Early Irish Myths and Sagas #1

So now for something completely different. The last couple posts were about the Tain Bo Cuailnge, and in Celtic literature a "Tain" is really just a type of story, just like in modern literature we have comedies, tragedies, and tabloids. A Tain is a cattle raid, so the things that happen are essentially that someone steals cattle and someone else gets upset by this and responds in the rational Irish manner by killing a lot of people and consequently a lot of cattle as well. These next three stories I'll be discussing are The Wooing of Etain, the Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel, and The Cattle Raid of Froech, and though that third one is technically a Tain, it really reads much more like a wooing/pursuit story with a little bit of cattle raiding at the end. Sorry cattle enthusiasts.

Ireland's favorite thing next to Guinness and fist fights

The Wooing of Etain

I can say with great confidence that this was the most confusing of any of the stories I've read in this course so far, especially the beginning part. The Side, essentially the divinities of these ancient Celtic legends, are the main characters in this one, but lacking a knowledge of the surrounding mythology it gets pretty confusing as to which of these is a god, a demigod, or a mortal since the narrative doesn't make much mention of their status. Presumably the original intended audience would've known the surrounding mythology better than I do, and that's just another one of those factors that serve to remind us that we're reading the campfire stories from almost two millennia ago.

Anyway, onto the body of this story. It starts out with this guy Echu Ollathir, but since there are about 100 other characters named Echu we can just call him by his other name, Dagdae. Now Dagdae has got it bad for this lady, Eithne (aka Boand), but she's married to Elcmar. The issue here is apparently not that she's married but rather that Elcmar's always hanging around making it hard for her to cheat on him. Dagdae resolves this by asking Elcmar to run over to the store for some Doritos and laundry detergent and then puts a spell on him which makes him experience the next nine months as just a day. Either that or else he gives him a copy of Grand Theft Auto V which has a similar effect, sources are unclear. In these nine months Dagdae and Boand are pretty much free to do whatever they want, so she redecorates the entire living room, takes that feminist literature class she always wanted to at the community college, and gives birth to Dagdae's son, Oengus. Elcmar is apparently totally cool with having a brand new son a day after his wife was clearly not pregnant, so that's fine and they make Oengus live with his new foster father, Mider. Now in a very Conchobor-esque move, Oengus wins Elcmar's throne when he asks if he can be king for just a day and a night. When Elcmar comes back for it Oengus says not until we hear what Dagdae has to say about this. Dagdae, being his real father, naturally thinks that maybe all of Elcmar's land should stay with Oengus because why not. And now we've just begun this long and confusing story.

One day Mider comes to visit Oengus. They talk and watch some TV and then Mider gets his eye poked out with a pointed stick, but then gets it healed almost immediately.

The cast of Monty Python, not learning how to defend against a pointed stick.

I hope the three of you who get this reference enjoyed it.

Oengus asks him to stay but Mider is still salty about the eye thing, so he says he'll stay only if he gets a fancy new chariot, some really nice clothes, and the finest woman in all of Eriu, Etain. Oengus agrees and goes to her father, Ailill (not the Ailill of Tain Bo Cuailnge infamy), to ask for her. He says yes on the condition that Oengus complete a few impossible tasks for him and then pay her weight in gold, so Oengus calls up his super powerful godly father and takes care of it. Now Mider is really happy with his brand new trophy wife, but his old one, Fuamnach, isn't so pumped. Also she can do magic. So she turns innocent little Etain into a puddle. Which turns into a worm. And then a fly. Because magic. Fly-Etain hangs around Mider for a while but then gets blown away by Fuamnach's magic for seven years, a ridiculously long lifespan for both a fly and a gust of wind. She ends up landing on Oengus who appreciates her for all her magic fly abilities, like smelling nice and curing sickness. He and the fly travel everywhere together and he loves this thing. He loves it.

Because a massive disgusting bewitched fly is what I want following me everywhere

Anyway, Fuamnach finds the fly again and not knowing to leave well enough alone, she blows it away again. Everyone is understandably tired of this kind of behavior, so they just cut her head off and are done with her. Now Etain-Fly is blown around again for either 7 or 1012 years, there appears to be some discrepancy in the story. Though it's confusing, this is actually a pretty interesting convention when considering that these are immortals we're dealing with. Though it may have been intentionally, the basic idea is that to these beings, the passage of time is irrelevant and the actual years are just an arbitrary expression of "a really long time." Etain-Fly lands in someone's cup, gets drunk (and I don't mean intoxicated), and is reborn as a human. Hooray! Eventually she grows up and marries Echu Airem, but she is so fine that his brother Ailill (another Ailill, I know) falls in love with her and is so in love that he gets deathly sick. She helps to heal him, but he says he can't be completely cured unless she sleeps with him. Somehow she buys this weak excuse and consents to pity-sex, but it has to be on a hill so as not to shame her husband in his own house. Sure she's already planning to cheat on her husband with his brother, but that would just be plain rude.

The night of their meeting arrives, but Ailill sleeps through it. He couldn't stay awake long enough to meet the woman he apparently loved so much that he almost died of it. The guy must've been narcoleptic or something. This happens not once but three times. Though Etain does meet a mysterious stranger disguised as Ailill, who reveals himself to be Mider, her husband from long before she got turned into a fly and reborn as a human. I guess she buys that story, too, but says she can't go with him unless she's given by her husband. It may have been true, but damn if this isn't the most gullible girl in Ireland.

Mider is eager to win back his old wife, so he disguises himself as a hot movie star and sneaks into Echu's house where he challenges him to a game of fidchell, or ancient Irish chess. They wager some chariots and cows and stuff, and Mider loses a few times on purpose. One time he agrees to build a causeway over a bog as his wager, but he makes Echu promise that no one watch. When he finds out that Echu's steward was watching, he gets mad and challenges him to another game with the stakes this time being that the loser must grant the winner anything he asks. Mider destroys him and Echu realizes he got hustled. The use of simple games as an intellectual competition seems to be a common archetype throughout many stories across many different cultures as a stand in for physical combat.

Like that time Bill and Ted beat Death at Battleship

Echu is a man of his word, so when Mider asks for a kiss from Etain he has to agree, but tells him to come back in a little bit. In the meantime, Echu fortifies his castle and puts guards everyone, but since Mider is basically a god, he gets in anyway, turns Etain into a swan, and they fly off. Seems like something Zeus would do, what with his always turning people into swans and stealing them. Another one of those common threads between world mythologies that can really only be attributed to coincidence or subconscious universal archetypes. Whatever. Anyway, Echu is pissed off and proceeds to go around Ireland digging up every "sid" (basically a fairy mound or barrow, a place where the divine Side lived) he could bury a shovel in. He finally finds Mider who tells Echu to knock off all the landscaping he's been doing. Mider agrees to give him back Etain if he can correctly pick her out of a group of 50 identical women. Now at the moment I can't think of any other classical examples of this kind of test (though I'm sure there must be a couple), but this immediately brought to mind a scene from a more recent animated film, Spirited Away, by the fantastic director Hayao Miyazaki. Anyone who doesn't believe animation can be as legitimate an art form as live-action film should definitely watch this movie, as it's one of his best. Anyway, in the scene the protagonist must choose her parents (who have been turned into pigs) out of a large group of pigs, only to realize that they're not actually among the other pigs. I can't say with certainty whether or not the Japanese filmmaker was aware of this ancient Celtic myth, but the similarities are uncanny.

Uh...that one? Or...wait...that one?

Back to the story at hand: Echu tries to determine which woman is his wife by having them each serve him a drink, because Etain was supposed to be the best at serving. After 48 drinks he just wants to go home, watch some Netflix, have some coffee, and sleep it off, so he picks the 49th Etain as the real one.  Much later, after this woman has given Echu a daughter, Mider stops by to reveal that Etain was pregnant when he took her and that the woman Echu chose is actually his own daughter, and that his new daughter is also his granddaughter. That's some borderline Oedipus stuff right there. Echu goes and throws up for a bit and then tells his servants to abandon the child to get eaten by wild animals, but some guy takes pity and rescues her because what bad could possibly come from a child born of incest?

Thought I wouldn't fit a GoT reference in here this time? Think again. 3/3.

I spent way more time talking about The Wooing of Etain than I originally planned, so I'll get to Da Derga's Hostel and the Cattle Raid of Froech in another short post real soon.