Jan 21 2010
The Excellence of Ancient Word: Druid Rhetorics from Ancient Irish Tales by Seán Ó Tuathail Copyright © 1993 John Kellnhauser
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Introduction While the ancient Irish tales abound with warriors and kings (not to forget Queen Medbh!), another figure at almost every turn emerges to out- rank them. Usually referred to as the “druid”, this person upon closer inspection is seen to be not any stereotypical wizard with his potions and paraphernalia, but a poet who, instead of having to memorize rote “secret spells”, produced spontaneous verse often in a deliberately archaic diction. A lengthy essay on the philosophy and practise of Irish druids is beyond the scope of this book, but given the misrepresentation of druids in the popular media, a few summary remarks are in order.
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In the ancient Irish tales Irish druids are frequently depicted in detail. They bare no resemblance at all to the white-robed oak- worshippers of Julius Caesar. Irish druids wore, not white hooded robes, but rainbow capes, often feathered tunics and head-dresses (note, in the kast roscin this collection, how the druids mock the monks’ hooded robes!). The important trees were rowan, yew, and hazel, and mistletoe was not found in ancient Ireland. While they occasionally carried magic wands and stones, in the far great majority of cases druids’ only magic “tool” was their voices. They were, emphatically, not “pagan priests” and most of what we think of as priestly functions fell to the local king or tribal chief. They were sages, advisors, “wizards” – their closest modern equivalents would be scholars sometimes called upon to be government advisors, although in many cases they were unaffiliated with the rulers and conducted what we nowadays would call “private practice”.
But over all else, they were “poets”. The word is placed in quotes because above all other cultures and societies in the history of the world, ancient Ireland accorded poets what can only be termed nearly divine rank. Poets paid no taxes and were exempt from military service. They had a freedom of movement to cross political borders denied even kings, and wherever they traveled they were entitled to the best of available lodging. And woe to anyone who harmed, or even offended a poet! One can do no better than simply cite the story of Cairbre whose satire is included in the present collection: a wandering poet visits Tara in the days when the gods themselves ruled there, and is denied what he considers suitable food and a fine enough bed. The next morning he enters the throne room at Tara (which was, by the way, named not after the king but called “Réalta na bhFile”, “Star of the Poets”!), and recites five spare lines of verse, whereby the King of the Gods himself is toppled from his throne. In a second example, also included here, Ireland herself is conjured up, out of the magic mists, by a “poem”. (The word “rosc”, plural “roscanna”, is a rhetorical, usually magical, chant, and this word will be used throughout this book to distinguish a “poem” that can topple gods or conjure whole nations from the modern less potent variety.)
One of the purposes of the present collection is to make the archaic roscanna more readily available to the modern reader, in both English and Irish. With this in mind, and in contrast to many “scholarly editions”, the orthography has been modernized, within the limits of phonetic accuracy, i.e., “ben” has been rendered as “bean” because the former is simply the older orthography for the latter, and only the latter will be recognizable by the modern Irish reader; however, “túatha” has been left in the older form and not rendered as “tuatha” because the difference between the two forms is not one of spelling, but basically of pronunciation (”too-uh-thuh” versus “tueh-heh”). Without a long thesis on Old Irish phonetics, this will go some way toward making the roscanna readable by persons who know Modern Irish, provided they remember that aspirated medial consonants are pronounced (e.g. “Teamhair” is said as two syllables). In a few cases has out-right modernization been employed (e.g. “cen” is given as “gan”). Such “normalization” of spelling is not, admittedly, by any means standard practice, but no less a respected scholar than Myles Dillon (in his Stories from the Acallam, DIAS 1970) argued for its use. However, much of the archaic grammar has been retained, such as inbed initial object pronouns prefixed to verbs and dative plurals in “-ibh” because in such cases to give the modern rendering would completely destroy the phrasing and scan of the lines. Continue Reading »
Originally posted 2009-07-15 14:28:46. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
