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Chapter 6.3: The
cycle of Conn, Art and Cormac
Part 1
Fabio P.
Barbieri
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There is of course no doubt of the
pagan identity of the tales of Conn Cetchatach or
Hundred-battles, his two sons Connla and Art, the
usurper Lugaid mac Con and Conn's grandson Cormac
mac Airt, "the Solomon of Irish
legend", the ancestors of the great house of
Ui Neill, from which came seven centuries of
kings of Tara and innumerable minor kings and
clans. In this Irish legend cycle, most plot
elements of the story of Vortigern and the
dragons recur, though in a curiously complicated
way. In the following summary, evident
similarities with the story of Vortigern as we
have seen it so far (many other points will
arise in the course of discussion) will be
underlined, more subtle or dubious ones pointed
out in footnotes.
Conn Hundred-battles, high king
of Tara and therefore of all Ireland, has two
sons, Connla and Art. Connla is stolen by an
amorous fairy woman in spite of all that Conn and
his court druid could do, and Conn is left with
only one possible son and heir, Art. Meanwhile
another fairy, the fair Becuma White-skin, is
expelled from the land of the gods because of
adultery. She appears to Conn as he sits on the
magic mound of his royal fortress (as fairy women
sometimes appear to kings in other Celtic
legends) and tells him that she has come to his
kingdom for love of his son Art - we had already
been told that he is the only man in the world
she loves. Conn, who is a widower, demanded her
for himself, as is his right as king to do. She
then demands that Art be exiled.
Conn's kingdom, so far blessed by
three harvests a year, is struck by a violent
famine. Ireland's druids[1] are summoned to deal
with this crisis in royal magic and advise
the king that it is ultimately caused by his
second wife's treachery, and that he has to
find a boy without sin and sacrifice him,
shedding his blood over the royal fortress of
Tara. Before a grand assembly of the Irish
nation, Conn leaves the kingdom in Art's hands
after recalling him to Tara, and, taking Becuma's
own magical coracle, undertakes a magical journey[2], at the end of which he
meets the perfect family: Daire Degamra son of
Fergus Fialbrethach, and his wife Rigru
Rosclethan daughter of Lodan of the Land of
Promise. Like Conn himself, they have only one
living son, Segda Saerlabraid. It is this boy
who, according to the word of the druids, must be
sacrificed; in spite of his parents' protests, he
heroically submits to the will of the king of
Ireland.
The boy is then taken to Tara
to be sacrificed so that his blood may be mixed
wixed with the parched soil of Ireland; but a
difficulty arises, since his parents have
demanded the protection of Art mac Conn, of Conn
himself, of the great warrior Finn mac Cumail,
and of the poets of Ireland, all of whom
therefore oppose the druids' judgement. The
boy then raises his voice in the assembly,
but, instead of taking on the wisdom of the
druids, he demands that the blood sacrifice be
performed; but his mother appears in a magical
disguise, and challenges the wisdom of the
druids by demanding them what was in the two
sacks carried by the cow that carried her[3]. When the druids are
unable to answer, she opens the sacks. Each of
them contained a monster - a one-legged and a
twelve-legged bird - and as soon as they are
released, the birds start fighting each other,
until the one-legged one overwhelms the
twelve-legged. The one-legged bird stands for
the wonderful boy, Segda, who is right as against
the crowd of his would-be killers, symbolized by
the twelve-legged monster[4]. The cow is sacrificed
in place of the boy.
It is only after this that Becuma
sees Art mac Con face to face (this seems to
follow on his readmission to Tara to rule in
place of Conn). She eventually procures his
banishment with a rigged board game; but the
young hero triumphs, coming back with the fairy
woman whom his step-mother had doomed him to
search, and Becuma is finally driven out of the
land permanently.
After Art succeeds his father Conn
as king of Tara, there is a savage civil war in
Munster. The loser, Lugaid mac Con, crosses over
to Britain, where he receives the help of Beine Brit
(the Briton): the result is that Ireland is
invaded by an enormous and invincible foreign
host. (Remember the Saxons!) In one of the
most frightful battles in Irish legend - if
legend it is - Art mac Conn and his allies are
slain, and the swords of the British place Lugaid
mac Con on the throne. The night before the
battle, the smith Olc Alcha and the druid Dil,
separately, order their unmarried daughters to
lie with the allied kings[5], Eogan of Munster and
Art mac Conn, neither of whom has a successor.
So, thanks to the supernatural insight of two
wise men (smiths were considered almost as
magical as druids in ancient Ireland), two
childless kings, going to their deaths, will have
heirs from two maidens[6] (problems of succession
seem to feature prominently in this legend).
Art's unrecognized son Cormac is taken in by
Lugaid himself[7]. One day Lugaid
pronounces a wrong judgement; Cormac contradicts
him, giving the right one; before the whole
assembly, the walls of Tara come crashing down,
and Lugaid is expelled from the throne in favour
of the wonderful boy Cormac, who becomes the
greatest king Ireland has ever known.
If a pro-Vortigernid line is
discernible in Nennius, then the pro-Ui Neill
sentiments simply howl at us from this. Most
astounding is the attitude of the wonderful boy,
who is so concerned that the king of Eriu be
obeyed, that he is willing to be killed to
preserve his authority. Quite apart from the
human absurdity of this, and from the fact that
the Irish mind in general seems to have been
anything but willing to submit so far to Tara,
this simply clashes with the sort of legend this
is. The wise boy Ambrosius of the Welsh legend is
first cousin, if not blood brother, to the very
young Taliesin of the legend of Maelgwn and
Elphin, to Breton boy heroes such as N'oun-Doaré[8], to the outrageously
youthful CuChulainn, and above all to young
Cormac mac Art in the same story. All these
wonderful boys take control from their elders and
dominate their stories. In other words, the
nature of the story demands that Ambrosius take
control from the adults around him, in the name
of a wisdom or power of more than human origin;
and that is what he does.
i)- Why the Munster
episodes of the saga are suspect.
