The Books That Define Ireland. Tom Garvin

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      Geoffrey Keating, The History of Ireland/Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (1634)

Geoffrey Keating was born in South Tipperary, south-west of Mallow, around 1580, of ‘Old English’ (Sean-Ghaill) or Anglo-Norman stock. He presumably grew up well aware of the near-genocide that had occurred in Desmond (South Munster) some decades before his birth, and knew also of the Nine Years War that was going on in Ulster in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign. Not much is known of his personality or private life other than what is offered the reader by his written work. As Bernadette Cunningham remarks in her wonderful study The World of Geoffrey Keating, ‘The real Geoffrey Keating is more elusive than Shakespeare. No manuscript in his hand has been identified and none of his contemporaries mentions having met him.’1 He seems to have come from a comfortable landed family in the barony of Iffa and Offa and was educated at a local school of poetry specialising in Irish and Latin manuscripts. He studied theology in France (Rheims and Bordeaux) as was the custom for Catholic seminarians of that time and later was ordained to the priesthood. He returned to Ireland around 1610. He died no later than 1644.2 Writing extensively in Irish, his first work was Eochair-Sgiath an Aifrinn (The Key Shield of the Mass), a defence of the Catholic Mass. He became well known in the south of Ireland as a preacher, and eventually published the background material to his sermons as Trí Bior-Ghaoithe an Bháis (The Three Spears of Death) around 1631. However, he is best remembered for his four-volume history of Ireland, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (Compendium of Knowledge about Ireland) published in 1634 (hereafter referred to as FFE). This work continues to be valued not only for being a compendium of Irish history, pseudo-history and mythology but also for being the first major historical work to be written in modern Irish. It is still quite accessible to anyone reasonably familiar with the modern version of the language and able to deal with the old spelling which was to be replaced eventually by a more streamlined official standard in the 1950s.3 Keating was evidently competent in Old and Middle Irish as well as Latin and his book became the major conduit by which versions of old tales and the common mediaeval version of the history of the Irish race was passed on to an increasingly literate and English-speaking country.

      Inevitably, FFE was appropriated for political purposes unimagined by Keating in his historical era, and was to become material for unionist and nationalist self-justifications in the eighteenth century and after. Keating was commonly titled ‘the Irish Herodotus’. Herodotus was, of course, the early fifth-century Greek writer who was famous for his extraordinary blending of myth, unverifiable if entertaining anecdotes and genuine historical information. However, Herodotus was traditionally known to the Greeks not only as being the Father of History but also as the Father of Lies. It was the Greek historian’s fate to be contrasted tacitly with the evidence-based scientific approach represented by his successor Thucydides in his extraordinary eye-witness analysis of the Peloponnesian War (432–404 BC). This is not to suggest that Keating was the Irish equivalent of either Greek figure because he had a healthy scepticism about many of the accounts and fables which he presented to the reader combined with an unquestioning acceptance of writings which he held to be divine Revelation. To be fair, he tended to distance himself from the more outlandish anecdotes and narratives which the traditional lore offered him.

      An ambivalent contemporary recommendation of Keating to the historian Luke Wadding by a Church of Ireland bishop (John Roche) displayed scepticism of Popish pleadings:

One Doctor Keating laboureth much in compiling Irish notes towards a history in Irish. The man is very studious, and yet I fear that if his work ever come to light it will need an amendment of ill-warranted narrations; he could help you to many curiosities of which you can make better use than himself. I have no interest in the man, for I never saw him, for he dwelleth in Munster.4

In the early seventeenth century, Catholicism in Ireland was a reluctantly tolerated religion, keeping its head down and defending itself in whispers rather than in bellicose sermons. Corish describes it accurately as becoming increasingly ‘hidden’ in the period between 1700 and 1800.5 The Flight of the Earls and the beginning of the Ulster plantations in the first decade of the seventeenth century symbolised the slow approach of a new, putatively Protestant order in Ireland. Keating’s book, which is a claim for the essentially authentic character of a Catholic Irish nation going back to the fifth century and with links to a semi-imaginary but very noble pagan prehistory, was, by the standards of the time and place, unusually self-assertive. The complete breakdown of the Catholic and Jacobite cause lay two generations in the future, after Aughrim’s Great Disaster of 1691.

      FFE begins with a long and polemical introduction (díonbhrollach) which denounces various English, Welsh and Anglo-Irish (Palesman) historical writers who, in Keating’s view, betrayed their noble academic calling by libelling the Irish, an ancient and noble people who had been the founders of a great and early civilisation on the island of Ireland, later extended to North Britain in the form of the Kingdom of Scotland or, in Irish, Alba (‘Albion’, or the Gaels’ share of Great Britain, Albion being the White Island as seen from France). The argument was that the Irish were learned and that their monks had reintroduced learning and writing into western Europe, including Britain, after the barbarisation of the continent in the aftermath of the fall of the Western Empire in the fifth century. Not only were the ancient Irish very learned, they were also brave, and they had at one stage allegedly invaded Britain under a King Dáithí and got as far as the Alps