Old Ireland
The classical Greek and Ron-an authors and the fathers of the Church give very little information about Ireland.
However, there exists a native literature that is still comparatively rich despite the loss of many Irish writings in the wars of the 16th and 17th centuries. It consists of poems, grammars, glossaries, annals and other historical writings and law-books. With very few exceptions, however, this entire literature, covering the period at least from the 8th to the 17th centuries, exists in manuscript only. As far as the Irish language is concerned, printing has only been in existence for a few years, that is, only since the language began to die out. Thus, only a tiny part of this rich material is accessible.
Of the annals the most important are those by Abbot Tigernach (died 1088), those of Ulster, and particularly those of the Four Masters. The latter were compiled in 1632-36 under the supervision of Michael O'Clery, a Franciscan monk, with the help of three other Seanchaidhes (students of antiquity), in the monastery of Donegal from materials which have nearly all been lost now. They were published from the extant original manuscript from Donegal in a critical edition with English translation by O'Donovan in 1856.(1) The earlier editions by Dr. Charles O'Conor (the first part of the Four Masters, the Annals of Ulster, etc.) are unreliable in text and translation.1917
Most of these annals begin with the mythical prehistory of Ireland, taking as their basis the old folk legends, which were spun out interminably by the bards of the 9th and 10th centuries and then put into proper chronological order by monastic chroniclers. Thus, the Annals of the Four Masters begin in the year of the world 2242, when Ceasair, a granddaughter of Noah, landed in Ireland 40 days before the flood; other annals trace the forebears of the Scots, the last immigrants to arrive in Ireland, in a direct line back to Japhet and relate them to Moses, the Egyptians and the Phoenicians, just as our mediaeval chroniclers traced the forebears of German tribes back to Troy, Aeneas, and Alexander the Great. The Four Masters devote only a couple of pages to these old fables (in which the only valuable element, the genuine old folk legend, cannot be distinguished to this day); the Annals of Ulster omit it completely; even Tigernach states with a critical audacity extraordinary for his day that all the monuments of the Scots before King Cimbaoth (supposedly 300 B.C.) are uncertain. But when a new national life was awakened in Ireland at the end of the last century, and with it fresh interest in Irish literature and history, these monastic fables were considered to be the most important parts. With truly Celtic enthusiasm, and specifically Irish naivety, belief in these tales was declared to be an essential ingredient of national patriotism; this did, of course, give the super-clever English scholars — whose own achievements in philological and historical criticism are justifiably famous in the rest of the world — the desired pretext for rejecting everything Irish as sheer nonsense.*
Since the thirties of the present century, however, a far more critical spirit has come over Ireland, particularly through Pétrie and O'Donovan. The above-mentioned studies by Pétriea prove that there is complete agreement between the oldest preserved inscriptions from the 6th and 7th centuries and the annals, and
* One of the most naive products of that time is The Chronicles of Eri, being the History of the Gaal Sciot Iber, or the Irish People, translated from the original manuscripts in the Phoenician dialect of the Scythian language by O'Connor, London, 1822, 2 vols. The Phoenician dialect of the Scythian language is, of course, Celtic Irish, and the original manuscript is just any verse chronicle. The publisher is Arthur O'Connor, an exile of 1798,[196] uncle of the subsequent leader of the English Chartists, Feargus O'Connor, an alleged descendant of the old O'Connors, kings of Connaught, and, to a certain extent, pretender to the Irish throne. Before the title there is a portrait of him, a handsome, jovial, Irish face, with a striking resemblance to his nephew Feargus, grasping a crown in his right hand. Underneath it says: "O'CONNOR — CEAR-RIGE, HEAD OF HIS RACE, AND O'CONNOR, CHIEF OF THE PROSTRATE PEOPLE OF HIS NATION: 'Soumis, pas vaincus [Subjected but undefeated]'."
:1 G. Pétrie, The Ecclesiastical Architecture of Ireland, anterior to the Anglo-Norman Invasion, Dublin, 1845.— Ed.
O'Donovan(2) is of the opinion that these begin to report historical facts as early as the 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D. For us it is fairly immaterial whether the credibility of the annals commences a few hundred years earlier or later, for they are, as far as that period is concerned, unfortunately, almost entirely useless for our purpose. They contain short, dry notices of deaths, accessions to the throne, wars, battles, earthquakes, plagues and Scandinavian raids, but little that has any bearing on the social life of the people. If the entire legal literature of Ireland was published, they would assume quite a different significance; many dry notices would acquire new life through explicatory passages in the law-books.
These law-books, which are very numerous, are nearly all awaiting the moment when they will see the light of day. In 1852, on the insistence of Irish students of antiquity, the English Government approved the appointment of a commission for publishing the old laws and institutions of Ireland. But how? The commission consisted of three lords (who are never far away when there is public money to be expended), three lawyers of the highest rank, three Protestant clergymen, Dr. Pétrie, and an officer who is Head of the Irish Survey. Of all these gentlemen only Dr. Pétrie and two of the clergymen, Dr. Graves (now Protestant Bishop of Limerick) and Dr. Todd, could claim to understand anything of the commission's task; of these, Pétrie and Todd have since died. The commission was given the duty of arranging the copying, translation and publication of the old Irish manuscripts of a legal content and were authorised to employ the necessary people for the job. They employed the two best men available: Dr. O'Donovan and Professor O'Curry, who copied a good many manuscripts and made a rough translation; but before anything was ready for publication, both died. Their successors, Dr. Hancock and Professor O'Mahony, then took up the work. So far, the two volumes already mentioned, containing the Senchus Mor, have come out. The publishers admit that only two of the members of the commission, Graves and Todd, have taken part in the work, by making some notes in the proofs. The officer, Sir Th. Larcom, put the original maps of the survey of Ireland at the disposal of the publishers for the verification of place names; Dr. Pétrie soon died, and the other gentlemen restricted their activities to conscientiously drawing their salaries for 18 years.