By the same token, it seems clear
that all the burden of bad luck and bad judgement
which, in Wales, falls upon Vortigern - the
wondrous boy's enemy - fall, in Ireland, upon the
enemy of the dynasty, the suspiciously-named
Lugaid mac Con. He is the usurper, the
jumped-up cad, a lesser king in Munster - a rank
equivalent to a British teyrn. Lugaid's
low rank is vigorously underlined: trouble flares
up between him and Eogan, the heir of Munster,
because the latter has called him a
"vassal" to his face after a disputed
judgement by Eogan's father Ailill; but once he
first has to face him on the battlefield (this is
the battle of Cenn Abrat, which is only the
prelude to Mag Mucrama) Lugaid himself admits
that if they were to fight face to face,
"the heat" of Eogan, son and grandson
of kings, would destroy him, and is only saved by
the heroic self-sacrifice of his clown Dodera,
who dies in his place (it is even possible that
the fact that his life is redeemed by so
low-caste a life as that of a clown may reflect
on Lugaid mac Con's value).
The tremendous over-promotion of
this under-king of Munster[9] is flagrantly
illegitimate; one wonders whether this story was
written as an Ui Neill, or in any case northern,
reaction, to the great careers of such Munster
kings as Feidlimid mac Crimthann (820-841) or
Brian Boruma (king of Tara, 1002-114)[10]. The start of the war in
a disputed judgement in Munster is glaringly
designed to prelude to the end of the whole cycle
in Lugaid's bad judgement in Tara, which brings
the walls crashing down - the climax which
restores the rightful line, Conn's line, to the
throne.
(Historians should note that
whatever the historical background to the
survival of a Vortigern dynasty in remote corners
of Wales, no faith can be placed in the notice
that he gave way to Ambrosius gracefully. He must
recognize the superior justice and wisdom of
Emrys, just as Lugaid must inevitably recognize
the superior justice and wisdom of Cormac; both
are acting out a mythological script.)
I have no doubt whatever that this
represents a rewriting of the story in the
interests of the descendants of Conn. Conn
clearly played the part of Vortigern in an
earlier redaction; the ill-luck and scapegoat
role were removed from him and placed on a
usurper who (so far as we are told) had no
connection with Conn or his dynasty, and who
seems to have been deliberately placed in the
hostile and ill-starred province of Munster. Conn
is promoted to king of Tara by the power of a
foreign army. In Britain, the procedure is
reversed: according to both Nennius and Geoffrey,
Vortigern found himself unsupported on the throne
(Geoffrey, but not Nennius, makes him a usurper)
and therefore called in the Saxons; but in
both cases, what we have is a very unsteady crown
backed by alien hordes.
This procedure was well known to
the Celtic theorists. The Irish tract on royal
justice, the Audacht Moraind, lists four
kinds of sovereign: notice the first:
The prince who takes power with
the help of troops from outside. A weak and
fleeting lordship is usual for him. As soon as
his troops leave him his dignity and the terror
he inspires decline.
The prudent prince. He obtains
possession of his territories without victories,
without triumphs; he deprives no one and no one
deprives him. He voyages through his reign in
days and nights, for the whole world is spent in
days and nights.
The prince of truth. He and
truth increase each other, strengthen each other,
strive for each other, and build each other up.
The bull prince. He is not a
well-liked man. He strikes and is struck, he
injures and is injured, he tosses and is tossed.
Against him horns are constantly shaken. Rough
and difficult the beginning of his lordship,
hateful and unprincely its middle, unstable and
fleeting its end. Against his sons his crimes
will be retained, men’s faces will be
turned, men’s hearts will be closed.
“Not welcome”, all will say, “are
the sons of that prince: evil was your
father’s lordship before.”[11]
The parallels between Conn and
Vortigern indicate that the Irish legend bears
the same sense of dynastic disaster as the
British; and therefore its centre of misfortune
can be neither Beine Brit nor Lugaid mac Con, but
Conn and his son Art. Munster was purely dragged
in to explain the misfortunes of Conn and his
children - that is, in fact, of the rival
province of the Connachta, the descendants of
Conn. But the name Lugaid mac Con! Could
it not be that the war had once been seen as
internecine to the house of Conn? I think this
may well be an Irish version of the deliberate
duplication of ancestors that gave us Good
Maximus and Bad Maximianus; removing a
"bad" ancestor not by duplicating him,
but rather by shifting him to a distant and
unloved bloodline. He wasn't one of ours, he was
a Munsterman! Yes, there was another son of Conn,
but he was fairy-stolen, you see...
Whatever the identity of the
usurper Lugaid, this I can say with some
convinction: the story was altered by the
insertion of a second set of antefacts of Mag
Mucrama, deliberate and achieved with remarkable
artistry, built from elements - music, social
inferiority, the presence of the supernatural -
which, as the brothers Rees have shown, are
typical of the traditional Irish view of Munster
within a symbolic geography in which the
Connachta - descendants of Conn - are the source
of sovereignty, and in which the kingship of Tara
- for centuries a monopoly of the Conn-descended
Ui Neill - is "the centre"; clearly,
then a symbolic geography that serves Ui Neill
interests[12]. This antefact has no
parallel whatever in the British legend, and as
it serves Ui Neill interests so well, there is no
reason not to assign it to the same hand that
made the wondrous child will his own murder in
the service of the Ui Neill crown of Tara.
The antefacts I am speaking about
are those which make Mag Mucrama begin, not in
Tara, but in Munster. This is the story: because
of a challenge to the royalty of Ailill, father
of Eogan - the stripping bare of a hill where he
used to pasture his horses[13] - the sage Erches kills
the king of a local sid (that is, a fairy
king); Ailill himself asserts his royalty over
his daughter Aine in the most brutal way, by
raping her (we remember that the Celtic king was
a sexual lord), but is mutilated by having
his ear ripped off[14]. Aine promises revenge;
and punctually, after a few years, her brother
Fer Fi, "Yew-man", a minuscule but
wonderful fairy musician, causes the quarrel
between Ailill's son Eogan and Lugaid, who is his
foster-son: each of them want possession of him
("...Among the 'folk of vocal and
instrumental music' in Ireland, only the harpist
could aspire to the rank of freeman - and he only
on condition that he 'accompanies nobility'[15]".) - a perfectly
useless quarrel, as Ailill points out, since Fer
Fi vanished after playing his wonderful music.
