SOURCE: "The Irish Epic," "The Epic Hero," and "Tragedy in the Epic" in The "Táin Bó Cuailnge" and the Epic Tradition, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Dallas, 1979, pp. 14-157.

[In the following excerpt, Gray enumerates the different narrative and structural elements, as well as character types, present in the Táin and compares the poem with other epic poems, including the Iliad, the Odyssey, Beowulf, the Chanson de Roland, and the Mabinogion.]

The Irish Epic

The Táin Bó Cuailnge suffers from obscurity outside the country in which it originated. If it is known at all, it is generally perceived only as a source for some of W. B. Yeats's works, a notion which intensifies the suspicion with which it is regarded. For although Yeats may be, as T. S. Eliot proclaimed him, the greatest modern lyric poet to write in English, he was known to dabble in strange matters, even to be deceived by charlatans; and his enthusiasm for the Irish heroic materials is perceived as somewhat bizarre. In fact, the Táin is no stranger or more esoteric than the Iliad; and it is certainly far less so than the Odyssey, in which one-eyed giants and monsters of every sort may appear just beyond the crest of each approaching wave. The comparison between the Irish prose narrative and these Classical epics may at first seem surprising. To determine whether or not there is any justification for including the Táin in this most august literary company, an inquiry into its form and action must be undertaken.

Although the scholars who deal with them do not see the stories of the Ulster cycle as partaking of the strange, religio-mythic nature of the Welsh Mabinogion, some readers, like W. P. Ker, feel that they do.' Others call them sagas, presumably because they are written in mixed prose and verse rather than entirely in verse, looking at first glance more like the Old Icelandic sagas or the Prose Edda than they do like the epics of Greece. Even the translator Cecile O'Rahilly calls them sagas.² However, the Old Man who speaks to the audience at the beginning of Yeats's play The Death of Cuchulain calls the Irish heroic tales "the old epics."³ Here again, some critics would agree with this classification, while others would deny that it applies.

Oral narratives are diverse in form, and it is impossible to isolate any one tale and label it as being of only this type or that. And yet certain broad categories can be defined which tell something about the works which embody them. All lengthy oral narratives come out of and are sophisticated and elaborate reworkings of the homely folk-tale, which is often observable just below the more polished surface of the mythological or magical story, the saga and the epic. But that is not necessarily to favor one form above the rest, since each performed a different function in the society from which it arose.

The first of these narrative types with which come have equated the Táin Bó Cuailnge is the mythological, magical story. Because of certain clearly supernatural elements of the Ulster Cycle, a group of prose narratives including the Táin about the kings and warriors of Ulster, some would equate this narrative with what Gwyn Jones describes as "the kind of folktale which its most recent and distinguished classifiers call tales of magic, and I without originality call wondertale."⁴ Jones places the Welsh Culhwch and Olwen within this category, although he makes abundantly clear that just as wondertale finds its way into the epic Beowulf, Culhwch and Olwen, a wondertale, is in part heroic and epical. Perhaps a better example of wondertale might be the Welsh Mabinogion, which H. Munro and N. Kershaw Chadwick say cannot "fairly be regarded as heroic."⁵ By "heroic" is generally meant an action which is within the realm of human ability although beyond the compass of most mortals, an act which is defined by superb human prowess rather than by a resort to the use of magic. Great feats of sorcery and shamanism glitter through the pages of the Mabinogion: Arawn, the king of the Underworld, exchanges forms with Pwyll, the central character of the First Branch of the Mabinogi, and sleeps unsuspected beside his wife for a year; in the Second Branch, "Branwen Daughter of Lyr," Bendigeidfran gives the King of Ireland Matholwch "a cauldron, and the virtue of the cauldron is this: a man of thine slain to-day, cast him into the cauldron, and by to-morrow he will be as well as he was at the best, save that he will not have power of speech"⁶ and in the Fourth Branch, Gwydion "made by magic twelve stallions and twelve greyhounds, each of them black but whitebreasted, and twelve collars and twelve leashes upon them.… "⁷ In these incidents the feats are more exciting and more memorable than the characters who performed them. And these are only a few examples of the enchantments which dominate the Mabinogion.

Nothing of this nature happens within the Táin proper; the hero Cúchulainn may slay an incredible number of men in one day, look more hideous in his battle-fury than any other warrior, and wield a weapon greater than any other, but he does these things by virtue of his extraordinary physical power, and not through casting spells. He does cast a spell at one point in order to convince Lóch, one of Medb's warriors, that he is bearded and therefore old enough to fight.⁸ However, his victory over Lóch is brought about by his magnificent human strength. But within the Ulster Cycle there are supernatural feats as bizarre as anything in the Welsh tales. The story of "The Sick-bed of Cú Chúilainn" recounts an episode in which the hero is enchanted and as a vision. In it two fairy women flog him; and Fann, the wife of the sea god Manannan mac Lir, is offered to him in exchange for his military services. His charioteer goes into the fairy world and describes its wonders to Cúchulainn, and the warrior undertakes and wins the battle. The tale ends with his abandonment by the fairy woman, and his re-entry into his normal state after his king's "people of skill" have "chanted wizard and fairy spells against him" and given him and his wife a "drink of forgetfulness," and after the sea god has shaken "his cloak between Cú Chúlainn and Fann so that they might never meet again throughout eternity."⁹ Some of the Ulster stories even more closely related to the Táin are likewise wondrous in nature, like "The Quarrel of the Two Pig-keepers and how the Bulls were Begotten." This tale tells of the origins of the two bulls, Finnbennach, whose desertion of Mebb's herd has left her less wealthy than her husband, and Donn Cuailnge, the Brown Bull of Cuailnge, which she goes cattle-raiding to obtain. The tale runs thus: two pig-keepers of the síd, or fairy-folk, are dismissed from their jobs after each tries to prove that his power is equal to that of the other through casting spells on the other's swine. They take the form of quarrelling birds, then successively water creatures, stags, warriors, phantoms, dragons and maggots, which are drunk from water by two cows who bear the two famous bulls. The metamorphoses of these shape-changers are not unlike those of Gwydion and Gilfaethwy in the Welsh "Math Son of Mathonwy." The Welsh characters are punished for raping Goewin by being placed under spells that make them take the forms of several different sorts of wild beasts, one type each year; they must couple and bring forth the young of each kind.

The Táin proper, however, contains no such comparable magic deed. Even Ferdia, whom some have identified as a sort of supernatural or mythological figure because of his unassailable horny skin, is discovered by Kuno Meyer to be wearing a tunic made of horn. The usual translation, Meyer says, is the culprit in causing this misunderstanding. It is not that his flesh cannot be hacked, but that "'There will not be found a hero's hand to hack warrior's flesh like that of Fer Diad.… "'¹⁰

Some dauntless critics like Eileen M. Bolton nevertheless see the Táin—and indeed the whole Ulster Cycle— as mythology in disguise, a sort of theogony for those who can understand its symbols. This perspective arises from the paucity of description of the deities in the Táin in contrast to the greater amount of discussion of the gods in other epics. To conclude that the Celts were not particularly religious is offensive to some scholars, who rather ingeniously assert that the priests who wrote down the old heroic stories were actually recording mythology—but euhemerizing it so that they would be able to save fine stories without preserving pagan beliefs. But as the Chadwicks point out in The Growth of Literature, this search for deities beneath the flesh of heroes has hardly been limited to Celtic studies. Their argument against the acceptance of such theories is especially important:

It was formerly an accepted article of faith and is still apparently believed by many scholars that Sigurdr (Siegfried) and Brynhildr themselves were products of fiction, though not fiction in the ordinary (modern) sense of the word. They were believed to have originated in personifications of light, who meet with their doom in conflict with the powers of darkness.… A similar origin has been claimed for the stories of Achilles, CúChulainn, and other heroes, though in the case of the former we believe that it is now generally abandoned, at least in this country. All these claims in our opinion spring from a fundamental misconception of the nature of heroic poetry and saga. The characters on whose behalf they are made are essentially and primarily heroic; but the claims are based on secondary works composed in later times in a more or less non-heroic milieu.¹¹[Italics mine]

W. P. Ker agrees that the notion of "dress[ing] up ideas or sentiments to play the part of characters" is not applicable to an heroic literature, which "will keep its hold upon common matters.…"¹² Gerald Murphy generally concurs with this point of view, although he does not make his case as strongly. About the lack of mythology displayed in the Irish stories he reminds the reader that there are mythological tales—the group of stories known as the Mythological Cycle—but he is not concerned about their limited revelations. This problem he shrugs off by saying that these tales "throw no more light on ancient Celtic religion than the Roman versions of Greek myths, unaided by Greek religious monuments, would throw on ancient Greek religion," a fact which does not mean that the Romans or the Greeks were necessarily lacking in highly developed beliefs and rituals; this absence of mythology should not reflect poorly upon the ancient Irish, either.¹³ James Carney is unwilling to assert too strongly that the heroes could not possibly be euhemerized gods, but he is also unwilling to make any really strong claim in favor of the theory. Only in the case of Medb is he willing to accept this hypothesis, since there was known to be a goddess by that name who by symbolic marriage conferred kingship on the rulers of Tara.¹⁴

Although it may now be unfashionable to see Achilleus as a god of light, mythological studies of the Irish materials seem to be the vogue. Bolton has written about the Táin in the Anglo-Welsh Review in two articles which provide an astronomical mythology of Cúchulainn "the sun-hero"¹⁵ and of his struggles. Her articles are ingenious and well-argued, but they seem to lose the heroic milieu in their flights to the stars. A more plausible argument is made by Charles Bowen in his "Great-Bladdered Medb: Mythology and Invention in the Táin Bó Cuailnge." He always keeps Queen Medb of Connacht in the fore, realizing that it is she with whom the reader must deal, while he investigates her mythic ancestry in order better to comprehend the epic queen. He never loses touch with the physical, humorous, scatological side of her characterization, the excesses of which are often boisterously funny, as he is willing to admit. The Chadwicks see the fantastic exploits of the hero Cúchulainn, too, as "intended as much to amuse as to impress"¹⁶; this opinion, of course, undercuts any notion of his god-likeness.

It is with the Irish Mythological Cycle, rather than with the heroic Ulster Cycle which contains the epic, that the Welsh stories may best be compared. The parallels between these two groups of tales have been pointed out by numerous scholars. Murphy says that "the Irish mythological tales remind one of the Welsh Mabinogion. …"¹⁷ And Alwyn Rees compares the Tuatha De Danann who dominate this cycle with the Children of Don who appear in their Welsh counterpart. He also points out correspondences of names in the two narratives and some "broad similarities between some of the stories on either side," while he denies any relationship between the Ulster Cycle and the Mabinogion.¹⁸ The gods which the mythologists seek in the Ulster Cycle appear, Murphy says, in the account of the Battle of Moytura in this Mythological Cycle; and the comparisons that he draws in describing the appearance of the Irish pantheon apply to the Greek and Teutonic stories as well as the Welsh accounts. "Its theme, a battle in which the Tuatha De Donann defeat the Formoiri, is reminiscent of Greek traditions concerning the defeat inflicted on Cronus and his Titans by Zeus and the Olympian gods, or of Scandinavian traditions concerning wars between Aesir and Vanir."¹⁹ For example, Snorri Sturlson's Prose Edda, in which Gylfi is informed about the doings of the gods, is closer to the Mythological tales than to the story of the cattle-raiding queen and the hero who defends Ulster's Brown Bull.

Another test which may be applied to an oral narrative, in order to determine whether or not the wondertale is a dominant element in it, is to examine how far it veers toward romance. The Welsh wondertales' offspring are the Arthurian romances, and there must therefore be something of the romance in them for them to bring it forth. The Finn Cycle, another group of Irish narratives, contains the story of Diarmuid and Grainne which, Jan de Vries says, "reminds us of the Welsh story of Tristan," but "one may … wonder if there is any question here of a love that might be called 'romantic'." That even such an apparently romantic story might not be romantic he suggests by calling to mind the "Ulster story of Deirdre [which] can give us an idea of the true nature of such a love. In the Irish stories this love is indeed no romanticism, but a tragic reality."²⁰ Raymond Cormier compares Cúchulainn himself to Yvain, concluding that the Irish hero is absolutely not a "romantic lover. He is more akin to Achilles, to Beowulf, even to Roland, whereas Yvain's near cognates are Erec, Lancelot, Perceval, Gauvain and others."²¹ And he makes this comparison in light of that most nearly romantic of Cúchulainn's adventures, "The Wasting-Sickness of Cú Chúlainn."

Certain essential characteristics of the wondertale, then, do not appear in the Táin Bó Cuailnge. The fantastic and mythological elements of this sort of narrative are not to be found in the heroic Táin, which describes an essentially human reality. Character is all-important to the Táin; in fact, both its shape and texture grow out of the characters of Cúchulainn, Medb and Ailill and a few others. And though a few of the elements of romance can be found within the Ulster Cycle, they are at best subsidiary to the stories' heroic milieu. Like the Prose Edda, however, the Táin's form is a mixture of verse and prose, and the prose tales which make up the Mabinogion bear more resemblance to the Táin than to the heroic poetry of other peoples when they appear on the printed page; for as well as being written mostly in prose, the verses which are scattered throughout the Irish narrative are stanzaic and varied rather than conforming to a single standard heroic line.

A look at the Táin in juxtaposition with the Icelandic sagas seems to disclose a more likely analogy for it. The form—the mixture of verses with prose—is the same in both, and both are definitely heroic. Murphy provides a concise definition for heroic literature. He says that it is "aristocratic in outlook":

As virtues it recognizes loyalty, prowess, and fulfilment of one's word.… It idealizes its heroes, yet remains fundamentally realistic: those heroes are made of flesh and blood; their success or failure depends more on character and action than on accident or magic, though fate and the gods may be regarded as inscrutable and yet necessary factors in life.… Description of the ceremony of court life, of the interior of palaces, and of the ornament of clothes and weapons, is universal in heroic literature.²²

Scholars as sage as the Chadwicks consistently refer to the Táin Bó Cuailnge as a saga, presumably making this judgment mostly on the basis of form. De Vries says:

Irish "heroic epic" can hardly be discussed without a glance at the Icelandic saga. Both are, in regard to their form, so remarkably similar that the thought at once arises that there must be a close kinship, perhaps even a close connexion. For both are prose stories in which stanzas have been inserted, which have the character partly of lyrics, partly of dialogues. In both cases the almost obvious view that the prose stories have been dissolved from an older poetic form, the remnants of which are still scattered throughout the story, can be considered to be correct.²³

But these similarities do not imply a close relationship between the two types of narrative, because, as de Vries notes, the poetry that is mixed with the prose serves entirely different functions within the two forms. (And he goes on to point out that when the poetry is excluded from the comparison, "the similarity of the Irish and Icelandic prose story is really not very great."²⁴) The difference is that the verses serve an ornamental function in the Irish tales, whereas the stanzas in at least the older Icelandic sagas are scaldic²⁵ in nature, and rather than decorating the prose they confirm that what it presents is true.²⁶ The Chadwicks classify two types of poems in the Táin: those "dealing with situation or emotion, and consisting wholly or mainly of speeches,"²⁷ as well as "many which are of an informative (antiquarian) character, consisting largely of catalogues."²⁸

And if the two narrative forms, the Icelandic and the Irish, are apparently similar but in reality quite different, the tales which they contain are quite obviously constructed in a dissimilar manner. The Táin Bó Cuailnge concerns a single event: the cattle raid and its outcome; the Icelandic sagas record the actions of several generations. A single folk tale could well comprise the Táin's basis, although it is embellished by other subsidiary tales. But, as Jones indicates, "the nature of the saga," on the contrary, "is to proceed by means of linked sections in a chronological and genealogical way, so that no one folk tale could underlie it in its entirety."²⁹ For instance, in the Laxdaela Saga,³⁰ the action begins with the settling of Iceland, followed by a brief account of several generations of a particular family in the Laxdale River valley. The main story begins with the birth of Olaf the Peacock, the bastard son of one of the family members, to a captive Irish princess. The story continues with Olaf s son Kjartan, who becomes involved in a blood feud with his cousin over a woman. Both are murdered, and after many more deaths the feud peters out and the story ends. There are, obviously, many incidents in this saga; and they are organically and chronologically bound tightly together in a way that the Ulster Cycle's tales are not. Each of the tales in the Irish group could stand on its own, although of course it would lack some of its richness if extricated from the Cycle.

