[18] For Molling, see above, p. [209-10]. The following translation is by Standish Hayes O'Grady, "Silva Gadelica," p. 422.
[19] For a description of the awful consequences of a saint's curse that make a timid lunatic out of a valliant warrior see O'Donovan's fragmentary "Annals," p. 233.
[CHAPTER XIX]
THE BARDIC SCHOOLS
We must now, leaving verifiable history behind us, attempt a cautious step backwards from the known into the doubtful, and see what in the way of literature is said to have been produced by the pagans. We know that side by side with the colleges of the clergy there flourished, perhaps in a more informal way, the purely Irish schools of the Brehons and the Bards. Unhappily however, while, thanks to the great number of the Lives of the Saints,[1] we know much about the Christian colleges, there is very little to be discovered about the bardic institutions. These were almost certainly a continuation of the schools of the druids, and represented something far more antique than even the very earliest schools of the Christians, but unlike them they were not centred in a fixed locality nor in a cluster of houses, but seem to have been peripatetic. The bardic scholars grouped themselves not round a locality but round a personality, and wherever it pleased their master to wander—and that was pretty much all round Ireland—there they followed, and the people seem to have willingly supported them.
There seems to be some confusion as to the forms into which what must have been originally the druidic school disintegrated itself in the fifth and succeeding centuries, but from it we can see emerging the poet, the Brehon, and the historian, not all at once, but gradually. In the earliest period the functions of all three were often, if not always, united in one single person, and all poets were ipso facto judges as well. We have a distinct account of the great occasion upon which the poet lost his privilege of acting as a judge merely because he was a poet. It appears that from the very earliest date the learned classes, especially the "fĭlès," had evolved a dialect of their own, which was perfectly dark and obscure to every one except themselves. This was the Béarla Féni, in which so much of the Brehon law and many poems are written, and which continued to be used, to some extent, by poets down to the very beginning of the eighteenth century. Owing to their predilection for this dialect, the first blow, according to Irish accounts, was struck at their judicial supremacy by the hands of laymen, during the reign of Conor mac Nessa, some time before the birth of Christ. This was the occasion when the sages Fercertné and Neidé contended for the office of arch-ollav of Erin, with its beautiful robe of feathers, the Tugen.[2] Their discourse, still extant in at least three MSS. under the title of the "Dialogue of the Two Sages,"[3] was so learned, and they contended with one another in terms so abstruse that, as the chronicler in the Book of Ballymote puts it:—
"Obscure to every one seemed the speech which the poets uttered in that discussion, and the legal decision which they delivered was not clear to the kings and to the other poets.
"'These men alone,' said the kings, 'have their judgment and their skill, and their knowledge. In the first place we do not understand what they say.'
"'Well, then,' said Conor, 'every one shall have his share therein from to-day for ever.'"[4]
This was the occasion upon which Conor made the law that the office of poet should no longer carry with it, of necessity, the office of judge, for, says the ancient writer, "poets alone had judicature from the time that Amairgin Whiteknee delivered the first judgment in Erin" until then.