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Book of Invasions



         


Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of the Taking of Ireland) is the Middle Irish title of a loose collection of poems and prose narratives recounting the mythical origins and history of the Irish race from the creation of the world down to the Middle Ages. An important record of the "pseudohistory" of Ireland, it was compiled and edited by an anonymous scholar in the 11th century, and might be described without exaggeration as a mélange of mythology, legend, history, folklore, Christian historiography, political propaganda and barefaced lies. It is usually known in English as The Book of Invasions or The Book of Conquests.

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The origins of Lebor Gabála Érenn

Purporting to be a literal and accurate account of the history of the Irish race, Lebor Gabála Érenn (hereinafter abbreviated as LGE) may be seen as an attempt to provide the Irish with a written history comparable to that which the Israelites provided for themselves in the Old Testament. Drawing upon the pagan myths of Celtic Ireland - both Gaelic and pre-Gaelic - but reinterpreting them in the light of Judaeo-Christian theology and historiography, it describes how the island was subjected to a succession of invasions, each one adding a new chapter to the nation's history. Biblical paradigms provided the mythologers with ready-made stories which could be adapted to their purpose. So not surprisingly we find the ancestors of the Irish enslaved in a foreign land, or fleeing into exile, or wandering in the wilderness, or sighting the "Promised Land" from afar.

Four Christian works in particular had a significant bearing on the formation of LGE:

The pre-Christian elements, however, were never entirely effaced. One of the poems in LGE, for instance, recounts how goddesses from among the Tuatha Dé Danann took Gaelic husbands when the Gael invaded and colonised Ireland. Furthermore, the pattern of successive invasions which LGE preserves is curiously reminiscent of Timagenes of Alexandria's account of the origins of another Celtic people, the Gauls of continental Europe. Cited by the fourth century historian Ammianus Marcellinus, Timagenes (first century BCE) describes how the ancestors of the Gauls were driven from their native lands in eastern Europe by a succession of wars and floods.

Numerous fragments of Irish pseudohistory are scattered throughout the seventh and eighth centuries, but the earliest extant account is to be found in the Historia Brittonum or "History of the Britons," written by the Welsh priest Nennius in 829-830. Nennius gives two separate accounts of early Irish history. The first consists of a series of successive colonisations from Spain by the pre-Gaelic races of Ireland, all of which found their way into LGE. The second recounts the origins of the Gael themselves, and tells how they in turn came to be the masters of the country and the ancestors of all the Irish.

These two stories continued to be enriched and elaborated upon by Irish bards throughout the ninth century. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, several long historical poems were written that were later incorporated into the scheme of LGE. Among the many authors of these important sources, four poets stand out:

It was late in the eleventh century that an anonymous scholar brought together more than one hundred of these poems and fitted them into an elaborate prose framework - partly of his own composition and partly drawn from older, no longer extant sources - which paraphrased and enlarged upon the verse. The result was the earliest version of LGE. It was written in Middle Irish, a form of Irish Gaelic used between 800 and 1200.

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Textual variants

From the beginning, LGE proved to be an enormously popular and influential document, quickly acquiring canonical status. Older texts were altered to bring their narratives into closer accord with its version of history, and within a century of its compilation there existed a plethora of copies and revisions. Five recensions of LGE are extant, surviving in about a dozen medieval manuscripts:

As late as the seventeenth century LGE was still accepted as an accurate and literally true history of Ireland. Geoffrey Keating drew on it while writing his history of Ireland, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, and it was used by the authors of the Annals of the Four Masters. Today scholars are much more critical of the work, but there seems little doubt that it does contain an account of the early history of Ireland, albeit a bowdlerised and distorted one. The biggest fiction in the work is the claim that the Gaelic conquest took place in the remote past - about 1500 BCE - and that all the inhabitants of Christian Ireland were descendants of the first Gaelic invaders. In fact, the Gaelic conquest - depicted in LGE as the Milesian settlement - was the latest of the Celtic occupations of Ireland, taking place after 150 BCE, and many of Ireland's pre-Gaelic peoples continued to flourish for centuries after it.

LGE was translated into French in 1884. The first complete English translation was made by R A Stewart Macalister between 1937 and 1942. It was accompanied by Macalister's own critical notes and an introduction, in which he made clear his own view that LGE was a conflation of two originally independent works: a History of the Gaedil, based on the history of the Israelites as set forth in the Old Testament, and an account of several pre-Gaelic settlements of Ireland (to the historicity of which Macalister gave very little credence). The latter was then inserted into the middle of the other work, interrupting it at a crucial point of the narrative. Macalister theorised that the quasi-Biblical text had been a scholarly Latin work entitled Liber Occupationis Hiberniae ("The Book of the Taking of Ireland"), thus explaining why the Middle Irish title of LGE refers to only one "taking," while the text recounts more than half a dozen.

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The contents of Lebor Gabála Érenn

There now follows a brief outline of the text of LGE. The work can be divided into ten "books":

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The historical accuracy of Lebor Gabála Érenn

The manner in which Celtic-speaking peoples came to be in possession of the island of Ireland is still a matter of conjecture. However, four separate invasions or migrations can be distinguished (the dates given below are highly doubtful):

So how does is this reconstruction of the history reflected in LGE? To begin with, if the Cruthin had an invasion myth, no trace of it remains in LGE, which supports the belief that their colonisation of the country was a lengthy process of gradual migration. And the first two "takings" of Ireland - those of Cessair and Partholón, both taking place before the Flood - seem to be wholly fanciful, with no direct historical value at all.

The next taking, however, that of the Nemedians, may well have been a mythologised version of the historical Bolgic invasion of the fifth or sixth century BCE. This belief is supported by many details in the text of LGE, a discussion of which is beyond the scope of this article.

The next two takings would also seem to have a historical basis. We can identify the Fir Bolg and their allies with the Érainn again, invading the country for a second time because their ancestors the Nemedians were portrayed as having abandoned the country (which the historical Érainn probably never did). The Tuatha Dé Danann might be a wholly mythical people who have been substituted for the historical Lagin, Domnainn and Gálioin. It has been suggested that this confused state of affairs arose because the Laginian invasion was not a true taking, since the Laginians only conquered about half the country. Nevertheless, the First Battle of Moytura probably does reflect an historical victory of the Lagin over the Érainn in County Sligo (the location of two townlands known as West and East Moytirra), by virtue of which the Lagin conquered the western province. The Second Battle of Moytura, however, would then have been entirely fictional, as most likely were the Fomorians.

The Milesian invasion is clearly a semi-legendary version of the historical Goidelic invasion. Éber and Éremón (whose names mean simply "Irishman" and "Ireland") have replaced the historical leaders of the Eoganachta and Connachta respectively. The name of their father Míl Espáne is similarly derived from the Latin Miles Hispaniae, "a soldier of Spain."

The Roll of the Kings before the Introduction of Christianity contains much that is of interest to historians, but a lot of it is confused and bowdlerised. For example, the story of Tuathal Techtmar, who is depicted as a High King of Ireland in the early second century of the Christian era, is thought to be another version of the Goidelic invasion, Tuathal Techtmar being in reality the historical antecedent of Éremón. Éber's real antecedent, Mug Nuadat, would then be similarly displaced. There are also doublets of the Bolgic and Laginian invasions in the stories of two other kings, Lugaid mac Dáire and Early Mythological Cycle, the last two books are properly assigned to the Historical Cycle.

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References

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