Gods and Fighting Men, Lady I. A Gregory [best e books to read TXT] 📗

is long to me!

 

That is not the way I used to be, without fighting, without battles,

without learning feats, without young girls, without music, without

harps, without bruising bones, without great deeds; without increase of

learning, without generosity, without drinking at feasts, without

courting, without hunting, the two trades I was used to; without going

out to battle, Ochone! the want of them is sorrowful to me.

 

No hunting of deer or stag, it is not like that I would wish to be; no

leashes for our hounds, no hounds; it is long the clouds are over me

to-night!

 

Without rising up to do bravery as we were used, without playing as we

had a mind; without swimming of our fighting men in the lake; it is long

the clouds are over me to-night!

 

There is no one at all in the world the way I am; it is a pity the way I

am; an old man dragging stones; it is long the clouds are over me

to-night!

 

I am the last of the Fianna, great Oisin, son of Finn, listening to the

voice of bells; it is long the clouds are over me to-night!

 

NOTES THE APOLOGY

 

 

The Irish text of the greater number of the stories in this book has

been published, and from this text I have worked, making my own

translation as far as my scholarship goes, and when it fails, taking the

meaning given by better scholars. In some cases the Irish text has not

been printed, and I have had to work by comparing and piecing together

various translations. I have had to put a connecting sentence of my own

here and there, and I have fused different versions together, and

condensed many passages, and I have left out many, using the choice that

is a perpetual refusing, in trying to get some clear outline of the

doings of the heroes.

 

I have found it more natural to tell the stories in the manner of the

thatched houses, where I have heard so many legends of Finn and his

friends, and Oisin and Patrick, and the Ever-Living Ones, and the

Country of the Young, rather than in the manner of the slated houses,

where I have not heard them.

 

Four years ago, Dr Atkinson, a Professor of Trinity College, Dublin, in

his evidence before the Commission of Intermediate Education, said of

the old literature of Ireland:--"It has scarcely been touched by the

movements of the great literatures; it is the untrained popular feeling.

Therefore it is almost intolerably low in tone--I do not mean naughty,

but low; and every now and then, when the circumstance occasions it, it

goes down lower than low ... If I read the books in the Greek, the Latin

or the French course, in almost every one of them there is something

with an ideal ring about it--something that I can read with positive

pleasure--something that has what the child might take with him as a

[Greek: ktema eis dei]--a perpetual treasure; but if I read the Irish

books, I see nothing ideal in them, and my astonishment is that through

the whole range of Irish literature that I have read (and I have read

an enormous range of it), the smallness of the element of idealism is

most noticeable ... And as there is very little idealism there is very

little imagination ... The Irish tales as a rule are devoid of it

fundamentally."

 

Dr Atkinson is an Englishman, but unfortunately not only

fellow-professors in Trinity but undergraduates there have been

influenced by his opinion, that Irish literature is a thing to be

despised. I do not quote his words to draw attention to a battle that is

still being fought, but to explain my own object in working, as I have

worked ever since that evidence was given, to make a part of Irish

literature accessible to many, especially among my young countrymen, who

have not opportunity to read the translations of the chief scholars,

scattered here and there in learned periodicals, or patience and time to

disentangle overlapping and contradictory versions, that they may judge

for themselves as to its "lowness" and "want of imagination," and the

other well-known charges brought against it before the same Commission.

 

I believe that those who have once learned to care for the story of

Cuchulain of Muirthemne, and of Finn and Lugh and Etain, and to

recognise the enduring belief in an invisible world and an immortal life

behind the visible and the mortal, will not be content with my

redaction, but will go, first to the fuller versions of the best

scholars, and then to the manuscripts themselves. I believe the forty

students of old Irish lately called together by Professor Kuno Meyer

will not rest satisfied until they have explored the scores and scores

of uncatalogued and untranslated manuscripts in Trinity College Library,

and that the enthusiasm which the Gaelic League has given birth to will

lead to much fine scholarship.

 

A day or two ago I had a letter from one of the best Greek scholars and

translators in England, who says of my "Cuchulain": "It opened up a

great world of beautiful legend which, though accounting myself as an

Irishman, I had never known at all. I am sending out copies to Irish

friends in Australia who, I am sure, will receive the same sort of

impression, almost an impression of pride in the beauty of the Irish

mind, as I received myself." And President Roosevelt wrote to me a

little time ago that after he had read "Cuchulain of Muirthemne," he had

sent for all the other translations from the Irish he could get, to take

on his journey to the Western States.

 

I give these appreciative words not, I think, from vanity, for they are

not for me but for my material, to show the effect our old literature

has on those who come fresh to it, and that they do not complain of its

"want of imagination." I am, of course, very proud and glad in having

had the opportunity of helping to make it known, and the task has been

pleasant, although toil-some. Just now, indeed, on the 6th October, I am

tired enough, and I think with sympathy of the old Highland piper, who

complained that he was "withered with yelping the seven Fenian

battalions."

