“They were in Étar for nine days then without food or drink, unless they drank the brine of the sea or ate the clay. But Athirne had seven hundred cows. That is, there were white, red‐eared cows in the middle of the fort, and neither a man nor a boy of the Ulstermen tasted a drop of their milk because it was poured over the cliff so that not one of them would experience the taste of Athirne’s food. And the severely wounded men were carried to him, and not a drop was allowed into their heads, so that they died alone from bloody sickness. And the nobles of the Ulstermen used to go to him to beg for a drink for Conchobar, but he refused.”
This is my translation of a passage from Talland Étair “The Siege of Étar” (or Howth, in English), a text that is, in my opinion, very underappreciated. This passage occurs when the men of Ulster are besieged in Étar by the Leinstermen because of Athirne’s actions during the earlier part of the story. If this is your first encounter with Athirne and you’re wondering if it’s ok to hate him already without learning more about him, it absolutely is. He does not get better upon further acquaintance. This is just one of the awful things he does, and a lot of the story of Talland Étair is about the suffering he causes. This passage is a brutally direct description of the devastating consequences of allowing one individual to control and restrict access to a resource that should be used for the benefit of all, and it resonates as much today as I’m sure it did a thousand years ago.
Talland Étair is one of my favourite texts, but it has been generally neglected and was also quite ill-served by most of its editors and translators until recently. The first edition and translation was produced by Whitley Stokes and published in 1887. Unfortunately, Stokes chose to leave out several passages which he felt were not originally part of the text, one of which is a long poetic passage in which the woman satirist Leborcham reports the events of the siege to the women of Ulster. Eleanor Hull later reworked Stokes’ translation in 1889. It wasn’t until 1949 that Margaret Dobbs edited and translated the missing passage about Leborcham, although as the text’s most recent editor, Caoimhín Ó Dónaill, says, the value of Dobbs’ edition is undermined by misreadings of the manuscript and a translation that “is barely related to the text in places.” Frank O’Connor produced a translation of part of the text in 1967, but only part, because he felt that the rest of the text wasn’t worthwhile. (This is putting it mildly. He seems to have hated the first part of the text and thought its author entirely incompetent.) Patrick K. Ford included a translation of the text in his 1999 book The Celtic Poets, which incorporated the Leborcham material, and so a full translation was finally available over a century after Stokes’ original work. In 2005, Ó Dónaill’s new edition and translation of the text was published and offered a much better representation of the full text and a more useful and balanced discussion of its content. This edition was published by the Department of Old and Middle Irish of the National University of Ireland Maynooth and is still available for purchase from curach bhán. Unfortunately, like other publications in this series, the book is of somewhat poor physical quality with small print on slightly shiny paper, which reduces legibility, and some of the volumes also suffer from insecure bindings. Of course, no digital version is available, and so the full text remains inaccessible to anyone who uses a screen reader or simply can’t get a physical copy of the book. This is a shame, because it really is a wonderful text to read in its entirety and the passage with Leborcham’s report on the siege only serves to reinforce and enhance the description of the horrors of the siege expressed in the passage above.
Before I discuss that passage and Athirne’s behaviour, I should give a summary of the story.
There is an Ulster poet called Athirne who is a genuinely awful human being. He is so awful that Conchobar, king of Ulster, convinces him to leave Ulster and go on a tour of Ireland and bother everyone else for a while. Athirne goes off and makes an absolute pest of himself in Connacht, Munster, and Leinster. In the south of Connacht he meets the king Echu son of Luchta and demands that he give Athirne his eye, which Echu does after plucking it out of his own head. In Munster he demands to be allowed to sleep with the wife of the king Tigernach Tétbuillech in spite of the fact that she is not only pregnant but in active labour! Athirne is a truly nasty piece of work and next he decides to deliberately instigate war between Ulster and Leinster by insulting the Leinstermen so much that they kill will him and the Ulstermen will be forced to avenge him. He demands a treasure from the king Fergus Fairrce son of Nuadu Necht, and when he receives that he goes on to torment another Leinster king, Mess Gegra. He demands to sleep with Mess Gegra’s wife, threatening the vengeance of the Ulstermen if Mess Gegra does not comply. Mess Gegra allows this but makes it clear that this is for the sake of his own honour and not out of fear of the Ulstermen. Athirne then spends a year in Leinster before leaving for Ulster with 150 of the wives of Leinster noblemen. Athirne knows that as soon as he leaves Leinster and forfeits the protections he has enjoyed (and abused) as a guest, the Leinstermen will come after him (and who could blame them?) and so he summons the Ulstermen to meet him at the border. I can’t imagine that they were happy about this.
