8
Arthur and the Irish
In the prose genre of late-medieval/early-modern Irish literature known in scholarly parlance as the romantic tale (scéal romansaíochta), Arthur looms large. Of the approximately sixty examples of the genre that have survived, five (the earliest stemming from the fifteenth century) involve Arthur and/or Arthurian characters (particularly Gawain, but also including a daughter of Arthur!), and none of the stories they tell can be traced back to any extant sources outside of Ireland. “No other body of foreign heroes had this sort of success,” declared Alan Bruford in his description and inventory of the romantic tale (1969: 11).
Yet, as noted by William Gillies in his survey of the Arthurian waifs and strays to be found in the folk tales, folk songs, and local legends of Scotland (Gillies 1981, 1982: 68–70; Gowans 1992), only a few traces of these seemingly indigenous Arthurian tales survived into the Irish and Scottish Gaelic oral storytelling tradition, which probably incubated the genre as a whole, and which, as recorded in the past two hundred years, proved in the main very hospitable to the narrative material of the romantic tales, especially in those cases where the protagonists are “native” characters. Still, given the close connections between manuscripts and oral performance that obtained in Ireland from the beginnings of Irish literature down to the nineteenth century, it is likely that this corpus of Irish Arthurian story was part of the popular mainstream of storytelling, not limited to a literary or antiquarian backwater. In fact, one of these Arthurian tales (Eachtra an Mhadra Mhaoil, “Adventure of the Cropped Dog”) is witnessed in over three dozen manuscripts, surely a sign of the story’s popularity. (The Irish word eachtra, cognate with Latin extra and used in earlier literature to designate tales of travel into the Otherworld, comes to be used in the genre of the romantic tale to convey the sense of “adventure”.)
Before the era of the romantic tale, the earliest references in medieval Irish literature to an “Arthur” who might be the same as the famous Arthur of Britain cluster around the death of a legendary scion of the royal dynasty of the Dál nAraidi, a people of eastern Ulster. Mongán mac Fiachna, the fosterling of the wizardly seafarer Manannán mac Lir (who sired him in the guise of Fiachna), is said in these sources (including annals) to have been slain in the early seventh century by an “Artú(i)r son of Bicóir” from Britain, with a “dragon stone from the sea” (ail dracoin din muir; Nutt & Meyer 1895: 1.29, 1.84, 1.137–9; Mac Mathúna 1985: 43; Dooley 2004: 18; White 2006: 40, 58). In light of the fact that Mongán’s conception tale (preserved in a text as early as the seventh or eighth century) stands as the closest Celtic analogue to the account of Arthur’s deception-laden origins given by Geoffrey of Monmouth centuries later (Mac Cana 1972: 128–9), it is tempting to speculate that an Irish author familiar with both narrative traditions thought it would be fitting to have Mongán’s life come to an end at the hands of a figure that he construed as his British counterpart – or that the tradition the author was following was linking together figures who in other respects as well appear to be cognate reflections of a Celtic mythological type. Another “Artúr” mentioned in early Irish sources (where the name is hardly common) is the son of Áedán mac Gabráin, the sixth-century king of the Dál Riata, another eastern Ulster tribe, which also established itself in Argyll and set the foundation of what was to become the kingdom of Scotland. In Adomnán’s famous Latin life of St Columba (written in the late seventh century), the Irish saint and contemporary of Áedán, who became best known for his work of establishing churches and monasteries in Scotland, predicts the death of this Arthur (bk. 1, ch. 9; Sharpe 1995: 119–20). That the latter figure was also blended into the tradition concerning the death of Mongán may be deduced from the detail that his slayer came from Dál Riata territory (Kintyre, in Argyll; see Stokes 1896: 178). Remarkably, as early as the fifteenth century, the poets and genealogists of the Campbell clan, dominant in this southern part of the Scottish Highlands, were asserting a family connection between the Campbells and Arthur of Britain (Draak 1956: 238–40; Gillies 1982: 60, n. 70, 66–8; Gillies 1999).
