The literature of the Celts

By Magnus Maclean

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Title: The literature of the Celts

Author: Magnus Maclean

Release date: September 30, 2025 [eBook #76961]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Blackie and Son Limited, 1926

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LITERATURE OF THE CELTS ***

THE LITERATURE OF THE CELTS

MAGNUS MACLEAN
M.A., D.Sc., LL.D.

_NEW EDITION_

BLACKIE AND SON LIMITED
50 OLD BAILEY, LONDON; GLASGOW, BOMBAY
1926

PREFACE

Celtic studies have grown apace within recent years. The old scorn, the
old apathy and neglect are visibly giving way to a lively wonder and
interest as the public gradually realise that scholars have lighted upon
a literary treasure hid for ages. This new enthusiasm, generated in
great part on the Continent—in Germany, France, and Italy, as well as in
Britain and Ireland, has already spread to the northern nations—to
Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, and is now beginning to take root in
America.

A remarkable change it certainly presents from the days when Dr. Johnson
affirmed that there was not in all the world a Gaelic MS. one hundred
years old; and the documents were so derelict and forgotten, so little
known and studied, that though this prince of letters travelled in the
Highlands expressly to satisfy himself, Celtic knowledge of the existing
materials and Celtic studies were so deficient that they proved wholly
inadequate to the task of disproving his bold statement.

It was left to the scholarship of the nineteenth century to unearth the
ancient treasures and to show that Gaelic was a literary language long
before English literature came into existence, and that there are still
extant Celtic-Latin MSS. almost as old as the very oldest codexes of the
Bible.

There is undoubtedly a charm in the thought that all over the Continent
of Europe, in the libraries of many of its romantic cities and towns,
there are scores of MSS., some of them upwards of a thousand years old,
fugitives in the early times from these much harassed islands; and that
European scholars of the highest erudition, such as Zeuss, Ebel, Nigra,
Ascoli, Windisch, Zimmer, and Whitley Stokes, have been profoundly
interested in these literary relics, and have devoted much of their time
to the work of studying, translating, elucidating, and editing the
Gaelic texts or glosses found in them.

To-day the number of those engaged in similar research at home and
abroad is vastly on the increase, and augurs well for the future of this
department of knowledge.

Professor Kuno Meyer, Ph.D., himself a distinguished German Celticist,
in reviewing the present state of Celtic studies last year at Dublin,
made the following significant statement:—

“I cannot conclude without casting a glance into the future. I am
convinced that the present is but the beginning of an era of still
greater activity in all departments of Celtic studies. Everything points
to that.

“The more reliable text-books and hand-books will be published, the
greater will be the numbers of those taking up Celtic studies. As the
fields of other more ancient and more recognised studies become
exhausted, there will come a rush of students on to the fresh, and
often, almost virgin soil of Celtic research, to study the great Celtic
civilisation at its source, to collect the last lingering remnants of a
mighty tradition.

“Again and again it has happened during recent years that workers in
other subjects have in their researches finally been led on to the
Celtic soil, where lie the roots of much medieval lore, of many
institutions, of important phases of thought.

“And another thing, too, I will foretell. The re-discovery, as it were,
of ancient Celtic literature will not only arouse abroad a greater
interest in the Celtic nations, but it will lead to beneficial results
among those nations themselves.”

Mr. W. B. Yeats, in the _Treasury of Irish Poetry_, 1900, gives pen to
similar reflections and anticipations:—

“Modern poetry,” he writes, “grows weary of using over and over again
the personages and stories and metaphors that have come to us through
Greece and Rome, or from Wales and Brittany through the Middle Ages, and
has found new life in the Norse and German legends. The Irish legends in
popular tradition and in old Gaelic literature are more numerous and as
beautiful, and alone among great European legends have the beauty and
wonder of altogether new things. May one not say then, without saying
anything improbable, that they will have a predominant influence in the
coming century, and that their influence will pass through many
countries.”

The interest thus lately evolved in the literature of the Celts, who
were among the earliest inhabitants of the country, and whose blood
still courses in our British veins, has naturally awakened a desire in
many minds to know the nature and extent of the literary legacy they
have bequeathed—its substance and quality, and also to gain some
acquaintance with the opinions and results of recent scholarship on the
subject.

But, strange to say, notwithstanding the activity of Celticists, no book
has yet appeared which professes to give in short compass a general
survey of the whole field. There is thus, I venture to think, room for
such a volume as the present, which is intended to serve as a popular
introduction to the study of the literature. Containing, as it does, the
gist of two series of lectures which I delivered under the Maccallum
Bequest in the University of Glasgow during the sessions 1900–1 and
1901–2, it is now prepared and issued with a view to meeting the demands
not only of the general reader, but also of the private student in quest
of a guide to the original sources, the authorities, and books on the
subject.

In its preparation, in addition to the numerous published works
mentioned in the text, I have received valuable help from Professor
Mackinnon, Edinburgh University, and Dr. Alexander Macbain, Inverness,
both of whom supplied me not only with many of their printed papers
embodying the fruits of their own personal research, but also with other
useful information. To the former I am still further indebted for
interesting details regarding the life and work of several of the
scholars, and to Professor Rhys of Jesus College, Oxford, for kindly
reviewing in MS. form the chapter on Welsh Literature.

And, finally, I have to record my special indebtedness to the kind
assistance of my friend, Mr. David Mackeggie, M.A., whose knowledge of
Celtic history and literature is both extensive and accurate, and who,
besides giving me much suggestive aid in the preparation of the
lectures, read the proofs of this volume.

MAGNUS MACLEAN.

THE TECHNICAL COLLEGE,
GLASGOW, _May, 1902_.

This volume has already appealed to so wide a circle of readers that a
reprint is now called for; and it is very gratifying to the author to
find that his confidence in the growing demand for a book of this kind
has been amply justified.

MAGNUS MACLEAN.

_November, 1906._

In the present reissue no alteration of the reprint has been required.

MAGNUS MACLEAN

_June, 1926._

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

THE ARRIVAL OF THE CELT IN HISTORY AND LITERATURE

PAGE

The Celts in primitive Europe—Advent in British Isles—Two
branches—Observations of Cæsar and Tacitus—Main facts of Celtic
progress on the Continent—A vast empire—Interview with Alexander
the Great—Colony in Galatia—Cup of conquest
full—Disintegration—The scattered remnants—Recent statistics—The
ancient Celts as seen through Greek and Roman eyes—Literary
awakening—Ogam writings—First men of letters—Earliest written
Gaelic now extant—Modern linguistic discovery—The place of
Celtic in the Aryan group 1

CHAPTER II

ST. PATRICK, THE PIONEER OF CELTIC WRITERS

The historical Patrick—Authentic records—Earliest known Gaelic
litterateur—Dates elusive—Birthplace—Autobiographical details of
his youth—Taken captive—Escape—Obscure wanderings—Return
home—The rôle of missionary in Ireland—Epoch-making
career—Remarkable Patrician Dialogues—His own literary work—The
“Confession”—“Epistle to Coroticus”—“Deer’s Cry”—Ireland’s
oldest book—Three other antique compositions from the Book of
Hymns—A curious prophecy—Personal character—Death 22

CHAPTER III

ST. COLUMBA AND THE DAWN OF LETTERS IN SCOTLAND

The fugitive MSS.—Gaelic a literary language for ages—Scotland’s
first writer—St. Columba one of the rarer master-spirits—His
peculiar qualities—Intellectual standpoint—Birth—Early life—A
fateful incident—Set sail for Pictland—Motive—Arrival in pagan
Scotland—His missionary enterprise—Light the lamp of
literature—An ardent scholar, penman, and poet—The famous
“Cathrach”—His Gaelic poems—Latin hymns—The Columban
renaissance—Encouragement of bards and scholars—The _Amra
Choluimcille_—Iona as an educational centre—European fame and
influence 40

CHAPTER IV

ADAMNAN’S “VITA COLUMBÆ”

Oldest Scottish book in existence—A sturdy survival—Criteria of
age—Dorbene the copyist—Romantic history of the MS.—Now in
Schaffhausen—Adamnan, a rare personality—Abbot and
scholar—Influential career—Attitude to the two great questions
that divided the Celtic churches—Pathetic estrangement—“Lex
Adamnani”—A mighty social revolution—Death—His writings—“The
Vision of Adamnan”—His _Life of Columba_ in three
parts—Remarkable contents—Most valuable monument of the early
Celtic Church—List of MSS. in which preserved—Latin _versus_
Gaelic 58

CHAPTER V

THE BOOK OF DEER

An ancient curio—Second oldest book of Scotland—Where did it come
from?—Its contents threefold—Gaelic colophon from the ninth
century—The work of a native scribe of Alba—Peculiarities—The
ecclesiastical art of the period—The Gaelic entries—“Legend of
Deer”—Drostan’s tears—Some very quaint history—The earliest
source for Scottish Gaelic—Authentic glimpses into the Celtic
condition of Scotland—Origin of shires, parishes, burghs,
individual freedom, and the use of the English language—Three
editions of the Gaelic of the Book of Deer—Now one of the very
oldest MSS. of native origin that Cambridge can boast of 79

CHAPTER VI

THE MS. LEGACY OF THE PAST

A fresh start in the study of Celtic literature—Advent of foremost
scholars—The new basis found by Zeuss—Resurrection of ancient
texts—Unexpected light—H. d’Arbois de Jubainville and his
mission to this country—The numbers, dates, and localities of
Gaelic MSS.: (1) on the Continent; (2) in the British
Isles—Subject matter—Examples of the oldest written Gaelic
poetry in Europe—The great books of saga—Leabhar Na
h’Uidhre—Books of Leinster, Ballymote, and
Lismore—Quotations—Account of the Ancient Annals—Tighernach—The
_Chronicon Scotorum_—The _Four Masters_—Romance of the fugitive
documents 96

CHAPTER VII

THE SCOTTISH COLLECTION OF CELTIC MSS.

Cabinet in Advocates’ Library—Curious assortment of vernacular
literature—Number and character—Origin of the
collection—Highland Society and Kilbride MSS.—Subsidiary
additions—Work for the expert—Fate of some luckless
documents—Value of MSS. XL., LIII., and LVI.—Three literary
monuments of the Western Highlands: (1) The Book of the Dean of
Lismore—History, description, value, contents, extracts, names
of contributors; (2) The Fernaig MS.—Characteristics—Interesting
details of supposed author; (3) The Book of Clanranald—Quaint
relic—Two MSS., the Red and the Black—History and contents, with
specimen prose-poem and elegy 115

CHAPTER VIII

THE MYTHOLOGICAL CYCLE

A rich and abundant saga literature—Three leading periods or
cycles—The myths and folk-tales—Problems to men of science—The
philologists and anthropologists take opposite sides—Their
theories—Attitude of the annalists and romancists of
Ireland—Their craze for genealogy—Early settlers in Erin—Advent
of the Milesians or Gaels—The Three Sorrows of Gaelic Storydom:
(1) “The Tragedy of the Children of Tuireann”; (2) The
fascinating “Aided of the Children of Lir”; (3) Story of
“Deirdre and the Sons of Uisneach”—Extraordinary interest
evinced in this saga—Marvellous output of texts and translations 134

CHAPTER IX

THE HEROIC CYCLE

The golden age of Gaelic romance—Number of the tales—Cuchulinn—His
early adventures—The Wooing of Eimer—Training in Skye—The Bridge
of the Cliffs—Tragedy of Conlaoch—Elopement—The “Táin Bó
Chuailgné,” and exploits of Cuchulinn—Ferdia at the ford—The two
champions of Western Europe—Cuchulinn in the Deaf
Valley—Death—The Red Rout of Conall Cearnach—Instruction of
Cuchulinn to a prince—His “Phantom Chariot”—Modern translations
of these rare sagas 153

CHAPTER X

THE OSSIANIC CYCLE

The old order changes—Who were the Feinn?—Ossian, his name and
relation to the bardic literature—The Ossianic tales and poems
very numerous—Earliest references—First remarkable
development—Original home of the Ossianic romance—The leading
heroes—A famous tract—Legends, regarding Fionn, and curious
details of his warrior-band—The literature divided into four
classes—Most ancient poems of Ossian, and the
Feinn—Quotations—“The Dialogue of the Ancients”—Ossian and
Patrick—Story of Crede—Miscellaneous poems—Prose tales—“Pursuit
of Diarmad and Grainne”—“Lay of Diarmad”—Norse Ballads—Dream
figures, a remarkable Gaelic tradition 174

CHAPTER XI

THE INFLUENCE OF THE NORSE INVASIONS ON GAELIC LITERATURE

The dreaded Vikings—In English waters—Descents on Iona—Monasteries
favourite objects of attack—Destruction of books—Their own eddas
and sagas—Modern discovery of the wonderful Icelandic
literature—The Northmen in a new light—Literary effects of their
invasions—Arrested development—Lamentable dispersion of the
literary classes—Pilgrim Scots—The rise of Scottish
Gaelic—Present-day differences between it and Irish—Introduction
of Norse words—Decay of inflection—Gaelic examples of Viking
beliefs and superstitions—The Norseman still with us 198

CHAPTER XII

THE FOUR ANCIENT BOOKS OF WALES

The _Myvyrian Archaiology_—Oldest texts—The Black Book of
Caermarthen—The Book of Aneurin—The Book of Taliessin—The Red
Book of Hergest—Gildas and Nennius—The ancient Laws and
Institutes—A great dialectic battle—The princes of song—“I
Yscolan”—A Welsh Ossianic poem—Characteristics of the early
poetry—The medieval romances—Their history—Modern translations
of the Mabinogion—Two classes of tales—The legend of
Taliessin—His curious odes—Kilhwch and Olwen—The Lady of the
Fountain—Three striking features of the Arthurian romances—Their
influence on Western Europe 217

CHAPTER XIII

CELTIC LITERARY REVIVALS

Sixth century awakening throughout Celtdom—Illustrious
names—Brittany’s wonderful cycle of song—Charming
examples—Dearth of tenth century—A strange trait of Celtic
life—The brilliant medieval renaissance—Output of Ireland,
Wales, and Brittany—The Cornish dramas—Last speaker of that
dialect—Period of inactivity and decline—Recrudescence—1745–1800
the high-water mark of Highland production—A galaxy of
poets—Splendid lyrical outburst—New Ossianic cycle—Seana
Dana—Caledonian Bards—The Welsh Eisteddfod—Latest Celtic
renaissance—Some characteristic features, results,
manifestations—Antiquity, thou wondrous charm! 239

CHAPTER XIV

HIGHLAND BARDS BEFORE THE FORTY-FIVE

“The Owlet”—Three Macgregor songs—The old bardic system
superseded—Era of modern Gaelic poetry—Mary Macleod—Details of
her life—Famous songs—Iain Lom—Ardent poet and politician—His
“Vow”—Eventful career—Poems—Created Gaelic
Poet-Laureate—Influence on Highland history—Other minor bards
and bardesses—Imitations by Sir Walter Scott—The blind harper,
and the blind piper—A comic poet—Two major bards—Maccodrum’s
Muse—Characteristics of the group before the Forty-five 262

CHAPTER XV

THE INFLUENCE OF THE CHURCH ON GAELIC LITERATURE

The origins of Celtic literature—Two streams—The Pagan—The
Christian—Influence of the early Celtic Church as patron of
letters—Originates a written literature—Attitude towards the
ancient sagas—Medieval obscurantism—The Dialogues between Ossian
and Patrick quoted and discussed—Their significance—Bishop
Carsewell and the Reformation—The rival influences of Naturalism
and the Church—Decline of Gaelic oral literature—The Nineteenth,
a century of gleaning rather than of creative
work—Reasons—Present-day return to nature—Splendid services of
individual Churchmen 286

CHAPTER XVI

THE INFLUENCE OF CELTIC, ON ENGLISH LITERATURE

Earliest contact—Loan-words—Three periods of marked literary
influence—Layamon’s “Brut”—A fascinating study for critics—The
development of the Arthurian Romance—Sir Thomas Malory—Question
as to origin of rhyme—A Celtic claim—Elements in Scottish
poetry—in English literature—Gray’s “Bard”—Macpherson’s
“Ossian”—Influence on Wordsworth and his contemporaries—Moore’s
“Irish Melodies”—Sir Walter Scott—Tennyson—Interesting
comparison—Arnold, Shairp, Blackie—Novelists after Scott—Living
writers 304

CHAPTER XVII

THE PRINTED LITERATURE OF THE SCOTTISH GAEL

Two interesting bibliographies—Surprising revelations—First Gaelic
printed book—Meagre output prior to the Forty-five—Earliest
original works issued—No complete Bible in type before
1801—Nineteenth century activity—The Highlander’s favourite
books—A revelation of character—His printed literature mainly
religious—Translations—The two books in greatest demand—Dearth
of the masterpieces of other languages—The most popular of
English religious writers—of native bards—Gaelic poetry—The
printed succession—Notable books—Account of the Gaelic
grammars—Dictionaries—Periodicals—Value of the literature 325

CHAPTER XVIII

THE MASTER GLEANERS OF GAELIC POETRY

The work of the gleaner—Authors of the three most precious relics
of Celtic literature, Leabhar Na h’Uidhre, Book of Hymns, and
Book of Leinster—of the three Highland treasures, Book of the
Dean of Lismore, Fernaig MS., and Book of Clanranald—Advent of
Macpherson—Collections and collectors between 1750 and
1820—First printed gleaning—Four nineteenth-century monuments,
Campbell’s Leabhar na Feinne, Mackenzie’s Beauties of Gaelic
Poetry, Sinclair’s Songster, and Carmichael’s Carmina
Gadelica—Other recent gleaners and their books 347

CHAPTER XIX

THE MASTER SCHOLARS OF CELTIC LITERATURE

The bards and seanachies—Six men of outstanding literary
eminence—The earliest pioneer of the modern philological
movement—Representatives of the older scholarship—Those of the
new—The brilliant Zeuss—Foreign periodicals dealing with
Celtic—Foremost scholars of the various
nations—Italian—German—French—Danish—Scandinavian—American—British,
including English, Irish, Welsh, Manx, and Scottish—Many
literary problems solved—The promise of future harvests 367

INDEX OF NAMES 387

INDEX OF SUBJECTS 397

CHAPTER I
THE ARRIVAL OF THE CELT IN HISTORY AND LITERATURE

The Celts in primitive Europe—Advent in British Isles—Two
branches—Observations of Cæsar and Tacitus—Main facts of
Celtic progress on the Continent—A vast empire—Interview with
Alexander the Great—Colony in Galatia—Cup of conquest
full—Disintegration—The scattered remnants—Recent
statistics—The ancient Celts as seen through Greek and Roman
eyes—Literary awakening—Ogam writings—First men of
letters—Earliest written Gaelic now extant—Modern linguistic
discovery—The place of Celtic in the Aryan group.

Emerson, looking forth from the new time on the nations of Europe, gave
pen to the reflection, “The Celts are of the oldest blood in the world.
Some peoples are deciduous or transitory. Where are the Greeks? Where
the Etrurians? Where the Romans? But the Celts are an old family of
whose beginning there is no memory, and their end is likely to be still
more remote in the future, for they have endurance and productiveness—a
hidden and precarious genius.”

A sweeping statement withal, yet the thoughtful finding of an eminently
studious and dispassionate mind.

When the curtain lifts over primitive Europe, and authentic history
first begins, the Celts are already there, and loom formidable in the
heart of the Continent. Not the earliest inhabitants by any means;
archæology points to anterior races. These the ethnologists designate
according to the shape of their heads and supposed colour of their hair.
Their remains have been found in caves, and in what are known to science
as the Neolithic or Stone Age barrows. And they present types of
humanity widely differing from the succeeding so-called Aryans.[1] But
beyond their material survivals, and the people who were supposed to
have been descended from them, there is absolutely no record of these
vanished races. They belong to prehistoric times.

So do the Celts in great part, but unlike their predecessors they have
emerged in history, and projected themselves on its pages to this day.
They have stepped out of the impenetrable haze, and appear at the
opening of the written drama of Europe.

History finds them for the first time located about the upper reaches of
the Danube, in the lands corresponding to modern Bavaria, Wurtemburg,
Baden, and the country drained by the Maine to the east of the Rhine.
The idea of an ingress from Asia has lately been abandoned. Research
seems to have effectively exploded it.[2]

They were barbarians from our point of view, not savages; not civilised,
but apparently a good stage onward from earlier types. It was they who
gave names to many of the rivers and mountains of Europe—“names which
are poems,” says Matthew Arnold, “and which imitate the pure voices of
nature.”

Hyperboreans they seemed to have been called by the original Greeks, but
since the time of Hecatæus and Herodotus, that is, from about 500 B.C.,
they came to be known to the classic writers as κελται or κελτοι—a name
which at that early period the Greeks applied indiscriminately to all
the people of north and west Europe who were not Iberians.

To them, as well as to the Romans, all that stretch of the Continent
appeared to be occupied mainly by κελτοι. And though the Germans lived
from time immemorial beyond them in the north, not till the first
century B.C. did the Romans discover that they were a different people.
Cæsar himself was one of the earliest to observe and chronicle the fact.

But there were reasons for this apparent ubiquity of the Celts. Apart
from their chronic unrest and frequent migrations, we can well
understand why the Germans appeared merged in them. The Germans were
early deprived of their independence, and held in slavish subordination
till they recovered their freedom about 300 B.C. For centuries before
that date, conqueror and conquered apparently lived under a common
regime, obeying the same chiefs, and fighting in the same armies, though
generally in the relation of dominant masters and subject slaves. In
this way they even came to have many words in common, as their
respective languages show.

At what time the Celts entered Gaul, Britain, and Ireland is a question
unhappily beyond the knowledge of man. The seventh century B.C., or even
the tenth as the Irish tradition maintains, is given as an approximate
date. But of this there is no authentic record. Nor yet of a second
immigration assumed to have followed in the third century B.C.

That there were two such invasions of Britain with a considerable
interval between them is one of the pet theories of philology. For two
branches of an originally parent stock may be traced, known as the
Gadelic and the Brittonic, or more recently as the Q and P groups. The
one includes the Irish, Manx, and Gaelic-speaking peoples, and was the
earlier to arrive; the other embraces the Welsh, Cornish, and Breton,
who came later.

This linguistic fact might be represented tabularly, thus:—

The main difference between those two branches is, that in Gadelic the
original guttural of the Aryan tongue came gradually to be _c_ with the
sound _k_, ogam _qu_, and that in Brittonic it became _p_. So we say:—

English Gaelic Welsh Latin
Four _c_eithir _p_edwar quatuor
Five _c_oig _p_imp quinque

Such a distinction points to a great change from the common speech of
earlier Celtic times. It existed prior to the Christian era, and is
still strikingly in evidence. Edward Lhuyd, the illustrious Welsh
antiquary, writing in the early part of the eighteenth century, noted
that there were scarcely any words in the Irish that began with _p_,
beyond what were borrowed from Latin or some other language. So much was
this the case, that in an ancient alphabetical vocabulary which he had
beside him, the letter _p_ was entirely omitted. Other instances might
be given. For example, in O’Reilly’s Irish Dictionary, out of upwards of
700 pages, only twelve are occupied with that letter; and when we come
to examine the most recent Gaelic collection of words—the etymological
dictionary of Dr. Macbain—we find about 270 beginning with _p_ out of a
total of well over 7000; and even of these, the majority are derived or
borrowed from Norse or English. There is a MS. of the eighteenth century
in the Laing collection of Edinburgh University, which puts the case
succinctly, when in the sections of what promised to be a good Gaelic
grammar, it observes that of old no word, except _exotic_ words, began
in Gaelic with a _p_. Fastening on so characteristic a distinction
Professor Rhys, some years ago, decided to call the Brittonic the P, and
the Gadelic the Q group, as the more simple and fundamental
classification.

Thus far philology helps to differentiate between the two branches, and
points to a remote advent of the Gael in Britain.

But when we turn to history we find there is nothing definite on this
most attractive subject till Cæsar arrives and makes personal
observation. Speaking of the south—for he had not penetrated the
northern parts—he tells us that he found two races in possession: one in
the interior, which considered itself indigenous; the other on the
sea-coast, roving adventurers from the Continent who arrived later.
Tacitus, writing nearly a century and a half after Cæsar, namely, about
82 A.D., practically confirms Cæsar’s report of a double occupation, and
adds the further interesting details, that the one race was dark
complexioned and had curly hair, while the other, resembling the Gauls,
had red hair and were tall of stature. In the eighth century A.D. we
know, on the authority of Bede, that there were in these islands five
written languages, viz. those of the Angles, the Brythons, the Scottis,
the Picts, and the Latins, the first four[3] of which were spoken. It is
the ever-puzzling yet fascinating work of philology and ethnology to
trace the origin and exact racial connection of these—a work which
hitherto has proved as elusive as the finding of the North Pole. Who are
the dark complexioned race of the South? and who the Picts of the North?
are questions of perennial interest to the experts.

But though early British and German history is so elusive, we are on
sure ground with the main facts of Celtic progress on the Continent from
the fifth century B.C. Authentic history then opens with the advent of
the classical writers just at the time when the Celts were entering upon
a series of conquests which for the next 200 years made them the
dominant race in Europe.[4] It is needless to follow their various
migrations, even if it were possible. As their territories became
congested on the Danube, they sent forth horde after horde of conquering
tribes who surged every way. Now westward for the most part, till, in
the graphic language of Galgacus, uttered centuries after, “there was
now no nation beyond—nothing save the waves and the rocks” (Nulla jam
gens ultra; nihil nisi fluctus et saxa), then, like the back-rushing
tides, they receded eastwards.

“Tumults,” the Romans called these irrepressible outbursts, and most
felicitously too, for they were the terror of Europe.

A cursory glance at some of the more famous of their invasions suffices
to show the restless energy of the Celts and their far-reaching
conquests.

From Gaul, where they appear to have established themselves north of the
Garonne and about the Seine and Loire, the hungry tribes made a dash for
Spain, shortly before 500 B.C., and wrested the peninsula from the hands
of the Phœnicians. One hundred and twenty years later North Italy shared
the same fate. Surging through the passes of the Alps they overthrew the
Etruscans on their own ground in the great battle of Allia, 390 B.C.,
and annexed their territory. Flushed with the victory they pressed
forward, and within three days stormed and sacked the town of Rome
itself. Indeed, it is with this momentous incursion that authentic Roman
history begins.

One more mighty invasion of the East, and the Illyrians along the Danube
are vanquished, thus rendering the conquerors masters of a vast
territory extending from that river and the Adriatic to the Atlantic,
and bounded on the north by the Rhine and Mid-Germany, and on the south
by Mid-Italy and Mid-Spain, and including the British Isles—a
magnificent empire rivalling that of Alexander or of Cæsar in their
palmy days. Goldsmith’s lines might well apply to them—

One only master grasps the whole domain,
And half a tillage stints the smiling plain.

So formidable, indeed, were the Celts during the period of their
ascendency that it served the purpose of the classic nations—Greeks and
Romans—to keep the peace with them as best they could, and even to play
them off against their own hereditary foes. And so the expansive tribes
were for the most part on friendly terms with both, especially with the
Greeks. We have an account in Strabo of an interview which Alexander the
Great had with their ambassadors. It is given on the authority of
Ptolemy, his general. The young potentate knew well the advantage of
cultivating good fellowship with his powerful neighbours, and when the
tribes of the Adriatic sent delegates he received them with all due
courtesy and respect.

While they were drinking, says the general, Alexander asked them what
was the object of their greatest fear, thinking they would say himself.
But the imaginative Celts had quite other views. They feared no man. One
thing only alarmed them, they replied, and that was lest the heavens
should one day fall and crush them. Still, they added, that they valued
the friendship of such a man as he was above everything.

“How vainglorious these Celts are!” muttered the young autocrat to his
courtiers, a little piqued, perhaps, at their rejoinder. Yet, if such
were really the object of their superstitious dread, the promise they
made was not without its own grim cogency. “If we fulfil not our
engagement,” they said, “may the sky falling upon us crush us, may the
earth opening swallow us, may the sea overflowing its borders drown us.”

With Alexander they kept their pledge, but in 280 B.C., when another
king ruled Macedonia, they over-ran his territories, slew him in battle,
and pillaged the temple of Delphi itself—an act of vandalism so shocking
to the Greeks that it roused their patriotism to such a pitch that they
were able to repulse the enemy in the neighbouring gorges.

Thus compelled to evacuate Greece, the Celts invaded Asia Minor in 278
B.C., and established there the well-known colony of Galatia. It was to
their descendants that St. Paul addressed his trenchant epistle, and the
words, “O foolish Galatians, who hath druided you?”

For six centuries after they continued to speak their language there, so
that St. Paul must have heard one dialect at least of the ancient
tongue.

It may surprise students of the classics to learn that the Celts claim
Hercules as one of their own potentates. In an old Gaelic MS. in the
Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh, we find the renowned hero figuring thus:
“Ercoill mac Amphitrionis, mhic Antestis, mhic Andlis, mhic Mitonis,
mhic Festime, mhic Athol, mhic Gregais, mhic Gomer, mhic Jafed, mhic
Noe”—a truly wonderful genealogy, tracing him up to Noah through the
Cymric Gomer.

The Greek version of the myth is interesting. It tells how Hercules, on
his expedition against Geryon, turned aside into Gaul and married there
a handsome Gaulish lady, by whom he had a son, Galates. This Galates,
surpassing all his countrymen in strength and prowess, led the way to
conquest, and exercising a wide sway, his territory and subjects
eventually came to be named after him—the one Galatia, the other Galatæ.

In whatever way the classic story originated, it is matter of history
that after the Celtic invasion of Greece, Galatæ became the popular
Greek name for the people hitherto known as κελτοι, even as Galli was
the favourite Roman one.

But already, before the Greek repulse, the Celtic cup of conquest was
full, and their vast empire began to crumble and disintegrate. The first
great shock was given by the revolt of their born thralls, the Germans,
about 300 B.C. In the struggle for independence these recovered their
liberty and big stretches of territory. Besides falling out with the
Greeks, the flurried tribes in that wild consternation of defeat came to
blows with the Romans also, who in two different battles got the victory
over them. Forced to ally themselves with former foes, now with the
Etruscans, again with the Carthaginians, the Celts still fought
desperately, but all in vain. Their dominion was doomed. And as if to
hasten the swift debacle, the various sections of the same great people
attacked and dispossessed each other. It was probably in the pressure of
those times that the Brittonic invaders surged into Britain and elbowed
their Gaelic kinsmen into more straitened circumstances; for all the
continental Celts were simultaneously in the throes of a lamentable
dispersion. Reverse followed reverse with singular fatality. Every
attempt to redeem their desperate fortunes seemed to fail. “They went to
the war, but they always fell,” said their own sad bard afterwards,
summing up in one terse antithesis the history of their collapse.

The failure was crushing and irretrievable. They lost Spain, they lost
the north of Italy, they lost Gaul, and subsequently Britain.

The story of Cæsar’s conquests needs no rehearsal. By 80 A.D. all
Britain south of the Firth of Forth figured as a Roman province.

Meantime the Celtic dialects of Gaul and Spain were gradually being
superseded by the Latin, and even the laws, habits, and civil
administration of the people were becoming Roman, until in the third
century of our era scarcely a vestige of the ancient régime remained
outside of the British Isles and Brittany, except to the south of the
latter, where the influence of the discarded dialect on the adopted
Latin might be traced.[5]

In Britain the Romanising process was suddenly arrested by the hasty
departure of the conqueror; and in the helpless abandonment that ensued
the Saxons found an open door. The same fate that they had themselves
formerly inflicted on their kinsmen now overtook the Britons, who were
hustled in great numbers into the wilds of Cornwall, of Wales, and
Strathclyde. And the last stage of the driving west remained to be
accomplished in the case of the Irish, when the Anglo-Celts arrived in
the twelfth century.

Since the great debacle of their race the Celtic remnants have continued
to speak one or other of the dialects bequeathed from their ancestors.
Five of these are living tongues. Apart from the number that speak them
abroad, it is estimated there are upwards of 3,000,000 people in
Brittany and the British Isles whose mother tongue is Celtic. The
distribution and proportion, according to the latest available
statistics,[6] are full of interest, in view of the long struggle for
existence of the language and people, and the extraordinary vitality
they have evinced in defying the tooth of time. These facts may be
crisply tabulated thus:—

Gaelic.[7] 254,415. Chiefly in the Highlands of Scotland.
Irish. 679,145. West of a line in Ireland from Dungarvon Bay to
Loch Swilly.
Manx. 3,000. West Coast, Isle of Man.
Welsh. 900,000. Over Wales.
Cornish. Extinct. Formerly Cornwall.
Breton. 1,300,000. In Brittany, N.W. corner of France.

A sadly dwindling minority are these fag-ends of once so mighty a race.
There can be no doubt that we see the isolated parts gradually expiring
on the horizon, and with more accelerated speed within the last few
decades than for centuries before. Modern industrialism now woos them
away from the strongholds of their own characteristic life, and the
separate units get absorbed in the common national life and the common
civilisation. Numbers of them—of the Irish especially—are still seeking
a home, following the hereditary instincts of their ancestors, and
hiving westwards to America, only to lose their distinctive Celtic
existence and to be merged in the larger life of that great nation.

The facts are sufficiently patent, but to show the rapidity with which
the disintegration is going on it may be mentioned that since 1851,
3,925,133 persons have emigrated from Ireland alone—a number larger than
that of all the remaining Celtic-speaking population in Europe. In 1899
the number was 43,760; in 1900, 47,107; in 1901, 39,870, the vast
majority of whom were from the western Irish-speaking provinces; and, as
in the depopulation of the Highlands, it is largely a drain of the best
blood, the land being left in the hands of the old and the feeble.

There are those who still write and dream of laying the foundations of a
new Celtic civilisation, but in view of the present subtle and swift
dissolution it is hard to know what they mean, unless indeed it be a
leavening of the existing civilisation by a recrudescence of the Celtic
spirit and Celtic aspirations.

In the main the race has already become fused with the population of
Europe, disappearing as Gallo-Grecians in the east, as Celt-Iberians in
Spain, as Gallo-Franks and Anglo-Celts in the north-west—all but the
Celtic fringes that are shedding their past.

Thus far the history, and from what we have said it will appear that the
Celts first emerge in literature in the fifth century B.C., from which
time the classical writers make frequent, though generally short and
meagre allusions to them. Dr. W. Z. Ripley,[8] one of the latest
authorities on ethnology, would discount their evidence as of little
value for the purposes of modern scientific research into race origins
and affinities, yet, nevertheless, so far as it goes, it is highly
interesting and important.

The earliest of all the Greek authors to mention the Celts, if we except
the geographer Hecatæus (520 B.C.), is Herodotus (484–425?), who twice
refers to them in his history as dwelling at the sources of the Danube
and bordering on the Kunesii, the westermost inhabitants of Europe.
Xenophon, at a later period (390), speaking of them as mercenaries with
Dionysius of Syracuse in 368 B.C., remarks that “the ships brought
Keltoi and Iberes.” Plato, Ephorus, Pytheas, and Scylax all furnish
hints in the same century. Aristotle also knew about this extraordinary
people, who, he was told, feared “neither earthquake nor floods,” living
in a country so cold that even the ass did not thrive there, yet putting
little clothing on their children. It appears he had also heard that
they had sacked Rome. Timæus popularised the new name Galatæ in bringing
into notice Galatia, which, he avers, is named after “Galates, son of
Cyclops and Galatia.”

From this time onward we get fuller details of the Celtic character,
manners, and customs. And to show the number and variety of authorities
from which information may be gleaned, the following may be selected:
Polybius, a Greek writer of the second century B.C., and Posidonius of
the first. Julius Cæsar and his contemporary Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, a
geographer of the early part of the first century A.D., Virgil, Cicero,
Livy, Tacitus, Dion Cassius, Pliny, Ptolemy, and Ammianus Marcellinus,
the latter bringing the list down towards the end of the fourth century,
when the Roman Empire in its own turn began to break up, and the Gaels
were at length prepared to enter the arena of literature and speak for
themselves.

It is outwith the scope of this chapter to go into many of the
interesting details which these various authors furnish, but a few of
those which astonished the writers may be noted in passing, such as, the
Celts’ intellectual cleverness; their numbers and great size; the
magnificence of their funerals, and their belief in the immortality of
the soul. Their cities were forests, and though otherwise cleanly in
their eating, lion-like, they were wont to take up huge joints and gnaw
at them. Other features of striking peculiarity were their figurative,
exaggerated language; the functions of bards and druids; their chariots
and excellent horsemanship; the fierceness and noise of their first
onset in battle; their readiness to be disheartened by reverse; their
astounding clothes,—dyed tunics, flowered with various colours, flaming
and fantastic, striped cloaks buckled on their shoulders, and breeches.
Their chiefs generally appeared with a retinue of followers. Of old, the
Celts devoted themselves to plundering other people’s countries. The
heads of their fallen enemies they cut off and hung to their horses’
manes; they were warlike, passionate, and always ready for fighting;
otherwise simple, frank, hospitable to strangers, but vain, quarrelsome,
fickle, and ever prone to waste their strength on personal feuds and
factions. Such were some of the curious traits and customs of our Celtic
progenitors as seen through Greek and Roman eyes.

Scarcely had the Romans finally abandoned Britain than the Celts enter
upon a new rôle. They annex the Roman script, the Roman language for
literary work, and the Roman art of writing. And thus equipped, they
proceed to produce a literature of their own in Latin and Gaelic. The
wonder is that with their natural quickness and thirst for knowledge
they did not achieve a record in this direction before.

When we reflect on the other great nations of antiquity, we find that
they generally had a literature of some kind, written down, if not in
books, then on skins or slabs and in temples. The Egyptians had their
“Book of the Dead,” the Indians their “Rig-veda,” the Persians their
“Zend-avesta,” the Chinese and Hebrews their “Sacred Books,” the Greeks
and Romans their classics, and we naturally ask, “What had the Celts in
the zenith of their power?” say between 500 and 300 B.C. No writing at
all that we know of. At this day only a few inscriptions remain in the
Gaulish language of Cæsar’s time and later, but nothing earlier. These
nomadic warrior populations may have had their bardic compositions and
tales floating by oral tradition, but we have no evidence that they
developed a literature, though some of them may have known Greek
letters.

It is to the insular Gaels, to those of Ireland and Scotland in the
fifth and sixth centuries of our era, that we have to look for the early
beginnings of Celtic literature. The Irish first showed signs of a rude
awakening to activity in this direction. They invented a system of
writing peculiar to themselves, simple and ingenious, and good enough
for rough inscriptions on stones, but too cumbrous for the needs of
literature.

Their earliest records are to be found in this Ogam script, which
consists of a number of short lines drawn straight or slanting, either
above, below, or through a long stem-line. Thus—

| || ||| |||| |||||
+-----++-----+++-----++++-----+++++----------
h d t c qu

represents the letters h, d, t, c, qu, being the first letters of the
first five numerals in Gaelic, h’aon, dha, tri, ceithir, coig; the last
in Manx is queig; in Irish cuig; and in Latin quinque.

The vowels are similarly represented, broad vowels, a, o, u; small
vowels, e, i—

| || ||| |||| |||||
+-----++-----+++-----++++-----+++++----------
| || ||| |||| |||||
a o u e i

Over two hundred stones have been found inscribed with Ogam writing,
most of them in the south-west of Ireland, from twenty to thirty in
Wales and Devonshire, and ten in Scotland. The Book of Ballymote, a MS.
of the fourteenth century, fortunately contains a key to some of these
inscriptions, so that many of them have been read, though not all.

Who introduced this peculiar mode of writing? and when? are questions
that have never yet been determined. Brash, who made personal inspection
of most of the stones, was of opinion that they are of pre-Christian
origin, whereas Dr. Graves has attempted to prove that they belong to a
period between the fifth and seventh centuries A.D.

References to Ogam inscriptions are frequently met with in the earliest
Celtic literature, and some examined contain grammatical forms alleged
to be older than those of the most ancient MSS., and corresponding even
with the archaic forms of the antique Gaulish monuments.

The Ogam used to be written on wood and stone, and it is not improbable
that many of the genealogies and bits of legendary lore may have been
handed down from generation to generation in this way, as well as by
oral tradition.

It is with the great wave of Christian evangelisation that passed over
Ireland and Scotland successively, through the labours of St. Patrick
and St. Columba, that the use of the Roman script became widely general,
and we trace the dawn of letters. Round the names of these two men there
shines a lustre which the lapse of ages has failed to dim. They not only
kindled the torch of a higher faith and purer life among their Celtic
brethren, but they lighted also the lamp of literature, which has
continued to burn with more or less radiance for 1500 years.

St. Patrick, as the earlier of the two, is really the Cædmon of Gaelic
literature. Born in Scotland, probably, as the later critics think, at
Old Kilpatrick, near Dumbarton, he was, while yet a youth of sixteen,
carried captive to Hiberio, and though he escaped after six years from
his hard fate as his master’s thrall and feeder of cattle, his
missionary zeal, new kindled, urged him to return as evangelist to the
land of his former oppression. The visions of his early captivity, as he
lay down to rest of nights near the cattle, remind us of Cædmon’s vision
in the stable at Whitby, upwards of two hundred years after—a vision
which issued in the birth of English literature, as did those of St
Patrick in that of Gaelic.

And so the unassuming herd emerges as the first known writer of the
ancient Celtic people, the first of whom we have any definite authentic
knowledge.

Three literary compositions stand in his name, namely, his “Confession,”
written in rugged Latin, his “Epistle to Coroticus,” in similar language
and style, and the “Deer’s Cry,” a lorica or prayer in Gaelic. This hymn
has always been regarded, and rightly too, as a gem of sacred song.

The religious and literary dawn that lit up Ireland in the fifth century
reached Scotland in the sixth through the advent of the heroic Columba.
He too, by unhappy circumstances driven over sea, lived an exile in “the
land of his adoption tried,” and with even more brilliance and learning
did for Scotland what St. Patrick did for Ireland. So that the school of
Iona became for centuries after his death a centre of light and leading
in religion and letters, not only for Scotland and Ireland, but also for
many parts of Europe.

His own special contributions to literature include several beautiful
poems in Gaelic and Latin, and many transcripts in Latin of parts of
books of Scripture, such as the Cathrach, a copy of the Psalter believed
to have been made while he was yet a student, and perhaps also the Book
of Durrow and the Book of Kells—two wonderful specimens of penmanship
and early Celtic art. If these latter are not exactly the work of his
own hands they belong at least to the Columban period, an era of great
literary activity, which produced, among other well-known works, the
_Amra Choluimcille_ of Dallan Forgaill, Adamnan’s _Life of Columba_, and
the Book of Deer.

It will thus be seen that the earliest written MSS. of the Celtic people
are essentially a Christian literature, which ignored almost entirely
the pagan traditions of the race in its effort to supersede them. But
the atmosphere was heavy with these, and apparently from pre-Christian
times there had come floating down by oral transmission a great mass of
heroic saga which at length found written expression in the seventh or
eighth century A.D. So that now to the purely Christian literature there
was added the purely pagan, which much more faithfully reflected the
characteristic flavour of the race, its strength, and its weakness, its
facts, its fancies, and its foibles. Professing to go back to a remote
antiquity, it is significant that the setting of this ancient saga is
confined exclusively to these islands. None of the stories belong to
Europe or the doings of the parent stock in its palmy days. As compared
with the Christian, this pagan contribution is by far the more important
from a literary point of view. Yet it must be borne in mind that though
there are still extant in Ireland Celtic Latin MSS. which reach up to
the time of St. Patrick and St. Columba, there is none existing which
contains actual Gaelic writing prior to the eighth century.

Almost the only specimen of continuous prose written by the end of the
eighth century now known to exist is a portion of a Gaelic sermon on
temperance and self-denial from the text, “If any man will come after
me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.” This
curious relic is in the town library of Cambray, in a MS. containing the
canons of an Irish council held in 684. The MS., however, bears direct
evidence that it was not written until about a century afterwards.

The earliest written Gaelic is contained in MSS. on the Continent, such
as those at Milan, Cambray, Vienna, St. Gall, and other places. And even
these are not books of saga, but generally Latin books with some Gaelic
poems jotted on the leaf margins, or glosses, and other explanatory
writing. There are a few such literary monuments also in the British
Isles, containing ancient Gaelic. The Book of Armagh, for example, dates
from 807, and in addition to vernacular notes, preserves the Latin
“Confessions” of St. Patrick, copied, it is believed, from the apostle’s
own autograph MS. The Book of Deer, almost equally venerable, with a
Gaelic colophon, belongs to the same century. To its original contents
were added in the eleventh and twelfth centuries Gaelic entries which
are of uncommon philological and historical interest and value.

But setting aside these Latin books in which the Gaelic jottings are
purely incidental and secondary, we need to come down as far as the
eleventh century to reach the existing sources of the earliest written
compositions in the native tongue. It is in such MSS. as the Leabhar Na
h’Uidhre, the Book of Hymns, and the other great MiddleAge gleanings of
after days that we find the Patrician and Columban literature as well as
the ancient sagas.

Till within very recent times the Celt had no idea that he was heir to
such a vast literary inheritance as really exists. As in the olden times
men sometimes buried their wealth to save it from the hands of ruthless
foes, and, dying themselves or falling in the fray, lived not to
indicate to others the site of their hid treasures, so it has happened
in the case of Gaelic literature. Much of it perished at the hands of
the enemy and the avenger. What was saved from the wreck of the more
stormy and turbulent periods of our history owes its existence to-day
very largely to concealment and neglect. And as the plough or the spade
occasionally turns up an old stone cist, or a casket of ancient coins,
or a canoe of primitive man, so the casual researches of antiquarians
and scholars have brought to light a hidden mass of ancient writings
which appear to have been scattered broadcast over Europe and the
British Isles. These Gaelic relics are now jealously preserved in
various countries, and within the last century have been made the
subject of the most interested scrutiny by leading Continental and
British philologists, with the result that they have thrown a welcome
light on some of the darker problems of history, philology, and
ethnology. For example, as late as the first quarter of last century few
people had any idea that the Celtic populations were allied with the
southern nations of Europe, or that their language had any connection
whatever with the Romance and Teutonic tongues. One solitary scholar,[9]
indeed, threw out the hint as early as 1786, but offered no proof; and
it remained a visionary hypothesis until the long list of documents
reappearing one by one enabled scholars to establish the point beyond
question, that linguistically the Celtic people are a branch of the
great Aryan family, and thus closely allied with the Teutonic, and still
more nearly with the Greek and the Latin peoples. Roughly, this
relationship may be represented as under. The table is not meant to
indicate race affinities, which it is very far indeed from doing, but
simply to exhibit the affinities of language which modern philological
studies have traced:—

Aryan
|
+--------------------------+-----------------------------+
| |
European Branch Asiatic Branch
|
+------------------------+-----------------------+
| | |
| Slavonic Teutonic
| | |
| +-----+--------+ |
| | | |
| Russians Old Prussians |
| |
+------+-------+ +-------+--------+
| | | | | |
Greek Latin Celtic English Germans Norse

It is this important and surprising discovery, that we are a part of a
vast Indo-European family spread to the east over a great part of Asia,
and to the west over the most of Europe including Russia, that has given
such impetus to Celtic studies within recent years. The Gaelic has been
found to have roots which go far down towards the parent stock. And its
literature, therefore, is of the utmost value to all who seek to read
the riddle of the past and to push back the horizons of knowledge beyond
the age even of Herodotus, “the father of history.”

There is a fascination and refining influence in the study of the Greek
and Roman classics, but for the man of large outlook and broad human
sympathies there is much also to interest and attract in the literature
of the Gael—so old, so weird, so fanciful.

Wordsworth, as he listened to the song of the Highland maid in the
harvest field, felt the pathos of the past in that moving Gaelic
product, and would fain learn its story. Hence his reverie—

Will no one tell me what she sings?
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old unhappy far-off things,
And battles long ago.

That is just what they do; dealing with much brighter things too. For
the spirit of the race is enshrined in these old writings, and the
fortunes of the race in their history.

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER I
NUMBER OF PERSONS SPEAKING GAELIC AND ENGLISH, AND GAELIC ONLY, IN
SCOTLAND IN 1891 AND 1901.
┌───────────────────┬───────────────────┬───────────────┬─────────────┐
│ County. │ │ Gaelic and │ │
│ │ Population. │ English. │Gaelic only. │
├───────────────────┼─────────┬─────────┼───────┬───────┼──────┬──────┤
│ „ │ 1891. │ 1901. │ 1891. │ 1901. │1891. │1901. │
├───────────────────┼─────────┼─────────┼───────┼───────┼──────┼──────┤
│Inverness │ 89,317│ 89,796│ 44,084│ 43,179│17,276│11,721│
│Ross and Cromarty │ 77,810│ 76,135│ 37,437│ 39,235│18,577│12,171│
│Argyll │ 75,003│ 73,083│ 36,720│ 34,224│ 6,042│ 3,313│
│Lanark │1,046,040│1,337,886│ 22,887│ 26,695│ 84│ 101│
│Sutherland │ 21,896│ 21,239│ 14,786│ 14,076│ 1,115│ 469│
│Perth │ 126,199│ 123,276│ 13,847│ 11,446│ 304│ 78│
│Renfrew │ 290,798│ 268,459│ 8,435│ 5,585│ 63│ 40│
│Edinburgh │ 434,159│ 487,702│ 6,308│ 5,745│ 19│ 75│
│Caithness │ 37,177│ 33,623│ 4,068│ 2,865│ 76│ 20│
│Dumbarton │ 94,495│ 113,627│ 3,556│ 3,040│ 36│ 14│
│Bute │ 18,404│ 18,641│ 3,482│ 2,713│ 29│ 20│
│Nairn │ 10,019│ 9,291│ 2,487│ 1,325│ 53│ 10│
│Elgin │ 43,453│ 44,749│ 2,263│ 1,860│ 12│ 2│
│Stirling │ 125,608│ 141,847│ 1,840│ 2,021│ 2│ 10│
│Ayr │ 226,283│ 254,165│ 1,827│ 1,654│ 14│ 16│
│Aberdeen │ 281,332│ 303,908│ 1,534│ 1,331│ 8│ 8│
│Forfar │ 277,773│ 283,736│ 1,461│ 1,303│ 8│ 13│
│Fife │ 187,346│ 218,347│ 726│ 840│ 6│ 3│
│Banff │ 64,190│ 61,440│ 639│ 499│ 3│ │
│Haddington │ 37,485│ 38,656│ 575│ 459│ 7│ 7│
│Linlithgow │ 52,808│ 64,796│ 486│ 575│ 2│ 5│
│Clackmannan │ 28,432│ 31,994│ 215│ 170│ 1│ 1│
│Dumfries │ 74,221│ 72,564│ 201│ 176│ │ 1│
│Roxburgh │ 53,741│ 48,804│ 177│ 132│ │ │
│Kincardine │ 35,647│ 40,896│ 116│ 103│ 1│ │
│Berwick │ 32,406│ 30,793│ 89│ 74│ │ 1│
│Orkney │ 30,453│ 27,727│ 88│ 70│ │ │
│Selkirk │ 27,353│ 23,356│ 73│ 57│ │ │
│Peebles │ 14,761│ 15,066│ 70│ 72│ │ 1│
│Kirkcudbright │ 39,985│ 39,335│ 69│ 98│ │ │
│Wigton │ 36,062│ 32,593│ 68│ 84│ │ │
│Shetland │ 28,711│ 27,736│ 67│ 52│ │ │
│Kinross │ 6,280│ 6,981│ 56│ 55│ │ │
│Persons on Board │ │ │ │ │ │ │
│ Ship in Scottish │ │ │ │ │ │ │
│ Waters │ │ 9,856│ │ 887│ │ 6│
├───────────────────┼─────────┼─────────┼───────┼───────┼──────┼──────┤
│ Total │4,025,647│4,472,103│210,677│202,700│43,738│28,106│
└───────────────────┴─────────┴─────────┴───────┴───────┴──────┴──────┘

In the census of 1901 the schedule restricts the entries in the Gaelic
column to persons over three years of age. According to the previous
census the number of persons under three years of age amounted to 7½ per
cent of the whole population. This must be taken into account in order
to institute a fair comparison between the returns of the
Gaelic-speaking population in 1891 and 1901.

CHAPTER II
ST. PATRICK, THE PIONEER OF CELTIC WRITERS

It is a characteristic of our age to doubt, if not to deny, the
historical reality of many of the heroic figures that hover in the
background of history. And such a doubt has extended even to St.
Patrick, due largely to the fact that he is not mentioned by the early
historians Prosper of Aquitaine (402–463) and Bede (673–735), both of
whom attribute the conversion of Ireland to Palladius.

But this seeming omission has been explained on the highly probable
assumption that Patrick[10] was the Palladius of these writers; and
against the merely negative inference there is the positive and almost
overwhelming voice of history and tradition, which puts the essential
features of Ireland’s apostle beyond all doubt.

The authentic records of his career are numerous and very old, dating
back, we may say, to his own handwriting. For in the Book of Armagh we
have what professes to be a copy of the autobiographical “Confession”
which he wrote himself late in life. This Book of Armagh, one of the
most ancient and exquisite of the Irish MSS., is itself nearly 1100
years old, having been written in 807 by a scribe Ferdomnach, and, in
addition to the “Confession” and other interesting contents, it has
preserved to us various Patrician documents. That the writer had before
him the actual autograph MS. of the saint when copying the “Confession”
is inferred from his own words, “Thus far the volume which Patrick wrote
with his own hand. On the seventeenth day of March was Patrick
translated to the heavens.” And also from his frequent marks of
interrogation and casual hints, such as, “The Book is uncertain here,”
showing that during the intervening centuries since Patrick wrote the
writing must have become faded and even illegible in some places.

Besides his own personal account, there is no lack of early lives by
other authors. Among those that may still be consulted are: (1) the
biographical Hymn by Fiacc of Sletty, one of the saint’s own
contemporaries; (2) two seventh-century Lives known as Tirechan’s and
Muirchu Mac Cumachteni’s, found in the Book of Armagh; (3) the
Tripartite Life, largest of all, from three very ancient Gaelic MSS.,
believed by Colgan, though not by later critics, to belong to the early
part of the sixth century, and translated by him in his _Trias
Thaumaturga_, 1645; (4) the Monk Jocelin’s memoir, twelfth century; and
(5) other MSS. of the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. Subsequent
authors, of course, are mainly dependent on these.

A great historic character was this St. Patrick, who could not be buried
in documents. His own words have far-reaching significance, beyond even
what he himself meant to convey when he wrote, “He who is mighty came
and in his mercy supported me, and raised me up and placed me on the top
of a wall.” On this eminence St. Patrick is great, not merely as apostle
of Ireland, but also as occupying a niche in the origins of Celtic
literature. Essentially a man of religious initiative, and making no
claim to distinction as a writer, he is nevertheless the earliest known
pioneer of letters in Ireland—the first of whose work we have definite
records to attest the authenticity.

What share he had in making the latter a literary country it is
difficult to say; but from his missionary advent in Ireland a knowledge
of letters seems to have spread rapidly over the land. His monasteries
and churches were centres and nurseries of learning. “He used,” as
Tirechan tells us, “to baptize men daily and to read letters and
abgatoriae with them.”

There is a high probability that the Ogam writing peculiar to Ireland
originated before his time, and even the beautiful modification of the
Roman alphabet found in Irish books. These are still matters for
research. But one thing, at least, is claimed for the saint and his
Christian followers, that they made the use of the Roman script for the
first time widely general. And this had far-reaching results for the
future, since only by its adaptation, as apart from the rude and
cumbrous though ingeniously simple Ogam, was any real literature
possible.

In view of the mass of biographical material that has collected round
the venerated name of St Patrick, it might be supposed that every event
of his life would stand out clear and luminous. Yet such is the
perversity of historic authorship, that names and dates and even
oft-told incidents are hard to get at in their true setting. The career
of the apostle is inextricably jumbled up and confused with that of two
others—the traditional Palladius and another Patrick, both of which
semi-mythical characters appear and disappear again and again, crossing
his path like his double; insomuch that it has been conjectured that the
incidents of one life are often transferred to another, and the saint is
credited with experiences which really belonged to the history of the
other two, such, for example, as his alleged mandate from the Pope and
the superior continental training under Germanus.

Dates especially are wonderfully elusive. The usual chronology for St.
Patrick’s career is given as follows: Birth, 387; missionary advent in
Ireland, 432; death, 492 or 493. Yet each of these dates is still under
discussion. Dr. Whitley Stokes puts the advent as early as 397; Dr. Todd
as late as 439 or 440. And so, after all that has been said and
searched, we are dependent for the essential features and outstanding
facts of his life upon the apostle’s own writings.

Such historical details as are generally accepted may be briefly given.
But in this case there is an advantage in quoting the _ipsissima verba_
of the saint, and thus allow him to tell his own tale at critical points
of his career, for his style and matter are themselves a revelation of
character.

He first projects himself on the canvas of literary history by relating
early circumstances and the pregnant event which changed the whole
aspect of his life, and gave it the direction it afterwards took. Thus
he begins:—

I, Patrick, a sinner, the rudest and least of all the faithful and the
most despicable among most men, had for my father Calpornius a deacon,
son of the late Potitus a presbyter, who was of the town of Bonaven
Taberniæ; for he had a farm in the neighbourhood where I was taken
captive. I was then sixteen years old. I knew not the true God, and I
was carried in captivity to Hiberio with many thousands of men
according to our deserts, because we had gone back from God and had
not kept His commandments, and were not obedient to our priests who
used to warn us for our salvation.

Bonaven Taberniæ has been the subject of much eager inquiry to this day.
Where is it? or Nemthur, the alternative name furnished by Fiacc of
Sletty? Many places claim the honour of being the birthplace of the
saint. Boulogne, Bristol, Glastonbury, Carlisle, Tours, Caerleon, and
Ireland have all contended at one time or another for the prestige. But
the best authorities in recent times seem to favour Old Kilpatrick, near
Dumbarton, as the most likely locality from which sprung the saint, and
as fulfilling better than any of the others the actual suggestions of
the records. In the river opposite the town there is a rock visible at
low water, called St. Patrick’s stone, tradition alleging that the ship
in which he sailed away to Ireland struck against it, but continued its
voyage unharmed.

In captivity in Antrim he remained for six years, his daily employment
being to feed cattle. Then the love of God entered his heart, he tells
us, and a spirit of prayer grew upon him. Often he would say a hundred
prayers in a day, and rise of nights to resort to the woods and
mountains in snow, and frost, and rain, for the same purpose.

While thus exercised, one night, in a dream, a voice came to him saying,
“Thy fasting is well; thou shalt soon return to thy country.” Later on,
the dream was repeated, the same voice assuring him that the ship was
now ready, 200 miles away.

Waiting no longer, the poor enthused slave fled from his master, and,
after long wandering, reached the port, where he found indeed a ship,
but the captain of it proved rough and hostile, and refused to have
anything to do with him. On the way back to his hut he was recalled by a
sailor, the upshot of the parley being that he accompanied the crew on
the voyage. Afterwards he seems to have been detained by them on shore,
perhaps in Gaul, as they wandered in a desert and suffered great
hardships. “How is it, Christian?” said the captain one day when no food
could be had. Patrick gave a characteristic reply, and he tells us that
they were saved from starvation on that occasion by a herd of swine soon
after appearing, some of which they killed and ate.

There is no mention in his account of any Continental sojourn,[11]
though almost all the Lives make reference to such. Fiacc of Sletty
waxes poetical over it:—

He went across all the Alps—great God, it was a marvel of a journey—
Until he staid with German in the south, in the south part of Latium;
In the isles of the Tyrrhene Sea he remained, therein he meditated,
He read the Canon with German; it is this that writings declare
To Ireland God’s angels were bringing him in his course,
Often was it seen in vision that he would come thither again.

If such wandering took place, it was probably after he escaped from the
mariners. For, over twenty-two years of his life at this period seem to
be a blank, unless accounted for by some such sojourn in this country or
abroad. At length, after great privations and lonely struggle, he made
his way back to his parents, who received him “as a son, and earnestly
besought him not to expose himself to fresh dangers, but to remain with
them henceforth.”

For a while he did stay, and then the apostolic spirit came upon him.
“In the dead of night,” he says, “I saw a man coming to me as if from
Hiberio, whose name was Victoricus, having innumerable epistles. And he
gave me one of them, and I read the beginning of it, which contained the
words, ‘The voice of the Irish.’ And whilst I was repeating the
beginning of the epistle, I imagined that I heard in my mind the voice
of those who were near the wood of Foclut, which is near the Western
Sea, and then they cried, ‘We pray thee, holy youth, to come and
henceforth walk amongst us.’”

He is supposed to have been forty-five years of age then. His mission,
we see, he attributed solely to an inward call or divine command. There
is no mention of any authority from the Pope, of any visit to Rome or
Gaul, or even of the superior education he is credited with having
received on the Continent under Germanus. On the contrary, he speaks of
himself in his early condition as “a rustic, a fugitive, unlearned, and
not knowing how to provide for the coming day;” spiritually, “like a
stone lying in the deep mud.” And in later life, in reference to the
“Confession,” “Wherefore I thought of writing long ago, but hesitated
till now, for I feared I should not fall into the language of men;
because I have not read like others who have been taught sacred letters
in the best manner, and have never changed their language from infancy,
but were always adding to its perfection; for my language and speech is
translated into a foreign tongue. Indeed, it can be easily perceived
from the childishness of my writing after what manner I have been
instructed and taught.”

He had used Latin, no doubt, as his mother tongue in boyhood, but, not
having received much instruction in it, he had never cultivated it as a
literary language, and consequently it had, during his captivity, fallen
very much into abeyance, so that it was difficult for him in later days
to write this language of the learned as fluently as he would wish.

His father was of Roman descent. His mother is said to have been
British—a merely conjectural statement.

Like St. Columba in after years, St. Patrick addressed the tribesmen
through their chiefs and kings, and was tolerant of contemporary
superstitions, seeking rather to graft the new faith upon the old. He
adopted the pagan festivals and associated them with Christian events.
At Tara, however, he attacked paganism in its stronghold and burnt the
druidical books, extorting from King Laoghaire a reluctant acquiescence
in his work. From the chief, Daire, he obtained the site for his famous
monastery at Armagh, which became his headquarters. He threw down, in
what is the present county of Cavan, the great idol Crom Cruach—object
of immemorial veneration and savage rites. From the huge stone, which
bowed westward on that day of doom, the demon is reported to have fled
to hell, leaving his fallen image leaning over, so that what was once
called “The Chief of the Mound” was henceforth known as “The Crooked one
[Crom Cruach] of the Mound.”

As his work advanced, a vast following of missionaries, bishops, and
even chiefs and sub-kings, with their subjects, came under his
influence. He had a share also in reforming the ancient druidical laws
of Ireland, and bringing them more into harmony with Christian
principles. According to the “Four Masters,” it was in 438 the part of
the Brehon Law known as the Seanchus Mor, and still preserved in
venerable documents, was redacted. Much of the work may be of later
dates, but tradition credits St. Patrick with having undertaken the task
along with others, and with having effected a drastic purification in
his own lifetime.

Many legends have gathered round his name during the ages, and
superstitious beliefs, as one might expect. Yet, so great is his
prestige in the land of his adoption to this day, that not only are
thousands called by his name, but the peasantry of Ireland actually
believe that St. Patrick banished snakes from the island.

The historical records know nothing of any meeting between Ossian and
the saint; yet in some of the older MSS. there are Dialogues[12] in the
heroic style reported as having been carried on between them, the bard
representing the pagan ideal of his ancestors, the saint the Christian
ideal of the Church. They are evidently the work of later times, some
centuries, no doubt, after the saint’s time. But, both from a literary
and religious point of view, they are profoundly interesting.

Besides these characteristic Dialogues reported in the Book of Lismore
and other ancient MSS., and assumed to have taken place between St.
Patrick and Ossian, there is a romantic and beautiful one recorded by
Tirechan, and repeated with more or less variations in the Lives of St.
Patrick, and consequently of great antiquity. It is taken from the Book
of Armagh.

The saint had come to the well called Clebach, and before sunrise sat
down beside it with his followers.

And lo! the two daughters of King Laoghaire, Ethne the fair and Fedelm
the ruddy, came early to the well to wash after the manner of women,
and they found near the well a synod of holy Bishops with Patrick. And
they knew not whence they were or in what form or from what people, or
from what country; but they supposed them to be divine sidhe, or gods
of the earth, or a phantasm, and the virgins said unto them, “Who are
ye! and whence come ye?” And Patrick said unto them, “It were better
for you to confess to our true God, than to inquire concerning our
race.”

The first virgin said,
“Who is God?
And where is God?
And of what (nature) is God?
And where is His dwelling-place?
Has your God sons and daughters, gold and silver?
Is He ever living?
Is He beautiful?
Did Mary foster His Son?
Are His daughters dear and beautiful to men of the world?
Is He in heaven or in earth?
In the sea?
In rivers?
In mountainous places?
In valleys?
Declare unto us a knowledge of Him,
How shall He be seen?
How is He to be loved?
How is He to be found?
Is it in youth?
Is it in old age that He is to be found?”

With swift strides the narrative goes on to tell how the saint
enlightened the two maidens, how they believed and were baptized, how
they received the eucharist of God and slept in death. Thereafter they
were laid on the same bed, covered with garments, while their friends
raised great lamentation for them.

Such is a summary of the chief events in St. Patrick’s long and
epoch-making career in Ireland, taken generally to have lasted sixty
years, so that he must have lived to a ripe old age, if the records
report with any exactness.

Leaving now the biographical and coming to the purely literary aspect of
his life, we find that there are three pieces of literature assigned to
him, namely, the “Confession” and the “Epistle to Coroticus,” both in
Latin, and the “Deer’s Cry” in Gaelic. The two former are sometimes
styled his epistles, numbered I. and II., the history of whose
preservation to our own time is not without its peculiar interest.

Besides the copy of the “Confession” in the Book of Armagh, there are
four other MSS. in existence: (1) the Cottonian, in the British Museum;
(2) two MSS. in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, formerly preserved in the
Salisbury Cathedral; (3) one MS. in the Public Library of Arras. The
text of the Bollandist Fathers was taken from the Arras MS. and
published at Antwerp in 1668 in their _Acta Sanctorum_. A copy of the
“Epistle to Coroticus” accompanies each of the above except that in the
Book of Armagh.

Of the “Confession,” the style and gist may be gathered from the
extracts given as we recounted his life. It is perhaps the earliest
piece of authentic Celtic literature we have, inasmuch as it is the
first of which the authorship can be definitely and historically
asserted. Its Latin is rude and archaic, answering to the description
St. Patrick gives of his own writing. It quotes from the pre-Vulgate
version of the Scriptures, and contains nothing inconsistent with the
period in which it professes to have been written.

The saint appears to have penned this document as a kind of defence of
his apostolic work against the attacks of men who regarded the whole
undertaking as arrogant and presumptuous in view of his own rusticity.
“The rustic condition was created by the Most High,” he gently reminds
them, and adds some plain truths which show that, like Jesus, and St.
Paul, and St Francis of Assisi, and other great master-spirits of the
Christian Evangel, he did not disdain poverty, but voluntarily assumed
it for the promotion of the Gospel. It would be tedious, he says, to
relate even a portion of the many toils and dangers he had gone through.
Twelve times his life was in imminent peril. Never one farthing did he
receive for all his preaching and teaching. He challenges his detractors
to say if he did and it will be returned. The people, indeed, were
generous and offered innumerable gifts, which, out of principle, he
refused, lest it might furnish an opportunity for cavil against the
disinterestedness of his mission. On one occasion, on being told that
his own nephew declared that his preaching would be perfect if he
insisted a little more on the necessity of giving, he gave the noble
reply, that “for the sake of charity he forebore to preach charity.”

The “Epistle to Coroticus” is evidently from the same pen. The Latin and
the literary style are similar. It also quotes from the pre-Vulgate
version, and there is no internal evidence against the assumption that
it was written by the saint. Though not found in the Book of Armagh, it
is preserved in the other MSS. cited, some of which may be as old as the
eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Certain authorities identify Coroticus with the Welsh prince Caredig.
Other more recent scholars, such as Drs. Skene, Whitley Stokes, and
Douglas Hyde, contend that he was a prince of Strathclyde, Ceretic by
name, who had his capital at Alclwyd, the modern Dumbarton, and thus
that he hailed from St. Patrick’s own district.

At any rate, the soldiers and allies of this nominally Christian king
suddenly made a descent on the eastern shores of Ireland, which they
harried, carrying away many of St. Patrick’s converts to be sold as
slaves, and ruthlessly killing numbers of them on the very day after
their baptism, while the symbol of their faith, as he says, was still
wet upon their foreheads, and these neophytes were yet clad in their
white vestments. The letter was sent as a remonstrance against such
barbarous conduct, and to urge the lawless prince to restore the
captives. But to little effect, for the invader treated messengers and
letters alike with ridicule and contempt, delivering the converts
abducted into the hands of the Picts and Scots.

In this letter, as in the “Confession,” St. Patrick gives interesting
personal details. A few extracts are worth quoting. For example:—

I, Patrick, an unlearned sinner do truly acknowledge that I have been
constituted a bishop in Ireland. I accept it of God that I am. I dwell
among barbarians a proselyte and an exile for the love of God.

I have written these words to be given and delivered to the soldiers
and by them to Coroticus.... I do not say to my fellow-citizens nor to
fellow-citizens of pious Romans, but to fellow-citizens of demons,
through their evil deeds.... I was of noble birth according to the
flesh, my father being a Decurio. For I bartered my nobility—I do not
blush nor regret it—for the benefit of others. No thanks to me. But
God hath put in my heart the anxious desire that I should be one of
the hunters or fishers who as God formerly announced should appear in
the last days.... What shall I do, Lord? I am greatly despised. Lo thy
sheep are torn to pieces around me and plundered by these aforesaid
marauders under the command of Coroticus.

In this letter he mentions also that he is constrained by the Spirit not
to see any of his kindred.

For St. Patrick’s beautiful hymn, the “Deer’s Cry,” we are indebted to
the Book of Hymns of the eleventh century, which, like the Book of
Armagh, contains several Patrician pieces. It is a Gaelic composition
alleged to have been made by the saint while on his way to the great
Court of Tara. It was celebrated for generations before the English
conquest as a _lorica_ or prayer for protection. Dr. Todd says, “That
this hymn is a composition of great antiquity cannot be questioned. It
is written in a very ancient dialect of the Irish Celtic. It was
evidently composed during the existence of pagan usages in the country.
It makes no allusion to Arianism or any of the heresies prevalent in the
Continental Church. It notices no doctrine or practice of the Church
that is not known to have existed before the fifth century. In its style
and diction, although written in a different language, there is nothing
very dissimilar to the Confession and the letter about Coroticus, and
nothing absolutely inconsistent with the opinion that it may be by the
same author.” Beyond this no positive proof can be given.

In the _Liber Hymnorum_ it is prefaced by the following distinctive
account in Gaelic:—

Patrick made this hymn. In the time of Laoghaire son of Nial it was
made. The cause of making it however was to protect himself with his
monks against the deadly enemies who were in ambush against the
clerics. And this is a corselet of faith for the protection of body
and soul against demons and human beings and vices. Every one who
shall say it every day with pious meditation on God, demons shall not
stay before him. It will be a safeguard to him against every poison
and envy; it will be a comna to him against sudden death; it will be a
corselet to his soul after dying. Patrick sung this when the
ambuscades were sent against him by Laoghaire that he might not go to
Tara to sow the faith, so that there seemed before the ambuscaders to
be wild deer and a fawn after them, to wit, Benen;[13] and faed fiada
(guard’s cry) is its name.

Apparently the assassins mistook the chanting of the lorica for the cry
of the deer. This saved the party, and furnished a name for the hymn.

A very remarkable and striking piece of literature it is, and one that
does credit to the language in which it is clothed. “For its glow of
imagination and fervour of devotion,” says Dr. Dowden, the author of the
_Early Celtic Church in Scotland_, “it will always challenge a high
place in the history of Christian hymnology.”

It it well worth transcribing also as exhibiting the saint’s creed, his
belief in contemporary superstitions and attitude towards them, his
piety and poetic gift. In all probability we have here a very fair
representation of the gist of his teaching. Like the authors of the
Vedic hymns, and the votaries of all primitive religions, he invokes the
powers of nature, a phase of the religious spirit which seems to have
fallen devotionally in abeyance in modern times. What strikes our age
perhaps as more curious and superstitious, he prays for protection
against the spells of women, smiths, and Druids, like any good heathen.

I[14] bind myself to-day to a strong virtue, an invocation of (the)
Trinity. I believe in a Threeness with confession of an Oneness in
(the) Creator of (the) Universe.
I bind myself to-day to the virtue of Christ’s birth with his baptism,
To the virtue of his crucifixion with his burial,
To the virtue of his resurrection with his ascension,
To the virtue of his coming to the Judgment of Doom.
I bind myself to-day to the virtue of ranks of Cherubim,
In obedience of angels,
(In service of archangels),
In hope of resurrection for reward,
In prayers of patriarchs,
In predictions of prophets,
In preachings of apostles,
In faiths of confessors,
In innocence of holy virgins,
In deeds of righteous men.
I bind myself to-day to the virtue of Heaven,
In light of sun,
In brightness of snow,
In splendour of fire,
In speed of lightning,
In swiftness of wind,
In depth of sea,
In stability of earth,
In compactness of rock.
I bind myself to-day to God’s virtue to pilot me,
God’s might to uphold me,
God’s wisdom to guide me,
God’s eye to look before me,
God’s ear to hear me,
God’s word to speak for me,
God’s hand to guard me,
God’s way to lie before me,
God’s shield to protect me,
God’s host to secure me,
Against snares of demons,
Against seductions of vices,
Against lusts (?) of nature,
Against every one who wishes ill to me,
Afar and anear,
Alone and in a multitude,
So have I invoked all these virtues between me (and these)
Against every cruel, merciless power which may come, against my body
and my soul,
Against incantations of false prophets.
Against black laws of heathenry,
Against false laws of heretics,
Against craft of idolatry,
Against spells of women, and smiths, and Druids,
Against every knowledge that defiles men’s souls,
Christ to protect me to-day.
Against poison, against burning, against drowning, against death
wound,
Until a multitude of rewards come to me!
Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me!
Christ below me, Christ above me, Christ at my right, Christ at my left,
Christ in breadth, Christ in length, Christ in height!
Christ in the heart of every one who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of every one who speaks to me,
Christ in every eye who sees me,
Christ in every ear who hears me.
I bind myself to-day to a strong virtue, an invocation of (the) Trinity,
I believe in a Threeness with confession of an Oneness in (the) Creator
of (the) Universe
Domini est salus, Domini est salus, Christi est salus,
Salus tua Domine, sit semper nobiscum.

The oldest book in Ireland is now believed to be the _Domhnach Airgid_,
a copy of the four Gospels in Latin presented, according to the
“Tripartite Life,” by St. Patrick to St. Aedh Maccarthenn of Clogher.
For protection it has a triple shrine of yew, silver-plated copper, and
gold-plated silver. Shrine and MS. are to-day among the most prized
treasures of the Royal Irish Academy. It is highly probable, says
Professor G. T. Stokes and Dr. Wright, that it was the veritable copy
used by St. Patrick himself.

The Book of Hymns has also three other very interesting compositions,
which profess to date back to his time.

First there is Sechnall’s Hymn in praise of St. Patrick, supposed to
have been written during his lifetime, and generally regarded as
genuine. St. Sechnall, or Secundius as he is sometimes called, was the
nephew and disciple of Patrick, and associated with him in the See of
Armagh, either as contemporaneous bishop or as his successor. It was he
who annoyed the saint by his sordid remark about preaching on the
necessity of giving. To condone for the pain he gave his uncle, the
penitent Sechnall composed this poem of twenty-two stanzas in his
praise, thus constituting himself, if written before the “Deer’s Cry,”
the first known poet of Christian Ireland. In view of its alleged
acceptance by St. Patrick, the hymn has been held in great veneration,
and sung as one of his honours on the days of his Festival.

A second Patrician piece in the Book of Hymns is Fiacc of Sletty’s
metrical life—also called a Hymn. It is purely biographical, and written
after St. Patrick’s death, according to the introduction in the above
ancient MS. Here we are told in Gaelic, with Latin words curiously
interpolated, that Patrick said to Dubthach, chief bard of Ireland,
“‘Seek for me a man of rank, of good race, well-moralled, one wife and
one child with him only.’ ‘Why dost thou seek that, to wit a man of that
kind?’ said Dubthach. ‘For him to go into orders,’ said Patrick. ‘Fiacc
is that,’ said Dubthach, ‘and he has gone on a circuit in Connaught.’
Now while they were talking, it is then came Fiacc from his circuit.
‘There,’ said Dubthach, ‘is he of whom we spake.’ ‘Though he be,’ said
Patrick, ‘yet what we say may not be pleasing to him.’ ‘Let a trial be
made to tonsure me,’ said Dubthach, ‘so that Fiacc may see.’ So when
Fiacc saw he asked, ‘Wherefore is the trial made?’ ‘To tonsure
Dubthach,’ say they. ‘That is idle,’ said he, ‘for there is not in
Ireland a poet his equal.’ ‘Thou wouldst be taken in his place,’ said
Patrick. ‘My loss to Ireland,’ says Fiacc, ‘is less than Dubthach’s
(would be).’ So Patrick shore his beard from Fiacc then, and great glee
came upon him thereafter, so that he read all the ecclesiastical ordo in
one night—or fifteen days, as some say—and so that a bishop’s rank was
conferred on him, and so that it is he who is Archbishop of Leinster
thenceforward and his successor after him.”

Dr. Todd thinks it impossible to attribute so high an antiquity to the
Hymn as Fiacc’s own time, since it contains an allusion to the
desolation of Tara. Colgan 250 years previously met the difficulty by
regarding the latter reference as prophetic.

We must not omit a very curious prophecy regarding St. Patrick which the
Scholiast on Fiacc’s Hymn has preserved. It is in the copy of the Book
of Hymns now in the convent of St. Isidore at Rome, a MS. of the
eleventh or twelfth century. From internal evidence it may be recognised
that the stanza cannot be older than the beginning of the seventh
century, but it is written in a very ancient dialect of the Gaelic, and
purported to be an old-time prediction by a pagan Druid.

Ticfa tailcend
Tar muir murcend,
A brat tollcend,
A crand chromcend,
A mias in iarthur a thigi,
Frisgerad a muinter uili
Amen, Amen.

He comes, he comes, with shaven crown, from off the storm-toss’d sea,
His garment pierced at the neck, with crook-like staff comes he,
Far in his house, at its east end, his cups and patens lie,
His people answer to his voice. Amen, Amen, they cry.
Amen, Amen.

A third Patrician fragment in the Book of Hymns, eleventh century, is
entitled Ninine’s Prayer, with the explanatory head-line, “Ninine the
poet made this prayer, or Fiacc of Sletty.” It runs:—

We put trust in St. Patrick, chief apostle of Ireland,
Conspicuous his name, wonderful; a flame that baptized Gentiles,
He fought against hard-hearted Druids; he thrust down proud men with the
aid of Our Lord of fair heavens.

He purified the great offspring of meadow-landed Erin,
We pray to Patrick, chief apostle, who will save us at the Judgment from
doom to the malevolences of dark demons.
God be with me with the prayer of Patrick, chief apostle!

In all this varied literature, reaching from his own time till ours, the
Apostle of Ireland stands forth a commanding personality, as different
from St. Columba as St. Francis was from St. Bernard. Genial, earnest,
humble, sensitively sympathetic, with commanding force of character and
irresistible determination as the agent of a Divine Mission, his
enthusiasm made way for him. Less impulsive, less warlike, and less
learned than Columcille, he carried on his spiritual campaign in a
spirit of self-denying devotion and love of men. “Patrick, without
loftiness or arrogance,” as Fiacc describes him, “it was much of good he
thought.” At the end of the day we find him in poverty and misery
writing his Confession, not sure but the morrow of his life may bring a
violent death, or slavery, or some other dread evil.

Yet true to the last in his unquenchable zeal, his own words seem to sum
up the high aim of his life: “Therefore it is very fitting that we
should spread our nets that a copious multitude and crowd may be taken
for God, and that everywhere there may be clergy who shall baptize a
needy and desiring people.”

He died at Saul, while on a visit there from Armagh, and his grave is
believed to be at Downpatrick, to which place tradition says the remains
of St. Columba were transported from Iona in the more troublous times,
and re-interred beside those of his great forerunner.

CHAPTER III
ST. COLUMBA AND THE DAWN OF LETTERS IN SCOTLAND

The fugitive MSS.—Gaelic a literary language for ages—Scotland’s first
writer—St. Columba one of the rarer master-spirits—His peculiar
qualities—Intellectual standpoint—Birth—Early life—A fateful
incident—Sets sail for Pictland—Motive—Arrival in pagan
Scotland—His missionary enterprise—Lights the lamp of
literature—An ardent scholar, penman, and poet—The famous
“Cathrach”—His Gaelic poems—Latin hymns—The Columban
renaissance—Encouragement of bards and scholars—The _Amra
Choluimcille_—Iona as an educational centre—European fame and
influence.

Modern research and historical criticism have done much for Celtic
literature. Not long ago the subject might be regarded as a tangled web
of fact and fiction. Inquirers found it hard to thread their way through
the unsifted mass of materials, to know the true from the fabulous,
authentic history from myth and legend.

All the more because the original documents, like the graves of a
household, were “severed far and wide by mount and stream and sea,” and
for the most part inaccessible. It must be matter of astonishment to
many to learn that very few of our older Celtic MSS.—MSS. written in
these islands—have found a home in Scotland. They have long ago been
transferred to the Continent, to France, Italy, Holland, Switzerland,
Austria, and Germany. So that to-day scores of these venerable relics
are preserved in places as distant and far apart as Milan, St. Gall,
Würzburg, Carlsruhe, Brussels, Turin, Vienna, Berne, Leyden, Nancy,
Paris. Even the oldest MS. now existing that can be proved to have been
written in Scotland, is kept not in Edinburgh or Glasgow, but in the
public library of Schaffhausen in Switzerland.

One reason for this seems to have been that the Irish or Scots gave so
many evangelists and professors in those early days to the Continent,
men like Columbanus and St. Gall, and their followers; and another, when
the books were in danger in the British Isles from the depredations of
the Norsemen, they were removed for security to the monasteries and
seats of learning presided over by these Celtic scholars.

The records thus available, here and there, carry us back over a period
of well nigh 1500 years to the days of St. Patrick and St. Columba. As
Cædmon was the pioneer of English literature, so is St. Patrick the
first known litterateur of Ireland, and St. Columba the first of
Scotland. From the time of the introduction of Christianity by these
men, Celtic literature has a history, continuous and verifiable. Beyond
their day all is uncertain and cloudy. Pagan Scotland lies in the dim
background enveloped in haze. Sagas and myths and poems and romances it
undoubtedly had in abundance, floating by oral tradition, but no written
record. In almost every instance of its old-time lore, authorship is
unknown. That by-past is the region of conjecture, and we can be as
little certain of the origins as Greek scholars are of the genesis of
the _Iliad_ or of the _Odyssey_.

In this study, then, we go back to the march between Pagan and Christian
times, and leaving behind at present the doubtful and uncertain, we
shall endeavour to trace the dawn of letters in Scotland.

On that far horizon the first man we encounter with a pen and a passion
for writing is the wonderful St. Columba. Across the ages his impressive
figure still stands out massive and strong in the background of history.
Among the men of fame—the rarer master-spirits who have helped to make
Scotland what she is—Columcille stands earliest. Vividly and terribly in
earnest himself, he stamped his religious convictions not only upon many
districts of Ireland, but also upon heathen Alba.

He possessed just the qualities that were best fitted to give him an
ascendancy over men in that rude age. Unlike most of the great
evangelists of Christianity, he was of princely origin, descended both
on his father’s and his mother’s side from illustrious Irish kings. This
noble lineage, combined with the patronage of his own kinsman Conall,
King of Dalriada—our modern Argyllshire—gave him an immense influence in
an age when the tribes, even in matters of religion, followed their king
or chief.

But Columcille was personally a born leader of men. Physically and
intellectually he towered above his fellows. Of a tall and commanding
appearance, powerful frame, broad face, close and curly hair, his grey
eyes large and luminous, he looked the saint he was, joyful and radiant,
with a love for everything beautiful in nature, animate and inanimate.
Withal he had a loud and resonant voice, well adapted for impassioned
speech. When preaching, tradition says that he could be easily
understood across the Sound of Mull. And Adamnan assures us that when
singing with his brethren in the church, the venerable man raised his
voice so wonderfully that it was sometimes heard at the distance of 1000
paces, while from the “Old Irish Life” we learn that his reading carried
even farther. A voice to soothe the savage breast with its plaintive
sweetness, and yet of power and range sufficient to awe the pagan mind.

