" Surely one of
the most touching sentences ever uttered in all the long series of
the lament of the Celt in exile!
the most touching sentences ever uttered in all the long series of
the lament of the Celt in exile!
Warner - World's Best Literature - v06 - Cal to Chr
Renan by his
treatise on 'La Poésie des Races Celtiques,' and later Matthew
Arnold by his essay on Celtic Literature,' accomplished an almost
inestimable service. Everything that has been done since is but a
variation along the lines indicated by these two great critics; and
with this result, that it is already a commonplace to say we have in
the Celtic literature of the past not only an almost inexhaustible
mine of beauty, but the material for a new and vivid Anglo-Celtic
literature of the imagination.
In the ensuing brief sketch of some of the main features of this
subject, at once so fascinating and so important, no attempt is made
to do other than to interest, and perhaps allure further, the general
reader. For convenience's sake, this brief paper may be divided into
four sections:-Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and Cornish.
## p. 3404 (#378) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3404
I-IRISH
"FROM what dragon's teeth, and when sown, sprang forth this
warlike crop? " asks Mr. Standish O'Grady, writing in his "History
of Ireland' of the host of famous heroic men and women whose
names have come down to us from the antique periods of the Gael.
"Out of the ground they start," he tells us, "the armies of her
demigods and champions,-beautiful heroic forms, -in the North the
Red Branch, in the South the Ernai or Clan Dega, in the West
Queen Meave and her champions, in the Southeast that mysterious
half-red Meave and her martial grooms! "
A wonderful world! that heroic Ireland, the old Ireland of Queen
Meave and Cuculain, which only now for the first time is become at
all a possible region for the most of us. It is due to the remark-
able modern band of Irish writers and scholars represented by Mr.
O'Grady in the one category, and his older namesake, Mr. Standish
Hayes O'Grady of the 'Silva Gadelica,' in the other, that this litera-
ture is at last unsealed for those readers who have no Gaelic equip-
ment to aid them. With their aid Queen Meave emerges into new
life in poetry and romance; Cuculain is seen fighting afresh his
ancient battles; and St. Patrick encounters again the primitive
Ossian: all these, fortunately, are now as much within the reach of
an American audience as their classic prototypes in Homer or in
the northern sagas. These few more familiar names, out of the vast
number which threaten confusion in the old Irish romances and
bardic books, may serve as clues in the perplexing labyrinth of a
subject which seems at first so difficult to penetrate. Take Queen
Meave, for instance: how do we arrive at her place and story, so
early in the centuries? She belongs to the second great cycle of
Irish legendary history, in which she has Cuculain, Conor mac
Nessa, Fergus, and Deirdrê, as companions in romance. In this cycle
the dramatic centre is the fierce interminable war between Con-
naught and Ulster, brought about by the treacherous murder of the
sons of Usnach. The story of their tragic end, and of the melan-
choly death of Deirdrê, is one of the most moving in all Irish tra-
dition. But the master-romance of the cycle is not that of Deirdrê,
but of Queen Meave and her foray in quest of the famous bull of
Louth; a tale familiar in Irish under its title of The Cattle-spoiling
of Cooley. '
If one is tired of the modern world and its literary interpreta-
tions, its self-conscious fictions and impressionistic poetry, one cannot
do better than dive deep into the past, where Queen Meave marches
in half-barbaric splendor and beauty across the stage of the ancient
## p. 3405 (#379) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3405
Eri, which was approximately contemporaneous with the birth of
Christ. That was the time when the Red Branch mustered in the
north its heroic array of warriors, descendants of Ir, the son of
Milesius; and of the Red Branch came Cuculain the mighty. Con-
naught, the Ireland west of the Shannon, was Queen Meave's patri-
mony, where still lived the chief remnant of the prehistoric Firbolgs,
the race that once fought with the gods themselves. And we have
still to supply the mid-Ireland, with Tara as capital, and Cairbre as
king; the Leinster of that day, subject to Finn and Far-Cu; and the
Munster, subject to Lok and Eocha, with the children of Conairy
Mór the Beautiful, too, ranging the south in their fullness of power.
The colors to be got out of this Celtic antiquity, the spirit of life
that surges in its romantic annals, the fine fury of its heroes, the
beauty and picturesqueness of its women, combine to make a story
that only an Ireland of the first century could have inspired, and
that only an Ireland of the sixth to the ninth century could have
written.
Throughout Celtic history, the sixth century is for many reasons
a climacteric period. In Irish literature, we reach about the year
575 a first point to which we can refer approximately the more con-
scious operation of its genius. Then it was that it made its first
open claim to something like a national recognition. At the famous
conclave of that year, held at Druimceta, it attained an almost aca-
demic position and organization. In this conclave, the then king of
the Scottish Gaels, the leading King of the Irish, and St. Columcill,
assisted at the deliberations which decided the caste and privileges
of the Illuminati. There seem to have been three grades: the first,
a pseudo-Druidic order, the Gradh Ecna; the second, one of law-
makers and lawyers; the third, the Bardic order, the Gradh Fili, the
poets being termed File in Irish. Of the many degrees to which the
poets or File could attain, the highest (as in the other grades, of
Ecna, "Wisdom," and of Fene, "Law") was the Ollave, or Doctor.
These doctors of literature, so to call them, were already the con-
tinuators of a great tradition, especially in poetry. They had to
carry, written only in their heads, an immense body of bardic and
religious legendary history and philosophy. And inasmuch as they
were the sole depositories of this profound and occult learning, to
say nothing of those heroic tales and romances in which the Celtic
people so delighted, they received high honor wherever they went.
When the chief poet, the ollave, or doctor of poetry, arrived, in his
weather-beaten cloak of dark crimson trimmed with white feathers,
accompanied by his little band of disciples, at some chieftain's
house, he was received with signal hospitality and treated to the
best his host could afford.
## p. 3406 (#380) ###########################################
3406
CELTIC LITERATURE
While literature was still oral, it is clear that despite the care
used in its preservation in the bardic schools, it could not be main-
tained with the absolute accuracy of a written or a printed text.
The remoter the historical matter to be remembered, the less likely
was it to be preserved, literatim et verbatim, without those little liber-
ties of the imagination which the Celtic word-master of earlier ages
was always ready to take. Thus the first cycle of Irish legendary
history, dating back many centuries before the Christian era,- the
primitive and mythological cycle, - allows full license to the imagina-
tion, working upon a basis of semi-barbaric tradition, with a mixture
in it of nature-myths and remotest history. Both because of the
extent and the extreme difficulty of the materials afforded by this
cycle in the study of the pre-Christian religious beliefs of the Celtic
races, its stories will always form a great hunting-ground for Celtic
students. We learn from it how the Nemedians were overtaken by
the Fomorians and fought with them, almost to extermination, on
Tory Island, escaping then to the south of Europe, particularly to
Greece; and a couple of centuries later returned, under their new
name of the Firbolgs. The Nemedians meanwhile supplied similarly
a recrudescent race, the Tuatha Dé Danann, of whom came the
Dagda, the all-king, almost the Zeus of ancient Ireland. The same
cycle supplies us also with the mythical types correspondent to those
of the Greek mythology: e. g. , Ogmuir, the Irish Heracles; Lug or
Lugh, the Apollo; Diancéa, the Esculapius; Manannan, the Neptune;
and so forth. We have also Bridget, the Goddess of Poetry, the
Gaelic Muse, and the first and foremost of the many illustrious
Brians of Gaelic story. Later critics differ ingeniously about the pre-
cise origins and significations of many of these prehistoric figures.
Our own conjecture is, and it lays claim to no great originality or
finality, that we have in this Danann cycle an all-but inextricable
commixture of primitive nature-myths and folk-tales brought by
the Milesian and pre-Milesian immigrants from the Aryan cradle in
the East, together with a certain addition of confused history relat-
ing to the earliest adventures of the new-come races upon Irish
ground. But such as this traditional cycle was, it provided the
background for the much later second cycle, of which we have
already spoken, and which bears the Red Branch aloft as a sign. In
sight of the Red Branch, the darker part of the journey is over; and
the mists of mythology only form the veil shutting out all but the
mere human foreground.
We have spoken so far of two cycles-the Mythological, whose
chronology is a matter for further criticism to decide; the Heroic,
or Red Branch, which we place at the beginning of the Christian
era.
## p. 3407 (#381) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3407
Now we come to a third cycle: the "Fenian," named after Finn
Mac Cool, according to most Irish writers; the "Ossianic," named
after Ossian, Finn's famous son, according to most Scotch. We need
only speak of it here of course on its purely Irish side and from
the Fenian aspect, as the reader will find it fully dealt with under
its Ossianic aspect elsewhere. The heroes of this cycle, if we accept
their historical existence in Ireland, lived from the second to the
fourth centuries of the Christian era. Art, his grandson Cormac,
and Cormac's son, Cairbre; Cool, his son Finn, and King Goll: these,
with Owen Mor and many another, fill the Fenian romances with
their fierce and picturesque pursuit of destiny and death. They only
await the hand of that predestined shaper into final and positive and
modernly intelligible form of the confused romances which treat of
their doings, to add a new epic to the larger literature which has the
Old World for its text and the New World for its interpreter.
These three great cycles of Irish romance by no means exhaust
the wealth of story, still lurking perdu in old MSS. or in rare and
rarely read works. Some of these additional tales have already
reached American readers under modern retellings or poetic inter-
pretations; such as, e. g. , 'The Voyage of Maeldune,' retold mem-
orably, and differently enough, in flowing hexametrical periods by
Tennyson:-
-
"And we came to the Isle of Shouting; we landed; a score of wild birds
Cried from the topmost summit with human voices and words;
Once in an hour they cried, and whenever their voices pealed,
The steer fell down at the plow and the harvest died from the field,
And the men dropt dead in the valleys, and half of the cattle went lame,
And the roof sank in on the hearth, and the dwelling broke into flame;
And the shouting of these wild birds ran into the hearts of my crew,
Till they shouted along with the shouting, and seized one another and slew;
But I drew them the one from the other; I saw that we could not stay,
And we left the dead to the birds, and we sailed with our wounded away. "
Tennyson took his version from Joyce's Early Celtic Romances. '
In this volume we have, among other legendary romances, five or
six of the most wonderful or moving tales in Celtic or any other
literature. Three of these are- -The Three Sorrowful Tales of Erin,'
comprising The Fate of the Children of Usna' (or 'Deirdrê'); (The
Fate of the Children of Lir'; and The Fate of the Children of
Tuirenn. ' The names of the three others are The Voyage of Mael-
dun' (the oldest copy of which is dated 1100), The Pursuit of
Dermot and Grania,' and 'Ossian in the Land of Youth. Of these
perhaps the story of 'Deirdrê' is the best known, and American
readers may be referred to the fine epical version by Dr. Robert D.
## p. 3408 (#382) ###########################################
3408
CELTIC LITERATURE
Joyce (Deirdrê'), published some years ago by Roberts Brothers
of Boston. Two brief examples of the short episodical narratives
which make up the marvelous 'Voyage of Maeldun' may be cited
here,- The Miller of Hell' and 'Signs of Home,' the latter giving
the return of the Celtic Ulysses and his companions.
THE MILLER OF HELL
HE next island they came to, which was not far off from the
had a large mill on it; and near the door stood the
miller, a huge-bodied, strong, burly man. They saw num-
berless crowds of men and horses laden with corn coming
towards the mill; and when their corn was ground they went
away towards the west. Great herds of all kinds of cattle cov-
ered the plain as far as the eye could reach, and among them
many wagons, laden with every kind of wealth that is produced
on the ridge of the world. All these the miller put into the
mouth of his mill to be ground; and all as they came forth went
westward.
Maeldun and his people now spoke to the miller, and asked
him the name of the mill, and the meaning of all they had seen
on the island. And he, turning quickly towards them, replied in
a few words: -
"This mill is called the Mill of Inver-tre-Kenand, and I am
the Miller of Hell. All the corn and all the riches of the world
that men are dissatisfied with, or which they complain of in any
way, are sent here to be ground; and also every precious article
and every kind of wealth which men try to conceal from God.
All these I grind in the Mill of Inver-tre-Kenand and send them
away afterwards to the west. "
He spoke no more, but turned round and busied himself
again with his mill. And the voyagers, with much wonder and
awe in their hearts, went to their curragh and sailed away.