This is the way public duties are carried out in England, and even more so in Ireland under English rule. Without jobbery,(3) nothing works. No public interests may be satisfied without a tidy sum of money or some fat sinecures for lords or government protégés coming out of it. With the money which this utterly superfluous commission has swallowed up, we in Germany would have printed the complete unprinted historical literature — and even better.
The Senchus Mor is to the present day our main source on conditions in old Ireland. It is a collection of ancient legal regulations which, according to the introduction (added later),[3]
was compiled at the behest of St. Patrick and on his advice brought into harmony with Christianity, which was rapidly spreading in Ireland. The High King of Ireland, Laeghaire (428-458, according to the Annals of the Four Masters); the Vice-Kings Core of Munster and Daire, probably a prince of Ulster; further, three bishops: St. Patrick, St. Benignus and St. Cairnech; and finally three law scholars, Dubthach, Fergus and Rossa; these are the men who are said to have composed the "commission" that compiled the book, and no doubt they worked harder for the money than the present commission, which only had to publish the work. The Four Masters gives the year of composition as 438.
The text itself is obviously based on ancient pagan material. The oldest legal formulae contained in it are all composed in verse, with a fixed metre and what is known as consonance, a kind of alliteration, or rather consonantal assonance, which is peculiar to Irish poetry and often leads into rhyme proper. Since it has been established that the old Irish law-books were translated in the 14th century from the so-called Fenian dialect (Bérla Feini), the language of the 5th century, into the Irish current at the time (Introduction [Vol. I], p. XXXVI et passim), it is understandable that in Senchus Mor as well the metre has been obliterated to a certain extent in many places; but it does emerge often enough, along with occasional rhymes and strongly "consonant" passages, in order to lend the text a certain rhythmic fall. It is generally enough simply to read the translation in order to uncover the verse formulae. In between, however, there are numerous passages of undoubted prose, particularly in the second half; while the verse formulae are certainly very ancient and have been handed down in the traditional way, these prose insertions seem to originate from the compilers of the book. The Senchus Mor is, by the way, quoted several times in the glossary compiled in the 9th or 10th century and ascribed to Cormac, the King and Bishop of Cashel, and was undoubtedly written down long before the English invasion.
All the manuscripts (the oldest seem to date from the beginning of the 14th century or earlier) contain a number of mostly consistent glosses and longer commenting notes on the text. The glosses are wholly in the spirit of the old glossaries, with word-play deputising for etymology and the explanation of words. The notes are of very different value, often badly distorted and many of them incomprehensible, at least without some knowledge of the other law-books. The age of both is uncertain; but the greater part is probably younger than the English invasion. Since, for all that, they only show very few traces of any developments in law beyond the scope of the text, and even then only in the more precise establishment of detail, the larger, purely explicatory part can safely be used, with discretion, as a source for the older period, too.
The Senchus Mor contains: (1) the law of distraint, i.e. just about the whole legal procedure; (2) the law on hostages, which were handed over by people of different territories during disputes; (3) the law concerning Saerrath and Daerrath (see below)[197]; and (4) family law. From this book we derive a good deal of useful information on the social life of the age; but as long as many expressions remain unexplained and the other manuscripts are
• ot published, there is much that is still obscure. Apart from the literature, the architectural monuments, churches, round towers, fortifications and inscriptions give us an idea of the condition of the people before the English arrived.
Of the foreign sources, we need only mention a few passages on Ireland in the Scandinavian sagas and the life of St.Malachias by St. Bernard,[3] which do not have much to offer; we then come straightway to the first Englishman to have written about Ireland from first-hand knowledge.
Sylvester Gerald Barry, called Giraldus Cambrensis, Archdeacon of Brecknock, was a grandson of the amorous Nesta, daughter of Rhys ap Tewdwr, Prince of South Wales, mistress of Henry I of England and ancestress of almost all the Norman captains who took part in the first conquest of Ireland. He went to Ireland in 1185 with John (later "Lackland") and in the following years wrote first Topographia Hibernica, an account of the land and its inhabitants, and then Hibernia Expugnata, the highly biased history of the first invasions. We are principally concerned with the first work here. Written in highly pretentious Latin, full of the maddest belief in miracles and all the clerical and national prejudices of the time and the RACE of its vain author, the book is still of great importance, being the first report in any detail by a foreigner.(4) After this the Anglo-Norman sources on Ireland naturally become more abundant; there is, however, still little information to be gained with regard to the social conditions of the part of the island that remained independent, and permitting one to draw conclusions about the old state of affairs. Not until the end of the 16th century, when Ireland was first systematically and completely subjugated, do we receive more detailed reports on the actual living conditions of the Irish people, naturally with a strong English bias. We shall see that, in the course of the 400 years that have elapsed since the first invasion, the condition of the people has changed only slightly, and not for the better. But for this very reason, the more recent writings — Hanmer, Campion, Spencer, Davies, Camden, Moryson,[199] et al.—to whom we shall have frequent recourse, are one of our main sources for a period five hundred years earlier, and an indispensable, badly needed complement to the scanty original sources.
