Irish antiquarianism had had its heyday in the second half of the eighteenth century. After the comparatively peaceful passing of the Stuart coup in 1745, sentimental primitivism could come to attenuate the anti-Gaelic stance of the Anglo-Irish elite. The investigation of Irish history was adopted by scholarly societies of Enlightenment vintage and came to rely more and more on native sources and native help; witness the way in which Charles Vallancey collaborated with Charles O’Conor of Belanagar, and Joseph Cooper Walker and Charlotte Brooke made use of the services of Theophilus O’Flanagan. Native learning was slowly beginning to be adopted by the Anglo-Irish intelligentsia, in a pattern that was to persist after the Union and into the nineteenth century. Sir William Betham relied on the help of EdwardO’Reilly and Owen Connellan, and the expertise of Eugene O’Curry and John O’Donovan was made accessible in the public domain initially because these men were enlisted by Larcom and Petrie as assistants in the Ordnance Survey of Ireland. Connellan, O’Donovan and O’Curry made a greater name and a better career for themselves in the world of learning than O’Conor, O’Flanagan or even O’Reilly had done (though O’Conor and O’Reilly had been allowed into the ranks of the Royal Irish Academy). Connellan was appointed Irish historiographer-royal by George IV, William IV and Victoria, and obtained the chair of Celtic at Queen’s College, Cork; O’Donovan received an honorary doctorate from Trinity College, Dublin as well as a (meaningless) appointment to the chair of Celtic at Queen’s College, Belfast; and for O’Curry there was eventually the professorial chair in Newman’s Catholic University. Indeed the emancipation of native-born scholars in terms of professional career prospects is closely linked to the educational facilities open to Catholics in Ireland. O’Flanagan worked in Trinity College and in the Royal Irish Academy as a mere assistant or amanuensis, and could not hope to do any better than to set up a private academy in Limerick. A Catholic scholar like John Lanigan, author of the Ecclesiastical histoty of Ireland (1822) could only reap academic laurels by going to the Continent: he was given a chair at the Italian university of Pavia before returning to Ireland in 1796 with at least the prestige of a professorial title. Academic status was an important thing in the gradual [71] professionalization of the historical sciences, and until the establishment of Newman’s Catholic University (which finally brought academic recognition and security to Eugene O’Curry) the only Irish institution offering career possibilities to native scholarship was the seminary at Maynooth, founded in 1795 as a conciliatory measure by the government to cater for those Irish aspirants to the priesthood whom the French Revolution had barred from pursuing their call on the Continent. Maynooth was a vitally important institution in the life of Catholic Ireland; not only were the meetings of its governing council in fact tantamount to bishops’ conferences (banned as such under the existing legislation),5 it also became an important scholarly focus for an Irish Catholic intelligentsia. It afforded a professorial chair for Lanigan when that scholar was driven from the Continent by the tide of revolutionary wars (Lanigan was later deprived of his Maynooth place by the malicious rumour that he had Jansenist sympathies); it gave employment to the Gaelic scholar Paul O’Brien, author of an Irish grammar. Yet even O’Donovan never managed, for all his widely-acknowledged learning and vastly valuable contributions to scholarship, to keep destitution at bay; his tokenist appointment to a chair of Celtic at Queen’s College, Belfast, was poorly remunerated (indeed, there were no students forthcoming to follow his courses there) and he had to work exceedingly long hours to make a living by his pen; after his death, a charitable fund had to be set up for his widow and children.
