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.
It is natural to compare the Irish legends with those of other races. An eminent Irish scholar asserts that the ‘Tain bo Cuailgné is to Irish history what the Argonautic expedition, and the Seven against Thebes, xxare to the Grecian.’ Landor’s ‘Hellenics’ represent many of the least known Greek legends, and his ‘Gebir’ might be taken for a recovered Greek ‘lesser epic;’ but with such poems the Irish legends can boast little affinity. The best of the Roman have perished, except those which Livy preserved by appropriating, and which, notwithstanding their large element of fiction, constitute perhaps the most true, because the most characteristic portion of the earlier Roman history. Between the Irish and such Scandinavian legends as the celebrated ‘Story of the Volsungs and Niblings’ there is one striking resemblance. In each case the earliest existing prose version obviously represents a metrical work earlier still, large fragments of which survive, cropping up in it like sea rocks that indicate the hills submerged. In the ‘Tain’ many passages, besides those which can be called poetical, thus hold their own, apparently but because the trouble of altering them was thus evaded. That Scandinavian tale has a keen-edged, concentrated might about it, together with, at least in Mr. Morris’s translation, a corresponding force and an exquisite beauty of style; and in these respects I think it superior to the ‘Tain:’ but the latter will probably be deemed by impartial readers to have the advantage in imagination, varied conception of character, and pathos. xxiAs regards comparative antiquity the ‘Tain’ must have preceded the Northern work by at least six centuries. The latter includes a chapter, the fourteenth, entitled ‘The Welding together of the Shards of the Sword Grana,’ taken, as might seem, from ‘The Knighting of Cuchullain,’ so close is the resemblance—as close as that between the Spanish story of the ‘Monk and the Bird,’ known to the English reader through Archbishop Trench’s charming poem, and the Irish tale regarded as its original. The best characteristics of Irish legends, a certain swiftness and daring, a wildness of invention, a power that in its fiercest moods is often subtly combined with grace, and a tenderness as often alternated with humour, are found chiefly in the earlier. The highest inspiration of the Bards seems to have passed away not long after Ireland became Christian. ‘Great Pan was dead,’—slain by the shaft of a mightier light. The further back we go the higher is the imagination, the energy, and even the art; the legends of the Heroic Age surpassing the mediæval in refinement as much as in force, and the mediæval escaping the extravagancies and vulgarities sometimes found in those of later days. In ancient Ireland history and poetry had but a single Muse, and the bard who professed to be ‘a maker’ would have found no listener. Through all its changes the traditional xxiilegend claimed a foundation of truth, and pointed ever to some unmeasured antiquity. In that early springtide the hard and rugged March buds of Song were scarcely distinguishable from the rough rind of fact out of which they had pushed.
The present work concludes a series of poems intended to illustrate Irish history at its chief periods. The ‘Legends of St. Patrick’ deal with Ireland’s ‘saintly time,’ and ‘Inisfail’ with those six centuries between the Norman invasion and the repeal of the penal laws in the latter half of the eighteenth century—a period calamitously misrepresented by partisan historians; one in which the wild passions and wilder political theories which, since the first French Revolution, have in so many countries directed high aspirations to mean or fatal ends, had no existence; a period of which ‘all the struggles were characterised by the spirit of liberty, nor less by that of loyalty, whether directed to Gaelic princes, to Norman chiefs who had become Irish, to Charles, or James.’[6] Another period remained, that of Ireland’s ‘Heroic Age.’ This volume is a contribution to its illustration. I trust that the poets of a later day will illustrate it more worthily, and do for Irish history what the lofty and stainless poetry of Scott did for that of his country. xxiiiThe theme is large; and the quarry, so rich in materials, is as yet scarcely opened. Notwithstanding the destruction of numberless Irish books which certainly existed as late as 1631, and the yet larger number known to have been extant in the eleventh century, besides the vast collections which perished during the Danish invasions, we are informed that the Irish books still preserved in Trinity College, Dublin, and the Royal Irish Academy would alone fill 30,000 quarto pages. These volumes exist, almost all of them, in MS. only; while a few, which, without State aid or any public encouragement, have been translated, remain unprinted—a circumstance not honourable either to Ireland’s patriotism, or to that love of learning once her boast. A mere fragment of the remaining surplus from the Irish Church property would restore to light all the best specimens of ancient Irish genius for the benefit not of Ireland’s sons only, but of learning in all lands; and she has still scholars competent to the task. Those who cannot study the originals may wish to know where they may find some valuable translations. Several have appeared in the ‘Atlantis,’ a periodical established in connection with the Catholic University of Ireland when Cardinal Newman was its rector, in the publications of the ‘Ossianic Society,’ of the ‘Irish Archæological and Celtic xxivSociety,’ and of the ‘Kilkenny Archæological Society.’ The English reader is more likely to be already acquainted with Dr. O’Donovan’s great translation of the ‘Annals of the Four Masters;’ with the works of Dr. Petrie, of Dr. Todd, and Dr. Reeves; with the ‘Tripartite Life of St. Patrick,’ translated, as well as many ancient tales, by Mr. W. M. Hessessy; with Dr. Joyce’s ‘Old Celtic Romances;’ and with Mr. Standish O’Grady’s brilliant bardic ‘History of Ireland.’ How entirely early Irish legends are susceptible of a high poetic rendering in our own day can be doubted by no one who has read the poems founded on them which we owe to the genius of Sir Samuel Ferguson.[7]
Meave, Queen of Connacht,[24] and Ailill her husband, waking one morning fall into a disputation, each claiming to be the worthier of the two, and the wealthier. Their lords decide that the king and queen are great and happy alike in all things save one only, namely, that Ailill possesses the far-famed white Bull, Fionbannah. Meave hearing that Conor Conchobar, King of Uladh,[25] boasts a black Bull mightier yet, is fain to purchase it, but cannot prevail so far. She therefore declares war against Uladh. There meets her Faythleen the Witch, who prophesies calamity, but promises that in aid of Meave she will breathe over the realm of Uladh a spirit of imbecility. This she does; yet Cuchullain, unaided, afflicts the whole army of Meave by exploits which to him are but sports. Fergus, the exiled King of Uladh, narrates to Meave the high deeds of Cuchullain wrought in his childhood.
