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Gods and Fighting Men by Lady I. A. Gregory

L >> Lady I. A. Gregory >> Gods and Fighting Men



GODS AND FIGHTING MEN:

THE STORY OF THE TUATHA DE DANAAN
AND OF THE FIANNA OF IRELAND,

ARRANGED AND PUT INTO ENGLISH BY LADY GREGORY.

WITH A PREFACE BY W.B. YEATS

1905




DEDICATION TO THE MEMBERS OF THE IRISH LITERARY SOCIETY OF NEW YORK


My Friends, those I know and those I do not know, I am glad in the year
of the birth of your Society to have this book to offer you.

It has given great courage to many workers here--working to build up
broken walls--to know you have such friendly thoughts of them in your
minds. A few of you have already come to see us, and we begin to hope
that one day the steamers across the Atlantic will not go out full, but
come back full, until some of you find your real home is here, and say
as some of us say, like Finn to the woman of enchantments--

[Illustration: Irish Gaelic]

"We would not give up our own country--Ireland--if we were to get the
whole world as an estate, and the Country of the Young along with it."

AUGUSTA GREGORY.




PREFACE

I

A few months ago I was on the bare Hill of Allen, "wide Almhuin of
Leinster," where Finn and the Fianna lived, according to the stories,
although there are no earthen mounds there like those that mark the
sites of old buildings on so many hills. A hot sun beat down upon
flowering gorse and flowerless heather; and on every side except the
east, where there were green trees and distant hills, one saw a level
horizon and brown boglands with a few green places and here and there
the glitter of water. One could imagine that had it been twilight and
not early afternoon, and had there been vapours drifting and frothing
where there were now but shadows of clouds, it would have set stirring
in one, as few places even in Ireland can, a thought that is peculiar to
Celtic romance, as I think, a thought of a mystery coming not as with
Gothic nations out of the pressure of darkness, but out of great spaces
and windy light. The hill of Teamhair, or Tara, as it is now called,
with its green mounds and its partly wooded sides, and its more gradual
slope set among fat grazing lands, with great trees in the hedgerows,
had brought before one imaginations, not of heroes who were in their
youth for hundreds of years, or of women who came to them in the
likeness of hunted fawns, but of kings that lived brief and politic
lives, and of the five white roads that carried their armies to the
lesser kingdoms of Ireland, or brought to the great fair that had given
Teamhair its sovereignty, all that sought justice or pleasure or had
goods to barter.


II

It is certain that we must not confuse these kings, as did the mediaeval
chroniclers, with those half-divine kings of Almhuin. The chroniclers,
perhaps because they loved tradition too well to cast out utterly much
that they dreaded as Christians, and perhaps because popular imagination
had begun the mixture, have mixed one with another ingeniously, making
Finn the head of a kind of Militia under Cormac MacArt, who is supposed
to have reigned at Teamhair in the second century, and making Grania,
who travels to enchanted houses under the cloak of Angus, god of Love,
and keeps her troubling beauty longer than did Helen hers, Cormac's
daughter, and giving the stories of the Fianna, although the impossible
has thrust its proud finger into them all, a curious air of precise
history. It is only when one separates the stories from that mediaeval
pedantry, as in this book, that one recognises one of the oldest worlds
that man has imagined, an older world certainly than one finds in the
stories of Cuchulain, who lived, according to the chroniclers, about the
time of the birth of Christ. They are far better known, and one may be
certain of the antiquity of incidents that are known in one form or
another to every Gaelic-speaking countryman in Ireland or in the
Highlands of Scotland. Sometimes a labourer digging near to a cromlech,
or Bed of Diarmuid and Crania as it is called, will tell one a tradition
that seems older and more barbaric than any description of their
adventures or of themselves in written text or story that has taken form
in the mouths of professed story-tellers. Finn and the Fianna found
welcome among the court poets later than did Cuchulain; and one finds
memories of Danish invasions and standing armies mixed with the
imaginations of hunters and solitary fighters among great woods. One
never hears of Cuchulain delighting in the hunt or in woodland things;
and one imagines that the story-teller would have thought it unworthy in
so great a man, who lived a well-ordered, elaborate life, and had his
chariot and his chariot-driver and his barley-fed horses to delight in.
If he is in the woods before dawn one is not told that he cannot know
the leaves of the hazel from the leaves of the oak; and when Emer
laments him no wild creature comes into her thoughts but the cuckoo that
cries over cultivated fields. His story must have come out of a time
when the wild wood was giving way to pasture and tillage, and men had no
longer a reason to consider every cry of the birds or change of the
night. Finn, who was always in the woods, whose battles were but hours
amid years of hunting, delighted in the "cackling of ducks from the Lake
of the Three Narrows; the scolding talk of the blackbird of Doire an
Cairn; the bellowing of the ox from the Valley of the Berries; the
whistle of the eagle from the Valley of Victories or from the rough
branches of the Ridge of the Stream; the grouse of the heather of
Cruachan; the call of the otter of Druim re Coir." When sorrow comes
upon the queens of the stories, they have sympathy for the wild birds
and beasts that are like themselves: "Credhe wife of Cael came with the
others and went looking through the bodies for her comely comrade, and
crying as she went. And as she was searching she saw a crane of the
meadows and her two nestlings, and the cunning beast the fox watching
the nestlings; and when the crane covered one of the birds to save it,
he would make a rush at the other bird, the way she had to stretch
herself out over the birds; and she would sooner have got her own death
by the fox than the nestlings to be killed by him. And Credhe was
looking at that, and she said: 'It is no wonder I to have such love for
my comely sweetheart, and the bird in that distress about her
nestlings.'"


