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MANY OF US know what it was like to grow up in an Ireland that existed in the shadow of Christianity. No parish is without a church, no historical site is without a cross.
We know about the Catholic Church in particular, and its influence on Ireland. We know all about the moral codes, the education system, the high-walled religious institutions, the priests and nuns — both good and bad — and the ultimate fall from grace of that institution in many ways.
But how did Christianity bed in here in this Celtic land in the first place? Saint Patrick, the lad in the green cape who banished the snakes, is usually the first in our minds when pondering the meaning of ‘Christian Ireland’. Wasn’t he the one who brought Christianity over here? Before that, we were busy painting blood on our faces and dancing around fires, right? Well, there’s a bit more to it…
I’m an Irish writer, and I see that there’s an innate storytelling in our culture, in the way that we speak to each other and how we describe the everyday. This unique Irish way of seeing and expressing drives my approach to writing. I have a fantastic love for Irish Mythology, the playfulness and madness of it.
The very reason I’m able to read Irish Mythology is because early Irish Christian scholars were the ones who wrote it down. They may even have made a load of it up. That’s what drove me to make this documentary, I’m approaching it with the enquiry of a writer who has a love for the Irish writing tradition.
This was a queasy journey for me. I wouldn’t call myself a Christian, I’m not religious. Catholicism was something that was done to me in school against my will. But I refuse to allow my own hesitations around Christianity to quell my curiosity about Irish culture.
The documentary is a thesis, with the central question, “What role did early Irish Christianity have in the Irish writing tradition?” and like any thesis, I cite experts to bolster my enquiry. Dr Elizabeth Boyle of Maynooth University, Dr Daniel Curley of the University of Galway and Dr Therese Cullen are some of the academics who contributed.
The arrival of Christianity to Ireland is fucking fascinating. We know that Christianity came to Ireland in the 5th century with Patrick. Christianity was a new belief system. An urgent, apocalyptic belief system that took hold when the social fabric of the Roman Empire was unravelling across Europe.
But Christianity in Ireland was also a vehicle which introduced the radical new technology of writing. I was very curious about the impact of writing on our indigenous oral storytelling. That’s a mad concept to get your head around because we take writing for granted now. Before the monastic system, we most likely held our stories orally, or through song, and might even have used the landscape to remember stories. Such as the telling of the epic Táin Bó Cúailnge from the hill of Rathcrogan in Roscommon. I explore this in the documentary with Dr. Daniel Curley.
We invented spaces between words, too. That sounds like a lie that you’d hear an ould lad say in the pub. But we actually did invent spaces between words. Irish monks were prolific writers of Latin script during the time that Rome was collapsing. The Irish preserved Latin. Translated Greek and Roman books. Contributed to Latin dictionaries.
Before Irish intervention, Latin was written in Scriptio continua (continuous script). This writing had no punctuation, marks or spaces. The Irish introduced spaces. Think of what that does to the written word. It brings pause, breath, lyricism and song to the page. Emotion and drama.
Writing ceases to be a way to simply record data and now becomes a medium for aesthetic expression. It’s my personal view, that this is our oral storytelling methodology finding its way into the technology of writing. The early Christian scholars were writing down Ireland’s own stories, stories that existed orally, or as songs. We had a very important impact on the craft of writing as we know it today.
There was an inventiveness in how the monks recorded our mythology too, borrowing bits from the Bible, echoes of Greek and Latin myth woven in there for the craic. I can’t help but compare some of their work to Flann O’Brien, who would have been writing in the 1930s. Especially his book At Swim-Two-Birds. Flann is widely considered to be the first postmodern writer. Because of how he would blend Irish Mythology with American Westerns. He’d have Fionn MacCumhaill hanging around with cowboys on the same page. Revolutionary at the time. But sure, we were doing that 1500 years ago in the monasteries. Blending the Biblical story of Noah’s Ark with tales about the magical Tuatha de Dannan.
In making this documentary, I learned about the role of slaves in Early Christian Ireland. The economies of monasteries were based around a class system, which depended upon forced unpaid labour.
Christianity and the use of writing legitimised the power of Irish kings, a lot of the monks and nuns were the children of Irish kings. The stories of poor people were not written down.
Our Mythology contains stories that are deeply connected to the land and biodiversity. Holy wells, trees, lakes. We lost a bit of that with Christianity. The Christian Bible presents the earth as God’s creation for Humans to freely exploit. Our pre-Christian Irish stories hold the land and nature as an unpredictable force to be feared and worshipped. In 2024, a climate scientist would agree with the latter rather than the former.
Knowing that some features of our natural landscape have stories attached to them that might be older than the pyramids gives me a deep respect for biodiversity.
Just an hour up the road from me in Limerick, near Lough Derg, is a cave called Fintan’s Grave. In our Mythology, a fella came here belonging to the biblical Noah’s niece, and waited out Noah’s flood in that cave by turning into a salmon. He then went on to become the Salmon of Knowledge.
Most likely another example of an Irish monk, blending the Bible with indigenous stories. But that story, attached to that cave, could be thousands of years old, it could even contain a historical memory of the icecaps melting in Ireland during the last ice age, passed down orally over millennia. I know that sounds a bit mad, but in Australia, there are aboriginal oral stories that contain geologic information about islands that were submerged by water 30,000 years ago. When you hear the stories of your ancestors in the landscape, you’ll think twice about exploiting and disrespecting it. We’re in the middle of a climate emergency.
Blindboy Boatclub is an artist, author and podcaster. His regular show ‘The Blindboy Podcast’ is available wherever you get your podcasts. Blindboy’s new RTÉ One documentary, The Land of Slaves and Scholars, airs on Thursday 21 November @ 10:15 pm. Available afterwards via the RTÉ Player.
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