ABSTRACT
T h e student of Irish antiquity has an advantage which in many other archaeological centres is not available. Time has left to him the fragments of an extensive body of literature, written and oral, transmitting a memory of the life of the people who wielded the weapons and the imple ments which he can handle. From this point of view, oral ‘ literature ' is less trustworthy than that which has a long manuscript tradition: it is liable to become impressed with the changing conditions of life in successive centuries, and to be delivered to the collector in a form as much modified as the material used in the children’s game called ‘ Russian Scandal \ Even manuscript materials require to be treated scientifically before they can be used to any good purpose. The large volumes of O’Curry are still valuable as repertories of illustrations; but they are melancholy examples of the loss involved in failing to pass the ore through a crucible, and thus accepting the precious metal still contaminated with its attendant dross. We shall take three ancient tales and endeavour to see
what they mean. We have here nothing whatever to do with any literary value that they may possess : to the scientific student, the literary aspect of folk-stories is a nuisance, and their literary manipulation anathema. Nor have we here anything to do with philological problems, or with the interpretation of difficult passages: our only concern is with the contents of the tales in their most general form. We begin with the story, or, rather, sheaf of independent
Cualnge. This narrative does not possess the literary pre eminence of the Homeric epics; but from the point of view of cultural history it is hardly less important. The Homeric epics illuminate for us a period of the history of the Aegean Sea and the coasts around it, upon which we have no other light from literary sources. The Cattle Raid of Cualnge illuminates for us, in a way that no other docu ment does, the manners and thought of Europe in the later La Tene Period. It shows us men and women living the life of the time, using the cultural apparatus of the time : and if it occasionally introduces supernatural events which we cannot accept as literal history, it shows us what they believed to be possible.1 Can we accept the testimony of this document ? Is it
really an accurate picture ? In the form in which the story has come down to us it is much later than the time which it professes to describe. The oldest manuscript con taining it is of the beginning of the twelfth century. Doubt less it has been copied from earlier sources, now lost: but for philological reasons we cannot date its text to a century earlier than about the sixth. This is still as far removed from the alleged events described as we are from the reign of King John. Mere oral tradition could not possibly convey accurate details across that long and varied stretch of time. Is the gap to be bridged in any other way ? The answer must be in the affirmative. The tradition
can be corroborated from other sources. The archaeology is remarkably accurate : the people use the weapons and the implements which they should have used at the time indicated. The testimony of Poseidonius, Caesar, and other contemporary writers, so far as it goes, gives us a picture quite consistent with that drawn for us by the Irish story. We can make allowances for changes here and there, due to the changed outlook of the Christianized compilers; but on the whole the story is an authentic record of life and belief, even though we may not take it as an authentic record of prosaic history.2 The name of the piece introduces us at once to a matter
of importance. It is one of a series of stories which have,
for their subject, cattle-forays. Where cattle is the chief wealth of a community, raids on the cattle by acquisitive neighbours become matters of commonplace : both in Ire land and in the Scottish Highlands they formed a traditional industry. These stories all bear the name Tain B o ----- ' The Cattle-Raid o f ’, with a name of owner or of locality filling the blank. The story thus belongs to a specific class. Now, in the
Book of Leinster there is a list of stories which the men of learning were expected to be able to recite upon great occasions. These stories are said to have been 350 in all, though only a comparatively small number has come down to our time. They were grouped into twelve categories, namely-
— a list which, for all its baldness, is itself a picture of life, as it shows the types of incident which were matter for intellectual interest.3 It is not to be supposed that the recitation of these
