The Easter fire blazed on the hill, a defiant orange wound against the darkening sky, and from his vantage point Patrick watched the druids scramble, their pale robes whipping in the wind as they pointed toward him in fury. He had lit it deliberately, knowing exactly what it meant. The high king’s orders were absolute: all fires must die until the sacred flame on Tara was relit. His fire was a declaration, and the druids understood it instantly.
They turned to the king, their voices sharp with fear. “Your majesty, if we do not put out the fire of this new religion today, it will burn forever after in this land. ”
Patrick stood his ground as the royal chariots thundered toward him. He had come back to this island against every sane instinct.
As a boy of fourteen, he had been dragged from his home in Britain by Irish raiders, sold into slavery, and left to freeze through the long nights watching his master’s cattle on the cold, empty hills. It was there, alone in the dark, that he had learned to pray. The faith that had meant nothing to him as a careless boy became his only comfort, his only anchor. And then the visions had come, urging him to escape, and after six years he had finally fled, crossing the sea to Gaul and training for the priesthood, only to feel a strange, unshakable pull back to the land that had enslaved him.
He could not explain it. He only knew he had to return. , and now here he was, standing before the furious power of the High King of Ireland, his life hanging on a single breath. .
The king’s officers shouted at him, their swords already drawn, but Patrick did not run. Instead, he opened his mouth and the words of the Psalms poured out of him, old words he had whispered to himself through a thousand freezing nights: “Some trust in chariots, some in horses, but we will trust in God. ”
The sky answered him. Thunder cracked, splitting the heavens open, and the king’s horses, panicked by the crash, bolted in every direction, scattering the officers and their chariots into chaos.
The men at the foot of the mountain who had been sent to seize him saw nothing but a herd of deer passing through the mist, and they let it go, convinced their quarry had vanished. The tradition grew that Patrick had called upon a prayer known as his Breastplate, the Cry of the Deer, and that it had saved his life. . In the years that followed, Patrick’s mission did not stop.
He walked the length of the island, baptizing chieftains and their clans, raising churches overall the countryside. At his first landing in Strangford Lough, he had been given a simple barn by a local lord, and he had made it his first church. The druids, the ancient holy men of the Celts, ordered a contest of faith, a trial of powers between him and their own magician, Lochet Mao, but Patrick prevailed, and Christianity began to take root. It was not an easy victory.
The Irish were a people with a deep, ancient culture of their own, a people who had carried their Celtic ways across centuries, whose druids conducted their rituals in the sacred oak groves, whose very alphabet still carried the memory of the trees. But Patrick won them, not by force, but by daring, by showing up where they least expected him and doing what they believed impossible. He took their shamrock, the humble three-leaved plant that grew everywhere, and used it to explain the Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, three beings in one, as the leaf was three yet one. To this day, that small green plant remains the emblem of his day and the national flower of the Irish people.
. But Patrick brought something else to Ireland, something that would change everything. He brought writing. The Irish had stories, thousands of them, tales of gods and warriors, of kings and queens, of magical cattle raids and tragic loves, stories passed mouth to mouth by the bards for generations beyond counting.
They had never been written down. Patrick’s monks, working alongside the native learned men, began to put them on parchment, preserving them, saving them from the fog of time. The old religion faded, but the old stories did not die. They were written, and they survived.
. And what stories they were. The Celts had always loved their heroes, and their greatest heroes were the stuff of songs. There was Cuchulainn, the boy who had become a legend before he was a man.
He had been born Setanta, son of Deichtine, sister of King Conor of Ulster, though his true father was Lugh, the sun god of the old gods themselves. When he was about five years old, he had watched a troop of Red Branch Knights pass by his mother’s fort at Dún Dealgan, just outside where the town of Dundalk now stands, and he had told her he was going to be a warrior. She had laughed softly and told him he would be, when he grew up. But Setanta had set his jaw and said no, he wanted to be one now, and he had run off after them, following the chariot tracks all the way north to Emain Macha, the capital of Ulster.
. When he arrived, the boys of the warrior school were gathered on the green outside the king’s palace, playing at hurling. Setanta had walked straight into their game, taken the ball from them, knocked them all down, and scored a goal, leaving bloody noses and broken heads and howls of outrage all over the field. The arms master Fergus had come out to see what the commotion was, and when he learned the boy was the king’s own nephew, he had brought him inside to meet Conor.
The king had taken the fierce little boy under his arm, looked after him, trained him, made sure he had weapons and everything a young warrior could need. . One day, Conor and all the Red Branch Knights were invited to a feast at the house of a smith named Cullen, not far down the road. Conor stopped by the playing field and asked Setanta if he wanted to come along.
But Setanta was in the middle of his game and said he would follow their tracks along later. So the king and his warriors went ahead, and as the night deepened, they feasted and drank, and perhaps they drank more than they feasted. When it grew fully dark, Cullen asked Conor if all his people were present, because he had a ferocious guard dog, and anyone who came to the house after dark would be killed instantly. Conor, his mind hazy with drink, forgetting all about the boy, said yes, they were all there.
