The King perceived this however, and offered him just what he wanted, two thousand warriors to help him and his exiles in acquiring the kingdom. The account of their embarcation and voyage is perhaps as good a specimen of exaggerated verbosity and of the rhetoric of the professed story-teller as any other in these sagas, which abound with such things, and it is perhaps worth while to give it at length. It will be seen that the story-teller or prose-poet, passes everything through the prism of his imagination, and aided by an extraordinary exuberance of vocabulary and unbounded wealth of alliterative adjectives, wraps the commonest objects in a hurricane of—to use his own phrase—"misty-dripping" epithet. The Battle of Moy Léana is recorded in the Annals of Ulster, by Flann in the eleventh century, and by the Book of Leinster, and no doubt the essence of the saga is very ancient, but the dressing-up of it, and especially the passage I am about to quote, is, in its style—not to speak of the language which is modern—almost certainly post-Norman.
THE SAILING OF OWEN MÓR.
"Then that vindictive unmerciful host went forward to the harbours and ports where their vessels and their sailing ships awaited them; and they launched their terrible wonderful monsters; their black, dangerous, many-coloured ships; their smooth, proper-sided, steady, powerful scuds, and their cunningly-stitched Laoidheangs from their beds and from their capacious, full-smooth places, out of the cool clear-winding creeks of the coast, and from the calm, quiet, well-shaped, broad-headed harbours, and there were placed upon every swift-going ship of them free and accurately arranged tiers of fully-smoothed, long-bladed oars, and they made a harmonious, united, co-operating, thick-framed, eager-springing, unhesitating, constant-going rowing against currents and wild tempests, so that loud, haughty, proud-minded, were the responses of the stout, fierce-fronted, sportive-topped billows in conversing with the scuds and beautiful prows.
"The dark, impetuous, proud, ardent waters became as white-streaked, fierce-rolling, languid-fatigued Leibhiona, upon which to cast the white-flanked, slippery, thick, straight-swimming salmon, among the dark-prowling, foamy-tracked heads [of sea monsters] from off the brown oars.
"And upon that fleet, sweeping with sharp rapidity from the sides and borders of the territories, and from the shelter of the lands, and from the calm quiet of the shores, they could see nothing of the globe on their border near them, but the high, proud, tempestuous waves of the abyss, and the rough, roaring shore, shaking and quivering, and the very-quick, swift motion of the great wind coming upon them, and long-swelling, gross-springing, great billows rising over the swelling sides of the [sea] valleys, and the savage, dangerous, shower-crested sea, maintaining its strength against the rapid course of the vessels over the expanse, until at last it became exhausted, subdued, drizzling and misty, from the conflict of the waves and fierce winds.
"The labouring crews derived increased spirits from the bounding of the swift ships over the wide expanse, and the wind coming from the rear, directly fair for the brave men, they arose manfully and vigorously to their work, and lashed the tough, new masts to the brown, smooth, ample, commodious bulwarks, without weakness, without spraining, without overstraining. Those ardent, expert crews put their hands to the long linen [sails] without shrinking, without mistake, from Eibhil to Achtuaim, and the swift-going, long, capacious ships, passed from the hand-force of the warriors, and over the deep, wet, murmuring pools of the sea, and past the winding, bending, fierce-showery points of the harbours, and over the high-torrented, ever-great mountains of the brine, and over the heavy, listless walls of the great waves, and past the dark, misty-dripping hollows of the shores, and past the saucy, thick-flanked, spreading, white-crested currents of the streams, and over the spring-tide, contentious, furious, wet, overwhelming fragments of the cold ocean, until the sea became rocking like a soft, fragrant, proud-bearing plain, swelling and heaving to the force of the anger and fury of the cold winds.
"The upper elements quickly perceived the anger and fury of the sea growing and increasing. Woe indeed was it to have stood between those two powers, the sea and the great wind when mutually attacking each other, and contending at the sides of strong ships and stout-built vessels and beautiful scuds. So that the sea was in showery-tempestuous, growling, wet, fierce, loud, clamorous, dangerous stages after them, whilst the excitement of the murmuring dark-deeded wind continued in the face and in the sluices of the ocean from its bottom to its surface. And tremulous, listless, long-disjointed, quick-shattering, ship-breaking, was the effect of the disturbance, and treacherous the shivering of the winds and the rolling billows upon the swift barks, for the tempest did not leave them a plank unshaken, nor a hatch unstarted, nor a rope unsnapped, nor a nail unstrained, nor a bulwark unendangered, nor a bed unshattered, nor a lifting uncast-down, nor a mast unshivered, nor a yard untwisted, nor a sail untorn, nor a warrior unhurt, nor a soldier unterrified, nor a noble unstunned—excepting the ardour and sailorship of the brave men who attended to the attacks and howlings of the fierce wind.
"However, now, when the wind had exhausted its valour and had not received reverence nor honour from the sea, it went forward, stupid and crestfallen, to the uppermost regions of its residence; and the sea was fatigued from its roarings and drunken murmurings, and the wild billows ceased their motions, so that spirit returned to he nobles and strength to the hosts, and activity to the warriors, and strength to the champions. And they sailed onwards in that order without delay or accident until they reached the sheltered smooth harbour of Cealga and the shore of the island of Greagraidhe."
