Part I : The Story of the Manuscripts

SOME PLACES on this old earth on which we dwell seem always to have had a history and Tara is one of those places. It is not vastly impressive today but from the most ancient of times it had held a place in the hearts of Irishmen unequaled and unique. It stands for ancient splendors and legendary deeds, for memories of kings and champions and early Christian Saints, for battles with the Danes and the ‘41 rebellion; for the men of '98 and the Great Emancipator - indeed to write adequately the story of Tara would he to write much of the history of Ireland and the history of Ireland is one of the longest histories in the world.
This green hill where once stood the acropolis of Tara has lain ruined and desolate for almost fourteen hundred years. One may justly ask how so much is known about what happened so long ago. That is a romance in itself and one which we propose to tell. Let us go back to the third century of our era when the great Cormac Mac Art was High King at Tara. We are told : “He called together the chroniclers of Ireland and bade them write the chronicles in one hook and he entered the exploits and synchronisms of the kings of Ireland with the kings and emperors of the world and the kings of the provinces with the monarchs of Ireland." In other words, he collected and collated the histories of Ireland up to his time.

Two hundred years later St. Patrick came to Tara and with his remarkable insight into the Irish character appreciated the importance of the histories and laws of his adopted country. He gathered together the historians, the lawmakers and the poets and, being British, formed them into a committee. This committee studied and revised the tracts and treatises delivered to them. The poets put a thread of poetry round the matter that it might endure-and endure it did. The laws stood as common law throughout much of Ireland till the sixteenth century; the histories and poems are still, to-day, exercising and diverting the learned and entertaining the uncritical amongst us. St. Patrick also fell in with a loquacious and truly aged member of the Fianna, a dicentenarian whose age we may say, did not worry the original recorder of the story and must not he allowed to divert us from our theme now.
This old man entertained him greatly with stories of the Fianna and deeds of long ago-so much so indeed that the Saint was agitated lest it should he a " destruction of devotion and a dereliction of prayer." His guardian angels, however, reassured him: " Holy cleric," they said, no more than a third part of their stories do these ancient warriors tell by reason of forgetfulness and lack of memory, but let them he written down, for to the companies and nobles of a later time to give ear to these stories will he for a pastime," and Patrick bade his scribe, Brogan, write down the tales lest they should he lost. A new order was emerging with the spread of Christianity and a sense of urgency to record the old before it perished is apparent in this tale; a sense of urgency we find appearing again and again impelling our historians in the face of changing times, of invasions and disasters to ever fresh efforts to record the old as it is threatened by the new.

With Saint Patrick's example before them the early monks became keen antiquarians: " There was not an illustrious church in Erin that had not a great hook of history named from it and from the saints who sanctified it."

Alongside the monastic schools flourished the secular Bardic Colleges with their lengthy courses and elaborate curricula from which graduated the Ollamhs and Files (professors and poets) to be found in all the great palaces and houses of the kingdom, keeping the histories and genealogies of the great families with exactitude.

In 795 came the Danes raiding and plundering and for two centuries they devastated the land, burning and destroying the monasteries and colleges, and invading and occupying the Duns and Raths of the nobility. Many libraries went up in flames. Many beautiful books were 'drowned', or otherwise destroyed. Much, however, miraculously survived and the old traditions of learning continued on, to be encouraged and fostered by Brian Boru during the comparative stability of his reign. In the eleventh century the monastic libraries were re-established; the annals were brought up to date; the bardic schools again flourished and Tighernach the annalist could again write of "The countless illuminated books of the men of Erin," which he was able to consult.

During the twelfth century this revival of learning continued and it is from a manuscript of the time, The Book of Leinster, transcribed about 1150, we get our earliest copy of the "Dindsenchas," a topographical tract which has been much used by writers on Tara. This series of poems and prose pieces deals very fully if sometimes rather enigmatically with the ruins on Tara in the ancient writer's day and is the source of the various names signposted on the monuments to-day.
The Norman invasion made little impression on the bardic tradition except, perhaps, as we have said, to renew again the impulse to record what was ancient while it was yet remembered. Throughout the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the hereditary bards continued to exercise themselves on the intricate genealogies and family histories of the clans they served and the old legends and poems were ever welcome in the houses of the chieftains.

With the sixteenth century came collapse. The dissolution of the monasteries scattered ecclesiastical libraries far and wide over Europe and the terrible wars of Elizabeth reduced the country to poverty. The bardic traditions indeed survived into the seventeenth century to finally disappear with the collapse of the Irish aristocracy on which they depended.

The seventeenth century saw the break-up of the complex and ancient Celtic civilization and everything seemed lost; patrons gone, books scattered, scholars in exile and poverty everywhere. A handful of men alone realized the urgency of the position and set themselves to retrieve what they could.

Their efforts are a saga in themselves and we should like to write much of Colgan working in Louvain; of tile Four Masters in Donegal; of Keating traveling in disguise through Ireland; of Duald MacFirbis and John Lynch and many others. However, it must suffice to name them and to say their efforts through multitudinous difficulties saved for us the greater part of the early history of Ireland we know to-day and gave us that continuity of scholarship which we are trying to stress in this short review.

With the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came the foundation and growth of the great libraries in Dublin. Enlightened men saw the value of a literature preserved so long and through such tribulations and set themselves to collect together what manuscripts they could find in Ireland and abroad Though much was lost, much miraculously remained and was gradually assembled and catalogued. In the collections of the Royal Irish Academy, the National Library of Ireland, the Franciscan College and the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, the nation possesses a vast and unique body of manuscripts varying from time-stained vellums of the sixth century onwards, to scraps of poetry preserved in exercise books in the nineteenth century. Printed books in Irish were rare until comparatively recent times. The histories and stories we have were copied and re-copied laboriously by scribes and were of necessity limited in numbers. That so many have survived is, perhaps, the most remarkable part of the whole story-an unfinished story still, for to-day the cataloguing and transcribing continues in the libraries. Scholars are still working on the manuscripts. The Folklore Commission is still collecting unwritten material from the shanachies and story-tellers of the West.

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From 'The Legend of Tara' Elizabeth Hickey / Dundalgan Press, Ltd. 1996