III

One often hears of a horse that shivers with terror, or of a dog that
howls at something a man's eyes cannot see, and men who live primitive
lives where instinct does the work of reason are fully conscious of many
things that we cannot perceive at all. As life becomes more orderly,
more deliberate, the supernatural world sinks farther away. Although the
gods come to Cuchulain, and although he is the son of one of the
greatest of them, their country and his are far apart, and they come to
him as god to mortal; but Finn is their equal. He is continually in
their houses; he meets with Bodb Dearg, and Angus, and Manannan, now as
friend with friend, now as with an enemy he overcomes in battle; and
when he has need of their help his messenger can say: "There is not a
king's son or a prince, or a leader of the Fianna of Ireland, without
having a wife or a mother or a foster-mother or a sweetheart of the
Tuatha de Danaan." When the Fianna are broken up at last, after hundreds
of years of hunting, it is doubtful that he dies at all, and certain
that he comes again in some other shape, and Oisin, his son, is made
king over a divine country. The birds and beasts that cross his path in
the woods have been fighting men or great enchanters or fair women, and
in a moment can take some beautiful or terrible shape. One thinks of him
and of his people as great-bodied men with large movements, that seem,
as it were, flowing out of some deep below the narrow stream of personal
impulse, men that have broad brows and quiet eyes full of confidence in
a good luck that proves every day afresh that they are a portion of the
strength of things. They are hardly so much individual men as portions
of universal nature, like the clouds that shape themselves and re-shape
themselves momentarily, or like a bird between two boughs, or like the
gods that have given the apples and the nuts; and yet this but brings
them the nearer to us, for we can remake them in our image when we will,
and the woods are the more beautiful for the thought. Do we not always
fancy hunters to be something like this, and is not that why we think
them poetical when we meet them of a sudden, as in these lines in
"Pauline":

"An old hunter
Talking with gods; or a nigh-crested chief
Sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos"


IV

One must not expect in these stories the epic lineaments, the many
incidents, woven into one great event of, let us say, the story of the
War for the Brown Bull of Cuailgne, or that of the last gathering at
Muirthemne. Even Diarmuid and Grania, which is a long story, has nothing
of the clear outlines of Deirdre, and is indeed but a succession of
detached episodes. The men who imagined the Fianna had the imagination
of children, and as soon as they had invented one wonder, heaped another
on top of it. Children--or, at any rate, it is so I remember my own
childhood--do not understand large design, and they delight in little
shut-in places where they can play at houses more than in great expanses
where a country-side takes, as it were, the impression of a thought. The
wild creatures and the green things are more to them than to us, for
they creep towards our light by little holes and crevices. When they
imagine a country for themselves, it is always a country where one can
wander without aim, and where one can never know from one place what
another will be like, or know from the one day's adventure what may meet
one with to-morrow's sun. I have wished to become a child again that I
might find this book, that not only tells one of such a country, but is
fuller than any other book that tells of heroic life, of the childhood
that is in all folk-lore, dearer to me than all the books of the western
world.

