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On Raven’s Wing - Ep 27
188 Plays4 years ago
I talk to Dr Rena Maguire about On Raven’s Wing by Morgan Llywelyn. This book is a retelling of part of the Ulster Cycle, especially the life of Cuchulain, the Hound of Ulster, and the Tain Bo Cuailhge, the Cattle Raid of Cooley. It is mainly set at Emain Macha which is known to be Navan Fort bear Armagh. How much of the story reflects the Irish Iron Age?
Links
- On Raven’s Wing by Morgan Llywelyn
- Navan Research Group
- Tain online
- Emania Journal
- The Togail
- Kenneth Jackson
- Mallory, James P. [ed.], Aspects of the Táin, Belfast: December, 1992. Contact Navan Fort, as their shop may still have copies
Contact
- Twitter: @prehistpod
- Guest Twitter: @justrena
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to 'Prehistories' Show
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome back to Prehistories. I'm Kim Bedelf. Last month I talked to Erin Kavanagh about the book of Taliesin. Have you read it? What did you think? Was there anything that particularly struck you as being indicative of time in the early medieval period? Was there anything that surprised you? Are there any related works you think that I should read? As you know, this is not my area of expertise. I'm all about prehistory, but that's where we're going today, so that's great.
00:00:40
Speaker
Send me any comments or any questions about last month or about this month's show to me on Twitter at prehistpod or you can find the show on archaeologypodcastnetwork.com forward slash prehistories so you can give me some comments there.
Modern Life and Ancient Discoveries
00:01:00
Speaker
Another month into the new abnormal and I've been reflecting on how strange it is to be in one place most of the time and not venturing very far from home
00:01:08
Speaker
I think there is a perception that this is what life was like in the past, you know, that you didn't stray very far, that you stayed put and maybe only saw the next village. But there have now been so many discoveries of long distance movement of individuals in the archaeological record.
00:01:26
Speaker
You know, like Amesbury Archer, he grew up in the foothills of the Alps in the Neolithic and he ended up buried near Stonehenge. Well, I say Neolithic, it's probably early Bronze Age because he may have brought bronze to Britain, although it would be amazing if we found the one person who did that. There was a late Bronze Age woman from Eichteved. I think I'm saying that right. It might not be in Denmark who made the journey to southern Germany and back several times as far as I'm aware from the most recent evidence.
Viking Mass Grave Discussion
00:01:56
Speaker
And from later periods too. I'm just thinking about Vikings as well at the moment. I'm talking to a client whose name I won't reveal about developing a Vikings game and you know I told them about one of the most interesting sites that was dug just before 2012, just before the British Olympics.
00:02:14
Speaker
when we held it here. 54 men from Scandinavia but also from the Arctic regions of Scandinavia and Russia and some of the Baltic states were found in a mass grave in Weymouth on the south coast of England and they dated to about AD 1000 and the story is that they were Vikings who had tried to raid but got caught and massacred by the English.
00:02:38
Speaker
So we seem to find it again and again and again. How many people really didn't stray more than just a few miles from their homes in prehistory or at any other time indeed? Is there just this thing where we have to go different places? We feel this itch or is that just some of us and some of us prefer to stay at home and have actually just enjoyed this lockdown? I don't know, I think I enjoyed it a little bit to start with.
00:03:05
Speaker
But I'm feeling the lack of being able to go and see family and who are all over the country and in other countries too. But anyway, sorry. Let me not get into that.
Celtic Myths and 'On Raven's Wing'
00:03:22
Speaker
Let's introduce the topic of today. There's quite a bit of travel in the book that we're looking at today. The book is On Raven's Wing by Morgan Llewellyn.
00:03:34
Speaker
Morgan Llewelyn was not her real name. She was born as Sally Snyder in America, but she became very, very interested in what she called her Celtic past and did a lot of research into Welsh and Irish history and myths and then wrote
00:03:51
Speaker
Tons of stories, all fictional stories, around all of the historical and mythological events. She apparently had found in her family tree that she was descended from Florin Vower himself, which is pretty amazing if true.
00:04:08
Speaker
I mean it's just it's the same as somebody saying they're descended from William the Conqueror if they're from from England and it's just really how okay that little giggle there that you had was my guest today.
Irish Iron Age Archaeology with Reena McGuire
00:04:20
Speaker
Hi Reena, it's Reena McGuire everyone.
00:04:24
Speaker
Lovely to talk to you. We had a little chat and catch up. This is just such a strange time and I really thought, okay, well, you know, I'm not doing any, I'm not doing my sword fighting. I'm not doing brownies. I'm not doing Pilates. I'm not doing any freelance work anymore. I do thankfully have an employed job and a paid job.
00:04:44
Speaker
This has given me some of my time back so I can rekindle the podcast. So this is, I think, my third one in the new series. And I wouldn't want to speak to anybody else other than Reena at some point because we are old friends now, I think we can say. We most certainly are. And I particularly want, I've picked your brains before on this subject and I thought, well, you know, why don't we do a podcast about it?
00:05:09
Speaker
So, Reena, you are kind of a, you're not just kind of a, you are a specialist in the Irish Iron Age and starting to look at the British Iron Age as well, is that right? Yes, indeed. The problem with the Irish Iron Age has been nobody really knew when it started properly and certainly not when it finishes. And that complicates a lot of what Morgan Nolan writes about. It complicated our lives as archaeologists quite considerably over the years. My speciality moves into
00:05:38
Speaker
using horsiness to pick out the threads and try to actually work out when things happened. I know it's such a big job and you're picking it apart site by site it sounds like to me. A wee bit, just a wee bit.
