It must next be considered what amount of reliance can be placed upon the Irish annals and annalists, who have preserved to us our early history. If, in those few cases where we happen to have some credible external evidences of early events, we find our native annalists notoriously at variance with such evidences, our faith in them must of necessity be shaken. If, on the other hand, we find them to coincide fairly well with these other accounts taken from foreign sources, we shall be inclined to place all the more reliance on their accuracy when they record events upon which no such sidelights can be thrown.
Now, from the nature of the case, it is exceedingly difficult, considering how isolated Ireland was while evolving her own civilisation, and considering how little in early ages her internal affairs clashed with those of Europe, to find any specific events of which we have early external evidence. We can, for instance, apart from our own annals and poems, procure no corroborative evidence of the division of Ireland between Conn and Owen, of the destruction of Emania by the Three Collas, or of the battle of Gabhra. But despite the silence upon Irish affairs of ancient foreign writers, we have luckily another class of proof of the highest possible value, brought to light by the discoveries[Pg 39] of modern science, and powerfully strengthening the credibility of our annals. This is nothing less than the record of natural phenomena. If we find, on calculating backwards, as modern science has enabled us to do, that such events as the appearance of comets or the occurrence of eclipses are recorded to the day and hour by the annalists, we can know with something like certainty that these phenomena were recorded at the time of their appearance by writers who observed them, whose writings must have been actually consulted and seen by those later annalists, whose books we now possess. Nobody could think of saying of natural phenomena thus accurately recorded, as they might of mere historical narratives, that they were handed down by tradition only, and reduced to writing for the first time many centuries later. Now it so happens that the Annals of Ulster, annals which treat of Ireland and Irish history from about the year 444, but of which the written copy dates only from the fifteenth century, contain from the year 496 to 884, as many as 18 records of eclipses and comets which agree exactly even to the day and hour with the calculations of modern astronomers. How impossible it is to keep such records unless written memoranda are made of them by eye-witnesses, is shown by the fact that Bede, born himself in 675, in recording the great solar eclipse which took place only eleven years before his own birth is yet two days astray in his date; while, on the other hand, the Ulster annals give not only the correct day but the correct hour—thus showing that Cathal Maguire, their compiler, had access either to the original or to a copy of the original account of an eye-witness.[1]
Again, we occasionally find the early records of the two great[Pg 40] branches of the Celtic race, the Gaelic and the Cymric, throwing a mutual light upon each other. There exists, for instance, an ancient Irish saga, of which several versions have come down to us, a saga well known in Irish literature under the title of the Expulsion of the Dési,[2] which, according to Zimmer—than whom there can be no better authority—was, judging from its linguistic forms, committed to writing in the eighth century. The Dési were a tribe settled in Bregia, in Meath, and the Annals[3] tell us that the great Cormac mac Art defeated them in seven battles, forcing them to emigrate and seek new homes. This composition describes their wanderings in detail. Some of the tribe we are told migrated to Munster, whilst another portion crossed the Irish Sea and settled down in that part of South Wales called Dyfed, under the leadership of one Eochaidh [Yohy], thence called "from-over-sea." There Eochaidh with his sons and grand-children lived and died, and propagated themselves to the time of the writer, who states that they were then—at the time he wrote—ruled over by one Teudor mac Regin, king of Dyfed, who was then alive, and whose pedigree is traced in fourteen generations up to the father of that Eochaidh who had led them over in Cormac mac Art's time. Taking a generation as 33 years, and starting with the year 270, about the time of the expulsion of the Dési, we find that Teudor Mac Regin should have reigned about the year 730, and the Irish saga must have been written at this time, which agrees with Zimmer's reckoning, although his computation is based on purely linguistic grounds. That school of interpreters who decry all ancient Irish history as a mixture of mythology and fiction, and who can see in Cormac mac Art only a sun-god, would probably ascribe the expulsion of the Dési and other records of a similar nature to the creative imagination of the later Irish, who, they hold, invented their genealogies as they did their history. But in this case it happens by the merest accident that we have collateral evidence of these[Pg 41] events, for in a Welsh pedigree of Ellen, mother of Owen, son of Howel Dda, preserved in a manuscript of the eleventh century, this same Teudor is mentioned, and his genealogy traced back by the Welsh scribe; the names of eleven of his ancestors, corresponding—except for inconsiderable orthographical differences—with those preserved in the ancient Irish text.
"When we consider," says Dr. Kuno Meyer, "that these Welsh names passed through the hands of who knows how many Irish scribes, one must marvel that they have preserved their forms so well;" and he adds, "in the light of this evidence alone, I have no hesitation in saying that the settlement of an Irish tribe in Dyfed during the latter half of the third century must be considered a well-authenticated fact."[4]
Dr. Reeves cites another remarkable case of undesigned coincidence which strongly testifies to the accuracy of the Irish annalists. In the Antiphonary of Bangor, an ancient service book still preserved on the Continent, we find the names of fifteen abbots of the celebrated monastery of Bangor—at which the heresiarch Pelagius was probably educated—and these fifteen abbots are recorded by the same names and in the same order as in the Annals; "and this undesigned coincidence," says Reeves, "is the more interesting because the testimonies are perfectly independent, the one being afforded by Irish records which never left the kingdom, and the other by a Latin composition which has been a thousand years absent from the country where it was written."
