CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
MYTHOLOGY AND THE ORAL
TRADITION
Ireland
--.•. --
Proinsias Mac Cana
O
ne of the matters on which Celticists have failed most signally to achieve
consensus is the degree to which the extant corpus of medieval Irish literature
may be accepted as a reliable index of native mythology and religion: apart from
the diverse special interests of the scholars themselves - constituents of the literary
evidence which appear to stand forth in high relief when viewed from one academic
or ideological perspective may be less prominent when seen from other points
of view - there is the very real problem posed by the nature of the evidence itself
and by the manner of its survival. First one must have regard to the chronological
gap which separates the Irish materials from the information on the beliefs and
practices of the continental Celts that survives in inscriptions, iconography and the
commentaries of various classical authors and which furnishes a vital complement to
the Insular evidence. Near the beginning of the twentieth century Camille Jullian
commented on this difficulty from the standpoint of a historian of Gaul. Even if it
could be proved that Irish tradition and Gaulish civilization were historically related,
is it justifiable to interpret the one by recourse to the other? Can one, he asks, really
rely on documents written in Ireland so many centuries later than the independent
Gaul of the pre-Christian era?1
His problem was a very real one, but somewhat exaggerated in its formulation.
In the first place, while the extant manuscript collections of vernacular literature only
commence about the end of the eleventh century, a large proportion of their contents
are linguistically older by two or three centuries. Second, the substantial conversion
of Ireland from paganism did not take place until the fifth century, and there is no
evidence to suggest that Christianity might have had a foothold anywhere in the
country before the fourth. However, as a corollary to this Jullian raised another
issue which was - and still is - of greater consequence: the extant mythological texts
are, he believed, largely the creation of storytellers and learned authors and as such
do not represent faithfully either Ireland itself or its beliefs and traditions.^2 This
argument has considerable substance; just how much is still a matter for lively
debate among students of Irish antiquity, though naturally the range of material and
detail now involved goes far beyond anything Jullian had in mind. But essentially the
central issue remains the same: to what extent does the literature written
in a Christian environment in the Old Irish period truly reflect the traditions and