In the same early cycle of stories about the mysterious Mongán cited above, in one of the most extraordinary references to reincarnation to be found anywhere in Celtic literatures (Nagy 1997: 303–7), we learn that he was a rebirth of the Irish hero Finn mac Cumaill, around whom is centered the so-called Fenian or Ossianic tradition of story and song, and whose long-lived fame was still attested in the repertoires of Irish and Scottish storytellers of the last century. The connection between Mongán and Arthur would be even stronger, then, if we accept the Dutch Celticist A. G. van Hamel’s unjustly overlooked thesis (anticipated in Nutt & Meyer 1895: 2.22–5) that Arthur the dux bellorum and Finn the leader of Ireland’s premier fian, “hunting and warring band,” are matching cognate manifestations of what he dubbed the Celtic “exemplary hero”(1934: 219–33). A socializing leader of fellow heroes, this figure protects society against hostile, often supernatural, invasion and goes on forays into the Otherworld, from which he emerges with treasures to share and stories to tell. The hero-leader as profiled by van Hamel is also devoted to hunting, particularly of boars, and takes an interest in the development of young heroes in the making. The Arthur of Culhwch ac Olwen certainly fits this description, as does the Finn nostalgically presented in the twelfth- or thirteenth-century Irish prosimetric omnibus text Acallam na Senórach, “Dialogue of the Old Ones” (Stokes 1900; Dooley & Roe 1999).
An Irish translation of the ninth-century Historia Brittonum including the Mirabilia was produced in the eleventh century, but in this version the Arthurian material is handled perfunctorily, even carelessly (Dooley 2004: 10–15). There is, however, an Arthur who figures in the Acallam mentioned above, one of the most important surviving repositories of medieval Fenian tradition (Stokes 1900: 5–9). Son of the king of the Britons, this Arthur is a rogue member of Finn’s fian, who in the course of a hunt steals Finn’s dogs and takes them back with him to Britain. Finn dispatches a party of his men to recover his dogs, a quest on which they are successful. (Artúr is found hunting in the vicinity of Sliabh Lodáin meic Lír – surely this refers to Lothian, the district around Edinburgh, which may well have its own Arthurian associations; Gillies 1981: 58, n. 36). In addition to the hounds and a chastened Arthur, Finn’s men also return with some British horses that become the progenitors of the horses used by the members of the fian. Like the reference to a lost Irish story known as Aígidecht Artúir, “The hosting of Arthur,” in a tale list no later than the twelfth century (Mac Cana 1980: 47), the story of this wayward Arthur in the Acallam affirms the impression, also to be gleaned from the references to Irish heroes as members of Arthur’s retinue in Culhwch ac Olwen, of lively communication, exchange, and even rivalry operating between Irish and Welsh literary culture (Dooley 2004: 20–23; Bernhardt-House 2007).
The Normans along with their Breton and Welsh allies established a foothold in Ireland in 1169, and there are signs of increased influence from and interest in Anglo-Norman and Continental literature in post-twelfth-century Irish literature. There is no evidence, however, that a translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae into Irish was ever attempted. Furthermore, “Arthurian references in Classical bardic verse are rare and late” (Gillies 1982: 66) – a telling statement, given the importance and quantity of this genre in late medieval Irish literature. One of those rare references comes relatively early in the bardic record (fourteenth century), but the mention occurs only in passing, as part of a mildly invidious comparison between Irish and foreign paradigms of nobility (Dooley 1993). In this poem, for the first time in the Irish literary record, an Artúr is designated as a king – but the word used is the Irish one (rí) as opposed to the English borrowing cing, discussed below.
