How the Irish Saved Civilization

by Thomas Cahill

  In a word, a formidable opponent. Blithe exaggeration is a regular feature of Irish heroic literature, a convention as enjoyable to its intended audience as the exaggerations of a sportscaster to a Super Bowl audience. As in so many passages from the Tain, this one yields up a vivid miniature of the period—in the near-Homeric simile describing a warm and welcoming hostel on a winter’s evening. More than this, we glimpse something of the emotional temper of these people and the high pitch of feeling at which their lives were lived. I do not question for a second that the warp-spasm was a real experience, keenly felt by its subject and plainly observable to the opposing army. Anyone who has ever felt (or been the object of) real rage can understand the distortions described in this passage. As, I think, can anyone who has experienced terror: what a perfect ritual for dealing with the warrior’s own terror, as the booming of the heart within his breast is transformed into “the baying of a watch-dog at its feed” and he himself is transformed from ordinary mortal into killing machine:

  [Cuchulainn then] went into the middle of them and beyond, and mowed down great ramparts of his enemies’ corpses, circling completely around the armies three times, attacking them in hatred. They fell sole to sole and neck to headless neck, so dense was that destruction. He circled them three times more in the same way, and left a bed of them six deep in a great circuit, the soles of three to the necks of three in a circle round the camp…. Any count or estimate of the rabble who fell there is unknown, and unknowable. Only the names of the chiefs have been counted…. In this great Carnage on Murtheimne Plain Cuchulainn slew one hundred and thirty kings, as well as an uncountable horde of dogs and horses, women and boys and children and rabble of all kinds. Not one man in three escaped without his thighbone or his head or his eye being smashed, or without some blemish for the rest of his life. And when the battle was over Cuchulainn left without a scratch or a stain on himself, his helper or either of his horses.

  More often than not, Cuchulainn reminds us of a comic book hero. The only audience likely to be amazed by exploits like these today would be preadolescent boys—but then in early stories like the Tain, we touch the imaginative childhood of the human race. Even the hero’s gear suggests such a connection. Here, for instance, is the description of Cuchulainn’s chariot:

  When the spasm had run through the high hero Cuchulainn he stepped into his sickle war-chariot that bristled with points of iron and narrow blades, with hooks and hard prongs, and heroic frontal spikes, with ripping instruments and tearing nails on its shafts and straps and loops and cords. The body of the chariot was spare and slight and erect, fitted for the feats of a champion, with space for the lordly warrior’s eight weapons, speedy as the wind or as a swallow or a deer darting over the level plain. The chariot was settled down on two fast steeds, wild and wicked, neat-headed and narrow bodied, with slender quarters and roan breast, firm in hoof and harness—a notable sight in the trim chariot-shafts. One horse was lithe and swift-leaping, high-arched and powerful, long-bodied and with great hooves. The other flowing-maned and shining, slight and slender in hoof and heel. In that style, then, he drove out to find his enemies.

  How these people would have loved the Batmobile! But while they are hypnotized by physical display, calculation is beyond them. The numbers of the dead—as of the living—are considerably inflated: nothing like a real accounting is attempted. These counts are not dissimilar to the ages of the centuries-old patriarchs found in the Book of Genesis. All the storyteller really wants to say is that the number of dead was astonishingly large—or that Methuselah lived a very long time.

  Throughout the early centuries of our era, human settlements were far smaller than they are today. The population of a great city or a small country could be counted in the thousands, and between the settled places lay unpeopled wildernesses, owned by no one in particular, which offered perils to conventional travelers but sanctuaries for the dispossessed. When Medb and Ailil call for their pigs and cattle, these are brought in from the “woods and wastes”—the no-man’s-lands, the places in between.

  No character in the Tain is drawn as perceptively as Medb. She is so full of life and color that even Cuchulainn seems pale beside her. When Fingin the Healer comes to the sorely wounded Cethern, he points to Cethern’s largest wound: “A vain, arrogant woman gave you that wound.”