The Ulstermen lose the battle that takes place then and they retreat to Étar, where they are besieged in the wretched conditions described above. During the siege, Leborcham comes each day to provide supplies for Conchobar. She also reports back to the women of Ulster to tell them what the men are suffering but also to reassure them that those who still live will soon return. After the nine days of the siege, reinforcements arrive from Ulster and the Leinstermen are routed. The survivors then return home, except for Conall Cernach who stays behind when the rest of the Ulstermen leave. He instead pursues Mess Gegra because he holds him responsible for the deaths of his brothers, Mess Dead and Lóegaire, during the battle. Before Conall catches up to him, Mess Gegra has a strange dispute about a nut with his charioteer which results in the charioteer cutting of Mess Gegra’s arm and then killing himself. Conall finds Mess Gegra and confronts him and they fight, with Conall tying one arm to his side so that, like Mess Gegra, he only has one working arm during their combat. Conall wins, but before dying Mess Gegra tells him that once Conall has beheaded him, he should place his head on top of his own to gain Mess Gegra’s honour. Conall Cernach realizes this is a trick and instead places the head on a nearby pillar stone, which is pierced by a drop of corrosive blood and then knocked over by the force of a blow from the head. Conall then encounters Mess Gegra’s wife, Búan, and demands that she come with him. She asks to first be allowed to lament her husband, and then drops dead on the spot. She is buried there, and Conall finds that Mess Gegra’s head can no longer be moved. The brain is removed and brought back to Ulster, where it is eventually used to kill Conchobar. The end!
My initial interest in this text was in the death of Mess Gegra. I was working on what eventually became two articles about his death and the further adventures of his head and brain. The first of these articles, “Dangerous Heads and Posthumous Revenge: Some Parallels for the Death of Mess Gegra in Talland Étair” was published in Celtica in 2022 and the second is forthcoming. I was really struck by the passage describing the siege and Athirne’s hoarding though because it is such a powerful and incisive depiction of the inequality and injustice that inevitably follow when control over essential resources is given to only a few individuals. There are a lot of ways of responding to and thinking about Athirne’s behaviour throughout the text, but especially in this passage, which so starkly contrasts his wealth and wastefulness with the suffering and deprivation of the Ulstermen .
This passage certainly elicits a strong emotional response of horror and sadness and anger. It’s upsetting to think of anyone in these terrible conditions, but these are familiar characters, including Cú Chulainn. It’s not clear exactly which of the Ulstermen are present during the siege and which come later to provide support and break the siege, but among those present are certainly characters that we like and care for and we are of course upset to imagine them suffering in this way. This is one of the reasons that I think the Leborcham passage that Stokes rejected works so well in the fuller context of the tale. It comes when the battle has ended and the Ulstermen have suffered heavy losses but ultimately defeated the Leinstermen. Leborcham goes to Ulster ahead of them and tells the story of the siege and battle to the women of Ulster, who are anxiously waiting to hear which of their husbands and sons and brothers and fathers have survived and which have not. Leborcham tells them who lives and who doesn’t, but also describes the terrible conditions that they have survived, saying: “I have seen it there. The Ulstermen found clay which they licked, as the honey-desirer licks honey.1 It destroys us. The brine of the great sea satisfies us, it receded across fury (?).”2 The thought of the women of Ulster hearing this as they learn of the loss of so many of their loved ones is terribly sad. And who is to blame for all of this? Athirne, of course.
Not only did Athirne deliberately instigate the conflict that led to the siege, he then sits in the middle of that siege with 700 cows and orders that their milk be poured out every day. How can we not be angry? This goes well beyond selfishness. It’s not like he’s just hoarding resources for his own use, which would be bad enough. Here he’s intentionally destroying resources (milk) in order to increase the suffering of the very men who came to save him. What kind of person does this? The exact kind of person who insists on having sex with a woman while she is giving birth and demands that a man rip out his own eye. And we can think “why is this allowed to happen?” and talk about rules of hospitality and the power of poets in medieval Ireland, but in the modern world grocery stores and restaurants regularly throw away or destroy food rather than giving it to those in need, artificial shortages of medications and other important goods cause suffering all over the world, and relentless and deliberate waste still co-exists with appalling levels of deprivation. “Why is this allowed to happen?” is very much the right question, but clearly not one that we have a good answer for. Not everyone sees the value of studying medieval literature, but just a few lines of this medieval Irish story have expressed in a crystal clear and viscerally impactful way a truth about the modern world, and exposed how long this kind of injustice has been recognized and yet not addressed.
