stories about women—surprising because so stunningly unsentimental. He likes women; he is one of the few Irish writers who really do; but he insists on regarding them as people and therefore as responsible. Hence his stories “Teresa” and “A Letter,” about two lovely girls, two lovely evaders of life, either of whom, though for very different reasons, could do with a swift kick. Or there is the sweet old Irish mother in “Childybawn,” Mother Machree incarnate, a honeymouthed old bat with saw teeth. Or, on the other side of the ledger, the little girl in “The Trout,” who discovers the sweet taste of courage, or the wife in “The Fur Coat,” who realizes with a shock that her youth is gone when, after years of privation too busy for discontent, she finds that she has lost the ability to spend a bit of money on herself. Yet now, as at the beginning, his work yields into another dimension that cannot be measured or be dealt with by firm acceptance—his sense of the ineffable hidden heart that is the source of all Irish loyalty and romance. Two stories can give the direction: the very early “Fugue,” whose theme is the young rebel hunted on the hills in every generation, and “The Silence of the Valley,” which circles continually closer to a single tremendous event, the death of an old cobbler in a mountain valley in West Cork. In that story everything is presented and nothing is explained. One does not explain the recognition of wonder. When O’Faolain was twelve, and as yet an unalloyed romantic, he was plagiarizing so successfully from Robert Louis Stevenson that several of his tales were printed in the Cork Examiner. A career of graceful triumph was before him. But a year later he went one night to the theater to see the Abbey players in Lady Gregory’s Jackdaw. There he saw something that shocked him. On the stage was a table, and on the table was a red and white checked tablecloth exactly like the one in the kitchen at home; and in a flash of wonder he realized that you could write about the life that merely lay around you. After that nothing came easy.

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Part Three Irish America

Irish America

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Mr. Dooley and the Same Old World

9 Mr. Dooley and the Same Old World

I

t is now twenty years since Mr. Martin Dooley, then proprietor of a speakeasy, was last heard from. It is nearer forty years to the time when he had the daily attention of millions of Americans, and when his words, spoken in the relative seclusion of his barroom to his silent auditor, Mr. Malachi Hennessy, were re-echoed admiringly throughout the United States and the United Kingdom.You, gentle reader, may never have heard of him, or only vaguely, as you have heard of Bill Nye or Petroleum V. Nasby; yet, just forty years ago, some one of your relatives was singing: For Mister Dooley, for Mister Dooley, The greatest man the country ever knew, Quite diplomatic and democratic Is Mr. Dooley-ooley-ooley-oo. It was a silly song. It heaped praises on Mr. Dooley for things he had never done, and could not be imagined attempting: He drove the Spaniards back to the tanyards . . . Those who sang it knew very well how silly it was, but they sang it in tribute and gratitude to the man whose wisdom was more than helpful to a nation still trying to recover its self-possession after having fought the War with Spain. In that United States, still full of men who had survived Spanish bullets and American embalmed beef and the Montauk Point hospital camp—a country headed by Theodore Roosevelt, the hero of San Juan Hill—Martin Dooley, self-described as “th’ man behind th’ guns, four

First published in the Atlantic 177.6 ( June 1946): 119–25.

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thousan’ miles behind thim, an’ willin’ to be further,” easily held his own in popularity. It was one of those rare moments in history when venerable wisdom is given the palm over youth and vigor. If your interest is aroused by this and you turn to any recent American history to find out more about Martin Dooley, the chances are that you will find his words quoted in the text, but you will not find his name in the index. His creator, Finley Peter Dunne, will be listed there, a proof of the weakness of current historical method, which readily accepts Plato’s Socrates but draws the line at our American philosopher, presumably because he is not mentioned in so poor an authority as the Chicago city directory. There is no denying the substantive existence of Finley Peter Dunne, or his influence in American politics and journalism; but to use that as an excuse for relegating Mr. Dooley to the limbo of once popular fictions, with Private Miles O’Reilly and the Lady from Philadelphia, is as foolish as it is bigoted. The admirers of Mr. Dooley are now a small and select group, gently asserting the merits of good dialect writing; yet you will never hear one of them say, “Wait till I read you what Finley Dunne has to say about that.” The idea is preposterous. One might as readily quote what William Shakespeare said when he decided that his royal uncle had killed his royal father. Let the historians grasp the larger realities. It was Mr. Dooley, and not Dunne, to whom the American people listened lovingly. And it was the old and wise Dooley who gave the historians the indispensable observation with which they high-light the politics of our emergence as an imperial power: “Whether th’ constitution follows th’ flag or not, th’ Supreme Coort follows th’ iliction returns.” When Dooley said that, Dunne was a mere stripling of thirty-three. Proceeding conventionally, one would admit that Dunne, the author, takes standing over Dooley, the character, and begin with a sketch of Dunne’s life and works. Neither, however, is a conventional figure in literature. Dooley is a unique invention: the only mythical philosopher I can think of with a philosophy. He is also Dunne’s only major character. With the exception of Hennessy, who somehow manages a vivid existence on little more than silent bewilderment, the other people in the essays are as shadowy as the fall guys in Plato’s dialogues: they exist only through Dooley’s quotations or descriptions of them. Hogan, the gullible intellectual; Father Kelly, the humane and humorous priest; Dock O’Leary, the agnostic; Schwartzmeister, the foreign element and Dooley’s German rival; the various cops, plumbers, misers, lovers, housewives, aldermen, reformers, and bums, who are mentioned transiently—all exist to feed Dooley information it would be out of character for him to find in his newspaper, or to enable him to point and illustrate a moral. 112


Nor is it simply Dooley’s singularity that gives him precedence. Other authors have spoken through their characters, or invented them only to discover that, once alive, they would go their own ways and do their own work. But Dooley was so large that Dunne could live inside him unnoticed and endowed with a freedom that Dunne, the citizen, would never be permitted. No one could serve a warrant on Dooley; nor could any enemy impugn his motives. His probity and fairness and tolerance, the modesty of his living, were as unquestioned as George Washington’s honesty. Hence, when Dooley struck at a malefactor, the victim had no redress except to answer Dooley back in kind with as good as he gave. It is a matter of history that no one ever managed that. The great of the nation—industrial barons, leaders of reform, generals of the army; indeed, the President of the United States himself—tiptoed past that Archey Road barroom with placating smiles. No one willingly drew on himself the whip of Dooley’s scorn.Those who did wished they hadn’t. Imagine being poor Andrew Carnegie, who, every time he opened his mouth, got Dooley’s foot in it. Or Theodore Roosevelt, whose bulliest bravery was no protection against potshots from behind the bar—“I’d like to tell me frind Tiddy that they’se a sthrenuse life an’ a sthrenuseless life”— though it was as an author that Roosevelt suffered most. Dooley’s review of his Rough Riders, a regimental history in the first person, began with a discussion of suitable subtitles: ’Tis “Th’ Biography iv a Hero be Wan Who Knows.” ’Tis “Th’ Darin’ Exploits iv a Brave Man be an Actual Eye Witness.” ’Tis “Th’ Account iv th’ Desthruction iv Spanish Power in th’ Ant Hills,” as it fell fr’m th’ lips iv Tiddy Rosenfelt an’ was took down be his own hands. The review then proceeded with a synopsis of the author’s account of the war: “. . . so I sint th’ ar-rmy home an’ attackted San Joon hill. Ar-rmed on’y with a small thirty-two which I used in th’West to shoot th’ fleet prairie dog, I climbed that precipitous ascent in th’ face iv th’ most gallin’ fire I iver knew or heerd iv. But I had a few r-rounds iv gall mesilf an’ what cared I? dashed madly on, cheerin’ as I wint.Th’ Spanish throops was dhrawn up in a long line in th’ formation known among military men as a long line. I fired at th’ man nearest to me an’ I knew be th’ expression iv his face that th’ trusty bullet wint home. It passed through his frame, he fell, an’ wan little home in far-off Catalonia was made happy be th’ thought that their riprisintative had been kilt be th’ future governor iv New York. Th’ bullet sped on its 113

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mad flight an’ passed through th’ intire line fin’lly imbeddin’ itself in th’ abdomen iv th’ Ar-rch-bishop iv Santago eight miles away. This ended th’ war. “They has been some discussion as to who was th’ first man to rreach th’ summit iv San Joon hill. I will not attempt to dispute th’ merits iv th’ manny gallant sojers, statesmen, corryspondints, an’ kinetoscope men who claim th’ distinction.They ar-re all brave men an’ if they wish to wear me laurels they may. I have so manny annyhow that it keeps me broke havin’ thim blocked an’ irned. But I will say f ’r th’ binifit iv posterity that I was th’ on’y man I see. An’ I had a tillyscope.” The last punch was right to the wind: . . . if Tiddy done it all he ought to say so an’ relieve th’ suspinse. But if I was him I’d call th’ book “Alone in Cubia.” From then on, the book was Alone in Cubia. And one of the most interesting chapters in Dunne’s life is how Roosevelt genially, if nervously, courted his friendship. The personal history of Martin Dooley was known to all. Like Socrates he made one brief excursion into office—as precinct captain (1873–75)— but after that retired to philosophy. (When asked to remain in politics, he refused and gave his reasons: “As Shakespeare says, ‘Ol’ men f ’r th’ council, young men f ’r th’ ward.’”) His occupation was saloonkeeper, though in his earlier years he had worked at heavier manual employment as street laborer and drayman. Born in County Roscommon, Ireland, he had emigrated to the United States before the Civil War and had worked his way west to Chicago. He was a mature observer of the Chicago Fire of 1871. His age, when he first became a national figure, in 1898, was unknown but was commonly believed to be at least in the late sixties.What his age was when he last appeared, in 1926, is anybody’s guess. Dooley’s barroom was on Archey Road (Archer Avenue) in Chicago, in a neighborhood once purely Irish and still, in 1898, Irish enough so that it made little difference in the essays. “The barbarians around them,” we are told in Dunne’s description of the area,“are moderately but firmly governed, encouraged to passionate voting for the ruling race, but restrained from the immoral pursuit of office.” And of Dooley himself we have the following account: Among them lives and prospers the traveller, archaeologist, historian, social observer, saloonkeeper, economist, and philosopher, who has not been out of the ward for twenty-five years “but twict.” He reads the 114


newspapers with solemn care, heartily hates them, and accepts all they print for the sake of drowning Hennessy’s rising protests against his logic. From the cool heights of life in the Archey Road, uninterrupted by the jarring noises of crickets and cows, he observes the passing show, and meditates thereon. His impressions are transferred to the desensitized plate of Mr. Hennessy’s mind, where they can do no harm . . . He is opulent in good advice, as becomes a man of his station; for he has mastered most of the obstacles in a business career, and by leading a prudent and temperate life has established himself so well that he owns his own house and furniture, and is only slightly behind on his license. It would be indelicate to give statistics as to his age. There, except to note that he profited by Socrates’ example and remained a bachelor, is the sum of Martin Dooley’s personality and circumstances at the time the world began to beat a path to his keyhole. It was far easier to create Dooley in character than to keep him there. Much of Dunne’s quality as an artist can be measured by his success in doing just that. The difficulties were innumerable. Many of the earlier essays written between 1893 and 1898 were concerned with Chicago politics, a subject obviously within Dooley’s experience. Others were observations on general topics, or tall stories, or little homilies on practical virtue and everyday vice. But with national syndication the politics had to become national or international, and the localisms either universal or unintelligible. Dunne managed it beautifully. The newspapers still accounted for the bulk of Dooley’s information; and Hogan and Father Kelly and Dock O’Leary supplied subjects for literary, theological, and scientific discussion. Hogan was the most useful. He read everything, believed everything, and followed every fad from infant care to golf. Hogan came very close to being enthusiastic, progress-minded America. He is an appealing, understandable, and—in his full implications—rather a terrifying character. There were other dangers for Dooley—the worst, perhaps, that he would become a fossil, with only a fossil’s powers of entertainment, and lose his value as an interpreter. Such fossils abound in all professional humor. An American example, to which you can easily add a dozen others, is the chinwhiskered farmer, with cowhide boots and a catgut twang, dear to fifthrate cartoonists. It would have been all too easy for that to happen to Dooley, for he represented a factor in American life that changed very nearly out of recognition during the thirty-three years he appeared in the newspapers and magazines. That Dooley did not fossilize, that he remained fresh and alive to the last, is due to Dunne’s objective sensitivity to social change. 115

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It would be foolish to offer the eight volumes of essays as a sociological document on the thens and nows of the American-Irish scene.The primary interest of both Dunne and his readers was in his political or social comment; his attention to background was purely literary.Yet the essays do record many of the most significant permutations of Irish life in America, as and when they took place. The change of tone over the years is very broad. In the late 1890s, for example, Dooley waxed sardonic over golf, that social-silly pastime of the idle rich. In 1919, he followed Hogan and Larkin out to the links to watch them play. He was as ironic as ever, but now in everyday language.The game had become just another foolish fact—no longer a Sunday-supplement, lobsters-and-champagne myth.“There’s nawthin’ more excitin’ to th’ mother iv siven at th’ end iv a complete wash-day thin to listen to an account iv a bum goluf game fr’m th’ lips iv her lifemate. ’Tis almost as absorbin’ as th’ invintory iv a grocery store.” That Dooley or Hogan should be on the links in 1895 might not have been impossible, but at any rate it wouldn’t have happened. In 1919 it would not lift an eyebrow. Golf is one example, and not particularly a central example, of the change represented. The whole process needs a history by itself, and none is yet written.The essays indicate it by progressively relaxing the belligerence with which the characters, Dooley included, face the smug and wealthy world. More and more their angry sarcasm is softened by indifference, their irony by amusement. This is not growing weakness or old age or an access of gentleness—just that a battle has been won and the victors are letting down their stiffly assumed defense. To put it more briefly still: the pressure is off. The pressure let up in numberless ways, about that time, as the first generation of American-born Irish took over from their parents.Think of it in concrete terms. Families that had struggled along for years—God knows how—on the father’s uncertain wages of, say, eight to ten dollars a week suddenly found themselves with five or six times that amount as the boys and girls grew up and got jobs their parents could never dream of. They marched into Canaan land and the walls toppled in the onrush. The “No Irish Need Apply” signs were broken up for firewood. It was a happy, marvelous time—a time for them to wonder at and enjoy—and it was enjoyed. After fifty years of low wages, high immigration, and few opportunities, the American dream came true for the Irish with a bang. People with Irish names might, if they chose, be irritated by a last social sniper or two, but there was no serious obstacle left. Like the Yankees before them, they were now free to camp on the higher pastures and throw rocks at the foreigners below—for the Mayflower had meanwhile discharged another enormous boatload. 116


This last aspect of the change did not escape Dunne’s attention, and though he had always been avowedly partisan as far as the Irish were concerned, he let these new recruits to smugness have a well-directed volley. KnowNothingism was a form of mental decrepitude he disliked in anybody. [Shaughnessy] was in yisterdah an’ says he: “’Tis time we done something to make th’ immigration laws sthronger,” says he. “Thrue f ’r ye, Miles Standish,” says I;“but what wud ye do?” “I’d keep out th’ offscourin’s iv Europe,” says he.“Wud ye go back?” says I.“Have ye’er joke,” says he. “’Tis not so seeryus as it was befure ye come,” says I. In a longer speech Dunne let Dooley remind Americans of the hypocrisy of paleface nativism: . . . As a pilgrim father that missed th’ first boats, I must raise me claryon voice again’ th’ invasion iv this fair land be th’ paupers an’ arnychists iv effete Europe.Ye bet I must—because I’m here first. ’Twas different whin I was dashed high on th’ stern an’ rockbound coast. In thim days America was th’ refuge iv th’ oppressed iv all th’ wurruld. They cud come over here an’ do a good job iv oppressin’ thimsilves. As I told ye I come a little late.Th’ Rosenfelts an’ th’ Lodges bate me be at laste a boat lenth, an’ be th’ time I got here they was stern an’ rockbound thimsilves. So I got a gloryous rayciption as soon as I was towed off th’ rocks. Th’ stars an’ sthripes whispered a welcome in th’ breeze an’ a shovel was thrust into me hand an’ I was pushed into a sthreet excyvatin’ as though I’d been born here.Th’ pilgrim father who bossed th’ job was a fine ol’ puritan be th’ name iv Doherty, who come over in th’ Mayflower about th’ time iv the potato rot in Wexford, an’ he made me think they was a hole in th’ breakwather iv th’ haven iv refuge an’ some iv th’ wash iv th’ seas iv opprission had got through . . . Annyhow, I was rayceived with open arms that sometimes ended in a clinch. I was afraid I wasn’t goin’ to assimilate with th’ airlyer pilgrim fathers an’ th’ instichoochions iv th’ counthry, but I soon found that a long swing iv th’ pick made me as good as another man an’ it didn’t require a gr-reat intellect, or sometimes anny at all, to vote th’ dimmycrat ticket, an’ befure I was here a month, I felt enough like a native born American to burn a witch. For the most part, however, Dunne let his people enjoy their prosperity in quietness and added his benediction. His own prosperity, considerable as it was, had, I believe, very little to do with the increasing gentleness of his comment. He was far too objective for that, and his natural kindliness, combined with a bitter hatred of hypocrisy, did not lend itself to jeremiads on 117

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the evils of having enough. The observation was as fundamental with him as with Shaw that the trouble with the poor is poverty. In his later years he had fewer occasions to attack the comfortable proponents of salutary poverty, but if we go back to 1894, the year of the Pullman strike, we can see the color of his fury. After months of conflict, the strike against the company had been suppressed with use of Federal troops, and starvation was a daily fact in Pullman, Illinois. Dunne, then on the editorial staff of the Chicago Evening Post, had punched at Pullman’s head from time to time, but when it seemed that the company’s policy toward the beaten men was to be one of cold-blooded retaliation, he let go with both hands and both feet and the pavement and did not smile as he worked.The essay shows Dunne at his most Irish, using wit coldly as a bludgeon, savaging his victim with it. It shows too what Dunne could do when he felt himself called upon to champion a cause— for his action in such a case was that of a champion.You could hardly call it defending the weak. It was slaughter: Go into wan iv th’ side sthreets about supper time an’ see thim, Jawn—thim women sittin’ at th’ windies, with th’ babies at their breasts an’ waitin’ f ’r th’ ol’ man to come home. Thin watch him as he comes up th’ sthreet, with his hat over his eyes an’ th’ shoulders iv him bint like a hoop an’ dhraggin’ his feet as if he carried ball an’ chain. Musha, but ’tis a sound to dhrive ye’er heart cold whin a woman sobs an’ th’ young wans cries, an’ both because there’s no bread in th’ house. Betther off thim that lies in Gavin’s crates out in Calv’ry, with th’ grass over thim an’ th’ stars lookin’ down on thim, quite at last. And betther f ’r us that sees an’ hears an’ can do nawthin’ but give a crust now an’ thin . . . Then he turned directly to the employer himself: “But what’s it all to Pullman? Whin Gawd quarried his heart a happy man was made. He cares no more f ’r thim little matthers iv life an’ death thin I do f ’r O’Connor’s tab. ‘Th’ women an’ childhern is dyin’ iv hunger,’ they says.‘Will ye not put out ye’er hand to help thim?’ they says. ‘Ah, what th’ ‘ell,’ says George. ‘What th’ ‘ell,’ he says. ‘What th’ ‘ell,’ he says. ‘James,’ he says, ‘a bottle iv champagne an’ a piece iv crambree pie. What th’ ‘ell, what th’ ‘ell, what th’ ‘ell.’” “I heard two died yesterday,” said Mr. McKenna. “Two women.” “Poor things, poor things. But,” said Mr. Dooley, once more swabbing the bar, “what th’ ‘ell.” As the editorial writer at twenty-seven had had nothing but contempt for a tycoon befuddled by his own power, so at thirty-one, when Dunne 118


lifted his sights from Chicago to the world of nations, he found no bigger game. Dooley was fazed by no man’s pretensions. Statesman or alderman, man of war or man of God, it was all the same; “man” without its modifiers was the meaningful word—and, be it noted, the dignified word.Though his hero-worship was not even microscopic, his respect for human worth was as ready as his understanding of human nature. Like every writer worth his salt, Dunne had his vision of evil, profound and thoroughgoing, and what is less usual, balanced by an equally searching vision of decency. He could never write a Utopia. The complexity of the human spirit was his starting point, and his philosophy was bounded by an intensely felt perception that all souls are alike before man as before God. All men are ME.Th’ little tape line that I use f ’r mesilf is long enough an’ acc’rate enough to measure anny man in th’ wurruld, an’ if it happens that I’m ladlin’ out red impeeryalism at tin cints th’ glass instead iv breakin’ stone at Joliet or frinds in Wall Sthreet it’s because I started th’ way I did. The same applied to Joe Chamberlain and Oom Paul Kruger, to Father Kelly and to Carey, the young criminal in “The Idle Apprentice.” It was, I think, largely because of this perception that people recognized in Dooley the peculiar authority of the man who has been there and knows. Applicability is an attribute of the classics. Dooley navigated in the world with his map of Archey Road; he traveled Archey Road by the signposts of the human heart. “It must be a good thing to be good,” he said, or ivrybody wudden’t be pretendin’ he was. But I don’t think they’se anny such thing as hypocrisy in th’ wurruld.They can’t be. If ye’d turn on th’ gas in th’ darkest heart ye’d find it had a good raison for th’ worst things it done, a good varchous raison, like needin’ th’ money or punishin’ th’ wicked or tachin’ people a lesson to be more careful, or protectin’ th’ liberties iv mankind, or needin’ the money. Hypocrisy and the money motives it concealed were often his theme— sometimes illustrated by an example drawn from Archey Road, but more usually by a direct attack on the conniving interests, whether individual or national. Imperialism he counted the biggest hypocrisy of all, and the most vicious. And though his friend Theodore Roosevelt wrote him argumentative letters on the subject, he hit at it repeatedly, scoring his most effective shot when he readjusted the imperialistic slogans of the day to “Hands acrost th’ sea an’ into somewan’s pocket” and “Take up th’ white man’s burden an’ 119

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hand it to th’ coons.” In this work he rarely let his personal sympathies interfere with his vision. As an Irishman he loved the United States, hated England, and had a soft spot in his heart for France, but he knew all too well that greed has no nationality. The protests that Dunne leveled against British methods in South Africa merge inevitably with his open disgust at the cruelty used in suppressing the Filipino Insurrection. Read his discussion of American use of the water torture in his essay on “The Philippine Peace,” an almost Swiftian satire in which his pity and indignation vent themselves in lacerating wit; or his personalization of nineteenth-century diplomacy, in which both the Englishman and the Frenchman are represented as thieves—the Frenchman the more amiable, but not enough to matter much to the victim. ’Tis unforch’nit, but ’tis thrue.Th’ Fr-rinch ar-re not steady ayether in their politics or their morals.That’s where they get done be th’ hated British. Th’ diff ’rence in furrin’ policies is th’ diff ’rence between a second-rate safe blower an’ a first-class boonco-steerer. Th’ Fr-rinch buy a ton iv dinnymite, spind five years in dhrillin’ a hole through a steel dure, blow open th’ safe, lose a leg or an ar-rm, an’ get away with th’ li’bilities iv th’ firm.Th’ English dhress up f ’r a Methodist preacher, stick a piece iv lead pipe in th’ tails iv their coat in case iv emargency, an’ get all th’ money there is in th’ line. In view of the lambasting they took from him, it is difficult to understand Dooley’s immense popularity with the English. The likeliest explanation is that they knew that his fair-mindedness cut both ways. He flailed into them as hard as any other American journalist in his protests about the Boer War, but he was the first to admit the safety-first quality of American sympathy. “Don’t ye think th’ United States is enthusyastic f ’r th’ Boers?” asked the innocent Hennessy. “It was,” said Mr. Dooley.“But in th’ las’ few weeks it’s had so manny things to think iv. Th’ enthusyasm iv this counthry, Hinnissy, always makes me think iv a bonfire on an ice-floe. It burns bright so long as ye feed it, an’ it looks good, but it don’t take hold, somehow, on th’ ice.” While it is obvious, or seems obvious, how Martin Dooley’s sixty-odd years of experience in the Old and New Worlds as laborer and proprietor, participant and observer, fitted him for his great role, it is less easy to understand how Dunne, at twenty-six, could create and endow Dooley. Fortunately there is a good biography—Elmer Ellis’s Mr. Dooley’s America—well 120


written and definitive, and explaining everything except that which no biography can explain: the ignition of genius. Dunne’s background, as Ellis reconstructs it, was good but not unusual. He came from a comfortably well-off, middle-class, Irish family. His father was interested in the art of politics, his mother in good reading; and the son acquired both tastes. He got a high school education but was both too smart and too lazy to satisfy his teachers. In 1884, when he was not quite seventeen, he went to work for the Chicago Telegram. Perhaps fortunately for him, the Telegram was a poor sort of paper—“a bright boy was better talent than any other it could command,” writes Mr. Ellis. Dunne was soon its police reporter, and within a few months one of his stories attracted the attention of the editor of the News, who hired him away. In 1888 he went to the Chicago Times to do political reporting and in the same year became city editor. At twenty-two, “already at the top as a reporter in Chicago,” he was feeling restless. He began moving about from paper to paper.The year 1890 saw him editor of the Sunday edition of the Tribune; 1891, a political reporter on the Herald; 1892, in charge of the editorial page of the Evening Post, a Herald subsidiary. In that year he began writing Irish dialect stories for the Sunday Post. The stories soon had as their central character a Col. McNeery, modeled on John McGarry, an eminent Dearborn Street publican, who, like his successor, was a Roscommon man and a bachelor. The McNeery stories were an instant success; too much of a success, in fact, for McGarry objected and Dunne had to invent a new character. The result, slowly developed over the next few years, was Martin Dooley— enough like McGarry to maintain a continuum, different enough to assuage McGarry’s anger.Then came the Spanish war, and in telling Hennessy how Cousin George “Dooley,” the admiral, won at Manila, Mr. Dooley suddenly found himself talking to an eagerly attentive world. The rest of Dunne’s life is not so important for us. His own career had just begun in 1898, and for nearly twenty-five years afterwards he remained near the top of his profession. He was editor and one of the founders of the American Magazine when it was the organ of the liberal “muckrake” movement. He was editor of Collier’s for several years before it was sold to Crowell. His friends included such men as Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and most of the other American writers of his day. His admirers numbered such unlikely people as Henry James and Henry Adams. But the fact remains that he created Martin Dooley when he was twentysix and had developed him fully by the time he was thirty. After that Dunne exhibited a continuous miracle in maintaining Dooley—but there was no new miracle, only much fine work in other fields. More could not have been 121

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expected of him. “I, mesilf,” said Dooley, “am ivry man.” A generation of readers understood him to be right. Dunne’s admirations were as catholic as his resentments. Ready to applaud at a hero’s popular triumph, he was yet like William James, who found most cause to wonder at those “great examples of sustained endurance” found readily in “thousands of poor homes where the woman successfully holds the family together and keeps it going by taking all the thought and doing all the work.” James saw that from a distance. Dooley lived on the same block with it. The distance or nearness of the point of vantage does not matter: it takes like genius to make a selection from the obvious. All Dooley’s personal heroes are kin to the woman James described.They appear in different guises— a good cop, a hardworking father of a large family, a washerwoman whose tenderly reared only son turns out a bum, a Union veteran who never marches in a parade or waves the bloody shirt. In one of his finest heroic tales the hero is a fireman. It never disqualified a man, to Dooley’s thinking, that he got paid for his bravery by the week. The fireman’s name was Clancy, and he had all the necessary attributes, the “sustained endurance” and the strength for it, the flair for dramatic action, respect and contempt for danger, and, in the great heroic tradition, the inner compulsion to outlive his luck, to effect his own doom. All th’ r-road was proud iv him, an’ faith he was proud iv himsilf. He r-rode free on th’ sthreet ca-ars, an’ was th’ champeen hand-ball player f ’r miles around.Ye shud see him goin’ down th’ sthreet, with his blue shirt an’ his blue coat with th’ buttons on it, an’ his cap on his ear. But ne’er a cap or coat’d he wear whin they was a fire. He might be shiv’rin be th’ stove in th’ ingine house with a buffalo robe over his head; but, whin th’ gong sthruck, ’twas off with coat an’ cap an’ buffalo robe, an’ out come me brave Clancy, bareheaded an’ bare hand, dhrivin’ with wan line an’ spillin’ th’ hose cart on wan wheel at ivry jump iv the horse. The Clancy saga is then built up in a few swiftly told feats of grand irrational courage: “Who’ll go up?” says Bill Musham.“Sure, sir,” says Clancy,“I’ll go”; an’ up he wint. His captain was a man be th’ name iv O’Connell, fr’m th’ County Kerry; an’ he had his fut on th’ ladder whin Clancy started. Well, th’ good man wint into th’ smoke, with his wife faintin’ down below. “He’ll be kilt,” says his brother. “Ye don’t know him,” says Bill Musham. An’ sure enough, whin ivry wan’d give him up, out comes me brave Clancy, as black as a Turk, with th’ girl in his arms. Th’ oth122


ers wint up like monkeys, but he shtud wavin’ thim off, an’ come down th’ ladder face forward. “Where’d ye larn that?” says Bill Musham. “I seen a man do it at th’ Lyceem whim I was a kid,” says Clancy. “Was it all right?”“I’ll have ye up before th’ ol’ man,” says Bill Musham.“I’ll teach ye to come down a laddher as if ye was in a quadhrille, ye horsestealin’, ham-sthringin’ May-o man,” he says. But he didn’t. Clancy wint over to see his wife.“O Mike,” says she,“’twas fine,” she says.“But why d’ye take th’ risk?” she says. “Did ye see th’ captain?” he says with a scowl. “He wanted to go. Did ye think I’d follow a Kerry man with all th’ ward lukkin’ on?” he says. But like Achilles or Cuchulain, Clancy cannot die in bed.The hero must break his taboos. Clancy’s are worn-out luck and onsetting age. He knows that the time has come to quit. He will quit—after the last battle. Carefully, in a tense, restrained passage, Dooley sings out his story to the end: Well, so he wint dhrivin’ th’ hose-cart on wan wheel, an’ jumpin’ whin he heerd a man so much as hit a glass to make it ring. All th’ people looked up to him, an’ th’ kids followed him down th’ sthreet; an’ ’twas th’ gr-reatest priv’lige f ’r anny wan f ’r to play dominos with him near th’ joker. But about a year ago he came in to see me, an’ says he, “Well, I’m goin’ to quit.” “Why,” says I, “ye’re a young man yet,” I says. “Faith,” he says, “look at me hair,” he says—“young heart, ol’ head. I’ve been at it these twinty year, an’ th’ good woman’s wantin’ to see more iv me thin blowin’ into a saucer iv coffee,” he says. “I’m goin’ to quit,” he says,“on’y I want to see wan more good fire,” he says.“A rale good ol’ hot wan,” he says, “with th’ wind blowin f ’r it an’ a good dhraft in th’ ilivator-shaft, an’ about two stories, with pitcher-frames an’ gasoline an’ excelsior, an’ to hear th’ chief yellin’: ‘Play ‘way sivinteen.What th’ hell an’ damnation are ye standin’ aroun’ with that pipe f ’r? Is this a fire ‘r a dam livin’ pitcher? I’ll break ivry man iv eighteen, four, six, an’ chem’cal five to-morrah mornin’ befure breakfast.’ Oh,” he says, bringin’ his fist down, “wan more, an’ I’ll quit.” An’ he did, Jawn.Th’ day th’ Carpenter Brothers’ box factory burnt. ’Twas wan iv thim big, fine-lookin’ buildings that pious men built out iv celluloid and plasther iv Paris.An’ Clancy was wan iv th’ men undher whin th’ wall fell. I seen thim bringin’ him home; an’ th’ little woman met him at th’ dure, rumplin’ her apron in her hands. The suggestion is regularly made that the time has come to revive Dooley, and not infrequently some small attempt at it is made. One of the essays, 123

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peculiarly applicable to some present crisis, is reprinted in a newspaper or magazine, or an editorial is written, liberally spiced with pertinent quotations. The result is only a vague wonder and amusement, not the hopedfor stirring of a new interest. As a method it is too piecemeal to succeed. Dooley’s credit with his readers was long-term. He held them by his continuous provision of apposite wisdom; by his wit, and its varied rhythm which is not to be learned in one day; and above all, by his personality, which was thoroughly loved and as thoroughly understood. His clientele was trained to him and stayed with him for years. Besides, they knew how to read dialect. Strange as it may seem, they even liked to read it. The present reading public has a firmly settled aversion to dialect writing, which is not likely soon to be shaken. If taste should turn again in that direction, it will not be towards the dialect of Dooley’s all but vanished generation of immigrant Irish, but to some vernacular as readily heard now as that was then. Meanwhile, with every year, his obscurities increase. As unfamiliarity makes his language difficult, so the fading memory of topicalities that were the occasions of his wit darkens the wit itself and makes what was catholic and clear seem merely abstruse. Rendition into straight English has been tried and, to my taste, fails. As well translate Chaucer—though that has been done.Translation precipitates some of the wit out of the essays, but it destroys their artistic compaction, and it dissolves Martin Dooley altogether. Dooley without Dooley is inexcusable. He must be read in the original and at length. That will never be done again by a great many. But there will, I believe, always be a scattering of people in whose estimation he will be secure. The need for study and a glossary to read it has rarely killed a specimen of wisdom, and of witty wisdom—never. Not that a glossary is necessary yet. Only practice and an ear for the brogue are required. Given these, the essays are as good as ever.The ear for the brogue is the most immediately important. If a few will take the trouble to read him, many will listen to him read, and with pleasure. There is the way to make converts. And there, I think, is the way he could be brought again to wide attention. I offer it as a free suggestion to any recording company that they put out a Dooley album—taken perhaps, from Elmer Ellis’s well selected anthology, Mr. Dooley at His Best—and read, of course, by Barry Fitzgerald. It should go over nicely. What could be better, any one of these evenings, than to switch off the damned driveling radio, put a record on the phonograph, and hear Fitzgerald-Dooley talking soberly of Things Spiritual: How can I know annything, whin I haven’t puzzled out what I am mesilf. I am Dooley, ye say, but ye’re on’y a casual obsarver.Ye don’t know annything about me details. Ye look at me with a gin’ral eye. 124


Nawthin’ that happens to me really hurts ye. Ye say, “I’ll go over to see Dooley,” sometimes, but more often ye say, “I’ll go over to Dooley’s.” I’m a house to ye, wan iv a thousand that look like a row iv model wurrukin’ men’s cottages. I’m a post to hitch ye’er silences to. I’m always about th’ same to ye. But to me I’m a millyon Dooleys an’ all iv thim sthrangers to ME. I niver know which wan iv thim is comin’ in. I’m like a hotel keeper with on’y wan bed an’ a millyon guests, who come wan at a time an’ tumble each other out. I set up late at night an’ pass th’ bottle with a gay an’ careless Dooley that hasn’t a sorrow in th’ world, an’ suddenly I look up an’ see settin’ acrost fr’m me a gloomy wretch that fires th’ dhrink out iv th’ window an’ chases me to bed. I’m just gettin’ used to him whin another Dooley comes in, a cross, cantankerous, crazy fellow that insists on eatin’ breakfast with me. An’ so it goes. I know more about mesilf than annybody knows an’ I know nawthin’. Though I’d make a map fr’m memory an’ gossip iv anny other man, f ’r mesilf I’m still uncharted.

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10 Irish-American Literature, and Why There Isn’t Any

T

here is an Irish family I know here in New England who had a granduncle who told the truth. His name was Dan, and he was a hero, a genuine one, with four years of fighting in the American Civil War; and he was a sour, taciturn, grumpy old man, which in view of his truthfulness is what you might expect. One time one of his grandnephews—not a favorite, for he had none—got him talking about the Siege of Petersburg.“Uncle Dan,” he said, “you were at Petersburg, weren’t you?” “The whole bloody nine months,” said Dan. “Did the great mine explosion take place anywhere near your part of the front?” “Right on my goddam front,” said Dan. “What did it look like?” “I don’t know,” said Dan, knocking out his pipe and going away for a rest. “I wasn’t there that day.” Now, can you, gentle Irish reader, conceive of another Irish veteran of that war, who had been within six hundred miles of the scene, who would not have given his audience a complete and personalized picture of the explosion and what happened little Paddy Keefe when the land blew up? No. Nor can I. For a long time now I have been trying to collect materials for the great Irish-American novel, a trilogy, of course, which would tell the whole three generation story from North Cork in 1847 or 1874 to Massachusetts in 1947. I have asked literally hundreds of people. And it is First published in Irish Writing (Cork) 3 (November 1947): 71–81.

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well I began asking young, for there are very few left now who experienced the early part of the history. Needless to say, everybody has been most cooperative. Everyone realizes that the story must be got down before it is forgotten altogether and the Irish-Americans lose the only cultural heritage that can distinguish them from any other kind of Americans. Needless to say, the amount of fact I have found in what I have gathered borders on the microscopic. If there were a few more Uncle Dans my hopes would be higher. Dan, it would seem, was a psychological sport, a unique eccentric, for I have met no other old Irishman or Irishwoman like him. They are not taciturn, Heaven knows, nor grumpy at all with the young people who want to hear what it was like. But they’re Irish, and they tell stories. Everything comes out packaged in a story. And when you tear off the fictional wrapping, you are lucky indeed if you find a fact, or half a fact, inside. It isn’t that the stories aren’t good. Like all Irish stories they are very well-shaped, full of wit and sharply observed character, built around the one real folk theme, the victory of the hero through a sly and funny stratagem. But in them Uncle Mike or Daniel O’Connell or The-Man-Who-Kicked-The-DentistThrough-The-Awning are all on the same level of reality, practically in the same moment of history. Take away the stratagem and you find that though the story has seemed all along to be about something you wanted to learn— say, the methods of the Castle Garden swindlers—it isn’t about that at all. I haven’t heard anyone mention the Castle Garden swindlers for years. Like many another important detail in the unwritten history they have been forgotten, all but lost completely.Yet they gave many a man his first taste of America. Castle Garden, where they operated, was the old immigration depot in New York; and the swindlers were of many nationalities and were all equally mean.The old people always claimed that the Irish swindlers were the most successful and the meanest.Yet, except for an employment agency racket described in a novel written in the 1870s, I don’t know how they worked, what line and bait they used, or how they won the confidence of the suspicious and frightened peasants. I really don’t know anything about them except their significance. In the two stories I heard about them all the details had dropped away, leaving only an improbable yarn about how Cousin Mike or Uncle Joe swindled the swindler.The swindler himself had been reduced to a figure of fun, which he assuredly was not; and Cousin Mike swaggered across the scene, “the boy well able to look after himself,” which assuredly he was not. You can depend on it that if he met with a swindler, by the time Mike got to his relatives his pockets were as empty as his pride. If I could get that story, if I could have heard Mike tell it himself, honestly, I would have the start for a novel.The story as it exists doesn’t mean 127

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a damn thing, except that an Irishman hates to admit he has been made a fool of. I knew that before I could talk. My father used to tell me I would never get what I was looking for.What I needed was the talk in the kitchens at night, when the old country friends came visiting. “If you had the record of one night’s talk, you’d have it all. But you wouldn’t be able to understand most of it if you did have it.”Why, I asked; and he tried to explain how different it was from anything I could have heard at anytime after I was old enough to take notice. “That talk vanished before the talkers. After the turn of the century it all died out; and especially after that you never heard them going off into Irish when they wanted to talk above the young folk’s heads. Before . . . “ But he couldn’t tell me what it had been like before. It was as foreign to him as to me. Probably more, for the contrast between Irish in America and Irish-American was at its sharpest in his boyhood, when all the parent generation was immigrant and the children were Americans from birth. The tangle of emotions and cultures he remembered cannot be stated simply. It was a tangle and not a dichotomy. The parents were becoming Americans (or were to become Americans: the process is sometimes as instant as physical change of phase); and the children knew Ireland only through their parents’ ageing and increasingly sentimental stories. I suspect, too, that the parents were jealous of their own experience. Assimilation to American life had been a rough, painful business for them, with little free choice about it, while the children saw it as little more than a schoolyard brawl between Dirty Micks and Hungry Yanks. As a result, the older people clung to their belief that no one could understand the story who had not been through it. After the American change of phase, they could hardly understand it themselves. The big change—it was really the end of the story—took place around the turn of the century, say, 1905, on the average, when these Americanborn, American-educated children took over from their parents. They walked easily into the sort of jobs their fathers could never have dreamed of. Family incomes, with three or four of the boys working at once, shot up from eight or ten dollars a week to sixty or eighty. It was the great victory, the realization for the Irish of the American dream, as later and much more swiftly the same dream came true for the Italians, the Poles, and a dozen other immigrant nationalities. The first result of it was that the Irish ghettos broke up. Today you will find in hardly any New England town a definite Irish quarter, though every town will have its memories of a “Patch,” a “Kerry Acre,” a “Roscommon Gap.” At the same time Irish-American life lost its cohesion and its distinct character. The Irish began to disperse into the general American landscape: in a sense, to vanish.That process has gone a long way in the intervening forty years, less in New England than else128


where because New England is a very small part of the United States and the Irish here are very numerous. Even here, however, the rate of amalgamation is high; and what any of us O’s or Mac’s can claim as truly Irish in his culture or his character is intangible and small. Old prejudices, old memories, and religion have operated to a fairly wide extent to keep the Irish apart from the ProtestantYankees, but these factors do not operate to prevent IrishLithuanian, Irish-Italian, Irish-Polish marriages, nor are the children of these marriages “Irish.” Go outside New England and you will find the process gone immensely further towards completion.There is, at any rate, nothing to stop it. The story, then, comes to its real end before 1910. Though there were plenty of families, after that, who had not yet made the grade or who were too freshly over to have gone through enough of the initiation, the results were assured; there was no suspense left. All the rest is epilogue—an epilogue that has less and less to do with Ireland, slow as we have been to realize it. The separation was proved in 1919, when the De Valera–Cohalan feud split the Irish-American societies wide open. Today there are only a few shadows of such societies left, and their influence is a shadow of those shadows.Yet the occasion of the blow-up was ridiculously petty compared to the turmoils and scandals the Clann-na-nGael and the other Irish Independence organizations survived between 1858 and 1919. It doesn’t explain it, either, to say that the organizations broke up because their object had been achieved—the Irish are not as logical as that. They broke up because they were not held together any longer by outside pressure. Given that pressure—prejudice and discrimination; given the urge it engendered to strike back hard—at England, because England was the hereditary enemy, whereas America, though at the moment it might be Purgatory, held out the promise of a Heaven; add a lot of nostalgic sentiment, some knowledge, and a hell of a lot of ignorance of Irish politics; and you have the mixture that gave those organizations their driving force, their mass, their cohesion. By 1919, though they hardly knew it, they were going on old inertia. For a while it was still possible to raise money for the Cause, but the Civil War in Ireland stopped that. Now try raising a couple of hundred thousand for a grand and Irish, if unspecified, cause. Patrick Ford’s “Fenian Ram” submarine in Brooklyn Navy Yard is a monument to more than the crackpot revolutionism that thought it up. It is a monument, the only monument, to the people who subscribed the money for it out of their meagre and uncertain pay, and to the emotions that made them subscribe. People and emotions both dead now, and forgotten. In Ireland To-Day, in 1936, Francis Hackett described certain “troglodyte” Irishmen you can, or could, still find here, 129

