Philip Freeman's "Celtic Mythology": Book Review

 
This professor of Classics and Celtic Studies, Harvard-trained, brings a compendium of interwoven tales, from sources translated from a wide variety of his predecessors. The contents cover the earliest deities, the Book of Invasions, the Wooing of Etain, tales from the Tain and the Ulster Cycle, and stories from the Irish otherworld. Then, a few on Finn the outlaw, before the Mabinogi are related in four stories, followed by three more Welsh stories and sagas. Finally, Christian saints Patrick, Brigid, and Brendan gain attention in this slim, but accessible collection.

A quick sample of the tone. Cu Chullain asks his charioteer: "Where on earth are we?" He replies: "'I have no idea, my lord.' He continues, "But I don't think we're in Ulster anymore." (125) Not Kansas either, but the everyday register of these stories makes them meaningful for us. Too often either scholarly versions are antiquated (if in public domain) or New Age-tinged florid reckonings divorced from academic rigor and narrative control. Professor Freeman stays grounded.

It's lightly annotated with introductions and endnotes, clarifying where the texts originated and variants in meaning here and there. But the learning's worn lightly, for this volume is aimed at the general reader. While Irish-published resources remain, and predecessors such as Oxford's translation by Sioned Davies of the Mabinogi and Penguin's anthology of Irish themes by Jeffrey Gantz, the updated version of Philip Freeman's colloquial versions is welcome. I'd have liked Breton, Scots, Manx, and Cornish topics to widen the Celtic scope, however. (Amazon US 2/16/17)

Mark Williams' "Ireland's Immortals": Book Review

How the Christian Irish regarded their island's pagan divinities, in medieval and modern times, comprises the two halves of Ireland's Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth. Mark Williams, an Oxford medievalist, unravels the tangled threads in texts that challenge even the skilled interpreter. Old Irish remains formidable for scholars, and the fact that the evidence exists only in copies centuries after its first renditions onto parchment, deep within already Catholic times, complicates any explicator's task. Dr. Williams remains steady throughout this study. His accessible style remains academic but blessedly free of jargon or cant. His glossaries summarize key concepts and his footnotes address arcane debates.

His history of the gods of Irish myth examines key writings left by the monks and scribes, from the period after conversion. Williams estimates that within a half-century after the Patrician period, Ireland would have been effectively under Christian control. Although pre-Christian practices may have endured, they diminished rapidly, despite the imaginations of later bards eager to insist on secret continuity with centuries nearly up to our own. Williams separates the archaic from the innovative elements inserted into these stories and chronicles preserved within monasteries. Although these tales and accounts were tamed, a "ferocious weirdness" persists in surreal or juxtaposed scenes, distinguishing imagery from the dour scenarios in Anglo-Saxon sagas such as {Beowulf}, for instance.

These Irish pre-Christian versions resemble (as in the Book of Invasions, a chronological origin myth of successive waves of those landing on the nation's shores) the configurations of Romanesque architecture.  Williams compares the sagas to these simple, repeating structures which are decorated with teeming surface details. The medieval corpus, furthermore, rises as a massive edifice, if resting on slender foundations. Pseudo-scholarship at its most ingenious labored to match biblical lore with Celtic supposition. This tension, concentrating around the meaning of the "god-people" the Túath Dé sustains itself within the literature Williams examines. As a blend of inherited narratives with concocted alterations shaped into a Christian mindset, these tales' impact faded by the end of the Middle Ages. The Irish seemed to lose interest. Only in the nineteenth century did curiosity revive about gods.

Part two delves into more recent re-workings of the myths of the Irish gods and goddesses. Romanticism, antiquarianism and the occult all generated speculation. W.B. Yeats and George Russell epitomized the poetic turn of the Celtic Revival at the end of the Victorian period, in the wake of a British passion for the classics and the pagan to counter the tamed, the scriptural and the stolid. Gods, as redefined by the Irish revivalists, emerge as "spiritual entities." Among the Anglo-Irish gentry emerge intellectuals eager to fabricate a past for their country, rooted in wisdom of the earth and appeals to the forces lingering, despite the reign of Christendom, supposedly on fringes of the Celtic homeland.

The ninth chapter introduces William Sharp (1855-1905). Taking on the feminine alter ego of Fiona Macleod, Williams engagingly shares this fantasist of Gaelic Scotland. In Fiona, we encounter a fabled "self-sequestered Highland visionary." Williams labels her as "an imaginary personage, albeit an alarmingly insistent one." Characteristic of this author's tone, he keeps his investigations lively even as he grounds them in careful judgment. He counters the bent suppositions and fey imagination lavished upon sources that, in modern times, create a "feedback loop." Williams analyzes distortions within American anthropologist Walter Evans-Wentz's The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries. He adapted his Oxford dissertation oddly; this 1911 compendium persists as a New Age "crank piece."

For Mark Williams' predecessor at his university proved both an "exorbitant Celtophile" and a misled eccentric. Evans-Wentz conjured up the peasantry as informants for a pan-Celtic fairy belief system. He incorporated an unnamed mystic's testimony. Yet this was none other than George Russell. Williams reasons that Evans-Wentz betrayed a "spiritual crush on Russell." Testifying as to the endurance of this account lies beyond the scope of Williams' work, but he admits he had to cut a third of his own draft. The results remain impressive, even if the source of that apt John Cowper Powys colophon beginning Chapter Nine lacks attribution to that fabulist, as obsessive as many in this volume, of strange magic.

Nowadays, Williams tracks a second arc, again with diminishing attention to the old gods, among Irish writers. The Túath Dé and their replacements, the Túatha Dé Danann, as the Irish supernatural race, endure within the "wide uptake" by creative classes outside the isle. The fine arts alongside Celtic Paganism and Celtic Reconstructionism enshrine goddesses, notably the fire spirit of Brigit.

Unfortunately, opposition to the ancient forces still exists. Vandalism of historic sites and a modern sculpture to the Celtic sea-god testifies to the powers of these representations as feared by evangelicals. Unlike other cultures where monotheism replaced paganism, Williams concludes that in Ireland, a "restless refusal to resolve" the ambiguities of the survival of the venerable if often barely recalled deities within a Christian context distinguishes that island's literary legacy within the extant sources.

