irelandseyeonmythology - Tumblr blog

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Sreng mac Sengainn is actually the funniest bitch in the Mythological Cycle for looking at Nuada, leader of a tribe of gods who have just decimated Sreng's forces to the point that there are less than 300 of them left after they made what Sreng KNEW was a suicide charge and, when Nuada is like "I'll fight you if you tie your arm back :)" going "No."

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Join me as I dress the entirety of the Tuatha dé in the most obnoxious color palettes and outfits known to man

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This showed up in an email for an Irish language course and ???? Do they want me to fuck the Irish language? Like the Irish language is deeply sexy but it isn’t my type?? I just want to learn how to speak it and read academic things so the nice people in the unis will hire me???

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If I want to read the Fenian cycle, which translation(s) do you think are best? Any to definately avoid?

So, for Diarmaid and Gráinne, people probably already know my opinions on it, because I'm not shy, but AVOID THE O'GRADY EDITION. It's the standard because it's free, but it's free because it's outdated. Read the Ní Shéaghda edition + translation (and make sure you aren't getting the modern Irish version! ...unless you read Modern Irish, in which case, maith thú, ceannaigh an leabhar fós, mar sin rinne Ní Shéaghda é níos easca a léamh.) It explains a lot more about exactly how many manuscripts there are of it (over 40) and why certain things that O'Grady did REALLY aren't part of the tradition. (Little known fact: Diarmaid does not have a love spot in the Early Modern Irish text, nor does Fionn marry Gráinne after Diarmaid's death in all but one of the manuscripts. It doesn't mean they aren't an authentic part of the TRADITION, but if you're looking at what it says in the "original" text? No.)

Beyond that? The Fenian Cycle is...a maze. It doesn't seem like it at first, because the way we receive it is often very simplified, but the more I do with it, the more I realize there IS, and it can be, frankly, terrifying. But I recommend the Fionn Cycle Bibliography which has been compiled by Natasha Sumner at Harvard; it compiles...just about everything that's been done and sorts by text; I recommend going to the primary source listings and looking at what's been done recently. With some texts like the Acallam, there's still so much work to be done that I still struggle to say that we're even THERE yet, but it's going to be an improvement on the 19th century editions and translations.

For folklore, since there is a THRIVING oral tradition around the Fianna, going into the United States, I recommend FionnFolklore.org, run by the same. (The woman has spent her entire scholarly career making this stuff as accessible as possible.)

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Talking about Gráinne, it's always "WHY are people romanticizing her relationship with Diarmaid, we should really be harsher towards her", as if Gráinne has EVER been widely liked as a character since the O'Grady edition and translation (which has multiple flaws, btw) came out in the 19TH CENTURY.

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Me whenever Elatha is about to launch into a self-righteous rant to his son, who he abandoned as a boy and whose country he raided WHILE his son was not only living in it, but actively ruling it.

reading the cmt for the first time in...a while (got the morgan daimler translation for christmas) and man. bres really meets his dad for the first time and elatha is immediately like "kind of a cringe fuck up, ain't you?"

like sir. whose fault is that????

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Automation kills everything, I swear

Well, I've found my dream job if academia doesn't work out.

(Source: Ronald Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe)

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Well, I've found my dream job if academia doesn't work out.

(Source: Ronald Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe)

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pov: you are interested in medieval Irish literature

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Part One of a new illustration series focusing on the tragic tale of Deirdre and Naoise.

Fedlimid gets some bad news, a baby is born and Leabharcham heads away for safety.

This is my March Postcard Club illustration! If you’re interested in getting a print in the post (along with new postcards each month) then you can sign up here!

[irelandseyeonmythology]

people take the piss out of thank you in irish being long but i like it. go raibh maith agat is more heartfelt than thanks imo. thanks very much has NOTHING on go raibh míle maith agat. i also think más é do thoil é/le do thoil is better than please

[irelandseyeonmythology]

This Saint Patrick's Day, don't forget the reason for the season. Celebrate like St. Patrick would have wanted:

Speak Welsh.

Turn your enemies into foxes

Call out your local politicians

Set a bonfire, piss off the cops

Curse your enemies' fields to become barren marshes, unfit for farmland.

