Early Irish Literature - Pagan Literature and Christian Sentiment

Pagan Literature and Christian Sentiment

The bulk of the ancient stories and some of the ancient poems were probably, as we have seen, committed to writing by monks of the 7th century, but are themselves substantially pagan in origin, conception, and colouring. And yet there is scarcely one of them in which some Christian allusion to heaven, or hell, or the Deity, or some Biblical subject, does not appear. The reason of this seems to be that, when Christianity succeeded in gaining the upper hand over paganism, a kind of tacit compromise was arrived at, by means of which the bard, and the fili (i.e., poet), and the representative of the old pagan learning were permitted by the sympathetic clerics to propagate their stories, tales, poems, and genealogies, at the price of tacking on to them a little Christian admixture, just as the vessels of some feudatory nations are compelled to fly at the masthead the flag of the suzerain power. But so badly has the dovetailing of the Christian into the pagan part been performed in most of the oldest romances that the pieces come away quite separate in the hands of even the least skilled analyser, and the pagan substratum stands forth entirely distinct from the Christian accretion. Thus, for example, in the evidently pagan saga called the Wooing of Étaín, we find the description of the pagan paradise given its literary passport, so to speak, by a cunningly interwoven allusion to Adam's fall. Étaín was the wife of one of the Tuatha Dé Danann, who were gods. She is reborn as a mortal — the pagan Irish seem, like the Gaulish druids, to have believed in metempsychosis — and weds the king of Ireland. Her former husband of the Tuatha Dé Danann still loves her, follows her into life as a mortal, and tries to win her back by singing to her a captivating description of the glowing unseen land to which he would lure her. "O lady fair, wouldst thou come with me" he cries "to the wondrous land that is ours", and he describes how "the crimson of the foxglove is in every brake — a beauty of land the land I speak of. youth never grows into old age there, warm sweet streams traverse the country", etc.: and then the evidently pagan description of this land of the gods is made passable by an added verse in which we are adroitly told that, though the inhabitants of this glorious country saw everyone, yet nobody saw them, "because the cloud of Adam's wrongdoing has concealed us".

It is this easy analysis of the early Irish literature into its ante-Christian and post-Christian elements which lends to it an absorbing interest and a great value in the history of European thought. For, when all spurious accretions have been stripped off, we find in it a genuine picture of pagan life in Europe, such as we look for in vain elsewhere. "The church adopted towards Pagan sagas the same position that it adopted toward Pagan law I see no reasons for doubting that really genuine pictures of a pre-Christian culture are preserved to us in the individual sagas. "The saga originated in Pagan and was propagated in Christian times, and that too without its seeking fresh nutriment, as a rule, from Christian elements. But we must ascribe it to the influence of Christianity that what is specifically pagan in Irish saga is blurred over and forced into the background. And yet there exist many whose contents are plainly mythological. The Christian monks were certainly not the first who reduced the ancient sagas to fixed form. but later on they copied them faithfully and promulgated them after Ireland had been converted to Christianity".