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unchanged in the heart of the common people down to the present day (typical of this
spirit of syncretism: St. Columba himself is known to have described Christ as "my
druid"). Such enduring syncretism reflects the fact that the cultural aesthetic in
the North, the Gaelic Heroic ethos, has a direct qualitative link with the seventh
century, and this, as much as anything, set Gaeldom apart from the English-speaking
Lowlands after 1124.
Oral forms of traditional narrative have long
existed side-by-side with textual forms, the later being more static recordings of the
same thematic corpus. The common touchstone between the oral and written forms is not an
original composition "written in stone" by an author, but rather the collective
cultural mind, the same context from which meaning itself derives: Traditional narratives
begin in the mind of a speaker, end in the mind of a hearer and create meaning all in the
context of the Gaelic Heroic ethos. The cultural mind, the worldview of the Gael, was at
once oral, tribal, and born of the original fusion of the Heroic with the Christian. This
is true even today. The Heroic worldview had an aesthetic appeal to the Gael that was in
part tied to the continuation of a tribal, pastoral way of life: A sense of place or
personal identity for the individual was tied to genealogy, to traditions building steam
for a thousand years. Such traditions were ultimately based upon the doings of Heroic
ancestors after whose stylized, culturally meaningful example it was understood one should
try to pattern his life by analogy. Christianity provided an effective articulatory
framework for something powerfully mystical and psychologically deep: the Celtic cult of
the ancestral dead.
Orality reflected the ancient, preliterate
way of processing information for cultural transmission. This involved much more than
memory: It was an exploitation of a preliterate patterning in the mind at the conceptual
level. Such cognitive patterning was based upon a conceptual framework hierarchically
organized by analogy, for instance, to kinship and genealogy. Stock aphoristic knowledge
(proverb and gnome), ironic negative understatement (litotes) and formulaic, culturally
meaningful descriptive epithets (including metonyms, cognomens, patronymic epithets and
kennings): These occupied a certain level of generality within such cognitive relational
systems, and could be grouped paratactically, or developed chronologically in the style of
oral narrative. As an example of a stock, formulaic epithet from the Heroic period, let us
consider that of Conn, traditional ancestor of the Iron Age royal house of Gaels (of which
the O’Neills represent the main stem): This is given in Gaelic as "Conn
Cetchathach" which means "Conn of the Hundred Battles." The name is
stylized and formulaic, an appropriate Heroic nickname not to be taken literally: The
meaning both originates and obtains in the closed system of emic cultural knowledge. In
other words, the name is an idiomatic label loaded with cultural meaning. "Of the
Hundred Battles" is an appropriate epithet for describing the traditional
founding-figure of an Heroic-age royal genealogy. Therefore the phrase "of the
hundred battles" means that the traditional |