Nevertheless, he rules in favour of his own son,
which enrages Lugaid; and so it starts...
The whole sequence of events is
redolent with uncomplimentary views of Munster.
The presence in Munster of Deisi, vassals,
the instability and violence of Munster politics,
the ugly caricature of the normal legend of the
king's divine marriage (Aine is none other than
the mother-goddess of Knockainey near Limerick,
matriarch of the royal tribe Corco Laigde), the
baleful nature even of Munster's peculiar gift of
music - and that in a land whose king had his
ear ripped off[16] - all bespeak a very
negative view of the country. It is in unruly,
sedition-infested Munster, where vassals will not
even accept the judgements given by their own
provincial kings, that war broods and starts.
Contrary to that, the royalty of Tara is
something so high and noble that the highest
object known to the story - the wondrous boy - is
willing to be killed rather than the word of the
king of Tara should be contradicted. Need I add
that this hardly bespeaks a Munster origin for
any of the legend? The Munster characters and
Munster settings of the story must have been, not
figures or places that any Munsterman would
recognize, but the remote and defamatory
impressions from hostile northerners.
Even in the legend as we have it,
the heart of the story is the dethronement and
dynastic disasters suffered by Conn's line,
culminating in one of the most horrible battles
of Irish legend, in the abomination of foreign
conquest, and in the near-extinction of
legitimate dynasties. What connects the miserable
fortunes of Munster to the horrors of Mag Mucrama
is not even quite clear, since, up to the moment
of Mag Mucrama, the feud had been exclusively
within Munster; all that we are told is that the
legitimate Eoganachta house of Munster is
overthrown at the same time as the Connachta king
of Tara, by British hordes under Beine Brit who
sweep the exiled Lugaid mac Con to victory: when
the heroic Art mac Conn dies side by side with
the rightful king of Munster, Eogan, neither of
them leaving known heirs[17].
iii)- The threat to the
dynasty of Conn
To remove the "I love
Munster... not" element from the story as we
have it, is not altogether possible; but it is
quite clear that the other elements are a good
deal closer to the British story, and are
therefore likelier to be archaic. Reading between
the lines, it is perfectly clear that the time of
troubles begins with Conn's disastrous marriage,
which puts an end to a never-to-be-repeated
Golden Age (when could it ever again be said that
Ireland had three harvests a year?) If Conn's
story is not connected with Mag Mucrama
narratively, it is connected emotionally, through
the long-brooding threat to the dynasty. Conn had
only two sons; a fairy woman fell in love with
one of them, Connla, and used her magic to reach
him (nobody else can see her). Conn's druid could
only hold her back for a while, and the boy
eventually vanished from human gaze, and no man
knows where he is gone.
It is a lovely tale, but with a
dire import for Ui Neil dynastic legend: the race
that was to produce so many kings of Tara and
other places, is close to extinction. Conn has
only one surviving son, Art. The legend itself
underlines the point: "Then Conn looked at
his other son and said, 'Today Art is left
alone'. For this reason he is called Art Oenar
- the lonely - or Oenfer - Art
Only-Son". And we need not doubt that the
legend always remembered Art mac Conn as the
victim of Mag Mucrama. These words, for
this reason he is called..., strongly
suggests that the whole story was written to
explain the hero's nicknames, which in turn
suggests that the nicknames themselves already
existed, probably as part of a mnemonic
king-list. That Art should be Oenfer is
the worst possible prelude to the Battle of Mag
Mucrama; once we realize that, it is impossible
to miss the terrible surmise in Conn's long look
at his remaining son, or the impact of our own
tragic knowledge.
After, it seems, Connla's
disappearance, Conn suffers another tragedy: his
beautiful, noble and very beloved queen dies. The
legend underlines their mutual love and
happiness; but it can also have escaped nobody
that this deprived Conn of the opportunity of
providing the solitary Art with a brother. He
chooses a second bride, Becuma, who had come to
Ireland in quest of his son Art. But apart from
depriving Art of a woman who had specifically
asked for him, his choice is itself about as bad
as he could make it. There is something very
ominous about the way that, having been banished
from the Land of Promise for adultery, Becuma
promptly went for the king’s only heir. Not
only is she the second fairy woman to woo a son
of Conn, but the love of someone who has the
hatred of Manannan mac Lir and all the gods, and
who should have died, is something distinctly
ill-omened. We know that she is alive and in
Ireland only because Manannan and his fellow gods
decided not to pollute the pure land with her
blood. She is a pollution.
It is not clear, however, that she
is guilty of any of what follows: it is the
king's own initiative to marry her, when she had
in fact asked for his son. Her fault is larger:
in spite of all her superlative and supernatural
qualities, a woman with a sin in her past is not
worthy of a high king - any high king, father or
son. The land immediately reacts by losing its
fertility.
Conn's guilt is an intricate
matter. That he has prevented Becuma from
marrying Art is actually good news in the long
run, since, had the woman married his son, their
whole descent would have been tainted (even if -
and it's a big if - they had had any children at
all); while he already had one heir, if no more,
and therefore the dynasty could not be altogether
defiled. His marriage, in the end, makes him
something like a dynastic scapegoat, taking on
himself a guilty association that would otherwise
have reached his son. And indeed Becuma, while
bearing no sons herself, shows a marked hostility
towards Art, demanding that he be banished from
Ireland.[18] This is peculiar,
since the standard wicked stepmother of European
fable is generally jealous of the legitimate heir
on behalf of her own children: but Becuma is not
so much concerned with advancing her own
blood-line, as with damaging the legitimate heir
- the very heir whom she had originally wanted to
marry.
iv)- the threat of fairy
love in Celtic dynastic thought
This only makes sense within a
deeply slanted view in which the central issue is
the continuity and purity of the blood-line, and
the threat posed to it by the alien woman. Becuma
does not carry any alternative power or value,
she cannot - like the usual wicked stepmother -
intrude her own brood in the inheritance: what
she can do is either to attach herself to the
heir, taking to his bed the pollution for which
she has been expelled from the Land of Promise,
or else attach herself to his father and use him
to ruin the heir.
