Fractured Emerald: Ireland

by Emily Hahn

Overview

The New Yorker contributor’s fascinating account of Irish history from legendary kings to occupation, independence, and modern political strife.

The author of The Soong Sisters and China to Me turns her observant and discerning eye to the oft‑troubled land of Ireland. In a magisterial combination of historical research and keen personal observation on the scene, Emily Hahn gives us a view of the whole of Ireland and its history, from the legends of the great kings and the heroes of myth to the Saint who converted Ireland to Christianity many centuries ago to modern times. She details the trials and tribulations of a conquered people as they rebel against their exploiters and fight and die for independence, eventually achieving their goal but only at the price of a bitter partition that haunts the country to this day. Hahn’s breadth of vision and acute sense of the telling detail paints the big picture while also pinpointing the small but important moments. Perhaps the subtitle manages to encapsulate it all: Ireland, Its Legends, Its History, Its People from St. Patrick to Bernadette Devlin.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781497629530
Publisher:	Open Road Media
Publication date:	05/27/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	392
Sales rank:	1,055,009
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

A revolutionary woman for her time and an enormously creative writer, Emily Hahn broke all of the rules of the 1920s, including by traveling the country dressed as a boy, working for the Red Cross in Belgium, being the concubine to a Shanghai poet, using opium, and having a child out of wedlock. Hahn kept on fighting against the stereotype of female docility that characterized the Victorian era and was an advocate for the environment until her death at age ninety‑two.

Emily Hahn (1905–1997) was the author of fifty‑two books, as well as one hundred eighty‑one articles and short stories for the New Yorker from 1929 to 1996. She was a staff writer for the magazine for forty‑seven years. She wrote novels, short stories, personal essays, reportage, poetry, history and biography, natural history and zoology, cookbooks, humor, travel, children’s books, and four autobiographical narratives: China to Me (1944), a literary exploration of her trip to China; Hong Kong Holiday (1946); England to Me (1949); and Kissing Cousins (1958). The fifth of six children, she was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and later became the first woman to earn a degree in mining engineering at the University of Wisconsin. She did graduate work at both Columbia and Oxford before leaving for Shanghai. She lived in China for eight years. Her wartime affair with Charles Boxer, Britain’s chief spy in pre–World War II Hong Kong, evolved into a loving and unconventional marriage that lasted fifty‑two years and produced two daughters. Emily Hahn’s final published piece in the New Yorker appeared in 1996, shortly before her death.
Emily Hahn (1905–1997) was the author of fifty-two books, as well as 181 articles and short stories for the New Yorker from 1929 to 1996. She was a staff writer for the magazine for forty-seven years. She wrote novels, short stories, personal essays, reportage, poetry, history and biography, natural history and zoology, cookbooks, humor, travel, children’s books, and four autobiographical narratives: China to Me (1944), a literary exploration of her trip to China; Hong Kong Holiday (1946); England to Me (1949); and Kissing Cousins (1958).
 
The fifth of six children, Hahn was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and later became the first woman to earn a degree in mining engineering at the University of Wisconsin. She did graduate work at both Columbia and Oxford before leaving for Shanghai. She lived in China for eight years. Her wartime affair with Charles Boxer, Britain’s chief spy in pre–World War II Hong Kong, evolved into a loving and unconventional marriage that lasted fifty-two years and produced two daughters. Hahn’s final piece in the New Yorker appeared in 1996, shortly before her death.
 
A revolutionary for her time, Hahn broke many of the rules of the 1920s, traveling the country dressed as a boy, working for the Red Cross in Belgium, becoming the concubine to a Shanghai poet, using opium, and having a child out of wedlock. She fought against the stereotype of female docility that characterized the Victorian era and was an advocate for the environment until her death. 

Read an Excerpt

Fractured Emerald: Ireland

---

By Emily Hahn

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Copyright © 1971 Emily Hahn Boxer
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-2953-0

---

CHAPTER 1

Ireland's story, if not unique, is exceptional. Through centuries of being conquered, occupied, cruelly used, fought over, and exploited, she has retained her individuality and has never lost sight of her goal, freedom from the invader. She has gone her own way, which coincides with no other. How is one to account for this long feat of endurance? Not by citing the peculiarities of race: the original settlers of Ireland were the same men who populated Britain and northern Europe. The answer probably lies in her geographical position—close to Britain yet detached, in the cold north where the population has always had to struggle for survival. The Irish are tough, or they would not be there.

Geologists think it was something like eight to ten thousand years ago when rising waters isolated Eire from the great land mass of the European continent, at an earlier date than the separation of Britain, too, from the mainland. Britain's western coastline curves over and around Ireland, protectingly or threateningly depending on one's political point of view. The water dividing these two islands is 120 miles across at its widest, but in the North Channel there is one place where the passage is only 25 miles wide. Studying the map, any jigsaw-puzzle addict's fingers will itch to move the two pieces of land together because they seem to fit so well, but if history teaches us anything it is that such a reunion would be—as the doctors have it—contraindicated.

Travel by water was slow and perilous at the time of Christ: on the far side of Britain from the Continent Ireland was cut off from the rest of the known world. New ideas and developments in Europe were a long time arriving if they got to Ireland at all, and they were usually weakened by that time, or otherwise altered for the worse. The Roman invasion, however, was completely absorbed by Britain en route, the Romans never passing beyond Pembrokeshire, let alone the Irish Sea. When Caesar landed on British soil the other island was still considered and dismissed as a dangerous outland of forest and mountain and bog, full of wild beasts and wilder men.

The background of these wild men is vague to us. There may have been humans in Ireland even before the waters rose and separated the countries, but the first people who left signs of occupation were Neolithic tribes who evidently came from southern and eastern Europe by way of Britain or perhaps Brittany. They were Picts, of the same race that lived in Britain, who could domesticate animals and pasture them. They built houses of woven lath and clay, cut down trees and grew crops on the clearings, made pottery, and spun wool. Their most lasting achievements were stonework buildings—great tombs and monuments and certain structures that may have been temples. Many of these stone edifices have survived. In the Boyne Valley, at New-grange, is a splendidly preserved burial mound with patterns chiseled on the inside walls, regular circles and whorls like those found in Britain. Most Picts cremated their dead and buried the ashes in mass graves. This was done at Newgrange, but individual burials too have been found in smaller graves. Also, the living buried possessions with certain of the dead people—pots, tools, and beads.

Later, probably after 2000 B.C., a different people came into Ireland, bringing techniques unknown to the earlier settlers. They were the Early Bronze Age men, who dug copper and tin and smelted the metal to make the alloy called bronze. Bronze Age pins, buckles and other jewelry have survived in large numbers, with bronze spearheads and knives and swords, and have been dug up by modern man. Then these prehistoric miners found gold, mainly in the Wicklow Mountains. They developed a new technique to work the malleable stuff and produced exceedingly beautiful objects—golden collars, torques, bracelets, rings, and brooches. Raw Irish gold left the country in ingots which were traded in continental Europe and Asia Minor, and the traders brought home objects from those far-off lands. Some of these, too, have been exhumed.

After a.d. 600 yet another wave of migrants came into Ireland, bringing an end to the Bronze Age. These Celts, or Gaels, were offshoots of the iron-using people who had overrun Britain and the Continent. Bronze Age metalworkers had brought weaponry up to a high standard and equipped their warriors with efficient short-bladed swords and leather bronze-studded shields, but even they couldn't stand up to the new iron weapons, and the Celts vanquished the Picts. They became the new overlords of Ireland.

In such telescoped form, eighty or a hundred centuries of Irish prehistory can be made to sound tidy. Bronze Age pushes out Stone Age, to be dislodged in turn by Iron Age, as in a gigantic game of musical chairs, but events do not really arrange themselves in such obligingly neat form. The changes took place irregularly, at different times in different places, with long lags. And the defeated races did not disappear from the scene just to make our work easier. They lingered as subservient members of the new order, or, more often, left the areas they favored to take refuge among hills and the thick forests that still covered most of the country. The overlords moved in and lived on the flat plains of central Ireland, where crops grew best and animals could graze easily. To the north and south the island is mountainous, its ranges leveling off toward the center in little hills called drumlins, still fiercely steep but eventually tailing away. The central flat region is a wide band running at a slant on the map, northeast to southwest, coast to coast. In the west these lowlands are boggy, but the eastern half is naturally well drained, a good place for farms and herds. It is the district most thickly studded with remains of prehistoric fortifications.

In Caesar's day the Irish were passing through their Heroic Age. Kings battled kings rather as men today go to work—it was their daily task. The social structure was complex. Small groups were governed by kings, but the kings had their own hierarchies, with high kings over subkings. There were nobles, priests (Druids) of the same social status, freemen of lower status, and unfree men. The Irish had no written language, the Druids keeping the entire store of racial knowledge in their heads. Among the free members of society was an arrangement of fealty that bore little if any relationship to the feudalism of Europe. It was based on livestock. A freeman would borrow breeding cattle from his lord and pay rent on the beasts for a certain period of time, until they had bred enough new animals for him to stock his farm. These payments constituted fealty, and the borrower was expected to serve his lord when called upon to do so, on the battlefield or in other emergencies. When the parent stock was no longer needed he could return the beasts to their owner, such repayment automatically releasing him from fealty to that overlord: usually, however, people preferred to continue as followers of the same man until death ended the connection.

The Irish meaning of the word "king" is also unlike that of neighboring countries, since there were many limits to a king's powers. Usually he could not adjudicate; justice was the preserve of the Druids. He could not appoint his successor, nor was it taken for granted that his son would automatically inherit, for the Druids had declared that such matters were settled by the darb-fine, a special law of succession. The royal family group must elect the new tanist, or king, from a precisely defined circle comprising not only the late king's sons but his brothers, his father's brothers, his grandfather's brothers, and even — assuming they were still alive—his great-grandfather's brothers, with the children of all these relatives. This would seem to give the electors a wide choice, but the prize was usually passed back and forth between the two main branches of the family. To avoid quarrels and bloodshed, the election of the tanist was usually held well before the existing incumbent died, though even with such precautions there were quarrels. As the method applied also to non-royal families and their inheritances, we can see why genealogies were so important to the Irish, and why the Druid genealogist needed a trustworthy, retentive memory.

When Christianity pushed out Druidism, the legal powers of the priests passed to a new class, the brehons, who inherited something of the Druids' supernatural aura as well. The Druids had been masters of magic, and when newly converted kings had to give up the comfort and promise of spells they must have felt sadly insecure. We have little information on that lost magic, the Church having effectively erased most of it from the records, but "Druid mist," which could be called up to befuddle the enemy in battle, is still remembered in legend.

Until the ninth century and the era of the Norsemen there were no towns or cities in all Ireland. In that pastoral country, people's lives were arranged about their cattle. They grew crops with which to feed the animals, and in the summer they drove the beasts to where the grain was growing, though they reserved some of it in dry form for winter needs. During those summer months in the fields they camped out in buaile, or booleys; the rest of the year they lived in little rural or family groups, complete with domestics and farmhands, in self-sufficient homesteads often called raths. These were ring-forts of a sort, much of a pattern though they varied in size and strength. An earthen rampart, usually circular and always topped by a wooden stockade, surrounded the land on which stood the owner's house-nothing grand, made of mud and lath or timber—and outhouses for his slaves, farm gear, and perhaps a few animals, dogs and horses. Cattle were kept outside the stockade. Everyone lived in this fashion, though prosperous men advertised their wealth with luxurious furnishings and kings had two ramparts rather than one. A poor freeman's house was far inferior, but the actual land was no problem, since in all Ireland there were at most half a million people. This townless existence seems isolated, but the ancient Irish were not really secluded, for they attended periodic meetings, get-togethers for business and pleasure where everyone could meet friends, settle disputes, arrange loans of cattle, dance, race horses, and take part in contests of skill or strength, with the high king, or ardri, presiding over all. These meetings, even after Christianity arrived, always took place on an ancient burial ground, for which reason some people think they derived from pagan funeral games. Our country fairs and church bazaars may have a similar source.

The oldest Irish epic that can be traced deals with the story of a warrior queen, Maeve of Connacht, said to have lived about the time Christ was born, who made war on Cuchulain, of the great kingdom of Ulster, to get possession of the magic bull of Cooley. Two centuries later the epics tell of two high kings who held power over all the other Irish rulers: Conn of the Hundred Fights controlled most of the fertile center of the island and Eoghan More ruled the south. After many inconclusive battles the two agreed to divide the country, each on his side of a line running from today's Dublin to Galway. Eoghan More's descendants were the Eoghanachts. Their kingdom included Munster and Clare, with the hill of Cashel for center and capital. Conn's descendants, the Dal Cuinn, vigorously expanded their central territory all the way to the west coast, taking in land from Leinster and Ulster. Of his breed the greatest was Niall of the Nine Hostages, whose people the Ui Neills ventured even farther, across the North Channel by way of the Hebrides to Britain. In those wild outlands they made themselves at home, some tending their beasts, others voyaging back and forth for trade or piracy from Antrim to Argyll or Kirkcudbright. Alba was their name for the new country, but as Irish Celts were known as Scots (Scottici), this adopted land, in the course of time, was called Scotland.

In 306 the southern half of Britain was a thriving Roman colony ruled by Constantius, Augustus of the Western Empire. That year he was in England with his son Constantine, and when he died Constantine succeeded to the tide, but was dissatisfied with it. He was an ambitious man. In 312 he invaded Italy to make war on the Emperor for the greatest rank of all.

The Christians were then a suppressed minority. Constantine was favorably disposed toward the new faith nevertheless: a racing man would say that he felt a hunch about it. His imagination was stirred by the thought of Jesus, so much so that before he rode into the decisive battle for the Empire against his enemy Maxentius, he ordered his soldiers to paint on their shields the Greek-character monogram of Christ, chi rho or X P. Riding with his men toward the Milvian bridge outside Rome, he saw a cross of light high in the sky over the sun. The omen proved true. That afternoon at the bridge, Maxentius was killed in battle and Constantine the Greek became ruler of the Roman Empire.

It is impossible to exaggerate the effect of his conversion on subsequent world history. Now the Church was honored, not persecuted, and free of the litigation that had so hampered it. Constantine's subjects followed his example until within a century Roman Britain was probably more Christian than pagan. But Roman power there was fading. There was no dramatic or sudden abandonment of the colony, only a measured withdrawal: the legions slid away like a slowly ebbing tide, with soldiers embarking in greater and greater numbers on the homeward-bound ships. They left a few British trained to fight the Roman way, but as the disciplined troops who had policed the country disappeared, Celtic raiders, long intimidated, grew more audacious. Some made forays from Scotland across the ruined Wall of Hadrian, more arrived in ships from Ireland. Ireland's patron saint Patrick was born at this time, while his native Britain was still Roman in tradition and law, when educated people spoke in Latin and the new Christian faith had taken root and flourished. But the great days of the Empire were over, and Rome ceased to be bulwark and protector of Britain.

When I was a child in St. Louis, our Irish cook used to tell me that Patrick was the first Christian ever to go to Ireland, and that he converted all the Irish. She sincerely believed this, but it is likely she was mistaken. I say likely because one can't absolutely refute her statements (or any others about the subject) with chapter and verse: little is known of Patrick's life. The legends accrued around his name are many and bewilderingly contradictory. But a lot of research has been done since our cook's day, and I am particularly grateful for a recent publication, Saint Patrick: His Origins and Career, by the Reverend Professor R. P. C. Hanson. For instance, the author convinces with his argument that the saint was born not before 388 and not after 408. It may seem a small point, but no point concerning Patrick is small-it is too rare for that. Some people even doubt that he existed at all: one man recently referred to him as the Paul Bunyan of Ireland, but this is carrying caution too far. Patrick existed. It is not his fault that he has been accredited with many fatuous-sounding miracles, for he himself seems never to have claimed credit for even one. Of his actual writings only two examples have been preserved, and both have been sifted over and over for meanings other than the obvious. His Latin style was awkward in the extreme, though at that time the writings of other scholars were polished and beautifully balanced. The British Pelagius, whose well-known heresy shocked and angered the Church, was one of Patrick's contemporaries. He was an accomplished scholar; Patrick was not. Nevertheless it was Patrick who went on that important mission to Ireland. The explanation for this puzzling combination of facts lies in a painful but very important adventure of his early youth. He tells us that he was the son of a comfortably fixed man, a decurion or alderman who seems also to have been a deacon—he may have taken the latter office to save himself from taxes. The family lived in a country villa, just where is unclear. At fifteen the boy was probably learning his lessons like other boys of his class, acquiring Latin as one of the refinements no gentleman could afford to be without, but for everyday purposes he spoke the dialect of the country. He says he paid little attention then to religious matters. At fifteen or sixteen he was kidnapped by sea raiders and carried off, with many fellow captives, to Ireland, and there sold into slavery.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Fractured Emerald: Ireland by Emily Hahn. Copyright © 1971 Emily Hahn Boxer. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

• Cover
• Introduction
• Foreword
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Chapter 16
• Chapter 17
• Chapter 18
• Chapter 19
• Chapter 20
• Chapter 21
• Chapter 22
• Chapter 23
• Rulers of England and (After 1603) Great Britain, From Henry II
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• Copyright