00:05:53
Speaker
and object by object. There's going to be quite a few publications out this year from Reena, so I'll obviously there'll be the link to Reena's social media in the show notes, so do take a look at what she posts about and there's loads of really interesting stuff.
00:06:10
Speaker
So the funny thing is you mentioned the horsey-ness, and Morgan Clewellyn, if we give her her adopted name, was a big horsey person as well. So maybe we could start with that actually, and I'm springing this on you because I didn't say we were going to talk about this. But has she got the horsey stuff right in the book? Do you remember? Yes. No. No.
00:06:32
Speaker
Okay, this is where it gets really complicated. We have absolutely no, you know, England has got places like Park in Merck, which I'm probably saying really wrong, and then Karigbach, etc. Well, maybe not so much Lin Karigbach, but England has got places like Wet Wang and all the rest of it. We've got sort of the developed British Iron Age.
00:06:53
Speaker
in which you can see manifestations of horsiness. You've even got flag fin where you've got the late Bronze Age horsiness. In Ireland, we're only starting to think, oh, wait, we know we've got horses here. They weren't native. We don't know if they're friends or food or both. And we found one chickpeas made out of antler.
00:07:15
Speaker
which I did do a paper on with Exorc. You did some experimental archaeology, didn't you? That's right. And our librarian in Queen's University was so kind to a lonelier horse to do this and tried to actually work out. But it's very similar to what was found at Flag Finn, the antler chick piece with the holes bored through. This carries a certain balance of how it would be used, the circumstances it would be used,
00:07:41
Speaker
So that gives you basically, there's a potential of a late Bronze Age in Ireland where they're not basically saying that, you know, trigger was on the menu. But what's going on after that? There's this big lull that we have no idea what goes on until all of a sudden bang out of nowhere. It seems to be in sort of 30 murky contexts. If we're lucky, that's if we're lucky.
00:08:06
Speaker
Most times they don't have any provenance whatsoever. You find the gorgeous, gorgeous pieces of tack that we associate with Irish equitation. And nobody has ever had a date for them. And whenever I was doing the tour around it, researchers of museums, people had them as being everything from Nate Prone's age right through. But the truth is, it's nobody's fault on that score because we just haven't known the dates. There's been many devious ways in which I've hammered down, but we can pretty much securely say,
00:08:35
Speaker
that these things were being made between about, probably about AD 4050. That's an important date. AD 4050. Think about it for Britain. It is slightly, slightly important in Britain. It's never so slightly. And because Ireland appears to have friends with benefits, which probably I think the young folk call the relationship.
00:08:54
Speaker
With the Roman Empire, we'd give you slaves, you'd give us horses. What's not to love about this? And the Irish, of course, were terrible slavers. We were absolutely rubbish human beings in this respect. I mean, just think our most famous saint, St Patrick, was brought over by slavery.
00:09:11
Speaker
And Nail Nia Gallach was a monster in this respect in the early medieval period. And the fact that he made his living from taking people hostage and if they were well enough selling them, selling them back home. And if they weren't, then they were put to work. So Ireland has quite a mucky background if at this time is something that we do have to admit. But from the Iron Age, nobody actually knows what exactly is going on. And hammering down the period of history in which these things are being made.
00:09:40
Speaker
So then using usewear and micro usewear and all sorts of experimental work and God knows what, you're able to actually start tying down the evidence of these pieces shows more that it was for riding horses rather than driving
Ireland's Historical Links to Rome
00:09:53
Speaker
them. Everybody immediately thinks chariots, chariots, chariots, because those gorgeous
00:10:01
Speaker
the dashing, cooh-hulling, driving out his chariot and his galloping horses. And of course, he has magical horses. They're Irish magical horses. They talk and they cry and everything. And they also kick butts, they fight on his behalf. And one is called the Lea-Macha, the Graef-Macha. And the other is the Doosingland.
00:10:25
Speaker
the Black of Sanglou, where he's actually born. And these are magical horses, twins again, you've got that whole thing of duality, which of course you get from the late Bronze Age going on in rock art and everything else. So there's a lot of hints that there's already certain mythos are being fed in over the period beforehand. And I'm not saying there's not chariots here. In fact,
00:10:54
Speaker
There's going to be two papers, the first one this Christmas, and the other one then directly after it, Plays the Gods. Yep. Which will show that yes, we did have, but they were rare. I've found the evidence, or not me, strictly speaking, I have to be accurate here. One of my colleagues, Dr. Brian Scott, had one here. Is that what I think it is? Oh yeah. Yep.
00:11:18
Speaker
That'll be a joint paper. Yours need deodorants. Whenever they are introduced to new ideas, they bring something very, very special to rookies like myself, you know? I don't know if you can call yourself a rookie anymore, Reena. It's just, you know, I might say, and people forget I haven't been around for absurd decades. Well, I have. I remember the Iron Age. I went to school on it, but I mean, you know, my age at this stage. But yeah, there are vehicles where they're coming from is interesting.
00:11:45
Speaker
the connections with the south of England are interesting. So yeah, there's a lot to be discussed there. As for Morgan Llewellyn being right about chariots, not the way she writes it. Right. But she's still, they're a game that brings us into the whole situation of the tie on itself and how it comes about.