The Icelandic sagas are family chronicles interested in preserving the history of the clans who settle in Iceland; the Táin is concerned with the doings of two kings and their heroes, all of whom live simultaneously and have the advantage of a tradition which has long existed on the island where they live. The purpose of the Icelandic sagas is to structure such a tradition; de Vries says that "every family is proud of the row of its acestors who have established and enhanced the prestige and the power of the family."³¹ The Táin records the heroic deeds of two kingdoms rather than those of a single family and its enemies. There are, of course, genealogies in the Táin Bó Cuailnge, but they are only indirectly concerned with the action, whereas they inform it intrisically in the Icelandic sagas.

In matters of love, the Icelandic and the Irish narratives appear to be more similar. If the Irish love stories are far more tragic than romantic, the Icelandic sagas reveal a love that is even more so. In Njal's Saga, to take just one example, there is a story in which Gunnar marries Hallgerd against all advice, and out of petty revenge she costs him his life. And if the Irish stories are non-romantic, this relationship is anti-romantic. The involvement between Gunnar and Hallgerd begins only after he has gone to the Althing in the ornate clothing that reflects a courtly attitude which is catastrophic in this society.

Such motifs point to one of the greatest differences between the Irish and the Icelandic narratives. The Icelandic sagas provide something of a code for aristocratic behavior, by showing men's triumphs as well as their downfalls. The Irish tales of the Ulster Cycle provide no fine example of kingship or of aristocratic behavior; Conchobor, Medb and Ailill are seriously flawed and at times despicable, and scenes of the doings of the court, such as "Bricriu's Feast," reveal little that one might label as "manners." What the Táin shows, instead, is Cuchulainn, the ultimate hero, who can only be admired, not emulated, and who is so thoroughly isolated an individual that his errors are not even particularly useful warnings for others. There is no intention here of suggesting that the Icelanders who are presented in the sagas are ordinary mortals, although they certainly live in a far more mundane sphere than the Irish heroes; they are "great figures of a great past."³² Scholes and Kellogg say:

Lionel Trilling has said that all characters in fiction, even Priam and Achilles, exist by reason of their observed manners. This may be so, but Achilles is not presented in a context of manners to the same extent that Gunnar and Njal are.… It would make no sense to say that Achilles was well- or ill-bred, or that he was prosperous. These considerations are irrelevant in his case. They would be descriptions of manners in a world in which manners are not really significant. But in the world of the saga they are significant because the saga-man or the saga tradition requires that they be so.³³

A code of manners, then, is more carefully drawn in the sagas.

Nevertheless, it should not be construed that the Irish narratives provide no display of deportment or of excellent conduct. As the Chadwicks point out, in his fight with the cattle-raiders from Connacht, "CúChúlainn's conduct to his opponents is uniformly chivalrous"—more so than that of the Greek hero. "He spares the life of Fraech in his first encounter, and will not attack Nad-Cranntail, who has come against him without proper weapons. He frequently declares that he will not slay charioteers, messengers, and persons unarmed."³⁴ But Cúchulainn's actions here are presented, like his other feats, for admiration, not for emulation, since he is the exceptional man in this matter as in others, and not the norm.

Because these two narrative forms are unlike on this level, it may be surprising that one element which appears to be closer to the magic of the wondertale than to codes of behavior is the same in the Táin and in one Icelandic saga. Cúchulainn's "warp-spasm"—that strange physical contortion that he undergoes in his battle-fury—has a parallel "in a story from an Icelandic saga. The Viking Egill Skallagrimsson had similar berserk fits of rage.… "³⁵ But although these two contortions may be the same on the surface, one wonders whether or not they may in reality be as different from one another as the alternating passages of verse and prose in the two narrative types. Egill's berserk fury can be retraced to the god Odin, who had only one eye and was the deity who ruled berserk heroes.³⁶ Cúchulainn's transformation, on the other hand, is more likely to arise from the exaggerating imagination of the Irish storyteller. Before he goes out to fight, the narrative goes,

The … warp-spasm seized Cúchulainn, and him into a monstruous 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 to 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 wierdly 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. (p. 150)

The description continues for another few pages. The her6's grimace is surely terrible and terrifying; the beautiful youth in his battle-fury is hideous to look upon. And that horrifying ugliness seems to be exactly the point of this fanciful description. The Chadwicks say that the "superhuman prowess attributed to heroes is … conventional, … due to … hero-worship in the modern sense and the tendency to exaggeration stimulated thereby,"³⁷ an explanation which certainly sounds plausible.

The Táin, then, is no more closely related to the Icelandic saga than it is to the Welsh wondertale or to any species of religious mythology. The love relationships in the Icelandic sagas do resemble those in some of the stories from the Ulster Cycle, but in form, plot and social function the two narrative types differ. And the saga may cover many years, while the Táin Bó Cuailnge takes place in only a few months.

But if the Táin Bó Cuailnge is neither wondertale, mythic story nor saga, what is it? Many scholars have called it an epic. Thomas Kinsella, with more or less nonchalance, calls it "the oldest vernacular epic in Western literature" (p. vi). Before identifying it as an epic, I would like to offer a brief definition of this form. First of all, an epic is a long, traditional narrative which may contain humorous elements but is nevertheless serious in intent. It is usually delivered in nonstanzaic verse. It is concerned with conflict among men which takes the form of combat. One central hero dominates the epic, and he is both a man and a cultural representative, although he is not a typical representative of his society. The epic may contain many episodes, but it centers around an isolated event—like the playing out of the "wrath of Achilles" of the homecoming of Odysseus. This central event and the hero's role in it illuminate the finest part of the spirit of the people, and the hero is usually triumphant in the end. (The Classical epic is, of course, the model for this definition, which is at odds with certain elements of Gilgamesh and of late Medieval epics.) The Táin seems generally to fit this description.

Immediately a difficulty arises because the Táin Bó Cuailnge is in prose; although it contains older passages in verse, these are stanzaic and have an ornamental rather than a narrative function. Only the "rhetorics" which are characterized by archaic, difficult language and appear in the oldest of the tales are nonstanzaic.³⁸" Of course no piece of literature fits tidily into a critical category; but this prose character must be noted as a rather obvious exception to the rule of epic form. De Vries says that for the Irish, the telling in prose was a matter of simple preference. Some scholars, he notes, have proposed that the stories might have been given prose form because their complex, peculiar, stanzaic verse forms were unsuitable for narrating epics; but he sensibly argues with this point of view by asking "whether a way out would not have been found by choosing a simpler verse-form, if a real need for poetic treatment had existed," since the Irish were skillful technicians in a variety of verse forms.³⁹ Another hypothesis might be suggested. The difficulty of transcribing stories from an oral to a written form before the time of the tape recorder has been noted by many scholars. If the flow of the story is slowed to a pace convenient for transcription, the teller is severely hampered in his activity. Perhaps the redactors found the story easier to put into writing if it could be told in prose, saving the original poetic form of only the most lyrical passages. But that the Táin has come into prose from a verse origin is not particularly important to this discussion, which seeks to deal with the narrative as it exists rather than with an analysis of its historical development. Even if its poetic beginnings are to be accorded importance, they do not make a particularly strong case for a similarity in form between the Irish narratives and the Greek epics.

The tone of many passages of the Táin Bó Cuailnge is likewise different from that of the classical epics. If the Táin is too heroic and too much of this world to make it a wondertale, and if it is too far divorced from society per se to be like the saga, it is for some too earthy, too rough-and-tumble in tone to be truly epical. The Chadwicks acknowledge this difference, and note that the modern reader is likely to be offended by the "lack of restraint" these stories show. They say that "the dignified and fastidious tone which prevails in Teutonic and Greek heroic poetry is not generally characteristic of Irish heroic saga," and often "the love of the grotesque and the fantastic and of rough horseplay throws all sense of dignity to the winds."⁴⁰

And to compare the story of a cattle raid to that of a war fought over the most beautiful woman in the world may seem at first to be a travesty. But both Ker and de Vries indicate that tales of cattle-raids are indigenous to heroic societies, and de Vries even locates this activity in Homer: the condition for the bestowing of Neleus' daughter is that the oxen of Iphiclea be taken out of Phylace.⁴¹ Nor is the Táin Bó Cuailnge the only Irish tale of a cattle raid; it is one of the most common forms of Irish heroic story.

The Irish epic may seem to lack classical propriety in its choice of subject matter, but the distance placed between the reader and the heroes is basically the same in the Homeric epic and the Táin. Both are dramatically presented, thoughts of the characters being revealed through dialogue, or occasionally in monologue. These speeches can be quite revealing of what the character experiences. One example is Helen's statement in the Iliad that

"I wish that on that day when my mother first
     bore me
the foul whirlwind of the storm had caught
  me away and swept me
to the mountain, or into the wash of the sea
      deep-thundering
where the waves would have swept me away
 before all these things had happened.
Yet since the gods had brought it about that
     these vile things must be,
I wish I had been the wife of a better man
  than this is,
one who knew modesty and all things of
 shame that men say.
But this man's heart is no steadfast thing, nor
     yet will it be so
ever hereafter; for that I think he shall take
     the consequences.
But come now, come in and rest on this chair,
     my brother,
since it is on your heart beyond all that the
     hard work has fallen
for the sake of dishonored me and the blind
     act of Alexandros,
us two, on whom Zeus set a vile destiny, so
    that hereafter
we shall be made into things of song for men
    of the future."⁴²

And as Carney shows, Medb's "Humanistic observation" that "'Everyone … who parts here from his dear one and his friend will curse me, for it is I who have gathered this host',"⁴³ provides a similar insight. But sympathy for a character never reaches the point of empathy, partly because to empathize with an epic hero smacks of something hardly less than hubris on the part of the reader. The hero is a superior man at his greatest. And the reality in which he acts is far removed from the reader's. If there are cattle-raids and abductions, they are not simply that; the Donn Cuailnge is a great bull, perhaps even a supernatural one, and Helen is a superlatively beautiful and desirable queen, and the daughter of a god. The tones of the two epics are similarly lofty in keeping with their presentations of the great men whose stories they tell.

The actions of the Táin and the Iliad are surprisingly similar. In the first place, the praxis in each case arises from the protagonist. Scholes and Kellogg say that this circumstance is in the nature of epic: the "plot is inherent in the concept of the protagonist, but that concept is not realized in the narrative until this character is expressed through action."⁴⁴ In both instances, only one incident in the middle of the hero's life is spoken of: in the case of Achilleus, his anger,⁴⁵ and in that of Cúchulainn, his solitude. The first of these assertions, that the anger of Achilleus is the subject-matter of the Iliad, has been made many times. The opening lines of the epic support it.

But the assumption that the Táin Bó Cuailnge is about the solitude of Cuchulainn is more implicit. There is no statement directly to this point in the text, but the action bears it out. Because the men of Ulster are incapacitated by their "pangs" at the beginning of the story, Cuchulainn must face the Connacht forces single-handed. He is accompanied only by his charioteer as he meets, in single combat, one of Medb's followers each day. The final stage, and the culmination, of his solitude is his combat with his friend and foster-brother, Ferdia, whom he kills. After this episode, while he lies almost mortally wounded and outside the battle, the forces of Ulster come to his aid and the battle is won. A curious parallel between the two stories is evident; the death of the friend, at the hand of the hero or as good as at his hand, is the turning point of both actions. In the Iliad, Achilleus is the only hero who is not fighting for most of the battle, while in the Táin Bó Cuailnge Cuchulainn is the only hero who is fighting, almost until the end. And whereas in the Iliad the turning point, the death of Patroklos, brings Achilleus back into the battle, in the Táin the death of Ferdia results in Cúchulainn's removal from it. Rhys Carpenter comments upon the isolation of the Greek hero, too. He asks, "who can say whether his famous 'wrath' is cause or consequence of this isolation?"⁴⁶

Neither of these narratives brings the hero to his death, although the deaths of the heroes must come soon thereafter to both: to Achilleus because he has killed Hektor, and to Cúchulainn because of his arming by the druid Cathbad.⁴⁷ The stories end with the heroes triumphant, the Iliad with the truce for the burial of the dead and the attendant funeral games, and the Táin Bó Cuailnge with the exit from the battle-field, in which "the Connachtmen went back to their own country, and the men of Ulster went back to Emain Macha full of their great triumph" (p. 253). In neither case, however, has the hero regained for his people what has been stolen from them. Helen is still among the Trojans, and the Donn Cuailnge is dead. The triumph in both cases has to do with something else. As Scholes and Kellogg have commented, in the Iliad the funeral of Hektor "represents the triumph of Achilles over his greatest antagonist, himself. It represents the final purgation of his accumulated rage.… The narrative has reached equilibrium."⁴⁸ The Iliad is concerned with Helen only secondarily. The Táin's interest in the Brown Bull of Cuailnge is more in the foreground. He is captured at the beginning of the narrative, and at its end he dies. Nevertheless, Cúchulainn's victory is the culmination of the narrative.

The men of the enemy—of Troy and of Cruachan Aí—are portrayed, curiously enough, far more intimately than the heroes from Greece or from Ulster. The Greeks are seen in their tents, but the Trojans are seen in their city, even in domestic scenes with their families. The Ulstermen, likewise, are shown mostly on the field of battle. There is an episode when their daily lives are revealed, and that is in Fergus' tales of Cúchulainn's boyhood deeds. But the revelation of the Ulster court is of something that happened in the past, and it lacks the emotional intensity of Hektor's farewell to his wife. Fergus' story is an entertainment given before the campfire of the Connachtmen. Medb and Ailill are first met, however, in the intimacy of their bed, and this is the scene which opens the Táin. The variety of dimensions in which their enemies are shown accentuates the sense of the single dimension in which the principal heroes of the two epic, Achilleus and Cúchulainn, act.

The only parts of the Iliad which seem to have no parallel in the Táin are the invocation to the Muse and the Diomed. There is a story, however, which Kinsella includes with his translation of the Táin that shows something similar to the invocation: a reclaiming of the lost story of the cattle raid through supernatural means. Muirgen, the son and student of the poet Senchan, chants to the gravestone of Fergus, telling it that if it were the hero instead of a rock the Táin could be recovered. Fergus then appears and chants the story to him (pp. 1-2). And so before each narrative begins there is a relationship set up among the gods, the heroic action and the poetry which speaks of it. But these two stories do not deal with the casting of spells or primarily with sacred matters; the supernatural presents itself as an integral part of the tales, but the heroic matters about which the Muse sings, or which Fergus—who is no ordinary shade, but that of a hero—relates, are the heart of them.⁴⁹ The other "missing element" in the Táin Bó Cuailnge is the Diomed, in which a foil to the character Achilleus is established. Diomedes is a fine warrior, but only through the intervention of a god can he perform the sort of feats that Achilleus can do out of his own heroic strength. The Myrmidon hero's greatness is thereby magnified. But the price of this interruption in the narrative is that the action leaves Achilleus for so long that the fabric of the epic is loosened; the gain in characterization brings about a raveling, which may be construed as a weakening in structure. The focus of the Táin Bó Cuailnge is far less shifting; all the events before the entry of Cuchulainn lead directly to his emergence, and once he appear his presence directs all the action.

