A Literary History of Ireland, from Earliest Times to the Present Day

by Douglas Hyde

[CHAPTER II]

EARLIEST ALLUSIONS TO IRELAND FROM FOREIGN SOURCES

Of all the tribes of the Celts, and indeed of all their neighbours in the west of Europe, the children of Milesius have been at once blessed and cursed beyond their fellows, for on the shores of their island alone did the Roman eagle check its victorious flight, and they alone of the nations of western Europe were neither moulded nor crushed into his own shape by the conqueror of Gaul and Britain.

Undisturbed by the Romans, unconquered though shattered by the Norsemen, unsubdued though sore-stricken by the Normans, and still struggling with the Saxons, the Irish Gael alone has preserved a record of his own past, and preserved it in a literature of his own, for a length of time and with a continuity which outside of Greece has no parallel in Europe.

His own account of himself is that his ancestors, the Milesians, or children of Miledh,[1] came to Ireland from Spain about the year 1000 B.C.,[2] and dispossessed the Tuatha De Danann who had come from the north of Europe, as these had previously dispossessed their kinsmen the Firbolg, who had arrived from Greece.

Such a suggestion, however, despite the continuity and volume of Irish tradition which has always supported it, appears open to more than one rationalistic objection, the chiefest being that the voyage from Spain to Ireland would be one of some six hundred miles, hardly to be attempted by the early Irish barks composed of wickerwork covered with hides, fragile crafts which could hardly hope to live through the rough waters of the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic on a voyage from Spain, or through the Mediterranean and the Atlantic on a voyage from Greece.

On the other hand, if we assume that our ancestors passed over from Gaul into Britain and thence into Ireland, we shall find it fit in with many other facts. To begin with, the voyage from Gaul to Britain is one of only some two and twenty miles, and from Britain to Ireland, at its narrowest point, is hardly twelve. The splendid physique, too, of the Irish,[3] which is now alas! sadly degenerated through depression, poverty, famine, and the rooting out of the best blood, but which has struck during the course of history such numerous foreign observers, seems certainly to connect the Irish by a family likeness with the Gauls, as these have been described to us by the Romans, and not with the Greeks or the swarthy, sun-burnt Iberians. Tacitus also, writing less than a century after Christ, tells us that the Irish in disposition, temper, and habits, differ but little from the Britons, and we find in Britain, North Gaul, and Germany, tribes of the same nomenclature as several of those Irish tribes whose names are recorded by Ptolemy about the year 150.[4]

On the one hand, then, we have the ancient universal Irish traditions, backed up by all the authority of the bards, the annalists and the shanachies, that the Milesians—who are the ancestors of most of the present Irish—came to Ireland direct from Spain; and, on the other hand, we have these rationalistic grounds for believing that Ireland was more probably peopled from Gaul and Britain. The question cannot here be carried further, except to remark that in an age ignorant of geography the term Spain may have been used very loosely, and may rather have implied some land oversea, rather than any particular land.[5]

If Ireland were not—thanks to her native annalists, her autochtonous traditions and her bardic histories—to a great extent independent of classical and foreign authors, she would have fared badly indeed, so far as history goes, lying as she does in so remote a corner of the world, and having been untrodden by the foot of recording Greek or masterful Roman. There are, however, some few allusions to the island to be found, of which, perhaps, the earliest is the quotation in Avienus, who writing about the year 380 mentions the account of the voyage of Himilco, a Phœnician,[6] to Ireland about the year 510 B.C., who said in his account that Erin was called "Sacra"[7] by the ancients, that its people navigated the vast sea in hide-covered barks, and that its land was populous and fertile. In the Argonautics of the pseudo-Orpheus, which may have been written about 500 B.C., the Iernian[8]—that is apparently the Irish—Isle is mentioned. Aristotle knew about it too. Ierne, he says, is a very large island beyond the Celts. Strabo, writing soon after the birth of Christ, describes its position and shape, also calling it Ierne, but according to his account—which he acknowledges, however, that he does not make on good authority—it is barely habitable and its people are the most utter savages and cannibals.[9] Hibernia, says Julius Cæsar, is esteemed half the size of Britain and is as distant from it as Gaul is. Diodorus, some fifty years before Christ, calls it Iris, and says it was occupied by Britons.[10] Pomponius Mela, in the first century of our era, calls Ireland Iverna, and says that "so great was the luxuriance of grass there as to cause the cattle to burst"! Tacitus a little later, about the year 82, telling us how Agricola crossed the Clyde and posted troops in that part of the country which looked toward Ireland, says that Hibernia "in soil and climate, in the disposition, temper, and habits of its people, differed but little from Britain, and that its approaches and harbours were better known through traffic and merchants."[11]