click here
|
Chapter 6.3: The
cycle of Conn, Art and Cormac
Part 2
Fabio P.
Barbieri
|
viii)- Moral corruption at
the court: the king, the druids, the fairy bride
The relationship of the king and
the dangerous alien woman is directly connected
with the moral corruption of the court druids.
In neither of the legends are the druids
incompetent; both in Britain and in Ireland, the
first advice they give their kings is correct and
insightful. Vortigern's wizards tell him to
look for a designated place to build a fortress
the Saxons cannot storm, and, according to
Nennius, reveal to him, what he did not yet know,
that the tribe he had so naively let into Britain
was envious of him and meant to kill him by
stealth; by moving to Snowdon, though he cannot
keep them from rebelling and overrunning the
land, he frustrates their plan. In the same
way, Conn's druids start with a surprising
display of wisdom: they have the insight to see
the root of the King's troubles in the disastrous
presence of Becuma. But both groups of
wizards follow this advice up with one that is
shamefully and disastrously wrong, the same in
both cases: the immoral and potentially
disastrous sacrifice of the wondrous boy. In
the Irish legend the discontinuity between the
discovery of the evil and the proposed remedy is
so flagrant that one suspects that the druids may
know all too well what they are doing. Dare
they tell the besotted king that he must dismiss
his glorious new wife? One rather thinks
not; in fact, when Rigru Roscleidan herself tells
him the truth, his only answer is "Yours
would be good advice, if I could follow it, but I
cannot; so give me another" - at which the
woman curses the whole land of Ireland to famine
as long as Becuma is there.
The druids do not even try. They
are, as Geoffrey's version of the wonderful boy
calls them, "lying flatterers". (In
both legends, druids are present as a group, not
as individuals. The decision to find and
sacrifice the wonderful boy comes not from any
named individual, but by a nameless assembly:
which the miraculous child overcomes alone.
This reminds me a bit of the fact that teyrnedd
and tyranni - an inferior class - are
always many and nameless: evidently, to the
Celtic mind, a large number and no clear leader
were bad news.) There is a presumption that
druids will know, always, everywhere, ever
where ordinary human beings cannot imagine any
relationship of cause and effect or see beyond
their nose; this story feature satisfies that
presumption, laying the blame on their cowardice,
not their ignorance. Therefore, if the
druids fail not through ignorance but through
lack of moral fibre, there must be a reason; and
the only sensible reason is that of the Irish
story: the full knowledge that the king would not
put up with the true answer to his problem - to
wit, divorce his bride.
There is, however, one bit that
makes no sense. Vortigern's druids have
already charged Ronwein's people with being the
worst kind of traitors; there is no reason for
them not to then have the nerve to face the king
with the facts[26].
What we have here is a by-product
of the imposition of a mythical pattern upon
historical, even contemporary, facts. The
pattern of the legends of Conn and Vortigern
involves the seduction of an ageing but still
vigorous sovereign by a woman of literally fatal,
irresistible charm; which incarnates an episode
of dynastic near-ruin, in which we are to
understand that the king was led to folly and
crime when particularly vulnerable - as
vulnerable as a middle-aged widower - to
something with the crushing allure of a fairy
woman[27]. The concept of
welcoming one's own destroyer under the guise of
something good, attractive, even supportive, must
have applied with particular pertinency to
Vortigern's admission of the Saxons into Britain;
to Britons of any age after the mid-450s, their
presence was one of the largest and sourest facts
in view - if that wasn't welcoming one's
destroyer - what was? However, the very
visibility of their presence means that the
druids of the royal household could not really
give an obscure warning; and as their warning
about the Saxons was in fact so clear, the whole
element of druids running away from their
responsibility could not hold. There was
nothing to conceal, nothing that could be
concealed. The story element was not
written out or replaced with any other
explanation; it simply grew obscure and murky.
Geoffrey's Merlin reacts to Vortigern's druids as
though they were the moral cowards of the Irish
legend; but while his insult "lying
flatterers" would make plenty of sense in
the story of Conn, where they are exactly that,
it does not mean anything in Geoffrey, where the
point is not that they had deliberately lied to
flatter the king, but that they had advised a
crime while ignorant of the facts[28].
