The Coming of Cuculain
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Standish O\'Grady >> The Coming of Cuculain
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THE COMING OF CUCULAIN
BY
STANDISH O'GRADY
Author of
"THE TRIUMPH AND PASSING OF CUCULAIN"
"IN THE GATES OF THE NORTH"
"THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE"
ETC.
PREFACE
There are three great cycles of Gaelic literature. The first
treats of the gods; the second of the Red Branch Knights of Ulster
and their contemporaries; the third is the so-called Ossianic. Of
the Ossianic, Finn is the chief character; of the Red Branch
cycle, Cuculain, the hero of our tale.
Cuculain and his friends are historical characters, seen as it
were through mists of love and wonder, whom men could not forget,
but for centuries continued to celebrate in countless songs and
stories. They were not literary phantoms, but actual existences;
imaginary and fictitious characters, mere creatures of idle fancy,
do not live and flourish so in the world's memory. And as to the
gigantic stature and superhuman prowess and achievements of those
antique heroes, it must not be forgotten that all art magnifies,
as if in obedience to some strong law; and so, even in our own
times, Grattan, where he stands in artistic bronze, is twice as
great as the real Grattan thundering in the Senate. I will
therefore ask the reader, remembering the large manner of the
antique literature from which our tale is drawn, to forget for a
while that there is such a thing as scientific history, to give
his imagination a holiday, and follow with kindly interest the
singular story of the boyhood of Cuculain, "battle-prop of the
valour and torch of the chivalry of the Ultonians."
I have endeavoured so to tell the story as to give a general idea
of the cycle, and of primitive heroic Irish life as reflected in
that literature, laying the cycle, so far as accessible, under
contribution to furnish forth the tale. Within a short compass I
would bring before swift modern readers the more striking aspects
of a literature so vast and archaic as to repel all but students.
STANDISH O'GRADY
A TRIBUTE BY A. E.
In this age we read so much that we lay too great a burden on the
imagination. It is unable to create images which are the spiritual
equivalent of the words on the printed page, and reading becomes
for too many an occupation of the eye rather than of the mind. How
rarely--out of the multitude of volumes a man reads in his
lifetime--can he remember where or when he read any particular
book, or with any vividness recall the mood it evoked in him. When
I close my eyes, and brood in memory over the books which most
profoundly affected me, I find none excited my imagination more
than Standish O'Grady's epical narrative of Cuculain. Whitman said
of his Leaves of Grass, "Camerado, this is no book: who touches
this touches a man" and O'Grady might have boasted of his Bardic
History of Ireland, written with his whole being, that there was
more than a man in it, there was the soul of a people, its noblest
and most exalted life symbolised in the story of one heroic
character.
With reference to Ireland, I was at the time I read like many
others who were bereaved of the history of their race. I was as a
man who, through some accident, had lost memory of his past, who
could recall no more than a few months of new life, and could not
say to what songs his cradle had been rocked, what mother had
nursed him, who were the playmates of childhood or by what woods
and streams he had wandered. When I read O'Grady I was as such a
man who suddenly feels ancient memories rushing at him, and knows
he was born in a royal house, that he had mixed with the mighty of
heaven and earth and had the very noblest for his companions. It
was the memory of race which rose up within me as I read, and I
felt exalted as one who learns he is among the children of kings.
That is what O'Grady did for me and for others who were my
contemporaries, and I welcome these reprints of his tales in the
hope that he will go on magically recreating for generations yet
unborn the ancestral life of their race in Ireland. For many
centuries the youth of Ireland as it grew up was made aware of the
life of bygone ages, and there were always some who remade
themselves in the heroic mould before they passed on. The
sentiment engendered by the Gaelic literature was an arcane
presence, though unconscious of itself, in those who for the past
hundred years had learned another speech. In O'Grady's writings
the submerged river of national culture rose up again, a shining
torrent, and I realised as I bathed in that stream, that the
greatest spiritual evil one nation could inflict on another was to
cut off from it the story of the national soul. For not all music
can be played upon any instrument, and human nature for most of us
is like a harp on which can be rendered the music written for the
harp but not that written for the violin. The harp strings quiver
for the harp-player alone, and he who can utter his passion
through the violin is silent before an unfamiliar instrument. That
is why the Irish have rarely been deeply stirred by English
literature though it is one of the great literatures of the world.
