“Tuatha De Danaan”

“Midir and Etain”

“The Children of Lir”

“Cuchulain and Ferdia”

“Deirdre of the Sorrows”

“The Boyhood of Finn”

“Oisin in Tir na nOg” [Land of Youth]

[ This folder contains sundry commentaries on Irish Mythology and manuscript culture written by leading Irish scholars. Those given with asterisks (*) are highly recommended and sure to please. ]

   —, The Celtic Realms (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson 1967) - Part II [Chap. 2]: “History and Geography of the British Isles”.

*   —, The Celtic Realms (London: W&N 1967) - Part III [Chap. 7]: Celtic Religion and Mythology and the [...] Otherworld”.

    —, Introduction to the Irish Sagas, adapted by Bruce Stewart for RICORSO from a radio talk of 1959.

*    —, “The Wooing of Etain [Tochmarc Étaíne]’, a radio talk of 1959 (adapted for RICORSO by Bruce Stewart).

    —, “Latin Writing in Ireland’, in Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, ed. Seamus Deane (Derry: Field Day Co 1991).

*Séamus Mac Mathona, “Paganism and Society in Early Ireland”, in Irish Writers and Religion, ed. Robert Welch (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1992).

“Archaelogy” - dealing with the ethnic and cultural history of Early Ireland

“Cuchullain” [hero of the Ulster Cycle]

“Divisions” [the system of five-fold division in Ireland]

“Fionn Mac Cumhaill / Finn McCool” [hero of the Fionn Cycle]

“Irish Mythology” [belief-system of the insular Celts]

“Lughnasa” [feast day dedicated to the god Lugh]

“Ulster Cycle” [Ulster Cycle]

“The Celts”

“Celtic Language”

Translations of the Irish myths found if the few surviving manuscripts such as 12th-century The Book of Leinster and the 14th-century Yellow Book of Lecan (Leabhar na hUidre) - both late copies of earlier compilations which may have been made before the Viking invasion - began to come out in scholarly editions from the mid-nineteenth century. Romanticised abbreviations of them by author such as James Standish O”Grady, promoting the “Heroic History” of Ireland, followed in the 1880s and 1890s. In 1902 Lady Gregory, one of the founders of the Irish Literary Revival - though herself an Anglo-Irish aristocrat - translated the tales of the Ulster Cycle revolving around Cuchulainn and those of the Mythological Cycle - revolving around Fionn Mac Cumhall - as Cuchulainn of Muirthemne (1902) and Gods and Fighting Men (1904) respectively. The style of English which she employed for the translation was called Kiltartanese after the dialect of Hiberno-English spoken by the common people on her own estate at Coole Park in Co. Galway.

Interesting and attractive as her work is, it is not modern in the sense of sharing the habits of speech of modern readers - indeed, it demands that we accept a highly-rafted dialect as the proper language of the literature in question. It is easy to see that this is not the case and that she was, in fact, engaged him her own project or equating Irish myth and legend with the folklore records whcih she took among the peasantry of the West of Ireland - and which therefore reflect her infatuation with a particular Hiberno-English pattern of expression. Aside from that, she is inevitably guilty of a high degree of Victorian Romanticism and, indeed, her Cuchulain was written in the last year of Queen Victoria’s life. For the modern reader, therefore, the translation-version by Marie Heaney (1994) - which is really a rewrite of the story in various English versions - is much more approachable. It sounds like a modern story-teller, perhaps on a radio broadcast. Another more strenuous rendition of the Gaelic material exists in the form of the translation made by the distinguished poet Thomas Kinsella (1928-2019) with illustrations by Louis le Brocquy which have been reproduced on these pages. Kinsella”s translation is noted for the rawness with which he follows the original phrases in order to capture their original poetic force but is not easily readable in a second-language context. It is therefore Marie Heaneyְs version which we will use as the standard translation for our course. Accordingly, I have divided the index between passages translated by Lady Gregory and Marie Heaney for comparison, if you wish.

