The Myths,
Legends,
and Lore of
Ireland
101 THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW
ABOUT THE EMERALD ISLE
RYAN HACKNEY AND AMY HACKNEY BLACKWELL
WITH TECHNICAL REVIEW BY GARLAND KIMMER, PHD
Contents
Introduction
PART ONE: PREHISTORY AND MYTHOLOGY OF ANCIENT IRELAND
1. The Earliest Inhabitants
2. Mesolithic Age and the First Farmers
3. Legends and Archaeology
4. The Bronze Age
5. Iron Comes to Ireland
6. Who Were the Celts and Kings?
7. Gaelic and Indo-European Languages
8. Celtic Ireland
9. Wild and Crazy Heroes
10. The Seat of Ancient Kings
11. Brehon Laws
12. The Celtic Class System
13. The Learned: Druids
14. Celtic Art and Poetry
15. Celtic to the End: The Never Conquered Nation
16. The Celtic Pantheon
17. The Otherworld
18. Celtic Festivals
19. Creation Myths
20. The Battles of Magh Tuiredh and the Invasions of Milesians
21. The Tain
22. The Heroic Deeds of Cuchulain
23. Conchobar and Deirdre
24. Finn MacCool
PART TWO: THE ARRIVAL OF CHRISTIANITY (AND THE BRITISH, TOO!)
25. Christianity Arrives
26. Who Was St. Patrick?
28. St. Columcille, Felonious Monk
29. St. Columbanus, Missionary to Europe
30. Wild and Crazy Irish Saints
31. Irish Blend: Christian Traditions
32. Monasteries in Ireland
33. Schools and Universities
34. The Pre-Xerox Age: A Life of Copying
35. The Book of Kells
36. The Rise and Fall of Irish Dynasties
37. Anglo-Saxons in Britain
38. Bring On the Vikings
39. Dublin Is Founded
40. Life with Vikings
41. What Would Brian Boru Do?
42. An Ireland Unified
43. The Normans Are Here!
44. The Irish Strike Back
45. I’m Henry VIII, I Am: Tudor Colonization
46. The Protestant Reformation
47. Elizabeth I’s Reign
48. The 1641 Rebellion and Oliver Cromwell
49. The Williamite War
50. Protestants Take Hold
51. Catholic Life
52. The Second City of the British Empire
53. Protestant Irish Nationalism
54. Wolfe Tone’s Rebellion
55. Hasta La Vista, Baby: Daniel O’ Connell, the Liberator
56. Catholic Emancipation
PART THREE: PRESERVING IRISH CULTURE AND HISTORY
57. Before the Reformation
58. Ireland’s Counter-Reformation
59. Religious Tensions in the North
60. Modern Catholicism
61. Scandals in the Church
62. Traditional Irish Life
63. Irish Language
64. Irish Music
65. Before There Was Riverdance . . .
66. Death and the Supernatural
67. Irish Sports
68. Rich Folklore and Heritage
69. Potatoes, for Better or Worse
70. Life During the Famine
71. Help! Responses to the Famine
72. Results of the Famine
PART FOUR: EMIGRATION TO MODERN LIFE
73. Why the Irish Left — and Where They Went
74. The Hardships of Emigration
75. The Immigrant Experience in the United States
76. Irish Communities in Other Lands
77. The Rebirth of Nationalism (Meanwhile, Back in Ireland . . . )
78. The Home Rule Party
79. A Celtic Revival
80. An Ireland Divided
81. World War I and the Easter Rebellion
82. War of Independence
83. Irish Civil War
84. Irish Free State
85. De Valera and the Fianna Fáil Path
86. World War II
87. A New Republic
88. Trouble in the North
89. Sunday, Bloody Sunday
90. The Peace Process
91. The Good Friday Agreement
92. Ireland’s Celtic Tiger
93. Ireland and the European Union
94. Modern Irish Politics
95. The Liberalization of Ireland
96. Women’s Rights
97. Family Life
98. Irish Food: Potatoes, Beef, and More Potatoes — and a Cuppa!
99. For the Love of Irish Beer and Whiskey
100. Irish Contributions to Literature and Art
101. Tracing Your Roots
Appendix B: Irish Proverbs and Blessings
Copyright
Introduction
Ireland is an island that transcends both its geographical and political boundaries. This transcendence has not occurred because of either a powerful military or economic presence. It has, in fact, occurred despite the notable lack of either. Instead, Ireland can be found on every continent through the memories, stories, and dreams of the immigrants, exiles, and friends who treasure Irish culture. Recent population statistics show just over 4.2 million citizens in the Republic of Ireland, while counting the numbers of Irish expatriates presents a much larger, more complex problem. Numbers range as high as 80 million Irish émigrés, a figure that suggests that Irishness exists as prominently metaphorically and spiritually as literally.
