Coire Sois, The Cauldron of Knowledge: A Companion to Early Irish Saga

4. The Concept of the Heroin Irish Mythology

4 The Concept of the Hero in Irish Mythology ( 1 9 8 5 ) Giambattista Vico claimed, as long ago as 1725, that“the first science to be learned should be mythology or the interpretation of fables.”1 Vico’s words, and the work of modern mythologists in many fields—anthropology,depth psychology, the history of religions, and literary criticism—have left little impression on the intellectual life of Ireland. Yet our manuscripts contain mythological texts whose abundance and archaic character make them unique in Western Europe. Insofar as our mythology has been at all rediscovered , credit must rest largely with our creative writers, and notably with Yeats,whose use of myth in the creation of literature was hailed as“a step toward making the modern world possible in art.”2 The use of myth by AngloIrish writers stands in marked contrast to the practice of modern writers 51 52 THEMES in the Irish language. There is a chiastic pattern here: Anglo-Irish writers trying to create a national literature in English have drawn upon the resources of the indigenous tradition, whereas those writers whose aim has been to create a modern European literature in Irish have for the most part turned away from traditional themes. Perhaps in their case the burden of the past was too strong in the language itself to allow them to exploit Irish myth for their own purposes. But it is not primarily as a quarry for modern creative writers that Irish mythology lays claim upon our attention, but rather as a rich and complex body of material which is there and which calls for elucidation and interpretation. It is in that mythology that we can discover the native ideology of Ireland, for although the early Irish material includes a valuable wisdom literature the abstract formulation of philosophical and theological theories was not the Irish way. It was in their myths that they explored the nature of men and the gods, and a central task of criticism must be to uncover and to restate in abstract terms the configuration of the ideological patterns which underlie the myths. As the great French mythologist Georges Dumézil put it:“A literary work does not have to set forth a theory: it is the hearer’s or the reader’s task to perceive the providential design which has arranged the events in the order in which the work presents them and with the results which it describes. Yet it is the design that justifies these events and results, and gives them a meaning.”3 This “providential design” must be established by close study of the texts, but the general observation may be made that Irish myth is concerned above all with the relationship between man and the gods, and that the myth of the hero is used as a vehicle for exploring this relationship. In this respect, Irish myth shares the character of mythological systems in general . The situation can be stated in structuralist terms: a basic opposition in Irish myth is between man and god, and this opposition is mediated in the person of the hero. “Opposition” is used here in the sense of the discrimination of paired categories, and it is the structuralist view that every mythical system is built upon a sequence of such oppositions which are mediated by a third category which is abnormal or anomalous.4 The hero belongs to this third category: he is at once the son of a god and of a human father; he is mortal and he lives out his life among men, but Otherworld personages intervene at crucial moments in his life. The myth of the hero is exceptionally well represented in Irish sources, and the space at my disposal here allows only a selective treatment. It seemed best to choose two of the more remarkable heroes of Irish tradition for extended discussion, and the two who are dealt with are the martial hero, Cú Chulainn, and the king-hero, Conaire Mór. In each case I concentrate on a single tale: for Cú Chulainn I restrict myself in the main to the early version of his “Conception Tale,” and for Conaire Mór to “The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel .”The necessarily summary account of these two texts may perhaps give some indications of the thematic content of the Irish versions of the myth of the hero, while the commentary is intended to elucidate...