Stones of Aran (13 page)
Authors: Tim Robinson
The comparatively humdrum Fir Bolg were no match for this dazzling throng, who travelled through the air in dark clouds to Ireland, darkened the sun for three days and nights, and
demanded
“battle or the kingship.” In the ensuing battle of Mag Tuired, the plain of towers, a hundred thousand of the Fir Bolg were slain. There was a second battle of Mag Tuired twenty-seven years later in which the Tuatha Dé Danann defeated the
Fomorians
, and a rather vague passage of
Lebor
Gabála
suggests that the Fir Bolg led the Fomorians on this occasion. The battle site was anciently identified as Moytirra in Sligo, but a later tradition transferred the site of the first battle to near Cong in Mayo; there are impressive groups of cairns and stone circles on both sites which have been fancifully explained in terms of these battles.
Whether or not the Fir Bolg were concerned in both battles, the result was that the remnants of them took refuge overseas in
islands
that have been identified as Rathlin, the Scottish Arran and Islay, and elsewhere among the Picts. By the time of their return from this second exile the situation had changed again, the Tuatha Dé Danann had been defeated by the Goidel, and there was a king, Cairbre, ruling at Tara in Meath. The Fir Bolg, led now by Aonghas son of Umor, petitioned him for territories around Tara that included many important sanctuaries, and in return Cairbre demanded their service in the building of his great fort, each side accepting four sureties or guarantors for the compliance of the other. But Cairbre soon imposed intolerable taxes on the Fir Bolg, who left his territory for that of Queen Medb and her consort Ailill in Connacht:
They struck westward, along the bright sea,
To Dún Aonghasa in Ãra,
and the verse version of
Lebor
Gabála
(a mnemonic doggerel which was perhaps the form in which it had been orally
transmitted
) goes on to specify where the various leaders of the Fir Bolg
established
themselves, principally on the south and east of Galway Bay. For instance Irgus took “Cend Boirne,” which is Black Head at the mouth of the bay, Bera took a point of land probably to be identified with Finavarra near Ballyvaughan, Taman took Tawin Island at the head of the bay, and Aonghas's son Conall settled in the territory of Aidne on the south of the bay. In the Aran Isles, apart from Aonghas at his Dún, there was Concraide in Inis Meáin, where the fort, Dún Chonchúir, is attributed to him, while Mil (not to be confused with the Goidel of that name) took a place called Murbech or Murbheoch, which is rather tentatively
identified
with Cill Mhuirbhigh by some commentators. However:
From the day that Cairbre heard of it,
his temper mounted high;
he sent forth a summons, wherever they should be
to his four sureties â¦
Bring to me, said just Cairbre,
the nomad multitudes of the Sons of Umor:
or let each man of you bring his head
as I pledged you for a season.
Now Cairbre's sureties included no less a hero than Cú Chulainn, and Aonghas took council with his friends before
deciding
to send his three brothers and his own son Conall in single combat against the four champions. Conall fell before Cú Chulainn himself, and is buried (with his father) under Carn Chonaill in his territory of Aidne; the other three were vanquished too, and lie under “The Hillock of the Heads,” somewhere in Mayo near Clew Bay. The prose version of
Lebor
Gabála
concludes
this episode with a brief note on the uncreative nature of the reign of the Fir Bolg, and the unimportant communities they bequeathed to history:
No forts or entrenchments are reckoned as having been dug, nor lakes to have burst forth, nor plains to have been cleared, in the reign of the Fir Bolg. Of their seed are the three communities who are in Ireland not of Goidelic stock: to wit the Gabraide of the Sue in Connachta, the UÃ Thairsig, and the Cailleoin in Laigen. Those are the
adventures
of the Fir Bolg.
For centuries this extraordinary group of texts has been read in search of light on questions ranging from the age of Dún Aonghasa and the racial constitution of the Aran Islanders, to the origins of the Irish, the prehistory of the Celts in general, the
nature
of their religion, and the mythic dimensions of the human psyche. In the last century attention focused on questions nearer the beginnings of this spectrum: the apparently historical content of the
Lebor
Gabála
was paramount, the knots and contradictions in its detailed genealogies and chronologies were to be resolved by careful scholarship, while the legendary stuff was patronized as the childish fantasies of mediaeval fabulists. More recently it has been the latter end of the spectrum that caught the eye; the
half-suppressed
otherworldly content of the book is seen as more
important
and in a sense truer than the fictitious lists of ancestors, in which it is the repetitions and inconsistencies that may be decoded for evidence of the structures of the underlying myths. When I tried to pursue the old-fashioned question of the age of Dún Aonghasa through the successive readings that have been made of
Lebor
Gabála,
I found myself on a wild paper-chase through not only the mythic dimensions of the human mind but some of its lesser dimensions too. Here are some of the landmarks I noticed; any one of them could conceal some subjective tunnel into the Dún, but objectively they lead nowhere.
The earliest description of Dún Aonghasa is that of Roderic O’Flaherty in his
West
or
H-Iar
Connaught
, written in 1682:
On the south side (of the island) stands Dun-Engus, a large fortified place, on the brim of a high clifft, a hundred
fathoms
deep; being a great wall of bare stones without any mortar, in compass as big as a large castle bawn, with
sever-all
long stones on the outside, erected sloapewise about it against assaults. It is named of Engus McHuathmore, of the reliques of the Belgmen in Ireland, there living about the birth-time of Christ.
O’Flaherty assumed the identity of the Fir Bolg with the Belgae, a confederation of Celtic tribes whose continental history is fairly well known as they were Julius Caesar’s fiercest opponents and he recorded much about them in his
Gallic
Wars
. They inhabited the
north-east of Gaul (and gave their name to the country of
Belgium
), but claimed to have originated farther east, beyond the Rhine. Shortly before Caesar’s time they had made settlements in the south-east of Britain; the famous Caractacus was a Belgic chieftain who was dispossessed by the Romans and led resistance to them from the fastnesses of Wales. It seems possible that Belgie tribes contributed to immigration into Ireland under Roman
pressure
, but nothing is recorded on the question.
O’Flaherty’s identification of the Belgae with the legendary Fir Bolg was generally accepted by the great nineteenth-century Irish Celticists, for whom Dún Aonghasa was “the last standingplace of the Firbolg aborigines of Ireland, ready to fight their last battle, or take a fearful and eternal departure from the rocks they had
contested
foot by foot.” The words are those of William Wilde,
spoken
within the Dún itself to the scholars of Ireland assembled in banquetry, and to the islanders looking on from its terraced
ramparts
. The occasion is worth reliving here, for on that day in 1857 the ancient fort must have brimmed with the fervours of the age. In that year the British Association held its meeting in Dublin, and Dr. Wilde, as Secretary of Foreign Correspondence to the Royal Irish Academy, had proposed, organized and conducted an excursion of the Associations Ethnological Section to the Aran Islands. A steam yacht chartered in Galway had carried seventy eminent excursionists to Cill Éinne, and from there, by way of various Christian and Pagan sites, the party had tramped the rocks to Dun Aonghasa. In the words of the official reporters of the
proceedings
, Martin Haverty:
This was our culminating point of interest—the chief end and object of our pilgrimage…. This was the Acropolis of Aran—the Palace-fortress of the days of Queen Maeve,—the venerable ruin which Dr. Petrie … described as “the most magnificent barbaric monument now extant in Europe.” We can here only describe its dimensions, its remote
antiquity
, its site on the beetling brow of the precipice, its walls,
now reduced to little more than crumbling piles of loose stone; but the indescribable feelings of sadness, of awe, and enthusiasm, which the place inspired, cannot be conveyed to the reader by any words of ours.
Haverty goes on to tell of the unpacking of the hampers, the
enjoyment
of an abundant dinner washed down with some excellent sherry, the warmth of the sun, the gentle murmurs of the Atlantic far below, the ocean breeze that fanned the august assembly. Then the Reverend Dr. MacDonnell, Provost of Trinity College,
Dublin
, was voted into the chair (a table-like rock near the cliff edge), and the speeches began. Dr. George Petrie proposed the toast to old Mr. O’Flaherty of Cill Mhuirbhigh who had been his host thirty-five years earlier when Petrie was engaged in the first serious study of Aran’s monuments, then largely unknown to the outside world. Next Dr. Wilde recapitulated the progress of the present excursion and paid tribute to various members of the party: Dr. Petrie, “the pioneer of philosophic antiquarian research in Ireland”; Dr. O’Donovan, whose letters written in the course of his work for the Ordnance Survey of 1839 were the source of Wilde’s own opinions on Dún Aonghasa and remained for half a century to come the best accounts of Ireland’s ancient monuments; his
colleague
in the Ordnance Survey, Eugene O’Curry, “the chief brehon and lexicographer of Ireland—the true, the genuine Irishman, to whom the people, the history and the language of his country are the breath of life”; Samuel Ferguson, “who, to his valuable
contributions
to the science of the antiquary, has so happily blended the popular fascination of the poet,” and Frederick William Burton, “whose pencil has so accurately portrayed the living generation of the island.”
Then Wilde, after sounding the Firbolgic trumpet-note with which I introduced him, concluded by appealing to the islanders to refrain from pulling the Dún apart “for the paltry advantage of catching a few rabbits”—for it seems that it had suffered dreadful delapidations in the years since Petrie’s first visit (a period which
included the Great Hunger, when catching a rabbit was by no means a paltry advantage). Wilde’s peroration insists on the ethnic continuity of Aran:
Remember, above all, that these were the works of your own kindred, long, long dead…. You have a right to be proud of them; they are grand monuments of the brave men your forefathers were, and of how they laboured and how they fought to defend the land they left to you and your
children
. Do you defend them in peace as they defended them in war, and let your children’s children see strangers coming to honour them, as we have done today.
After nearly a score of other speeches including one from the French consul, in French, inviting the party to visit his own land, and one from Professor O’Curry in Irish, reiterating the
anti-rabbiting
plea, a committee was voted into existence to report on the state of Ireland’s monuments to the British Association. Finally, reports Haverty, “a musician, with bagpipes, played some merry tunes, and the banquet of Dún Aengus terminated with an Irish jig, in which the French Consul joined
con
amore
.”
So, for a few summer hours in 1857, the mind of Ireland
assembled
and disported itself in this great stone skull lying abandoned on the clifftops of Aran. But the glowing certainties it was
celebrating
—that the old invasion-myths were basically true, that the Fir Bolg were Celts and the Araners their descendants, that the rest of Ireland was similarly or even more loftily descended from heroes whose names and deeds are preserved to us—were to fade with the waning of the century and the rise of a more sceptical scholarship. In 1902 the Clare archaeologist T.J. Westropp, who had devoted much of his life to an extraordinarily fresh-eyed
examination
of many hundreds of the ancient forts (or “cahers” as he calls them, from the Irish word
cathair
), and whose outlook was not limited to Ireland, wrote:
The Firbolgic origin of the cahers has been impressed upon Irish archaeology by the great names of Petrie and O’
Donovan
, supported by Lord Dunraven and Miss Stokes,
popularised
by many writers and accepted by a large body of antiquaries without any thought of the vast impossibility
involved
in the legend and its hopelessly weak foundation. Even if the legend of the sons of Huamore be not a sun myth as Professor Rhys suggests, even if it rested on some earlier and better authority than (it should appear) a poem of the tenth century, still, the story in that poem is alone enough to undermine the popular belief; and it is surprising that any of the above antiquaries should have been carried away by so wild a theory. We are called upon to believe that several hundred, if not a couple of thousand of stone forts were built by a handful of fugitives who were able to live in nine raths in Meath, and were exterminated or scattered in a year or two after settling in Galway, Mayo and Clare. The prose version only names Dún Aonghus; the poem in
addition
tells how Ennach built a fort in Clare in the
neighbourhood
of Dael; and one manuscript adds “thus they dwelt in fortresses.” On this tiny base rests the vast inverted pyramid of theory which attributes the cahers of Kerry and Cork to a tribe never even stated to have settled in those counties, and the innumerable cahers of Clare, Galway, Mayo, Sligo and other districts, to this short-lived little band. After this utter impossibility, the question of the historic value of the legend sinks into unimportance.
Here Westropp himself seems to be taking
Lebor
Gabála
needlessly
literally, if only to dismiss its testimony. However, the Fir Bolg still held their interest for students of the Irish past, and as the antiquaries of the old regime gave way to the specialized
archaeologists
and philologists of the new, the old tales were
subjected
to more ruthless and varied interpretations than ever
before. The mutually contradictory views held either successively or even simultaneously by the Celticist John Rhys about the turn of the century, for example, defy summary. As a minor
consequence
of these far-reaching controversies the presumed date of Dún Aonghasa shot back and forth like a shuttle through the
centuries
. The tone of the debate was immoderate in proportion to its abstruseness, each protagonist dismissing his opponent’s case unargued and with heavy sarcasms, which leave the reader
unedified
. R. A. S. Macalister, the editor and translator of
Le
bor
Gabála,
has this to say in his introduction (of 1941) to the section dealing with the long-suffering Fir Bolg:
We may discard all “Belgic” and similar theories without discussion. We need not waste time over the “bags of earth” about which our historians tell us. Kuno Meyer’s explanation is by far the most reasonable, that
Fir
Bolg
=
Fir
i
mBolgaib
=
bracati
or breeches-wearers. Thus interpreted it becomes a term of contempt for the “lower orders,” applied, by those who wore the dignified flowing costumes which the sculpture of the “High Crosses” depicts for us, to those who found it more convenient, in the life of activity in which their lot was cast, to have each leg separately clothed. This however is only a secondary application of the story. It is really no history, but a member of the same mythological complex as the rest.
Nevertheless Macalister believed the
Lebor
Gabála
to derive from folk traditions of genuine events, and in particular that the “takings” of Partholon, Nemed and the Fir Bolg reflected a Pictish (and therefore in his view, non-Celtic and even non-I
ndo-European
) invasion of Ireland in the Early Bronze Age. It was the Picts, then, who built these fortresses, “silent but eloquent
witnesses
to the terror inspired by the Sword-Men” (i.e. the Goidel), and who “made their last despairing stand” on the Aran Isles. On this theory the date of Dún Aonghasa flew back at least as far as 1000
BC
.
“Macalister’s appropriation of Meyers ghostly breeches,” along with every other modern theory, was dismissed with cackles of
derision
by the philologist T. E O’Rahilly in his book of 1946,
Early Irish History and Mythology
. For him the old identification of the Fir Bolg with the Belgae was correct, and “as there is no reason to question the accuracy of the tradition that attributes their erection to the defeated Fir Bolg, it is permissible to conjecture that these remarkable fortresses were constructed probably in the second century
BC
.” As to the meaning of the name, O’Rahilly presents a fascinating theory, the basis of which is quite beyond lay
judgement
, but which certainly restores the lustre of cosmic origins to the rather earthy image the “men of bags” had acquired.
Fir
Bolg,
it appears, is a mere periphrasis of an earlier name for them,
Builg,
which is not just the plural of the word
bolg
, bag, but like many names of Celtic tribes a pluralized form of the name of a deity.
O’Rahilly produces independent evidence that there was
indeed
a Celtic god Bolg, and argues that that name would derive from a hypothetical Celtic word
bolgos
, having the same
Indo-European
root as the Latin
fulgur
and the German
Blitzen
, and like those words meaning “lightning.” This also explains the name of Cú Chulainn’s ultimate weapon, the
gai
bolga
, often mentioned in legends about this Celtic hero; it is the spear of the
lightning-god
, the thunderbolt. Another hero, Fergus Mac Roich, had a similar weapon, a sword called Caladbolg, which on this
interpretation
would mean “crushing-lightning”; through Welsh legend and Latinization of its name this lightning-sword ended up in the hands of another Celtic hero, King Arthur, as Excalibur. The name of Aonghas occurs repeatedly in the otherworldly pedigrees of the Fir Bolg, and it is only going half a word beyond O’Rahilly himself to claim that our Aonghas is of the illustrious company of heroes who wield the lightning, sign of their former status as gods of thunder.