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

by Douglas Hyde

"If not the finest pieces of casting ever seen, yet as specimens of design and workmanship they are perhaps unsurpassed. The surface is here overspread with no vague lawlessness, but the ornament is treated with fine reserve, and the design carried out with the precision and delicacy of a master's touch. The ornament on the cone flows round and upwards in lines gradual and harmonious as the curves in ocean surf, meeting and parting only to meet again in lovelier forms of flowing motion. In the centre of the circular plate below—just at the point or hollow whence all these lines flow round and upwards, at the very heart, as it might seem, of the whole work—a crimson drop of clear enamel may be seen."

These beautiful fragments are almost certainly pre-Christian, and may even have been worn by Conairé the Great or Conor mac Nessa. They represent a variety of design which stands midway between the stone engravings and the art of the early Christians. It is a remarkable fact, amply proven and universally acknowledged, that the bronze-work of the pre-Christian Irish was never surpassed by their post-Christian metal-work. Indeed, while the pagan Irish are proved to have attained great skill in the art of design, in working of metals, and especially in the art of enamelling by various processes, the specimens of the earliest Christian metal-work, such as St. Patrick's bell, are exceedingly rude and barbarous—possibly because the skilled pagan workmen did not turn their hands to such business, and the Christian converts had themselves to do the best they could.

Many of the monks, however, appear to have given themselves up to metal-work, and reached a very high pitch of excellence in it, as may be seen at a glance by the inspection of such master works as the two-handed Ardagh chalice, the cross of Cong, and numerous shrines, cúmhdachs [coodachs], or book-cases, and croziers. The ornamental designs upon the later Christian metal-work reached their highest perfection in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and the work of this period exhibits about forty different varieties of design, in which animal forms are only sparingly used, and in which there is no trace of foliate pattern. Indeed, these are not found in Irish metal-work before the period of decadence in the thirteenth century. Although the best specimens of Christian art in metal-work belong to the tenth and eleventh centuries, we are not to assume from this that the metal-work of the earlier Christian artists did not keep pace with the work of the early Christian scribes, who produced such magnificent specimens of penmanship and colour in the seventh and eighth centuries. They may have done so, but no relics of their work are left. According to Dr. Petrie, few, if any, of the more distinguished churches of Ireland were destitute of beautiful metal-work in the shape of costly shrines at the coming of the Norseman, as the frequent allusions in the Irish annals show; but scarcely one of these escaped their destructive raids, and hence the finest surviving specimens are of a much later date than the finest surviving manuscripts,[5] which were only destroyed whenever met with, but were not, like the costly metal-work, an object of eager and unremitting pursuit.

In sculpture the Irish never produced anything finer than their tall, shapely, richly but not over-richly ornamented Celtic crosses. The Ogam-inscribed stones, of which over a couple of hundred remain, are perfectly plain and undecorative. Some of the later inscribed tombstones (of which some two hundred and fifty remain), contain, it is true, fine chisel-work, but the numerous high Celtic crosses, covered many of them with elaborate sculpture in relief, with undercutting, and ornamented with the divergent and interlaced spiral pattern, show the finest artistic instinct. Most of these beautiful works of art are later than the year 900, but hardly one is posterior to the Norman invasion, which soon put a stop to such artistic luxuries.

The Irish were not a nation of builders. Most of the early Irish houses, even at Tara, were, as we have seen, of wood. The ordinary dwelling-house was either a cylindrical hut of wicker-work with a cup-shaped roof, plastered with clay and thatched with reeds, or else a quadrilateral house built of logs or of clay. The so-called city of Royal Tara was, in fact, a vast enclosure, containing quite a number of different raths, and houses inside the raths. The buildings seem to have been constructed of the timbers of lofty trees planted side by side, probably carved into fantastic shapes upon the outside, while the inside walls were closely interwoven with slender rods, over which a putty or plaster of loam was smoothly spread, which, when even and dry, was painted in bright colours, chiefly red, yellow, and blue. The roofs were formed of smooth joists and cross-beams, and probably thatched with rods and rushes, much in the same manner as the houses of the peasantry to-day. The floors appear to have been of earth, carefully hardened and beaten down, and then covered with a coat of some kind of hard and shiny mortar. No doubt some very fine barbaric effects were realised in these buildings, some of which, as is evidenced by the description of Cormac's Teach Midhchuarta, must have been immense. There were as many as seven dúns, or raths, round Tara, each containing within it many houses, and each surrounded by a mound, or vallum, planted with a stockade like a Maori pah.[6] The finest house of all, painted in the gayest colours, planted in the sunniest spot, and provided overhead with a balcony, was reserved for the ladies of the place, and was called the grianán [greeanawn], or sunny house.

Stone, however, was used in places, at a very early date, long before the first century, as may be seen from the stone forts of western and south-western Ireland, huge structures of which one of the best known is Dún-Angus, in the Isle of Arran, but there was no knowledge of mortar. Masonry was also used occasionally by the early monks in constructing their little clocháns, or beehive cells, and their oratories, with rounded roofs, built without a vestige of an arch, the whole surrounded by an uncemented stone wall, or cashel.

The Irish do not seem to have done much in stone-work until the Danish invasions forced them to construct the round towers in which to take shelter when the enemy was upon them, saving thus their jewels, books, and shrines. The Danes, who made rapid marches across the country, could not burn these towers nor throw them down, nor could they spend the time necessary to reduce them by famine, lest the country should be roused behind them, and their retreat to their ships cut off. The idea and form of the round tower the Irish almost certainly derived from the East. In Lord Dunraven's "Notes on Irish Architecture" the path of these buildings from Ravenna across Europe and into Ireland is distinctly shown; but while only about a score of examples survive in the rest of Europe, Ireland alone possesses a hundred and eighteen of these curious structures. There are three well-marked styles of towers. The doors and windows of the earlier ones are primitive and horizontal, but in the later ones the rude entablature of the earlier towers has given way to the decorated Romanesque arch, and the beauty and number of the arched windows is greatly increased.

The transition from the horizontal to the round-arched style is shown in the Church of Iniscaltra, erected two years after the battle of Clontarf, and many years before the true Romanesque appeared in England. From that time till the coming of the Normans, Irish ecclesiastical architecture—the only kind practised, for the Irish did not live in or build castles—progressed enormously, and several fine specimens belonging to the twelfth century still survive.

"The remains," writes Miss Stokes, "of a great number of monuments belonging to the period between the fifth and twelfth centuries of the Christian era, have survived untouched by the hand either of the restorer or of the destroyer, and in them, when arranged in consecutive series, we can trace the development from an early and rude beginning to a very beautiful result, and watch the dovetailing, as it were, of one style into another, till an Irish form of Romanesque architecture grew into perfection. The form of the Irish Church points to an original type which has almost disappeared elsewhere—that of the Shrine or Ark, not of the Basilica."

The Norman invasion, however, put a complete stop to the natural development of Irish Romanesque, and changed the building of churches into that of castles, in which the Irish only copied, so far as they built at all, the pattern of the invader.