Part 18 (1/2)

At last the Wee Folk come in a great mult.i.tude to beg the release of Iubdan. On the kings refusal they visit the country with various plagues, snipping off the ears of corn, letting the calves suck all the cows dry, defiling the wells, and so forth; but Fergus is obdurate. In their quality as earth-G.o.ds, _dei terreni_, they promise to make the plains before the palace of Fergus stand thick with corn every year without ploughing or sowing, but all is vain. At last, however, Fergus agrees to ransom Iubdan against the best of his fairy treasures, so Iubdan recounts themthe cauldron that can never be emptied, the harp that plays of itself; and finally he mentions a pair of water-shoes, wearing which a man can go over or under water as freely as on dry land. Fergus accepts the shoes, and Iubdan is released.

*The Blemish of Fergus*

But it is hard for a mortal to get the better of Fairylanda touch of hidden malice lurks in magical gifts, and so it proved now. Fergus was never tired of exploring the depths of the lakes and rivers of Ireland; but one day, in Loch Rury, he met with a hideous monster, the _Muirdris_, or river-horse, which inhabited that lake, and from which he barely saved himself by flying to the sh.o.r.e. With the terror of this encounter his face was twisted awry; but since a blemished man could not hold rule in Ireland, his queen and n.o.bles took pains, on some pretext, to banish all mirrors from the palace, and kept the knowledge of his condition from him.

One day, however, he smote a bondmaid with a switch, for some negligence, and the maid, indignant, cried out: It were better for thee, Fergus, to avenge thyself on the river-horse that hath twisted thy face than to do brave deeds on women! Fergus bade fetch him a mirror, and looked in it.

It is true, he said; the river-horse of Loch Rury has done this thing.

*Death of Fergus*

The conclusion may be given in the words of Sir Samuel Fergusons fine poem on this theme. Fergus donned the magic shoes, took sword in hand, and went to Loch Rury:

For a day and night Beneath the waves he rested out of sight, But all the Ultonians on the bank who stood Saw the loch boil and redden with his blood.

When next at sunrise skies grew also red He roseand in his hand the _Muirdris_ head.

Gone was the blemis.h.!.+ On his goodly face Each trait symmetric had resumed its place: And they who saw him marked in all his mien A kings composure, ample and serene.

He smiled; he cast his trophy to the bank, Said, I, survivor, Ulstermen! and sank.”

This fine tale has been published in full from an Egerton MS., by Mr.

Standish Hayes OGrady, in his Silva Gadelica. The humorous treatment of the fairy element in the story would mark it as belonging to a late period of Irish legend, but the tragic and n.o.ble conclusion unmistakably signs it as belonging to the Ulster bardic literature, and it falls within the same order of ideas, if it were not composed within the same period, as the tales of Cuchulain.

*Significance of Irish Place-Names*

Before leaving this great cycle of legendary literature let us notice what has already, perhaps, attracted the attention of some readersthe extent to which its chief characters and episodes have been commemorated in the still surviving place-names of the country.(171) This is true of Irish legend in generalit is especially so of the Ultonian Cycle. Faithfully indeed, through many a century of darkness and forgetting, have these names pointed to the hidden treasures of heroic romance which the labours of our own day are now restoring to light. The name of the little town of Ardee, as we have seen,(172) commemorates the tragic death of Ferdia at the hand of his heart companion, the n.o.blest hero of the Gael. The ruins of Dun Baruch, where Fergus was bidden to the treacherous feast, still look over the waters of Moyle, across which Naisi and Deirdre sailed to their doom. Ardnurchar, the Hill of the Sling-cast, in Westmeath,(173) brings to mind the story of the stately monarch, the crowd of gazing women, and the crouching enemy with the deadly missile which bore the vengeance of Mesgedra. The name of Armagh, or Ard Macha, the Hill of Macha, enshrines the memory of the Fairy Bride and her heroic sacrifice, while the gra.s.sy rampart can still be traced where the war-G.o.ddess in the earlier legend drew its outline with the pin of her brooch when she founded the royal fortress of Ulster. Many pages might be filled with these instances. Perhaps no modern country has place-names so charged with legendary a.s.sociations as are those of Ireland. Poetry and myth are there still closely wedded to the very soil of the landa fact in which there lies ready to hand an agency for education, for inspiration, of the n.o.blest kind, if we only had the insight to see it and the art to make use of it.

