17 Things You (Probably) Didn’t Know About The Historical (St) Patrick

March 17, 2022 8:01 AM

For the day that's in it, 17 Things You (Probably) Didn’t Know About The Historical (St) Patrick and the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs St. Patrick's Day Message which is extra-special this year.
posted by scorbet (25 comments total)

Well if we’re doing St. Patrick’s day trivia: Why Mexico Celebrates St. Patrick’s Day.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:48 AM on March 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

From the article:

What there is, in fact, is a rather profound, strangely respectful, yet altogether realistic treatment of insular Irish pagans and their society [from Patrick].

Yep. This is the thing about the Christianization of Ireland that I got the biggest kick out of - for the most part the Celts seemed to just sort of roll it up in with the rest of their culture, and Patrick rolled with them doing that. There's a bunch of Celtic myths and tales from about this time which are a fascinating sort of double-image, with elements of both the pagan or Celtic beliefs and the Christian ones. I took a seriously in-depth course in Irish literature in college, and the professor told us about one story in particular (we didn't read it) where there's this grand battle between a couple of Celtic tribes, and suddenly the sky goes dark and everyone stops all "what the hell?" and the hero's Druid steps forward and says he's suddenly getting a vision of a Man in a foreign desert land who's The Son Of God and He is at that minute being crucified. The hero says "well, hell, that's not right. Okay, when we finish up here, let's go and kill the guys who killed That Guy." And then the battle starts up again.

Or there's a passage from the Irish epic Agallamh Na Seanórach, which translates to "The Dialogue of the Ancients". The Agallamh is the epic poem where we got all the stories from the Fenian Cycle of Irish myth - all the stories about the hero Fionn MacCumhail and his warriors. The epic itself starts with Patrick on his way around Ireland, and he runs into a couple of really old giants; the giants are a couple of Fionn's warriors. Patrick baptizes them first, then they spend the next several days hanging out, with the old giants telling Patrick all about Fionn and their band and The Good Old Days, with stories about battles and epic love stories and visits to Tir Na Nog and such.

This takes several days, so there's lots of breaks for people to get sleep and such. And during one such break, Patrick is suddenly paranoid that maybe he shouldn't be getting all into these stories about pagan hijinks or whatever. But he is visited by two angels who tell him it's all cool - this is all stuff that THEY did before they were baptized, and him just listening to their stories is cool. And besides, these are some great stories, so maybe Patrick should start writing them down so other people could read them too.

So THAT was how the early Christians saw the Celtic legends that pre-dated them - "yeah, this stuff is from before Christianity came here, but dude, these stories are epic." Compare that to how the Spanish treated the Mayan texts they ran into.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:49 AM on March 17, 2022 [14 favorites]

/looks down

They're ... manky ?
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 9:08 AM on March 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

Thanks for posting, I laughed so hard I nearly converted, but caught meself in time.

Did anyone else have the tradition, as a child (U.S.), that if you WERE NOT Irish*, on St. Patricks Day, that was why you had to wear green or else you'd get mercilessly pinched all day? The "wearing of the green" somehow conferred temporary Irishness from pinching. Or is this just another thing kids came up with to torture each other? Because we did not have the income or specialty wardrobe to have clothing specifically for this day, so you'd wear green socks or a pair of green cords or pin a little felt shamrock on. And someone would creep up behind you and pinch, hard!-- because they 'couldn't see' your little bit of green.

*Irish, meaning an obvious Irish last name, mostly. In my Cali childhood there were not the Irish community enclaves such as there are still now in the Midwest and East coasts.
posted by winesong at 9:33 AM on March 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

The writer Terry O'Hagan (AKA VoxHib) also featured on an episode of the Amplify Archaeology podcast about the historical St. Patrick, which covers similar topics as the histicle, if maybe not quite so... forcefully.
posted by scorbet at 10:01 AM on March 17, 2022

ooh!! I'm def going to spend next years St P's in Mexico City!!!!
posted by supermedusa at 10:20 AM on March 17, 2022

From the "deviant sexual practices" link in the number 7 paragraph, the same author makes an interesting case for Patrick maaaaybe being gay, or at least having had a same-sex encounter in his youth.

