Tag: medieval Irish literature

Publish and Persist

This post requires some introduction, because I originally wrote it in late March, and left it in my drafts until now. This was mostly because I was afraid of backlash, whether in the form of direct harassment on social media, or in the form of not getting the PhD funding I was then waiting for. I didn’t know if these fears were justified, but they were enough to make me hesitate, especially as AHRC funding decisions were coming up within the next month. It wasn’t that I thought it would stop me from getting funding — it was more that, if I posted it and then didn’t get the funding, I would always wonder whether these two things were related, and I couldn’t face that uncertainty.

The thing about AHRC funding is that if you get it, you’re notified in early April; if you don’t, you’re left hanging, waiting in case some additional funding becomes available later or you’re able to secure a scholarship elsewhere. If I had got funding at that stage, I would have posted this in April. But, as you can probably guess, I did not, and so I was left waiting… and waiting… and waiting, unsure whether it was a good time to post it.

Then, in May, as a result of entirely unrelated factors, I was subjected to transphobic harassment on social media, including transphobes posting my author headshots, taken from my website, and speculating about my assigned gender and, by extension, my genitalia and healthcare choices. I ended up locking down my Twitter account for a few weeks, making my YouTube videos private to deny them further ammunition, and otherwise going into hiding as far as public internet presence was concerned. It was comparatively mild compared to what other trans people have experienced online, but it still made me afraid to be publicly trans. I lost my nerve, stopped posting anything too obviously queer on social media, and developed significant anxiety about how some of my future books would be received (due to being much more explicitly queer/trans than my previously published titles) and whether I would be able to cope with that.

In other words, it destroyed any chance of this being posted. At least for a while.

But that fear is exactly what this post is about. It is about defying those who want to cow us into invisibility and silence, to push us out of the public eye and out of their publications because they make it unbearable for us to stay. It is about asserting my right to exist as myself within academia, my right to do the research I want to do, and the validity of that research.

So here’s the post. I’ve left it more or less as it was when I wrote it at the end of March, with a few tweaks, corrections, and additions to reflect the time that’s passed.


On the 24th of March, I announced the publication of a long-awaited academic article of mine. Entitled ‘”What Manner of Man is this Hound?: Gender, Humanity, and the Transgressive Figure of Cú Chulainn’, it’s colloquially known in certain corners of the internet as my ‘trans Cú Chulainn’ article, although in actual fact it’s only partly about transmasculine readings, and is significantly about monster theory.

This article begin life as part of my undergraduate dissertation, way back in 2017-18, and I’ve been talking about it on Tumblr for almost as long, which is why some people have genuinely been waiting five years to read this. It’s rare for an baby academic like me to have that kind of eager audience, and I’m afraid I’ve rather tested their patience: although I wrote it up into an article in 2019, presented a section of it a conference in 2020, and submitted the article in 2021, it’s taken until now for it to be published.

I’ve been rewarded, however, with a slew of enthusiasm on Tumblr: “I’ve been waiting literally years to read this, I’m so excited!” say bloggers eagerly in their tags, a level of enthusiasm few academics experience when publishing a new article.

(You can download and read the article for free on the Research page of this site, btw.)

Because my work on queer readings of Táin Bó Cúailnge originated as part of my undergraduate dissertation, and it’s in that final year of undergrad I first started posting meaningfully about my research online, this has become my online academic brand. This was the first area of research I worked in, so people associate me with it — especially on Tumblr, but also on Twitter, where I gained quite a lot of my followers after appearing on the Motherfoclóir podcast to talk about this.

It’s funny, because actually, academically, queer theory represents only a very small part of what I do. I’ve mostly moved on to other areas of research: my MA thesis was about Láeg mac Riangabra, and while I occasionally make shippy jokes on Tumblr about his relationship with Cú Chulainn, that wasn’t an aspect I was exploring. My PhD proposal revolves around friendship in the Ulster Cycle, the very thing that critics of queer readings think people like me are neglecting or erasing. And my other two published articles have nothing to do with queer readings — one is about Láeg in Brislech Mór Maige Muirthemni and Oidheadh Con Culainn, and one is an edition and translation of a fragmentary onomastic text about the seven Maines, the sons of Medb and Ailill.

(Although I did recently use that research to answer somebody’s questions about queer interpretations of Táin Bó Cúailnge, so I guess even that can be queered if you try hard enough.)

For the most part, I have shifted towards expressing my queer readings transformatively, e.g. through retellings, and focusing on other areas in my academic life. It’s partly because I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as somebody who exclusively worked on queer stuff. It’s partly because my interests genuinely shifted. And it’s partly just a coincidence in terms of what I’ve been working on right now, and what’s moved to the back burner.

But as far as the internet is concerned, what I do is queer readings of Irish lit.

And that’s fine. There are way, way worse reputations to have. But I have to say, not everybody is thrilled about it.

Last year, I received a serious of anonymous hate messages on Tumblr from somebody who was intensely angry about my work. As far as I could tell, they claimed to be a student in my own field, and they were furious that I, a queer trans person, might point out that medieval literature can be analysed more effectively if we free ourselves of the assumption that everybody in any given text is heterosexual and exists within a modern western gender binary. Controversial, you see.

Anon accused me of being simultaneously a nobody, whose work was of no value and whom nobody really respected, and also an unavoidable plague, whom they could not themselves escape because I had so dominated the field with my queer agenda. I wasn’t sure how I could be both a nobody and everywhere, but evidently I’d succeeded, and it was upsetting this person considerably.

An anonymous Tumblr message: "Unfortuantely you keep plaguing the internet and your 'field' that you have no business being a part of with probably the worst 'scholarship' that has come out of Cambridge I've ever seen."

They made various other accusations, some of which I couldn’t disprove — for example, they claimed I’d only won the CMCS Prize for Young Scholars due to lack of competition. This may well be true, for all I know, but since there’s no evidence either way, it still looks good on my CV, and I can only assume there’s a measure of bitterness about the award that drove Anon’s campaign. They were angry that my ‘trendy’ research was being legitimised in this way, since everybody knows that editions and translations of fragmentary onomastic texts are all the rage with the queer theory crowd these days (??).

Some of their tirades were amusing — or at least, they were either funny or upsetting, so I picked funny, because laughing at them was better than letting them get to me. Mostly, they instilled in me a sense of spite. I’d already moved on from queer theory, but it made me want to go back and publish more of it — to present at every conference, to submit to every journal. If they thought I was an unavoidable plague before, I reasoned, I would make sure that got even worse, and they’d never be able to escape me getting my grubby queer little hands all over their precious medieval literature.

The saga ended after a few days. Anon’s grievances had become increasingly specific, and I’d pointed out that if they weren’t careful, they were going to give away their own university affiliation and, by extension, their identity. Either this scared them into silence or they simply got bored, but the incident never recurred. I continued with my work, and my research, although my spite-fuelled urge to publish was slightly dampened by my life circumstances getting a lot more complicated, robbing me of the time to act on it.

The spite didn’t go away, though.

It was noticeable throughout Anon’s tirade that it was my work on queer readings, and particularly trans readings, that they were targeting. Of course it was. There are a lot of people who would like to pretend that queer and trans lives are a modern invention, and a lot of people who are viscerally uncomfortable with the idea of disrupting the assumptions we make about medieval texts’ constructions of gender and sexuality, for reasons they often won’t interrogate.

But anyone who reads my latest article will see that I’m hardly making any radical claims: it’s simply a preliminary study of why transmasculine readings of Cú Chulainn might be useful and add nuance to our understanding of masculinity in the text, before I then go off talking about monsters for the entire second half of it. In fact, I’ve been distinctly worried that the people who wanted trans readings will be disappointed that I’m not nearly as bold as they were expecting.

The thing is, it didn’t matter. This person hadn’t read my article. It wouldn’t have made a difference if they had. What they were reacting against, what they were objecting to, wasn’t really my work. It was me, as a queer, trans scholar, existing boldly in academia without hiding those facts about myself.

An anonymous message on Tumblr, reading, "Speaking from inside knowledge, you won that prize because there were extremely few submissions, exactly no one takes your work seriously except for the moronic zoomers desperate for attention and legitimisation. UCC has been steadily declining in the views of most of the academic world for some time now. Do you actually think anyone works their salt thinks Cú Chulainn is a "trans man"? When this garbage stops being trendy I hope youl'l be gone along with it. The sooner the better."

They want me gone. They made that pretty clear. Not just my queer theory work, but me as a scholar. The sooner the better.

And that’s why it didn’t make a difference to them that my other work isn’t on queer theory, and why it wouldn’t keep me ‘safe’ from this kind of bigotry if I never wrote about gender or sexuality ever again. There is no way to be the ‘good’ trans person, to be ‘acceptable’ levels of queer, to squash myself into a normative box enough that they can forget I’m different and start to accept my scholarship at face value. Because my work, to them, will always be coloured by the fact that I’m a queer trans scholar whose work is informed by my own understandings of the world, and thus is tainted by my agenda.

So if I’ll never be good enough, why try?

Once upon a time, I thought, maybe I shouldn’t provoke people. I thought, I’ll get pigeonholed. I thought, I need to do some stuff other than queer theory so that people take me seriously as a scholar. I thought, I have to prove myself, over and over again.

But it’s pointless.

They will never want me, whether I spend the rest of my academic life writing about queer readings or whether I dedicate myself to editing obscure lists of names and trying to determine chronological continuity between interrelated texts. But the latter will make it a lot easier for them to ignore me, and the former… well, the former will piss them off. And you know what? I think there are certain people in the world who deserve to be pissed off.

Why should I squash myself and my research interests into a safe conventional acceptable-to-bigots box, for the benefit of people who never wanted me there in the first place? I shouldn’t. I won’t. And the very fact that they don’t want me to be here makes me all the more determined to keep doing what I do.

So I hope Anon knows that within 48 hours of uploading my article to this website, 275 people opened or downloaded the PDF. More than 350 people visited the page where it’s hosted, and presumably looked at the abstract, and at my other work. My tweet about it got more views and engagement than anything else I’d tweeted this year (including when I announced The Hummingbird Killer… clearly my audience has priorities). These numbers may not sound exceptional to those in large academic fields, but for an independent scholar in a niche area of study, hosting an article on their own website (ruling out people accidentally stumbling on it while looking for another article)… yeah, that’s pretty good, actually. Those are some pretty good numbers.

Five months down the line, that number has doubled. As far as I can see from the stats I have access to, the PDF has been opened/downloaded at least 550 times. Some of those may be the same people coming back to check something, to re-download it; some may be bots. But even if only a fifth of those downloads are real people… that’s still a hundred people who’ve sought out my article. Downloaded it. Maybe read it, maybe cited it.

Because people want trans readings. People want my trans readings. People want my scholarship, because I deserve to be here.

A photo of Finn Longman, a white person with orange tinted glasses wearing a graduate cap and gown, pointing at an anti-litter poster in the window of a building which reads "Bin the Butt". On the windows are stripes in the colour of the progress pride flag, which says #BogaimisLeBród #ProgressWithPride @UCC.
MA Graduation, standing in front of the Boole Library at UCC with Pride decals in the windows, laughing about the word ‘butt’.

I don’t know when I’ll return to queer theory. I have a few articles in mind, a few texts where I think trans readings would do a great deal to illuminate the layers of the story. I might write them next month, or in three years’ time. And maybe there will be people who are angry about that: in my field or out of it, on the internet or in person. Maybe there will be doors that get closed in my face because of it.

But if people don’t want that work, then it’s because they don’t want me, a person who is queer, trans, and unashamed. And if they don’t want me, well, that sounds like a them problem.

Because, as I edit this post on 3rd September 2023, I can confirm that although I didn’t get AHRC funding, I did, at the very last minute, get full PhD funding via two Cambridge-specific scholarships, and I will be starting a PhD in the department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic this October. I’ll be working on friendship and interpersonal relationships between men in the late Ulster Cycle, looking at how these relationships are depicted from the medieval to the early modern period and the various influences shaping their development, such as chivalric romance. I imagine this research will show up plenty of queer possibilities, even if they’re not my primary focus, and I’m looking forward to examining intimacy and loyalty within various contexts.

Moreover, in July, I presented a paper at the International Congress of Celtic Studies, and received some great comments and made some great academic connections as a result of it — including one that might result in more queer readings in the near future. And I just had another article accepted for publication (pending revisions), my first time submitting to a journal with no caveats about age or qualifications, as if I were any scholar. The peer reviewers, despite their exacting corrections, clearly thought my work was worth something, and while some days that’s harder to remember than other days, I’m going to choose to believe them.

So I’m going to keep plaguing the internet and my field with my research, and if Anon and others like them don’t like it… I actually don’t care, except that spite is a way more effective academic motivation than any traditional ‘publish or perish’ rat race, and every time my work annoys somebody who doesn’t see me as a person, it just makes me want to do it even more. Publish and persist. Persist as a scholar and persist as a person and persist as a thorn in the side of everyone who wants us gone.

As a medievalist, I can say with confidence: trans people have always been here. And as a trans person, I will say with defiance: you won’t get rid of us.

And as a trans medievalist, I’ll say: hi, can I interest you in an article about monster theory, boundary-crossing, and trans readings of Cú Chulainn? Because it’s open access and available to read right here.


Disclaimer: I would be remiss if I didn’t note that although I face certain barriers as a queer, trans, disabled scholar, I still benefit from white privilege. While I’ve been occasionally treated as an outsider for being English without a meaningful claim to Irishness, this has primarily been from people outside academia, and I haven’t faced the automatic othering that people of colour often face in medieval studies, Celtic studies, and academia as a whole. Indeed, as a white English person I’m often assumed to belong (“So is your family Irish?”) in a way that Irish people of colour are not (“But where are you REALLY from?”).

