Places of Myth in Ireland

Andrea Binelli Places of Myth in Ireland According to mythology, the Druid Amergin and his Milesian comrades, direct ancestors of the Irish, were the last tribe to invade Ireland, around 1700-1500 BC. After bitter controversies and a few sea-storms, they eventually managed to displace the Tuatha de Danaan, the magic people who had control of the island at the time of their arrival. It is reported that, after being defeated, the Tuatha de Danaan retired beneath the ground, where they still live as fairies, in symbiotic relationship with the landscape. Such an epilogue can be read as the archetype of two major features of the Irish identity: the emotional empathy between the people and their landscape, and the idiosyncratic blend of land and myth. This enthralling interaction with the lore of place is a predominant element of the Irish ‘habitus’, it being conceived by Pierre Bourdieu as a ‘system of durable, transposable dispositions’, comprising the ‘structuring of practices and representations’.1 In particular, the landscape, seen as ‘a synthesis of natural and cultural elements’,2 was conceptualized as a sort of trans-historical, speaking mirror-image, occasionally taking on from the Tuathas the status of mythological ‘Other’, and providing Irish writers with a crucial meta-text to their works. Writers, anthropologists, politicians, and critics alike have repeatedly mapped the island in order to imagine, to shape, or just to figure out ensuing notions of Irishness. Accordingly, the landscape has been considered a stable signifier of the so-called ‘country of the mind’ and it has guaranteed a sense of continuity throughout Irish History.3 With respect to this, Norman Vance has argued: ‘There is much to be said for basing notions of Irish tradition not on language but on responses to topography and geographical location’.4 Indeed, cognitive mapping still impinges upon any form of Irish literary representations as well as upon their reception, and it indisputably keeps on 1 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 72. 2 F.H.A. Aalen, Man and the Landscape in Ireland (London: Academic Press, 1978), p. 9. 3 ‘And when we look for the history of our sensibilities I am convinced, as Professor J.C. Beckett was convinced about the history of Ireland generally, that it is to what he called the stable element, the land itself, that we must look for continuity’. Seamus Heaney, ‘The Sense of Place’, in Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-78 (London/Boston: Faber and Faber, 1980), pp. 131-49 (p. 140). 4 Norman Vance, Irish Literature: A Social History. Tradition, Identity and Difference (Dublin: Four Courts, 1999), p. 7. 156 Andrea Binelli affecting the criteria and the set of values informing the national canon- construction. Proofs of this attitude are already noticeable in Amergin’s incantations, as recorded in the manuscript Leabhar Gabhála (The Book of Invasions). In mythical times, the chief bard of the Milesians and supposedly first poet of Ireland already worshipped nature to the point of undergoing a thorough identification with it: I am the wind which breathes upon the sea, / I am the wave of the ocean, / I am the murmur of the billows, / I am the ox of the seven combats, / I am the vulture upon the rocks, / I am a beam of the sun, / I am the fairest of plants, / I am a wild boar in valour, / I am a salmon in the water, / I am a lake in the plain…5 Amergin’s pantheism was going to be rehearsed for four centuries by Gaelic bards, especially in Dinnseanchas (also spelled Dindsenchas and Dinnsheanchas), topographical poems or tales, which, as stated by Seamus Heaney, ‘relate the original meanings of place names and constitute a form of mythological etymology’.6 All the more remarkable about this genre of writing is that it initiated places and place-names into their vocation as first guardians of a cultural legacy. Hills and rivers, routes and forests, squares and cottages have since grown into perceptible signs and symbols within an intricate semiotic network. No analysis of Irish literary production, no matter what age it belongs to, can neglect this inheritance. However, such an intense perception of place came to suffer a severe trauma in the Nineteenth Century, as the English language was imposed on Irish people. Bereft of their own language, the Irish found themselves unable to decode their massive cultural heritage, encompassing mythologies and the ciphers of the places. In this connection, Declan Kiberd recognized that ‘a life conducted through the medium of English became itself a sort of exile’.7 A linguistic estrangement, diminishing the sense of belonging to a place, was also the main thematic concern in Brian Friel’s Translations (1980).8 Friel’s play showed how the erasure of the Irish toponymy, and its replacement by an English one, was meant to choke the breath of a place, and to alienate the genius loci from their inhabitants. By the same token, in The Rough Field (1972), John Montague had expressed the painful sense of mutilation produced by ‘A Lost Tradition’, and he addressed the landscape as ‘a manuscript / We had lost the skill to read, / A part 5 Astley Cooper Partridge, Language and Society in Anglo-Irish Literature (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1984), p. 46. 6 Heaney, ‘Sense of Place’, p. 131. 7 Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Vintage, 1996), p. 2. 8 Brian Friel, Translations (Derry: Field Day, 1981). .

Load more