The Táin (Táin Bó Cúailnge)

Part 1: The Finding of the Táin: Senchán, the Saints and the Ghost of Fergus

The Finding of the Táin

Summary

The aged chief poet Shen'-cawn (Senchán Torpéist), charged by the swineherd-saint Mar-vawn' (Marbán), asks the poets of Ireland whether any of them can recite the Táin Bó Cúailnge whole. None can: they know only fragments, and the book in which it was written has been carried off to 'Latin lands'. The poets search Ireland and then Scotland for a year without success.

On their return Senchán's kinsman, Saint Caillín, takes them to Marbán, who tells them that no one among the living or the dead knows the whole tale except Fergus mac Róich. The saints of Ireland, Colum Cille, the two Ciaráns, Brendan and the two Finnians among them, gather at Fergus's grave and fast for three days. Senchán sings a poem to the gravestone; a mist closes round them, and Fergus rises in his old splendour, takes the seat they courteously give him, and teaches them the Táin from beginning to end.

Analysis

Hutton opens with a medieval story about the Táin rather than with the Táin itself. The tale of its recovery (Do Fallsigud Tána Bó Cuailnge, 'On the Finding of the Táin') survives in the Book of Leinster and elsewhere, and it reflects a real situation: the medieval literati knew that their great saga existed in broken and competing versions. The claim that the book had gone abroad 'in exchange for' a Latin text, Isidore's Etymologies in one version, shows the learned class measuring native tradition against the Latin learning of the Church (O'Rahilly 1967) (Ó Cathasaigh 2014).

The frame makes a pagan witness speak to Christian saints. Fergus, who took part in the events, is the only authority the poets can trust, but he can be reached only by prayer and fasting. The story thus gives the Church the role of custodian of the native past, a point central to the argument that the sagas are learned monastic literature rather than raw survivals of pagan oral poetry (McCone 1990). Hutton's list of saints, with their gentle animal companions and golden moons of holiness, is her own idealising expansion.

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Part 2: The Pillow Talk and the Two Bulls

Book I

Summary

At sunset Ailill and Medb look out over their rich land from the mound of Cruachain. In bed that night Ailill remarks that it is good to be the wife of a wealthy man, and Medb replies that she was richer than he when they married. She recounts her descent from the high-king Eochaid Feidlech, her suitors, and the three conditions she set for a husband: that he be without meanness, jealousy or fear. Ailill, she says, lives on a woman's wealth.

Their possessions are brought out and counted: vessels, jewels, clothes, flocks, herds and horses. They are equal in everything except that Ailill owns the white-horned bull Finnbennach, which was calved in Medb's herd but went over to the king's because it would not be ruled by a woman. The herald Mac Roth tells Medb that the only equal bull is the Donn Cúailnge, owned by Dáire mac Fiachna in Ulster, and a druid recounts the earlier lives of the two bulls as rival swineherds who passed through many shapes.

Medb tells her daughter Findabair why she hates Ulster and its king Conchobar, who was once her husband. She sends Mac Roth with nine men to borrow the Donn for a year, offering rich rewards. Dáire agrees, but at the feast that night one of the messengers boasts that the bull would have been taken by force anyway. Dáire withdraws his consent, and Medb swears that the Donn will come to Cruachain.

Analysis

The pillow talk is found only in Recension II and Hutton follows it; Recension I begins instead with the mustering of the armies at Cruachain. The scene is comic and pointed at once. Under Irish law the partner who brought more property to a marriage had the greater say, and the quarrel about who is richer is a quarrel about authority (Kelly 1988) (O'Rahilly 1967). Medb's three conditions, a husband without meanness, jealousy or fear, are a portrait of the ideal king, and they show that she sees herself as the one who chooses kings.

Cattle were the principal measure of wealth in early Ireland, and a bull was the pride of a herd (Kelly 1997). Yet the two bulls are no ordinary animals: the druid's account of their transformations (told in the fore-tale De Chophur in Dá Muccida, 'The Quarrel of the Two Swineherds') makes them reborn rivals whose feud is older than the war it causes. Hutton, following the medieval tradition, gives Medb a long autobiography and a personal grudge against Conchobar that the oldest version lacks; the effect is to make her a wronged woman as well as an ambitious queen.

