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

18. Cú Chulainn, the Poets, and Giolla Brighde Mac Con Midhe

18 Cú Chulainn, the Poets, and Giolla Brighde Mac Con Midhe ( 2 0 0 5 ) In his lecture at the First International Conference on the Ulster Cycle of Tales in Belfast in 1994, Patrick K. Ford considered the relevance of the idea of everlasting fame to the depiction of Cú Chulainn in Táin Bó Cúailnge.1 He argued that“for the Irish as for the Greeks, fame was valued over life itself . And fame was bestowed on heroes by poets and consisted literally in what was heard: lofty deeds sung and told by poets.”2 The present contribution in Pat’s honor will cover some of the same ground,but it has a different point of departure: it is prompted in the main by a claim made by the thirteenth-century poet Giolla Brighde Mac Con Midhe in A theachtaire tig ón Róimh ‘O messenger who comes from Rome,’3 to the effect that the fame of Cú Chulainn (among others) is to be put down to the survival of the 259 260 THE ULSTER CYCLE praise (moladh) given to him by poets. There is little sign, however, that Cú Chulainn was the subject of eulogy among poets; the purpose of what follows is to explore the implications of Giolla Brighde’s claim in the light of the evidence of the Táin. A theachtaire tig ón Róimh takes the form of a response to a cleric who evidently has claimed that the pope in Rome had ordained that Irish poets should be suppressed, and poetic art “dethroned.”4 Giolla Brighde’s reply falls broadly into three sections. In the first of them,5 he observes that no documentary evidence has been offered in support of the cleric’s claims, and he therefore declines to believe that the cleric is telling the truth. The second section6 is a defence on largely religious grounds of the poet’s role as eulogist, and particularly of his right to receive a reward for his work (luach ar na laoidhibh,7 crodh ar laoidh8 ). In the core of this section,9 he says that the son of Mary will give him heaven as a reward for a composition of his excellent poetry (duais . . . ar dhuain dom dheaghdhán).10 He goes on to claim that a patron who is magnanimous in his payment of the poets will also go to heaven, for that is clearly what he has in mind when he says that “the generous man is free from hell.”11 Eulogy is justified since the praising of men is the praising of him who created them (moladh daoine is dó is moladh / an neach do-ní a gcruthoghadh).12 The third section of the poem,13 beginning with the well-known line Dá mbáití an dán, a dhaoine,“If poetry were suppressed, O people,” deals with the social and cultural value of the poetic craft, mainly in terms of what would be lost if that craft were to be suppressed. A social function has already been alluded to in a quatrain which implies that the custom of rewarding the poet for his work allows him to distinguish between the generous and the niggardly patron, thus enabling him to ennoble the one and to satirize the other.14 Now, as he contemplates the threat of an assault on his profession, Giolla Brighde focuses on the social significance of the poet’s role as historian and genealogist: Dá mbáití an dán, a dhaoine, gan seanchas, gan seanlaoidhe, go bráth ach athair gach fhir rachaidh cách gan a chluinsin. Dá dtráigheadh an tobar fis, ní béarthaoi muna mbeimis do dheighfhearaibh saora a sean, craobha geinealaigh Gaoidheal. ——— If poetry were suppressed, O people, so that there was neither history nor ancient lays, every man for ever would die unheard of except for the name of everybody’s father. If the well of knowledge were to dry up, but for us, noble men would not be told of the illustrious among their ancestors nor the branches of the pedigrees of the Irish.15 The noble men of Ireland depend on the poets for knowledge of their family history,their illustrious ancestors,and their place in the genealogical scheme of things. This is a defence not only of the contemporary poets—the aos cumtha as he has called them earlier in...