Apples and Pears

Everybody knows the Celtic languages exist out there in some hidden place, mountainous or seaside, not really part of the ordinary world. Same with the people who speak them” both are really part of some romantic, mystical other realm. Or something like that.

That is maybe accurate in 2026, in an odd way, but also obviously inaccurate and silly,

Most of the Celtic languages are/were old-fashioned and rooted in the earth because they were spoken in places that are/were “out there” on geographical or social margins until recently. They are ordinary languages for all that, and the people who speak/spoke them are/were ordinary people trying to get along in an often difficult world. The languages are about to die not because they are too fine or mystical for this crass time, but because the modern world (post maybe 1540?) has ground them out, like it has ground out many other things.

People in absolutely boring unmystical, unromantic but definitely Irish county Offaly only stopped speaking Irish in the 1830s, most often because they had been incorporated in an English-owned and administered estate and big farm system that had no place for Irish or for anything old or in the way. The Famine removed probably a million Irish-speaking people from the island in the 1840s in a five-year-long living Hell. but a lot of southern and western Ireland spoke Irish until the 1880s. (For more details, see the post Irish, the Inside Story on the blog Irish Love Songs, Irish Language, (on Blogger).

Most of the geographic Scottish Highlands spoke Gaelic until the 1880s/1890s, but only parts of the western seaboard, and the Outer Hebrides had large enough concentrations of people still to make it a viable language there and to outweigh the fact that Highland communities also existed within an estate system that offered very limited opportunities for making a living: a system that despised Gaelic. (The Clearances of the late 18^th and then 19^th centuries had already removed the majority of people from everywhere else and sent them to Glasgow or Canada etc.) See Scottish Gaelic, the Inside Story on Irish Love Songs, Irish Language for details.

All Wales (except Gower south Pembroke (English-settled): far east Gwent: a border strip of Brecknock and Montgomeryshire: and Maelor Saesneg) spoke Welsh until the 1930s when the effects of the English-language industrial system in the heavily-populated Valleys combined with English and Irish in-migration there and the Depression broke apart communities in the Valleys and removed the basis of a separate Welsh national society. English society absorbed increasing areas on the borders, and then in the 1950s , with increasing economic, educational and media integration with England, areas of the rural south and touristy north east coast turned to English. (There is a Welsh, and also Breton Inside Story on Blogger too.)

There were parts of central and eastern Brittany that were mixed Breton and French (Breton mostly in the nobility?) until the Middle Ages, then monoglot French, but after this, the Breton/French border was stable for many hundred of years after until really the 1950s, when greatly increased economic and media integration with France, combined with many years of French-only schooling, and then the post-WWII Patriotic French orgy and casting out of all things not patriotic French, and the destruction of peasant agriculture and shift to Big Farming, meant that parents in many places started speaking French to their children.

Manx lost ground for similar reasons to Scottish Gaelic in the late 19^th century. Cornish…Well, Cornish is really the only Celtic language that fits the Mystical Celtic model, and only then because the language was lost in the 16^th and 17^th centuries when nobody much was paying attention, so not a lot is known about anything.

Today, things are bleak. The 1950s, then again the late 1970s, saw most remaining Celtic-speaking communities turn to English, often because of closer and closer integration into larger societies, the end of old ways of life and because of TV and radio.

What’s left? Where are Celtic languages spoken as community languages?

In Ireland, it’s mostly Tory Island and a small strip of mainland opposite (though a lot of that is summer houses now), maybe Inis Meain (though that is losing its native Irish-speaking population), maybe a small area around Screeb etc.

In the Highlands, it’s Grimsay island with less than 200 people, and that will go eventually.

In Wales, it’s the area west of Caernarfon town (Eifionydd, Lleyn, etc.), plus bits of Meirionydd, maybe Llanbrynmair, maybe a few tiny bits of Cardiganshire: the upper Gwaun valley in Pembrokeshire, and the semi-industrial highland area on the borders of Carmarthenshire and Glamorgan.

In Brittany, it’s the village of Plounevez-Moedac and to a much lesser extent, Sein island.

In Ireland in former Gaeltacht, there are small networks of families that still speak Irish to each other. There are people in lots of places like Belfast, Rennes, Cardiff and Glasgow who have learned the language, but they often speak an impoverished version that is really based on English.

Wait…So am I just some elitist yearning for some distant, idealized past, and dumping on the vigorous living language of the people who are actually doing the work?

One of the things about the Celtic languages, besides the old stuff, is the fact that they are/were very rich and earthy languages that reflected two thousand years of human and natural interaction. Someone described them as “Medieval.” Given the contemporary associations of that word, that is neither accurate or useful, but the languages do rise from another world.

On the other hand, modern English and French are pretty much Standard Official and Media languages that reflect…something else.

People who’ve learnt a Celtic language in classes or books or online usually do not have access to the traditional language and are often not even aware of it, or even care that there is such a thing. They often speak a Celtic language that is a translation of their English or French, and I’m not referring to word order

Last week, an online discussion of an Irish grammatical feature produced some sample sentences (“an duine ab eagraithe etc.) that while not formally incorrect, struck me as awkward. In the end, I think that the problem is not that the grammatical structures are “wrong”, but that an Irish speaker would not use that construction to express the thought. She would not even start from that same place.

She could say , for example, something like “an duine ab fhearr” (the best person), but might also come at that from an entirely different direction. And just because in English you use the same approach and thus construction to say “the best person” and “the most organized person” (“an duine ab eagraithe”) doesn’t mean that this is how you do it in Irish.

I think that a traditional Irish speaker would approach the utterance differently, using other structures that reflect other ways of looking at people and experience: other ways of categorizing, organizing and expressing experience: structures that reflect maybe older, less “theoretical” analyses of experience: structures that arise from thousands of years of face-to-face experience.

That is very vague, isn’t it, and it doesn’t really make sense. Hadn’t I better approach this in a more logical, precise way?

Let me try.

Irish would not start with a concept of “organized” that is good across all types of experience. Books might be “curtha i dtoll a chéile.” Another group of objects (with moving parts etc.)might be “ar inneall”, or “i ngleas, as might metaphorically, a person. A person might be said to “have everything (needed) “under his hand”, and so on. The word “eagar” suggests “things in a row or arrangement” (according to Dineen’s (old) dictionary.

So Irish acknowledges that different situations and types of objects arise out of different contexts. They have different trajectories and natures, and the language acknowledges that in conceptualizing how they might be made ready to be used or put in “order”, you don’t start from the same place. The specifics must be seen, and they cannot cannot be subsumed in one abstract concept of order that is good no matter if you’re referring to tools or houses or cows or people or businesses.

