| 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 piece, but given the misrepresentation of druids in the popular media, a few summary remarks are in order.
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.
Retaining the archaic grammatic forms where they occur also serves the important purpose of high-lighting the heady "mixture" of language in the originals, where, for example, the first person singular of verbs may end in both "-u" and "-im" within the same rosc. Vocabulary is likewise left largely archaic (e.g. "fria" instead of the modern "leis") since these often directly effect the sound-scheme and "poetic diction" of the original (while the distance between forms here is rather greater, no one attempts to put Shakespeare into "modern grammar" and much of his greatest poetry would be destroyed by the attempt). In other cases, there is only the archaic term available (e.g. "féath fiath" or "magic mists which confer invisibility").
One additional major editorial decision has been made. Archaic Irish texts are notorious for interpolations (in keeping with the abundance of puns encountered in the roscanna, one might quip they suffer a great deal of "monkey-ing" and "monk-eye-ing"!). Thus an otherwise perfectly Irish tale will suddenly digress into asides on Alexander the Great, the Siege of Troy, or Biblical events. These are all late additions. In the present book, whose concern is not the manuscripts per se, but the actual roscanna themselves, these corruptions, where obvious, have been edited out in an attempt to restore the respective roscanna to their original forms. In most cases the additions are indeed obvious (sometimes they are even directly in Latin). A good example is the rosc from Forbuis Druim Damhghaire beginning "O God of druids...". This rosc was uttered by a pagan wizard several centuries before Saint Patrick was born yet suddenly bursts into "O Patrick, your blood... victory of the apostles". Even allowing for "otherworldly time" and a good deal of magical precognition, it is too much to credit that a druid would have called upon an as of yet unborn Christian saint in one of his magic incantations.
The overly pedantic too easily forget, there is no "true" text (not without a time machine), only the re-copying of a re-copying of the setting down (in a usually idiomatic spelling in an alphabet system not really suitable), often in abbreviated form, of an oral recitation itself the re-telling of a re-telling. In addition, and of even greater importance is the fact that the roscanna delight in complicated puns, and this itself makes any attempt to establish a single transcription not only impossible but inherently antagonistic to what is intended.
For example, in rosc in Forbuis Druim Damghaire we find the "text" gives "dris agarbh imtenn". This might be reconstructed as "dris a garbh imtéinn" ("it is a rough thornbush I have gone round", perhaps referring to some magic ritual), or "dris a garbh im' thein" ("a rough thorn bush in my fire", a magic fire figuring in the narrative), or "dris a garbh agaibh im' teann" ("a thornbush they have in my strength"). In the same rosc, one finds text "draic thairpech" where the "p" is probably a miscopy for "b", giving either "draic thairbeach" (bullish dragon) or "draic tháir beach" (dragon of an insult like bees), both of which fit the context. Similarly in another rosc in the same story, the text gives "leic ar gcul in caemmacamh" which could be either "leic ar a gcúl a chaem-mhacamh" ("stones on their backs made smooth" meaning that there are no recently carved ogham stones, i.e. no warriors have been defeated for a long time), or "leic, ár gcul an caemh-macamh" ("stones", this word appending to the preceding "harsh hills", then "a slaughter of chariots is the beauty of youth") where the "an" with an "n" provides the pun. The differences between lentated and non-lentated consonants ("c" versus "ch", etc.) and between long and short vowels is not, per se, preclusive of such puns. A similar situation can be seen in English where it is quite acceptable, for the sake of "poetic diction", to sing the word "again", usually pronounced "a-ghin", as "a-gayn" when one wishes to rhyme it with a word like "rain". In many cases such alternation is not even needed: one rosc ends with text "ir im a toctad" which can be either "irim a thochtadh" (I bestow its silence) or "iri mo thochtadh" (you bestow my silence). Given the general tendency in Irish pronunciation to attach a final consonant in one word to a initial vowel of a following word, and to drop the vowel in "mo" when it follows prepositions such as "le" or "i", these two utterances could even be pronounced the same!
It should be stressed that the roscanna themselves were certainly originally intended to be obscure, full of puns, and often were set in deliberately "pseudo-archaic" forms intermixed with more modern idioms. They were, after all, not public proclamations but "magic", spells and prophecy, and like all such were conceived to draw mystic power from having multiple meanings and "ancient obscure diction". (If the English reads as artificially "stilted", the English reader should feel reassured that the Irish also reads that way!).
This multi-faceted aspect of the language of roscanna has the same insistence on ambiguity which one finds in ancient Irish art wherein a given figure is not merely a spiral or a face or an animal or a leaf, but is all of them at once in an exquisite gestalt.
Any attempt to find a single "true" version may be admirable by modern scientific standards but such an approach is irreconcilably alien to the minds which originally produced the roscanna, and to the culture which they describe. For an equivalent modern example of the literary "mind-set" of the druidic roscanna, one need look no further than the greatest (and most "non-grammatical" masterpiece of Anglo-Irish literature - "Finnigans Wake", whose title itself only seems to lack an apostrophe if one ignores the all important point that this lack is intentional and calls our attention to the fact that the "funeral ritual of Finnigan" is itself a pun (turning on a wayward "s") on "Fionn Again Wakes".
Most of the roscanna included in the present work have never been translated before. The present author is first a poet, and second a scholar (a distinction that the ancient Irish might not have accepted) and the texts have been studied and the poems translated with this in mind (e.g. "damh" has been translated by some scholars as "ox" but it also means "stag" - as the modern poet Michael Hartnett has so translated it. When one encounters a druid riding in a chariot pulled by "damha", these are hardly oxen but must be shamanic stags; when the word is found modified by the adjectives "fierce, divinely mad" etc, such a beast amy be an ox to the lexicographer, but between the two, to the poet could be only ever a stag. The roscanna are poetry before they are grammar and vocabulary, and must correctly be approached as such.
. Order your special Timepiece here |