The mythical prehistory of Ireland tells of a series of immigrations, taking place one after the other and mostly ending with the subjugation of the island by the new immigrants. The three last are: that of the Firbolgs, that of the Tuatha-de-Dananns, and that of the Milesians or Scots, who are supposed to have come from Spain. Popular Irish writing of history summarily turns the Firbolgs (fir = Irish fear, Latin vir, Gothic vair: man) into Belgians, the Tuatha-de-Dananns (tuatha = Irish people, region, Gothic thiuda) as necessary into Greek Danai or Germanic Danes. O'Donovan is of the opinion that there is some historical basis for at least the above-mentioned immigrations. In the annals there occurs in the year 10 A.D. an insurrection of the Aitheach Tuatha (translated in the 17th century by Lynch, an expert on the old language, as plebeiorum hominum gensd), in other words, a plebeian revolution, in which the entire aristocracy (Saorchlann) was slain. This points to the Scottish conquerors' dominion over the older inhabitants. From folk-tales about the Tuatha-de-Dananns, O'Donovan concludes that the latter, transformed by later popular belief into elves of the mountain forest, survived into the 2nd or 3rd century A.D. in scattered mountain areas.
It is beyond doubt that the Irish were a mixed people, even before the English settled among them in their masses. As today, in the 12th century the predominant type was already fair-haired. Giraldus (Top. Hib., Ill, 26) says of two strangers that they had long yellow hair, like the Irish. Nevertheless, there are still two completely different types of black-haired people, particularly in the west. One is tall and well-built with handsome features and curly hair, a type one feels one may have encountered before, in the Italian Alps or in Lombardy; this type occurs chiefly in the south-west. The other, thick-set and short in build, with coarse, straight black hair and a flat, almost negroid face, is more often found in Connaught. Huxley attributes this dark-haired element in the originally blond Celtic population to an Iberian (i.e. Basque) admixture,[200] which is no doubt partly true, at least. By the time the Irish make their first definite appearance in history, though, they have become a homogeneous people with a Celtic language, and there is no longer any trace of alien elements apart from the (mostly Anglo-Saxon) slaves acquired through battle or barter.
The pronouncements of the ancient classical writers about this people do not sound very edifying. Diodor relates that the Britons who inhabit the island called Iris (or Irin? It is the accusative 'Ipiv) eat human beings.b Strabo goes into more detail:
"Concerning this island" (lerne) "I have nothing certain to tell, except that its inhabitants are more savage than the Britons, since they are man-eaters as well as heavy eaters" (iroXvcpci-yoi; according to another reading Tror\<pâ-yoC, cabbage-eaters), "and since, further, they count it an honourable thing, when their fathers die, to devour them, and openly to have intercourse, not only with other women, but also with their mothers and sisters."0 Patriotic Irish historians have waxed not a little indignant over these alleged slanders. It remained for more recent research to show that, cannibalism, and particularly the eating of parents, is probably a transitional stage of all peoples, It may corne as some consolation to the Irish to learn that the ancestors of the modern
Berliners still subscribed to the same practical point of view a good thousand years later:
" ..aber Weleta'm. die in Germania sizzent. tie wir Wilzc heizen, die ne saunent si h nicht /e <hedenne da/ sie iro patentes mit niêren rente ezen sulîn, danne die Winnie'"'1 iNotker, <|iioted in Jacob Grimm's Rechtsalte rthüm er}1 p. 488).
And under English rule, we shall see the consumption of human flesh in Ireland make its return more than once. As regards the "phairerogamia" (to borrow Fourier's phrase') with which the Irish are reproached, such things occurred among all uncivilised peoples, and even more so among the particularly amorous Celts. It is- interesting to note that even then the island bore its present native name: his, frin and jerne are identical with Eire, Erinn, and that Ptolemy already knew the present-day name of the capital, Dublin, Eblana (with the correct accent ''Eß\ai>tt).d This is all the more remarkable as the Irish Celts have since times immemorial called it by another name, Athciiath. and Duibhlinn — the black pool — is for them the name of a place on the River Li f fey.
Moreover we find in Pliny's Natural History, IV[7], 16, the following passage:
" The Britons travel there" (to Hibernia) "in boats of willow branches, over which animal hides have been sewn together."' And later Solinus says of the Irish themselves:
"'They sail the sea between Hibernia nnd Britannia in boats of willow blanches which they (over with cowhides" (G. Jul. Solini Cosmographia, Ch. 25). In 1810, Wakefield found that all along the west coast of Ireland "no other boats occurred except ones which consisted of a wooden frame covered over with a horse- or oxhide". These boats
•' "But the Weletabi who livt in Germany and whom we call Wilze are not ashamed to sav that they ha\e more right to eat their parents than the worms have."— F.d.
were of different shapes according to the area, but they were all distinguished by being uncommonly light, so that an accident rarely occurred. Of course, they were of no use for the high seas, for which reason fishing was only possible in the bays and between the islands. In Malbay, County Clare, Wakefield saw boats like these, 15 feet long, 5 feet wide and 2 feet deep; two cowhides were used for one boat, the hair to the inside, the outside tarred; it was equipped for two oarsmen. A boat like this cost about 30 shillings (Wakefield, Vol. II, p. 97). Instead of plaited willow — a wooden frame! What progress in 1,800 years and after almost 700 years of "civilising" treatment at the hands of the world's foremost maritime nation!