Another incidental proof of the accuracy of early Irish literary records is afforded by the fact that on the few occasions where the Saxon Bede, when making mention of some Scot, i.e., Irishman, gives also the name of his father, this name coincides with that given by the annals.
We may, then, take it, without any credulity on our part,[Pg 42] that Irish history as drawn from native sources may be very well relied upon from about the middle of the fourth century. Beyond that date, going backwards, we have no means at our disposal for checking its accuracy or inaccuracy, no means of determining the truth of such events as the struggle between Conn and Owen, between the Fenian bands and the High-king, between Ulster under Conor and Connacht under Mève, no means of determining the actual existence of Conairé the Great, or of Cuchulain, or of the heroes of the Red Branch, or of Finn mac Cúmhail [Cool] and his son Ossian and his grandson Oscar. Is there any solid ground for treating these things as objective history?
It has been urged that it is unphilosophic of us and was unphilosophic of the annalist Tighearnach to fix the reign of Cimbaeth[5] [Kimb?], who built Emania, the capital of Ulster, some three hundred years before Christ, as a terminus from which we may begin to place some confidence in Irish accounts, seeing that the Annals carry back the list of Irish kings with apparently equal certainty for centuries past him, and back even to the coming of the Milesians, which took place at the lowest computation some six or seven hundred years before. All that can be said in answer to this, is to point out that there must have been hundreds of documents existing at the time when Tighearnach wrote, "the countless hosts of the illuminated books of the men of Erin," as his contemporary Angus called them—records of the past which he was able to examine and consult, but which we are not.[Pg 43] Tighearnach was a professed annalist, "a modern but cautious chronicler,"[6] and for his age a very well-instructed man, and it seems evident that he would not have placed the founding of Emania as a terminus a quo if he had not inferred rightly or wrongly that native accounts could be fairly trusted from that forward. It certainly creates some feeling of confidence to find him pushing aside as uncertain and unproven the arid roll of kings so confidently carried back for hundreds of years before his starting-point. The historic sense was well developed in Tighearnach, and he no doubt discredited these far-reaching claims either because he could not find sufficiently early documentary evidence to corroborate them, or more likely because such accounts as he had access to, began to contradict one another and were unable to stand any scrutiny from this time backwards. With him it was probably largely a question of documents. But this brings us at once to the question, when did the Irish learn the use of letters and begin to write, to which we shall turn our attention in a future chapter.
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[1] Nor is this mere conjecture; it is fully borne out by the annals themselves, which actually give us their sources of information. Thus under the year 439, we read that "Chronicon magnum (i.e., The Senchas Mór) scriptum est"; at 467 and 468, the compiler quotes "Sic in Libro Cuanach inveni"; at 482, "Ut Cuana scripsit"; in 507, "Secundum librum Mochod"; in 628, "Sicut in libro Dubhdaleithe narratur," &c.
[2] "Indarba inna nDési."
[3] See "Four Masters," A.D. 265.
[4] See Kuno Meyer's paper on the "Early Relations between the Gael and Brython," read before the Hon. Society of Cymmrodorion, May 28, 1896.
[5] To start with Cimbaeth as Tighearnach does "is just as uncritical as to take the whole tale of kings from the very beginning," says Dr. Atkinson, in his preface to the Contents of the facsimile Book of Leinster; and he adds, "if the kings who are supposed to have lived about fifteen centuries before Christ are mere figments, which is tolerably certain, there is little more reason for believing in the kings who reigned after Christ prior to the introduction of writing with Christianity (sic) into the island,"—an unconvincing sorites! One hundred and thirty-six pagan and six Christian kings in all reigned at Tara according to the fictions of the Bards.
[6] Dr. Whitley Stokes' "Tripartite Life of St. Patrick," vol. i. p. cxxix. "That Tighearnach had access to some library or libraries furnished with books of every description is manifest from his numerous references; and the correctness of his citations from foreign authors, with whose works we are acquainted may be taken as a surety for the genuineness of his extracts from the writings of our own native authors now lost." For the non-Irish portions of his annals Tighearnach used, as Stokes has shown, St. Jerome's "Interpretatio Chronic? Eusebii Pamphili," the seven books of the history of Paulus Orosius, "The Chronicon, or Account of the Six Ages of the World," in Bede's Works, "The Vulgate," "The Etymologarium," "Libri XX of Isodorus Hispalensis," Josephus' "Antiquities of the Jews," probably in a Latin translation, and perhaps the lost Chronicon of Julius Africanus.