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Summary

Harbinger of death, shaper of destiny: The image of woman in Irish traditional culture

Introduction

This work is not intended to be an exhaustive study of Celtic female deities as they represented in myth, epic literature and folklore. In the last decades a number of such general works appeared (see, e. g. [Green 1995]). We are not speaking of the real medieval Irish women, who enjoyed a surprising level of physical and moral freedom. This book is about an archetypal image of women in Irish myth and folklore. The woman in the Early Irish literature was very often treated not as a woman, but as some strange creature. This creature was called by an untranslatable name banscál, ‘a female shape’ or a ‘female phantom’; in short, any woman-looking being. This being was not regarded as a goddess, but it wasn’t a normal woman, either. She was, in a word of J.F. Nagy, a liminal creature; in every single occasion we cannot say, what part of this creature we are seeing – real or mythical. In some respect, we can agree with the view of E. MacNeill, who believed that in reality such women were members of local, autochthon groups of population, goidelicized though, but still hostile to the Goidelic invaders. From the physical point of view, they were most probably short, darkhaired, and rather mongoloid, flat-faced people. The well-known Lorica, ascribed to Saint Patrick depicts women as persons, innately capable of sorcery. In the Irish folklore, female sorcery is a fact of life. Perhaps that’s why the witch-hunting never was practiced in Ireland on a large scale: witches were all too common. Suddenly a woman could «prove» to be a changeling (e. g. the well-known story of Bridget Clery).

Women in Early Irish literature are, in spite of their common liminality still unlike each other. The aim of this book is to distinguish and describe the main archetypes or proto-characters of liminal women, marked by the mythical names of Etain, Fedelm, Gormflaith and Leborcham. We’ll learn to recognize those mythical beings and discover what is hiding beneath their names and characters.

Etain-Sin-Cailb: An Otherworld wife

The old Irish saga Togail Bruidne Da Derga (TBDD) is usually regarded as a locus classicus for the mythology of kingship. However, let us not forget that two women played a crucial role in the destiny of the ill-starred king Conaire: the old woman Cailb and the young Etain. Etain was a woman of the side, whom the king Eochaid married in the beginning of the saga. According to J. Rhys, the aes side were a real people, the pre-Goidelic inhabitants of Ireland; that’s why a marriage to a woman of the side was considered possible. In the Irish folklore, a red-haired woman is always a supernatural being, who brings bad luck upon her husband. Etain’s hair is compared in the TBDD to the ailestar, the iris flower. The maiden’s golden-yellow hair and bright green cloak vividly recreate the image of a flower, growing on the brink of a dangerous bog. In this aspect, Etain can be compared with the treacherous «flower-wife» of the insular Celtic literature (Blodeuedd «the flowery face» in the Welsh Mabinogion and the Irish Bláthnat). After marrying Etain the king Eochaid dies, as it seems, a natural death. Nevertheless, there are obvious similarities between this story and the story of king Muirchertach’s tragic death (Aided Muircherthaigh maic Erca): 1) The king sees a lonely yellow-haired woman in green (Ir. uaine, the colour of natural green); 2) He falls in love at the first sight; 3) The woman reciprocates his love and lets the king know that this was the actual purpose of her coming; 4) She has already known him by rumour; 5) She is connected with the world of the side; 6) She wants something or stipulates something for herself; 7) The king dies.

The motif of woman as a personification of Sovereignty, Eros and Death in Early Irish literature is well studied. The metaphor of death as marriage is an international phenomenon, which lies outside the limits of epic literature. For example, quite recently some Satanist sectarians in the Russian city of Tomsk were reported to have met a «lady in red» before committing a ritual suicide. This is a