By the same token, it is notable
that neither Nennius nor Geoffrey are very clear
about the final fate of Ronwein. The Irish
story leads inevitably up to Becuma's final
banishment from Ireland; in Britain, though
Ronwein is guilty of crimes that make the blood
run cold, she simply... fades. The point is
that the moral value of the alien woman's
banishment is defined by the king's besotted
clinging, the druids' cowardly evasion of
responsibility, the terrible dangers of the triad
of quests, and, by contrast, the shining moral
clarity associated with the wondrous boy. We
know that she is corrupt and dangerous just
because the king clings to her even when he
should and does know better; because his crazed
love for her corrupts the court atmosphere to the
point where the druids dare not speak the truth
as they should, to the point where, rather than
get rid of her, the king is disposed to cut the
throat of a literally innocent boy; and to the
point where only a bold stripling (or his angry
mother) dare to break a whole world of lies, and
throw the truth in the king's face. The
truth is told, in Ireland, by Rigru Rosclethan at
the court of Conn, and by the bold stripling
Cormac mac Art at the court of the usurper
Lugaid; in Britain, it is shown with particular
clarity by Geoffrey's Merlin, who spoke before
the king with a freedom that the king had never
heard before in his life, and which still clearly
contrasts with his sycophantic court. But
as the story develops, the moral cowardice of
Vortigern's wizards, and Merlin's contrasting
defiant honesty, are not clearly connected with
the fate of Ronwein in any way. Even less
are they so in Nennius, where Ronwein plays a
distinctly reduced part, not even poisoning
Vortimer. Both versions have something in
common with the Irish legend: the murderous
enmity of Becuma for Art mac Conn corresponds to
Geoffrey's Ronwein murdering Vortimer; but the
Nennian Vortimer dying in the course of the war
rather than at her hand seems close to Art mac
Conn dying not at Becuma's hands but in battle
against the Britons, beheaded by the exiled hero
Lugaid Laga. It seems that the legend may
have contained an alternation from the beginning.
However, this very alternation
points to the fact that the corrupting alien
woman is directly comparable to the murderous
alien host that features in both legends, so that
what she does not do, they do. The royal
heir is doomed to die; either at her hands, or at
theirs. Everything points to the corrupting
alien women, Ronwein, Becuma, having a profound
and essential connection with the devastating
alien host. And this means that the dreaded
spell of fairy love is to be seen as one face of
the terrors of the Outside, the alien horde as
the other. Where the Outside is not, like
Becuma and Ronwein, lethally seductive, it is
lethally destructive like the Host; but it is
lethal anyway. The Outside is a place of
power and terror. And therefore Ronwein's
direct connection with the dreadful alien Host is
very much in keeping with the spirit of this
legend; she seduces, they destroy - a most
efficient division of labour.
These actually are the two stages
of the destruction of a foredoomed king in a
number of legends; in particular, the sombre and
impressive tale of a later king of Tara,
Muirchertach mac Ercae. He, according to
Professor Byrne, was probably unhistorical; the
more reason to pay attention (as he does) to the
legendary and mythological features in his story.
He is in fact an Ui Neill, a descendant of Conn
and Art, and - like Conn and Vortigern - he has a
scapegoat quality. He meets his doom-lover
while sitting on his mound, just as Conn meets
Becuma; and we are told that she kills him to
avenge the aboriginal inhabitants of Tara,
slaughtered in the Ui Neill conquest; in other
words, Muirchertach is the vessel of wrath for
the bloody conquests that established his whole
line as high kings of Eriu. Sin[29] separates him from his
family and the Church, and then leaves him,
enchanted and exhausted, at the mercy of his
avenger. He may well have taken this
scapegoat role, consciously or unconsciously,
from what an earlier tradition envisaged for Conn[30].