Our history was different and the evolutionary product was a
peculiarity of character, and the strings of our being vibrate
most in ecstasy when the music evokes ancestral moods or embodies
emotions akin to these. I am not going to argue the comparative
worth of the Gaelic and English tradition. All I can say is that
the traditions of our own country move us more than the traditions
of any other. Even if there was not essential greatness in them we
would love them for the same reasons which bring back so many
exiles to revisit the haunts of childhood. But there was essential
greatness in that neglected bardic literature which O'Grady was
the first to reveal in a noble manner. He had the spirit of an
ancient epic poet. He is a comrade of Homer, his birth delayed in
time perhaps that he might renew for a sophisticated people the
elemental simplicity and hardihood men had when the world was
young and manhood was prized more than any of its parts, more than
thought or beauty or feeling. He has created for us or
rediscovered one figure which looms in the imagination as a high
comrade of Hector, Achilles, Ulysses, Rama or Yudisthira, as great
in spirit as any. Who could extol enough his Cuculain, that
incarnation of Gaelic chivalry, the fire and gentleness, the
beauty and heroic ardour or the imaginative splendour of the
episodes in his retelling of the ancient story. There are writers
who bewitch us by a magical use of words, whose lines glitter like
jewels, whose effects are gained by an elaborate art and who deal
with the subtlest emotions. Others again are simple as an Egyptian
image and yet are more impressive and you remember them less for
the sentence than for a grandiose effect. They are not so much
concerned with the art of words as with the creation of great
images informed with magnificence of spirit. They are not lesser
artists but greater, for there is a greater art in the
simplification of form in the statue of Memnon than there is in
the intricate detail of a bronze by Benvenuto Cellini. Standish
O'Grady had in his best moments that epic wholeness and
simplicity, and the figure of Cuculain amid his companions of the
Red Branch which he discovered and refashioned for us is I think
the greatest spiritual gift any Irishman for centuries has given
to Ireland.
I know it will be said that this is a scientific age, the world is
so full of necessitous life that it is waste of time for young
Ireland to brood upon tales of legendary heroes, who fought with
enchanters, who harnessed wild fairy horses to magic chariots and
who talked with the ancient gods, and that it would be much better
for youth to be scientific and practical. Do not believe it, dear
Irish boy, dear Irish girl. I know as well as any the economic
needs of our people. They must not be overlooked, but keep still
in your hearts some desires which might enter Paradise. Keep in
your souls some images of magnificence so that hereafter the halls
of heaven and the divine folk may not seem altogether alien to the
spirit. These legends have passed the test of generations for
century after century, and they were treasured and passed on to
those who followed, and that was because there was something in
them akin to the immortal spirit. Humanity cannot carry with it
through time the memory of all its deeds and imaginations, and it
burdens itself only in a new era with what was highest among the
imaginations of the ancestors. What is essentially noble is never
out of date. The figures carved by Phidias for the Parthenon still
shine by the side of the greatest modern sculpture. There has been
no evolution of the human form to a greater beauty than the
ancient Greeks saw and the forms they carved are not strange to
us, and if this is true of the outward form it is true of the
indwelling spirit. What is essentially noble is contemporary with
all that is splendid to-day, and, until the mass of men are equal
in spirit, the great figures of the past will affect us less as
memories than as prophecies of the Golden Age to which youth is
ever hurrying in its heart.
O'Grady in his stories of the Red Branch rescued from the past
what was contemporary to the best in us to-day, and he was equal
in his gifts as a writer to the greatest of his bardic
predecessors in Ireland. His sentences are charged with a heroic
energy, and, when he is telling a great tale, their rise and fall
are like the flashing and falling of the bright sword of some
great champion in battle, or the onset and withdrawal of Atlantic
surges. He can at need be beautifully tender and quiet. Who that
has read his tale of the young Finn and the Seven Ancients will
forget the weeping of Finn over the kindness of the famine-
stricken old men, and their wonder at his weeping and the self-
forgetful pathos of their meditation unconscious that it was their
own sacrifice called forth the tears of Finn. "Youth," they said,
"has many sorrows that cold age cannot comprehend."
