This volume explores the interest of medieval Irish authors in the myths and legends of the ancient classical world, which were used in part as a lens through which to reimagine, rethink and even in some cases “rescue” their own native storytelling traditions and find a place for them within the Christian worldview and value system cultivated in the early medieval monasteries of the island. This study follows closely upon the work of Michael Clarke, Erich Poppe and Isabelle Torrance, eds., Classical Antiquity and Medieval Ireland: An Anthology of Medieval Irish Texts and Interpretations (2024) and more distantly upon that of Brent Miles, Heroic Saga and Classical Epic in Medieval Ireland (2011).
All these studies reveal that Latin learning, even the study of secular Latin texts, was surprisingly strong and assiduously cultivated in medieval Ireland, even more so after the destructive Viking attacks of the ninth and tenth centuries. As early as the seventh century, Ermantraut shows, Christian monks can be observed “processing” allusions to the Greek and Roman gods in their commentaries on Latin poems, and Irish authors continued to find fresh understandings of the old divinities in their vernacular retellings of Virgil, Lucan and Statius through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These scholar-translator-authors developed a whole repertoire of strategies for understanding ancient deities within the framework of medieval Christian historiography, often recruiting techniques of interpretation derived from their training in the exegesis of the scriptures, especially the Old Testament. They did not dismiss out of hand or necessarily even demonize the old gods and pagan heroes, but found new wine for these old wineskins. Their interpretive strategies were all part of a familiar toolkit learned from biblical commentators, often offering ingenious linguistic or typological significances for names, figures and events whose literal interpretations were felt to present logical or theological difficulties.
These techniques of scriptural exegesis thus offered Irish scholars a fresh way to valorize and revitalize the significance of divinities and secular heroes celebrated in their own insular oral traditions, though these readings were sometimes offered with caveats, slippery obfuscations or alternative explanations that were left to stand only as possibilities by their authors. Some adaptations even anticipate the allegorizing techniques of later medieval authors, such as those found in the Ovide moralisé approach to rehabilitating the Metamorphoses. Other vernacular retellings are distinctly sui generis, producing retellings of Latin poets by adapting them to the popular conventions and generic expectations of traditional prose sagas. These were interspersed with passages of heightened verse, often exemplifying a degree of “Celtic hyperbole” like those preserved in the Táin Bó Cúailnge ‘Cattle-Raid of Cooley,’ which survives in three twelfth-century recensions. But the classical narratives themselves were both elaborated and trimmed to taste in order to satisfy the expectations of a readership accustomed to dramatic storytelling techniques, as in the Middle Irish version of Lucan’s Bellum Civile or Pharsalia, reworked in In Cath Catharda ‘The Civil War’, a free prose rendering which ramps up the extraordinary carnage of the original martial heroics in a kind of Irish aristeia, as well as milking the excitement of supernatural interventions, like those of the Thessalian witches. Conversely, In Cath Catharda sharply truncates Lucan’s more philosophical and political reflections, instead finding a place for the events recounted in the poem within Christian sacred history as schematized by St. Augustine in his City of God or Orosius in his History against the Pagans, both standard reference texts copied out and studied in Irish monasteries.
Ehrmantraut focuses her interest upon treatments of classical divinities per se, recalling in her “Introduction: Gods of Gold and Silver,” the taxonomy that St. Jerome offers in his commentary on the pagan idols worshipped at Belshazzar’s Feast in Daniel 2:4, where he extrapolates their symbolic value to Christian epistemology based upon the quality of material from which these images were crafted: (1) gods of gold are rational conceptions of the human mind before divine revelation (cf. Romans 1), personifying cosmic powers or recalling actual historical personages; (2) gods of silver are mythic fictions or figures of speech promulgated by pagan prophets and poets; (3) those of bronze and iron are stories of the old gods that have been transmitted through popular tradition in debased or garbled form; and (4) those of wood and stone are just superstitious nonsense, not to be credited at all. Medieval Irish authors made similar distinctions about their own vernacular traditions, as suggested by the bilingual colophon concluding the second recension of the Táin Bó Cúailnge in the thirteenth-century Book of Leinster:
In Irish: “A blessing on everyone who will study/learn the Táin faithfully in this way and who will not add any other form to it.”
In Latin: “But I who wrote this historia, or rather fabula, do not give credence to certain things in this historia or fabula. For certain things in it are the deceptions of demons; certain things, however, are poetic figments; certain things resemble the truth, certain things do not, certain things are for the delectation of fools.” (2).
This layered or multi-focal view of the veracity of the old myths summarizes the nuanced and discriminating view of the pre-Christian divinities entertained by medieval Irish monks, one almost “proto-Humanist” in perspective, a rationalizing effort to “save the appearances” or preserve at least some value in the competing older traditions they had inherited in their own time and place.
In Chapter One, “Naming the Gods: From Gloss to Epic,” Ehrmantraut explores how Irish glossators sought to imitate the inventive etymological analyses of divine names and other supernatural terms that they had learned from the seventh-century Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville, often quite contrived, even fanciful interpretations offered with a degree of amused or creative panache, but also seeking seriously to elucidate the divine word or name’s inherent meaning and serving to generate a whole set of native Irish epithets for the Olympian gods that only grew in number through time between the seventh and thirteenth centuries.
In Chapter Two, “The Olympian Gods in the Classical Adaptations,” the author charts the first appearances of the classical deities in Old Irish prose texts and how they were characterized there both by their epithets and other associations, primarily in the Togail na Tebe ‘Destruction of Thebes’, an adaptation of Statius’s Thebaid. The actions and behavior of gods and other supernatural beings included typological suggestions in which they were represented to anticipate later figures in Christian sacred history, either through euhemerization, the reading of the old gods as human men and women divinized by ignorant descendants, or like the Greek Hercules who was taken typologically to prefigure the Hebrew Samson of biblical history.
Ehrmantraut turns to “Infernal Powers: Battle Spirits, Witches, and Furies” in Chapter Three, focusing on such figures as Lucan’s necromancer Erichtho, a figure associated in the Irish prose rendering with the Witch of Endor in 1 Samuel of the Old Testament, as well as with popular figures from archaic native folklore, like the Morrígan ‘Great Queen’, a once august mother-goddess who was progressively demonized into a kind of vengeful battle-fury. All these demonic female figures are conflated in the Irish vernacular term ammait ‘witch, banshee’, which is used of them in three texts: Togail na Tebe, In Cath Catharda and Imtheachta Aeniasa ‘The Adventures of Aeneas’, that is, the Irish prose redaction of Virgil’s Aeneid.
In Chapter Four, “God and Gods: The Christian Framework of In Cath Catharda,” Ehrmantraut shows how the gods of Lucan’s poem are minimized in their supernatural agency to offer a more deeply Christianized interpretation of the willful human source of the central conflict, its outcome and significance for world history. The “Irish version reframes the Roman civil war by including a new pseudohistorical prologue … [positioning] the Battle of Pharsalus as a pivotal point between the pagan past and the Christian present, drawing on the Augustinian ages of the world and an Orosian succession of world empires,” thus recruiting “infernal actors” like Erichtho not maliciously to provoke the conflict per se, but rather to presage “the end of the Roman republic” in anticipation of the birth of Christ during the reign of Caesar Augustus in the Principate to follow, as well as to dramatize the ultimate fate that awaits both “pagans and unrepentant Christians alike on Judgement Day” (161).
In Chapter Five, “Otherworldly Beings: Classical Influence Beyond the Classical Adaptations,” the author explores several Old Irish narrative motifs calqued on classical models, as in Togail Bruidne Da Derga ‘The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel’ and Cath Maige Tuired ‘The Battle of Magh Tuireadh’, where a preternatural thirst is inflicted upon their enemies by hostile druids, an idea inspired by Book Four of Statius’s Thebaid and retained in the Togail na Tebe. This motif had “legs” in other medieval Irish texts, like Niall Noígíallach ‘Niall of the Nine Hostages’, symbolizing a thirst for or disinheritance from political sovereignty. Likewise, a reading of Ovid’s various works influenced depictions of the vagaries of love and its loss in the Tochmarc Étaine ‘Wooing of Étain’.
In Chapter Six, “Druids, Ethnography, and the Translation of Knowledge,” the author examines the extent to which the depiction of these figures in early Irish literature is based upon classical ethnographic descriptions beginning with Caesar’s De Bello Gallico rather than authentic Irish folk memory or inherited knowledge. Except for the characterization of Gaulish druids as “bloodthirsty priests” in the retelling of Lucan’s poem in In Cath Catharda, pagan druids were (for the most part) embraced and honored by Irish authors as wise pre-Christian magi, like those from the east who came to honor the baby Jesus in Bethlehem, that is, as natural philosophers, astrologers and diviners who had a precocious intuition of truths soon to be revealed to the world more fully by the incarnation of Christ.
In her Conclusion, Ehrmantraut offers a full review of the appearance of the classical gods in early Irish literature from concrete physical idols to the winged golden ram that rescues Phrixus and Helle in the Togail Troí ‘Destruction of Troy’, then to the imagined rulers of a Golden Age in retellings of Ovid or in his stories of troubled or rejected love. In particular, demonic supernaturals could be borrowed quite literally, like the Thessalian witches who were associated with the native Morrígan or banshees, since all these beings could be neatly accommodated within the superstructure of Christian demonology. Figurative interpretations of the old gods, classical or native Irish, also offered a way in which both pagan pasts “could be pressed into the service of the Christian present and eschatological future” (23). In addition, the translation of Latin mythological or secular texts provided opportunities for further political reflection in narrative form, even serving as a means of national consciousness-building for the medieval Irish authors, creating a sense of their distinctive Irish identity in a western world where they had once been distant outsiders from Roman civilization, but were now its eager cultural inheritors. “The conflation of Allecto and the Morrígan in the first recension of the Táin Bó Cúailnge is not merely an equivalency drawn for the sake of clarifying an obscure allusion … Even infernal beings like Furies and battle spirits belonged to God’s creation and by properly understanding their role in God’s grand design, a medieval reader came one step closer to comprehending the divine plan” (163). So, the Latin learning of these early Irish monks, even their clear interest in Greco-Roman religion, was anything but “insular,” but rather a cultural, religious and even political project, an effort to integrate the spiritual and intellectual life of the island ever more closely into the thought-world of post-Roman western Europe. As Sir Kenneth Clark once observed in his 1969 introduction to the BBC series Civilisation, “By the Skin of our Teeth,” the early Christian monasteries of pre-urban Ireland ironically served, perhaps even by their isolation, as crucial conservators of classical culture in northwestern Europe after the fall of Rome. Brigid Ehrmantraut has now mapped out even more of their contributions in this volume.