'History and Salvation in Medieval Ireland', by Dr Elizabeth Boyle: A Review

One of my earliest memories is attending a St Patrick’s Day parade in Galway, put on with typical flair by the local street theatre company, Macnas. The parade told the story of Ireland’s succession of inhabitants: Cessair and her followers; Partholon and his family; the Nemedians; the Fir Bolg; the Tuatha Dé Danann; and finally the Milesians, the Gaelic Irish, the children of Míl Espáine. Each successive invading force leapt and laughed and advanced with wild energy. Coming right at the tail end of this procession was St Patrick, standing atop a float, wearing sunglasses and a plastic mitre, waving his arms in ridiculous benediction.

Fir Bolg in the 1990 Macnas Parade, Galway

The message was quite clear, and I understood it perfectly well: Ireland was better before St Patrick.

I only realised recently, though, that the artists behind the parade were quite explicitly pro-pagan and anti-Patrick. Páraic Breathnach, one of the founding members of Macnas, described himself in a contemporary interview as coming ‘from the pagan past of Ireland’. His interviewer explains, ‘[Breathnach’s] kind of paganism is a celebration of pre-Christian values of respect for fellow human beings, love of nature, a celebration of instincts uncorrupted by alleged civilisation and imposed moralities’.

This extolling of pre-Christian Ireland might have been slightly edgy in the early ’90s, but it’s now a relatively common way of approaching, and appropriating, our past. A few examples: Brigid is widely appreciated, even among secular Irish commentators, but as a ‘goddess’ more than as a saint; sheela-na-gigs are reclaimed as symbols of ancient feminism; the Púca Festival invites people to celebrate ‘Samhain’ as ‘an ancient story about fire and accessing other worlds’; Manchán Magan writes about the Irish language as a mystical medium, ‘a gift to ourselves from the ancient past’; and the St Patrick’s Festival includes plays about Cú Chulainn and documentaries on the Hill of Uisneach, ‘resting place of the gods’.

This vogue for reaching back to Ireland’s misty pagan past is perfectly understandable. In recent decades the Catholic faith has ceased to be something that unites the majority of Irish people, whereas references to ‘Celtic’ symbols and values are unlikely to be divisive, especially since they are vague enough to serve almost any purpose, and make few discernible moral claims. This use of the past is also, perhaps, an attempt to deal with the trauma of Church scandals and the subsequent disintegration, for many, of a Christian worldview. Along with yoga and mindfulness, some sort of connection with our ancient past is part of the contemporary spiritual menu.

Participants in a (wildly expensive) ‘Celtic Spirituality Retreat’

There are two major weaknesses in all this, though. Firstly, the fact that we know almost nothing about the culture and values of pre-Christian Ireland. Respect for fellow human beings, love of nature, the celebration of instincts: it sounds lovely, but it’s all imagined. The meaning of ‘Celtic festivals’ like Imbolc and Samhain is often filled in with great detail by contemporary commentators, but again, it’s largely a matter of guesswork and imagination, combining modern folklore with medieval sources and Neolithic monuments, with little sense of history. Similarly, the notion – dogma in contemporary Ireland – that St Brigid is the Christian version of a pre-existing goddess is not at all substantiated by available sources. And as for sheela-na-gigs, far from being Celtic fertility symbols later suppressed by the Church, they are found almost exclusively on Church buildings, and the oldest of them date to the Norman period.

What about early Irish sagas? It’s often naively presumed that tales situated by their authors in pre-Christian Ireland are straightforward sources for pre-Christian practices and values. In fact, these sources are immensely complex, and often profoundly infused with an explicitly Christian worldview. When Páraic Breathnach was asked on RTE’s Cúrsaí Ealaíne, for example, whether the pagan Irish had a superior culture to later Christian culture he replied, ‘Bhí scéalta níos deise acu’ (‘Their stories were more beautiful’). But the truth is, we simply don’t have their stories. What survive are stories told in a thoroughly Christian context, which may include elements of an older oral tradition, but they are nevertheless stories told by Christians, as part of a deeply biblical culture. (Lebor gabála Érenn, for example, the literary basis for the St Patrick’s Day parade on the invasions of Ireland, is clearly informed at every level by the Scriptures and St Augustine).

This brings us to the second weakness in contemporary use of Ireland’s pagan past: it leads us to treat medieval Irish sources as mere intermediaries. If contemporary Ireland is grateful to early Irish monks for anything, it’s that they ‘preserved pre-Christian stories’. We take the texts they put together and use them as a ticket to fairyland, rather than pausing to consider the motives and methods of their medieval composers. In our attempts to see back into the pagan past, we end up looking over the heads of medieval Irish literati, and in doing so we really miss a trick.

Dr Elizabeth Boyle’s book, History and Salvation in Medieval Ireland, more than any other publication I know, bucks this trend by highlighting the textual richness of medieval Irish culture, and its complex, fascinating use of the Bible

Boyle, as she makes clear in the Acknowledgements, is not a believer, but she appreciates – as not all Celticists do – that the texts and manuscripts she studies are the product of a Bible-believing context, and she allows them to speak in all their richness, bringing out all the artful biblical allusions ignored by many other scholars. And, against the widespread tendency to approach the Irish past with little attention to historical detail, Boyle assiduously dates every text and manuscript she discusses. (All of this might sound intimidating to the general reader, but Boyle’s writing is lucid and accessible).

The book consists of five chapters, whose enticing titles are worth quoting in full: ‘In the Egypt of this our island: Reflections on Jewish history’, ‘Absalom, Absalom!: Rewriting the David story’, ‘More than honey to my mouth: The psalms’, ‘The green-grassed land of the Assyrians: Constructing the history of Babylon’, and ‘Twilight of the idols’.

The chapter on the Psalms on its own covers an immense range of fascinating literary texts and artefacts. Boyle points out at the outset just how omnipresent the Psalms were in medieval Irish culture: ‘It is reasonable to assert that the vast majority of literate people in medieval Ireland would have known the psalms by heart’ (p. 85). They were the base text for the teaching of writing and reading, as evidenced by the Springmount Bog wax tablets, dating to the sixth or early seventh century. Apart from these scratchings, medieval Ireland yields many other interesting Psalm-manuscripts, like the Milan Psalter, richly glossed in ninth-century Irish, and the Southampton Psalter, illustrated with images both of David (understood as author of the Psalms) and of Christ (understood as the Psalms’ prophetic referent).

David and the defeated Goliath in the Southampton Psalter, made in tenth-century Ireland

Irish monks weren’t just copying Psalms, though, they were thinking carefully about their meaning, and doing such thinking in the company of Jerome, Isidore, Bede, Augustine, and others. One particularly fascinating example of such exegesis is the ‘Old Irish Treatise on the Psalter’, a vernacular question-and-answer commentary on the Psalms, dating to the ninth century. Its author memorably compares the Psalter to a city surrounded by a single wall but containing many individual buildings:

[The Psalter has] the form of one book without, and many psalms within, like some glorious building with many shrines, with various treasure-houses, with special keys to open each one of them’ (p. 93).

This Irish love for the Psalms is shown most charmingly in a Middle Irish poem in which the Psalter is figured as a woman, indeed a lover. The poet had grown up with this lover, meeting her at the age of seven (when Psalter study would have begun for clerical students), but now she is old, ‘wearied with toil and travel, grimed with dust, [but] wise still’ (p. 115). The poem concludes with a prayer that the King – i.e. God – might refresh the beauty of this monk and his beloved Psalms in heaven.

The other chapters yield similar gems, fascinating samples of biblically influenced Old and Middle Irish writing (all translated, sometimes for the first time): an eleventh-century Irish poem about the origin of idols, expanding on Wisdom 14:15; a short narrative about three junior clerics and their kitten; a twelfth-century poem about Ahaziah, Athaliah, Jehoash and all that messy business; descriptions of Babylon in a twelfth-century vernacular poem; didactic poems giving brief synopses of the reigns of kings of Israel and Judah; Middle Irish explanations of the origins of the Hebrew, Greek, and ogam alphabets; and 'Saltair na Rann', the long poem recounting salvation history, dating to about the year 1000.

My favourite text discussed by Boyle, though, is the retelling in Irish of the David vs Goliath story, clearly influenced by stories about the boyhood deeds of Cú Chulainn, with all the cheek and bravado that makes those stories so enjoyable (although, as Boyle points out, the Cú Chulainn stories were not merely 'native' constructions, but were likely influenced themselves by biblical narratives):

David son of Jesse; the best king who ever came into the world was the same David. It is he who made the three fifties to praise Christ; it is he who killed Goliath, champion of the Philistines, in the time of Saul, son of Kish, king of the people of God [ríg thúaithi Dé], of the children of Israel. Fighting against Goliath was challenging then, i.e. seven cubits his size, a crested helmet upon his head, an iron breastplate around him - five thousand ounces in it - bronze greaves around his legs, an iron sword in his hand. Each day he used to kill fifty men of the people of God in single combat. Jesse, then, the father of David, it is he who was a counsellor to Saul. Saul's stewards, then, were going to seek a champion against Goliath. At that time, David was a lad shepherding.

'Where are you going?' said David to the stewards.

'To seek warriors against the champion'.

'Would that you did not go there', said David. 'The truth of God or of men is not with you. If it was I who came, I would kill him before the men of the world'.

'This is what the son of Jesse said', said the steward to Saul.

'Silly boy', he said, 'and a fool. The reason I put him to my sheep was to save that boy from that challenge. Let someone go to him'. Nine men go to him.

'Come to speak with the king! If you do not come willingly, you will go by force'. With that, he cast the nine of them down and he ties them up. 'Come up with us and we'll be grateful'.

'I will go of my own accord', he said. He goes with them. 'Will you go', said Saul, 'against the champion?'

'I will go indeed', he said.

'What valorous deeds have you ever done?' said Saul.

'A great lion came to me', he said, 'one time in the desert. It took a sheep from the flock. I ran to it so that I went onto its back and so that I ripped its jaws apart as far as its throat'.

'A fine feat!' said Saul. 'How will you go against the champion?'

'With my sling and my crook'.

'A bad weapon against a champion', said his father.

David goes then against him in the ford [isin n-áth]. David puts a stone in his sling; he shot it into the air. The stone made its noise while going up. Goliath looks up. His helmet came away from his head; the stone struck his forehead so that it was in the middle of his skull. After that David plies the crook upon Goliath's head so that he made fragments of it [imrid íar sin in camóic for a chend co nderna brúar de]. That was David's first combat (pp. 56-58).

While the rest of Ireland looks past our medieval Irish writers to peer into Celtic twilight, Boyle pays these writers the attention they deserve, and what emerges is deeply interesting and substantial, and worthy of our study.

Like many academic books, History and Salvation in Medieval Ireland is surprisingly expensive: £145 in hardback, £39 on Kindle, and £43 in paperback. Whether or not you get your own copy, though, you should certainly borrow it from your local library. Anyone interested in the history of Ireland or the history of the Bible’s reception will read it with immense pleasure.

A version of this review appeared originally in Leaven Magazine.