For this apostle of Scotland, despite his name, was no mere cooing dove.
He could be very terrifying when roused. Of a hot and passionate temper,
he was in reality a perfervid Celt; stern and even vindictive at times,
he would fight his battles with the carnal weapons, if need be, just as
readily as he would with the spiritual. Three battles at least, fierce
and sanguinary, stand to his account in history, he their instigator,
two of these even after he became Abbot of Iona.

Altogether a strange character to contemplate was this father and
founder of monasteries, especially when viewed from our scientific
age—the intellectual standpoint of his time was so wholly different from
ours. He continually moved in a halo of miracles, prophecies, and
angels, as real to him as physical laws and nerves and germs are to us.
So credulous was he that he never seemed even to question the magical
impostures of his opponents, the Druids. He is not represented as trying
to expose their marvels, but rather as endeavouring to outrival them by
greater miracles of his own. The one set he believed to be from the evil
one, the other of God. For him the seen always merged in the unseen; the
natural is construed in terms of the supernatural. Science, of course,
had not then formulated laws or facts as we know them, and St. Columba
was a child of his age, imbued with the same credulity as the
contemporary heathen around him, and very much the same superstitions.
He believed he could bless men or blight them by his intercessions, and
sometimes in the exercise of this power he did not even hesitate to
curse irreconcilables and consign them to future destruction.

On one occasion, exasperated with a thief of noble birth who had twice
plundered the house of a man of humble condition, and mocked and laughed
at the rebukes of the saint himself, the irate Columba—and this is a
picture for an artist—followed him to the water’s edge, and wading up to
the knees in the clear green sea-water, raised both his hands to heaven
and solemnly invoked a curse on the man. Returning to the dry ground he
sat down, and forthwith told his companions what the fate of the scamp
would be. No maudlin saint was the imperious Columcille. Gentle,
affectionate, and kind, yet a man to impress the wild Pictish tribes
with awe and reverence.

Born at Gartan, Donegal, in the north of Ireland in 521, and brought up
from youth in Christian principles, he was trained under the best
masters, and apparently caught up in the wave of evangelisation that
swept over Ireland from St. Patrick’s time. At any rate, when
twenty-five years of age he founded the Church of Derry, and seven years
later the Monastery of Durrow. Other establishments soon followed,
springing up here and there under his initiative and fostering care,
until when full forty years old an event occurred which in a manner
changed the whole aspect of his career, and gave a new direction to his
energies. This was the battle of Cooldrevna, of far-reaching import.

Two causes are usually assigned for the fight. St. Finnian of Moville,
under whom the future abbot first studied, brought back with him from
Rome a copy of the Psalms, supposed to be the first copy of St Jerome’s
Vulgate that appeared in Ireland. This the master treasured, and wished
to keep private and reserved. But Columcille, then an ardent student and
rapid writer, sat up for nights together and surreptitiously transcribed
the book for his own use. Hearing of this, Finnian claimed the copy, but
in vain. His disciple refused to part with it, and the matter was
referred to King Diarmad at Tara. This monarch, to whom no doubt a legal
quarrel over a book was new, could find nothing in the Brehon Law to
adjudicate the case by, except the practical adage, _le gach boin a
boinin_ (with every cow her calf), and being perhaps more disposed to
favour Finnian, as of his own kin and jurisdiction, he, not unnaturally,
adapted this precedent to the case in point, giving the judgment, “As
with every cow her calf, so with every book its son.”

This decision is the first we know in the law of copyright. It gave dire
offence to Columba, which was greatly heightened some time after by
another regal affront. It happened at the Great Convention of Tara that
a young prince, in utter violation of the law of sanctuary, slew the son
of the king’s steward, and knowing the penalty to be certain death, fled
for refuge to the northern princes, who placed him under the sheltering
wing of their kinsman, the sacred Columba. Ignoring the saint’s
authority, the king had the refugee promptly seized and put to death.
This, it appears, exasperated the imperious Columcille to the last
degree, and he immediately made his way north, and roused to arms the
race of Hy-Neill, the northern branch against the southern. And with the
King of Connaught, whose son had been slain, they marched their forces
southward. A furious battle ensued at Cooldrevna, in the red ruin and
carnage of which King Diarmad was defeated with the loss of 3000 men.

Two years after, the Hegira took place, when the saint fled or migrated
on his great mission to Scotland—henceforth an exile from Erin.

Speculation has been rife as to the real motive that drove this
intensely patriotic Irishman over the wave. Many would fain believe, in
view of its epoch-making significance, that this momentous step was
purely voluntary “for the love of Christ,” as the “Old Irish Life” puts
it. Adamnan, while connecting it with the battle, also puts this
construction upon it. “In the second year after the battle of
Culdreimhne,” he says, “and in the 42nd year of his age, St. Columba
resolving to emigrate for Christ sailed from Scotia (that is Ireland) to
Britain.” Many other saints had wandered elsewhere on similar missions.
But there is a persistent tradition that this unique missionary was
banished by the Synod of the Saints in Ireland for the bloodshed he had
caused; and that this sentence was confirmed by St. Molaise, whom the
unhappy Columba consulted, and who advised him to seek as many souls in
conversion among the heathen as there fell of men in battle. Some, on
the other hand, construe his action as a voluntary penance,
self-inflicted. Others find mainly a political motive in his removal to
Dalriada, where he might be of immense service to his kinsmen in helping
to avert the ever increasing and harassing incursions of the Picts.
Certainly he became a bulwark to them.

Imbued with a high missionary zeal, there is no doubt that ultimately he
went forth to the new spiritual campaign voluntarily, but, as in the
case of most fateful careers, it is evident that circumstances wound him
up to the task, the most conspicuous and compelling of which was
Cooldrevna. That the parting from Erin was bitter, a very tearing of the
heart, is matter of history. The verses, the records attributed to
himself on this occasion, reveal the depths of his feelings. “How rapid
the speed of my coracle and its stern turned toward Derry. I grieve at
the errand over the proud seas, travelling to Alba of the Ravens. There
is a grey eye that looks back upon Erin, it shall not see during life
the men of Erin nor their wives. My vision over the brine I stretch from
the ample oaken planks; large is the tear from my soft grey eye when I
look back upon Erin. Upon Erin is my attention fixed, upon Loch Leven,
upon Linè, upon the land the Ultonians own; upon smooth Munster, upon
Meath.”

As Dr. Douglas Hyde has sympathetically observed, “Columcille is the
first example in the saddened page of Irish history of the exiled Gael
grieving for his native land and refusing to be comforted, and as such
he has become the very type and embodiment of Irish fate and Irish
character.”

A pity it is that history has not photographed the dramatic scene when
the great monk, forty-two years old, tall and powerful, lands from his
curach the “Liath Bhalaidh,” with twelve followers on the island of Hy,
now the famous Iona. It was in 563 that he took possession of this
future home, of which he had received a grant from the King of Dalriada,
which was afterwards confirmed by King Brude. Modern Scotland had not
yet emerged, being in early fragments. And it is important to note, for
it has been very confusing to historians, that in Columba’s day Ireland
was Scotia, from whence in earlier days the Scots had come, who then
occupied Dalriada, or, as it is known to-day, Argyllshire. North and
east were the Picts, possessing the body of Alba, as modern Scotland was
then called; and in Strathclyde the Britons. Not till centuries after
was the name of Scotia or Scotland finally transferred from Erin to
Alba.

The Dalriadic Scots, though not destitute of a primitive civilisation,
were rude and barbarous. Slavery and polygamy were common, blood feuds
incessant. Women fought side by side with the men in battle, until first
Columba and afterwards Adamnan obtained exemption for them. The heathen
Picts were even more degraded, under the tyranny of a Druid regime, full
of sorcery and superstition. No ray of Christianity seemed as yet to
have penetrated their darkness.

Such were the wild and waste lands into which the devoted Columba threw
himself as a deliverer. For two years he remained in Hy, organising his
base, and, it is thought, learning the Pictish language, before setting
out on his visit to “the powerful king of the Pictish nation.”

His missionary labours for the next thirty-two years, in collaboration
with the devoted band of men who imbibed his spirit and adopted his
methods, have caught the eye of the world.

But there is another aspect of his enterprise, far-reaching and
magnificent, which has been largely overlooked and overshadowed by our
one-sided veneration for his religious genius. And that is the
significance of his literary work. It is not so generally known that the
Apostle of Scotland was a patron of letters, intensely interested in
literature, an ardent writer and disseminator of knowledge—one in fact
who has left his literary mark on the ages, and who was the first to
help to raise Scotland to the proud eminence in education which she
occupies to-day.

As in the great awakening in Europe in the sixteenth century there were
two movements, independent of each other and yet going on side by side—a
revival of religion and a revival of learning, known as the Reformation
and the Renaissance; so, in St. Columba’s enterprise two similar
movements were fostered, not as separate and hostile to each other, but
as mutually helpful and conjoined.

The abbot was from youth a great lover of books and an unwearied scribe.
His standard biographer, Adamnan, says that he never could spend the
space even of one hour without study, or prayer, or writing, or some
other holy occupation, watching or fasting. This love of books continued
in his case to the very end. Not till the day of his demise was the pen
finally laid aside. On that day, after blessing the Monastery, he
descended from the hill and sat in his hut transcribing the Psalter. But
the vitality of that once deft hand and brain was now well-nigh spent,
and answered feebly, like the diminishing flow of water from a spout.
“Here,” cried the saint, at length, conscious of the impending change,
“at the end of the page I must stop, and what follows let Baithene
write.”

It was his love of literature that got him into trouble with St.
Finnian, and in the “Calendar of Aengus” the story goes that he once
visited a man, Longarad, noted for his collection of books. In
anticipation of the visit, and mindful perhaps of Cooldrevna, the _sai_
or saoidh (wise man) hid his treasures, whereupon Columba left “a word,”
that is, a curse, on the books, so that when in after ages they had
become unintelligible from various causes, this was deemed the full and
sufficient reason. “May your books be of no use after you, since you
have exercised inhospitality in withholding them.”

He composed a book of hymns for the office of every day in the week, and
in the “Old Irish Life” he is credited with having written “three
hundred gifted, lasting, illuminated noble books.” It is highly probable
that those thus referred to were simply transcribed by him, for we have
no evidence that he wrote any prose literature.

The three books still existing in Ireland which tradition and some high
authorities regard as the work of his own hand are simply transcripts.
They are certainly very ancient, even if they do not quite reach up to
his day. Two of them are in Trinity College, Dublin, and the third in
the Royal Irish Academy. The former, known as the Book of Durrow and the
Book of Kells,[15] are copies of the Gospels in Latin, the one finished,
the other not, but the Book of Kells, which is the unfinished one,
contains on its blank pages copies of charters of the eleventh and
twelfth centuries, connected with the endowment of the Institution. The
other book referred to as in the Royal Irish Academy is the famous
“Cathrach,” believed to be the identical copy of the Psalter that
Columba made when he was a student. The skill displayed in the
penmanship and decoration of these ancient MSS. is astonishing, and they
have covers which are brilliant specimens of early Celtic art. The Book
of Kells, in particular, is spoken of as “the unapproachable glory of
Irish illumination.” In fact, the codex known as the “Four Masters”
alleges that “it was the principal relic of the western world on account
of its remarkable cover.”

Great interest attaches to the celebrated “Cathrach” or “Battler,” so
called from the circumstance that a battle was fought on account of it.
It continued an heirloom in the successive generations of the saint’s
family, the O’Donnells, until a comparatively recent representative,
exiled as a supporter of James II. carried it with him to the Continent
in the beautiful shrine prepared for it at the end of the eleventh
century. In early days it used to be carried three times round the army
when Cinal Conaill went to battle, in the belief that if thus carried on
the breast of a cleric free from mortal sin it would get them the
victory.

In 1802 the precious relic was recovered from the Continent and opened.
Within was found a decayed wooden box covering a mass of vellum stuck
together and hardened into a single lump. By careful moistening
treatment, the various leaves at length came asunder, and proved a real
Psalter, written in Latin in a “neat but hurried hand.” Fifty-eight
leaves remained, containing from the 31st to the 106th Psalm, and an
examination of this text has shown that it is precisely a copy of the
second revision of the Psalter from the Vulgate of St. Jerome, which
strengthens the belief so long and tenaciously held, that this may have
been the very book for which 3000 warriors fell.

From very early times Columba was spoken of as a poet. That he wrote
verse and befriended the bards is attested by the oldest tradition and
some of the most ancient records. Many Gaelic poems are attributed to
him. “Thrice fifty noble lays,” says one poet—

Some in Latin which were beguiling,
Some in Gaelic, fair the tale.

Among his reputed Gaelic poems may be mentioned three that Colgan
considered genuine, 250 years ago, and were printed by Dr. Reeves in his
first edition of Adamnan’s _Life of St. Columba_: his “Farewell to Ara,”
published in the _Gaelic Miscellany_ of 1808; and another on his escape
from King Diarmad, reproduced in the _Miscellany of the Irish
Archæological Society_. There are three verses composed as a prayer at
the battle of Cooldrevna, ascribed to him in the _Chronicon Scotorum_;
and there is a collection of fifteen poems in the O’Clery MSS. at
Brussels. But by far the largest collection is contained in an oblong
MS. of the Bodleian Library at Oxford. This document embraces everything
in the shape of poem or fragment anywhere believed as his, and that
could be collected about the middle of the sixteenth century.

None of these are found in the oldest MSS., though not a few are
apparently very ancient and beautiful, breathing the intensity of
feeling and passion so characteristic of the Gael. Dr. Hyde is perhaps
not far off the mark when he says that of the great number of Irish
poems attributed to him, only a few—half a dozen at the most—are likely
to be even partly genuine. It is very hard to say how much or how little
is his. But this authority is inclined to agree with Dr. Healy, author
of _Ireland’s Schools and Scholars_, that at least the three considered
genuine by Colgan represent substantially poems that were really written
by the saint. “They breathe his pious spirit,” says Healy, “his ardent
love for nature, and his undying affection for his native land. Although
retouched, perhaps, by a later hand, they savour so strongly of the true
Columban spirit that we are disposed to reckon them amongst the genuine
compositions of the saint.”

A few specimens are worth quoting, by way of illustrating Columba’s
poetic genius:—

Were the tribute of all Alba mine, from its centre to its border, I
would prefer the sight of one house in the middle of Derry. The reason
I love Derry is for its quietness, for its purity and for the crowds
of white angels from the one end to the other.... My Derry, my little
oak-grove, my dwelling and my little cell, O eternal God in heaven
above, woe be to him who violates it.

Ara was a little isle, like Iona, in the west of Ireland, where St. Enda
lived, and was visited by the saints.

Farewell from me to Ara. It anguishes my heart not to be in the west
among her waves, amid groups of the saints of heaven. It is far, alas!
it is far, alas! I have been sent from Ara West out towards the
population of Mona to visit the Albanachs. Ara Sun, oh Ara Sun, my
affection lies buried in her in the west, it is the same to be beneath
her pure soil as to be beneath the soil of Paul and Peter. Ara
blessed, O Ara blessed, woe to him who is hostile to her, may he be
given shortness of life and hell.

The next, so characteristic of the saint’s love of nature, is taken from
the poem on Cormac’s visit—one of the three considered genuine:—

It were delightful, O Son of my God, with a moving train,
To glide o’er the waves of the deluge fountain to the land of Erin,
O’er Moy-n Eolarg, past Ben-Eigny. O’er Loch Feval,
Where we should hear pleasing music from the swans,
The host of gulls would make joyful, with eager singing,
Should it reach the port of stern rejoicers, the _Dewy Red_,
I am filled with wealth without Erin, did I think it sufficient.

In the unknown land of my sojourn of sadness and distress,
Alas, the voyage that was enjoined me, O King of secrets,
For having gone myself to the battle of Cuil.
How happy the son of Dima of the devout church
When he hears in Durrow the desire of his mind
The sound of the wind against the elms when ’tis played,
The blackbird’s joyous note when he claps his wings,
To listen at early dawn in Ros-grencha to the cattle,
The cooing of the cuckoo from the tree on the brink of summer,
Three objects I have left, the dearest to me on this peopled world,
Durrow, Derry, the noble angelic land, and Tir-Luighdech,
I have loved Erin’s land of cascades, all but its government.
My visit to Comgall and feast with Cainnech was indeed delightful.

Of his Latin hymns only three remain. They are preserved in the _Liber
Hymnorum_, a MS. probably of the end of the eleventh century, and are
known as the “Altus,” “In te Christo,” and “Noli Pater.” No doubt exists
as to the genuineness of the “Altus.” It is the most famous of the
three, and is supposed to have been written after the battle of
Cooldrevna. The poem takes its name from the first word, and each of its
twenty-two stanzas begins in order with a letter of the alphabet,
probably as a help to the memory. The stanzas are rudely constructed,
with a kind of rhyme between every two lines. The poem has enjoyed a
great reputation, and has been variously rendered into English. Perhaps
the best translation is that of the Rev. Anthony Mitchell:—

Ancient of Days; enthroned on high;
The Father unbegotten He,
Whom space containeth not nor time,
Who was and is and aye shall be;
And one-born Son and Holy Ghost,
Who co-eternal glory share.
One only God of Persons Three
We praise, acknowledge and declare.

Attention has been directed by Dr. Dowden, Bishop of Edinburgh, to the
saint’s curious conceptions of the physical causes of clouds, and rain,
and tides, in the stanza beginning with I:—

In the three quarters of the sea,
Three mighty fountains hidden lie,
Whence rise through whirling water-spouts,
Rich-laden clouds that clothe the sky:
On winds from out his treasure house,
They speed to swell bud, vine, and grain;
While the sea-shallows emptied wait
Until the tides return again.

In the R stanza we have a picture of the judgment not unlike the “Dies
Iræ”:—

Riseth the dawn:—the day is near
Day of the Lord, the King of Kings;
A day of wrath and vengeance just,
Of darkness, clouds, and thunderings:
A day of anguish, cries, and tears,
When glow of women’s love shall pale;
When man shall cease to strive with man,
And all the world’s desires shall fail.

What now are we to think of this new literature and the other
productions, Latin and Gaelic, to which the monasteries of the period
gave rise? Is the Columban renaissance really a decadence in comparison
with what went before, the old unwritten inheritance? “Yes,” says
Darmesteter, and if we accept the antiquity of the oral tradition, I
think we must admit the truth of it. The sagas and historic tales, and
the poetry that is mingled with them, are of far greater importance from
a purely literary point of view. With a wild freedom of imagination and
an old-time conception of life untouched by Christian thought, they
breathe the spirit of pre-Christian ages, very much in the primitive
manner of Homeric poetry; and being intensely human and heroic, they
have a charm even for minds set to later ideals.

For example, in the _Colloquy or Dialogue of the Ancients_, it is
recorded that St. Patrick himself felt a little uneasy at the delight
with which he listened to the stories of the ancient Feinn, and in his
over-scrupulous sanctity he feared it might be wrong to appreciate and
enjoy so much, these worldly narratives. But when he consulted his two
guardian angels they not only assured him that there was no harm in
listening to the tales, but even desired him to get them written down in
the words of ollamhs, “for,” said these wise counsellors, “it will be a
rejoicing to numbers and to the good people to the end of time to listen
to these stories.”

Yet for all this the Columban period _was_ a renaissance. You cannot
spring a new creed and new ideas upon a nation without a reawakening of
thought and corresponding progress.

Over and above his own personal contributions to literature, Columba
helped forward the cause of letters in two other ways, namely, by
encouraging the bards and the scholars.

In his day the bards in Ireland had become an intolerable nuisance—idle,
numerous, and insolent; in fact they had developed into a loafing class,
who quartered themselves on the working-classes, on the chiefs and
farmers. They went about the country in bands, carrying a silver pot,
nicknamed by the people “the pot of Avarice.” Their tyranny was such
that he who refused to contribute was mercilessly satirised and
disgraced. Three attempts had been made to suppress them, but hitherto
to no purpose. At length Aedh, the High King of Ireland, considering
them to be too heavy a burden on the land, resolved to banish the whole
profession. Summoning a great Convention of all Ireland to Drumceat in
590 to settle important national affairs, he made this one of the chief
items. And the fate of the bardic institution would most certainly have
been sealed had not Columcille averted it. With 140 followers he had
crossed over to attend the Conference, and besides obtaining exemption
from military service for the women, and independence and freedom from
taxation for Dalriada, which was henceforth simply to help the parent
kingdom in affairs of war, he also succeeded in moderating the fury of
the chieftains against the bards. Their numbers were reduced and their
prestige abated, but the profession was amply compensated for this by
acquiring a new and recognised position in the State. No bards except
those specially sanctioned were to pursue the poetic calling. But for
the maintenance of these latter distinct public estates in land were set
apart for the first time, in return for which they were obliged to give
public instruction to all comers in the learning of the day, after the
manner of university professors. The rate of reward for their poems was
also legally fixed, so that from this time down to the seventeenth
century the bardic colleges, as distinct from the ecclesiastical ones,
taught poetry, law, and history, educating the lawyers, judges, and
poets of the Irish nation.

In recognition of the service rendered them on this occasion the bards
appeared before Columba in a body, with Dallan Forgaill, their chief, at
their head, bringing the famous “Amra” or elegy which the latter had
composed in his praise. This poem is in the Fenian dialect, so ancient
and obscure as to be very baffling and almost unintelligible to
scholars. It has come down to us heavily annotated with gloss and
commentary in the eleventh century MS. (Leabhar Na h’Uidhre). So far as
can be made out, it speaks of the saint in relation to the people as
“their soul’s light, their learned one, their chief from right, who was
God’s messenger, who dispelled fears from them, who used to explain the
truth of words, a harp without a base chord, a perfect sage who believed
in Christ; he was learned, he was chaste, he was charitable, he was an
abounding benefit of guests, he was eager, he was noble, he was gentle,
he was the physician of the heart of every age; he was to persons
inscrutable, he was a shelter to the naked, he was a consolation to the
poor, there went not from the world one who was more continual for a
remembrance of the cross.”

But a recent writer, Dr. Strachan of Manchester, casts doubts upon the
antiquity of its present form, thinking it belongs, as transcribed, to a
later date.

The other way in which St. Columba helped forward the cause of letters
was by encouraging the scholars. The monasteries became great schools of
learning as well as missionary centres. In all the institutions he
founded, ample provision was made for the multiplication of books. The
knowledge of Hebrew and Greek was fostered among the monks as well as of
Latin and Gaelic. To the monastic houses founded throughout Pictland by
the Columban clergy the tribes sent their youth to be trained. And for
several centuries, as Skene has observed, there was not a Pictish boy
taught his letters but received his education from a Columban monk. In
later times students from the Continent flocked to the more famous of
the Celtic seats of learning in Ireland and Scotland, and we even hear
of Iona sending professors to Cologne, Louvain, and Paris.

There is no evidence that the northern Picts had a knowledge of letters
before Columba taught them. There is even doubt as to what language
these tribes spoke. Yet in 710 A.D., a little more than a hundred years
after his death, a knowledge of letters was common in Pictland. With
reference to subsequent ecclesiastical changes, it is known that King
Naitan sent a proclamation “by public command throughout all the
provinces of the Picts to be transcribed, learned, and observed.” This
we have on the authority of Bede, a statement which shows that learning
must have made considerable progress among the people even at that early
date. So that in this respect we may very well endorse the opinion of
Professor Mackinnon, when he says that “we have not yet perhaps fully
realised the part which the School of Iona had in shaping the destinies
of the Scottish nation.” When in Scotland we discuss the past history of
our national education, the figure of John Knox invariably rises before
us as prime inaugurator of the first real system, but the great Abbot of
Iona was at it 1000 years before him.

Shaping the destinies of the Scottish nation; ay, and might we not add
of literature? For a further striking claim has been repeatedly put
forward on behalf of the Celtic poets in the Columban period, namely
this, that they taught Europe to rhyme. And this claim has been made not
so much by partisans as by some of the foremost European scholars,
including Zeuss and Nigra, who have remarked and pointed out that the
Latin verses of Columcille and other early saints, either rhyme or have
a strong tendency to rhyme. Referring to the advance towards final
assonance in later times made by the English in their Latin poems, Zeuss
says, “We must believe that this form was introduced among them by the
Irish, as were the arts of writing and of painting and of ornamenting
manuscripts, since they themselves, in common with the other Germanic
nations, made use in their poetry of nothing but alliteration.” It is
only some 500 years after Columba that we find rhyme beginning to appear
in English literature.

The other foreign writer of note, C. Nigra, with equal emphasis asserts
that “final assonance or rhyme can have been derived only from the laws
of Celtic phonology.” Meanwhile this must be regarded as a moot point.
For other eminent scholars, Thurneysen and Windisch, have professed
their opinion that it may be traced to the Latin. But “this at least is
clear,” observes Dr. Hyde, who has gone very carefully into the matter,
“that already in the seventh century the Irish not only rhymed, but made
intricate Deibhidh and other rhyming metres, when for centuries after
this period the Germanic nations could only alliterate.”

It is our proud boast as an English-speaking people that we can go back
as far as Cædmon to the beginnings of our literature; yet how few
British subjects realise that Gaelic was a literary language long before
then in the hands of men like St. Patrick, St. Columba, and Dallan
Forgaill, and that there are Latin MSS. still extant associated with
Columba and the School of Iona which are almost as old as the very
oldest existing codex of the Bible.

It is worth our while to think of this, and of the remarkable man who,
in the obscurity of his island home, recognised the value and permanence
of his own work, giving utterance to a sentiment which the ages have
amply verified: “Small and mean though this place is, yet it shall be
held in great and unusual honour, not only by Scotic kings and people,
but also by the rulers of foreign and barbarous nations, and by their
subjects; the saints also even of other churches shall regard it with no
common reverence.” And it is so. Systems and dynasties have since
fallen, yet the fame of Iona still stands secure, and continues to
attract the saint and the foreigner.

CHAPTER IV
ADAMNAN’S “VITA COLUMBÆ”

Oldest Scottish book in existence—A sturdy survival—Criteria of
age—Dorbene the copyist—Romantic history of the MS.—Now in
Schaffhausen—Adamnan, a rare personality—Abbot and
scholar—Influential career—Attitude to the two great questions
that divided the Celtic churches—Pathetic estrangement—“Lex
Adamnani”—A mighty social revolution—Death—His writings—“The
Vision of Adamnan”—His _Life of Columba_ in three parts—Remarkable
contents—Most valuable monument of the early Celtic Church—List of
MSS. in which preserved—Latin _versus_ Gaelic.

Many Scottish visitors visit Schaffhausen, on the Rhine in Switzerland,
and perhaps few of them are aware that in the public library there, is
deposited one of the rarest and most interesting relics of Scotland.

It is a parchment MS. of sixty-eight leaves, each about eleven inches by
nine. The volume looks as if in the original binding. Its sides are of
beechwood, greatly worm-eaten and covered with calfskin, the sewing of
the back very rude and curious, and the front would seem to have been
formerly secured by clasps.

This is not a Gaelic work, though Gaelic names appear in it. It is
written in Latin in double columns. Capital letters abound, some of them
of great size and adorned with red and yellow paint. The summaries at
the beginning, the headings of chapters, and the colophon of the scribe
are all in rubric which on the whole is wonderfully fresh and beautiful.

Three handwritings may be traced: the first, that peculiar to the
greater part of the book; the second, in evidence towards the end, in
all probability the work of the same writer, but with different pen and
ink and in smaller, rounder letters; the third, corrections in spelling
by a later and much inferior penman.

The ink is dark, almost jet-black, except in some places where it has
turned brown.

Such is the general appearance of the relic. And marvel not if a vague,
far-away look steals into the eye when one reflects that this book which
he sees and handles is well nigh, if not quite, 1200 years old; that it
is, in fact, the oldest now existing, known to have been written in
Scotland, and separated by the lapse of 100 years from the next most
ancient.

A copy of Adamnan’s _Life of St. Columba_, made by one of his
contemporaries in Iona—this, the sturdy survival is taken to be. And if
the criteria of its age are not misleading, it dates from before 713
A.D. These criteria are in themselves profoundly interesting.

1. It is recognised that the handwriting is that peculiar heavy kind
found in the oldest Gaelic MSS.—not quite so round as that in the Books
of Kells and Durrow, but possessing many features in common, and
certainly anterior to that of the Book of Armagh, fixed at 807.

2. Similarly the Latin spelling corresponds with that of the more
ancient Celtic MSS. at home and abroad.

3. The Greek characters which appear in the text are in the semi-uncials
of the period, without accents or breathings.

4. The later corrections, supposed to have been made on the Continent,
are reckoned by Dr. Ferdinand Keller, an expert in the handwriting of
Charlemagne’s time, to belong to the period between 800 and 820.

5. The parchment is in goat-skin, in colour and condition extremely
ancient.

6. But more conclusive still is the remarkable colophon of the scribe at
the end of the volume, where he says, “I beseech those who wish to
transcribe these books, yea, rather, I adjure them by Christ, the judge
of the world, after they have diligently transcribed, carefully to
compare and correct their copies with that from which they have copied
them, and also to subjoin here this adjuration: ‘Whoever readeth these
books on the virtues of St. Columba let him pray to the Lord for me
Dorbene that after death I may possess eternal life.’”

Here we have actually the name of the scribe—a splendid clue to the age
of the MS. which critics have not been backward in availing themselves
of. The name is so rare in the records that they had only a choice
between two, one anterior to Adamnan’s day, the other his contemporary,
and Abbot-elect of Iona in 713. But this latter Dorbene died that same
year before assuming office, and only nine years after Adamnan himself.
He in all probability it was who copied the _Life_.

To the objection, Why not by another of the same name? Dr. Reeves
replies in effect, “Not likely, as the name is almost unique and
pointedly connected with the Columban society.” And to the further
objection that it might possibly be by a later hand from the autograph
of this Dorbene, he answers, “Even less likely, as the colophon in Irish
MSS. is always peculiar to the actual scribe, and usually omitted by
other transcribers. And this is the only MS. of Adamnan’s _Life_ that
has the name and the colophon.”

The interest attaching to it on account of its extraordinary age and
subject-matter is greatly enhanced when we consider its history. For the
old document had hairbreadth escapes and adventures, and if it could
speak for itself doubtless could unfold a tale infinitely more
surprising, because more real and tragic, than many of the miraculous
incidents it does record. All the long agony of the early, the middle,
and the modern ages has transpired since first it went a-wandering.
Invasions, crusades, and revolutions, the rise and fall of systems and
nations—whole populations passing swiftly and stormfully across the
bosom of Europe into oblivion, and the book in the heart of the troubled
area survives them all and emerges at length, as if from the debris, to
reassert that “there lived a man.”

Adamnan, ninth Abbot of Iona, wrote the original in the years 691 to
693—that is, ten or twelve years before his death, which occurred in
704. In the second preface—for there are two—he tells us that it is the
substance of the narratives learned from his predecessors, and is
founded either on written authorities anterior to his own time or on
what he heard himself from ancient men then living. And we know that he
was sufficiently near the fountainhead, both in time and place, to be
able to draw from authentic sources; for he wrote just a century after
St. Columba’s death, and at the urgent request of his brethren. In his
boyhood he had frequent opportunities of conversing with those who had
seen and known the saint, and he was surrounded in the monastery and in
the island with all the halo of association and piety in which the
memory of his hero was enshrined.

The written material he could rely on was not meagre even at so early a
date. There was the narrative of Cummene the Fair, seventh abbot of
Iona, and thus one of his own immediate predecessors. His account
Adamnan transferred entire and almost verbatim into the third book of
his own work. It was really a tract entitled _De virtutibus sancti
Columbæ_. In addition to this he had at least one other Latin memoir and
various Gaelic poems in praise of the saint, such as the “Amra” of
Dallan Forgaill, and those of Baithene Mòr, and perhaps of St. Mura.

In another of his books (_De Locis Sanctis_) the author informs us how
he generally set about composing his literary efforts. He wrote the
first draft on waxen tablets, revised and corrected it, and then from
the text so prepared, a clean copy was neatly written out on parchment.

Dorbene the Scribhnidh may have copied the _Life_ in Adamnan’s own time;
if not quite so early, then shortly after his death. And whatever became
of Adamnan’s original, Dorbene’s copy appears to have remained in the
monastery till the beginning of the ninth century, when it was probably
taken to Germany. At that time a strong tide of Scotic pilgrims set in
towards Central Europe, owing no doubt to the Norse invasions, which
rendered life and property insecure in Iona and elsewhere.

In 825 Blathmac was murdered in the monastery, along with several of the
brethren, because he refused to tell where the Columban relics were hid.
The likelihood is that after that narrow escape one of the fleeing monks
carried the book to St. Gall or Reichenau on the Rhine. At any rate it
is significant that Walafridus Strabus, formerly Dean of the Irish
monastery of St. Gall in Switzerland, and then Abbot of Reichenau from
842–849, knew of the tragic event and wrote a poem in Latin on the death
of Blathmac. And it was in this very house of Reichenau, that used to be
frequented so much by Scotic missionaries, that the MS. was ultimately
found. And quite casually too.

Ages had elapsed when, in the beginning of the seventeenth century,
Stephen White, a learned Irish Jesuit in search of Gaelic documents on
the Continent, luckily discovered it. He immediately transcribed the
venerable codex, and gave Ussher, Colgan, and the Bollandists the
benefit of his copy. Both the latter published the text—Colgan in 1647,
the Bollandists in 1698.

Thereafter, a second time the original vanished. When or how it was
removed from Reichenau is not known, but it must have been before that
monastery was suppressed in 1799. Once more it emerged, this time at
Schaffhausen, rediscovered by Dr. Ferdinand Keller of Zurich, the
distinguished archæologist.

Writing of the interesting find in January 1851, Dr. Keller tells the
story of its reappearance, showing into what sorry neglect it had fallen
before it reached its ultimate coign of vantage. “The present
_proprietor_ of the MS. of St. Columba,” he says, “is the town-library
of Schaffhausen. Here I found this codex in 1845 at the bottom of a high
book-chest, where it lay pell-mell with some other MSS. and old books
totally neglected, bearing neither title nor number.” It was twice
borrowed by Keller, and on the last occasion in 1851 he made a valuable
collection of facsimiles from it.

Finally the aged record, after well-nigh 1200 years’ vicissitudes, was
published by Dr. Reeves, Bishop of Down, in 1856, and his work
republished in 1874 by the publishers of the Series of Scottish
Historians, this time with English translation and re-arrangement of the
Notes, which Dr. Reeves permitted in order to adapt the book to a wider
circle of readers.

A truly romantic history, taking it all in all, is this story of the
ancient wanderer which has come to honour in a foreign land, but has not
yet found a way home to its native soil. What would Schaffhausen take
and part with it? Scotland has never asked. Some day she may, when she
awakens to the fact that the very oldest and, at the same time, one of
the most intensely interesting monuments of her literary history is an
alien in a strange country.

Apart from the book itself, the hero of the book, and its faithful
copyist, there is a fascination and much insight to be drawn from a
study of the personality of its author. Adamnan, like Boswell, has
achieved immortality through an enthusiastic and almost self-effacing
hero-worship. His great object, as he tells us again and again, is to
show up the wonderful character of the saintly Columba, and any deed or
tale that he thinks will enhance the prestige of this “great father and
founder of monasteries” goes down with unfailing devotion.

Born about the year 624 in Donegal, Adamnan, like Cummene, was a kinsman
of St. Columba. Indeed, the three men were descended from three
brothers, all of royal lineage. His peculiar name is understood to be a
diminutive of Adam, and is frequently followed by the patronymic Ua
Tinne, meaning grandson of Tinne. Of his father Ronan, or his mother
Ronnat, we know absolutely nothing beyond their descent, which was of
high degree. And of his own childhood and youth there remains only a
single legend, supposed to be the creation of a later age, reporting his
first meeting with Finnachta, afterwards monarch of Ireland, with whom
Adamnan was on the most friendly terms. This Finnachta, as his
biographer relates, was riding along one day to his sister’s house with
a numerous cavalcade, when he met a schoolboy with a jar of milk on his
back. In his haste to get out of the way the stripling knocked his foot
against a stone, and tripping, down went the jar with its contents upon
the ground. Whereupon the great prince spoke kindly to the boy and
assured him of protection, bidding him not to sorrow over it. To whom
the latter replied, “O good man, I have cause for grief, for there are
three goodly students in one house and three more of us are attendants
upon them. And how we act is this: one attendant from among us goes out
in turn to collect sustenance for the other five, and it was my turn
to-day; but what I had gathered for them has been spilled upon the
ground, and what grieves me more, the borrowed jar is broken and I have
not wherewith to pay for it.”

These are the boyish and dramatic circumstances in which Adamnan emerges
on the canvas of tradition. From his youth it would thus appear that he
was inured to hardship, and consequently qualified for the rigorous
discipline of the monastic life. Plain living went with high thinking,
and the quiet, thoughtful student soon acquired a reputation for
scholarship. He was just the kind of man to obtain entrance into the
distinguished circle of Iona, and though we cannot trace his career as
subordinate there, with certainty, we know that in 679, when fifty-five
years of age, he became head of the institution. At that period the
monastery was already known far and near for its learning. And there
seems little doubt that the new abbot was, taking him all in all, the
ablest and most accomplished of St. Columba’s successors. A great
linguist, he knew not only Latin, but, it may be inferred from his
writings, Hebrew and Greek also.

Four years prior to his own promotion, Finnachta had become king in his
native country. That monarch, it would appear, never lost sight of the
boy with the jar, whose whole bearing indicated a youth of rare promise.
The latter was afterwards invited to his court, and ultimately
constituted the king’s spiritual adviser (anamchara). This we have on
the authority of an ancient bardic composition in a vellum MS., formerly
in the possession of W. Monck Mason, Esq.

Besides his interesting relations with Finnachta, Adamnan was fortunate
in possessing the friendship of King Aldfrid of Northumbria. This
intimacy probably dates from the time when the latter as prince had
occasion to seek refuge in Ireland from his intriguing foes. At that
time he may have even been, as Duald Mac Firbis’s annals affirm, a pupil
of Adamnan.

At any rate, with two such royal friends, the influence of the Ionan
abbot was very great. And on important occasions he served as ambassador
or “go-between” in matters of State betwixt the two kings. For example,
after a raiding expedition by the North Saxons on Meath, Finnachta got
him to undertake a mission to his friend Aldfrid to negotiate for the
return of the captives, and the abbot had the satisfaction of personally
conducting sixty of them back to Erin in 686.

Two years later he paid another visit to the Court in Northumbria. On
both occasions a dreadful plague was raging in that country, and
throughout a great part of Europe. In his usual ultra-rational manner
Adamnan attributes his own immunity from the pestilence, and that of the
Picts and Scots in general, to the intercession of his holy patron St.
Columba.

On these tours he made the acquaintance of the leading clergy in the
north of England. It is supposed he met Bede, then a young man, at the
Court also. This distinguished historian gives various facts regarding
the abbot and his movements. He appears to have read Adamnan’s book on
the “Holy Places,” though it may be that he never saw the biography,
which was a much later production. At least he makes no mention of it
anywhere.

There were two great questions that then divided the Celtic churches—the
celebration of Easter and the tonsure. Through his intercourse with the
English clergy in Northumbria, and more especially, it is affirmed,
through a lively discussion he had with the learned Ceolfrid, Abbot of
Jarrow, Adamnan was persuaded to adopt the Catholic in preference to the
Celtic usage in these matters. On his return to Hy the brethren
strenuously opposed the innovation, and there was a lasting difference
of opinion thus originated by his change of views. For years the abbot,
who was pre-eminently a man of peace and unity—and, like the great and
pious scholar he was, always open to conviction,—earnestly strove to win
them over to what he deemed to be the better method, but did not succeed
in his own lifetime, though in after years the change was ultimately
adopted. In 692 he visited Ireland, and again in 697, between which
years he wrote the book that has made his name and memory immortal. A
man of great energy and incessant diligence, he was much on the move
convening synods and negotiating affairs. Like his extraordinary patron,
he interested himself in politics as well as in religion and literature,
of which he was a shining light.

Unhappily the law which St. Columba had got enacted, exempting women
from fighting in actual warfare, had soon fallen into abeyance, and
Adamnan resolved to have it re-enacted. According to a legend in the
Leabhar Breac and Book of Lecain, his attention was called to the
inhuman custom in the following accidental way. One day he happened to
be travelling through the plain of Bregia, says the legend, with his
mother on his back, when they saw two armies in deadly conflict. During
the heat of the combat his mother’s eye caught sight of a woman dragging
another woman by means of an iron reaping-hook from the opposing
battalion. The hook was fastened in the unfortunate victim’s breast.
Sitting down overcome by the sight, the distressed Ronnat said to her
son, “Thou shalt not take me from this spot until thou exemptest women
for ever from being in this condition and from excursions and hostings.”
Adamnan promised it. And at the important Synod of Tara, convened in
697, with the approval of King Finnachta, the point was carried,
involving a mighty social revolution from henceforth in the life and
customs of the Gael. For under the old regime, men and women went
equally to battle.

The enactments of this synod were afterwards known in Latin as “Lex
Adamnani,” and in Gaelic “Cain Adhamhnain.” In addition to a certain
privilege conceded to him and to his successors of levying contributions
for sacred purposes, Dr. Reeves thinks it was on this occasion that the
questions of Easter and the tonsure were publicly discussed, and
Adamnan’s views and usage adopted in Ireland.

Afterwards he seems to have been some years in that country promoting
his reforms. He certainly was there in 701; and Bede mentions that he
crossed from Erin to Hy the summer of the year that he died, and
indicates that he had been there a considerable time previously. His
death occurred on September 23rd, 704. It is thus touchingly
commemorated by the great historian. “For it came to pass that before
the next year came round he departed this life; the Divine goodness so
ordering it that, as he was a man most earnest for peace and unity, he
should be taken away to everlasting life before the return of the season
of Easter he should be obliged to differ still more seriously from those
who were unwilling to follow him in the way of truth.” He had apparently
celebrated his last Easter in Ireland, and died at the mature age of
seventy-seven.

His fame rests on his writings, chiefly the _Life of St. Columba_, and
his book on the “Holy Places”—_De Locis Sanctis_. Adamnan himself saw
not these Holy Land localities, but a French bishop on his return from
the east was driven by a storm to spend the winter with Adamnan, who
took down on waxen tablets his interesting accounts of the chief places
visited, and afterwards wrote out, _brevi textu_, on parchment. It is
better written and more fluent even than the biography, and when found
many years after, it was published as “the earliest account coming from
modern Christian Europe of the condition of Eastern lands and the cradle
of Christianity.”

Adamnan presented the book to King Aldfrid of Northumbria. There are
extant MSS. of it as old as the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries still
on the Continent—at Rome, Corbey, Saltzburg, and other places.

Besides these chief Latin works he is credited with a _Life of St.
Patrick_; poems, quoted by Tighernach, the “Four Masters,” and the Book
of Lecain; a _History of Ireland_ to his own times, and _An Epitome of
Irish Laws in Metre_. These two latter are only mentioned by Ward[16]
(on what authority is not known), and may be probably only compilations
of more modern times.

In the _Liber Hymnorum_, however, there is a short hymn in Gaelic
entitled Adamnan’s Prayer. It may be read in Dr. Stokes’ _Goidelica_.
And in the Leabhar Na h’Uidhre there is a more lengthy production known
as “Fis Adhamhnain.” It is in the form of a sermon, and may have been
written down some two hundred years after the abbot’s time. In this
remarkable vision Adamnan figures as “the high sage of the western
world,” and like Aeneas or Dante, he is privileged on the festival of
St. John the Baptist to visit heaven and hell. The scenes he beheld are
depicted in the original Gaelic with a realism and power of vivid
imaginary detail that puts even Thomas Boston in the shade. As Dante
found his Florentine enemies in not too comfortable circumstances in the
Inferno, so Adamnan is here represented as seeing the Aircinnich—the lay
administrators of the church lands, who too often abused their trust, in
similar dool. But this sentiment alone is sufficient to show that the
composition is of later date than Adamnan’s day, for such Aircinnich had
yet to arise, and the broad acres they mismanaged.

It is said that at the time of the great Synod in 697 the public mind
had for long been kept in such a state of suspense and alarm by the
prevailing pestilences and portents, that the report of the abbot having
some such vision made it so susceptible to his influence that he had far
less difficulty in carrying into effect his revolutionary measures than
he would have had in ordinary circumstances.

But all these things—writings and traditions alike—tend to show how this
quiet, intellectual, studious, pious, and—from our point of
view—amazingly credulous, yet influential scholar, impressed his own and
succeeding ages.

Adamnan’s best known book is essentially a Life of St. Columba, written
not in any chronological order, but on a characteristic plan of his own.
There are two prefaces, and what would really be the gist and
subject-matter of a modern biography is condensed by him into one short
paragraph at the end of the second of these. The work is then divided
into three parts or books. The first deals with prophetical revelations,
the second with miracles, the third with visions of angels; and under
these titles he groups all the most striking stories of the saint’s
life. All the collateral information—and it is not much—regarding the
history of the time, the social life, the manners, customs, language,
topography, etc., we get merely by the way in the telling of the tale.
Adamnan apparently had no thought that his readers would wish to know
something of these, or if he had he did not deem it any part of his task
to enlighten them. He was writing for his own times, and he could not
conceive that the eye of any monk or other reader could wander off from
the central luminary to mere details of the environment. It is at once
the limitation and strength of the enthusiast and the specialist. How
could he know that he was writing for the far-distant future?—this
unassuming monk in his cell, unconsciously addressing a people who have
emerged from his theory of the universe, and who listen and wonder at
his stories, which to them have all the charm and interest of fairy
tales.

_Tempora mutantur, eheu!_ The little facts that incidentally dropped
from his pen are those most sought and valued now, while the miracles,
visions, and prophecies which he took to be the soul and substance of
the book, wear a different aspect to modern eyes. It is these trifling
details, sometimes mere names, that give us glimpses into the state of
society in Ireland and Pictland, and into the civil and ecclesiastical
history of the time.

Adamnan’s consuming desire at all times is to present “the evidences
which the venerable man gave of his power.” And when we reflect that he
believed that “by some divine intuition” St. Columba, “through a
wonderful experience of his inner soul, beheld the whole universe drawn
together and laid open to his sight, as in one ray of the sun,” we need
not be surprised at the wonders unfolded. In the first chapter of Book
I., and before entering upon illustrative examples, he gives a summary
of his hero’s supernatural qualities. For example, he healed diseases;
expelled from the island “innumerable hosts of malignant spirits, whom
he saw with his bodily eyes assailing himself and beginning to bring
deadly distemper on his monastic brotherhood.” The surging waves quickly
became quiet at his prayer, and contrary winds changed into fair. He
took a white stone from the river Ness and blessed it for healing
purposes. This famous pebble floated like an apple when placed in water.
In the country of the Picts he raised a dead child to life, and while
yet a young man in Hibernia turned water into wine. An immense blaze of
heavenly light was occasionally seen to surround him in the light of
day, and he was frequently favoured with the society of bright hosts of
celestial beings. He often saw just men carried by angels to the highest
heavens, and reprobates hurried by demons to hell. The blessed man even
foretold the destinies of individual men, pleasing or painful, according
to their deserts. And “in the dreadful crash of wars he obtained from
God by the virtue of prayer, that some kings should be conquered and
others come off victorious.”

And now, coming to the substance of the separate books in order, we need
not dwell on the prophetical revelations, numerous and curious though
they are, beyond giving one or two as typical examples. The credulity of
the author and his capacity for belief are passing strange, and even
foreign to an age like our own. A peasant, he tells us, once asked the
saint by what death he would die. “Not in the battlefield nor at sea,”
came the ready response, “but the travelling companion of whom thou hast
no suspicion shall cause thy death.” And the man died through the
effects of a wound accidentally caused by his own knife.

One wonderful experience may be quoted, as quite in line with Professor
James’ argument in his Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh University (May,
1901). In discussing “The reality of the Unseen,” this brilliant
exponent of the new Psychology instanced a number of curious cases of
the occurrence of a “presence” to individuals, and he maintained that
the sentiment of reality could indeed attach itself to things of which
the representative faculty could frame only the dimmest sort of an idea.
And abstractions other than the ideas of pure reason had the power of
making us feel presences that we were impotent articulately to describe.
No more striking example of his contention could be desired than the
following. It is entitled, “Of the consolation which the monks when they
were weary on their journey, received from the saint visiting them in
spirit.”

Baithene and the brethren were returning in the evening to the monastery
from the harvest work when something strange and unusual was felt by
them all. It is thus described by an elder brother. “I perceive,” he
said to the others, “the fragrance of such a wonderful odour, just as if
all the flowers on earth were gathered together into one place. I feel
also a glow of heat within me, not at all painful, but most pleasing,
and a certain unusual and inexpressible joy poured into my heart, which
on a sudden so refreshes and gladdens me that I forget grief and
weariness of every kind. Even the load, however heavy, which I carry on
my back, is in some mysterious way so lightened from this place all the
way to the monastery that I do not seem to have any weight to bear.”

King Brude and his Druids had rather a different sensation when, outside
their fortifications near Inverness, some of the latter tried to prevent
the saint from chanting the evening hymns. Very much in the flesh this
time, St. Columba began to sing the 44th Psalm so wonderfully loud, like
the rattle of thunder, that king and people were terror-struck with the
awful noise, and forthwith relented. Columba seems to have been more
than a match for these pagan opponents. For in the second book, where
the miracles are recorded, among other confusions to which he drove the
resisting Picts, the following is recorded. When first he visited Brude,
it happened that the king, elated by the pride of royalty, acted
haughtily and would not open his gates to his distinguished visitors.
But the man of God, observing this, approached the folding doors with
his companions and, having first formed upon them the sign of the cross,
he knocked and then laid his hand upon the gate, which instantly flew
open of its own accord, the bolts sliding back with great force. The
saint and his followers then passed through, and ever after, as long as
he lived, king Brude knew how to respect and reverence his imperious
visitor. It was to him that the latter gave the remarkable white pebble
which effected cures. “And what is very wonderful,” says our author,
“when this same stone was sought for by those sick persons whose term of
life had arrived, it could not be found.” Even King Brude himself was
abandoned _in articulo mortis_ by the fateful pebble.

After giving examples of miraculous punishments inflicted on those who
were opposed to St. Columba, Adamnan instances a few encounters with
wild beasts, and as they relate to our own Scotland they are of ancient
and exceptional interest.

“On one occasion,” to quote our author, “when the blessed man was
staying some days in the Scian island (Skye), he left the brethren and
went alone a little farther than usual to pray; and having entered a
dense forest he met a huge wild boar that happened to be pursued by
hounds. As soon as the saint saw him at some distance he stood looking
intently at him. Then raising his holy hand and invoking the name of God
in fervent prayer, he said to the beast, ‘Thou shalt proceed no farther
in this direction; perish on the spot where thou hast now reached.’ And
no sooner were these fateful words uttered than it appears his
formidable opponent collapsed, expiring on the spot.”

But an experience on the mainland of the Picts seems to have been even
more exciting. One day he had to cross the river Ness. And when he
reached the bank of the river he saw some of the inhabitants burying an
unfortunate man, who, according to the accounts of those who were
burying him, was a short time before seized as he was swimming, and
bitten most severely by a monster that lived in the water; his wretched
body was, though too late, taken out with a hook by those who came to
his assistance in a boat. The blessed man, on hearing this, was so far
from being dismayed that he directed one of his companions to swim over
and row across the coble that was moored at the farther bank. And Lugne
Mocumin, hearing the command of the excellent man, obeyed without the
least delay, taking off all his clothes except his tunic and leaping
into the water. But the monster, which, so far from being satiated, was
only roused for more prey, was lying at the bottom of the stream, and
when it felt the water disturbed by the man swimming, suddenly rushed
out, and giving an awful roar darted after him with its mouth wide open,
as the man swam in the middle of the stream. Then the blessed man,
observing this, raised his holy hand, while all the rest, brethren as
well as strangers, were stupefied with terror, and invoking the name of
God, formed the saving sign of the cross in the air, and commanded the
ferocious monster, saying, “Thou shalt go no farther, nor touch the man;
go back with all speed.” Then at the voice of the saint the monster was
terrified, and fled more quickly than if it had been pulled back with
ropes, though it had just got so near Lugne as he swam that there was
not more than the length of a spear staff between the man and the beast.
Then the brethren, seeing that the monster had gone back, and that their
comrade Lugne had returned to them in the boat safe and sound, were
struck with admiration and gave glory to God in the blessed man. And
even the barbarous heathens who were present were forced, by the
greatness of this miracle which they themselves had seen, to magnify the
God of the Christians.

The raising of the hand and forming the sign of the cross in the air
seems to have been a frequent and effective expedient. In the case of a
youth who was returning from the milking of the cows with his pail on
his back, and who stopped at the door of the cell where the blessed man
was writing, it was the means of driving out a demon that lurked in the
milk pail. No sooner had he left than the saint made the sign. Instantly
the air was greatly agitated. The bar which fastened the lid of the pail
being pulled back through the two openings which received it, was shot
away to a great distance, while the lid fell to the earth and the
greater part of the milk was spilled upon the ground. The demon that
lurked in the bottom of the pail could not endure the power of the sign,
and fled thus violently in terror.

Such is the unvarying style of Adamnan. That he himself credited those
versions of stories reported is beyond question. “Our belief in the
miracles which we have recorded,” he says, “but which we did not
ourselves see, is confirmed beyond doubt by the miracles of which we
were eye-witnesses.” Three times in his own experience he saw
unfavourable gales changed into propitious breezes.

As Book III., dealing with visions and angels, embodies Cummene’s
contribution, it is of the highest interest to consider some of its
choice memories. “On a certain night,” proceeds chap. ii., “between the
conception and birth of the venerable man, an angel of the Lord appeared
to his mother in dreams, bringing to her as he stood by her a certain
robe of extraordinary beauty, in which the most beautiful colours, as it
were, of all the flowers seemed to be portrayed. After a short time he
asked it back and took it out of her hands, and having raised it and
spread it out he let it fly through the air. But she, being sad at the
loss of it, said to that man of venerable aspect, ‘Why dost thou take
this lovely cloak away from me so soon?’ He immediately replied,
‘Because this mantle is so exceedingly honourable that thou canst not
retain it longer with thee.’ When this was said, the woman saw that the
forementioned robe was gradually receding from her in its flight, and
that then it expanded until its width exceeded the plains, and in all
its measurements was larger than the mountains and forests. Then she
heard the following words, ‘Woman, do not grieve for the man to whom
thou hast been bound by the marriage bond; thou shalt bring forth a son
of so beautiful a character that he shall be reckoned among his own
people as one of the prophets of God, and he hath been predestined by
God to be the leader of innumerable souls to the heavenly country.’ At
these words the woman awoke from her sleep.”

A priest, to whose care the sacred youth had been confided, upon
returning home from the church after mass found his house illuminated
with a bright light, and saw in fact a ball of fire standing over the
face of the little boy as he lay asleep. And in after years a higher
personage, St. Brendan, reported that he observed a most brilliant
pillar wreathed with fiery tresses preceding the same wonderful
individual.

It was not to be supposed that such a distinguished ornament of the
church militant could escape the attention and intrigues of its
arch-enemy. And so, on another day, while the holy man went to seek in
the woods of Iona for a place more remote from men and fitting for
prayer, he suddenly beheld, as he afterwards told a few of the brethren,
a very black host of demons fighting against him with iron darts. These
wicked demons, as the Holy Spirit revealed to the saint, wished to
attack his monastery and kill with the same spears many of the brethren.
But he, single-handed, against innumerable foes of such a nature, fought
with the utmost bravery, having received the armour of the apostle Paul.
And thus the contest was maintained on both sides during the greater
part of the day, nor could the demons, countless though they were,
vanquish him; nor was he able by himself to drive them from his island
until the angels of God—as the saint afterwards told certain persons—and
they few in number came to his aid, when the demons in terror gave way.

The chapter, which is far and away the most thrilling and humanly
interesting, is the last of the volume, entitled, “How our patron Saint
Columba passed to the Lord.” It lingers with loving memory over the
closing scene of this remarkable life, giving a minute account of the
saint’s last words and acts, his preparations for the impending change,
and the manner and circumstances of his death. But as this is an
oft-repeated and well-known passage, it need not be quoted here.

Adamnan’s _Vita Columbæ_ is not the only ancient _Life of St. Columba_
after Cummene’s, but it is undoubtedly the standard classic one, from
which most of the subsequent biographies draw their facts and
inspirations, with the exception, perhaps, of the “Old Irish Life,”
which furnishes particulars not mentioned in this one.

Neither is the Schaffhausen document the sole existing MS. copy of the
great biography. Dr. Reeves consulted as many as seven distinct MSS.,
three of which contained a longer and four a shorter text. Besides these
he had heard of five other extant copies, more or less complete.

The seven from which he obtained his own various readings are the
following:—

I. Codex A.—The famous Schaffhausen one, the oldest of all, dating from
the early years of the eighth century.

II. Codex B.—A vellum of the middle of the fifteenth century, preserved
in the British Museum.

III. Codex C.—The Canisian text, which was published in 1604 from a MS.
in the monastery of Windberg, Bavaria.

IV. Codex D.—The second tract in a large vellum of the thirteenth
century, in Primate Marsh’s library, Dublin.

V. Codex F.—A vellum consisting of fifty leaves, now in the Royal
Library of Munich.

VI. Codex G.—A small quarto MS. on vellum of the early part of the ninth
century, in the Library of St. Gall.

VII. Codex Cottonianus in the British Museum, also a vellum of the
latter part of the twelfth century.

The others, which he had not seen, are variously distributed in Austria,
Bavaria, Switzerland, and Belgium.

With all its defects, Adamnan’s masterpiece is the most valuable
monument of the early Celtic Church which has escaped the ravages of
time; imaginative, superstitious, magical, and steeped in hero-worship,
it is characteristically Celtic and of surpassing interest to the
archæologist and philologist.

Its value as such would have been vastly enhanced in these times had it
been written in Gaelic, and doubtless, too, had the author condescended
more on social and historical details. But Adamnan apparently had no
high opinion of his native language as a literary medium. In his first
preface he almost apologises for using Gaelic names of men and tribes
and obscure places in the “base Scotic tongue,” which he thinks rude in
comparison with the languages of foreign nations, and begs his readers
not to despise a record of useful deeds on account of these native words
inserted.

Dr. Reeves seems to regret that Adamnan did not follow the method of
Bede and give us an ecclesiastical history instead of a biography. We
cannot all share his sentiment. Had it been other than it is—had it even
been in Gaelic—the probability is that it might not have survived. In
Gaelic it certainly never could have attained the celebrity it enjoyed
on the continent of Europe during the Middle Ages, and which helped to
perpetuate it. On the other hand, without the memoir as thus preserved,
the life of St. Columba, the greatest pioneer of Scottish history,
religion, and literature, would now be as vague and jumbled as that of
any mythical hero, even as that of the historical St Patrick outside his
own “Confession” unfortunately is; and we should be ignorant of many
points concerning which we have now first-hand information.

As it stands, the _Vita Columbæ_ is still the most authentic voucher we
have for various important particulars in the civil and religious
history of the Picts and Scots, and the severe Pinkerton himself was
perhaps never nearer the truth on Celtic subjects than when he
pronounced it “the most complete piece of such biography that all Europe
can boast of, not only at so early a period, but even through the whole
Middle Ages.”

CHAPTER V
THE BOOK OF DEER

An ancient curio—Second oldest book of Scotland—Where did it come
from?—Its contents threefold—Gaelic colophon from the ninth
century—The work of a native scribe of Alba—Peculiarities—The
ecclesiastical art of the period—The Gaelic entries—“Legend of
Deer”—Drostan’s tears—Some very quaint history—The earliest source
for Scottish Gaelic—Authentic glimpses into the Celtic condition
of Scotland—Origin of shires, parishes, burghs, individual
freedom, and the use of the English language—Three editions of the
Gaelic of the Book of Deer—Now one of the very oldest MSS. of
native origin that Cambridge can boast of.

In the year 1860, Mr. Henry Bradshaw, Librarian of Cambridge University,
while rummaging among old books, came upon a curious production which at
once usurped his attention. Here, thought he, is surely a survival from
some remote time. And examining the MS., he found it to consist of
eighty-six parchment leaves, six inches long, four and a half wide, and
closely written on both sides.

The language was Latin, written in the Irish character, “not very unlike
the Bodleian Cædmon.” Each page showed marks of ruling with a sharp
instrument, and the letters hung from the ruled lines instead of resting
on them. The pages were surrounded by ornamented borders, most of them
filled in with interlaced work in panels, and with fretwork of a
peculiar kind.

On a casual inspection of the subject-matter, the accomplished librarian
had no difficulty in ascertaining that it consisted of the first six
chapters of St Matthew’s Gospel, and part (verses 1–22) of the seventh;
the first four chapters of St. Mark, and part of the fifth (to middle of
verse 35); the first three chapters of St. Luke, with the first verse of
the fourth; the whole of the Gospel of St. John; a fragment of an Office
for the Visitation of the Sick, in a later hand; and the Apostles’
Creed. The writing of the Gospels was all in one uniform hand, the ink
dark-brown with age, and the initial letters of paragraphs designed in
fanciful dragonesque forms and variously coloured. At the end of the
book, just after the Apostles’ Creed, the writer had added a colophon in
another language, which looked like Gaelic, and on the margins and
vacant spaces of the volume there was a number of entries in the same
vernacular, but evidently inserted much later.

What greatly enhanced the rarity and interest of this remarkable codex,
in the finder’s eyes, was that it also contained a collection of
coloured pictures and ornamental designs contemporary with the writing,
executed in the same style, and apparently by the same hand that penned
the Gospels.

Where did this ancient curio come from? It was easy for him to trace its
entrance into the Library, for he found it among the remainder of the
books of John Moore, at one time Bishop of Norwich, and later of Ely.
These books had come into the possession of the University in a very
interesting way. After the prelate’s death, which took place in 1714, it
appears that King George the First, acting on the suggestion of Lord
Townshend, bought the extensive library of the deceased for the sum of
6000 guineas, and gifted it to the College Library.

The small octavo MS. of which we are speaking, and now known as the Book
of Deer, had formed part of Bishop Moore’s collection in 1697, and
strange to say, after its removal to Cambridge, it lay apparently
neglected for a century and a half on the shelves of that University
Library, until the discriminating eye of Mr. Bradshaw singled it out as
of exceptional antiquity and value—as, in fact, one of the very oldest
MSS. of native origin that Cambridge can boast of.

Thus far the history of the quaint foundling. For the rest, it must tell
its own tale.

Obviously one of the few relics of the Celtic Church now extant, it
required an expert in the Gaelic language and antiquities to elicit the
desired information regarding its origin and long past. And when Whitley
Stokes sought a perusal, we can almost fancy the eager Bradshaw
addressing his fellow-linguist in the language of Marcellus to Horatio
when the ghost of Hamlet’s father suddenly appeared, “Thou art a
scholar; speak to it.” Here was the worn and faded form of a book
resurrected from the dust of oblivion, and, like the shade of the dead
king, once more catching the eye of men, and making their hearts quiver
with eerie curiosity.

A rising Celticist, Mr. Whitley Stokes soon applied himself to the
interesting inquisition, following the venerable scroll back for a
thousand years to the ancient time when it first took shape. And in the
_Saturday Review_ of December 1860 appeared an anonymous article from
his pen, in the form of an appreciative notice, giving translations of
the Gaelic, and otherwise making known to the public the importance of
this latest literary discovery.

In the contents of the volume he found sufficient internal evidence to
be able to trace its past, so far as many details of its early origin
and environment are concerned.

These contents, as already hinted, are threefold. First, the original
substance of the book; second, its ornamentations; and third, the notes
and memoranda inserted at a later time on the margins and blank pages.

And into what age and environment, we naturally ask, do these lead us?

As on receipt of an unknown letter, the receiver turns with eager eyes
to scan the signature at the end, so here the expert first directs his
attention to the colophon or postscript of the scribe.

In this particular instance it happens to be in Gaelic, and may be
rendered thus: “Be it on the conscience of every one in whom shall be
for grace the booklet with splendour, that he give a blessing on the
soul of the poor wretch (truagain) who wrote it” (“Forchubus caichduini
imbia arrath inlebran colli aratardda bendacht forainmain in truagain
rodscribai”).

This Gaelic, says Whitley Stokes, is identical with the oldest Irish
glosses given by Zeuss in his _Grammatica Celtica_, and “certainly as
old as the ninth century.” Professor Westwood, from a study of the
written characters, which are those at that time common to the Irish and
Anglo-Saxon schools, came to the same conclusion as to the age of the
book.

The version of the Gospels which it contains is one of a class which has
been called “Irish,” because, while mainly corresponding with Jerome’s
Vulgate, it preserves occasional readings from versions of earlier
dates. The text, in other words, agrees with the text of the various
Books of Gospel used in the Scoto-Irish monasteries of the period, such
as the Books of Durrow, Kells, Dimna, Moling, Armagh, etc.

It would appear that Jerome’s recension made its way early among Gaelic
scholars, and during the isolation of the Celtic Church, there had been
a sort of revision which produced a native version exhibiting
characteristics peculiar to itself and common to all the above-mentioned
texts. Hence the wonderful uniformity alike in the text and in the
peculiarities of spelling found in all the surviving Gaelic MSS. of that
early period.

It is not known whether the book was produced in the place whose name it
bears or in Iona, or whether it was written by a Pict or a Scot.
Scholars are content to affirm their opinion that it is the work of a
native scribe of Alba, without particularising too confidently.

Dr. Stuart, who edited it for the Spalding Club in 1869, observed that
though the handwriting is good and uniform, casual examination of the
MS. will show that it is a careless transcript of a corrupt text. The
spelling is frequently barbarous and capricious. There are many
violations of grammar, with omissions, transpositions, repetitions and
interpolations of various kinds, while the prepositions are almost
always joined to the word which they govern.

Generally speaking, this Book of Deer exhibits many of the peculiarities
of spelling which Tischendorf noted in the Vulgate, for example:—

Magdalen_æ_ for Magdalen_e_.
Ba_b_tismum for ba_p_tismum.
O_cc_ulus for o_c_ulus.
Abra_ch_am for Abra_h_am.
_Ch_anna for _C_ana.
Pro_f_eta for pro_ph_eta.
Dic_ie_ns for dic_e_ns.
_Z_abulus for _d_iabolus.
_H_oriens for _o_riens, etc.

But the copying is otherwise of such a kind that it appears very
doubtful if the scribe really knew Latin well. It certainly indicates a
great falling away from the high scholarship of Adamnan and the verbal
accuracy of Baithene. And this itself might confirm us in the idea that
it may have been written in Deer or somewhere in Buchan rather than in
Iona. Very curious blunders might be quoted; but perhaps none more
grotesque than that in the genealogy in St. Luke, where Seth is set down
as the first man and father of Adam, or again in John xviii. 22, “Sic
respondis Pontifici” (Answerest thou the high priest so?) is written
“Sicrespem dispontifici.” In other cases words are introduced which
entirely destroy the sense.

The second feature of this remarkable codex to arrest the attention, is
the decoration, which also is found to exhibit the character of the
ecclesiastical art of the period at which it is presumed to have been
written. The style of ornament of the illuminations is in fact entirely
similar to that used in the well known Irish Books of Gospel prior to
the ninth century, and on its own account is exceedingly interesting.
The first folio has its page divided into four panels by a plain Latin
cross, with a rosette in the centre. In these are four figures
representing, most likely, the four evangelists, though they might very
well stand for clerics. Fronting the beginning of the first Gospel is a
figure, full-page size, taken to represent St. Matthew, the author of
that Evangel. He appears with a beard, and clothed in ecclesiastical
vestments, all but the feet, which are bare. In his right hand he holds
a sword of unusual form, turned downwards with the point of the scabbard
resting between his feet; the handle is guarded before and behind, the
guards being curved and reversed.

On either side of the evangelist there looks forth a smaller figure,
which seems to be intended for an angel.

At the beginning of St. Mark’s Gospel is another figure in the same
style, with an object in front of his breast like a book in ornamental
binding. In his own place, St. Luke appears in the attitude of prayer,
his arms outspread. St. John is surrounded by six smaller figures,
similar to those accompanying St. Matthew. The two last pages of the MS.
have also designs of which one repeats with variations that at the
beginning of the book; while the other is a combination of similar
figures with geometric ornament. Throughout the volume are found here
and there small drawings—quaint little flourishes representing fern
leaves, birds, and animals, curiously wrought, and words as if in trial
of the pen, some of which show very delicate and correct lines. The
initial letter of each Gospel is enlarged and ornamented with patches of
different colours, about two inches high, and the ends of the principal
strokes of the letters terminate in dogs’ heads.

Yet it must be added that with all its similarity of style and
attractive colouring, the art is poor in comparison with that of
contemporary Irish MSS.

Such are the original contents of the codex. There remain the later
notes and memoranda on the margins and blank spaces. And these are of
two kinds—those written in Latin and those in Gaelic. The Latin ones
consist of (1) the fragment of an Office for the Visitation of the Sick
inserted between Mark and Luke, and with a single line of Gaelic rubric
in the body of it, namely, “Hisund dubeir sacorfaic dau” (“Here give the
sacrifice to him”); (2) a Charter by King David confirming to the monks
of Deer their lands and their privileges. As the Office for the Sick may
have been the first insertion, perhaps 200 or 250 years after the
original book was written, so the King’s Charter, granted some time
before his death in 1154, was with a single exception apparently the
last, for in declaring that the clerics of Deer were free from all lay
interference and undue exaction, “as it is written in their book,” it is
implied that the rest of the entries had already been made.

These latter are the six Gaelic ones, and they contribute the chief
value to the Book of Deer. They all relate to grants of land and other
privileges given from time to time to the Monastery of that name. At
Banff and Aberdeen, in the early part of the twelfth century, the book
was produced in the King’s Courts in evidence of the rights of the
clerics to the land in question, and their claim was thereby
substantiated. The entries were made at different times, from the end of
the tenth or the beginning of the eleventh century down to the middle of
the twelfth. They occur in the earlier part of the book, and though
inferior in point of penmanship and even of ink to the original contents
of the MS., they are well written and perfectly legible throughout.
Inscribed as they were in the Gaelic of the place and of the period,
these entries introduce us direct and at once into the community of
monks who owned the codex.

The first is of exceeding great interest. It is known as the “Legend of
Deer.” Based upon a tradition of some 500 years, it cannot be regarded
as strictly historical, which all the others are. The tradition was that
the monastery of Deer was founded by St. Columba. According to the
legend, the great Abbot came with his pupil Drostan from Hy (Iona) to
Abbordoboir, the modern Aberdour in Aberdeenshire, but whether by land
or sea is not stated. The record simply says, “As God had directed
them.” Bede the Pict was, at the time, Mormaer or Grand Steward of
Buchan, and gave them the town in freedom for ever from mormaer and
toisech (chieftain). They came after that to the other town of the
district, now known as Deer, and “it was pleasing to Columcille because
it was full of God’s grace,” and he asked Bede to give him that one too,
but the Pict refused.

Then a son of this ruler took ill and was at the point of death, when
his father sent to the clerics—Columba and his pupil—to pray for the lad
that he might recover, and he gave them in offering the land from “Cloch
in tiprat to Cloch pette meic Garnait” (“From the stone of the well to
the stone that marks the bounds of the son of Garnat’s place”). They
offered a prayer and health came to the dying youth. After that,
Columcille departed from the district, gifting the town to Drostan. But
before he set out he blessed it, and left as his “word,” “Whosoever
shall come against it, let him not be many-yeared or victorious.”

Drostan’s tears (deara), we are told, flowed freely on parting with his
famous Chief, whereupon the immortal Columba said, “Let Dear be its name
henceforward.” And thus the town and monastery derived their name, since
variously spelt as Dear, Der, Deir, Dere, and Deer.

The facts underlying the legend are not at all improbable. On the
contrary, they are quite in keeping with the character of St. Columba
and the range of his mission. Arguing from the circumstance that no
Drostan is mentioned in history in connection with the saint, an attempt
has been made by Dr. Macbain to show that the founder of the monastery
may have been another individual of that name who lived about 700 A.D.,
but there is no sufficient data. The word is a diminutive of the British
name Drust. And whoever Drostan was, as a saint he has been held in
honour in the Buchan district from very early times. The church of
Aberdour was dedicated to him, and Drustie’s fair used to be held
annually at Deer on the 14th of December.

In connection with the “word” said to have been left by Columcille,
there is some very quaint history in after years. The Celtic Earls of
Buchan, partly influenced by it, no doubt, showed a munificent spirit
towards the Church of Deer till the fall of their House with the Comyns,
when Robert the Bruce came to the throne.

The Comyns had opposed the latter and were so utterly overthrown that,
according to a chronicle of the period, of a name which numbered at one
time the three Earls of Buchan, Mar, and Menteith, and more than thirty
belted knights, there remained no memorial in the land “save the orisons
of the monks of Deer.”

Sir Robert de Keith, the influential Marischal of Scotland and staunch
supporter of the Bruce, got a grant of some pleasant lands in the
neighbourhood of the monastery from the King as a reward for his
services. Thereafter, partly through intermarriage, the Marischals in
succession became the leading family in the district, and at the time of
the Reformation were tenants of the abbey lands. By authority of a
member of the family who had become “Abbot and Commendator of Deer,” the
property was by a certain process rather mendaciously made over to the
Earl of the day. But the Earl’s wife, “a woman both of a high spirit and
of tender conscience, forbade her husband to leave such a consuming moth
in his house as was the sacrilegious meddling with the Abisie of Deir.”
Unfortunately, however, “fourteen chalders of meill and beir was a sore
tentatione, and he could not weel indure the randering back of such a
morsell.” Her demand was met with “absolut refusall.” So she had a
vision of the impending ruin of the house. It is thus curiously recorded
by Patrick Gordon, a writer of the eighteenth century, in his book
entitled, _A Short Abridgement of Britanes Distemper from the year of
God 1739 to 1749_.

The night following, “in her sleepe, she saw a great number of
religious men in their habit, cum forth of that Abbey to the stronge
Craige of Dunnoture which is the principall residence of that familie.
She saw them also sett themselves round about the rock, to gett it
down and demolishe it, having no instruments nor toilles wherewith to
perform this work, but only penknyves; wherewith they foolishly (as it
seemed to her), began to pyk at the Craige. She smyled to sie them
intend so frutles are interpryse; and went to call her husband to
scuffe and geyre them out of it. When she had fund him and brought him
to sie these sillie religious monckes at their foolishe work, behold!
the wholl Craige, with all his strong and statly buildings, was by
their penknyves undermynded and fallen in the sea, so as ther remained
nothing but the wrack of ther rich furniture and stufe flotting on the
waves of a raging and tempestuous sea. Som of the wiser sort, divining
upon this vission, attrebute to the penknyves the lenth of time befor
this should com to pass; and it hath bein observed, by sundrie, that
the Earles of that house before wer the richest in the kingdom, having
treasure in store besyd them; but ever since the addition of this so
great revenue, they have losed their stock by heavie burdeines of debt
and ingagment.”

The writer who relates this wonderful vision did not live to see the
downfall of the House in the following century, or, it is surmised, he
would have regarded it in the light of a literal fulfilment.

But a much more distinguished author in recent times, the French Comte
de Montalembert, has not hesitated to connect the ruin of the family
fortunes with the sinister “word” of the famous Columcille: “Whosoever
shall come against it, let him not be many-yeared or victorious.” The
scribes who inserted the later entries had kept up the ominous
prediction by concluding the fourth with the sentence, “And the Lord’s
blessing on every mormaer and on every toisech who shall fulfil this,
and to their seed after them;” and the fifth, with the alternative, “And
his blessing on every one who shall fulfil this after him, and his curse
on every one who shall go against it.”

In Gaelic entry No. 2 we suddenly emerge from the traditionary elements
of the first into the region of historical fact. We need not detail the
various grants referred to in the entries 2 to 6 or the names of the
donors. Our chief interest in these vernacular addenda lies in the
circumstance that they throw an ancient and fresh light on the language
and history of the period. Philologically, they are of great value as
the earliest specimens of Scottish Gaelic extant. In Adamnan’s _Life of
St. Columba_ there are, of course, some Celtic words, but these are
merely names of persons or places and the book is the work of a scholar
born and educated in Ireland.

Hitherto, therefore, so far as the Gaelic literary monuments of Scotland
have survived, they may all be regarded as more or less of Irish origin,
character, and inspiration. But here at length and for the first time we
have one that is distinctly Scottish, both in language and the manner of
writing. As Windisch has expressed it in his _Celtic Speeches_, “the
oldest source for Scottish Gaelic is the Book of Deer.” After it there
is no other for 400 years, till the Dean of Lismore’s book is produced
between 1512 and 1526.

Before the sixteenth century you will look in vain for a scrap of any
literature or even record in Scottish Gaelic outside the Book of Deer.
The arguments that may be adduced to show that in the latter we have the
genuine native vernacular, as distinct from the Irish Gaelic in vogue in
contemporary MSS., are these.

First, the book was evolved in a corner of Scotland as remote as could
be from Ireland. The district formed part of the country of the Picts,
who had asserted a kind of independence in ecclesiastical affairs.

Second, the Norsemen by their frequent incursions had inserted a wedge
as it were between the two countries that hitherto had so much in
common. They destroyed Iona and forced the Church to adopt Dunkeld as
its chief abbatial centre. Since Malcolm Canmore’s time, Scotland was
thus becoming a separate kingdom, independent of English and Irish
influences, and the establishment of bishoprics by the Kings Alexander
and David freed even the Church from both England and Ireland. The
twelfth century was therefore a likely time for the birth of a native
literature.

Third, the writing in the Book of Deer is of a thoroughly practical
kind, relating to business transactions, and the Gaelic of the district
must have been used. The very purpose of the memoranda was to
substantiate claims against future mormaers and toisechs who might be
disposed to dispute their legality.

Fourth, it is believed that even in the Western Highlands, not to speak
of Buchan, the difference between Irish and Scottish Gaelic was then
wider than the literature would lead us to infer. For this reason, that
the Gaelic MSS. of the period were produced by men who derived their
culture from Ireland and naturally followed the Irish standard in their
written compositions. The contents of the Book of Deer fully justify
that conclusion.

The Gaelic text is of the same age with that in the Leabhar Na h’Uidhre
and Book of Hymns. Yet a comparison with these typical Irish monuments
shows that the monks of Deer had developed peculiarities in writing
Gaelic which differed considerably from the standard of the Irish
scholars. Windisch, commenting upon this circumstance, says, “The manner
of expression, words, and forms are as in the Irish, but the manner of
writing shows already a stronger phonetic decay; whether it be that the
Scotch Gaelic has lived faster, or that only the manner of writing has
remained less ancient, and has fitted itself more exactly to the
pronunciation of the time.”

It is in this respect more like the Middle than the Ancient Irish.

Those who are interested in the study of archaic words and grammatical
forms will find the Book of Deer not a bad quarry; in fact our very
oldest bed-rock for Scottish idioms. There are few declensional
specimens, it is true, but these suffice to show, as Dr. Whitley Stokes
observed, that the Highlanders declined their nouns in the eleventh
century as fully as the Irish, which is very far from being the case
to-day. Some of the peculiarities of the newly-fledged Scottish Gaelic
may here be noticed. For example, that distinction of vowels so
noticeable in the Authorised Version of the Scriptures, where we have
the Irish _o_ in _focal_ instead of the Scottish _a_ as in _facal_, may
be observed in the colophon of the Book of Deer, where we have
_truagain_, “the poor wretch,” and not _trogan_ as in the Irish Priscian
of St. Gall. Another feature is the confusion of vowels if ending words,
as _i_ for _e_, the sinking of _c_ and _t_ to _g_ and _d_, and the
assimilation of _ld_ and _ln_ to _ll_. The spelling has further local
characteristics, perhaps due to Pictish influence, as, for example, _cc_
for _ch_; thus _imacc_ is for _imach_, modern _a mach_, “out of,”
“henceforth;” _buadacc_ is for _buad(h)ach_, “victorious.”

The aspirated _d_ or _g_ is dropped, as in _blienee_, just as from
Jocelyn of Furness (1180) we learn that the pronunciation of _tighearn_
was at that time _tyern_, though in Irish _tigerna_. Another Gaelic
Scotticism is the manner of treating _n_ in the preposition _in_. In
early Irish the _n_ disappears before _s_ and _p_; here it is retained,
as _insaere_, _inpett_. We also find _ibbidbin_ for _im-bidbin_ and
_ig-ginn_ for _in-cinn_. Thus the two peculiar features of Celtic
grammar known as aspiration and eclipsis, or vocalic infection and nasal
infection of tenues, are observed.

The great rule for spelling known as “Leathan ri leathan is caol ri
caol,” that is, “broad (vowel) to broad, and small (vowel) to small,”
forced on Scottish Gaelic from Ireland, is, with very rare exceptions,
ignored in the Book of Deer. The orthography of the latter has many
contractions, and is more phonetic than that of the Irish MSS. All of
which peculiarities and circumstances point to the conclusion arrived at
by Celtic scholars in general, that the Scottish Gaelic dialect of the
eleventh and the twelfth centuries, and especially the accent, differed
much from the language of educated Irishmen.

The next two literary monuments of this vernacular, namely, those of the
Dean of Lismore and of Duncan Macrae of Inverinate, both of whom wrote
phonetically, bring out this difference between the two dialects still
more clearly. It is an interesting fact, apparent from the Book of Deer,
that the present Aberdeenshire, now so Teutonic, was, when the entries
were made, a Gaelic-speaking district. The names of the kings, mormaers,
and toisechs mentioned are all Celtic, indeed most of them are common
enough names to-day in the Highlands,—Cathal, Domnall, Muridach,
Maelcolum, Cainnech, Donnchad, Gartnait, Aedh, Comgall, Maledoun,
Matadin; Nectan was Bishop of Aberdeen, Leot Abbot of Brechin,
Domangart, a ferlegin or “man of learning,” and Cormac Abbot of Turiff.
A few are non-Celtic, such as Andrew, Samson, and David. Unhappily, in
these records the names of women do not figure much. Two very euphonious
and beautiful ones, however, are given,—Eua, the “wedded wife” of
Colban, and Ete, daughter of Gillemichel. It is a wonder that these
delightful names, especially Ete or Eite, have gone out of use in the
Highlands.

The Celts seem to have had a genius for coining melodious appellations,
sweet and endearing, as well as strong, rough, and uncouth.

Unlike Adamnan’s _Vita Columbæ_ and Bede’s _History_, there is no hint
in this MS. of any language other than Latin and Gaelic. The latter was
in evidence in the Courts of Banff and Aberdeen, and we would gather
from the line of vernacular inserted in the Latin fragment of an Office
for the Visitation of the Sick that the monks of Deer were more familiar
with their Gaelic than their Latin; for in the Irish Book of Dimna the
direction is not the Gaelic “Hisund dubeir sacorfaic dau,” but it is the
Latin “Das ei Eucharistan.”

But apart from their philological value, the memoranda in the Book of
Deer throw a welcome light on an early and obscure period of our
national history. Where the student of the social, political, and
ecclesiastical machinery of the time would otherwise have to grope his
way among dim and doubtful hints and analogies, he has here authentic
glimpses into the Celtic condition of Scotland.

And these notices are all the more valuable because they were made at
the time when a great social and ecclesiastical revolution was
impending. There was, on one side, the change from the primitive
patriarchal polity to the feudal regime, and on the other, from the
monastic to the parochial system. The period covered by the entries is
towards the close of the Celtic epoch, before this momentous transition
had taken place. We see the old order ready to depart, and we get some
light on the origin of the new institutions which were about to
supersede it.

Queen Margaret, wife of Malcolm Canmore, had much to do with the
remoulding of the ancient structure of society in Scotland. This old
system of inherited peculiarity was first confronted with one founded on
different principles, when the Celtic clergy of Scotland met in council,
to listen during three days to the addresses of the Saxon princess,
whose speeches were translated into the language of the Gael by her
husband the King. Just as in the other great social movements of later
times in the Highlands, the influences that undermined the old order
were not the result of natural progress in the Celtic polity, but of
foreign ideas and principles introduced from without. It was these that
led to the destruction of the civil and ecclesiastical institutions on
which the old regime rested. In the train of Queen Margaret had come
into Scotland a race of Saxon, and afterwards of Norman settlers, whose
presence in the country led to a quickening of the national life, and
the awakening of a feeling of unity such as could find no place among
the divided clans of a Celtic people.

In the Book of Deer we still have the old patriarchal system in full
swing. There is the Ardrigh or High King. Under him and over the
provinces are the mormaers, and under the mormaers the tribal or
district chieftains known as toisechs. All these had their exactions out
of the land, besides having their own fat manor lands. They had rights
of personal service, civil and military; of entertainment when
travelling; and of exacting rent in kind or in money. There were neither
dioceses nor parishes as yet. The patriarchal idea was carried out even
in the monastic system. Each tribe or tuath had a monastery. Its abbot
belonged to a leading family of the tuath or of the founder, in which
family the office was hereditary. The system gave rise to great abuses;
for as the monastery grew rich in lands the abbot took to do more with
the temporal than with the spiritual management, and often the lands
passed out of the possession of the monastery altogether into the hands
of the laymen.