Irish and the other languages acknowledge the way the physical world actually is. It perceives more truly and accurately in this way. The languages are “softer” ad more “human” and I would argue that they offer people in our abstract, machine-driven, space capsule life something valuable. They offer a wild apple with, each one, its own indescribable complex taste that tells about time and place and circumstance: and this in place of the modern standard “fizzy soda” apple.

You can hear (very near) Plounevez Breton on Youtube by looking for Maurice Prigent or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jdi54Zhl-4A . Probably better if you don’t understand him. It’s a little, um, risque.

You can hear a whole hour of a Grimsay storyteller if you buy Peter Morrison’s recording from The School of Scottish Studies or look for him on Tobar a’ Dualchais. Or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGgk70mtyew#ddg-play

I don’t know where you can hear Tory Island Irish, but probably Youtube somewhere. Well, here, but the people the film maker chose of course don’t have teeth… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCkl1jxheGs Or at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcuxN8_dbks These people, when the narrator, shuts up, do have teeth.

You can hear far northwestern Welsh (Caernarfon town, then near Swansea in the south) at. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFyLcEuYqvU#ddg-play

East Carmarthen/west Glamorgan Welsh (as mentioned above) is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2hPg-SkVcE.

Kings and Queens

Ireland is unique among probably all European countries in that traditions concerning pre-Christian sacred places persisted into the late 19th and early 20th centuries in some parts.

(Wales and the Highlands of Scotland and Brittany have much, much less)

There are reasons for this: yes, the places and personages and traditions were considered locally important for various reasons, and were closely integrated with local life, but there are regions of Ireland where this once true, but where such traditions disappeared, In other areas, they continued.

For example, in the province of Munster, traditions survived strongly. This might have been linked to the fact the sacred figures (“fairy queens”) associated with the places were important in the 18th century Irish language poetic tradition that is strongly associated with the area. On the other hand, the “fairy queens” were not central to the almost equally strong 18th century south Ulster poetic tradition, and local traditions did not survive at all as well there. (A contributing factor might have been the strong clerical opposition in south Ulster to the Irish language and traditions associated with it: an animosity engendered by strong Irish language Protestant religious proselytization that taught literacy in Irish in the early 19th century.)

It’s possible to recover information about some now lost traditions outside the core west Munster area, but for Tipperary and Waterford, for example, you need to search. In Offaly and Wexford, etc., it is even more difficult. East Galway traditions about Finnbhar did survive more strongly, though, again, many extraneous elements may enter into survival, like the fact that Irish language folklore collection happened in the early 20th century there. On the other hand, it is a tall hill not far from water (Loch Corrib), and this was a strongly traditional area.

Very little information survived in areas where Irish was lost, by the way: linguistic change was not just linguistic but a signifier of profound social change and not in the direction of strengthened old tradition.

Traditions about Áine (east Limerick, Loch Gur), Aoibheall (east Clare), Donn (west Clare, central Limerick), Gearóid Iarla (east Clare) and Clíona (north and west Cork) are well-documented, but since Aindrias Mac Cruitín’s poem given here last week mentioned Donn, that’s what I will talk about.

It does not hurt that Kate Miller-Lisowski published the results of her research in the mid 1940s in Béaloideas #21.

She was interested in establishing an outline of beliefs about an old God, Donn, and therefore in my opinion, tried to fit disparate material into a consistent picture in ways maybe not profitable. 19th and 20th century folktales and belief, ancient manuscript traditions, manuscript tales etc. all served different social functions and often therefore emphasized different aspects of tradition, Stories and traditions were sometimes even “captured” by unrelated streams of tradition, developing thereafter in directions that have little to do with Donn.

What do I mean?

A story featuring Donn might contain elements that also exist in other specific story traditions, so that a Donn story or anecdote might switch onto another track and to another separate tradition through a narrator's confusion. This confusion might replace older tradition depending on circumstances. Fir example, a particular storyteller lives a long time and is heard by many people, or a narrator has a strong personality or is an important person etc etc, and other traditions gradually face into the background and new traditions take their place: traditions not originally associated with Donn at all.

In west Munster and in old llterary and historical tradition, Donn was associated with a small island off south Kerry where all the dead were thought to go...or at least that’s what some sources say. Tales focusing on this Donn are fairly different from those in west Clare and Limerick tradition.

In those places, Donn was thought of as the local “fairy king” dwelling in the hill and ruling certain aspects of land and life. For example, in one story of a man who unintentionally goes into the hill, the man sees dead relatives there. In another, a man out at night meets Donn riding the road. In another, people establishing potato fields up on the sides of Donn's hill (Knocjfeerina) are directed not to do that. Women in the area left presents every year for Donn, not because they were women, necessarily, but because women were considered custodians of human settlement and life. In another tale, Donn and his people play a hurley match across country against the fairies of Áine (east Limerick) for good crops.

All these traditions are consistent with Aindrias’s attitude and his plea to be taken into the Otherworld hill.

There are very similar traditions about the other kings and queens I mentioned above and I could go on a lot longer, but there is a lot to do today.

Máire O’Neill’s book The Festival of Lughnasa does provide a lot of information about local traditions similar to the ones I’ve mentioned here, but from all over Ireland. They do all relate to the old harvest festival and stories connected to it: stories originally linked to beliefs about the old god Lugh, but then transferred to St. Patrick etc. These same concerns were behind a lot of the types of traditions discussed above and I don't know of any other one place where such things are gathered. She did her research in a good time (1930s and 1940s) when older people remembered such things at least vaguely, but it is a great and unusual (and out of print) book and a model of scholarship.

She was daughter of Eoin MacNeill, by the way,

And by the way, I fixed the problems with the www.crannfis.com site, and there is a lot of new material un the book, music and website reviews, and it's being added to daily. An Irish language text and learning section will be added soon,

Bog Irish

Most recent Irish historiography has taken the loss of the Irish language in large areas of Ireland during the 19th century too much for granted, and has failed to examine the circumstances of this loss and its implications for our understanding of modern Irish society. One gets the impression, in reading many contemporary general works on Irish history, that most Irishmen and women somehow simply woke up on some unspecified morning between the Flight of the Earls in 1609 and the onset of the 18th century and decided to speak English instead of Irish--except, of course, for the Aran Islanders – and the death of the Irish language is commonly treated in the historiography as a minor and not very relevant occurrence, with few important implications for the development of Irish society, as though it were a mere change of wardrobe. The Great Famine is one of the few real landmarks in this vague landscape, in that it killed off the remnant Irish-speaking hordes in the West. Writings on pre-famine society should thus consequently include a perfunctory discussion of the existence of the Irish language, but such a discussion is no longer relevant in works dealing with post-famine society.

