JAMES JOYCE KNEW AND LOVED HIS DRUIDLAND IN FINNEGANS WAKE.

BY MICHAEL McGRATH, KILKENNY.

After 500 pages of FINNEGANS WAKE we come across the Everlasting Ashtree or the 'Overlasting Eshtree' in the Joycean language - I have one in my back garden that I had to regretfully cutback as it was interfering with reruns of Inspector Morse on TV.

Joyce references a river and a mountain in Tipperary just over our Kilkenny border , when he writes, "beside the Anner at the the foot of Slievenamon", while "with a snowdrift from one beechen bow" relates the ashtree in passing to a metaphorical tree used by C.J. Kickham in his poem: She lived beside the Anner

At the foot of Slievenamon, A gentle peasant girl with mild eyes like the dawn. Her cheeks were dewy rosebuds And her teeth were pearls rare, A snowdrift neath the beechen bow

her neck and nut brown hair, This ashtree is the the Teutonic Yggdrasil, the steed of Ygg and Wodin, our 'beingstalk' or 'quickenbole, our tree of life and also "crossbones" where "Tyburn Fenians" (Irish rebels condemned to death) lie in their dreams of a free Ireland. It is far from certain that Joyce was not a nationalist when you discover the depths of his knowledge and love of the lore of of ancient Ireland, our sacred sites and how it all gelled together. Being both male and female, this ashtree to Joyce meant the ultimate union in its being. And nearby is the Stone of the Unchanging Law. Joyce portrays Stephen Dedalus in "Stephen Hero" on a visit to Mullingar, staying with his 'godfather' or guardian at a house near Lough Owel ( 'Stephen Hero' , revised edition I have, 1956). Later in Ulysses he has Stephen Dedalus follow 'false' Hellenic gods into a Martello Tower, now a museum I enjoyed visiting when I climbed to the roof of it last Bloomsday, and then enjoyed readings and a male choir bellowing out 'Mammy'. in Joycean celebration in Fitzgeralds pub in nearby Glasthule - everybody crammed in and happy as Larry before Twelve Noon on our sacred day. Tara then for Midsummer and all our faithful druids a few days later. I bought a new copy of Wake for a fiver in the Glasthule bookshop and ended up arguing that it was ten times the better book than Ulysses, with happily a visiting American professor agreeing with me - but I digress. Joyce has Mulligan (Gogarty) unjustifiably dub the Martello their Omphalos. In this part of 'Finnegans Wake' Joyce returns to his youth and his 1900-1901 memories of the country around Mullingar and fixes this as the scene of the confrontation with the character 'Yawn' on a real Omphalos established imperishably on Uishneach, a theatre for communion between druidic gods, humankind and earth spirits of the Otherworld. Here he had a real rock, the enormous Ail na Míreann as a justification for his symbolic stone of unchanging law. Here, too, in ancient times there grew that huge tree Craebh Uisnigh, an Ash. "Due northward fell the Ash of Uisneach as far as Granard, in the time of the sons of Aedh Sláine" - The Book of Leinster. This would mean that the tree was about twenty five miles high and thus was a cosmic rival of Yggdrasil. Or as I joke, this is why our ancient druids needed no satellites with trees like this to hang out their aerials on! The knoll 'Asnoch' with 'Mearingstone' in Finnegans Wake refers to the Hill of Uisneach in the county Westmeath - the modern day Druidess Gina McGarry brought me up on it back in 2006, struggling upward as she led me to the attractive sight of her well-filled nylon tights with my head at that delightful level as we ascended with her in front. About 600 feet high, surmounted by a large rock twenty feet high and twenty yards in circumference - that's the traditional centre, meditallium, navel, umbilicus or Omphalos of Ireland and the point where its four ancient provinces met. In Irish the rock was Ail na Míreann, Rock of the Divisions. The English word 'mere' or 'mearing' signifies 'boundary' and 'merestone' a stone that marks a boundary. The Irish word 'mir' is pronounced the same as the English 'mere' - though it means not a boundary but a section of countryside separated from other sections by a boundary. The Irish genitive plural míreann and the English 'mearin' have become merged in the Irish brogue which is now used to denote a boundary between two farms. Ail na Míreann ceased to have its traditional and literal meaning when a new province or 'fifth' was created by detaching sections of territory from the other four. This division is ascribed to the legendary King Tuathal Teachtmhar, newly restored to the High Kingship after a rebellion of the aborigines. He is said to have formed the new province of Midhe or The Middle, situated around present Meath, by detaching from each of the ancient four provinces sections of them around their meeting point - thereby creating a mensal home kingdom for himself. This is how the present historic county Meath originally came into being. The Irish word for province, Cùige (Fifth) , must have come into usage about this time and it continues to have this meaning although the country has long since reverted to the quadripartite provincial system. The contradictory use of a fifth for a quarter and a subsequent division of the island into halves between Conn Céad Cathach (Conn of the Hundred Battles) and Eoghan Mór explains the references to 'Conn's Half' and 'Eoghan Mór's five quarters'. It would seem that Joyce was inspired by his youthful memories of Mullingar and Uisneach in writing Finnegans Wake. The historical references are intended to be an evocation of 'climes of old times gone by' which the historic hill of Uisneach might well be deemed to hold invisible but imperishable in its aura of sombre and mysterious solitude.

And for a druid it was fitting that we got into Uisneach from the road through a hole in the hedge. Copyright @Michael McGrath 2022.