Ireland's Immortals by Williams Mark;

Author:Williams, Mark; [Williams, Mark;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691157313
Publisher: PrincetonUP
Published: 2016-07-15T05:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

7

THE IMAGINATION OF THE COUNTRY

TOWARDS A NATIONAL PANTHEON

I saw gods rising up from the earth.

—1 SAMUEL 28:13

THE SECOND HALF of this book represents a fresh point of departure in two ways. Firstly, it turns from a complex range of texts to a complex range of persons. Secondly, it turns from writing in Irish to material written for the most part in English.

The sagas, pseudohistories, and poems examined hitherto had all been part of a developing literary tradition, one in which the Túatha Dé Danann and the people of the síd had been major players. That tradition had certainly been responsive to outside influences and to internal cultural realignments, but it had nevertheless been essentially continuous, and—at least until the beginning of the seventeenth century—confident of its own value.1 Nearly three decades after the Flight of the Earls in 1607—often regarded as the moment of apocalypse for the native Gaelic order—Geoffrey Keating felt able to set down the traditional framework of ‘The Book of Invasions’, including the Túatha Dé Danann, as part of his panoramic narrative of Irish history. And even in the late eighteenth century the poet Brian Merriman could play with the conventions of the native otherworld and its inhabitants in his exuberant masterpiece Cúirt an mheon-oíche (‘The Midnight Court’), at a time when Irish-language culture was undergoing a period of contraction and decline.2 That decline was nevertheless all too real, and it continued catastrophically, with power under English rule being diverted further and further from those whose language was Irish. Part and parcel of the same process was the loss of the native linguistic disciplines, so that old manuscripts could no longer be fully understood and access to the treasures of the medieval past was cut off.3 After the failed rebellion of 1798, the turn of the nineteenth century brought with it one kind of nadir for a planted and colonized country, when the 1800 Act of Union officially absorbed the island into the United Kingdom.

BACKGROUND MOVEMENTS

At this point, therefore, history compels a radical shift in direction, and it is worth beginning with three orienting observations. The first is that the recuperation of the native gods by English-speaking Ireland was a phenomenon of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and was associated with currents of preoccupation within the Irish Protestant bourgeoisie of that period. While an enterprising reader in the year 1800 might have turned up brief mentions of the Túatha Dé Danann in the works of Irish antiquarians, a century later the ancient divinities could be found thronging the poetry, mythography, academic scholarship, art, and spiritual speculation of the age. In a single century, the gods spilled into the vanguard of Irish culture; this chapter and the next set out to investigate and explain this spectacular growth.

Secondly, a signal feature of the gods’ proliferation was that they were redefined as spiritual entities. By the end of the Middle Ages, the literary Túatha Dé Danann figured in the literature as supernatural beings, but they were not regarded as divine, mystical, or cosmic.

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