Tag: early modern irish

The Early Modern Irish For “Stress Relief”

(Disclaimer so that nobody gets their hopes up: I don’t think there is an early modern Irish phrase for “stress relief”. If there is, I haven’t yet encountered it. This blog post will not give you that information. I apologise if that’s why you’re here.)


At the weekend I resumed one of my most niche hobbies: translating the fifteenth-century Oidheadh Con Culainn. I began this during my MA, translating scenes I needed to reference in my thesis, and quickly discovered its value as stress relief in the nail-biting week or two after the offer first came in for The Butterfly Assassin. I don’t know how other people’s debut book deals have gone down, but for me, that initial negotiation period was extremely anxiety-inducing — and it turns out you can’t translate early modern Irish and think about publishing at the same time, so it’s a pretty good distraction. My supervisor was vaguely surprised when I handed him 130 lines of translation instead of the 20-30 I’d been planning to do that week, but so the Stress Relief Translation was born.

The bulk of the project so far — going back to the beginning of the text with the intent to translate all of it, rather than simply the key scenes featuring Láeg mac Riangabra — was done during April-June last year. I had a complicated housing situation last year (I moved house five times in ten months, which was not my choice and which I would not recommend), and that particular period was one of significant stress, so I used to sit at the dining table with my translation as a way of trying to force myself to feel more grounded in the house. It didn’t work, but I got a fair amount of translation done.

And then I moved again, and started my day job, and life got busier, and all in all, Oidheadh Con Culainn has fallen by the wayside. But the past week has been very stressful, and I very much needed a distraction that would take me offline for a day or two, so I went back to it.

It’s tricky, picking up a translation after you’ve abandoned it for the best part of a year. I did a small amount a few weeks ago, but not enough to really get back into the rhythms of it. Those first few minutes when I sit down with my handwritten pages, my glossary, and the printed text for reference — at first it feels impenetrable, as though I’m bouncing straight off the text. I rarely find I can dive right in with an easy sentence, because generally speaking, if a sentence is a string of easy, familiar words and I could translate it without so much as glancing at a glossary, I’ll have done it quickly at the end of the previous session, and left the hard part to start the next session.

I find myself looking at the text, and it resists me, and I resist it. And there’s a moment of, “Why am I doing this?”, and after that, a moment of, “I’ve forgotten how to translate, I’m getting worse at Irish rather than better, I’ll never do it.” The words are meaningless.

My mind — always scattered, fast, processing information as quickly as possible and then spitting it out in another direction — rebels against the need to slow down. It begs to be given something easier to play with, but easier means an ineffective distraction, means I’ll drift too quickly back to everything I’m trying to avoid. The only way past this initial hurdle is to push through the surface and allow my mind to slow and embrace the process.

So, I find a verb. I check the glossary, because these fifteenth century forms are weird and still, after twenty sections of this text, often unfamiliar. I place this first building-block of the sentence on the page, and reach for an adjective. (These usually come in strings of two or three, in early modern texts, with subtle if not imperceptible differences of meaning between them in English.) I begin to piece together the sentence, and then the next.

The first sentence is usually the slowest. But then I’ll spot a phrase I recognise, or a word I know, or a whole string of description that the text already used two pages ago and so I can pull it out, like tugging on a loose thread. Gradually, the text drags me under, my mind slowing to the speed of the task, my focus narrowing.

Sometimes, a phrase will defeat me. I’ll turn it upside down and shake it out, hoping some meaning will fall out; nothing comes of it. An idiomatic description of magic prompts the most inelegant of literal translations: it’s clearly a rote phrase, as it has now recurred three times in the text, but that doesn’t mean I’m any closer to understanding what it means. Another word, when looked up in the glossary, gives only the translation “?”; it’s comforting to know it defeated somebody else too, but also frustrating. When I check the electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language (“Help me, eDIL, you’re my only hope!”), I find that it’s attested only in this text, and nobody is sure what it means. Okay then. I take my red pen, draw square brackets around the word I don’t know, and move on.

This policy — to move on, not to linger, not to get stuck on those tricky sentences — has served me well, and it’s one of the reasons this process works as stress relief. It helps me break through the impenetrability and fear that characterises the first few moments of every translation session. I move onto the next sentence, find the pieces I recognise, gather them together. Sometimes, a later sentence brings clarity to an earlier one, the vital context needed to understand a phrase. I go back, fill in a gap. Other times, it remains a mystery, but I’ve already been drawn ahead, deeper beneath the veil of language.

Just one more sentence, I find myself saying as the afternoon wears on. A few more words. Just that little adjectival run there. I’ll just polish off this bit of dialogue, it looks similar to a previous one, it’ll only take a moment–

Before I know it, I’ve covered half the section I’d thought I might start over the course of the next week. The translation net has caught me again.

I am not a particularly good translator of early modern Irish. I am not a good translator of any form of Irish, though I have at least studied medieval Irish, and modern Irish, while I’m still a learner, offers me more recourse to the advice and translations of others. Fifteenth century Irish, by comparison, is a mess: a little too early to suit most of the early modernists and far too early to be modern, but grammatically, not particularly like medieval Irish, leaving me stranded between resources and dictionaries.

