Early Bardic Literature, Ireland.
O'Grady, Standish, 1846-1928
English
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EARLY BARDIC LITERATURE, IRELAND.
by
Standish O'Grady
11 Lower Fitzwilliam Street, Dublin
Scattered over the surface of every country in Europe may be found
sepulchral monuments, the remains of pre-historic times and
nations, and of a phase of life will civilisation which has long
since passed away. No country in Europe is without its cromlechs
and dolmens, huge earthen tumuli, great flagged sepulchres, and
enclosures of tall pillar-stones. The men by whom these works were
made, so interesting in themselves, and so different from anything
of the kind erected since, were not strangers and aliens, but our
own ancestors, and out of their rude civilisation our own has
slowly grown. Of that elder phase of European civilisation no
record or tradition has been anywhere bequeathed to us. Of its
nature, and the ideas and sentiments whereby it was sustained,
nought may now be learned save by an examination of those tombs
themselves, and of the dumb remnants, from time to time exhumed out
of their soil--rude instruments of clay, flint, brass, and gold,
and by speculations and reasonings founded upon these archaeological
gleanings, meagre and sapless.
For after the explorer has broken up, certainly desecrated, and
perhaps destroyed, those noble sepulchral raths; after he has
disinterred the bones laid there once by pious hands, and the urn
with its unrecognisable ashes of king or warrior, and by the
industrious labour of years hoarded his fruitless treasure of stone
celt and arrow-head, of brazen sword and gold fibula and torque;
and after the savant has rammed many skulls with sawdust, measuring
their capacity, and has adorned them with some obscure label, and
has tabulated and arranged the implements and decorations of flint
and metal in the glazed cases of the cold gaunt museum, the
imagination, unsatisfied and revolted, shrinks back from all that
he has done. Still we continue to inquire, receiving from him no
adequate response, Who were those ancient chieftains and warriors
for whom an affectionate people raised those strange tombs? What
life did they lead? What deeds perform? How did their personality
affect the minds of their people and posterity? How did our
ancestors look upon those great tombs, certainly not reared to be
forgotten, and how did they--those huge monumental pebbles and
swelling raths--enter into and affect the civilisation or religion
of the times?
We see the cromlech with its massive slab and immense supporting
pillars, but we vainly endeavour to imagine for whom it was first
erected, and how that greater than cyclopean house affected the
minds of those who made it, or those who were reared in its
neighbourhood or within reach of its influence. We see the stone
cist with its great smooth flags, the rocky cairn, and huge barrow
and massive walled cathair, but the interest which they invariably
excite is only aroused to subside again unsatisfied. From this
department of European antiquities the historian retires baffled,
and the dry savant is alone master of the field, but a field which,
as cultivated by him alone, remains barren or fertile only in
things the reverse of exhilarating. An antiquarian museum is more
melancholy than a tomb.
But there is one country in Europe in which, by virtue of a
marvellous strength and tenacity of the historical intellect, and
of filial devotedness to the memory of their ancestors, there have
been preserved down into the early phases of mediaeval civilisation,
and then committed to the sure guardianship of manuscript, the hymns,
ballads, stories, and chronicles, the names, pedigrees, achievements,
and even characters, of those ancient kings and warriors over whom
those massive cromlechs were erected and great cairns piled. There
is not a conspicuous sepulchral monument in Ireland, the traditional
history of which is not recorded in our ancient literature, and of
the heroes in whose honour they were raised. In the rest of Europe
there is not a single barrow, dolmen, or cist of which the ancient
traditional history is recorded; in Ireland there is hardly one
of which it is not. And these histories are in many cases as rich
and circumstantial as that of men of the greatest eminence who have
lived in modern times. Granted that the imagination which for
centuries followed with eager interest the lives of these heroes,
beheld as gigantic what was not so, as romantic and heroic what was
neither one nor the other, still the great fact remains, that it
was beside and in connection with the mounds and cairns that this
history was elaborated, and elaborated concerning them and
concerning the heroes to whom they were sacred.
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