“It was not so in the case of Deer, the clerics of which down to the
middle of the twelfth century were still receiving from the bounty of
the Gaelic chiefs of this district additions to their monastic
inheritance, in the whole of which they were secured by King David I.,
with full immunity from all secular exactions.” It is plain, however,
from the terms of the royal charter, that attempts had been made to
fleece them, and that they were able to maintain their rights in virtue
of the grants recorded in their book.

The abuses of the lay abbacies, though not wholly removed, were fairly
checked by Queen Margaret and her sons, through the creation of
bishoprics and the gradual supersession of the monastic by the parochial
system. Soon, dioceses and parishes, which cannot be traced farther back
than the time of Alexander I., began to appear in the records. They had
been established in England much earlier.

Other new civil divisions and distinctions emerge. The old “countries”
and “provinces” become shires. Towns spring up, and the number of
individuals and corporations holding personal property and corporate
rights increased. A large part of the best land was given by charter
from King David to men who held of the crown in feudal tenure.

The mormaer became merged in the Earl, and the toisech in the Thane. In
short, with the growth of feudal law, and the change to the parochial
system, the old Celtic regime was fast becoming a thing of the past,
though many of the customs and traditions associated therewith lingered
on till the great overthrow of the Forty-five, and even in some
localities almost to our own times.

We are thus able, through the medium of this venerable Book of Deer, to
reach a hand over time to Columcille and his faithful Drostan, to Bede
the Pict, to the monks of Buchan, and that succession of the Ardrighs,
mormaers, and toisechs who lived in the old and primitive conditions,
before the new institutions and the regime under which we ourselves
exist were evolved. We can hardly think of Scotland to-day apart from
the categories of parishes, burghs, individual freedom, English
language, and many others, and yet in these far-off times the monks of
Deer and their contemporaries had to be doing without them. For all
this, these men were not lacking in culture or pious devotion. Their
book shows us that they revered the spiritual Columba as their Chief,
and founder of their monastery, and besides being expert caligraphists,
having some skill in painting and illumination, they were educated with
a sufficient knowledge of Latin to transcribe it intelligently and use
it in the services of the church. “This is not much to say of them,”
says Dr. Anderson in his Rhind Lectures, “but,” he adds, “it is a great
deal more than we have it in our power to say of any other community or
institution from similar evidence, if we except the parent community of
Iona itself.”

Of the Gaelic of the Book of Deer there are three editions. The first
was prepared, Latin and Gaelic together, with valuable preface and
facsimile plates, by Dr. Stuart, and published by the Spalding Club in
1869. It is one of the many excellent and beautifully printed volumes we
owe to that distinguished Association. Mr. Stokes was responsible for
the English translation. The second publication he has given himself, in
his own _Goidelica_. There we find all the later entries of the codex
with translation, notes, and glossary. A similar service has since been
rendered by Dr. Macbain of Inverness, who provides the text with
translation, notes, and glossary of his own, founded on the work of the
previous editors, but throwing additional light on the vocabulary. This
contribution appears in the eleventh volume of the _Transactions of the
Gaelic Society of Inverness_ (1884–85), and is a welcome aid to the
study of the text.

As in the case of the oldest book of Scotland, so in the case of this
second oldest, it is to be regretted that the Book of Deer has strayed
outwith our own land, yet no doubt, it is to this fact that we owe the
existence of both to-day; for no other book of so ancient a calibre has
been able to survive the many stormy convulsions and turbulent ferments
known as Scottish history. Cast up like flotsam and jetsam in a late
age, and treasured in the high places of learning, they both add a
lustre and a glory now to our ancient language and literature which we
would otherwise in vain desiderate.

CHAPTER VI
THE MS. LEGACY OF THE PAST

A fresh start in the study of Celtic literature—Advent of foremost
scholars—The new basis found by Zeuss—Resurrection of ancient
texts—Unexpected light—H. d’Arbois de Jubainville and his mission
to this country—The numbers, dates, and localities of Gaelic MSS.:
(1) on the Continent; (2) in the British Isles—Subject
matter—Examples of the oldest written Gaelic poetry in Europe—The
great books of saga—Leabhar Na h’Uidhre—Books of Leinster,
Ballymote, and Lismore—Quotations—Account of the Ancient
Annals—Tighernach—The _Chronicon Scotorum_—The “Four
Masters”—Romance of the fugitive documents.

It is practically within the last fifty years that the great revival in
the study of Celtic literature has taken place. About the middle of last
century the foremost scholars began to arrive, and since then there has
been quite a galaxy of experts, both on the Continent and in the British
Isles, who have approached the subject on scientific lines, and by
careful literary research have not only opened to us the treasures of
the past, but have also thrown a flood of light on them.

Prior to their advent, Celtic studies had no solid basis, for the
sufficient reason that the materials were not available. Old-time
convulsions had dispersed the documents to the four winds, and they
remained where they lay, buried for ages from the public eye.

Such learned men as occupied themselves with these studies before the
middle of last century confined their attention in great part to the
languages and literatures of the Neo-Celtic races—the Welsh and the
Bretons. They sought in these light to dissipate the obscurity that hung
over the early history of the Celtic race—the period anterior to the
conquest of Gaul by the Romans. They consulted grammars and dictionaries
published in Brittany, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, during the last
three centuries. Of the texts themselves, the oldest they knew were
Welsh, dating from about the thirteenth century; and some poems of Welsh
bards preserved in MSS., of which the most ancient went no farther back
than the end of the twelfth century. These were literary treasures
indeed, with the characteristic Celtic flavour, as may be seen from the
beautiful critiques of Renan and Matthew Arnold, both of whom were
charmed by the spirit and sentiment they breathe.

But in general it may be said that the early scholars had only mastered
the more modern forms of the language, and it was from texts
comparatively recent that they sought illumination of a past removed
from them by more than nineteen centuries.

Such was the stage Celtic study had reached—a kind of arrested
development—when suddenly a unique resuscitation took place.

The first of the new scholars to arrive were O’Donovan and O’Curry.
Eugene O’Curry, Professor of the Catholic University of Ireland, went
straight to the necessities of the case by publishing in 1849 a
catalogue of the Gaelic MSS. in the British Museum, and then, of those
in the Royal Academy of his native land. Afterwards, besides other
valuable contributions, he gave to the world his _Lectures on the MS.
Materials of Irish History_, enhancing the interest of the work by
putting a very large and varied selection of facsimiles of the ancient
writings in the appendix. A very Tischendorf was this indefatigable MS.
hunter and interpreter. Very aptly indeed did he speak of himself as an
underground worker. Much had been done by other labourers, but the
foundation was still to seek and still to lay. And it is significant of
former methods, that he knew not one man previous to his own time who
had qualified himself for the work in hand, either by mastering the
ancient Gaelic, or by making himself acquainted with the MSS. And yet
these are the genuine sources of historical and antiquarian knowledge in
this department.

Close after O’Curry came the great Continental savant Zeuss, who may be
regarded as the real founder of the new and solid basis on which Celtic
studies now rest. His monumental work, the erudite _Grammatica Celtica_,
appeared in Leipzig in 1853, giving a new impetus all over Europe to a
study which hitherto had attracted but a languid, or at the best, a
restricted attention. And when, following up this great work, the German
grammarian published the glosses found in some of the oldest Gaelic MSS.
on the Continent, it was recognised that he had opened up a new and most
fertile field for future explorers. These latter were immediately
forthcoming—learned authorities, like Nigra, Ascoli, Ebel, Stokes,
Windisch, and Zimmer, who brought to light other important documents and
explained their significance. Thus was the new movement in Celtic study
duly inaugurated, with what results we shall see.

The glosses published by Zeuss, though they furnish no fresh ideas,
offer to the learned world a grammatical interest of the highest kind.
They belong, some to the eighth century, others to the ninth, and the
venerable Gaelic in which they are couched presents certain antique and
curious characteristics which are entirely lacking to the Welsh of the
same period, and still more to that of the twelfth and following
centuries—the only forms known to the scholars before Zeuss.

Since his time the new basis which he found for Celtic studies has been
wonderfully enlarged, chiefly through the discovery of other Gaelic
texts contemporary with some of those that served for his own beautiful
work. And then the remarkable publications of erudite men in Dublin, and
the excellent work of Windisch, Professor of Sanskrit at Leipzig, have
called the attention of experts on the continent to a great mass of
documentary material in the British Isles. Under the transcription and
retouching of many of these MSS. by later copyists, there are found
original compositions, primarily in the ancient Gaelic of which Zeuss
was the first interpreter.

Unlike the glosses, they furnish us with a vast storehouse of new ideas
and traditions of every sort, comprising especially the mythological and
legendary, the legal also, and even the grammatical under various forms.
Their originality is unquestionable. These texts, in carrying us back to
pagan times, throw quite unexpected light on the incomplete though
precious accounts which ancient writers like Cæsar, Diodorus of Sicily,
and Strabo have given of the primitive civilisation of the Gauls. We
should expect to find in this mass of curious heroic literature some
expression of the traditions common to all the Celtic race before the
settlement of the different branches in the countries which now bear
their name, and we are not disappointed. The MSS. preserved do give us a
crowd of fresh thoughts on the beliefs and customs of the Celts in the
most ancient epochs of their history.

In this respect they help to gratify the longing desire of living men to
know something of the actions, the range of thought, the character of
mind, the habits, the tastes, the arts, the religion, and, in short, the
everyday life of so old and venerable a race as our own, which has
played such a wonderful part in the drama of history.

The French authorities have been fully alive to the value of these
studies, and on one occasion, at least, the Minister of Public
Instruction showed his interest in a very practical and laudable way. In
February of 1881 Jules Ferry, who was in office at the time, appointed
H. d’Arbois de Jubainville, Professor of Celtic in the College of
France, as a special commissioner to visit the British Isles, and
investigate and make a list of all the Gaelic MSS. he could find. This
literary mission De Jubainville carried out the same year, subsequently
embodying his report in a book which gives not only his catalogue of
MSS. inspected in England and Ireland, but also a list of those on the
Continent. For some reason or other he omitted to include Scotland in
the area of his research, and so the large collection of valuable
documents in the Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh, is not chronicled in his
interesting résumé. Yet still, we have now for the first time a pretty
general estimate of all the more important material available.

We need not follow this enthusiastic MS. hunter in his peregrinations
through the British Isles and on the Continent, entering, as he
frequently did, the precincts of ancient universities, cloisters, and
museums, sitting in odd corners in libraries, poring over musty leaves,
deciphering antique characters, looking at some documents through glass
cases which he would fain see opened, handling others with eager,
hurried scrutiny, while a verger or a monk mounts sentry over the
inquisitive foreigner, watching the precious relics with jealous care,
and limiting the time for observation.

What concerns us most are the tabulated results; and we might look in
the passing at some of the more striking facts which they exhibit.

And first of all it is not a little surprising to learn that, while the
libraries of the Continent possess twenty MSS., or more correctly twenty
portions of MSS., written in the Gaelic language before the eleventh
century, in the libraries of England and Ireland there are only seven of
that remote age. But after that date the British libraries take the
lead, since the number of their Gaelic MSS. before the seventeenth
century amount to 133, whereas the total on the Continent down to the
seventeenth century is only thirty-five. Of course this excludes the
Celtic Latin MSS., of which there are upwards of 200 in European
libraries.

Altogether there are just fifty-six Gaelic documents that are known to
be on the Continent of dates ranging from the eighth to the nineteenth
century, and these are distributed as follows:—

8th century 2 Milan, Cambray.
8th to 9th century 2 St. Paul in Carinthia, Vienna.
9th century 13 Berne, Carlsruhe (2), Dresden, Laon, Leyden,
Nancy, Paris (2), Rome, St. Gall (2), Turin.
9th to 10th century 1 Würzburg.
10th century 2 Paris.
11th century 6 Carlsruhe, Rome (2), St. Gall, Vienna (2).
11th to 12th century 1 Klosterneuburg.
12th century 1 Engelberg.
13th to 15th century 1 Rennes.
14th to 16th century 1 Paris.
16th century 1 Stockholm.
17th century 12 Brussels (11), Paris.
18th century 5 Paris (4), Rouen.
19th century 4 Paris (2), Rouen (2).
Dates uncertain 4 Berne, Florence, Milan (2).

Besides the number, antiquity, and wide distribution of these MSS., we
are struck with two things. First, the fact that Milan and Cambray, two
Continental cities, have the honour of possessing the two most ancient
Gaelic MSS. now extant. One of these relics is a Latin commentary on the
Psalms, the other a Latin sermon, but in both there are glosses in Irish
or Gaelic written in the eighth century. Earlier than that we cannot go
for actual writing still extant in the native tongue.

The other striking thing about the list is the entire absence of Gaelic
MSS. in the northern countries of Europe, such as Norway, Sweden, and
Denmark, where we should most expect to find them. There is one indeed
at Stockholm, but it is merely a copy written in the sixteenth century.
Surely this goes far to confirm the sinister reputation of the marauding
Danes and Norsemen with regard to learning. Keating, writing 250 years
ago, asserts their destructiveness. “It was not allowed to give
instruction in letters.... No scholars, no clerics, no books, no holy
relics, were left in church or monastery through dread of them. Neither
bard nor philosopher nor musician pursued his wonted profession in the
land.”

Apparently these northern pillagers, who laid waste so many monasteries,
instead of removing the rare and precious books to their own lands, were
no better than the Vandals in their mad business of burning and
destroying on the spot what they evidently themselves could not value or
appreciate.

But coming now to the British Isles, we might briefly consider the
literary legacy which the learned Frenchman found in those libraries of
England and Ireland that he visited. In all, he mentions 953 as the
number of MSS. to which he had access, and these were located as
follows:—

At Cambridge 3
„ British Museum 166
„ Oxford 15
„ Royal Irish Academy 560
„ Trinity College, Dublin 63
„ Franciscans, Dublin 22
„ Lord Ashburnham 63
„ Some special libraries 61
———
Total 953
===

So far from being exhaustive, our literary commissioner thinks these
figures very far below the actual number of Gaelic MSS. in the British
Isles. Though he makes no reference in this respect to Wales or
Scotland, he is aware that there must be many in private libraries that
he has not indicated. And he admits that, according to O’Curry, Trinity
College has 140 instead of the 63 he mentions. And besides its 559
catalogued MSS., the Royal Academy of Ireland possesses about as many
more not catalogued, of which only one, the Book of Fermoy, was
described to him as worthy of his special attention.

Though in point of antiquity there is none of all these British MSS. to
compare with the oldest glosses on the Continent, there are two which
come near it. They date from the ninth century, and are both located in
Trinity College. These are the Book of Armagh and the Book of Dimna.
Next in order, between the ninth and tenth centuries, come (1) the Irish
Canons at Cambridge; (2) the Gospel of Maeielbrid Mac Durnâin, tenth
century, at Lambeth Palace; (3) the Psalter of Southampton, end of the
tenth century or beginning of the eleventh, at St. John’s College,
Cambridge; (4) The Book of Deer, with its Latin, ninth to tenth, and
Gaelic entries tenth to twelfth, also at Cambridge in the University
Library; and (5) the Gaelic portion of the Missal of Stowe, bought by
the British Government with the rest of Lord Ashburnham’s collection for
their Museum.

These seven MSS. are the most ancient, the only ones, in fact, in which
you find Gaelic written before the eleventh century within the British
Isles. Yet they are not Gaelic MSS., strictly speaking, but Latin ones
in which are found some words or phrases or paragraphs written in the
native tongue. The Gospel of Maeielbrid, for example, contains only a
line and a half of Gaelic, the Book of Armagh four pages.

To find what we would strictly call Gaelic documents, we must come down
as far as the closing years of the eleventh century, which yields us
four. Henceforth there is no lack of abundant and rich material. The
twelfth century is credited with seven, the thirteenth with eight, the
fourteenth with eleven, the fifteenth and sixteenth with ninety-six, the
seventeenth with sixty-six, the first half of the eighteenth with
seventy-seven. Total down to the year 1750, 276 MSS. in the British
Isles of the whole number 953 catalogued by De Jubainville. So that the
remainder, the vast majority of the British MSS., are of comparatively
recent date, subsequent in fact even to the days of Macpherson of
Ossianic fame.

More important than the number, dates, and distribution is the
subject-matter of our literary legacy, and this now falls to be
considered. It is very difficult to classify the MSS. according to their
contents, as so many of them are miscellaneous. Yet they do admit of
being brought under certain categories. Leaving aside for the present
all the later ones written after 1600, we have in all 168 Continental
and British documents to deal with.

Of these we must place in a section apart all the Latin ones that only
contain glosses or poems or notes in Gaelic which are additional or
secondary to the original text. This is the case with all the
Continental MSS. concerned, except three, one at Rennes, one at Paris,
and one at Stockholm. It is also the case with ten Britishers, viz. (1)
the Book of Deer, (2) the Irish Canons, (3) the Psalter at Cambridge,
(4) the Gospel of Maelbrigte hua Maelûanaig, (5) the Book of Dimna, (6)
the Book of Armagh, (7) the Book of Kells, (8) the fragment of Psalter
attributed to St. Camin, (9) the Missal of Stowe, and (10) the Gospel of
Maeielbrid Mac Durnâin at Lambeth Palace.

That makes a total of forty-two in which the Gaelic is only added in
notes to a Latin original. Yet they comprise the most ancient of all we
have, and though their grammatical value is very considerable, their
literary interest is but meagre—almost nil in fact—with the exception of
the few poems at Milan, St. Gall, Dresden, St. Paul in Carinthia, and
Klosterneuburg.

As these poems seem to lie like wayside flowers in our path, it is worth
our while, before passing on, to turn aside for a little to cull some of
the verses.

Of the two poems in the Milan codex, Dr. Stokes declares they are
difficult to decipher and more difficult to translate. But of the four
quatrains on the margin of the Priscian of St Gall, here are two
charming examples, very characteristic of the Gael’s love of nature and
learning, as well as reminiscent of his wild environment. The first is
not unlike the lyric of Columcille himself, when he describes the peace
of Durrow:—

A grove surrounds me:
The swift lay of the blackbird makes music to me—
I will not hide it;
Over my much-lined little book,
The song of the birds makes music to me.

The author of the second, as Professor Mackinnon has fancied, must often
have seen the storm burst upon a wild spot on the west of Ireland, or,
more likely still, on Iona, Tiree, Oronsay, or Skye.

Is acher in gaith innocht:
Tufuasna fairggae findfholt;
Ni ágor reimm mora minn
Dond laechraid lainn oa Lochlind.

Wild blows the wind to-night:
The white-haired billows rage;
The bold warriors from Norway
Fear not the path of a clear sea.

In the Codex Boernerianus of Dresden we have the following lines.
Translated literally, they run thus:—

To go to Rome is much of trouble, little of profit. The King whom thou
seekest here, unless thou bring him with thee thou findest not.

Great folly, great madness, great loss of sense, great folly since
thou hast proposed (?) to go to death, to be under the unwill of
Mary’s Son.

It was the late Herr Mone, Archivdirektor at Carlsruhe, who discovered
the Gaelic poems in the MS. belonging to St. Paul in Carinthia, and sent
the first verse of the first of these poems to Dr. Reeves. Thereafter
Dr. Whitley Stokes wrote him requesting to be favoured with the
remainder, with which request he not only complied, but also sent two
other extracts from the same codex, and a letter dated Carlsruhe,
January 24th, 1859. There are in all five short Gaelic poems or
fragments in the MS.

The first, of eight stanzas, is in praise of Aedh, son of Diarmad, and
has been translated by Eugene O’Curry.

We give here simply the first and last verses:—

Aedh great to institute hilarity,
Aedh anxious (desirous) to dispense festivity,
The Straight Rod, the most beautiful,
Of the hills of cleared Ro-er-enn.

At ale-drinking, poems are sung
By companies among people’s houses
Sweet-singing bards announce
In pools of ale the name of Aedh.

The next to be quoted is part of a longer poem found in the Books of
Leinster, Ballymote, Glendaloch, Lismore, and a Bodleian MS. The copy
from the Book of Leinster is given in full by Dr. Whitley Stokes in his
_Goidelica_, but here are the two quatrains of it in the Carinthian
codex:—

He is a bird round which a trap shuts,
He is a leaky bark in dangerous peril,
He is an empty vessel, he is a withered tree,
Who so doth not the will of the King above.

He is pure gold, he is a heaven round the sun,
He is a vessel of silver full of wine,
He is an angel, he is wisdom of saints,
Every one who doth the will of the King.

The third poem, Dr. Stokes says, is exceedingly obscure. It seems to
mean—

There remains a fort in Tuain Inbir ... with its stars last night,
with its sun, with its moon.

Gobhan made that: let its story be perceived by you: my heartlet, God
of heaven, he is the thatcher that thatched it.

A house wherein thou gettest not moisture; a place wherein thou
fearest not spear-points. More radiant it is than a garden, and it
without an _udnacht_ around it.

Another of the pieces in this Carinthian MS. is of a very different
order. A monk in a humorous and facetious strain, according to Professor
Zimmer, contrasts his own serious studies with the very different
pursuits of another person whom he calls Pan Gurban (or Panqur ban,
Windisch), a Slavonic name, meaning, as Zimmer thinks, “Mr. Hunchback.”

Omitting the forty-two Gaelic documents from the 168, we have 126
remaining which have been written before the year 1600, and these deal
with a great variety of subjects: religion, law, medicine, astronomy,
grammar, history, and legendary history.

The texts that treat of theology, mysticism, lives of saints, and
martyrologies, are very numerous; those of law few. Medicine figures in
a class apart. Astronomy gets even a smaller place than medicine. Its
most ancient monument dates from the fourteenth century.

One of the most curious and least known of all the Gaelic relics is a
treatise on Gaelic grammar, written in Gaelic. It is divided into four
books, and is preserved to us in ten MSS. of the fourteenth, fifteenth,
and sixteenth centuries. The four books of which it is composed are
attributed, the first to Cennfaelad, an historic personage who died in
678; the other three to mythical, prehistoric authors, such as
Fercertné, Amergin Glûngel, and Fenius Farsaid. The antiquity and
ability of the latter grammarian for the work, may be inferred from the
somewhat startling statement that he is said to have composed the Gaelic
tongue out of seventy-two languages, and afterwards his son Nial visited
Egypt to teach the languages after the confusion of Babel. Verily the
Celts were an enterprising race to have a grammarian first in the field,
and the nebulous Fenius Farsaid deserves a grave as high as Browning’s
hero, for even before Moses “ground he at grammar.” It is a pity that
this rare old treatise which Ireland possessed in the Middle Ages has
not been published. The MSS. are in the British Museum, Royal Academy of
Ireland, Trinity College, and with the Franciscans of Dublin.

But not in any of the above-named categories do we find the body and
soul of Celtic literature. The real breathing spirit of the past speaks
to us rather in the great MSS. of the Middle Ages, those which deal with
romance and history—the earlier sagas and the later annals; and these
deserve more than a passing reference. The saga or heroic literature is
far and away the most curious and abundant. De Jubainville himself
chronicles no less than 540 pieces of this class. But its greatest
monuments are the miscellaneous MSS. known as the Leabhar Na h’Uidhre,
the Book of Leinster, Book of Ballymote, Book of Lecain, and Book of
Lismore.

No more precious and important document in the whole range of ancient
Gaelic literature has reached us than the Leabhar Na h’Uidhre, or Book
of the Dun Cow, said to be so called after an original text of that name
now lost, but of which it contains a copy. St. Ciaran, it appears, wrote
down from the dictation of the risen Fergus, the tale of the “Táin Bó
Chuailgné,” in a book which he had made from the hide of his pet cow.
This favourite from its colour was called the Odhar (or Dun), of which
Na h’Uidhre is the genitive. The existing Leabhar Na h’Uidhre is a MS.
of the end of the eleventh century, and, even more than the Book of
Hymns, its contemporary, it merits the distinction of being the earliest
exclusively Gaelic document that we have. Besides preserving St.
Ciaran’s version of the Táin, it contains a copy of Dallan Forgaill’s
famous “Amra” in praise of Columcille, and quite a number of ancient
sacred and secular pieces, some of which are of great interest. The
compiler of this venerable codex was Maelmuiri, son of the son of Conn
nam-Bocht, a writer who met his death in 1106 in the middle of the great
stone church of Clonmacnois, at the hands of a band of robbers. There is
a quaint inscription at the top of folio 45 in his own original
handwriting. The words run, “This is a trial of his pen here by
Maelmuiri, son of the son of Conn.”

Next in importance to Leabhar Na h’Uidhre comes the Book of Leinster,
written fifty years later. Rich in saga, it contains the fullest account
of the “Táin Bó Chuailgné.” O’Curry sets so high a value upon this codex
that he writes: “I think I may say with sorrow that there is not in all
Europe any nation but this of ours that would not long since have made a
national literary fortune out of such a volume, had any other country in
Europe been fortunate enough to possess such an heirloom of history.”

The Book of Ballymote belongs to the end of the fourteenth century—that
of Lismore to the fifteenth. The latter is the property of the Duke of
Devonshire, having been discovered in his Castle of Lismore, county of
Waterford, Ireland, so late as the year 1814. Besides containing Lives
of saints, etc., it is considered specially important in point of view
of the Ossianic cycle.

Of all the heroic sagas the greatest and the longest is that for which
we are indebted to the Book of Leinster and Leabhar Na h’Uidhre—the
“Táin Bó Chuailgné.” This is not the place to deal with such a lengthy
story; but by way of illustrating the quality and literary interest of
these old world MSS., preserving as they do the most characteristic
traits of Celtic genius in the age before writing, we give two
quotations from this wonderful saga.

And the first will show the keen perception, the wealth of pictorial
detail, and descriptive power of language so characteristic of the
Gaelic ursgeuls and poems. It is the personal account of the Ulster
chiefs as given in the Táin.

“There came another company there,” said Mac Roth; “no champion could
be found more comely than he who leads them. His hair is of a deep-red
yellow, and bushy; his forehead broad and his face tapering; thin red
lips; pearly shining teeth; a white smooth body. A red and white cloak
flutters about him; a golden brooch in that cloak at his breast; a
shirt of white kingly linen with gold embroidery at his skin; a white
shield with gold fastenings at his shoulder; a gold-hilted long sword
at his left side; a long, sharp, dark-green spear with a rich band and
carved silver rivets in his hand.” “Who is he, O Fergus?” said Ailill.
“The man who has come there is in himself half a battle; the fury of
the slaughter hound,” etc.

Truly a wonderful accoutred warrior was this, and gorgeous in his
apparel for his age. Like our Oriental Nabobs and savage chiefs he
believed in colour and luxurious display.

But I fancy it would be hard to beat the second quotation as an
illustration of the riotous luxuriance of the Celtic imagination in the
days when it was at its best, unsobered by science, unrestricted by
reason. The quotation is from the description of the fight between the
two rival bulls in Queen Meve’s country. In the poetic language of the
tale, “the province rang with the echoes of their roaring, the sky was
darkened by the sods of earth they threw up with their feet, and the
foam that flew from their mouths; faint-hearted men, women, and children
hid themselves in caves, caverns, and clefts of the rocks, whilst even
the most veteran warriors but dared to view the combat from the
neighbouring hills and eminences. The Finn-bheannach or White-horned at
length gave way, and retreated towards a certain pass which opened into
the plain in which the battle raged, and where sixteen warriors bolder
than the rest had planted themselves; but so rapid was the retreat and
the pursuit that not only were all these trampled to the ground, but
they were buried several feet in it. The Donn Chuailgne at last coming
up with his opponent, raised him on his horns, ran off with him, passed
the gates of Meve’s palace, tossing and shaking him as he went, until at
last he shattered him to pieces, dropping his disjointed members as he
went along. And wherever a part fell, that place retained the name of
that joint ever after.” And thus it was that “Ath Luain, now Athlone,
which was before called Ath Mor or the Great Ford, received its present
name from the Finnbheannach’s luan or loin having been dropped there.”

This “Táin Bó Chuailgné” opens a window upon the past, and were it only
for the rich and abundant historical details it so lavishly furnishes,
must be held a treasure. “Notwithstanding the extreme wildness of the
legend,” says O’Curry, “I am not acquainted with any tale in the whole
range of our literature in which the student will find more of valuable
details concerning general and local history; more of description of the
manners and customs of the people; of the druidical and fairy influence
supposed to be exercised in the affairs of men; of the laws of Irish
chivalry and honour; of the standards of beauty, morality, valour,
truth, and fidelity exercised by the people of old; of the regal power
and dignity of the monarch and the provincial kings, as well as much
concerning the division of the country into its local dependencies;
lists of its chieftains and chieftaincies; many valuable topographical
names; the names and kinds of articles of dress and ornament; of
military weapons; of horses, chariots, and trappings; of leechcraft as
well as instances of perhaps every occurrence that could be supposed to
happen in ancient Irish life. All of these details are of the utmost
value to the student of history, even though mixed up with any amount of
the marvellous or incredible in poetical traditions.”

So much for the sagas and monuments of heroic literature. There remain
the other great class of MSS. to which we have referred—the Annals. They
serve as a basis for Irish history, and only the more quaint and
important need be mentioned here, such as the Annals of Tighernach, the
_Chronicon Scotorum_, the Annals of Innisfallen, the Annals of Boyle,
the Annals of Ulster, the Annals of Loch Cé, the Annals of Clonmacnois,
and most important of all, the book called the “Four Masters.”

Of all these the Annals of Tighernach is the most ancient and most
reliable, having for author the abbot of that name who died in 1088. It
is supposed that in compiling this work he had as basis a chronicle kept
by the monks from the founding of the abbey in 544. The MS. of this
history belongs to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. A considerable
part of it is in Gaelic, interspersed with numerous quotations from
Latin and Greek authors. Dr. O’Conor, commenting on this, remarks that
Tighernach’s balancing of these authorities against each other manifests
a degree of criticism uncommon in the early age in which he lived.

The precious historical composition known as the _Chronicon Scotorum_
exists in a copy written towards 1650 by Duald Mac Firbis. The original
belonged to the twelfth century, the chronicle itself ending in 1135. It
begins with the following title and short preface by the compiler:—

The chronicle of the Scots (or Irish) begins here—

Understand, O Reader, that it is for a certain reason, and
particularly to avoid tediousness that our intention is to make only a
short abstract and compendium of the history of the Scots in this
book, omitting the lengthened details of the historical books;
wherefore it is that we beg of you not to criticise us on that account
as we know that it is an exceedingly great deficiency.

He then passes rapidly over the first three ages of the world,—the
earlier colonisation of Ireland, the death of the colonists at Tallaght
in the county of Dublin, and the visit of Nial, the son of Fenius
Farsaid, to Egypt to teach the languages. With winged speed the compiler
reaches the year 375, when St. Patrick was born, and then the red letter
date 432 which witnessed his arrival in Ireland. Columcille’s prayer at
the battle of Cooldrevna is given under the year 561, and numerous
scraps of poems here and there quoted as authorities. A large deficiency
occurs between 722 and 805 A.D., where the compiler has written, “The
breasts (or fronts) of two leaves of the old book out of which I write
this, are wanting here, and I leave what is before me of this page for
them, I am, Dubhaltach Firbisigh.” A similar defect, it may be noted,
occurs in the Annals of Tighernach from 756 to 973.

The other Annals above-mentioned carry the history down towards the end
of the sixteenth century.

Almost contemporary with the _Chronicon Scotorum_ arose the greatest of
all, _The Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland by the Four Masters_,
commonly cited as the “Four Masters,” a name given to its authors by
Colgan. It was the work of Michael O’Clery and other three great
scholars, begun in 1632 and finished in 1636. All the best and most
copious Annals he could find throughout Ireland were collected by him
for this _magnum opus_. Like so many others of these historical
compilations, it begins far back, in the year of the world 2242, and
finishes in 1616 A.D. “There is no event of Irish history,” says Dr.
Hyde, “from the birth of Christ to the beginning of the seventeenth
century, that the first inquiry of the student will not be, ‘What do the
“Four Masters” say about it?’ for the great value of the work consists
in this, that we have here in condensed form the pith and substance of
the old books of Ireland which were then in existence, but which, as the
Four Masters anticipated, have long since perished.”

The work has been published by O’Donovan in 1851. His is regarded as the
best and most complete edition in translation and notes. It forms six
volumes, without counting the supplementary index. The autograph MS.
still exists, composed of two volumes, of which the first, stopping at
the year 1169, forms No. XXI. of the Stowe Collection. Of the second
volume there are two autograph copies: the one complete, in the library
of the Royal Academy of Ireland; the other, comprising only the years
1335 to 1605, is preserved at Trinity College, Dublin.

And now looking back over this long legacy of vellum, is there not
something eerie in the thought of these old-world musty MSS. creeping
out once more into the light, after ages of gravelike oblivion?

If we could follow their actual history, from their slow genesis under
the pen of ancient amanuenses through their subsequent fortunes, when
perhaps some of them under the cloak of a fleeing monk, or in a shaky
coracle at sea, barely escaped the fury of illiterate warriors or the
waves; some of them other perils on land in their wanderings through the
British Isles and the Continent,—what a revelation of life and destiny
that would be! They have slept a long sleep through turbulent ages since
then, apparently unappreciated, buried, neglected, and forgotten, but
now in this new age, as we have seen, there is a mighty hunt and
scramble for the resurrected relics. Many of them have been already
published, and there is a movement afoot by the Irish Text Society to
print the more important of the rest. Libraries and individuals compete
with each other for possession of the originals. So that now, in the
eyes of the wise and the wealthy, the hitherto obsolete MSS., often cast
aside in odd chests and closets as mere brown rubbish, are more prized
and coveted as rare treasure than even their rivals of to-day. And what
a legacy of vellum all-told we owe to the old scribes of cell and
cloister; from the legended Fenius Farsaid all the way down to the “Four
Masters.”

CHAPTER VII
THE SCOTTISH COLLECTION OF CELTIC MSS.

Cabinet in Advocates’ Library—Curious assortment of vernacular
literature—Number and character—Origin of the collection—Highland
Society and Kilbride MSS.—Subsidiary additions—Work for the
expert—Fate of some luckless documents—Value of MSS. XL., LIII.,
and LVI.—Three literary monuments of the Western Highlands: (1)
The Book of the Dean of Lismore—History, description, value,
contents, extracts, names of contributors; (2) The Fernaig
MS.—Characteristics—Interesting details of supposed author; (3)
The Book of Clanranald—Quaint relic—Two MSS., the Red and the
Black—History and contents, with specimen prose-poem and elegy.

In a cabinet in the Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh, may be seen what
looks like the decayed and mouldering remains of some obsolete
literature. Very rarely is the case opened, and only once in a while
does the casual observer show any more than a passing interest in these
faded and tattered remnants. Why should he? In comparison with the vast
variety of neatly printed and handsomely bound volumes around, their
appearance is uninviting. Handwritten, many of them with frayed edges,
leaves missing, ink faded, words illegible, it is only too apparent they
have not escaped the marks of age, damp, soot, and moths.

Here is No. IX., for example, a portion of a single leaf of dirty
paper—no more. And No. LII., loose leaves and scraps gathered together
under one cover; XXXVII., one of the best known of all, with several of
its leaves torn, and in many places quite illegible. No. XL., five
layers of different origin stitched together in a vellum cover. And what
shall we say of the curious little volume only two inches long and one
and a half in breadth and thickness, bound together with thongs in quite
primitive fashion? On a page in the middle is written: “Is e so leabhar
Neil Oig” (“This is Neil the Younger’s book”). And here and there on
some other musty records we find such entries as these: “Is mise Eoin o
Albain” (“I am John from Scotland”), or “Is mise Domhnall a foghlumach
Maigbeathadh” (“I am Donald Bethune the Scholar”).

All are not equally tattered and faded. The handwriting in several is
fresh and clear as on the day of production. It varies from the coarse
and careless to the highly finished and artistic, from the merest daubs
to the richly coloured and ornamental.

Yet to the superficial observer with no antiquarian tastes, there is
little here to attract, the more because most of these torn and dirty
fragments exhibit a language and orthography hard to decipher, and much
harder to read and understand. It took the late Dr. Maclauchlan of
Edinburgh five years to decipher and copy a single MS.—No. XXXVII., and
he tells us pathetically that it was the hardest piece of work he was
ever engaged in.

The interested spectator, on the other hand, if his eye happens to be
directed to the obscure and tattered miscellany, naturally inquires, and
learns to his surprise that this is the Scottish collection of Gaelic
MSS., all that could be gathered into one place in this country of the
vernacular MS. literature of the past. A swift inspection shows upwards
of threescore documents, of which thirty-six at least are parchments,
the rest paper or paper and parchment combined. Alongside lie later
volumes—transcripts of tales, ballads, and other lore. A few of the
parchments hail from the fourteenth century, but the majority were
written in the fifteenth and sixteenth. The paper MSS. were all produced
within the last 350 years, mainly in the end of the seventeenth and the
first half of the eighteenth centuries, while the adjacent accretions of
transcripts and books belonged to men who lived within the last 100
years.

It is easy to tell the tale of this assortment. Ireland, England, and
the Continent had their rich collections long ago. With Scotland such a
thing seems to have been an afterthought. Only in 1861 were these
literary monuments of the past brought together and deposited as a kind
of national treasury in the Advocates’ Library, and this laudable result
is due mainly to the energy and interest of Dr. Skene, author of _Celtic
Scotland_, and formerly Historiographer-Royal in Edinburgh.

He knew of two collections fairly large and representative that had been
made earlier, and exerted himself to have them united and housed where
they might be reasonably accessible. These belonged, one to the Highland
Society, the other to the Kilbride family.

The former was made in the opening years of the nineteenth century,
while the battle still raged over the authenticity of Macpherson’s
Ossian. With Mr. Henry Mackenzie, author of the _Man of Feeling_, as
their chairman, the Society instituted an inquiry into the whole
question, and scoured the country far and near for Ossianic MS.
literature. In this way they secured a good many documents, the greater
number of which came from London through Macpherson’s literary executor.
It was well known that in his lifetime Macpherson had carried away from
the North-West Highlands and Islands some very old literary MSS., which
he afterwards deposited with his London publishers for public
inspection. But so few cared to see them that the originals thus
exhibited cannot now be identified.

It is highly probable that some of those which the Highland Society
received from the Metropolis were among the number. The rest came to
them from other quarters. Some were purchased, and the whole reported on
in the Proceedings of 1805.

The history of the Kilbride[17] collection is even more fortuitous. A
letter from Lord Bannatyne to the Chairman of the Society and Committee
tells how it was first discovered. Acting on the suggestion of Lord
Hailes, Bannatyne when Sheriff of Bute, and accustomed to attend the
Circuit at Inverary, made inquiries among the Highland gentlemen he met
there regarding any fugitive Gaelic MSS. they might happen to be
cognisant of, and in this way there came into his hands one of the
Kilbride collection, belonging to Major Maclachlan. It appears that from
the time of the Reformation, the Kilbride family had cultivated a taste
for Celtic antiquities, as a result of which they possessed a very large
number of Celtic documents, gleaned partly in the Highlands and partly
in Ireland. Following up the clue thus incidentally found, the
enthusiastic Sheriff obtained permission for a delegate “to take
inspection and bring an account of the MSS. in Major Maclachlan’s
possession.” These were found to number twenty-two, exclusive of five
that were lent. They are catalogued V. to XXXI. in the Edinburgh
Cabinet.

We need not dwell upon the subsidiary additions to this original and
double nucleus in the Advocates’ Library. But it may be noted, there are
besides in the University Library of Edinburgh, a Gaelic medical MS.;
one collection of poetry made in the middle of the eighteenth century,
by Jerome Stone; another in the beginning of the nineteenth, by Irvine,
and a fragment of a Gaelic grammar. The Library of Scottish Antiquaries
also exhibits a Gaelic curio in the form of a translation of the “Lilium
Medicinæ” of Bernardus Gordonus, a foreign physician. And counting the
few extra productions in private hands, these comprehend all the MS.
literature of the Gael now extant in Scotland, so far as known.

Not a satisfying sum-total by any means. The harvest truly was plentiful
but the gleaners were few, and this forlorn remnant hardly does credit
to our national prestige and veneration for the past. It cannot compare
either in number, variety, antiquity, or content, with the rich
assortments elsewhere, such as those in Ireland, England, and the
Continent. Yet this collection, such as it is, has a value of its own,
and in some important respects supplements the material of other more
ancient and valued documents.

The wonder is that so many of these manuscripts have survived to tell
their tale of dool, considering the haphazard way in which they have
been preserved. There is something to be said for the apparent apathy
and neglect, when we remember the stormy past, the national vicissitudes
and convulsions that continued down almost to last century.

And how should our Scottish ancestors know that there was any purpose to
be served in preserving books which nobody could read? The peculiar
idiom and orthography had long since become obsolete. Until fifty years
ago no scholar could interpret the scrolls, and the wiseacres of the
past, no less than the multitude of illiterate clansmen, might well be
pardoned if it never occurred to them that the brain of a modern critic
would some day forge a key for these old-world hieroglyphics, and
through the study of the derelict parchments, make a dead language
speak.

Instances are on record of the fate of some luckless MSS., which serve
to illustrate the doom of many more.

Before the Forty-five, for example, a valuable collection of old Gaelic
poetry was made in Strathglass, which afterwards found its way to the
Catholic College of Douay. The last heard of this vagrant volume was
that the Principal, while yet a student there, saw the leaves of the
mutilated document torn out to kindle the fire in their stove.

A similar vandalism overtook the library of the Macvurichs, seanachies
of Clanranald, who had been accumulating material for seventeen
generations, from the time of Muireach Albanach, about 1200. There were
many parchments, according to the testimony of a recent illiterate
descendant, and among them the Red Book made of paper, but none of these
are now to be found, because, when deprived of their lands, his family
lost their literary taste and zeal. He knew not what became of the
parchments. Two or three he saw cut down by tailors to make measuring
tapes, and although he himself fell heir to some after his father’s
death, being without education, he set no value upon them and they
disappeared.

Dr. Skene has prepared a general catalogue of the Scottish collection.
But half of the documents have never been read or described. No Zeuss or
Zimmer has yet arisen in Scotland with leisure or patience enough to
decipher them.

Strange that the cry “Made in Germany” should apply even to the key to
the ancient Gaelic, that the Continent had to come to our aid to
interpret our own literature, and that now, the key having been handed
over, these remaining relics should continue, hieroglyphically locked in
the land of their nativity. Yet it is so. With the exception of a few
specimens culled here and there, we have no English rendering of some of
the finest pieces of this MS. literature.

Though poor in history and law, and destitute of dramatic writings, the
collection is fairly rich in the poetic, the heroic, the legendary, and
more wonderful still, the medical. The latter treatises have a quaint
interest of their own, and offer a basis of comparison for measuring the
progress in the medical department of science. What would our modern
savants, for example, think of the “Notes according to Jacques de
Forli”? Even the old-fashioned doctor himself might be puzzled to get at
their meaning.

Jacques de Forli says that there are two ways of administering an
electuary; according as it is intended for the vitals or the
extremities. For the extremities there is tria sandaili for the side,
and diamargariton for the head, and pliris for the brain, and sweet
electuary to strengthen the parts of the bladder, and diacostum in the
folds of the diaphragm, and each of these is to be given before food,
that they may affect the part at a distance from the stomach; for the
food prevents the moving of the electuary towards the parts which it
is necessary to invigorate.

Dr. Kuno Meyer has described MS. XL. as one of the most important. Its
principal claim on our attention lies in the fact that it contains a
considerable number of old texts, of which no other versions or no other
equally old and good versions are known to exist. The handwriting of the
oldest part is of the fourteenth century. Initial letters are coloured,
and the contents are seven Aideda or Death-tales of the heroic cycle of
early Irish legend. It supplements the Book of Leinster by relating the
death of Conchobar, who was hit in battle by a ball made of lime mixed
with the brains of a slain foeman known as Mesgedra, and though the
bullet could not be removed from his head, the wound was stitched with
thread of gold to match his auburn hair. Afterwards when debarred from
physical exertion, an awful trembling shook creation, and on inquiring,
the king learned from his Druids that Christ was pitilessly crucified
that day. Whereupon a great rage seized Conchobar for the iniquity
thereof, and drawing his sword he rushed against a wood, attacking the
trees till the wood was level. And with the fury the brains of Mesgedra
started out of his head, his own brains following after, so that he fell
dead.

From the versions in LIII, and LVI., much valued by scholars, Dr.
Whitley Stokes has published the Tale of the Sons of Uisneach (_Irische
Texte_: Stokes and Windisch, Leipzig, 1887).

Specially interesting, from the purely Scottish point of view, are the
three well-known literary monuments hailing from the Western Highlands,
and they deserve more than a passing reference.

The first figures in the Advocates’ Library as a MS. collection of
Gaelic poetry taken down from oral recitation as early as 1512 to 1526.
It is known as “The Book of the Dean of Lismore,” the accepted belief
being that Sir James Macgregor, at that time Dean of Lismore in
Argyllshire, and his brother Duncan were the compilers.

Originally it was brought into notice by John Mackenzie, Esq., of the
Temple, London, literary executor of Macpherson, who gave it among the
other documents to the Highland Society. How it came into his hands or
where it lay for the 300 years that elapsed between the Dean’s time and
the beginning of last century is not known.

The book, as it stands, consists of 311 quarto pages. Several are
amissing at the beginning and at the end. Many of the leaves are stained
and almost illegible from the effects of damp. Others are worn by use
and exposure. But apart from these defects, which are common to other
codexes, the MS. differs from all the MSS. in the Scottish collection in
two essential features. It is written in the current Roman hand of the
period, and the spelling is phonetic.

There are two distinct handwritings, and thus apparently two compilers.
On the lower margin of the 27th page stands the inscription:—

Liber Domini Jacobi Macgregor Decani Lismoren,

the handwriting of which has a striking resemblance to that of the major
part of the volume. And this is really all there is to show that the
Dean was compiler.

The other Macgregor, whose name occurs on page 144, is for good reasons
identified as his brother:—

Duncha deyr aclyth Mac Dhowl vic Eone Reawych
“Duncan (the ‘deyr aclyth’ is untranslatable), son of Dugald, son of
John the Grizzled.”

The book is of great interest on account of its age, orthography, and
contents. It has a double value, as Dr. Skene has pointed out—linguistic
and literary. Linguistic, because its peculiar orthography presents the
language at the time in its aspect and character as a spoken language,
and enables us to ascertain whether many of the peculiarities which now
distinguish the Gaelic were in existence 400 years ago. Literary,
because it contains poems attributed to Ossian, and to other poets prior
to the sixteenth century which are not to be found elsewhere; and thus
presents to us specimens of the traditionary poetry current in the
Highlands prior to that period, which are above suspicion, having been
collected nearly 400 years ago, before any controversy on the subject
had arisen.

In other words, we have here the oldest written Scottish Gaelic, except
that in the Book of Deer, with numerous productions of the time
antecedent to the Reformation, and some even of the fourteenth century,
for comparison with our modern Gaelic. And we have the complete
refutation of Dr. Johnson’s bold assertion that the language had nothing
written. “The Erse never was a written language,” said that vigorous
critic; “there is not in the world an Erse (that is, a Gaelic) MS. a
hundred years old.” Into what strange neglect had our literature fallen
when such an emphatic dictum could be made on the housetops.

This one was at that time over 200 years old, and could it have been
resurrected from its nameless obscurity would surely have satisfied the
unconvinced and sceptical Doctor.

Voluminous and various are its contents, culled from about sixty-six
different authors, the whole extending to 11,000 lines of Gaelic poetry,
with 800 in the genuine Ossianic style. The pieces vary from
half-a-dozen to a hundred lines. And a peculiarity of the Ossianic
fragments in this MS. is the frequent introduction of St. Patrick, who
is represented as holding dialogues with the bard. Seeing that in the
poems of Macpherson the saint never emerges, it is surmised that he
regarded all references to him as unauthentic, interpolations of later
times, when the Church ideas and dogmas crept into vogue. The Dean’s
collection is divided naturally into two parts, one more ancient and
untouched by Christian sentiment, the other more modern, and not free
from ecclesiastical leaven. To the former category belong those poems
superscribed “The author of this is Ossian,” and of these the finest is
the bard’s eulogy of his father Finn. “The ideal here set forth is
perfectly Homeric,” wrote Professor Blackie; “Achilles in his best
moments and most favourable aspect might have stood for it.”

In its English rendering, which is poetically inferior to the original,
it runs thus:—

’Twas yesterday week,
I last saw Finn;
Ne’er did I see
A braver man;
Teige’s daughter’s son,
A powerful King;
My fortune, my light,
My mind’s whole might.
Both poet and chief,
Braver than kings,
Firm chief of the Feinn
Lord of all lands,
Leviathan at sea,
As great on land,
Hawk of the air,
Foremost always,
Generous, just.
Despised a lie,
Of vigorous deeds,
First in song,
A righteous judge,
Firm his rule,
Polished his mien,
Who knew but victory,
Who is like him,
In fight or song?
Resists the foe
In house or field.
Marble his skin,
The rose his cheeks,
Blue was his eye,
His hair like gold.
All men’s trust,
Of noble mind,
Of ready deeds,
To women mild,
A giant he,
The field’s delight.

Ne’er could I tell,
Though always I lived,
Ne’er could I tell,
The third of his praise,
But sad am I now
After Finn of the Feinn!

and so on.

As it is quite impossible to produce in English the euphonious effect of
the peculiar rhythm of the original Gaelic, with its alliteration and
vocalic concords, here is an example from the above description:—

DEAN TEXT MODERN VERSION
Fa Filla fa flaa Fa filidh, fa flath,
Fa ree er gire Fa righ air gach righ,
Finn flah re no vane Fionn flath righ nam Fiann,
Fa trea^t er gy^t teir Fa triath air gach tir,
Fa meille mor marre Fa miol mor mará
Fa lowor er lerg Fa luthmhor air leirg,
Fa schawok glan gei Fa seabhag glan gaoithe
Fa sei^t er gi carde Fa saoi air gach ceird.
Fa hillani^t carda Fa h’ oileamhnach ceirde
Fa m’ky^t nor verve Fa marcach nar mheirbh,
Fa hollow er znei^t Fa ullamh air gniomh,
Fa stei^t er gi scherm Fa steidh air gach seirm,
Fa fer chart a wrai Fa fior cheart a bhreith,
Fa tawicht toye Fa tabhach tuaith,
Fa Ly’seich naige Fa ionnsaigheach ’n aigh
Fa bra^ta er boye. Fa breadha air buaidh.

At page 87 there is a curious fragment on Tabblisk, supposed by some to
be chess, by others backgammon:—

Ruinous is Tabblisk, few men but know it,
Of what I know myself, I have a little tale to tell,
On a certain day I was travelling through Foytle. The land,
Variegated, beautiful, pleasing. I came there at noon,
When a maiden of red lips met me in the town,
And asked me to join in one of these games;
She produced a chess-board, etc.

Here follows the description of this game.

They made much of blood in those days, even as we do of heredity now:—

The blood of forty and three kings in the blood of the Great King,
The blood of many races is thy pure blood which we cannot name,
The blood of Arthur in thy gentle veins....
The blood of Conn of the two Conns beneath thy soft skin;
The blood of Grant, as also of the race of Neil, etc.

It is quite interesting to note the names of some of the contributors to
the Dean’s book. They are so various in rank and character.

Of these Duncan Mor O’Daly was Abbot of Boyle in 1244. Some of his
pieces have reference to persons and events in Irish history. One of
them, beginning, “Mayst thou enjoy thy belt, O Cathal,” gives a very
full description of that ornamented article of attire and its adjuncts.
There is another whose name has been preserved by tradition, namely,
Muireach Albanach, and he has been claimed by Scottish Gaels as the
first of the celebrated Macvurichs.

Four of the poems in the MS. are by Campbell, the Knight of Glenorchy,
who fell in the battle of Flodden; three by the Earl of Argyll, and
other three by the Countess Isabella.

The compositions generally are very difficult to read, yet the book is
not lacking in colour. Here are aphorisms from Phelim Macdougall,
reflecting, no doubt, the fashionable virtues and vices and partialities
of the age:—

’Tis not good to travel on Sunday,
Not good to be of ill-famed race;
Not good to write without learning,
Not good is an Earl without English.
Not good is a sailor if old,
Not good a priest with but one eye,
Not good a parson if a beggar.
Not good is a lord without a dwelling,
Not good is a woman without shame,
Not good is fighting without courage,
Not good is entering a port without a pilot;
Not good is a maiden who backbites,
Not good is neglecting the household dogs,
Not good is disrespect to a father,
Not good is the talk of the drunken,
Not good is a knife without an edge,
Not good is the friendship of devils;
And thy Son, oh Virgin most honoured,
Though he has saved the seed of Adam,
Not good for himself was the cross.

The Fernaig MS. is another Highland production that was not known in
Johnson’s day. In 1807 it was in the west of Ross-shire, at the place
whose name it bears, and afterwards came into the possession of Dr.
Skene. This collection was made between the years 1688 and 1693, in the
country of the Macraes, in far Kintail, and breathes the spirit of the
times, politically and religiously, as then reflected in Highland
Jacobite circles.

The MS. consists of two paper volumes in brown pasteboard cover,
containing 4200 lines of poetry. There are several leaves loose, and
others blank, a few half pages written upon, and one folded in. The
second part was never finished. In one place six leaves closely written
on both sides have been neatly removed.

Like the Dean of Lismore’s, the handwriting is in the current Roman
character, and the spelling phonetic. The collection includes
compositions by different authors within the area extending from South
Argyll to the north of Sutherland, Bishop Carsewell being among the
number. Some of the pieces date back to the beginning of the sixteenth
century. Strange to say for a Highland gleaning, there is no love or
drinking song. Wine and women have scant notice here. The Gaelic in
great part is practically the dialect still spoken in Kintail and
district.

Little is indicated of the history of the book or of the author in the
text itself. But on the first page of volume I. occurs the significant
and suggestive superscription:—

Doirligh Loijn Di
Skrijvig Lea Donochig
Mack rah 1688.

Professor Mackinnon, adopting this clue, made careful search, and is
satisfied that the writer was Duncan Macrae of Inverinate, chief of that
name. In the course of his investigation, the professor alighted upon
some curious and interesting facts, full apparently of local colour.

It appears there were two Duncan Macraes of some note living on the
shores of Loch Duich at that time. Big Duncan of Glenshiel, a warrior
who fell at Sheriffmuir, and whose mighty claymore, said[18] to be
preserved in the Tower of London as “the great Highlander’s sword,” with
one terrible stroke cut through trooper and steed, ere he succumbed
himself in the onslaught. The other, Donnachadh nam Piòs, or Duncan of
the silver plate, so called from the magnificence of his table service,
was our author. Born about 1640, in early life he studied in the
University of Edinburgh, and was known as a man of unique ingenuity and
mechanical skill. As evidence thereof it is said he had something to do
with bringing the water into Edinburgh, and it is related how, on one
occasion, a foreign vessel having got dismasted in passing through Kyle
Rhea, he made a new mast for the craft by splicing pieces of wood
together. For this the captain, deeply grateful, gave him the famous
silver herring, which remained in the family for generations, and was
reputed to attract the herring from far and near into Loch Duich.

The oak trees now at Inverinate he reared from French acorns.

Like his brother John, who graduated at the University, King’s College,
Aberdeen, on July 12th, 1660, Duncan possessed the bardic gift. Poems
attributed in the MS. to “an certain harper” and “Tinkler” are, by good
authorities, set down to his own Muse, these being simply _noms de
plume_.

Cultured, liberal, and deeply religious, he was ecclesiastically an
ardent Episcopalian, politically a vehement Jacobite. His wife, the
heiress of Raasay, it appears, diddled him out of her property by
conveying the title-deeds to a relative to keep the lands for her own
clan. Blood was thicker than the marriage bond.

But in spite of this the Kintail chief prospered, and bought lands in
Glen Affaric from the Chisholm. Like the passing of Arthur, his death
was rather dramatic. He had gone to Strathglass, attended by a single
follower, to settle about this new property, and was returning with the
papers in his possession. On coming to Dorisduan he found the Connag
River in high flood, but ventured to cross, only to be carried away in
the attempt. Unfortunately for him, his companion possessed the fatal
gift of _or na h’Aoine_, by which, according to local belief, he could
cause the death, if he wished, of any one seen by him crossing the
stream on a Friday. And at this juncture the unhappy man, seeing his
master battling with the flood, and unable to keep from looking at him,
much less to render assistance, in his distress exercised his sinister
gift, thereby drowning the poetic Duncan, his own chief.

The Fernaig MS., apart from other considerations, is of great value as
representing the literary output of the seventeenth-century period in
the Highlands, and so helping to fill the gap between the Dean of
Lismore’s time and the pregnant Forty-five.

One other very interesting relic of Highland MS. literature remains to
be noticed. It is the Book of Clanranald, found in two MSS. known as the
Red and the Black. The latter, a thick little paper codex strongly bound
in black leather boards, is of the size of a New Testament and of the
nature of a commonplace book, containing accounts of the families of the
Macdonalds, and the exploits of the great Montrose, together with some
of the poems of Ossian.

The history of the book is obscure. Many years ago Dr. Skene picked it
up among some old Irish MSS. at a bookstall in Dublin, and, buying it,
sent the fugitive back to the family of Clanranald, in whose possession
it now is.

But of the two MSS. the Red is far and away the more famous, as it
figured largely in the Ossianic controversy, and gives the Macdonald and
Montrose histories fuller. On Macpherson’s visit to the West he received
this MS., by consent of Clanranald, from Nial Macvurich, and it was only
after Macpherson’s death that the present Red Book was restored.
Authorities are not certain that this is the real original, but
Clanranald believes that it is, and the editors of _Reliquiæ Celticæ_
are of the same opinion.

Since its return it has been much consulted by Ossianic inquirers, as
well as by the historians of the country. A transcript and translation,
not very accurate, were made of the historical parts early in last
century. Sir Walter Scott made use of these in his notes, _Lord of the
Isles_, and Mark Napier in his _Montrose_, to throw light upon the
obscurer points of Highland conduct in that great chief’s campaign. In
later times a better rendering has been given by the great Irish
scholar, O’Curry, who translated the history for Dr. Skene’s _Celtic
Scotland_.

Both MSS., the Red and the Black, are closely allied and supplement each
other. The only English in the former is a satire on Bishop Burnet,
whereas nearly the whole of the last half of the latter is in that
language. The writers were the Macvurichs, hereditary bards of the
Clanranald chiefs, who traced their descent from Muireach Albanach. The
early history of the Macdonalds, down to about 1600, was probably
composed by successive members of this line, but the record of the
Montrose wars and following events is evidently the work of Nial
Macvurich, whose life extended from the reign of Charles the First
beyond Sheriffmuir. It may have been written prior to 1700. Its chief
purpose is to vindicate the Gael in his marvellous exploits under
Montrose. Here Alasdair Macdonald and not the brilliant Lowland leader
is hero.

Needless to say, besides Ossianic fragments, old as the _Ages of the
Feinn_ and _Cnoc an Air_, the MSS. contain genealogies, chronologies,
history, poetry, geography, grammar, and various disconnected jottings.

A most curious production is the genealogy of Clanranald as far back as
Adam, often with name and date, and some of the names are portentously
long.

The Macdonald history begins with the superscription, “The age of the
World at the time the sons of Milé came into Ireland 3500” (that is,
1700 B.C.), and in the opening sentence announces that Amergin Whiteknee
was poet and historian and judge to them, and the first Gaelic author.

There is a wonderful prose poem on page 210 of the Red Book, on the
“Army and Arming of the Last Lord of the Isles,” part of which is worth
quoting for the way in which it hits off the characteristics of the
clans, and the graphic description it gives of the armour of this
supreme King of the Gael.

And they were in well arranged battalions, namely, the proud, luminous
countenanced, finely-hued, bold, right-judging, goodly, gifting Clan
Donald; the ready, prosperous, routing, very bold, right judging
Clanranald; the attacking, gold shielded Clan Alister; the protecting,
firm, hardy, well-enduring Macphees; the fierce, strong men, the
Maclachlans; the lively, vigorous, liberally-bestowing, courageous,
austere, brown-shielded Macdougalls; the cheerful, chief-renowned,
battle-harnessed Camerons; the inimical, passionate, hardy Macneils;
the manly, sanguinary, truly noble Mackinnons; the fierce, undaunted,
great-feated Macquarries; the brave, defending, foraging, valiant,
heroic, ale-abounding Mackenzies; the active, spirited, courteous,
great-bestowing Clan Morgan (or Mackay) and the men of Sutherland came
as a guard to the Royal Prince; and the powerful, lively, active,
great-numbered, arrogant Mackintoshes in a very large powerful force
around the Chief of Clan Chattan in active, hardy battalions with
their champions. There came along with these warriors earls, princely
high chiefs, knights, chiefs, lords, barons and yeomen, at one
particular place, to the noble son of Alexander, and these numerous,
rejoicing, heroes, and powerful, active, fierce, sounding hosts
gathered together.

This is the manner in which they appointed the powerful, fierce,
active, mighty-deeded, white-armoured, supreme King of the Gael, viz.,
the terror-striking, leopard-like, awful, sanguinary, opposing,
sharp-armed, fierce, attacking, ready, dexterous, powerful, steady,
illustrious, full-subduing, furious, well-prepared, right-judging
Earl, as he received on him the armour of conflict and strife against
every tumult, that is, his fine tunic, beautifully embroidered, of
fine textured satin, ingeniously woven by ladies and their daughters;
and that good tunic was put upon him.

A silk jerkin which was handsome, well-fitting, rich,
highly-embroidered, beautiful, many-coloured, artfully-done, gusseted,
corded, ornamented with the figures of foreign birds, with branches of
burnished gold, with a multiplicity of all kinds of embroidery on the
sides of the costly jerkin. That jerkin was put upon him to guard him
against dangers.

A coat of mail which was wide, well-meshed, light, of substantial
steel, beautifully-wrought, gold-ornamented, with brilliant Danish
gems. Such a mail coat as that was possessed by the lithe Luga of Long
Arms.

We may conclude this brief account of the Book of Clanranald by a
specimen of its poetry—an elegy for Sir Norman Macleod, which Nial
Macvurich made. It illustrates how to the Gael, when in grief, all
nature seems to suffer and reciprocate his feelings; and the mighty
portents associated in the olden days with the birth or demise of a
chief.

A death of the deepest anguish it is
To his friends and his followers;
Over his grave as they perform a _neachd_
They have their turn at the tomb which we cannot get.

The women of every country are in sadness,
Also their heroes and ecclesiastics;
Their faithful freemen are in grief,
The extremity of severe affliction is among them.

The hospitality, the pure generosity,
The joyous exclamation, the ready welcome,
They have all gone with him into the earth,
For an age after him there will be but lamentation.

We are in want of gold and cattle,
Since the Chief of Rushgarry died;
The learned men since the hour of his death,
Have forsaken their havens of watching.

Flaming troubles pervaded the stars of heaven,
They poured forth the showers of lightning;
The hills are not illumined by day,
Their grief for him mastered them.

The rivers are rising over the woods,
There is a scarcity of fish in the bays;
The fruitage is not found in the land,
The roaring of the sea is very coarse.

At the last hours of his death,
Dreadful tokens appeared to us;
Foreboding clouds which denoted grief,
Were of gold colour in the Northern region.

Such is our heritage of Celtic MSS. in this country, and, in view of the
paucity of these existing relics, may we not reiterate the lines of
Horace?—

Full many a chief and warrior lived
Ere Agamemnon saw the day,
Of whom no record hath survived
The glories that have passed away.
Unwept, unsung, unknown they lie,
For want of hallowed Poesy.

CHAPTER VIII
THE MYTHOLOGICAL CYCLE

A rich and abundant saga literature—Three leading periods or
cycles—The myths and folk-tales—Problems to men of science—The
philologists and anthropologists take opposite sides—Their
theories—Attitude of the annalists and romancists of Ireland—Their
craze for genealogy—Early settlers in Erin—Advent of the Milesians
or Gaels—The Three Sorrows of Gaelic Storydom: (1) “The Tragedy of
the Children of Tuireann”; (2) The fascinating “Aided of the
Children of Lir”; (3) Story of “Deirdre and the Sons of
Uisneach”—Extraordinary interest evinced in this saga—Marvellous
output of texts and translations.

With the arrival of Christianity and its literary promulgators, St.
Patrick and St Columba, authentic history may be said to have begun,
first in Ireland, and then in Scotland. Before the fifth century there
existed a rich and abundant saga literature transmitted by oral
tradition. But even the very oldest of the tales we now have, could
hardly have been written down in MS. form before the seventh or eighth
century. Such is the general belief of scholars who have sifted and
examined the earliest records.

The mass of saga carried over from pagan times, goes back over ages
untold and immemorial. And yet it is found to sort out under great
leading periods or cycles, three of which seem to stand out distinct and
pre-eminent. These are known as the Mythological, the Heroic, and the
Ossianic.

Roughly speaking, the Mythological cycle, beginning away back in the
vague and dim past, stretches to near the beginning of the Christian
era. The other cycles follow, filling up the 400 odd years that elapse
before the dawn of written history.

The mythological stories are fewer than the rest, and of course more
absurd and unintelligible. Most of them are found in O’Clery’s _Leabhar
Gabhala, or Book of Invasions_, 1630, of which the more important MSS.
are the Books of Leinster and Ballymote. Their chief interest lies in
the light they throw upon the early religious ideas of the Celt.

In a practical age like our own, most people are impatient of ancient
myth and fairy tales. They seem so utterly unreal, absurd, and
impossible, that it is hard to conceive how any sane mortal could have
given them credence for one moment. And yet so universal are such
stories among every race of mankind, and so credible and far-reaching in
their influence in early times, that they have survived when multitudes
of recorded facts have perished. They show that men, and especially
primitive men, have the same kind of thoughts, desires, fancies, habits,
and institutions all the world over.

The myths and folk-tales have a wonderful similarity, reappearing in
different guise but in substance the same, among the most varied races
and peoples, so that savages to-day in different continents and islands
have beliefs and customs corresponding to those which stagger us in the
sagas of our own Celtic ancestors, and quite as fantastic.

It is this which lends the fascination to students of comparative
mythology and to the folk-lorist. What seems arrant nonsense and the
height of absurdity to ordinary intelligence, lures them on to seek in
these wild stories for the origins of belief, for the early conceptions
which influenced men in their religion and in their life. Removed from
primitive man by centuries of progress, and ruled as we are by a
scientific view of the world, it is hard for us to put ourselves at the
centre of vision and standpoint of our early ancestors, to whom the
facts of life were more confused than they appear to us, and in a manner
more uncanny and mysterious. Like the savage of to-day, judging from
their myths, they conceived all things as animated and personal, capable
of endless interchange of form. Men might become beasts, beasts might
change into men. Even the gods appeared in human or bestial forms.
Animals, plants, stones, earth, winds and waters, spoke and acted like
human beings, changing their shapes accordingly.

This is the very essence of myth and fairy tale. Or as Professor Max
Müller has expressed it, “What makes mythology mythological in the true
sense of the word is what is utterly unintelligible, absurd, strange, or
miraculous.”

What appears most incredible and repugnant, the ugly blots and scars of
these narratives are just the problems to men of science. How to account
for them? How to explain their origin? Over this, contending schools are
constantly engaged in a kind of guerilla warfare. Leaving the
archæologists to pursue their own studies among the material
“survivals,” the philologists and anthropologists take opposite sides
each in defence of his own particular theory.

Briefly stated, the difference between them is this: the philologists
maintain that language—language as it were in a state of disease—is the
great source of the mythology of the world. Professor Max Müller held
this view and gave it a widely accepted vogue. The ugly scars he
explained as due to the old words and popular sayings lingering on in a
language after their original harmless and symbolic meanings had been
lost. Thus what might have been originally a poetical remark about
nature, might in process of time be interpreted colloquially and become
an obscene, brutal, or vulgar myth. To go no further afield than the
Hebrew sacred writings, when we think of an impassioned apostrophe to
the sun, and the subsequent popular legend that the sun and the moon
stood still, we see that the philologist argument is not without force
and cogency.

Yet the anthropologists are more in the line of evolution, for they
maintain that mythology on the whole represents an old stage of thought,
from which civilised men have slowly emancipated themselves. This is
also the view of Mr. Andrew Lang, who recently contributed a work on the
subject. The scars so-called are the remains of that kind of taste,
fancy, customary law, and incoherent speculation that prevail in human
nature in its primitive barbarian state. And indeed when we contemplate
the credulity, superstition, and readiness to accept the grotesque and
fabulous, that dominate such inhabitants even of a civilised country as
are kept ignorant and isolated, this theory seems to point to the main
source of myth and fairy tale.

As in the early literature of Greece the gods and heroes are mixed up,
so in the records of the Gael. But the annalists and romancists of
Ireland, who had a passion for writing history, evidently had no inkling
of this. The thought of mythology was far enough removed from their way
of thinking, and such floating tales and personages and events as they
found wafted towards them on the stream of tradition they took for
actual fact. At any rate, they wove them into the story of the past of
their nation in such a way as to lead us to believe that the mythical
beings were as real to them as the kings and warriors of their own age.
And these historians had quite a craze for genealogy; never satisfied
unless they could trace their chiefs or heroes and ancestors up to Adam,
which they invariably succeed in doing, bridging the gaps with very
fertile ingenuity.

Thus the last great chasm to be spanned in the line of pedigree is the
Deluge—to surmount which was a work more intricate and needing more
skill in a manner than the Forth Bridge; for if they could once connect
with Noah, the Bible record does the rest.

The feat is accomplished, set down by the annalists of the Middle Ages
with all the plausibility of sober fact. Forty days before the Flood,
the Lady Cæsair, niece or granddaughter of Noah—it is immaterial
which—with fifty girls and three men came to Ireland. This, we are to
understand, was the first invasion or conquest of that country. All
these were drowned in the Deluge, except Finntan, the husband of the
lady, who escaped by being cast into a deep sleep, in which he continued
for a year, and when he awoke he found himself in his own house at Dun
Tulcha. It is charming to note with what precision and _sangfroid_ names
are quoted in this legended history. At Dun Tulcha he lived throughout
many dynasties down to the sixth century of our era, when he appears for
the last time with eighteen companies of his descendants engaged in
settling a boundary dispute. Being the oldest man in the world, he was
_ipso facto_ the best informed regarding ancient landmarks.

After the Flood various peoples in succession stepped on to the platform
of Irish history. First the Partholans; then the Nemedians, Firbolgs,
Tuatha de Danann, and last of all the Milesians, thus carrying the
chronology down to the time of Christ. From the arrival of the earliest
of these settlers, the Fomorians or “Sea Rovers” are represented as
fighting and harassing the people. Sometimes in conjunction with the
plague, at other times with the Firbolgs and Gaileoin and Fir-Domnann,
they laid waste the land. The Partholans and Nemedians were early
disposed of. And then appeared from the north of Europe, or from heaven,
as one author says, the Tuatha de Danann, who at the great battle of
Moytura South overcame the Firbolgs, scattering them to the islands of
Aran, Islay, Rathlin, and the Hebrides, and afterwards defeating the
Fomorians at Moytura North, thus gaining full possession of the land.
Much of this fabulous history is taken up with these early struggles
between the Fomorians and the Tuatha de Danann, of whom Breas and Lugh
of the Longhand, and Dagda are the great heroes.

At length from Spain and the East came the last invaders, known under
various names, as the Milesians, the Scots, or Gaels. They are the
ancestors of our modern race, called Milesians from an ancestor Milé,
and Gaels or Gaidels from an ancestor Gadelus. When they arrived at
Tara, a vast army from over the seas, they met the three kings and
queens of the Tuatha. The latter complained that they were taken by
surprise, and entreated the Milesians to embark again on their ships
that they might have a fair chance of opposing them. This they did,
retreating for “nine waves” on the sea. But on facing about, lo! Ireland
was not to be seen. The Tuatha de Danann by their enchantment had made
the island as small as a pig’s back, and therefore invisible from the
ships. Besides, they raised a violent storm with clouds and darkness.
Many Milesian ships were wrecked, and a crisis was only averted by their
leader, Amergin, who was also a Druid, pronouncing a Druidic prayer or
oration, addressed it would seem to the Tuatha, when the storm
immediately ceased and they landed in peace. After some skirmishes, the
Tuatha eventually retire to the Land of Promise, the country of the
_Sìdh_—fairy mounds, where in the popular lore they were till lately,
taking considerable interest in the affairs of their quondam conquerors.

Druidism, it will be seen, enters largely into all these ancient
contests, the opposing parties using spells as well as blows.

The Milesians we are supposed to have some knowledge of—with more or
less of their blood in our veins. They are regarded as the main body of
the Gaelic people. But who were the Tuatha de Danann and the Fomorians?
Personifications of the forces of nature, or the Gaelic gods of the
upper and lower worlds, argue writers on mythology. As Zeus, Poseidon,
Pluto, and the rest of the Greek deities rule over the heavens, the
earth, the sea, and the shades, so do the Tuatha, the pagan gods of the
Gaelic people; while the Fomorians, vicious and troublesome as they
were, may in their origin be none other than the sea powers—the rough
chaotic tumult of the Atlantic Ocean, against which in the west of
Ireland the various settlers had to contend.

But the early introduction of Christianity, throwing the pagan gods and
traditions, as it did, into the limbo of perdition, renders it very
difficult for us now to arrive at any definite and certain conclusions
on these matters.

The literary interest of the mythological cycle centres largely in the
“Three Sorrows of Story-telling,” two of which belong exclusively to it,
the third to the Cuchulinn cycle. Though connected with the period of
the Tuatha de Danann, it is well to remember that these two as well as
the third were actually written later than the earliest of the heroic
tales.

First comes the “Aided or Tragedy of the Children of Tuireann.” It is
mentioned by Cormac in his Glossary (ninth or tenth century), and by
Flann of Monasterboice (ob. 1056). The story is partially told in the
Book of Lecain (cir. 1416), and is found in several MSS., including No.
LVI. of the Scottish collection. O’Curry, O’Duffy, and Joyce have each
at various times edited and published it with translation; the first in
the _Atlantis_, vol. iv.; the second for the Society for the
Preservation of the Irish Language in Dublin, 1888; and the third in his
_Old Celtic Romances_, London, 1879.

The scene opens near the ramparts of Tara, in the reign of Nuada of the
silver arm. Two handsome, young, and well-formed men are seen
approaching. Accosted by the doorkeeper, who had only one eye, they
announced themselves as physicians, and subsequently offered to put his
cat’s eye in the place of the one he had lost. This done, the substitute
proved convenient and inconvenient, for when he desired to take sleep or
repose, then the eye would start at the squeaking of the mice, the
flying of the birds, and the motion of the reeds; whereas, when he
wished to watch a host or an assembly the same organ continued in deep
sleep. Similarly, but to better effect, the king was fitted with a new
arm, namely, that of the swineherd, of equal length and thickness with
his own. The bones only were removed from its original owner and set by
the one leech, while the other sought herbs to put flesh and muscle upon
it.

This introduction apparently has no bearing upon the story proper, which
now begins.

The Fomorians who dwelt in Lochlann laid Ireland under heavy tribute.
Whoever paid not the tax had his nose cut off. One day, when the King of
Sire held a fair upon the hill of Balar, the Tuatha de Danann, who were
there assembled, saw a goodly host coming towards them. This was Lugh
Lamhfhada and the fairy cavalcade from the Land of Promise. Lugh was
mounted on a steed which was as swift as the bleak, cold wind of spring,
and sea and land were equal to her, and her rider was not killed off her
back. When the troop came where the king was they presently saw a grim
and ill-looking band advancing towards them—eighty-one Fomorian
ambassadors come to lift the tax. Lugh arose and slaughtered them,
leaving only nine to bring back the news. Incensed, the Fomorians, under
Breas, the son of Balor of the mighty blows, resolved to invade Ireland
and take revenge on Lugh. “And after ye have overcome him and his
people,” said Balor to the departing warriors, “put your cables round
this island of Erin which gives us so much trouble, and tie it to the
stems of your ships; then sail home, bringing the island with you, and
place it on the north side of Lochlann, whither none of the Tuatha will
ever follow it.” Thus the Irish difficulty is not of yesterday, and
Balor proposed to settle it in a very drastic way.

Lugh heard of their arrival and sent to assemble the fairy cavalcade
from every place where they were. Cian, his father, traversing the plain
of Muirtheimhne on this quest suddenly encountered three warriors—the
sons of Tuireann, with whom, though relatives, he was at deadly feud.
The only ruse he could think of for defence in this awkward plight was
to strike himself with a Druidical wand into the shape of a pig, and
join the herd of swine he saw feeding near him. But the brothers
detected the trick, and Brian the eldest, with one swift stroke of a
magic wand transformed the others into two slender fleet hounds, who
gave tongue ravenously upon the trail of the Druidical pig. While the
latter made for a wooded grove Brian’s spear transfixed her in the
chest, and the pig screamed in human speech, imploring quarter. The only
concession granted the unhappy beast was that she might return into her
original shape and therein get killed. In this Cian had his revenge,
for, instead of the _eric_ of a pig, he assured them they would now be
liable for an _eric_ altogether oppressive, because of his rank.

Six times they buried the body and the earth refused it, but the seventh
time they put it under the sod the earth took to it.

Meanwhile Lugh had joined issue with the Fomorians and got the victory.
And after the slaughter and triumph of the battle, missing his father,
he set out with the fairy cavalcade to find out what had befallen him.
When lo! as he crossed the scene of his sire’s sad fate, the earth spoke
to him and said:—

“Great was the jeopardy in which your father was here, O Lugh, when he
saw the children of Tuireann, for he was obliged to go into the shape of
a pig; nevertheless they subsequently killed him in his own shape.”

The body was thereupon dug up and examined. Lugh kissed it three times,
uttering words of lamentation, and ending with a mournful lay.

“Cian was again placed in the grave after that, his tombstone was
erected over his tomb, his dirge was sung, and his name inscribed in
Ogam.”

And now it will be ill with the sons of Tuireann. Having reached Tara,
and as he sat in honourable position next the King of Erin, Lugh looked
round on the miscreants and ordered the Chain of Attention of the Court
to be shaken, that all present might listen. Of the entire company the
children of Tuireann were the best in agility and dexterity; they were
the handsomest as well as the most honoured. So Lugh approached the
subject of the death of his father and the vengeance due with
circumspection and inquiry. Brian denied: “Nevertheless,” he said,
speaking for himself and his brothers, “we shall give _eric_ for him to
thee, as though we had done the act.”

Thereupon, in presence of all, Lugh announced the compensation required,
“namely, three apples, the skin of a pig, a spear, two steeds, a
chariot, seven pigs, a whelp, a cooking spit, and three shouts on a
hill.” A mere trifle this eric may seem, but it turned out afterwards,
when the special items demanded were characterised, that there was as
much hazard involved in getting any one of them as there was for the
youthful David in another Court, and for another king, to get one
hundred foreskins of the Philistines. Brian suspected treachery, but he
accepted the bill, and with his two brothers went forth to seek the
payment. Daring feats of valour have to be faced to get those wonderful
apples from the Garden of Hesperides, and the skin of the pig of the
King of Greece, and the well-poisoned spear of the King of Persia, and
all the rest. But they got a loan of Lugh’s curach to ferry them over
the wave wherever they wished, and their sister Eithne, going down to
the harbour, uttered a lay over them as the warrior band put out from
the beautiful and clearly-defined borders of Eire.

Success crowned their extraordinary adventures, much to the chagrin of
Lugh, who sent a spell of magic after them to bring them back. They
present him with their spoils, taken in strange and distant lands, only
to be reminded that the full measure of the _eric_ has yet to be
discharged. On the morrow they went to their ship, and the maiden, with
moist eyes, sees them off once more. Again they are successful.
Thereafter, in attempting the last feat of all, namely, to give three
shouts on the hill of Midkena in Lochlann, they got severely wounded by
the spears of its champion guardians. And on their return they
despatched their aged father, Tuireann, to Tara with all haste to seek
from Lamhfhada the gifted skin to relieve them, but Lugh refused; and
the life went forth from the brothers three at the same time.

Their father sang their death song, and “after that lay, Tuireann fell
upon his children and his soul left him;” and they were interred, parent
and sons, and, it is even alleged, sister too, all in one grave.

The “Tragedy of the Children of Lir” is the second in order of the Three
Sorrows. Though set in the earliest cycle, it is not represented in any
of the ancient MSS. The oldest as yet known to contain it is No.
XXXVIII. of the Scottish collection, written at the latest in the early
seventeenth century. There is a copy also in MS. LVI. All the other
copies, which are pretty numerous, belong to the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, and are in the MSS. of Dublin and the British
Museum. Monsieur H. d’Arbois de Jubainville in his survey noted no less
than seventeen of these. The comparative lateness of the records has led
Mr. Alfred Nutt to surmise that this story may simply be the Gaelic
version of the “Seven Swans” _märchen_, once common in the country, and
worked up by a monk of the sixteenth century—a suggestion Professor
Mackinnon thinks not at all unlikely. O’Curry published the tale with a
translation in the _Atlantis_, and Dr. P. W. Joyce included it in his
_Old Celtic Romances_.

The incidents of this once very popular tale are as follows: In a
conflict with the Milesians the Tuatha de Danann were defeated, and
found it necessary to deliberate on the policy they must pursue and the
king they should elect. Various candidates are eligible, but Bodhbha
Dearg is ultimately chosen. In high dudgeon, Lir, who sought the exalted
position for himself, left the assembly and returned to his own _Sìdh_.
So far from retaliating, the new ruler, when Lir’s wife died, sent for
him and offered him his choice of three of the most beautiful and
best-instructed maidens in all Erin. He took the eldest of these sisters
and married her. But she died, leaving four handsome children, a
daughter and three sons. A second time Lir had his choice, and Eva,
sister number two, came as spouse to his home at _Sìdh_ Fionnachaidh. A
devoted stepmother she proved to the children, till by and by green-eyed
jealousy infected her. She saw that their father would often rise from
his bed in the dawn of the morning and go to theirs to fondle them. And
fancying herself slighted, “she lay in bed a whole year filled with gall
and brooding mischief.”

The outcome of this passion was a plot to do away with the children,
whom for the purpose she enticed to a lonely spot and bribed her
servants to slay. This they refused to do, and although she made the
attempt herself she had not the nerve to execute it. “Her woman’s
weakness prevented her.” Yet she had her revenge in a curious way. She
got the children to bathe in Lake Dairbhreach, and once there, by
Druidical enchantment she transformed them into four beautiful
snow-white swans. As such for 300 years they swim back and fore on the
smooth lake, then for 300 in the Sruth na Maoile (off Kintyre), and 300
more at Iorus Domnann and Innis Gluaire, in the Western Sea. And in no
way could they escape their bird life “until the union of Larguen, a
prince from the north, with Becca, a princess from the south,” or as the
Irish version adds, “until Talchend Adzehead (that is, St. Patrick)
shall come to Erin, bringing the light of a pure faith, and until ye
hear the voice of the Christian bell.”

The vindictive Eva repented her evil deed, but could not undo the
mischief. To ameliorate their lot, she granted her enchanted victims the
use of their Gaelic speech, of their human reason, and the power of
singing sweet, plaintive, fairy music, surpassing all known in the world
in its harmony and soothing influence.

Swift retribution ultimately overtook this once beautiful woman; for
when the king heard of her cruel deed, he asked her “what shape of all
others on the earth, or above the earth, or under the earth she most
abhorred?” To which she replied, “A demon of the air.” “A demon of the
air you shall then be to the end of time,” said the angry Bodhbha Dearg.

Meanwhile the centuries roll over the children of Lir on the peaceful
Lake Dairbhreach, not altogether without sunshine, since the
people—Milesians and Tuatha de Danann alike—were wont to crowd on its
shore to hear their music and watch their graceful movements. But the
time came when they found themselves in “the current of Mull,” tossed on
the stormy seas twixt Erin and Alba, and here they had to dree their
weird with much suffering for another cycle; sometimes separated from
each other in the storm and darkness; at other times almost frozen to
death on Carraig-nanròn. Hapless birds! the slow moving ages bring them
to the third stage, which is pretty much a repetition of their
experiences in the second. For in the Western Ocean round Glora Isle
they are still tormented by the restless wave and the cold and vicious
winds of winter, till their three hundred years therein are
accomplished.

And then at last St Kemoc comes; they hear the sound of the Christian
bell and their spell is broken. Thereafter the children of Lir, no
longer swans, receive Christian baptism and die. For rashly attempting
to take the birds prematurely away from his protection one of the MSS.
asserts that St. Kemoc cursed King Larguen with righteous energy. And
after their death, in the manner of the previous interments, he buried
these ill-starred children all in one grave, sang their death-song,
performed their funeral rites, raised their tomb, and wrote their names
in Ogam. Thus ended their chequered career, which lasted well-nigh a
millennium.