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. . . so mummified that they seemed to me almost prehistoric. There are Irishmen driving taxi-cabs in New York who ought to be in the National Museum, like bog butter. How they do it, how they manage to feel and think and act and look like stub-ends of an extinct era is a social mystery . . . In immigrants like these there has been no new rooting, simply a persistence in folk-ways that a stubborn will has glazed over, at immense expense of spirit. Among the unemployed there are knobs and mounds of such discarded Irishmen. They could not adapt themselves, and once they leave the cluster around the historic Church their fate too often is to go to the bottom. Hackett is quite right, of course. But one must remember that once these troglodytes would have had something more than the Church to cluster around for understanding and help. Many a family here had at least one such nonadaptor: in my time he would be a silent old man who would say nothing because nobody could understand anything he had to say. If one could reconstruct the process by which he had passed, by what degrees one can only guess, from the role of strongest link with the home village to the inevitable high and dry loneliness among grandnephews and nieces who probably did not even know the name of the village, one would have the exact index of Irish-American history. Sixty years ago a man like that might be out of place in America, but he would not be lost in America. He would have the Fenian societies, the old A.O.H., probably a dozen friends on whom he could call in the evenings for comfortable discussions of the world of Ballybeyond. By the time I might have known him even Ballybeyond was worn out. The whole congenial immigrant society in which he had sheltered was vanished away. Whatever half-pitying attention he got from the sons of his friends would be given because they too were “Irish.” He would know damn well that they weren’t. Punkauns and pishogue Yankees, the whole lot of them. Till a year ago I would have passed off the old man’s deprecation of us as crankiness. But he was right. There are a lot of Irish short stories or novels about which I used to congratulate myself that I knew exactly what they meant, because I too was “Irish.” I felt quite familiar with Ireland, before I saw Ireland. It was an illusion, of course, produced by the fact that I had heard stories at home in the same manner and the same dialect. What I forgot was that I had the stories third hand, from my father or mother, who had them from older people.The stories—they were very like some of Frank O’Connor’s in Bones of Contention—dated back to the 1860s or 1870s, when you could go from Cork City to any New England mill town without noticing the difference, if you squinched your eyes a bit and ignored the Yankees and the climate and anything that happened outside the “Patch.” The town I was born in 130


probably had the heaviest concentration of Cork and Kerry Irish in America, though by no means the largest. From the outside it might have seemed a cosmopolitan city—fifty-three languages were recorded there in the 1920 census—but you know the Irish won’t tolerate cosmopolitanism, and the Irish ran this place. The mills were owned from New York. The top society, what there was of it, was Yankee. Politically, the Irish were in full control. They probably made up forty percent of the one hundred thousand population and were so closely interallied that their ranks were never broken, though they were, to put it mildly, not loved by their colonials, the Wops,Turks, Frogs, Polacks, Squareheads, and other tolerated races. (There was one time the French Canadians voted en masse for a man named Rochefort and then found out he was from Cork!) My father used to say that the whole town was made up of Millstreet men married to Dingle women. He meant the whole of the town that mattered. At least half of the family relationships—we counted up to third cousin and if necessary allowed one or two removals—dated from the 1830s in Cork or Kerry and were uninjured by the trip across the Atlantic. In my childhood I used to hear Fermoy Irish spoken, which I’ll bet few of my Fermoy contemporaries have heard. Millstreet or Dingle Irish was easy to find. The prize Irish, I was told, was from where “you could shpit across the Blackwater.” I heard that Irish too, for the man who told me had “often shpit that shpit.” Now, if anyone under sixty ought to be able to write the great IrishAmerican novel, assuming of course enough knowledge of grammar to put the words in order, I, or any townsman of mine, ought to be able to. But I can’t, as I have explained, for the reasons I have explained. I still thought I could till I went to Ireland and got up to C——, our family village in North Cork. I had come to find one thing: if anyone remembered my great-grandfather, who had stayed in C—— when the rest of the family emigrated and who died there about 1880. It was disappointingly plain that no one did. On the other hand, the investigation was not to be abandoned for such a small failing as that. I produced genealogical evidences enough to satisfy a College of Heralds. I named the farm we had had, detailed our relationships with the other numerous families of the area, and sat back to hear the conclusions. For a couple of hours all went very well. The farm was well known and was a respectable one. The relationships had an authentic timbre. Nobody questioned my grandfather’s account of who and what we were. I felt as if I were at home playing the game of “Tommy O’Donovan; which Tommy O’Donovan?; The Custer Street O’Donovans; which Custer Street O’Donovans?—there’s two.” It was a damn nice feeling.Two thousand miles 131

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and eighty years seemed the merest mist between us.The Irish are the same the world over, I was saying to myself, when the blow fell. One of the men sensed a flaw in the evidence. “Where did your greatgrandfather marry?” he asked me. “In B——,” I said. “He and his brother married two sisters, O’Mahonys, from there.” I felt pretty proud of that bit of information. It brought the story back to 1832, and I could take it a step farther. There was a strange silence. Something, plainly, had gone wrong.With a cute smile he leaned forward again. “What did they go so far out of the parish as that for, to marry? B—— is fifteen miles and more north of here.” “I know,” I said. And added innocently, “What’s fifteen miles?” Fifteen miles, it turned out, was a lot. It was too far by a great deal; and it meant that there was something fishy about all the claims I had advanced on behalf of my forbears.The discussion around me became very animated, though there was a polite attempt to avoid putting the charges into definite words till they seemed proved. There were hidden reasons, however, and they had to be found. They were found. The inquisitor challenged me with the general opinion. “They were herdsmen,” he said. “They were wandering up and down the country tending other people’s herds; and that’s how they took girls from so far out.” Shocked, I protested.“They had the farm at P——.They weren’t herdsmen. My grandfather never said so.” “He wouldn’t say so. It was their father had the farm—and they were herdsmen. That’s how they did it.” “It,” whether they did it or not, ruined my social standing in C——, and ruined it finally. I was pretty sore about it at the time. Not angry with the men of C——, who were, if anything, more kindly courteous after the dreadful decision than before, but damned angry at the assumption that eighty years of pride and honest respectability and firm Irishry in exile weighed nothing beside the possibility of a social error in 1832. Afterwards, in a less injured mood, it occurred to me that very likely this was what my father had meant when he said I would not have understood the talk of his parents’ old friends. There must often have been very similar judgments passed in New England kitchens, in the 1870s and 1880s, when the local Irish Who’s Who was being gone over. He had, to be sure, told me the strange case of the old lady who objected to her son’s fiancée because her own (the old lady’s) father had been a leaseholder, while the girl’s grandfather had been a cottier “with two rocky rack-rented acres and one cow.” That the girl’s family had become more prosperous in America than her own made no difference; good blood was good blood, caste was caste. 132


I don’t suppose the old lady really expected her objection to be understood or accepted. Certainly her son would not have seen the point. He knew that his mother and his mother-in-law had worked side by side in the mills. And now to have the social grading system of rural Ireland offered him as a standard for choosing a wife! What American could invent that sort of thing? If our hypothetical IrishAmerican author (me?) has to breathe his early characters to life by informing them with such attitudes and judgments as those, I’m afraid he is stuck. And all the Irish history, sociology, and anthropology in the world won’t unstick him.The great book, you understand, ought to be a novel, a real one, and not one of those undisguised sociological tracts, multiple case-histories, that are passed off on us as “serious” literature “with a purpose.” Maybe the business could be inverted and the book be written by an observant Irish farmer who would stoke up on American history and sociology. Any offers? Well, let us look at some writers who have made gestures this way. We will begin with John McElgun, of whom you have no doubt heard. If opportunities made an artist, John McElgun, author of Annie Reilly or the Fortunes of an Irish Girl in New York (New York: McGee, 1878), would be the bright star and eminence of Irish-American letters. Mr. McElgun’s style leaves us something to desire—he seems to have quarried his language with a pick-axe; and his thought sometimes has the consecutive direction of a Mexican jumping bean, sometimes not. Nevertheless, very plainly he knew what he was writing about.Time and again he gives us a chunk of realism: his is the picture of the employment agency swindler I mentioned earlier. He knew Ireland; he knew Queenstown and Liverpool and the passage agencies; he knew what the immigrant ships were like, what the Irish boarding houses in New York were like, what happened to the Irish who fell away from the Church. All these things he mentions. Sometimes he describes them; and when he does you want to reach out your foot across sixty-nine years and kick him solidly in the pants. Because Mr. McElgun is a snob, and a double snob, true and inverted. He knows that the Irish of his time have the virtues of health, strength, sound morals, and the true religion. He says so constantly, in at least two different ways. At the same time he is ashamed because they do not also have the virtues of money, gentle breeding, secure social position, and money.Writing for God knows what expected audience, he tries to show that the Irish really have all these latter virtues, or ought by rights to have them, or soon will have them, and really, after all, don’t need to have them because they have them anyway, and are just as well off without them. He cannot admit any Irish social failing, except, of course, in the case of some thick Mick who is not representative of the race and who has been seduced by the easy life of the Pennsylvania oil fields. Still, there is a lot of 133

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honesty in this author. (If there were more, his book would be an invaluable document today.) He keeps at least two toes on the ground, which sometimes gives him an incongruously equivocal air, balanced as he is on pride and shame. In the Irish boarding house, for instance, where the guests sleep three and four in a bed, “All the floors were bare but clean, except where covered with tobacco-juice and the ashes of pipes.” You see, he can’t admit that such Irish dosses were ever dirty—yet he has to note the dirt.There is a touch of the artist about old McElgun—which is a hell of a lot more than you can say for the refined journalists and grocer’s educated daughters who crashed the “Household Book of Irish Verse” and other such seven pound proofs of Irish-American culture with superior steel engravings. McElgun romanced crudely about the facts.The journalists and the daughters wrote dishwatery appeals to Owen Roe and Red Hugh, charging them with ousting the Saxon slaves and tyrants before it was too late. McElgun had a lot of honest Irish xenophobia; he admired the Yankees, but immigrants other than Irish, particularly the “smelly Germans,” he caricatured crudely and cruelly. The Household Book set, thirsting for gentility, imitated Yankee schoolmarm poetasters with poetasteless odes and triolets to Pere Marquette, the Lesser Common Song Sparrow, and the falling snow. McElgun tells us plenty, mainly because he shows himself so plainly. They only tell us why the struggling poorer Irish wrote off the lace-curtain Irish of that time as a dead loss.The trouble is that there are only a few McElguns to hundreds of others. It is not, you see, because the Irish weren’t literate that we have no Irish-American literature. It is because they wrote tripe. And not real tripe, either, like McElgun’s—but imitation tripe. There are two other writers to be considered, both very substantial. Finley Peter Dunne, who wrote the Mr. Dooley essays, and James T. Farrell, author of the Studs Lonigan trilogy and the semi-autobiographical Danny O’Neill novels, A World I Never Made, etc. Neither fits the bill. Dunne’s Mr. Dooley is, I think, the greatest humorous character in American literature, and the wisest and most enduring. And the lesser characters, Hennessy, who draws Dooley out, and Hogan and Dock O’Leary and Father Kelly, whom he makes his examples of the world, are uncannily real, too. But the primary concern of the essays is philosophic, to draw the universal from the topical by stingingly moral wit. The details of Dooley’s life and neighborhood are put in only as incidental background and very stingily. If the novel I desire is ever written, the novelist will inevitably incur a tremendous debt to Dunne, who recorded the speech of the immigrant generation and who preserved half a dozen of its characters, so soundly conceived you can ring them true against any criterion. But the Dooley essays are a long way from fulfilling the rounder purposes of imaginative fiction. 134


Farrell, like Dunne, a Chicago man, writes of the period after the First World War, so he never comes near what I believe the essential beginning. There is no distinctive Irish-American life or thought left for him to describe. His novels are American novels with many Irish-American characters. The significance of his work lies in his description and knowledge of the void into which whole myriads of our people have fallen, that modern, lower middle class, traditionless, urban void underlying industrially revolutionized society in Chicago, Liverpool, Paris, Milan, Dublin.The void has no national boundaries. The people in it have no essential nationality but modern barbarism. If it happens that the specimens Farrell examines are Irish-American Catholics, they could as easily be Polish-American, Italian-American, Czech-American, German-American, without his making any fundamental changes. Nor would it require a basic rewriting to set the novel outside America altogether. Studs Lonigan, Farrell’s trilogy, can be studied with profit by any politician or priest anywhere who feels that his particular institution has faced up to its responsibilities. Studs is “Irish,” “Catholic,”“American”: these at any rate are his party labels.You know him personally, whatever your party labels are. Studs and his limbo are everywhere. Unless we fill that void with something better than propaganda, Hollywood, and defunct nationalism, we will fall into it with him, amid a universal collapse. Again our hypothetical author must incur a debt to Chicago, for he cannot finish his story without indicating that many, many Irish families, once they broke out of the Irish slum, fell promptly into Farrell’s void.They fell into it nearly naked of tradition. They neither kept their Irish traditions, which no longer seemed relevant, nor discovered the important American ones. If they carried the Church with them, as too often they did, it was to the detriment of the Church and a proof of the clergy’s failure. That, of course, is not the whole epilogue to the great change of phase around 1905. Unfortunately it is too much of the epilogue.We can all examine our consciences for the fault. I might say that the beginning of the novel is relatively easy.The story from the Famine exodus to the end of the American Civil War is given in vivid detail, splendidly composed, in Oscar Handlin’s Boston’s Immigrants: 1775– 1865. The Irish regimental histories, crude as they are, give us a great deal more. It is what happened to the returned Irish veteran that stumps me. Uncle Dan at the siege of Petersburg in 1864, in a regiment harmoniously made up of the survivors of Yankee and Irish outfits, can be revived as a living man. But what Dan did or thought or said or hoped, in 1870, in a mill town slum, I don’t know and find hard to imagine. I hope sometime I shall know. I hope someone gets beyond the second chapter, before it is too late. 135

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11 Edwin O’Connor and the Irish-American Process

W

e were friends for fifteen years, which seems a very short time now. The friendship was, I think, immediate on both sides, yet one of the chief results of our first meeting was the delineation of our disagreement on a whole range of matters, beginning with the preferability of salt water or fresh water and heading open-endedly toward infinity. The subjects on which we differed never grew fewer. Neither of us, I am quite sure, ever induced the other to change his opinion on anything, or expected to, or ever really wanted to. But the arguments were never tedious. Each of us knew the shutoff point. For years we had lunch together every month or six weeks. When the lunch was in Cambridge, as it usually was, we always ate in the same restaurant and had exactly the same food. We often wondered why. Neither of us had any particular passion for mushroom omelet; neither ever ordered it anywhere else. Besides, he was a gourmet, and I, as he would be the first to agree, was not. We probably arrived at the menu out of gastronomic aspiration on my side, despair on his. In any case, it took no thought and did not delay the conversation. I hope that it was not ominous that at our last lunch he suggested we go to a Chinese restaurant. I was surprised and reminded him of his pronouncement, delivered years ago: “Chinese food is all wet hay. There are little dishes of wet hay and big dishes of wet hay, but wet hay is all it is.” But, no, he said, it really wasn’t that bad, and besides he couldn’t face up to

First published in the Atlantic 222.1 ( July 1968): 48–52.

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another omelet. So we ate chow mein and had exactly the same talk we would have had at our regular joint. I mention this sort of thing, and our continual mild disagreements, to make plain at the start that this is a very limited depiction of him, for he was a many-sided man, with a lot of interests that I did not share, and many other friends, most of whom I did not know; and I am sure that any of these friends would describe him as accurately as I can and yet very differently. What I had in common with him was the same background: second- and third-generation, small-city, middle-class, Catholic, New England American Irish, which meant that though he came from Woonsocket and I from Lawrence, we could share many memories and some attitudes and never needed to explain them. But after all, we shared these with thousands of others to whom neither of us felt drawn. A strong but by no means total similarity of temperament must have counted for more. We tended to like or dislike other Irish, past or present, for the same visceral reasons. On that we seldom disagreed. He was very Irish.To a degree often equaled but certainly never surpassed, he had the Irish capacity for being instantaneously right on any topic that interested him, and he would thereupon argue his position with a fluent precision that filled me with envy. In part this was because he actually had thought deeply about many things; in part it was the fruit of his preoccupation with moral theology. Often, however, it was just plain instinctive response, the Irish ages speaking, and he was being automatically right just like one of his own Buckys or P. J.’s.When that happened, seldom more than a minute passed before he recognized what he was doing.Then a daffy light would come into his eye, and the argument would swiftly dissolve into a burlesque uttered in the voice and with the vocabulary exactly appropriate to some yappy little fanatic or pompous, oracular ass—this, too, with a fluent precision that filled me with envy. When we first met I had just got myself locked into a lifetime affair with early Irish history, a matter of mistaking a mountain for a good-sized molehill due to the surrounding fog. Among the several subjects in which he then or later felt no faintest interest, early Irish history occupied a commanding place, but the spectacle of my ever growing difficulties with what, after all, I had wished on myself fascinated him, and he was at once involved. For a time he was content to listen gravely to my tentative theories about the date and structure of the corpus of genealogies or the nature of the kingship of Tara, and then to assure me of my error. “Ah, no, no, man, that won’t do at all—sheer hallucination—you’ll have to go back and work harder at it than that. Of course, whenever you want help, just ask me. But not this after137

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noon. Not next week either.” Presently, however, he retired from the role of mentor. Instead, I was made conscious of the threatening and rather sinister figure of Bucko Donahue, the greatest, indeed the only, living expert on Irish annals. Bucko, from whom I sometimes received enigmatic phone calls, postcards of hotel lobbies, and once a letter from Harbour Island in the Bahamas, was a small, rubbery Bahamian Negro of incredible age whose saga is much too complicated to recount here, though it is not amiss to remark that he was the only ex-slave of Bernard Baruch who was educated by the Christian Brothers solely in Latin. Somehow or other he had discovered the Irish annals, genealogies, sagas, synchronisms, and disdaining books, had worked out all the problems in his head. He had reduced the whole lot to a luminous clarity, which when set down would fill no more than four pages.Yet he still forbore to publish, out of hatred for me. “God almighty, John, I don’t know what you’ve done to offend him. Maybe you did nothing at all. He’s like that—touchy—seething with passion. But I tell you I’ve never seen any human being regarded with the unspeakable loathing he feels for you. He’s just waiting till you’re ready to publish.Then he’ll bring out his four pages and make an utter fool of you. I keep telling him the things you tell me, and you should see the little fellow laugh. He gets hysterical. The tears rolling down that little shrunken face of his and the evil glinting in the tiny little eyes. Oh, I tell you, John, it frightens me!” Bucko’s one letter contained libelous aspersions on two of my most respected colleagues, one of whom was reported as playing split weeks as master of ceremonies at a Jersey City burlesque house, the other as set right by a night in the Harbour Island drunk tank after he was caught “sneaking around the Anglican church doing push-ups every morning.” Most of the rest will bear quotation. My dear Kelleher, It’s all cod, you know, this work you’re doing on the Annals. Mother of God, I’ve been through it all a dozen times—the first time I went through the whole business it took me nearly a week. A week lost, is what I say now. Here I was down here in God’s glorious sunshine, and all I was doing was racing through the biggest barrelful of hogwash I’ve ever come across. I reject the Annals in toto for two reasons. First, it was all swiped from the Jews. Second, it’s all crap anyway . . . Well, you just keep right on with your work if you can keep fooling the Harvard lads. I’ve got no respect for them 138

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myself. A few of them come down this way now and again; if we catch them we feed them to the turtles . . . I’ve met O’Connor: A HELL OF AN IMPRESSIVE MAN. IF WE HAD MORE LIKE HIM A SENSIBLE MAN COULD LIVE IN THE WORLD TODAY. Erin go ha ha

And the signature in a huge, ominous, shaky scrawl. Then Bucko took to dying at fairly short intervals. His last demise, about five years ago, was when he was eaten by a sea turtle while sleeping under water. I took that as rather a compliment. It was not often that I had any influence on an O’Connor creation, but the sleeping under water bit obviously came from the story of Mac dá Cherdda, one of the two idiot saints of Ireland and one of the few seventh-century Irish personages whose tale Ed ever listened to with interest. Of course Bucko was not the only one who now arrived to threaten or bother me.There was a whole menagerie of characters who communicated only by telephone. One night I answered the phone to hear a high-pitched, ancient Irish screech on the other end. This time he was an eighty-yearold maniac, somebody like Mother Garvey in The Last Hurrah. “Hello!” he shrilled. “Is this Profissor Kay-le-her, the great authority on I-rish histhry and I-rish ge-ne-al-o-gy?”As usual I played back.“It is, begor,” I said, matching his voice and pitch, “the virry man.” “Well now, then, Profissor, I have a quistion for you. I have here a virry old and most valuable book, The History of Ireland, by Abbé Mac Geoghegan and John Mitchel, and the quistion I have to ask you is . . .” Suddenly I realized, My God, this isn’t Ed! And I hadn’t sense enough to keep to the screech and the brogue I started with but dropped my voice to its natural level. Great explaining and apologizing had to be done before I got shut of that call. There were more hazards in being a friend of Ed’s than were known to the uninitiated. To be sure, there were also calls made in his own character. He read The Last Hurrah over the phone, bit by bit, and I remember the night we agreed happily that he had a best seller that could not miss. We were united, too, in one large miscalculation, expecting that he would be denounced by angry old priests from a thousand pulpits and that every Irish society in the country and most of the Holy Name Societies would pass resolutions condemning him for a dirty bird and a fouler of his own nest.When the book came out, he got hundreds of letters, and if I recollect aright, only sixteen took the expected line. Instead, he was thanked again and again for the accuracy and fun of his book, and Catholic colleges showered him with invitations to speak. Unbeknownst to us, unnoticed till then by anybody, the public hu139

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morlessness that settled down over the American Irish about the turn of the century, when the Irish societies drove the Irish comedians off the stage, had silently lifted.The Irish could laugh at themselves again. Unfortunately by that time there was not a hell of a lot left to laugh at. Most of his humor is backward-looking—the old people’s dinner-table talk in The Edge of Sadness, for instance—reminiscence or survival of a generation in which character had such free play that what now seems wildly exaggerated or eccentric was nothing out of the ordinary. How much of the comedy in The Last Hurrah is actually in Skeffington’s recollections? How much more of it is exemplified in characters like Ditto Boland or Cuke Gillen, who, blessedly all unwitting, are on the verge of extinction? The young are seldom funny: indeed the younger, distinctly the unfunnier. One could cite, to be sure, the boobish “reform” candidate, Kevin McCluskey, with his telegenic family and his rented telegenic dog, but McCluskey is not funny as an individual, and there is nothing very merry about what he fronts for. The only real exception is Father Danowski, the baroque Polish curate in The Edge of Sadness. He is funny enough. And he is treated with the underlying tenderness otherwise reserved for the old folks. But then, though he is little more than a boy, he belongs as a Polish-American to a generation roughly equivalent to that of the narrator’s Irish-American father—a fact which I am not certain occurred to his author. In most ways Ed O’Connor was a present-minded man. He was urbane, well informed, concerned with politics as a citizen, full of the sense of how much needs desperately to be done here and now, and always very interested in the young. He was impatient with sentimental, unhistorical praise of the good old days. Like Goldsmith, whom he admired, he was a very sane writer, well aware of abnormality and viciousness but dealing by preference with that smaller, more ordinary range of aberrations which we count as reasonably normal human conduct. I think that one of his fundamental assumptions was that the human mixture in every age and clime had about the same general proportions of decent men and rogues and fools. But he did not assume that every age or every phase of society inhibited or, alternatively, called forth and rewarded the same qualities and responses. Some were definitely more inclined toward evil than others. Some were relatively good—like the society we both had known as boys. It was not only his humor that was backward-looking. He looked back, too, for his standards of normality. Or he seemed to. In his books the basic recurrent pattern is of something coming unexpectedly to an end, generally something complicated and of long standing. To the casual eye it has appeared sound, but now as it starts to come apart the observer (the narra140

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tor) realizes that actually the signs of approaching dissolution have been all about and unmistakable, most noticeably a blind, self-satisfied irrelevance to present conditions. If the observer then turns to what is now not so much beginning as emerging, already largely developed, from under the wreckage, he is likely to feel no more than a very wary hope. The newly emergent may offer fresh promise, but it is a promise strictly limited by the weaknesses of this fallen flesh. After all, the old, too, was once new and shiny and full of ruthless vitality, and blindly, self-satisfiedly unaware that no generation escapes the consequences of original sin. You may wonder, where is the hope or normality in that? Well, it is not either in the new, which has not yet life’s lessons, or in the old, which by this time has forgotten them. The normality he was looking for was the mature complexity of the ordinary; and you look for that somewhere in the middle of the process. He and I first knew the Irish-American process toward the end of its heyday. Our parents knew it in its prime. When we had grown up we knew that that phase of society, though it looked eternal to us as boys, was transitional in the extreme and could not have lasted long under any circumstances. It had come into being about the turn of the century, when a modest prosperity had become general among the Irish, most of whom by then had been born and educated here. Many symptoms signaled its rapid demise—the rise of the funeral home and the destruction of the wake; the death of the old people, the last links with that vanished mid-nineteenth-century Ireland from which we were all originally recruited; the disappearance of the genial, uncomplimentary nicknames; and finally, the lack of any continuing force, like discrimination, or afterward the resentment of remembered discrimination, strong enough to hold the society together from without or within. Whatever happened, there came a time when nobody felt very Irish anymore, or had much reason to. By the late 1940s that society was practically all gone.The people were still there; their lives were, if anything, more complicated than ever—but not in terms of the familiar, habitual complexity that was so harmless and satisfying and whose passing he regretted. A lot of our talk was swapping stories about all that. Many of his were used, more or less altered, in his books—but that well was deep and full, as would soon have been apparent. When he died he was happily at work on two novels at once. One was to be built around the narrator’s recollections of boyhood, thirty-five years ago. The passages he read over the phone were about the boy sitting on the backstairs of his grandfather’s drugstore, listening to the discussions between the grandfather and the men who dropped in daily to talk and argue.That, 141

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plainly, was going to be a very tender novel. The other, as he described it, was to be about a cardinal-archbishop, a man of eighty, neither a reactionary nor a fervent ecumenicist, who finds himself wondering at times whether he is simply presiding over the end of the whole show, and later realizes that he is only at the beginning of an act. Judging by what he wrote of it, it would have been a strong, densely constructed book, and in all likelihood the funniest since The Last Hurrah. While O’Connor’s belief in Catholicism never lessened, he was finding the Church increasingly discomforting. He remarked that he had been all for liturgical reform in theory but had not counted on a Mass in English that demanded of the communicant a tin ear. Like his fictional cardinal, he was no reactionary. He knew in detail the necessity for reform. He was keenly aware, too, that essential change had been delayed so long and was so poorly prepared for that what should have come as rich, healthy development arrived with the simplicity of an avalanche. He spoke feelingly of development. Newman was his hero. By nature he was hostile to all urgers of formulas for attaining perfection in one or two glorious installments.Yet his irritation at what he considered the largely needless disruption of cherished rituals was felt not so much for himself as for older people, especially old priests who asked only to be allowed to continue the old liturgy and devotions, as privately as possible, for the remainder of their own lives, and were refused. For them he had deep sympathy. For himself, though he resented being deprived of the familiar and habitual, rich in associations gathered since childhood, he could get along, even if it meant shopping around for the “least offensive Mass.” As a matter of fact he could have got along on harder fare even than that. His faith was in no danger. I think that the general shape of the cardinal novel can be deduced from the less than thirty pages he finished. It would be a continuation and deepening of the movement already strongly defined in his best novel, The Edge of Sadness, a movement toward the future rather than to a fondly remembered past. It would be the record of a subconscious search for essentials and of the repeated, astonished discovery that these are not at all what or where one had always taken for granted. It would be the discovery of the ubiquity of grace in small and unprepossessing packets. And thus a justification of faith. Near the opening of the fragment the cardinal discovers that he has cancer and has but a few months, possibly only a few weeks, to live. He is a bit shocked but not surprised. Nothing surprises this experienced old stoic very much, least of all his realization of how often he is mistaken in his impressions and assessments, for he has no pretensions to infallibility, and he knows that however uncertain he may be in these days of reform and revolution 142

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within the Church, everybody else is equally so. All is drifting and changing. No man is really in control. Without altering his routine he sets about putting his house in order. But how? The archdiocese was in fairly good shape; he was not a bad administrator, he knew that, and twenty years ago, he reflected, he would have felt confidence and even pride in what he was leaving behind him. Now he was not so sure. Suddenly the new age had come in, and with it had come the new demands: had he met them? At all? What would his successor find? Naturally he wonders who his successor will be. Much of the rest of the book, I imagine, would have been taken up with the possible candidates and their supporters and enemies; and O’Connor’s gifts for character-drawing would have got great exercise from this parade—the worried conservatives and hopeful liberals, the opportunists and speculators, the idealists, the honestly bemused, the plain good men and elegantly trimmed trimmers, the impressive empty barrels, the cocksure expositors of the wave of the future, the slit-mouthed reactionaries, the plentiful boobs and nitwits, lay and clerical—all vocal, all variously but equally wrong or inadequate. About these, about himself, about the Church, the cardinal, often mistaken and seldom wrong, would make discovery after discovery, and no longer without surprise. At the end, I think, he would be unworried, for though he would have come to understand that while the tide of change has only begun to flow, and no man can say what, if any, of the familiar landmarks it will leave, all that it can do to the essentials is to reveal them anew, for a while, not to destroy them, and that it is given to no man to say exactly what the essentials are. Then a final mistake would come to light, that the diagnosis was wrong, that he has not got cancer. And this would not matter a great deal, for he will die soon anyway, a thing of moderate moment in the life of a man who has done his best and has trust. The Edge of Sadness already offered proof that O’Connor’s looking backward for the good was more apparent than real. He was no sentimentalist. If he looked at the immediate future with mounting concern, as I think most sensible men do, he was not afraid of it and had no thought but of the need for getting on with the search for justice. Least of all did he imagine that the good men became scarcer when Irish America began to evaporate into the haze of history. Like most humorists he was anything but a bouncing optimist. Many indeed were the men and slogans on which he turned a bleak eye: the Godlove-you-boy-and-keep-the-faith kind of Irishman with a heart like an ice 143

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cube; all social climbing, but particularly the Yankee variety; the sort of people who swarm together publicly to give each other medals for intersomething tolerance; what passes for politics in this Commonwealth; what passes for social responsibility with some Boston bankers; the cry that we— Irish or Italian or whoever—made it on our own, and so could the Negroes if they had the gumption. And of course the war—another matter on which we disagreed. Yet he was equally far from pessimism—Mark Twain’s anguished despair of the God Damned Human Race.There is a passage in The Edge of Sadness that I think exactly expresses his enduring assessment of human nature. We all share in a shattering duality—and by this I don’t mean that soggy, superficial split that one so often sees: the kind of thing, for example, where the gangster sobs uncontrollably at an old Shirley Temple movie. I mean the fundamental schism that Newman referred to when he spoke of man being forever involved in the consequences of some “terrible, aboriginal calamity”; every day in every man there is this warfare of the parts. And while this results in meanness and bitterness and savagery enough, God knows, and while only a fool can look around him and smile serenely in unwatered optimism, nevertheless the wonder of it all is to me the frequency with which kindness, the essential goodness of man does break through, and as one who has received his full measure of that goodness, I can say that for me, at least, it is in the long succession of these small redemptive instants, just as much as in the magnificence of heroes, that the meaning and glory of man is revealed. That of course is a fictional character speaking, but it has the inflection of his own voice and thought. He was a good man. He was one of the freest men I have ever known, and doubtless because of that, one of the most genial. I am afraid I have made him seem an unwontedly sober, if not indeed a somber, figure. In fact I have scarcely a memory of him which has any such shadow on it—in token whereof, this last one. We were crossing the Public Garden one day just after The Last Hurrah made the best-seller list, when he was set upon by a newly warm friend who had to express his delight with his pal’s success. However, he admitted to critical reservations, too. “The book goes great, Ed, up to where Skeffington starts to die, but after that it sort of trails off. The old punch goes out of it.” Ed’s eyes waltzed, and he drew a short breath, familiar signs of inspiration.“George,” he said,“I might have known you’d see that. Of course you’re 144

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absolutely right. As a matter of fact, I’ve just written a new ending, for the movie version.This time Skeffington doesn’t die after the election. He enters the priesthood. Mother Garvey gets ordained too. Then years go by, and Skeffington is the oldest living monsignor in the archdiocese, and he’s celebrating Easter Mass at the cathedral, with Mother Garvey as his deacon. When he raises the Host at the consecration, the camera follows his hands. But it doesn’t come down again. It keeps going up and up, slowly; and you see the shafts of light coming down from the chancel windows; and then you begin to hear organ music, and then the angels singing, faint and far away. Skeffington and Mother Garvey have dropped dead together. Right on the altar.” “Jee-sus, Ed!” said the critic reverently. “Now you really got something!”

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12 A Long Way from Tipperary

A Review of George Potter, To the Golden Door,The Story of the Irish in Ireland and America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960)

M

y earliest acquaintance with Irish-American history of the written variety was gained from the sort of articles that used to appear in minor Catholic magazines or in the Boston Sunday papers. They were turgid little essays on the fact that the Continental Army was seventy-six percent Irish, or that many of George Washington’s closest friends were nuns and priests, or that Lincoln got the major ideas for the Second Inaugural Address from the Hon. Francis P. Mageoghegan of Alpaca, New York, a pioneer manufacturer of cast-iron rosary beads. As I remember, nobody seemed to take these articles very seriously. Sometimes I got the impression that nobody but me ever read them. They were the last offerings of stale editorial tribute to the irascible jealousy of that part of the Irish-American reading public that wrote letters to the editor. About thirty years ago they began to vanish from the Boston papers, and no editors were lynched. Now one is rarely seen, even around March 17. I wonder whose is the major component in the Continental Army these days. Oral Irish-American history was a different matter. It dealt mainly with bitterly resented instances of Yankee discrimination and insult, but there was a strong sub-theme of breast beating.This or that thick Mick who had disgraced us all, who had given the whole race an undeserved bad name, would be recalled and his memory execrated. You couldn’t, it would be agreed, altogether blame the Yankees, with that sort of article parading around in First published in the Reporter 22 (12 May 1960): 44–46.

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front of them. But . . . oh, couldn’t you! . . . and with that, another insult, still infuriating after forty years, would rise to the surface. Curiously, there was little in all this about the ordinary details of life or work in the old days. Economic exploitation might be mentioned, but it was rarely dilated upon. I got the impression that existence had been at once difficult and dull and that there had been little about it that anyone wanted to remember. Life had really begun after the turn of the century, when the general breakthrough into American acceptance had been made. The chief remaining complication was what to do about the ignorant damned foreigners who were coming in and ruining everything. Mr. Potter’s To the Golden Door is a history of the American Irish up to 1861. As I glanced through it the first time, my suspicions were aroused. I seemed to detect a recurrence of the there’s-always-an-Irishman-at-the-bottom-ofit-doing-the-real-work approach to American history; and I sensed that the author’s motivation for writing the book was heavily conditioned by the old resentment-apology mixture. Closer examination showed me I was wrong. Of the many biographical fragments collected by Mr. Potter only a few deal with successes like the Hon. F. P. M. His interest was in the ordinary individual about whom we do not know whether he failed or succeeded because we can see him only for an instant in a letter, a court record, a newspaper paragraph. Despite this fine awareness that men are all individuals, the book deals mainly with Irishmen in the mass, because that is the way they mainly appear in the source material—a gang of Irish working on the railroad, a swarm of immigrants dumped at a port, a new Catholic congregation, a militia company, a slum with its inhabitants, a dire faceless threat to the American way of life. But every reader will soon be forced to realize that the subject before him is not trends and problems but people with names, faces, hopes, and, at that distant time, futures. The book has its share of faults. As might be guessed from the title of its opening section,“The Top of the Morning,” the introductory survey of Irish history is spotty and rather romanticized. Due no doubt to Mr. Potter’s having died last year, all scholarly apparatus is lacking except for an index of proper names, so that often there is no way of identifying the source of a quotation or estimating its reliability—which is indeed unfortunate, for the author’s research was thorough and his material rich. But as I see it, the major difficulty stems from an ambivalence between a natural scholarly impartiality and an urge to explain the Irish and to justify them as Americans. The explanation seems to rest upon a belief that the Irish as a group can be identified at any time by certain personal characteristics—as, say, the witty, warm-hearted, pugnacious Irishman.The jus147

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tification is that these were mostly attributes well worth adding to the American character (especially in New England) and that, if the Irish were frequently hard to put up with, they paid their way from the start, and painfully, as cheap expendable labor that the native Americans hesitated neither to exploit nor meanly affront. Because Mr. Potter was avid for fact and because he would not distort fact, though sometimes he minimized it, his argument is often shown up as inadequate by the documentation, and the documentation is as often blurred by the argument. An example is his explanation of Irish anti-Abolitionism. The Irish stand on that square with no good characteristics and, even if explained, cannot be excused.Apart from these weaknesses, the book is rich, vivid, and valuable: by all odds the best attempt so far at telling the story. The story is not for those who like their American history sweetened and condensed, nor is the book to be recommended as a safe assignment for civics classes in public or parochial schools. It does not show that “Only in America.” It shows that in America as in any other place individual courage is often overbalanced by group nastiness and group opportunity by the stupidity of individual leaders.Time and again the reader is given a glimpse of a situation that cries out for judgment and as immediately defeats it. An Irishman faints from hunger on a street in Boston; he has come over on a “coffin ship,” and his clothes are so putrid from two months in the steerage that when he is carried in to a shop the people in the shop vomit. Who is responsible for him? Who is going to help him? Does he get new clothes or a job or a grave in potter’s field, or does he get shipped back, penniless, on the same kind of a boat? Again, a subcontractor on a canal excavation (the chances are fifty-fifty that he is Irish himself) absconds with the payroll. The unpaid Irish laborers riot and ravage till the militia quells them. Do they get their rights? No. Do they get any part of their pay? Not if the company can help it. Do they respect the law of the land? What recognition or protection do they get from the law? The answer is, in either case, not much. Like most true history, the tale, fully told, is one from which almost nobody comes off well. Nearly all charges by and against the Irish are exaggerated, and nearly all are true to one degree or another. This is clearest when Mr. Potter is writing about New England, but it is not clear enough. Here his general impartiality is thrown out of plumb by his evident sympathy for the Irish and his tendency to see the Yankees even more in terms of settled characteristics. And that is too bad, for the Irish-Yankee confrontation is the richest still-unrealized tragi-comedy in American history. On the one side, the Irish, fleeing from a homeland where they had been racked, 148

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robbed, and demoralized by an imposed aristocracy of Protestant, Puritan, Anglo-Saxon derivation. On the other, a Protestant, Puritan, Anglo-Saxon people who had, when the Irish arrived, just about completed a city and a society made in their own best image. More thoroughly than ever before in history the sins of the fathers were visited on the second cousins onceremoved. The mutual despair and hatred re-echoed from the welkin. No wonder that assimilation is not yet quite complete in and around Boston. Nor that the drama remains to be written. The dramatist would have to reimagine the tale with entire sympathy for both sides and full understanding of the two histories and unfailing consciousness of the irony. All the way through I was reminded of a story I heard in Dublin last year. An Irish diplomat found himself seated next to an Irish-American judge at a banquet in New York. The judge was elderly, cantankerous, and xenophobic. After disposing of the Reds, the so-called intellectuals, the Jews, the Italians, and modern youth, he took up the Puerto Ricans.“There’s a problem you’d never understand—these people swarming in from that Godforsaken over-populated little island. They’re unbelievably ignorant. They haven’t any trades or skills. Some of them can’t even speak English. One of them comes up here, takes any sort of job for any kind of pay, lives cheap, saves up a few dollars and sends the fare home to bring up his brother. Pretty soon the whole damn family is here, sending for the relatives.You’ve got no idea how bad it is.” The Irishman could not keep his diplomacy buttoned up. “How did your family come over?” he asked. A hundred years from now, when the Irish-Americans are a footnote in the high-school history books, perhaps a Puerto Rican judge seated next to . . .

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13 Irishness in America

I

n 1892 my grandfather took a steady look at the facts and predicted that Jim Corbett would beat John L. Sullivan. For a month before the fight he was laughed at by all his neighbors in the Irish section of Salem, Massachusetts. For a month after, none of them would speak to him. Though I am proud of his intelligence, I can understand why the neighbors might feel that this uncalled-for rationality was vaguely treasonous. Whether or not they could define their feelings, all surely sensed that much more than the heavyweight championship was at stake. It was not that they objected to Corbett. Under the new rules he won the championship fairly. Presently, indeed, they would like him and approve of him, for in a curious new way he was a credit to the race. But he was not Sullivan’s equal. He was a clever fighter, a trained and disciplined athlete. Sullivan was a hero— the hero—and when he went down, the heroic age of the Irish in America fell with him. Recall that no one then or since ever said, “Shake the hand that shook the hand of Gentleman Jim Corbett.” No one fastened on Corbett as the image against which to vent such a rage as I once found in an old A.P.A. pamphlet: “They may boast of their vaunted John L. Sullivans, but one cleareyed Yankee boy with a Winchester repeater could take a dozen such.” Corbett himself was well aware of the difference. It was he who told about the old lady in Boston to whom he was introduced as “the man that licked John L. Sullivan.” She shot him a glance of indignation and snapped, “It’s little you had to do!”

First published in the Atlantic 208.1 ( July 1961): 38–40.

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Yet, of what was lost sixty-nine years ago, little would have lasted out the decade anyway, and there was less that the Irish really wanted to hang on to. Sullivan was lucky that he went when he did, while he was still the meaningful symbol of what the Irish here had perforce to be proud of: native strength, the physical endurance that made possible the “Irish contribution to America” that orators and writers have since sentimentalized so much. What they really mean is that from the 1840s on, floods of Irish immigrants gave the country what it had not had before, a huge fund of poor, unskilled, cheap, almost infinitely exploitable labor, and that this labor force was expended, with a callousness now hard to comprehend, in building the railroads and dams and mills, in digging the canals, in any crude, backbreaking job. The contribution was real enough, but it would be difficult to distinguish it from the drafthorse contribution to America, and it was rewarded with about as many thanks. Let us not imagine, either, that the Irish were somehow the better for it. A man who knows that he is considered valueless except as a broad back and a pair of strong arms is not thereby impelled toward education, refinement, and high ambitions. All too many of the Irish who were not killed by that usage were ruined by it. That was a plain fact of life, reflected flatly in the cartoons that accompanied “Mick” jokes in every comic paper, the unvarying depictions of the baboon-faced shanty Irishman and his slatternly button-nosed wife. (Not that the Irish were the only people thus complimented. Pick up any number of Judge for, say, 1900 and look at the drawings of Negroes, Jews, Swedes, Germans, and “Hunkies.” You may well wonder to whom this humor was addressed. Somebody apparently felt secure enough to laugh.) Nonetheless, the heroic age was a fact. Heroic qualities characterized it: not least, the unconsidering wastefulness of men who felt they had nothing for which to save. Then every Irish quarter had its strong man, who would lift a dumpcart on his back or bend a crowbar, and who ruptured himself or died of booze, and who in my childhood might dimly be remembered as the “sort of idiot” that used to be around in those primeval times. That was what Sullivan superbly and prodigiously embodied. The dumpcart lifters had the strength of two or three . . .Yankees, let us say, but they were poor. Sullivan displayed the strength of ten for purposes impartially pure or impure, lavished his money like a pagan king, drank like a whole bevy of royalty, and with iron pugnacity and iron confidence bade defiance to the world that under-valued the Irish. He was only eight years older than Corbett, but they stood on either side of a gulf of history neither experience nor imagination could bridge.Ten years after his defeat, his people were already forgetting what he had meant. They had begun to re151

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fer to him as a figure of fun. And that was the last thing the real John L. ever was. Corbett was equally representative. He was a prophetic figure: slim, deft, witty, looking like a proto-Ivy Leaguer with his pompadour, his fresh intelligent face, his well-cut young man’s clothes. He was, as it were, the paradigm of all those young Irish-Americans about to make the grade. These were the children of what you might call the “hidden Irish,” who, by 1890, were the vast majority of the Irish in America: the men and women who, though denied opportunity for themselves, confidently counted on it for their children and, like millions of later immigrants, scraped and saved to give their children a fair start. Publicly these people were all but invisible, because they did not look or act as everyone knew the “real” Irish acted and looked. Moreover, they lived in the Irish quarters cheek by jowl with the wild Tads and thick Micks, who were recognizable. Which is a point my father made twenty-five years ago when he was explaining why neither I nor anyone of my generation would be able to write the great Irish-American historical novel in three volumes.“You don’t know,” he said, “and you can’t imagine what it was like before the great sorting out took place, when the cleans and the dirties, the lazy and the vigorous, the decent and the criminal were all mixed up together down on Valley Street.” He was right. I do not know, and I would not trust my imagination. I did get one remote glimpse of it at his wake. An old man I had not seen before came up to me and began explaining that he was an old friend of the family’s. “I lived next to them for eight years on Park Street. They were a fine, quiet, respectable family, all of them. I’ll say this to you, though you may not believe it—not once, mind you, in all those eight years did the patrol wagon drive up to their door.” The sorting out is the key event in the whole history. There are a dozen books that proudly recount the rise of Irishmen to American fame and fortune throughout the nineteenth century, but these instances are irrelevant to the main theme. Most of those who succeeded vanished as Irish. Not until the grade was made en masse could any ordinary man feel secure in what he might attain.That happened just after the turn of the century, and the generation to whom it happened, my father’s generation, is the only one to whom the term “Irish-American” can properly be applied. Before them were the Irish in America, ill-assimilated, unaccepted. Since them, with people of my age, what is there left that can be considered significantly Irish? But at that moment they were Irish-Americans: a hundred and sixty-two percent American, born here, educated here, conscious of their citizenship, illuminated with the fresh capacity they sensed in themselves 152


to fulfill the promises Horatio Alger and Teddy Roosevelt had revealed to all who would Strive and Succeed.Their confidence rested on a calm faith that innate Irish vigor, its fetters thrown aside, was worth at least another hundred and fifty-nine percent in any open competition.They got the jobs their fathers could never have got. They made the grade like walking up a hill.They led their parents out of the Patch, the Acre, the Shantytown, and into new two-apartment houses in the new streets. A lot of them later went on to single houses in the suburbs. There, for the most part, they stopped. At least, they did in New England—and really, it was only in New England that the whole process was unfolded, for only here did their own numbers and a sufficiently coherent opposition ensure that they would remain a distinct group so long. With rare and universally scorned exceptions, they had no desire to move socially “higher.” What they wanted and got was a mutual standoff with the Yankees.True, the Irish social climber did exist in sufficient numbers to be known as a type made comic by his genteel paroxysms of double-involuted inverted snobbery. I remember one woman who drove my father to the verge of apoplexy by saying of a man he admired,“Judge O’D—— must have Protestant blood in him, he’s so refined.” Or another who remarked that her people weren’t common Irish; they came from a castle in Ireland. “Indeed,” my father snorted, “it was bloody democratic of your old father to come over here and work on the Lawrence Sewer Department. What castle did he come from, will you tell us?” Loftily, she named a flea-bitten market town in Mayo. Inevitably, that generation has become far less Irish than they began.They were yet in early middle age when the old, powerfully emotional bond with Ireland suddenly dissolved, or, let us say, when it was revealed to be woven only of emotion. Men who never saw Ireland, even the few who had some notion of Irish history, set great store in the expectation that Ireland free would somehow be a glorious and transcendent fulfillment of—of what, I don’t know. I don’t think they knew, either. They tended to imagine it emerging as a sort of forty-ninth American state with a difference. They were completely out of touch with the actualities; their Irish politics were, at best, thirty years out of date. That Ireland must become a small country in the butter-and-egg business, that it was already a land in which most of the cultural evidences were secondhand English, and Victorian English at that, never occurred to them. Nor could they conceive that Irish and American interests might possibly conflict. My father once mentioned that, for the year between the Easter Rising of 1916 and the American entry into World War I, a lot of Irish-Americans were pro-German. How did they 153

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make the switch in 1917? I asked.“There wasn’t any switch,” he said.“They went on the principle that England couldn’t be right, but the United States couldn’t be wrong.”The Irish Revolution was shelved by them till the end of 1918, when they again became happily anti-British without the complication of a pro-Germanism that had never agreed with them. For the next three years they piled into big organizations like the Friends of Irish Freedom.Their fervor was so unbounded that it survived de Valera’s American tour in 1919–20 and his quarrel with the American-Irish leaders. In no small part that enthusiasm depended on Michael Collins, in whom they saw a man so much like their own best image of themselves that they took it as proof of the identity of Irish and American Irish.They were wrong. Collins was not an American. The supposed identity was tenuous in the extreme. Then suddenly came the Irish civil war, which blew everything apart. Collins’s death in the civil war was the end. Of all the men I knew as a boy, only one, a veteran of the Irish Brigade in the Boer Army, maintained any interest in Irish politics. And as for identification, what American could identify with de Valera? Like Sullivan’s fall, it was well that it happened quickly and unexpectedly, for it would have happened anyway and was best not lingered over. Ireland, instead of being a dream mutually shared with Irish nationalists, had become a foreign country—a country specially, if mildly, well regarded, but foreign nonetheless. Irishness in America petered away into a genial, largely uninterested St. Patrick’s Day recollection of faded pieties. In place of the big organizations, evaporated like the dew, there now remain a few societies that concern themselves intelligently with Irish culture and a few others that exist because for some reason they exist. No one should repine, least of all the Irish, who can now pursue their own course without worrying about what some rabid American relic of extinct Fenianism may do to Anglo-Irish relations in prosecuting his vendetta against George III and the late immortal Victoria. Is there, then, nothing to show for all that century-long struggle of the Irish to become American? Practically nothing.They became American, and that was it. There is no point in talking about this or that people’s contribution to America. The only contribution any people consciously make is what they want for themselves, and, predictably, in America that has always been what other Americans of older vintage already possess. When the newcomers get this, they throw away what they had to content themselves with before. Or, another way of putting it is, the Irish contribution was their grandchildren, no longer Irish. To answer a last objection: probably more than any other group (though not as singlehandedly as they liked to imagine) the Irish did build and staff 154


the Catholic Church in America, and insofar as they are still identifiable, they produce for it a disproportionately large number of vocations. Actually, though, the Catholic Church in this country is the clearest proof that the story is over, the connection dissolved, the alienation completed. This is never more apparent than when an American bishop addresses an “Old Irish Mother of Mine” speech to incredulous Irish ears or tries to get chummy with the Irish hierarchy. The results make Dublin and Galway seem very far away. Aye, and long ago. Like it or not, we’re on our own.

