There is a plain in northwest Ireland called Rathcroghan,* the medieval word rath indicating that a notable—and fortified—dwelling once stood there. In the centuries of Ireland’s prehistory—before the written word—this place was called Cruachan Ai, and here stood the royal palace from which the province of Connacht was ruled. It was a primitive building, built by local craftsmen from local materials, and yet it was a place that might please our contemporary eye: round, light, two-storied, and held aloft by carved wooden pillars that created a small maze of well-constructed rooms, paneled in red yew, and at its center the royal hall and bedroom—“guarded by screens of copper with bars of silver and gold birds on the screens, and precious jewels in the birds’ heads for eyes” (as such a palace was anciently described). Incredibly enough, we have a sort of record of a conversation that once took place in this bedroom. It is as if we can listen in on an exchange that is roughly two millennia old.
The royal bed is laid, and two large figures are reclining there, conversing playfully amid the pillows, as might any man and woman when day is done. Ailil, the king, is musing:
“It is true what they say, love: it is well for the wife of a wealthy man.”
“True enough,” replies Medb, the queen. “What put that in your mind?”
“It struck me how much better off you are today than the day I married you.”
“I was well enough off without you.”
“Then your wealth was something I didn’t know or hear much about—except for your woman’s things, and the neighboring enemies making off with loot and plunder.”
Medb doesn’t care for the direction the conversation is taking, and reminding Ailil that her father was high king of Ireland—Eochaid Feidlech the Steadfast—she gives him a quick tour of her genealogy, in case he’d forgotten. Of Eochaid’s six daughters, Medb was “highest and haughtiest”:
“I outdid them in grace and giving and battle and warlike combat. I had fifteen hundred soldiers in my royal pay, all exiles’ sons, and the same number of freeborn native men, and for every paid soldier I had ten more men, and nine more, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And that was only our ordinary household!”
Clearly stung, she barrels on, letting Ailil know who let whom into this bed:
“My father gave me a whole province of Ireland, this province ruled from Cruachan, which is why I am called ‘Medb of Cruachan.’” Medb recounts her wooing by the kings of Ireland—“and I wouldn’t go. For I asked a harder wedding gift than any woman ever asked before from a man in Ireland—the absence of meanness and jealousy and fear.” She had decided Ailil had these qualities and settled on him. “When we were promised, I brought you the best wedding gift a bride can bring: apparel enough for a dozen men, a chariot worth thrice seven bondmaids, the width of your face of red gold and the weight of your left arm of light gold. So, if anyone causes you shame or upset or trouble, the right to compensation is mine, for you’re a kept man.”
Ailil responds hotly that he has two kings for brothers and that he “let them rule because they were older, not because they are better than I am in grace and giving. I never heard, in all Ireland, of a province run by a woman except this one, which is why I came and took the kingship here.”
“It still remains,” says Medb between her teeth, “that my fortune is greater than yours.”
“You amaze me. No one has more,” shouts Ailil, gesturing grandly, “than I have, and I know it!”
All right, then, they must take inventory! That very night:
the lowliest of their possessions were brought out to see who had more property and jewels and precious things: their buckets and tubs and iron pots, jugs and wash-pails and vessels with handles. Then their finger-rings, bracelets, thumb-rings, and gold treasures were brought out, and their cloths of purple, blue, black, green and yellow, plain grey and many-colored, yellow-brown, checked and striped. Their herds of sheep were taken in off the fields and meadows and plains. They were measured and matched, and found to be the same in numbers and size. Even the great ram leading Medb’s sheep, the worth of one bondmaid by himself, had a ram to match him leading Ailil’s sheep.
From pasture and paddock their teams and herds of horses were brought in. For the finest stallion in Medb’s stud, worth one bondmaid by himself, Ailil had a stallion to match. Their vast herds of pigs were taken in from the woods and gullies and waste places. They were measured and matched and noted, and Medb had one fine boar, but Ailil had another. Then their droves and free-wandering herds of cattle were brought in from the woods and wastes of the province. These were matched and measured and noted also, and found to be the same in number and size. But there was one great bull in Ailil’s herd, that had been a calf of one of Medb’s cows—Finnbennach was his name, the White Horned—and Finnbennach, refusing to be led by a woman, had gone over to the king’s herd. Medb couldn’t find in her herd the equal of this bull, and her spirits dropped as though she hadn’t a single penny.