To some extent, the grammatical anarchy of transitional periods of the language suits me. I have a purely vibes-based approach to grammar, far more inclined to rely on context and meaning to infer details than to memorise a paradigm. If I were more grammar-minded, perhaps I’d be puzzled when the language doesn’t do what I expect, but as I also don’t know what the verbs are supposed to look like, I don’t notice when the scribes get it ‘wrong’ either, or do their own thing. (I can see the philology types wincing from here.)

The language of Oidheadh Con Culainn hasn’t fully lost the dative case yet (though it’s inclined to give its endings to words that should never have had them), and still has some of the older verb forms, though independent pronouns abound and are usually emphatic, just to make it extra clear what’s going on. Had I only the modern Irish knowledge to rely on, I would find these verb forms challenging, but I’ve found that I remember more from medieval Irish grammar than I would have consciously expected. Verb endings I once cried over (literally; second year undergrad was rough) now come naturally, almost without thinking. And the modern Irish does help too: where I would once have overlooked nasalisation as an indicator of first person plural, now I process that information on an almost unconscious level, endless Duolingo repetition making it second nature. Ár bportán is not a useful phrase, but when I come to translate dá n-ucais, it helps.

There is a phrase I once heard used in the context of Irish dance: what is hard for you today will one day be your warm-up. It’s true. I’ve seen it in the studio, both as a dancer and as a teacher of dance. I remember beginners struggling to master jump-2-3s in October, when our uni society classes began, and by January they thought nothing of circling the room with them as part of our cardio warmups. Sometimes, Irish grammar feels like that. Trying to memorise the form of a verb felt like trying to learn a new step out of a book, in the wrong shoes, with no mirror: nearly impossible. But after years of repetition, casual use, practice… it’s there in my mind, even if I still wouldn’t be able to draw you a chart of it.

Despite these grammar victories, and the small confidence boosts they represent, I am, as I’ve said, not a particularly good translator of early modern Irish. Somebody else could do a far better job of Oidheadh Con Culainn than me: they would do it more quickly, more stylishly, with less reliance on the glossary and fewer baffled gaps whenever I couldn’t piece together the jigsaw puzzle of phrases. But I have discovered, in these last few years, the joy of having particularly niche research interests: it doesn’t matter if I’m good at it if I am the only person doing it.

Now, I believe there are others who are, or have been, working on translations of Oidheadh Con Culainn — but with none published or immediately forthcoming, still it is much as though I’m in a world where nobody cares for this text except me. And thus I can be both the text’s best translator and its worst, and it doesn’t matter, because what is important is that I want this text translated and if I do it, then it will be done.

Some of the other texts I intend to work on, like Eachtra na gCuradh, are even more niche — one might fairly describe them as “obscure” — and there, too, I have the automatic status of Best Translator For The Job, even while being objectively poorly qualified to do it. If nobody else is doing it, then why not? Why not be the one to make it happen? Who cares that I don’t have a PhD, that I’m not an established scholar, that I can’t memorise verb tables? I can still sit there with a glossary and a set of paradigms and Make It Work, however slowly, and I can produce something that is of value to me.

And this is… liberating, I have found. I’m doing this because I want it done. There — an all-important independent pronoun. If only English had a stylish way of emphasising it. Misi. Me. It is being done by me (liomsa) for me (domsa): by me, for me, emphatic 1st person singular pronoun. I myself want it done.

Others may benefit from my work, if I reach a point where I am confident enough to share it. In the meantime, I am translating this text because doing so enables me to read it. No matter how badly I do it, I’m achieving a goal! I’m bringing myself closer to understanding the story that I feel I’ve only glimpsed in small pieces before now.

And the more I read of it, the more interested I am by the complicated dynamics at work in it. Oidheadh Con Culainn is a complicated story, and a long one, and there hasn’t been a great deal written about it as a story in its own right, but every section I translate presents new ideas for consideration.

One could, for example, approach it with reference to disability studies and crip theory, and explore how the Children of Cailitín are Othered through physical difference, and how these ‘deformities’ are both the source of their power and a sign of their evil natures. Or one could consider how noncombatants are characterised within the text, with the entire category of “noncombatant”, encompassing poets and druids and women, seeming to function almost as a gender within the story. Or one might look at the personal, human relationships at work: the question of whether the Ulaid are trying to keep Cú Chulainn safe because they value him as a person, or simply because he’s useful to them…

I keep a document on my computer of “papers I’d like to write one day”, though in truth, it’s as much “papers I would like somebody else to write so that I can read them” as it is a list of things I seriously intend to tackle myself. Every time I sit down and translate more of this text, I add new things to that list.

This, too, is a gem: treasure in the form of a small boost to my confidence. I have transformed this text into something I can understand, and in doing so, teased out another idea that I could explore with it, and another, and another. It’s a reminder that I’m still an academic, still a medievalist, even outside of formal academia. That I have ideas, and thoughts to contribute.

On Saturday, I was joined on a Discord call during my translation session by a medievalist friend of mine. Periodically I would share with them a phrase I was struggling with, or an idea it had sparked, and we’d toss back and forth our thoughts and articles we’d read and details that seemed relevant. We described the articles we’d write to counter flawed arguments we’ve seen from past scholars; we discussed the future of our field. I felt awake, the same way I felt awake after the Lament symposium a few weeks back. Like some part of my brain that is so often dormant these days had been prodded into life.

And though on Sunday I spent my translation session alone, uninterrupted by chat, I could feel those ideas and that sense of scholarly community still humming through me, helping me feel connected to the work.

By the time I set my translation aside on Sunday to focus on other things, I felt more Me than I have done in a long time — and significantly less stressed than I had been earlier in the week, when doomscrolling filled most of my non-work hours. My wrist was aching, because handwriting is a key trigger for my chronic pain (but I’ve never mastered translation without pen and paper being involved somewhere in the process), but my mind was settled again.

Translating early modern Irish is an odd form of stress relief. When I first told my MA supervisor that this was why I had translated so much more than he expected, he laughed, and said that most people found early modern Irish the cause of stress, not the solution to it. But what matters about this project is that it asks something of my brain that the rest of my life does not demand of it: it asks me to slow down. It asks me to be wrong. It asks me to put things together with fumbling hands from small, scattered pieces, until gradually the picture emerges.

Don’t start translating unless you’re prepared to make a mistake, said Seán Ua Súilleabháin at that Lament symposium and perhaps, in the end, that’s what I need from this. The chance to be wrong about something that doesn’t matter at all. The chance to cross things out and puzzle over it and not have the answers and take my best guess. That’s healing, for a brain that always feels scrutinised, a brain that is always performing. Top speed, top volume, all the time. To take a step back and give time to something that nobody is asking me to do, that I am not good at, but which is useful to me, and which feeds my curious, creative, academic brain: that has value.

It will be a long time before I finish translating Oidheadh Con Culainn, but that’s okay. I’m making my peace with that. There is, after all, no rush.


To support my ongoing translation efforts, consider buying me a coffee. Alternatively, you could buy my books. They have nothing to do with early modern Irish, but they did still come out of my brain, so you might still like them.

Lament, Protest, and Letting Men Cry

This Wednesday, I attended a symposium about Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, ‘The Lament for Art O’Leary’. Even if you don’t know much else about early modern Irish literature, you might be familiar with this lament if you’ve read A Ghost in the Throat, which revolves around the act of translating it. Before this week, that was my sole exposure to the lament, too;1 having been composed in the late eighteenth century, it’s later than most of what I work on. But I’m interested in caoineadh (keening, laments) as a genre or motif because of the work I’ve been doing on Oidheadh Con Culainn, which involves a number of laments, so I thought it would be useful context for me.

The symposium was organised by Vona Groarke, writer in residence at St John’s College, Cambridge, and the Cambridge Group for Irish Studies. It combined academic discussion of the lament itself (the historical context of its composition; its manuscripts and transmission; issues of translation) with creative responses to it (a panel of poets discussing works they’d written in dialogue with this lament; two of its translators discussing their approach; a musical performance of works inspired by/relating to the lament), allowing for a multi-disciplinary and multifaceted approach.

I’ve got to say: I think this might be my favourite format for a conference. There’s something about having a whole day to focus on a single text that allowed me to take in far more information than I ever can at any conference where I’m having to adjust my brain to an entirely new topic every half an hour. More to the point, the mixture of academic context and creative responses is exactly what interests me about engaging with historical material, and I felt inspired both creatively and academically by the discussion.

I didn’t write down who said it, but at one point somebody during the day said that creative writing can be a form of critical commentary on the text. I absolutely agree. I discussed this a little a few weeks ago when I wrote about retellings and academia, and I loved hearing from others who found creative reworkings to be a way of understanding a text. That emphasis on textual response was refreshing for me, as medieval Celtic Studies often doesn’t engage too much with that; I would like to see more of it.

What follows is going to be a mixture of me reporting on what I heard at the symposium, and also my own thoughts and ideas that arose in response to it, or which had been percolating for a while and were brought to the surface by it. Bearing in mind that I’m working from memory and my own imperfect notes (which are in insular minuscule because I write notes like an act of personal violence against my future self), I apologise if at any point during this blog post I misrepresent the arguments made by the speakers; moreover, I’ve left out a lot from the day if it didn’t directly relate to my own creative and academic ideas. All errors are on me.

As I mentioned above, I went in not knowing too much about the lament itself. If you’d asked me, I would have said that it was an eighteenth-century poem. I quickly learned that this was an inaccurate representation of it. It was pointed out during the discussion that Eibhlín Dubh, the lament’s composer, would not have considered herself a poet, nor been considered one by eighteenth century Irish standards, and the lament did not belong to the formal, written, poetic tradition. Nor was it written in the eighteenth century, although it was composed then. It wouldn’t have been written down until some time later, probably in the early nineteenth century, because it’s a product of an oral tradition.

