Celtic Poetry and the Decline of Oral Traditions

My group's chapter is titled "Boundary". It opens with the poem "The Wooing of Etain" from the Irish myth cycle and documents a goddess who through various misfortunes must live as a human being for a while. Being a goddess she can cross that boundary between the god's realm and that of human beings, but inevitably she must go back. This idea of liminality seems to be a favorite for the Celtic poets and bards since it appears frequently.

The poem Buile Subhine, OR The Frenzy of Sweeney, is an excellent example of this liminal borderland. Written down, which we later find out is sadly ironic, in the 11th with vestiges reaching back in to the 9th. Sweeney is a king situated between the burgeoning Catholicism of his kingdom and the old traditions, between the horns of oral and typographic literature, and most obviously between the extremes of maddness and sanity. Because Sweeney can not reconcile himself to Catholicism and "literature", the hallmarks of civilization of course, he is condemned to live the life of a bird, perching in trees and spilling out mad verse.

Sweeney can't hack the border between classical Celtic orality and the encroaching Literacy, and so he's forced to hover on the periphery until his death and renunciation of the oral values he fought for. Read Seamus Heaney's "Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish" to see the fight between orality and literacy encompassed in the body of a single individual: the Mad Bird King.