How do we come by this extraordinary encounter? Can we depend, at all, on its accuracy?
I have been quoting from the first scene of the Irish prose epic Tain Bo Cuailnge, The Cattle Raid of Cooley. There are several versions, none of them complete, the earliest dating to the eighth century. This scene comes to us from a twelfth-century manuscript, translated masterfully from the ancient Irish by the contemporary Irish poet Thomas Kinsella. The manuscript tradition, however, is based on an earlier oral tradition that may go back to the time of Christ. And though we can hardly claim to have this royal conversation word for word, the oral-scribal tradition witnesses that such a conversation may well have been the impetus for the rest of the epic action of the Tain.
Medb calls for the chief messenger, Mac Roth, and asks where the match of Ailil’s bull might be found. “I know where to find such a bull and better,” Mac Roth tells her, “in the province of Ulster, in the territory of Cuailnge, in Daire mac Fiachna’s house. Donn Cuailnge is the bull’s name, the Brown Bull of Cuailnge.”
“Go there, Mac Roth,” orders Medb. “Ask Daire to lend me Donn Cuailnge for a year. At the end of the year he can have fifty yearling heifers in payment for the loan, and the Brown Bull of Cuailnge back. And you can offer him this too, Mac Roth, if the people of the country think badly of losing their fine jewel, the Donn Cuailnge: if Daire himself comes with the bull I’ll give him a portion of the fine Plain of Ai equal to his own lands, and a chariot worth thrice seven bondmaids, and my own friendly thighs on top of that.”
The reader is not surprised when Daire graciously accepts this deal! Unfortunately, Daire’s generous hospitality to Mac Roth’s party undoes the agreement, for “they were given the best of good food and kept supplied with the festive fare until they grew drunk and noisy.” The messengers then get into a verbal duel about whether Medb’s forces could have taken the Brown Bull from Ulster by force, had Daire not agreed to the transaction. Daire’s steward enters the room just as one boasts: “We would have taken it anyway, with or without his leave!”
With that, the deal is off. “And only it isn’t my habit,” smolders Daire after he has learned of the drunken boast, “to murder messengers or travelers or any other wayfarers, not one of you would leave here alive.”
When Mac Roth recounts this outcome to Medb, she announces genially: “We needn’t polish the knobs and knots in this, Mac Roth. It was well known it would be taken by force if it wasn’t given freely. And taken it will be.” Medb assembles a vast army, which under her command sets out forthwith for Cuailnge to capture the Brown Bull. En route they will be met not by the forces of Ulster, who have been laid low by mysterious pangs, but by one champion only, the boy Cuchulainn.
The first thing that will probably strike any modern reader who opens the Tain is what a rough, strange world this is, both simple and full of barbaric splendor. Here is no deliberation or subtlety, no refinement or ambiguity. We know immediately that we are at a far remove from Virgil, Cicero, Plato, and the whole literary tradition of the classical world, excepting perhaps Homer. The characters of the Tain do not think profoundly; they do not seem to think at all. But they do act—and with a characteristic panache and roundedness that easily convinces us of their humanity.
And none more rounded than Medb. How different a queen she is from Dido. One cannot see Medb languishing for a lover—or for anything. If Augustine was the first self-conscious man, Medb—at the other end of the consciousness spectrum—is prereflective. Her ready speech, moreover, is characteristically Irish. We can imagine her sharp first sentence (“What put that in your mind?”) on the lips of many a character in modern Irish drama—and this opens up to us an astonishing continuity: from prehistoric Ireland to the present day.
The sexual frankness of these characters is unlike anything in classical literature, even in the folk epics of Homer. We would need to reach all the way back to the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh to find anything comparable. Medb’s offer of “her own friendly thighs” to seal the bargain with Daire is obviously thrown in casually. And it is just as obvious that Medb is not in the remotest sense a needy woman—the very phrase would curdle before her! Rather, in early Irish literature both men and women openly admire one another’s physical endowments and invite one another to bed without formality.
In another story, Derdriu—Deirdre of the Sorrows—passes Noisiu on the rampart of Emain Macha, the chief seat of the Ulster kings. They have never seen each other before. Of Derdriu, the king’s druid, Cathbad, had prophesied that
High queens will ache with envy
to see those lips of Parthian-red
opening on her pearly teeth,
and see her pure perfect body.
Though Noisiu knows that she is pledged to the old king and that there is a curse on her, he cannot help himself: “That is a fine heifer going by.”