These standard views often associate Irish in post-17th-century Ireland specifically with the west of Ireland and with the fecund, sweaty, picturesque masses toiling there in a primitive Celtic half-light in an ignorance born of simple isolation from the modern world. English and modernity together, these views assume, flowed westwards from the areas closest to Dublin and the Irish Sea, but hadn't yet reached the distant western bogs, when the famine gave those remote Gaelic realm their death blow. Language use, whether English or Irish, was thus a simple function of distance from England or from Dublin, and Irish survived simply as one aspect of a stagnant, unchanging, primitive society, like a slug under a rock in the middle of a bog destined to wither when exposed to light.

The truth is rather different. Much of the older generation in flat and fertile north county Meath, 30 miles from Dublin, was still Irish-speaking in 1890. Many older people in northeastern county Louth, 45 miles from Dublin, were still Irish-speaking in the early 20th century. At the same time, very remote areas like southwestern Mayo, and even Clare island in Mayo, were already English-speaking in the mid-19th century. Irish did not disappear in some mysterious overnight vague fashion, nor was its 19th-century existence associated simply with distance from the Irish Channel. It did not survive due to simple isolation or poverty. The process of language loss is very closely related to the profound changes that occurred Irish society in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and an understanding of this process has much to add to our understanding of the genesis of contemporary Irish society.

(To be continued)

Proverbs

Roinnt sean-fhocail ó Shráid na Cathrach, Co an Chláir. Foilsíodh in Irisleabhar na Gaidhilge, Seám Ó Briain ó’n mbaile sin a chnuasaigh circa 1910. Táid coitianta go maith, ach ní raibh, b’fhéidir, an tráth sin.

Some proverbs from Miltown Malbay, Clare. They were published in the Gaelic League Journal and Seán I’Brian from Miltown Malbay collected them around 1900. They’re common ones, but maybe they weren’t that common at that point.

(Spelling as in the original)

Is fear greim de choinín ná dhá ghreim de chat.

(Better a one hand grip on a rabbit than two hands on a cat.)

Nuair is gainne den bhia, sé is cirte a roinnt.

O)When the food is scarcest, it’s then it’s most proper to share.

Galar na náire at tart ach bhain an tochras an bárr cfe.

(Thirst is a shameless disease/need, but the need to scratch an itch beats it.)

Eist le fuaim na habhann agus geobhaidh tú breac

(Listen to the sound of the river and you’ll catch a trout.)

Ag lord go mhadra agus gan fhios a dhátth agat.

)Searching (everywhere) for your dog and you don’t know what color he is.)

Ní hionnan dul go dtí an baile mór agus teacht as.

(It’s one thing to go to the city: it’s another to get out of it.)

As an obair a gheibhtear an fhoghluim.

)One learns from doing the work.)

Up the Hill and Down the Other Side

To Dháibhí Ó hIarlaithe (mid-18^th century)

Muinntear Uí hIarlaithe were, if I remember correctly, hereditary airchinnigh of the church of St Gobnait in Ballyvourney, west of Macroom, Co Cork, and so were not only responsible for maintaining the shrine and church etc., but were expected to provide hospitality in general. (Line 7 of the poem refers to this aspect of their role.)

Aircheannach was a traditional role in Ireland, originally ecclesiastic, but over the centuries it became laicized and hereditary, The families were still associated with learning and poetry even in later years, though lay learning rather than ecclesiastical. A well-known example was Tadhg Ó Rodaigh in central Leitrim, and he was a very important link in that area in carrying on and transmitting the old learning,

Ballyvourney.Ballingeary etc. was in 1700 an out-of-the-way place and it wasn’t until about 1718 that it got a powerful English landlord determined to make as much money as possible from the place. The old system was dismantled and the Uí hIarlaithe lost their land.

Dáibhí mac Phádraig, the subject of this poem, fled the area and married Doireann Ní Dhonnchú of the family of the lords of Gleann Fleisce, an even more remote place just over the border in Kerrty.

This poem tranmslated here laments that things have really gone to hell in Ballyvourney and the poet (Séamas Ó Muimhneacháin) wishes Dáibhí mac Pádraig was still around and things were back the way they used to be.

A little bit of Gleann Fleisce

Ursa den Iarl’fhuil riamh do’b acmhainne bang,

Ba churanta triall i ngliadhaibh cath faobhair-lann,

Nár cuireadfh i ndiaidh a riain gur neartaigh dlí Gall,

Lenar clipeadh gach triath i gcian tar fairrigí fann.

Is é chruinnigh am liach so i’m chliabh, dá leamaimis labhairt,

Gan duine den triabh in bhur ndiaidh ag seasamh tís teann,

In ionad na mbiatach bhfiala bhfairsing bhí i bhfabhar,

Conairt dá riar, is fiach ag gasraibh Gall.

Tuilleadh le’r liath mo chiabh, tú thaistil faoin nGleann,

Le’r hitheadh na triatha I’d dhiaidh do’b aithnid díbh ann,

Más miste leat iad dá gciapadh in anaithibh namhad,

Lig cumas do bhriathran I’m thriall go dtagair faoin mball.

Séamas Ó Muimneacháin (flourished around 1770).

Extremely literal and awkward translation

“Oh, “supporting beam” of lordly blood whose words were capable.

(also pun om “Iarlaith”)

Who was hero-like in struggle in sharp-edged battle,

Who was not forced back/out of his track until the foreign law became strong,

With which every lord was harassed far over the seas, weak.

What gathered sorrow into my breast, if I may speak,

Is that there’s no one of your kin after to stand hospitality for those in hardship,

In the place of the very generous hospitallers who were in favor.

Now dogs are being reared, and the English do hunt.

Another reason my hair has greyed, that you have fled to the Gleann,

As a result of which the strong you knew here are now eaten (to the bone).

If you care that they are harassed in terror of the foreigners,

Set free your skilled words for me, until you come back to the place.

Well, that sounds really stupid. It is a very literal translation, but it’s more than that: it is the difference between languages and different traditions.

In Irish, it is very effective poem though. The cadence not only swings hard, but the language is concise and effective, and there is a satisfaction in the skill with which syntax is used to make music and meaning.

It is amhrán. and for the sound pattern in the first verse, I get ú, ia, ia, a, a, Remember that only accented syllables count.

I translate from Cois an Ghaorthaigh, edited by Diarmaid Ó Muirithe for An Clóchomar in 1987. It’s a collection of 18^th and 19 century poetry from the Ballyvourney area, a place that was overrun with poets of many families. The last of Muinntear Uí hIarlaithe was probably Pádraig Ó Crualaoi (1864 – 1949), a tailer in Macroom, one of whose grandparents (great-grandparents?) married a woman of that family.