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Part Four Early Irish History and Literature

Early Irish History and Literature

Key to Abbreviations in the Essays of Part Four A Clon: The Annals of Clonmacnoise, being annals of Ireland from the earliest period to A.D. 1408, translated into English, A.D. 1627, by Conell Mageoghagan. Ed. D. Murphy. Dublin, 1896. A Cott: Cottonian Annals (formerly the Annals of Boyle). “The Annals in Cotton MS Titus A xxv.” Ed. A. M. Freeman. Review Celtique 41 (1924): 301– 30; 42 (1925): 283–305; 43 (1926): 358–84; 44 (1927): 336–61. AFM: Annála ríoghachta Éireann: Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland by the Four Masters from the earliest period to the year 1616. Ed. J. O’Donovan. 7 volumes. Dublin, 1856. Reprint, New York, 1966. AI: The Annals of Inisfallen (MS. Rawlinson B. 503). Ed. Seán Mac Airt. Dublin, 1951. A Tig: The Annals of Tigernach. Ed.W. Stokes. Review Celtique 16 (1895): 374– 419; 17 (1896): 6–33, 119–263, 337–420; 18 (1897): 9–59, 150–97, 267–303, 390–91. AU: Annála Uladh: Annals of Ulster, otherwise Annála Senait, Annals of Senat: a chronicle of Irish affairs, 431–1131, 1155–1541. Ed. W. M. Hennessy and B. MacCarthy. 4 volumes. Dublin, 1887–1901. BB: Facsimile of the Book of Ballymote. Ed. R. Atkinson. Dublin,1887. CGH: Corpus Genealogiarum Hiberniae I. Ed. M. A. O’Brien. Dublin, 1962. CS: Chronicon Scotorum: a chronicle of Irish affairs from the earliest times to A.D. 1135, with a supplement, 1141–50. Ed.W. M. Hennessy. London, 1866. Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh (War of the Gaedhill with the Gaill). Ed. and trans. J. H.Todd. London, 1867. EIHM: Early Irish History and Mythology. Ed. T. F. O’Rahilly. Dublin, 1946. Lec: Facsimile of the Book of Lecan. Ed. K. Mulchrone. Dublin, 1937. LL: Lebor Laignech [The Book of Leinster]. Ed. R. I. Best, O. Bergin, and M. A. O’Brien. 5 fascicles. Dublin, 1954–67. LM: Leabhar Muimhneach [Book of Munster]. Ed. T. Ó Donnchadha. Dublin, 1940. LU: Lebor na hUidre [Book of the Dun Cow]. Ed. R. I. Best and O. Bergin. Dublin, 1929. Misc A: Miscellaneous Irish Annals A.D. 1114–1437. Ed. Séamus Ó hInnse. Dublin, 1947. Rawl B 502: Rawlinson B. 502, A Collection of Pieces in Prose and Verse in the Irish Language [In Facsimile]. Ed. K. Meyer. Oxford, 1909. Silva Gadelica: Silva Gadelica. Ed. S. H. O’Grady. 2 volumes. London, 1892. T Frag: Annals of Ireland.Three Fragments. Ed. J. O’Donovan. Dublin, 1860. YBL: Facsimile of the Yellow Book of Lecan. Ed. R. Atkinson. Dublin, 1896. 158

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14 Early Irish History and Pseudo-History

W

hatever our special concerns may be with Celtic or Irish Studies, we must all be conscious that we are working within a large field. We know that it is large; we do not know how large. It is a field whose boundaries are nowhere defined. We know that it is full of barely exploited resources, but we do not know how rich it is or what fresh discoveries it may yet be made to yield. All we know for sure is that we have every reason for confident expectation. A few considerations suffice to justify that expectation. One is the record of the undeniable achievements already made in modern Irish history, in Celtic linguistics, in the critical examination of Celtic and Anglo-Irish literatures, in Irish ecclesiastical history, and in several less thoroughly explored aspects of our general range of studies. A second is to bear in mind how recent most of these achievements are. Fifty years ago the pickings were slim and were still often entangled with all too abundant propagandistic apologetics. A century ago most of these areas of study were untouched by serious modern scholarship, and in the others serious scholarship was just beginning.Which brings us to a third consideration: that the present sum of accomplishment is all the more remarkable when we recollect that for all aspects and at all stages it represents the work of too few people. What can be achieved when, and if, we attract a normal complement of scholars to the field is indeed a subject for pleasant speculation. To be sure there are disadvantages inherent in this general condition of First published in Studia Hibernica 3 (1963): 113–27.

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incompleteness. Discussion of them will form a large section of this paper. But for the moment let us consider the advantages implicit in our late start. If by comparison with what exists in other fields we find that in ours the seventeenth-century job of scholarship was never done, that the eighteenthcentury job was not more than faintly and occasionally attempted, that the nineteenth-century job was not even consecutively outlined, and that the twentieth-century job still leaves much to be desired even within its own frame of reference, there is also the fact that we do not have to expend a large portion of our limited manpower in undoing the work of our predecessors. There is work for all, more than enough for every recruit we can enlist, and for the most part it can be work of sound originality. None of us will be forced to spend three-quarters of his working life checking other scholars’ footnotes.Anybody in the field, with a reasonable amount of imagination and enterprise, can make real discoveries, significant contributions. There is no corner of the field where you can dig and not strike pay-dirt. We should always remember that we are the fortunate generation. So much for happy generalizations. When we come down to specific cases, to the actual conditions presently obtaining in any particular area of the field, we find that these conditions are by no means so enviable, and in what should apply to the field as a structural whole they are not good at all. It is one thing to know that the ground beneath your feet is crossed and recrossed by rich veins of ore. It is quite another to mine the ore and refine it. Time is needed for that, and money and much apparatus and personnel, and steady, determined cooperation.With regard to any of these our blessings have not been signal. We own the field; we know it is a rich one; we have many samples to show how promising is its wealth; but compared with our colleagues in other fields we are still miserably poor. I would submit to you that our poverty is mostly our own fault.We have not gone about the task the right way. We have never visualized this field in its entirety. Our special areas of study are usually too small and are needlessly separated from one another, with the result that each of us is apt to depend upon too limited a body of information. Most of our historians know too little about Celtic and Anglo-Irish literature. Few of our students or critics of literature know much about Irish history. The celticists and linguists, though their scholarship is generally the most professional within the field, all too seldom have shown sufficient interest in the historical or literary content of what they so skillfully edit. As a rule we do not know enough about the areas that impinge, or should impinge, on our own to ask relevant information from them. How often do we know whom to ask? It is scarcely to our credit that these conditions which have existed for decades have not been remedied before now. 160

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We can rejoice then that a movement in the right direction, a movement towards unity and cooperation and the exchange of information and ideas, has at last begun.The formation of the American Committee for Irish Studies, and the unexpectedly large response it has evoked, is the most heartening and hopeful thing that has happened to us in years. It is up to every one of us to do his best that these hopes may be speedily and widely fulfilled. You may well disagree with the foregoing description of the present state of things, for one can of course point to individual scholars here and there within the field whose interests or competence is by no means so restricted. There are exceptions to prove any rule: and any rule is ultimately only a working generalization.Yet I think you will agree that conditions are considerably less than ideal. And I would suggest that a practical, relevant measure of the gap between the actual and the possible can be obtained by comparing what we possess with what exists in the field of English studies. A student of English literature has to know English history. And he can know it. An English historian had better provide himself with a working knowledge of English literature, at least for his own period and what leads up to it; and again that knowledge is readily available to him. English studies are in effect an organic, unified whole.The entire topography is charted on good maps. There are reliable guides to all the roads and most of the by-ways. Irish and Celtic studies should be even more obviously a unified whole. The number of outside influences is smaller.The interior trends, at least up to the seventeenth century, are longer. For several aspects, medieval literature, for example, the available evidence is more complete.Yet to pretend that our studies either form a whole or reveal one would be a mockery. To return to the comparison with English studies, suppose that, with one large exception, everything in English history and English literature had been examined and discussed as thoroughly, or at least as doggedly, as it now has been. Suppose the exception were Anglo-Saxon history. Let us even imagine that all the existing documents for that history were known and that nearly all of them had been edited, with one degree of skill or another, and had mostly been translated into modern English. For this comparison we will even allow that a fair number of essays and monographs on various aspects of the Anglo-Saxon problem had been published, some of them brilliant, few devoid of at least one valuable insight into the subject. But still there would be no Anglo-Saxon history. Everything reliable would start with 1066. If this were the case, who could ever be sure about anything in English history or literature for four or five centuries after 1066? Could we ever be certain that any piece of evidence we might examine was or was not a sur161


vival from Anglo-Saxon times or the result of a development in which an Anglo-Saxon element was important? We could not. And if English medieval studies were thus uncertain, there would also be a factor of nagging uncertainty in the modern material, whose origin could be traced in whole or in part to the medieval period. Actually this parallel is misleading because it is insufficient. The AngloNorman conquest of Ireland was by no means so decisive in its effects as the Norman conquest of England. It had a century of bounding success, less than a century of sunny prime; then it collapsed. There is nothing in English history to parallel the native recovery in Ireland in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.To go back somewhat farther, there is nothing in Irish history comparable to the Anglo-Saxon invasion of the fifth century. The culture that reasserted itself in the fourteenth century and continued viable, though maimed and all too often chaotic, down to the early-seventeenth century was but the latest stage of the culture that had existed continuously and strongly since prehistoric times. It was so instinct in the native population and was smashed to pieces at so recent a date in history that, though we do not know for certain what survives from it, we can be sure that much does survive if only below the level of consciousness. It is true that for post-Norman Ireland—Ireland, say, from 1170 to 1600—we have a fair amount of good modern historical writing. If you examine it, however, you will find that about eighty percent of it is based on Norman and English sources. The native history for that period is almost as poorly attended to as is pre-Norman history. If you want proof of this, examine volumes III to VI of the Annals of the Four Masters and compare what you find with, say, Edmund Curtis’s History of Medieval Ireland— not really a very good survey but the best we have. How much of the information in the Four Masters is reflected even faintly in Curtis’s book? At a generous estimate, a third. Since Curtis was a good historian and since, though his chief interest was in Norman Ireland, he was by no means hostile or insensitive to the Irish material, can we take it for granted that what he neglected is not of much importance anyway? By no means. We do not know whether it is important or not because nobody in our time has ever tried to make continuous sense of it.To be sure the annals have been mined for many small studies. The various Irish journals are full of them—many of them, incidentally, done two or three times over because, for lack of bibliographies, the later authors were unaware of the previous studies. In most cases, however, these short essays do not amount to much. They have no adequate frame of reference within which they can be placed and tested. They are read without one; they were written without one. Or again, shifting the argument slightly, look at the vast body of bardic poetry, a great quan162

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tity of which is still unedited. How much of it can be made to yield valuable historical information, political and social? How many poems are still obscure for want of an intelligible historical background? One can go on posing question after question. We should pose them. If we pose enough of them, often enough, we shall be driven to doing something practical about getting the answers. Let us now consider two facts, each in its way unique.The first is that for at least a thousand years, and perhaps even more, before the onset of the Viking raids in the early-ninth century, Ireland had remained uninvaded. We can perhaps even extend the period because the Viking invasion of Ireland, catastrophic as it was, was by far a more limited affair than either of the Danish conquests in England.The Viking kingdoms in Ireland were microscopic compared to the Danelaw; there was no parallel in Ireland for Knut. As for the prehistoric invasions, the later ones at least were apparently of like by like, of one Celtic people by another with very much the same language and institutions. Thus the culture that existed in Ireland in the early historical period was, if essentially barbaric and certainly archaic, vigorous, unimpaired, and extraordinarily indigenous. As we know, it was also proudly self-conscious. The second thing to consider is that of the countries that lay outside the Roman Empire or its sphere of influence Ireland was the first to be Christianized. The consequences of that were many. There were of course no towns in Ireland, no heritage of Roman order and Roman law, and therefore a diocesan organization for the church was impossible.The church for the first time had to deal with an unbroken culture that was intensely foreign to it.There had to be compromises. It is quite evident that the church compromised and in doing so produced a new ecclesiastical set-up suited to Irish and Scottish conditions. That compromise could not of course be a final solution. Ultimately it would have to be readjusted in favour of the greater power, the continually expanding Roman church; but it existed for a long time and produced some very curious results. One of these results, plainly, was a sudden great release of long-thwarted energies.The native society was, as we know, rigidly stratified and familial. A man was what he was chiefly in terms of his heredity and his tribe. The population seems to have been stable; and therefore growth within it would tend to be from the top downwards, for the conditions for survival were much better at the top than they were lower down. In a famine the nobles are the last to starve. One of the most constant, continuing phenomena of Irish life was that of the great families spreading outwards, displacing their older clients, and themselves constantly dropping off-shoots down into 163


the peasantry. The society was, then, one in which to fall was easy, to rise most difficult. Through this ancient, geologically concreted stratification Christianity broke open a great vertical fissure. Anybody could become a monk or priest or nun. Any monk or nun might become an abbot or abbess or the founder of a new church. More to the point, within the church anyone with the talent for it could become learned. In the lay society learning was a class prerogative. It belonged to the hereditary literati. But in the church, with its great need for books and records and for scribes to copy or compose them, there would be no standing on ceremony of birth or rank. If the peasant’s son could learn to read and write, to master Latin, let him by all means learn; and thus one who as a layman would scarcely be fit to hold a fili’s horse would become as a cleric a man who might well look down on the fili as an obsolete purveyor of antiquated superstition and useless knowledge. On the continent the church was to some degree a conservative force intent on preserving some semblance of Roman law and order. In Ireland Christianity, at least in the early centuries of its mission, must have been wholly revolutionary—a sort of seventh-century Red China with all the fervor of the newest and rawest revolution of its time. No wonder then that it poured missionaries and scholars abroad for two centuries or that it had them to offer. No wonder it took a different line from Rome. And no wonder either that by the eighth century the toparchs of the old order had begun to move in on it and to annex it as thoroughly as they did. It was well worth capturing. A century or two more and we find the poets, the filid, now pious Christians, singing once more of the right order of things, the sacred order that must not be broken: Let the king’s son be a king; let the wright’s son be a wright; let the priest’s son be a priest. The fissure had closed. The revolution was over. One proof of this seems to have been the composition of that corpus of saints’ genealogies now preserved in several texts—for example in Rawlinson B. 502 and the Book of Ballymote— which I think had but one real purpose, to conceal forever the fact that some of the notable early clerics had been unpalatably plebeian. The consequences of the Christian revolution did not of course thereupon cease.The biggest consequence of all was the ending of Irish isolation. No matter how exotic a member of the Christian community Ireland may have been, it was a member. It was no longer a remote pagan Ogygia on the extreme western verge. It had become part of Europe.The traffic with the continent worked both ways. If Irish missionaries and scholars went abroad, they could also come back; and we know the names of some who did.The Irish communities in France and Germany and Switzerland were clearly in correspondence with the monasteries at home. Kings sometimes went 164

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to Rome on pilgrimage.We can be sure they did not travel without attendants. In other words, the Irish knew what was going on on the continent. One thing they certainly knew about was the rise of the Holy Roman Empire, which means that like all other European peoples they knew about Charlemagne.1 After Charlemagne’s death in 814 they would have received and admired the great and growing body of legend that celebrated him and his court. By the beginning of the tenth century there is strong evidence that the idea of imitating Charlemagne had occurred to several kings in Ireland, as it was indeed occurring to kings everywhere in the western world. I would argue that the so-called High Kingship of Ireland—which as Professor D.A. Binchy has lately shown2 certainly did not exist before the middle of the ninth century—is to be understood chiefly in terms of that imitation. My own belief, indeed, is that the first actual High King was Brian Bóroimhe, from 1003 to 1014; and of him it is to be noted that when, in 1005, he left twenty-two ounces of gold on the high altar at Armagh his scribe Máel Suthain wrote a note in the margin of the Book of Armagh. The last sentence of the note is relevant here. It begins: Ego scripsi, id est Caluus Perennis, in conspectu Briani imperatoris Scotorum . . . “I, Máel Suthain, wrote this in the sight of Brian, Emperor of the Irish.” That, I think, is the true translation of árd-rí Érenn—Emperor of the Irish. This idea came to me only recently while I was trying to devise a theory which might account for the fact that the annals as we have them show clear evidence of extensive revision and that most of the revision seems directed towards establishing an elaborate basis for certain claims in regard to the High Kingship or, to use the earlier title, the kingship of Tara.The revision, I may say, was highly successful. It is the source of that traditional picture of the Irish polity which is stated as fact in all later medieval documents that deal with the subject, and which was accepted almost without question by Keating, by Roderic O’Flaherty, by Charles O’Conor in the eighteenth century, by everybody in the nineteenth century, and, though somewhat more guardedly, by quite a few scholars in this century. Most of you are familiar with that concocted tradition, but we may remind ourselves of its broad outlines. It was a large and not excessively intricate design in which the central element was the High King. The High King, or king of Tara, was at once overlord of the provincial kings, the ultimate enforcer of order within the realm, and the highest appeal judge in law. Early in his reign (and incidentally we are never given any clear account of how he was chosen) he secured the submission of the provincial kings when he made a sun-wise circuit of the country and took the hostages of each province. If he failed to take the hostages of any province he was denied the full title and was called instead ard-rí co fressabra, “High King 165


with opposition.” But since this term does not appear before the mideleventh century, that is, until after the usurpation of the office by Brian Bóroimhe, king of Munster, it would seem plain that the circuit and the taking of hostages were always successfully performed. This over-kingship of Ireland was an office of the greatest antiquity; and all but a few scattered sources maintain that from the time of Eochaid Mugmedón, fourth-century ancestor of the Uí Néill and the Connachta, it had belonged exclusively to his posterity.The Connachta indeed were shut out after the death of Ailill Molt in 482. Thereafter, till Brian’s usurpation in 1003, it was the sole monopoly of the Uí Néill, the descendants of Niall of the Nine Hostages who supposedly died in 405 or thereabout.At first six Uí Néill kindreds contended for the title, but from 734 its possession was restricted to two lines, Cenél Éogain, the most powerful of the Northern Uí Néill, and Clann Colmáin Móir, the dominant line among the Southern Uí Néill.These two regularly—and we are apparently to assume for the most part peacefully— interchanged the High Kingship alternately from 734 to 1002. Their hold on it was broken only once during that period, by the intruded reign of Conghalach mac Máele Mithigh, king of Brega, who was also of the Southern Uí Néill and who reigned as High King from 944 to 956, after which the alternation was immediately resumed. Such has been the received tradition. It is one we might well prefer to believe since it credits the Irish with a capacity for orderly and comprehensive government most unusual in a European people of that time. But what and how good is the evidence that supports the tradition? That question has been raised from time to time in the past. The usual answers have been to point to the fact of the tradition and of its unquestioning acceptance by such erudite older writers as Keating and O’Flaherty or to cite the frequent and pre-eminent references to the kings of Tara in the Irish annals or to refer to the numerous early documents in which the tradition is expounded, as for example the Book of Rights, the Bórama, the tract Do Fhlathiusaib Érenn, or the famous poem on the circuit of Ireland by Muirchertach of the Leather Cloaks. None of this evidence is to be trusted very far. In view of some of the other traditions that were for long unquestioningly accepted in Ireland, to appeal to the fact of tradition is a rather perilous means of substantiation. As for the annals, I will speak of them shortly. The Book of Rights, once described by that truly great scholar Eoin MacNeill as the “constitution” of pre-Norman Ireland, is now being reedited by Professor Myles Dillon; and after his edition appears I do not think we shall hear any more such high evaluations of the text. Professor Binchy has pointed out,3 and will shortly demonstrate, that the poem on Muirchertach was composed perhaps two hundred years after the supposed event 166

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it celebrates and is indeed but one more twelfth-century forgery of an all too familiar type. The Bórama and the tract on the kingship of Ireland are undoubtedly earlier—my guess would be tenth century—but they are also inventions, frequently self-contradicting propaganda for the cause.The truth seems to be that the tradition as we have it as well as most of the evidence for it draws heavily upon the example and legends of Brian Bóroimhe, the first man who actually succeeded in being the Irish Charlemagne. The document most basic to the tradition, the Book of Rights, was I think composed for Brian’s grandson Muirchertach and very likely dates from the first decade of the twelfth century. Not, mind you, that the whole business began with Brian.The arguments for the High Kingship, or rather for the kingship of Tara being of right the over-kingship of Ireland, had been building up for at least a century and a half before Brian’s usurpation. A good deal of the process is reflected in the annals, and we can infer still more of it by observing where and how the annals have been rewritten, for I believe it can be shown that everything in the annals up to about 590 and a large number of entries from thence to 735 (the entry on Bede’s death) were either freshly composed or wholly revised not earlier than the latter half of the ninth century. Nor does the rewriting stop at 735. So extensive was the revision of historical evidence that we have, I would say, about as much chance of recovering the whole truth about early Christian Ireland as a historian five hundred years from now would have if he were trying to reconstruct the history of Russia in the twentieth century from broken sets of different editions of the Soviet Encyclopedia. Not that that historian’s task would be quite hopeless. Eighty or ninety percent of the information in the encyclopedias would be sound enough. In the annals too we shall find that most of the information, at least from the early-seventh century on, is reliable, because it is about matters with which the revisionists were not concerned. But everything that deals with the kingship of Tara, particularly in the early centuries, or with the rise or the identity of the Uí Néill, or with the two chief ecclesiastical centers in Ireland, Armagh and Clonmacnois, can only be regarded with wary suspicion. No doubt even a large portion of this information is genuine. It will, however, be a long while before we shall be able to say with confidence what is reliable and what has been tampered with or falsified. To be sure, the new tradition was not manufactured out of whole cloth. There was a kingship of Tara, and it was a very important kingship indeed. Though in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries it was essentially, as Professor Binchy has remarked, the over-kingship of the Uí Néill, the dominant lords of the northern half of Ireland, the power of the Uí Néill had grown steadily (from what beginnings we do not know) till by the ninth 167


century they dominated all Ulster and the Midlands and generally overawed Connacht and Leinster as well.The remaining test, therefore, of their claim to the suzerainty of all Ireland was the ability also to dominate Munster. Yet the annals tell of only three kings of Tara, all of Clann Colmáin, who between them took the hostages of Munster four times in eighty-seven years—Máel Sechnaill mac Máelruanaid in 854 and 856, his son Flann Sinna in 882, and his grandson Donnchad mac Flainn in 941. Donnchad accomplished this late in a long reign (919–44) and with the help of Muirchertach, king of Ailech, Flann took the hostages very early on in a still longer reign (879–916) and may well have taken them again after the battle of Belach Mugna in 908, though the annals do not say he did.4 It is interesting that there is no consistency about the titles applied to these kings. At his death AU and CS call Máel Sechnaill rí Érend uile, “king of all Ireland”; Flann is called rí Temrach by AU, rí Éreann uile by CS, and rí Herend by AI; Donnchad, rí Temrach by AU, rí Érenn by CS. “King of Ireland” and “king of Tara” are of course titles regularly applied to kings who never went near Munster. As for the term ard-rí hÉrenn, “High King of Ireland,” I have discovered it only once before the time of Brian Bóroimhe, at 980 in AU, where it refers to Domnall Ua Néill, who took the hostages of Connacht and Leinster but not those of Munster. A Tig, CS, and AI call him rí Temrach.5 Thus, though from an early period in the annals “king of Tara” and “king of Ireland” are used as interchangeable terms, it is clear that the latter is not descriptive of an actuality. Neither for that matter is “king of Tara.”The kings of the Uí Néill did not reside at Tara. The place had been deserted from some time in the sixth century. Earlier it would appear to have been the site associated with a great priest-kingship; and I have little doubt that as we find the title “king of Tara” used in Christian times it represents at once an antiquarian revival and a claim to the possession of the national prestige that had surrounded the pagan priest-kingship.The Uí Néill could claim it because Tara now lay within their territory. In any case the office had almost certainly not been a territorial kingship, and eligibility for it had not been restricted to one ruling stock.6 Rather the pagan priest-king had been the supreme religious figure in the country. It was of course the prestige and not the substance of the office which the Uí Néill sought to revive for their own benefit. And who, by the way, were the Uí Néill? If we look at their genealogies we find a very neat explanation. They were some eight tribes descended from Niall of the Nine Hostages and located in western Ulster and the Midlands.They admitted to close kingship with the Connachta and Airgialla but claimed superiority over both.The Northern Uí Néill comprised three tribes, Cenél Conaill, Cenél Éogain, and Cenél Énnae, the last quite unim168

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portant. The early pedigrees of the five Southern Uí Néill tribes are less clear than those of their northern cousins, and it is difficult to determine just where some of their territories lay. By the late-seventh century the progeny of Niall’s son Conall Cremthainne—Clann Colmáin Móir of Mide and Sil Áeda Sláine of Brega—were dominant among the Southern Uí Néill, but curiously these two lines, with a common ancestor as late as Diarmait mac Cerbaill (d. 565), had no common tribal name.That is only one of the curiosities that manifest themselves when we examine the account of Uí Néill origins and early Christian generations. Neatness, we find, was achieved at the cost of considerable question-begging, ambiguity, and outright impossibility. The Uí Néill genealogies do not mesh with others. The tribal histories of the Laigin and Ulaid, the earliest we have, recount temporal relationships between their kings and the immediate ancestors of Niall which can only be explained by the assumption that Niall’s pedigree was altered and lengthened after these histories were written. From point to point the ambiguity grows. The fact is, we know less about the origin of the Uí Néill, and therefore of the Connachta and Airgialla, than of any other major people in Ireland. The Uí Néill emerge into history like a school of cuttlefish from a large ink-cloud of their own manufacture; and clouds and ink continued to be manufactured by them or for them throughout their long career. Only one thing seems consistent, their claim of sole right to the kingship of Tara. In the early historical period that claim was as new as it was vast. To support it history had to be rewritten. We can see the extent to which this was done if we look at what I would call the Irish World Annals.7 This text, based on Bede’s Chronicle, with additions from Jerome, Marcellinus, Prosper, and so on, contains Irish material from Lebor Gabála, Do Fhlathiusaib Érenn, and the original annals and purports to trace Irish history from the time of the Flood.The pre-Patrician Irish material is surprisingly scanty, the chief elements being a regnal list of Ulaid from the foundation of Emain Macha to its fall and a whittled-down list of the kings of Tara from which, in the Christian era, names not of the Uí Néill-Connachta-Airgialla ancestry have been deleted.The Irish World Annals have entirely replaced the original annalistic texts up to about 590 and from then to 735 fit like a sleeve over what remains of the true annals. Four purposes are relentlessly pursued. The sole domination of Tara by the Uí Néill is dated from the first century A.D.; the fall of Emain Macha, and thus the Uí Néill conquest of central Ulster, is placed at A.D. 327 instead of somewhere about the middle of the fifth century, where earlier records certainly put it; the latest version of the Uí Néill regnal lists and pedigrees is woven into the annals; and Patrick is associated with the Uí Néill and Tara. By this last is signalized the unity 169


of the ambitions of the Uí Néill and those of Armagh which, from very early on, was pushing its claim to the ecclesiastical primacy of Ireland. Considering what bare-faced lies these inventions must have seemed when they were first advanced, you may wonder how the Uí Néill could carry them off. One reason, certainly, was that mutuality of interests between the great kings and the great monasteries I have just referred to. All existing texts of the early annals would seem to fall into three recensions, each associated with a great monastery—the Ulster Version (the Annals of Ulster, the Cottonian Annals, and the misnamed “Annals of Tigernach”) with Armagh, the Annals of Inisfallen perhaps originally with Emly, and all the others with Clonmacnois. Apart from interpolations it would appear that up to 910 all the annals are but selective versions of one common source, a text very likely composed in that year and both fuller and more national in its purview than any of the recensions derived from it. My guess is that it was composed in some monastery associated with Armagh but in territory within the Southern Uí Néill sphere of influence. Louth is a distinct possibility. Thus, despite occasional differences of emphasis, all versions of the early annals tell the same essential story and do not offer competing accounts of pre-tenth-century history. Nevertheless, we do not lack evidence for the existence of older and quite different traditions about the kingship of Tara and the Christianization of Ireland. Much can be gleaned from contradictions within the annals themselves or from disagreements between the annals and such supporting documents as the regnal lists, the tribal histories, ex post facto prophecies like Baile Cuind and Baile in Scáil, and from the early lives of Patrick.We can see how the story kept changing, the claims expanding, from century to century. Each later version was meant to outmode and replace its predecessors, but always some of the older documents survived. So did certain dilemmas consequent on the difficulty of telling too many lies all at once. For example, the exact order and identity of the kings of Tara in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries were never wholly straightened out.The exact regnal years of the early kings remained vague. And as for the key date of all, the year from which the beginning of actual Irish history has always been counted, the year of Patrick’s arrival, there were so many conflicting accounts and traditions that, though 432 was soon agreed on and generally accepted, this exact definition could only be maintained by creating new vagueness for a hundred years on either side of the date—which reminds us that the Irish World Annals had still another purpose, deliberate obfuscation. But then, of course, the Irish literati always had natural talents in that direction. Needless to say, what I have offered in this paper is not to be taken as fact. It is theory and hypothesis. I am sure of certain things. I am sure, for 170

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instance, of some of the discoveries I have chanced upon about the nature and structure of the annals and the Irish World Annals. I am reasonably confident that some aspects of the arguments I have offered here today will stand up pretty well. But frankly I do not ever expect to see hypothesis replaced by universally accepted fact. All we can hope for are better and better theories that take in more evidence and account for it more satisfactorily. Ultimately the theories ought to be quite good because there is so much evidence and because, though in some very curious ways, it is both wide-ranging and unified. Nearly everything one touches turns out to have been affected by the ever-developing inventions of the historical revisionists. Even the myths and sagas are not exempt, and certainly Irish hagiography is full of still decipherable political overtones. All of which should remind us that in medieval Ireland there were no categorical divisions between history and literature or between sacred and profane fictioneering.The same men wrote them all impartially. And when we approach what is, after all, the very fount and centre of all our studies we would also do well to lay aside interdisciplinary prejudices. A last word. It would be a bad mistake to assume that because the old, abnormally static picture of pre-Norman Ireland has been got rid of research is now going to be easier. On the contrary, it is going to be much more difficult. We no longer have a definite framework against which to arrange our ideas. Still we have achieved a great liberation. We no longer know what isn’t so and never was.

Notes Paper read at the inaugural meeting of the American Committee for Irish Studies (at the convention of the Modern Language Association of America), Chicago, December 27, 1961. 1. Since this paper was read, Professor Binchy has called to my attention a passage in Einhard’s Vita Karoli Magni, cap. 16, where it is said that Irish kings (Scotorian . . . reges), impressed by his gifts (presumably to Irish foundations), wrote to Charlemagne of their own will and declared that they would consider none but him their lord, and themselves his subjects and servants. Einhard (d. 840) adds that their letters to this effect were extant. 2. “The origins of the so-called High-Kingship,” Statutory Lecture, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1959. 3. D. A. Binchy, “The Fair of Tailtiu and the Feast of Tara,” Ériu 18:120. 4. A fourth might be Máel Sechnaill’s grandfather, Donnchad mac Domnaill (778– 97). AFM S.A. 770 ( = 775) describes an invasion of Munster which resulted in the Munstermen giving Donnchad “his own demand” (do beartsat iaramh a rér dó). AU, the only other source for the event, says nothing of his asking or getting anything.We may take it that Donnchad was then effectively king of Tara, though his predecessor, Niall Frossach, apparently a weak king, did not die till 778. 171

Early Irish History and Literature 5. I have not cited AFM’s usage in this matter because it is so late and in certain ways so artificial a text. Needless to say, its compilers fully accepted the legends about the High Kingship. See AFM 2:643, where the tale of Muirchertach of the Leather Cloaks is woven into the text as if it were genuine information. 6.The pre-Patrician regnal list of Tara is heavily weighted in favour of the Uí Néill ancestry from about the beginning of the Christian era, but even thereafter it admits Ulaid, Laigin, Dál nAraide, Érainn, and Éoganacht names. More to the point is the testimony of the Ulaid and Laigin tribal histories which claim kings of Tara in the fifth and sixth centuries. See Rawl B 116 b 54 (in the poem Nidu dir dermait), where the last four Laigin kings of Tara are Bressal Bélach (d. AU-435), Muiredach Sníthe, who would seem to be of the same generation, Nad Buidb, and Móenech [sic] mac Cairthinn. Several paternities can be suggested for the two latter, all of which would place them later than Bressal Bélach. Móenech may possibly be the mysterious filius Coethinn filii Coelboth of AU-446 but more likely is son of Cairthenn (or Mac Cairthinn) Muaich of Uí Máil. In this case his floruit would be mid-sixth century. The Ulaid (Rawl B 156 b 32–44) claimed Muiredach Muinderg, his son Carrell, and his grandson Báetán, who died after a career of triumph in 581. I do not think there can be much doubt that Báetán was the strongest Irish king of his time. At this point the annals are extremely vague on the kings of Tara.The death of the joint-kings, Báetán mac Muirchertaig and Eochaid mac Domnaill, both of Cenél Éogain, is put at 572. The regnal lists normally put Ainmire mac Sétrai of Cenél Conaill next, but his death dates in AU are 569 (main hand) and 576 (secondary hand).The succeeding king, Báetán mac Nimneda of Cenél Conaill, dies in 585 after a one-year reign. I would suggest that the two Uí Néill Báetáns and the gap between them are signs of an attempt to conceal the fact that Báetán mac Cairill was then the recognized king of Tara. The much more shadowy Éoganacht and Dál nAraide claims also deserves examination. 7. This new term is necessary to distinguish my concept of the text from T. F. O’Rahilly’s “Irish World Chronicle.” In his view the text was merely a preface to the annals and therefore ended at 430. Though he questioned many of their early entries, he accepted the general historicity of the fifth- and sixth-century annals. I would assume that they contain a considerable amount of genuine material taken over from the annalistic texts the Irish World Annals replaced, but this has been so subject to revision, rearrangement, and interpolation that I doubt we shall ever be able confidently to separate the real from the false. On the other hand, I hope to show that the apparent division at 430–31 is merely editorial and is quite late.

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The Rise of the Dál Cais

15 The Rise of the Dál Cais

T

he sudden rise of the Dál Cais to the summit of power in Munster, and shortly thereafter to the overkingship of Ireland, was plainly an event of revolutionary import in Irish history. To measure its significance, however, and to understand the nature of the revolution, would require that we be able to state confidently what long-standing condition of things the revolution overturned. In fact, because the general context of early Irish history is still so vague, we are a long way from being able to make any such statement. We can only guess and suggest, puzzling over the battered and all too often fragmented evidence, and often taking the longest way round in hopes that it prove a short way home. With due apologies to the reader, this circumambulatory and highly theoretical explanation of how the Dál Cais may have risen is therefore offered. In brief summary, my theory is that they got their start, probably in the early tenth century, as protégés of the Midhe kings of Tara who resorted to a number of devices to keep Munster divided and weak; that for this purpose the Uí Néill created the sub-kingdom of Thomond; and that when the Uí Néill power suddenly declined in the mid-century, the Dál Cais were already strong enough to make the rest of the ascent on their own.1 A united Munster, as it was certainly the largest, should always have been the strongest single political unit in pre-Norman Ireland. However, the annals indicate that from the death of Fedelmid mac Crimthainn in 847 to about 980, when Brian won full control, Munster was mostly very weak. It must, therefore, have been mostly divided. Evidently only a very strong king First published in Étienne Rynne, ed. North Munster Studies, Essays in Commemoration of Monsignor Michael Moloney. Limerick: Thomond Archeological Society, 1967. 230–41.

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of Cashel could command the loyalties of all or most of the Éoganachta and enforce obedience upon the more than twenty tribes and tribal groupings, free and unfree, that populated the province. Of course the reward of such strength would be large, for a Munster so united would automatically control Osraige, as it were by mere gravitation; and the combined forces of Munster and Osraige would in turn dominate west and south Leinster, south Connacht, and the flat territories east of the Shannon, particularly Delbna and Cenél Fiachach, where there was no natural boundary between Munster and Midhe. All this is illustrated in what the annals tell us of Fedelmid. What he achieved—and perhaps much earlier, Cathal mac Finguine— was much like Brian’s accomplishment as king of Munster and was indeed the more remarkable since in his time the Uí Néill were a buoyantly rising power. In his heyday Fedelmid clearly dominated the southern half of Ireland. Munster sources claim that he took the kingship of Ireland from Niall Caille in 838. He certainly showed himself stronger than Niall on several occasions, especially in 840, when, if we can trust all that is in the annals for that year, he invaded Midhe and Brega, encamped at Tara, where he slew a man who was probably a northern rídamna Erenn, captured Niall’s queen and her train, and took the hostages of Midhe and Connacht. If he was not at that moment de facto king of Ireland, no one else was either.That year, however, saw the highwater-mark both of his own career and of Éoganacht Munster. He was then at least middle-aged, and besides he was up against the dilemma of all who would attack the Uí Néill kingship of Tara before the partnership of Clann Colmáin Móir of Midhe and Cenél Éogain of Ailech began to fall apart. Though that alliance was always an uneasy one, each partner seems to have been secure in its own territory, and the territories lay in tandem. Had Fedelmid been able to actually conquer Midhe, not just to discomfort it, and to lay claim to the kingship of Tara, he would have been faced both with the hostility of the defeated population and the angry, unbroken power of the North. By contrast, Munster had no neighbours to the south and west and only old enemies to the north and east. As long then as the Uí Néill power remained high a policy of aggression was impractical for Munster, for though it might bring many brief successes no decisive victory was possible. The security of the province would, therefore, rest upon the ability to maintain optimum size and strength by means of strong internal unity, and thus to stand successfully on the defensive. The only existing institution through which unity could be achieved was the kingship of Cashel, but this apparently had become inadequate except in the hands of an unusual man. By all rights even a mediocre king of Cashel ought to have been among the three or four most prominent figures in the country. Few were. Indeed there seems almost no limit to the obscurity 174


possible to a holder of that office. Of the fifteen kings who ruled during the 115 years after Fedelmid, there are nine for whom no activities whatsoever are reported; one, Lorccan mac Condligáin who succeeded in 922, has not even a death notice; and in the case of Fergráid, who died in 961, we cannot be sure of his father’s name, let alone of his pedigree, for the regnal lists call him Fergráid mac Ailgenáin, and the annals, Fergráid mac Cléirig. More curious still is the intermittency of the office. There seems to have been no king of Cashel at all from 853 to 856, in 860, from 909 to 914, and for an uncertain period from about 924 or 931 to 936 or 939. How succession was determined is also unclear. Of these fifteen kings, eight were of Clann Faílbe Flainn of Éoganacht Caisil, one of Cenél Fingín of Éoganacht Caisil (in the same sept but not the same family as Fedelmid), one of Éoganacht Locha Léin in West Munster, one of Uí Echach Muman in Desmond.The ancestries of four—Cenn-fáelad úa Muchtigeirn, Cormac mac Cuilennáin, Flaithbertach mac Inmainén, and the shadowy Fergráid— are either unknown or are open to serious doubt. None of the tribes from which kings of known ancestry came were closely related to each other. Cenél Fingín and Clann Faílbe Flainn had diverged in the early seventh century, while the genealogical connection of Éoganacht Locha Léin and Uí Echach Muman (Éoganacht Raithlind) with each other, and of both with Éoganacht Caisil, was prehistoric. Even within Clann Faílbe Flainn the eight kings came from four different families whose common ancestor would have flourished in the mid-eighth century.Though two of the eight were brothers and two, in different lines, were sons of preceding kings, it is evident that succession to Cashel was still a long way from being restricted to one family within one kindred as in Midhe and Ailech, or even to one tribe as in Leinster. Connacht and Leinster are the only provinces that can be realistically compared with Munster. Ulidia was too small, Airgialla too indistinct; and even if we were to count the territories of the Northern Uí Néill and Southern Uí Néill as provinces, the fact that their over-kings were eligible for Tara would put them in a different class. Conditions in Connacht and Leinster were, however, quite different from those pertaining in Munster. In Connacht the provincial kingship, formerly shared with Uí Fiachrach, had been held only by Uí Briúin since 773, within Uí Briúin by Síl Muiredaig since 777, and within Síl Muiredaig by the line ancestral to the O’Connors since 872. (Significantly, though, kings of the distantly and perhaps even artificially related Uí Briúin Breifne line were to break into the succession from 956 on. The first of them, Fergal úa Ruairc, was the contemporary and enemy of Mathgamain mac Cennétig, the first Dál Cais king of Munster.) Though at first glance the Leinster succession might appear confusing, swapping about as it did between Uí Dúnchada, Uí Fáeláin, and Uí Muiredaig, 175


it was a model of regularity by comparison with Cashel.These three lines, whose common ancestor had died in 727, were branches of one tribe, Uí Dúnlainge, and are thus comparable not with the Éoganachta as a whole but with Clann Faílbe Flainn alone.Within the historical period the kingship of Leinster had also been shared by Uí Ceinnselaig, Uí Garrchon, and Uí Máil, but since 717 Uí Dúnlainge had shut out all competition. As the annals show, in both provinces there was still plenty of room and occasion for internecine war.The limited eligibility for the kingship, however, meant a relatively simplified political structure within which succession fights would tend to be short and, for the moment, decisive. In Munster on the other hand, where the structure was still loose and complicatedly hierarchical, the process of contesting succession was probably so difficult and unrewarding that at times no one would undertake it—which might explain some of the periods without a king—since the title-holder would win only a partial and grudging recognition. At any rate, though the fact that eight of the fifteen kings belonged to Clann Faílbe Flainn most likely indicates that that sept was striving toward the goal attained by Uí Briúin and Uí Dúnlainge, it is equally likely that some powerful and constant factor prevented their success. The preventing agent was most probably the Uí Néill. Fedelmid had demonstrated that Tara’s claim to the sovereignty of all Ireland was incompatible with the existence of a strong, independent Munster. The inherent weaknesses of the Éoganacht kingship of Cashel must have been of obvious advantage to the Uí Néill in enabling them easily to manipulate Munster affairs, keep the province divided, and forestall the emergence of another Fedelmid. To allow the natural development or the reform of the institution would be disastrous for Tara. Of course the kingship of Cashel was not unique in type; it was simply old-fashioned. Everywhere in Ireland, though at markedly different rates in different areas, the natural trend was toward the establishment of large territories—or what one might call small countries—each ruled over by a king who belonged to a single royal family. Midhe and Ailech were already fairly advanced examples. In each the succession, accompanied within the ruling kindred by short, vigorous bouts of kin-slaying, was mostly from father to son. If, however, we look back to the sixth or seventh century, we find that the dominant type of political organization was not territorial kingship, but an overkingship of a federation of tribes whose members claimed a common origin and who might or might not dwell contiguously to each other. Thus the Uí Néill were a federation of eight tribes, some of which were themselves multiple, boasting an impossible descent from a single ancestor in the early fifth century. They were joined in—or were partly separated 176


