Cuchulain's life and love and death entranced the ears of the great for many centuries, and into hundreds of bright eyes tears of pity had for a thousand years been conjured up by the pathetic tones of bards reciting the fate of her who perished for the son of Usnach. The wars of Mève and of Conor mac Nessa were household words in the hall of Muirchertach of the leather cloaks, and in the palace at the head of the weir—Brian Boru's Kincora. Whosoever loved what was great in conception, and admired the broad sweep of the epic called upon his bards to recite the loves, the wars, the valour, and the deaths of the Red Branch knights.[1]
But there was yet another era consecrated in story-telling, another age of history peopled by other characters, in which the households of many chieftains and some even of the chiefs themselves delighted. These are pictured in the romances that were woven around Conn of the Hundred Battles, his son Art[Pg 364] the Lonely, his grandson Cormac mac Art, and his great-grandson Cairbré of the Liffey. This cycle of romance may be called the "Fenian" Cycle, as dealing to some extent with Finn mac Cúmhail and his Fenian[2] militia, or the "Ossianic" Cycle since Ossian, Finn's son, is supposed to have been the author of many of the poems which belong to it.
In point of time—as reckoned by the Irish annalists and historians—the men of the Fenian Cycle lived something over two hundred years later than those of the Cuchulain era[3] and in none of the romances do we see even the faintest confusion or sign of intermingling the characters belonging to the different cycles. One of the surest proofs—if proof were needed—that Macpherson's brilliant "Ossian" had no Gaelic[Pg 365] original, is the way in which the men and events of the two separate cycles are jumbled together.
As the war between Ulster and Connacht, which followed the death of the children of Usnach, is the great historic event which serves as basis to so many of the Red Branch romances, so the principal thread of history round which many of the Fenian stories are woven, is the gradual and slowly increasing enmity which proclaimed itself between the High-kings of Erin and their Fenian cohorts, resulting at last in the battle of Gabhra, the fall of the High-king, and the destruction of the Fenians.
Thus in the battle of Cnucha is related how Cúmhail[4] [Cool], the father of Finn, made war upon Conn of the Hundred Battles because he had raised Criomhthan of the Yellow Hair to the throne of Leinster, and how he obtained the aid of the Munster princes in the war. At the battle of Cnucha or Castleknock, near Cool's rath—now Rathcoole some ten miles from Dublin—Cool was routed and slain by the celebrated Connacht champion Aedh mac Morna, who lost an eye in the battle and was thenceforth called Goll (or the blind)[5] mac Morna. Many of the Munster Fenians followed Cool in this battle, and we find here the broadening rift between the Fenians of Munster and of Connacht which ultimately tended to bring about the dissolution of the whole body.
Again we find in the fine tale called the Battle of Moy Muchruime how Finn, through spite at his father Cool being thus killed by Conn of the Hundred Battles, kept out of the way when Conn's son Art was fighting the great battle of Moy Muchruime and gave him no assistance.
And again it was partly because Finn kept out of the way on that occasion that Conn's great-grandson fought the battle[Pg 366] of Gabhra against Finn's son Ossian and his grandson Oscar, a battle which put an end to Fenian power for ever.
Of many of these tales we find two redactions, that of the old vellum MSS. and that of the modern paper ones, the latter being as a rule much longer and more decorative. Here, for instance, is the later version of one passage out of many which is slurred over or disregarded in the old one[6]; it is the sailing of Cúmhail, Finn's father, to Ireland to take the throne of Leinster. I translate this from a modern manuscript of the battle of Cnucha, in my own possession, as a good instance of the decorative, and in places inflated style of the later redactions of many of the Fenian sagas.
THE SAILING OF CúMHAIL.