For the rest, however, some symptoms of progress soon become noticeable. Under King Cormac Ulfadha, who is thought to have ruled in the second half of the 3rd century, his son-in-law, Finn Mac Cumhal, is said to have reorganised the Irish militia, the Fianna Eirionn(5) probably after the model of the Roman legion, with a distinction between light troops and troops of the line; all later Irish armies of which we have details distinguish between kerne—light — and galloglas—heavy — infantry, or troops of the line. The heroic deeds of this Finn were celebrated in many old lays, some of which still exist; these, and perhaps a few Scottish-Gaelic traditions, form the basis of Macpherson's Ossian (Irish Oisin, son of Finn), in which Finn appears as Fingal and the scene has been switched to Scotland.[201] In Irish folk-lore Finn lives on as Finn Mac-Caul, a giant to whom some miraculous feat of strength is attributed in almost every locality of the island.
Christianity must have found its way to Ireland quite early, at least on the east coast. Otherwise, there is no explanation for the fact that even long before St Patrick so many Irishmen played an important part in ecclesiastical history. Pelagius the Heretic is usually considered to have been a Welsh monk from Bangor; but there was also an ancient Irish monastery of Bangor, or rather Banchor, near Carrickfergus. And that he comes from here is proved by Hieronymus, who describes him as "stupid and heavy with Scottish gruel" ("scotorum pultibus praegravatus").[3] It is the first mention of Irish oatmeal porridge (Irish lite, Anglo-Irish stirabout), which even then, before the introduction of the potato, was the staple food of the Irish people, and which it remained even afterwards, alongside the potato. The main disciples of Pelagius— Coelestius and Albinus — were also Scots, i.e. Irish. From his monastery Coelestius wrote, as Gennadius[3] tells us, three detailed letters to his parents, from which it is evident that alphabetic writing was known in Ireland in the 4th century.
In all the writings of the early Middle Ages the Irish are called Scots, and the country Scotia. We find this term in Claudian, Isidor, Beda, the geographer of Ravenna, Eginhard and even in Alfred the Great: "Hibernia, which we call Scotland" ("Igbernia the ve Scotland hatadh").[202] What is now Scotland was called Caledonia, a foreign name, or Alba, Albania, its native one; the transference of the name Scotia, Scotland, to the northern tip of the eastern island did not take place until the 11th century. The first great wave of emigration of Irish Scots to Alba is supposed to have occurred in the middle of the 3rd century; Ammianus Marcellinus knows of them there as early as A.D. 360.b The emigration took place by the shortest sea-route, from Antrim to the Kintyre peninsula; even Nennius mentions expressly that the Britons, who then occupied the entire Scottish lowlands as far as the Clyde and the Forth, had been attacked by the Scots from the west and by the Picts from the north.' The seventh of the old Welsh historical Triads[20]* also relates that the gwyddyl ffichti (see below) came from Ireland over the Norse Sea (Môr Llychlin) to Alba and settled on the shores of this sea. The fact that the sea between Scotland and the Hebrides is called "Norse" proves, by the way, that this Triad is more recent than the Norse conquest of the Hebrides. Around the year 500 larger bands of Scots came over. These gradually formed a kingdom of their own, independent both of Ireland and of the Picts. In the 9th century under Kenneth MacAlpin they finally subjugated the Picts and formed the state to which some 150 years later the name Scotland, Scotia, came to be applied, probably by the Norsemen, for the first time.
In the 5th and 6th centuries Old Welsh sources (Nennius, the Triads) mention raids by the gwyddyl ffichti or Gaelic Picts on Wales; these are generally interpreted as raids by Irish Scots. Gwyddyl is the Welsh form of gavidheal, as the Irish call themselves. As for the origin of the term "Picts", we may leave it to others to investigate that.
In the second quarter of the 5th century Patricius (Irish Patrick, Patraic, as the Celts always pronounce the "c" as "k" in the fashion of the ancient Romans) established the domination of Christianity without any violent upheavals. Traffic with Britain, which,had long existed, now became more lively; master-builders and artisans came over and taught the Irish, who had only known dry stone building until then, the use of mortar. But from the 7th to the 12th century the latter was used only in church buildings, which is sufficient proof that its introduction is linked with that of Christianity, and further that from now on the clergy, the representative of foreign culture, was completely divorcing itself from the people in its intellectual development. While the social advance of the people was non-existent or extremely slow, the clergy soon developed a literary culture that was extraordinary for the time. It expressed itself chiefly in its zeal to convert the heathens and to found monasteries, as was the custom of the age. Columba converted the British Scots and the Picts; Gallus (the founder of St. Gallen) and Fridolin the Alemanni, Kilian the Franks of the Main, Virgilius the people of Salzburg; all five were Irish. Similarly, the Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity mainly by Irish missionaries. What is more, Ireland was considered all over Europe to be a nursery of learning, so much so that Charlemagne summoned an Irish monk, Albinus, to Pavia as teacher, whither he was later followed by another Irishman, Dungal. Of lthe large number of Irish scholars who were important in their day but are now mostly forgotten, the greatest was the "Father" or, as Erdmann calls him, the "Carolus Magnus[3]
of mediaeval philosophy"—Johannes Scotus Erigena^ "He was the first with whom from then on true philosophy began," Hegel says of him.c Of all the West Europeans of the 9th century he alone understood Greek, and through his translation of the writings attributed to Dionysius, the Areopagite, he harked back to the last offshoot of the old philosophy, the Alexandrian Neoplatonic school.[204] His teaching was very daring for his time: he denied the eternity of damnation, even for the devil, and comes very close to pantheism. For this reason, contemporary orthodoxy did not shrink from slandering him. It was all of two centuries before the science founded by Erigena was developed further by Anselm of Canterbury.(6)
But before this development of higher culture could influence the people, it was interrupted by the raids of the Norsemen. These raids, which form the staple ingradients of Scandinavian — particularly Danish — patriotism, came too late and emanated from nations too small for them to culminate in conquest, colonisation and the formation, of states on any large scale, as had been the case with the earlier incursions of the Germanic tribes. As far as historical development is concerned, the advantages they bequeathed are quite imperceptible compared with the immense and — even for Scandinavia — fruitless disturbances they caused.
