#oddnub

[whatissleepeven]

Good morning bitches bros and nonbinary hoes. Hope you're doing good friendo.

GOOD MORNING YOU WONDERFUL LOVELY FRIEND OF MINE, I'M BACK IN ACTION AND FOR REAL THIS TIME

Finally, after nearly a year, I can say with confidence I'm doing good! I hope you're doing good as well, my friend; I know it's hard to be upbeat, (plus I left without warning which is my bad (_(; ), but I'm officially back!

See you on the flip side, bro!

[finnlongman]

Your thoughts about the Ulster Cycle and various related matters are always interesting and fun to read, so it'd be cool to see you go down the Stadish O'Grady rabbithole!

Thanks! I, uh, may have already started drafting an introductory blog post before I even got as far as downloading The Coming of Cuculain to my Kindle so I could read it properly. I might be getting ahead of myself, but I'm interested to see if I can wrangle at least a couple of blog posts out of it. Maybe a general one or two, and then a couple focused on specific scenes or ideas that particularly interest me? Obviously, I'm particularly fascinated by how he portrays Láeg, but it may be when I read it properly, I find other interesting elements I want to discuss...

[karthedense]

∞

Stakes are high and so am I It's in the air tonight It's a free for all

from Free for all by Ted Nugent

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPnrAkG-3sM

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

If you don't mind me asking, what got you into medivial lit/the ulster cycle?

honestly? i got into medieval irish lit via children's fantasy books about fairies. like, eoin colfer etc (i had a big artemis fowl phase), kate thompson -- basically if it came out in the 00s and contained fairies, there's a high chance i read it. then as i got into my teens it was the more paranormal YA side of things -- holly black, maggie stiefvater etc. (i LOVED the 'books of faerie') also some retellings and more "historical" novels too. i read a lot of really bad books about fairies as well, and some adult fantasy that was just... Not Great, but there were also a lot of books i really loved. it's hard now because i know too much and i can't enjoy a lot of them sdfkljsdf

anyway because i was into fairies i got into folklore and some of the early modern stories like "oisín in tír na nóg", and i also got interested in a few bits of the early history... i wanted to write my own novels about some of it so i just went looking for sources but a lot of what i found online wasn't great and i was working from like, victorian and edwardian materials which were pretty misleading. but, the process of trying to find that info kind of piqued my interest and i wanted to learn more

anyway because i was into folklore and also trad music and dance and stuff, i was originally more of a finn cycle kind of person. still have a soft spot for it. the otherworld in finn cycle texts is much closer to the folkloric otherworld i think, like, it's a bit wispy and insubstantial and the people of the síd are underground and there's music that sends people to sleep or makes them fight and so on (related: there's a reason dancing on dangerous ground is my favourite irish dance show. it's based on toruigheacht diarmuid agus grainne (i DEF spelled that wrong) and it's great, i LOVE how their grainne is portrayed and someone should compare it to lady gregory's grania one day)

how i got into the ulster cycle... i don't know. it was a gradual process. i read the táin in my late teens and... well not to go into too much detail but being 17 fucking sucked for me and i was so full of rage all the time and basically just wanted to peel off my skin in frustration, so i guess i read about cú chulainn and went "oh, fucking mood" sdfkljd. plus i'm always in it for anything with homoerotic potential so i was into TBC but i didn't really focus on it until my final year of uni? before that i'd been a bit more focused on the otherworld in various forms

i think i sorta switched to ulster cycle for the same reason i read a lot more romance novels than i did as a teenager... i'm much more interested in *people* now than i used to be. it's not that i'm not interested in magic and stuff but like. i'm *more* interested in having a shitton of feelings about something, and i find there are some surprisingly poignant and human moments in the ulster cycle because there's a... certain consistency of characters? like cú chulainn is not the same in every text and láeg is not the same in every texts but at the same time they're similar enough that you're like "oh that's the same guy" and then you can see the emotions developing in different stories, i guess??