There are critics repelled by the abounding energy in O'Grady's
sentences. It is easy to point to faults due to excess and
abundance, but how rare in literature is that heroic energy and
power. There is something arcane and elemental in it, a quality
that the most careful stylist cannot attain, however he uses the
file, however subtle he is. O'Grady has noticed this power in the
ancient bards and we find it in his own writing. It ran all
through the Bardic History, the Critical and Philosophical
History, and through the political books, "The Tory Democracy" and
"All Ireland." There is this imaginative energy in the tale of
Cuculain, in all its episodes, the slaying of the hound, the
capture of the Laity Macha, the hunting of the enchanted deer, the
capture of the wild swans, the fight at the ford and the awakening
of the Red Branch. In the later tale of Red Hugh which he calls
"The Flight of the Eagle" there is the same quality of power
joined with a shining simplicity in the narrative which rises into
a poetic ecstacy in that wonderful chapter where Red Hugh,
escaping from the Pale, rides through the Mountain Gates of
Ulster, and sees high above him Slieve Mullion, a mountain of the
Gods, the birthplace of legend "more mythic than Avernus" and
O'Grady evokes for us and his hero the legendary past, and the
great hill seems to be like Mount Sinai, thronged with immortals,
and it lives and speaks to the fugitive boy, "the last great
secular champion of the Gael," and inspires him for the fulfilment
of his destiny. We might say of Red Hugh and indeed of all
O'Grady's heroes that they are the spiritual progeny of Cuculain.
From Red Hugh down to the boys who have such enchanting adventures
in "Lost on Du Corrig" and "The Chain of Gold" they have all a
natural and hardy purity of mind, a beautiful simplicity of
character, and one can imagine them all in an hour of need, being
faithful to any trust like the darling of the Red Branch. These
shining lads never grew up amid books. They are as much children
of nature as the Lucy of Wordsworth's poetry. It might be said of
them as the poet of the Kalevala sang of himself,
"Winds and waters my instructors."
These were O'Grady's own earliest companions and no man can find
better comrades than earth, water, air and sun. I imagine
O'Grady's own youth was not so very different from the youth of
Red Hugh before his captivity; that he lived on the wild and rocky
western coast, that he rowed in coracles, explored the caves,
spoke much with hardy natural people, fishermen and workers on the
land, primitive folk, simple in speech, but with that fundamental
depth men have who are much in nature in companionship with the
elements, the elder brothers of humanity: it must have been out of
such a boyhood and such intimacies with natural and
unsophisticated people that there came to him the understanding of
the heroes of the Red Branch. How pallid, beside the ruddy
chivalry who pass huge and fleet and bright through O'Grady's
pages, appear Tennyson's bloodless Knights of the Round Table,
fabricated in the study to be read in the drawing-room, as anaemic
as Burne Jones' lifeless men in armour. The heroes of ancient
Irish legend reincarnated in the mind of a man who could breathe
into them the fire of life, caught from sun and wind, their
ancient deities, and send them, forth to the world to do greater
deeds, to act through many men and speak through many voices. What
sorcery was in the Irish mind that it has taken so many years to
win but a little recognition for this splendid spirit; and that
others who came after him, who diluted the pure fiery wine of
romance he gave us with literary water, should be as well known or
more widely read. For my own part I can only point back to him and
say whatever is Irish in me he kindled to life, and I am humble
when I read his epic tale, feeling how much greater a thing it is
for the soul of a writer to have been the habitation of a demigod
than to have had the subtlest intellections.
We praise the man who rushes into a burning mansion and brings out
its greatest treasure. So ought we to praise this man who rescued
from the perishing Gaelic tradition its darling hero and restored
him to us, and I think now that Cuculain will not perish, and he
will be invisibly present at many a council of youth, and he will
be the daring which lifts the will beyond itself and fires it for
great causes, and he will also be the courtesy which shall
overcome the enemy that nothing else may overcome.