SIGNS OF HOME
S⁰⁰
OON after they saw a beautiful verdant island, with herds of
oxen, cows, and sheep browsing all over its hills and val-
leys; but no houses nor inhabitants to be seen.
And they
rested some time on this island and ate the flesh of the cows
and sheep.
## p. 3409 (#383) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3409
One day while they were standing on a hill a large falcon
flew by; and two of the crew, who happened to look closely at
him, cried out in the hearing of Maeldun:-
"See that falcon! he is surely like the falcons of Erin! "
"Watch him closely," cried Maeldun, “and observe exactly in
what direction he is flying. "
And they saw that he flew to the southeast, without turning
or wavering.
They went on board at once; and having unmoored, they
sailed to the southeast after the falcon. After rowing the whole
day, they sighted land in the dusk of the evening, which seemed
to them like the land of Erin.
――
ence.
Of all the books of the kind published since Macpherson's 'Ossian,'
Lady Charlotte Guest's 'Mabinogion,' and Villemarqué's Barzaz-
Breiz,' this collection of Dr. Joyce's has had the most marked influ-
It consists of eleven tales, and was the first readable collection
of the old Gaelic prose romances published in English. So far as
the general public is concerned, Dr. Joyce's method is unquestion-
ably the best. "A translation," he says, "may either follow the very
words, or reproduce the life and spirit, of the original; but no trans-
lation can do both. If you render word for word, you lose the spirit;
if you wish to give the spirit and manner, you must depart from the
exact words and frame your own phrases. I have chosen this latter
course. My translation follows the original closely enough in nar-
rative and incident; but so far as mere phraseology is concerned, I
have used the English language freely, not allowing myself to be
trammeled by too close an adherence to the very words of the text.
The originals are in general simple in style; and I have done my
best to render them into simple, homely, plain English. In short,
I have tried to tell the stories as I conceive the old Shenachies them-
selves would have told them if they had used English instead of
Gaelic. »
Another characteristic and admirably edited translation of one of
these miscellaneous stories that lie outside the three cycles of Irish
romance is 'The Vision of Mac Cougleime,' which we owe to Dr.
Kuno Meyer (London: Nutt).
Among the legendary Celtic romances is the short but beautiful
and characteristic account of Ossian's expedition to the Isle of the
Blest or the Land of Youth, and his subsequent return as an old and
decrepit man-in a word, the Celtic Rip Van Winkle. This legend
not only underlies all the spiritual romances of Celtic Ireland and
Scotland, but has profoundly appealed to the imagination of the
VI-214
## p. 3410 (#384) ###########################################
3410
CELTIC LITERATURE
whole complex English race of to-day, whether under the badge of
the rose, the thistle, the shamrock, or the leek, whether under the
banner of the United Kingdom or that of the Stars and Stripes.
OISIN IN TIRNANOGE;
-
OR
THE LAST OF THE FENI
[According to an ancient legend, Finn's son Oisin, the hero poet, survived
to the time of St. Patrick, two hundred years (the legend makes it three hun-
dred) after the other Feni. On a certain occasion, when the saint asked him
how he had lived to such a great age, the old hero related his story, of
which the following is the close. ]
I
LIVED in the Land of Youth more than three hundred years;
but it appeared to me that only three years had passed
since the day I parted from my friends. At the end of that
time I began to have a longing desire to see my father Finn
and all my old companions, and I asked leave of Niam and of
the king to visit Erin. The king gave permission, and Niam
said:-
"I will give consent, though I feel sorrow in my heart, for
I fear much you will never return to me. "
I replied that I would surely return, and that she need not
feel any doubt or dread, for that the white steed knew the way,
and would bring me back in safety. Then she addressed me in
these words, which seemed very strange to me:
"I will not refuse this request, though your journey afflicts.
me with great grief and fear. Erin is not now as it was when
you left it.
The great king Finn and his Feni are all gone;
and you will find, instead of them, a holy father and hosts of
priests and saints. Now, think well on what I say to you, and
keep my words in your mind. If once you alight from the
back to me. Again I warn
white steed, you will never come
you, if you place your feet on the green sod in Erin, you will
never return to this lovely land. A third time, O Oisin, my
beloved husband, a third time I say to you, if you alight from
the white steed you will never see me again. ”
I promised that I would faithfully attend to her words, and
that I would not alight from the white steed. Then as I looked
into her gentle face and marked her grief, my heart was
## p. 3411 (#385) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3411
――――――
weighed down with sadness, and my tears flowed plentifully;
but even so, my mind was bent on coming back to Erin.
When I had mounted the white steed, he galloped straight
toward the shore. We moved as swiftly as before over the clear
sea. The wind overtook the waves and we overtook the wind,
so that we straightway left the Land of Youth behind; and we
passed by many islands and cities till at length we landed on
the green shores of Erin.
As I traveled on through the country, I looked closely around
me; but I scarcely knew the old places, for everything seemed
strangely altered. I saw no sign of Finn and his host, and I
began to dread that Niam's saying was coming true. At length
I espied at a distance a company of little men and women,* all
mounted on horses as small as themselves; and when I came
near, they greeted me kindly and courteously. They looked at
me with wonder and curiosity, and they marveled much at my
great size and at the beauty and majesty of my person.
I asked them about Finn and the Feni; whether they were
still living, or if any sudden disaster had swept them away.
And one replied:-
"We have heard of the hero Finn, who ruled the Feni of
Erin in times of old, and who never had an equal for bravery
and wisdom. The poets of the Gaels have written many books
concerning his deeds and the deeds of the Feni, which we can-
not now relate; but they are all gone long since, for they lived
many ages ago. We have heard also, and we have seen it
written in very old books, that Finn had a son named Oisin.
Now this Oisin went with a young fairy maiden to Tirnanoge,
and his father and his friends sorrowed greatly after him and
sought him long; but he was never seen again. "
When I heard all this I was filled with amazement, and my
heart grew heavy with great sorrow. I silently turned my steed
away from the wondering people, and set forward straightway
for Allen of the mighty deeds, on the broad green plains of
Leinster. It was a miserable journey to me; and though my
mind, being full of sadness at all I saw and heard, forecasted
further sorrows, I was grieved more than ever when I reached
Allen. For there indeed I found the hill deserted and lonely,
and my father's palace all in ruins and overgrown with grass
and weeds.
The gigantic race of the Feni had all passed away, and Erin was now
inhabited by people who looked very small in Oisin's eyes.
## p. 3412 (#386) ###########################################
3412
CELTIC LITERATURE
I turned slowly away, and afterwards fared through the land
in every direction in search of my friends. But I met only
crowds of little people, all strangers, who gazed on me with
wonder; and none knew me. I visited every place throughout
the country where I knew the Feni had lived; but I found their
houses all like Allen, solitary and in ruins.
At length I came to Glenasmole,* where many a time I had
hunted in days of old with the Feni, and there I saw a crowd
of people in the glen. As soon as they saw me, one of them
came forward and said:
-
"Come to us, thou mighty hero, and help us out of our strait;
for thou art a man of vast strength. "
I went to them, and found a number of men trying in vain
to raise a large flat stone. It was half lifted from the ground;
but those who were under it were not strong enough either to
raise it further or to free themselves from its weight. And they
were in great distress, and on the point of being crushed to
death.
I thought it a shameful thing that so many men should be
unable to lift this stone, which Oscar, if he were alive, would
take in his right hand and fling over the heads of the feeble
crowd. After I had looked a little while, I stooped forward and
seized the flag with one hand; and putting forth my strength, I
flung it seven perches from its place, and relieved the little men.
But with the great strain the golden saddle-girth broke, and
bounding forward to keep myself from falling, I suddenly came
to the ground on my two feet.
The moment the white steed felt himself free, he shook him-
self and neighed. Then, starting off with the speed of a cloud-
shadow on a March day, he left me standing helpless and sor-
rowful. Instantly a woeful change came over me: the sight of
my eyes began to fade, the ruddy beauty of my face fled, I lost
all my strength, and I fell to the earth, a poor withered old
man, blind and wrinkled and feeble.
The white steed was never seen again. I never recovered
my sight, my youth, or my strength; and I have lived in this
manner, sorrowing without ceasing for my gentle golden-haired
wife Niam, and thinking ever of my father Finn, and of the
lost companions of my youth.
* Glenasmole, a fine valley about seven miles south of Dublin, through
which the river Dodder flows.
## p. 3413 (#387) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3413
Between these romances and the first definite Christian writings
the numerous Ossianic colloquies and narrative poems, and the Irish
Annals, form the connecting links. The Ossianic poetry, even where
it is specially Irish in character, we have elected to leave aside for
the present, for reasons already given; but it must be remembered
that they form a very important section in themselves, and amount
in Irish alone to some fifty thousand lines, even on a fairly moderate
computation.
Turning to the Annals, we are confronted at once by that extraor
dinary repository of Irish lore, history, and legend known as 'The
Annals of the Four Masters. ' This remarkable testament of the
Irish genius was due primarily to the zeal and energy of Michael
O'Clery, born at Donegal about 1580-the last of a long line of
scholars. Having become a Franciscan, in his conventual calling
he was living far away from his native soil, at St. Anthony's monas-
tery in Louvain. But there he had another Donegal man, Edh the
son of Bháird (Ward), for fellow worker; and the two together
formed the idea of collecting and putting into permanent form the
valuable MS. flotsam of old Irish literature which in earlier days,
wandering in their own land, they had found drifting insecurely
hither and thither. The plan they proposed was for O'Clery to get
leave of absence and return to Ireland, there to roam up and down
the land, collecting and copying every valuable MS. he could lay
hands on; then transmitting the copy to his co-worker in Louvain.
Ædh son of Ward died too soon to carry out fully his part of the
undertaking: but another Irish Franciscan, Father Colgan, took up
the task; and it was he who gave the book its present title, The
Annals of the Four Masters,' calling it after the four men who chiefly
collaborated in the work, viz. , Michael O'Clery, Farfassa O'Mulconry,
Peregrine O'Clery, and Peregrine O'Duigenan. The Annals, thus
laboriously brought to a triumphant close, carry history back to the
Deluge, and down to the years contemporary with their compilers
and authors, and the early part of the seventeenth century. "There
is no event of Irish history," says Dr. Hyde, "from the birth of Christ
to the beginning of the seventeenth century, that the first inquiry of
the student will not be-What do the Four Masters say about it ? >
The Annals indeed present in their curiously epitomized and synchro-
nized pages the concentrated essence of thousands of the confused
MSS. which the Four Masters collated, sifted, and interpreted with
consummate art and intelligence. They wrote, we may add, in an
archaic, almost cryptic style, full of bardic euphemisms and other
difficulties; so that it is fortunate even for Celtic scholars that
O'Donovan's seven great volumes, in his quarto edition, present the
text with an accompanying English translation.
## p. 3414 (#388) ###########################################
3414
CELTIC LITERATURE
The more one compares the great work of the Four Masters with
other succeeding works of the same historical order, the more one
sees how great was the effect upon Irish literature of the growth of
Christian influence. St. Patrick's are the world-wide name and fame
which most clearly mark the early Christian history of Ireland, when
the new divine creed entered into the land and confronted the Celtic
paganism. Many are the exquisite legends of St. Patrick, often so
naïvely and so tenderly told; with glimmerings here and there
already of the humor which we connect so much with the Irish
temper of mind, and which received probably its greatest stimulus
when an Irishman of earlier times wished, in all courtesy, to rec-
oncile his old fighting instincts with the Christian gentleness and
self-sacrifice. This as it may be, the hagiology of the mediæval
Irishman is in delightful contrast to the tales of battle and foray in
the three great cycles of early romance. As for St. Patrick, the
legendary and apocryphal literature that centres about him amounts
in verse and prose to an immense bulk. Much of this matter has of
course very small historical value; but it may be conceded that
Patrick's traditional rôle as a law-maker and reviser, in connection
with the revision of the Brehon Law, deserves serious attention.
Similarly, though we do not accept more than a small part of
the poems attributed to him as really his, there is enough to show
him a poet, as well as a great teacher and preacher and lawgiver.
