Early Irish Myths and Sagas - Jeffrey Gantz [25]
The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel
Introduction
‘The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel’ is part impacted myth, part heroic saga and part literary tour de force. The name of the hosteller in the title is uncertain: some texts give Úa Dergae (the nephew of the red goddess) instead of Da Derga (the red god). In either case, the red deity is chthonic; and the mythic subtext deals with the slaying of a king, in a house of death, at Samuin. Although there is no mention of an iron house, the raiders’ attempts to burn the hostel suggests that it is related to the iron houses in ‘The Intoxication of the Ulaid’ and ‘The Destruction of Dind Rig’. Curiously, although Conare is slain – and that is the point of the tale – the hostel is never actually destroyed.
The opening episode, which describes the wooing of Étaín by Echu Feidlech, expands upon the story in the second section of ‘The Wooing of Étaín’. At the point where Echu dies, however, something appears to be missing, even though there is no evidence of a lacuna. What follows in the manuscripts is very confused, even as to syntax, but it appears to be a garbled version of the incest episode at the end of ‘The Wooing of Étaín’, and we can probably assume that, originally, the child is abandoned because it is the offspring of the king’s inadvertent union with his own daughter. The conception of Conare Már, like that of the Ulaid hero Cú Chulaind, is duple, the storyteller in both cases attempting to reconcile traditions of divine paternity with those of ordinary mortal fatherhood. Once Conare has been installed as king, the tale begins to edge into a kind of history – perhaps it recalls a significant battle or raid in Irish tribal warfare.
Throughout ‘The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel’, Conare appears doomed: doomed to break his gessa (taboos), doomed to die for being the offspring of incest. Yet he is not entirely guiltless: the story suggests that he has shown poor judgement in excusing his foster-brothers from hanging and in interfering in the quarrel between his two clients. The structure of the tale is idiosyncratic; some may find the catalogue section tedious and the climax disappointingly perfunctory. Irish stories, in manuscript, do tend to become ‘unbalanced’: descriptive passages flower into luxuriant growths out of all proportion to their narrative importance (perhaps owing to the storyteller’s showing off), while conclusions seem casually, even indifferently, thrown away (perhaps owing to the storyteller’s or scribe’s growing tired). But it is also true that descriptive catalogues of this sort were important to the Celts – both as literary set-pieces and as a matter of record – and that, in this case at least, the lack of attention given to the dénouement underlines its inevitability.
The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel
There was once a famous, noble king of Ériu, and Echu Feidlech was his name. One day, as he was crossing the fairground of Brí Léith, he saw a woman at the edge of the well. She had a bright silver comb with gold ornamentation on it, and she was washing from a silver vessel with four gold birds on it and bright, tiny gems of crimson carbuncle on its rims. There was a crimson cloak of beautiful, curly fleece round her, fastened with a silver brooch coiled with lovely gold; her long-hooded tunic was of stiff, smooth, green silk embroidered with red gold, and there were wondrous animal brooches of gold and silver at her breast and on her shoulders. When the sun shone upon her, the gold would glisten very red against the green silk. Two tresses of yellow gold she had, and each tress was a weaving of four twists with a globe at the end. Men would say that hair was like the blooming iris in summer or like red gold after it had been burnished.
At the well, the woman loosened her hair in order to wash it, and