Cause an earthquake

Write all your letters in Latin

Despite this, claim that your Latin is bad.

Become a key part of Uí Néill propaganda.

Yeet your enemies into the sky so that they freeze to death.

Adopt a child who refuses to leave you alone.

Bargain with an angel to be allowed to judge the souls of the Irish on Judgement Day

Remind your local surviving members of the Fianna that all their friends are dead and in Hell.

Have two oxen decide your burial place

Develop a long and complex relationship with St. Brigit in the folk tradition, despite neither of you being contemporaries.

Refuse to suck the nipples of the pirates who you are trying to convince to take you back to Britain.

Disguise yourself as a deer

Fight against manmade climate change

Be accused by your former friend of unspecified charges that might or might not have involved gay sex and write a long self-justifying letter about your tragic backstory.

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🌀 MONTHLY IRISH FOLKLORE POSTCARD CLUB 🌀

For those who don’t know, I run a postcard club! Every month, I pick a story from Irish myth and folklore and subscribers get a new piece of art made by me plus an explanation of the story.

Some stories and characters I’ve drawn so far include the goddess’ Áine and Brigid, the Birth of Aengus, Fionn and Sadhbh and much, much more!

I’m reminding everyone because this year I’m hoping to illustrate more long-form stories, with each month being a new part of the chosen story.

The poll to choose the next story is currently neck and neck, so if you’d like to subscribe and have your say, you can do so here!

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"We need more complicated female characters" people literally haven't been able to handle Gráinne and Medb for over a thousand years

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A sidenote is that also, there is NO translation that has been made that doesn't use Elizabeth Gray's edition. Because the woman. Transcribed the medieval text (which was only digitized last year or thereabouts). (And she did it. Again. In the *80s*. Before a lot of the resources we have at our disposal as paleographers *existed*.)

There is NO reliable translation of Cath Maige Tuired that does not have Elizabeth Alma Gray involved in its creation in some way. It's hers. It's her text.

Every time I see someone claim that Elizabeth Gray deliberately censored her edition and translation of Cath Maige Tuired, I nearly combust with pure indignation on her behalf -- Like, Elizabeth Gray is NOT a prude, she was the FIRST Anglophone academic (the Germans did it first, fwiw) to translate ALL the raunchy bits.

The reason why there are passages that weren't translated is that they're rosc passages that are NOTORIOUSLY difficult to translate and Elizabeth was working...pre-internet. (And, honestly...seeing other attempts at translations...with respect...those are not translations. Those are word salads. Hence why Gray. Did not do them.) And she gave our ungrateful asses an index of all the appearances of the Tuatha Dé across the medieval Irish literary tradition, which, to this day, is STILL the most complete account we have and is a resource I use all the time....which she did...PRE-INTERNET.

(Also as a sidenote, she was and remains a mentor to a number of people in the field and influenced a number of Celticists from the 1980s-1990s who went on to have their own grad students and mentees, so I can very confidently say that the field would not be the same if it wasn't for her.)

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Every time I see someone claim that Elizabeth Gray deliberately censored her edition and translation of Cath Maige Tuired, I nearly combust with pure indignation on her behalf -- Like, Elizabeth Gray is NOT a prude, she was the FIRST Anglophone academic (the Germans did it first, fwiw) to translate ALL the raunchy bits.

The reason why there are passages that weren't translated is that they're rosc passages that are NOTORIOUSLY difficult to translate and Elizabeth was working...pre-internet. (And, honestly...seeing other attempts at translations...with respect...those are not translations. Those are word salads. Hence why Gray. Did not do them.) And she gave our ungrateful asses an index of all the appearances of the Tuatha Dé across the medieval Irish literary tradition, which, to this day, is STILL the most complete account we have and is a resource I use all the time....which she did...PRE-INTERNET.

(Also as a sidenote, she was and remains a mentor to a number of people in the field and influenced a number of Celticists from the 1980s-1990s who went on to have their own grad students and mentees, so I can very confidently say that the field would not be the same if it wasn't for her.)