Fittingly, Williams ends his six-hundred page survey with a tribute to the late John Moriarty, a philosopher and shaman from County Kerry. Moriarty's "ecological and psychic sensitivity" to summon up again the mythic terrain's specters signifies the restoration of "imaginative vitality." In a nation divided by income inequality and sectarian squabbles, Moriarty's vision and Williams' precision combine. This learned volume contributes valuable insights that may guide all those who look to the Irish tales and Celtic heritage as a relevant force of energy.

(Interview with Mark Williams here. Amazon US 1/11/17 and Amazon British 1/12/17)

Celts or Pre-Celts?

A few years ago I blogged on genetic studies conducted in Britain attempting to find out how many of the native population possessed Saxon, Celtic, Norman and/or Viking ancestry. New analyses confirm that invasion narratives of massive displacement tend to be myths, as genetics verify.  Dan Bradley's team at Trinity College has been investigating similar Irish genetic markers. Larissa Nolan in the Independent reports that similarities in the "Celtic fringe" (my words) distinguish many Irish.

"Compared to the rest of western Europe, our genetic type has remained relatively untouched and this has also been found in Wales, Scotland and the Basque country. The rest of Europe has developed but we have remained pre-Celtic, we have retained much of our genes from many years back. We have not been as affected by migration as other places and this could be why our genetics are very similar." Many share an O-blood type; those of us from Ireland's west a marked rise in similar genes. By the way, headlines that Celts are not a separate genetic group are no revelation. The Cornish differ from the Scots as do the Northern from the Southern Welsh. Always it's language and culture, not blood, making up Celts, who are many peoples linked by similar tongues and customs, ancient or modern.

Some argue we go back to Mesolithic times as there was never a massive Celtic invasion. I recall from a 2003 study that the area around where my family originates, where no "invaders" reached, Castlerea in Roscommon (a radius for my grandfather's farm of just over twenty miles north-west and about five or six miles for my grandmother's farm from Castlerea) was the highest concentration: 93% "pure" genes. DNA with another "untouched" group, Basques, and that of Irish natives matched.

This chart from the 2003 report shows a cluster of core markers uniting the Basques with two Welsh locations, Haverfordwest and Llanidloes, and with Castlerea, as highest Y-chromosome "extremes."
Is this more than other parts of Connacht, I speculate, as the Aran Islands were garrisoned by the English? The researchers chose Castlerea as an indigenous locale likely separated from in-comers.

Marie McKeown summarizes this. "Men with Gaelic surnames, showed the highest incidences of Haplogroup 1 (or Rb1) gene. This means that those Irish whose ancestors pre-date English conquest of the island are descendants of early settlers who probably migrated west across Europe, as far as Ireland in the north and Spain in the south." Maybe the Leabhar Gabhala/Book of Invasions is true!

I also have been diagnosed with an abundance of iron in my blood, which also is a trait I inherit. So, along with my very fair skin, faint freckling, blue eyes, and once reddish-brown hair, I am truly Irish.
P.S. Frank McNally in the Irish Times took the piss, as they say, out of this recondite research here.

Evangeline Walton's "Mabinogion Tetralogy": Book Review

This retelling of the Welsh Mabinogi, acclaimed as one of the best fantasies of the 20th century, finds a long-overdue reprinting in a single volume from Overlook Press. I review the 2002 printing; the volume appeared with a better cover in 2012. As a teenager, I always meant to read the Ballantine four-volume paperback box set, part of the revival by that press of worthy tales post-Tolkien, but somehow I forgot. Inspired by two sources, Morine Krissdottir's 2007 biography of John Cowper Powys, and David Goodway's enthusiastic acclaim in "Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow" for Powys' "Porius," I started that even longer epic but paused three chapters in as it reminded me of Walton.

I had to start with her fiction dramatizing the tension between the Old Tribes (akin to pre-Celts, indigenous inhabitants of Britain) and the New (as in the Celts, although they are not named as such), and hints of even newer religions emerging in very far off lands that one day will seek to wipe out tribal faiths and undermine traditional beliefs and customs over all these isles and more. Powys praised Walton's 1936 debut, originally called "The Virgin and the Swine." It met with no wider success then. While not the best title for the masses, the symbols of commodified woman and coveted magic pigs both fit her emphasis, cleverly teased out and elaborated by her into druidic rituals and Pythagorean cosmologies), of the clash between Old Tribe "conservatives" affirming free love and no bonds between men and women, and the New Tribes, who insist on marriage to lock women into their increasingly patriarchal system, one which traps both sexes into lifelong commitment. It's surprising for that time period, but very congenial with Powys' own take on tribal times. Both Walton and Powys imaginatively delve into this cultural strife, and both elaborate the battles both physical and spiritual, sexual and tribal, between those who push empire or impose rule, and those who fumble to try to attain a more individually based, and erotically liberating, lifestyle.

It's livelier in Walton than this summary sounds. Renamed "The Island of the Mighty" after Betty Ballantine finally tracked Walton down in the 1960s to learn that she had written three other installments, which precede it in this omnibus, the series was published in roughly chronological order as to its narrative in the early 1970s. "The Prince of Annwn" starts off splendidly with the weird hunt, the bargain with forces beyond, and it progresses smartly into the epic fight in the Underworld.

Her prose carries the action along, yet pauses for insight, and commentary. "Blackness terrifies; it is sightlessness, it blinds a man and hides his enemies; yet the darkness within the earth is warm and life-giving, the womb of the Mother, the source of all growth. But in snow or in white-hot flame nothing can grow. Whiteness means annihilation, that end from which can come no beginning." (18)

However, Walton leavens the mythic tone by making her characters believable, and taking down a peg the boasts of legends. "The Mabinogi says that no house or ship could hold him, though if that tale has not grown in the telling, houses and ships must have been very small then. One thing seems certain: Bran was very big." (153) Lightening the tone of much of the original, wit proves welcome.

Poetry fittingly enters into a Welsh setting. "At night the stars, watching those many bright fires upon the once dark earth, must have wondered and searched the sky for a gap in the constellations, shivering lest they too should fall." (164)  This is early in the second book, "The Children of Llyr," which describes the stubborn rivalries that will tear apart not only the Mighty Island but Erinn too.

My favorite hero in this section? A brave starling who speaks. Amidst the war, powerfully evoked. "Dawn found them there, gray men fighting amid gray shadows; as perhaps every man who fights in war fights a shadow, the death that he sees as death because it sees him as death; so that out of their common passion for life all are turned into its foes and kill." (243) Walton subtly raises dark specters of brutality and cunning, even as she gently commemorates those who resist evil with compassion.

An eerie gray figure makes a prophecy not only the Welsh live with today, when "fair-haired invaders will sweep over all and subject us all." The power of women having been abandoned as birth is limited to their domination by men (as procreation begins to be understood by the Old Tribes), and as rebirth (a subject sprinkled deeply into these tales by Walton's hand) eventually is denied, "for ages women will be as beasts of the field and we men will rule, and practice war, our art. By it we will live--or by it, rather, we will struggle and die." (277) The earlier respite from pain gives way to pain.

Bran's prophetic head predicts, too: force will be unleashed, beyond its proper use "only to keep one man from hurting another"; and governments will elevate the masses over the individual. (289) Gods having been corrupted and cruel, people will set up government, and that in time too will threaten all.

Against this top-down oppression, happiness tries to rebound. As "The Song of the Rhiannon," part three scans the fate of a few who escape human destruction and divine vengeance. In life's plain magic, fragile and elusive hope rests. "Yet a Head that talks after being cut from its shoulders is not, if we stop to think, nearly so vast or all-moving a Mystery as the wonders of growth, or or sunrise and sunset." Walton's narrator avers: "We have made of 'natural' and 'everyday' poor words, ordinary and trite, when they should be the Word, full of awesome magic and might; of cosmic power." (348)

Unlike many who delve into this material, Walton refuses to excavate a spuriously "Celtic" artifact to parade as a proto-New Age bauble to gush about. Her story-cycle fairly examines the strengths and weaknesses of Old and New Tribes, and she judges the excesses and follies of rulers over the ruled, as well as the inevitable bickering and petty strife which appears doomed to haunt families everywhere. Even if paternity at this distant point remains a debated theory and a novel supposition that the New Tribes from Dyved appear to import into the neighboring realm of Gwynedd, it hovers.

As this theory starts to become reality, and as women begin to be vowed for life to one man, the anthology as it progresses gains momentum. The storm that assaults Dyved, the flight of the survivors, the increasing despair of their lives, the poignancy of death, as a few seek to rally magic against cunning power, set up the entry of the last and longest portion. "The Island of the Mighty" feels at first more archaic, having been written nearly forty years before. Some spellings of Welsh names differ, and the register of the prose seems more hesitant in the first chapters of volume four.

Then, the excitement grows: the punishment meted out to impetuous Gilvaethwy and scheming Gwydion, their three transformations, the fate of Pryderi, the spite of Arianrhod, the odd births of Llew, Dylan, and Blodeuwedd, the predicament of Goronwy, and the final rounds of cunning retribution. All these resound. While fantasy looms over all and magical spells proliferate, Walton wisely sticks to the everyday, if that adjective works, reactions of confounded characters trying to survive. This reliable set of plot complications drives the last few hundred pages along swiftly.

A generation gap widens. "For it is a strange thing that the most intimate relations of our lives, those which hold our holiest and deepest loves, should also be innate antagonisms, individual combats in the universal war that is as old as sex and as consciousness and the reproduction of life. Yet it shall be so until the day when the world is healed and the sundered halves are welded, and consciousness is more clearly and truly conscious than ever, yet has fused and melted into the One." (560-1) While I suggested above that New Age musings are absent from Walton's presentation as to "Celticisms," she admits that she interposes some slight Atlantis hints, if not named as such, to account for lore from distant times and lands, and to encourage a "stair of evolution" as Math mentions towards unity. I find hints of Platonic models, or Neo-Platonic conceptions, which on the other hand enrich these themes.

Math warns how, in suppressing these "Ancient Harmonies," the New Tribes' "recognition of fatherhood will enslave women." Either that submission by women or their hiring out of their bodies will make women "the bondmaids of men." (588) Arrayed against coercive arrangements, the consciousness of the Whole--as bees and ants possess-- contends against the individual ambition within humans who fight systematic injustice. Llew learns from Gwydion how people lost consciousness of the Whole so as to shut themselves off, to work for their own gain. In turn, this confounds systems, "for in all systems there is injustice, and one class profiting at the expense of another; and since individuals will always work for their own gain and not the system's, the suffering class will always end by turning and preying upon the other." What will eventually transpire is the winning back of a collective identity, when this "wider consciousness" into a oneness with all species and a fellowship where all creatures are known "alike for our fellow beings" will happen. (595) But "millions of ages will pass" before the world moves ahead this far. By then, who knows about human evolution? Heady topics for a rendering of medieval Welsh legend, but reason why Powys praised it.

Again and again, the "magnet and the sting" of attraction reverberate as men and women strive to first couple and then divide again. Peace must come for this to happen safely, and plenty of instances in the previous six-hundred pages, by the time Math and Gwydion muse about this, demonstrate the hazards of trust and the dangers of lust. Each side tries to devour the other, yearning (again the Platonic notion lingers) "unknowing after that lost wholeness." In the "give and take of exchange," Math observes, "through the brief moments when their flesh achieves it, life goes on and the endless round renews itself, and more souls are embodied in the world to carry on the ceaseless quest and strife." (615) This suggests also a Buddhist notion, perhaps, of clinging to the flesh and the worldly.

