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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.

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Understanding Standish

The nineteenth century was remarkable for many reasons, but one of them was that it managed to produce two men named Standish O’Grady who had an interest in medieval Irish literature. That they were cousins makes it perhaps marginally less remarkable than it would otherwise have been, but it’s still a singular achievement, as I’ve yet to encounter any other century that had produced a Standish O’Grady at all, let alone one who is a Celticist.

No, I haven’t actually looked. But that, dear friends, is beside the point.

On the one hand, then, we have Standish Hayes O’Grady — a scholar responsible for the Silva Gaedelica, and a founding member of the Ossianic Society. And on the other hand, we have Standish James O’Grady, whose writings were considerably more in the creative direction. It would be reductive to say that he wrote fanfiction, but he certainly wrote retellings, and transformative fiction of a kind, so it wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate either.

It is evidently important to know which O’Grady you’re talking about at any given moment, but I have more than once been reading something and come to the conclusion that the author had not, in fact, realised that there were two of them. These mistakes happen, though it’s a little more embarrassing when they happen in an academic article. So, to remove any doubt, it is very much the second of these two Standishes that I’ll be discussing today — the one given the title “the father of the Irish literary revival.”

Everything I know about Standish James comes from his Wikipedia page, so I won’t pretend to have any new insight or information on that front. My interest is less directly in the man himself, and more in his works. Most specifically, in The Coming of Cuculain.

I’ve been aware of The Coming of Cuculain for a while now — it’s been entertaining my medieval group chat since some time during the first lockdown, primarily on the basis of how delightful and homoerotic many of the scenes between Cú Chulainn and Láeg are when taken out of context. But what about in context? And what can we learn from O’Grady’s portrayal of Láeg?

For those who might have stumbled on this post unawares, I should briefly point out that my MA thesis (currently a work in progress and very much supposedly my main priority right now) is focused on the character of Láeg mac Riangabra as he appears in selected medieval and early modern Irish texts. In my experience, he’s a fascinating and weirdly neglected figure, the subject of so few articles that I can count them on my fingers despite his many textual appearances. I’m endlessly emotional about him — I have a soft spot for the loyal sidekick, particularly when they’re sarcastic as well as beloved — and deeply intrigued whenever he comes up in retellings or re-imaginings. Which is not wildly often. But this novel of O’Grady’s offers rich pickings for a Láeg enthusiast, and my main impression on encountering it was that it’s a pity there isn’t more of a “reception studies” tradition in our field, because this book would be a fascinating one to discuss in that context.

(I should note here that some work has been done on O’Grady’s work — a book named Standish O’Grady’s Cuculain combines excerpts from his History of Ireland with a few articles about his work. But there is far, far more that could be said.)

Then it occurred to me that I could be the one to do this. Perhaps I have neither the grounding in 19th century literature and history nor the time to try and approach it academically, in articles or conference papers — but that kind of academia-adjacent musing is half the reason I have a blog. And why not discuss it here? The Coming of Cuculain is accessible, in the sense that it’s in English and in the sense that it’s available via Project Gutenberg. Anyone who wished to read along with me could do so. And in the meantime, I’m well-positioned to comment on O’Grady’s approach to Cú Chulainn, because I’ve spent the last four years nerding out over him. Even better, I’m perhaps uniquely positioned to examine how he portrays Láeg, by virtue of being one of the only people who has ever paid Láeg any substantial academic attention.

And so, I thought, this would provide an excellent way to procrastinate on writing my thesis while still feeling like I was doing something academic and productive. Perfect. Exactly what I need as a formless summer without externally imposed structures stretches out in front of me — more ways to avoid the many, many things which require my attention.

O’Grady seems genuinely interested in Láeg: he gives him backstory, autonomy, and character development in a way that goes far beyond his source material. But is there any textual basis for his inventions, or are they purely his own creation? What picture do these choices paint of Láeg?

Over the next few days/weeks, I plan to read through The Coming of Cuculain in detail and examine how O’Grady portrays Láeg. Where I can identify sources, I’ll discuss those; where I can’t, I’ll consider some of the factors that might have led to O’Grady’s narrative choices. If you’d like to read along with me, please do! I hope, however, to provide enough context in these posts to make them comprehensible without needing to read O’Grady’s work directly.

(And yes, I will try and spread the posts out, and I won’t be blogging exclusively about this, because I have no idea how long it’s going to take me. Could be 2 weeks. Could be 2 months. It depends how much there is to say.)

Before we look at The Coming of Cuculain, however, I want to briefly examine The History of Ireland, which O’Grady published about fifteen years earlier. This would warrant a whole series of blog posts in its own right, but for the moment, I only want to consider the ways it contextualises The Coming of Cuculain, and the clues it offers as to how O’Grady was approaching his material.

Firstly, he explicitly tells us that he’s drawing on Keating. This makes a lot of sense — Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, Keating’s 17th century narrative history of Ireland, is a source for a lot of of pre-20th century authors. I assume this is because its language was a lot more accessible than medieval Irish, it was widely available, and it provided a temptingly ‘complete’ source without need to make reference to lots of different stories scattered all over the place. My knowledge of Keating is actually woefully incomplete (by which I mean I haven’t read it, although I’ve ctrl+f’d my way through on occasion), but the references to him suggest that any extended study of O’Grady would warrant an examination of Keating as well, to identify what aspects of O’Grady’s characterisation derive from his work.

Secondly, The History of Ireland gives us a few clues to some of the misconceptions underlying O’Grady’s work. One that stuck out to me on a brief page through is the fact that he doesn’t seem to know what Táin means. There are references to “warriors of Tân” (occasionally with the definite article), as though it’s a place or people-group rather than an event/activity. A táin is a driving, a cattle-raid, but repeated “incorrect” uses of the word make it apparent that in 1878, when The History of Ireland was published, O’Grady wasn’t aware of that. And so we get quotes like this:

There was the exiled might of Fergus Mac Roy, who, under Meave, ruled all the host of Tân, a shape gigantic of heroic mould, holding a joyless majesty and a spirit in ruins.

Standish O’Grady, The History of Ireland Volume 2, p. 126. (Via Google Books)

Which brings me to the third thing we learn from The History of Ireland: O’Grady can write. Whatever else is going on in his work, there’s a certain poetic brilliance to his descriptions. A joyless majesty and a spirit in ruins — what a way to describe the exiled Fergus! It’s easy to see why his work would have caught the attention of his contemporaries, and why it had such an influence on other writers like Yeats.

Like I said, there’s a lot that could be discussed about The History of Ireland, but today let’s look only at its portrayal of Láeg.

Two things interest me here: where Láeg comes from, and the manner of his death. These are both things I’ve been researching recently, and I’m interested to know how authors handle them. The first, because the medieval sources give us virtually nothing on this topic. The second, because it changes considerably over time.

In his introduction to volume two of The History of Ireland, O’Grady actually expresses confusion about Láeg’s role in Cú Chulainn’s death-tale — one moment he dies, the next he’s riding away on the Dub Sainglend, so what’s going on? The answer is that this is a confusion of the medieval and early modern recensions of the story: in the medieval text, Láeg dies, while in the early modern one, he survives to take the news to Emer. O’Grady, however, is not aware of these divergent traditions and that each is internally consistent unless combined, so on the basis of this contradiction and other inconsistencies, writes:

I conclude that the distance in time between the prose tale and the metrical originals was very great, and, unless under such exceptional circumstances as the revolution caused by the introduction of Christianity, could not have been brought about within hundreds of years.

Standish O’Grady, The History of Ireland Volume 2, p. 26.