Let the dog loose
. Setanta came along later, his game finished, tossing his hurley and his ball and his javelin up into the night air and catching them all before they fell, when he saw the great hound bounding toward him. He did not run. He tossed his sliotar, his small ball, up into the air, swung his hurley, and drove it straight into the dog’s open mouth, down its throat, through its body, out the back, killing it dead on the spot.
The knights came running out, relieved to find him alive, but Cullen was in despair over the loss of his hound, which had taken him a year to raise and train. Setanta looked up at him and said, “Since I am the one who killed your guard dog, I will be your guard dog. I will be the Hound of Cullen. ” In Irish, that was Cú Chulainn, and that was how he got his name.
He was perhaps seven years old. . The stories of Cú Chulainn made up the heart of what scholars would later call the Ulster Cycle, a collection of more than a hundred tales of kings and warriors, bloody and often tragic. He became the greatest champion Ulster ever knew, a man willing to sacrifice anything for the honor of his people, and no story shows that more painfully than the one about his only son.
When Cú Chulainn was a young warrior, he had been sent away to the Isle of Skye to train at the school of Scáthach, a legendary female warrior. Another warrior woman named Aoife had attacked Scáthach while Cú Chulainn was there, and he had defended his teacher. In the fight, Aoife had gotten him down on his back and was about to kill him. Cú Chulainn, quick as ever, had called out that Aoife’s horses were going over the cliff, and when she turned to look, he had flipped her over, held his sword to her throat, and given her a choice: stay with him for a year and bear him a son, or die.
She had agreed. Before he left for Ireland, he had given her a gold ring, with instructions that when the boy was old enough to fit it on his finger, she must send him to find his father. And he had placed a geis on the child, a sacred taboo: the boy must never give his name to any single warrior, and he must never refuse a fight. .
Years later, King Conchobar and the Red Branch Knights were standing on the strand at Dundalk when a small boat came across the sea toward them. In it was a boy about ten years old, and he had a neat trick: he could toss his sling up into the air, catch birds in flight, and bring them down unharmed, exactly as Cú Chulainn himself had done as a boy. Conchobar sent a warrior down to ask the boy his name. The boy refused.
The warrior threatened him. The boy said he would fight him instead. The warrior drew his sword. The boy took his sling, put a stone in it, and struck the warrior square between the eyes, dropping him cold.
The warrior staggered back up to the king, muttering that he didn’t like to fight children anyway. Conchobar sent Conall Cernach, the great Ulster hero, down to try. The same thing happened. There was only one champion left to send.
Cú Chulainn came down to the strand, and when he looked into the boy’s eyes, he saw something there, something fierce and familiar, the eyes of Aoife, and he suspected the truth. But he had no choice. He was the champion of Ulster. The boy refused to give his name.
It was forbidden for him to refuse a fight. They fought, first on the sand, then in the shallows, and the boy drove Cú Chulainn down beneath the waves, nearly drowning him, pressing him down so hard that his feet left an imprint in the stone beneath, an imprint that some say could be seen on the beach at Dundalk for centuries after. Cú Chulainn, desperate to save himself, called for his terrible weapon, the Gae Bulg, the magic spear withs barbed prongs that, once they entered a man’s stomach, could never be removed without killing him. He drove it into his own son’s belly, and the boy died there in the water, in his father’s arms.
Cú Chulainn lifted the body, carried it up to King Conchobar and the Red Branch Knights, and he said,”Men of Ulster, this is what I have done for you. I have killed my only son for you. ” They stood in silence, and there was nothing anyone could say to that, then or ever. .
But Cú Chulainn’s greatest trial, the one that would define him forever, came with the Cattle Raid of Cooley, a saga that began not in Ulster, but in a bed in Connacht, with a king and queen arguing over who was the greater. Queen Maeve and King Ailill lay side by side, comparing their wealth, each insisting they had married the other. They listed their herds, their jewels, their lands, their treasures, and when they were done, they found they were exactly equal. Then Ailill mentioned his bull, a magnificent animal, one his wife had no match for.
Maeve’s blood ran cold. In Irish law, if her husband was the wealthier of the two, he could dominate her in the marriage. Maeve was not a woman who could be dominated, not by anyone. She was born to dominate, and she was not about to let a bull, of all things, undo her.
She had heard of another bull, the Brown Bull of Cooley, kept in the small kingdom of Cooley, just across the border in Ulster, and she decided she was going to have it, no matter what it took, no matter who she had to destroy to get it. And so she gathered an army, the combined forces of Connacht and all its allies, hundreds upon hundreds of warriors, and she marched on Ulster to seize the bull. The men of Ulster were struck by a strange weakness, a curse that left them unable to fight, so it fell to one man, Cú Chulainn, to hold back the entire host of Connacht alone, to defend his province and his people at the fords and the narrow passes, fighting them one by one, champion by champion, month after month, until his land could recover. He fought heroes from across Ireland, and he beat them all, every single one, but there was one he dreaded above all others.