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Update: I was closing out tabs and I found this, from Maggie Williams, "Warrior Kings and Savvy Abbots: The Depiction of Contemporary Costumes on the Cross of the Scriptures at Clonmacnois":

With legal texts, there's always the question of how much they were enforced (and dating law tracts can be quite difficult because of the number of glosses put on top of the older laws), but it's another example of sumptuary law (it's interesting that it doesn't enforce the NUMBER of colors, only the colors themselves.)

So I’ve been getting more into broader brehon law, not just marriage law, and is it true they had laws about how many different colors you could wear? I can’t find any sources about it but maybe I’m just not looking hard enough

That comes from one kind of famous (ish?) passage from the Annals, that reads as follows (from the O'Donovan translation):

Do I think it was something people followed? ...probably not, honestly. We don't see much reference to it elsewhere. Not to say there were NO restrictions, but it's to say that I think it's often taken 100% uncritically and you'd think we'd see more reference to it elsewhere, in the actual lawbooks, if that was the case. (Though, naturally, some of it's practical, in the sense that...would a slave be able to have more than one color? Being a slave? Very likely not.) It's the issue with all sumptuary laws, which is "to what extent were these things widely being used?"

To quote from Sparky Booker's "Moustaches, Mantles, and Saffron Shirts: What Motivated Sumptuary Law in Medieval English Ireland?": "In terms of implementation, the success of enforcement of sumptuary laws varied.11 Indeed, historians disagree about whether these laws were intended to be enforced fully, or whether they were 'primarily symbolic,' a method of 'affirm[ing] values' and even actively shaping the social world by enshrining socio-economic divisions in law."

We know that medieval Ireland had a number of colors associated with the aristocracy: purple (like with the rest of Europe) seems to be common, white, red, like in this description from the Táin (Recension 1, O'Rahilly's translation): "He held a light sharp spear which shimmered. He was wrapped in a purple, fringed mantle, with a silver brooch in the mantle over his breast. He wore a white hooded tunic with red insertion and carried outside his garments a golden-hilted sword."

Likewise, the famous description of Etáin in Togail Bruidne Da Derga (Stokes' translation):

"A mantle she had, curly and purple, a beautiful cloak, and in the mantle silvery fringes arranged, and a brooch of fairest gold. A kirtle she wore, long, hooded, hard-smooth, of green silk, with red embroidery of gold. Marvellous clasps of gold and silver in the kirtle on her breasts and her shoulders and spaulds on every side. The sun kept shining upon her, so that the glistening of the gold against the sun from the green silk was manifest to men."

For more on this, see Niamh Whitfield, "Aristocratic Display in Early Medieval Ireland in Fiction and in Fact: The Dazzling White Tunic and Purple Cloak", which she's generously put on Academia.

After the English colonization of Ireland, you have new sumptuary laws being put into place -- Booker discusses the earliest case we have, from 1297, when a hairstyle known as the "cúlán" was banned for Englishmen, with the enactment complaining that the Englishmen were taking it up to such an extent that they were getting killed after being mistaken for Irishmen. (I feel like there is a solution to this that does not involve banning the hairstyle, let me think...)

You had similar fines being imposed on saffron sleeves or kerchiefs for women, or wearing a mantle in general for men, as of 1466 in Dublin -- these aren't as a matter of maintaining social class so much as preserving a distinction between the English and the Irish (what's interesting, of course, is that the English had to have been adopting these fashions to some extent for the law to be needed.) And we see them routinely going back to this aversion towards saffron colors, since it was associated extensively with Ireland and Irishness, and a particularly high value one at that.

So: Eochaidh Eadghaghach -- that section in the annals provides the quote that says that this is a thing that happened -- I leave it to you to decide whether it was ever practiced or even in place in the first place. I think it might have, if only as a societal ideal, but I'm incredibly doubtful. We know that colors often ARE used as a way of marking social standing in the literature, but I don't think it was as regimented as that quote suggests. Sumptuary laws ARE better recorded in a post-Norman invasion context, usually (though not ALWAYS) as a means of marking out the Irish from the English populations (even though we know, both from this and other evidence, that these lines weren't always as firm as the authorities might have liked.)

I know that Kelly also goes into a lot of details re: colors and dyes in his "Early Irish Farming" -- if you're looking to get into the world of day to day life in Ireland, there isn't a better source.