As someone who is kinda new here, I too want to jump on the Laeg bandwagon (bandlaegon?)! Do you have a handy summary post that explains Who Even Is This Guy and Why Should I Care?
I probably do, but I can't find it, and I'll take any excuse to talk about Láeg, so let's just start again.
Who even is this guy, and why should I care?
Láeg mac Ríangabra, also sometimes spelled Lóeg, Laogh, Laoi, and pretty much any variation thereupon, is Cú Chulainn's charioteer, companion, and closest friend. In some texts, he appears to be his foster brother. In later texts, the relationship looks more like a sworn brotherhood situation. (I wrote an article about that.)
The name Lóeg or Láeg literally means "calf" and figuratively means "favourite, darling" ("Mo lao thú" is used in Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, for example). "mac Ríangabra" is ostensibly a patronymic, and in two texts we see his parents, Srían or Rían and Gabar. However, since it appears to mean reins-of-a-horse or path-of-a-horse, I believe this 'patronymic' was originally just a descriptive epithet meaning charioteer, which at some point was reinterpreted as a personal name and parents created to match. This would explain why we get so many charioteers called mac Ríangabra, only some of whom are ever explicitly given a familial link to Láeg.
(Note. Under the entry for Lóeg, eDIL suggests an uncertain meaning "calf of the sea-horse" for his name. I've absolutely no idea where they get that, but I think it's wrong, so ignore that; it's probably based on a weird reading somewhere and doesn't take into account all the texts.)
Why is he called calf? Or perhaps we should ask: why is he called Beloved? What does this tell us about the role the earliest authors thought he played in these texts? I don't know. I'm normal about it though.
He is the most well-developed charioteer in medieval Irish literature, in part because he he gets more screentime than all the rest put together. He is Cú Chulainn's only companion throughout the majority of Táin Bó Cúailnge, as well as large parts of other stories (Tóruigheacht Gruaidhe Griansholus, Oidheadh Con Culainn, etc), meaning that their relationship plays a significant role in these texts. Analysing Láeg can, for example, tell you a lot about the different recensions of the Táin. (I wrote an article about that.)
And being a charioteer encompasses more than just driving Cú Chulainn around: depending on the text it involves driving, navigation, and geographical knowledge, yes, but also legal advice, treating Cú Chulainn's wounds, fighting on his behalf or alongside him, making camp, taking messages and serving as go-between, inciting Cú Chulainn, restraining Cú Chulainn, dressing him in his armour, and probably more.
It's a lifelong relationship, though its nature shifts according to the text. In one version of Compert Con Culainn, he and Cú Chulainn are raised together from infancy, while in Tóruigheacht Gruaidhe Griansholus, he swears eternal friendship to Cú Chulainn after being defeated by him in single combat. In the early medieval story of Cú Chulainn's death, he dies just before Cú Chulainn himself does, hit by a spear meant for Cú Chulainn; in the early modern tale, he survives, and is the one to bring the news back to Ulster. (I wrote an article about that.)
In one group of manuscripts of Oidheadh Con Culainn written in Cork, Láeg holds Cú Chulainn's hand as he dies. (I have a forthcoming book chapter about that.) Cú Chulainn's wife Emer describes the three of them as living together in one dwelling place.
And his friendship with Cú Chulainn goes beyond the living, human world. In Serglige Con Culainn, he travels to the Otherworld on Cú Chulainn's behalf. In Síaburcharpat Con Culaind, St Patrick summons Cú Chulainn's ghost from Hell and Láeg is with him, demonstrating that they're together in the afterlife. In Tóruigheacht Gruaidhe Griansholus, he expresses a desire to be buried with Cú Chulainn.
(Sometimes people come up to me at conferences and say, a little nervously: "So, how do you interpret this relationship? I mean, is this queer?" This usually gets them a longer answer than they expected. I am extremely open to homoerotic readings. I also don't believe erotic elements are necessary for queer readings. At the moment, my approach to writing about friendship is both very aromantic and very informed by queer theory: I believe in dismantling gendered and heteronormative assumptions about how relationships are structured, and I also believe that friendship can be profound, intimate, physical, etc, and that it is vitally important not to replace heteronormative paradigms with amatonormative ones. I wrote a blog post about this. Ultimately, I believe that Cú Chulainn and Láeg are Weird About Each Other. I don't believe their relationship maps neatly onto any modern labels or divisions, encompassing as it does a very particular blend of service and intimacy, hierarchy and equality, friendship and violence, which is specific to a medieval warrior-charioteer sworn brotherhood setup; I think it would be reductive to suggest that it did. But I do have a picture of them kissing on the wall of my study, which a Tumblr mutual gave to me. I contain multitudes.)
