Chapter Nine - Nation, History, and Memory: The Irish Free State, Europe-Centered Worlding of Ireland, and James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939)

Summary

Irish nationalist antiquarian and (mytho-)historical, literary, political, folklore, racial, and other range of commentaries about Ireland through the medium of “Iranian” referentialities (past and present) were among the many divergent instances of locating Ireland in a world historical setting. Both full-fledged and residual traces of theories of “oriental” origins of the Irish reappeared well into the early twentieth century, but with rapidly diminished frequency and declining power of persuasion, at least in Irish historical circles. Such works were still being produced during the Irish War of Independence (1919–21) and even after the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922. A case in point is the references to Scythians, Egyptians, and Phoenicians, in Seumas MacManus’ 1921 The Story of the Irish Race. This was despite the fact that such theories were compellingly cast aside as legendary and mythological in the new historiographic models that emerged in Ireland after the latter decades of the nineteenth century and were further reinforced by the likes of Patrick Weston Joyce, Eoin MacNeill, Mary Teresa Hayden and George Aloysius Moonan, or Alice Stopford Green in the early twentieth century. In her 1925 History of the Irish State to 1014, Alice Stopford Green noted the past appeal of legendary accounts of ancient Ireland by casting her glance over a much broader time frame than just the period since the eighteenth century:

Irish tradition told of a series of invasions, wars, and successive colonies ending in pestilence and death. All distinct knowledge of the past, however, has been obscured by the learned fictions of the annalists and genealogy makers of Christian times. Overawed by the authority of classic authors, and the pride of empire which Rome had bequeathed to the world, they set themselves to shape Irish history after the fashionable manner of Latin models. In the interests of symmetry, and to give Ireland a good place in the orthodox framework of world history, patriot scholars devised a fantastic scheme of genealogies and chronologies by which the invasions of the island should be forced into line with the Empires known to classic fame. The learned men's terror of provincialism, and of a merely national history, ended in double disaster—the complete discrediting down to our own day of all early Irish history; and the confusion or destruction of a mass of genuine tradition of great importance for the study of European civilization.