#ferdia

[denndrawings]

Just boys playing in the creek :’)

[sissiarte]

It's been like a year but I finally got around to finish this :_)

(Inspired by Ivan the Terrible and His Son by Ilya Repin)

[dilutedh2so4]

Cú Chulainn fights Ferdiad, by Desmond Kinney

[robertwaltons]

fell back into the ulster cycle fixation hole and this time i have a whole fic to show for it please clap

[nerves-nebula]

really funny that i was very very fixated on a super power I made up as a kid which is basically like. weaponized projection. It's what Atchkie has and it used to be suuuch a big deal to me. The ability to force your perspective and sensory input onto someone else, in a way that disoriented and confused and distressed them. but in a way that could also be very useful and helpful if honed. i loved this idea for a really long time and then i just kinda forgot about it and now the only remnants are that Atchkie does it and Ferdia does it. and y'all dont even know who Ferdia is.

it used to be CORE to the plot of loose stitches but now I forget atchkie can even do it half the time fasdfsdf

[a-drifting-boat]

The way the Táin uses poetry is interesting to me. We see it at very important/intense moments - Dubthach's chant, the Morrígan's words as the army cross the plain, Fer Diad and Cú Chulainn's fight, etc. Which you would expect. But, as Carson points out, the roscada are often used during very tense exchanges, as "verbal jousting or an exchange of veiled threats."

And I know nothing whatsoever about Old or Middle Irish and have not read much scholarship on the Táin, so I am very much speculating here, but I think at certain points in the text something like this might also be going on with the poetry. Because the other context in which we see poetry used in the Táin is in dialogue when characters are deceiving each other.

It's used when Medb suspects Fergus of misdirecting the army (which he is.) And it's used when Medb persuades Fer Diad to fight Cú Chulainn, after she gets him drunk and tells him Cú Chulainn insulted him publicly. Cú Chulainn and Fer Diad also exchange verse dialogue before fighting. Which makes sense, given that it's a significant/dramatic moment - but it's also a moment when they are taunting each other, and trying to conceal their unwillingness to kill each other with bravado.

I think when Táin characters exchange dialogue in verse rather than prose, it's sometimes to signal lying/concealment/artifice. In the instances I pointed out it happens when characters are very carefully considering their words, and choosing what they will say for the calculated effect on the listener. And to me at least the poetry adds to that sense of tension, of speech that is being carefully managed.

[a-tam]

"Man of Smoke"

Ferdiad from the Tain Bo Cualinge! He's a bit older, maybe if he survived the fight with Cú at the ford.

This also became practice of Kamome Shirahama's style along the way haha

Also please listen to The Tain by The Decemberists.

[revisionlightning]

Art of Cú Chulainn and Ferdiad. I couldn't decide on a bg so have both.