You can feel it in the land still, if you’re quiet enough. The way the past breathes up through the soil. We talk of the great warriors, the high kings, the men who stood shield to shield with sword and spear, their names ringing in the old stories. We see the gallowglass, that great foreign warrior, the gall-óg-laoch, with his two-handed axe, a figure of might and terror, a rock in the tide of battle. His shadow is a long one, and it has covered much. But there’s another figure standing in that shadow, a quieter man, a man whose story is told in whispers, in fragments of iron pulled from the river mud, in the grain of a yew stave preserved for a thousand years in the peat. This is the archer, the saighdeoir. His story is one that begins in silence, is reborn in the clamour of a Viking raid, and finds its true voice in the rustle of leaves in a wooded pass. It’s a story of a weapon forgotten and found again, a tool that changed hands and changed purpose, a thread that runs through the heart of how men fought and lived on this island. To understand him is to look past the gleam of the axe and listen for the sound of a bowstring in the rain.
Before the sharp tang of the Norseman’s arrowhead bit into Irish soil, the air held a different kind of threat. For the better part of two millennia, the bow was a ghost, a memory from a time of stone circles and bronze daggers. The earth itself shows this strange quiet. Go back far enough, to the Neolithic or the Early Bronze Age, and you will find the sharp, leaf-shaped flint points that flew from ancient bows. There is a man in Poulnabrone, his bones resting in the earth for thousands of years, with just such a point embedded in his hip, a final, silent testament to the bow’s old power. Then, around 1500 B.C., the trail goes cold. For two thousand years, the archer vanishes from the archaeological record. It is a profound and telling absence, a broken tradition. The skill of fletching an arrow, of tillering a bowstave, of feeling the tension in the string, all this seems to have faded from the collective hands of the people. The warrior’s world became a place of close work. The heroic ideal, the one captured in the ink of later manuscripts, celebrated the man who could look his enemy in the eye. Honour was found in the clash of bronze on a wooden shield, in the heft of a spear. The missile of choice was the one that came directly from the warrior’s own arm: the thrown dart, the javelin, cast with a wonderful facility and nearness, as one English writer would later observe. Or it was the sling, a simple and ancient tool, its power born of a spinning motion, its ammunition gathered from the stony beds of rivers. The bow, in this world, became a thing of lesser importance, a tool for hunting birds and small game, its use in war a distant echo. To strike a man from afar was a thing apart from the true business of battle. The culture of war had shaped itself around a different kind of courage, a different measure of a man. This long forgetting is the key. It meant that when the bow returned, it came as something new, a foreign craft that had to be learned again, a piece of technology that had to find its place in a world that had already decided how a warrior should stand, and fight, and fall.