There can be no doubt, then, that
the central issue is the blood-line. Becuma only
counts for what she can do against it: her plans
are not centred on herself, but on the
blood-line. The heart of the legend is the threat
to the blood-line. It is at Mag Mucrama, with the
death of Art, the last legitimate king, that the
doom of the line awaits; but Becuma herself,
though she has apparently no part in the
catastrophe, is nothing less than an incarnation
of the threat to the dynasty. She battens on the
king, gives him no heir, and her lack of
fertility is reflected in the collapse of the
land's own fertility; not satisfied with that,
she twice drives out the legitimate heir, once by
influence with his besotted father, and once by
her own power.
Art is recalled to Tara because
Conn must leave the country to search for the
remedy to Becuma's evil (namely the wondrous
boy); but when that crisis has blown over, and as
soon as Becuma and Art meet, they display their
hostility in what is formally a game of fidchell
- a board game not unlike chess - but with
terrible stakes (it is perhaps not without
symbolic value that the king-piece in fidchell
has to escape an encirclement by his opponents).
Playing fairly, Art wins the first game,
compelling Becuma to procure the wand of Cu Roi[19], which seems to be a
token of sovereignty over the world; as it takes
Becuma one year to find it, this is something
like a one-year sentence of exile. She comes back
and places it in his lap (is there a whiff of
sexual challenge in this surprisingly intimate
gesture?); they play again, and this time Becuma
uses magic and Art loses. She orders him out of
the island to pursue a horribly dangerous quest
for a fairy bride, Delbchaem daughter of Morgan.
Art actually wins Delbchaem, but even his success
is ill-omened. Delbchaem will give him no
children, and the son who is to rescue the
dynasty will be a bastard, begotten on the night
before Mag Mucrama on the daughter of the smith
Olc Acha. Art’s heroic faerie marriage, like
those of his father and brother, have got the
dynasty precisely nothing.
The genealogical picture is
therefore constructed around a growing crisis of
descent and legitimacy, articulated over two
generations, each with two sexual unions, and
conditioned by ominous fairy love. Conn's story
starts with a reasonable but worryingly slim
quota of two possible successors; and the first
ominous development is the loss of Connla to
irresistible fairy love. So the first of the
father's two brides provides the legitimate heir
but does not give him enough brothers to insure
reasonably against contingencies; the second not
only fails to provide any, but positively
threatens the whole line of succession. The son
then wins a legitimate bride, but only at his
stepmother's command - the effect of ominous
fairy love reaches across the generation, not
only to threaten him, but to saddle him with an
expensively conquered wife who gives him no
children at all. It is through a casually met
virgin, offered by her sage father, that the
bloodline carries on.
Both father and son are faced with
the problem of dynastic continuity; both have two
consorts, of whom the second has something to do
with making up for the dynastic safety the first
has failed to deliver; but while the father's
second bride, legitimate on the surface, is a
creature of deceit and dynastic enmity, the son's
second consort, illegitimate on the surface, but
given by a wise father - the only authority, one
suspects, who could legitimately command a
daughter to give her virginity away outside
marriage - rescues, in effect, the royal line
from destruction.
The episode of the wise smith also
shows the centrality of the patrilinear royal
dynasty in the legend. The daughter's virginity
is the father's concern, an instrument to
perpetuate a patrilinear family, and therefore to
be given according to the father's interests and
judgement. Marriage is a serious matter, but if
an even more serious one - such as loyalty to the
threatened royal blood-line - intervenes, then
the father has the right to dispose of his
daughter's sexual activity. There is no hint
whatever of consent: the girl does as she is told
(and we remember the brutal means used in the
Patrician legend of St.Monesan to force the girl
into an unwanted marriage). Indeed, Moncha, the
girl given to his ally Eogan in the parallel
episode, dies in childbirth; instead of regarding
this as a tragedy, the story commends her highly,
because she has all but committed suicide to
continue the patrilinear dynasty (on being told
that if the boy is born one day later, he will be
a high king - that is, he will succeed to his
father's throne - she holds him back by force
till the appointed day, and dies). This is in
keeping with what we saw of the story's attitude
to Becuma: just as her actions are centred
exclusively on the patrilinear blood-line of
Conn, with no hint of any alternative power or
meaning, so here girls are given around with no
regard either to their will or even to the
Christian values of chastity and marriage: the
preservation of the patrilinear dynasty obscures
all else, and the feminine element in this story
is exclusively to be a provider of heirs. (I
notice with incredulous amusement the interest in
Celtic matters of some popular feminist writing!)
The love of fairy women marks the
progress of dynastic downfall, and it does so in
triadic stages. The house of Conn suffers - that
is the only word - from three fairy marriages,
each with differential characteristics. Conn
himself simply takes Becuma by royal command,
exercising his sovereign prerogative; Connla is
ravished by his bride, falling in love and
vanishing with her; Art fights his way to his
with sword and shield. In Dumezilian terms, this
is clearly a trifunctional catalogue of
marriages: by royal command from the supreme king
of Eriu (first function); by violent and helpless
love, led by the will of the woman rather than
the man (third function - lust and the feminine);
by heroic capture by the bridegroom (definitely
second function!). They have in common that none
of them does the long-term future of the dynasty
any good; and we remember that the Irish of all
times have always dreaded the lure of the
fairies. The triadic sequence of functional
marriages means that some sort of progression has
been gone through; and its completion is that Art
goes to Mag Mucrama without an heir. Without the
timely intervention of Olc Acha, the dynasty
would die - of the love of fairy women.
