Ireland’s Immortals

Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth

Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth by Mark Williams is a well-documented book of research meant to appeal to the reader with an amateur’s interest in the subject. According to Williams, “its purpose is to trace the evolution of the divinities of Irish mythology” from the early Middle Ages to the present. I’ve read the first 200 of a total of 500 pages (excluding endnotes, index, and ancillary backmatter). This brings me to the thirteenth century and the advent of Finn mac Cumaill and the stories of the fíanaigecht also known as the Finn Cycle.

 My purpose in reading is to find out whether storytellers altered the ancient gods of Ireland through time. The clear answer is yes. Readers find so many ancient gods drastically altered in modern retellings (think Circe by Madeline Miller for a single example). I enjoy modern retellings of myths that travel far afield of the originals. It got me thinking about whether people have always taken great liberties with early stories of gods. In the case of the Irish pantheon, the answer is yes. In fact, scholars may not know much about these gods in their earliest iterations. 

Irish Immortals Unlike Greek Gods

Unlike the Greek gods about whom we learn in school, the Irish gods don’t live in a faraway place in the clouds, such as Mount Olympus. They are sometimes thought to live in the island’s symbolic seat of Tara or inside hills and prehistoric mounds or síde (hollow hills). Newgrange (Bruig na Bóinne) is the most important of the síd-mounds in Ireland. It was constructed circa 3300 to 3200 BC. It’s associated with the Dadga, the top god of the literary pantheon, and Oengus, his son. Many lesser supernatural beings are associated with other síd-mounds.

The Irish immortals are so often altered, and their stories are so intertwined, that their personalities are not distinct in the way the Olympian gods’ are. Williams notes a few exceptions, one being Morrígan, “a gruesome war-goddess, shapeshifting between woman and crow, eel and wolf.” I’m glad of this because Morrígan is a goddess I hope to work into my story. Generally, Ireland was too decentralized and thinly populated to develop national gods. 

The Role of Christianity in the Shape Shifting Irish Immortals

If I understand Willaims correctly, the reason Irish gods were so altered is that the people of the island became Christians and their newfound piety caused them to transform pagan gods, not to demons as their European countrymen did, but to fit those gods into a Christian worldview. This required major changes. The gods became half-fallen angels or sinless humans. And perhaps many other things as well; there are records of many lost manuscripts, but no existent stories of the gods emerging from a void. “All surviving mythological material from Ireland is the product of a pious and intellectually sophisticated Christian culture (5).” 

Archaeological artifacts hint that rivers, bogs, and pools were important to the pagan Irish. “Offerings deposited into water or into the earth suggest a belief in spirits dwelling below the surface of the world. (31).” Particularly, “watercourses seem regularly to have been venerated as divinities–usually goddesses, though there are a few river-gods (10).” Wells and springs associated with pagan rites were used for baptisms by early Christians, thus consecrating the sites. 

A Few Distinct Irish Immortals

An early Irish god who does have a distinct place is Lug (often spelled ‘Lugh’), a youthful warrior who is equally gifted in all the arts. In the nineteenth century, he became the god of the sun through literary works although nothing in his earlier history indicates this. The epic hero Cú Chulainn may be his son or his mortal incarnation, depending on the source. In the Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley, the great Irish epic), Lug heals Cú Chulainn, who remains in a coma for three days while Lug battles in his stead. This may have originated with pagan storytellers, but it is as likely to be a twist added by medieval Christian monks.

The Pagan-Christian Mashup

Even later Middle Age (late seventh to mid-eighth century) filid (singular fili) or poet-genealogists-aristocratic confidants were likely to put a Christian spin on stories. Williams gives an example in The Immram Brain (The Voyage of Bran), one of the earliest surviving stories in the Irish vernacular. It includes a scene of a native god Mannanán mac Lir, the son of the sea. The breakdown of the story is complicated. If you’re interested in it, see the text. In this and others, Williams notes that the filid writers might have been Christianized druids. On the whole, he asserts, “It is abundantly clear that a secular literary tradition in Irish could only have emerged in a Christian context, and that the Bible remained at all times the wellspring and core of Irish literacy (46).”

Williams continues with Irish narratives, showing the mix of paganism and Christianity and lamenting that the texts, which sometimes use older passages, are hard to pin down in time of composition. The writers appear to have made various conclusions about the ancient gods including: 

• they were merciful angels sent before the coming of Christianity to guide the Irish according to the truth of nature;
• they were unfallen human beings who, unstained by sin, were both invisible and immortal;
• they were half-fallen angels who’d failed to take sides in Lucifer’s rebellion against God;
• they were demons (79)

Writers Create Their Own Irish Immortals

The breadth of explanations for the gods meant that it was possible for a saga-writer to choose the most conducive to the literary effect they were aiming at in a given work. The fictional vampire offers a modern parallel: presumably few writers would assert a belief in their literal existence, but they feel free to reshape the mythology (significant word) of vampirism for the purposes of their fiction, with results variously poignant, comic, politically or socially metaphorical, phantasmagoric, erotic, or horrific. The composers of the Old Irish sagas should be credited with having allowed themselves similar room for manoeuver with regard to the native gods; only when this is borne in mind can we take the measure of their artistic achievement. (83)

While Williams never directly tells the mythological tales, he uses several as examples throughout the book. Here he summarizes the plot and discusses the saga The Wooing of Étaín to show how the writers keep the gods’ nature undefined. Though even a summary is too long for this post, I love the weirdness of the tale and can see it’s a must-read. One of the story lines (in modern terms, we might say subplots) includes a powerful sorceress turning her female rival, Étaín, into a pool of water out of which emerges a giant fly, one that “buzzes musically and sheds healing dew from its wings.” (84) After many travails at the whim of the sorceress, the fly drops into the wine cup of the wife of a great warrior, who swallows the fly and becomes pregnant. Étaín is born again, more than a thousand years after her first birth. 

Next Up

This is a good place to stop as the next chapter (four) “New Mythologies: pseudohistories and the Lore of Poets” is quite long. As Williams says, there are no leprechauns or pookas here. I did, however, read about and discuss those supernatural creatures in earlier posts. See Irish Wonders: Pookas and Banshees and Brownies, Boggarts and Banshees.