from—a super-federation with the three Connachta (the joint common ancestor being Eochaid Mugmedón) and with the three branches of the Airgialla (at Cairbre Lifechair). No less complicated or distant from current political realities was the federation of the four dála of the Laigin, joined remotely at Cú-Chorbb mac Moga-Corbb. It is safe to assume that if either had been put together in the ninth or tenth century the composition would have been radically different.Then, for example, Uí Néill status would scarcely still be offered to such unsuccessful tribes as Cenél Énnae and Cairbre Móra, or to Cenél Fiachach which seems at times to have drifted into the Munster orbit. Presumably when such a federation was first formed each of the constituent tribes would have been eligible, at least in theory, to furnish the overking of the whole group. In fact the weaker members would never get the chance to do so. Always the tendency would be to narrow eligibility to the stronger tribes and finally to the strongest of all. Thus among the Uí Néill we can observe the successive elimination of Cenél Lóegaire, Cenél Cairbre, Cenél Conaill, and Síl Áeda Sláine from eligibility to Tara, until for over two hundred years only Cenél Éogain and Clann Colmáin Móir appear to have remained in the running. I say “appear” because, as is shown by the example of Congalach mac Máele-mithig, king of Brega, who broke the alternation from 945 to 956, those who had been shut out had not consented to their own exclusion, and could, if opportunity offered, invoke the old form of the institution. As if to emphasize that fact, the immediate and momentarily successful rival of Congalach was Ruaidrí úa Canannáin, king of Cenél Conaill. This reversal of Uí Néill development, this reversion to former usages, may have done as much to weaken the kingship of Tara as the re-emergence of a united Munster under Brian. Though Domnall úa Néill (957–980) and Máel Sechlainn Mór (981–1003, 1014–1022) restored the alternation, plainly neither was able to restore the confidence on which it had so long rested. Neither took the hostages of Munster—a sign of diminished power. Domnall probably never went near Munster at all, though in the early years of his reign there surely can have been little strength in the province to prevent him. The Éoganacht federation comprised about fifteen tribes, some apparently quite small, a number of them unknown apart from the genealogies. There are some indications that Uí Fidgeinte and Uí Liatháin were not original members, probably having been added in the latter half of the eighth century. Later still, perhaps in the early tenth century, the Dál Cais, formerly know as In Déis Tuaiscirt, were given a new or revised prehistoric pedigree which made them descend from Cormac Cass, son of Ailill Aulomm, and were thus brought into cousinly equality with the Éoganachta, whose 177


eponymous ancestor was Éogan Mór, son of Ailill. Though the early portions of the Éoganachta genealogies are generally detailed and well-articulated, most of the pedigrees end by or before the beginning of the ninth century, and those which continue beyond that date are often in poor shape, which makes one suspect late and somewhat conjectural supplementation. Since genealogies tended to be brought up to date, at least for successful lines, at intervals of three or four generations, it would look as though the prestige and morale of the Éoganachta in the tenth century were so low that there was little incentive to keep their pedigrees in repair.The Dál Cais genealogies, on the other hand, are generally in excellent order down to the early eleventh century, after which, as elsewhere, we find the pedigrees of the great families that emerged during that century and the next. The contrast between the two sets of genealogies seems eloquent. Since the genealogies of a tribe or tribal federation were in essence its constitution, or the nearest to it that these people, incapable of generalization, could devise, the attachment of Uí Liatháin and Uí Fidgeinte to the Éoganacht stem had the effect of an amendment and was doubtless a matter of Éoganacht policy. The statement implicit in the Dál Cais genealogy was different. They were neither admitted to nor forced into the federation; they were joined to it, apparently in co-equality with all four or five of the old Éoganacht tribes that still counted. It may seriously be doubted that this was Éoganacht policy. Nor, if done before the late-tenth century, could it have been the handiwork of the Dál Cais themselves, for they were not yet strong enough nor sufficiently established to make such an innovation stick. Only the Uí Néill had such power, and they for less than a hundred years, from early in the reign (846–862) of Máel Sechnaill mac Máelruanaid to the death of his grandson, Donnchad mac Flainn Sinna, in 944. There is evidence that the whole arrangement of prehistoric pedigrees underlying the corpus of Irish genealogies was considerably altered in order that they might more nearly reflect the political conditions of this period; that, in other words, the Uí Néill were then using the genealogies as a political instrument. Most of the genealogical changes affecting northern and eastern Munster tribes were probably intended to reflect and justify a policy of detaching these tribes from their allegiance to Cashel by encouraging a semiindependence under Uí Néill auspices. The typical change was the granting of, or hinting at, an Eremonian ancestry. Thus the Osraige were joined to the Laigin stem; the Déisi—though never, apparently, In Déis Tuaiscirt— were made to descend from a brother of Conn Cétchathach; less conclusively Éle Deiscirt were provided with descent from another brother; and by joining the Érainn in a remoter kinship with Dál Cuinn the new status 178


was offered to the Múscraige and, much more vaguely, to Corcu Baiscinn and Corcu Duibne.2 To be sure, the only firm illustration of this policy in the annals is the account of the convention of Ráith Áeda mic Bric, in 859, when Máel Sechnaill, who had taken the hostages of Munster three times in the preceding five years, forced Máelguala, king of Cashel, to warrant the alienation of Osraige to Leth Cuinn. However, the numerous entries on the Déisi Muman during this period of a century show them to have been quite as independent of Cashel, and indeed generally as hostile to it, as was Osraige. The few entries on the Éle and Múscraige that do not simply retail deaths of kings also indicate that they were in conflict with the Éoganachta. Two entries are of particular interest. In 892 Dub-lachtna mac Máelguaile, king of Cashel, and the Munstermen defeated the Éle at Cashel with heavy loss. A possible clue to this event may lie in the story of the miraculous “finding” of Cashel by the swineherds of the kings of Éle and Múscraige.3 One element in the story is the prophecy of the future kings of Cashel, in which Dub-lachtna is the latest named, indicating that the prophecy was written or revised in his time. The import of the tale is unclear—as is so often the case, the text seems a jumbled abridgment of two versions—but one theme is that the Éle had prior rights to the hill, though heaven ordained that the Éoganachta should possess it and that the then king of Éle might justly feel himself defrauded. The king is Conall mac Nenta Con, who is otherwise known only from the pedigree of Éle Deiscirt, which would connect them with Dál Cuinn and the Déisi. Since the battle in 892 would seem to have involved an Éle attack on Cashel, one version of the story may have been designed as Uí Néill approval of claims which the Éle had been encouraged to advance. The context of the other entry is much more definite. In 905 Cellach mac Cerbaill and the Osraige inflicted a defeat on the Éle and Múscraige in which more than a hundred fell, including the king of Éle. In this same year Cellach had taken the kingship of Osraige from his brother Diarmait, pretty clearly with the backing of Cormac mac Cuilennáin, king of Cashel, and the attack on the Éle and Múscraige was most likely a bid to repay his debt to Cormac by forcing these tribes back to their old allegiance. Three years later Cormac and Cellach both fell in the battle of Belach Mugna, and Diarmait, who had fought on the Uí Néill side, was restored by Flann Sinna, the victorious king of Tara. The reign of Cormac mac Cuilennáin is one of the most intriguing episodes in early Irish history; and one of the most frustrating, too, for the evidence has plainly been cut and blurred with deliberate intent. There is not space here even to summarize the problem, but the supposition may 179


be put forward that Cormac was originally installed in Cashel as a puppet sponsored by the Uí Néill, that he and his equally mysterious associate in rule, and later successor, Flaithbertach mac Inmainén, abbot of Inis Cathaig, broke away from Uí Néill influence and led Munster in a brief resurgence reminiscent of the exploits of Fedelmid, only to be brought down in ruin by the combined forces of Midhe, Connacht, and Leinster, at Belach Mugna, in 908. Cormac was killed there; Flaithbertach was captured; the kingship of Cashel remained vacant for six years afterwards. Indeed for the next three decades Munster history is a thin and uninformative record and the kingship the dimmest of phantoms. It would appear that the Uí Néill were no longer satisfied with half-measures with regard to Cashel. Not only was it to be divested of all control over its former subjects, but actual rivals of significant strength were to be created. Flaithbertach assumed the kingship of Cashel in 914, retired to religion in 922, was captured by the Limerick Vikings in 923, and died in 944. He was succeeded in 922 by Lorccán mac Condligáin, of whom, it will be remembered, nothing further is recorded. One regnal list says that Lorccán reigned nine years, another a year and a half.4 In either case we are left with a kingless period of uncertain duration.The next king, Cellachán Caisil, first appears in the annals with a raid on Clonmacnois in 936 but is not called king of Cashel till 939. In the latter year, together with the Vikings of Waterford and at least some of the Déisi Muman, he raided on the borders of Midhe and Leinster as far as Clonard and plundered Clonenagh and Killeigh. This brought a firm response. In 940 the king of Tara, Donnchad mac Flainn, and his successor-designate, Muirchertach mac Néill, king of Ailech, took the hostages of Leinster and Munster. Cellachán, however, thereupon attacked and defeated the Osraige, apparently winning their submission, for the next year Muirchertach plundered their territory till they submitted once again to him. Cellachán then chastised the Déisi for having also submitted to Muirchertach. That plainly was too much. The Déisi and Osraige, old enemies, promptly joined forces and defeated him with heavy loss, whereupon Muirchertach came to Munster for the third time in two years, took its hostages at Cashel, and brought Cellachán himself back to Midhe to submit to Donnchad. His motive clearly was neither love nor overweening respect for Donnchad, with whom he was often at daggers drawn; rather it was to protect his own inheritance by repressing this Éoganacht defiance which Donnchad was doing too little to control. It is just at this time that Brian’s sept, Clann Tairdelbaig of Dál Cais, is mentioned in the annals for the first time. In CS S.A. 940 ( = 941) we are told that Orlaith, daughter of Cennétig mac Lorccáin, was put to death by Donnchad, king of Ireland, for sleeping with his son Óengus. Orlaith was 180


Brian’s sister. She is named in Ban-Senchus as one of three wives of Donnchad, the others being Caindeach, daughter of Canannán (? of Cenél Conaill), and Dub Leamna, daughter of Tigernán mac Sellacháin, king of Breifne. There was in fact a fourth, Derbail, daughter of Máel Finnia mac Flannacáin, king of Brega. Caindeach died in 929, Derbail in 931; Dub Leamna, whose father had died in 892, could not have been less than fifty-one at her death in 943. Unless she was taken on as a sort of comfortable Katherine Parr for Donnchad in his final years, the chances are that she had been his chief wife at least since the death of Derbail. In that case Orlaith would have been a very junior secondary-wife or royal concubine. What matters, however, is not her status or her guilt, but that here was a political marriage, even if of inferior kind, involving the king of Tara and the petty ruling kindred of Dál Cais. It would appear, too, that Donnchad had little fear of her family’s resentment when he executed the girl, for we may assume that no king in his position would take any large political risk to punish an offense that were as easily dealt with by divorce. As the marriage had most likely been a means of flattering this upstart but useful line and of binding them in alliance, so the girl’s death would be a calculatedly brutal warning that they had best recognize their station and keep to it. If the king’s estimate of Clann Tairdelbaig was that they would consider their profit and would not dare actively to resent the deed, the signs are that he was right—then. Shortly thereafter Uí Néill supremacy suffered its first collapse. Muirchertach mac Néill was killed in 943, the last of his own generation in his derbfine, and apparently left no heir of sufficient age or strength to take Tara. Donnchad died in 944, and his son Óengus, king of Midhe, in 945. The kingship went to Congalach mac Máele-mithig, king of Brega, most likely with the backing of Cenél Éogain. As we have seen, he was immediately challenged by Ruaidrí úa Canannáin, king of Cenél Conaill, who was probably supported by Midhe. For the next six years all Uí Néill energies were absorbed in this internecine struggle. In Munster Cellachán at once took advantage of the resulting freedom from their interference. In AU for 944 we find “the battle of Gort Rottacháin by Cellachán over Thomond, where many fell”; and in CS and AFM “a victory by Cellachán Caisil over Cennétig mac Lorccáin in Mag Duine, where many fell.” Neither placename can be identified, so we cannot guess which king had invaded the other’s territory. It is clear, however, that Cennétig is here regarded as king of Thomond. This is the first mention of Thomond in the annals. The reference to it in the Tripartite Life, which would be but a little earlier, also implies that Clann Tairdelbaig is the ruling line known to the writer, for the inevitable 181


Patrician miracle appropriate to the child of a worthy king is performed upon Eochaid Ballderg, son of Cáirthenn mac Blait “sen Clanne Tairdelbaig.”5 The chances are that in 944 both the territory of Thomond, regarded as a distinct division of Munster, and its rule by the king of the Dál Cais were of recent date, perhaps being the result of a new ordering of Munster affairs made after Belach Mugna, for otherwise there should be at least a few references to Thomond and Dál Cais before the tenth century. Instead a scattering of early entries mention In Déis Tuaiscirt, but with no hint of eminence. An examination of the tribal regnal list reinforces the impression of a sudden change in status.Three early kings are ancestral to Clann Tairdelbaig, but for a period that may be calculated as from the late-seventh to the earlyninth century the office is held only by men from the rival Clann Óengusa. Then comes Rebechán mac Mothlai, who was also abbot of Tomgraney and who died in 934. According to LM he too was of Clann Óengusa, but he does not appear in their genealogies.6 He is followed by Brian’s grandfather, Lorccán mac Lachtnai, who is not mentioned in the annals and of whom nothing believable is told in other sources.Then Cennétig succeeds, to be followed by his sons Lachtna, who died in 953, Mathgamain, who died in 976, and Brian, who died in 1014. Of Lachtna LM tells us that he was slain by Uí Floinn and Uí Cernaig.7 Uí Floinn was a line related to Clann Tairdelbaig; Uí Cernaig, a branch of Clann Óengusa. The struggle for succession within Dál Cais had clearly not yet been resolved. Since a full century is also left unaccounted for between Rebechán, in 934, and his immediate predecessor in the list, Cormac mac Domnaill of Clann Óengusa, plainly a lot of Dál Cais history either went unwritten or was silently expunged. Nor is the record much more satisfactory for the years between the death of Lachtna and that point, in the middle of the next decade, where, both in AI and Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh, the Dál Cais saga suddenly bursts into full bloom. Yet obviously those years were crucial both for Dál Cais and for Munster. The Uí Néill civil war was halted in 950, when Ruaidrí úa Canannáin fell in battle. At once Congalach turned south, raided West Munster, and slew Echtigern and Donncuan, two sons of Cennétig. Though again this was a defeat for the Dál Cais, we may gather that their influence now extended over West Munster as well as Thomond, which would make the later successes of Mathgamain and Brian considerably less surprising. Cennétig died the following year. In AU he is called rí Tuathmuman; in CS rí Dáil Cais; and in AI rígdamna Cassil. Whatever allowances may be made for later interpolation, this is high-sounded notice for a man for whom nothing victorious is recorded. 182


In the same year, Cellachán, his son Donnchad, and the Munstermen raided Síl Anmchada and Delbna Bethra, plundering Clonfert and burning Gallen. Congalach countered by sending a fleet onto Loch Derg, which raided the islands of the lake and took the hostages of Munster after some opposition. Interestingly, this action, the last intervention in Munster by a king of Tara for more than thirty years, was made not in the direction of Cashel, but toward Thomond. Cellachán died in 954. The tale of his successors is swiftly told. Máel Fathartaig mac Flainn of Cenél Fingín, the first of his sept since Fedelmid, died in 957. According to the BB regnal list he was slain by the Osraige. Dub-dá-boirenn mac Domnaill, probably of Cenél Lóegaire of Uí Echach Muman, the first Desmond king of Cashel since Fedelmid mac Tigernaig in 590, was slain by his own kin in 959. In 961 the vague Fergráid was killed by his own kin, whoever they may have been. Donnchad mac Cellacháin was killed by his own brother in 963. For none of the four is any activity reported. Truly the ancient Éoganacht kingship of Cashel was guttering out. None of the regnal lists include Donnchad mac Cellacháin, and all present Mathgamain mac Cennétig as the successor of Fergráid. However the annals all refer to Donnchad as rí Caisil at his death, as does the Cogadh, and it is through him that the future great families of Clann Faílbe Flainn, the Mac Carthys and O’Callaghans, descend.The matter is of some importance when we try to determine whether there was an immediate successor to Donnchad and, if so, whether the new king was Mathgamain of Thomond or Máel-muad mac Brian of Cenél Áeda of Uí Echach Muman, king of Desmond. According to Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh, ch. xlix, when Mathgamain determined on all-out war with the Norse in Munster he led the Dál Cais into the territory of the Éoganacht, “and the Éoghanacht and the Muscraighe gathered unto them from Dún na Sciath to Belach Accailli.”8 He then went to Cashel and encamped at Dún Cuirc, whence he plundered the Norse throughout the province. This was in the year after the death of Donnchad. Plainly at this point in the Cogadh the kingship of Cashel is regarded as vacant, and indeed not till ch. lvii is Mathgamain said to have assumed the sovereignty of Munster. Then it is stated that he reigned for six full years, which would mean that he became king only in 970 or 971, an inference supported by the fact that the first event of his reign mentioned in the chapter is dated 972 in AI. In view of all his activity between 964 and 971, as narrated in both the Cogadh and the annals, including several victories over the Norse and the Laigin and his thrice taking the hostages of Desmond, it would seem that he did not win recognition easily. But of course we must ask, recognition as what? If it were as king of the whole province, as apparently it was, then he was the first in a very long 183


time and on what must have been a wholly new basis. If, on the other hand, it were only as king of Cashel, he was probably accepted as such by the northern Munster tribes, including Éoganacht Caisil, as early as 964; but it is unlikely that elsewhere in the province the title still carried much of its old connotation. To be sure, as they are used in the annals at this period, the titles are still pretty much interchangeable, but thereafter the devaluation of rí Caisil is obvious. Except for an occasional antiquarian usage, as when AU calls Muirchertach Ua Briain king of Cashel in 1090, from the mid-eleventh century on it generally means only king of the Éoganacht Caisil. The chances are that when the Éoganacht Caisil rallied to Mathgamain in 964 and allowed him to encamp at Cashel, an agreement was reached according to which they and the Dál Cais should hold the kingship alternately, on the model of the alternation in Tara. The kingship was their most precious possession; it was rapidly withering away; and if it could only be saved by sharing it with new and powerful “kinsmen,” then the presumptuous claims set forth in the revised Dál Cais genealogy could be accepted as fact. The agreement to alternate in rule is written into all the obviously manufactured Dál Cais tribal history in LM and is clearly implied in Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh, where Cashel is claimed as the place of origin and birthright of the tribe.9 The firm insistence upon the right to alternate with the Éoganachta can only date from this period, for once Dál Cais had control of the province, as they had from Brian’s time on, the effect of the claim would rather be the right of the Éoganachta to alternate with them.We must, however, reflect that though the agreement may have been made with Éoganacht Caisil the Dál Cais rulers no doubt had all the Éoganachta in mind, and in particular the one really strong group among them, the Uí Echach Muman in Desmond. In the regnal lists Máel-muad mac Brian, king of Desmond, by whom Mathgamain was slain, is recognized as having reigned for two years (977–78), till he was slain by Brian. There was no further vengeance. His son Cian was installed as king of Desmond, married to Brian’s daughter Sadb, cherished as an ally, and may have been promised the succession—not that such a promise would have been of much value without the strength to collect it. There is, of course, no way of knowing what agreements were reached. Immediately after Clontarf struggle for the succession broke out in both northern and southern Munster. Cian, who was of Cenél Áeda of Uí Echach Muman, was defeated and slain by Domnall mac Duib-dá-boirenn of Cenél Lóegaire, son of the Duib-dá-boirenn mac Domnaill, who had died as king of Cashel in 959. Donnchad mac Briain at once invaded Desmond, took Domnall’s hostages (which means that he recognized him as king of Des184


mond), and slew his son Cathal. In 1015, no doubt encouraged by the growing feud between Donnchad and his brother Tadg, Domnall led a hosting to Limerick, obviously to challenge Dál Cais for control of the province; but the brothers, joining forces for the moment, defeated and slew him.That seems to have ended the threat from Desmond for a long time to come, and for the next hundred years the descendants of Brian ruled Munster. Or did they at once? According to the poem Inneol duib in senchad sen, Brian was succeeded by Dúngal mac Máel-Fathartaig.10 In the LL regnal list, after Donnchad mac Briain, we find “Dungal (Hua ¯ ¯ Dondchada) m. Mael¯ Fathartaig .i. (marb),” that is, Dúngal mac Máel-Fathartaig—or, according to a glossator, Dúngal úa Donnchada—reigned a year and died, in 1064 or 1065, after Donnchad had gone to Rome on his last pilgrimage. Actually Dúngal, whom A Tig and AFM call ri Caisil, died in 1025. AI, very much an O’Brienite document, gives him no title but mentions that he went on pilgrimage in 1024; Leabhar Oiris says that he died in Cork. He must have been an old man, for according to the genealogy of Cenél Fingín he was son of Máel Fathartaig mac Flainn mic Donnchada, king of Cashel, who died in 957. Was he or was he not in any effective sense king of Munster? The question is shrouded in doubt. The only certain previous mention of him is an entry in AFM at 1015:“Dúngal úa Donnchaid went on a raid to Ara Cliach where he slew Finn son of Ruaidrí Ua Donnagáin, king of Ara and Uí Cuanach.”That would have been a fairly minor exploit, about par for a mere king of Éoganacht Caisil. There is, however, an earlier entry for the same year which deserves attention: “a great raid by Máel Fothartaig in Dál Cais; and Donnchad mac Briain and the Dál Cais met him but were defeated; and Ruaidrí Ua Donnagáin [king of Ara] and the son of Ua Cathaláin [? king of Uaithne Cliach] and other persons were slain; and Máel Fothartaig carried off the spoils.” Here we have a much more considerable exploit—but who was this Máel Fothartaig? My guess is that we should read “mac Máel Fothartaig” and understand it to mean Dúngal. If so, perhaps he did gain perfunctory recognition for one year. In 1016, Donnchad took the hostages of Munster from Cnámhchaill westward, which would include all the Éoganachta; and that settled that. The rise of the Dál Cais was complete. A last question: why was it the Dál Cais and not one of the other considerable North Munster tribes that made this remarkable advancement? If I am right about how it began, why did the Midhe Uí Néill select them, and not the Éle or Múscraige or Corcu Mruad, to rule Thomond? No doubt many factors were involved, including size, coherence, and the possible genius of the ruling kindred, but I think the likeliest was location. Their territory lay on either side of the Shannon from just north of Limerick to 185


Loch Derg. They controlled the portages, fords, and rapids of that difficult stretch of river, at a time when the Norse had made water-transport, particularly up and down the Shannon, a new key to the military domination of Ireland. It is not surprising, then, that they at one end of the Shannon and Breifne at the other should have begun their expansion at the same time and with like disastrous results for the old order.

Notes 1. This is much at odds with my earlier estimate of Uí Néill relations with Munster—see “Early Irish History and Pseudo-History” (1963). One lives and learns. [“Early Irish History” is the essay reprinted just previously in this collection.—Ed.] 2. For the Éle Deiscirt pedigree see LL 325 c 33; Lec 181 R d 15; Facsimile of the Book of Ui Maine, ed. R. A. S. Macalister (Dublin, 1941): 89 V d 65; and Genealogical Tracts, ed.T. Ó Raithbheartaigh (Dublin, 1932): C-160. For Corcu Baiscinn and Corcu Duibne as descending from Conaire Már in the Érainn stem attaching to Dál Cuinn see LL 324 f 24, g 35. 3. Myles Dillon, “The Story of the Finding of Cashel,” Ériu 16:61–73. 4. LL 320 ab 17; Caiseal Cathair Chlann Mogha, lines 203–6; LM, 421. 5. Tripartite Life of Patrick, ed. K. Mulchrone (Dublin, 1939): 206. 6. LM, 316. 7. LM, 298. 8. Dún na Sciath is now represented by Donaskeagh townland in the parish of Rathlynin, eight miles west of Cashel. Belach Achaille is now Ballycahill townland, parish of Ballycahill, twelve miles north of Cashel, as was shown by T. F. O’Rahilly, Hermathena 48:205. Clearly only Éoganacht Caisil is meant. 9. Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh: 70. 10. LM, 411.

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Humor in the Ulster Saga

16 Humor in the Ulster Saga

A

nyone reading Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of Invasions) for the first time, and there are probably few who have read it a second time, might well feel that it furnishes many examples of naive, unconscious humor.1 Lebor Gabála, which exists in four recensions dating from the eleventh or the twelfth century and which is reflected in a number of short proto-versions and in scattered early references, is an elaborate pseudo-historical account of the origins and early vicissitudes of the Gaels and of the various peoples who are imagined as having occupied Ireland before them.There is a good deal of disharmony among the recensions on matters of detail and the sequence of events, but all agree that the Gaels originated in Scythia (compare Scotia), were for a while in Egypt, where they were on very good terms with the Hebrews at the time of Exodus, and, having left Egypt or been run out, came at last by long wanderings to Spain which they conquered. Here all the recensions converge, and we are told in wordings so closely alike as to show a common source that at Brigantia in Spain Bregon mac Bratha built a great tower,Túir Bregoin, and that from it, one winter evening, his son Ith saw Ireland. Ith then went to Ireland, where he was killed by the Tuatha Dé Danann, who had recently conquered the island from the Fir Bolg.To avenge him the Gaels invaded in force, landing at Inber Scéne, the estuary of the River Scéne. In all this it is to be understood that their coming was fated, for the Gaels, by broadest implication, are presented in Lebor Gabála as the second Chosen People and Ireland as the second Promised Land. First published in Harry Levin, ed. Veins of Humor (Harvard English Studies 3). Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972. 35–56.

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The notion of anyone seeing Ireland from Spain might seem rather absurd. It certainly did to me for a while, the more since I knew that the Irish had a fairly constant trade with Spain and must have been well aware of the distances involved. Some years ago, however, I happened to look at a reproduction of the Ebsdorf map (circa 1235), a medieval mappa mundi of the sort that in one degree of elaboration or another was standard for centuries. Sure enough, there in the northwestern corner of Spain was Brigantia, with its tower, and very close by to the north was Ireland. I then examined other such maps and for the first time saw that in terms of the world geography depicted on them the various long voyages of the Gaels in Lebor Gabála, which I had assumed were the products of half-ignorant fancy, were for the most part quite practicable. The maps are based chiefly on the geographical treatise in Book I, chapter 2, of Orosius’s Historiarum contra paganos libri septem, written in 418. In discussing Lebor Gabála, Eoin MacNeill long ago called attention to the mention by Orosius of the great Roman pharos at Brigantia, which he regarded as one of the few notable structures in the world, and to another statement which seems to imply that Brigantia could be seen from Scenae fluminis ostium in southern Ireland.2 And MacNeill remarked that it had been natural enough to draw the reverse conclusion, that Inber Scéne could be seen from Brigantia. As long as I had thought this just an isolated fragment of Latin learning seized on by some susceptible Irishman in the seventh century and woven into an imaginative pseudo-history based largely on farfetched biblical parallels, I could continue to regard it as but one moderately absurd element in a rather thin fiction. Since then I have had to change my mind. With many others I could wish that Lebor Gabála had never been written, or had not been so hugely successful as to become the very center-piece of early and medieval Irish learning; for very early on, it overbore and forever replaced whatever ancient origin legends and pagan cosmogony may have been current among the Irish, so that, apart from what can be gleaned none too certainly from a few tales and from Lebor Gabála itself, we have no Irish equivalent of the Eddas. Yet obviously this success was no mere accident. When the Irish accepted Christianity they found in the Bible and in Christian literature what their own myths would scarcely have provided them, an authoritative, consecutive history of the world from Creation. The man who composed the original of Lebor Gabála united the Irish with this world history on the most honorable terms imaginable and through a narrative, many of whose details could be checked out in such impartial authors as Orosius and Isidore of Seville. It would of course be a mistake for us to equate his production with the recensions we now possess, for these are the result of centuries of effort to improve it, to harmonize it with a later al188


ternative version, and to correct, most unsuccessfully, a couple of basic inconsistencies about the temporal relationship of biblical events.They are the result, too, of that genial capacity for wandering away from the point, which the Irish literati possessed to so signal a degree, or for assuming that if one explanation is good, two or three are so much the better. Still, nowadays, even when reading these recensions I hesitate and reflect before presuming to laugh at anything in Lebor Gabála. It is enough to smile in admiration at the boldness of the original concept. Lebor Gabála has clearly discernible purposes, but it is, after all, atypical, since the ideas underlying it were so largely stimulated by non-native sources. When we turn to more purely Irish tales, sagas, and cycles, it is hard to be anywhere near so sure of their purposes, particularly where the story, though written down in the eighth or ninth century, seems to have originated from that remote realm of myth which is forever obscured by the interposition of Lebor Gabála. Thus in the Ulster Saga, which all agree is based on or incorporates very old material, we come on indications that even as the stories were being set down they were being adapted to and influenced by the artificial scheme in which the Irish annals and genealogies were linked through Lebor Gabála to Christian world history. In all likelihood the Saga or its mythic prototype had no definite temporal setting but was imagined as having taken place in the measurelessness of the old gods’ time. In the annals, however, which I think received their intrinsic form about 790, we find that Cú Chulainn, heros fortissimus Scottorum, died in A.D. 2, so that his life overlapped with that of Christ by one year. The death of Conchobar mac Nessa, king of Ulster, is at A.D. 33, the date being confirmed in those stories which tell that he died as the result of battle fury excited by a vision of the Crucifixion. The annals assign the central tale of the Saga, the prose epic Táin Bó Cuailgne, to 19 B.C., the same year as the death of Virgil, who of course was widely regarded as having prophesied in the Fourth Eclogue the coming of Christianity and who was thus in a way a Christian figure. Later in the annals the beginning of Patrick’s mission, which is plainly seen as the most important event in Irish history, is dated not only from the Incarnation but from the deaths of Cú Chulainn and Conchobar. Nor is it hard to discover elsewhere in Irish literature implied resemblances between Christ and Cú Chulainn. Each has an earthly “father” but is conceived by a divinity who appears in the form of a bird, each has a marvelous youth, each is supernaturally gifted and of supreme courage, each has a life-span divisible by three (thirty-three years for Christ, twenty-seven for Cú Chulainn), each strives for his people, and each dies erect and wounded by a spear. Whether the original of Cú Chulainn had all these attributes we have no sure means of telling, but there can be little doubt that the Chris189


tian writers who set down the tales stressed these or added them deliberately. They also deliberately made him foster-father of Lugaid Réo Derg, whom they depicted as in a sense the ultimate ancestor of the Uí Néill kings of Ireland and the initiator of the regular alternation in that kingship, which they presented as the form of succession proper to the Sixth Age of the World initiated by the birth of Christ.3 To be sure, the purpose of all this, though patent enough, is nowhere directly stated.Yet it is also clear that to the men who were thus inventing the pre-Patrician annals, the Ulster Saga and its heroes had immense prestige which was well worth uniting with their construction and that once the union had been made the originally disparate elements continued to affect each other.A good example is “The Phantom Chariot of Cú Chulainn,” a rather late story in which, centuries after his death, Cú Chulainn appears to Lóegaire mac Néill, who was king of Ireland when Patrick came, urging him to accept the new religion. He has of course been summoned up by Patrick. Most unhistorically, Lóegaire submits after a couple of heavyhanded miracles, and “heaven was decreed for Cú Chulainn.”4 If we turn to the stories themselves, setting all this Christianizing influence aside for the moment, we find that indeed Cú Chulainn is the very epitome of the Celtic hero. By his own decision and stratagem he takes arms at seven, aware that in doing so he has chosen both the highest fame and an early death. At seventeen he defends Ulster singlehandedly against the host and champions of the rest of Ireland. At twenty-seven he dies amid wild tragedy, with all his tabus broken, mortally wounded by his own magic weapon the gae bulga, yet terrifying and undaunted to the last. He is very beautiful. In some descriptions he is small and dark, boylike in appearance; in others, unbelievably splendid, with seven pupils, seven colors of hair, seven fingers on each hand, seven toes on each foot. But when he is possessed by his battle frenzy he undergoes the riastra, in which he swells hugely and becomes frightfully distorted. He is skilled in every conceivable feat of arms and in the arts of poetry and divination; yet, though befittingly capable of heroic boasting, he is sometimes said to be modest to the point of shyness. He can act without thought from sheer pride and valor, or he can reveal his grasp of hidden knowledge, or he can give the instructions on right conduct which are the final proof of wisdom. There are plenty of contradictions in what we are told about him, but none alter the consistency with which he is accepted as the supreme hero. And that at last brings us to the point of this essay. In Irish literature, apart from the Ulster Saga, there are stories that are comic throughout, stories that are simply tragic or heroic, and quite a few that are mixed—generally serious in tone, but with comic episodes, or generally comic with serious 190


or possibly serious portions.These mixed stories present more problems than I care even to mention here, but there seems little reason to doubt that where comedy or comic satire prevails the basic intent is to be funny. Also, most of these tales are either isolated or belong to lesser cycles or story-groups. Their protagonists are often historical or semihistorical personages who, though they may exhibit heroism, are not, like Cú Chulainn, heroes in the classical sense. As for the Fionn cycle, with its mythical heroes, the comic or parodic stories that belong to that are as a rule comic and nothing else. Finally, none of these tales or cycles pretend to anything like the prestige of the Ulster Saga. That is the hero-cycle par excellence. But in many ways a very queer hero-cycle it is. It is full of violence and tragedy, in many of its constituent stories quite unmixed. In many others, however, though the tenor is tragic or heroic the narrative may suddenly and quite without warning lapse into broadest comedy and, shortly after, revert as instantly to its former level. In the Táin this happens repeatedly, most often in an episode involving Cú Chulainn. But it is best to begin illustrating with a short example: an old story which is not quite in the canon of the cycle, Aided Con Rói maic Dáiri (The Tragic Death of Cú Rói mac Dáire). The Ulster heroes went to besiege the Fir Falgae and to carry off from them the beautiful Blathnat and three magical cows, three magical birds, and a magical cauldron. Cu Roi mac Daire went with the men of Ulster then to the siege, and they did not recognize him, that is, they called him the man in the grey mantle. Every time a head was brought out of the fort,“Who slew that man?” Conchobar would say. “I and the man in the grey mantle,” each answered in turn. When, however, they were dividing the spoil, they did not give Cu Roi a share, for justice was not granted him. He then ran in among the cows, and gathered them before him, collected the birds in his girdle, thrust the woman under one of his armpits, and went from them with the cauldron on his back. And none among the men of Ulster was able to get speech with him save Cu Chulainn alone. Cu Roi turned upon the latter, thrust him into the earth to his armpits, cropped his hair with his sword, rubbed cow-dung into his head, and then went home. After that Cu Chulainn was a whole year avoiding the Ulstermen.5 From there on, nothing is funny or meant to be funny. For love Blathnat betrays Cú Rói to Cú Chulainn and arranges the stratagems by which he is slain; but Cú Rói is avenged by his poet Ferchetne, who seizes Blathnat in his arms and leaps from a cliff into the sea, where both are drowned.The 191


main theme of the tale is in fact the praise of Cú Rói for his valor, nobility, and generosity. This is from the second version of the story (probably twelfth century). In the older version (eighth or ninth century) Cú Chulainn leaps onto the cauldron four times but is thrown off by Cú Rói with mounting force so that the last time he sinks into the ground to his armpits. The tonsorial attentions are absent. In other tales Cú Chulainn also encounters Cú Rói, most notably in Fled Bricrenn (Bricriu’s feast)—a fascinating story, at once comic and heroic, which ends with a beheading-challenge like that in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and which is the source of Yeats’s “The Green Helmet.” At a feast given simply to raise dissension among the Ulstermen, Bricriu, the Thersites figure in the Saga, incites the mutual jealousy of the three chief heroes, Cú Chulainn, Conall Cernach, and Lóegaire Buadach, over the question of which of them is pre-eminent and has the right to the Champion’s Portion at the feasts of the Red Branch. Conchobar advises that they appeal to the judgment of Cú Rói mac Dáire.They agree, but first they go to other princes and wisemen— none of whom can give a verdict that satisfies Lóegaire or Conall.At last they arrive at Cú Rói’s stronghold and are honorably received by Blathnat. Cú Rói, she says, is away; and till he comes back each of them must take his turn guarding the fort for a night.The first night Lóegaire stands watch. In the darkness an immense giant approaches him from the sea “with his hands full of stripped oaks, each of which would form a burden for a wagon-team of six, [and] at whose root not a stroke had been repeated after a single sword-stroke.”The giant hurls the oaks at Lóegaire one by one, but Lóegaire avoids them and counters with a spear-cast which also misses. [Then] the giant stretched his hand towards Loegaire. Such was its length that it reached across the three ridges that were between them as they were throwing at each other, and thus in his grasp the giant seized him. Though Loegaire was big and imposing, he fitted like a year-old child into the clutch of his opponent, who then ground him between his two palms as a chessman is turned in a groove. In that state, half-dead, the giant tossed him out over the fort, so that he fell into the mire of the ditch of the gate.The fort had no opening there, and the other men and inmates of the hold thought Loegaire had leapt outside over the fort, as a challenge for the other men to do likewise (p. 273). Lóegaire, deeply shamed, does nothing to dispel the error. Next night it is Conall’s turn, and the same business occurs. Cú Chulainn, when he stands guard, has a far busier time, having to kill so many phantoms and monsters 192


that he is already tired and sad when the giant comes. Nevertheless he avoids the giant’s grasp, overcomes him, and makes him grant three wishes: the sovereignty of Ireland’s heroes for Cú Chulainn, the Champion’s Portion without dispute, and precedence over the women of Ulster for his wife.The giant then vanishes. Then Cu Chulainn mused to himself as to the leap his fellows had leapt over the fort, for their leap was big and broad and high. Moreover, it seemed to him that it was by leaping that the valiant heroes had gone over it. He tried it twice and failed.“Alas,” said Cu Chulainn, “my exertions for the Champion’s Portion have exhausted me, and now I lose it through not being able to take the leap the others took.” As he thus mused, he essayed the following feats: he would spring backwards in midair a shot’s distance from the fort, and then he would rebound from there till his forehead struck the fort. Then he would spring on high until all that was within the fort was visible to him, and again he would sink up to his knees in the earth owing to the pressure of his vehemence and violence. At another time he would not take the dew off the tip of the grass by reason of his buoyancy of mood, vehemence of nature, and heroic valor. What with the fit and fury that raged upon him he stepped over the fort outside and alighted at the door of the hall. His two footprints are in the flag on the floor of the stronghold at the spot where the royal entrance was. Thereafter he entered the house and heaved a sigh (p. 275). The giant is of course Cú Rói, though this is not known to the champions. Next morning he returns in his proper guise—presumably as a man no bigger than they—and awards Cú Chulainn the Champion’s Portion. At the end of the story, in the beheading-test episode, he again appears as an uncouth giant. But it is not only Cú Rói who is given to sudden changes of size. In the final battle in the Táin, Fergus mac Róig, the exiled former king of Ulster, encounters his successor and enemy, Conchobar mac Nessa. Fergus attacks with his sword, Caladbolg (compare Excalibur); Conchobar protects himself with his magical shield, Ochan. Fergus’s fury mounts wildly, but when he is appealed to by his fellow exile Cuscraid mac Conchobair, and by his old friend Conall Cernach, not to bring defeat upon the Ulstermen but to vent his rage elsewhere, he turns and chops off the tops of three hills. Nothing is said about his suddenly looming to giant stature, but obviously he does. Cú Chulainn can also change size, the more dramatically indeed since he is usually presented as rather small. In the Táin he fights a number of single combats at fords, the most famous of which is his three-day duel with Fer 193