He composed lots of poetry himself and carried in his head lots and lots more that had been passed down to him. Most of it was of poets from the area, so the book provides a portrait of the literary tradition in one small area. (Very little of this poetry was ever written into manuscript, so that’s not where he got it. A lot of the poems in Cois an Ghairthaidh was obtained from oral tradition from other people besides Pádraig.) Some of Pádraig’s own lore was written down in 1942 and ater published in a big book (Seanchas Phádraig í Chrualaoi) by Comhairle Bhéaloideas Éireann in 1982.l

Sometimes modern people assume that if it wasn’t for writing and computers etc, everything that happened in the past would have soon been forgotten, but that was not at all true in traditional societies.

Pádraig, for example, knew details of the lives of people (relatives, admittedly) who lived around 1700, and he knew the works of poets who flourished 150 years before he was born, and stories about them. People in the area still remembered in the 1940s the exact location where people dropped and died during the Famine. People in Ballinskelligs, which was also still Irish-speaking in the 1940s, knew details of the battle that happened in the early 17^th century when an English warship unexpectedly appeared there.

People remembered.

Place names helped, of course, and in many parts of Ireland, a walk to the top of the hill was a walk through local history as recorded in very local place names. That rock is where Seán encountered the púca; that hillock is where Máire (my great-grandmother’s cousin) used to sit: over there was very good for rushes: Ó Súilleabháin Beara passed in the valley there long ago.

Fewer and fewer people walk to the top of the hill today, of course, and the local place names and thus the history and links between place and people are falling away into darkness, as is so much else, including Dáibhí Mac Pádraig, this poem etc. etc.

Irritated, Sometimes Hysterical Englishmen

Quite a few Englishmen wrote long, passionate descriptions of Ireland in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. There was Spenser the poet, of course, and world-traveler Fynes Moryson: Stanyhurst of Dubli: the Catholic priest William Good: Barnaby Rich: Harrington: Bodley:Dunton and so on.

Descriptions of Ireland…a reader would expect to learn a good bit about Ireland from them, or at least about the writer. Information about Irish society would be very useful because no Irishman or woman wrote a description of their own society or any aspects of it. Irish literature is helpful, of course, but limited.

The descriptions and essays in fact tell us probably more about English society than Irish society because most of the writers were absolutely horrified by the Irish and their ways. What was it in contemporary English society and the English psyche produced that reaction?

To begin why were they even in Ireland?

Well, the Queen was supposedly Queen of Ireland as well as of England and Wales, though most of the Irish did not recognize her or her government as having any authority there. That had been the situation for many generations, though. Irish unwillingness to recognize their authority tended to upset English officials when the fact was brought to their attention, mostly they were not looking west at all.

A lot happened in English society in the early 16th century, though, and the end result was (as I wrote somewhere else) an extremely manic, aggressive and efficient expanding economy and state. Ireland’s bad luck was that it was right there and not only was it not a competitor like France or Spain, it was easy pickings.

English society in the late 16th century was characterized by, for the first time in its history:

A landowning class, many of them newly ascended to that position and beholden to the government for their wealth. Wealth was now gained through business, law and government position.

Very few great lords were in any position to challenge the Crown or had any interest in doing so.

A new Church whose property was at the disposal of the government and whose clergy were willing to act as agents of the state.

A social structure based on an absolute right to property precluding all other previous hereditary rights of access or claims on resources of land.

For ordinary people, individual and family survival was dependent on adherence to practices that certified one was a good and remunerative farm tenant.

Every man has a master/superior responsible for his good behavior.

There was a network of officials resident throughout the country charged with enforcing the law. They were backed by force. Many of them were also the local landlords.

English was sole official language,

Most of the men who wrote about Ireland were not there on holiday. They were government officials, soldiers or entrepreneurs there because they wanted the Irish to do what they were supposed to do: or there were there to get rich on the wild frontier.

The same things tended to horrify them, and they can be summed up under a few headings.

Ireland was: disorganized: messy: confusing: different: they didn’t speak English and didn’t want to: they liked butter, milk, oatmeal, plants and spiced whiskey (actually the whiskey was about the only thing the writers were enthusiastic about because herbs and spices made it soothing and pleasant.): they didn’t live the way we do, the way they should too.

It’s normal to think that people whose land or service or resources you want are stupid, primitive and are wasting the land and its resources and that it’s simply a natural law that people who will use the land more efficiently and productively should push them aside. The intensity of the English reaction to the Irish partly arises from that, but was mainly the reaction of a newly anal society to a society that was still pretty relaxed. I won’t go into the specifics of practices that induced horror, disgust and disapproval here. Some of them tell us something about the Irish, some tell us about the English writers, and others just tell us about a repetoire of stock European travelers’ tales meant to disgust.

If you are interested, I will point you toward the sources.

Many of these writings have been printed in various journals, but the only place I know of where some of them are collected in in:

1) Quinn, David Beers, The Elizabethans and The Irish, Folger Shakespeare Library. Cornell University Press, (about 1965)

2) Myers, James (editor), Elizabethan Ireland: A Selection of Writings by Writers on Ireland Archon Books, 1983

Quin was a Shakespeare scholar and didn’t know much about Ireland. He tries to compare what the writers said and put it in context but doesn’t supply texts. He has a chapter comparing contemporary English writers on Native Americans.

Myers has a limited selection but prints the texts.

Some of the writers summarized the Irish character, and I will finish with that. Some of what they describe is still accurate about the Irish, but a lot of it is not

William Good: “And to speak in general of them all, the nation is strong of body, and passing (fairly) nimble, stout and haughty in heart: for wit, quick: martial, prodigal and careless of their lives: enduring travail, cold and hunger: given to fleshly lust: kind and courteous to strangers: constant in love: in enmity implacable: light of belief (i.e. they are gullible), greedy of glory, impatient of abuse and injury, and as (Gerald of Wales) said in old times, in all affections vehement and passionate. If they be bad, you shall nowhere meet with worse: if they be good, you can hardly find better.”

Stanyhurst: “The people are thus inclined: religious, frank, amorous, ireful, sufferable of infinite pains, very (vain)glorious; many sorcerers, excellent horsemen, delighted with wars, great almsgivers, passing in hospitality. The lewder (i.e. common) sort both clerks and laymen, are sensual and overloose in living. The same, being virtuously bred up or reformed, are such mirrors of holiness and austerity that other nations retain but a shadow of devotion in comparison to them…Greedy of praise they be and fearful of dishonor.”