Later nineteenth-century trends towards professionalization aside, the pattern set in the Patriot decades was to persist until well after the Union: that the investigation of Irish antiquity and the Irish language and literature was a matter for Anglo-Irish gentlemen gathered together in clubbish societies and assisted by scholars with a native knowledge of Gaelic culture. On the whole, such Anglo-Irish antiquarianism had flourished under protection of the Patriotic political climate. The investigation of the nation’s past was considered a philanthropic, public-spirited effort to improve the state of general knowledge and to enhance the nation’s standing by elucidating its ancient origins, and the subscribers to the learned volumes of these decades include a preponderance of Patriotic public figures; it was, also, the Patriot politican Henry Flood who, in his testament, bequeathed funds to Trinity College towards the establishment of a professorial chair in Irish. Flood, moreover, stipulated that the first incumbent of that chair, ‘if he should be then living', was to be Charles Vallancey, the most celebrated antiquary of his day, whose enthusiasm was behind a multitude of scholarly initiatives: he was one of the founding members of the Royal Irish Academy, had started and conducted a scholarly review entitled Collectanea de rebus Hibemicis, and was a helpful patron to many men who, like Lanigan, O’Flanagan and others, had more learning than he but less financial security.
Vallancey’s name has by now become a by-word for hare-brained fancy. He read dictionaries as modern critics would read Finnegans wake, based elaborate theories on comparisons between languages of which he was utterly ignorant - Gaelic and Algonquin, or Gaelic and Chinese. He could blithely assert that the great Gaelic sixth-century legislator Cenn Faeladh was known in China under the [71] name of Confulus, erroneously rendered as Confucius. A modern reader may marvel that this man was regarded, by all but a few, as the leading antiquarian of his day; but on closer scrutiny the case appears less bizarre. Vallancey, after all, worked in a context where the central model of cultural antiquity was provided by the Old Testament. In that biblical context, it makes perfect sense to see kinship between Gaelic and Hebrew, or Gaelic and Chinese, since all linguistic difference dates back only to the Tower of Babel, and all the world’s nations are related in that all descend from the three sons of Noah: Shem, Ham and Japhet. The model was, to adopt a phrase from early ethnology, monogenist, tracing human diversity back to a single common origin. Etymology - the study of linguistic derivations and similarities - was conducted on a purely lexical basis: languages were seen simply as collections of individual words, which in turn were combinations of radical syllables; grammatical structures governing the morphology of word-formation were not taken into account. To demonstrate similarities between Gaelic, Hebrew and Chinese by reducing them to their constituent syllables was perfectly permissible and followed established linguistic practice; it was as if one could demonstrate architectural similarities between the Parthenon, the Alhambra and the Great Pyramid by reducing all three edifices to lookalike piles of rubble, mortar and broken stones. In that context, Vallancey’s fallacies become less idiosyncratic and less egregious, and his antiquarian heritage, which threw its shadow well into the nineteenth century, begins to warrant closer scrutiny.
According to the paradigm in which Vallancey worked, the nations of Northern Europe were all descended from Japhet, son of Noah (while as the Semitic nations and their languages were derived from Noah’s son Sem, and the black races were considered to be descendants of Noah’s son Ham). In particular, the European continent was held to have been populated by the offspring of Japhet’s progeny Gomer and Magog? The link between the prehistoric inhabitants of the British Isles (Scoti) and their biblical ancestor was often sought in the similarly-named Scythians mentioned by classical Greek sources. Thus, a model which we may call Scytho-Celtic was arrived at, which traced the Celtic Scoti back by way of the north and east European Scyths to, ultimately, Japhet and Noah. There were, however, variations on this model. Various antiquaries were convinced that the Celts had reached the British Isles, not through the heart of the European continent, but by the circuitous sea route leading from the Middle East to Carthage and pre-Roman Spain to the British Isles; and in order to bolster this model they could point out the evidence for ancient Phoenician tin trade mentioned by classical authors, as well as the version propounded by native sources: for the Lebor Gabala Erenn. followed by all native scholars including Keating, held that the original Gaelic ancestor to settle Ireland was Mil Easp;aacute;ine, the Spanish one, whose anchors had come to Spain by way of Egypt. Against the Scytho-Celtic model, then, was placed the Phoenician model - a debate in antiquarian linguistics that goes back as far as the mid-seventeenth-century confrontation between the Phoenician-oriented French scholar Samuel Bochart [73] (friend of Sir James Ware) and the Scytho-Celtic champion, the Dutch scholar Marcus Boxhom (who influenced Edward Lhuyd and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz).
