“A person with my blessings has a hard time imagining a home in which children do not hear reading and are not read to, even prenatally. The cadences of ordered meaning should be with them, in them, and growing from their beginnings to a supernal End. The intuition of number, with which all are born, is, by education, not taught so much as recognized, named, and applied. Combine the intuition of number and the cadence of ordered meaning and one has music. A mother singing a melody to her unborn child is fitting him for greater glories, first perhaps of Mozart and Bach, and finally of heaven, whence all this comes and to which it returns.”
As I was listening to Gerard Doyle narrate The King of Ireland’s Son, I kept imagining children listening to their parents read the stories, and that made them even more delightful. Several reviews from parents who did read them aloud, and even the ones who didn’t care for the book themselves, admitted that the children loved them. Many adults said that they’d heard the stories as children and read them on their own when they grew up, often multiple times. This was the case with my dear friend from whom I heard about this book a couple of years ago.
First I listened to the Audible version in bits and pieces, many parts several times over, because I would get distracted or fall asleep and have to backtrack. Though I was captivated by the Irish storytelling style of Gerard Doyle, listening was not the best way for me, not primarily an auditory learner, to keep the characters and their adventures straight. Finally, desperate to make sense of everything, I completed the print edition.
Now, I am still at a loss for how to articulate what charms me so much about Colum’s accomplishment, so I looked to other readers who might do it for me. One reader who enjoyed it many times, as a child and as an adult, wrote, “I am stunned at the beauty of Colum’s language and at his handling of plot. There is a story within a story within a story, with smaller tales that reflect on the main ones and often involve the same characters…. And the stories themselves often have an eerie beauty and an undercurrent of sadness. But there’s lots of humor, too, [The King of Cats is hilarious. -GJ] and lots of adventure, and, among the characters, girls as well as boys get to show spunk and initiative.”
Then the King of Ireland’s Son
mounted his horse and rode away— His hound at his heel, His hawk on his wrist; A brave steed to carry him whither he list And the green ground under him.
Another reviewer explains how “…what initially appear to be seven different stories actually blend together to become tales-within-tales. The primary tale is a coming-of-age story of the quests of the youngest son of the King of Ireland. During the course of the quest, the king’s son and others in the primary tale relate stories of their own. Characters from these secondary tales then appear later in the primary tale. The end result is a rich and complex tapestry of interconnecting histories and experiences as each character grows and finds out more about him- or herself. It soon becomes clear that for the central characters, learning the stories themselves becomes the goal of their quest.”
A little background on Colum and the book:
“Although the book was written in America in the years before 1916, Colum was a close friend and colleague of some of those who led the Easter Rising. The King of Ireland’s Son was the ultimate calling-up of Irish mythology and legend, and… made many happy hours for children curled up before glowing turf fires to read by the light of Tilley lamps in the long winter evenings of the new Ireland.”
“Asked how to say his name, he told The Literary Digest the last name was the same as the word column. ‘In my first name, the first a has the sound of au. The ordinary pronunciation in Irish is pau’drig.'” (Wikipedia)
Are some of you, my blogging reading friends, familiar with The King of Ireland’s Son? Please tell me about your experience of it. I’m hoping to find a child to read it to very soon!
You are the one who made us You silver all the minnows in all rivers You wait in the deep woods To find the newborn fox cubs And unseal their eyes You shower the sky with stars
You walk alone In the wild royal darkness Of the heavens above the heavens Where no one else can go.
When the fragile swallows assemble For their pilgrimages When the hummingbirds Who are scarcely more Than a glittering breath Set out for the rain forest To drink from the scarlet flowers On the other side of the world With only now and then The mast of a passing ship For a resting place and an inn
When the Canada geese Are coming down from the north When the storks of Europe Stretch out their necks toward Egypt From their nests on the chimney tops When shaking their big wings open And trailing their long legs after them They rise up heavily To begin their autumn flight
You who speak without words To your creatures who live without words Are hiding under their feathers
To give them a delicate certainty On the long dangerous night journey.
From Father Justin’s blog on the treasures and scenes of St Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, I am sharing a link to his post from last year featuring a very old mosaic icon of the Prophet Hosea, from the sixth century. He writes in the comments:
“Roberto Nardi and his team of conservators recently carried out a major program to consolidate and clean and conserve the mosaic. From their detailed study, they became convinced that it is the work of artisans from Constantinople. The portrait medallions of the apostles around the arch, and the prophets around the base, are each very striking and individualized. An examination of the mosaic up close reveals surprising colour juxtapositions, that the artisans knew would blend together when the mosaic was seen from a distance. Every detail is a source of wonder.”
You can see Fr Justin’s close-up photo of the brilliant icon here: “The Prophet Hosea.” He says of the prophet that, “He recalled the sojourn in the wilderness with longing,” because during that period the Israelites were close to God, whereas in the time during which Hosea lived, their faith was weak.
This fresco below is not that mosaic icon, and is very different from it; I like its energy. It is featured in another article on the prophet here, which gives more of his story from the Bible: The Orthodox Times.
I hope you will take a look at Fr. Justin’s photo of the sixth century mosaic: Prophet Hosea.
“A person with my blessings has a hard time imagining a home in which children do not hear reading and are not read to, even prenatally. The cadences of ordered meaning should be with
them, in them, and growing from their beginnings to a supernal End. The intuition of number, with which all are born, is, by education, not taught so much as recognized, named, and applied. Combine the intuition of number and the cadence of ordered meaning and one has music. A mother singing a melody to her unborn child is fitting him for greater glories, first perhaps of Mozart and Bach, and finally of heaven, whence all this comes and to which it returns.”
As I was listening to Gerard Doyle narrate The King of Ireland’s Son, I kept imagining children listening to their parents read the stories, and that made them even more delightful. Several reviews from parents who did read them aloud, and even the ones who didn’t care for the book themselves, admitted that the children loved them. Many adults said that they’d heard the stories as children and read them on their own when they grew up, often multiple times. This was the case with my dear friend from whom I heard about this book a couple of years ago.
secondary tales then appear later in the primary tale. The end result is a rich and complex tapestry of interconnecting histories and experiences as each character grows and finds out more about him- or herself. It soon becomes clear that for the central characters, learning the stories themselves becomes the goal of their quest.”