The actual production of “native” Arthurian literature seems to have started in Ireland in the fifteenth century, perhaps inspired by the Lorgaireacht an tSoidhigh Naomhtha, “Quest of the Holy Grail” (Falconer 1953). This is the editor Sheila Falconer’s choice of title. Lorgaireacht was picked from among the various Irish words used to translate queste in the text, which, as it has survived in three manuscripts, is fragmentary and without a beginning. According to Falconer, this is (for the Middle Ages) a relatively straightforward translation into Irish of what seems to have been in turn a straightforward pre-Malory English translation of the Vulgate Queste, now lost (1953: xix–xxxi). The only one of the many translations of foreign romance literature produced in medieval Ireland that is based on an Arthurian text, the Lorgaireacht is dated as early as the middle of the fifteenth century (Falconer 1953: xxxii). Arthur is Cing Artúr, Galahad is Sir Galafas, and Lancelot is Sir Lámsalóid. The borrowings cing and sir, also commonly used in the indigenous Arthurian tales, are among the formidable arguments for positing an English original for the Lorgaireacht. For the concept of “grail” the translator resorted to an Irish word for “vessel” (soidheach), hence the “McGuffin” of the story is referred to as the Soidheach Naomhtha, “Holy Vessel.”
The text’s general fidelity to its ultimate source notwithstanding, there are some twists that distinguish it from the Queste. In a telling switch, Percival (Persaual) and his savage ways are French, not Welsh. Guinevere (Genebra) is the daughter of the king of the Romans. Merlin is Merling, possibly under the influence of the name of the popular Leinster saint Moling, who in native tradition is associated with a figure some scholars have considered an Irish “reflex” of Merlin, the madman Suibne (Falconer 1953: xiv–xv, xxvi; Nagy 1996). Moreover, promise and prophecy (concerning the Grail, Galahad, and other key story elements) play a noticeably larger role here than they do in the Queste (Falconer 1953: xvi, n. 3; 294, n. on l. 120). Here and elsewhere in Irish Arthuriana, Gawain is B(h)albhuaidh (misinterpreted as Galahad in Macalister 1998), a form of the name suggestively closer to the original Welsh Gwalchmei than its Latin or French derivatives (Gillies 1982: 60–61). In sum, the Lorgaireacht constitutes evidence for literary communication between Ireland and England on matters Arthurian. If this link could be extended back into the fourteenth century, and viewed as not simply one-way, then what some scholars have seen as the possibly “Irish” features of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Jacobs 2000) would be indeed more explicable.
Already witnessed in a manuscript from 1517 (Bruford 1969: 260) is the earliest surviving homegrown Arthurian tale, the “Adventure of the Cropped Dog,” mentioned above (Macalister 1998: 2–72). While the key motif in the story, that of the hero-turned-wolf (or dog), is familiar from mainstream European romance tradition – as in Guillaume de Palerne, translated into Irish as Eachtra Uilliam (C. O’Rahilly 1949) – it may well have originally entered into that mainstream from Celtic tradition. And here again, as in the Acallam episode discussed above, Arthur and a “human” dog are brought together in the story line: the most important of the hunting dogs stolen from Finn by Artúr in that episode is Bran, Finn’s metamorphosed cousin (Bernhardt-House 2007: 18–20). Although Arthur and Gawain (Balbhuaidh) feature prominently in the Eachtra, they are in some respects out of character, or more in an “Irish” character. As Bernadette Smelik has pointed out, at the opening of the story, Arthur, the Rí an Domhain, “King of the World” (Macalister 1998: 2), a designation not uncommon in the world of the romantic tale (Bruford 1969: 22), is a victim not of any yen for adventure but a geis, “interdiction,” an Irish term/concept that permeates native literature (Smelik 1999: 147–8), according to which he must hunt on the Plain of Wonders in the Dangerous Forest for seven years, a condition that leaves him and his companions vulnerable to near-fatal attack by the magician-warrior Ridire an Lóchrainn, “Knight of the Light” (ridire, a common Irish rendering of “knight” in these tales, is a borrowing from English “rider,” while lóchrann or lócharn is a borrowing from Latin lucerna).