Ferdia, his blood brother, his friend closer than a brother, the man he had trained beside on the Isle of Skye, was fighting on Maeve’s side. They refused to fight each other, both of them, again and again, until Maeve found Ferdia’s weak point. She did not threaten him. She did not bribe him, though she had offered her daughter, her gold, her favor, and he had turned them all down.
Instead, she challenged his courage. She said, low and sharp,”I think you’re afraid to fight Cú Chulainn. You’re afraid he’s going to kill you. ” That got him.
He agreed. The fight took place at the ford of a river in what would later be called Ardee, a town whose very name would remember him, Baile Átha Fhirdia, the town of the ford of Ferdia. For the first day, they hacked at each other with their swords, neither gaining the better. At dusk, they bound up each other’s wounds with their own hands, gave each other food, and rested, brothers still.
The second day, they fought again, no mercy, no quarter, and when night fell, Cú Chulainn knew he was in trouble. He told his charioteer, if tomorrow it looked as if he were losing, he was to send him the Gae Bulg, sent it down the water to him. The third morning, they met again, and Ferdia was stronger. He drove Cú Chulainn back, wounded him, laid him low, and Cú Chulainn, seeing death in his friend’s eyes, called for the Gae Bulg.
His charioteer sent it across the water. Cú Chulainn caught it with his toes, slipped under Ferdia’s guard, and drove the terrible weapon into his belly. Ferdia fell, and Cú Chulainn knelt in the ford, holding his best friend’s body, weeping over him, lamenting him for pages and pages in the old manuscripts, while behind him the rest of Ireland advanced, and his charioteer urged him to flee, because they would come and they would kill him, and he could not hear him, could not stop mourning the man he had loved, the man he had killed. He won the war, but he lost his brother, and perhaps that was the true tragedy of the Cattle Raid, the price of being the champion.
The bull itself, stolen at last by Maeve’s army, died shortly after being brought to Connacht, its conqueror’s triumph turning to ashes in a single night. And the story ended not with victory, but with waste, with everything fought for torn apart, with both queens left with nothing but their pride, and their pride was cold comfort indeed. . The second great cycle of Irish legend centered around another warrior, one perhaps even more beloved, a man named Fionn mac Cumhaill, whom the English called Finn McCool.
He was almost certainly a real man, a leader of the Fianna, a band of warriors who were as skilled with words as with weapons, fighters who were also poets, and perhaps it was that combination that made his stories endure so long. Someone once said that Finn McCool is everybody, that he is merely ourselves, our own conflicting natures writ large across ancient tales. He is the most generous man who ever lived, and in other stories, he is mean and stingy. He is the most noble and brave, and in others, he acts out the part of a coward.
He is the most well-intentioned of men, and yet in some tales, he is vindictive and jealous. He is a man who takes enormous risks to gain wisdom, who as a boy put his thumb into a cauldron of wisdom and burned it, gaining insight that never left him. He is not merely a military hero, but almost a spiritual one, a man who undergoes transformations, who undertakes quests, who seeks insight and knowledge and poetry as fiercely as he seeks victory. The Irish have always valued learning and poetry, and so Fionn has remained their eternal hero, a figure of the mind as much as of the sword, the embodiment of their highest hopes for themselves.
One of the best-known of his stories begins with fury: Fionn discovers that his own fellow warrior, Diarmuid, has run off with Grainne, the daughter of the king, the woman Fionn himself had sought to wed. An epic pursuit follows, Fionn hunting Diarmuid across the length of Ireland, a chase of years, until at last the two men are reconciled, and even that story, so full of rage and betrayal, ends not in blood, but in something like peace. And so the legends go on, passed down through the generations, told by mothers to children, by bards to kings, written down at last by the monks who came with Patrick, who preserved them for centuries yet to come. .
When St. Patrick arrived in Ireland, it was this island, and this island alone, that had fully retained the Celtic identity, the same spirit that had driven Vercingetorix to stand against Caesar and Boudica to burn the Roman colonies, the same fierce, proud, violent, beautiful-and-furious soul that had produced fortunes of warriors and poets, of kings and queens, of tragedies and triumphs. The Romans had conquered Gaul and Britain, but they had never conquered Ireland. The old ways had survived here, long enough for Patrick to bring them the gift of writing, long enough for them to be preserved forever, long enough for Cú Chulainn and Fionn mac Cumhaill to live on, long after the last druid had gone silent in the last oak grove.
The stories do not end. They were told for a thousand years before Patrick, and they have been told for sixteen hundred since, and there is no reason to suppose they ever will stop being told, because they are not merely ancient tales. They are the people who told them, walking through the mist of time, their battles, their loves, their griefs, their stubborn, defiant, glorious refusal to be forgotten. And so long as there is an Ireland, they will still be there, waiting in the turning of a page, in the telling of a tale, in the glow of an Easter fire lit against the darkness of the night.
.
