Mongan

Má bhíonn cú mhall subhailceach féin, is minic go mbíonn sí déanach chomh maith. Is amhlaidh go bhfuil an diabhal le fuacht ar an nduiche seo le mí go leith, agus tá brat trom sneachtaigh anois again leis, agus leanann a chuid dualgaisí fuacht agus sneachta araon. Do bhí an bean agam breoite agus cat linn chomh maith, i dtreo na raibh d’uaine agam féachaint ar am nblog go dtí seo.

In 1899, Seoirse MacConmara, a doctor in Corofin, north Clare, noticed a child playing with the leather cover of a manuscript on the floor of a house. He saved the manuscript, passed it on to Douglas Hyde, who passed it on to Seamus O Duilearge who published a tale from it in Zeitschrift fur Celtische Philoogie, no 12. (The Germans were the first to take an interest in Old Irish language and Literature in the 20th century.)
 

The tale was entitled Tóruigheacxht (i/e. Tóraíocht) Duibhe Lacha Láimh-Ghile there (The Quest for Black Duck with White Hands)there and it is one of the few copies of a tale usually entitled Serc Duibhe Lacha do Mhongán (Dubh Lacha’s Love for Mongán). (The main other known cooy is in the Book of Fermoy, century), 
 

It’s an interesting enjoyable story. Here, at the beginning, Mongán’s father, Fiachna, king of Dál nAraidhe in what is now county Antrim, has been forced to fight with Ularg, king of Lochlainn (Norway, but often just the Otherworld) in order to fulfill a vow . Things are not going well until a mysterious stranger appears: (my translation)
 

Fiachra summoned the nobility of Ulster then, and set out for Lochlann with a large, warlike host, in order to avenge the offense to himself and the wrong to the dark hag on the king of Lochlann. He gave battle-notice to Ularg when he got there and gave him a delay of three days and three nights, so that he could gather his troops. The King of Lochlann requested battle from Fiachra then, after he'd had gathered his kin.
 

The king of Ulster sent three hundred hardy, valiant warriors into the combat and three venomous sheep were loosed against them from among the king of Lochlann's folk. The sheep went through them and over them like a hawk through small birds, or wolves through scattered herds of sheep on a wide flat plain. That's how the fierce sheep went through Fiachra's folk, and whoever saw them once, never saw them again. The sheep killed three hundred on the second day, and three hundred on the third day, and Fiachra was gloomy at the slaughter and alarming decline that the sheep had inflicted on his folk. He called for his weapons, saying that he'd go to fight the sheep himself, for the sake of his people.
 

"Don't say that, king of Ulster," the lords of his people said. “It's not proper for you to fight sheep."
 

"I give my word," Fiachra said, "that they'll kill no more of the men of Ireland, until I see if I can kill them myself, or until they kill me."
     

Fiachra saw an unknown warrior coming straight towards him then. He was wearing a green mantle, with a fine silk shirt that covered his white skin, a gold band around his hair, and two golden brogues on his feet. 
 

He came up to the king of Ulster “You're gloomy, King of Ulster."
 

"I haven't far to look for a cause: "to be specific, the destruction and stupendous slaughter of my folk by black wizard sheep, and I'm going now to fight them myself."

"What reward would you give to the person that would muzzle them?"  the youth asked in a grave and polite manner.

"Whatever he asked, if it were in my power."
 
"Grant me my own request and I'll muzzle the venomous sheep for you. If you won't, I won't muzzle them, and you won't succeed in doing so either."

"Let me know your reward,.”

"I request the ring that's on your middle finger as a sign to your wife in Ireland, so that I can sleep with her."

"I swear," said Fiachra, "that I won't allow any of the men of Ireland to be killed because I was unwilling to provide that sign."    
 
"It's no loss for you because a miraculous child will be born to your wife, and you'll be called his father. His name will be Mongan mac Fiachra. The boy will be a master of learning in every science proper to the son of a king and high sovereign; and, what's more, I'll take on your own shape, so that your wife won't suffer any indignity."

Fiachra gave the precious ring to the young man who then extracted from the obscure 
recesses of his mantle a sheepdog with a bright silver chain around its neck. 

"At whatever point in time the sheep attack you, loose the sheepdog. I give my word that no a sheep of them will return to the king of Lochlann's dun afterwards and I swear to you that the Lochlann men will submit to you without any further battle after this."

The youth was actually the Many-Skilled One, fair haired Manannan mac Lir, the most learned in druidic powers and arts of all those who lived in that age of the world.

He went on to Ireland, where he slept with the queen and she was left pregnant and heavy-sided.

As regards the sheep: the dog felled them that day, and three hundred of the king of Lochlann's folk along with them. The delight of the king of Ulster and his folk was, as a result of this, unbounded. The gloom and misery of the King of Lochlann and his people was proportionately deep.

Manannan is thus Mongán’s biologic father, and the various anecdotes about Mongán all suggest his mystic knowledge and power, and he played in the traditions of the northeast of Ireland the role of a semi-divine wonder-child who emerged from the womb already versed in the secrets of the universe. He was born of the god Manannan, as in the Toruidheacht17; he was considered the reincarnation of the archetypical seer/poet/hunter of Gaelic tradition, Fionn Mac Cumhaill18; he met the great northern Irish/Scottish saint Colmcille (Columba) and provided him with supernatural knowledge: (See Imacallam Choluim Chiulle agus ind Oclaig oc Carn Eolaire, 8th or 9th century, printed by Kuno Meyer in Zeitschrift fur Celtische Philologie, no. II.)
   
