twitch of twitch.cymru

Sometimes cultures have catastrophic memory failures. Memory erasures. Disruptions. Ireland in the sixth century provides us with a good example of this. Something happened. Something huge. We can see it laid bare in the archaeology: a revolution. Fundamental shifts in the way that people lived, farmed, ate, organized themselves. People started to build ringforts and crannogs (settlements in the middle of lakes). Palisaded enclosures. But we don't really know what happened or why.

[...] Our sparse records from that period refer vaguely to 'the first mortality' in 545, 'a great mortality' in 549, a 'pestilence' in 554, and another 'great mortality' in 556. They list battles, the deaths of kings, the foundations of churches. Beneath their laconic testimony the changes on the ground - visible in the archaeology but invisible in the textual record - show the radical transformation of communities.

[...] The social changes of the sixth century are one of the many reasons why it is highly unlikely that many - or any - practices or beliefs from pre-Christian Ireland survived intact into the Christian era.

Elizabeth Boyle, 'Fierce Appetites'

... 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'

claiming that christianity isn't a "real and true" part of irish culture or whatever feels.... wrong. ireland has been largely christian since the 5th century, and so christianity has been a part of the culture for well over a thousand years. i'm not sure how to word it but to me that feels like if something has been part of a culture for that long then it definitely is woven into it and a "proper and real" part of it by this point..?? the idea that pagan beliefs are more "valid" or are like the "more authentic religious beliefs" for irish people (and tbh other celtic peoples) is.. annoying to say the least, since christianity has been a part of every celtic nation for hundreds of years. if i recall correctly, the early irish took so well to christianity that they didn't even have any martyrs??

it's been a while since i did my class on christianity in early irish literature. but the things i've seen some people say today (st patrick's day) about christianity in ireland are annoying to me. i don't think the introduction of christianity was a tool of colonisation in ireland in the same way it was in the americas, which seems to be a comparison that some people have made - either consciously or subconsciously. and even elements of a culture that have arisen due to its colonisation are still real and valid psrts of it anyway, i would argue. and that taking away such elements would only do even more damage. and tbh a lot of people trying to "connect with their true and real cultures from 1000 years ago" can very easily veer into fascist territory. not always, but it is easy for them to get into white supremacist ideas, which are a plague upon this field.

not sure if there are many other celticists on here, or any medieval academics, but feel free to correct my vaguely-remembered information. but as a celtic studies student from wales with family connections to 3 other different celtic nations, a lot of things i see online about christianity and paganism in regards to the celtic nations do irk me somewhat.