Matt Fulton | Writer + Filmmaker

 On the Nature of Violence in the Táin

The Táin Bó Cúailgne is an Irish epic set roughly in the first century CE and tells the story of a war between the four provinces of Ireland provoked when Queen Medb and King Ailill of Connacht attempts to steal Donn Cúailnge, the prized stud bull of Ulster. Rendered powerless by an ancient spell and unable to repulse Queen Medb’s invasion, the Ulstermen seek out and entrust their defense to the demigod Cú Chulainn. As with other epics such as Beowulf, the Old English poem Andreas, Homer’s Iliad, and Gilgamesh, the Táin sits firmly within the cultural construct of heroism and devotes significant attention to Cú Chulainn’s characterization as a selfless savior of the Ulstermen. While initially passed along orally from the early-medieval period and then written down by a series of anonymous monks, it is evident that the various “authors” of the Táin took pains to focus on the development of Cú Chulainn’s identity as a national hero, not just for Ulstermen, but for the Irish as a collective people which endures to this day. As Ciarán Carson—then a poetry professor at Queen’s University in Belfast—explained in the introduction to his translation of the Táin, Cú Chulainn, as the epic’s chief protagonist, is “a figure of immense physical, supernatural and verbal resource who engaged the attention of many later Irish and Anglo-Irish writers” such as William Butler Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, and Samuel Beckett, often as a symbol of an idealized Irish society free from the oppression of British colonial rule. (xi) The Táin is also an infamously bloody work, brimming with passages recounting savage battles and pitched bouts of single combat, all depicted by vivid and stunningly violent prose. Cú Chulainn is often the cause of this wanton slaughter. A distinguishing characteristic of Cú Chulainn is his flights of rage, known as “ríastrad” in Old Irish and translated as “Torque” by Carson. During these frenzies, Cú Chulainn becomes nearly unrecognizable, even to his comrades. His body contorts and mutates in unnatural and horrific ways—an eyeball dangles down his cheek or blood spurts from his forehead like some gory geyser—all the while making Cú Chulainn unstoppable on the battlefield. He physically dismantles his enemies. He habitually lobs off heads with reckless abandon. He bisects people from neck to navel with a single swing of his sword. He rips others apart and impales them upon standing stones. Cú Chulainn does not possess the traits we often expect in a hero, nor does he embody the personal characteristics commonly held up as a national savior. Moreover, the violence in the Táin is so excessive that a reader might openly wonder if the Medieval monks who wrote this epic deliberately tried to paint a cartoonish picture of warfare with an outwardly monstrous protagonist in the vanguard. Yet these monks, if they are guilty of such a feat, did not do so without cause. On the contrary, the extreme brutality depicted in the Táin at the hands of Cú Chulainn offers an exemplary national hero for the Irish people. By carefully examining three passages throughout the text, one can better understand the nature and purpose of violence in the Táin and find an alternative reading which suggests that this violence represents the inherent frustration and anger felt by the Irish when faced with subjugation by outside forces throughout history, whether at the hands of Queen Medb, Oliver Cromwell, or Winston Churchill.

Before examining the passages, we have to take note of the unique mix of poetry and prose in the Táin, something Carson says is exemplary of early Irish writing. Setting aside the poetry, Carson explains that the “prose itself can be separated into three main stylistic strands: the straightforward, laconic style of the general narrative and dialogue …  a formulaic style found primarily in descriptive passages … and an alliterative, heavily adjectival style typical of the later writing.” (xiv) For our purposes, these passages dealing with violence fall into the third, adjectival style.

The first passage sits roughly halfway through the text in a section titled “Single Combat,” in which Cú Chulainn duels the warrior Nad Crantail, sent by Queen Medb as a worthy match for the demigod, in order to delay the approaching Connacht armies. They fight for the bulk of this section, hurling stakes and spears at each other, among other acts of cunning. Finally, Nad Crantail returns to the duel after a brief break to speak with his sons, and the passage describes the following bit of butchery:

He went back after Cú Chulainn, and threw his sword at him. Cú Chulainn jumped into the air. He became terrible transformed, as he had with the young fellows in Emain. He landed on Nad Crantail’s shield and cut off his head. He struck again through the headless neck and split him to the navel. The four bits fell to the ground. (81)

Nad Crantail tries to kill Cú Chulainn by throwing a sword at him, but it doesn’t work out. Cú Chulainn dodges the sword and launches into a Torque, which is compared to another suffered by “the young fellows in Emain.” He lands on Nad Crantail’s shield, shatters it, and then decapitates the man. This is where it gets interesting, even a bit excessive. We are told that Cú Chulainn spins around and bisects the already dead Nad Crantail, quite literally splitting him in half. To end the passage, we’re told for good measure that precisely four bloodied hunks of meat hit the earth—you can almost hear the squish and thump. The language here is more laconic than adjectival; the description isn’t particularly “flowering,” but the passage effectively paints a picture in the reader’s mind. It demonstrates how Cú Chulainn is incapable of merely killing an enemy and walking away—he has to make an event of the corpse ; he has to humiliate his foe in the moments immediately following their death. As a bonus and a small insight into the mindset and dark humor of the authors, Carson notes that Nad Crantail can be translated to mean “shaft sticking out of arse.” (220) It’s a fitting moniker for the ill-fated champion of an outside force come to invade Ulster.