"Now the place where Cúmhail chanced to be at that time was between the islands of Alba and the deserts of Fionn-Lochlan, for he was hunting and deer-stalking there. And the number of those who were with the over-throwing hero Cúmhail in that place, was thrice fifty champions of his own near men. And he heard at that time that his country was left without any good king to defend it, and that Cáthaoir Mór [king of Leinster] had fallen in the pen of battle, and that there was no hero to keep the country. Thereupon, those chieftains were of a mind to proceed unto the isolated green isle of Erin, there to maintain with valour and might the red-hand province of Leinster. And joyfully they proceeded straight forwards towards their ship.[7]
"And there they quickly and expeditiously launched the towering,[Pg 367] wide-wombed, broad-sailed bark, the freighted full-wide, fair-broad, firm-roped vessel, and they grasped their shapely well-formed broad-bladed, well-prepared oars, and they made a powerful sea-great, dashing, dry-quick rowing over the broad hollow-deep, full-foamed, pools [of the sea], and over the vast-billowed, vehement, hollow-broken rollers, so that they shot their shapely ships under the penthouse of each fair rock in the shallows nigh to the rough-bordered margin of the Eastern lands, over the unsmooth, great-forming, lively-waved arms of the sea, so that each fierce, broad, constant-foaming, bright-spotted, white-broken drop that the heroes left upon the sea-pool with that rapid rowing, formed [themselves] like great torrents upon soft mountains.
"When that valiant powerful company perceived the moaning of the loud billow-waves and the breaking forth of the ocean from her barriers, and the swelling of the abyss from her places, and the loud convulsion of the sea from her smooth streams, it was then they hoisted the variegated, tough-cordaged, sharp-pointed mast with much speed. And when the great foundation-blasts of the angry wind touched the even upright-standing, sword-straight masts, and when the huge-flying, loud-voiced, broad-bordered sails swallowed the wind attacking them suddenly with sharp voice, that stout, strong, active, powerful crew rose up promptly and quickly, and every one went straight to his work with speed and promptitude, and they stretched forth their ready courageous, white-coloured, brown-nailed hands most valiantly to the tackling, till they let the wind in loud, sharp, fast, voice-bursts into the shrouds of the mast, so that the ship gave an eager, very quick, vigorous leap forward, right straight into the salt-ocean, till they arrived in the delightfully-clear, cold-pooled, querulously-whistling, joyfully-calling reaches of the sea, and the dark sea rose speedily around them in desperate-daring floodful doisleana, in hardly-separated ridges and in rough-grey, proud-tongued, gloomy-grim, blue-capacious valleys, and in impetuous shower-topped wombs [of water]; and the great merriment of the cold wind was answered by the chieftains, strong-workingly, stout-enduringly, truly-powerfully, and they proceeded to manage and attend the high-ocean, until at last the strong and powerful sea overcame the intention of the high wind, and the murmur and giddy voice of the deep was humbled by that great rowing, till the sea became restful, smooth, and very calm behind them, until they took port and harbour at Inver Cholpa, which is at this time called Drogheda."
The stories about Cormac mac Art, his grandfather Conn of the Hundred Battles, and his son Cairbré of the Liffey,[Pg 368] which are numerous, are mostly more or less connected with the Fenians, and may, as they deal with the same era and the same characters, be conveniently classed along with the Fenian sagas. One of the best known of these sagas is the Battle of Moy Léana[8] in which Conn of the Hundred Battles slew his rival Owen, who had forced from him half his kingdom. Owen had lived for six years in Spain, and had married a daughter of the Spanish king. At the end of this time he was seized with great home-sickness and he proposed to return to Ireland. When his father-in-law heard this, he said to him:—
"If that Erin of which you speak, Owen, were a thing easily moved, we would deem it easier to send the soldiers and warriors of Spain with you thither to cut it from its foundation and lay it on wheels and carry it after our ships and place it a one angle of Spain"—a grandiloquent speech which Owen did not relish; "He did not receive it with satisfaction, and it was not sweet to him," says the saga.
