In Search of the Irish Dreamtime

Archaeology & Early Irish Literature

J.P. Mallory

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780500773345
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia antica

Following his account of Irish origins as evidenced by archaeology, genetics and linguistics, J. P. Mallory returns to the subject to interrogate what he calls the 'Irish Dreamtime': the native Irish retelling of their own origins, as related by medieval manuscripts. He attempts to explore the reality of this version of the earliest history of Ireland, which places apparently 'mythological' events on a concrete timeline of invasions, colonizations and royal reigns that extends even further back in time than the history of Classical Greece. Can the accounts of this 'Dreamtime' really inform us of the way of life in Iron Age Ireland? By comparing the world depicted in the earliest Irish literary tradition with the archaeological evidence available on the ground, Mallory explores Ireland's rich mythological tradition and tests its claims to represent reality.

CHAPTER ONE

Discovering the Oldest Irish Tradition

…the Irish date their history from the first aeras of the world…so that in comparison with them, the antiquity of all other countries is modern, and almost in its infancy!

Roderic O’Flaherty¹

In 1188 a 42-year-old prelate, diplomat and scholar spent three days entertaining the citizens of Oxford with a public reading of his first-hand account of a ‘wild and inhospitable people’ who were ‘so barbarous that they cannot be said to have any culture’, and ‘wallowing in vice’ so much so that they contaminated any visitor to their shores. They were also the ‘most deceitful’ people in the world although, as we will soon see, the speaker was not very hard to fool. Their only saving grace was that they seemed to have a good sense of rhythm. The speaker, Giraldus de Barri, more commonly known as Giraldus Cambrensis or Gerald of Wales (FIG. 1.1), having recently finished his fieldwork among this abhorrent people, had just completed a book about them as he could no longer refrain from ‘offering to public view the light of wisdom burning clearly and carefully trimmed’. It is claimed that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Baldwin of Forde, never tired of reading it. Needless to say, Giraldus’ work did not enjoy quite such a high reputation among the wild and deceitful subjects of his book, the people of Ireland.²

Giraldus divided The History and Topography of Ireland (Topographia) into three parts, each of which he read out on separate days.³ On the first day the poor of Oxford were invited to hear about the landscape and animals of Ireland, especially the birds (Giraldus believed that along with gold, birds from Ireland would make a suitable tribute to Britain);⁴ there was even a section on beavers that was just plain padding as Giraldus well knew that there were no beavers in Ireland⁵ (we will be reminded again of this fact later on). They also got to hear his dismissal of the notion that St Patrick had driven the snakes out of Ireland; according to Giraldus (and here he was correct), poisonous reptiles had never made it to the island in the first place. As Giraldus’ book was in Latin it is difficult to know what an uneducated audience made of it. His friend, Walter Mapes, had written to him lamenting that his ‘works, being in Latin, are understood by only a few persons’.⁶ Perhaps the audience only turned up for the sandwiches.

1.1. Giraldus Cambrensis (1146–1223).

On day two Giraldus invited the highest ranks of Oxford academics, who would have had no problem with Latin, to his reading of part two on the wonders and miracles of Ireland. Stories of the miraculous activities of Irish saints would have been common fare for such an assembly but one can only wonder what they made of his account of a fish with gold teeth, a talking wolf (FIG. 1.2), a half-man-half-ox or a wandering church bell.

On the final day it was the turn of the rest of the scholars, the knights and some other citizens to hear his account of the six attempted colonizations of Ireland. As we will need to revisit these in detail later, they are as follows:

1. Cæsara (Irish Cesair), granddaughter of Noah, attempted to colonize Ireland with a party of three men and 50 women but all were drowned in the Flood.

2. Bartholaunus (Partholón) and his people came to Ireland 300 years after the Flood and cleared forests to work the land. In another 300 years the population of Ireland had climbed to 9,000. Bartholaunus’ people fought and won a major battle against a race of Giants (Fomorians) but a pestilence induced by their rotting corpses carried away the entire population save Ruan (Tuan) who survived until the time of St Patrick to relate the early history of Ireland.

3. Nemedus (Nemed), a Scythian, arrived with his sons and they too engaged against pirates (Fomorians). The population eventually covered the entire island but the majority died in battle once again fighting the Giants (Fomorians). Nemed and his descendants held Ireland for 216 years. The survivors abandoned Ireland and returned to either Scythia or Greece.

4. The five brothers and sons of Dela (the Fir Bolg) then arrived in Ireland, which they divided up into its five provinces (the four current provinces with a central province of Meath (the ‘middle’). After a time, one of the brothers, Slanius (Sláine) became the sole ruler and first king of Ireland.

5. The descendants of the fourth colonization suffered major losses against another invader from Scythia (that Giraldus does not mention by name but who are known in Irish as the Tuatha Dé Danann). His account of this invasion is subsumed in his treatment of his fifth (our sixth) colonization.

