The Ancient Hymn- Charms of Ireland. 439
that, behind the Christian Brigit of Kildare, there lay another Brigit, more powerful and awful, the great triune goddess of Wisdom of pagan Gaeldom, presiding alike over poetry, medicine, and the arts.^° She it is who seems to have given her name to the Brigantes, the tribe of Brigit; she whose connection with light and fire and healing powers were transferred over to her Christian successor "Brigit the ever-good woman, the golden flame, sparkling, the radiant fiery sun," the maiden who, on a wet day when she had been herding her sheep on the Curragh of Kildare, dried her cloak by hanging it "indoors across a sunbeam ";^^ she whose sacred fire, perpetually watched by forty virgins, might never be extinguished. Both in the ancient hymns and the later runes and charms, she has become everywhere confused with the Virgin Mary, and is represented as the Mother, or more generally the Foster-Mother, of our Lord ; in Ireland she is commonly called " The Mary of the Gael."
She becomes thus naturally the guardian of the house- hold and the hearth, associated with the fireside, and all this idea conveys of health and home. Many runes assign to Brigit and to the Virgin Mary a distinct share and place in the watching of the home. In the special prayers for " covering " the fire or " sparing it " as it is called {i.e. the nightly making up of the turf so that a seed of flame might be preserved until morning), that prevail everywhere in Ireland and in the Hebrides, Brigit or Bride
^ In Cormac's Glossary, (ed. Stokes, p. 23, art. " Brigit"), she is described as Brigit, a poetess, the female sage or mistress of wisdom, the goddess whom poets adored on account of the greatness of her protecting care, whence she is called the goddess of poets. She is daughter of the Dagda, and her two sisters are Brigit the woman-leech or physician, and Brigit mistress of smith-craft or metal work. This is an interesting example of the breaking up of a triad of qualities into three personalities. So great and all-pervading was she that " with all Irishmen every goddess was called Brigit."
^' Hymn " Brigit be bithmaith," Liber Ilymnorutn, vol. ii., pp. 39, 42.
