New Grange, tomb of the nameless sea voyagers

When this review appears the little site museum at New Grange will be
open. Who knows? The Board of Works may even decide to open the tomb
itself.

Because of Mr. O'Kelly's excavations it has been shut for the last
three summers; hard luck on visitors from abroad since it is the only
major monument we have to show prior to Cormac's Chapel.

On present showing the excavation will last till 1969. It may be
difficult to excavate with coach loads of visitors dropping in, but
they seem to be able to do it in France with the aid of a little
chicken wire, and the results, though perhaps crude by our
standards, are more plentiful and exciting.

Generous tribute

Accordingly, the volume, "New Grange" in the "Ancient People and
Places" series by its _General Editor Glyn Daniel, and the late Sean
O Riordain is doubly welcome.

Trebly welcome indeed, as a most generous tribute from an eminent
foreign archaeologist to an Irish one whom we lost when he was only
coming into his strength.

With its plentiful maps, plans and magnificent photographs, it should
enable you to see everything worth seeing in the Boyne Valley.

Silent forbears

My own interest in prehistoric archaeology is limited by the fact that
we shall never really know much more about it. The builders of New
Grange, Dowth and Knowth Delonged to an inscriptionless civilisation,
and we shall never know their language, poetry of its own; there
names.

This, of course, has a poetry of its own: there is something
moving in the thought of those nameless prospectors sailing up the
Aegean and Mediterranean, and pressing on from their settlement in the
Boyne Valley to the north of Scotland; and few things are more
impressive than those great tombs whose architectural plan seems to
represent the return to the womb and from whose walls the eyes of
the Death Goddess look sternly at us.

Island hermits

But we can never get inside the builders' minds as we can get inside
the mind of a group ot monks lying in a common grave on Aran with
'The Seven Romanists' for an epitaph. We know who the Romanists were,
and we can deduce with some certainty what brought them together on an
island in the Atlantic.

I should sacrifice the excavation of a lot of ring forts and passage
graves for that of one monastic site like Inishcaltra. Perhaps we
concentrate on prehistoric archaeology because we are so fond of
theory, but even if there is nothing to read in Late Neolithic it
does not necessarily follow that there is nothing of importance in
any other language.

World of myth

Here we come to the great gap in this valuable book. There is a
considerable literature in Irish on the Boyne tombs which is totally
ignored by Professor O'Riordan and Dr. Daniel.

Bruig na Boinne is, as an old Irish writer described it, "The Land of
Elemar's Wife."

Elemar, a sinister figure who probably represents the Death Ood, is
married to the River Boyne, the Bo Fhinn or "White Cow." She is loved
by the Good God, the Great God or the Great Father, Echaid, who by
magic banishes her husband for nine months during which she gives
birth to Echaid's son, Aengus, and Aengus finally achieves the
ownership of Bruig na Bolnne.

The best version is in the famous "Wooing of Etain" and it is clearly
a resurrectlon myth of extraordinary beauty and philosophical depth.

One would suppose that any visitor to New Grange would wish to know
something of these ancient traditions, but instead the authors seem
to criticise Sir William Wilde and George Coffey and to imply that
New Grange is not Bruig na Boinne at all.

"It was Wilde who first ldentifed the Boyne barrows as the royal
cemetery of Brugh na Boinne," they say. But was it?"

Their only reference to the native literature on the subject is in two
quotations from translations of the Annals, recording the plundering
of the graves in 861. The translations, each over a hundred years old,
are completely out of date and certainly misleading—how would
Dr. Daniel treat a mere literary man who quoted important documents in
this casual way? 

Ancient source

But ev«n as they stand, the quotations show that the original
ninth-century author knew perfectly well that the tombs were part of
Bruig na Boinne. They refer to Dowth as "the cave of the grave of
Bodan, i.e., the shepherd of Elemar."

"Gravo" should be "monument, I am not sure that "Bodan" is a man's
name at all, and "shepherd" should be "cowman." " But like "The Land
of Elemar's Wife" "The Monument of Elemar's Cowman" is clearly a
poetic reference to one of the characters in the myth of the White Cow
and the goddess's escape from the kingdom of death. A scholar friend
points out to me that the Irish name given to New Grange itself "Achad
Aldai" seems to another reference to Echaid the "Great God."

German authority

For readers who have an acquaintance with German the Irish literature
of the Boyne tombs is splendidly summarised by Rudolf Thurneysen in his
great book //Die Irische Koenig und Heldensage// and if Bord Failte
produces a guide-book of its own, I sincerely hope it will stipulate
that the author should make himself familiar with It.

In any but this mad, distracted country of ours that literature would
be known to every child.

New Grange by Glyn Daniel and Sean O'Riordan: Ancient People and
Places (Thames and Hudson, 35s.).

Sunday Independent, 1964-09-27, p.8