🧚 Opening, part 2

The mode in which the pagan legend sometimes put on a Christian interpretation is especially illustrated in the ‘Children of Lir.’1 Even in its later form that tale is said to be anterior to the year 1000; but as an oral tradition it probably existed, like the social and political conditions it records, centuries before the Christian Era.2 A narrative, at first but the record of some dreadful crime in a heathen household, changed by degrees into a mystic hymn on the sanctity of childhood, its capacity for the heavenly hope, its obedience, endurance, and fidelity, its power through entire simplicity to find, in the strangest affliction, purification only and a whiter innocence.3 Under the trials of nine centuries those sufferers alone retain a perpetual childhood; their father’s house, and the still lake before it, stand ever before their imagination; and the burden of the years but falls on them for a moment, to be flung aside for ever.4 Their ‘songs in the night season,’ the swan-song of a long dying, wafted over unstable waters for the solace of the strong ones dwelling on the land, imply that the martial bards of old knew in part the higher and serener function of poetry.5 It is significant that while the sentenced belong to the earlier Tuatha de Dannan race, the witch, while imprecating upon them the curse, addresses them thus:--‘Ye of the white faces, of the stammering _Gael_.’6 Apparently some bard of a later day resolved that these children of an unblessed stock should be a prophetic anticipation of the Gael whose boast was his faith.7 There was to be again a Ruth out of Moab, one not gleaning amid the fields of promise, but scattering their earliest seed; a Gentile with a faith not found in Israel, yet an Israelite indeed.8 A prose translation of this tale, among the earliest at once and the most signally modified of the Irish legends, was made by my early friend, Gerald Griffin,[4] a man who, when certain to attain the first place among Irish popular writers, passed it by for a humble one among the ‘Christian Brothers.’9

The ‘Children of Lir’ is perhaps the chief memorial of that Tuatha de Dannan race, which had held sway for two centuries before the invasion of the Gael, and yet were themselves regarded as intruders by the Firbolgs.10 Lir and Bove, Tuathan kings, were separated by seven centuries from ‘Conn of the Hundred Fights.’11 The great names of Tyr-Owen and Tyr-Conel had not risen; and 1,800 years had to pass before the foundations were laid of those abbeys and castles now in ruins.12 Yet then, too, there were monuments.13 The Tuathan might have pointed out to his Gaelic conqueror a cairn which still remains on the coast of Sligo, that of Eochy, King of the Firbolgs.14 On the banks of the Boyne he might have made boast of a huge sepulchral mound still shown to the traveller, the tomb of Lewy, in whose veins the blood of the Tuatha was blended with that of the earlier Fomorian pirates.15 We know not whether the Dun-Aengus had yet lifted its ponderous masses on Aran Island; but two centuries were to go by before Queen Macha traced the foundations of Emania, and five before Queen Meave built the palace of Cruachan.16 It is remarkable that while numerous Firbolg monuments, and in some places the race itself, survive, the mediæval genealogies include no descent from the Tuatha de Dannan.17 They are described as an unwarlike race that worked in mines, and practised magical arts--arts through which, when dispossessed by a stronger foe, they had ‘retired into invisibility,’ living an immortal life among hills and under lakes.18

The ‘Children of Lir,’ and the ‘Sons of Usnach’[5] are two of those tales which in Ireland were always known as ‘the Three Sorrows of Song.’19 Critics who regard the ‘Tain bo Cuailgné’ but as a single fragment of a great Irish epic, include the second among the remaining fragments.20 To me it seems that each work is structurally complete in itself; but that, in spirit, the two are strikingly unlike, the ‘Tain’ being essentially epic, while the ‘Sons of Usnach’ is a tragedy cast in a narrative form.21 The idea of fate enters into it as strongly as into any Greek play, its heroine, the ‘Babe of Destiny,’ being, of all those who have a part in the tale, the one least subdued by that destiny which she strives in vain to avert.22 Those who charge the Irish race with a fatalism supposed to be a mark of its Eastern origin, may point to this tale as a proof that the characteristic is at least an ancient one.23

It is natural to compare the Irish legends with those of other races.24 An eminent Irish scholar asserts that the ‘Tain bo Cuailgné is to Irish history what the Argonautic expedition, and the Seven against Thebes, are to the Grecian.’25 Landor’s ‘Hellenics’ represent many of the least known Greek legends, and his ‘Gebir’ might be taken for a recovered Greek ‘lesser epic;’ but with such poems the Irish legends can boast little affinity.26 The best of the Roman have perished, except those which Livy preserved by appropriating, and which, notwithstanding their large element of fiction, constitute perhaps the most true, because the most characteristic portion of the earlier Roman history.27 Between the Irish and such Scandinavian legends as the celebrated ‘Story of the Volsungs and Niblings’ there is one striking resemblance.28 In each case the earliest existing prose version obviously represents a metrical work earlier still, large fragments of which survive, cropping up in it like sea rocks that indicate the hills submerged.29 In the ‘Tain’ many passages, besides those which can be called poetical, thus hold their own, apparently but because the trouble of altering them was thus evaded.30 That Scandinavian tale has a keen-edged, concentrated might about it, together with, at least in Mr. Morris’s translation, a corresponding force and an exquisite beauty of style; and in these respects I think it superior to the ‘Tain:’ but the latter will probably be deemed by impartial readers to have the advantage in imagination, varied conception of character, and pathos.31 As regards comparative antiquity the ‘Tain’ must have preceded the Northern work by at least six centuries.32 The latter includes a chapter, the fourteenth, entitled ‘The Welding together of the Shards of the Sword Grana,’ taken, as might seem, from ‘The Knighting of Cuchullain,’ so close is the resemblance--as close as that between the Spanish story of the ‘Monk and the Bird,’ known to the English reader through Archbishop Trench’s charming poem, and the Irish tale regarded as its original.33 The best characteristics of Irish legends, a certain swiftness and daring, a wildness of invention, a power that in its fiercest moods is often subtly combined with grace, and a tenderness as often alternated with humour, are found chiefly in the earlier.34 The highest inspiration of the Bards seems to have passed away not long after Ireland became Christian.35 ‘Great Pan was dead,’--slain by the shaft of a mightier light.36 The further back we go the higher is the imagination, the energy, and even the art; the legends of the Heroic Age surpassing the mediæval in refinement as much as in force, and the mediæval escaping the extravagancies and vulgarities sometimes found in those of later days.37 In ancient Ireland history and poetry had but a single Muse, and the bard who professed to be ‘a maker’ would have found no listener.38 Through all its changes the traditional legend claimed a foundation of truth, and pointed ever to some unmeasured antiquity.39 In that early springtide the hard and rugged March buds of Song were scarcely distinguishable from the rough rind of fact out of which they had pushed.40