Hmm. Questionable. His reference to ‘metrical originals’ is because he’s convinced the stories belong to a bardic tradition. While many of them may have had oral elements and also subsequently went on to have a poetic afterlife in the early modern period… the oldest stratum of the stories as we have them is largely prose. Moreover, his point about the introduction of Christianity is a sign that he’s dating these texts a lot earlier than we generally do these days. Even the medieval version of The Death of Cú Chulainn can only be dated to the eighth century at earliest, by which point Ireland had already been Christian for a good couple of centuries. The early modern one’s more like fifteenth century. And, in the case of this particular “inconsistency”, the confusion can be attributed to the reckless conflation of different recensions. Whether this is Keating’s fault or some other source of O’Grady’s, I’m not sure, but I appreciate that at least he noticed Láeg’s death/survival, since this divergence is so often overlooked.

On the question of Láeg’s origins, however, The History of Ireland is fascinating. Following the account of how Cú Chulainn got his name, we’re told:

It was about this time that he was presented with a companion and attendant, Læg, son of the King of Gowra, for Rury More had brought his father a captive to the north, and his son Læg, born to him in old age, in the north, was given to Cuculain when he returned to Dûn Dalgan for the first time from Emain Macha, and he was four years older than Cuculain.

Standish O’Grady, The History of Ireland Volume 1, p. 113. (Via Google Books)

This fascinates me, because I have absolutely no idea where he got this from.

Some parts, I can guess at. Son of the King of Gowra is clearly derived from the name mac Riangabra, though it’s an interesting approach at etymology. He’s split the patronymic into “Rí an Gabra”, and if you’re the kind of person to pronounce a lenited b as w, I suppose Gowra‘s not too unlikely an Anglicisation of that. (Personally, I’d pronounce it with a v sound, but this is far from the most idiosyncratic of O’Grady’s spellings.)

This is not how Láeg’s name is broken down in the two texts I know of that provide a glimpse of his parents. Both the version of Compert Con Culainn from RIA MS D.iv.2 (a ~12th century text in a 15th century manuscript) and the Old Irish text Fled Bricrenn ocus Longes mac nDuil Dermait split it into two, with Srian as Láeg’s father, and Gabor as his mother. They seem likely to be Otherworldly individuals — in the Compert they’re encountered at Síd Truim, and in Longes mac nDuil Dermait they live on a probably-Otherworldly island. The Compert also suggests a connection with Connacht.

But since srían means “bridle” and gabor means “horse, mare, esp. a white one”, in origin the name probably didn’t refer to people at all. Instead it’s a reference to his profession as charioteer: bridle-of-a-horse. That would explain why we encounter other charioteers with the same name, mainly Id and Sedlang mac Riangabra, who show up in Fled Bricrenn (a distinct text from Longes mac nDuil Dermait, despite the similar first part of their names). In this text, Id is Conall Cernach’s charioteer, but in the Stowe version of the Táin he appears as Fer Diad’s charioteer. It seems likely that it’s originally a name/title given to charioteers, but it’s subsequently understood as a patronymic and broken down into personal names.

Rationalising it instead as Rí an Gabra is an interesting approach. It’s not the first time I’ve seen it, but it’s the first time I’ve seen that etymology turned into story: a king of Gowra, taken as a hostage in Ulster, whose son (no mention here of Láeg’s brothers, though their names are referenced later in the text) is “given” to Cú Chulainn as a companion. This suggests Láeg is unfree — probably not enslaved, per se, but as a hostage’s son, not entirely autonomous, either. The power dynamic there is an interesting one, and one I’d like to come back to in future.

I also enjoy that O’Grady has specified Láeg’s age: four years older than Cú Chulainn. This is, honestly, roughly what I would have guessed myself if not given any other clues; he has that “older brother” feel to him, but he’s still young enough to chase around after Cú Chulainn. In the D.iv.2 Compert, we’re told that Láeg is still young enough to be “on the breast” when his mother, Gabra, nurses the newborn Cú Chulainn; the two then grow up together from infancy. This narrows the age gap between them, and gives them a different, and more equal, kind of relationship (something I’ll be discussing at length in my thesis, so I won’t go into great detail here). But this text is unusual, and other accounts rarely align with it — O’Grady’s four-year gap is plausible enough, and I appreciate that he even bothers to specify.

