Pagan Ireland.

by Eleanor Hull

The Romance of the Early Kings.

THE DAWN OF HISTORY AND THE RISE OF THE KINGDOM OF ULSTER.

We will now try to learn something about the Early Kirgs who reigned in Ireland before the coming of Christianity to that country. Of the times immediately succeeding the settlement of the Milesians in Ireland and the division of the country between Heber and Keremon our knowledge is very scanty, but it points to the gradual settlement of the country, the establishment of law and order, and the beginning of those national customs which we find existing at a later period.

Though many of the kings given in the Annals and old histories are merely names to us and we are inclined to suspect that they never really existed at all, but were merely put in to fill up that vast space of time between the supposed date of the coming of the early races and the dawn of certain history, there are a few of them of whom some facts are given and these point to a gradual increase in the enlightenment and civilization of the people.

For instance, an early king named Tighernmas (Teernmas) was the first who discovered gold and smelted it and introduced the use of ornaments in dress. He must also have greatly improved the system of weaving and the art of dyeing, for he taught his subjects to dye their clothes different colours, brown, red, and crimson, and to ornament them with fringes and to wear brooches of gold and silver. He taught them, too, to use drinking horns at their feasts and endeavoured to make them more refined in their ways of life.

His successor Eochaid (Eochy) went a step further and ordered that each class among the people should wear a different number of colours in their dress. Servants were to wear plain clothes of one colour, rent paying farmers, two; officers, three ; and so on up to seven colours in the dress of kings and queens. Thus each rank was at once known by its dress, a convenient and sensible custom. The colours were no doubt worn on different parts of the costume, the cloak, the tunic, and the shirt ; but some may have worn tartans or mixed colours like the Highland clans. Again, a wise king named Ollamh Fodhla, or Fola the Learned, is remembered because he established the Feis of Tara, which met, as you will remember, once in every three years at Samhain (Sowan) in November to examine the Records of the Kingdom, to establish and promulgate the Laws, and for a week of public festivities.

It was he who arranged the order in which the guests were to enter the Banqueting House, and caused them to sit according to rank; he also made a wise law, that if any quarrel arose during the seven days of the Convention of Tara and a man struck another with a weapon intending to kill him, he should inevitably suffer death. Not even the king himself had power to pardon a crime committed in the king's own house during the continuance of the peaceful Feast against one under his protection. Fodhla seems also to have endeavoured to bring order into the provinces by appointing a military leader or captain over every cantred or tribal division, and a gentleman-farmer in every village, who were to attend him when he needed their services. This bound each tribe and district to the central monarchy of Tara. He was a very wise monarch, and during his long reign of forty years the country advanced in prosperity and order.

The next event of importance is the founding of the capital of the Northern Province of Ulster in the reign of Cimbaoth (Kimbay), about 289 B.C. One of the most reliable of the old Irish historians, Tighernach (Teernach), who wrote his Annals before 1088 A.D., tells us that all the history before this time is uncertain, and that reliable history begins from this date. But it is difficult to see why he fixes upon this special event as the beginning of accurate history, for some of the earlier records seem to have just as much foundation in fact as those that come after, and it is quite certain that many of the later stones are either pure romance or are romance founded on fact.

Even the story of the founding of Emain Macha or Emania, the capital of Ulster, is woven into a romance, as you shall hear. Three King's of Ireland made an agreement together, that each of them should reign seven years in turn, and they took as witnesses seven druids, seven " fili " or law-givers, and seven young chiefs who bound themselves to see that the compact was carried out. All went well for sixty-three years, but at last one of the three, Aedh Ruadh or Hugh the Red, was accidentally drowned in the waterfall in Donegal, called after him Assaroe (Eas Aedha Ruaidh) or the Fall of Red Hugh. He had no son, but his only daughter, Macha the Red-haired, who was a warlike and fierce woman, claimed to reign in place of her dead father.