What is most to the purpose, perhaps, is that he made his life a
poem; so that the mediæval scribes can hardly speak of him without
adorning and beautifying the tale they have to tell. Less known but
hardly less interesting is St. Columcill, whom Dr. Hyde claims "to
have been, both in his failings and his virtues, the most typical of
Irishmen; at once sentimental and impulsive, an eminent type of the
race he came from. " Dr. Hyde goes on to relate, in illustration of
this, the tale of the heron in Iona:-
:- When he saw the bird flying
across the water from the direction of Ireland, and alighting half
frozen with cold and faint with flight upon the rocky coast there, he
sent out one of his monks to go round the island and warm and
cherish and feed the bird; 'because,' said he weeping, 'it has come
from the land I shall never see on earth again!
" Surely one of
the most touching sentences ever uttered in all the long series of
the lament of the Celt in exile!
The Lives of the Saints form altogether a most important and
characteristic section of Irish literature. Even when composed in
Latin, they remain so saturated with Celtic feeling and coloring that
they may fairly be counted among Irish books. Dr. Hyde names
several Latin lives of St. Patrick alone, ascribed to St. Benignus, St.
Ultan, St. Eleran, and others of his later followers. Of St. Columcill
## p. 3415 (#389) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3415
(St. Columba), one of the fullest, written in Irish in the sixteenth
century, was compiled at Lifford under the direction of Manus
O'Donnell, Prince of Tirconnell; though Adamnan's Latin life of the
Saint is the most important book on the subject, written as it was
only a hundred years after the death of Columba, and by one who
was his spiritual successor as Abbot of Iona.
The Danish invasion of Ireland, lasting from the ninth to the
eleventh centuries, draws a red line across the history of its litera-
ture. During that troubled period many of the most priceless of its
MSS. were destroyed, and violent disruptions threatened every phase
of learning. However, the old impulse of the sixth century still
lived; and we find in the tenth, Cormac, Bishop of Cashel, first
among a redoubtable band of men of letters and men of affairs who
strove successfully to maintain the Irish spirit. Cormac's 'Glossary'
is the oldest book of its kind, and invaluable as a monument; and
the reputed poems of Gorm'ly, his betrothed bride, whom he never
married, and whose tale is a sad and strange one, form in their
different ways an extremely characteristic expression of the Irish
literature of the time.
During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the older Irish romances
multiplied themselves and begat new ones in the most astonishing
way. The Book of Leinster' mentions one hundred and eighty-one
tales, duly classified: Love-tales, Battle-tales, Tales of Travel, Forays,
Feasts, Visions, Tragedies, etc. What we have called the doctors
of literature devoted themselves henceforth more to prose than to
poetry, and poetry fell more and more into the hands of those who
wrote not for the elect but for the people.
There was no new development of Irish poetry, such as there was
of Welsh poetry in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The
bardic schools, which did so much for Irish poetry from the sixth
century to the seventeenth, insisted upon its conventions to a degree
that was excessive. Geoffrey Keating, who carried on his great work
at the same time as the Four Masters, in the first half of the seven-
teenth century, and who was a poet as well as a historian, still
used the bardic prosody, and wrote some delightful poems by its
rules; but he lent his influence to aid the new liberty in prose and
verse that Irish literature was learning. Keating's name is of first-
rate importance in its record, for this very reason. He was the first
really to conceive of Irish literature as a literature for the people,
and not only for the elect. He was the first to do this; and partly
because he did it, he was the last great landmark in the larger
Gaelic literature of Ireland. His History of Ireland,' the result
of an enforced retirement from preaching, was, says Dr. Hyde,
"the most popular book ever written in Irish. ” He marks too the
## p. 3416 (#390) ###########################################
3416
CELTIC LITERATURE
transition, as we pointed out, from the old bardic tradition in Irish
poetry. After his coming the bards threw away their superfluous
prosody and wrote for the people, and became poets indeed, instead
of the most ingenious of schoolmen. The result was the remarkable
body of Irish poetry which belongs to the last three centuries, and
which contains many of the characteristics of folk-song and culture
poetry, in a most tuneful and idiosyncratic fashion quite its own.
Let us listen again to Dr. Hyde on this point:-
"What the popular ballads of the folk had been like prior to the seven-
teenth century we have no means of knowing. No scribe would demean his
learned pen by committing them to paper; but from that date down to the
beginning of the present century the bards the great houses being fallen —
turned instinctively to the general public, and threw behind them the metres
that required so many years of study in the schools, and dropped at a stroke
several thousand words which no one understood except the great chiefs or
those trained by the poets, while they broke out into beautiful but at the
same time intelligible verse, which no one who has once heard and learned is
likely to forget. This is to my mind the real glory of the modern Irish
nation; this is the sweetest creation of Gaelic literature; this is the truest note
of the enchanting Irish siren, and he who has once heard it and remains
deaf to its charm has neither heart for song nor soul for music. The Gaelic
poetry of the last two centuries is the most sensuous attempt to convey music
in words ever made by man. It is absolutely impossible to convey the
lusciousness of sound, richness of rhythm, and perfection of harmony in
another language. "
Discounting what we will in the natural enthusiasm of one who
has devoted himself heart and soul to the cause of the Gaelic
tongue and of Irish literature, quite enough remains to carry the
contention for the continuing interest of native Irish poetry after so
many centuries. That such a poetry and such a language should
suddenly decay after so noble and enriched a record in the past, is
nothing short of a tragedy in the history of tongues.
Dr. Hyde's own collection of the 'Love Songs of Connacht' is the
best example that American readers could possibly have of this
Irish poetry, the late flowering of so venerable and noble a tree.
And with this work, and some of the collections of the folk-tales
still current in Erse-speaking Ireland, made by Dr. Hyde, Mr. Jere-
miah Curtin, and Mr. Larminie, and Englished for us, we must bring
this brief outline of the Irish contribution to Celtic literature to a
close. Its modern interpretation is only now beginning to take its
due place, let us remember, both at the hands of its scholars and on
the lips of its poets. And if any reader should think the scholars
still, after all we have said, too difficult to follow, let us recommend
them to turn to the poems and tales of Mr. W. B. Yeats and to the
## p. 3417 (#391) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3417
romantic pages of Mr. Standish O'Grady, the latest exponents in our
more modern tongue of that imagination, and that subtlety and
energy of thought, which are characteristically Irish.
Of the three great cycles of Gaelic literature, the third is the (so-
called) Ossianic. Of this cycle Finn (Fionn, Fingal) is the central
hero. The second great cycle is that which treats of the heroes of
the Ultonians, i. e. , the Red Branch of Ulster; among this cycle
Cuculain (Cuchullin, Cohoolin, Coolin) is the supreme type. No liv
ing writer has so well reconstructed the past for us as Mr. Standish
O'Grady has done, and nowhere is he so successful as in his vivid
and beautiful historical romance, of which Cuculain is the hero. Of
the famous "battle-prop of the valor and torch of the chivalry of the
Ultonians » Mr. O'Grady has given us an account which deserves to
pass into the fixed literature of our race. Apart from its vividness,
charm, and power, The Coming of Cuculain' affords a general idea
of the first great heroic cycle (its predecessor dealing entirely
with mythical or mythopoeic beings), and of primitive heroic life as
reflected in that literature. The excerpts selected are (1) the opening
of the romance, and (2) from the chapter telling how Cuculain won
his knighthood.
FROM THE COMING OF CUCULAIN>
I
TH
HE Red Branch feasted one night in their great hall at
Emain Macha. So vast was the hall that a man such as
men are now, standing in the centre and shouting his
loudest, would not be heard at the circumference; yet the low
laughter of the King sitting at one end was clearly audible to
those who sat around the Champion at the other. The sons of
Dithorba made it, giants of the elder time, laboring there under
the shoutings of Macha and the roar of her sounding thongs.
Its length was a mile and nine furlongs and a cubit. With her
brooch-pin she plowed its outline upon the plain, and its
breadth was not much less. Trees such as earth nourished then
upheld the mossy roof beneath which feasted that heroic brood,
the great-hearted children of Rury, huge offsprings of the gods
and giants of the dawn of time. For mighty exceedingly were.
these men. At the noise of their running to battle all Ireland
shook, and the illimitable Lir trembled in his watery halls; the
roar of their brazen chariots reverberated from the solid canopy
of heaven, and their war-steeds drank rivers dry.
## p. 3418 (#392) ###########################################
3418
CELTIC LITERATURE
A vast murmur rose from the assembly, for like distant
thunder or the far-off murmuring of agitated waters was the con-
tinuous hum of their blended conversation and laughter, while
ever and anon, cleaving the many-tongued confusion, uprose
friendly voices, clearer and stronger than battle trumpets, when
one hero challenged another to drink, wishing him victory and
success, and his words rang round the hollow dome. Innumer-
able candles, tall as spears, illuminated the scene. The eyes of
the heroes sparkled, and their faces, white and ruddy, beamed
with festal mirth and mutual affection. Their yellow hair shone.
Their banqueting attire, white and scarlet, glowed against the
outer gloom. Their round brooches and mantle-pins of gold or
silver or golden bronze, their drinking vessels and instruments
of festivity, flashed and glittered in the light. They rejoiced in
their glory and their might and in the inviolable amity in
which they were knit together; a host of comrades, a knot of
heroic valor and affection, which no strength or cunning, and
no power seen or unseen, could ever release or untie.
At one extremity of the vast hall, upon a raised seat, sat
their young king, Concobar Mac Nessa, slender, handsome, and
upright. A canopy of bronze, round as the bent sling of the
Sun-god, the long-handed, far-shooting son of Ethlend, encircled
his head. At his right hand lay a staff of silver. Far away at
the other end of the hall, on a raised seat, sat the Champion,
Fergus Mac Roy, like a colossus. The stars and clouds of night
were round his head and shoulders, seen through the wide and
high entrance of the Dûn, whose doors no man has ever seen
closed and barred. Aloft, suspended from the dim rafters, hung
the naked forms of great men clear against the dark dome,
having the cords of their slaughter around their necks and their
white limbs splashed with blood. Kings were they, who had
murmured against the sovereignty of the Red Branch. Through
the wide doorway out of the night flew a huge bird, black and
gray, unseen; and soaring upwards sat upon the rafters, its eyes
like burning fire. It was the Mór Reega, or Great Queen, the
far-striding, terrible daughter of Iarnmas (Iron-Death). Her
voice was like the shouting of ten thousand men. Dear to her
were these heroes. More she rejoiced in them feasting than in
the battle prowess of the rest.
When supper was ended, their bard, in his singing-robes and
girt around the temples with a golden fillet, stood up and sang.
## p. 3419 (#393) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3419
He sang how once a king of the Ultonians, having plunged into
the sea-depths, there slew a monster which had wrought much
havoc amongst fishers and seafaring men. The heroes attended
to his song, leaning forward with bright eyes. They applauded
the song and the singer, and praised the valor of the heroic
man who had done the deed. Then the Champion struck the
table with his clenched hands and addressed the assembly.
Wrath and sorrow were in his voice. It resembled the brool
of lions, heard afar by seafaring men upon some savage shore
on a still night.
"Famous deeds," he said, "are not wrought now among the
Red Branch. I think we are all become women. I grow weary
of these huntings in the morning and mimic exercises of war,
and this training of steeds and careering of brazen chariots
stained never with aught but dust and mire, and these unearned
feastings at night and vain applause of the brave deeds of our
forefathers. Come now, let us make an end of this.
Let us
conquer Banba (Ireland) wholly in all her green borders, and let
the realms of Lir, which sustain no foot of man, be the limit of
her sovereignty. Let us gather the tributes of all Ireland, after
many battles and much warlike toil. Then more sweetly shall
we drink, while the bards chant our prowess. Once I knew a
coward who boasted endlessly about his forefathers, and at last
my anger rose, and with a flat hand I slew him in the middle
of his speech, and paid no eric, for he was nothing. We have
the blood of heroes in our veins, and we sit here nightly boast-
ing about them: about Rury, whose name we bear; and Macha
the warrioress, who brought hither bound the sons of Dithorba
and made them rear this mighty Dûn; and Kimbaoth son of
Fiontann; and my namesake Fergus, whose crooked mouth was
no dishonor, and the rest of our hero sires; and we consume the
rents and tributes of Ulster which they by their prowess con-
quered to us, and which flow hither in abundance from every
corner of the province. Valiant men too will one day come
hither and slay us as I slew that boaster, and here in Emain
Macha their bards will praise them. Then in the halls of our
dead shall we say to our sires, 'All that you got for us by your
blood and your sweat, that we have lost, and the glory of the
Red Branch is at an end. '»
That speech was pleasing to the Red
out that Fergus Mac Roy had spoken well.
