Gaels

“ How long they remained in undisturbed possession of our land we do not know,33 but they were later conquered or driven westward by a very different race of Celtic origin—the Goidels or Gaels, a tall light-haired people, workers in bronze, whose descendants and language are to be found to-day in many parts of Scotland, Ireland, and the Isle of Man. Another Celtic people poured into the country about the fourth century b.c.—the Brythons or Britons, who in turn dispossessed the Gaels, at all events as far as England and Wales are concerned. ”

“ In every respect, save that of ancient kinship, the Welsh and the Gaels differ materially. There is, perhaps, more likeness between the Highlander and the Welshman than between the latter and the Irishman; but even here the distinctions are considerable, and the Gaelic islesman of Barra or Uist is as different a creature from the native of Glamorgan or Caermarthen as though no racial cousinship united them. ”

“ There still exists in England, Wales, and Ireland, a distinct race, possessed of some of the mental characteristics anciently attributed to the Gaels. In mental character the Gaels are excitable, and alternately lively and melancholy. The Gael is also by temperament an excellent soldier, but he needs to be commanded by a race possessed of moral determination, tempered by judgment and foresight. Another characteristic of the Gaelic race is sociability. ”

“ The first words spoken by a Gael on Irish soil, in the ancient legend, were an invocation addressed to Ireland herself by the druid Amorgen: "I entreat the land of Eire," and the land itself, under its three names, Éire, Fódla, and Banbha, when the Gaels arrived, was reigning as queen over the Men of Ireland. Thus we find the clearly formed idea of one nation, composed of diverse peoples, but made one by their affiliation to the land that bore them—the clearest and most concrete conception of nationality to be found in all antiquity. ”

“ One invasion followed another, and an old Irish tract gives the definite Gaelic monarchy as beginning in the fourth century B.C. They drove the earlier peoples, the Iberians, from the stupendous stone forts and earthen entrenchments that guarded cliffs and mountain passes. The name of Erin recalls the ancient inhabitants, who lived on under the new rulers, more in number than their conquerors. The Gaels gave their language and their organisation to the country, while [9] many customs and traditions of the older race lingered on and penetrated the new people. ”

“ It makes a considerable part of the continent Gaelic as well. In consequence of this, the Britons are a later and intrusive population, a population which effected a great and complete displacement of the earlier Gaels over the whole of South Britain, and the southern part of Scotland. ”

“ The Gaels have such a ceaseless consciousness of immortality, that their departed friends are considered as merely absent for a time, and permitted to relieve the hours of separation by occasional intercourse with the objects of their earliest affections.”—See the Notes to Mrs Brunton’s Works. ”

“ I think we have conclusive grounds for believing that the Celtic migrations to Ireland cannot have begun very much, if at all, sooner than the fourth century B.C. Before stating these grounds, let us ask is there any discoverable reason for supposing that the Gaels inhabited Ireland from a time many centuries farther back. I think it possible that those who in modern times have entertained this view have been influenced by the dates assigned to the Gaelic immigration by Irish writers like the Four Masters and Keating. ”

“ Others have received an undeserved canonization, which must be stripped from them before they can be seen in their true colours. Others, again, were adopted by the Norman-French romancers, and turned into the champions of chivalry now known as Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table. But, however disguised, their real nature can still be discerned. The Gaels and the Britons were but two branches of one 252race—the Celtic. In many of the gods of the Britons we shall recognize, with names alike and attributes the same, the familiar features of the Gaelic Tuatha Dé Danann. ”

“ According to the legend detailed in the three sections into which the work was divided, in 1831 an ancient medical man, of extreme Jacobite views, finding himself dying, confided to a young Highland gentleman, who was visiting him in London, the long-hoarded secret that the Gaels "have yet a king." ”

“ They do not seem to have indulged in any enervating services or gross idolatry in the kind of worship which was maintained among the people. We see the moral significance of their influence more fully when we contrast the ancient Gaels with the ancient Greeks. ”

