Abundant river, abundant in water!
Fish-abounding lake!
It was what Amargin the Druid sang, when the Gael first came into Ireland. Here is the story of their coming:--
------ * The stories told in this and the following lecture, and the translations of Irish poems, etc., are taken from Mr. T.W.
Rollertone"s delightful _Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race,_ or from M. de Jubainville"s _Irish Mythological Cycle,_ translated and published in Dublin in the "nineties.
Bregon built a tower in Spain. He had a son named Ith; and one fine evening in winter Ith was looking out over the horizon from Bregon"s tower, and saw the coast of Ireland in the distance; for "it is on a winter"s evening when the air is pure that one"s sight carries farthest." So says the eleventh century bard who tells the tale: he without knowing then that it was not in Spain was Bregon"s tower, but on the Great Plain, which is in the Atlantic, and yet not in this world at all. Now this will tell you what you ought to know about Ireland, and why it is we end our lectures with her. We saw Wales near the border of things; looking out from that cliff"s edge on to the unknown and unseen, and aware of mysterious things beyond. Now we shall see Ireland, westward again, down where the little waves run in and tumble; sunlit waves along shining sands; and with boats putting out at any time; and indeed, so lively an intercourse going forward always, that you never can be quite sure whether it is in mortal Ireland or immortal Fairyland you are,--
"So your soul goes straying in a land more fair; Half you tread the dew-wet gra.s.ses, half wander there."
For the wonder of Ireland is, that it is the West Pole of things; there is no place else nearer the Unseen; its next-door neighbor-land westward is this Great Plain, whither sail the Happy Dead in their night-dark coracles,--to return, of course, in due season; and all the peoplings of Ireland were from this Great Plain. So you see why the Crest-Wave, pa.s.sing from dying Europe, "went west" by way of Ireland.
I will tell you about that Great Plain: it is
"A marvelous land, full of music, where primrose blossoms on the hair, and the body is white as snow.
"There none speaks of _mine and thine;_ white are the teeth and black the brows; eyes flash with many-colored lights, and the hue of the fox-glove is on every cheek. . . .
"Though fair are the plains of Ireland, few of them are so fair as the Great Plain. The ale of Ireland is heady, but headier far the ale of the Great Country. What a wonder of a land it is!
No youth there grows to old age. Warm streams flow through it; the choicest mead and wine. Men there are always comely and blemishless."
Well; Ith set sail from the Great Plain, with three times thirty warriors, and landed at Corcaguiney in the south-west of Ireland; and at that time the island inhabited less by men than by G.o.ds; it was the Tuatha De Danaan, the Race of the Danaan G.o.ds, that held the kingship there. Little wonder, then, that the first name of Ireland we get in the Greek writings is "Sacred Ierne, populous with the Hibernians."
Well now, he found MacCuill, MacCecht, and MacGrene the Son of the Sun, arranging to divide the kingdom between them; and they called on him to settle how the division should be.--"Act," said he, "according to the laws of justice, for the country you dwell in is a good one; it is rich in fruit and honey, in wheat and in fish; and in heat and cold it is temperate." From that they thought he would be designing to conquer it from them, and so forestalled his designs by killing him; but his companions escaped, and sailed back to the Great Plain. That was why the Milesians came to conquer Ireland. The chiefs of them were Eber Finn, and Eber Donn, and Eremon, and Amargin the Druid: the sons of Mile, the son of Bile the son of Bregon; thus their grandfather was the brother of that Ith whom the G.o.ds of Ireland slew.
It was on a Thursday, the first of May, and the seventeenth day of the moon, that the Milesians arrived in Ireland; and as he set his right foot on the soil of it, Amargin chanted this poem:
I am the wave of the Ocean; I am the murmur of the billow; I am the ox of the seven combats; I am the vuture upon the rock; I am a tear of the sun; I am the fairest of plants; I am a wild boar in valor; I am a salmon in the water; I am a lake in the plain; I am a word of science; I am the spear-point that gives battle; I am the G.o.d who creates in the head the fire of thought.
Who is it that enlightens the a.s.sembly upon the mountain, if not I?
Who telleth the ages of the moon, if not I?
Who showeth the place where the sun goes to rest?
They went forward to Tara, and summoned the kings of the Danaan G.o.ds to give up the island to them; who asked three days to consider whether they would give battle, or surrender, or quit Ireland. On that request Amargin gave judgment: that it would be wrong for the Milesians to take the G.o.ds unprepared that way; and that they should go to their ships again, and sail out the distance of nine waves from the sh.o.r.e, and then return; then if they could conquer Ireland fairly in battle, it should be theirs.