In Irish antiquarian practice, a certain political flavour inhered in the choice of historical model. Those who took a positive interest in Irish antiquity, who relied on native amanuenses and were willing to envisage a prestigious, highly civilized origin for the country’s native inhabitants, tended to favour the Phoenician model; it was this school that had closest ties with the Patriotic element in public life (witness Flood’s choice of Vallancey for his endowed Trinity chair). More conservative, Anglocentric scholars who preferred to believe that Ireland was primordially a barbaric country where all traces of culture were introduced by outside influences such as the Vikings or the English, naturally rejected the Phoenician model and endorsed a Scytho-Celtic one. The main representative of this school was the Irish antiquary Ledwich, supported by British colleagues such as Pinkerton.
The decades between 1775 and 1800 saw increasingly vituperative altercations between the two schools. Ledwich and Vallancey, who originally had collaborated in Collectanea de rebus Hibernicis, began to use that forum to excoriate one another. The case of Ledwich is interesting. He exercised considerable critical sense in debunking Vallancey’s Phoenician fancies, but became every bit as heedless and headstrong when it came to expounding his own Viking-oriented ideas. Among the Irish Patriotic audience which took a sympathetic interest in the origins of their native country, Vallancey’s party (including in its ranks scholars like Sylvester O’Halloran and the somewhat more sedate Joseph Cooper Walker) kept the upper hand in the debate; in Britain, the Scytho-Celtic approach of Pinkerton and Whitaker was in the ascendant. In addition, a competing model should be mentioned which had some influence in the nineteenth century: the British antiquary Jacob Bryant published a massive book in 1775, reprinted in 1806, entitled Analysis of antient mythology. In its three weighty tomes Bryant drew up a Casaubon-style Key to All Mythologies and explained the cultures and religions of the Middle and Far East as vestiges of a Hamitic complex, derived from Noah’s third son Ham and reaching from ancient Egypt and Assyria to India, the defining characteristic of which was the worship of the serpent (or serpent’s egg) and of sexuality and fertility. Bryant called this cultural stratum ‘Cushite’ or ‘Cuthite’ after Ham’s son Cush.
Irish antiquarianism was plunged into a crisis by a combination of political and scholarly events. In scholarly terms, the rise of the Indo-European model exercised a considerable destabilizing influence on Irish speculations on the national origins, and in political terms, the rising of 1798 and the Union of 1800 placed the estimate of the national past under a great political mortgage. Conservative opinion saw in 1798 a re-enactment of the traumatic rebellion of 1641: a conclusive proof of the irredeemable barbarism of the native Irish. In the conservative view, Anglo-Irish Patriots were accused of culpably conniving, through their sympathy and laxity, with the disaffection of this nation which could obviously only be held under control by repressively authoritarian government. This conservative, [74] unionist backlash against the rebellious Gaels and their Patriotic fellow-travellers naturally embarrassed those antiquarians who had taken a rose-tinted interest in the exotic and interesting antiquity of the Gaels; it vindicated the negative estimates of Ledwich and Pinkerton and placed the entire Phoenician school under a cloud. J. C. Walker wrote to Pinkerton to confirm the latter’s malicious suspicion that Vallancey must [...] be hurt at the conduct of those whose champion he has been’, and could only offer the following limp defence of the embarrassed savant, which implausibly conflates moral character, ethnicity and linguistic knowledge:
the rebellion began amongst, and was for a considerable time confined to, the descendants of the English and other nations that settled in the counties of Dublin, Wicklow, and Wexford. I do not believe it would be possible to find one hundred or even fifty people in those three counties who understand and speak the Irish language. (Letter to Pinkerton, 31 Oct. 1798, in John Pinkerton, Lit. Corr., 2 vols. London 1830, Vol. 2, p.37.)