Left bound, helpless, and inordinately thirsty, Arthur turns to his beloved foster son Balbhuaidh, the only one of the king’s company not overwhelmed by the Knight of the Light, to find him some water. This Gawain, however, is not the urbane adult knight commonly encountered in Arthurian story but a beardless youth, who asks to be knighted before he fulfills his lord’s request, since it would not be fitting for Arthur to be served by anyone below the rank of knight. Smelik points out (1999: 148–52) that the immature Balbhuaidh of the Eachtra is more reminiscent of the equally beardless Irish hero Cú Chulainn, the sister’s son of the king of Ulster, who precociously wins his heroic spurs and proves his loyalty and usefulness to the king and the other adult heroes of the province, all of whom are in effect his foster fathers, in the eighth–ninth-century section of the text Táin Bó Cúailnge, “Cattle Raid of Cúailnge” (recension 1), known as the Macgnímrada, “Boyhood Deeds (of Cú Chulainn)” (C. O’Rahilly 1976: 13–26). Also worth noting is the parallel between Balbhuaidh’s quest and the Irish type scene of the hero obtaining water or nourishment for his king incapacitated on the battlefield, on display in the Macgnímrada (C. O’Rahilly 1976: 16) and in another Irish saga of the late first millennium AD, the Togail Bruidne Da Derga, “Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel” (Knott 1936: 43–4).
Balbhuaidh not only fetches water for Arthur but returns in the company of the Madra Maol, who drives away the Knight of the Light (his half-brother) when he reappears in an attempt to finish off Arthur and his men. The enchanted dog-hero then leads Balbhuaidh on a chase after the Knight, a multi-episode pursuit that constitutes the rest of the story and climaxes in the reconciliation of the brothers and the restoring of the Madra Maol to his human form, and to his rightful throne in India. The dog-hero in effect takes over the pre-eminent role in the story that at the beginning of the Eachtra would appear to be assigned to Balbhuaidh. Given the patterning after the Macgnímrada with which the tale seems to begin, and given that Cú Chulainn is the consummate dog-like hero (cú meaning “dog”), it is perhaps fitting for an actual dog-hero to take over the job begun by Balbhuaidh.
There may be one more Irish Arthurian production surviving from the fifteenth century. Among the contents of British Library MS Egerton 1781, an Irish manuscript written in 1484–7, a list (added in the sixteenth century) includes a tale titled Sgél Isgaide Léithe, “The Story of Iosgaid Liath” (“Gray Hollow-at the-Back-of-the-Knee,” or simply “Gray Leg” or “Gray Thigh”). The part of the manuscript containing this tale is lost, but it has been convincingly argued that the Sgél is the same as the Arthurian tale Céilidhe Iosgaide Léithe, “The Visit of Iosgaid Liath,” witnessed only in two considerably later manuscripts (Draak 1956). As is the case with all of these Irish Arthurian tales, the prosimetric Céilidhe is written in Classical Modern Irish, the literary standard developed in the late Middle Ages and used down to the nineteenth century. Hence there is nothing in the language of Céilidhe that would preclude its composition in the fifteenth century.
Perhaps the most imaginative of the native Arthurian narratives, the Céilidhe (Mac an tSaoi 1946: 42–70), like the Eachtra, is not as interested in the Arthurian characters or milieu as in a remarkable enchanted, and enchanting, creature of unmistakable Irish make who, coming from afar, creates profound displacement within the Arthurian ensemble and wreaks havoc with our Arthurian expectations. “Gray Hollow” is a supernatural female who in the shape of a deer lures one of Arthur’s knights, the son of the king of Gascony, to her home, where she seduces him. She is later discovered by the knight’s wife, who invites her rival to the court. Arthur and his knights all fall in love with the beautiful stranger, and so the Gascon prince’s wife and the other jealous spouses attempt to discomfit her by revealing her secret: a tuft of persistent gray hair on the back of her leg. Iosgaid Liath, however, has the last laugh: she lifts her skirt to reveal smooth legs, while the women of Arthur’s court, ordered to reveal their own legs, are found to sport the accursed tuft themselves. The otherworldly female then reveals her name (Ailleann) and her somewhat surprising identity as the daughter of the king of the Picts. Condemning her rivals to a life of spinsterhood, Ailleann invites the men of the court to abandon their current wives and come with her to a realm where they will find new ones. A fresh set of wives is indeed provided there for Arthur and his knights, but before this adventure is concluded, they undergo an ordeal arranged by Ailleann: a deer hunt that turns into a massacre of the Arthurian hunting party when they are attacked by savage cats, mares, and bitches. In desperate straits, similar to those in which they find themselves at the beginning of the Eachtra, Arthur and Gawain remain as the only survivors. When Gawain is about to strike an attacking dog, Ailleann tells him to desist, since the dog is his bride. She and the other new wives (her fellow murderous beasts) are then returned to their human forms by Ailleann, who also revives Arthur’s men, and the happy couples enjoy wedded bliss back in the court of Arthur: Rí an Domhain .i[d est]. Cing Artúir, “the King of the World, that is, King Arthur” (Mac an tSaoi 1946: 70).
Perhaps the most conspicuously Irish element in the story is its rather villainous heroine. A supernatural female who confronts the hunter hero in the shape of a deer, who has something hideously ugly about her, who is deeply resented by her female colleagues, and who leads the way to an Otherworld wholly populated by women, Ailleann clearly has much in common with the goddess-like embodiment of sovereignty frequently encountered in medieval Irish tales and classical bardic poetry. Cited by the editor of the Céilidhe as a likely reference to this tale (Mac an tSaoi 1946: xi), a poetic aisling or “vision” by Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn (seventeenth century) interrogates a female allegorical representation of Ireland concerning her visits to the courts of various legendary Irish kings, asking whether it was she who visited the Bórd Cruinn, “Round Table,” of Cing iongantach Artúr, “wondrous King Arthur” (Knott 1922: 269).
The embarrassment of the women of Arthur’s court perhaps derives from the story (well attested in Continental literature) of the chastity test undergone by the wives of Arthur and his knights, who for the most part fail miserably, but the story also exists in a native Fenian form (Gillies 1981: 64–6), and may be Celtic in origin. Besides, the wives in the Céilidhe are more than embarrassed, since they suffer a deathlike punishment of loneliness and privation. Their fate echoes the even more brutal treatment meted out in a Fenian tale to the womenfolk of Finn’s fian by the aged fian member Garaid mac Morna, who in revenge for a trick played upon him locks them in a house and burns them to death (Gwynn 1904). Similarly, Cú Chulainn kills the Ulsterwomen en masse after they abuse his foster son’s wife (Marstrander 1911). In both of these heroic cycles, this act of genocide signals an impending Götterdämmerung and the dangerous dynamics that will ultimately bring down the heroic house of cards, but in the Céilidhe, where, after all, the women are not actually slain and their husbands are not at all unhappy about leaving them, there is more the sense of a heroic cycle being renewed and refreshed, courtesy of Ailleann’s remarkably disruptive visit.