I am sure that Standish O'Grady would rather I should speak of his
work and its bearing on the spiritual life of Ireland, than about
himself, and, because I think so, in this reverie I have followed
no set plan but have let my thoughts run as they will. But I would
not have any to think that this man was only a writer, or that he
could have had the heroes of the past for spiritual companions,
without himself being inspired to fight dragons and wizardy. I
have sometimes regretted that contemporary politics drew O'Grady
away from the work he began so greatly. I have said to myself he
might have given us an Oscar, a Diarmuid or a Caoilte, an equal
comrade to Cuculain, but he could not, being lit up by the spirit
of his hero, be merely the bard and not the fighter, and no man in
Ireland intervened in the affairs of his country with a superior
nobility of aim. He was the last champion of the Irish aristocracy
and still more the voice of conscience for them, and he spoke to
them of their duty to the nation as one might imagine some
fearless prophet speaking to a council of degenerate princes. When
the aristocracy failed Ireland he bade them farewell, and wrote
the epitaph of their class in words whose scorn we almost forget
because of their sounding melody and beauty. He turned his mind to
the problems of democracy and more especially of those workers who
are trapped in the city, and he pointed out for them the way of
escape and how they might renew life in the green fields close to
Earth, their ancient mother and nurse. He used too exalted a
language for those to whom he spoke to understand, and it might
seem that all these vehement appeals had failed but that we know
that what is fine never really fails. When a man is in advance of
his age, a generation unborn when he speaks, is born in due time
and finds in him its inspiration. O'Grady may have failed in his
appeal to the aristocracy of his own time but he may yet create an
aristocracy of character and intellect in Ireland. The political
and social writings will remain to uplift and inspire and to
remind us that the man who wrote the stories of heroes had a
bravery of his own and a wisdom of his own. I owe so much to
Standish O'Grady that I would like to leave it on record that it
was he who made me conscious and proud of my country, and recalled
my mind, that might have wandered otherwise over too wide and
vague a field of thought, to think of the earth under my feet and
the children of our common mother. There hangs in the Municipal
Gallery of Dublin the portrait of a man with brooding eyes, and
scrawled on the canvas is the subject of his bitter meditation,
"The Lost Land." I hope that O'Grady will find before he goes back
to Tir-na-noge that Ireland has found again through him what
seemed lost for ever, the law of its own being, and its memories
which go back to the beginning of the world.
THE COMING OF CUCULAIN
CHAPTER I
THE RED BRANCH
"There were giants in the earth in those days, the same
were mighty men which were of yore men of renown."
The Red Branch feasted one night in their great hall at Emain
Macha. So vast was the hall that a man, such as men are now,
standing in the centre and shouting his loudest, would not be
heard at the circumference, yet the low laughter of the King
sitting at one end was clearly audible to those who sat around the
Champion at the other. The sons of Dithorba made it, giants of the
elder time, labouring there under the brazen shoutings of Macha
and the roar of her sounding thongs. Its length was a mile and
nine furlongs and a cubit. With her brooch pin she ploughed its
outline upon the plain, and its breadth was not much less. Trees
such as the earth nourished then upheld the massy roof beneath
which feasted that heroic brood, the great-hearted children of
Rury, huge offspring of the gods and giants of the dawn of time.
For mighty exceedingly were these men. At the noise of them
running to battle all Ireland shook, and the illimitable Lir
[Footnote: Lir was the sea-god, the Oceanns of the Celt; no doubt
the same as the British Lear, the wild, white-headed old king, who
had such singular daughters; two, monsters of cruelty, and one,
exquisitely sweet, kind, and serene, viz.: Storm, Hurricane, and
Calm.] trembled in his watery halls; the roar of their brazen
chariots reverberated from the solid canopy of heaven, and their
war-steeds drank rivers dry.
A vast murmur rose from the assembly, for like distant thunder or
the far-off murmuring of agitated waters was the continuous hum of
their blended conversation and laughter, while, ever and anon,
cleaving the many-tongued confusion, uprose friendly voices,
clearer and stronger than battle-trumpets, when one hero
challenged another to drink, wishing him victory and success, and
his words rang round the hollow dome. Innumerable candles, tall as
spears, illuminated the scene. The eyes of the heroes sparkled,
and their faces, white and ruddy, beamed with festal mirth and
mutual affection. Their yellow hair shone. Their banqueting
attire, white and scarlet, glowed against the outer gloom. Their
round brooches and mantle-pins of gold, or silver, or golden
bronze, their drinking vessels and instruments of festivity,
flashed and glittered in the light. They rejoiced in their glory
and their might, and in the inviolable amity in which they were
knit together, a host of comrades, a knot of heroic valour and
affection which no strength or cunning, and no power, seen or
unseen, could ever relax or untie.
