Keating Hero

At that time, it was said, the woods were so dense that a squirrel could travel from the mountain to the lough, hopping from branch to branch, and never touch the ground. Through the shadowy forest, Hugh Maguire led the men of Fermanagh, Donegal, and Tyrone into position on the northern banks of the Arney, a slip of a river that falls from the west and flows into Upper Lough Erne at Ballymenone. On the Arney, in ambush, the army of Ireland waited.

All unaware, Sir Henry Duke marched north from Dublin to relieve the shriveling garrison at Enniskillen Castle, the fair seat of the Lion of Erne, taken by the English and besieged by the chiefs of Ulster: Maguire, O'Donnell, and O'Neill. Duke's troops waded into the stream at the place called the Ford of Biscuits, where their sodden provisions would drift with the current, and they died in the fields, called still the Red Meadows, where their blood soaked into the clay. So it was recorded, for the year 1594, in the annals of the Four Masters, and so it was told in my day by Hugh Nolan, the sage historian of Ballymenone.

"Defeature" it was termed by the English historian of the era. The Four Masters proclaimed it "a great victory." For a giddy moment it seemed that Patrick's island would be saved for Patrick's faith, that the Irish would shape a nation once again. Then Hugh Maguire of Fermanagh was killed in Cork, Hugh O'Donnell of Donegal was killed in Spain, and, old man among the rebels, Hugh O' Neill of Tyrone survived to surrender. The Wild Geese flew, the rapparees took to the hills. Defeat was complete.

Defeat is the context. As the North filled with new men, and the native people crowded into reservations on the margins, there was no role for the soldier. The heroes of defeat fought with the pen--four together in the West, one alone in the South, the five of them linked in the dreamy prose of Finnegans Wake as tellers of the Irish tale. The man in the South was Geoffrey Keating, priest and bard, set to wandering by his public denunciation of a high lady's sin. He gathered the stories of his land, reading difficult texts, hearing faulty tales, and stringing the pieces into history.

I see Keating in the dark on the road, in the rain and chilly winds, hugging the precious manuscripts rolled in his cloak, seeking the squinty light of the thatched hovel where he would find a bowl of oaten gruel, a clatty pallet on the floor, an unreliable flame to light the page on which he wrote. I do not know if he had read Herodotus, the first master of his trade, but like Herodotus he traveled, collecting tales, and when he set them in sequence, he welcomed both the factual and the fantastic, saying clearly, repeatedly, as Herodotus did, that many of the tales were not so, not credible to the scientific mind. But, like the monk who transcribed the Táin into the Book of Leinster, though it contained the deceptions of demons, Keating knew the stories should be preserved as historical evidence. He did not fabricate them; they were facts, data, and, having been believed once upon a time, they opened windows upon the past and contained cultural wealth as true as the merely empirical. In the wake of defeat, the Four Masters wrought together and Keating struggled alone to save the parts of the Irish past that could fuel the smithy in which future generations would forge the culture of the race in preparation for the construction of a nation all their own.

Nothing more to be done: when military action is implausible, political hopes dim, the job is the poet's. The last rising of the Scots was put down, and Robert Burns declared himself the people's poet, collecting the ballads and composing the verse in which the spirit of...