Requiring the desire of women for men to be buttoned-down into a life sworn only to one man sparks Llew's lament as to marriage as a "crucifying riddle: how to make painless the love between a man and a woman when love must die in one heart at a time." (704) While this saga ends without resolving this eternal question, the wisdom filling this thick book merits reflection. It's a welcome addition to the shelf, although my 2002 printing has six errors on the copyright page alone, and it has typographical slips here and there throughout the text. Finally, the fantasy genre label may confuse some expecting nothing more than swords and romance. On the other hand, the thoughtful presentation of weighty subjects, and the good-natured tone with which Walton leavens arcane lore, provides readers with a vivid immersion into an ancient time of what-ifs, made relevant for moderns. (Somewhat edited for Amazon US 8-14-2014)

"The Otherworld: Music & Song from Irish Tradition": Review

Twenty years in the making and drawing from the National Folklore Collection’s musical and narrative archives stretching back nine decades, this inviting book presents the words and sounds of those who relate tales from the otherworld. Editors Ríonach uí Ógáin and Tom Sherlock define this expanse as ‘a domain relating to the preternatural, an alternative realm parallel to or sometimes beyond human earthly existence’.  Having visited it, glimpsed it, or heard music from it, people tell tales and play songs.

What they offer confronts the mystery of the world beyond, and it provides for many puzzled by loss or wearied by drudgery a chance to enter the imaginative sphere. The fantastic leaps out to pull in the wanderer, but it often repels or threatens those humans tempted or foolish enough to cross its border.

The results, compiled here with two CDs of forty stories and songs in both Irish and English, represent but a smidgen of the material at UCD, but they allow researchers and students to listen in on recordings, as well as to follow along with transcriptions and photographs which enrich this well-designed (by Red Dog) text.  Voices from all but Offaly, Derry, and Longford contribute individual and communal memories. The value of this edition rests in its thematic range and bilingual accessibility into this lore.

For instance, the juxtaposition of Irish and English, urban and rural, widens the perhaps expected territory investigated here. Told by Meg Doyle in Dublin’s Ringsend or Edward Kendellan in Stonybatter, the tale of the banshee (a popular choice for many interviewed) from 1980 balances out the preponderance of rural material collected as Gaeilge in earlier years. Following Doyle’s report, the famous fiddler Micho Russell from Doolin in Clare plays ‘The Banshee Reel’ as the text includes a photograph of a local holy well and a placename report (originally in Irish, translated) on a local hill associated with keening cats ‘wailing and shrieking’.

Séan Ó Catháin tells a legend of Petticoat Loose, who ‘among other crimes’ in Munster, ‘drowned a school master in Coilleagán and killed infants’. The action damning her was being drunk ‘and about to have a child’ while Sunday Mass was being said. It’s a bit confusing, but the haunting nature of such tales, perpetuated widely and doggedly, supports the popular warning of the fate of a ‘fallen woman’.

On the other hand, ‘Amhrán an Frag’ comically contrasts a frog’s entry across the domestic threshold (as told to the Conamara teller as if real) with an invented song by Peadar Ó Ceannabháin likening that intrusion to ‘the fight in the gap of the fort/ an troid a bhí I mBearna an Dúin’.  The mock-heroic, complete with the amphibian converted into a ‘mermaid’s husband dressed in women’s clothing’ conveys the manner in which the everyday inflates into the epic.

Fear, humor, and respect mingle in such reactions to the uncanny. Meeting the devil at the crossroads and learning a rousing tune, for example, can conjure up the clever retort of the human player confronted by the revelation from the next world.  Jigs stolen or learned from devious faeries repeat the prevalent notion that pipers suddenly appear among humans to play before vanishing as quickly. Máire Ní Bheirne of Teelin passes on such an account to Donegal collector Mícheál Ó Domhnaill in 1974, and from here, the reel ‘Tiúin an Phíobaire Sí’ passes (and takes on two more titles in English) into the repertoire of the group Altan, widening its audience and broadening the scope of the living tradition.

Also common and continuing today is the tacit admonition to those walking about not to enter the realm of those who often are given, for fear of summoning them or a curse, no name but ‘them’.  The widespread notion that metal and water protect the man or woman from the fate dangled by the fairy hosts or the sí attest to the enduring (and quietly persisting, or at least not denied) awareness of a mysterious presence hovering near farms and villages, in circles, forts, bushes, trees, or cairns.

Associations of venerable places with the otherworld fill many pages here, such as Fionnbhearra (Cnoc Meá near Athenry in Galway) and Áine (Cnoc Áine near Teelin in Donegal).  Most of Ireland is covered, and much of the past century. Collectors for the Folklore Commission, such as Tom Munnelly, Seán Ó hEochaidh, and Caoimhín Ó Danachair (who looks quite the indefatigable itinerant in his leather vest and pipe) garner credit as the predecessors to the current editors and their colleagues, who wrote down and taped such material. The compact discs show the results, originally on acetate disc, cassette, reel-to-reel tape, digital audio, minidisc, and memory sticks. While the technological progression proves the passing of time for its archivists, the variety of places the fieldwork was conducted reveals the way such material was gathered: in the fields, in a car, or at home.

Labeling this as tradition does not detract from its ongoing relevance. As the editors remind us, Tom Munnelly titled a paper ‘They’re there all the same’ when it came to the question of belief. Elusive or vague as Irish responses may continue to be when asked about the truth of ‘the good people’ or the banshee, the popularity of Samhain, bonfires, vampires, lotteries, and prophecy persists despite a purportedly secularised mindset today. One wonders after perusing these attractive pages and hearing the creaky fiddles or bold voices from the recent past what folklorists a century hence will say about us. (In pdf and online at: Estudios Irlandeses 9 (2014): 195-196)

Éamon Carr's "Deirdre Unforgiven": Book Review

As a musician and poet, Éamon Carr came to prominence in the Irish counterculture in the late 1960s, and as drummer for Horslips, he memorably created lyrics blending the Ulster Cycle and other Celtic tales into hard-charging or softly lilting music. Now, he returns to these inspirations, but, in the intervening decades, the impacts of Northern violence, itself recapitulated, mythologised, and raw, darken this play, subtitled "a journal of sorrows".  For, during the 1990s, Carr as a journalist revisited places he had toured as a musician, and he heard new stories of strife, vengeance and suffering again.