The other two Kings, Dithorba and Cimbaoth, said they would not share the throne with a woman, whereupon Macha raised an army and defeated them and seized upon the sovereignty of Ireland. During her reign of seven years, Dithorba died, and his five young sons claimed to succeed their father as she had succeeded hers. But Macha would not hear of this. She said things were different now and that, as she had gained the right to reign through force of arms and not by mere succession, she would retain the kingdom. The young men fought for their rights,

Then she married Cimbaoth, and resigned the command of the army to him. But she was uneasy while the sons of Dithorba lived, and she pursued them to Connaught, and by a cunning device got them into her power and enslaved them. She obliged them to build a magnificent fort or palace for her, which, from the gold pin at her neck wherewith she marked out the ground on which it was to be built, was called Emain Macha, or the neck pin of Macha (Eo, a brooch or breast-pin, and mum the neck).

The power of the Northern Kingdom took its rise at this period, and it grew steadily till about the beginning of the Christian era. It was during the time of its greatest brilliance that King Conchobhar (Conor) lived and the hero Cuchulain and the champions of the Red Branch, of whom so many famous stories are told. These fine old stories every Irish child ought to know, but they are too long to tell here, for we have to deal rather with the stories that belong more certainly to history, and especially to those dealing with the affairs

O' Curry gives this account from the Book of Leinster. M.S. Mat. pp. 70. 71. and Appendix No. XXXVIII., pp. 526-8. A different origin for the name is given in the story known as the Cessndidtn Ulad (see Hull, The Cuchulain Saga, pp. 97-100).

Emain Macha was destroyed by the Three Collas in 332 A.D, but the raths may still be seen at Navan Fort, Co. Armagh of the central monarchy of Tara, and of them, too, there are a great number. Whenever a king of any importance reigned, the old story-tellers used to take the main facts of his life and weave them into a romance. Some of these stories are ugly, full of foul and cruel deeds, which show us what a wild time it was ; but some are pretty, like fairy tales, and full of poetry and imagination. They were recited in just the same manner as the purely romantic tales were recited for the amusement of chiefs and royal personages at banquets and entertainments and in consequence there was what the old writers call " a thread of poetry " woven round the bare outline of fact, to make it interesting and amusing to listen to.

Some of the stories were evidently written by enemies who made the worst they could of the actors in the story. There was always great jealousy between the kings of the North and South, that is, between the Ui Neill of Ulster and Leinster, who gave a long line of monarchs to the throne of Tara, and the race of Oiliol Olum, Kings of Munster. For this reason, the stories told by the Munster poets naturally make the most of the triumphs of their own chiefs and blacken the deeds of their rivals while the Northern story-tellers exalt the deeds of the North and of the Northern champions, and delight to make the worst they can of the motives and actions of the Southern race. This jealousy lay at the bottom of most of the internal wars which kept Ireland in a perpetual state of disquiet, and we see it reflected even in the pages of the sober historians, such as Keating, and the author of the history of the wars between the Irish and the Norsemen, called the " Wars of the Gaedhil and Gaill," who always make the best of their own side and the worst of the other.

Therefore, we must be cautious in receiving these stories just as they come to us : they are rather romances founded on fact than actual history and the storytellers have added little touches out of their own imagination here and there to give them freshness and variety. Nevertheless these old romantic tales come much nearer the truth than any modern historical novel, such as the novels of Sir Walter Scott ; and the main facts can be proved in many ways to be true, and are accepted as true by all the old historians.

Therefore, I am going to tell you a few of these famous stories which in old days were well known to every one in the country and I have thought it a pity to take out of them all the fairy and imaginative bits which the writers put in to make them charming, the " thread of poetry " they wove around them, so that you will have to pick out the germ of truth from the story just as the historians did when they came to write down the his- tory of Ireland in their Annals. It does not much matter now whether we believe a little more or less to be historical but it matters very much that we should understand the condition of Ireland in these early times, and this we can only do by reading the stories of the race.