I am now neck-deep in research for what is, I hope, the follow-up to my first two books of a projected trilogy.
The first two, The Book of Conquests and The Silver Arm, were published in the late 70s and early 80s but the third and final of this series, The Son of the Sun, was never completed.
Now the time has come to finish this ambitious trilogy.
It brings me back to my earliest research and discovery of our ancient origins. It was here where I fell in love with Irish mythology and a lifelong obsession began.
When I was young there was nothing I loved more than reading. I was blessed to have a superb library across the park in Drumcondra, just down the road from one of James Joyce’s family homes.
I found my love of books there, every book I ever wanted, all free to take home and read.
Most of all, I loved reading about my two artistic heroes, Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo but it was Da Vinci’s notebooks with his mad inventions of everything from submarines to helicopters that fired my young imagination.
I devoured Jules Verne and H.G.Wells but my favourite book by a mile was ‘Irish Sagas and Folk Tales’ by Eileen O’Faoláin.
As far as I can remember this is the very first book I borrowed at around 10 years old.
No, didn’t nick it, this one is paid for.
It was nice to know that the wonderful James Joyce, this friend of my grandfather Thomas Fitzpatrick and my own family, had a connection with Drumcondra, one of my favourite places on the planet along with Glasnevin and both wonderful, safe, warm places to grow up in as a kid.
He was the only writer I was even aware of as a kid. I grew up listening to my mom, my aunts, and my granny discussing him frequently as Joyce had worked freelance for my grandfather Thomas FitzPatrick, writing cartoon captions for my granddad’s cartoons in his publication ‘The Lepraucaun’ in the early 1900s.
Of course, Joyce was by then a very controversial figure with his books banned in Ireland for decades.
These words from my granny I remember well:
‘Lovely man but wrote those famous books… bit of an odd fellow, dirty mind but nice eyelashes….’
SILENCE IS GOLDEN
Hard to find in a full house
What I did love most about that beautiful library in Drumcondra was the silence. For myself, reading in silence is a huge comfort, it allows me to let the mind run free and live another life in my imagination.
Due to my family situation, I rarely had a moment’s silence so this quiet library was paradise.
At that point in time, my mother and myself had been abandoned by my rich father, a well-known press photographer who inherited a huge fortune in property. He left us both, leaving my mom penniless, as she often said ‘with two and six in her arse pocket’, so we relied on the kindness of others to take us in as rent-paying ‘lodgers’.
I and my mother stayed in a few homes in Glasnevin and Drumcondra as lodgers from 1948, when my Father sold our house without us knowing, to 1960 when we finally had a place to ourselves. It seems such a short time now but those years were wonderful for me as a kid with lots of friends it was much, much harder for my very proud mom.
It was far from a miserable existence even though we moved frequently. This time we spent as ‘lodgers’ was an extraordinary formative part of my life.
Lodging was the norm in Dublin back then and every family home on our street had lodgers who helped pay the rent.
The home we moved to in Drumcondra when I was around eight years old was fun and I loved all the company there -it was a full house all the time. I and mom shared that house with her old friend from Skerries, her four girls, two boys, and even another lodger, all of us packed into a little three-bedroom house beside Griffith Park in Drumcondra. Unfortunately, there was nowhere to go to read so that’s where the library came in handy.
MY GRANDFATHER’S LIBRARY
I have tried to recreate this library in my mind ever since.
All I ever had as I grew into my teens were absolutely minimum possessions, a few books, and comics, and most importantly, the last remnants of my grandfather’s beautiful library, a dozen leather-bound books that survived after all the rest had to be sold off to pay my father’s gambling debts.
I was only five or six when I was first in the old family home visiting my father’s mother. I remember well the stacked shelves of beautiful leather-bound books with their gold-embossed spines that lined the entire room in the former family home. I am blessed that anything survived and I still treasure those few books left that I have.
At this point my father had been taken to Grangegorman Mental Hospital to dry out, I even remember visiting him there and meeting his mates from the Irish Times drying out with him.
My mother was completely broke and I think she was looking for some help from the family but he had even gambled away his own family home and now the entire family was broke, not just us.
The contents of the house, all my grandfather’s artwork, and that beautiful library were all auctioned off to pay the debts and that library was lost forever.
I know it sounds crazy but for years I dreamt of that library and even tried to recreate it everywhere I have lived.
My own studio today, though much smaller than the huge studio of my grandfather’s, is just wall-to-wall books and I love it.
I always feel content surrounded by books, they are food for the soul but the old books from my granddad’s library are still among my favourites.
No amount of money would tempt me to part with them today.
MYTHOLOGY, HISTORY, AND A LOVE OF THE OLD LEGENDS.
The day I picked up a copy of Keatings History of Ireland
In 1962 I started my first job as an ad agency ‘ visualizer’ and over the next four years I gradually worked my way up the ladder switching jobs to get more money as by now aged 22, I had a family to support.
One day I was researching stuff for the ad agency, Wilson Hartnell, that I worked for and after spending time in my favourite Dublin bookshop, Parsons Bookshop on Leeson Street Bridge, I got the bus to the quays in town to search the bookshops there for reference material.
Near Capel Street Bridge was one of my favorite haunts, a rare book shop full of antiques and musty old books.
The old man who ran the shop knew me well, “Here, I’ve got something for you, young man”, he said with a big smile.
He knew my interest and my hunger for any old books related to Irish mythology as he had found me a few good ones over the years.
What he handed me was a rather battered leather-bound, but complete, copy of Keatings ‘History of Ireland’, compiled by the extraordinary historian, the Rev Jeoffry Keating, from the annals that existed at his time of writing, around 1600. This included one of the most important manuscripts of them all -and now lost it seems forever -the Cinn Droma Sneachta, the Book of the White Cow, a reference to the fine pale calf vellum on which the annals were written by the scribes, a treasure trove of ancient knowledge, a collection of our most ancient annals.
For the princely sum of three pounds, it was mine.
Now I cannot overstate just how important this book was to me. It led me on a trail of discovery about the earliest inhabitants of the island of Ireland. This was just the beginning of a path spanning my very first book ‘Celtia’ directly to ‘The Book of Conquests’ and ‘The Silver Arm’ as I attempted to tell the story of the ancient peoples of Ireland and try to explain their mythology and beliefs.
The early sections of Keatings History were mesmerizing and told in great detail the tales of the early invader races that came to Ireland and their stories were extraordinary and revealing.
In my case, they certainly inspired my work and still do.
Now, with age taking its slow toll, it is time to finally complete the trilogy. Inevitably, this leads me to the final chapter of this epic tale, the story of the earliest inhabitants and the invaders who all contribute to our genetic makeup stretching back thousands of years.
All those old musty, dusty books of mine are now out again and scattered over the couch as I research the ancient texts to tell the story of my ancestors, their conquests and defeats, and their rituals and beliefs all those thousands of years ago.
I am using one or two of those very same books I read as a child but now they are supplemented with more serious works of analysis and research. I use Google to fine-tune a lot of my work and check for errors using the finest research ever available from expert academics in faraway universities and elsewhere, a virtual bonanza of information that I use to add to material from the annals now digitized and available to one and all at no cost.
Advancements in DNA and archaeology have revealed even more about our ancient past. These new discoveries are helping to make sense of some of our earliest stories including the material I have translated and recorded for the first two volumes and now for this new final volume, The Son of the Sun.
‘Seventy years of obsession with Irish mythology’ could be the story of my life and it still consumes me now as much as when I read the first stories in the Drumcondra library.
You might be wondering why it has taken me 40 years to get to this point. Let me explain that in my next blog!