We know of course, the story of how Tristan won Iseult. I recently spoke to chef Rick Stein about it following Van Morrison’s superlative concert on Cyprus Avenue. The tale is the essence of Cornish culture, although the story is essentially British and ancient Pictish or Pretanic in origin. Tristan (Trystan, Drystan, Drustanus) is almost certainly taken from the legendary Pictish Chronicle. Drest or Drust  frequently appears as the name of several ancient Pictish kings far to the northwest of Britain (modern “Scotland”). Drustanus is merely Drust rendered into Latin. It may have originated from an ancient legend regarding a Pictish king who slew a giant in the distant past, which had spread throughout the British Isles, or the name may also come from a sixth-century Pictish saint who bore another form of the name – or it may have migrated upwards from the southwest due to the fame of the legends of King Arthur.

Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson has translated from the old Welsh as follows: “At that time Trystan ap Tralluch and Esyllt the wife of March ap Meirchion went wandering as outlaws in the wood of Celyddon, with Golwg-Hafddydd as her handmaid, and Y Bach Bychan as his page carrying pasties and wine, together with them; and a bed of leaves was made for them. And March ap Meirchion went to Arthur to complain of Trystan and to entreat him to avenge the insult against him, since he was more nearly related to Arthur than Trystan was; for March ap Meirchion was cousin to Arthur, ‘to seek for you either satisfaction or its refusal.’ And then they surrounded the wood of Celyddon.

Now it was a magic property in Trystan that whoever drew blood from him died, and whoever he drew blood from died. And when Esyllt heard the noise and the talking on all sides of the wood, she trembled in Trystan’s arms, and Trystan asked her why she trembled, and she said it was through fear for him…And then Trystan rose up and took his sword in his hand, and made for the fight as fast as he could, til he met March ap Meirchion, and March ap Meirchion said, ‘Even though I kill him, it would cause my own death.’ And at that the other men said, ‘Shame on us if we bestir ourselves for him.’ And then Trystan went through the three armies unharmed.

Then March ap Meirchion went to Arthur again, and complained to him that he got neither compensation for his wife nor its refusal. ‘I know no council for you but this,’ said Arthur, ‘to send harpers to play for him from far off; and after that to send poets and eulogists to praise him and turn him from his anger and his wrath..’ And this they did. And after that Trystan called the minstrels to him and gave them handfuls of gold and silver; and then the chief peacemaker was sent to him, that is, Gwalchmai ap Gwyar….

And then Trystan and Gwalchmai went to Arthur, and there Arthur made peace between him and March ap Meirchion. And Arthur spoke with the two of them in turn, but neither of them was willing to be without Esyllt; and then Arthur awarded her to the one of them while the leaves should be on the trees and the other while the leaves should not be on the trees, the married man should choose. And he chose when the leaves should not be on the trees, because the nights would be the longest at that time, and Arthur told that to Esyllt. And she said, ‘Blessed be the judgement and he who gave it;’ and Esyllt sang this song:

‘There are three trees that are good,

Holly and ivy and yew;

They put forth leaves while they last,

And Trystan shall have me as long as he lives.’

And so March ap Meirchion lost Esyllt for good.”

And then there were the linkage between the Arthurian tales and the story of Suibhne Geilt, one of a series of sagas engendered by the Great Battle of Moira 637AD. Nikolai Tolstoy in The Quest for Merlin writes “fortunately, it is not necessary to rely solely on deductive analysis to show that Geoffrey of Monmouth did not invent the Merlin stories, since there is evidence that much of it was already in existence well before his time.” Tolstoy names three other bodies of work as providing such evidence.

“Thus the four distinct versions of the Prophet’s career have survived; the Vita Merlini of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Welsh Myrddin poems, the Lailoken episodes, and the story of Sweeney’s frenzy. That they all ultimately represent the same saga (though obviously with accretions and distortions acquired along the way) is abundantly clear and is accepted by the best authorities.

In his own translation of Buile Suibhne, Seamus Heaney says “It is possible….to dwell upon Sweeney’s easy sense of cultural affinity with both Western Scotland and Southern Ireland as exemplary for all men and women in contemporary Ulster, or to ponder the thought that the Irish invention may well have been the development of a British original, residually present in the tale of the madman called Alan”.

I myself believe that if the citizens of Northern Ireland could become more fully aware of the extent of their inter-related characteristics, not just with each other, but with other peoples of these islands then a symbiosis of their respective identities could be established which would provide a solid foundation for the peace they so richly deserve.