The third Sorrow of Gaelic storydom, that of “Deirdre and the Sons of
Uisneach,” does not belong, strictly speaking, to the mythological
cycle; yet it is prehistoric and mythical in every other respect, though
devoid of the absurd and fantastical elements so characteristic of the
other two. Indeed it may have sprung, as Mr. J. F. Campbell maintains,
from some Indo-European romance, the common heritage in one form or
other of the Aryan family from India to Ireland. The tale is at once the
oldest and most famous of the three Aideds, and must have had a wide
vogue in early times, for it is mentioned in so ancient an authority as
the Book of Leinster, that it was one of the _primscela_ that the bards
were bound to know. Many versions of the saga exist, but chiefly in
ballad form.

The oldest and shortest is that in the Book of Leinster, twelfth
century, with which may be classed one in the Yellow Book of Lecain,
fourteenth century, and in the Egerton MS., British Museum. The best and
fullest version, now published, is generally held to be that obtained
from MSS. LIII. and LVI. of the Scottish collection, the former a vellum
of the fifteenth century. In addition to various other documents in the
Advocates’ Library, such as Nos. V. and XLVIII., which contain
fragments, Monsieur H. d’Arbois de Jubainville found seventeen copies of
the legend in later MSS. in London and Dublin.

The extraordinary interest evinced in this saga is not confined to
ancient or medieval times, but continues unabated down to our own day,
if we may judge by the attention it has received at the hands of
authors, editors, and translators. Nearly every foremost scholar of the
nineteenth century has dealt with it in text, or notes, and translation.

Of many and various publications in modern times, the following will
suffice to show the place it holds in Celtic literature. The texts,
printed sometimes with notes and translation, are usually of different
versions.

O’Flanagan, _Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Dublin_, 1808;
O’Curry, _Atlantis_, vol. iii. 1860, from Yellow Book of Lecain;
Campbell, _Leabhar na Feinne_, 1872; Windisch, _Irische Texte_, vol. i.
Leipzig, 1880; Dr. Whitley Stokes, _Irische Texte_, vol. ii. Leipzig,
1887, the former from Book of Leinster, the latter from MSS. LIII. and
LVI., Advocates’ Library. Dr. Cameron’s _Reliquiæ Celticæ_, also from
MS. LVI. Windisch, O’Curry’s and O’Flanagan’s texts, reprinted _Gaelic
Journal_, Dublin, 1882–84. Carmichael, _Transactions of the Gaelic
Society of Inverness_, vol. xiii. 1887, an admirable folk-lore version
taken down in the Western Isles from oral recitation. Angus Smith, in
his _Loch Etive and Sons of Uisneach_, treats it fictionally in dialogue
form, 1879.

Keating tells the tale in his _History of Ireland_. It is found in part
in the Welsh story of Peredur, taken apparently from a fifteenth century
MS. Mr. Joseph Jacobs has given in English dress, in _Celtic Fairy
Tales_, an abridged account from Carmichael’s version. Of French
translators, H. d’Arbois de Jubainville, M. Georges Dottin, and M. Louis
Ponsinet may be mentioned. Of poetical English versions there is no
lack. Macpherson treated it specially in Darthula, Sir James Ferguson
dramatised it, Dr. Joyce published it in America (Deirdre: Boston and
Dublin), and Drs. Todhunter and Douglas Hyde have given other
renderings. Mr. T. W. Rolleston made it the subject of the Prize Cantata
of the Fèis Ceoil in Dublin in 1897.

Truly a marvellous output of texts and translations, rivalling any in
the whole range of our Gaelic literature. And the above catalogue does
not by any means exhaust the list. The wonder is that the saga should be
found in remote and outlying corners of the Highlands floating by oral
tradition down to our own time. Fletcher got a version about 1750,
Irvine took down part of the verse about 1801 from a fox-hunter on
Tayside, Carmichael from an old Macneill in Barra in 1871. The story is
of additional interest to us because it is laid partly in Ireland and
partly in Scotland, among that beautiful scenery around Loch Etive so
well known to native and tourist.

The story opens at Emain Macha, or Emania, where, with the nobles of
Ulster, King Conchobar is feasting in the house of Feidhlim the bard.
During the entertainment Feidhlim’s wife gave birth to a daughter; and
Cathbad the Druid forthwith prophesied that the child would grow up “a
maiden fair, tall, long-haired, for whom champions would contend.” Her
lips would be cherry-red over pearly teeth; her lovely form the envy of
high queens. Deirdre, the Druid named her, and thrilled the company by
announcing that her queenly beauty would yet involve the province in
heavy woes.

All the nobles present, instantly wished to circumvent such destiny by
having the child put to death. Conchobar intervened: “Let not that be
done,” said he; “I will take her with me and send her to be reared that
she may become my own wife.” Deirdre was accordingly removed and kept
apart in a fortress, seeing no one but her tutor and nurse and
Lebarcham, the king’s _banchainte_ or conversation woman. Shot up at
length into the fair maiden of Cathbad’s prediction, she happened one
snowy day to be looking out, when she observed her _oide_ (tutor)
killing a calf, and a raven came to drink the blood. “Dear to me” she
exclaimed, “would be the man who would have the three colours yonder on
him, his hair like the raven, his cheek like the blood, and his body
like the snow.” “Such an one is Naois, son of Uisneach,” suggested the
_banchainte_.

They met, Deirdre and he. A kinsman of the king and one of three gifted
brothers, this Naois stood head and neck taller than any man in Erin,
and peerless in strength, courage, and manly beauty. When he or his
brothers sang, the cows gave two-thirds additional milk and people were
enchanted. Their prowess was such that the three together could meet all
Ulster in arms.

Deirdre adored Naois, and proposed that they twain should elope. At
first he refused, but bewitched by her charms and entreaties he yielded.
The brothers went off, taking their followers, 150 men with their wives
and greyhounds. For a time they were pursued round Erin to Ballyshannon,
Howth, Rathlin, till they sought refuge in Alba and sailed for Loch
Etive. From that beautiful centre they made many excursions inland,
living in hunting booths, chasing the deer on the mountains, assisting
the King of Alba, who needed their help, and living joyous and free; a
most romantic life, full of incident and full of happiness.

After a time Conchobar hatched a plot to lure them back. First he
approached Cuchulinn and Conall Cearnach to undertake a mission. But
these champions, suspecting treachery, gave blunt refusal. At length
Fergus Mac Roich was induced to go, not without misgivings. When he
arrived with his two sons and bargeman, Naois and Deirdre were sitting
together in their hunting booth playing at chess. Fergus went into the
glen and raised his sweet-voiced warning cry, after the manner of a
hunter. Naois heard the sound and said, “I hear the cry of a man of
Erin.” Deirdre dissimulated at first, “That was not the cry of a man of
Erin but the cry of a man of Alba.” Afterwards she explained it was
because of a dream she had had, which she felt foreboded evil. The
emissaries spend the night with them and win over Naois.

Next morning they all sail away, returning to Erin, and as the land
fades from her view, Deirdre with mingled regret and presentiment, sings
or recites a beautiful lay, describing the shores of Loch Etive and the
charms of the life she led in the glens. The following rendering is from
Dr. Skene, the few verses here quoted indicating the feeling and passion
of the old lyric:—

Glen Etive! O Glen Etive!
There I raised my earliest house;
Beautiful its woods on rising
When the sun fell on Glen Etive.

Glen Orchy! O Glen Orchy!
The straight glen of smooth ridges;
No man of his age was so joyful
As Naois in Glen Orchy.

Glenlaidhe! O Glenlaidhe!
I used to sleep by its soothing murmurs;
Fish and flesh of wild boar and badger,
Was my repast in Glenlaidhe.

Glendaruadh! O Glendaruadh!
I love each man of its inheritance,
Sweet the noise of the cuckoo on bended bough,
On the hill above Glendaruadh.

Glenmasan! O Glenmasan!
High its herbs, fair its boughs;
Solitary was the place of our repose,
On grassy Invermasan.

The upshot of this fateful voyage was that Fergus, their guardian, was
unwittingly decoyed to a feast through the King’s strategy, his son
Buinne Borb was bribed to act the traitor, and the sons of Uisneach were
slain. But not before they had done mighty execution against the hosts
of Conchobar, and kept them at bay till his Druid put a sea with high
waves across the plain before them, while their foes had the benefit of
dry land on which to attack from behind.

Deirdre was distracted at the loss of her lover. Taken to the King’s
palace, for the space of a whole year even the raising of her head or
the giving of a smile she did not concede, till Conchobar, chagrined
with such moping, resolved to send her away for a time with Eogan who
slew Naois. On the way the evil man flung her a brutal taunt, suggestive
of her defencelessness, which when Deirdre heard she gave a start, made
a wild leap from the chariot, and her brains were dashed in fragments
against a pillar stone that stood opposite. But the manner of her death
is otherwise told in the popular version, apparently with more romantic
effect and less probability. All through, the narrative is interspersed
with touching lays, expressive of the heroine’s feelings at various
times. Thus after her loss:—

Long is the day without Uisneach’s children,
It was not mournful to be in their company,
Sons of a king by whom pilgrims were rewarded;
Three lions from the hill of the cave.

Thou that diggest the tomb,
And that puttest my darling from me,
Make not the grave too narrow;
I shall be beside the noble ones.

Cathbad, the Druid, in retaliation for Conchobar’s dissimulation, curses
Emain Macha; and Fergus Mac Roich, resenting the dastardly treachery
that brought the noble sons of Uisneach to an untimely grave, took
service under Queen Meve of Connaught and harassed Ulster for years. At
length Nemesis overtook the guilty Conchobar. Emania is levelled to the
ground, never again to be rebuilt. None of his race inherit the proud
walls of that ancient citadel.

Thus, like Helen of Troy, was Deirdre the unhappy cause of strife and
calamity to the land and its people, to the lover and friends she held
so dear—fateful Deirdre and hapless sons of Uisneach!

CHAPTER IX
THE HEROIC CYCLE

The golden age of Gaelic romance—Number of the tales—Cuchulinn—His
early adventures—The Wooing of Eimer—Training in Skye—The Bridge
of the Cliffs—Tragedy of Conlaoch—Elopement—The “Táin Bó
Chuailgné,” and exploits of Cuchulinn—Ferdia at the ford—The two
champions of Western Europe—Cuchulinn in the Deaf Valley—Death—The
Red Rout of Conall Cearnach—Instruction of Cuchulinn to a
prince—His “Phantom Chariot”—Modern translations of these rare
sagas.

The Heroic, or, as it is sometimes called, the Cuchulinn, or Red-Branch
cycle, corresponds with the period immediately before and after the
opening of the Christian era.

This was really the golden age of Gaelic romance, at once the most
complete, productive, and brilliant of the three traditional epochs. And
happily of it almost all the larger and more important tales have been
preserved. What a world of human interest is conjured up even by the
names and titles of these old-world sagas. Among them we find the “Táin
Bó Chuailgné”; Deirdre and the Sons of Uisneach; Conchobar’s Vision; The
Battle of Rosnaree; Conchobar’s Tragedy; The Conception of Cuchulinn;
His Training; The Wooing of Eimer; Death of Conlaoch; Cuchulinn’s
Adventure at the Boyne; Intoxication of the Ultonians; Bricriu’s
Banquet; Eimer’s Jealousy; Cuchulinn’s Pining; Conall’s Red Rout and the
Lay of the Heads; The Capture of the Sìdh; The Phantom Chariot of
Cuchulinn; and that hero’s Death; The Recovery of the Táin through the
Resurrection of Fergus. These and many other episodes, quaint and
suggestive, give us curious glints into the past.

In her recent book on the Cuchulinn saga, Miss Eleanor Hull has
classified the tales of this cycle under eight heads, which may be
briefly summarised as follows:—

I. Tales personal to Conchobar 5
II. „ „ Cuchulinn 16
III. „ „ Fergus Mac Roich 5
IV. „ „ Conall 4
V. „ „ Celtchar 2
VI. „ „ Curigh 4
VII. „ prefatory to “Táin Bó Chuailgné” 24
VIII. Miscellaneous 36
——
Total 96
==

A goodly aggregate, indeed, to survive the dim forgetfulness of time!
These narratives now constitute the main body of early Celtic tradition.
They breathe the spirit of the race in the long distant past, and
consequently are of unique value and import.

It is evident they bear marks of pre-Christian origin, but we must
remember they have reached us through the transcription of monks, and
hence be prepared to find in them many interpolations, suppressions, and
alterations. Indeed one very old legend represents the longest—the
“Táin,” as having been taken down by St. Ciaran at the grave of Fergus
Mac Roich, and to the dictation of that hero, who, it appears, was
conjured up from the dead for the purpose. St. Columba and the other
chief saints of Ireland are reported as witnesses of this proceeding,
and on their departure with the coveted writing, after they had offered
up thanksgiving, Fergus also retired to his lone tomb.

There are Scotch versions of some of the sagas, but the vast majority
are Irish. The earliest written copies are those in the Leabhar Na
h’Uidhre and Book of Leinster—the latter the fullest of all the saga
documents.

Ulster was the chief theatre of the Heroic drama. In that province,
under the patronage of King Conchobar, arose the renowned order of
knighthood which included such celebrities as Conall Cearnach,
Cuchulinn, and the sons of Uisneach. Yet of all the knights of the Royal
Branch, the second, above-named, was _facile princeps_, the most
outstanding and representative man; in fact, a kind of demigod, round
whom whole armies and many champions fatefully gyrated.

_Fortissimus heros Scotorum_, says the Annals of Tighernach, “vii years
was his age when he took arms, xvii when he was in pursuit of the ‘Táin
Bó Chuailgné,’ xxvii when he died.” The Book of Ballymote, a later MS.,
gives him a much longer career, asserting that the year of the “Táin”
was the fifty-ninth of Cuchulinn’s age, from the night of his birth to
the night of his death.

To get at once a direct and luminous glimpse into the literature of his
cycle, we have only to follow this champion in his varied fortunes and
exploits. And so we turn to the story of his extraordinary career,
recognising that the Celtic imagination has here full play, untrammelled
by the limitations of physical science or modern thought, and that in
these rich and varied creations of fancy we have fact and fiction so
intricately commingled that it is vain to try to differentiate between
them.

Some of the sagas tell us that Cuchulinn was supernaturally descended
from the god Lugh. But later versions with more restraint affirm that
his father’s name was Sualtam, his mother’s Dechtine, and that she was a
sister of King Conchobar. When a boy he was known as Setanta, till he
got the name Cuchulinn, which came to him in a manner quite
characteristic and worthy of mention.

Culand, a smith and Ulster retainer, it appears, had asked the king and
his retinue to spend a night and a day with him. In response to this
invitation “all the Ultonian nobles set out: a great train of
provincials, sons of kings and chiefs, young lords and men-at-arms, the
curled and rosy youth of the kingdom, and the maidens and fair-ringleted
ladies of Ulster. Handsome virgins, accomplished damsels, and splendid
fully-developed women were there; satirists and scholars were there; and
the companies of singers and musicians, poets who composed songs and
reproofs, and praising-poems for the men of Ulster. There came also with
them from Emania, historians, judges, horseriders, buffoons, tumblers,
fools, and performers on horseback. They all went by the same way behind
the king.”

Late that evening Culand inquired if any more were expected, and on
receiving a reply in the negative, he closed the doors and let loose the
house-dog. No sooner was the place thus shut up for the night than the
boy Setanta arrived, and was set on by the dog. A fierce struggle
followed, but the youth got the better of his canine assailant and laid
him lifeless. For this loss Culand demanded _eric_. Unable to pay,
Setanta offered to watch the house himself until a pup of its slain
guardian grew up. Hence the name Cu-Chulaind, that is, Culand’s dog, by
which he was subsequently known. So runs the myth.

Afterwards, with the consent of his mother, he paid a visit to his uncle
the king. Happening to arrive at Emania when the boys were playing
shinty, the mischievous frolics began to throw their balls and _camags_
at him. Whereupon Cuchulinn’s “war-rage seized him,” and “he shut one
eye till it was not wider than the eye of a needle; he opened the other
till it was bigger than the mouth of a meal goblet.” No wonder that the
terrified youngsters fled in every direction.

Presently King Conchobar recognised his nephew when he presented himself
at the Court, and he introduced him to his youthful compeers. Suitable
arms, a suitable chariot and charioteer were given him, and he soon
proved himself a unique warrior.

The women of Ulster admired him “for his splendour at the feat, for the
nimbleness of his leap, for the excellence of his wisdom, for the melody
of his language, for the beauty of his face, and for the loveliness of
his look.” “There were seven pupils in his royal eyes, four in the one
and three in the other; seven fingers on each of his two hands, and
seven toes on each of his two feet.” “I should think,” says the writer
of one text, “it was a shower of pearls that was flung into his head.
Blacker than the side of a black cooking-spit, each of his two eyebrows,
redder than ruby his lips.”

He was too young, too daring, too beautiful, in the opinion of the
chiefs, to be a gallant unwed; for their women and maidens loved him
greatly. So they took counsel with the king to have him married.

Emissaries were sent to the courts and princes of all Erin in quest of a
partner whom it might please Cuchulinn to woo, but they returned after a
year unsuccessful.

Left to fend for himself, the hero got ready his chariot and set out for
the house of Forgaill of Lusk, whose daughter Eimer was renowned for the
six victories she had upon her: the gift of beauty, the gift of voice,
the gift of music, the gift of embroidery and all needlework, and the
gifts of wisdom and virtuous chastity. In the pleasure-ground of the
mansion, surrounded by the fair daughters of the neighbouring chiefs and
men of wealth, the lady descried the famous chariot in the distance, and
one of her maidens describes the appearance of the horses, the chariot,
charioteer, and hero. The latter she reports thus:—

Within the chariot a dark sad man, comeliest of the men of Erin.

Around him a beautiful crimson five-folded tunic, fastened at its
opening on his white breast with a brooch of inlaid gold, against
which it heaves beating in full strokes. A shirt with a white hood,
interwoven red with flaming gold. Seven red dragon gems on the ground
of either of his eyes. Two blue-white, blood-red cheeks, that breathe
forth sparks and flashes of fire. A ray of love burns in his look.
Methinks a shower of pearls has fallen into his mouth. As black as the
side of a black ruin each of his eyebrows. On his two thighs rests a
golden hilted sword, and fastened to the copper frame of the chariot
is a blood-red spear with a sharp mettlesome blade, on a shaft of wood
well-fitted to the hand. Over his shoulders a crimson shield with a
rim of silver, ornamented with figures of golden animals. He leaps the
hero’s salmon-leap into the air and does many like swift feats.

Such was Cuchulinn in the damsel’s eyes. Eimer declined his suit at
first on the plea that she was a younger daughter, and advised him to
approach her father for leave to pay court to her elder sister, whose
brilliant accomplishments she fully rehearsed. This suggestion the hero
spurned and love sprang up between them.

After he departed Forgaill heard of the visit of the remarkable unknown
stranger, and quickly divined who he was. Not wishing to have this
professional champion as son-in-law, the wily father disguised himself
as a Gaulish or Scandinavian envoy and set out for Emania. There he was
well received by the king, and while witnessing the feats of the knights
he took occasion to recommend the king to send his nephew to Skye to
complete his special training in arms, at the celebrated school of the
lady Scathach. His sinister idea was that so many dangers and
difficulties would beset Cuchulinn on the way that he would never
return. The latter vowed he would go. And on setting out he encountered
many perils. Among others he had to traverse “the plain of misfortune,”
which he did by the aid of a wheel and of an apple given him by a chance
acquaintance. He took instruction from the Albannach Donall by the way,
and declined the love of his ugly daughter. But departing from their
home he arrived in safety at Dun Scathach.

The Grianan or sunny house of his future instructress, “built upon a
rock of appalling height,” “had seven great doors and seven great
windows between every two doors of them, and thrice fifty couches
between every two windows of them, and thrice fifty handsome
marriageable girls in scarlet cloaks and in beautiful and blue attire,
attending and waiting upon Scathach.”

Here he met his one match in arms, Ferdia Mac Daman, the Firbolg
champion. Naois, Ardan, and Ainnle, the three sons of Uisneach, were
also pupils. To pass the “Bridge of the Cliffs” was the first great feat
to be learned. “Wonderful was the sight that bridge afforded when any
one would leap upon it, for it narrowed until it became as narrow as the
hair of one’s head, and the second time it shortened until it became as
short as an inch, and the third time it grew slippery as an eel of the
river, and the fourth time it rose up on high against you until it was
as tall as the mast of a ship.”

It was while practising the feat of the bridge that Scathach’s lovely
daughter Uathach fell in love with him as she spied the hero from one of
the windows of the Grianan. And then “her face and colour constantly
changed, so that now she would be as white as a little white flowret,
and again she would become scarlet.” Cuchulinn and she were afterwards
married. During his sojourn at the Dun, Scathach was carrying on war
against other tribes over whom her rival the Princess Aoife (Eva) ruled.
When the two hosts met, Aoife challenged Scathach to single combat, and
Cuchulinn went out instead to encounter the heroine. This was his chance
introduction to the lady who bore him his famous son Conlaoch. Before he
went back again to his native land, he left instructions with her that
the child to be born if a girl would be hers, if a boy she was to train
him In all hero feats, except the gaebolg or belly dart—a mysterious
weapon that could only be cast at fords on water. Then she was to send
him to Erin, bidding him tell no man who he was.

Conlaoch’s amazing exploits in his father’s country are related in a
special tale, which tells how he killed the Ulster warriors sent against
him, and how Cuchulinn himself unwittingly opposed him in arms till,
hard pressed by his skilful opponent, he called for his gaebolg and
despatched him.

It was then the unhappy father discovered that he had killed his own
son.

This is apparently the Gaelic version of the well-known Persian tale of
Sohrab and Rustum—a story of Aryan origin. Just as Cuchulinn recognised
when too late his kinship with Conlaoch, and mourned over him, so did
the father of the young Tartar, for the brief moments the latter
survived his mortal wound.

On his return from Skye, prior to the birth of his ill-fated son,
Cuchulinn had been joyously welcomed home by King Conchobar and his
knights. Losing no time he proceeded to Lusk to claim Eimer. The young
lady had in his absence become deeply enamoured of him, though her
father and brothers remained obdurate. Fortifying themselves against the
intrusion of the champion for a whole year, they denied him entrance, or
even a sight of his faithful lover, until Cuchulinn, getting desperate,
scaled the walls, overcame his opponents and carried off Eimer, her
maid, and much treasure in his chariot. All the way north to Emania he
had frequent combats with the men who followed to frustrate this heroic
elopement.

Commenting on the story, O’Curry makes the interesting remark that
“there is scarcely a hill, valley, river, rock, mound, or cave in the
line of country from Emania in the present county of Armagh to Lusk in
that of Dublin of which the ancient and often varying names and history
are not to be found in this singularly curious tract,” namely, the
Wooing of Eimer. “So that, if we look upon it even as a highly-coloured
historic romance, it will be found one of the most valuable of our large
collection of ancient compositions on account of the light which it
throws not merely on ancient social manners, and on the military feats
and terms of those days, but on the meaning of so vast a number of
topographical names. And it records, too, I may add, very many curious
customs and superstitions, many of which to this day characterise the
native Irish people.”

Other exploits of the wonderful Cuchulinn are related in the “Táin Bó
Chuailgné” or “Cattle Raid of Cooley”—the greatest and longest of the
heroic sagas. Here we encounter that remarkable Amazon, Queen Meve of
Connaught, and her third husband, Ailill. When at Rath-Cruachan it seems
they had spread their royal couch, and between them there ensued a
pillow conversation, ending in a controversy as to which of the two was
the richer. In this debate comparison was made between their mugs and
vats and iron vessels, their urns and brewers’ troughs, and kieves.
Their jewels also were brought out, such as finger-rings, clasps,
bracelets, thumb-rings, diadems, and gorgets of gold; their apparel of
crimson, blue, black and green, yellow and chequered and buff,
wan-coloured, pied and striped. Comparison was made between their flocks
of sheep and steeds and studs, and herds of swine and droves of cows.
But all were found to be exactly equal.

Then Ailill recollected that he had a young bull named “Finn-bheannach”
or “White-horned,” which had been calved by one of the Queen’s cows, but
which had left her herd and joined his own because the high-minded
animal did not “deem it honourable to be under a woman’s control.”
Meve’s disappointment was keen that no bull of hers was found to match
this one; so, when Fergus Mac Roth the herald assured her that Daré, in
Cuailgne, Ulster, possessed a brown one, the best in all Erin, she
immediately sent him with nine subordinates to fetch it, offering its
owner liberal terms for a year’s loan. Daré treated the messengers with
kindly hospitality, and agreed to the royal request. But, unhappily,
while the men were imbibing too freely that night, his steward overheard
one of them boasting that if the bull had not been willingly sent they
would have taken it by compulsion.

On this coming to Daré’s ears, he swore by the gods that now they would
not have his Donn Chuailgne either by force or consent.

Meve was not a woman to be thus lightly denied or insulted. _Nolens
volens_ she would have the bull, and summoned her native forces for
action. She also invited the men of Leinster and Munster to join her in
avenging past indignities received at the hands of the men of Ulster.
Fifteen hundred men from the latter province, who happened to be at feud
with King Conchobar for his treachery to the sons of Uisneach, were
prevailed upon to answer her summons, and a great army set out. At a
place near modern Louth, where they halted on the march, a feast was
held, at which the Queen contrived to promise to each of the leaders,
without the knowledge of the rest, the hand of her beautiful daughter
Finnamhair in marriage as a stimulus to valour and fidelity. “On one of
the nights the snow that fell reached to men’s legs and to the wheels of
the chariots, so that it made one plain of the five provinces of Erin,
and the men never suffered so much before in camp. None knew throughout
the whole night whether it was his friend or his foe who was next him
until the clear shining sun rose early on the morrow.”

Though the Ulster men had sufficient warning of the approach of this
host, they were not in readiness. A childish helplessness, to which they
were subject for an unmanly crime, had overtaken them and left them at
the mercy of their foes.

It was Cuchulinn’s country the enemy had invaded, and he kept them at
bay. Hovering around them unseen all day, he killed as many as a hundred
each night with his sling. In vain Meve tried to buy this boyish hero
off, first by a mutual conference, with the glen between them, and
second by sending an embassage with Mac Roth as messenger-in-chief. On
this occasion Cuchulinn discarded the twenty-seven cunningly prepared
undershirts which with cords and ropes were secured about him. And this
he did to escape the difficulty that would arise in throwing them off,
should his paroxysm come to boiling point and he in them still. Anon for
thirty feet all round the hero’s body the snow melted with the intense
heat generated in his system. His charioteer, we are told, durst not
come nigh him. From a safe distance he informed his master of Mac Roth’s
approach and described him.

Cuchulinn demands single combat, enjoining his opponents by the laws of
Irish chivalry not to pass the ford till he was overcome. Queen Meve
reluctantly consents, deeming it better to lose one warrior a day than a
hundred each night. With her messenger came a youth anxious to see the
renowned hero, and he, deceived by the boyish appearance of Cuchulinn,
determined to fight him. To warn the rash stripling of his danger, the
latter plays upon him two sword-feats. By the first, “the under-cut,” he
slices away the sod from under this Etarchomal’s soles and lays him
supine, with the sod upon his upturned chest. By the second, “the
vigorous edge-stroke,” he takes off all his hair from poll to forehead
and from ear to ear, as clean as though he had been shaven with a razor,
but without drawing blood. Finally, he despatches him with the “oblique
transverse stroke,” whereby in three simultaneously fallen segments the
youth reaches the ground.

Champion after champion falls in single combat, until Meve, getting
desperate, had at length to call in the aid of magic. So we read that
one warrior was helped by demons of the air in bird shape, but in vain;
and the great magician Cailatin and his twenty-seven sons, despite their
spells, also met their doom. Cuchulinn was further persecuted by the
war-goddess, the Morrigan, who appears in all shapes to plague him and
to frighten the life of valour out of his soul. He himself is not behind
in demoniac influence, for with the help of the Tuatha de
Danann—Manannan especially—he does great havoc among Meve’s troops,
circling round them in his chariot and dealing death with his sling.

It was during one of these exploits that he gave his chariot the heavy
turn, so that its iron wheels sank into the earth and their track was in
itself a sufficient fortification, for the stones and pillars and flags
and sand rose back high on every side round the wheels.

His foes are baffled. Impatient Meve cannot forget that the Ulster men
will soon be rid of their childish feebleness, and then the game is up.
So she approaches Ferdia, the only warrior fit to match Cuchulinn, with
the view of arranging a combat whereby the latter may be laid low.
Ferdia at first refuses to fight his former comrade, with whom he had
made a compact of undying friendship while attending the lady Scathach’s
school in Skye. The Queen then promises him Finnamhair for wife, with
land and riches. It is probable that even this bait would not have
fetched the unwilling warrior had she not further threatened that her
druids and ollamhs would “criticise, satirise, and blemish him,” enough
to “raise three blisters on his face,” if he refused. Thereafter he
consented, thinking it better to fall by valour and championship than by
druids and reproach.

Fergus was accordingly sent forward to tell Cuchulinn that his friend
Ferdia was coming to fight him. “I am here,” retorted the champion,
“detaining and delaying the four great provinces of Erin from Samhain
till Feill Brighde, and I have not yielded one foot in retreat before
any one during that time, nor will I, I trust, before him.” The
charioteer gets ready the chariot, and into it sprang “the
battle-fighting, dexterous, battle-winning, red-sworded hero, Cuchulinn,
son of Sualtam, and there shouted around him Bocanachs and Bananachs and
Genîtî Glindi, and demons of the air. For the Tuatha de Danann were used
to set up shouts around him, so that the hatred and the fear and the
abhorrence and the great terror of him should be greater in every
battle, in every battlefield, in every combat, and in every fight into
which he went.”

The heroes met at the ford. After the first day’s fight, “each of them
approached the other forthwith and each put his hand round the other’s
neck and gave him three kisses. Their horses were in the same paddock
that night, and their charioteers at the same fire; and their
charioteers spread beds of green rushes for them with wounded men’s
pillows to them. The professors of healing and curing came to heal and
cure them, and they applied herbs and plants to the stabs and cuts and
gashes and to all their wounds. Of every herb and of every healing and
curing plant that was put to the stabs and cuts and gashes and to all
the wounds of Cuchulinn, he would send an equal portion from him
westward over the ford to Ferdia, so that the men of Erin might not be
able to say, should Ferdia fall by him, that it was by better means of
cure that he was enabled to kill him.”

As the days pass the fighting becomes more serious. Early on the fourth
Ferdia arose and went forward alone to the ford. He knew that that day
would decide the contest, and that either or both of them would fall.
Having put on his wonderful suit of battle, he displayed many
extraordinary feats which he never learned from any other,—not from
Scathach, or Uathach, or Aoife, but which were invented by himself.

On seeing these, Cuchulinn said to his charioteer, “I perceive there, my
friend Laeg, the noble, varied, wonderful, numerous feats which Ferdia
displays on high, and all these will be tried on me in succession.
Therefore if it be I who shall begin to yield this day thou must excite,
reproach, and speak evil to me, that the paroxysm of my rage and anger
shall grow the more. If it be I who shall prevail then thou shalt laud
and praise and speak good words to me, that my courage may be the
greater.”

“It shall be so done indeed, O Cuchulinn,” replied the faithful Laeg.

The champions then arranged to try the ford feat. And the saga remarks:
“Great was the deed, now, that was performed on that day at the ford—the
two heroes, the two warriors, the two champions of Western Europe, the
two gifted and stipend-bestowing hands of the north-west of the world,
the two beloved pillars of the valour of the Gael, and the two keys of
the bravery of the Gael, to be brought to fight from afar through the
instigation and intermeddling of Ailill and Meve.”

First, they began to shoot with missive weapons, till, getting more
furious, Cuchulinn sprang at his opponent twice for the purpose of
striking his head over the rim of his shield, but each time Ferdia gave
the shield a stroke of his left knee or elbow, and cast Cuchulinn from
him like a little child on the brink of the ford.

Laeg perceived that act, and, true to the instructions of his master,
began taunting him. “Alas! indeed,” said he, “the warrior who is against
thee casts thee away as a lewd woman would cast her child. He throws
thee as a mill would grind fresh malt. He pierces thee as the felling
axe would pierce the oak. He binds thee as the woodbine binds the tree.
He darts on thee as the hawk darts on small birds, so that henceforth
thou hast not call, or right, or claim to valour or bravery to the end
of time and life, thou little fairy phantom.”

At that word up sprang the fallen hero with the rapidity of the wind,
and with the readiness of the swallow, and with the fierceness of the
dragon, and the strength of the lion, into the troubled clouds of the
air the third time, and he alighted on the boss of the shield of Ferdia,
but with the same humiliating result.

“It was then that Cuchulinn’s first distortion came on, and he was
filled with swelling and great fulness, like breath in a bladder, until
he became a terrible, fearful, many-coloured Tuaig, and he became as big
as a Fomor, or man of the sea, the great and valiant champion in perfect
height over Ferdia.”

So close was the fight they made now that the Bocanachs and Bananachs,
and wild people of the glens, and demons of the air screamed from the
rims of their shields, and from the hilts of their swords, and from the
hafts of their spears.

At length Ferdia found an unguarded moment upon his opponent and wounded
him sorely. Cuchulinn, unable to endure this, or Ferdia’s stout quick
strokes and tremendous great blows at him, called for the gaebolg. It
was a weapon that used to be let down the stream and cast from between
the toes. It made the wound of one spear in entering the body, but it
had thirty barbs to open, and could not be drawn out of a person’s body
until it was cut out. So Laeg set the gaebolg down the stream, and
Cuchulinn caught it between the toes of his foot and threw an unerring
cast of it at Ferdia.

“That is enough now indeed,” said the wounded man. “I fall of that.”

Thereafter a trance, a faint, and a weakness fell on Cuchulinn as he saw
the body of Ferdia. But Laeg roused him, and then he began to lament and
mourn, and to utter a panegyric over his slain rival as David did over
Jonathan:—

O Ferdia (he said) treachery hath defeated thee.
Unhappy was thy fate—
Thou to die, I to remain,—
Grievous for ever is our lasting separation.

When we were far away, yonder
With Scathath, the gifted Buanand,
We then resolved that till the end of time
We should not be hostile one to the other.

Dear to me was thy beautiful ruddiness,
Dear to me thy perfect form,
Dear to me thy clear grey-blue eye,
Dear to me thy wisdom and thine eloquence.

There hath not come to the body-cutting combat,
There hath not been angered by manly exertion,
There hath not borne shield on the field of spears
Thine equal, O ruddy son of Daman.

Never until now have I met,
Since I slew Aoife’s only son,
Thy like in deeds of battle,
Never have I found, O Ferdia.

Finnamhair, daughter of Meve,
Notwithstanding her excellent beauty,
It is putting a _gad_ on the sand or sunbeam
For thee to expect her, O Ferdia.

He continued to gaze on his fallen friend, and when at length, tempted
by his charioteer to come away and get healed of his grievous wounds, he
said, “We will leave now, O my friend Laeg, but every other combat and
fight that ever I have made was to me but as a game and a sport compared
to the combat and the fight of Ferdia.”

There is a most beautiful rendering of his further eulogy in Dr.
Sigerson’s _Bards of the Gael and Gall_. Here it is. The repetition and
rhythm have been adapted from the original:—

Play was each, pleasure each,
Till Ferdia faced the beach;
One had been our student-life,
One in strife of school our place,
One our gentle teacher’s grace,
Loved o’er all and each.

Play was each, pleasure each,
Till Ferdia faced the beach,
One had been our wonted ways,
One the praise for feat of fields,
Scathach gave two victor shields—
Equal prize to each.

Play was each, pleasure each,
Till Ferdia faced the beach;
Dear that pillar of pure gold,
Who fell cold beside the ford.
Hosts of heroes felt his sword
First in battle’s breach.

Play was each, pleasure each,
Till Ferdia faced the beach;
Lion, fiery, fierce, and bright,
Wave whose might nothing withstands,
Sweeping, with the shrinking sands,
Horror o’er the beach.

Play was each, pleasure each,
Till Ferdia faced the beach;
Loved Ferdia, dear to me;
I shall dree his death for aye,
Yesterday a mountain he,—
But a shade to-day.

Queen Meve with her army ravaged the province of Ulster and secured the
Donn Chuailgne. Ultimately, through the recovery of the Ultonians from
their temporary debility, she was thoroughly defeated. Yet,
notwithstanding the loss of so many warriors, the masterful woman
congratulates herself on having accomplished the two great objects of
her expedition—the securing of the brown bull and the chastisement of
her former husband, King Conchobar.

The story of the Táin ends in an anti-climax, relating in the most
ludicrous and fantastic manner the tragic fate of the bulls,[19] the
unwitting cause of all this frenzy.

But Queen Meve was determined to avenge herself on Cuchulinn, and in the
course of time collected another large army. Among all his foes none was
more venomous than were the descendants of the wizard Cailatin, who,
with his twenty-seven sons, had been killed at the ford combat. The
malignant efforts of these sorcerers to get the warrior into their power
are vividly described. For a time he was kept and entertained in the
royal palace by his wife Eimer and the ladies of Emania, and poets, and
musicians, and wise men. The wizards made noise as of battle, and when
Cuchulinn looked out he imagined he saw battalions drawn up upon the
plains smiting each other unsparingly. It was with difficulty he was
withheld from going out.

So, by Conchobar’s command he was taken at length by the druids and
ladies of the Court to a far away lonely glen, called the Deaf Valley.
Even here the wizards found him, and in consequence the very dogs were
terrified with the goblins, prodigies, and eldritch things with which
the place was haunted. A full account is given of the manner in which
they ultimately decoyed him from his retreat, and it is related how all
the omens were against him. For example, his brooch fell and pierced his
foot. His noble steed, the Liath Macha, refused to be yoked, and when
finally persuaded, let fall down his cheeks two large tears of dusky
blood.

But Cuchulinn met his foes in battle array. And as many as there were of
grains of sand in the sea, of stars in heaven, of dewdrops in May, of
snowflakes in winter, of hailstones in a storm, of leaves in a forest,
of ears of corn in Magh Breagh, of stalks of grass beneath the feet of
the herds on a summer’s day, so many halves of heads and of shields, so
many halves of hands and of feet, so many red bones, were scattered by
him throughout the plain of Muirtheimhne. Grey was that field with the
brains of his enemies, so fierce and furious the hero’s onslaught.

When he fell, he fell pierced with his own spear, which Lewy, the son of
Curigh, had hurled back upon him, but rising again, he went against a
pillar of stone that he might die standing up. And the Liath Macha
defended him with teeth and hoofs to the last, killing as many as thirty
in the struggle. So died the mighty Cuchulinn.

In the Red Rout of Conall Cearnach we read how that famous knight, who
had been previously sent for, came back from Pictland to avenge the
death of his friend, and how he brought the heads of the chief offenders
to Eimer.

Satisfied with this retribution, Eimer desired Conall to dig a grave for
Cuchulinn wide and deep; and she laid herself down in it with her mate,
saying, “Love of my soul, O friend, O gentle sweetheart, many were the
women who envied me thee until now, and I shall not live after thee.”
After she expired Conall performed the customary funeral obsequies,
wrote their names in Ogam, and raised the stone over their tomb.

In the Leabhar Na h’Uidhre there is a detached episode entitled, “The
Instruction of Cuchulinn to a Prince.” It occurs in the romance known as
“The Sickbed of Cuchulinn,” and on the authority of the Brehon Law we
know that many of the precepts therein enjoined were rules legally
incumbent on the chieftains in aftertimes.

The occasion was the election of a king to rule over Erin in Tara.

Lugaid, destined for this exalted office, was at the time the pupil of
Cuchulinn, sitting over his pillow as he lay ill. When news came,
suddenly the prostrate hero arose and began to instruct the young
prince. Among other precepts he gave voice to these, which show not only
the traditional estimate of the hero’s character, but also the high
moral qualities expected in the chief ruler of Erin and his satellites.

“Speak not haughtily. Discourse not noisily. Mock not, insult not,
deride not the old. Think not ill of any. Make no demands that cannot be
met. Receive submissively the instructions of the wise. Be mindful of
the admonitions of the old. Follow the decrees of your fathers. Be not
cold-hearted to friends; but against your foes be vigorous. Avoid
dishonourable disputes in your many contests. Be not a tattler and
abuser. Waste not, hoard not, alienate not. Submit to reproof for
unbecoming deeds. Do not sacrifice justice to the passions of men. Be
not lazy lest you become weakened, be not importunate lest you become
contemptible.”

“Do you consent to follow these counsels?” the distinguished tutor
asked.

To which the prince made answer, “These precepts without exception are
worthy to be observed. All men will see that none of them shall be
neglected. They shall be executed, if it be possible.”

Little wonder that in later Christian times the old pagan hero was held
in high esteem, and even exalted into a medium for the conversion of
King Laoghaire, whom the preaching of St. Patrick himself failed to
convince. In the “Phantom Chariot of Cuchulinn” it is related that
Patrick went to Tara to enjoin belief upon the King of Erin, that is,
upon Laoghaire, son of Nial, for he was King of Erin at the time, and
would not believe in the Lord, though he had preached unto him. “By no
means will I believe in thee, nor yet in God,” said the heathen monarch
to the saint, “until thou shalt call up Cuchulinn in all his dignity, as
he is recorded in the old stories, that I may see him, and that I may
address him in my presence here; after that I will believe in thee.”

Upon this St. Patrick conjured up the hero, so that he appeared to the
King in his chariot as of old. Laoghaire’s description of Cuchulinn as
thus seen in his phantom chariot is even more graphic than that of the
maid in the Wooing of Eimer.

The spectre proved a most earnest preacher, endeavouring to persuade his
royal hearer to believe in God and Patrick, and so escape the pains of
hell, of which it appears he had had some experience.

My little body was scarred—
With Lugaid the victory:
Demons carried off my soul
Into the red charcoal.

I played the swordlet on them,
I plied on them the gae-bolga;
I was in my concert victory
With the demon in pain.

Great as was my heroism,
Hard as was my sword,
The devil crushed me with one finger
Into the red charcoal.

It is somewhat ludicrous to read that he practised the gaebolg even on
the spiteful units of the under world, though apparently with less
success than on Ferdia and the rest.

The tale consistently enough concludes that “great was the power of
Patrick in awakening Cuchulinn, after being nine fifty years in the
grave.”

To appreciate the vigour and spirit of these remarkable sagas as they
figure in the original, one requires to read them through. No
quotations, however well chosen, can do full justice to their wealth of
imagination and descriptive power, especially when depicting stirring
incidents, curious customs, men, horses, chariots, arms, ornaments,
vesture, and colours. Then they are profuse, fantastic, minute, and
boldly original, tedious, sometimes through the very prodigality of
their adjectival resources. In perusing them the reader feels that he is
in a fresh field of literature and breathing an atmosphere entirely
different to anything modern.

Though Homeric in form, there is always the Celtic tinge in the literary
style as well as in the facts seized on and made prominent. Within the
last half century these early tales have been frequently translated into
various languages, and excellent versions are now available from the
pens of such distinguished scholars as Eugene O’Curry, Dr. Whitley
Stokes and O’Flanagan, M. d’Arbois de Jubainville and M. Louis Duvan,
Dr. Ernst Windisch, Dr. Kuno Meyer, Standish Hayes O’Grady and O’Beirne
Crowe.

CHAPTER X
THE OSSIANIC CYCLE

The old order changes—Who were the Feinn?—Ossian, his name and
relation to the bardic literature—The Ossianic tales and poems
very numerous—Earliest references—First remarkable
development—Original home of the Ossianic romance—The leading
heroes—A famous tract—Legends regarding Fionn, and curious details
of his warrior-band—The literature divided into four classes—Most
ancient poems of Ossian, and the Feinn—Quotations—“The Dialogue of
the Ancients”—Ossian and Patrick—Story of Crede—Miscellaneous
poems—Prose tales—“Pursuit of Diarmad and Grainne”—“Lay of
Diarmad”—Norse Ballads—Dream figures, a remarkable Gaelic
tradition.

The Ossianic cycle brings us down to the middle of the third century
A.D. It is clearly much later than the Heroic. For in the interval the
old order peculiar to the days of Cuchulinn has passed away, and new
manners and customs are in vogue. No longer is our attention engrossed
with descriptions of chariots and war-horses and cow-spoils. The heroes
are an organised body of men, who engage in the peaceful pastimes of
hunting and feasting when not occupied with the more serious business of
warfare. They appear less mythical than the demi-gods and champions of
earlier times; yet they move in that dim background of history where
figures are always seen in chiaroscuro, and we cannot even be remotely
confident of their historical reality.

Indeed, it has long been a moot question who the Feinn[20] were, and we
still have the most conflicting opinions on the subject. For example,
the native Irish have always regarded them as an actual martial caste,
maintained during several reigns by the kings of Erin for national
defence. And there is documentary evidence to show that as early as the
seventh century Fionn[21] was generally looked upon as a quondam popular
hero. Eugene O’Curry shared the belief of his countrymen, for he says:
“I may take occasion to assure you that it is quite a mistake to suppose
Finn Mac Cumhaill to have been a merely imaginary or mythical character.
Much that has been narrated of his exploits is, no doubt, apocryphal
enough, but Finn himself is an undoubtedly historical personage; and
that he existed about the time at which his appearance is recorded in
the Annals is as certain as that Julius Cæsar lived and ruled at the
time stated on the authority of the Roman historians.” And O’Curry
supports this opinion with the statement that the hero’s pedigree is
fully detailed in the Book of Leinster, and his death is chronicled in
the _Annals of the Four Masters_, as having taken place in 283 A.D.

Yet more recent scholarship inclines to other and very different views.
Dr. Hyde fancies the school of Mr. Nutt and Professor Rhys would
recognise in the Feinn tribal deities euhemerised or regarded as men.
Dr. Skene and Mr. Macritchie believed they were a race distinct from the
Gaels, probably allied to, or even identical with, the Picts, the latter
venturing the opinion that they might be the _sìdh_ or fairy folk of the
mounds so frequently in evidence in Gaelic literature; while Dr.
Alexander Macbain speaks of Fionn as probably the incarnation of the
chief deity of the Gaels, and his band of heroes as a kind of
terrestrial Olympus.

From these latter the popular Ossian, son of Fionn, has been singled out
as the representative bard of early times. The most ancient forms of the
name were Ossin, Oisin, or Oisein, meaning “the little fawn.” It is
variously spelt in the Book of the Dean of Lismore. And only in
Macpherson’s time and through his usage did the word acquire its modern
familiar orthography.

In the same manner as the name of David is traditionally associated with
the Hebrew Psalter, or the name of Homer with the Homeric poetry, so is
that of Ossian the warrior bard with the classic poems of the Gael. His
will always be identified with the bardic literature that celebrates the
deeds of the Feinn, even though scholars cannot affirm with historic
certainty that he actually lived or was the real author of one of the
ballads attributed to him.[22]

The Ossianic tales and poems are very numerous. Indeed O’Curry says that
if printed at length in the same form as the text of O’Donovan’s edition
of the _Four Masters_ they would occupy as many as 3000 pages of such
volumes. And that statement was made before the publication of
Campbell’s Scottish collection, known as _Leabhar na Feinne_. Apart from
the tales, it is believed that the poetry alone extends to upwards of
80,000 lines.

Yet, compared with the wealth of ancient texts that represent the Heroic
saga, we have very few old vellum MSS. representing the Ossianic. Of
many of the pieces there are two redactions, one on vellum, the other on
modern paper—the latter usually the longer and more profuse. It would
seem as if the Ossianic tales took hold of the imagination of the Gael
much more powerfully than did those of the Heroic cycle, with the result
that they have been in process of evolution down almost to the present
day—certainly to the end of the eighteenth century, which witnessed that
wonderful recrudescence of production, associated in Scotland with the
names of Macpherson, Smith, Clark, Maccallum, and others.

The earliest references to Fionn occur in two Irish poets, one of the
tenth and the other of the eleventh century; in the Annals of
Tighernach, who died in 1088; and in the venerable Leabhar Na h’Uidhre
and Book of Leinster. So that as early as the origin of these latter two
MSS. we have written Ossianic or Fionn tales; and, seeing these literary
monuments were compiled from older documents it is at least possible, as
scholars affirm that some of the tales may have been written down in MS.
before the end of the seventh century.

The first remarkable development in the evolution of the saga took place
between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, the most characteristic
feature of the change being the prominence given to foreign invasion,
especially the invasion of Lochlanners. Fionn is no longer a tribal
chief in one locality, but the acknowledged leader of all Gaeldom
against the intruding aliens.

The stories of his own exploits and of those of his warrior band are
Gaelic variants of tales common to all Celtic, indeed to all Aryan
races. In his essay on the “Development of the Ossianic or Fenian Saga,”
printed in vol. ii. of _Waifs and Strays of Celtic Tradition_, Mr.
Alfred Nutt says that “in the redactions which substantially reach back
to the twelfth century, these tales are profoundly modified in two ways:
firstly, the euhemerising process begun in the ninth to tenth centuries
has fully developed, and the saga has been fitted into a framework of
tribal and personal conditions, which necessarily determine the growth
along certain lines; secondly, mythic features and incidents have been
translated, as it were, into historic terms, borrowed from the
comparatively recent history of the race, and the saga has in
consequence been enriched by a new series of personages, and by a wider
geographic horizon. At this stage it is taken up by the literary class
of the day, the professional story-tellers, and metrically fixed. It is
literary in so far as the form is artificial, that is, due to a given
man who did not hesitate to embellish and amplify out of his acquired
stock of knowledge; popular in so far as it is kept in close touch with
tradition. This semi-literary form continued to develop until the
eighteenth century in both divisions of Gael-land, but the guiding
impulse ever came from Ireland. During the last hundred years and more,
large fragments of it have been preserved in Scotland orally, and offer
the most instructive object lesson with which I am acquainted to the
student of traditional diffusion and transmission. Side by side with the
semi-literary development, the purely popular forms continued to exist
and grow. With regard to Scotland, the chief Ossianic problem is, how
far these may be looked upon as independent of the semi-literary twelfth
century forms, that is, as derived substantially from the earlier
traditions brought by the Gael to Scotland in the early centuries of the
Christian era. There is much to be said for and against this view. There
is practically nothing to be said in favour of the Fenian saga being
older on Scotch ground than the Dalriadic colonisation. Both Scotland
and Ireland have an equal claim to the saga in this sense—that both
countries were inhabited by Gaels, who told and localised it wherever
they went; but Ireland’s claim is so far superior that these tales were
told in Ireland earlier than in Scotland; that whatever admixture of
fact there is in them is Irish fact, and that the chief shapers of the
cycle have been Irish, and not Scotch Gaels. On the other hand, the
Gaels seem both to have preserved the popular form in a more genuine
state, and the semi-literary form orally with greater tenacity.”

Ireland we may therefore regard as the original home of the Ossianic
romance, which in time diffused itself to the west of Scotland, to the
Hebrides, and even to the Isle of Man. And it is significant that while
the theatre of the Cuchulinn drama was mainly the north of that
country—Ulster and Connaught, that of the Feinn was the south—Leinster
and Munster.

The leading heroes of this cycle were:—

1. Fionn, son of Cumhail, son of Trenmor, who is represented as having
been a druid.

2. Gaul Mac Morna, leader of the clan Morna in Connaught. The first name
of Gaul was Aedh Mac Morna, but in the battle of Cnucha he lost an eye
and was henceforth known as Gaul, that is, the _Blind_ Mac Morna. In
this battle he slew Cumhail, Fionn’s father, the leader of the Leinster
band, and though he afterwards served under Fionn, they had no great
love for each other.

3. Ossian, son of Fionn, who in later times became famous as the great
poet of the Celtic people.

4. Oscar, son of Ossian, and grandson of Fionn, who is represented as
handsome and kind-hearted, and generally one of the bravest of the
Feinn.

5. Diarmad O’Duibhne, with the beauty spot—“ball seirc”—which compelled
any woman who saw it to fall in love with him.

6. Caoilte Mac Ronan, a nephew (or cousin) of Fionn, the swiftest of all
the Fenian heroes.

7. Fergus Finne-bheoil, “the eloquent,” who figures as a wise counsellor
as well as a great warrior.

8. Conan Maol, the fool and coward of the party.

The greater number of the incidents of this cycle are represented as
having taken place during the reign of Cormac Mac Art Mac Conn of the
hundred battles, and that of his son, Cairbre of the Liffey. The former
reigned from 227 to 268 A.D., but it was during the reign of the latter
that the battle of Gabhra was fought, in the year 283 A.D., which for
ever put an end to the Fenian power.

In O’Flaherty’s “Ogygia” it is said, “_Cormac_ exceeded all his
predecessors in magnificence, wisdom, and learning, as also in military
achievements. His palace was most superbly adorned and richly furnished,
and his numerous family proclaim his majesty and munificence; the books
he published and the schools he endowed at Temor bear unquestionable
testimony of his learning; there were three schools instituted, in the
first the most eminent professors of the art of war were engaged, in the
second history was taught, and in the third jurisprudence was
professed.”

There is a famous tract entitled, “The Instruction of a Prince,”
ascribed to this king, which has evidently been redacted in Christian
times. It is preserved in the Book of Ballymote, and takes the form of
question and answer between the son Cairbre and his royal father.

“O Grandson of Conn, O Cormac,” said Cairbre, “what is good for a
king?”

“That is plain,” said Cormac, “it is good for him to have patience and
not to dispute, self-government without anger, affability without
haughtiness, diligent attention to history, strict observance of
covenants and agreements, strictness mitigated by mercy in the
execution of laws ... let him enforce fear, let him perfect peace.”

“O Grandson of Conn, O Cormac,” said Cairbre, “what is good for the
welfare of a country?”

“That is plain,” said Cormac, “frequent convocations of sapient and
good men to investigate the affairs, to abolish each evil and retain
each wholesome Institution, to attend to the precepts of the elders;
let the law be in the hand of the nobles, let the chieftains be
upright and unwilling to oppress the poor.”

“O Grandson of Conn, O Cormac,” said Cairbre, “what are the duties of
a prince at a banqueting house?”

“A Prince,” said Cormac, “should light his lamps and welcome his
guests with clapping of hands, procure comfortable seats, the
cup-bearers should be respectable and active in the distribution of
meat and drink. Let there be moderation of music, short stories, a
welcoming countenance, a welcome for the learned, pleasant
conversations, and the like.”

“O Grandson of Conn, what is good for me?” to which Cormac answers:—

“If thou attend to my command, thou wilt not mock the old although
thou art young, nor the poor although thou art well-clad, nor the lame
although thou art strong, nor the ignorant although thou art learned.
Be not slothful, nor passionate, nor penurious, nor idle, nor
jealous....”

Again Cairbre asks how he is to conduct himself among the wise and among
the foolish, among friends and among strangers, among the old and among
the young, to which Cormac, his father, replies:—

Be not too knowing nor too simple; be not proud, be not inactive, be
not too humble nor yet haughty; be not talkative but be not too
silent; be not timid, neither be severe. For if thou shouldst appear
too knowing thou wouldst be satirised and abused; if too simple thou
wouldst be imposed upon; if too proud thou wouldst be shunned; if too
humble thy dignity would suffer; if talkative thou wouldst not be
deemed learned; if too severe thy character would be defamed; if too
timid thy rights would be encroached upon.

There are various versions of the story of Fionn’s birth. In Leabhar Na
h’Uidhre it is told shortly as follows: Tadg, chief druid of Conn, had a
beautiful daughter called Muirne. Cumhail, son of Trenmor, who was head
of the Militia in King Conn’s time, asked Muirne in marriage, but her
father Tadg refused to give her, because he knew from his druidical
knowledge that if Cumhail married her, he himself would lose his
ancestral seat at Almhain, now Allen, in Leinster. So Cumhail took
Muirne by force and married her. Tadg appealed to King Conn, who sent
his forces after the delinquent, resulting in the battle of Cnucha being
fought, in which Cumhail was killed by Aedh son of Morna, who in turn
lost his eye. Muirne fled to Cumhail’s sister, and gave birth to a son,
who was at first called Demni. When he grew up he demanded _eric_ of his
grandfather Tadg for the death of his father, and so, according to
druidical anticipation, he got possession of Almhain. He also made peace
with Gaul, who afterwards figured as one of his band of warriors.

In the Bodleian Library, Oxford, there is a MS. written about the
fifteenth century, in which is preserved a treatise entitled “Boyish
exploits of Fionn.” It is interesting to note here how he was reputed to
have come by the gift of seeing into the future. At that time on the
banks of the Boyne there lived a famous poet called Finn Eges, and young
Fionn was sent to him to complete his education. There was a prophecy
that if one of the name of Fionn ate a salmon caught in Fiacc’s pool on
the Boyne he should no longer be in ignorance of anything he might wish
to know. The poet had industriously fished the pool for seven years and
never landed a single fish. However, one was caught shortly after
Fionn’s arrival, and Finn Eges sent the lad to cook it, with strict
injunctions not to taste it. While turning the salmon on the fire Fionn
burnt his thumb, and instinctively thrust it into his mouth to cool. On
reporting the incident to his master, the poet asked him his name.
“Demni,” said the lad. “Your name is Fionn,” muttered the poet, “and it
is you who were destined to eat of the salmon of knowledge, you are the
real Fionn!”

Thus it was that knowledge came to the young hero. Through the chance
incident of suddenly inserting his thumb in his mouth, the hidden was
revealed to him.

The legend, as given in a vellum MS. in Trinity College, Dublin, is
somewhat different. It says that on a certain occasion Fionn was hunting
near _Sliabh nam Ban_, and while standing at a spring, presently a
strange woman came along, filled a silver tankard at the well, and
without saying a word walked away with it. The hero’s curiosity was
aroused. He followed, unperceived, until she reached the side of the
hill, where a concealed door opened to admit her. In by this entrance
she walked, and Fionn attempting to do likewise got his thumb trapped
between the door and doorpost as the former suddenly swung back. It was
with great difficulty he managed to extricate the _ordag_, but having
succeeded, he at once thrust it, bruised as it was, into his mouth to
ease the pain. And no sooner had he done this than he found himself
possessed of the gift of foreseeing future events. Hence the expression,
“ordag mhor an eolais” (the great thumb of knowledge).

Irish scholars invariably represent the Feinn as a band of Militia, or
kind of standing army, that fought battles, and defended the kingdom
from invasion. Before a soldier could be admitted into this select
corps, he had to promise, “first, never to receive a portion with a
wife, but to choose her for good manners and virtues; second, never to
offer violence to any woman; third, never to refuse any one in the
matter of anything he might possess, that is, he ought to be charitable
to the weak and the poor; and fourth, no single warrior should ever flee
before nine champions.” It was necessary that “both his father and
mother, his tribe, and his relatives should first give guarantees that
they would never demand an _eric_ or revenge from any person for his
death.”

In a fifteenth century MS. in the British Museum it is stated that (1)
Not a man was taken until he was a prime poet versed in the twelve books
of poetry. (2) No man was taken till in the ground a large hole had been
made such as to reach the fold of his belt, and he put into it with his
shield and a forearm’s length of a hazel stick. Then must nine warriors
having nine spears, with a ten-furrows’ width between them and him,
assail him, and in concert let fly at him. If he were then hurt past
that guard of his, he was not received into the Fian-ship. (3) Not a man
of them was taken until his hair had been interwoven into braids on him,
and he started at a run through Ireland’s woods, while they seeking to
wound him followed in his wake, there having been between him and them
but one forest bough by way of interval at first. Should he be overtaken
he was wounded, and not received into the Fian-ship after. (4) If his
weapon had quivered in his hand he was not taken. (5) Should a branch in
the wood have disturbed anything of his hair out of its braiding he was
not taken. (6) If he had cracked a dry stick under his foot, as he ran,
he was not accepted. (7) Unless that, at full speed, he had both jumped
a stick level with his brow, and stooped to pass under one on a level
with his knee, he was not taken. (8) Unless also without slackening his
pace he could with his nail extract a thorn from his foot, he was not
taken into the Fian-ship. But if he performed all this he was of Fionn’s
people.

Keating, who wrote about 1630, and who had access to documents now no
longer extant, gives some curious details:—

The members of the Fenian body (he says) lived in the following
manner. They were quartered on the people from November Day till May
Day, and their duty was to uphold justice and to put down injustice on
the part of the kings and lords of Ireland, and also to guard the
harbours of the country from the oppression of foreign invaders. After
that, from May till November, they lived by hunting and the chase, and
by performing the duties demanded of them by the kings of Ireland,
such as preventing robberies, exacting fines and tributes, putting
down public enemies, and every other kind of evil that might afflict
the country. In performing these duties they received a certain fixed
pay.... However, from May till November the Fenians had to content
themselves with game, the product of their own hunting, as this right
to hunt was their maintenance and pay from the kings of Ireland. That
is, the warriors had the flesh of the wild animals for their food, and
the skins for wages. During the whole day, from morning till night,
they used to eat but one meal, and of this it was their wont to
partake towards evening. About noon they used to send whatever game
they had killed in the morning by their attendants to some appointed
hill, where there were wood and moorland close by. There they used to
light immense fires, into which they put a large quantity of round
sandstones. They next dug two pits in the yellow clay of the moor, and
having set part of the venison upon spits to be roasted before the
fire, they bound up the remainder with _sugans_—ropes of straw or
rushes—in bundles of sedge, and then placed them to be cooked in one
of the pits they had previously dug. There they set the stones which
they had before this heated in the fire round about them, and kept
heaping them upon the bundles of meat until they had made them seethe
freely, and the meat had become throughly cooked. From the greatness
of these fires it has resulted that their sites are still to be
recognised in many parts of Ireland by their burnt blackness. It is
they that are commonly called _Fualachta nam Fiann_, or the Fenians
cooking spots.

As to the warriors of the Fenians, when they were assembled at the
place where their fires had been lighted ... there every man stripped
himself to his skin, tied his tunic round his waist, and then set to
dressing his hair and cleansing his limbs, thus ridding himself of the
sweat and soil of the day’s hunt. Then they began to supple their
thews and muscles by gentle exercise, loosening them by friction,
until they had relieved themselves of all sense of stiffness and
fatigue. When they had finished doing this they sat down and ate their
meal. That being over, they set about constructing their
hunting-booths, and preparing their beds, and so put themselves in
train for sleep. Of the following three materials did each man
construct his bed—of the brushwood of the forest, of moss, and of
fresh rushes. The brushwood was laid next the ground, over it was
placed the moss, and lastly rushes were spread over all. It is these
three materials that are designated in our old romances as the _Tri
Cuilcedha nam Fiann_ (the three beddings of the Fenians).

The literature of the Ossianic cycle is divided by O’Curry into four
classes—

1. The first consists of poems in ancient MSS., ascribed to Fionn Mac
Cumhail, to his sons Ossian and Fergus Finnbheoil, and his nephew
Caoilte. There are seven in Fionn’s name, five in the Book of Leinster,
and two in the Book of Lecain. Other two are attributed to Ossian in the
Book of Leinster, of which one is a description of the battle of Gabhra,
which took place in the year 283, and in which Oscar, the brave son of
Ossian, and Cairbre Lifeachair, the monarch of Erin, fell by each
other’s hands.

The original of this latter has both alliteration and assonance, which
we miss in the English version here given:—

An Ogam on a stone, and a stone on a grave,
Where once men trod;
Erin’s prince on a white horse
Was slain by a slender spear.

Cairbre made a cruel cast,
High on his horse good in the fray;
Shortly before they both were lamed—
He struck Oscar’s right arm off.

Oscar made a mighty cast,
Raging bold like a lion:
Killed Cairbre, grandson[23] of Conn,
Whom warriors bold obeyed.

Youths, mighty and daring,
They met their death in the strife;
Not long before their combat,
More heroes had fallen than lived.

I myself was in the fight,
Southward there of Gabor green;
Twice fifty men I slew—
With my own hand I slew them.

The Ogam is here on the stone,
Round which many ill-fated fell;
Were Finn, in prowess great, alive
Long in mind would be the Ogam.

The facts of Cairbre fighting on horseback and the Ogam on the stone
seem to point back to early times, though alternatively the ideas might
be used afterwards to give an air of antiquity to the piece.

Ossian’s second describes the great fair and festival games of Liffey,
and sketches a visit he paid with his father and accompanying warriors
to the court of the King of Munster. These are the only poems of the
bard that O’Curry knew, that could positively be traced as far back as
the twelfth century. The earliest written pieces superscribed with his
name that we have in Scotland are the nine in the Book of the Dean of
Lismore. Mr. J. F. Campbell was of opinion that the Dean regarded them
as actual compositions of the warrior-bard, contemporary with Cormac Mac
Art.

Of one of these, well known as a lament of Ossian in his old age,
Professor Blackie has given an English rendering from the Dean’s text,
and Dr. Douglas Hyde another more recently from a similar text in the
Belfast Museum. The latter runs thus:—

Long was last night in cold Elphin,
More long is to-night on its weary way.
Though yesterday seemed to me long and ill,
Yet longer still was this dreary day.

And long for me is each hour new-born,
Stricken, forlorn, and smit with grief
For the hunting lands and the Fenian bands,
And the long-haired, generous, Fenian chief.

I hear no music, I find no feast,
I slay no beast from a bounding steed,
I bestow no gold, I am poor and old,
I am sick and cold, without wine or mead.

I court no more, and I hunt no more,
These were before my strong delight
I cannot slay, and I take no prey;
Weary the day and long the night.

No heroes come in their war array,
No game I play, there is nought to win;
I swim no stream with my men of might,
Long is the night in cold Elphin.

Ask, O Patrick, thy God of grace, To tell me the place he will place me
in, And save my soul from the Ill One’s might, For long is to-night in
cold Elphin.

As in the beautiful poem entitled “Finn’s Pastimes,” so in the following
verses from the Dean’s Book, the bard shows that he is in intimate touch
with nature, revelling in her sights and sounds:—

Binn guth duine an tir an ôir,
Binn a ghlòir a chanaid na h’eoin;
Binn an nuallan a ni a chorr,
Binn an tonn am Bun-da-treoir,
Binn am fabhar a ni a ghaoth;
Binn guth cuach os Cas-a’choin,
Aluinn an dealradh a ni grian,
Binn a nithear feadail nan lon, etc.

Sweet is man’s voice in the land of gold,
Sweet the sounds the birds produce;
Sweet is the murmur of the crane,
Sweet sound the waves at Bundatreor,
Sweet the soft murmuring of the wind;
Sweet sounds the cuckoo at Cas-a’choin,
How soft and pleasing shines the sun,
Sweet the blackbird sings his song, etc.

There is one genuinely ancient poem ascribed to Fergus, the bard’s
brother. It was copied from the lost “Dinnsenchus” into the Book of
Lecain and Book of Ballymote. It tells of a remarkable adventure Ossian
once had. While out hunting with a few followers he was decoyed into a
mountain cavern by some of its fairy inhabitants, and detained there
with his companions for a whole year. During all that time the bard was
in the habit of cutting a small chip from the handle of his spear, and
casting it upon the stream that issued from his rocky prison. Fionn, who
had searched in vain for his missing men, happened one day to come to
this river, and observing a floating chip, picked it up, and knew at
once that it was from Ossian’s spear, and intended for a sign. He
thereupon followed the stream to its source, entered the cavern, and
rescued the captive hunters.

A poem by Caoilte Mac Ronan, found in the same two MSS. as the last, and
copied from the same source, is not a legend of the Feinn, but a love
story, in which Cliodhna, a fair-haired, foreign lady, figures as
heroine.

2. The second class of Ossianic literature consists of tracts made up of
articles in prose and poetry, attributed to one or other of the bards
already mentioned, but related by some other person. The most important
in this category, and perhaps the only genuine one now existing, is that
known as “Agallamh na Seanórach,” or “Dialogue of the Ancients,” the
latter being Ossian and Caoilte. Full of curious and really valuable
historical information, it is the largest Fenian or Ossianic tale, and
has recently been edited by Dr. Whitley Stokes. The text preserved in
the Book of Lismore, and more or less fully in other collections,
asserts that after the battle of Gabhra, the Feinn were so shattered and
diminished in numbers that they dispersed themselves over the country.

Ossian and Caoilte survived their brethren in arms, and after wandering
for a time among the new and strange generation that had grown up, they
agreed to separate.

The former went to his mother in the enchanted mansion of Cleitech, as
some MSS. say, to “Tir nan Og.” The latter passed over Magh Breagh
southwards, and ultimately joined St. Patrick, who was delighted to add
so remarkable a convert to his following.

Nearly 150 years passed since their early warrior days, when Ossian
suddenly returned from “Tir nan Og” and the enchanted mansion to seek
his old friend and comrade Caoilte. On finding him, henceforth they both
became St. Patrick’s constant companions in his missionary journeys
through Erin. They give him the history and topography of every place
they visit and of numberless other places, all of which is noted down by
Brogan, the saint’s faithful scribe, for the benefit of future
generations. So says the wonderful “Colloquy of the Ancients.” As an
instance of this service, Patrick and his company were one day sitting
on the hill Finntulach, now better known as Ard-Patrick, in the county
of Limerick, when the saint inquired regarding the origin of the name.
Caoilte explained how it used to be called Tulach na Feinne until Fionn
altered it; and went on to relate how that great leader of men and his
following were once on this same hill when Cael O’Neamhain came to him,
and the conversation of the two heroes turned on Crede, the daughter of
Cairbre, King of Kerry.

“Do you know,” said Fionn, “that she is the greatest flirt of all the
women of Erin; that there is scarcely a precious gem in the land that
she has not obtained as a token of love; and that she has not yet
accepted the hand of any of her admirers.” “I know it,” said Cael, “but
are you aware of the conditions on which she would accept a husband?”
“Yes,” replied Fionn, “whoever is so gifted in the poetic art as to
write a poem descriptive of her mansion and its rich furniture will
receive her hand.” “Good,” said Cael, “I have with the aid of my nurse
composed such a poem, and if you will accompany me, I will now repair to
her court and present it to her.”

Fionn consented, and setting out on their journey they in due time
reached the lady’s mansion, which was situated at the foot of the
well-known Paps of Anann in Kerry. On their arrival, the lady asked
their business. Fionn answered that Cael came to seek her hand in
marriage. “Has he a poem for me?” queried she. “I have,” said Cael. And
he then recited his poem, of which the following are a few
characteristic verses:—

Happy the house in which she is,
Between men and children and women,
Between Druids and musical performers,
Between cup-bearers and door-keepers.

Between equerries without fear,
And distributors who divide (the fare);
And over all these the command belongs
To fair Crede of the yellow hair.

It would be happy for me to be in her _dùn_,
Among her soft and downy couches,
Should Crede deign to hear my suit,
Happy for me would be my journey.

A bowl she has whence berry-juice flows,
By which she colours her eyebrows black,
She has clear vessels of fermenting ale;
Cups she has and beautiful goblets.

The colour (of her _dun_) is like the colour of lime
Within it are couches and green rushes,
Within it are silks and blue mantles,
Within it are red, gold, and crystal cups.

Of its grianan the corner stones
Are all of silver and of yellow gold,
Its thatch in stripes of faultless order,
Of wings of brown and crimson red.

Crede seems to have been very well pleased with this song, for she
married Cael. But, sad to tell, on being called away soon after to the
battle of Finntraigh, he was there killed. His widowed partner gave vent
to her grief in an elegy replete with interest, because it exhibits the
Celtic characteristic of imputing to all nature—birds, deer, waves, and
rocks, one’s own mournful feelings; and because it contains allusions to
ancient customs. Her wail sounds like a Highland coronach of other days:
“A woeful note, and O a woeful note is that which the thrush in
Drumqueen emits, but not more cheerful is the wail which the blackbird
makes in Letterlee. A woeful sound, and O a woeful sound is that the
deer utters in Drumdaleish. Dead lies the doe of Drumsheelin, the mighty
stag bells after her sore suffering, and O suffering sore is the hero’s
death, his death, who used to lie by me. Sore suffering to me is Cael,
and O Cael is a suffering sore, that by my side he is in dead man’s
form; that the wave should have swept over his white body, that is what
hath distracted me, so great was his delightfulness. A dismal roar, and
O a dismal roar is that the shore’s surf makes upon the strand.... A
woeful booming, and O a boom of woe is that which the wave makes upon
the northward beach, butting as it does against the polished rock,
lamenting for Cael, now that he is gone.”

3. The third class of this literature consists of miscellaneous poems
attributed chiefly to Ossian, with a few also to his brother poets, and
a large number without any ascription of authorship. They are found
mostly in paper MSS. of the last 250 years, and are generally
transcripts from older books. In whole or in part they often take the
form of dialogues between Patrick and Ossian. Apparently following the
idea suggested by the “Colloquy of the Ancients,” the Gaelic dreamers
have instituted talks and debates between these representatives of
Paganism and Christianity. Such dialogues are to be found in earlier
MSS., like those of the Book of Lismore and the Book of the Dean of
Lismore, but more frequently in later ones. Besides dealing with the
exploits of the Feinn, they somewhat humorously accentuate the
antagonism between the pagan and ecclesiastical ideals. Specimens of the
more famous of these may be seen in the chapter dealing with the
influence of the Church on Celtic literature. Of the other poems of this
class, the best known is perhaps that entitled “Cath-Chnuic-an-Air,” or,
more shortly, “Cnoc-an-Air.” In addition to giving an account of the
battle, it describes the treasures of the Feinn hidden under Loch Lenè
(Killarney).

The delightful “Ossian and Evir-Alin” may also be noted here. Pattison
thought it possibly one of the oldest of all the Ossianic fragments, but
he was well aware that it is not easy to determine its age. These verses
from his English rendering suggest its peculiar charm:—

We came to the dark Lake of Lego;
There a noble chief came to meet
And conduct us with honour to Branno—
With honour and welcomings sweet.

· · · · ·

Branno inquired, “What is your purpose?
What would you have of me?”
And Cailta said, “We seek thy daughter,
Her would we have of thee.”

· · · · ·

“So high the place, O Ossian,
Do men’s tongues to thee assign,
If I twelve daughters had,” said Branno,
“The best of them should be thine.”

Then they opened the choice and spare chamber,
That was shielded with down from the cold;
The posts of the door were of polished bone,
And the leaves were of good yellow gold.

Soon as generous Evir-Alin
Saw Ossian Fingal’s son,
The love of her youth, by the hero
By me, young maid, was won.

Then we left the dark Lake of Lego
And homeward took our way;
But Cormac, fierce Cormac, waylaid us
Intent on the furious fray.

Ossian and Cormac fight for the lady. The personal combat is described,
and the victorious Ossian continues—

I swept the head from his shoulders
And held it up in my hand;
His troops they fled, and we came with joy
To Fingal’s mountain land.

4. The fourth class consists of prose tales, describing in a romantic
style the exploits and daring deeds of Fionn and of individuals of his
band. The two best known are the “Pursuit of Diarmad and Grainne,” and
the “Battle[24] of Ventry Harbour.” Of the former the leading details
are these:—

Fionn in his old age asked the monarch Cormac Mac Art for the hand of
his celebrated daughter Grainne in marriage. The king agreed to the
hero’s proposal, and invited him to Tara to obtain the princess’s own
consent, necessary in those days as in these to their union. Accepting
the invitation, he proceeded thither, attended by a chosen body of his
warriors, among whom were his son Ossian, his grandson Oscar, and a
chief officer Diarmad O’Duibhne. A grand feast was provided, over which
the monarch presided, and the Feinn were entertained with every mark of
favour and distinction.

It appears to have been a custom on such occasions in ancient Erin, says
O’Curry, for the mistress of the mansion or some other distinguished
lady to fill her own rich drinking cup with choice liquor, and send it
round by her maid-in-waiting to the leading gentlemen at the banquet,
who in turn passed it on to certain others next them, in order that
every guest might enjoy the distinction of participating in the special
favour. The lady Grainne in this instance did the honours of the
occasion, and all, with the exception of Ossian and Diarmad, had drunk
from her cup. But while the imbibing company were yet proclaiming their
praises of the liquor and their profound acknowledgments to the hostess,
they fell one by one into a heavy sleep.

The slim hostess had caused the drink to be drugged, and, as soon as she
recognised the effect, went and sat beside Ossian and Diarmad,
addressing the former, and complaining to him of the folly of his father
Fionn in expecting that a maiden of her youth and beauty should ever
consent to become the wife of so old and war-worn a veteran. Had it been
Ossian himself, gladly would she accept him; but since that could not be
in the circumstances, she saw no chance of escaping the evil her
father’s rash promise threatened to bring upon her than by flight.
Ossian could not dishonour his own sire by being partner to such a
course, so she conjured Diarmad, by his manliness and chivalry, to take
her away, make her his wife, and thus save her from a fate more tragic
in her eyes than death itself.

After much persuasion, for the step was serious in view of his leader’s
ire, Diarmad consented, and they both eloped, gaining the open country
before the somnolent company awoke.

But no sooner had Cormac and Fionn rallied than they perceived how they
were duped, and, raging desperately, they vowed vengeance against the
absent pair. Organising a party for pursuit, the jilted lover
immediately set out to scour the country. In this search he sent forward
advance parties of his swiftest and best men in every direction.
Apparently to little purpose at first, for Diarmad was a favourite with
his brethren-in-arms, and the peculiar circumstances of the elopement
invested it with such an element of romance, and of sympathy on the part
of the young heroes, that those in pursuit never could discover the
retreat of the lovers. Even if Fionn himself did happen to get on their
track, he was thwarted by means of some wonderful stratagem on the part
of Diarmad.

Such is the outline of “The Pursuit of Diarmad and Grainne,” a pursuit
which extended all over Erin. In the course of its narration in the
original a large amount of curious information on social manners,
ancient tales, superstitions, topography, and the natural products of
different parts, is introduced. The absconding pair were caught at last,
but the Fenian heroes would not permit Fionn to punish Diarmad.

Ultimately, the chief had his own peculiar revenge. When at the hunt of
the magic boar Diarmad killed that formidable quarry, and escaped
scatheless, with sinister intention Fionn asked him to measure its
length against the bristles. In doing so Diarmad’s foot, his only
vulnerable part, was pierced by one of the poisonous points. And
although Fionn could have restored him by a draught from his life-giving
shell, he would not. Thus died the hapless Diarmad O’Duibhne, an officer
of fine person and most fascinating manners. Famous in family annals
too, for from him the Campbells trace their descent. Not only does he
figure in their genealogical tree,[25] but the Dukes of Argyll still
have the boar’s head on their coat-of-arms.

The “Lay of Diarmad” has for generations been very popular. There are
various versions of it. Pattison’s English rendering is mainly from the
text in Maccallum’s collection. Fionn afterwards repenting that he did
not save his young rival, lamented thus:—

Alas, that, said Fionn, for a woman
I’ve slain my own sister’s son—
For an ill woman slain him! too noble
To be slain for the loveliest one.

Sad stood the heroes beside thee,
O youth of the noble race;
And dim grew the eyes of each maiden
When the mould went over thy face.

And now like the tree, I stand lonely—
Wither’d and wasted and sear;
With the rude howling tempest to tear me,
Where the shade of no green bough is near.

Quite a large collection of ancient Ossianic ballads are concerned with
the wars between the Feinn and the Norse invaders from Lochlann. They
are quite manifestly of dates posterior to the Viking age, and might
constitute a class by themselves. In “The Banners of the Feinn,” the
heroes are marshalled before us one by one. And here also Diarmad
O’Duibhne takes the lead. The ballad, in rollicking modern verse, has
been thus rendered by Dr. Macneill:—

The Norland king stood on the height
And scanned the rolling sea;
He proudly eyed his gallant ships
That rode triumphantly.

And then he looked where lay his camp
Along the rocky coast,
And where were seen the heroes brave
Of Lochlann’s famous host.

Then to the land he turn’d, and there
A fierce-like hero came;
Above him was a flag of gold,
That waved and shone like flame.

“Sweet Bard,” thus spoke the Norland king,
“What banner comes in sight?
The valiant chief that leads the host,
Who is that man of might?”

“That,” said the bard, “is young MacDoon,
His is that banner bright;
When forth the Feinn to battle go,
He’s foremost in the fight,” etc., etc.

Dream-figures of the dim and distant past, Fionn and his warriors have
not quite lost their sway over the Celtic imagination. Indeed, Gaelic
popular tradition has it that they are not dead, but sleeping under
great green knolls somewhere in the Highlands, and that one day they
will awake to restore the Gael to his ancient power, just as the Cymri
look for the return of Arthur. It is even related that once a wight
obtained entrance to their place of rest, and was asked to blow three
times on the _dudach_ or horn. This he did, and, after the first blast,
behold! the sleeping forms of men and dogs moved to life; after the
second, the Feinn warriors got up on their elbows and stared at him. The
sight so unnerved the rash intruder that, throwing down the instrument,
he fled in terror from the ghostly place; while after him came the awful
imprecation, “Milè mollachd, is miosa dh’fhag na fhuair” (“A thousand
curses on you; you left us worse than you found us”). These were the
last words he heard as he made good his escape—the last account of the
Feinn borne to the upper world.

CHAPTER XI
THE INFLUENCE OF THE NORSE INVASIONS ON GAELIC LITERATURE

Britain owes her proud pre-eminence among the nations as much to the sea
as to any other external factor. Her empire seems to sit stable upon the
waves. So far from disconnecting the broadcast parts, it is the ocean
that links them well together into one mighty whole which keeps “the
fretful realms in awe.” Thus as citizens of the British Empire we are
wont to regard the sea as our most powerful ally and friend. We connect
with it the idea of national defence. It is our bulwark. With it we
associate also the spirit of freedom, and pleasure in summer time, when
multitudes frequent the coast and drink in new life and energy there.
And in reflective moments it wafts our thoughts to larger issues, and we
recognise that the sea helps towards the realisation of the brotherhood
of man, for it brings the nations into close touch with one another, and
through the quiet channels of trade and commerce, tends to exorcise old
and distant race antagonisms. And so in this country we are born to view
the ocean with kindly eyes, and to rely upon it almost as our national
foster-parent.

Yet it was not ever thus. We go back to a time in these western lands
when the briny wave was a terror to men, for out there, in storm and
shine, lurked their chief danger. Any morning they awoke, or any evening
they retired to rest, they might see the dragon-prowed galleys of the
wild Norsemen bearing down upon them. And in the night, when the winds
howled or there came a moaning from the deep, they could not be sure but
the dreaded Vikings were upon them. No part of the coast of these
islands or of north or west France was safe from their incursions. The
blue waves and the distant horizon of the watery main were then scanned
with different feelings from ours. A secret fear haunted the imagination
as it saw or fancied it perceived a distant sail on the seascape. The
very children inherited the awe inspired by these ruffians of the deep;
for ruffians they were, many of them, who massacred and laid waste,
sparing not even the peaceful abodes of piety and learning.

Sometimes they bore down upon a reach of coast when the unsuspecting
inhabitants had not the faintest presentiment of peril from the waves. A
medieval writer (Monachi Sangale, Gesta Caroli, II. 14) tells how
Charlemagne himself and his courtiers were thus surprised. They were
seated at a banquet one day in the town of Narbonne, when all of a
sudden some swift barks were seen putting into the harbour. The company
started up, wondering who the strangers might be. Were they Jews, or
Africans, or simply British traders? None could tell. The keen eye of
the king alone hastily divined the situation. “No bales of merchandise,”
said he, “are borne hither by yonder galleys. They are manned by
terrible foes.” And then advancing to the window, he stood for a long
time reflecting, his eyes moist with tears and bent on vacancy. No one
durst ask him the cause of his foreboding, till at length he broached it
himself. “It is not for myself,” muttered he, “that I am weeping, nor
for any harm that yonder barks can do to me; but it grieves me sore to
think that during my lifetime they have made bold to approach these
shores, and greater still is my dejection when I reflect on the evils
they will yet inflict on those who come after me.” And he was right. The
crews that he saw in the offing were plundering Northmen, who were soon
to be followed by kindred sea-rovers bent on conquest. Of little avail
in his own time were his strong forts and garrison towns built to
withstand the foe, and after his death his less imperious successors
hardly dared lift a dagger to stem the tide of invasion that laid waste
their fairest lands and cities. “Take the map,” wrote Sir Francis
Palgrave in his history of _Normandy and England_, “and colour with
vermilion the provinces, districts, and shores which the Northmen
visited, as the record of each invasion. The colouring will have to be
repeated more than ninety times successively before you can arrive at
the conclusion of the Carlovingian dynasty. Furthermore, mark by the
usual symbol of war—the two crossed swords—the localities where the
battles were fought by or against pirates,—where they were defeated or
triumphant, or where they pillaged, burned, or destroyed; and the
valleys and banks of the Elbe, Rhine and Moselle, Scheldt, Meuse, Somme
and Seine, Loire, Garonne and Adour, the inland Allier, and all the
coasts and coastlands between estuary and estuary, and the countries
between the river streams will appear bristling as with _chevaux de
frise_.

“The strongly-fenced Roman cities, the venerated abbeys and their
dependent bourgades, often more flourishing and extensive than the
ancient seats of government, the opulent seaports and trading towns were
all equally exposed to the Danish attacks, stunned by the Northmen’s
approach, subjugated by their fury.”