Diad, his shield-brother of former days. Cú Chulainn does not want to use the gae bulga, the ultimate weapon, against him; but he is hard put to survive, for Fer Diad is not only huge, he is conganchnes (horn-skinned), so that by the third day Cú Chulainn is a mass of wounds. To add further to the disparity, Fer Diad wears a leather apron, a stone as big as a millstone outside that for fear of the gae bulga, and over both an apron of smelted iron. From earliest morning till midday they cast spears at each other, then they close for the final sword fight. Then for the first time Cú Chulainn sprang from the brink of the ford on to the boss of Fer Diad’s shield, trying to strike his head from above the rim of the shield.Then Fer Diad gave the shield a blow with his left elbow and cast Cú Chulainn off like a bird on to the brink of the ford. Again Cú Chulainn sprang from the brink of the ford on to the boss of Fer Diad’s shield, seeking to strike his head from above the rim of the shield. Fer Diad gave the shield a blow with his left knee and cast Cú Chulainn off like a child on to the brink of the ford. Laeg [Cú Chulainn’s charioteer] noticed what was happening.“Alas!” said Laeg, “your opponent has chastised you as a fond mother chastises her child. He has belaboured you as flax (?) is beaten in a pond. He has pierced you as a tool pierces an oak. He has bound you as a twining plant binds trees. He has attacked you as a hawk attacks little birds, so that never again will you have a claim, or title to valour or feats of arms, you distorted little sprite,” said Laeg. The berating—one of the charioteer’s functions—has its due effect. Cú Chulainn tries again, still more furiously, but Fer Diad shook his shield and cast off Cú Chulainn into the bed of the ford as if he had never leapt at all . . . Then occurred Cú Chulainn’s first distortion [riastra]. He swelled and grew big as a bladder does when inflated and became a fearsome, terrible, many-coloured, strange arch, and the valiant hero towered high above Fer Diad, as big as a fomóir or a pirate.6 The ability to expand suddenly to a giant stature may have originally betokened not a hero, but a god, as would also great beauty alternating instantly with horrible distortion or the assumption of the guise of a vast bodach or churl. My friend Daniel A. Melia has suggested to me that behind the Ulster Saga lies some great myth-epic like the Mahabharata, involving a war between two septs of a single god-kindred, though in the cycle as we have it all has been euhemerized, and the fighting is between Ulster and Connacht. This seems most probable; and I think it is likely too that 194


when the Ulster tales were being written down, in the seventh or eighth century, in a recently and somewhat spottily Christianized Ireland, the myths were still being told in the old ways among the people and were still being understood and fundamentally accepted in their original meaning. The literati, on the other hand, would have been thoroughly Christian, proudly conscious of their new learning; however they may have admired the force of the old tales and have recognized their prestige, they would doubtless have been contemptuous of the superstitious veneration accorded the tales by the vulgar. Thus, in those passages where the god-qualities of the protagonists were most evident, they may have deliberately turned the narrative into parody, to mock and deflate, to make reverence impossible. Or there is the possibility that parodic versions already existed, themselves ancient; parody of sacred things is, after all, found everywhere and in all ages and need not be connected with disbelief. If that were so, the serious and comic versions may have been selectively combined, to exploit the old parodies for the new purposes. I think particularly of Scéla Mucce Meic Dathó (The Story of Mac Datho’s Pig), in which Conall Cernach is the chief figure. It is a strange and certainly ancient tale, full of the sort of lethal boasting and challenging described by Posidonius in his account of the Celts.7 The Ulstermen and the Connachtmen are at Mac Datho’s house—most likely, as has been suggested, the Celtic otherworld hostel. His famous pig, fattened for seven years on the milk of threescore cows, is slaughtered for their feast, and sixty oxen draw it to the hall. “Nine men were under the hurdle on which was the tail of the pig, and they had their load therein.” Contention breaks out over which hero has the right to carve it. One Ulsterman after another advances his claim, only to be savagely squelched by Cet mac Matach of Connacht, who reminds each one of the defeats suffered at his hands.The Ulstermen are in dismay and disgrace, their challenges exhausted, and Cet sits down to carve. With that, Conall Cernach enters and orders Cet away from the pig. Cet yields reluctantly. “It is true,” said Cet, “thou art even a better warrior than I; but if Anluan mac Matach (my brother) were in the house, he would match thee contest for contest, and it is a shame that he is not in the house tonight.” “But he is,” said Conall, taking Anluan’s head out of his belt and throwing it at Cet’s chest, so that a gush of blood broke over his lips. After that Conall sat down by the pig, and Cet went from it. But what size is Conall? “Then Conall went to carve the pig and took the end of the tail in his mouth until he had finished dividing it. He sucked up 195


the whole tail, and a load for nine was in it, so that he did not leave a bit of it, and he cast its skin and membrane from him.”8 There is much here and in the story at large which I would not attempt to assess, yet I would also hesitate to fall back on such venerable non-ideas as “primitiveness” or “Celtic whimsy.” I am sure, however, that this passage was not meant to be taken ponderously. The Irish writers of the eighth century were fully as intelligent as we are and, in their own context, quite as witty and sophisticated. And consider the context. For at least a thousand years, and probably more, before the onset of the Viking raids in the ninth century, Ireland had remained uninvaded, a phenomenon for which it would be hard to find a parallel in Europe or Asia. Moreover, when the Irish accepted Christianity and Latin learning they took these on their own terms, for their native culture, not having been pulverized by the Roman steamroller, was still lively and coherent. There can be little doubt that the adoption of Christianity and of writing brought about a huge revolution, with many consequent changes of beliefs and attitudes; but inevitably the revolution was contained and then absorbed by the indigenous culture. And by then that culture was no longer barbaric. Eighth-century Ireland was certainly an unusual country, but it was no longer remote and isolated. It was a participating member of Christian Europe. Thus it would be a great mistake to assume that a literate Irishman of the time, writing down an ancient and barbaric tale, would regard it or treat it as his ancestors had. I doubt such men regarded anything as their ancestors had, even in matters where there was no unbridgeable gap.The old native learning continued to be taught, though mingled with the new. “Poetry,” filidecht, remained in high esteem, and the filid were proudly, even jealously conscious of the antiquity of their tradition. Even the old claims of the poets’ magical powers continued to be put forward. But were they advanced with full solemnity? Here is a description from an early metrical tract on how an aggrieved poet should go about cursing a king who had refused to pay him for a proffered eulogy. There is fasting on the land of the king for whom the poem has been composed and counsel is taken with thirty warriors (or perhaps “laymen”) and thirty bishops and thirty poets about making a satire afterwards. And it is unlawful for them to hinder the satire once the reward has been refused. It only remains for the poet, accompanied by six who have respectively the six degrees of poetry, to go before sunrise to a mound where seven territories meet, and the chief poet faces the land of the king he is about to revile and they all have their backs to a thorn which stands on the summit of the hill, and each man carries in his hand a stone and a spike from the thorn and speaks into 196


both of them a stanza in the measure called laídh. The chief poet says his stanza first, and then the other poets chant theirs in unison, and each puts his stone and his spike at the base of the thorn, and if it is they that are at fault the ground of the hill swallows them up; if it is the king, however, that is at fault the ground swallows him and his wife and his child and his horse and his weapons and his clothing and his hound.9 If this is not genial self-satire, it is at least very good insurance against having to put one’s self on the spot by actually attempting to carry out the threat to curse. Quite apart from the unlikelihood of finding six colleagues willing to risk being buried alive by involving themselves in a dispute concerning royalties, the instructions look difficult to fulfill. Even in Ireland thorn-crowned hills where seven territories met must have been scarce, and the chances of getting a unanimous verdict from thirty laymen, thirty bishops, and thirty poets would always be rather slight. Doubtless the poets were quite content to have people believe or even half-believe in their wonderful powers, but certainly there was one group in Irish society who knew very well that a poet’s curse was not necessarily fatal and that his best satire would quite probably not raise three highly colored and disfiguring blemishes on the victim’s face. I mean, of course, the poets themselves; and I think it safest to guess that even if that passage may incorporate prehistoric injunctions, the man who wrote it had his tongue in his cheek. Between us and the men who set down the Ulster Saga lie a dozen centuries of tumultuous and often chaotic history. The earliest manuscripts in which the stories have been preserved were written in the twelfth century, in an Ireland very different from what it had been four hundred years earlier. Many of the stories come to us in much later manuscripts and after unknown vicissitudes. Some have been crudely abridged by less competent scribes, others are fragmentary, and often enough two versions have been jammed together inexpertly. The Táin and a number of other major tales are first found in the Lebor na Huidre (Book of the Dun Cow), written at Clonmacnois about the beginning of the twelfth century; as I have argued elsewhere, they may have been copied from books brought from Louth about 835 which may well have suffered disfigurement in that long interval.Again, particularly in the case of the Táin, it is hard to see why the writers thought fit to include such an uneven diversity of material, some of it, like the many little onomastical passages explaining how this or that place in north Louth got its name, of scant literary merit. As I indicated at the beginning, one of the hardest things to determine about a native Irish work may often be its overall purpose. Yet where humor can be definitely observed and where literary dexterity is patent we are not at such disadvan197


tage, especially if it be taken for granted that the writers’ attitudes toward what they dealt with were complex. If parody were first introduced into the Saga for the reasons suggested above—which reasons would become less and less imperative as the memory of the old gods faded—it would in any case soon be enjoyed for its own sake and developed further as a genre. Indeed, I would think it likely that certain episodes in the Táin were written simply as comedy. Temptation would not have been lacking. The tale requires that one Connacht or allied hero after another be sent against Cú Chulainn in single combat, and it is axiomatic that none of them has a chance. Most of the duels are treated seriously enough; but as the series is extended a suspicion of burlesque enters. There is for example the case of the surly and unpopular Cúr mac Da Lóth, whose attack is apparently not even noticed by Cú Chulainn, who is preoccupied with his morning exercises. Early on the morrow, then, Cúr mac Da Lóth arose. A cartload of arms was brought by him to attack Cú Chulainn, and he began to try and kill him. Early on that day Cú Chulainn betook himself to his feats. These are all their names: uballchless, fóenchless, cless cletínech, tétchless, corpchless, cless cait, ích n-errid, cor ndelend, léim dar néim, filliud eirred náir, gai bulga, baí brassi, rothchless, cles for análaib, brúud gine, sían curad, béim co fommus, táthbéim, réim fri fogaist, dírgud cretti fora rind, fornaidm níad. Cú Chulainn used to practice each of these feats early every morning, in one hand, as swiftly as a cat makes for cream (?), that he might not forget or disremember them. Mac Da Lóth remained for a third of the day behind the boss of his shield, endeavoring to wound Cú Chulainn. Then said Láeg to Cú Chulainn: “Good now, little Cú, answer the warrior who seeks to kill you.”Then Cú Chulainn looked at him and raised up and cast aloft the eight balls, and he made a cast of the ninth ball at Cúr mac Da Lóth so that it landed on the flat of his shield and the flat of his forehead and took a portion of brain the size of the ball out through the back of his head. Thus Cúr mac Da Lóth fell by the hand of Cú Chulainn.10 Nad Crantail, on the other hand, got full attention, though with little better luck. He got Cú Chulainn to agree to an exchange of spearcasts—Nad Crantail naturally having the first shot—with the stipulation that neither target was to dodge. Nadcrantail throws a cast at him; Cuchulainn leaps on high before it. “You do ill to avoid my cast,” said Nadcrantail. 198


“Avoid my throw then on high,” said Cuchulainn. Cuchulainn throws the spear at him, but it was on high, so that from above it alighted in his crown, and it went through him to the ground. “Alas! it is you are the best warrior in Ireland!” said Nadcrantail. “I have twenty-four sons in the camp. I will go and tell them what hidden treasures I have, and I will come that you may behead me, for I shall die if the spear is taken out of my head.” “Good,” said Cuchulainn. “You will come back.” Nadcrantail goes to the camp then.11 The Irish had no native tradition of drama—the first play in Irish was Douglas Hyde’s Casadh an tSúgáin, written in 1901—yet I find it hard to believe there was no acting. In the case of a number of early and late stories which are clearly literary constructions, not set down directly from oral narration, it seems inconceivable that the storyteller, having memorized the text, would not have mimed the action to some extent. At least the spectacle of Cú Chulainn lobbing his spear like a howitzer shell and Nad Crantail waddling stiffly off with a couple of feet of shaft sticking out of the top of his skull ought to have inspired a bit of pantomiming. Then, too, there is the non-duel with Láiríne mac Nóis. I cannot imagine that being narrated by a man sitting with his hands quietly folded in his lap. By mid-story the field of challengers is getting rather thin. The normal champions have begun to be a little reluctant about going where glory and oblivion await them; and Medb and Ailill, the queen and king of Connacht, have to keep raising the ante, besides resorting to not a little deceitful persuasion. Still, it is not for the sake of his prowess that they settle on an idiot like Láiríne, but because they calculate that by his inevitable death a much better warrior can be forced to come forward.The man thus indirectly aimed at is his brother, Lugaid mac Nóis, the king of Munster, who is a good friend of Cú Chulainn though he has been compelled to join the hosting. Lugaid recognizes their game for what it is and knows that as usual Medb and Ailill’s daughter Findabair will be promised, with the implication that her lucky spouse will inherit the sovereignty of Connacht and that this, along with the customary deft flattery, will set Láiríne’s few wits astray. He came to meet Cú Chulainn and a conversation took place between them. Then said Lugaid: “They are urging a brother of mine to come and fight with you, a foolish youth, rough, uncouth, but strong and stubborn, and he is sent to fight you so that when he falls by you, I may go to avenge his death on you, but I shall never do so. And by the friendship that is between us both, do not kill my brother. Yet I 199


swear, that even if you all but kill him, I grant you leave to do so, for it is in despite of me that he goes against you.” Then Cú Chulainn went back and Lugaid went to the camp. Meanwhile Láiríne is getting the full treatment at the royal pavilion. Then Láiríne mac Nóis was summoned to the tent of Ailill and Medb and Finnabair was placed beside him. It was she who used to serve him goblets and she who used to kiss him at every drink and she who used to hand him his food. “Not to all and sundry does Medb give the liquor that is served to Fer Báeth or to Láiríne,” said Finnabair.“She only brought fifty wagon-loads of it to the camp.” “Whom do you mean?” asked Ailill. “I mean that man yonder,” said she. “Who is he?” asked Ailill.“Often you paid attention to something that was not certain. It were more fitting for you to bestow attention on the couple who are best in wealth and honour and dignity of all those in Ireland, namely, Finnabair and Láiríne mac Nóis” [said Medb].Then (in his joy) Láiríne flung himself about so that the seams of the flockbeds under him burst and the green before the camp was strewn with their feathers. Láiríne longed for the full light of day that he might attack Cú Chulainn. He came in the early morning on the morrow and brought with him a wagon-load of weapons, and he came on to the ford to encounter Cú Chulainn. The mighty warriors in the camp did not think it worth their while to go and watch Láiríne’s fight, but the women and boys and girls scoffed and jeered at his fight. Cú Chulainn came to the ford to encounter Láiríne, but he scorned to bring any weapons and came unarmed to meet him. He struck all Láiríne’s weapons out of his hand as one might deprive a little boy of his playthings. Then Cú Chulainn ground and squeezed him between his hands, chastised him and clasped him, crushed him and shook him and forced all his excrement out of him until a mist arose on all sides in the place where he was. And after that he cast him from him, from the bed of the ford across the camp to the entrance of his brother’s tent. However Láiríne never (after) rose without complaint and he never ate without pain, and from that time forth he was never without abdominal weakness and constriction of the chest and cramps and diarrhoea. He was indeed the only man who survived battle with Cú Chulainn on the Foray of Cúailgne.Yet the after-effects of those complaints affected him so that he died later.12 This, the perforation of Cúr, and the excerpt from the Fer Diad episode are quoted from the second recension of the Táin, of which the principal manuscript is the Book of Leinster. This recension was written, apparently in 200


the mid-twelfth century, by a master craftsman who based his work on the Lebor na Huidre text but who polished, rearranged, and omitted or resolved inconsistencies at will. He also invented a new introduction to explain why the Táin took place, the “Pillow Talk of Medb and Ailill,” as witty and elegant a piece of writing as exists in Irish. Whoever he was, he was living proof of the level of urbanity that could be reached in a country with no towns except for the Norse settlements and the great monastic establishments. So far from being awed by the ancient and recently rediscovered epic, he was clearly delighted with the possibilities inherent in a central figure who is by turns engagingly juvenile and an appalling vortex of wrathful destructiveness.Yet, though he improved these episodes and heightened their humor, he did not invent them. They are in the older version and, though less skillfully told, perhaps because somewhat abridged, have nearly all the same comic elements. Yet this man was also four centuries further removed from the society in which the divinity of the Ulster heroes was still both known and felt; and the consequent difference in his attitude is discernible throughout his work, as for instance in the way he treats Cú Chulainn’s daily practice of his feats. You will remember that, having named them—and his list is almost identical with that in Lebor na Huidre—he tells us that Cú Chulainn “used to practice each of these feats early every morning, in one hand, as swiftly as a cat makes for cream.”That, however, would be more than difficult, for the feats include the salmon leap, ropewalking, management of the gae bulga, the champion’s shout, and various weapon-strokes, as well as “climbing a javelin with stretching of the body on its point, with the binding (?) of a noble warrior.”To be sure, the writer was perfectly aware of this; for the feats were traditional and were named in a number of stories, where attempts were even made to describe them.Yet obviously he chose to spoof them by exaggerating what might seem impossible to exaggerate, the marvelous dexterity of the hero qua hero, while at the same time enriching the narrative action. In the older version Cú Chulainn is busy performing the feats in the normal manner when Cúr arrives. Cur was plying his weapons against him in a fence (?) of his shield till a third of the day; and not a stroke of the blow reached Cuchulainn for the madness of the feats, and he did not know that a man was trying to strike him, till Fiacha Mac Fir-Febe said to him: “Beware of the man who is attacking you.” Cuchulainn looked at him; he threw the feat-apple that remained in his hand, so that it went between the rim and the body of the shield, and went back through the head of the churl. It would be in Imslige Glendanach that Cur fell according to another version.13 201


It might of course be argued that the second recension writer simply took episodes which struck him as implicitly funny, but were in fact examples of rude heroic exaggeration, and turned them into explicit comedy. He was fully capable of that, and perhaps he did so occasionally, but certainly not always. For one thing, he would have known Irish literary forms better than would be possible for anyone today and would have recognized intentional humor. For another, in the Lebor na Huidre version the pommeling of Láiríne and its aftermath, though more briefly told, are essentially as in his account and are at as far a remove from any plausible notion of sober epic. If I could be transported back to any period in Irish history, I would choose the eighth century. That must have been the high point—when the culture, still freshly invigorated by what Christianity had brought to it, had not yet undergone the terrible battering it took from the Vikings in the next two centuries. The island then must have been, relatively, a land of peace, disturbed only by succession fights and local wars fought by small forces in the most traditional and not very bloody manner. It must, too, have been rather a rich country, full of the products of its own arts, all too few of which were to survive Norse plunder and destruction. By the time theViking terror had subsided Ireland was on an almost permanent war footing, with constant campaigning by the great provincial dynasts, none of whom proved strong enough to knock out his rivals and establish the single monarchy at which all doubtless aimed. The native church was by then generally in decline, and attempts were being made at a thorough Roman reformation. Yet, though much altered, bent in a new direction, and wracked by warfare, the essential continuity of the culture was still unbroken; the great monasteries remained centers of learning; and quite evidently a considerable renaissance was under way in the eleventh century and in the twelfth, when the earliest of the big codices that have come down to us—Lebor na Huidre, the Book of Leinster and Rawlinson B 502—were written. The Norman Conquest, beginning in 1170, changed all that. The native society, if still not quite broken, was badly maimed—so that when the first conquest failed in the fourteenth century, partly before the gathering force of Irish recovery, partly because the English had lost interest in a colony that was no longer profitable, the culture had already lost much of its vigor and confidence. The chief art, bardic poetry, was highly elaborated, highly disciplined, often arid.The prose, deeply influenced by romance and crippled by a turgid, over-ornate style, never approached anything like the old energy and splendor. Obviously there was a great yearning toward lost wholeness and a ro202


manticization of the past; and whatever remained from pre-Norman Ireland was treated with vast respect, preserved in copy after copy, and generally misunderstood. Since worse defeats and worse destructions came in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, those attitudes were naturally further reinforced, especially with regard to whatever helped to bolster national pride.Thus a work like Lebor Gabála, which I rather suspect was never taken with total seriousness in pre-Norman Ireland, though its usefulness was certainly appreciated, was accepted practically as gospel by learned Irishmen down to the mid-nineteenth century; and they pointed to it as documentary proof of the seamless continuity of verifiable Irish tradition, a tradition which, interestingly, could be matched only by that of the Jews. They were, to be sure, conventional Christians whose faith in the Bible as world history had not yet been shaken by Darwin, but I think their belief in Lebor Gabála was more instinctive than that. Essentially—like the Sligo cobbler who explained to Yeats why, though he put no stock in hell or the Trinity, he believed in the fairies—for them “it stood to reason.” As for the Táin, it continued to be copied well into the eighteenth century, though we may suspect for a learned and limited audience. Synopses of it, and translations of single episodes like the duel with Fer Diad, were published in the nineteenth century, but scholarly editions and translations of the whole epic from the oldest texts became available only from 1905 on. Since then there has been constant and fruitful study of it, all motivated by the recognition of its high importance.Yet it may be that reverence has again produced solemnity, which in turn makes it difficult to deal with the Táin both as epic and as what it also is, a curious ragbag of the magnificent and the trivial, the tragic and the comic.To overstress the ragbag aspect would of course be the worst mistake of all.Yet there it is, and it needs to be looked at. In doing so, and trying to understand it, I think it helps to assume that the authors of the proto-versions were lively, complicated Irishmen who knew what they were doing (even if we can’t quite make out what they were up to) and who were fond of a joke.

Notes 1. R. A. S. Macalister, ed., Lebor Gabála Érenn, Irish Texts Society, 5 vols. (Dublin, 1938–56). 2. Phases of Irish History (Dublin, 1919), p. 98.The tower, incidentally, still exists. It is Torres de Hércules, the lighthouse at Corunna, reconstructed in the late-eighteenth century about the still massive remains of the pharos. 3. I discuss this at greater length in “The Táin and the Annals” (1971). [That essay follows immediately in part 4.—Ed.] 4. Tom Peete Cross and Clark Harris Slover, Ancient Irish Tales (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969), p. 354. In the reissue of this book, which was first published in 1936, 203

Early Irish History and Literature Charles Dunn has supplied a bibliography identifying the editions and translations of the tales. 5. Ibid., p. 329. 6. Cecile O’Rahilly, ed., Táin Bó Cúalgne from the Book of Leinster (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1967), pp. 227–28. 7. J. J. Tierney, “The Celtic Ethnography of Posidonius,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Ireland, 60 C, no. 5 (Dublin, 1960). See especially pp. 247, 251. 8. Cross and Slover, p. 206. 9. Eleanor Knott, Irish Classical Poetry, Cultural Relations Committee of Ireland (Dublin: Colm Ó Lochlainn, 1960), pp. 76–77. 10. O’Rahilly, p. 189. 11. L. Winifred Faraday, trans., The Cattle-Raid of Cualgne (London: David Nutt, 1904), p. 58. The text is from Lebor na Huidre and the Yellow Book of Lecan. 12. O’Rahilly, pp. 192–93.At this point a page is missing from the “Book of Leinster,” and the text is supplied from the closely related Stowe MS. Miss Faraday found the corresponding passage in Lebor na Huidre unpalatable and omitted much of it in her translation. 13. Faraday, p. 69. Miss Faraday translates some of the feat names. Miss O’Rahilly leaves them as they stand in the text, feeling it “impossible to translate most of them with any certainty as to the meaning.”

204

The Táin and the Annals

17 The Táin and the Annals

T

raditionally Táin Bó Cuailgne took place during the Pentarchy, when for a time there was no king of Ireland and rule was divided among the five provincial kings.This is not specifically stated in the Táin itself, but the two kings who figure prominently in the story, Conchobar mac Nessa of Ulidia and Ailill mac Máta of Connacht—like Conchobar, Ailill is known as the son of his mother, Máta Muirisce—are named in all versions of the Pentarchy list.There are also references to Ailill’s nephew, Ercc, son of Cairbre Nia Fer, as being in Tara. It is not made clear, however, whether he has become king of Tara or is still only son of the king, or indeed whether Tara in this case implies a provincial kingship of Mide or over-kingship of the Laigin. As for the king or kings of Munster, LU and YBL give Lugaid mac Nóis that title, but LL does not. In the Pillow Talk which prefaces the LL Táin we are told that when Medb of Connacht chose Ailill as her husband she was being wooed by his two brothers, Find [Fili], king of Leinster, and Cairbre Nia Fer, king of Tara, sons of Russ Ruad of the Laigin. A mysterious third suitor, Eochu Bec, may thus be understood as king of Munster. It would seem that the author of the Pillow Talk ignores or rejects the doctrine that the original five provinces included two Munsters and no Mide. Significantly he also calls Conchobar, not mac Nessa, but mac Fachtna, as in the prehistoric genealogy of Síl Ír. In the tract appended to Lebor Gabála, on the kingship of Ireland after the Milesian invasion—which we may refer to as DFE from its title in LL, Do Fhlathiusaib hÉrenn—we find in the older version1 that the Pentarchy First published in Ériu 22 (1971): 107–27.

205


followed the five-year reign of the eighty-fourth monarch, Eterscél Mór moccu hIair, of the Érainn, during whose time Christ was born. The five kings were Conchobar mac Nessa,Ailill mac Máta, Cairbre Nia Fer (presumably ruling the Laigin from Tara), and, in the two Munsters, Cú Roí mac Dáire and Tigernach Tétbannach.2 In this case the duration of the Pentarchy is not specified. It is followed by the reigns of Nuada Necht, the great-grandfather of Ailill and his brothers, who ruled but half a year, and of Conaire Már mac Eterscéil, who ruled for seventy years and fell at last in Dá Derga’s hostel. After the article on Conaire LL has no¯ combad and so na coicedaig and ¯ ¯ Rawl B 502 has Coic cen ardrig. ¯ 3 Then comes the eighty¯ bliadna iar do hErend seventh king, a nephew of Medb, Lugaid Ríab nDerg, son of the three Finds of Emain sons of Eochaid Feidlech. It may be as well to note right here that the reign of Conaire Már is probably either an interpolation in DFE or has been greatly lengthened. The Pentarchy in either location, after Eterscél or after Conaire, may also be an interpolation. If Christ was born in, let us say, the last year of Eterscél, the subsequent reigns to the fourth year of Lóegaire mac Néill, traditionally the beginning of Patrick’s mission, should add up to something like 432 years. In the following list the first column of figures is for the longer reignlengths given in DFE; the second, for the shorter. The variation, it will be observed, is almost all in the reigns of the Síl Éremóin kings, of whom most are ancestral to the Uí Néill.The Pentarchy, being of uncertain duration, is omitted from the calculation.

Síl Éremóin Síl Ébir (Crimthann mac Fidaig) Síl Ír Síl Lugdach maic Ítha Other

Subtracting Conaire

555.5 16.0 20.0 30.0 6.0 _______ 627.5 -70.0 _______ 557.5

431.5 13.0 20.0 30.0 6.0 _______ 500.5 -70.0 _______ 430.5

If Conaire be left out, the first king in DFE whose reign falls wholly within the Christian Era is Nuada Necht. The first whose reign is of significant length is Lugaid Ríab nDerg. Since there seems no room for the Pentarchy, it may be that DFE originally ignored the Táin. 206


In the prehistoric portion of the annals—the fullest text for this period being the first fragment of A Tig4—the first king of Ireland mentioned is Conaire, and the Pentarchy follows his death in 30 B.C. Two differences in the annals Pentarchy list from that in DFE are that Ailill is called mac Mágag and that instead of Cú Roí mac Dáire we have his grandfather, Dedad mac Sin, over one of the Munsters. Immediately following the list is an entry interpolated by the “H” hand of LU, which states that Lugaid Réo Derg (the difference in epithet is significant) became king in the seventh year after Conaire and which thus seems to give us the duration of the Pentarchy. However, simplicity exists nowhere in Irish history, and it is not surprising to find in the same annals, at 44 A.D., another notice of the death of Conaire in Togail Bruidne da Berga [sic], and, at 49 A.D., the beginning of the twentysix (read twenty-three) year reign of Lugaid Réo Derg. Lugaid’s death is then reported at 72 A.D., and again we find two accounts: that he was slain by the three Ruadchinn of the Laigin or, it may be, that he fell on his own sword in grief for his wife, Derb-forgaill. The first of these, which is undoubtedly the older, relates to the tradition that the three Ruadchinn Laigen slew both Conaire Már and Lugaid and that because of the slaying of Lugaid the Laigin forfeited the land between Áth Cliath and the Boyne.5 The second refers to Aided Lugdach occus Derfogaille and related stories in which Lugaid is accounted fosterson of Cú Chulainn.6 In the later version of the tract on the post-Milesian kings of Ireland7 an attempt is made to resolve the contradictions by placing the Pentarchy after Conaire and by using the list found in the annals, but this only means that whoever attempted such minor surgery was unaware of how deeply rooted the discrepancies were. DFE, then, mentions the Ulster Saga only by naming Conchobar as one of the Pentarchs and in its secondary account of the death of Lugaid—both quite likely being interpolations.The annals, on the other hand, have quite a lot to say about the Ulster Saga and the Táin—if anything, too much. Not only are we given widely varying dates for the death of Conaire and the accession of Lugaid, but with regard to the reign of Conchobar in Emain, the life-span of Cú Chulainn and the date of the Táin exactitude also evades us, though for no lack of data. Here are the relevant Irish entries from the first fragment of A Tig. The italicized passages are added by the “H” hand of LU.8 The dates are reckoned by counting kalends before 1 A.D., and thereafter by kalend-count and from the ferials of the solar-cycle. c. 39 B.C.

Fergus mac Leti, qui conflixit contra bestiam hi Loch Rudraige et ibi demersus est, regnauit in Emain annis .xii. 207


34 B.C. 30 B.C.

19 B.C. 2 A.D.

21 A.D. 33 A.D.

43 A.D. 44 A.D. 49 A.D.

62 A.D.

72 A.D.

Natiuitas Con Culainn maic Soaltaim. Hoc anno cepit regnare in Emain Conchobur Mac Nessa, qui regnauit annis .lx. Rorannad Hériu iarsin hi cóic, iar n-árcain Conare Mór mic Etarsceóil hi mBrudin Dá Dergga, etir Conchobur mac Nessa ocus Coipre Nia Fer ocus Tigernach Tétbannach ocus Dedad mac Sin ocus Ailill mac Mágag. Isin tsechtmad bliadain iar ndith Conaire rogab Lugaid Reo Derg rigi. [Under same kalend as the death of Virgil] Slógad Tána Bó Cúalgni. Mors Con Chulaind fortissimi herois Scottorum la Lugaid mac tri con (.i. rí Muman) ocus la Ercc (.i. rí Temrach) mac Coirpri Niad ocus la trí maccu Calattin de Chonnachtaib. Uii. mbliadna a áes intan rogab gaisced, xuii. mbliadna · dano a áes intan mboi indegaid Tána Bó Cuailg[n]e, xxuii. bliadna immorro a áes intan atbath. [marg.] Mors Emiri uxoris Con Culaind. [marg.] Mors Eirc maic Corpri rig Temrach ocus Lugdach mac Conroi la Conall Cernach ocus inriud coiced nErenn la secht Maini ó Ultaib. Conchobur mac Nessa in uii. anno Tiberii quieuisse dicitur. Conchobur mac Nessa obiit, cui successit filius eius Causcraid, qui regnauit in Emain annis tribus. Cath Artig for coiced nOlnecmacht la Cuscraid mac Concobair. Cuscraid obit la Mac Cecht. Mac Cecht do thuitim fochetoir la Conall Cernach ic Crannaig Maic Cecht. Glasni macConchobair .ix. annis regnauit. Íriél Glunmar mac Conaill Chernaig regnauit in Emain annis .xl. Togail Bruidne da Berga (ut alii aiunt, sed certe falluntur) for Conaire Mor.9 Lugaid Réo Derg mac na trí Find nEmna regnauit in Temoria annis xxui. Tricha ríg do Leith Chuind óthá Lugaid coDiarmait mac Cerbaill. Tomaidim Locha Rib maic Maireada dar Mag nAirbthen. Tomaidim Linmuine tar Liathmuine, edón Locha Echach áitt dollégad síl nDubthaich Dóeltengad acht Curcu Fóche nama; combrathair-side in Dubthach do Fergus mac Roaig. Lugaid Réo Derg occissus est óna trib Rúadchennaib (.i. 208


73 A.D. 78 A.D.

79 A.D. 85 A.D.

do Laignaib). Nó commad im claideb dodolécad connabbad do chomaid a mná .i. Deirbe Forgaill, nodechsad. Cremthann Nia Náir regnauit annis .xiii. Iriél Glúnmar (.i. mac Conaill Cernaig) die dominica hi Semniu occissus est o Cremthand Nia Náir (uel a Gallis, ut alii dicunt). [o Cremthand added in space left blank by Rawl B 502 scribe.] Fiacha Findamnas mac Iriel Glunmair regnauit in Emain dieis a athar annis .xx. Cremthand Nia Nar mortu[u]s est.

Though we are told here that the Táin occurred at 19 B.C., if we accept the entry on the death of Cú Chulainn, the date should be 8 B.C., and Cú Chulainn would have been born seventeen years earlier, in 25 B.C. If instead we go by the entry on his birth at 34 B.C., he would have died in 7 B.C., and the Táin would be at 17 B.C. We may also note that any of these dates for the Táin would require that the Pentarchy, if it began in 30 B.C., have lasted much longer than the five or seven years otherwise allotted to it. Or, if we accept the statement that Lugaid Réo Derg began to reign seven years after the death of Conaire, the Pentarchy would have been from 30 to 23 B.C. and the Táin have taken place sometime during those years. It may also be observed that the five-year gap from 44 to 49 A.D., between the second entries on the death of Conaire and the accession of Lugaid, corresponds to the alternate location for the Pentarchy in DFE, which might give us another approximate date for the Táin were not the chief actors long since dead. Then there is the question of how long the reign of Conchobar lasted. The entry on his accession says that he ruled for sixty years, that is, presumably from 30 B.C. to 30 A.D., but neither date for his death, 21 or 33 A.D., squares with this. The latter, however, is consistent with the story that his death was caused by a vision of the Crucifixion. As for the other Pentarchs, the interpolations associated with the entry on the death of Cú Chulainn imply that at least two of them, Cairbre Nia Fer and either Tigernach Tétbannach or Dedad mac Sin, were dead by 2 A.D., since new kings are named. And the lack of any formal reference in the annals to the existence of a king of Ireland from the first entry on the death of Conaire to the second on the accession of Lugaid raises the possibility that at least one redactor conceived, perhaps rather vaguely, of the Pentarchy as lasting for seventy-nine years, from 30 B.C. to 49 A.D., and with slowly changing personnel. One thing seems certain, that all or most of this confusion was in the annals from quite an early date. Best thought that the “H” hand scribe of 209


LU was probably of the thirteenth century. “H’s” interpolations in A Tig were scarcely his own invention. Rather he must have been resupplying material he felt was very significant and which the Rawl B 502 scribe had omitted in abridgment or because, as at 78 A.D., he was uncertain of the reading in his exemplar. In all likelihood “H” copied in his additions from another text of the same annals which he had before him, for a number of his passages are paralleled in AI, written in 1092, and also in A Cott (formerly the Annals of Boyle) which is more closely related to AU than to A Tig. In other words, these entries were characteristic of the pre-Patrician section of the annals long before Rawl B 502 was written in the late-twelfth century. And as is shown by the treatment of that section in AI, it was old, out-moded stuff which some scribes were not inclined to treat with much patience.Too many unremembered hands had tampered with it for too many forgotten reasons. Another sign, however, that these entries belong to the source of all our existing texts of the early annals is the presence of the following in AI, CS, and AU at a period when A Tig is lacking. AI § 389

CS-431 CS-432

AI § 391

CS-482

AU-482

[After entry on Palladius = 431 A.D.] Ab Incarnatione Domini nostri Iesu Christi usque hunc annum .ccccxxxii. anni sunt. A morte Con Culainn herois .ccccxxxiiii. A morte Conchobuir Meicc Nessa .ccccxiii. Ab Incarnatione Domini cccc.xxxiio. A morte con cCulaind herois usque ad hunc annum cccc.xxxi; a morte Concupair mic Nessa cccc.xii. anni sunt. [ = 432 A.D.] Item illo tempore Loegare mc. Neill Hiberniam regnauit annis .xxxuiii. Quarto autem anno regni eius Patricius peruenit ad Scottos. Praefátus item Loegare .xuiii. rex erat ex quinque regum tempore qui Hibern(iam) in quinque diuisserunt partes. id est Conchobur ocus Corpre ocus Tigernach Tetmanach [ocus] Dedad mc. Sin ocus Ailill mc. Mágach. [After entry on the battle of Ocha in which Ailill Molt mac Nath I mic Fiachrach, the last Connacht king of Ireland recognized by the annals and regnal lists, was slain by the Uí Néill and Dál Araide.] A tempore Concuphair mic Nessa usque ad Cormac mac Airt, ccc.uii. anni sunt. A Cormac usque ad hoc bellum cc. uii. [After same entry.] A Conchobro filio Nesae usque ad Cormac filium Art .ccc.uiii. A Cormac usque hoc bellum .cxui., ut Cuana scripsit. 210


The figures here, especially in the 482 entry, present several puzzles.10 What counts, however, is the evidence that the originals seem to have been composed by the same hand as those given earlier. Thus AI gives the same list of Pentarchs found in A Tig at 30 B.C.; and the statement that Lóegaire was the eighteenth king after the Pentarchy agrees with the pre-Patrician sections of A Tig and CS, where, with the exception of Crimthann mac Fidaig of Munster, whose story is wound up with the origin-legend of the Uí Néill, only Lugaid Reó Derg and his descendants are recognized as post-Incarnation kings of Ireland, a view much at odds with DFE. The reckoning of dates both from the Incarnation and from the deaths of Cú Chulainn heros and Conchobar mac Nessa shows the annalist again stressing the importance of the Ulster Saga. Perhaps most interesting of all is that AU attributes the 482 entry to Cuanu, that is, to the author of Liber Cuanach which is cited as an authority in AU eleven times from 467 to 629. It seems certain that DFE is older than the common source of the annals as we have them, but not much older, perhaps no more than a few decades. The chief political doctrines that underlie both DFE and the prehistoric portion of the genealogical corpus are that there had been an over-kingship of Ireland from the time of the Milesian invasion, that until the time of Christ succession to this kingship had followed no particular pattern, but that from there on—from Nuadu Necht or Lugaid Riab nDerg to the death of the last pagan king, Diarmait mac Cerbaill, in 565—there had been a nearly regular pattern of alternation (selaigecht) in the kingship.11 This alternation was meant to be understood as the political arrangement proper to Ireland in the Sixth Age of the World which had been initiated by the Incarnation. After the death of Diarmait there came a long period of uncertain succession, a time of troubles, which was brought to an end when the alternation was “restored” by the Mide and Ailech kings in 734 or 743, depending on whether Áed Allan mac Fergaile of Ailech or Domnall mac Murchada of Mide be counted as the first of the new series.12 It was also, of course, to be understood that the alternation was ordained by God and that all Irishmen thus owed gratitude and loyalty to those royal kindreds by which it had been so happily revived. It is fair to assume that when DFE was composed the actual alternation was a successfully established fact—that is, some time well after 743. The earlier alternation was of course a fiction deliberately manufactured to provide justification and sanction. Mostly it was sheer invention, but as it approached the fifth century and the period of detailed tradition the compiler would have had to suppress the reigns of known kings of Tara who were not of Dál Cuinn and, after the emergence of the Uí Néill, perhaps of one or two Connacht kings of Tara as well, while the reigns of the Dál Cuinn would 211


have had to be lengthened to cover the gaps. In the annals this would produce consequent displacement of other events relative to the new dates for each remaining king’s accession and death. This, I think, explains a good deal of the confusion in the fifth- and early-sixth century annals.13 If, as seems likely, the older annals were reworked by the same men who compiled DFE, and at the same time, the common source of the early annals as they now exist reflects still another revision. In this, I take it, two major alterations were made. First, the entries about the Ulster Saga, the Pentarchy, the reign of Conaire Már, and those which date events from the deaths of Cú Chulainn and Conchobar were added. Second, in the regnal list of Tara after the Incarnation, though in the annals it is clearly taken from that in DFE, the reigns of all other non-Dál Cuinn kings before Crimthann mac Fidaig are omitted, or, if like Cairbre Cattchenn, Éllim mac Condrach, and Cathaír Már, the kings are named, no space or insufficient space is left for their reigns. From Crimthann on, except for some unnecessary confusion about where to place Nath Í mac Fiachrach, the annals offer the same list as DFE.14 I used to think that this deletion of non-Dál Cuinn names was late and was perhaps a strident over-assertion of Uí Néill claims in the late-tenth or eleventh centuries, when Uí Néill fortunes were in marked decline. But I was wrong. It was characteristic of the common source. And the purpose evidently was to provide room for the Pentarchy and the reign of Conaire, since the omitted reigns total somewhat over seventy years.15 I would suggest that DFE was composed, Lebor Gabála and the prehistoric portion of the genealogical corpus given approximately the shape in which we have them now, and a large annalistic text running from Creation to what was then the present was assembled, all at about the same time and in the same workshop. The time would have been toward the end of the reign of Donnchad mac Domnaill (c. 770–97), the second Mide king in the alternation.The chronological framework of the early annals is chiefly based on Bede’s Chronicle which ends in 726, the ninth year of Leo III, emperor of Byzantium. In the annals there is a good deal of confusion about the final Bedan entries, and it seems to be assumed that Leo’s ninth year was his last, though he actually died in 741.Thus Bede’s Chronicle was most likely incorporated long enough after 741 for memory of Leo to have dimmed. Again, there is the matter of the Iona Chronicle which was inserted wholesale into the annals from the early-seventh century to 736, apparently to compensate for large excisions of Irish material which, it may be suspected, conflicted with the claims of the newly (and to us, mysteriously) exalted Mide kings.16 But, perhaps the most telling evidence is statistical. If we take all the annalistic texts together, the number of entries per decade rises rapidly from an average of about 25 in the latter half of the 212


sixth century to nearly 140 in the decade 741–50. Over the next two decades it falls to about 110 (761–70), then mounts sharply to nearly 160 in 781–90, after which it again falls to about 110 in 801–10. The two peaks seem to have some correspondence to the reigns of the first two Mide kings of Tara.The statistics, of course, are somewhat obscured by the fact that the third fragment of A Tig ends in 766, while CS is lacking from 723 to 803, where it resumes as rather a thin chronicle. If, however, we assume that an annalistic text is likely to be fullest for the period just before it is revised or brought up to date, the figures would indicate a year around 790. As has often been pointed out, the common source of the existing early annals ends in 911/912.17 From 766, where A Tig breaks off, to 911 we have to depend mostly on AU and AFM since the other texts offer only a small number of entries not found in these. AFM is the latest of our texts, compiled in the seventeenth century from a number of sources, several now lost; and, since it also draws on AU, comparison of the two texts is not as clear as it otherwise might be. However, I think it can be said with much confidence that one of the now lost sources of AFM was a quite full copy of a ClonmacnoiseVersion text, not improbably an unbroken copy of A Tig. Down to 835 AU is our fullest text by a considerable margin, though before 766 A Tig does contain a large number of entries not preserved in AU. In the fortyfive years from 766 to 811 AFM has about 60 entries not found in AU, 13 misplaced relative to AU, and 21 additions to entries common to both, while AU has about 150 entries not found in AFM and many additions to common entries.This proportion, however, is soon reversed.The figures for the last hundred years of the common source, 812–911, illustrate the decline of AU after 835 and the rising importance of AFM (see table 17.1).

Table 17.1. Comparison of AU and AFM In AU only

Total

Decade

Shared AU & AFM

811–21 822–31 832–41 842–51 852–61 862–71 872–81 882–91 892–901 902–11

76 76 101 88 51 72 69 65 36 41

31 36 20 13 12 11 12 11 8 4

Total

Combined

AU

In AFM only

AFM

total

101 112 121 101 63 83 81 76 44 45

26 24 31 39 35 42 35 46 60 53

102 100 132 127 86 114 104 111 96 94

133 136 152 140 98 125 116 122 104 98

213


It will be noticed that, despite the dwindling of AU, AFM stays pretty close to its average of 107 entries per decade during the century. Also, if 6 entries found only in AI in the decade 832–41 be added to the above, we have another peak equal to that at 781–90, with a number of entries not approached again before 911. Other signs that something happened to the common source about 835 are also forthcoming. For example, from 664 to 826 we have frequent entries on diseases and plagues, but thereafter none till 907. Even more indicative is that the large amount of information about monasteries and ecclesiastical families from the late-seventh century on, particularly those in east Mide and Brega, falls off very markedly about 835. For some the entries cease altogether; others are mentioned infrequently thereafter.18 The existing texts of the early annals can be roughly assigned to three versions: the Ulster Version which is chiefly represented by AU and A Cott; the Clonmacnois Version which includes A Tig, CS, A Clon, Annals of Roscrea, T Frag, and the short annals from Egerton 1782 printed in Silva Gadelica; and, as the third version, AI, first written in 1092, which is considerably closer to the Clonmacnois Version than to AU, but which shows affinities with both. It is of interest that after 911 AU and the Clonmacnois Version texts also have a common source which, however, accounts only for a percentage of all entries varying from almost nothing in the years immediately after 911 to twelve or fifteen percent in some later decades.19 Before 911 the percentage of common entries is of course immensely higher. The three versions represent different abridgments of and selections from the common source, or more likely from a prior abridgment of it, possibly a teaching-text made by a fer léiginn for his own use sometime after 911. Even when all texts are taken together, I am sure that we cannot reconstruct the early annals in anything like their original fullness. Too many screening and filtering operations, all too often haphazard, intervene between us and whatever may have existed in 790 or 835 or 911, not to mention the smaller effects of scribal corruption, ill-advised “correction,” and the addition of material from non-annalistic sources. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that the ultimate source was more diverse and was wider in its coverage than are any of the versions drawn from it. Each of our versions contains numbers of entries one would think more characteristic of the others, and which in fact are characteristic of the source.Thus though AU contains many of the sort of entries which the Four Masters customarily, though not regularly omitted—entries on storms, eclipses, plagues, great falls of mast, insufficiently identified persons, events abroad, and matters considered scandalous—enough such are found only in AFM or CS to show that they are not basically typical of AU. A study of the geo214


graphical distribution of entries unique to each version points to the same conclusion. Those in AU, especially after 835, show, as one would expect, a strong interest in the north, eastern Mide and Brega, Connacht, and Great Britain.Those in AFM and CS relate chiefly to western Mide, north Leinster, Osraige, north Munster, and eastern Connacht. In AI the non-Munster entries average about sixty percent for the eighth century and over fortyfive percent for the ninth. In each of the versions there is a considerable overlap with the geographical purview of the others. AFM, for example, has three entries on abbots of Bennchor and one each on abbots of Othan and Í and on kings of an Fochla, Conaille, and the Ards, which are not in AU. It also has at 766 a unique Scottish entry—on the death of Muiredach mac Ainbhchellaig, whose accession as king of Cenél Loairn is noticed in AU at 733. Some entries unique to CS are also of the sort one would expect chiefly from AU: CS- 852 CS-904

CS-909

Fechtgna a ccomarbus Patruic. Ead Rí Cruithentuaithe do tuitim fri da H. Imair ocus fri Catal, go .d. cedoibh. Ailech dargain do gallaibh. Caittell mac Ruadrach, Rí Bretan, moritur.

And at 835 AI alone provides an entry on the death of Indrechtach mc. Tomaltaich, lethríg Ulad. From 820 to 907 CS and AU share thirty-three entries omitted in AFM, mostly on northern events.Three of these are also shared with AI. Thirteen of the entries found in CS and AFM, but not in AU, are reflected in AI. Most of these refer to Munster and Leinster, but one is what might be considered typically an AU entry: CS-854 AI-854

Inrachtach H. Finnachta, heres Coluim Cille, sapiens optimus, .iiii. Id. Martii apud Saxones martizatur. Indrechtach hua Fínechta, abb Iae, hi martra dochoid oc dul do Roim (la Saxanu).

