Loved this book! How
The Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe. The title says it all; the spread of early Catholicism to the wonderfully brutish Emerald Isle ushered in an era of scholarship, monastery-
proto universities, and traveling scholars. They were dying for knowledge of their new religion and the world in general, so as Rome fell and lost its love of learning (i.e. became illiterate dumbasses), the Irish stepped in and copied most of the canonical works we now ignore so thoroughly.
While the subject matter is fascinating, it's the asides that captivate me and keep me reading non-fiction about eight times more often than fiction. Here are the ones I just had to share with my fellow nerds:
"Throughout the countryside, once the very image of Roman peace, illegal brotherhoods of extortionists formed -- the proto-Mafiosi. Curiales and other struggling middle-class townsmen, who had been accustomed to sending their infants to be nursed by shepherds in pure mountain air, began to find it impossible to retrieve these children. Snatched away to inaccessible mountain fastnesses, the children were raised brutally as shepherd-slaves, and the name shepherd became synonymous with thief, kidnapper, trafficker in children. The fear of such kidnapping still finds echoes in the lost children and loathsome adults who haunt the deep wood of European fairy tales."
No freakin' way!
How about this:
"We have evidence that the Tuatha De Danaan have some historical reality, as well: we know that Ireland was peopled before the arrival of the Celts in the fourth century B.C. and that an earlier people have built the great barrows and magnificently carved tumuli that dot the Irish landscape to this day. In the foundation myth, the Tuatha De Danaan are preternaturally skilled in building and craftsmanship. These taller, otherwordly beings eventually devolve into "the little people," the fairies and leprechauns of later Irish legend, whose spirits haunt the tombs and fairy mounds they once built. "The little people" is a euphemism - rather like the prehistoric phrase le bon dieu - meant to disguise the speaker's fear of something unfamiliar and much larger than himself. It is possible that this flickering phenomenon of the little people represents the afterglow of Irish guilt over their exploitation of more artful aborigines."
How cool is that!
"The phrase [attributed to Jesus, repeated by St. Patrick in his open letter to the British Christians] "the violent bear it away" fascinated the twentieth-century Irish-American storyteller Flannery O'Connor, who used it as the title of one of her novels. O'Connor's surname connects her to an Irish royal family descended from conchobor (pronounced "Connor"), the prehistoric king of Ulster who was foster father to Cuchulainn and "husband" of the unwilling Derdriu. In the western world, the antiquity of Irish lineages is exceeded only by that of the Jews."
Who knew?! Not me.
"The Irish innovation was to make all confession a completely private affair between penitent and priest - and to make it as repeatable as necessary. (In fact, repetition was encouraged on the theory that, oh well, everyone pretty much sinned just about all the time.) This adaptation did away with public humiliation out of tenderness for the sinner's feelings, and softened the unyielding penances of the patristic period so that the sinner would not lose heart. But it also emphasized the Irish sense that personal conscience took precedence over public opinion or church authority. The penitent was not labeled by others; he labeled himself.
Though one's confession was made to a human being, he or she was chosen by the penitent for qualities of true priestliness -- holiness, wisdom, generosity, loyalty, and courage. ... To break [the seal of confession]...was practically the only sin the Irish considered unforgivable. So one did not necessarily choose one's "priest" from among ordained professionals...One looked for an anmchara, a soul-friend, someone to be trusted over a whole lifetime. Thus, the oft-found saying "Anyone without a soul-friend is like a body without a head," which dates to pagan times. The druids, not the monks, had been the first soul-friends."
"Oft-found saying"? Really. Never heard of that before but -yay!- now I have.
Sorry, but you just can't make up stuff like this. Sue me; I like knowing how our world came to be the way it is.
If you really want to get your nerd on, also read How
The Irish Became White. Haven't read this one, and it gets middling reviews, but if you read as much non-fiction as I do, it all works out.
See how the links extend.......?