Both Conn and Vortigern had the
rank of insular High King (or Emperor), unique
sovereigns above both gwledig and teyrn;
and the point of the story is how they came to
either lose or endanger near to loss the rank
that, after all, pertained not to them alone but
to the dynasty. Therefore the moral
corruption brought in by the fairy or alien
woman, and swiftly embracing all the court - to
the point where the Druids, though they know the
truth, no longer dare tell it to the king - is at
the very core of the story: for the loss of Truth
by the sovereign - shown in the default of its
ministers, the Druids - is one and the same with
the collapse of his supremacy. Fir,
truth, is the very essence of a king, in every
Irish treatise; it can go to war with him and
strengthen him in battle, it can make his fields
fertile and all he does successful. This
is, I would suggest, because the king himself is
married to the land, a relationship which, like
all marriages, is based on Truth. Once Conn
marries a woman with untruth in her soul, who has
been banished from the Land of Youth because of
treachery; once Vortigern marries an alien woman
unconnected with “the land he loves”
and member of a tribe of exiles (it is a constant
and unhistorical feature of the legend that
Hengist, Horsa and their people, clearly
including Ronwein, had been banished from their
mother country) - then both Vortigern and Conn
have placed untruth at the very core of their
royalty. And it withers.
It seems very likely, therefore,
that at some point Conn was seen not as the great
ancestor, but as the near-ruin of the dynasty,
precipitating a terrible period of trial. The
difference is that, as recorded history begins,
the dynasty that claims descent from Conn and
Cormac - the Ui Neill - are very much in the
saddle. Whatever historical upset had taken
place, it had been carefully covered over, and
the antefact of the war transferred to Munster.
The trace of the origin of the catastrophe in
Conn's disastrous infatuation for Becuma is still
clearly to be found in the fact that it is
entirely thanks to her that Art goes to his last
battle without an heir; in other words, without
her Mag Mucrama would not be as disastrous as it
is, since dynasty and race would not have come
near extinction. She and the Alien Host
collaborate in its near-destruction.
The element of threat from the
Outside of fairyland is central to the Irish
legend, and accounts for many of the elements in
which it deviates from the British parallel.
For instance, the enmity between Art and Becuma
is not well motivated, since there is no
transition from the magic fairy love she is said
to have felt for him at the start of the story -
not so much to Art's expulsion from the island,
which might be a way for a wife committed to her
husband to distance herself from her first love,
but to the mutual hatred shown in the game of fidchell;
a hatred with no visible element of mutual
attraction left over, in which each of the two is
trying to do the other as much harm as s/he can.
But while the latter is clearly in keeping with
the radical enmity between Ronwein and Vortimer,
and with the nature of Becuma as a threat and a
pollution to the line - whose legitimate
succession passes through Art - the former is
simply an Irish commonplace, used probably in
conscious imitation of the other fairy's wooing
of his brother Connla. We are probably
meant to feel enough nervousness about the
arrival of this magnificently dangerous alien
woman not to question too much the sense of her
actions, especially since - in the light of
Connla's disappearance - the love of a fairy
woman might be held to be quite as dangerous as
her hate.
The dynastic crisis does not
appear in the same terms in Wales. There is
no such obvious threat to the succession:
Vortigern has no less than three possible heirs,
Vortimer, Catigern and Pascent[31]. Of them, Catigern
vanishes early - not fairy-stolen, but fallen in
battle (against the Saxons of Ronwein, though!);
but Vortimer is the subject of Ronwein's peculiar
hostility. Unlike his father, Vortimer is a
hero to all Welsh traditions, the warrior who
would not give an inch against the Saxons, who
would fight even after his death. In his
case, it is perfectly clear why Ronwein should be
hostile to him; but the parallels between the
Irish and Welsh legend warn us that the issue is
not only one of national hatred between English
and Welsh. The exile of Art is the only
request made by Becuma in exchange for her hand,
and is therefore the parallel of the favours made
to the Saxons in exchange for Ronwein's hand;
namely, their settlement in Britain. But
the issue between Art and Becuma is one of
dynastic continuity rather than national
survival; and it follows that we should not
neglect it when considering Ronwein and Vortimer.
Ronwein and Becuma are flagrantly parallel
characters, and their special characteristic is
to be bad news to the integrity of the dynasty.
This includes a corrupting effect on the
integrity of their royal function, closely
related with the corruption of the druids; this
is especially evident in the Irish story.
ix)- Ronwein
Ronwein figures, in both Geoffrey
and Nennius, as the daughter of Hengist and niece
of Horsa, two unquestionably English heroes; yet
her origins as a legendary character are
evidently not English but Welsh[32]. She is a Celtic
figure, the destroyer disastrously embraced,
within a context that centres on the dynasty -
the British dynasty of the Vortigernids. And
there is one assonance that has haunted me for
years, and that looks like it might have
something to do with the earliest development of
the story - and of another Welsh legend to do
with the conquest of the island. Is it only
me, or is Ronwein rather too close for
comfort to Rhuuein, Rome[33]?
In point of fact, if Ronwein were
seen as in some sense "Roman", it would
be quite possible to read the legend of Vortigern
as a reversal of the proper relationship of Rome
and Britain as we have seen it in Gildas and The
dream of Maxen Gwledig: a perverted reversal,
I argue, of the norm of male Roman rule over
feminine Britain[34], in other words an
account of usurpation. The following points
occur:
In "proper" Gildasian terms, Britain is
a land for Romans to rule; and we know that royal
rule of this kind would inevitably be seen as the
marriage of a male Roman king with a female
figure of Britain. Here, conversely, we
have an alien woman whose name is terribly close
to that of Rome, marrying a native male British
king, in whose name the inferior
"native" kingship of the teyrnedd
is clear for everyone to see; in other words, an
unwonted case of British masculinity marrying
Roman femininity.
In the legend of Maxen Gwledig, Maxen - though
king in Rome - comes to Britain and settles there
for seven years out of his love for Elen, leading
his Roman subjects to think that he is dead,
until he comes back to Rome in wrath; in the
legends of Conn and Vortigern, it is Becuma and
Ronwein who leave their native lands and settle
in Britain or Ireland, where their bridegrooms
are wildly in love with them, until Becuma at
least is forced to leave.
Conn leaves Ireland once, ultimately on account
of his disastrous love for Becuma, handing it
over to Art in the presence of a grand national
assembly; then he comes back and takes the throne
again. The parallel of Vortigern and
Vortimer indicates a rebellion instigated by the
Britons, and especially by their lords; but, like
Conn, Vortigern comes back and takes his throne
again. Maxen leaves Rome for love of Elen;
the Senate - like Vortigern's rebellious Britons
- then installs another Emperor; but Maxen comes
back to Rome and takes the throne again. The
fact that the Senate is parallel in this with
Geoffrey's generic "Britons" and with
the grand national assembly of the legend of
Conn, confirms that what we are talking about, in
both cases, are assemblies of the national
nobility[35].
Maxen comes to Britain to conquer it, and leaves
it to conquer Rome (again); Ronwein and Becuma
are expelled from their native lands[36], and Becuma at least is
also expelled from Ireland. That is to say,
Maxen's reason to enter the island, and to leave
it, is one and the same; and so is Becuma's[37]; but while in his case
it is to win a throne by means of a marriage with
a British princess - and to take back another by
means of his alliance with her brothers - in her
case both expulsions represent both the break
of a marriage alliance and the loss,
either of a throne or of an even higher dignity -
life among the immortals. Ronwein, as we
have seen, simply vanishes from the scene; which
is probably the easiest way out of the narrative
difficulties raised by having this arch-criminal
simply expelled from the island which her
"father" was shortly to conquer -
expelled how, who by, where to, and for how long,
since Hengist was soon to be king himself? - and
indeed to connect Ronwein with Hengist at all.
Of course, Ronwein's association
is with the Saxons, not with the Romans; but even
this is not without parallel. The
connection between Romans and Saxons is obscure
but not nonexistent; as I have pointed out, it is
present in Gildas, who draws a number of visible
parallel between the description of the two
invasions, making his Saxons into an evil (and
temporary) caricature of his Romans. I have
argued that the first redaction of the legend of
Vortigern, Emrys and the dragons - of which
Ronwein must be seen as a part - dates back to
the sixth century, and there is no reason not to
think that this represents another slant on the
same idea. Ronwein represents a
horrible, perverted version of the legendary
power called Rhuwein - the power that came
to Britain from Outside, established its own
monarchy in the island. Even the fact that
Ronwein and her Saxons are pagans[38] is probably germane,
since Gildas knew that the Romans were pagans
when they conquered Britain.