The Irish society that resulted from the success of the English project was very different from what preceded it, and the Irish people that society produced are very different. The Gaelic Revival of the 1890s etc. was very consciously a project to reclaim a lot of the old stuff and to reconnect with what was before. For a while, it looked like it might succeed, but by 1920, it was clear that they would not.

It is a shame.

Cats and Carpenters

The Irish country poet Riobard Bheldon (1836-1914) included a poem in a New Year’s card he sent to a woman he’d been fond of when he was young. He wrote two love songs to her before she went off to America with her family. This is not one of them, though: it’s only a silly poem about a cat.

Or is it?

(The card happened to have a picture of a cat on the front and Bheldon pretends he is sending her the cat.)

“Bail ó Dhia ort, séan is rath,

‘s nár bhaine spíach leat ar an mbliain seo ag teacht,

Bí I’d thost go foill is cluthaig lem ais

Go neosad sceol duit gan chlaon gan chleas.

Is cian mo chuaird ag trial that lar

Ón gComarach suairc na sruthán geal.

Cónaíonn cois sléibhe ann fear bocht ait,

Is cuma cé hé, is é luaigh liom teacht.

Dúirt sé liom go rabhais gan cat,

Luchaig is francaigh allta o’d chreach,

Ag struailleadh gach ball, gach am gan stad

Is poll sa trunc taobh thal dem nglas.

Ní tóin le gríosach mé ná spreas,

Ach seibineach groí den síolrach ceart,

Is gear mo ghaol leis an tsean-chat glas

Bhí i gCom Machan na gcraobh le’d mhuintir seal,

Muirnín ghleoite do phléadh a cheart

Ag sciobadh gach spóla bhíodh méith nó maith.

Fuair mé om thógaint leamhnacht ba,

Is bannie bhí soil ón ngaibhairín breac.

Má gheibhim siúd uaitse, cóir is ceart,

Togha gach só mat sport dom chb,

Níl luch ná francach thiar nó theas

Gheobhaidh an ball, ná díolfadh as:

Is gear mo shúil is táim lúfar pras:

S’é an t-ádh a sheol chugat mé, a Bhrín deas.

Here is a translation, but don’t read it until you’ve read the explication below, please.

Blessing of God on you, good luck and prosperity,

No misfortune come on you in the new year to come.

Quiet just a minute now and come here close

‘til I tell something: it’s no lie or deceit.

Far I’ve traveled here to you, over the sea,

From Comeragh Mountains where streams shine silver.

There lives a man, a poor and eccentric man.

It doesn’t matter who, but he’s the one told me to come.

He said to me that you are without any cat,

And the mice and rats are plundering you

Ripping and tearing clothes all of the time constantly

And a hole in the trunk there beside the lock.

I’m no sit-by-the-fire cat, no, nor some useless thing,

But a valiant bruiser of the good old stock,

closely related too to the old gray cat

your people had a while in leafy Com Machan,

a handsome sweetheart who’d make his needs known,

run off with every piece of meat that’s solid and good.

I had, when I was raised, fresh milk of the cow

And the delicious milk from the little gray goat.

If I get the same from you, all my rightful dues,

The choice of every good thing to put in my mouth,

There’s no mouse or rat, neither west or south,

Who’ll come into the place who won’t pay for it.

My eyes are sharp and I’m agile and fast,

And it’s good luck brought me to you, fair Brídín.

Yeah, that sounds pretty stupid or at least totally forgettable.

In translation, it is. In Irish, it’s not.

Translation really only works when the words themselves and the ideas or images they express are simple, clear and obvious, and do not depend at all on context or echoes of other elements of the original literature. My translation was done in five minutes and does not communicate the depths of the original. For that you need to know Irish well.

I know that sounds pompous and “special”. I will try to explain.

There are books that come at you with trumpets and drums sounding. Sometimes those kinds of book are actually good or great, even though the writing clearly knows it’s good and wants to be sure the reader knows too.

There are books that approach quietly and go about their business as quietly and unobtrusively as a carpenter who never looks busy, but then the job is done and done really well: done beautifully, in fact.

There are books that, at first glance, look like the literary equivalent of mass mailing advertising circulars that you glance at, then dump in the recycling.

“Riobard Bheldon: Amhráin agus Dánta” (edited by Pádraig Ó Macháin, The Poddle Press, 1995) at first glance makes you wonder why it even exists. I mean, an 158-page edition of the work of a minor Irish language country poet (1835-1914) from an obscure place in probably the worst period of Irish poetry?

It is a great book, though, if you’re interested in Irish stuff.

The easiest virtue to pinpoint is the physical book itself. It’s a solid, graceful, slim hardback with a wonderfully printed cover, a contemporary painting of the County Waterford place the poet was from. The book is well laid out. It has contemporary photographs of the people who feature in it. There are useful appendices. It is printed on good paper. It is pleasant to hold and look at.

It is written in good, solid, graceful Irish. Yes, very nice, but that’s maybe just one step above paper quality in the list of irrelevant stuff. Books are good because of what they say or how they say it, not because the grammar is right or something. Right?

Here’s where we get into things that are harder to enunciate, at least for me.

Every language, like every person, has its own nature, or better, its own voice, its own “tune”. (I’m not saying, by the way, that it is intrinsic to a language or person. I was almost going to say that Irish is lyrical, vehement and eloquent, but then I remembered the equally characteristic precise, clear and sometimes quietly ironic tune, so I can’t characterize the language that way at all. I will come back to the question of the tune of the Irish language though.

A lot of contemporary English-language writing is mainly derived from other writing, it seems to me, and not from life, the world etc. I don’t mean that the writers should go out and get jobs as cowboys or policemen or prostitutes or something, and have Experiences.

I mean that a lot of our experience in contemporary life rises out of an interaction with words on a screen rather than with people or bugs or sky or whatever, and this shows in the writing

There is this thinness: a lack of a sense of specificity, of the solid reality of all the stuff outside us, and of the beautiful, heartbreaking fragility of it all.

So there’s a tendency for the words to either just pile up or to plod along grayly, and the tune ultimately derives from the office memo or police report. Other times, the writing is carefully calculated for maximum effect, based on latest public relations and publishing industry research. That “tune” ultimately derives from advertising.

Sometimes a literary tradition or, like in Ireland, a whole social discourse, is deeply infused with a perception of the beauty, fragility and consequent necessary solidarity of life, that it facilitates awareness of this in people who make songs and stories in that language. These people don’ t necessarily have to come to some grand perception of beauty etc. themselves: the tools available to them in their tradition often incorporate this perception, so a new poem or song will communicate it “naturally”.

It may communicates such a perception even when that perception is not the supposed subject of the work.