Also, happy St. Gertrude's Day!
posted by indexy at 11:14 AM on March 17, 2022

EmpressCallipygos is there an English translation that you like which compiles the myths you reference? Or a good starting place? It all sounds very interesting to me but I’m nay good at Celtic. Cheers!
posted by BlunderingArtist at 11:21 AM on March 17, 2022

is there an English translation that you like which compiles the myths you reference? Or a good starting place?

There are scores! Irish was forbidden in Ireland for a good chunk of time, and odds are most people in Ireland heard about the old tales via some English translation or other. I don't have a favorite personally. But - if you do go hunting, and you're looking for the Fenian Cycle specifically, you can do a search either for the "Fenian Cycle" itself, or look for stories about Fionn - or, try looking for his name under the spelling "Finn McCool", which is a) how that Irish name is pretty much pronounced and b) makes him sound like a bad-ass dude.

As far as Irish and Celtic myth goes, my class delved more into what's called the Ulster Cycle - a completely different set of myths and tales about a completely different set of gods, demigods, and such. The main hero there was a warrior hero named Cuchullain (pronounced "Coo-hullen", pretty much) and his band of warriors. The main source for the stories in the Ulster Cycle is an epic poem called the Táin Bó Cúailnge (which sort of is pronounced "Toyn bo cooley"), or "The Cattle Raid of Cooley". The main plot of the Táin is a cattle raid, kicked off when Queen Maeve - a somewhat egotistical queen from Connacht in the south of Ireland - really REALLY wants a magic bull that has somehow ended up in the herd belonging to the king of Ulster. At first she just tries negotiating for it, but the negotiations break down and she decides she'll try taking it by force. The only thing is that the men of Ulster are under a weird ancient curse and can't fight back at first - but fortunately CuChullain is not affected by that curse, and so he holds off Maeve's men singlehandedly for nine days (because he's just THAT AWESOME a fighter) until the curse wears off and they can join the battle and fight Maeve off.

The Táin is kind of like the Iliad, in that it's this one super-intricate epic poem where the poet gets into telling the backstories about everything, so you learn why there's a magic bull in Ulster, what the curse is about, why CuChullain isn't affected by it, what makes CuChullain such a bad-ass warrior, and such. I do have a preferred translation there - Thomas Kinsella did one in 1969.

But if you're totally new to Irish myths you may want to start out reading a more straightforward "Folk Tales Of Ireland" kind of collection, just to familiarize yourself with the stories themselves a bit. The early Celtic poets didn't always speak all that straightforwardly (I think everyone in that college class all thought we were going to fail for the first couple weeks because the professor was using more direct translations and they were one hell of a mindfuck).
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:45 AM on March 17, 2022 [14 favorites]

I love it. Thanks a bunch!
posted by BlunderingArtist at 11:58 AM on March 17, 2022

Just as a warning most Irish myths don't end with "and they all lived happily ever after". There's a particular set (The Children of Lir, The Quest of the Sons of Turenn, Deirdre and the Sons of Uisneach - though they can have slightly different names) that are known as the Three Sorrows of Storytelling.
posted by scorbet at 12:36 PM on March 17, 2022 [4 favorites]

Did anyone else have the tradition, as a child (U.S.), that if you WERE NOT Irish*, on St. Patricks Day, that was why you had to wear green or else you'd get mercilessly pinched all day?

winesong, we had that tradition in both my family's mid-Atlantic suburb and our extended family's Long Island towns, but it didn't matter whether you were of Irish descent or not - you either wore green or you got pinched, those were the rules.
posted by headnsouth at 12:56 PM on March 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

The not wearing green/pinching was a thing in East Tennessee as well, which was the reason I always kinda disliked the day. At least until I grew up and could kinda dislike it because of drunk beer bros.
posted by indexy at 1:07 PM on March 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

Grew up in Montana, and yes the pinching was A Thing there. Even coming from a family that was mostly Irish (a bit of Welsh on my mom's side). You wore green or got pinched.

Hell I'm 48, and I am STILL wearing green today. Just in case. No one has pinched me yet. Must be working...
posted by caution live frogs at 1:12 PM on March 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

I listened to this podcast:"Did St. Patrick Kill a Wizard?" a while ago. The weird thing about the snakes thing is that it isn't that weird. The source for the snakes is an incredibly wild later hagiography that also has St Patrick killing wizards, turning people into foxes and battling a horde of demons raised by a druid.

The miracles that St Patrick himself claimed are very modest. E.g. he and his companions were lost and hungry, but miraculously came across some wild pigs and ate them.

For some reason "driving the snakes out of Ireland" just happens to fall in the middle ground between the boring miracles Patrick claimed, and the wildly unbelievable miracles later made up about him.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 1:46 PM on March 17, 2022

Lots of interesting stuff there! I'm going to add one of my own; the name Patricius is very Roman, and may imply a claimed link back to the elite patrician families of ancient Rome.
posted by vincebowdren at 1:48 PM on March 17, 2022

Patrick is my cat Tommy's first middle name, because of his compulsion to pick up any long, stringy object in his teeth and carry it off somewhere like it's his mission in life. The first thing he did when I met him at the shelter was try to walk off with my shoelaces. My sister was watching him in action one day and said, "He's like St. Patrick trying to get all the snakes out of Ireland."
posted by The Underpants Monster at 2:26 PM on March 17, 2022 [11 favorites]

(The article is delightful BTW)
posted by The Underpants Monster at 2:40 PM on March 17, 2022

Just as a warning most Irish myths don't end with "and they all lived happily ever after".

Another warning is that they can be really earthy - there's a point at which Queen Maeve has to bow out of a battle during the Tain because she has an unusually heavy period. There's also a whole thing with CuChullain and his wife Emer, where CuChullain is always chasing after other ladies but Emer's all "feh, I don't care, I know he'll come back to me anyway when he's got this out of his system" and he does. (Except for with one particular fairy woman named Fand who CuChullain gets a little hung up on, and there's a whole separate story about that.)

But sometimes that earthiness can also be REALLY funny. There's a thing about CuChullain's fighting skills - he's as good of a fighter as he is because he sometimes just goes BUGNUTS and literally will not stop, and there's a story about how he's been in one battle that's ended but CuChullain is still freaking out and swinging his sword around at everything and chasing everyone, and just WILL NOT snap out of it. So all CuChullain's men go and hide in his house to protect themselves - and Emer leads all the WOMEN out to face CuChullain, and when he comes along they all flash him. And the shock of seeing all the women flash him is what finally makes him stop.

And that curse the men of Ulster are under - the backstory is about how a fairy woman was forced to run a race while she was literally in labor, and to get her revenge she cursed all the men of Ulster, for nine generations, to be stricken with labor pains for nine straight days at any time they were in danger. So THAT is why CuChullain was fighting Maeve's army alone at first - because the men of Ulster were all going through that.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:29 PM on March 17, 2022 [5 favorites]

But if you're totally new to Irish myths you may want to start out reading a more straightforward "Folk Tales Of Ireland" kind of collection

I'd advise having a quick glance at the contents. It should have stories like "The Children of Lir", "How Cúchulain got his Name", "The Salmon of Knowledge", and "Oisín in Tír-na-nÓg". Otherwise, it may be a more specialised collection, focussing solely on "Folk Tales".

Basically there are more or less four sets of Irish stories : The mythological Cycle (about the Tuatha Dé Danann and the Fomorians and so on), the Ulster Cycle (about Concobhar MacNessa and Cúchulainn), the Fenian Cycle (about Fionnn MacCumhail and the Fenian) and Folk/Fairy Tales (about normal people stepping into fairy rings, leprechauns, and ghosts and so on) and the stories I mentioned above will make sure that you get a mixture of the first three, at the very least.