In a spare but eloquent style, Deirdre Unforgiven by its title conflates the tragic protagonist, enslaved and compelled to wed lusting, selfish usurping King of Ulster Conor, with what I sense as an echo of Clint Eastwood's compellingly and similarly haunted anti-hero, himself unhinged by lost love and simmering sorrow. As Professor Shannon McRae's preface and Carr's introduction explain, these verses adapt Yeats' Japanese Noh ritual to drama. Enhanced by John Devlin's drawings, this is a pairing well suited for Carr (see his 2008 poetry collection and homage to Basho, The Origami Crow [my review]); here he conveys through the stripped-down incantatory recitals of ancient Greek tragedy the structure for his bleak ritual scenario.

Taking place in the "uncertain time" just before dawn (itself redolent of suggestion in charged Irish rhetoric) a triple Chorus precedes a Young Man, a reporter, fresh from an eerie conversation with a crow-like figure on the Shankill. The Chorus and the Old Woman, the Celtic goddess of war the Morrigan, fill out Deirdre's backstory "of yesterday's news that is heard too soon". Meanwhile, the reporter recalls as of 1999 yet "another bad day at Drumcree" between marchers and protesters.

The ghosts of Deirdre and of the unforgiving ruler over Ulster, Conor, masked as is the Old Woman, tell their side of the saga. They reveal Conor's thwarted frustration and Deirdre's desperate elopement with Naoise. Deirdre arises to warn: "There will not be enough mourners to lament/ those who fall" but as the Chorus speaks for so many witnesses: "They listened/ and dismissed her concerns".

Opening the second scene, the Young Man recounts more victims: footballers caught in a blast, a grave for one who died too young, three boys at home as they slept blown up by a petrol bomb. Deirdre bewails her passion for Naoise, for it blinded the pair: "we didn't see the blight".  She tells of her doom after that of Naoise and his brothers, and as she collapses, the Old Woman continues her tale. The Chorus repeats the triple spiral of lore: "Pure black banner/ Pure blue sky/ Pure red blood". Conor's desolation and the reporter's despair combine, for both lack words to assuage their torment.

The Young Man, in a very Yeatsian image of how the off-kilter past whirls into the present, sums up their predicament: "Somewhere, whip in hand, a laughing child/ sets a wooden-top spinning./ Now ask,/ for this world to keep turning/ must we all,/ each one,/ hear the lash sing?" Silence follows.

Deirdre chose to fling herself on a rock, to dash out her life rather than submit to Conor. Her defiance, commemorated by a memorial tree "that when the wind blows/ sings of infinite sadness", represents the capitulation of the female to the male, the injustice perpetuated by the cocky and headstrong over those perceived or outfoxed to remain weak. The Old Woman, no stranger to this anguish for she herself embodies its mythic atavistic force, concludes: "For wherever there are dead men/ that's where you'll find me./ My wings forever wrap the fallen/ who so wanted to be free".

Carr's play invites no easy resolution. As Yeats did, so does he. Deirdre Unforgiven presents a stark reminder of the brutality behind the cant, and the cost incurred by too glib a chant or rousing ballad.
(Slugger O'Toole 11-15-13. British Amazon 11-15-13 and Amazon US 11-14-13 all without OC link)

"To the Winds Our Sails: Irish writers translate Galician poets": Book Review

This 2010 anthology collects five poems each from ten Galician women. Irish poets translate four per poet from an English-language crib, with the remaining one rendered into Irish itself. The results reveal some of the revived enthusiasm and energy emanating from this northwestern corner of Iberia, with its alleged ancient ties to the Celtic lands, as the legendary homeland of the Irish themselves. 

How such expression cross over linguistic expanses, co-editor Mary O’Donnell observes, raise questions. ‘It remains one of the essential questions whenever translation is in the air: how should it be done—an attempt at a literal transposition, an attempt to capture the spirit of the poem, regardless what gymnastics of language and phrasing, or is it a bit like making a dog stand on its hind legs? In other words, can it be done at all?’

Comparing Luz Pozo Garza’s take (from As arpas de Iwerddon [The Harps of Iwerddon—unmentioned in this very under-annotated book but it’s the Welsh version of Éire]) on the medieval account Lebor Gabala Éren or Book of Invasions, the possibilities emerge across the sea that unites rather than divides Galician from Gael. Taking Binn Éadair as her setting in these inclusions, she evokes a John Hinde picture-postcard rather than today’s Howth full of imposing villas. She appears to wish to return to what was imagined, in venerable or more recent depictions of this fabled promontory north of Dublin, and like her translator Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, envisions myth within or beneath today’s exurban sprawl. 

Manuela Palacios in her preface explains the context for each poet. She singles out Luz Pichel’s surrealism. The unpredictable bursts into her “Burning the Firewood’. I cite in full for a flavour of her style. ‘The fog at daybreak is crammed with the bustle/ of rushing people./ A cock’s cry that comes with from afar/ echoes the cry of the crow,/ that scurries frightened/ by the blows of men.// They rise with the day and break maces/ against the doors of the cattle shed.// Another cock responds./ I look at the woodshed and think/ how I would like to burn it all.’

Catherine Phil MacCarthy’s rendition captures the rhythm of the Galician, with about the same amount of syllables per line. English usually takes fewer words than the original, so MacCarthy’s choice shows the attention to not only meaning but melody that translation may provide. Poets were given free rein to tighten or loosen the English or Irish equivalents, and in the latter (each Galician chose which of her five poems would be singled out for the Gaelic selection; some Irish poets had their own command of Irish to translate and some were given assistance, notably by Rita Kelly), considerable change can be seen, as that language in turn often demanded more words and more syllables than the Galician, in turn.

Why use three languages? This parallels, as O’Donnell shows, compare 'two histories of struggle, two histories almost assimilated by greater, eloquent cultures that communicate in what are decisively termed world languages’, so giving Gaeilge and Gallego a chance to be heard along with English and rather than Spanish strengthens cultural exchange and encourages dialogue between the two nations, in real or idealised manifestations between two cultural cousins, seeking blood ties beyond the water.

Ultimately, the choice of ten women poets itself burrows into the land for some, and transcends its limits for others eager to enter imaginary or psychic terrain. This matters for any reader. Let Xiana Arias via Paddy Bushe conclude, as they do this volume, with a burst of transmission asserting ‘This is Not Feminine Literature’: ‘This is not feminine literature, the author said, while writing a play for children. There is a hero who snatches a beautiful woman from the arms of an evil man. In the end she leaves, alone, scoring the asphalt with her toenails.’ This image digs deep into one’s imagination, a fitting way to leave the impact of this encounter within the reader’s mind. (Slugger O'Toole 9-25-13 and to Amazon US 8-10-13)

Tony Bailie's "A Verse for Murder": e-Book Review

This cover merits study--it's well chosen and ties into the mystery elaborated by an informant. The title, a play off of the "murder of crows," echoes in the name of Barry Crowe, a Belfast journalist (or is it "sleazy tabloid hack"?) pursuing the backstory behind the sudden demise, apparently by auto-asphyxiation, of Northern Ireland's leading poet. The compromising circumstances unfold neatly in this e-book novella.

Bailie, whose novels The Lost Chord and Ecopunks delved into respectively gnosticism and New Age quests, continues his application of Celtic and esoteric themes into his fiction. As a Belfast-based journalist (and a poet), he enjoys sending up his profession(s) and their shared pretensions. His short story "The Druid's Dance" in the anthology Requiems for the Departed by Irish mystery writers incorporating Celtic myth and archetypes anticipates the mood and tone of this new tale.

Reviewing a mystery, one cannot give much away. The blurb at Amazon sums up the premise enticingly. It's not betraying the story to admit that the set-up elaborates into, over 74 quick pages, an entry into the symbol of the spiral and the Triple Goddess of Celtic lore. Drawing on, in my "guesstimation," theories of spacetime and the earlier attempts of Irish writers Denis Johnston (The Brazen Horn) and Francis Stuart (The Abandoned Snail Shell) to plunge into the liminal, the results for Barry recall those of the warp-spasm of Cú Chulainn, and the cosmic terror that seems to cross generations and centuries as Bríd, Andrea, and Alma enter the lives of Barry and his cop pal Dervla.

Phrasing sharpens: "curtains all along the street begin twitching in a semaphore of suburban noisiness" updates Brinsley McNamara's once-famous novel about a gossiping lot, in the "valley of squinting windows."  Rowan Tree "looked like a poet should do, elongated body, gaunt face, exploding hair and eyes that suggested insanity." Another, once-promising, poet's eyes "retained the primal urgency of someone who wanted to say something but had no idea of how to say it."

Futurist couplings of poetry as violence, "sexual electricity," a jealous bard Rowan Tree's curse in verse, hallucinogens, nods to Robert Graves and pagan rituals still alive today in the heart of the city: these exemplify the details Tony Bailie adds to enrich his narrative. If you find this enticing, you will find this efficiently conveyed but pleasingly allusive tale a pleasure. I'd like to hear more from Barry.
(Amazon US 10-31-12 and British Amazon; slightly edited and expanded for Slugger O'Toole 10-22-13. P.S. See also my brief review the same day of his electronically delivered short story "Sacred Santa" on Amazon US and British Amazon)

Ag foghlaim faoi Galicia

Faoi deireadh, bím ag léamh mír faoi na Gailíse sa Spáinn. Deirtear finscéal go raibh ndúiche Cheilteach fadó. Ach, níl mé cinnte mar scoláire, ar an drochuair.

Mar sin féin, thósaigh mé fuarthas ar iosacht leabhar leictreoneach le David Hoffman. Is treoirleabhar aísiúil é. Scriobh sé go soiléir agus gonta.

Tá mé ag gheofar ar iosacht leabhar eile leis filiochta aistrithe ó Gailísis go Béarla-- agus roinnt Gaeilge. Beidh mé sé ag thaispeáint ar bealach spraoiúil a foghlaim beag as Gaeilge agus Gailísis a chéile. Is cosúil Portaingéilis go fírinne.

Is maith liom an suíomh seo ar an nghréasán Turgalicia freisin. Tá tú in ann ag dul ag imeall an réigiún agus ag fheicéail an tír féin. Tá bealaí taistil eagsulaí ann.

Go minic, d'fhéadhfadh go mbeadh mearbhall nuair a lorg de reir "Galicia" i mBéarla. Tá sé freisin réigiún arsa sa Pholainn. Bhí conái Giúdaigh ann, go dtí go chéid seo caite. Fada ó shín, rinne Ceiltigh ansin.

Learning about Galicia

Lately, I'm reading a bit about Galicia in Spain. It's said in legend that it was a Celtic heartland long ago. But, I'm not sure as a scholar, unfortunately. 

All the same, I started with borrowing an electronic book by David Hoffman. It's a useful guidebook. It's written clearly and concisely.

I am borrowing another book about poetry translated from Galician to English--and some Irish.  It will show me a fun way to learn a little in Irish and Galician together. It's like Portuguese, certainly.

I like this site on the web Turgalicia too. You are able to go about and the region and to see the land itself. There's various itineraries there.

Often, there may be confusion when searching regarding "Galicia" in English. It's also an ancient region in Poland. Jews lived there, until the last century. Long ago, Celts did.

(Photo/Grianghraf: Cristina Pato leis bratach na Gailíse agus píopaí/with a flag of Galicia and pipes.)

Neil Hegarty's "The Story of Ireland": Book Review

"Incorrigably plural" in its diverse history, Ireland has never been as isolated as its geographical position may indicate. Dr. Neil Hegarty links the island--from its prehistoric pioneers to its European financial bailout--to the wider world. International connections, from its first settlers to its increasingly multicultural population today, characterize its gene pool, its waves of invaders and immigrants, and its complex mix of political, religious, and social ingredients. These may simmer, then boil, then cool down again and again over long centuries full of contention and compromise. This energy, distilled into this well-informed study, pulses through every event listed in 330 smoothly paced pages (along with a lively introduction by foreign correspondent Fergal Keane, a timeline, footnotes, reading list, and detailed index).

