The Celts (1987) s02e04 Episode Script

One of the remarkable things about the Celtic world is that we find that their Celtic art form stretches throughout Europe, even into Siberia.
And we can compare the remains of the frozen tombs, for example, with remains from western Ireland.
And they do compare, there's a correlation in the art form.
The dependence upon the open ended curve.
Perhaps it indicates free will, free choice, independence of spirit.
All these marvellous things which we hold very dear, even to this day.
(Enya: The Celts) The fact is, societies are judged by what they leave behind.
Indeed, for several years now, some American artists have been taking the junk, the refuse of our mass produced, consumer society, everything including the kitchen sink, and turning it into art.
The difference is, and this is a sad reflection on us, much of what the Celts left behind actually started out as art.
And this rather shocking contrast provides us with as direct a means as we shall have of getting in touch with them, of finding out what they were really like, of cutting through the sentiment of romance and legend and myth.
Look at it this way.
2,000 years from now, come to this place or to any other part of the rubbish dump that we're turning our world into.
Will what you find make your imagination dance? The comparison is probably unfair.
Much of what they buried was deliberately brilliant.
Objects whose beauty and ingenuity were meant to add lustre to a ritual such as burial.
But the inspiration to make even mundane domestic objects beautiful as well as practical set the Celts a world apart.
The discoveries of La Tène in 1858 changed the world's understanding of the word Celt.
The archaeologists came to the conclusion that the La Tène find was not a grave or a huge sacrificial offering, but that it contained the relics of a Celtic dwelling place.
The objects found in such profusion in the waters of Lake Neuchâtel acquired a much more profound meaning.
They became more than a mere archaeological reference point.
The words La Tène came to indicate not just artefacts of great beauty made with advanced skill, but literally a definition of an art style.
Clearly, it was a style.
The style lasts many thousands of years, deriving, in fact, from certain centres like Hallstatt, modified and developed, made more sophisticated by, in fact, La Tène art.
And then, in a sense, remaining as a form of communication.
It developed, I think, initially, it was very clear ideas related to nature.
A natural form.
It may well be that the sinusoidal elements in the pattern making of Celtic art derived from living in a woodland situation.
The tendrils of branches and twigs, the light falling through the trees, created certain patterns in the minds of the Celts, and they used this in terms of trying to express, as I say, the inexplicable.
(Frank) These patterns were a stunning combination of the simple and the ornate.
On the one hand, the famous Celtic torcs were extensively patterned, the surface decorated with intricate designs.
But this first-century Celtic horse mask, found in Yorkshire, makes its statement in no more than a few curves.
No mass production, each piece was individually turned out, which meant that everything, whatever its function, was unique.
There was an added dimension, in that the making forged a bond between owner and craftsman, be it a warrior's sword or a simple bucket.
This one, dated to 50 BC, and found at Aylesford in Kent, had been made for its household with great care and affection.
And when something was made for ornamental purposes only, like some of the shields in the British Museum, the result could be astounding.
They're decorated with coral and glass and the panels and abstract designs on them suggest that the maker was far more than an artisan metalworker.
The Celts reached these heights several centuries before Christ, commanding metal with the flair which produced objects such as the Basse Yutz flagons.
(Man) Basically, the vessel itself would have been hammered up from a single piece of metal until one had this cylindrical shape.
This would not have been one operation.
You would hit it a bit, and then you'd have to put it in the furnace to anneal it, take it out, hammer again.
So a long process, to produce this complex and very fine shape.
And that would give you most of the components of this flagon.
In other words, the body, which is all one, and then the base, which was a separate attachment, and then the spout and the head, which is another sheet attachment.
Now, on the head are the animal handle, and these two rather fine animal figures here, and finally, at the end of the spout, you've got the little duck.
Now, these are all castings.
It was lost wax castings.
There is, of course, decorative elements on here as well, things such as the coral inlays there, coral imported from the Mediterranean area into central Europe.
