reason for its survival is to be found in the way myth was diffused throughout every other department of knowledge. The orderly functioning of tribal society, which of course continued into the Christian period, would have been impossible if the tradition on which it was founded had been rejectedin toto. Add to this the inherent conservatism of the Irish temperament, never willing to lay a scrap of old knowledge aside unless forced to do so, and it becomes obvious that a great deal of the old learning was bound to survive in one way or another.

Nevertheless, it could not have survived unchanged in its original form. The learned class who were its custodians may not have been among the most eager new catechumens, but the Christian religion made rapid progress among the tribal and provincial kings, on whom they depended for support, and inevitably an accommodation had to be made. The ancient functions of these learned experts were essential to the working of Irish society—James Carney has remarked that the society could no more have done without them than a modern state could abolish its civil service³—and they had to go on exercising many of these functions. But of course they could no longer be priests—that is, druids—and anything that was specifically religious in their learning had to be suppressed. Moreover, during the first century or so of Christian impact, about 450 to 550, the Irish language was going through such drastic changes that oral-formulaic poetry—the medium in which one assumes the learned class preserved its lore—must have become virtually impossible to practice according to the established conventions.⁴ In combination with the gradual conversion of the learned class, this change must have knocked much of the mythological tradition loose from its moorings in the ancient oral culture.

During the centuries that intervened between Patrick's time and the period in which the surviving versions of the Táin took shape—the 8th and 9th centuries—the two intellectual traditions were integrated. The monasteries, far from being centers of opposition to the old learning, became the places where it was enshrined in books, that is, all of it that could be preserved. Unfortunately, no first-hand evidence has come down to us from this transitional period, so that it is impossible to observe the process of integration directly. But it seems to have taken place in a fairly thoroughgoing way. Even though the oral storytelling tradition continued to flourish, and presumably remained capable for some centuries longer of providing tidbits of material that had not previously been written down, nothing that was unabashedly pagan and incompatible with the new dispensation seems to have been in general circulation. On occasion the scribes may have felt nervous about recording details that seemed to them extravagant, as their interpolated comments and marginal notes attest,⁵ but in general the evidence suggests that the marriage of the traditions had been consummated by the 9th century, the point at which our literary evidence really begins.

The means by which the lore of the native intellectual tradition had been preserved, in spite of its religious discreditation, was primarily the technique of euhemerization. In essence this is the conversion of myth into pseudo-history and gods into heroes. In order to reconcile their reluctance as Christians to write about forbidden subjects with their reluctance as Irishmen to discard even a jot or a tittle of their own cultural tradition, the early generations of literati found it necessary to transform ancestor-deities into mere ancestors, albeit prodigious ones. The pagan gods, who collectively were known as the Tuatha Dé Danann ('Peoples of the Goddess Danu') became a tribe of tall, good-looking humans with unusual skill in magic.

Anything that conflicted directly with Christian doctrine or Biblical history had to be abandoned: for instance, the Irish have left us no pre-Christian account of the Creation. All the traditions that could be salvaged, however, were eventually organized into a canonical body of pseudo-historical doctrine. This purported to chronicle every notable event in Ireland since its first settlement, immediately before the Flood, and to trace the ancestry of every native population-group all the way back to Adam.⁶ Every saga and cycle was assigned a place in the scheme, so that the events it related, no matter how little they might accord with literary realism or even common sense, could be regarded as historical "fact," and thus legitimate matter for preservation. The fall of Dind Rig was as much a part of history as the fall of Jericho or Troy, and Cú Roi mac Daire as real a king as Saul or Theseus. And since the characters in the sagas were real human beings, there could be nothing unchristian about recording their adventures.

Even though a great bulk of ancient material had been preserved, however, it had not come down in homogeneous form, but in multiple and fragmentary transmissions over a long period of time. A redactor in the 9th century or later, attempting to put in writing a tale or even a brief episode, might have at his disposal, or at least in his memory, several manuscript versions, some incomplete and none in agreement, besides other different versions he had heard recited, and possibly still others suggested to his mind by common sense. Even if he wanted nothing more than to transmit the story unaltered, he could hardly avoid manipulating the material in order to achieve this end. In attempting to bring order and clarity out of the jumble he had inherited, he would have to risk doing violence to tradition. Even a careful scribe would need great good fortune to avoid such violence, and not all scribes were careful. We can be almost certain that some such damage has been done to the substratum of myth that underlies the Táin.

Nevertheless, damage or no, the substratum is there. Not only is it possible that the story itself has its basis in one or more ancient mythic narratives, but several of the characters, among whom Medb is certainly to be included, have independent standing as figures of mythology, being mentioned in numerous traditions outside the Táin. It is necessary here to set aside the question of what we might call the mythic "deep structure" of the Táin, and to pursue Medb's independent associations instead, to see what light they can shed on the character that has been created for her as the rambunctious queen of Connacht.