The pages from Marie Heaney are digitally scanned while those from Lady Gregory are given in text-form. A full copy of Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902) is also given here but text and file are both unusually large (i.e., 335pp. or 255KB). A similar version of Gods and Fighting Men (1904) is available at on the Sacred Texts website but it is not copied full here. You can find it at Sacred Texts [online] or in another digital edition formatted for various applications including Kindle at Gutenberg Project [online].

A beautiful dignity hangs over Irish mythology, an orderliness, a sense of fitness. All the gods are beautifully dressed and most are of startlingly beautiful appearance. It is only by contrast with other mythologies that we realize that the ‘land of promise’ contains little that is ugly. There is no sin and no punishment. There are few monsters, nothing to cause alarm, not even extremes of climate. There is no serious warfare, no lasting strife. Those who die, or who are lured away to the Land of Promise, the land of the young, leave for an idealized existence, amid beauty, perpetual youth, and goodwill. The heathen Irish erected a spirituality - a spiritual loveliness which comes close to an ideal spiritual existence. [...; &c.]

Séamus Mac Mathona, ‘Paganism and Society in Early Ireland’, in Irish Writers and Religion, ed. Robert Welch (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1992)

[...]
Since pagan Irish religion was animistic in nature, it is not surprising to find that there were strong cults of sacred animals, and of rivers, lakes and wells. These latter were deemed to be either gods or goddesses, or to contain a sacred presence. The Boyne river (Boand in Irish), for example, is derivable from bou-vindá, which means ‘cow-white (goddess)’. Boand plays an important role in mythological tales. She is the mate of Nechtan, (or Nuadu Necht), who is identical with the fisher god Nodens of early Britain. Nechtan may also be compared with the Roman water-god Neptunus. As Mircea Eliade has pointed out, cults of rivers, lakes and wells are based ultimately on the sacredness of water. Water gives life and strength; it aids fertility, it purifies, it cures illness, and it continually renews itself. [13] Little wonder that it was considered to be the manifestation of the sacred.
[...]
The túath (pl. túatha), petty kingdom, was the basic political and territorial unit: it designates both the people and the territory ruled by a king (rí). According to F. J. Byrne, there were about 150 túatha in the country at any given time between the fifth and the twelfth centuries. [22] It is stated in one law-text that no tuath was properly constituted unless it had an ecclesiastical scholar, a cleric, a poet and a king. [23] Society was tribal in that the king of the tuath (rí túaithe) was the ‘true’ king, and that people, with the exception of the learned classes, had no legal standing outside their own túath; it was not tribal in the sense that this infers distinct religious and cultural differences between túatha. As regards the hierarchical or stratified nature of society, it was divided into three classes corresponding roughly to king, lords and commons  -  in Irish, rí, flatha and bó-airig. This tripartite division is found in other Indo-European societies. It corresponds to Caesar’s division of Gaulish society into druides, equites and plebs, and to the Indian classification into brahmans (priests), ksatriyas (warriors) and vaishyas (farmers). Classical accounts of Gaulish society, most of which are based on that of the Stoic ethnographer Posidonius of Apamea, make a further tripartite division of the learned classes into Vates (seers/poets), bardoi (bards) and druides (druids). Vates corresponds etymologically to Ir. fáith (pl. fátha), bardoi to Ir. bard (pl. baird), and druides to Ir. druí (pl. druíd). By the time the Old Irish laws were written, the fili (pl. filid) ‘poet, seer’, is the dominant member of the learned classes, having taken over many of the functions of the others.

Marie Heaney, Over Nine Waves: A Book of Irish Legends (London: Faber & Faber 1994). Preface

[...] I have already mentioned the antiquity of these stories but it is not their historical or mythological value that gives them their significance and interest. Indeed it is almost the reverse. What ensures their place in world literature is their agelessness, their value as expressions of the perennial art of the storyteller. The societies and traditions that these stories reflect have long gone, but the characters from them, the heroes, the tyrants, the troublemakers, the passionate headstrong women and men have survived.’