stories was a mere act of amusement. If it were, the narrators would have been encouraged to fashion new tales — or at least, seeing that such a feat is probably impossible, to re-group the stock incidents into new and surprising combinations. It was much more like a religious ceremony. These 350 stories formed a sort of sacred canon. Just as the sacred books of the Hebrews are practically the history of the nation; just as the histories of Homer became practically sacred books to the Greeks: so the sacred books of the Irish were tales of the adventures of notable people, carefully committed to memory by those whose business it was to recite them at the periodical festivals. Thus the story before us is essentially a sacred book. It stands first in the list of cattle-raids, as befits its importance. It relates the raid not of a cow (bo), but of the bull (tarb)
S H A D O W - S C E N E S 129 of Cualnge ; but the formula of the title is conventional, and the slight solecism is of no importance. Cualnge is the name of a district between Dundalk Bay and Carlingford Loch, now represented by the parish of Cooley in Co. Louth. The political background of the story, so far as it can
be recovered from the narrative, is as follows. The country is a Pentarchy, each kingdom being governed by its own king. Each king is independent of the rest. There is no effective trace of a ‘ High King ' having real or theoretical authority over the country, either in Tara or anywhere else: and occasional references to this functionary are later anachronisms. So far as the story has historical importance, it is the record of the beginning of an aggres sion, on the part of the rulers of Connacht, upon the adjacent kingdom of the Ulaid, whose name, though not the exact delimitation of their territory, survives in the modern province of Ulster. The scene opens with a dispute between Medb, queen
of Connacht, and her insignificant husband Ailill. It is not unimportant to make a differentiation between this ancient queen's name and the euphonious modem adapta tion thereof: the latter should be spelt * Maeve ', and pro nounced to rhyme with ‘ save *; the former should be spelt * Medb’, and pronounced something like ‘ my-eye-w’ in one syllable. For this word appears to mean ‘ mead-(drunken) ', old Celtic medva : compare the Cymric meddw. In such a name there would at the time be no dis grace. Many ancient classical authorities speak of the Celtic disposition to inebriation,4 and their testimony is confirmed by the native literature. We read of even an admired hero like Fer Diad, the friend and combatant of Cu Chulaind,* drinking himself drunk.5 In one of the lives of St Brigid contained in a manuscript (Rawl. B. 512) in the Bodleian Library, we may find what to our ears is an utterly hateful story 6 to the effect that * Bishop Mel, by
130 A N C I E N T I R E L A N D the Grace of God being drunkenknew not what he was singing in his book, and so, when placing the veil on St Brigid, he inadvertently conferred episcopal orders upon her.* We might read without surprise such a tale in some blasphemy issuing from modern Russia: to find it in a composition seriously intended to do honour to the saint and to her spiritual adviser, is truly disconcerting ! Even if we take inebriatus in a figurative sense (‘ drunken with the Grace of God'), which is the only interpretation that can make the incident tolerable, f it is astonishing that the writer used such a metaphor at all, and, using it, did not realise and guard against the obvious ambiguity of his words. Such an oversight could not possibly happen except in a community where no stigma was attached to inebriation : where, indeed, as among the ancient Aztecs, a drunken man was regarded as being in a special state of spiritual exaltation, so that to injure or even to mock at him was a deadly sin. However that may be, it is hard to believe that any
one would care to be a full namesake of that horrible woman, too politely described by Sir Samuel Ferguson as ‘ the Helen and Semiramis of Irish romance', whose unspeak able personality towers gigantic in some of the most ancient records of the country. The dispute between Medb and her husband begins with
AililTs uttering the platitude that ‘ a rich man's wife is a lucky woman'— which is just the sort of thing that we expect to hear from him. Medb agrees, but suspiciously asks him why he thinks so : and Ailill, to her indignation, points to the advantages which she has gained from marry
and so on till we reach ‘ each one had one : and that was my standing'. If Queen Medb really said this, I am afraid we must
accuse her majesty of over-statement; for the retinue specified amounts to 40,478,703,000 persons, if I have not made an arithmetical error; or rather more than three times the whole population of modem Dublin crowded upon every single square mile in Ireland. This is a mere indiscretion : the rest of the speech is of more importance from a sociological point of view. We mark that women take their place in battle along with men, and recall the familiar narratives of the British queens Boudicca and Cartimandua, who have much in common with Medb. Not till long years afterwards, when Adamnan brought about the passage of a law of emancipation, were women relieved from this obligation. The reference to the ‘ high kingship ’ of Medb’s father
is, as we have seen, anachronistic.
