“New Mythologies: Pseudohistories and the Lore of Poets”
In my last post on Ireland’s Immortals, I looked at the evolving stories of the Irish gods, Christianized in the early Middle Ages. Part 2 of Ireland’s Immortals discusses the tenth through twelfth centuries, when the Viking Wars ended and the island was politically stable, allowing for scholarship and monastic learning. Centuries’ old writing and stories were revived. Scholars of this period have given us most of what is known of early Irish literature (129).
The Synthetic History of Irish Immortals
Williams refers to these works as ‘synthetic history.’ They integrate biblical, native, and classical sources into a single story. While these tales create histories of the Irish ancestors, for the purposes of understanding Irish gods, the important change is that the Túatha Dé are stripped of their earlier identities as gods, unfallen human beings, and half-fallen angels. They become a human race. (The Túatha Dé are discussed in my last post.)
In an effort to bring Irish history to the biblical narrative of the world, in the late eleventh century, scholars wrote Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of Invasions). It traces the peoples of the world to ancestors in the book of Genesis. However, there is no mention of the Irish in scripture or Christian history. Scholars resolved the problem with the story of Noah and the flood.
The Lebor Gabála Érenn
A granddaughter of Noah (not a biblical personage), Cessair, arrives in Ireland with 150 women and three men. They all drown in the flood, except for Fintan mac Bóchra, who “escapes in the form of a salmon and magically lives on in various forms for three and a half millennia. (133-4).”
The next set of humans to arrive are wiped out by plague except for one survivor who lives on in animal guises, the form of which depends on who’s telling the story. Another wave of people, also descendants of Noah’s relations, are the people of Nemed. They are largely wiped out by the Formorians, but a few manage to go to other places. (As to the Formorians, we don’t know exactly where they came from.) Some Nemedians are enslaved in Greece and get their name from their job of carrying soil up mountains to create agricultural land: Fir Bolg or “Bag Men.’ Eventually, they free themselves and return to settle Ireland.
Another remnant of Nemedians learns magic and becomes super-human in their skills. These god-peoples–the Túatha Dé–return to Ireland, usurp the Fir Bolg and take the island for themselves. (In some variations, they come from the north, a bad-omen direction for medieval scholars. In other versions, they appear from a black-vapor cloud. In others, the black cloud is merely the smoke from burning ships, set aflame so that the Túatha Dé wouldn’t retreat to wherever they came from.) The Túatha Dé are, around the year 900, thought of as less than the gods they were previously, but not yet the mere humans (who learn magic in the ‘north of the world’) they will be seen as a century later.
The Second Strand of the Lebor Gabála Érenn
A second strand of the Lebor Gabála Érenn follows another people descended from Japhet, son of Noah, who become the Gaels. At the Tower of Babel, a Scythian nobleman named Fénius Farsid takes all the best parts of the world’s languages and pieces them together to make Irish, the perfect language. After wandering, this man and his progeny settle in what is now Spain and Portugal. They see Ireland, decide to invade, and defeat the Túatha Dé.
This long chapter of Irish Immortals discusses research on why and how these two different strands of Lebor Gabála Érenn came about. It appears that various sections of the story came from different original sources. It also traces the story of the Túatha Dé and shows how they came to be thought of as invaders and then eventually as ordinary people rather than a race of god-people.
A Few Fun Bits for Reimagining Ireland’s Immortals
Chapter four has genealogies, and the ‘cities, sages, and treasures’ of the Túatha Dé, which later writers will use to recreate/reimagine Irish mythology. A few of interest that can be used in reimagining these myths:
- From Falias came the Stone of Fál which is in Tara, which used to cry out beneath every king who used to take control of Ireland.
- From Goirias came the spear which Lug had: a battle would never go against the man who had it in hand.
- From Findias came Núadu’s sword: no one might escape from it–from the moment it was drawn from its battle-scabbard.
