history of Ireland in 100 words , livre ebook

A HISTORY OF IRELAND IN 100 WORDS
SHARON ARBUTHNOT M IRE N MHAONAIGH GREGORY TONER
ILLUSTRATED BY JOE McLAREN
A History of Ireland in 100 Words
First published 2019
Royal Irish Academy, 19 Dawson Street, Dublin 2 www.ria.ie
Sharon Arbuthnot, M ire N Mhaonaigh, Gregory Toner Illustrations Joe McLaren
ISBN 978-1-911479-18-5 (HB) ISBN 978-1-911479-19-2 (pdf ) ISBN 978-1-911479-20-8 (epub) ISBN 978-1-911479-21-5 (mobi)
All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owners or a licence permitting restricted copying in Ireland issued by the Irish Copyright Licensing Agency CLG, 63 Patrick Street, D n Laoghaire, Co. Dublin, A96 WF25.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Project Manager: Helena King Design and production: Fidelma Slattery Copy-editor: Maggie Armstrong Indexer: Geraldine Begley
Printed in Poland by L&C Printing Group 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
How to use this book
WRITING AND LITERATURE
TECHNOLOGY AND SCIENCE
FOOD AND FEASTING
THE BODY
SOCIAL CIRCLES
OTHER WORLDS
WAR AND POLITICS
A SENSE OF PLACE
COMING AND GOING
HEALTH AND HAPPINESS
TRADE AND STATUS
ENTERTAINMENT AND SPORT
THE LAST WORD
Guide to further reading
Sources cited
A
Abhainn
Amach
Aoir
Aonach
Aos
Ar n
B
Badhbh
Baile
Bainne
B s
B al
B arla
B
Bolg
Brat
Br thair
Breitheamh
Br g
C
Cac
Cailleach
C in
Caist l
Caoch
Cara
Carn
Cath
C adaoin
C il
Ceo
Ceol
Cill
Cl irseach
Cl
Clog
Cluas
Coire
Comharba
Creach
Cr ga
C ige
Cup n
Curadhmh r
D
Dalta
Damhsa
D n
Dearg
Dia
E
Eineach
F
Fadhb
Feis
Fia
Fianna
File
Fine
F or
Fliuch
Forc
Francach
Fuinneog
G
G ire
Galar
Gall
Gealt
Geis
Gloine
Gr
Gruaig
I
Iom na ocht
Ionraic
L
L r
Leabhar
Leas
Leipreach n
Lios
Litir
Loingeas
Long
M
Mac t re
Me
Meisce
N
Neimheadh
Nigh
O
Oile n
Orda
P
Punt
R
R alt
R omhaire
S
Saol
Saor
Sc al
Seanchas
S odh
Sn omh
S il
T
Taoiseach
T
Todhcha
Tuaidh
Tuath
U
ll
PREFACE
Words create and convey history; this is a history told by 100 of them, providing glimpses of various aspects of Ireland s past. A treasure trove of words serves as its inspiration-the electronic Dictionary of the Irish language (eDIL; www.dil.ie ), a digitised, updated version of the Royal Irish Academy s Contributions to a dictionary of the Irish language which appeared in various separate parts between 1913 and 1976. The augmented electronic version was first published in 2013 and a revised version appeared in 2019. The history of Ireland told in this book s pages draws on a small proportion of eDIL s words; we hope readers will be enticed to dip into www.dil.ie and so experience other words that express further strands of Ireland s rich and varied story.
We are grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Great Britain and Northern Ireland for funding the revision of eDIL and supporting the publication of this volume. The Royal Irish Academy, the original publisher of the print dictionary, provided encouragement from the start and we are indebted to Ruth Hegarty, Fidelma Slattery and Helena King in particular for guiding the volume through the press. Dr Kay Muhr and Dr Immo Warntjes kindly provided information on specific words and our colleagues on the eDIL project, Dr Marie-Luise Theuerkauf and Dr Dagmar Wodtko, gave encouragement and advice. Dr Rebecca Shercliff offered valuable suggestions for improvement throughout the volume and compiled the list of sources we include at the end. Friends and family were our first critical readers and helped us by means of their kindness, as well as their candour. Helen Breen, Professor Margaret Kelleher, Br d Millar, Siobh n Mullin, Dr Elaine Murphy, Eoin Toner and Trudi Tweedie contributed in various ways and helped us clarify our thinking and presentation. We hope that they and all our readers will be informed and entertained by the history created and conveyed in our selection of 100 words.