“As well it might,” Derdriu shoots back. “The heifers grow big where there are no bulls.”
“You have the bull of this province all to yourself—the king of Ulster.”
“Of the two, I’d pick a game young bull like you.”
Guess what happens next.
Similarly, there is recorded in another story of the Tain cycle this conversation between the boy Cuchulainn, the Irish Achilles, and Emer, the girl he comes to woo:
“May your road be blessed!” cries Emer on his approach.
“May the apple of your eye see only good,” returns Cuchulainn. Then, peering down her dress: “I see a sweet country. I could rest my weapon there.”
The tasks the hero must perform before this sweet country is open to him are laid out by Emer herself—not by her father, as would be the case in a continental fairy tale:
“No man will travel this country until he has killed a hundred men at every ford from Scenmenn ford on the river Ailbine, to Banchuing … where the frothy Brea makes Fedelm leap.”
“In that sweet country I’ll rest my weapon.”
“No man will travel this country until he has done the feat of the salmon-leap carrying twice his weight in gold, and struck down three groups of nine men with a single stroke, leaving the middle man of each nine unharmed.”
“In that sweet country I’ll rest my weapon.”
“No man will travel this country who hasn’t gone sleepless from Samain [Hallowe’en], when summer goes to its rest, until Imbolc [Candlemas or Groundhog Day], when the ewes are milked at spring’s beginning; from Imbolc to Beltaine [May Day] at the summer’s beginning and from Beltaine to Bron Trogain, earth’s sorrowing autumn.”
“It is said and done.”
Well, they may not be civilized, but they certainly are confident—and this confidence is one of the open-handed pleasures of early Irish literature. We have no trouble imagining these people, both men and women, riding hard on horseback, drawing the blood of their enemies, leaping about in muscular dancing, and passing the damp Irish night in vigorous coupling. Even their sorrows and deaths are tossed off with a shrug, though they understand tragedy and receive it as convulsively as any people. “For the great Gaels of Ireland,” wrote G. K. Chesterton,
Are the men that God made mad.
For all their wars are merry,
And all their songs are sad.
The Irish are part of a larger ethnic grouping called the Celts (preferably pronounced with a hard “c”), who first entered western consciousness about 600 B.C.—only a century and a half after the legendary founding of the City of Rome—when, like the German barbarians long after them, they crossed the Rhine. One branch of the Celtic tree settled in present-day France and became the Gauls, whom Julius Caesar would conquer in the century before Christ and who in their Romanized phase would produce the effete Ausonius. A cognate tribe settled the Iberian peninsula and became great sea traders; indeed, traces of the buildings of these Iberian Celts may have been found as far afield as New Hampshire—which would make the Celts the first Europeans to reach the Americas. In the third century B.C., Celts invaded the Greek world, advancing as far south as Delphi and settling in present-day Turkey, where, as the Galatians (note the similarity of consonantal sounds in “Celt,” “Gaul,” and “Galatian”), they were recipients of one of Paul’s letters. Siblings of the Gaulish Celts crossed to Britain as early as 400 B.C., becoming the Britons, who nine centuries later, in the time of Augustine and Patricius, would be gradually pushed by the Angles and Saxons into Cornwall, where they would become the Cornish, and into Wales, where they would become the Welsh. It is from these British Celts that the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table would spring. Echoes of the language they spoke may be heard today in the form of modern Welsh and Breton, which belong to the same linguistic group as Gaulish.
About 350 B.C., some fifty years after Celtic tribes began their invasion of Britain, they reached Ireland. Some, no doubt, came by way of Britain, but it is most likely that those who gained ascendancy were Iberian Celts, whose language was somewhat different from that of the British invaders. These became in time the Irish; and the language they spoke belongs not to the Brythonic branch of Welsh and Breton but to a Celtic branch called Goidelic by scholars—whose present-day shoots are the last living Gaelic tongues: Irish and Scots Gaelic. Ireland itself is the only Celtic nation-state in our world, all the other Celts having been absorbed by larger political entities.