The Táin is more, then, than the "centre-piece of the Ulster Cycle" (p. xii). It is an epic which closely resembles the great Homeric epic, the Iliad, and the other stories of the Cycle buttress it rather than control it. They give the origins of many of the events of the epic, but they do not determine its outcome. The story of "The Pangs of Ulster" explains the incapacity of the Ulstermen at the coming of the Connacht cattle-raiders, and "The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu" tells how Fergus and his men happen to be fighting against Cúchulainn instead of being by his side. Likewise the tale "How Cúchulainn was Begotten" helps to reveal the reason why he is favored by certain gods in the battle. "The Quarrel of the Two Pig-keepers and how the Bulls were Begotten" gives not only the origin of the two great bulls, but also provides a thematic parallel for the argument between Medb and Ailill and possibly even indicates the origin of their quarrel. And like the subsidiary legend of the death of Achilleus, the story of Cúchulainn's death completes a story that needed finishing but whose ending was not appropriate to the epic about the hero.

With so much similarity between the two epics one wonders whether or not the redactor who transcribed the Táin Bó Cuailnge might have been familiar with the Iliad and integrated classical motifs into the Irish tale. De Vries feels that some classical influence is possible:

The clergy's wide knowledge of classical literature suggests that the author or the successive redactors of the Tain legend also drew on it for their motifs.… [The Táin] shows this influence in the careful drawing of the characters, in the dramatic beginning of the fighting, and especially in the description of various earlier events which—with the technique so well known from the Odyssey—seems to overtake the events in the course of the story. It is possible that classical influence is also shown in the strongly rhetorical dialogues, which for that matter are among the most favored stylistic devices in Irish literature.⁵⁰

This possibility of classical influence does not sound unlikely, although it may be refuted—along with Rudolf Thurneysen's idea that the Táin was greatly influenced by the Aeneid—by Carney's objection: the Táin is very much a part of the entire Irish tradition of oral literature, pretty well in its entirety.⁵¹ And even if there is classical influence, there is no reason to ascribe all the excellences of the Táin Bó Cuailnge to it. If the "classisized" motifs and structures of the Táin are integral to it and function organically within it, it is perhaps more useful critically to observe the Iliad and the Táin as analogues rather than as source and byproduct.

The heroic poetry of one people is not like that of another because of "influences" on one side and imitation on the other. Rather, all heroic ages are, to some extent, alike. C. M. Bowra's study of the characteristics of such literature shows the universality of the essential ingredients of an heroic poem. All heroic poetry, he says, "is inspired by the belief that the honour which men pay to some of their fellows is owed to a real superiority … [which] he [the hero] must realize … in action." Furthermore, this hero "gives dignity to the human race by showing of what feats it is capable. …"⁵² The poetry itself "works in conditions determined by special conceptions of manhood and honour. It cannot exist unless men believe that human beings are in themselves sufficient objects of interest and that their chief claim is the pursuit of honour through risk."⁵³ Many societies, then, have produced heroic poetry when they passed through phases of history in which they held heroic attitudes.

Despite its prose form, then, the Táin is a part of the epic tradition. It is the story of the central event in the life of one hero, who dominates the story. The tone of the Táin Bó Cuailnge is heroic, though not classically restrained; but the action is of sufficient magnitude, and the characterization is of sufficient excellence and nobility to overshadow this lack of restraint. The Táin's action is in many ways parallel to that of the Iliad, and the heroes of the two poems show many similarities. The relationship among gods, men and poetry is im. portant to both, and both have subsidiary legends which are essential for an understanding of the two actions. The Tain Bo Cuallnge is far more than an exotic curiosity; it is in the mainstream of the epic tradition.

The Epic Hero

The Irish hero, Cúchulainn, like his Greek counterpart, Achilleus, is unlike any other warrior in his epic. Both are set apart from their fellows: Cúchulainn fights while all the men of Ulster lie helpless from their pangs, and Achilleus sulks in his tent while the Greeks fight and die in a raging battle. The movement of the Irish epic is, in part, the transition of Cúchulainn from a state of solitude into unity with his community. The gods who preside over the fray, as well as the men who enact it, have a relationship with the hero that is unlike that with any other man.

If the Iliad is on the one hand the story of the anger of Achilleus, it is on the other the manifestation of the working out of Zeus's will. The reader's interest is more on the side of Achilleus, but without the gods and their doings, there would be no Iliad; after all, the war was the result of a beauty contest among goddesses. To understand the role of the hero in an epic, then, one must also see him in relation to the gods, since he dwells on the middle ground between the Otherworld and day-to-day secular life. As Scholes and Kellogg say, "epic … stands midway between sacred myth, a story whose events take place entirely outside of the profane world of historical men and events, and secular narrative, a story whose events take place entirely within the profane world.… "⁵ In fact, the tension between those two extremes defines the hero, for he is partially divine at its outset and has throughout a special relationship with the deities. On the other hand, his people depend upon him utterly at some point in the fray. And the hero is himself not entirely of his people; he is somehow godlike in his powers and ancestry—many of the warriors in the Iliad are tagged "godlike." And he is isolated from his people at some stage, suffering under the burden of his own actions.

All these distinctions regarding the epic hero, and here specifically the Táin's hero, Cúchulainn, hang upon the relationship between the warriors who fight the battles and the gods who are never far away. If the course of the Iliad is established by the Judgement of Paris, the Táin unfolds—apparently quite directly—from the "bad blood between Ochall Ochne, the King of the sid in Connacht, and Bodb, King of the Munster sid."⁵⁵ The quarrel between their two pig-keepers, who become the two bulls on whose account the Tain is fought, is resolved only at the very end of the epic, where the two senselessly destroy one another. Like the Ulster warriors, the Donn Cuailnge is the victor, but his own death after the conflict means that nothing material is gained on the one side or preserved on the other, since the Tain's prize no longer exists. What is strange about this matter is that these two sid pig-keepers and their kings seem to be as unable to fulfill their own destinies without the aid of men as the Greek goddesses are unable to know who is most beautiful without consulting the opinion of a mortal. The gods seem to depend upon human strength for conclusions to their dilemmas; without the Táin it seems that the two sid pig-keepers would have persisted forever in their mutual persecution. If man's weakness in comparison to the gods is that he exists in the context of time rather than that of eternity, this potential for an ending seems to be a capacity that the gods must come to man to borrow.

At one point there is a reference to Medb's promise that the two bulls will be brought together to battle it out. Diarmait comes from Conchobor to the Connacht camp in order to request that the King and Queen of that province release the plundered cattle, make retribution for the damage that they have caused and arrange the confrontation of the bulls. Maine, the queen's son, says that his mother will not agree to this arrangement (p. 163), however, and so the war must go on among the people. As in the Iliad, destiny seems to have arranged a situation that no combat can decide, though a longer struggle can accomplish at least that much.

This situation is clarified by the Morrigan's speech, early in the Táin, to the Brown Bull. She settles near him on a stone and says:

'Dark one are you restless
     do you guess they gather
to certain slaughter
     the wise raven
groans aloud
     that enemies infest
the fair fields

      ravaging in packs
learn I discern
     rich plains
softly wavelike
     baring their necks
greenness of grass
     beauty of blossoms
on the plains war
     grinding heroic
hosts to dust
     cattle groans the Badb
the raven ravenous
     among corpses of men
affliction and outcry
       and war everlasting
raging over Cuailnge
     death of sons
death of Kinsmen
     death death!'
(p. 98)

The bull responds to these verses by tearing a trench through the ground as he moves away, and by killing two thirds of "three and fifty boys who always played on his back" (p. 100); the message from this war-goddess awakens the malevolent powers of the bull.

The Táin Bó Cuailnge is not the only part of the Ulster Cycle where this need exists for the arm of a warrior to settle a conflict between immortals. Raymond Cormier points out that in "The Wasting-Sickness of Cu Chulainn," "the kings of the Otherworld go to war but cannot win without the aid of a human (perhaps because … they are only feeble shadows?)"⁵⁶ In both cases the principal human involved is Cúchulainn, perhaps indicating that this greatest of Irish heroes has a special relationship to the gods. The Chadwicks say that the "want of power" on the part of the gods is a characteristic common to Greek and Irish heroic tales. "They are scarcely more than a match for great kings and heroes. The Dagda has to call Ailill to his assistance against Ethal Anbuail; and his success in the end is chiefly due to his human ally.… "⁵⁷

And the gods, of course, have much to do with the battles of men. They appear at several points in the Táin, usually to aid the Ulstermen. After the episode in which Cuchulainn sees through Ailill's attempt to trick him with Finnabair, their daughter, and Tamun the fool, certain gods manifest themselves. After Cúchulainn has screamed his war-cry, "demons and devils and goblins of the glen and fiends of the air replied, so hideous was the call he uttered on high. Then the Nemain stirred the armies to confusion" (p. 141).⁵⁸ A few lines later Lug mac Ethnenn, who identifies himself as Cuchulainn's "father from the side," comes to heal the hero's wounds and to give him a healing sleep. After the men of Ulster arise from their pangs, the Nemain appears again, bringing "confusion on the [Connacht] armies and a hundred of their number fell dead" (p. 223). Before the last battle begins, the Morrigan speaks terror-inspiring verses from her situation between the camps of Ulster and Connacht, which verses end, "Hail Ulster! / Woe men of Ireland! / Woe to Ulster! / Hail men of Ireland!" But she is not unprejudiced: "This last ('Woe to Ulster') she said in Connachtmen's ears only, to hide the truth from them." The text continues that the "same night Net's wives, Nemain and the Badb, called out to the men of Ireland near the field at Gairech and Irgairech, and a hundred warriors died of fright" (pp. 238-39). Apart from these appearances, these gods are mentioned several times, especially in verses. The gods, then, like the gods in the Iliad, exist within the same reality as the men. Especially at the time of the greatest battle in each epic the boundaries between the world and the heavens are broken down. And the supernatural parents of the most important heroes come to care for their sons.

But although the Irish gods are involved in the fray as much as their Greek counterparts are, even to the extent of choosing sides and causing deaths, there is a great deal of difference in the bardic attitude toward them. The Irish gods are aloof, unfathomable and universally awe-inspiring. They and their foibles are never the subjects of laughter. Their motives are their own; there is no attempt to show them in conversation with one another or to represent them when they are not directly involved in the action of the epic. There are, of course, stories about some of the gods which do reveal their more anthropomorphic sides, but in the Táin only Lug and the Morrigan are presented in human shape, and they retain their superiority to even the greatest hero. The reader of the Táin is influenced in his admiration of Cúchulainn because he is favored by the gods. This favor from the deities, one should remember, is actively sought by Achilleus in the Iliad. Cedric Whitman says that "he will have 'honor from Zeus,' by which he means he will risk all.… "⁵ Yet in the Greek epics, where the gods may be silly or even cowardly, "Agamemnon, Diomede, Odysseus, Ajax and Achilles set the standard by which the gods are judged."⁶⁰ In the Táin Bó Cuailnge this basis for evaluating the behavior of the gods does not apply; the Celtic gods, at least in the epic itself, seem to be above human evaluation.

The epic hero, then, is not one of the gods; but neither is he entirely one with his people. Some scholars have suggested that he may be a character from folklore, from some favorite story, who has been introduced into an historical or semi-historical tale. This theory seeks to explain the discrepancy between the naturalistic milieu of the epic and its more fantastic elements. For example, de Vries indicates that although the Táin might have occurred, its hero is not even from Irish folklore; he is Gaulish in origin." Scholes and Kellogg agree that "epic narrative … takes actual historical persons, places, or events, and combines them with characters derived from myth in a fictional fusion.… Thus, in Beowulf in the Chanson de Roland, and in the Nibelungenlied we find combinations of this order, in which a more or less recognizable Hygelac, or Charlemagne, or Atilla is found side by side with a mytho-fictional Beowulf, Roland, or Siegfried.… "⁶² One tends to agree with the Chadwicks, who feel that inferences of this nature are unjustified⁶³; they seem to be especially wary of this argument's tendency to lead on to celestially mythological theorizing.⁶⁴ Rather, they feel that elements of folktales tend to be attracted to the heroes: "if the hero gains in popularity—which is perhaps due in the main to poets—he may come before very long to be credited with new exploits, which seem chiefly to be borrowed from folktales and stories of earlier heroes, presumably because this was the material most ready to hand."⁶⁵

There is something to be said for both sides of this argument, but I believe that if one is cautious in his judgments he may be able to find a middle ground. The hero is different from his fellow warriors, and he does seem at times to be composed more of the filaments of folk tale than the flesh and blood of an historical personage. He is not an elemental deity, but neither is he as human as his comrades-in-arms, at least at the outset of the epic. Whatever the origin of his superhuman characteristics may be, they do exist. And at the same time, the character whom they adorn is far more human than a figure from a mythological tale.

The ordinary barriers between the earth and the heavens, between the world of men and the world of the gods, though, are not absolute in the epic. These narratives represent points in the lives of humans and deities in which this limit is in a state of flux. The world of man may be entirely naturalistic at one moment, and then it may at the next become a setting for the entry of a god. Zeus, in the Iliad, controls the situation, now allowing the gods to join in the battle, and now restraining them. The Táin Bó Cuailnge veils the mechanics of the movements of its gods with a fog of mystery.

Within the world of men, the hero is something of an outsider. Carpenter says that "like [Achilleus] himself, his folk the Myrmidons are a lonely race …, unrelated to Argives and Danaans and Achaens.…"⁶⁶ Scholes and Kellogg note further that in "Greece the archaeologists have succeeded in finding the golden Mycenae of Agamemnon and the sandy Pylos of Nestor, but Achilles and his Myrmidons have left no marks on the real world because they are not of it."⁶⁷ And whatever the history of his literary evolution may be, Cui-chulainn, too, is shown to be a different sort of being from the Ulstermen whose possession he defends.

Within the action of the Táin Cuchulainn manifests the traits of an outsider. His home is also obscure; the Chadwicks say that it is impossible to be sure where Cuchulainn's home was, and they indicate that because the Táin does not give this information it can be inferred that he lacked an Irish fort of his own.⁶⁸ That he is not from Conchobor's Ulster is made abundantly clear. One of the stories which Fergus relates of his boyhood deeds tells of the day on which he smashed Conall Cearnach's chariot-shaft with a stone. In reply to Conall's query as to why he did it, he replies: "'To test my hand and the straightness of my aim.… Now, since it is your Ulster custom not to continue a dangerous journey, go back to Emain…"' (p. 87). It is obvious from this statement that Ulster's customs are not Cúchulainn's. Later, when he and his charioteer are travelling through the Ulster countryside they see some deer. Cúchulainn asks, "'What are those nimble beasts there?"' (p. 90), a question that he surely would not have needed to put if he were familiar with this territory. But if he does not belong to Ulster, Medb says that his mother—who is Conchobor's, the king's, sister—does (p. 170). And at the end of the epic, Ailill and Medb make peace with Ulster and Cúchulainn (p. 253). His isolation begins with this distinction from his fellow warriors.

He is further differentiated from the rest of the Táin's characters by evidences of his superiority to them, which are to greater or lesser degrees the accoutrements of magic or of godlikeness. First, because of an offense against the wife of the Ulsterman Crunniuc—she was forced to race two chariot horses despite the onset of her labor pains—the men of Ulster were doomed to suffer the pangs of child-birth "for five days and four nights in their times of greatest difficulty" (p. 7). Since the Ulstermen, except for the exiles in Medb's army, have been taken by these "Pangs of Ulster" when attacked by the Connachtmen, Cúchulainn has to face the enemy alone until they recover. He is aided in the battle only by Lug, the god, and by the boy troop of Ulster, until the men arrive. Fergus explains the reason that Cúchulainn is immune from this disability: "'[it] never came to our women or our youths, or anyone not from Ulster—and therefore not to Cúchulainn or his father"' (p. 81). It should be noted that the father is not named here, but whether he is Lug or Sualdam, he is not of Ulster.

Two even stranger manifestations of Cúchulainn's singularity are his supernatural horses and the hero light that shines from him in his battle-fury. In these two particulars he is seen once again to have a great deal in common with Achilleus. His horses are born under the same mysterious circumstances that attend his own birth, and the story of their coming forth is so strange and complex that perhaps it should be recounted briefly here. Conchobor and his sister Deichtine stop for the evening in a house whose mistress is in labor. She bears a son, and the same night a mare in the stable throws twin foals. In the morning, however, everything but the boy and the foals has disappeared; and the king and his sister take the boy and the horses back to Emain Macha, where Deichtine undertakes the fostering of the baby. He dies in childhood, and his foster-mother grows thirsty from making a long lament for him. When she takes a drink, she accidentally swallows a small creature which is in the cup. That night the god Lug appears to her in a dream, telling her that she is pregnant with his child, and that the foals which they took from the enchanted house are to be raised along with him. As if matters were not already complicated enough, she is given in marriage to Sualdam mac Roich. She is so ashamed of going to bed with her new husband when she is already pregnant that she vomits away the pregnancy. She at last becomes pregnant again, apparently by Sualdam, and her son is Setanta, who later is given the name Cúchulainn (pp. 22-23).

There is another story in the Ulster Cycle, "The Death of Cúchulainn," in which these horses prove their supernatural natures. The Chadwicks draw from this tale and another in their account of the horses' origins: "in Bricriu's Feast …, they come from two different lochs and have just been caught. At his [Cúchulainn's] death they flee to their lochs; but one of them returns and defends his body, and afterwards makes its way home to his wife. It lays its head on Emer's lap to let her know what has happened.… "⁶⁹ In this story one of them, the Gray of Macha, furthermore refuses to come to the chariot-driver for harnessing, and when its master reproaches it, it weeps tears of blood onto Cúchulainn's feet.⁷⁰ This relationship of the hero to his horse is like that of Achilleus and Xanthos, which sorrowfully prophesies its master's death.⁷¹ This horse, too, is a part of the hero's inheritance, "which the sea-god gave his father at his wedding."⁷²"

Cúchulainn also has a "hero halo" or hero-light. It is described as "long and broad as a warrior's whetstone, long as a snout" (p. 153), and it is part of his "warp-spasm" that comes over him, the product of his battlefury, before he performs his greatest heroic feats. Murphy calls the recording of this feature a "primitive Indo-European" credence "reflected in … the Greek Iliad."⁷³ Carpenter, too, calls attention to Achilleus' "cloud of fire [which] blazes magically about his head."⁷⁴ These manifestations may be more a matter of poetic exaggeration of the great military valor of these two heroes than a supernatural manifestation, but it is important to note that they alone among their fellow warriors have the hero light.

And if Cúchulainn and his horses, like Achilleus and his, have these super-human characteristics, the two heroes also possess special weapons and shields. Cúchulainn fights in a dazzling fashion; his battle feats include:

the apple-feat—juggling nine apples with never more than one palm; the thunder-feat; the feats of the sword-edge and the sloped shield; the feats of the javelin and rope; the body-feat; the feat of Cat and the heroic salmon-leap; the pole-throw and the leap over a poisoned stroke; the noble chariot-fighter's crouch; the gae bolga; the spurt of speed; the feat of the chariot-wheel thrown on high and the feat of the shield-rim; the breath-feat, with gold apples blown up into the air; the snapping mouth and the hero's scream; the stroke of precision; the stunning-shot and the cry-stroke; stepping on a lance in flight and straightening erect on its point; the sickle-chariot; and the trussing of a warrior on the points of spear. (p. 34)

What some of these feats, like the apple feat, have to do with battle is obscure; perhaps they were intended to terrify the opponent by sheer displays of virtuosity. They are not as naturalistic modes of combat as are those described in the Iliad, although from time to time precise and credible accounts of wounding and killing are recorded in the Táin. At any rate, most of the best fighters in the Táin know most of these feats, and Ferdia, Cúchulainn's greatest opponent, has all of these feats, in addition to many of his own invention, except the gae bolga, since he studied the art of war under the same tutor that taught Cúchulainn. But the gae bolga makes all the difference. The exact nature of this weapon is not given in the Táin, but it seems to be used to disembowel the opponent—at least this is its effect upon both Conla, the hero's son, and upon Ferdia. The Chadwicks suggest that it might be a "forked spear."⁷⁵ Achilleus, as Carpenter indicates, likewise has a weapon which only he can use: "When at last he goes to war he takes with him his father's mighty ashen spear, which none but he among the warriors can lift,…"⁷⁶ And when he finishes Hektor, it is this instrument which accomplishes his aim.

The shield of Achilleus, with its detailed representation of war and peace, and with its divine crafting, is one of the most wonderful features of the Iliad. Cúchulainn's shield, although far less elaborately described in the Táin, may possess some shadow of the greatness of the one that Achilleus had. Cúchulainn's shield likewise is impossible for any enemy to pierce, and Alwyn Rees and Brinley Rees say that its iconography suggests that it is more than natural: "Cúchulainn had five wheels on his shield, which is particularly noteworthy when we remember that Achilles' shield was made in five layers … [possibly] representing the cosmos … "⁷⁷ The arming of the heroes, however, is directly connected with their early deaths. When Thetis agrees to get her son his immortal armor, she weeps and tells him that she will soon lose him since there is a prophecy that his death will follow closely upon Hektor's, and this armor will allow him to kill the Trojan, which would decide the war and win his fame (Iliad, XVIII. 95-96). Cúchulainn's armor is not immortal, but there is a prophecy made on the day that he accepts it: "if a warrior took up arms for the first time that day his name would endure in Ireland as a word signifying mighty acts, and stories about him would last forever" (p. 84). A similar prophecy is made on the day that he first steps into a chariot. Like Achilleus, he is forewarned about the doom which accompanies his arming, and he, too, is eager to accept it. He says, "'That is a fair bargain… If I achieve fame I am content, though I had only one day on earth"' (p. 85).

The hero, then, with his obscure origin, his hero-light and his horses, his weapons and his shield, and in the case of Cúchulainn, his special relationship with the gods—the story of his death has it that even the Morrigan wanted to protect him from his fall in battle—lives in a reality different from that of the lesser figures who surround him. Carpenter confirms this notion in respect to Achilleus: "Whatever his ultimate origin, Achilles must derive from a different realm from the severely practical Menelaos, the garrulous old politician Nestor, or for that matter all the other leading figures of the Achaean expeditionary force."⁷" The hero—Irish or Greek—can only be made one with his society through the poem which tells the story of his great feats, through which he becomes indigenous to their tribal memories. He may never be, like a character from Icelandic saga, anyone's physical ancestor, but he can become the ancestor to all the greatness in the culture which he has touched.

If, on the one hand, the hero must be integrated with his culture on one level, he must become completely a part of humanity on the other. His special relationship with the gods stems from his parentage. Cúchulainn's father, some versions of the Táin (including Kinsella's) have it, is the god Lug—and one remembers that Achilleus was the son of the Neriad Thetis. The case of the Myrmidon hero is not terribly unusual; in the Iliad many warriors—Sarpedon, Aeneas, and Eudoros, to name a few—have a god for one parent. The unusual thing is that, as Rhys Carpenter says, "both of Achilles' parents are superhuman, since his mother Thetis is a mermaid from the depths of the sea and his father Peleus bears the marks of a Märchen hero" [italics mine].⁷⁹ A Märchen, briefly, is a wonder-tale or motif of the fairy-tale sort, and its hero is a being typical of his milieu. Carpenter goes on at some length to demonstrate that both Peleus and his son are of the Märchen:

various familiar Marchen motifs cluster about him [Peleus].. In order to win his bride he clings fast to her while she … changes herself into lion and snake. Any son by her is predestined to become greater than his sire.… Peleus is the wielder of a wonderful weapon, the ashen spear which Achilles is to inherit.… Märchen heroes tend to stand out as lonely wanderers, as folk from far away or from nowhere.⁸⁰

Cúchulainn, too has a god for a parent in most versions of the story, but he is the only character in the Táin Bó Cuailnge who has one. The Chadwicks indicate that "most of the royal geneologies contain the names of gods, usually Lug or Nuadu, or both."⁸¹ In the Táin, however, the divine ancestry of the others is not mentioned. Some critics, like Cormier, warn the reader not to take it for granted that Lug is Cúchulainn's father, since the evidence of this relationship is not consistent.

I see no particular reason to doubt that he was sired by the god, however, since the only other option is to accept that he was actually the child of Dechtine and Sualdam. Kuno Meyer shows that the belief that Sualdam was the hero's father was a late interpolation:

I believe that a … mistake is responsible for the name, if not for the creation of another well-known figure of ancient Irish story-telling, that of the human father of Cúchulainn.… Now by itself mac soalte would mean 'well-nurtured son', and that this is actually the original phrase to which the name of the father may be traced is proved.…⁸²

Even if his father is Sualdam, though, and not Lug, the Märchen nature of his parenting still persists. For this Sualdam, it seems, is no average man. When the Ulster hosts arise from their pangs, and Sualdam hears that his son is lying wounded after his many single combats with Connachtmen, he sets up a cry at his son's behest to arouse the warriors to combat. Conchobor and his druids consider what he has said, but in his haste to effect an attack he falls over his shield and beheads himself. If he were only a man this beheading would put a stop to his urgings, but when the head is brought back to Sualdam's house it speaks its warning once more (pp. 218-19). This scene recalls the severed head of Bendigeidfran which directs his men in the Mabinogion⁸³; Sualdam must surely be considered to be of the wondertale kind. Cuchulainn's chariot-driver, Laeg, also manifests Märchen characteristics at least once in the epic. In the scene following the healing by Lug, this charioteer "casts a protecting spell on his horses and his companion-in-arms and made them obscure to all in the camp, while everything remained clear to themselves" (p. 148).

The raising of the hero is also reminiscent of the Märchen. Among Carpenter's examples of the Märchen characteristics of Achilleus, he cites that hero's upbringing. "His [Achilles'] mother tries to make him immortal … [and because she is] unable to take her mortal child with her beneath the waves, she entrusts the infant to a wizard of the forest, Cheiron the centaur … [in whose keeping] Achilles grows to a man's strength and more than a man's prowess."⁸⁴ Cúchulainn, likewise, has his training in arms from a mysterious creature, the witch Scáthach. He goes to her on his own, and from her he learns all the arts of warfare as well as a prophecy regarding his future. And while he stays with her he apparently becomes her foster-son, for two of her other pupils, Ferbaeth and Ferdia, are bound to him as both friends and foster-brothers.

And for a long time the Irish hero seems to lead a charmed life. Although Cuchulainn has opted for long fame and few years, he does not seem to be vulnerable to wounding in ordinary combat. He is blooded four times within the Táin: once by the boy-troop of Ulster; once by the warrior Lóch, but only with the help of the Morrígan; by Ferbaeth; and by Ferdia. The wounding by the boy-troop happens when the hero is still a child, and before he is fostered by Scáthach or armed by his king. After this point, however, it seems that Cúchulainn can be wounded only in some extreme circumstance, one in which his existence between the world of the gods and that of man is brought into some tension. The wounding of the mature Cúchulainn is at the heart of the action.

One case of wounding which happens at the Táin itself occurs during the hero's fight with Lóch mac Mofemis, a single combat which comes between Cúchulainn's fight with Ferbaeth and his conflict with Ferdia. The episode begins with the entry of a young woman who comes to the hero offering him her treasure and her cattle, and proclaiming her love for him. She identifies herself as "King Buan's daughter," but he apparently does not recognize her as the Morrígan. He dismisses her curtly, telling her that he has no time now for a woman, despite her offer of help to him. When he continues to reject her, she threatens him. She will use her shape-changing abilities against him and will attack him in the form of an eel, a she-wolf, and a "harmless red heifer" which causes the cattle that follow her to stampede him. He replies with threats to crack her ribs, burst her eye, and shatter her leg, which injuries can be undone only by a blessing from him (pp. 132-33). The scene moves then to the Connacht camp, where Medb and Ailill are coercing Lóch to fight the young hero. Lóch says that he cannot deign to confront a child with no beard, and the hero has to make himself a beard with berry juice and by speaking into "a fistful of grass" so that everyone will be deceived that he has a beard. This conflict, then, will be a Märchen battle, in which the hero must fight against both a warrior and a shape-changing supernatural woman, and before which he must alter his own appearance with magic (p. 134).

The situation is from Märchen, but the way in which the battle takes place is purely heroic. Cúchulainn fights both Lóch and the Morrígan with his strength and his heroic fury, and not with magic. Both warriors are incited to fight by words which attack their honor. Medb taunts Lóch: "'It is a great shame on you … that the man who killed your brother can destroy our army, and you still haven't gone to fight him. Surely a peppery overgrown elf like him can't resist the fiery force of a warrior like you"' (p. 134). Likewise, when Cúchulainn is in dire straits with the Morrígan coiled about his legs in the form of an eel and Lóch hacking away at him, the satirist "venom-tongued Bricriu mac Carba"—one of the Ulstermen in Medb's camp—forces him to react valiantly by saying, "'Your strength is withered up … if a little salmon can put you down like this, and the men of Ulster rising out of their pangs. If this is what happens when you meet a tough warrior in arms, it's a pity you took on a hero's task, with all the men of Ireland looking on"' (p. 135). The hero immediately recovers enough to crush the Morrigan's ribs as he had promised when his anger is roused after this attack on both his personal prowess and his responsibility to the Ulster forces. And so the hero eventually wins the battle at the cost of much of his heroic strength and after receiving several wounds. The episode ends with more trickery on the part of the Morrigan, who thereby gets a blessing from Cúchulainn which heals each of her wounded parts.

The healing of the hero's wounds by Lug follows soon after this combat, the injuries received through the agency of magic being likewise cured with supernatural aid. These two episodes which show most strongly the hero's supernatural connections are juxtaposed against—indeed, form an interlude among—the combats which heighten his sense of his own humanity. The conflict with Lóch, in fact, proceeds from both these sides of his personality, another reason for his vulnerability. He walks the boundary here between the supernaturalism surrounding him and within him, and the terribly powerful fact that Lóch was the pupil of the same Scathach who had trained him, and was, like Cúchulainn, also her foster-son. There was not, apparently, also the "blood pact of friendship" (p. 203) binding these two warriors that bound Cúchulainn and Ferdia, but their common foster-mother is still a strong human tie. Cúchulainn is forced to kill Lóch with the gae bolga, the weapon whose use he learned from that same foster-mother, which is perhaps one of the reasons that after the battle a "great weariness fell on" him. And this tie to the man he kills, while he is totally separated from those he defends who lie in their pangs, is surely what gives rise to the verses that he speaks: "'I am almost worn out / by single contests. / I can't kill all their best / alone as I am"' (p. 136).

Cúchulainn's recent battle with Ferbaeth, also his foster-brother, and one of the three men who draw blood from him, is a more terrible experience for the hero. If this combat is untouched by supernatural adversity, it is equally lacking in supernatural aid. This fight has the extra dimension of being a struggle between two foster-brothers whose friendship was once apparently deep. Neither of the heroes goes delightedly into the combat; first their friendship must be broken. The Ulster exile, Ferbaeth, is made drunk with wine, and Finnabair, Medb's daughter, is promised to him. He complies, saying, "'I don't want all this.… Cúchulainn is my foster-brother and sworn to me for ever. Still, I'll meet him tomorrow and hack his head off"' (p. 129). Cúchulainn, a man who would not stoop lightly to imploring an enemy, "begged him [not to renounce their friendship and fight with him] by their foster-brotherhood and by their common foster-nurse, Scáthach" (p. 130). Ferbaeth answers that he cannot stop now, because he has promised Medb to fight him. He has, that is to say, put his honor before his friendship and the bonds of their common fostering. Once he has broken faith with his foster-brother, Cúchulainn is no longer bound to respect the tie, either. He tells Ferbaeth to "'keep your friendship, then!"' (p. 130). But a curious thing happens; this hero, who has come out of many single combats unmarked, accidentally steps on a "piece of split holly" as he furiously storms away into the glen. It pierces his foot and emerges at his knee. It is this offending piece of holly that Cúchulainn uses to put an end to Ferbaeth.