Branch, and they cried
Then all at once, on
## p. 3420 (#394) ###########################################
3420
CELTIC LITERATURE
a sudden impulse, they sang the battle song of the Ultonians,
and shouted for the war so that the building quaked and rocked,
and in the hall of the weapons there was a clangor of falling
shields, and men died that night for extreme dread, so mightily
shouted the Ultonians around their king and around Fergus.
II
On the morrow there was a great hasting of the Red Branch
on the plain of the assemblies. It was May-day morning and
the sun shone brightly, but at first through radiant showers.
The trees were putting forth young buds; the wet grass sparkled.
All the martial pomp and glory of the Ultonians were exhibited
that day. Their chariots and war-horses ringed the plain. All
the horses' heads were turned towards the centre where were
Concobar Mac Nessa and the chiefs of the Red Branch. The
plain flashed with gold, bronze, and steel, and glowed with the
bright mantles of the innumerable heroes, crimson and scarlet,
blue, green, or purple. The huge brooches on their breasts, of
gold and silver or gold-like bronze, were like resplendent wheels.
Their long hair, yellow for the most part, was bound with orna-
ments of gold. Great truly were those men; their like has not
come since upon the earth. They were the heroes and demigods
of the heroic age of Erin, champions who feared naught beneath
the sun; mightiest among the mighty, huge, proud, and uncon-
querable, and loyal and affectionate beyond all others; all of the
blood of Ir, son of Milesius, the Clanna Rury of great renown,
rejoicing in their valor, their splendor, their peerless king.
Concobar had no crown. A plain circle of beaten gold girt his
broad temples. In the naked glory of his regal manhood he
stood there before them all, but even so a stranger would have
swiftly discovered the captain of the Red Branch; such was his
stature, his bearing, such his slow-turning, steady-gazing eyes
and the majesty of his bearded countenance. His countenance
was long, broad above and narrow below, his nose eminent, his
beard bipartite, curling and auburn in hue, his form without any
blemish or imperfection.
"Let the tameless horses of Macha be harnessed to the
chariot," cried Concobar, "and let Læg, son of the King of
Gabra, drive them hither, for those are the horses and that the
chariot which shall be given this day to Cuculain. "
## p. 3421 (#395) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3421
Then, son of Sualtam, how in thy guileless breast thy heart
leaped when thou heardest the thundering of the great war-car
and the wild neighing of the immortal steeds, as they broke
from the dark stable into the clear-shining light of day, and
heard behind them the ancient roaring of the brazen wheels, as
in the days when they bore forth Macha and her martial groom
against the giants of old, and mightily established in Eiria the
Red Branch of the Ultonians! Soon they rushed to view from
the rear of Emain, speeding forth impetuously out of the hollow-
sounding ways of the city and the echoing palaces into the
open, and behind them in the great car green and gold, above
the many-twinkling wheels, the charioteer, with floating mantle,
girt round the temples with the gold fillet of his office, leaning
backwards and sideways as he labored to restrain their fury
unrestrainable: a gray long-maned steed, whale-bellied, broad-
chested, with mane like flying foam, under one silver yoke, and
a black lustrous tufty-maned steed under the other; such steeds.
as in power, size, and beauty the earth never produced before
and never will produce again.
Like a hawk swooping along the face of a cliff when the
wind is high; or like the rush of March wind over the smooth
plain; or like the fleetness of the stag roused from his lair by
the hounds and covering his first field, was the rush of those
steeds when they had broken through the restraint of the chari-
oteer, as though they galloped over fiery flags; so that the earth
shook and trembled with the velocity of their motion, and all
the time the great car brayed and shrieked as the wheels of
solid and glittering bronze went round, and strange cries and
exclamations were heard, for they were demons that had their
abode in that car.
The charioteer restrained the steeds before the assembly, but
nay-the-less a deep purr like the purr of a tiger proceeded
from the axle. Then the whole assembly lifted up their voices
and shouted for Cuculain, and he himself, Cuculain the son of
Sualtam, sprang into his chariot all armed, with a cry as of a
warrior springing into his chariot in the battle, and he stood
erect and brandished his spears, and the war sprites of the Gael
shouted along with him; for the Bocanahs and Bananahs and the
Geniti Gluidi, the wild people of the glens, and the demons of
the air, roared around him, when first the great warrior of the
Gael, his battle-arms in his hands, stood equipped for war in his
## p. 3422 (#396) ###########################################
3422
CELTIC LITERATURE
chariot before all the warriors of his tribe, the kings of the
Clanna Rury and the people of the Emain Macha. Then too
there sounded from the Tec Brac the boom of shields and the
clashing of swords and the cries and shouting of the Tuatha Dée
Danann, who dwelt there perpetually; and Lu the long-handed,
the slayer of Balor, the destroyer of the Fornoroh, the immortal,
the invisible, the maker and the decorator of the firmament, whose
hound was the sun, and whose son the viewless wind, thundered
from heaven and bent his sling five-hued against the clouds;
and the son of the illimitable Lir in his mantle blue and green,
foam-fringed, passed through the assembly with a roar of far-off
innumerable waters, and the Mór Reega stood in the midst with
a foot on either side of the plain, and shouted with the shout of
a host, so that the Ultonians fell down like reaped grass with
their faces to the earth, on account of the presence of the Mór
Reega and on account of the omens and great signs.
The following poems from the ancient Erse are taken from the
'Lyra Celtica: an Anthology of Representative Celtic Poetry,' edited
by Elizabeth A. Sharp.
THE MYSTERY OF AMERGIN
AM the wind which breathes upon the sea,
I
I am the wave of the ocean,
I am the murmur of the billows,
I am the ox of the seven combats,
I am the vulture upon the rocks,
I am a beam of the sun,
I am the fairest of plants,
I am a wild boar in valor,
I am a salmon in the water,
I am a lake in the plain,
I am a word of science,
I am the point of the lance of battle,
I am the God who creates in the head [i. e. , of
man] the fire [i. e. , the thought].
Who is it who throws light into the meeting on the mountain
[if not I]?
Who announces the ages of the moon [if not I]?
Who teaches the place where couches the sun [if not I]?
## p. 3423 (#397) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3423
THE SONG OF FIONN
AY-DAY, delightful time! How beautiful the color!
M
The blackbirds sing their full lay. Would that Læg were
here!
The cuckoos sing in constant strains. How welcome is the noble
Brilliance of the seasons ever! On the margin of the branching
woods
The summer swallows skim the stream: the swift horses seek the
pool;
The heather spreads out her long hair; the weak fair bow-down
grows.
Sudden consternation attacks the signs; the planets, in their courses
running, exert an influence:
The sea is lulled to rest, flowers cover the earth.
VISION OF A FAIR WOMAN
TEL
ELL us some of the charms of the stars:
Close and well set were her ivory teeth;
White as the canna upon the moor
Was her bosom the tartan bright beneath.
Her well-rounded forehead shone
Soft and fair as the mountain snow;
Her two breasts were heaving full;
To them did the hearts of heroes flow.
Her lips were ruddier than the rose;
Tender and tunefully sweet her tongue;
White as the foam adown her side
Her delicate fingers extended hung.
Smooth as the dusky down of the elk
Appeared her shady eyebrows to me;
Lovely her cheeks were, like berries red;
From every guile she was wholly free.
Her countenance looked like the gentle buds
Unfolding their beauty in early spring;
Her yellow locks like the gold-browed hills;
And her eyes like the radiance the sunbeams bring.
## p. 3424 (#398) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3424
In contemporary Celtic poetry no one surpasses Mr. W. B. Yeats,
particularly in the re-creation of that wonderful past with whose
atmosphere his whole work is charged. As an example of Mr. Yeats's
narrative method with legendary themes we may quote some lines
from his beautiful 'The Wanderings of Oisin' (Ossian):—
F
LED foam underneath us, and round us a wandering and milky
smoke,
High as the saddle-girth, covering away from our glances the tide;
And those that fled, and that followed, from the foam-pale distance
broke;
The immortal desire of immortals we saw in their faces, and sighed.
I mused on the chase with the Fenians, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair,
And never a song sang Neave, and over my finger-tips
Came now the sliding of tears and sweeping of mist-cold hair,
And now the warmth of sighs, and after the quiver of lips.
Were we days long or hours long in riding, when, rolled in a grisly
peace,
An isle lay level before us, with dripping hazel and oak?
And we stood on a sea's edge we saw not; for whiter than new-
washed fleece
Fled foam underneath us, and round us a wandering and milky smoke.
And we rode on the plains of the sea's edge-the sea's edge barren
and gray,
Gray sands on the green of the grasses and over the dripping trees,
Dripping and doubling landward, as though they would hasten away
Like an army of old men longing for rest from the moan of the seas.
But the trees grew taller and closer, immense in their wrinkling bark;
Dropping-a murmurous dropping-old silence and that one sound;
For no live creatures lived there, no weasels moved in the dark-
Long sighs arose in our spirits, beneath us bubbled the ground.
And the ears of the horse went sinking away in the hollow night;
For as drift from a sailor slow drowning the gleams of the world
and the sun,
Ceased on our hands and our faces, on hazel and oak leaf, the light,
And the stars were blotted above us, and the whole of the world
was one.
## p. 3425 (#399) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3425
Finally, here is one of Mr. Yeats's "old songs re-sung":
THE MADNESS OF KING GOLL
SAT on cushioned otter skin:
I
My word was law from Ith to Emen,
And shook at Invar Amargin
The hearts of the world-troubling seamen,
And drove tumult and war away
From girl and boy and man and beast;
The fields grew fatter day by day,
The wild fowl of the air increased;
And every ancient Ollave said,
While he bent down his faded head,-
"He drives away the Northern cold. "
They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech-leaves old.
I sat and mused and drank sweet wine;
A herdsman came from inland valleys,
Crying, the pirates drove his swine.
To fill their dark-beaked hollow galleys.
I called my battle-breaking men
And my loud brazen battle-cars
From rolling vale and rivery glen,
And under the blinking of the stars
Fell on the pirates of the deep,
And hurled them in the gulph of sleep:
These hands won many a torque of gold.
They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech-leaves old.
But slowly, as I shouting slew
And trampled in the bubbling mire,
In my most secret spirit grew
A whirling and a wandering fire:
I stood: keen stars above me shone,
Around me shone keen eyes of men:
And with loud singing I rushed on
Over the heath and spungy fen,
And broke between my hands the staff
Of my long spear with song and laugh,
That down the echoing valleys rolled.
They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech-leaves old.
And now I wander in the woods
When summer gluts the golden bees,
VI-215
## p. 3426 (#400) ###########################################
3426
CELTIC LITERATURE
Or in autumnal solitudes
Arise the leopard-colored trees;
Or when along the wintry strands
The cormorants shiver on their rocks;
I wander on, and wave my hands,
And sing, and shake my heavy locks.
The gray wolf knows me; by one ear
I lead along the woodland deer;
The hares run by me, growing bold.
They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech-leaves old.
I came upon a little town
That slumbered in the harvest moon,
And passed a-tiptoe up and down,
Murmuring to a fitful tune,
How I have followed, night and day,
A tramping of tremendous feet,
And saw where this old tympan lay,
Deserted on a doorway seat,
And bore it to the woods with me;
Of some unhuman misery
Our married voices wildly trolled.
They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech-leaves old.
I sang how, when day's toil is done,
Orchil shakes out her long dark hair
That hides away the dying sun
And sheds faint odors through the air:
When my hand passed from wire to wire
It quenched, with sound like falling dew,
The whirling and the wandering fire,
But left a mournful ulalu;
For the kind wires are torn and still,
And I must wander wood and hill,
Through summer's heat and winter's cold.
They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech-leaves old.
