Lady Augusta Gregory Read online

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  Chapter 3. The Battle of Gabhra

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  Book X. The End of the Fianna

  Chapter 1. Death of Bran

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  Chapter 2. The Call of Oisin

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  Chapter 3. The Last of the Great Men

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  Book XI. Oisin and Patrick

  Chapter 1. Oisin's Story

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  Chapter 2. Oisin in Patrick's House

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  Chapter 3. The Arguments

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  Chapter 4. Oisin's Laments

  422

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  •

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  IRISH

  myTHS

  AND

  LEGENDS

  1 1

  PRE FACE

  I

  A few months ago I was on the bare Hill of Allen, "wide Almhuin

  of Leinster," where Finn and the Fianna lived, according to the

  stories, although there are no earthen mounds there like those

  that mark the sites of old buildings on so many hills. A hot sun

  beat down upon flowering gorse and flowerless heather; and on

  every side except the east, where there were green trees and distant hills, one saw a level horizon and brown boglands with a few green places and here and there the glitter of water. One could

  imagine that had it been twilight and not early afternoon, and had

  there been vapours drifting and frothing where there were now

  but shadows of clouds, it would have set stirring in one, as few

  places even in Ireland can, a thought that is peculiar to Celtic

  romance, as I think, a thought of a mystery coming not as with

  Gothic nations out of the pressure of darkness, but out of great

  spaces and windy light. The hill of Teamhair, or Tara, as it is now

  called, with its green mounds and its partly wooded sides, and its

  more gradual slope set among fat grazing lands with great trees

  12

  IRISH MYTHS AND LEGENDS

  in the hedgerows, had brought before one imaginations, not of

  heroes who were in their youth for hundreds of years, or of

  women who came to them in the likeness of hunted fawns, but of

  kings that lived brief and politic lives, and of the five white roads

  that carried their armies to the lesser kingdoms of Ireland, or

  brought to the great fair that had given Teamhair its sovereignty,

  all that sought justice or pleasure or had goods to batter.

  II

  It is certain that we must not confuse these kings, as did the

  medireval chroniclers, with those half-divine kings of Almhuin.

  The chroniclers, perhaps because they loved tradition too well to

  cast out utterly much that they dreaded as Christians, and perhaps because popular imagination had begun the mixture, have mixed one with another ingeniously, making Finn the head of a

  kind of Militia und
er Cormac MacAn, who is supposed to have

  reigned at Teamhair in the second century, and making Grania,

  who travels to enchanted houses under the cloak of Angus, god of

  Love, and keeps her troubling beauty longer than did Helen hers,

  Cormac's daughter, and giving the stories of the Fianna, although

  the impossible has thrust its proud finger into them all, a curious

  air of precise history. It is only when one separates the stories

  from that medireval pedantry, as in this book, that one recognises

  one of the oldest worlds that man has imagined, an older world

  certainly than one finds in the stories of Cuchulain, who lived,

  according to the chroniclers, about the time of the birth of Christ.

  They are far better known, and one may be certain of the antiquity of incidents that are known in one form or another to every Gaelic-speaking countryman in Ireland or in the Highlands of

  Scotland. Sometimes a labourer digging near to a cromlech, or

  Bed of Diarmuid and Grania as it is called, will tell one a tradition

  that seems older and more barbaric than any description of their

  adventures or of themselves in written text or story that has taken

  PREFACE

  1 3

  form in the mouths of professed story-tellers. Finn and the Fianna

  found welcome among the court poets later than did Cuchulain;

  and one finds memories of Danish invasions and standing armies

  mixed with the imaginations of hunters and solitary fighters

  among great woods. One never hears of Cuchulain delighting in

  the hunt or in woodland things; and one imagines that the storyteller would have thought it unworthy in so great a man, who lived a well-ordered, elaborate life, and had his chariot and his

  chariot-driver and his barley-fed horses to delight in. If he is in the

  woods before dawn one is not told that he cannot know the leaves

  of the hazel from the leaves of the oak; and when Erner laments

  him no wild creature comes into her thoughts but the cuckoo that

  cries over cultivated fields. His story must have come out of a time

  when the wild wood was giving way to pasture and tillage, and

  men had no longer a reason to consider every cry of the birds or

  change of the night. Finn, who was always in the woods, whose

  battles were but hours amid years of hunting, delighted the "cackling of ducks from the Lake of the Three arrows; the scolding talk of the blackbird of Doire an Cairn; the bellowing of the ox from

  the Valley of the Berries; the whistle of the eagle from the Valley of

  Victories or from the rough branches of the Ridge of the Stream;

  the grouse of the heather of Cruachan; the call of the otter of

  Druim re Coir. " When sorrow comes upon the queens of the stories, they have sympathy for the wild birds and beasts that are like themselves: "Credhe wife of Cael came with the others and went

  looking through the bodies for her comely comrade, and crying

  as she went. And as she was searching she saw a crane of the

  meadows and her two nestlings, and the cunning beast the fox

  watching the nestlings; and when the crane covered one of the

  birds to save it, he would make a rush at the other bird, the way

  she had to stretch herself out over the birds; and she would

  sooner have got her own death by the fox than the nestlings to be

  killed by him. And Credhe was looking at that, and she said: 'It is

  no wonder I to have such love for my comely sweetheart, and the

  bird in that distress about her nestlings.' "

  l4

  IRISH MYTHS AND LEGENDS

  III

  One often hears of a horse that shivers with terror, or of a dog

  that howls at something a man's eyes cannot see, and men who

  live primitive lives where instinct does the work of reason are

  fully conscious of many things that we cannot perceive at all. As

  life becomes more orderly, more deliberate, the supernatural

  world sinks farther away. Although the gods come to Cuchulain,

  and although he is the son of one of the greatest of them, their

  country and his are far apart, and they come to him as god to

  mortal; but Finn is their equal. He is continually in their houses;

  he meets with Bodb Dearg, and Angus, and Manannan, now as

  friend with friend, now as with an enemy he overcomes in battle;

  and when he has need of their help his messenger can say: "There

  is not a king's son or a prince, or a leader of the Fianna of Ireland,

  without having a wife or a mother or a foster-mother or a sweetheart of the Tuatha de Danaan. " When the Fianna are broken up at last, after hundreds of years of hunting, it is doubtful that he

  dies at all, and certain that he comes again in some other shape,

  and Oisin, his son, is made king over a divine country. The birds

  and beasts that cross his path in the woods have been fighting

  men or great enchanters or fair women, and in a moment can

  take some beautiful or terrible shape. One thinks of him and of

  his people as great-bodied men with large movements, that seem,

  as it were, flowing out of some deep below the narrow stream of

  personal impulse, men that have broad brows and quiet eyes full

  of confidence in a good luck that proves every day afresh that

  they are a portion of the strength of things. They are hardly so

  much individual men as portions of universal nature, like the

  clouds that shape themselves and re-shape themselves momentarily, or like a bird between two boughs, or like the gods that have given the apples and the nuts; and yet this but brings them the

  nearer to us, for we can remake them in our image when we will,

  and the woods are the more beautiful for the thought. Do we not

  always fancy hunters to be something like this, and is not that

  PREFACE

  1 5

  why we think them poetical when we meet them of a sudden, as

  in these lines in "Pauline" :

  An old hunter

  Talking with gods; or a high-crested chief

  Sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos ...

  IV

  One must not expect in these stories the epic lineaments, the

  many incidents , woven into one great event of, let us say, the

  story of the War for the Brown Bull of Cuailgne, or that of the last

  gathering at Muirthemne. Even Diarmuid and Grania, which is a

  long story, has nothing of the clear outlines of Deirdre, and is

  indeed but a succession of detached episodes. The men who imagined the Fianna had the imagination of children, and as soon as they had invented one wonder, heaped another on top of it. Children--or, at any rate, it is so I remember my own childhood -do not understand large design, and they delight in little shut-in

  places where they can play at houses more than in great expanses

  where a country-side takes , as it were , the impression of a

  thought. The wild creatures and the green things are more to

  them than to us, for they creep towards our light by little holes

  and crevices. When they imagine a country for themselves, it is

  always a country where one can wander without aim, and where

  one can never know from one place what another will be like, or

  know from the one day's adventure what may meet one with tomorrows sun. I have wished to become a child again that I might find this book, that not only tells one of such a country, but is

  fuller than any other book that tells of heroic life, of the
childhood that is in all folk-lore, dearer to me than all the books of the western world.

  1 6

  IRISH MYTHS AND LEGENDS

  v

  Children play at being great and wonderful people, at the ambitions they will put away for one reason or another before they grow into ordinary men and women. Mankind as a whole had a

  like dream once; everybody and nobody built up the dream bit by

  bit, and the ancient story-tellers are there to make us remember

  what mankind would have been like, had not fear and the failing

  will and the laws of nature tripped up its heels. The Fianna and

  their like are themselves so full of power, and they are set "in a

  world so fluctuating and dream-like, that nothing can hold them

  from being all that the heart desires.

  I have read in a fabulous book that Adam had but to imagine a

  bird, and it was born into life, and that he created all things out of

  himself by nothing more important than an unflagging fancy; and

  heroes who can make a ship out of a shaving have but little less of

  divine prerogatives. They have no speculative thoughts to wander

  through eternity and waste heroic blood; but how could that be

  otherwise, for it is at all times the proud angels who sit thinking

  upon the hill-side and not the people of Eden. One morning we

  meet them hunting a stag that is "as joyful as the leaves of a tree

  in summer-time" ; and whatever they do, whether they listen to

  the harp or follow an enchanter over-sea, they do for the sake of

  joy, their joy in one another, or their joy in pride and movement;

  and even their battles are fought more because of their delight in

  a good fighter than because of any gain that is in victory. They live

  always as if they were playing a game; and so far as they have any

  deliberate purpose at all, it is that they may become great gentlemen and be worthy of the songs of poets. It has been said, and I think the Japanese were the first to say it, that the four essential

  virtues are to be generous among the weak, and truthful among

  one's friends, and brave among one's enemies and courteous at all

  times; and if we understand by courtesy not merely the gentleness

  the story-tellers have celebrated, but a delight in courtly things, in

  beautiful clothing and in beautiful verse, one understands that it

  PREFACE

  17

  was no formal succession of trials that bound the Fianna to one

  another. Only the Table Round that is indeed , as it seems, a

  rivulet from the same river, is bound in a like fellowship, and

  there the four heroic virtues are troubled by the abstract virtues of

  the cloister. Every now and then some noble knight builds himself a cell upon the hill-side, or leaves kind women and joyful knights to seek the vision of the Grail in lonely adventures. But

  when Oisin or some kingly forerunner-Bran, son of Febal, or

  the like-rides or sails in an enchanted ship to some divine country, he but looks for a more delighted companionship, or to be in love with faces that will never fade. No thought of any life greater