Cúchulainn talks with his friends and foster-father Fergus, the leader of the Ulster exiles, after this killing. Fergus says, "'Your comrade is fallen.… I wonder will you pay for his death tomorrow?"', to which Cúchulainn replies, "'Sometime I must pay"' (p. 131). Kinsella explains this exchange by citing Thurneysen's explanation that the payment may be a matter of Wergeld (p. 268, n. 131). But even if, on one level, the payment is a matter of blood price, on another it is something far more serious. After this breaking of the family tie, three other such incidents occur: the fight with Lóch which leaves him more badly wounded than did the holly-branch, his confrontation by his foster-father Fergus, and his climactic combat with his "own ardent and adored foster-brother" (p. 168), Ferdia. His anger with Ferbaeth sets off a long succession of events in which friendship vies with honor for supermacy in the hero's estimation, a series of conflicts in which the hero will move into his loneliest and darkest hours in the Táin, and as a result of which he can finally become one with his people, fully humanized and free of his Märchen trappings. The names of the three heroes with whom Cúchulainn has his most significant single combats suggest this metamorphosis: Ferbaeth, Fergus, and Ferdia all carry the prefix fer, apparently a form of fear, "man."

The combat with Ferdia is more complex and more moving than either the battle with Lóch and the Morrígan, or the conflict with Ferbaeth. It begins in much the same way, with Medb taunting and bribing the warrior in order to bring him to fight his foster-brother. Finnabair herself comes in to tempt him; "at the neck-opening of her shirt she offered him certain fragrant sweet apples, saying that Ferdia was her darling and her chosen beloved of the whole world" (pp. 168-69). But Medb goes further in her subterfuge this time. She does not merely taunt him, but she actually lies to him, telling him that Cúchulainn thinks little of him. This speech arouses Ferdia's anger to the point that the queen has little difficulty in sending him out to fight, even though he is first provided a "surety" of six champions whom he must face at home if he does not fight the Ulster hero. And his charioteer does his part, also, to prepare the warrior for the battle, although perhaps he does not intend what he says to have this effect, by praising Cúchulainn extravagantly, and by expressing his own fear of him. Ferdia accuses his charioteer of being false in his friendship (p. 180)—an ironic accusation, considering what he intends to do. This continued praise for his foster-brother is unlike the taunts used from time to time. Later in this conflict Laeg will use this method of enspiriting his master. But Ferdia's charioteer, if he is using the praise of the enemy in order to goad his master, is using envy as his instrument, the very emotion whose insidious power began the battle between the pig-keepers, and the argument between Medb and Ailill. At any rate, the effect of the charioteer's words is limited. Ferdia when he speaks to Cúchulainn's face, is eager for the battle. But when he is alone with his chariot-driver he says that "'I wouldn't have come looking for this fight"' (p. 178). The two warriors formally break off their friendship and taunt one another, and when Cúchulainn seems to be softening in his antagonism, Ferdia rejects the speech he makes as "cunning" (p. 186).

Cúchulainn's own attitude is much steadier in its love for Ferdia. He accepts the challenge and the breaking of the friendship, and he joins his foster-brother in an exchange of insults. And yet even in the midst of this verbal parrying, when he has just been called "a clumsy and feeble / chicken-hearted / trembling boy,"' he replies:

'While we stayed with Scathach
we went as one
with a common courage
     into the fight.
My bosom friend
and heart's blood,
dear above all,
     I am going to miss you'
(p. 184).

He seems to understand well how Ferdia came to oppose him, and he seems to forgive him and to wish, even now, that the combat might be avoided. He recounts to Ferdia all that Medb has done to entice him into the battle, omitting only the lies which Medb told him about his attitude toward his friend. Ferdia replies that "'Our friendship is finished through foul play"' (p. 187), apparently assuming the "foul play" to be on the part of Cúchulainn, and not himself or his new sovereign. And so at this point there is little that can be done except to fight, and Cúchulainn must acquiesce to this necessity.

Before the meeting of the two heroes, however, two factors are different this time. Fergus, who has just had a battle with Cuchulainn himself, comes to warn the hero of his opponent for the next day. Cuchulainn tells his foster-father how little he wants to fight Ferdia after he has given Fergus the beautiful greeting which Kinsella unhappily supplies only in a note:

'If a flock of birds were to settle on the plain, I would give you one wild goose and share another; if the fish were running in the river-mouths, I would give you one and share another; with a fistful each of cress and marshwort and sea-herb, and afterward a drink of cold water out of the sand.' (p. 276, n. 174)

He has greeted Fergus in this way before, and in this second greeting omits to say that he will place "myself in your place in the ford of battle, watching while you slept" (p. 118). This speech is no doubt a stock greeting in Irish poetry, a formulaic phrase, but it is singularly appropriate at this moment in the action of the Táin, omission and all, since it bespeaks a generosity in friendship which Cúchulainn will show many times before the end of this battle with his dearest friend, and since it adds great poignancy to this act which is in any case an "abomination,"⁸⁵ the killing of a friend and foster-brother.

And in contrast to the rebuffing of the Morrígan's lure before the battle with Lóch, Cúchulainn is shown going out to be with his wife Emer the night before he begins the encounter with Ferdia. In the hero's decision to go to his wife before meeting Ferdia, so that he may likewise be "washed and bathed, with hair nicely plaited and freshly trimmed" (p. 175) there is a sense of the ritual importance of the battle that is about to take place. No such preparations are deemed necessary before any of his other combats. And, too, another side of love and loyalty is implied by "sweet-haired" Emer's "waiting in Cairthenn Chiana-Da-Dam … at Sliab Fuait" (p. 175). The implicit tenderness and concern of this meeting, which causes Cúchulainn to be late the next morning for the encounter at the ford, amplifies the sense of the breach in affection and steadfastness which must be a part of it.

As the battle itself begins, the rules of courtesy are observed; because Ferdia is first to reach the ford of battle he is given the choice of weapons for the first day's fighting. Each wounds the other badly in the fray, but despite the injuries sustained and the swearing off of the friendship, after the fighting on each of the first two days "they came up to each other and each put his arm around the other's neck and gave him three kisses. Their horses passed that night in the same paddock and their charioteers by the same fire" (p. 188). Furthermore, Cúchulainn sends healing herbs to Ferdia, who sends food and drink to Cúchulainn; until the third day there is still a tie between them, and the breaking of vows of friendship has only allowed them to act in this antagonistic way toward one another without changing their hearts. On the third day of battle, when the end is coming into sight, Ferdia admits that "Medb has ruined us" (p. 192), but at their parting on that evening they do not observe the same practices that have characterized the two previous nights. On the fourth day the battle which has moved to the ford itself ends in the death of Ferdia; this death Cúchulainn, grievously wounded himself, brings about with the gae bolga.

By this point the Ulster hero is unrecognizable. He is no longer the warrior who could, with a thunder-feat, kill "a hundred, then two hundred, then three hundred, then four hundred, then five hundred, where he stopped" (p. 154) in his "first full battle with the provinces of Ireland" (p. 155). After carrying his friend's body away from the water, Cúchulainn faints, and when he arises from his faint he does not even bother to move himself away from a place where he is vulnerable to attack by Ferdia's vengeful allies. Laeg, his charioteer, tries to hearten him; but he is so incapacitated by grief that he can only make a long lament for Ferdia.

His sorrowings after killing Ferdia are reminiscent of Achilleus' mourning after his decision, first not to fight and then to allow Patroklos to wear his armor and go into the battle in his place. But if possible the Irish hero's burden is even more awesome than the Myrmidon's; his friend has fallen by his own hand, and there is no Hektor on whom to vent his sorrow and rage. These must come back upon himself. And while he lies suffering, wounded physically and emotionally, there is no supernatural cure. The hero, transformed by this sorrow, suffers humanly. He can only wait for the men of Ulster to arise from their pangs and finish the war. Paolo Vivante's description of the result of Achilleus' grief at Patroklos' death also provides an acute analysis of the outcome of Cúchulainn's sorrow: "The great scene of mourning marks the irrevocable break: Achilles dying, the proudest of lives forever cut off from its divine background … is resigned, even eager to die. His humanization is spontaneous, intimately realized; it is not a doom imposed upon him from without."⁸⁶ Honor, a matter of immortality, has come before human love in the epic until this point, with only one exception; and after this scene friendship will become the order of the action.

There is a commonly held notion that Patroklos is more than Achilleus' friend, and that he is his alter-ego. When Patroklos wears the hero's armor into combat with Hektor, Achilleus sees himself killed, not just his friend. And because Achilleus later confronts the Trojan wearing his own captured armor, Achilleus must kill himself. What Cúchulainn faces in the person of Ferdia, too, is in some sense himself, although it is not his more ethical side as in the case of Achilleus and Patroklos. Ferdia does not have Cúchulainn's armor, but he does have his feats, which he has learned from their common foster-mother. They are more than equals in battle; they are reflections of one another. Only on the last day of the battle, after the night of separate fires for charioteers and separate paddocks for horses, do the opponents invent feats of their own. Cúchulainn comes to the ford after Ferdia and sees him do "a thousand thrilling feats on high, multiple and miraculous, that no-one had ever taught him—not his foster-mother or foster-father, nor Scáthach nor Uathach nor Aife—but drawn from him that day at the thought of Cúchulainn" (p. 193). Cúchulainn responds by performing a similar series of feats of his own invention, after which he kills Ferdia. But if he destroys some part of himself in bringing death to this friend, what he destroys is not the human side as one might expect; this side of himself is only wounded, while his immortal part is driven from him, as the waters of the river are driven from their bed.

The exception to this rule of honor before friendship is, of course, his encounter with Fergus. Fergus is Cúchulainn's foster-father, and when he comes against his foster-son he is unarmed; Ailill has stolen his sword in revenge for Fergus' amorous dealings with Medb. Like the others, he is not willing immediately to go out to fight Cúchulainn, but after he is intoxicated with the wine that they have given him, and after they implore the drunken Fergus to fight, he agrees. Out he proceeds to meet the hero, who comments to him that he must be under strong security to confront him unarmed. Fergus replies that if there were a sword in his scabbard, he "wouldn't use it on you" (p. 165). He then makes a rather amazing request—that his foster-son yield before him, thus appearing to be a coward. Cúchulainn is unwilling to do so at first, according to the Book of Leinster version: "'I am loath to do that,' said Cú Chulainn, 'to flee before one man on the Foray of Cúalnge."'⁸⁷ Fergus, however, offers to flee from Cúchulainn at another time, and the hero falls back before him. Fergus' allies encourage him to chase the hero, which he refuses to do. This episode, in which friendship, and foster-parent and sonship are held above honor, occurs shortly before the combat with Ferdia.

And there is a sequel to this scene. In the Last Battle Cúchulainn, marked with the wounds he received in his battle with Ferdia but in his battle-fury, tells Fergus that the debt has fallen due, and that he must now retreat. Fergus makes good the debt, and the result of his yielding is the turning point of the Táin. After he falls back "with his troop of three thousand," the conflict goes against the army which the king and queen of Connacht have mustered. "The men of Galeoin and the men of Munster went away as well. They left Medb and Ailill to the battle, with their seven sons and their nine troops of three thousand men" (p. 249). The sacrifice of Fergus has been the greater, since Cúchulainn is able to show his courage and skill at arms in the combat with Ferdia, whereas Fergus ends his participation on the Táin with a retreat.

These two encounters between Cúchulainn and his foster-father provide a variation upon the father-and-son combat theme found in another story from the Ulster Cycle, "The Death of Aife's One Son." In another tale Cúchulainn, under the tutelage of Scáthach, has helped his foster-mother to defeat her greatest enemy, a female warrior called Aife. Despite his prior agreement with Emer that each of them will "stay pure until they met again, unless the other died" (p. 29), he forces the defeated queen to agree to share a bed with him and to bear him a son. The result of this breaking of vows is disastrous; the son, when he has grown large enough to fit the ring which Cúchulainn left with his mother, comes to Ireland. The boy, as one might expect, causes the Ulstermen a great deal of trouble upon his arrival, as Conall Cearnach says, making "little of Ulster's honour" (p. 42). Emer warns her husband that the child is his son, but he is unmoved by her protests and says to her that "'no matter who he is … I must kill him for the honour of Ulster"' (p. 44). This he does using the gae bolga. Upon realizing what they have lost, the Ulstermen set up a lament for him. Clearly some momentous change must take place in the character who is willing to kill his own son to protect the honor of his province, before he can yield to his foster-father, who poses the same threat. This giving way before Fergus happens after the battles with Ferbaeth and Lóch; the metamorphosis which is completed only after the death of Ferdia has already begun at this point. And it is only after the death of Ferdia that the action becomes panoramic; instead of single combats, a full-scale battle is fought. Cúchulainn engages Fergus in this second conflict in the midst of the encounter, with his fellow Ulstermen fighting on either side of him on the broad plain beyond the river.

Fergus' yielding to his foster-son shows that something even more radical has occurred; when the hero of the epic is thus transformed, his transformation colors the attitude of the others as well. His presence permeates every angle of the action. Whereas he has once had supernatural affinities, he now has become supremely human, and the people of the epic's world cannot escape the influence of his own attitude.

If the Táin Bóo Cuailnge shows how the hero is humanized, the setting of the major combats further indicates the nature of his struggles. Rivers are especially important. Most of Cuchulainn's single combats are fought at or in fords, and rivers are even capable of arising in protest against human actions. Initially, the water seems to be antithetical to Cúchulainn's military genius; when Fraech decides to attack him, just after the stories of his childhood have been told, Medb's champion decides: "'I'll attack him there in the water; he isn't good in water"' (p. 93). Fraech's analysis of the situation is imperfect, though; he dies in the conflict. Later, however, Cúchulainn's attitude seems to change. Fergus relates to the Connachtmen that the hero has chosen to take them on one by one in the ford of the Cronn River (p. 117).

The Cronn River is more than the setting for a battle, although it is that, too. If rivers form natural boundaries, the Cronn is a self-conscious one. It rises against the crossing of Medb's army, rearing "up to the tree-tops" (p. 111), and possibly it does so at Cúchulainn's command. Whether the river arises of its own volition, though, or whether it is invoked by the hero, it shows a definite animation—almost a god-like personality. The obvious corollary to this action, of course, is the rising of the river Xanthos in the Iliad against the bloodying of its waters. The motivation is not the same, since the Cronn actually aids the warrior, but the events themselves are similar. Just after the Cronn attacks Medb's and Ailill's army, two other rivers, the Colptha and the Gatlaig, stand up in their beds to thwart the encroaching warriors. At one other time, too, another river leaves its bed. In the battle between Cúchulainn and Ferdia, when the heroes fight so closely on the last day of the conflict that "their shield-rims and sword-hilts and spear-shafts screamed like demons and devils and goblins of the glen and fiends of the air," they "drove the river off its course and out of its bed, leaving a dry space in the middle of the ford big enough for the last royal burial-ground of a king or queen—not a drop of water on it except what the two heroes and high warriors splashed there …" (pp. 195-96). Although the contest may sound more than human, and although there is doubtless some exaggeration in this description, what happens with this river is natural. It lacks—or at least does not manifest—the powerful consciousness of the Cronn.

There is a possible explanation for the Cronn's strange behavior. The entire Connacht force is bearing down upon the hero and his charioteer when they reach the ford, and the hero is in an extremely poor position to hold them all back. He requests that the river "save Muirtheimne from the enemy / until the warrior's work is done / on the mountain-top of Ochaine" (p. 111). Since the river is "Nes's Cronn River" according to Ailill (p. 107)—that is, the river which bears some special relationship to Conchobor's mother Nes—it might be expected to show displeasure at the invasion of Conchobor's territory, especially by an army which includes the legions of Fergus, who once was Ulster's king, before Nes found a way, through trickery, to procure it for her son. This reasoning, however, is shaky as an explanation for the behavior of the Colptha and the Gatlaig. In these cases one can presume only that the rivers are something like gods, determined sometimes to carry out their bordering functions.

A ford, then, is almost a conscious concession or courtesy to men, which allows them to transgress the boundary, though only by getting their feet wet from it. Kinsella comments in a note:

A ford is frequently the place of challenge and single combat. In a practical sense it would be natural to defend a boundary, following a river, at such a crossing-place …; but warriors appear also to select a ford in a more formal way, as an arena for certain kinds of combat.… Looking at the symbolism of the matter, and taking account of the mysterious nature of boundaries in themselves, Alwyn and Brinley Rees … suggest that the ford 'partakes in some measure of the nature of a divination rite' (p. 263, n. 73).

I would like to suggest an alternate explanation of this choice of "arena" which is perhaps less fanciful than that suggested in Celtic Heritage. If a river is a boundary, and if Cúchulainn is a character who exists between the Marchen or mythological world of his father and the world of the Ulstermen, perhaps the ritual of the ford is related to this humanizing process. To be human is to be mortal; the river's universal symbolism as the flow of time, the short-lived hero's greatest enemy, would seem to fit this case. When Laeg gives Cúchulainn the gae bolga, he floats it down the stream to him—the weapons whose victories ironically send the hero into his human and humanizing sorrow arrive by way of time's waters. And after the hero is mortalized, he moves away from the boundary, leaving it behind to join the battle which rages on the plain beyond, and to join with these men who can offer another sort of immortality—that which is found in song.

The crossing of the boundary is dramatized in the final portions of the two epics, the Iliad and the Táin. Achilleus' treatment of old Priam shows that he has undergone a radical change. The scene in which Cúchulainn spares Medb is less complex, but it likewise shows a transformation in character. He comes upon her in a helpless situation, although he "held his hand. He wouldn't strike her from behind." And to her plea for mercy he replies, "'If I killed you dead … it would only be right."' The redactor explains his sparing of her by telling the reader that he is not "a killer of women" (p. 250). These two comments, though, are not sufficient explanation for his show of mercy. When others deserved it, he struck them from behind (p. 96), and he previously attempted to kill Medb and spared Aife only because she offered him a better bargain (pp. 96, 33). If anyone beside himself can be blamed for Ferdia's death, furthermore, it is Medb. Yet he spares her, and finally even makes peace with her (p. 253).

Cúchulainn, then, like Achilleus, begins his participation in the epic as an isolated figure, tinged with characteristics of a Märchen world. Through his responsibility for the death of a friend—and in the case of the Tain, a friend who is also a foster-brother—he goes through a period of intense human suffering which breaks down this isolation and lessens the difference between the hero and the other warriors. He is mortalized; Cúuchulainn is wounded, and having done the deeds which bring him great glory and long life in the songs of men, he draws closer to his confrontation with the short physical existence which he has agreed to as its price. Some critics see the epic hero as therefore tragic, but for reasons which will be provided in the chapter, I do not concur with this point of view.

Tragedy in the Epic

The prevalent opinion about Achilleus is that he is a tragic hero as well as an epic one. Such an attitude arises from a number of observations about the Iliad, the first of which is that epic action is there dramatically presented. Rhys Carpenter even finds the structure of Attic tragedy in the Iliad.⁸⁸ And certainly what occurs within the epic's characters is presented as external action. W. P. Ker says that the "tragedy of Atilla.…, like the story of Achilles, is fit for a stage" since the "events" in both narratives are "played out in the clashing of one will. against another."⁸⁹ Other critics, like Cedric Whitman, tend to read the Iliad as an epic which may present external events, but whose real concern is with the warriors' inner lives. He does not understand its conflict as a matter of will against will, but as a psychological self-examination by Achilleus, whose will is most of all in conflict with itself. Whitman comments that "the whole tragic paradox of Achilles centers upon this scene [in which Patroklos begs the hero to fight, then to lend him his armor], and in order to understand it, it is necessary to remember that the wrath of the hero is a search for himself which is complete only when the poem is complete."⁹⁰ James M. Redfield refutes Whitman's argument by warning that a critic's familiarity with the existential quests undertaken by many protagonists of modern literature can interfere with his ability to understand heroes like Achilleus. Whitman, he feels, discovers these encounters with the "Absolute and the Absurd" in narratives where they do not exist.⁹¹ As well as being aware that a modern perspective can cause a certain existentialistic myopia, one should also avoid the tendency to regard Achilleus—or any other epic hero for that matter—as a pre-Hellenic Hamlet. Achilleus is indeed "complete only when the poem is complete," but his new state is not dependent upon the internal ambivalence which would bring about the tragic soul-search. Achilleus does not sit on the sidelines because he is unsure whether or not he should act; he sulks in his tent because he is determined not to fight.

Cúchulainn, likewise, is presented dramatically, and he is rendered in terms of his decisions. The epic hero, unlike the tragic hero, is active even in regard to his fate. Early death, the price of great and long-lasting fame, is his because he chooses it freely; he is no Oedipus—or Derdriu, for that matter—who has been born to a terrible doom. Both Achilleus and Cúchulainn hear and comprehend their fates long before they are accomplished, and while there is the time and the opportunity to avoid them. Their cases are not unique; Beowulf and others share this characteristic with them. Achilleus' mother and his horse warn him against going out to meet Hektor, and both Scathach and Cathbad tell Cúchulainn what will happen if he persists in his heroic course. The fate which the Irish hero accepts, moreover, is hardly cruel; Scáthach concludes her description of his future by telling him that

'you will keep for thirty full years
   your sharp valour and your force
I will not add another year
   nor tell you more of your career
full of triumph and women's love
    what matter how short'
(p. 37).

His life ends early, as foretold. Even so, he does not die as the result of some terrible deed of his own, brought about by a tragic flaw in his character. He succumbs because he has been placed in what Alwyn and Brinley Rees call "a series of ambiguous situations where heroism is of no avail."⁹² Trickery and a series of conflicting taboos undo him. On the day of his death, Cúchulainn sets out for the field of battle despite a number of inauspicious signs and the pleas of his loved ones to abstain from the fighting. He is then met on the road by three crones who detain him and ask him to share their meal of hound's flesh. He must decide whether to refuse the feast and break one taboo, or else eat the meat of the creature for which he was named and therefore ignore another prohibition.⁹³ He partakes of the food, and suffers as a result the withering of a hand—because it brought the hound's flesh to his mouth—and the loss of power in one thigh—because he put the bones under it. Next he loses his charioteer and his horse, and is mortally wounded by his own spear, because of a ploy of his enemies' satirists. His spear, it seems, carries an injunction of its own, that it must be yielded upon demand, or it will kill its owner. The satirists make use of this double-bind by demanding the weapon. They threaten to revile him; but he kills them before they can dishonor him in any way. He does not die either humbled or humiliated, but standing on his feet, tied by his belt to a standing stone beside a loch. He meets his end with his hero-light playing about his head and his friend, Conall the Victorious, already riding out to avenge him.⁹⁴ This heroic death is entirely suitable for one who has lived such a life of valor, and nothing about it lessens his greatness.

The Táin Bó Cuailnge, of course, does not contain this story which is one of the Death Tales of the Ulster Heroes; in the final moments of the epic the hero is alive and triumphant. Whether or not his Greek counterpart fares quite as well in the end of his epic has been debated, especially because of the complexities of the hero's meeting with Priam. And if he does not die quite as beautifully as Cúchulainn, at least he is never humiliated as his enemy Hektor is. He falls, not because he is any man's inferior in single combat, but because he is found by a chance arrow. And he dies on the field of a full-scale battle, with his fellow warriors fighting all around him.

If there is nothing about Achilleus' death that smacks of a tragic fall, there is likewise nothing about him that inspires in the reader the tragic emotions of pity and fear. As an epic hero he arouses the reader's awe, as stated in the previous chapter. Even Whitman acknowledges 'the triumph of the spirit amid self-destruction."⁹⁵ Maurice McNamee takes this notion further, differentiating the epic hero from both tragic and low-comic characters:

Since the epic poem is built not upon incongruities in the actions of the main characters but upon the congruity between their action and the ideals of the culture which the epic embodies, it is neither pity nor laughter that it aims at, but admiration.… Precisely because it is the man of heroic stature accomplishing truly great deeds that the epic holds up for our admiration we do not identify ourselves as closely with the epic as we do with the tragic hero. There is a certain awesome distance maintained between ourselves and the epic hero, but it is not, as in comedy, a critical but an approving distance.⁹⁶

To weigh this difference between the emotions evoked by the epic and tragic heroes, one might consider the difference between the way that he reacts to Homer's mighty Telemonian Aias and to the Ajax in Sophocles' tragedy.⁹⁷

Pity and fear are lacking from the reader's attitude toward the epic hero because he does not "fall" as the tragic hero does. He suffers intensely, but his pain makes him human and a part of a human community, rather than isolating him from it. That is not to say, however, that the epic contains no tragedy or no tragic hero, but rather to maintain simply that neither Cuchulainn nor Achilleus plays that role. The theory put forth by Redfield's book is that Hektor is the Iliad's tragic hero, and that his tragedy, juxtaposed against Achilleus' epic heroism, gives the Myrmidon "a location in the human world,"⁹⁸ since "the pathos of the poem is concentrated in the death of Hector."⁹⁹ If tragedy, then, has a place in the epic, and a function in the humanizing of the hero, it cannot be a characteristic of the great hero himself.

The foil for the Märchen hero cannot be other than human. He must begin his participation in the epic as a man who has, like Hektor, all the trappings of humanity—a wife, a son, a city which he loves, and a home in that city. He can never begin as a lonely outsider with supernatural parents, horses, and armor. Perhaps by the end of the epic the hero is capable of tragic action, but that would involve yet another metamorphosis than the one which made him human. Cúchulainn, for certain, never enters the tragic domain.

The world of the tragic hero has at its heart the problem of honor, and because honor is also an epic matter, the two realms are likely to become confused. Familiarity with tragedy generally precedes a reader's familiarity with epic, and as a result he may make the equation of the search for honor and the evil which it usually brings about in tragedy. In itself, though, honor is of two kinds; indeed, in the epic it is the highest form of greatness. The epic hero furthermore seeks honor with a pride that in tragedy would be a defect; but the honor is the due of his kind, and his pride in it is fully justified. McNamee rightly holds that honor for the epic hero is inevitable, that it is the "instinctive reaction to such greatness."¹⁰⁰ And if the hero is a cultural representative, then the glory which is accorded him illuminates the people whom he represents.

This proud stance of the epic hero, nevertheless, is the focal point for those critics who interpret the actions of the epic hero as tragical. Achilleus, for instance, is called "essentially a tragic character" because "by an excess of anger and hurt pride, [he] brings about the death of his dearest friend.…" But, McNamee contends, the "Greeks themselves, for whom The Iliad was written, would probably have reacted to his character quite differently.… They would … probably have admired him as a rather good embodiment of their notion of a hero."¹⁰¹ What is excessive in the tragic hero is, contrary to the belief of some critics, appropriate in the epic hero, because his pride is a public matter. The tragic hero's pride is personal, narrow, and selfish, whereas the epic hero's pride is extended to his race and is a condition of his status and function. This difference is reflected in the fates of the Greeks who return to their homes after the conflict in Ilium. What has been a rightful seeking after honor breaks down into self-centeredness. Agamemnon is an especially good representative of this change.

Diomedes, too, provides an example of the difference between tragic excess and epic sufficiency. His fight with gods and his wounding of them would surely come under the heading of hubris if he were being represented as a tragic figure. But he is not; no righteous vengeance is taken upon him. His action reveals no flaw. Rather, it reveals his magnificence; Aphrodite looks silly beside him. Turning to the Táin Bó Cuailnge, it should be noted that Cuchulainn's temporary victory over the Morrígan in the contest with Lóch likewise reveals the hero's great power, although the comparison does not degrade the goddess. In the epic, where gods and men function in a common reality, pride which would otherwise affront them loses its irreverence. Even others than great heroes may be proud without risking excess; Fergus describes one of the minor champions of Ulster as a "flood of skill and courage, … a flood of hot blood, vigour, power and pride—a force to hold armies together; my own foster brother, Fergus mac Lete, King of Line, the battle-crest of the north of Ireland" (p. 230). There is certainly no condemnation of this man's pride.

But if even a direct, physical attack upon gods can be justified in the cause of epic heroism, an affront to fate apparently cannot be. The heroes of the Iliad and the Táin, Achilleus and Cúchulainn, are quick to embrace their fates; but Hektor's lapse at the end of Book VIII, in which he denies his doom, is his undoing. Even Zeus knows better than to go against destiny. To deny what the gods respect is excessive pride in the epic, and the act which originates the tragedy in the Táin, like the act which causes Hektor's fall in the Iliad, comes out of this kind of excess. This wrongful pride likewise has its root in a moral flaw; envy, in the Táin, brings about Medb's wrongdoing and consequent fall.

To return for the moment to the notion of the pride which is the hero's right, it should be remembered that this attitude is expressed in boasting. But the claims of their own greatness made by the likes of Achilleus or Cúchulainn or Beowulf are more than mere words. The epic hero's "self-definition," according to Redfield, "is a boast and a promise he makes to himself and to others."¹⁰² It is a verbal expression of this race-encompassing pride, and it is unlike Hektor's blind and foolish claims that the victory may yet be Troy's. On a practical level, the hero's boast helps him to prepare himself emotionally for the battle to come, insuring that there will be no lack of great deeds owing to weakness of heart. And it also acts as a kind of "surety" against his failure; to return in disgrace after an impressive boast would surely be as important to avoid as the facing of any number of champions.

If there is pride and pride, then there are boasts and boasts. Medb's and Ailill's bickering over which of them is superior is certainly of the imperfect sort. In the first place, mere wealth is the basis for the comparison, and in the second, the argument leads on to the doing of base deeds rather than heroic ones. The "Pillow Talk" controversy is seen for what it is when it leads Medb to commit an affront to fate. When the Connacht troops begin to muster for the cattle raid, a woman in a chariot arrives on the scene. She identifies herself to Medb and Fedelm, a poetess who possesses the "Light of Foresight." The queen requests a prophecy regarding her host, and Fedelm replies, "'I see it crimson, I see it red."' Obstinately, Medb argues against this prophecy, which the poetess repeats several times. Her final comment to Fedelm shows that she is determined to ignore what she could hardly miss understanding as a forecast of doom: "'It doesn't matter.… Wrath and rage and red wounds are common when armies and large forces gather. So look once more and tell me the truth"' (p. 61).

