The natural history of Ireland

Reviewed by Tom Kennedy on 10 Sep 2009

As we are always being told, the winner gets to write the history, and lies, if repeated often enough become established as fact. Rewriting of history is as old as history itself, and back in the 12th century Giraldus Cambrensis in penning his Topographia Hiberniae had no wish to present the recently defeated Irish in a favourable light. Over the following centuries Giraldus was followed by a number of other revisionists, all anxious to convince readers that it had been necessary to put manners on the ignorant bog Irish.

Naturally, this steady corruption of history infuriated the former lords and chiefs who, when forced to flee abroad, took with them their own glowing memories of what Ireland had been like for them at the height of the Gaelic order.

EXILE

One of these individuals, who set sail for Spain as a boy in 1602, was Philip O'Sullivan Beare. His family had taken the name Beare from the Beare Peninsula in Cork after they had settled there when dispossessed of their lands in south Tipperary almost four hundred years before by the Normans. Memories were long, but continued defiance eventually led to exile. With the defeat of the Irish at Kinsale, adopting a superior air and holding out was just not on. In the same year that Philip fled, his less fortunate tutor, Donagh O'Croinin, was hanged and eviscerated in Cork.

Like many of his kind, Philip was received well in Spain, and on finishing his education under the protection of the Governor of Galicia, he joined the Spanish navy, where, no doubt his Catholic piety and his dislike of the English were encouraged.

He produced a Historiae Catholicae Hiberniae Compendium in 1621, in which he commented that division among the Irish had been their downfall. He also worked on a lengthy rebuttal of the views expressed by Giraldus Cambrensis, Stanihurst and others. Whenever one of these writers made a disparaging remark, Philip countered this with glowing accounts, many of which, although just as strange, give us a glimpse of how the Irish saw themselves.

The distinctive old Gaelic magic is in there, such as his account, in among the list of birds, of how they would not fly over the Skellig rock because it was so sacred that they had to land and walk across. In among his wonderful isles is one in which no one could die. However, the pain of living was so severe that no one choose to prolong their agony.

Philip listed all the plants, animals, mountains and other features that he knew, or had heard about, and interestingly, like many Gaelic scholars who had received a classical education, he relied heavily for his natural history on Pliny the Elder.

Philip seems to have worked on this project for some time, for the original manuscript, written in Latin, has lots of amendments and marginal notes, often suggesting the inclusion of additional material. It was a remarkable work, but although it has a title, Zoilomastix, alluding to Zoilos, who made disparaging comments about Homer, the 718 page manuscript was never published.

As Keith Sidwell, Professor of Latin and Greek at University College Cork, comments in his foreword, more than 300 Irish writers produced more than 1,000 printed works in Latin, and many more remain as unpublished manuscripts.

Zoilomastix disappeared, only to turn up unexpectedly three centuries later at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. In the 1960s, the Irish Manuscripts Commission, published a selection of abstracts, but as the classics scholar and medical doctor, Denis C O'Sullivan, realised, not many people can still read Latin, and besides, as part of Ireland's lost literature, Zoilomastix deserves to be better known.

Since his school days in Listowel, Denis had always harboured an ambition to study classics, and by fortunate coincidence, he had just completed his honours degree in Greek and Latin at UCC when he came across the Zoilomastix. For this translation, Denis choose the first part of the manuscript, which has now been pubished as The Natural History of Ireland.

Apart from the translation, the introduction provides us with some background on what is known about this young Irish exile, and there are useful summaries of all the authors referred to by Philip. For the text itself, Denis presents us with Latin on one side, and an excellent translation into English on the facing page where we can delve into how an Irish gentleman recalled the abundance of life in what must have seemed to him a paradise lost.