6. Eventually Ireland was colonized by the Sons of Milesius (Míl) who had come from Spain. They divided Ireland into halves under Herimon (Erimon) and Heber (Eber) and after the death of Heber, Herimon became the first king of the Irish ‘race’.

Giraldus continued the story up through St Patrick and the coming of Christianity, the raids and settlements of the Norse, and until the barbarous Irish found themselves under the enlightened rule of Henry II, the ‘invincible king’, who (with some help from Giraldus’ relatives) managed to conquer a substantial part of the land. A considerable portion of this section was also given over to the character assassination of the Irish, justifying the civilizing activities of the British crown.

1.2. A talking wolf implores a priest to grant the last rites to his mate.

According to the most ancient histories of the Irish…

So begins Giraldus’ account of the six attempts to colonize Ireland undertaken by Cesair, Partholón, Nemed, the Fir Bolg, the Tuatha Dé Danann and, finally, the Sons of Míl from Spain. It appears that this ‘most ancient’ account was, in fact, a now lost Latin summary of the Irish original, the Lebor Gabála Érenn ‘Book of the Takings of Ireland’ (LG). This account of what John Carey has called the Irish National Origin Legend⁷ (INOL) was compiled in the 11th century from various earlier poems that dealt with the initial settlement of Ireland through the coming of the immediate ancestors of the historical Irish. The antiquity of the account of Ireland’s first colonists, in a Latin version, must go back to at least the 9th century since a similar account⁸ also appears in the Historia Britonum (c. 829–830), dubiously attributed to another Welshman, Nennius, who is reputed to have gained it from learned men in Ireland.⁹ There is evidence that some of the personages mentioned in this account appear in poems dating as far back as the 8th century¹⁰ and incidents from the colonization were probably entered into the Irish annals in c. 743–753.¹¹ It should be recalled that before the Norse ‘Troubles’, the Irish monasteries were among the most sought after educational institutions in Europe where scholars came to study in both Latin and Old Irish. During the 7th century Aldhelm, the abbot of Malmesbury, described how boatloads of Englishmen came to Ireland to study¹² and even a number of Northumbrian kings learned Irish.¹³ After all, the Venerable Bede had described the Irish as ‘a harmless race that had always been most friendly to the English’.¹⁴ It is in the 7th and 8th centuries that the most famous of Ireland’s illuminated manuscripts such as The Cathach, and the books of Durrow and Kells were prepared; Giraldus regarded one such manuscript that he saw in Kildare as the work of angels (FIG. 1.3).¹⁵

1.3. An Irish scribe, after being tutored in calligraphy by an angel, tries his hand.

If Giraldus had really wanted to do his homework on understanding the earliest traditions of the Irish, he would have tracked down one of the major compendia of Irish (rather than Latin) learning that were current in the 12th century, some of which still survive.¹⁶ This was a time when the monasteries, who had endured pillaging by both the Norse and rival groups of Irish, were about to face a new threat from the Anglo-Normans, who had begun their conquest of the island in 1167. Gathering earlier books and manuscripts that had survived several centuries of onslaught, major anthologies of these earlier works were prepared and expanded upon in Irish monasteries. The oldest of these that still survives is known as the Lebor na hUidre (LU) or ‘Book of the Dun Cow’ (PL. IX) which had been initially compiled in 1106 since that is the date when one of its principal scribes had been killed during a raid on his monastery of Clonmacnoise in Co. Offaly. If Giraldus had knocked on the door when he was resident in Ireland (1183 and then again in 1185) to get a peek at the book he would probably have received a frosty welcome as the Normans had torched the monastery in 1179, burning over 100 houses. It is believed that by then the manuscript had been taken far to the west (Connacht or Donegal) for safe keeping. Of the original manuscript, only 67 leaves survive today but during Giraldus’ time he would probably have been able to view the now missing 66 leaves. These would have been critical to his research because they likely included the Lebor Gabála Érenn that was the initial text in a number of other such anthologies and was referred to by later authors.¹⁷ All that remains of this earliest account of the Irish National Origin Legend in the Lebor na hUidre today is a section on the children of Noah.¹⁸

If Giraldus had chosen to do his research at the monastery of Terryglass in north Tipperary he would have had similar luck. This monastery had possessed a much larger compendium which is properly known as the Lebor na Núachongbála but, thankfully, far more commonly as the ‘Book of Leinster’ (LL). This manuscript was closely associated with Dermot Mac Murrough, the king of Leinster who was driven out of his own country in 1166, five years af...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Author
• Other titles of interest
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Discovering the Oldest Irish Tradition
• Chapter Two: Impossible Stories and Impertinent Tales
• Chapter Three: Excavating the Dreamtime
• Chapter Four: The Archaeology of the Irish National Origin Legend
• Chapter Five: The Natural Environment
• Chapter Six: The Built Environment
• Chapter Seven: Warfare and Weapons
• Chapter Eight: Transport
• Chapter Nine: Material Culture
• Chapter Ten: Burial
• Chapter Eleven: Whence the Dreamtime?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Sources of Illustrations
• Index
• Copyright