Gods and Fighting Men by Lady I. A Gregory (portable ebook reader txt) 📕

PREFACE

I

 

A few months ago I was on the bare Hill of Allen, "wide Almhuin of

Leinster," where Finn and the Fianna lived, according to the stories,

although there are no earthen mounds there like those that mark the

sites of old buildings on so many hills. A hot sun beat down upon

flowering gorse and flowerless heather; and on every side except the

east, where there were green trees and distant hills, one saw a level

horizon and brown boglands with a few green places and here and there

the glitter of water. One could imagine that had it been twilight and

not early afternoon, and had there been vapours drifting and frothing

where there were now but shadows of clouds, it would have set stirring

in one, as few places even in Ireland can, a thought that is peculiar to

Celtic romance, as I think, a thought of a mystery coming not as with

Gothic nations out of the pressure of darkness, but out of great spaces

and windy light. The hill of Teamhair, or Tara, as it is now called,

with its green mounds and its partly wooded sides, and its more gradual

slope set among fat grazing lands, with great trees in the hedgerows,

had brought before one imaginations, not of heroes who were in their

youth for hundreds of years, or of women who came to them in the

likeness of hunted fawns, but of kings that lived brief and politic

lives, and of the five white roads that carried their armies to the

lesser kingdoms of Ireland, or brought to the great fair that had given

Teamhair its sovereignty, all that sought justice or pleasure or had

goods to barter.

 

 

II

 

It is certain that we must not confuse these kings, as did the mediaeval

chroniclers, with those half-divine kings of Almhuin. The chroniclers,

perhaps because they loved tradition too well to cast out utterly much

that they dreaded as Christians, and perhaps because popular imagination

had begun the mixture, have mixed one with another ingeniously, making

Finn the head of a kind of Militia under Cormac MacArt, who is supposed

to have reigned at Teamhair in the second century, and making Grania,

who travels to enchanted houses under the cloak of Angus, god of Love,

and keeps her troubling beauty longer than did Helen hers, Cormac's

daughter, and giving the stories of the Fianna, although the impossible

has thrust its proud finger into them all, a curious air of precise

history. It is only when one separates the stories from that mediaeval

pedantry, as in this book, that one recognises one of the oldest worlds

that man has imagined, an older world certainly than one finds in the

stories of Cuchulain, who lived, according to the chroniclers, about the

time of the birth of Christ. They are far better known, and one may be

certain of the antiquity of incidents that are known in one form or

another to every Gaelic-speaking countryman in Ireland or in the

Highlands of Scotland. Sometimes a labourer digging near to a cromlech,

or Bed of Diarmuid and Crania as it is called, will tell one a tradition

that seems older and more barbaric than any description of their

adventures or of themselves in written text or story that has taken form

in the mouths of professed story-tellers. Finn and the Fianna found

welcome among the court poets later than did Cuchulain; and one finds

memories of Danish invasions and standing armies mixed with the

imaginations of hunters and solitary fighters among great woods. One

never hears of Cuchulain delighting in the hunt or in woodland things;

and one imagines that the story-teller would have thought it unworthy in

so great a man, who lived a well-ordered, elaborate life, and had his

chariot and his chariot-driver and his barley-fed horses to delight in.

If he is in the woods before dawn one is not told that he cannot know

the leaves of the hazel from the leaves of the oak; and when Emer

laments him no wild creature comes into her thoughts but the cuckoo that

cries over cultivated fields. His story must have come out of a time

when the wild wood was giving way to pasture and tillage, and men had no

longer a reason to consider every cry of the birds or change of the

night. Finn, who was always in the woods, whose battles were but hours

amid years of hunting, delighted in the "cackling of ducks from the Lake

of the Three Narrows; the scolding talk of the blackbird of Doire an

Cairn; the bellowing of the ox from the Valley of the Berries; the

whistle of the eagle from the Valley of Victories or from the rough

branches of the Ridge of the Stream; the grouse of the heather of

Cruachan; the call of the otter of Druim re Coir." When sorrow comes

upon the queens of the stories, they have sympathy for the wild birds

and beasts that are like themselves: "Credhe wife of Cael came with the

others and went looking through the bodies for her comely comrade, and

crying as she went. And as she was searching she saw a crane of the

meadows and her two nestlings, and the cunning beast the fox watching

the nestlings; and when the crane covered one of the birds to save it,

he would make a rush at the other bird, the way she had to stretch

herself out over the birds; and she would sooner have got her own death

by the fox than the nestlings to be killed by him. And Credhe was

looking at that, and she said: 'It is no wonder I to have such love for

my comely sweetheart, and the bird in that distress about her

nestlings.'"