In the Irish foundation myth, the sons of Mil, survivors of the Great Flood through their descent from Noah, reach Ireland from Spain and wrest it from a tribe called Tuatha De Danaan, the People of the Goddess Danu. The connection to Noah can only be the result of later monkish tinkering with the original material—somehow, the Irish had to be connected to things biblical. But there is little reason to doubt the Iberian connection. We have evidence that the Tuatha De Danaan have some historical reality, as well: we know that Ireland was peopled before the arrival of the Celts in the fourth century B.C. and that an earlier people had built the great barrows and magnificently carved tumuli that dot the Irish landscape to this day. In the foundation myth, the Tuatha De Danaan are preternaturally skilled in building and craftsmanship. These taller, otherworldly beings eventually devolve into “the little people,” the fairies and leprechauns of later Irish legend, whose spirits haunt the tombs and fairy mounds they once built. “The little people” is a euphemism—rather like the prehistoric phrase le bon dieu—meant to disguise the speaker’s fear of something unfamiliar and much larger than himself. It is possible that this flickering phenomenon of the little people represents the afterglow of Irish guilt over their exploitation of more artful aborigines.
Even at this early stage of their development, the Irish were intoxicated by the power of words. Every noble Irish family maintained a family of ancestral poets. The sons of Mil were accompanied by their poet, Amhairghin, who, stepping off the boat that brought him to the Irish shore, proclaimed:
I am an estuary into the sea.
I am a wave of the ocean.
I am the sound of the sea.
I am a powerful ox.
I am a hawk on a cliff.
I am a dewdrop in the sun.
I am a plant of beauty.
I am a boar for valour.
I am a salmon in a pool.
I am a lake in a plain.
I am the strength of art.
One problem with this Irish prehistoric material is that we cannot date it with any precision. From the Celtic invasion in the fourth century B.C. to the invasion of books nine centuries later, after which the traditional oral lore began to be written down, we are looking at a timeless Ireland. We can presume that Amhairghin’s poem, at least in its current form, is not actually as old as the Celtic invasion, but we cannot be sure how old it is. We can date the action of the Tain perhaps to the first century of our era, perhaps to a century or so later, but there is no way of knowing when this episode or that was added to the strand of narrative.
What hints we have suggest that Ireland was, during this entire period, a land outside of time—that, in fact, it changed little from the time of Amhairghin to the time of Augustine. This was an illiterate, aristocratic, seminomadic, Iron Age warrior culture, its wealth based on animal husbandry and slavery (the importance of both of which one cannot fail to notice in the Tain’s royal inventory). Such cultures have been known to exist for many hundreds of years without undergoing appreciable alteration. What normally changes them is outside influence, rather than inner dynamics; and Ireland, splendidly isolated in the Atlantic and largely beyond the traffic of civilization, suffered few intrusive influences. We can safely assume, therefore, that the world of Medb and Ailil was little different from the earlier Ireland that the Celtic invaders had made and that this world, in most respects, remained intact into the century of Rome’s fall. On this timeless island, one would have come in contact with a culture very like that of the British and continental Celts prior to their centuries of Roman influence. In this place and period, one might also have experienced a milieu something like such pre-Roman cultures as Homeric Greece, the India of the Mahabharata, and Sumer, with their common equipage of warhorses and warrior chariots and their common standards of heroic action.
The Irish, like all the Celts, stripped before battle and rushed their enemy naked, carrying sword and shield but wearing only sandals and tore—a twisted, golden neck ornament. Just such a torc may be seen around the neck of the naked Dying Gaul, a Greek statue of the third century B.C. The Gaul’s tough hide has been pierced by a heart wound between his ribs, and he is bleeding to death. Sitting on the ground, he holds himself erect with a last effort of will. His face is a drama of both dignity and hopelessness, as he “casts a cold eye on life, on death.” The Romans, in their first encounters with these exposed, insane warriors, were shocked and frightened. Not only were the men naked, they were howling and, it seemed, possessed by demons, so outrageous were their strength and verve. Urged on by the infernal skirl of pipers, they presented to the unaccustomed and throbbing Roman sensorium a multimedia event featuring all the terrors of hell itself.