Finally it may be noted that, especially before c. 880, quite a few entries in AI are paralleled only in AU. One could go on multiplying instances, but these, I think, are enough to show that the existing versions draw from a single fount and that their differences are mainly characteristic of themselves, not of their source. Let us now turn to the annalistic text which I think was constructed about 790 and of which the common source was a revision.The compilers of this, following the doctrine of DFE that Emain fell to the three Collas more than three generations before the time of Lóegaire mac Néill, set the event at 327 A.D. However, they had also to take notice of the tradition that 215


Emain was founded and fell at times equally distant from the birth of Christ. In Senchus Síl Ír, the genealogical tract on Dál Araide origins, and in the Emain king-list associated with it, the statement is that Emain was founded in 450 B.C. and fell in 450 A.D.20 In this list there are forty-four kings of Emain from Cimbáeth mac Finntáin to Fergus Foga. Conchobar mac Fachtna is the twentieth—not the midmost—apparently with a reign of forty years. In the annals the list is abridged to thirty-two names and the foundation of Emain is put at about 305 B.C.21 Conchobar mac Nessa is the sixteenth king, with a stated reign of sixty years. In Senchus Síl Ír the heroes of the Ulster Saga, with the exception of Cú Chulainn, descend from Rudraige mac Sittride, the seventy-fifth king of Ireland and tenth of Emain. It speaks, not of Fergus mac Ro-eich and Conchobar mac Nessa, but of Fergus mac Rossa mic Rudraige and Conchobar mac Fachtna mic Caiss mic Rudraige. In the annals the list is shortened before Conchobar by omitting Rudraige and four of his descendants, including Fachtna and Fergus mac Rossa. Evidently the excisions totalled too many years, for we find in the annals that a name, Fíac mac Fíadchon, not found in the long list, is inserted between the seventh and eighth reigns. Fíac is said in the annals to have reigned for seventy-five years, but the kalendcount would indicate about fifteen and the annus-mundi dates, thirty. If we omit Fíac altogether, the sum of the stated reign-lengths in the annals from Cimbáeth down to, but not including, Conchobar is 273 years, which reckoned from 305 B.C. would put the beginning of Conchobar’s reign at 32 B.C.22 However, so many uncertainties are involved that I do not think we can accurately recover the original mathematical reasoning or say where Conchobar’s accession was then placed in the annals. It may, however, be quite significant that in the poem Cimbaeth cleithe n-óc nEmna in DFE, which is based on the same shortened list as in the annals, Conchobar is called mac Cathbath. In the annals he may also originally have been thus named. In shortening the Emain king-list to accommodate the new date for the fall of Emain, the annalists created other problems for themselves. Since the annals, like Bede’s Chronicle, began with Creation, and since the coming of the Gaels was set at about 1500 B.C., there should have been plenty of room for them to mark the reigns of all eighty-four kings of Ireland from Éremón to Eterscél Mór. In fact they did nothing of the sort. Apart from a few entries related to Lebor Gabála, one on the destruction of Dind Ríg, which is set at about 705 B.C., and an entry at 77 B.C., à propos of nothing at that date, which says that seventy Laigin kings reigned in Tara from Labraid Loingsech to Cathaír Már, all we get till the entry on the death of Conaire at 30 B.C. is the new Emain king-list. That this is quite deliberate is indicated by the often-discussed statement after the entry on the beginning of 216


the reign of Cimbáeth at 305 B.C., Omnia monimenta Scottorum usque ad Cimbaeth incerta erant. What the remark really means is that the annalists were trying to get off the hook presented by the statement in DFE that Cimbáeth was also the fifty-third king of Ireland. If they were to attempt to harmonize this with their Emain list, they would have had to cram thirty-one kings of Ireland, some with very long reigns, into the same 273 years (plus whatever we should add for Fíac mac Fíadchon) they had allowed for the fifteen Emain kings from Cimbáeth to Conchobar. Their solution was simply to imply that the Tara list was dubious and to leave it out. I presume that, if they mentioned Eterscél at all, it was simply to observe that Christ was born during his reign. They would then have picked up the Tara list with Nuadu Necht or Lugaid Ríab nDerg, probably at 2 A.D. Their strategy with regard to the previous kings would be the more excusable in that no one knew better than they the disharmonious mess presented by the prehistoric genealogies on which DFE had been based. Here we may pause for a moment to take note of the peculiar importance of Lugaid Ríab nDerg. He was, as we observed earlier, Medb’s nephew. Her brothers, the three Finds of Emain, Bress, Nár, and Lothar, begot him by triple incest upon their sister Clothra. Shortly afterwards they were slain by their grieving father, Eochaid Feidlech, the eighty-second king of Ireland, in the battle of Druim Criaich. In token of his somewhat unusual conception Lugaid was born with a red stripe round his neck and another around his waist to indicate which part of him derived from which sire (or uncle). His head was like Nár’s, his breast like that of Bress, and from the waist down he resembled Lothar. When grown to manhood he begot his own son, Crimthann Nia Nár, also incestuously upon his mother. Crimthann married outside the family. The purpose of this interesting tale is not what one learned psychoanalyst has imagined. It makes Lugaid a sort of ultimate ancestor of Dál Cuinn, for I would suggest that the result of the three-fold incest is meant to symbolize the union of the Uí Néill, Connachta, and Airgialla, in a federation, while the second incest, as it were, shows them fused into one people. Thus, too, Lugaid is the ideal figure to initiate that selaigecht in which his descendants were increasingly, and at last totally, dominant. In the annals his epithet is Réo Derg which is of uncertain meaning. O’Rahilly in EIHM takes it as the sounder, presumably older form and suggests that it may denote “of the red sky.” He also says that it could be shown that Lugaid in fact “was none other than Cú Chulainn himself,” but he does not offer the proof. It may, however, be remarked that in the tale just cited Ríab nDerg, “Red-stripe,” has a clear function. I know of no tale in which Réo Derg has any function. If, as I would guess, it was introduced into the annals by the reviser, he may have had two reasons for doing so. In 217


relocating Lugaid’s reign he could refer inferentially to stories in which Lugaid Réo Derg was the fosterson of Cú Chulainn and, at the same time, imply that these stories were a better authority for such ancient history than DFE and the annals associated with it.The use of the epithet may also point to the reason for the introduction or exaggeration of the reign of Conaire, that is, because of the tradition that both Conaire and Lugaid were killed by na tri Rúadchinn Laigen. In poems referring to that story we find a variant of the epithet, as, for example, in Do chomramaib Laigen, attributed to Flann mac Máel-máedóc, abbot of Glenn Uisenn, who died in 979: Hit he¯ cauraid cloite ¯ ferg na tri¯ Ruadchind, reim ¯ ¯ ngaile,

robeotar Lugaid reo ¯ nderg hit e¯ beotais Conaire.23

and again in Masu de chlaind Echdach aird, attributed to Orthanach úa Cáelláma (? bishop of Kildare, d. 840): · Guin iar Lugdach Reo nDerg. ríg rucad a tír thoirthech tríath anim dóib túath iarna rath otá Boind co Ath Cliath.24 The fact that in DFE and the genealogies Lugaid Ríab nDerg is related to Medb and connected with Emain through his fathers may have offered sufficient temptation for the reviser to try to associate the Táin also with the Dál Cuinn origin legend. However, he had too many implied affinities and correlations in mind to succeed wholly with any of them.The attempt to present Lugaid Réo Derg as succeeding Conaire after the Pentarchy and, at the same time, to bring him into a temporal relation with Cú Chulainn which would permit Lugaid to be his fosterson was bound to fail if, as was obviously important, the death of Cú Chulainn was to be placed at 2 A.D. The choice of that date—like 33 A.D. for the death of Conchobar—was clearly to associate these heroes with Christ. Thus the lives of Christ and Cú Chulainn overlap by one year—to which may be added that each has a life-span divisible by three: each has a divine father but is known as the son of a mortal father; each dies for his people, erect and pierced by a spear. By such manipulations the preeminence of the Táin was again asserted, but at the cost of blurring the other intended associations. The reviser may also have had in mind the need to overrule the authority of Senchus Síl Ír, for in that tract, at least as it stands in LL and Rawl B 502, there seems to be no certain mention of the Táin, as if to the compiler it was not the supreme tale of the Ulster Saga; Fergus and Conchobar are referred to differently; and the attached pedigree of Cú Chulainn, instead of making him half-Ulsterman, half-divine or half-divine, half-Briton, has him a Gael of the line of Éremón.

218


To whom, then, was the Táin so important, and why? One clue is that the central body of the tale was clearly composed in what is now north County Louth and by a person or persons who knew the local landscape intimately. My guess—and I am by no means the first to make it—is that the reviser was Cuanu, abbot of Louth, who died in 825. I would further suggest that his revision of the annals was the Liber Cuanach cited in AU and that it was brought to Clonmacnoise from Louth in 835, where it became the basis of the common source of the annals discussed before.25 Another, and very tentative, suggestion is that in the early-ninth century the Táin, which till then may not have been widely known outside Conaille—or not in the form in which it has come down to us—was brought forward and refurbished to serve as a heartening political allegory for a cause in which Cuanu was deeply involved. When the cause failed, the new popularity of the Táin—assuming that it was popular—was eclipsed, but a copy was also brought to Clonmacnoise in 835 and there lay dormant for nearly three hundred years. One of the curiosities of Irish history is the uncertainty about the place and manner of death of the Cenél Éogain king of Tara, Áed Oirdnide mac Néill Frossaig. Most annals say that he died in 819, at Áth dá Ferta in Mag Conaille, a ford somewhere near Louth, which figures prominently in the Táin and in Táin Bó Regama. AFM states piously that he died after a victory of penance. A Cott has him slain: Aed mac Neill interfectus est. AI, off on its own tack and probably confusing two separate entries, says that he died on a hosting in Scotland.The regnal lists, Baile in Scáil, and Keating say that he fell at Áth dá Ferta (or i cath Da Ferta) by Máel-Cánaig—Baile in Scáil stating explicitly, at bath per conflictionem Mael The implication is ¯ Canaigh. ¯ that he was killed by the miracles of a saint—as is usually the case, of a dead saint—obviously because of the violation of a monastery with which the holy man had been connected. Later on such chastisements are a positive speciality at Clonmacnois, accomplished per uirtutem Dé ocus Ciaráin. Since fert “grave” and fiurt “miracle” have similar inflected forms it is not surprising to find in AU that the place-name is translated iuxta Uadum duarum Uirtutum. This stress on the miraculous nature of the cause and the place of death, when combined with the fact that the exact location of Áth dá Ferta is uncertain—for it is not clearly defined in the Táin—may raise some doubt as to whether Áed actually did die there or whether it was simply deemed an appropriate place for him to suffer the saint’s wrath. In the Táin Áth dá Ferta is where Cú Chulainn, by agreeing to make a mock flight from Fergus, gets the promise that Fergus will fly from him at another time.That promise, redeemed in the last battle, ensures the victory of the Ulstermen.

219


As for Máel Cánaig, he was an anchorite of Louth who had died in 815. From the martyrologies we learn that his feast was September 18th and that he was from Rúscach in Cuailgne—now Roosky, half a mile south of Carlingford and of course in the Táin country. The violation for which he punished Áed took place in 818, when we learn from AU that Cuanu, abbot of Louth, went in exile to Munster, with the shrine of Mochta. AI says that the shrine of Mochta came to Lismore, in flight from Áed mac Néill. Since Lismore was a center of the reform movement, we may assume that Cuanu was associated with the Céli Dé. Whether he ever recovered his abbacy is uncertain. He was replaced at Louth, however, by a man of whom he would presumably have approved, Eochu úa Tuathail, a noted Céli Dé reformer, who died in 822. At his own death, in 825, Cuanu is called Cuanu Lugmaid, sage and bishop, but in the annals it is customary to give an exking or ex-abbot his former title in the entry on his death. In the quarter century or so before the full onset of the Viking raids a struggle seems to have been going on between the reformers and the traditional churchmen for the control of Armagh and thus, too, of its associated monasteries of which Louth was one of the chief. It concluded in the battle of Leth Cam, in 827, in which Níall Caille mac Áeda Oirdnidi, king of Ailech, defeated the Airgialla and Ulaid. Flanngus mac Loingsig, the abbot of Armagh, had died in 826 after ruling for fourteen years. He was probably a first cousin of the reigning king of Ulidia, Muiredach mac Echdach; and Muiredach was certainly a first cousin once-removed of Diarmait úa Áed Róin (d. 825), the founder of Dísert Diarmata in Leinster, a monastery also associated with the reform movement. Flanngus was succeeded, obviously through the influence of Níall Caille to whom he was anmchara, by Éogan Mainistrech mac Ainbhthig, then or later also abbot of Clonard and Monasterboice. The king of Airgialla, Cummascach mac Cathail, preferring the claims of his own half-brother, Artrí mac Conchobar, the bishop of Armagh, ousted Éogan and installed Artrí. Éogan appealed to Níall, who came with Cenél Éogain and Cenél Conaill to oppose the Ulaid and Airgialla, and in the resulting battle Cummascach was killed. Éogan resumed the abbacy tré neart Néill and retained it till his death in 834. Interestingly, the mother of Cummascach and Artrí was Lann, a sister of Níall.26 I suspect that she was also the wife of the reigning Mide king of Tara, Conchobar mac Donnchada, and that Artrí was their son. The first notice of Artrí is at 818, when he went to Connacht with the shrine of Patrick. AU then calls him airchinnech and CS, princeps, but at 823, when he and Fedelmid mac Crimthann, king of Cashel, proclaimed the lex Patricii over Munster, and in 825, when he proclaimed it over na Teóra Connacht, glosses in AU identify him as bishop of Armagh. In the other annals 220


no title is given, as if he were too famous to require one. At 832 AU notes in a single entry, Artri mac Conchobair, abbas Aird Machae, et Conchobair mac Donncodha, rex Temhro, uno mense mortui sunt—which would seem to reinforce the suggestion that he and Conchobar were closely related.That may also explain why, in 831, Conchobar had profaned Éogan Mainistrech hi foigiallnaig (whatever that may mean) and made prisoners of his muinntir and ¯ carried off his horse herd. As for Artrí, there is one other interesting scrap of information. CS and AFM provide a quatrain attributed to a senior of Armagh, lamenting the results of the battle: Ní ma ruccsam ar mbáire, Ní marggabhsam Eogan

ní ma lodmar sech Léire, sech cech ndeoraidh ind Ére.

O’Donovan translates: Not well have we gained our goal, not well have we passed by Leire, Not well have we taken Eoghan in preference to any pilgrim in Ireland. The meaning is that they were foolish to have gone past Lann Léire, Dunleer in Louth, to fetch Éogan from Monasterboice, but since deoraidh presumably refers to Artrí, it may carry not only the connotation of “pilgrim,” but also the more usual meanings of “stranger” or “outlander,” which, if he were of Clann Colmáin of Mide, he would most certainly be in the Armagh context. It may also imply one who embraced exile and poverty for the love of God, in other words, a Céle Dé. If Conchobar was backing Artrí, and through him the reform movement, his failure to appear at the battle was no doubt disappointing but perhaps not unexpected. If, as I think possible, the Táin was being put forward in the year or so immediately preceding as an allegory of the situation, it might have been read in some such sense as this: A king of Ulidia, intent on defending Emain Macha (read Ard Macha) against a threat from the west, and a Conaille champion, Cú Chulainn (Cuanu himself?), saving the situation by fighting in his own territory while the other heroes, for some reason or other, are prevented from coming to his aid. The fact that Cuanu sought refuge in Munster might also explain the name and the friendly depiction of Lugaid mac Nóis, the king of Munster, who, as far as I know, appears only in the Táin. He might possibly stand for Flann mac Foirchellaig, abbot of Lismore from 814 to 825, who may have been the son of Fóirchellach Fobair, abbot of Clonmacnois (Cluana mac Nóis), who died in 814. All this is, of course, so speculative that I hesitate to push it any further, as I have long hesitated even to propose it. However, it may help to explain 221


why Cuanu, or whoever was the reviser of the annals, set such great store by the Táin. The Viking attacks which began in full force about 825 upset everything in Ireland, lay and ecclesiastical, and surely reduced concern with the reform movement. Armagh and Louth were both plundered for the first time in 832. Louth was plundered again in 840, and its bishops, priests, and sages made captive. For a hundred years thereafter we have little information on it. In the Clonmacnois Version annals, however, we can find a curious sequence of entries about a family which came from Louth. For no other family in Ireland below the top ranks of royalty do we have anything like such information.The sequence begins with Gormán, abbot of Louth, who died on pilgrimage at Clonmacnois in 738. His son Torbach, a scribe, was briefly abbot of Armagh before his death in 808.27 Torbach had a son, Áedacán, abbot of Louth, who went on pilgrimage to Clonmacnois with his son Éogan and died there in 835. I presume that he belonged to the same ecclesiastical family as Cuanu and may perhaps have been a brother or cousin. Éogan remained at Clonmacnois and founded a family of scribes and clerics, which seems for a long while to have kept up its connections with the old home, for we find, for instance, that Cáencomrac, abbot of Louth, who died at Inchenagh in Loch Ree in 903, was tutor of his greatgrandsons.28 The family later became known as Maic Cuinn na mBocht, from Conn na mBocht who died in 1031 as head of the Céli Dé at Clonmacnois and warden of its poor. One of Conn’s grandsons, slain by raiders in 1106, was the chief scribe of LU. An entry at 37 b asks “a prayer for Máel Muire mac Céilechair, grandson of Conn na mBocht, who copied and searched out this book from various books.” The books may well have belonged to his own family and have been brought from Louth in 835. In Máel Muire’s hand we have most of the oldest text of the Táin, a number of other important Ulster tales, some devotional material, and legends connected with the royal families of Mide and Ulidia. That this family also maintained the annals at Clonmacnois is strongly suggested by the detailed and often flattering entries about them, generation after generation, which were surely supplied by themselves and were sometimes embellished by elevating deceased members of the family to offices at Clonmacnois they had in fact not held. Occasional hints are also dropped that they were a branch of the royal family of Brega, Uí Chellaig, but unfortunately for that the earliest instance adduced, Torbach himself, died long before the eponymous Cellach was born. At other times they admit to being of Mugdorn Maigen which is probably correct, for Mugdorn Maigen was very close to Louth and Conaille. It is likely that several other ecclesiastics at Clonmacnois, who had the epithet Conaillech, also belonged 222


to the family, though they cannot be attached to the genealogy. The genealogy, as it can be reconstructed from the annals, runs from 758 to 1134, covers twelve generations, and includes nineteen certain names. There are seven other names that may belong to it, and three that do belong but for which the linkages cannot be made.We have, then, an actual line connecting the LU Táin with Louth and, I think, with the Clonmacnois Version annals and Liber Cuanach as well (see table 17.2). I have long been puzzled to account for the presumed popularity of the Táin in pre-Norman Ireland and have not been satisfied by the explanation that while the Fenian tales found wide acceptance among the ordinary folk the Ulster Saga, and especially the Táin, was preferred by the filid and by aristocratic audiences. There are, to be sure, many stirring passages and quite a few amusing ones in the Táin, but what could a Munster or Connacht man, aristocrat or not, have made out of the many short placename stories it also contains, some of very small literary merit, about how this ford or that hill or fort or dolmen in Cuailgne or Muirthemne got its name? But indeed, how many independent mentions of the Táin are there before the twelfth-century or in Ulster tales of which our earliest copy is not also in LU? In Cormac’s Glossary, for instance, there are three references to Cú Chulainn, one of which also speaks of Conchobar as mac Cathboth. None of these relate to the Táin.There are also single references to Sencha, Cormac Cond Longass, and Mess Gegra—again enough to show that Cormac mac Cuilennáin, slain in 908, knew some Ulster Saga stories, but not that he knew the Táin. I do not know what the answer is, but I think that we must consider the pre-twelfth century reputation of the Táin a moot question. May it not be possible that the sudden appearance of the full text of this huge story, along with the other old Ulster tales, in LU triggered a wave of interest among the learned somewhat comparable to the excitement over the “rediscovery” of Ossian in the eighteenth century, and comparable also in its results? In any case, whether the learned knew the Táin or not, or were familiar only with some shorter or less impressive version, or were aware of reim-scéla and iar scéla which postulated it, the important siting of the references to it in the annals would have been enough to prepare them to receive it with enthusiasm.

Notes 1. See Macalister’s Recension I—LL, B. Fermoy—Lebor Gabala v. The acephalous ¯ Rig Erenn in Rawl B 502 (CGH 117–22) is closely related to DFE. ¯ 2. Rig Erenn has Tigernach Tetbuillech mac Luchta. See Geneal. Tracts, § C 187, for a ¯ pedigree attaching his brother Eochaid mac Luchta to the pre-Eoganachta Munster stem at Duach Dalta Dedaid. As for Tigernach Tetbannach, see ibid., C 162, and also Macalister’s Recension 3 (cf. note 7 infra) for a pedigree which tries to reconcile the 223

224

Máel Ciaráin, abb., d. 1079 Célechair, sruithsenóir, d. 1134

Máel Ciaráin, uasalsagart, d. 1134

Cormac, tánaisi abb., d. 1103

Do Mugdorn Maigen

Do Mugdorn Maigen

Máel Iosa, d. 1103

Note: A star means that the person is said to be of Uí Chellaig Breg. Ferdomnach, do Mugdornaib, abb. Clonmacnois, d. 872. Colmán Conaillech mac Ailella, do Conaillib Muirthemne, abb., d. 926. (It was he who, with the king of Tara, Flann Sinna, built the daimliac in 909, and who is doubtless depicted on Flann’s Cross.) Diarmait Conaillech, fer léigind, d. 1000. Brossal Conaillech, abb., árd-suí, d. 1030. ?Ailill mac Brossail, saccart fois Cluana mic Nóis, d. 1044. Maolán úa Cuinn na mBocht, airchinnech of Eclais Bec, d. 1097. Gilla an Choimdedh úa Cuinn na mBocht, tánaisi abb., d. 1128. ? Máel Mochta, comarba Ciaráin, plundered at Cluain Finnloch by Síl Anmchada and Delbna, 1141. (He probably was not the abbot.) Máel Muire Mac Cuinn na mBocht, primshenóir Érenn, d. 1180.

*Máel Muire, scribe, sIain 1106

Célechair, bishop, d. 1064 Gilla Críst, d. 1085

Óenacán, airchinnech E.B., d. 949 ? Conaing, bishop, d. 1010

Conn na mBocht, cend Céledh nDé, anchorite, d. 1031

Ioseph, anmchara, d. 1024

Dúnchad, fer-leiginn, anchorite, d. l006

*Dúnadach, bishop of Cl., d. 955

Ecertach, airchinnech of Eclais Bec, d. 898

Luchairén, scribe, d. 865

Éogan, anchorite of Clonmacnois, d. 847

Áedacán, abb. Louth, d. at Clonmacnois on pilgrimage, 835

*Torbach, scribe, abb. Armagh, d. 808

Gormán, abb. Louth, d. at Clonmacnois on pilgrimage, 758

Table 17.2. Pedigree of Maic Cuinn na mBocht of Clonmacnois


The Táin and the Annals statement that he and Dedad mac Sin reigned after Eterscél Mór with a claim that they were of the Érainn. The pedigree is full of self-contradicting repetitions. All efforts to resolve the confusion in DFE were of course hopeless (see table 17.3).Yet the genealogies and pseudo-historical documents are full of vague, inadequate attempts at resolving such dilemmas. The Lecan Miscellany is essentially an anthology of them. 3. A Cott has Togail Bruidne da berca for Conairi Mor. v bliadna d’Erind chen ric (h). Revue Celtique 41:314. Bruidhen Da Berga also occurs in the Rawlinson B. 512 text of Scél mucci Maic Dáthó, ed. Meyer, Hibernia Minora, 1894. 4. See Revue Celtique 16:405–14, for the section discussed here. 5. EIHM 94, 119; LL 51 b 49. 6. Carl Marstrander, “The Deaths of Lugaid and Derbforgaill,” Ériu 5:201–18; Eleanor Hull, The Cuchullin Saga (London, 1898), pp. 82, 230–34; Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 3:259. § 84. 7. Macalister’s Recension 3 = Lebor Gabála in BB and H. 2.15, and the second text in Lec. 8. Eoin MacNeill, “Annals of Tigernach,” Ériu 7:45–49. A twelfth-century date is much more likely; see H. P. A. Oskamp, “Notes on the history of Lebor na Huidre,” PRIA 65. § C., no. 6. 9. The same Latin gloss occurs a number of times in the so-called Dublin Fragment of A Tig, a text actually closely related to AU. 10. According to the figures in AI § 389 Cú Chulainn would have died in 2 B.C. and Conchobar in 19 A.D. I cannot make out the purpose of that emendation. In the second fragment of A Tig the reign of Cormac mac Airtt is put at 219–63 A.D. The ferials in this part of the text are much disturbed but are well enough preserved at the beginning and end of the reign for these to be dated securely. The dates, moreover, are corroborated by the associated entries on Roman matters.The figures in AU-482 indicate a span of 424 years from the death of Conchobar to the battle of Ocha, which agrees exactly with the kalend-count in the first and second fragments of A Tig and in CS, if eight demonstrably extra kalends in CS be omitted. But the kalends are deficient.The AU figures would thereby put the death of Conchobar at 60 A.D. and that of Cormac at 366 A.D. The figures in CS give a span of 514 years and place Conchobar at 32 B.C. and Cormac at 275 A.D. This might mean that the original calculation was from the accession of Conchobar to the death of Cormac. If we take 30 B.C. and 263 A.D. as the proper dates for these, the figures in the entry should be ccxc.iii and cxix. Anyone who has worked with the chronography of the annals knows how easily the lower-case Roman numerals can be misread, if blurred, or rubbed, or could be deliberately corrupted by learned emendators. A “u” is readily altered to “ii” or viceversa, and unwanted letters can easily be dropped. I have seen where so careful a transcriber as Whitley Stokes has read “x” as “c.” However, I admit it would take a lot of accidental corruption to produce the figures in CS and AU. 11. From Lugaid to Crimthann mac Fidaig the alternation is between Dál Cuinn and non-Dál Cuinn kings. From Níall to Ailill Molt it is between Uí Néill and Connachta. From there on it is between the ancestors of Cenél Éogain and Clann Colmáin Móir (and of course of Síl Áeda Sláine) and those of the less successful Cenél Lóegaire and Cenél Cairbre. 12. I think there is a strong likelihood that the alternation became a fact; that is, that it was reluctantly accepted by Cenél Éogain, only with the reign of Donnchad mac 225

226

Findabair and the seven Maines ≠89 Crimthann Nia Nár

≠87 Lugaid Ríab nDerg

= Clothra

=

Cú Roí

Dáire

≠84 Eterscél Mor

Éogan

Ailill

≠86 Conaire Már

Mess-Buachallab

Étaín Óg

≠83 Eochaid Airem = Étaín

Iar

Dedaid mac Sin

ÉRAINNa

Note: Numbers indicate kings of Ireland in DFE. In the genealogies that attach the Érainn pedigree to that of Leth Cuinn at Óengus Turbech Temra, the seventieth king of Ireland, the linkage is made eleven generations before Eochaid Feidlech and twelve generations before Dedaid mac Sin. Though on this chart the Érainn pedigree is moved up in order to make Eterscél Mór and Mess-Buachalla contemporaries, in the genealogical scheme Eterscél comes two generations later than Crimthann Nia Nár. b Mess-Buachalla was the daughter, by incest, of Eochaid Airem and Étaín Óg—cf. Tochmarc Étaine, Ériu xii.

a

≠82 Eochaid Feidlech Cairbre Ailill = Medb Bress, Nár, Lothar Nia Fer mac Máta Cruacháin na trí Find Emna

≠88 Conchobar Ercc Abratruad

Find Fili

Ross Ruad

Find

Finntán

≠85 Nuadu Necht

Fergus Fairrge

LETH CUINN

LAIGIN

Table 17.3. Relationships of Some of the Chief Non-Ulidian Figures in TBC and Related Tales


The Táin and the Annals Domnaill. There are only eight entries in the annals about Domnall mac Murchada from 733 to 763, and one of these, a premature entry on his death (A Tig, AFM-761) calls him Domnall mac Muirchertaig, rí Úa Néill. It is also curious that having entered religion in 740 he should have done so again in 744, the year after the beginning of his reign. He may have been at least temporarily deposed, for he is not mentioned again till 756. By contrast, his son’s reign is very well reported. 13. Confusion was compounded by the necessity of pegging the fourth year of Loégaire at 432 which by then had become the accepted date for the beginning of Patrick’s mission. That, by the way, is a well-known magic number which can be divided nine ways with no remainder and has several other remarkable properties. We may also note that in Hindu cosmogony the Kali Yuga is a period of 432,000 years and that the Krita, Trita, and Dvapara yugas are multiples of it by, respectively, 4, 3, and 2, while the Maha Yuga which is closed by the apparent destruction of the world is 4,320,000 years. My guess is that the learned were delighted to find in Prosper’s notice of Palladius at 431 an excuse for putting Patrick at 432. Placing the beginning of the reign of Loégaire at 428 meant putting Níall still earlier. An analysis of Uí Néill death dates indicates that, if Níall was the common ancestor, his death should come between 428 and 463—say, at a mean of about 445. Loégaire would thus come correspondingly later. This would also remove the difficulty about accepting the tradition that Crimthann mac Énnai Chenselaig was Níall’s slayer. Much more confusion resulted from moving the fall of Emain Macha back to 327 A.D. from some time in the latter half of the fifth century. The new doctrine required that Fergus Foga, the last king of Ulidia in Emain, should be made contemporary with Muiredach Tíreach and the three Collas. In the Dál Araide genealogies he is first cousin of Fiachra Lonn, who is mentioned in the annals of 482. Needless to say, the shearing actions caused by such relocations of important events and of the persons associated with them are felt in the genealogies as well as in the annals. 14. As in DFE Nath Í should come between Níall and Loégaire, but see the entries on his death at 445 in AU and AI. It is possible that these come from a much older annalistic text than any we now possess. If so, the fourth year of Loégaire would be 449. The ferials in A Tig and CS can be reconstructed from 1 A.D. to 652 A.D., where they end.They indicate 443 A.D. for the coming of Patrick. A number of such oddities in the early annals may derive from notes and glosses inserted by men who had access to texts compiled long before 790. 15. In the previous list of reigns from Eterscél to 432 it will be noted that the total of Síl Éremón alone can be 431.5 years. But to use only these reigns would do away with the alternation while still admitting Laigin, Érainn, and Dál Fiatach kings of Ireland. 16. If the Scottish entries are subtracted from the annals a remarkably thin chronicle of Irish events is left, and in this a significant number of entries have been rendered useless by deleting what would identify the persons mentioned. Particularly in the sixth and early-seventh centuries there has been much deliberate suppression of information on Tethba, Cenél Cairbre, Cenél Lóegaire, and Cenél Fiachach. We are left with no adequate account of what was certainly the most significant political process in early Christian Ireland, the rise of Clann Colmáin Móir and the emergence of Mide as a major state. 227

Early Irish History and Literature 17. As Hennessy suggests, the entry Finis Cicli in CS S.A. 910 ( = 911) may refer to the end of a nineteen-year lunar cycle—if it be assumed that such a cycle began in 1 A.D. Thus in AI, at 798, we have Initium Cicli; secunda feria, .ix. luna. Use of the lunar cycle, however, is not characteristic of the Clonmacnois Version annals. It may be that the CS entry, which is the last entry in the common source, was originally Finis Cronici, and that it was emended by someone who was puzzled to find it where the continued text he was using most certainly did not end. 18. Of course this might have been due simply to the Viking raids, but I do not think so. The entries on the eastern monasteries were made by local annalists who were much interested in the network of ecclesiastical families there, and this sort of information practically ceases after 835. 19. This later common source was probably the Book of Dub-dá-leithe cited in AU at 629, 963, 1004, and 1021. The author was most likely Dub-dá-leithe mac Máel Muire, of Clann tSinaich of int Airthir, the family that tended to monopolize the abbacy of Armagh from the early eleventh century on. He was fer léigind of Armagh from 1046 to 1049, and then abbot till he was ousted in 1060. He died in 1064. If, as I think is possible, the Book of Dub-dá-leithe was the source of AU and the so-called Dublin Fragment of A Tig, it was probably a revision of the common source in terms of the curious chronological scheme one finds in both those texts. A great many of the glosses and multiplied entries one finds in AU are attributable to attempts to harmonize the text with the Clonmacnois Version. Since the latter has plenty of chronological oddities of its own, though these are less obvious, the attempts were not very successful. 20. Cf. CGH, 269–86. 21. This explains the effort to re-date the fall of Emain in A Tig, where the ferials are deliberately corrupted to make it seem that the year is 307 A.D. 22. See note 10 above, where CS also indicates 32 B.C. 23. Ed. Meyer, from Rawl B 502 88a, Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 8:117. 24. LL 51 b 49. 25. Note AU-471: Praeda secunda Saxonum de Hibernia, ut alii dicunt, in isto anno deducta est, ut Maucteus (.i. Mochtae) dicit. Sic in Libro Cuanach inueni. As the gloss observes, Maucteus is Mochta, patron of Louth. 26. Ban-Shenchus, Revue Celtique 47:310; 48:186, 225. She is said to be mother of Cummascach and of Fogartach mac Máel Bressail of Uí Fiachrach Arda Sratha, king of Airgialla who died in 853. Cummascach was of Síl Duibthire of Uí Cremthainn. Artrí is not mentioned in Ban-Shenchus. The statement that he was half-brother of Cummascach is in the annals. 27. See James F. Kenney, The Sources for the Early History of Ireland: Ecclesiastical, 2d ed., ed. L. Bieler (New York, 1966), p. 338, for his association with the Book of Armagh. 28. See the story Imthecht Caenchomraic from the Book of MacCarthy Reagh in Silva Gadelica 1:87–89. Here comarba Mochta has been changed to ocus Mochta a ainm ar tús. His two pupils, Dúnadach and Óenacán, sons of Ecertach, have become Eogan ocus Ecertach dá mac Aedacán d’íb Máine, by confusion with Maic Áedacáin, the famous Uí Maine learned family of post-Norman times.

228

The Battle of Móin Mhór

18 The Battle of Móin Mhór, 1151

I

n his Early Celtic Nature Poetry (1937) Kenneth Jackson translated a quatrain that occurs in the tracts on metrics: Cold is the night in Móin Mór, rain pours down that is not trifling, a roaring with which the fresh wind laughs howls over the sheltering wood.1

Some years ago it occurred to me that the verse might be from a lost saga in which it probably described men’s (or a man’s) feelings in a threatened army on a wild night that presaged disaster.The mention of heavy rain, wind, and, above all, cold would seem, too, to indicate that the battle, if indeed the quatrain had the context I imagined, had been fought well after the usual campaigning season. So I looked in the annals, and it didn’t take much search to find that a great battle had been fought at Móin Mhór in 1151, a year in which the winter, AFM tells us, was “changeable, windy, stormy, with great rain” [Gamh ilshíonach, gaethach, ainbhthionach, co ffolc ndearmhair]. As for where it was fought, O’Donovan says in a note that Móin Mór means “large bog” and that the battle-site was the townland of Moanmore, parish of Emly, barony of Clanwilliam, county of Tipperary. For once he was wrong on all counts. Móin can of course mean not only “bog,” but “moor” or “waste.” And Móin Mhór was the name for what are now known as the Nagles Mountains that stretch along the south side of the Blackwater from Fermoy to Mallow, forming a moorland that is continued westward as the Boggerach MounFirst published in Celtica 20 (1988): 11–27.

229


tains, both ranges having ridgelines averaging about thirteen hundred feet. The two moorlands are separated by a long, shallow pass that runs northby-west about fourteen miles from Blarney to the Blackwater opposite Mallow. Nowadays the Cork to Dublin railroad and Route N20 follow the pass. In the twelfth century it would have been threaded by a narrow track between the small streams at the bottom and the hilltops, very likely wooded or furze-covered, on either side, a feasible enough path for single travellers or small parties but no place for a panicky army.Then as now the more usual and presumably less difficult way north from Cork, at least for a large force, would be by way of Glanmire, three miles east of the town, and then over by where Watergrasshill and Rathcormack now stand. The crossing of the Blackwater would be at Fermoy or Ballyhooley. It is unfortunate that for the period around 1151 so many of the annalistic texts are scant or defective. AU is lacking from 1132 to 1154, AI from 1131–1158,ALCé from 1139 to 1169,2 and CS ends at 1150. However, there are long entries on the battle and events associated with it in A Tig, in AFM (which draws its account chiefly from A Tig), and in Mac Carthaigh’s Book, the first of the three texts edited by Séamus Ó hÍnnse as Misc A.The battle is also mentioned briefly in A Cott (formerly the Annals of Boyle) and in A Clon, where it appears under the date 1141. It is referred to in LL and Lec in that part of the tract on the Christian Kings of Ireland that deals with the high-kings with opposition; and Professor Ó Coileáin has pointed out to me that in LL, in Fíanna bátar i nEmain, attributed to Cináed Ua Artacáin, it merits a whole quatrain which he translates: The battle of Móin Mór—great the calamity— brought grief to Munster; the forces of Leinster overwhelmed the descendant of Blat; the hatred of his [or “its”] noblemen towards Diarmait. “The descendant of Blat” indicates Toirdhelbhach Ua Briain, king of Thomond. “Diarmait” is Diarmait Mac Murchadha, king of Leinster. As for the tract on the high-kings, under the reign of Toirdhelbhach Ua Conchobhair, who died in 1156 and whom Lec credits with twenty years as ard-rí co fressabra [high-king with opposition], though it does not specify which twenty of his long career, Lec has “the battle of Móin Mór and the ravaging of Munster.” LL, very much a Leinster document, has “Battle of Móin Mór. Won by the Leinstermen and the Connachtmen over Toirdhelbhach Ua Briain. Diarmait mac Donnchadha Maic Murchadha and Toirdhelbhach Ua Conchobhair were the victors.” However, some lines earlier it is stated in LL that after Muirchertach Ua Briain, who died in 1119 but who had been in deep trouble since 1114, there was a comflaithius, a 230


period of joint rule, of thirty-six years, “unless,” it is added,“Toirdhelbhach mac Ruaidhrí Uí Chonchobhair was king of Ireland,” implying pretty broadly that in the eyes of the writer he wasn’t. A Tig, a chronicle with a strong Connacht bias, states that the battle was won by Toirdhelbhach Ua Conchobhair,“king of Ireland,” and AFM pretty much follows suit. Mac Carthaigh’s Book, which because of the gap in AI is our only Munster source, is not much concerned with who won. What it describes is a great defeat for the forces of Thomond and Ciarraighe Luachra as they emerged from the pass in the morning fog and encountered the waiting enemy. As we shall see, the real question is whether the ultimate victor was the king who won the battle or someone else far away. Toirdhelbhach, son of Diarmait, son of Toirdhelbhach, son of Tadhg, son of Brian Bórumha, had been king of Thomond and for most of the time king of Munster since the death of his brother Conchobar Slapar Salach, also called Conchobhar na Cathrach, in 1142.Toirdhelbhach, son of Ruaidhrí na Saighi Buidhi Ua Conchobhair, had been king of Connacht since 1106, when Toirdhelbhach Ua Briain’s uncle Muirchertach, then at the height of his power as king of Munster and high-king with opposition, had deposed Domhnall, son of Ruaidhrí, and replaced him with the eighteen-year-old Toirdhelbhach. For the next few years Toirdhelbhach had functioned with apparent fidelity as Muirchertach’s man, but evidently he was not consumed with gratitude, for when Muirchertach was first incapacitated by serious illness, in 1114,Toirdhelbhach at once threw his support behind Muirchertach’s brother Diarmait. In the turmoil that followed, and during which there was the customary switching of sides, neither Diarmait, who died in 1118, nor Muirchertach, who died in 1119, was in a position to claim the kingship of Ireland or that of Leath Mhogha, the kingship of Munster being itself sufficiently in doubt. After Diarmait’s death Muirchertach made a final bid to recover Munster and to put down the claim of Tadhg, son of Muiredach, son of Carthach—Tadhg being the first Mac Carthaigh in what had been Clann Faílbhe Flainn of Eóghanacht Caisil—to the kingship of Desmond; but though Muirchertach was seemingly backed by Ua Conchobhair, Ua Máel Seachlainn of Midhe, and Ua Ruairc of Bréifne, when he had advanced as far as Glanmire he was suddenly and definitively deserted by all these allies who instead made a pact with Tadhg, recognising his claim and supporting him against the men of Thomond.“It was then,” says Mac Carthaigh’s Book,“that Muircheartach Ó Briain was parted from the kingship of Munster and Ireland.” Nor was that the final insult, for Ua Conchobhair soon divided Thomond among the three sons of Diarmait: Conchobhar, Toirdhelbhach, and Tadhg. In thus politically reviving Eóghanacht Caisil through his recognition of Mac Carthaigh as king of Desmond, and of Desmond as co-equal to and 231


independent of Thomond, Ua Conchobhair’s intention was to keep Munster divided and to keep it weak through the guaranteed mutual enmity of the two ruling kindreds. If Ua Briain and Mac Carthaigh should come to some reluctant understanding, the province would remain divided. If, as was far more likely, each side sought to subordinate the other and restore a united Munster under its own rule, Ua Conchobhair could presumably intervene on behalf of the losing party and thus re-establish the twofold division. Meanwhile he could expect that Thomond would be particularly weakened for some time to come by rivalry among the three brothers to whom it had been shared out. These devices of course were old and familiar; and Ua Conchobhair had had plenty of opportunity to observe their employment by Muirchertach Ua Briain, a master practitioner. Indeed, over the following twenty years, the struggle to reunite the province did go on; and when he had the power to do so, Ua Conchobhair did what he could to prevent its being resolved; but, with the murder of the great Cormac Mac Carthaigh in 1138, the Uí Bhriain came out ahead. Cormac’s killer was Diarmait Súgach Ua Conchobhair Ciarraighe. It would appear that he did the job as a favour to Toirdhelbhach Ua Briain when both were guests at the house of Mac Carthaigh at Magh Thamhnach.Their complicity seems to have cemented their friendship. As for the hoped-for contention among the three sons of Diarmait Ua Briain, that was soon settled. Toirdhelbhach yielded to Conchobhar, to whom he seems to have been loyal till Conchobhar’s death in 1142, and between them they ousted Tadhg. From then on Tadhg sometimes sought refuge in Connacht, sometimes was back in Munster in or out of favour, and sometimes was imprisoned by Toirdhelbhach. At all times he remained for Ua Conchobhair a potentially useful pawn. Nor in later years was Tadhg the only such alternative to Toirdhelbhach that Ua Conchobhair could summon up.The two Toirdhelbhachs, incidentally, were wound and bound in one of those complicated skeins of kinship that may fill the modern mind with respect for the ingenuity of our royal ancestors.To count only their nearest degrees of relationship,Toirdhelbhach Ua Briain was first-cousin, sister’s son, and son-in-law of Toirdhelbhach Ua Conchobhair. Interestingly, each of the three women involved—Ua Briain’s aunt, mother, and wife—was named Mór, and, need it be said, all three were also closely related. By Mór, daughter of Toirdhelbhach Ua Conchobhair, Toirdhelbhach Ua Briain had a son, Muirchertach, who was thus also sister’s son to Ruaidhrí Ua Conchobhair,Toirdhelbhach Ua Conchobhair’s eldest son, chosen successor, and, except in moments of rebellion, his righthand man. As we shall see, Muirchertach was to prove useful to his maternal kin on two occasions. 232


Now to turn to broader themes. If we examine what the annals tell us of the five years before the battle of Móin Mhór, it becomes apparent that in the all-Ireland scene the prestige and fortunes of Toirdhelbhach Ua Conchobhair, then entering his sixties, were much on the wane, while those of a young and capable rival, Muirchertach mac Néill Uí Lochlainn, were rising steadily. Suddenly, too,Toirdhelbhach Ua Briain’s prospects brightened. In 1145 Ua Lochlainn and his chief ally, Donnchadh Ua Cearbhaill of Airghialla, expelled Ua Gairmleadhaigh of Cenél Móain from the kingship of northern Cenèl nEóghain and, three years later, banished him to Connacht, a pretty sure sign that Ua Gairmleadhaigh had been Ua Conchobhair’s man. Then Tighearnán Ua Ruairc of Bréifne broke with Ua Conchobhair and began a series of raids into northern Connacht that would go on for years. The Munstermen invaded Connacht and captured the king of Uí Mhaine and killed the king of Iar-Connacht, though their fleet on the Shannon was later defeated by Ua Conchobhair’s fleet. Most significant of all, however, was that Midhe,Tethbha, and Cairbre Ua Ciardha, which had long suffered under Ua Conchobhair’s harsh enforcement of his claims, turned against him and, apparently in desperation, began attacking not only Connacht, but Bréifne, Connacht’s former ally, and the Airghialla, who had been pressing upon them on behalf of Ua Lochlainn. And CS adds the astonishing ocus Tairdhealbach O Bríain do ríoghadh dhóib, “and Toirdhelbhach Ua Briain was made king by them,” whatever in practice that may have meant. Ua Conchobhair was a tough customer—as cruel, crafty, warlike, and grasping as they came—and he fought back hard and steadily. Yet though in the eleven years remaining to him he was to enjoy a number of successes and several outright victories, Móin Mhór among them, he was not to recover what he had lost in 1145. Ua Lochlainn, on the other hand, though he experienced occasional setbacks, went from power to power. In 1148 he and Ua Cearbhaill invaded Ulidia, deposed the king, and divided that country four ways; he also took the hostages of Cenél Conaill, thus making himself complete master in the north. In 1149 he received the hostages of Bréifne and Leinster and of Midhe, Tethbha, and Conmhaicne. In 1150 he made a royal progress [ríogh thurus] to Inis Mochta in Brega, and there, according to AFM, the hostages of Connacht were sent to him “without a hosting, through the blessing of Patrick and the coarb of Patrick and his clergy [samad].” That left only Munster outstanding; yet few could have expected that Ua Briain would submit easily. In 1146 he had raided Leinster, ravaged Uí Fhailghe, and taken many captives. From 1145 to 1147 he kept his brother Tadhg in fetters, doubtless suspecting him of connivance with Ua Conchobhair. In 1149 he invaded south Connacht, took a great cattle-prey, and 233


destroyed Ua Conchobhair’s castle at Galway. And in 1150, apparently after Ua Lochlainn had returned from his royal progress, Ua Briain invaded Brega. Actually AFM describes two invasions, but since both are to the same area and since the same surprisingly weak opposition from Ua Ruairc and Ua Cerbhaill is indicated, it may be guessed that this is but one event differently reported in two of AFM’s sources. The first entry says that Toirdhelbhach Ua Briain led an army to Loch Ua nGobhann [unidentified] in Machaire-Gaileng [in barony Moregallion in Meath], plundered Slane, and in a skirmish with Ua Ruairc and Ua Cearbhaill lost the son of Ua hIfearnáin of Uaithne Cliach. The second entry is much more substantial and is best quoted entire. An army was led by Toirdhealbhach Ua Briain to Ath-cliath, and the foreigners came into his house; and from thence to Commarmana, and to Abha, and burned Domhnach-mor Mic Laithbhe. An army was led by Muircheartach, son of Niall Ua Lochlainn, with the CinelEoghain and the Ulidians, to relieve Ua Cearbhaill and Ua Ruairc, to Dun-Lochad, in Laeghaire; and the foreigners made a year’s peace between Leath-Chuinn and Leath-Mhogha. I think it is fairly plain what Ua Briain was attempting—a bold, decisive move, and almost certainly an act of desperation, a gambler’s throw. Surely every one of Brian’s descendants who held or might take the kingship of Thomond would dream of duplicating his great forebear’s accomplishment. Brian by force and policy had united Munster. He took control of south Connacht and of Osraighe and then forced Leinster to submit to him. Then he took Dublin. And in 997, at a parley on the eastern shore of Loch Ree, he brought the Uí Neill high-king, Máel Seachlainn Mór of Midhe, to accept a settlement that both men surely knew could only be temporary. Brian recognized Máel Seachlainn as high-king and as supreme in Leath Chuinn. Máel Seachlainn recognised Brian as king of Leath Mhogha and not to be challenged there. And each turned over to the other such hostages, then in his possession, as would pertain to this arrangement. Brian thus got all the hostages Máel Seachlainn then held from Leinster, Dublin, Uí Mhaine, and Uí Fhiachrach Aidhne. It is not said what he gave in return. Like everything Brian did this was revolutionary, most of all, I think, because it gave actual political substance to the old, but I suspect almost literary, concept of Leath Chuinn and Leath Mhogha as halves of Ireland separated by a boundary running from Áth Cliath to Áth Cliath Medraighe (in effect from Dublin to Galway). Having achieved that, Brian of course could not have stopped even if he had wanted to. The movement he led had too much impetus. 234