 

 

III

 

One often hears of a horse that shivers with terror, or of a dog that

howls at something a man's eyes cannot see, and men who live primitive

lives where instinct does the work of reason are fully conscious of many

things that we cannot perceive at all. As life becomes more orderly,

more deliberate, the supernatural world sinks farther away. Although the

gods come to Cuchulain, and although he is the son of one of the

greatest of them, their country and his are far apart, and they come to

him as god to mortal; but Finn is their equal. He is continually in

their houses; he meets with Bodb Dearg, and Angus, and Manannan, now as

friend with friend, now as with an enemy he overcomes in battle; and

when he has need of their help his messenger can say: "There is not a

king's son or a prince, or a leader of the Fianna of Ireland, without

having a wife or a mother or a foster-mother or a sweetheart of the

Tuatha de Danaan." When the Fianna are broken up at last, after hundreds

of years of hunting, it is doubtful that he dies at all, and certain

that he comes again in some other shape, and Oisin, his son, is made

king over a divine country. The birds and beasts that cross his path in

the woods have been fighting men or great enchanters or fair women, and

in a moment can take some beautiful or terrible shape. One thinks of him

and of his people as great-bodied men with large movements, that seem,

as it were, flowing out of some deep below the narrow stream of personal

impulse, men that have broad brows and quiet eyes full of confidence in

a good luck that proves every day afresh that they are a portion of the

strength of things. They are hardly so much individual men as portions

of universal nature, like the clouds that shape themselves and re-shape

themselves momentarily, or like a bird between two boughs, or like the

gods that have given the apples and the nuts; and yet this but brings

them the nearer to us, for we can remake them in our image when we will,

and the woods are the more beautiful for the thought. Do we not always

fancy hunters to be something like this, and is not that why we think

them poetical when we meet them of a sudden, as in these lines in

"Pauline":

 

                            "An old hunter

   Talking with gods; or a nigh-crested chief

   Sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos"

 

 

IV

 

One must not expect in these stories the epic lineaments, the many

incidents, woven into one great event of, let us say, the story of the

War for the Brown Bull of Cuailgne, or that of the last gathering at

Muirthemne. Even Diarmuid and Grania, which is a long story, has nothing

of the clear outlines of Deirdre, and is indeed but a succession of

detached episodes. The men who imagined the Fianna had the imagination

of children, and as soon as they had invented one wonder, heaped another

on top of it. Children--or, at any rate, it is so I remember my own

childhood--do not understand large design, and they delight in little

shut-in places where they can play at houses more than in great expanses

where a country-side takes, as it were, the impression of a thought. The

wild creatures and the green things are more to them than to us, for

they creep towards our light by little holes and crevices. When they

imagine a country for themselves, it is always a country where one can

wander without aim, and where one can never know from one place what

another will be like, or know from the one day's adventure what may meet

one with to-morrow's sun. I have wished to become a child again that I

might find this book, that not only tells one of such a country, but is

fuller than any other book that tells of heroic life, of the childhood

that is in all folk-lore, dearer to me than all the books of the western

world.

 

Children play at being great and wonderful people, at the ambitions

they will put away for one reason or another before they grow into

ordinary men and women. Mankind as a whole had a like dream once;

everybody and nobody built up the dream bit by bit, and the ancient

story-tellers are there to make us remember what mankind would have been

like, had not fear and the failing will and the laws of nature tripped

up its heels. The Fianna and their like are themselves so full of power,

and they are set in a world so fluctuating and dream-like, that nothing

can hold them from being all that the heart desires.

 

I have read in a fabulous book that Adam had but to imagine a bird, and

it was born into life, and that he created all things out of himself by

nothing more important than an unflagging fancy; and heroes who can make

a ship out of a shaving have but little less of the divine prerogatives.

They have no speculative thoughts to wander through eternity and waste

heroic blood; but how could that be otherwise, for it is at all times

the proud angels who sit thinking upon the hill-side and not the people

of Eden. One morning we meet them hunting a stag that is "as joyful as

the leaves of a tree in summer-time"; and whatever they do, whether they

listen to the harp or follow an enchanter over-sea, they do for the sake

of joy, their joy in one another, or their joy in pride and movement;

and even their battles are fought more because of their delight in a

good fighter than because of any gain that is in victory. They live

always as if they were playing a game; and so far as they have any

deliberate purpose at all, it is that they may become great gentlemen

and be worthy of the songs of poets. It has been said, and I think the

Japanese were the first to say it, that the four essential virtues are

to be generous among the weak, and truthful among one's friends, and

brave among one's enemies, and courteous at all times; and if we

understand by courtesy not merely the gentleness the story-tellers have

celebrated, but a delight in courtly things, in beautiful clothing and

in beautiful verse, one understands that it was no formal succession of

trials that bound the Fianna to one another. Only the Table Round, that

is indeed, as it seems, a rivulet from the same river, is bound in a

like fellowship, and there the four heroic virtues are troubled by the

abstract virtues of the cloister. Every now and then some noble knight

builds himself a cell upon the hill-side, or leaves kind women