The King perceived this however, and offered him just what he wanted, two thousand warriors to help him and his exiles in acquiring the kingdom. The account of their embarcation and voyage is perhaps as good a specimen of exaggerated verbosity and of the rhetoric of the professed story-teller as any other in these sagas, which abound with such things, and it is perhaps worth while to give it at length. It will be seen that the story-teller or prose-poet, passes everything through the prism of his imagination, and aided by an extraordinary exuberance of vocabulary and unbounded wealth of alliterative adjectives, wraps the commonest objects in a hurricane of—to use his own phrase—"misty-dripping" epithet. The Battle of Moy Léana is recorded in the Annals of Ulster, by Flann in the eleventh century, and by the Book of Leinster, and no doubt the essence of the saga is very ancient, but the[Pg 369] dressing-up of it, and especially the passage I am about to quote, is, in its style—not to speak of the language which is modern—almost certainly post-Norman.
THE SAILING OF OWEN MóR.
"Then that vindictive unmerciful host went forward to the harbours and ports where their vessels and their sailing ships awaited them; and they launched their terrible wonderful monsters; their black, dangerous, many-coloured ships; their smooth, proper-sided, steady, powerful scuds, and their cunningly-stitched Laoidheangs from their beds and from their capacious, full-smooth places, out of the cool clear-winding creeks of the coast, and from the calm, quiet, well-shaped, broad-headed harbours, and there were placed upon every swift-going ship of them free and accurately arranged tiers of fully-smoothed, long-bladed oars, and they made a harmonious, united, co-operating, thick-framed, eager-springing, unhesitating, constant-going rowing against currents and wild tempests, so that loud, haughty, proud-minded, were the responses of the stout, fierce-fronted, sportive-topped billows in conversing with the scuds and beautiful prows.
"The dark, impetuous, proud, ardent waters became as white-streaked, fierce-rolling, languid-fatigued Leibhiona, upon which to cast the white-flanked, slippery, thick, straight-swimming salmon, among the dark-prowling, foamy-tracked heads [of sea monsters] from off the brown oars.
"And upon that fleet, sweeping with sharp rapidity from the sides and borders of the territories, and from the shelter of the lands, and from the calm quiet of the shores, they could see nothing of the globe on their border near them, but the high, proud, tempestuous waves of the abyss, and the rough, roaring shore, shaking and quivering, and the very-quick, swift motion of the great wind coming upon them, and long-swelling, gross-springing, great billows rising over the swelling sides of the [sea] valleys, and the savage, dangerous, shower-crested sea, maintaining its strength against the rapid course of the vessels over the expanse, until at last it became exhausted, subdued, drizzling and misty, from the conflict of the waves and fierce winds.
"The labouring crews derived increased spirits from the bounding of the swift ships over the wide expanse, and the wind coming from the rear, directly fair for the brave men, they arose manfully and vigorously to their work, and lashed the tough, new masts to the brown, smooth, ample, commodious bulwarks, without weakness,[Pg 370] without spraining, without overstraining. Those ardent, expert crews put their hands to the long linen [sails] without shrinking, without mistake, from Eibhil to Achtuaim, and the swift-going, long, capacious ships, passed from the hand-force of the warriors, and over the deep, wet, murmuring pools of the sea, and past the winding, bending, fierce-showery points of the harbours, and over the high-torrented, ever-great mountains of the brine, and over the heavy, listless walls of the great waves, and past the dark, misty-dripping hollows of the shores, and past the saucy, thick-flanked, spreading, white-crested currents of the streams, and over the spring-tide, contentious, furious, wet, overwhelming fragments of the cold ocean, until the sea became rocking like a soft, fragrant, proud-bearing plain, swelling and heaving to the force of the anger and fury of the cold winds.
"The upper elements quickly perceived the anger and fury of the sea growing and increasing. Woe indeed was it to have stood between those two powers, the sea and the great wind when mutually attacking each other, and contending at the sides of strong ships and stout-built vessels and beautiful scuds. So that the sea was in showery-tempestuous, growling, wet, fierce, loud, clamorous, dangerous stages after them, whilst the excitement of the murmuring dark-deeded wind continued in the face and in the sluices of the ocean from its bottom to its surface. And tremulous, listless, long-disjointed, quick-shattering, ship-breaking, was the effect of the disturbance, and treacherous the shivering of the winds and the rolling billows upon the swift barks, for the tempest did not leave them a plank unshaken, nor a hatch unstarted, nor a rope unsnapped, nor a nail unstrained, nor a bulwark unendangered, nor a bed unshattered, nor a lifting uncast-down, nor a mast unshivered, nor a yard untwisted, nor a sail untorn, nor a warrior unhurt, nor a soldier unterrified, nor a noble unstunned—excepting the ardour and sailorship of the brave men who attended to the attacks and howlings of the fierce wind.
"However, now, when the wind had exhausted its valour and had not received reverence nor honour from the sea, it went forward, stupid and crestfallen, to the uppermost regions of its residence; and the sea was fatigued from its roarings and drunken murmurings, and the wild billows ceased their motions, so that spirit returned to he nobles and strength to the hosts, and activity to the warriors, and strength to the champions. And they sailed onwards in that order without delay or accident until they reached the sheltered smooth harbour of Cealga and the shore of the island of Greagraidhe."
Who or what the Fenians were, has given rise to the greatest diversity of opinion. The school of Mr. Nutt and Professor[Pg 371] Rhys would, I fancy, recognise in them nothing but tribal deities, euhemerised or regarded as men.[9] Dr. Skene and Mr. Mac Ritchie believed that they were an altogether separate race of men from the Gaels, probably allied to, or identical with, the Picts of history; and the latter holds that they are the sidhe [shee] or fairy folk of the Gaels. The native Irish, on the other hand, who were perfectly acquainted with the Picts, and tell us much about them, have always regarded the Fenians as being nothing more or less than a body of janissaries or standing troops of Gaelic and Firbolg families, maintained during several reigns by the Irish kings, a body which tended to become hereditary. Nor is there in this account anything inherently impossible or improbable, especially as the Fenian régime synchronises with a time when the Irish were probably aggressively warlike. Keating, writing in Irish about the year 1630, gives the traditional account of them as he gathered it from ancient books and other authorities now lost, and this certainly preserves some ancient and unique traits. He begins[Pg 372] by rejecting the ridiculous stories told about them, such as the battle of Ventry and the like, as well as the remarks of Campion and of Buchanan, who in his history of Scotland had called Finn a giant.
"It is proved," writes Keating, "that their persons were of no extraordinary size compared with the men that lived in their own times, and moreover that they were nothing more than members of a body of buanadha or retained soldiers, maintained by the Irish kings for the purpose of guarding their territories and of upholding their authority therein. It is thus that captains and soldiers are at present maintained by all modern kings for the purpose of defending their rule and guarding their countries.
"The members of the Fenian Body lived in the following manner. They were quartered on the people from November Day till May Day, and their duty was to uphold justice and to put down injustice on the part of the kings and lords of Ireland, and also to guard the harbours of the country from the oppression of foreign invaders. After that, from May till November, they lived by hunting and the chase, and by performing the duties demanded of them by the kings of Ireland, such as preventing robberies, exacting fines and tributes, putting down public enemies, and every other kind of evil that might afflict the country. In performing these duties they received a certain fixed pay....
"However, from May till November the Fenians had to content themselves with game, the product of their own hunting, as this [right to hunt] was their maintenance and pay from the kings of Ireland. That is, the warriors had the flesh of the wild animals for their food, and the skins for wages. During the whole day, from morning till night they used to eat but one meal, and of this it was their wont to partake towards evening. About noon they used to send whatever game they had killed in the morning by their attendants to some appointed hill where there were wood and moorland close by. There they used to light immense fires, into which they put a large quantity of round sandstones. They next dug two pits in the yellow clay of the moor, and having set part of the venison upon spits to be roasted before the fire they bound up the remainder with sugàns—ropes of straw or rushes—in bundles of sedge, and then placed them to be cooked in one of the pits they had previously dug. There they set the stones which they had before this heated in the fire, round about them, and kept heaping them upon the bundles of meat until they had made them seethe freely, and the meat had become thoroughly cooked. From the greatness of these fires it has[Pg 373] resulted that their sites are still to be recognised in many parts of Ireland by their burnt blackness. It is they that are commonly called Fualachta na bhFiann, or the Fenians' cooking-spots.
"As to the warriors of the Fenians, when they were assembled at the place where their fires had been lighted, they used to gather round the second of those pits of which we have spoken above, and there every man stripped himself to his skin, tied his tunic round his waist, and then set to dressing his hair and cleansing his limbs, thus ridding himself of the sweat and soil of the day's hunt. Then they began to supple their thews and muscles by gentle exercise, loosening them by friction, until they had relieved themselves of all sense of stiffness and fatigue. When they had finished doing this they sat down and ate their meal. That being over, they set about constructing their fiann-bhotha or hunting-booths, and preparing their beds, and so put themselves in train for sleep. Of the following three materials did each man construct his bed, of the brushwood of the forest, of moss, and of fresh rushes. The brushwood was laid next the ground, over it was placed the moss, and lastly fresh rushes were spread over all. It is these three materials that are designated in our old romances as the tri Cuilcedha na bhFiann—the three Beddings of the Fenians."
Every man who entered the Fenian ranks had four geasa [gassa, i.e., tabus] laid upon him,
"The first, never to receive a portion with a wife, but to choose her for good manners and virtues; the second, never to offer violence to any woman; the third, never to refuse any one for anything he might possess; the fourth, that no single warrior should ever flee before nine [i.e., before less than ten] champions."
There was a curious condition attached to entrance into the brotherhood which rendered it necessary that
"Both his father and mother, his tribe, and his relatives should first give guarantees that they should never make any charge against any person for his death. This was in order that the duty of avenging his own blood [wounds] should rest with no man other than himself, and in order that his friends should have nothing to claim with respect to him however great the evils inflicted upon him."
All the Fenians were obliged to know the rules of poetry,[10][Pg 374] for no figure in Irish antiquity, layman or cleric, could ever arrive at the rank of a popular hero unless he could compose, or at least appreciate a poem.
The Fenian tales and poems are extraordinarily numerous, but their conception and characteristics are in general distinctly different from those relating to the Red Branch. They have not the same sweep, the same vastness and stature, the same weirdness, as the older cycle. The majority of them are more modern in conception and surroundings. There is little or no mention of the war chariot which is so important a factor in the older cycle. The Fenians fought on foot or horseback, and we meet, too, frequent mention of helmets and mail-coats, which are post-Danish touches. Things are on a smaller scale. Exaggeration does not run all through the stories, but is confined to small parts of them, and it is set off by much that is trivial or humorous.
The Fenian stories became in later times the distinctly popular ones. They were far more of the people and for the[Pg 375] people than those of the Red Branch. They were most intimately bound up with the life and thought and feelings of the whole Gaelic race, high and low, both in Ireland and Scotland, and the development of Fenian saga, for a period of 1,200 or 1,500 years, is one of the most remarkable examples in the world of continuous literary evolution. I use the word evolution advisedly, for there was probably not a century from the seventh to the eighteenth in which new stories, poems, and redactions of sagas concerning Finn and the Fenians were not invented and put in circulation, while to this very day many stories never committed to manuscript are current about them amongst the Irish and Scotch Gaelic-speaking populations. We have found no such steady interest evinced by the people in the Red Branch romances, and in attempting to collect Irish folk-lore I have found next to nothing about Cuchulain and his contemporaries, but great quantities about Finn, Ossian, Oscar, Goll, and Conan. The one cycle, then, antique in tone, language, and surroundings, was, I suspect, that of the chiefs, the great men, and the bards; the other—at least in later times—more that of the un-bardic classes and of the people.
I do not mean to say that many of the Cuchulain stories were not copied into modern MSS. and circulated freely among the people all over Ireland during the eighteenth century and the beginning of this, especially Cuchulain's training, Conlaoch's (his son's) death, the Fight at the Ford, and others, but these appear never to have put out shoots and blossoms from themselves and to have generated new and yet again new stories as did the ever-youthful Fenian tales; nor do they appear to have equally entwined themselves at this day round the popular imagination.
