Posted by Atticus on August 15, 2004, at 14:37:18
In reply to Irish Art of place, posted by Jai Narayan on August 15, 2004, at 8:07:06
I have to admit, the thought that our bloodlines may have crossed in the distant past did spring up when you mentioned County Mayo, since that's where the invested princes of the clan Odubhda were stationed to intercept Vikings coming up the Moy estuary to rape, pillage, take on supplies for journeys to Greenland, and generally behave in a very Viking-like way. I was able to track a lot of this down because one of Pez's friends was a doctoral student in English, and was able to track down the Gaelic origins of the Anglicized version of the family name, which put my clan (or sith, as they were called back then) in a specific time and location. The nickname for the branch of the Odubhda from which I'm descended was "Kings of the Moy" because they were pretty successful at intercepting the Viking incursions. They even captured some Viking warships, which were the finest and fastest on the sea in that part of the world at the time, reverse-engineered them and built their own variation, and then set out on search-and-destroy missions looking for Vikings off the northwest coast. When the English invaded, the Odubhda were forced south, and eventually ended up as sodbusters in Limerick, eking out a living farming primarily potatoes like most everyone else. Without a "High" King (Niall's son, the last, died in a battle), who is defined as someone who ruled over the entire island from top to bottom, the various clans really didn't do a very good job of mustering a cohesive counteroffensive -- too much internal jockeying for power, even though, as you note, there still was a king, Fiachra's kid. The Celtic knot tatooed on the inside of my right wrist is, among many other things, a symbol of resistance to English rule in Ireland. (It's such an old pagan symbol that one layer of meaning after another has been added to it.) I got it during my punker days as a symbol of ethnic pride and of resistance to any and all authority that I viewed as unjust. As the dialogue between Marlon Brando's character Johnny in "The Wild One" and another character goes:
"So Johnny, what're you rebelling against?"
Brando: "Whattaya got?"
Hope you're doing well today, fellow Altantean. I feel pretty good myself. :) Atticus
poster:Atticus
thread:377554
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/write/20040729/msgs/377953.html