- Mythology and the Oral Tradition: Ireland -
of Cli Chulainn's birth-tale is a coherent mythico-heroic text and is evidently a
tersely phrased version of an oral narrative;13 the 'Death of Conchobor', as James
Carney pointed out, comprises 'a genuine traditional story' and an extension relat-
ing his death to Christ's crucifixion;14 the centre-piece of the Ulster cycle, Tdin Bo
Cuailnge, though rich in heroic forms and ideology, need not as a whole presuppose
a close equivalent in pre-literate tradition; the story of 'Cli Chulainn's Boyhood
Deeds' which forms part of the extant text of the T din is a highly skilful essay in writ-
ten narrative, not a didactic account of ritual, yet it offers a consistent and, as
Georges Dumezil has shown, remarkably archaic view of heroic initiation.
The modern convention of classifying the literature into four cycles - the mytho-
logical cycle, the Ulster cycle, the Finn cycle and the king cycle -is indeed modern
and, so far as mythology is concerned, quite misleading, since the whole corpus is in
varying degrees mythological. The traditional mode of classification was not by cycle
but instead grouped the individual tales together under such heading as 'birth-tales',
'death-tales', 'wooings', 'elopements', 'plunderings', etc. which did not explicitly
distinguish 'mythological' from other tales. Of those tales which deal specifically
with the gods Cath Maige Tuired, 'The Battle of Mag Tuired', has a central role,
featuring as it does virtually the whole Irish pantheon in the archetypal victory of
the divine Tuatha De Danann over the demonic Fomoiri, a theomachy that has famil-
iar analogues in the mythology of Scandinavia, Greece and India; the fact that it has
in its approximately ninth-century written form been accommodated to the new syn-
thetic history of Leabhar Gabhdla does not of course invalidate it as evidence for the
nature of Irish mythology. Indeed it is remarkable how the testimony of this and
other Irish texts matches and complements the continental (and British) evidence on
the Celtic gods despite the glaring disparities and deficiencies of the extant sources.
Lugh and Brighid (Brigid) are only the two most conspicuous of those Irish deities
who are identifiable as pan-Celtic either by name or function, or both, and it is some
measure of the tenacity of custom and oral tradition that residual popular lore and
ritual associated with them continued to flourish virtually to our own day.
The primary reason why there was such a carry-over from the oral to the written
phase was that oral literature and learning enjoyed high status long before the coming
of writing, and that mainly because, in their more formal mode, they were cultivated
and controlled by an elitist and privileged class of semi-sacred savants and poets: the
druids and, subsequently, the filidh, who were closely associated with religion and
ideology and had their close counterparts in Wales and, earlier still, among the Celts
of Britain and the Continent. The extent to which their repertoire was transmitted in
writing depended on factors beyond their immediate control: the motivation and pri-
orities of individual monastic scribes and authors for example, or the hazards by
which manuscripts perished or survived to our own time.
Given the pivotal role of sacred kingship in early Irish society it is hardly sur-
prising that the mythology, and to some extent the ritual, of sovereignty bulks large
in the extant literature, even if trimmed of some their most uncivil features. Yet even
here, despite the richness of the extant material, its incompleteness as a record of the
oral tradition is evidenced by the casual or fortuitous manner in which some items
are attested. When, for example, in the twelfth century Giraldus Cambrensis
describes a 'barbarous and abominable' rite of inauguration practised in what is now