He is in almost every text that Cú Chulainn is in, from the very early tales to the very late ones. His absences are notable, and often 'corrected' in later reworkings: he is not present in Aided Óenfhir Aífe, the early tale of how Cú Chulainn kills his own son, but he is present in the early modern story, Oidheadh Chonlaoich, because clearly his absence struck them as unlikely.
You would think, then, that this character who shows up in such a large number of texts and plays such an important role in them would have received some scholarly attention, and you ... would be wrong. In autumn 2018, I set out to answer a question I thought was simple: "What province is Láeg from, and if it's Ulster, why isn't he affected by the debility during Táin Bó Cúailnge?" I discovered that nobody had written anything about this, or, really, anything else about him. Even detailed character studies like Doris Edel's Inside The Táin scarcely mention Láeg (I think he warrants three or maybe four mentions in the entire book).
So, two years later, I started an MA looking specifically at Láeg, because if nobody was going to give me the answer, I decided to find it myself. Everything I've done since has really cascaded from that.
This doesn't mean there has been absolutely no attention paid to Láeg -- for example, I found out that he survived in Oidheadh Con Culainn because it was discussed in passing in Joseph Falaky Nagy's book Conversing with Angels and Ancients, and Alf Hiltebeitel published an article about the role of the charioteers in Comrac Fir Diad back in 1982, 'Brothers, Friends and Charioteers: Parallel Episodes in the Irish and Indian Epics'. (Did you know: if you google that article trying to get the original pub date, the AI summary will link you to my article about Láeg instead? Because I cited it and mine's Open Access, I guess. Hate that this suggests the AI has ingested my research, but such are the perils of OA publishing.) But there is shockingly little considering how significant a role he plays, and he is often overlooked in contexts where he should have been mentioned, such as in Julia Kühns' summary of the plot differences between the two death tales, where she doesn't appear to notice Láeg's survival.
So, the three articles I've published about Láeg so far, as well as my forthcoming chapter and various conference papers, have significantly raised his academic profile and I think I have single-handedly doubled the amount that's been written about him. It's amazingly easy to become the world expert on a medieval Irish character; you just have to pick somebody that nobody else cares about.
Why has Láeg barely been discussed? Well, aside from the lack of literary and character-led analysis in our field in general, it is probably substantially a class thing (why would we write about a servant when we could write about a warrior) and, relatedly, treating him as an extension of Cú Chulainn -- just another weapon in his arsenal. And, sure, they're deeply intertwined and Láeg-without-Cú Chulainn is something of a shadow... but he is still a separate person, as evidenced by his appearance in a bardic poem set after Cú Chulainn's death. It's also partly that his role develops significantly in late tales, but scholarship has hitherto focused more on early material. But that doesn't excuse the Táin Bó Cúailnge scholarship, where there were plenty of chances to talk about him!
I still don't know, for the record, what province he's from. It's very ambiguous. He may have a link to Connacht, via a connection with Cét mac Magach, but that might just as easily be a Charioteer Connection via complicated textual garbling. He may have a link to the Otherworld: his parents might live on an Otherworldly island, or hang out at Síd Truimm. He is, however, quite probably a similar age to Cú Chulainn, which might be why he doesn't suffer under the debility during TBC. (Or this might also be a class thing. "Men of Ulster" is not men in the broad sense, it is far more specific than that.)
But I haven't exactly answered the question of why we should we care about Láeg. I suppose the answer is: because without him Cú Chulainn would be nothing. He would never have made it to the fight in the first place; he would not have his weapons; he would made poor choices and lost his legal status; he would be unable to win certain combats; he would have died on his grand European tour when he was fifteen; he would be wounded with nobody to bandage him up; he would be alone, he would be lost, he would be considerably less interesting. And instead we have This Guy. And at first glance you think that he is the ordinary one, there only to reflect Cú Chulainn's light. But once you start looking at him, you start to realise... he's an absolute freak.
He goes to the Otherworld, and then comes back. He fights a hundred warriors using Cú Chulainn's own weapons because Cú Chulainn is asleep at the time. He plays board games with Cú Chulainn in a moving chariot, holding the reins while sitting with his back to the horses and not looking where they're going. He can turn them invisible. He can see people from the Otherworld when Cú Chulainn can't. He is so weird and I love him so much.
Anyway. I could talk about Láeg until the cows come home. I already wrote a 27k MA thesis about him, and he's a big part of my PhD. But hopefully the above provides a brief introduction to why this is my conference t-shirt:
I have received many compliments on it. I'm thinking of making a follow-up that has the dates and titles of my articles on the back, like a band's tour t-shirt, but I think I need a few more articles before I can make that work.
