... It's because of deep thinking like this that it irritates me when I see medieval Ireland being portrayed in simplistic terms, as though everyone was sitting around a fire telling stories about gods and heroes; as though the stories which emerged from medieval Ireland are folk tales without authors. These writers thought so carefully about words, and wrote with a consciousness of having meaning layered upon meaning, that to reduce it all to 'mythology' feels like an insult. The tendency to romanticize it seems disrespectful to writers who valued precise engagement with words and what they signify.
The sophisticated grammatical terminology attested in Old Irish shows how writers subjected their own language to the same rigorous analysis as Latin.
Elizabeth Boyle, 'Fierce Appetites'
Cú Chulainn and Fergus, Medb and Derdriu aren't timless continuations of a pre-Christian mythology: they are concious creations fashioned by their authors - Cú Chulainn's character created to be a type of King David and a type of Christ; Medb's character created to exemplify the dangers of permitting a woman to hold power.
The wish to make characters ahistorical, to remove them from their precise contexts and romanticize them as an unbroken link to Ireland's deep past is not only insulting to the authors who produced the sophisticated literature of medieval Ireland but it is also politically probematic as it feeds into a pernicious idea that Ireland didn't have any real history until the English arrived. Once there are Anglo-Normans on the island of Ireland, historians start to take Ireland seriously. Before that, there's just some fuzzy notion of druids and Newgrange and Cú Chulainn and myths and 'Celtic' and everything packaged into a mush of non-history with an Enya soundtrack. But the inhabitants of Ireland - regardless of ethnicity - have always had their own agency, the ability to change, to fight each other, rule over each other, exploit each other, as well as to introduce new technologies, new ideologies, new ways of living.
[...] What the medieval Irish authors who wrote sagas about Cú Chulainn and Emer, Ailill and Medb were doing was writing historical fiction. [...] They wanted to write stories about characters living in a historic and heroic society, characters that could be equals of Moses, David and Solomon on the one hand, and Aeneas, Achilles and Hector on the other [...] They created a storied landscape populated by gods and heroes.
However, these authors couldn't escape their circumstances: the weapons the heroes hold are ninth-century not Iron Age weapons; the legal principles that characters uphold or violate are medieval Christian laws, not Iron Age pagan ones; the healing that Dían Cécht offers is medieval medicine derived from North African sources, not some kind of indigenous lore. [...] And while it can be hard to reconcile genius with anonymity, some of these authors were geniuses; so we should not reduce their work to one big indistinguishable myth, strip away their role, and diminish their achievement just because we do not know their names.
[...] And that literature was written by people who had received their educations in ecclesiastical schools: a bilingual education with the Bible at its heart.
Elizabth Boyle, 'Fierce Appetites'