ON THE PERSISTENCE OF TYPE IN THE IRISH MYTHOLOGICAL CYCLES
By D. N. A. Strand, F.R.A.I.
Williams and Norgate, 14 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London, and 20 South Frederick Street, Edinburgh
1887
Fasciculus I of a Projected Series
PREFATORY NOTE
The present writer has, in the course of some fifteen years' sustained engagement with the Irish mythological cycles, become persuaded of a conclusion which will appear, to those whose acquaintance with the material is less thorough than his own, both bold and — he anticipates — unwelcome. He has therefore resolved to present his evidence in a systematic form, beginning with the theoretical and methodological foundations of the inquiry, proceeding in subsequent fasciculi to the analysis of individual figures and narrative complexes, and concluding, when the argument has been fully elaborated, with a synthetic treatment of the whole. The present fasciculus is the beginning of that sequence.
It establishes the method. It introduces the concept of phylo-craniometrics as the present writer has developed it — drawing upon, but materially advancing beyond, the standard craniometric tradition as practised by Retzius, Broca, and the present generation of their followers — and demonstrates its application to the foundational question of population succession as encoded in the mythological record. It offers, by way of illustration, a condensed analysis of the structural role of the Fomorians in the invasion sequence of the Lebor Gabála Érenn , arguing that this role constitutes the single most diagnostically important feature in the entire mythological corpus, and that scholars who have treated it as a narrative peculiarity rather than an evidential fact have, in doing so, overlooked the most direct testimony available to them about the deepest layer of human habitation on this island.
The present writer is aware that the term ancestral record , applied to a body of mythology, will raise eyebrows in certain quarters. He invites those eyebrows to descend. The argument will be made on its merits.
I. ON THE NATURE OF MYTHOLOGICAL EVIDENCE
It is a commonplace of recent scholarship — and the present writer notes, with the particular patience of one who has been patient on this point for rather longer than courtesy demands, that it has become a commonplace precisely because it is repeated without examination — that the Irish mythological cycles cannot be read as history. He does not dispute this. He disputes instead the inference commonly drawn from it: namely, that the cycles therefore yield no historical information at all.
This inference is both logically unsound and practically wasteful.
A document may be unreliable as chronicle while remaining highly reliable as a compressed and unconsciously accurate record of something altogether more interesting than the events it purports to describe. A man who misremembers the date of a fire may nonetheless remember, with perfect fidelity, that the house was destroyed and that his grandfather was inside it. The date is recoverable from the parish register; the grandfather is not recoverable from any other source. The chronicler's value is not in his dates.
The Lebor Gabála Érenn — the Book of Invasions, compiled in its surviving form during the eleventh century of the common era from sources of considerably greater antiquity — presents a sequential account of six successive arrivals in Ireland, each displacing or absorbing the one before it.¹ The monks who produced it were engaged in three simultaneous projects, all three of which are visible in the text and frequently in conflict within it: the preservation of a tradition, its Christianisation, and its synchronisation with biblical chronology. The resulting document is, on its surface, a work of considerable confusion. Its dates are unreliable. Its genealogies contradict one another. Its geography is sometimes fantastical.
The present writer proposes to treat this confusion not as a defect but as a diagnostic instrument. The seams in the synthesis are precisely the locations at which the editing shows, and a seam is, by definition, the site where two originally separate materials have been joined. Where the monks' own framework sits uneasily upon the material it is framing, the original material may be glimpsed in its unframed state. It is this material — these glimpses — that the phylo-craniometric method is designed to evaluate.
[Marginal note, in pencil:] The seams. Remember this for III — the Fir Bolg geography sits very awkwardly on the Connacht data and this is the seam that matters most there.
II. ON THE FOMORIANS AS THE FIRST DIAGNOSTIC
The Fomorians present the attentive reader of the invasion sequence with an immediate and illuminating puzzle. They are not, in any structural sense, an invading people. They are present before the first invasion and they remain — in some form, at some level of the narrative — after the last. Every arriving group encounters them. No arriving group eliminates them. They return.
The structural function of this persistence is, in the present writer's view, the most significant single fact in the entire mythological corpus, and it is one to which wholly insufficient analytical attention has been directed.²
Consider what the Fomorian condition actually describes. They are characterised throughout the texts as primordial — coming from the sea, from below the sea, from before anything else — rather than as a people with a point of origin, a homeland, a migration. Every other group in the invasion sequence arrives from somewhere recognisable; the Fomorians simply are. When Cichol Gricenchos confronts Partholón's people at the first battle — Cath Maige Itha, the earliest encounter between the incoming farmers and whatever was already on this island — he is described as footless, or as possessing malformed lower limbs: a physical aberration presented not as individual injury but as characteristic of his kind.³ He is bodily different from those he opposes. He is, to borrow a term from the geological sciences to which the present writer makes no apology for recurring, a substrate — not a layer of the sequence but the ground upon which every layer is deposited.
That they intermarry with every arriving group is equally instructive, and the present writer emphasises it because it is the feature most commonly minimised by those whose analytical instincts stop at narrative rather than proceeding to evidence. The Tuatha Dé Danann — the mythology's divine race, the most fully elaborated of all the invasion groups — carry Fomorian blood in their most exalted members. Lugh Lámhfhada, the mythology's most brilliant, most comprehensive, most theologically significant figure, is the son of Cian mac Dian Cécht of the Tuatha and of Ethniu, daughter of the Fomorian king Balor himself. He is, by every genealogical measure available, a synthesis.⁴ There is no reading of this arrangement that does not resolve into the same conclusion: the Fomorian type persists not only as an adversarial external force but as an internal constituent of every subsequent population. It is absorbed. It is never lost.
The phylo-craniometric implication is, to the present writer, inescapable. A people of whom the mythology says — consistently, across recensions, across centuries of separate transmission — they were here before the beginning, they intermarried with every arriving group, and they could not be eliminated , is a people whose lineal signature is present in every subsequent population the island has produced. The mythology has, without knowing it or intending it, described the behaviour of an ancestral type that predates the historical record entirely — a deep type , as the present writer's methodology designates it — whose traces survive in the craniometric record precisely because no subsequent displacement was thorough enough to remove them.
This is what the Fomorians are. Not sea-demons. Not a poetic convention. Not a narrative device for externalising evil. They are the mythological encoding of the island's oldest inhabiting population, expressed in the narrative vocabulary available to those who remembered them without understanding what they were remembering.
[Marginal note:] Tory Island — the northwest coastal bias in the survey data is not accidental. Check the deep type measurements against the Fomorian stronghold geography systematically. This is where the density should be highest if the argument is right.
III. THE PHYLO-CRANIOMETRIC METHOD — A SYSTEMATIC ACCOUNT
Craniometry, as the present writer's readers will be aware, is the systematic measurement of the human skull for purposes of classification and comparison. Its value as an anthropological instrument has been established by the work of Retzius and Broca and need not be rehearsed here at length. What the present writer proposes — and what constitutes the present writer's methodological contribution, which he anticipates will in time be recognised as the discipline's most significant advance since the development of the cephalic index itself — is not a revision of the standard method but an extension of its ambition.
Standard craniometric analysis is essentially taxonomic in its aspiration: it sorts the present population into physical types, assigns those types to geographic distributions, and observes correlations between type distribution and the historical record of population movement. Its temporal horizon is, in practice, the historical period — the period for which independent documentary evidence is available to confirm or challenge the measurement-based conclusions. Where documentary evidence runs out, the standard method stops.
The present writer's method does not stop.