00:12:10
Speaker
she's going, she does a cracking bodice ripper of its type regarding and bringing it to the masses. It's just another version of the story. And it's a story that was retold and retold and retold and wee bits get added and wee bits get taken away. And people make it
00:12:29
Speaker
relevant to their period of time. And that's the beauty or the nightmare, depending on your outlook. Exactly. Off the tie-in. Yeah. We've mentioned it briefly. We haven't really explained that on Raven's Wing, the subtitle is the story of the tie-in. And the tie-in, Bo Cooley, is the – mainly it's the cattle raid of Cooley, isn't it, that one? But this story is slightly bigger than that. It's more stories from the Ulster cycle with the birth of
00:12:58
Speaker
Kuholin and how he got his name and then all the way through to his death. Sorry guys, that's a bit of a spoiler there. He does go through to his, he dies in the end. Yeah. So, but obviously the central part of the book is about the cattle raid. Yes. There's three recensions tonight to understand the background of it. Past archaeologists have taken it really quite literally. That's, I have mixed feelings about this. It is horrifically.
00:13:26
Speaker
horrifically disturbed context, in which if you know what you're looking for, both linguistically, not my area, and artifactually, much more my area, you'll have a much better idea of which parts are early medieval, which parts are getting into the medieval era per se, and which parts just might be before 400 AD. That is the problem
00:13:52
Speaker
Imagine the worst stratigraphy you ever walked into where there had been earthquakes and rebuilt houses and God knows what. And you could see, you think to yourself, Oh, look, that strata joins up. Oh God, no, it doesn't. That's the way onto something else. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And that's pretty much what the tie-in is. And I'll explain. There's three recensions. Now, when we talk about recensions, we're talking about versions of it that start off. Now,
00:14:20
Speaker
there's the, as part of a much bigger, as you quite correctly say, called the Ulster cycle. And within that, that contains stories like the sorrowful tale of Dartery and the Sons of Ushna, it contains all the big weepies. Yeah. Yeah. Which lead in because this is an era of heroes we're talking about. These are iconic. And here in Ireland, we grow up
00:14:44
Speaker
with accepting that legend. I mean, if you listen to the horse slips, but the entire album of the time on the book of invasions, both of them take their inspiration from their prog rock. They're brilliant there. And I start every seminar with one, which doesn't really go well with undergraduate. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't go to all of the cultures. Even to the modern day, you've got reworkings of it by groups like the Decemberists who brought out a mini album called the time.
00:15:13
Speaker
So there's three recensions of it. One we know for a certain, which is the 11th century thereabouts, and that's the Laburnahudra. Now the Laburnahudra means the book of the Don Cau. It was a Don Cau vellum that it was written on, they say. Some people say that it is earlier than the 11th century. There's a person called Romanus Olatov, I hope I've got that name right, who says that it was possibly the first
00:15:42
Speaker
section of it was actually written 670 AD. Wow. In Bangor, in County Down, very polite in Bangor, so they are. They love that idea. A wonderful monastery was referred to as the seat of angels and everything else, but firmly early medieval. Great place for scholarliness and everything else. Now, there's the Laburna Houdra, then there's the Yellow Book of Lhikan, and it's probably written down in the 14th century. And there's a big overlap between that and the Laburna Houdra.
00:16:12
Speaker
Then there's a book of Leinster, but we don't really, that was, we know that's around about the 12th century AD because there's a whole wee intro to by the wee clerk who's writing it. And there's another ascension, but we don't talk about that. There's been a whole lot of translations. The earliest ones obviously are an old Irish and that's a skill all in itself. Then there's middle Irish, early modern Irish. Tragically, I don't speak any of them with any great
00:16:37
Speaker
understanding whatsoever, not like a lot of my colleagues, like people like Jim Murray. This is his territory very firmly. Within those three books, there's different versions and there's overlaps. Some cut short and others carry the story right through. So whenever folks and etc put them together in the early medieval period,
00:16:57
Speaker
They were, remember, these are young fellas from places like Northumberland, Scandinavia. They're very well-read young lads. Some of them are, of course, are native Irish. They've been educated extremely highly. Some of them are called McNoise in places like that, where the standard scholarlyness was extremely high. They aren't content with just writing what they're hearing from the old people. They want to hear, they think, because it's an action-packed story,
00:17:25
Speaker
they add lots of things like, and then whoa, and whoa, and they create almost like, you know why Hollywood keeps resurging, like old stories, and then they make them more flash bang wallop. Yeah. And they remake them. But there's always these way anachronisms chucked in. And there's lots and lots of anachronisms and all of their ascensions at the time.
00:17:50
Speaker
And that's what makes it really one devil of a text to actually try and date. Kenneth Jackson had believed that it was in fact, the famous quote, a window to the Iron Age. And yes, there are wee tiny windows to the Iron Age, aren't it? Tiny. They're shattered. You have to put the glass together and you're going to imagine what shattered glass is like. And they're the size of a kaleidoscope.
00:18:16
Speaker
because you'll also get the same with the early medieval period. For example, the weapons. I would refer anybody to the Eulidia series of books by Jim Murray, who's interested in that. You get, it's a general mash. So it's a very disturbed context. Sometimes I think you're easier just going to the toggled broom at the derga, but I'm not going to even go there on that one.
