Many of the tales in
the repertoire of an Irish or Scottish story-teller were so long they would
burn a dip candle down in the telling or last the whole night long. A far cry
from a modern evening of television fare punctuated by sound bites and commercial
breaks!
Where we now move in and out of an virtual world by a trip to the fridge or
to answer the phone, once the seanachie began,"There was,in old times,
and in old times it was, a king of Ireland..." or, perhaps, "There
was a fisherman once in Kinsale who had seven children.." you knew you
were setting sail on "perilous seas in faery lands forlorn" for a
long voyage.
For centuries , many of these fireside tales were once the property of the Celtic
aristocracy, recited in hall or battle-camp by men of the highest rank, known
as filidh, These men were members of a learned order within the privileged class,
guardians of an oral-based culture and living repositories of its history and
mythology.They underwent at least twelve years of intensive training in developing
memory and concentration, and learned literally hundreds of stories and verses,
histories, and genealogies. A fili's repertoire had to include tales of Destructions,
Cattle Raids, Courtships, Battles, Deaths, Feasts, Adventures in the Otherworld,
Elopements and Visions. He was a composer,too, who had mastered the art of crafting
verse in intricate metrical forms.
Such a long education was rewarded well: on graduating, a fili wore a cloak
of crimson and yellow feathers, and carried a golden rod. Each year he received
twenty-one cows, food for himself and twenty attendants. He could keep six horses,
two dogs, and was granted immunity from arrest for any crime save treason or
murder.
The tales he told were even longer than the seanachie's: "serialised",
as we would say, over several evenings in a chieftain's hall, which as Jeffrey
Gantz points out,"would be in the storyteller's interest since during that
time he would be enjoying his host's hospitality."
When the written word was introduced into Ireland at the beginning of the Christian
era, the "Men of Art" were forbidden to write their knowledge down.
So precious was the gift of memory, it was not to be jeopardized, impaled on
the point of a pen. Stories shifted shape like the characters within them, from
extemporaneous prose to complex alliterative verse, here embellished by the
harp, there settling into formulaic passages familiar to all.
Moreover, the spoken word held the power of breath, was literally inspiration,
which was considered a gift from the great goddess Brigit, patron of poetry
and divination. As such, the spoken word could make magic, invoke the divine.
A very fine line existed between story, poetry and incantation in early Celtic
culture. The title fili, generally meaning "poet" or "storyteller"
interchangeably, has also been translated as "weaver of spells." Hence
the famous verse of Amairgen, one of the sons of Mil who invaded Ireland from
Spain, probably about 500 B.C. Standing on the deck of his ship, he declaimed:
As Celtic scholars Alwyn
and Brinley Rees comment, "Potentially the whole of creation is bound up
in Amairgen," and the story is much less about a historical invasion than
it is a cosmogony, Amairgen being the "Word of Skill" that brings
a new world into being. In another "creation incantation" he conjures
fish into the waters of his people's new land:
In the high age of pre-Christian
Celtic culture in Ireland, the filidh were part of a threefold division, along
with the druids and bards. The bardic order like the druids, withered under
the virulent opposition of the Catholic Church; some of the bards sold their
souls to the new order and became purely composers of praise poetry to the highest
bidder. Others took up the wandering road, telling tales and singing songs to
whoever would listen in return for a meal and bed for the night. Thus the great
oral legacy of high Celtic culture became intermingled with the coarser peasant
stock of "Jack" tales and humorous anecdotes.
But the filidh managed to survive - and actually flourish,too, taking over many
of the ancient secular and religious functions of the bards and druids. They
were in fact much more than storytellers - they were teachers, judges, royal
advisors and seers down to the 17th century when so much of the surviving Celtic
culture fell beneath English rule. And so the tapestry of story was unravelled:
some of it, the high myth and hero-tale, surviving in manuscripts written by
church clerics in the early Middle Ages, some in the rag-bag of wonder-tales
and folk-legends of the countryside.
Where today we experience the old tales at a psychological distance, regarding
them as fiction at worst, or as containing archetypal symbolism at best,the
Celtic storyteller in the early years of this century did not question the truth
of the tale. If such marvels did not abound today, no matter: "There was
magic in old times!" But the fili neither believed nor disbelieved - he
made the journey to the Otherworld himself, and this was an unquestioned fact
to his listeners. A true walker-between-the-worlds, he knew intimately the territory
of Tir na nOg, and brought back its treasures in the form of stories and prophetic
utterances.
To reach the Otherworld and gain its knowledge, the filidh performed rituals
to induce trance. One of these involved killing a bull whose meat and broth
was eaten by the fili who then was wrapped in its hide, whereupon he fell into
a sleep or trance in which he gained access to Otherworldly vision and knowledge
which he translated into stories of this wondrous realm or used for prognostication.
This ritual was banned by St.Patrick, but a form of this was actually witnessed
as late as the 18th century among the country-people of Gaelic Scotland. On
the Isle of Skye in 1769 a traveller named Pennant witnessed a local seer being
wrapped in a bull's hide and placed in a recess behind a waterfall to attain
supernatural knowledge.
Obviously repelled by such a barbaric custom, he reported: "A wild species
of magic was practised in the district of Trotternish, that was attended with
a horrible solemnity: a family who pretended to oracular knowledge practised
these ceremonies. In this country is a vast cateract (sic) whose waters falling
from a high rock, jet so far as to form a dry hollow beneath, between them and
the precipice. One of these imposters was sewed up in the hide of an ox, and,
to add terror to the ceremony, was placed in this concavity; the trembling enquirer
was brought to the place, where the shade, and the roaring of the waters, increased
the dread of the occasion. The question is put, and the person in the hide delivers
his answer."
As the practice of seership faded out among the filidh, the ritual of gaining
poetic inspiration by lying in the dark still persisted. In early 17th century
Ireland, the poet O Gnimh describes himself as following the traditional custom
of composing while lying on a bed in a darkened hut; and the ritual still persisted
in some measure among the peasant storytellers themselves. A 19th century visitor
to Ireland reports that some were known to recite their tales this way:
"Many a winter's night...have I heard the old chronicler, lying on his
back quietly in
the bed beyond the fire, repeat the "deed of old" to delighted listening
ears, but in language so ancient as to be now almost unintelligible to most
Irish speakers of the modern school."
For unlike oracular practice, when the fili enters the Otherworld and merely
reports what he sees, storytelling demands that the teller take the listeners
with him and be their guide or psychopomp into the inner worlds. Thus may the
seanachie ritually set the context for the tale with: "Once there was,
and once there was not...", defining the storyteller as someone who can
enter into another reality at will.
Some of these traditional ritual openings are reminiscent of techniques used
in modern hypnosis to alter consciousness. For example:
"Once long ago, and a long time it was.If I were there then, I should not
be there now. If I were there now and at that time, I should have a new story
or an old story, or I should have no story at all..."
The everyday mind is arrested and confused, as time loops back on itself, the
world of cause and effect is suspended, and we enter those marvellous realms
where what seems like a day's visit turns out to be a hundred years. Or a masterpiece
of spatial disorientation: "Once it was where it was not beyond seven times
seven countries and the Sea of Operencia behind an old stove in a crack in the
wall in the skirt of an old hag and there in the seven times seventh fold...a
white flea; and in the middle of it the beautiful city of a king."
The world is turned upside down, and the listener dizzily emerges in the Otherworld.