The craftsman making this was faced with an enormous problem, namely, he got a beautiful object, but he had also to try and make a functional one as well.
In other words, a flagon that would be serviceable for the service of wine.
Ah, and the problem here is the extremely narrow aperture at the top, which meant that after wine had been served in this thing at the Celtic feast or whatever, you've got the problem of the washing up, and, of course, of the drying.
With a very narrow aperture like that, it would be impossible to dry this thing adequately.
And of course, what you'd have would be wine slowly corroding into the copper, and, of course, then you'd have tainted wine thereafter.
How do you get round this problem? Well, quite simply, the base itself is just stuck on and can be taken off relatively easily.
Relatively easily, but to allow some sort of access from underneath.
And what they did was to coat the inside with layers of beeswax.
So now, the wine that's in there is no longer in direct contact with the metal, it's in contact with the wax, which protects it from the tainting of the metal.
(Frank) Every Celtic community of any stature had its own workshop.
The craftsman was a figure of some importance.
Students trying to develop those artistic styles experience the sophistication of the Celtic artists.
2, 500 years ago, they had a knowledge of measurement, of heat control, of tooling.
In other words, even then, they were developing a powerful medium.
Celtic art as a movement was a means of communicating the indefinable, in that other traditions It had a literary tradition as well as a visual tradition.
And I suspect that because Celtic culture was basically oral in form, similar to the Persian And there, where I find the similarity is that they tended to use the decorative forms of Celtic art to communicate ideas.
And that is perhaps why it's become stabilised so early on in its development.
It became a means of communication.
(Frank) At a personal level, it was primary communication.
The Celtic warrior who daubed his naked body going into battle was sending clear messages to his enemy.
The ancient writers made much of this personal decoration.
According to one report, "their flesh is very moist and white, "while their hair is not only naturally blond, "but they also use artificial means to increase this natural quality of colour.
" Their exhibitionism was almost an art form in itself.
They were just as fond of display as we are.
In fact, to go by the reports of those who met them, they must have been the most colourful people in Europe.
Real peacocks.
I saw the pleasure in your face It didn't seem to matter then It left a shadow in its place.
(Frank) Their observers remarked that they wore tunics dyed and stained in various colours, and trousers which they called by the name of brassae.
And they wore striped cloaks, picked out with a variegated small check pattern and fastened with buckles.
Their society too expressed itself through fashion.
Inner space, just as fascinating as outer space.
You don't stand back from the Celtic artist, you approach him, go with him, into his inner world.
The Celt was a broker in time and space, and completely different from the rectangular presentation of art to which we've become accustomed.
In the mind's eye of the Celtic artist, nothing was finite, no edges, no borders, no boundaries.
And the blurs and curves of his world created a relationship between time and space that offered a different kind of relativity.
No demarcation, everything was possible.
Nothing was what it seemed.
You know the child's wonder at first seeing a blob of water under the microscope? Well, it's exactly the same if you look into something like the Book of Kells.
You begin to wonder what else lies further in.
(Enya: Triad (St Patrick, Cú Chulainn, Oisín)) Although they came much later, these illuminated manuscripts seem to have been inspired by the same imaginative sources that informed the earlier expressions of the Celts.
Again, the artists, in this case monks, had great technical ability.
The Book of Kells was written on vellum, taken, they say, from the hides of 150 calves.
The pigments the scribes used to get their brilliant colours came from Mediterranean plants and insects, from the precious stone lapis lazuli, mined in Afghanistan.
Indigo from the east, woad from northern Europe.
These illuminated texts also helped to build a literature which was founded on a far older term of expression, an oral tradition which exists to this very day.
You have oral literature, which is folklore.
And this opens up a huge business.
I was reared on that tradition.
The background in which I find myself now was absolutely, you know, homely to me when I was young.
This was my television screen, this was my radio, this was my everything.
My listening to old men in the chimney corner.
Last year, I felt very guilty.
It was the first year in 12, or since the old folk died out and left the ancestral home away up in a remote part of the mountains that I missed visiting that spot (Frank) The storyteller often began with a personal reminiscence.
Then he embarked upon a tale as embroidered and as colourful as any jewelled shield.
and singing to the spirits, departed this song.
Summer is coming, oh, summer is here With the leaves on the trees and the sky blue and clear.
The traditional songs were equally embellished and ornate, and the style of the performer decorated and enhanced a rich assortment of images.
And the flowers, they are springing In the May morning dew God be with the old folk who are now dead and gone.
The songs and stories related to the landscape or to events great and small, to the predicament of everyday life.
The tradition used language and imagery that the listeners could connect with, in which feeling was usually more important than fact.
And our joys, they were mingled In the May morning dew.
There's a remarkable succinctness, laconic style, which has been remarked upon by many observers throughout the years.
And the great mediaevalist Robin Flower who was curator of manuscripts in the British Museum has remarked upon this in a number of his writings, that this quality is something which has survived right down to the 20th century in those areas where the poetic tradition survived amongst native speakers.
And I'm not speaking of learned, educated native speakers of the language, but those who had control of their own tradition.
And, of course, it exists similarly in Gaelic-speaking Scotland, where people had this preoccupation with the best way to express an idea, the most pithy way to do it.
And, of course, you have traditions in Scotland and Ireland of Otherworld beings, fairies, coming to do harm to human beings and being thwarted when they were outwitted verbally by the human.
And this is a very common motif, that if you're able to outwit an Otherworld being, by your verbal dexterity, then you can come away free and safe.
(Frank) Tradition, folklore, storytelling.
Not just entertainments.
They also contained lessons for life.
A long time ago, there was a well.
And close to it, there lived a queen who was very, very sick.
She had three daughters, and she said to the oldest one, "Go to the well of true water and bring me a drink to heal me.
" So the oldest daughter went, and she reached the well.
And she was just leaning over to fill up her jug, when a toad jumped out, and he asked, "If I let you take a drink of water to heal your mother, "will you marry me?" "No, I'll not marry you, you hideous creature!" she said.
"Not for anything.
" "Well, then," said the toad, "you'll not get the water.
" So she went home.
Then the queen asked her middle daughter to go to the well.
So she went and she was just leaning over to fill up her jug, when the toad jumped out again, and he asked, "If I let you take a drink of water to heal your mother, "will you marry me?" (Frank) This story is a classic, in every sense.
It has ingredients from many of the legends that have come down to us from Celtic mythology.
There's the single human good deed, the drink of water, that becomes the basis of a magical encounter.
There's the ugliness of the toad pitted against the innocence of the girl, and the dangers that can happen when beauty meets beast, and the family in which the youngest always wins.
It's the stuff of every bedtime tale since story began.
(Woman) She hadn't been lying in bed very long when he started again.
(Speaking Gaelic) And she knew fine that she'd promised to marry him.
But she didn't listen to his complaining until he said, "There's an old, rusted sword behind your bed, "and I wish you'd cut off my head with it, "rather than keeping me any longer in this torture!" So she picked up the sword and she took the head off him.
But the moment the steel touched his neck, he turned into a handsome young man.
And he married the young princess, and they were long alive and merry together.
(Frank) These tales of good and evil, of princesses and fairy folk, continually inspired artists throughout the Celtic countries.
The Tuatha Dé Danann are regarded in Ireland as the fairy folk.
They're called the fairies.
In Irish, the daoine sidhe, the fairy folk.
Now, I come from County Clare.
I was born in Dublin, but my parents and forebears are from County Clare.
And in County Clare, the legends and the sort of ethos of the Tuatha Dé Danann is all about When I lived down in Clare, I used to be fascinated by the neighbours leaving out milk for the fairies, as it was called.
And this had a deep and lasting impression on me, and in Dublin, I was listening to stories by my mother and my grandmother, they were telling me stories, you know, bedtime stories, they were all about the fairy folk.
And I grew up absolutely fascinated by them.
And as I grew up, I resolved to do something about this whole mythology.
Cos the Tuatha Dé Danann to me were always the most exciting of these peoples, the sort of prehistoric, aboriginal inhabitants of this island.
And they were a mystical people who were later deified by the incoming Celts, like Nuada of the silver arm became a god to the Celts.
He was one of the great warrior kings of the Tuatha Dé Danann.
And I've always been fascinated by them and I've always tried to work, you might say, with them, and try and bring their legends to life, bring them to the modern reader and make as wide an audience as possible for my work and for their exploits in literature and in art.
(Bells ringing) (Frank) Jim Fitzpatrick is an illustrator.
Record sleeves, books of stories, comics.
The images he uses come from an ancient world, which would have understood our tabloid culture.
Fitzpatrick is finding in the Celtic legends of his childhood the same archetypal concerns with beauty and noble birth and exception that have always appealed to the storyteller, to his audience, and now, to contemporary readers.
He draws with conviction, as if he believes in these stories.
His images come from the very situations that were once described orally by the bards who entertained the court.
And the same images have continued to illustrate popular European culture for centuries.
The concerns expressed in the legends are those which appeal to all humanity.
And each myth has in it stock elements.
It can be heroism or intrigue or competition or magic or death.
(Enya: Fairytale) Myths such as the wooing of Étaín, in which her husband, the king and her magical lover Midir play a series of board games to compete for the queen's honour, such situations have recurred time and again.
The legends of the Celts have had a profound and enduring effect upon European literature.
Then you have the development of the Otherworld literature, for instance, that began to be written down in the seventh century, the journey to the Otherworld.
The Voyage of Bran is perhaps the earliest example of that.
And that gradually was adopted by the monastic redactors and poets, and they Christianised that.
And there's a whole series of the Otherworld journey, there are five or six tales from the Old Irish period.
And one of these was translated into Latin, or reworked in Latin, as the Vita Brendani, The Life of Saint Brendan, and in a variant form as the Navigatio Brendani, The Voyage of Saint Brendan.
And this, as we all know, had an extraordinary impact upon Europe, the Europe of the time, of the Early Middle Ages.
We don't know quite why.
But it spread like wildfire throughout Europe.
It was translated into many, many languages, and some would hold, of course, that it was one of the events that spurred people like Christopher Columbus and others to carry out their journeys to the New World.
(Enya: Triad (St Patrick, Cú Chulainn, Oisín)) (Frank) The Voyage of Bran and The Navigation of Brendan, among the earliest Celtic literature, were a breakthrough.
Because the Celts had always declined to keep a written record.
The fact that they wrote such work down at all was, in itself, as important a development as the content of the texts.
This ancient literature of theirs was as simple and as great as any of the Celtic art forms.
The writers who composed them were concerned, on one level, with the physical heroism of exploration, and on another, they were concerned with the inner journey, man's seeking after his own truth.
So, in every sense, the Celts were extending their own horizons.
This is the space race of the past.
The search for the new frontier, to boldly go.
Once upon a time, a mortal Celt called Bran was urged by the god of the sea to seek the Land of Promise.
In the Christian legend, Saint Brendan and his monks discovered America.
This was the quest, the Golden Fleece, the Promised Land, the Holy Grail.
And it had practical effects, as when The Voyage of Bran and The Voyage of Brendan entered the European literature, the search for the Otherworld became the discovery of the New World.
The spiritual vision became a practical one, and it must have informed everybody from Christopher Columbus to John Glenn.
Imagine these as the chariots of the gods, in a previous incarnation, of course.
In fact, for a very powerful and lethal symmetry, you don't have to go very far here.
Just over there, to runway 19, site of the famous Llyn Cerrig Bach find, a huge cache of Iron Age weaponry.