The peril of these marriages must
lie in their alien nature. The king ought to
marry the goddess of his own country; but these
fairy women, one and all, are creatures of the
Absolute Outside, whose divinity (if that is what
it is) is positively alternative to that of any
goddess of the land. What they do is either to
lure the hero - as in the case of Connla - away
from his house and roots, or to bring in, with
themselves, the ruinous power of the outside
world; and it is no coincidence that none of the
three fairy marriages seems to be fertile, and
that, in particular, none of them produces the
desperately needed heirs. In psychological terms,
it is possible to see this as the counterpart to
the strong localism and rootedness of the Celtic
mind, to which every kingdom however small is a
land-goddess to provide the local king with
prestigious ancestors and native legends: the
Outside then becomes a place of extreme danger,
full of allure and fascination, invested with all
the psychological contents excluded from the
powerful knot of ideas clustered about land, king
and fertility in this world.
The presence of these spiritual
powers is part of the terrible danger of the
dynasty; that very danger we had seen in Conn's
anxious surmise, when he said "today Art is
left alone"; in other words, it preludes to
Mag Mucrama.
The connection is not obvious:
nothing the fairy lovers do has to do with Mag
Mucrama. But it is quite clear that the whole
legend deals with a time of grim dynastic peril,
with the blood-line is threatened at every level.
Conn loses one son, and nearly another, by the
action of supernatural women, in a context of
sexual desire and competition. There is an
obvious symmetry: Conn strives to keep Connla
from the invisible fairy woman; he himself keeps
Becuma from Art, whom she originally claimed to
love just as Connla's invisible lover had claimed
him.
Between them, these two episodes
include a fairly complete list of the problems
that can happen between two generations of men
within the same family, dealing with attractive
women; and in both cases, Conn's action is
disastrous. He uselessly opposes the strong charm
of fairy love, desperate - as his words make
touchingly clear - to keep Connla in his house,
an understandable but counterproductive father's
reaction; but he then claims the woman who could
have married his other son, driven both by his
widower's loneliness and by his middle-aged lust
- that is, he uses his royal power and rank to
unfairly deprive his other son of a bride. The
common element in both events is an ageing and
lonely father's hidden jealousy of his children,
whom he does not really want to grow up and
become heads of their own families. There is no
need to suggest that I am reading too much
psychological depth in this story; the emotions
involved are not only elementary and universal,
but particularly clear and relevant to a society
in which patrilinear succession, carrying great
burdens of authority and even magical power, was
an absolutely central issue. Conn's attitude
problems - which have a vividity and realism
completely absent from any of the pasteboard
females in the legend - must have been clear to
any Irish father and son; and we can only
conclude that Conn's jealousy and overreaching
lie at the heart of the dynasty's problems.
Against Conn's disastrous home
life is set the superhumanly splendid picture of
the wonderful boy's family. To understand Daire,
his wife Rigru Rosclethan daughter of Lodan of
the Land of Promise, and their son Segda
Saerlabraid, we must divest ourselves of our idea
of "sexuality", as we like to call it.
The defining feature of this extraordinary family
is that father and mother have had sex only once,
and from that one congress has come the wonderful
boy. In terms of our miserable world, this is
simply miraculous, since no earthly couple, even
if they approached sexuality in the most ascetic
self-denying spirit purely in order to have a
child, could trust that a single effort would do
the trick; but these people did it, with perfect
confidence - and begat a perfect son. Yet in
spite of what seems to us a most self-denying sex
life, there is nothing ascetic or self-denying
about them: to the contrary, they live in a
splendour that Conn, king of Tara though he is,
has never even imagined. What is more, they live at
ease: they do not have to struggle -
everything a man needs, fire, clothes, food,
drink, is supplied by invisible but willing
hands, and there is no sight or feel of effort or
strain anywhere in their house. In short, this is
life as it should be, not as it is in the
troubled and painful sphere of our world.
It is in this context that the
golden couple's one single coupling must be
understood, as part of a world where there is no
strain and no reason to indulge in any strain.
Sex, the repeated, sweaty, smelly sex of our
world, with its accompaniment of uncontrolled
desire before, occasional violence during[20], and exhaustion and
stinking organic liquids after, has no place in
such a life. And by contrast with the house of
Conn, that of Fergus Fialbrethach is content with
that one son; there is nothing about his lack of
brothers to suggest the same anxious surmise with
which Conn looks at his own child, now left alone
in the still unseen shadow of Mag Mucrama. It is
clear that - before they heard in horror the
explanation of the king of Eriu's visit - they
never had felt the possibility of any threat to
their heir.
Like the threat of fairy love, but
from a different perspective, this picture is
best understood from a psychological viewpoint,
as embodying desires that the ideology at once
incarnates and denies. To be a king is to be
connected with luxury and to be served, as well
as to be a part of a continuous patrilinear
descent in which sons and heirs are expected. The
Celtic ideology creates these expectations, and
then - because the reality of human life is not
easily escaped - denies that they are possible:
but this picture of unreal satisfaction, service
without servants, wealth without exploitation or
theft, descent without the risk of sterility,
illness or war - incarnates what kingship should
be and, in our world cannot. It is not escapism,
but something more complex: the mind reaching out
towards a kind of fulfilment which is created by
the culture to which it belongs, but which cannot
be achieved in the real world - though the
culture cannot, on a profound level, admit its
falsity without dismantling some of its most
cherished images and values.
Now Vortigern - in two separate
and largely alternative legends - is also shown
as being destructively attracted to women who
carry extremely negative values: even his
summoning of the Saxons is, in effect, only a
symptom of this basic sexually disorderly nature.
Nennius edits together two legends, originally
separate and to some extent contradictory: that
of the fortress and the dragons, and that of St.
Germanus. But both are characterized by Vortigern
marrying women he should not touch; in the
former, the heathen woman Ronwein; in the latter,
his own daughter. His basic disposition, that is,
is a disordered lust that seizes either on what
is too distant, or on what is too close, ignoring
proper distinctions. The "love" of
Vortigern for the regiones of Britain, in
the Nennian version of the story of the dragons,
is contrasted with this lust of his, which brings
the Saxons on the island; and in the terribly
negative legend of St. Germanus, Vortigern's lust
leads to his fortress Caer Gwrtheyrn being
destroyed like Sodom and Gomorrah.
v)- Vortigern, Herod and
Judas
It is much to the point that his
disorderly lusts end not in concubinage but in
catastrophic marriages, that rip to pieces the
king's duty to marry and have a clean home life.