Moreover, I’m a coward: while I preach defiance about the nature of my research, I know I’ve not done enough, in the past, to publicly call out bigotry within our field and in related areas. I could make all sorts of excuses about feeling vulnerable as a student, struggling with energy levels due to my disabilities, or not having enough information to feel confident speaking up… but others in the same position as me have done far more to stand up for the vulnerable and the marginalised, and the people most directly affected by these issues rarely have a choice about whether they’re involved or not. I want to do better on this, because the hate mail that I’ve received pales in comparison to some of the vitriol that gets thrown at others. I hope that the institutional support (and funding) of being a PhD student rather than an independent scholar will empower me to do more in this regard, and I want to at the very least acknowledge that I’m aware of these dynamics and the ways that I have failed in the past to challenge them.

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.

Mentor, Master, and Medievalist

A few wee disconnected bits of news for you today, because a lot’s been happening lately. I’ve mentioned most of this on Twitter already, but it can be hard to keep track of that kind of thing, so here it is, in convenient blog post format. (I miss the internet of the 2010s, when everything was in convenient blog post format…)

The first is that I’m mentoring with Rogue Mentor! I’ve wanted to mentor for a while — I credit my experiences as a mentee in Author Mentor Match with having taken The Butterfly Assassin from “okay” to “publishable”, and I’ve been wanting to give back to the writing community. Rogue Mentor is a chilled out, low-key programme with no time limits or high-pressure showcases, and I’m really looking forward to getting to work with an author to take their book to the next level.

I’m looking for someone who has reached the point where they don’t think they can take their book any further on their own, and they just need another perspective / pair of eyes to make it click so that it’s ready for querying. I’ll be there for my mentee through as much of that process as they want me to be, and honestly, I see this as a chance to make a new writing friend, too, Mentorship can create a sense of hierarchy, but we’re all just people, some of us slightly further ahead in our writing journeys.

So, if you have a book that you know isn’t quite ready but you don’t know how to get it there by yourself, maybe consider submitting to me, and we can figure it out together. Even if you’ve never considered a mentorship programme before, why not think about it? Sometimes all you need is somebody to ask the right questions, so that you have to come up with the answers. Everyone needs a “But why?” reader, and when it comes to character motivations and worldbuilding, I like to think I’m pretty good at that. Plus, it’s invaluable to have someone who has been through the querying / submission process before you, to help you gauge what’s “normal” and keep calm during the process, so if that’s a direction you’re interested in, you might benefit from submitting.

My MSWL is here, but I wouldn’t say it’s an exhaustive list of the only types of books I’m interested in. If I haven’t mentioned something, and it’s not on my anti-MSWL either, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m not interested in it. Just means I don’t know, yet, that I’m interested in it. Checking out my last blog post, where I shared my recent reading habits and preferences, might help give you an idea how likely I am to enjoy something. If I don’t seem like a great fit, do try one of the other Rogue Mentors! There are people looking for all sorts of genres and books, and they might be someone who’ll love yours.

You can submit to me during the April 22-25 submission window, and we’ll start working together in early June. (Mentee announcements are 26th May, which is my publication day, so I’ll probably be slightly busy that first week.)

Please do consider submitting! I’d be particularly excited to have a UK/Ireland-based mentee, but I’m open to anyone who has a book that I might click with.


The second piece of news is that at the end of May, I will be at the International Literature Festival in Dublin for my first panel as a newly-hatched baby author! Timed perfectly for two days after The Butterfly Assassin comes out, it’ll be a brand new experience for me, and I’m… slightly terrified.

I’ll be on a panel with Maura McHugh, who writes comics with folkloric/mythological influences. We’ll be talking about dark stories, monstrosity (of both the human and the beastie variety; The Butterfly Assassin has no actual monsters, but it certainly has monstrous humans), and all manner of things like that; I’ll probably end up talking about medieval Irish lit, too, so it promises to be an entertaining one.

Full details of the event are here. It’s on the 28th May, which is a Saturday. If you’re in Dublin, or close enough to get there, it would be wonderful to see you there! I’ll also be visiting some bookshops on the Sunday, so that’s definitely the weekend to catch me if you’re Ireland-based.


Speaking of Ireland, I was in Cork last week for my MA graduation ceremony, and I’m now officially a Master of Early and Medieval Irish. It was lovely to be back there; I took the opportunity to go to a friend’s talk about medieval Irish literature, as well as to see some parts of the area I never got the chance to see as a student. It was strange being back in the city now that everything has opened up so much, because there were Covid restrictions throughout my time living there. The spectre of Covid still lingers — my supervisor couldn’t be at graduation due to testing positive — but all in all, it was a very different Cork from the quiet, closed-up city I mainly experienced.

A selfie of me wearing a black mortarboard and a black graduation grown with a blue and green hood over an orange jumper and a white shirt. I am a white person with a buzz cut and orange-tinted glasses. I'm smiling at the camera. In the background are shelves of antique books in grill-fronted cupboards.

Many people wanted to know what’s next for me, and whether I’m going to do a PhD. As I’ve said before, I only want to do a PhD if I have a thesis topic in mind that excites me — not just for the sake of it. Since I don’t yet, I’m taking a little break from academia. But, I’m working on adapting some of my MA work into articles and papers, and there are a few research projects I’d like to explore as an independent scholar, so that doesn’t mean it’s going to be all quiet from me on the medievalist front. First steps will be to figure out how to become a Reader at the British Library, so that I can actually access materials… friends with library benefits are all very well, but a nerd cannot work from scanned PDFs alone.

As that suggests, I’m going to be staying in London for at least the next year, and probably longer. I’m about to move house again, for the third time in six months, and this time, I’m hoping to be there for a good while. Maybe not long enough to make it worth shifting all of my books over… but long enough to bring more than a shelf’s worth. I hope. It’ll be a new corner of London for me, and I’m looking forward to exploring, and trying to put down some roots and be part of a community.

So that’s what’s coming up for me: a house move, a gradual process of getting my life in order in a new location, and a slow ramp up in book events as publication (now only six weeks away!) draws ever closer. And, hopefully, amidst all that: a mentee, and the chance to be part of the writing community from a new direction, too. Join me! It’s going to be an interesting few months.


With only six weeks to go until The Butterfly Assassin is released, now is a great time to pre-order. We have a subtly-altered cover (check out the Books page for that) and I’m excited to see the finished copies which will also have a very funky spine… 👀

Retelling The Details

I like writing retellings. I joke that it’s because the plot is already done for me: I’m very much not an outliner, because I’m unable to see my way to the end until I’ve got there, but a retelling offers me a ready-made framework and an end already in sight. That is, if I actually stick to the original plot. Some of my ‘retellings’ over the past few years have been looser, ‘inspired by’ their source material more than directly retelling it: Bard, for example, or the chaotic gay orchestra novel that I have yet to finish (or title).

That isn’t to say I only write retellings (The Butterfly Assassin isn’t one, by any stretch of the imagination), but they’ve certainly dominated my output over the past few years, with The Wolf and His King (a retelling of ‘Bisclavret’) being my main focus recently. In that one, I kept most of the original story intact, extrapolating backstory and secondary characters but leaving the plot framework in place. I can tell you something, it made writing a synopsis a lot easier.

There are many different ways of approaching retellings, and the term gets used to describe everything from a direct reworking to something that only borrows a few names or plot points or vibes. All of these are totally valid approaches (although going into a book expecting it to be one kind and getting the other can be a major disappointment), and have their own challenges. I’ve had fun with both, but recently I’ve been thinking about the challenges specific to retellings that stick close to their originals.

There’s a lot to consider. How do you find the balance between something that feels accurate and authentic, and something that works well as a modern novel? The further removed your source material is from that format, the more challenges at play — a novel’s story structure, pacing, and sensibilities can be very different from a medieval prose tale, an ancient epic poem, or a Greek tragedy. How do you write characters that reflect the values and ideals of the society who created them, while also being sympathetic and interesting to modern readers with modern expectations of what a protagonist will be like?

And the closer you stick to the original story, the more the divergences stand out. Why include X, and omit Y? Will your readers notice? Will they know the story as well as you do, and wonder why you chose to privilege one version over another? How do you decide which details matter, and which can be abandoned for the sake of making good art?

To some people, the answer to this is simple: do what you want, and anyone who doesn’t like it can deal with it, because that’s their problem, not yours. And it’s true. Your retelling is your retelling. If a detail is incompatible with the story you’re trying to tell, maybe it’s best simply to let go of it, and sometimes, changing the details is crucial to the retelling. This is a story where A chooses B, not C; this is a story where D has the power, not E; this is a story where F survives. Art over accuracy.

But there’s a flip side to that: if the details don’t fit the story, is the story right? Is this the material you should retell to weave this particularly story? Would another character, another fairytale, another text provide a better basis? Fundamental changes to the mood and vibe of the story should be done with intent and thought: details should be changed because changing them does something, makes the story what it is, not because they fell by the wayside along the way. Intent and thought over carelessness.

And figuring out which details are important to shaping the story and which are merely incidental can be harder than it sounds.

Recently, I’ve been rereading parts of To Run With The Hound. For those unfamiliar with this novel of mine, it’s a retelling of Táin Bó Cúailnge, focusing on the bond between Cú Chulainn and Fer Diad from their training together through to their encounter on the battlefield. I wrote the first draft in late 2018, and have been waiting to have the time and brainpower to edit it ever since.

There are many things I intend to change when I redraft the book; I’ve been keeping note of them for years. Some of these changes are about the writing — ways to try and fix the pacing, the prose, the characterisation. Some of them are more academic: Add more Naoise to part I, says one of my notes, and remember that the sons of Uisliu are known for their singing voices. The more I learn about the Ulster Cycle, the more attention I pay to the secondary characters, the ones who were just names to me when I wrote the first draft.

What really struck me, rereading, was that I disagree with my past self’s interpretations of the source material.

This is, perhaps, a risk you take when adapting a text you’re also working with on an academic level. My relationship to the Táin will never be a purely narrative relationship: it’s one fundamentally informed by my academic work. Everything from how I arrange the chronology of the different remscéla (fore-tales) to which recension I choose to follow when details diverge is an interpretation that relies on my academic understanding of the text. The relationships I portray between characters are coloured by the other texts they appear in, and how those stories join up.

It’s a funny thing. At the time that I drafted TRWTH, I knew the Táin incredibly well. Only a few months out of undergrad, I’d been working closely with the text in order to write my dissertation. I’d read it dozens of times in close succession, and knew the plot back to front.

I know it better now, and so I would write this book differently.

See, in most cases it’s not that 2018!me had a completely unrecognisable reading of the major characters. My reading of Cú Chulainn — and of Fer Diad — was informed by my dissertation, a piece of work I’ve continued to develop, turning part of it into an article. I have a deeper understanding now than I did then, but it’s built on the same foundations.

There are characters I would write very differently, with Láeg being the most prominent of those. I knew almost nothing about him when I began writing TRWTH, and it shows; he has very little in the way of a distinct personality. It was writing that book that made me realise he was interesting in the first place, and so my narrative approaches informed my academic research, and sent me down a rabbithole that led to my MA thesis focusing on Láeg.

Mostly, though, it’s the details. It’s the things I didn’t think were important. It’s the scenes I skimmed over, versus the ones I allowed the story to dwell on; it’s the little changes, where a piece of advice is spoken by one character instead of another, or somebody else takes a watchman role and describes a battle. It’s everything that the casual reader, the one who hasn’t spent the last four years immersed in the Ulster Cycle, probably won’t even notice.

Nobody reviewing a retelling of this sort would be likely to say, “Well, I liked it, except that the author made Lugaid the observer in this instance of the watchman motif, and that just doesn’t fit, because he isn’t otherwise fulfilling an interpretative or mediating function.” Nobody would say, “Yeah, the author clearly knows the text really well, but they seemed to misinterpret the significance of this character’s skill at board games.” Because nobody cares.

But I care.

With a retelling like this, one where a significant portion of the book hews very closely to its source material (Part I of the book is largely my own invention, informed by Tochmarc Emire and Oileamhain Con Culainn, but Part II and Part III follow the Táin almost beat for beat), it’s the details that matter, the details that make it my retelling and not somebody else’s. Hell, it’s the details that make it a retelling and not a translation. And currently it’s a retelling that reflects my 2018 self’s interpretation, but it doesn’t reflect my interpretations as of 2021.

Now, as well as being a better academic than I was in 2018, I’m also a better writer, and I know that there’s a point at which faithfulness becomes limiting. The story needs to breathe and change, because no matter how much I want to evoke the moods and images of the medieval text, my audience is not a medieval audience, and wants different things from a story. This inevitably means letting go of some details, diminishing some moments in order to give more weight to others, reshaping scenes to fit the greater whole. But a crucial part of doing that is deciding which details have to be kept — and my past self and I disagree on that.

Every time I work on the Táin, I learn something new about it. In writing my undergraduate dissertation, I learned how to approach the different recensions, and how each paints a slightly different image of gender and sexuality within the text; I learned how the story interacted with legal concepts of marriage and adulthood and fosterage. In writing TRWTH, I developed an understanding of the story as narrative, and the complex chronology of the remscéla that defied any attempt to put them in order; I began to notice which details the Táin never gives us, and which characters were worth examining more closely.

In the independent research I did between undergrad and my MA, I developed on all of those understandings, and over the course of my MA I’ve learned a great deal more, albeit mostly focused on Láeg: about the interactions between the Táin and other texts, particularly late (early modern) Ulster Cycle tales, and about the fact that there’s never only one explanation for anything. And the details that my past self thought didn’t matter — who wins at fidchell between Cú Chulainn and Láeg; who tells Cú Chulainn about the warriors approaching his camp — now matter to me, because many of them play a pivotal part in my academic interpretations of Láeg.

This could go on forever. Perhaps I’ll find another character to examine at length, or a new obscure late tale to fixate on that will reshape my understanding of everything that went before it, or some other angle of approach that will bring me back to the Táin with fresh eyes to seek out new readings. No doubt if this book is ever published, there’ll come a point, a few years down the line, when I cease to agree with my interpretations and wish I’d done this or that differently.