According to Paul B. du Chaillu, one of the more recent and exhaustive
writers on the subject, the Viking age extended from the second to the
middle of the twelfth century A.D. For a long time—centuries no
doubt—individuals were wont to come as traders, and in that capacity may
have been welcomed. But towards the end of the eighth century an
alarming development took place. Issuing from the viks or bays of Norway
and Denmark, the notorious Vikings appeared as depredators and
conquerors. 787 is given as the date when first their hostile vessels
were seen in English waters. And henceforward concerted attempts were
made to land on our shores and annex our territory. In 793 the work of
plunder was effectively inaugurated by an attack on Lindisfarne and
other points in Northumbria. The monastery on that island was laid
waste, and the Northumbrian kingdom itself so crippled that it lost the
commanding influence it wielded in the days of Adamnan and Bede and
their friend King Aldfrid.

Next year the marauding Norsemen emerged in the Western Isles, which
from this time till the middle of the thirteenth century were destined
to be favourite haunts and special theatres of their operations.

They quickly found and sacked defenceless Iona, and for years took
spoils of the sea between that Island and Erin. The Hebrides and the
Isle of Man were at their mercy in 798, and still insatiate with former
booty, in 802 they revisited Iona and burned its sacred buildings to the
ground. Returning four years later, they put the whole community to the
sword, numbering no fewer than sixty-eight persons.

Iona truly had cause to dread the unceasing attentions of these terrible
strangers, for each visit seemed more appalling than the other. Baulked
in their efforts to get the silver shrines and relics of the departed
Columba, the freebooters made another swift and dire descent upon the
island in 825. Trained by sad experience, the monks on this occasion had
taken the precaution to bury their treasure-trove in a hole in the
earth, covering the surface with sods. And when their fierce assailants
burst upon the unprotected sanctuary, they found the holy St. Blathmac,
who was probably acting-abbot at the time, standing before the altar. Of
him they impetuously demanded the way to the hidden objects of their
pursuit—the precious silver shrines—and when he calmly refused,
insisting that he did not know the place of concealment which his
brethren had selected, they savagely murdered him on the spot. The
Annals of Ulster record the martyrdom, and Walafridus Strabo, a
contemporary on the Continent, gives an interesting metrical account of
the event in Latin, gathered no doubt from one or other of the monks who
had fled to him from these islands through terror of the Norse.

Once more, on Christmas eve in 986, the famous monastery of Hy, ever
rising on its own ashes, was attacked and destroyed by the successors of
these old Danes, and this time the abbot and fifteen monks were put to a
violent death. From Orkney and Shetland, and the coasts of Caithness and
the Hebrides the hardy Norsemen swooped down upon Eastern Scotland as
well as upon the English and Irish seaboards, until at length they made
themselves for a time masters of a great part of the country.

How they went to work may be gathered from their own records. For
example: Harold Fairhair’s saga, c. 22, says, “They ravaged in Scotland
and took possession of Katanes (Caithness) and Sudrland (Sutherland) as
far as Ekkjalsbakki. Sigurd slew the Scotch Jarl, Melbrigdi, and tied
his head to his saddle-straps; the tooth which protruded from the Jarl’s
head wounded the calf of Sigurd’s leg, which swelled and he died
therefrom; he is mounded at Ekkjalsbakki.”

From these details it will be seen that they had much of the Vandal and
the rough buccaneer in their composition. Monasteries were favourite
objects of attack. They contained the richest plunder, and from their
nature, as religious centres, offered the least resistance. And not
content with merely carrying off the loot, the rovers mingled blood with
their depredations. Hence the peculiar fitness of the introduction into
the Litany of the significant petition: “From the fury of the Northmen,
good Lord, deliver us.” And this coarse grain in their character
accounts for their reckless conduct in other directions. They seem to
have had a special aversion to monks and clerics and learning. They made
short work of the books and bells of monasteries. We have contemporary
evidence of their vandalism towards literature in a remarkable book of
the period entitled, _Wars of the Gael with the Gaill_ (Northmen). It is
in Gaelic, and appears in the Book of Leinster, copied about 1150. The
author may have been an eye-witness of many of the scenes, and
particularly of the battle of Clontarf, which he so realistically
describes. His accuracy on matters of fact has been fully attested. We
can, therefore, credit his statement when he affirms regarding the few
men of learning who had survived the Viking ordeal that “their writings
and their books in every church and in every sanctuary where they were,
were burnt and thrown into water by the plunderers from beginning to
end” (of the Norse invasion).

Countless numbers of the illuminated books of the men of Erin and Alba
thus perished. It was a mania with these illiterate rovers to destroy
all learning. Eloquent testimony to this is borne by the historian
Keating also. “It was not allowed,” he says, “to give instruction in
letters.... No scholars, no clerics, no books, no holy relics were left
in church or monastery through dread of them. Neither bard nor
philosopher nor musician pursued his wonted profession in the land.”

And if modern evidence were necessary it might be found in the fact that
while Gaelic MSS. of the Viking age are to be found in almost every
other country of Europe, there is not one to be gleaned in the lands
whence the Norsemen came. From which circumstance it may be inferred
that they set so little value upon these literary acquisitions that they
took no care to preserve them, or even to carry them away to their own
territory. When the tide of invasion had well nigh spent itself,
Ireland, once so rich in native literature, was found to be so depleted
that King Brian Boru had to send delegates abroad, “to buy books beyond
the sea and the great ocean,” as the records affirm, so scarce had they
ultimately become.

Yet even in their roving days the strenuous Norsemen had rare _eddas_
and _sagas_ of their own, to which they were passionately devoted. These
were not then written down, but recited orally, like the Celtic tales,
till they found a literary embodiment in MS. books.

It was only towards the middle of the last century that their wonderful
national sagas burst upon Europe, and thrilled and surprised the learned
quite as much as if they had felt a whiff of the old Viking breath upon
them. Prior to that time historians were largely dependent upon the
English, Irish, and Frankish chronicles for their knowledge of this
northern race and their deeds of spoliation, but since the discovery in
Iceland of the literary remains of their immediate descendants, quite a
fresh light has been cast upon their disposition and habits. And we
recognise that they were not quite the demons and fiends the monkish
scribes believed them to be. It is clear that, having suffered so much
from the hardy invader the latter had the tendency to exaggerate his
ferocity. For example, the author of the _Wars of the Gael with the
Gaill_: “In a word, although there were an hundred sharp, ready, cool,
never-resting brazen tongues in each head, and a hundred garrulous,
loud, unceasing voices for each tongue, they could not recount nor
narrate nor enumerate nor tell what all the Gael suffered in common,
both men and women, laity and clergy, old and young, noble and ignoble,
of hardship and of injury and of oppression in every house from these
valiant, wrathful, foreign, purely pagan people.”

In every war and conquest there are dreadful happenings, and the Viking
was not troubled with sentiment or too much conscience in his
proceedings. He was rough and ready—like his trade, as we should say—as
he needed to be in that age if he meant to be master or even to get a
living.

Great upheavals, we must remember, were taking place in his mother
country and driving him from his home.

To take one example, Harold Fairhair, in bringing the whole of Norway
under his sway effected quite a revolution, changing the old ödal tenure
by which the land was held into a feudal one. Rather than submit to the
new order many nobles and people simultaneously sought freedom
elsewhere. They settled in Shetland, Orkney, and the Hebrides,
occasionally raiding back to harass the king. But by the year 872 the
latter had so far established his rule at home that he was free to
tackle these islands with their Norwegian rebels and annex the territory
to Norway. Whereupon the more daring and independent spirits who had
settled there and in Ireland, and had contracted alliances in marriage
with leading native families, once more hived off, this time sailing
away for Iceland to join friends and relations who had migrated thither
from the mother country. And these were the nucleus of the colony whose
descendants produced the wonderful Icelandic literature which is now
reckoned among the most valuable assets of medieval Europe. Among the
settlers were men who bore Gaelic names and left their impress upon this
Norse heritage. From the parchments lately discovered upon which the
history of the Vikings is written, and which are begrimed by the smoke
of the Icelandic cabin and worn by the centuries that have passed over
them, we learn many things that tend to show the Northmen in a new
light. These men, who held undisputed sway of the seas for more than
nine centuries, were not by any means barbarians. They had a
civilisation rivalling that of the Gael, though of a different warp and
woof, and they were not even without a script or mode of writing. The
characters they used are known as runes, and may have been in use as
early as the second or third century.

In the sagas we are often told that drawings on shields and embroidery
on cloth were made by them to preserve the memory of heroic deeds and
important events. And though the set who invaded our shores, in the
stress of war and sailing were not likely to trouble much with learning
or letters, their nation had doubtless retired _literati_ just like our
own.

To trace the effect of these Norse invasions on Celtic literature will
now be our main endeavour.

I. The first and immediate influence was doubtless to arrest its
progress. After ages of apparent barrenness, the genius of the
Gaelic-speaking peoples had at length produced the germ of a literature
which in the days of St Patrick and St. Columba took root and began to
grow. For well-nigh four centuries it had gone on developing in a most
promising way. The quiet and leisure of the monasteries furnished the
atmosphere most suitable for its inception and subsequent growth. These
religious retreats were then the centres of learning and nurseries of
thought, and many men were arising within their sacred walls who had a
genuine love and taste for writing—a love so great that they were not
merely content with copying books, composing poems, or writing history,
but they embellished them in a way which has excited the admiration of
modern times.

Gaelic literature both in Ireland and Scotland was thus bidding fair to
yield a rich and abundant harvest when the blight of the Norse invasion
fell suddenly upon it, and effectually hindered its farther advance for
several centuries. The history of literary work in every age and country
shows that it is mostly in times of peace that this delicate plant
flourishes. In the stormier periods, when wars are waged, changes
frequent, and a spirit of unrest abroad, production of books is rare or
even non-existent.

When the Celts themselves were a warrior race, living for the most part
by the sword, and migrating from land to land, they had no literature
that we know of. The conditions of life were not such that men could
quietly cultivate the art and practice of writing. Life was too full of
change, too turbulent, and too uncertain.

Similarly the Norsemen during the Viking age, till they gained a
peaceful retreat in Iceland, were no litterateurs. Sailing and fighting
were more exciting, and with these the habits of the scribe or of the
author were not entirely compatible. And so when the tide of invasion
burst upon the monasteries of Ireland and Scotland, when rest from
strife and security from change could no longer be had, authorship, if
it did not entirely cease, became more rare and spasmodic. This is
particularly true of Scotland, for with the exception of the Book of
Deer, with its Latin contents of the ninth century, and its Gaelic
entries written towards the end of the Viking period, we have nothing to
show, of known Scottish origin, from the beginning to the end of these
incursions. Ireland was more fortunate in that in spite of invasion her
literary output was more continuous, especially in the department of
poetry.

II. Contemporary with this arrested development, the sinister influence
of the Norse depredations may be traced in another result, and one which
has left a deep and permanent mark in the history of Celtic literature.
It is the lamentable dispersion of the literary classes—monks and
missionaries—to the Continent with such books and MSS. as they were able
to save from the violence of the invaders. Long before the inroads of
these Norsemen became a terror to the Gael, we know that Irish
missionaries had spread themselves over England, France, Germany,
Switzerland, and Italy. And in addition to their peripatetic preaching,
they had established monasteries and colleges for the diffusion of
Christianity and learning. From MSS. preserved in St. Gall, Switzerland,
we gather that these pilgrim Scots usually travelled in companies,
provided with long walking-sticks, leathern wallets, and water-bottles.
They wore long flowing hair, and were clad in rough garments. Though
thus rude and uncouth in appearance, they were accomplished scholars,
many of them, and easily acquired the languages of the countries through
which they passed, or in which they settled and preached with all the
perfervid eloquence so natural to the Celt. To show the extent of their
wanderings, and the distinguished calibre of the missionaries
themselves, a few names may be given which still live in books and
tradition. St. Columbanus, perhaps the best known of all, died in 615.
His name is perpetuated in the town of San Columbano. It was he who
founded the monasteries of Luxueil in France, and Bobbio among the
Apennines. Almost equally prominent as an evangelist was St. Gall, his
companion, who gave his name not only to the town which subsequently
grew up beside his monastery, but also to a whole canton of Switzerland.
Then there were St. Catald, from the school of Lismore in Ireland; St.
Donnatt his brother, Bishop of Lupice in Naples; St Kilian the apostle
and martyr of Franconia, still annually commemorated at Würzburg. At a
monastery near Strasburg, also founded by an Irish bishop, there is a
charter of date 810, which specifies grants made to that house, to the
poor, and to the pilgrim Scots—the nine of whom therein mentioned are
all bishops except the abbot. In the ninth century there was a convent
of Scots at Mont St. Victor near Feldkirk. Dungall, of the same Scotic
nationality, figures as the author of the famous letter to Charlemagne
on the eclipses of 810, and he held the office of preceptor at the
cathedral school at Pavia. Besides the numerous other places in which
they laboured, from the middle of the seventh to the twelfth century,
Scotic monasteries were founded at Ratisbon, Vienna, Eichstadt,
Würzburg, Erfurt, Kelheim, and Constance.

These earlier retreats served as so many houses of refuge for the poor
monks and scholars flying from the fury of the Norsemen, when life and
property became insecure at home, in Iona, and elsewhere. It is known
that a fresh tide of Gaelic pilgrims set out for the Continent from the
time that the new peril appeared, seeking safe custody for themselves
and their books among their countrymen abroad.

And thus it has come to pass that there are to-day hundreds of Celtic
MSS. in Latin and Gaelic widely scattered throughout Europe, in places
as far apart as Paris, Brussels, Dresden, Berne, Vienna, Rome, Florence,
Milan, Schaffhausen, St. Gall, etc. And while in the British Isles we
have only seven of these with Gaelic writing prior to the eleventh
century, on the Continent there are as many as twenty.

It is surmised that it was in this manner in 825, after the attack on
Iona and murder of St. Blathmac, that the famous _Vita Columbæ_ of
Adamnan found its way to Reichenau on the Rhine, where it remained for
nearly a millennium, till it was ultimately transferred to Schaffhausen.

These are two far-reaching and long-lasting effects of the Viking
troubles—the arrest of the literary development and the dispersion of
the documents, but they by no means exhaust the category.

III. We have now to take into account the severance of Ireland from
Scotland. Anterior to the Norse invasions the language and literature of
both were one. There is no distinction to be made, for they were common
to both countries from the time of St. Columba, and there was constant
coming and going between Scotland and Ireland. But when the Norsemen
came they effectually put a stop to this. For two centuries they kept
the kindred realms apart, and never again was the original unity
restored.

During the period of disjunction the separated parts began to travel on
different lines, and when the Viking sway ceased to sever them, the
language and literature of each had already taken on a character of its
own sufficiently divergent to keep them for ever asunder. The Book of
Deer is the first monument of this departure in Scotland, even as the
Leabhar Na h’Uidhre and _Liber Hymnorum_ are the earliest in Ireland.

The Norse invasions were thus directly responsible for the rise of the
Scottish Gaelic and our native vernacular literature as distinct from
the Irish. Had it not been for their interception there is no knowing
how long the two dialects might have continued as one.

As it was, notwithstanding the growing divergence, the written, though
not the spoken language of both countries might be regarded as still,
for the most part, the same in form till the fourteenth century. After
that they ceased to be even apparently identical, and to-day the chief
differences between the two tongues are these four:—

1. The Irish has a future in the verb, whereas Gaelic uses the present
tense to indicate futurity.

2. Inflection is fuller in written Irish than in written Gaelic.

3. In Irish (south especially) the accent remains on the end syllable,
whereas in Gaelic it is nearly always on the first.

4. In Gaelic every noun outside the _o_ declension forms the plural in
_n_, whereas in Irish _n_ is shown very rarely.

IV. Instead of the parent Irish, there was from henceforth a Norse
linguistic influence upon the language of Scotland. There can be no
doubt that the new element thus imported into the Gaelic is very
considerable. Yet this is a department of philology which has never been
adequately worked. It offers an interesting field for further research
and inquiry, and it is gratifying to know that the study of Irish-Norse
relations, in its various aspects, claims the attention of such eminent
writers as Professor Zimmer, Professor Sophus Bugge, Dr. Alexander
Bugge, Dr. Craigie of Oxford, and Miss Faraday.

We have to reckon with the fact that the Norsemen came in large numbers,
and freely intermarried with the native races, so that to-day the
inhabitants of Orkney, North-east Caithness, North and West Sutherland,
and North Lewis, differ very little in physique and general appearance
from the people of Norway and Iceland. And in Skye, Islay, and Kintyre
there is a large admixture of Viking blood, as well as in the other
Hebridean Islands, though not so marked in Mull and Jura.

As we should expect, the Norse element in the Gaelic is most in evidence
in maritime terms and place names.

As examples of the former, we have _vata_, a boat; _sgoth_, a skiff;
_birlinn_, a yacht; _sgioba_, a crew; _stiuir_, a rudder; _ailm_, a
helm; _sgod_, the sheet of the sail; _rac_, the masthoop; _stagh_, the
stay; _reang_, the rib; _tobhta_, the thwart; _tearr_, tar; _spor_, a
flint.

Then we have _eilean_ for island; _haf_, the open sea; _ob_, a
land-locked bay, as in Oban; _uig_, a creek; _aoi_, an isthmus;
_geodha_, a gully; _sgeir_, a reef; _bodha_ and _roc_, sunken rocks;
_cleit_, a cliff; _grunnd_, the bottom; _bruic_, sea-weed.

Of place names there is no lack. It has been calculated that in Lewis,
Norse are still to Gaelic names as three or four to one; in Skye as
three to two; in Islay as one to two; in Kintyre as one to four; in
Arran and the Isle of Man as one to eight.

The Minch they called Skottlandsfjord. The smaller isles were nearly all
renamed, Eriskay, Eric’s isle; Jura, deer’s isle; Pladda, flat isle;
Staffa, stave isle; Sanda, sand isle. To the larger islands the invaders
left their original names, though these were occasionally sounded in
Norse fashion, as, for example, Sgith (Skye) as Skiō with long vowel.

Personal names were also imported; Rognvald as Raonall or Rao’all,
Ragnhilda as Raonailt, Torcull, Goraidh, etc. The Latin Magnus, which
was common as a personal name in Norway, we borrowed in the Gaelic form
Manus; and such surnames as Macleod, Nicolson, Macaulay, and Macaskill
with the Celtic Mac prefixed.

Other common words of Norse derivation are _traill_, a slave; _nabuidh_,
a neighbour; _sgillinn_, a penny; _mòd_, a court of justice, meeting;
_gadhar_, a greyhound; _toraisgean_, a peat knife, half Norse, half
Gaelic; _suith_, soot; _shearradair_, towel; _mal_, rent; _gleadhraich_,
noise.

The Vikings were called _sumarlidi_, “summer wanderers,” because they
were most abroad at that season, and from this came the name once famous
in the West—“Somerled” of the Isles. To the Norse is also attributed the
insertion of _t_ in words like _struth_ for _sruth_, _stron_ for _sron_.

V. But more important even than the introduction of new words was the
influence upon the structure of the language. And competent authorities
hold that to it we must assign the main share in accelerating the decay
of inflection noticeable in the Scottish Gaelic and Manx as compared
with the Irish. The latter was not so much exposed to Norse influence as
the former. And it is very apparent that the change referred to began to
assert itself soon after the Norse had ostracised the Irish, and taken
its place as a rival language in the West, destined to influence the
local Gaelic.

It is not contended that the Gaelic writers derived any help from the
Norsemen. They were themselves the more advanced of the two. On the
other hand, the Icelandic scholar Viglisson has traced Gaelic rhymes and
measures as well as Gaelic ideas in the old Norse literature, and
Professor Zimmer even suggests that the Icelander owes to the Gael his
prose style. In the Islendinga Book, c. 1., we read that when Iceland
was first settled from Norway in the days of Harold Fairhair there were
Christian men, whom the Norsemen called Papa, but who afterwards went
away because they would not remain with the heathen, and left behind
them Irish books and croziers and bells, from which it could be seen
that they were Irishmen.[26]

VI. How far the Norse ideas have entered into the warp and woof of
Gaelic literature is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the whole
subject, and one that offers a wide field for research. It cannot yet be
said that we have sufficiently differentiated between the two sets of
legends, beliefs, and customs to be able to affirm with certainty that
such and such belong to the one race, and such and such belong to the
other. The mythologies of peoples have so much in common, so much that
seems characteristic of the thinking of the whole human race at certain
stages of its development, that many ideas and legends have no exclusive
value, and cannot be claimed as the original heritage of one people more
than another.

Yet conceptions pass from land to land and folk to folk, like an
epidemic, and become assimilated by each new race that breathes or
imbibes them, and as the Gaels have contributed to the thought of the
Norsemen, so have the Vikings in turn impressed their ideas, especially
their legends and beliefs, upon the imaginative race with whom they
mingled, and by whom they ultimately became absorbed.

When we remember that, in the opinion of the best authorities, even the
very oldest of the Gaelic sagas could hardly have been written down
before the seventh or eighth century, and that many of them are of much
later date, we can well conceive how a Norse element might enter largely
into them.

It is well known that the Lochlanners or Norsemen figure largely in the
Ossianic poems, and “it is quite evident,” says Dr. Hyde, “that most of
them, at least in the modern form in which we now have them, are
post-Norse productions.”

In the Mythological, which is really the latest in point of writing,
while the Fomorians who dwelt in Lochlann, vicious and troublesome
invaders as they were, may in their origin be conceived as none other
than the sea-powers personified—the rough chaotic tumult of the Atlantic
Ocean, against which in the west of Ireland the various settlers had to
contend, they might more literally represent the Viking rovers which
later ages had to encounter, and by whom they were so often harassed and
overcome.

In such stories as The Children of Lir, and more particularly The
Children of Tuireann, we have Gaelic examples of Norse beliefs and
superstitions. Take, for instance, shape-changing, of which there are
many illustrations in the Viking sagas. We are reminded at once of the
unhappy fate of the children of Lir, when we read in the Hrolf Kraki,
cc. 25, 26, that “King Hring of Uppdalir in Norway had a son Björn, and
when his wife died, he married a woman from Tuinmôrk. She changed her
stepson into a bear in this way. She struck him with a wolf-skin glove,
and said that he should become a fierce and cruel lair-bear, and use no
other food than the cattle of his father.” She went on to say, “Thou
shalt kill it for thy food, so much of it that it will be unexampled,
and never shalt thou get out of this spell, and this revenge shall harm
thee.”

Then it is told that the king’s cattle were killed in large numbers, as
a big and fierce grey bear began to attack them. One evening the Bondi’s
daughter (Björn’s sweetheart) happened to see this fierce bear, which
came and fondled her much. She thought she recognised in the animal the
eyes of her lover, and followed him to his den, where, strange to
relate, she saw, not the bear, but a man. And Björn, for he was no
other, told her he was a beast by day and a man by night.

As in this Norse saga we have the marriage, the stepmother, the revenge,
the striking with the wolf-skin glove, the spell, all corresponding to
the similar details in the Gaelic tale, with the exception that in the
latter the objects are usually struck by a magic wand instead of by a
wolf-skin glove. And comparing it with the story of the children of
Tuireann, Cian went into the shape of a pig, while Björn figured as a
bear.

The two Gaelic stories above referred to, though they profess to belong
to the Mythological age, centuries before Christ, were actually written
down much later than the Heroic tales. The Norse story, on the other
hand, is supposed to be laid in the sixth century A.D., and it would be
hard to say, we daresay, which originated first or found the earliest
expression in writing.

Another Viking idea which has found its way into Gaelic literature is
the belief in a Valhalla, or hall of the slain. It was held that to fall
gloriously on the field of battle secured undisputed entrance into this
heaven. In the “Aged Bard’s Wish,” an attractive poem of the Macpherson
period, we find the bard desirous of obtaining entry at death into the
hall where dwell Ossian and Daol. This conception of the future was
evidently adopted from Norse traditions, for the Gael, so far as is
known, had not originally the idea of a Valhalla. Transmigration was
more in his line. And curious was the occupation of the warriors in the
hall of the slain.

“Every day after having dressed, they put on their war clothes, and go
out into the enclosure and fight and slay each other. This is their
game; near day meal they ride home to Valhalla and sit down to drink”
(later edda, c. 40).

The unworthy and fushionless had not this bliss. Their portion was a
region cold, foggy, and cheerless. And it is thought that the author of
Adamnan’s vision may have got his cold and wet imagery of the place of
woe from the pagan invaders. St. Brendan, in his _Navigatio Brendani_, a
book well known in medieval Europe, gives a legend which is one of the
most singular products of Celtic imagination. He found Judas upon a rock
in the midst of the Polar seas. Once a week he passes a day there to
refresh himself from the fires of Hell. A cloak that he had given to a
beggar is hung before him and tempers his sufferings. As St. Brendan
lived in the middle of the sixth century the subject of the legend is
pre-Norse, and it is the heat that is represented as infernal. Dante, it
will be remembered, reserves the ice and cold for the last degree of
torment in the Inferno. And of Highland bards, Duncan Macrae, David
Mackellar, and others, down to the eighteenth century, have introduced
the same idea. Indeed, it has even been hinted that the tendency of the
Highland preacher to dwell upon the sterner aspects of our faith may
well be due to the lingering influence of the northern paganism. But
this we think rather far-fetched and unlikely, for other less ancient
influences, local and potent, have been at work to depress the outlook
of the Gael.

The Norseman, however, is still with us in hidden and often unknown
corners of our life, our literature, and our history. Perhaps to him we
owe our continuance as a race to this day. He has carried with him over
the wave the breath of freedom and strenuous endeavour, and infused them
into the life of this great nation, helping Britain to build up and
maintain a world-wide empire and supremacy upon the seas.

But judging his influence upon Gaelic literature solely, we cannot say
that, so far as it is known, it was of a helpful or even far-reaching
kind. In the first shock of invasion it would rather seem to have been
ruinous and deleterious in its effects, arresting development and
dispersing the rising literary activity.

But what if it could be proved by further research that while distinctly
hostile to the ecclesiastical order in all its manifestations and
productions, and therefore its books, the appearance of the Norsemen in
these islands revived the interest in the native sagas, so that the
scribes were encouraged to write them down and preserve them for future
ages. Then verily it might with strictest veracity be said that to the
Vikings we owe the cream of our literature, for it is a recognised fact
that “the sagas and historic tales, and the poetry that is mingled with
them, are of far greater importance from a purely literary point of
view” than all the ecclesiastical transcriptions and contributions of
the period. But this is a suggestion we offer as not at all improbable,
and, like the whole subject of Norse influence, is worthy of a fuller
investigation than any it has yet received.

CHAPTER XII
THE FOUR ANCIENT BOOKS OF WALES

The _Myvyrian Archaiology_—Oldest texts—The Black Book of
Caermarthen—The Book of Aneurin—The Book of Taliessin—The Red Book
of Hergest—Gildas and Nennius—The ancient Laws and Institutes—A
great dialectic battle—The princes of song—“I Yscolan”—A Welsh
Ossianic poem—Characteristics of the early poetry—The medieval
romances—Their history—Modern translations of the Mabinogion—Two
classes of tales—The legend of Taliessin—His curious odes—Kilhwch
and Olwen—The Lady of the Fountain—Three striking features of the
Arthurian romances—Their influence on Western Europe.

The arrival of James Macpherson marks a great moment in the history of
Celtic literature. It was the signal for a general resurrection. It
would seem as if he sounded the trumpet, and the graves of ancient MSS.
were opened, the books were read, and the dead were judged out of the
things that were written in them.

This is true not only of the Highland and Irish barderie, but also of
the poetry of Wales. The sudden popularity of the Ossianic publications
led to a desire on the part of the Welsh to show that they also were in
possession of a body of native poems not less interesting, and with far
better claims, as they thought, to authenticity. It is significant to
note that though Edward Lhuyd gave an account of the Welsh MSS. in the
_Archæologica Britannica_ as early as 1707, none of the poems were
printed till the era of Macpherson. His famous _Fragments of Ancient
Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland_, 1760, was soon followed
by a succession of rival publications from the sister country, such as
_Specimens of the Poetry of the Ancient Welsh Bards_, 1764; _Musical and
Poetical Relics of the Welsh Bards_, 1784; “Poems of Taliessin,” in the
_Gentleman’s Magazine_, 1789–90; _The Heroic Elegies and other Pieces of
Llywarch Hên_, 1792, and in the year 1801 the text of the whole of the
poems. This latter figures as the now oft-quoted _Myvyrian Archaiology
of Wales_, containing all the chief productions of Welsh literature, and
was published in 1801–1807 by Owen Jones, a wealthy furrier in Thames
Street, London. Interested scholars, among them Aneurin Owen, Thomas
Price, William Rees, and John Jones set themselves to finish the work of
the Myvyrian peasant.

There was no lack of venerable MSS. from which to draw, for many
transcripts had been made from time to time in the past. But the sources
to which we must go for the oldest texts are mainly four, known as _The
Four Ancient Books of Wales_, namely:—

The Black Book of Caermarthen.
The Book of Aneurin.
The Book of Taliessin.
The Red Book of Hergest.

The Black Book of Caermarthen is the oldest. It is a MS. of the twelfth
century in the Hengwrt collection, and contains only poems. It consists
of fifty-four folios of parchment in small quarto, with illuminated
capitals. There are four different handwritings, apparently of the same
period, with the exception of a few insertions made by a subsequent
writer. The MS. belonged originally to the six black Canons of the
priory of Caermarthen. Hence the name. After the dissolution of that
religious house at the Reformation, it passed into the hands of Sir John
Price, a native of Brecnockshire, and before the year 1658 was in the
Hengwrt collection. Last century it changed hands again, when the whole
of the latter most valuable collection was bequeathed to W. W. E. Wynne,
Esq., of Peniarth.

The Book of Aneurin, second in point of antiquity, belongs to the
thirteenth century. It also is a small quarto, consisting of nineteen
folios of parchment. Here we have, perhaps, the most ancient copy now
extant of that truly venerable and illustrious relic of Welsh poetry
called the “Gododin,” as well as the four Gorchanau, not quite so old.
The capitals which mark the beginning of the stanzas are coloured
alternately red and green. This literary monument belonged formerly to
the Hengwrt collection, but in more recent times was bought from Mrs.
Powell of Abergavenny by Sir Thomas Phillipps, Bart., of Middle Hill.

The Book of Taliessin, third in order, is still in the same collection.
A small quarto MS. written on vellum, in one hand throughout, of the
early fourteenth century, it consists now of thirty-eight leaves, and
wants the outer page both at the beginning and at the end. Hence it
begins in the middle of one poem and ends in that of another.

The last, but certainly not the least of this wonderful series, is the
Red Book of Hergest in Jesus College, Oxford. It is a thick folio
containing 360 leaves of vellum, and has been written at different times
from the early part of the fourteenth century till the middle of the
fifteenth. From this valuable codex Lady Charlotte Guest got eleven of
her far-famed stories.

The book takes its name from Hergest Court, a seat of the Vaughans, near
Knighton, Radnorshire, and before it was finally gifted to Jesus College
in 1701, it passed through several hands.

It is written in double columns, in three different handwritings. There
is reason to infer that it was begun in 1318 at the very latest, a date
given in one of the columns, and that it was finished in 1454. The book
is an enormous compilation of Welsh compositions in prose and verse, of
all the periods from the sixth century till the middle of the fifteenth.

Embellished lately in a magnificent binding of red morocco with steel
clasps, and preciously preserved in a case, it is now shown as one of
the curiosities of Oxford.

If we except this codex and others in Jesus College, and those in the
British Museum, most of the Welsh MSS. are in private hands. They used
to belong to the religious institutions, but when these were done away
with in the reign of Henry VIII., the ancient documents were dispersed.
Various leading families of Wales afterwards made collections, thus
helping to preserve the MSS. from destruction, but more than one of
these collections have since been destroyed by fire.

It must be understood that though the four great books of poetry and
romance here considered have been called _The Four Ancient Books of
Wales_, they are not the only compositions of a remote origin. For there
are three other notable works represented in very old MSS. These are,
first, the history and epistle of Gildas, forming one Latin treatise on
the early history of the country, and written by him in the year 560. Of
this work there have been three MSS. The oldest perished, but not before
a printed copy had been taken of it in 1568. The other two, one of the
thirteenth and the other of the fourteenth century, are still extant in
the public library of Cambridge.

Next to this very ancient history of Gildas is that of Nennius—an
edition of the _History of the Britons_ made by him in 858. There are
three MSS. extant of this venerable book dating as early as the tenth
century—one in the Vatican, one in Paris, and one in the British Museum.

Not less celebrated is the great native compilation entitled _The
Ancient Laws and Institutes of Wales_. The oldest of them, namely, The
Laws of Howeldda, belong to the tenth century.

Wales thus possesses a literature which for antiquity carries us back as
far as the age of St. Columba. In the sixth century, when the Abbot of
Iona was opening the page of poetic history in Scotland, the little land
in the west had many distinguished bards, such as Aneurin, Taliessin,
Llywarch Hên, Myrddin, Kian, Talhaiarn. For the preservation of their
pieces we are mainly indebted to _The Four Ancient Books_.

As in the case of the Ossianic compositions, a great dialectic battle
was fought over the origin of these Cymric poems, some, such as Malcolm
Laing and John Pinkerton, denying, and others affirming their antiquity,
but the outcome of the controversy has been to establish their genuine
authenticity. While it is freely admitted by the best critics that many
of the pieces traditionally attributed to Taliessin are not older than
the twelfth century, no one now disputes that Aneurin, Taliessin,
Llywarch Hên, and Myrddin were famous bards who lived and composed in
the sixth century, and that we have some of their poems preserved in the
above-mentioned books with the exception, perhaps, of Myrddin’s. The
honour of the title “King of the bards” lies between the first two, both
of whom have been so designated. Stephens, in his _Literature of the
Cymry_, gives the palm to Aneurin. His great poem, the “Gododin,” has
attracted much attention on account of its peculiar character and
recognised historic value. It is practically divided into two parts by
stanza forty-five, where the author speaks in his own name. The first
part is consistent throughout, and Dr. Skene regards it as the original,
as distinguished from the second, which may be a later continuation made
up of other incidents. The poem is found in the Book of Aneurin, and
various theories have been advanced as to the locality and date of the
battle it treats of. One of these assumed that the subject was a
struggle between the tribe Ottadeni and the Saxons in the sixth century.
Another, that it referred, on the contrary, to the traditional slaughter
of the British chiefs at Stonehenge by Hengest in “The Plot of the Long
Knives.” A third would find in it the battle mentioned by Bede as having
been fought between Aidan, King of the Scots of Dalriada, and Ethelfrid,
King of Northumbria, in 603. A fourth theory suggests _that_ between
Oswy and Penda. But the name of the Scottish Donald Brec emerges in the
story, “A phen dyvynwal vrych brein ae cnoyn,” which in English means,
“And the head of Donald Brec the ravens gnawed it.” The scene of the
struggle appears to have been Catraeth and Gododin. And it is
interesting to note that one of the editors of the _Myvyrian
Archaiology_ (Mr. Edward Williams) locates it in Roxburghshire, as the
battle fought between the Cymry and Saxons in 570. Villemarqué, on the
other hand, in his, _Poems des Bardes Bretons_, places the contest on
the banks of the Calder in Lanarkshire in 578. While Dr. Skene is
equally sure that the requirements of the case are met “in that part of
Scotland where Lothian meets Stirlingshire in the two districts of
Gododin and Catraeth, both washed by the sea of the Firth of Forth, and
where the great Roman wall terminates at Caredin, or the Fort of
Eidinn.”

The style of the poem may be gleaned from the following rendering:—

A grievous descent was made on his native place,
The price of mead in the hall, and the feast of wine;
His blades were scattered about between two armies;
Illustrious was the Knight in front of Gododin,
Eithinyn the renowned, an ardent spirit the bull of conflict.
A grievous descent was made in front of the extended riches,
The army dispersed with trailing shields—
A shivered shield before the herd of the roaring Beli,
A dwarf from the bloody field hastened to the fence;
On our part there came a hoary-headed man to take counsel
On a prancing steed bearing a message from the golden-torqued leader.
Twrch proposed a compact in front of the destructive course,
Worthy was the shout of refusal.
We cried, Let Heaven be our protection;
Let his compact be that he should be prostrated by the spear in battle.
The warriors of the far-famed Alclud
Would not contend without prostrating his host to the ground.

Like Ossian, Aneurin appears to have been a warrior-bard. Where he
speaks of himself he says:—

I am not headstrong and petulant.
I will not avenge myself on him who drives me.
I will not laugh in derision.
Under foot for a while,
My knee is stretched,
My hands are bound
In the earthen house,
With an iron chain
Around my two knees.
Yet of the mead from the horn,
And of the men of Catraeth,
I, Aneurin, will compose,
As Taliessin knows,
An elaborate song
Or a strain to Gododin
Before the dawn of the brightest day.

Taliessin, on the other hand, was no warrior, simply a bard. Several of
his pieces possess more real poetry than any part of the “Gododin.” As
Stephens has remarked, they show more skill in composition, finer ideas,
bolder images, and more intense passion than any poet of the same age.
There are seventy-seven pieces attributed to him, twelve of which, this
critic thinks, may be genuine, and as old as the sixth century; among
these the “Battle of Gwenystrad,” the “Battle of Argoed Llwyvain,” the
“Battle of Dyffryn Gwarant,” and some of the Gorchanau. In after life
Taliessin became the bard of Urien Rheged, to whom and to his son Owain
his chief poems are addressed. These contain some passages of exquisite
beauty.

Llywarch Hên does not rival the other two as a prince of song, yet his
poems are not lacking in poetic excellence. They are undoubtedly old,
and valuable from his descriptions of manners, and the incidental
allusions he makes that are strikingly illustrative of the age, and all
the more interesting because we have so few other authorities to
enlighten us as to its manners. His forte lay not so much in heroic
poetry as in elegies and pathetic lamentations. Of the poems attributed
to him in the Red Book of Hergest the following is a specimen:—

Sitting high upon a hill, battle inclined is
My mind, and it does not impel me onward.
Short is my journey, my tenement is laid waste.

Sharp is the gale, it is bare punishment to live,
When the trees array themselves in gay colours
Of summer, violently ill I am this day.

I am no hunter, I keep no animal of the chase,
I cannot move about;
As long as it pleases the cuckoo, let her sing.

The loud-voiced cuckoo sings with the dawn,
Her melodious notes in the dales of Cuawg;
Better is the lavisher than the miser.

At Aber Cuawg the cuckoos sing
On the blossom covered branches;
The loud-voiced cuckoo, let her sing awhile.

At Aber Cuawg the cuckoos sing,
On the blossom covered branches;
Woe to the sick that hears their contented notes.

At Aber Cuawg the cuckoos sing,
The recollection in my mind;
There are that hear them that will not hear them again.

Have I not listened to the cuckoo on the ivied tree?
Did not my shield hang down?
What I loved is but vexation; what I loved is no more.

In such doleful strains the bard continues his parable. The sad note of
the Gael is not lacking in him.

Myrddin is the fourth great poet of the sixth century. Various poems are
reputed his in the _Myvyrian Archaiology_, but they are all probably of
a much later date, as Stephens and others think. One of the most
interesting to us of these traditional Myrddin pieces is the “I
Yscolan.” It appears in the Black Book of Caermarthen. Yscolan is
represented as having held a dialogue with Myrddin. To have done so he
must have lived in the sixth century. Welsh writers, like Davies and
Stephens, identify the name as St. Colan or Columba. “Instead of being
unknown to the Cymry of the Middle Ages, no person was better known than
Yscolan,” says Stephens. From their view Dr. Skene dissents, and
Professor Rhys also holds it utterly impossible that Yscolan was St.
Columba, as the two names cannot be connected, _Columba_ being in Welsh
_Cwlum_. It is not maintained by any of these critics that the poem, as
it stands, is anything like so old as the period of Myrddin. But older
it evidently is than the time of Edward I., and this shows, as the Welsh
writers affirm, the existence among the bards, from an early date, of a
tradition that St. Columba had, in his zeal for Christianity, destroyed
some druidic books. This tradition got mixed up with a later one about
the books of Cambria, which had been sent to the White Tower of London
for security, having been destroyed there by some Vandal of an Yscolan,
who must have lived after the twelfth century.

But whoever the Yscolan of the dialogue was, Myrddin assails him thus
(Stephens’ version):—

Black is thy horse, and black thy cap,
Black thy head, and black thyself,
Black-headed man, art thou Yscolan?

And Yscolan answers:—

I am Yscolan the Scholar,
Light is my Scottish knowledge.
My grief is incurable for making the ruler take offence[27] at thee.

For having burnt a church,[28] destroyed the cattle of a school,
And caused a book to be drowned,
I feel my penance to be heavy.

Creator of all creations,
And greatest of all supporters,
Forgive me my fault.

A full year I have been
At Bangor on the pole of a weir.
Consider thou my sufferings from sea-worms.

If I had known as well as I now do
How clearly the wind blows upon the sprigs of the waving wood,
I should not have done what I did.

Had he known of certain proofs of druidic excellence he would have
refrained. Though the tradition of St. Columba having destroyed some
pagan books may have actually been current among the Welsh bards, it is
very unlikely that he ever met Myrddin. As Dr. Skene suggests, the black
Yscolan may well have been one of the black Canons of Caermarthen
connected with some book-episode in the Tower. For we know from Adamnan
that the dress of Columba was white, and the above sketch hardly fits in
with his history. It is interesting to note that in the book called
Taliessin, there is “The Death-song of Corroi, son of Dayry,” curiously
enough the only specimen of a Welsh Ossianic poem which has come down to
us. It tells the story of Curigh of Munster; and Cuchulinn, the famous
hero of Ulster:—

Tales will be known to me from sky to earth
Of the contention of Corroi and Cocholyn,
Numerous their tumults about their borders.

This poem is fully noticed by Dr. Skene in his edition of the _Book of
the Dean of Lismore_, p. 141.

Taking the Welsh poems as a whole, the difficulty has always been to
differentiate between the historical and the mythological. They are
usually so obscure in themselves, especially the so-called mythological
ones, that some think there lurks in them a system of mystical and
semi-pagan philosophy handed down from the Druids, and which our age
cannot fathom.

Others think that they are nothing but the wild and extravagant
vapourings of bards of the twelfth and subsequent centuries. Referring
to this, Dr. Skene wrote in his edition of the poems, and translations
of the poems, in _The Four Ancient Books of Wales_, vol. i. pp. 15, 16:—

I consider that the true value of these poems is a problem which has
still to be solved. Whether they are genuine works of the bards whose
names they bear, or whether they are the production of a later age, I
do not believe that they contain any such system of Druidism or
Neo-Druidism as Davies, Herbert, and others attempt to find in them,
nor do I think that their authors wrote, and the compilers of these
ancient MSS. took the pains to transcribe, century after century, what
was a mere farago of nonsense and of no historical or literary value.
I think that these poems have a meaning, and that, both in connection
with the history and literature of Wales, that meaning is worth
finding out; and I think further, that if they were subjected to a
just and candid criticism, we ought to be able to ascertain their true
place and value in the literature of Wales.

Renan, on the other hand, held that bardism lasted into the heart of the
Middle Ages under the form of a secret doctrine, with a conventional
language and symbols almost wholly derived from the solar divinity of
Arthur. “This,” he says, “may be termed Neo-Druidism, a kind of Druidism
subtilised and reformed on the model of Christianity, which may be seen
growing more and more obscure and mysterious until the moment of its
total disappearance.”

One remarkable fact in connection with these early poems is how few of
them contain any notice of Arthur. Out of the whole number there are
only five which mention him at all, and then it is the historical
Arthur, the Guledig, to whom the defence of the wall was entrusted, and
who fought the twelve battles in the north, perishing at Camlan.

For accounts of the ideal Arthur we need to turn to the medieval
romances, and this is the part of Welsh literature which has most
fascinated the world and influenced the literatures of Europe. It is
well known how there arose on the Continent in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries a body of Romance, popular in England, France,
Germany, Norway, Sweden, and even Iceland, down to the Reformation, and
it is equally well known that the origin of these tales may be traced to
Wales through the north-west of France—the modern Brittany.

First appeared the _Historia Britonum_ of Gruffydd ap Arthur, commonly
known as Geoffrey of Monmouth, who was a Welsh priest, born in 1128. In
this book he professed to have translated into Latin from an ancient
Welsh MS. the history of Britain from the days when the fabulous Brut,
the great-grandson of Aeneas, landed on its shores, down through the
whole period of King Arthur and his Round Table to Cadwaladr, a Cymric
king who died in 689. From the Latin the stories were put into French
verse by Gaimar, and getting to France they fell into the hands of
Robert Wace, a native of Jersey (and Norman trouvère), who, with the
help of other independent sources of information, made them into a poem
in 1155, which he called the “Brut.”

In this form the Romance found its way back to England, and about 1205
was told for the first time in English verse by Layamon, an English
priest who dwelt on the banks of the upper Severn, and who was thus,
besides being indebted to Wace, near enough the original source to have
access to the great body of Welsh literature then current on the
subject.

Through these, and French authors, the Cymric tales soon passed to other
Continental lands, and since then have been retouched, paraphrased, and
amplified in all the languages of Europe. They belong to the age, and
breathe the spirit of chivalry.

In modern times these romances have again attracted attention, and
become famous through the publication of Lady Charlotte Guest’s English
translations of the Mabinogion, 1st edition, 1837–49, and reprint, 1877;
Vicomte de la Villemarqué’s French translations of the Welsh poems and
Round Table romances in 1841 and subsequently; and later still,
Professor Loth of Rennes’ translation of the Mabinogion.

As in the case of the Gaelic sagas, traditions had been floating among
the Welsh people for hundreds of years, and when the general awakening
of the twelfth century took place, a natural desire sprung up to have
these collected, arranged, and written down. The Mabinogion were thus
originally tales penned to be repeated at the fireside, to while away
the time of young chieftains and their following, but ultimately they
reacted very powerfully upon the national literature and character. The
name Mabinogion was not at first so generally applied to all the tales
as it is to-day. Only four were so designated.

In point of antiquity these tales sort out into two distinct
classes,—one older, the other less ancient. The latter celebrate heroes
of the Arthurian cycle, and are full of ecclesiastical terms and of
allusions to Norman customs, manners, arts, arms, and luxuries. The
former refer to persons and events of an earlier period, are more
mythological, and contain very few of these later allusions. As
Professor Rhys[29] thinks, they are essentially Goidelic stories, and
their machinery is magic, not the laws of chivalry.

To the older class belong—

The Tale of Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed.
The Tale of Branwen, daughter of Llyr.
The Tale of Manawyddan, the son of Llyr.
The Tale of Math, son of Mathonwy.

These only are the Mabinogion.

The Contention of Llud and Llevelys.
The Story of Kilhwch and Olwen.
The Dream of Rhonabwy.

This last Professor Rhys regards as a hash or after-composition, in
spite of the respectability of the MS.

To the later class—

The Tale of the Lady of the Fountain.
The Story of Peredur, son of Evrawc.
The Story of Geraint, son of Erbin.
The Dream of Macsen Gudelig.

And to these eleven, in her third volume published in 1849, Lady
Charlotte Guest added the Hanes Taliessin, compiled in the fourteenth
century, but, according to Ernest Renan, belonging to the more ancient
of the two classes above mentioned. The great beauty, originality, and
antique flavour of these stories may here be exhibited by means of a few
characteristic extracts.

And the first to be given is from the legend of Taliessin.

“In times past (it begins) there lived in Penllyn a man of gentle
lineage, named Tegid Voel, and his dwelling was in the midst of the lake
Tegid, and his wife was called Caridwen. And there was born to him of
his wife a son named Morvran at Tegid, and also a daughter named
Creirwy, the fairest maiden in the world was she; and they had a
brother, the most ill-favoured man in the world, Avagddu. Now Caridwen
his mother thought that he was not likely to be admitted among men of
noble birth by reason of his ugliness, unless he had some exalted merits
or knowledge. For it was in the beginning of Arthur’s time and of the
Round Table.

“So she resolved, according to the arts of the books of Fferyllt, to
boil a cauldron of Inspiration and Science for her son, that his
reception might be honourable, because of his knowledge of the mysteries
of the future state of the world.

“Then she began to boil the cauldron, which, from the beginning of its
boiling, might not cease to boil for a year and a day, until three
blessed drops were obtained of the Grace of Inspiration.

“And she put Gwion Bach, the son of Gwreang of Llanfair in Caereinion in
Powys, to stir the cauldron, and a blind man named Morda to kindle the
fire beneath it, and she charged them that they should not suffer it to
cease boiling for the space of a year and a day. And she herself,
according to the books of the astronomers, and in planetary hours,
gathered every day of all charm-bearing herbs. And one day towards the
end of the year, as Caridwen was culling plants and making incantations,
it chanced that three drops of the charmed liquor flew out of the
cauldron and fell upon the finger of Gwion Bach. And by reason of their
great heat he put his finger to his mouth, and the instant he put these
marvel-working drops into his mouth he foresaw everything that was to
come, and perceived that his chief care must be to guard against the
wiles of Caridwen, for vast was her skill.

“And in very great fear he fled towards his own land, and the cauldron
burst in two, because all the liquor within it, except the three
charm-bearing drops, was poisonous, so that the horses of Gwyddno
Garanhir were poisoned by the water of the stream into which the liquor
of the cauldron ran, and the confluence of that stream was called the
Poison of the Horses of Gwyddno from that time forth.

“Thereupon came in Caridwen, and saw all the toil of the whole year
lost. And she seized a billet of wood and struck the blind Morda on the
head until one of his eyes fell out upon his cheek. And he said,
‘Wrongfully hast thou disfigured me, for I am innocent. Thy loss was not
because of me.’

“‘Thou speakest truth,’ said Caridwen; ‘it was Gwion Bach who robbed
me.’

“And she went forth after him running. And he saw her and changed
himself into a hare and fled.

“But she changed herself into a greyhound, and turned him. And he ran
towards a river and became a fish. And she in the form of an otter-bitch
chased him under the water until he was fain to turn himself into a bird
of the air. She as a hawk followed him, and gave him no rest in the sky,
and just as she was about to stoop upon him, and he was in fear of
death, he espied a heap of winnowed wheat on the floor of a barn, and he
dropped among the wheat and turned himself into one of the grains. Then
she transferred herself into a high-crested black hen, and went to the
wheat and scratched it with her feet, and found him out and swallowed
him, and, as the story says, she bore him nine months, and when she was
delivered of him she could not find it in her heart to kill him, by
reason of his beauty. So she wrapped him in a leathern bag, and cast him
into the sea, to the mercy of God, on the 29th day of April.”

And, Moses-like, was Taliessin afterwards found in the Weir of Gwyddno
by that prince’s only son Elphin, who took him to the house of his
father. Some of the extraordinary tales which this prodigy of a boy told
in verse are given, and it is related how he bewitched the bards of King
Mælgron by pouting out his lips after them, and playing “Blerwm, blerwm”
with his finger upon his lips as they went to court. His own answers to
the king are always in song. Among the curious odes that he sang are
those known as—

The Excellence of the Bards.
The Reproof of the Bards.
The Spite of the Bards.
One of the Four Pillars of Song.

This latter begins:—

The Almighty made
Down the Hebron Vale,
With his plastic hands
Adam’s fair form.

And five hundred years,
Void of any help,
There he remained and lay
Without a soul.

He again did form,
In calm paradise,
From a left side rib,
Bliss-throbbing Eve.

Seven hours they were
The Orchard keeping,
Till Satan brought strife
With wiles from Hell.

Thence were they driven,
Cold and shivering,
To gain their living
Into this world, etc.

Of the story of Kilhwch and Olwen, which has a particularly antique
character, Renan felicitously says that by its entirely primitive
aspect, by the part played in it by the wild boar in conformity to the
spirit of Celtic mythology, by the wholly supernatural and magical
character of the narration, by innumerable allusions, the sense of which
escapes us, it forms a cycle by itself. Passing by the unique adventures
of Kilhwch, he quotes as a typical sample the remarkable passage on the
finding of Mabon, where his followers said unto Arthur, “Lord, go thou
home; thou canst not proceed with thy host in quest of such small
adventures as these,” and Arthur commissions Gwrhyr, because he knew all
languages, and was familiar with those of the birds and the beasts, to
accompany others, whom he named, in search of the lost cousin. They went
forward first to the ousel of Cilgwi, and got its weird and quaint
answer, then to the stag of Redynvre. From him to the owl of Cwm
Cawlwyd, to the eagle of Gwern Abwy, and, lastly, to the salmon of Llyn
Llyw. Each tells its tale, and passes them on to the next. The speeches
of these ancient denizens of the land are very old-fashioned and
curious, typical of all the primitive extravagance of the Celtic
imagination.

But it is in tales like the “Lady of the Fountain” and “Peredur” that we
tap the later, full-blown, and most characteristic Arthurian romance.
The former begins: “King Arthur was at Caerlleon upon Usk; and one day
he sat in his chamber, and with him were Owain, the son of Urien, and
Kynon, the son of Clydno, and Kai, the son of Kyner, and Gwenhwyvar and
her handmaidens at needlework by the window. And if it should be said
that there was a porter at Arthur’s palace, there was none. Glewlwyd
Gavaelvawr was there, acting as porter to welcome guests and strangers,
and to receive them with honour, and to inform them of the manners and
customs of the court; and to direct those who came to the hall or to the
presence chamber, and those who came to take up their lodgings.

“In the centre of the chamber King Arthur sat upon a seat of green
rushes, over which was spread a covering of flame-coloured satin, and a
cushion of red satin was under his elbow. Then Arthur spoke, ‘If I
thought you would not disparage me,’ said he, ‘I would sleep while I
wait for my repast; and you can entertain one another with relating
tales, and can obtain a flagon of mead and some meat from Kai.’ And the
king went to sleep.”

Kynon tells a tale: “I was the only son of my mother and father, and I
was exceedingly aspiring, and my daring was very great. I thought there
was no enterprise in the world too mighty for me, and after I had
achieved all the adventures in my own country, I equipped myself and set
forth to journey through deserts and distant regions. And at length it
chanced that I came to the fairest valley in the world, wherein were
trees of equal growth, and a river ran through the valley, and a path by
the side of the river. And I followed the path until midday, and
continued my journey along the remainder of the valley until the
evening, and at the extremity of the plain I came to a large and
lustrous castle, at the foot of which was a torrent. And I approached
the castle, and there I beheld two youths.”

He describes the wonderful dress of these, and of a man in the prime of
life clad in a robe and a mantle of yellow satin with band of gold lace,
shoes of variegated leather fastened by two bosses of gold. This man
went with him towards the castle. “And there I saw four-and-twenty
damsels,” he says, “embroidering satin at a window. And this I tell
thee, Kai, that the least fair of them was fairer than the fairest maid
thou hast ever beheld in the island of Britain, and the least lovely of
them was more lovely than Gwenhwyvar, the wife of Arthur, when she has
appeared loveliest at the offering on the day of the Nativity or at the
feast of Easter. They rose up at my coming, and six of them took my
horse and divested me of my armour; and six others took my arms and
washed them in a vessel until they were perfectly bright. And the third
six spread cloths upon the table and prepared meat. And the fourth six
took off my soiled garments, and placed others upon me, namely, an under
vest and a doublet of fine linen, and a robe and a surcoat, and a mantle
of yellow satin with a broad gold band upon the mantle, and they placed
cushions both beneath and around me, with coverings of red linen, and I
sat down. Now, the six maidens who had taken my horse unharnessed him as
well as if they had been the best squires in the Island of Britain.
Then, behold, they brought bowls of silver wherein was water to wash,
and towels of linen, some green and some white; and I washed, and in a
little while the man sat down to the table, and I sat down next to him,
and below me sat all the maidens except those who waited on me.”

After he divulged the object of his journey, the host directed him to a
black man of great stature on the top of a mound, ill favoured, with but
one foot, one eye in the middle of his forehead, a club of iron, and a
thousand wild animals grazing around him.

Next day Kynon set out and found this giant. And when I told him, he
says, “who I was and what I sought, he directed me. ‘Take,’ said he,
‘that path that leads towards the head of the glade, and ascend the
wooden steep until thou comest to the summit; and there thou wilt find
an open space like to a large valley, and in the midst of it a tall
tree, whose branches are greener than the greenest pinetrees. Under this
tree is a fountain, and by the side of the fountain a marble slab, and
in the marble slab a silver bowl attached by a chain of silver, so that
it may not be carried away. Take the bowl and throw a bowlful of water
upon the slab, and thou wilt hear a mighty peal of thunder, so that thou
wilt think that heaven and earth are trembling with fury. With the
thunder there will come a shower so severe that it will be scarce
possible for thee to endure it and live. And the shower will be of
hailstones. And after the shower the weather will become fair, but every
leaf that was upon the tree will have been carried away by the shower.
Then a flight of birds will come and alight upon the tree, and in thine
own country thou didst never hear a strain so sweet as that which they
will sing. And at the moment thou art most delighted with the song of
the birds thou wilt hear a murmuring and complaining coming towards thee
along the valley. And thou wilt see a knight upon a coalblack horse,
clothed in black velvet, and with a pennon of black linen upon his
lance; and he will ride unto thee to encounter thee with the utmost
speed. If thou fleest from him he will overtake thee, and if thou
abidest there, as sure as thou art a mounted knight he will leave thee
on foot, and if thou dost not find trouble in that adventure thou
needest not seek it during the rest of thy life.’”

In these tales the principal part belongs to the women, and here it is
the Lady of the Fountain. In reading the romances we instantly find
ourselves on the top wave of chivalry. Three things strike the modern
reader.

First, the ideal here presented of King Arthur and his Queen Gwenhwyvar,
the pure and homely atmosphere of their Court in that wild and barbarian
age, and the sterling qualities and integrity of the Knights of the
Round Table. Each fights not for any national cause, but to show his
personal excellence and satisfy his taste for adventure. It is an epic
creation representing the dream of medieval times.

Second, not less surprising to us is the _sangfroid_ with which the
warriors carry out their adventures, the supreme indifference to danger,
or to the pain and death they inflict when they set to, to try each
other’s mettle. Knight attacks knight for no other reason than that he
is superior in prowess to himself, and he will risk his life any day to
get the mastery over a rival in arms. They reck nothing of sword cuts.
Enough for them that it is in accordance with the laws of chivalry.

Third, and perhaps most wonderful of all, is the delicacy of the
feminine feeling breathed in these romances. There is nothing sensual in
the love here portrayed. It is angelic. Never an impropriety or gross
word is to be met with in all these pages, never a prurient suggestion
for all the roughness of that rude age. Women figure as divine, the most
charming creatures in the world, to protect whose honour and win whose
love and esteem, danger and even death are freely braved. This was a new
element introduced into European literature—the creation of woman’s
character and the place given her in chivalry. “Nearly all the types of
womankind known to the Middle Ages,—Guinevere, Iseult, Enid,”—says
Renan, “are derived from Arthur’s court.”

The influence of these tales upon the literature, the taste, the social
life of the whole of Western Europe has been immense, and they are still
as fresh and enchanting to the intelligent reader as any Arabian Nights’
Entertainment.

Lady Charlotte Guest’s literary monument is for English readers the
standard classic. There we find a charming translation with luminous
notes of these famous Mabinogion, a collection which Renan has called
“the pearl of Gaelic literature, the completest expression of the Cymric
genius,” and for the early Welsh poetry, both in the original and in
translation, we have the sumptuous edition of Dr. Skene, culled from
_The Four Ancient Books of Wales_, to delight us. The poetry and romance
of the Cymry are really two literatures essentially distinct from each
other. Springing from the same soil, each reflects in its own way the
same national character which had so much in common with that of our own
ancient Gaelic ancestry, so that we feel to-day with regard to that long
past, that “distance only lends enchantment to the view.”

CHAPTER XIII
CELTIC LITERARY REVIVALS

Sixth century awakening throughout Celtdom—Illustrious
names—Brittany’s wonderful cycle of song—Charming examples—Dearth
of tenth century—A strange trait of Celtic life—The brilliant
medieval renaissance—Output of Ireland, Wales, and Brittany—The
Cornish dramas—Last speaker of that dialect—Period of inactivity
and decline—Recrudescence—1745–1800 the high-water mark of
Highland production—A galaxy of poets—Splendid lyrical
outburst—New Ossianic cycle—Seana Dana—Caledonian bards—The Welsh
Eisteddfod—Latest Celtic renaissance—Some characteristic features,
results, manifestations—Antiquity, thou wondrous charm!

There comes a time in the history of races when, passing from simplicity
to reflection, their deepest nature finds expression in some form of
literature. That time for the Celtic people has been the late fifth, but
more especially the sixth century of our era. And the remarkable fact
confronts us then of a simultaneous poetic awakening in all the chief
groups into which the Celtic remnant had been divided. Ireland,
Scotland, Wales, and Brittany were all involved in this primal literary
activity.

A most curious phenomenon to contemplate is this racial renaissance.
When the great Celtic empire had crumbled, and its defeated fragments
were driven to their last resorts on the outmost confines of Europe,
vanquished by the alien who kept them at bay, suddenly the sundered
remnants burst into song. Plaintive and sad for the most part has been
this utterance, but full of the wealth of sentiment, fancy, and old-time
peculiarities of conception so characteristic of this ancient people.

St. Patrick, St. Sechnall, Dubthach, Fiacc, Dallan Forgaill, and others,
inaugurated the new time in Ireland; St. Columba and his following
accomplished a similar transition for Scotland, opening the pages of
literary history with beautiful hymns and lyrics, which have continued
to this day. In Wales the pregnant sixth century which gave us
Columcille was _the_ great age of bardic literature—the age of such
princes of poetry as Aneurin, Taliessin, Llywarch Hên, and Myrddin.

These are among the most illustrious names of the Celtic past. And in
Brittany the same period is believed to have produced that wonderful
cycle of song, some of which has been taken down from oral recitation so
late as last century by the learned and enthusiastic M. de
Villemarqué,[30] the Macpherson of Brittany, and published in his
delightful _Barzaz-Breiz, Chants populaires de la Bretagne_, a number of
which Mr. Tom Taylor has rendered into English. Those entitled—

The Wine of the Gauls,
The Prediction of Gwenc’hlan,
The Lord Nann and the Fairy,
The March of Arthur,
The Plague of Elliant,
The Drowning of Kaer-Is—

are held to belong to the period with which we are dealing, and to have
been in existence prior at least to the close of the sixth century. They
are all distinguished by the presence of alliteration as well as rhyme,
by a more or less complete division into triplets, like the ancient
Welsh triads, as well as by a distinctly archaic impress in the manners
described, and the feelings of the singer.

The names of the authors have not come down to us, as in the other three
countries, but, having already quoted specimens of the fifth and sixth
century poetry of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, it might not be
uninteresting now to give characteristic examples of the early
compositions of Brittany.

The Wine of the Gauls is undoubtedly ancient, so ancient indeed, that
Part II. is regarded as a fragment of the song that accompanied the old
Celtic sword-dance in honour of the sun. It runs thus:—

Blood wine and glee
Sun to thee—
Blood wine and glee.
Fire! Fire! steel, oh! steel!
Fire! fire! steel and fire.
Oak! Oak! earth and waves,
Waves, oak, earth and oak.

Glee of dance and song
And battle throng.
Battle, dance and song.
Fire! fire, etc.

Let the sword blades swing
In a ring,
Let the sword blades swing.
Fire! fire, etc.

Song of the blue steel
Death to feel,
Song of the blue steel.
Fire! fire, etc.

Fight, whereof the sword
Is the Lord,
Fight of the fell sword!
Fire! fire, etc.

Sword, thou mighty King
Of battle ring,
Sword, thou mighty King!
Fire! fire, etc.

With the rainbow’s light
Be thou bright,
With the rainbow’s light.
Fire! fire, etc.

Far more charming is the episode of Lord Nann and the Fairy, and
genuinely typical of the powerful fancy and natural magic of the Celt.

The good Lord Nann and his fair bride,
Were young when wedlock’s knot was tied—
Were young when death did them divide.

But yesterday that lady fair
Two babes as white as snow did bear:
A man-child and a girl they were.

For making him a manchild’s sire, Lord Nann offered to get his bride any
dainty food she liked, “meat of the woodcock from the lake or of the
wild deer from the brake.” She chose the latter, while she grudged
sending him to the wood.

The Lord of Nann when this he heard
Hath gripp’d his oak spear with never a word,

His bonny black horse he hath leap’d upon;
And forth to the greenwood he hath gone.

By the skirts of the wood as he did go,
He was ’ware of a hind as white as snow;

Oh fast she ran and fast he rode,
That the earth it shook where his horse-hoofs trode.

Oh fast he rode, and fast she ran,
That the sweat to drop from his brow began,

That the sweat on his horse’s flanks stood white
So he rode and rode till the fall o’ the night.

When he came to a stream that fed a lawn
Hard by the grot of a Corrigaun.

The grass grew thick by the streamlet brink,
And he lighted down off his horse to drink.

The Corrigaun sat by the fountain fair,
A-combing her long and yellow hair;

A-combing her hair with a comb of gold—
(Not poor, I trow, are those maidens cold)—

Now who’s the bold wight that dares come here
To trouble my fairy fountain clear?

Either thou straight shalt wed with me
Or pine for four long years and three,
Or dead in three days’ space shalt be.

This proposal he spurned, asserting that he was already married, and
would die on the spot ere he would take a Corrigaun to wife. Her spell
she cast, and instantly he feels sick. On return he bids his mother make
his bed, for in three days she would hear his passing-bell, but adjures
her never to tell the tale to his bride. The three days expire, and the
latter inquires of her mother-in-law why the Church bells toll and the
priests chant in the street below, all clad in their white vestments? “A
strange poor man had died,” was the evasive answer. Then she asks
whither her husband had gone, and on being assured he would soon be
back, the unsuspecting lady concerns herself with the kind of gown she
would wear for her churching. Said her mother-in-law:—

“The fashion of late, my child, hath grown,
That women for churching black should don.”

And then:—

As through the churchyard porch she stept
She saw the grave where her husband slept.

And the dialogue proceeds:—

“Who of our blood is lately dead
That our ground is new raked and spread?”

“The truth I may no more forbear,
My son—your own poor lord—lies there.”

She threw herself on her knees amain,
And from her knees ne’er rose again.

That night they laid her, dead and cold
Beside her lord beneath the mould;
When lo!—a marvel to behold!—

Next morn from the grave two oak trees fair
Shot lusty boughs into the air;

And in their boughs—oh wondrous sight—
Two happy doves all snowy white—

That sang as ever the morn did rise
And then flew up—into the skies.

In addition to the songs, Villemarqué published _The Breton Bards of the
Sixth Century_, but Renan preferred the songs as by far the better.

The impulse given by the first literary awakening continued in Ireland,
Scotland, and Wales for two or three centuries, until the confusion and
disintegration of the Norse invasions put an end to it. During this
early and brilliant period the Celt poured forth the richest treasures
of his nature. Before the foe triumphed, many valuable pieces of
literature, including the heroic sagas, had been committed to writing,
and thus preserved for posterity, though it is known that much was
destroyed by the reckless invader. It was a bright morning—this dawn of
letters—too suddenly clouded and overcast.

For a century or two after, the Celtic field in its various parts
remained singularly barren and unproductive. Ireland was not altogether
without poets and scholars, though greatly fallen from her pristine
glory, but in Wales, from the middle of the seventh century till the
year 1080, hardly any poetry of merit was produced, and the same might
be said of Scotland, and, it would appear, of Brittany also.

No illustrious bards or outstanding writers redeemed the general dearth
of the tenth century. That was the darkest hour before another brilliant
dawn.

Ossian, St. Patrick, and Columcille; Dubthach and King Laoghaire; Prince
Arthur and his knights; Taliessin and the Royal Urien, Aneurin, Llywarch
Hên; what were these but memories? vanished heroes and bards of the
past. Already the walls of Balclutha were desolate, the harp hung mute
in Tara’s hall; nay, Tara itself was now a simulacrum,—a ruin, deserted
for ever. And even from Caerleon and Dun-Reged had not the glory
departed? Too soon the sun, late-risen, had sunk upon the unhappy Celts,
defeated in war and now dumb and helplessly inarticulate in literature.
It seemed as if, swan-like, the pathetic remnants of this old race had
at length sung their dying song, and sunk into silent and finished
oblivion.

To such a pass to all appearance, through Carlyle’s “star-fire and
immortal tears,” had Destiny led these hapless peoples by the advent of
the tenth century, that he would be a visionary indeed who should
prophesy any renaissance, and a true seer, for the time being, who
should say—

... Look
Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there.

Yet, phœnix-like, is it not ever the fate of the hidden and precarious
Celtic genius to rearise from its ashes and reassert its vitality? And
so in the eleventh and twelfth centuries there was such a wonderful
literary awakening throughout Celtdom, that it was as when:—

... A sable cloud
Turns forth her silver lining on the night.

And this new activity, be it noted, was not confined to the Gaels of
Ireland and Scotland, but, as in the sixth century, comprehended the
Cymri of Wales and Brittany also.

Herein lies a strange trait of Celtic life, that the great literary
revivals should be thus simultaneous, and common to all the sundered
groups, though these latter are isolated so much linguistically and
locally. Not once or twice in their history has this curious affinity of
genius and sentiment been evinced.

In the case of the Gael, no sooner was the grip of the Vikings relaxed
than the bards and schools began to flourish again. The new Irish king,
the semi-usurper Brian Boru, helped much towards this happy
consummation, as he was a real patron of letters and worked hard to
restore the fallen fortunes of Gaelic literature. Early in the eleventh
century he was on the throne, and that and the following century
witnessed the new and copious revival of art and learning. To this
period belong the great monuments, such as the Leabhar Na h’Uidhre, the
Book of Hymns, the Book of Leinster, as well as the Scottish Book of
Deer.

During these two centuries a host of poets and some annalists lived, the
chief of whom were Flann of Monasterboice and Tighernach. Quite a number
of the names of prominent bards who wrote then are given by Dr. Hyde in
his _Literary History of Ireland_. And we know that from this time the
interest taken in the past gave rise to that rich and abundant medieval
succession of books of saga common to Ireland and Scotland. But though
these latter were compiled, some of them after the twelfth century, the
actual revival did not last beyond the Norman Conquest of Ireland, which
culminated at the close of that same twelfth century, arresting Irish
development and disintegrating Irish life. So that for 300 years after,
Erin produced nothing comparable to her former achievements.

Turning to the Cymri, on the other hand, we find the remarkable
intellectual awakening of the eleventh and twelfth centuries ushered in
in a similar way as in Ireland, by the advent of new rulers. Rhys ap
Tewdwr, who had taken refuge in Brittany, returned in 1077 and ascended
the throne of South Wales, to which he laid claim as true heir. And
Gruffyd ap Kynan, similarly exiled in Ireland, came back to reign in
North Wales in 1080. Uniting their forces in one first great attempt,
these two hereditary princes overthrew the reigning monarch, and were
confirmed on the thrones of their ancestors.

Like Brian in Ireland, they also in their own fatherland were
instrumental in introducing a new era of literature. In North Wales it
showed itself in a revival of poetry, while in South Wales it took the
form of prose. Thomas Stephens mentions no less than seventy-nine bards
who lived between 1080 and 1400, many of whose pieces are still extant
in MSS.

To this period belong the greatest monuments of Welsh genius—_The Four
Ancient Books of Wales_, and the wonderful cycle of romance treasured
for us in the Mabinogion, besides those numerous compositions
traditionally attributed to Taliessin, Myrddinn, and others. Chronicles,
romances, poems, mabinogion, and a large collection of moral and
historical triads—these constitute the result of that extraordinary
outburst of creative energy which dates from the days of Gruffyd ap
Kynan.

Nor was Brittany asleep during this literary activity, for she too had
her share in common with Wales in the origin and dissemination of the
Arthurian romance.

It is one of the problems of criticism to-day, rightly to apportion the
credit between the two countries.

Robert Wace undoubtedly drew from independent Breton sources as well as
from Geoffrey of Monmouth. And from the eleventh century onwards date
the historic and narrative ballads so characteristic of Brittany. A
selection of these have been translated into English by Mr. Taylor, and
all of those he gives came into existence, he assures us, before the end
of the fourteenth century. So we have such medieval titles as, “The Evil
Tribute of Nomenöe,” “Bran,” “The Return from Saxon-land,” “The
Crusader’s Wife,” “The Clerk of Rohan,” “Baron Jauïoz,” “The Battle of
the Thirty,” “Jean of the Flame,” “Du Guesclin’s Vassal,” and “The
Wedding Girdle”—titles not unlike Chaucer’s own.

Bran, the hero of the second ballad, is believed to have been taken
prisoner in the great battle recorded in history as having been fought
in the tenth century near Kerloän, between the Norsemen and the Bretons,
under Ewen the Great.

Sore wounded lies the good knight Bran
On the foughten field of Kerloän.

On Kerloän’s field, hard by the shore,
Lieth the grandson of Bran-Vor.

Maugre our Bretons won the day,
He’s bound and o’er sea borne away.

Borne over sea, shut up, alone,
In Donjon tower he made his moan.

Bran dies in captivity.

On the battlefield of Kerloän
There grows a tree looks o’er the lan’;

There grows an oak in the place of stour, (_i.e._ battle)
Where the Saxon fled from Ewen-Vor.

Upon this oak, when the moon shines bright,
The birds they gather from the night.

Sea-mews, pied-black and white are there
On every forehead a bloodspeck clear.

With them a corbie, ashgrey for eld
And a young crow[31] aye at her side beheld.

Wayworn seem the twain, with wings that dreep,
As birds that flight o’er sea must keep.

So sweetly sing these birds, and clear,
The great sea stills its waves to hear.

And aye their songs one burden hold
All save the young crow’s and the corbie’s old.

And this is ever the crow’s sore cry,
“Sing, little birds, sing merrily.”

“Sing, birds o’ the land, in merry strain,
You died not far from your own Bretayne.”

Besides these narrative ballads, Brittany produced at various periods
idyllic songs and religious canticles.

As for Cornwall, whose dialect is now extinct, she never produced much
of a Celtic literature. What there is still extant is preserved in MSS.
of the fifteenth century, representing possibly all the ancient
literature she ever had, and dates from that or the preceding fourteenth
century. These pieces consist of one poem, entitled “Mount Calvary,” and
three dramas, or miracle plays, with nothing distinctly Celtic about
them save the language. With the exception of these and another drama of
the seventeenth century (1611), and the Lord’s Prayer translated, the
obsolete and defunct Cornish dialect has no literature to show, and
therefore is not concerned in the special Celtic revivals characteristic
of the literature in the other dialects. A translation of the ancient
dramas from the original Cornish has been made and published thirty
years ago by Edwin Norris. Their value now is almost solely linguistic.
“The last survivor of those who spoke in their youth pure Cornish is
said to have been Dolly Pentreath of Mousehole near Penzance, who died
in 1778, aged 102. And even she would not have talked Cornish in her
youth if she had not lived in one of the few parishes along the coasts
of Mount’s Bay and St Ive’s Bay, and a few districts to the west of
those bays, where alone at the beginning of the last century
(eighteenth) the ancient dialect existed.” (Morley’s _English Writers_,
vol. i. p. 750.)

After the brilliant medieval renaissance came another period of
inactivity and decline. From the sixteenth century it is true that a new
series of poets and prose writers began to arrive in the different
Celtic nationalities. In Ireland, during the first half of the
seventeenth century, there was quite a distinguished recrudescence of
national scholarship, associated with the names of Geoffrey Keating, the
Four Masters, and Duald Mac Firbis, all of whom were prose writers of
eminence; and in the Highlands of Scotland flourished Mary Macleod and
her contemporaries.

But we must come down to the period immediately following the Forty-five
to encounter a more general and splendid resuscitation.

And this time the Highlands especially were prominently to the front.
Hitherto, though possessing bards of mark, not since the days of
Columcille did the Scottish Gael burst so richly and abundantly and
tunefully into song. It seemed as if the accumulated and pent-up
sentiments of generations, at last overflowing, had found outlet and
expression. The great Jacobite risings furnished the incentive.
Involving, as they did, the profoundest issues for the individual, the
family life, and the whole structure of society in the Highlands, these
far-reaching events stirred the deepest emotions in the Gaelic breast,
which found utterance on tongues which otherwise might for ever have
remained silent.

Surpassing the story even of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table,
because more near, more real and historical, the romance of Prince
Charlie and the Highland chiefs has taken a lasting hold of the popular
imagination. It has woven itself into deathless song and story. The
poetry and music it has elicited in the Highlands alone are among the
sweetest creations of Celtic genius. They convey a pathos of sound,
richness of rhythm, and perfection of harmony that is captivating even
to foreign ears.

The period between 1745 and 1800 may be regarded as the high-water mark
of Highland poetry. For quality and quantity combined, it has never been
reached in the past, and is not likely now ever to be rivalled in the
future. Never before in Gaelic Scotland had there been such a quick and
splendid succession of bards. In fact, within those fifty years after
Culloden we have nearly all the great names of Highland poetry—certainly
those best known and which rank highest in the national esteem. A mere
list of the more important is sufficient to attest this.

There were living then Alexander Macdonald, better known as Alasdair
Macmhaighstir Alasdair; John Maccodrum, the North Uist bard; Hector
Macleod of South Uist; Dugald Buchanan; David Mackellar; Rob Donn;
Duncan Macintyre, popularly called Donnachadh Bàn; Lauchlan Macpherson,
John Roy Stuart, Kenneth Mackenzie, James Macpherson, Dr. John Smith,
John Clark, Mrs. Grant of Laggan, William Ross, Allan Macdougall, James
Shaw, James Macgregor, Ewan Maclachlan, Alexander MacKinnon, Donald
Macdonald, and Donald Macleod—a goodly number and highly representative
to appear in that single half century.

It is somewhat remarkable that Ireland, too, shared in the Jacobite
poetic reawakening, though she had so partial and distant a hand in the
actual warfare. Without doubt, her people thoroughly sympathised with
the gallant attempt of Prince Charlie. And this is abundantly evidenced
by the popularity and amount of the national poetry. Not only might a
list of names be given, similar to the above, though fewer in number,
but Dr. Hyde assures us that the Jacobite poems of Ireland would, if
collected, fill a large-sized volume. Hardiman printed about fifteen in
the second volume of his _Irish Minstrelsy_, and O’Daly about
twenty-five more in his _Irish Jacobite Poetry_, second edition.

Comparing this splendid lyrical outburst of that period in the two
countries, Dr. Hyde expresses his own opinion in the following
interesting criticism: “There seems to me,” he says, “to be perhaps,
more substance and more simplicity and straightforward diction in the
poems of the Scottish Gaels, and more melody and word-play, purchased at
the expense of a good deal of nebulousness and unmeaning sound in those
of the Irish Gaels; both, though they utterly fail in the ballad, have
brought the lyric to a very high pitch of perfection.”

But the literary revival of the eighteenth century was not by any means
confined to the work of the lyrical poets either in Scotland, Wales, or
Ireland. It was this period, the latter half of the century, that
witnessed the new Ossianic cycle, associated with the name of
Macpherson. Though popularly supposed to be, the latter was not the
earliest pioneer of this movement. In 1756, four years before
Macpherson’s _Fragments_ appeared, Jerome Stone, who was in youth a
packman, and afterwards a teacher at Dunkeld, gave to the public the
first translation of old Gaelic poems ever published. On his death, that
same year at the age of thirty, he left a collection, gleaned by
himself, of ancient Ossianic ballads, which has recently passed into the
possession of Edinburgh University.

Stone undoubtedly had the bardic gift; his rendering of the original is
quite as free as Macpherson’s own. The following may be quoted as an
example of his style. It is taken from “Fraoch’s Death,” published in
the _Scots Magazine_, 1756, shortly before he died:—

But now he’s gone and nought remains but woe
For wretched me; with him my joys are fled;
Around his tomb my tears shall ever flow,
The rock my dwelling, and the clay my bed;
Ye maids and matrons from your hills descend,
To join my moan and answer tear for tear;
With me the hero to the grave attend,
And sing the songs of mourning round his bier,
Through his own grove his praise we will proclaim,
And bid the place for ever bear his name.

Stone did not catch on, like his more brilliant successor.

Before then, except for the fragments that survived, mainly on the lips
of oral tradition throughout the Highlands, the old-time volume of saga
and heroic poetry had well nigh sunk into oblivion. The MSS. lay
neglected in odd and distant corners of the land, hidden and
inaccessible, so that the new generations of Gaels as they appeared were
wholly ignorant of their existence. The stirring events of the times
themselves were not conducive towards the more peaceful study and
pursuit of literature. Hence, with the better known publication of
Macpherson’s contributions there came to the view of modern times, with
startling suddenness, an old deposit of literary wealth, which quite
astonished the age. It was as if by some convulsion, ancient strata of
underlying rock had suddenly upheaved and found access to the surface,
much to the wonder and curiosity of all.

The heather was immediately ablaze. A new enthusiasm was awakened in the
past. Gaelic scholarship was taxed to the uttermost to substantiate the
credit of this new fame. Libraries were scrutinised, ancient houses
searched, memories ransacked, and every remote township and glen scoured
to find material. And when material was not forthcoming in sufficient
amount, the Muses were invoked to supply the deficiency.

It is now well understood that the period was one of abnormal activity
in the production of Ossianic poetry. This might be inferred from the
existing British collections of Gaelic MSS., most of which are posterior
to the age of Macpherson. Many imitators sought to emulate the ancient
bards, and even to palm their modern productions upon the public as part
of the original deposit. So late as the day of Mackenzie of “The
Beauties” such pieces as “Mordubh,” “Collath,” and “The Aged Bard’s
Wish” were regarded as ancient and authentic, though there are few
people now, and certainly no recognised authority on the subject,
prepared to maintain that.

Certain of these eighteenth century creations are of great merit. Though
they lack the antiquity they profess, they are worthy to rank alongside
the poetry of the period. Dr. Smith’s _Seana Dana_ or _Old Lays_, for
example, are reckoned fully as interesting and poetical in the original
Gaelic as Macpherson’s _Ossian_; yet, unlike the latter, his English
translation is a poor substitute for the really fresh and idiomatic
vernacular which he published. One of his finest poems, “Dan an Deirg,”
has been rendered into English, edited, and annotated by an accomplished
Englishman, Mr. C. S. Jerram, a scholar and graduate of Cambridge.

In Mr. Pattison’s _Gaelic Bards_ we have a translation in dainty verses
of another of his poems, entitled “Finan and Lorma.” Here the young
people around the ancient Ossian are represented as addressing the bard
in these lines:—

While on the plains shines the moon, O Bard!
And the shadow of Cona holds;
Like a ghost breathes the wind from the mountain,
With its spirit voice in its folds.

There are two cloudy forms before us,
Where its host the dim night shows;
The sigh of the moon curls their tresses,
As they tread over Alva of roes.

Dusky his dogs came with one,
And he bends his dark bow of yew;
There’s a stream from the side of the sad-faced maid,
Dyes her robe with a blood-red hue.

Hold thou back, O thou wind! from the mountain,
Let their image a moment stay;
Nor sweep with thy skirts from our eyesight,
Nor scatter their beauty away.

O’er the glen of the rushes, the hill of the hinds,
With the vague wandering vapours they go;
O! Bard of the times that have left us,
Aught of their life can’st thou show?

To which Ossian replies:—

The years that have been they come back as ye speak,
To my soul in their music they glide;
Like the murmur of waves in the far inland calm,
Is their soft and smooth step by my side.

Smith’s translation appeared in 1780, and the originals, nominally from
the Gaelic of Ossian, Ullin, and Orran, etc., in 1787. The poems were
fourteen in number, with titles as follow: “The Lay of the Red,” “The
Death of Gaul,” “The Lay of Duhona,” “Diarmad,” “Clan Morni,” or “Finan
and Lorma,” “The War of Linne,” “Cathula,” “The War of Manus,” including
“The Lay of the Great Fool,” “Trahul,” “Dargo,” “Conn,” “The Burning of
Taura,” “Calava,” and “The Death of Art.”

In the lay of Taura there occurs the much admired word-portrait
entitled, “Aisling air dhreach Mna,” or “The Vision of a Fair Woman.”
This is how she looked in the eye of her Gaelic admirer, and one can
judge if her charms match those of Aspasia or of Cleopatra:—

Innseam pàirt do dreach nan reul;
Bu gheal a deud gu h-ùr dlù;
Mar channach an t-sléibh
Bha cneas fa h-eideadh ùr.

Bha a bràighe cearclach bàn
Mar shneachda tlà nam beann;
Bha a dà chich ag eiridh làn;
B’e’n dreach sud miann nan sonn.

Bu shoitheamh binn a gloir;
S’ bu deirge na’n ròs a beul;
Mar chobhar a sios n’a taobh
Sinte gu caol bha gach meur.

Bha a dà chaol mhala mhine
Dûdhonn air liomh an loin.
A da ghruaidh dhreachd nan caoran;
’Si gu iomlan saor o chron.

