Mythic Ireland in Art: Newgrange, Ogham and the Old Stories
Ireland's oldest stories were not written down for centuries after they were first told, and Ireland's oldest monuments were built long before anyone wrote anything at all. Yet the two have always been tangled together. The mounds of the Boyne Valley, the stones cut with notches along their edges, the hill at Cashel where kings were made: each has a story attached, and each has been drawn, painted and printed by artists who wanted to put the story and the place back together.
This is a guide to that old, half-legendary Ireland as it appears in art, and to the prints that carry it onto a wall today.
Newgrange: a house for the Dagda
Newgrange, in the Brú na Bóinne complex in County Meath, was built around 3200 BC, which makes it older than Stonehenge and the pyramids at Giza. Its white quartz front and domed mound are a modern reconstruction, but the passage and chamber inside are original. A narrow opening above the entrance, the roof-box, lets the sun of the winter solstice reach down the passage and light the chamber floor for a few minutes each December morning.
The later storytellers had their own explanation for the place. In the mythological cycle it is the home of the Dagda, the chief god of the Tuatha Dé Danann, and his son Aengus took it from him by a clever trick over time and tenancy. When the Tuatha Dé Danann were defeated by the Milesians, the stories say, they withdrew into the mounds and became the people of the sídhe. Whatever the builders believed, the mound was soon reread as a doorway.
That doorway quality is what the Newgrange Irish Sunset print catches, with the mound low against a darkening sky and a moon above the fields. It sits well in a study or hallway where it can be looked at from a distance.
Cú Chulainn and the heroic age
The other great body of Irish legend is the Ulster Cycle, and its centre is Cú Chulainn, the young warrior of the Táin Bó Cúailnge who holds back an army at the border of Ulster. His best-known image in Irish public life is a sculpture rather than a painting: Oliver Sheppard's bronze The Death of Cúchulainn, which has stood in the General Post Office in Dublin since 1935 and became a symbol of the Easter Rising generation's idea of sacrifice. The Celtic Revival artists of the early twentieth century drew heavily on this material, which is one reason the old stories feel so close to the visual history of modern Ireland. We explore that thread in Celtic Art: What Is Actually Irish About It.
Ogham: writing on the edge of a stone
Ogham is the earliest form of writing used for Irish. Letters are strokes and notches cut along the edge of a standing stone, read from the bottom up, and most of the surviving inscriptions are short memorials giving a name and a father's name. They date from roughly the fourth to the sixth centuries AD, and the largest number are found in the south-west, in Kerry and Cork.
The idea of ogham as a "tree alphabet", with each letter named for a tree, comes from later medieval tradition and is better understood as a scholars' game than as ancient druidic practice. That is worth knowing, because it keeps the script interesting for the right reasons: it is a real alphabet, built for stone, and unlike anything else in Europe. If you like the look of it, our Irish language prints are the nearest thing on the shelf.
Cashel: where a rock became a kingdom
The Rock of Cashel rises out of the Tipperary plain and was the seat of the kings of Munster long before it was a church site. Tradition holds that St Patrick came here and baptised the king, and the buildings that crown the rock today include Cormac's Chapel, consecrated in 1134 and one of the finest Romanesque buildings in Ireland. Few places show so plainly how royal power, legend and the Church were layered on one another.
The Rock of Cashel framed print keeps the silhouette dramatic, with the ruins against a cloudy sky, and suits a library or living room wall where historical subjects already sit comfortably.
The tree at the centre of it all
Trees mattered in early Irish law and literature, and certain trees, the bile, marked the sacred centres of tribes. The Celtic tree of life as a decorative symbol is a modern synthesis rather than a single ancient image, which we unpick in the Celtic Tree of Life explained. As a graphic, though, it is hard to beat: roots and branches bound into a circle. The Celtic Tree of Life print in black and white is a good entry point if you want something mythic without a landscape.
Bringing the old Ireland home
Prints with a mythic or ancient subject tend to work best when they get room to breathe, and when the frame is chosen to match the mood: dark wood for Newgrange and Cashel, white or oak for the lighter graphic pieces. Browse the full Irish art prints collection, or look through the Irish historical art prints and the landscape and seascape prints for more places where the old stories still seem to hang in the air.