the fianaigecht material has that too to some extent and is also emo as fuck, but some of the most emotional material there is the early modern stuff not the medieval stuff, and/or it's poetry (and i'm not very good at translating poetry so if i'm gonna work with an original text i'd prefer it to be prose)

but also i won't lie i kinda started blogging about ulster cycle stuff because it was... less frustrating as a blogging experience than focusing on the more mythological/otherworld type of stuff where i constantly found myself having to work around online polytheists and like, not step on any toes, and after i got a few angry anons just for posting about medieval lit i was like "okay i just won't talk about the tuatha de danann anymore" and switched to something that seemed "safer". and in the process of shitposting about the ulster cycle i realised how much i loved it -- i knew i *liked* it before that but memes unlocked a new level. (then Fate happened to my notifications and i briefly considered exclusively blogging about, like, minor king-tale figures or something, but by then i was invested)

anyway yeah idk that was kind of a long answer for what should have been a simple question lol. basically: children's and YA fantasy novels is what set me on this path and then i just sort of wandered around until i wound up at ulster cycle material

[vivienna-vivid]

For the song thing, Gira Gira by Ado. I don't remember most of those lyrics, but it is the first association my brain made

I will accept your answer mainly because Gira Gira slaps and the MV's aesthetics is everything I want. Thanks Odd~😊

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

Would you recommend Stadish O'Grady? You've mentioned him on your blog here and there (I think your header is also a quote from him?), and I'm curious on your overall thoughts/if you'd recommend.

lol i mean. it depends what you mean by "recommend"

also bear in mind there are two standish o'gradys and they're not the same person, there's standish hayes o'grady who edited a number of medieval irish texts and published the silva gaedelica, and there's standish james o'grady who wrote novels based on medieval irish stuff, totally different people (they're cousins tho). my blog title is a quote from standish james not standish hayes, specifically from his 1894 book "the coming of cuculain", so the fiction one. standish hayes is the academic one. it's very confusing

and i mean i haven't actually read "the coming of cuculain" all the way through, i very much did a ctrl+f for láeg because he's my boy, but i ADORE the láeg sections. some of them are pure invention, zero basis in medieval lit, even when everything else around them in the story has an obvious medieval counterpart, and i love that because you know what it tells me? it tells me that standish james cared about láeg. he looked at him and was like "huh. we should see more of this guy." and GAVE HIM BACKSTORY and it was very homoerotic. full points to him, 10/10, excellent choices were made

like would i recommend it on an academic level? no, it's fiction and it invents as much as it retells and it's probably misleading in places, since it is a novel and not intended as an academic piece of work. would i recommend it as nineteenth century ulster cycle fan fiction? absolutely yes it has some Extremely Good láeg/cú chulainn moments in it

idk anything much about his other work so can't speak to that but that is my judgment lol

[finnlongman]

Is there any reason certain names end up being used so repeatedly in the Ulster Cycle? Like, I remember reading some translations of The Wooing of Emer+Cú Chulainn's Training with Scathach, and the name Cett/Cat appears 3 times; once as one of Emer's brothers, once as one of Scathach's sons, and once as a soldier fighting with Aoife. Is it just a translation thing or is it not actually deep and it was just a common name? Sorry if this question seems a little stupid. Thank you for your time.

Interesting question! I've been thinking a lot about names recently, particularly those that repeat, so this coincides well.

A lot of the time, I think it's simply that they're common names. There are a zillion guys called Ailill (sometimes within the same text), every other random maiden seems to be called Étain, and I lose track of how many Eochaids there are. Whenever you get an index of names, as you sometimes do for longer texts where a lot of characters appear, you find yourself scrolling through half a page of the same name. If you're lucky, they'll be distinguished by epithets or patronymics. If you're not, good luck figuring out which Lugaid you're supposed to be looking up...

There are some names that only come up once, like Cú Chulainn, but for the most part, I'd hazard that it's more common for there to be multiple characters with a name than for it to be wholly unique.

Now, sometimes this is a plot point. Recently, I've been working on a tiny fragment from TCD H.3.17, concerning the seven Maines. The seven Maines, if you haven't come across them, are the seven sons of Medb and Ailill, all of whom have the same name (but different epithets to distinguish them). In this case, there's a reason for it: Medb renamed all of them because when she asked a druid which of her sons would kill Conchobar, he prophesied that it would be Maine. Realising she didn't have a son called Maine yet, Medb took action to fix that. But! She wasn't precise enough in her question. Maine Andoe does kill a Conchobar... but it's a different one.