Bha a gnuis mar bharra-gheuga
Anns a cheud-fhás ûr;
A falt buidhe mar óradh shleibhtean;
’S mar dhearsadh gréine bha sûil.

The Gaelic is not easily translated into felicitous English, but it has
been given by Dr. Macneill, somewhat literally thus:—

Tell us some of the charms of the stars;
Close and well-set were her ivory teeth;
White as the cannach upon the moor
Was her bosom the tartan bright beneath.

Her well-rounded forehead shone
Soft and fair as the mountain snow;
Her two breasts were heaving full;
To them did the hearts of the heroes flow.

Her lips were ruddier than the rose,
Tender and tunefully sweet her tongue;
White as the foam adown her side
Her delicate fingers extended hung.

Smooth as the dusky down of the elk
Appeared her two narrow brows to me;
Lovely her cheeks were like berries red;
From every guile she was wholly free.

Her countenance looked like the gentle buds
Unfolding their beauties in early spring;
Her yellow locks like the gold-browed hills,
And her eyes like the radiance the sunbeams bring.

In the same year, 1780, in which Dr. Smith issued his renderings,
another small volume of translations of so-called ancient Gaelic poetry
appeared under the title _Caledonian Bards_. It was by John Clark,
apparently a very much poorer imitator of Macpherson, and hailing from
the latter’s own native district, Badenoch. Among the poems submitted,
appears the “Mordubh,” already referred to, and which in its vernacular
garb has misled more than one Celtic enthusiast. Of the latter, besides
Mackenzie, Mrs. Grant of Laggan, 1755–1838, was so far deceived that,
taking Clark’s eighteenth century contribution for genuine ancient
poetic material, she set herself to render some of it into more
beautiful verse of her own. A contemporary and friend of Sir Walter
Scott, this lady takes a high place in the Highland English literature
of the period. A third who lived in her time, and who had no mean poetic
gift, was the Rev. Duncan Maccallum of Arisaig, the author of “Collath,”
that other composition which passed for a time as a specimen of ancient
poetry. But enough has been said to show the range of this derived and
imitative activity.

It will be seen that while on the one hand the Jacobite romance gave
rise to a new poetic revival, the Ossianic compositions, on the other
hand, proved also a source of general Celtic inspiration during the
latter half of the eighteenth century, and for two decades, at least, of
the nineteenth. Though the impulse of the Prince Charlie episode did not
carry to Wales as it did to Ireland, that of the Ossianic cycle did, and
issued in a similar enthusiasm in the production and publication of
books of Welsh poetry. This interest became so widespread that in 1819
the national Eisteddfod was revived once more at Caermarthen, and
regained its old place in the hearts of the people. Without discussing
the tradition that ascribes its origin to the sixth century, it is now
fairly well ascertained that it is, at least, as old as the twelfth or
thirteenth century. History shows that Prince Griffith of South Wales
held a great Eisteddfod at Caermarthen in 1451, at which the twenty-four
metres of Welsh poetry were settled for all time. Since then it has had
a chequered career; officially patronised by the Tudors, it seems to
have declined under the Stuarts, and nearly perished under the first
three Hanoverians. But now, since its revival in 1819, nearly every
hamlet in Wales holds its annual Eisteddfod, and the national one has
grown to such a magnitude that it tends not only to keep alive the
Celtic spirit, but also to foster the love of music and poetry in the
Principality.

Like much of our own Highland barderie, the Welsh poetry is the product
of workmen who have never been taught to read or write their own
language in the schools. Yet such is their natural taste and sense of
style that some of their best modern lyrics need not fear comparison
with those of Tannahill or even of Burns. Undoubtedly such poetry has
serious limitations, but it has a charm and beauty of its own, and is as
fresh and limpid as the mountain streams. The fragrance of the heather
is upon it quite as much as it is upon the lyrics of our own bards in
the Highlands. And as these latter felt the charm of the towering
mountain, the gloomy glen, the forest solitude, the lonely mysterious
sea, the bubbling stream, the wildflower, and the changing seasons, and
gave felicitous and sympathetic expression to the emotions these
awakened in their breasts, so did the peasant poets of Wild Wales. All
through last century, both in the Highlands and in that country, there
have been a succession of minor bards who have maintained the native
tongue sweet and warm and tuneful by their lyrics, though in Ireland the
same cannot be said, as the language there until quite recently had not
been fostered so much as in the sister countries.

But to-day we constantly read of ourselves as passing through another
Celtic renaissance, and this is the last which falls to be noticed. It
took its rise half a century ago in the work of the scholars, and
doubtless was the natural sequence of the widespread interest aroused at
home and abroad by the Ossianic compositions. It was recognised that
there was material to work upon, which could be dealt with from a
scientific as well as a literary point of view. And so the renaissance
in the first instance was a revival of interest in the language itself,
and the ancient MS. monuments that contained its oldest forms.

Two sets of scholars interested themselves in this new line of research.
On the one hand, distinguished Irishmen like John O’Donovan and Eugene
O’Curry devoted themselves to the task of bringing to light the
neglected and hidden MS. remains, which had hitherto for centuries lain
in the obscurity of religious or public libraries unread and
uncatalogued. And through these treasures they sought to interpret the
Gaelic past. On the other hand, Continental savants such as Bopp, Zeuss,
and Ebel, deeply absorbed in philological studies, were already at work
on the linguistic problem, which has rescued the Celtic dialects from an
unnatural isolation and equally unmerited contempt.

Zeuss’s book in particular, published in 1853—the Gaelic part of it
founded on the study of Gaelic Continental MSS., illuminated the whole
field, just as much as if the searchlight had been turned on a dark and
hidden landscape. From that day a Celtic renaissance was assured. His
philological results, and the fact that the ancient dialects had now
been proved beyond question to belong to the great Aryan group, and
closely akin to the classic languages of Europe, gave the Celtic a new
importance and fired the enthusiasm of that subsequent galaxy of
scholars, who have made Celtic studies famous.

Surprised and charmed with the prestige their own language and
literature had thus suddenly acquired in the eyes of Europe, and
especially of learned philologists, many of the Celts themselves now
began to look with kindlier interest upon their own literary legacy and
to recognise its value. The attention thus drawn to the past gradually
aroused enthusiasm for every surviving relic of tradition, of
literature, of history, of social custom, and of music. It has led to
the foundation of Celtic chairs for the study of the language and
literature, notably at Oxford, Edinburgh, and Berlin. It has given rise
to the Gaelic Mòd, Irish Text Society, and numerous other Highland,
Irish, and Welsh Associations, and kindred periodicals, British,
American, and Continental. Never before has such a mass of Celtic
tradition and lore been brought to view, and published in book or
magazine, as there has been within the last few decades.

It cannot indeed be said that this renaissance has added any new
masterpieces to the native literatures, either in prose or poetry. A
wonderful outburst of literary activity there has been, and
distinguished authors have arrived; but the remarkable thing is, and it
is worthy of note, that the so-called Celtic renaissance, if we regard
it solely from its literary side and apart from the work of scholars,
has found its fullest expression in English, and addresses itself not so
much to the native Gaels or Cymri as to the English-speaking world in
general. Highland, Welsh, and Irish litterateurs have taken to placing
their wealth of dream, of poetic sentiment and imagination, as well as
their marvellous gift of story-telling, at the service of English
literature, which is accordingly enriched, while the old river dries up
in proportion as the number of readers and writers of the original
tongue declines.

There are some things that we cannot hope to resuscitate. They pass in
the nature of things. Some that we would not wish to recall even if we
might. They have served their day. And if the current Celtic renaissance
has not contributed as much to the vernacular literature as might be
desired, it has certainly immensely enhanced the glories of the past,
and it has otherwise exhibited a revival of Celtic _esprit de corps_
which shows that—

The ancient spirit is not dead—
Old times, methinks, are breathing there.

That this race-feeling survives, this kinship of blood, and is ever and
anon reasserting itself, may be inferred from the recent Pan-Celtic
Congress in Dublin, where representatives of Wales, of Brittany, of the
Highlands, of Ireland, and even of Celtdom beyond the seas, assembled in
all their ancient _tailoring_ to do homage to the past, to reckon with
the present, and formulate afresh their aspirations—to ask, in fact,
what does this latest renaissance mean? and whither tends it?

A truly heterogeneous gathering, and eminently characteristic of the
race, who still look wistfully for the return of Arthur or of the Feinn,
and some new age of magic and romance, and whose forte it is unceasingly
to pursue the unknown, the undefinable, the ideal.

We can picture the bewildered surprise and irrepressible mirth of the
average, unimaginative, unbelieving Sassenach, as he suddenly encounters
the extraordinary Pan-Celtic pageant on the living streets of Dublin.
Whence this resurrection of phantoms—these apparitions of long dead
ancestors? “Nay, good citizen, ’tis no phantasy,” sober reason replies,
“but one of various manifestations, perhaps the most evanescent of the
present Celtic renaissance, which finds little in our modern,
materialistic civilisation answering to its deepest aspirations.” And,
falling into reverie over the unwonted spectacle, we ourselves in our
wonderment musingly repeat the words of Charles Lamb:—

Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that being nothing, art
everything! When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity—then thou wert
nothing, but hadst a remoter _antiquity_, as thou calledst it, to look
back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself, flat,
jejune, _modern_! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what
half Januses are we, that we cannot look forward with the same
idolatry with which we for ever revert? The mighty future is as
nothing, being everything; the past is everything, being nothing.

CHAPTER XIV
HIGHLAND BARDS BEFORE THE FORTY-FIVE

“The Owlet”—Three Macgregor songs—The old bardic system superseded—Era
of modern Gaelic poetry—Mary Macleod—Details of her life—Famous
songs—Iain Lom—Ardent poet and politician—His “Vow”—Eventful
career—Poems—Created Gaelic Poet-Laureate—Influence on Highland
history—Other minor bards and bardesses—Imitations by Sir Walter
Scott—The blind harper, and the blind piper—A comic poet—Two major
bards—Maccodrum’s Muse—Characteristics of the group before the
Forty-five.

The Book of the Dean of Lismore may be regarded as having gathered up
the best of the available, medieval, Gaelic poetry, and as having closed
the old bardic period. After it there came a break of nearly a hundred
years. It is true that there are some pieces which hail from this
interval, but they are isolated and few, with no certain dates.

Of these, the most remarkable is that styled “The Owlet,” and it is
worthy of notice here as being the only composition of the kind in the
language. The poem is attributed to Donald Macdonald, a native of
Lochaber, and perhaps the most expert archer of his day. Withal a famous
wolf-hunter, he appears to have lived in the days before firearms, and
to have composed the verses when old. Their occasion is briefly
summarised by Mackenzie of “The Beauties,” in a footnote. In his
declining years the poet had married a young woman who proved a very
unmeet helpmate. For when he and his dog were worn down with the toils
of the chase, and infirmities rendered them stiff and decrepit, this
“crooked rib” took a pleasure in teasing them. Finding an old feeble owl
one day, she installed it in the house as a more fitting companion than
herself for the aged bard and his dog. The poem is an ingenious
performance in the form of a dialogue between the outraged husband and
the bird.

Three Macgregor songs of that period have likewise a wonderful charm and
pathos. They are entitled “Macgregor’s Lullaby,” “Macgregor’s O’Ruara,”
and “The Braes of the Ceathach.” The authoress of the first laments the
death of her husband, who, with his father and brother, were beheaded at
the instigation of Colin Campbell of Glenorchy; her own sire, Campbell
of Glenlyon; and Menzies of Rannoch. The following verses are from
Pattison’s rendering:—

Early on a Lammas morning,
With my husband was I gay;
But my heart got sorely wounded
Ere the middle of the day.

(chorus) Ochan, Ochan, Ochan uiri,
Though I cry, my child, with thee—
Ochan, Ochan, Ochan uiri,
Now he hears not thee nor me.

Malison on judge and kindred—
They have wrought me mickle woe;
With deceit they came about us,
Through deceit they laid him low.

Had they met but twelve Macgregors,
With my Gregor at their head;
Now my child had not been orphaned,
Nor these bitter tears been shed.

On an oaken block they laid him,
And they spilt his blood around;
I’d have drunk it in a goblet
Largely, ere it reached the ground.

· · · · ·

When the rest have all got lovers
Now a lover have I none;
My fair blossom, fresh and fragrant,
Withers on the ground alone.

While all other wives the night-time
Pass in slumber’s balmy bands;
I, beside my bedside weary,
Never cease to wring my hands.

Far, far better be with Gregor
Where the heather’s in its prime,
Than with mean and Lowland barons
In a house of stone and lime.

· · · · ·

Bahu, bahu, little nursling—
Oh! so tender now and weak;
I fear the day will never brighten
When revenge for him you’ll seek.

Ochan, Ochan, Ochan uiri,
Though I cry, my child, with thee—
Ochan, Ochan, Ochan uiri
Yet he hears not thee nor me.

We pass by the few existing lines of Bishop Carsewell and Sir John
Stewart of Appin, who both lived in the sixteenth century, and forthwith
emerge upon the new time, the era of modern Gaelic poetry. Almost
simultaneously in Scotland and Ireland, a great change took place in the
form and complexion of this vernacular poetic literature. From the early
part of the seventeenth century, the intricate metres and technicalities
of the old bardic system, which had been in vogue for a thousand years,
began to be discarded and superseded, and more freedom in versifying
introduced. Dr. Douglas Hyde sums up the principles of this new
departure in two sentences: first, the adoption of vowel rhyme in place
of consonantal rhyme; second, the adoption of a certain number of
accents in each line in place of a certain number of syllables. And in
consequence of these changes, he holds that the Gaelic poetry of the
last two centuries is probably the most sensuous attempt to convey music
in words ever made by man. He who has once heard it and remains deaf to
its charm can have little heart for song or soul for music. It is
absolutely impossible, he says, to convey the lusciousness of sound,
richness of rhythm, and perfection of harmony in another language. The
sweetest creation of all Gaelic literature, this new outburst of lyric
melody was a wonderful arrangement of vowel sounds, so placed that in
every accented syllable, first one vowel and then another fell upon the
ear in all possible kinds of harmonious modifications. Some verses are
made wholly on the à sound, others on the ò, ù, è, or ì sounds, but the
majority on a unique and fascinating intermixture of two, three, or
more; as, for example, in Mary Macleod’s vowel-rhyming over the drowning
of Mac-Ille Chalum in the angry Minch between Stornoway and Raasay:—

Mo bhèud, ’s mo bhròn,
Mar dh’eirich dhò
Muir beucach, mòr,
Ag leum mu d’bhòrd,
Thu féin, ’s do shèoid
’Nuair reub ’ur seòil,
Nach d’fhaod sibh treòir
A chaitheadh orr.

’S e an sgeul’ craiteach
Do’n mhnaoi a d’fhag thu,
’S do t-aon bhrathair,
A shuidh na t’aite,
Diluain Càisge,
Chaidh tonn bàit ort,
Craobh a b’aird’ de’n ubhal thu.

To give the effect in English the original has been somewhat freely,
though not quite accurately, rendered thus:—

My grief, my pain,
Relief was vain
The seething wave
Did leap and rave
And reeve in twain,
Both sheet and sail,
And leave us bare
And foundering.

Alas! indeed,
For her you leave.
Your brother’s grief
To them will cleave.
It was on Easter
Monday’s feast
The branch of peace
Went down with you.

It has been acknowledged even by Dr. Hyde, one of our greatest Irish
authorities of the present, that the Scottish Gaels led the way in this
great change that transformed the Celtic poetry of both Islands, and to
Mary Macleod, popularly known as “Mairi nighean Alasdair Ruaidh,” has
been assigned the honour of being the first of the modern Highland bards
to inaugurate the new system.

Before her day most of the Gaelic poetry was Ossianic, or of uncertain
authorship; fugitive, and generally in the ancient style. The poets were
bound by the rules of their order, and to excel within the very narrow
limits of the old-world prosody, hedged about as it was with so many
technicalities, required years of severe bardic study and preparation.
Mary, apparently without any tuition, without even the power to read or
write, suddenly burst these unnatural bonds asunder, and gave to the
spirit of her poetry the freedom of the elements, unhampered and
unfettered by the intricate metres of the Schools. She invented rhythms
of her own, often making the music of sound an echo of the sense. And
from her time scores of new and brilliant metres have made their
appearance.

Only a few biographical details of this remarkable woman are known, but
they are characteristic, and extremely interesting, revealing a
personality outside the common order of Highland intellect. Born in
Roudal, Harris, in the year 1569, she was the daughter of Alexander
Macleod, son of Alasdair Ruadh, a descendant of the chief of that
distinguished clan; and at an early age, apparently, she became a nurse
in the family of the Macleods at Dunvegan Castle. Though otherwise
illiterate, the poetic Mary must have derived some culture,
independently of book learning, from her association with the chiefs and
their following in the ancestral home where, nearly 200 years
afterwards, Dr. Johnson and his friend were so hospitably entertained.
In the course of her long career, for she lived to be 105 years old, she
nursed no less than five lairds of the Macleods,[32] and two of the
lairds of Applecross.

There is no evidence that she was much addicted to the making of poetry
until somewhat advanced in life. It was then at least that she composed
those pieces that have survived and made her name illustrious in
Highland literature. Most of them have reference to events that happened
in the Macleod family.

Thus the song, “An Talla ’m bu ghna le Mac Leoid,” was produced
extempore during the last illness of one of the lairds. Happening to ask
Mary facetiously what kind of a lament she would make for him after he
was gone, she declared in response that it would be a very mournful one.
“Come nearer me,” said the aged chief, “and let me hear part of it,”
whereupon the clever bardess sang this pathetic dirge. The power of
extemporising poetical compositions still lingers in the Highlands.

Again, “Hithill, uthill agus hò,” owes its existence to the gift of a
snuff-mull bestowed on Mary by a son of Sir Norman.

All her barderie, however, did not suit the proud chief of Dunvegan, who
objected to the scope of the publicity he and his menage received at the
hands of the family nurse, exercising, as she freely did, the privileges
of the poet. And therefore he banished her to the island of Mull, under
the care of a relative.

But if one song sent her away, another brought her back. It was hard to
be exiled from Eilean-a-Cheo, and the castled seat of the clan, and so
seizing the opportunity which the advent of the young laird’s birthday
offered, she composed the now well-known “Luinneag Mhic Leoid,” or “Ode
to Macleod,” in which she presented a portrait so flattering that the
stubborn chief relented and sent a boat to bring her back, on condition
that henceforth she should no more exercise her gift of song. The
delighted poetess readily assented.

Yet even on the way from Mull to Skye she could not restrain the poetic
afflatus, and though for a time after her return she kept her word, as
Blackie says, “a bird is a bird and will sing”; and Mary Macleod, this
irrepressible daughter of the red-haired clansman, once more incurred
the displeasure of her chief by composing a new poem on the recovery of
his son from some illness; and in extenuation of the charge laid against
her, she naively maintained, “It is not a song; it is only a crònan,”
that is, a crooning.

The ode she produced in Mull in the days of dreary exile is one of the
finest of her poems; wild and beautiful, with a very peculiar charm. It
generally appears in all the best collections of Gaelic songs, and has
been translated into English verse both by Pattison and Blackie. The
rendering of the latter is, perhaps, the more euphonious, and brings out
better the repetition at the beginning of each stanza, as:—

I sit on a knoll,
All sorrowful and sad,
And I look on the grey sea
In mistiness clad,
And I brood on strange chances
That drifted me here,
Where Scarba and Jura
And Islay are near.

Where Scarba and Jura
And Islay are near;
Grand land of rough mountains,
I wish thee good cheer,
I wish young Sir Norman
On mainland and islands
To be named with proud honour,
First chief of the Highlands!

To be praised with proud honour
First chief of the Highlands,
For wisdom and valour,
In far and nigh lands;
For mettle and manhood
There’s none may compare
With the handsome Macleod
Of the princeliest air.

And the blood through his veins,
That so proudly doth fare,
From the old Kings of Lochlann
Flows richly and rare.
Each proud earl in Alba
Is knit with his line,
And Erin shakes hands with him
Over the brine.

And Erin shakes hands with him
Over the brine;
Brave son of brave father,
The pride of his line,
In camp and in council
Whose virtue was seen,
And his purse was as free
As his claymore was keen.

· · · · ·

With my heart I thee worship
Thou shapeliest Knight,
Wellgirt in the grace
Of the red and the white;
With an eye like the blaeberry
Blue on the brae,
And cheeks like the haws
On the hedge by the way.

With a cheek like the haws
On the hedge by the way,
’Neath the rarest of locks
In rich curly display;
And the guest in thy hall
With glad cheer shall behold
Rich choice of rare armour
In brass and in gold, etc.

It needs some of Mary’s own imagination to picture her going about in
after days wearing a tartan _tonnag_, fastened in front with a large
silver brooch, and carrying a silver-headed cane. Hardy to a degree in
mind and constitution, the venerable nurse and poetess, when long past
the natural span of years, was much given, we are told, to gossip,
snuff, and whisky. After her death, which took place at Dunvegan in
1674, she was buried in her native isle of Harris.

Mackenzie of “The Beauties” appraised this quaint personage as the most
original of all our poets, who borrowed nothing. Her thoughts, her
verse, and rhymes were all equally her own; her language simple and
elegant; her diction easy, natural, and unaffected. There is no
straining to produce effect; no search after unintelligible words to
conceal the poverty of ideas. Her thoughts flow freely, and her
versification runs like a mountain stream over a smooth bed of polished
granite. She often repeats her rhymes, as in the above instance, yet we
never feel them tiresome or disagreeable, for, more than most of her
Gaelic compeers, Mary was mistress of the poetic lyre.

After her came another striking figure in the history of Highland bardic
literature. This was John Macdonald, the Lochaber poet, popularly known
as Iain Lom, probably from lack of hair either on his head or face, and
sometimes styled Iain Manntach, from an impediment in his speech.
Singular in these physical respects, he was no less remarkable for his
mental characteristics. A man of great force of character, he combined
in his personality the ardent poet and the keen politician, the
intuitive dreamer and the restless man of action.

Macdonald belonged to the Keppoch family, lived through the stirring
times of Charles I., Charles II., James II., the Revolution, and
subsequent reign of William and Mary, dying at an advanced age in 1710,
when Anne was on the throne.

This is the wonderful schemer whom some regard as the real genius of the
Montrose Campaign during the Civil War. Were it not for him, it is
certain, events could not have developed so favourably and so
brilliantly for the victorious Marquis as they did. Keen Jacobite as he
always was, he accompanied the latter on most of his marches, and it is
marvellous that the great Border minstrel, Sir Walter Scott, especially
in his account of the battle of Inverlochy in the _Legend of Montrose_,
makes no reference to him.

The Keppoch bard first came into prominence as a man to be reckoned
with, in connection with the murder of his chief, which, it is said he
foresaw, but was unable to avert. Sent abroad as a minor to be educated,
the heir of Keppoch was supplanted in his absence by his own faithless
and intriguing cousins, who murdered both him and his brother on their
return home. The dastardly crime rankled in the bosom of the fiery bard.
Among the faithless clansmen he alone remained fearlessly true to the
stricken family, and he determined to have revenge. “The Vow of Iain
Lom,” published in Mrs. D. Ogilvy’s _Highland Minstrelsy_, graphically
depicts his state of mind at the time. He went from house to house, and
castle to castle, calling for vengeance on the assassins, and having at
last obtained a commission from Government to take them dead or alive,
he first addressed himself to Glengarry, who declined the dangerous
task, and then to Sir Alexander Macdonald, who put a company of chosen
men at his disposal, the “Ciaran Mabach,” poet and soldier, at their
head.

Under the Keppoch bard’s directions the murderers were summarily
attacked and beheaded in their own barricaded house. A gruesome monument
of seven heads, representing those of the father and six sons, now marks
the well on Loch Oich side, known as _Tobar-nan-ceann_, where these
bleeding trophies are said to have been washed on their way to Glengarry
Castle, whence they were carried to Skye as a tribute to the Knight of
Sleat.

The bard has a poem on “Mort na Ceapach,” the murder of Keppoch; and
another entitled “A Bhean Leasaich,” in which he begins by praising Sir
Alexander Macdonald of Sleat and his son Sir James, evidently with the
intention of provoking Glengarry for his remissness in the matter of
retribution upon the usurpers. His own persecution by the traitors
furnished the poet with another theme. From this time he became a man of
mark in the Highlands, feared and respected. Though not a soldier
himself, when the Civil War broke out he identified himself with the
cause of the Stuarts, and was the means of bringing the armies of Argyll
and Montrose into deadly conflict at Inverlochy on February 2nd, 1645.
The wily John, a willing spectator, evaded taking a personal hand in the
encounter by the following ruse. When asked to make ready to march to
the fight, by the Macdonald commanding the Irish contingent, he slyly
replied, “If I go along with thee to-day, and fall in battle, who will
sing thy praises to-morrow? Go thou, Alasdair, and exert thyself as
usual, and I shall sing thy feats, and celebrate thy prowess in martial
strains.”

The result was that the bard feasted his eyes from a safe distance on
the disaster of the Campbells, with whom he was ever at feud, and moved
by all the passion and prejudice of the event composed the heroic
stanzas entitled, “The Battle of Inverlochy.” So realistic and graphic
is the description given in the original Gaelic that it seems to
photograph many of the details just as they happened. “The spirit of
poetry, the language, and boldness of expression,” says Mackenzie, with
perhaps the Celtic leaning to hyperbole, “have never been equalled.” Yet
to-day we read these vindictive strains with different feelings from
those that animated the bard.

A few verses may be quoted from the rendering of Professor Blackie,
which, though they lack the fire and intensity of the original, give a
good idea of the gist of the poem:—[33]

Did you hear from Cille Cummin
How the tide of war came pouring?
Far and wide the summons travelled,
How they drave the Whigs before them!

From the Castle tower I viewed it
High on Sunday morning early,
Looked and saw the ordered battle
Where Clan Donald triumphed rarely.

Up the green slope of Cuil Eachaidh
Came Clan Donald marching stoutly;
Churls who laid my home in ashes,
Now shall pay the fine devoutly!

· · · · ·

Many a bravely mounted rider,
With his back turned to the slaughter,
Where his boots won’t keep him dry now,
Learns to swim in Nevis water.

On the wings of eager rumour
Far and wide the tale is flying,
How the slippery knaves, the Campbells,
With their cloven skulls are lying!

O’er the frosted moor they travelled,
Stoutly with no thought of dying;
Where now many a whey-faced lubber,
To manure the fields is lying!

From the height of Tom-na-harry
See them crudely heaped together,
In their eyes no hint of seeing,
Stretched to rot upon the heather!

Warm your welcome was at Lochy,
With blows and buffets thickening round you,
And Clan Donald’s groovèd claymore,
Flashing terror to confound you!

Hot and hotter grew the struggle
Where the trenchant blade assailed them;
Sprawled with nails on ground Clan Duiné,
When the parted sinew failed them.

Many a corpse upon the heather,
Naked lay, once big with daring,
From the battle’s hurly-burly,
Drifting blindly to Blarchaorainn.

· · · · ·

If I could, I would be weeping
For your shame and for your sorrow,
Orphans’ cry and widows’ wailing,
Through the long Argyll to-morrow.

All this to the weird and exulting chorus:—

H-i rim h-ŏ-rò, h-ò-rò leatha,
H-i rim h-ŏ-rò, h-ò-rò leatha,
H-i rim h-ŏ-rò, h-ò-rò leatha,
Chaidh an la le Clann-Dòmhnuill.

His dangerous strategy and stinging sarcasm at length roused the Marquis
of Argyll to offer a reward for his head, and it is characteristic of
the impetuous John that he appeared in person in the audience-hall of
this mighty chief to claim it, relying for safety, no doubt, on the
sacred regard in which Highlanders always held the professional bard.
The Marquis received him courteously, and as they passed through a room
hung round with heads of moor-fowl, he asked him, “Have you ever seen,
John, so many black-cocks together?” “Yes,” he replied. “Where?” “At
Inverlochy.” “Ah! John,” muttered Argyll, “will you never cease gnawing
at the Campbells?” “I am only sorry,” added the implacable bard, “that I
cannot swallow them.”

For his services in the Stuart cause he was created Gaelic
poet-laureate, and received from Charles II. a yearly pension. Iain Lom
thus holds the unique distinction of having been the first and only
Gaelic poet-laureate. Altogether his poems would occupy a considerable
volume, though they have never been so issued.[34] Pattison has not
translated any, but Iain Lom has nevertheless obtained a well-merited
niche in Messrs. Blackie, the publishers, _Poets and Poetry of
Scotland_, 1876, compiled by James G. Wilson; and the romantic side of
his character is charmingly represented incidentally in Neil Munro’s
novel, entitled _John Splendid_.

Long after his death his Jacobite effusions still exercised a powerful
influence over his countrymen, counteracting in no small degree the
efforts of the Government to suppress the Stuart factions. “Children
were taught to lisp them,” says the _New Statistical Account of
Scotland_. “They were sung in the family circle on winter nights, and at
weddings, lykewakes, fairs, and in every company. They attributed to the
Stuarts and their adherents the most exalted virtues, and represented
their opponents as incarnate fiends. In 1745, Moidart and Kilmonivaig
were called ‘The Cradle of the Rebellion,’ and they were the very
districts where the songs of Iain Lom leavened the whole mass of society
with Jacobite sentiments.”

Mightier was the verse of Iain
Hearts to nerve, to kindle eyes,
Than the claymore of the valiant,
Than the counsel of the wise.

Contemporary with Iain Lom, and his confederate in bringing retribution
upon the Keppoch traitors, was a minor bard, known as Archibald
Macdonald, or “An Ciaran Mabach,” an illegitimate son of Sir Alexander
Macdonald, sixteenth baron of Sleat. In after life he lived in easy
circumstances, well adapted for the cultivation of his poetic tastes, on
an estate granted him in North Uist by his influential father, in return
for numerous services rendered as a sagacious and practical man of
affairs. Otherwise his life was uneventful and his poetry limited in
amount.

But the field held various other less prominent bards, for to this
period belonged several of those whose productions appear in the Fernaig
MS. of Duncan Macrae. Nor was the Highlands then lacking in poetesses.
Two at least figure in the record of the remembered.

Dorothy Brown, a native of Luing Island, Argyllshire, composed many
poems, of which perhaps that to Alasdair Maccolla is the only one now
extant, yet as a poetess she alone of women in that age approached the
standard of Mary Macleod.

Cicely Macdonald, her contemporary, was daughter of Ronald of Keppoch,
in youth a frolicsome maiden and clever at epigrams. Marrying a
gentleman of the Lovat family, she lived with him farther north, and
came to be known for her bardic gifts. Songs and laments were her chief
productions, but after her husband died at Inverness in a fit of
inebriety, she took to hymn-making. The names of her earlier pieces are
suggestive, such as: “Moràghach Mhic Shimidh,” “Slan gu bràth le ceòl na
clarsaich,” and “Alasdair a Glinne-Garaidh.” The latter beautiful one,
Mackenzie assures us, has served as a model for many Gaelic songs.

The next name in the succession is that of Nial Macvurich, family bard
and historian of Clanranald, distinguished also as a descendant, through
a long line of bardic ancestors, from the ancient and historic Muireach
Albannach, whose poetry figures in the Book of the Dean of Lismore. To
Nial we are indebted for the history of his illustrious clan, written in
Gaelic and preserved in the Red Book of Clanranald. But it is to be
regretted that of his own poems none is now extant, except two pieces
treasured in “The Beauties.” Solicitous to perpetuate the history and
ancient poetry of others, it appears that Nial took no thought for his
own to have them written down, and so they have mostly disappeared. He
lived to a great age, like the majority of these early Highland bards,
and was an old man living on his farm in South Uist at the time of the
first Jacobite rising in 1715.

Still another poet of Clanranald fame, John Macdonald, or Iain Dubh Mac
Iain ’Ic-Ailein, born about 1665, and resident in Eigg; and then we
reach the Aosdan Matheson, who was bard to the Earl of Seaforth in the
seventeenth century. Appurtenant to this post he held free lands in
Lochalsh, Ross-shire, and composed as many poems as would fill a large
volume, but most of these, like Nial Macvurich’s, and for the same
reason, have long been forgotten. One of those preserved has been very
freely rendered or imitated in English by Sir Walter Scott, under the
title “Farewell to Mackenzie, High Chief of Kintail,” 1815.

The original verses are arranged to a beautiful Gaelic air, of which the
chorus is adapted to the double pull upon the oars of a galley, and
which is therefore distinct from the ordinary boat-songs. They were
composed on the occasion of the embarking at Dornie, Kintail, of the
Earl of Seaforth, who was obliged to take refuge in Spain, after an
unsuccessful effort in favour of the old Chevalier in 1718. Sir Walter’s
version runs thus:—

Farewell to Mackenneth, great Earl of the North,
The Lord of Lochcarron, Glenshiel, and Seaforth;
To the Chieftain this morning his course who began,
Launching forth on the billow his bark like a swan.
For a foreign land he has hoisted his sail,
Farewell to Mackenzie, High Chief of Kintail!

O swift be the galley, and hardy her crew,
May her captain be skilful, her mariners true,
In danger undaunted, unwearied by toil,
Though the whirlwind should rise, and the ocean should boil;
On the brave vessel’s gunnel, I drank his bonail,
And farewell to Mackenzie, High Chief of Kintail!

Awake in thy chamber, thou sweet southland gale!
Like the sighs of his people, breathe soft on his sail;
Be prolong’d as regret, that his vassals must know,
Be fair as their faith, and sincere as their woe;
Be so soft, and so fair, and so faithful, sweet gale,
Wafting onward Mackenzie, High Chief of Kintail!

Be his pilot experienced, and trusty, and wise,
To measure the seas and to study the skies;
May he hoist all his canvas from streamer to deck,
But oh! crowd it higher when wafting him back—
Till the cliffs of Skooroora, and Conan’s glad vale,
Shall welcome Mackenzie, High Chief of Kintail!

Hector Maclean, of the same period, was bard to Sir Lachlan Maclean of
Duart, from whom he had a small annuity. Two poems of his, the “Chief’s
Elegy” and “Song,” are reckoned among the beauties of Gaelic poetry, and
have also attracted the attention of Sir Walter Scott, who translated or
imitated in the abrupt style of the original a fragment of the latter,
entitled “War-Song of Lachlan, High-Chief of Maclean.” This song, like
many of the early Gaelic productions, makes a rapid transition from one
subject to another. From the situation of a forlorn maiden of the clan,
who opens with an address to her absent lover, it passes finally to an
eulogium over the martial glories of the chieftain. Thus:—

A weary month has wandered o’er
Since last we parted on the shore;
Heaven! that I saw thee, Love, once more,
Safe on that shore again!
’Twas valiant Lachlan gave the word;
Lachlan, of many a galley lord;
He call’d his kindred bands on board,
And launched them on the main.

Clan Gillian is to ocean gone,
Clan Gillian, fierce in foray known;
Rejoicing in the glory won
In many a bloody broil;
For wide is heard the thundering fray,
The rout, the ruin, the dismay,
When from the twilight glens away
Clan Gillian drives the spoil.

Woe to the hills that shall rebound
Our banner’d bagpipes’ maddening sound;
Clan Gillian’s onset echoing round,
Shall shake their inmost cell.
Woe to the bark whose crew shall gaze
Where Lachlan’s silken streamer plays!
The fools might face the lightning’s blaze
As wisely and as well!

Lachlan Mackinnon of Strath, Isle of Skye, is the next to figure in this
succession. Unlike so many of the others, he was not unlettered, nor
ignorant of such knowledge of the language as may be gleaned from a
critical study of its structure. Hence his Gaelic is wonderfully pure
and correct. In early life he filled the rôle of a strolling musician,
carrying his violin about with him from place to place, till certain
personal considerations obliged him to desist.

After him came a blind harper and a blind piper, both famous in Highland
minstrelsy. The harper was Roderick Morrison, son of an Episcopal
clergyman in the island of Lewis. He was born in the year 1646, and in
his boyhood had been sent along with his two brothers to be educated at
Inverness, all three having been destined by their father for the
ministry of the Church. But, unhappily, while there the youthful
islanders were seized with smallpox, which was then epidemic in the
town. His two brothers recovered from the effects of the dread scourge,
and afterwards became ministers, one at Contin, the other at Poolewe in
Ross-shire. Roderick himself was the chief sufferer, for not only was
his face disfigured and contracted, but he also lost the use of his
eyes. Incapacitated thus for a profession, he turned his attention to
music, and in addition to the skill he acquired in playing other
instruments, became an adept at the harp. Hence the name “An Clarsair
Dall,” by which he was generally known throughout the Highlands.

Visiting Ireland, it is thought he profited by tuition from his
fellow-harpers there, who had achieved fame in that form of minstrelsy;
and on his return to Scotland he took occasion to call at every baronial
residence on the way to exhibit his art. It so happened at the time that
many of the Scotch nobility and gentry were at the Court of King James
in Holyrood, Edinburgh, and thither the blind musician wended his way,
where he found an excellent friend in the person of the Highland
chieftain, John Breac Macleod of Harris, who readily engaged him as his
family harper.

While holding this office Morrison composed several beautiful tunes and
songs, living the life of a farmer at Totamòr in Glenelg, on a piece of
land which his patron granted him rent-free. On the death of the latter
he returned to his native island, and died there in a good old age, and
was buried in a country churchyard near Stornoway.

Morrison was a poet of power and culture. His elegy, “Creach nan
Ciadan,” on the chieftain who befriended him, is reckoned one of the
most pathetic, plaintive, and heart-touching of Highland laments.

The blind piper, John Mackay of Gairloch, was a contemporary, though
twenty years his junior. Like his father before him, who hailed from the
Reay country, this Mackay was born blind. Taught music first of all
under the paternal roof, he was sent later on to the Isle of Skye to
perfect his studies under the direction of the celebrated Mac Crimmon.
There he excelled all other pupils, and soon learned to compose
pipe-music himself. In fact, it is recorded that one of the Mac
Crimmons, jealous of his powers as a pipe-music composer, bribed some of
the youths to throw him over a precipice, which they did one day, the
blind stripling falling a distance of twenty-four feet, but without
physical hurt. The rock is still known as “Leum an Doill,” or “The Blind
Man’s Leap,” since he had the good fortune to land on his soles.

After seven years’ tuition in Skye he returned to his native parish,
succeeding his father as family piper to the Laird of Gairloch, and
subsequently marrying. Numerous pibrochs, strathspeys, reels, and jigs
are placed to his credit. When at length he was superannuated on a small
but competent annuity, the old man used to pass his time visiting
gentlemen’s houses in the Reay country and the island of Skye. On one of
these peregrinations in Sutherlandshire he composed the beautiful
pastoral “Coire an Easain,” lamenting Lord Reay. Of this poem Mackenzie
says, “It is not surpassed by anything of the kind in the Celtic
language—bold, majestic, and intrepid, it commands admiration at first
glance, and seems on a nearer survey of the entire magnificent fabric as
the work of some supernatural agent.” Could Highland admiration go
farther?

The “Piobaire Dall” lived till he was about ninety-eight years of age,
and sleeps with his father Ruairidh Dall within the clachan of his
native parish in the west.

Other minor bards of the period were, John Whyte, William Mackenzie,
John Maclean, Malcolm Maclean, the poet Macdonald of Muck, who composed
the “Massacre of Glencoe,” Angus Macdonald, Hector Macleod, Archibald
Macdonald, and Zachary Macaulay.

Archibald Macdonald excelled as a comic bard—one of the few that
Highland Gaeldom has produced. His “Elegy” on Roy while living—a piper
and favourite companion of his own—and his “Resurrection” of the same
individual, are counted very clever. He it was who composed the famous
satire, “Tha biodag air Mac Thomàis,” which, when played at a wedding
memorable in Highland history, ended so tragically for the player, and,
indeed, for Mac Thomàis himself, the alleged heir to the Lovat estates,
who had to fly from the country, and whose descendants have on more than
one occasion in recent times contested the right of the present Lovat
family to the ancient inheritance.

Tradition still pathetically relates how on that occasion, enraged at
the playing of the piece which so cleverly satirised himself, this young
Master of Lovat stabbed the bag of the piper, to silence it, with his
biodag, but the weapon entered the player’s heart also, and bag and
piper both collapsed with a mournful groan.

Zachary Macaulay is worthy of note on another account. From his family
was descended the brilliant Lord Macaulay, so famous in letters, and it
may very well have been from this source that the gifted essayist and
historian derived his vivid pictorial style. Zachary was born in the
island of Lewis early in the eighteenth century, and was the son of an
accomplished Episcopalian clergyman there. His productions as a poet
exhibit true bardic power, though he is believed in his youth to have
been given to writing wanton songs. The air of one of his popular pieces
was in after days a great favourite with Burns.

Two major bards remain to be noticed, who lived partly before and partly
after the Forty-five—John Maccodrum and Alexander Macdonald. The latter,
the more distinguished of the two, claims fuller mention hereafter.
Meanwhile, no more fitting subject might be found wherewith to conclude
this chapter than an account of the original and witty Maccodrum, with
examples of his poems.

Born in North Uist, he became in manhood bard to Sir James Macdonald of
Sleat, who died at Rome in 1766. It was a curious circumstance that
first commended him to the notice of this nobleman. The poet happened to
make a satire on the tailors of the Long Island, who were so exasperated
that they refused one and all to make him any clothing. Consequently he
went about for a time in tatters, and meeting Sir James one day, the
latter naturally inquired the reason why his trousers were so ragged.
Maccodrum explained, and was asked to repeat the offending verses. On
complying he was there and then promoted to be bard to the family, and
obtained, as was usual in such circumstances, free lands on the estate
for his maintenance.

A lively wit and biting sarcasm seem to have been characteristics of
Maccodrum’s Muse. Yet he could be very tender, as on the occasion when
he laments the untimely death of his patron, at the early age of
twenty-five. Then was the bard unusually serious and even pious:—

As I awake it is not sleep
That strives with me in troubles deep;
My bed beneath the tears I weep
Is in disquiet;
My bed beneath, etc.

Of him, my patron bright, bereft,
I have no fair possession left;
While pain of loss my soul has cleft
In sight and hearing;
While pain of loss, etc.

Sore tears are ours; joy is no more,
No hope of smiles; no cheer in store;
We seem like the brave Fianns of yore
And Finn forsaken;
We seem like the brave Fianns, etc.

Ah! true it seems the tale to tell;
Our cup is filled with doings fell;
Provoking in a rage of hell
Bless’d God the Highest;
Provoking in a rage, etc.

Blest One, from Thee let us not swerve;
Above with Thee he goes to serve;
O Christ! do Thou for us preserve
Our loving brothers;
O Christ! do thou for us preserve, etc.

Maccodrum was deemed a witness of no mean weight in the Ossianic
controversy, on the strength of the following statement by Sir James
Macdonald, in a letter dated from Skye, October 10th, 1763. Addressing
Dr. Blair, on that occasion he writes: “The few bards that are left
among us repeat only detached pieces of the Ossianic poems. I have often
heard them and understood them, particularly from one man, called John
Maccodrum, who lives on my estate in North Uist. I have heard him repeat
for hours together poems which seemed to me to be the same with
Macpherson’s translations.”

The bard once met the hero of Ossianic fame when the latter had gone to
the Outer Hebrides to collect fragments of ancient poetry. From
Lochmaddy, Macpherson happened to be travelling across the moor towards
the seat of the younger Clanranald of Benbencula, and falling in with a
native, he took occasion to ask him if he had anything on the Feinn.
This man, who was none other than the quick-witted and sarcastic
Maccodrum, taking advantage of Macpherson’s badly expressed and
ambiguous Gaelic, retorted literally to the effect that the Feinn did
not owe him anything, and even if they did, it were vain to ask for
payment now. Unaware of the personality of the bard, and direly offended
at the character of the reply, which reflected on his own knowledge of
the language, the proud collector passed on his way without more ado.
Both men thus met and parted as ignorant of each other as ships that
pass in the night.

Maccodrum’s poems have never been published separately. A few appeared
in Alexander Macdonald’s collection. Many of the rest, entrusted to
memory, are now merged in oblivion. He had not the versatility either of
Mary Macleod or of Alexander Macdonald, for he sometimes imitates the
poems of bards more original than himself, yet in purity and elegance of
language he frequently approaches Macdonald. His satire on “Donald
Bain’s Bagpipe,” and his poems on “Old Age” and “Whisky,” are considered
excellent, witty, ingenious, and original. And “Smeorach
Chlann-Domhnuill,” or “The Mavis of Clan Donald,” which has been
rendered into English verse by Professor Blackie, is a delightful pæan
in praise of his own native Uist.

The Mavis of Pabal am I; in my nest
I lay long time with my head on my breast,
Dozing away the dreary hour,
In the day that was dark, and the time that was sour.

But now I soar to the mountain’s crest,
For the chief is returned whom I love best;
In the face of the sun, on the fringe of the wood,
Feeding myself with wealth of good.

On the tip of the twigs I sit and sing,
And greet the morn on dewy wing,
And fling to the breeze my dewy note,
With no ban to my breath, and no dust in my throat.

Every bird will praise its own nest,
And why shall not I think mine the best?
Land of strong men and healthy food,
And kindly cheer, and manners good.

A land that faces the ocean wild,
But with summer sweetness, mellow and mild,
Calves, lambs, and kids, full many a score,
Bread, milk, and honey piled in the store.

A dappled land full sunny and warm,
Secure and sheltered from the storm,
With ducks and geese and ponds not scanted,
And food for all that live to want it, etc.

The poet, apparently, made the most of his own rugged island, and now
lies buried in an old churchyard not far from the village of Houghary,
where a rough boulder of gneiss, of uneven, battered surface, spotted
with nodules, but without any inscription, marks his grave. He himself,
while living, had picked it out from the beach and destined it for this
purpose.

The Highland bards before the Forty-five were thus a goodly company, and
they had this in common, that they were independent for the most part of
writing, in some cases even of education; yet they had a wonderful
command of their native Gaelic, and an extraordinary ear for the
beauties of sound that may be expressed through the medium of language.
They were all more or less attached to chiefs, whose praises they sang,
and almost without exception these early bards lived into an extreme old
age, and died in the land they had never left, and among the friends
they had never forsaken.

CHAPTER XV
THE INFLUENCE OF THE CHURCH ON GAELIC LITERATURE

The origins of Celtic literature—Two streams—The Pagan—The
Christian—Influence of the early Celtic Church as patron of
letters—Originates a written literature—Attitude towards the
ancient sagas—Medieval obscurantism—The Dialogues between Ossian
and Patrick quoted and discussed—Their significance—Bishop
Carsewell and the Reformation—The rival influences of Naturalism
and the Church—Decline of Gaelic oral literature—The Nineteenth, a
century of gleaning rather than of great creative
work—Reasons—Present-day return to nature—Splendid services of
individual Churchmen.

As we work our way back through history towards the origins of Celtic
literature, we recognise two streams issuing from two very different
sources. One has its rise in pre-Christian times, welling up from the
pagan heart of the race from a remote antiquity. It is represented by
the sagas and the poetry that is mingled with them. These sagas breathe
the spirit of the Celtic people in the long past, and are the most
characteristic of all their literary products. So old are they, that
very few of them deal with events posterior to the eighth century, and
those that do are the less meritorious.

In this respect it may be said that the Celts produced their best
literature first. This literature was long in coming to the birth. It
took centuries to evolve. But when it did appear it proved a new
creation. The mind of a people lived in it, spoke through its tales.
Generations of ancestors, lost and speechless in the slumber of the
ages, found in it life and utterance.

So far as this stream has gained in volume through its course down the
centuries, it has done so by expansion. Each succeeding age harks back
to the past and draws from the original, imitating and transcribing,
until now in the great books of sagas and modern literature thereon, we
have a mighty river of Gaelic lore.

Yet nothing so original, nothing so characteristic in this line has ever
been added to the early contribution. The Celtic genius seems to have
found its fullest and most distinctive expression then, in the days
before writing, and before Christianity was introduced, and ever since
it has been drawing inspiration from its oldest creations.

Take away this stream, and the peculiar interest of Celtic literature is
gone. How many centuries the sagas were in the making before they took
final shape as we read them, can never be known. They passed from
generation to generation by oral delivery, and it was only in the
seventh or eighth century of our era that they ultimately found
embodiment in writing. This much can be inferred, though we have no
copies earlier than the end of the eleventh century and middle of the
twelfth, those from which these latter drew their texts having perished
long ago.

But as this stream flowed on from a past as remote and mysterious as the
sources of the Nile were in the days of Herodotus, suddenly a new and
independent one takes its rise. And this latter stream can be traced to
its source in the fifth century of our era. It emanated not, as in the
other case, from the pagan heart of the race in its more primitive
phase, but in that heart overtaken and surprised by the new doctrines of
Christianity.

This was really a new departure—a new beginning. The two streams had
little in common. In essence and colour they seemed as if they belonged
to two different worlds, which indeed was the case, in point of outlook
and underlying thought.

As literature the old was better. It represented the real quintessence
of the Celtic genius before it was diverted into new channels. And this
is what makes critics like M. Darmesteter, while fully admitting the
glorious significance of the new stream as a literary renaissance, yet
consider it a decadence in contrast with the earlier.

For all this, the far-reaching significance of the new creation must not
be lost sight of. It is probable that even then the ancient stream had
reached its full flood, and but for the advent of the latter, which came
with the new thought, it may have gradually subsided with the old order
and never have found a way to posterity.

Historically, then, it is with the introduction of Christianity that
Celtic literature first finds its embodiment, and when we consider the
condition of continental Europe at the time, this early beginning in the
writing of books is quite marvellous. It is to the Church, therefore, in
the person of its missionary pioneers, that we owe the initial force
that resulted in a written Gaelic literature.

In bringing Christianity to bear on the old pagan life and thought of
the race, the missionaries effected a reanimation, which brought latent
powers into action in a new direction. They furnished the people with
fresh ideas, new material for thought, and an entirely changed outlook.
The movement, indeed, might be described as the passage from Celtic
naturalism to Christian spiritualism. And when we consider what the old
paganism really was in many of its features, this emancipation cannot be
regarded in any other light than that in which history uniformly regards
it, as a salvation of the country, preparing the way for the realisation
of all those grand possibilities that lay in the future.

With the coming of St. Patrick Ireland entered upon a new epoch, and
with the advent of St. Columba the political and literary history of
Scotland may be said to have begun. Every credit is due to the Church,
therefore, as the importer and originator of a written literature, as
well as of a true religion. To it we owe the remarkable arrival of
letters which not only tapped a new fountain head, causing a new stream
of literary composition to flow, but which also secured for us the
preservation and continuance of the old to this day.

“Few forms of Christianity,” wrote Renan, “have offered an ideal of
Christian perfection so pure as the Celtic Church of the sixth, seventh,
and eighth centuries. Nowhere, perhaps, has God been better worshipped
in spirit than in those great monastic communities of Hy or Iona, of
Bangor, of Clonard, or of Lindisfarne.”

And it is this purity of motive and sincerity of purpose that led the
early missionaries, in contrast to the obscurantists of later ages, to
recognise the high value of literature and use it in the service of
religion. In the primitive Celtic Church we find no conflict between the
two, such as the sickly piety of some more modern periods has instituted
and maintained. Learning and culture were then never regarded as enemies
to religion. On the contrary, they were deemed not only helpful, but
even indispensable to the progress of Christianity in the land. And they
were encouraged as such. They were the most powerful agents for the
removal of racial ignorance, superstition, and prejudice.

All honour, therefore, to the Church that first kindled the lamp of
literature and the love of knowledge in these once dark islands.

The attitude of this early Celtic Church towards the original oral
traditions and compositions of the people was perfectly consistent, and
can be easily understood. It simply ignored them as far as that was
possible, offering in their stead a substitute infinitely better fitted,
as it thought, to elevate the life and character of these pagan peoples.

With a zeal that is entirely praiseworthy, it set itself to the
multiplication of copies of the Psalter, of the Gospels, and other parts
of Scripture. It is really marvellous, when we consider that these had
to be patiently and laboriously and beautifully handwritten, how much
was accomplished in this way by the early missionaries. St. Columba
alone was credited with having written “three hundred gifted, lasting,
illuminated, noble books,” all of them transcriptions of some portions
of the Bible, no doubt.

It is this which accounts for the fact that almost all the existing
literary monuments of the early Celtic Church are copies of the Gospels
or of the Psalter, with or without Gaelic or Latin glosses.

Thus the “Domhnach Airgid,” the “Cathrach,” the Books of Durrow, Dimna,
Kells, Molling, Armagh, Deer, the “Gospel of Maeielbrid Macdurnain,” the
“Psalter of Southampton,” with correlative books like the “Irish Canons”
and “Missal of Stowe,” in the British Islands, besides those on the
Continent.

It is significant that the missionaries used the Latin versions of the
Scriptures rather than Greek or Hebrew ones, with the reading and
writing of which latter they seemed to have been less familiar. They did
not attempt, so far as we know, to make a Gaelic translation of the
original, but contented themselves, no doubt, with rendering from Latin
into the Gaelic in course of their preachings and expositions.

One thing is evident, that these scholarly men had no aversion to
textual criticism or any fear of it, like so many of their Highland and
Irish successors to-day, for they freely indulged in it for their own
and the popular benefit. Thus the Celtic Church of Scotland and Ireland
had Jerome’s recension of the Vulgate almost as soon as it was issued,
and, to judge from the youthful Columba and his master St. Finnian’s
avidity for it, welcomed it with great enthusiasm. And more than that,
the Celtic Church appears to have collated Jerome’s text with older
native texts of their own, to make if possible even a better version,
such as they might use in all their monasteries, and such as we find to
this day in most of their great books of Gospel, as quoted above.

But in the same way that Knox unfortunately found it expedient to
destroy many beautiful buildings, books, and customs of the Roman
Catholic Church at the time of the Reformation, so the early Celtic
Church in conflict with an ancient and debasing paganism felt it
necessary, while tolerating many ancient customs and superstitions, to
resist the leaven of heathenism in every shade and form, and thus even
to ignore the compositions which breathed so freely its spirit and
atmosphere.

There is a high probability that the best minds felt the hardship of
having to turn their backs upon the most beautiful of these literary
products of their race. For example, in the “Dialogue of the Sages,”
found in the Book of Lismore, it is recorded that St. Patrick himself
felt rather uneasy at the delight with which he listened to the stories
of the ancient Feinn, and feared it might be wrong in him to enjoy or
show his appreciation of those pagan narratives, yet when he consulted
his guardian angels, they not only assured him that there was no harm in
listening to the tales, but even counselled him to have them written
down in the words of ollamhs, “for,” said they, “it will be a rejoicing
to numbers and to the good people to the end of time to listen to these
stories.”

The missionaries appear to have been too earnest and consistent in their
struggle with the gnarled roots of paganism to indulge their taste in
writing what they could not help admiring as tales of great literary
beauty, and very fascinating. And so for two or three centuries, though
the cultivation of writing and bardic compositions went steadily on,
none of the ancient pagan products found patrons sufficiently literary
to commit them to MSS.

The new school followed a style and trend of its own, and in addition to
endless transcribing, produced Latin prose works of its own, prominent
among which may be mentioned St. Patrick’s _Confession_, and “Epistle to
Coroticus,” Cummene’s and Adamnan’s _Lives of St. Columba_, Brendan’s
_Navigatio_ or _Voyaging_, each of which have had a wide vogue
throughout the Middle Ages, and since.

Among its Gaelic contributions are many beautiful poems, some of ancient
renown, on account of their theme or author, such as Dallan Forgaill’s
_Amra Choluimcille_, St. Columba’s own numerous lyrics—that on Derry, on
Cormac’s visit, his “Farewell to Ara,” all breathing love of nature and
affection for home.

Then we have the verses of Cennfaelad, who died in 678; Aengus the
Culdee’s “Feilire,” or Calendar, about 800; the poems in the Monastery
of St. Paul, Carinthia; and the verses in the Codex Boernerianus; the
“Saltair na Rann,” about the year 1000, a collection of 162 poems in
early middle Irish.

Of hymns and prayers, both in Gaelic and Latin—compositions of the early
Celtic Church—there is no lack. The most famous of the Latin ones are
those of Sechnall (on St. Patrick) and of Columcille (“The Altus,” “In
te Christo,” and “Noli Pater”); and of the Gaelic ones, St. Patrick’s
“Deer’s Cry,” Colman’s and Fiacc’s hymns, “Ninine’s Prayer,” Ultan’s and
Broccan’s hymns, both in praise of Brigit, “Adamnan’s Prayer,” and the
hymns of Sanctain and Mael-isu.

When to these we add specimens of homiletic literature and “Cormac’s
Glossary” (Cormac, King-Bishop of Cashel, 837–903), which is reckoned by
far the oldest attempt at a comparative vernacular dictionary made in
any language of modern Europe, and the same author’s “Saltair of
Cashel,” we have a very fair representation of what the new literature
initiated by the monks and missionaries contained.

It is mainly a religious literature, as contrasted with the purely pagan
war-stories and romances of the heroes. This ethical movement for a time
tended to supplant the natural spontaneous poetical output of the race,
yet it could not crush out these older creations, which were independent
of books and MSS., and as intense in feeling and true to nature as
anything which the classical literatures contain.

And so in course of time there came a reaction. The votaries of
naturalism so far triumphed in their zeal for the ancient sagas and
romances, that they began to have them written down. Zimmer thinks that
the earliest redaction of the “Táin Bó Chuailgné” dates from the seventh
century. But it is difficult to ascertain when the sagas first found
embodiment in ink. The interest in them appears to have been revived
immediately before or at the time when the Norsemen arrived and were
devastating the country. The devotion of the latter to the
characteristic sagas of their own race and nation may have quickened the
enthusiasm of the Gael for his own. And the new atmosphere which this
rough pagan element introduced to the land, breaking for a time the
influence and sway of the Church and of the men of learning in the
monasteries, may have conduced further to bring into popular favour the
old heroic war-poetry, nerving the heart of the people to withstand the
onslaught of the invader in the spirit of the dead heroes.

Christianity suffered eclipse for a while, and with it the interests of
learning and the religious literature, cultivated so assiduously in the
monasteries.

By the time that the sagas had come to be written down, the old feeling
which had prompted the early missionaries to ignore them was apparently
giving way, since there were scribes within the Church eager to commit
them to MS. This was a natural and inevitable reaction.

But monastic Christianity, ever on its guard against nature, was
constantly seeking after the strange and paradoxical. For it, abstinence
was worth more than enjoyment, happiness must be sought in its opposite.
And so there sprung up afresh, this time a more blind and uncompromising
orthodox antagonism to the early paganism and all its creations.

The Dialogues between Ossian and Patrick are our witness. These, while
professing to bring the spirit of paganism and of early Christianity
together in the person of the last great representative of the one and
the first of the other, were evidently the work of monkish scribes in
the twelfth century or earlier, and they throw a significant sidelight
on the situation. In reality they reflect the posture of affairs, not as
it was in the early days when Christianity was first introduced, but as
it existed later, when ecclesiastical doctrines had taken on their more
lurid, medieval colour.

In form and setting the Dialogues are the nearest approach to a drama
that the Gael has ever produced. And Miss Hull thinks that they were
designed simply to popularise the ancient tales. But such a view seems
to us to miss the whole aim and point of these compositions, which are
clearly the undisguised result of a reaction,—nay, even revolt in the
minds of thoughtful and patriotic men, monks or clerics or laymen,
against the narrow and captious spirit that can see no good in any form
of natural life and religion other than the contracted faith in which it
was itself reared.

Evidently the Church had descended from the high level of faith and
policy it had maintained in the days of St. Patrick and St. Columba, and
measures which the latter had found necessary as temporary expedients
till the need for them had vanished, smaller minds had elevated into
principles; and even the simple tenets of Christianity they had
distorted by casting them into an ecclesiastical mould, and opposing
them to the most natural instincts and enthusiasms of the human heart.

The writers of the Dialogues, we can see, are thoroughly in earnest, and
not sparing in their irony and banter of the grim theology which found
no place for the natural virtues of the Celts, or for the story of the
dreams and ideals of a thousand years. A mocking, derisive humour runs
through these pieces, but the humour is all on one side. There can be no
mistaking the sympathies of the writers, who themselves are
intellectually emancipated from the narrow tenets and intolerant spirit
that would consign the heroes without reflection and without scruple to
endless pain.

In these Dialogues paganism at its best is brought face to face with
ecclesiastical Christianity, and is made to appear more just, more
humane, and desirable in every way.

To the spirit of these conversations, or to the form in which they are
cast, no exception can reasonably be taken. In one respect only might
students of history dissent, and that is, to the selection of St.
Patrick as spokesman for the bigotry that is here pilloried.

Those who are familiar with the authentic records of his life and the
spirit of his teaching will feel that an injustice is done the apostle
of Ireland, by associating his name with such counterfeit sentiment. Had
a typical medieval monk or cleric been selected as advocate of the
repulsive theology represented here, the rôle would have been more true
to life and historical fact. As it is, one feels that a noble character
is traduced and put in a false setting. These Dialogues are profoundly
interesting, not only because of the struggle between nature and dogma,
between the cosmic process and the ethical, here brought into
irreconcilable antagonism, but also because the two original and
independent streams of Gaelic literature seem here to meet, and, like
the rushing together of contrary tides or of two confluent currents, to
mingle their waters together in a wild tumult of angry waves, which only
subsides as each again gradually finds its own channel.

One of the most interesting of the Dialogues is that which is known as
“Ossian’s Prayer,” and is about 150 lines in length. The bard begins by
asking the saint if the Feinn of Erin are in heaven. When he is informed
that his father, Gaul, and Oscar cannot be there, he not unnaturally
retorts, “If Erin’s Feinn are not in heaven, why should I Christian be?”
Thereupon the saint taunts him with irreverent fierceness of language,
adding “What are all the Feinn of Erin to one hour with God alone?” But
Ossian declares he would prefer to see one battle waged by the valiant
Feinn than to see the Lord of Heaven and his cleric (Patrick) chanting
sin.

The saint tries to impress him with God’s omniscience by telling him in
effect that it would be impossible for the smallest midge to enter
heaven without God’s knowledge. “How different from Finn,” exclaims the
bard, “thousands might enter, partake of his cheer, and depart without
notice.”

The argument throughout shows complete divergence in their thought.

“Finn is in hell in bonds,” says Patrick. “He is now in the house of
pain and sorrow, because of the amusement he had with the hounds and for
attending the (bardic) schools each day, and because he took no heed of
God.” And to an interpolation of Ossian, “Misery attend thee, old man,”
he continues, “who speakest words of madness; God is better for one hour
than all the Fenians of Erin.”

To which the bard retorts, “O Patrick, who makest me that impertinent
answer, thy crozier would be in atoms were Oscar present. Were my son
Oscar and God hand in hand on Knock-na-veen, if I saw my son down, it is
then I would say that God was a strong man.

“How could it be that God and his clerics could be better men than Finn,
the chief king of the Fenians, the generous one, who was without
blemish? All the qualities that you and your clerics say are according
to the rule of the King of the Stars, Finn’s Fenians had them all, and
they must be now stoutly seated in God’s heaven. Were there a place
above or below better than heaven, ’tis there Finn would go and all the
Fenians he had.”

Baffled in his attempt to initiate the pagan into his new doctrines, and
curious to hear, Patrick relents and calls for a tale. The following is
an example of the usual metre of the original mellifluous Gaelic:—

Ossian, sweet to me thy voice,
Now blessings choice on the soul of Finn,
But tell to me how many deer
Were slain at Slieve-na-man-finn.

And warming to the task, the bard recites the glorious character and
deeds of the vanished heroes. “The Fenians never used to tell untruth.
There never sat cleric in church, though melodiously ye may think they
chant psalms, more true to his word than the Fenians, the men who shrank
never from fierce conflicts.” And then when he adds, “I never heard that
any feat was performed by the King of the saints, or that _He_ reddened
his hand,” the exasperated and dogmatic Patrick stops him short with the
assertion, “Let us cease disputing on both sides, thou withered old man,
who art devoid of sense; understand that God dwells in heaven of the
orders, and Finn and his hosts are all in pain.” Ossian, pathetically,
“Great then would be the shame for God not to release Finn from the
shackles of pain; for if God himself were in bonds, my chief would fight
on his behalf. Finn never suffered in his day any one to be in pain or
difficulty without redeeming him by silver or gold, or by battle and
fight, until he was victorious.

“It is a good claim I have against your God, I to be among these clerics
as I am, without food, without clothing or music, without bestowing gold
on bards, without battling, without hunting, etc.” The idea of his
well-meaning instructors was to starve the bard into submission, in the
intolerant spirit of the Inquisition of later times, or of boycotting in
more modern days.

Elsewhere the bewildered Ossian laments as follows:—

“Alas, O Patrick, I did think that God would not be angered thereat; I
think long, and it is a great woe to me, not to speak of the way of Finn
of the Deeds.” To which Patrick: “Speak not of Finn nor of the Fenians,
for the Son of God will be angry with thee for it. He would never let
thee into his court, and He would not send thee the bread of each day.”

“I will, O Patrick, do his will. Of Finn or of the Fenians I will not
talk, for fear of bringing anger upon them, O cleric, if it is God’s
wont to be angry.”

Mingled with these arguments are passages which quiver with the Gaelic
enthusiastic love of nature. In _Finn’s Pastimes_, for example, we have
a lyric of extraordinary beauty. After a couple of verses addressed to
his opponent, ending, “Can his doom be in hell, in _the house of cold_?”
Ossian goes on to tell of his father’s delight in nature. The passage is
held to be in the very best style, rhyme, rhythm, and assonance, all
combined with a most rich vocabulary of words expressive of sounds,
nearly impossible to translate into English. But we quote from Dr.
Sigerson’s beautiful rendering of the original:—

The tuneful tumult of that bird,
The belling deer on ferny steep;
This welcome in the dawn he heard,
These soothed at eve his sleep.

Dear to him the wind-loved heath,
The whirr of wings, the rustling brake;
Dear the murmuring glens beneath,
And sob of Droma’s lake.

The cry of hounds at early morn,
The pattering deer, the pebbly creek,
The cuckoo’s call, the sounding horn,
The swooping eagle’s shriek.

These Dialogues are quoted at some length, because they bring into clear
outline permanent tendencies—the rival influences of naturalism and the
Church—Celtic literature struggling to be free, and the Church seeking
to saturate it with its own sentiment, and use it solely for its own
propaganda. That is the history down to this day. Nature, love, and war
on the one side, and religious themes on the other. The one timid of the
other, and each on its guard against the undue ascendency of its rival.

Thus it is assumed that James Macpherson ignored these ancient
compositions, namely, the Dialogues, as modern and counterfeit, because
of the intrusion of the ecclesiastical element into the purely pagan
domain. Into none of his own so-called translations did he admit any
flavour of Christianity, regarding that only as the genuine and original
Ossianic residuum which breathed the spirit of pre-Christian times.

But he lived in the days before textual criticism. We cannot credit the
Church as a whole with disinterested love of literature and its
encouragement. But in every age there have been men within its fold who
were passionately devoting themselves to authorship on their own
account, and to the preservation of books and MSS., and literary lore of
the past. Every monastery in the Middle Ages was thus more or less a
place in which reading and writing were cultivated, and some were active
centres of literary work. So that indirectly, and especially in
troublous times, we owe to the Church the splendid heritage of a Gaelic
literature continuous from the days of St. Patrick and St Columba to our
own. Down to very recent times, in fact, the men connected with
religious institutions have been the real custodiers, if not always
themselves the authors, of Gaelic productions. Thus it was Maelmuiri in
Clonmacnois that enriched posterity with the wonderful Leabhar Na
h’Uidhre, while his contemporary did for the hymns in the _Liber
Hymnorum_ what he so bravely and intelligently did for the sagas. From
their time the fatuous hostility to the sagas had evidently broken down.
Perhaps the Dialogues between Ossian and Patrick had been as effective
in their own way in pouring ridicule and contempt upon the opposing
faction as the poems of Burns in withering the hyper-orthodox tyranny of
later times. At any rate, from the monasteries of Ireland in these
Middle Ages came the great books of sagas and romance, such as the Books
of Leinster, Ballymote, Lecain, Lismore, etc.; and in Scotland in the
corresponding period we have the Glenmasan MS. of the thirteenth
century; MS. XL. of the fourteenth; and, besides others, the great Book
of the Dean of Lismore, which covers the period down almost to the
Reformation in Scotland.

But with the Reformation the old spirit of mistaken evangelical zeal
against the ancient heroic literature seems to have revived in an
aggressive form, for we find no less a man than Bishop Carswell, the
most representative Churchman in the Highlands of that age, inveighing
against the popularity of the sagas. In the epistle to the reader, which
he prefixed to Knox’s Liturgy, the first book printed in Gaelic, he
says:—

And great is the blindness and sinful darkness and ignorance and
perverseness of those who teach and write and compose in Gaelic, that
with the view of obtaining for themselves the vain rewards of this
world, they are more desirous, and more accustomed to preserve the
vain, extravagant, false, and worldly histories concerning the Tuath
de Dananns and Milesians, Fionn, the son of Cumhail, and his heroes
the Feinn, and many others, which I shall not here mention, nor
attempt to examine, than they are to write, and to teach, and to
compose the sincere words of God and the perfect way of truth. For the
world loves falsehood more than the truth, and as a proof of it,
worldly sinful men will pay for falsehood, and will not listen to the
truth though they have it for nothing.

A great portion of the darkness and ignorance of such persons arises,
too, from the aforesaid truths not being taught in good books,
understood by all who speak the general language or habitual Gaelic
tongue.

This was a volte-face from the sympathetic attitude of the Dean of
Lismore, and no doubt included him in its sweeping indictment. Yet we
may take it as representing the attitude of the leaders of the
Reformation towards the literature as well as the beliefs and cults
tolerated by the Latin Church. For a time the great evangelical
movement, which had spread from Germany over England and Scotland, had
little effect in the Highlands. The people remained widely indifferent
to religious influences of every kind, except such lingering influence
as the Roman Catholic Church continued to exert upon them; but when at
length they came once more under the influence of evangelical preachers,
like Robert Bruce and others, the precedent set by Carsewell and the
reformers seems to have been less or more uniformly followed; and with
every revival of clerical authority there appeared an unmistakable
tendency towards a revival of clerical intolerance, painfully
detrimental to wholesome literature, as well as to music, athletic
sports, and amusements of every kind.

Consequently since the Reformation Gaelic oral literature has been
gradually disappearing, until, in the words of Mr. Alexander Carmichael,
“it is now becoming meagre in quantity, inferior in quality, and greatly
isolated.”

In his own collection, which represents the latest gleaning in this
field of Gaelic lore, we see the influence of the Church and the old
pagan traditions strangely intermingled. The very title, “Hymns and
Incantations,” suggests the double influence, the two streams which have
been running parallel, approaching each other, mingling and separating
all through Celtic literature.

However much the Church may have gained the ascendency over rival
influences, it has never been able to stifle the heroic poetry of the
race. At periods when the latter seemed most to have gone under, and
disappeared beneath the ban of religion, it came to life again with
amazing vitality, as, for example, in the days of Maelmuiri and after,
when the ecclesiastical seemed to have conquered the pagan; and again in
the days of Macpherson, when the Reformation appeared to have made a
clean sweep of the heroic saga in the land, leaving neither name nor
memorial. And the MSS. had so completely disappeared that they were not
known to exist.

But forth they came to testify once more to the hidden and precarious
genius of the Celtic people, which produced such diverse characters as
Fergus and Ossian, Patrick and Columcille.

While the nineteenth century has been exceptionally brilliant in the
department of English literature, the same cannot be said of Gaelic
literature. In the former great works of creative genius have appeared,
which have added immense lustre to the language in which they were
conceived. In the latter the output by comparison has been very poor and
meagre, no lengthy sustained production of any originality having seen
the light either in prose or poetry. It would seem as if the genius of
the Gaelic language had found more congenial expression in English, for
not a few of those who have enriched the younger literature, from Sir
Walter Scott onwards to William Black and Robert Buchanan, have derived
their inspiration, and sometimes their themes, from Celtic sources. Of
native compositions we have nothing to show beyond elegies, songs, and
lyrics, some of them of great beauty, and as spontaneous and true to
nature as the beating of men’s hearts. But no epic, no heroic poetry, no
drama, no great prose work worthy to be classed with the masterpieces of
English literature, or even with the minor works, has appeared within
the last century. Instead of being a century of creative work, as in
English, it has rather been a century of gleaning. All the best works in
Gaelic are collections—gleanings from the past.

It would be difficult to assign the real reason for the barrenness of
production in recent times. Many causes seem to combine. The derelict
condition of the Highland and Irish populations in the beginning of last
century may have had something to do with it; the decline and limited
use of the language; the invasion of English and English literature, of
Lowland people and Lowland ways.

Gleaners and native lovers of Celtic literature generally ascribe a
large share of the decadence to the influence and attitude of the Church
in its local testimony. During the greater part of last century,
especially in the Highlands, that influence has been such that, had the
Dialogues been produced any time within that period, they would have hit
the mark quite as surely as in the age in which they were written, if we
conceived St Patrick as orthodox cleric and Ossian as the native genius
of the Celtic people.

But times have changed. The lights and shadows on the canvas have again
shifted. Our modern habits of thought are different. Like Ossian, men
look askance on morbid teaching, and have no great enthusiasm for
unnatural asceticism. The prevailing theory of life, impatient of
ethical dualism, objects to the identification of nature with evil quite
as much as the bard did. If nature is not evil, it asks, where, then, is
the necessity or the benefit of a renunciation which is incompatible
with the conditions under which men have to exist? And so, concurrent
with the decadence of ecclesiastical ideas and ecclesiastical authority,
there is a return to nature; and in many quarters a fresh interest is
being taken in the language, literature, and lore of the Gael. And new
writers have arisen who breathe the spirit of the race, and voice its
longings, yearnings, strivings, free from theological bias.

Their medium is no longer the Gaelic, but the English, into which they
have carried many quaint idioms, sentiments, and expressions. Indeed it
is doubtful if ever the Gaelic will again adapt itself to any great
literary work, since the gifted have adopted English as the more
comprehensive vehicle.

Yet now, looking dispassionately over the vicissitudes of Gaelic
literature from the time it was first cradled in the rough bosom of the
race, and nurtured by Christianity, we cannot forget the splendid
services rendered by monks and Churchmen in the early days and during
the Middle Ages down to the Reformation. Adverse periods of obscurantism
there have been, blighting enough and painfully retrograde. But for ages
the Church figured as the patron of letters, and even in later times
there have been enthusiastic literary workers within its pale. In
Scotland men like Sage, Macnicol, Smith, Maccallum, Drs. Norman Macleod,
Macdonald, Clerk, Maclauchlan, Cameron, Dowden, Henderson, and Macneill;
in Ireland Drs. Reeves, Todd, Wright, Stokes, and many others.

And taking the influence of the Church at its best, we may surely apply
to it, in its relation to literature, the remark of Dean Church in a
wider connection: “History teaches us this, that in tracing back the
course of human improvement, we come in one case after another upon
Christianity as the source from which improvement derived its principle
and its motive. We find no other source adequate to account for the new
spring of amendment, and without it no other source of good could have
been relied on.”

So here Christianity, through its medium, the Church, besides saving the
soul of a departing oral literature, has been the fruitful spring and
inspiration of much that is beautiful, pure, and enduring in our Gaelic
heritage.

CHAPTER XVI
THE INFLUENCE OF CELTIC, ON ENGLISH LITERATURE

Earliest contact—Loan-words—Three periods of marked literary
influence—Layamon’s “Brut”—A fascinating study for critics—The
development of the Arthurian Romance—Sir Thomas Malory—Question as
to origin of rhyme—A Celtic claim—Elements in Scottish poetry—in
English literature—Gray’s “Bard”—Macpherson’s “Ossian”—Influence
on Wordsworth and his contemporaries—Moore’s “Irish Melodies”—Sir
Walter Scott—Tennyson—Interesting comparison—Arnold, Shairp,
Blackie—Novelists after Scott—Living writers.

Anglo-Saxon or Old English came into contact with Celtic from the year
449 onwards. By the end of that century the latter had the beginnings of
a literature, the former had not. Cædmon’s poem dates from nearly 200
years later.

English literature could not, therefore, have been influenced by Celtic
for centuries after the first Saxon invasion, as it had not then come
into existence. But the English language was so influenced. From the
earliest contact it doubtless bore traces of the Celtic in the form of
loan-words.

Yet, strange to say, very few such native vernacular words passed over
into Old English till the Norman invasion. The reason may have been, as
suggested by Sweet, that the Britons were themselves to a large extent
Romanised, especially those of the cities, who were for the most part
descendants of Roman soldiers.

After the Conquest many more Celtic words found their way into English
through the Norman-French, and, as might be expected, it is very
difficult to discriminate between the contributions of the earlier and
the later period. Names of persons and places, on the other hand, are
easily distinguished, because they were generally taken over without
change.

Not till the fateful Forty-five had finally broken down the ancient
barriers of racial seclusion was there any further great accession of
this Celtic element. But owing to the interest awakened then in the
Highlands, the freer intercourse established with England and the
Lowlands of Scotland, and especially through the writings of historians
and travellers, and of great authors like James Macpherson and Sir
Walter Scott, a number of new words passed from this time direct from
the Highland Gaelic as well as from the Irish into the English language.
From the former came the well-known clan, claymore, ghillie, plaid,
pibroch, sporran, slogan, whisky, reel; and from the latter, brogue,
kern, Tory, shamrock, shillelagh, usquebaugh, bother, and a few others.
Words had been dribbling from the Welsh also, as we might expect, from
time to time.

The influence on the literature began later, but it has been very marked
and continuous down to the present day. Three periods stand out as
particularly potent. The first begins from the end of the twelfth
century and extends to the Reformation. The second, taking its impetus
from the Forty-five and the Ossianic revival, carries us forward to the
time of Tennyson. And the third, coeval with the modern Celtic
renaissance, reaches from Tennyson to the present time.

Though the different branches of the Celtic people had been producing a
literature from the sixth century, that literature does not seem to have
affected English authorship, until in the Middle Ages it created the
captivating Arthurian romances. Then, like the other Continental
literatures, the English for the first time fell under the sway of the
Celtic imagination.

The earliest great poem written in the English language after the Norman
Conquest owes its inspiration and theme entirely to that source. In the
opening passage the author introduces himself thus: “There was a priest
in the land, whose name was Layamon; he was son of Lovenath; may the
Lord be gracious unto him! He dwelt at Ernley at a noble church on
Severn’s bank, good it seemed to him, near Radstone, where he read
books. It came in mind to him and in his chiefest thought that he would
of England tell the noble deeds, what the men were named, and whence
they came, who first had English land.”

This Layamon, travelling widely over the land in search of information,
found three valuable books on which he based his tale—an English
translation of Bede, a Latin book made by St. Albin and the fair Austin,
and the French one by Wace.

His own poem he called the “Brut,” after the fabulous Brutus, the
great-grandson of Aeneas, who, according to Welsh writers, became the
ancestor of the Kings of Briton. It deals chiefly with the materials of
Wace, but it gives the story of Uther Pendragon and his famous son
Arthur in much fuller detail. For example, while Wace’s “Brut” contains
15,300 lines, Layamon’s has 32,250, more than double, and the
composition is characterised by a somewhat rude attempt at alliteration
and rhyme.

There are two MSS. still extant of this interesting work, both of them
in the British Museum. The oldest is held to have been written not later
than 1205, and the language is so purely English, notwithstanding its
source, that less than fifty words of French origin have been found in
it by Sir Frederick Madden, who in 1847 first edited these texts.

Almost a hundred years pass after Layamon wrote before another English
book of the kind appears. And this time it is the rhyming chronicle of
Robert of Gloucester, who goes over some of the ground of Geoffrey of
Monmouth, and brings the history down to 1272.

A fascinating study for critics is the wonderful way in which the
Arthurian romance seems to have developed from a small beginning. This
gradual evolution can in the main be traced.

So far as our modern knowledge goes, the Arthur of real life was a
Cornish chief with a following in Wales, who met Cedric of Wessex in the
stricken field, but who himself at length fell fighting the Picts, most
probably in our own native Scotland. Gildas chronicles a great victory
won over the Saxons, but omits to record who was the victorious chief.
It is Nennius who first mentions Arthur by name, in the ninth century.
His story is vastly amplified by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote about
1154, and by the time it comes from the pen of Robert Wace, some ten
years later, there is the splendid addition of the Round Table. Layamon
is able to go into details, not hitherto mentioned, of the construction
of this famous Board, which obviated quarrels over uppermost seats,
since no one could have precedence owing to its shape. Up to this point
the legend bore no Christian character. It is saturated with the magic,
and slaughter, and revenge of the old Pagan North, rich in stories of
giants, dwarfs, serpents, and heathen enchantments, far enough removed
from the spirit of medieval Christianity. But by the beginning of the
thirteenth century it suddenly underwent a great development, and new
incidents were added with which the earlier writers could not have been
acquainted.

Thomas Arnold thinks that this transformation is due to the genius of
Walter Map (_circa_ 1210), who introduced the religious element with the
view of converting the Arthurian legends, and employing them in the
service of Christianity.

From this time we have in French the Story of the Holy Grail, the
History of Merlin, Sir Launcelot of the Lake, the Quest of the Holy
Grail, and the Death of Arthur. The first two have been attributed to
Robert Borron, the latter three to Walter Map himself. But the whole
subject appears to be wrapped in singular obscurity, and offers a field
for considerable divergence of opinion. The latest dissertation on the
question is that by Jessie L. Weston in her recent publications. (Nutt:
London, 1901.) After the above, five more stories followed, such as
Tristram and the history of King Pellinore by other writers. These later
series of romances seem to have caught on better in France than in
England. For only a few metrical compositions of this class are found in
English MSS. prior to the days of Sir Thomas Malory, and these in
documents of the fifteenth century. One alliterative tale, indeed, that
of _Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight_, first printed by Sir F. Madden in
1839, and re-edited by Dr. Morris, is held by the latter to have been
written about 1320. Sir Gawayne was Arthur’s nephew, and figures in the
early stories as one of the purest models of knighthood, though very
differently represented by the author of Tristram and subsequent
writers, including even Malory, who drew from French sources. About the
middle of the fifteenth century Henry Lonelich translated into English
verse the prose narrative of the sacred Grail, and possibly this may
have led Malory, the author of the more famous _Morte d’Arthur_, to
produce, as he did about the year 1470, the remainder of the romances
connected with the Holy Grail in English prose. It was one of the
earliest books printed by William Caxton (1485), and certainly one of
the finest examples of the prose of the pre-Elizabethan period.

Sir Thomas Malory compiled it out of the French versions of “Merlin,”
“Launcelot,” “Tristram,” the “Queste du Saint Graal,” and the “Mort
Artur.” His own postscript at the end of the book fitly describes its
scope in very quaint terms. It runs as follows:—

Heere is the end of the whole booke of King Arthur and of his noble
Knights of the round table, that when they were whole together there
was ever an hundred and fortie. Also heere is the end of the death of
King Arthur. I pray you all, gentlemen and gentlewomen, that read this
book of King Arthur and his Knights from the beginning to the ending,
pray for me while I am alive, that God send mee good deliverance.

And when I am dead, I pray you all pray for my soule. For this booke
was finished the ninth yeare of the raigne of King Edward the Fourth,
by Sir Thomas Maleor, Knight, as Jesu help me for his great might, as
hee is the servant of Jesu both day and night.

Thus endeth this noble and joyous booke entitled _La Mort Darthur_,
notwithstanding it treateth of the birth, life, and acts of the said
King Arthur and of his noble Knights of the round table, and their
mervailous enquests and adventures, the achieving of the holy
sancgreall, and in the end the dolorous death and departing out of
this world of them all.

As literature, this work of Malory is very interesting, and has been
frequently edited within the last hundred years.

Beyond the powerful influences exerted by the Celtic romances, there
falls to be noticed another way in which the Gaelic genius is believed
to have affected and even moulded English poetry in the later Middle
Ages. It is well known that down to Chaucer’s time English poetry was
characterised chiefly by alliteration. Scarcely any authors attempted
rhyme. And those, like Layamon, who tried to combine both, often seem to
achieve neither the one nor the other. They failed to produce the real
effect of metre. But after Chaucer, rhyme gradually supplanted
alliteration. And it is held by various learned authorities that this is
due to Celtic influence. The Celts first invented rhyme, they say, and
in proof of this it is shown that they used it centuries before the
English or any other western nation. “Outside of Wales and Ireland,”
says Dr. Hyde, “there probably exists no example in a European
vernacular language of rhymed poetry older than the ninth century.”

And Matthew Arnold, in a footnote to his _Study of Celtic Literature_,
asserts that “rhyme,—the most striking characteristic of our modern
poetry as distinguished from that of the ancients, and a main source, to
our poetry, of its magic and charm, of what we call its _romantic
element_,—rhyme itself, all the weight of evidence tends to show, comes
into our poetry from the Celts.” And in this opinion these litterateurs
are supported by the earlier testimony of great philologists like Zeuss
and Count Nigra.

