THE STORY OF THE IRISH NATION

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CHAPTER I

THE GAELIC PERIOD: PAGAN

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Na fine day in the Wicklow Mountains you can

survey half Ireland. You can look as far north as the lovely Mourne range in Ulster, and on the other hand as far south as the tip of Wexford, framed in a bright sea.

To take in the full scope of the Irish story you must climb to some similar height in imagination, some height from which narrow boundaries are released, and the prospect becomes emotionally open. To find this eminence, it is perhaps best to go back a few thousand years. Here it is no longer history, as we know it nationally and politically, that takes us by the hand. It is the much calmer genius of science.

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The Story of the Irish Nation

From this remote period one can construct no certain narrative. There is only the wavering accent of tradition, the hint of geology and anthropology, the literal "footprints on the sands of time." But by great luck we happen to have preserved in Gaelic the oldest existing body of Northern literature. From this literature we are able to judge or guess at the types of men who stand on the sky-line of Irish history.

This Gaelic past is of intense interest, not only because so many records and memorials of it exist, but because the Irish people to-day are in such vivid relation to their past. Like all invaded and suppressed peoples, they have been repeatedly informed that their past is wild, obscure, and barbaric; they have been encouraged to forget it. But the past swings the future into being. The present key to Ireland is in the Gaelic period which flourished so nobly in pagan times, and so generously in the Christian period that followed Patrick. This civilization, however, is not monstrously peculiar or archaic. The Irish are not racially separate from Europe. Their history is a vital part of European history. By an accident of political and economic suppression the Irish people have been forced for centuries to turn all their energies into making a fight for survival. But, for centuries, like a river that

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has been dammed and forced out of its channel, the Irish nation has at last pushed through its unnatural obstacle, established its continuity, and begun to flow in freedom. Hence the head-waters of Gaelic civilization are more important to examine than ever.

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To begin with the earlier human inhabitants of Ireland, it is by no means established that they were all of one racial stock. It was dark Mediterranean people, we are told, who worshiped around the glacial boulders which still remain. It was broad-headed "Beaker" people who erected the great burial mounds and laboriously decorated the memorial stones. These prehistoric inhabitants of Ireland are hardly discernible. They are vaguely known as Iberians and as Picts.

Descendants of early tribes-wiry, black-haired Sicilian-like-are still to be met in stony Connacht. Perhaps these are "Iberians." Once it was supposed that the famous chronologies of the pagan kings had historical value and gave a clue to the pre-Celtic Irish, but it now appears that their lists of dates and monarchs were compiled on the model of the Old Testament after Christianity had come to Ireland. But

much is to be inferred from the unwritten recordsfrom the burial mounds and the big memorial stones and the Druidical circles which are still, to our wonderment, sprinkled over Ireland. On a stone at New Grange there is to be seen the spiral that came from the Ægean, traced by some pre-Celtic hand about 1500 B. C. Near-by in royal Meath are the many hillocks which the fear and awe of a later age raised to the Old Men. Under a seventy-foot mound at New Grange, with a circle of stones outside, one may now climb down to the mysterious set of chambers in which the pre-Celtic chiefs were first buried. Here, up to the time of Christianity, the pagan kings were laid, sometimes in urns and sometimes lengthwise and sometimes standing up, in full armor and face toward the enemy.

The early race of men came to be called Firbolg, or "men of the bags." In these bags, it is recorded, the Greeks, so-called, compelled the Firbolg to haul loam for their hillside gardens. Revolting against their slavery, the Firbolg escaped from their Mediterranean masters, making boats out of their bags.

However dim this legend, the first man of the present surviving type certainly came to Ireland oversea, so one may fairly picture the Firbolg sailing to their new country as Lucan pictured the Briton: