A History of Ireland in 100 objects (revisited)

The UK edition of the Irish Times comes in depressing monochrome, which certainly buggers up many of the excellent graphics. Distribution can be a bit hit-and-miss, too: the Monday edition rarely makes it to London suburban news stands.

But the Saturday edition is an essential. Well, to be truthful, Malcolm finds the Thursday property porn seductive, too.

This weekend, Fintan O’Toole’s series, a shameless but excellent rip-off of Neil MacGregor’s original for the British Museum and the BBC, has reached the 8th century, AD. Malcolm first acknowledged this effort in February, when O’Toole was starting off: doesn’t time fly, when you’re having fun?

It’s a regular feature of Heritage&Habitat — a neat way of embracing O’Toole and Michael Viney, another essential week-end read, on the same page.

Were one looking for iconic images of early Ireland, the Ardagh chalice (this week’s object) would have to be in the Top Five.

Malcolmian aside:

There is an upside of being a constituent kingdom of the old Union: Ireland didn’t have its treasures pillaged and brought back to ornament and instruct London, which was the fate of colonies and dependencies across the world.

Hence, MacGregor didn’t have a suitable Irish object to include in his list — though, to be fair, his global view included just four specifically British subjects.

O’Toole can properly speak for himself, and any person of intellect or sensibility who hasn’t already done so should search him out. That’s where the chalice is represented in full colour, anyway. What Malcolm would wish to acknowledge is not that O’Toole provides a succinct account and description of the chalice, but that he then finds a different “take” in his conclusion:

A poem in the exuberant monkish collection Hisperica Famina describes a “wooden oratory . . . fashioned out of candle-shaped beams” and talks of how monks would “hew the sacred oaks with axes, in order to fashion square chapels”. The usual word for a church in early medieval Irish is dairthech – literally, “oak house”.

Typically, these buildings were small, rectangular and relatively plain. So, even while the Irish were making religious objects of astonishing opulence, they were using them in relatively humble spaces.

He adds this wasn’t because of any lack of expertise in masonry, so O’Toole adds a provocative suggestion:

This tendency to use wood rather than stone was distinctive: in most of Europe, stone churches were regarded as essential marks of prestige. Why not in Ireland? The explanation is certainly not to be found in a lack of skill in masonry – the stonework at Gallarus is exceptionally accomplished. One possibility, hinted at in the mention of the “sacred oak”, is that Ireland retained a pre-Christian attachment to the holiness of trees.

But the obvious reason is that Ireland still had no urban tradition. When the idea of creating towns finally arrived in Ireland, it would come from the outside and at the expense of the culture that lavished its ingenuity on objects such as the Ardagh Chalice.

The past is an alien country. They did things differently there.

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