Because that’s the thing that keeps striking me — O’Grady bothers. O’Grady asks, “How did Láeg end up as Cú Chulainn’s charioteer? Where is he from? Is he an Ulsterman? What is their relationship? How old is he?” He asks the questions the medieval texts don’t answer, and attempts to come up with responses to them. These are the same questions I’m constantly asking myself, and to know that I’m not alone in that — that somebody else has asked them before me — means I feel connected to O’Grady’s work even before reading in depth. For some reason, he was interested in this particular pairing of characters, and what it meant.

But finally, the thing that’s really interesting about this backstory is that it’s completely different from the backstory he gives to Láeg in The Coming of Cuculain. Clearly, he wasn’t satisfied with this account of the King of Gowra, or a charioteer who was simply “given” to Cú Chulainn, so he started again — and this time, Láeg gets a lot more autonomy, and their friendship is emphasised. And it’s that second approach to Láeg that I’ll be talking about over the next however long.

So if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a novel from 1894 to read. Please feel free to join me.

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An Early Modern Melancholy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How early modern of them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Case for Queer Theory in Celtic Studies

Most of you have heard enough about my research interests to last a lifetime, but for those who may have stumbled on my blog for the first time, one of my primary areas of academic interest is queer readings of medieval Irish literature. In particular, I look at the Ulster Cycle, and I’m fascinated by the character of Cú Chulainn and the various ways in which he performs heroic masculinity, or fails to do so.

This makes me fairly popular in some circles – particularly on Tumblr, where I regularly have people asking when and where they can read my research – but this positivity isn’t universal, and although explicit hostility towards the subject is rare, I still feel the need to defend the legitimacy of this area of study. I’m apologetic about it, careful to couch everything in the most ambiguous of terms and to keep terminology specific to queer theory to an absolute minimum. I was even told not to use the word ‘queer’ in my undergraduate dissertation title – instead, it was about ‘ambiguities of gender and sexuality’.

It’s not just queer theory. Celtic Studies isn’t exactly known for its cutting-edge literary theory in general. Kind of the opposite. There are a bunch of reasons for that, not least because our ratio of scholars to texts compared to, say, Old English literature is completely absurd. This has its drawbacks – it can be hard to know which journals will be willing to publish anything too new-fangled and theory-heavy, for example. Still, queer theory is what I do, so it’s what I know the most about — and I’ve often found myself turning to other disciplines for comparative material I can pillage and bring back with me, because there isn’t nearly enough of it within our own field.

Sometimes, I read queer approaches to Arthurian literature or similar and marvel at the complexity, and how deep it’s able to go, because it feels like I can only skate over the surface, tentatively suggesting that maybe we should allow for the possibility of atypical constructions of gender within a text. Like I’m stuck at 101 level and other medieval disciplines are at 401 and I don’t dare to advance any further until I’ve proved I’m allowed to be here in the first place.[1]

Of course, it’s not wholly negative. It creates a space for younger scholars to take new approaches, knowing that it hasn’t all been said before, and it would be wrong to suggest that nobody in the field is using theoretical approaches. There are a number of scholars who work from a more theory-heavy angle, and queer theory isn’t unheard of – Sarah Sheehan’s 2005 article, ‘Fer Diad de-flowered: homoerotics and masculinity in Comrac Fir Diad’, explores queer readings of the relationship between Cú Chulainn and Fer Diad and is hardly recent, even by medievalist standards. I might be the first within academic circles[2] to argue for a transmasculine reading of Cú Chulainn, but I’m not entirely breaking new ground here, and it would be arrogant to suggest that I am.