What I have to decide — what anyone writing a retelling like this has to decide — is which of those details are important not to the source material, but to the story I’m telling. I need to acknowledge that by omitting something on which I hung an academic argument, I’m not deciding that that detail or that argument isn’t important, only that it doesn’t contribute to the book I’m trying to write at this time. And this book can’t be every story at once, can’t be every interpretation at once, can’t be every reading at once. I have to choose.

I can write a Cú Chulainn who was nursed by Láeg’s mother and raised alongside his charioteer, or I can write a Cú Chulainn who was raised by his parents until he went to Emain Macha when he was five, or I can write a Cú Chulainn whose closest bond of fosterage is to Conall because his mother was Cú Chulainn’s nurse, but I can’t write all of them. I can have a Láeg with Connacht connections, a Láeg with Otherworld connections, or a Láeg who is both human and Ulaid, but I can’t have all of those Láegs at once. I can give Fer Diad’s charioteer a name of my own invention to compensate for his namelessness in the early manuscripts, or I can make him Idh mac Riangabra, Láeg’s brother, as he is in the fifteenth-century Stowe manuscript, but I can’t do both.

(It’s a shame, almost, that there’s little room in ‘original’ fiction to write four different, unrelated books about the same character, which contradict and conflict with each other. Fanfic writers have the right of it, where the same writer may offer multiple readings of a character, and nobody expects them to bring the same version to the table every time. I could write a retelling of Oidheadh Con Culainn and focus on entirely different character details than the ones that are important in Táin Bó Cúailnge, but I would struggle to sell both without the world assuming one was a sequel to the other and being perplexed by the perceived inconsistency.)

Academia is about possibilities, readings, offering interpretations. Retellings are about making choices: which interpretation will we go for? Which possibility will we draw to the front? In a good retelling, there are still multiple readings open to the audience, but they may be completely different readings from those the audience would take from the source material, because the characterisation that’s been offered has already been shaped and interpreted. And that, inevitably, means letting go of some of the possibilities that the source material left open.

When I go back to TRWTH, the changes I make will be informed by my greater academic understanding of the medieval texts. Láeg might actually have a personality, for a start, and this time I’ll remember that the sons of Uisliu are singers, able to charm with their voices. And the details I include might shift in response to those changes, placing the focus on different scenes and different moments.

But ultimately, what I have to decide is not which interpretation I think has the strongest manuscript support, but which interpretation makes the best story. Which reading will pave the way to telling the story I want to tell; which possibility I should lean into, to get the strongest emotional response from my readers. It’ll be a novel shaped and directed by my academic research, but it won’t — can’t — shouldn’t be my academic research in novel form.

In a retelling, an author makes choices. We untangle contradictions, close off alternative readings, privilege one interpretation over another, sideline one character for another’s sake, and in doing so, we let go of details. Even the ones we care about.

Accuracy matters, in a retelling like this. But art, it turns out, matters more.


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The Celtic Myths That Shape The Way We Think (Book Review)

When I first saw the title of Mark Williams’ new book, The Celtic Myths That Shape The Way We Think, I have to admit, I was… concerned. If it weren’t for the fact that I know and trust Mark when it comes to medieval literature (he was my second year Old Irish teacher and dissertation supervisor), I might have thought it was a pop psychology book about the inherent mythic structures in our brains, or something similar.

However, I do trust Mark, and I also know first hand that authors don’t always choose their titles, so I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. And the blurb makes it pretty clear that we’re not talking about any mythic brainwaves: if these stories have shaped the way we think, it’s in the sense of shaping how we think about Irish and Welsh myth/culture, not in the sense of defining our daily approach to interpersonal relationships.

(Which is… good. Because I seriously worry about anyone who bases their approach to interpersonal relationships on the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi, since, uh, yikes.)

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed Ireland’s Immortals and still find it a super useful reference book, so I figured I would get my hands on Celtic Myths and see what Mark had to offer on this occasion, hoping for a new go-to recommendation for people who come to me looking for guidance on what to read to learn more about medieval lit. I finished the book this afternoon, sitting on my landlords’ roof (… don’t tell them), and I thought I’d give you my thoughts.

The tl;dr is that this is a great introductory read, but if you’re expecting short blog posts, you’re definitely in the wrong place, so you’re getting way more detail than that. No, I was not paid to write this review; yes, I bought this book with my own money, etc. Though if anyone wants to give me a sponsorship deal for yelling about medieval literature on the internet, my DMs are open…

A photograph of "The Celtic Myths That Shape The Way We Think" by Mark Williams. It's a bright sunny day, and there's a tree turning autumnal red in the background.
Rooftop reads: climbing out of the window with a book is my new favourite hobby on sunny days.

First of all, Mark makes it very clear from the beginning that this is a book aimed at the general reader. Unlike Ireland’s Immortals, which sought to hit that sweet spot between being an academic/scholarly book and also an accessible work that the general public might enjoy, that means Celtic Myths doesn’t contain footnotes (though there is some ‘further reading’ listed at the back). Quotes are given only in English translation, and technical terms are kept to a minimum; generic “Celtic scholars” are referenced rather than bogging the text down with names. This may be frustrating to those who want to follow up on specific points, but probably makes for a much easier and less daunting read for the newcomer.

Each chapter explores a different story, giving a rundown of the original material and then discussing its afterlife over time, and some of the ways the story has been reworked and developed. Throughout the book, there are pictures (including a number of full-colour plates), showing how characters and stories have been conceptualised over time, from fourteenth-century manuscript illustrations to Hellboy II.

Since I’m not a ‘general’ reader, I found that I was already familiar with almost all of the book’s content; though I’m not an expert on the Welsh side of things, I’ve done enough Welsh lit to be passingly familiar with the stories and poems in question, and there was nothing in the book that I’d say was brand new information. Of course, some of that is because Mark himself was my lecturer for a while: in chapter 3 (“Merlin: From Wildman to Wizard”) there were a number of details I was pleased to find I already knew, only to realise a few minutes later that that was because I got them from Mark, in a lecture he gave about medieval ‘wildman’ stories, Merlin, and Suibhne.

This is great, though, because now it means I finally have an alternative to trying to cobble together explanations for people based on my own undergraduate lecture notes, which are frequently chaotic if they exist at all — I can instead pass them this book, knowing that it covers the same material in a far more coherent way. I get a lot of people asking me questions about medieval literature (mainly Irish, but occasionally Welsh) or looking for reading recommendations, and I’m always looking for books that I trust to be both accurate and accessible.

(Obviously, having been taught by Mark means I’m also inclined to agree with a lot of his interpretations, since he played a significant part in shaping my own approach to Celtic literature. I wouldn’t say we agree 100% of the time, and there are a couple of details in the Cú Chulainn chapter where I’m inclined to quibble with the simplified explanations given, even though I know you can’t go into all the complexities in a general-purpose book like this. But it does mean I’m predisposed to find his conclusions believable: we belong to similar schools of thought.)

I had hoped that I’d be able to make use of the book myself as a sort of general-purpose reference book — sometimes I find it useful to have more ‘introductory’ material around when I can’t remember where I found something, because it can save me time hunting. Unfortunately, since this book has no footnotes and few direct quotes or citations, I don’t think I’ll be adding it to that particular shelf in my library, because unless it’s something where I can cite this book directly, I’d have to go off and do my own detective work to get a more detailed reference. However, as a scholarly reader, I am well aware that I am not the target audience, and this isn’t meant as a criticism — just a note for anyone thinking of picking it up who is wondering whether it’ll suit their purposes.

So who is the target audience? Well, I admit I have no sense of how easy it would be to follow if you came to the book with absolutely zero familiarity with any of the content, because it’s now too many years since I can remember what it was like not to know who Cú Chulainn is. But I’d say this is a really great book if your primary exposure to this material is via T.W. Rolleston or Peter Berresford Ellis or anyone else who offers “Celtic Myths & Legends” in one convenient volume, and you’re looking to understand why actually, it’s all a little more complicated than that. It’ll probably also suit people whose exposure to Celtic myth has been through retellings or reworkings in popular culture, and who want to know whether Neil Gaiman’s Mad Sweeney or Guillermo del Toro’s Nuada really bear any resemblance to their medieval namesakes — people who are trying to figure out what the “real myth” is behind the retellings.

Spoiler alert: “real myth” is both an oxymoron and a complicated metric to apply to anything Celtic, as Mark demonstrates. He uses the word “myth” critically throughout the book, explaining some of the difficulties with using this term for Celtic material. Some scholars use it pretty freely, even for late material, while others try not to use it at all, and still more are somewhere in the middle — Mark generally falls into the third category, acknowledging the mythic content in texts while also foregrounding their medieval or early modern literary context and origin. He discusses the dates and contexts of different texts, looking at how some of the most famous “mythological” material is actually the product of named authors centuries after when most people would have imagined it to be composed, and examines the tension between “pagan” ideas and the Christian context in which our medieval literature was produced, and how contemporary events shaped the literature as we have it.

He does this in a non-judgmental way, acknowledging that many people feel a personal and/or spiritual connection to material, even if it isn’t ancient, and exploring the ways that “late” material may still be an authentic part of a country’s literary and cultural heritage. But he’s also frank about aspects of popular “Celtic” culture that are modern inventions, and how they came to be, looking at the lasting impact of Iolo Morgannwg (Edward Williams), James Macpherson (inventor of the poems of Ossian), and others who shaped our modern conception of Celtic literatures.

I think the Introduction of the book in particular is vital reading for those new to dealing with Celtic material on anything other than a surface level. Mark points out how many popular treatments are second- or third-hand information, often a long way distanced from their source material, regurgitated uncritically (particularly online). I see a lot of misinformation online, where people misinterpret what the Irish texts say or even just make stuff up from nowhere, and it spreads powerfully quickly, including ending up in published books and guides. Mark doesn’t dismiss the value of these stories as creative works and folk traditions, but warns readers to be aware of what is and is not a genuine part of the historical tradition.

“The upshot is that the afterlife of a given story tends to dominate, to the extent that it completely obscures the medieval original behind a heavy veil of romantic nationalism and, in a few cases, outright fraud. As a result, popular handbooks often depend on retellings of retellings, in which dubious ‘truths’ about Celtic myth are endlessly recycled: these retellings can lie a long way from the primary sources and take on a facticity of their own. People may want to include elements of such retellings in their own creative endeavours or spiritual life — which is of course absolutely legitimate — but some of these ‘well-known facts’ rest on fragile evidence.”

Mark Williams, The Celtic Myths That Shape The Way We Think, p. 12.

In each chapter, Mark considers some of the uses to which the medieval stories have been put. If I’m honest, I would have liked more detailed analysis of some of these — particularly in the Cú Chulainn chapter (how predictable of me), where he touches on the use of images of Cú Chulainn for political purposes. The image of the dying Cú Chulainn has been utilised for both republican and unionist causes, with the same image being used for the statue in the GPO as in loyalist murals in Belfast. I’ve read a couple of really interesting articles on the topic, but it’s something I’d love to know more about, and Mark only gives it a glancing treatment. But, that’s my background speaking — the very fact that I’ve read some academic articles on the subject is a sign that I’m not the “general reader” here.

Still, I’d have liked to hear more of Mark’s thoughts on some of the pop culture he discusses (The Owl Service as a reworking of the Fourth Branch, The Call as an interpretation of the Túatha Dé, etc). I suppose that would be a different book, one focused on textual reception for those already familiar with the stories, rather than one aimed at introducing newcomers to the tales behind the pop culture they’re familiar with. I do think that’s a book the field needs (though I know there has been some work on this already) and when I initially read the blurb of this one, I hoped maybe this might be it, but on most levels, it’s not.

There is slightly more Welsh material than Irish material in the book: five chapters about specifically Welsh material, four about specifically Irish material, and one about Brutus and origin legends which explores both Geoffrey of Monmouth and Lebor Gabala. Where there are parallels or relevant examples from the literature of the “other” country, Mark draws them in, but he’s keen to stress that Irish and Welsh material are not interchangeable, nor as similar as they’re often painted to be in popular thinking. And for those wondering why a book about “Celtic” myth seems to make little mention of Scottish, Cornish, Manx or Breton material, Mark addresses this in the introduction: the bulk of the early literature that we have is from Wales and Ireland, making them his primary focus, though other Celtic-speaking areas are referenced where relevant.

So that’s the content, but what about the style? Well, while this one doesn’t include either the word “sexcapades” or the word “glitterati”, both of which showed up in Ireland’s Immortals and helped secure it a place on my “favourite academic books list”, it’s still plenty entertaining. The humour is often understated, but undeniable, and it definitely doesn’t feel like slogging through dense academic prose. The pictures also help, as does the fairly large print…

(Listen. I’m in the middle of Thesis Hell. I need all the help I can get when it comes to actually absorbing any information.)

So while as a scholarly reader I found myself wanting more — more detail, more discussion of textual reception, more direct quotes — I would have no reservations about recommending this to any general reader looking for a solid introduction to some of the most famous figures in Irish and Welsh literature: Taliesin, Merlin, Finn, Deirdre, and so on. If you want a way in to Celtic mythology that’s grounded in actual sources and up-to-date on recent scholarship and academic interpretations, this is it, and a much better starting place than most of the “Celtic Myths” books on the market.

If, however, you’re looking for a more detailed scholarly investigation into the mythological side of the Irish tradition, go for Ireland’s Immortals. Almost five years after its publication, it’s still one of my go-to recs — but this one is a great addition to the list, particularly for those who are brand new to the material.


You can buy The Celtic Myths That Shape The Way We Think on Amazon UK (affiliate link; if you buy via this link I earn a small commission) or at your local bookshop or wherever you normally buy books, and likewise with Ireland’s Immortals.

If you enjoyed this post and want to enable me to continue buying books like this so I can tell you about them, please consider dropping a couple of quid in my tip jar!

Brothers, Breasts, and Big Murder: The Coming of Cuculain #4

All right, here it is — the last post in my Standish O’Grady series. I’ve learned a lot from writing these posts, and having a theme to follow has been great in terms of encouraging me to blog more consistently than I have done in years, but I think next time I do a blog series, I’ll pick something that can be wrapped up in 2-3 posts. I didn’t really anticipate that it would take me a full month to get through this, and I have to admit, my attention span isn’t great and I struggle to keep focused for that long. Hence this final post has taken me a while longer to write than I intended it to. (It’s also longer than I’d planned, because I really didn’t want to split it into two, but there was a lot to say.)

In any case, we’re nearly done, and I’m excited to wrap up our discussion of The Coming of Cuculain. For those who somehow missed the earlier posts in the series, they’re all designed to be read without having encountered Standish O’Grady’s work yourself, but a passing familiarity with Cú Chulainn and the Ulster Cycle in general will probably make things easier to follow.

Previous posts in this series:

  1. Understanding Standish (an introduction to the project and an examination of Standish O’Grady’s earlier work on the same subject)
  2. Conquest, Classicism and Characterisation (a discussion of the first part of The Coming of Cuculain, up to Cú Chulainn’s arrival at Emain Macha)
  3. The Boy-Troop at Boarding School (a discussion of the second part of The Coming of Cuculain, the portrayal of the boy-troop, and Láeg’s first appearance in the book)
  4. Sacred Steeds and Tangled Timings (a discussion of the third part of The Coming of Cuculain, looking at how Cú Chulainn acquired his supernatural horses, and Láeg threatened to beat him up for not listening to him because that’s friendship, baby)

You can find The Coming of Cuculain at Project Gutenberg.


We left off just before Cú Chulainn’s “knighting”, an event shrouded in ominous prophecies of future sadness and a short life. The word “knighting” has always struck me as a peculiar one to use in this context, as has the description of the Ulaid as the “Red Branch Knights” — a phrase you see often in Victorian translations and retellings. It’s a very… Continental word, and not one you find in a medieval Irish context, although it starts creeping into the language from about the seventeenth century onwards.

But this led me on an interesting etymological rabbithole. Knight when we see it in, say, Arthurian contexts is often a translation of chevalier. The crucial element there being cheval: horse. Owning and riding a horse is an essential element of chivalry, and it’s one of the reasons the word has never struck me as particularly appropriate for Irish characters, who are notably disinclined to ride horses.

In fact, riding horses rather than travelling in chariots is so unusual for upper-class warrior figures in medieval Irish texts that the early modern Oidheadh Con Culainn makes a point of emphasising its rarity:

the three men who first rode a horse of a single rein in Ireland: Lug at the battle of Mag Tuired, Súaltaim on the Líath Macha at the hosting of the Táin, and Conall on the Dergruathar [in this text, riding to find Cú Chulainn].

This passage is a little puzzling as we do have other riders (including one in this very text, approximately five pages earlier). Also, no surviving version of Cath Maige Tuired depicts Lug riding a horse in this way, so either the author of this triad had access to a version we don’t have, or he’s making it up because of Lug’s connection to Cú Chulainn, who is the focus here. However, the fact of the matter is that a character (Conall) turning up on horseback instead of in a chariot is considered a sign that Something Is Unusual And Probably Bad about the situation — notably, the other occurrences are in times of crisis.

So, medieval Irish warriors are definitely not chevaliers. But when I went looking into the English word, ‘knight’ (from Old English cniht), Wiktionary gave me the meaning, “A young servant or follower; a trained military attendant in service of a lord.” What’s more, this was the first in the list, with the meaning “armed and mounted warrior” coming in at third. In other words, ‘knight’ has got more linguistic flexibility than I realised, and the French chevalier meaning isn’t the only one at work.

“A trained military attendant in service of a lord” certainly seems to describe the situation that Cú Chulainn seems to be entering here, becoming one of Conchobar’s fully-fledged fighters (and therefore graduating from boarding school/the boy-troop). I still think that O’Grady is substantially projecting upon his image of ancient Ireland a world that belongs far more to Continental romance than it does to any Old Irish tale, but I’m prepared to grant that my objection to specific words is not as justified as I thought.

Where O’Grady’s image feels un-Irish to me is the level of ritual and formality involved in this knighthood process. Not that the medieval Irish world didn’t contain rituals or formality, some of them incomprehensible to us when we read, but he gives us a process that seems more… Classical than anything else:

When the other rites had been performed and the due sacrifices and libations made, and after Cuculain had put his right hand into the right hand of the King and become his man…

I mentioned last week that Cú Chulainn’s actual taking of arms in the Boyhood Deeds is somewhat shrouded in subterfuge, so there’s definitely no big ritual happening in front of everybody, but I don’t think we ever really get rites being performed and sacrifices and libations being made in Irish texts like this. Of course, they’re all written by monks, who would probably have hesitated to include anything so obviously pagan, but since we know virtually nothing about pre-Christian Irish religion, we really can’t assume it bore any resemblance to, say, Classical practices.

I do enjoy, however, the use of the phrase “become his man”, because where have we seen that before? Láeg, the first time he met Cú Chulainn. These layers of hierarchy are very medieval, each bound to the next one up in the chain, and there’s a scene in Táin Bó Cúailnge that really evokes this. A messenger is sent to Cú Chulainn to try and negotiate. He encounters Láeg first, and asks him whom he serves. Láeg points to Cú Chulainn, sitting a little way off, and says, “That man.” The messenger goes to Cú Chulainn and asks him who he serves. Cú Chulainn says, “Conchobar.”

He’s doing it to rile the messenger up by refusing to confirm his name, and he continues the mischief throughout the conversation, but it also gives us the sense that Láeg’s obligation to Cú Chulainn isn’t dissimilar to Cú Chulainn’s obligation to Conchobar, and O’Grady’s use of a similar phrase to describe both relationships seems particularly apt.

It’s also interesting because Láeg essentially made a formal declaration long before he actually became Cú Chulainn’s charioteer — which hasn’t happened yet. After Cú Chulainn has been given weapons (and declared them inadequate, and been given Conchobar’s own, as in the Boyhood Deeds) the time comes for him to choose his charioteer, and it’s treated as though this weren’t a foregone conclusion. Conchobar “caused to pass before Cuculain all the boys who in many and severe tests had proved their proficiency in charioteering” (followed by a quick description of what that entails), so that he might choose.

Amongst them was Laeg, with a pale face and dejected, his eyes red and his cheeks stained from much weeping. Cuculain laughed when he saw him, and called him forth from the rest, naming him by his name with a loud, clear voice, heard to the utmost limit of the great host.

“There was fear upon thee,” said Cuculain.

“There is fear upon thyself,” answered Laeg. “It was in thy mind that I would refuse.”

“Nay, there is no such fear upon me,” said Cuculain.

I love this scene. I love it because we rarely get a glimpse of how or why Láeg became Cú Chulainn’s charioteer, although the version of Compert Con Culainn in RIA MS D.iv.2 tells us it was because of a “special love of fighting”. I also love it because of Láeg’s moment of insecurity here. We’ve seen in the last two posts how clear Cú Chulainn’s affection is for him, and how close the pair of them are, yet still, in this moment, he thinks perhaps Cú Chulainn might choose somebody else.

And for Cú Chulainn, the idea that he might ever have picked anybody other than Láeg is so absurd that he can only laugh at Láeg’s anxiety, because of course he wouldn’t! Why would he ever choose anybody else? Nor does it seem to cross his mind for a moment that Láeg might refuse — after all, he’s already promised himself to Cú Chulainn. Láeg’s self-effacing fear that perhaps he might be overlooked is completely unfounded, but that doesn’t make it less poignant. Perhaps it’s the very fact of his closeness with Cú Chulainn that makes him afraid — if he does lose his ‘life-friend’, what then?

But Cú Chulainn declares his choice in front of the entire host, with no room for misinterpretation, and he also makes a prophecy:

“Verily, dear comrade and bed-fellow,” answered Cuculain, “it is through me that thou shalt get thy death-wound, and I say not this as a vaunt, but as a prophecy.”

And that prophecy was fulfilled, for the spear that slew Laeg went through his master.

Leaving aside the fact that I’ll cry about “dear comrade and bed-fellow” forever, this is an interesting merging of the medieval and early modern versions of the Death of Cú Chulainn, something we saw in our first post too. In the medieval story, Láeg dies; in the early modern one, he survives, but is injured by a spear that goes first through Cú Chulainn, into Láeg, in a kebab-style double impalement (Cúbab…). By taking the latter injury and making it Láeg’s death-blow, O’Grady merges the two versions of the story neatly, and also confirms that he doesn’t envisage Láeg surviving the story. He’s gone the medieval route in that regard.

A messy stick-figure drawing in pencil on a square of yellow notepaper. On the left is a figure labelled Erc mac Cairbri, who is smiling. In the middle is a shorter figure with spiky hair, labelled Cú Chulainn, holding a sword and with a sad face. On the right is a curly-haired figure labelled Láeg, also with a sad face. He is holding some poorly-drawn reins; a label reads "horses here" with an arrow to the right. Cú Chulainn and Láeg are standing in what looks more like a bucket with wheels but is intended to be a chariot. A long spear "held" by Erc mac Cairbri goes through Cú Chulainn and Láeg. The title of the image reads "KEBAB". The whole thing is very badly drawn.
For those struggling to imagine the scene, a highly sophisticated drawing…

Prophecy made and choice declared, Láeg becomes Cú Chulainn’s charioteer officially: “After that Laeg stood by Cuculain’s side and held his peace, but his face shone with excess of joy and pride.” Delightful.

O’Grady also gives us here a glimpse of the rest of Láeg’s family:

Laeg was one of three brothers, all famous charioteers. Id and Sheeling were the others. They were all three sons of the King of Gabra, whose bright dun arose upon a green and sloping hill over against Tara towards the rising of the sun. Thence sprang the beautiful stream of the Nemnich, rich in lilies and reeds and bulrushes, which to-day men call the Nanny Water.

These brothers show in a couple of places, including in Fled Bricrenn, as well as another text entitled Fled Bricrenn ocus Loinges mac nDuíl Dermait which is nothing to do with the more famous Fled Bricrenn despite sharing part of its title with it. In that text, there are actually 9 Riangabra siblings, six boys and three girls, although the three “canonical” brothers are listed separately, suggesting the author hasn’t been entirely successful at integrating his OCs.

This text also provides some solid support for Famously Bisexual Cú Chulainn, but that’s slightly beside the point.

Anyway, Idh mac Riangabra is Conall Cernach’s charioteer in Fled Bricrenn and Fer Diad’s charioteer in the Stowe version of the Táin, and Sedlang, or Sheeling as O’Grady’s calling him, is Loegaire’s Buadach’s charioteer in Fled Bricrenn; I’m not sure if he shows up anywhere else.

I mentioned in my Motherfoclóir episode that “Riangabra” probably means “bridle-of-a-horse”, or maybe (less likely) “path-of-a-horse” — essentially, the name means “charioteer”. With this in mind, it’s plausible it was originally just an epithet given to charioteers that was later interpreted as a patronymic. Hence originally, Láeg, Idh and Sedlang may not have been understood as brothers, just men with the same profession, but later, they get given parents and a couple of possible backstories and are explicitly referred to as brothers.

O’Grady definitely leans heavily into the “sibling” reading, and I suspect he might be using the Stowe version of the Táin, or something that draws on it, because that text shows Idh and Láeg forced into fighting each other to protect their masters and there’s considerable animosity between the pair of them. O’Grady frames this as a kind of brotherly rivalry or animosity between the pair — more on that in a second.

In the Boyhood Deeds, Cú Chulainn goes haring off in Conchobar’s chariot, driven by Conchobar’s own charioteer, Ibar. After they’ve tricked Conall Cernach into turning back so that he can’t stop them, Ibar fulfils the typical charioteer function of interpreting the landscape they’re passing for Cú Chulainn’s benefit, explaining where they are, who lives there, what the significance of certain animals is, etc. In the process, Cú Chulainn displays his prowess at hunting and fighting, before returning to Emain Macha laden with animals he’s caught and other spoils.

O’Grady follows this more or less beat-for-beat, with one major difference: Láeg is the charioteer in question, and the chariot is not Conchobar’s, but the “sacred chariot of Macha” that we discussed last week — as far as I can tell, O’Grady’s own invention. Obviously, it would have to be Láeg after all this build-up, and the chariot is also already firmly established. Láeg’s usual absence from the Boyhood Deeds contributes to one of the small mysteries about him (when, exactly, did he and Cú Chulainn meet?), but O’Grady has firmly answered that question, so he’s present.

While Cú Chulainn commands Ibar to do as he wishes, in O’Grady’s narrative, both Láeg and Cú Chulainn seem to be game for adventure, although Láeg is periodically portrayed as timid to big up Cú Chulainn’s own heroic fervour. We have to remember that these are two teenage boys out for a drive with no adult supervision for the first time in their lives. Plus, they’ve essentially been at boarding school for years. Of course they’re excited.

It’s when they encounter Conall that we get a glimpse of Idh mac Riangabra. A watchman describes the chariot, identifying Láeg by “his manner of driving”, and that’s when Idh speaks up:

“If it be my brother that charioteers sure am I that it is Cuculain who is in the fighter’s seat, for many a time have I heard Laeg utter foul scorn of the Red Branch, none excepted, when compared with Sualtam’s son. For no other than him would he deign to charioteer. Truly though he is my own brother there is not such a boaster in the North.”

This is striking, because we honestly haven’t seen Láeg expressing this kind of scorn. He has friends among the boy-troop before Cú Chulainn himself arrives, and seems to have appointed himself the rescuer of some of them. I wonder if O’Grady is here drawing on a line in Oidheadh Con Culainn, where after Cú Chulainn’s death, Láeg states that he will never be the charioteer of any other man. Perhaps, rather than grief, O’Grady reads this as distaste for the rest of the Ulaid.

