Lady Augusta Gregory Read online

  than that of love , and the companionship of those that have

  drawn their swords upon the darkness of the world, ever troubles

  their delight in one another as it troubles Iseult amid her love, or

  Arthur amid his battles. It is one of the ailments of our speculation that thought, when it is not the planning of something, or the doing of something or some memory of a plain circumstance

  separates us from one another because it makes us always more

  unlike, and because no thought passes through another's ear unchanged. Companionship can only be perfect when it is founded on things, for things are always the same under the hand, and at

  last one comes to hear with envy the voices of boys lighting a

  lantern to ensnare moths, or of the maids chattering in the kitchen

  about the fox that carried off a turkey before breakfast. This book

  is full of fellowship untroubled like theirs, and made noble by a

  courtesy that has gone perhaps out of the world. I do not know in

  literature better friends and lovers. When one of the Fianna finds

  Osgar dying the proud death of a young man, and asks is it well

  with him, he is answered, "I am as you would have me be." The

  very heroism of the Fianna is indeed but their pride and joy in one

  another, their good fellowship. Goll, old and savage, and letting

  himself die of hunger in a cave because he is angry and sorry, can

  speak lovely words to the wife whose help he refuses. " 'It is best as

  it is,' he said, 'and I never took the advice of a woman east or west,

  and I never will take it. And oh, sweet-voiced queen,' he said,

  IH

  IRISH MYTHS AND LEGENDS

  'what ails you to be fretting after me? and remember now your silver and your gold , and your silks . . . and do not be crying tears after me , queen with the white hands,' he said, 'but remember

  your constant lover Aodh, son of the best woman of the world,

  that came from Spain asking for you, and that I fought on Corcaran-Dearg; and go to him now,' he said, 'for it is bad when a woman is without a good man. "'

  VI

  They have no asceticism, but they are more visionary than any

  ascetic, and their invisible life is but the life about them made

  more perfect and more lasting, and the invisible people are their

  own images in the water. Their gods may have been much besides

  this, for we know them from fragments of mythology picked out

  with trouble from a fantastic history running backward to Adam

  and Eve, and many things that may have seemed wicked to the

  monks who imagined that history, may have been altered or left

  out; but this they must have been essentially, for the old stories

  are confirmed by apparitions among the country-people to-day.

  The men of Dea fought against the mis-shapen Fomor, as Finn

  fights against the Cat-Heads and the Dog-Heads; and when they

  are overcome at last by men, they make themselves houses in the

  hearts of hills that are like the houses of men. When they call

  men to their houses and to their country Under-Wave they

  promise them all that they have upon earth, only in greater abundance. The god Midhir sings to Queen Etain in one of the most beautiful of the stories: "The young never grow old; the fields and

  the flowers are as pleasant to be looking at as the blackbird's

  eggs; warm streams of mead and wine flow through that country;

  there is no care or no sorrow on any person; we see others, but

  we ourselves are not seen. " These gods are indeed more wise and

  beau tiful than men; bu t men , when they are great men, are

  stronger than they are, for men are, as it were, the foaming tide-

  PREFACE

  19

  line of their sea. One remembers the Druid who answered, when

  some one asked him who made the world, "The Druids made it. "

  All was indeed but one life flowing everywhere, and taking one

  quality here, another there. It sometimes seems to one as if there

  is a kind of day and night of religion, and that a period when the

  influences are those that shape the world is followed by a period

  when the greater power is in influences that would lure the soul

  out of the world, out of the body. When Oisin is speaking with S.

  Patrick of the friends and the life he has outlived, he can but cry

  out constantly against a religion that has no meaning for him. He

  laments, and the country-people have remembered his words for

  centuries: "I will cry my fill, but not for God, but because Finn

  and the Fianna are not living. "

  VII

  Old writers had an admirable symbolism that attributed certain energies to the influence of the sun, and certain others to the lunar influence. To lunar influence belong all thoughts and emotions that were created by the community, by the common people, by nobody knows who, and to the sun all that came from

  the high disciplined or individual kingly mind. I myself imagine a

  marriage of the sun and moon in the arts I take most pleasure in;

  and now bride and bridegroom but exchange, as it were, full cups

  of gold and silver, and now they are one in a mystical embrace.

