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

of more than one race. The pure and

placid but often cold imagination of the Aryan has been at work on some.

In others we trace the more picturesque fancy, the fierceness and

sensuality, the greater sense of artistic elegance belonging to races

whom the Aryan, in spite of his occasional faults of hardness and

coarseness, has, on the whole, left behind him. But as the greatest

results in the realm of the highest art have always been achieved in the

case of certain blends of Aryan with other blood, I should hardly deem

it extravagant if it were asserted that in the humbler regions of the

folk-tale we might trace the working of the same law. The process which

has gone on may in part have been as follows:--Every race which has

acquired very definite characteristics must have been for a long time

isolated. The Aryans during their period of isolation probably developed

many of their folk-germs into their larger myths, owing to the greater

constructiveness of their imagination, and thus, in a way, they used up

part of their material. Afterwards, when they became blended with other

races less advanced, they acquired fresh material to work on. We have in

Ireland an instance to hand, of which a brief discussion may help to

illustrate the whole race theory.

 

"The larger Irish legendary literature divides itself into three

cycles--the divine, the heroic, the Fenian. Of these three the last is

so well-known orally in Scotland that it has been a matter of dispute to

which country it really belongs. It belongs, in fact, to both. Here,

however, comes in a strange contrast with the other cycles. The first

is, so far as I am aware, wholly unknown in Scotland, the second

comparatively unknown. What is the explanation? Professor Zimmer not

having established his late-historical view as regards Finn, and the

general opinion among scholars having tended of recent years towards the

mythical view, we want to know why there is so much more community in

one case than in the other. Mr O'Grady long since seeing this

difficulty, and then believing Finn to be historical, was induced to

place the latter in point of time before Cuchulain and his compeers. But

this view is of course inadmissible when Finn is seen not to be

historical at all. There remains but one explanation. The various bodies

of legend in question are, so far as Ireland is concerned, only earlier

or later, as they came into the island with the various races to which

they belonged. The wider prevalence, then, of the Finn Saga would

indicate that it belonged to an early race occupying both Ireland and

Scotland. Then entered the Aryan Gael, and for him henceforth, as the

ruler of the island, his own gods and heroes were sung by his own bards.

His legends became the subject of what I may call the court poetry, the

aristocratic literature. When he conquered Scotland, he took with him

his own gods and heroes; but in the latter country the bardic system

never became established, and hence we find but feeble echoes of the

heroic cycle among the mountains of the North. That this is the

explanation is shown by what took place in Ireland. Here the heroic

cycle has been handed down in remembrance almost solely by the bardic

literature. The popular memory retains but few traces of it. Its

essentially aristocratic character is shown by the fact that the people

have all but forgotten it, if they ever knew it. But the Fenian cycle

has not been forgotten. Prevailing everywhere, still cherished by the

conquered peoples, it held its ground in Scotland and Ireland alike,

forcing its way in the latter country even into the written literature,

and so securing a twofold lease of existence ... The Fenian cycle, in a

word, is non-Aryan folk-literature partially subjected to Aryan

treatment."

 

The whole problem is extremely complex, and several other writers have

written upon it. Mr Borlase, for instance, has argued in his big book on

the Dolmens that the cromlechs, and presumably the Diarmuid and Crania

legend, is connected with old religious rites of an erotic nature coming

down from a very primitive state of society.

 

I have come to my own conclusion not so much because of any weight of

argument, as because I found it impossible to arrange the stories in a

coherent form so long as I considered them a part of history. I tried to

work on the foundation of the Annalists, and fit the Fianna into a

definite historical epoch, but the whole story seemed trivial and

incoherent until I began to think of them as almost contemporaneous with

the battle of Magh Tuireadh, which even the Annalists put back into

mythical ages. In this I have only followed some of the story-tellers,

who have made the mother of Lugh of the Long Hand the grandmother of

Finn, and given him a shield soaked with the blood of Balor. I cannot

think of any of the stories as having had a modern origin, or that the

century in which each was written down gives any evidence as to its age.

"How Diarmuid got his Love-Spot," for instance, which was taken down

only a few years ago from some old man's recitation by Dr Hyde, may well

be as old as "Finn and the Phantoms," which is in one of the earliest

manuscripts. It seems to me that one cannot choose any definite period

either from the vast living mass of folk-lore in the country or from the

written text, and that there is as good evidence of Finn being of the

blood of the gods as of his being, as some of the people tell me, "the

son of an O'Shaughnessy who lived at Kiltartan Cross."

 

Dr Douglas Hyde, although he placed the Fenian after the Cuchulain cycle

in his _History of Irish Literature_, has allowed me to print this

note:--

 

"While believing in the real objective existence of the Fenians as a

body of Janissaries who actually lived, ruled, and hunted in King

Cormac's time, I think it equally certain that hundreds of stories,

traits, and legends far older and more primitive than any to which they

themselves could have given rise, have clustered about them. There is

probably as large a bulk of primitive mythology to be found in the Finn

legend as in that of the Red Branch itself. The story of the Fenians was

a kind of nucleus to which a vast amount of the flotsam and jetsam of a

far older period attached itself, and has thus been preserved."

 

As I found it impossible to give that historical date to the stories, I,

while not adding in anything to support my theory, left out such names

as those of Cormac and Art, and such more or less historical personages,

substituting "the High King." And in the "Battle of the White Strand," I

left out the name of Caelur, Tadg's wife, because I had already followed

another chronicler in giving him Ethlinn for a wife. In the earlier part

I have given back to Angus Og the name of "The Disturber," which had, as

I believe, strayed from him to the Saint of the same name.

 

 

 

 

III. THE AUTHORITIES

 

 

The following is a list of the authorities I have been chiefly helped by

in putting these stories together and in translation of the text. But I

cannot make it quite accurate, for I have sometimes transferred a mere

phrase, sometimes a whole passage from one story to another, where it

seemed to fit better. I have sometimes, in the second part of the book,

used stories preserved in the Scottish Gaelic, as will be seen by my

references. I am obliged to write these notes away from libraries, and

cannot verify them, but I think they are fairly correct.

 

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Publication Date: 05-09-2015

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