Fergus is sent to Cuchullain with gifts, and requires him to forsake King Conor. This he will not do, yet consents to forbear Meave’s host till she has reached the border of Uladh, the queen engaging that the warfare shall then be restricted to a combat between himself and a single champion sent against him day by day. Each day Meave’s champion is slain. Cailitin, lord of the Magic Clan, counsels Meave to send against Cuchullain his best-loved friend Ferdīa; yet she sends, instead, Lok Mac Favesh. When he too falls, Cailitin and his twenty-seven sons, all magicians, fling themselves upon Cuchullain to slay him. Cuchullain slays them. The Mor Reega, the War-Goddess of the Gael, prophesies to him that there yet awaits him the greatest of his trials. After ninety days of combat Cuchullain’s father brings him tidings that all Uladh lies bound under a spell of imbecility.
Queen Meave sends her herald to Ferdīa the Firbolg, requiring him to engage with Cuchullain in single combat. Ferdīa refuses to fight against his ancient friend; yet, later he attends a royal banquet given in his honour; and there, being drawn aside through the witcheries of the Princess Finobar, he consents to the fight. The charioteer of Ferdīa sees Cuchullain advancing in his war-car to the Ford, and, rapt by a prophetic spirit, sings his triumph. For two days the ancient friends contend against each other with reluctance and remorse: but on the third day the battle-rage bursts fully forth: and on the fourth, Cuchullain, himself pierced through with wounds innumerable, slays Ferdīa by the Gae-Bulg. He lays his friend upon the bank, at its northern side, and, standing beside him, sings his dirge.
Cuchullain lies long in the forest nigh to death from his wounds, and yet more through grief for Ferdīa. The queen crosses the Ford into Uladh, and captures the Donn Cuailgné. The confederate kings fall out among themselves; Meave summons a war council; whereupon there bursts forth a second contention between them and the Exile-Band. She makes the circuit of all Uladh; yet enacts nothing memorable. Lastly she marches against Eman, its metropolis, but slowly, being encumbered by her spoil. Uladh rouses itself daily out of its trance of imbecility. The death of Ketherne. Finobar is fain to draw Rochad to the cause of her mother, but fails. Her fate. The queen, falling into despondency, re-crosses the frontier.
Queen Meave, having reached the sacred plain of Uta, sacrilegiously encamps thereon. A Druid denounces the late war as unrighteous, while Fergus contemns it as ineffectual; and immediately afterwards the Mor Reega manifests herself to the host. Next evening, while division of the spoil is being made, Meave is ware of the advance of King Conor; and Ailill transfers the supreme command to Fergus, who prepares for the attack. The battle is gloriously won by Fergus. That night Meave is warned by signs and omens; and Cuchullain, weak from his wounds, arrives in the Ulidian camp. From midnight to near sunset the next day he lies in a trance, during which fair spirits minister to him again his lost strength; and there is shown to him a vision of some mystic greatness reserved for Erin, yet of an order which he cannot understand. When the second battle is well nigh lost Cuchullain wakes; and Meave is driven in utter overthrow across the Shannon.
1. Lectures on the MS. Materials of Ancient Irish History, p. 41.
2. Lectures on the MS. Materials of Ancient Irish History, p. 30.
3. Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish, vol. iii. p. 403.