A striking instance of how the Ossianic tale continued to develop down to the eighteenth century was supplied me the other day when examining the Reeves Collection.[11] I there[Pg 376] came upon a story in a Louth MS., written, I think, in the last century, which seemed to me to contain one of the latest developments of Ossianic saga. It is called "The Adventures of Dubh mac Deaghla," and tells us of how a prophet was born of the race of Eiremóin, "and all say," adds the writer, "that it was he was the druid who prophesied to Fiacha Sreabhtainne that he should fall in the battle of Dubh-Cumair by the three brothers, Cairioll, Muircath, and Aodh." He also "prophesied to the race of Tuathal that Cairbré of the Liffey was that far-branching tree which was to spread round about through the great circuit of Erin, around which smote the powerful wind from the south-west, overthrowing it wholly to the ground—which wind meant the Fenians, as had been announced by the smith's daughter."[12] The Fenians it seems heard that this Torna had prophesied about them and intended to kill him, and he and his family had to emigrate to Britain. From there he sends a letter in true epistolary style to an old friend of his, one Conor son of Dathach, beginning "Dear Friend"—an evident mark of seventeenth or possibly eighteenth century authorship, for there are no letters written in this style in the older literature, and this piece evidently follows a[Pg 377] Latin or a Spanish, or possibly an English model. However this may be, Torna's letter asks Conor for news of the situation, and in time receives the following answer:
"To Torna son of Dubh, our dear friend in Glen Fuinnse in Britain in Saxony.
"Thy affectionate missive was read by me as soon as it arrived, and it had been a cause of joy to me, were it not for the way we are in at Tara at this moment.
"For we never felt until the Munster Fenians came and encamped at the marsh of Old Raphoe and Treibhe to the south-west; the warriors of Leinster also and Baoisgnidh, together with Clan Ditribh and Clan Boirchne, were to the south of them, towards the bottom of the stream of Gabhra and on the west towards the old fort of Mève; and that same evening the King having received an account of the encamping of the Fenians urges messengers secretly to Connacht to the Clan of Conal Cruachna that they might come, along with all the king's friends from the western border of Erin; and other messengers he despatches to Scotland for the Clan of Garaidh Glúnmhar, desiring Oscar of the blue Javelin, Aodh, Argal, and Airtre to come from abroad without delay, and that secretly.
"On the early morning of the morrow, before the stars of the air retired, the King urged the druids of Tara against the Fenians to argue with them, and ask what was the cause of their rebelling in this guise, or who it was with whom they had now come to do battle, because they appeared not in habiliments of peace or friendship, but a flush of anger appeared in the face and countenance of every several man of them.
"'And there is another unlawful thing of which ye are guilty,' said the druids, 'which shows that ye have broken the vow of allegiance and obedience to your king, in that ye have come in array and garb of battle to the door of his fortress without receiving his leave or advice, without giving him notice or warning. To what point of the compass do ye travel, or on what have ye set your mind [that ye act not] as is the right and due of a prince's subjects, and as was always before this the habitude of the bands that came before ye; and as shall last with honest people till the end of the world.'
"However, now the druids are a-preaching to them and casting at them bold storm-showers of reproofs by way of retarding them till the coming back of the messengers who went abroad, for Mac Cool is not amongst them to excite them against us, and we hope that[Pg 378] they will remain thus until help come to us. For this is the eleventh day since the druids went from us, and our watchmen who observe what approaches and what goes, disclose all tidings to us, and they are ever a-listening to the loud argument of the druids and the captains against one another. Moreover, the desire of the Fenians to make a rapid assault upon Tara is the less from their having heard that Cairbré was gone on his royal round to Dun Sreabhtainne to visit Fiacha,[13] though he is really not gone there, but to a certain place under cover of night with his women and the royal jewels of Tara. And it was lucky for him that he did not go to Dun Sreabhtainne, for the Fenians had sent Cairioll and nine mighty men with hi............