S HARON A RBUTHNOT
M IRE N M HAONAIGH
G REGORY T ONER
St Brigid s Day 2019
INTRODUCTION
It is ten thousand years since the first settlers reached Ireland following the retreat of the ice sheet that covered the country during the last Ice Age. For the vast bulk of time since then, the people who lived, loved and died on this island have left no written record of their existence. Only with the coming of Christianity in the fifth century ad was the Latin alphabet introduced, giving the Irish the ability to record their own thoughts and ideas for the first time.
From around the sixth century, Ireland began to develop what became the most extensive surviving vernacular literature in early medieval Europe. Writing was carried out exclusively in ecclesiastical centres and much of the early literature reflects clerical concerns-saints lives, the Bible, theology-and most of it was in Latin. From the earliest times, however, the monks also wrote in their native language, Irish. The range of their output is astonishing. They wrote numerous tracts on early Irish law, covering everything from murder to bee-keeping. They kept records in both Latin and Irish of what was happening in the country; these were known as annals, year by year accounts of events. Most extraordinarily, they created a vast secular literature encompassing tales and poems about kings, warriors and women. These tales provided allegories for Christian living and told of the shaping of the Irish landscape. They recorded ancient battles and defeats, floods and disasters. They told stories of journeys to the Otherworld, of wonderful beasts and beautiful paradises. From this mass of story and myth, historians, beginning in the eighth century, forged a history of Ireland that traced the ancestry of the island s peoples back to Adam, culminating in the compilation of The book of the taking of Ireland , also known as The book of invasions , in the eleventh and twelfth century.
Through this enormous literary outpouring, these churchmen and scholars give us an insight into the beliefs, habits and daily lives of the Irish-how they ate, drank, dressed, loved and lied. It is primarily a picture of an imagined past that they present, a story of how they thought their ancestors had lived. But they could not conceal their own wants and desires, their own experience and agendas. When a writer claims that St Patrick founded a particular church in Connacht, we know that this is because the church at Armagh, Patrick s church, was staking its claim to control over it. When an author depicts the clothing, weapons and hair-style of an ancient warrior, we know that he is using his imagination and his own everyday experience to create that image. Most of all, the texts reveal the authors own values and view of the world in which they lived. It is that world that we wish to portray in this book.
It is no longer thought that people s perception of the world is limited by their vocabulary, but our store of words does say something fundamental about us and how we think. It tells others what we know and what is important to us. The way we use words, distinguish between them and link them together says something about how we perceive our environment. In this book, we will explore the history of Gaelic Ireland through the words used by its people. We will reveal extraordinary connections between words we still use and words used in a bygone era. We will show how people lived and how they described that experience in their own words.
This book is not intended to be a comprehensive history of Ireland, but rather to provide insights into moments of life that may be otherwise absent from the history books. The focus is on Gaelic Ireland throughout, as Gaelic was the native language of the majority of the inhabitants of the island for the last 2,000 years, yielding its primacy to English only in the last 150 years. Ireland was probably always a multilingual island. Many of the clergy learned Latin and wrote highly accomplished works in that language. Some traders and clergy are likely to have known Old English and Welsh, as well as something of continental languages. The Viking settlers brought Norse to Ireland in the ninth century. With the arrival of the Anglo-Normans in the twelfth century, two other languages were introduced, Norman French, spoken primarily among Anglo-Norman nobles, and English, spoken by the wider settler population. In spite of this, the majority of people continued to speak Irish and, with time, many of the settlers, Norse, English and French speakers, came to adopt Irish as their mother tongue. So a history of how the Irish people viewed themselves must primarily be sought in the words that they used and in words and ideas that they borrowed from other languages and peoples.

We have arranged individual entries around a range of themes that are indicative of the physical, intellectual, cultural and social environment in which Irish people lived in the Middle Ages. War and the supernatural feature strongly in the literature of the period and so are necessarily covered, but we also examine aspects of life that receive less attention in conventional accounts of early Ireland such as food, technology, mental health and the human body. No attempt at a history of Ireland would be complete without an examination of concepts relating to art, literature, law and society, so these are included too. We endeavour throughout to show Ireland s linguistic and cultural contacts with its neighbours in Britain