Children play at being great and wonderful people, at the ambitions
they will put away for one reason or another before they grow into
ordinary men and women. Mankind as a whole had a like dream once;
everybody and nobody built up the dream bit by bit, and the ancient
story-tellers are there to make us remember what mankind would have been
like, had not fear and the failing will and the laws of nature tripped
up its heels. The Fianna and their like are themselves so full of power,
and they are set in a world so fluctuating and dream-like, that nothing
can hold them from being all that the heart desires.

I have read in a fabulous book that Adam had but to imagine a bird, and
it was born into life, and that he created all things out of himself by
nothing more important than an unflagging fancy; and heroes who can make
a ship out of a shaving have but little less of the divine prerogatives.
They have no speculative thoughts to wander through eternity and waste
heroic blood; but how could that be otherwise, for it is at all times
the proud angels who sit thinking upon the hill-side and not the people
of Eden. One morning we meet them hunting a stag that is "as joyful as
the leaves of a tree in summer-time"; and whatever they do, whether they
listen to the harp or follow an enchanter over-sea, they do for the sake
of joy, their joy in one another, or their joy in pride and movement;
and even their battles are fought more because of their delight in a
good fighter than because of any gain that is in victory. They live
always as if they were playing a game; and so far as they have any
deliberate purpose at all, it is that they may become great gentlemen
and be worthy of the songs of poets. It has been said, and I think the
Japanese were the first to say it, that the four essential virtues are
to be generous among the weak, and truthful among one's friends, and
brave among one's enemies, and courteous at all times; and if we
understand by courtesy not merely the gentleness the story-tellers have
celebrated, but a delight in courtly things, in beautiful clothing and
in beautiful verse, one understands that it was no formal succession of
trials that bound the Fianna to one another. Only the Table Round, that
is indeed, as it seems, a rivulet from the same river, is bound in a
like fellowship, and there the four heroic virtues are troubled by the
abstract virtues of the cloister. Every now and then some noble knight
builds himself a cell upon the hill-side, or leaves kind women and
joyful knights to seek the vision of the Grail in lonely adventures. But
when Oisin or some kingly forerunner--Bran, son of Febal, or the
like--rides or sails in an enchanted ship to some divine country, he but
looks for a more delighted companionship, or to be in love with faces
that will never fade. No thought of any life greater than that of love,
and the companionship of those that have drawn their swords upon the
darkness of the world, ever troubles their delight in one another as it
troubles Iseult amid her love, or Arthur amid his battles. It is one of
the ailments of our speculation that thought, when it is not the
planning of something, or the doing of something or some memory of a
plain circumstance separates us from one another because it makes us
always more unlike, and because no thought passes through another's ear
unchanged. Companionship can only be perfect when it is founded on
things, for things are always the same under the hand, and at last one
comes to hear with envy of the voices of boys lighting a lantern to
ensnare moths, or of the maids chattering in the kitchen about the fox
that carried off a turkey before breakfast. This book is full of
fellowship untroubled like theirs, and made noble by a courtesy that has
gone perhaps out of the world. I do not know in literature better
friends and lovers. When one of the Fianna finds Osgar dying the proud
death of a young man, and asks is it well with him, he is answered, "I
am as you would have me be." The very heroism of the Fianna is indeed
but their pride and joy in one another, their good fellowship. Goll, old
and savage, and letting himself die of hunger in a cave because he is
angry and sorry, can speak lovely words to the wife whose help he
refuses. "'It is best as it is,' he said, 'and I never took the advice
of a woman east or west, and I never will take it. And oh, sweet-voiced
queen,' he said, 'what ails you to be fretting after me? and remember
now your silver and your gold, and your silks ... and do not be crying
tears after me, queen with the white hands,' he said, 'but remember your
constant lover Aodh, son of the best woman of the world, that came from
Spain asking for you, and that I fought on Corcar-an-Dearg; and go to
him now,' he said, 'for it is bad when a woman is without a good man.'"