At the end of the 8th century, Ireland was far from being inhabited by a single nation. A supreme kingship over the whole island existed only for appearance, and even that was by no means permanent. The provincial kings, whose number and territory were continually changing, were constantly at war with one another, and the smaller local princes also had their private feuds. On the whole, however, certain rules seem to have prevailed in these internal struggles which kept the devastation within definite bounds, so that the country did not suffer too much. But things were about to change. In 795, a few years after the first raid on England by this same predatory people, Norsemen landed on the island of Rathlin, off the coast of Antrim, and burnt everything down. In 798, they landed near Dublin and after that they are mentioned almost every year in the annals as heathens, foreigners, and pirates, never without the addition of losccadh (burning down) of one or several places. Their settlements in the Orkneys, Shetlands and Hebrides (Southern Isles, Sudhreyjar of the Old Norse sagas) served them as a base for operations against Ireland, as well as against what was to be Scotland, and against England. In the middle of the 9th century they were in possession of Dublin,(7) which, according to Giraldus, they first rebuilt as a proper city, just as he attributed to them the construction of Waterford and Limerick. The name Waterford is itself merely the anglicisation — here nonsensical — of the Old Norse Vedhrafiördhr, which means either "Bay of Storms" (Wetterföhrde) or "Bay of Rams". The prime necessity of the Norsemen as soon as they had settled in the country was naturally to acquire fortified ports; the population of these towns long remained Scandinavian, but by the 12th century they had long since been assimilated by the Irish in language and customs. The disputes between the Irish princes greatly facilitated the depreda-tions and settlement of the Norsemen, and even their temporary conquest of the whole island. The extent to which the Scandinavians themselves considered Ireland to be one of their regular pillage lands is indicated by the ostensible death-song of Ragnar
Lodbrôk in the Snake Tower of King Ella of Northumberland, the Krâkumâl, composed about the year 1000.2<)b In this song, the old pagan savagery makes one final outburst, as it were. On the pretext of singing the heroic deeds of King Ragnar, the raids of the entire Norse people in their own land as well as all along the coasts from Dünamünde to Flanders, Scotland (here called Skotland, perhaps for the first time) and Ireland are briefly described. Of Ireland it is said:
"We hew'd with our swords, heap'd high the slain, Glad was the wolf's brother of the furious battle's feast; Iron struck brass-shields; Ireland's ruler, Marsteinn, Did not starve the murder-wolf or eagle; In Vedhrafiördhr the raven was given a sacrifice.
We hew'd with our swords, started a game at dawn, A merry battle against three kings at Lindiseyri; Not many could boast that they fled unhurt from there. Falcon fought wolf for flesh, the wolf's fury devoured many; The blood of the Irish flow'd in streams on the beach in the battle."(8)
By the first half of the 9th century a Norse Viking, Thorgils, called Turgesius by the Irish, managed to subjugate Ireland completely, but with his death in 844° his kingdom, too, disintegrated and the Norsemen were driven out. The invasions and struggles continued with varying success, until finally, at the beginning of the 11th century, Ireland's national hero, Brian Borumha, originally only king of part of Munster, rose to be ruler of all Ireland and confronted the concentrated force of the invading Norsemen in a decisive battle at Clontarf (not far from Dublin) on April 23 (Good Friday), 1014. As a result, the might of the invaders was broken forever.
In anticipation of the imminent decisive battle, the Norsemen who had settled in Ireland, and on whom Leinster was dependent (the King of Leinster, Maolmordha, had ascended to the throne with their help in 999 and had kept it ever since thanks to them), sent messengers to the Southern Islands, and the Orkneys, to Denmark and Norway to request reinforcements, which duly arrived in large numbers. Njâl's Saga[207] tells how Jarl Sigurd Laudrisson prepared his departure in the Orkneys, how Thorstein Siduhallsoon, Hrafn the Red and Erlinger of Straumey went with him and how he arrived at Dublin (Durflin) on Palm Sunday with all his army:
"Brodhir and all his army came too. Brodhir tried to learn by means of sorcery how the battle would go; the answer he got was this: if the battle were to be fought on Friday, King Brian would win the victory but lose his life, and if the battle were to be fought earlier, all Brian's opponents would lose their lives. Then Brodhir said that they should not join battle before Friday."*[1]
fârr âtti thvî fagna (fell margr î gyn ûlfi, haukr sleit hold medh vargi), at hann heill thadhan kaemi; Yra blôdh î oegi aerit fell um skaeru."a
Vedhrafiördhr is, as we have said, Waterford; I do not know whether Lindiseyri has been located anywhere. At any rate, it does not mean Leinster, as Johnstone translates it*; the eyri (sandy spit of land, Danish ore) indicates a quite definite locality. Valtafn can also mean falcon feed, and is mostly so translated here, but as the raven is Odin's holy bird, the word obviously carries both meanings.
We have two versions of the battle itself: that of the Irish annals and the Scandinavian one in Njâl's Saga. According to the latter:
"King Brian had already reached the fortress" (Dublin) "with all his army. On Friday the army" (of the Norsemen) "came marching out of the fortress, and both armies drew up in battle array. Brodhir was on one flank and King Sigtrygg" (King of the Dublin Norsemen, according to the Annals of Inisfallen) "on the other. It should be said that King Brian did not wish to fight on Friday; so a wall of shields was formed round him, and his arm)' was drawn up in front of it. Ulf Hraeda was on the flank facing Brodhir, and on the other flank facing Sigtrygg were Ospak and King Brian's sons. In the centre was Kerthialfadh, with the banner aloft before him."
When the battle got underway, Brodhir was chased by Ulf Hraeda into a wood where he found shelter. Jar! Sigurd had a great deal of trouble with Kerthialfadh, who reached the standard and slew the standard-bearer as well as the next man to seize the standard. Then they all refused to bear the standard, and Jarl Sigurd took the standard off its staff and hid it under his clothes. Soon afterwards, he was pierced by a spear, and, at this point, his part of the army seems to have been defeated. Meanwhile, Ospak had attacked the Norsemen in the rear, turning Sigtrygg's flank after a hard struggle.
"And at this all his troops broke into flight. Thorstein Siduhallsson stopped running while the others were fleeing, and tied up his shoe-thong. Kerthialfadh asked him why he was not running like the others. 'Because,' said Thorstein, 'I cannot reach home tonight, for my home is out in Iceland.' Kerthialfadh spared his life."
Now Brodhir saw from his hiding-place that Brian's army was pursuing the fugitives, and that few men were left to man the wall of shields. Then he ran from the woods, broke through the wall of shields and slew the King (Brian, who was 88 years old, was obviously unable to take part in the battle and had stayed in the camp).
"Then Brodhir shouted, 'Let the word go round that Brodhir has felled Brian.' "
But the pursuers returned, surrounded Brodhir and took him alive.
"Ulf Hraeda slit open his belly and led him round an oak tree so that his intestines wound round the trunk; and Brodhir did not die before they had all been pulled out of him. Brodhir's men were all slain."
According to the Annals of Inisfallen the Norse army was divided into three sections. The first consisted of the Dublin Norsemen and 1,000 Norwegian volunteers, who were all clad in long coats of mail; the second, of the Irish auxiliaries from Leinster under King Maolmordha; the third, of reinforcements from the islands and from Scandinavia under Bruadhair, the commander of the fleet which had brought them, and Lodar, the Jarl of the Orkneys. Opposing them, Brian also drew up his army in three sections; the names of the leaders, however, do not agree with those given in Njâl's Saga. The report of the battle itself is unimportant; shorter and clearer is that of the Four Masters, which folows:
"A.D. 1013" (given instead of 1014 owing to a recurrent error). "The foreigners of all western Europe assembled against Brian and Maelseachlainn" (usually called Malachy, King of Meath under Brian's sovereignty) "and they brought with them ten hundred men in coats of mail. A fierce, furious, violent and bitter battle was fought between them, the like of which had never been seen in those days, at Cluaintarbh" (ox-meadow, now Clontarf) "on the very Friday before Easter. In this battle were slain Brian, 88 years old, Murchadh, his son, 63 years old, Conaing, his nephew, Toirdhealbhach, his grandson..." (There follow a multitude of names.) "The" (enemy) "troops were finally driven back from the Tulcainn to Athcliath" (Dublin) "by Maelseachlainn by dint of heavy fighting, intrepidity and laying about the foreigners and the Lein Sterinen; and there fell Maelmordha, son of Murchadh, son of Finn, King of Leinster ... and there were also innumerable dead among the men of Leinster. Also slain were Dubhgall, son of Amhlanibh" (usually called Anlaf or Olaf) "and Gillaciarain, son of Gluniairn, two subordinate commanders (tanaisi) of the foreigners, Sichfrith, son of Lodar, Jarl of the Orkneys (iarla insi h Oirt), Brodar, leader of the men from Denmark, who was the man who slew Brian. The ten hundred men in coats of mail were cut to pieces, and at least 3,000 of the foreigners were slain there."(9)
Njârs Saga was written down in Iceland about a hundred years after the battle; the Irish annals are based, at least in part, on contemporary reports. The two sources are completely independent of each other; not only do they agree on the main points, but they also complement each other. We only learn from the Irish annals who Brodhir and Sigtrygg were. Sigurd Laudrisson is there called Sichfrith, son of Lodar; Sigfrith is, in fact, the correct Anglo-Saxon form of the Old Norse name Sigurd, and the Scandinavian names in Ireland — on coins as well as in the annals — mainly occur not in the Old Norse but in the Anglo-Saxon form. The names of Brian's subordinate commanders have been modified in Njâl's Saga to suit the Scandinavian tongue; one of them, Ulf Hraeda, is even wholly Old Norse, but it would be rash indeed to infer, as some do, from this that Brian, too, had Norsemen in his army. Ospak and also Kerthialfadh seem to be Celtic names; the latter perhaps distorted from the Toirdbeal-bhach mentioned in the Four Masters? The dates — the Friday after Palm Sunday in one, the Friday before Easter in the other — agree perfectly, as does the site of the battle; although it is called Kantaraburg in Njâl's Saga (otherwise = Canterbury),[208] it is explicitly said to be right by the gates of Dublin. The course of the battle is described most accurately in the Four Masters. The Norsemen were driven back from the plain of Clontarf, where they attacked Brian's army, over the Tolka, a small river flowing past the northern side of Dublin, towards the city. The fact that Brodhir killed King Brian is mentioned in both sources; the exact details are given only in the Nordic one.
