Recent issues of Interzone, a British magazine devoted to science fiction, have posed the question of whether that literary genre could have been invented in 8th century Ireland, near what is now Navan.
The man asking is Val Nolan, an academic and sci-fi expert who occasionally reviews books for this newspaper. And his own answer to the question – plot spoiler alert – is no, not really, for technical reasons we don’t need to go into here.
But the story of a UFO sighting in Meath 1,300 years ago, and its subsequent embellishment in many retellings, is no less interesting for not being an official forerunner of Ursula Le Guin or Philip K Dick.
The source for Nolan’s entertaining speculations was a paper delivered to a Harvard colloquium on Celtic Studies in 1992, by the American philologist John Carey.
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In “Aerial Ships and Underwater Monasteries: the Evolution of a Monastic Marvel”, Carey traced how a strange spectacle seen during the assembly at Tailtiu, circa 743 AD, became exaggerated and eventually exported, first to England and later Texas, where a version of it turned up in newspapers of the late 1890s.
It all began, modestly enough, with reports of mere flying ships, recorded as background detail to political events. As the annals put it: “Another wonder of the same assembly: seeing three ships voyaging in the air above them, when the men of Ireland were celebrating the assembly with [King] Domnall son of Murchad.”
But three centuries later, in a poem by Gilla Pátraic, Bishop of Dublin from 1074-1084, the story has grown legs – and arms. Repeating the original details about the king and the assembly, he adds:
“Behold! Suddenly they see a ship glide through the air, from which someone casts a spear at a fish. It fell to the ground: swimming down, [the sailor] recovered it. Who can hear such things without praising the Lord of Heaven?”
From around the same era, the Book of Ballymote has a version in which the man retrieving the spear gets into difficulty with the earthlings: “When he seized one end of [the spear] from above, a man seized it from below. ‘You are drowning me!’ said the man aloft. ‘Let him go,’ said Congalach. Then he is released, and swims upward away from them.”
This makes clear the idea, implicit in the image of flying ships, that what seems like air to the people on the ground is water to those above. It also updates the story from the 740s, because Congalach was a later Irish king, reigning from 944 to 956.
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For the next major development, Carey relied on a collection of monastic legends stored in Edinburgh. There, the phenomenon is recorded with two important changes of detail.
The scene has now switched from the seat of secular power to monastic Clonmacnoise. And here, it isn’t a spear the ship’s crew throw down. It’s an anchor. Which falls somehow onto the floor of a church, where clerics seize it.
This is followed by another near-drowning as a sailor attempts retrieval. But he too is eventually able to swim back, anchor and all, to the mother ship.
In an old Norse text, listing various Irish marvels, it is the sailor himself who is seized, until the presiding bishop orders him released. Then he swims back to the ship where they cut the rope and leave the anchor behind.
The legend’s popularity is further evidenced in a version told by the English cleric Gervase of Tilbury (1150 – 1220). Using the story as “further proof of the existence of an upper sea”, he moves the events to an unspecified location in Britain. And his version is also darker, because the stricken sailor dies during the struggle, “suffocated by the moisture of our thicker air”.
Perhaps the strangest twist in the tale’s evolution is the one by which it turned up in 1890s Texas. That was part of a more general spate of UFO sightings during those years. But as reported by the Houston Post of April 26th, 1897, an incident at the town of Merkel the previous night had unmistakable similarities with the ones in Meath and Offaly a millennium earlier:
“Some parties returning from church ... noticed a heavy object dragging along with a rope attached. They followed it until in crossing the railroad, it caught on a rail. On looking up they saw what they supposed was the airship ... After some ten minutes a man was seen descending the rope: he came near enough to be plainly seen; he wore a light blue sailor suit, was small in size, He stopped when he discovered parties at the anchor, cut the rope below him and sailed off in a northeast direction.”
How the story ended up in Texas, not even John Carey – nor indeed Val Nolan – can explain. Either way, as at ancient Clonmacnoise, the celestial visitors had left a souvenir behind. The Houston Post reported the anchor was “now on exhibition at the blacksmith shop of Elliott & Miller and is attracting the attention of hundreds”.
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