“The tempestuous waters have destroyed Breccan, and this is the skull of his lapdog; and but little of greatness now remains, for Breccan and his people have perished in the waves.”
And this was “divination by the staff”—a power possessed only by the chief poets, and by none else.
THE STORY OF BRECCAN.
The story of Breccan is related in Cormac’s Glossary. He was a merchant who traded between Ireland and Scotland with fifty corracles. Now there was a great whirlpool at Rathlin Island caused by the meeting of the seas, and they formed a caldron vast enough to swallow all Ireland. And it happened on a time that Breccan and all his corracles were lost and engulfed in this caldron. Not a man was left to tell the tale of how or where they had perished. Thus it was that the skull of a small animal being discovered on the beach, it was brought to the blind poet, who laying his staff on it obtained the inner vision by which he revealed the fate of Breccan and his fifty corracles.
BARDIC PRIVILEGES.
Now St. Patrick left the poets all their rights of divination by wisdom, and all their ancient rights over story-telling with the music of the harp, three hundred and fifty stories being allowed to the chief poet. He also secured just judgments for their professional rights; so that if land was mentioned in their songs as having been walled and trenched by them, that was considered to be sufficient legal evidence of title to the soil.
But what they received of St. Patrick was better, he affirmed, than all the evil rites to devils which they had abandoned; along with the profane practice of magic by the two palms, called Imbas for Osna, by which lucid vision and the spirit of prophecy was supposed to come on them after invocations to idols and demons—all of which evil practices St. Patrick abolished, but left to the poets the skilled hand in music and the fluent tongue in recitation; for which none can equal the Bards of Ireland throughout all the world.
The ogham writing on the poet’s staff is mentioned in very old manuscripts as in use in the Pagan period, before St. Patrick’s time, though no specimen of ogham writing has yet been found of earlier date than the Christian era.
St. Patrick introduced Latin and the Latin letters, which superseded ogham. And after his time Latin was taught very generally in the Irish schools.