The most widespread and persistent traditions about Medb are clustered around the myth of the king's hieros gamos or 'sacral marriage.' 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. According to Irish belief, there was a distinct goddess for each kingship, who would of course be known by different names in different places, but the goddess's function in the myth, and the inaugural ritual connected with it, is always the same. This is quite in keeping with the nature of Celtic religion, whose deities, in the words of Proinsias Mac Cana, "appear under an endlessly varied nomenclature, while remaining essentially unchanged in terms of function."⁷ Thus, it is possible for us to learn something about what the goddess Medb was like from stories whose heroines have different names, once we have established her connection with the myth, and it is easy to establish that connection; a number of scholars have done so.⁸ Queen Medb of Connacht, for instance, is said to have had a succession of husbands, each of whom, like Ailill, was king of Connacht by virtue of his marriage to her. Needless to say, such an arrangement bears no relation to the means by which eligibility for kingship was established in real life. Another Medb, who was given the epithet Lethderg ('Red-side' or 'Half-red'), but on the mythic level is obviously the same figure, was married to a number of successive kings of Tara. The Book of Leinster says, "Great indeed was the strength and power of that Medb over the men of Ireland, for it was she would not allow a king in Tara without his having herself as wife."⁹ In other words, it was the ritual union, here treated as historical, with the goddess Medb that validated the kingships of Connacht and Tara.

In what may be regarded as the early stage of this myth, the goddess represents the earth in general and the tribal territory in particular. Her role is both sexual and maternal; she can appropriately be considered a goddess of fertility. The king is chosen as a flawless representative of this tribe and united to her in a ritual marriage ceremony at his inauguration feast. The name for such a feast was banais rígi ('wedding-feast of kingship'); sometimes it was simply called feis. This word—which is also the basis of the compound banais, that is, ban 'woman' + feis—ultimately means 'spending the night, sleeping together, sexual intercourse.' After the wedding, 'if the king proves to be worthy and the marriage valid, the earth will be fertile and everything from crops to livestock to the human birthrate will flourish. Unworthy behavior on his part can bring all these blessings to an end, as many stories attest.

The king's role in this stage of the myth, which might be called the fertility-myth, is almost as symbolic as the goddess's; his office is clearly conceived as more religious than political. But times change. Whether there was ever a purely non-political king in real Irish life, or whether the myth represented a religious ideal that had long since vanished from the actual world, there is no question that the business of kingship at some stage moved away from ritual and into realpolitik. Royal power became something to be fought and lusted for. This development seems to have given rise to a new interpretation of the myth, a second stage which grew up alongside the old one, and which will be called the sovereignty-myth to distinguish it from the fertility-myth of the earlier stage. Now 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. Since the Irish had no law of primogeniture, a number of men were theoretically eligible to succeed to a given kingship. The question of who would do so and how was naturally surrounded by a high degree of anxiety and developed a potent mystique, which found expression in the myth of the goddess's choice.

The best-known story that reflects this sovereignty-myth concerns the sons of Eochaid Mugmedon.¹⁰ Camping out in the woods, they are all very thirsty, but the only well they can find is guarded by an ugly hag, who refuses each of them a drink unless he will kiss her. Only one accepts: he is Niall, who will become ancestor to the powerful Uí-Néill. As soon as he embraces her, the hag becomes a beautiful young woman and identifies herself as the sovereignty of Ireland, which will belong to him and his descendants thenceforward. Clearly, the goddess's role is still a sexual one, but the interest is now focused on her choice of a partner and on the test which confirms and manifests that choice, rather than the subsequent wedding and the fecundity it brings into being.

The sovereignty-myth continued to exert its force on the Irish imagination through the centuries. There is a direct line from the goddess in the myth to that personification of Ireland we find in the aisling poems Egan O'Rahilly and others wrote during the Penal times, where she appears as a young woman in need of the right lord and master to wed her—a role the poets unfortunately assigned to the Stuarts.¹¹ For the purposes of this discussion, however, it is important only to emphasize the connection between the sovereignty-myth and the tradition that the kingship of Connacht or Tara depended on marriage to one Medb or another.

The gift of a drink seems to be important in all tales of the sovereignty-myth type: usually the woman offers not water, as she does to Niall, but wine, mead, or ale. An etymological connection has been made by medieval as well as modern scholars between the words flaith ('sovereign' or 'sovereignty') and laith ('beer'). Apparently the drinking of some symbolic intoxicant functioned to confirm the kingship in a manner parallel with the ritual marriage. Rudolf Thurneysen has speculated, plausibly enough, that a ritual drinking-bout was part of the inauguration ceremony.¹² It is obviously significant for our inquiry that the name Medb, formed from the same Indo-European root that gives the word 'mead' in many languages, including English, can mean either 'the drunken one' or 'she who intoxicates.'

Drunkenness, at least in this context, would not have been seen as degenerate behavior, but as a kind of ecstatic state in which a human was lifted out of himself and might hope to achieve contact with the divine. One of the most characteristic traits of Celtic culture is the importance it placed on the state of frenzy or ecstasy, which could be cultivated not only in drunkenness, but also in the mad fury to which Celtic warriors worked themselves up when they went into battle. Some evidence also suggests that sexual ecstasy was associated with these other two kinds, and had a similar significance—might, in fact, have been regarded as a manifestation of the same kind of supernatural force.¹³ Thus, the king's ritual drunkenness at the inaugural feast might be interpreted as an image of the sacred orgasm in which he was united with the goddess.

As a beneficent mother who could confer the blessings necessary to communal life, or as the alluring nymph whose love-test brought success and royal power to those who passed it, the goddess was obviously a positive and attractive force, but it is important to understand that she had a negative aspect also. She could confer and bless, but she could, if she chose, withhold and curse as well. In both the fertility and the sovereignty-myths, the candidate's worthiness is a matter for some concern: if he is unworthy, there may be serious consequences for him or for the whole community. Therefore, the goddess was also associated with evil and danger. This dualistic conception is reflected in the story of Níall, where the old woman at the well appears loathesome, at least to those whose qualities do not fit them for kingship. All the brothers refuse her the kiss she asks for except Niall, who offers not only to kiss her, but to lie with her as well. We should not judge him either callous or perverse for this: the point is that he alone is gifted with insight into her true nature, an imporant sign of his worthiness. After the ugly hag has become a lovely nymph, she explains the change allegorically: kingship, she says, is often achieved through hardship and strife, but it is sweet once possessed. This pat little moral has a rationalizing sound to it, and has probably been added to the myth at a relatively late stage. More likely the goddess was originally regarded as good and evil, desirable and abhorrent, protective and destructive, at the same time.

In a story similar to that of Níall and the hag at the well, it is possible to see the goddess's vicious side a little more fully. This story concerns Macha Mongruad, not represented as a goddess, but certainly playing a goddess's role.¹⁴ Macha is a claimant for the kingship of Ulster who, having received no justice from those who are supposed to share the royal power with her, successfully asserts her claim in arms, and defeats all her rivals. Among these are the five sons of Dithorba, whom she pursues into the wilds of Connacht, disguising herself as a leper. In this repellent guise she joins the five brothers at their campfire. Apparently her dual aspect is not hidden from them any more than the hag's was hidden from Níall, although here it is presumably a matter of her tactics rather than their perceptiveness. At any rate, once dinner is over, the brothers say, "Beautiful is the hag's eye! Let us lie with her." Taking them into the woods one at a time, Mancha overpowers each one in turn, and takes them all back to Ulster as her prisoners, where they are enslaved.

It is important to emphasize the dualism in the conception of this goddess, the simultaneous goodness and evil she was paradoxically able to represent. Perhaps only in that way can we attempt to understand how she could have been regarded—as she indisputably was—not only as the goddess of fertility and sovereignty, but also as the goddess of war. With our assumptions based on the compartmentalized Classical pantheon, which in this respect has little in common with Celtic religion, we find this association difficult to comprehend, but its existence cannot be doubted. Both Anne Ross and Marie-Louise Sjoestedt-Jonval, the scholars who have worked most intensively on Celtic goddess-types, have observed and commented on it. Sjoestedt says, "The series of mothers merges into that of goddesses of slaughter so that one cannot establish a clear opposition between them."¹⁵

The war-goddess expresses none of the joy in combat we might expect to find among a warlike people; she is an object of fear and loathing even to those who are blessed with her help. Cú Chulainn, for example, sometimes receives favors from the war-goddess, but when he encounters her directly, their relations are usually hostile. It is typical that, when she takes part in a battle, she does so only by magically demoralizing one side or the other, and it would be fair to say that she represents terror and carnage more than any other aspects of warfare. The Irish tradition tends to conceive her as a trio: the Mór-rígain, whose name probably means 'Great Queen,' the Badb, or 'Crow,' and the Nemain, 'Frenzy' or 'Panic.' The latter two seem to be mainly personifications of the most terrifying aspects of battle. Usually when they appear in the Táin, for instance, it is more or less as figures of speech. The Mór-rígain, however, manifests a little more personality. In the Táin she carries on a minor feud with Cu Chulainn while he is still single-handedly holding off Medb's army. In general, throughout the Táin, the Mór-rígain seems delighted by the slaughter; although she occasionally gives help or advice to either side, she seems more interested in insuring that a battle will take place than in which side will win it.

If we attempt to see this forbidding divinity as an extension of the goddess's negative aspect, a kind of fiercely logical carrying of the dualism to its natural extreme, we will possibly be on the right track, although the mental territory we enter here is so barren of familiar landmarks that it is hard to speak with much assurance. At any rate, the war goddess, like the others, has a strongly sexual aspect, and this tends to reinforce the association. It may also be worthwhile to point once again to the association of different forms of ecstasy, such as intoxication, sexual ardor, and warlike fury. If all three were in fact seen as variant manifestations of the same supernatural force, that may help explain how the pagan Celts were able to maintain such apparently incompatible conceptions of the same divine power.

