PREFACE.

The ‘Foray of Queen Meave,’ the longest of the following poems, is founded on and in substance represents the far-famed ‘Tain bo Cuailgné,’ a tale regarded by many Irish scholars as the great Irish epic of ancient times, by others as a part only of some larger epic of which numerous portions remain, but which unhappily found no Pisistratus to combine them into a whole. The lamented Professor Eugene O’Curry has expressed his opinion that ‘in the time of Senchan and St. Columba’ (that is in the sixth century) ‘it was generally believed that Fergus was the original writer of the tale.’[1] ‘On this supposition it must have existed in a rudimental form a little before the Christian Era. It was lost for several centuries, but recovered in the sixth, when, according to the legend recorded by Professor O’Curry, St. Kiaran wrote down the tale “in a book which he had made from the hide of vihis pet cow—a book called the Leabhar na h-Uidré.”’[2] Elsewhere that great authority states that a large portion of this work is preserved in a copy ‘written at the same

Clonmacnoise by a famous scribe named Maelmire, who was killed there in 1106.’[3] That copy of St. Kiaran’s version is still extant in the Royal Irish Academy, as well as a copy of a later version included in the ‘Book of Leinster,’ a collection compiled about 1150. Translations of both these versions have been made by Professor O’Looney, and to both I have had access through his kindness. These two versions differ much from each other, the earlier being the simpler and stronger, while the later is the richer in detail. To the sixth century belong not a few Irish works of unquestioned authenticity, such as the elegy written by Dallan Forgaill on the death of St. Columba, A.D. 592, found also in the Leabhar na h-Uidré. To an earlier period, the fifth century, belongs the tract entitled the ‘Battle of Magh Tuireadh,’ or Moytura. Several poems are confidently referred to Dubthach, chief Bard of King Laeghaire, St. Patrick’s earliest convert at the Royal Court; and to the same century belongs the Senchas Mor, or Compilation

of Laws. The ‘Tripartite Life of St. Patrick’ viiis attributed by Colgan and others to the sixth century, because it mentions as still living many persons known to have died before the close of that age. Books are recorded as having been in the hands of the Druids before St. Patrick’s time, or soon after, such as the ‘Cuilmenn,’ the ‘Sailtair of Tara,’ attributed to the third century, the ‘Book of St. Mochta,’ one of St. Patrick’s early disciples, the ‘Book of Cuana,’ &c. There is consequently nothing to surprise us in the circumstance that the ‘Tain bo Cuailgné’ belongs to a period so early. The following poem, written of course in the character of an old Irish bard, is not a translation except as regards some passages which occur chiefly in Fragment III. It is not in the form of translation that an ancient Irish tale of any considerable length admits of being rendered in poetry. What is needed is to select from the original such portions as are at once the most essential to the story, and the most characteristic, reproducing them in a

condensed form, and taking care that the necessary additions bring out the idea, and contain nothing that is not in the spirit, of the original.

An attempt to introduce to modern readers a work so ancient, and connected with allusions so unfamiliar, seems to call for some remarks on the character of that work, and on the age which produced it. The ‘Tain bo viiiCuailgné’ is especially valued, not only for its poetic merits, but for the light which it throws upon early Irish customs, such as the use of the war-chariot, abandoned, apparently, as early as the second century. It marks strikingly the mutual relations of Ireland’s different kingdoms, classes, and races. It is the amplest voice from Ireland’s ‘Heroic Age,’ thus belonging to the first, as the so-called ‘Ossianic’ poems belong to the second cycle of ancient Irish song. The latter cycle derives its name from the circumstance that, though little of it can be traced back to Ossian, it records the warriors of the Fianna Eireann who were his contemporaries, and flourished in the second century. Yet even they, scarcely excepting Diarmid, Oscar, and Fionn himself, though the terror of Ireland’s provincial kings till their power,

rendered too exacting by long success, was extinguished by a single fatal reverse, were never counted equal to the mighty ones of her earlier time.