The second passage is from the following section of the text, aptly named “The Great Slaughter” and picks up after Cú Chulainn has risen—rather Christlike—after sleeping for three days to recover from his wounds, only to find that the youth of Ulster have been slaughtered upon attempting to come to his aid. The news sends him into a spectacular Torque, the full description of which carries on for more than a page, although we will only focus on the first section. The passage goes:

The first Torque seized Cú Chulainn and turned him into a contorted thing, unrecognizably horrible and grotesque. Every slab and every sinew of him, joint and muscle, shuddered from head to foot like a tree in the storm or a reed in the stream. His body revolved furiously inside his skin. His feet and his shins and his knees jumped to the back; his heels and his calves and his hams to the front. The bunched sinews of his calves jumped to the front of his shins, bulging with knots the size of a warrior’s clenched fist. The ropes of his neck rippled from ear to nape in immense, monstrous, incalculable knobs, each as big as the head of a month-old child. (109)

This passage, not to mention the remainder of the description that follows, is nothing if not adjectival. It goes into painstaking detail with all these strange, horrific things that are happening to his body. It’s as if he’s the Hulk. Cú Chulainn becomes “a contorted thing, unrecognizably horrible and grotesque. We’re told how his joints and sinew shudders, how the features of his legs are physically twisted backwards. It’s violent and brutal, just as much as the bisection we witnessed previously. The adjectives are doing all the work in this passage, all to convey an image of this monstrous creature Cú Chulainn is becoming. And this is still our hero, our national savior. We feel his rage. He is arguably still heroic because he is going through this transformation out of a kind of righteous anger, to morph into an avenging angel of Ulster’s slaughtered youth, and that’s nothing an oppressed people wouldn’t want their national savior to do in their name—despite the brutality to follow.

The third and final passage is likewise from “The Great Slaughter” and describes how Cú Chulainn assaults the Connacht camp to claim vengeance for Ulster.

He drove into their packed ranks, an enemy to beat all enemies, three times encircling them with great ramparts of their own corpses piled sole to sole and headless neck to headless neck, so all-encompassing was the carnage. Three times again he circled them, leaving a layer of them six deep, the soles of three to the necks of three in a ring-fence round the camp. So that the name of this episode in the Táin is Seisrech Breslige, the Sixfold Slaughter. It is one of three massacres in the Táin whose casualties are beyond computation. (110)

It is in this passage that we feel the kind of power Cú Chulainn possess and are made to understand the damage he can inflict upon his enemies, not just in single combat, but against a massive armed encampment. He is described as an “enemy to beat all enemies”; such is the threat he poses to Queen Medb’s forces. We are told that the carnage is “all-encompassing” and primarily left to ourselves to imagine just what that carnage entailed. However horrific this assault was, it was given a name—Seisrech Breslige; the “Sixfold Slaughter,” for how he inflicted six times the death upon Connacht as they inflicted upon Ulster. Finally, in a stunning bit of worldbuilding, it is said that this is one of three massacres in the epic whose casualties are beyond computation. So staggering is the human cost of provoking Cú Chulainn’s rage that mathematics struggle to make sense of its totality. Such is the extent to which the authors wanted us to understand just how badly the Connacht camp was attacked. From the standpoint of a people under invasion, it is difficult to see how the Ulstermen would view Cú Chulainn’s methods as excessive, or monstrous, or anything but heroic and justified.

Looking back on Cú Chulainn’s current place in the collective Irish consciousness, it is certainly not the case that a string of early-Medieval monks wrote down the story of the Táin to make a statement about the “Anglicization” of Ireland and all the adverse effects that island has suffered under centuries of colonialism. However, there is something enduring and fundamentally true to the Irish experience that would cause a modern writer like Yeats and his contemporaries to appropriate Cú Chulainn as a national hero for an idealistic, free, and prosperous Ireland. It is equally true that a people under subjugation are often brimming with a deep-seated frustration which thinly masks an even deeper rage beneath the surface. Sometimes that rage is thrust into the open, as seen in the numerous acts of rebellion throughout the years by the Irish against British rule—or even, unfortunately, as seen by the IRA. With that context in mind, it is clear that the extreme violence perpetrated by Cú Chulainn in the Táin is entirely fitting for the historical mood and anxieties of the nation over which this hero is meant to be seen as a savior. There have been countless Irish over the centuries who no doubt wished that this boastful demigod was real, that he might transform into something “unrecognizably horrible and grotesque” and take vengeance, six-fold, for all the historical wrongs exacted upon them.

Works Cited

Carson, Ciaran, translator. Táin Bó Cúailnge. Penguin Books Ltd, 2008.

Copyright © 2020 Matthew Fulton. All rights reserved.