In both cases, as in the legend of Conn, the
disastrous bride, daughter or stranger, is
Vortigern’s second wife; and while in the
legend of St.Germanus it is his own unexplained
lust that lead him to "marry" his own
daughter, it is the special interposition of the
Earl of Hell that makes him fall in love with
Ronwein. Nennius: "Satan entered the heart
of Vortigern, that he should fall in love with
the maiden; and he asked her from her father, and
said: 'all that you ask from me you shall have,
even to the half of my kingdom'."
The allusion was meant to be
obvious, and it is, even to us: the king's sudden
fury of lust, like that of Herod[21], leads him to the most
disastrous of political choices. Both
Nennius and Geoffrey clearly quote King Herod's
promise to give Salome all that she wanted,
"even to the half of my kingdom" (Mark
6.23). Modern readers, however, may miss the
point that the quotation is in fact double: the
image of Satan entering the king's heart also
comes from the Gospels, and the king does duty
for Judas (Luke22.3; John 13.27) as well as
Herod. Geoffrey repeats the very same words
(which is remarkable, since most of his account
is just as alternative to Nennius' here as
elsewhere[22]), but then adds an
unnecessary explanation: "I say that Satan
entered his heart because, though he was a
Christian, he was determined to make love with
this pagan woman". Explanations are always a
sign of nervousness, and it is rather striking
that Geoffrey, of all people, should be nervous
at the idea that intense love leading to marriage
should be seen as "Satan entering the
heart"; but it shows that he took the idea
quite seriously - and that it did not begin
with him.
The literary and religious
brilliance of the idea is striking. It is not an
imitation of any one Gospel scene, but a highly
intelligent, pointed connection, which evidently
depends on a sophisticated and profound culture
of Biblical reading and commentary; for the two
Gospel scenes have several things in common. They
are the antefacts to the Gospel's two great
crimes, the murders of John the Baptist and that
of Our Lord himself. They both take place, like
the meeting of Vortigern and Ronwein, at great
ceremonial meals, king Herod's birthday (Mk.6.21)
or Easter (for this reason I think that the
author had John 13.27 rather than Luke 22.3 in
mind, since in the latter the Devil enters Judas'
heart at a comparatively ordinary meal of Our
Lord's). And they both represent the dramatic
moment in which the resistance of two people who
had stood in the way of crime breaks down. The
Gospel version seems consciously selected to make
a point: Mark and Matthew tell almost the same
story about the murder of John, but the Herod of
Matthew is a scoundrel who would gladly have John
killed if only he did not dread his popularity
(14.5), while the Herod of Mark is a man of
conscience, sensitive to John's moral
superiority, but betrayed by his lust for his
illegitimate wife and her daughter; and it is
from Mark, not Matthew, that our unknown source
is quoting. Likewise, while the Judas of the
Synoptic Gospels is a traitor of his own free
will, happily going to the high priests to sell
his master for silver (Mt.26.14-16; Mk.14.10-12;
Lk.22.3-6[23]) and bent on betraying
him at the first opportunity, the Judas of John
is an unhappy soul who has not made up his mind
until the last minute, and practically rushes out
of Jesus' Easter meal into the night, to his
Master's and his own destruction. This sort of
selection could not have been possible except in
a culture of inventively critical Bible reading,
where separate passages can be brought together
to make a deeper point; it shows the sort of high
literary intelligence and intimate acquaintance
with the Bible that we found in Gildas.
There is also an indication that
this high interpretative culture existed in a
recognizably Celtic world such as his. The
extreme importance of public ceremonial royal
meals - and, more importantly, the fact that they
are moments of great spiritual danger - seems to
be a topos. St.Gildas' thunder at the
admission of the lowest scoundrels to the royal
table is one aspect of this (anticipated by
St.Patrick's call on good Christians to desert
Coroticus' cannibalistic feasts), but the fact
that Satan tempts Vortigern at the banquet hints
at something worse than mere public waste and
effrontery: that is, that it is at these banquets
that supernatural danger, whether physical or
moral, can overwhelm the king. He is more exposed
to demonic influence there than anywhere else.
Like Conn's love for Becuma, Vortigern's love for
Ronwein is a thing of evil fate, the result of
evil supernatural powers; but while Conn meets
her on his mound - a magical place where magical
and unearthly events are apt to happen -
Vortigern does so at an official banquet in his
own court. In later Welsh traditions, banquets
are moments of adventure and danger: Bran's
banquet in Ireland turns into a massacre,
Maelgwn's great feast becomes the stage for
Taliesin's public humiliation of the king's bards
and of the king himself (which indicates that
positive as well as negative spiritual powers can
enter without warning). In Arthurian legend,
there is an absolute expectation that the king's
great Pentecost banquet (corresponding almost
certainly to the pagan feast of Beltaine) will be
attended by some great wonder or adventure, and
Arthur is under an obligation - very like an
Irish geis - not to sit to meat until one
has taken place. Some of these wonders and
adventures are not very nice: The knight of
the cart opens with Meleagant of Gorre
entering Arthur’s court and informing him
that he has been taking Arthur’s people
prisoner and that Arthur himself can do nothing
about it. The theme of the spiritual danger of
royal banquets seems more British than Irish; its
prevalence in Britain might have something to do
with the polemics of great churchmen like Patrick
and Gildas against the evils done at these
banquets.
Whether either Nennius' source, or
Geoffrey's, was close to this original, is hard
to tell. I gave my reasons to believe that the
earliest version of this legend must have been
rather pro-Vortigern; and the correspondence with
the legend of Conn, which must also have started
as an apologia for a disastrous fall in the
house's prestige and power, is telling. On the
other hand, Geoffrey, though hostile to
Vortigern, preserves material Nennius has ignored
or suppressed, and which has clear parallels in
Ireland. In Geoffrey's account, written with
medieval court etiquette in mind, Vortigern,
instead of laying a lawful claim to Ronwein like
any Celtic king, negotiates for her hand with her
"father" Hengist. But in fact the
negotiations go through the very same stages as
those for Elen's hand in The dream of Maxen
Gwledig: there is never a question of
refusing the king's demand, but the girl's family
obtains, in exchange, dominion over a lesser
kingdom within Vortigern's sphere - Kent - which
is taken from its ruler Gurangonus against his
will, just as the house of Eudav obtain Britain
from Maxen, who had taken it from Beli, in
exchange for Elen. A highly Celtic element is
that Ronwein was specially delegated to pour
drink to the king, like Etain and other female
wine-givers or mead-givers of Irish legend.
Indeed, we never see her doing anything except
pouring drink: it is in this capacity that she
poisons the king's son Vortimer, who - like Art
fighting the British at Mag Mucrama - is
particularly concerned with opposing the alien
host.
This is not really out of keeping
with the patriotic Vortigern of Nennius. Given
that the hero of the legend of the dragons is
fundamentally a well-meaning patriot whose every
succeeding action is concerned with repairing his
disastrous error in letting in the Saxons, there
has to be some reason why such an honourable and
patriotic figure has been misled into committing
such a catastrophic mistake. The irresistible
lure of an alien woman on a middle-aged widower
with an adolescent or adult son (Vortimer) is the
most humanely understandable and sympathetic
explanation of a ruinous political choice, whose
evil was not at any rate immediately visible,
since the Saxons of the legend of the dragons
were concealing their evil intentions until they
had murdered the king (we remember that the
druids of Vortigern revealed their intention to
him, thus foiling that plot).
vi)- a triad of quests
Ronwein, taken to Britain and the
king’s court on purpose to please the Devil,
has many parallels with Becuma. I do not only
mean the general fact of both being, literally, femmes
fatales, women of doom; there is a more
specific structural similarity in the narrative.
The entrance both of Ronwein and of Becuma into
the royal house is quickly followed by a curious
triadic development: a sequence of three
dangerous quests/ banishments. In Ireland, this
triad involves each of the three protagonists in
turn. Conn searches for the wondrous boy for a
month and a half; Becuma searches for the wand
for a year; and Art takes an indeterminate amount
of time to search for a bride. The central
element of this triad is obviously the quest for
the wondrous boy, which is both the only one
which has a direct bearing on the plot, and also
the only one with a direct Welsh parallel.
But the legend of Vortigern also
has a triad of quests; and there, too, the quest
for the wondrous boy is the centrepiece. However,
it is Vortigern who is the protagonist of all
three. He has the fortress sought for; he has the
boy sought for; and, at the end of the story, he
leaves the fortress to search for a kingdom of
his own. In the Nennian version, the sequence is
explicit, and, while Geoffrey is unwilling to
place Vortigern in anything like the heroic light
implied by a triad of quests, nevertheless he
does not contradict it: Vortigern seeks for the
fortress when he is already in Wales, driven out
by the Saxons; and the fact that we find him in
another castle when Ambrosius comes to destroy
him, means that he has sought for it.
Unlike the Irish story, it is not
hard to see why this triad of quests should
follow upon Vortigern's disastrous marriage: at
least two of its three terms spring directly from
it. It is certainly because of the presence of
the Saxons, Ronwein's kinsmen admitted to Britain
because of the king's love for her, that
Vortigern must search for the arcem
munitissimam; it is because of the overriding
need that the fortress should stand, whatever the
cost, that the wondrous boy is searched for; and
while Vortigern's final expulsion from the
fortress has only an indirect relationship with
his disastrous second marriage, nevertheless it
completes a sequel of misfortunes begun when he
first saw Ronwein. It may be argued (though there
is no warrant for it in the actual words of the
two texts as they have come down to us) that his
marriage to Ronwein, the alien woman, broke the
greater "marriage" between the king and
the land of Britain, and therefore, whatever his
valiant efforts to amend for his mistake,
deprived him of his rank; after which, it was
Ambrosius, the new king/bridegroom of Britain,
who, by telling him to find another (lesser)
fortress, assigned to him a new and lesser, but
still royal, rank - as another Nennian passage
says that the descendants of Vortigern held their
hereditary lands "by the gift of
Ambrosius", largiente Ambrosio. For
in this case, until the new master of the land
grants Vortigern (and therefore his descendants)
a new title, he/they literally has/have nothing.
The decree of Ambrosius may be seen as the
creation of a new kingdom, and something like a
new birth for the house of Vortigern[24].
The triad of quests forms the very
bones of the British legend; while, except for
the central episode of the boy, its Irish
counterpart is largely irrelevant to the course
of the Irish one, and, so far as it is relevant,
it moves in the opposite direction. There is no
particular reason for Art to demand that Becuma
should get him Cu Roi's wand of sovereignty (no
reason, that is, in the story; there is of course
the natural ambition of any king); and the fairy
marriage imposed on him by Becuma is not only
vindictive, but, as we have seen, in the way of
the dynasty, since it is to beget no heir. The
British triad is restorative, amending for
Vortigern's sins by bringing the great fortress
into existence, locating (for whatever reason)
its genuine defender and king, and placing
Vortigern himself in a lesser but stable
monarchy; on the other hand, the only thing that
the Irish triad of quests does for the house of
Conn is to provide Art with an infertile wife,
the last, and, from the point of view of view of
dynastic continuity, the most damaging of the
house of Conn's three fairy brides.
It follows that the idea that the
quest for the wondrous boy was one of a triad
must have survived any idea of what these quests
were really about. The difference between the
Irish and the British triads is not random: it is
to do with the dialectic of Inside and Outside,
so intensely felt in Celtic and especially Irish
culture. While all the three quests of Vortigern
take place inside the bounds of Britain, two of
the three Irish quests take place in the outer
ocean, while only the alien Becuma finds herself
searching inside Ireland - and even so, her quest
is through the side, the haunted fairy
hills of the country: that is, decidedly outside
the bounds of human Ireland.