## p. 3427 (#401) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3427
II-SCOTTISH
EARLY Celtic literature in Scotland is so intimately allied with the
Irish, that much of the previous section must be held to belong as
much to the present one. We shall not need to recapitulate here
what is there dealt with. The two Gaelic currents began to sepa-
rate, if almost imperceptibly, even then; and only in century-long
stages, after passing the point marked by the medieval recapitu-
lators of Ossian and St. Patrick.
treatise on 'La Poésie des Races Celtiques,' and later Matthew
Arnold by his essay on Celtic Literature,' accomplished an almost
inestimable service. Everything that has been done since is but a
variation along the lines indicated by these two great critics; and
with this result, that it is already a commonplace to say we have in
the Celtic literature of the past not only an almost inexhaustible
mine of beauty, but the material for a new and vivid Anglo-Celtic
literature of the imagination.
In the ensuing brief sketch of some of the main features of this
subject, at once so fascinating and so important, no attempt is made
to do other than to interest, and perhaps allure further, the general
reader. For convenience's sake, this brief paper may be divided into
four sections:-Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and Cornish.
## p. 3404 (#378) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3404
I-IRISH
"FROM what dragon's teeth, and when sown, sprang forth this
warlike crop? " asks Mr. Standish O'Grady, writing in his "History
of Ireland' of the host of famous heroic men and women whose
names have come down to us from the antique periods of the Gael.
"Out of the ground they start," he tells us, "the armies of her
demigods and champions,-beautiful heroic forms, -in the North the
Red Branch, in the South the Ernai or Clan Dega, in the West
Queen Meave and her champions, in the Southeast that mysterious
half-red Meave and her martial grooms! "
A wonderful world! that heroic Ireland, the old Ireland of Queen
Meave and Cuculain, which only now for the first time is become at
all a possible region for the most of us. It is due to the remark-
able modern band of Irish writers and scholars represented by Mr.
O'Grady in the one category, and his older namesake, Mr. Standish
Hayes O'Grady of the 'Silva Gadelica,' in the other, that this litera-
ture is at last unsealed for those readers who have no Gaelic equip-
ment to aid them. With their aid Queen Meave emerges into new
life in poetry and romance; Cuculain is seen fighting afresh his
ancient battles; and St. Patrick encounters again the primitive
Ossian: all these, fortunately, are now as much within the reach of
an American audience as their classic prototypes in Homer or in
the northern sagas. These few more familiar names, out of the vast
number which threaten confusion in the old Irish romances and
bardic books, may serve as clues in the perplexing labyrinth of a
subject which seems at first so difficult to penetrate. Take Queen
Meave, for instance: how do we arrive at her place and story, so
early in the centuries? She belongs to the second great cycle of
Irish legendary history, in which she has Cuculain, Conor mac
Nessa, Fergus, and Deirdrê, as companions in romance. In this cycle
the dramatic centre is the fierce interminable war between Con-
naught and Ulster, brought about by the treacherous murder of the
sons of Usnach. The story of their tragic end, and of the melan-
choly death of Deirdrê, is one of the most moving in all Irish tra-
dition. But the master-romance of the cycle is not that of Deirdrê,
but of Queen Meave and her foray in quest of the famous bull of
Louth; a tale familiar in Irish under its title of The Cattle-spoiling
of Cooley. '
If one is tired of the modern world and its literary interpreta-
tions, its self-conscious fictions and impressionistic poetry, one cannot
do better than dive deep into the past, where Queen Meave marches
in half-barbaric splendor and beauty across the stage of the ancient
## p. 3405 (#379) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3405
Eri, which was approximately contemporaneous with the birth of
Christ. That was the time when the Red Branch mustered in the
north its heroic array of warriors, descendants of Ir, the son of
Milesius; and of the Red Branch came Cuculain the mighty. Con-
naught, the Ireland west of the Shannon, was Queen Meave's patri-
mony, where still lived the chief remnant of the prehistoric Firbolgs,
the race that once fought with the gods themselves. And we have
still to supply the mid-Ireland, with Tara as capital, and Cairbre as
king; the Leinster of that day, subject to Finn and Far-Cu; and the
Munster, subject to Lok and Eocha, with the children of Conairy
Mór the Beautiful, too, ranging the south in their fullness of power.
The colors to be got out of this Celtic antiquity, the spirit of life
that surges in its romantic annals, the fine fury of its heroes, the
beauty and picturesqueness of its women, combine to make a story
that only an Ireland of the first century could have inspired, and
that only an Ireland of the sixth to the ninth century could have
written.
Throughout Celtic history, the sixth century is for many reasons
a climacteric period. In Irish literature, we reach about the year
575 a first point to which we can refer approximately the more con-
scious operation of its genius. Then it was that it made its first
open claim to something like a national recognition. At the famous
conclave of that year, held at Druimceta, it attained an almost aca-
demic position and organization. In this conclave, the then king of
the Scottish Gaels, the leading King of the Irish, and St. Columcill,
assisted at the deliberations which decided the caste and privileges
of the Illuminati. There seem to have been three grades: the first,
a pseudo-Druidic order, the Gradh Ecna; the second, one of law-
makers and lawyers; the third, the Bardic order, the Gradh Fili, the
poets being termed File in Irish. Of the many degrees to which the
poets or File could attain, the highest (as in the other grades, of
Ecna, "Wisdom," and of Fene, "Law") was the Ollave, or Doctor.
These doctors of literature, so to call them, were already the con-
tinuators of a great tradition, especially in poetry. They had to
carry, written only in their heads, an immense body of bardic and
religious legendary history and philosophy. And inasmuch as they
were the sole depositories of this profound and occult learning, to
say nothing of those heroic tales and romances in which the Celtic
people so delighted, they received high honor wherever they went.
When the chief poet, the ollave, or doctor of poetry, arrived, in his
weather-beaten cloak of dark crimson trimmed with white feathers,
accompanied by his little band of disciples, at some chieftain's
house, he was received with signal hospitality and treated to the
best his host could afford.
## p. 3406 (#380) ###########################################
3406
CELTIC LITERATURE
While literature was still oral, it is clear that despite the care
used in its preservation in the bardic schools, it could not be main-
tained with the absolute accuracy of a written or a printed text.
The remoter the historical matter to be remembered, the less likely
was it to be preserved, literatim et verbatim, without those little liber-
ties of the imagination which the Celtic word-master of earlier ages
was always ready to take. Thus the first cycle of Irish legendary
history, dating back many centuries before the Christian era,- the
primitive and mythological cycle, - allows full license to the imagina-
tion, working upon a basis of semi-barbaric tradition, with a mixture
in it of nature-myths and remotest history. Both because of the
extent and the extreme difficulty of the materials afforded by this
cycle in the study of the pre-Christian religious beliefs of the Celtic
races, its stories will always form a great hunting-ground for Celtic
students. We learn from it how the Nemedians were overtaken by
the Fomorians and fought with them, almost to extermination, on
Tory Island, escaping then to the south of Europe, particularly to
Greece; and a couple of centuries later returned, under their new
name of the Firbolgs. The Nemedians meanwhile supplied similarly
a recrudescent race, the Tuatha Dé Danann, of whom came the
Dagda, the all-king, almost the Zeus of ancient Ireland. The same
cycle supplies us also with the mythical types correspondent to those
of the Greek mythology: e. g. , Ogmuir, the Irish Heracles; Lug or
Lugh, the Apollo; Diancéa, the Esculapius; Manannan, the Neptune;
and so forth. We have also Bridget, the Goddess of Poetry, the
Gaelic Muse, and the first and foremost of the many illustrious
Brians of Gaelic story. Later critics differ ingeniously about the pre-
cise origins and significations of many of these prehistoric figures.
Our own conjecture is, and it lays claim to no great originality or
finality, that we have in this Danann cycle an all-but inextricable
commixture of primitive nature-myths and folk-tales brought by
the Milesian and pre-Milesian immigrants from the Aryan cradle in
the East, together with a certain addition of confused history relat-
ing to the earliest adventures of the new-come races upon Irish
ground. But such as this traditional cycle was, it provided the
background for the much later second cycle, of which we have
already spoken, and which bears the Red Branch aloft as a sign. In
sight of the Red Branch, the darker part of the journey is over; and
the mists of mythology only form the veil shutting out all but the
mere human foreground.
We have spoken so far of two cycles-the Mythological, whose
chronology is a matter for further criticism to decide; the Heroic,
or Red Branch, which we place at the beginning of the Christian
era.
## p. 3407 (#381) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3407
Now we come to a third cycle: the "Fenian," named after Finn
Mac Cool, according to most Irish writers; the "Ossianic," named
after Ossian, Finn's famous son, according to most Scotch. We need
only speak of it here of course on its purely Irish side and from
the Fenian aspect, as the reader will find it fully dealt with under
its Ossianic aspect elsewhere. The heroes of this cycle, if we accept
their historical existence in Ireland, lived from the second to the
fourth centuries of the Christian era. Art, his grandson Cormac,
and Cormac's son, Cairbre; Cool, his son Finn, and King Goll: these,
with Owen Mor and many another, fill the Fenian romances with
their fierce and picturesque pursuit of destiny and death. They only
await the hand of that predestined shaper into final and positive and
modernly intelligible form of the confused romances which treat of
their doings, to add a new epic to the larger literature which has the
Old World for its text and the New World for its interpreter.
These three great cycles of Irish romance by no means exhaust
the wealth of story, still lurking perdu in old MSS. or in rare and
rarely read works. Some of these additional tales have already
reached American readers under modern retellings or poetic inter-
pretations; such as, e. g. , 'The Voyage of Maeldune,' retold mem-
orably, and differently enough, in flowing hexametrical periods by
Tennyson:-
-
"And we came to the Isle of Shouting; we landed; a score of wild birds
Cried from the topmost summit with human voices and words;
Once in an hour they cried, and whenever their voices pealed,
The steer fell down at the plow and the harvest died from the field,
And the men dropt dead in the valleys, and half of the cattle went lame,
And the roof sank in on the hearth, and the dwelling broke into flame;
And the shouting of these wild birds ran into the hearts of my crew,
Till they shouted along with the shouting, and seized one another and slew;
But I drew them the one from the other; I saw that we could not stay,
And we left the dead to the birds, and we sailed with our wounded away. "
Tennyson took his version from Joyce's Early Celtic Romances. '
In this volume we have, among other legendary romances, five or
six of the most wonderful or moving tales in Celtic or any other
literature. Three of these are- -The Three Sorrowful Tales of Erin,'
comprising The Fate of the Children of Usna' (or 'Deirdrê'); (The
Fate of the Children of Lir'; and The Fate of the Children of
Tuirenn. ' The names of the three others are The Voyage of Mael-
dun' (the oldest copy of which is dated 1100), The Pursuit of
Dermot and Grania,' and 'Ossian in the Land of Youth. Of these
perhaps the story of 'Deirdrê' is the best known, and American
readers may be referred to the fine epical version by Dr. Robert D.
## p. 3408 (#382) ###########################################
3408
CELTIC LITERATURE
Joyce (Deirdrê'), published some years ago by Roberts Brothers
of Boston. Two brief examples of the short episodical narratives
which make up the marvelous 'Voyage of Maeldun' may be cited
here,- The Miller of Hell' and 'Signs of Home,' the latter giving
the return of the Celtic Ulysses and his companions.
THE MILLER OF HELL
HE next island they came to, which was not far off from the
had a large mill on it; and near the door stood the
miller, a huge-bodied, strong, burly man. They saw num-
berless crowds of men and horses laden with corn coming
towards the mill; and when their corn was ground they went
away towards the west. Great herds of all kinds of cattle cov-
ered the plain as far as the eye could reach, and among them
many wagons, laden with every kind of wealth that is produced
on the ridge of the world. All these the miller put into the
mouth of his mill to be ground; and all as they came forth went
westward.
Maeldun and his people now spoke to the miller, and asked
him the name of the mill, and the meaning of all they had seen
on the island. And he, turning quickly towards them, replied in
a few words: -
"This mill is called the Mill of Inver-tre-Kenand, and I am
the Miller of Hell. All the corn and all the riches of the world
that men are dissatisfied with, or which they complain of in any
way, are sent here to be ground; and also every precious article
and every kind of wealth which men try to conceal from God.
All these I grind in the Mill of Inver-tre-Kenand and send them
away afterwards to the west. "
He spoke no more, but turned round and busied himself
again with his mill. And the voyagers, with much wonder and
awe in their hearts, went to their curragh and sailed away.
SIGNS OF HOME
S⁰⁰
OON after they saw a beautiful verdant island, with herds of
oxen, cows, and sheep browsing all over its hills and val-
leys; but no houses nor inhabitants to be seen.