One way it does that is through a certain type of music: a music that pleases and awakens the attention: a clear-eyed, precise and realistic music desperately alive to and in love with this passing world and all its creatures and colors and textures.

Another way it does it is by echoing previous works or even just by alluding to them, even if only in words used, expressions and sound patters that call up listeners and readers’ memory of these works and of the understanding behind them.

Men and women making poetry in the 19th century and earlier grew up in a milieu that prized this old way of understanding life. They had tools available to them with which to express themselves. They learned easily how to be good carpenters

If you hear amhráin poetry and song growing up, your own words may naturally fall into those patterns, and if you grow up immersed in poetry and stories that assume and express a way of perceiving the world, you too will absorb that perception. It will seem normal and natural.

Robert Weldon’s poetry should be pretty pedestrian. It’s written to or for or about people and events around where he lived, and then – after he was “discovered” -- to or for or about people and events in the Gaelic Revival of the time.

He was discovered when he composed on the spot and then recited a poem at a local open air Gaelic League meeting, and then in the years after, Patrick O’Carmody (a Clareman living nearby), Pádraig Ó Dálaigh from Dungarvan and and the prior of nearby Mount Melleray monastery encouraged him and wrote down his poems and songs. If he had not recited that poem at the meeting, he would very likely be unknown today.

But his apparently pedestrian work is not pedestrian, and the Irish ,very human music in the poems says a lot more than you might think.

A poem welcoming a minor public figure he has met to the area once again, for example, communicates affection, human solidarity, the dignity of the individual, and awareness of precariousness of life, but these are not enunciated overtly. They are there in the music of meter and in tone and wording. These were not things Riobard invented, but they were there at hand when he needed to express deep emotion.

The cat poem is a deeply delt and emotional poem in which he tells the woman he remembers their past together in the mountains, and though life didn’t work out so that they could marry as he hoped and he’s no longer young, he remembers…

Tradition exists or existed for the reason that it can provide us solid means of talking about the real things without having to invent it all ourselves each time. Of course, a dead tradition can also stifle, and a tradition that has lost touch with real things can poison perception and expression, but the Irish language is not one of those.

Okay, now you can go back and read the translation.

What I said above is, yes, very vague and abstract, so here are some specifics:

The poem is amhráin so it is structured around repeating accented vowel patterns.

For example, the vowels that mater in the first line are “a” in bail, “I” in Dia, “é” in séan, and “a” in rath.

Second line: “a” in Bhaine, “I” in spiach, “i” (“ee”) in bliain (“ian” is pronounced “ee” and “a” in teacht.

The pattern changes in detail in line 5 (“Is cian”): in line 11 (“ag struailleadh): 13 (“Ní tóin”)_ and 15 )”Is gear”) and then in 21, and 23 (“Níl luch”) and (Is gear).

Each of these marks also slight intentional shift in music and feeling that in many cases corresponds to a change in focus and implied emotional charge in the words.

The tone overall is familiar, conversational and fond (fond toward the cat, but by implication also to Bríd), and this comes out in cadence, in the register of language and so on.

A small example, and then I have to finish chores” “Tóin le gríosach” is literally, “bum/butt in the (fireplace) ashes , and not only is that a clear image of something in the world rather than just saying “I’m not lazy” but it’s a semi-proverbial expression for somebody who is lazy or a homebody, and thus calls up probably memories of Riobard and Bríd’s life long before in a then more traditional local society. The cadence of the changing vowel pattern there also suggests energy and intention.

Another example is the “muirnín ghleoite” lines where the formal, restrained description of what sounds like a very pushy cat not only is funny in its contrast between language and remembered reality, but again probably calls up memories of a former time (together).

And now I have to feed the goats.

Married/Unmarried

(Note: This essay was written before the last two, but then not posted until now.)

Cia re bhfuil Eiri ac anmhuin?

Mó is righin dá rioghdhamhnaibh,

Críoch na n-iaith linnet leabhar,

Gan triath innti d’áitiughadh.

(For whom is Ireland waiting?

Potential kings are slow in appearing,

The country of wide territories of warm lakes,

Though no lord now inhabits her.)

(Translated from Duanaire Mhéig Uidhitr: The Poembook of Cú Chonnacht Mág Uidhir, Lord of Fermanagh 1566 – 1589, edited from the Copenhagen manuscript by David Greene, Dublin Institute for advanced Studies, 1972)

Bardic poetry is not for everyone. It’s not just that the language is often compressed and difficult, but the subject matter is usually praise of some now long dead Irish king or lord. I mean, who cares? He was probably just some brutal strongman.

Probably he was sometimes, yeah, but maybe not.

The public presentation of a new bardic poem at the court of the lord for whom it was composed was not a literary or public relations event and the poet was not some bookish guy hoping to get on the good side of the powerful. It was a public ceremony enunciating and affirming truths central to the society, and one of them was the symbolic “marriage” of the human realm and nature/the non-human world, as represented in the person of the ruler.

Not that the ruler was believed to have achieved some mystical understanding or status. There were historical periods when he may very well have plotted and murdered to ascend to his position, but the understanding was that, by filling the position of king/lord, a man accepted the fact that he had to maintain justice and proper action in all matters because if he did not, natural and social harmony would be broken. Evidence that he was maintaining the proper way was good weather, good crops of nuts etc. in the forests, fish in the streams and social peace. Evidence that he was not living up to the ideal were bad crops, bad weather, bad acorn and berry crops and general bad luck foe everybody

There are several old stories that illustrate what happened when a ruler did something to satisfy his own desires, even though it went against the proper way of things. Conchobhar Mac Nessa took young and beautiful Deirdre for himself: Conaire Mór allowed close kin to do violence against the people. What happened as a result? Dark forces of chaos and violence erupt and destroy the king and his court. See the story of Deirdre or Togail Bruidne Dá Derga

So the presentation of a bardic poem was one way that the social descendants of the ancient druids, acting as spokesmen for the proper way of things, affirmed that a particular ruler was following the right path and was a good king etc. It was a precise, important ceremony and though there were no priests and no mention of God, it could almost be called a religious one. If it was a religious ceremony, though, it involved difficult work on the highwire too, as it were, because the requirements of the poetic meter were very strict and required careful training.

