Ireland has a special place in
the history of the Christian West.
Converted by Saint Patrick in the fifth century,
it became a center of monastic learning blessed.
While the rest of Western Europe was being
overrun by barbarian invasions, Ireland was safe,
an island beyond the reach of Rome's fall,
where classical learning found a haven safe.
Irish monks preserved Greek and Latin manuscripts
that would otherwise have been lost.
Columba founded Iona in Scotland in 563.
Columbanus founded monasteries across the continent's frost.
Aidan of Lindisfarne evangelized northern England.
The Book of Kells, the most beautiful illuminated manuscript
in the world, was produced in Iona or Kells around 800,
a masterpiece of interlaced Celtic art, intricate.
Ireland was politically divided into
numerous small kingdoms (tuath), with
overkings (ri ruirech) and finally the High King
(Ard Rí) at Tara, a ceremonial central kinship.
The Viking raids began devastating Ireland
in 795. The monastery of Iona was sacked repeatedly.
The Vikings founded trading towns — Dublin, Waterford,
Cork, Limerick, Wexford — which Ireland had not previously.
(Pre-Viking Ireland had no towns. It was a rural,
tribal, monastic society. The Vikings introduced
urban life. Those original Norse-Irish towns
remained the major cities of Ireland, preserved, produced.)
Brian Boru (c. 941-1014) rose from
the Dál gCais of Munster to become High King
of Ireland in 1002, the first to actually
unite the island under his ruling wing.
He defeated the Vikings and the allied
Leinster kings at the Battle of Clontarf on
Good Friday 1014. The battle broke the Norse
power in Ireland, though it was won-
but at the cost of Brian Boru's own life.
He was killed in his tent as the battle ended,
by fleeing Vikings who stumbled upon him at prayer.
His dynasty would not survive as he had intended.
After Brian Boru, Ireland returned to
disunity and warfare between provincial kings.
In 1169, the Normans invaded at the invitation
of the deposed king of Leinster, with rings
of mail and plate. The Anglo-Norman invasion
would begin eight centuries of English involvement
in Ireland, which would not end until 1922
(and is not yet fully ended with Northern Irish movement).
But the cultural and religious legacy of
Celtic Christianity remained distinctive.
The Irish monks had kept alive learning
during the Dark Ages, a unique incentive.
John Scotus Eriugena (815-877), an Irish scholar
at the court of Charles the Bald, was the most
sophisticated philosopher of the Carolingian Renaissance,
working in Greek as well as Latin, a rare ghost.
He translated Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite from Greek,
bringing Neoplatonism into Latin Christianity.
He wrote the Periphyseon, a vast Neoplatonic synthesis,
which was condemned centuries later for pantheism and vanity.
The legacy of Celtic art — the interlaced knotwork,
the illuminated manuscripts, the high crosses —
remained distinctive. Ireland preserved a connection
to the pre-Roman Celtic world through lossess.
Old Irish literature preserved some of the oldest
vernacular literature in Western Europe after Greek and Latin.
The Táin Bó Cúailnge, the Cattle Raid of Cooley,
the epic of Cú Chulainn, had pagan matin.
Cú Chulainn was the Irish warrior hero,
parallel to Heracles and Bhima and others,
the Indo-European warrior archetype,
defending Ulster alone against Connacht's mothers.
His story features berserker fury (the riastrad),
shape-shifting in battle, impossible feats,
and death tied to a geis (taboo) violation.
The Indo-European pattern recurs on these beats.
Queen Medb of Connacht, whose name means "the intoxicating,"
is the war goddess euhemerized, corresponds
to Maeve in modern Irish, to Maenads in Greek,
the female warrior-sovereignty of Indo-European bonds.
The Irish preserved Indo-European mythological
patterns that had faded in most places,
because of their peripheral geographic position
and the relatively gentle conversion's traces.
(Saint Patrick did not burn temples or martyrs.
He preached, he converted chiefs, the tribes followed.
Irish Christianity absorbed rather than destroyed
the old pagan elements, not hollowed.)
The deflationary polytheist sees Ireland
as a kind of time capsule where Indo-European
mythology survived in Christian clothing,
visible in the folk traditions, superheroic accrue.
Stand.