The Heroic Age had reached its highest greatness shortly before the Christian Era. It was then that Fergus Mac Roy reigned over Uladh, now Ulster; but he renounced his throne, incensed at seeing his wily stepson preferred to him, and was exiled because he had revenged the murder of Usnach’s sons. Among the ancient Irish heroes he was the popular favourite, ixprincely in all his ways, magnanimous, truthful, just, and not the less majestic because a man of mirth. His supplanter, Conor Conchobar, was his opposite in all things, a man more sagacious, but perfidious and implacable. At that time lived also Conal Carnach, and his foster-son Cuchullain immeasurably the greatest of all Ireland’s legendary warriors. His character is one so consistent and so original that it suffices by itself to stamp the age which conceived it as high among the most poetic of the world. Cuchullain has been called the Achilles of early Erin; yet with the swiftness, the fierce impulse, and indomitable might that belonged to the Greek, he blends in perfect harmony qualities that remind us

more of Hector. Like him, he is the defender of the city, more inspired by patriotic zeal than even by his love of glory: like him, he is generous, modest, forbearing to the weak. It is to the strong only among his country’s foes that he is unpitying; and even in his dealings with them there is no ferocity. They have to die, and he slays them. He is reverent to both his parents—fiercely as they were at variance with each other—to age, to woman; and about him, even in his sterner moods, there plays often the joyous spirit of the child. His devotion to Ferdīa is tenderer than that of Achilles to Patroclus; but on him there has fallen a sterner duty. xHe has not to avenge that friend, but to encounter and lay him low when the invader of Uladh. The one blemish in Cuchullain’s life, his desertion of Aifné, his boyhood’s love in Scatha’s Island, for a rival whose chief attraction was perhaps that she could only be won by force of arms, is an episode not included within the scope of the Tain. His lifelong aspiration was fulfilled.

A few years after the repulse of Meave, while the other warriors of Ulster were engaged on an invasion of Alba (Scotland), Cuchullain alone remained behind for the protection of his country. Suddenly the forces of all the other kingdoms fell again upon the northern land, stirred up by ancient hatred, and led on by a remnant of Cailitin’s ‘Magic Clan.’ Cuchullain again held them at bay till the return of the Ulster army: but it returned only in time to avenge his death, still in the prime of youth, and to complete his work.

It has been remarked that in the characters of Homer—so absolutely true are they to nature—the qualities which bear the same name are yet essentially different qualities; as, for example, courage as illustrated in Achilles and Ajax, in Diomed and in Hector. This mark of truthfulness strikes us at once in the Tain. The kingly valour of Fergus, thoughtful and serene, has nothing in common with the animal fearlessness of Lok xiMac Favesh, or the blind patriotic fury of Ketherne, and but little with that of Ferdīa. In Cuchullain, courage is an inspiration descending from above upon a being essentially emotional, and though always brave, yet sensitive and capable of awe. We smile at the boundless admiration lavished on strength by all early races; nor shall we understand it aright while we suppose that it was, indeed, directed to mere physical qualities. This was not so. Body and soul were not then thus carefully discriminated; the heroic deed was attributed, not to the hand alone, but to the warrior himself, his heart and his brain; and not to the man only, but to some

divine aid, his because deserved by him. Cuchullain is the chief example of heroism thus conceived. He is slender as a maid; but in the crisis of battle, when his spirit kindles, his stature becomes gigantic. This close connection between the material and the spiritual explains the rapidity with which the wounds of these legendary heroes heal. Should there ever come a time when the spiritual is the chief object of man’s reverence, the present adulation of mere intellect will be looked on as we regard the enthusiasm bestowed on martial might in days gone by.

