High Ideals

When I was a teenager, I read a wonderful book called Trinity, by Leon Uris. Set in Donegal during the years of the Great Famine and its aftermath, the novel follows an Irish family through one of the darkest periods in Ireland's history. Amid the suffering, poverty, and humiliation endured by the Irish peasantry, stories of ancient Ireland are passed down as a way of remembering who they were—and of recovering a sense of pride that the hardships of their own time threatened to take from them.

One name from those stories has stayed with me ever since: Cormac mac Airt. Even in their lowest moments, the people in Uris's story looked back to the ideal of Cormac—the wise and just king—as a reminder of what Ireland could be. He represented a time when the Irish could imagine their own people not as a conquered and impoverished nation, but as a people with a proud history, a rich culture, and an ideal of justice worth remembering.

In the stories of ancient Ireland, few kings are remembered quite like Cormac mac Airt. He ruled from Tara, the ancient seat of Ireland's High Kings, during the age of Fionn mac Cumhaill and the Fianna. His father was Art mac Cuinn, and his grandfather was Conn Cétchathach, Conn of the Hundred Battles. His name is woven through the great traditions of Ireland: the heroic world of the Fianna, the wisdom of kingship, the mysteries of the Otherworld, and the ancient royal traditions of Tara.

Among the High Kings of Ireland, Cormac stands out for his moral character—a king who valued truth, wisdom, generosity, and justice. The stories portray him not simply as a powerful ruler, but as an embodiment of high ideals: a man who understood that authority carries responsibility, that wisdom matters more than power, and that a king's greatness is measured by how he treats those entrusted to his care.

The King of Tara

Cormac's name is inseparable from Tara. For centuries, the Hill of Tara was associated with the kingship of Ireland—a place of ceremony, assembly, storytelling, and royal authority. The great monuments that remain there today are older than Cormac himself, but later tradition connected many of them with his reign, including Cormac's House and the Banqueting Hall.

Yet the stories surrounding Cormac are less interested in the grandeur of Tara than in the question of what happens when a man is given power over others. That question appears early in his story, in a small tale that reveals much about the kind of king Cormac would become.

A Boy's Judgment

A poor woman once complained that the king's sheep had eaten her plants. The king decided that the sheep should be given to her as compensation. Young Cormac thought this was unfair. The sheep were worth far more than the plants they had eaten, and taking them would be an excessive punishment for the loss. Instead, he suggested that the woman should be compensated with the sheep's wool. The plants would grow again, and so would the wool, making the value of the compensation more equal to the value of what she had lost.

The young Cormac had seen something the king had missed: justice was not simply about making someone pay for a wrong. It was about finding a fair measure of what had been lost.

The Wisdom of Cormac

That idea appears again in Tecosca Cormaic, the Instructions of Cormac, an early Irish wisdom text preserved in medieval manuscripts. The work presents Cormac as a teacher of kingship, offering counsel on the qualities expected of a ruler: truthfulness, generosity, hospitality, courage, restraint, judgment, and wisdom.

A king must listen. He must not be ruled by anger. He must be generous and uphold truth, while understanding the people over whom he rules. These teachings reveal something about the society that remembered Cormac. The ideal king was not simply a warrior who could defeat his enemies, but a man whose character was worthy of the authority he possessed.

Cormac became the embodiment of that ideal.

Cormac and the Fianna

Cormac's story also brings him into the great heroic tradition of Fionn mac Cumhaill and the Fianna. The Fianna were the legendary warrior band of early Ireland, and their stories are filled with battles, hunts, loyalty, betrayal, love, and encounters with the supernatural. Cormac was their king, and through his family he becomes part of some of Ireland's most enduring stories.

His daughter Gráinne was promised in marriage to Fionn, but at the wedding feast she fell in love with the younger warrior Diarmuid Ua Duibhne. She placed Diarmuid under a supernatural obligation, or geis, and together they fled. The story that follows, The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne, became one of the great romances of Irish literature.

Through Cormac, the royal court, the heroic world of the Fianna, and the supernatural traditions of Ireland all become intertwined.

A Branch from the Otherworld

Cormac's own adventures reach even further. In Cormac's Adventure in the Land of Promise, he encounters Manannán mac Lir, the mysterious figure associated with the sea and the Otherworld. Cormac is drawn into a strange journey beyond the ordinary world, where he encounters treasures that belong to a realm beyond human understanding.

Among them is a silver branch bearing three golden apples. When the branch is shaken, it produces music so beautiful that those who hear it forget their sorrow. It is an extraordinary image: the treasures of the Otherworld are not simply gold or weapons, but something capable of easing grief.

For Cormac, the journey becomes another lesson in wisdom, desire, loss, and the limits of human knowledge. The king who governs Ireland must also learn that there are things beyond his power.

Between Two Irelands

Perhaps the most intriguing part of Cormac's later tradition is his connection with Christianity. Some medieval accounts portray him as recognizing the existence of a single God before the arrival of St Patrick. His story therefore places him in a fascinating position within Irish tradition.

Cormac belongs to the old Ireland—the world of Tara, druids, the Fianna, and the gods and heroes of ancient stories. Yet he also seems to look beyond it. We should be careful here: these stories were written down centuries after the time in which Cormac is traditionally placed, and they cannot be treated as straightforward historical evidence that Cormac was a Christian.

But the symbolism is powerful. Cormac becomes a king standing at the edge of two worlds, with the old Ireland behind him and the Christian Ireland ahead.

The Death of a King

Cormac's death is no less memorable. According to tradition, he died after choking on a salmon bone. In some versions, his death was connected with the anger of a druid after Cormac had turned away from the old gods.

It is a strangely humble end for a great king. Cormac had ruled at Tara, commanded warriors, and been surrounded by stories of the Otherworld. He was remembered as one of the wisest kings of Ireland, yet his life ended with something as ordinary and fragile as a piece of food. The story brings the king back to the level of every other human being: power does not make us immortal, and wisdom does not place us beyond death.

Never Forgotten

Perhaps that is why Cormac endured so strongly in the memory of Ireland. During the Great Famine, when hunger, poverty, and humiliation had reduced so many people to desperation, stories of ancient Ireland offered something that could not be taken from them: a memory of who they had been and an ideal of what their people could be. In Trinity, those stories become a way for the characters to recover a measure of pride when almost everything else has been taken away.

There is something remarkable in what happened to that same book more than a century later. Bobby Sands, imprisoned in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh, loved Trinity so much that he memorized large portions of it and recited the story to his fellow prisoners. Leon Uris himself later recalled hearing how Sands would recount the novel from memory to the men in the cells.

The circumstances were profoundly different, but the need was strangely familiar. In the Famine years, and again in a prison cell generations later, stories of Ireland could become more than stories. They could preserve memory when the present offered little hope, and remind people of a dignity that circumstances could not erase.

Perhaps that is the enduring power of Cormac mac Airt. He belongs to a world of ancient kings and heroes, but the ideal he came to represent survived far beyond that world: that a king should be just, that wisdom should matter more than power, and that a people should never forget what they believe themselves capable of being.

When so much had been lost, the ideal remained.