The raid begins in a broken promise of hospitality. Dáire is willing to lend the bull until a drunken messenger boasts; the war arises from words spoken at a feast, a recurring pattern in early Irish saga.

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Part 3: The Hosting Summoned; Leborcham's Tale of Deirdre and the Sons of Uisliu

Book II

Summary

Messengers summon Medb's seven sons, the Maines, and the kings and chiefs of the Four Fifths of Ireland to Cruachain. While the hosts gather, the poetess Lowercam (Leborcham) is asked to tell a story at the feast, and Medb chooses the tale of the sons of Uisliu, hoping to stir Fergus against Conchobar.

Leborcham tells how the druid Cathbad prophesied over the unborn Derdriu (Hutton's Daerdra) that she would be beautiful and would bring ruin on Ulster. Conchobar has her reared in seclusion to be his wife. Seeing a raven drink calf's blood on the snow, she longs for a man with hair like the raven, cheeks like blood and skin like snow, and she claims Noísiu, son of Uisliu, who flees with her and his brothers to Scotland. Conchobar sends Fergus to promise them safety; Fergus is held back by a feast he is bound by geis to attend, and the sons of Uisliu are killed at Emain Macha by Eógan mac Durthacht. Fergus takes vengeance, burns Emain and goes into exile in Connacht with three thousand men. Derdriu, after a year of grief with Conchobar, dashes her head against a rock.

Fergus leaves the feast in tears. Afterwards Medb finds him on the mound and urges him to lead the host against the king who dishonoured his guarantee, reminding him that she has loved him and borne him sons.

Analysis

Here Hutton departs most clearly from the medieval Táin, which refers to the exile of Fergus without telling the story. She inserts a full retelling of Longes mac nUislenn ('The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu'), one of the fore-tales, so that the reader learns why the greatest of the Ulster heroes is fighting for Connacht. The Deirdre story was the best known of all Irish tales during the Revival, retold by Yeats, Synge and AE, and its inclusion shows how Hutton read the Táin through the literature of her own day (Hutton 1924) (Gregory 1902).

The tale is a lesson in broken guarantees. Fergus's honour depends on the safety of those he protects, and Conchobar's treachery makes him an exile with a grievance. Derdriu's accusation, that he sold his honour for an ale-feast, shows how the obligations of geis and hospitality can trap a hero. The divided loyalty of Fergus, who loves Ulster but marches against it, becomes one of the main threads of the Táin.

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Part 4: The Muster at Cruachain, the Curse of Macha and Fedelm's Prophecy

Book III

Summary

The hosts arrive on Mag Aí: Medb's seven sons, all called Maine because a druid told her that Conchobar would be killed by Maine; the seven sons of Mágach; the men of Munster and Leinster; Fráech with his fairy-gifted company; and Cormac Conloingeas, Conchobar's exiled son, with three bands. The army waits fifteen days for good omens.

Uneasy, Medb consults her druid, who explains why Ulster will be helpless: the curse of Macha. The wife of Crunniuc, a woman from the otherworld, was forced by the king of Ulster to race his horses while she was near her time. She won, gave birth to twins at the finish, and cursed the men of Ulster to suffer the weakness of a woman in labour whenever they were in greatest need. Only women, boys and one future hero, Cú Chulainn, are exempt.

As Medb drives away she meets a young woman standing on the shaft of a chariot, the poetess Fedelm from the fairy mound of Cruachain. Asked how she sees the host, Fedelm answers again and again, 'I see them red', and in a final vision describes a young warrior with the shape of a dragon in battle, whose fury distorts him: Cú Chulainn.

Analysis

The curse of Macha (Noínden Ulad, 'the debility of the Ulstermen') is told in its own short tale and only alluded to in the Táin; Hutton places the story in the mouth of a druid. It is the device that makes the plot possible: a whole province is disabled, and a boy must defend it. Macha is one of several figures linked with sovereignty and the land, and the curse binds the warrior aristocracy of Ulster to a woman's suffering they refused to respect (Ó Cathasaigh 2014) (McCone 1990).