4. Author of The Collegians.
5. More correctly written Uisnach. See Loch Etive and the Sons of Uisnach, Macmillan & Co.
6. Advertisement to ‘Inisfail,’ p. 52.
7. 1. Lays of the Western Gael. 2. Congal. 3. Poems. By Sir Samuel Ferguson. Bell and Sons.
8. Ulster.
9. Eman, also called Emania, stood nearly on the present site of Armagh.
10. Page 9. He taught her all the Ogham Signs to read. The Ogham characters are a species of alphabet, or as some call them cypher, cut upon stones, or wooden staves. They are found in many parts of Ireland; and much has been written on them by the most learned Irish antiquarians of recent times, especially by Bishop Graves.
11. The Irish, originally ‘Scoti,’ were so called from Scota.
12. Ballyshannon.
13. Howth.
14. Page 38. By Geisa bound. These Gesa, or Geisa, often as trivial in character as they were rigidly enforced, have a large place in the legends of the Irish pre-Christian times. Sometimes they applied to particular individuals alone: thus, in the case of Cuchullain, it was a Gesa that no one should wake him out of his sleep. Sometimes they were self-imposed: thus Fergus Mac Roy and Cuchullain also, had bound themselves in youth never to refuse an invitation to the feast of a good man, however humble. The most remarkable illustrations of the Gesa will be found in ‘Conary,’ the noble poem of my friend, Sir Samuel Ferguson, who speaks of them as ‘certain sacred injunctions, the violation of which was attended with temporal punishment. The agents in inflicting such retribution appear in the form of Fairies.’ (Poems by Sir Samuel Ferguson, p. 61. McGee, Dublin; George Bell, London.)
15. Page 39. Deirdré and he were playing chess together: Chess was a favourite game with the Irish, and is frequently alluded to in the earliest tales.
16. Page 73. The ‘Lia Fail,’ and Ogham lore revered. The ‘Lia Fail,’ or ‘Stone of Destiny,’ was the stone on which the Irish ‘Chief Kings,’ or Ard-Righs, were crowned at Tara. It was subsequently used for the same purpose during many centuries in Scotland, to which it had been brought by the Dalriad Irish recorded by Bede, at the coronation of her Kings of Irish race. It was removed by Edward the First from Scone to Westminster Abbey, where it still supports the chair of Edward the Confessor. (See ‘Hist. of Scotland’ by Sir Walter Scott, vol. i. p. 34.)
17. Bamba, Fodhla, and Eire.
18. The current running between Cantire, in Scotland, and the northern coast of Ireland.
19. Achill Island, on the coast of Connaught.
20. The ‘Tonsured One,’ i.e. St. Patrick.
21. ‘The term Mael, Mull (or Moyle, as Moore calls it), does not properly apply to the current itself, but to the Mael, or bald headland by which it runs.’—Professor Eugene O’Curry.
22. ‘They met a young man of good family whose name was Aibhric, and his attention was often attracted to the birds, and their singing was sweet to him, so that he came to love them greatly, and that they loved him; and it was this young man that afterwards arranged in order and narrated all their adventures.’—The Fate of the Children of Lir, prose version by Professor O’Curry.
23. Page 105. Or Acaill; Now Achill Head.
24. Now Connaught.
25. Now Ulster.
26. Chief King.
27. Now Dundalk.
28. Armagh.
29. Cu in Irish means hound.
30. Page 146. Hail Eric just. The fine exacted for various offences by the Brehon law.
31. Page 151. The dread Mor Reega. The War Goddess of the ancient Irish. An account of this divinity will be found in the admirable essay contributed to the ‘Revue Celtique’ (May 1870), by W. M. Hennessy, Esq.
32. Page 153. Among the Sidils. The Fairy Hills.
33. Page 181. There shone the torque of Meave. ‘Take off his armour that I may see the Brooch for the sake of which he undertook the combat. Leagh came, and stripped Ferdīa.… Cuchullain saw the brooch; and he began to lament and moan for him.’ (MS. translation, by Professor O’Looney.)
34. Page 191. And, southward next, that lake. Lough Derg in Donegal, a place of pilgrimage still frequented. To this island properly belongs the legend illustrated by Calderon in his ‘Purgatory of St. Patrick,’ so admirably presented to the English reader by my lamented friend, the late Denis Florence MacCarthy.
35. The Shannon.
36. Page 201. Beside Ath-Luain. Now Athlone.
37. Page 226. From Caiseal’s crested rock. Now Cashel.
New original cover art included with this ebook is granted to the public domain.
The original printed book included both footnotes and endnotes. In this edition, all notes have been converted to sequentially numbered endnotes.
De Vere consistently spells the Irish title “ollamh” as “ollamb”; this and other non-standard spellings of Irish words have not been corrected.
There are some errors and inconsistencies in the rendering of single and double quotation marks in nested dialogue, especially in the long narration by Fergus starting on page 138. These have been silently corrected.
The following changes and corrections have been made: