Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) (29 page)

Stories of how Cúchulainn dies began to circulate as early as the tenth century, well before the
Táin Βó Cuailnge
reached its final form. In all accounts he is no more than twenty-seven years old, the magic number built on Celtic triplism: 3 x 3 x 3. Always invincible in combat, Cúchulainn is brought down by a combination of the physical and the metaphysical: the deceptions of wizardry, the violations of
gessa
, and the implacable vengeance of wronged heroes. The vision of the champion forcing himself to stand tall in his final moments has appealed deeply to later generations of readers. It is the unmistakable inspiration for Oliver Sheppard’s famous statue in Dublin and has been the starting point for numerous modern illustrators.

In his battles with Medb, Cúchulainn had killed a warrior named Cailitin, who was also a wizard and possibly of Fomorian origin. After this Cailitin’s wife gave birth to sextuplets, three boys and three girls, all of them hideous and misshapen. As their father had been her ally, Medb takes the venomous little creatures under her protection and sends them all to Scotland to study sorcery. On their return she incites them against her long-time adversary, Cúchulainn. She begins with an invasion of Cuailnge, to the southeast of Emain Macha, certain of drawing Conchobar mac Nessa into the fray. Hearing that treachery is planned against Ulster’s prime hero, Conchobar orders Cúchulainn to come to Emain Macha, while still sharing the company of Emer, his druids and the women of Ulster. The loathsome children of Cailitin come to the plain before the fortress and fling up showers of dead oak leaves and withered stalks of thistles. They raise an ear-splitting clamour that sounds like a vast army. Thinking Emain Macha undefended, Cúchulainn starts to rush out to meet the invaders when Cathbad, the wise druid, tells him it is all a hallucination, designed to lure him to his death. Wait three days, he adds, and it will all be gone. One of the witches transforms herself into a crow and flies over Cúchulainn’s head, taunting him with reports of the destruction of Dún Delgan and of his followers.

After passing the house of his nursemaid, where he stops for some refreshment, Cúchulainn comes upon three crones, all blind in the left eye. They are cooking something on a rowan-tree spit over a fire; it is the carcass of a dog. As the crones also have poisons and spells, Cúchulainn is wary, much more because the eating of dog meat is a violation of a
geis
, incumbent upon him because of his name, ‘
hound
of Culann’. But he cannot simply withdraw because he would violate another
geis
if he visited any cooking hearth and did not accept food offered to him. His chariot speeds by, implying he does not wish to stop, when one of the crones calls out to him to stop and be sociable. He refuses, but she entreats him further by saying her small meal is only a roasting hound. Then she adds the taunt that it is unseemly to see the great ones of the world who cannot stand the company of the humble and the poor. With this he relents and draws near to her fire, where she gives him a dog shoulder-blade with her left hand. He eats some of the meat, holding it in his left hand. Uneasy, he then tries to put the meat aside, hiding it under his left thigh. Forces beyond Cúchulainn’s person are not deceived, and immediately he feels a seizure. The strength in his left arm and thigh begins to diminish. Cúchulainn and Láeg quickly leave the crones’ fire and push on to Muirtheimne.

Enemies, watching from a cautious distance, know the champion is nearing his end but dare not approach him as they can still see the hero’s light flickering around his head. Holding the huge wound together, Cúchulainn drags himself to a nearby lake for a soothing drink and a chance to wash himself. Seeing a pillarstone nearby, he struggles toward it, putting his back against it for support. Taking his belt, he ties himself to the stone so that he might die standing up, as he had once pledged. Lugaid and Erc banter between themselves over who should have the courage to act. Cúchulainn’s faithful horse, the Grey of Macha, though bleeding from his wounds, returns to make a last pass with teeth and hooves against the timid attackers. The agony continues for three days while the ravens of battle, Badb and Mórrígan, hover about the champion’s head until the hero’s light at last flickers out. Cúchulainn then lets out a great sigh, splitting the stone at his back. A raven lights on his slumped shoulder and settles there. The Grey of Macha fetches Conall, brings him to Cúchulainn’s body and lays his head on the dead hero’s breast.