The Irish heroes were aware that they became possessed when confronted by the enemy and that their appearances could alter considerably, and they called this phenomenon the “warp-spasm.” When in the Tain the armies of Connacht are confronted by Ulster’s champion, the seventeen-year-old Cuchulainn, this is how he appears:
The first warp-spasm seized Cuchulainn, and made him into a monstrous thing, hideous and shapeless, unheard of. His shanks and his joints, every knuckle and angle and organ from head to foot, shook like a tree in the flood or a reed in the stream. His body made a furious twist inside his skin, so that his feet and shins and knees switched to the rear and his heels and calves switched to the front. The balled sinews of his calves switched to the front of his shins, each big knot the size of a warrior’s bunched fist. On his head the temple-sinews stretched to the nape of his neck, each mighty, immense, measureless knob as big as the head of a month-old child. His face and features became a red bowl: he sucked one eye so deep into his head that a wild crane couldn’t probe it onto his cheek out of the depths of his skull; the other eye fell out along his cheek. His mouth weirdly distorted: his cheek peeled back from his jaws until the gullet appeared, his lungs and liver flapped in his mouth and throat, his lower jaw struck the upper a lion-killing blow, and fiery flakes large as a ram’s fleece reached his mouth from his throat. His heart boomed loud in his breast like the baying of a watch-dog at its feed or the sound of a lion among bears. Malignant mists and spurts of fire—the torches of Badb—flickered red in the vaporous clouds that rose boiling above his head, so fierce was his fury. The hair of his head twisted like the tangle of a red thornbush stuck in a gap; if a royal apple tree with all its kingly fruit were shaken above him, scarce an apple would reach the ground but each would be spiked on a bristle of his hair as it stood up on his scalp with rage. The hero-halo rose out of his brow, long and broad as a warrior’s whetstone, long as a snout, and he went mad rattling his shields, urging on his charioteer and harassing the hosts. Then, tall and thick, steady and strong, high as the mast of a noble ship, rose up from the dead centre of his skull a straight spout of black blood darkly and magically smoking like the smoke from a royal hostel when a king is coming to be cared for at the close of a winter day.
In a word, a formidable opponent. Blithe exaggeration is a regular feature of Irish heroic literature, a convention as enjoyable to its intended audience as the exaggerations of a sportscaster to a Super Bowl audience. As in so many passages from the Tain, this one yields up a vivid miniature of the period—in the near-Homeric simile describing a warm and welcoming hostel on a winter’s evening. More than this, we glimpse something of the emotional temper of these people and the high pitch of feeling at which their lives were lived. I do not question for a second that the warp-spasm was a real experience, keenly felt by its subject and plainly observable to the opposing army. Anyone who has ever felt (or been the object of) real rage can understand the distortions described in this passage. As, I think, can anyone who has experienced terror: what a perfect ritual for dealing with the warrior’s own terror, as the booming of the heart within his breast is transformed into “the baying of a watch-dog at its feed” and he himself is transformed from ordinary mortal into killing machine:
[Cuchulainn then] went into the middle of them and beyond, and mowed down great ramparts of his enemies’ corpses, circling completely around the armies three times, attacking them in hatred. They fell sole to sole and neck to headless neck, so dense was that destruction. He circled them three times more in the same way, and left a bed of them six deep in a great circuit, the soles of three to the necks of three in a circle round the camp…. Any count or estimate of the rabble who fell there is unknown, and unknowable. Only the names of the chiefs have been counted…. In this great Carnage on Murtheimne Plain Cuchulainn slew one hundred and thirty kings, as well as an uncountable horde of dogs and horses, women and boys and children and rabble of all kinds. Not one man in three escaped without his thighbone or his head or his eye being smashed, or without some blemish for the rest of his life. And when the battle was over Cuchulainn left without a scratch or a stain on himself, his helper or either of his horses.
More often than not, Cuchulainn reminds us of a comic book hero. The only audience likely to be amazed by exploits like these today would be preadolescent boys—but then in early stories like the Tain, we touch the imaginative childhood of the human race. Even the hero’s gear suggests such a connection. Here, for instance, is the description of Cuchulainn’s chariot:
When the spasm had run through the high hero Cuchulainn he stepped into his sickle war-chariot that bristled with points of iron and narrow blades, with hooks and hard prongs, and heroic frontal spikes, with ripping instruments and tearing nails on its shafts and straps and loops and cords. The body of the chariot was spare and slight and erect, fitted for the feats of a champion, with space for the lordly warrior’s eight weapons, speedy as the wind or as a swallow or a deer darting over the level plain. The chariot was settled down on two fast steeds, wild and wicked, neat-headed and narrow bodied, with slender quarters and roan breast, firm in hoof and harness—a notable sight in the trim chariot-shafts. One horse was lithe and swift-leaping, high-arched and powerful, long-bodied and with great hooves. The other flowing-maned and shining, slight and slender in hoof and heel. In that style, then, he drove out to find his enemies.