And they
rested some time on this island and ate the flesh of the cows
and sheep.
## p. 3409 (#383) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3409
One day while they were standing on a hill a large falcon
flew by; and two of the crew, who happened to look closely at
him, cried out in the hearing of Maeldun:-
"See that falcon! he is surely like the falcons of Erin! "
"Watch him closely," cried Maeldun, “and observe exactly in
what direction he is flying. "
And they saw that he flew to the southeast, without turning
or wavering.
They went on board at once; and having unmoored, they
sailed to the southeast after the falcon. After rowing the whole
day, they sighted land in the dusk of the evening, which seemed
to them like the land of Erin.
――
ence.
Of all the books of the kind published since Macpherson's 'Ossian,'
Lady Charlotte Guest's 'Mabinogion,' and Villemarqué's Barzaz-
Breiz,' this collection of Dr. Joyce's has had the most marked influ-
It consists of eleven tales, and was the first readable collection
of the old Gaelic prose romances published in English. So far as
the general public is concerned, Dr. Joyce's method is unquestion-
ably the best. "A translation," he says, "may either follow the very
words, or reproduce the life and spirit, of the original; but no trans-
lation can do both. If you render word for word, you lose the spirit;
if you wish to give the spirit and manner, you must depart from the
exact words and frame your own phrases. I have chosen this latter
course. My translation follows the original closely enough in nar-
rative and incident; but so far as mere phraseology is concerned, I
have used the English language freely, not allowing myself to be
trammeled by too close an adherence to the very words of the text.
The originals are in general simple in style; and I have done my
best to render them into simple, homely, plain English. In short,
I have tried to tell the stories as I conceive the old Shenachies them-
selves would have told them if they had used English instead of
Gaelic. »
Another characteristic and admirably edited translation of one of
these miscellaneous stories that lie outside the three cycles of Irish
romance is 'The Vision of Mac Cougleime,' which we owe to Dr.
Kuno Meyer (London: Nutt).
Among the legendary Celtic romances is the short but beautiful
and characteristic account of Ossian's expedition to the Isle of the
Blest or the Land of Youth, and his subsequent return as an old and
decrepit man-in a word, the Celtic Rip Van Winkle. This legend
not only underlies all the spiritual romances of Celtic Ireland and
Scotland, but has profoundly appealed to the imagination of the
VI-214
## p. 3410 (#384) ###########################################
3410
CELTIC LITERATURE
whole complex English race of to-day, whether under the badge of
the rose, the thistle, the shamrock, or the leek, whether under the
banner of the United Kingdom or that of the Stars and Stripes.
OISIN IN TIRNANOGE;
-
OR
THE LAST OF THE FENI
[According to an ancient legend, Finn's son Oisin, the hero poet, survived
to the time of St. Patrick, two hundred years (the legend makes it three hun-
dred) after the other Feni. On a certain occasion, when the saint asked him
how he had lived to such a great age, the old hero related his story, of
which the following is the close. ]
I
LIVED in the Land of Youth more than three hundred years;
but it appeared to me that only three years had passed
since the day I parted from my friends. At the end of that
time I began to have a longing desire to see my father Finn
and all my old companions, and I asked leave of Niam and of
the king to visit Erin. The king gave permission, and Niam
said:-
"I will give consent, though I feel sorrow in my heart, for
I fear much you will never return to me. "
I replied that I would surely return, and that she need not
feel any doubt or dread, for that the white steed knew the way,
and would bring me back in safety. Then she addressed me in
these words, which seemed very strange to me:
"I will not refuse this request, though your journey afflicts.
me with great grief and fear. Erin is not now as it was when
you left it.
The great king Finn and his Feni are all gone;
and you will find, instead of them, a holy father and hosts of
priests and saints. Now, think well on what I say to you, and
keep my words in your mind. If once you alight from the
back to me. Again I warn
white steed, you will never come
you, if you place your feet on the green sod in Erin, you will
never return to this lovely land. A third time, O Oisin, my
beloved husband, a third time I say to you, if you alight from
the white steed you will never see me again. ”
I promised that I would faithfully attend to her words, and
that I would not alight from the white steed. Then as I looked
into her gentle face and marked her grief, my heart was
## p. 3411 (#385) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3411
――――――
weighed down with sadness, and my tears flowed plentifully;
but even so, my mind was bent on coming back to Erin.
When I had mounted the white steed, he galloped straight
toward the shore. We moved as swiftly as before over the clear
sea. The wind overtook the waves and we overtook the wind,
so that we straightway left the Land of Youth behind; and we
passed by many islands and cities till at length we landed on
the green shores of Erin.
As I traveled on through the country, I looked closely around
me; but I scarcely knew the old places, for everything seemed
strangely altered. I saw no sign of Finn and his host, and I
began to dread that Niam's saying was coming true. At length
I espied at a distance a company of little men and women,* all
mounted on horses as small as themselves; and when I came
near, they greeted me kindly and courteously. They looked at
me with wonder and curiosity, and they marveled much at my
great size and at the beauty and majesty of my person.
I asked them about Finn and the Feni; whether they were
still living, or if any sudden disaster had swept them away.
And one replied:-
"We have heard of the hero Finn, who ruled the Feni of
Erin in times of old, and who never had an equal for bravery
and wisdom. The poets of the Gaels have written many books
concerning his deeds and the deeds of the Feni, which we can-
not now relate; but they are all gone long since, for they lived
many ages ago. We have heard also, and we have seen it
written in very old books, that Finn had a son named Oisin.
Now this Oisin went with a young fairy maiden to Tirnanoge,
and his father and his friends sorrowed greatly after him and
sought him long; but he was never seen again. "
When I heard all this I was filled with amazement, and my
heart grew heavy with great sorrow. I silently turned my steed
away from the wondering people, and set forward straightway
for Allen of the mighty deeds, on the broad green plains of
Leinster. It was a miserable journey to me; and though my
mind, being full of sadness at all I saw and heard, forecasted
further sorrows, I was grieved more than ever when I reached
Allen. For there indeed I found the hill deserted and lonely,
and my father's palace all in ruins and overgrown with grass
and weeds.
The gigantic race of the Feni had all passed away, and Erin was now
inhabited by people who looked very small in Oisin's eyes.
## p. 3412 (#386) ###########################################
3412
CELTIC LITERATURE
I turned slowly away, and afterwards fared through the land
in every direction in search of my friends. But I met only
crowds of little people, all strangers, who gazed on me with
wonder; and none knew me. I visited every place throughout
the country where I knew the Feni had lived; but I found their
houses all like Allen, solitary and in ruins.
At length I came to Glenasmole,* where many a time I had
hunted in days of old with the Feni, and there I saw a crowd
of people in the glen. As soon as they saw me, one of them
came forward and said:
-
"Come to us, thou mighty hero, and help us out of our strait;
for thou art a man of vast strength. "
I went to them, and found a number of men trying in vain
to raise a large flat stone. It was half lifted from the ground;
but those who were under it were not strong enough either to
raise it further or to free themselves from its weight. And they
were in great distress, and on the point of being crushed to
death.
I thought it a shameful thing that so many men should be
unable to lift this stone, which Oscar, if he were alive, would
take in his right hand and fling over the heads of the feeble
crowd. After I had looked a little while, I stooped forward and
seized the flag with one hand; and putting forth my strength, I
flung it seven perches from its place, and relieved the little men.
But with the great strain the golden saddle-girth broke, and
bounding forward to keep myself from falling, I suddenly came
to the ground on my two feet.
The moment the white steed felt himself free, he shook him-
self and neighed. Then, starting off with the speed of a cloud-
shadow on a March day, he left me standing helpless and sor-
rowful. Instantly a woeful change came over me: the sight of
my eyes began to fade, the ruddy beauty of my face fled, I lost
all my strength, and I fell to the earth, a poor withered old
man, blind and wrinkled and feeble.
The white steed was never seen again. I never recovered
my sight, my youth, or my strength; and I have lived in this
manner, sorrowing without ceasing for my gentle golden-haired
wife Niam, and thinking ever of my father Finn, and of the
lost companions of my youth.
* Glenasmole, a fine valley about seven miles south of Dublin, through
which the river Dodder flows.
## p. 3413 (#387) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3413
Between these romances and the first definite Christian writings
the numerous Ossianic colloquies and narrative poems, and the Irish
Annals, form the connecting links. The Ossianic poetry, even where
it is specially Irish in character, we have elected to leave aside for
the present, for reasons already given; but it must be remembered
that they form a very important section in themselves, and amount
in Irish alone to some fifty thousand lines, even on a fairly moderate
computation.
Turning to the Annals, we are confronted at once by that extraor
dinary repository of Irish lore, history, and legend known as 'The
Annals of the Four Masters. ' This remarkable testament of the
Irish genius was due primarily to the zeal and energy of Michael
O'Clery, born at Donegal about 1580-the last of a long line of
scholars. Having become a Franciscan, in his conventual calling
he was living far away from his native soil, at St. Anthony's monas-
tery in Louvain. But there he had another Donegal man, Edh the
son of Bháird (Ward), for fellow worker; and the two together
formed the idea of collecting and putting into permanent form the
valuable MS. flotsam of old Irish literature which in earlier days,
wandering in their own land, they had found drifting insecurely
hither and thither. The plan they proposed was for O'Clery to get
leave of absence and return to Ireland, there to roam up and down
the land, collecting and copying every valuable MS. he could lay
hands on; then transmitting the copy to his co-worker in Louvain.
Ædh son of Ward died too soon to carry out fully his part of the
undertaking: but another Irish Franciscan, Father Colgan, took up
the task; and it was he who gave the book its present title, The
Annals of the Four Masters,' calling it after the four men who chiefly
collaborated in the work, viz. , Michael O'Clery, Farfassa O'Mulconry,
Peregrine O'Clery, and Peregrine O'Duigenan. The Annals, thus
laboriously brought to a triumphant close, carry history back to the
Deluge, and down to the years contemporary with their compilers
and authors, and the early part of the seventeenth century. "There
is no event of Irish history," says Dr. Hyde, "from the birth of Christ
to the beginning of the seventeenth century, that the first inquiry of
the student will not be-What do the Four Masters say about it ? >
The Annals indeed present in their curiously epitomized and synchro-
nized pages the concentrated essence of thousands of the confused
MSS. which the Four Masters collated, sifted, and interpreted with
consummate art and intelligence. They wrote, we may add, in an
archaic, almost cryptic style, full of bardic euphemisms and other
difficulties; so that it is fortunate even for Celtic scholars that
O'Donovan's seven great volumes, in his quarto edition, present the
text with an accompanying English translation.
## p. 3414 (#388) ###########################################
3414
CELTIC LITERATURE
The more one compares the great work of the Four Masters with
other succeeding works of the same historical order, the more one
sees how great was the effect upon Irish literature of the growth of
Christian influence. St. Patrick's are the world-wide name and fame
which most clearly mark the early Christian history of Ireland, when
the new divine creed entered into the land and confronted the Celtic
paganism. Many are the exquisite legends of St. Patrick, often so
naïvely and so tenderly told; with glimmerings here and there
already of the humor which we connect so much with the Irish
temper of mind, and which received probably its greatest stimulus
when an Irishman of earlier times wished, in all courtesy, to rec-
oncile his old fighting instincts with the Christian gentleness and
self-sacrifice. This as it may be, the hagiology of the mediæval
Irishman is in delightful contrast to the tales of battle and foray in
the three great cycles of early romance. As for St. Patrick, the
legendary and apocryphal literature that centres about him amounts
in verse and prose to an immense bulk. Much of this matter has of
course very small historical value; but it may be conceded that
Patrick's traditional rôle as a law-maker and reviser, in connection
with the revision of the Brehon Law, deserves serious attention.
Similarly, though we do not accept more than a small part of
the poems attributed to him as really his, there is enough to show
him a poet, as well as a great teacher and preacher and lawgiver.