CHAPTER VI: TALES OF THE OSSIANIC CYCLE

*The Fianna of Erin*

As the tales of the Ultonian Cycle cl.u.s.ter round the heroic figure of the Hound of Cullan, so do those of the Ossianic Cycle round that of Finn mac c.u.mhal,(174) whose son Oisin(175) (or Ossian, as Macpherson called him in the pretended translations from the Gaelic which first introduced him to the English-speaking world) was a poet as well as a warrior, and is the traditional author of most of them. The events of the Ultonian Cycle are supposed to have taken place about the time of the birth of Christ. Those of the Ossianic Cycle fell mostly in the reign of Cormac mac Art, who lived in the third century A.D. During his reign the Fianna of Erin, who are represented as a kind of military Order composed mainly of the members of two clans, Clan Bascna and Clan Morna, and who were supposed to be devoted to the service of the High King and to the repelling of foreign invaders, reached the height of their renown under the captaincy of Finn.

The annalists of ancient Ireland treated the story of Finn and the Fianna, in its main outlines, as sober history. This it can hardly be. Ireland had no foreign invaders during the period when the Fianna are supposed to have flourished, and the tales do not throw a ray of light on the real history of the country; they are far more concerned with a Fairyland populated by supernatural beings, beautiful or terrible, than with any tract of real earth inhabited by real men and women. The modern critical reader of these tales will soon feel that it would be idle to seek for any basis of fact in this glittering mirage. But the mirage was created by poets and storytellers of such rare gifts for this kind of literature that it took at once an extraordinary hold on the imagination of the Irish and Scottish Gael.

*The Ossianic Cycle*

The earliest tales of this cycle now extant are found in ma.n.u.scripts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and were composed probably a couple of centuries earlier. But the cycle lasted in a condition of vital growth for a thousand years, right down to Michael Comyns Lay of Oisin in the Land of Youth, which was composed about 1750, and which ended the long history of Gaelic literature.(176) It has been estimated(177) that if all the tales and poems of the Ossianic Cycle which still remain could be printed they would fill some twenty-five volumes the size of this. Moreover, a very great proportion of this literature, even if there were no ma.n.u.scripts at all, could during the last and the preceding centuries have been recovered from the lips of what has been absurdly called an illiterate peasantry in the Highlands and in the Gaelic-speaking parts or Ireland. It cannot but interest us to study the character of the literature which was capable of exercising such a spell.

*Contrasted with the Ultonian Cycle*

Let us begin by saying that the reader will find himself in an altogether different atmosphere from that in which the heroes of the Ultonian Cycle live and move. Everything speaks of a later epoch, when life was gentler and softer, when men lived more in settlements and towns, when the Danaan Folk were more distinctly fairies and less deities, when in literature the elements of wonder and romance predominated, and the iron string of heroism and self-sacrifice was more rarely sounded. There is in the Ossianic literature a conscious delight in wild nature, in scenery, in the song of birds, the music of the chase through the woods, in mysterious and romantic adventure, which speaks unmistakably of a time when the free, open-air life under the greenwood tree is looked back on and idealised, but no longer habitually lived, by those who celebrate it. There is also a significant change of _locale_. The Conorian tales were the product of a literary movement having its sources among the bleak hills or on the stern rock-bound coasts of Ulster. In the Ossianic Cycle we find ourselves in the Midlands or South of Ireland. Much of the action takes place amid the soft witchery of the Killarney landscape, and the difference between the two regions is reflected in the ethical temper of the tales.

In the Ultonian Cycle it will have been noticed that however extravagantly the supernatural element may be employed, the final significance of almost every tale, the end to which all the supernatural machinery is worked, is something real and human, something that has to do with the virtues or vices, the pa.s.sions or the duties or men and women. In the Ossianic Cycle, broadly speaking, this is not so. The n.o.bler vein of literature seems to have been exhausted, and we have now beauty for the sake of beauty, romance for the sake of romance, horror or mystery for the sake of the excitement they arouse. The Ossianic tales are, at their best,

Lovely apparitions, sent To be a moments ornament.

They lack that something, found in the n.o.blest art as in the n.o.blest personalities, which has power to warn, to comfort, and command.