00:18:39
Speaker
Okay, that sounds interesting. With a lot of these texts that were written down at this time or slightly earlier and might refer to a time before that, they're so added to, there's different voices speaking, different people writing, different sources
00:18:55
Speaker
is sometimes the sources repeat the story, but just in a slightly different way. And Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kingdom of Britain is the same. And, you know, last month I talked to Erin Kavanagh about Taliesin and that's early medieval text. And it's, you know, as you say, these are so layered and the layers are so unclear that it's really difficult. When I went to university,
00:19:23
Speaker
I was told that a generation of archaeologists, I think, maybe in English universities, particularly studying prehistory, was, you can't get anything from the Irish sagas, you just leave them alone. And that was kind of a reaction against some of the people talking about how it's a window, as you say, in the window into the Iron Age. But there's still the themes from the
00:19:46
Speaker
Tyne, and certainly I recognise them from on Raven's wing, that come into our discussions of the Iron Age of Britain, not even Ireland, but of Britain, like cattle raids as being just this endemic thing that everybody was doing, apparently. And the only evidence we've got of that
00:20:07
Speaker
is the tie-in. That's it. No, no, it's not. Really? Is it? That's why I've got you here. What people call the white piece, lovely white shit piece of shiny metal fitted underneath a horse's jaw. They are basically a form of bozo. If you look at a polo pony, that's exactly how they work. Only they make them in like fluid rope and modern things. Now then they want it to be very flashy. And the Irish fitted up
00:20:35
Speaker
their horses with of the very elite people with these whenever they're riding them and you would ride it actually with your hand very low
00:20:42
Speaker
you're basically cattle cutting what you see cowboys doing, what you see goat shows doing. And if that isn't a lovely piece of circumstantial evidence for cattle raiding, I don't know what it is. I love that. I love that there's such, you know, small evidence, but just there's that corroboration. But like you say, with the chariots as well, the chariot is very important to Kuhalan.
00:21:06
Speaker
particularly, but all of his fellow warriors from the Red Branch, you know, they all have their chariot with their driver and then they are the fighter in the back. And all those chariots then that are found, as you say, in Wetwang and places around that in the East Rising of Yorkshire are, you know, that's how they're
00:21:27
Speaker
they're interpreted. And it's kind of, there was this rejection of the myths as evidence, but it's just there
Myths and Archaeological Interpretations
00:21:38
Speaker
all the time. It hasn't gone away. The islands are so, archaeologically, there's so much connections that we're starting to see. There must have been very robust either trade, communication, intermarriage,
00:21:51
Speaker
And anybody to think that Ireland was splendid isolation through the Roman Empire would basically need to rethink the logistics of the thing, especially when you've got things like all them stones showing up in Wales for the very, very end of the Iron Age, tipping into the early medieval. It's people are messy and things, cultures are messy, you know?
00:22:14
Speaker
I mean, for example, the game of Shinti up in Scotland, we were talking about Camogie and Hurley earlier. Of course, Hurland being the official game, but Shinti is very, very similar. Slight differences, but very similar indeed.
00:22:32
Speaker
Now granted these, as we understand them, they're early medieval. Edna Sullivan, Professor Edna Sullivan, a UCD, would be the person to talk to about that. I rely totally upon his knowledge of such things. People don't wake up and say, well, that's the Iron Age over and done with. Let's get on with the early medieval. It's so much more.
00:22:51
Speaker
Yeah, this is true. I mean, we make these divisions ourselves, don't we? And then it's never quite like that. I mean, going to the actual archaeology behind the time and on Raven's Wing, it's mainly set at Evinmaha, which is basically Navan Fort, isn't it? I mean, that is accepted.
00:23:15
Speaker
Mavenford and it's a great place to visit in County Armagh, absolutely beautiful place. I'll have to come over and visit you at some point. Oh you do have to, we have to take you down to Armagh and it in itself also has, if anybody is interested in this, I do have to get a plug in. There are a series of journals, it's called Emania
00:23:32
Speaker
and it's published by the wonderful Kirach Ban, whose Daniel Buckner is the driving force behind that. It was set up during the excavation of Naven Fort, Hawkees Fort, Loch Nesshade, the King's Stables, that whole ritual landscape around that area. It was set up to get the stories out, and it's probably one of the best journals that you'll ever read if you are into the Iron Age. It's an international publication.
00:23:59
Speaker
and it's worth going onto it. Yeah, we'll put a link in their show notes, yeah. Navenfort is really the hub of it all because that's where, of course, the Branch of the Red Knights are. They are, of course, the creme de la creme warriors of the time. And Morgan of Ireland has great fun with this. She paints a very colourful society. I'm not going to say that a bit of imagination does any harm to this. These guys would have had hellish egos about themselves.
00:24:27
Speaker
They were godfathers. They were the local boys, the local unit, whatever you want. I don't know. They ruled their turf. And we can't think of them perhaps as being kings, as we would understand kings, but they are certainly leaders of groups who share certain territorial or kinship would be a good word. And that certainly seems to be
00:24:56
Speaker
Certainly we see that idea of kinship and family links as something that's very important because when the Vikings come along to the great roundhours and monastic settlements later,
00:25:09
Speaker
whenever the records of who is married to who, going back to a God knows when, are destroyed. That's something that the monks find absolutely incredibly upsetting because who can prove what bloodlines are? Oh, there we go. The Irish were dreadful again. Bloodlines were connected to who? Is that? And I find that insistence of knowing who was interlinked to who quite fascinating, especially in the light of the new Grange paper that came out recently.
00:25:39
Speaker
And anybody Irish will get my reference, it's the equivalent of your mother reading the death column in the Irish news and going, here, do you know who
Navan Fort's Significance
00:25:48
Speaker
was married to them? Ireland does not change. It's complicated by fosterage as well, is there? Because there are those ties of kinship through, not just through blood, but through, and Kualin is fostered to Conor Magnesa. That's right, Conor Magnesa.
