Exchanging blood for wine: Envisaging heaven in Irish bardic poetry

Recent years have witnessed an explosion of interest in the area of late medieval popular religion.2 Although the term has often been difficult to define (and this has generated its own controversy) there seems now to be a general acceptance that it consists of the engagement of individuals and groups, both lay and ordained, learned and unlearned, with divine mysteries, resulting in the perpetual growth of various forms of devotion and ritual. Fortunately, an ever-increasing body of scholarship continues to unearth valuable and hitherto overlooked sources as evidence of what men and, increasingly, women thought about their God. Probably the most valuable source for late medieval popular religion in Ireland, but one which has only recently attracted serious attention, is a body of religious poetry composed between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries by Gaelic Irish professional poets.3 Out of a surviving corpus of 2000 bardic poems, some 400 are specifically devoted to religious themes. Interestingly (and contrary to popular perception) late medieval Gaelic Ireland was not merely a bastion of what is currently dubiously termed ‘Celtic spirituality’; rather, it participated fully in devotional trends evidenced right across late medieval and early modern Europe, being exposed to ongoing continental influences, particularly through the medium of extensive networks of mendicant friars (and before them, Cistercian monks) who adopted and promulgated the latest European devotional fads. The works of the bardic poets display both knowledge and appreciation of these while, at the same time, conforming to a strict and rigid literary form for over 400 years. What follows is a discussion of the idea of heaven as portrayed by professional Gaelic Irish poets. As I argue below, the evidence suggests two complementary influences on the bardic conceptualization of heaven: one that pertains to the life and vocational experience of native poets, and another that belongs to a wider contemporary European devotional tradition.