The Myths, Legends, and Lore of Ireland

by Blackwell, Amy Hackney

  These stones are not local; some of them came from Wicklow, 50 miles away, and others from Northern Ireland. This indicates that whoever built them was very organized — it’s not easy to assemble the man-power to transport big rocks over that many miles. The tomb might have been surrounded by a ring of giant stones, though only twelve of these now remain. It sounds a little like Stonehenge, something to which the tomb has been compared.

  Inside the mound is a long passageway leading to a subterranean burial chamber. Inside this chamber are three recesses for holding remains. The front door of Newgrange is a solar observatory extraordinaire. When the tomb was first excavated by experts, archaeologists found the remains of at least three cremated bodies and some human bones. Offerings of jewelry were probably once there as well, but these were stolen long ago.

  No one knows exactly why these mounds were built. They might have been burial places for kings; ancient legends certainly suggest that as a possibility. Or they might have served as calendars. Many megalithic sites are constructed to catch the sun at particular times of the year, and they are astonishingly accurate.

  Newgrange is the best-known example of this. Every year during the winter solstice (December 19–23), the rising sun shines through a slit over the entrance and lights up the burial chamber for seventeen minutes. At the time the tomb was built, the sunlight would have shone directly onto a spiral design carved into the wall.

  Similar solar phenomena happen at other megalithic sites. The light of the setting sun at winter solstice illuminates one of the chambers inside Dowth. At Knowth, the eastern passage seems to have been designed to catch the rising sun of the spring and autumn equinoxes, while the western passage might have caught the setting sun on those same days.

  The tombs at Brú na Bóinne are an extremely popular tourist destination. The tour of Newgrange features a fake winter solstice sunrise, so that visitors can see how the sun illuminates the chamber. But don’t get your hopes up about seeing the real thing; admission to the Newgrange chamber for the winter solstice sunrise is by lottery. Fifty names were chosen from more than 25,000 for the 2010 event.

  The River Boyne, which flows past these mound tombs, has long been very important spiritually to the Irish people. Legend says that the first occupant of Newgrange was named Elcmar. His wife was Boann, the spirit of the river.

  4 { The Bronze Age

  Around 2400 B.C.E., life in Ireland began to change again. People started making tools out of metal instead of stone. These metalworkers might have been a new wave of immigrants bringing their craft with them, or they might have been the folks already in Ireland. Whoever they were, their metal tools were much better than stone ones.

  This period is called the Bronze Age because most of these tools were made of bronze, an alloy made of copper and tin mixed together. Ireland has tons of copper, and archaeologists have found traces of many copper mines. Tin is harder to get; people might have imported it from England or possibly from Brittany in France.

  Smiths shaped bronze into all kinds of objects, including axes, spearheads, and jewelry. They decorated some of these with triangles and zig-zags, which gives the impression that these objects might have been more for show than for use.

  Ireland also had a fair amount of gold hidden in its hills, and Bronze Age smiths used it to make some spectacular jewelry — thick bracelets and necklaces called torques, fancy hairpins, and half-moon-shaped trinkets that they probably hung around their necks. They also made disks of thin sheets of gold with hammered decoration; these are called sun discs, and people might have worn them as jewelry, too. Examples of these jewels can be seen at the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin.

  5 { Iron Comes to Ireland

  The Bronze Age in Ireland ended around 800 B.C.E. Bronze tools disappeared and iron ones took their place. This must have been the result of increased contact with Britain, which was in closer contact with the rest of Europe, where iron was all the rage.

  Early iron wasn’t superior to bronze — in the days before steel was invented, iron was ugly and of poor quality. But iron ore was readily available almost everywhere, and supplies of tin, necessary for making bronze, were not. And so blacksmiths stuck with it and gradually got better at using it.

  The Iron Age didn’t start all at once. People gradually started using more iron and less bronze. In the late eighth century B.C.E., iron was prevalent on the Continent, and a century later it was widespread in Britain. Irish smiths at this time were working with both metals, producing distinctive swords and other artifacts.

  The iron-using people also had horses. Archaeologists have found many bits for bridles and other tidbits of equestrian gear. They have also unearthed miles and miles of wooden tracks beneath the bogs, paths made of giant oak planks laid side by side; these would have made transporting goods by horse and cart much easier than dragging them through Ireland’s soft soil.

  The advent of iron is often associated with the arrival of the people called the Celts. By 300 B.C.E., the Celtic artistic style was thoroughly established in the northern part of Ireland. The Celts spread their culture and language throughout Ireland over the next several centuries, mixing their beliefs with Christianity and resisting foreign assailants as long as they could.

  6 { Who Were the Celts and Kings?

  It’s hard to say anything conclusive about the Celts, because they didn’t record their history themselves. They couldn’t write (with one minor exception, which we discuss later in this section). Most everything we know about them today comes from either the archaeological evidence or the accounts of Roman visitors that were transcribed by medieval Christians. This means that all of our written records on the Celts were filtered through two sets of biases: the Romans, who looked on them as an alien culture that needed to be conquered, and the Christians, who thought the Celts were pagans who hadn’t seen the truth of Christ. And modern observers have all kinds of opinions that color their views.