 

 

 

 

THE AGE AND ORIGIN OF THE STORIES OF THE FIANNA

 

 

Mr Alfred Nutt says in _Ossian and the Ossianic Literature,_ No. 3 of

his excellent series of sixpenny pamphlets, _Popular Studies in

Mythology, Romance, and Folklore_:--

 

"The body of Gaelic literature connected with the name of Ossian is of

very considerable extent and of respectable antiquity. The oldest texts,

prose for the most part, but also in verse, are preserved in Irish MSS.

of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and go back to a period from one

hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty years older at least. The

bulk of Ossianic literature is, however, of later date as far as the

form under which it has come down to us is concerned. A number of

important texts, prose for the most part, are preserved in MSS. of the

fourteenth century, but were probably redacted in the thirteenth and

twelfth centuries. But by far the largest mass consists of narrative

poems, as a rule dramatic in structure. These have come down to us in

MSS. written in Scotland from the end of the fifteenth to the middle of

the seventeenth century, in Ireland from the sixteenth down to the

middle of the nineteenth century. The Gaelic-speaking peasantry, alike

in Ireland and Scotland, have preserved orally a large number of these

ballads, as also a great mass of prose narratives, the heroes of which

are Ossian and his comrades.

 

"Were all Ossianic texts preserved in MSS. older than the present

century to be printed, they would fill some eight to ten thousand octavo

pages. The mere bulk of the literature, even if we allow for

considerable repetition of incident, arrests attention. If we further

recall that for the last five hundred years this body of romance has

formed the chief imaginative recreation of Gaeldom, alike in Ireland and

Scotland, and that a peasantry unable to read or write has yet preserved

it almost entire, its claims to consideration and study will appear

manifest."

 

He then goes on to discuss how far the incidents in the stories can be

accepted as they were accepted by Irish historical writers of the

eleventh century as authentic history:--

 

"Fortunately there is little need for me to discuss the credibility or

otherwise of the historic records concerning Finn, his family, and his

band of warriors. They may be accepted or rejected according to

individual bent of mind without really modifying our view of the

literature. For when we turn to the romances, whether in prose or verse,

we find that, although the history is professedly the same as that of

the Annals, firstly, we are transported to a world entirely romantic, in

which divine and semi-divine beings, ungainly monsters and giants, play a

prominent part, in which men and women change shapes with animals, in

which the lives of the heroes are miraculously prolonged--in short, we

find ourselves in a land of Faery; secondly, we find that the historic

conditions in which the heroes are represented as living do not, for the

most part, answer to anything we know or can surmise of the third

century. For Finn and his warriors are perpetually on the watch to guard

Ireland against the attacks of over-sea raiders, styled Lochlannac by

the narrators, and by them undoubtedly thought of as Norsemen. But the

latter, as is well known, only came to Ireland at the close of the

eighth century, and the heroic period of their invasions extended for

about a century, from 825 to 925; to be followed by a period of

comparative settlement during the tenth century, until at the opening of

the eleventh century the battle of Clontarf, fought by Brian, the great

South Irish chieftain, marked the break-up of the separate Teutonic

organisations and the absorption of the Teutons into the fabric of Irish

life. In these pages then we may disregard the otherwise interesting

question of historic credibility in the Ossianic romances: firstly,

because they have their being in a land unaffected by fact; secondly,

because if they ever did reflect the history of the third century the

reflection was distorted in after-times, and a pseudo-history based upon

events of the ninth and tenth centuries was substituted for it. What the

historian seeks for in legend is far more a picture of the society in

which it took rise than a record of the events which it commemorates."

 

In a later part of the pamphlet Mr Nutt discusses such questions as

whether we may look for examples of third-century customs in the

stories, what part of the stories first found their way into writing,

whether the Oisin and Patrick dialogues were written under the influence

of actual Pagan feeling persisting from Pagan times, or whether "a

change came over the feeling of Gaeldom during the fourteenth and

fifteenth centuries," when the Oisin and Patrick dialogues in their

present form began to be written. His final summing-up is that

"well-nigh the same stories that were told of Finn and his warrior

braves by the Gael of the eleventh century are told in well-nigh the

same way by his descendant to-day." Mr Nutt does not enquire how long

the stories may have been told before the first story was written down.

Larminie, however, whose early death was the first great loss of our

intellectual movement, pushes them backward for untold ages in the

introduction to his _West Irish Folk Tales and Romances_. He builds up a

detailed and careful argument, for which I must refer readers to his

book, to prove that the Scottish Highlands and Ireland have received

their folk-lore both from "Aryan and Non-Aryan sources," and that in the

Highlands there is more non-Aryan influence and more non-Aryan blood

than in Ireland. He argues that nothing is more improbable than that all

folk-tales are Aryan, as has sometimes been supposed, and sums up as

follows:--

 

"They bear the stamp of the genius