Early Irish Myths and Sagas - Jeffrey Gantz [4]
When the events related in these stories might have taken place is yet another mystery. The Alexandrian geographer Ptolemy, who wrote in the second century A.D. but is believed to have drawn upon sources at least two hundred years older, provides evidence that Ireland was then Celtic-speaking; however, few of his names – and they are restricted both in number and in location – suggest those of our stories, so that one might suppose the people of these stories (insofar as they were real) had not yet appeared. At the other end, the milieu of the tales predates the advent of Christianity, while the circumstances of the Ulster Cycle must predate the Uí Néill appropriation of Emuin Machae. Kenneth Jackson has placed the formation of the Ulster tradition somewhere between the second century B.C. and the fourth century A.D., which seems entirely reasonable.
What Irish life was like during this period is, fortunately, not such a difficult question. On the one hand, we have the evidence of the Classical authors, Posidonius (via Diodorus Siculus and Strabo) and Caesar – evidence that was taken from Gaul and Britain but must surely have been valid for the Irish Celts as well. On the other, we have not only the evidence of the stories but also that of the Irish annals and genealogies and law tracts.
What emerges from the collation of this evidence is a culture of extraordinary vitality and beauty. Irish society exhibited the same tripartism that Georges Dumézil perceived elsewhere in the Indo-European world: a warrior class headed by a king; a priestly class (the druids); and a class of farmers and free men. The king of a túath, or tribe, was often subject to an over-king, to whom he gave assurances of allegiance and from whom he received some kind of support; the over-king, in turn, might have been subject to his provincial king. (The idea of a high king or king of Ireland is probably a fiction, fabricated by later peoples – notably the Uí Néill – to provide a historical justification for their claim to rule Ireland and perpetuated by the romanticism of subsequent tradition.) Kingship seems originally to have been sacral – indeed, the ‘kings’ in the mythological tales are barely euhemerized gods. In some traditions, the tribal king was ritually married to the tribal goddess (Medb, for example); in others, he had a sympathetic relationship with the land: if he were healthy and virile, the land would be fertile, while if he were blemished or impotent, the land would become barren. (This Wasteland idea is not, of course, exclusively Celtic.)
In ‘The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel’, a druid partakes of the flesh and broth of a slaughtered bull and then lapses into a deep sleep, wherein he is expected to see the form of the new king. In later Irish history, however, the king was chosen from an extended family unit; and his position, continually contested by other family members (just as in fifteenth-century England), was far from secure. Curiously, the kings of the Irish stories are not battle leaders: either they betray vestiges of divinity (Cú Ruí, for example) or they have a young champion as heir and rival. Examples of this second pattern – which reflects the relationship of Agamemnon to Achilles and anticipates those of Arthur to Lancelot and Mark to Tristan – are legion: Mider temporarily loses Étaín to his foster-son Óengus; Conchubur loses Derdriu to the young warrior Noísiu and relinquishes supremacy in battle to Cú Chulaind; Cet rather than King Ailill is the champion of the Connachta.
The second class of Irish society, the priests, is more controversial. Popular notions of white-robed druids overseeing human sacrifices, cutting mistletoe with golden sickles and chanting spells over magic cauldrons persist – and not without reason. But Strabo points out that the druids concern themselves with questions of ethics in addition to their study of natural phenomena. And because they are considered the most just of all, they possess