So they embarked, and put the nine waves between themselves and the sh.o.r.e, and waited. And the Danaans raised up a druid mist and a storm against them, whereby Ireland seemed to them no more than the size of a pig"s back in the water; and by reason of that it has the name of Innis na Wic, the Island of the Pig. But if the G.o.ds had magic, Amargin had better magic; and he sang that Invocation to the Land of Ireland; and at that the storm fell and the mist vanished. Then Eber Donn was exulting in his rage at the thought of putting the inhabitants to death; but the thought in his mind brought the storm again, and his ship went down, and he was drowned. But at last the remnant of them landed, and fought a battle with the G.o.ds, and defeated them; whereafter the G.o.ds put a druid invisibility on themselves, and retired into the hills; and there in their fairy palaces they remain to this day; indeed they do. They went back into the inwardness of things; whence, however, they were always appearing, and again vanishing into it; and all the old literature of Ireland is thridded through with the lights of their magic and their beauty, and their strange forthcomings and withdrawings. For example:
There was Midir the Proud, one of them. In the time of the great Caesar, Eochaid Airem was high king of Ireland; and he had for his queen Etain, reborn then as a mortal,--but a Danaan princess at one time, and the wife of Miidir. It was a fine evening in the summer, and Eochaid Airem was looking from the walls of Tara and admiring the beauty of the world. He saw an unknown warrior riding towards him; clad in purple tunic; his hair yellow as gold, and his blue eyes shining like candles. A five-pointed lance was in his hand; his shield was ornamented with beads of gold.
--"A hundred thousand welcomes to you," said the high king. "Who is it you are?"
--"I know well who you are," said the warrior, "and for a long time."
--"What name is on you?" said Eochaid.
--"Nothing ill.u.s.trious about it in the world," said the other. "I am Midir of Bregleith."
--"What has brought you hither?"
--"I am come to play at chess with you."
--"I have great skill at chess," said the high king; and indeed, he was the best at it in Ireland, in those days.
--"We shall see about that," said Midir.
--"But the queen is sleeping in her chamber now," said Eochaid; "and it is there the chessboard is."
--"Little matter," said Midir, "I have here a board as good as yours is."
And that was the truth. His chessboard was of silver, glittering with precious stones at each corner. From a satchel wrought of shining metal he took his chessmen, which were of pure gold.
Then he arranged them on the board.--"Play you," said he.
--"I will not play without a stake," said the king.
--"What will the stake be?" said Midir.
--"All one to me," said Eochaid.
--"If you win," said Midir, "I will give you fifty broad-chested horses with slim swift feet."
--"And if you win," said Eochaid Airem, sure of victory, "I will give you whatever you demand."
Midir won that game, and demanded Etain the queen. But the rules of chess are that the vanquished may claim his revenge,--a second game, that is, to decide the matter; and the high king proposed that it should be played at the end of a year. Midir agreed, and vanished.
The year ended, and Eochaid was at Tara; he had had the palace surrounded by a great armed host against Midir; and Etain was there with him. Here is the description of Etain:
"A clear comb of silver was held in her hand, the comb was adorned with gold; and near her, as for washing, was a basin of silver whereon four birds had been chased, and there were little bright gems of carbuncles on the rim of the basin. A bright purple mantle waved round her; and beneath it another mantle with fringes of silver: the outer one clasped over her bosom with a golden brooch. A tunic she wore, with a long hood that might cover her head attached to it; it was stiff and glossy with green silk beneath red embroidery of gold, and clasped over her breast with marvelously wrought clasps of gold and silver, so that men saw the bright gold and the green silk flashing against the sun. On her head were two tresses of golden hair, and each tress plaited into four strands, and at the end of each strand a little ball of gold. Each of her two arms was as white as the snow of a single night, and each of her two cheeks of the hue of the foxglove. Even and small the teeth in her head, and they shone like pearls. Her eyes were blue as the blue hyacinth, her lips delicate and crimson. . . . White as snow, or the foam of the wave, was her neck. . . . Her feet were slim and white as the ocean foam; evenly set were her eyes, and the eyebrows of a bluish black, such as you see on the sh.e.l.l of a beetle."