But nobody in the twelfth century was going to be able to repeat Brian’s performance. Novelty and surprise had been essential elements of his success. A century and a half later the game had once again become almost ritualized, every player knowing all the conditions and rules and knowing too the characters, abilities, interests, strengths, and vulnerabilities of all other possible players.Yet there was no other game, and if Toirdhelbhach Ua Briain was going to play it, he had to make the move he did make before Muirchertach Ua Lochlainn should sweep the board. Thus he persuaded the Dublin Galls to submit to him, to “come into his house.” One may wonder how much they charged him. Their price to Ua Lochlainn in 1154 would be twelve hundred cows, and in 1168 they would charge Ruaidhrí Ua Conchobhair four thousand. However, since to get the submission of Dublin seems to have counted as securing that of Leinster too, Ua Briain was doubtless ready to pay what was demanded: both parties of course understanding that the submission was for a short time only and would involve no serious commitment of loyalties on the part of the Galls. What counted was that Ua Briain, who, from his expedition in the previous year, could claim hegemony over southern Connacht, could now equally lay claim to lordship of Leath Mhogha. His next move showed that either he or some trusted adviser was a clever man. He moved into Brega and occupied the land around Tara. It was, one may guess, late in the year when troops were normally dispersed; and it would appear that Ua Briain was strong enough to deal handily with such opposition as Ua Ruairc and Ua Cearbhaill were able to mount on short notice. Further, since when Ua Lochlainn hurried south to reinforce them with such troops as he could scrape together there was still no battle, it would appear that Ua Briain was able to keep his army concentrated and ready for action, which in turn would mean that he was able to keep it supplied— and that would require that he had brought supplies with him. In other words, this thrust into Brega had been well-considered beforehand and unusually well-prepared. He had, to be sure, the Dublin Galls with him, or some of them at any rate, but the signs are that they were not anxious to fight if they did not have to. Instead they are credited by AFM with negotiating a year’s peace “between Leath-Chuinn and Leath-Mhogha” [go ndearnsatt Goill síth mbliadhna etir Leath Cuinn, ocus Leath Mogha]. This may be presumed to mean that technically, according to the accepted rules of the game,Toirdhelbhach had paralleled Brian’s triumph of 997: in some form or other Ua Lochlainn had been made to recognize him as overlord of Leath Mhogha and thus, if only for the moment, the equal of himself as overlord of Leath Chuinn.The conditions of 1150 were, however, very different from those of a century and a half earlier. Ua Briain had made a strong and cun235


ning move, but from a very shaky base. This time the momentum was all with Ua Lochlainn. So now we come to 1151, the year of the great battle. Each of the annalistic texts is composite, drawing from two or more sources, so it is not surprising that they report the events differently or present them in different order. For 1151, though, I think we can be fairly sure of the order in which the events did occur. To begin with, young Muirchertach Ua Briain, Toirdhelbhach’s son by Mór, daughter of Toirdhelbhach Ua Conchobhair, deposed, or tried to depose, his father. Doubtless this was done at the instance of his maternal kin—as would clearly be the case in 1164, when, and successfully, he would depose his father again. His fledgling effort, however, came to grief when he was captured by his uncle Tadhg Ua Briain, who handed him over to the offended parent, who, not unnaturally, imprisoned him.Tadhg’s motives are unclear. He and Toirdhelbhach had long been at odds, and as we have seen Toirdhelbhach had fettered him at least twice, but it may be that he didn’t like Muirchertach or that he felt that if anybody was going to replace Toirdhelbhach it should be himself. Presently it was. Tadhg shortly turned against Toirdhelbhach and was at once recognized by Ua Conchobhair, who sent an army under Ruaidhrí to Tadhg’s support. Ruaidhrí raided across Thomond, past Limerick, and into Uí Chairbre Aedhbha, where he destroyed the trees of Port Righ, “the best that were in Ireland,” and plundered Croom. In Desmond—again surely with Connacht backing or the promise of it—the Eóghanachta revolted against Ua Briain, made Diarmait, son of the murdered Cormac Mac Carthaigh, their king, and raided across the river Maine into Ciarraighe Luachra which they burned and plundered as far as Sliabh Mis. That, however, was a brief incursion, for they were routed with slaughter by the Ciarraighe. From the account in Mac Carthaigh’s Book it looks as though Toirdhelbhach Ua Briain and his chief—indeed, only—ally, Diarmait Súgach Ua Conchubhair Ciarraighe, had foreseen these contingencies and were not caught unprepared or without a plan of action. Ua Briain came from Thomond and joined forces with Diarmait Súgach, apparently in Uí Chonaill Gabhra and probably at or near Magh Thamhnach, where they had killed Cormac thirteen years before.The combined army was large [lanmór], and furthermore each contingent was accompanied by “trains” [conna n-imircibh]. One can only guess what the “trains” were, for this seems the only mention of such impedimenta in the pre-Norman annals. A likely supposition would seem strings of packhorses carrying sacks of meal and possibly one or two portable forges for mending weapons.3 In any case, as in the Brega 236


campaign of the previous year, the purpose would be to enable the army to move fast and remain concentrated, thus multiplying its effectiveness. No doubt there were outlying scouts and foragers, but the main force would be kept together and under close control. Diarmait Súgach also sent seven ships on wheels from Eas Duibhe (now Ballylongford) on the Shannon across country south to Loch Léin, their crews presumably intended as a detachment that could move quickly to counter any thrust from Desmond on either side of the lakes. Apparently that precaution was not necessary, for the Eóghanachta Locha Léin and the southern Corcu Duibhne fled to Féardhruim in Uí Echach Mumhan—perhaps the grassy uplands between Cork and Kinsale. As for Diarmait Mac Carthaigh, he retreated south across Móin Mhór and took refuge with Ua Mathghamhna in Uí Echach, whence he despatched messages to Ua Conchobhair in Connacht and Diarmait Mac Murchadha in Leinster appealing for help. The Thomond-Ciarraighe army came south across Múscraighe (presumably by what would now be the route past Millstreet and Macroom) to Cenn Eich (now Kinneigh) which they plundered. (Kinneigh is ten miles south of Macroom and twenty-five miles WSW of Cork.) They then proceeded to Cork, where they probably remained for several days since they had time to commit “many outrages on the community of Barra.” It was there that the campaign failed. Had it succeeded, the men of Desmond would have come to Cork and submitted to Ua Briain, who could then turn to oppose Ua Conchobhair and Mac Murchadha as ruler of a reunited Munster. Nothing of the sort occurred.The “Uí Mhathghamhna, the Uí Dhonnchadha, the Uí Chaoimh, and the Uí Mhuircheartaigh, as well as the nobles of the Eóghanacht,” were assembling against Toirdhelbhach, and the aid for which Mac Carthaigh had called was coming swiftly from the north and the east. A Tig says, A hosting into Munster by Toirdelbach Húa Conchobair and all Connacht, and Diarmait Mac Murchada, king of Leinster, with his army, and MaelSechlainn, son of Murchad Húa MaelSechlainn, with the men of Meath, and Tigernán Húa Ruairc and the men of Teffa; and crossing Munster they reached Glanmire and Móin Mór . . . The mention of Glanmire perhaps gives us the key to what happened next. Ua Briain doubtless knew that Ua Conchobhair and Mac Murchadha were coming against him and that he would have to meet them. To leave Cork by Glanmire and then march north across country where it would be hard to pin him down would have the further advantage that it might 237


enable him to meet the Leinster army and defeat it in detail. Now, with that route blocked and the men of Desmond mustering angrily in his rear, the only way north to Thomond or west to Ciarraighe Luachra would be by the long pass described earlier. When that was understood by the army, something close to panic probably set in. If the quatrain quoted at the beginning of this article can be taken as evidence, the army must have struggled through the pass during a long, cold, stormy night. Mac Carthaigh’s Book tells us that the Desmond forces “were at their rear in pursuit of them” and that “the day”—we can perhaps read “morning”—“being misty, Síol Briain did not perceive the Connachtmen and the Leinstermen until they found themselves in their midst.” It was then Ua Briain’s forces that suffered defeat in detail as they emerged seriatim from the pass.Two of the three battalions were destroyed, and the third took heavy losses. The kings, however, “with a few horsemen, went from the battle unperceived through the mist past Abha Mhór northwards.” Diarmait Súgach sent word to the lake-fleet; and the crews “sprang to their ships, and leaving them at the north side of Loch Léin they went themselves to Ciarraighe without being noticed.” Behind them came Diarmait Mac Carthaigh, who plundered and wasted Ciarraighe Luachra from end to end and took its hostages. Toirdhelbhach Ua Briain, says A Tig, went into Limerick, for he found no place in Munster, and he brought ten score ounces of gold and sixty jewels, including the drinking-horn of Brían Boroime; and these he divided among the nobles of the Síl Muredaig and Húi Briuin and Conmaicni, for never had there been levied from one country what was collected in that wise. Very likely he figured that he might as well offer these treasures himself, since they would have been seized anyway. In the event they seem to have purchased his freedom. The annals say nothing of his being imprisoned, though AFM reports that he was banished. A Tig then adds,“Thereafter the king of Ireland, with hostages of Mogh’s Half, came home.” Taken by itself, there could be no clearer statement that Toirdhelbhach Ua Conchobhair had not only won the battle, but had recovered the title of ard-rí co fressabra. However, the effect is somewhat spoiled by two short entries which follow at once. A hosting by Murchertach, son of Níall, son of Lochlann, and by the north of Ireland as far as Coirrsliabh [na] Seghsa (the Curlieu Hills) in Corann, and he got two hostages from Toirdelbach Húa Conchobair, and came home. 238


The hostages of Leinster were sent to the house of Murchertach, son of Níall, son of Lochlann. It will be remembered that in 1150 Ua Conchobhair had sent his hostages to Ua Lochlann at Inis Mochta without having been directly compelled to do so. Now, either when launched on a campaign that would momentarily leave Connacht weakly defended or returning from Munster with an army that, from its losses and the demoralizing effects of great booty, was likely in no condition for another campaign, he found his province threatened with an invasion from the north and had to buy that off with two more hostages.4 Under those conditions Ua Conchobhair was not king of Ireland, whatever A Tig might call him. As for Mac Murchadha, Ua Conchobhair’s fellow-victor, the battle seems to have made no change in his estimate of the overall political situation. He had submitted to Ua Lochlainn before. Now, sending new hostages, he emphatically reaffirmed that allegiance. Nor is there cause for surprise. If, as is stated in A Tig, the Connacht army had been accompanied not only by the Leinstermen, but by forces from Tethbha, from Midhe, under Mael Seachlainn Ua Mael Seachlainn, and, it would seem, from Bréifne, under Tighearnán Ua Ruairc, the whole expedition must not only have had the approval of Ua Lochlainn, it must have been actively forwarded by him. All of these people had in recent years shown themselves bitterly inimical to Ua Conchobhair. Ua Ruairc in particular had surely not been made friendlier by an attempt to waylay and kill him where he was headed for a parley with Ua Conchobhair in 1148. A Tig attributes the plot to Domhnall Ua Fearghail, king of Conmhaicne and doubtless Ua Ruairc’s very unwilling vassal, but though one of the three would-be assassins who perished in the attempt was an Ua Fearghail, the other two were unmistakably Connachtmen—Echmarcach mac Branáin of Corco Achlann and a son of Aireachtach Ua Roduibh of Clann Tomaltaigh. Ua Ruairc, though wounded, evidently went on to the parley, but not, one may presume, in a wholly amicable frame of mind. As we have seen, Midhe, Tethbha, and Bréifne had all submitted to Ua Lochlainn, and if they had joined the Munster expedition it would have been at his will, not their wish; nor is there any indication in the annals that they took an active part in the fighting. They may of course have been detached to block the Glanmire escape-route. Thus it would seem that in Ireland the ultimate victor of the battle was Muircheartach Ua Lochlainn, who had managed to have one rival dispose of another and more immediately threatening rival and had done so with no direct cost to himself. In the aftermath of the battle Ua Lochlainn had the hostages of both victors; the challenge from the south was eliminated; 239


Munster was firmly divided into Thomond and Desmond, and indeed would never be reunited under a single king; Ua Lochlainn could and did intervene there at will, now backing, now chastising Ua Briain or Mac Carthaigh as his own interests might dictate. For the next fifteen years Ua Lochlainn rode pretty high.Toirdhelbhach Ua Conchobhair died in 1156 and was succeeded by his son Ruaidhrí, who at once took an active line, pushing Ua Lochlainn when he could, submitting when he had to, and, at least on one occasion, apparently giving the high-kingship, as represented in the person of Ua Lochlainn, the sort of recognition that he himself would aspire to.5 In 1166 Ua Lochlainn’s most necessary ally, Donnchadh Ua Cearbhaill of Airghialla, turned on him and killed him in battle. The great Ua Lochlainn house of cards instantly fell apart, and Ua Conchobhair moved at once, and decisively, for the kingship. His house of cards had a few years to stand. As for Toirdhelbhach Ua Briain, the Móin Mhór disaster by no means meant that his career was over. Next year, 1152, he and Diarmait Súgach were back in Ciarraighe, whence, however, they were promptly expelled by Diarmait Mac Carthaigh, who then divided Ciarraighe between two kings of his own choosing. (Thereafter the only word on Diarmait Súgach is of his death in 1154.) Toirdhelbhach again made peace with his brother Tadhg, and after some further to-do, Toirdhelbhach Ua Conchobhair divided Thomond between them while reaffirming his recognition of Mac Carthaigh as king of Desmond. Fraternal trust, however, proved once again to be shallow-rooted. In 1153 Tadhg united with Mac Carthaigh and Diarmait Mac Murchadha and expelled Toirdhelbhach, who took refuge with Ua Lochlainn. Evidently this ousting had the approval of Ua Conchobhair, for when Ua Lochlainn moved south to reinstall Toirdhelbhach he was opposed by Tadhg and by Ua Conchobhair, whom he defeated separately. Then Tadhg was taken by another brother, Diarmait Finn Ua Briain, who at once blinded him, whereupon Toirdhelbhach resumed the full kingship of Thomond. For the time being he was Ua Lochlainn’s man, but in 1156 he submitted to Toirdhelbhach Ua Conchobhair shortly before the latter’s death and thereafter gave twelve hostages to Ruaidhrí. Ua Lochlainn was not inclined to put up with that defection. In 1157 he hosted to Leinster, took its hostages, and, accompanied by the Leinstermen, invaded Desmond and forced the submission of Mac Carthaigh. He then proceeded to Thomond and banished Toirdhelbhach, whom he replaced with Conchobhar mac Domhnaill Uí Bhriain, at that time subking of Ormond.6 But while Ua Lochlainn was in the south Ruaidhrí Ua Conchobhair went north and raided Cenél Eóghain, and when Ua Loch240


lainn hastened north to defend his home-territory, Ruaidhrí went to Munster and restored Toirdhelbhach, who promptly blinded both Conchobhar and his son. For a few years thereafter Toirdhelbhach’s routine was relatively peaceful. He gave hostages to Ruaidhrí in 1160 and 1161, fought Mac Carthaigh, sometimes with success, from 1161 to 1163, and, in 1164, possibly to keep his hand in, blinded Ua Cinnéidigh, the current king of Ormond. However, in 1165 his son Muirchertach deposed him once again. As to what then ensued the accounts in the annals are at odds. A possible reconcilement of their contradictions would be that Toirdhelbhach first sought refuge in Leinster, then went to Desmond and offered Diarmait Mac Carthaigh hostages and military service for aid against Muirchertach and Ua Conchobhair, and finally, when nothing else availed, consented reluctantly to retire to the consolations of religion at Killaloe. At any rate, for him the game at last was up. He died in 1167. The game was about up for Muirchertach, too. He was killed at Dún na Sciath in 1168 by a first-cousin-once-removed, Conchobhar, son of Muirchertach (slain at Móin Mhór), son of Conchobhar Slapar Salach, apparently at the instigation of Diarmait Mac Carthaigh. Conchobhar was quickly slain by Diarmait Finn and Ua Faeláin of Déisi Mumhan; and after a brief flurry of killings among the nobles of Dál gCais, Muirchertach’s brother Domhnall took the kingship of Thomond, blinded another brother, Brian an tSléibhe, and ruled with much success for the next twentysix years. Now, a last question. At the beginning I suggested that the quatrain there quoted might be from a lost saga. Or it might be from a tract on the great battle and the events that led up to it. Some annals, I think, offer further evidence in that direction. Thus A Tig says of the Munster forces: their losses exceeded computation, including Murchertach, son of Conchobar Húa Bríain, king of Thomond, the second best man of the Dalcassians, and Lugaid, son of Domnall Húa Bríain, and twelve of the Húi Chenn-étig, and eight of the Húi Dedaig, including Flaithbertach Húa Dedaig, and nine of the Húi Gráda, including Aneslis Húa Gráda, and twenty-four of the Húi hÓcáin, and four of the Húi Achir, and a grandson of Eochaid Húa Longsig, and four of the Húi Néill Buidi, and five of the Húi Echtigirn. Until sand of sea and stars of heaven are numbered, no one will reckon all the sons of the kings and chiefs and great lords of the men of Munster that were killed there, so that of the three battalions of Munster that had come thither, none escaped save only one shattered battalion. 241


AFM has the same list, except that it has “two,” not “twelve,” of the Uí Chinnéidigh. It identifies the source as Sliocht lebair Leacain. With the exception of Ua Loingsigh, who was of Uaithne Tíre, all the names are of Dál gCais septs and individuals. 7 Muirchertach, son of Conchobhar Slapar Salach, was clearly sub-king of Thomond under Toirdhelbhach as king of Munster. Lughaidh was most likely son of Domhnall, son of Muirchertach Mór. Domhnall, who died at Lismore in 1135, had been king of Dublin under his father and was most likely his intended successor. Whoever compiled the list knew Dál gCais very well, as intimately as long after did Seán mac Ruaidhrí Mag Raith, author of Caithréim Thoirdhealbhaigh; and indeed the list is quite like rosters of slain in the Caithréim, for instance that for the battle of the Abbey, as if in that detail both writers were using a well-determined form. Though Mac Carthaigh’s Book treats of Thomond losses in the battle in less than one sentence, it mentions three of the four nobles named in A Tig—Conchobhar Ua Briain, Flaithbhertach Ua Deaghaidh, and Aineislis Ua Gráda—and in the same order. Its account, too, of the campaign and the battle would seem drawn largely from a source concerned with detailing the activities of Toirdhelbhach Ua Briain. It is of course well-known that much in the annals is either quoted or condensed from much fuller narratives. A very good example can be found in the Annals of Connacht, where most of the material for 1315 and 1316 seems taken from a tract on the causes and results of the battle of Athenry. After that, in 1317, though the Bruce invasion was still going on, the annals resume their jog-trot course. I have long suspected that there was a fairly continuous tradition of saga-writing in Thomond, centering of course on the fate and fortunes of Uí Bhriain—in other words, that there was a good deal, now lost or surviving only in snippets, between the source of Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh and Leabhar Oiris at one end and Caithréim Thoirdhealbhaigh at the other. I would think, too, judging from the Caithréim, that such writing could be intensely concerned with the chief figures and yet be curiously objective about them. And if, like the Caithréim, any given narrative dealt with several generations, the writer, though doubtless having his own preferences among the protagonists, might privately feel that one was very much like another, both those gone before and those now coming down the pike. In such a narrative the real theme would be the continuously unfolding history of “the blood,” of which the protagonist was but the current representative. When death or catastrophe came to such, expression of grief for him might be elaborate; it would certainly be formal.

242


But when writing of battles—and the pages on the battle of the Abbey and its immediate aftermath offer a most moving example—there could be genuine grief for those who stood and died—for whom, unlike the kings at Móin Mhór, there was no going “from the battle unperceived through the mist.” And if I am right in guessing that the quatrain quoted at the beginning is from an inset poem in such a saga, it may give us a hint of the mood of foreboding and terror and sorrow expressed in the prose that described the battle.

Notes 1. For Kelleher’s translation see part 5, just ahead.—Ed. 2. Annals of Loch Cé: a chronicle of Irish affairs, 1014–1690, ed.W. M. Hennessy, 2 vols. (London, 1871); reprint, Irish Manuscripts Commission, Dublin, 1939. 3. In the account of the battle of Bealach Mughna, 908, in Fragmentary Annals of Ireland, ed. J. Radner (Dublin, 1978): 154; and in Geoffrey Keating, History of Ireland, ed. and trans. D. Comyn and P. S. Dinneen, 4 vols. (London, 1902–14): 3:204—both texts drawing from the lost Book of Cluain Eidhneach—it is said that when the Munster army crossed into Leinster the clerics remained at Lethglenn, “and also the servants of the army and their pack horses [a ccapoill lóin].” 4. The list of Connacht losses is brief. A Tig has “Tadg, son of the Liathanach Húa Conchobair, and Murchertach Húa Cathalain, chief of Clann Focartaig, and Aed, son of MaelRúanaid Húa Fallomain, chief of Clann Uatach, and four of the Leinstermen, fell in the counterstroke of that battle.” AFM has “Tadhg, son of Liathach [mistranslated from an Liathanaigh in the text] Ua Conchobhair; Muircheartach Ua Cathalain, chief of Clann-Fogartaigh; Aedh, son of Maelruanaidh Ua Follamhain, chief of ClannUadach; four of the Luighni; and many others.” AFM is doubtless right in identifying the four as “Luighni” [do Luighnibh] rather than as “Leinstermen” [do Laignib] as in A Tig.They would be Uí Eaghra or Uí Ghadhra. In other words, we have no indication of what Leinster casualties may have been. 5. For that we may consider a curious business that took place in 1161. From the time he had succeeded to the kingship of Connacht, Ruaidhrí Ua Conchobhair had repeatedly asserted control over Munster and in 1159 and 1160 had challenged Ua Lochlainn’s hegemony over Meath. Now, in 1161, he again took Ua Briain’s hostages and, joining forces with Ua Ruairc, moved into Meath and north Leinster, where he took the hostages of the Uí Fhaeláin and Uí Fhailghe and placed lords of his own choosing over both. Ua Lochlainn responded by plundering eastern Bréifne as far as Leac Bladhma (Lickblaw, three miles NW of Castlepollard in Westmeath), where Mac Murchadha and the Dublin Galls hastened to join him. Then, AFM tells us, Ruaidhri Ua Conchobhair gave him four hostages for Ui-Briuin, Conmhaicne, the half of Munster and Meath; and Ua Lochlainn gave him his entire province [of Connacht]. He also gave the entire province of Leinster to Diarmaid Mac Murchadha. Muircheartach Ua Lochlainn was therefore, on this occasion, King of Ireland without opposition. He gave the half of Meath which came to him

243

244

slain at Móin Mhór, 1151.

Lughaidh,

Maighir, rd. Mumhan, slain in 1118 by Tadhg Mac Carthaigh and Toirdhelbhach mac Díarmata.

Brian Gleanna

blinded with his father, 1158.

Son,

c. 1142, 1145, 1151, 1152; king of Thomond, 1158; blinded by Toirdhelbhach.

Conchobhar,

king of Dublin under his father; died at Lismore, 1135.

Domhnall,

king of Thomond 1164–68; deposed his father, 1151, 1164; slain by Conchobhar mac Muirchertaigh.

Muirchertach,

king of Thomond, 1168–1194.

blinded by Domhnall Mór, 1168.

Brian,

c. 1153, 1168.

Diarmait Finn,

Domhnall Mór,

king of Thomond, sometime king of Munster, died 1167.

Toirdhelbhach,

him in 1115, again king of Munster, 1116; died at Corcach Mór, 1118.

Diarmait, deposed Muirchertach, 1114; imprisoned by

c. 1107; slain 1115 by Connachta.

Domhnall,

1086.

Tadhg, died

(In 1175, Domhnall Mór also blinded Mathghamhain mac Toirdhelbhaig, presumably a young brother of his own.)

blinded by Domhnall Mór, 1175; d. 1175.

Diarmait,

king of Thomond, 1152–53; blinded by Diarmait Finn, 1153; died 1154.

Tadhg Glae,

Toirdhelbhach, king of Munster, ard-rí co fressabra, died 1086.

Tadhg, slain 1023 by Éile, at instigation of Donnchadh.

Brian Bórumha, king of Ireland, sl. 1014.

slew Muirchertach mac Toirdelbhaigh; slain a few days after by Diarmait Finn, 1168.

Conchobhar,

king of Thomond, slain at Móin Mhór.

Muirchertach,

king of Munster, died 1142.

Conchobhar Slapar Salach,

king of Munster, ard-rí co fressabra, 1086–1114, king of Munster 1115 and 1118, died 1119.

Muirchertach Mór,

in Tethbha.

Murchadh an Sgéith Ghirr, rd. Mumhan, sl. 1068

Toirdhelbhach mac Taidhg, 1063; died at Rome, 1064.

Donnchadh, king of Munster, deposed by

Table 18.1. Uí Bhriain Before the Conquest


The Battle of Móin Mhór to Diarmaid Ua Maeleachlainn, and the other half was in the possession of Ruaidhrí Ua Conchobhair. After this Mac Lochlainn returned to his house. The event is reported less fully in AU, A Tig, Misc A S.A. 1160, and A Clon S.A. 1163. From these entries it could perhaps be taken as another temporary and tactical submission on Ruaidhrí’s part, neither more nor less significant than dozens of similar transactions by him and others, except that AU also specifies that Ua Lochlainn gave him his entire province [a choiged comhlan], and, according to A Clon, Ua Lochlainn “graunted all the province of Leinster to Dermot mcMurrogh.” I know of no other instance of one Irish king giving or granting another king that king’s own province or of such a grant being accepted, at least under such conditions as here where Ruaidhrí seems not to have been defeated by Ua Lochlainn and where Mac Murchadha was on Ua Lochlainn’s side. It would seem that something unusual went on at Lickblaw. One possibility is that Ua Lochlainn and Ua Conchobhair, the only contenders for the high-kingship, were equally aware that Irish political institutions were too peculiar, too out-of-date, to be recognized abroad—Laudibiliter, issued six years earlier, makes no mention of any native Irish government, as if there was none worthy of mention— and in this instance they decided to take steps towards setting up a normal feudal arrangement. Since Ruaidhrí certainly intended to replace Ua Lochlainn, it would be to his advantage if the position to which he succeeded was that of monarch. I would suggest, too, that at no time in the century before the Conquest were any of the major dynasts contending for so inconclusive a title as ard-rí co fressabra, or even of ard-rí in anything like its old sense. Surely what each hoped was to establish a monarchy of the sort that would be recognized by Rome and by other monarchs. Considering how new and shaky such monarchies were elsewhere, that would have been no overweening ambition.Yet of course the realities of the Irish system made it quite unlikely of fulfillment. 6. Conchobhar mac Domhnaill was doubtless brother of Lughaidh mac Domhnaill, a high Dál gCais noble slain at Móin Mhór.Their father, I presume, was Domhnall son of Muirchertach Mór. However, Muirchertach’s brother Tadhg also had a son named Domhnall, slain by the Connachtmen in 1115. As for Domhnall son of Muirchertach Mór, he was active in defence of his father in 1115 [cf. Misc A] and died, an old man, at Lismore in 1135, according to AFM. A Tig, however, has Domhnall Gerrlamach, mac maic [sic] Muirchertaigh, in clericatu quieuit. 7. Uí Loingsigh of Uaithne Tíre would seem to have been specially favoured vassals of Dál gCais. In 1088 Muirchertach Ua Briain induced Domhnall ua Lochlainn, grandfather of our Muirchertach Ua Lochlainn, to invade Connacht, promising to help him but failing to deliver. It was an expensive default. Domhnall was outraged and joined forces with the Connachtmen to ravage Thomond, which they accomplished very thoroughly, destroying Limerick and Cenn Coradh, taking the hostages of Thomond, and carrying off a hundred prisoners. A ransom of “many kine, and gold and silver and drinking-horns” (A Tig) was paid for three nobles, Mathghamhain Ua Ceinnéidigh, the son of Conghalach Ua hÓgáin, and the son of Eochaidh Ua Loingsigh. Ua Ceinnéidigh and Ua hÓgáin were of Dál gCais; Ua Loingsigh was most likely king of Uaithne Tíre since his father, Eochaidh, had died in 1080.

245

Part Five Translations and Adaptations from the Irish

Translations and Adaptations from the Irish

248


Loch Sílend, is mairg nod n-ib ara biad! ro llín Corpre di chennaib conid crú co rice a grian. Loch Sílenn

Loch Sílenn— Evil drink with a man’s food! Cairbre has filled it with heads. Down to its sand it is blood.

From Annals of Inisfallen (MS. Rawlinson B. 503), A.D. 573. Ed. Seán Mac Airt. Dublin, 1951. All translations and adaptations in this section were first published in John V. Kelleher, Too Small for Stove Wood, Too Big for Kindling, Collected Verse and Translations. Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1979.

249


As do bás Aodha do raidheadh: A mBuach fearus an tonn frí bruach, atfet scela, cia fa scith, Aedh mac Ainmireach ro bíth. Ben Aeda cecinit: Bator ionmuine tri taoibh, fris nach freisge aithearrach, taobhan Taillten, taobh Teamhra, ’s taobh Aodha mic Ainmireach. Aedh mac Ainmirech

Of death of Aed was said: At Buach The wave beats against the rock Telling still one weary tale, Aed mac Ainmirech is slain. The wife of Aed sang: Long dear to me were three sides I’ll not look upon again— Side of Teltown, Tara’s side, Side of Aed, Ainmire’s son.

From Annála ríoghachta Éireann: Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland by the Four Masters from the earliest period to the year 1616, S.A. 594 ( = 598). Ed. J. O’Donovan. 7 vols. Dublin, 1856. Reprint, New York, 1966.

250


Ba srianach, ba echlascach a tech a mbidh Sechnasach; ba himdha fuidhel for slaitt hi taggh i mbith mac Blaimaicc. Sechnussach mac Blathmaic

Bridles and horse-rods to spare Wherever Sechnussach dwelt— Always plenty of plunder In the house of Blathmac’s son.

From Annála Uladh: Annals of Ulster, otherwise Annála Senait, Annals of Senat: a chronicle of Irish affairs, 431–1131, 1155–1541, A.D. 671. Ed. W. M. Hennessy and B. MacCarthy. 4 vols. Dublin, 1887–1901.

251


Cu Chuimne Ro legh suithi co druimne, A lleth n-aill hiaratha Ro leici ar chaillecha. Ando Coin Cuimne ro-mboi, im-rualaid de conid soi, ro leic caillecha ha faill, ro leig al-aill arith-mboi. Cú Chuimne

Cú Chuimne in youth Read his way through half the Truth. He let the other half lie While he gave women a try. Well for him in old age. He became a holy sage. He gave women the laugh. He read the other half.

From Annála Uladh: Annals of Ulster, otherwise Annála Senait, Annals of Senat: a chronicle of Irish affairs, 431–1131, 1155–1541, A.D. 747.

252


Ossi brigh in dal occ Innsi na Righ, Donnchadh ni dichet for muir, Fiachna ni tuideacht hi tir. Royal Mistrust

’Twas grand When kings met at Inishnaree. Fiachna wouldn’t come to land. Donnchadh wouldn’t put to sea.


253


Bron do Grellaigh Eillte huair, Fuaramar cuain na taib; Asbert Cormacan fri Niall, “Nach in lecar siar tigam sair.” Practical Advice

Alas, cold Grellach Eillte— By its side we saw the hosts. Then Cormacán said to Niall, “If we can’t go west, go east.”


254


Turus Laighean línibh ócc, iar rott ro-geal ríoghdha cuairt, ní mat cualatar an séd; fuaratar écc i cCind Fuaitt. Flaithe Liphe leathan glonn cartait glonn fri feathal find, dus rimart cin cetaibh cend isin nglenn uas Tigh Moling. Mor a airbert im cech reut, deithbhir cidh airdirc an fód, tair maighean co mílibh ced tairius Laighean línibh ócc. After Cenn Fuait

Leinster war-bands, all the braves, On white roads, a royal rout— Not wisely were they guided. They were beaten at Cenn Fuait. Lords of broad herdful Liphe Sent them against the Norsemen. Heads by hundreds were counted Near Tech Moling, in the glen. Courageous was their effort; The field is rightly famous. Over the plain came the troops, Leinster war-bands, all the braves.


255


Conadh dó sin ro ráidh Conghalach mac Maolmithigh, Muircheartach dar fine Fáil, ní raghba grem ná gabháil, cis beith oc losccadh ar ngráin as iar ndeghithe ar naráin. Friscart Muircheartach, Cumba Conghalach Breagh mbuidhe ocus duine mut no got; as a chind ní tucthar gluitiudh acht ma beith co bruitiud brot. Royal Insults

It was of that Conghalach mac Máele-mithig said: Though Muirchertach burnt our corn And dined well upon our bread, He who would rule all Ireland Failed to take one prey or stead. Muirchertach replied: Congalach of rich Brega Is like a gobbling mute— Out of his head splutter noises Like stew a-bubble in a pot.


256


Ní fuilet a máine, nocho mó atá a maisse, nocho mór a gére, nocho déne acht braisse. A Braggart

Far from rich, Plain as a ditch, His wits laggard— What else but a braggart?

From Kuno Meyer, ed. Bruchstücke der älteren Lyrick Irlands. Berlin, 1919. p. 36.

257


Ingen gobann ben na cerdda, gnúis roglasse is rodergga. The Smith’s Daughter

The smith’s daughter, wife of the wright, her face brick red and pasty white.

From Kuno Meyer, ed. Bruchstücke de älteren Lyrick Irlands. Berlin, 1919. p. 31.

258


Nírb ingnad i tig Chrundmáil cáilfhinnach salann for arán cen imm: is menand rosecc feóil a muintire amal sheccas rúsc imm chrann. A Niggard

No lie! In Crunnmáel’s wattled shed— Salt, not butter, on bread! That’s why The flesh shrinks on his folk Like bark on a dried oak.

From Kuno Meyer, ed. Bruchstücke der älteren Lyrick Irlands. Berlin, 1919. p. 33.

259


Tuc in mbairgin, tale in mbairgin ocus bloc don blonaic móir; maith t’athair is do máthair, tuc in mblathaig ina deóid. The Free-loader

That bread there—give us a slice! Begod, that bacon looks nice! —Grand folk, your mother and dad!— Is there buttermilk to be had?

From Kuno Meyer, ed. Miscellanea Hibernica. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1917. p. 44.

260


Mac Conaba, nocho dein Moda, acht criathradh mine; Do’n mac Mhaenaigh i sineall Corrgat ocus doirrseoracht. The Teacher’s Pet

Mac Conaba—what a shirk! Sifting meal’s his only work. That, and mind the door a bit, For he’s the pet of Maenach’s son.

From B. MacCarthy, ed. Codex Palatino-Vaticanus. Todd Lecture Series 3 (1892): 133.

261


A ben fuil isin chuiliu, in tabrai bíad do duiniu? in tabrai dam, a ben bán— saill, loimm, imm, ocus áran? Atá form, meni tuca bád im dorn, bér-sa th-enech, a ben bán, is indisfet dom dëán. Student and Cook

Woman in the kitchen, Do you give food to people? Will you give me some, fair woman— Milk, bacon, bread, and butter? If not, you’ll get a lesson. I’ll shove you in the corner And when you’ve lost your honor I’ll tell the old professor.

From Kuno Meyer, ed. Bruchstücke der älteren Lyrick Irlands. Berlin, 1919. p. 33. I swiped the last three lines from Sean O’Faolain’s translation in The Silver Branch because I couldn’t possibly have bettered them.—J.V.K.

262


Is caingen Bith forsin liss nimdaingen, Ocus gairm neich ’n-a dorus · Doromus. [dosroinus] The Bad Fort

’Tis no sport To stand in a rotten fort And hear the attacker shout At the gate.

From B. MacCarthy, ed. Codex Palatino-Vaticanus. Todd Lecture Series 3 (1892): 131.

263


Uar in adaig i Moin mhoir fearaid d’fheartan, ni deireoil. Dorrdan rostibh in gaeth glan geisidh os chailli clithair. Móin Mór

Wild is the night on Móin Mór. Cold under the driving rain, Men hear the bleak wind’s laughter Howl above the screening wood.

From B. MacCarthy, ed. Codex Palatino-Vaticanus. Todd Lecture Series 3 (1892): 120. I think this is from a lost saga and describes the night before a great defeat suffered very late in the year 1151 by the men of Thomond under Turlough O’Brien.The battle was fought just south of Mallow at the head of the pass that runs north from Blarney. The Annals of the Four Masters say that the winter was “changeable, windy, stormy . . . with great rain.”—J.V.K. [See the essay “The Battle of Móin Mhór, 1151,” in part four of this collection.—Ed.]

264

Translations and Adaptations from the Irish The Snoring Bedmate

You thunder at my side, Lad of ceaseless hum; There’s not a saint would chide My prayer that you were dumb. The dead start from the tomb With each blare from your nose. I suffer, with less room, Under these bedclothes. Which could I better bide Since my head’s already broke— Your pipe-drone at my side, Woodpecker’s drill on oak? Brass scraped with knicky knives, A cowbell’s tinny clank, Or the yells of tinkers’ wives Giving birth behind a bank? A drunken, braying clown Slapping cards down on the board Were less easy to disown Than the softest snore you’ve snored. Sweeter the grunts of swine Than yours that win release. Sweeter, bedmate mine, The screech of grieving geese, A sick calf ’s moan for aid, A broken mill’s mad clatter, The snarl of flood cascade . . . Christ! now what’s the matter? 265


That was a ghastly growl! What signified that twist— An old wolf ’s famished howl, Wave-boom at some cliff ’s breast? Storm screaming round a crag, Bellow of raging bull, Hoarse bell of rutting stag, Compared with this were lull! Ah, now a gentler fall— Bark of a crazy hound? Brats squabbling for a ball? Ducks squawking on a pond? No, rough weather’s back again. Some great ship’s about to sink And roaring bursts the main Over the bulwark’s brink! Farewell, tonight, to sleep. Every gust across the bed Makes hair rise and poor flesh creep. Would that one of us were dead!

After Ní binn do thorann rem thaoibh. Measgra Dánta (1927) 1.5.

266

Translations and Adaptations from the Irish Carolan’s Apology to Cian Óg O’Hara (Seán Harló)

As I was of a Tuesday on the street at Drohidmore Who should bump into me but John Harlow, and he stewed, With a bottle of good whiskey that he shoved into my fist— And God help us, but I said that he was better than O’Hara! Another day and I was in the tavern drinking ale. A frightful crock came on me and a rambling in my speech. Why wouldn’t some kind neighbor squeeze a padlock round my throat When I ever put John Harlow on a level with O’Hara? You make me screech with horror, John, you bloody monstrous whale! You ugly lump of lowness, with the creaking in your pipe! The time you’re scoffing flummery and guzzling penny beer, There’ll be Spanish wine and claret on the table for O’Hara!

Eighteenth century. From Tomás Ó Máille, ed. Amhráin Chearbhalláin. Irish Texts Society 17 (1916): 176–77.

267

Translations and Adaptations from the Irish Misty Gap (Mám an Cheó)

Big Lynch and myself as partners went To plow Misty Gap, for to change our luck. On barley and wheat our minds were bent And grass to spare for the livestock. We harnessed my steed to his spavin’d beast, Then Lynch shook out two fathom of rein— The nags plunged off to the west and the east And the plow rammed into a rockdrain. The plowbeam split and the mouldboard broke, The shafts came away in my two hands! “Hell take you, Lynch! would bring such a yoke For to break wild earth in the highlands! My curse on the day that I made a join With a man more daft than his addled mare, A gom who thought to get crops and coin From a sod that would twist a plowshare!” “Quiet, now, Michael, and dry the tear— When one thing fails there’s the next to do. If we stick this job till the end of the year We’ll be flying high as the curlew. We still have to wall both sides of the gap . . . Yes, and begod, there’s the drains to dig . . . I suppose we ought to manure it slap . . . ” “And we after losing our plowrig! I know your talk—there’s a way if there’s will. Soon you’ll be off for the loan of a pick. I to be perishing here on the hill And you swilling porter in Meelick. I can see you below in the sheebeen house Roaring for drink like a pagan king, 268


With your poll to the wall, a melodious souse, And the barmaid in stitches with laughing.” “Who knows the better way, slow or fast, Down the hollow or up the glen? Let’s wander home, since the morning’s past, And crack this conundrum like wisemen. We’ll write a letter to Mullingar For the like of a plow that was never seen, With a white steel coulter struck out so hard It will level the rocks like a fairgreen.” “Suppose we got it, you idiot born! We can’t sow the Gap for a month at best, And the soil’s so scrawny and thin for corn The seed may be more than the harvest.” “We’ve still got the seed—we can get it ground For bread to eat while we cut our turf. Trust to me for a plan that’s sound; I’ve as many as foam on the sea-surf. We must spite the crowd that said we’d fail. ‘A two-fool join,’ was their mildest slur; And ‘There’s a power of driving in a two-headed nail But you can’t get it into the rafter.’ Put the corn to steep—we’ve a way to wealth— Here in the Gap we’ll set up a still. Drinking the losses will help the health And the profits will pay for our victual.”

Eighteenth century. From Tomás Ó Máille, ed. Amhráin Chearbhalláin. Irish Texts Society 17 (1916): 249–51.

269


Prátaí istoidhche, Prátaí um ló, A’s dá eireóchainn i meadhon oidhche Prátaí gheóbhainn. Spuds

For supper spuds After spuds all day. Get up at midnight— Spuds or hay!

Munster, eighteenth century. From Daniel Corkery, The Hidden Ireland. Dublin, 1924. p. 15.

270

Translations and Adaptations from the Irish The Shining Geese (Na Géadhna Geala)

Praise for my geese, my shining geese, That never drink milk but feed on grass. Though safe on the strand or the flooding seas, Gay on the Shannon their days they pass. My curse on the priest by whom I was wed, My second curse on the tricky town Where the pints today have a three-inch head. As for their dancing, I’d put it down. Shame on the man who wastes his store And wakes each day with a splitting top. With the Shannon beside me I’ve drink galore And I rise clear-eyed from my decent cot. Not better to me is a feather tick Than a settle of rushes, cut fresh and sweet. A black silk stock would but gripe my neck While a bawneen jacket is loose and neat. You can keep bright parlours and elegant bow’rs— Under a tree I’ll take my ease, Sober and snug in the summery hours Watching my little sailing geese. The winter will come with its bitter chill, And the snow drift deep into every glen. The stock shall perish upon the hill, And the goose be plucked as well as the hen.

271


Bright friends of my bosom, pay no heed! When winter is conquered by March, the Ram, Friskily frolic on flowers you’ll feed! Now I’m used to milk, I mislike a dram.

Nineteenth century? From Tomás Ó Máille, ed. Amhráin Chearbhalláin. Irish Texts Society 17 (1916): 246–47.

272


A h-aon ó’n mbeó ’s a dó ó’n marbh, Púnt as phósa ’s coróin as bhaiste, Mairtfheóil rósta ’gus bagún dearg— Sidé a chuir fheóil ar thóin an tsagairt. Dues

One from the sound and two from the dead, For a christening a crown, a pound to be wed, Beef well browned and bacon red— Sure, the priestly rump was bound to spread.

Munster, modern. Given to me by Professor Daniel A. Binchy, who heard it in Dunquin in the 1920s.—J.V.K.

273


O nach bfuil, a Shiobhán Sál, t’faicsin abhus i ndán dún; ar shliab Shioin na bfer mar chách benfad asat lán mo shúl. Joan Saul

Haughty hidden Joanie Saul, Though scarce a lad may spy you, In the host on Sion’s Mount My ghost will freely eye you.

From Egerton 111, as given by Standish Hayes O’Grady in Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in the British Museum, vol. 1 (1926): 482.

274


Ná ling ná ling, an fod for ataí Gairit bia fair, fada bia faí Ash Wednesday Sermon

Prance not, prance not on that sod— Short the spell you’ll be above it, Long, long beneath, begod!

From Laud 610, quoted in Colm Ó Lochlainn, ed. Tobar Fíorghlan Gaedhlige. Dublin, 1939. p. 44.

275


Donnchadh Ó Briain nár chrech cill cá chan sin is é ar tuitim? Creach ceall cá tarbha a teibe, ceann Banbha nír buaineide. Its Own Reward

Donnchadh O Briain, famous, strong, Ireland’s head, lives no longer— He that never burned a church. What gain is there in virtue?

From Add. MS. 19,995, as given by Standish Hayes O’Grady in Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in the British Museum, vol. 1 (1926): 334.