There was a wonderful phrase used by Angela Bourke about this: she likened the written text to a documentary about a dance performance. The documentary is not the dance, although it gives the audience a way of perceiving it. The living performance is the dance. This stuck with me throughout the day, and I found myself wondering whether dance was, actually, a key way one could engage with the lament. A repeated theme throughout both academic and creative discussions was that lament begins in the body, that it is an embodied, physical act. Could you choreography Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, I asked myself? Would it be meaningful to choreograph it, or would the loss of the verbal elements destroy something fundamental about it? What would that choreography look like?

I have a lot of thoughts about what that choreography would look like, few of which I’m capable of articulating verbally. I came to the conclusion that it would be meaningful, and also that I would not be good enough as a choreographer to do it. But I have a strong idea of what my creative vision and approach would be to that, and I would love one day to find a way of making it happen.

To return to the symposium itself, though, and specifically to the discussions of oral tradition, which were eye-opening… From Tríona Ní Shíocháin’s talk about oral compositional practice, I learned how the lament incorporates repetitive, formulaic phrases belonging to a broader tradition of lament. Ní Shíocháin discussed how the shared traditions of caoineadh and the use of these formulaic rhythms problematises the very concept of single authorship: how the lament should not, perhaps, be considered a unique and original work of single genius, but the climax of a much larger tradition and a multivocalic tradition.

There was a lot of discussion throughout the day about caoineadh as a tradition belonging to women, in both the academic discussions and the creative ones. I found this particularly mentally stimulating, because I disagree: my own work looks at texts in which laments can be as much a masculine tradition as a feminine one. There were moments that threatened to become uncomfortable (a remark about ‘female bodies’ and how the speaker would not elaborate on the topic for fear of getting in trouble made the audience laugh, because of course the idea of being ‘cancelled’ for transphobia is hilarious and the only reason one shouldn’t make overly simplistic binary remarks, right), but for the most part, I found this gap or omission in the discussion to be something that made me think more about my own research. And not always for the reasons I expected.

For example, I loved the session featuring three poets giving their responses to the lament — I hadn’t expected to, because I don’t know a great deal about modern poetry, but I found it incredibly engaging. The first poet, Fran Lock, read aloud works of hers inspired by this one, talking about grief, talking about looking for a framework for expressing personal emotions in pre-existing work, and finding it in Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, which is so much angrier than elegy. I loved listening to the work, letting the rhythms of it happen to me, feeling the emotions it evoked. But it was the second poet, Mícheál McCann, who really got my brain moving.

Mícheál’s forthcoming work includes a poem called ‘Keen for A–‘, which uses Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire as a springboard to depict a gay relationship in modern Northern Ireland. He talked about poetry of the AIDS crisis as a starting point for queer elegy, and considered the wildly different connotations and resonances of blood in those kinds of poems versus for Eibhlín Dubh. He discussed whether queer love in poetry is always expressed as elegy, because it cannot be permitted to last, and discussed the grief of things that aren’t safe to name or keen aloud.

But what really struck me was when he came to justify his use of this ‘female text’, as Ní Ghríofa puts it, to discuss a marginalised masculinity and to express a different kind of grief. How it might seem, to some, that he was co-opting a tradition that wasn’t his, when in fact, he was seeing resonances across categories and across boundaries of gender and sexuality. He discussed the marginality of queer voices within the Irish literary tradition: who can and cannot speak in the tradition as it exists, and who has been omitted?

This, immediately, ignited the part of my brain that had written down, in an earlier talk: “women’s bodies and women’s songs? but — earlier laments can be spoken by men. modern gendering of bodies and of voices? who have we cut out of this tradition?”

See, the idea that keening/caoineadh is a female tradition is a modern one. I mean ‘modern’ in the technical sense here, not in the sense of ‘recent’ — e.g., I’m including the eighteenth century in this. We heard during talks at the symposium about professional keening women, who could weep dramatically even for a stranger in exchange for fairly decent pay at the time, and were essential to any respectable funeral, and of course, this specific lament is explicitly a lament from a woman’s perspective. That caoineadh has been, in certain times and places, the primary domain of women is undeniable.

But.

There are also, definitely, texts where men participate in caoineadh. Some have argued for a distinction between abstract mourning laments and those spoken specifically over a body, suggesting that the latter is more specifically a feminine activity, but still I disagree. In the fifteenth-century Oidheadh Con Culainn, for example, it is Conall Cernach who first speaks a lament over Cú Chulainn’s dead body; it’s referred to as a ‘laoidh’ rather than a ‘caoineadh’, but the young warriors of the Ulaid are ‘ac caoinedh’ Cú Chulainn. Ac caoinedh. Keening, specifically: these young men, participating in this supposedly female tradition. (I discussed this somewhat in my article about Láeg in Oidheadh Con Culainn.)

Then, of course, there’s Cú Chulainn’s famous lament for Fer Diad in Táin Bó Cúailnge. Some have argued that this doesn’t technically count as caoineadh; others have argued that it’s a misogynistic co-option of women’s voices and women’s place in society by a male hero; others have seen it as an act of protest by the marginalised and politically powerless youth fighting on behalf of others.2 All of these explanations suggest that the very act of a man lamenting another man requires justification, a reason for it to occur, and that in itself is because we are assuming, based on the modern tradition, that caoineadh is a female tradition.

