History as literature, and other essays

by Theodore Roosevelt

THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS

THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS

Next to developing original writers in its own time, the most fortunate thing, from the literary standpoint, which can befall any people is to have revealed to it some new treasure-house of literature. This treasure-house may be stored with the writings of another people in the present, or else with the writings of a buried past. But a few generations ago, in that innocent age when Blackstone could speak of the “Goths, Huns, Franks, and Vandals”—incongruous gathering—as “Celtic” tribes, the long-vanished literatures of the ancestors of the present European nations, the epics, the sagas, the stories in verse or prose, were hardly known to, or regarded by, their educated and cultivated descendants. Gradually, and chiefly in the nineteenth century, these forgotten literatures, or fragments of them, were one by one recovered. They are various in merit and interest, in antiquity and extent—“Beowulf,” the Norse sagas, the “Kalevala,” the “Nibelungenlied,” the “Song of Roland,” the Arthurian cycle of romances. In some there is but one great poem; in some all the poems or stories are of one type; in others, as in the case of the Norse sagas, a wide range of history, myth, and personal biography is covered. In our own day there has at last come about a popular revival of interest in the wealth of poems and tales to be found in the ancient Celtic, and especially in the ancient Erse, manuscripts—the whole forming a body of prose and poetry of great and well-nigh unique interest from every standpoint, which in some respects can be matched only by the Norse sagas, and which has some striking beauties the like of which are not to be found even in these Norse sagas.

For many decades German, French, Irish, and English students have worked over the ancient Celtic texts, and recently many of the more striking and more beautiful stories have been reproduced or paraphrased in popular form by writers like Lady Gregory and Miss Hull, Lady Gregory showing in her prose something of the charm which her countrywoman Emily Lawless shows in her poems “With the Wild Geese.” It is greatly to be regretted that America should have done so little either in the way of original study and research in connection with the early Celtic literature, or in the way of popularizing and familiarizing that literature, and it is much to be desired that, wherever possible, chairs of Celtic should be established in our leading universities. Moreover, in addition to the scholar’s work which is especially designed for students, there must ultimately be done the additional work which puts the results of the scholarship at the disposal of the average layman. This has largely been done for the Norse sagas. William Morris has translated the “Heimskringla” into language which, while not exactly English, can nevertheless be understood without difficulty—which is more than can be said for his translation of “Beowulf”—and which has a real, though affectedly archaic, beauty. Dasent has translated the “Younger Edda,” the “Njala Saga,” and the “Saga of Gisli the Outlaw.” It is pleasant for Americans to feel that it was Longfellow who, in his “Saga of King Olaf,” rendered one of the most striking of the old Norse tales into a great poem.

It is difficult to speak with anything like exactness of the relative ages of these primitive literatures. Doubtless in each case the earliest manuscripts that have come down to us are themselves based upon far earlier ones which have been destroyed, and doubtless, when they were first written down, the tales had themselves been recited, and during the course of countless recitations had been changed and added to and built upon, for a period of centuries. Sometimes, as in the “Song of Roland,” we know at least in bare outline the historical incident which for some reason impressed the popular imagination until around it there grew up a great epic, of which the facts have been twisted completely out of shape. In other instances, as in the “Nibelungenlied,” a tale, adaptable in its outlines to many different peoples, was adapted to the geography of a particular people, and to what that people at least thought was history; thus the Rhine becomes the great river of the “Nibelungenlied,” and in the second part of the epic the revenge of Krimhild becomes connected with dim memories of Attila’s vast and evanescent empire. The “Song of Roland” and the “Nibelungenlied” were much later than the earliest English, Norse, and Irish poems. Very roughly, it may perhaps be said that, in the earliest forms at which we can guess, the Irish sagas were produced, or at least were in healthy life, at about the time when “Beowulf” was a live saga, and two or three centuries or thereabouts before the early Norse sagas took a shape which we would recognize as virtually akin to that they now have.

