Books: She holds Armagh was a pagan sanctuary In a couple of months of convalescence I have read three Irish books, all of which gave me great pleasure and all of which I think may be of lasting importance. Two are literature, or concerned with literature; one is a book on art. This must take pride of place, because if there were such a thing as an Irish Honours List, Mlle. Françoise Henry would rightly be many people's first preference. She is a Frenchwoman who has dedicated her life to the study and interpretation of Irish art, has learned more about it than anyone else, and made it better known abroad than it has ever been before. First of three “Irish Art In the Early Christian Period” (Methuen, 63/-) is a translation of the first volume of her /L’Art Irlandais/, and superior to the French version in its arrangement and the provision of a proper index. The illustrations are extraordinarily fine, and the text is both scholarly and personal. That is to say the author is quite able to take a classroom view of a monument, but she also likes to tell you what it looks like when you've tramped miles and crossed wet fields and suddenly see it, in some blaze of watery light. And the emotion of a work of art seen in that way is an essential part of the story. The summary of Irish history which runs through the three volumes is admirable, though not entirely exempt from French naughtiness. She dismisses the whole subject of St. Patrick in an urbane footnote, referring us to O’Rahilly, Esposito, Ryan, Carney, Binchy and Shaw. This is rather like referring a student of racial violence to the works of Verwoerd, Nkrumah, Tahombe, Cruise O’Brien and Smith. /Antiquity of Armagh/ But she does leave the traditionalists looking very foolish when she suggests that Armagh was a pagan sanctuary long before St. Patrick’s time. This is almost certainly true, and she does not even give the evidence its full weight, because the statue of the horned god (Cernunnos?) which she illustrates is not unique. There is another complete statue in private possession; there are /four/ statues of a figure with a headdress of sun-rays which I take to be Lug (three of these are in the Cathedral crypt and are not often seen), and there is a figure with a runner’s kirtle and horse's ears which is beyond question Macha, the Irish Epona, and not Labraid Loingsech as Kingsley Porter thought. With the so-called “Navan Fort,” Armagh is one of the twin forts which are referred to in the sagas as “Emain Machae”—The Twins of Macha. Mlle. Henry's book leaves me with no criticisms, only the odd doubt. For instance, in the third volume of the French edition, she follows the usual practice of translating the name of the builder of the Tuam shaft cross as “Gilla Crist O’Toole” and then ingeniously provides him with a suitable Wicklow ancestry. But surely, the inscription merely means “grandson of Tuathal” whom I take to be the well-known Connacht builder, Tuathal Saer, whose beautiful gravestone in Clonmacnois is noticed by most visitors. In the same way she seems to me to ignore the linguistic evidence against her early dating of certain churches and crosses. Whatever we may say, these were built by masons, and the fact is that there is no word in Old Irish for “mason.” When there /were/ real masons from A.D. 900 onwards, this caused confusion, because the only way you could refer to masons was as “builders in wood and stone” or some such circumlocution. Nor is this all, for as a friend points out to me. the Irish laws, which carefully define the privileges of the various groups of wood-workers do not recognise the existence of masons at all. So, till I know more about it, I must continue to doubt whether any of these churches or crosses were built before the tenth century, though where the masons came from to build so many of them, or where they !earned their skills are problems beyond me. It is no flattery to say that they are probably beyond anybody except Mlle. Henry herself. /Gifted poet/ Louis MacNeice, one feels, should have been director of wireless in B.B.C.'s Northern Ireland station, but it is hard to imagine northern politicians tolerating in such a position the son of a well-known nationalist. Dublin might have offered him his opportunity, but could our politicians trust their communications to the son of a Protestant bishop? MacNeice, like his colleague, Denis Johnston, had to earn his living outside Ireland. He was immensely gifted, so much so that I sometimes thought everything, even his poetry, came too easily to him. In some ways his unfinished autobiography “The Strings are False” (Faber and Faber; 30/-), seems to have demanded more of him, and at least in the early chapters about his childhood In Carrickfergus he writes like a master. This is a distinguished and very readable book by a man who in life was much loved as well as admired. /Essential Behan/ I am told that something I wrote in this paper suggested “The World of Brendan Behan”, edited by Scan McCann (Four Square; 3/6),and if true, this would indeed be something to take pride in. Here, a group of Irish Journalists and writers record their memories and opinions of Behan, and the general level is no far above that of the ordinary obituary book that it is hard to believe that anything more, definite will be written. It will be an indispensable book for students in the future, but it is equally fascinating to the general reader of today. Sunday Independent, 1965-11-21, p.19