Fedelm's prophecy is a rosc in Recension I, one of the archaic verse passages, and its refrain is among the most memorable lines of the saga. Medb tries to explain away each warning, and the scene sets her confidence against fate. It is also the first portrait of Cú Chulainn, seen from the enemy side as something monstrous before he appears as a boy.

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Part 5: The March to Ulster, the Withe and the Forked Pole

Book IV

Summary

The army sets out from Cruachain, south-east across Connacht. Medb fears the three thousand Leinstermen, the Gaileóin, who are better soldiers than all the rest and might turn against her; she wants them killed, but Fergus protects them and they are dispersed among the other troops. Fergus, who is guiding the army, leads it on long detours to give Ulster time, and secretly warns his foster-son. When Medb reproaches him he says he is keeping clear of a certain 'Slaughter-hound' of Mag Muirthemne.

At the Ulster border the host finds a hoop twisted from an oak sapling, cut and made with one hand, standing on one foot and seeing with one eye, and marked with an ogham inscription that forbids them to pass until one of them makes a hoop in the same way. The army goes round through the forest and camps in heavy snow. The next day the two scouts Err and Innel and their charioteers are found beheaded, their heads set on the prongs of a forked branch driven into a ford with one cast, which is named Áth Gabla. Fergus breaks seventeen chariots pulling it out, and finally frees it one-handed.

Fráech's three harpers play the strains of sorrow, laughter and sleep. Ailill asks who could have done these deeds; Fergus rules out the great warriors of Ulster one by one and names Cú Chulainn, his foster-son, praising him at length. Medb replies that he has only one body. Fergus begins to tell of the boy's youth.

Analysis

The episodes at the border show Cú Chulainn's method before we see him. He fights through signs, conditions and bargains as much as through strength: the ogham hoop imposes a geis on the army, and the forked branch is both a threat and a riddle. The one-handed, one-eyed, one-footed posture is ritual, and has been compared with the stance of figures who work magic in other Irish tales (Ó Cathasaigh 2014). The episode also shows the Táin's interest in place names. Many incidents end with a dindshenchas, an account of how a ford or hill received its name.

Fergus's position is now plain. He is the guide of the Connacht army and secretly works against it, and the narrative enjoys his double dealing. Medb's suspicion of the Leinstermen, whom she would kill because they are too good, is a first glimpse of the ruthlessness that critics have read either as political realism or as hostile caricature (O'Rahilly 1967).

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Part 6: The Boyhood Deeds of Cú Chulainn

Book V

Summary

In camp the Ulster exiles tell the macgnímrada, the boyhood deeds. Fergus tells how the five-year-old Sétanta, son of Súaltam and Deichtire, left his home at Dún Delga for Emain Macha, playing with toy javelin, shield, hurley and ball on the way. He ran onto the playing field without asking the protection of the boy-troop, fought off all of them, and was taken under Conchobar's protection.

Cormac Conloingeas tells how, a year later, the boy went late to a feast given by the smith Culann and was attacked by the smith's huge hound, which he killed by dashing it against a pillar stone. When Culann lamented the loss of his guardian, the boy offered to take its place until a whelp could be reared, and the druid Cathbad named him Cú Chulainn, 'the Hound of Culann'.

Fíacha mac Fir Febe, an Ulster exile, tells how at seven the boy overheard Cathbad say that whoever took arms that day would be famous but short-lived, and demanded arms from Conchobar, breaking every set until he was given the king's own. He drove to the border, killed the three sons of Nechta Scéne, who had slain many Ulstermen, and returned with their heads on his chariot, a flock of white birds tethered above it and a wild stag running behind. Conchobar recognised his sister's son, and the boy was plunged into three vats of cold water until his battle-heat was cooled.

Analysis

The boyhood deeds form a self-contained section of the Táin, told in retrospect as stories in the enemy camp. The device lets the narrative stop while the army is held at the border, and it lets Fergus and Cormac, Ulstermen in exile, express their pride in the hero they are fighting. Each tale ends with the same point: why wonder that such a boy, now seventeen, should hold off an army? (O'Rahilly 1976)

The episodes follow a pattern found in heroic biographies across many cultures: precocious strength, a new name, a choice of short life and lasting fame, and a first raid beyond the frontier (Ó Cathasaigh 2014). The choice at seven, 'one day and one night' of life if only his deeds are remembered, became the motto of Pearse's school. The cooling in the vats (in the Irish preceded by the women of Emain coming out naked to shame the boy, an episode Hutton leaves out) shows the community's need to tame the force it depends on: Cú Chulainn's heat is necessary in war and dangerous at home (Dooley 2006).

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Part 7: Ferdiad's Tale, I: The Wooing of Emer

Book VI

Summary

In the royal tent at Áth Gabla the young warrior Ferdiad of the Fir Domnann, who trained with Cú Chulainn under Scáthach, offers to tell Ailill and Medb how the hero was trained in arms. He begins at Emain Macha with a description of Conchobar's hall, the Cráebrúad or Red Branch, and of its warriors. At fifteen Cú Chulainn is loved by the women of Ulster, and the men, anxious that he should leave a son, look for a wife for him. He has already chosen Emer, daughter of Forgall Manach, who has the six gifts of a woman: beauty, voice, sweet speech, needlework, wisdom and chastity.

Cú Chulainn drives to her father's house with Láeg and the horses Líath Macha and Dub Sainglenn. He and Emer talk in riddles that her companions cannot follow; he boasts of his fosterage by the wise men of Ulster and the favour of the god Lug, and she sets him impossible conditions, among them that he must kill a hundred men at every ford. As they drive north he explains the riddles to Láeg, with the stories of the places he named.

Analysis

Books VI and VII are Hutton's longest addition to the Táin. She makes Ferdiad tell the tale Tochmarc Emire ('The Wooing of Emer'), a separate saga that survives in several versions, so that the reader knows the bond between the two foster-brothers before they meet at the ford. The device copies the boyhood deeds of Book V, in which the exiles tell stories in the enemy camp, and it gives Ferdiad a voice and a history that the Táin itself barely sketches (Hutton 1924) (Thurneysen 1921).

The riddling dialogue is a display of learning. Its obscure metaphors, place lore and allusions to gods resemble the style of the rosc, and they present the hero as a master of words as well as arms, as the Irish poets themselves wished to be seen. The conditions Emer sets anticipate the slaughter at the fords in the Táin.

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Part 8: Ferdiad's Tale, II: Training with Scáthach and the Gae Bolga

Book VII

Summary

Forgall, disguised as a foreign envoy, persuades Cú Chulainn to seek training abroad, hoping he will not return. Cú Chulainn and Emer pledge themselves to each other, and he sails with Conall Cernach and Lóegaire. A false vision sends his companions home, and he goes on alone, guided by a beast and by a youth who gives him a wheel and an apple to lead him across the Plain of Ill Luck and a perilous glen, to the island fortress of the warrior-woman Scáthach. There he finds Ferdiad and other pupils from Ireland.

He crosses the Bridge of the Cliff at the third attempt with his 'salmon-leap', and on the advice of Scáthach's daughter Úathach forces Scáthach, with his sword at her breast, to grant him three wishes: full training, marriage to her daughter and prophecy of his future. He learns the feats, fights in Scáthach's war against Aífe, and Scáthach lays a geis on her pupils never to fight each other. She gives him alone the gae bolga and sings of what awaits him: the Táin, the great slaughter, and a short life of lasting fame. On the way home he rescues a princess from the Fomorians. Ferdiad ends his story with an oath that he would rather kill himself than kill Cú Chulainn.

Analysis

The training with Scáthach completes the hero's education, and it is the shared past that makes the later fight so painful. Scáthach, a woman who teaches war in a land beyond the sea, is one of several powerful female figures in the Ulster Cycle; her prophecy, which in the Irish is an archaic rosc, here becomes a song in short rhyming lines (Ó Cathasaigh 2014).

The episode is full of tests of a kind familiar from international folk tale, the dangerous bridge, the helpful guide, the magical gifts, and the gae bolga is its prize. Ferdiad's oath at the end is irony of the sharpest kind: the reader already knows from the Táin that he will meet Cú Chulainn at the ford (Hutton 1924).

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Part 9: The Early Exploits on the Border; the Morrígan

Book VIII

Summary

The hosts move on. Cú Chulainn fells an oak across their path with an ogham geis, and thirty chariots are wrecked leaping it. Fráech is sent against him and drowned as they wrestle in a river; women in green carry his body into the fairy mound. Cú Chulainn kills men in sixes and in threes, and with sling-stones kills Medb's pet dog, bird and squirrel. He shapes a holly shaft so smooth that a fly could not settle on it, frightens the charioteer he is helping by revealing who he is, and kills his master Orlám, Ailill's son.

A red woman with a one-legged horse appears to him; she offers him her love and help, and when he refuses she threatens to hinder him in his fights as an eel, a wolf and a heifer. Only when she becomes a black bird does he recognise the Morrígan. She warns the Donn Cúailnge, which moves away from the raiders. Ailill steals Fergus's sword while Fergus lies with Medb, and Fergus fits a wooden sword to his sheath. Cú Chulainn's sling kills a hundred men each night, and he refuses Medb's first offers of terms.

Analysis

These short episodes, many of them ending with the name of a place, form the core of the Táin's first half in both recensions (O'Rahilly 1976). They show Cú Chulainn's mixture of courtesy and terror, and the comedy that runs through the saga: a warrior who smooths sticks for an enemy's charioteer and then kills his master.

The Morrígan, 'phantom queen' or 'great queen', is a war goddess whose appearances link sex, prophecy and death. Her offer and threat set up the fight with Lóch in Book X. The stealing of Fergus's sword while he lies with Medb is a sly comic episode that has a serious end: Fergus will fight with a wooden sword until the last battle (Ó Cathasaigh 2014).

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Part 10: The Compact of Single Combat; Fergus and Etarcomol

Book IX

Summary

The army camps for three days, losing a hundred men a night to Cú Chulainn's sling. Medb sends her herald Mac Roth to offer terms, and when the hero refuses to see the women and cattle of Ulster become slaves of Connacht, Fergus brings his own condition: one man a day is to fight him at a ford, and while the fight lasts the army may march; when the man is dead it must halt. Medb accepts, reasoning that it is better to lose one man a day than a hundred each night.

Fergus goes to Cú Chulainn and the two greet each other warmly. A young Connacht warrior, Etarcomol, follows Fergus out of curiosity and insults the hero. Cú Chulainn spares him three times, cutting the sod from under his feet, shaving his head and slicing his clothes, and at last cuts him in three. Fergus, whose guarantee of safety has been violated, drags the body back to Medb's camp.

Analysis

The compact turns war into a series of formal duels and so gives the middle of the Táin its shape: a long succession of fords and champions. The ford is the boundary between territories, and in Irish law and story it is the natural place of combat (Kelly 1988). The bargain also shows the importance of guarantees: Fergus binds both sides, and Etarcomol's death, which breaks his protection, is felt as a personal injury.

Cú Chulainn's three warning strokes are a display of control that makes the final stroke deliberate. The young man is killed not by the hero's fury but by his own arrogance. The episode is a small model of the many in which the Connacht champions, tempted or shamed by Medb, walk to their deaths.

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Part 11: The Combats at the Fords: Nad Crantail, Fer Báeth and Lóch

Book X

Summary

A long series of champions fails. Nad Crantail attacks with spits of holly and Cú Chulainn stands on each one as it flies; next day Nad Crantail is killed. Cú Chulainn, mocked as beardless, puts on a false beard of grass so that grown men will fight him. His fellow pupil Fer Báeth, tempted by Medb with Findabair, is killed by a holly spike thrown backwards over the hero's shoulder. Láréne, brother of his friend Lugaid, is crushed and spared, but crippled for life.

Medb then brings Lóch mac Mo Femis, protected by a skin of horn. As they fight in the ford the Morrígan attacks Cú Chulainn as an eel, a wolf and a red heifer, as she had threatened; he breaks her ribs, an eye and a leg, and kills Lóch with the gae bolga, granting his request to fall facing east, away from the men of Ireland. Later he meets an old woman milking a cow with three teats, blesses her three times for three drinks, and so heals the Morrígan's three injuries. Meanwhile Medb has found the Donn Cúailnge and driven it away, and the exhausted hero raises a terrible cry from his camp.

Analysis

The single combats repeat a pattern with small variations, and the repetition itself is meaningful: each opponent is lured by gifts, flattery or the promise of Medb's daughter, and each dies. Critics have seen in Medb's repeated offer of Findabair to one man after another the saga's most damaging picture of her, and in Cú Chulainn's reluctance to kill his friends a growing weariness (Dooley 2006) (O'Rahilly 1967).

The fight with Lóch combines the human and divine levels of the Táin. The Morrígan's attack and her later healing show the uneasy relation between the hero and the powers of the otherworld: he wounds her, refuses her and, without knowing it, cures her. The Donn's capture means that Medb has won her object halfway through the story, and what remains is a question of whether she can bring it home.

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Part 12: Lug's Healing, the Boy-Troop and the Great Slaughter; Fergus Yields

Book XI

Summary

As Cú Chulainn sits wounded and weary, a tall, shining warrior crosses the Connacht camp unseen by its men. He is Lug son of Ethliu, Cú Chulainn's father from the otherworld, who sings him into a sleep of three days and nights and heals his wounds. While he sleeps the boy-troop of Emain Macha, a hundred and fifty boys led by Follomain son of Conchobar, attacks the host three times and is destroyed.

When Cú Chulainn wakes and hears of it, he arms himself and his chariot, and the ríastrad comes on him: his body turns inside its skin, one eye sinks into his head and the other bulges out on his cheek, sparks rise over his head, his hair stiffens like the branches of a thorn, and a column of dark blood rises from his head like the mast of a ship. He drives round the host and makes the great slaughter of Mag Muirthemne, killing men past counting. Next morning he shows himself in his beauty, and the women climb on the men's shields to look at him.

Fergus is now sent to fight him. At the ford Cú Chulainn agrees to retreat before his foster-father, on condition that Fergus will retreat before him in the final battle. Then Calatín and his twenty-seven sons attack with poisoned weapons and are killed with the help of Fíacha, an Ulster exile.

Analysis

This book contains the most famous image of the Táin, the ríastrad or 'distortion', which Kinsella rendered as the 'warp-spasm' and so gave English a new word. The description is grotesque and exact, and it treats heroic rage as a physical transformation, something that happens to the hero rather than something he chooses. Whether such passages are archaic survivals or the work of learned writers enjoying hyperbole is part of the debate about the saga's origins (Kinsella 1970) (McCone 1990).

The episode also brings together the divine and human sides of the hero. Lug, the god of many skills, appears as his father and heals him, and the boys' deaths give the slaughter the character of revenge. Fergus's retreat before his foster-son, with his promise to be repaid in the final battle, is the hinge on which the end of the Táin turns.

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Part 13: The Fight with Ferdiad

Book XII

Summary

Medb holds a council and her chiefs agree that only one man can match Cú Chulainn: Ferdiad son of Damán of the Fir Domnann, his foster-brother, trained with him by Scáthach, and protected by a skin of horn that no weapon can pierce. Ferdiad will not fight his friend, so Medb sends satirists who threaten to raise blisters of shame on his face. At a feast she offers him wealth and her daughter Findabair, and when he still hesitates tells him, falsely, that Cú Chulainn has belittled him. He swears to fight.

Fergus warns Cú Chulainn, and Ferdiad's charioteer recalls the kindnesses of the past. At the ford Cú Chulainn appeals to their friendship and Ferdiad answers with taunts. They fight for three days, first with missiles, then with spears, then with heavy swords; each night they embrace, send each other healing herbs and food, and their horses and charioteers share a camp.

On the fourth day they fight in the ford. Ferdiad wounds Cú Chulainn, and Láeg taunts his master to rouse his fury. Cú Chulainn calls for the gae bolga, which Láeg sends to him down the stream, and casts it with his foot; it enters Ferdiad's body and he dies. Cú Chulainn carries him north across the ford, so that he will lie on the Ulster side, and laments over him. The ford is named Áth Fir Diad, Ardee.