In the coffee break that followed the poets’ session, I sought out Mícheál McCann to discuss this with him. I told him that I thought his work absolutely belonged to the Irish tradition — that men had been keening men for centuries, in familial contexts and homosocial contexts and perhaps, depending on your reading, homoerotic contexts too. We discussed Cú Chulainn’s lament for Fer Diad, and the fact that even if caoineadh were an exclusively female tradition, there’s something strange about the automatic reading of a man performing ‘feminine’ activities as inherently misogynistic, parodic, or appropriative. Why don’t we assume that that could be genuine? Why can’t a male character also perform femininity, without that being seen as a bad thing?

When we assume that gender boundaries are rigid, we pass judgment on those who transgress them, and in doing so, limit our understanding of those same characters. I have, of course, argued for a transmasculine reading of Cú Chulainn, and my main purpose in doing so is to gently suggest we look at how gender is being constructed in this text and all the ways in which characters do or don’t live up to those ideals, rather than taking as read what we think the categories should be. One thing we may choose to consider as part of those constructions is the act of lamenting: who does it, and for whom?

I have often been disappointed by discussions of Cú Chulainn’s lament for Fer Diad that allow for gender fluidity only because they deny the possibility of homoeroticism. Leaving aside the fact that I believe treating caoineadh as a women’s job is erroneous, there’s something very odd about arguments which think the only reason Cú Chulainn laments the way that he does is because he is casting himself in the role of female admirer of male beauty. This is incomprehensible to me as an argument. Is it so impossible that he could be situating himself as a male admirer of male beauty? Are we so determined to impose a heteronormative view that the only way a man could lament another man is to take on a woman’s role?

I am always happy to explore the ways male characters embrace femininity and problematise masculinity — but not at the cost of acknowledging the possibility of homoerotic desire, seriously. It’s 2023, let’s stop being afraid of that as a concept.3

What I think would be actually interesting to discuss in the context of this particular act of caoineadh is something that was brought up at this symposium, too: laments as an act of resistance, an expression of injustice and a call for change. The idea of the Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire as an anti-colonial work recurred throughout several talks, highlighting the way it contrasts the rightful social status of Art with how it has been taken from him by English aggressors. Mulligan, too, has discussed Cú Chulainn’s lament for Fer Diad in the context of social protest to some extent (see fn. 2).

What I’d love to do some time, although I don’t know when I’ll have the time and the brainpower, is to explore lament in Táin Bó Cúailnge at more length through the framework of ‘grievability’. This is a term I learned from Judith Butler’s discussions of equality, war, and nonviolence,4 and it has struck me ever since as a crucial piece of articulating what is going on in Comrac Fir Diad. For a life to be grievable means it has value: it is a life that ‘even before it is lost, is, or will be, worthy of being grieved on the occasion of its loss; the life has value in relation to mortality.’5

Medb and Ailill have made it very clear that they do not consider Fer Diad’s life to be grievable:

‘Do you hear your new son-in-law bidding you farewell?’ 
‘Is that what he is doing?’ asked Ailill. 
‘It is indeed,’ said Medb. ‘But I swear my people's oath that he who is so bidding you farewell will not return to you on his own feet.’ 
‘Because of what we have gained by this marriage,’ said Ailill, ‘we care not if both of them fall, provided that Cú Chulainn is killed by him. But indeed we should be the better pleased if Fer Diad escaped.’ (Táin Bó Cúailnge, Recension 1, trans. O'Rahilly.)

‘We care not if both of them fall.’ Fer Diad’s life is only valuable because of what he can potentially offer to them; it is not worthy of being mourned in its own right. But Cú Chulainn, the very person who killed him, asserts otherwise. He mourns, and in doing so, protests that exact judgment. He says: this life was worth grieving, and if you will not do it, I will. In doing so he asserts that Medb and Ailill are wrong, and that there is injustice in the judgments they are making (which in turn, casts serious aspersions on their integrity as rulers, because Bad Judgment is the last thing a medieval Irish monarch wants to be accused of).

Lament as an act of protest against injustice: it’s not just for women.

Later in the day I mentioned this to Margo, my former modern Irish teacher, who was also at the conference. She agreed with my medieval examples, and pointed out that even some of the modern caoineadh is spoken by men, for men — in fact, one of the very examples (the name of which I sadly didn’t write down) given by one of the speakers was spoken by a man. Why, then, were we all agreeing that caoineadh was a female tradition?

True: the literary tradition is often male dominated, and to have a genre that is dominated by women is refreshing. True: after a few decades of scholarship agreeing that this is the case, it’s unpalatable to say, “Actually, we were wrong, men do this too.” But we agreed that this ‘boys don’t cry’ understanding of caoineadh was a limiting one, and one that denied men an outlet for grief which so many have sorely needed. Throughout the centuries men have mourned and cried and touched and held the bodies of their friends and loved ones, and nobody gains from pretending this is not the case, and portraying masculinity as untouched by these kinds of emotions.