(Williams quotes from the fifteenth-century Book of Fermoy to include these Lebor Gabála ‘facts.’) (149)
The Filid
A discussion of the filid follows. You may recall from my last post that these are poet-genealogists-aristocratic confidants who were likely to put a Christian spin on stories. Here a case is made that the filid used the native gods to symbolize mysterious dimensions of their art. “Mythopoeia–the self-conscious making of myths–is indeed the correct term, for the filid’s use of the gods was no hangover from Irish paganism. Rather it was a framing of the scholarly in terms of the supernatural, enabled by the medieval scholars’ intense and characteristic fondness for personification and allegory (160).”
Symbolism in the Telling of Ireland’s Immortals
Williams makes much of the Christian and other symbolism throughout the Lebor Gabála. Some elements of interest:
- The goddess Brigit, “is a paradoxical and unique figure in the mythology characterized by curious bifurcations of identity. Her name has two forms, Brigit and Brig; she seems to be both one entity and also a trio of sisters. Most famously of all, she most likely bears some connection to her Christian namesake, Brigit of Kildare, Ireland’s most beloved female saint (161).”
- The filid used family trees to visualize the branches and interrelationships of native learning. Those who could penetrate the involved “mythological metaphors” were “qualified member[s] of the filid club (166).”
- Other Irish texts have similar metaphors. In Echtra Cormaic i Tir Tairngiri (Cormac’s Adventure in the Land of Promise), an otherworldly well has five springs flowing from it. The god Manannán explains that this is the fountain of knowledge and the five streams are the five senses.
- In changing the number and nature of ancient mythological characters, the filid would make them into groups whose numbers have biblical significance. Many groups of eight because there were eight people in Noah’s Ark. Many groups of seven, because there are seven days of creation, seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, and seven sacraments.
The Missing Óengus
Williams finds it strange that Óengus, son of the Dadga, is generally missing from these groups of seven or eight and not among the primary or ‘skilled’ ones. He describes Óengus as similar to Odysseus “of many twists and turns (175).” However, one story of Óengus that Williams summarizes is rather fun. In Bó Bithblicht melc Lonán (The Son of Lonán’s Perpetually Milkable Cow), Flann mac Lonáin (a true, historical poet, killed in 896), meets a huge churl and ends up owing him a cow. After a year, the churl comes to Flann’s house with some thugs and weapons to exact payment. He will only take a cow that gives endless milk. Flann is panicked and composes an extemporaneous poem about his predicament. The churl then tells him that he is Óengus in disguise. He has received his perpetually milkable cow as poetry is rich in milk. Williams notes that a god conveying “supernatural insight to a mortal was a staple of the earliest Irish narrative prose (180).”
From Paganism to Meta-mythology
To be clear, none of these stories is fully recounted in Irish Immortals. This is not a book of myths but a book about myths and mythological characters, how they developed and changed, and what influenced those changes. I’m primarily looking at it as a way to sort out which Irish myths I would like to find and learn more about. The author is showing that at this particular point in Irish history–the tenth through twelfth centuries–the myths move far from Irish paganism and become a “kind of meta-mythology for intellectuals” and more (181).
The chapter concludes with examples of Christian-centered myths in which the old gods are killed. St. Patrick is active in much of this. Ireland appears to have lost many of its original myths, or wholly reconfigured them, through a Christian lens. The old gods were reimagined as ordinary people or seen as demonic and by necessity, driven out or killed. (Recall that prior to the tenth century, old gods were seen as unfallen humans or half-fallen angels, so this is a big shift.)
A second conclusion is that this shift in works such as the Lebor Gabála was not total. Other narrative genres maintained the position of the ancient gods. Yet to outsiders, these early Irish gods, the Túatha Dé “were so native as to be beneath notice–a pattern that prevailed for centuries to come (193).”
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Next Up in Ireland’s Immortals
The next section of Ireland’s Immortals discusses the Finn Cycle. I first heard of the great hero Finn mac Cumaill as Finn McCool. I’m looking forward to these fíanaigecht (fenian tales).