  From the moon come the folk-songs imagined by reapers and

  spinners out of the common impulse of their labour, and made

  not by putting words together, but by mixing verses and phrases,

  and the folk-tales made by the capricious mixing of incidents

  known to everybody in new ways, as one deals out cards, never

  getting the same hand twice over. When one hears some fine

  story, one never knows whether it has not been hazard that put

  the last touch of adventure. Such poetry, as it seems to me, desires

  an infinity of wonder or emotion, for where there is no individual

  20

  IRISH MYTHS AND LEGENDS

  mind there is no measurer-out, no marker-in of limits. The poor

  fisher has no possession of the world and no responsibility for it;

  and if he dreams of a love-gift better than the brown shawl that

  seems too common for poetry, why should he not dream of a

  glove made from �he skin of a bird, or shoes made from the skin

  of a fish , or a coat made from the glittering garment of the

  salmon? Was it not /Eschylus who said he but served up fragments from the banquet of Homer?-but Homer himself found the great banquet on an earthen floor and under a broken roof.

  We do not know who at the foundation of the world made the

  banquet for the first time, or who put the pack of cards into rough

  hands; but we do know that, unless those that have made many

  inventions are about to change the nature of poetry, we may have

  to go where Homer went if we are to sing a new song. Is it because all that is under the moon thirsts to escape out of bounds, to lose itself in some unbounded tidal stream, that the songs of

  the folk are mournful, and that the story of the Fianna, whenever

  the queens lament for their lovers, reminds us of songs that are

  still sung in country-places? Their grief, even when it is to be

  brief like Grania's, goes up into the waste places of the sky. But in

  supreme art or in supreme life there is the influence of the sun

  too, and the sun brings with it, as old writers tell us, not merely

  discipline but joy; for its discipline is not of the kind the multitudes impose upon us by their weight and pressure , but the expression of the individual soul turning itself into a pure
fire and

  imposing its own pattern, its own music, upon the heaviness and

  the dumbness that is in others and in itself. When we have drunk

  the cold cup of the moon's intoxication, we thirst for something

  beyond ourselves , and the mind flows outward to a natural

  immensity; but if we have drunk from the hot cup of the sun, our

  own fullness awakens, we desire little, for wherever one goes ones

  heart goes too; and if any ask what music is the sweetest, we can

  but answer, as Finn answered, "what happens." And yet the songs

  and stories that have come from either influence are a part, neither

  less than the other, of the pleasure that is the bride-bed of poetry.

  PREFACE

  2 1

  VIII

  Gaelic-speaking Ireland, because its art has been made, not by

  the artist choosing his material from wherever he has a mind to,

  but by adding a little to something which it has taken generations

  to invent, has always had a popular literature. One cannot say

  how much that literature has done for the vigour of the race, for

  one cannot count the hands its praise of kings and high-hearted

  queens made hot upon the sword-hilt, or the amorous eyes it

  made lustful for strength and beauty. One remembers indeed that

  when the farming people and the labourers of the towns made

  their last attempt to cast out England by force of arms they named

  themselves after the companions of Finn. Even when Gaelic has

  gone, and the poetry with it, something of the habit of mind

  remains in ways of speech and thought and "come-all-ye"s and

  poetical saying; nor is it only among the poor that the old thought

  has been for strength or weakness. Surely these old stories ,

  whether of Finn or Cuchulain, helped to sing the old Irish and

  the old Norman-Irish aristocracy to their end. They heard their

  hereditary poets and story-tellers, and they took to horse and died

  fighting against Elizabeth or against Cromwell; and when an English-speaking aristocracy had their place, it listened to no poetry indeed, but it felt about it in the popular mind an exacting and

  ancient tribunal, and began a play that had for spectators men

  and women that loved the high wasteful virtues. I do not think

  that their own mixed blood or the habit of their time need take

  all, or nearly all, credit or discredit for the impulse that made our

  modem gentlemen fight duels over pocket-handkerchiefs, and set

  out to play ball against the gates of Jerusalem for a wager, and

  scatter money before the public eye; and at last, after an epoch of

  such eloquence the world has hardly seen its like, lose their public spirit and their high heart and grow querulous and selfish as men do who have played life out not heartily but with noise and

  tumult. Had they understood the people and the game a little

  better, they might have created an aristocracy in an age that has

  22

  IRISH MYTHS AND LEGENDS

  lost the meaning of the word. When one reads of the Fianna, or of

  Cuchulain, or of some great hero, one remembers that the fine life

  is always a part played finely before fine spectators. There also

  one notices the hot cup and the cold cup of intoxication; and

  when the fine spectators have ended, surely the fine players grow

  weary, and aristocratic life is ended. When O'Connell covered with

  a dark glove the hand that had killed a man in the duelling field,

  he played his part; and when Alexander stayed his army marching

  to the conquest of the world that he might contemplate the beauty

  of a plane-tree, he played his part. When Osgar complained as he

  lay dying, of the keening of the women and the old fighting men,

  he too played his part; "No man ever knew any heart in me," he

  said, "but a heart of twisted horn, and it covered with iron; but

  the howling of the dogs beside me," he said, "and the keening of

  the old fighting men and the crying of the women one after another, those are the things that are vexing me. " If we would create a great community-and what other game is so worth the labour?

