Early Irish Myths and Sagas - Jeffrey Gantz [1]
There are many reasons why this should be so. To begin with, these stories originated in the mists of Irish prehistory (some elements must predate the arrival of the Celts in Ireland), and they developed through the course of centuries until reaching their present manuscript state; consequently, they manage to be both archaic and contemporary. Their setting is both historical Ireland (itself an elusive entity) and the mythic otherworld of the Síde (Ireland’s ‘faery people’, who live in burial mounds called ‘síde’ and exhibit magical powers), and it is not always easy to tell one from the other. Many of the characters are partially euhemerized gods – that is, they are gods in the process of becoming ordinary mortals – so that, again, it is not easy to tell divine from human.
At bottom, this tension between reality and fantasy is not accidental to the circumstances of literary transmission and formation but rather an innate characteristic, a gift of the Celts. The world of the Irish story is graphic: blood spurts not only from the calf flayed for Derdriu but also from the lips of Anlúan as his head is thrown across a table (in ‘The Tale of Macc Da Thó’s Pig’); the ‘hero’ of ‘Bricriu’s Feast’ is tossed from the balcony of his house on to a garbage heap; the warriors of Ulaid (the Irish name for Ulster) are all but roasted in an iron house (in ‘The Intoxication of the Ulaid’). Yet this story-world is also magically bright and achingly beautiful. Two pairs of lovers – Mider and Étaín (in ‘The Wooing of Étaín), and Óengus and Cáer Ibormeith (in ‘The Dream of Óengus’) – turn into swans. The hero of ‘The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel’ can dispatch several hundred foes without even reaching for his Weapons; Macc Da Thó’s pig is so large that forty oxen can be laid across it. Myth obtrudes upon reality at every turn. In ‘The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel’, a bird descends through a skylight, sheds his bird outfit and sleeps with the woman Mess Búachalla, thus fathering the story’s hero, Conare Már; in ‘The Wooing of Étaín’, Mider’s wife, Fúamnach, turns her rival Étaín into a scarlet fly; in ‘The Wasting Sickness of Cú Chulaind’. Cú Chulaind is horsewhipped and then healed by two women from the otherworld (shades of the German women in Fellini’s Casanova). In these Irish stories, then, the pride and energy of reality are allied with the magic and beauty of fantasy – and the result is infused with a rare degree of idealism. In the otherworld of ‘The Wooing of Étaín’, not only are bodies white as snow and cheeks red as foxglove, but there is no ‘mine’ or ‘yours’.
The Celts
The traditions of these early Irish stories originated with the Celts, an Indo-European group who are the ancestors of the Irish, the Scots, the Welsh, the Cornish, the Bretons and the people of the Isle of Man. When and where this group first appeared is, rather fittingly, an elusive, even controversial, question. The conservative view, and perhaps the most prevalent, is that the Celts surfaced with the beginning of the Iron Age in Europe, roughly 1000 B.C.; and this is certainly the earliest period in which the archaeological testimony affords positive proof. Myles Dillon and Nora Chadwick, however, propose to date the first Celtic settlements of the British Isles to the early Bronze Age (circa 1800 B.C.) and to identify the Beaker Folk as Celts.1 Leon E. Stover and Bruce Kraig go further still: comparing the Classical descriptions of the Iron Age Celts with what they infer from burials at Stonehenge and Únětice (a cemetery near Prague), they propose to classify ‘the Wessex and Únětician warriors as formative Celts’ and conclude by claiming that the Celts ‘emerged as a dominant people in Europe by the beginning of the third