x)- Legend and history:
Art mac Conn and Vortimer
The purpose of having such stories
at all is to explain something. They are
not about a cosmic or permanent reality: they do
not define any element of the world. They
are about a specific dynasty and a specific point
in history. Both have a considerable amount
of contact with historical reality:
"Vortigern" and Ambrosius were
historical figures, and the house of Niall of the
Nine Hostages, with its descent from Conn and
Art, certainly represents one of the most massive
historical facts in Ireland. The Welsh
legend is built out of real politics, as seen
through a sixth-century refracting glass and from
a Vortigernid viewpoint; it represents, in
effect, an apology for the disaster that had
befallen the dynasty in the time of a disastrous
ancestor - besotted by a femme fatale with
more than a touch of the terror of fate itself
about her. It was not wickedness, but
wretched love, that had led him to his disastrous
choice.
And this strongly suggests that
something of the kind may have been at the heart
of the Irish legend before an unknown but
brilliant narrative talent decided to rework it
against Munster. Conn, the ancestor of the
great Ui Neill tribe who eventually made a
near-monopoly of the kingship of Tara,
corresponds to the figure of Vortigern; and as
the legend is certainly one of guilt and
ill-conceived effort in the attempt to shore up a
failing kingdom, we can only imagine that Conn's
role and fortunes were rather cleaned up. But
the facts suggest that he was once seen not as
the forefather of the dynasty's glory, but as its
near-ruin.
Perhaps, too, something can be
drawn from the notice that his son Art died in a
catastrophic battle following an invasion from
Britain led by an exile called Lugaid mac Con and
a leader from Britain called Beine. John
Morris - whose constant historicization of
legendary matter I am for once happy to follow -
argued that Beine was not a Welsh or Irish name,
but sounded like a Roman Bennus or Benignus[39]. It seems that, at
some point, the ancestors of the O'Neils suffered
a disastrous reverse, possibly through an
alliance between a Roman commander and a
rebellious or exiled faction gone down in legend
as that of Lugaid mac Con. We have seen
that the story of Connla the fairy-stolen was
underlain by a pre-existing notice, probably from
a king-list, that made Art an only son, and by
the pathos of knowing that he was to die in a
great battle. This notice, which is
certainly much older than the story itself, is a
reason to suspect that historical data may
underlie the legend-cycle, in a frame of
interpretative legend.
There is a different strand of
evidence that suggests that Conn was a historical
figure: the renaming of the province of
Connaught. "The name of the [province]
refers primarily to the descendants of Conn...
The three septs which claimed descent from
Niall's brothers formed the teora Connachta
or "three Connachts". According
to tradition, the [province] beyond the Shannon
was once known as Coiced Ol nEcmacht, the
Fifth of the Fir Ol nEcmacht (or Necmacht), which
may conceal the name of the Nagmatae, a
tribe which Ptolemy locates in the west of
Ireland. On the other hand, it may be
simply a pseudo-antiquarian device to describe
the province as it presumably was before the
Connachta [as descendants of Conn] had come into
existence..." (Byrne, Irish Kings
and High Kings, 231). Pseudo-antiquarian
devices, however, are as a rule easily detected.
We have often met the fantastic chronological,
geographical or dynastic mistakes they tend to
produce. But this one shows no such
features. Nor does it seem to serve
anyone’s interests; by the time this bit of
lore was written down, there were practically no
Connaught houses which did not claim descent from
Conn, who was so prestigious that the only
advantage to be drawn from pseudo-antiquarian
devices was to claim, not to disclaim, him.
And on the other hand, Ptolemy's geography of the
British Isles is famously accurate, still used
today to describe both Roman and barbarian areas.
Even more important than the correspondence
between nagmatae and Fir Ol nEcmacht,
is the fact that he knows nothing of any *Connactae;
which shows that, in his time, the name had not
yet come into being. At some point in
history, dynasties claiming descent from a King
Conn achieved such success in north-west Ireland
that the area was identified with them, but the
process was only completed after the time of
Ptolemy's informants.
That there are two separate
strands of evidence, together with the political
nature of the legends, seem to me enough to
accept the historicity of Conn, of Art, and
therefore of Mag Mucrama. And while we have
no written or (it seems[40]) archaeological evidence
for a Roman raid on Ireland, it is hard to
imagine where an invasion of the force and
merciless efficiency suggested by the legend
would come from, if not from the legions. The
siting of the battle suggests deep penetration:
Mag Mucrama is in county Galway. An
invasion from Britain such as the text describes,
would have to cross all of Meath. The
legends associate Conn with Tara in every
possible way[41], and if his son and heir
existed at all, he must have been a king of
Meath. In other words, the picture is that
the enemy army had crossed the whole of Art's
probable lordship before he gave battle; and the
reason why he took so long to do so is
sufficiently shown by the fact that he lost and
died. Then the British host installs Lugaid
mac Con on the throne of Tara - and vanishes
(though a vindictive fantasy has Beine Brit
beheaded by Lugaid Laga); just as a Roman army
would, after they destroyed a stroppy native
king, installed another (perhaps his brother, if
that patronymic mac Con means what I
suspect!) and sufficiently impressed the terror
of the eagles on the natives.
Vortimer, on the other hand,
cannot be a historical figure. His name,
unlike Art mac Conn's, is a calque on his
father's - which is in turn almost certainly a
racial and social insult, and therefore (this is
my point) legendary rather than historical.
Art Oenfer mac Conn must certainly have figured
in the king-lists and pedigrees as the fallen of
Mag Mucrama, and therefore - if we take Conn to
be at all historical - he must be historical too:
it was the ruin of Mag Mucrama, however we
imagine it, that placed them both in an ancient
legend of dynastic ruin. Vortimer’s
death before his father, on the other hand, seems
a very convenient device to explain why
king-lists and pedigrees knew no-one of that
name, and traced the line of Vortigern through
Pascent or Britu. Vortimer, according to
Rachel Bromwich, is unknown to the gogynfeirdd,
the poets that follow on the heroic age of
Taliesin, Neirin and Llywarch Hen; he only turns
up in narrative legends in which Vortigernid
manipulation is more than suspected; and our
faith in his historicity is not helped by the
fact that two genealogies name him as the father
of Madrun - who is none other than the goddess Matrona,
patroness of the river Marne and favourite of any
amount of legendary lines of descent[42].
And we should remember that these
legends are explanations of dynastic disasters.
In Britain, it is the father, Vortigern with whom
the dynasty is ruined; in Ireland, it is Art, the
son. The dynastic disaster is consumed at
Mag Mucrama, and Mag Mucrama is the affair of Art
and of Art alone: Conn is long since dead. Vortimer,
on the other hand, exists purely to clean up the
reputation of his line, and is completely
untainted by his father's crime or punishment,
except to the extent that Ronwein murders him
– in other words, that he pays for his
father’s disastrous marriage with his life;
he is, to that extent, and in a different way
from his father, a scapegoat.
The major difference between Art
and Vortimer is that Art eventually succeeds his
father and suffers, alone, for whatever taint had
entered Ireland from Outside in his father's
days; while all of Vortimer's life and adventures
take place within the frame of his father's
lifetime. This is almost certainly dictated
by the fact that the historical
"Vortigern" was in fact the only figure
directly connected and charged with letting in
the Saxons. The legend of his disastrous
love depends on this historical fact; and on the
legend of his disastrous love depends, in his
entirety, the character of Vortimer, who is
wholly defined by his relationship with the two
terms of the ruin - Ronwein and the Saxon host -
and who exists, therefore, wholly within the
framework of the legend. The admission of
the Saxons, with all that it implies, is the
affair of Vortigern and of him alone. On
the Irish side, Conn's dark role seems to arise
from his having only one son, something which was
to prove disastrous at Mag Mucrama, and from that
son having no legitimate heir. The naive
moral positivism so often encountered in these
legends must have argued that their ill-luck must
have some reason.
Notes
History
of Britain, 407-597 is copyright © 2002, Fabio
P. Barbieri. Used with permission.
Comments
to: Fabio P.
Barbieri
|