Preserved in manuscripts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the third of our five surviving Irish Arthurian tales, the prosimetric Eachtra Mhacaoimh an Iolair, “Adventure of the Eagle Boy” (Macalister 1998: 74–196). “Eagle Boy” is the irresistible translation offered by R. A. S. Macalister, but since macaomh, as Bruford points out, conveys in the romantic tales a sense similar to that of archaic English “childe” (1969: 24), a translation such as “The Noble Youth of the Eagle” might be more accurate. This is another story, like the Eachtra an Mhadra, that centers on a character dispossessed of his right to the throne whom Arthur happens to meet. The Eagle Boy, however, unlike the Cropped Dog, develops a close relationship with Arthur, into whose lap he is dropped by an eagle that comes to the rescue in response to the prayer of the boy’s mother, who fears that her newborn child will be put to death by his evil uncle. Arthur has the unknown youth raised as if he were the king’s son. But when he learns that he is no son to Arthur, the foundling requests knighthood of Arthur, who is sad to see him go, and sets out to find his true patrimony. Along the way, he finds his true love and slays the evil husband of a damsel in distress, who subsequently becomes Arthur’s wife. Eagle Boy finds his homeland (Sorcha, a country familiar from the geography of the romantic tales), is reunited with his family, confronts and slays his evil uncle, fetches his beloved from her home in India, and becomes the rightful king of Sorcha.
Perhaps the most notable feature of the otherwise unremarkable Eachtra Mhacaoimh is a colophon copied along with it into one of the eighteenth-century manuscripts that preserve the text. It is written by a Brian Ó Corcráin, who claims (in Irish) to have “got the bones of this story from a gentleman who said that he himself had heard it told in French.” The subsequent passage in the note has been interpreted in two different ways: Ó Corcráin either claims to have composed the Irish text himself, “inserting these little poems to complement it,” or says that, upon Ó Corcráin’s expression of interest, the narrator of the story wrote it down for him and added the verse (Breatnach 2004). The colophon concludes, “Until now the story itself has never been available in Irish.” Whether it was Ó Corcráin or his unidentified source who wrote the version of the story we know as the Eachtra Mhacaoimh, and whether this is the Brian Ó Corcráin who was a cleric in Co. Fermanagh in the fifteenth century, or the poet of the same name who worked in the early seventeenth century, are important questions, albeit impossible to answer definitively unless more information comes to light. There are, however, details that unambiguously and instructively stand out in the colophon: the fascinating metaphor of French “bones” fleshed out in the Irish language; the understanding of this narrative repertoire as not just written but heard; and Ó Corcráin’s proud assumption of responsibility for having nativized the story (a process that includes telling it prosimetrically), or for having brought about the production of an original native story out of foreign elements.
Even more such Arthurian “bones” may lie within the Irish Arthurian tale that is best known among scholars of Arthurian literature (Gowans 2003), the Eachtra an Amadáin Mhóir “Adventure of the Big Fool” (Ó Rabhartaigh & Hyde 1927; as we shall see, amadán has a range of meanings beyond “fool”). It is the story’s obvious kinship with the Perceval romance that has attracted considerable attention to this text, preserved in three eighteenth-century manuscripts (Bruford 1969: 251), with the final episode attested in narrative verse form as well (Gillies 1981: 66–72). The Eachtra, however, is no translation of Chrétien de Troyes or one of his epigones, nor is the amadán, “fool,” simply an Irish counterpart to Perceval. At many points in the story, the Eachtra seems almost like a burlesque of what late medieval Irish tradition managed to absorb of the enormous body of Arthurian lore concerning Perceval and the quest for the Grail – except that in the Eachtra, the Grail is nowhere in sight. The amadán, like Perceval, is alienated from his patrimony, but his family includes Arthur, and the alienation threatens Arthur’s kingship itself. The amadán is actually Arthur’s nephew, raised in secret and away from knighthood and weaponry, lest he lose his life in trying to take revenge on Arthur for having slain the amadán’s brothers, who were trying to put their father on the throne. When the Fool does finally stumble upon Arthur’s court, all he wants is really to be a court fool, and Arthur cynically manipulates him and his desire. Among his picaresque adventures, which lead the hero far from Arthur’s court, making the Arthurian connection almost negligible, the Fool encounters a monstrous one-eyed cat who reveals the Fool’s family background to him (shades of Perceval’s hermit and Kundry!), and also reveals his own background as a member of the Tuatha Dé Danann (literally, “tribes of the goddess Danu”), the pre-Christian Irish pantheon fondly remembered and utilized for various plotting purposes in the romantic tales. In another episode, reminiscent of the genre of fabliau rather than romance, the amadán’s first act of intercourse is described as a matter of “making a fool” of a woman. The joke is perhaps an allusion to the distinctly feminine connotations of Irish am(m)ait, “sorceress, supernatural female, foolish woman” (T. O’Rahilly 1942: 149–52), the word from which the hero’s designation amadán derives. And the conclusion that sexual identity is at issue in this story becomes inescapable with the story’s final episode, in which the Fool spends a good deal of time missing his legs, of which he has been magically deprived, and depending on a woman to help him move around in search of a remedy.
