Origins of the genre
When and how did the ballads originate? These are important questions, but the present state of our knowledge does not allow us to give definitive answers. Much research remains to be undertaken into the stimuli behind the tradition and its maintenance as a living, creative species of verse over more than four centuries in both Ireland and Scotland. It would seem that the ballads have their roots in different types of 'literature', and that the diversity of themes within the tradition reflects a diversity of origins for the corpus as a whole. Small items of verse about Fionn and other characters who later became prominent in fian-lore are attested in linguistic forms which date to the eighth and ninth centuries. These sometimes have a genealogical content. It is also likely that the ballads owe much to the Middle Irish poetry of dindshenchas which describes, sometimes at signficant length, the stories behind particular place-names. An interest in place-names, often set in the context of an itinerary or supporting the verisimilitude of the narrative, is an enduring characteristic of the ballads, and accords well with the open-air lifestyle of the Fiana. It is also possible that the structure of some ballads was influenced by the forms of the speech-poems in which the protagonists in the Irish prose sagas sometimes addressed one another. Conversation is certainly an important feature of the lays, especially the Fian-ballads, in which Oisín often provides stories at the request of St Patrick. Yet even more important than matters of style and structure is the delineation, within the lays, of heroes and heroic adventure, which was once a central concern of the prose sagas. The consistent welding of heroic narrative with poetry makes the lays unique within the body of surviving Celtic literature, and must surely be indicative of a very substantial debt to earlier forms of heroic narrative. Items resembling the ballads do not appear in manuscripts until the eleventh century, and it is possible that the fully fledged narrative poem did not emerge until after 1000 A.D. Professor Gerard Murphy, who believed that the earliest significant specimens of the Gaelic lay tradition belonged to the twelfth century, postulated that the lays developed as part of the growth of the wider body of medieval European balladry. However, datings of texts remain uncertain, and the correspondence in time may be accidental or artificial. It is conceivable, as Murphy also suggests, that the presence of the Norsemen in Ireland may have introduced the Irish, and presumably the Gaelic speakers of Scotland, to poems celebrating Germanic heroes. This may have encouraged them to produce their own form of heroic verse, and it may partly explain the prominent place given to the Norsemen in the ballad tradition. The development of Fian lays is to be set within the wider growth of prose traditions about the Fian; both prose and verse are known collectively in Irish (but not in Scottish Gaelic) as Fianaigheacht (modern Irish Fiannaíocht), 'Fian-lore'. This is seen in a splendidly varied form in the remarkable collection of prose and verse known as Acallam na Senórach ('The Conversation of the Old Men'), which was compiled in Ireland in the late twelfth century (c. 1175) and exists in various recensions. The frame of the Acallam is a journey round parts of Ireland. The principal traveller is St Patrick, who is given a 'guided tour' of the sites associated with the Fiana, the guides usually being Oisín and Caoilte, the last survivors of that great warrior band. Here we can see several aspects of the tradition which can also be observed in the lays at a later stage: for example, the conversation between St Patrick and Oisín, which forms a frame for some of the ballads; and the link with place-names which frequently surfaces in the poems, and which can sometimes became a dominant concern. Here too we can trace in embryo some of the themes which were elaborated in later ballads, such as the tricks and swift running of Caoilte, the 'fast man' of the Fiana. By the fourteenth century, when a later version of the Acallam was compiled, there existed a long ballad which told of his tricks in an attempt to free Fionn from the clutches of Cormac mac Airt of Tara, and of his subsequent race round Ireland to fetch a couple of all wild animals as a ransom to free Fionn. Verses telling of Caoilte's running are found in the first version of the Acallam, and the whole ballad, together with a prose explanation, are recorded in the later Acallam. This ballad is found in BDL (Poem IX in the present edition). It is apparent that the growth of the Fian material in this period not only stimulated the emergence of new poetry, but also drew other verse to itself, including poems which evidently bore no relationship to the earlier body of Fianaigheacht. This was liable to happen with nature poetry. In the twelfth-century Acallam, for example, a descriptive poem about a place called Arran, possibly that in Scotland, was used in the context of a prose narrative to which it was probably unrelated when first composed. Throughout the Middle Ages, the ballads retained a close link with prose narrative. Certain tales are attested in both prose and verse. The tales in Acallam na Senórach provided a rich stimulus for story-tellers; indeed, a number of later medieval tales and ballads appear to have their origins in summary acounts which first appear in the Acallam. This is apparent in two ballads in BDL, Poems VI and XX. A couple of other items, BDL XIII and XXIV, appear to assume a knowledge of the story of the elopement of Diarmaid and Gráinne, celebrated in the prose tale Tóruigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne, which contains a version of his death. The accounts of the deaths of the other principal heroes, Oscar, Conlaoch and Fraoch (Poems XXII, XXIII and XXVII), similarly exist in prose and verse. Frequently the prose and verse accounts differ in points of detail, but occasionally there is a much more significant discrepancy in their plots. The vigorous post-1100 development of the lays reflects the growing prestige of poetry in Ireland and Gaelic Scotland. By the twelfth century, schools of poets were emerging in the Gaelic territories, and their codes of practice were being encapsulated in bardic rule-books which laid down the types of language, metre and rhyme which were believed to be suitable for this important craft. As a result the status of poetry and its practitioners rose to such an extent that it began to encroach on other literary domains, with the result that even the time-honoured prose sagas were no longer inviolable. This explains why so many different genres are found jostling one another in this body of verse - genealogy, mythology, traditional history, heroic narrative, elegy and eulogy, debates, discussions, and much else. The Gaelic ballad thus stands at the interface of
several traditions, most noticeably those of narrative prose and didactic and
eulogistic poetry. It reaches back into
the past, recasts old themes in new moulds, and, as time passes, makes these
relevant to the changing social, political and literary circumstances of
Ireland and Scotland. A relaxed, wide-ranging, all-embracing perspective thus
informs the corpus, and is reflected in a mingling of moods and styles, and
even of themes.
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