--What I call on you to note about that is something very unpoetic. It is not the flashing brightness, the grace, the evidence of an eye craving for beauty, and of a hand sure in the creation of beauty;--but the dress. The Irish writers got these ideas of dress without having contacted, for example, cla.s.sical civilization, or any foreign civilization. The ideas were home-grown, the tradition Irish. The writer was describing what he was familiar with: the kind of dress worn by an Irish princess before Ireland had seen foreign fashions and customs. He was heightening picture for artistic effect, no doubt; but he was drawing with his eye on the object. I am inclined to think that imagination always must work upon a basis of things known; just as tradition must always be based on fact. Now then: try, will you, to imagine primitive savages dressing like that, or sufficiently nearly like that for one of their bards to work up such a picture on the actualities he had seen. I think you cannot do it. And this picture is not extraordinary; it is typical of what we commonly find in the ancient Irish stories. What it proves is that the Ireland that emerges into history, war-battered and largely decivilized by long unsettled conditions as she was, remembered and was the inheiritor of an Ireland consummately civilized.--But to return to the hall of Eochaid Airem:
Every door in it was locked; and the whole place filled with the cream of the war-host of the Gael, and apprehension on everyone, they not knowing would it be war and violence with Midir, or what it would be. So it had been all day; so it was now in the dusk of the evening. Then suddenly there stood Midir in the midst of them: Midir the Proud; never had he seemed fairer than then.
No man had seen him enter; none knew how he had come. And then it was but putting his spear in his left hand for him, and putting his right arm about the waist of Etain, and rising through the air with her, and vanishing through the roof. And when the men of Ireland rushed out from the hall, they saw two swans circling above Tara and away, their long white necks yoked together with a yoke of moon-bright silver.
It was a long time the G.o.ds were ruling in Ireland before the Milesians came. King after king reigned over them; and there are stories on stories, a rich literature for another nation, about the time of these Danaan G.o.ds alone. One of them was Lir, the Boundless Deep. He had four children by his first wife; when she died, he married her sister, Aoife by name. Aoife was jealous of the love he had for his children, and was for killing them. But when it came to doing it, "her womanhood overcame her," and instead she put swanhood on the four of them, and the doom that swans they should be from that out for nine hundred years: three hundred on Lake Derryvaragh in West Meath, three hundred on the Straits of Moyle between Ireland and Scotland, three hundred on the Atlantic by Erris and Innishglory. After that the enchantment would end.
For that, Bov Derg, one of the G.o.ds, changed her into a demon of the air, and she flew away shrieking, and was heard of no more.
But there was no taking the fate from the swan-children; and the Danaans sought them on their lake, and found they had human speech left to them, and the gift of wonderful Danaan music.
From all parts they came to the lake to talk with them and to hear them singing; and that way it was for three hundred years.
Then they must depart, Fionuala and her three brothers, the swan-children, and wing their way to the northern sea, and be among the wild cliffs and the foam; and the worst of loneliness and cold and storm was the best fate there was for them. Their feathers froze to the rocks on the winter nights; but they filled the drear chasms of the tempest with their Danaan singing.
It was Fionuala wrapped her plumage about her brothers, to keep them from the cold; she was their leader, heartening them. And if it was bad for them on the Straits of Moyle, it was worse on the Atlantic; three hundred years they were there, and bitter sorrow the fate on them.
When their time to be freed was near, they were for flying to the palace of Lir their father, at the hill of the White Field in Armagh. But long since the Milesians had come into Ireland, and the Danaans had pa.s.sed into the hills and the unseen; and with the old centuries of their enchantment heavy on them, their eyes had grown no better than the eyes of mortals: gorse-grown hills they saw, and green nettles growing, and no sign of the walls and towers of the palace of Lir. And they heard the bells ringing from a church, and were frightened at the "thin, dreadful sound."
But afterwards, in their misery, they took refuge with the saint in the church, and were converted, and joined him in singing the services. Then, after a while, the swanhood fell from them, and they became human, with the whole of their nine centuries heavy on them. "Lay us in one grave," said Fionuala to the saint; "and place Conn at my right hand, and Fiachra at my left, and Aed before my face; for there they were wont to be when I sheltered them many a winter night upon the seas of Moyle." So it was they were buried; but the saint sorrowed for them till the end of his days. And there, if you understand it, you have the forgotten story of Ireland.
She was once Danaan, and fortunate in the Golden Age. Then she was enchanted, and fell from her high estate; and sorrow and the wildness of ages of decivilizing wars were her portion; but she retained her wonderful Danaan gift of song. Then came Christianity, and she sang her swan-song in the services of the Church;--when she had overcome her terror of the ominous sound of the bells. She became human again: that is, enjoyed one more period of creative greatness, a faint revival of her old splendor; and then,--Ah, it was a long time ago; a long time the hermit had been sorrowing over her grave! But listen, by the lake of Derryvaragh, on the seas of Moyle, or by Erris and Innishglory, and you will hear still the ghostly echoes of the singing of Danaan swans. _Danaan_ swans: music better than of the world of men!
O Swan-child, come from the grave, and be bright as you were of old When you sing o"er the sun-bright wave in the Danaans" Age of Gold!
Are you never remembering, darling, the truth that you knew well then, That there"s n.o.body dies from the world, asth.o.r.e, but is born in the world again.