Still, the theoretical approach is a minority one. In my experience, it’s entirely possible to study medieval Irish literature without ever being exposed to concepts of literary theory. We explore a lot of angles – but they’re linguistic, historical, mythological angles. Not theoretical frameworks.

I wonder if this is different for those studying Celtic material within an English or Comparative Literature department – and I’m willing to acknowledge, too, that it may also have been a Cambridge quirk, and not universal. But for me, when I brought ideas of narrative foils and literary doubles into my undergrad essays, I was drawing on concepts I learned in A-Level English Literature, and I never moved on from that until I decided of my own accord to go down a queer theory rabbithole. Now, as I embark on postgrad studies, I’m trying to fill some of the huge gaps in my understanding of theory, but that’s because it interests me – because at heart I’m interested in this material as literature (not necessarily mythology, history, or interesting expressions of language). Nobody else is going to make me do it, because it’s not seen as particularly necessary.

I suspect it’s the absence of these broader theoretical approaches in the field that means the possibility of queer readings can often be dismissed out of hand. The most recent and relevant example of this that comes to mind is Tom O’Donnell’s book Fosterage in Medieval Ireland, where he discusses the relationship between Cú Chulainn and Fer Diad and claims that it has been ‘misconstrued as homosexual’ due to a lack of understanding of the emotional richness of fosterage on the part of modern readers.[3]

I’m perfectly willing to accept that their relationship can be read as a normative relationship between foster brothers, and I appreciate that O’Donnell’s purpose in this chapter is to emphasise the bonds of affection within medieval Irish fosterage. However, I don’t accept that this rules out the possibility of a queer reading, and I think implying that a queer reading negates or contradicts a normative interpretation shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what a queer reading is.

Queer theory draws on a post-structuralist approach, which tells us that we can have multiple, even contradictory readings of texts, because there is no single true reading. These readings can exist simultaneously. In our case, we’re working with anonymous material that may have developed over hundreds of years through the oral tradition before reaching anything like its surviving form, so we can make no claims about authorial intent – of course we can’t. But we can look for different ways that we, as modern readers, can interpret and understand material, and no eleventh-century monk is going to take to Twitter to tell us that we’ve misread his intentions. Death of the author has never been so literal.

There’s this pervasive idea that a queer reading is in some way anachronistic, but a queer reading is not an attempt to impose modern identities on premodern characters. For a start, queer identities and behaviours have always existed; both gender and sexuality are culturally defined and therefore change over time. Relationships and expressions of identity that are normative now might be viewed as subversive or queer at various points in history, and vice versa – behaviours we might identify as ‘queer’ may have been normative within specific social structures (see, for example, Ancient Greek pederasty).

We’re in danger of assuming our modern understanding of normativity is the one that applies to these texts, but even in the rigid, hierarchical, Christian world of medieval Ireland, our modern western idea of the gender binary fails to fully encompass the concepts expressed in the texts and the laws.[4] And since ‘heterosexual’ is as much a modern concept as ‘homosexual’ why do we think it’s somehow neutral or historically accurate to position this as the norm?

What a queer reading does is disrupt the assumptions on which our conventional understandings of a text are based. How many more possibilities are opened up when we stop assuming that everybody in a text is heterosexual and cisgender? How much more carefully do we look at characters, power structures, conflicts and oppositions, if we stop making assumptions about gender and sexuality? A queer reading reminds us that there are always other ways of understanding relationships. It reminds us to examine how gender is constructed uniquely within a specific narrative, and to explore how this affects our understandings of other power dynamics.

In other words, a queer reading is a way of thinking outside the box when we analyse a text, creating alternative understandings that may contradict, inform, or problematise the mainstream interpretations.

