The Filí

Welcome to the History of Ireland In the last episode, we looked at the relationship between New Gaeilge and the Celts And its possible inspiration for a uniquely Irish supernatural being The people of the Shí, or the Tuath Dé We also touched on the messy, complicated nature of trying to unpack any of this And the impossibility of trying to see what the pre-Christian Irish actually believed in

You will see list after list of Irish gods and goddesses online And there’s a huge amount of almost neo-Celticism that’s been built around it Whether those claims can be backed up gets you into tricky academic debates To very briefly summarize, there are two camps The nativists, who believe we can understand pre-Christian Ireland with some certainty And the anti-nativists, who reckon we can’t And in these debates, generally modern scholars lean more towards anti-nativism Which leads me to believe that any online list laying out who the pagan Irish actually believed in Is making claims that maybe they can’t quite back up

I understand the hunger for a clear pre-Christian national Irish mythology and deities But we just can’t know what that was And to be honest, the reality is a lot more interesting Ireland has always been known as the land of saints and scholars And we have a deep history of telling beautiful stories And this is where we can start being a little more definitive Because though we can’t speak to what pre-Christians actually believed We can talk about the literature which was most likely influenced by ancient beliefs And it is a rich tapestry of fascinating stories that spans centuries Written and illustrated by a class of monastic scholars And today we’re going to explore who these storytellers were And again, it’s all about the crossover between two cultures Or maybe more accurately, the evolution of one culture from paganism to Christianity Today we’re exploring the Fili

The Fili are often described as ancient Irish poets That’s how the word is usually translated into English as poet But they were a lot more than that They were educators, genealogists and the confidants of kings One historian, Elvett Johnson, goes as far as to describe them as The custodians of communal aristocratic memories Basically, they were the smart lads in the room An elite class of poets who had huge influence in Ireland In some way, shape or form, from pagan times right up to the Renaissance

There was anything between 16 and 7 classifications of Fili Basically, with Baird at the one end, a Fili who hadn’t done much study All the way up to Ollam, a master To become an Ollam, you had to study for at least 12 years And memorize hundreds and hundreds of stories They were a large aristocratic class that would advise chieftains and kings And were thought to have powers of divination And were keepers of the Dinshankas, the history of place names

They also acted as propagandists, propping up Irish leaders’ legitimacy By explaining their genealogy and telling stories of their greatness Or if a king or chieftain was seen to have insulted the Fili Or was acting in any manner that was kind of unfitting They would be hit with an Eire Eire, translated as satire à l’ampoune or even the poet’s curse Has been described by one historian as a formidable weapon With which members of the poetic orders enforced claims Either on their own behalf or on behalf of other persons who employed them It was genuinely seen as a big deal And it was believed it could actually do physical harm It was kind of like teasing or slagging They would write poems that made fun of the kings And would do them a great amount of political damage So basically, the Fili were people who were so good at taking the piss out of people They gained real political power It doesn’t get much more Irish than that

And the Fili really were held in high regard There are stories of when the English eventually came to Ireland When they were shocked to see the Irish High Kings Letting their poets sit at the table with them and share a meal These poets were much more than mere entertainers One imagines a Gandalf-like figure sitting at the head of the table Guiding kings and providing wisdom And Tolkien’s wizards do resemble the Fili quite a bit And it wouldn’t be the first time that Tolkien borrowed from Ireland to create Middle-earth But we might touch on that at a later date

Now anyone with a passing interest in Celtic history May be thinking that these Fili lads sound a lot like Druids The ancient Celtic class of priests And there’s definitely some overlap and connection between the two A medieval Irish lore book describes the Fili as a higher social status than Druid The Druid was seen as a craftsman, like a smith While the Fili was a lord, closer to the kings This may be because as Christianity entered Ireland around the 5th century The Druid became a lot less important in society But the Fili definitely did not

As Ireland became Christian, it’s most likely that the Fili followed suit Or at least as Mike Williams describes Bridge the ecclesiastical and secular worlds Sharing their fundamental intellectual and religious assumptions with their clerical colleagues Or as Elvett Johnson writes The Fili take their place firmly within the Irish intellectual milieu Even in its monastic context And can be seen as joining secular and ecclesiastical interests Largely because, although they could be clerics They formed a basically secular learned class Strongly connected with the royal courts

What that all means is that we should imagine the Fili not as pagan tree worshipping poets And instead as an important intellectual, almost clerical class in ancient Ireland And with this idea in our head It’s very easy to imagine them hoovering up the knowledge which the church brought to Ireland In the form of Latin manuscripts and classical writing It would make sense that monks setting up centres of learning Would have worked closely or even merged with the native intellectual class You could imagine Fili becoming monks and vice versa As Johnson writes, the Fili were neither druids in disguise or monks in mufti They were a very Irish mix of the two

And so the Fili or monks or a mix of the two Are responsible for the stories we do have that tell of Irish mythology They’re responsible for the beautiful centuries long Irish literary tradition And because of this, we start to see an amazing melting pot of pagan and Christian ideas Can we separate the pagan from the Christian to better understand ancient Ireland? Or is the past lost and is there no way to extract pagan beliefs from stories written by Christians? Well, I’ll leave that debate to the nativist and anti-nativist academics For me, it’s just another good example of that scale of authenticity that I mentioned in the last episode It’s impossible to strive for pure authentic truth Without sounding ridiculous, everything is a story told by someone at some point What I do think is that we can better understand the history of Ireland by studying these stories And that they’re just great pieces of creativity

With all of that swirling around, one of the fascinating byproducts of this mix of Fili and monk Was that a lot of work was done to fit the two a day into the Christian worldview Interestingly, they weren’t cast out as evil pagan gods But instead, as we discussed, demoted from gods to supernatural beings The concept of the she and the she-mound became more and more important As Williams writes, the she-mound grew in importance because Christian intellectuals Founded a discreet way to signal the divinity of originally non-Christian figures Without directly describing them as gods

And nowhere is this more true than in Laura Govola Éireann The Book of the Taking of Ireland Or better known as the Book of Invasions This was quote written in order to bridge the chasm between Christian world chronology And the pre-history of Ireland You see, the best place for ancient history in the 5th-6th century was the Bible It was full on believed as fact And if it was fact, the intellectuals of Ireland wanted to understand How the history of Ireland slotted into the biblical narrative And so there was a keen need to trace the Irish all the way back to the Book of Genesis

And through this they came across a bit of a problem As Williams writes, here Ireland’s men of learning came to a dead end They possessed a conspicuously lush body of traditions about the origins of the people of their own island But could find no reference to the Irish either in scripture or the works of Christian world history So who, they asked themselves, where are they? And where did they come from? It makes me think again of Tommy Tiernan and his joke about there being a huge gap between who we think we are and who we actually are It was the same back then

The long and short of it was that this Book of Invasions created a pseudo-history That basically went something like this The world was created and there was Noah’s flood And at some point the Gaels migrated to Egypt Meanwhile, Ireland was settled by Nebid and his people, the Numidians But they got into a war with the Fomorians and were scattered around the world Some of the Numidians were enslaved in Greece and forced to carry bags of soil up mountains And became known as the Bagmen or Firbolgs And these people eventually made it back to Ireland Meanwhile, the other Numidians went north and gained magical powers Returning to Ireland as the Tuath Adannan And then after a while, the Gaels or Milesians left Egypt and arrived in Ireland to conquer the Tuath Adannan Splitting Ireland in two With the Gaels taking the land and the Tuath Dé being sent off to live under the Sheathlands

Just a brief aside, in this story there’s also a great narrative that the Gaels left after the fall of the Tower of Babel And basically took all the best bits of different languages to create the first perfect language Irish or Gaelic or Gaelic So that is a very very quick overview of what was the genuine historical worldview that was believed at the time And don’t worry, it won’t be on the test, there’s a lot of names obviously But some will become more familiar to you as we go on

What’s important here is to notice that the Tuath Dé, the people of the Sheathlands Have been demoted from gods to mere magicians, magical Numidians And the Gaels or the Irish must be one of the few people in the world to have said that they defeated their own gods in battle This is what happens when Christians write old beliefs in their worldview, am I right?

This book of invasions was written and revised over centuries The form we now know was finished around 1075 But academics can say that a lot of its stories came from earlier traditions And so it can be argued that it’s a bit of an amalgamation of quote unquote real pagan stories And the literary pseudo-historical invention of later Christians What a complicated mess

Regardless, the stories themselves are a lot of fun There’s one more group of people who we really should speak about when thinking of these stories The Gaelic revival writers of the 18th, 19th and 20th century Because they had a huge impact on how we understand them But I’m going to hold off on that for a little while And instead, next episode, let’s actually get stuck into the stories themselves Next episode, we’re going to tell the story of the First Battle of Moitora And meet the Tuath Dé for the very first time

You can also get in touch through the website or on Facebook and Twitter It’s always great hearing from you guys And if I’ve made a mistake, please do let me know The History of Ireland was written and produced by me, Kevin Dolan With music by Liam Doyle and additional help from assistant producer Aoife Murphy This podcast was recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation Sovereignty was never ceded