But maybe the two brothers just don’t know each other that well. Láeg identifies Idh from a distance: “My haughty brother Ide, who hath ever borne himself to me as though I were a wayward child”. Idh’s probably the elder, in that case, and can’t reconcile himself with the idea that his little brother has grown up.

Anyway, they damage Conall’s chariot sufficiently that he has to turn back, which he’s furious about, threatening Cú Chulainn “that if a step would save thy head from the hands of the men of Meath, I would not take it”. Yeah, yeah, Conall. We know full well you’re going to end up being the one he choose to avenge his death, nobody believes you. Ah, cousins.

The close of this chapter’s interesting, though, because it gives us a glimpse of Conall backstory that, as far as I can tell, O’Grady has made up out of nowhere. When Fingin sees Conall returning to the Ulaid, he says:

His father Amargin was well known to me. He was a warrior grim and dour exceedingly, and he ever said concerning the boy, ‘This hound’s whelp that I have gotten is too fine and sleek to hold bloody gaps or hunt down a noble prey. He will be a women’s playmate and not a peer amongst Heroes.’ And that fear was ever upon him till the day when Conall came red out of the Valley of the Thrush, and his track thence to Rath-Amargin was one straight path of blood, and he with his shield-arm hacked to the bone, his sword-arm swollen and bursting, and the flame of his valour burning bright in his splendid eyes. Then, for the first time, the old man smiled upon him, and he said, ‘That arm, my son, has done a man’s work to-day.’”

I’m pretty sure we call that toxic masculinity…

The idea that Conall was ever considered less-than-manly is not a tradition I’m familiar with in the slightest; this is, after all, the guy who rides a horse known as “Dripping Red” which in some stories has a dog’s head and is 100% down to eat people. (Link there to more info about Conall’s monster horse, courtesy of my friend Emmet, the Conall expert.) Nor am I particularly aware that there’s notable tension between him and his dad. So, odd detail. Maybe just O’Grady’s attempt to ensure we know exactly what it is he considers manly: Doing Big Murder.

Well, the guy thought imperialism was a neat idea that Ireland should join in with, so I guess that shouldn’t really come as a surprise.

In any case, Láeg and Cú Chulainn continue their journey — they are “at large in Erin” — with Láeg interpreting the landscape for Cú Chulainn and explaining to him how things work. This made more sense when it was Ibar, a grown man who’d been driving Conchobar around for any number of years; Láeg has been in the same place as Cú Chulainn this whole time, and it’s hard to say how he would have obtained this information.

Cú Chulainn decides that he needs to fight somebody to prove himself, though Láeg is very much not thrilled about the idea of fighting the Sons of Nechtan, who are by all accounts very good fighters. Cú Chulainn won’t be dissuaded, but he does insist on taking a nap beforehand.

“Witless and devoid of sense art thou,” answered Láeg, “for who but an idiot would think of sweet sleep and agreeable repose in a hostile territory, much more in full view of those who look out from a foeman’s dun, and that dun, Dun-Mic-Nectan?”

“Do as I bid thee,” said Cuculain. “For one day, if for no other, thou shalt obey my commands.”

I enjoy this glimpse of Insulting Láeg, who comes up so frequently in medieval texts, as well as the idea that this is probably not going to be a simple hierarchical relationship in which Láeg unquestioningly does as he’s told. The “sleeping on the way to a fight” is something I associate more with Fer Diad than with Cú Chulainn, though; in Comrac Fir Diad, he does something very similar, and his charioteer berates him for it.

Láeg keeps watch while Cú Chulainn sleeps, and when their enemies come, he draws Cú Chulainn’s sword, though it’s almost too heavy for him. “His aspect, too, was high and warlike, and his eyes shone menacingly the while his heart trembled, for he knew too well that he was no match for the man.”

There are a few early modern texts where we get this kind of motif — Láeg fighting while Cú Chulainn sleeps. One of them is Toruigheacht Gruaidhe Griansholus, where I think he defeats about 100 warriors by himself, and is very much portrayed as a champion in his own right. O’Grady seems to split the difference between medieval Láeg (not a warrior himself though occasionally does a murder) and early modern Láeg (will readily do murders while Cú Chulainn naps). Like, he’ll try, but he’s “no match”, unlike early modern Láeg, who is more than once described as “a match for a hundred”.

Fortunately for Láeg, Cú Chulainn eventually wakes up and takes over the fight, defeats them all roundly, and they return home — but all is not well.

Cuculain was a pale red all over, for ere the last combat was at an end that pool of the Boyne was like one bath of blood. His eyes blazed terribly in his head, and his face was fearful to look upon. Like a reed in a river so he quaked and trembled, and there went out from him a moaning like the moaning of winds through deep woods or desolate glens, or over the waste places of the earth when darkness is abroad. For the war-fury which the Northmen named after the Barserkers enwrapped and inflamed him, body and spirit, owing to those strenuous combats, and owing to the venom and the poison which exhaled from those children of sorcery, that spawn of Death and Hell, so that his gentle mind became as it were the meeting-place of storms and the confluence of shouting seas.

It’s the ríastrad again — here explicitly compared to going beserk — although O’Grady also throws in a bunch of Otherworldly beings around them making everything even stranger, and their attempts to go hunting deer become shrouded in danger: “Alive or dead thou shalt come with me on this adventure, though it lead us into the mighty realms of the dead.” There’s less emphasis on the obscene body horror of the transformation in the medieval texts, because O’Grady, like other Victorian writers, is a coward, but Cú Chulainn’s “gentle mind” (lol) has been lost to it.

Those waiting for them at Emain Macha are afraid that he’s going to kill everyone, unable to recognise friend from foe, and they send the women of the Ulaid to bare their breasts to him and shame him into chilling tf out. This, again, comes straight from the Boyhood Deeds, and a few interpretations have been offered for it. Is Cú Chulainn just really freaked out by boobs? Is this a sexual thing — he’s too young to handle adult sexuality? Or is it that they’re reminding him that these are the women who nursed and raised him, and he’s about to kill his own kin?

O’Grady evidently goes for the second explanation… sort of. His weird focus on the sexual purity of the great Ulaid warriors shows itself again, and he’s convinced Cú Chulainn drinks his Respect Women juice every morning:

“His virginity is with him, and his beautiful shamefastness, and his humility and reverence for women, whether they be old or young, and whether they be comely or not comely. And this was his way always, and now more than formerly since young love hath descended upon him in the form of Emer, daughter of Fargal Manach, King of Lusk in the south.”

This is, for the record, the first time that Emer has been mentioned in this text, and will also be the last. Maybe it’s just because I know how wildly misogynistic a lot of the medieval texts are, but I find this characterisation patently unconvincing. When it comes to interpreting the medieval scene, I’m honestly inclined to lean towards Doris Edel’s explanation for why Cú Chulainn’s affected by the Ulaid Boob Party (she’s the one who proposes it’s the “don’t kill the people who suckled you” explanation), although a transmasc reading might suggest there’s a kind of dysphoric shame involved, so that’s another possibility.

In any case, this calms Cú Chulainn down, and he’s able to go and have a bath (much more civilised than the medieval tradition where they dunk him repeatedly in vats of cold water to calm his fury), and “Laeg ministered to him […] Laeg put upon him his beautiful banqueting attire, and he came into the great hall lowly and blushing.”

I do think this is a very cute image, of Láeg dressing him and him being hugely embarrassed by the whole situation and by everybody praising the great deeds he achieved. Plus, you know, it once again emphasises the intimacy of the charioteer/warrior pairing — Láeg isn’t a taxi driver, he’s the best friend Cú Chulainn is ever going to have.

Which is what I was looking for out of The Coming of Cuculain, and O’Grady more than delivered. Cute Láeg/Cú Chulainn content? Absolutely. In bucketloads. We have been spoiled.

O’Grady closes with Cú Chulainn once again falling into a deep sleep to recover from his deeds, with many thinking that he’s never going to wake up. Finally, he tells us: “Cuculain was seventeen years of age when he did these feats.” And that’s the end of it.

In the Boyhood Deeds, he’s not seventeen, he’s about six; Fergus remarks, “If he could do so much then, imagine what he’s capable of now that he’s seventeen.” O’Grady’s decision to extend the whole training montage over the course of a decade does a lot for the realism of it, although it means we never see Cú Chulainn training with Scáthach — one wonders then how he might bring Fer Diad into the story. For that, we’d need a sequel… but as far as I’m aware, there isn’t one.

And even if there was, over the past month I’ve written practically a whole thesis’ worth of blog posts about Standish O’Grady (around 17k in total, I think; my thesis is supposed to be 20k), so I think — and perhaps you agree — that it’s very much time to move on. Also, frankly, I’m struggling to come up with new alliterative titles.

So, next week I’ll be back with something completely different, which I’m very excited to share with you. In the meantime, I hope you’ve enjoyed this deep dive into obscure 19th century retellings. If you have, you can show your appreciation by leaving a comment, buying me a coffee, and telling your friends.

Sacred Steeds and Tangled Timings: The Coming of Cú Chulainn #3

Before I resume my reading of The Coming of Cuculain, I have a brief bit of news to share, which is that I was a guest on the Motherfoclóir podcast this week, talking about Táin Bó Cúailnge. We discussed why it’s weird that Cú Chulainn is so often portrayed as super-muscular, considered whether Fer Diad’s death is really a good starting point for queer readings, and pondered the etymology of Láeg’s name. It’s a pretty good intro to my research interests! You can listen to the episode here.

All right, so, back to Standish O’Grady. For those unfamiliar with this series of posts, I’m currently reading through Standish O’Grady’s 1894 novel, The Coming of Cuculain, and discussing his takes on medieval Irish literature — particularly when they’re weird. You don’t need to have read O’Grady’s work to follow along, although a basic knowledge of who Cú Chulainn is will help and I’d recommend reading the posts in order. (But, hey, you do you, I’m not going to make you.)

Previous posts in this series:

  1. Understanding Standish (an introduction to the project and an examination of Standish O’Grady’s earlier work on the same subject)
  2. Conquest, Classicism and Characterisation (a discussion of the first part of The Coming of Cuculain, up to Cú Chulainn’s arrival at Emain Macha)
  3. The Boy-Troop at Boarding School (a discussion of the second part of The Coming of Cuculain, the portrayal of the boy-troop, and Láeg’s first appearance in the book)

You can find The Coming of Cuculain at Project Gutenberg.

I’d planned for this to be my final post in this series, but, well, it hit 3k and I figured that was long enough, so we’re going to finish it off next time. My apologies to anyone who is waiting for me to blog about literally anything else. I promise those days are coming.


I said all along that I wasn’t going to discuss every aspect of The Coming of Cuculain that I found interesting, because this series would last until Christmas if I did. That means I’m going to skim fairly rapidly over O’Grady’s account of the Deirdre story (Longes mac nUislenn) which has been slightly clumsily inserted into the middle of this book. O’Grady himself seems perplexed by the story, and by Cú Chulainn’s absence from it, which is understandable; it’s hard to make its timeline match up with the Táin. He might have been better served by omitting it entirely, being as how it isn’t part of Cú Chulainn’s story, but he’s obviously trying to build up towards the Táin and felt the need to explain Fergus’s exile somehow.

His take on Deirdre is wild on several levels. In the medieval account, a prophecy is made shortly before Deirdre’s birth that she’s going to bring doom to the Ulaid, and it’s counselled that she should be killed. Conchobar, however, stopped listening after the part of the prophecy that said she was also going to be super hot, and decides to have her reared to be his wife. O’Grady absolves Conchobar of all responsibility by having Deirdre be born during his father’s reign, and generally ommitting the whole sketchy child bride situation that we’ve got going there. He also has Conchobar lecture Fergus at length about how sexually pure the Ulaid are and how this is a source of their strength, which would be great comedy if O’Grady didn’t seem to actually mean it.

There’s a great deal more that could be said about how that whole story is handled, but I said all along that my main interest was how O’Grady portrays Láeg, so I’m going to move fairly rapidly on from that.

Last week, we saw that O’Grady’s Láeg swears his loyalty to Cú Chulainn approximately five minutes after meeting him, and that the two immediately become intimate friends, sharing a bed and generally expressing their deep affection. But Láeg isn’t yet a charioteer, so how does that come about?

Well, before we can look at Cú Chulainn’s “knighting” — sidenote, it’s weird how retellings keep referring to the Ulaid as “knights”; it’s such an incongruous term for the setting — and therefore his acquisition of arms, a chariot, and a charioteer to drive it, we need to take a look at what’s going on with the horses.

O’Grady has a fondness for the supernatural, as we’ve already seen, but he really takes it to new heights when it comes to Cú Chulainn’s horses, the Líath Macha and the Dub Sainglend. He introduces us to the idea of the “sacred chariot” of Macha — an ancient, prophecy-laden chariot that the Ulaid keep and venerate as a sacred relic, which can only be drawn by two equally prophecy-laden horses, who haven’t been seen in three hundred years — “since Macha dwelt visibly in Emain”.

I’ll be honest with you: I don’t know where O’Grady is getting this from. I have never come across the idea of a “sacred chariot” in any of the medieval texts, nor the fact that the Líath Macha and the Dub Sainglend are immortal horses who’ve been roaming free for centuries waiting for a prophesied warrior to come and harness them again. And I’m pretty sure the texts don’t suggest it’s been three hundred years since Macha lived, although O’Grady’s use the word “visibly” suggests he conceptualises her as a figure who lived a mortal life and then became Otherworldly in some way.

On which note: Noínden Ulad tells the story of how the heavily pregnant Macha is forced to race the king’s chariot; she wins, but gives birth as she crosses the finishing line and curses the Ulaid to be afflicted with labour pains in times of great need. We’re told that the curse afflicts all who hear it, and their descendants for nine generations. O’Grady, however, presents Macha’s curse as a looming threat rather than a known reoccurrence. It has yet to fall, but they know it’s coming, and when it does, only their prophesied hero will be able to stand against it…

Now, I’m not ruling out the possibility that elements of this whole sacred chariot malarkey come from texts I’m not familiar with — I will never claim to know everything about medieval Irish literature — but I also think there’s a strong chance here, based on the changes he’s made to recognisable material, that O’Grady is simply… making things up.