Emboldened by the sight of the raven where it would otherwise never perch, Erc and Lugaid approach Cúchulainn, lifeless but still standing. As Lugaid pulls back Cúchulainn’s hair, hoping for a clean swipe at the neck, the Ulsterman’s sword falls, severing Lugaid’s hand at the wrist. In revenge Lugaid and his men remove both the right hand and the head of Cúchulainn, which they bear in triumph to Tara. The hero’s body, still tied to the pillarstone, remains in the field. Tradition associates Cúchulainn’s death with the stone called Clocharfarmore [stone of the big man] still standing about four miles south of Dundalk.

Later Conall Cernach avenges his friend’s death by killing Lugaid.

Stories from the third cycle of Irish heroic literature are often set far from the seats of royal power and usually depict men in battle. Sometimes the men are in conflict with rapacious mortal invaders, at other times with different bellicose factions of their own warrior caste, or perhaps with alluring supernatural figures. At the centre of the action, not always portrayed favourably, is the poet–warrior–seer Fionn mac Cumhaill, along with his armed companions, the Fianna Éireann. Many of the later stories of the cycle are set within a narrative frame that asserts that Oisín, Fionn’s son, and Caílte mac Rónáin, Fionn’s cohort or nephew, have survived to a later date and are recalling wondrous deeds from earlier days. The third is also the most voluminous of all the cycles, with more stories recorded in manuscript tradition than from the other three, as well as much celebration in oral tradition. It is the only cycle still alive in the mouths of traditional Irish and Scottish Gaelic storytellers at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Some stories, old and new, are filled with rollicking adventures told with a
Boys’ Own Paper
depiction of hard-won victories. Stories told within the Oisín and Caílte narrative framework, especially when the listener is a Christian figure such as St Patrick, are tinged with a sense of loss and regret for a stout-hearted, generous heroism that cannot be regained.

The word ‘Fenian’ is a neologism coined in 1804 by yet another charlatan, Colonel Charles Vallancey, outwardly appearing to be an anglicization of the Irish ‘fianna’. Contained within it, however, is an apparent word-play on the Old Irish
Féni
, another name for the early invaders of Ireland, the Goidels, the people who brought the Irish language to the island. They are often thought ‘true Gaels’. In early Irish law the Féni are the old, aboriginal or purest population, free land-tillers, never to be confused with servants or slaves. To someone who knows no Irish the words
Féni
and fianna might appear similar, but from their roots they have no linguistic connection. ‘Fenian’ nonetheless entered popular usage in the nineteenth century and acquired political associations that do nothing to illuminate Old Irish literature. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, the revolutionary body founded in 1858, adapted ‘Fenian’ as an alternative name, and so it was cited in story and song, as in ‘The Bold Fenian Men’. Fenian activity peaked in 1866–7, with an armed invasion of Canada by US members, most of them veterans of the Union Army in the Civil War, and open rebellion in British-occupied Ireland. More recently ‘Fenian’ has been the popular designation for Republican, anti-British advocacy, especially in the six counties of Ulster still a part of the United Kingdom.

Membership in a fianna was exclusive but not hereditary. An applicant had to distinguish himself intellectually as well as physically. He must become a prime poet and master twelve books of poesy. Among the ordeals he had to endure was standing waist-deep in a hole armed only with a shield and a hazel stick while nine warriors threw their spears at him from a distance of nine furrows; to suffer even one wound was to fail. He would be rejected if his weapons quivered in his hands, if his braided hair was disturbed by hanging branches, or if his foot cracked a dead branch as he strode through the forest. He should have the ability to make a running leap over a bough equal to the height of his brow or to pass easily under one as low as his knee. One of the most difficult tests required him to pull a thorn from his foot while running, without slowing down.

Some of the most admired passages from the Fenian Cycle are not narrative but rather nature poetry, such as those in the fifteenth-century
Duanaire Finn
[The Poem Book of Fionn], which cannot be known adequately in translation. The twentieth-century poet and fiction writer James Stephens evoked the earlier tradition in a widely quoted passage in his
Irish Fairy Tales
(1920). In it Fionn quizzes his men as to which sound provides the finest music to be heard. Their answers are all worthy: the calling of a cuckoo from a high tree, the ring of a spear on a shield, the belling of a stag across water, the baying of a tuneful pack of hounds heard in the distance, the song of a lark, the laugh of a gleeful girl or the whisper of a beloved. The master then answers his own question. ‘The music of what happens,’ says great Fionn, ‘that is the finest music in the world.’