It is evident that our knowledge of this battle is fairly detailed and authentic, considering the barbarism of the times. There would not be many 11th-century battles about which we have such definite and consistent reports from both parties. This did not deter Professor Goldwin Smith from describing it as a "SHADOWY[3] conflict" (loc. cit.,b p. 48). In the esteemed professor's head the most robust facts do, indeed, very often assume a "shadowy" form.
After the defeat at Clontarf the raids of the Norsemen became less frequent and less dangerous. The Dublin Norsemen soon came under the dominion of the neighbouring Irish princes and in a generation or two were assimilated by the native population. As the sole recompense for the havoc they had wreaked, the Scandinavians left the Irish three or four cities and the beginnings of a trading urban population.
The further back in history we go, the fainter are the characteristics distinguishing peoples of the same tribe one from the other. On the one hand, this is due to the nature of the sources, which become scantier the older they are, confining themselves to essentials; on the other hand, however, it is due to the development of the peoples themselves. The individual branches of the tribe were the closer to one another, were more alike, the smaller the distance separating them from the original stock. Jacob Grimm' quite rightly always treated all reports from the Roman historians describing the campaign of the Cimbri[209] to Adam of Bremen and Saxo Grammaticus, all the literary monuments from Beowulf and the Hildebrandslied to the Eddas[210]
and the sagas, all the law-books from the Leges barbarorum[21] ] to the Old Danish and Old Swedish laws and the Germanic precedents, as equally valuable sources for the German national character, German customs and legal procedure. The specific character may only be of local significance, but the character reflected in it is common to the whole tribe; and the older the sources, the more these local differences tend to disappear.
Just as the Scandinavians and the Germans of the 7th and 8th centuries were less different than today, originally the Irish Celts and Gallic Celts must have been more alike than are the Irishmen and Frenchmen of today. We should not, then, be surprised to find a number of traits in Caesar's description of the Gaulsa which Giraldus twelve centuries later ascribes to the Irish, and which we find in the Irish national character even today, despite the admixture of so much Germanic blood....[212]
FROM THE PREPARATORY MATERIALS
Endnotes
[196] 96 Arthur O'Connor was one of the few leaders of the United Irishmen Society, which prepared the 1798 uprising (see Note 229), who managed to escape execution. After his release from gaol in 1803, O'Connor was banished to France, where he stayed to the end of his days.
[197] 97 Saerrath and Daerrath—two forms of tenancy in old Ireland, whereby the tenant, generally an ordinary member of the community, was given the use of stock and later also of land by the chief of the clan or tribe and by other representatives of the tribal élite. They entailed partial loss of personal freedom (especially under Daerrath) and various onerous duties. These forms of dependence were typical of ilie period of the disintegration of tribal relations in ancient Irish society and of the early stages of feudalisation. At this time land tenure was still mainly communal, while stock and farming implements were already private property, and private landownership already existed in embryonic form. Engels' "see below" refers to the unfinished part of this chapter, p. 172
[199] 99 A reference to the following works: M. Hanmer, The Chronicle of Ireland; E. Campion, History of Ireland; E. Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland, published in Ancient Irish Histories. The Works of Spencer, Campion, Hanmer and Marleburrough, vols. I-II, Dublin, 1809, and also to: John Davies, Historical Tracts, London, 1786; W. Camden, Britannia, London, 1722 (the first edition of this book was published in 1586 in Latin; later English translations appeared); F. Moryson, An Itinerary Containing Ten Years Travels through the Twelve Dominions of Germany, Bohmerland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Denmark,-Poland, Italy, Turkey, France, England, Scotland and Ireland, London, 1617.
[200] Huxley spoke of this in a public lecture in Manchester on January 9, 1870. A detailed account of the lecture was published in the Manchester Examiner and The Times on January 12, 1870 under the heading "Professor Huxley on Political Ethnology" (see also Engels' letter of March 9, 1870 to Marx, present edition. Vol. 43).
[7] 17 In 1866-68, after the suppression of the Polish insurrection of 1863-64, the Russian Government promulgated "Regulations on the Gubernia and Uyezd Administration in the Kingdom of Poland" and a number of ukases aimed at the abolition of Polish institutions and the consolidation of the administrative apparatus — the chief means of national oppression. The number of gubernias was increased, the prerogatives of the governors appointed by the Russian Government were extended, supreme bodies (the State Council and others) were abolished, and different administrative departments (post, communications) were subordinated to the respective ministries in St. Petersburg.
[2 0 1] See Note 180.
[2 0 2] The reference is to the following medieval works: Claudianus, De IV consulatu Honorii Augusti panegiricus; Isidorus Hispalensis, Etymologiarum libri XX; Beda Venerabilis, Historiae Ecclesiasticae libri quinque; Anonymus Ravenatis, De Geographiae libri V; Eginhard, Vita et gesta Karoli Magni; Alfred the Great, Anglo-Saxon Version of the Historian Orosius. In all probability Engels used extracts from the above-mentioned works contained in K. Zeuss, Die Deutschen und die Nachbarstaemme.
[20] At Mentana, on November 3, 1867, the French army, jointly with the Pope's hired guards, defeated Garibaldi, who had undertaken a new campaign against Rome to liberate the city from the French and annex it to the Italian state.