At one extremity of the vast hall, upon a raised seat, sat their
young king, Concobar Mac Nessa, slender, handsome, and upright. A
canopy of bronze, round as the bent sling of the Sun-god, the
long-handed, far-shooting son of Ethlend, [Footnote: This was the
god Lu Lam-fada, i.e., Lu, the Long-Handed. The rainbow was his
sling. Remember that the rod sling, familiar enough now to Irish
boys, was the weapon of the ancient Irish, and not the sling which
is made of two cords.] encircled his head. At his right hand lay a
staff of silver. Far away at the other end of the hall, on a
raised seat, sat the Champion Fergus Mac Roy, like a colossus. The
stars and clouds of night were round his head and shoulders seen
through the wide and high entrance of the dun, whose doors no man
had ever seen closed and barred. Aloft, suspended from the dim
rafters, hung the naked forms of great men clear against the dark
dome, having the cords of their slaughter around their necks and
their white limbs splashed with blood. Kings were they who had
murmured against the sovereignty of the Red Branch. Through the
wide doorway out of the night flew a huge bird, black and grey,
unseen, and soaring upwards sat upon the rafters, its eyes like
burning fire. It was the Mor-Reega, [Footnote: There were three
war goddesses:--(1) Badb (pronounced Byve); (2) Macha, already
referred to; (3) The Mor-Rigu or Mor-Reega, who wag the greatest
of the three.] or Great Queen, the far-striding terrible daughter
of Iarnmas (Iron-Death). Her voice was like the shouting of ten
thousand men. Dear to her were these heroes. More she rejoiced in
them feasting than in the battle-prowess of the rest.
When supper was ended their bard, in his singing robes and girt
around the temples with a golden fillet, stood up and sang. He
sang how once a king of the Ultonians, having plunged into the
sea-depths, there slew a monster which had wrought much havoc
amongst fishers and seafaring men. The heroes attended to his
song, leaning forward with bright eyes. They applauded the song
and the singer, and praised the valour of the heroic man
[Footnote: This was Fergus Mac Leda, Fergus, son of Leda, one of
the more ancient kings of Ulster. His contest with the sea-monster
is the theme of a heroic tale.] who had done that deed. Then the
champion struck the table with his clenched hand, and addressed
the assembly. Wrath and sorrow were in his voice. It resembled the
brool of lions heard afar by seafaring men upon some savage shore
on a still night.
"Famous deeds," he said, "are not wrought now amongst the Red
Branch. I think we are all become women. I grow weary of these
huntings in the morning and mimic exercises of war, and this
training of steeds and careering of brazen chariots stained never
with aught but dust and mire, and these unearned feastings at
night and vain applause of the brave deeds of our forefathers.
Come now, let us make an end of this. Let us conquer Banba
[Footnote: One of Ireland's many names.] wholly in all her green
borders, and let the realms of Lir, which sustain no foot of man,
be the limit of our sovereignty. Let us gather the tributes of all
Ireland, after many battles and much warlike toil. Then more
sweetly shall we drink while the bards chaunt our own prowess.
Once I knew a coward who boasted endlessly about his forefathers,
and at last my anger rose, and with a flat hand I slew him in the
middle of his speech, and paid no eric, for he was nothing. We
have the blood of heroes in our veins, and we sit here nightly
boasting about them; about Rury, whose name we bear, being all his
children; and Macha the warrioress, who brought hither bound the
sons of Dithorba and made them rear this mighty dun; and Combat
son of Fiontann; and my namesake Fergus,[Footnote: This was the
king already referred to who slew the sea-monster. The monster had
left upon him that mark and memorial of the struggle.] whose
crooked mouth was no dishonour, and the rest of our hero sires;
and we consume the rents and tributes of Ulster which they by
their prowess conquered to us, and which flow hither in abundance
from every corner of the province. Valiant men, too, will one day
come hither and slay us as I slew that boaster, and here in Emain
Macha their bards will praise them. Then in the halls of the dead
shall we say to our sires, 'All that you got for us by your blood
and your sweat that have we lost, and the glory of the Red Branch
is at an end.'"
That speech was pleasing to the Red Branch, and they cried out
that Fergus Mac Roy had spoken well. Then all at once, on a sudden
impulse, they sang the battle-song of the Ultonians, and shouted
for the war so that the building quaked and rocked, and in the
hall of the weapons there was a clangour of falling shields, and
men died that night for extreme dread, so mightily shouted the
Ultonians around their king and around Fergus. When the echoes and
reverberations of that shout ceased to sound in the vaulted roof
and in the far recesses and galleries, then there arose somewhere
upon the night a clear chorus of treble voices, singing, too, the
war-chant of the Ultonians, as when rising out of the clangour of
brazen instruments of music there shrills forth the clear sound of
fifes. For the immature scions of the Red Branch, boys and tender
youths, awakened out of slumber, heard them, and from remote
dormitories responded to their sires, and they cried aloud
together and shouted. The trees of Ulster shed their early leaves
and buds at that shout, and birds fell dead from the branches.
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