00:26:07
Speaker
And obviously then there is the explanation of his name because his name was Satanta when he was born. Did I say that right? Satanta, that's right. But he got the name of the Hound of Cullen. The Hound of Cullen. Cullen is the blacksmith. He has a really big, nasty dog.
00:26:29
Speaker
The dog jumps out whenever a poor wee satanter's going home after a good game of hurling. It has a go at him and he knocks the dog dead. Needless to say, the Smith is not too happy about this and takes it up with the big boss man. And Coo Holland basically says he will become the guard dog of Cullen and guard his premises until he trains up another dog. Now, what's the fun part of this? I'm just saying.
00:26:58
Speaker
is that there have been dog skulls very big.
00:27:02
Speaker
large, nasty dogs, skulls found in the king's stables, although they are late Bronze Age, possibly. I think somebody... This is it. Yeah, along with the monkeys, you know, or well, monkey. Yeah, Navanfort is amazing and the complex around it and it kind of is a bit more complicated than just being the seat of the kings of Ulster in maybe, maybe the first century AD or first century BC.
00:27:28
Speaker
with a late bronzer, well, possibly earlier than that, but definitely late bronzer. There's even been a whole shitat brooch found at it. Really? Wow. Again, it's all in Emania. It's a fascinating site and it has a big, big history that obviously even on the Iron Age it was old. Of course, it has a wonderful foundation. Actually, it has several wonderful foundation myths, depending on which one you want to believe.
00:27:56
Speaker
you know, such places do attract these stories. Yeah. You mentioned the monkey. It is nice to, and I know you did a thread on that recently on Twitter as well about the monkey, which was presumably a gift, some kind of, or traded or something. Oh, surely. I mean, and it's what, knocking into the very end of the Bronze Age, into the earlier age.
00:28:22
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, imagine the distances that people are covering at that point. There again, when you think about it, all they have to do is island hop along the Iberian Peninsula. Then you've got that short run across point of, what do you call it, Southern France over into, what do you call it, Cork and Kerry.
00:28:45
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
Prehistoric Mobility
00:28:46
Speaker
And then travel up through the country. You've got lots of rivers. Yeah, exactly. You know, we can't discount anything. They were highly mobile people.
00:29:18
Speaker
and to think other ways, we do them a terrible disservice.
00:29:24
Speaker
times sometimes. And that's great. I mean, the stabilised open hours, this is so it's so useful to find that out. Talking of which, after that, Kualan, he wants to train to be a Knight of the Red Branch, and he sent away. Oh, but it's all to do with who he loves as well, isn't it? Because he's in love with this girl, but her father doesn't like him.
00:29:44
Speaker
I wouldn't have liked it later. I would have heard words. Yeah, yeah. Well, he's a bit unstable. Let's put it that way. Look, anybody whose eyes can pop and turn into a volcano. Yeah.
00:29:57
Speaker
girl, you stay away from him. Yeah. It sounds a little bit like that berserker thing that you hear about Vikings maybe doing or not doing in later centuries, doesn't it? Mike Bailey, Professor Mike Bailey here of the Dandruff Chronology fame, has got a lot to say about Cuhollan and the whole transformation thing. That is symbolic actually of
00:30:21
Speaker
various events in the sky, it's marking out the popping was in fact being able to see some comet or whatever. It's a fascinating book when it's home right. Yeah, Mike Bailey does do some very interesting things to do with kind of, what's the word?
00:30:40
Speaker
Catastrophe theories about how things... Yeah, yeah, I've always been interested. It maybe seems a bit too neat sometimes though. But there's also, I remember going into a few years ago, depictions of people in the Iron Age and some do seem to be depicted with like one eye bigger than the other and or stark staring eyes or whatever, as being maybe a depiction of this state that was known to happen to some people potentially.
00:31:08
Speaker
Yeah, so that was interesting. You make an interesting point there, because in the town, there's a number of gestures, physical gestures, which you take on whenever something big is about to go down. For example, when you're putting a guess out on somebody, a guess is like a taboo. Whenever it's issued, it's very much a dying the world thing. And whenever this magic is occurring,
00:31:37
Speaker
they're described as standing on one leg with their hands raised above their heads. Almost like bull shaped horns whenever the incantation is made.
00:31:48
Speaker
Now, that is echoed, yet again, in the book that I'd mentioned earlier, another very ancient book, which might be a slightly less fragmented window into the Iron Age. They tell me from the language used, and that's the Togo Bruno de Durga and the destruction of the House of Durga. And the Morrigan, yes, she pops up in that one as well, only not as attractive or sexy.
00:32:15
Speaker
and she pops up and at this time in her hag forum and when she's about to issue a doom in the toggle she stands on one leg and takes on again this gesture
00:32:27
Speaker
Again, she has seen as being one-eyed with one huge, loving, angry eye. There are gestures, and I think that when we look at things like, for example, the Tallinn and all the very strange little humanoid figures that appear on late-earnage metalwork, I think they're maybe catching glimpses of legends of
00:32:52
Speaker
of ideas, so I'll never poo-poo and say they all vanished by the early medieval. It's just a case of knowing how they changed and they'll never know what they started out as, you know? I know, that's the sad thing, isn't it? I mean, once you've got the early medieval stuff, you can think, yeah, how far can I trace it back? But it's all educated guesswork, but guesswork nonetheless. I think you try to hammer down your chronology and then you hope for the best.
00:33:22
Speaker
Yeah, that's what archaeologists do, hammer down the chronology. Kuhalan gets sent on a journey to Skye, where there's actually a woman called, well, possibly Skye, or Skaha, is that right? Skaha, that's right. Who is a great warrior herself and she trains Kuhalan to be even better, to be invincible basically.
