Culture and Society
Gaelic culture and society was centered around the Fine (clann) and, as such, the landscape and history of Ireland was wrought with inter-fine relationships, marriages, friendships, wars, vendettas, trading, and so on. Despite this, Gaelic Ireland had a rich oral culture and appreciation of deeper and intellectual pursuits. Filí and draoithe (druids) were held in high regard during pagan times and orally passed down the history and traditions of their people. Later, many of their spiritual and intellectual tasks were passed on to Christian monks, after said religion prevailed from the 5th century onwards. However, the filí continued to hold a high position in their clanns and territories. Poetry, music, storytelling, literature and other art forms were highly prized and cultivated in both pagan and Christian Gaelic Ireland. Hospitality, bonds of kinship and the fulfilment of social and ritual responsibilities were held sacred.
The Gaelic order in Ireland, rather than a single unified kingdom in the feudal sense, was a patchwork of túatha (singular: túath). These túatha often competed for control of resources and thus continually grew and shrank. Law tracts from the beginning of the 8th century describe a hierarchy of kings: kings of túath subject to kings of several túatha who again were subject to provincial overkings. Already before the 8th century these over-kingships had begun to dissolve the túatha as the basic sociopolitical unit.
Read more about this topic: Gaelic Ireland
Famous quotes containing the words culture and, culture and/or society:
“Asia is rich in people, rich in culture and rich in resources. It is also rich in trouble.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)
“Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing—he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)
“Although knaves win in every political struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from the hands of one set of criminals into the hands of another set of criminals, as fast as the government is changed, and the march of civilization is a train of felonies, yet, general ends are somehow answered.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)