I come from lands of strange things, from lands of familiar things, so that I may learn from you the spot on which died, and the spot on which were born, knowledge and ignorance...I have grazed it (Loch Neagh) when I was a stag, I have swum it when I was a salmon, when I was a seal, I have run upon it when I was a wolf, I have gone around it when I was a human...19  
Manannan prophesied Mongan's birth when he appears to the voyager Bran: 
   
He will have pleasant acquaintance with every elvish dwelling...He will proclaim mysteries (a course of wisdom) without fearing it...The blessed host will take him under a circle of clouds to a festival that is not sorrowful..

 

Mongan did actually live and the annals record his death in 625 A.D., fighting the Britons of Strathclyde in Lowland Scotland. It doesn't follow from this fact that these tales about Mongan have a place in textbooks of early Irish history: the historical Mongan has simply assumed a mythological persona attributed in other centuries to other figures. It's no longer clear why this persona became attached to Mongan in particular. We know that he was of the royal family of the kingdom of Dal nAraidhe (the south of County Antrim), that his father Fiachna Fionn Mac Baetain was provincial king of the Ulaid (Ulstermen) and was killed by Fiachna Dubh Mac Demmain (king of neighboring Dal Fiachrach) in the battle of Lethed Midind in 626, after reigning for some thirty-eight years. Fiachna was also commemorated in a tale (now lost) about his attack on Bamborough in northern England: Sluagad Fiachna meic Baitain co Dun nGuaire i Saxanaib. Mongan did marry Dubh Lacha, daughter of Fiachna Dubh, and was felt to have connections with the important nearby monastery of Bangor. Not much else is known of him. Why he had become within a hundred years of his death a supernatural figure in the tradition is unclear, but stories about Mongan feature in one of the first known manuscripts of written Gaelic literature, the eighth century: Cin Droma Snechta produced at the monastery of Druim Snechta near present-day Monaghan town. 
 

The other short tales and anecdotes about him are scattered in various places. Some are noted in Kuno Meyer and Alred Nutt’s Immram Brain:  The Voyage of Bran (London, two volumes, 1895-7) (The book is now available online:    )
 

Why is Mongán ibn a book focused on the tale of Bran?
Stories of both feature in what is believed to be the first secular Irish manuscript or at least the first well-known one, Cín Dromma Sneacxhtai. Produced probably in the monastery at Bangor. (The Mongán story is Compert M., and the Bran story is Immram Brain.
 

The various tales in the Cín demonstrate the process of the creation of a written literature from a strictly oral one, and a very perceptive examinatiuion of such matters and many others is to be found in Proinsis Mac Cana’s paper Mongán Mac Fiachna agus Immram Brain, Eriu, no. 23, 1972, and  in On the Prehistory of Immram Brain, no. 25, and in The Sinless Otherworld of Immram Brain, no. ?) They are seminal papers of an intelligence not often seen in Irish learning since.

The context was an ongoing debate between Mac Cana and James Carney. 

Irish society was changing quickly in the 196-s and 1970s and drawing much closer to Britain after Fianna Fáil’s half-hearted attempt to build an Irish economy focused on Ireland, drawing away from its long-term dependence on the export of agricultural products (mostly cattle, beef and milk and milk products) to Britain. Postwar European prosperity meant there was more money around everywhere, and private sector business took on an increasing social importance, overshadowing the state sector that had dominated since independence. The newly-influential business sector had no time for or interest in outdated traditions.

One outmoded tradition, as James Carney saw it, was the mostly unstated but general assumption that early Irish literature and tradition draw on native and even pre-Christian roots. Scholars like Myles Dillon drew attention to the many Irish parallels to ancient Sanskrit literary and social practice, and Mac Cana investigated continuity in Irish tradition.
 

Carney saw Christian and Classical Latin sources for Irish literature, and a monastic origin for the structure of learning. Most people didn’t care oner way or the other, but the ongoing Carney/Mac Cana debate had not only academic implications. Was Irish tradition somewhat unique and particular to Ireland, or was it just another expression of a cosmopolitan medieval Latin culture of no particular significance: and, by implication, did Ireland have its own identity and culture, or was it just an unfortunately very backward corner of the EU?
 

Mac Cana was professor at the University of Wales for a while, and after (though Professor at University College, Dublin, between 1971 and 1985,( was mostly associated with Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, an institution that intentionally did not have high student.
Professor Carney was at Maynooth, a place with much higher student numbers, and it is interesting to compare the subscribers to their respective festschrift. Mac Cana’s lists a lot of Welshmen, foreigners and Irish scholars who used Irish as a living language. Carey’s lists the mainstream of contemporary Irish scholarship, many of whom had been either students of his or of his students, and Carney’s views have dominated Irish scholarship, really up to the present.
 

I suppose it is clear where my sympathies lie,
 

A similar disregard for the native Irish tradition, or in this case, viewpoint, characterized the field of Irish history since the mid-1960s, for similar reasons. It was only when Kevin Whelan’s closely-researched work on Early Modern Irish social history appeared that the “Revionist” dominance began to wane, and today, it is possible to assume academically that British dominance of Ireland was not an unmixed blessing.
 

It may be that Irish Literature is too minor, inconspicuous a field to support a current debate similar to that which occurred in Irish History. The field has, im my opinion, floundered during the last thirty years, and it is only sat University College, Cork, that engaged, exciting work is being done, and there almost only in Early Modern and Modern literature.
 

The oral tradition is pretty much gone, but the texts are still there, though, and offer just as much as they ever have to those interested. I suppose, though, in a way, what you bring to them influences what you get from them.