Who or what the Fenians were, has given rise to the greatest diversity of opinion. The school of Mr. Nutt and Professor Rhys would, I fancy, recognise in them nothing but tribal deities, euhemerised or regarded as men.[9] Dr. Skene and Mr. Mac Ritchie believed that they were an altogether separate race of men from the Gaels, probably allied to, or identical with, the Picts of history; and the latter holds that they are the sidhe [shee] or fairy folk of the Gaels. The native Irish, on the other hand, who were perfectly acquainted with the Picts, and tell us much about them, have always regarded the Fenians as being nothing more or less than a body of janissaries or standing troops of Gaelic and Firbolg families, maintained during several reigns by the Irish kings, a body which tended to become hereditary. Nor is there in this account anything inherently impossible or improbable, especially as the Fenian régime synchronises with a time when the Irish were probably aggressively warlike. Keating, writing in Irish about the year 1630, gives the traditional account of them as he gathered it from ancient books and other authorities now lost, and this certainly preserves some ancient and unique traits. He begins by rejecting the ridiculous stories told about them, such as the battle of Ventry and the like, as well as the remarks of Campion and of Buchanan, who in his history of Scotland had called Finn a giant.
"It is proved," writes Keating, "that their persons were of no extraordinary size compared with the men that lived in their own times, and moreover that they were nothing more than members of a body of buanadha or retained soldiers, maintained by the Irish kings for the purpose of guarding their territories and of upholding their authority therein. It is thus that captains and soldiers are at present maintained by all modern kings for the purpose of defending their rule and guarding their countries.
"The members of the Fenian Body lived in the following manner. They were quartered on the people from November Day till May Day, and their duty was to uphold justice and to put down injustice on the part of the kings and lords of Ireland, and also to guard the harbours of the country from the oppression of foreign invaders. After that, from May till November, they lived by hunting and the chase, and by performing the duties demanded of them by the kings of Ireland, such as preventing robberies, exacting fines and tributes, putting down public enemies, and every other kind of evil that might afflict the country. In performing these duties they received a certain fixed pay....
"However, from May till November the Fenians had to content themselves with game, the product of their own hunting, as this [right to hunt] was their maintenance and pay from the kings of Ireland. That is, the warriors had the flesh of the wild animals for their food, and the skins for wages. During the whole day, from morning till night they used to eat but one meal, and of this it was their wont to partake towards evening. About noon they used to send whatever game they had killed in the morning by their attendants to some appointed hill where there were wood and moorland close by. There they used to light immense fires, into which they put a large quantity of round sandstones. They next dug two pits in the yellow clay of the moor, and having set part of the venison upon spits to be roasted before the fire they bound up the remainder with sugàns—ropes of straw or rushes—in bundles of sedge, and then placed them to be cooked in one of the pits they had previously dug. There they set the stones which they had before this heated in the fire, round about them, and kept heaping them upon the bundles of meat until they had made them seethe freely, and the meat had become thoroughly cooked. From the greatness of these fires it has resulted that their sites are still to be recognised in many parts of Ireland by their burnt blackness. It is they that are commonly called Fualachta na bhFiann, or the Fenians' cooking-spots.
"As to the warriors of the Fenians, when they were assembled at the place where their fires had been lighted, they used to gather round the second of those pits of which we have spoken above, and there every man stripped himself to his skin, tied his tunic round his waist, and then set to dressing his hair and cleansing his limbs, thus ridding himself of the sweat and soil of the day's hunt. Then they began to supple their thews and muscles by gentle exercise, loosening them by friction, until they had relieved themselves of all sense of stiffness and fatigue. When they had finished doing this they sat down and ate their meal. That being over, they set about constructing their fiann-bhotha or hunting-booths, and preparing their beds, and so put themselves in train for sleep. Of the following three materials did each man construct his bed, of the brushwood of the forest, of moss, and of fresh rushes. The brushwood was laid next the ground, over it was placed the moss, and lastly fresh rushes were spread over all. It is these three materials that are designated in our old romances as the tri Cuilcedha na bhFiann—the three Beddings of the Fenians."
Every man who entered the Fenian ranks had four geasa [gassa, i.e., tabus] laid upon him,
"The first, never to receive a portion with a wife, but to choose her for good manners and virtues; the second, never to offer violence to any woman; the third, never to refuse any one for anything he might possess; the fourth, that no single warrior should ever flee before nine [i.e., before less than ten] champions."
There was a curious condition attached to entrance into the brotherhood which rendered it necessary that
"Both his father and mother, his tribe, and his relatives should first give guarantees that they should never make any charge against any person for his death. This was in order that the duty of avenging his own blood [wounds] should rest with no man other than himself, and in order that his friends should have nothing to claim with respect to him however great the evils inflicted upon him."
All the Fenians were obliged to know the rules of poetry,[10] for no figure in Irish antiquity, layman or cleric, could ever arrive at the rank of a popular hero unless he could compose, or at least appreciate a poem.
The Fenian tales and poems are extraordinarily numerous, but their conception and characteristics are in general distinctly different from those relating to the Red Branch. They have not the same sweep, the same vastness and stature, the same weirdness, as the older cycle. The majority of them are more modern in conception and surroundings. There is little or no mention of the war chariot which is so important a factor in the older cycle. The Fenians fought on foot or horseback, and we meet, too, frequent mention of helmets and mail-coats, which are post-Danish touches. Things are on a smaller scale. Exaggeration does not run all through the stories, but is confined to small parts of them, and it is set off by much that is trivial or humorous.