November 2019 - Climate Change

It’s hard to get away from the constant drumbeat of bad news – especially surrounding climate change. If you follow the Irish weather at all (apparently since I like Ireland, my phone also thinks I need its weather reports), they have been experiencing the ping-pong effect of the changing weather going from drought to flooding to hurricane to flooding again. And while the drought was helpful in exposing previously undiscovered archeological sites, the rest is not good for anyone. Without trying to sound like an Irish version of John Oliver (Last 10,000 Year This Month) I am going to talk about some of the stories that have been passed down through the millennia about how a change in climate affected the Emerald Isle.
            Because Ireland is an island, they are more vulnerable to many things. Much of what is needed to sustain a modern society cannot be found on the island and has to be imported from mainland Europe or elsewhere. One of those things is lumber. Ireland was once vastly forested, but of course progress came along and most of the trees were cleared and the land was used for farming. This has finally caught up to everyone because there is currently a massive housing shortage and the costs of importing lumber are prohibitively high.

            While a housing shortage may not rise to the level of impact that carbon emissions, melting polar ice, and rising sea levels are going to have, it’s a good reminder that we don’t always have the foresight to know how our present actions are going to impact future generations. Today it may be housing, but soon it will be agriculture and many other necessities. And while I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir, it’s always good to have a different perspective so we can continue to find new ways to deal with our problems. And now, this…

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Sionnan 

Siann is both the mythological embodiment of the River Shannon and the maiden at the story of the river’s formation.

There are many versions of the story and most of them are rather vague and hard to contextualize with our modern understanding. Basically, the young woman goes down to a well, the waters rise up, she is drowned, and the waters flow to the sea. In post-Christian interpretation there are cross overs to Eve’s downfall in Eden and she being punished as she is washed away.

However, in some of the earliest surviving texts there is mention of the waters rising up from the sea. And yes, where the River Shannon meets the Atlantic around Limerick, the river is affected by the ocean tides. But the source of the Shannon is well inland and not affected by the tides.

Poetic license or mythological allegory could  explain this story. But the hosts of the podcast Story Archeology have an interesting theory. Near the end of the last ice age, there was a massive lake in what is now Canada. The water was being retained by a massive glacier and when the ice shelf finally collapsed because of the warming global climate, the water surged toward the Atlantic creating huge tsunamis and massive rise in sea-levels. It is theorized that this is what created the Black Sea basin and may have lived on in human memory through stories like the Biblical floods and the floods in the story of Gilgamesh.


Could this surge from the sea be a tidal wave that washed over Ireland changing the landscape and creating a new river? Perhaps. It certainly would be interesting to think that our ancestors are warning us against a warming climate while at the same time creating a new story about their rebirth and re-imagining of themselves after the reformation of the land.



The Fisher King


There is no more climate related story from Celtic Literature than that of the Fisher King. While not strictly Irish, its formula permeates through all Irish and Celtic stories in the British Isles.

At its basic form, it features an elderly king who presides over a kingdom that has become a wasteland. The cause of the famine is a wound suffered by the king – generally signifying his impotence which symbolized the infertility in the lang. The king generally has in his possession a magical object that can restore the land but the king must first be healed. The hero must find the castle and ask the king the right question – how do I heal you. In which case the kingdom can be restored and everyone lives happily ever after.

The tale of the Fisher King figures most famously in the Arthurian Legends and Percival’s quest for the Holy Grail. But that tale is derived from much older Welsh sources that have our hero seeking a magical cauldron such as Culhwch and Olwen and Peredur son of Efawg.

The idea of a wounded king being unfit to rule features throughout Irish stories. The very first king of the Tuatha de Danaan, Nuada, was wounded in battle. And while a silver hand was fashioned to replace the one he lost, he was unfit to rule lest the land fall into famine.

The trope appears in other circumstances where the defect is not physical. Poor leaders, bad warriors, and tyrants all feature in stories where their inability to lead results in the land being unfarmable. Once the leader is dealt with and the wrong undone, the land returns to its normal state of fertility and the people are saved.


Now if there aren’t metaphors there for our present situation, I don’t know where else to look.

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