Endurance

by Dermot Somers

  DUEL AT ARDEE

  It was from this campsite just north of Ardee that Ferdia was sent forth to fight Cuchulainn in single combat. The two heroes were foster brothers, one of the closest of all relationships in Gaelic culture. Medb had bribed and tricked Ferdia into the fight, offering her daughter as a reward. To break his continuing resistance, she plied Ferdia with drink, reverting to her role as the ‘goddess who intoxicates’. He did not yield until she claimed in public that Cuchulainn had insulted his prowess. With that twist of Medb’s tongue, single combat at the ford of Ardee was launched between the champion of Ulster and the Connacht hero.5

  The dramatic power of the episode comes from the emotional bond created between the two heroes. After a bad start when they goad each other with disappointed insults, the brutality of the struggle is underscored by the kind of mutual love that Yukio Mishima, the twentieth-century novelist, celebrated among Japanese warriors. It is a physical and a mystical bond that comes from living on the edge of the sword, in the light of glory and the shadow of death. To kill one another is their professional duty and the ultimate challenge to their skill, but the more their bodies merge in blood and gore in the ford at Ardee, the more they love the traditional oneness that they are. Aristotle, in the fourth century BC, reported that the culture of Celtic warriorhood was openly tolerant of homosexuality. Relations between warriors and women in the Táin have no trace of the tenderness with which Ferdia and Cuchulainn minister to each other’s wounds at night. Their love for each other is the heart of the brutal saga; their duel is the most famous episode of the Táin – and yet it is known to be a recent addition, dating from the ninth or tenth century, and not part of the original at all.

  On the fourth day of combat, Cuchulainn found the viciousness to perform a foul stroke and to overcome their unity. He hooked the barbed ga bolga, a unique weapon, out of the water with his foot and kicked it up into Ferdia’s crotch so that the spear entered between his buttocks and drove straight up into his bowels where it opened out into thirty points.6 Ferdia’s dead body had to be butchered in order to extract the weapon. Cuchulainn’s act amounted to a savage, symbolic rape. As a betrayal, it is perhaps surpassed only by his slaughter – in another story – of his own son. He used the ga bolga on that occasion too, bringing the boy’s entrails down around his ankles. Those who portray Cuchulainn as a shining hero might bear in mind that his most extreme acts of savagery were intended to impress the king of Ulster with his absolute loyalty.

  PURSUIt THROUGH CO. WESTMEATH

  The Ulstermen were on their feet. A horde of heroes led by Conchobar, their king, poured from the northern province in pursuit of Medb’s army. Their coming shook the forests and drove the wild animals out onto the plains. The breath of the warriors filled the valleys with a fog so dense that the hills looked like islands in a lake. The uproar of their travel thundered through the land. Delays for single combat had ensured that the retreating army would be caught. An advance foray came upon Medb’s rearguard at a ford on the River Brosna, just to the east of Mullingar, relieving them of their heads and of the women they had kidnapped in the Cooleys.

  Medb sent back an observer who saw men and horses instead of hills and slopes all the way from Ardee to Mullingar, a distance of more than forty miles. The vengeful Ulstermen skidded to a halt at Slemain Midi, a smooth plateau a couple of miles northwest of Mullingar. The ancient name is preserved in the modern Slanemore (big, slick place). There the Ulstermen set up their war camp overlooking Lough Owel. The quality of the landscape and its pleasant elevation is emphasised by a variety of burial mounds, staking a claim to the airy plateau from the earliest times.

  In the morning, the soldiers rushed naked into battle. Those whose camps faced the other direction burst out through the backs of their tents in their rage to fight. They had a few miles to travel because the battle erupted further south in a place known to the Táin as Gáireach, and as Garhy today. Close to Lough Ennell, it lies along the R390 from Mullingar to Moate. Well beyond the suburbs of Mullingar, the rumpled landscape is attractively undeveloped. It is studded with ringforts in various stages of extinction.

  Fergus mac Róich of Ulster, fighting for Queen Medb, came up against a former friend on the battlefield. ‘You rage very hard at your kith and kin,’ the warrior sneered. ‘For the sake of a whore’s backside.’

