"The being that he had first seen, the one like a mounted prince, would not do such labor, nor the silvery warriors he had seen gathered in the twilight. The black being from the ground, though, who had lifted the stone that became a chest - he and his like might do it. Doctor Dee in England had told him that the Druids of Ireland had lifted and tossed across the sea the great stones that stood on Salisbury plain. If they could do that it would have been easy for them to make a dwelling-place of earth and guardian stones, into which folk could go at need: folk not like himself nor anyone now alive. They might long remain hidden within it, they might change in nature there, and issue forth when they chose, or were called." (Under Lough Neagh, p. 77)
Part of the onslaught of finding meaning in Flint and Mirror: A Novel of History and Magic, a narrative that takes place during 16th century Europe (mainly Ireland and England) - a time of feudalism - is trying to comprehend what the people living under fuedalism are fighting for; particularly the Earls, Dukes, Knights, and other soldiers divided at the forefront. The main character, Hugh O'Neill, whom the author John Crowley based off of a real historical figure (as with the other characters), embodies this divisive confusion of purpose as he and his gallowglass men wander and roam the devastated Irish landscape and he back to the seemingly more ordered world of the Crown, under Queen Elizabeth, for, sometimes relevant and oftentimes futile, guidance. Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone under the Queen, is a soldier that fought with a clashing sense of identity; half of himself dedicated to England, where he grew up and learned one way of war and politics, and the other half loyal to Ireland, the land of his birth and stories of his heritage. As the Irish landscape during this time fell under the weight of feudal wars brought about by the need for resources and upholding dominant familial structures, Hugh O'Neill fights to maintain stability between the dominant faiths, the Protestant Crown, the Irish Catholics, the Spanish Catholics, and the Holy Roman Empire, and to keep some sense of peace in Ireland as war ravished its geography.
"Sir Henry Sidney, though he would not have said it to the Irish, was quite clear in his dispatches to the London council why he took up Hugh O'Neill. Not only was it policy for the English to support the weaker man in any quarrel between the Irish dynasts, and thus prevent the growth of any over-mighty subject; it also seemed to Sir Henry that, like an eyas falcon, a young Irish lord if taken early enough might later come more willingly to the English wrist. Said otherwise: he was bringing Hugh to England as he might the cub of a beast to a bright and well-ordered menagerie, to tame him." (Rath, p. 20)
"The Earl of Tyrone was a divided man. A man who desired to be one and whole, who believed that in some way he was whole, though more often he felt himself not to be. He felt division, or complication, in himself, with every part of him: his mind, his spirit, his language, his hopes and fears and ambitions, his love and his hate. He knew who, or what, had divided him, and he sought within for the singular self he believed he was: but like a ship tacking to avoid the rocks on one side, then the shallows on the other, seeking a harbor, he remained cleft in two." (Pale Man, Dark Man, p. 138)
Alongside Crowley's reinvented, and fantastical, biography of Hugh O'Neill and his new rendering of falling feudal structures, is myth, folklore, and magic brought about by subtle events and storytelling. Though these do not take up the majority of the text, the title of the book directly references their importance as something that might emerge from or take precedence over the horrors of war. They are scattered throughout Flint and Mirror as poignant markers of a dying ancient land - on the side of the English but moreso the Irish, and they are shared by all kinds of people who inhabit this world: poets, lords, priests, wives, husbands, and "lost" children who remember tales, who have visions, who carry beliefs that are not yet - or ever - finally in communion with the dominant way of life understood through cultural homogeneity and economic transaction. In short, they were not, at least during the time written about in Flint and Mirror, capable of preventing the violence between different groups, but they were able to help lessen the burden and at times heal the pain brought about by chaos of political warfare.
"'There is a tale told of my ancestor, who loved a woman of the other world. He did not know she was what she was, look you, but she seemed only a beautiful woman he encountered bathing. He stole her cloak from her, and without it she could not flee nor transform herself into another shape, and so he had her, and she told him that if he had not taken the cloak he never would have. And from that event she bore him a son, and she told him before she departed her otherworld place in Knockainey Hill, that if he loved that son at all, he was never to show surprise at anything he did.'" (A Gray Goose, p. 36)
"St. Ciwa was suckled by a wolf, and had a long black nail on her left hand's great finger to show the kinship she held with her grandmother. What would her own suckling bestow, if she could give suck, upon this thing within her? Fubún. It was curious to feel herself going mad... The boy, unnnamed still and still unchristened, opened his eyes... his hands... they had not shed strangeness. They had grown to be hands no child of woman could have. She grasped one hand at the wrist and showed it to Sorley. 'The web grows between the fingers,' she said. 'When it grows thicker I cut it away with the sharpest knife... it causes him no pain... it grows back,' she said. 'Always grows back.'" (Monstrous, p. 109 - 113)
As a path to finding and remembering the sacred before the dawn of Christ and the subsequent empires that followed, the folkloric and the mythical are reborn. They are stories shared that guide them, or else signs shown and materialized, read as signals to another place away from the disaster and devastation of the present. Under the oppression of the feudal lands, they hold meaning for the people that cannot be found within their shared communities, if any, that take another shape through dominance and the hoarding of power. At the beginning of the story, a renowned poet gives a gift to Hugh O'Neill, a flint to symbolize the disappearing magic of the land, and later a doctor gives him another, an obsidian crystal, to connect the Earl to something higher and greater than himself and his fight: communication with the Queen beyond time and space. O'Neill uses both for memory and faith, but cannot wield them against the violence; he can only carry them, felt objects that hearken another kind of value within him that acknowledges mystery while clarifying it past immediate action. The old stories do the same.
As the land and people die and the old ways along with them, as some muster up and have the will to survive while they can, as other ways of life emerge from the rubble, the entire novel is a plea for transformation in an almost alchemical way: through differing beliefs (Orthodox and animistic), through the merging of cultures and peoples and individual bodies (Empires, commoners, royalty, and the biological) through the sharing of experiences material and immaterial (war itself, the mystical, the natural and the familial). Like the woman whose cloak was stolen and whose child was born, there shouldn't be any surprise that another realm escapes from the bottle from which the spirit seems trapped. Although much remains hidden or obscured into un-recognizability, the struggle and the will to keep fighting, might come from the desire and need to recognize this other realm.
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