Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [139]
—from the Táin, translated by Thomas Kinsella
What was The Cattle Raid of Cooley?
This grim description of the transformation of a handsome young Irish hero into a dreadful killing machine is the picture of Cuchulainn, the greatest warrior of Irish myth and folklore, and a central character in the Ulster Cycle and one of its central stories, The Cattle Raid of Cooley (Táin Bó Cúailnge).
First written down in the Christian era, the Ulster Cycle has an overlay of Christian culture, but the stories are about an older, darker time in Ireland, hundreds of years before the arrival of St. Patrick and Christianity. Said to have taken place about the time of Jesus Christ, the Cycle has a slim basis in fact, since its stories may be a recounting of the actual struggles among early Irish groups. But the stories in the Cycle have been layered with myth, legend, and fantastic episodes of sex, drinking, and killing—in approximately equal measures.
Although there are conflicting versions of his birth, Cuchulainn’s tale begins when Lugh, the chief of the gods, impregnates Deichtine, the sister (or daughter) of Conchobor (pronounced connor), legendary king of Ulster, in a dream. The child she bears—Sétanta—possesses extraordinary power due to his divine parentage, and gains further strength when he is tutored by goddesses in the art of war. But the boy gets into hot water when he is attacked by the watchdog of the smith god, Culann, and kills the animal. Culann angrily demands restitution, and the boy agrees to stand in as watchdog until a new animal can be trained. As a result of this episode, Sétanta’s name is changed to Cuchulainn—” the hound of Culann.”
When little Cuchulainn grows up, he is a strikingly handsome man and a ferocious warrior who turns into an appalling vision of terror when a battle frenzy—usually translated as the “warp-spasm”—seizes him. Armed with a magic spear called the Gae Bulga, which can inflict only mortal wounds, and accompanied by a charioteer who makes his chariot invisible, Cuchulainn is a fierce headhunter who always takes the most heads. To help him regain his mortal shape after battle, naked maidens are paraded in front of him and he is lowered into three successive barrels of icy water until he has cooled off—clearly the ancient Celtic version of the proverbial “cold shower.”
In the Táin, the character of Cuchulainn is equaled only by Queen Medb (Maeve), the legendary warrior queen of Ulster’s rival province, Connacht. Although here a mortal queen, the mythical Medb was also a powerful goddess of fertility—headstrong, powerful, dominating, and sexually ravenous. Her name meant “she who intoxicates”—figuratively and literally—and is closely connected to the medieval drink mead. As Celtic authority Miranda Jane Green put it, “Her rampant promiscuity symbolizes Ireland’s fertility, and the association of her name with an alcoholic drink is linked with the concept of the union between goddess and mortal ruler….” Before a battle, she would calm the troubled warriors who knew they had to fight the next day. As Thomas Cahill writes—and this was no myth—“Insensate drunkenness was the warrior’s customary prelude to sleep.”
In the Táin, Medb only marries the older King Ailill because he has money. The Táin actually opens with a comic scene in which the king and queen are arguing in bed over who is the wealthier of the two. Ailill says, “It struck me today how much better off you are today than the day I married you.” Medb replies that she brought him such a great dowry when they married