As our tour bus rounded the shoulder of a hill, the ground dropped away to one side, revealing a vista of cottages along a valley, closed in by mountains. Someone began singing "Where the Mountains of Mourne sweep down to the Sea", and suddenly everyone was singing. Not a typical New World experience, to be sure, but a very Irish one.
One of the first things to catch my attention upon arriving in Ireland, was the quality of English spoken there - the frequent delicacy and elegance of grammatical construction in everyday speech. Later, I encountered the famous propensity of the Irish to resort to verse or song to illustrate a point.
A number of times verses, or even entire poems were quoted with an ease and naturalness that could only be born of habit. Indeed, Irish literacy is no illusion. Ireland is to literature what Switzerland is to banking, and a list of famous Irish writers would continue right off the page, led by some giants of English letters, such as Yeats, Joyce, and Shaw.
Joyce
Like an iceberg, Irish literature was largely hidden, as it has only "emerged" from Gaelic into English, in the last couple of centuries. For millennia before that, first an oral legacy, and then a written one accumulated in the Gaelic tongue. Much of the former is lost to us today, and much of the latter remains untranslated. But it was there in those same islands, in all its wealth and depth, and beauty, for ages before ever the English ear first heard it - in fact, for ages before ever there was such a thing as an English ear.
Literature has always played an important part in Gaelic culture, and it is said that only three voices were "suffered to speak" at public events. These were the poet or bard, the historian, and the "brehon lawyer" who would try cases under the law, citing precedents, and rendering judgements.
By the thirteenth century the bardic tradition had become formalized. Bards belonged to guilds, and studied their art for years, before gaining entry into the craft. There was a school for bards, where the students lived in windowless buildings, and studied by candle light, for as long as seven years. Bards were much respected in Irish society, and some of the tradition persists today. In fact, a McAteer was recently named "Bard of Armagh".
Surely there can be few cultures anywhere else in the world, which took their literature as seriously. It would be difficult to fully appreciate the culture of Erin without exposure to the bardic tradition, and so we have made use of Irish verse in these pages, wheresoever it seemed appropriate. To "modern man" these "intrusions" may seem irrelevant, but if you are of Irish descent, read them; contemplate them; let them speak to you; for they are nothing less than the voices of your forbears calling out to you across the centuries.
of Clan Mhac an t'Saoir |