In the final spoken session of the day, before the musical performance, two of the lament’s translators discussed their approaches to it: Vona Groarke and Paul Muldoon. Vona Groarke was clear that she doesn’t consider her work to be a translation from the Irish: she worked from seventeen prior translations to write her own version. I was astonished by the idea of having seventeen translations, or indeed, any translations to work from, since I spend a lot of my time working with untranslated texts or those that were translated once in the 19th century and never again. Seventeen! Can you imagine?! Muldoon, on the other hand, based his translation directly on an edition of the Irish text by Ó Túama. This seems to be the ‘standard’ edition, considering how many copies of it I saw in the audience during the day — which made me feel wildly unprepared, as someone who’d never even read it, I’m not gonna lie.

One topic particularly dominated (you could even say derailed) this session: the issue of blood-drinking. There is a line in the lament where Eibhlín Dubh mentions cupping Art’s blood in her hands and drinking it. This line is not in every version or manuscript, because the thing about the oral tradition is that it gives rise to a lot of variant versions, but it seems to have been fairly definitively established that it does belong to the lament and isn’t a late insertion. Having established that, there was some animated conversation about what, exactly, is going on in this scene.

At first, neither panellist could recall any other Irish examples of drinking the blood of the deceased, but fortunately, somebody else in the audience (possibly one of the other speakers? I am so bad at faces, I couldn’t recognise people when they changed locations in the room) mentioned Emer, Cú Chulainn’s wife, and Deirdre, who drinks the blood of her lover Naoise (and also of his brothers, in some versions). So I was not obliged to give an impromptu Oidheadh Con Culainn lecture, for which everybody was probably quite grateful, whether they knew it or not. But yes, this motif is very well-established in the early modern Irish tradition.6

There was some discussion following this about Classical traditions of blood-drinking, for example, the motif of preventing blood from hitting the floor so that the Furies wouldn’t come for vengeance. In Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoighaire, the blood has already touched the ground, so that can’t be the mechanism we’re thinking of here, and some instead favoured the interpretation that this is more of a ‘last kiss’, a way of taking the beloved into one’s body in the only way that is still permitted. A final intimacy.

Which makes sense. But this got me thinking, because there is one text I know of from medieval Ireland where the blood of a living character is drunk: Aided Derbforgaill. In this text, a young woman called Derbforgaill comes in search of Cú Chulainn, because she’s heard about his great exploits and wants to marry him. She’s injured, and when Cú Chulainn sucks the stone from her wound, he accidentally drinks some of her blood. As a result, he cannot marry her — presumably because the blood-drinking has created some kind of kinship bond — so she marries his foster son, Lugaid. Later, when she dies horribly for unrelated reasons and Lugaid dies of grief about it, Cú Chulainn is the one to avenge her.

I was thinking about this in the context of these blood-drinking examples from laments and death tales. Cú Chulainn’s role as Derbforgaill’s avenger is, presumably, because she is his daughter in law. But could it not also be because of the blood-drinking, and the kinship that bestows on the pair of them? And if that’s the case, could this be related to blood-drinking in death tales? Is drinking someone’s blood a way of asserting yourself as their next-of-kin, and therefore claiming the right to vengeance for their death? It is Conall who avenges Cú Chulainn, not Emer, but he does so for Emer, and brings the heads of the slain to her. And Eibhlín’s lament certainly has a vengeful tone, even if direct action isn’t taken.

This is purely just me noodling around with ideas; this may have been proved or disproved in academic discussions already. (I intend to look at it more eventually.) But although we are not trying to prevent vengeance by the Furies, perhaps there is a vengeance connection here, via kinship: claiming the dead, claiming the right to avenge them, claiming that the injustice that has been done is against you, the bereaved.

The session ended before I’d plucked up the courage to raise my hand and suggest this possibility, so I settled for inflicting it on a friend via WhatsApp instead. (They had been receiving a few stream-of-consciousness responses to the conference throughout the day, including a lot of my thoughts about choreographing the lament.) Still, it made me think that in future research into those kinds of mourning rituals, I should definitely incorporate or at least explore the late texts and the insights they have to offer on the matter.

The final session of the day was a musical performance: an excerpt from a student composition using Muldoon’s text, and two scenes from an opera based on Groarke’s. This opera, composed by Irene Buckley, was due to be performed in April 2020, but we can imagine what happened to that (it did not happen), so we got a brief almost-premiere. I confess to being no great lover of opera, particularly of the highly ornament and warbly classical variety; this wasn’t that, and the soprano’s clear tones managed to entrance me. I could almost see my choreography in my head as the music was performed, and my body itched with the need to make it real: to embody the lament, just as the poets and academics had discussed.

I’ll finish here, before this post ends up being too absurdly long, but I’ll end with this: I left that night with two translations/versions of the lament in my bag, half a dozen new creative and/or academic ideas in my head, and a strong sense of having learned far more from the day than I’d anticipated. I was extremely glad I’d been able to go, despite the fact that it meant getting up a lot earlier than I usually do on my days off work. It was an excellent way to mark the 250th anniversary of the lament’s composition, and I hope in future to have the opportunity to explore other works from the same mix of creative and academic angles.

And if you see me writing an article with a title like ‘Boys Don’t Cry?: A Reconsideration of the Gendering of Caoineadh‘ any time soon, well… you’ll know some of what prompted it.

But in the meantime, I’m just going to be eagerly awaiting the publication of Mícheál McCann’s ‘Keen for A–‘, because I can’t wait to eventually read the whole thing. Seriously, those excerpts slapped. And I’ll definitely be checking out the other poets’ work too. Maybe it’s time for me to get back into modern poetry again.


1 I actually had mixed feelings about A Ghost in the Throat. I loved the idea of exploring one’s own feelings and experiences through translation, and the dialogue between past and present that that creates. I was uncomfortable with some of the ways gender and sex are portrayed in the book. It is very much a book about cis womanhood and cis motherhood, written for cis women, especially for cis mothers. This is fine; I don’t expect to be the target audience of every book. But it was a book that did not allow the possibility of a world in which people like me exist, and that was alienating. Ní Ghríofa at one stage focuses intently on the mare of the Lament as a female animal, and the overall impression it left me with was that she saw herself as more similar to a mare, because it has a uterus, than to a cis man, because he does not. I simply can’t vibe with that kind of distancing between sexes, and as someone who has a uterus but is very much not a woman and considers myself a hell of a lot more like a man than like a horse, I was conscious that this was a narrative I could not be part of. This may be an uncharitable reading of that section of the text. It’s nevertheless been my lasting recollection of the book, and shapes my retrospective feelings about it.

2 See, for example, Ann Dooley, Playing the Hero: Reading the Irish Saga Táin Bó Cúailnge (U. of Toronto Press, 2006), who perceives Cú Chulainn as co-opting a female role, and Amy Mulligan, ‘Poetry, Sinew, and the Irish Performance of Lament: Keening a Hero’s Body Back Together’ in Philological Quarterly 97.4 (2018), who presents the ‘social protest’ argument alongside discussions of Dooley’s reading, while still mostly presenting male caoineadh as transgressive/unusual.

3 Sarah Sheehan’s article, ‘Fer Diad De-flowered: Homoerotics and Masculinity in Comrac Fir Diad‘ in Ulidia 2 (2009) is one of the only published academic discussions of this lament that embraces homoerotic possibilities, though to read some scholars complaining about queer readings, you would think they were endemic.

4 Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (Verso, 2020), and Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (Verso, 2016). I highly recommend both of these, but especially The Force of Nonviolence, which disrupts the traditional understanding of pacifism as a passive refusal to fight and foregrounds the need for active, forceful disruption of violent system and societal structures.

5 Butler, The Force of Nonviolence, p. 75.

6 It is specifically the early modern Oidheadh Con Culainn that emphasises this detail for Emer. I read an article once which discussed the fourteenth (?) century Deirdre/Naoise blood-drinking tradition as deriving from the Emer tradition, but the entire argument was undermined by not realising that Oidheadh Con Culainn is the fifteenth century text, and the early version of the story (Brislech Mór Maige Muirthemni) lacks the exact details they rested their discussion on. I haven’t looked at it further since, but based on the dates they gave for the Deirdre texts, it may well be that the Emer tradition derives from there, rather than the other way around. I was surprised no peer reviewer caught that error, as it was fairly fundamental, but I guess that’s what happens when nobody cares about the late versions of the texts :( I swear, I have read multiple articles that made similar errors or confused events of one story with the other.


If you enjoyed this post and want to facilitate my research in general, please consider buying my books, or dropping a couple of quid in my tip jar.

An Early Modern Melancholy

I’ve been working this week on Oidheadh Con Culainn, the Early Modern version of The Death of Cú Chulainn. It’s a fascinating story that pretty much nobody seems to care about, as is often the way with these early modern prose tales — too late for the medievalists, too early for the modernists, or at least that’s how it can feel. This lack of interest means there’s no English translation of it than I can find, so I’ve been translating sections myself, gradually uncovering the story.

I went into it looking for Láeg mac Riangabra. I knew I’d find him — I had, at least, been able to read a summary of the story beforehand, so I knew that his role had grown and developed from the medieval version of the text. As Cú Chulainn’s charioteer, he’s also largely neglected in the scholarship, relegated to footnotes and passing remarks. In one analysis I read that listed the main differences between the two versions of the story, his role wasn’t even mentioned, despite the fact it has changed entirely.

In the medieval story, then, Láeg dies shortly before Cú Chulainn, hit by a spear meant for the hero. It’s poignant enough. There would have been a poem, originally, Láeg’s last words — this is lost, as the redactor of the only surviving copy of the story thought we knew it well enough that abbreviating it to a single line was enough: “Bitterly have I been wounded.” Cú Chulainn draws out the spear, bids him farewell, and goes alone to his death after that. A heroic blaze of glory.

But in this later text, it happens a little differently. Láeg is wounded, not killed, and Cú Chulainn sends him away: begs him to go home, to survive, to tell his story to those left behind. Except Láeg doesn’t go. He takes himself to the edge of the battle and he watches, and when it’s over he goes to bind Cú Chulainn’s wounds and assure him that this isn’t how he dies. Cú Chulainn knows otherwise: he recognises his mortality, the culmination of prophecies, and all that remains is to take some control over the place and manner of his death. He asks Láeg’s help to prop himself against a standing stone, holding his weapons, facing his enemies, and it’s there that he dies. But at least this time, he doesn’t die alone.

For me, the most moving moments of the text are here: as Cú Chulainn begs Láeg to leave, and Láeg refuses. As the hero says, “From the first day we bound ourselves together, we have never before quarrelled or separated, not by day or by night, until this moment.” And this quarrel, this separation, is with the goal of saving Láeg from meeting the same fate. Of saving the charioteer and with him the story.

It seems a very early modern melancholy to me. Of course, I’m a medievalist, and no expert — a piece of A-level coursework on Hamlet and The Duchess of Malfi back in 2013 does not an early modernist make. Still, it’s Hamlet that this brings to mind: the melancholy, the friendship, the tragedy of the one who survives.

It feels, in these moments, that the redactor is appealing to a very different aesthetic and emotive sensibility than their medieval predecessors. No more the blaze of glory — now the grief. Now the friend. Stay alive, begs the tragic hero, in whatever words he’s given. Stay alive so that you can tell my story. No longer the impartial narrator of myth: instead the story is given to the grieving beloved, who holds the narrative in their trust.

And the hero is proven tragic by his ability to die (as Anne Carson says, immortality defies tragedy). It surprises him too. Cú Chulainn says — “If I had known that my heart was one of flesh and blood, I would never have performed half the feats that I did.” He’s caught out. His mortality is almost a shock. So this is it. Our medieval hero is waiting for the end to his short life; our early modern hero finds his humanity a disruption.

But the friend — the friend is condemned to survive. Horatio and Láeg, made unwilling bards by their endurance. Both would probably have found it easier to die there, and the medieval hero would have let them. But the early modern one bids them live, entrusts to them the precious role of remembrance. It’s a cruel kind of love, that one, to abandon your friends to life.

And then the curtain falls. Then Horatio is left among the dead — no word as to whether Fortinbras believes his tale, or if he’s tried and hanged for treason and the murder of a dynasty. Then Láeg, in his grief, leaves Emer and Conall to their revenge — and goes where? The story doesn’t say. As friend, his part is tied to the hero’s. Perhaps he walks the landscape alone. Perhaps he goes home, to his mother, and weeps with his head in her lap for a young man who was beloved by him. Perhaps she saw this coming, and would have tried to protect him from it, if he had let her.

It’s a melancholy erasure, this fading out. It refuses grief. It gives in to it. It crumbles under the weight of aftermath and then it hides from it. Cowardly, almost. Where does Láeg go? Or Horatio? To another story, one nobody will tell, because that kind of survival is too raw a wound to salt it with words. They go to the gravestone of endpapers.

How early modern of them.

Or at least, that’s how it seems to me, a medievalist, caught up in the peculiar, melancholic loss everpresent in this text. “It is then fell the chief of valour and arms, glory and prowess, protection and bravery.” But left behind was Láeg, his most loyal friend. And wounded and grieving, he mounts Cú Chulainn’s one surviving horse and rides home, alone, “and it is slow and spiritless he came,” until Emer spots him from the ramparts of Emain Macha and understands what has been lost.

Maybe Láeg could have had another story — found another hero in need of a charioteer, perhaps, just as Horatio could have stayed at court as an advisor, or perhaps gone back to Wittenberg and his studies. In Horatio’s case, we don’t know that he didn’t. But Láeg tells us clearly: “I will not be the servant of any other person forever after my own lord.” Still an ending, then, but a messier one than his medieval counterpart, who dies at Cú Chulainn’s side, king of charioteers. This one is a loss of identity, he who has been defined by his counterpart now walking the rest of his story alone.

We aren’t told where it takes him. Of course we aren’t. The text isn’t Merugud Laeig, the Wanderings of Láeg, the Going-Astray of Láeg. The text is Oidheadh Con Culainn, the Violent Death of Cú Chulainn. And so the beats it follows, of prophecy and plot and battle and death and mourning and revenge, are those of the hero’s story.

Láeg is, I think, somewhat genre-savvy, though all he tries for optimism when he kneels at the wounded Cú Chulainn’s side and tells him the end of his life hasn’t yet come. He knows what’s coming. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t beg to stay, to be a part of it, to meet the end as he has lived before now: by Cú Chulainn’s side. “A chomalta inmain,” he says: O beloved foster-brother. Perhaps it makes it easier, to think that it didn’t come as a surprise. Perhaps it makes it worse, the anticipation of tragedy a preemptive grief that never eases the sting when it comes for real.

Either way, the result is the same. He is the story-carrier, the news-bearer, the messenger of grief, who takes word back to Ulster and sets in motion Conall’s vengeful rampage. As such he cannot be allowed to die. Cú Chulainn is genre-savvy too, to recognise that. The closest of companions must be sent away.

How early modern of him. Or so it seems to me.

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story.
— Hamlet, Act V Scene II


To support me in having ongoing feelings about Láeg mac Riangabra, please consider buying me a coffee.