Perhaps more than any other culture, Ireland lives with the fundamental tension between its past and its present, between tradition and change, in the foreground of its everyday existence. The Ireland of today is simultaneously the same and very different from the Ireland of my first visit in 1987. That summer, I spent time in Dublin, Sligo, and Galway. I was making a tour of Ireland’s recent literary past, and it was easy to believe that Ireland’s past was more alive and vibrant than its present.
Just a couple of years later, Mary Robinson became Ireland’s seventh president. If that office has traditionally been symbolic, Robinson turned both the symbolism and the role of the office on end. Her tenure underscores Ireland’s seemingly split personality. It is a culture that values tradition and history yet is not afraid to adapt and develop. Aside from being the first elected President to not have the support of Fianna Fáil and Ireland’s first female President, Robinson shifted the ground rules for the office — which you’ll learn about in this book. Moreover, she took Ireland onto the international stage more powerfully than ever before by becoming the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights. She advocated powerfully for human rights out of the Ireland’s historic relationships with its more powerful neighbors.
In Irish letters, this difficult and at times diffident relationship between past and present lingered throughout the twentieth century. James Joyce worried that this was the case when he described Dublin as the center of Ireland’s paralysis in a letter to his publisher. Joyce found his vision of Dublin at a remove, writing in France and Switzerland to create in Dublin the quintessential setting for exploring the tensions between group and individual identity. This thematic tension dates back to early Celtic culture in Ireland, where existence outside the tribe was unthinkable.
Like Joyce, both W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney are
intimately aware of their interactions with the historical (or perhaps prehistorical) role of the Irish poet. Poets possessed a power and prestige that allowed them to exist outside of the tribe and to move freely from place to place. Yeats’s term as a senator in the 1920s hints at the prestige attached to men of letters that persisted into the twentieth century and beyond. Heaney’s self-described status as an “artful voyeur” in “Punishment,” a poem that works as allegory for the Troubles in the North, serves as a reminder of the poet’s historical role as both chronicler of and outsider to the tribe.
The constant awareness of how Ireland’s epic, mythological past maintains itself into the present comes sharply into focus in the following pages: The Myths, Legends, and Lore of Ireland can give you a start to learning about Irish history and heritage, but there is so much more to learn. This book brings you into Ireland thousands of years ago and leaves you in the present.
— Garland Kimmer, PhD
Part 1
Prehistory and Mythology of Ancient Ireland
Ireland is an island with a past. People lived there for millennia before anyone started recording history, and they left their mark on the landscape — standing stones, odd-looking structures, great mounds of earth. The presence of so many prehistoric remains, a lot of which are pre-Celtic, ties Ireland’s past to its present. Celtic culture is everywhere in Ireland, from the stone-crosses in the countryside to patterns knit into wool sweaters. The influence of the Celts is remarkable, considering how little is actually known about them.
1 { The Earliest Inhabitants
Compared with the European mainland, Ireland hasn’t been inhabited for very long. Africa, the Middle East, and central Europe have all housed humans for hundreds of thousands of years, and there is evidence of humans in England going back at least 250,000 years. But it was only about 9,000 years ago that anyone ventured to the Emerald Isle. Why was this? One word: ice.
Ireland was covered with ice for a very long time. It had few plants, and the only animals who lived there were creatures that preferred snow and ice, such as reindeer, woolly mammoths, and the spectacular Irish giant deer. The temperature fluctuated, but mostly just in variations on the same theme of cold.
About 13,000 years ago, the ice finally started to recede, and Ireland warmed up. This was bad for some of the larger mammals, which became extinct, but it was good for smaller creatures and plants. No one knows for sure how Ireland’s wildlife got there; maybe it floated across the Irish Sea, or maybe there was a temporary bridge of land between Ireland and what is now called England. In any case, by about 5000 B.C.E. Ireland was covered with forests and full of wild beasts.
2 { Mesolithic Age and the First Farmers
These conditions made Ireland even more attractive to humans. The early settlers did not leave behind much information about themselves. Mostly, archaeologists have found stone tools — things like axes, knives, and scrapers. People used these tools to chop plants or skin animals. Ireland is full of these stone tools, many of which have been picked up by amateur collectors.