  According to classical writers, most of the people who lived in northwestern and central Europe were Celts — keltoi in Greek. Ancient writers knew of Celtic people in Spain, France, Germany, Switzerland, and modern Austria. Celts were hard to miss, because they were violent; various Celtic peoples started attacking Greek and Roman settlements around 400 B.C.E. and kept attacking as long as there was loot to be had.

  The ancients thought the Celts had originated in Switzerland and spread out from there. They envisioned the Celts as a warrior people who marched from country to country, attacking civilized people and settling wherever they conquered. Modern scholars think it more likely that the Celtic language and culture spread from group to group through trade, though there was certainly some fighting involved, too. This Celtic culture moved over the Continent and into the British Isles until, by the fourth century B.C.E., most of the people in northwestern Europe and Britain were members of this cultural group.

  Historians have long imagined ancient history as a series of peoples taking over land from one another. When they envisioned the Celts, they saw warriors who came marauding over the countryside, laying waste and taking over local wealth. While there is some truth to this picture, it seems that cultural spread was actually a much gentler process most of the time.

  The people who became known as the Irish were probably a mix of indigenous peoples — remember the folks who built those mounds and tombs? — and immigrants who brought new language and technology with them. The newcomers entered Irish society by marrying the natives, although there was probably some violence as well. Irish legend gives the impression that a bunch of warriors arrived several centuries before Christ and established chiefdoms for themselves all over the country. The Celtic languages became predominant either through military domination or because they were more prestigious for other reasons. However it happened, by the time the Romans arrived, the Irish people were speaking Celtic languages.

  7 { Gaelic and Indo-European Languages

  Although Celtic languages and cultur
es were similar to one another, they were by no means identical; there were a vast number of physical types and cultural traditions that fell under the heading Celtic. The Celts who settled in France became known as Gauls. The ones in Britain became the Bretons and the Welsh.

  The Celts who arrived in Ireland sometime around 350 B.C.E. didn’t belong to the same group as the Celts in Britain. Most of the ancestors of the Irish Celts came from Spain. Language is the clue to their origin.

  Linguists classify languages into families of related tongues. Almost all European languages — including French, German, English, and Irish — are grouped into a giant family called Indo-European, which also includes such ancient languages as Latin, Sanskrit, and Hittite. Finnish, Hungarian, Basque, and Estonian are exceptions — they are European but do not belong in the Indo-European group. All Indo-European languages show basic similarities in vocabulary and grammar that suggest they might have come from a single language — proto-Indo-European.

  It is believed that proto-Indo-European may have been spoken many thousands of years ago somewhere north of the Black Sea. The people who spoke this language apparently traveled extensively in Central Asia and Europe, and forms of their language took root throughout these regions. One of the major language groups to develop this way was the Celtic family.

  There were many Celtic languages, and the Irish language is just one of them. Irish comes from the Celtic branch called Goidelic, which also includes Scots Gaelic. The term Goidelic comes from the Irish Celts’ name for themselves, Goídil, which gives us the modern word Gaelic. Irish is not very closely related to the languages spoken nearby, particularly Welsh and Breton (spoken in Brittany, France), but instead had its roots in Spain; hence, scholars think the ancestors of the Irish came from Spain.

  8 { Celtic Ireland

  People studying Ireland actually have an advantage over those scrutinizing Celts from other lands, because a number of ancient Irish stories and other writings survive. The Celts didn’t write these things down themselves; they transmitted their culture orally. But centuries later, medieval monks, in their zeal to preserve stories of the oral tradition in written form, wrote down a bunch of ancient Celtic legends and books of laws, and these offer the modern reader a unique glimpse into ancient Irish life. This life seems to have included heroes, feasts, cattle raids, and love affairs.

  The land was divided into five areas:

  Leinster — the southeast

  Meath — the middle

  Connacht — the west

  Ulster — the north

  Munster — the southwest

  Each of these provinces was divided into 100 or so smaller sections called tuatha, or tribes, each governed by its own chieftain, called a rí. People were divided into clans, and several clans made up a tribe. Ordinary people swore allegiance to their local king. Sometimes one man would rise above all the others and become high king of all Ireland.

  9 { Wild and Crazy Heroes

  The Irish were obsessed with war, weapons, and heroics. If their poetry is any indication, they spent most of their time at war with one another, stealing cattle, and feasting on pork.

  The Celts scared the Romans and other “civilized” contemporary observers. When they went into battle, they would strip naked and dash at their enemies dressed in nothing but sandals and their fancy necklaces. They howled as if possessed by demons, their shrieks augmented by loud bagpipes.