So here we have a story that not only involves seven people called Maine, but also two people called Conchobar, and that overlap is central to the plot. But this fragment seems to be an excerpt from the longer text Cath Boinde... where there are two guys called Eochaid and that's not a plot point whatsoever. Eochaid Feidleach and Eochaid Dala just happen to have the same first name. Even within the same story, repeated names both do and don't have meaning.

The Maines aren't too unusual, even if they're one of the only groups I know of where there's an explanation for their names: there are a lot of lists of people with the same name. In the Táin the largest groups of same-named warriors are ten people, I think ("Ten Fiacs, ten Fiachas, ten Feidlimids"), although three is a pretty common number there and in Togail Bruidne Da Derga. But in some of the later (early modern) texts, we get groups of up to three hundred: "Ferdia son of Daman with three hundred Ferdias in his train; Fraoch son of Fidhach with three hundred Fraochs [etc.]" (Táin Bó Flidais II). It makes you wonder whether they made them all change their name, or whether they just had a highly selective job interview process with only one question...

It's clear that names recur a lot even within the same texts, but what about across different texts? Well, looking at the example you asked about, it's worth noting that The Training of Cú Chulainn is a later text that derives from The Wooing of Emer, so that may also result in some overlap or borrowing of names -- even if it's for different characters. But often the reason a name is common is to do with the meaning of it. You get a lot of names with the Cú or Con element at the beginning because 'hound' was evidently a comparison made for particularly fierce fighters. You also get a lot of names with the 'Fer' prefix -- Fer Diad, Fer Baeth, Fer Logain, etc, and 'fer' just means 'man'. So names that mean things are bound to recur.

What do these names mean? Well, I'm away from my books and library access at the moment, which makes it a little tricky to verify which spellings are used in the original Irish of those texts -- Cat and Cett would be distinct names, but I'm also aware of at least one spelling of Scáthach's son's name as Caid, which would be different again. (Caid means 'pure, holy, noble', which would maybe place him in opposition to her other son Cuar, meaning 'crooked, bent', although it usually means in the physical rather than moral sense -- and I'm not sure where the Caid spelling comes from as I've only come across it in translation.)* It looks like it's usually spelled Cet in Tochmarc Emire (but one of the manuscripts also says 'Scathqu' at one point, so I Don't Trust It). The most famous Cet is Cet mac Mágach, but 'cét' has a bunch of meanings -- it can mean 'first', it can mean 'a hundred'... it's a solid name for a firstborn son, so maybe that's why it shows up so much. One of the MSs of Training uses Cat, which is harder to pin down -- it could just mean 'cat', although that seems unlikely, or maybe it relates to 'cath' ('battle'), or maybe it's an early modern scribe getting confused about his vowels, I'm not sure.

This is... getting very long, and not saying much, so, the short version is: Sometimes Names Just Show Up A Lot. And the scribes and authors are evidently aware of the potential for confusion and plot points with regard to this, as the story of the seven Maines proves, but at other times, they throw repetition at you and leave you to figure it out. But a lot of the names that show up very frequently do so because they have a meaning, one that may relate to the characters' physical traits (so many fair-haired Fionns!) or their skills or even just their birth order.

I hope this was... useful? Sorry, I feel like I just threw a lot of words at you when you were probably looking for a quick answer. You happened to catch me at a time when I'm immersed in thinking about names in medieval Irish lit, so the infodumping was inevitable!

* Note that manuscript spellings are often wildly inconsistent, so the same name might show up as Cet, Cat, Caut -- without translating fully and getting context, it's hard to figure out whether they're all the same person, and right now I'm just scrolling quickly through editions, so I apologise if I've missed anything in that regard.

[vivienna-vivid]

☕ Freud

Ahhh Freud. The bitch himself.

Surprisingly, I actually like some of his other ideas! His theories on the conscious and unconscious mind -- the ego, superego, and id stuff -- really became a strong foundation on a lot of concepts in modern psychology and I can’t say that I hate him for it. He really did pave a way on how we approach psychology and saying that these things aren’t valid because of his grosser ideas is really unfair.

I also appreciate how his works really got the Psychodynamic movement going (which resulted in Carl Jung and Anna Freud being a thing <3)