These silent mansions: a life in graveyards

Abstract

and is lost. Who is ‘my silver warrior, who has not died, who will not die’? Who are these ‘skilful bird-flocks of witches’ called on in the hope that they will us – not, you observe, that we should be saved from them, for this is a very different world from ordinary Christianity. But the same mysterious quality survives even into the common Latin charms of the later middle ages, with their travelling angels, their three good brothers, their marble stones and bragotty worms. The little story, the historiola that empowers a charm, is already at one remove from the religion which inspired it; imagination has stepped in. We cannot say that Goibniu is the Iron Age smith-god, even if he turned out to have the same name, for continuity and identity are two quite different things. Philologically, Santa Claus is St Nicholas, but knowledge of the gentleman on the sleigh will not help us reconstruct the fourth-century bishop of Myra, because supernatural identities evolve over time, and it is so hard to reverse the process, and so easy to fool ourselves that we have succeeded. Irish charm-mongers, like their contemporaries among the storytellers, were confronted with traditional formulae and tags of verse from which they reconstructed the best narratives that they could. Icelandic scholars did the same when they tried to piece together old myths from the riddling verses of the skalds; so did the Arabs with the lost lore of Ad and Thamud; so did the Hebrews with their archaic verses embedded in the Pentateuch. It is the common destiny of any scholar who finds themselves stranded by the arrival of literacy on the further shore from an ancient oral culture. Thanks to John Carey’s research, we can now add something more to this picture: for some people, some of the time, invoking the old supernatural powers was not just a literary fantasy, but a real magical power. We do not know what they taught but we know that they taught it, these druids and charm-smiths and strong women. The clerical, textual world of the Early Middle Ages, which we have mistakenly taken for the reality, was only a small clearing in the forest of the oral. And if in Ireland, why not elsewhere?