Here is description of how traditional bardic students went about learning poetry:

"....the place should be in a solitary recess of a garden or within a sept or inclosure far out of the reach of any noise....The structure was a snug, low hut , and beds in it at convenient distances, each within a small apartment without much furniture of any kind, save only a table, some seats, and a conveniency for clothes to hang upon. No windows to let in the day, nor any lights used at all but that of candles and these brought at a proper season only. The students upon thorough examination being first divided into classes. The professors....gave a subject suitable to the capacity of each class, determining the number of rhimes, and clearing what was to be chiefly observed therein as to syllables, quartrains, concord, correspondence, terminations and union, each of which were restrained by peculiar rules. The said subject having been given over night, they worked it apart each by himself upon his own bed, the whole next day in the dark, till at a certain hour in the night, lights being brought in, they committed it to writing. Being afterwards dressed and come together in a large room where the masters waited, each scholar gave in his performance, which being corrected or approved of, either the same or fresh subjects were given against the next day....It was six or seven years before a mastery or the last degree was conferred, which you'll the less admire upon considering the great difficulty of the art, the many kinds of their poems, the the exactness and nicety to be observed in each...."

(This is from the Memoirs of the Marquis of Clanricarde, published in 1722, said to be the work of Thomas O'Sullivan, an Irish scholar from Tipperary who was active in London in the 1720s researching manuscripts in order to write a history of Ireland. Good source books on “bardic” metrics are Eleanor Knott's Irish Syllabic Poetry, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1974; and Duainearacht: Rialacha Meadarachta Fhiliocht na mBard by Cait Ni Dhomhnaill, Oifig an tSoláthair, Dublin 1975.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about at all.

Bardic poetry can be difficult, but the poets did also compose poetry about other things. Mostly it was never written down because there was no one concerned about preserving it. Sometimes, pretty much by accident of history, it was written down and it survived, and this is where the whole corpus of the Dánta Grá, the great love poetry of the late Medieval period comes from.

Then in the late 16th century the world collapsed and Irish men and women watched as hordes of violent, greedy bastards with guns and cannon and big horses grabbed everything and killed anybody who got in the way. It didn’t matter that an Irish ruler observed the way of things: the flood engufhed everyone, It sure looked like all that old stuff was just total crap. It looked like God had abandoned the Irish too.

Pretty soon, there were almost no Irish lords and the Englishmen who took their land did not care about ceremonies or bardic poetry or letting the old learned families stick around unless they could pay the new rent. “This land was always yours, you say? Don’t make me laugh. Land is a commodity and it’s mine now. Beat it.”

So knowldge of the old system of learning, including bardic poetry, gradually and sometimes instantaneously died out. Mostly it took a generation, though, asnd there were still some people who had been educated in the old system left and they composed poetry in the old way or something like it: poetry about what was happening. Great poetry.

Aodhgán O Rathaille, Seathrúin Ceitinn, Páidrigín Haicéad, Muiris Mac Dáibhi Dubh, O Bruadair, Séamas Dall Mac Cuarta, Piarais Feiritéar and the rest took the careful attention, gravitas and exquisite musical sensibilty of the bards and used them to go up against death and darkness, and I will talk about them next week.

A thonn-sa thíos is airde géim go hard,

Meabhair mi chinn cloite ó’d bhéiceach tá:

Cabhair dá dtíodh arís ar Eirinn bhán,

Do ghlam nach binn, do dhingfinn féin i’d bhráid.

You, wave down there that cries out so loudly,

My mind is overwhelmed by your yelling:

If help came to fair Ireland once more,

I’d shove your harsh howling back down your throat.

Mist and Pigs

I mentioned last week that an Irish/Scots Gaelic king or lord had serious obligations to his people and was expected to be absolutely just and therefore to maintain the harmony of the human with the natural and supernatural worlds.

Power and glory are always a temptation, though, and particularly in periods when the structure of existence seemed shaky (the Norse invasions and aftermath that – like in England – destroyed some kingdoms and thus encouraged the expansion of others: then the rebound from the Anglo-Norman invasions), some men decided to just go for it, to hell with tradition.

Most of the time, though, the structures of daily life and of society made it easier to do the right thing. And, of course, some poet might always appear to tell you that you were screwing up. It wasn’t just the poet: behind him was the whole power of the forces of nature and “supernature”, and his satire would not only make people snicker at you, but it would also symbolically withdraw the mandate of heaven, and all kinds of bad things would happen to you and your people.

It’s easier to be good when “good” is normal and expected.

The Tudor and Stuart dynasty English who conquered and colonized Ireland in the late 16th and 17th centuries didn’t care about any of that. Their society assumed you could be a rapacious bastard all your life, and as long as you were of the right religion and paid dues to the authorities, you’d be fine. You could always repent on your death bed, but it sure looked like might made right: the guys who killed and plundered got very rich.

Anyway, Ireland was there for Englishman to get rich. The people were barbarians and followed the wrong religion and didn’t matter, so you could do things there you couldn’t get away with in England, then go home one day and enjoy life. Or you could grab lands and live like a lord in Ireland while the Teigs did all the work.

The Irish didn’t see it that way.

They saw big armies with cannon and big horses. They saw men who did not observe the rules and thought it was fine to destroy crops and starve people, slaughter prisoners and women and children, lie, go back on an oath, swindle, assassinate…that kind of thing. They saw those guys win again and again and take your lands. No harm done, though: if you were harmless and inoffensive and lucky, they would allow you to use some land at a high rent.

The Irish saw the end of the world.

The same thing has happened often in other times and places, and no one knows, but the Irish could write,
Aogán O Raithile from east of Killarney was rediscovered in the Irish Revival of the 1890s etc. and he is worth rediscovering. He was born about 1670 and, except for an O Dálaigh family that stayed pretty quiet in the backcountry nearby, the bardic schools were gone, so he did not possess the kind of learning that slightly earlier poets like O Bruadair, O Donncha an Ghleanna, etc. did. This makes him more accessible to us, in a way, because he speaks plainly, not in a traditional idiom.

He was more or less a refugee for most of his life, taking shelter wherever he could find a surviving Irish noble family that still had land. (Mostly they were Mac Carthaigh or de Brún of the old lords of his area.) His poems are those of a man pushed to the edge and dealing with ruin and evil, and they do not mince words.

There was hope, to begin, that the Stuart kings would return to England and right what had been done in Ireland, and his vision poems see the Otherworld Queens returning to the land with good tidings:

Maidean sul smaoin Titan a chosa do luaill
Ar mhullach cnoic aoird aoibhinn do lodamar suas,
Tarraster linn scaoth bhruinneasll soilbhir suairc-
Gasra bhí i Sídh Seanaibh solas-bhrugh thuaidh.

Fearastar scím driaíochta nár doracha snua
Ó Ghaillimh na líog-gheal go Corcaigh na gcuan;
Barra gach crainn síor-chuireas toradh agus cnuas,
Meas daire ar gach coill, fír-mhil ar clochaibh go buan…

Oner morning before the Sun even thought to stir his feet,
To the summit of a fine high hill I climbed (literally “we”).
There came to me a band of joyous happy maidens:
A band from the resplendent (Fairy) palace north there, Shee (Shanid?).