How these people would have loved the Batmobile! But while they are hypnotized by physical display, calculation is beyond them. The numbers of the dead—as of the living—are considerably inflated: nothing like a real accounting is attempted. These counts are not dissimilar to the ages of the centuries-old patriarchs found in the Book of Genesis. All the storyteller really wants to say is that the number of dead was astonishingly large—or that Methuselah lived a very long time.
Throughout the early centuries of our era, human settlements were far smaller than they are today. The population of a great city or a small country could be counted in the thousands, and between the settled places lay unpeopled wildernesses, owned by no one in particular, which offered perils to conventional travelers but sanctuaries for the dispossessed. When Medb and Ailil call for their pigs and cattle, these are brought in from the “woods and wastes”—the no-man’s-lands, the places in between.
No character in the Tain is drawn as perceptively as Medb. She is so full of life and color that even Cuchulainn seems pale beside her. When Fingin the Healer comes to the sorely wounded Cethern, he points to Cethern’s largest wound: “A vain, arrogant woman gave you that wound.”
“I believe you are right,” replies Cethern. “A tall, fair, long-faced woman with soft features came at me. She had a head of yellow hair, and two gold birds on her shoulders. She wore a purple cloak folded about her, with five hands’ breadth of gold on her back. She carried a light, stinging, sharp-edged lance in her hand, and she held an iron sword with a woman’s grip over her head—a massive figure.”
The “massive figure” of Medb dominates the Tain as does no other woman in any epic we have left to us. In the Iliad Helen makes her cameo appearance; in the Aeneid Dido has an interesting supporting role. But the only women in classical literature who impel the story forward are to be found in Greek drama: Clytemnestra, Antigone, Medea. (There are ways in which the Tain seems closer to drama than to Homeric epic: it is full of dialogue and short on poetry—which appears only occasionally and, for the most part, in archaic incantations not unlike the choruses of Greek plays.)
The Greek drama of the fifth century B.C. grew out of the seasonal liturgies of an agricultural people and magnified the conflicts of their social life—thus the necessity of significant female characters. But one cannot imagine a woman in Greece’s heroic age—that is, three or four centuries before the dramatists, in the period of Greece’s early development most comparable to that of the Tain—standing on the Trojan battlefield or traveling with Odysseus. Just as unthinkable would be a woman traveling with Aeneas. At the end of the Tain, its ostensible moral is uttered by the vaguely omniscient Fergus: “We followed the rump of a misguiding woman. It is the usual thing for a herd led by a mare to be strayed and destroyed.” Medb does not reappear after this judgment on her, but even this “last word” seems ontologically overshadowed by her personality.
Nor is she an exception in this literature. Cuchulainn is trained in battlecraft by three women, each more extraordinary than the one before. The god of war, mentioned briefly in the Tain, is put in the shade by the three goddesses of war, who regularly make the scene and stir things up. (One of these, Badb, is mentioned in the description of Cuchulainn’s warpspasm.) Derdriu, pledged to Conchobor, the Ulster king, runs off with Noisiu and his brothers—the sons of Uisliu—only to be tracked down and recaptured, as Noisiu is slain. Though she submits to Conchobor, Derdriu never smiles again. Conchobor, out of spite, decides to share her with Eogan mac Durthacht, the king of Fernmag, who to win favor with Conchobor had killed Noisiu—not in a fair fight but through trickery. “They set out the next day for the fair of Macha. She was behind Eogan in the chariot. She had sworn that two men alive in the world together would never have her.
“‘This is good, Derdriu,’ Conchobor said. ‘Between me and Eogan you are a sheep eyeing two rams.’
“A big block of stone was in front of her. She let her head be driven against the stone, and made a mass of fragments of it, and she was dead.”
A suicide, all right, but nothing like Dido’s. These are all women who, in life and death, exhibit the power of their will and the strength of their passion. Here is part of Derdriu’s lament for Noisiu, spoken to the royal musicians who had come to cheer her up:
Sweet in your sight the fiery stride
of raiding men returned to Emain.
More nobly strode the three proud
sons of Uisliu toward their home:
Noisiu bearing the best mead
—I would wash him by the fire—
Ardan, with a stag or a boar,
Anle, shouldering his load.
The son of Nes [i.e., King Conchobor], battle-proud,
drinks, you say, the choicest mead.
Choicer still—a brimming sea—
I have taken frequently.
Modest Noisiu would prepare
a cooking-pit in the forest floor.