Anyway, we have a sacred chariot, we have empty stalls awaiting the return of these ancient horses, and Conchobar has put the young Cú Chulainn in charge of looking after it all. A sacred duty. He wonders, vaguely, whether his nephew is the prophesied warrior, but while Cú Chulainn does excel at games of fighting, we’re told that he’s still… just a boy. Surely, the Ulaid think, the prophesied figure who will come will be like a reincarnation of Lug!

But our promised one is gentle exceedingly. He will not know his own greatness, and his nearest comrades will not know it, and there will be more of love in his heart than war.

I’ll be honest, that doesn’t sound much like Cú Chulainn to me, but it fits well enough with O’Grady’s characterisation — his Cú Chulainn isn’t particularly proud and a lot of his violence has been softened and smoothed away.

Shortly after Cú Chulainn has been given these duties, he receives a visitation from Lug, who tells him that tonight he’ll capture the Líath Macha and the Dub Sainglend. He’s excited about this — enough that Láeg notices something’s up when they’re eating dinner together, and asks him what’s got into him.

“Thy eyes are very bright,” said Laeg.

“They will be brighter ere the day,” he replied.

“That is an expert juggler,” said Laeg. “How he tosseth the bright balls!”

“Can he toss the stars so?” said Setanta.

“Thou art strange and wild to-night,” said Laeg.

“I will be stranger and wilder ere the morrow,” cried Setanta.

Sensing that his friend is in a weird mood, Láeg tries to stop him leaving, but Cú Chulainn manages to get away, and goes off on a wild chase in search of his magic horses.

Here, the details are faintly recognisable: Cú Chulainn encounters the Líath Macha at a lake, and they make a circuit of Ireland until the horse is broken. He then goes in search of the Dub Sainglend, and subdues her by showing that the Líath Macha (“thy better”) has already been tamed. While I’m not aware of any such extended description of how Cú Chulainn obtained his horses in the medieval sources, the broad outline conforms to a reference in Fled Bricrenn:

“Not at all,” said Cú Chulaind, “for I am tired and broken to pieces. Today, I will eat and sleep, but I will not undertake combat.” All this was in fact true, by reason of Cú Chulaind’s encounter that day with the Líath Machae by the shore of Lind Léith near Slíab Fúait. The horse had come towards him from the lake, Cú Chulaind had put his arms round its neck, and the two of them had circled all Ériu until at last night fell and the horse was broken. (Cú Chulaind found the Dub Sainglend in the same way, at Loch Duib Sainglend.)

‘Bricriu’s Feast’ in Jeffrey Gantz (trans), Early Irish Myths and Sagas, p. 231

Fled Bricrenn doesn’t, however, tell us that the horses are three hundred years old, or that they have to be yoked to a specific sacred chariot; one feels, if it were going to come up anywhere, that it would probably be there, since it’s the only account I know of that describes their origins. I suspect, then, that this is like O’Grady’s extrapolation of Cú Chulainn’s brief displays of elemental control into a youthful training to control water, or the invention of the otter incident in his childhood — a passing reference turned into a whole story.

There are also a number of other details in The Coming of Cuculain that suggests familiarity with a version of Fled Bricrenn — more on those in my next post.

[Edit: I was reminded shortly after posting this that an alternative tradition has the horses being born at the same time as Cú Chulainn. If I remember correctly, this comes from Feis Tige Becfholtaig, “version B” of the story of Cú Chulainn’s conception and birth. It’s weirdly hard to find a translation of this version, but I’m pretty sure Lady Gregory uses it, which explains how it ends up in so many retellings and popular accounts. O’Grady doesn’t seem to be using this one, however; his source for the horses’ origins looks to be Fled Bricrenn.]

Cú Chulainn brings these horses triumphantly home and they go to their stalls in the stable that has been waiting for them for centuries, and then he returns to his dormitory. His return doesn’t go unremarked:

Laeg was asleep with the starlight shining on his white forehead; his red hair was shed over the pillow. Cuculain kissed him, and sitting on the bed’s edge wept. Laeg awoke.

“Thou wert not well at supper,” said Laeg, “and now thou hast been wandering in the damp of the night, and thou with a fever upon thee, for I hear thy teeth clattering. I sought to hinder thee, and thou wouldst not be persuaded. Verily, if thou wilt not again obey me, being thy senior, thou shalt have sore bones at my hands. Undress thyself now and come to bed without delay.”

Cuculain did so.

“Thou art as cold as ice,” said Laeg.

“Nay, I am hotter than fire,” said Cuculain.

“Thou art ice, I say,” said Laeg, “and thy teeth are clattering like hailstones on a brazen shield. Ay, and thine eyes shine terribly.”

It seems that running around Ireland in the middle of the night isn’t without its consequences — Cú Chulainn has fallen ill, and after berating him for it, Láeg goes to fetch a doctor to look after him. But let’s pause here a moment, and think about Láeg.

We already saw last week that Cú Chulainn and Láeg are sharing a bed. This is presented as unremarkable, although we’re not told whether it’s typical for the boys to pair up like this — remember that this is before Láeg has been chosen as Cú Chulainn’s charioteer, so they aren’t yet a formal warrior pairing. It’s clearly not a one-time thing, as even when he might have been better served by sneaking in and not waking Láeg up, Cú Chulainn still goes to where Láeg is sleeping, and wakes him up.

I don’t know why Cú Chulainn is crying right now. He cries a lot in this book, and while I have no objection to that, that doesn’t mean I can always tell what emotion is supposed to be expressed by it. In this instance, his tears are met not with sympathy from Láeg, but exasperation — I told you you’d get sick, but would you listen?

I also enjoy that Láeg flexes his authority here — I’m older than you, you have to do what I tell you — and even threatens to beat Cú Chulainn up if he doesn’t get into bed right this instant. Unfortunately, Cú Chulainn is chilled to the bone, so sharing a bed with him doesn’t sound like much fun, and out of concern for his health, Láeg has to go and call for a doctor and explain that his friend is ill.

Exasperated mumfriend Láeg is my favourite Láeg. I enjoy the instances of the two of them being chaotic together, but there’s something about the way Láeg is the one who grabs Cú Chulainn by the scruff of the neck and tells him to Stop that’s special. It’s a relationship that Cú Chulainn doesn’t really have with anyone else — usually, when somebody tries to tell him what to do, he does the precise opposite. Sure, he doesn’t always listen to Láeg, but that just gives Láeg more opportunities to roast him for being a fool.

Now, obviously, being who I am and being interested in queer readings, I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight the obvious potential for reading O’Grady’s Cú Chulainn and Láeg in that light. It hardly needs to be pointed out — the bed-sharing and the kissing is obvious enough. Of course, within the ancient/medieval setting of the story, bed-sharing doesn’t have the connotations it has for us now in the modern era, but I do think the kissing is unusual. We get a lot of that in later medieval French texts (it’s the feudalism), but I’ve found comparatively few instances of kissing in medieval Irish texts, especially “casual” kissing. Perhaps it’s O’Grady using ideas imported from continental romance literature (there are a few of those in the novel), but for us, it still provides a foundation on which we might build a queer reading.

I mean, last week we saw Cú Chulainn was prophesied to be Láeg’s “life-friend”, so they’re basically already married, but you know. I try and at least pretend I’m acknowledging a heteronormative reading too (though the utter absence of Emer save for a brief and unconvincing reference later in the text means it really doesn’t lend itself to that).

In any case, a doctor is fetched and we have a healing scene that seems to be lifted straight from the Táin — three days of sleep, after which he wakes recovered. It’s not long before he goes to Conchobar and asks if he could be “knighted”.

This is an instance where O’Grady’s Cú Chulainn considerably diverges from the hero we see in the Boyhood Deeds. In the Boyhood Deeds, Cú Chulainn essentially obtains weapons and a chariot through trickery. He overhears the druid Cathbad saying that whoever takes arms upon a certain day will achieve great fame (in one recension he leaves then and doesn’t wait to hear the “but have a short life” part of the prophecy; in another he hears it and simply doesn’t care) and tricks Conchobar into arming him by saying it was Cathbad’s decree that he should be given weapons that day.

O’Grady’s Cú Chulainn, on the other hand, goes to Conchobar very politely and says, “If it be pleasing to thee, my Uncle Conchobar, I would be knighted on the morrow, for I am now of due age, and […] I am thought to be sufficiently versed in martial exercises”. We’re also told that he’s “now a man’s full height”, which is very much not the case in the Boyhood Deeds, where he’s still only about six years old. O’Grady has extended the Boyhood Deeds to cover Cú Chulainn’s entire adolescence, cutting out his training with Scáthach and any intevening pre-Táin deeds to finish up with a seventeen-year-old Cú Chulainn newly invested in arms.

Is this more realistic? Probably. Does it nevertheless complicate things? A little. It’s why O’Grady has to shove the Deirdre story in where he does. Yes, it’s always a chronologically problematic story; even the early modern authors noticed that, and tried to include an explanation for Cú Chulainn’s absence by having him appear briefly and say, “You don’t want me involved, everybody will die.” (Probably true.) But if we had a gap between these childhood adventures and the Táin itself, there’d be more space for Fergus’s exile to take place off-screen, without having to worry about how to fit it in.

This older Cú Chulainn doesn’t have to resort to tricks and misdirection to get Conchobar’s consent, although the king is still hesitant. He asks him to think carefully, pointing that there’s a prophecy that whoever is knighted on that day “will be famous and short-lived and unhappy”. But Cú Chulainn won’t be dissuaded, so Conchobar agrees. That doesn’t mean he’s happy about it:

They went to the boys’ dormitory and to the couch of Cuculain. Cuculain and Laeg were asleep together there. Their faces towards each other and their hair mingled together. Cuculain’s face was very tranquil, and his breathing inaudible, like an infant’s.

“O sweet and serene face,” murmured the King, “I see great clouds of sorrow coming upon you.”

Brief digression here: last year, Tumblr user riseupriseupandcomealong illustrated this scene, and it makes me emotional every time it crosses my path (click for original):

This isn’t the first time Conchobar’s seen sadness for Cú Chulainn: after giving him responsibility for the chariot, there’s this curious exchange…

“Why art thou sad, dear Setanta?”

“I am not sad,” answered the boy.

“Truly there is no sadness in thy face, or thy lips, in thy voice or thy behaviour, but it is deep down in thine eyes,” said the King. “I see it there always.”

Setanta laughed lightly. “I know it not,” he said.

It’s true that Cú Chulainn is repeatedly described as “sad” in medieval texts. In Fled Bricrenn, he is a “sad, melancholy man”; in Tochmarc Emire he’s a “dark, sad man”. It’s probably these descriptions that O’Grady’s drawing on when he repeatedly paints his Cú Chulainn in these clouds of sorrow. They’ve always struck me as interesting — never is Cú Chulainn’s sadness explained, and it’s not the emotion one would immediately associate with him. (Something like “rage” would be more typical, probably — but then, Anne Carson would say that rage and grief go together, at least in the creation of tragedy.)

From this earlier reference to a sadness of which Cú Chulainn himself is unaware, we’ve progressed to a more immediate sense of threat. Cú Chulainn has won these sacred horses, as the prophecies said that he would, but at the cost of falling ill; is this a sign of things to come? Even as he prepares to take arms, the climax to which his training has been building, sorrow is descending on him. We get the impression that his glory won’t come without a cost, and O’Grady repeatedly implies that it’s going to be high one.

It’s on this ominous note that we’ll be leaving our discussion for today. The next post will be the last, and we’ll look at Cú Chulainn’s “knighting” and subsequent escapades with Láeg, and then we’ll be done with O’Grady. See you then!


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The Boy-Troop at Boarding School: The Coming of Cuculain #2

Today I’m going to be continuing my discussion of Standish O’Grady’s 1894 novel, The Coming of Cuculain. If you missed my explanation of what this project is about, you may want to check out my first post, ‘Understanding Standish’; if you didn’t see my discussion of the first part of the book, you can find that over at ‘Conquest, Classicism and Characterisation’.

You don’t need to have read The Coming of Cuculain to follow along with these posts — they’re designed to be comprehensible to anyone with the vaguest idea of who Cú Chulainn is — but if you want to, you can find it for free at Project Gutenberg. Since I’m reading this on my Kindle, quotes won’t have page numbers, for which I apologise. And as before, in my discussion I’m using the form of names that’s most familiar to me, even if it differs from O’Grady’s spelling. If this seems likely to cause any confusion, I’ll try and clarify the first time the name comes up. If anything’s confusing, please do drop a question in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer!

And now onto the book…


From the first time the boy-troop of Ulster is mentioned in The Coming of Cuculain, we have clues as to how O’Grady conceptualised the warrior training undertaken by young boys in mythological Ireland.

… then there arose somewhere upon the night a clear chorus of treble voices, singing, too, the war-chant of the Ultonians, as when rising out of the clangour of brazen instruments of music there shrills forth the clear sound of fifes. For the immature scions of the Red Branch, boys and tender youths, awakened out of slumber, head them, and from remote dormitories responded to their sires …

The image of the young warriors with their “treble voices”, relegated to “remote dormitories” rather than participating in the great feast that the adults are enjoying, positions the boy-troop as a sort of proto-boarding school. This impression only intensifies the more he discusses the young warriors, and it’s this, I think, which fundamentally shapes his portrayal of youth and adolescent masculinity.

I noted in my last post that I’m more interested in exploring O’Grady’s take on medieval material than examining how his experiences and background shaped his work, which still stands, for two reasons — the first being that his political ideas were complex and that’s really not my area of expertise, and the second being that his opinions were frequently Very Bad and I’m pretty sure I couldn’t continue to offer light-hearted discussions of his work if I looked too closely at them. However, some nonpolitical aspects of O’Grady’s life are worth mentioning, because it’s clear that they shaped his interpretations (in interesting rather than Massively Racist ways). This “boy-troop as boarding school” motif is one such element. In ‘Standish O’Grady: Between Imperial Romance and Irish Revival‘, Patrick Maume notes that,

In 1856 O’Grady became a boarder at Tipperary Grammar School. He distinguished himself as both a scholar and an athlete but found separation from home traumatic. Like many other boarding-school survivors, he idealizes boyhood as a lost paradise.

The Coming of Cuculain is fundamentally about this “lost paradise” of boyhood, but it’s also about the rites of passage through which youths become warriors and boys become men, and this ‘warrior training’ is conceptualised as boarding school. We saw last week that Cú Chulainn has to leave his mother behind before he can gain access to these rites of passage and his heroic identity, although he seemed perfectly happy to do so at the time; unlike O’Grady, this separation could hardly be called ‘traumatic’, but there’s still a tension between the natural but lonely childhood described in the first part of the book, and the more formal training he undergoes, now with friends and peers.

And Dechtire’s hesitance to send her son away is positioned as problematic, because this boarding school for warriors isn’t merely a privilege, it’s an obligation:

So, impelled by the unseen, Setanta came to Emain Macha without the knowledge of his parents, but in fulfilment of the law, for at a certain age all the boys of the Ultonians should come thither to associate there with their equals and superiors, and be instructed by appointed tutors in the heroic arts of war and the beautiful arts of peace.

It’s not that Dechtire doesn’t want him to be a warrior. But “she loved him dearly, and feared for him the rude companionship and the stern discipline, the early rising and the strong labours of the great school”. Boarding school, she thinks, will be too much for her little boy. He’s too young to be sent away. She’d rather keep him at home another year. The 19th century boarding school vibes are strong.

Those of us for whom school was the local state school, a short bus ride from home, might not be able to identify with this specific kind of school, where young men from good families beat each other up as a way of instilling masculinity and identity. Yet it’s strange how natural it feels to us, as modern readers, that a school should be the way for children to undergo formal training. Within a medieval Irish context it feels faintly bizarre. Even though we do have the boy-troop, and we do have groups of students training together — such as those who train with Scáthach, Cú Chulainn and Fer Diad among them — we don’t see a centralised system in the same way. Instead the medieval texts show the youths learning through a system of fosterage. And O’Grady’s not unaware of fosterage as an institution — after all, he’s decided that Fergus is Conchobar’s foster-father, though this seems a strange choice — but he still leans towards this boarding school setup for his warriors.But in his descriptions of the school, we see dissatisfaction with his own time and the education he himself might have undergone:

In this school the boys did not injure their eyesight and impair their health by poring over books; nor were compelled to learn what they could not understand; nor were instructed by persons whom they did not wish to resemble…

The following list of skills (martial and strategic skills, mostly) aren’t too dissimilar from what we see in the medieval texts with regard to warrior training — though a couple of details stood out to me. The first was the idea that they were “to drink and be merry in hall, but always without intoxication”, since there is a text literally called The Intoxication of the Ulaid. (O’Grady later suggests that drunkenness didn’t exist in this era, which is… very funny to me.) The second is that they are taught “to reverence women, remembering always those who bore them and suckled them”.

Listen. I would love to rehabilitate these Irish heroes and ignore their rampant misogyny. But in most cases I would say it’s safe to say they’ve never respected a woman in their lives. The possible exception is how Cú Chulainn behaves towards Emer, and he still slips up on that front a number of times. O’Grady’s projecting a very specific idea of courtliness here, one that feels like it’s been imported from later romances, and I don’t find it entirely convincing.

But sobriety and proto-feminism aside, the boy-troop’s transformation into boarding school isn’t wholly absurd, and it certainly provides ample opportunity for Cú Chulainn to meet his peers and thrash them in a hurling match. (Knowing that O’Grady played hurling at school, and based on the descriptions here, I have an incongruous image of them all in PE kit, chasing each other around a school field…)

Nor is it unique to O’Grady, as an image. In 1900, Alfred Nutt discussed the fight of Cú Chulainn and Fer Diad: “Ferdia asks how his old fag (‘his attendant to tie up his spears and prepare his bed’) dare stand up against him”. The use of the word ‘fag’ here — in the boarding school sense, not the homophobic slur sense! — shows that Nutt, too, was conceptualising of warrior training as similar to a Victorian boarding school. In this instance, of course, both boys are far away from their homeland, having travelled to Alba in search of training; perhaps the boarding school analogy fits better in this instance, especially as Scáthach is a renowned tutor rather than a direct relative of any of the characters.

The boy-troop, on the other hand, is closer to home — but Cú Chulainn still comes to them as an outsider. And it doesn’t go entirely as planned. He joins in their hurling match and excells himself, but matters come to a head when they ask him to accept their protection, as though he were their subject. Cú Chulainn’s pride won’t let him accept the lower status implied by this, but when he asserts his identity as the king’s nephew, the “boy who was captain of the whole school, and the biggest and strongest” assumes he’s lying, and the boys proceed to beat him up.

In the Boyhood Deeds, it seems to take Cú Chulainn very little effort to fight his peers — he’s preeminent even at a very young age. Here, though, O’Grady focuses on his persistence rather than his power:

… for the slumbering war-spirit now, for the first time, had awaked in his gentle heart. Many times he was overborne and flung to the ground, but again he arose overthrowing others, never quitting hold of his hurle, and, whenever he got a free space, grasping that weapon like a war-mace in both hands, he struck down his foes. The skirts of his mantle were torn, only a rag remained round his shoulders, fastened by the brooch; he was covered with blood, his own and his enemies’, and his eyes were like burning fire.

This is not the only time O’Grady asserts that when he’s not trying to kill people, Cú Chulainn is “gentle” — and he’s not using the term to mean noble. We’ve already been told that “there were within him such fountains of affection and loving kindness”, which, honestly, doesn’t sound much like the Cú Chulainn I know. It’s clear O’Grady’s going for more… nuance and less violence. Which is fine. Cowardly (let the tiny child do murder!), but fine.

Young Cú Chulainn, gentle though he might be, persistent though he might be, is not having a great time of it in this fight. He’s not losing, per se — in fact, his “battle-fury” (a thoroughly de-weirded version of the ríastrad that does not seem to involve his body turning inside out, more’s the pity) has descended and he’s giving those other boys a thumping they won’t forget. But he’s still backed up in a corner, up against the goal. And… is telling them to fight him. Now that’s more like the Hound I know.

And this — this is the moment I’ve been waiting to talk about. Because this is where we get our first appearance of Láeg.

Then a boy stood out from the rest. He was freckled, and with red hair, and his voice was loud and fierce.

“Thou shalt have a comrade in thy battle henceforward,” he said, “O brave stranger. On the banks of the Nemnich, [Footnote: Now the Nanny-Water, a beautiful stream running from Tara to the sea.] where it springs beneath my father’s dun on the Hill of Gabra, nigh Tara, I met a prophetess; Acaill is her name, the wisest of all women; and I asked her who would be my life-friend. And she answered, ‘I see him standing against a green wall at Emain Macha, at bay, with the blood and soil of battle upon him, and alone he gives challenge to a multitude. He is thy life-friend, O Laeg,’ she said, ‘and no man ever had a friend like him or will till the end of time.’”

So saying he ran to Setanta, and kneeling down he took him by his right hand, and said, “I am thy man from this day forward.”

Iconic. Perfect. Absolutely beautiful.

But let’s break it down a little more. It’s clear at a glance that this is very different from the version of Láeg we encountered in The History of Ireland, discussed in my first post. There, he’s the son of a hostage, “given” to Cú Chulainn. One again we have Gabra interpreted as a place, although here we’re given more details: Gabra, near Tara. I know of no such place, although I did manage to find the River Nanny on a map, but that doesn’t mean it never existed (I’m not a placename expert). I still think the bridle-of-a-horse etymology is more likely for “Riangabra”, but by telling us that Láeg’s father has a dun near Tara, we’re being implicitly told that he’s of fairly high status — a fitting companion for Cú Chulainn, even if O’Grady holds back from saying outright that he’s the son of a king, on this occasion.

In the History of Ireland, Láeg has little autonomy. Here, he has a lot more. He sees a small boy, bloodied and injured, squaring up to a crowd of other kids and saying, “Fight me, then!” and he goes, ah yes, I want this one. And decides to stand beside him.

But not just because he loves an underdog. No, in keeping with the generally supernatural vibes of the book — Cú Chulainn is “impelled by the unseen”, gods lining his path — Láeg has been given a prophecy. He has been told that he will meet this boy who will be his life-friend, and no man ever had a friend like him or will till the end of time”.

Sorry, I need to take a moment. This is… a lot. This is a lot.

In this introduction, O’Grady presents Láeg as an equal — a comrade, a friend. Not a hostage, given away without being consulted, nor a servant, plucked from obscurity. He’s a boy of the Ulaid, enough of an insider to belong to Conchobar’s “school”, and he’s the one to initiate their relationship.

I have… a lot of feelings about this. I think I mentioned before that the question of how Láeg came to be Cú Chulainn’s charioteer is rarely addressed in the medieval texts — there is one passage that offers a version where they grew up together from infancy, but other than that, his background is never really remarked upon. He’s simply there. O’Grady, however, seems to have seen this as a failing, and he’s incorporated Láeg into Cú Chulainn’s childhood in order to provide this explanation.

It means that before we ever see Láeg as a charioteer, subservient and of lower status, we see him as Cú Chulainn’s prophesied “life-friend”, setting him up as a crucial character in the story to come, and signalling his importance in Cú Chulainn’s life from this point forwards.

Láeg then calls on his own friends to support Cú Chulainn in this fight, recalling times when he was “a shield to thee against thy mockers” to one of them. This Láeg, it seems, has a history of standing up against bullies and befriending the picked-upon. Ah, my bold, bright Láeg. I love this image, this tiny hint of a personality trait that comes from O’Grady, not from the stories. He has a good heart, this tells us, in the space of a few words; he’s brave, not led by the spirit of the crowd, with no tolerance for mockery. (Also vaguely hilarious since Láeg’s main job seems to be insulting Cú Chulainn, but I suppose he only tolerates consensual insults.)

The passage proceeds apace, and is relatively familiar to those who’ve read the Boyhood Deeds — Conchobar demands to know who Cú Chulainn is and why he’s attacking the other boys, and after stating his name, he’s recognised for who he is and brought into the fold:

… the reward of this his first battle was that the boys at his uncle’s school elected him to be for their captain, and one and all they put themselves under his protection. And a gentle captain made he when the war-spirit went out of him, and a good play-fellow and comrade was Setanta among his new friends.

The lonely boy growing up in Dun Dealgan has got what he wanted: companionship, recognition, the opportunity to prove himself a warrior. So far, so good: it’s what we would have expected.

But what O’Grady gives us that the Boyhood Deeds doesn’t is this:

That night Setanta and Laeg slept in the same bed of healing after the physicians had dressed their wounds; and they related many things to each other, and oft times they kissed one another with great affection, till sweet sleep made heavy their eyelids.

*screams softly*

O’Grady’s signalling to us, from this first meeting between the two, that this friendship is going to be pivotal. This is the first character who has been presented as Cú Chulainn’s equal; their first meeting, and already we see “great affection”. It is the most meaningful and long-lasting of all of Cú Chulainn’s friendships — even in the original texts, where Láeg’s loyalty and omnipresence is frequently overlooked by commentators — and we’re given no room to mistake Láeg declaration of loyalty for a fleeting schoolboy alliance on the sports field.

This is why I wanted to read this book and discuss it here. There are a dozen choices O’Grady makes that are worth talking about, but considering how little attention has been paid to Láeg in scholarship, his decision to give the charioteer such a central role from an early stage is what caught my eye. Especially since he’s changed his story since the first time he wrote about Cú Chulainn and Láeg, and now seems determined to bring him more centrally into the story.

Maybe it’s because Láeg symbolises the boarding school camaraderie: the character who takes the “new boy” under his wing. (It’s worth noting that this chapter is in fact titled The New Boy.) Maybe it’s because giving Cú Chulainn a close friend enables O’Grady to emphasise Cú Chulainn’s “fountains of affection” and present a more nuanced picture than the usual tiny violent child with murder in his heart. Or maybe, just maybe, O’Grady — like me — simply looked at Láeg and thought, I want to know more about this guy.

“I am thy man from this day forth.”

And he was.

And we’ll see what that looks like to O’Grady next time.


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Conquest, Classicism, and Characterisation: The Coming of Cuculain #1

Today, I began my reading of Standish O’Grady’s 1894 novel, The Coming of Cuculain. I’ve been slightly putting it off all week, wanting to wait until I had the brainpower to read it thoughtfully, pausing to write up my thoughts, rather than racing through the way I usually do when I read.

According to my Kindle, I’m 31% of the way through the book, although this includes the prefatory notes, so the real percentage may be slightly higher. It’s shorter than I’d realised, as a novel: by this point in the story Cú Chulainn has just reached Emain Macha and been accepted into the boy-troop. And we’ve also had our first appearance of Láeg, which is frankly, perfect and iconic in every way. But more on that to come.

I intend to focus mainly on Láeg as my reading progresses, because if I were to tackle every aspect of this book that strikes me as worthy of discussion, we would be here forever, and I’m sure I’ve got blog readers who would rather I didn’t exclusively post about Standish O’Grady for the next six months. But even before Láeg enters the scene, there is… a lot going on that seems worth talking about, so this first post is going to focus on the quarter of the book before we meet him.