  Cuchulainn, his body riddled with wounds, joined in the slaughter, and massacred all before him. After an attempt on the life of his former king was deflected, mac Róich and his Ulster exiles left the battlefield rather than dishonour themselves any further. The Gaileoin of Leinster and the men of Munster also withdrew. The battle lay between Ulster and Connacht alone. Medb’s army suffered a savage and a well-deserved defeat. They fled to the Shannon, crossing this time at Athlone. Medb bewailed the shambles of the retreat to her former lover. Fergus made his bitter response: ‘We followed the rump of a misguiding woman. It is the usual thing for a herd led by a mare to be strayed and destroyed.’

  BATTLE OF THE BULLS

  The journey moved into metaphor as Donn Cuailnge, the brown bull, met Finnbennach, the white-horned, and the battle of the bulls broke out. Donn, in myth, was the force of darkness, and Finn the power of light. The battle raged the length and breadth of Ireland under cover of night, until the white bull was slaughtered and his mangled remains were hoisted on the victor’s horns. The dark bull staggered northwards, strewing the landscape with portions of his foe. As each body-part hit the ground, the landscape received a matching name. The liver, ae, fell at Cruachain Ae. Luan, the loins, landed at Athlone. Láirig, the thigh, gave its name to Port Láirge, Waterford today. And Dublin, or Áth Cliath, was named for cliatha, the ribs. This conclusion is not one of the finer moments of the Táin. It is Dinnseanchas (place-lore) out of control. The brown bull, a carcase impaled on his horns, suggests nothing so much as a berserk forklift careering countrywide, a pallet of beef aloft on the prongs.

  The Cattle-raid of Cooley is a rear-view mirror on a violent past. The Pagan Iron Age of the Táin – a few centuries spanning the birth of Christ – is a shadowy period, fraught with hardship. As a race, we do not remember coming through there. (Many of us joined the bloodstream and the memory bank a long while after.) Maybe we disowned those origins in the light of the Christianity that followed. The ingrown darkness will have gone on taking toll, exacting blood money for the past, no matter how far we move away. Time, for us, has been a rising series of coils, repeating circles, playing out conflicts. We have not lifted far above the early spirals, and the past is still the future if we slip back down a notch.

  We live at the scene of the crime, and the flashbacks have not ended yet.

  Notes

  1. Fergus mac Róich is a well-known character in the ancient literature, quite apart from the Táin itself. His virility is reported to have been of equine proportions. This explains why he was drafted into the Táin as the story developed: to match the reputation of Queen Medb. At one stage of the Táin journey, King Ailill spies on the entwined lovers. He steals Fergus’s sword and has it replaced with a wooden one in a piece of symbolism from comic burlesque.

  2. There were major fords up and down the river, which might have suited better. Further south (near Clonmacnoise), a gravel-ridge cut the Shannon. This was the Eiscir Riada, a bank of moraine deposited by receding ice and crossing Ireland from Dublin to Galway. Where it was breached by the river, sections of higher ground remained between the strands of the current, creating a logical ford. The Shannon Commissioners dredged and deepened the main channel in the 1840s, lowering the level of the river in the process.

  3. The culture of Ireland in the Pagan Iron Age is characterised by features recognisable from the European Celts, such as the use of chariots. This culture would reach a climax and then collapse. Its lore and legends would remain fixed at a certain point in time. It was replaced by a later culture whose folk heroes, na Fianna, would continue to develop in the imagination right through to mode
rn literature.

  4. Their confinement has been read as a classic case of couvade, a common practice of primitive tribes whereby men go into labour and upstage their pregnant women. The practice also occurs in modern culture.

  5. Dinnseanchas, the lore of place, was actually responsible. The fact that there was a point on the River Dee with a name that sounded somewhat like Fear Diadh allowed a story to develop around a warrior of that name. Being close to the heartland of the Cuchulainn myth, it was logical that the two would then confront each other.

  6. ‘… co ndechaid dar timthireacht a chuirp agus gorbo lán cach n-áge de dá fhorrindibh.’

  ‘… and it [ga bolga] entered his body through the anus and filled every joint and limb of him with its barbs.’ Táin: transl. Cecile O’Rahilly.