What is most to the purpose, perhaps, is that he made his life a
poem; so that the mediæval scribes can hardly speak of him without
adorning and beautifying the tale they have to tell. Less known but
hardly less interesting is St. Columcill, whom Dr. Hyde claims "to
have been, both in his failings and his virtues, the most typical of
Irishmen; at once sentimental and impulsive, an eminent type of the
race he came from. " Dr. Hyde goes on to relate, in illustration of
this, the tale of the heron in Iona:-
:- When he saw the bird flying
across the water from the direction of Ireland, and alighting half
frozen with cold and faint with flight upon the rocky coast there, he
sent out one of his monks to go round the island and warm and
cherish and feed the bird; 'because,' said he weeping, 'it has come
from the land I shall never see on earth again!
" Surely one of
the most touching sentences ever uttered in all the long series of
the lament of the Celt in exile!
The Lives of the Saints form altogether a most important and
characteristic section of Irish literature. Even when composed in
Latin, they remain so saturated with Celtic feeling and coloring that
they may fairly be counted among Irish books. Dr. Hyde names
several Latin lives of St. Patrick alone, ascribed to St. Benignus, St.
Ultan, St. Eleran, and others of his later followers. Of St. Columcill
## p. 3415 (#389) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3415
(St. Columba), one of the fullest, written in Irish in the sixteenth
century, was compiled at Lifford under the direction of Manus
O'Donnell, Prince of Tirconnell; though Adamnan's Latin life of the
Saint is the most important book on the subject, written as it was
only a hundred years after the death of Columba, and by one who
was his spiritual successor as Abbot of Iona.
The Danish invasion of Ireland, lasting from the ninth to the
eleventh centuries, draws a red line across the history of its litera-
ture. During that troubled period many of the most priceless of its
MSS. were destroyed, and violent disruptions threatened every phase
of learning. However, the old impulse of the sixth century still
lived; and we find in the tenth, Cormac, Bishop of Cashel, first
among a redoubtable band of men of letters and men of affairs who
strove successfully to maintain the Irish spirit. Cormac's 'Glossary'
is the oldest book of its kind, and invaluable as a monument; and
the reputed poems of Gorm'ly, his betrothed bride, whom he never
married, and whose tale is a sad and strange one, form in their
different ways an extremely characteristic expression of the Irish
literature of the time.
During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the older Irish romances
multiplied themselves and begat new ones in the most astonishing
way. The Book of Leinster' mentions one hundred and eighty-one
tales, duly classified: Love-tales, Battle-tales, Tales of Travel, Forays,
Feasts, Visions, Tragedies, etc. What we have called the doctors
of literature devoted themselves henceforth more to prose than to
poetry, and poetry fell more and more into the hands of those who
wrote not for the elect but for the people.
There was no new development of Irish poetry, such as there was
of Welsh poetry in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The
bardic schools, which did so much for Irish poetry from the sixth
century to the seventeenth, insisted upon its conventions to a degree
that was excessive. Geoffrey Keating, who carried on his great work
at the same time as the Four Masters, in the first half of the seven-
teenth century, and who was a poet as well as a historian, still
used the bardic prosody, and wrote some delightful poems by its
rules; but he lent his influence to aid the new liberty in prose and
verse that Irish literature was learning. Keating's name is of first-
rate importance in its record, for this very reason. He was the first
really to conceive of Irish literature as a literature for the people,
and not only for the elect. He was the first to do this; and partly
because he did it, he was the last great landmark in the larger
Gaelic literature of Ireland. His History of Ireland,' the result
of an enforced retirement from preaching, was, says Dr. Hyde,
"the most popular book ever written in Irish. ” He marks too the
## p. 3416 (#390) ###########################################
3416
CELTIC LITERATURE
transition, as we pointed out, from the old bardic tradition in Irish
poetry. After his coming the bards threw away their superfluous
prosody and wrote for the people, and became poets indeed, instead
of the most ingenious of schoolmen. The result was the remarkable
body of Irish poetry which belongs to the last three centuries, and
which contains many of the characteristics of folk-song and culture
poetry, in a most tuneful and idiosyncratic fashion quite its own.
Let us listen again to Dr. Hyde on this point:-
"What the popular ballads of the folk had been like prior to the seven-
teenth century we have no means of knowing. No scribe would demean his
learned pen by committing them to paper; but from that date down to the
beginning of the present century the bards the great houses being fallen —
turned instinctively to the general public, and threw behind them the metres
that required so many years of study in the schools, and dropped at a stroke
several thousand words which no one understood except the great chiefs or
those trained by the poets, while they broke out into beautiful but at the
same time intelligible verse, which no one who has once heard and learned is
likely to forget. This is to my mind the real glory of the modern Irish
nation; this is the sweetest creation of Gaelic literature; this is the truest note
of the enchanting Irish siren, and he who has once heard it and remains
deaf to its charm has neither heart for song nor soul for music. The Gaelic
poetry of the last two centuries is the most sensuous attempt to convey music
in words ever made by man. It is absolutely impossible to convey the
lusciousness of sound, richness of rhythm, and perfection of harmony in
another language. "
Discounting what we will in the natural enthusiasm of one who
has devoted himself heart and soul to the cause of the Gaelic
tongue and of Irish literature, quite enough remains to carry the
contention for the continuing interest of native Irish poetry after so
many centuries. That such a poetry and such a language should
suddenly decay after so noble and enriched a record in the past, is
nothing short of a tragedy in the history of tongues.
Dr. Hyde's own collection of the 'Love Songs of Connacht' is the
best example that American readers could possibly have of this
Irish poetry, the late flowering of so venerable and noble a tree.
And with this work, and some of the collections of the folk-tales
still current in Erse-speaking Ireland, made by Dr. Hyde, Mr. Jere-
miah Curtin, and Mr. Larminie, and Englished for us, we must bring
this brief outline of the Irish contribution to Celtic literature to a
close. Its modern interpretation is only now beginning to take its
due place, let us remember, both at the hands of its scholars and on
the lips of its poets. And if any reader should think the scholars
still, after all we have said, too difficult to follow, let us recommend
them to turn to the poems and tales of Mr. W. B. Yeats and to the
## p. 3417 (#391) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3417
romantic pages of Mr. Standish O'Grady, the latest exponents in our
more modern tongue of that imagination, and that subtlety and
energy of thought, which are characteristically Irish.
Of the three great cycles of Gaelic literature, the third is the (so-
called) Ossianic. Of this cycle Finn (Fionn, Fingal) is the central
hero. The second great cycle is that which treats of the heroes of
the Ultonians, i. e. , the Red Branch of Ulster; among this cycle
Cuculain (Cuchullin, Cohoolin, Coolin) is the supreme type. No liv
ing writer has so well reconstructed the past for us as Mr. Standish
O'Grady has done, and nowhere is he so successful as in his vivid
and beautiful historical romance, of which Cuculain is the hero. Of
the famous "battle-prop of the valor and torch of the chivalry of the
Ultonians » Mr. O'Grady has given us an account which deserves to
pass into the fixed literature of our race. Apart from its vividness,
charm, and power, The Coming of Cuculain' affords a general idea
of the first great heroic cycle (its predecessor dealing entirely
with mythical or mythopoeic beings), and of primitive heroic life as
reflected in that literature. The excerpts selected are (1) the opening
of the romance, and (2) from the chapter telling how Cuculain won
his knighthood.
FROM THE COMING OF CUCULAIN>
I
TH
HE Red Branch feasted one night in their great hall at
Emain Macha. So vast was the hall that a man such as
men are now, standing in the centre and shouting his
loudest, would not be heard at the circumference; yet the low
laughter of the King sitting at one end was clearly audible to
those who sat around the Champion at the other. The sons of
Dithorba made it, giants of the elder time, laboring there under
the shoutings of Macha and the roar of her sounding thongs.
Its length was a mile and nine furlongs and a cubit. With her
brooch-pin she plowed its outline upon the plain, and its
breadth was not much less. Trees such as earth nourished then
upheld the mossy roof beneath which feasted that heroic brood,
the great-hearted children of Rury, huge offsprings of the gods
and giants of the dawn of time. For mighty exceedingly were.
these men. At the noise of their running to battle all Ireland
shook, and the illimitable Lir trembled in his watery halls; the
roar of their brazen chariots reverberated from the solid canopy
of heaven, and their war-steeds drank rivers dry.
## p. 3418 (#392) ###########################################
3418
CELTIC LITERATURE
A vast murmur rose from the assembly, for like distant
thunder or the far-off murmuring of agitated waters was the con-
tinuous hum of their blended conversation and laughter, while
ever and anon, cleaving the many-tongued confusion, uprose
friendly voices, clearer and stronger than battle trumpets, when
one hero challenged another to drink, wishing him victory and
success, and his words rang round the hollow dome. Innumer-
able candles, tall as spears, illuminated the scene. The eyes of
the heroes sparkled, and their faces, white and ruddy, beamed
with festal mirth and mutual affection. Their yellow hair shone.
Their banqueting attire, white and scarlet, glowed against the
outer gloom. Their round brooches and mantle-pins of gold or
silver or golden bronze, their drinking vessels and instruments
of festivity, flashed and glittered in the light. They rejoiced in
their glory and their might and in the inviolable amity in
which they were knit together; a host of comrades, a knot of
heroic valor and affection, which no strength or cunning, and
no power seen or unseen, could ever release or untie.
At one extremity of the vast hall, upon a raised seat, sat
their young king, Concobar Mac Nessa, slender, handsome, and
upright. A canopy of bronze, round as the bent sling of the
Sun-god, the long-handed, far-shooting son of Ethlend, encircled
his head. At his right hand lay a staff of silver. Far away at
the other end of the hall, on a raised seat, sat the Champion,
Fergus Mac Roy, like a colossus. The stars and clouds of night
were round his head and shoulders, seen through the wide and
high entrance of the Dûn, whose doors no man has ever seen
closed and barred. Aloft, suspended from the dim rafters, hung
the naked forms of great men clear against the dark dome,
having the cords of their slaughter around their necks and their
white limbs splashed with blood. Kings were they, who had
murmured against the sovereignty of the Red Branch. Through
the wide doorway out of the night flew a huge bird, black and
gray, unseen; and soaring upwards sat upon the rafters, its eyes
like burning fire. It was the Mór Reega, or Great Queen, the
far-striding, terrible daughter of Iarnmas (Iron-Death). Her
voice was like the shouting of ten thousand men. Dear to her
were these heroes. More she rejoiced in them feasting than in
the battle prowess of the rest.
When supper was ended, their bard, in his singing-robes and
girt around the temples with a golden fillet, stood up and sang.
## p. 3419 (#393) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3419
He sang how once a king of the Ultonians, having plunged into
the sea-depths, there slew a monster which had wrought much
havoc amongst fishers and seafaring men. The heroes attended
to his song, leaning forward with bright eyes. They applauded
the song and the singer, and praised the valor of the heroic
man who had done the deed. Then the Champion struck the
table with his clenched hands and addressed the assembly.
Wrath and sorrow were in his voice. It resembled the brool
of lions, heard afar by seafaring men upon some savage shore
on a still night.
"Famous deeds," he said, "are not wrought now among the
Red Branch. I think we are all become women. I grow weary
of these huntings in the morning and mimic exercises of war,
and this training of steeds and careering of brazen chariots
stained never with aught but dust and mire, and these unearned
feastings at night and vain applause of the brave deeds of our
forefathers. Come now, let us make an end of this.
Let us
conquer Banba (Ireland) wholly in all her green borders, and let
the realms of Lir, which sustain no foot of man, be the limit of
her sovereignty. Let us gather the tributes of all Ireland, after
many battles and much warlike toil. Then more sweetly shall
we drink, while the bards chant our prowess. Once I knew a
coward who boasted endlessly about his forefathers, and at last
my anger rose, and with a flat hand I slew him in the middle
of his speech, and paid no eric, for he was nothing. We have
the blood of heroes in our veins, and we sit here nightly boast-
ing about them: about Rury, whose name we bear; and Macha
the warrioress, who brought hither bound the sons of Dithorba
and made them rear this mighty Dûn; and Kimbaoth son of
Fiontann; and my namesake Fergus, whose crooked mouth was
no dishonor, and the rest of our hero sires; and we consume the
rents and tributes of Ulster which they by their prowess con-
quered to us, and which flow hither in abundance from every
corner of the province. Valiant men too will one day come
hither and slay us as I slew that boaster, and here in Emain
Macha their bards will praise them. Then in the halls of our
dead shall we say to our sires, 'All that you got for us by your
blood and your sweat, that we have lost, and the glory of the
Red Branch is at an end. '»
That speech was pleasing to the Red
out that Fergus Mac Roy had spoken well.