A druid cloud spread over all, of no dark appearance,
From Galway of shining stones to Cork with its bays:
The top of every tree put forth fruit and nuts,
A crop of acorns in each oak wood, true honey on every stone,,,

But by was clear by 1729 that darkness was not to lift.

From a lament for a last Irish lord:

Cabhair ní ghairfead go gcuirthear mé i gcruinn-chomhraiinn,
Dar an leabhar, dá ngairfinn, níor ghaire-de an ní dhomh-sa:
Ár gceodhnasch uile, glac-chumasdach shíl Eoghainn,
Is tóllta a chuisle ‘gus d’imigh a bhrí ar feochaidh…

Mo ghlam is minic, is sílimse síordheora,
Is trom mo thubaist ‘s is duine mé ar míchothrom,
Fonn ní thigeann im ghaire ‘s mé ag caoi ar bhóithre
Ach foghar na Muice nach gontar le saigheadóireacht.

Stadfadsa feasta – is gar dom éag gan mhoill
Ó treascaradh dragain Leamhain, Léin is Laoi:
Rachasd ‘na bhfasc le searc na laoch do chill,
Na flatha fá raibh mu shean roimh éag do Chríost.

I will not cry out for help until I’m put in a narrow coffin,
And by the Book, though I called, it would be no nearer to me.
Our whole support, a skilled hand of the seed of Eoghain,
His veins holed now, and all his might decaying.

It’s often I cry out in pain and tears come always,
Heavy disaster I carry always, a man on uncertain ground,
No music I hear anywhere near as I go down the road lamenting
But only the squeal of the Pig that is not slain by arrows (i.e. death)

I will stop now and forever, for death draws soon near
Since the dragons of (river) Laune, Killarney and Lee are thrown down.
I will go to them in the graveyard, with love for those heroes:
The lords under whom my own ancestors served (as poets) since before Christ died.

Coxie

Aoghán O Raithile expressed his rage at the invaders openly in the poem translated here last week, and his despair.

Another poet, either Aodh Buidhe Mac Cruitín of Clare or Cormac O Luinín of Fermanagh or maybe someone else, took a different road.

A Courtly Poem For Sir R. Cox (O Luinín) was published in Eigse (vol iv, p.284-6), followed in a later issue by the article Sgiathluithreach an Choxaigh by Briain O Cuív (A shield-prayer for Cox). O Cuív pointed out that the poem was not the fawning, adulatory exercise that O’Sullivan described, but instead an slightly-camouflaged series of insults. it’s actually hard to see how O’Sullivan missed that fact, but that he seems to have been a contrary and argumentative person.

Cox (1650 – 1730) himself was a prominent English landlord, soldier and administrator who as Lord Administrator in 1703 passed “the most penal of the penal laws” and wrote a book, Hibernica Anglicana, telling how the brave, clean-living English defeated hordes of savage barbarian Irish and took control of the place in the interests of good administration. He imprisoned Mac Cruitín in Dublin for daring to publish a book in English dissenting from that view.

Do you get the impression he didn’t like the Irish?

He also had power, and anybody who wanted to criticize him could not do it openly.

The poem in question survives in two manuscripts as far as I know: one by historian of noble Irish family)_ Charles O’Connor (Roscommon), and an earlier one by Mac Cruitín now at Maynooth. The text is very similar in both.

The poem starts out more or less normally enough:

A Risteard mhuirnidh na gcreach,
Go maire tú fá oineach:
Nár théidh tú go hifrionn na gceall,
‘s go raibh tú beo again tamull.

A little clumsy in Irish, and, come to think of it, poems of praise don’t usually start by hoping the subject will not go to Hell. The next three quatrains continue to talk about Cox not ending up going to Hell. Yes, a bit odd, but Cox, hearing a translation of them, might just think, “Well, those Irish aren’t much as writers either…”

The poem gets weirder:

May you never be felled in an alehouse brawl
by a four-sided cudgel wielded by a wanderer.
May no unsteady tree ever fall on you:
May your enemies never destroy your coach.

May you never sit on the white mare
A big sore ready to burst on your buttocks.
If ever it happens you have to go out,
May Christ protect you from the diarrhea.

May you never have to box a big burly soldier
And you with an anguished scab on your neck.
May your britches never fall down in battle
And you without button or button-hole to keep them up
when panicked hasty retreat is called.

May you never have a big open sore on your shoulder
From having to carry heavy bundles each and every day.
May you never be observed sweeping the streets,
Oh miserable excuse for a mother’s son.

May you and a hag with a hat, on a winter’s day
Never have to stand all day long at the market cross
Crook mouthed from ear to ear
Shivering while you bawl out ballads for sale.

May you never be a penniless wanderer
Traveling all Ireland, cursed and unlucky forever.
With no food, wit hno clothes, with no possessions,
Begging hopelessly forever for pennies to live.

May no Church minister ever discover you out in the field
Just as you finish screwing your mother.
May you never have to stand before the congregation,
A sinner’s white sheet all around you.

May you never have to fight for your life
And you on the back of a cursed misshapen horse,
Without saddle, without reins, without spurs,
Tortured and bothered with the rain and snow in your face.

while the wind blasts out of the north
Always into your face, never ceasing even for a second,
And you having a tall English hat perched on your head,
Gripping it with desperate fingers lest it fly away.

And then your horse stops all of a sudden, no warning,
Right in the middle of the river ford,
And you in a panic kicking her ribs with your heels
But it’s no good: you have to jump off right there.

It goes on like that for five more verses, four of which are insulting, th last of which could be interpreted as something like praise if you weren’t reading carefully.

The poet never says anything like “You’re a vicious tyrant.” He never criticizes Cox at all, and if called out, he could say (like Good Soldier Schweik) “What? I was just saying I hoped bad things don’t happen to you? What did I do wrong?”
Whoever heard the poem in Irish , though, would always think of Cox in these degrading situations and

might not fear him quite as much. Even if they did, they might smile behind their hands when they saw him ride by.

James Scott wrote a big book Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, Yale, 1985) about his fieldwork in a Malaysian village where he focused on the strategies poor peasants used to deal with big farmers and landlords when any open disagreement or opposition is not tolerated. His point was that silence and apparent agreement do not always imply consent, and poor obsequious peasants are often smarter and more determined than their betters think.

Praise poems are not always about praise, especially when the big people with power know that you are just an Irish fool trying to ingratiate himself with you

Mongan

"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 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.