“ Galicia in Eastern Austria and Galicia in Western Spain mark their extreme borders towards the rising and setting sun.
Several centuries before the days of Ambigatos, in the older period of tribal confederation, was the [pg 104] coming of the Gaelic Sons of Milid to Ireland. Tradition places the date between three and four thousand years ago. Yet even after that long interval of isolation the resemblance between the Irish and continental Gaels is perfect; they are tall, solidly built, rather inclined to stoutness; they are fair-skinned, or even florid, easily browned by sun and wind. ”

“ Serf in the east in the northern boundaries of the Brythonic race with Gaels to the north of them. So he may have been a Highland or a Welsh Celt. One or other of the forms of his name has been resolved, apparently with equal ease, into either a Gaelic or a Welsh etymon. Perplexing or unsatisfactory as this undoubtedly is it yet may suggest an explanation. As [43] happens in our own and other times his name would assume various forms according to the dialects or languages of the speakers and writers. ”

“ Literally: "Fooboon to you, O host of the Gaels, not a man of you is alive: the Galls are together-dividing your lands, while ye are [unsubstantial] like a fairy host. The Clan Carthy of Leath Mogha [i.e., Southern Ireland] , and to call them out down to one man, there is not—and sad is the disgrace—one person of them imitating the [old] Gaels," etc.
[19] Yohy is the pronunciation of the Irish Eochaidh, genitive Eochach, or even Eathach. The Eochaidh here alluded to is Eochaidh Muigh-mhea-dhon [Mwee-va-on] , father of Niall of the Nine Hostages. ”

“ England is still to-day the land of the Saxons to the Gael, and its inhabitants are the "Sassenachs"; the Irishman persists in disregarding the coming of the Angles. We may talk of the extinction of the Gaelic tongue, but in his poetry, as in every place-name of stream or hill or townland all over the country, it is about us still. In the poetry we are back in Gaelic Ireland; the old tribal distinctions, the old clan names, meet us on every page. What does the modern man know of Leth Cuinn or Leth Mogha, the ancient divisions of the North and South, or of the stories which gave them birth? ”

“ It may be doubted whether, for practical purposes, the Gaelic will ever come again into general use. But the concerted endeavour by a whole nation to win back its ancient, wellnigh forgotten speech is a most interesting social phenomenon. At all events, both by direct translations of the Gaelic hero epics and by original work in which the Gaelic spirit is transfused through English ballad and other verse forms, a lost kingdom of romance has been recovered and a bright green thread of Celtic poetry runs through the British anthology of the century. ”

“ There is, in most literatures, a meeting-place where the Mythological and the Historic stand in close conjunction, the one dying out as the other takes its place. Only in Ireland we never seem to reach this point; we can never anywhere say, "Here ends legend, here begins history." In all Irish writing we find poetry and fact, dreams and realities, exact detail and wild imagination, linked closely hand in hand. This is the Gael as revealed in his literature. ”

“ Up to the time of the Union the Gaelic language had preserved intact, in spite of Penal Laws and the instruments of repression, all that was most vital in the national spirit. Tales of warriors and heroes, of the long wars of the Gael with the stranger, the sighs of love and the aspirations of devotion, satire and encomium, all the literature and song of a people were enshrined in the native tongue. ”

“ Gaelic belongs to the Celtic group of languages, and the Celtic is itself a branch of the Indo-European or Aryan family of speech; for it has been found that the languages of Europe (with the exception of Turkish, Hungarian, Basque, and Ugro-Finnish) , and those of Asia from the Caucasus to Ceylon,1 resemble each other in grammar and vocabulary to such an extent that they must all be considered as descended from one parent or original tongue. This parent tongue is variously called the Aryan, Indo-European, Indo-Germanic, and even the Indo-Celtic language. ”

“ But we had scarcely gone by the first Highlandman, when another darted out upon us from a by-path, and again broke the sabbath of the woods and waters; and then another followed, so that the morning ride by the Bras d'Or was fringed with Gaelic. Now I have heard many languages in my time, and know how to appreciate the luxurious Greek, the stately Latin, the mellifluous Chinese, the epithetical Sclavic, the soft Italian, the rich Castilian, the sprightly French, sonorous German, and good old English, but candor compels me to say, that I do not think much of the Gaelic. ”

“ For centuries—we do not know how many—before the Norman invasion, the inhabitants had spoken Gaelic. The absence of political unity, the ceaseless wars and forays, must all have tended to fuse the population and obliterate original differences much more than a settled state of society. Yet they exist. The differences in folk-lore are not greater than other differences. Ethnologists know that the so-called Gaelic race is really a compound one, containing in addition to the true Celtic (Aryan) element probably two that are not Aryan—a Mongolian or Finnish element, and an Iberian element. ”

“ Douglas Hyde, an Irish scholar and staunch Protestant, says: “A pious race is the Gaelic race. The Irish Gael is pious by nature. There is not an Irishman in a hundred in whom is the making of an unbeliever. The spirit, and the things of the spirit, affect him more powerfully than the body, and the things of the body... What is invisible for other people is visible for him... ”

“ In Britain, Gaul, and Spain they were displaced and absorbed by the Germanic races. And now for long centuries no Keltic people of importance has maintained its independence; the Gaelic of the Scotch Highlands and of Ireland, the native dialect of the Welsh and of Brittany, being the scanty remains of that great family of related tongues which once occupied more territory than German, Latin, and Greek combined. The solution of the Irish question may lie in the fact that the Irish are fighting against the inevitable ”

“ The Gael, like a tempest, shall burst on the foe!—
The bards shall exult, and the harp string shall tremble,
And love and devotion be poured in the strain;
Ere "Samhain"5 our chiefs shall in Temor assemble—
The "Lion" protect our own pastors again:
The Gael shall redeem every shrine's desecration;
In song shall exhale our warm hearts adoration ”

“ If it had not been for Scandinavian burnings and plunderings, mediæval Gaelic literature would, even now, be so immense that it would command the respect of the world at large. Those who say that the bulk of mediæval Gaelic writings has come down to us—and there are those that have the unspeakable hardihood to say so—must be classed as very prejudiced, or very ignorant of Irish history. ”

“ The Gaelic monuments, the Gaelic usages, the Gaelic superstitions, the Gaelic verses, disdainfully neglected during many ages, began to attract the attention of the learned from the moment at which the peculiarities of the Gaelic race began to disappear. So strong was this impulse that, where the Highlands were concerned, men of sense gave ready credence to stories without evidence, and men of taste gave rapturous applause to compositions without merit. ”

“ Still, the English spoken by three-fourths of the people of Ireland is largely influenced by Gaelic idioms, for most of those expressions which surprise Englishmen are really translations from that Irish which was the language of the speaker's father, grandfather, or great-grandfather—according to the part of the country you may be in—and there have perpetuated themselves, even in districts where you will scarce find a trace of an Irish word. There are, however, also hundreds of Gaelic idioms not reproduced in the English spoken by the people, and it is difficult to render these fitly. ”

“ The question of the Gaelic Revival seems to be really a form of the eternal question of the interdependence of the practical and the ideal in Ireland. Their true relation to each other is one of the hardest lessons the student of our problems has to learn. ”

“ A hero who shall reign supreme O’er Gael from the famous land; Noble, high-born prince of the Gael, Thou’lt in apportioned Albin reign. Hero, who’ll desert no fight, With sword, so long as right remains, Who for the Gael from Greece, subjection Ne’er suffer would at Saxon’s hand. The very roots from whence they grow, Pluck them that thou may’st us deliver; Suffer not a Saxon hence to live, After that thou overcom’st them. Burn all their women, ugly in form; Burn their children, every one ”

“ These Names a connecting Link between the existing Celtic Dialects and the Oriental, Greek, and other Languages, &c. The origin of the Irish nation, or Gael, forms—for numerous reasons—a highly interesting and important subject of inquiry. Of this Nation the very same theories have been maintained as those which have been adopted in some quarters with respect to the North American Indians, the Negroes, and other branches of the Human Family; viz., that they are of a stock aboriginally inferior and distinct, by nature incapable of the virtues of civilization. ”