This is the last story in this opening series of Return of Ancient, the end of the beginning, if you like. I’ve put this series into a book that will be available from next week, arriving before the turn of the year. But on to the final step on this particular trail.
We’ve seen in this series that the traditional pilgrimage date for Croagh Patrick is 17 March, later fixed as the date of St Patrick’s death and his feast day, now internationally famed. Two older names for the mountain come down through time. Before Croagh Patrick, the mountain was known Croagh Aigle, or Eagle Mountain, from its shape on the horizon from the northeast. Before that again comes the name Crom Cruagh. Crom is an ancient god of Ireland, who was revered into the sixteenth century in parts of rural Ireland. He was also represented as a golden figure surrounded by twelve stones, harking back to the divisions of the ages.
The Dindseanchas, the Irish book of place names, was written by Christian scribes not only to record the new and Christianised names of places, but also to disparage the old gods. Crom Cruagh, according to the Dindseanchas, was a god of the harvest, and people offered their first-born sons in order to have a good harvest. The children were killed by having their heads bashed against the Killycluggin Stone, associated with Crom Cruagh, and the blood sprinkled over the base of the stone.
Crom arrived back into popular culture not in Ireland but in the United States in the 1930s, in the pulp fiction story Conan the Barbarian. The character of Conan was created in Texas in 1932 by author Robert E Howard, who had been putting together elements of different fiction to create what today is called the sword and sorcery genre. Howard sold the story to Weird Tales, the popular pulp fiction magazine that also featured the work of HP Lovecraft.
The fictional Conan is a worshipper of Crom, and the Conan stories give us some further clues. The name barbarian originates from the pirates of the Barbary (or Berber) Coast of north Africa, but the name Conan is of Gaelic origin, meaning little hound. (Con or Cú is a hound or dog). The God of the barbarians is Crom, further identifying the Irish roots of the story.
The name Conan is unusual, but not unknown. In some accounts, Conan was a king who lived on Tory Island, where he was ousted by Balor of the Evil Eye. One of the most famous Conans of the time was Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle’s Dublin-born grandparents were called John Doyle and Marianne Conan. Arthur Conan Doyle was aware of his Irish roots, not to mention the origins of the Conan name: his third novel about Sherlock Holmes concerned a dog of supernatural origins was called The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Looking to create a fictional world for Conan, Robert E Howard drew on the legend of the people called the Hyborians. He based these characters on the Hyperboreans, a race of fabled magicians of light, who lived in the far north of the world. The Greek writers Pliny the Elder and Heterotodus preserved the memory of the Hyperboreans in their writings, identifying them as great masters of the arts. In Howard’s story, the Hyborians wander for hundreds of years before meeting the Picts, a people associated in antiquity with the Scots.
The cult story of Conan the Barbarian attracted the attention of Hollywood producers, but like many stories, the idea for a movie version floated around for years before Italian producer Dino de Laurentiis acquired the rights, and passed them to his daughter Barbara. Barbara drafted Oliver Stone to write a script, and they hired Austrian bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger to play the lead role. The movie was a hit, and made a star out of Schwarzenegger.
In Irish Christian tradition, it is Saint Patrick who vanquishes Crom, along with the Morrigan. But as we’re discovering, the old gods not only did not go away, but they’ve been with us all along, and now they’re back with a vengeance.
Mind blown
It should be Herotodus and not Heterodotus, which we caught in the edit. It did remind us of the dangers of ancient straight white scholars.