From the time of John Barbour, too, it is recognised that the bards of
Scotland who wrote English poetry have been influenced in various ways
not peculiar to their own contemporaries in England, by their connection
with and descent from the Celt. Stopford Brooke mentions three elements
of Scottish poetry that he regards as distinctly Celtic contributions.
These are, first, the love of wild nature for its own sake—the
passionate, close, and poetical observation and description of natural
scenery, which is not found in the poetry of England till near the end
of the eighteenth century; second, the love of colour so characteristic
of Gaelic and Cymric authorship; and, third, the wittier, more
rollicking humour, which contrasts with the Teutonic humour, which has
its root in sadness. The humour of Dunbar is thus as widely different
from that of Chaucer as the humour of Burns is from that of Cowper, or
of a modern Irishman is from that of a modern Englishman.

But if there is really humour in the ancient Celtic literature it is
entirely unconscious. Many passages tickle our risible faculties now,
and we smile as we read some of the narratives, such as the fight
between Queen Meve’s bull and his opponent in the old saga, but this is
because of the very wealth of the Gaelic imagination and the mendacity
of its exaggerations. It is questionable if the original Gael, the slave
of such a powerful fancy, saw anything in his own extravagant
descriptions to laugh at. More likely he perpetrated these fictions
quite as unconsciously as his Irish descendant of to-day perpetrates his
bulls.

All the same it is quite conceivable that from this early tendency to be
carried off the ground by flights of fancy, the Scottish sense of
humour, conspicuous in the poets from pre-Reformation times, may have
developed.

That Celtic literature revelled from a remote antiquity in nature and
love of colour is very manifest from the earliest Gaelic, Welsh, and
Breton tales. Take, for instance, the following description of Olwen
from the Welsh:—

The maiden was clothed in a robe of flame-coloured silk, and about her
neck was a collar of ruddy gold, on which were precious emeralds and
rubies. More yellow was her head than the flower of the broom, and her
skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands
and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood anemone amidst the spray
of the meadow fountain. The eye of the trained hawk, the glance of the
three-mewed falcon, was not brighter than hers. Her bosom was more
snowy than the breast of the white swan, her cheek was redder than the
reddest roses. Whoso beheld her was filled with her love. Four white
trefoils sprang up wherever she trod.

The old sagas and romances are full of this sort of vision. It was
impossible that such Celtic compositions could exist without imparting
some of their charm, their brilliant colouring, their observation, and
delight in nature and the unknown, to English literature. Naturally,
Scottish poetry first felt this influence. But the wonder is that
English literature as a whole was so late in being permeated therewith.
When it did enter, it effected a mighty change both in the style and
subject matter.

Beyond rhyme, love of nature, love of colour, and a certain type of
humour, which we have just glanced at, Matthew Arnold recognised three
elements which are in a manner distinct from these. “If I were asked,”
he says, “where English poetry got these three things—its turn for
style, its turn for melancholy, and its turn for natural magic, for
catching and rendering the charm of nature in a wonderfully near and
vivid way—I should answer, with some doubt, that it got much of its turn
for style from a Celtic source; with less doubt, that it got much of its
melancholy from a Celtic source; with no doubt at all, that from a
Celtic source it got nearly all its natural magic.”...

“The Celt’s quick feeling for what is noble and distinguished gave his
poetry style; his indomitable personality gave it pride and passion; his
sensibility and nervous exaltation gave it a better gift still, the gift
of rendering with wonderful felicity the magical charm of nature. The
forest solitude, the bubbling spring, the wildflowers are everywhere in
romance. They have a mysterious life and grace there; they are nature’s
own children, and utter her secret in a way which makes them something
quite different from the woods, waters, and plants of Greek and Latin
poetry. Now, of this delicate magic Celtic romance is so pre-eminent a
mistress, that it seems impossible to believe the power did not come
into romance from the Celts. Magic is just the word for it—the magic of
nature; not merely the beauty of nature,—_that_ the Greeks and Latins
had; not merely an honest smack of the soil, a faithful realism,—_that_
the Germans had; but the intimate life of nature—her weird power and her
fairy charm.” What better example of this distinction between the magic
and beauty of nature might be wished for than the following beautiful
conception? “Well,” says Math to Gwydion, “we will seek, I and thou, to
form a wife for him out of flowers. So they took the blossoms of the
oak, and the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms of the
meadow-sweet, and produced from them a maiden, the fairest and most
graceful that man ever saw. And they baptized her, and gave her the name
of Flower-Aspect.”

Shakespeare, in handling nature, while he had the Greek touch, is also
credited with sometimes striking the more exquisite and inimitable
Celtic note. Thus:—

The moon shines bright. In such a night as this,
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees,
And they did make no noise, in such a night
Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls—
... In such a night
Did Thisbe fearfully o’er-trip the dew—
... In such a night
Stood Dido with a willow in her hand,
Upon the wild seabanks, and waved her love
To come again to Carthage.

But we must pass on to the second period, the period after the
Forty-five, to see a more abundant entrance of the Celtic elements into
English literature as a whole. It might be detected in isolated
instances, but during the latter half of the eighteenth century both
prose and poetry were influenced by Celtic in a very marked degree.

Collin’s ode on the “Popular Superstitions of the Highlands” was perhaps
the first contribution after the memorable Rising to herald the new
time. If we except Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” it is almost the earliest
inroad by an English poet into the wild and romantic regions beyond the
Grampians.

After him came Gray, with a similar interest in Celtic lore. His
well-known poem “The Bard” appeared in 1755. This ode is founded on a
tradition current in Wales that Edward I., when he completed the
conquest of that country, decreed the death of all the bards who should
fall into his power. The original argument of this fine production is
set down in the author’s commonplace book as follows:—

The army of Edward I., as they march through a deep valley, are
suddenly stopped by the appearance of a venerable figure seated on the
summit of an inaccessible rock, who, with a voice more than human,
reproaches the king with all the misery and desolation which he had
brought on his country; foretells the misfortunes of the Norman race,
and, with prophetic spirit, declares that all his cruelty shall never
extinguish the noble ardour of poetic genius in this island; and that
men shall never be wanting to celebrate true virtue and valour in
immortal strains, to expose vice and infamous pleasure, and boldly
censure tyranny and oppression. His song ended, he precipitates
himself from the mountain, and is swallowed up by the river that rolls
at its foot.

Gray deviated a little from this original sketch, but the above is, in
the main, the gist of the poem.

“Ruin seize thee, ruthless King!
Confusion on thy banners wait!
Though fanned by conquest’s crimson wing,
They mock the air with idle state.
Helm nor hauberk’s twisted mail,
Nor e’en thy virtues, Tyrant, shall avail
To save thy secret soul from nightly fears,
From Cambria’s curse, from Cambria’s tears!”
Such were the sounds that o’er the crested pride
Of the first Edward scatter’d wild dismay,
As down the steep of Snowdon’s shaggy side
He wound with toilsome march his long array.
Stout Glo’ster stood aghast in speechless trance:
“To arms!” cried Mortimer, and couched his quivering lance.

On a rock, whose haughty brow
Frowns o’er old Conway’s foaming flood,
Robed in the sable garb of woe,
With haggard eyes the poet stood;
(Loose his beard, and hoary hair
Stream’d like a meteor, to the troubled air;)
And, with a master’s hand and prophet’s fire,
Struck the deep sorrows of his lyre.
“Hark! how each giant oak, and desert cave,
Sighs to the torrent’s awful voice beneath:
O’er thee, oh King! their hundred arms they wave,
Revenge on thee in hoarser murmurs breathe;
Vocal no more, since Cambria’s fatal day,
To high-born Hoël’s harp, or soft Llewellyn’s lay,” etc.

In addition to “The Bard,” Gray translated into English verse fragments
of the “Gododin” and “The Triumphs of Owen” from Mr. Evans’s _Specimens
of the Welsh Poetry_, published in London in 1764.

After Gray came the renowned Macpherson, representing the very soul of
the Celtic genius, and Europe listened surprised as it felt the thrill
of the new notes which he struck from the old instrument—the passionate,
penetrating regret, the deep melancholy, the sensitiveness to the powers
of nature. In his _Ossian_ we are made to feel “the desolation of dusky
moors, the solemn brooding of the mists on the mountains, the occasional
looking through them of sun by day, of moon and stars by night, the
gloom of dark cloudy Bens or cairns, with flashing cataracts, the ocean
with its storms.” And when the wind shrieks and the elements do
frightful battle, there is the eerie sensation of ghostly presences
hovering around the warriors on the hillside or out on the ocean.

And through all the sadness of sorrow and the clang of conflict there
break gleams of tender light and soothing reflection, as, for example:—

Come, thou beam that art lonely, from watching in the night! The
squally winds are around thee, from all their echoing hills. Red, over
my hundred streams, are the light-covered paths of the dead. They
rejoice on the eddying winds, in the season of the night. Dwells there
no joy in song, white hand of the harps of Lutha? Awake the voice of
the string; roll my soul to me. It is a stream that has failed.
Malvina, pour the song.

I hear thee from thy darkness in Selma, thou that watchest lonely by
night! Why didst thou withhold the song from Ossian’s failing soul? As
the falling brook to the ear of the hunter, descending from his
storm-covered hill, in a sunbeam rolls the echoing stream, he hears
and shakes his dewy locks: such is the voice of Lutha to the friend of
the spirits of heroes. My swelling bosom beats high. I look back on
the days that are past. Come, thou beam that art lonely, from watching
in the night!

No wonder these plaintive notes struck the heart of modern times with
overpowering emotion, awakening a sympathy with the past, and opening a
new avenue of vision into the life of nature. Englishmen especially, who
had hitherto beheld the bleak mountains, the moors, and the naked rocks
with feeling almost akin to aversion, began to see a hidden beauty and
majesty in these sublime and lonely objects. And a passion for nature
gradually crept into English poetry. Thomson had made a beginning in
this direction with his _Seasons_ as early as 1726–30, but it cannot be
said that he quite struck the notes which afterwards so moved and
enchanted the readers of Macpherson, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and
Tennyson.

The new Ossian had a wonderful mastery of style, rhythmical flow,
pathos, and sometimes even sublimity of language, though it can scarcely
be said that he represented the realistic force and vivid exactness of
the Gaelic he sought to imitate in his English style. Of his
_Fragments_, when they appeared, the poet Gray wrote: “I was so struck,
so extasié with their infinite beauty, that I writ into Scotland to make
a thousand enquiries.” And he adds, “In short, this man is the very
demon of poetry, or he has lighted on a treasure hid for ages.”

English poets and litterateurs from this time found a new well-spring of
inspiration in the ancient Celtic fountain thus wondrously and
unexpectedly tapped. And so we find men like Pennant, Dr. Johnson,
Boswell, and numerous other interested travellers and historians, making
pilgrimages through the Highlands, with the view of observing for
themselves the old life surviving there, and of gathering up materials
for literary work. Each of the above-named, well known in the pages of
English literature, have contributed books which are now classic
authorities on the social customs and conditions of the Highlands at the
time of their visit, and thus helped to carry a stream of Celtic thought
and feeling into the prose of the period, which was afterwards more
fully developed by the great magician, Sir Walter Scott.

Meanwhile the new elements had entered into the warp and woof of English
poetry, and may be traced in all the great masters of the period—Cowper,
Burns, Wordsworth, Crabbe, Byron, and their numerous contemporaries.
Blake was so enthusiastic that he is generally regarded as an imitator
of Macpherson, and Southey, going even farther back, edited, with
introduction, in 1817, the _Morte d’Arthur_ of Sir Thomas Malory before
mentioned.

Yet more characteristically Celtic as a poet than all these, because
himself an Irishman, was Thomas Moore, author of _Lalla Rookh_, an
Indian tale; and _Irish Melodies_. It is with these latter lyrics that
we are here most concerned, because they exhibit so much the quality of
the Gaelic muse in English verse. Take, for example, the following
delightful pieces—euphonious, melancholy, and touching—so full of the
Ossianic sadness and Celtic sentiment for the past, and for the dead
heroes:—

The harp that once through Tara’s halls
The soul of music shed,
Now hangs as mute on Tara’s walls
As if that soul were fled.
So sleeps the pride of former days,
So glory’s thrill is o’er;
And hearts that once beat high for praise
Now feel that pulse no more!

No more to chiefs and ladies bright
The harp of Tara swells;
The chord alone, that breaks at night,
Its tale of ruin tells.
Thus freedom now so seldom wakes,
The only throb she gives,
Is when some heart indignant breaks
To show that still she lives.

This one, too, sounds a similar note. It is entitled “After the
Battle”:—

Night closed around the conqueror’s way,
And lightnings show’d the distant hill,
Where those who lost that dreadful day
Stood few and faint, but fearless still!
The soldier’s hope, the patriot’s zeal,
For ever dimm’d, for ever crost—
Oh! who shall say what heroes feel
When all but life and honour’s lost?

The last sad hour of freedom’s dream
And valour’s task mov’d slowly by,
While mute they watch’d, till morning’s beam
Should rise and give them light to die.
There’s yet a world where souls are free,
Where tyrants taint not nature’s bliss;
If death that world’s bright opening be,
Oh! who would live a slave in this?

From Moore it is but a step to the great master-hand of Celtic romance,
the heroic Sir Walter Scott, who has done more than any modern writer to
popularise the literature of the Gael, and to make the Gael and his
country interesting to Englishmen. With his magic power he threw a halo
over the land and the people, and made their past live again in his
enchanting pages. What a world of forgotten romance he brought to light
alike in his prose and his poetry! In the _Lady of the Lake_, _Tales of
a Grandfather_, _Waverley_, and _Rob Roy_, we have Celtic life and
tradition depicted in a way which has vastly influenced and enriched our
English literature, besides showing the gate to subsequent authors into
a field near at hand, into which English imagination, much less English
sympathy and literary art, had hardly as yet found its way. What
Wordsworth in England did for the Lake District, Scott in Scotland did
for the Highlands, fostering the love for scenery which the English
poets had already begun to awaken.

Yet, more than any of his predecessors who cultivated the poetry of
natural description, Scott carried into English literature the Celtic
imagination and sentiment, the Celtic magic and wistful veneration for
the past, which made him the wizard of modern literary romance.

The enthusiasm aroused by Macpherson, and even more by himself, had not
died down before another great period of Celtic influence arrived—the
last, and, in certain respects, the most potent and extensive of all. As
early as 1842, the _Morte d’Arthur_ and some other pieces of Tennyson
appeared, but it was in 1859, contemporary with the Celtic renaissance
at home and abroad, that he published _The Idylls of the King_. Founding
on the old Arthurian romances, as told in English by Sir Thomas Malory,
Tennyson depicts anew the more picturesque characters and incidents,
idealising them in his own inimitable poetic style. So we have, in
twelve books,—

The Coming of Arthur,
Gareth and Lynette,
The Marriage of Geraint,
Geraint and Enid,
Balin and Balan,
Merlin and Vivien,
Lancelot and Elaine,
The Holy Grail,
Pelleas and Ettarre,
The Last Tournament,
Guinevere, and
The Passing of Arthur.

The charm of these Idylls, which rank among the Poet-Laureate’s best
work, may be gathered from the opening passage, describing the coming of
Arthur:—

Leodogran, the King of Cameliard,
Had one fair daughter, and none other child;
And she was fairest of all flesh on earth,
Guinevere, and in her his one delight.

For many a petty king ere Arthur came
Ruled in this isle, and ever waging war
Each upon other, wasted all the land;
And still from time to time the heathen host
Swarm’d overseas, and harried what was left.
And so there grew great tracts of wilderness,
Wherein the beast was ever more and more,
But man was less and less, till Arthur came.
For first Aurelius lived and fought and died,
And after him King Uther fought and died,
But either fail’d to make the kingdom one.
And after these King Arthur for a space,
And thro’ the puissance of his Table Round,
Drew all their petty princedoms under him,
Their King and head, and made a realm and reign’d.

And thus the land of Cameliard was waste,
Thick with wet woods, and many a beast therein,
And none or few to scare or chase the beast;
So that wild dog, and wolf and boar and bear
Came night and day, and rooted in the fields,
And wallow’d in the gardens of the King.
And ever and anon the wolf would steal
The children and devour, but now and then,
Her own brood lost or dead, lent her fierce teat
To human sucklings; and the children, housed
In her foul den, there at their meat would growl,
And mock their foster-mother on four feet,
Till, straighten’d, they grew up to wolf-like men,
Worse than the wolves.

This, surely, puts us back into the old days. But “Arthur heard the call
and came; and Guinevere stood by the castle walls to watch him pass.”
The Celtic ideal of woman and the Celtic pursuit of the unknown and
mysterious, and the delicacy and passion that characterise the early
romances, pervade these nineteenth century Idylls throughout.

It is interesting to compare the Passing of Arthur, for example, as
recorded by Layamon, with Tennyson’s more elaborate and developed
idealisation. According to the former, these were the words of the
king’s dying speech to Constantine:—

I will fare to Avalun to the fairest of all maidens, to Arganté the
Queen, an elf most fair, and she shall make my wounds all sound; make
me all whole with healing draughts. And afterwards I will come again
to my kingdom and dwell with the Britons with mickle joy! Even with
the words there approached from the sea a little short boat floating
with the waves; and two women therein wondrously formed; and they took
Arthur anon and bare him quickly and laid him softly down, and forth
they gan depart. Then was it accomplished that Merlin whilom said,
that mickle care should come of Arthur’s departure. The Britons
believe yet that he is alive, and dwelleth in Avalun with the fairest
of all elves, and the Britons even yet expect when Arthur shall
return.

Compare with this the appearance from the wave of Tennyson’s wondrous
barge with its fair occupants, and the famous farewell speech Arthur
made before setting out. After the well-known passage beginning, “The
old order changeth, yielding place to new,” he goes on:—

But now farewell. I am going a long way
With these thou seést—if indeed I go
(For all my mind is clouded with a doubt)—
To the island-valley of Avilion;
Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,
Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies
Deep-meadow’d, happy, fair with orchard lawns
And bowery hollows crown’d with summer sea,
Where I will heal me of my grievous wound.

So said he, and the barge with oar and sail
Moved from the brink, like some full-breasted swan
That, fluting a wild carol ere her death,
Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood
With swarthy webs. Long stood Sir Bedivere
Revolving many memories, till the hull
Look’d one black dot against the verge of dawn,
And on the mere the wailing died away.

But when that moan had past for evermore,
The stillness of the dead world’s winter dawn
Amazed him, and he groan’d, “The King is gone.”
And therewithal came on him the weird rhyme,
“From the great deep to the great deep he goes.”

Sir Bedivere was thus the sole survivor of the Knights of the Round
Table. In the final battle all that remained of them perished except the
king himself and two knights, who escaped wounded. But first one and
then the other passed, dying from his hurt. With what a halo of colour
and real Celtic enchantment poets and romancers have covered up the last
grim tragedy of the wounded knight watching his master, the royal Arthur
die, after all the rest were fallen and gone, and the Round Table was
from henceforth to be but a memory.

Macaulay must have inherited the Celtic power of pictorial detail and
vivid colouring, though he might not willingly acknowledge it. Where did
he get that brilliant turn for style and those suggestive tricks of
lively fancy if not from his Celtic ancestry?

After him came three Celtic enthusiasts of great literary standing, who
put Macaulay’s apathy towards the Gaelic and Cymric tradition to the
blush. These were Matthew Arnold; John Campbell Shairp, Professor of
Poetry at Oxford, and Principal of the United College, St. Andrews; and
Professor Blackie of Edinburgh.

Over the first, the apostle of culture, and otherwise dispassionate
critic, the Celtic past undoubtedly cast a spell. The finding of its
literature seemed to have influenced him in a similar manner as the
hoving of a new planet into his ken thrills the eager astronomer. And we
have his personal contribution in his well-known _Study of Celtic
Literature_ (1867), a book which, like Renan’s French essay, has done
much to enhance the reputation and influence of our ancient heritage in
modern times. It was through his strenuous advocacy that the Celtic
chair which Professor Rhys now occupies in Oxford was established.

Principal Shairp published _Kilmahoe: a Highland Pastoral, with other
Poems_, in 1864; his _Poetic Interpretation of Nature_ in 1877; and
_Aspects of Poetry_ in 1881. These books revel in the Celtic sentiment,
its melancholy, and love of nature. Their author exhibited the same
spirit of admiration for the Gaelic muse that Matthew Arnold did for the
Cymric.

In one of his Highland lyrics, entitled, “A Dream of Glen Sallach,”
Shairp showed that he could be overpowered by the gloom pervading the
land of the heather as much as any Gael:—

In deep of noon, mysterious dread
Fell on me in that glimmering glen,
Till as from haunted ground I fled
Back to the kindly homes of men.

Thanks to that glen! its scenery blends
With childhood’s most ideal hour,
When Highland hills I made my friends,
First owned their beauty, felt their power.

And in “The Forest of Sli’-Gaoil” he muses thus of other days:—

And doth not this bleak forest ground
Live in old epic song renowned?
Of him the chief who came of yore
To hunting of the mighty boar,
And left the deed, to float along
The dateless stream of Highland song,
A maid’s lorn love, a chief’s death toil.
Still speaking in thy name Sli’-Gaoil!
Well now may harp of Ossian moan
Through long bent grass and worn grey stone:
But how could song so long ago,
Come loaded with some elder wo?
Were then, as now, these hills o’er-cast
With shadows of some long-gone past!
Did winds, that wandered o’er them, chime
Melodies of a lorn foretime?
As now, the very mountain burns
For something sigh that not returns!

Professor Blackie in later life had a similar passionate regard for
Celtic literature, and not only did much by poetic renderings into
English from the Gaelic, and in other ways, to introduce English readers
to the best treasures of the Gaelic past, but also, like Matthew Arnold,
was instrumental in founding a Celtic chair, namely, that in Edinburgh
University.

Of novelists who, like Sir Walter Scott, have drawn their themes and
inspiration from Celtic sources, there has been a splendid succession
from the days of Tennyson till now. Among others, besides the veteran
Dr. George Macdonald, we may mention William Black, Robert Buchanan, and
Robert Louis Stevenson, all three now dead, but recognised in their time
as men of considerable literary genius. Black’s descriptions, his scenes
and incidents and characters in those graphic stories laid in the West
Highlands, are well known, and are as full of nature as Stevenson’s
thrilling tales of _Kidnapped_ and _Catriona_ are of Celtic passion and
adventure. Buchanan’s _Child of Nature_ is now perhaps not so well known
as these others, but the plot is laid in the extreme north-west corner
of Sutherlandshire, and interprets Gaelic life and character with
wonderful verve and insight. All the three writers seem to have caught
the magic glamour of the North, and to have been influenced in their
style by the Celtic elements.

Of living novelists to carry on the succession we have still a
distinguished contingent. Besides names, less familiar, the following
have achieved a wide reputation, namely, Dr. John Watson (Ian Maclaren),
Neil Munro, Fiona Macleod, Katherine Tynan, and W. B. Yeats. These
writers are distinctly Celtic in style, idiom, and sentiment. They have
all the passion, yearning, imagination, and emotion of the Gael,
combined with his wonderful gift of story-telling and of local colour.

There are other writers of distinction, such as Andrew Lang, Dr. Douglas
Hyde, Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, Dr. Sigerson, Dr. Todhunter, Stopford A.
Brooke, Edmund Jones, T. W. Rolleston, Miss Eleanor Hull, Miss Jessie L.
Weston, Miss Goodrich Frere, and Miss Emily Lawless, who have done much
of later years to popularise the Celtic lore and literature, and to
extend its sway over English letters.

Through books of history and philology which have been issuing from the
press in a steady flow for decades past, the tide of Celtic influence
still continues to rise and permeate every department of English
literature. So that from that little spring we saw welling up in the
fifth century, and which at first yielded but a few words of Celtic
import to incipient English, we have been able to trace a continuous
stream, gaining in volume and momentum through the centuries, until now
it is like a mighty Missouri which mingles its waters with the broader
and more potent Mississippi, to be carried to the great ocean of human
intercourse, and lose itself in the common good.

CHAPTER XVII
THE PRINTED LITERATURE OF THE SCOTTISH GAEL

A close study of the printed literature of the Scottish Gael leads to
some surprising and even wholly unexpected revelations. Happily, we have
the materials for such a scrutiny within moderate compass, a fact which
cannot be predicated of the more comprehensive and ubiquitous English.

It is an amazing circumstance—indeed the _Spectator_, some seventy years
ago, dubbed it “a piece of Highland dilettanteism”—that one should be
found enthusiastic enough to attempt to make an exhaustive bibliography
of the printed Gaelic output of Scotland. Yet such a devotee has emerged
not once, but twice within the last century.

First, in the person of John Reid, a Glasgow bookseller of Lowland
birth, who published in 1832 his _Bibliotheca Scoto-Celtica_, or “an
account of all the books which have been printed in the Gaelic
language,” down to that date.

Second, in the person of the Rev. Donald Maclean, minister of Duirinish,
Skye, who brought the catalogue forward to 1900, arranging the authors’
names alphabetically, and giving the various editions, with their dates
and places of publication. This MS., which has not yet been printed,
contains in addition a complete transcript of the title of each work, an
account of the author or translator so far as known, the number of
copies printed, size of paper, and published price, and in the case of
the very rare books, an account of the copies known to exist, and the
price they fetched on transfer.

Had it not been for the earlier researches of Reid, it is not likely so
elaborate an effort would have ever been attempted. Even Reid seems to
have been lured on gradually, all unconscious at first of the magnitude
of the task, for he says that his book was not written with the view of
being published. On the contrary, its _raison d’être_ is thus explained
by him in the preface:—

While studying the Gaelic language in 1825 a friend wished me to make
up a catalogue of his Gaelic books. It appeared, after the list was
made up, scarcely probable that many more should exist, and under the
idea of having almost already completed the list, the present work was
undertaken. All the Gaelic books in the neighbourhood were examined,
but I found the work increase so rapidly on my hands that it became
necessary to class them and re-write the whole; and the longer I
searched the more I was convinced that the literature of the Gael was
richer than even its friends imagined. The number of translations,
song-books, etc., which I now met with, many of them works which I had
never previously heard of, obliged me four times to extend the plan
originally adopted, and to re-write the MS.

Reid ransacked the principal libraries in this country and on the
Continent in search of Gaelic books, yet he admits the list must
necessarily be imperfect. When finished, the work was awarded a premium
by the Highland Society of London in 1831, and printed the following
year. It has been the aim of his bibliographic successor to supplement
and complete the list by a new classification up to date.

Both men deserve credit for having patiently and persistently pursued
what was undoubtedly an interesting but eminently thankless task, so far
at least as financial remuneration was concerned.

When we hark back to the period when MS. writing first began to pass
into modern type, we discover that no book of any kind was printed in
this country before 1477. In that year Caxton issued in London the
earliest publication from an English printing press. Other books quickly
followed, but nearly a century elapsed before any Gaelic writing passed
through the inky mill.

The first printed work in that language is the translation of John
Knox’s _Liturgy_ by Bishop Carsewell, published in Edinburgh in 1567.
Carsewell, or Carsuel, as the name is sometimes spelt, a native of
Kilmartin, was superintendent of the diocese of Argyll, and well versed
in the Highland vernacular. It was he who, in the preface to his work,
denounced the ancient _ursgeuls_ or Gaelic prose tales as lying fables,
and inaugurated a clerical campaign against the popular ballads. Yet he
merits our approbation for getting into print so early a book which
modern philologists regard as uncommonly valuable.

Only three copies exist of the original issue,—one, complete, in the
possession of the Duke of Argyll, and two others imperfect. Of the
twain, one is now in Edinburgh University Library, the other in the
British Museum.

The Duke’s was lost for a time, but recovered in 1842, and doubtless
restored to its ancient place in Inverary Castle.

This rare book is five inches long and three and a half broad,
containing 247 pages, on the 246th of which occurs the couplet:—

Gras Dé is na thós atáimid
Ni ránuic sé fós finid.

And on the last page the following:—

DO BVAILE

adh so agclo an
Dvn Edin Le Ro
ibeart Lekprevik
24 Aprilis 1567.

In 1872 the Rev. Dr. Maclauchlan transcribed it entire for a new edition
which was published the following year, 1873.

Nearly another century glides slowly by after the printing press
disgorged Carsewell’s translation before any further Gaelic
printing—that we know of—took place, if we except the translation of
Calvin’s Catechism issued at Edinburgh in 1631. In fact, three
psalm-books complete the list for the whole of that seventeenth century,
namely, the first fifty Psalms of David with the Shorter Catechism,
published by the Synod of Argyll in 1659, exactly ninety-two years after
the Liturgy; another Psalter by John Kirke in 1684, and the Synod of
Argyll’s finished in 1694. Thus in the sixteenth century we have just
one Gaelic printed book; in the seventeenth, three and a catechism; and
all these merely translations from other languages.

Not till 1741 do we encounter any original work, and even then it is
simply a Gaelic Vocabulary by Alexander Macdonald, the gifted bard of
Ardnamurchan. So that till after the Forty-five, Gaelic Scotland had no
printed literature of its own—neither poetry nor prose of any kind.

Indeed, with the exception of a few reprints between 1702 and 1725 of
the Synod of Argyll’s Psalter and Catechism, and Kirke’s Irish version
of the Bible and Vocabulary in 1690, Lhuyd’s Vocabulary in Nicholson’s
_Historical Library_, 1702, and Macdonald’s, 1741, there were no
additions to the printed list of the Highlands till Baxter’s _Call to
the Unconverted_ was issued in Gaelic in 1750, Macdonald’s _Songs_ in
1751, and David Mackellar’s _Hymns_ in 1752. These two latter volumes
were the early precursors in type of that considerable output of song
and hymn and story with which we have been familiar in later years.

After them came, in 1752, a small book entitled _Hymn of Praise_
(English and Gaelic), Willison’s _Mother’s Catechism_, and next year
Macfarlane’s _Translation of the Psalms, with forty-five of the
Paraphrases_.

Between 1753 and 1767, Reid could not find that any Gaelic work was
printed, with the exception of reprints of the Mother’s and Shorter
Catechisms and Macdonald’s songs.

Like some slow-moving stream, the output was at first very feeble and
irregular, and drawn for the most part from imported sources.

In 1767, however, an event occurred in the Gaelic printing world worthy
of special notice. This was the issue of the New Testament for the first
time in the language of the Highland people. It was translated by
Stewart of Killin, with the assistance of Dugald Buchanan and other
eminent Gaelic scholars, and was published by the Society for
Propagating Christian Knowledge. Strange to say, the language of this
translation was looked upon at that period as perfectly free from Irish
idiom, and yet in Reid’s day, half a century later, it was regarded as
savouring more of Irish than of Gaelic.

The same year in which the New Testament saw the light in the ancient
dialect there appeared also the celebrated hymns of Dugald Buchanan, and
the year after the no less famous songs of Duncan Ban Macintyre.

As yet no Bible existed in the language of the Highlands, and attention
having been drawn to this fact, the Society for Propagating Christian
Knowledge set themselves to supply the defect. It was arranged to have
the Old Testament translated and issued in four parts, which were
ultimately published in Edinburgh as follows:—

Part I. in 1783.
Part IV. in 1786.
Part II. in 1787.
Part III. in 1801.

The first part contained the Pentateuch, to which was prefixed a
vocabulary of five pages and general rules for reading the Gaelic
language. The second comprised from Joshua to the end of 1 Chronicles.
The third, published last, contained 2 Chronicles and on to the end of
the Song of Solomon. The fourth was made up of the Prophets, and to it
was prefixed an advertisement, stating the use that had been made of
various English translations.

The Rev. Dr. John Stuart of Luss was responsible for the rendering from
Hebrew into Gaelic of the first three parts, and the Rev. Dr. John Smith
of Campbeltown for the fourth, which appeared second in point of
publication.

Their MS. translations were, before being sent to press, submitted for
revision to a Committee of Highland clergymen specially selected; and by
order of the General Assembly of 1782 a collection was made in all the
parishes to defray the expense. This appointment was renewed in 1783 and
1784, as the funds of the S.P.C.K. were reduced, and the outlay on
publication amounted to £2300 for some 5000 copies, with an additional
number of Part I. containing the Pentateuch. The whole work was printed
on fine and common paper; and until the early decades of last century
was looked upon as the standard of Gaelic orthography.

Considering that the Bible has since come to be regarded as a kind of
fetich in the Highlands, it is somewhat surprising to learn that there
was no complete rendering of it in the language earlier than 1801, just
a century ago. And apparently not till 1807 were the Gaelic Old and New
Testaments finally printed together in one volume. In that year they
were thus issued in England for the first time on behalf of the British
and Foreign Bible Society, who chose two different colours of paper for
the purpose—the one blue for the Old Testament, and the other yellow for
the New, which gave the book rather a polychrome appearance. The
impression amounted to 20,000 copies, each of which cost the Society 6s.
6d., though they issued them to subscribers at half that price.

Of the Gaelic Scriptures there have been fourteen different recensions.

From the time of the publication of Dugald Buchanan’s and Duncan Ban
Macintyre’s compositions in 1767–68, may be reckoned the real beginning
of the new era of printing, so far as the production of original Gaelic
literature was concerned, and that mainly poetry, for of prose the land
was singularly barren, except in translations. And it will hardly be
credited that from the introduction of printing down to the end of the
eighteenth century, just about a hundred years ago, if we exclude the
translations from other languages, and extra editions of books already
published, there were not in all three dozen printed original
Scottish-Gaelic works to be found. The day of copious issue had not yet
arrived for the sweet and tuneful Gaelic.

Even the collected MSS. of Macpherson did not appear in type till 1807,
almost half a century after his so-called translations electrified the
literary world.

Thus it will be seen that the nineteenth century was really the golden
age of Gaelic printing, for, with the exception of the straggling
volumes indicated above, the literature we now have passed into printed
book form within the last hundred years. From the beginning of the
century there was a marked increase in the rate of publication—an
activity which has been growing in volume and momentum to the present
day.

And now it will be found highly informing and even entertaining to
review the printed literature of the Gael, to consider its character,
its general features, and specially to note what the Highlander deemed
worthy of putting into type—his favourite books. Such a survey, in fact,
amounts to a revelation of character, and throws a wonderful light on
his recent past, his outlook on life, and peculiar habits of thought.
Indeed, the glimpse we get here of the mental composition and literary
limitations of the purely Gaelic-speaking or Gaelic-reading section of
our countrymen is really amazing, and if we did not know that they now
rely so much for their knowledge and information on the English
language, would simply be incredible.

It surprised Reid beyond measure that there were so many Gaelic printed
books to catalogue seventy years ago, and probably he thought the work
was well-nigh complete for all time, but had he lived to-day to scan the
amended and supplemented list, it would almost take his breath away, for
he expected the Gaelic long before now to be as extinct as the
Waldensian or the Cornish. He just gave it fifty years in which to “die
down and drone and cease.” People in general, even Highlanders, are
scarcely aware of the very considerable number of printed books that
exist in the native tongue.

But a cursory glance at the catalogue shows the derived nature of the
material. A large proportion of the volumes consists of translations,
and these translations, if we except the Scriptures, are almost, if not
entirely from the English. And here we are face to face with a most
striking fact. The literature represented, both in the original and in
translations, is mainly religious.

You will search in vain for the masterpieces of other languages and
other nations. The Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament, _The Arabian
Nights’ Entertainments_, parts of Homer’s _Iliad_, and Thomas à Kempis’
_Imitatio Christi_, are perhaps the solitary exceptions. All the best
literature of the world has been given a silent go-by.

And this is true even of the greatest English and Scottish works of
genius. You will not find Chaucer, or Shakespeare, or Bacon, or Gibbon,
Scott or Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle, or Tennyson here. Two poems alone
of Burns are translated, “Tam o’ Shanter” and “Auld Langsyne,” but the
great masters are to Gaelic print as if they had never existed. Science
is unknown, and art and philosophy; history, too, we may say, and the
drama. Whole departments of human thought remain practically
unrepresented, as if they were alien to the Gaelic mind.

On the other hand, works of religion, pious devotion, theology, and
ecclesiastical polemics abound, showing the peculiar cast of the modern
Celtic temperament.

And of all the books, that which has been most in demand, if we may
judge by the extraordinary frequency with which it has been printed, has
been the Shorter Catechism. We are confronted with the curious fact that
between the year 1651 and the Disruption in 1843 no less than seventy
editions or reprints of this document were issued, and this
notwithstanding the circumstance that it was also usually published with
the oft-printed Psalter. The version far and away the most in evidence
seems to have been the Synod of Argyll’s, though other versions, such as
Dr. Ross’s, Dr. Macdonald’s, Dr. Smith’s, and Morrison’s were in
circulation, besides various other Catechisms, of which Willison’s and
Watt’s were prominent examples. The Gael seems to have had a perfect
mania for Catechisms. And next to these in his estimation comes the
Psalter, with nearly eighty editions or reprints between the year 1659
and the Disruption.

These editions represent six important versions, without taking into
account other four unauthorised ones. The select six may be given in
chronological order, as follows:—

1. The Synod of Argyll’s translation of the first fifty Psalms,
entitled, “An Ceud Chaogad do Shalmaibh,” 1659; and the whole,
1694.

2. Kirke’s Psalter—a translation by the Rev. Robert Kirke,
Balquidder, 1684. This was the first complete version issued,
ante-dating the former when finished by ten years.

3. Macfarlane’s translation, which is just the Synod of Argyll’s
amended and altered by the Rev. Alex. Macfarlane, M.A., of
Kilninver and Kilmelford, who excluded many of the Irishisms and
added forty-five of the paraphrases, 1753.

4. Smith’s revised version, including all the Paraphrases, by the
Rev. Dr. Smith, Campbeltown, 1787.

5. Ross’s Psalter, also an amendment, by the Rev. Thomas Ross, LL.D.,
Lochbroom, 1807.

6. The General Assembly’s authorised translation, 1826.

Of these the most extensively used seems to have been Dr. Smith’s, which
ran through no less than thirty or thirty-five editions in half a
century. Next to his, in popular esteem, came Macfarlane’s, represented
by twenty. Ross’s and the General Assembly’s have also had a wide vogue,
especially in more recent times.

Besides the Shorter Catechism and Psalter, the _Confession of Faith_ has
been printed in Gaelic eleven times, and _The Book of Common Prayer_
eight times, and Prayers from it once.

Of English religious writers who have captivated the Highland emotions,
Bunyan takes first place with his _Pilgrim’s Progress_, eleven editions;
_Death of Mr. Badman_, one edition; _The Barren Fig-tree_, one; _The
World to Come_, seven; _Visions of Heaven and Hell_, four; _Heavenly
Footman_, three; _Water of Life_, five; _Holy War_, two; _Come and
Welcome_, four; _Grace Abounding_, three.

Then Baxter’s _Call to the Unconverted_ went through nine editions, and
his _Saints’ Rest_, seven. Alleine, Boston, Doddridge, Dyer, Jonathan
Edwards were also prime favourites, whose works were represented by many
editions, especially _The Sinner’s Alarm_, _The Fourfold State_, _The
Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul_, _Christ’s Famous Titles_,
and _Doomed Sinners_.

Though the Gaelic-reading Highlanders had apparently little appetite for
general English literature in their own tongue outside works of
religion, they had a surprising avidity for hymns, elegies, and sermons,
for books on the Church, Christian doctrine, Baptism and the Sacraments.
And we meet with such varied titles as _Voluntaryism Indefensible_,
_Christ is All_, _Apples of Gold_, _Village Sermons_, _Letters to
Sinners_, _The Unspeakable Gift_, _Fame of the Branch_, _The Rose of
Sharon_, _Call to Awaken_, _Salvation by Grace_, _Sacramental
Exercises_, _The Believer’s Hope_, _A Parting Exhortation_, _Blair’s
Sermons_, _Token for Mourners_, _On the Guidance of the Holy Spirit_,
_Short History of the Baptists_, _Lessons on the Sabbath_, _The
Declaratory Act_, _A Word of Warning to the People_, _Assurance of
Salvation_.

Topics of this kind abound. They formed the favourite pabulum of the
more pious of our countrymen, and to this day some of these or similar
theological productions may be found in almost every Gaelic household of
the North and West Highlands.

While English printing concerned itself first with such works as _The
Game and Playe of the Chesse_, _The Dictes and Sayings of Philosophers_,
_The Æneid of Virgil_, _The Poems of Chaucer_, _Lydgate and Gower_, _The
Golden Legend_, and the _Morte d’Arthur_, Gaelic printing took to do
with religion. Knox’s Liturgy, Catechisms, Psalters, and Vocabularies
were its main concern; and only after the lapse of nearly two hundred
years did it give any attention to poetry or native literature of any
kind. The original bards, like all other English and foreign writers,
had to wait in the outer court of the Gentiles. But after Baxter’s _Call
to the Unconverted_ was issued in 1750 they began to come straggling in,
Mackellar with his hymns and Macdonald with his songs. And in addition
to Dugald Buchanan’s and Macintyre’s we have, during the following half
century, these books:—

A volume of Hymns published in 1770 by Macfadyen, a Glasgow University
student; and about the same time an Elegy and one or two other Gaelic
poems by another Glasgow student. Ronald Macdonald, son of Alexander,
published the first issue of old Gaelic poems, including some of his own
and his father’s, in 1776. Then followed in 1777 an anonymous collection
of Mirthful Songs, and in 1780 another of Curious ones; and a volume
entitled _Loudin’s Songs_.

John Brown’s, Margaret Cameron’s, and A. Campbell’s appeared in 1785;
and next year the better known collections of John Gillies, bookseller,
Perth, and Duncan Kennedy, schoolmaster, Kilmelford.

In 1787 Dr. Smith published his alleged poems of Ossian, Orran, Ullin,
etc., and those entitled _Dargo and Gaul_. And before the century closed
Kenneth Mackenzie’s, Alexander Macpherson’s, Duncan Campbell’s, and
Allan Macdougall’s compositions were all in type, issued separately.

The subsequent years, from 1800 to 1831, were most prolific in the
output of poetical publications. It seemed as if the Highland bards had
made a rival rush for the printing presses, and kept the busy machines
clicking. Among the names of those whose poems were then issued occur
the following: Dr. Dewar, Rob. Donn, William Gordon, George Ross Gordon,
Peter Grant, Angus Kennedy, A. and J. Maccallum, J. Macdonald, John
Macgregor, Dr. James Macgregor, P. Macfarlane, D. Macintosh, A. Mackay,
J. Maclachlan, J. Maclean, D. Macleod, D. Matheson, J. Morrison, James
Munro, A. and D. Stewart, R. Stewart, P. Stuart, P. Turner. And in
addition to theirs, and some other ten volumes of anonymous poetry,
partly original and partly collected, there were published within that
period the Highland Society’s edition of Ossian’s poems, and its
reprint, the one in London, 3 volumes, 1807, the other in Edinburgh,
1818.

If the Gaelic muse was at first slow in committing its productions to
modern printing, it appears to have cast off all reserve after 1800, and
every type of bardic effusion went to the press.

But of all the bards whose poems were appearing then, undoubtedly the
most popular was Dugald Buchanan. No other book in Gaelic, if we except
the Shorter Catechism and Psalter, has gone through so many editions as
his Hymns. In the comparatively short period of 110 years from their
first appearance they have been issued from the press forty times—so
great has been the demand for these vivid and impressive products of
Gaelic genius.

Next in general vogue to Buchanan’s comes Peter Grant’s _Spiritual
Hymns_, a book which has been printed at least nineteen times.

These three instances alone—the Psalter, Dugald Buchanan’s and Peter
Grant’s Hymns—would indicate that this is the type of literature that
has gone highest with the Gael, even if we did not observe how
frequently volumes of spiritual hymns occur in the list of printed
books.

By comparison such a classic as Alexander Macdonald’s _Gaelic Songs_ has
only reached eight editions, Duncan Ban Macintyre’s ten, and Rob Donn’s
three.

And this bias, so unmistakably exhibited by the Gaelic printed
literature, is not confined to poetry, but may be traced even in the few
original prose works that the language possesses.

Only ten such books appeared during the early decades of the nineteenth
century, and they are all religious ones of quite indifferent merit.
While of forty-five prose translations which were printed, either
through the munificence of private individuals, or as booksellers’
ventures, forty-two were of a religious and three of a moral kind.

There can be no doubt that this extraordinary preponderance of the
religious over every other type of printed literature in the Gaelic
list, has exercised its own baneful influence on the Highland character
of last century, leaving it lop-sided in some obvious directions and
rendering the Gael blind to the wider issues of life, and therefore more
or less impervious to new ideas. We can well understand his limitations,
if, ignorant of English or other modern languages, he were confined to
the books of his native tongue, as many Highlanders of the past
generations were. These books absolutely give him no knowledge of
science, philosophy, art, or even of the great literatures of the world.
And his own poets occupied, as we have seen, a somewhat subordinate
place in his list. Taught to look through one particular medium, and
deprived of most other means of vision, the unsuspecting Gael grew up
almost entirely oblivious of the march of mind, and for the most part
ignorant of the thoughts that shake mankind.

It is through the introduction of English, therefore, that he has been
getting emancipated of late years from the narrow outlook which his own
ill-chosen and limited printed literature affords. And it is the sudden
intrusion of this higher knowledge, rendering many of his theories
obsolete, which has so painfully convulsed the older generation of
Gaelic-speaking Highlanders in recent times, and left them so ill at
ease.

Though printing made its first inroad on the Gaelic language as early as
1567, it is characteristic of the race that the cream of the literature
only found type within the nineteenth century. After the early editions
of Ossian, Peter Grant, and Rob Donn, the following may be quoted as the
most noteworthy literary books that have appeared in the last hundred
years from the Highlands, namely: Dr. Norman Macleod’s _Caraid nan
Gaidheal_; Mackenzie’s _Beauties of Gaelic Poetry_, 1841; Campbell’s
_West Highland Tales_, 1860–62; Dr. Clerk’s _Ossian_, 1870; Campbell’s
_Leabhar na Feinne_, 1872; Sinclair’s _Oranaiche_, 1876–79; Nicolson’s
_Gaelic Proverbs_, 1882; Henry Whyte’s _Celtic Garland_, 1880–81;
_Celtic Lyre_, 1883–95; Mary Mackellar’s _Poems and Songs_, 1881; Neil
Macleod’s _Clarsach an Doire_, 1883; Dr. Cameron’s _Reliquiæ Celticæ_,
1892–94; Dr. Nigel Macneill’s _The Literature of the Highlanders_, 1892;
and Alexander Carmichael’s _Carmina Gadelica_, 1900.

In addition to the purely literary works, there are three other classes
of Gaelic books, intimately associated with the history of the language,
which have received considerable attention from the printer, and which
are worthy of our notice here. These are School-books, Grammars, and
Dictionaries.

Of school-books there were three series that ran through many editions
during the first half of last century, namely, the Gaelic Society’s
School series, the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge series,
and the General Assembly’s series. Besides ordinary class books,
portions of Scripture, especially from Proverbs, Psalms, Job, and the
Gospels were printed for use as reading books in schools. The first of
the above series dates from 1811, the second from 1815, and the third
from 1826.

John Reid apparently never heard of Fenius Farsaid or the “Uraicept na
n-Éigeas,”[35] or of the other MS. fragments, for he has the following
interesting modern account of Gaelic Grammars.

“The first attempt that we have on record of a Celtic Grammar was one
written by Florence Gray, a monk who was born in Humond about the end of
the sixteenth or the beginning of the seventeenth century; but we have
never been able to find a copy of it, or ascertain if it was printed. It
is probable that if it was printed it appeared about 1620, as we know
that he was living in Dublin in 1630.

“In 1639 Tobias Stapleton, an Irish priest, published at Louvain a small
quarto Catechism for the use of the Irish students on the Continent, in
parallel columns, Latin and English. To the end of the Catechism is
added a small tract in Latin and Irish, entitled, ‘Modus perutilis
legendi linguam Hibernicam.’

“After this there appeared various little imperfect compends of Irish
Grammar, but nothing of any real value until 1677, when there appeared
at Rome Molloy’s _Grammatica Latino-Hibernica Compendiata_, which,
although deficient in syntax and other important requisites, was
decidedly the most important work on the subject until 1728, when Hugh
M‘Cuirtin published his _Elements of the Irish Language_,[36] which
again appeared enlarged in his Dictionary, published in 1732.

“In 1742, Donlevy published at Paris a Catechism in Irish and English,
to which he appended ‘The Elements of the Irish Language.’ This has been
followed by the Irish Grammars of General Vallancy, Dr. William Neilson,
Dr. Paul O’Bryan, William Halliday, and one or two anonymous
authors.[37] It is said by Lhuyd, in the year 1707, that a Scottish
gentleman had then some thoughts of publishing a Scottish Gaelic
Grammar; but the earliest attempt known to us is by Malcolm, who, about
the year 1736, published _Some Elements of the Ancient Scottish, or
Caledonian Celtick, with some Observations_. In the year 1778 Shaw’s
work appeared, with the following title: _An Analysis of the Gaelic
Language, by William Shaw, A.M., Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit.
Virg., Edin._, 1778.”

A second edition followed the same year, the published price of the book
being 4s. sewed. It is now very rare, but not of much account.

The next work of the kind to appear was Stewart’s, announced as follows:
“Elements of Gaelic Grammar, in four parts. I. Of Pronunciation and
Orthography. II. Of the Parts of Speech. III. Of Syntax. IV. Of
Derivation and Composition. By Alexander Stewart, Minister of the Gospel
at Dingwall, Honorary Member of The Highland Society of Scotland,
Edinburgh. Printed by C. Stewart & Coy.; for Peter Hill, Edinburgh; and
Vernon and Hood, London, 1801.”

A second edition, corrected and enlarged, was issued in 1812, a third in
1876, and a fourth in 1879. It is very much superior to that by Shaw,
and is still the best and the one in common use.

A smaller volume appeared in 1828, entitled, _The Principles of Gaelic
Grammar, designed to facilitate the study of that language to youth_, by
Archibald Currie, formerly Master of the Grammar School, Rothesay, but
at the time of publication Tutor at Prospect, Duntroon, Argyllshire. It
has never been reprinted. After him Neil Macalpine, of Dictionary fame,
produced one which went through four editions. The other grammarians
have been Munro, 1835–43; Forbes, 1843–48; Dr. Macgillivray, 1858; L.
Macbean; D. C. Macpherson, 1891; Malcolm Macfarlane, for the Highland
Association, 1893; Reid, 1895; and Gillies, 1896, the latter based on
Stewart’s.

A good Grammar of the Gaelic language is still a desideratum. Students
feel that those already in existence follow too slavishly the model of
grammars of other tongues, from which the Gaelic diverges, and thus
exceptions to the rules abound. Only a man of the Zeuss type, well
versed in philology and the original structure and peculiar idioms of
this ancient speech, would be likely to bring order out of the existing
chaos, and produce a book which would be a real help to the study of the
language. Meanwhile the student has to fall back upon Stewart, whose
outlines were put together when philological research was yet in its
infancy. Though Zeuss and Windisch have Gaelic Grammars, they are in
Latin and German.

The history of the Dictionaries is even more interesting. Michael
O’Clery is credited with the first attempts to produce a Gaelic one.[38]
His _Seanasan Nuadh_, or glossary of old words, was published at Louvain
in 1643. Other Irish lexicographers followed, as many as six
Dictionaries appearing before the year 1817 was ended, among them that
of the learned Lhuyd of Wales and Oxford in 1706.

The earliest in the Scottish Gaelic, was Kirke’s Vocabulary, printed at
the end of the Irish Bible in 1690, and consisting of five and a half
pages, on which the words were arranged alphabetically. Later, in 1702,
another Vocabulary of thirteen pages by him, including additions by
Lhuyd, was published in _Nicholson’s Scottish Historical Library_. This
one is not arranged alphabetically, but under twelve heads or divisions.
Neither of Kirke’s was issued by itself, apart from other
subject-matter.

Afterwards, about the year 1732, the Rev. Dr. Malcolm or M‘Colm of
Duddingston made an attempt to compile a lexicon, the material for which
was said to have been prepared by Lhuyd. He published a prospectus and a
specimen of the work, entitled “Focloir Gaoidheilge-Shagsonach,” but
although he was encouraged by the General Assembly and received a grant
of £20, the work never appeared.

Thus the first Gaelic Dictionary published in separate form was
Macdonald’s Vocabulary, 1741, written for the use of the Charity Schools
founded and endowed in the Highlands by the Society for Propagating
Christian Knowledge. Like its predecessor, it is not arranged
alphabetically but divided into subjects or chapters, like the
syllabaries used by the ancient Assyrians.

A more ambitious work was “A Galic and English Dictionary, containing
all the words in the Scottish and Irish dialects of the Celtic that
could be collated from the voice, and old books, and MSS., by the Rev.
William Shaw, A.M., followed by an English and Galic Dictionary,
containing the most useful and necessary words in the English language,
explained by the correspondent words in the Galic,” by the same author,
1780. The published price was two guineas, though it was frequently sold
for three and a half. Shaw’s knowledge of the language was defective. A
most furious Highland storm burst over his head on account of his open
championship of the Johnsonian side in the Ossianic controversy.
Consequently some of the subscribers returned their copies, but on the
plea that there were a good many Irish words in the book. Others, who
did not return them within a reasonable time, were found liable to pay.
The case had gone to the Court of Session, and the author won, the
judges finding that though he did not fulfil the terms of his prospectus
he was not guilty of fraud or deceit in the preparation of the book, and
when a definition of a Gaelic Dictionary was given they held that his
legally answered the description. From Shaw himself the curious fact was
elicited that, when picking up words among the Highlanders, he found the
task nearly impossible, as he had to pay them all except the most
educated, the natives being impressed with the idea that he was going to
make a fortune out of the language, and of course they should have a
share. In consequence he turned to the Irish peasantry, who received him
more graciously; and he had access to Colonel Vallancy’s MSS. But the
upshot was that the Dictionary did ultimately contain more Irish words
than Gaelic. And this, combined with his own unpopularity, gave his
controversial foes the opportunity to thwart him, which he resisted, as
we have indicated, by litigation. Ultimately he had to seek refuge in
the Church of England, where through the influence, it is supposed, of
Dr. Johnson, he got a living worth £200 a year.

“A new Alphabetical Vocabulary, Gaelic and English, with some directions
_for writing and reading_ the Gaelic,” by Robert Macfarlane, Edinburgh,
appeared in 1795; and in 1815 another, in two parts, by Peter
Macfarlane, the Gaelic translator of Bunyan’s _Pilgrim’s Progress_,
Doddridge’s _Rise and Progress_, and Blair’s _Sermons_. The two parts
were also published separately in the same year. This was the only
really practical Gaelic Dictionary up to date, but on account of its
limited size was still very deficient

A prospectus for a more comprehensive lexicon was issued in 1803 by
Alexander Robertson, schoolmaster, Kirkmichael, and a few parts
appeared. Thereafter the Highland Society bought his MS., as an aid to
the Dictionary contemplated by themselves.

Since then there have been issued as many as five good ones, all more or
less well known and serviceable at the present time. The first of these
was by Rev. A. Armstrong, A.M., “in which the words in their different
acceptations are illustrated by quotations from the best Gaelic writers;
and their affinities traced in most of the languages of ancient and
modern times, with a short historical appendix of ancient names deduced
from the authority of Ossian and other poets; to which is prefixed a new
Gaelic Grammar, 1825.” The work was published at three guineas.

On the other hand, the rival, issued by the Highland Society of
Scotland, three years later, on somewhat similar lines, cost seven
guineas in demy quarto, and ten in royal. To an advertisement from the
publisher the following is attached: “This great work has occupied the
attention of the Society since 1814, and presents not only a fully
illustrated view of the Gaelic of Scotland, but surpasses in extent any
lexicon of the Celtic Language ever offered to the public in this or any
other country.” Armstrong’s and this one are by far the largest and the
best.

Next in order comes that projected by the Rev. Dr. Norman Macleod,
Minister of Campsie, and the Rev. Dr. Daniel Dewar of Glasgow, 1831. It
was superintended through the press and indeed mainly compiled by the
Peter Macfarlane already mentioned and his son Donald—both accredited
Gaelic scholars; and sold for a guinea. It is now known as Macleod and
Dewar’s.

Contemporary with it we may say, there appeared, in 1832, the first
attempt at a Gaelic pronouncing Dictionary, sold in parts by all the
teachers in the Highlands. It was originally issued as “A Pocket
Pronouncing Gaelic Dictionary for Schools in the Highlands and Islands”;
containing a far greater number of pure Gaelic words than any other
Dictionary, and three times, in some instances ten times, the number of
illustrations and examples in the large Gaelic Dictionaries, from the
Bible and other sources; also all words that are exclusively Irish
pointed out, and reasons given for rejecting them by N. Macalpine,
student in Divinity and Parochial Schoolmaster in Islay.

While Armstrong’s and the Highland Society’s Dictionary have only had
one edition, and Macleod and Dewar’s five, Macalpine’s has reached as
many as twelve, and was last printed in 1890. A small volume of
recognised merit by the Rev. Ewen Maceachen bears the date 1842. It has
now been re-edited by Dr. Macbain and Mr. John Whyte.

Lately Dr. Macbain’s own _Etymological Dictionary_, the most scholarly
work of the kind, has been published at Inverness in 1896, of which
interesting book a new edition may shortly be expected, so that Highland
Vernacular Dictionaries have had a goodly record.

One other department of this study remains to be noted, namely the
periodicals, a mere list of which suffices to show their character and
history. But indirectly this list throws a pathetic sidelight on the
waning fortunes, or may we not say, the expiring struggles of our
ancient tongue, as well as upon the number and variety of efforts that
have been put forth to resuscitate it.

PERIODICALS
┌──────────────────────────────┬─────────────────────┬───────┬────────┐
│ Name. │ Place. │ Date. │ Nos. │
├──────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────┼───────┼────────┤
│Ros-Roine (The Rose of the │Glasgow │1803 │ 4│
│ Field) │ │ │ │
│An Teachdaire Gaidhealach │ „ │1829–31│ 24│
│ (Highland Messenger) │ │ │ │
│An Teachdaire Ur Gaidhealach │ „ │1835–36│ 9│
│ (New Messenger) │ │ │ │
│Cuairtear nan Gleann │ „ │1840–43│ 40│
│An Cuairtear Og Gaidhealach │Antigonish │1851 │ 13│
│Cuairtear nan Coillte │Ontario │1840 │ │
│Teachdaire Gaidhealach │Antigonish │1837 │ │
│ Thasmania │ │ │ │
│An Fhianuis (The Witness) │Glasgow │1845–50│ 36│
│Eaglais Shaor na h’Alba │ „ │1875–93│ 74│
│ (Quarterly) │ │ │ │
│An Fhianuis (Continuation of │ „ │1893– │ │
│ above) │ │ │ │
│A Bheithir Bheuma (The │ „ │1845 │ │
│ Satirist, No. 1) │ │ │ │
│Teachdaire nan Gaidheal │ „ │1844 │ 8│
│Caraid nan Gael │ „ │1844 │ 5│
│Caraid nan Gaidheal (No. 1) │Inverness │1853 │ │
│Fear Tathaich (The Mountain │Glasgow │1848–50│ 25│
│ Visitor) │ │ │ │
│An T-Aoidh Miosail │Edinburgh │1847–48│ 17│
│An Gaidheal (The Gael) │Toronto │1871–77│ 6 vols.│
│ Issued afresh │Glasgow and Edinburgh│ │ │
│Monthly Visitor │ „ │1858– │ │
│The Celtic Magazine │Inverness │1876–88│13 vols.│
│The Highland Magazine │Oban │1885 │ 8│
│The Banner of Truth │Glasgow │1872–74│ 2 vols.│
│The Highland Monthly │Inverness │1889 │ 51│
│Cuairtear na Coille │ „ │1881 │ │
│MacTalla │Sydney, Cape Breton │1892 │ │
│Supplement to _Life and Work_ │Glasgow │1879– │ │
│Scottish Celtic Review │ „ │1881–85│ 4│
│The Celtic Monthly │ „ │1892– │ │
└──────────────────────────────┴─────────────────────┴───────┴────────┘

Of these it will be seen the most died in their infancy. The only
survivors in Scotland to-day are the Church Quarterly _An Fhianuis_, the
Monthly Supplement to _Life and Work_, and the _Celtic Monthly_. There
have been about twenty monthly periodicals tried since the beginning of
last century. Of the _Gaelic Messenger_, to take a single example, Dr.
Nigel Macneill says that the late Mr. W. R. Macphun, the publisher,
informed him in 1873 that the parcels of _Messengers_ sent to the
Highlands and Islands came back at the end of the year, _after they had
been read_, without any accompanying payment. Dr. Macleod, the editor,
and his enterprising publisher saw then that it was time to give up the
business. “Some who have lost time and money in recent times over Gaelic
affairs,” adds Dr. Macneill sententiously, “may find some cold comfort
in this incident in the experience of our greatest of prose writers.”

Further comment on that score is surely unnecessary. Yet is it not
suggestive of much that the only paper at present wholly written in
Scottish Gaelic is one published in Cape Breton, 3000 miles without and
beyond the Celtic fringe of the Old World?

Taken as a whole, we may see from this survey that the printed Gaelic
books extant belong to the past. They represent a type of thought which
has been largely superseded. And no modern outside the world of Gaelic
dream could live and thrive on them exclusively. Nevertheless they
represent the literature of a people, ancient and venerable, and as such
they will have a value and interest for the future historian,
litterateur, philologist, and ethnologist far exceeding what they have
to-day; and in translations the best of the bards will be read when the
language in which they breathed their poetry is no longer heard on the
lips of men.

CHAPTER XVIII
THE MASTER GLEANERS OF GAELIC POETRY

The work of the gleaner—Authors of the three most precious relics of
Celtic literature, Leabhar Na h’Uidhre, Book of Hymns, and Book of
Leinster—of the three Highland treasures, Book of the Dean of
Lismore, Fernaig MS., and Book of Clanranald—Advent of
Macpherson—Collections and collectors between 1750 and 1820—First
printed gleaning—Four nineteenth-century monuments, Campbell’s
Leabhar na Feinne, Mackenzie’s Beauties of Gaelic Poetry,
Sinclair’s Songster, and Carmichael’s Carmina Gadelica—Other
recent gleaners and their books.

To the gleaners of the poetic heritage of the past we are indebted
almost as much as to the poets themselves; for what mattered it to us
that some Homer or Ossian had sung, if none of their contributions ever
reached us? An unappreciative age may allow its masterpieces to be lost,
but the gleaners will not suffer that. They treasure the best, many a
time snatching the fugitive poems from the verge of oblivion.

Sometimes they glean for the pure pleasure of possessing, as the miser
amasses his gold. Often they do it to share with others. In any case,
like the middlemen of commerce, they are the true distributers, for
sooner or later their wares reach the market.

Unlike that of the poet, the work of the gleaner demands no originality;
only a certain devotion and enthusiasm for the compositions admired, and
a certain critical judgment, the latter not always in evidence, and not
necessarily indispensable. Posterity does the winnowing.

To the gleaners we owe the original compiling of the three most precious
relics of Celtic literature now in the world—the Leabhar Na h’Uidhre,
the Book of Hymns, and the Book of Leinster.

It is away back in the latter end of the eleventh century and early part
of the twelfth that we encounter the authors of these. When the gloom of
the Middle Ages was settling down upon Europe, and weird apparitions
hovered round the camp fires and the cloisters; when the feudal lords
were building their strong castles and the men of peace their churches
and monastic retreats, to escape from war and disorder and general
wickedness, one might enter the precincts of the great monastery of
Clonmacnois in Ireland and find Maelmuiri, the son of the son of Conn
nam Bocht, busy with his pen compiling the Leabhar Na h’Uidhre. Many
times already had the sacred edifice been attacked and pillaged by the
marauding Norsemen, and even then it was surrounded by people rendered
violent and half savage by the disorders of the time, so that the
studious Maelmuiri with his literary tastes was not secure in his quiet
retreat, but in the midst of his peaceful avocations was set upon one
night in the church and murdered by a band of robbers, to whom
literature, most likely, had no meaning.

But Maelmuiri had already reared his monument, more lasting than brass,
in the book which happily escaped the hands of the ruffians.

It is the oldest miscellaneous gleaning we have, and contains, among
many valuable productions in prose and poetry, such ancient poems as
Dallan Forgaill’s “Amra” or “Praise of Columcille,” and a pretty large
transcript of the “Táin Bó Chuailgné.” The Gaelic of the former in the
Fenian dialect was so ancient even in Maelmuiri’s time that it had to be
heavily glossed and commented upon.

Of his contemporary, the compiler of the Book of Hymns, nothing seems to
be known. His monument too has survived the ravages and vicissitudes of
time, but without his name. A wonderful anthology it is, carrying us
back, as in the case of the other, to the days of St Columba, and even
further, to the period of St. Patrick. For here, in the _Liber
Hymnorum_, we have the Gaelic hymns of Patrick, Colmán, Fiacc, Ultán,
Broccán, Sanctáin, Dallan Forgaill, Máel-ísu, the prayers of Níníne and
Adamnan; a Quatrain on the Apostles; besides a variety of beautiful
Latin hymns with Gaelic glosses and prefaces. Among the more famous of
the latter may be mentioned the “Te Deum,” the “Magnificat,” the “Gloria
in Excelsis Deo,” and the “Benedictus Dominus Deus Israel,” so well
known to worshippers throughout the ages since then; and the three Latin
hymns of St. Columba—the “Altus,” “In te Christo,” and “Noli Pater.”

Many of these occur only in the Book of Hymns, except when copied from
it elsewhere, and may have been lost to posterity, but for the industry
of the unknown gleaner now no more remembered.

Maelmuiri and he, in all probability had made their collection before
the close of the eleventh century; and fifty years later appeared the
compiler,[39] who produced the Book of Leinster, containing no less than
187 romances in prose and poetry. After the Leabhar Na h’Uidhre this is
reckoned the most important monument of Gaelic literature.

The stories recorded relate to events which for the most part happened
before the year 650, and their interest and variety may be inferred from
the following category of subjects, into which they have been
classified, namely: destructions of fortified places, cow-spoils,
courtships, battles, cave-stories, voyagings, tragic deaths, feasts,
sieges, adventures, elopements, slaughters, water-eruptions,
expeditions, progresses, and visions. A book of old-time and abundant
human incident is this middle-age document.

In succession to these three master-gleaners there arose numerous other
less famous ones in Ireland.

But our special quest carries us over from this time to the land famed
in later song and story as the home of the Gaelic tongue. And coming to
Scotland three other monuments of Celtic industry and literary taste
arise to view, covering the period extending from the fourteenth century
to the Forty-five. They are the Book of the Dean of Lismore, the Fernaig
MS., and the Book of Clanranald. These having been described in detail
in Chapter VII., demand no more than a passing reference here. Happily,
more is known of their authors than of the compilers of their famous
precursors.

It was in that wild and turbulent period of clan feuds in the Northern
and Western Highlands, and family quarrels between the Douglases and
their rivals in the Lowlands, almost half a century before the Scottish
Reformation, that the Dean of Lismore in his island home near Oban, set
about collecting his fund of Gaelic poetry. In 1512, just the year
before Flodden, he began to write down what he gleaned from oral
recitation throughout the Highlands and Ireland, and continued with the
help of his brother down to the year 1526, thus conserving not only the
poetry of his own generation and of two previous centuries, but also
most beautiful and characteristic fragments of Ossianic poems, some of
which, but for him, would have been irretrievably lost.

A hundred and sixty years pass stormfully by before we meet the next
gleaner in this field of poetic literature. And then arose among the
wild Macraes of Kintail the chief of that name, Donnachadh nam Piòs,
full of piety and song. Amid the tumults of the Revolution of 1688,
while Claverhouse was leading the clans on to fateful Killiecrankie, and
Cannon and Buchan were ravaging the Northern Highlands, this friend of
the Muses, and learned chieftain, found a pastime in making of verse and
committing to manuscript, thousands of lines of poetry current in his
own district, from Carsewell’s day down to his own, and in point of
place from Southern Argyllshire north to the borders of Caithness.

This representative gleaning carries the bardic succession over the long
interval since the Dean’s time, and it is a pity that though the Fernaig
manuscript has been transcribed and annotated by Professor Mackinnon,
and again transcribed by Dr. Cameron and Dr. Macbain, and partly
transliterated by Dr. Henderson, no English rendering has yet been
published.

The poems in the Book of Clanranald are not of the same high order as
the earlier survivals, with the exception of the two or three Ossianic
fragments, which are likewise to be found elsewhere. But they supplement
the Fernaig collection, and help to bring down the poetic tradition
nearer the Forty-five. It is to the Macvurichs—the descendants of
Muireach Albanach, and the hereditary bards of Clanranald—that we owe
this contribution to the gleanings of poetising in by-gone days. They
collected throughout their successive generations chiefly elegies and
eulogies, from the time of Charles the First to George the Second.

A new era of enthusiasm for bardic compositions opened with the advent
of Macpherson and his publication in June 1760 of “Fragments of Ancient
Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland.” The rich field of Celtic
lore in the past was by this time almost unknown. Few interested
themselves in the Celtic literature of their country. The Book of the
Dean of Lismore lay in obscurity, nobody now knows where. For centuries
it had never been heard of. The Fernaig MS. and the Book of Clanranald
were equally buried, perhaps in old clan chests or lumber-rooms. No
better evidence of the great dearth in the land of master-gleaners could
be adduced than the challenge of Dr. Johnson, that there were not in the
whole world Gaelic MSS. one hundred years old, and the feeble way in
which it was met.

Interest in these days had reached a very low ebb indeed, when the
controversy over Macpherson’s _Ossian_ set the Celts a-searching.

Macpherson himself, first in the field of these newly awakened
enthusiasts, is believed, in the course of his journey through the
North-West Highlands, to have gleaned the best of what remained of the
treasure. But for him it is highly probable there would be no Scottish
collection of Gaelic MSS. in the Advocates’ Library to-day. Many of them
were already on their way to decay, as their tattered appearance shows.

Besides the work of the Highland Society and the stock in hand of the
Kilbride family, it is quite remarkable the number of minor collections
that were made between the years 1750 and 1820. This period was, in
fact, a resurrected Ossianic cycle. It would be tedious, and quite
unnecessary here to catalogue all the names, but we may mention the
Turner, the Jerome Stone, the Macnicol, the Fletcher, the Campbell, the
Gillies, the Irvine, the Macpherson, the Kennedy, the Sir George
Mackenzie, the Sinclair, the Sage, the Macfarlane, the Grant, and the
Maccallum collections. And among these gleaners, the baronet, the
clergy, the teacher, the farmer, the printer, the soldier, the advocate,
the traveller, are all represented.

It is curious now, looking back on the great Macpherson Ossianic
controversy, which called forth all this industry, this laborious
writing and research, to reflect on its rise and progress. Doubtless it
was felt then, as it is recognised now, that the only real way to solve
the riddle was to glean in the fields of poetry and history—a task prior
to that period too much neglected. They wanted data. Had they the
records we now possess, and had they been able to read the ancient
scrolls, there would have been no literary wrangle. How quietly and
naturally the question, then a problem, has with the advent of
scientific scholarship solved itself. As a controversy the Macpherson
squabble is now as extinct as the dodo. And the Celtic champions who
heralded the dawn of last century, as we did of this, would perhaps be
almost as much taken aback with the issue could they know, as with the
wonders of steam or electricity and the camera.

It is an interesting fact that the earliest to achieve a printed
collection of ancient Gaelic poetry was Ronald Macdonald, son of the
Ardnamurchan bard, who published a volume in 1776, presumably from
materials treasured by his father.

But if through the past centuries the master gleaners appeared only at
rare intervals, the nineteenth has not been thus barren. For almost
simultaneously with the Celtic renaissance abroad, enthusiastic
harvesters entered the field at home. Four works especially, all
produced within the last sixty years, call for particular attention.
Following the modern method, their authors have each taken up a special
line, ransacking the past and the present for their own peculiar pearls.
And thus for the first time the whole Scottish field of Gaelic poetry
has been well-nigh gone over, and representative poems of every age and
class have been gleaned and printed.

First in the order of the antiquity of its contents, though not first in
the field, comes Campbell’s _Leabhar na Feinne_. It appeared in 1872,
its title page announcement sufficiently indicating its aim and scope.
As a sub-title, the latter runs as follows:—

“Heroic Gaelic Ballads
Collected in Scotland
Chiefly from 1512 to 1871

copied from old manuscripts preserved at Edinburgh and elsewhere, and
from rare books; and orally collected since 1859; with lists of
collections and of their contents; and with a short account of the
documents quoted.

Arranged by
J. F. Campbell,
Niddry Lodge, Kensington, London, W.”

The author, who was a barrister, and of an ancient and illustrious
Highland family in Islay, spent twelve years from 1859 collecting
folk-lore and poetry as opportunity offered throughout the Highlands, a
work in which he was assisted by various contributors and coadjutors.
His first book, entitled _Popular Tales of the West Highlands_, orally
collected, was published in Edinburgh in 1862. There are four volumes,
and they contain mainly prose stories, such as were wont to be repeated
round the firesides in the Highland Ceilidh in days of yore. Yet,
commingled with the Sgeulachdan, are to be found Ossianic fragments
which had filtered down by oral tradition.

This publication, however, was but a stepping-stone to the author’s real
_magnum opus_, the _Leabhar na Feinne_.

For it, he collected about 54,000 lines of heroic poetry, and these it
will be observed are independent of the Irish MSS., and almost of the
Scottish MSS. written in the Irish character before the year 1512. With
regard to the latter he says, “To publish them is more than I am able to
do. Where extracts have been made I have quoted a few passages to show
what the language is like, and how these ancient writings correspond to
later writings.”

Since in many cases he had two or more versions of the same ballad, and
in some cases five or six, it was his original intention to collate and
make one perfect copy. This idea he had ultimately to abandon, and
wisely followed the plan of printing the oldest, with selections from
later versions. Of the first Ossianic fragment he attempted to collate
from two versions, namely, Garbh Mac Stairn, he says, “not a line of
Macpherson’s Gaelic was in either version, but the story seemed to be
the foundation of the first book of Fingal, and therefore a literary
curiosity.” It is significant that when Campbell issued his first book
he favoured the authenticity of Macpherson’s _Ossian_, but by the time
_Leabhar na Feinne_ appeared he was strong the other way. His early
attitude he attributed to “unformed opinions affected by old beliefs.”

The ballads of _Leabhar na Feinne_ are arranged under nine heads,
according to their chronological sequence, as follows:—

I. The Story of Cuchulinn.

II. The Story of Deirdre.

III. The Story of Fraoch.

IV. The Story of Fionn and the Feinn, including the Norse Ballads.

V. Parodies.

VI. Later Heroic Ballads.

VII. Mythical Ballads.

VIII. Poems like Macpherson’s _Ossian_.

IX. Pope’s collection of ten Ballads.

These heroic tales read like the _Arabian Nights_, often with the
exaggerated fancy of _Don Quixote_. The extraordinary variety and human
interest of the ballads may be gleaned even from their names. For
example: The Story of Cuchulinn and Eimer, his wife; his sword; his
chariots; Garbh Mac Stairn; and Conlaoch; and Connal’s revenge. The
Story of Fionn and his Feinn; his pedigree; stories about his birth;
Ossian and Padruig; Ossian’s last hunt; how he got his sight; the loss
of the Fenian history; Ossian’s controversy with Padruig; his lament for
his comrades; their names; their favourite music; how nine went forth to
seek a whelp. Caoilte; how he slew a magic boar and a giant.

The following would pass as the titles of chapters in the great classic
of Cervantes: The adventure with the timbrel player; With Silhalan; The
adventure of the hag; The stealing of Fionn’s cup; The adventure with
the enchanter’s family; Roc, the King’s one-legged runner; The smithy
song, how they got swords; The one-eyed giantess and her ships; The
battle with Manus; Fionn’s expedition to Lochlan; His puzzle; His
enchantment in the rowan booth; The adventure of the nine with a
horseman; The adventure in the house of the king of the fair strangers;
The Black Dog slain by Bran; The adventure of the six at the golden
castle; The tightest fight of the Feinn; The expedition of eight or of
the six to foreign lands; The distressed maiden; The battle of Fair
Strand, in which the Feinn defeated the whole world in arms; The maid of
the fair white garment; Ossian’s courting; How Bran was killed and
Gaul’s dog; Fionn’s encounter of wits with Ailbhe, Cormac’s daughter;
The elopement of Grainne, Fionn’s wife, with Diarmad, Fionn’s nephew;
Diarmad’s lament for his comrades; The story of Gaul Macmorna; his
adventure with Lamh-fhad; Gaul’s last words to his wife.

The parodies have these headings: The black wrapper; A dream; The tailor
and the Feinn; The truiseal stone; Diarmad’s speech.

Among later heroical ballads occur subjects like these: The lay of the
great fool; Oscar and the giant; Muirchadh Mac Brian and the heiress of
Dublin; Muirchadh Mac Brian’s riding dress; Hugh O’Neil’s horse.

Such sumptuous narrative, spiced with no lack of imaginative detail,
might satisfy even Chaucer’s merry group as they foregathered to listen
to the story-telling at the Tabard Inn centuries ago.

In 1841, some thirty years before _Leabhar na Feinne_, Mackenzie’s
_Beauties of Gaelic Poetry_ appeared. It is a work of more general
interest than the other, in so far that it gives gems of every type of
poem. Here are to be found in concise compass the best productions of
the best bards during the last 300 years, with brief biographical
sketches, critical and explanatory notes, and other elucidations.

John Mackenzie, the compiler, was born in 1806 of humble parentage in
Gairloch, Ross-shire. Educated in the parish school there, and
afterwards at Tain Academy, he developed a taste for reading and music,
and became very proficient in the making of musical instruments. His
father had him started in life as an apprentice joiner in Dingwall. This
occupation he soon left, however, for more congenial literary work, such
as the collecting of poetical material for publication. On leaving his
native strath to push his way in the great cities of the South, he acted
for a time as book-keeper in the Glasgow University printing office, and
in addition to compiling “The Beauties,” wrote much in prose. Afterwards
the late Gaelic publishers, Maclachlan and Stewart, Edinburgh, employed
him on various undertakings for several years. Besides “The Beauties” he
wrote a “History of Prince Charlie,” the English-Gaelic Dictionary,
usually bound with Macalpine’s, the “Gaelic Melodist,” and compiled,
wrote, translated, or edited under surprising difficulties, about thirty
other works.

A man of talent and industry, Mackenzie has produced a book which not
only enhances the prestige of our native literature, but also places
himself in the front rank of Gaelic gleaners.

Like the Dean of Lismore, however, he has inserted certain matters which
critics feel might, with advantage, be omitted, as they detract from the
dignity of the work as a whole.

On the other hand, the author of _Leabhar na Feinne_ feels aggrieved
that Mackenzie has not included among “The Beauties” some of the ancient
heroic ballads of Ossianic origin. As well might objection be taken to
Mr. Campbell himself for omitting the heroic poetry in the Irish MSS.
and the Scottish MSS. written in the old Gaelic script. As a matter of
fact, Mackenzie does give as samples three very beautiful pieces, the
“Mordubh,” “Collath,” and “The Aged Bard’s Wish,” which he took to be
ancient, but which are now held to belong to the Macpherson period.

Both compilers did well to follow each his own plan and work out his own
ideal. The field has thus been all the better harvested.

Mackenzie’s undertaking seems to have early undermined his health, and
though usually resident in the South, he died at Inverewe on the 19th
day of August 1848, among his own people, and was buried with his
fathers in the old chapel in the churchyard of Gairloch, near which, at
the roadside, a monument now stands to his memory.

A few specimen extracts from “The Beauties” may here be quoted to
illustrate their quality. Of the three earlier poems “The Aged Bard’s
Wish” is the best known, and of it our author gives both the text and a
literal translation. It was Mrs. Grant of Laggan who first brought it
under public notice, and then it was considered ancient because there is
no flavour of Christianity in its composition. On the contrary, the bard
desires entrance at death into the hall where dwell Ossian and Daol, and
expresses the wish that there be laid by his side at the last a harp, a
shell full of liquor, and his ancestor’s shield. In other respects both
the language and sentiment are modern.

O càiraibh mi ri taobh nan allt
A shiubhlas mall le ceumaibh ciuin
Fo sgâil a bharraich leag mo cheann
’S bi thùs’ a ghrian ro-chàirdeil rium.

O place me by the purling brook,
That wimples gently down the lea,
Under the old tree’s branchy shade,
And thou, bright sun, be kind to me!

Where I may hear the waterfall,
And the hum of its falling wave,
And give me the harp and the shell and the shield
Of my sires in the strife of the brave.

Of Macintyre’s “Ben Dorain,” which is also included, Professor Blackie
says, “I shall be surprised to learn that there exists in any language,
ancient or modern, a more original poem of the genus which we may call
venatorial. What Landseer, in a sister art, has done for animals in
general, that Macintyre, in this singular work, has done for the deer
and the roe.” And then Blackie himself gives a characteristic rendering
into English of the poem, very free, but catching the spirit of its
Gaelic author. For example:—

My delight it was to rise
With the early morning skies
All aglow,
And to brush the dewy height
Where the deer in airy state
Wont to go;
At least a hundred brace
Of the lofty antlered race,
When they left their sleeping place
Light and gay;
When they stood in trim array,
And with low deep-breasted cry,
Flung their breath into the sky,
From the brae;
When the hind, the pretty fool,
Would be rolling in the pool
At her will;
Or the stag in gallant pride,
Would be strutting at the side
Of his haughty-headed bride
On the hill.
And sweeter to my ear
Is the concert of the deer
In their roaring,
Than when Erin from her lyre
Warmest strains of Celtic fire
May be pouring;
And no organ sends a roll
So delightsome to my soul,
As the branchy-crested race,
When they quicken their proud pace,
And bellow in the face
Of Ben Dorain.
O what joy to view the stag
When he rises ’neath the crag,
And from depth of hollow chest,
Sends his bell across the waste,
While he tosses high his crest,
Proudly scorning.
And from milder throat the hind,
Lows an answer to his mind
With the younglings of her kind
In the morning;
With her vivid swelling eye,
While her antlered lord is nigh,
She sweeps both earth and sky,
Far away;
And beneath her eye-brow grey,
Lifts her lid to greet the day,
And to guide her turfy way
O’er the brae.
O how lightsome is her tread,
When she gaily goes ahead,
O’er the green and mossy bed
Of the rills;
When she leaps with such a grace
You will own her pretty pace
Ne’er was hindmost in the race,
When she wills;
Or when with sudden start,
She defies the hunter’s art.
And is vanished like a dart
O’er the hills.

At the end of the book Mackenzie gives a select number of “Beauties” by
individuals who invoked the muse only on rare occasions, or whose
history is little known to the world. Among these we find the anonymous
yet exquisitely beautiful and pathetic “Mali Bheag Òg.” Our author
claims to be the first to give the whole of it correctly in print.[40]
There is much uncertainty as to the history, circumstance, and locality,
but the occasion of the poem was the elopement of two lovers, who were
pursued. The gallant, a young officer, stood to the defence of his
beautiful fiancée, who stole behind him in the melée. Unhappily his
sword accidentally in the swing struck her so violent a blow that she
expired at his feet. It was in jail awaiting execution that he composed
this heart-melting song:—

Nach truagh leat mi’s mi’m priosan,
Mo Mhàli bheag òg
Do chairdean a’ cuir binn’ orm,
Mo chuid de’n t-saoghal thù.
A bhean na mala mìne,
’S na’m pogan mar na fiòguis,
’S tu nach fagadh shios mi
Le mi-rùin do bheoil.

’S mise bh’air mo bhuaireadh
Mo Mhàli bheag òg,
’Nuair ’thain an ’sluagh mu’n cuairt duinn
Mo ribhinn ghlan ùr;
’S truagh nach ann san uair ud,
A thuit mo lamh o m’ ghualainn,
Mu’n dh’amais mi do bhualadh,
Mo Mhàli bheag òg.

As another independent gleaning, and valuable supplement to Mackenzie’s
work, there falls to be mentioned Archibald Sinclair’s _An T’
Oranaiche_, or the _Gaelic Songster_, published in 1879. “If a man were
permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the
laws of a nation,” said a wise man. And certainly the songs occupy no
mean place in Celtic life and poetry. Of these there is no collection in
Gaelic like Sinclair’s—humorous, patriotic, satiric, and sentimental. He
gleaned, as he tells us, in many a field, saving some from oblivion.
Others he snatched from fugitive pieces of paper, ere these latter
became food for the moth. In all there are 290 songs in the volume, and
upwards of fifty names of composers, some of whom are still living. The
songs are mainly of last century, and were compiled in Glasgow by their
editor, who was a publisher in that city.