Flint is one of the best stones for tool making, and the best flint in Ireland is in the northeastern corner. And that’s where most of Ireland’s stone tools have been found — in Antrim, Down, and the Strangford Lough area. One of the best Mesolithic sites is Mount Sandel in County Derry, where archaeologists have found the remains of several little dome-shaped huts, built there between 7010 and 6490 B.C.E. Here, people lived, huddled around their fires, eating nuts, berries, pigs, birds, and fish.
The Mesolithic Period, also known as the Middle Stone Age, lasted for several thousand years. Stone technology did not change much during this time. People lived a fairly migratory existence, moving around in pursuit of plants and animals. Around 4000 B.C.E., things changed. People began to grow food and make pottery. They cleared forests for their fields and built more permanent settlements. Archaeologists call this new period the Neolithic Period, or New Stone Age.
It’s possible that the Mesolithic Irish developed this new technology on their own, but it’s more likely that these changes came over the ocean with new immigrants. The newcomers either conquered the people already living there, or, more likely, they just assimilated them, intermarrying and sharing techniques for making tools and growing food. This assimilation worked in both directions. It brought new things while keeping the old, and this layering was vital to Irish culture later.
Neolithic people built their houses out of wood. These houses have mostly decayed, but their foundations are still visible. Archaeologists have also found lots of new tools for grinding wheat and a huge number of polished stone axes made from a stone called porcellanite.
3 { Legends and Archaeology
Stone Age people built a lot of tombs or tomblike structures out of gigantic rocks covered with mounds of earth; this building technique makes the tombs look like big, grassy mushrooms from the outside. These ancient tombs continue to intrigue people today; there are so many of them all over the landscape, they’re hard to miss.
The megalithic tombs were probably constructed shortly before the arrival of the Celts, who called them fairy mounds and believed that the spirits of ancient people — bold heroes and brave maidens — lived there. The Celtic creator gods, the Tuatha Dé Danann, were known to be fabulously good at building things, and perhaps it was they who constructed the tombs dotting the countryside.
Eventually, the spirits inhabiting the fairy mounds transformed into the little people of later Irish legends — leprechauns and fairies and brownies, whose spirits are said to haunt the land.
Many of these tombs are called passage tombs because they contain passages leading to burial chambers underneath the mound. The walls of the passage and chamber are made of rock that is often elaborately carved.
Court tombs, or cairns, have an open, roofless courtyard in front leading into two, three, or four chambers at back. Archaeologists have found human remains in them but think that they might originally have been built as temples. They tend to be evenly distributed about 3 miles apart instead of clustered like graves; generally structures that are spaced like that are places of worship, but there’s no way to tell for sure how people used them.
Wedge tombs also occur primarily in the northern part of Ireland. These tombs have stone walls and roofs; the roof gets lower and the passage narrower as one goes into the tomb, hence the name wedge. Most of them face west or southwest, toward the setting sun.
Wedge tombs are numerous; there are about 500 of them all over the northern part of the country, although some can be found on Ireland’s eastern coastline. The ones that have been excavated contain human remains, and some contain pottery, which suggests that they were made toward the end of the Neolithic period. Labbacallee (“Hag’s Bed”), in County Cork, is an excellent wedge tomb. It got its strange name because it contained the skeleton of a headless woman when it was first opened.
Portal tombs, also called dolmens, consist of several large upright stones topped by a giant capstone. Putting these rocks in place must have been a stupendous effort — some capstones weigh as much as 100 tons. These dolmens were originally surrounded by mounds of earth, and people were buried inside them. A giant dolmen at Poulnabrone, County Clare, had more than twenty people buried in it over a 600-year period; this might mean that only royalty was buried there. There are dolmens all over Ireland, as well as in Wales and Cornwall. The Kilclooney More dolmen in County Donegal is particularly cool — its capstone is almost 14 feet long.
Some of the most spectacular archaeological sites from the Neolithic period are in the Boyne Valley in County Meath. These sites are called Brú na Bóinne, which means “Boyne Palace.” They consist of large stone tombs built around 3200 B.C.E., several centuries before the great pyramids of Egypt. The three main components of this site are Newgrange, Knowth, and Dowth.
People have known about these tombs for centuries; Vikings plundered them, while Victorians hunted treasures there and carved their in
itials on the walls. The sites gradually deteriorated and were even quarried at one point. The Republic of Ireland has become very interested in its history, however, and consequently, the tombs have been extensively restored.
The tombs at Newgrange are built inside a huge, grassy mound of earth. The stones at the entrance and some of the stones holding the tomb together are elaborately carved with spirals.