Book of Invasions

The sequence begins before the Flood. Cessair, given in the text as a granddaughter of Noah refused a place on the ark, arrives with a small company; all die in the Flood except Fintan, who survives across the ages in the shape of a salmon, an eagle and a hawk and is thus available to narrate.

Partholon comes next, clears plains, introduces cattle and brewing, and his people die of plague. Nemed follows; his descendants are oppressed by the seafaring Fomorians, a recurring antagonist described in monstrous terms and never given a settlement of their own. The survivors scatter, and two branches return: the Fir Bolg, who divide Ireland into five provinces and establish kingship, and the Tuatha De Danann, who arrive from northern islands with druidic learning and four talismans, the Lia Fail, the spear of Lugh, the sword of Nuada and the cauldron of the Dagda.

The Tuatha De Danann defeat the Fir Bolg at the first battle of Mag Tuired and the Fomorians at the second. They are then defeated in turn by the Milesians, sons of Mil Espaine, who sail from Iberia, are made to withdraw beyond the ninth wave and return against druidic storm, and take the country. Ireland's name is settled by agreement with the goddess Eriu. The defeated Tuatha De Danann withdraw into the hollow hills, the sid mounds, which is how a displaced pantheon is converted into a fairy population without anyone having to call them gods.

The remainder is dynastic: king lists and genealogies running from the Milesian settlement down to historical rulers, which is where much of the text's medieval usefulness lay.

The work is not a record of oral myth transcribed. It is scholarship, assembled in monasteries by men trained in Latin learning who had read Genesis, Jerome, Orosius and Isidore of Seville, and whose problem was that Ireland did not appear in any of them. The solution was to write it in: to give the Irish a place in the descent of nations from Noah's sons, a migration route through recognised geography, and a chronology synchronised with biblical and Roman dates.

Hence the descent from Japheth, the standard biblical ancestor for the peoples of Europe, and the wandering route through Scythia, Egypt, where the ancestral figure Goidel Glas is given a pharaoh's daughter, Scota, for a wife, Spain and finally Ireland. The parallel with Israel is deliberate and unconcealed: an exodus from Egypt, a period of wandering, a promised land taken by force from prior inhabitants. Reading the text without noticing that project produces nonsense; reading it with the project in view makes almost every oddity explicable.

Composition was cumulative. Verse from the ninth and tenth centuries by poets including Eochaid ua Flainn is embedded in the prose, and the compilers frequently record conflicting versions side by side, sometimes noting that other authorities say otherwise. The prose framework took shape in the eleventh century. It then continued to be copied, expanded and rearranged, producing several distinct recensions; the first is preserved in the Book of Leinster of around 1150, others in the Book of Ballymote, the Book of Fermoy, the Great Book of Lecan and elsewhere. R. A. S. Macalister's edition and translation, published in five volumes between 1938 and 1956, remains standard and is itself heavily critical of the material it presents.

For most of a millennium this was simply the history of Ireland. It underlies the Annals of the Four Masters in the seventeenth century, Geoffrey Keating's influential history of the same period, and the standard account taught in Ireland well into the modern era. The Milesian genealogies were used by ruling families to establish descent, which gave the text a practical political function and a strong incentive for its continual extension.

It is not history. There is no archaeological trace of successive invasions on this pattern, the chronology is constructed backwards from biblical dates, several of the peoples appear to be learned inventions or projections of tribal names, and the whole scheme is a medieval synthesis rather than a memory. Nineteenth-century attempts to read the takings as a record of real migrations, and twentieth-century attempts to match the Fir Bolg or the Tuatha De Danann to archaeological cultures, have not survived scrutiny.

What it does preserve is real, and it is of two kinds. First, in euhemerised form, the names and attributes of gods: Lugh, the Dagda, Nuada, Brigid, Ogma, the Morrigan and Eriu appear as human kings, warriors and queens with fathers and death-dates, and the same figures are worshipped or invoked as divine in other Irish sources and are attested in continental inscription. The compilers evidently knew they were handling gods and chose to demote them rather than delete them.

Second, and more securely, it is direct evidence for the intellectual world of eleventh-century Ireland, what its scholars read, how they reconciled native tradition with Christian universal history, and what kind of past they thought their country ought to have. As a document of medieval Irish self-understanding it is first-rate. As an account of what happened in prehistoric Ireland it is worthless, and it is worth saying both things plainly.