Medieval Mondays: Early Irish Ogam

The Great Court at the British Museum is full of interesting objects such as Greek statues and Native American totem poles. Off to one side is a simple slab of rock that many people pass by. From a distance it doesn't look like much but it's perhaps the rarest object in the room.

If you look more closely, you'll see a series of slashes cut into the rock. This is a simple form of writing called Ogam. The Irish developed Ogam in the 4th century AD. The system was simple: letters were made up of one to five slashes, either short or long, on either side of a natural edge of the rock or a carved line. Slanted lines and lines that cut across the dividing line were also used. It was generally read counter-clockwise.

This particular stone dates to the 5th century and was found along with two others, having been reused to build a later medieval fort. The inscription reads, "[stone] of Vedac, [son] of Tob of the Sogain."

Such a short inscription is common with Ogam. Like Viking runestones, most Ogam stones were simple memorials that only recorded the carver and who the stone was dedicated to. Ogam died out after a couple of centuries as it was replaced by Latin.

Medieval Mondays: Abortionist saints in Medieval Ireland

While abortion has been considered a sin by the Catholic Church for many centuries, the history of the Church's views on it aren't completely straightforward. A new article in the Journal of the the History of Sexuality tackles the unusual topic of saints who performed abortions.

Dr. Maeve B. Callan found references to four early medieval Irish saints who performed miraculous abortions. Callan writes, “these accounts celebrate saints who perform abortions, restore female fornicators to a virginal state, contemplate infanticide, and result from incest and other ‘illegitimate’ sexual unions. Moreover, the texts themselves generally reflect a remarkably permissive attitude toward these traditionally taboo acts, an attitude also found in Irish penitentials and law codes.”

All four saints--Ciarán of Saigir, Áed mac Bricc, Cainnech of Aghaboe, and Brigid of Kildare--lived in the fifth and sixth centuries but like other saints, tales of their deeds survived long after that.

Saint Ciarán helped out a nun who had been raped by the local king: “Ciarán, despising the enormity of such a crime and wishing to apply a cure, went to the house of sacrilege to seek the girl from there. . .Then the man of God, led by the zeal of justice, not wishing the serpent’s seed to quicken, pressed down on her womb with the sign of the cross and forced her womb to be emptied.”

The other saints' stories are similar. An interesting detail is that in later versions of this tale, Saint Ciarán only blessed the nun's womb. The act of pressing down on it (a primitive and dangerous abortion technique) was left out.

Callan hasn't found any evidence for abortionist saints in other medieval cultures. It would be interesting if other scholars probed deeper into the hagiographies of their regions to see if any similar stories exist.

Medieval Mondays: Did Saint Brendan sail to America?

Fellow author and blogger buddy Sean McLachlan recently wrote a couple of interesting posts about the Vikings in North America for the travel blog Gadling. One was on L'Anse aux Meadows, the only confirmed Viking settlement in the New World. The other is on the controversial Kensington Runestone and other purported Vikings traces in the U.S. These runestones are problematic to say the least and may be modern forgeries.

There is a whole subculture in the United States of trying to prove that various ancient cultures arrived in the New World before Columbus. One of the more popular theories is that Saint Brendan voyaged to the New World.

Saint Brendan lived from about 484-577. Not much is known about his life for certain. One later account written in the ninth century, Voyage of St Brendan the Navigator, tells a fantastic tale of his seven-year journey to the Isle of the Blessed and back. This isle was supposedly far to the west out in the Atlantic. During their voyage, the saint and his companions meets devils, Judas, and sea monsters, and have many adventures. Time and against the saint protects his followers by calling on God.

While it seems like a Christian fable or morality tale, some people, especially Irish-Americans, think it proves that the early Irish visited the New World. There's no archaeological evidence for this, however and there is no mention of it in any of the Irish records besides the fantastical tale of Saint Brendan. One would think that Irish monks risking life and limb to preach to the native Americans would write an account of their exploits.

Back in 1976, adventurer Tim Severin decided to prove that Saint Brendan could have made the voyage. He constructed a currach, the traditional Irish boat of the times. These boats come in all sizes and are made of leather lashed onto a wooden frame. Severin's boat was 36 feet long and had two masts. A model is below. he and his crew sailed this unlikely craft all the way from Ireland to Newfoundland.

This was certainly an impressive feat. Showing that Brendan could have made it, however, doesn't prove that he did. Severin had the advantage of knowing where he was going!

While Severin was a serious investigator, the same can't be said for some of those searching for the early Irish in the New World. Barry Fell and other authors caused a craze in the 1970s when they claimed to have found numerous inscriptions of Ogam, an ancient Irish script, all over the United States. There's a good page on this controversy at the Council for West Virginia Archaeology website. Well worth a look.

Photos courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Medieval Mondays: How the Irish Didn't Save Civilization

A friend of mine has been reading How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill. He asked me about it so I’m going to talk about it here. This book came out back in the Eighties and was an instant bestseller. Lots of Irish-Americans liked the idea that the Irish saved civilization.

Unfortunately, this book is full of holes. It’s wonderfully written and has some interesting details about life in early medieval Ireland, but its central thesis that Irish monks preserved civilization through the Dark Ages simply isn’t true.

First off, Cahill's’s concept of civilization is limited to Greek and Roman texts. Yes, Irish monks did preserve a large amount of Classical literature, poetry, drama, and political writings, but does that constitute "civilization"? They certainly didn’t save Roman technology! And what about all the other civilizations like, um, China?

Also, the Irish weren’t the only people preserving these texts. The Byzantine Empire, which was the eastern half of the Roman Empire that survived in an ever-shrinking form until 1453, also preserved Classical learning. Byzantium is often overlooked in European history classes, and Cahill overlooks it here. Then there were the Jewish and Muslim scholars in North Africa and the Middle East who translated Classical texts into Hebrew and Arabic and wrote commentaries on them, not to mention creating a lot of literature and science in their own right.

How the Irish Saved Civilization reminds me a bit of Black Athena, a book that claims all civilization came out of Africa. Both books take generally overlooked cultures and blow them out of proportion in order to please their readership. Yes, a lot more civilization came out of Africa than most Western historians give credit to, but not everything came out of Africa. The same goes for the hardworking Irish monks preserving Classical texts. Did they save civilization? No, but they sure helped.