How would the original audience have understood this passage? It’s clearly a condemnation of Athirne’s cruelty and his abuses of his power and privilege. Is it more than that? Is it more broadly a commentary on the unchecked power of the poet? That’s one reading, but I think we have to consider Leborcham’s role in this text again. Like Athirne, she is a poet who is close to the king. In fact, the passage immediately following the one that I began with describes how Leborcham brings supplies to Conchobar every day and her general service to him.
“This is how Conchobar was supplied: the girl would bring it on her back from Emain Macha regularly in the evening. It is she, Leborcham, who would bring it. There were a male and a female slave in the house of Conchobar, and she is the child that was born to them, the girl Leborcham. The form of the girl was misshapen, that is, her two feet and her two knees were behind her, and the backs of her two thighs and her two heels were in front of her. It is she who used to traverse Ireland in a single day. Everything of good and of evil that was done in Ireland, she would report it to Conchobar in the Cráebrúad at the end of the day. Her little loaf, which was the size of sixty loaves, would be placed before her at the head of the fire, alongside her portion with the host. It was she, then, who carried his portion to Conchobar on her back from Emain Macha.”
I could (and perhaps will) write a whole other post contrasting the figures of Athirne and Leborcham, but it is clear that although they come from very different positions, they have achieved a similar status. There are poems in Tochmarc Lúaine ocus Aided Athairne “The Wooing of Luaine and the Violent Death of Athirne” that have yet to be fully translated and which describe Leborcham (or two different Leborchams, to be accurate). They make it clear that she holds a high position in spite of being born to slaves, is physically distorted in various ways, and consumes what might be considered more than her fair share of food, as we see also in this passage from Talland Étair. Athirne isn’t actually consuming what he takes though, he merely prevents others from having it. His is basically a protection racket. If he is paid off, he will leave people in peace. Until the next time, of course. Or unless he just feels like enjoying the suffering of others. Leborcham, in contrast, provides an actual service. Never think that she is a tame poet though. It is always made clear that she comes and goes as she pleases, even against Conchobar’s wishes in Longes mac nUislenn “The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu,” and the fact that she is able to come and go during the siege at Étar demonstrates this again.
There’s another important aspect of Athirne’s actions to consider here, and that is his stated motivation for pouring the milk of his cows away. He very specifically does not want to share what he has. He does not want others to have the experience of tasting his food. That belongs to him and him alone. There are other stories about Athirne and his hoarding behaviour. A short text called Athirne Ailgessach has been translated by John Carey in The Celtic Heroic Age under the title “Athirne’s Greediness” and by Ford in The Celtic Poets as “Athirne the Insistent.” There we learn that Athirne refused to eat where others could see him but instead would take his food elsewhere. A kind of jealous hoarding, sometimes at the expense of others, is not atypical of poets, but usually what they are hoarding is their skill and knowledge. (Do I have thoughts about the hoarding of knowledge and the state of academic publishing? Yes, yes I do.) In a story known as “Athirne and Amairgen,” also translated in both The Celtic Heroic Age and The Celtic Poets, when Athirne learns of the boy Amairgen who appears to have great wisdom, he feels threatened and tries to kill him. He is then forced by the Ulstermen to pay reparations for this, and he also takes the boy into fosterage to teach him. Amairgen then supplants Athirne as chief poet of Ulster. In one of the poems in Tochmarc Lúaine, Leborcham herself is said to give birth to nine children each year, but she kills them immediately so that they cannot usurp her position.
“A birthing of nine children was what she bore
each ever-bright year
to the son of Errgind Illdathach,
to the steward of Conchobar.
From the womb they roared,
from her speckled, pus-filled womb.
