icans were victorious, and the Nemedian colony being all dispersed and destroyed, next, and, in number, the third, of these colonies, which was known to the Irish, In process of time, the Tuatha-de-Danaan were themselves dispossessed of their sway: From thence tracing this chosen race in their migrations to different countries, and According to Hanmer's Chronicle, there arose dissensions between these brothers, and the youngest, inge, having, (as Hanmer expresses it,)" encroached round about the middle stone and fixed meare afore id, usurped at length the sole rule of the country. In one of the old Irish romances, on the subject of Finn Mac Combal, that hero is imagined to have de ved a portion of his knowledge from the waters of a certain magical fountain, which was in the possession the Tuatha-de-Danaan, and of which a single draught was sold for three hundred ounces of gold 1 Bo called from an artificial silver hand, which he wore to supply the loss sustained from a wound he ceived in the battle of Moytura. We are told seriously by O'Flaherty, that "Cred, a goldsmith, formed hand, and Miach, the son of Dian Kect, well instructed in the practical parts of chirurgery, set the arm."pia, part iii. ch. 10. of the grandsons of this Nuad, named Brittanus, or Maol Briotan, is said to have passed over, after ent, into North Britain; and from him, according to the Psalter of Cashel, the Britons derived their To this tradition Camden alludes, in a note on his Introduction-"Brittannis dicta est a quodam tur Britannus." There is also another of the grandsons of Nuad, named Simon Breac, who is y distinguished part in the Scotch version of our Milesian story; being represented therein as famous Stone of Destiny, and even substituted, in place of Heremon, as the founder of archy, (Fordun, 1. i. c. 26. See, also, Stillingfleet's Origin. Britan. cap. 5) The Scotch eem to have confounded this primitive Simon Breac with another of the same name, Nuad, who flourished four centuries later. See Innes, vol. ii. sect. 2. wary of Stowe," says Dr. O'Connor," no less than five metrical chronicles, in which memorated."-Rer. Hibern. Script. Prol. ii. 37. y and Antiquities of the Southern Isles of Aran, by John T. O'Flaherty, Trans. made, there will occur, in the course of this work, opportunities of more particularly adverting. Our business, at present, as well with them as with the other class of documents alluded to, which, though branching out so extravagantly into fable, have often their roots laid deep in traditional truth, must be to refer to them merely as repositories of the ancient traditions of the country, as retaining traces of those remote times to which no history reaches, and as, therefore, of use in the task imposed upon all inquirers into the first origin of a people,-that of seeking, through the dim vista of tradition, some glimmerings of truth. And even here, in this obscure region of research, it is far less in the actual events related by the Bards and Seanachies, than in the absurdly remote period to which the first links of their chain of tradition is carried, that any very insurmountable obstacle to our belief in most of their narratives lies: and this disposition to extend and elevate their antiquity, has marked the first imperfect attempts at chronology in all countries. Even among some whose history, in other respects, has received the authenticating sanction of ages, the same ambition is known to have prevailed. Thus, in the calculations of the Egyptians, the interval between two of their kings was made to occupy no less a period than 11,340 years; and yet that two such kings really existed, and were named Menes and Sethon, is accounted by no means the less probable or historical for this absurd flight of calculation; nor is it at all questioned, that under the serene skies of Chaldæa astronomy may have had its birth, because that people boasted of having made observations upon the stars through a period of 470,000 years. So far back in the night of time have our Bardic Historians gone in quest of materials, that, from the very first age of the world, we find marked out by them a regular series of epochs, which have each been signalized by the visit of some new colony to their shores. Beginning a few weeks before the Flood, when, as they say, a niece of Noah, named Cesara, arrived with a colony of antediluvians upon the Irish coast, they from thence number, through the lapse of ages, no less than five or six different bands of adventurers, by which the island, at various intervals, had been conquered and colonized. * To dwell, at any length, on the details of the earlier of these settlements,-details possessing neither the certainty of history, nor the attractiveness of fable,-can hardly be deemed necessary. Still so much of truth is occasionally intermixed with their fictions, and so many curious, if not important speculations, have arisen out of this period of Irish history, that to pass it over without some degree of notice, would be to leave the task attempted in these pages incomplete. From the time of Cesara, who is allowed on all hands to have been a purely fabulous personage, there occurs no mention of any colony till about the beginning of the fourth century after the Flood, when Ireland was invaded, and taken possession of, by a chief, of the race of Japhet, named Partholan, who, landing at Imbersciene, in Kerry, says O'Flaherty," the 14th day of May, on a Wednesday," fixed his residence in the province of Ulster, upon an island named Inis-Samer, in the river Erne. The fables related by the Irish bards respecting Partholan,-his faithless wife, her favourite greyhound, the seven lakes that burst forth after his arrival,-may all be found in the rhyming form that best suits them, in the marvellous pages of Keating. After holding possession of the country for three hundred years, the race of Partholan were all swept away by a plague; and the Hill of Howth, then called Ben-Heder, was the scene of the most awful ravages of this pestilence. To this colony succeeded another, about the time, it is said, of the patriarch Jacob, who were called, from the name of their leader, Nemedians, and are said to have come from the shores of the Euxine Sea. The fierce wars waged by this people with the Fomorians, a tribe of African sea-rovers, who then infested the coast of Ireland, forms one of the most picturesque subjects of the ancient Irish Muse. The stronghold of these African mariners, who are supposed, not improbably, to have been Carthaginian traders, was the Tower of Conan, which stood upon an island on the sca-coast of Ulster, named from this structure Tor-inis, or the Island of the Tower. This fortress the Nemedians stormed; and, after dislodging from thence their formidable enemy, left not a trace of the mighty structure standing. An Irish poem called The Storming of the Tower of Conan," still exists in the noble library of Stowe. The Fomorians, however, having been joined by fresh supplies of force, a general battle, by land and sea, ensued, in which According to Bardic authorities, cited by Keating, the arrivals in Ireland, before the Deluge, were nume rous; and, among other visiters, three daughters of Cain are mentioned. The famous White Book, so much ridiculed by some of the Scotch controversialists, is the authority cited for this story. See chapter headed, "Of the first Invasion of Ireland before the Flood." It is probable that for most, if not all, of the wild inventions respecting Partholan and the Nemedians, we are indebted to a poet or Seanachie of the tenth century, named Eochaidh O'Floinn, of whose numerous writings an account may be found in the Transactions of the Iberno-Celtic Society for 1820. the Africans were victorious, and the Nemedian colony being all dispersed and destroyed, the country was once more left at the mercy of those foreign marauders, and relapsed into wildness and desolation for the space of two hundred years. The next, and, in number, the third, of these colonies, which was known to the Irish, by the name of Fir-Bolgs, first imposed upon them, it is said, the yoke of regal authority, and dividing the island into five parts or provinces, established that pentarchal form of government, which continued, with but few interruptions, till the twelfth century of our era. The five sons of Dela, under whose command the colony had landed, shared the kingdom, according to this division, between them,* placing a stone in the centre of the island at the spot where their five shares met. Their tenure of royalty, however, was but short; for, not more than thirty or forty years had this quintuple sovereignty remained in their hands, when they were dispossessed by the Tuatha-de-Danaan, a people famed for necromancy, who, after sojourning for some time in Greece, where they had learned this mysterious art, proceeded from thence to Denmark and Norway, and became possessors, while in those countries, of certain marvellous treasures, among which were the Stone of Destiny, the sorcerer's spear, and the magic caldron. Armed with these wonderful gifts,f the tribe of the Danaans next found their way to Scotland, and, after a rest there for some years, set sail, under the auspices of their chieftain, Nuad of the Silver Hand, for Ireland. Here, landing secretly, under cover of a mist which their enchantments had raised, these sorcerers penetrated into the country, and had reached Sliabh an Iaruinn, the Mountain of Iron, between the lakes of Allen and Eirne, before their presence was discovered. The alarmed Belgians, thus taken by surprise, retreated before them rapidly into Connaught, where, at Moytura, on the borders of Lake Masg, that sanguinary battle took place, which, under the name of the Battle of the Field of the Tower, was long a favourite theme of Irish song. Defeated signally by their invaders, the Belgians fled to the Isle of Man, North Aran,|| and the Hebrides, and the victorious Danaans became in their turn sole masters of the country. In process of time, the Tuatha-de-Danaan were themselves dispossessed of their sway: a successful invasion from the coast of Spain having put an end to the Danaanian dynasty, and transferred the sceptre into the hands of that Milesian or Scotic race, which, through so long a series of succeeding ages, supplied Ireland with her kings. This celebrated colony, though coming directly from Spain, was originally, we are told, of Scythic race, and its various migrations and adventures before reaching its Isle of Destiny in the West, are detailed by our Bards, with all that fond and lingering minuteness in which fancy, playing with its own creations, so much delights to indulge. Grafting upon this Scythic colony the traditional traces and stories of their country, respecting the Phoenicians, they have contrived to collect together, without much regard to either chronology, history, or geography, every circumstance that could tend to dignify and add lustre to such an event; an event upon which not only the rank of their country itself in the heraldry of nations depended, but in which every individual, entitled by his Milesian blood to lay claim to a share in so glorious a pedigree, was interested. In order more completely to identify the ancestors of these Scythic colonists with the Phoenicians, they relate that by one of them, named Fenius, to whom the invention of the Ogham character is attributed, an academy for languages was instituted upon the Plain of Shenaar, in which that purest dialect of the Irish, called the Bearla Feini, was cultivated. From thence tracing this chosen race in their migrations to different countries, and According to Hanmer's Chronicle, there arose dissensions between these brothers, and the youngest, Slainge, having, (as Hanmer expresses it,) "encroached round about the middle stone and fixed meare aforesaid," usurped at length the sole rule of the country. † In one of the old Irish romances, on the subject of Finn Mac Comhal, that hero is imagined to have derived a portion of his knowledge from the waters of a certain magical fountain, which was in the possession of the Tuatha-de-Danaan, and of which a single draught was sold for three hundred ounces of gold. So called from an artificial silver hand, which he wore to supply the loss sustained from a wound he received in the battle of Moytura. We are told seriously by O'Flaherty, that "Cred, a goldsmith, formed the hand, and Miach, the son of Dian Kect, well instructed in the practical parts of chirurgery, set the arm."— Ogygia, part iii. ch. 10. One of the grandsons of this Nuad, named Brittanus, or Maol Briotan, is said to have passed over, after their defeat, into North Britain; and from him, according to the Psalter of Cashel, the Britons derived their origin. To this tradition Camden alludes, in a note on his Introduction." Brittannia dicta est a quodam qui vocabatur Britannus." There is also another of the grandsons of Nuad, named Simon Breac, who is made to play a distinguished part in the Scotch version of our Milesian story; being represented therein as the importer of the famous Stone of Destiny, and even substituted, in place of Heremon, as the founder of the Milesian monarchy. (Fordun, 1. i. c. 26. See, also, Stillingfleet's Origin. Britan. cap. 5.) The Scotch antiquarians, however, seem to have confounded this primitive Simon Breac with another of the same name, also grandson of a King Nuad, who flourished four centuries later. See Innes, vol. ii. sect. 2. "There are in the library of Stowe," says Dr. O'Connor, "no less than five metrical chronicles, in which this battle of Moytura is commemorated."-Rer. Hibern. Script. Prol. ii. 37. See Sketch of the History and Antiquities of the Southern Isles of Aran, by John T. O'Flaherty, Trans. of Royal Irish Academy, vol. xiv. connecting them, by marriage or friendship, during their long sojourn in Egypt, with most of the heroes of Scripture history, our Bards conduct them at length, by a route, not very intelligible, to Spain. There, by their valour and enterprise, they succeed in liberating the country from its Gothic invaders,* and, in a short time, make themselves masters of almost the whole kingdom. Still haunted, however, in the midst of their glory, by the remembrance of a prophecy, which had declared that an island in the Western Sea was to be their ultimate place of rest, the two sons of their great leader, Milesius, at length fitted out a grand martial expedition, and set sail, in thirty ships, from the coast of Gallicia for Ireland. According to the Bardic chronology, 1300 years before the birth of Christ, but according to Nennius, Engus,† and others, near five centuries later, this "lettered and martial colony," (to use the language of one of its most zealous champions,) arrived under the command of the sons of Milesius, on the Irish coasts; and having effected a landing at Inbher Sceine, the present Bantry Bay, on Thursday, the first of May, A. M. 2934, achieved that great and memorable victory over the Tuatha-de-Danaan, which secured to themselves and their princely descendants, for more than 2000 years, the supreme dominion over all Ireland. CHAPTER VI. HISTORICAL VIEW OF THE COLONIZATION OF IRELAND. WHEN stripped of their fanciful dates, and reduced within due bounds of antiquity, these traditions of the first settlements in Ireland, however fabulously coloured, may be taken as preserving the memory of some of those early invasions, of which, in times when the migratory spirit was alive over the whole earth, this island must frequently have been the object. The story of a colony, in remote ages, under a chieftain of the race of Japhet, falls in with the hypothesis of those who, in tracing westward the migration of We have here a specimen of that art of annihilating both space and time which is so prodigally exhibited throughout the Milesian story. Among the many different nations that in succession became masters of Spain, the occupation of that kingdom by the Goths, which is here assumed as having taken place in the remote Milesian times, did not really occur till about the beginning of the fifth century of our era. † Psalter-na-Rann. Engus is here referred to merely as the putative author of this work, a high authority having pronounced that there are no grounds for attributing it to him. (Lanigan, Ecclesiastical History of Ireland, vol. 3. c. 20.) The very nature, indeed, of some of the contents of this Psalter, if, as Bishop Nicholson asserts, it contains a catalogue of the kinge of Ireland, from Heremon down to Brian Boroimhe, who was slain in 1014, shows that it could not have been the production of a writer of the eighth century. Dissertations on Irish History, sect. 21. Ogygia, part. iii. ch. 16. O'Flaherty has here reduced, it will be observed, the calculation of the Bards, and computes the dates of his landing to have been only a thousand years before our era; while Keating adheres to the authority of the Psalter of Cashel, in fixing it three centuries earlier. The author of Dissertations on the History of Ireland, (as I shall henceforth designate Mr. O'Connor, of Belanagare, in order to distinguish him from his reverend descendant, the late librarian of Stowe,) at first adopted the calculation of O'Flaherty, but saw reason afterwards to abate near five centuries of that date (see Ogyg. Vindic., preface; also, Reflections on History of Ireland, Collectan. No. 10;) and Dr. O'Connor is content to refer the coming of the Milesians to the year before Christ, 489. (Rer. Hibern. Script. Prol. ii. 45.) The most extravagant, how. ever, of all the computations of this event is that made by Donald O'Neil, a king of Ulster, who, writing in the year 1317, to Pope John XXII., assures his holiness that the Milesian colony settled in Ireland about 2300 years before the Christian era. See Fordun, (Scotichron,) to whom we must trust for the authenticity of this curious document. It is also quoted, but without reference to any authority, by Usher, Eccles. Antiquitat. c. 16. In endeavouring to fix the period of the Argonautic expedition, the learned author of The Remains of Japhet comes gravely to the conclusion that it must have been about the same number of years from the flood as the beginning of the reign of the Milesians; and adds, "so that if Jason did sail to Ireland, it must have been soon after the establishment of the Milesians in that kingdom." The fondness of the Irish for their old national traditions is shown in the names given to remarkable places throughout the country, most of which may be traced to some famous hero or heroine, commemorated in ancient songs and tales. Even the shore on which the antediluvian nymph Cesara was said to have been buried, used to be pointed out, in the days of Giraldus, with reverence. (Topog. Dist. 3. c. 1.) Memorials, in like manner, of the great battle between the Milesians and the Tuatha-de-Danaan were preserved for ages on the spot where that combat is said to have occurred. Not only of the chieftains, but of the ladies and druids who fell in the fight, the names were associated with the valleys and hills in that neighbourhood. An old poem on the Battle of Sliabh Mis is referred to by Smith, (History of Kerry,) who adds, that "the monumental stones said, in the above poem, to have been erected over the graves of the noble warriors, arc still remaining on Mount Cahirconree, one of the Sliabhmis mountains in Kerry," the Noachida, include both Britain and Ireland among those Isles of the Gentiles* which became, on the partition of the earth, the appanage of the descendants of Japhet. The derivation of a later settlement, the Nemedians, from some country near the Euxine Sea, coincides no less aptly with the general current of European tradition, according to which the regions in the neighbourhood of the Caucasian mountains are to be regarded as the main source of the population of the West.t We have shown it to be probable, as well from foreign as from native tradition, that Ireland derived her primitive population from Spain. The language brought by these first settlers was that which was common then to all the Celts of Europe. Those Spanish colonies, therefore, placed by Ptolemy on the south and south-western coasts of Ireland, must have arrived there at some much later period, when the dialect of the Celtic, anciently spoken in Spain, had become corrupted by mixture with other tongues; as it is plainly from these later Spanish settlers must have flowed that infusion into the Irish language of a number of Basque or Cantabrian words, which induced the learned antiquary, Edward Lhuyd, to imagine a degree of affinity between these tongues. In the direction of Spain, it is most likely, whatever of foreign commerce or intercourse the ancient Irish may have possessed, was, down to a comparatively recent period, maintained. The description given, indeed, by a poet of our own days, of the geogra phical position of Ireland, as standing "with her back turned to Europe, her face to the West," is far more applicable to the state of her political and commercial relations in those times of which we are speaking. Wholly withdrawn from the rest of Europe, her resort lay along the shores of the Atlantic alone; and that commerce which frequented her ports in the first century of our era, was maintained, not certainly with the Romans, to whom she was then and for ages after unknown, but with Iberian merchants most probably, and with those descendants of the ancient Phoenician settlers who inhabited the western coasts of Spain. A remark above applied to the Spanish colonization, will be found applicable also to the colonies from Gaul. Whatever share may have been contributed by that country to the first Celtic population of Ireland, it was not till a much later period, most probably, that the Gaulish colonies, named by Ptolemy, established themselves in the island. The people called Fir-Bolgs by the Bards were, it is evident, Belge, of the same race with those in Britain; but at what period they fixed themselves in either country, and whether those who took possession of Ireland were derived mediately through Britain, or direct from Belgic Gaul, are questions that must still remain open to conjecture. The Menapii and the Čauci, both nations of the Belgic coast, came directly, it is most probable, to Ireland, as there is no trace of them to be found in Britain,-the town of Menapia in Wales having been founded, it is thought, by the Irish Menapii. In the Bardic historians we find a romantic account of a monarch, named Labbra Longseach, who having been exiled, in his youth, to Gaul, returned from thence at the head of a Gaulish colony, which he established in the regions now known as the counties of Wicklow and Wexford. This site of the settlement corresponds exactly, as will be seen, with the district assigned by Ptolemy to the Menapii; and, in farther confirmation both of the tradition and of this geographer's accuracy, we find the old Irish name for the harbour which these foreigners first entered to have been Loch Garman, or the harbour of the Germans. "The first language spoken in Europe," says Parsons, "was the Japhetan, called afterwards the Pelasgian and this language," he asserts, "is now to be found only in Ireland, the Highlands of Scotland and Wales." According to the Chronicle of the Celtic Kings, Japhet was the first British monarch. Sammes, ch. 10. † See Sir William Jones's Sixth Discourse, On the Persians. See "As, by collating the languages, I have found one part of the Irish reconcileable to the Welsh; so, by a diligent perusal of the New Testament, and some manuscript papers I received from the learned Dr. Edward Brown, written in the language of the Cantabrians, I have had a satisfactory knowledge as to the affinity of the other part with the old Spanish."-Preface to Lhuyd's Glossography. The attempt to prove this alleged affinity is admitted to have been an utter failure: the instances of resemblance between the two languages being no greater than may be satisfactorily accounted for by such engraftments on the original speech of a country as foreign colonies are always sure to introduce. See Baxter, on the word Ibernia, where he has allowed himself to be misled by this false notion of Lhuyd into some very erroneous speculations. §"Both these nations," says the Monk Richard, "were undoubtedly of Teutonic origin, but it is not known at what period their ancestors passed over." Whitaker, however, who will allow no fact to stand in the way of his own hypothesis, with respect to the peopling of Ireland exclusively from Britain, deserts his favourite guide, Richard, on this point, and insists that the Menapri and the Cauci were not German, but British tribes. (Hist. of Manchester, book i. ch. 12. sect. 4.) Camden, Dr. O'Connor, Wood, (Inquiry into the Primitive Inhabitants of Ireland,) and other authorities, all pronounce these tribes to have been of German origin; as were, most probably, the neighbours of the Menapii, the Coriondi. They must have come from Belgic Gaul and Germany, for we meet with no trace of them in Britain; Menapia, in Wales, being founded by the Irish Menapii."-Ledwich, Antiquities. From the long spears, called Laighean, with which the Gauls who accompanied this prince were armed, the province of Leinster is said to have derived its ancient name of Coige Laighean, or the province of the Spears. See O'Halloran, vol. ii. ch. 6. |