This makes more sense if we realize how strong the anti-English subtext was that ran through the Phoenician model. The presupposition was that ancient Ireland had had a native tradition of high civility, which was now lost owing to the violent destruction and wholesale ruin that was brought upon the country in modern times. In the opposition between civility and barbarism, the Anglo-centric view saw the Irish as savages and the English presence as a force of civility; the Phoenician hypothesis turned the tables, and predicated civility on the native Gaels while bracketing the English presence with the Viking spoliations, seeing them as violent disruptions. This implicit valorization was subliminally reinforced by the fact that the link between Phoenicia and Ireland was usually traced by way of Carthage, and that a similar pattern was detected in Carthaginian-Roman relations as in Irish-English ones. Thus, Vallancey (himself a general officer in the Engineers, a staunch member of the establishment and certainly not subversively anti-English) could write:
Almost all Carthaginian manuscripts were committed to the flames, and the History of this brave and learned People, has been written by their most bitter Enemies, the Greeks and Romans; in this too they resemble the Irish.
Indeed the pattern was imposed on all obscure parts of Gaelic pre-history: the Irish were successively derived from all the ousted races and lost civilizations in world history, whose names only entered the record as they encountered their overthrowers and vilifiers. Ultimately the line of descent is traced back from Phoenicia to the Holy Land, and Vallancey speculates that the Phoenicians (of whom Carthage was indeed a colony) were originally ‘in all probability [...] no other than the indigenae of the Land of Promise, the Chanaanites,’ driven thence by Joshua and his chosen people.
One may see why men like Ledwich, an ordained minister in the Established Church of Ireland, had strong reservations about such an approach to the irish [75] past; and one can see why it abruptly ceased to be fashionable after 1798. Irish history-writing in the opening decades of the nineteenth century on the whole steered clear of the airy realms of antiquarian speculation - the field was left to Ledwich, whose Antiquities of Ireland was reprinted in 1804, and to Walker, whose more pro-Gaelic Historical memoirs of the Irish bards was reprinted in 1808. Historians proper abandoned the late-eighteenth-century ambition to give philosophic accounts of Irish history and tended, in the opening years after the I Inion, to address the conflicts of the 1790s, to assess the causes and effects, the righls and the wrongs, of the United Irish rising and the enforced Act of Union. 13 The study of Gaelic antiquity fell under a cloud, lost its fashionableness in the salons of Dublin as that city itself, deprived of its metropolitan status and of its parliament, sank into provincialism.
A good indication to that effect is the sudden inertia of the Royal Irish Academy on the antiquarian front. It had produced six volumes of Transactions in the decade between 1787 and 1797, each of which included a section of antiquities, with contributions by Vallancey, O’Halloran, Walker and O’Flanagan among others. In contrast, the next six volumes, published over the period 1800-1815, had little or nothing of Irish interest in their antiquities sections, and although men like Caesar Otway and James Hardiman began to take up antiquarian topics again thereafter, the publication rate as a whole stagnated badly: only two additional volumes appeared between 1815 and 1828. Whatever did appear in these decades was reticent and matter-of-fact, dealing with the description of an archaeological finds, and deliberately refraining from wild theories about the prestigious or barbaric origin of the Gaels. Thus, Thomas Wood, in his essay, ‘On the mixture of fable and fact in the early annals of Ireland, and on the best mode of ascertaining what degree of credit the ancient documents are justly entitled to’, studiously avoided the very mention of a Phoenician or Vallanceyesque model, 14 and J.C. Walker concluded his essay, ‘On the origin of romantic fabling in lreland’, with the following disclaimer:
I might have urged the probability of the Irish bards being descendants of an Oriental colony; and inheriting, of course, the inventive faculties peculiar to the East; but I have studiously avoided every assertion, or conjecture, that could lead to controversy. I have no system to support.