Cú Chulainn and Fer Diad’s relationship is a great illustration of this multiplicity of possible interpretations, because I’d argue that the fosterage argument and the queer reading are in no way contradictory. Firstly, because a relationship that was normative to a contemporary audience may still hold queer resonances for modern readers. Secondly, because even within its historical context, a structure doesn’t have to be inherently queer in all its iterations to create space for queer identities and behaviours to exist. It would be absurd to suggest that historically, all brothers-in-arms were ‘kinda gay for each other, actually’ – but that doesn’t mean there weren’t those who found this brotherhood a space in which they could express themselves within a normative structure that rendered it acceptable.

We see elsewhere how institutions formed around homosocial bonds can facilitate queerness. In the medieval church, we find the rite of spiritual brotherhood (or ‘adelphopoiesis’ – brother-making), intended as a spiritual bond between two men and invoking aspects of marriage rites. This rite wasn’t intended as a romantic or sexual one, and historians have often argued with attempts to compare it to modern queer relationships. But in the 13th century, Athanasius I condemned it because it “brings about coitus and depravity.”[5] This structure, then, was creating a space for queer behaviours. The institution was not itself inherently queer, but for those looking for ways to express their unswerving commitment to their close companion and repudiate the possibility of heterosexual marriage… well, it clearly looked appealing.

Thus a type of relationship doesn’t have to be inherently or universally queer to create space for queer behaviours and readings to exist. We can simultaneously read Cú Chulainn and Fer Diad’s relationship as a societally normative bond between foster brothers, and acknowledge a queer reading, without either necessitating opposition to the other.

And yet I’m still nervous about doing so. Still afraid that expressing my interest in and enthusiasm for queer readings will mean more advanced scholars look down on me, or that I’ll be dismissed as not really understanding the historical context of material. When I stand up at a conference and say I’m talking about transmasculine readings of Cú Chulainn, as I did a couple of weeks ago, I couch it in caveats and disclaimers. Emphasise that ‘all’ I’m suggesting is an unconventionally expressed masculinity which may resonate with modern transmasculine experiences, and that this reminds us not to automatically categorise Cú Chulainn as a ‘hypermasculine’ figure simply because he’s a hyper-martial figure.

I was grateful that on this occasion the response to my paper was so positive – people responded far better to it than I feared, and I had a bunch of really interesting questions. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t nervous, before and during it, because I had absolutely no idea how it was going to go down. And I still hesitate, when meeting someone new within the field – especially a more senior academic – to talk to much about that side of my research.

I hope one day I’ll be able to be unapologetic about it. Because it’s not anachronistic, to suggest that we as modern readers might interpret texts in ways which resonate with modern queer identities and experiences. Nor to point out the ways that gender is constructed, and how characters succeed or fail at performing that. Nor is it ahistorical to look beyond the normative explanation of relationships and explore alternative understandings.

Queer theory and queer readings belong in Celtic Studies. We make no claims to have the only truth or the only valid interpretation. We accept contradiction and alternatives and arguments which problematise our own. But we’re sticking around, because our readings have value, too.

Or at least, I am. You couldn’t be rid of me if you tried.

[1] I can’t imagine a Celtic Studies journal publishing something like Blake Gutt’s “Transgender genealogy in Tristan de Nanteuil”, for example, nor half of what I’ve read by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen.

[2] I say ‘in academic circles’ because it’s actually quite a popular reading among young people on the internet, most of whom aren’t studying the material formally.

[3] O’Donnell, Fosterage in Medieval Ireland (2020), p.95. This is in no way intended to call Tom O’Donnell out specifically – I have a lot of respect for him, and his pop culture-heavy blog posts about medieval Irish lit have been an inspiration to me in thinking about public-facing academia. But I have to admit this statement made me grumpy when I read it.

[4] When we look at material from outside the western/Christian world, we have to be even more wary about imposing colonialist ideas about binary gender – this is not, and has never been, a universal truth.

[5] See https://time.com/5896685/queer-monks-medieval-history/ for more on this.

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