Branch, and they cried
Then all at once, on
## p. 3420 (#394) ###########################################
3420
CELTIC LITERATURE
a sudden impulse, they sang the battle song of the Ultonians,
and shouted for the war so that the building quaked and rocked,
and in the hall of the weapons there was a clangor of falling
shields, and men died that night for extreme dread, so mightily
shouted the Ultonians around their king and around Fergus.
II
On the morrow there was a great hasting of the Red Branch
on the plain of the assemblies. It was May-day morning and
the sun shone brightly, but at first through radiant showers.
The trees were putting forth young buds; the wet grass sparkled.
All the martial pomp and glory of the Ultonians were exhibited
that day. Their chariots and war-horses ringed the plain. All
the horses' heads were turned towards the centre where were
Concobar Mac Nessa and the chiefs of the Red Branch. The
plain flashed with gold, bronze, and steel, and glowed with the
bright mantles of the innumerable heroes, crimson and scarlet,
blue, green, or purple. The huge brooches on their breasts, of
gold and silver or gold-like bronze, were like resplendent wheels.
Their long hair, yellow for the most part, was bound with orna-
ments of gold. Great truly were those men; their like has not
come since upon the earth. They were the heroes and demigods
of the heroic age of Erin, champions who feared naught beneath
the sun; mightiest among the mighty, huge, proud, and uncon-
querable, and loyal and affectionate beyond all others; all of the
blood of Ir, son of Milesius, the Clanna Rury of great renown,
rejoicing in their valor, their splendor, their peerless king.
Concobar had no crown. A plain circle of beaten gold girt his
broad temples. In the naked glory of his regal manhood he
stood there before them all, but even so a stranger would have
swiftly discovered the captain of the Red Branch; such was his
stature, his bearing, such his slow-turning, steady-gazing eyes
and the majesty of his bearded countenance. His countenance
was long, broad above and narrow below, his nose eminent, his
beard bipartite, curling and auburn in hue, his form without any
blemish or imperfection.
"Let the tameless horses of Macha be harnessed to the
chariot," cried Concobar, "and let Læg, son of the King of
Gabra, drive them hither, for those are the horses and that the
chariot which shall be given this day to Cuculain. "
## p. 3421 (#395) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3421
Then, son of Sualtam, how in thy guileless breast thy heart
leaped when thou heardest the thundering of the great war-car
and the wild neighing of the immortal steeds, as they broke
from the dark stable into the clear-shining light of day, and
heard behind them the ancient roaring of the brazen wheels, as
in the days when they bore forth Macha and her martial groom
against the giants of old, and mightily established in Eiria the
Red Branch of the Ultonians! Soon they rushed to view from
the rear of Emain, speeding forth impetuously out of the hollow-
sounding ways of the city and the echoing palaces into the
open, and behind them in the great car green and gold, above
the many-twinkling wheels, the charioteer, with floating mantle,
girt round the temples with the gold fillet of his office, leaning
backwards and sideways as he labored to restrain their fury
unrestrainable: a gray long-maned steed, whale-bellied, broad-
chested, with mane like flying foam, under one silver yoke, and
a black lustrous tufty-maned steed under the other; such steeds.
as in power, size, and beauty the earth never produced before
and never will produce again.
Like a hawk swooping along the face of a cliff when the
wind is high; or like the rush of March wind over the smooth
plain; or like the fleetness of the stag roused from his lair by
the hounds and covering his first field, was the rush of those
steeds when they had broken through the restraint of the chari-
oteer, as though they galloped over fiery flags; so that the earth
shook and trembled with the velocity of their motion, and all
the time the great car brayed and shrieked as the wheels of
solid and glittering bronze went round, and strange cries and
exclamations were heard, for they were demons that had their
abode in that car.
The charioteer restrained the steeds before the assembly, but
nay-the-less a deep purr like the purr of a tiger proceeded
from the axle. Then the whole assembly lifted up their voices
and shouted for Cuculain, and he himself, Cuculain the son of
Sualtam, sprang into his chariot all armed, with a cry as of a
warrior springing into his chariot in the battle, and he stood
erect and brandished his spears, and the war sprites of the Gael
shouted along with him; for the Bocanahs and Bananahs and the
Geniti Gluidi, the wild people of the glens, and the demons of
the air, roared around him, when first the great warrior of the
Gael, his battle-arms in his hands, stood equipped for war in his
## p. 3422 (#396) ###########################################
3422
CELTIC LITERATURE
chariot before all the warriors of his tribe, the kings of the
Clanna Rury and the people of the Emain Macha. Then too
there sounded from the Tec Brac the boom of shields and the
clashing of swords and the cries and shouting of the Tuatha Dée
Danann, who dwelt there perpetually; and Lu the long-handed,
the slayer of Balor, the destroyer of the Fornoroh, the immortal,
the invisible, the maker and the decorator of the firmament, whose
hound was the sun, and whose son the viewless wind, thundered
from heaven and bent his sling five-hued against the clouds;
and the son of the illimitable Lir in his mantle blue and green,
foam-fringed, passed through the assembly with a roar of far-off
innumerable waters, and the Mór Reega stood in the midst with
a foot on either side of the plain, and shouted with the shout of
a host, so that the Ultonians fell down like reaped grass with
their faces to the earth, on account of the presence of the Mór
Reega and on account of the omens and great signs.
The following poems from the ancient Erse are taken from the
'Lyra Celtica: an Anthology of Representative Celtic Poetry,' edited
by Elizabeth A. Sharp.
THE MYSTERY OF AMERGIN
AM the wind which breathes upon the sea,
I
I am the wave of the ocean,
I am the murmur of the billows,
I am the ox of the seven combats,
I am the vulture upon the rocks,
I am a beam of the sun,
I am the fairest of plants,
I am a wild boar in valor,
I am a salmon in the water,
I am a lake in the plain,
I am a word of science,
I am the point of the lance of battle,
I am the God who creates in the head [i. e. , of
man] the fire [i. e. , the thought].
Who is it who throws light into the meeting on the mountain
[if not I]?
Who announces the ages of the moon [if not I]?
Who teaches the place where couches the sun [if not I]?
## p. 3423 (#397) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3423
THE SONG OF FIONN
AY-DAY, delightful time! How beautiful the color!
M
The blackbirds sing their full lay. Would that Læg were
here!
The cuckoos sing in constant strains. How welcome is the noble
Brilliance of the seasons ever! On the margin of the branching
woods
The summer swallows skim the stream: the swift horses seek the
pool;
The heather spreads out her long hair; the weak fair bow-down
grows.
Sudden consternation attacks the signs; the planets, in their courses
running, exert an influence:
The sea is lulled to rest, flowers cover the earth.
VISION OF A FAIR WOMAN
TEL
ELL us some of the charms of the stars:
Close and well set were her ivory teeth;
White as the canna upon the moor
Was her bosom the tartan bright beneath.
Her well-rounded forehead shone
Soft and fair as the mountain snow;
Her two breasts were heaving full;
To them did the hearts of heroes flow.
Her lips were ruddier than the rose;
Tender and tunefully sweet her tongue;
White as the foam adown her side
Her delicate fingers extended hung.
Smooth as the dusky down of the elk
Appeared her shady eyebrows to me;
Lovely her cheeks were, like berries red;
From every guile she was wholly free.
Her countenance looked like the gentle buds
Unfolding their beauty in early spring;
Her yellow locks like the gold-browed hills;
And her eyes like the radiance the sunbeams bring.
## p. 3424 (#398) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3424
In contemporary Celtic poetry no one surpasses Mr. W. B. Yeats,
particularly in the re-creation of that wonderful past with whose
atmosphere his whole work is charged. As an example of Mr. Yeats's
narrative method with legendary themes we may quote some lines
from his beautiful 'The Wanderings of Oisin' (Ossian):—
F
LED foam underneath us, and round us a wandering and milky
smoke,
High as the saddle-girth, covering away from our glances the tide;
And those that fled, and that followed, from the foam-pale distance
broke;
The immortal desire of immortals we saw in their faces, and sighed.
I mused on the chase with the Fenians, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair,
And never a song sang Neave, and over my finger-tips
Came now the sliding of tears and sweeping of mist-cold hair,
And now the warmth of sighs, and after the quiver of lips.
Were we days long or hours long in riding, when, rolled in a grisly
peace,
An isle lay level before us, with dripping hazel and oak?
And we stood on a sea's edge we saw not; for whiter than new-
washed fleece
Fled foam underneath us, and round us a wandering and milky smoke.
And we rode on the plains of the sea's edge-the sea's edge barren
and gray,
Gray sands on the green of the grasses and over the dripping trees,
Dripping and doubling landward, as though they would hasten away
Like an army of old men longing for rest from the moan of the seas.
But the trees grew taller and closer, immense in their wrinkling bark;
Dropping-a murmurous dropping-old silence and that one sound;
For no live creatures lived there, no weasels moved in the dark-
Long sighs arose in our spirits, beneath us bubbled the ground.
And the ears of the horse went sinking away in the hollow night;
For as drift from a sailor slow drowning the gleams of the world
and the sun,
Ceased on our hands and our faces, on hazel and oak leaf, the light,
And the stars were blotted above us, and the whole of the world
was one.
## p. 3425 (#399) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3425
Finally, here is one of Mr. Yeats's "old songs re-sung":
THE MADNESS OF KING GOLL
SAT on cushioned otter skin:
I
My word was law from Ith to Emen,
And shook at Invar Amargin
The hearts of the world-troubling seamen,
And drove tumult and war away
From girl and boy and man and beast;
The fields grew fatter day by day,
The wild fowl of the air increased;
And every ancient Ollave said,
While he bent down his faded head,-
"He drives away the Northern cold. "
They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech-leaves old.
I sat and mused and drank sweet wine;
A herdsman came from inland valleys,
Crying, the pirates drove his swine.
To fill their dark-beaked hollow galleys.
I called my battle-breaking men
And my loud brazen battle-cars
From rolling vale and rivery glen,
And under the blinking of the stars
Fell on the pirates of the deep,
And hurled them in the gulph of sleep:
These hands won many a torque of gold.
They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech-leaves old.
But slowly, as I shouting slew
And trampled in the bubbling mire,
In my most secret spirit grew
A whirling and a wandering fire:
I stood: keen stars above me shone,
Around me shone keen eyes of men:
And with loud singing I rushed on
Over the heath and spungy fen,
And broke between my hands the staff
Of my long spear with song and laugh,
That down the echoing valleys rolled.
They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech-leaves old.
And now I wander in the woods
When summer gluts the golden bees,
VI-215
## p. 3426 (#400) ###########################################
3426
CELTIC LITERATURE
Or in autumnal solitudes
Arise the leopard-colored trees;
Or when along the wintry strands
The cormorants shiver on their rocks;
I wander on, and wave my hands,
And sing, and shake my heavy locks.
The gray wolf knows me; by one ear
I lead along the woodland deer;
The hares run by me, growing bold.
They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech-leaves old.
I came upon a little town
That slumbered in the harvest moon,
And passed a-tiptoe up and down,
Murmuring to a fitful tune,
How I have followed, night and day,
A tramping of tremendous feet,
And saw where this old tympan lay,
Deserted on a doorway seat,
And bore it to the woods with me;
Of some unhuman misery
Our married voices wildly trolled.
They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech-leaves old.
I sang how, when day's toil is done,
Orchil shakes out her long dark hair
That hides away the dying sun
And sheds faint odors through the air:
When my hand passed from wire to wire
It quenched, with sound like falling dew,
The whirling and the wandering fire,
But left a mournful ulalu;
For the kind wires are torn and still,
And I must wander wood and hill,
Through summer's heat and winter's cold.
They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech-leaves old.
## p. 3427 (#401) ###########################################
CELTIC LITERATURE
3427
II-SCOTTISH
EARLY Celtic literature in Scotland is so intimately allied with the
Irish, that much of the previous section must be held to belong as
much to the present one. We shall not need to recapitulate here
what is there dealt with. The two Gaelic currents began to sepa-
rate, if almost imperceptibly, even then; and only in century-long
stages, after passing the point marked by the medieval recapitu-
lators of Ossian and St. Patrick.