276


Truagh sin a lebhair bhric bháin tiocfaidh lá agus bud fhíor; dérfaid nech ós cionn do chláir, uch nach mair an lámh do scríobh. Envoi

White, letter-speckled book, The day comes on when one, Looking on your page, will say, The hand that wrote is gone.

From Egerton 209, as given by Standish Hayes O’Grady in Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in the British Museum, vol. 1 (1926): 592. Probably the stanza most often found in the margins of Irish manuscripts.—J.V.K.

277

Index

Index Abbey Theatre, 108 “Abdication of Fergus MacRoy, The” (Ferguson), 36 Abha Mhór, 238 Adams, Henry, 121 AE. See Russell, George William Aebhin, 30 Aed, 63 Áedacán, 222 Áed Allan mac Fergaile, 211 “Aedh mac Ainmirech” (Kelleher), 250 Áed mac Néill, 219, 220 Aeneid, 38 “After Cenn Fuait” (Kelleher), 255 Aided Con Roí maic Dáiri, 191 Aided Lugdach occus Derfogaille, 207 Aife, 37 Ailech, 174–76, 180, 211, 220 Ailill Aulomm, 177–78 Ailill mac Máta, 199–200, 205–7 Ailill Molt mac Nath I mic Fiachrach, 166, 210 Aine, 30, 32, 33 Aireachtach Ua Roduibh, 239 Airgialla, 168–69, 175, 177, 217, 220, 233, 240 Alger, Horatio, 153 Alspach, Russell, 39 n 1 American Committee for Irish Studies, xiv, 161, 171 American Magazine, 121 Amhráin Chearbhalláin, 267, 268–69, 271–72 Ancient Irish Histories (Hanmer), 61 Aneslis Húa Gráda (Aneislis Ua Gráda), 241–42 Anglo-Saxon, 4, 5, 15, 20, 149, 161–62 Angus, 13 Anluan mac Matach, 195 anmchara, 220 Annals of Boyle. See Cottonian Annals Annals of Clonmacnois (A Clon), 213, 214, 222– 23, 230 Annals of Connacht, 242

Annals of Inisfallen (AI), 168, 170, 182–83, 185, 210–11, 214–15, 219, 220, 230, 231, 249 Annals of Ireland:Three Fragments (T Frag), 214 Annals of Loch Cé, 230 Annals of Roscrea, 214 Annals of the Four Masters (AFM), 61–62, 162, 181, 185, 213–15, 219, 221, 229–31, 233– 34, 235, 238, 242, 250, 255, 256, 264 Annals of Tigernach (A Tig), 168, 170, 185, 207– 11, 213–14, 230–31, 237–42 Annals of Ulster (AU), 168, 170, 181, 182, 184, 210–11, 213–15, 219–21, 230, 251, 252, 253, 254 Annie Reilly or the Fortunes of an Irish Girl in New York (McElgun), 133–34 ap Ithel, Williams, 10 Ara Cliach, 185 Aran Islands, 46, 49 ard-rí, 165, 245 n 5 ard-rí co fressabra, 165–66, 238, 245 n 5 Ards, 215 Armagh, 165, 167, 170, 220–22 Arnold, Edwin, 35 Arnold, Matthew, xii, 3–23 Arthur (king of England), 22 n 8 Artrí mac Conchobar, 220–21 “Ash Wednesday Sermon” (Kelleher), 275 Áth Cliath, 45, 47, 52, 207, 218, 234 Áth Cliath Medraighe, 234 Áth dá Ferta, 219 Atherton, James S., 57–59, 61–62 Atlantic Monthly, 98 Babel, Isaac, 99 “Bad Fort, The” (Kelleher), 263 Báetán, 172 n 6 Baiae, 6 Baile Cuind, 170 Baile in Scáil, 170, 219 Baile’s Strand, 37

279

Index Ballylongford, 237 Ballysodare, 29 Ban-Senchus, 181 bardic literature, 16, 88, 162–63 Baruch, Bernard, 138 Battle of Athenry, 242 Battle of Aughrim, 49, 50–51 Battle of Clontarf, 62, 184 Battle of Limerick, 49, 51 Battle of Móin Móhr, xv, 229–45, 264 Battle of the Boyne, 25, 50 Battle of Ventry, 35 Baudelaire, Charles, 107 Beare, 31 Beckett, Samuel, xi, 100 Bede, 167, 169, 212, 216 Belach Accailli, 183 Belach Mugna, 168, 179–80, 182, 243 n 3 Bell, 85–87, 105–6 Belvedere College, 102 Bennchor, 215 Bhéartha, 30 Bible, 203 Binchy, Daniel A., 165, 166–67, 171 n 1, 273 Bjersby, Brigit, 37 Black Girl in Her Search for God (Shaw), 92 Blathnat, 191–92 Boer War, 120, 154 Bones of Contention (O’Connor), 130 Book of Armagh, 165 Book of Ballymote (BB), 164, 183 Book of Cluain Eidhneach, 243 n 3 Book of Dub-dá-leithe, 228 n 19 Book of Invasions. See Lebor Gabála Érenn Book of Lecan (Lec), 230 Book of Leinster (LL), xvi n 2, 66, 69, 185, 200, 202, 205, 206, 218, 230–31 Book of MacCarthy Reagh, 228 n 28 Book of Munster (LM), 182, 184 Book of Rights, 166–67 Book of the Dun Cow. See Lebor Na Huidre Books at the Wake, The (Atherton), 57 Bórama, 166–67 Boston College, 104 Boston’s Immigrants, 1775–1865 (Handlin), 135 Boyne River, 207 “Braggart, A” (Kelleher), 257 Brega, 166, 169, 174, 177, 181, 214–15, 222, 233–34, 235, 236–37, 256 Bregon mac Bratha, 187 Breifne, 181, 186, 231, 233, 239 Bress natrí Find Emna, 217

Breton, 10 Brian an tSléible, 241 Brian Bóroimhe, 62, 165–68, 173–74, 177, 180– 81, 182, 184–85, 231, 234–35, 238, 244 Bricriu’s Feast. See Fled Bricrenn Brigantia, 187, 188 Brittany, 13 Brooklyn Navy Yard, 129 Brown, E. K., 12 Bruce invasion, 242 Brut y Tywysogion, 10 Buach, 250 Budgen, Frank, 58 Bullock, Shan, 85 Byrne, Donn, 87 Byzantium, 212 Cáencomrac, 222 Cailb, 45–46 Cailleac Bare (Cailleac Biorar, Cailleac Buillia), 29–33 Cailleach na Béara, 27 Cain, 18 Caindeach, 181 Cairbe, 249 Cairbe Cattchenn, 212 Cairbe Nia Fer, 205, 209 Cairbe Ua Ciardha, 233 Cairbre Lifechair, 177 Cairbre Móra, 177 Cáirthenn mac Blait, 182 Caithréim Thoirdhealbhaigh, 242 Caladbolg, 193 Carlingford, 220 Carnegie, Andrew, 113 “Carolan’s Apology to Cian Óg O’Hara” (Kelleher), 267 Carroll, Paul Vincent, 93 Carthage, 32,33 Casadh an tSúgáin (Hyde), 199 Cashel, 174–76, 179–80, 183–85, 220 Castle Garden, 127 Cathaír Már, 212, 216 Cathal mac Domnall, 185 Cathal mac Finguine, 174 Cathleen Ni Houlihan, 8, 38 Catholic Association, 49 Catullus, 32 Céli Dé, 220, 221, 222 Cellachán Caisil, 180, 181, 183 Cellach mac Cerbaill, 179, 222 Celtic Ireland (MacNeill), 62–63

280

Index Celtic Revival, 3–23, 87, 89 Celtic Twilight, The (Yeats), 28–29, 31, 33 Cenél Áeda, 183, 184 Cenél Cairbre, 177 Cenél Conaill, 168, 177, 181, 220, 233 Cenél Énnae, 168, 177 Cenél Éogain, 166, 168, 174, 177, 181, 219, 220, 233, 234, 240 Cenél Fiachach, 174, 177 Cenél Fingín, 175, 183, 185 Cenél Loairn, 215 Cenél Lóegaire, 177, 183, 184 Cenél Móain, 233 Cenn Eich, 237 Cennétig mac Lorccáin, 180–82 Cenn-fáelad úa Muchtigeirn, 175 Cenn Fuait, 255 Censorship of Publications Act, 90–93 Cet mac Matach, 195 Charlemagne, 165, 171 n 1 Chart, D. A., 60 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 88, 124 Chekov, Anton, 99 Chicago, 111–25, 134–35 Chicago Evening Post, 118, 121 Chicago Fire of 1871, 114 Chicago Herald, 121 Chicago News, 121 Chicago Telegram, 121 Chicago Times, 121 Chicago Tribune, 121 Child’s History of Ireland, A ( Joyce), 60 “Childybawn” (O’Faolain), 108 “Choice, The” (Yeats), 34 Christ ( Jesus), 189, 206, 210, 211, 216, 217, 218 Chronicle of Ireland (Hanmer), 61 Chronicon Scotorum (CS), 168, 180, 181, 182, 210–11, 213, 214–15, 220, 221, 230, 233 Cian, 184 Ciarraighe Luachra, 231, 236–38 Cimbáeth cleithe n-óc nEmna, 216 Cimbáeth mac Finntáin, 216–17 Cináed Ua Artacáin, 230 “Circus Animals’ Desertion, The” (Yeats), 38 Civil War, American, 126, 135, 148 Civil War, Irish, xiii, 87, 104, 129, 154 Clancy, George, 44 Clann Colmáin Móir, 166, 168, 169, 174, 177, 221 Clann Faílbe Flainn, 175, 176, 183, 231 Clann-na-nGael, 129 Clann Óengusa, 182

Clann Tairdelbaig, 180–82 Clann Tomaltaigh, 239 Clarke, Austin, xiii, 86, 99 Clonard, 180, 220 Clonenagh, 180 Clonfert, 183 Clonmacnois, xvi n 2, 62, 167, 170, 180, 197, 213, 214, 219, 221–23, 224 Clontarf, 62, 184 Clooth-na-Bare, 24, 25, 27–33, 37 Clothra, 317 Cnámhchaill, 185 Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh, 62, 182–84, 242 Cohalan, Daniel, 129 Coipre Nia Fer, 208 Collas, 215 Collier’s Magazine, 121 Collins, Michael, 154 Collooney, 29–30 Coluim Cille, 215 Colum, Padraic, 17, 86 Come Back to Erin (O’Faolain), 95–97, 107 Comrac Fir Diad ocus Conchulaind, 65 Conaille, 215, 219, 221–22 Conaire Már mac Eterscél, 44–47, 48, 51–52, 206–8, 209, 212, 216–18 Conall Cernach, 192–93, 195–96, 208–9 Conall Cremthainne, 169 Conall mac Nenta Con, 179 Conary (Ferguson), 36 Conchobar Húa Bríain, 241–42 Conchobar mac Donhnaill Uí Bhriain, 240, 245 n 6 Conchobar mac Donnchada, 220–21 Conchobar mac Fachtna, 216 Conchobar mac Nessa, 189, 191–92, 193, 205– 12, 216, 218–19, 223 Conchobar Slapar Salach, 231, 241–42 Conchobhar na Cathrach, 231 Concise Dictionary of Irish Biography (Crone), 58 Congal (Ferguson), 35 Conghalach mac Máele Mithigh, 166, 177, 181, 182, 256 Conla, 37 Conmhaicne, 233, 238, 239 Connacht (Connachta), 166, 168–69, 174, 175, 177, 180, 194–95, 198, 199, 205, 211, 215, 217, 220, 223, 231–39, 243 nn 4, 5 Conn Cétchathach, 178 Connelly, Thomas E., 58 Corbett, Gentleman Jim, xiv, 150–52 Corco Achlann, 239

281

Index Corcu Baiscinn, 179 Corcu Duibne, 179, 237 Corcu Mruad, 185 Corinth, 6 Cork, 102, 104, 106, 108, 126, 131–33, 185, 230, 237 Corkery, Daniel, 270 Cork Examiner, 108 Cormac Cass, 177 Cormac cond Longass, 223 Cormac mac Airt, 210, 225 n 10 Cormac mac Cuilennáin, 175, 179–80, 223 Cormac mac Domnaill, 182 Cormac’s Glossary, 223 Corunna, 203 n 2 Cottonian Annals (A Cott), 170, 210, 214, 219, 230 Countess Cathleen, The (Yeats), 36 Crimthann mac Fidaig, 211, 212 Crimthann Nia Nár, 217 Crone, John S., 58 Croom, 236 Crucifixion, 189, 209 Crunnmáel, 259 Cuailgne, 220, 223 Cuala, 52 Cuala Press, 24 Cuanu, 211, 219–22 Cu-Chorbb mac Moga-Corbb, 177 “Cú Chuimne” (Kelleher), 252 Cu Chulainn, 36–38, 65–70, 123, 189–94, 198– 201, 207–12, 216, 217–19, 221–23 Cuchulain of Muirthemne (Gregory), 69 “Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea” (Yeats), 37 Cuchullin Saga, The (Hull), 69 Cuinn na mBocht, 222, 224 Cullain, 30 Culte des héros et ses conditions sociales: Saint Patrick héros national de l’Irlande (Czarnowski), 58 Cummascach mac Cathail, 220 Cúr mac Da Lóth, 198, 200, 201–2 Cú Roí mac Daire, 44, 191–93, 206–7 Curran, Constantine P., xi, 101–2 Curtin, Jeremiah, 64–65 Curtis, Edmund, 162 Cuscraid mac Conchobair, 193 Czarnowski, S., 58, 71–72 n 1 Dál Cais, xiv–xv, 173–86, 241–42 Dál Cuinn, 178–79, 211–12, 217–18 Dál nAraide, 216

Dalton, Edward Alfred, 61–62 D’Alton, John, 61 Danelaw, 163 Dante, 46 Danu, 29–30 Dartmouth College, xi Darwin, Charles, 203 Davis, Thomas, 8, 36 Davitt, Michael, 7, 75 “Dead, The” ( Joyce), xiii, 40–56, 62, 78 Death of Cuchulain, The (Yeats), 37 “Death of Cuchullin, The” (Yeats), 37 Dedad mac Sin, 207, 209 Déisi, 178–80 Déisi Muman, 179, 241 Delbna Bethra, 174, 183 Derbail, 181 derbfine, 181 Derb-forgaill, 207 Desmond, 175, 183–85, 231–41 destitutio tenuium, 13 Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel, The. See Togail Bruidhne Dá Derga de Valera, Eamon, 105, 129, 154 “Dialogue of Self and Soul, A” (Yeats), 34 Diana, 32, 33 Diarmait Finn Ua Briain, 240–41 Diarmait mac Carthaigh, 237–41 Diarmait mac Cerbaill (fl. 49), 208 Diarmait mac Cerbaill (d. 565), 169, 211 Diarmait mac Cerbaill (fl. 905), 179 Diarmait mac Donnchadha Maic Murchadha, 230 Diarmait mac Murchadha, 230–31, 237, 239– 40 Diarmait Súgach Ua Conchobhair Ciarragighe, 232, 236–40 Diarmait Úa Áed Róin, 220 Diarmait Úa Briain, 232 Dillon, John, 7 Dillon, Myles, 166 Dind Ríg, 216 Dísert Diarmata, 220 Divine Comedy, The (Dante), 46 Do Chomramaib Laigen, 218 Do Fhlathiusaib Érenn (DFE), 166, 169, 205–7, 209, 211–13, 215–18 Domhnach-mor Mic Laithbhe, 234 Domhnall, son of Ruaidhri, 231 Domhnall Ua Fearghail, 239 Domnall Húa Bríain, 241 Domnall mac Duib-dá-boirenn, 184

282

Index Domnall mac Murchada, 211, 227 n 12 Domnall Uá Néill, 168, 177 Donizetti, 54 Donnchadh O Briain, 276 Donnchadh Ua Cearbhaill, 233, 240 Donnchad mac Briain, 184–85 Donnchad mac Cellachán, 183 Donnchad mac Domnaill, 171 n 4, 212 Donnchad mac Flainn Sinna, 168, 178, 180– 81 Donncuan, 182 Druim Criaich, 217 Dub-dá-boirenn mac Domnaill, 183 Dub-dá-leithe mac Máel Muire, 228 n 19 Dub-lachtna mac Máelguaile, 179 Dub Leamna, 181 Dublin, 35, 40–56, 98–102, 234–35, 242 Dubliners ( Joyce), xiii, 40–41, 54, 78 Dublin Magazine, 86, 98–99 “Dues” (Kelleher), 273 Duib-dá-boirenn mac Domnaill, 183, 184 Dún Cuirc, 183 Dúngal mac Máel-Fathartaig, 185 Dúngal úa Donnchaid, 185 Dunleer, 221 Dun-Lochad, 234 Dunn, Joseph, 69 Dún na Sciath, 183, 241 Dunne, Finley Peter, xiii–xiv, 111–25, 134–35 Dutch Interior (O’Connor), 95–96 Early Celtic Nature Poetry ( Jackson), 229 Early Irish History and Mythology (EIHM), 217 Easter Rising (Dublin), xiii, 7–8, 153–54 Ebsdorf Map, 188 Echmarcach mac Branáin, 239 Echtigern, 182 Eddas, 188 Edge of Sadness, The (O’Connor), 140, 142–44 Egypt, 187 Éle Deiscirt, 178–79, 185, 186 n 2 Éllim mac Condrach, 212 Ellis, Elmer, 120–21, 124 Ellmann, Richard, xi, 25, 40–43, 53, 55 n 1, 56 n 13, 71, 100, 101 Elton, Oliver, 61 Emain Macha, 169, 207, 215–17, 221, 227 n 13 Emer, 37 Emly, 170, 229 English Writers (Morley), 11 Enid, 10–11 “Envoi” (Kelleher), 277

Eochaid Ballderg, 182 Eochaid Feidlech, 206, 217 Eochaid Húa Longsig, 241 Eochaid Mugmedón, 166, 177 Eochu Bec, 205 Eochu úa Tuathail, 220 Éoganacht (Éoganachta), 63, 174–86, 236–37 Éoganacht Caisil, 175, 184, 185, 231 Éoganacht Locha Léin, 175, 237 Éoganacht Mugmedón, 177 Éoganacht Raithlind, 175 Éogan Mainistrech mac Ainbhthig, 220–22 Éogan Mór, 178 Érainn, 178, 206, 226 Ercc, son of Cairbre Nia Fer, 205 Éremón, 216, 219 Eterscél Mór Moccu hIair, 206, 216–17 Excalibur, 193 Falias, 39, 62 Famine (O’Flaherty), 93–95, 96 Farrell, James T., 134–35 Fedelmid mac Crimthainn, 173–75, 176, 220 Fedelmid mac Tigernaig, 180, 183 Feis Tighe Chonán, 31 “Felire of Angus the Culdee,” 13 Fenian, 5, 6–7, 31, 35–36, 129–30,154, 223 Ferchetne, 191 Fer Diad mac Damáin mic Dáire, 65–70, 193– 94, 200, 203 Fergal úa Ruairc, 175 Fergráid mac Cléirig, 175, 183 “Fergus and the Druid” (Yeats), 36 Fergus Foga, 216 Fergus mac Ro-eich (Fergus mac Róig), 193, 216, 218–19 Fergus mac Rossa mic Rudraige, 216 Ferguson, Samuel, 35–36, 48 Fews, 29, 33 Fíac mac Fíadchon, 216–17 Fiana, 29–30 Fianna bátar i nEmain, 230 filid, 164, 196, 223 Find, 205 Findabair, 66, 199, 200 Finds of Emain, 217 Finias, 39, 62 Finmole, 37 Finnegans Wake ( Joyce), xiii, 44, 46, 57–72, 79– 81 Finn MacCool, 64 Fionn, 29–30, 62, 64, 191

283

Index Fir Bolg, 62, 69, 187 Fir Falgae, 191 Fitzgerald, Barry, 124 FitzGerald, Edward, 73 Flaithbertach Húa Dedaig (Flaithbertach Ua Deaghaidh), 241–42 Flaithbertach mac Inmainén, 175, 180 Flanngus mac Loingsig, 220 Flann mac Foirchellaig, 221 Flann mac Máel-máedóc, 218 Flann Sinna, 168, 179 Fled Bricrenn, 192–93 Flight of the Eagle, The, 32 Fochla, 215 Fóirchellach Fobair, 221 Ford, Patrick, 129 Fort, Paul, 99 Four Courts, 47 “Freeloader, The” (Kelleher), 260 French Canadians, 131 Friends of Irish Freedom, 154 “Fugue” (O’Faolain), 108 “Fur Coat, The” (O’Faolain), 108 Gadfly, The (Voynich), 91 Gaelic (Irish language), 7, 11, 20, 24–39, 44, 46, 49, 58, 72 n 2, 104, 199, 249–77 Gallen, 183 Galway, 33, 41–43, 51, 53, 234 Garnett, Edward, 103–4 George III (king of England), 154 Geraint, 10–11 “Geraint the Son of Erbin,” 11 Germans, 4, 14, 134, 153–54 Gibbons, Grinling, 50 Gilbert, John T., 54 Giraldus Cambrensis, 61 Gladstone, William Ewart, 5 Glanmire, 231, 237–38 Glas Gainach, 64 Glasnevin, 55 Glenn Uisenn, 218 Gods and Fighting Men (Gregory), 62 Gogarty, Oliver St. John, 86 Goldsmith, Oliver, 140 golf, 116 Gonne, Maud, xi Gorias, 39, 62 Gormán, 222 Gort Rottacháin, 181 Gossip About Lough Neagh (Smith), 64 “Grace” ( Joyce), 46

Grammatica Celtica (Zeuss), 13 Graves, Robert, 31 Great O’Neill, The (O’Faolain), 87, 106 Greek, 6, 11 Green Helmet, The (Yeats), 192 Gregory, Augusta, 16, 26, 62, 69, 85, 89, 108 Grellach Eillte, 254 Guaire, 26 Guest, Charlotte, 10 Guinness’s Brewery, 53 Hackett, Francis, 129–30 Haliday, Charles, 62 Handlin, Oscar, 135 Hanmer, Meredith, 61 Hardy, Thomas, 90, 99 Harvard University, xi–xii, 104 Healy, Tim, 7 Herbert, Algernon, 11 Herne’s Egg, The (Yeats), 35 Hero-Tales of Ireland (Curtin), 64–65 Hidden Ireland, The (Corkery), 270 Higgins, F. R., 85, 93 “High Talk” (Yeats), 35 Hinduism, 227 n 13 Histoire Danice (Saxo), 61 Histoire de France (Martin), 13 Historiarum Contra Paganos Libri Septem (Orosius), 188 History of Dublin, A (Gilbert), 54 History of Ireland from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, The (Dalton), 61 History of Medieval Ireland (Curtis), 162 History of Sligo, County and Town (Wood-Martin), 31 History of the County of Dublin (D’Alton), 61 History of the United States (Muzzey), 59–60 Home Rule, 6 “Hosting of the Sidhe, The” (Yeats), 28 House by the Churchyard, The (Le Fanu), 58–59 Howells, William Dean, 121 Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 73 Húi Achir, 241 Húi Briuin, 238 Húi Dedaig, 241 Húi Echtigirn, 241 Húi Gráda, 241 Húi hÓcáin, 241 Húi Néill Buid, 241 Hull, Eleanor, 69 Humor of Ireland, The (O’Donoghue), 58 Hyde, Douglas, 9, 199

284

Index Í, 215 Iar-Connacht, 233 Imslige Glendanach, 201 Inber Scéne, 187–88 Inchenagh, 222 In Déis Tuaiscirt, 177, 178, 182 Indrechtach mc. Tomaltaich, 215 Ingcel, 45, 48 Inis Cathaig, 180 Inishnaree, 253 Inis Mochta, 233, 239 Inneol duib in senchad sen, 185 Interpretation of the Cuchulain Legend in the Works of W. B.Yeats, The (Bjersby), 37 Iona Chronicle, 212 Ireland To-Day (Hackett), 129–30 Ireland under the Normans (Orpen), 62 Irish Fairy and Folk Tales (Yeats), 31 Irish Fireside, 35 Irish Literary Society, 8 Irish Republican Army (I.R.A.), 104 Irish Revolution (1916–21), xiii, 4, 85–89, 93, 107, 153–54 Irish Statesman, 99, 105 Irish Times, 106 Irish World Annals, 169–71, 172 n 7 Isidore of Seville, 188 Ith, 187 “Its Own Reward” (Kelleher), 276 Jackdaw, The (Gregory), 108 Jackson, Kenneth, xi, 229 James, Henry, 121 James, William, 122 James Joyce Remembered (Curran), 101 Jerome, 169 Jesuits, 49, 102 Jews, 203 “Joan Saul” (Kelleher), 274 John Bull’s Other Island (Shaw), 4 Johnston, Denis, 86, 93 Jones, Owen , 10 Joyce, James, xii–xiii, 20, 40–56, 57–72, 73–81, 85, 86, 99, 101–2 Joyce, Nora Barnacle, 40 Joyce, Patrick Weston, 30, 39 n 2, 60 Joyce, Stanislaus, 40–41, 44 Judge, 151 Juno, 32, 33 Kavanagh, Patrick, xi, xiii, 98–99 Keating, Seatrún, 165, 166, 219

Kelleher, John V., background and career of, xi–xvi, 98–102, 126–33, 136–39, 150–54 Kenney, James F., 228 n 27 Kerry, 128, 131 Kildare, 218 Killaloe, 241 Killeigh, 180 King, Séana D., 69 King James’ Irish Army List (D’Alton), 61 King of the Beggars (O’Faolain), 106 Kinsale, 237 Knocknarea, 28 Know-Nothingism, 117 Knut, 163 Labraid Loingsech, 216 Lachtna, 182 Laeg, 194, 198 Laegaire, 63, 234 Laigin, 169, 177, 178, 183, 205–7, 216, 226 Láiríne mac Nóis, 199–200, 202 Land of Spices (O’Brien), 92 Langland, William, 88 Lann, 220 Lann Léire, 221 Last Hurrah, The (O’Connor), 139–40, 142, 144–45 Last Poems (Yeats), 7–8, 24, 35 Latin, 6, 164, 188 Laudibiliter, 245 n 5 Lawrence (Mass.), xi, 137 Laws of Life, 92 “Leabhar Breac,” 13 Leabhar Oiris, 185, 242 Leath Cuinn, 179, 226, 234–35 Leath Mhogha, 231, 234–35 Lebor Gabála Érenn, 62, 169, 187–89, 203, 205, 212, 216 Lebor Na Huidre (LU), 197, 201–2, 205, 207, 209–10, 222–23 Lecan Miscellany, 225 n 2 Lectures on the Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History (O’Curry), 10, 12 Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, 58, 71 n 1 Leinster, 168, 174, 175, 180, 215, 220, 229–45, 255 Leo III (emperor of Byzantium), 212 Leth Cam, 220 “Letter, A” (O’Faolain), 108 Lhuyd, Edward, 10 Liber Cuanach, 211, 219, 223 Limerick, 49, 180, 185, 236, 238

285

Index Lír, 30, 65 Lismore, 220, 221 Literature in Ireland (MacDonagh), 27 Lives of the Archbishops of Dublin (D’Alton), 61 Loch Derg, 183, 186 Loch Léin, 237 Loch Ree, 222 “Loch Sílenn” (Kelleher), 249 Loch Ua nGobhann, 234 Lóegaire Buadach, 192–93 Lóegaire mac Néill, 190, 206, 210, 215 Lorccán mac Condligáin, 175, 180 Lorccán mac Lachtnai, 182 Lothar Natrí Find Emna, 217 Lough Dagea, 29, 33 Lough Gill, 29 Lough Ia, 29, 31, 33 Lough Liath, 29–30, 33, 39 n 2 Lough Neagh, 64 Louth, 170, 197, 219–23 Lover, Samuel, 58 Lugaid mac Nóis, 199, 205, 221 Lugaid Réo Derg (Lugaid Riab nDerg), 190, 206–7, 209, 211, 217–18 Lugh, 63 Mabinogion, 10–11, 21 n 6, 22 n 8 Mac Carthaigh, Cormac, 231–32, 236 Mac Carthaigh’s Book, 230–32, 236, 238, 242 Mac Carthy, 183 Mac Cecht, 45 Mac Conaba, 261 Mac Dá Cherdda, 139 MacDonagh, Thomas, 27–28 Machaire-Gaileng, 234 MacKenna, Stephen, 85, 86 Macleod, Fiona. See Sharp, William MacNeill, Eoin, 62–63, 166, 188 Macpherson, James, 11–12, 18 Macroom, 237 “Madness of King Goll, The” (Yeats), 35 Máel-Cánaig, 219–20 Máel Fathartaig mac Flainn mic Donnchada, 183, 185 Máel Finnia mac Flannacáin, 181 Máelguala, 179 Máel-muad mac Brian, 183, 184 Máel Muire mac Céilechair, 222 Máel Seachlainn, 237, 239 Máel Seachlainn Mór, 177, 234 Máel Sechnaill mac Máelruanaid, 168 Máel Suthain, 165

Maenach, 261 Maeve (Medb), 28, 65–66, 199–200, 205, 206, 217–18 Maeve’s Butterpat, 28 Mag Breg, 45–46 Mag Conaille, 219 Mag Duine, 181 Magh Thamhnach, 232, 236 Magnus Barefoot, 35 Mahabharata, 194 Mangan, James Clarence, 36 Marcellinus, 169 Martin, Henri, 13 Masu de chlaind Echdach aird, 218 Máta Muirisce, 205 Mathgamain mac Cennéitig, 175, 182, 183 Matthew Arnold: A Study in Conflict (Brown), 12 McElgun, John, 133–34 McGarry, John, 121 Meascán Meidhbhe, 28 Melia, Daniel M., 194 Meluchra, 29–30, 32 Mess Gregra, 223 Meyer, Kuno, 35, 257, 258, 259, 260, 262 Mide (Midhe), 169, 173–86, 205, 211–15, 220– 22, 231, 233, 234, 237, 239 Midsummer Night Madness (O’Faolain), 103, 105 Milchu moccu Buain, 63 Milucradh, 32, 33 Miscellaneous Irish Annals (Misc. A), 230 “Misty Gap” (Kelleher), 268–69 Mochta, 220 Móin Mhór, xv, 229–45, 264 “Móin Mór” (Kelleher), 264 Monaghan, May Joyce, 53 Monasterboice, 220, 221 Montgomery, Niall, 100–101 Moon in the Yellow River, The ( Johnston), 93 Moore, George, 85, 86 Mor, 64–65 Mór, 232 More Pricks Than Kicks (Beckett), 100 Morley, Henry, 11 Mountain Tavern, The (O’Flaherty), 58 Mr. Dooley at His Best (Ellis), 124 Mr. Dooley’s America (Ellis), 120–21 Mugdorn Maigen, 222–23 Muirchertach (king of Ailech), 168 Muirchertach mac Néill Uí Lochlainn, 180, 181, 233–36, 238 Muirchertach of the Leather Cloaks, 166–67, 172 n 5

286

Index

Nad Crantail, 198–99 Nasby, Petroleum V., 111 Nash, D. W., 10, 13 Nath Í mac Fiachrach, 212 New England, 128–33, 136–45, 148–49, 153– 54 Newman, Cardinal John Henry, 142 Niall Caille mac Áeda Oirdnidi, 174, 220 Niall of the Nine Hostages, 166, 168–69 Niall Ua Lochlainn, 234 “Niggard, A” (Kelleher), 259 Norman Conquest, 162, 202 Norse. See Vikings Nuada Necht, 206, 211, 217 Nutt, Alfred, 4, 11–12, 22 n 11 Nye, Bill, 111

O’Flaherty, Liam, xiii, 58–59, 85, 86, 87, 93– 95 O’Flaherty, Roderic, 165, 166 Ogham, 35 O’Grady, Standish, 29–30, 32, 35, 274, 276, 277 Ogygia, 164 Ó hÍnnse, Séamus, 230 Oisin, 11, 36 O’Kearney, Nicholas, 31–32 “Old Woman of Beare,” 27, 29–33 O’Leary, John, 7, 35 O’Lochlainn, Colm, 275 Ó Máille, Tomás, 267, 268–69, 271–72 O’Neill, Owen Roe, 134 O’Neill, Red Hugh, 106, 134 Only Jealousy of Emer, The (Yeats), 37 O’Nolan, Brian (Flann O’Brien, Myles na gCopaleen), xi, xiii, 100–101 On the King’s Threshold (Yeats), 35 On the Study of Celtic Literature (Arnold), 3–23 O’Rahilly, T. F., 172 n 7, 217 O’Reilly, Private Miles, 112 Orlaith, 180–81 Ormond, 240–41 Orosius, 188 Orpen, Goddard Henry, 62 Orthanach úa Cáelláma, 218 O’Sheel, Shaemas, 18–19 Osraige, 174, 178–80, 183, 215, 234 Ossian (Macpherson), 11–12, 18, 19, 31, 223 Ota, 62 Othan, 215

O’Brien, Flann. See O’Nolan, Brian O’Brien, Kate, 92 O’Brien, William, 7 O’Callaghan, 183 O’Casey, Sean, xiii, 86–87, 93 Ó Coileáin, Seán, 230 O’Connell, Daniel, 44, 50, 52, 88, 93, 106, 127 O’Connor, Edwin, xiv, 136–45 O’Connor, Frank, xi, xii, xiii, 20, 24, 86, 95– 97, 98–99, 104, 130 O’Connors, 175 O’Conor, Charles, 165 O’Curry, Eugene, 10, 12 O’Donoghue, D. J., 58 O’Donovan, John, 221, 229 Odyssey (Homer), 46 Óengus, 180–81 O’Faolain, Sean, xi, xiii, 85–88, 89–90, 92–93, 95–97, 99, 102, 103–8, 262

Pagan Ireland (Wood-Martin), 30 “Pardon Old Fathers” (Yeats), 25 Paris, 6 Parnell, Charles Stuart, 6–7, 8, 12, 75–76, 88 Parr, Katherine, 181 Pastheen Finn (Ferguson), 35 Patrick, Saint, 11, 63, 169–70, 181–82, 189– 90, 206, 210, 220, 227 n 13, 233 Pearse, Padraic, 93 Penal Code, 49–51 Pentarchy, 205–9, 218 “Peredur the Son of Evrawc,” 11 Personal Library of James Joyce,The (Connelly), 58 “Phantom Chariot of Cú Chulainn,The,” 190 Phoenix Park, 53 Pictures in the Hallway (O’Casey), 87 “Pillow Talk of Medb and Ailill,The,” 201, 205 Playboy of the Western World,The (Synge), 40, 67 “Poésie des races celtiques, La” (Renan), 13

Muirchertach Ua Briain, 184, 230–36 Muirchertach Ua Lochlainn, 235–41 Muiredach mac Ainbhchellaig, 213 Muiredach mac Echdach, 220 Muirthemne, 223 Mullingar, 269 Munster, 63, 166, 168, 173–86, 199, 205–7, 215, 220–23, 229–45, 270, 273 Murchad Húa Máel Sechlainn, 237 Murias, 39, 62 Murphy (Beckett), 100 Múscraige, 179, 183, 185, 237 Muzzey, 59–60 My Brother’s Keeper ( Joyce), 44 Myles na gCopaleen. See O’Nolan, Brian

287

Index Pokorny, Julius, 69–70 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A ( Joyce), xiii, 20, 41, 44, 54, 62, 73–81, 101 Port Righ, 236 Posidonius, 195 Pot of Broth, The (Yeats), 35 Potter, George, 146–49 Powell, Frederick York, 61 “Practical Advice” (Kelleher), 254 Prosper, 169 Pullman strike (Chicago), 118 Ráith Áeda mic Bric, 179 Rawlinson B. 502 (Rawl B 502), xvi n 2, 164, 202, 206, 209, 210, 218 Rebechán mac Mothlai, 182 Recollections of James Joyce ( Joyce), 41 Red Barbara and Other Stories (O’Flaherty), 58– 59 Red Branch (Ulster), 192 “Red Hanrahan’s Song About Ireland” (Yeats), 28, 33 Redmond, John, 7 Relief Act of 1793, 49 Renan, Ernest, 13 riastra, 66, 67, 68, 190, 194 Rodenbach, Georges, 99 Rome, 6, 163–65 Roosevelt, Theodore, 111, 113–14, 119, 121, 153 Rosenblatt, Roger, xii Rosses, 29 Rough Riders (Roosevelt), 113–14 “Royal Insults” (Kelleher), 256 “Royal Mistrust” (Kelleher), 253 Ruadchinn, 207 Ruaidhrí na Saighi Buidhi Ua Conchobhair, 231 Ruaidrí Úa Canannán, 177, 181–82 Ruaidrí Úa Conchobhair, 232, 235–36, 240– 41, 243–45 n 5 Ruaidrí Ua Donnagán, 185 Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (FitzGerald), 73 Rudraige mac Sittride, 216 Rúscach, 220 Russell, George William (AE), 16, 85, 86, 99, 104, 105 Russ Ruad, 205 Sadb, 184 Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, 60 satori (enlightenment), 26

Saxo Grammaticus, 61 Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin,The (Haliday), 62 Scathach, 66, 68 Scéla Mucce Meic Dathó, 195–96 Scotland, 12, 37, 65, 163, 215, 219 Scythia, 187 Seán mac Ruaidhrí Mag Raith, 242 “Sechnussach mac Blathmaic” (Kelleher), 251 “Second Coming, The” (Yeats), 34 selaigecht, 217 Sencha, 223 Senchus Síl Ír, 216, 218 Setanta, 38 Shadow and Substance (Carroll), 93 Sharp, William (Fiona Macleod), 17 Shaw, George Bernard, 4, 80, 86, 92 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 35 “Shining Geese, The” (Kelleher), 271–72 Síl Áeda Sláine, 169, 177 Síl Anmchada, 183 “Silence of the Valley, The” (O’Faolain), 108 Síl Éremóin, 206 Síl Ír, 205 Síl Muiredaig, 175, 238 Silva Gadelica, 214 Silver Branch, The (O’Faolain), 262 Sinn Fein, 15 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 192 Slane, 234 Sliabh Guillean, 32, 39 n 2 Sliabh Mis, 236 Slieave Daeane, 29, 33 Sligo, 9, 28–29, 31, 33, 203 Sliocht Lebair Lecain, 242 Smith, W. S., 64 “Smith’s Daughter, The” (Kelleher), 258 “Snoring Bedmate, The” (Kelleher), 265–66 Socrates, 114, 115 Southern Illinois University, xv Spain, 187–88 Spenser, Edmund, 35 “Spuds” (Kelleher), 270 Stephen Hero ( Joyce), 41 Stephens, James, 86 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 108 Stillorgan, 46 Stokes, Whitley, 4, 12, 13, 44, 62 Story of Dublin, The (Chart), 60 Story of Mac Datho’s Pig, The. See Scéla Mucce Meic Dathó Stuart, Francis, 86

288

Index “Student and Cook” (Kelleher), 262 Studs Lonigan trilogy (Farrell), 134 Suibhne, 35 Sullivan, John L., xiv, 150–52, 154 Swift, Jonathan, 120 Sybaris, 6 Synge, John M., 16, 21, 40, 67, 89, 99 Tadhg, son of Diarmiat Ua Briain, 231, 232 Tadhg, son of Muiredach, son of Cathach, 231 Tadhg Ua Briain, 236, 240 Táin Bó Cuailgne, xv, 65–70, 189, 191, 193, 197, 200–201, 203, 205–28 Táin Bó Regama, 219 Táin Quest, The (Ferguson), 36 Taliesin; or,The Bards and Druids of Britain (Nash), 10, 13, 21 n 7, 22 n 8 Tara, 44–47, 52, 137, 165–70, 173–86, 205–6, 211–13, 216–17, 219, 220, 235, 250 Taylor, Tom, 10 “Teacher’s Pet, The” (Kelleher), 261 Tech Moling, 255 Tennyson, Alfred, 73 “Teresa” (O’Faolain), 108 Tethba, 233, 239 “They Went Forth to Battle But They Always Fell” (O’Sheel), 18–19 Thomond, 173, 181–83, 185, 231–32, 234, 236–42 “Three Beggars, The” (Yeats), 25 Three Irish Glossaries (Stokes), 12 Thurneysen, Rudolph, 69 Tigernach Tétbannach, 206, 209 Tigernán mac Sellacháin, 181 Tighearnán Ua Ruairc, 233, 237, 239 Tipperary, 229–30 “To a Young Beauty” (Yeats), 25 Tobar Fíorghlan Gaedhlige, 275 Todd, James Henthorn, 62 Togail Bruidhne Dá Derga, xiii, 36, 44–48, 62, 206–7 Toirdhelbhach mac Ruaidhri Ua Conchobhair, 231 Toirdhelbhach Ua Briain, 230–42, 264 Toirdhelbhach Ua Conchobhair, 230–40 “To Ireland in the Coming Times” (Yeats), 36 Tolstoy, Leo, 90 Tomgraney, 182 Tone, Wolfe, 88 Torbach, 222 To the Golden Door: The Story of the Irish in Ireland and America (Potter), 146–49

Transactions of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society, 31 Transactions of the Ossianic Society, 31 Tripartite Life of St. Patrick, 181–82 “Trout, The” (O’Faolain), 108 Tuatha De Danann, 39, 62, 187 Turgeis, 62 Turner, Sharon, 11, 22 n 8 Twain, Mark, 121, 144 Ua Cathaláin, 185 Ua Cearbhaill, 233–35 Ua Cinnéidigh, 241–42 Ua Gairm Leadhaigh, 233 Ua hIfearnáin, 234 Uaithne Cliach, 234 Uaithne Tire, 242 Ua Lochlainn, 233–36 Ua Loingsigh, 242, 245 n 7 Ua Mathghamhna, 237 Ua Ruairc, 231, 234 Uí Bhriain, 232, 244 Uí Briúin, 175–76 Uí Briúin Breifne, 175–76 Uí Ceinnselaig, 176 Uí Cernaig, 182 Uí Chairbre Aedhbha, 236 Uí Chellaig, 222 Uí Chonaill Gabhra, 236 Uí Cuanach, 185 Uí Dúnchada, 175–76 Uí Dúnlainge, 176 Uí Echach Muman, 175, 183, 184, 237 Uí Fáeláin, 175, 241 Uí Fhailghe, 233 Uí Fiachrach, 175, 234 Uí Fidgeinte, 177–78 Uí Floinn, 182 Uí Garrchon, 176 Uí Liatháin, 177–78 Uí Máil, 176 Uí Maine, xvi n 2, 233, 234 Uí Muiredaig, 175 Uí Néill, xiv, xvi n 2, 166–70, 173–82, 190, 206, 211–12, 217, 234 Ulaid, 169, 220–21 Ulidia, 175, 220–22, 233, 234 Ulster, xiv–xv, 35, 63, 65–70, 168–70, 187–204, 205–28 Ulster Version, of the Annals, 214 Ulysses (Joyce), 42, 46, 53, 55, 78, 79, 100, 101, 102

289

Index University College, Cork, 104 University College, Dublin, 102 Utopia (More), 119 “Vacillation” (Yeats), 34 Verhaeren, Emile, 99 Victoria (queen of England), 154 Vikings (Norse), 62, 163, 180, 183, 186, 196, 201, 202, 220, 222, 228 n 18, 255 Villemarqué, 10 Vindication of the Genuineness of Ancient British Poems, A (Turner), 11 Virgil, 189 Vision, A (Yeats), 34 Voynich, E. L., 91 Wales, 10–11, 13 Walsh, Maurice, 87 Wanderings of Oisin, The (Yeats), 36 War of the Gaedhil with the Gaill,The. See Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh Washington, George, 113, 146

Weaver, Harriet, 58 Wellington Monument, 53 White Goddess, The (Graves), 31 Whitman, Walt, 86 Wilde, Oscar, 86 William III (king of England), 50 Wind Among the Reeds, The (Yeats), 28 Wood-Martin, W. G., 30–33 World I Never Made, A (Farrell), 134 World War I, 135, 153–54 World War II, xi Yeats, Jack B., xi, 100 Yeats, Mrs. William Butler, xi, 100 Yeats, William Butler, xii–xiii, 7–9, 11, 16–17, 20–21, 24–39, 80, 85, 88–90, 93, 99–100, 192, 203 Yellow Book of Lecan (YBL), 205 Young Irelanders, 8, 89, 94 Zen Buddhism, 26 Zeuss, Johann Kaspar, 13

290

Index

A native of Lawrence, Massachusetts, and a graduate of Dartmouth College, John V. Kelleher taught for over forty years at Harvard University. He is now a professor emeritus of Irish Studies. In writings published widely in the United States and Ireland, Kelleher has made pioneering scholarly contributions over the entire range of Irish Studies—from the earliest corpus of Old Irish poetry, annals, and heroic tales to the history and literature of Ireland and Irish America in the twentieth century. He currently makes his home in St. Louis, Missouri. Charles Fanning is a professor of English and history and the director of Irish and Irish Immigration Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His books include The Irish Voice in America: 250 Years of Irish-American Fiction, The Exiles of Erin: Nineteenth-Century Irish-American Fiction, and Finley Peter Dunne and Mr. Dooley: The Chicago Years. He has edited New Perspectives on the Irish Diaspora, Chicago Stories of James T. Farrell, and Mr. Dooley and the Chicago Irish. He is currently at work on a memoir, parts of which have appeared in Creative Nonfiction and the Irish Review.

291

Selected Writings of John V. Kelleher on Ireland and Irish America

Swift's Irish Writings: Selected Prose and Poetry

Selected Writings on Aesthetics