  5 TOUR OF THE NORTH

  Brian Boru (1006)

  No other Irish ruler, before or since, travelled as vigorously as Brian Boru. Kingship was to wind down wearily soon after his reign, as if he had worn out the mechanism. Upstart king of a minor Irish tribe, he grew in power a thousand years ago to dominate the entire island. A master of military and political strategy, he challenged the ruling dynasty for the high kingship. Reigning at the end of the Viking period, he was killed in old age at the Battle of Clontarf.

  Brian Boru was so mobile throughout his life that travel became a major theme in the folklore celebrating him. A young woman was said to have walked the length of Ireland on her own, from Tory in the northwest to Glandore in the far south, during his reign. She flaunted a rod in front of her, with a gold ring mounted on it. The story symbolised the peace and prosperity of the great king’s reign, and was meant to reflect well on his descendants. The annals give a more accurate image, though, of a period clotted with medieval violence. The young woman with the ring is more appealing to folk memory than the prisoners who made harrowing journeys in and out of the country at the time, as part of a booming slave trade.

  MARCHING KING

  Self-imposed king of an ungovernable Ireland, in his sixties, Brian Boru ranged powerfully around the country from Kincora, his base at Killaloe in Co. Clare. He patrolled Ulster in particular, clockwise and anticlockwise, as if he intended to tread the province into submission. The tour of the north in 1006, made at the age of sixty-five, was a show of strength, a triumphant procession from Kincora, taking hostages from all the unruly tribes of Ulster to consolidate his power.

  At the age of seventy, he launched a two-pronged approach on the Donegal area, his ships sailing up the Atlantic coast while his army went north by land. He captured the King of Cenél Conaill and brought him back to Co. Clare as a hostage. Brian’s eldest son, Murchadha, his right-hand man, also raided Donegal that year and took, according to the annals, ‘three hundred captives and many cows’.

  Some of Brian’s journeys might be seen as ritual flourishes, the excursions of a man who could not sit still, even in old age. But the intention, in his later years, was to dominate the tribes of the northern Uí Néill, who had traditionally provided every second king of Ireland, alternating with the Uí Néill of Meath. Brian, an outsider, had smashed that chain and was intent on forging a new one. Murchadha, his son, was to be the second link.

  At the age of seventy-two, Brian marched into Osraighe, (roughly Co. Kilkenny today) and spent three summer months punishing it for defiance. He pushed on to Dublin in September, and besieged the city for a further three months, without gaining entry.

  He travelled the long road from Clare to Dublin again the following year, 1014 – one way only this time. Given the average life expectancy at the time, he was more than halfway through a second life by then. Seventy-three-year-olds did not go raiding around the medieval countryside as a rule. The stones and mud of the roads would lock a man’s joints at an early age, whether on horseback or on foot, while the scars of battle would strangle flexibility. Perhaps Brian was spared the normal penalties of age. A diet of fish from the Shannon estuary would have helped in that respect. There were other exceptions; Máel Sechnaill, the Uí Néill King of Ireland who was Brian’s rival and sometimes ally, was his match in ways.

  Máel Sechnaill, later known as Malachy, used the military march as a jab into the midriff of an enemy. He was defensive too, building a barrier of stone across the River Shannon at Lanesborough to block the body punches launched upstream by Brian Boru.

  PROPAGANDA

  Brian died at the Battle of Clontarf, on Good Friday, 1014, hacked to death in his tent by a Viking called Brodir, from the Isle of Man. Many of the popular tales of Brian’s kingship come from Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh, an account of the Viking wars in Ireland, written over a century later. Composed as propaganda, ‘The Battle of the Irish against the Foreigners’ is responsible for Brian Boru’s reputation as the greatest king of Ireland before or since. It was not the only account. The Brjanssaga from the Norse Chronicles also gave Brian Boru a heroic dimension while relating the events at Clontarf from the other side. The Saga reported that Brian’s severed head knitted itself back to his body after the attack. Strong on anatomical detail, it described the fate of Brodir, the king-slayer, when Brian’s people captured him. ‘They cut open his belly and led him round and round the trunk of a tree and so wound all his entrails out of him, and he did not die before they were all drawn out of him.’