One episode shows all of these opposing elements in rather close association, and is worth examining for the detail it can add to the complex pattern of fertility, sovereignty, and war affinities. It occurs in the tale called The Second Battle of Mag Tured, which contains a number of traditions about warfare among the gods, distorted, fragmented, and disguised as history. Shortly before the climactic battle, a sexual encounter takes place between the Dagda (the 'Good God') and the Mórrígain. The time is Samain, the Celtic New Year:

Now the Dagda had an appointed meeting with a woman … about the Samain of the battle, in Glenn Edinn. The river Unnius of Connacht roars to the south of it. He saw the woman in the Unnius … washing, with one of her two feet … to the south of the water, and the other … to the north.… The Dagda conversed with her, and they made a union. "The Bed of the Couple" is the name of that place since then. The Mór-rígain is the woman that is mentioned here.¹⁶

Now, the Dagda is a god who certainly fits the type of the father-and-chieftain divinity. If he mates with a goddess at the time of year when important festivals were held, including such inaugural rites as that of Tara, it is certainly safe to see this encounter as a divine analogue of the sacral marriage between king and goddess.⁷ But, on the other hand, is it necessary to accept the word of the text that the goddess in question is the war-goddess? After all, The Second Battle of Mag Tured is a confused text. Could not the identification here, which sounds like an editorial aside, be mistaken? It might be reasonable to think so, if not for the passage that follows:

Then she told the Dagda that the Fomorians would land at Magh Scetne, and that he should summon Ireland's men of art [magicians] to meet her at the Ford of Unnius, and that she would go into Scetne to destroy Indech … [king] of the Fomorians, and would take from him the blood of his heart and the kidneys of his valor. Now she gave two handfuls of that blood to the armies that were waiting at the Ford of Unnius.

Obviously, then, she is the Mór-rígain, or at least the war-goddess, for these actions are hardly appropriate to a goddess exclusively concerned with fertility. Altogether, then, this passage provides impressive evidence that the goddesses of fertility/sovereignty and war played overlapping roles.

It is significant that the encounter between the Dagda and the Mór-rígain begins, and may even be consummated, with the goddess astride a river. Here is what Anne Ross has to say about the symbolism of rivers for the Celtic peoples:

Springs, wells and rivers are of first and enduring importance as a focal point of Celtic cult practice and ritual. Rivers are important in themselves, being associated in Celtic tradition with fertility and with deities, such as the divine mothers and the sacred bulls, concerned with this fundamental aspect of life … The Celtic mother-goddesses who frequently also function in the role of war-goddesses … have a widespread association with water. This is due, no doubt, to their own obvious connection with fertility which, in the popular mind, could be likened to the life-giving powers of water which could be witnessed by man himself. So we find, for example, the powerful river Marne taking its name from that of the Gaulish Matrona, 'Divine Mother.' No doubt there was at one time a cult legend in circulation associating the Mother with the river, which became the physical personification of the goddess, mirroring her own supernatural forces—strength, the powers of destruction, fertility.¹⁸

It is worth recalling at this point that river-names in Celtic languages were invariably feminine, and that where tradition has assigned eponyms, they are always women. The position of the Mór-rígain in the glen, straddling a river with one foot on each bank, suggests that the river is to be envisioned as emanating from between her legs. There should be nothing startling about such a notion. Springs and wells are, after all, primary female symbols. The locus of fertility, in a female divinity, would obviously be the womb. Seen in this context, the source of the river is the point at which the fluid of life issues from the body of the earth-mother.

To carry the analogy a bit farther, we might ask whether Ross's idea that the river "became the physical personification of the goddess, mirroring her own supernatural forces," is capable of further extension. If the river is the fluid of life, emanating from the goddess's body, what might be its specific referent? A number of possibilities suggests themselves. For one, there is the amniotic fluid that fills the womb during pregnancy: the "water of life" par excellence, in which the body of a new human being mysteriously takes shape. The ancient Gauls, perhaps by analogy with this process, invested the waters of springs and sources with curative powers.¹⁹

If we should seek an analogue for the goddess's malevolent and destructive powers, we might consider the menstrual blood, an object of fearful taboo in many cultures, where it has often been regarded as especially dangerous and destructive to men. One might look back to the two handfuls of blood given by the Mór-rígain to the magicians she was helping. In the narrator's mind they were certainly taken from the enemy leader's heart, but it is tempting to wonder if they might not originally have consisted of her own menstrual blood, envisioned as a destructive charm against enemy warriors.

Whatever the value of these speculations, there is one more symbol of the goddess's sexual power that is sufficient in itself to account for the Mór-rígain's symbolic posture over the river Unnius: that is her urine. Support for this assertion can be found in yet another text, a remarkably primitive story that survives among the lesser fragments of the Ulster cycle, The Death of Derbforgaill:

One day at the end of winter there was deep snow. The men made a great pillar of the snow. The women went up on the pillar. This was what they thought of: "Let us urinate on the pillar to see whose urine will go deepest into it. The woman who penetrates it completely is the best lover among us." However, their urine did not go through. Derbforgaill was called by them. It was not to her liking because she was not wanton. Nevertheless, she went onto the pillar. It went through from her to the ground.

"If the men knew this, now, no woman would be loved in comparison with this one. Let her eyes be taken out of her head, and her two ears, and her hair. She won't be well-desired after that."

So the women mutilate Derbforgaill. According to the other manuscript, they tear off "her nose and her hair and the flesh of her buttocks." She very shortly dies, after having refused to open the door to her husband, Lugaid, and Cú Chulainn takes vengeance on the nameless women, killing them all.²⁰

There are several remarkable features to this frank and gruesome little tale. The women's contest takes place on top of a phallic symbol erected by the men; in winning the contest Derbforgaill equals the measure of this monument, and perhaps she can even be said to demolish it symbolically in the process. What is most important for our purpose, however, is the sentence where the meaning of the contest is explained, and here we have some choice in both the text and the translation. The women say, referring to the one who will demonstrate the most impressive capacity, either "as ferr congaib uan" or "as ferr ergaire uainn," that is, depending on the manuscript, either her congaib or her ergaire is the best among us. Ergaire usually means 'the act of checking or hindering,' though in some expressions it can mean 'being a match or an equal for' something. However, it occurs with an apparent sexual connotation in a passage describing Fergus mac Roig in his more virile aspect: "Seven fists [i.e. 42 inches] the length of his penis. His scrotum the size of a bushel basket. Seven women to curb him [dia ergaire] unless Flidais should come," Flidais being one of his usual consorts.²¹ The editor of this passage, Whitley Stokes, marks ergaire and queries in a footnote, "in sensu obscaeno?" It seems clear that the meaning is sexual. If it were simply a matter of physical restraint, one would expect seven men rather than seven women, and in addition there is the testimony of the context. So presumably the statement "her ergaire is best" means "her matching or checking (in the obscene sense) is best."

Now, the other word, congaib, which Carl Marstrander translates 'to keep' and Rudolf Thurneysen 'to satisfy (enclose) a man¹²² must be related to the verb con-gaib 'contains, maintains, keeps,' as both translations imply. But the context calls for the verbal noun rather than a finite form of the verb, and the verbal noun of con-gaib is not congaib but congbal. On the other hand, there is a noun conga(i)b, which is more loosely related to the same verb; it means 'gathering or host,' but also 'equipment.' In the latter sense it has been used with a sexual meaning. The R.I.A. Dictionary cites a reference to emasculation in the Yellow Book of Lecan: "robhean a chongaib ferda as"—'lopped off his manly equipment.' The dictionary cautiously places our sentence next to this one, and whether or not caution is necessary, the meaning must be something like, "she has the best (sexual) equipment of all." Thus, both readings establish that bladder capacity is synonymous with sexual performance.

The episode thus establishes beyond doubt that there is a relationship between copious urination and sexuality, but it does more than that: it refers specifically to a physical measure of sexual power. Just as the phallic myth depends on the notion that a man's potency is reflected by the size of his genitals, the corresponding female myth, as we see it here, measures a woman's sexual power by the capacity of her "inner space," with the bladder undoubtedly serving as an analogue for the vagina and uterus. All of this, perhaps, makes the relevance of river and urine symbolism to the figure of the fertility-sovereignty-war goddess a little clearer.

To return to Medb as a literary character in the Táin, scholars have shown that much of her behavior can be accounted for by reference to her divine background. Tomás Ó Máille and Rudolf Thurneysen, half a century ago, pointed out the connection between the fertility-sovereignty myth and Medb's promiscuity.²³ They were responding to an article Heinrich Zimmer had written in 1911, in which he cited Medb as evidence that sexual life in ancient Ireland had come sadly short of the moral standards of his own day. If Medb boasts that she "never had one man without another waiting in his shadow," argued Ó Máille and Thurneysen, if she continually offers "the friendship of her thighs" to whomever she wants to influence, if she conducts an affair with Fergus so flagrantly that even Ailill's celebrated complaisance is strained, she is only living up to the spirit of the myths that lie beneath her character. Her hapless daughter Finnabair is also promised to many, although the promise is never fulfilled. She is so passive a pawn of her mother that it seems best to regard her as nothing more than an extension of Medb herself, a mere variant on the promise of friendly thighs. In the Táin, such promises are usually made while the prospect is being plied with strong drink, and even this has been traced back to the sovereignty-myth and the symbolic beverage given to the chosen candidate.²⁴ Although this line of argument is basically sound, it is worth keeping in mind that some of these actions may be natural enough in the circumstances of the plot: we may not need a myth to explain why Medb would find it practical to get a man drunk, or offer him her daughter's hand or her own thighs, in order to persuade him to risk challenging Cu Chulainn to single combat.

Medb's affair with Fergus, on the other hand, does not seem quite necessary to the plot. It is not an unnatural development, given her promiscuous character, but as we have been seeing, that character is to a certain extent the consequence of her mythological background. Fergus, too, has a background, and it reveals him to be a fertility-god just as surely as Medb is a fertility-goddess. The passage quoted above, on his virile dimensions, lends support to this thesis; it is also worth reflecting that his name means something like 'Manly Force, son of Great Stallion.' Under the circumstances, then, their romance may have been foredoomed by mythological influences regardless of the requirements of the story.

These examples of mythological influence on the characterization of Medb come, it might be said, from outside the Táin, inasmuch as they are based on the memory of a mythic prototype that is in a way independent of the story-pattern exemplified in the Táin itself. We may seek for further examples of the same kind. Thus, it may seem obvious that, in commanding an army, Medb is manifesting the character of a war-goddess. Anne Ross certainly makes this assumption; she speaks of Medb as a lone exception to the rule that war-goddesses do not take up arms but operate instead through magical means.²⁵ But the exceptional nature of Medb's case is even more striking than that. Apart from the mythological battle of Mag Tured, we seldom find this goddess identifying herself with either side in a battle. As we have already seen, she gives the impression of being delighted only by the prospect of carnage, and indifferent to the interests of the combatants. It is hard to imagine her supporting one side, let alone commanding it. Medb's attitude in the Táin, of course, is far removed from such impartial malignance, and for that reason, the mythic prototype of the war-goddess should probably receive no credit for determining her characterization.

Obviously, then, there is more to Medb than we can account for by looking to her supernatural prototype. The whole cattle-raid is begun by her ambition to surpass her husband, and sustained by her ruthless drive to succeed in the project without regard to what may be prudent or just. At first glance it might seem to be a logical development of the sovereignty-myth that the woman who represents sovereignty should become a human queen lusting to extend her power. No doubt it is the myth that has caused Medb to be remembered as a true sovereign, rather than a passive royal consort, as queens were in real life. But ambition on her part does not belong to the myth; it is quite unnecessary. The female has sovereignty entirely in her keeping; in fact, she is sovereignty. There is no suggestion that, in mating with the mortal king and giving him a draft of her powerful ale, she is taking a subordinate role. Kings come and go; she remains. The goddess has no reason to envy her beneficiaries. Therefore, it is not enough to point to the sovereignty-myth as the explanation for Medb's ambitious drive. We must also give some credit to the plot of the Táin, where as instigator and commander of the great cattle-raid she is committed to a ruthless and self-centered role. The question of the origin of the plot—whether it derives from ancient mythic story-patterns or from the pseudo-historical speculations of the early Christian period—is too large to take up here. It is safe to say, however, that evidence can be found to support the hypothesis of a mythic origin for the cattle-raid, whether or not it is conclusive.²⁶ Here, of course, we would have an "internal" mythological influence, as distinct from the "external" ones considered above.

The 8th- and 9th-century redactors found Medb's role already defined by the story, and they proceeded to interpret it in the light of their robust antifeminism and their conservative notion of a properly-ordered cosmos. T. F. O'Rahilly observed that, with the transition from goddess to masterful woman, Medb's character degenerated sadly.²⁷ Her sexual behavior was less tolerable in a mortal than it had been in a goddess, and perhaps led some of the saga writers to conclusions like Heinrich Zimmer's. But above and beyond that, it was quite foreign to Irish tradition for a woman to exercise kingship: there was no equivalent concept of queenship. The idea of a woman commanding royal authority and organizing a great military expedition would have outraged the patriarchist prejudices of the redactors, laymen no less than clerics, and Medb could hardly appear otherwise to them than as a wilful woman of dangerously subversive tendencies. Once the narrative had acquired its basic outline, certainly prior to the 8th century, the men who worked and reworked it operated not as free and autonomous authors, but as scholarly redactors, trying to bring out and clarify the shape of the story as they perceived it in what had been handed down to them. They could invent incidents and speeches, but they would have done so in order to realize the implications of the story as they understood these to be given; it is unlikely that they would have attempted to alter its fundamental shape in a consciously original way. It would thus be fair to say that all their invention was a form of interpretation, and that invention had no greater role to play in creating Medb's character. With each retelling, as the mythic substratum became ever more dim in the collective memory, the subversiveness of the headstrong queen would tend to stand out more and more sharply, and the arrangement of speech and incident would assert this interpretation with greater and greater clarity. Medb would tend to become ever more high-handed and imperious, ever less respectful of the sanctity of treaties, truces, and other gentlemen's agreements.²⁸

Of course this process was invisible to the storytellers and redactors who were collectively responsible for it. For them the story was fixed and given, a fact no longer of literature but of history. They thought of Queen Medb not as a goddess, nor as a fascinating literary creation, but as a larger-than-life ancestress; when they looked on her their disapproval was real, but it was mingled with awe. It is hard to keep your lips pursed when your jaw keeps dropping. If the redactors' undoubted antifeminism had controlled their responses to the extent Frank O'Connor implies,²⁹ we would probably have gotten a much less powerful and impressive Queen Medb in the Táin—perhaps a pouting Maureen O'Hara spoiling for a thwacking from John Wayne—and surely not the giantess we have instead. A lingering consciousness of Medb's divinity was always there, somewhere in the back of the writers' consciousness, and it produced an odd but powerful tension in the narrative. Perhaps nothing in the Táin illustrates it better than the scene at the end of the last battle:

Medb had set up a shelter of shields to guard the rear of the men of Ireland. She had sent off the Brown Bull of Cuailnge by a roundabout road.…

Then Medb got her gush of blood.

'Fergus,' she said, 'take over the shelter of shields … until I relieve myself.'

'By god,' Fergus said, 'you have picked a bad time for this.'

'I can't help it,' Medb said. 'I'll die if I can't do it.'

So Fergus took over the shelter of shields … and Medb relieved herself. It dug three great channels, each big enough to take a household. The place is called Fual Medba, Medb's Foul Place, ever since. Cu Chulainn found her like this, but he held his hand. He wouldn't strike her from behind.³⁰

Obviously more than one thing is going on here. The storyteller's purpose is to place Medb in a helpless and ridiculous position, where she will be not simply humiliated, but humiliated specifically as a woman, when Cu Chulainn catches her. The effect of the scene, however, is much more complex and ambivalent than this simple purpose would lead us to expect.

The natural process referred to, by the way, is not quite certain. The phrase translated 'gush of blood' by Kinsella and 'issue of blood' by Cecile O'Rahilly means literally 'urine of blood.' In the rest of the passage, however, a phrase meaning 'to pass urine' is used three times, and the name of the place afterwards means not 'Medb's Foul Place' but 'Medb's Urine.' Kinsella, who gives the correct meaning in his notes, is merely trying to resolve the ambiguity in favor of menstruation for editorial reasons. Neither menstruation nor urination, therefore, can be discarded as a possibility. Either would have seemed appropriately ignominious to the narrator, whose point of view is entirely in harmony with the sentiment expressed by Fergus at the end of the earliest surviving version, the one from the 9th century: "We followed the rump of a misguiding woman … it is the usual thing for a herd led by a mare to be strayed and destroyed."

The scene above, however, is found only in the 12th-century version, although it may be based on something earlier.³¹ But whether or not it goes very far back in the textual tradition of the Táin, the lurking symbolism in the scene suggests strongly that it must be based on something very old. And this ancient symbolism pulls the narrative in a direction the writer presumably did not intend. The last thing he would want Medb to do, if his intention has been represented correctly, is demonstrate her strength. But the power inherent in the symbolism will not be denied. Whether it is urine or menstrual blood, Medb produces it in such quantities that she creates a new landmark. The same thing happens in a derivative story called Táin Bó Flidaise II which may be based on a lost version of the Táin. Caught at a difficult moment during a retreat, Medb urinates so prodigiously that, in the words of one manuscript,

neither root nor underbrush nor stick of wood was left, down to the gravel of the earth, but it was stripped bare, and the mighty stones remained afterward. And neither root nor growth nor grass, in its pure, lovely ripeness, was left in that place forever after, so that Leacán ('Stony Place') and Mún Medhbhi ('Medb's Urine') is the name of that place since then.³²

Both versions of the story contain these little onomastic tags to explain the place-name, and they may perhaps point to an origin in the dindshenchas tradition. Bits of genuine myth have sometimes been preserved in these place-name legends, and it is worth noting that goddesses, who are more often identified with a particular locality than gods, play a proportionally large role in them. But whatever its origin, the story has maintained its integrity to the extent that the writer is unable to adapt it fully to his purpose. Even in the midst of a disorderly and humiliating retreat, Medb manages to give a demonstration of the power—the supernatural, female power—that once made her feared and honored. Mythology retains its power over the tradition, and here it has fought invention to a standstill. Will anyone deny that the scene is greater, not less, for the conflict?

A woman whose desire to possess a treasure is so strong that she willingly sacrifices a huge army for it, whose reluctance to share glory is so powerful that she casually proposes to slaughter the best of her allies, whose determination to achieve her purpose is so intense that she bribes, threatens, and seduces one man after another into a single combat she knows he will not survive, and occasionally mocks these victims to her husband as they go; a goddess who can bring the earth to life or make it barren, who can delude some men into destruction and make kings of others, who can intoxicate her followers with superhuman exhilaration on one occasion and emasculating terror on another—Medb is a powerful mixture. From a goddess who is never quite one thing without also being its opposite, she has become a queen who, in spite of being human and fallible, is never quite free of her former divinity. It is no wonder she had such power over the imagination of the medieval storytellers who shaped the Táin Bó Cuailnge, or that we who read their words can feel that power today.

Notes

¹ In a slightly different version, this paper was presented to the 1975 Conference of the American Committee for Irish Studies. The Táin (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. xiv-xv.

² For a concise discussion of the history of the Táin and the question of its origin, see Cecile O'Rahilly, Táin Bó Cuailnge from the Book of Leinster (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1967), Introduction.

³The Irish Bardic Poet (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1967), p. 8.

⁴ According to Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), the practice of oral poetry requires the use of a conventional vocabulary of formulae, each of which is designed to express a given idea in a given metrical form. These formulae are language-specific, since their utility depends on a particular arrangement of accented and unaccented syllables. Such linguistic changes as syncope and loss of final syllables would have thrown the entire system into confusion. For a discussion of the changes in Irish during the century in question, see Kenneth Jackson, Language and History in Early Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1953), ch. 4.

⁵ See, for instance, the famous notes at the end of the Táin in the Book of Leinster: Kinsella, p. 283; O'Rahilly, pp. 136, 272.

⁶ The central documents of this body of doctrine are the Lebor Gabála, or 'Book of Invasions,' ed. and tr. R. A. S. Macalister, 5 vols. (Dublin: Irish Texts Society, 1938-1955), and the genealogies mainly collected in Michael A. O'Brien, Corpus Genealogiarum Hiberniae (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1962), vol. I (all published). But virtually the entire corpus of Irish saga conforms at least superficially to the same plan, with due allowance made for its numerous inconsistencies.

⁷ "Conservation and Innovation in Early Irish Literature," Études Celtiques, vol. 13, fasc. 1 (1972), 115.

⁸ See Tomás Ó Máille, "Medb Chruachna," Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie (ZCP), 17 (1927), 129-46; Rudolf Thumeysen, "Zu Göttin Medb," ZCP, 18 (1929), 108-10; (1933), 352-53; Josef Weisweiler, Heimat und Herrschaft (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1943), ch. 6, especially pp. 91-93, 113-14; Jan de Vries, Keltische Religion (Stuttgart; Kohlhammer, 1961), pp. 129-31; Anne Ross, Pagan Celtic Britain (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), pp. 223-25, 360.

⁹ Ó Maille, pp. 137-38.

¹⁰ "The Death of Crimthann, Son of Fidach, and the Adventures of the Sons of Eochaid Muigmedon," ed. and tr. Whitley Stokes, Revue Celtique (RC), 24 (1903), 190-203.

¹¹ The subject is covered most thoroughly by Weisweiler, chs. 3, 4, 6.

¹²ZCP 18 (1927), 110.

¹³ Cf. de Vries, p. 138, although he appears to attribute the association in the passage he is discussing to confusion. See also Marie-Louise Sjoestedt-Jonval's discussion of the Celtic concept of the hero in Gods and Heroes of the Celts, tr. Myles Dillon (London: Methuen, 1949), pp. 57-59.

¹⁴ Edward Gwynn, ed. and tr., The Metrical Dindshenchas, Royal Irish Academy Todd Lecture Series, vol. 11 (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1924), IV, 124-31, 308-11; Whitley Stokes, ed. and tr., "The Rennes Dindshenchas," RC, 16 (1895), 279-83.

¹⁵Gods and Heroes, p. 93. See also ch. 3, and Ross, ch. 5. De Vries is less explicit, but does place Kriegsgöttinen under the heading Die Göttinen der Fruchtbarkeit (sect. D, ch. III, pt. 3).

¹⁶ From Whitley Stokes' ed. and tr. in RC, 12 (1891), 82-85. I have altered the translation superficially.

¹⁷ See Sjoestedt, pp. 40-41.

¹⁸Pagan Celtic Britain, p. 20.

¹⁹ See, for instance, Emile Thevenot, Divinités et sanctuaires de la Gaule (Paris: Fayard, 1968), chs. 5, 9.

²⁰ Carl Marstrander, ed. and tr., Ériu, 5 (1911), 201-18. My translation differs from his at several points.

²¹Ériu, 4 (1910), 26-27.

²² Thurneysen, Irische Helden- und Kónigsage (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1921), p. 428; "einen Mann … befriedigen (umfangen)."

²³ See note 8 above.

²⁴Weisueiler, p. 113.

²⁵Pagan Celtic Britain, p. 223.

²⁶ A fascinating argument is made by Erica Mumford in her unpublished dissertation, Medb and the Goddess of the Near East, Diss. Harvard 1973. Other speculations may be found in Duncan Norton-Taylor, The Celts (New York: Time-Life Books, 1974), pp. 77-82.

²⁷ "On the Origin of the Names Érainn and Ériu," Ériu, 14 (1943), 15-16.

²⁸ Cecile O'Rahilly, p. Iiii, has listed a number of changes made between the earlier and later written versions that appear to illustrate this process at work.

²⁹ See The Backward Look: A Survey of Irish Literature (London: Macmillan, 1967), p. 32.

³⁰ Kinsella, p. 250. Cf. Cecile O'Rahilly, pp. 133, 269-70.

³¹ See Cecile O'Rahilly's notes on the Pillow-Talk episode, pp. 273-74.

³² Royal Irish Academy MS. B. IV, I fol. 147 (144)^v. My translation, made from a photographic facsimile of the MS in Houghton Library, Harvard University.