Sweeter then than any meat
the son of Uisliu’s, honey sweet.
Though for you the times are sweet
with pipers and with trumpeters,
I swear today I can’t forget
that I have known far sweeter airs.
…
Noisiu: his grave-mound is made
and mournfully accompanied.
The highest hero—and I poured
the deadly drink when he died.
His cropped gold fleece I loved,
and fine form—a tall tree.
Alas, I needn’t watch today,
nor wait for the son of Uisliu.
I loved the modest, mighty warrior,
loved his fitting, firm desire,
loved him at daybreak as he dressed
by the margin of the forest.
Those blue eyes that melted women,
and menaced enemies, I loved:
then, with our forest journey done,
his chanting through the dark woods.
I don’t sleep now,
nor redden my fingernails.
What have I to do with welcomes?
The son of Indel will not come.
The tenacious persistence of certain patterns and emotions in the Irish literary tradition skirts the incredible. Here is part of another lament, composed by another woman for her murdered husband—eighteen centuries after Derdriu!
My love and my delight,
The day I saw you first
Beside the markethouse
I had eyes for nothing else
And love for none but you.
…
You gave me everything.
There were parlours whitened for me
Bedrooms painted for me
Ovens reddened for me,
Loaves baked for me,
Joints spitted for me,
Beds made for me
To take my ease on flock
Until the milking time
And later if I pleased.
…
My love and my fortune
’Tis an evil portion
To lay for a giant—
A shroud and a coffin—
For a big-hearted hero
Who fished in the hill-streams
And drank in bright halls
With white-breasted women.
…
My rider of the bright eyes,
What happened you yesterday?
I thought you in my heart,
When I bought you your fine clothes,
A man the world could not slay.
What happened to the rider of the bright eyes is that he was shot dead by a grasping Englishman one night in 1773, because he had refused to sell his splendid mare for the paltry offer of five pounds. By this time, English occupiers had enacted the anti-Catholic Penal Laws; among many injustices, these forbade a Catholic Irishman from owning a horse worth more than that sum. The slain man was Art O’Leary, an officer in the army of Maria Theresa of Austria and scion of one of the last noble Catholic families to survive in Ireland. (As a Catholic, he could not receive an Irish military commission.) The poet, his wife, was Dark Eileen O’Connell, an aunt of Daniel O’Connell, who fifty-seven years later would force Catholic Emancipation on the English Parliament, becoming a kind of Irish Catholic Martin Luther King. Her lament is almost the last great poem to be written in the Irish language, just as the Gaelic order and the old nobility that traced itself back to the time of Medb and Ailil sank beneath the waves of English oppression.
Are not the two laments remarkably similar in both imagery and feeling? Derdriu belongs to a simpler time: her excited admiration for the body of her lover, who roasts game for her in their forest shelter, is frank and pure. Dark Eileen is more refined: her husband prepares an entire household for her (with some of the delicacy of an English nursery rhyme), and the sexual feeling is less direct. Both cast a watchful eye on other females! But the strength of Eileen’s connection to prehistoric Derdriu becomes especially evident as one searches in vain through eighteenth-century English literature by women to find anything so frank and passionate as “The Lament for Art O’Leary.” Eileen does not destroy herself directly as did her ancient counterpart, but she comes from the same hard, unbending stock:
’Tis known to Jesus Christ
Nor cap upon my head,
Nor shift upon my back,
Nor shoe upon my foot,
Nor gear in all my house,
Nor bridle for the mare
But I will spend at law;
And I’ll go oversea
To plead before the King,
And if the King be deaf*
I’ll settle things alone
With the black-blooded rogue
That killed my man on me.
Art O’Leary lies buried in the ruined nave of Kilcrea Abbey in County Cork. These words, carved in modern English on his tomb, bring us back to prehistoric Ireland:
LO ARTHUR LEARY
GENROUS HANDSOME BRAVE
SLAIN IN HIS BLOOM
LIES IN THIS HUMBLE GRAVE
The three adjectives—“genrous, handsome, brave”—used to describe the murdered man are a summation of the Iron Age moral code, a code that shines out clearly in all early literature (whether Gilgamesh, the Iliad, or the Tain) and that mysteriously survived in Ireland long after its oblivion in more sophisticated civilizations—and that endures to some extent even to this day.