00:33:43
Speaker
So there's that. What I quite like about this is the is the old connection between Southwest Scotland and the islands and the Ulster area, Northern Ireland and stuff. And it's I don't know what to what extent that it seems like a very small link, really. And I think maybe the link should be were probably a bit more complicated. This is where this gets interesting because certainly linking the Ulster cycle to Scotland
00:34:11
Speaker
is, I hate to say it, yes, we did have a sort of empire. In the Ernie Medieval period, there was, of course, Daler Aida, which the people of the north especially took over to Scotland, the Scotai, as they were considered to be. And is it more that just the two areas are very closely linked rather than a natural? There's evidence certainly of the later Iron Age
00:34:38
Speaker
There's evidence of a huge amount of trade and also metal recipe, alloy recipe similarities. That's all the common publications yet, but there is a lot. Yes, that's just one square.
00:34:51
Speaker
But there's a huge amount of similarities going on there. It could mean everything. It could mean nothing. It'll have to be widened out from horsey stuff to be meaningful of anything because otherwise it could just mean somebody from a workshop that came over with saying, here, this is how I was trained to do this. So there's lots and lots of variables that might come into it. But certainly we know that there's a
00:35:13
Speaker
an M2 motorway running straight down the riverbahn during the end of the drainage, which is receiving stuffing directly from Northern Britain.
00:35:22
Speaker
and Scotland. So that's certainly there. We can't avoid that. That exists. The whole thing about Lincoln and the sky, et cetera, there might be a wee touch of Irish colonialism going on there from the early medieval period and that they're like, hey, yeah, because we had the best warriors because guess what? We owned it. And there may be a certain amount of that on it. Again, it's that shattered window, not just into the Iron Age, but also into the early medieval period. It's all very
00:35:53
Speaker
It's so very mushy and I think that battle's inevitably going to be won on linguistics, you know? Right, I see. I think I was really interested in that and I want to go back, well I have to go back to some kind of source in English, obviously a translation, to look at this because I don't know if you know, but I do sword fighting as historical European martial arts.
00:36:16
Speaker
And I'm fascinated in going back and back and back. And obviously the earliest manuscripts we've got as a fight book is only 1300, but we've got swords obviously start in the Bronze Age. So, but how were people using them? We've got no evidence of, we've got nothing written down, obviously, because it's prehistory. That's the whole point. But if there's a small explanation somewhere of some of the techniques, then maybe that
Fantastical Elements in History
00:36:42
Speaker
could
00:36:42
Speaker
But they all seem so fantastical and completely impossible to do, like leaping over this and that and twisting in the air to deliver a death blow. It's like, okay, well, that's not quite what I was looking for.
00:36:58
Speaker
But I wonder if that's kind of Morgan Llewellyn and not the original tie in. So I need to need to have a look at that. I mean, it describes, I mean, there's you have to be able to balance on the end of the sword or spear or whatever it is. And there's all sorts of athletics. And you're back to the point that you made about gestures and how much stylized warfare that, you know, where combat becomes stylized.
00:37:25
Speaker
and how much of it is simply made up by a pack of wee lads sitting in a round tower going, here, what do you think Koo Holland would do next? Oh, I think he would go then. Whoa! And they didn't have, you know, your Marvel and your action films. So they could have been very well-making
00:37:41
Speaker
it up in their heads. Well, that's it. You see, and then they get back to early. I mean, early medieval fighting is already very interesting, too, I guess. But I want to know more about and try things out. I mean, I did get myself a shield made. I probably need to send you over, actually. I'll get it once the libraries are back. PDF of Jim Mallory's book on how weapons were used, the description of the kind of sword in the town.
00:38:09
Speaker
versus what they would have been using. And you couldn't cut someone's head off. You're really always wrong about cutting heads off, which of course is very Celtic use that word rather advisedly. We might get there in a minute, really. It's a very much that line of things to do.
00:38:26
Speaker
to this night. Regarding those short swords, it wouldn't be a nice way to go. That's all I'm going to say. It really wouldn't. It would be hackity, hackity, and it's not quite the ethos of these heroic warlords, or were they heroic. I would beg to differ. I see my boys as something very different, in fact. And girls as well. There's a few of them there.
00:38:56
Speaker
I mean, there is a third stuff here as well as Skaher. And of course, there's the gay bulga that tell me if I said that wrong that Koolan gets given as well as the spear that can never miss. That would be amazing. I would obviously, you know, use it advisedly. And he seems to be very kind of wary of that weapon as well. He's not happy with it, really. I was described as being prompt.
00:39:24
Speaker
in so many different ways that... Yeah, I know. And it's not what you'd see either in the Iron Age or in the early medieval period, a pronged spear like that. Even with my dear self, import, import. You don't know what people are... At this stage, I always say to myself, if we go back to the early medieval period, these are monks, etc., writing
00:39:49
Speaker
They're trying to gather together as many of the old stories as they can. They're putting their own bits to it the way they see it being, because they see chariots every day, they see swords, shortish swords every day, they see this, that. So of course they can't think of it as being anything other. It's the same way whenever people would have found little flint, lithic things in the past, they said there were elf arrows and stuff like that.
00:40:13
Speaker
and little lightning bolts were axe heads. You don't know, whenever people found things, what story did they make about them? And we have no idea what's lost.
