IRELAND
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IRELAND
all those sapis is fho "Tdin Bo Chiiailgne", or "Cat-
tle-Haiti of Coolcy", a district in the County of
Louth. It gives a full account of the struggle be-
tween Connacht and Ulster, and the hero of the
piece, as indeed of the whole lied Branch cycle, is the
youthful Cuchulainn, the Hector of IrelancI, the most
chivalrous of enemies. This long saga contains many
episodes drawn together anil formed into a single
whole, a kind of Irish Iliad, and the state of society
which it describes from the point of culture-develop-
ment is considerably older and more primitive than
that of the Greek epic. The number of stories that
belong to this cycle is considerable. Standish Hayes
O'Grady has reckoned ninety-si.x (appendix to Elea-
nor Hull's "Cuchulain Saga"), of which eighteen
seem to be now wholly lost, and many others very
much abbreviated, though they were all doubtless at
one time told at considerable length.
After the Red Branch or heroic cycle we find a third very comprehensive and even more popular l)ody of romance woven round Finn Mac Cumhail (Cool), his son Oscar, his grandson Oisin or Ossian, Conn of the Hundred Battles King of Ireland, his son Art the Lonely, and his grand.son Cormac of the Liffey, in the second and thinl centuries. This cycle of romance is usually called the Fenian cycle, because it deals so largely with Finn Mac Cumhail and his Fenian militia. These, according to the Irish his- torians, were a body of Irish janissaries maintained by the Irish kings for the purpose of guarding their coasts and figliting their battles, but they ended by fighting the king himself anil were destroyed in the fam- ous <■»(/! (or battle of) (iubhra (Cowra). As the heroic cycle is often called the Ulster cycle, so this is also known as the Leinster cycle of sagas, because it may have had its origin, as MacNeill has suggested, amongst the Galeoin, a non-Milesian tribe and sub-
i'ect race, who dwelt round the Hill of Allen in ..einster. This whole body of romance is of later growth or rather expresses a much later state of civilization than the Cuchulainn stories. There is no mention of fighting in chariots, of the Hero's Bit, or of many other characteristics which mark the antiquity of the L'lster cycle. Very few pieces be- longing to the Finn story are found in Old Irish, and the great mass of texts is of Middle and Late Irish growth. The extension of the story to all the Gaelic- speaking parts of the kingdom is placed by MacNeill between the years 400 and 700; up to this time it was (as the product of a vassal race) propagated only orally. Various parts of the Finn saga seem to have developed in different quarters of the country, that about Diarmuid of the Love Spot in South Mimster, and that about GoU the son of Morna in Connacht. Certain it is that this cycle was by far the most pop- ular and widely spread of the three, being familiarly known in every part of Ireland and of ( iaelic-speaking Scotland even to the present day. It devclopeil also in a direction of its own, for, though none of the heroic tales are wholly in verse, yet the number of O.ssianic epopees, ballads, and ]3oems is enormous, amounting probably to some 50,000 lines, mostly in the more modern language.
Early Chn'slian Literature. — Perhaps no country that ever adopted Christianity was so thoroughly and rapi<lly perinealed and even .saturated with its lan- guage and conceptions as was Ireland. It adopted and made its own in secular life scores and hundreds of words originally introduced by the Church for ecclesiastical puriioses. Even to the present day we find in Irish words like prfi/, a kiss, borrowed from the Latin for "[the kiss] of peace", pac[ix], Old Irish pdc; the word for rain, bdistcach, is from bap- tizare, and meant originally "the water of baptism". From th(^ same root comes baitheas, "the crown of the head ", i. c. the baptized part. A common word for warrior, or hero, laich, now laoch, is simply
from laicus, a layman. The Latin language was, of
course, the one used for religious purposes, both in
prose and verse, for some time after the introduction
of Christianity. In it were written the earliest
hymns; Patrick used it in his "Confession", as did
Adamnan in his "Life of Columcille". But already
by the middle of the eighth century the native lan-
guage had largely displaced it all over Ireland as a
medimn for religious thought, for homily, for litanies,
books of devotion, and the lives of saints. We find
the Irish language used in a large religious literature,
much of which is native, while some of it represents
lost Latin originals which are now known to us only
from the Irish translations. One interesting de-
velopment of this class of writing is the vision-
literature beginning with the vision of St. Fursa,
which is given at some length by Bede, and of which
Sir Francis Palgrave states that "tracing the course
of thought upwards we have no difficulty in deducing
the poetic genealogy of Dante's Inferno to the Milesian
Fursceus". These "visions" were very popular in
Ireland, and so numerous that they gave rise to the
parody, the twelfth-century "Vision of Mac Con-
glinne". More important than these, however, are
the lives of the saints, because many of them, dating
back to a very remote period, throw a great deal of
light upon the manners and customs of the early
Irish. In the first half of the seventeenth century
Brother Michael O'Clery, a Franciscan, travelled
roimd Ireland and made copies of between thirty and
forty lives of Irish saints, which are still preserved in
the Burgundian Library at Brussels. Nine, at least,
exist elsewhere in ancient vellums. A part of one of
them, the voyage of St. Brendan, spread through all
Europe, but the Latin version is much more com-
plete than any existing Irish one, the original having
probably been lost.
Irish Historical Literature. — Owing to the nature of the case, and considering the isolation of Ireland, it is extremely difficidt, or rather impossible, to procure independent foreign testimony to the truth of the Irish annals. But, although such testimony is denied us, yet there haiijiily exists another kind of evidence to which we may appeal with comparative confidence. This is notliing li'ss than the records of natural phe- nomena as reported in the annals, for if it can be shown by calculating liackward, as modern science has enabled us to do, that such natural phenomena as the appearance of comets or the occurrence of eclipses are recorded to the day and hour by the annalists, then we can also say with something like certainty that these phenomena were recorded at the time of their appearance by writers who personally observed them, and whose writings must have been actually consulted and seen by these later annalists whose books we now possess. If we take, let us say, the "Annals of Ulster", which treat of Ireland and Irish history from about the year 444, but of which the written copy dates only from the fifteenth century, we find that they contain from the year 496 to 884 as many as eighteen records of eclipses and comets, and all these agree exactly to the day and hour with the calculations of modern astronomers. How im- possible it is to keep such records unless written memoranda are made of them at the time by eye- witn(\sses is shown by the fact that Bede, born in ()75, in recording the great solar ecli])se which took place only eleven years before his own birth, is yet two days astray in his date; whili^ on the other hand the "Annals of Ulster " give, not only the correct day, but the correct hour, tlius showing that their compiler, Cathal Maguire, had access either to an original, or a cojiy of an original, account by an eyewitness. Whenever any side-lights from an external quarter have been thrown upon the Irish aimals, cither from Cymric, Saxon, or Continental sources, they have always tended to show their accuracy. We may take