  “I believe you are right,” replies Cethern. “A tall, fair, long-faced woman with soft features came at me. She had a head of yellow hair, and two gold birds on her shoulders. She wore a purple cloak folded about her, with five hands’ breadth of gold on her back. She carried a light, stinging, sharp-edged lance in her hand, and she held an iron sword with a woman’s grip over her head—a massive figure.”

  The “massive figure” of Medb dominates the Tain as does no other woman in any epic we have left to us. In the Iliad Helen makes her cameo appearance; in the Aeneid Dido has an interesting supporting role. But the only women in classical literature who impel the story forward are to be found in Greek drama: Clytemnestra, Antigone, Medea. (There are ways in which the Tain seems closer to drama than to Homeric epic: it is full of dialogue and short on poetry—which appears only occasionally and, for the most part, in archaic incantations not unlike the choruses of Greek plays.)

  The Greek drama of the fifth century B.C. grew out of the seasonal liturgies of an agricultural people and magnified the conflicts of their social life—thus the necessity of significant female characters. But one cannot imagine a woman in Greece’s heroic age—that is, three or four centuries before the dramatists, in the period of Greece’s early development most comparable to that of the Tain—standing on the Trojan battlefield or traveling with Odysseus. Just as unthinkable would be a woman traveling with Aeneas. At the end of the Tain, its ostensible moral is uttered by the vaguely omniscient Fergus: “We followed the rump of a misguiding woman. It is the usual thing for a herd led by a mare to be strayed and destroyed.” Medb does not reappear after this judgment on her, but even this “last word” seems ontologically overshadowed by her personality.

  Nor is she an exception in this literature. Cuchulainn is trained in battlecraft by three women, each more extraordinary than the one before. The god of war, mentioned briefly in the Tain, is put in the shade by the three goddesses of war, who regularly make the scene and stir things up. (One of these, Badb, is mentioned in the description of Cuchulainn’s warpspasm.) Derdriu, pledged to Conchobor, the Ulster king, runs off with Noisiu and his brothers—the sons of Uisliu—only to be tracked down and recaptured, as Noisiu is slain. Though she submits to Conchobor, Derdriu never smiles again. Conchobor, out of spite, decides to share her with Eogan mac Durthacht, the king of Fernmag, who to win favor with Conchobor had killed Noisiu—not in a fair fight but through trickery. “They set out the next day for the fair of Macha. She was behind Eogan in the chariot. She had sworn that two men alive in the world together would never have her.

  “‘This is good, Derdriu,’ Conchobor said. ‘Between me and Eogan you are a sheep eyeing two rams.’

  “A big block of stone was in front of her. She let her head be driven against the stone, and made a mass of fragments of it, and she was dead.”

  A suicide, all right, but nothing like Dido’s. These are all women who, in life and death, exhibit the power of their will and the strength of their passion. Here is part of Derdriu’s lament for Noisiu, spoken to the royal musicians who had come to cheer her up:

  Sweet in your sight the fiery stride

  of raiding men returned to Emain.

  More nobly strode the three proud

  sons of Uisliu toward their home:

  Noisiu bearing the best mead

  —I would wash him by the fire—

  Ardan, with a stag or a boar,

  Anle, shouldering his load.

  The son of Nes [i.e., King Conchobor], battle-proud,

  drinks, you say, the choicest mead.

  Choicer still—a brimming sea—

  I have taken fr
equently.

  Modest Noisiu would prepare

  a cooking-pit in the forest floor.

  Sweeter then than any meat

  the son of Uisliu’s, honey sweet.

  Though for you the times are sweet

  with pipers and with trumpeters,

  I swear today I can’t forget

  that I have known far sweeter airs.

  …

  Noisiu: his grave-mound is made

  and mournfully accompanied.

  The highest hero—and I poured

  the deadly drink when he died.

  His cropped gold fleece I loved,

  and fine form—a tall tree.

  Alas, I needn’t watch today,

  nor wait for the son of Uisliu.

  I loved the modest, mighty warrior,

  loved his fitting, firm desire,

  loved him at daybreak as he dressed

  by the margin of the forest.

  Those blue eyes that melted women,

  and menaced enemies, I loved:

  then, with our forest journey done,

  his chanting through the dark woods.

  I don’t sleep now,

  nor redden my fingernails.

  What have I to do with welcomes?

  The son of Indel will not come.

  The tenacious persistence of certain patterns and emotions in the Irish literary tradition skirts the incredible. Here is part of another lament, composed by another woman for her murdered husband—eighteen centuries after Derdriu!

  My love and my delight,

  The day I saw you first

  Beside the markethouse

  I had eyes for nothing else

  And love for none but you.

  …

  You gave me everything.

  There were parlours whitened for me

  Bedrooms painted for me

  Ovens reddened for me,

  Loaves baked for me,

  Joints spitted for me,

  Beds made for me

  To take my ease on flock

  Until the milking time

  And later if I pleased.

  …

  My love and my fortune

  ’Tis an evil portion

  To lay for a giant—

  A shroud and a coffin—

  For a big-hearted hero

  Who fished in the hill-streams

  And drank in bright halls

  With white-breasted women.

  …

  My rider of the bright eyes,

  What happened you yesterday?

  I thought you in my heart,

  When I bought you your fine clothes,

  A man the world could not slay.

  What happened to the rider of the bright eyes is that he was shot dead by a grasping Englishman one night in 1773, because he had refused to sell his splendid mare for the paltry offer of five pounds. By this time, English occupiers had enacted the anti-Catholic Penal Laws; among many injustices, these forbade a Catholic Irishman from owning a horse worth more than that sum. The slain man was Art O’Leary, an officer in the army of Maria Theresa of Austria and scion of one of the last noble Catholic families to survive in Ireland. (As a Catholic, he could not receive an Irish military commission.) The poet, his wife, was Dark Eileen O’Connell, an aunt of Daniel O’Connell, who fifty-seven years later would force Catholic Emancipation on the English Parliament, becoming a kind of Irish Catholic Martin Luther King. Her lament is almost the last great poem to be written in the Irish language, just as the Gaelic order and the old nobility that traced itself back to the time of Medb and Ailil sank beneath the waves of English oppression.

  Are not the two laments remarkably similar in both imagery and feeling? Derdriu belongs to a simpler time: her excited admiration for the body of her lover, who roasts game for her in their forest shelter, is frank and pure. Dark Eileen is more refined: her husband prepares an entire household for her (with some of the delicacy of an English nursery rhyme), and the sexual feeling is less direct. Both cast a watchful eye on other females! But the strength of Eileen’s connection to prehistoric Derdriu becomes especially evident as one searches in vain through eighteenth-century English literature by women to find anything so frank and passionate as “The Lament for Art O’Leary.” Eileen does not destroy herself directly as did her ancient counterpart, but she comes from the same hard, unbending stock:

  ’Tis known to Jesus Christ

  Nor cap upon my head,

  Nor shift upon my back,

  Nor shoe upon my foot,

  Nor gear in all my house,

  Nor bridle for the mare

  But I will spend at law;

  And I’ll go oversea

  To plead before the King,

  And if the King be deaf*

  I’ll settle things alone

  With the black-blooded rogue

  That killed my man on me.

  Art O’Leary lies buried in the ruined nave of Kilcrea Abbey in County Cork. These words, carved in modern English on his tomb, bring us back to prehistoric Ireland:

  LO ARTHUR LEARY

  GENROUS HANDSOME BRAVE

  SLAIN IN HIS BLOOM

  LIES IN THIS HUMBLE GRAVE

  The three adjectives—“genrous, handsome, brave”—used to describe the murdered man are a summation of the Iron Age moral code, a code that shines out clearly in all early literature (whether Gilgamesh, the Iliad, or the Tain) and that mysteriously survived in Ireland long after its oblivion in more sophisticated civilizations—and that endures to some extent even to this day.

  Recall Medb’s boastful self-description: “I outdid [all my sisters] in grace and giving and battle and warlike combat.” “Grace”: therefore, she is handsome (or beautiful). “Giving”: therefore, she is generous. “Battle and warlike combat”: therefore, she is brave. Consider the high standards she set for her husband: “the absence of meanness and jealousy and fear.” “Meanness” is the opposite of generosity; “fear” is the opposite of bravery. “Jealousy,” though not precisely the logical opposite of handsomeness, is eternally linked to it in hopeless conflict: a wife’s beauty inevitably provokes the insecure husband to mindless jealousy—not of his wife but of his possible rivals.

  But there is also an unnamed virtue, hidden in these trinities: loyalty or faithfulness. Dark Eileen would have been unlikely to carve “genrous, faithful, brave”: O’Leary, a handsome figure in his mid-twenties, was known to enjoy, as Eileen herself wrote, drinking “in bright halls with white-breasted women.” Nor is faithfulness a virtue Medb could credibly have lauded (though its subterranean existence is hinted at in the jealousy motif). In the heroic eras of various societies, including Ireland’s, loyalty served as the foundation virtue. But it is not the insignia of heterosexual unions; rather, it is the bedrock of same-sex friendships. In Gilgamesh, there is the unbreakable friendship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu. In the Iliad, there is the undying bond between Achilles and Patroclus. In the Tain, the only relationship that is presented as ideal is the one between the warriors Cuchulainn and Ferdia, foster brothers who, though forced by Medb’s trickery to fight each other, love each other to the end. Thus, Cuchulainn to Ferdia:

  Fast friends, forest-companions,

  we made one bed and slept one sleep

  in foreign lands after the fray.

  Scathach’s pupils, two together

  we’d set forth to comb the forest.

  …

  There is no man that ever ate,

  no man that was ever born,

  no joyous son of king or queen,

  for whose sake I would do you harm.

  After he has killed Ferdia, Cuchulainn addresses the corpse:

  When we were away with Scathach

  learning victory overseas,

  it seemed our friendship would remain

  unbroken till the day of doom.

  I loved the noble way you blushed,

  and loved your fine, perfect form.

  I loved
your blue clear eye,

  your way of speech, your skillfulness[,]

  …

  your curled yellow hair

  like a great lovely jewel,

  the soft leaf-shaped belt

  that you wore at your waist.

  You have fallen to the Hound,*

  I cry for it, little calf.

  The shield didn’t save you

  that brought you to the fray.

  The lyrical similarities among the laments of Derdriu, Cuchulainn, and Dark Eileen can hardly be lost on the reader. But only in Cuchulainn’s dirge is the value of never-ending faithfulness sung—“fast friends,” whose “friendship would remain unbroken till the day of doom.” The irony of the speaker, who swore to his foster brother that “there is no man … for whose sake I would do you harm,” is painful.

  Fixity escaped these people, as in the end it escapes us all. They understood, as few have understood before or since, how fleeting life is and how pointless to try to hold on to things or people. They pursued the wondrous deed, the heroic gesture: fighting, fucking, drinking, art—poetry for intense emotion, the music that accompanied the heroic drinking with which each day ended, bewitching ornament for one’s person and possessions. All these are worth pursuit, and the first, especially, will bring the honor great souls seek. But in the midst of this furious swirl of energy lies a still point of detachment. When, in the heat of battle, the bloodied messenger informs Medb timidly that Cuchulainn has beheaded her son, she responds, “This isn’t like catching birds,” as we might say, “You didn’t think this would be a picnic, did you?” The face of the Dying Gaul speaks for them all: each one of us will die, naked and alone, on some battlefield not of our own choosing. My promise of undying faithfulness to you and yours to me, though made with all solemnity, is unlikely to survive the tricks that fate has in store—all the hidden land mines that beset human life. What we can rely on are the comeliness and iron virtue of the short-lived hero: his loyalty to cause and comrades, his bravery in the face of overwhelming odds, the gargantuan generosity with which he scatters his possessions and his person and with which he spills his blood. After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was heard to say that to be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.