Analysis

The combat with Ferdiad is the emotional centre of the Táin and its most elaborate episode, especially in Recension II, where much of it is in verse dialogue and lament (O'Rahilly 1967). It is the last of the single combats and the one in which the code that governs them becomes tragic. Both men are bound by honour: Ferdiad by the fear of satire, which could destroy a man's standing, and by his oath; Cú Chulainn by his duty to Ulster. The courtesies of the nights, embraces, healing herbs and shared food, sharpen the cruelty of the days.

The gae bolga, the barbed spear that only Scáthach taught to Cú Chulainn, decides the fight unfairly, and the narrative does not hide it. Cú Chulainn's lament, with its refrain of shared training and its bitter judgement on Medb's false promise, is a model for later Irish elegy. Hutton keeps Ferdiad's fatalism, 'What must be, must be', which gives the episode the shape of tragedy rather than a victory (Kinsella 1970) (Tymoczko 1999).

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Part 14: Súaltam's Warning and the Rising of Ulster

Book XIII

Summary

Ulster friends carry the wounded Cú Chulainn to the streams of Mag Muirthemne, into which the Túatha Dé Danann throw healing herbs. The armies of Ireland move on, and Medb sets Mac Roth to watch for the Ulstermen. Small bands come out of the debility to fight: old Iliach crushes his enemies with stones and his bare arms before Dóche kills him; the poet Amairgin pelts the host with stones until Cú Roí answers him and a truce is made. The young Rochad mac Faithemain is lured with an offer of Findabair; the kings to whom she has also been promised quarrel and fight, Fergus makes peace, and Findabair dies of shame.

Cú Chulainn's mortal father Súaltam finds him covered in wounds, and the son sends him to Emain Macha. Three times Súaltam cries out that men are being killed, women carried off and cattle driven, but no one may answer him: the Ulstermen may not speak before their king, nor the king before his druids, and the druid Cathbad only rebukes him. Turning in anger, Súaltam falls on the rim of his own shield, which cuts off his head; the head, carried back on his horse, repeats the cry. Conchobar rises and sends Findchad to summon the men of Ulster, naming a long roll of chiefs. Conchobar and Celtchar rescue captive women at Áth Féne, and Celtchar, Cormac and Dubthach chant prophecies of the battle to come.

Analysis

The waking of Ulster is told in a scene of dark comedy that also makes a serious point. The Ulstermen's custom that no one speaks before the king, and the king not before his druids, turns order into paralysis; it takes a decapitated head to break it. Súaltam, a humble figure beside the divine father Lug, has his one great moment in dying (O'Rahilly 1976). The episode of Findabair, offered to many men and finally destroyed by the offers, makes Medb's use of her daughter a source of open scandal.

Hutton also keeps a passage the medieval text calls one of the chief marvels of the Táin, the death of Iliach, which shows that the elderly and the weak of Ulster can still fight. The long roll of summoned warriors in the Irish is a catalogue in the epic manner, like the catalogue of ships in the Iliad.

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Part 15: Mac Roth's Survey of the Ulster Host

Book XIV

Summary

Ailill decides to stand and fight in Meath and sends Mac Roth to watch the plain. Mac Roth twice reports strange signs, a roar like an earthquake and then a grey mist with lights and shapes in it, and Fergus interprets them: the Ulstermen are cutting a road through the forest, and the mist is the breath of men and horses, the lights their eyes and weapons. Fergus warns Medb that no army on earth can withstand the Ulstermen once roused.

Next day Mac Roth describes, band by band, the companies that arrive on the hill of Slane in Meath, and for each one Fergus names the leader and his deeds: Conchobar himself, the sage Sencha, Láegaire Búadach, Amairgin, Celtchar, Munremar, Furbaide, the boy Erc of Tara, and many more. The last band, grieving and leaderless, are the men of Mag Muirthemne, without their lord Cú Chulainn. A cry is heard, and Fergus explains that it is Cú Chulainn struggling to rise from his sickbed. That night the Morrígan cries between the two armies, prophesying slaughter.

Analysis

The survey (often called 'the Array of the Host' or 'the Muster of the Men of Ulster') is a set piece of description in which a watcher describes and an expert identifies. The technique resembles the teichoskopia of Iliad 3, where Helen names the Greek heroes for Priam, though there is no reason to think of influence. The descriptions are among the most ornate passages in the Book of Leinster version, with long runs of epithets, and they offer a gallery of clothes, weapons and hair-styles that encouraged Jackson's reading of the saga as a picture of Iron Age society (Jackson 1964) (O'Rahilly 1967).