If both the Táin and the Iliad contain tragedies, then, there is a real difference between the two epics, since the opposing queen, rather than the antagonist in battle, plays the major tragic part in the Irish work. But the two similarly undo themselves by denying fate, and both are humiliated by their enemies. Medb does not die in the course of the epic, but she is taken by Cúchulainn. At the Last Battle he comes upon her in her tent as she is performing some embarrassing bodily function¹⁰³ and captures her there. To add injury to this insult, the next event of any importance is the battle of the two bulls; because they both die, the goal of the lost contest has been negated. The bull from Ailill's herd, the one possession which made him materially "greater" than the queen, no longer exists. The pathos of the situation, though, is the terrible irony that this contest was unnecessary in the first place and not needed to prove Medb greater than her husband. Her superiority to him must be clear to everyone but herself. Charles Bowen points out that even the "robust antifeminism" of the redactors of the Táin¹⁰⁴ is insufficient to bring her down to size; they write about her with some real disapproval, but it is "mingled with awe." She is, for all their attempts to discredit her, a "giantess," not some "pouting Maureen O'Hara spoiling for a thwacking from John Wayne."¹⁰⁵ Her husband, on the other hand, is a cuckold and a patsy; he meekly accompanies his powerful wife on the cattleraid which is designed to undermine his only advantage of her.¹⁰⁶

Medb further demonstrates her refusal to accept the fate which Fedelm has lain before her, and shows her destructive lack of insight into her situation, when she contradicts Fergus' warning about Cúchulainn's ability to fight. She says, "'Let us not make too much of it.… He has only one body. He can suffer wounding"' (p. 76). And her blindness to fate, to her relationship with her husband, and to the godlikeness of her enemy are akin to her ruthlessness. The extremity of this characteristic causes Carney to describe her as "a spiritual ancestress to Lady Macbeth." Her lack of scruples is truly amazing; Carney points out as an example her willingness to murder the finest group of warriors in her entire army because if they won the war they would take all the credit for the victory, and if they were left behind they would seize all the property that was left unguarded.¹⁰⁷ She does not glory in carnage; she is probably not capable of that much emotion. Medb simply does not care what the outcome of her thoughtless decisions may be. When Fergus suggests to her that they might do better to disperse these gifted fighters throughout the army she replies, "'I don't mind … as long as they break up their present order"' (p. 67).

Medb is concerned, then, with neither the honor of her people nor the dictates of fate. She wishes to settle a personal grievance, even at the cost of her entire army. Pathetically again, the argument which she heads out to win, and the envy which drives her on, are not even her own. Unbeknown to the queen, this quarrel has originated with the two supernatural pig-keepers who are now embodied as bulls. Although she holds herself to be more powerful than fate, she is really the pawn in a contest for superiority between two gods. Yet when they die, she is left with material parity with Ailill, though the price has been most of her army, many of her sons, her only daughter, and—probably most important to her—her dignity. She has the last laugh, but hardly the best one, since the cost of it has been so great; nevertheless, it is obvious that fate has been more generous to her than it is to most of her sort.

The glory which Cúchulainn seeks is part of his responsibility; a sovereign like Medb is accountable for other matters. Unlike heroes, rulers must be concerned with preserving ordered societies. And because of her part in bringing about this conflict Medb is guilty of violating this trust. If she comes off badly as a queen, one might note that her failing is common to other rulers in heroic poetry. Conchobor, one remembers, has behaved despicably in "The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu"; in his anxiety to claim the beautiful, cursed woman Derdriu, he causes the deaths of many great warriors. His slaughter of them fails to gain his designed purpose, however, since Derdriu kills herself after he takes possession of her. Similarly, in the Iliad, Agamemnon is certainly no model for leadership. Even Odysseus, so grand upon the field of battle and on the homeward voyage, brings about the wrath of his people when he kills the suitors, representatives of the finest families in his country. Yet all these kings are somehow redeemed in the epics. Conchobor does nothing unworthy in the Táin; he goes as quickly as he can to the defense of his province. Agamemnon, Whitman says, "never meets with full disgrace." Homer, by avoiding an overt "drawing [of] the feebleness of Agamemnon" avoids pushing the Iliad in the direction of satire.¹⁰⁸ And Odysseus is certainly justified in setting his own house in order. Like Cúchulainn in the story of his death, although to a lesser degree, Odysseus has been placed in double jeospardy, since whatever he decides to do will be at least partly wrong.

The case of Medb, however, is complicated by several factors. One of these is that she bears the name of the goddess Medb, although she is herself quite human. Bowen describes the goddess Medb as the deity who confers sovereignty upon a man; through a "sacral marriage" she creates the king of a province: "It was believed that every tribal and provincial king had to unite with a goddess in a symbolic wedding in order to inaugurate and confirm his kingship."¹⁰⁹ He continues his argument by saying that "the goddess, the king's divine consort, came to be seen as symbolizing not so much the land and its bounty as the idea of sovereignty itself: the mysterious blessing of destiny that conferred power on the man who was chosen to receive it."¹¹⁰ De Vries maintains that as a goddess, and therefore as the king's superior, Medb preserves the right and the ability to dethrone him and make some worthier man ruler if he proves to be inadequate.¹¹¹ Medb's contest with Ailill, then, takes on an additional significance. Names are meaningful in deciding what is good or evil for a character, as has been seen in the case of Cúchulainn. Medb, accordingly, may be regarded in one of two lights: she is either within her rights (as a namesake of the goddess) to test the worthiness of her husband the king, who shows himself to be disrespectful of her,¹¹² or she is a terrible perversion of the goddess. De Vries judges this second possibility to be the right one, saying that she has earned well the derision that she receives, by her "thirsting after love and power" rather than bequeathing them upon her chosen mate, and by her use of a "demonic power" to chain "men to herself while seeming "to play with their fate."¹¹³ I think, however, that it is the tension between this right and her misuse of it, between her greatness and her foolishness, that makes her a tragic figure.

The queen's methods as well as her goals are open to criticism. When she has great difficulty convincing warriors to go out singly to meet Cúchulainn, she resorts to underhanded techniques of persuasion. She threatens their honor, as in the case of Ferdia; she makes them drunk with wine, as in the case of Ferbaeth; she offers warrior after warrior marriage with her daughter; and she even offers the most recalcitrant her own sexual favors. The first three types of persuasion illustrate her nonchalance about dishonesty, while her promiscuity discloses an even more serious failing; because of her connection with the goddess whose name she shares, she is guilty of irreverence.

Medb has many foils in the Táin, and among them is Fergus, the leader of the Ulster exiles, who is often at loggerheads with her despite their alliance against Conchobor. Apparently, although this motive is never stated directly in the epic, he fights against Ulster as vengeance upon its king, who dishonored him by slaying men under his protection in "The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu." Nevertheless he remains a loyal friend and a generous one to Cuchulainn. Because of Fergus' impeccable handling of the trusts which this relationship involves, despite their delicacy in this war, the reader tends to sympathize with him, approving of his scorn for the ruthless queen. After the Last Battle, Medb turns to her conquered ally and says, "'We have had shame and shambles here today, Fergus."' He replies, "'We have followed the rump of a misguiding woman.… It is the usual thing for a herd led by a mare to be strayed and destroyed"' (p. 251). His comment should be closely examined. Before accepting his observation at face value as simply a piece of anti-feminism which the Táin's redactors included as a good joke, or as the final, just condemnation of a poor queen who is also a bad example of femininity, the reader should take note of the speaker of the sentiment.

Fergus is more honorable than Medb, but he is no better as a leader. He has led his men into ambush once, and on the Táin he leads them to defeat. There is something wrong with his judgment, it would seem, since he is neither weak like Ailill nor careless about fate like Medb. His acceptance of destiny is illustrated by a comment that he makes in the episode in which he asks Cúchulainn to fall back before him. He clearly sees the price which he must pay for this victory. He says to Cúchulainn: "'I shall flee before you when you shall be covered with wounds and blood and pierced with stabs in the battle of the Táin, and when I alone shall flee, then all the men of Ireland will flee."¹⁴ If this speech shows that he will accept his fate when it confronts him, it also foreshadows his inability to lead his men to victory.

If Fergus' leadership is less than excellent, his relationships with women are even worse. The malignity of Woman harrasses him constantly, and his poverty of leadership is tied up with this problem. In the Ulster Cycle he is in some way the victim of three women: Nes, his wife; Derdriu; and Queen Medb. Fergus is the king of Ulster when he chooses Nes for his consort. She agrees to marry him only if he will, in turn, allow her son by Cathbad to be king for one year. Her reason for this request, she says, is that she would like for Conchobor's, her son's, sons to be able to claim royal lineage. Fergus agrees, and with the apparent consent of the people of Ulster Conchobor takes his place on the throne for a year. When the time is up, however, the men of Ulster feel "greatly insulted that Fergus had given them over, like a dowry, while they were grateful to Conchobor for all he had given them." There is, obviously, a tinge of misogyny in the mood of the Ulstermen. "They decided, 'What Fergus sold, let it stay sold; what Conchobor bought, let it stay bought"' (p. 4).

Derdriu's beauty, likewise, is partially responsible for the reprehensible slaughter that Conchobor commands in the story of Uisliu's sons,"¹¹⁵ the carnage and broken trust which cause the dishonor that sends Fergus on the Táin. And the reader wonders whether Fergus would have taken the job as emissary from Conchobor to the exiles in the Derdriu tale if he had not had the beauty of this woman, as well as the promise of the king, to encourage him. On the cattle-raid itself, Medb often uses her "friendly thighs" to persuade Fergus to this or that. His comment about the "rump of a mare" has a second, obscene meaning. The women are certainly not blameless, and yet there must be something amiss with Fergus himself for him to fall such easy prey to their seduction.

They are not irresistible sirens, only calculating human females. Cúchulainn provides a meaningful foil to this weakness of Fergus, showing it to be just that, when he resists the advances of the Morrígan. She not only takes the form of a lovely young woman, but she has all the powers of a goddess to aid her in her guile. Perhaps Fergus' susceptibility to sexual persuasion results from his own exaggerated masculinity. Vivian Mercier provides the information that Fergus' name means "virility." And he quotes a description of Fergus from another scholar: "'He eats seven times as much as an ordinary man, he has the strength of seven hundred men, his nose, his mouth, and his penis are seven fingers in length, his scrotum is as big as a sack of flour. He needs no less [sic] than seven women when separated from his wife Flidais."'I¹¹⁶ The grandiosity of this description can be attributed to the Irish penchant for hyperbole; however the fact remains that a man with such awesome physical traits cannot easily be faulted for the liaisons which he forms in order to vent his great lust.

And yet the repeated dishonoring that he endures must come from some failing of his own if it is anything more than an instrument of anti-feminist invective on the part of the Táin's redactors. Perhaps, like Shakespeare's Brutus, Fergus is susceptible to pleas from others whom he wrongly judges to be as honest as himself, with similarly terrible results. Conchobor, as well as Nes and Medb, take advantage of this weakness, while only Cúchulainn is faithful to him. This overabundance of trust and total lack of guile, which contrast so strongly to Medb's dishonesty, are the frailties—although they can hardly be considered to be flaws—which allow him to make his first terrible error in kingly judgment. All his later misfortunes seem to begin with his gift to Conchobor's mother of a year with her son on the throne. If his difficulties originate in part from his trouble with women, they have another possible cause as well. Like Medb, Fergus, although human, is associated with the more-than-natural gift of kingship. He is thought of in connection with the stone at Tara (called the Bod Fearghuis, or "Fergus' Penis") which, Mercier cites Dineen as saying "'was supposed to shriek on the inauguration of the rightful monarch of all Ireland."¹¹⁷ If the association is more meaningful than the obvious connection between Fergus' masculinity and the phallic significance of this standing stone, then this information can provide a clue to the reason for the apparently unjust dishonorings which come to such a noble man. It is entirely possible that when he allows Nes to talk him out of his responsibility of kingship, which has a "sacral character,""¹¹⁸ he commits blasphemy. He must suffer for this offense, which allows, in turn, the slaughter of Uisliu's sons to occur in Ulster. Thus this infinitely masculine, honorable king earns, not the single defeat which is Medb's, but disgrace upon disgrace.

Both the Connacht queen and the former king of Ulster have a counterpoint in Ailill. If Medb's notion of honor is a false one, and if Fergus has brought about his own dishonor and loses his chance to clear himself, Ailill responds to his own dishonoring with a laugh and a prank. He discovers that, as he has long suspected, his wife is Fergus' mistress. His servant Cuillius brings him Fergus' sword as a sign that his suspicions have been correct, and his first reaction to this news is to exchange a grin with his charioteer, telling him to keep the sword. Ailill does not take action against either of the offenders himself; he declares Medb "'justified. She does it to keep his help on the Táin"' (p. 103). This assumption is not necessarily true. As has been said, she is not justified in her seduction, and Fergus has other reasons than his fascination with Medb for remaining with the Connacht army. Besides, Fergus can hardly be particularly helpful in combat without his weapon. Ailill, however, is not as unmoved by his wife's promiscuity as he pretends to be. He calls Fergus to his tent for a game of fidchell after his sword is stolen. He laughs in Fergus' face, and when the Ulsterman grows angry Ailill scoffs at him as though it were Fergus who had just been dishonored.

Ailill said:

'Why so wild
   without your weapon
on the heights of a certain
   royal belly
in a certain ford
    was your will worked
or your heroism
    an empty shout
to Medb's oaths
   tribes of men
can bear witness
   sucked dry in the struggle …'
(pp. 104-105).

They continue to exchange unfriendly words and to play fidchell, and Ailill eventually comes up with something like a threat: "'these wise men [the pieces in the game] / I move against Fergus / let right be done / as our game goes"' (p. 106). But still he makes no actual move to avenge himself. Medb, who is watching them play, finally reprimands her husband, telling him to "'Hold a while/your clownish words …"' (p. 106). The matter then remains unchanged until Ailill returns the sword to Fergus at the Last Battle. True to his commitment, and forgiving of the theft, Fergus springs into action against the Ulster warriors, despite a sarcastic remark by Conall to the effect that he fights only "'for the sake of a whore's backside"' (p. 247). Ailill's failure, then, is perhaps an insufficient concern for his honor. It matters to him enough to incite him to allow his servant to keep Fergus' sword and leave him vulnerable when facing his enemies, even Cúchulainn; but Ailill never takes the initiative to challenge Fergus himself. The theft of the sword is admittedly a witty vengeance for cuckoldry, but it does nothing to recoup Ailill's lost honor.

The weakness of the Connacht king provides an illuminating contrast for Fergus' action in the poignant scene in the Last Battle between the exile and the king of Ulster. He has his sword raised against Conchobor, when Cormac catches his hand and reminds him that to attack Ulster's king in this manner "'would be mean and shameful, and spoil friendships. These wicked blows will cheapen your enmity and break your pacts"' (p. 248). Fergus, who is mindful of his honor, but even more concerned with his friendships, turns aside at these words and attacks three nearby hills. The commotion that his blows make summons Cúchulainn to the battle where Fergus must suffer his last defeat, failing to obtain his revenge, but still guiltless of any betrayal of his "pacts," either with Cúchulainn or with any other Ulsterman.

If Fergus' valor points up Ailill's weakness, it is still important to remember that the Connacht king has not always been a puny character. As mentioned in Chapter Two, he was once powerful enough to aid one god in his fight against another. The responsibility for Ailill's diminished state must go to Medb. She has made him the king of his province by marrying him, but she has made him the clown and weakling that he is by her own emasculating infidelity. And in so doing she has unwittingly diminished herself by turning herself into the consort of a buffoon; once again, her grasping nature has deprived her of something valuable.

There is one other tragic figure in the Táin Bó Cuailnge. She is Finnabair, the daughter of Ailill and Medb, who is so terribly humiliated by her realization of her own dishonesty that she literally dies of shame. Almost to the end of the conquest she aids her parents in the war by pretending to acquiesce to their bestowal of her person upon many of the warriors in the camp—once even offering her to Cúchulainn. She barely escapes this last deceit with her life, and the strategy ends in a worsening of Medb's situation. The plan has been to dress Támun, the camp fool, to look like Ailill—an appropriate man to wear this disguise—and have him promise Finnabair to the hero in exchange for his leaving their armies alone until the Last Battle. Then the two of them are to escape quickly. Cúchulainn, however, recognizes the fool and kills him, leaving both his corpse and the girl bound to two standing stones. "There was," the redactor comments, "no further truce for them with Cúchulainn after that" (p. 141). This incident is merely humorous, but the girl quickly develops into a more rounded, and more sympathetic character.

The incident which proves to be her undoing involves her being promised to a certain Rochad mac Faithemain. He is an Ulsterman, and when his pangs end he sets out to aid Cúchulainn ahead of the rest of Ulster's army. Ailill spots him as he nears his friend, and sends a horseman out to detain him with the offer of Finnabair. She is more than agreeable to this arrangement since she has been in love with him for a long time. She sleeps with him for one night; then he returns to Ulster, keeping his bargain. Several of Medb's allies hear that the girl has been given, for once and for all, to this warrior from Ulster, and they reveal to one another that she has previously been promised to them in return for their military services. These revelations of Finnabair's deceit result in chaos; seven hundred men die in the mutiny that ensues. Seemingly Finnabair has been somehow unaware of either what her parents have promised regarding her, or of what the outcome of these promises could be. In either case her ignorance is a bit hard to understand. But her reaction to the results of her dishonesty is both real and tragic; she dies of shame.

Finnabiar evokes far more pity than her cold and calculating mother. De Vries contends that Medb is tragic in that "she has to send into the fight men that are particularly dear to her,"¹¹⁹ both her lovers and her sons. But while such sacrifices would be heart-rending to any ordinary mortal, there is little evidence to suggest that Medb is particularly sorrowful to lose any man. Finnabair reacts far more humanly, feeling an anguish which may be, once again, hyperbolic, but which reflects an awareness of the evils of deceit, and the value of honesty which is laudable, even if it comes too late. The death of the girl also suggests that her loss of honor, as well as her misery over the deaths which she has caused, contributes to her own dying.

Tragedy, then, plays a significant part in establishing the structure of the Táin Bó Cuailnge. For many reasons, its hero is not tragic himself, the most important of which are that his character development is a matter of becoming human while the tragic hero must be human from the start, and that his function as a warrior does not offer the same opportunity for a tragic fall that kingship presents. An epic hero might die in battle, but such a death is appropriate for him; far more disgrace would be implied if he died in bed of a weakening disease. The kings and queen of Ulster and Connacht, simply by carrying the different responsility of ruling, are more vulnerable to tragic errors and falls which must follow.

Finnabair is a foil for the faithful Emer, who stays with her husband the night before his conflict with Ferdia begins. The three more important tragic characters provide, by their degradation, a dark background which amplifies the triumph and splendor of the epic hero. The contrast between the goddess Medb and her flawed, human counterpart especially highlights first the godlikeness, then the triumphant humanity embodied in Cúchulainn.

The hero is caught up in someone else's tragedy. In the Iliad Agamemnon suffers the revenge of Apollo because he has insulted the god. He tries to make up for the losses that his payment of reparations to Apollo's priest entails by insulting Achilleus; a full-scale tragedy on Agamemnon's part is only narrowly averted. The Táin Bó Cuailnge begins with Medb's envy and her own consequent bad behavior. In both cases the hero is tossed into another character's situation, as well as into the gods' difficulties, as was discussed in Chapter Two. The human struggle catches him unawares, and initiates his humanizing, but his presence also transforms the essentially tragic action of the plot. As he becomes the center of the epic, the element of tragedy loses its centrality and even clarifies the nontragic nature of the epic action.

To point out the tragedies of the characters and the greatness of Cúchulainn, however, is not to deny the humor of the Táin. This ingredient is as essential to the reader's perception of the epic's human element as is the tragedy.

Notes

¹ He sees "Celtic epic" as standing at "one extreme" of the literary spectrum becaise of its "mythological romance and fantasy." While "the Homeric poems observe the mean," the "extremes may be found in the heroic literature of other nations; the extreme of marvellous fable in the old Irish heroic legends, for example.…" W. P. Ker, Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1957), pp. 44, 37.

² Cecile O'Rahilly, Táin Bó Cúalnge from the Book of Leinster (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1970), p. ix.

³ William Butler Yeats, The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1952), p. 438.

⁴ Gwyn Jones, Kings, Beasts and Heroes (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972), p. xviii.

⁵ H. Munro Chadwick and N. Kershaw Chadwick, The Ancient Literatures of Europe, Vol. I of The Growth of Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1932), p. 44.

⁶ Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones, trans., The Mabinogion, Everyman's Library (New York: Dutton, 1974), p. 29.

⁷ Jones and Jones, p. 57.

⁸ Thomas Kinsella, trans., The Táin (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1969), p. 134. All further references to the Táin will be to this edition unless otherwise indicated.

⁹ Tom Peete Cross and Clark Harris Slover, eds., Ancient Irish Tales (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1936), pp. 197-98.

¹⁰ Kuno Meyer, Miscellanea Hibernica, Univ. of Illinois Studies in Lang. and Lit., Vol. II, No. 4 (1917; rpt. New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1967), pp. 12-13.

¹¹ Chadwick and Chadwick, pp. 234-35.

¹² Ker, pp. 8-9.

¹³ Eleanor Knott and Gerald Murphy, Early Irish Literature (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1966), pp. 106-107.

¹⁴ James Carney, Introd., Early Irish Literature, by Eleanor Knott and Gerald Murphy (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1966), p. 14.

¹⁵ Eileen Bolton, "The Combat of Ferdiad and Cuchulain," Anglo-Welsh Review, 26, lvii (1976), 143.

¹⁶ Chadwick and Chadwick, p. 213.

¹⁷ Knott and Murphy, p. 106.

¹⁸ Alwyn Rees and Brinley Rees, Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales (London: Thames and Hudson, 1961), p. 69.

¹⁹ Knott and Murphy, p. 106.

²⁰ Jan de Vries, Heroic Song and Heroic Legend, trans. B. J. Timmer (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963), p. 89.

²¹ Raymond Cormier, "Cú Chiúlainn and Yvain: The Love Hero in Early Irish and Old French Literature," Studies in Philology, 72 (1975), 139.

²² Knott and Murphy, pp. 114-15.

²³ de Vries, p. 92.

²⁴ de Vries, p. 93.

²⁵ These scaldic verses were "short fixed texts which managed to survive many generations intact until they achieved definite form in the written texts of the sagas. The verses often epitomize the high moments of a story and serve a structural as well as a thematic function. They should probably be regarded as an essential element in the oral tradition of historical prose." This definition is taken from Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), p. 46.

²⁶ de Vries, p. 92.

²⁷ Chadwick and Chadwick, p. 28.

²⁸ Chadwick and Chadwick, p. 54.

²⁹ Jones, Kings, Beasts and Heroes, p. xxi.

³⁰ Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Palsson, trans. Laxdaela Saga (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969).

³¹ de Vries, p. 96.

³² de Vries, p. 98.

³³ Scholes and Kellogg, p. 174.

³⁴ Chadwick and Chadwick, p. 87.

³⁵ de Vries, p. 84.

³⁶ Donald A. Mackenzie, Teutonic Myth and Legend (London: Gresham Publishing Company, n.d.), pp. 21-29.

³⁷ Chadwick and Chadwick, p. 215.

³⁸ Chadwick and Chadwick, p. 58.

³⁹ de Vries, pp. 72-73.

⁴⁰ Chadwick and Chadwick, p. 78.

⁴¹ Ker, pp. 8-9; de Vries, pp. 74-75.

⁴² Homer, The Iliad, trans. Richard Lattimore, Phoenix Books (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1951), VI. 345-358. All further references to the Iliad will be to this translation.

⁴³ James Carney, Studies in Irish Literature and History (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1955), p. 68.

⁴⁴ Scholes and Kellogg, p. 209.

⁴⁵ Scholes and Kellogg, p. 209.

⁴⁶ Rhys Carpenter, Folk Tale, Fiction and Saga in the Homeric Epics (Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1962), p. 72.

⁴⁷ The import of these actions in relation to the heroes' deaths will be discussed more fully in Chapter Two.

⁴⁸ Scholes and Kellogg, p. 210.

⁴⁹ The role of the gods will be dealt with more thoroughly in Chapters Two and Three.

⁵⁰ de Vries, p. 82.

⁵¹ Carney, Studies, p. 66.

⁵² C. M. Bowra, Heroic Poetry (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1966), p. 4.

⁵³ Bowra, pp. 4-5.

⁵⁴ Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), p. 28.

⁵⁵ Thomas Kinsella, trans., The Táin (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1969), p. 46. All future references to the Tain will be to this edition unless otherwise indicated.

⁵⁶ Raymond Cormier, "Cú Chúlainn and Yvain: The Love Hero in Early Irish and Old French Literature," Studies in Philology, 72 (1975), 125.

⁵⁷ H. Munro Chadwick and N. Kershaw Chadwick, The Ancient Literatures of Europe, Vol. I of The Growth of Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1932), pp. 261-62.

⁵⁸ Kinsella describes "Nemain (Panic) … [as] one of the three goddesses of war, the others being Badb (Scald-crow), haunter of battle-fields, and Morrigan (Great Queen or Queen of Demons). Nemain and the Badb are mentioned as wives of the war-god Net" (p. 263, n. 68).

⁵⁹ Cedric Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), p. 183.

⁶⁰ W. P. Ker, Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1957), p. 37.

⁶¹ Jan de Vries, Heroic Song and Heroic Legend, trans. B. J. Timmer (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 84-85.

⁶² Scholes and Kellogg, p. 59.

⁶³ Chadwick and Chadwick, p. 215.

⁶⁴ Chadwick and Chadwick, p. 236.

⁶⁵ Chadwick and Chadwick, p. 238.

⁶⁶ Rhys Carpenter, Folk Tale, Fiction and Saga in the Homeric Epics (Los Angeles: Univ of California Press, 1962), p. 72.

⁶⁷ Scholes and Kellogg, p. 59.

⁶⁸ Chadwick and Chadwick, p. 300.

⁶⁹ Chadwick and Chadwick, p. 74.

⁷⁰ Tom Peete Cross and Clark Harris Slover, ed., Ancient Irish Tales (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1936), pp. 333-34.

⁷¹ Homer, The Iliad, trans. Richard Lattimore, Phoenix Books (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1951), XIX.404-24. All further references to the Iliad will be to this translation.

⁷² Carpenter, p. 9.

⁷³ Eleanor Knott and Gerald Murphy, Early Irish Literature (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1966), p. 117.

⁷⁴ Carpenter, p. 74.

⁷⁵ Chadwick and Chadwick, p. 73.

⁷⁶ Carpenter, p. 9.

⁷⁷ Alwyn Rees and Brinley Rees, Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales (London: Thames and Hudson, 1961), p. 189.

⁷⁸ Carpenter, p. 73.

⁷⁹ Carpenter, p. 71.

⁸⁰ Carpenter, p. 72.

⁸¹ Chadwick and Chadwick, pp. 206-207.

⁸² Kuno Meyer, Miscellanea Hibernica, Univ. of Illinois Studies in Lang. and Lit., Vol. II, No. 4 (1917; rpt. New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1967), p. 10.

⁸³ See "Branwen Daughter of Llyr," in Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones, trans., The Mabinogion, Everyman's Library (New York: Dutton, 1974), pp. 25-40.

⁸⁴ Carpenter, p. 74.

⁸⁵ Cormier, p. 120.

⁸⁶ Paolo Vivante, The Homeric Imagination: A Study of Homer's Poetic Perception of Reality (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 57-58.

⁸⁷ Cecile O'Rahilly, ed., Táin Bó Cúalnge from the Book of Leinster (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1970), p. 208.

⁸⁸ Rhys Carpenter, Folk Tale, Fiction and Saga in the Homeric Epics (Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1962), p. 79.

⁸⁹ W. P. Ker, Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1957), p. 23.

⁹⁰ Cedric H. Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), p. 179.

⁹¹" James M. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 11.

⁹² Alwyn Rees and Brinley Rees, Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales (London: Thames and Hudson, 1961), p. 333.

⁹³ Cúchulainn means "Hound of Culann." He was given this name, according to Fergus' story, because once, when he was a boy, he had served this man Culann as a watchdog. He had been forced to kill Culann's hound because it attacked him, but he made up its loss to its master by replacing it with himself until he could raise another puppy to defend the man's property (pp. 82-84).

⁹⁴ Tom Peete Cross and Clark Harris Slover, ed., Ancient Irish Tales (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1936, pp. 333-340.

⁹⁵ Whitman, p. 220.

⁹⁶ Maurice B. McNamee, Honor and the Epic Hero: A Study of the Shifting Concept of Magnanimity in Philosophy and Epic Poetry (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1960), p. x.

⁹⁷ W. B. Yeats wrote five plays about Cúchulainn. They are strange, lyrical works which sometimes approach high comedy—as in the case of The Green Helmet and The Only Jealousy of Emer—and tragedy, in At the Hawk's Well, On Baile's Strand, and The Death of Cuchulain. But of all these works, not one takes its story from the Táin itself, though all originate, to some degree, in tales from the Ulster Cycle. Several of Yeats's critics express perplexity at the fact that he never adapted the fight with Ferdia for a tragic work. In light of the present study, I think that it would be safe to put forward the premise that he never did so because that action does not contain the tragic possibilities of the other stories, and that Yeats, perceiving this difference, bypassed the most significant event in the great Irish hero's life rather than do violence to it.

⁹⁸ James M. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector (Chicago: Univ of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 28.

⁹⁹ Redfield, p. 29.

¹⁰⁰ McNamee, p. x.

¹⁰¹ McNamee, p. 8.

¹⁰² Redfield, p. 154.

¹⁰³ Charles Bowen notes that it is unclear exactly what she is doing, but that "neither menstruation nor urination … can be discarded as a possibility." Charles Bowen, "Great-Bladdered Medb: Mythology and Invention in the Táin Bó Cuailnge," Eire, 26 (1975), 32.

¹⁰⁴ Bowen, p. 30.

¹⁰⁵ Bowen, p. 31.

¹⁰⁶ Some scholars have speculated that the anti-feminism of Irish poetry has its origin in the transition, in Ireland, from a matriarchal to a patriarchal society. Succession, H. M. Chadwick says in The Heroic Age (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1912), was indeed reckoned through the female members of the royal family until the eighth century, "and there are said to be traces of the same type of succession in Ireland" (p. 428). In The Growth of Literature, furthermore, the Chadwicks point out examples of the evidence which would support a claim to matrilineal succession: "some of the leading heroes are frequently … called after their mothers, e.g. Conchobor (mac Nessa), Fergus (mac Roich), Ailill (mac Magach or mata), Cúchulainn (mac Dechtire)." This practice, however, does not offer certain proof of this form of succession, since "with this usage is probably to be connected the variation in the statements as to the paternity of these heroes …" (p. 177). Whether or not it has any anthropological basis, this form of succession exists in the Táin: Conchobor says to Medb that "I came and took the kingship here, in succession to my mother …" (p. 54). The power of Medb, and an anti-feminist attitude toward it, are certainties within the Táin Bó Cuailnge.

¹⁰⁷ James Carney, Studies in Irish Literature and History (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1955), p. 69.

¹⁰⁸ Whitman, p. 163.

¹⁰⁹ Bowen, p. 18.

¹¹⁰ Bowen, p. 20.

¹¹¹ Jan de Vries, Heroic Song and Heroic Legend, trans. B. J. Timmer (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963), p. 91.

¹¹² Ailill says to her that "'It struck me … how much better off you are today than the day I married you"' (p. 52). He later claims that he "'took the kingship here"' because he had "'never heard of a province run by a woman"'—admitting that Connacht was hers before it was his, and that he became king only by marrying her.

¹¹³ de Vries, p. 91

¹¹⁴ Cecile O'Rahilly, ed., Táin Bó Cúialnge from the Book of Leinster (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1970), p. 208.

¹¹⁵ This story, too, has quite a strong anti-feminist element; a woman, Derdriu, is at the root of the trouble. She is another tragic heroine, doomed from before her birth to cause great destruction in Ireland, but the way that she brings it about is damning. She cannot help her great beauty, any more than Helen of Troy can, but she must be held accountable for her seduction of Noisiu. He rejects her at first because she has been promised to Conchobor, but she persists with threats and insults until he agrees to take her with him (p. 12).

¹¹⁶ Vivian Mercier, The Irish Comic Tradition (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962), p. 58.

¹¹⁷ Mercier, p. 58.

¹¹⁸ de Vries, p. 91.

¹¹⁹ de Vries, p. 77.