Indeed, the technology furthers the symmetry, because, instead of these war machines, what the ancient Celts who lived here had was superbly crafted swords and very well-made chariots.
So that, given the military presence today, you could argue that what Llyn Cerrig Bach is is some kind of time machine.
Underneath this RAF base on the Isle of Anglesey, the Celts had given sacrifice, perhaps to the gods of war after a battle.
The objects discovered in the ground included harness pieces, a strong, almost unbreakable slave-chain, domestic possessions, a pot, a colander, and a decorative neckpiece, a piece of personal adornment.
The earth of Wales can still inspire Celtic art.
The Welsh poet, Gwyn Thomas.
(Man reading in Welsh) Another leading Welsh poet, Dick Jones, is conscious of the rhythmic nature of his Celtic tradition.
This poetry that we've written in Wales for centuries has a certain lilt and a regular beat to it.
(Cockerel crows) For instance, in T Gwynn Jones's famous poem Draw dros y don mae bro dirion-nad ery Cwyn yn ei thir, ac yno ni thery And because it is written to an age-old patten, it goes back about a thousand years, - these patterns - (Cockerel crowing) These patterns have become as much part of our nature now as, say, the eight the scale of music, the eight-note scale of music is.
So that we write, almost automatically, in this set way.
Now, it may be thought that this is a constriction.
But then, you see, the eight-note scale of music was no constriction of Beethoven, Bach and those people, was it? So that you have to write within the conscripts of this set form.
But then, of course, you can express your own innermost thoughts in this within this framework.
(Frank) In the northwest of Scotland, Sorley MacLean displays another of the preoccupations of the Celtic poet, - the dimension of time.
- o Bheinn na Lice fa sgàil Mura tig 's ann theàrnas mi a Hallaig a dh'ionnsaigh Sàbaid nam marbh far a bheil an sluagh a' tathaich gach aon ghinealach a dh'fhalbh (lnterpreter) They are still in Hallaig, MacLeans and MacLeods All who were there in the time of Mac Gille Chaluim The dead have been seen alive The men lying on the green at the end of every house that was The girls a wood of birches, straight their backs, bent their heads Between the Leac and Fearns the road is under mild moss - And the girls in silent bands a' dol a Clachan mar o thus Agus a' tilleadh às a' Chlachan, à Suidhisnis 's à tir nam beò a chuile tè òg uallach (Frank) The fact that Sorley MacLean writes in Gaelic authenticates his Celtic inheritance.
But one of his fellow countrymen exploited this oral tradition with dramatic effects.
James Macpherson.
He was an 18th-century Scot, a man of letters who became a politician, a man whose exploits would eventually resound across Europe.
Macpherson loved the good life, but he was studious enough to impress literary Edinburgh.
He had shown the Scottish literati some poems, and said he had collected them out on the Highlands, and they'd paid his expenses and sent him off to collect more.
It was at a time when Scotland needed a revival of its Celtic heritage, which was still muddy and bloodstained after the failed rebellion of 1745.
Macpherson's imagination was, he said, "alerted by fragments of poetry the folk with the Gaelic had given him".
He managed to stimulate their memories a little more, and, bit by bit, he was able to put together a body of work composed by an ancient poet called Ossian.
Now, these were great poems.
Heaven knows how old they were or where these folk got them.
But they were heroic and colourful and tender poems.
Glimpses of long-forgotten heroism, truly a bright light of other days.
And Macpherson produced some fragments of this literature.
The foundations of this important corpus of work, much stained with smoke, these documents were, and daubed with Scotch snuff, and, to be sure, they reeked of the people and the times of which they spoke.
Europe lionised James Macpherson, and showed an avid interest in his discoveries.
Napoléon, the German writer Goethe, the King of Sweden, the artist Angelica Kauffman, they all clasped Ossian to their bosoms.
So do the literary establishment, who wrote breathlessly of Ossian's tenderness and sublimity, reaching out for the brooding symbolism of his scattered oaks, and moss-grown warrior tombs, torrents rushing through a solitary valley, and mountains shaded with mist.
