Ancient Ireland \ Europe’s Oldest Vernacular Literature

Origin Tale: Lebor Gabála Érenn

¶ Ireland boasts Europe’s oldest vernacular literature. The county’s myths and legends fall into four cycles or sets: the Mythological Cycle; the Ulster (or Red Branch) Cycle; the Fenian (or Ossianic) Cycle; and the Kings’ (or Historical) Cycle.
¶ One of Ireland’s most popular medieval texts, Lebor Gabála Érenn (Book of Invasions), offers an origin story — from the Mythological Cycle — that culminates with the Gaels, also known as the Milesians. “Gaelic” is an ethnic and cultural label often applied to the native Irish. Consider, for example, its use in the phrase Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). Founded in 1884, that body revived and continues to oversee indigenous Irish sports, such as camogie, played by women, and hurling, played by men.
¶ Lebor Gabála Érenn claims that the Gaels (or Milesians) arrived in Ireland by sea from the northern coast of Spain. Genetic research may support that contention. Published in the scientific journal Nature on March 23, 2000, analysis of a certain DNA signature — passed (via the Y chromosome) from father to son — demonstrates that its highest global incidences occur in two European locales: Ireland’s western province of Connacht and the Spanish Basque Country (where it is manifest in 98% and 89% of males, respectively). These data suggest that Ireland’s first settlers likely migrated from northern Spain once the ice cap receded from the island after the last Ice Age (the Midlandian glaciation), around 9,000 years ago. Ireland remained without human inhabitants longer than most other European territories.
¶ Prior to presenting the Gaels, Lebor Gabála Érenn (literally: “Book of the Taking of Ireland”) narrates five earlier waves of invaders, several of whom were never fully eradicated. The first wave is the Fomorians, a race of supernatural giants somewhat comparable to the Greek Titans. The fifth wave is the Tuatha Dé Danann (“tribe of the goddess Danu”), another supernatural people. They sometimes clashed with the Fomorians.
¶ The Gaels effectively forced the Tuatha Dé Danann underground, where, in the form of the fairies, they inhabited (and continue to inhabit?) a discrete time-space continuum. This phenomenon may have informed Irish author C.S. Lewis’s creation of Narnia for his popular series of children’s books, which includes The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950). To this day, a belief persists that the fairies move between their realm and ours via landscape portals, such as sacred rocks and copses.
¶ The pantheon of Tuatha Dé Danann (TDD) deities still resonates. Éire (also spelled Ériu) was one of the TDD’s land goddesses, and Ireland means “land of Éire.” Appearing on its coinage, the country’s official name in Gaeilge (the Irish language) is Éire. The Gaeilge word for the month of August translates as “festival of Lugh.” A god associated with the skills of the warrior, the king, and the craftsperson, Lugh had a TDD father but a Fomorian mother.
¶ Known as the Dagda, the TDD’s father-figure god is associated with the complex of monuments called Brú na Bóinne, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Situated alongside the River Boyne, north of Dublin, this ensemble of passage tombs and other structures dates from around 3200 BCE, more than 600 years before Egypt’s pyramids and 1,000 years before England’s Stonehenge. Archaeological work on the site’s main passage tomb, Newgrange, began in 1962; ancient tales call that tomb Sí in Bhrú (“fairy mound of the palace”).
¶ Brú na Bóinne is from the Neolithic (or New Stone Age) period, when farming emerged; so, too, is the portal tomb (or dolmen) at Ballybrittas, on the slopes of Bree Hill, near the town of Enniscorthy, County Wexford. This burial chamber is distinguished by a roof- or cap-stone supported by upright stones.