The lineal index — a composite measurement derived from the cephalic index, cranial capacity, and a set of sub-orbital ratios that the present writer has found, through extensive field experience, to be particularly stable across generations — is designed to track not merely what type a subject belongs to but how long that type has been in this population. The theoretical basis is as follows. A type signature that recurs with statistical regularity in populations geographically isolated from each other — and that cannot be accounted for by known historical movement — must be explained by a common ancestral source antedating the historical period. The depth of that source — the remoteness of the point at which the type was introduced into the lineage — may be estimated, with appropriate caution, from the degree of its dispersal, the consistency of its expression across isolated populations, and its correlation or non-correlation with the genealogical categories the historical record recognises.⁵
The present writer calls this a deep type when it satisfies three conditions: its occurrence antedates any invasion sequence the mythology assigns to the relevant geographic zone; it is present as a residual signature in populations otherwise dominated by more recent type signatures; and it shows no correlation with the social or genealogical categories the historical record recognises. A deep type is, in other words, invisible to genealogy precisely because it is older than genealogy. It survives beneath the record because it predates the record. Its persistence in the living population is its own evidence of its depth.
IV. PRELIMINARY DATA FROM THE CONNACHT SURVEYS: THE FOMORIAN SUBSTRATE IN THE CRANIOMETRIC RECORD
The present writer has conducted systematic surveys in the provinces of Connacht and, to a lesser extent, Munster, accumulating craniometric data from some four hundred and twelve subjects over nine field seasons. The results of these surveys are presented in full in the field annex that accompanies this fasciculus. For the purposes of the present argument — which is, in this initial volume, methodological rather than exhaustive — a summary table will suffice.
Three distinct type signatures emerge from the data with consistent reliability, and these the present writer designates as follows.
Type A — The Dominant Type. The type signature present in the majority of subjects across the survey as a whole. This is consistent with the population the present writer, following the mythology, associates with the later invasion strata — the Milesian and Tuatha Dé Danann substrates. It is the expected population of the historical record.
Type B — The Intermediate Type. A type signature of moderate frequency, displaying measurements intermediate between Types A and C, characterised by particularly high ancestral concordance values in the inland Connacht material. The present writer associates this signature with an earlier stratum — the farming peoples of the mythology's middle layers — whose persistence will be treated in subsequent fasciculi.
Type C — The Deep Type. Present in approximately eight percent of subjects across the full survey, and at notably higher frequency — approaching fifteen percent — in the most westerly coastal populations, particularly the island communities of Connacht's outer coast. It is characterised by a lineal index falling consistently below the Type A mean, elevated cranial capacity relative to total skull volume, and — a finding the present writer records here with particular emphasis, and to which he will return at length in Fasciculus II — a consistent combination of notably dark complexion with what he has, in the field notes, described as Atlantic coloration of the irises: a pale, clear grey-blue quite distinct from the various blues observed in the dominant type, and sufficiently recurrent in precisely the geographic zone the mythology assigns to the Fomorians as to require, in the present writer's firm view, a systematic explanation rather than a dismissal as coincidence.⁶
The mythology said they could not be expelled from this island. The surveys confirm they were not.
CRANIOMETRIC DATA: TABLE I
Preliminary Type Signatures — Connacht and Western Coastal Surveys, 1878–1886
n = 412 subjects
| Type Classification | n | Mean Cephalic Index | Mean Cranial Capacity (cu. in.) | Lineal Index (Strand) | Ancestral Concordance | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Type A (Dominant) | 298 | 78.4 | 87.3 | 1.14 | Low–Moderate | Consistent with later invasion strata |
| Type B (Intermediate) | 68 | 81.2 | 83.1 | 0.97 | High | Probable farming stratum persistence; highest frequency in inland Connacht |
| Type C (Deep Type) | 46 | 74.9 | 91.7 | 0.71 | Low (discordant) | Dark complexion, Atlantic iris coloration; concentrated at western coast and island populations |
Note on Ancestral Concordance. Low concordance in Type C subjects does not indicate measurement error. It reflects the inapplicability of standard genealogical frameworks to this type signature. The deep type does not appear in the genealogical record because it predates the genealogical record. This is a feature of the analytical situation, not a deficiency of the data.
FOOTNOTES
¹ The Lebor Gabála Érenn survives in multiple manuscript recensions, of which the most complete are found in the Book of Leinster (c. 1160 CE) and MS 23 E 25 in the custody of the Royal Irish Academy. The question of precedence between recensions remains a matter of some textual complexity. MacNeill's recent remarks on this question, while characteristically energetic in their formulation, do not appear to the present writer to have settled it; the present writer has therefore worked principally from the Rawlinson B.512 recension, which preserves certain textual features that appear to antedate the Leinster compilation and which will be of particular relevance when the argument proceeds to the Nemedian stratum.
² The present writer observes that O'Donovan and Stokes — among the most diligent of the preceding generation's scholars — have each, in different contexts, remarked in passing upon the structural peculiarity of the Fomorians' narrative persistence. Neither has pursued this observation toward the conclusion it demands. The present writer attributes this not to any failure of intellect but to the constraints of a purely philological method, which is well suited to determining what a text says and poorly suited to determining what a text means by what it says. Phylo-craniometrics addresses itself to the latter question. This is why it is necessary.
³ The description of Cichol Gricenchos as gan cossa — without feet — appears in several recensions, while others give him one leg or limbs of abnormal form. The variation is itself informative: the transmitters were uncertain about the nature of the physical aberration, which argues for a genuine memory of bodily difference that they could not clearly visualise, rather than an invented conventional deformity. One does not invent a tradition one cannot describe consistently.
⁴ The genealogical arrangement of Lugh's parentage — Cian mac Dian Cécht of the Tuatha on the father's side, Ethniu daughter of Balor on the mother's — is not merely a dramatic device for the construction of a synthesis hero, though it functions as that also. It is, the present writer submits, a mythological encoding of an actual biological fact about the population that worshipped this figure: that this population carried, in its lineage, both the type signature of the incoming dominant group and the deep type signature of the substrate it had displaced. This is not a poetic observation. It is a population fact expressed in the vocabulary available to those who observed it without possessing the analytical framework to understand its mechanism. That the mythology chose to express this synthesis in its most exalted figure, rather than in a minor or peripheral one, is a diagnostic observation of the first importance. The mythology is not encoding Lugh's greatness by giving him mixed ancestry. It is encoding a cosmological truth about the irreducibility of the substrate by placing that substrate in the lineage of its greatest divine successor. The drafters knew the depth without knowing what they knew.
⁵ The present writer anticipates the objection — and has in fact received it, in correspondence from a colleague whose institutional affiliation he declines to specify, but whose methodological conservatism may be inferred from the terms in which his objection was framed — that the lineal index as here defined is not a standard measure and its validity has not been established by independent verification. The response is twofold. First: all standard measures were at some point non-standard, and the mere novelty of an instrument is not a refutation of its utility. Second: the lineal index has been validated in the only way that ultimately matters for any scientific instrument, which is by the consistency and coherence of the results it produces across a large and geographically diverse data set. Nine field seasons of data do not lie. What responds to systematic measurement exists. The present writer is prepared to be proven wrong by superior data, produced by superior method. He is not prepared to be dismissed by the absence of any method at all.
⁶ The pale grey-blue iris colouration in combination with markedly dark complexion occurs at the highest frequency in subjects from the Aran Islands and the Connemara coast, and is noted at lower but statistically significant frequency in the Beara and Iveragh peninsulas of Munster. The present writer notes — here, in a footnote, since the main text has already asked a great deal of the reader — that these locations correspond, with a precision he considers rather difficult to attribute to the ordinary operations of coincidence, to the coastal and island geography the mythology consistently assigns to the Fomorians and their territory. He will return to this observation in the subsequent fasciculus, where it becomes central to the argument rather than supplementary to it.
Fasciculus II — On the Antiquity of the Morrígan: Being an Inquiry into the Diagnostic Value of Mythological Function as an Index of Deep Type, with Supplementary Observations from the Western Surveys — is in preparation.
D. N. A. Strand, F.R.A.I. Autumn, 1887
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