VI

They have no asceticism, but they are more visionary than any ascetic,
and their invisible life is but the life about them made more perfect
and more lasting, and the invisible people are their own images in the
water. Their gods may have been much besides this, for we know them from
fragments of mythology picked out with trouble from a fantastic history
running backward to Adam and Eve, and many things that may have seemed
wicked to the monks who imagined that history, may have been altered or
left out; but this they must have been essentially, for the old stories
are confirmed by apparitions among the country-people to-day. The Men of
Dea fought against the mis-shapen Fomor, as Finn fights against the
Cat-Heads and the Dog-Heads; and when they are overcome at last by men,
they make themselves houses in the hearts of hills that are like the
houses of men. When they call men to their houses and to their country
Under-Wave they promise them all that they have upon earth, only in
greater abundance. The god Midhir sings to Queen Etain in one of the
most beautiful of the stories: "The young never grow old; the fields and
the flowers are as pleasant to be looking at as the blackbird's eggs;
warm streams of mead and wine flow through that country; there is no
care or no sorrow on any person; we see others, but we ourselves are not
seen." These gods are indeed more wise and beautiful than men; but men,
when they are great men, are stronger than they are, for men are, as it
were, the foaming tide-line of their sea. One remembers the Druid who
answered, when some one asked him who made the world, "The Druids made
it." All was indeed but one life flowing everywhere, and taking one
quality here, another there. It sometimes seems to one as if there is a
kind of day and night of religion, and that a period when the influences
are those that shape the world is followed by a period when the greater
power is in influences that would lure the soul out of the world, out of
the body. When Oisin is speaking with S. Patrick of the friends and the
life he has outlived, he can but cry out constantly against a religion
that has no meaning for him. He laments, and the country-people have
remembered his words for centuries: "I will cry my fill, but not for
God, but because Finn and the Fianna are not living."


VII

Old writers had an admirable symbolism that attributed certain energies
to the influence of the sun, and certain others to the lunar influence.
To lunar influence belong all thoughts and emotions that were created by
the community, by the common people, by nobody knows who, and to the sun
all that came from the high disciplined or individual kingly mind. I
myself imagine a marriage of the sun and moon in the arts I take most
pleasure in; and now bride and bridegroom but exchange, as it were, full
cups of gold and silver, and now they are one in a mystical embrace.
From the moon come the folk-songs imagined by reapers and spinners out
of the common impulse of their labour, and made not by putting words
together, but by mixing verses and phrases, and the folk-tales made by
the capricious mixing of incidents known to everybody in new ways, as
one deals out cards, never getting the same hand twice over. When one
hears some fine story, one never knows whether it has not been hazard
that put the last touch of adventure. Such poetry, as it seems to me,
desires an infinity of wonder or emotion, for where there is no
individual mind there is no measurer-out, no marker-in of limits. The
poor fisher has no possession of the world and no responsibility for it;
and if he dreams of a love-gift better than the brown shawl that seems
too common for poetry, why should he not dream of a glove made from the
skin of a bird, or shoes made from the skin of a fish, or a coat made
from the glittering garment of the salmon? Was it not Aeschylus who said
he but served up fragments from the banquet of Homer?--but Homer himself
found the great banquet on an earthen floor and under a broken roof. We
do not know who at the foundation of the world made the banquet for the
first time, or who put the pack of cards into rough hands; but we do
know that, unless those that have made many inventions are about to
change the nature of poetry, we may have to go where Homer went if we
are to sing a new song. Is it because all that is under the moon thirsts
to escape out of bounds, to lose itself in some unbounded tidal stream,
that the songs of the folk are mournful, and that the story of the
Fianna, whenever the queens lament for their lovers, reminds us of songs
that are still sung in country-places? Their grief, even when it is to
be brief like Grania's, goes up into the waste places of the sky. But
in supreme art or in supreme life there is the influence of the sun too,
and the sun brings with it, as old writers tell us, not merely
discipline but joy; for its discipline is not of the kind the multitudes
impose upon us by their weight and pressure, but the expression of the
individual soul turning itself into a pure fire and imposing its own
pattern, its own music, upon the heaviness and the dumbness that is in
others and in itself. When we have drunk the cold cup of the moon's
intoxication, we thirst for something beyond ourselves, and the mind
flows outward to a natural immensity; but if we have drunk from the hot
cup of the sun, our own fullness awakens, we desire little, for wherever
one goes one's heart goes too; and if any ask what music is the
sweetest, we can but answer, as Finn answered, "what happens." And yet
the songs and stories that have come from either influence are a part,
neither less than the other, of the pleasure that is the bride-bed of
poetry.


VIII

Gaelic-speaking Ireland, because its art has been made, not by the
artist choosing his material from wherever he has a mind to, but by
adding a little to something which it has taken generations to invent,
has always had a popular literature. One cannot say how much that
literature has done for the vigour of the race, for one cannot count the
hands its praise of kings and high-hearted queens made hot upon the
sword-hilt, or the amorous eyes it made lustful for strength and beauty.
One remembers indeed that when the farming people and the labourers of
the towns made their last attempt to cast out England by force of arms
they named themselves after the companions of Finn. Even when Gaelic has
gone, and the poetry with it, something of the habit of mind remains in
ways of speech and thought and "come-all-ye"s and poetical saying; nor
is it only among the poor that the old thought has been for strength or
weakness. Surely these old stories, whether of Finn or Cuchulain, helped
to sing the old Irish and the old Norman-Irish aristocracy to their end.
They heard their hereditary poets and story-tellers, and they took to
horse and died fighting against Elizabeth or against Cromwell; and when
an English-speaking aristocracy had their place, it listened to no
poetry indeed, but it felt about it in the popular mind an exacting and
ancient tribunal, and began a play that had for spectators men and women
that loved the high wasteful virtues. I do not think that their own
mixed blood or the habit of their time need take all, or nearly all,
credit or discredit for the impulse that made our modern gentlemen fight
duels over pocket-handkerchiefs, and set out to play ball against the
gates of Jerusalem for a wager, and scatter money before the public eye;
and at last, after an epoch of such eloquence the world has hardly seen
its like, lose their public spirit and their high heart and grow
querulous and selfish as men do who have played life out not heartily
but with noise and tumult. Had they understood the people and the game a
little better, they might have created an aristocracy in an age that has
lost the meaning of the word. When one reads of the Fianna, or of
Cuchulain, or of some great hero, one remembers that the fine life is
always a part played finely before fine spectators. There also one
notices the hot cup and the cold cup of intoxication; and when the fine
spectators have ended, surely the fine players grow weary, and
aristocratic life is ended. When O'Connell covered with a dark glove the
hand that had killed a man in the duelling field, he played his part;
and when Alexander stayed his army marching to the conquest of the world
that he might contemplate the beauty of a plane-tree, he played his
part. When Osgar complained as he lay dying, of the keening of the women
and the old fighting men, he too played his part; "No man ever knew any
heart in me," he said, "but a heart of twisted horn, and it covered with
iron; but the howling of the dogs beside me," he said, "and the keening
of the old fighting men and the crying of the women one after another,
those are the things that are vexing me." If we would create a great
community--and what other game is so worth the labour?--we must recreate
the old foundations of life, not as they existed in that splendid
misunderstanding of the eighteenth century, but as they must always
exist when the finest minds and Ned the beggar and Seaghan the fool
think about the same thing, although they may not think the same thought
about it.


IX

When I asked the little boy who had shown me the pathway up the Hill of
Allen if he knew stories of Finn and Oisin, he said he did not, but that
he had often heard his grandfather telling them to his mother in Irish.
He did not know Irish, but he was learning it at school, and all the
little boys he knew were learning it. In a little while he will know
enough stories of Finn and Oisin to tell them to his children some day.
It is the owners of the land whose children might never have known what
would give them so much happiness. But now they can read this book to
their children, and it will make Slieve-na-man, Allen, and Benbulben,
the great mountain that showed itself before me every day through all my
childhood and was yet unpeopled, and half the country-sides of south and
west, as populous with memories as are Dundealgan and Emain Macha and
Muirthemne; and after a while somebody may even take them to some famous
place and say, "This land where your fathers lived proudly and finely
should be dear and dear and again dear"; and perhaps when many names
have grown musical to their ears, a more imaginative love will have
taught them a better service.

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