Warrior Epic: Táin Bó Cúailnge

¶ The centerpiece of the Ulster Cycle of mythology, Táin Bó Cúailnge (Cattle Raid of Cooley) is Ireland’s best-known epic. It features a warrior queen, Medb (pronounced “mɛðv”), and an adolescent boy superhero, Cú Chulainn, who is capable of undergoing transformer-like bodily changes prior to combat. In addition to several incidents centered on hurling, the tale contains overwhelming evidence of ancient Ireland as a land of multiple regional kingdoms and sub-kingdoms.
¶ Medb, queen of the province of Connacht, assembles a coalition army to invade Ulster, Ireland’s northern province, which is controlled by a dynasty called the Red Branch. For much of the action, Ulster is defended by just Cú Chulainn, sister-son of the Red Branch king, Conchobar. Medb’s forces include several exiled Ulster warriors, led by Fergus, whom Conchobar ousted from the Ulster kingship.
¶ Underscoring that cattle constituted wealth in ancient Ireland, Medb’s objective is to secure Donn Cúailgne: the brown stud bull associated with a region called the Cooley peninsula, controlled by Ulster.
¶ Táin Bó Cúailnge contains many sub-tales beloved by the Irish, such as how Cü Chulainn (born Setanta) obtained his name and how Cú Chulainn engaged in multi-day combat against his foster-brother, Ferdia, at a ford, now known as Ardee (“ford of Ferdia”).
¶ Several medieval recensions (versions) of Táin Bó Cúailnge exist. As Ireland sought to revive its indigenous culture during the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, episodes from Táin Bó Cúailnge became popular among cultural-nationalist translators. One very successful translation, by Lady Augusta Gregory, was Cuchulain of Muirthemne: The Story of the Men of the Red Branch of Ulster (1902), which contains 20 chapters. Their titles include “Boy Deeds of Cuchulain” and “The War for the Bull of Cuailgne.”
¶ James Joyce poked fun at his fellow Irish author, William Butler Yeats, for his hyperbolic praise of Cuchulain of Muirthemne. Yeats opened his Preface to the volume with the following two sentences: “I think this book is the best that has come out of Ireland in my time. Perhaps I should say that it is the best book that has ever come out of Ireland; for the stories which it tells are a chief part of Ireland's gift to the imagination of the world — and it tells them perfectly for the first time.”
¶ The Táin Bó (or cattle raid) is considered a genre within ancient Irish literature. Another example of the genre is Táin Bó Flidhais (also known as the Mayo Táin, after County Mayo, its primary setting). Medb and Fergus feature prominently in Táin Bó Flidhais, whose bovine focus is a prodigious white milk-cow named the Maol.

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 Prehistory \ Ancient Monuments And Artifacts

Winter Solstice at Brú na Boinne

¶ The section about Lebor Gabála Érenn invokes several prehistoric monuments: the dolmen or portal tomb at Ballybrittas, County Wexford; and the internationally famous cluster of passage tombs at Brú na Boinne, County Meath. At sunrise each winter solstice — the shortest day of the year, a little before Christmas — the latter’s principal tomb (called Newgrange) has its passage illuminated by a beam of sunlight. Specifically, the light enters an opening called the roof box above the passage entrance; it then penetrates abound 19 yards straight down the passage into the tomb’s chamber. As the sunrise continues, the entire chamber becomes illuminated.
¶ Tours of Brú na Boinne are facilitated only by means of the complex’s official Visitor Center. The summer drought of 2018 exposed the landscape outlines of additional, previously unknown monuments at Brú na Boinne.

A History of Ireland in 100 Objects

¶ Supported by a user-friendly, informative website (with images, video, text, lesson plans, and more), a project that has caught the Irish cultural imagination is A History of Ireland in 100 Objects, a partnership between the country’s postal service (An Post), the National Museum of Ireland, and other institutions. Presented chronologically, the objects date from around 5000 BCE to the twenty-first century. Images of some of them have appeared on Irish stamps. Most of the items are displayed at the National Museum of Ireland, which has several branches.
¶ A compelling object is the Neolithic (New Stone Age) pottery bowl discovered in 1992 in a cave-grave in Annagh, County Limerick, that constitutes the final resting place of three male human skeletons, all victims of significant violence (for example, one exhibits a skull injury possibly delivered by a slingshot). About five centuries older than Newgrange, the cave-grave’s bowl and other artifacts — such as sheep, cattle, bear, and wolf bones — indicate that the people were farmers, hunters, and warriors. In other words: they were transitioning to farming from a more violent way of life. Two of the skeletons belonged to men aged over fifty at death.
¶ Notable about several of the pre-modern items in the Ireland in 100 Objects collection is their having been discovered in some hoard or other, probably assembled to be hidden away from invaders, such as Vikings. One hoard was unearthed from a bog at Coggalbeg, County Roscommon, in 1945. The Coggalbeg Hoard includes a lunula or crescent-moon-shaped ornament made by beating a small amount of gold so it becomes very thin. It dates to around 4,300 years ago (the Early Bronze Age). As almost 80% of European lunulae are from Ireland, we can consider the form to be an indigenous Irish one, probably associated with moon worship (or moon-and-sun worship).
¶ One of the most affecting of the 100 Objects is the leather and tinned bronze armlet (or arm bracelet) from between 362 and 175 BCE worn on an Early Iron Age male body discovered preserved in a bog in Old Croghan, County Offaly. Bogs have remarkable preservative capabilities, and this body is almost certainly that of a local or regional king (around six-feet-three-inches tall) who endured a triple sacrificial killing — that is a ritual death by three means (strangulation, stabbing, drowning), each one intended to acknowledge an aspect of a triune earth-sovereignty goddess.
¶ The Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney read a book (P.V. Glob’s archaeological study, The Bog People: Iron Age Man Preserved), and he also visited a bog body in a museum in Denmark. These activities precipitated several now-famous poems that use the sacrificial practice that bog bodies represent as a way of thinking about the the Troubles: the 30-year period of ethnic and religious conflict in Northern Ireland that ended with the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. One of the lyrics, “The Grauballe Man,” describes the victim as looking “[a]s if he had been poured \ in tar,” and it also notes “his slashed throat \ that has tanned and toughened.”

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