The imaginative literature of early races wears a rough exterior; but as we are told of a ‘latent heat,’ so xiithere exists a latent thoughtfulness; and it is often found unexpectedly in the depths of a tale which on its surface reveals no disposition to deal with hard problems. The reader of the Tain will be reminded of this truth in proportion as he understands the relative position of the Irish kingdoms at the time it describes. Connaught was the most barbaric as well as the poorest of them all; while Ulster had even then reached that superiority in strength and wealth, and in civilisation both civil and military, which for so many centuries she retained. Her king was the subtlest and most powerful of the Irish kings; and her celebrated ‘Red Branch Knights’ were the most gallant order of Irish chivalry. The more astonishing, consequently, was the utter prostration, a defeat without a battle, into which she so suddenly fell. Without any apparent cause her strength changed to weakness, and her wisdom to folly. It was the rebuke of her pride. At the critical moment of

her fortunes her great ones began to babble and talk nonsense. All that their country had been they forgot; and the near future they looked on through what the Tain calls ‘a mist of imbecility,’ and attributes to witchcraft. Equally striking is the change which takes place when the spell is reversed. The inferior nation can neither use nor retain the advantages accidentally and xiiidishonestly gained, and defeat succeeds to triumph. I know of nothing else in poetry which resembles this. Possibly it might be easier to find a parallel in history.

The Tain, a work which, while abounding in passion, distinctly includes an element of humour and irony, suffers nothing from a revulsion so strange. It ends with a great event, a battle and an overthrow; and if that catastrophe is but a ‘conclusion inconclusive,’ and no results remain behind, in this very circumstance lies a special significance of the work. To this issue the whole leads up, and the reader is not taken by surprise. Throughout the tale he finds the same strange mixture of ardent affections with causeless hatreds; of quick sympathies with injustice and ferocity; of high daring with a blundering the consequence not of incapacity, but of tortuous acuteness. Everywhere he finds the contrast between the emotional in excess and an all but complete absence of discipline, whether moral or mental. Such characteristics may last for centuries, but the end is ever the same—exertions that amaze, and abortive results. The only cause for surprise is that a moral so grave should have been unconsciously bequeathed by an ancient work,

written to amuse, not instruct. The explanation is that a poem true to the time and to the characters it commemorates, teaches by necessity what they teach.

xivThe relation in which St. Kiaran stood to the Tain illustrates that of the Christian priesthood to the imaginative traditions of Ireland. The living bards and the clergy could not but be rivals, but it was often a friendly rivalship; and as regards the bards of past centuries, there was no room for jealousy. By degrees the clergy took an interest in the ancient tales, and became attached to what they befriended. Amid many extravagances they detected doubtless a significance which escapes the half-closed eye of a cynic shrewdness. Occasionally they added to old legends an interpolation which might have surprised those who had first sung them. Thus we read that Cuchullain, when going forth to his last battle, heard a choir of angels singing above that hill on which the cathedral of Armagh was destined one day to stand; that he was pleased by the anthem, and that his pleasure in it was accepted as a homage of good-will. Elsewhere he is represented as fleeting in his war-car, after death, above his beloved Emania. He sings,—

yet he ends with a warning to the race of man, and announces the day of judgment.

xvThe teachers of those days doubtless believed that religion could afford to be indulgent towards minstrels who had been true to such lesser lights as they possessed. Paganism in those days was too little insidious to be dangerous. There is a paganism in literature much more formidable than theirs; but it had not then manifested itself. It belongs to that corrupted civilisation which uses against Christianity those intellectual and imaginative gifts, as well as that social and scientific progress, which it owes to Christianity alone. It belongs also to that merely conventional civilisation which has scanty dealings either with nature or with the supernatural. Nature, even in periods branded as ‘barbaric,’ has qualities that indicate a sympathy with the divine; for it has ardent affections, a simple refinement, singleness of aim, a marvellous self-sacrifice, and those unblunted sensibilities, both of love and reverence, without which the loftiest revealed truths cease to have a meaning. The heroic at its highest stretches forth its hands to the

spiritual; and its very deficiencies are a confession that it needs to be supplemented by a something higher than itself. We must not confound the ‘savage’ state which has fallen beneath the dominion of blind sense, with the ‘barbaric’ which has not yet ascended into the clearer day, but which in its twilight has a gleam of coming xvimorn. If Ireland, once converted to the faith, filled the world with her missions, there must have existed in her previously a thoughtfulness as well as a fearlessness each of which found its way at last into the nobler fields of enterprise. It is not unlikely that the apostle from Clonmacnoise and Iona often cheered his way over the Northumbrian moors or through the Teuton forest with a ballad about Cuchullain as well as with a Latin hymn of Sedulius.

The mode in which the pagan legend sometimes put on a Christian interpretation is especially illustrated in the ‘Children of Lir.’ Even in its later form that tale is said to be anterior to the year 1000; but as an oral tradition it probably existed, like the social and political conditions it records, centuries before the Christian Era. A narrative, at first but the record of some dreadful crime in a heathen household, changed by degrees into a mystic hymn on the sanctity of childhood, its capacity for the heavenly hope, its obedience, endurance, and fidelity, its power through entire simplicity to find, in the strangest affliction, purification only and a whiter innocence. Under the trials of nine centuries those sufferers alone retain a perpetual childhood; their father’s house, and the still lake before it, stand ever before their imagination; and the burden of the years xviibut falls on them for a moment, to be flung aside for ever. Their ‘songs in the night season,’ the swan-song of a long dying, wafted over unstable waters for the solace

of the strong ones dwelling on the land, imply that the martial bards of old knew in part the higher and serener function of poetry. It is significant that while the sentenced belong to the earlier Tuatha de Dannan race, the witch, while imprecating upon them the curse, addresses them thus:—‘Ye of the white faces, of the stammering Gael.’ Apparently some bard of a later day resolved that these children of an unblessed stock should be a prophetic anticipation of the Gael whose boast was his faith. There was to be again a Ruth out of Moab, one not gleaning amid the fields of promise, but scattering their earliest seed; a Gentile with a faith not found in Israel, yet an Israelite indeed. A prose translation of this tale, among the earliest at once and the most signally modified of the Irish legends, was made by my early friend, Gerald Griffin,[4] a man who, when certain to attain the first place among Irish popular writers, passed it by for a humble one among the ‘Christian Brothers.’

The ‘Children of Lir’ is perhaps the chief memorial of that Tuatha de Dannan race, which had held sway for two centuries before the invasion of the Gael, and yet were xviiithemselves regarded as intruders by the Firbolgs. Lir and Bove, Tuathan kings, were separated by seven centuries from ‘Conn of the Hundred Fights.’ The great names of Tyr-Owen and Tyr-Conel had not risen; and 1,800 years had to pass before the foundations were laid of those abbeys and castles now in ruins. Yet then, too, there were monuments. The Tuathan might have pointed out to his Gaelic conqueror a cairn which still remains on the coast of Sligo, that of Eochy, King of the Firbolgs. On the banks of the Boyne he might have made boast of a huge sepulchral mound still shown to the traveller, the tomb of Lewy, in whose veins the blood of the Tuatha was blended with that of the earlier Fomorian pirates. We know not whether the Dun-Aengus had yet lifted its ponderous masses on Aran Island; but two centuries were to go by before Queen Macha traced the foundations of Emania, and five before

Queen Meave built the palace of Cruachan. It is remarkable that while numerous Firbolg monuments, and in some places the race itself, survive, the mediæval genealogies include no descent from the Tuatha de Dannan. They are described as an unwarlike race that worked in mines, and practised magical arts—arts through which, when dispossessed by a stronger foe, xixthey had ‘retired into invisibility,’ living an immortal life among hills and under lakes.

The ‘Children of Lir,’ and the ‘Sons of Usnach’[5] are two of those tales which in Ireland were always known as ‘the Three Sorrows of Song.’ Critics who regard the ‘Tain bo Cuailgné’ but as a single fragment of a great Irish epic, include the second among the remaining fragments. To me it seems that each work is structurally complete in itself; but that, in spirit, the two are strikingly unlike, the ‘Tain’ being essentially epic, while the ‘Sons of Usnach’ is a tragedy cast in a narrative form. The idea of fate enters into it as strongly as into any Greek play, its heroine, the ‘Babe of Destiny,’ being, of all those who have a part in the tale, the one least subdued by that destiny which she strives in vain to avert. Those who charge the Irish race with a fatalism supposed to be a mark of its Eastern origin, may point to this tale as a proof that the characteristic is at least an ancient one.