The Tale of the Milesian, Ethné, New Grange and the Faeries
But the imagination of the Celtic bard always played with delight on the subjects of these transition tales, where the reconciling of the pagan order with the Christian was the theme. The same conception is embodied in the tale of Ethné, which we have now to tell.
It is said that Mananan Mac Lir had a daughter who was
given in fosterage to the Danaan prince Angus, whose fairy palace was
at Brugh na Boyna. This is the great sepulchral tumulus now called
New Grange, on the Boyne. At the same time the steward of Angus had a
daughter born to him whose name was Ethné, and who was allotted to
the young princess as her handmaiden.
Ethné grew up into a lovely and gentle maiden, but it
was discovered one day that she took no nourishment of any kind,
although the rest of the household fed as usual on the magic swine of
Mananan, which might be eaten today and were alive again for the
feast tomorrow. Mananan was called in to penetrate the mystery, and
the following curious story came to light. One of the chieftains of
the Danaans who had been on a visit with Angus, smitten by the girl's
beauty, had endeavoured to possess her by force. This woke in Ethné's
pure spirit the moral nature which is proper to man, and which the
Danaan divinities know not. As the tale says, her “guardian demon”
left her, and an angel of the true God took its place. After that
event she abstained altogether from the food of Faëry, and was
miraculously nourished by the will of God. After a time, however,
Mananan and Angus, who had been on a voyage to the East, brought back
thence two cows whose milk never ran dry, and as they were supposed
to have come from a sacred land Ethné lived on their milk
thenceforward.
All this is supposed to have happened during the reign
of Eremon, the first Milesian king of all Ireland, who was
contemporary with King David. At the time of the coming of St.
Patrick, therefore, Ethné would have been about fifteen hundred
years of age. The Danaan folk grow up from childhood to maturity, but
then they abide unaffected by the lapse of time.
Now it happened one summer day that the Danaan princess
whose handmaid Ethné was went down with all her maidens to bathe in
the river Boyne. When arraying themselves afterwards Ethné
discovered, to her dismay—and this incident was, of course, an
instance of divine interest in her destiny—that she had lost the
Veil of Invisibility, conceived here as a magic charm worn on the
person, which gave her the entrance to the Danaan fairyland and hid
her from mortal eyes. She could not find her way back to the palace
of Angus, and wandered up and down the banks of the river seeking in
vain for her companions and her home. At last she came to a walled
garden, and, looking through the gate, saw inside a stone house of
strange appearance and a man in a long brown robe. The man was a
Christian monk, and the house was a little church or oratory. He
beckoned her in, and when she had told her story to him he brought
her to St. Patrick, who completed her adoption into the human family
by giving her the rite of baptism.
Now comes in a strangely
pathetic episode which reveals the tenderness, almost the regret,
with which early Irish Christianity looked back on the lost world of
paganism. As Ethné was one day praying in the little church by the
Boyne she heard suddenly a rushing sound in the air, and innumerable
voices, as it seemed from a great distance, lamenting and calling her
name. It was her Danaan kindred, who were still seeking for her in
vain. She sprang up to reply, but was so overcome with emotion that
she fell in a swoon on the floor. She recovered her senses after a
while, but from that day she was struck with a mortal sickness, and
in no long time she died, with her head upon the breast of St.
Patrick, who administered to her the last rites, and ordained that
the church should be named after her, Kill Ethné—a name doubtless
borne, at the time the story was composed, by some real church on the
banks of Boyne.