This, it seems to me, depends on
the fact that the quest for the wondrous boy
takes Conn outside Ireland, but Vortigern very
much within Britain; Segda is an alien, but Emrys
is a Briton. And this, in turn, depends on the
fact that, in Nennius' version at least, Emrys is
decidedly Vortigern's successful rival. Segda
does nothing for or against Conn's royalty, but
Emrys is to take over Vortigern's. And since the
quest for the wondrous boy is the central episode
of the triad, therefore the boy’s role in it
defines its functioning. Once the Irish had
decided that he was not in fact a native-born
threat to Conn's royalty, with a better claim to
his throne, then the triad of quests was
inevitably removed to the outer world. And its
direct connection with the other triad of
infertile fairy marriages shows that sovereignty,
fertility and native status went together: as
they did in the case of Emrys, not only a hero,
but the founder of a dynasty (and therefore
fertile!).
vii)- Vortimer and Art mac
Conn
The search for the wondrous boy
also has an effect on political reality back
home: it causes the king to vanish. This is
evident in Ireland, where Conn summons the
banished Art back to Tara to reign in his stead
till he has brought the wondrous boy back. But
Art’s temporary installation as king reminds
us of one otherwise bizarre feature of the Welsh
story, where, at one point, Vortigern seems to
vanish from the throne, while his heroic son
Vortimer takes over as leader of the British -
with their hearty consent - and routs the Saxons
horse and foot. Vortimer then dies (according to
Geoffrey, poisoned by Ronwein) and Vortigern
simply steps back on to his throne, using his
recovered power to enforce a disastrous truce
with the Saxons, whom his son had all but
defeated; a truce which leads to the slaughter of
all the British elders (though Vortigern's own
life is preserved).
Geoffrey’s account is a good
deal clearer throughout. Nennius does not mention
either Ronwein poisoning Vortimer or Vortimer
actually seizing his father's crown with the
consent of "the Britons". It might be
that Geoffrey added these episodes to darken the
image of Vortigern, who, in his account, is
overthrown by his people and then steps back to
the throne over the body of his murdered son to
enforce a truce with the rebellious and already
defeated nation of his treacherous second wife;
but I don't think so. Nennius' narrative is
weaker than Geoffrey's, and feels disconnected.
If Vortimer had not taken over from Vortigern, by
what authority did he launch, against his
father's wishes, a nationwide war of
extermination against the English, with the
support of the armies of Britain? Even if he was
a field-marshal, army commanders do not start
wars without the consent of higher authorities:
if Vortimer had done it on his own authority, it
would have been equivalent to seizing the throne.
And how did he die? Nennius just says he did; but
epic heroes do not "just die" - their
death is significant, connected in some way with
the course of their lives and the meaning of
their legends. And if we do not accept that
Ronwein poisoned him, we have no cause for his
death at all. This sequence of episodes is fatal
to the view of Vortigern as a misguided but
committed patriot, and we must conclude, from the
fact that Geoffrey's later version is closer to
the Irish parallel, that Nennius, or his source,
suppressed them. We begin to suspect that he may
have been committed to whitewashing Vortigern.
The issue is not entirely one of
Nennius’ own attitudes. We have seen that
his account of the legend of the dragons (of
which the tale of Vortimer and Ronwein is a
follow-up, since it is equally connected with the
Irish legend of Conn, Art and Cormac) does not
come from the same source as Geoffrey’s,
though an ultimate common source must be
postulated for both, since both use the same
Gospel scene (Salome and Herod) and sentence
(“the Devil entered Vortigern’s
heart”), in conjunction. But if Nennius
selected an account of the legend which
deliberately left out the most dubious acts of
Vortigern’s, this shows his views.
The clincher is that it is
specifically the Vortimer of Geoffrey, rather
than that of Nennius, who is in several ways the
functional equivalent of the Irish Art mac Conn.
Having officially - and not merely, as it seems
in Nennius, with a nod and a wink - dethroned his
father, Vortimer is the recognized head of state;
and though Geoffrey presents this as a
revolutionary act, it has some features in common
with the Irish version of the quest for the
wondrous boy, where Conn commits the kingdom to
Art. The importance of this act is underlined by
the fact that Art actually has to be recalled to
Ireland: it is a reversal in the fortunes of the
kingdom, and marks, we must assume, a tremendous
defeat for Becuma, just as Vortimer's arrival
means a devastating series of defeats for
Ronwein's Saxon kinsmen. What is more, Art is
made regent in the presence of a vast assembly of
all the men of Ireland, which reminds us that
Geoffrey said that "the Britons" took
the throne from Vortigern and gave it to
Vortimer. Of course, the Irish scene does not
imply, like the Welsh, a revolt against the
ruling sovereign; but nobody can deny that Conn
is forced away from Ireland (in quest of the
wondrous boy) ultimately because of his own sin
in marrying Becuma, just as Vortigern is forced
from the throne ultimately because of his own sin
in marrying Ronwein. Vortimer is exclusively
responsible for the war against the alien
invaders; but so is Art, who is King of Tara
(Conn having long since died) when Beine Brit's
hordes invade. It is he who, when the invaders
have reached Mag Mucrama, declares "it is
time to give battle to the aliens", to which
Eogan of Munster, Lugaid’s actual target,
only assents. The death of Geoffrey's Vortimer is
directly related to his being the national
war-leader against the aliens, and marks the end
of the war; but so does that of Art, beheaded at
the hands of the heroic Lugaid Laga[25], after which Lugaid mac
Con, having left both allies and enemies dead on
the battlefield, simply walks into a deserted
Tara and takes over. And that Ronwein is
specifically the enemy of Vortimer is exactly
mirrored in the meeting of Art and Becuma:
"Art was certainly not pleased to see his
enemy". In the Irish story as we have it, no
link between Becuma and Mag Mucrama exists, and
therefore we cannot attribute the death of Art to
her either directly or indirectly; which
certainly does make a difference. But she
threatens the succession in him in another way,
by wishing on him a dangerous quest for another
infertile fairy bride, pushing the dynasty
further and further towards the spell of fairy
women.
Part 2
Notes
History
of Britain, 407-597 is copyright © 2002, Fabio
P. Barbieri. Used with permission.
Comments
to: Fabio P.
Barbieri
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