These Celtic sagas are conveniently, though somewhat artificially, arranged in cycles. In some ways the most interesting of these is the Cuchulain cycle, although until very recently it was far less known than the Ossianic cycle—the cycle which tells of the deeds of Finn and the Fianna. The poems which tell of the mighty feats of Cuchulain, and of the heroes whose life-threads were interwoven with his, date back to a purely pagan Ireland—an Ireland cut off from all connection with the splendid and slowly dying civilization of Rome, an Ireland in which still obtained ancient customs that had elsewhere vanished even from the memory of man.

Thus the heroes of the Cuchulain sagas still fought in chariots driven each by a charioteer who was also the stanch friend and retainer of the hero. Now, at one time war chariots had held the first place in the armies of all the powerful empires in the lands adjoining the Mediterranean and stretching eastward beyond the Tigris. Strange African tribes had used them north and south of the Atlas Mountains. When the mighty, conquering kings of Egypt made their forays into Syria, and there encountered the Hittite hosts, the decisive feature in each battle was the shock between the hundreds of chariots arrayed on each side. The tyranny of Sisera rested on his nine hundred chariots of iron. The Homeric heroes were “tamers of horses,” which were not ridden in battle, but driven in the war chariots. That mysterious people, the Etruscans, of whose race and speech we know nothing, originally fought in chariots. But in the period of Greek and Roman splendor the war chariot had already passed away. It had seemingly never been characteristic of the wild Teuton tribes; but among the western Celts it lingered long. Cæsar encountered it among the hostile tribes when he made his famous raid into Britain; and in Ireland it lasted later still.

The customs of the heroes and people of the Erin of Cuchulain’s time were as archaic as the chariots in which they rode to battle. The sagas contain a wealth of material for the historian. They show us a land where the men were herdsmen, tillers of the soil, hunters, bards, seers, but, above all, warriors. Erin was a world to herself. Her people at times encountered the peoples of Britain or of Continental Europe, whether in trade or in piracy; but her chief interest, her overwhelming interest, lay in what went on within her own borders. There was a high king of shadowy power, whose sway was vaguely recognized as extending over the island, but whose practical supremacy was challenged on every hand by whatever king or under-king felt the fierce whim seize him. There were chiefs and serfs; there were halls and fortresses; there were huge herds of horses and cattle and sheep and swine. The kings and queens, the great lords and their wives, the chiefs and the famous fighting men, wore garments crimson and blue and green and saffron, plain or checkered, and plaid and striped. They had rings and clasps and torques of gold and silver, urns and mugs and troughs and vessels of iron and silver. They played chess by the fires in their great halls, and they feasted and drank and quarrelled within them, and the women had sun-parlors of their own.

Among the most striking of the tales are those of the “Fate of the Sons of Usnach,” telling of Deirdrè’s life and love and her lamentation for her slain lover; of the “Wooing of Emer” by Cuchulain; of the “Feast of Bricriu”; and of the famous Cattle-Spoil of Cooley, the most famous romance of ancient Ireland, the story of the great raid for the Dun Bull of Cooley. But there are many others of almost equal interest; such as the story of MacDatho’s pig, with its Gargantuan carouse of the quarrelsome champions; and the tale of the siege of Howth.

In these tales, which in so many points are necessarily like the similar tales that have come down from the immemorial past of the peoples of kindred race, there are also striking peculiarities that hedge them apart. The tales are found in many versions, which for the most part have been enlarged by pedantic scribes of aftertime, who often made them prolix and tedious, and added grotesque and fantastic exaggerations of their own to the barbaric exaggerations already in them, doing much what Saxo Grammaticus did for the Scandinavian tales. They might have been woven into some great epic, or at least have taken far more definite and connected shape, if the history of Ireland had developed along lines similar to those of the other nations of west Europe. But her history was broken by terrible national tragedies and calamities. To the scourge of the vikings succeeded the Anglo-Norman conquest, with all its ruinous effects on the growth of the national life. The early poems of the Erse bards could not develop as those other early lays developed which afterward became the romances of Arthur and Roland and Siegfried. They remain primitive, as “Beowulf” is primitive, as, in less measure, “Gisli the Outlaw” is primitive.