4 Chapter Four: Irish Myth’s Genealogy
The Irish scholar Proinsias MacCana described the sources for Celtic religion as “fertile chaos” and the archaeologist Barry Cunliffe noted that “there is more, varied, evidence for Celtic religion than for any other example of Celtic life. The only problem is to assemble it in a systematic form which does not too greatly oversimplify the intricate texture of its detail.”
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
“Scholars have long lamented that Irish myth is not really a mythology in the usual Indo-European way: archaic elements have been inextricably interwoven with biblical and medieval material. This mythopoetic tendency accelerated remarkably in the late tenth and eleventh centuries, with the result that in this period ‘Irish mythology’ actually came into existence as a distinct cultural category. The great edifice of the national pseudohistory allotted to the gods their own era of eminence in the deep past, with a list of personnel and a clear timeline; it was at this point too that they acquired their lasting name, Túatha Dé Danann.
Ecclesiastical literati in the period had become more and more interested in the lore of the filid, and as they built up a narrative of the national past, they foraged from the professional poets’ genealogies, images, and ideas about the native gods. The filid in turn—anxious about losing their distinctiveness and being absorbed into clerical ranks—may increasingly have begun to use the gods to personify and allegorize aspects of their own intellectual curriculum, as well as to underscore the secular status of their profession.
The effect of the pseudohistory was paradoxical. On the one hand, it gave solidity to the fluid ontology of the gods by defining them as human magic-workers and tracing their descent from Noah. As intrinsically native figures, with no connection to the Bible, working the gods into the pseudohistory was a remarkable achievement; Ireland was now furnished with a new national myth that fused the natural and supernatural. On the other hand, the result was unwieldy and unstable, continuously expanding by the copious accretion of authorities.
The influence of the doctrines of Lebor Gabála on Irish letters, though substantial, was patchy. The idea that the gods had died out (or were among the damned) never took hold in most narrative genres, and some simply ignored it. The whole point of the synthetic history had been to connect the story of Ireland’s ancient past to that of the rest of the world, but the native god-peoples were unavoidably parochial: until the nineteenth century no one outside Ireland and Scotland took any notice of the Túatha Dé Danann. The twelfth-century Cambro-Norman cleric Gerald of Wales. . . sensibly asks how anything could be known about the fate of Cessair, because, after all, she and all her company drowned. ‘Perhaps some record of these events was found inscribed on stone or a tile, as we read was the case with the art of music before the Flood’, he drily comments. Gerald clearly had access to a chronology of the invasions because he describes Cessair, Partholón, Nemed, the Fir Bolg, and the Milesians in full. In contrast, he passes over the Túatha Dé Danann so quickly that one could miss them altogether: they are described as ‘another branch of the descendants of Nemedius’—Nemed—and that is it. All the adventures and achievements of the god-peoples are compressed into a single colourless clause. Gerald clearly felt the historical narrative of the Irish past was worth recording, but it seems he could summon up no interest in the doings of the Túatha Dé. To an outsider, the Irish gods were so native as to be beneath notice—a pattern that prevailed for centuries to come” (Williams).
Irish mythical and legendary literature falls into three main divisions:
- The Mythological Cycle (Book of Invasions, compiled in 9th and 12th century by monks)
- The coming of Partholan into Ireland (and the defeat of the evil Fomorians)
- The coming of Nemed into Ireland
- The coming of the Firbolgs into Ireland
- The invasion of the Tuatha De Danaan (People of Dana)
- The invasion of the Milesians (Sons of Miled) from Spain and their conquest of the People of Dana
- The Ultonian/Ulster or Conorian Cycle (Tain Bo Cualigné, compiled in 8th century)
- Cuchulainn, Maeve, Deirdre, etc.
- The Ossianic or Fenian Cycle (3rd century)
- Finn mac Cumhaill
- Oisin/Ossian, son of Finn Mac Cumhaill
Create timeline:
Newgrange in Boyne Valle
St. Patrick’s birth/enslavement/return to Ireland
Cormac’s Chapel
Round Tower at Cashel
Cahir Castle
Easter Rebellion
Partition of Ireland
UCC
Honan Chapel