SOURCE: "'Fury Destroys the World': Historical Strategy in Ireland's Ulster Epic," The Mankind Quarterly, Vol. XXIII, No. 1, Fall, 1982, pp. 41-60.

[In this essay, Radner explores why the Táin was so popular during the eighth century, a time when Ireland's political situation differed so markedly from that of the Táin's audience. She concludes that the epic represents "a complex and strategic gesture of farewell to that [pagan] era" that both glorifies the past and recognizes that its political environment was doomed to failure.]

Like other heroic literature which has been long maintained in oral tradition before its written redaction, the Ulster sagas of early Ireland present a highly archaic picture of life, and this fact has attracted much commentary.' The earliest of these sagas were probably committed to writing during the eighth century A.D., at least three hundred years after Christianity came to Ireland, and yet they portray a pagan warrior culture, at an earlier stage of organization and material culture than is documented elsewhere in early Irish literature—more comparable, in fact, to the Continental Celtic tribal culture described by Classical authors before the birth of Christ than to the Irish Celtic culture so far investigated by archaeologists.² Professor Kenneth Jackson's famous Rede Lecture of 1964 justifiably spoke of the Ulster epic as "A Window on the Iron Age."

The Ulster stories present not only a cultural, but also a political situation that bears little resemblance to the Ireland of their redactors' era. The whole island is represented, interconnected by relationships and alliances on a scale unknown in the early historical period. One province, the large northeastern division of the Ulaid, the Ulstermen, stands out against the others, whose troops are collectively referred to simply as the "Men of Ireland." In the Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle-Raid of Cooley), the central and most extensive narrative of the cycle, this enmity is sharply dramatized, as the domineering Medb and her husband Ailill, queen and king of Cruachan Aí in what is now Co. Roscommon, lead the massed armies of the Men of Ireland on an ambitious raid to steal the supernatural and gigantic bull Donn Cúailnge, The Brown One of Cúailnge, symbol and source of the power of the Ulster kingship.³

By the middle of the eighth century, when the Ulster stories began to be written down, and for several centuries following, the political situation in Ireland was radically different from that in the Táin. The Uí Néill, an ambitious dynasty in the midlands and the north whose ancestors scarcely appear in the Ulster sagas, had grown in power to become the strongest political force in Ireland, and were even making claims to an overkingship of the island symbolically based at Tara. Uí Néill expansion in the north had pushed the Ulaid eastwards beyond Lough Neagh and the River Bann, into a mere corner of the territory they dominated in the Ireland of the Táin, and away from Emain Macha, their legendary capital.⁴

It is fascinating, though also frustrating, to speculate about whether or not the Ulster sagas present valid historical and cultural evidence concerning prehistoric Ireland; but I am not here going to add my voice to all the opinions on this matter.⁵ Instead, this essay addresses a different set of questions, one which has not yet received much attention: Why, in an era dominated by those who were insignificant in the epic cycle, was the Ulster Cycle so popular? Why was it preserved so carefully in manuscripts, and why did Ulster stories bulk so large in the repertoires of medieval Irish filid (court poets)?⁶ How did this material have significance for its contemporary audiences, so far removed themselves from the pagan heroic culture and the political scheme of the Ulster stories?

We have some evidence that the scholars who wrote down the Ulster material made judgments and exercised choices in the process. The oldest surviving recensions of the Ulster sagas do not necessarily reflect the forms in which the tales had previously existed in oral tradition. Professor James Carney has recently drawn together the earliest Irish sources of information about the remote history of the Táin Bó Cúailnge, and has shown that some versions of the Táin prior to Recension I differed considerably from the story which reached vellum in or about the eighth century A.D.⁷ Several clues indicate that there once existed a version of the Táin in which the raid on Ulster came not from Cruachan in the west, but rather from the south—from the direction of Kells or Tara, archaic royal sites controlled, respectively, by the ancestors of the Uí Néill (whom Carney refers to as the "Bregians," from their legendary ancestor Cobthach Cóel Breg) and of the Laigin, the Leinstermen.⁸ There are allusions to such a version in the early Leinster genealogical tracts, as well as in alternate and conflicting versions of the army's itinerary within Recension I itself.⁹ Such a plot makes good sense, in fact. Medb, daughter of the Bregian king Eochaid Feidlech, and herself perhaps in origin the sovereignty goddess of Tara,¹⁰ surely belongs in the east rather than at Cruachan, and her husband Ailill is of the stock of the Gaileóin of Leinster. Their marriage and campaign against the Ulaid thus seem to represent a political union of the midlands and Leinster, a plausible threat to the power of Ulster. Professor Carney dates one of the major archaic references to this version of the Táin, in Luccreth moccu Chíara's poem Conaille medb míchuru, to the vicinity of A.D. 600, and notes that the poet referred to his material as sen-éolas, "old knowledge," even at that time; he suggests, therefore, that we can trace this early version of the Táin back to roughly a century from the pagan period, and that there may in fact be some historical basis for the events it portrays.¹¹

There is of course no way of telling whether this early version of the Ulster epic represents the only, or even the major version of the Ulster material in the centuries prior to the redaction of Recension I of the Táin. Oral tradition could have carried many variants. The question we are investigating here—the question of the relationship between the early redactions of Ulster stories and their contemporary audiences—does not require us to go on a quest for the "original" forms of the tales; but it is important to note that there existed in early Christian Ireland, whether in writing, in oral tradition, or in both, well-known versions of the stories which differed from those that have survived in writing. The significant point is that although these versions were available, they were rejected by the scholars who were keeping the written records, and the Ulster epic was firmly grounded in an alternate plot represented in such tales as Echtra Nerai (The Otherworld Adventure of Nera), Longes mac nUislenn (The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu), Fled Bricrenn (Bricriu's Feast), and Recension I of the Táin itself.¹² In other words, what we see in the written Ulster stories reflects deliberate choices and, probably, revisions on the part of composers and transmitters of the tradition in the eighth century and later, and it will be useful to examine some of these choices, as we attempt to interpret the Ulster tradition and decide what it signified, particularly in political terms, to its early redactors.

It is noteworthy that the Táin and other early Ulster sagas do not show an overt relationship to contemporary political configurations in Ireland, and in particular, that they do not directly reflect the emergence of the Uí Néill, who by the eighth century were clearly the most powerful dynasty in Ireland—though not overkings of the whole island by a long stretch.¹³ Pressing their conquests steadily against both the Laigin (Leinstermen) and the Ulaid confederation, they had since the fifth century expanded to control the midlands and the northern half of Ireland. The annals show a fairly constant struggle in the north, despite the fact that the Uí Néill had promptly established subject peoples, the Airgialla tribes, in most territories vacated by the Ulaid during the fifth century. Although the Ulaid confederation had probably been driven from the area of Emain Macha, their legendary capital, before 500 A.D. and was soon restricted to the area of the present counties Antrim, Down, and northern Louth, it was not until 851 that the Ui Neill King of Tara, Mael Sechnaill I, forced the submission of the king of the Ulaid. Ulster did not yield easily.

Thus conflict between the Uí Néill and the Ulaid was a historical fact throughout the period of the primary written development of the Ulster sagas, and it is interesting that it is not more directly reflected in them, and that there is not an obviously "Uí Néill" version, for instance, of the Táin Bó Cúailnge. Whether or not Professor Camey's inference be correct, that the "historical" attack that lay behind the Táin was from the direction of Tara, not Cruachan, there existed at least one version of the story in which this was the case; then why was such a version not developed further to show a "Bregian" triumph over the Ulaid, and thus to serve the Uí Néill's purposes? They were, after all, concerned to lay ancient claim to Tara and to an Uí Néill high-kingship at that site, which as early as the seventh century Muirchú, St. Patrick's biographer and partisan of the Uí Néill, was already calling caput Scotorum, "the capital of the Irish."¹⁴ Surely such interests could have been served by a Táin which portrayed an alliance of the Men of Ireland, united at Tara against the Ulaid.

The most obvious response to this is that these were, of course, Ulster stories, and that it was not at all in the interests of the Ulaid that their epic cycle should advertise the successes of their upstart neighbors, the Uí Néill. There may also have been some minor influences on the retention of the Ulster stories. We should note Professor Carney's observation that early genealogies show some subject peoples in southern Ireland, such as the Corco Ché, claiming remote descent from the Ulaid; to such groups, he proposes, the Uí Néill "were powerful, but parvenus, and for them the concept 'Ulster' would connote not merely 'real aristocracy' but 'people of our blood."⁵ It seems likely, in any case, that the Ulster stories were first redacted in Ulaid monasteries in the northeast—Bangor, Druim Snechta, Louth, and perhaps others. Thus the original decision as to the shape of the Táin and the other stories written prior to the Viking Age was probably an Ulaid decision. After all, such victory as there is in the Táin belongs to the Ulaid and to Cú Chulainn, the youthful hero who protects his province singlehanded; and the historical kings of the Dál nAraide of Ulster traced their descent to Conall Cernach, the only major character in the Ulster stories who is a direct ancestor of an important Northern royal line.

But if the original shaping of the Ulster material lay within Ulaid control, its subsequent development and preservation did not. It was the monasteries patronized by the Ué Néill in the Shannon basin, particularly Clonmacnois, that were responsible for the written maintenance of the "prime-tales" of Ulster, and it is in the great eleventh-century manuscript of Clonmacnois, Lebor na hUidre, that a great many of the early Ulster stories, including the Táin, have survived.¹⁶ Uí Néill scribes had ample opportunity to modify the tales; they would even have had the sanction of tradition for adapting the already-extant alternate versions of the Táin. There was, as Carney and others have remarked, a "general phenomenon, a constant policy, in early Irish monastic schools, of revising early tradition for either religious or political reasons," and "these revisions could go as far as fictional creation."¹⁷

It would not have been out of character, indeed, for Uí Néill historians to have "recomposed" the Ulster stories, both orally and in writing. The Uí Néill were not only vigorous political innovators, but also clever propagandists and revisers of myth. There are several instances on record of their "revision" of other peoples' stories to serve their own ends. One striking example—indeed, involving the very homeland of the Táin—was their successful effort to link St. Patrick of Armagh to the Uí Néil1 claim to a high-kingship of Ireland, the kingship of Tara; this appears earliest in Muirchiu's account of Patrick's contest with Lóegaire mac Néill's druids at Tara, culminating in the saint's victorious conversion of Lóegaire.¹⁸ And outside of the ecclesiastical sphere, we can see the Uí Néill historians at work adapting the traditions of another province, Munster, to their own ends in the stories of Cath Maige Mucrama and Scéla Eógain 7 Cormaic, which present an account of the birth, rearing, and accession to the throne of Tara of the important Uí Néill ancestor Cormac mac Airt. As Méirín 0 Daly has demonstrated, this story "in its original form had nothing to do with Cormac mac Airt or Tara, … it was a purely Munster tale which originated among the Corco Loígde and was later altered and added to by the partisans of the Connachta in order to lend support to the claim of the race of Conn [i.e. the Uí Néill] to the kingship of Tara."¹⁹

The essential Ulaid shape of the Táin, then, seems to have been retained even in the manuscripts kept by their enemies, despite those enemies' tendencies towards partisan revision. However, if we look more attentively at the Ulster tales and at their relationship to contemporary politics, we can see that they were in fact made to serve Uí Néill interests very well. True, they lack overt reference to dynastic themes: Tara is usually insignificant, as are direct prehistoric ancestors of the Uí Néill. But nevertheless the Ulster stories, as they were written and transmitted, were made to present a picture of Ireland's past that served and complemented the vision of the Uí Néill historians in various ways: through the development of themes that emphasize the dilemmas of the heroic past, offsetting its glories; through the incorporation of strategic anomalies into the plots; and through the historians' strategic and deliberate positioning of the Táin Bó Cúailnge and related events and personnel in their scheme of the history of Ireland. The Ulster stories in fact teach the Uí Néill lesson: the Ulaid were heroic but doomed, and the Uí Néill have legitimately inherited their power.

Thematically, the Ulster Cycle as a whole tends to present the tragic breakdown of those relationships on which early Irish society was founded: the relationships between host and guest, between kindred, between fosterbrothers, between men and women, between lords and clients and kings and overkings, between the human world and the gods. Behind the immense vitality, humor and imagination of the Ulster stories is a picture of society moving to dysfunction and self-destruction. Relationships no longer operate as they should. Communal feasts—occasions to reinforce social bonds, to establish reciprocal obligations—become in the sagas calculated occasions of strife and danger because of the duplicity of the host. In Fled Bricrenn (Bricriu's Feast) when the trickster Bricriu incites the Ulster heroes to compete for the Champion's Portion of meat, the resultant struggles are comic, and though a clear order of precedence in the warband is ultimately established, there is an undercurrent of ridicule; on the other hand, a similar contest in Scéla Mucce meic Dathó (The Story of Mac Datho's Pig) is far from lighthearted, and despite their victory it ends ultimately in a shameful situation for the Ulaid.²⁰ In Mesca Ulad (The Drunkenness of the Ulstermen) a contest in hospitality leads the Ulstermen into a feast which is the cover for a treacherous murder plot.²¹

Time and again in the Ulster tales warriors find themselves unable to function without violating sacred bonds. In Aided Óenfhir Aífe (The Tragic Death of Aífe's One Son) Cú Chulainn is trapped: to protect his people and his honor, he must slay his only son (and worthy successor) in single combat, but the consequence for the Ulaid is a great loss. "If only I had five years among you," says the boy, "I would slaughter the warriors of the world for you. You would rule as far as Rome."²² In the Táin, Cú Chulainn is also caught between personal and public responsibilities as he defends Ulster; three times he is obligated to fight and kill men who are foster-brothers to him. The replication of this event in the tale emphasizes its significance, as does the fact that one of the combats, that with Fer Diad, and a separate existence outside of the Táin as an independent tragic tale.

Relations between the sexes in the Ulster tales are often disastrous. The beautiful woman Deirdriu, wrongfully claimed by Conchobor, lures away the great warrior Noísiu and his brothers and triggers a revenge by Conchobor that breaks up the Ulster warband.²³ Uncontrolled by her husband Ailill, Medb's wayward desires dominate and doom the cattle-raid; "We followed the rump of a misguiding woman," comments Fergus at the end; "It is the usual thing for a herd led by a mare to be strayed and destroyed."²⁴ Finnabair, daughter of Ailill and Medb, is peddled by her own mother to any warrior who can be bribed to fight Cú Chulainn. Cú Chulainn's wife, Emer, is barren, and his only son, Connla, is begotten on a foreign warrior-woman under circumstances that poison his future and, ultimately, that of his father's kin.²⁵

Much of the chaos, the frustration of order and of social relations in the Ulster tales, can be immediately laid to the breakdown of royal control. Ailill is weak, and Medb is patently unfitted to lead the army or to govern. On the Ulaid side, not only has Conchobor initiated the break-up of his warband by indulging his selfish desire for Deirdriu despite a seer's warnings, but he has also caused the exile of Fergus, massive and vital Ulster warrior, by manipulating and violating the legal contracts it is his royal function to uphold.²⁶

It is not only kingship that breaks down in the Ulster cycle: it is the entire sacred sphere. Men and gods are disastrously out of harmony. Sometimes this conflict seems to stem from human offenses. At the start of Medb and Ailill's cattle-raid, for instance, the men of Ulster cannot define their province, because it is the season at which they are in the grips of a mysterious affliction, the ces noí(n)den, and are said to be as weak as women in childbirth; this sickness, said to derive ultimately from the betrayal of the goddess Macha by her human husband at the founding of Emain Macha, may be seen as the tangible and persistent symbol of a radical flaw in the Ulstermen.²⁷

Often in the Ulster tales, however, the Otherworld seems to have turned against men out of a kind of viciousness, for its own reasons, and with a mysterious selectivity. Thus Nera in Echtra Nerai (Nera's Otherworld Adventure) goes into the síd, the dwelling of the gods, and is favored, obtaining from the gods a wife, a son, cattle, and the interpretation of a vision which enables him to save Cruachan, royal seat of Ailill and Medb, from a forthcoming attack from the síd.²⁸ But in the larger picture we see that the Otherworld has merely used Nera's mediation to further its destructive intentions. Nera's son in the síd is given a cow, which is later stolen by the battle-goddess Mórrígan and driven to Ulster, where it is impregnated by the great Ulster bull, the Donn Cúailnge, before returning to the Connacht síd. The bull-calf born of this mating issues to the Finnbennach, Ailill's great White-Horned Bull, a challenge on behalf of its father, Donn Cúailnge, and this challenge, interpreted by the cowherd to Medb, motivates her great cattle-raid—and thus, after all, causes the massacre of the warband of the Men of Ireland. The Otherworld deviously sets men against men.

The massacre of the Men of Ireland by the Ulaid, however, the final human battle in the Táin, is not the culmination of the Táin; instead, final attention is focused on the mutually destructive battle of the bulls, the symbolic resolution of the malignant disorder of the supernatural world that lies behind all these events. From their origin as supernatural herdsmen,²⁹ the two bulls, Finnbennach Aí and Donn Cúailnge, have represented those guarantees of wealth, fertility and power that underlie Celtic sovereignty.³⁰ Both bulls are described as enormous and of immense sexual potency. A long description of the Donn Cúailnge in the twelfth-century Book of Leinster version of the Táin makes clear his power and the nature of the protection he affords to his province:

Here are some of the virtues of the Donn Cúailnge: He would bull fifty heifers every day. These would calve before the same hour on the following day, and those of them that did not calve would burst with the calves because they could not endure the begetting of the Donn Cúilnge. It was one of the virtues of the Donn Cúailnge that fifty youths used to play games every evening on his back. Another of his virtues was that he used to protect a hundred warriors from heat and cold in his shadow and shelter. It was one of his virtues that no spectre or sprite or spirit of the glen dared to come into one and the same canton as he. It was one of his virtues that each evening as he came to his byre and his shed and his haggard, he used to make a musical lowing which was enough melody and delight for a man in the north and in the south and in the middle of the district of Cúailnge.³¹

Although less description is devoted to the Finnbennach than to Donn Cúailnge, we are told that "because of the Finnbennach, no male animal between the four fords of all Mag Aí … dared utter a sound louder than the lowing of a cow."³²

At the end of the Táin the bulls meet near Cruachan, and fight all day, and then, circling round Ireland, they fight through the night, as the armies listen to the uproar in the darkness. In the morning the men see the Donn Cuailnge coming past Cruachan with the remains of Finnbennach hanging from his horns. He wanders through Ireland, and wherever he stops and lowers his head to drink, a piece of the defeated bull falls from his horns to the ground, and—Irish topography becoming the monument of this epic—the place is named from the falling portion: Finnleithe, "The White One's Shoulderblade"; Áth Lúain, "The Ford of the Loins." Finally Donn Cúailnge makes his way to Ulster, his every action changing the landscape and naming its features, and falls dead himself, at Druim Tairb, "The Ridge of the Bull."

The mutual destruction of the divine bulls seals the doom of the Ulaid and the Men of Ireland. It is not incidental that as they fight the bulls trample to death the trickster Bricriu, whose abrasive challenges and incitements have often tested and reaffirmed order among the Ulaid. With so much lost, the victory of the Ulaid is hollow indeed. There is no more real or lasting triumph here than at the funeral games of Hector. Cú Chulainn, son of the god Lug and the sister of King Conchobor, destined by his qualities as well as by his birth to act as mediator between gods and men, has failed to reconcile those forces; he has been charged with protecting his people when they have ceased to be capable, and probably even worthy, of protecting themselves; in a world gone incoherent, he has failed to maintain coherence. Donn Cúailnge and all that he symbolized is lost to Ulster. The victory of the Ulaid is temporary: admirable, but doomed.

Not only in the thematic development of the Ulster stories, but also in their political geography and genealogical relationships we can see a depiction of the past harmonious with the interests of the Uí Néill. Looking at the alliances and family relationships of the characters, one is constantly confronted with anomalies. There seems to have been a deliberate effort, in the shaping of the material, to conceal or blur genealogical or political connections, especially among the Men of Ireland. As noted above, Medb is situated at Cruachan in Connacht, though she is the daughter of Eochaid Feidlech of Tara. Her husband Ailill is actually a Leinsterman, a member of the group called Gaileóin, and yet there is no hint of this in Recension I despite the fact that the Gaileóin are allied with the Men of Ireland. Indeed, theirs are the most competent warriors in Medb's army, and as the troops set forth on the cattle-raid, Medb herself, jealous of the Gaileóin prowess and fearful that they will reap all the expedition's glory, recklessly suggests that all the Gaileóin soldiers should be killed! There seems to be no acknowledgement, on her part or Ailill's, that the Gaileóin are his people. The lines are blurred still further by the monastic historians' attempts to trace the genealogical relationships of the characters. Conchobor himself is variously attached to pedigrees,³³ and his wives Mugain and Eithne are in the historical scheme in fact sisters to Ailill's wife Medb.

Furthermore, the lines of enmity and alliance are not very firmly drawn in the Ulster stories. Cú Chulainn has friends and fosterbrothers among the Men of Ireland. Ailill and Medb serve as cooperative arbiters in the contest among the Ulaid warriors in Fled Bricrenn. Donn Cúailnge and Finnbennach Aí, the bull embodiments of the sovereignty and wealth of Emain Macha and Cruachan, originate as the swineherds of the síd kings of Connacht and Munster.³⁴ Furthermore, Erc son of Cairpre Nia Fer of Tara, a Gaileóin, is not allied with Ailill and Medb; instead, he is Conchobor's grandson and Cú Chulainn's first cousin, and thus brings his men (the fir Themra, Men of Tara) to the aid of the Ulaid in the final great muster of the Táin.

Thus although the Táin, like other Indo-European epics, may well have originated as a tale of internecine dynastic warfare,³⁵ it seems that in the forms in which the Ulster stories were transmitted in writing the aim was not so much to emphasize particular relationships as to create a general, and rather deliberately fuzzy, sense of interrelationships across Ireland. This too can be seen as complementing the Uí Néill interests; the effect is to minimize the sense that Ireland is politically divided into fixed and competing kingships, and thus to create a "historical" basis for the Uí Néill claim that Ireland can be ruled by one overking.

Indeed, the Uí Néill historians went to considerable effort to incorporate the "prime stories" of Ulster into their own elaborate myth of Ireland's past.³⁶ That myth makes much use of traditional lore, including not only the Ulster sagas, but also, for the bulk of the pre-Christian period, some relics of the pagan Irish cosmogony, brewed up with lavish handfuls of the Old Testament and Latin learning into the Lebor Gabala Erenn, The Book of the Taking of Ireland.³⁷ Focusing ultimately on the succession rights to the kingship of Ireland, the Uí Néill historical scheme was essentially complete by the late eighth century, according to Professor Kelleher; it was reflected not only in the relatively late Lebor Gabála and the king-list appended to it, which stretched back to the "beginning" of human settlement in Ireland, but also in the annals, in genealogies, in synchronisms, and in regnal lists and other items of senchas (traditional historical lore).

The historians' scheme is not easy to deal with. Clearly it was the work of many men over time, and different sources reflect varying and contradictory versions of, for instance, the succession to the kingship of Tara, the regnal lengths of kings, and the dates of key events. The scheme must have been tinkered with frequently, as new situations arose or new interpretations became expedient—and, in any case, that portion of it which deals with the period prior to the late sixth century, when annalistic record-keeping begins to be contemporary in Ireland, was largely based on legendary material whose dating was entirely an act of the imagination. Despite all the confusion of detail, however, the Uí Néill Scheme of the past can easily be seen as a metaphorical base for their contemporary aspirations—and in this scheme, the heroic tales of Ulster play a crucial part.

In the annals and regnal lists, the Táin is said to have taken place just prior to the birth of Christ during a period referred to as the Pentarchy (aimser na cóicedaig), when the kingship of Ireland lay vacant, and rule in Ireland was divided among five provincial kings. There is no general agreement, and much contradiction even within single sources, as to the duration of the Pentarchy, the regnal lengths of kings during and adjacent to this period, and even the identities of the pentarchs—except that the list always includes the Ulster sagas' Conchobor and Ailill. Regardless of these confusions, the Pentarchy's significance is clear: it is actually a metaphorical time-out-of-time, a liminal period of chaos. Its major theme is defective sovereignty. It follows immediately on the death of the legendary King of Ireland Conaire Mór, which is narrated in the tale Togail Bruidne Dá Derga (The Destruction of Dá Derga's Hostel).³⁸ According to the tale, Conaire's kingship began as a model of peace and prosperity:

Now during his reign there were great bounties, that is, seven ships arriving at Inber Colptha in every June of every year, and oak-mast up to the knees in every autumn, and plenty [of fish] in the Bush and Boyne rivers in June every year, and such abundance of peace that no man slew another in Ireland during his reign. And to everyone in Ireland his fellow's voice seemed as sweet as harpstrings. From mid-spring to mid-autumn no wind disturbed a cow's tail. His reign was neither thunderous nor stormy.

The general peace was shattered by the king's sins as sovereign, which cut him off from his supernatural protection; after a crescendo of portents of doom, Conaire was destroyed in a cataclysmic battle. According to the historical scheme, since there was no king to succeed him, Ireland was divided among the pentarchs for some years, until the kingship was restored in the person of Lugaid Ríab nDerg (or Réo Derg), a nephew of Medb's, begotten by her three brothers by triple incest with their sister Clothra. Lugaid later compounded the incest by begetting his son—and eventually King of Ireland also—Crimthainn Nia Nár, on his mother. As Kelleher has pointed out, this multiple incest "makes Lugaid a sort of ultimate ancestor of Dal Cuinn [the Uí Néill stock]" by concentrating the line of descent, and may indeed symbolize the historical threefold federation of the Uí Néill, Connachta, and Airgialla.³⁹

Thus Lugaid metaphorically ushers in the Uí Néill era, just after the birth of Christ. And on the threshold of this era the Táin takes place—arranged to serve the Ui Neill historical vision very well. The Táin's presentation of an Ireland interconnected, interrelated both by alliance and genealogy, complements the claim that Ireland is in fact a unit, capable of being controlled by a central hig-kingship. At the same time (like Togail Bruidne Dá Derga and the notion of the Pentarchy) the Ulster sagas show this interdependent Ireland lacking the essential element—effective sovereignty—that would preserve its wealth and harmony; and thus Ireland's noble warriors, however admirable they are in the Ulster tales, are tragically self-destructive and ineffective. In the armies' last battle in the Táin Fergus's culminating rage, deflected from vengeance on Conchobor and forever memorialized in the Máela Midi, the three flat hills whose tops he shears off with his sword, calls forth that exclamation from Cú Chulainn which seems to sum up the Táin's theme: Conscar bar a bith!—"Fury destroys the world!"

The root of the destruction—men's loss of harmony with the Celtic Otherworld—is also, I would suggest, deliberately connected to the Uí Néill presentation of themselves as a Christian dynasty tested and sanctioned by Patrick. In part, of course, the Ulster sagas' portrayal of the malignant tendencies of the gods may be explained as reflecting the Christian era's jaundiced view of the pagan past (although this theme is nowhere near so explicit in the Ulster sagas as it is, for instance, in Beowulj). But there is also a distinct political connotation. Professor Binchy has pointed out that as early as the Liber Angeli, that is by the early eighth century, the head of Armagh, Patrick's foundation, "stakes a claim to hegemony over all churches throughout Ireland, a claim strikingly similar to that put forward about the same time by the head of the Uí Néill dynasties, the king of Tara, to suzerainty over the other provincial kings. This is but one of many indications that the ecclesiastical pretensions of Armagh, based on the Patrick legend, and the secular pretensions of Tara, based on the myth of the 'High Kingship,' advance hand in hand."⁴⁰ In the Ulster sagas Emain Macha—so near in name as well as in place to Ard Macha, or Armagh—is championed by the hero Cú Chulainn, whose actions in the service of his king are beyond reproach. In the synchronic scheme as well as in Aided Con Culainn, the tale of his death,⁴¹ Cú Chulainn is deliberately portrayed as a forerunner of Christ. His lifespan and Christ's are coordinated, so that his death date in the annals is put one year after Christ's birth, and, as Professor Kelleher has pointed out, his lifetime—ideally 27 years—is, like Christ's, divisible by three.⁴² Deliberate allusions to Cú Chulainn's likeness to Christ abound in Aided Con Culainn, where he dies bound upright, wounded by a spear; after his death, his spirit returns to prophesy the Christian dispensation and the conversion of Emain from war to peace. From his ghostly chariot over Emain Macha he begins

"Emain, great Emain
  great in lands
in Patrick's lifetime
  [priests] will till
Emain's lands.… "⁴³

Emain Macha will be absorbed, as it were, by Ard Macha. Patrick will succeed Conchobor. Indeed, the death-tale of Conchobor seems to have been composed deliberately to sanction the Christian (and Patrician) succession: Conchobor's death (placed at A.D. 33 in the annals) is caused by his passionate dismay on hearing of Christ and the Crucifixion, and he is said to have been one of the two Irishmen who believed in the Christian God before the coming of the Faith to Ireland.⁴⁴

Thus Emain Macha and Armagh are interconnected within the Ulster saga tradition. And the historical scheme was completed by the establishment of a vital connection between Emain Macha and the Uí Néill kingship of Ireland through the figures of Cú Chulainn, Emain's hero, and Lugaid Ríab nDerg, restorer of the Tara kingship and symbolic Uí Néill ancestor. As the Ulster sagas developed under the sponsorship of the Uí Néill historians, there evolved a tradition that Lugaid was fosterson to Cú Chulainn. This is of course a significant connection in itself, but as it appears in narrative it is even more suggestive. Into the middle of the tale Serglige Con Culainn (The Wasting Sickness of Cú Chulainn) was interpolated a baldly doctrinal episode describing how the Pentarchy was brought to an end. An assembly took place to determine who should be the next King of Ireland, "for they did not like the hill of the lordship and rule of Ireland, i.e. Tara, to be without the government of a king, and they did not like the peoples to be without the rule of a king ordering their common life."⁴⁵ Through a divination ceremony, the bull-feast, Lugaid is identified as the destined king; significantly, the messengers who seek him for inauguration find him in Emain Macha, at the bedside of his sick fosterfather. Cú Chulainn revives from his affliction long enough to recite to Lugaid the Bríatharthecosc Con Culainn, a ritual set of instructions in proper royal behavior; such gnomic texts probably formed part of Irish inaugural rituals.⁴⁶ Promising to heed the instructions, Lugaid sets forth directly for Tara, and is made king. Metaphorically, therefore, Cú Chulainn inaugurates not only the Christian era and Armagh's primacy, but also in a sense the Uí Néill high-kingship, as he passes on to its founder the wisdom that the kings of the Táin era have so disastrously ignored: the rules of proper royal conduct, without which "fury destroys the world."

We must conclude that even if the Ulster epic cycle began as a simple celebration of a "heroic age" (and we have no way of knowing if it did), it became at the hands of the Uí Néill scholars, in its early years of written transmission and historical interpretation, a complex and strategic gesture of farewell to that era. As in so much early epic literature—the Iliad, the Mahabharata, Beowulf spring to mind—so also in the Táin and its related tales the seeds of doom seem implanted in the very nature of the heroic world. I am not prepared to hazard guesses about the functions of epic traditions in other cultures; but in the case of the Irish audience and the Ulster sagas, at least, it seems that that oscillation between admiration and rejection, kin-feeling and separation, that sense of "the pastness of the past" which is the hallmark of epic, was calculated and adapted to function very specifically in the present.

Notes

¹ Jackson 1964; Dillon 1947; Dillon 1975, 70-94; Harbison 1971.

² Tierney 1960; Powell 1959; Filip 1977; de Paor 1964.

³ The earliest version of the Táin Bó Cúailnge, Recension I, survives in four manuscripts, the oldest of which is Lebor na hUidre, or LU, dating from c. 1100 A.D. (Best and Bergin 1929); the earliest linguistic stratum in the story belongs to the eighth century (Thurneysen 1921, 99-113). Edition with translation, O'Rahilly 1976; translation, Kinsella 1970. General discussions and summaries of the Ulster Cycle: Dillon 1948; Murphy 1961; Ó Coileáin 1978.

⁴ It is one of the more interesting archaisms of the Ulster Cycle that it presents Emain Macha as a living domestic and ceremonial royal site; archaeological evidence has demonstrated that the major ceremonial site at Emain Macha had been destroyed, buried and abandoned as early as the third century B.C., and there is no evidence for continuous domestic settlement (Wailes 1982; 'Navan Fort' 1970).

⁵ Jackson 1964; O'Rahilly 1964; Chadwick 1932-40; Murphy 1961; Carney 1979.

⁶ Mac Cana 1980.

⁷ Carney 1979.

⁸ A somewhat similar hypothesis, though based on different assumptions and evidence, was made by O'Rahilly 1964, 176-83.

⁹ Haley 1970.

¹⁰ Ó Máille 1927.

¹¹ Carney 1971, 75; Carney 1979; poem text is printed in Meyer 1912, 306-307.

¹²Echtra Nerai: Meyer 1889-90; Longes mac nUislenn: Hull 1949; Fled Bricrenn: Henderson 1899, Best and Bergin 1929, 246-77.

¹³ Ó Corráin 1972, 14-23; Byrne 1973.

¹⁴ Byrne 1973, 48-105, 254-74.

¹⁵ Carney 1971, 75.

¹⁶ Kelleher 1971, 122-26, has demonstrated that the probable line of transmission from Ulster to the midlands lies with the ecclesiastical family that became the Maic Cuinn na mBocht, who moved from the monastery of Louth to Clonmacnois in the early ninth century; Máel Muire mac Céilechair, chief scribe of LU, was also of the family.

¹⁷ Carney 1979.

¹⁸ Gwynn 1913, 3-10; White 1920, 83-91.

¹⁹ O Daly 1975, 3.

²⁰ Henderson 1899; Thurneysen 1935.

²¹ Watson 1941; Watson 1938; Guyonvarc'h 1960-61.

²² Van Hamel 1956, 15; translated, Kinsella 1970, 45.

²³ In Longes mac nUislenn, Hull 1949.

²⁴ Kinsella 1970, 251.

²⁵Tochmarc Emire (The Wooing of Emer), Van Hamel 1956, 55-56.

²⁶ In Longes mac nUislenn, Hull 1949.

²⁷Ces Noínden Ulad, Windisch 1884; transl. also by Kinsella 1970, 6-8. See 6 Broin 1963.

²⁸ Meyer 1889-90.

²⁹ Windisch 1891; most recent English translation (from the Book of Leinster version) is Kinsella 1970, 46-50.

³⁰ There are various indications that pagan Celtic religion involved bulls with supernatural attributes. In addition to representations of bulls on surviving Gaulish inscriptions and altars, such personal and place names on the Continent as Tarva, Tarvisium, Tarvius, Donnotaurus, and so forth (see Holder 1896-1913) are suggestive; and Pliny the Elder mentions that the druids sacrificed white bulls (Natural History xxx, 13).

³¹ O'Rahilly 1967, 36 and 174.

³² O'Rahilly 1967, 134 and 270.

³³ The several sources of information about this are well set forth by Kelleher 1971.

³⁴De Chophur in dá Muccida, Windisch 1891.

³⁵ Melia 1972, 244-45.

³⁶ Kelleher 1971 thoroughly documents this incorporation; my interpretation here is built upon his evidence.

³⁷ Macalister 1938-56.

³⁸ Knott 1936; Stokes 1901-02.

³⁹ Kelleher 1971, 120.

⁴⁰ Binchy 1962, 61; for further discussion see Hughes 1966, 111-20.

⁴¹ Best and O'Brien 1956, 442-57; Tymoczko 1981.

⁴² Kelleher 1971, 122.

⁴³ Tymoczko 1981, 67.

⁴⁴ Meyer 1906, 2-21.

⁴⁵ Dillon 1953; translation of interpolated text is in Dillon 1951, 55-58.

⁴⁶ Kelly 1976, xiv.

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