A consideration of the wild array of motifs in the Eachtra an Amadáin Mhóir, many of which are familiar to readers of Arthurian literature as through a glass darkly, compels us to ask the question: is it possible that at least in some cases in these tales the resemblances are not the result of Irish exposure to English and French romances but evidence for the Celtic roots shared between traditional Irish narrative and the ensemble of motifs and story patterns operating in Continental Arthurian tradition? Tracing those motifs/patterns back to Celtic sources, to cultural exchange between the Irish and the Welsh in pre-Norman Britain, or to Irish influence entering Arthurian tradition via the Norman connection is now out of scholarly fashion, but there is still much to be said for viewing medieval Irish literature as a narratological “parallel universe” for Arthurian tradition.
The only surviving Irish Arthurian tale that focuses on the exploits of a figure who is not introduced to Arthur in the course of the story but is presented from the beginning as a member of the court and/or Arthur’s family paradoxically features two main protagonists whose names hardly sound Arthurian: this is the Eachtra Mhelóra agus Orlando, “Adventure of Melóra and Orlando” (Mac an tSaoi 1946: 1–41; Draak 1948). Melóra is Arthur’s daughter (in her own way as powerful a figure as Iosgaid Liath/Ailleann), who falls in love at the beginning of the story with the hero Orlando, new in her father’s court. While the young couple are not quite said to have been enamored of each other before they met – an Irish motif that actually may be of international provenance (Maier 2006) – their love and subsequent tribulations have been prophesied to each of them individually. The wicked Sir Mádor and Merlin (said to be Arthur’s draoi, “druid, wizard”) conspire to imprison Orlando, whose disappearance greatly distresses Melóra. She wheedles the truth from Sir Mádor and sets forth disguised as a knight to obtain the magical items (including the spear of Longinus) needed to rescue her beloved from his rock-bound imprisonment. Of course, this Irish sister to Ariosto’s Bradamante (who has been cited as a possible source; Draak 1948: 10–11), Lenore, and any number of other women warriors in popular traditions worldwide, succeeds in her mission, and brings her father, the Rí an Domháin, and the entire court with her to witness her performance of the rescue of Orlando, who needs the application of some magical pig oil in order to recover his human shape. He and the others then learn much to their surprise that Orlando’s rescuer, the hero of the story, is Arthur’s own daughter, through whose intercession Mádor and Merlin are spared from the royally mandated punishment of death, and whose request to marry Orlando is granted by her father.
In sum, the Irish Arthurian tales demonstrate both the openness of Irish literary tradition to outside sources, which are eagerly embraced and exploited, and also the persistence of native traditional models and motifs. The genre of the scéal romansaíochta in general, and the scéal artúraíochta in particular, not only provided exotic, eye-catching entertainment but also an unmistakable cultural statement. Perhaps the closest analogue to the medieval romantic tale in the modern world is “Bollywood,” the world of mass-produced popular Indian cinema as it has grown to gargantuan proportions and complexity during the twentieth century, in the course of India’s establishing itself as an independent nation. From a superficial perspective, all Bollywood films, like all romantic tales, are profoundly derivative productions. If you have seen/heard/read one, you have seen/heard/read them all. And yet, each example of the genre presents its own often remarkable variation on a theme: namely, the simultaneous acceptance of foreign narratives, media, and values as fair game for narrative purposes, and the fiercely possessive attempt on the part of storytellers and their audiences to make these imports unmistakably the native culture’s own – to show who are the real “Kings of the World.”