  It contained flashes of humour too, along with the surgery. Thorstein, one of the Norsemen fleeing towards the longships moored off the shore, stopped to tie his shoestrings. About to behead him, Brian’s grandson wondered why he was not in a hurry. ‘I won’t get home tonight,’ Thorstein said. ‘I live in Iceland.’

  ORIGINS

  Brian Boru was born at the tail end of a sprawling family. His father was petty king of a medieval group, based to the north of Limerick, on the Shannon. Of obscure origins, they had recently adopted the name Dál Cais (Dalcassians), echoing an ancient king. In a fiercely elitist culture, they had no future without a royal past. A suitable lineage was forged.

  The family occupied a couple of forts in the area of modern Killaloe. Kincora, the fort fondly associated with Brian himself, has disappeared. One theory is that it stood on the hill overlooking the Shannon, where the Catholic church of Killaloe stands today. Béal Boru still exists outside the town. It was a ringfort of the kind traditionally known as a ráith (or rath): a circular embankment with a cluster of thatched dwellings within. The wooden houses were fiercely combustible. Fortified with a palisade of bristling stakes, Béal Boru overlooked the Shannon. It is thought that there was a ford on the river at that point. Dál Cais were in a position to control travel and trade at strategic points, such as the Falls of Doonass at Castleconnell, where boats were portaged along the banks. Boru, Boroimhe, was not a surname. It was a cattle tax, paid to the occupants of the fort. (A couple of centuries after the death of Brian Boru, the Normans developed the site into a defensive mound.)

  The wider region of Brian’s birth was Tuamumu, Thomond or North Munster. His people were traditionally a minor force in the overall province, controlling Clare, parts of North Tipperary and East Limerick. There are hints that Brian’s grandfather, Lorcan, may have considered himself King of Munster during a hiccup in the reign of the Eoghanacht, the ruling dynasty. Brian’s father, Cennétigh, certainly did not reach the throne, but he did the best he could and married into another one. The daughter of the King of Connacht gave a transfusion of royalty to his sons.

  Orlaith, one of Brian’s older sisters, was well placed in the court of Donncha, the elderly King of Ireland. His fourth wife, she was effectively a concubine. She may have missed her step in the dark, because she was found in her stepson’s bed, and was executed. That was AD940, a year before Brian was born.

  By the time Brian had reached early manhood, an older brother, Mathgamhain (Mahon), was King of Thomond. Like a Clare hurling team, Mathgamhain and Dál Cais were not rated for the Munster title, and that made them doubly dangerous. The Eoghanacht had kept the title to themselves for cent
uries and assumed they owned it. But Dál Cais, the minor power, were primed and going places. Their rivals in Munster were in disarray. On the broader stage, the Uí Néill had been over-kings of Ireland for centuries, with the southern and northern factions taking it in turns to provide the King of Ireland: rí Éireann.

  The Viking invasions and wars of the previous hundred and fifty years were largely over by then. The Northmen had settled in towns, which they developed around the Irish coast, including Dublin, Waterford and Cork. Close to Dál Cais territory, Limerick was a major Viking outpost, a port on the Shannon estuary, a trading centre. Like Dublin, it was surrounded by new agricultural development.

  The population of Ireland in the tenth century was about half a million, although some estimates are a fraction of that. Many areas that are populated now were undrained bog or heavy woodland then. Apart from the nobles and the landless poor, the inhabitants were mainly cattle-breeders and mixed farmers. The equivalent of today’s ‘strong’ farmer was the bó-aire who lived in his own ringfort and was a snug man.

  GUERRILLA WARFARE

  Cogadh Gaedhel, an account written over a century later, insists that Brian Boru spent some of his early manhood in the wilderness, on the Clare side of the Shannon. Estranged from his brother Mathgamhain, the tribal king, he waged guerrilla warfare on the Vikings of Limerick. The theory is that he learned to fight like the Danes, learned the use of their weapons and developed a sense of military strategy. Usually dismissed as folklore and propaganda, the story at least has the merit of making him learn the hard way.