Most of the eminent literary scholars of the day admired Macpherson, though some voices did begin to raise doubts as to Ossian's authenticity.
This giant of a man, who lived up the harbour Whether they were genuine or not, they had a tremendous influence throughout Europe, on people like Lamartine and Napoléon himself.
And many, many others, musicians, dramatists, writers of all sorts, painters.
And the overtures, like Fingal's Cave, of course, go back to Ossian.
(Frank) Very soon, however, the people who had once flocked to purchase his epic verses began to call Ossian a fraud, and describe Macpherson as perverse and unamiable.
He was a man, they said, who kept only tavern company, the prey of toad-eaters and designing housekeepers.
Others called him proud, coarse, bullying, lecherous, sullen, intriguing.
They knew by now that they had been duped.
James Macpherson was a hoaxer.
Ossian was a figment of Macpherson's opportunistic imagination.
(Yells) His poems were unmasked as forgeries.
But he was not without success.
Macpherson's antics had imposed something fey upon the word Celtic.
Tennyson's poetry, the misty, romantic paintings of the 19th century Pre-Raphaelite movement, they drew in part upon the mood created by Ossian for their inspiration, if that's the right word.
And they embarked upon an artistic fashion, created a new definition of the word Celt, even a new word, Celticism, which, although it was bogus in terms of the old tribal civilisation, had a validity.
Whatever its faults and feynesses, the Celtic twilight at least remembered the oral traditions of a world full of sacred kings and mysticism and heroes and princesses.
(Woman singing in Irish) The new Celtic twilight would never be authentic.
It blurred the edges and distorted the mythology.
The Celtic legend of the girl who turns into a swan and is shot by her huntsman lover, and then reappears as a ghost was, in its original form, a story full of dark questions.
In this modern revival, the song, though accurate in detail, does the legend the disservice of soft focus, and emasculates both the oral and the musical traditions of the Celts.
The skin of a goat is buried deep in the ground for several weeks, then dug up again, stretched over a rim of ash wood to make a drum.
A wind whistling through a reed makes the noise of a pipe.
And the harp? The wife of the chieftain Breffni O'Rourke was walking along the sands of Lissadell one day, and she heard the sea breeze whistling melodiously through the beached carcass of a whale and she bade her court musician to make her an instrument that would produce the same sweet sound.
Several other legends support the natural world as the source of inspiration for the art of music.
One day, Fionn mac Cumhaill and his Fianna were lying in the grass, resting on their elbows after a long stag hunt, and a debate began about music.
One man said the sweetest sound in all the world was the sound of pebbles washing on a beach.
Another said it was the ring of a spear upon a shield.
Others preferred the bellowing of a stag across water, the cry of hounds in full pursuit, the laughter of a kissed girl or the whisper of a moved one.
And they turned to Fionn, and Fionn said thoughtfully, "The sweetest sound in all the world is the music of what happens.
" (Woman) It was in Ireland that the music of the harp was developed.
It became synonymous with the Celtic tradition, but exactly how Celtic it was to start with, nobody can know.
But the bardic schools were mostly in Ireland.
I mean, for what records that we do know, we have the bardic schools mostly in Ulster, also.
And the harpers that later served as bards in the courts of the chieftains in Scotland and probably in Wales would have been trained, probably, here.
So, I mean, they were a nation.
They considered themselves to be of one people.
They shared the same language, the same poetic traditions which are dependant on the language.
And the harpers were dependant on the poets, because the bardic order consisted of two mainstreams.
You had the poet and you had the harper, both of whom were known as bards.
This term bard tends to be shrouded in uncertainty too, as does the word harp, as to whether we're talking about a metal-strung instrument or a gut-strung instrument or a leather-strung instrument.
And certainly, during the time that we know most about the what we know to be the or we assume to be the Celtic bards, it was a metal-strung harp, which was used to accompany the chanting of the panegyric verse of the poets.
There is a Celtic sound, there is an inhood, there is a substance, a quality inside Celtic music which immediately makes it apparent.
Now, what that thing is, it's very hard to define, because it doesn't have the musical definition.
But it does have what I would call soul.
It's got depth, it's got feeling, it's got passion.
It's got rhythm, it's got life.
And it finds its best expression and its highest quality in Ireland where the music has all of these attributes running together, so what you get is something which is magnificent.
It is, to my mind, one of the best art forms that you could find anywhere.
People call it folk music, and I think of that term as unfair, because the word folk suggests something that is dead, something archaic, something lifeless, something that you can observe from a distance and study.
But here, and indeed in the other Celtic countries, this tradition is alive, it's doing well, and it's still being invested with imagination and with life, and it's being played by old people, by middle-aged people and by young people.
And again, returning to the Irish situation, if you walk into any place in Ireland where music is played, and of course, that means inevitably a pub, you will find elderly gentlemen playing ancient fiddles and young kids playing melodions, and the whole thing is buzzing and it's alive.
If I play the tune with the left hand, and if I put another tune on top of it with the right hand This would be sung.
The harp would play the popular tune and the singer would sing something slow over the top.
And you get them both together in counterpoint.
Now, the Welsh word penillion is what that is.
And although we must have given it to them like we gave them the harp and other music, I would say that they developed this art of singing counterpoints to the old folk tunes.
(Singing in Welsh) (Frank) Penillion is still practised in Wales, but only as an art form.
Further north, the working songs have suffered a similar fate.
The women walking the tweed in the Western Isles of Scotland now only sing for the tourist trade.
And for visiting film crews.
(Singing in Gaelic) (Singing in Breton) The traditions have survived most vigorously where they were frequently practised, and by large numbers.
The primitive sound of this unaccompanied Breton singing endures, because at weddings and festivals, it's a tune people dance to.
Melodies like this have lived for centuries because they were cherished by the people.
It wasn't until this century, really, that these these thousands and thousands of melodies were collected and written down.
So we're taking about an oral tradition and, of course, it's very hard to define the point of departure, the beginning of a melody.
But most of them are written because the people wanted to dance.
Jigs, hornpipes, reels happened because the Irish, for example, for some strange reason, wanted to dance, a nation of dancing people.
Several years ago, in Dublin, I met an old boy called Lennie Collinge.
He was, he told me, a projectionist in the Volta Cinema in Mary Street, one of Ireland's very first cinemas, founded by, of all people, the novelist James Joyce.
People sat there for hours, watching the waves crash silently onto a sepia beach.
But what was even more interesting was that Lennie, the projectionist, was the star of the show.
At the beginning and the end of each screening, he was expected to walk down the aisle, stand in front of the blank screen and take a bow.
The oral tradition treated its projectionists in much the same way.
The bard, the poet, was a performer.
When the storyteller came to a household, he brought with him a bag full of images, heroes and princesses and giants and mythical, fearsome creatures.
Whose faces and shadows leapt and danced in the space between the firelight and the wall.
The image was synonymous with the image maker, the storyteller with his story and the singer with the song.
But take a musician today from a Celtic region, Donegal, whose native tongue is Gaelic.
She has been long exposed to transatlantic influences and chooses to work in a popular idiom.
Can her art be called Celtic? Or is this a new horizon for Celtic expression? (Thunder rumbling) (Enya: I Want Tomorrow) Dawn breaks There is blue in the sky Your face before me, Though I don't know why Thoughts disappearing Like tears from the moon Waiting here As I sit by the stone They came before me Those men from the sun Signs from heaven say I am the one Now you're here, I can see your light This light that I must follow You, you may take my life away So far away Now I know I must leave your spell I want tomorrow Now you're here, I can see your light This light that I must follow You, you may take my life away So far away Now I know I must leave your spell I want tomorrow.
(Enya: To Go Beyond)