But the Patriotic, orientalizing model of Irish antiquity, though not often openly propounded, was tenacious enough; significantly, though few antiquarians endorsed the now largely discredited Vallancey, they all shared an intense and openly expressed disgust with regard to Vallancey’s adversary Ledwich; indeed, it may he said that, whatever differences of opinion prevailed among antiquarians in the first half of the nineteenth century, they all concurred in excoriating Ledwich. Vallancey himself was still alive and did publish two additional volumes ol Collectanea de rebus Hibernicis, by now a highly eccentric one-man venture; he was occasionally championed against his critics, largely on the basis of his earlier charisma in the field of learning. In his ‘Remarks on the Irish language, with a [76] review of its grammars, vocabularies and dictionaries', James Scurry defended Vallancey against the strictures of EdwardO’Reilly.
This O’Reilly, in turn, was perhaps the most important Gaelic scholar prior John O’Donovan. He was amanuensis to the Ulster King of Arms, Sir William Betham, whose genealogical researches he assisted; his Gaelic studies among the most valuable of the early century. With O’Reilly, a tenuous tradition of native scholarship and antiquarian interest begins to reinvigorate the world of Anglo-Irish scholarship. The lberno-Cellic Society, of which he the assistant secretary and whose sole volume of Transactions he edited in 1820, was itself a revamped continuation of Theophilus O’Flanagan’s Gaelic Society of Dublin. But unlike the Gaelic Society, which had been modest in membership’s social standing, O’Reilly’s lberno-Ce!tic venture stood under august presidency of the Duke of Leinster, and its membership included, not only four former members of the Gaelic Society, but also eight peers, six baronets, two MPs and two Roman Catholic bishops.
The overall impression one gets from recorded activities and publications in years 1800-1825 is that a great deal of continuing antiquarian and cultural zeal still persisted among the Catholic and (lower-)middle class intellectuals (many of whom came from native hedge-school milieus), but that this interest could no longer count on the overt support and patronage of a Patriotic Anglo-Irish elite in the troubled political climate. Men like Theophilus O’Flanagan, Peter Connell, Edward O’Reilly and (in his early career) Owen Connellan had little official, prestigious backing for their Gaelic expertise, and the great number ol language primers and grammars that were produced in this time were much more modest in presentation than Vallancey’s Grammar of the Iberno-Celtic or Irish Language of 1773. They were practical grammars rather than scholarly linguistic analyses, aimed for everyday usage rather than academic consultation; Paul O’Brien’s Grammar was a textbook for his courses at Maynooth. With the person O’Reilly, however, we see how Irish learning, linguistic and antiquarian knowledge slowly regained a degree of social acceptance.
This process was helped by the high reputation of a few native, Catholic scholars who in spite of their religious disadvantage had managed to carve out a respectable scholarly career for themselves: Lanigan, author of the well-regarded Ecclesiastical History of Ireland (1822) or the great archivist Dr Charles O’Conoi, whose massive conspectus Rerum Hibemicarum scriptores veteres, published in 1814, was never mentioned but in awe - and rightly so, as in discussing important
manuscript sources it lay the very foundation for later scholarship in Gaelic philology and ancient history. There was also the less academic, but very widespread influence of the hugely successful Irish melodies, in which Thomas Moore recalled the romance of bygone Gaeldom in numbers appearing, successively, in 1808, 1810, 1811, 1815, 1818, 1821, 1824 and 1834 (a collected on first appearing in 1820). Moore himself showed considerable antiquarian interest in his choice of topics, and handsomely acknowledged the work ofO’Flanagan in a note accompanying the song “Avenging and Bright”, which was based on the story of Deirdre and the sons of Usnach - first made available to the English-speaking world inO’Flanagan’s translation as published in the Transactions of the Gaelic Society of 1808. Moore concluded his source references with the remark, “Whatever may be thought of thse sanguine claims to antiquity, which mr.O’Flanagan and others advance for the literature of Ireland, it would be a very lasting reproach upon our nationality, if the Gaelic researches of this gentleman did not meet with all the liberal encouragement they merit.’O’Flanagan’s Deirdre edition also appeared as part of Ferguson’s Hibernian Nights' Entertainments and spark off all subsequent interest in the Deirdre theme from Standish O’Grady to Synge. |