Limerick Rake (I used the Irish Anthem pretty recently, but this one has a whole stanza about grammar and Euclid, so clearly on theme for the blog. Ignore the fact that like half the recordings skip that verse for more lasses...)
Mar 17– “The Poetry of The Celtic Races” by Ernest Renan, translated by WG Hutchinson (1896?)
Summary: Some French dude really likes the Irish. Happy Saint Patrick's Day!
Commentary: So for Saint Patrick's Day, we get a Frenchman writing about Ireland instead of one of the Irish or Irish adjacent authors that're actually in T5FSOB? Thomas Moore has around 10 poems in one of the volumes, and I know I read some Johnathon Swift a week or two ago. Although, there really aren't as many Irish authors as I would've expected. Yeats is totally absent, and a fairly uncontroversial choice, but there were not shortage of other options at that point. Also almost no Irish mythology/folktales (this essay is all I've found), despite having a variety of others. I'm not going to pretend there aren't plenty of groups omitted by Elliot (I think there's about a half a dozen women total in the collection, and anything south or east of Italy might as well be Mars) but this wasn't one I was expecting.
All that aside, I learned that the Irish have a plausible, but verified, claim of being the first Europeans in North America.
Did they not have a glimpse too of that great land, the vague memory of which seems to pursue them, and which Columbus was to discover, following the traces of their dreams?
Columbus "discovered" the Bahamas, which is about as far as you can get from Iceland and still be in North America, but sure, same thing, Renan.
Also, despite being mentioned nine times in today's reading, it isn't really about him. I was considering giving Elliot a pass when he came up, but no.
Perhaps the profoundest instinct of the Celtic peoples is their desire to penetrate the unknown. [...] The legend tells how, while St. Patrick was preaching about Paradise and Hell to the Irish, they confessed that they would feel more assured of the reality of these places, if he would allow one of them to descend there, and then come back with information.[...] A pit was dug, by which an Irishman set out upon the subterranean journey. Others wished to attempt the journey after him. With the consent of the abbot of the neighbouring monastery, they descended into the shaft, they passed through the torments of Hell and Purgatory, and then each told of what he had seen. Some did not emerge again; those who did laughed no more, and were henceforth unable to join in any gaiety. Knight Owen made a descent in 1153, and gave a narrative of his travels which had a prodigious success.
The best part of this story isn't the opening bit of flattery (and while I'll take the compliment, I think the urge to explore is nearly universal in human cultures), the Irish people going, "We'll believe in Hell when we get there," or the first guy going. It's the others who went to their priest to ask for their Hell-field-trip permission slip. Obviously, they're all down at the pub and find out their buddy got talked into going to Hell. Well, you can't let your friend go to Hell all by himself, so now they have to go too! Very Samwise Gamgee.
It cannot be doubted for a moment, after the able researches of Messrs. Ozanam, Labitte, and Wright, that to the number of poetical themes which Europe owes to the genius of the Celts, is to be added the framework of the Divine Comedy.
Renan: Everything the Italians did, the Irish did first. I'm Irish on one side and Italian on the other, so no loss there, I guess.
One can understand how greatly this invincible attraction to fables must have discredited the Celtic race in the eyes of nationalities that believed themselves to be more serious.
Screw you, "more serious" nationalities! If you can't have a good story, what's the point? Does this explain why so many authors pretend to be Irish? Their countries don't let them have fun writing their books, so they have come hang out with the Celts?
Which is worth more, the imaginative instinct of man, or the narrow orthodoxy that pretends to remain rational, when speaking of things divine? For my own part, I prefer the frank mythology, with all its vagaries, to a theology so paltry, so vulgar, and so colourless, that it would be wronging God to believe that, after having made the visible world so beautiful he should have made the invisible world so prosaically reasonable.
I think you can take out the "when speaking of things divine" and this applies as a general philosophy on most things. If you can't embrace the beauty of things and dream a little, you won't get very far.
All in all, I appreciate Renan's good opinion of the Celts, and I did learn some interesting things, but I still think I'd have preferred something a little more primary. Go read some Seamus Heaney. Éire go Brách!
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