Contrary to nationalist myth, the Romans traded with and tentatively explored a bit of the island they named Hibernia, "land of winter" from a mistranslation of the Greek "Ierne" for the eponymous Celtic mother goddess "Ériu". Ireland never was totally hidden from classical explorers who braved the Atlantic. "The sea remained a communications highway: indeed in a country cut with forest, highland and bog, it was sometimes easier to travel abroad than within the island itself."

This oceanic network drew a few of its residents into the Christian sphere before Patrick arrived, and Dr. Hegarty reminds us how far Irish influences spread throughout Europe. One determined "dissenter whenever necessary", irascible monk Columbanus took learning into the Alps, while Hiberno-Norse civilization, in Dr. Hegarty's emphasis, arguably strengthened by urbanization and commerce what it had first weakened, when many monastic storehouses of learning perished along with native caretakers and refugees during Viking raids. Brian Boru, conniving High King, comes across here as less heroic and more cunning in his ruthless consolidation of power, as not for the first time the Celtic Irish and their Norse rulers fought together as well as against each other amidst a host of mercenaries-- depending on who was paying whom to enlist not on behalf of a nation but a warlord.

Such allegiances tangled when the Anglo-Normans took advantage of taking over the tribal island to the west, invited by an adulterous local chieftain needing armed backup. Dermot MacMurrough, typecast as the traitor in many a legendary version of the Irish past, here does not come across as sympathetic, but his headstrong character is placed within a territorial feud familiar to viewers of a mob drama today: fractious Ireland with its petty kingdoms produces such as Dermot, with a vicious "style, rooted in a political climate that was positively Sicilian in its intensity and nastiness."

The Normans entered Ireland in 1169. These occupiers pushed aside the Hiberno-Norse and their ports fell, as the "Pale" of English control expanded inland from the island's east and southern coasts. Then "Old English" settlers succumbed to intermarriage and assimilation, so the Crown reasoned they must send more loyal invaders to anglicize the people lest the land "develop into a safe haven" for "rivals and enemies" using Ireland as a back door to sneak into England, so as to undermine or overthrow London's power. Over and over, more invaders were sent as the natives fought back, infiltrated the earlier colonists, and persisted in their anti-English opposition. Dr. Hegarty tells this intricate segment with vivid excerpts from chronicles and laws, and as throughout this book, he incorporates poems, testimony, and historical footnotes now and then taken from solid scholarship and up-to-date research.

Oliver Cromwell, another "polarizing figure" whom the native Irish learned to fear, gains thoughtful consideration. His atrocities are not excused, but his position as a Puritan bent on wiping out the Royalists in Ireland during the English Civil War places him as likely an inevitable military leader sent over to wipe out an insurgency, a general convinced of his anti-guerrilla campaign's necessity. His "ferocious ideological clarity and moral zeal" illustrate one of many case studies, over eight centuries of anti-British insurrection and cultural resistance. Catholic natives press back and are pressed back; both sides refusing to give quarter during frequent rebellions, often with Irish employed on each side.

Gradually, the indigenous language and the clan dominance weakened until by 1700, four-fifths of the land was owned by the English. Penal codes crushed Catholic freedom in a climate of "shrill paranoia and beady-eyed realism". A century before, Scots were planted in fertile but headstrong Ulster as Catholic landlords were driven off, or enticed to convert to Protestantism to keep their diminished holdings. Presbyterians, also oppressed by the Church of England, might listen with sympathy to the 1798 rebels seeking, in the aftermath of the American and French Revolutions, their own victory.

But, after another defeat, the Famine would devastate the native population. This sparked a "devotional revolution" by the Church designed to rally survivors. When Fenians sought to continue the tradition of rebellion, by the late nineteenth century, the hopes of political union with Britain had long been proven foolish. Fewer Protestants would entertain the notion of better times for an Ireland under Catholic power. As a garrison state, it had supplied--from the better-off and the poor--over forty percent of troops serving under the Crown abroad. Imperial ties again would stir fratricidal strife back home.

Politicians found themselves unable to convince Britain of Home Rule as a dominion solution for a measure of Irish self-determination. Isaac Butt, a Protestant barrister, "was intellectual, respectful, careful, uncharismatic, dour and unexciting--in short, lacking in many of the qualities that appealed in Irish political circles." As that phrasing shows, Dr. Hegarty demonstrates a command of nuance. I wondered if he'd miss an observation or qualification, but he never did. He writes for a wide audience, yet by academic training he keeps his detached, thoughtful perspective when addressing contested issues. For instance, he adds to the usual summation of Belfast's sectarian fears of a takeover by Home Rule (let alone Fenians) the progress in scientific endeavor and economic productivity achieved by Ulster's main city by the reign of Queen Victoria, as expressed through a typical Protestant refusal to countenance any "parliament in Dublin in thrall to a host of clerics."

The Boer War earns in-depth treatment to show the inconsistencies of such reformists as Michael Davitt. Despite all his sympathy for Australian aborigines and the Maori, Davitt remained silent when considering the plight of the native Africans as he and many Irish nationalists propagandized and supported the Boers against the Crown. Of course, many more Irish signed up to fight the Boers. Even if an "international consciousness" by modern times defined Irishness as Catholic and anti-British, many families relied on the payments sent home by soldiers to those who endured in poor, limited, and overpopulated conditions. Out of such discrimination and division, the last century's record of Irish fighting Irish begins its long litany of casualties and conflicted loyalties.

Nationalist Irish politics tore itself apart when allied to rebellion. However, after the doomed Rising of 1916, this glorified alliance was judged by enough bitter and beaten-down citizens as a desperate if timely necessity. By then, "Sinn Féin" republicans had convinced enough sympathizers that the Crown would never grant independence peacefully to what the imperial occupiers and a pro-British minority feared as an credulous, resentful, and nearby island that opened a "back door" to "Rome rule."

While these rebels claimed in rhetoric their socialist ideals and non-sectarian policies for all Irish, in practice, the majority of the divided island that resulted turned in on itself by censorship, repression, and moral panics designed to make it more Gaelic and more Catholic, as liberals fought to be heard in an increasingly conservative Free State. Still, facile portrayals of independent Ireland as cut off from European and certainly American culture are denied.

Dr. Hegarty reminds readers how dependent on wider currents of trade, ideas, and influences the Republic of Ireland has been. He examines the economy within the subsidized counties remaining, after yet another protracted conflict, under the Crown. At least, this Derry-born observer adds, in Ulster the "prevailing political uncertainty and civic abnormality kept house prices low and living conditions high" during the Troubles of the past decades.

Finally, the boom and bust of the past twenty years earns Dr. Hegarty's hope that a "sturdier civic culture" may be created to replace the "short-term, patronage and clientist politics" that led to the disfigurement of much of the Irish countryside with unplanned development, and a bubble where Dublin's real estate inflated into the world's most expensive. In a history illustrating the importance of global ties for the Irish, its links to a European economy facing unprecedented challenges by its own unity serve as a cautionary tale, to be careful what a vulnerable, secularizing, and newly affluent nation wishes for. As he concludes,"old pieties, myths and habits of deference are dissolving." What replaces these certainties, he insists, will be decided upon by the diverse people of Ireland themselves.

(Featured at New York Journal of Books 3-13-12)

Elizabeth Cunningham's "Red-Robed Priestess": Book Review

Imagine Mary Magdalen was born a Celt, foster-daughter of a hero who then rapes her. She then falls in love with a certain gifted foreign exchange student who comes to (what is now) Wales from Palestine. She rescues him from sacrifice by the Druids, so they must flee back to Israel. They will create a daughter, together. There he will meet his fate with --and apart from-- her. Meanwhile, her first-born daughter, taken from her by the Druids, a “misbegotten child of a misbegotten child,” grows up to lead a native rebellion against the Romanization of Britain.

After a career roaming the Levantine, where not only Jesus but Paul of Tarsus embraced her with various consequences, this red-robed priestess, born Maeve Ruadh, Mary the Red, sails from Gaul across the Channel. Her hair now faded to grey, at sixty she returns to the land of Britain where she was raised, to seek out her first-born daughter, rebel queen Boudica. During an uprising in Britain a generation after the Crucifixion, Maeve will witness through her shape-shifting self the fate of her homeland and the decisions made by both her headstrong daughters.

This ambitious novel completes Elizabeth Cunningham’s lively series, The Maeve Chronicles. As a first-time reader of Maeve’s adventures, I found the start of this complicated saga slower going. Still, Ms. Cunningham integrates the past gossip and guises of her appealingly flawed, wittily droll heroine deftly. The author blends what can be known from the historical record—as with the three earlier installments—into a winning mixture of fantasy, romance, epic, and meditation upon the struggle between Christian notions of peace and pagan insistence upon power, and how these principles themselves warp and mutate and shrivel as the cause of the Celtic Britons clashes with that of the Roman (or Romanized) imperial settlers.

Without taking herself or her creation of unpredictable, seductive Maeve too seriously, Ms. Cunningham manages to extend the relevance of this novel beyond a mash-up tale of “Magdalene returns to the Druids”. Her pace rarely pauses to allow us to catch up, but Maeve can shift via dream states conveniently across Britain if necessary, a helpful narrative device that compresses the defeat of the Druids on the Isle of Mon (today’s Anglesey off the northern Welsh coast) with the rebellion of Boudica that burned down London and two other Romanized cities before the Celts were crushed by the Roman forces. The predestined nature of the true part of this tale, therefore, requires skill in keeping the reader involved in a doomed epic. It is a testament to Ms. Cunningham’s ability that she can keep the plot moving rapidly while insisting upon depth given to the magical and mundane characters from history and myth who hurry across these busy pages.

Maeve, telling us her tale, muses early on about her relationship with the Roman commander. She recalls how both of them “kept straying into each other’s story, as if some incoherent dream insisted on inhabiting waking hours.” The chronicle, colloquially rendered in modern-day English, succeeds in avoiding the mustiness of many alternate histories. Maeve addresses herself to our time as well as hers, and this allows Ms. Cunningham to connect her predicament with that of anyone forced to take the side of those who murder or those who will die.

Tangled into the machinations of Celts and Romans, directed by the come-and-go voice of Jesus and the messages from earlier chronicles in this series now and then, Maeve struggles to make the right decisions, as her daughters must confront the presence of their mother in unexpected circumstances, and as she must admit uncomfortable revelations about her own background and her own long absence from the lives of her two girls.

“I sighed. Once again, the choice. Suddenly I was tired of spinning tales, spinning the truth, tired of spinning. They say deceit weaves a tangled web. But fabrication is an art form. The truth is the raw, and often unappealing, material.”

Maeve’s admission compels her to alter allegiances, and to test her loyalties. Ms. Cunningham presents a fair-minded portrayal of both sides in this British conflict, and this is enriched by Maeve’s own understanding of the lessons left for her by Jesus. “What does it mean to love your enemy on the eve of battle? Do you spare your enemy even though he won’t spare you? Do you kill him, because he will kill you? Which is worse, death or murder?”

The tragic resolution of this dramatic showdown comes after hints of stories perhaps nearly as ancient, the roots of King Lear and Hamlet, as well as plenty of Celtic divination and Druidic debate. Ms. Cunningham notes how she had to return, a final time, to allow her heroine the chance to return to her homeland, to settle the last story which Maeve’s long life had created. This final episode in The Maeve Chronicles, for all its carefully recreated battle and bloodshed, lingers in the mind equally as long for its introspection and revelation. This offers a welcome examination of the ties of love and the conflicts of loyalty on the intimate as well as epic levels. (Featured at the New York Journal of Books 11-15-11; Author's website.)