Links

Part 1

Part 2

To be continued

Part 2

The Inklings of course have now entered literary history, and more has been written about them than I will ever know. A literary society of that name was founded in about 1931 by an Oxford University College Graduate named Tangye Lean. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien both attended its meetings and when Lean left Oxford the name was applied to that group of friends, all of whom were male and Christian and most of whom were interested in literature. Two of the most prominent remained C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, whose friendship has become legendary.

Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien’s authorised biographer, was born in Oxford in 1946 and spent most of his life in that city. He read English language and literature at Keble College and met Professor Tolkien on a number of occasions. For some years he worked for the BBC as a radio producer and broadcaster. He felt that perhaps Northernness was the shared insight which started it all. He had written that, since early adolescence, Lewis had been captivated by Norse mythology, and when he found in Tolkien another who delighted in the mysteries of Edda and the complexities of Volsung legend it was clear that they would have a lot to share. Or perhaps their experiences in the First World War bound them together.

In Surprised by Joy, Lewis wrote that friendship with Tolkien “marked the breakdown of two old prejudices. At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist, and at my first coming into the English faculty, (explicitly) never to trust a Philologist. Tolkien was both.” Lewis, of course, the son of a Belfast solicitor, had been brought up by an Ulster Protestant, but during adolescence he professed agnosticism. In Tolkien he found a person of wit and intellectual verve who was, nevertheless, a devout Christian and it was Tolkien’s influence which led to Lewis’ eventual conversion. Yet Tolkien always regretted that Lewis had not become a Roman Catholic like himself, but had begun to attend his local Anglican Church, resuming the religious practices of his childhood.

Carpenter says that “Tolkien had a deep resentment for the Church of England which he sometimes extended to his buildings, declaring that his appreciation of their beauty was marred by his sadness that they had been, in his opinion, perverted from their rightful Catholicism. When Lewis published his prose allegory telling the story of his conversation under the title The Pilgrims Regress, Tolkien thought the title ironical. ‘Lewis would regress,’ he said, ‘He would not re-enter Christianity by a new door, but by the old one: at least in the sense that in taking it up again, or re-awaken the prejudices so sedulously planted in childhood and boyhood. He would become again a Northern Ireland Protestant.”’

I am not so sure. Speaking to Roman Catholic friends on the question of Christian Reunification, Lewis said, “I will begin by saying that, whether for good or ill, the nature of the disunity has changed with the centuries: it has become more clearly or strictly theological. I have been well placed for noticing this because I grew up in a very archaic society – that of Northern Ireland – amidst conditions which had even then long since passed away in England.” And again in his Meditation on the Third Commandment, regarding the proposed formation of a Christian Party, Lewis said that, “The demon inherent in every party is at all times ready enough to disguise himself as the Holy Ghost; the formation of a Christian Party means handing over to him the most efficient makeup we can find. If ever Christian men can be brought to think treachery and murder, the lawful means of establishing the regime they desire, and fake trials, religious persecution and organised hooliganism the lawful means of maintaining it, it will surely, be by just such a process as this. The History of the late medieval pseudo-Crusaders, of the Covenanters, of the Orangemen, should be remembered.”

By the mid 1940s Lewis was receiving a good deal of publicity. “Too much,” according to Tolkien, “for his or any of our tastes” in connection with his Christian writings, the Problem of Pain and The Screwtape Letters. Tolkien perhaps felt, as he observed his friend’s increasing fame in this respect, rather as if a pupil has speedily overtaken his master to achieve almost unjustified fame. He once referred to Lewis, not altogether flatteringly, as “Everyman’s Theologian.” Yet, if these thoughts were at all on Tolkien’s mind in the early 1940’s they were well below the surface. He still had an almost unbounded affection for Lewis – indeed still cherished the occasional hope that his friend might one day become a Roman Catholic. And the Inklings continued to provide much delight and encouragement to him.

“Hwaet! We Inclinga,” he wrote in parody in the opening lines of Beowulf, “on aerdagum searopancolra snyttru gehierdon.”

“Lo! We have heard in old days of the wisdom of the cunning- minded Inklings; how those wise ones sat together in their deliberations, skilfully reciting learning and song-craft, earnestly mediating. That was true joy!”

And it was to Beowulf that I owe the pleasure of my own introduction to Professor Tolkien through his famous essay Beowulf – The Monsters and the Critics, which of course was one of the first to show that the construction of the poem was rather more subtle than had been thought. I first read of it in 1963 in a Penguin Classic Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, so that I was further prompted to buy Professor Tolkien’s own edition of his work. And I wondered at Gawain’s identification with Cuchulainn.

C.S.Lewis once remarked that it was a shame that the stories of Cuchulainn and the Red Branch Knights were not better known in his native Ulster. I am unsure why this should be, especially as they were probably written in Bangor and with their possible connections to Arthurian legend. Ireland’s rich folklore has been carried to other parts of Europe and in return European folk tales of all times have made their way to Ireland. But few bodies of stories have exhibited such an international appeal as those comprising Arthurian literature.

When the tales of the deeds of King Arthur and his companions first hit Europe, they were a spectacular success; indeed some clergymen expressed alarm that the populace might prefer the stories of King Arthur and his Knights to the teachings of the Church. Names such as Merlin, Excalibur, Camelot, Morgan le Fay, Tristan, Lancelot, Avalon became some of the most enduring ever known. Arthur I met again in the Gododdin, Tristan as Drust, son of the Pictish king Talorc, who ruled in Northern Britain about 780, who was placed with Merlin in the Caledonian Forest and whose legends were later given a new setting in Cornwall. Merlin I met again in Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, his chilling study of the evil banality of academic politics in which his figure of Merlin is partly based on Yeats, as Gandalf in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, as Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, and more recently as Dumbledore in J K Rowling’s Harry Potter. Mordred, the Dark Lord, is everywhere.

To be continued

The Inklings – Mythological Voyagers

Part 1

Keir Hardie

Could I first of all thank you for inviting me to speak at the Carleton Summer School, renowned as William Carleton is for his interest in the traits and stories of the Irish peasantry. The link of course is that I myself an Irish peasant who would like to tell you of his own traits and stories.

I was born in Bangor, County Down, on 28th June 1944 , my father being English and my mother Scottish, so I am definitively British . My two grandmothers were Irish and were sisters. They were great-nieces of Edward Sloan, the Weaver Poet, the Bard of Conlig, and were collateral in descent from Sir Hans Sloane of Killyleagh (b). The Annals of the Four Masters, under the year 1015, record the death of Maolphádraig Ua Sluaghadhaigh, sage of Ireland, one of the greatest of our clan. We are the Cruthin of Dalriada, miscalled Milesians.

My Aunt Maggie was Welsh in name and in origin. My Scottish grandfather Robert Kerr was a socialist and follower of Keir Hardie. My English grandfather Samuel was so High Church that my Aunt Maggie, who was Roman Catholic, thought that his views were extreme and for the whole of her life worshipped God in her garden. My two Grannies originally belonged to a strict Brethren sect which was so exclusive that even God was denied entry. My great–grandmother Lambie’s family originated from Islay and spoke Ulster Gaelic, which I call Ulidian.

I was reared in the little village of Conlig which lies on the Old Monk’s Road connecting the ancient monasteries of Bangor and Movilla in Newtownards. My friend Mary O’Fee traced this road to the sea in Bangor, and her son James has stimulated my abiding interest in C S Lewis. It is said that a young monk in those days was grazing cattle in the area when a local king evicted him so that he could let his horses run free on the monastic lands. So the Monk called on the name of the Lord and changed the horses into stone. So it was that the district became known in Gaelic as Gort-na-Lig, the Field of Stone and part of it Conlig, of The Stone of the Hound, (Cuchulainn) (c), an old Standing Stone which can be seen near the village to this day.

Conlig was a village of family and friends. My father and mother ran the family store, selling everything from a needle to an anchor and I used to deliver the Belfast Telegraph for them, visiting along the way Danny O’Neill , the artist who lived with his family in 4 Hall Street, and who painted there with George Campbell and Gerard Dillon. I also passed Conlig House or Little Clandeboye, so beloved in the boyhood memories of William James Pirrie, who became Lord Mayor of Belfast in 1896 and built the Titanic in 1912.

Helen’s Tower, Conlig

Then I walked along the Tower Road, which led to Helen’s Tower built by Lord Dufferin in 1861, constructed, perhaps, with the aid of labourers made destitute by the recent Great Famine in Ireland. It enshrines today the memory of Helen, the Dowager Lady Dufferin who died in June 1867. The Tower is a particularly beautiful one. One room contains poems, written about it, by Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, the Duke of Argyll, Rudyard Kipling and Helen, Lady Dufferin herself. A replica was built in Theipval, France in memory of those who fought and died in the First World War. These included Aunt Maggie’s fiancé, and my grannies’ cousin, William Sloan, who died on the first day of Battle of the Somme, 1st July, 1916.

But in those days Conlig was a typical little Irish village and whatever the modern religious affiliations of its inhabitants, we were all country people or peasants at heart. Memories of the fairy folk or Sidhe pervaded our lives in superstition and story. When it was decided to build an extension to the village, which was mainly of small houses and cottages, they chose Turner’s Field. However, in the middle of Turner’s Field stood a Fairy Thorn which the villagers protected day and night. It is still standing today in its own reduced field surrounded by modern housing. Sacred Trees, indeed, were an important element of Early Irish tradition. In 1004 a great battle was fought Craebh Tulcha, now Crew Hill near Glenavy, between the Ulidian people and the Tyrone O’Neills in which many of the princes of Ulster were killed. In 1099 another battle was fought between the same parties at the same place, the invaders again gained the day and afterwards cut down the Craebh, the Sacred Tree. This desecration was avenged by the Ulidians when they cut down the Sacred Tree of the Tyrone O’Neill’s at Tullaghoge.

As a boy my favourite book was Adamnan’s Vita Columbae, Life of Columba edited from Dr Reeves’s text with an introduction on Early Irish Church history by J.T. Fowler, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1894. I was intrigued as one biographer translated Adamnan’s name as Adamson. Within its footnotes I found my first reference to William Carleton. His assertion that the bulk of the uneducated peasantry really believed that the priests had the power of translating Protestants into asses, I found deeply worrying. I loved the stories of Saint Comgal of Bangor, of the British Saint Finnian or Uinnian of Movilla and of Adamnan’s association with Aldfrith, the Northumbrian prince who succeeded his brother Ecgfrith as king in 685.

My other favourite books included Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica and the Northumbrian addendum known as the ‘Continuation of Bede.’ Bede stated that the five written languages of Britain were “Anglorum, Brittonum, Scotorum, Pictorum, et Latinorum” and the four spoken tongues to be “Brittonum, Pictorum, Scotorum, et Anglorum.” Some of the Saxon chronicles speak of English, Brit-Welsh, Scottish, Pictish and Book-Latin. In the Amhra of Colmcille is a stanza referring to the labours of the Saint for thirty years among “the people of Alba to the Ictian Sea (British Channel), the Gael, Cruthin, Saxo-Brits.” These languages and peoples all remain important to me as integral parts of the hidden heritage of lowland Scotland and of the British Islands in general, the islands of the Pretani.

Furthermore, the ”Continuation of Bede” placed Oengus, King of the Picts, in the mid eighth century within the tradition of the Brytenwalda, which means ruler of Britain and all its islands, including Ireland. The Roman legacy in Britain had created two quite different zones. The Pictish federation to the north of the Forth/Clyde line appears to have been created by frontier conditions. So the Picts owed their identity to the Roman frontier in Roman Britain and were as much Britons as the Votadini, whose great poem, the Gododdin, written in British or Welsh is the oldest Scottish poem. The limes therefore, which had the major role in the shaping of North Britain was not Hadrian’s Wall but the Antonine one.

Ever since childhood, I have, indeed, read a lot but the single most important event for me was my meeting with Kerry (d) at a Titanic function with her Mum and Dad, when I was Lord Mayor of Belfast in 1997. It was so good to meet people who knew Latin, the Venerable Bede and the history of Roman Britain. And their sitting room reminded me immediately of the smoke-filled meeting place of the Inklings at Oxford.

Editor’s notes

(a) in Co Tyrone

(b) Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753). Wikipedia has – an Ulster-Scot physician and collector, notable for bequeathing his collection to the British nation which became the foundation of the British Museum. He also invented Drinking chocolate and gave his name to Sloane Square in London, and Sir Hans Slone Square in his birthplace Killyleagh. i.e. Killyleagh, Co Down.

(c) Cuchulainn is Cúchulainn or Cú Chulainn, the great hero of the greatest Irish epic poem ‘The Cattle Raid of Cooley’, one of the ‘Ulster Cycle’. See Sétanta, Friday, January 12. 2007.

(d) Kerry is today Ian’s wife

To be continued: