The Giants Beneath the Turf

Cormac Deane
Field Correspondent, The Isles & the Otherworld

Fieldnotes — Connacht, the Aran crossing, late October

I went looking for the Fir Bolg the way you go looking for anyone long dead: by asking after the ground they are supposed to have touched. In Connacht that means the plain around Cong, where the Lebor Gabála Érenn places the first battle of Mag Tuired, and it means, further out, the crossing to Aran, where the great stone forts sit on the cliff edge like something built by hands too large for the work to have been easy.

The story, as the old book gives it, is not really a giant story at all, not at first. The Fir Bolg are one of the peoples said to have taken Ireland before the Tuatha Dé Danann arrived, however you prefer that telling. The name is usually glossed as men of the bags, and the explanation offered for it, when anyone bothers with one, is stranger than the name itself: that they had been held in bondage in Greece, set to carry clay and soil up bare mountains in leather bags to make barren ground fertile, and that when they escaped it was in boats sewn from those same bags, sailed west until they found Ireland waiting. Whether that is memory, etymology worked backwards, or a scribe's joke embedded centuries into a manuscript, nobody I spoke to would settle for me. Cong farmers and Cill Rónáin fishermen both let the question sit.

What is agreed is the ending, more or less. The Fir Bolg met the Tuatha Dé Danann at Mag Tuired and lost, their king Eochaid mac Eirc killed on the strand, and the survivors are said to have gone west to the last edge of the country, where they raised the dry-stone walls of Dún Aonghasa and the other forts along the Aran cliffs. Stand inside those walls on a grey morning with the Atlantic doing its slow work below, and it is not hard to believe the builders were larger than the men who came after them. The stone is set at a scale that argues for it.

It is in the more recent telling, the fireside version rather than the manuscript one, that the Fir Bolg become giants outright, and sleeping ones at that — figures so old and so tired they lay down at last and the land simply grew over them, a shoulder becoming a hill, a spine becoming a ridge. I want to be honest about where this belongs. It is not, so far as I have found it, written into the early sources in that exact form. It belongs instead to a wider and older habit, common across Ireland and much of northern Europe, of reading giants into land that is unaccountably large — a cairn too big for ordinary hands, a ridge shaped too much like a man on his back. The Fir Bolg, already cast as an ancient, outsized, defeated people, were an easy vessel for that habit to pour itself into. Somewhere between the book and the fireside, the men of the bags became the men who are the hills.

I do not think this makes the later story false, only made. What I can say is that the fields around Cong, and the stony shoulders of Aran, still carry the names and the suspicion, and more than one person I asked, when I pressed on whether they believed it, answered not with yes or no but with a look at the ground, as if the answer were underfoot, and had been for a long time.

Cormac Deane is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Isles & the Otherworld. Passage tombs, place-names, and the long argument between them; a habit of reading the landscape through the Irish in it, and of pointing out where a translation has quietly invented a story the original never told.