  -we must recreate the old foundations of life, not as they existed

  in that splendid misunderstanding of the eighteenth century, but

  as they must always exist when the finest minds and Ned the beggar and Seaghan the fool think about the same thing, although they may not think the same thought about it.

  IX

  When I asked the little boy who had shown me the pathway

  up the Hill of Allen if he knew stories of Finn and Oisin, he said

  he did not, but that he had often heard his grandfather telling

  them to his mother in Irish. He did not know Irish, but he was

  learning it at school, and all the little boys he knew were learning

  it. In a little while he will know enough stories of Finn and Oisin

  to tell them to his children some day. It is the owners of the land

  whose children might never have known what would give them

  so much happiness. But now they can read this book to their

  PREFACE

  23

  children, and it will make Slieve-na-man, Allen, and Benbulben,

  the great mountain that showed itself before me every day

  through all my childhood and was yet unpeopled, and half the

  country-sides of south and west, as populous with memories as

  are Dundealgan and Emain Macha and Muirthemne; and after a

  while somebody may even take them to some famous place and

  say, "This land where your fathers lived proudly and finely should

  be dear and dear and again dear" ; and perhaps when many names

  have grown musical to their ears, a more imaginative love will

  have taught them a better service.

  x

  I need say nothing about the translation and arrangement of

  this book except that it is worthy to be put beside "Cuchulain of

  Muirthemne. " Such books should not be commended by written

  words but by spoken words, were that possible, for the written

  words commending a book, wherein something is done supremely well, remain, to sound in the ears of a later generation, like the foolish sound of church bells from the tower of a church when

  every pew is full.

  WB. YEATS.

  PART ONE :

  T HE GODS

  26

  B O OK ON E :

  THE COMING OF THE

  TUATHA DE DANAAN

  CHAPTER I.

  THE FIGHT WITH THE FIRBOLGS

  It was in a mist the Tuatha de Danaan, the people of the gods of

  Dana, or as some called them, the Men of Dea, came through the

  air and the high air to Ireland.

  It was from the north they came; and in the place they came

  from they had four cities, where they fought their battle for learning: great Falias, and shining Gorias, and Finias, and rich Murias that lay to the south. And in those cities they had four wise men to

  teach their young men skill and knowledge and perfect wisdom:

  Senias in Murias; and Arias, the fair-haired poet, in Finias; and

  Urias of the noble nature in Gorias; and Morlas in Falias itself. And

  they brought from those four cities their four treasures: a Stone of

  Virtue from Falias, that was called the Lia Fail, the Stone of Destiny; and from Gorias they brought a Sword; and from Finias a Spear of Victory; and from Murias the fourth treasure, the Cauldron that no company ever
went away from unsatisfied.

  It was Nuada was king of the Tuatha de Danaan at that time,

  but Manannan, son of Lir, was greater again. And of the others

  that were chief among them were Ogma, brother to the king, that

  taught them writing, and Diancecht, that understood healing, and

  Neit, a god of battle, and Credenus the Craftsman, and Goibniu

  the Smith. And the greatest among their women were Badb, a battle goddess; and Macha, whose mast-feeding was the heads of men killed in battle; and the Morrigu, the Crow of Battle; and Eire

  and Fodla and Banba, daughters of the Dagda, that all three gave

  their names to Ireland afterwards; and Eadon, the nurse of poets;

  and Brigit, that was a woman of poetry, and poets worshipped

  her; for her sway was very great and very noble. And she was a

  THE COMING OF THE TUATHA DE DANAAN

  27

  woman of healing along with that, and a woman of smith's work,

  and it was she first made the whistle for calling one to another

  through the night. And the one side of her face was ugly, but the

  other side was very comely. And the meaning of her name was

  Breo-saighit, a fiery arrow. And among the other women there

  were many shadow-forms and great queens; but Dana, that was

  called the Mother of the Gods, was beyond them all.

  And the three things they put above all others were the plough

  and the sun and the hazel-tree, so that it was said in the time to

  come that Ireland was divided between those three, Coll the

  hazel, and Cecht the plough, and Grian the sun.

  And they had a well below the sea where the nine hazels of

  wisdom were growing; that is, the hazels of inspiration and of the

  knowledge of poetry. And their leaves and their blossoms would

  break out in the same hour, and would fall on the well in a

  shower that raised a purple wave. And then the five salmon that

  were waiting there would eat the nuts, and their colour would

  come out in the red spots of their skin, and any person that

  would eat one of those salmon would know all wisdom and all

  poetry. And there were seven streams of wisdom that sprang from

  that well and turned back to it again; and the people of many arts

  have all drank from that well.