[2 0 4] Alexandrian Neoplatonic school—a trend in ancient philosophy originating in the third century A.D. in Alexandria during the decline of the Roman Empire. The source of Neoplatonism was Plato's idealism and the idealistic aspect of Aristotle's teaching, interpreted in a mystical spirit by the Neoplatonic philosophers. In the fifth century A.D. an unknown adherent of this school, who attempted to combine the Christian doctrine with Neoplatonism, signed his works with the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, the first Christian Bishop of Athens.
[207] Njßl's Saga—an Icelandic saga which, according to the latest research, was recorded at the end of the thirteenth century from oral tradition and ancient written documents. The central theme is the life story of Gunnar, an Icelandic Hawding (a m e m b e r of the clan nobility), and his friend Bond Njâl (a free community member), an expert and commentator on ancient customs and laws. The saga tells of the battle of the Norsemen against the Irish King Brian Boru, and is an authentic source for the study of a major event in Irish history — the Irish victory over the Norse invaders in 1014 at the battle of Clontarf. Engels quoted the excerpt from the Njâl's Saga according to the text of the reader: F. E. Ch. Dietrich, Altnordisches Lesebuch, Leipzig, 1864, S. 103-08.
[1] In the autumn of 1867 the General Council of the International Working Men's Association launched a widespread campaign among the English workers in support of the Irish national liberation movement led by the Fenians. The memorial written by Marx was an integral part of this campaign. The Fenians were Irish revolutionaries who named themselves after the "Féne"— a name of the ancient population of Ireland. Their first organisations appeared in the 1850s in the USA among the Irish immigrants and later in Ireland itself. The secret Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, as the organisation was known in the early 1860s, aimed at establishing an independent Irish republic by means of an armed uprising. The Fenians, who expressed the interests of the Irish peasantry, came chiefly from the urban petty bourgeoisie and intelligentsia and believed in conspiracy tactics. The British Government attempted to suppress the Fenian movement by severe police reprisals. On September 18, 1867, the Fenians made an armed attack on a prison van in an attempt to liberate Kelly and Deasy, two of their leaders. The latter managed to escape but a policeman was killed during the clash. Five Irishmen (Maguire, Condon, Larkin, Allen and O'Brien) were charged with murder and brought to trial. Although there was no direct evidence, they were sentenced to death. Maguire was subsequently pardoned, and Condon, as an American citizen, had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. The others were executed. The Fenian trial in Manchester aroused a storm of protest in Ireland and England. On the insistence of Marx, the General Council of the International began, on November 19, a discussion on the Irish question during which the leaders of the international proletarian organisation expressed their solidarity with the struggle of the Irish people for independence and condemned the position of the reformist trade union leaders who, in the wake of the English bourgeois radicals, denied the right of the Fenians to resort to revolutionary methods in the struggle. The discussion was scheduled to continue on November 26 (see this volume, pp. 189-93), but when the news of the conviction was received, the General Council convened a special meeting on November 20 and addressed a memorial to the Home Secretary asking for the commutation of the death sentence. The British Government ignored the memorial. Because of opposition from the trade union leaders, the English labour press did not publish the memorial in its original wording. A report on the special meeting of the General Council, published in The Bee-Hive, No. 319, November 23, 1867, only summarised it, and named the General Council members who had signed it. The French translation was published by Le Courrier français, No. 163, November 24. In English the memorial was first published in full in The General Council of the First International. 1866-1868, Moscow, 1964. This document is also preserved in the form of the manuscript copy made by Mrs. Marx which fully coincides with the text entered into the Minute Book. Written as an article, this copy was apparently to be sent to the press. In this volume the memorial is reproduced from this copy.
[208] Contemporary scholars transcribe the name of King Brian's residence in Munster as Kankaraborg, or Kincora.
[209] T h e Cimbri and Teutons, Germanic tribes, invaded Southern Gaul and Northern Italy in 113-101 B.C. In 101 B.C. these tribes were routed by the Roman General Marius at the battle of Vercelli (Northern Italy). T h e Battle of the Romans against the Cimbri and Teutons was described by Plutarch in his biography of Marius, by Tacitus in Germania, and by other ancient historians.
[210] Beowulf—a poem about the legendary hero Beowulf is supposed to have been recorded in the eighth century and ranks as the finest known work of Anglo-Saxon poetry. It is based on folk sagas about the life of the Germanic tribes in the early sixth century. Hildebrandslied—an eighth-century German epic poem, of which only a few passages have survived. Engels refers to the so-called Elder Edda and the Younger Edda. The Elder JLdda is a collection of epic poems and songs about the lives and deeds of the Scandinavian gods and heroes. It has come down to us in a manuscript dating back to the thirteenth century, discovered in 1643 by the Icelandic Bishop Sveinsson. The Younger Edda is a treatise on pagan mythology and the poetry of the scalds compiled in the early thirteenth century by Snorri Sturlusson.
[21] Marx refers to the reactionary Prussian law on associations adopted on March 11, 1850.
[212] Engels' manuscript breaks off here. The extant plan for the second chapter ("Old Ireland") shows that Engels also intended to describe the clan system, landed property and the laws of old Ireland (see this volume, p. 307).
[3] Marx wrote this item on the basis of a letter from Johann Baptist Schweitzer dated April 29, 1868. The item was included in the report of the General Council meeting of May 12, 1868 published in The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 344, May 16, 1868, but is not to be found in the Minute Book. Informing Engels of Schweitzer's letter, Marx wrote to him on May 4, 1868 that he intended "to use this question in the interests of the Party", and insisted on an inquiry into the condition of the workers employed in the iron trade of the Rhine Province (see this letter and Marx's letter to Engels of May 7 and the latter's reply of May 6-7, 1868, present edition, Vol. 43).