Fergus again speaks for Ulster from the Connacht camp. His interpretations turn the enemy's ignorance into fear, and the closing image of the men of Mag Muirthemne without their young lord reminds the audience that the coming battle cannot be decided without Cú Chulainn.

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Part 16: The Battle of Gáirech and the Fight of the Bulls

Book XV

Summary

Hearing the Morrígan's cries, Cú Chulainn sends Láeg to rouse Ulster. The Ulstermen rise, and the armies meet at Gáirech and Ilgáirech. Medb goads Fergus with Conchobar's wrongs, and Ailill gives him back his own sword, the Caladbolg. Fergus drives the Ulstermen back three times and strikes Conchobar's shield, which roars. Conchobar answers him; Cormac begs him to spare Ulster, and Fergus turns aside and cuts the tops off three hills, the Máela of Meath.

Cú Chulainn hears the shield and breaks his bonds. He reminds Fergus of his promise, made earlier in the Táin, to yield to him when asked; Fergus withdraws with his men, the Leinster and Munster troops follow, and the Connacht army is left to fight alone. Medb, who has sent the Donn Cúailnge ahead to Cruachain, is overtaken by Cú Chulainn but spared, because he does not kill women. At her request he guards the retreat, and cuts the tops from three hills of his own. Fergus comments that it is what happens to a herd led by a mare.

At Cruachain the Donn Cúailnge meets Finnbennach. The bulls fight all night across Ireland; in the morning the Donn passes Cruachain with the remains of Finnbennach on his horns, scattering them over the land, so that places such as Athlone, 'the ford of the loin', are named after them. He returns to Cúailnge, kills many of the women and children who had come out to mourn him, and dies there, his heart broken.

Analysis

The battle is not won by force. It is decided by a series of personal bonds: Fergus's love for Ulster and his kinship with Conchobar, Cormac's plea, and above all the promise made to Cú Chulainn. The Táin repeatedly makes honour and obligation more powerful than armies (Ó Cathasaigh 2014). Fergus cutting the hilltops is a typical gesture of the saga, violence displaced onto the landscape and remembered in place names.

Fergus's remark about the herd led by a mare is the most quoted judgement on Medb, and it has been read as the moral of the whole saga, a warning against government by women, and as the bitter word of a man who has lost the battle and his own honour (Dooley 2006). The fight of the bulls returns the story to its beginning: the cause of the war destroys itself, the dismembered Finnbennach names the places of Ireland, and the Donn dies at home. The ending is a dindshenchas on the largest scale, mapping the country through the remains of the war's prize.

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Part 17: The Writing of the Táin

The Writing of the Táin

Summary

Fergus finishes his tale and returns to his grave; the mist lifts and the saints see only the flagstone and the stream. They disperse, and Senchán goes with Saint Ciarán towards Ciarán's foundation. On the way they pass Cruachain and the burial ground where Ailill and Medb lie in their mound, with their seven sons and the last pagan high-king, Dathí.

They come to the place where Clonmacnoise will one day stand, then only a few wattled cells and an oak church without a single grave. Ciarán takes the hide of the dun cow that fed him as a student, makes it into a book, and writes in it the Táin as Fergus told it, so that it will be known in later days.

Analysis

Hutton's closing frame joins two traditions. The famous manuscript Lebor na hUidre, 'The Book of the Dun Cow', written at Clonmacnoise around 1100, contains the oldest copy of the Táin; medieval legend held that it was made from the hide of Saint Ciarán's cow. Hutton turns that legend into the end of her story and so gives the saga a single, sacred origin (Hutton 1924) (O'Rahilly 1976).

Historically the opposite is true: the Táin we have was compiled from several versions, and the scribes themselves sometimes signal disagreement. Recension II even ends with a colophon in which one scribe blesses those who memorise the tale faithfully, and another, writing in Latin, declares that he does not believe it, since some things in it are the tricks of demons, some poetic inventions and some meant for the pleasure of fools (O'Rahilly 1967). Hutton's version leaves out that sceptical voice.

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