Recall Medb’s boastful self-description: “I outdid [all my sisters] in grace and giving and battle and warlike combat.” “Grace”: therefore, she is handsome (or beautiful). “Giving”: therefore, she is generous. “Battle and warlike combat”: therefore, she isbrave.Consider the high standards she set for her husband: “the absence of meanness and jealousy and fear.” “Meanness” is the opposite of generosity; “fear” is the opposite of bravery. “Jealousy,” though not precisely the logical opposite of handsomeness, is eternally linked to it in hopeless conflict: a wife’s beauty inevitably provokes the insecure husband to mindless jealousy—not of his wife but of his possible rivals.
But there is also an unnamed virtue, hidden in these trinities: loyalty or faithfulness. Dark Eileen would have been unlikely to carve “genrous, faithful, brave”: O’Leary, a handsome figure in his mid-twenties, was known to enjoy, as Eileen herself wrote, drinking “in bright halls with white-breasted women.” Nor is faithfulness a virtue Medb could credibly have lauded (though its subterranean existence is hinted at in the jealousy motif). In the heroic eras of various societies, including Ireland’s, loyalty served as the foundation virtue. But it is not the insignia of heterosexual unions; rather, it is the bedrock of same-sex friendships. In Gilgamesh, there is the unbreakable friendship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu. In the Iliad, there is the undying bond between Achilles and Patroclus. In the Tain, the only relationship that is presented as ideal is the one between the warriors Cuchulainn and Ferdia, foster brothers who, though forced by Medb’s trickery to fight each other, love each other to the end. Thus, Cuchulainn to Ferdia:
Fast friends, forest-companions,
we made one bed and slept one sleep
in foreign lands after the fray.
Scathach’s pupils, two together
we’d set forth to comb the forest.
…
There is no man that ever ate,
no man that was ever born,
no joyous son of king or queen,
for whose sake I would do you harm.
After he has killed Ferdia, Cuchulainn addresses the corpse:
When we were away with Scathach
learning victory overseas,
it seemed our friendship would remain
unbroken till the day of doom.
I loved the noble way you blushed,
and loved your fine, perfect form.
I loved your blue clear eye,
your way of speech, your skillfulness[,]
…
your curled yellow hair
like a great lovely jewel,
the soft leaf-shaped belt
that you wore at your waist.
You have fallen to the Hound,*
I cry for it, little calf.
The shield didn’t save you
that brought you to the fray.
The lyrical similarities among the laments of Derdriu, Cuchulainn, and Dark Eileen can hardly be lost on the reader. But only in Cuchulainn’s dirge is the value of never-ending faithfulness sung—“fast friends,” whose “friendship would remain unbroken till the day of doom.” The irony of the speaker, who swore to his foster brother that “there is no man … for whose sake I would do you harm,” is painful.
Fixity escaped these people, as in the end it escapes us all. They understood, as few have understood before or since, how fleeting life is and how pointless to try to hold on to things or people. They pursued the wondrous deed, the heroic gesture: fighting, fucking, drinking, art—poetry for intense emotion, the music that accompanied the heroic drinking with which each day ended, bewitching ornament for one’s person and possessions. All these are worth pursuit, and the first, especially, will bring the honor great souls seek. But in the midst of this furious swirl of energy lies a still point of detachment. When, in the heat of battle, the bloodied messenger informs Medb timidly that Cuchulainn has beheaded her son, she responds, “This isn’t like catching birds,” as we might say, “You didn’t think this would be a picnic, did you?” The face of the Dying Gaul speaks for them all: each one of us will die, naked and alone, on some battlefield not of our own choosing. My promise of undying faithfulness to you and yours to me, though made with all solemnity, is unlikely to survive the tricks that fate has in store—all the hidden land mines that beset human life. What we can rely on are the comeliness and iron virtue of the short-lived hero: his loyalty to cause and comrades, his bravery in the face of overwhelming odds, the gargantuan generosity with which he scatters his possessions and his person and with which he spills his blood. After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was heard to say that to be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.
Such an outlook and such a temperament make for wonderful songs and thrilling stories, but not for personal peace or social harmony. Though Medb and Ailil, Derdriu and Noisiu would have been exciting to know, they could not have been fun to work for. To such a view—the view of the servant—we now turn: to Patricius, the kidnapped boy shepherding sheep on a bleak Antrim hillside.
* Consult the Pronunciation Guide at the back of the book for pronunciation or certain Irish words.
* Which will surely be the case, the king being George III.
* The name Cuchulainn means Culann’s Hound.