Before I start, I should note that I’ll be referring to the characters by the most familiar form of their names — Fergus mac Roich, Conall Cernach etc — rather than the spellings O’Grady uses. Some of his Anglicisations are very idiosyncratic, and some are just kind of cursed; I’ll reference them if I think they’re interesting or worth discussing, but I won’t use them in the discussion. However, I’ll leave them as they are in the text in any quotes, clarifying in brackets if I think they’re sufficiently odd to be incomprehensible.


Right from the Preface, it’s clear that O’Grady has a very different perspective on the Ulster Cycle than I do, mainly that he seems convinced it represents, on some level, historical fact. “Cuculain and his friends are historical characters,” he asserts confidently. His justification for this is that “imaginary and fictitious characters, mere creatures of idle fancy, do not live and flourish so in the world’s memory”. I would… dispute that, as a reasoning, but it’s worth noting that this is where he’s coming from.

Oh, he acknowledges the fanciful elements of the stories, and doesn’t think they’re literally true on every level, but he believes, deep down, they’re a piece of history. This is not an especially wild claim for the 19th century, but it’s been extensively debunked in more recent decades; the idea that medieval Irish literature could offer us any sort of “window on the Iron Age”, as it has been put, has been widely dismissed. What’s surprising to me, as a modern reader, is how this belief in the story’s historicity doesn’t prompt O’Grady to pare back the weirder elements and present the most rational, sober version of the story that he can. For our friend Standish, history can and does co-exist with a world much stranger than our own…

Moving on, then, to the actual story. We begin with a feast at Emain Macha. Conchobar is a young king; Fergus mac Roich his champion, having abdicated his own claim to the kingship and bestowed it upon his young foster-son. While the tradition that Fergus was once king is familiar to me, I think this is the first time I’ve seen Conchobar depicted as Fergus’s fosterling. I’d be very interested to know if that shows up anywhere else, or if it’s an invention (or misinterpretation) of O’Grady’s.

Fergus stands up and gives a speech about how, “Famous deeds […] are not wrought now amongst the Red Branch. I think we are all become women.” To me, gendered implications aside, this reminds me of the beginning of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (hey look, this post is almost topical). A feast, it seems, is not a feast unless there is some new adventure to tell of, some great deed to recount. But Fergus’s call to arms runs deeper than just looking for diversions. He asserts that the Ulaid should conquer all of Ireland, and consider only the sea to be its borders.

Politically, this is… an interesting take, and it’s worth considering O’Grady’s political standpoint here. He was a Unionist, though proud of his Gaelic heritage; his under-referenced Wikipedia page claims he once advocated “a revitalised Irish people taking over the British Empire and renaming it the Anglo-Irish Empire”. So that’s a take. Perhaps it’s these viewpoints that are reflected in Fergus’s call for conquest, though how we’re supposed to interpret an Ulaid-led united Ireland, I’m not entirely sure.

I’m wary of digging too deep into O’Grady’s intentions, though here, as elsewhere in the book, I think his experiences and beliefs do shape the artistic choices he makes. My knowledge of his political activities (he wrote political books as well as novels) and my understanding of the nuances of 19th century national identity are too lacking to feel like I can tackle that aspect of the reading in any great depth, though I’d be fascinated to read something on the topic from somebody with that expertise.

With that in mind, and remembering that my focus is on how the medieval material is reinterpreted, let’s kill the author for a moment, and move on.

Fergus’s call for Ulaid expansion prompts calls for Cathbad, Conchobar’s druid (and in some accounts his father, though this isn’t referenced here), to prophesy the Ulaid’s future. He does so, offering two prophecies. One, that the Ulaid will be divided by fratricide and it will ultimately destroy them. The other, that “there shall come a child to Emain Macha, attended by clear portents from the gods; through him shall arise our deathless fame.”

Cú Chulainn thus appears on the scene as a prophesied saviour of the Ulaid, or at least their reputation. The Ulaid aren’t thrilled about the whole fratricide part of the prophecy, and Conchobar rejects it, but asks Cathbad for more info about this saviour they’re supposed to await. Cathbad “put on his divining apparel and took his divining instruments in his hands” (a very 19th century image of druidic prophecy, in my opinion) and relates in more detail his prophecy about Cú Chulainn.

One thing that strikes me in these early chapters is the strong emphasis that O’Grady puts on the supernatural world. Prophecies are given great weight, as we can see, but there’s a clue to what’s coming in Cathbad’s reference to “clear portents from the gods”. What this actually seems to entail is multiple on-page appearances of the Túatha De Danann, whose presence indicates that events are unfolding as planned. They seem far more involved in shaping those events than they do in any medieval texts I know of — lurking unseen to move the mortal pieces around the board and ensure that events unfold as they must. It’s a very Classical image, I think: while the TDD appear as shadowy figures in a number of texts, hiding in the background and stirring up mischief, we never really get the sense that they control mortal fates in the same way as the Greek or Roman gods might. Indeed, while they sometimes prophesy about the future, we don’t get the sense that they have the power to change it. Nor do they seem to fulfil quite the function that O’Grady gives them, of appearing briefly to signify to observers that what’s going down is what they had planned.

In typical 19th century fashion, O’Grady also attributes to each of them a domain within a pantheon: Lir as sea-god, Lug as sun-god (a popular and surprisingly enduring 19th century approach). Jeffrey Gantz once described this kind of approach as “pinning Roman tails on a Celtic donkey” — we have little evidence that the Túatha De Danann had these kinds of specific areas of influence, although certainly some of them seem to be good at specific things. But it’s completely par for the course in the period when O’Grady is writing, and so doesn’t tell us much about his personal takes.

We’re about to encounter the young Sétanta for the first time, but first, there’s an image of Conchobar and Fergus that I want to draw your attention to, because I’m pretty sure this is going to be important to how we read the friendships and relationships elsewhere in the story.

The right arm of Fergus was cast lightly over the shoulder of Concobar, and his ear was inclined to him as the young king talked, for their mutual affection was very great, and like that of a great boy and a small boy when such, as often happens, become attached to one another.

The word that comes to mind here is “homosocial”. We have this all-male warrior setting (so far, there have been no women mentioned on the page), and the friendship between men is being foregrounded. This particular friendship is one with a generational divide: by positioning Fergus as Conchobar’s foster-father, O’Grady redistributes some of the power back to Fergus, despite his abdication of kingship. Knowing as I do that Fergus will eventually oppose Conchobar and go into exile, this moment has a certain poignancy: it’s a friendship that cannot last. I assume, since Cathbad’s prophecy alludes to it, that those events will be covered within this book’s timeline, but I don’t actually know; I suppose we’ll find out exactly how emotional O’Grady manages to make it.

The chapter closes with a peculiar image of a young boy, watching the boy-troop play hurling, weeping. This, we are told, “was the child who had been promised to the Ultonians”. As an introduction to Cú Chulainn, it’s a striking one: a wordless observer, crying, is not a mental image I’d ever particularly associate with him. Normally he explodes onto the scene in a burst of violence, and instead, he’s a weepy outsider with no voice of his own, shrouded in prophecy.

My phrasing there sounds judgmental, as though I object to this characterisation. I don’t, insofar as I’m reading this as O’Grady’s work rather than as an interpretation of the medieval material; I think it would fail as the latter. But it’s certainly a mistier, less blood-soaked image than one would expect. And yet O’Grady’s Ulaid are far from battle-shy. In the opening description of their hall, we’re told:

Aloft, suspended from the dim rafters, hung the naked forms of great men clear against the dark dome, having the cords of their slaughter around their necks and their white limbs splashed with blood. Kings were they who had murmured against the sovereignty of the Red Branch.

This chilling image of the Ulaid feasting below the rotting corpses of their enemies suggests that O’Grady’s account isn’t going to be lacking in teeth… but he seems not to have given them to Cú Chulainn, on this occasion. Is it because of his hero’s young age (seven, we’re told later)? How weepy is his Cú Chulainn going to be as he ages?

The next chapter is where we really start to get the meat of O’Grady’s characterisation of Cú Chulainn. We’ve left Emain Macha for the moment, and we’re in Dun Dealgan (Dundalk), where Cú Chulainn is being raised by his parents and his nurse. There are some intensely sentimental descriptions of his early years, and of how his nurse “washed his garments and bathed his tiny limbs”. These glimpses of Cú Chulainn in the cradle certainly seem to be trying to emphasise his childishness and innocence.

And yet — on the very next page, Cú Chulainn chases a fierce otter (a water-dog), casts a stone at it, and kills it. A prophet sees this and foretells that he’ll do many great deeds, of which “the last will resemble the first”. This is a reference to Oidheadh Con Culainn, the early modern Death of Cú Chulainn, in which Cú Chulainn’s final deed before his death is to kill an otter. He says there that a prophecy was made that his last deed would be to kill a hound, as was his first (a water-dog being classified as a dog for prophetic purposes), but I’ve always assumed that the ‘first’ he’s referring to is the Hound of Culann, whose death gave Cú Chulainn his name. O’Grady seems to have taken it rather more literally, and presented us with an image of tiny Sétanta, enemy of otters.

There are other hints that some of these descriptions of Cú Chulainn’s childhood are extrapolated from later stories. We’re told that he “sailed his boats in the stream and taught it here to be silent, and there to hum in rapids, or to apparel itself in silver and sing liquid notes, or to blow its little trumpet from small cataracts.” This is attributing to a small child a surprising amount of power over the elements which isn’t explained in the least (is it normal to be able to control water, or are we supposed to read this as a sign of Cú Chulainn’s Otherworldliness?). So where does it come from?

I suspect it’s from the first recension of the Táin, where Cú Chulainn calls on a river for aid and it answers. Again, his elemental power is never explained or even presented as particularly remarkable, but it’s certainly there. I can’t be sure, of course, that O’Grady is drawing on this scene when he shows young Sétanta controlling the stream, but it seems likely enough. After all, when I drafted To Run With The Hound, I drew on that exact moment as a reason to show my young Sétanta experimenting with control over nature; perhaps it’s not a stretch to think that O’Grady might have thought alike.

In the Boyhood Deeds episode of the Táin, Sétanta asks his mother leave to go to Emain Macha, and she responds that he should wait until somebody can take him. He refuses, insisting on leaving as soon as he’s been given directions, and turns up announced before the boy-troop. O’Grady takes this brief moment of dialogue and elaborates it into something lasting several pages: the boy’s mother trying to keep from him the knowledge of Emain Macha and far-off places, and his attempts to trick the information out of her.

But we’re also given a glimpse into how Cú Chulainn is viewed by others, and this is something that particularly caught my interest:

The next night too he dreamed of Emain Macha, and heard voices which were unintelligible, and again the third night he heard the voices and one voice said, “This our labour is in vain, let him alone. He is some changeling and not of the blood of Rury. He will be a grazier, I think, and buy cattle and sell them for a profit.” And the other said, “Nay, let us not leave him yet. Remember how valiantly he faced the fierce water-dog and slew him at one cast.”

Who are these voices? Are they the voices of the Túatha De Danann? This seems surprising, if they’re accusing Cú Chulainn of being a ‘changeling’ (surely, they of all people would know). But it’s a fascinating image because of the way it presents him as an outsider, seemingly unfit to become a warrior (though the association with cattle is interesting in light of his pivotal role in the Táin), except for this early ‘heroic’ deed that suggests there’s more to him than meets the eye.

Cú Chulainn-the-outsider is one of my key interests, and here, we’ve got hints of it even before he leaves his home and comes to Emain Macha. The idea that Cú Chulainn seems, at this age, an unlikely hero and warrior is also of interest to me – what changed, to make this delicate boy who plays in the stream and occasionally murders animals into the terrifying fighter we know and love?

Part of it seems to be that he gets out from his mother’s apron strings. Because O’Grady appears to be laying the blame on her for not being willing to let go of him: Sétanta demonstrates to her his feats with a ball and hurley, and she still can’t see that he’s ready to leave and go to Emain Macha and spend time with other children. He’s isolated from his peers in Dun Dealgan because she’s concerned not to let him associate “with children of that rude realm whose conversation and behaviour she misliked for her child”. Súaltaim, his father, is here presented as a king, and Cú Chulainn a young noble who is clearly far too good to be the companion of simple peasants — but he’s lonely, and this loneliness drives his desperation to go to Emain Macha and encounter the boy-troop there.

Eventually, his desperation to leave gets the better of him, and he confronts his mother about it.

“These feats,” he replied, “are nothing to what I shall yet do in needlework, O mother, when I am of age to be trusted with my first needle, and knighted by thy hands, and enrolled amongst the valiant company of thy sewing women.”

“What meaneth the boy?” said his mother, for she perceived that he spoke awry.

“That his childhood is over, O Dectera,” answered one of her women, “and that thou art living in the past and in dreams.”

I could probably write a whole blog post about this quote, and the fascinating gendered readings we can make of the way Cú Chulainn equates growing up and attaining weapons with needlework and becoming one of his mother’s sewing women. No doubt O’Grady meant this sarcastic response in a rather misogynistic way, highlighting the absurdity of a hero doing needlework when he should be doing something more fitting, but its implications for a transmasculine reading are immense — especially as Cú Chulainn follows up on this by running away to Emain Macha before his mother realises what’s happening.

(I am barely resisting the temptation to spend 20 minutes reading way much into this one line…)

So, Sétanta flees his needlework, or at least the mother who would rather have him safe at home then out fighting other boys, and sets off for his future alone. There are more supernatural encounters here: he’s met on the road by Lugh, who tells him, “I am thy friend; fear nothing, for I shall be with thee always.” No sign here that Lugh is Cú Chulainn’s father — O’Grady evidently decided against trying to untangle the knot of paternity that we’re offered by Compert Con Culainn. A little further along the way, he meets Manannan mac Lir, who flings a mantle over him — probably the cloak that’s mentioned in the Táin as originating from Tír Tairngire.

And then finally, finally, he comes to Emain Macha, and encounters the boy-troop, and Láeg, and everything I set out to find in this book.

But that, dear friends, is a story for next time.


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You can read The Coming of Cuculain for free via Project Gutenberg.