The Celtic Riddle

"I think he was telling us that whatever it is is very, very old. He chose Amairgen's chant after all. That makes it Celtic, that I'm sure of, or maybe something from the time of Amairgen."

"So when exactly is that?" Jennifer asked.

"Any time after about 20B.C.," Breeta replied. "It could be as late as the twelfth or even the fifteenth century, when the 'Song of Amairgen' was written down."

Jennifer's eyes widened. "But that could be almost anything. Illuminated manuscripts, gold, iron, bronze, anything."

"It could," Breeta replied.

"Surely you could narrow it down for us a little more than that," Michael sighed. "What about all those old maps and weapons of your Da's? I know he said he was giving them to Trinity College, but could it be another of those, an especially old or important one? Are those things worth anything?"

"Oh yes," I said, "they are."

"It could be," Breeta said. "But my father liked lots of things. He wasn't an educated man, you know. He said that all the education in the world wouldn't have made him a success, just hard work. He left school early to work with his father in the family business, before he ran away to sea. Despite what he said, though, I think he felt the lack of education keenly. That's why he wanted you to go back to school, Michael." Michael nodded.

"Da was exceptionally well read, though, self-taught. He'd been brought up on all the old stories, like the one Denny just told us, and he taught them to us, my sisters and me. In some ways, he believed the old stories. Oh, I don't mean he believed in magic or the Little People or anything, at least no more so than most Irishmen, but unlike some, he believed the ancient stories were, in fact, real stories about real events and real people, and when he wasn't at work, he was out trying to prove it. He found and read old manuscripts, studied old maps, located all the sites of the great epic battles. You can find them, too, if you look."

"I gather this isn't a point of view shared by everyone," Alex said.

"You're quite right about that," she laughed. "I remember studying the Leabhar Gabala, the Book of Invasions, at school. Amairgen's poem comes from that, incidentally, and the story Denny just told us. It's the story of the arrival of various people on Ireland's shores, starting with someone called Cessair. There were Partholanians, Nemedians, then the Tuatha de, and eventually the so-called Sons of Mil, the Celts. I'd learned it at my father's knee, as they say." Her voice caught a little as she spoke.

"Anyway, the school had got in a professor of archaeology to talk to us about it. He said that the Mythological Cycle, the part of the Leabhar Gabala containing these very old stories, was just a collection of old fables, stories that were supposed to tell us something about the human condition, but not in any way true, and that they had been written down by monks in the twelfth century, not by poets like Amair-gen at all. He even said there was no real archaeological evidence for all the invasions that the book tells us about. I was terribly disappointed, and I raced home to talk to Da about it. I can't have been more than ten years old at the time, and I still believed all the stories he'd told me to be absolutely true, like children believing in Santa Claus, I suppose.

"Da was absolutely furious. He said that for all his schooling, the professor was nothing but a bloody ijit. He said it was true that the stories had been written down by monks all right, but that these monks had worked hard to preserve the old stories and that the stories themselves were much, much older than that. He said maybe the old stories had been exaggerated a little over time, and given a lot of magic, but that once you stripped away these elements in the stories, you would have a record of real history remembered and passed down through the centuries as myths."

"Your father was what is sometimes called an annalist, I believe," Alex said. "Quite an honorable tradition in the study of ancient times, trying to prove an historical basis for the old myths."

"Yes, but my Da became obsessed with the idea of proving that professor wrong, partly I think, because of his lack of schooling-he was a little sensitive on that score-but also because he really did think the man was an ijit. My father believed there were successive invasions of various peoples, many of them probably different groups of Celts. And he set out to prove it, to track the evidence down."

"So how was he planning to do this?" I asked.

"Well for starters, he set out to find and identify the four great gifts of the gods," she said.

Michael just looked at her. "He was daft," he said.

"Maybe," she said. "But what about Lia Fail? It exists, doesn't it?"

"You are going to have to enlighten us a little," Alex said. "Who or what is Lia Fail? And what are the four great gifts of the gods?"