Inventing Ireland Read Online Free PDF

Old English, those Gaelicized Normans who were especially demonized as hybrids in Spenser's View : but his ambition was to clear the reputation of the native Irish as well. This gives his comments a certain objectivity: and he is honest enough to tell much that is not flattering. His scholarly scruple is clear in the tentative tide which he appended to his text Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (A Basis for the Knowledge of Ireland), which was assembled mainly after the publication of Spenser's View in 1633. A Tipperary man who was born in 1570 and educated at Bordeaux, Céitinn returned in 1610 to witness Gaelic Ireland dying on its feet after the crushing defeat of O'Neill atKinsale a decade earlier and the subsequent Flight of the Earls. He might properly be seen as one of the first counter-imperial historians, in that his object was not only to reply to Spenser,Stanyhurst and the English writers, but more particularly to save the lore of ancient Ireland from passing into oblivion. Like the revivalists of three centuries later, Céitinn feared that the national archive had been irretrievably disrupted and that his country, to all intents and purposes, was about to disappear. He mocked the ambitious young English historians who had endlessly recycled the same clichés current since the time of Cambrensis, in a tyranny of texts over human encounters:
    ... óir atáim asoda, agios drong díobhsan óg; do chonnairc mé agus tuigim prímh-leabhair an tseanchusa, agus ní facadarsan iad, agus dá bhfacdís, ní tuigfidhe leo iad. Ní ar fhuath ná ar ghrádh droinge ar bioth seach a chéile,

ná ar fhuráileamh aon duine, ná do shúil re sochar d'fháil uaidh, chuireas romham stair na hÉireann do scríobh, ach de bhrí gur mheasas nár bh'oircheas chomh-onóraighe na hÉreann do chrích, agus comh-uaisle gach fóirne d'ar áitigh í, do dhul i mbáthadh, gan lua ná iomrádh do bheith orthu.
    (. . . I am old, and a number of these people are young. I have seen and understood the chief books of history, and they have not seen them, and if they had seen them they would not have understood anything. It was not for hatred or love of any tribe beyond another, nor at the order of anyone, nor in hope to get gain out of it, that I took in hand to write the history of Ireland, but because I thought it was not fitting that a country like Ireland for honour, and races as honourable as every race that inhabited it, should be swallowed up without any word or mention to be left about them.) 9
    In the Díonbhrollach or introduction, Céitinn (sounding at times like the Edward Said of his era) laments the fact that "truth" has now become a function of learned judgement rather than the sum of a whole people's wisdom. "Ireland", he complains, is never to be seen in itself, but as a flawed version of England, as a country still entrapped in the conditions from which England liberated itself in 1066.
    With devastating wit, Céitinn proceeds to show how, even on a purely textual level, the English writers have been amazingly selective in what they have culled from one another, and he unsparingly exposes the contradictions which nonetheless mar their testimonies. Accusing them of writing to a formula – blame the Irish – he compares them to the beetle, which disdains to alight on summer flowers but joyfully rolls itself in dung. Marvelling at Spenser's ignorance of the history of the Irish nobility, he jocosely concludes that, on the score of being a poet, the man allowed himself the licence of invention
    ... mar ba ghnáth leisean agus le na samhail eile iomad finnsgéal filíochta a chumadh agus a chóiriú le briathra blasta, do bhréagadh an léitheora.
    (as it was usual with him and with others like him, to frame and arrange many poetic romances with sweet-sounding words to deceive the reader.) 10
    This is, of course, a tongue-in-cheek rebuttal of the very terms in which Spenser castigated the native poets as practised liars, embellishing

truth for