St. Patrick’s Day Special: The Defender of Ulster
Our fourth Celtic Month piece celebrates St. Patrick’s Day, the national (and international) day of Ireland, on March 17th. Eat some boiled food; play the bodhrán; fight the English; but better yet, study the Irish language. I _promise_ the orthography is less intimidating than it looks.
Before you read what the piece means to me, share what it means to _you_. I’m just the artist; you’re the beholder.
Irish legend is replete with good stories and epic tales; but I ultimately decided to portray a key moment from the Táin Bó Cúailnge, featuring Cú Chulainn, one of Ireland’s most famous heroes.
In ancient Ireland, Queen Medb (or Maeve) and King Ailill of Connacht realized that they were equal in property except for one thing, namely Ailill’s bull, Finnbhennach, to whom there was only one equal in all of Ireland: Donn Cúailnge, a bull owned by an Ulsterman.
This may sound like a trivial issue; but within the context of ancient Irish society, unequal property in marriage was a very big deal; because Brehon Law, the code which governed Irish society before foreign law was imposed, acknowledged many types of marriages, some of them distinguished by the ratio of the property that the respective parties brought to the marriage. A marriage between a wealthier husband and a poorer wife was a substantially different legal relation than a marriage between an equally wealthy husband and wife.
After negotiations failed (due to a drunken envoy), Queen Medb resolved to attack Ulster and steal the bull; and so the Táin Bó Cúailnge (“Cattle Raid of Cooley”) began. Raising an enormous army and recruiting Fergus mac Róich, an exiled Ulsterman, as a general, Queen Medb and King Ailill advanced upon Ulster.
As a result of an earlier incident, the men of Ulster bore a curse that at their moment of need, they would all suffer labor-pains; and only one warrior was able to stand in Ulster’s defense: Cú Chulainn, a heroic youth, not yet having reached manhood.
Originally named Sétanta, he became known as Cú Chulainn, “Hound of Culann”, after he killed the enormous guard-dog of a man named Culann in self-defense, and agreed to guard Culann’s house until one of the dog’s puppies could be raised to an equally enormous size.
Along with his brother-in-arms Ferdiad, he was trained in the art of battle by the renowned Scottish warrior Scáthach. A precocious student, he defeated her sister Aífe in single combat at that young age, ending a long-ongoing feud that his teacher had been unable to resolve herself.
Thus, as the only beardless youth capable of holding his own in combat, Cú Chulainn stood alone against the armies of Connacht; holding them off at river passes, and invoking single combat to take on their forces one by one; buying time for the men of Ulster to recover from their curse.
In the course of this defense, he had to fight his old friend Ferdiad to the death; and killed him using the Gáe Bulg spear, the one thing Scáthach taught him that she didn’t also teach Ferdiad.
Cú Chulainn could only be defeated after he had broken his “geas” (pronounced “gyas”); a taboo, prophecy, or imperative, upon which one’s power is contingent, which both predicts and brings doom. Cú Chulainn had a geas that his downfall would come if he ever ate dog-meat.
This would come to pass after the Mórrígan, fickle crow-goddess of war and death, in the form of an old crone, offered him dog-meat, which he was obliged by courtesy to accept; ensuring his ruin in repayment of a grudge.
Thus at the hands of the Connacht warriors would come the end of Cú Chulainn’s short, tragic, glorious life.
The golden-haired figure is Queen Medb; the red-haired bearded figure beside her is either King Ailill, or Fergus. Fergus was given the task of leading Medb’s contingent on the battlefield, according to the epic; so we could either be looking at Queen Medb and Fergus at the head of her contingent, or both contingents with the king and queen at their respective heads.
Across, we see the beardless youth, Cú Chulainn, prepared to stand alone against them.
The valley between the foreground-hill and the background-hill plausibly contains a river and a ford, where Cú Chulainn will make one of his one-man stands to single-handedly hold the forces of Connacht at bay.
The crow and the stormclouds at upper left, of course, represent the Mórrígan and the bloodshed to come.
I portrayed each of the warriors as bearing a spear and a shield; because the Irish word for “warrior”, “gaiscíoch”, comes from the words “ga” and “sciath”, “spear” and “shield”. I based the shields on the Kiltubbrid Shield, an ancient alder-wood shield found in a bog in County Leitrim.