Primary Sources
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References and Further Reading
Bernhardt-House, P. (2007). Horses, hounds, and high kings: A shared Arthurian tradition across the Irish Sea? In J. F. Nagy (ed.), Myth in Celtic literatures, CSANA yearbook 6. Dublin: Four Courts Press, pp. 11–21.
Breatnach, C. (2004). Brian Ó Corcráin and Eachtra Mhacaoimh an Iolair. Éigse, 34, 44–8.
Bruford, A. (1969). Gaelic folktales and mediaeval romances: A study of the early modern Irish “romantic tales” and their oral derivatives. Dublin: Folklore of Ireland Society.
Dooley, A. (1993). Arthur in Ireland: The earliest citation in native Irish literature. In J. P. Carley & F. Riddy (eds), Arthurian literature, vol. XII. Cambridge: Brewer, pp. 165–72.
Dooley, A. (2004). Arthur of the Irish: A viable concept? In C. Lloyd-Morgan (ed.), Arthurian literature, vol. XXI: Celtic Arthurian material. Cambridge: Brewer, pp. 9–28.
Gillies, W. (1981). Arthur in Gaelic tradition, part I: Folktales and ballads. Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, 2, 47–72.
Gillies, W. (1982). Arthur in Gaelic tradition, part II: Romances and learned lore. Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, 3, 41–75.
Gillies, W. (1987). Heroes and ancestors. In B. Almqvist, S. Ó Catháin, & P. Ó Héalaí (eds), The heroic process: Form, function and fantasy in folk epic. Dun Laoghaire: Glendale, pp. 57–73.
Gillies, W. (1999). The “British” genealogy of the Campbells. Celtica, 23, 82–95.
Gowans, L. (2003). The Eachtra an Amadáin Mhóir as a response to the Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes. In K. Busby & R. Dalrymple (eds), Arthurian literature, vol. XIX: Comedy in Arthurian literature. Cambridge: Brewer, pp. 199–230.
Hamel, A. G. van (1934). Aspects of Celtic mythology. Proceedings of the British Academy, 20, 207–48.
Hartnett, C. P. (1973). Irish Arthurian literature, 2 vols. PhD thesis, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Jacobs, N. (2000). Fled Bricrenn and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In P. Ó Riain (ed.), Fled Bricrenn: Reassessments. London: Irish Texts Society, pp. 40–55.
Maier, B. (2006). At first sight: Notes on a poem by Donald John MacDonald. Scottish Gaelic Studies, 22, 221–9.
Nagy, J. F. (1996). A new introduction to Buile Suibhne (The Frenzy of Suibhne). Dublin: Irish Texts Society.
Nagy, J. F. (1997). Conversing with angels and ancients: Literary myths of medieval Ireland. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Nutt, A. & Meyer, K. (1895). The voyage of Bran son of Febal to the land of the living, 2 vols. London: David Nutt.
Ó Corcráin, B. (1912). Eachtra Mhacaoimh an Iolair (ed. I. de Teiltiún & S. Laoide). Dublin: Hodges Figgis.
Ó Rabhartaigh, T. & Hyde, D. (eds) (1927). An t-Amadán Mór. Lia Fáil, 2, 191–228.
O’Rahilly, T. F. (1942). Notes, mainly etymological. Ériu, 13, 144–219.
Smelik, B. (1999). Eachtra an Mhadra Mhaoil: Ein richtiger Artusroman? In E. Poppe & H. L. C. Tristram (eds), Übersetzung, Adaptation und Akkulturation im insularen Mittelalter. Münster: Nodus, pp. 145–59.