Another resource is the Schools Collection at Dúchas (heritage). Schoolchildren in the 1930s were asked to collect stories, local history, geography and customs from older relatives and neighbours so that it could be recorded for posterity. They've now been digistised, and transcribed so that you can, for example, read how the people in Claremorris used to celebrate St. Patrick's Day, a story about Fionn MacCumhail or cures for various ailments.
posted by scorbet at 6:16 AM on March 18, 2022 [5 favorites]

Two quick footnotes to add onto scorbet's excellent comment above:

the Tuatha Dé Danann and the Fomorians and so on

Just giving a bit more of a definition here: Tuatha Dé Danann and the Fomorians are two kinds of supernatural humans, for lack of a better word, that show up in Irish myth and legend. If you had to compare them to more generic "fantasy" tropes, the Tuatha are like fairies or elves, and the Fomorians are more like dwarves, goblins, or giants. Or, if you're familiar with Greek mythology, the Tuatha are like Zeus and Apollo and the gods on Mt. Olympus, and the Fomorians are like the Titans who preceded them.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:22 AM on March 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

I can attest that blundering into this collection in my local library kicked off my teen-rebellion-through-tenuous-Irish-identity phase.
I found Lady Gregory's telling of the Ulster Cycle more gripping than Yeats' retelling of folk tales.
(I still use 'By the gods of my people' as a substitute for cursing - a minced version of "I swear by the gods my people swear by".)
Keeping in mind that Lady Gregory bowdlerized the stories a bit, and had the biases of her upper class life, I still think it's a good intro to the myths.
Not least because Lady Gregory could get a little sharp:
"And indeed if there was more respect for Irish things among the learned men that live in the college at Dublin, where so many of these old writings are stored, this work would not have been left to a woman of the house, that has to be minding the place, and listening to complaints, and dividing her share of food."
posted by Mutant Lobsters from Riverhead at 7:00 PM on March 18, 2022

And if some of the names or situations or tropes in the other myth cycles seem familiar, we can thank Robert E. Howard for that.
posted by Mutant Lobsters from Riverhead at 7:02 PM on March 18, 2022

Having been in primary school in Chicago until 1974, and then moved to Ireland for the rest of my schooling and (mostly) still in Ireland - never heard of the pinching thing. That sounds nasty.
posted by Samarium at 8:13 PM on March 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I think the pinching thing is an Americanism.

Traditions around St. Patrick's Day developed very, very differently in each country, it seems. In Ireland itself, it's more of a family day, like Thanksgiving in the US - you gather with the family and there's a fancy meal. There's a religious element, and it's also a celebration - my Irish friend told me that the "giving things up for Lent" is waived on that one day. (One of my favorite memories from my first visit there was her spending the whole afternoon on March 16th periodically stopping to study the sky, and then the second the sun had sunk low enough to plausibly be called "sunset," she grinned, dug out a chocolate bar she'd had in her handbag and ripped into it like a starving ferret.)

In the US, it was more of a national-pride thing; Irish immigrants were still celebrating it as a religious feast day, but Catholic Irish were a minority in the largely-Protestant USA, and faced a good deal of prejudice for decades as a result - and the first St. Patrick's Day parade in New York was planned to be more of a protest march ("Look how many of us there are, you still wanna fuck with us?"). The "protest" element faded as the national attitude towards the Irish changed, and it became more of a celebration not of St. Patrick, but of "yay Ireland and yay for Irish Americans!" Except the non-Irish layman doesn't really get into it on a deeper level than that.

In a weird way it's kind of what's happened to Pride events - I suspect that the earlier Pride marches were more like "look how many of us there are, we're not ashamed of who we are so suck it" protests, but now it's more of a celebratory "yay LGBTQ community" thing, and corporations are starting to pile on by rainbow-flag-washing everything just for the month and calling it good, so for the layman "Pride parades" are just about "rainbow flags and something about gay people", just like St. Patrick's Day for the US layman is about "wear green and yay Irish people and let's go get drunk". The pinching thing probably started as some early "it's bad luck not to wear green" folklore somewhere, and the pinch was reinforcing that it was "bad luck" and then it just became a Thing.

I was in Ireland on St. Patrick's during that visit to my friend, and didn't have clean green clothing any more and fretted about that a bit. My friend just gently said that "we....don't really do that here."
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:10 AM on March 19, 2022 [2 favorites]