She crushed them under her thighs,
she beat them with her hand-striking,
her horrible, baneful children,
so that they did not gain the authority
of the function of messenger,
from the fully-active Leborcham,
messenger of the province of Conchobar.”3
If we look just a bit to the east, we can consider the Welsh story of Gwion Bach and Taliesin, also translated by Ford in both The Mabinogi and Other Medieval Welsh Tales and The Celtic Poets. As the boy Gwion Bach, he steals the gift of knowledge that the witch Ceridwen had intended for her son. Reborn as the poet Taliesin, he taunts the court poets of Maelgwn Gwynedd, depriving them of their ability to speak and mocking them for not knowing the things that he does. It is not enough to simply know. These poets want to know what others don’t know, to be known to possess this secret knowledge, and to prevent others from gaining it whenever possible. Knowledge is not diminished when shared, but they behave as if it is a finite resource and guard it jealously. It isn’t about the knowledge. It’s about the power (and profit) gained by the exclusive ownership of knowledge. (Again, the state of academic publishing is a disgrace.)
A final thought on reading Athirne’s actions here, in the tiny microcosm of society that exists during the siege of Étar: for a society to function, resources must flow and remain in circulation. This applies to knowledge, but also to actual physical resources. Here, Athirne stops that flow. He holds back or redirects the flow of milk, a liquid needed to sustain life in this situation. In his 1963 article “Structural Typology in North American Indian Folktales,”4 Alan Dundes pointed out that many of these folktales are centred on the movement from a state of disequilibrium to a state of equilibrium. Disequilibrium usually consists of a lack or surplus of something, and often takes the form of hoarded resources. Dundes describes “hoarded object tales” in which resources such as “game, fish, flood-plants, water, tides, seasons, sun, light, fire, and so forth are not available to the majority of mankind or to most members of a tribe” (122). He also comments on a type of story called “The Release of Impounded Water,” in which a monster “keeps back all the water in the world” and must be slain in order for the waters to be released (123). This is a type of story known in many cultures. In the Into-European world the most famous example is no doubt that of the Vedic story of the serpent Vr̥tra, who holds back the waters and must be killed by the god Indra in order to allow the waters to flow again and thus restore equilibrium. What we find during the siege of Étar is an extreme state of disequilibrium. Rather than killing Athirne to allow resources to flow correctly again, instead it is the Ulstermen themselves who must be released from their containment in order to restore equilibrium. Killing Athirne wouldn’t have ended the siege, of course, that required collective activity from both the Ulstermen at Étar and those who came to help them, but it certainly would have alleviated the suffering experienced during those nine days of drinking brine and eating clay. The thematic similarities between stories of poets hoarding knowledge and other resources and the dragons and serpents and monsters who hold back water from the world are certainly worth further thought.
Don’t worry about Athirne, by the way. He comes to a very sticky end, although not before doing more irreparable harm. When Conchobar decides to marry a woman called Luaine, Athirne and his sons insist that she sleep with them. When she refuses, they satirize her, causing physical blemishes and her death of shame. This, finally, is enough for the Ulstermen to decide that Athirne’s continued existence no longer has any value. When Conchobar asks how Athirne should be punished, the Ulstermen make it clear that they have not forgotten their past troubles. “The nobles of the Ulstermen said that this is the vengeance that would be fitting: to kill Athirne along with his children and his people. ‘Many times’, they said, ‘the Ulstermen have found shame in battle because of him’.” Collectively, the Ulstermen decide that Athirne must die, and this as at least in part motivated by his actions in Talland Étair. They pursue him and wall him up inside his home with his children and household, then they burn his fortress down around him. His daughters and household did not deserve this, but the blame is entirely Athirne’s, and he certainly had it coming.
Next week’s post will consider the crucial interconnectedness of independent narrative prose texts and materials like the dindshenchas by exploring the story of Medb’s little-known sister Derbriu and the pigs of Derblinne.
- Milchobar, a compound of mil “honey” and cobar “desirer, one who desires” is a poetic expression meaning “bear.” [↩]
- Ó Dónaill doesn’t translate the last part of this line and Dobbs’ translation is spotty and unclear. The end of the line is tethrag tar cutig. I take tethrag to be a form of traigid “ebbs, recedes; causes to ebb; retreats, diminishes, exhausts” and cutig to be a form of cuthach “rage, fury, madness.” Tar is quite flexible, but across or past or beyond could make some sense here, perhaps conveying the sense that the need to drink the brine of the sea has robbed them of their war-fury? I would be very happy to hear anyone else’s thoughts on this! [↩]
- My translation based on the 1980 edition of Liam Breatnach [↩]
- Dundes, Alan. 1963. “Structural Typology in North American Indian Folktales,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 19/1: 121-130. [↩]