By the well-known gleaners above mentioned, the heroic ballads, the
lyric poems, and the songs have been securely garnered. But there still
remained one large section of the field from which hitherto there had
been no great ingathering, necessary to complete the harvest up to our
time. And happily, ere the century closed, the crowning work appeared.
It is a remarkable book and sumptuous, published in two volumes, in
1900, by Alexander Carmichael, who was for many years a member of Her
Majesty’s Inland Revenue staff, and an enthusiastic admirer of Gaelic
lore. The work is styled “_Carmina Gadelica_,—hymns and incantations,
with illustrative notes on words, rites, and customs, dying and
obsolete; orally collected in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, and
translated into English,” by the author. Undoubtedly it places the
compiler in the very front rank of Celtic gleaners, and will carry its
testimony forward to posterity, as a monument of a phase of thought and
life now passing away. Even already its weird and old-world “ortha,
urnan agus ubagan,” sound like the echoes of a far-off time, from which
the race has long since emerged.

Yet its cultured author tells us that this work consists of old lore
collected during the last forty-four years, forming but a small part of
a large mass of oral literature written down from the recital of men and
women throughout the land of the Gael, from Arran to Caithness, and from
Perth to St. Kilda. The greater portion, however, was made in the
Western Isles, the last refuge of the distinctive Celtic life “expiring
on the horizon before the growing tumult of uniform civilisation.”

For three centuries Gaelic oral literature has been disappearing, and,
as our author tells us, it is now becoming meagre in quantity, inferior
in quality, and greatly isolated.

“Several causes have contributed towards this decadence,” he says,
“principally the Reformation, the rebellions, the evictions, the
Disruption, the schools, and the spirit of the age. Converts in
religion, in politics, or in aught else are apt to be intemperate in
speech and rash in action. The Reformation movement condemned the
beliefs and cults tolerated and assimilated by the Celtic Church and the
Latin Church. Nor did sculpture and architecture escape their
intemperate zeal. The rebellions harried and harassed the people, while
the evictions impoverished, dispirited, and scattered them over the
world. Ignorant school teaching and clerical narrowness have been
painfully detrimental to the expressive language, wholesome literature,
manly sports, and interesting amusements of the Highland people.”

Mr. Carmichael has classified the contents of his extensive gleaning
under the following five sub-titles: Invocations, Seasons, Labour,
Incantations, Miscellaneous, and in the general introduction explains
his mode of gathering the materials.

The glimpses of Highland life he gives in connection with his visits and
colloquies with the people are highly interesting.

“Whatever be the value of this work,” he says, “it is genuine folk-lore,
taken down from the lips of men and women, no part being copied from
books. It is the product of far-away thinking, come down on the long
stream of time. Who the thinkers and whence the stream, who can tell?
Some of the hymns may have been composed within the cloistered cells of
Deny and Iona, and some of the incantations among the cromlechs of
Stonehenge and the standing stones of Callarnis. These poems were
composed by the learned, but they have not come down through the
learned, but through the unlearned—not through the lettered few, but
through the unlettered many, through the crofters and cottars, the
herdsmen and shepherds of the Highlands and Islands.”

“The poems were generally intoned in a low, recitative manner, rising
and falling in slow modulated cadences, charming to hear but difficult
to follow. The music of the hymns had a distinct individuality, in some
respects resembling and in many respects differing from the old
Gregorian chants of the Church. I greatly regret that I was not able to
record this peculiar and beautiful music, probably the music of the old
Celtic Church.”

Following the advice and example of his acquaintance, J. F. Campbell of
Islay, whom he knew for a quarter of a century, Mr. Carmichael gives the
words and names of the reciters. But, unlike Campbell and Mackenzie and
Sinclair, he gives an English rendering of the original in every
instance. Thus, while to the vast majority of this nation _their_
felicitous poems are locked up in the Gaelic, _his_ are available to
all, in chaste and beautiful language, with charming letterpress,
embellished by old Celtic letters, artistically copied by his wife from
the ancient MSS. in Edinburgh and elsewhere.

Speaking of the original, he maintains that, although in decay, the
poems are in verse of a high order, with metre, rhythm, assonance,
alliteration, and every quality to please the ear and to instruct the
mind. Simple dignity, charming grace, passionate devotion, characterise
most of these pieces. Again and again he laid down his self-imposed
task, feeling unable to render the intense power and supreme beauty of
the original Gaelic into adequate English; but he persevered, thus
placing a stone as it were upon the cairn of those who composed and of
those who transmitted the work.

And now, a few characteristic specimens from the book may fitly close
this study. The first is an incantation beginning:—

The wicked who would do me harm,
May he take the (throat) disease
Globularly, spirally, circularly,
Fluxy, pellety, horny-grim, etc.

But scarcely any English can convey the vengeance of the vernacular.
Even the sounds are terrifying:—

Ulc a dhean mo lochd,
Gu’n gabh e’n galar gluc gloc,
Guirneanach, goirneanach, guairneach,
Gaornanach, garnanach, gruam.

Next, we quote two verses from “The Invocation of the Graces,”
interesting as containing beautiful names from the ancient sagas:—

A shade art thou in the heat,
A shelter art thou in the cold,
Eyes art thou to the blind,
A staff art thou to the pilgrim,
An island art thou at sea,
A fortress art thou on land,
A well art thou in the desert,
Health art thou to the ailing.

Thine is the skill of the Fairy Woman,
Thine is the virtue of Bride the calm,
Thine is the faith of Mary the mild,
Thine is the tact of the woman of Greece,
Thine is the beauty of Eimer the lovely,
Thine is the tenderness of Darthula delightful,
Thine is the courage of Meve the strong,
Thine is the charm of Buine-bheul.

Now follows an example of a charm for sprain:—

Christ went out
In the morning early,
He found the legs of the horses
In fragments soft;
He put marrow to marrow,
He put pith to pith,
He put bone to bone,
He put membrane to membrane,
He put tendon to tendon,
He put blood to blood,
He put tallow to tallow,
He put flesh to flesh,
He put fat to fat,
He put skin to skin,
He put hair to hair,
He put warm to warm,
He put cool to cool.
As the King of power healed that
It is in his nature to heal this,
If it be in his own will to do it.
Through the bosom of the Being of life
And of the Three of the Trinity.

And, finally, we may take this as a good specimen of an invocation:—

Bless, O Chief of generous Chiefs,
Myself and everything anear me,
Bless me in all my actions,
Make Thou me safe for ever.
Make Thou me safe for ever.

From every brownie and ban-shee,
From every evil wish and sorrow,
From every nymph and water-wraith,
From every fairy mouse and grass-mouse,
From every fairy mouse and grass-mouse.

From every troll among the hills,
From every siren hard pressing me,
From every ghoul within the glens,
Oh! save me till the end of my day.
Oh! save me till the end of my day.

In recent years, Dr. George Henderson has done useful work in
transliterating several poems from the Fernaig MS., which, along with
many songs collected in the West Highlands, he has published in his
_Leabhar nan Gleann_. And to Henry Whyte and Malcolm Macfarlane the Gael
is indebted for an extensive gleaning in the field of vocal music. In
addition to numerous Gaelic melodies, they have rescued a variety of
excellent songs from impending oblivion and enhanced their value,
especially to those who are unacquainted with the original, by giving
literal renderings in English, which serve to exhibit their simple
beauty.

Nor have the three sister nationalities been behind in work of this
kind. The first important Irish gleaning has been Miss Brooke’s
_Reliques of Irish Poetry_, consisting of heroic poems, odes, elegies,
and songs, which she published in the original with English translations
and notes, Dublin, 1789. In more recent times we have the interesting
collections in English of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, Dr. Hyde, Dr.
Sigerson, Yeats, and others, besides the _Treasury of Irish Poetry_
lately edited by Stopford A. Brooke, and T. W. Rolleston. The latter
deals simply with the nineteenth century, but Dr. Sigerson’s _Bards of
the Gael and Gall_ is an Anthology of nearly a hundred and fifty poems
metrically translated, “covering the ground from the earliest unrhymed
chant ascribed to the first invading Milesian down to the peasant days
of the eighteenth century.”

Wales is well represented by the extensive Myvyrian Archaiology of Owen
Jones, 1801–1807, which capable Welshmen, such as Aneurin Owen, Thomas
Price, William Rees, John Jones and others, set themselves to finish;
while M. de la Villemarqué has done for Brittany, in his now famous
books, perhaps all the ancient gleaning it was possible to do at a
period so late as the middle of last century.

CHAPTER XIX
THE MASTER SCHOLARS OF CELTIC LITERATURE

The bards and seanachies—Six men of outstanding literary
eminence—The earliest pioneer of the modern philological
movement—Representatives of the older scholarship—Those
of the new—The brilliant Zeuss—Foreign periodicals
dealing with Celtic—Foremost scholars of the various
nations—Italian—German—French—Danish—Scandinavian—American—British,
including English, Irish, Welsh, Manx, and Scottish—Many literary
problems solved—The promise of future harvests.

In the company of the scholars we still breathe the atmosphere of the
past. It is they who have resurrected the MSS. These monuments of
by-gone days are the quarries among which they work. As Burns “eyed with
joy the general mirth,” so do they scrutinise with eager glance the
much-prized vellum.

Only a scholar can know the pleasure it gives to hap upon a long-lost
relic of literature, to turn over its leaves, steeping the book in
water, if need be, to make its pages come asunder, and even using acid
to help the time-worn ancient one to deliver up its secret.

“Why bother with such defunct lore?” asks the man in the crowd, “the
past is over and gone. It is long since superseded.” Therein lies the
difference between him and the scholar. The scholar thinks it worth
while. Nay, he will sacrifice much—we shall repeatedly see—to search out
the contribution of the past, and determine its meaning. As Plato,
Aristotle, and the master-minds of ancient Greece wrote their books and
carried on their studies, knowing full well that these would be read and
assimilated by very few in their own day, there being no
printing-presses as now, and only a limited education; so many of the
Celtic scholars of our own time labour on in solitude, conscious also
that even with the printing-press the circle of their readers must be
small, yet knowing they are doing a work which in its own way is ever
widening the horizons of knowledge and enriching the common heritage of
mankind.

In the bards and seanachies, there have not been lacking from remote
times men who have interested themselves in the lore and learning of
their race; but we need to come down to more recent times to encounter
the class of writers we have specially in view in this study.

Happily, they are not confined to any one age or any one country. Yet
Ireland, as we might expect from its place in the Celtic group, figures
early and largely in the domain of Gaelic scholarship.

During the first half of the seventeenth century—to go no farther
back—it produced six men of outstanding literary eminence, who
represented a national scholarship in that country, the lustre of which
has never since been surpassed. These were Geoffrey Keating, Duald Mac
Firbis, and the Four Masters.

Keating, though born in Ireland, was of Norman extraction, and educated
abroad for the office of priest. On his return from Spain, a
full-fledged Doctor of Divinity, he was appointed to a church and
attracted great crowds as a preacher, till an incident, the most trivial
and fortuitous in its origin, drove him from the pulpit into literature.
The incident is worth recording as a determining factor in his
illustrious career. It seems that in his audience one day a young lady,
who was reputed to have questionable relations with a high dignitary of
the Province, happened to appear, curious, like all the rest, to hear
the great preacher. Keating, as fate would have it, was discoursing on
this occasion on a theme not likely to commend itself to the dissolute
girl; still less, since all eyes pointed the moral in her direction.

She had her revenge, for forthwith soldiers were dispatched by her
lordly patron to arrest the offending priest and make him prisoner. But
the latter hearing of this in time, made good his escape to the famous
glen of Aberlow, where he lived for years a hidden life. It was while
thus cashiered and ostracised that he conceived the idea of writing the
history of Ireland, from the earliest times to the Norman conquest,
afterwards travelling through the country in disguise, with Aberlow as
base, to consult the ancient MSS., which were then in the families of
the hereditary brehons and in the proximity of the old monasteries. Many
documents which existed in 1630, and which he perused, have since
disappeared. And his work is thus of great value, as he rewrote and
redacted their contents in his own words, like another Herodotus.

Duald Mac Firbis, his contemporary, was equally indefatigable in
ransacking the past for the benefit of the future. His _magnum opus_ is
_The Book of Genealogies_. O’Curry thinks it perhaps the greatest
national genealogical compilation in the world. In addition, he compiled
the _Chronicon Scotorum_, various glossaries, and, according to himself,
a dictionary of the Brehon laws.

Almost at the same time that Keating was writing his history in the
south of Ireland, the Four Masters were busy with theirs in the north.
Michael O’Clery, born at Donegal about 1580, was author of the Leabhar
Gabhala, or Book of Invasions, and other important works, but in
compiling the famous Annals, the greatest of all, he had the assistance
of other three eminent scholars, known as Farfasa O’Mulchonry, Peregrine
O’Clery, and Peregrine O’Duigenan. Hence the name “Four Masters,” given
by John Colgan of Louvain, himself worthy to rank after them as the
author of the _Trias Thaumaturga_, a book which owes its origin to the
vast collection of material amassed by Michael O’Clery throughout his
busy life. The latter work consists of two enormous Latin quartos, the
first containing the lives of Patrick, Brigit, and Columba; the second,
those of a number of other distinguished Irish saints.

From the middle of the seventeenth century we are carried forward to the
beginning of the eighteenth. And the next great name that illuminates
the pages of Celtic scholarship is that of a Welshman, Edward Lhuyd. A
peculiar interest and distinction attach to the work of this man,
inasmuch as he was the earliest pioneer of the modern philological
movement, and almost stumbled on the discoveries of Grimm and Rask,
which were only reached upwards of a century after his time.

An Oxford don, of Jesus College, he clearly saw the necessity of laying
a solid foundation for the scientific study of his own and kindred
languages, and, following up his ideal, he set about publishing
specimens of the literature and preparing vocabularies of the various
dialects. In pursuit of this laudable object he visited Ireland and
Scotland, and when his great work, the _Archæologica Britannica_, began
to appear about 1703, enthusiastic Celts from far and near sent him
congratulatory odes, some of which he afterwards printed. These poems
were either in Latin or in the mother tongue of their contributors.
Among the specimens sent from the Scottish Highlands, one, composed by
the Rev. John Maclean of Kilninian, Mull, has been justly described by
Professor Mackinnon as a “really admirable composition.”

Great praise and thanks, O noble Lhuyd, be thine,
True learned patriot of the Cambrian line!
Thou hast awaked the Celtic from the tomb,
That our past life her records might illume.
Engraved in every heart in lettered gold
Thy name remains; thy silent words unfold
To future ages what our sires had seen,
While others say, “A Gaelic race hath been.”

Such is one verse of the ode, as rendered in English by Dr. Nigel
Macneill.

Completed and printed at Oxford in 1707, the _Archæologica Britannica_
was, according to the title page, “delivered to the subscribers at 9s.
6d., being the remainder of their payment, and to others at 16s.”

As a scientific linguist, the reputation of its brilliant author was at
once established. His calibre may be inferred from the following
pregnant note, which he appended to an edition of Kirke’s Gaelic
Vocabulary in 1702. The note is in Latin to this effect:—

Of these 360 Gaelic words, 160 agree, in sound and sense, with the
British (Welsh) language. The letter _p_ in Welsh equates with the
letter _c_ in Gaelic, _e.g._, pren, crann (tree); plant, clann; pen,
ceann; pedwar, ceithir; pymp, cuig; pwy, cia; pasc, casg. _Gw_ of
Welsh equates with Gaelic _f_, _e.g._, gwyn, fionn; gwin, fion; gwr,
fear; gwair, feur; gwirion, firinneach. The Welsh _h_ corresponds with
the Gaelic _s_, _e.g._, hen, sean; helig, seileach; heboc, seabhag;
hil, siol; halen, salann; hyn, sin.

What was to prevent a man of such critical insight travelling towards
the interesting discovery of the position of the Celtic in the Aryan
group, or even the generalisation formulated in Grimm’s Law? Already he
was on the track, observing sound changes. He began with the Celtic
dialects, but had he lived, in all likelihood he would have carried his
equations to other languages of the Aryan group, and anticipated some at
least of the modern results. As it was, his early death occurred before
he had time to work out the idea on the wider platform; and the honour
of having laid a sure foundation for the new sciences of philology,
ethnology, and literary criticism passed a century and a half later to
the great German masters.

After Lhuyd’s time, unhappily in this country, his studies were not
followed up. On the contrary, the investigation of Celtic questions was
determined more by sentiment than by scholarship. Wrangling and
partisanship took the place of learning and scientific veracity. And so
far were the methods and results of later criticism from being
anticipated, that biassed men like Pinkerton and the Ossianic
controversialists had a loud voice in the land.

Gradually a better type of scholarship began to emerge both in Scotland
and Ireland. Not at first the representatives of the new order, but
representatives of the traditional seanachies, scholars of the long
past, who interested themselves afresh in the literature, history, and
antiquities of the race; and who began with unwearied zest to unearth
and bring to light the long lost and forgotten monuments of the past. Of
these, in Scotland, the brothers Donald and John Smith, Ewen Maclachlan,
Dr. Thomas Maclauchlan, and Dr. Archibald Clerk, were perhaps the most
prominent. As scholars they were rather uncritical, and do not rank in
the same category with the great names of later times; but they had
strong Gaelic sympathies and a large assortment of traditional
knowledge.

In Ireland, on the other hand, there were far more who occupied
themselves with the earlier periods. Of these it would be hard to rival
in patient, conscientious, and solid learning such men as O’Reilly,
Petrie, O’Donovan, O’Curry, Todd, Reeves, Hennessy, and Healy.

The first three were associated with the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, and
in that sphere found excellent scope for their Celtic studies, in
connection with the place-names of the country.

John O’Donovan was born in 1809. His father, though a small farmer, had
been descended from the celebrated O’Donovans of County Cork, and when
he died in 1817 his son John, then eight years of age and one of a
family of nine, was sent to Dublin to be educated. From the age of
seventeen he began to devote himself systematically to Celtic study, and
three years later was brought under the notice of the Survey Commission
as a youth singularly well qualified to conduct the archæological
department of their enterprise. Accordingly he entered the service in
1829, and forthwith instituted a careful investigation of the printed
books, MSS., and inscriptions bearing on topography; in due course
contributing articles to the _Dublin Penny Journal_, and laying the
first instalment of his research before the British Association in 1835.
Subsequently, Petrie and he published the full report.

In 1836 he set about preparing an Analytical Catalogue of the Irish MSS.
in Trinity College, and from 1841 was editor of the works published by
the Irish Archæological Society. Ever since he undertook the work of the
Ordnance Survey, he had in view the idea of writing a _Grammar of the
Irish Language_, and after seventeen years’ study the book appeared in
1847, and was received with enthusiasm both at home and abroad. It is
characteristic of the way in which British scholarship followed in the
rear of that on the Continent, that so well informed and interested an
exponent as O’Donovan did not know when he published his valuable
Grammar that aspiration and ellipsis had been explained in Germany eight
years before then. Thus he arrived too early to benefit much by the
study of comparative philology, though deeply interested in the science.

His masterpiece is really the edition he issued of the _Annals of the
Four Masters_ (1848–51). Of this vast effort Dr. Hyde affirms that it is
the greatest that any modern Irish scholar ever accomplished. “So long
as Irish history exists, the _Annals of the Four Masters_ will be read
in O’Donovan’s translation.”

In 1847 he was called to the Bar, but sacrificed his prospects in that
line for his Celtic studies. Later, he received the degree of LL.D. from
Trinity College, Dublin, and a Government pension of £50 a year, and was
appointed Professor of the Irish Language in Queen’s College, Belfast.
But having a large family to support on a small income, he contemplated
emigrating to America or Australia, when in 1852, most opportunely, the
Government resolved to appoint a Royal Commission to publish the ancient
Laws and Institutions of Ireland, and he and O’Curry, the two greatest
savants on that subject, were chosen for the office. Eight years’ more
arduous work undermined his constitution, and he succumbed to an attack
of rheumatic fever about the middle of November 1861.

Eugene O’Curry did not long survive him. Neither of them lived to
complete the vast undertaking, though they both wrote and translated
volumes of text, which have since been published.

The immense labours and success of O’Curry in the difficult fields of
Gaelic research are even more astonishing than those of his coadjutor,
as he had never received an academical education, and was mainly
self-taught, and had to forge his way in new and unexplored directions.
In view of this his surprise was great when offered the Professorship in
the Catholic University of Ireland, and so diffident was he that it was
with difficulty he was persuaded to accept it. His catalogues, editions
of texts and translations, and, above all, his famous books, the
_Lectures on the Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History_ (Dublin,
1861), and _On the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish_ (London,
1873), have rendered him a kind of quarry for subsequent scholars,
British and Continental.

To Dr. Todd is mainly due the inception, in 1841, of the Irish
Archæological Society for publishing original documents. He figures also
as the first editor of the _Liber Hymnorum_, Dublin, 1855, and as the
biographer of St. Patrick, while Dr. Reeves has done masterly service as
editor and biographer of Adamnan.

Of the line of scholars we have just passed in review, William Maunsell
Hennessy is probably the last great representative. The better part of
forty years he spent in close familiarity with the great tomes in
Dublin, publishing, translating, and annotating, till the list of his
works have become too numerous to mention here. Among the chief of these
are his edition of the _Chronicon Scotorum_, in the Master of the Rolls’
Series, 1858; and his translation of the _Tripartite Life of St.
Patrick_, printed by Mary Frances Cusack, 1871, and by O’Leary, New
York, 1874.

“Hennessy,” says Standish O’Grady, “was born at Castle Gregory, some
twelve miles west of Tralee, and in early life visited the United
States. Upon his return to Ireland he became a journalist, and was
appointed to the Public Record Office, Dublin, in 1868. He enjoyed the
friendship of the Cavaliere Nigra, himself an accomplished Celticist,
and was his guest at the Italian Embassy in Paris. In 1885 he was
visited by a family bereavement, almost tragic in sadness, and this
again was before long followed by a second blow, the effect upon his
sensitive and affectionate nature being such that he never fairly
rallied, but died at the age of sixty.”

Having thus glanced briefly at the representatives of the older
scholarship and their work, we shall now have occasion to retrace our
steps to consider the representatives of the new critical and
philological movement. After Edward Lhuyd’s demise no further progress
seems to have been registered in the elucidation of Celtic philology
till the time of Franz Bopp. Even as late as the first quarter of the
nineteenth century, Gaelic was regarded by scholars as a peculiar
language, unconnected with the other European tongues. It is true that
Sir William Jones, from his study of Sanskrit, had thrown out the hint
as early as 1786, that Celtic was of the same original stock with the
other languages of Europe and South-Western Asia; but when Bopp first
published his _Comparative Grammar_ Celtic was omitted. It was Dr.
Pritchard, an English ethnologist, who, in 1832, really demonstrated on
the lines laid down by Grimm and Bopp, that the Celtic language is a
member of the Indo-European group.

His book, entitled _The Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations_, from this
time drew the attention of continental scholars to the excluded and
hitherto neglected language, with the result that three important works
soon after appeared, namely, first, one _On the Affinity of the Celtic
Languages with the Sanskrit_, by Adolph Pictet (Paris, 1837); second,
the _Die Celtischen Sprachen_, or _Celtic Philology_, by Bopp (Berlin,
1839); and the _Celtica_ of Dr. Diefenbach (Stuttgart, 1839–40).

By this time Bopp had studied the Celtic dialects, and published the
above work as a supplement to his great _Comparative Grammar of the
Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Gothic, German, and Sclavonic
Languages_. Some features of Gaelic phonetics, such as initial
aspiration and ellipsis, taking the place of declension, seems hitherto
to have baffled scholars, but Bopp’s sagacity enabled him to perceive
that these are nothing else than the relics and results of the
after-action of the old case-endings, and that the rational explanation
is to be found in the final sound of the previous word, or, as we now
say, vocalic and nasal auslaut. This discovery has since been fully
confirmed by Zeuss, Ebel, and Windisch.

It was with the publication of the _Grammatica Celtica_, however, that
the great moment in the evolution of Celtic scholarship arrived. Its
gifted author, J. Caspard Zeuss, stands supreme as the real founder of
Celtic philology. He did for it what Grimm did for the Teutonic, and
Diez for the Romance. Since the appearance of his monumental work it has
been definitely settled that the Celtic languages are pure Indo-European
tongues, without any admixture of foreign elements, and thus that they
are members of the family in the same sense that Latin or Gothic is. In
addition, it has furnished the means of interpreting the most ancient
forms of the Gaelic language found in the very old MSS., which before
then had defied the efforts of translators.

Zeuss was born in Bavaria in July 1806, and after a brilliant school
career, he went to the University of Munich, as his friends intended
that he should be a clergyman. But the youth preferred linguistic
studies, for which it soon transpired that he had a unique genius; and,
college life over, he taught for seven years (from 1832–39) in the
Gymnasium of Munich. Meantime he pursued his own favourite science,
publishing in 1837 a work which is still authoritative. It dealt with
the German chiefly, but from the first his studies included the oriental
languages.

To settle in Berlin and support himself by teaching there had now become
the objective of his desire, as the Metropolis would furnish him with
exceptional opportunities, but being a Catholic, he found this
impossible. In 1839, however, he succeeded in getting a professorship in
the Lyceum in Spires, and went there from Munich. It was then he began
to study Celtic. How enormous the difficulties were for a man in his
position one can readily imagine, when it is remembered how widely
dispersed, unknown, and unintelligible the materials for the most part
were at that time. His income was small, but in order to economise his
resources, and have the wherewithal to pursue his researches, it is said
that he decided to remain a bachelor. It was his custom annually during
the vacation to visit the great libraries of London, Oxford, Würzburg,
St. Gall, and Milan for the perusal of the Gaelic documents. In the
preface to his great work, he even apologises for not having made full
use of the Milan glosses. This we know was not altogether his fault, for
he went twice there to study the MS. On the first occasion there
happened to be a convention of savants in the city, and the library was
closed, much to his disappointment. An epidemic of fever prevailed when
he returned the second time, and feeling certain sensations, he imagined
he had caught the infection, and left the place without accomplishing
the object of his visit. No doubt the overwrought student was nervous on
that occasion, and his fears may have got the better of him.

In 1847 he was appointed Professor of History in Munich. But his health
not being very robust, though he accepted the chair, he was obliged a
few months afterwards to resign. Fortunately, however, he received a
similar appointment in the Lyceum of Bamberg, which he was able to
maintain. This was his last. The _Grammatica Celtica_, which was to take
the learned world by surprise and revolutionise Celtic studies, appeared
in 1853, after thirteen years’ close and laborious work. It is written
in Latin, and is so profoundly erudite that it has the reputation, like
some other great German books, of being very difficult to grasp. The
numerous sources consulted in the production of this masterpiece of
scientific scholarship are all carefully given in the preface. Its
publication at once established his fame, but the work killed him. In
1855 he was compelled to resign his chair through broken health. That
same year Professor Siegfried of Dublin saw him, and afterward wrote the
following interesting impression which the appearance of the devoted
scholar made upon him. “I paid a visit,” he says, “to this remarkable
man in the vacation of 1855, when his health was fast sinking. He was a
tall, well-made, rather spare man, with black hair and moustache, giving
on the whole more the impression of a Sclavonian or a Greek than a
German.” He did not long survive his retirement, for in November 1856,
less than three years after the completion of his Grammar, this
illustrious linguist but modest and retiring man died in his native
village in Bavaria. To him, mindful of his outstanding influence, Dr
Whitley Stokes has not inaptly applied the Greek line—

Ζεὺς ἀρχή, Ζεὺς μέσσα, Διὸς δ’ ἐκ πάντα τέτυκαι.

After the publication of the _Grammatica Celtica_, Celtic studies
received a mighty impetus and took great strides forward. Now that the
Celtic dialects were proved to be Aryan, their further study became a
necessity in connection with the comparative grammar of the whole
family. Already in Germany there was the well-known _Zeitschrift für
vergleichende Sprachkunde_ (Journal of Comparative Philology), a journal
specially devoted to the Germanic, Greek and Latin languages; but now in
1856, the _Beiträge zur vergleichenden Sprachforschung_ (Contribution to
Comparative Etymology) was started in Berlin to deal with the Aryan,
Celtic, and Sclavonic tongues, and giving particular attention to the
Celtic. The periodical went through eight volumes, one appearing in four
parts every two years; and when it came to an end the _Zeitschrift_,
edited by Dr. Kuhn, began to receive articles on Celtic subjects, and
continues to do so still.

Among the contributors to the _Beiträge_ Dr. Hermann Ebel was the most
notable. His Celtic studies in the journal were afterwards translated
and issued in book form by the late Professor Sullivan of Dublin (1863).
Of these the most important are _On Declension_, and _The Position of
the Celtic_. Ebel taught for thirteen years in Schniedmuhl, and when the
Chair of Comparative Philology, once occupied by Bopp, in Berlin, fell
vacant, he was appointed thereto, but he did not live long to fulfil its
duties, for he died in 1875, only two years later. He left, it is said,
in MS. a dictionary of Old Gaelic. His greatest Celtic work, however, is
the second edition of Zeuss’s Grammar published in 1871, which embodies
the results of Celtic scholarship down to that year.

In 1870 another important periodical, wholly devoted to Celtic studies,
began to be published in Paris, namely the _Revue Celtique_. It was the
appearance of this quarterly that ultimately led to the appointment of
D’Arbois de Jubainville as Commissioner to the British Isles, to report
on the Gaelic MSS. found there. This paper, which still flourishes, has
for over thirty years done good service in the interests of scholarship,
there being among its contributors such eminent writers as Ebel,
Windisch, Max Müller, Count Nigra, Pictet, Jubainville, Stokes, Rhys,
Macbain, and others.

Occasional articles continue to appear in several German papers, but it
may be of moment in passing to note that a few years ago a new
periodical, entitled _Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie_, was
floated, as well as an _Archiv für Celtische Lexicographie_, which shows
the interest that is still taken by the German philologists in this
department of study.

As the great succession of Celtic scholars after Zeuss and Ebel are more
or less contemporary, it will be most convenient to deal with them in
the order of nationality. Among foreigners of the first rank are two
Italians, Count Nigra and Ascoli of Milan. Nigra was for a time his
country’s ambassador in London and Paris. It will be remembered that
Hennessy, who enjoyed his friendship, was entertained by him at the
Italian Embassy in the latter city. His most important contribution,
founded on his own researches in Italy, is the _Reliquie Celtiche_,
published in that land in 1872. Ascoli did similar good work in
connection with the Gaelic glosses in the ancient MSS. of Milan and St.
Gall, supplementing the labours in that field of Zeuss, Ebel, and Nigra.

In Germany, on the other hand, there are four still actively engaged who
rank among the masters. First comes the brilliant Professor Windisch of
Leipzig. He is best known for his _Irische Texte_ (vol. i.), published
in Leipzig, 1880; and again a second series of the same, in
collaboration with Dr. Stokes, in 1884. It is a learned work with a
vocabulary arranged alphabetically, which goes most minutely into the
structure of the words. Such pieces as Cuchulinn’s Sickbed, the Vision
of Adamnan, the Tale of the Sons of Uisneach, Hymns from the _Liber
Hymnorum_, and Irish glosses from the MSS. in the monastery of St Paul
in Carinthia are among its varied contents. Windisch is Professor of
Sanskrit in Leipzig, and besides an Irish Grammar has published other
books bearing on Celtic philology. In some instances he has corrected
Zeuss, and in various directions developed and extended his principles.
At present he is engaged on a second edition of the above-mentioned
grammar, and on an elaborate edition with translation of the Táin Bó
Chuailgné.

Next to him comes Professor Zimmer, formerly of Greifswalde, now
Professor of Celtic in Berlin University. Two books stand to his credit
in 1881, _Irish Glosses_ and _Celtic Studies_. As a writer he expresses
fresh and interesting opinions on a great variety of subjects, such as
the pagan character of Irish literature, the ancient Celtic Church, the
“Táin Bó Chuailgné,” Old Middle Irish MSS., the Irish scholars upon the
Continent, Fiacc’s _Life of St. Patrick_, and the scansion of the
classical Irish metres.

Professor Thurneysen of Jena (now of Freiburg) distinguished himself by
preparing, along with B. Gütterbock, an elaborate index to the
_Grammatica Celtica_, which renders that work more complete and
accessible. It was published in 1881.

He, along with Dr. Christian Stern, Librarian of Berlin, complete the
quartette of famous German Celticists who have been for some time in the
field, though not the list of able scholars engaged in like studies in
that country. Other significant names are Drs. Holder, Finck, Zupitza,
Foy, and Sommer.

Nor has France in recent years been lacking in eminent men of similar
research. M. de la Borderie, Gaidos, De Jubainville, Lotti, Ernault,
Dottin, and Professor Loth of Rennes have all greatly advanced the
interests of Celtic philology and literature. Of these, D’Arbois de
Jubainville is perhaps the best known, on account of his literary
mission to the British Isles on behalf of the French Minister of Public
Instruction in 1881, and his subsequent catalogue of the MSS. As
Professor at the College of France and editor of the _Revue Celtique_,
he made numerous interesting contributions in journal and book form to
the modern literature of the subject, such as _Grammatical Studies on
the Celtic Languages_ and _Epopée Celtique en Irlande_.

Ernault occupied himself more with the Breton dialect and folk-lore,
Professor Loth with the Mabinogion and Welsh metrics.

Other Continental savants of great promise remain to be mentioned. They
belong to the northern nations, which have recently begun to develop a
lively enthusiasm for Celtic studies. Denmark is well to the front with
Professor Holger Pedersen, a pupil of Zimmer’s, and Dr. Sarauw of
Copenhagen, while Scandinavia is represented by Dr. Liden of Gothenburg.
Much is expected of these men on the lines on which scholarship now
travels. Hitherto America, so much engrossed with the problems of the
present, has been slow to enter upon a research which burrows so deeply
in the past, yet within the last few years two names have emerged which
are intimately associated with this subject, namely, those of the Rev.
Professor Henebry and Professor Robinson of Harvard. The one is
concerned with the translation of O’Donnell’s _Life of St. Columcille_,
the other with the collection of certain early Irish poems and sagas.

And now, returning to our own shores after contemplating the masters
abroad, it is pleasing to find so many who have distinguished themselves
in one way or another in this field. England, Ireland, Wales, the Isle
of Man, and Scotland have each furnished enthusiastic and capable men.

Foremost of these British scholars, and apparently now of all living
Celticists, stands Dr. Whitley Stokes. Next to Zeuss he has done more
than any other single man in this particular department of study and
research. His publications are a library in themselves, and deal with
Cornish, Breton, Old Welsh, as well as Irish and Gaelic. He has made
himself master of the field in a very thorough and scientific manner.
Perhaps his best known books are the _Irische Texte_, vol. i., 2nd
series, 1884; vol. ii., published at Leipzig, 1887; _The Tripartite Life
of St. Patrick_, 1887, and his _Goidelica_ (old and early-middle-Irish
glosses, prose and verse) which appeared twenty years before the others,
and reached a second edition in 1872. In it are given accurate
translations of the Gaelic prefaces and hymns of the _Liber
Hymnorum_—that ancient anthology which dates from the eleventh century.

Dr. Stokes, who is a son of Professor William Stokes, Dublin, studied
Irish with O’Donovan, and Sanskrit and Comparative Philology with
Professor Siegfried in Dublin. After a distinguished career in the
Indian Civil Service he retired and took up residence in London. It was
in Calcutta that the foundation of his great reputation as a Celtic
scholar was laid, and it was from that city that he first issued his
_Goidelica_. The preface is striking in its brevity and simplicity:—

I have three objects in printing this book—one, to save the contents
of my transcripts of the glosses at Turin, Milan, and Berne from the
destruction which in this country anything solely entrusted to paper
MSS. must sooner or later meet with; another, to give those excellent
German philologists who, like Schleicher and Ebel, have expressed a
desire for trustworthy copies of Old Irish compositions, material on
which they may look with confidence; and, thirdly, to lay the first
stone of the cairn which I hope to raise to the memory of my beloved
friend and teacher, Siegfried.

The cairn has since been raised, and it is indeed a notable one. Besides
his books, contributions from Dr. Stokes may be found in Continental
journals, such as the _Beiträge zur vergleichenden Sprachforschung_ of
Berlin, and the _Revue Celtique_ of Paris. He is still busy in his
island home at Cowes, editing and translating texts, of which the
_Annals of Tighernach_, the _Amra Choluimcille_, _Agallamh na
Seanorach_, and the _Bruiden Da Derga_ have lately been published.

Other great names in this country are those of Professor Rhys of Oxford,
a Welshman; Professor Atkinson of Dublin, a Yorkshireman; Dr. Kuno Meyer
of Liverpool, a German; Dr. Strachan of Manchester, Professor of Greek
and Comparative Philology, a native of Keith, Banffshire; Dr. Douglas
Hyde, whose interesting book on the _Literary History of Ireland_ has
just recently appeared; Dr. Norman Moore, the poetical Dr. Sigerson, and
the Professors Gwynne, father and son. Of these Principal Rhys has
hitherto perhaps been the most prolific in dealing with the early
history and problems of Celtic Britain, while the others have interested
themselves more in the language and literature.

There are two other outstanding names very familiar to the student of
Celtic, the erudite Standish Hayes O’Grady, author of _Silva Gadelica_,
and friend of Windisch for many years, and Mr. Alfred Nutt, an authority
on folk-lore and literary antiquities. Besides Rhys, Wales has produced
such indefatigable workers as Gwenogfryn Evans and Canon Silvan Evans,
the veteran of Welsh philology; Professors Morris Jones and Lewis Jones,
of Bangor; the late Charles Ashton; Professor Anwyl of Aberystwyth, and
Mr. Brynmor Jones; while the Isle of Man has Mr. A. W. Moore and Mr.
Kermode.

In Scotland during the middle of last century Dr. Skene did much to
revive interest in the history and monuments of the past, by collecting
MS. materials, editing the _Four Ancient Books of Wales_, and publishing
his own voluminous _Celtic Scotland_.

The first scholar north of the Tweed to assimilate the results of
Zeuss’s labours and follow his lead was the late Dr. Cameron of Brodick;
very industrious, as may be seen from his contributions to the
magazines, and his posthumous work, the _Reliquiæ Celticæ_, but sadly
lacking in system and method. After him come Dr. Macbain of Inverness, a
distinguished philologist, whose Gaelic Dictionary is a valuable
contribution to Celtic etymology, and the Rev. John Kennedy; the late
Sheriff Nicholson; Professor Mackinnon, occupant of the Edinburgh Chair
of Celtic Literature, and Dr. Henderson, a former student of his, who
has since studied abroad and written various papers and books, and
edited poems or tales collected in the Highlands.

These all represent the forces of scholarship in the highways and
by-ways of Celtic literature. They are not all masters, in the technical
sense of the word; not a few of them are, as we have already seen, and
the marvel is, looking back for fifty years, the number of men of the
first rank who have appeared, in great part on the Continent but also in
our own land. It is truly a recrudescence or re-arising of the Celt.
Spent forces seem suddenly to have re-emerged and overflowed the
foremost files of time, taking science captive and using it as their
instrument. And yet people wonder and inquire and continue to ask for
evidence of a Celtic renaissance.

Many literary problems have within the last half-century been solved,
but many more remain to be unravelled—questions too, of history,
ethnology, and sociology. But so much has already been done—so much that
a century ago seemed visionary and impossible, and had not even appeared
on the horizon of dreamers, that there is the promise of future
harvests, and still unlimited scope for the masters.

Thus the progress. First the available materials had to be ascertained,
catalogued, sifted, and examined in every land. Then followed the work
of publishing and interpreting the texts which have already yielded such
interesting philological and ethnical results, and now we look for a
further synthesis in other directions from the hints and suggestions
scattered all over these published records, which will throw light on
the fascinating problems which confront the students of history,
ethnology, archæology, and of the beliefs and customs of the race in its
earlier stages—a study in keeping with the human experience, that to go
on we must often go back.

INDEX OF NAMES

Achilles, 133

Adam, 63, 83, 126, 130, 232

Adamnan, 5, 16, 42, 45, 46, 47, 50, 58–77, 83, 88, 92, 201, 209, 215,
226, 291, 292, 349, 374, 380

Aedh, 54, 105

Aedh, 91

Aedh Mac Morna, 178, 181

Aeneas, 68, 228, 306

Aengus, 48, 292

Aidan, 221

Ailbhe, 355

Ailill, 109, 160, 161, 165

Ainnle, 158

Albin, St. 306

Aldfrid, 65, 68, 201

Alexander I., 89, 94

Alexander the Great, 6, 7

Alleine, 334

Amergin, 131, 139

Amphitrionis, 8

Anderson, Dr., 95

Andlis, 8

Andrew, 91

Aneurin, 218–223, 240, 244

Anne, Queen, 270

Antestis, 8

Anwyl, Prof., 383

Aoife, 159, 165, 167

Ardan, 158

Arganté, 320

Argyll, Earl of, 126, 272, 274, 327

Aristotle, 12, 367

Armstrong, Rev. A., 343, 344

Arnold, Matthew, 2, 97, 309, 311, 321–323

Arnold, Thomas, 307

Art, 179, 186, 193, 254

Arthur, 125, 128, 227–240, 344, 250, 260, 306–308, 318–321

Ascoli, 98, 379, 380

Ashburnham, 103

Ashton, Charles, 383

Aspasia, 254

Athol, 8

Atkinson, Prof., 383

Attila, 2

Aurelius, 319

Austin, 306

Avagddu, 230

Bach, Gwion, 331

Bacon, Francis, 332

Baithene, 48, 61, 71, 83

Balan, 318

Balin, 318

Balor, 141

Bannatyne, Lord, 117, 118

Barbour, John, 309

Baxter, Richard, 328, 334, 335

Becca, 145

Bede, 5, 22, 56, 65, 77, 93, 201, 221, 306

Bede, the Pict, 85, 86, 94

Bedivere, 321

Beli, 222

Benen, 34

Benignus, St., 34

Bernard, St., 39

Bethune, Donald, 116

Björn, 213, 214

Black, William, 301, 323

Blackie, Prof., 123, 186, 268, 272, 284, 322, 323, 358

Blair, Dr., 283, 343

Blake, William, 316

Blathmac, St., 62, 201, 208

Bodhbha, Dearg, 144, 145

Bollandist Fathers, 31, 62

Bondi, 214

Bopp, Franz, 258, 375, 376, 379

Borderie, M. de la, 381

Borron, Robert, 307

Boston, Thomas, 68, 334

Boswell, 63, 316

Brachet, A., 9

Bradshaw, Henry, 79–81

Bran, 247, 248, 355

Branno, 192

Branwen, 229

Brash, 14

Breas, 138, 141

Brec, Donald, 222

Brendan, St., 75, 215, 291

Brian, 141–143

Brian Boru, 203, 246

Bricriu, 153

Bride, 365

Brigit, 292, 369

Broccán, 292, 349

Brogan, 189

Brooke, Miss, 366

Brooke, Stopford, 310, 324, 366

Brown, Dorothy, 276

Brown, John, 335

Browning, Robert, 107

Bruce, Robert the, 86, 87

Bruce, Robert, 300

Brude, 46, 72

Brutus, 306

Buchan, Earls of, 87

Buchanan, Dugald, 250, 329, 330, 335, 336

Buchanan, Robert, 301, 323

Bugge, Dr. Alex., 210

Bugge, Prof. Sophus, 210

Buinne Borb, 151

Bunyan, 334, 343

Burnet, Bishop, 130

Burns, Robert, 257, 282, 299, 310, 367

Cadwaladr, 228

Cædmon, 15, 41, 57, 79, 304

Cael, 189–191

Cæsair, Lady, 137

Cæsar, 3, 5, 6, 9, 12, 13, 99

Cailatin, 163, 169

Cailta, 192

Cainnech, 51, 91

Cairbre, 179, 180, 185, 189

Calpornius, 25

Calvin, John, 328

Cameron, Dr., 147, 303, 338, 351, 384

Cameron, Margaret, 335

Camin, St., 104

Campbell, A., 335

Campbell, Alex., 352

Campbell, Colin, 263

Campbell, D., 274

Campbell, Duncan, 335

Campbell, J. F., 146, 147, 176, 186, 338, 353, 354, 357, 363

Campbell, Knight of Glenorchy, 126

Campbell of Glenlyon, 335

Canmore, Malcolm, 89, 92

Caoilte, 179, 185, 188, 189, 355

Caredig, 32

Caridwen, 230, 231

Carlyle, Thomas, 245, 332

Carmichael, A., 147, 148, 300, 338, 361, 362, 363

Carsewell, Bishop, 127, 264, 299, 300, 327, 328, 350

Cassius, Dion, 12

Catald, St., 208

Cathal, 91, 126

Cathbad, 148–151

Cathula, 254

Caxton, William, 308, 327

Cedric, 307

Celtchar, 154

Cennfaelad, 107, 291

Ceolfrid, 66

Ceretic, 32

Chaillu, Paul B. du, 200

Charlemagne, 59, 199, 208

Charles I., 130, 270, 351

Charles II., 270, 274

Charlie, Prince, 250, 251, 256

Chaucer, 309, 310, 332, 335

Church, Dean, 303

Cian, 141, 142, 214

Ciaran, St., 108, 154

Cicero, 12

Clanranald, 129, 130, 276, 283

Clark, John, 176, 250, 256

Cleopatra, 254

Clerk, Dr. A., 303, 338, 372

Cliodhna, 188

Clydno, 234

Cocholyn, 226

Colan, St., 225

Colban, 92

Colgan, 23, 50, 62, 112, 369

Collin, 313

Colmán, 292, 349

Columba St. (Columcille), 15–17, 28, 39–72, 76, 77, 85–88, 94, 95, 104,
112, 134, 154, 201, 206, 209, 220, 225, 226, 240, 244, 250, 288–294,
299, 301 349, 369, 381

Columbanus, St., 41, 207

Comgall, 91

Comyns, 86, 87

Conaill, Cinal, 49

Conall, 42

Conall Cearnach, 149, 153–155, 170, 355

Conan Maol, 179

Conchobar, 121, 148–156, 160, 161, 169

Conlaoch, 153, 159, 355

Conn, 108, 125, 179, 180, 254, 348

Cormac, Abbot of Turiff, 91

Cormac, 51, 140, 291, 292, 341

Cormac Mac Art, 179–181, 186, 192–194, 355

Coroticus, 15, 30, 32, 33

Corroi, 226

Cowper, 310, 316

Crabbe, 316

Craigie, Dr., 210

Crede, 189, 190

Creirwy, 230

Cuchulinn, 149, 153–174, 178, 226, 354, 355, 380

Culand, 155, 156

Cumhail, 178, 179, 181, 185

Cummene, 61, 63, 74, 76, 291

Curigh, 154, 170, 226

Currie, Archibald, 340

Cwlum, 225

Cyclops, 12

Dagda, 138

Daire, 28

Dante, 68, 215

Daol, 214, 357

Daré, 161

Dargo, 254

Darmesteter, 53, 288

Darwin, Charles, 2

David I., 84, 89, 94

David, 91, 143, 167, 176, 328

Davies, 225, 227

Dayry, 226

Dechtine, 155

Deirdre, 146, 148–153, 354

Demni, 181, 182

Devonshire, Duke of, 109

Dewar, Dr., 336, 344

Diarmad, King, 44, 45, 50, 105, 106

Diarmad O’Duibhne, 179, 193–196, 254, 355, 356

Dickens, Charles, 332

Dido, 312

Diefenbach, Dr., 375

Diez, 376

Dima, 51

Diodorus, 12, 99

Dionysius, 12

Doddridge, 334, 343

Domangart, 91

Domnall, 91

Donall, Albanach, 158

Donlevy, 339

Donn, Rob., 250, 336–338

Donnatt, St., 208

Dorbene, 60, 61

Dottin, Georges, 148, 381

Dowden, Dr., 34, 52, 303

Drostan, 85, 86, 94

Drust, 86

Dubthach, 37, 240, 244

Duffy, Sir Charles Gavan, 324, 366

Duhona, 254

Dunbar, 310

Dungall, 208

Duvan, Louis, 173

Dyer, 334

Ebel, Dr. Herdmann, 98, 258, 376–382

Edward I., 225, 313

Edward IV., 309

Edwards, J., 334

Eimer, 153, 157, 160, 169–172, 355, 365

Eite, 92

Eithinyn, 222

Eithne, 143

Elaine, 319

Elphin, 232

Emerson, 1

Enda, St., 29

Enid, 237, 318

Eogan, 151

Eoin o Albain, 116

Ephorus, 12

Erbin, 230

Ercoill, 8

Ernault, 381

Etarre, 319

Ete, 92

Ethelfrid, 221

Ethne, 29

Eua, 92

Eva, 144, 145

Evans, 314, 383

Eve, 233

Evir-Alin, 192

Evrawc, 230

Ewen, 247, 248

Fairhair, Harold, 202, 204, 212

Faraday, Miss, 210

Farsaid, Fenius, 107, 112, 114, 338

Fedelm, 29

Feidhlim, 148

Fercertné 107

Ferdomnach, 23

Fergus Finne-bheoil, 179, 185, 188

Ferguson, Sir James, 148

Ferry, Jules, 99

Festime, 8

Fferyllt, 230

Fiacc, 23, 25, 26, 37–39, 240, 292, 349

Finan, 253, 254

Finck, Dr., 381

Finn Eges, 181, 182

Finnachta, 64, 65, 67

Finnamhair, 162, 163, 167

Finnian, St., 44, 48, 290

Finntan, 137

Fionn (Finn), 123, 124, 174–196, 283, 295, 296, 299, 354, 355

Flann, 140, 246

Fletcher, 148, 352

Forbes, 340

Forgaill, Dallan, 16, 55, 57, 61, 108, 240, 291, 348, 349

Forgaill of Lusk, 157, 158

Forli, Jacques de, 120

Foy, Dr., 381

Francis, St., 31, 39

Fraoch, 354

Gadelus, 138

Gaidos, 381

Gaimar, 228

Gairloch, Laird of, 280

Galates, 8, 12

Galgacus, 6

Gall, St., 41, 208

Garbh, 354, 355

Garnat, 86

Gartnait, 91

Gaul, 178, 181, 254, 295, 355

Gavaelvawr, 234

Gawaine, Sir, 308

Geoffrey of Monmouth, 228, 247, 306, 307

George I., 80

George II., 351

Geraint, 230, 318

Germanus, 24, 27

Geryon, 8

Gibbon, 382

Gildas, 220, 307

Gillemichel, 92

Gillies, H. C., 340

Gillies, John, 335, 352

Glengarry, 271, 272

Glewlwyd, 234

Gloucester, Robert of, 306

Glûngel, 107

Gobhan, 106

Goldsmith, 7

Gomer, 8

Goraidh, 211

Gordon, George Ross, 336

Gordon, Patrick, 87

Gordon, William, 336

Gordonus, 118

Grainne, 193, 355

Grant, 352

Grant, Mrs., 250, 256, 357

Grant, Peter, 336, 338

Graves, Dr., 14

Gray, 313–315

Gray, Florence, 339

Gregais, 8

Griffith, Prince, 257

Grimm, 370, 371, 375, 376

Gruffydd ap Arthur, 228

Gruffydd ap Kynan, 246, 247

Gudelig, 230

Guesclin du, 247

Guest, Lady Charlotte, 219, 229, 230, 237

Guinevere, 237, 319, 320

Guledig, 227

Gurban, 106

Gwenc’hlan, 240

Gwenhwyvar, 234–236

Gwreang, 231

Gwrhyr, 233

Gwyddno Garanhir, 231, 232

Gwydion, 312

Gwynne, Prof., 383

Hael, Rhydderch, 225

Hailes, Lord, 118

Halliday, William, 339

Hamlet, 81

Hardiman, 251

Healy, Dr., 50, 372

Hecatæus, 2, 11

Helen of Troy, 152

Hên Llywarch, 218, 221, 223, 240, 244

Henderson, Dr. George, 303, 351, 366, 384

Henebry, Prof., 381

Hengest, 221

Hennessy, W. M., 372, 374, 379

Henry VIII., 220

Herbert, 227

Hercules, 8

Herodotus, 2, 11, 19, 287

Hoel, 314

Holder, Dr., 381

Homer, 176, 332, 347

Horace, 133

Horatio, 81

Howeldda, 220

Hring, 213

Hull, Eleanor, 154, 293, 324

Huxley, 2, 6

Hyde, Dr. Douglas, 32, 46, 50, 57, 113, 148, 175, 186, 213, 246, 251,
264, 266, 309, 324, 339, 366, 373, 383

Irvine, 118, 148, 352

Isabella, Countess of Argyll, 126

Iseult, 237

Jacobs, Joseph, 147

Jafed, 8

James II., 49, 270, 279

James, Prof., 71

Jauïoz, 247

Jerome, St., 44, 49, 82, 290

Jerram, C. S., 253

Jocelin, 23

John, St., 68, 80, 83, 84

Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 123, 127, 267, 316, 343, 351

Jonathan, 167

Jones, Brynmor, 383

Jones, Edmund, 324

Jones, John, 218, 366

Jones, Prof. Lewis, 383

Jones, Prof. Morris, 383

Jones, Owen, 218, 366

Jones, Sir William, 18, 375

Joyce, Dr., 140, 144, 148

Jubainville, H. d’Arbois de, 99, 103, 108, 144, 147, 148, 173, 379, 381

Judas, 215

Kaer-Is, 240

Kai, 234, 255

Keating, Geoffrey, 101, 147, 183, 203, 249, 368, 369

Keats, 315

Keith, Sir Robert de, 87

Keller, Dr., 59, 62, 63

Kemoc, St., 146

Kempis, Thomas à, 332

Kennedy, 352

Kennedy, Angus, 336

Kennedy, Duncan, 335

Kennedy, Rev. John, 384

Kermode, 383

Kian, 221

Kilhwch, 230, 233

Kilian, St., 208

Kirke, John, 328, 341, 371

Kirke, Rev. Robert, 333

Knox, John, 56, 290, 299, 327, 335

Kuhn, Dr., 378

Kynan, 246, 247

Kyner, 234, 235

Kynon, 234

Laeg, 165–167

Laing, Malcolm, 221

Lamb, Charles, 260

Lamh-fhad, 355

Landseer, 358

Lang, Andrew, 137, 324

Laoghaire, King, 28, 29, 34, 171, 244

Larguen, 145, 146

Launcelot, Sir, 307, 319

Lawless, Emily, 324

Layamon, 228, 306–308, 320

Lebarchan, 149

Lekprevik, Roibeart, 327

Leodogran, 319

Leot, 91

Lewy, 170

Lhuyd, Edward, 4, 217, 328, 370, 371, 375

Liden, Dr., 381

Lir, 144–146, 213

Lismore, Dean of, 89, 91, 121–123, 127, 129, 175, 186, 187, 191, 262,
299, 300, 357

Livy, 12

Llevelys, 230

Llewellyn, 314

Llud, 230

Llyr, 229

Lonelich, Henry, 308

Longarad, 48

Lorma, 254

Loth, Prof., 229, 381

Lotti, 381

Lovat, 281

Lovenath, 306

Lugaid, 170, 172

Lugh, 138, 141–143, 155

Luke, St., 80, 83, 84

Lynette, 318

Mabon, 233

Macalpine, Neil, 340, 344, 356

Macaulay, Lord, 281, 321

Macaulay, Zachary, 281

Macbain, Dr. Alex., 4, 86, 95, 175, 344, 351, 379, 384

Macbean, L., 340

Macbeth, 313

Macbrian, 356

Maccallum, 352

Maccallum, A., 336

Maccallum, Rev. Duncan, 176, 195, 256, 303

Maccallum, J., 336

Maccarthenn, 36

Maccodrum, John, 250, 282–284

Maccolla, Alasdair, 276

Mac Crimmon, 280

M‘Cuirtin, Hugh, 339

Mac Cumachteni, 23

Mac Daman, Ferdia, 158, 163–168, 172

Macdonald, Alasdair, 130, 272

Macdonald, Alexander, 250, 282, 284, 328, 329, 335, 336, 341

Macdonald, Sir Alexander, 271, 272, 275

Macdonald, Angus, 281

Macdonald, Archibald, 281

Macdonald, Archibald (An Ciaran Mabach), 271, 275

Macdonald, Cicely, 276

Macdonald, Donald, 251, 262

Macdonald, Dr., 303, 338

Macdonald, Dr. George, 323

Macdonald, Sir James, 272, 282, 283

Macdonald, John (Iain Dubh), 276, 336

Macdonald, John (Iain Lom), 270, 275

Macdonald of Muck, 281

Macdonald, Ronald, 335, 352

Macdougall, Allan, 250, 335

Macdougall, Phelim, 126

Macdurnain, 103, 104, 290

Maceachan, Rev. Ewen, 344

Macfadyen, 335

Macfarlane, Rev. Alex., 328, 333, 334

Macfarlane, Donald, 344

Macfarlane, Malcolm, 340, 366

Macfarlane, P., 336, 343, 344

Macfarlane, Robert, 343

Mac Firbis, Duald, 65, 112, 249, 368, 369

Macgillivray, Dr., 340

Mac Gormann, Finn, 349

Macgregor, Duncan, 121, 122

Macgregor, Gregor, 263, 264

Macgregor, James, 251, 336

Macgregor, Sir James, 121, 122

Macgregor, John, 336

Mac-Ille Chalum, 265

Macintosh, D., 336

Macintyre, Duncan Ban, 250, 329, 330, 335, 337, 358

Mackay, A., 336

Mackay, John, 280, 281

Mackellar, David, 215, 250, 328, 335

Mackellar, Mary, 338

Mackenzie, Alexander, 267

Mackenzie, Sir George, 352

Mackenzie, Henry, 117

Mackenzie, High Chief of Kintail, 277

Mackenzie, John, 121

Mackenzie, John, 250, 282, 284, 328, 329, 335, 336, 338, 356, 357, 360,
361, 363

Mackenzie, Kenneth, 250, 335

Mackenzie, William, 281

Mackinnon, Alexander, 251

Mackinnon, Prof. D., 56, 105, 127, 144, 351, 384

Mackinnon, Lachlan, 279

Maclachlan, Ewen, 251, 372

Maclachlan, I., 336

Maclachlan, Major, 118

Maclaren, Ian, 324

Maclauchlan, Dr. T., 116, 303, 328, 372

Maclean, Rev. Donald, 325

Maclean, Hector, 278

Maclean, John, 281, 336

Maclean, Rev. John, 370

Maclean, Sir Lachlan, 278

Maclean, Malcolm, 281

Macleod, Alexander, 267

Macleod, Donald, 251, 336

Macleod, Fiona, 324

Macleod, Hector, 250, 281

Macleod, John Breac, 279

Macleod, Mary, 249, 265–270, 276, 284

Macleod, Neil, 338

Macleod, Dr. Norman, 303, 338, 344, 346

Macleod, Sir Norman, 132, 267, 269

Macneill, Dr. Nigel, 196, 255, 303, 338, 345, 346, 370

Macnicol, 303, 352

Macpherson, Alex., 335

Macpherson, D. C., 340

Macpherson, James, 103, 117, 121, 123, 129, 148, 176, 214, 217, 240,
250–256, 283, 298, 301, 305, 314–316, 318, 331, 351–355

Macpherson, Lachlan, 250

Macphun, W. R., 345

Macrae, Duncan, 91, 127–129, 215, 275, 350

Macrae, John, 128

Macritchie, 175

Mac Roich, Fergus, 108, 149–154, 301

Mac Roth, Fergus, 109, 161–164

Macsen Gudelig, 230

Macvurich, Nial, 129–132, 276, 277

Macvurichs, 119, 126, 130, 351

Madden, Sir Frederick, 306, 308

Maelbrigte, 104

Maelcolum, 91

Mælgron, 232

Mael-isu, 292, 349

Maelmuiri, 108, 299, 301, 348, 349

Magnus, 211

Malcolm, 339

Malcolm, Dr., 341

Maledoun, 91

Malory, Sir Thomas, 308, 309, 316, 318

Malvina, 315

Manawyddan, 229

Manus, 211, 254, 355

Map, Walter, 307

Mar, Earl of, 87

Marcellinus, 12

Marcellus, 81

Margaret, Queen, 92–94

Mark, St., 80, 84

Mary, Queen, 270

Mason, W. Monck, 65

Matadin, 91

Math, 229, 312

Matheson, Aosdan, 276

Matheson, D., 336

Mathonwy, 229

Matthew, St., 79, 84

Menteith, Earl of, 87

Menzies of Rannoch, 263

Merlin, 307, 319, 320

Mesgedra, 121

Meve, Queen, 110, 151, 160–169, 310, 365

Meyer, Dr. Kuno, 120, 173, 383

Milé, 130, 138

Mitchell, Anthony, 52

Mitonis, 8

Mocumin Lugne, 73, 74

Molaise, St., 45

Molloy, 339

Mone, 105

Montalembert, 88

Montrose, 129, 130, 271, 272

Moore, A. W., 383

Moore, Bishop, 80

Moore, Dr. Norman, 383

Moore, Thomas, 316

Morda, 231

Morley, 249

Morna, 178–181

Morni, 254

Morrigan, 163

Morris, Dr., 308

Morrison, 333

Morrison, J., 336

Morrison, Roderick, 279, 280

Mortimer, 314

Morvran, 230

Moses, 107, 232

Muireach, Albanach, 119, 126, 130, 276, 351

Muirne, 181

Munro, James, 274, 336, 340

Munro, Neil, 275, 324

Müller, Max, 136, 379

Mura, St., 61

Muridach, 91

Myrddin, 221, 224–226, 240, 247

Naitan, 56

Nann, Lord, 240, 242

Naois, 149, 150, 158

Napier, Mark, 130, 272

Nectan, 91

Neil, Oig, 116

Neilson, Dr. William, 339

Nennius, 220, 307

Nial, 34, 107, 112, 171

Nicholson, 328

Nicolson, 338, 384

Nigra, Count, 56, 57, 98, 309, 374, 379, 380

Ninine, 38, 292, 349

Noah, 8, 137

Noe, 8

Nomenöe, 247

Norris, Edwin, 249

Nuada, 140

Nutt, Alfred, 144, 175, 177, 383

O’Beirne, Crowe, 173

O’Bryan, Dr. Paul, 339

O’Clery, Michael, 50, 112, 135, 341, 369

O’Clery, Peregrine, 369

O’Connor, 111

O’Curry, 97, 98, 102, 108, 110, 130, 140, 144, 147, 160, 173, 175, 176,
185, 186, 193, 258, 369, 372, 373

O’Daly, 126, 251

O’Donnell’s, 381

O’Donnells, 49

O’Donovan, 97, 113, 176, 258, 339, 372, 373, 374, 382

O’Duffy, 140

O’Duigenan, 369

O’Flaherty, 179

O’Flanagan, 147, 173

Ogilvy, Mrs. D., 271

O’Grady, S. H., 173, 374, 383

Olwen, 230, 233, 310

O’Mulchonry, 369

O’Reilly, 4, 372

Orran, 254

Oscar, 179, 185, 193, 295, 296, 356

Ossian, 29, 122, 123, 129, 175–194, 214, 222, 244, 253, 254, 293–302,
314, 315, 323, 336, 343, 347, 355, 357

Oswy, 221

Owain, 223, 234

Owen, Aneurin, 218, 366

Palgrave, Sir Francis, 200

Palladius, 22, 24

Patrick, St., 15–17, 22–43, 53, 57, 68, 78, 112, 123, 134, 145, 171,
172, 187, 189, 191, 240, 244, 288, 291–302, 349, 355, 369, 374, 382

Pattison, 195, 253, 263, 268, 274

Paul, St., 8, 31, 76

Pedersen, Prof., 381

Pelleas, 319

Pellinore, King, 308

Penda, 222

Pendragon, Uther, 306

Pennant, 316

Pentreath, Dolly, 249

Peredur, 147, 230, 234

Petrie, 372

Phillips, Sir Thomas, 219

Pictet, Adolph, 375, 379

Pinkerton, 78, 221

Plato, 12, 367

Pliny, 12

Polybius, 12

Ponsinet, Louis, 148

Posidonius, 12

Potitus, 25

Powell, Mrs., 219

Price, Sir John, 218

Price, Thomas, 218, 366

Pritchard, Dr., 375

Prosper, 22

Ptolemy, 7, 12

Pwyll, 229

Pytheas, 12

Quixote, Don, 355

Ragnhilda, 211

Rao’all, 211

Raonailt, 211

Raonall, 211

Rask, 370

Reay, Lord, 280

Rees, William, 218, 366

Reeves, Dr., 50, 60, 63, 67, 76, 77, 105, 303, 372, 374

Reid, D., 340

Reid, John, 325–331, 338

Renan, 97, 227, 230, 233, 237, 244, 289, 322

Rheged, Urien, 223

Rhys, Principal, 4, 175, 225, 229, 230, 322, 379, 383

Rhys ap Tewdwr, 246

Rhonabwy, 230

Ripley, Dr. W. Z., 11

Robertson, Alex., 343

Robinson, Prof., 381

Roc, 355

Rognwald, 211

Rolleston, T. W., 148, 324, 366

Ronald of Keppoch, 276

Ronan, 63

Ronan, 179, 188

Ronnat, 63, 67

Ross, Rev. Thomas, 333, 334

Ross, William, 250

Ruadh, Alasdair, 267

Rustum, 159

Sage, 303, 352

Samson, 91

Sanctain, 292, 349

Sangale, Monachi, 199

Sarauw, Dr., 381

Scathach, Lady, 158, 159, 163, 165, 167

Schaafhausen, 2

Schleicher, 382

Scott, Sir Walter, 130, 256, 271, 277, 278, 301, 305, 316–318, 323, 332

Scylax, 12

Seaforth, Earl of, 276, 277

Sechnall, 36, 37, 240, 292

Secundius, 36

Setanta, 155, 156

Seth, 83

Shairp, Principal, 321, 322

Shakespeare, 312, 313, 332

Shaw, James, 250

Shaw, Rev. William, 340, 342

Shelley, 315

Siegfried, Prof., 378, 382, 383

Sigerson, Dr., 167, 297, 324, 366, 383

Sigurd, 202

Sinclair, Archibald, 338, 361, 363

Sinclair, Sir John, 352

Skene, Dr., 32, 55, 117, 120, 127, 129, 130, 150, 175, 195, 221–227,
238, 383

Smith, Angus, 147

Smith, Dr., 176, 250, 253–256, 303, 330, 333, 335, 372

Smith, Donald, 372

Sohrab, 159

Somerled, 211

Sommer, Dr., 381

Southey, 316

Stairn, 354, 355

Stapleton, Tobias, 339

Stephens, Thomas, 221–225, 247

Stern, Dr. Ludwig Christian, 174, 176, 380

Stevenson, R. L., 323

Stewart, A., 336, 340, 341

Stewart, D., 336

Stewart, Sir John, 264

Stewart, R., 336

Stokes, Prof. G. T., 36, 303

Stokes, Dr. Whitley, 25, 26, 32, 34, 68, 81, 82, 90, 95, 98, 104–106,
121, 147, 173, 188, 378–383

Stokes, Prof. William, 382

Stone, Jerome, 118, 251, 252, 352

Strabo, 7, 12, 99

Strabo, Walafridus, 202

Strabus, 62

Strachan, Dr., 55, 383

Stuart, Dr., 82, 95, 330

Stuart, John Roy, 250

Stuart, P., 336

Sualtam, 155, 156

Sweet, 304

Tacitus, 5, 12

Tadg, 181

Talchend, 145

Talhaiarn, 221

Taliessin, 218–223, 226, 230, 232, 240, 244, 247

Tannahill, 257

Taylor, Tom, 240, 247

Teige, 124

Tennyson, 305, 315, 318, 320, 323, 332

Tewdwr, 246

Thackeray, 332

Thisbe, 312

Thomson, 315

Thurneysen, Prof., 57, 380

Tighernach, 63, 111, 112, 155, 176, 246

Timæus, 12

Tinne, 63

Tirechan, 23, 24, 29

Tischendorf, 83, 97

Todd, Dr., 25, 33, 38, 303, 372, 374

Todhunter, Dr., 148, 324

Torcull, 211

Townshend, Lord, 80

Trahul, 254

Trenmor, 178, 181

Tuireann, 140–143, 213, 214

Turner, P., 336, 352

Tynan, Katherine, 324

Uathach, 159, 165

Uisneach, 146, 149–155, 158, 161, 380

Ullin, 254

Ultán, 292, 349

Urien, 234, 244

Ussher, 62

Uther, 319

Vallancy, 339, 342

Victoricus, 27

Viglisson, 212

Villemarqué, 222, 229, 240, 244, 366

Virgil, 12, 335

Vivien, 319

Voel Tegid, 230

Wace, Robert, 228, 247, 306, 307

Ward, 68

Watson, Dr. John, 324

Watt, 333

Weston, Jessie L., 307, 324

Westwood, Prof., 82

White, Stephen, 62

Whyte, Henry, 338, 366

Whyte, John, 281, 344

William King, 270

Williams, Edward, 222

Willison, 328, 333

Wilson, James G., 275

Windisch, Dr. Ernest, 57, 89, 90, 98, 121, 147, 173, 341, 376, 379, 380

Wordsworth, 19, 315–318

Wright, Dr., 36, 303

Wynne, W. W. E., 218

Xenophon, 12

Yeats, W. B., 324, 366

Yscolan, 224–226

Zeuss, J. Caspard, 56, 82, 98, 99, 120, 258, 309, 341, 376–379, 380,
382, 384

Zimmer, Prof., 22, 98, 106, 120, 210, 211, 292, 380, 381

Zupitza, Dr., 381

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Adamnan, 58–79;
his biography, 61–68;
writings, 67–79;
his Life of Columba, 16, 58, 69–79;
Adamnan’s Prayer, 68;
his Vision, 68

Aged Bard’s Wish, 253, 357, 358

Alexander the Great and Celts, 7

American scholars, 381

_Amra Choluimcille_, 55, 108

Ancestors of the Gael, 138, 139

Ancient Laws and Institutes of Wales, 220

Aneurin, the Book of, 218, 219

Annals, Irish, 111–113

_Archæologica Britannica_, 217, 370, 371

Armagh, the Book of, 17, 22, 23, 82

Arnold’s _Study of Celtic Literature_, 309–312, 321–323

Arthurian Romances, 227–238, 306–309

Aryan group of languages, 19

Ballymote, the Book of, 109

Bards, the Irish, 54

_Bards of the Gael and Gall_, 167, 168, 297, 298, 366

_Barzaz-Breiz, Chants populaires de la Bretagne_, 240–244, 366

_Beauties of Gaelic Poetry, the_, 356–360

_Ben Dorain_, 358–360

Bible, Gaelic, 328–330

Bibliographies, Gaelic, 325–327

Bopp’s discovery, 375, 376

_Breton Bards of the Sixth Century, the_, 244, 366

British scholars, 382–385

Brittany, early ballads of, 240–244;
medieval ballads of, 247, 248

Buchanan, Dugald, his hymns, 329, 336

Caermarthen, the Black Book of, 218

_Caledonian Bards_, 256

_Carmina Gadelica_, 361–366

Cathrach, the, 16, 48, 49

Celtic elements in English literature, 309–312

Celtic literary revivals, 239–261

Celtic renaissance, latest, 259, 353

Celts, early history of the, 1–9;
arrival in British Isles, 3;
Continental empire, 5–9

Christianity, introduction of, 27, 28, 47, 287–290

_Chronicon Scotorum_, the, 112, 369, 374

Church, the, its influence on Gaelic literature, 286–303

Churchmen, splendid services of, 303

Clanranald, the Book of, 129–133

Classical authors on early Celts, 11–13

Columba, St., 16;
his biography, 41–78, 226;
writings, 47–58;
his poems, 49–53

Confession of St. Patrick, 15, 25, 30

Cornish dialect, last speaker of, 249

Cornish literature, 248, 249

Coroticus, Epistle to, 15, 30

Cuchulinn, 155–173

Danish scholars, 381

Decay of inflection in Scottish Gaelic and Manx, 211

Decline of Gaelic Oral literature, 300

Deer, the Book of, 16, 17, 79–95, 209, 246

Deer’s Cry, the, 15, 31, 33

Deirdre and the sons of Uisneach, 146–152

_Dialogue of the Ancients_, 53, 188, 189

Dialogues between Ossian and Patrick, 29, 292–299

Dictionaries, Gaelic, 341–344

Differences between Irish and Gaelic, 209, 210

_Domhnach Airgid_, the, 36

Durrow, the Book of, 16, 48, 82

Early Celtic Church and oral traditions, 289

Early missionaries and the Scriptures, 289, 290

Edinburgh libraries in which are Celtic MSS.:
Advocates’, 115–118;
University, 118;
Scottish Antiquaries’, 118

Eisteddfod, Welsh, history of, 237

English literature, 305–324

English loan-words from Celtic, 304, 305

Fate of MSS., 119, 120

Feinn, the, 174–197

Fernaig MS., the, 127–129, 350, 351

Fiacc’s Hymn, 37, 38

Fionn, 175–197

Foundation of Celtic Chairs, 259

Four Ancient Books of Wales, 217–238, 247

Four Masters, the Annals of, 112, 113, 373;
authors, 369

French scholars, 381

Gadelic and Brittonic, linguistic difference, 3, 371

Gaelic, earliest written, 17;
earliest distinctly Scottish, 89;
first printed book, 327

_Gaelic Bards_, Pattison’s, 253

Galatian colony, 8

_Genealogies, the Book of_, 369

Genealogy, Irish, 137

German scholars, 379–381

Gildas, works of, 220

Gleaners, Gaelic, 347–366

Gododin, the, 221, 222

Grammars, Gaelic, 107, 338–341, 373

_Grammatica Celtica_, 98, 376–378

Gray’s _Bard_, 313, 314

Hergest, the Red Book of, 218–220, 224

Heroic Cycle, the, 153–173

Highland bards before the Forty-five, 263–285

Highland bards after the Forty-five, 249–251

Highland Society Collection of Gaelic MSS., 117

_Historia Britonum_, 228

Hymns, the Book of, 17, 36, 209, 246, 348, 349, 374, 382

Icelandic literature, 205

Influence of Celtic on English literature, 305–324

Iona, 46;
ravages of Norsemen, 201

Irish Annals, 111–113

Irish missionaries on the Continent, 207

_Irische Texte_, 380, 382

Italian scholars, 379, 380

Jacobite poems of Ireland, 251

Jones, Sir William;
his suggestion, 375

Jubainville, M. d’Arbois de; his mission to the British Isles, 99–104

Keating’s work, 368, 369

Kells, the Book of, 16, 48, 82

Kilbride collection of MSS., 117, 118

Knox’s _Liturgy_, 327, 328

Layamon’s “Brut,” 305, 320

_Leabhar Gabhala_, 135, 369

_Leabhar na Feinne_, 353–356

_Leabhar nan Gleann_, 366

_Leabhar Na h’Uidhre_, 17, 108, 209, 246, 348

Learning and culture, 289

Leinster, the Book of, 108, 109

_Liber Hymnorum_, 17, 36, 209, 246, 348, 349, 374, 382

Lir, Tragedy of the Children of, 144–146

Lismore, the Book of, 109

Lismore, the Book of the Dean of, 121–126, 226, 350, 351

_Literary History of Ireland_, Dr. Hyde’s, 246

Literature, Gaelic, printed, 325–346

Literature of the Early Celtic Church, 288–292

Llywarch Hên’s poetry, 223–224

Mabinogion, 229–238

Maccodrum’s Muse, 282–285

Macdonald, Alexander, his work, 328, 336, 337

Macdonald, John, life and poetry, 270–275

Macgregor songs, 263

Macleod, Mary, life and poetry, 264–270

Macpherson’s Ossian and other poems, 117, 217, 252, 314–316, 331, 351,
352

Malory, Sir Thomas, his _Morte d’ Arthur_, 308, 309, 316

Manuscripts, Celtic, 17, 40;
on the Continent, 96, 100, 101;
in England and Ireland, 97, 102;
in Scotland, 115–134;
antiquity of MSS., 102–104;
MSS. of the Middle Ages, 107;
MSS., XL., LIII., LVI., 120, 121;
Welsh, 217–238

Milesians, 138, 139

Minor collections of Ossianic poetry, 352

Minor Highland bards, 275–282

Mòd, Gaelic, 259

Modern novelists, 323–324

Moore’s _Irish Melodies_, 316, 317

Myrddin’s poetry, 224–226

Mythological Cycle, the, 135–152

Myth and folk-tale theories, 135–137

Mythical races in Ireland, 137

_Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales_, 218, 224, 366

_Navigatio Brendani_, 215

Nennius’ _History of the Britons_, 220

Nineteenth century output of Gaelic literature, 301, 302

Ninine’s Prayer, 38

Norris, Edwin, translation of Cornish dramas, 249

Norse eddas and sagas, 204, 205

Norse ideas in Gaelic literature, 212–215;
Norse words, 210, 211

Norse invasions, 198;
influence on Celtic literature, 205–217;
and upon the structure of the Gaelic language, 211, 212

O’Curry’s research, 97, 373, 374

O’Donovan’s life and work, 97, 372, 373

Ogam writing, 14, 15

Origin of shires, burghs, and parishes in Scotland, 84–95

Ossian, 175;
poetry, 185–188

Ossianic cycle, 174–197;
heroes of, 178;
literature, 185–197;
poetry, 123, 185–188;
tales, 176, 188–197

_P_, rarely used in Irish or Gaelic, 4;
group, 5

Patrick, St., 15;
Lives of, 23;
biography, 23–39;
writings, 15, 30–39

Patrick and Ossian, 29, 293–298

Periodicals, foreign, 378, 379;
Gaelic, 345, 346

Picts, the, 45, 56

Poetesses, Gaelic, 275, 276

Poet-laureate, Gaelic, 274

Poetry, Gaelic, in Continental MSS., 104–106

Psalters, Gaelic, 328, 333

_Q._, the Aryan guttural changed into _p_, 4;
group, 5

Reid’s _Bibliotheca Scoto-Celtica_, 325–327

_Reliquiæ Celticæ_, 384

_Reliques of Irish Poetry_, 366

Renan, Ernest, on Welsh literature, 227, 230

Rhyme, Celtic claim, 56, 57, 309

Rise of the Scottish Gaelic, 89, 209

Scandinavian scholars, 381

Scholars, modern Celtic, 367–385

School-books, Gaelic, 338

Scott, Sir Walter, renderings from Gaelic, 277, 278, 323;
influence, 317, 318

Scottish collection of Celtic MSS., 115–133

_Seana Dana_, 253–256

Severance of Scotland from Ireland, 209

Shairp, Principal, writings, 322, 323

Skene, Dr., Collection of MSS., 117;
on Welsh poems, 227, 237

_Songster, Gaelic_ (_An T Oranaiche_), 361

Sorrows of Gaelic Storydom, the Three, 140–152

Statistics of Celtic-speaking peoples, 10, 20, 21

Stephens’ _Literature of the Cymry_, 221

Stone, Jerome, a pioneer, 251

Táin Bó Chuailgné, 108–111, 160

Tales of Heroic Cycle, 153–173

Taliessin, the Book of, 218, 219;
the bard, 223;
legend of, 230–232;
odes, 232, 233

Taylor’s translations of Breton ballads, 240–244, 247, 248

Tennyson’s _Idylls of the King_, 318–321

Tighernach, the Annals of, 111

_Treasury of Irish Poetry_, 366

_Trias Thaumaturga_, 369

Tuireann, Tragedy of the Children of, 140–143

Uisneach, Tale of the Sons of, 121, 146–152

Valhalla, 214, 215

Vikings, 198–216

Villemarqué, M. de, Breton ballads and folk-lore songs, 240–248

_Vita Columbæ_, Adamnan’s, 58–79, 92;
criteria of age, 59;
copyist, 60, 61;
history of MS., 62;
contents, 69;
other MSS. of, 76, 77

_Wars of the Gael with the Gaill_, 203, 204

Welsh bards of the sixth century, 221

Welsh intellectual awakening of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, 246

Welsh MSS., 220

Welsh poetry, 217, 218, 257

Wordsworth and his contemporaries, 316

Whyte, Henry, his gleanings, 366

Yscolan, 225, 226

Zeuss’ life and work, 98, 99, 376–378

Zimmer’s books, 380

THE END

-----

Footnote 1:

“In Europe the ancient races were all, according to Schaafhausen,
‘lower in the scale than the rudest living savages,’ they must
therefore have differed to a certain extent from any existing
race.”—Darwin’s _Descent of Man_, chap. vii. p. 281.

Footnote 2:

“There is no proof of any migration of Asiatics into Europe west of
the basin of the Dnieper down to the time of Attila.”—Huxley.

Footnote 3:

Adamnan refers to the same four peoples.

Footnote 4:

“The first great movements of the European population of which there
is any conclusive evidence are that series of Gaulish invasions of the
east and south which ultimately extended from North Italy to Galatia
in Asia Minor.”—Huxley.

Footnote 5:

“Two centuries after Cæsar’s conquest the Celtic tongue had all but
disappeared from Gaul, still that language did not perish without
leaving behind it slight but yet distinct traces.”—A. Brachet.

Footnote 6:

Census, 1891.

Footnote 7:

The number in Scotland who could speak Gaelic in 1901 was 230,806, and
who could speak Gaelic only, 28,106. The census of 1891 gave 43,738
speaking Gaelic only, and 38,192 speaking Irish only.

Footnote 8:

_Races of Europe._

Footnote 9:

Sir William Jones.

Footnote 10:

Professor Zimmer, among others, believes that they were one and the
same person.

Footnote 11:

Dr. Whitley Stokes thinks this sojourn took place between his first
missionary advent to Ireland in 397 and his second in 432.

Footnote 12:

For examples, see Chap. XV.

Footnote 13:

Benen, name of Saint’s follower, St. Benignus.

Footnote 14:

Version by Whitley Stokes in his Goidelica.

Footnote 15:

The Book of Kells is held by the more competent authorities to belong
to the end of the seventh century.

Footnote 16:

Ward or Vardaus, author of _Acta Sancti Rumoldi_.

Footnote 17:

There are various Kilbrides in Scotland, several even in Lorn, but
this one is in the island of Seil, near Easdale.

Footnote 18:

Professor Mackinnon, in _Transactions of the Gaelic Society of
Inverness_, vol. xi.

Footnote 19:

See p. 110.

Footnote 20:

Fiann, gen. Feinne, means the band, troop; the plural Fianna, the
troops or the soldiers.—Dr. Ludwig Stern.

Footnote 21:

Said to be so named from his white head.—Dr. Macbain. Finn, ancient
form.

Footnote 22:

The age of the oldest existing Ossianic poems, according to Dr. Ludwig
Stern, is the eleventh and twelfth centuries, though a few of them may
be more venerable.

Footnote 23:

Really great-grandson.

Footnote 24:

Finntraigh.

Footnote 25:

Dr. Skene has shown, _Celtic Scotland_, vol. iii. p. 459, that another
O’Duibhne is in question.

Footnote 26:

Iceland, first settled by the Irish in 795, perhaps sixty-five years
earlier than the Norse. According to M. Letronne, 860 is the date of
the arrival of the latter.

Footnote 27:

The belief was that Myrddin was persecuted by Rhydderch Hael at the
instance of Yscolan.

Footnote 28:

Stephens has here, “For having hindered school instruction,” wrongly
translated, we believe.

Footnote 29:

“I don’t believe that Goidelic was extinct in Wales till the seventh
century; the bulk of the people of the north and the south of Wales
are in point of race to this day probably more Goidelic than
Brythonic. The Ordovices of Mid Wales were the Brythons of the west,
and hardly any others in Wales.”—Prof. Rhys.

Footnote 30:

He collected Breton ballads and folk-lore songs, added to them,
revised and altered, and published the collection as authentic.

Footnote 31:

Bran means crow in Breton dialect.

Footnote 32:

The late Mr. Alexander Mackenzie has offered other suggestions. See
_Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness_, Vol. XXII. pp.
43–49.

Footnote 33:

There is a spirited translation also by Mark Napier, Esq., in his
_Life of Montrose_.

Footnote 34:

D. Campbell, in his _Language, Poetry, and Music of the Highland
Clans_, says that Mr. James Munro was preparing his poems for
publication with a memoir. This projected book has never appeared.

Footnote 35:

Preserved in the Books of Ballymote and Lecain and MS. I. of the
Scottish collection.

Footnote 36:

“This was no work to commend him to the powers that were, and he
appears to have been cast into prison, for, in a touching note at page
64 of the last edition of his Grammar, he asks his readers’ pardon for
confounding an example of the imperative with the potential mood,
which he was caused to do ‘by the great bother of the brawling company
that is round about me in this prison.’ What became of him ultimately
I do not know.”—Dr. Douglas Hyde, _Literary History of Ireland_, pp.
599, 600.

Footnote 37:

O’Donovan’s, 1847, published since Reid wrote, is the best Irish
Grammar.

Footnote 38:

Of course Cormac’s Glossary is the earliest, but does not count among
printed ones, because only in MS.

Footnote 39:

Finn Mac Gormann, Bishop of Kildare, most probably.

Footnote 40:

Second stanza he printed for first time.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

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