Ireland’s Imperishable Mythic History

Abstract

Any review of a book like this is bound to be selective, as it contains such detail, such vast swathes of scholarly research, that one can only attempt an overview of some of its overarching theses. Suffice it to say, the book is magnificent, worth the enormous energy required of the reader, whether specialist or layman. I will attempt such a review, commenting at times from outside the specialist fields involved, in a thoroughgoing fascination with the work, and also remarking upon its great importance from my point of view. The transition from “pre-historical,” oral societies to “historical,” literate societies is a general world-historical phenomenon. The particular form which this process took in Ireland, between the fifth to seventh centuries C.E., is very well explicated in Mark Williams’s book. Before the coming to Ireland of an alphabet there existed ogam, a system of notches used originally for inscriptions along the edge of a stone. Perhaps this can be comparedwith the oracle bone inscriptions used in Ancient China, or quipos, the system of ropes with knots that represented a kind of early notation in pre-Hispanic Peru. Williams discusses the coming of literacy with the Latin alphabet to Ireland from Roman Britain, which resulted in writings in Latin, and the Irish language using the Latin alphabet. By around the year 700 C.E., three centuries after the process of conversion to Christianity began, “pagan divinities began to appear in a vibrant literature written in Old Irish” (4–5):