00:40:23
Speaker
Nobody has an idea what's lost. No, there are unknown unknowns. Oh, there always has to be. That's what keeps us right. You know? It is. It is. So you kind of brought it up and that's our final thing. We should really talk about the elephant in the room. This idea of Celtic-ness.
Celtic Identity and Storytelling
00:40:45
Speaker
which Morgan Flewellyn, obviously, she adopted this, she adopted a new name, which is very Welsh. She wrote huge amounts, mainly about Irish stories, and was hugely into her background and made quite a thing of that. And as you say, it's, you know, the story of the tie-in is remade again and again and again and again for each people who comes across it. And it's really important in terms of an idea of identity, do you think?
00:41:15
Speaker
Is it, or that should be a question. Is it important in terms of Irish identity? Celtic, Celtic city. That's the big one, isn't it? I'm going to sit in the fence and simply say that it was very useful to, especially with Irish archeology. There was a wonderful Prince of Liars called Charles de Blonsay. He was from London, came over here in the 1700s. Whenever people like Voltaire were saying that everything Irish was rubbish,
00:41:45
Speaker
Of course, Lloyd, et cetera, had all turned out, they were starting to develop this Welsh background thing going on, this exceptional, this is our unique foundation story. And Scotland cutting onto that too. And of course, it was
00:42:01
Speaker
in a slightly different situation politically, which I won't bother going into here in Loy, but we didn't have the luxury of creating that mythos for quite a while. Valonce, I think, he's referred to as the Prince of Liars because to give a slap in the face to people like Voltaire, who said that we were savages and barbarians,
00:42:21
Speaker
and that our antiquities were worthless. And of course there were some were happy to trample through many things at that point. Valenci came up with all sorts of fanciful stories that were very sexy at the time. He used all the right buzzwords. He tied them in to, of course it created trouble for everybody else afterwards, but his job was to try and preserve them. He was one of the Ordnance Survey men.
00:42:42
Speaker
who came over and he fell in love with the island and he wanted to preserve things and he made up all sorts of wonderful, wacky, crazy stories about them. And I wouldn't believe a word of them, not a word. But the thing is, what he found is still in the NMI. What he managed to record is still in the archaeological record. In that respect, I'm grateful to him. However, the stories that he created
00:43:08
Speaker
And then, of course, whenever the bird's name nationalism started, there was all the beautiful squiggly-wigglies of La Tème derivative, because it's not La Tème, let's admit it, it's derived from it, and it's insular. It's the same for Britain as well. This was adopted as being the very heartbeat, the Celtic heartbeat, and it was an identity which
00:43:31
Speaker
was very convenient because I suppose latin derivative just doesn't roll off the tongue. This sweet latin derivative twilight doesn't sound as good. You know, for some people, if you're marketing the idea, where the situation we are today, it's the old antiquaries. They fell in love with the place. They made up a lot of very pretty stories with the evidence that they had at
Chronology Challenges in Irish Iron Age
00:43:54
Speaker
the time. We don't forget have got the benefit of science.
00:43:59
Speaker
We have the big guns of all sorts of wonders that they could have only dreamt of, but I'm still gobsmacked. But by the 1940s, illustrious professor of archaeology, Professor Joseph Raftery, Barry Raftery's father, was able to get probably the tightest chronology of the Iron Age, which has taken a number of us, myself, in that mix.
00:44:24
Speaker
a while using science, and he's got it very, very tight. But again, he was totally in the tie-in as well, as being a chronological thing that's gone by art styles. And there's a lot to be said for that as well. Cultinicity as a defining moment in art may be a useful gauge. Cultinicity is an identity. No, we're something much more messy on this island. Cool, and I can guarantee you, if he and his mates existed,
00:44:52
Speaker
were a lot more messy. They would have had many influences coming in from across Europe and on Britain. They would have been mobile. They would have done horrible things because slavery, again, is talked about a lot. I'm not going to let the Irish off the hook on this one, folks.
00:45:10
Speaker
We did it. I mean, we were famous for it. Well, Britain has done more than its fair share on that site as well. That's right. Liam Hogan is a part of the leather stuff, of course. But I mean, it exists. I mean, it's again, I put the elephant in the cupboard. I don't think them as heroes or kings. I think them as something very close to your local drugs barns.
00:45:35
Speaker
Hmm. That's why I think of them or your local paramilitary lads or they're, they're very charming superficially. They're very, but would they see themselves as Celtic? That's a big question. Um, I think they see themselves perhaps as having roots, but are those real? I don't know. That's, it's a big story. The story goes off her own.
00:46:05
Speaker
It does go ever on. I think it's important that it was there, and it's been used politically, hasn't it? But it's good that maybe there's a time to think about, and you're promoting this, thinking about all the other influences.
Politics in Archaeology and History
00:46:23
Speaker
And I think, you know, we go back, there's lots, sadly, a lot of archaeology and historical stuff is used.
00:46:30
Speaker
as a political tool to assert one group's right to be in a place more than another group's. It's something that we all have to fight against. Absolutely. In Ireland it's never even quite as simple as that. For example, the symbol of Ulster as a red hand.
00:46:52
Speaker
And during my childhood of the troubles, it was used by both sides of paramilitaries because of the foundation myth that goes with it. It was for blood and ulster and extreme, extreme behaviour. So these things, symbols can mean basically the same thing, but they can be interpreted by two different groups.
