'Kindness in Your Unkindness': Lady Gregory and History (Critical Essay‪)‬

As a writer of narrative versions of Irish mythology and folk history plays, Lady Gregory was obliged to address the relation between Irish mythology and Irish history that preoccupied scholars and literary figures such as Standish O'Grady and T. W. Rolleston during the Irish Literary Revival. This essay outlines the ideological underpinnings of the 'heroic' idea of history shaping O'Grady and Rolleston's treatment of legend, considers the pressures it exerted on Gregory's narratives and folk histories, but also examines the manner in which her works pushed against the boundaries of that ideology, particularly in terms of gender. In her notes appended to the 1905 edition of Gods and Fighting Men, she cites extensively from the ethnographer Alfred Nutt when addressing the relationship of the legends presented in this work to actual Irish history. These citations are included to refute the disparaging view of early Irish literature held by certain Trinity College scholars, most notably Robert Atkinson who, before the Vice-Regal Commission on Intermediate Education in 1898, had lamented what he saw as its abundance of passages 'so silly or so indecent as to give you a shock from which you would never recover during the rest of your life'.1 The notes point to the extent to which Lady Gregory's treatment of her sources was informed by professional academic disputes concerning their origins and historical provenance, and they situate Gods and Fighting Men, a stylized narrative redaction of original tales drawn mainly from the Ossianic cycle, within a tradition of antiquarian scholarship. They serve to counter the suggestion, therefore, that Gregory's engagement with this material was purely fanciful, uninformed by scholarly concerns. It was important that Gregory made such a gesture in this work, not just because of the stance taken by Atkinson and others, but also because of her own position on the relationship of the tales treated to actual history. As a result of her discussion of the ideas of Nutt, O'Grady, and others in her notes, she felt secure enough to inform her readers that her own rendition of the legends of Finn McCumhaill was premised on the assumption that they had no foundation in actual history. Had she not shown her awareness of academic debate on this matter, this admission risked the admonition of the scholar that her selection from sources was without guiding principles and might have inclined the general reader consequently to view the tales themselves as mere rootless flights of fancy. Her admission that she found it impossible to arrange the stories coherently so long as she thought of them as history and her belief that, ultimately, evidence for the purely fictional character of Finn was as convincing as the thesis that he had actually existed are sensible, moderate conclusions that nonetheless retain the strength of her claims for the richness and importance of early Irish literature in the face of dismissive Trinity College pronouncements. (2)