  Some warriors would be so overcome by battle-frenzy that their very appearance changed. They called this transformation the warp-spasm. The Táin Bó Cuailnge has an excellent description of the hero Cuchulain (or Cú Chulainn) undergoing this phenomenon, which involved most of his body turning itself inside out and fire and blood shooting out of his head, after which he killed hundreds of enemy warriors and walked away unscathed.

  Cattle and metal treasure were the main forms of wealth in ancient Ireland — metal because it was rare, and cattle because they were useful. Cattle provided milk to drink and to make into cheese, and hide and meat after they were dead. If a king demanded tribute from his subjects, it would probably be in the form of cattle — in fact, a wealthy farmer was called a bóiare, or “lord of cows.” In the famous poem Táin Bó Cuailnge, a major war starts because Queen Mebd discovers that her husband has one more bull than she does.

  Celtic chieftains spent quite a bit of their energy stealing cattle from one another. They even had a special word for this activity, táin. (Cattle raiding wasn’t just an amusement for the ancient Irish; modern Irish people were stealing one another’s cattle well into the twentieth century.) Anyone whose cattle got stolen had to try to retrieve them, which occasioned many heroic expeditions and battles.

  10 { The Seat of Ancient Kings

  Tara is a hill in County Meath that was the seat of ancient Irish kings. It was considered the center of Ireland. People buried their ancestors in mounds surrounding it and periodically gathered there for festivals and rituals. Kings and their armies would gather there before marching to war.

  Tara was special because it was the home of the Lia Fáil, or “Stone of Destiny.” It was used to identify rightful kings — it shrieked if the feet of the rightful king rested on it.

  Ireland has tons of forts scattered all over the countryside, many of them built during the Bronze or Iron Ages and used for many centuries thereafter. The number and ingenuity of these forts suggest that the ancient Irish considered defense a high priority, though some experts think they were more likely built to impress. The most common form is the ring fort. These forts were built on top of circular mounds of earth with a wooden fence running around the circumference of the mound at the top and a moat surrounding the bottom.

  Some forts were built entirely of stone or on the edges of cliffs, which provide a natural barrier to attack. Others, called crannogs, were built on artificial islands in the middle of lakes or bogs. They were used as late as the seventeenth century.

  11 { Brehon Laws

  The best picture we have today of ancient Irish social organization comes from the Brehon laws, which were written down in the seventh and eighth centuries C.E. These laws describe a very structured society, with several classes of people and clearly defined punishments for infractions.

  For many years, historians believed that the Brehon laws came from the pre-Christian pagan past — possibly from the druids — and that they summarized centuries of laws and beliefs transmitted orally long before they were written. More recent scholars suggest that the Brehon laws were written by later Christians, who combined ancient Irish practice with foreign information and the Bible to create laws for the Irish people.

  This would mean the Brehon laws as described might not have entirely reflected the reality of Celtic society, but instead the Irish society of some centuries later. Still, many of the principles would have applied to the Celts, especially the emphasis on social status, honor, and recompense for offenses.

  12 { The Celtic Class System

  There were five classes of Irish people. At the top were the nobles, who belonged to the dominant families and owned property. Below them were ordinary freemen, who rented the land and farmed it, and then base clients who had fewer rights; the lords would give their clients cattle, and in return receive rents and other services. At the bottom were slaves. The fifth class of people was the group of learned men, including doctors, judges, poets, and craftsmen. Members of this group enjoyed special privileges and could move most freely outside their own clans.

  Brehon laws applied to civil, criminal, and military matters. They delineated five major classes of people and their rights and duties. All relationships, such as between landlords and tenants, parents and children, and masters and servants, were carefully regulated. Professionals were required to charge only the fees set by law, and they were ranked according to the status of their profession.

  A person who injured another was required to compensate his victim for the loss or to have the person nursed back to health at his e
xpense. Brehon law generally did not otherwise punish wrongdoers. People could kill outlaws who had committed serious crimes, but kings could ransom these outlaws and get them freed of obligation — if, for example, a king’s ally had committed some atrocious crime and another noble wanted to kill him, the king could ransom the ally and get him off the hook.

  13 { The Learned: Druids

  The druids were an ancient caste of learned men. What they learned and what they did has long been a matter of much discussion and debate. Herodotus claimed that they were descended from Noah, originated in the western Danube region, and espoused Pythagorean philosophy. Pliny and Tacitus noted their fondness for the oak and their refusal to worship the gods under roofs. Julius Caesar described their schools, where they memorized vast amounts of information, and their sacrificial practices, which involved placing humans or animals in wicker cages and burning them alive.

  The Romans distrusted the druids and did their best to put them down. In 61 C.E. the Roman Suetonius rounded up a number of druids and killed them, and that ended druidism in Roman territory (which didn’t include Ireland). But the druids were too fascinating for people to forget them; many still think of the megalithic dolmens as druid altars, where the ancient priest-magicians sacrificed their victims.

  In Irish legends, druids can predict the future by interpreting the actions of birds; they use this information to tell their leaders when to march into battle. They wear white robes and sport long beards.