00:47:15
Speaker
I was thinking more about in Britain, but certainly in Ireland, there are people who have kind of forced their way in. It's about how do you reconcile groups like that. I think that's the biggest topic to go into in the last couple of minutes. The thing is, the symbols are always important. All those Celtic-y symbols are still floating around. Sometimes they're just pretty generic. Other times there's something
00:47:44
Speaker
They can be used in many ways. I find that longevity quite fascinating. It is, isn't it? Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Rina. It's been amazing to talk to you and it was a really interesting book and I would like to go back to the tie-in. Unfortunately, like you, I can't read any of the Old Irish or Middle Irish.
00:48:05
Speaker
I can't do any old hours, good God no. But yeah, I'll try and get... You have recommended another book to me in the past, which I need to get to go back into, but I would recommend this. As you say, it's a bit of a bodice ripper. It's of its time. It reminds me a little bit of, but I like Sharon Penman's stuff probably a bit more, but it reminds me of her books. They're big, you know, they're historical kind of
00:48:34
Speaker
yarns that go on for ages and has loads of detail, loads of research, but it's not necessarily the way that Iron Age Ireland was.
00:48:49
Speaker
weren't actually that many and they were they're really kind of glossed over I think. Yes they are. It's all very soft focus. I'm going to be a horrible person but I haven't read a bodice ripper in years and I'm like I hope it's really due to fancy here you know. They're just very tame but oh god. So yeah I mean it's a fun read. It's a good entry level if somebody wants to dip their toes but as long as they know
00:49:17
Speaker
It's got a wee bit of early medieval in there. And Arnage, we're still unpicking that big, hairy thread that's so tangled, and it's all tangled up with part of your history over there, and part of the history over in Europe.
00:49:34
Speaker
Scandinavia and Northern Germany and the Romans. I will throw that one in as a complicated matter as well. But yeah, it's a good starter. It's fun. It's certainly not the worst I've ever read. But if anybody was doing the Tyne Resentions, I would definitely recommend either Kinsella or
00:49:55
Speaker
possibly, if they wanted to go really hardcore, go for Cecile Rahalay. That's if they want to get the real thing. But it's snuggle. I think that's the one you recommended to me, which I still haven't got hold of. Kinsella is much more accessible for people to read. Okay. It's probably one of the oldest stories in Europe. Yes,
Conclusion and Future Episodes
00:50:12
Speaker
it is. It is indeed. And it's well worth reading. It is. And then I'll talk into reading the toggle.
00:50:19
Speaker
Yeah, you probably will. So, I think my arm could be twisted. Thank you so much, Rina. We will put all of the links to those various books that Rina's mentioned in the show notes and obviously know how to contact Rina and me on social media if you've got anything that you want to say.
00:50:40
Speaker
let us know if you've managed to read on Raven's Wing and what you thought of it. Just send us a tweet, or if you go onto archaeologypodcastnetwork.com forward slash prehistories, then you should be able to leave comments under the show as well, so we'll be able to get your feedback and talk about it on the next show.
00:51:04
Speaker
So thank you so much, Rina. Very much my pleasure. We straight off in strange paths there occasionally, but unfortunately that's the iron age for you. Exactly.
00:51:17
Speaker
Well, it looks like I've got a lot more reading to do then. Excellent. Many thanks to Reena for that episode. I hope you enjoyed us talking about On Raven's Wing by Morgan Flewellyn or Sally Snyder. Let me know what you thought of the episode. Let me know if you go out and read On Raven's Wing or any of Morgan Flewellyn's other books and tell us about it.
00:51:43
Speaker
Did you enjoy them? Is there anything you took issue with in the books? Did you enjoy the way that she told the stories? Yeah, just let me know. You can find me on at prehistpod if I haven't said that before, which I think I probably did quite recently.
00:52:00
Speaker
Are there any other books or maybe films or even TV shows that you'd like to see get the prehistoric treatment where we dissect them, take them apart, slice them open and look at the evidence behind the stories that are being told? Or maybe we'll find some other origin for some of the ideas and the content and the look of these media, different media showing what prehistoric life
00:52:30
Speaker
is supposed to be like. Tell me. Let me know. Get in contact. In the next episode, I'm going to be talking to Susan Greaney of English Heritage, who I have talked to before. She's particularly responsible for the interpretation at Stonehenge. And so I talked to her quite a long time ago now about Bernard Conwell's book.
00:52:53
Speaker
Stonehenge and kind of the outdated theories that were in that. She's doing her PhD at the moment as well on the Neolithic monuments of Britain and Ireland so she's got her expertise about lots of different places as well as Stonehenge which obviously gets quite a lot of attention on its own.
00:53:12
Speaker
about Stonehenge itself. My other guest is going to be Joanna Valdez-Tollett, it might be Joanna, I will ask her when I talk to her, and she's just published her PhD, so she is Dr. Valdez-Tollett, with the British archaeological reports, BAR reports, on Atlantic rock art, and she's been uncovering some interesting folk tales to do with rock art.
00:53:36
Speaker
as well, which obviously is usually slightly later in dates than the Neolithic burial monuments and stone circles and so on. So yeah, we're going to talk about all interesting folk tales associated with prehistoric monuments. Is there a site near you that has got its own
00:53:55
Speaker
tales associated with it. Maybe those are actually quite recent or maybe they've been around for ages and people have been telling them to their children for generations. We'd love to hear about it and particularly any that you've got near you. Obviously it tends to be when you live locally somewhere that you hear these folk tales or if you read some of the antiquarian literary
00:54:21
Speaker
that the locals told about all of these prehistoric monuments. So either way, however you've found out about them, please get in touch. It'd be great to hear from you and hopefully you'll tune in for that exit.
00:54:51
Speaker
This show is produced by Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle.