6 - Demonology, allegory and translation: the Furies and the Morrígan

Summary

The literary classifications of a century ago still loom over us. When Táin Bó Cúailnge (The Cattle-Raid of Cooley) was recruited as the ‘primary epic’ of a national literature, and when the texts associated with it were called a Heroic Cycle, they were uprooted from the cultural context that gave them meaning. We are only beginning to undo the damage, and to re-learn how to listen to the medieval Irish construction of the ancient past. In this paper, I offer a case study taking this corpus as the record of a remarkable adventure in cross-cultural translation. Where the medieval scholar-authors’ engagement with Graeco-Latin models and analogues has been studied, it has usually been understood as a process of emulation and imitation between literatures; it has been approached less often in terms of mapping between languages, and this paper attempts to move the discussion in that direction.

I begin from the hunch or working hypothesis that the extended texts based on Classical sources – Togail Troí, Imtheachta Aeniasa, Togail na Tebe, In Cath Catharda – resemble the more famous narratives set in Ireland, notably the so-called Ulster Cycle texts and the catha and cathréimeanna, ‘battles’, ‘battle-surges’, not only for literary reasons but because both genres are concerned to re-imagine the pagan past of the human race, Irish or Greek or Trojan as the case may be. Such works to all appearances present themselves not as the productions of poetic imagination but as a kind of elevated historiography – realistic in the sense that it supposedly derives from the record of those who witnessed it, in accordance with Isidore’s definition of historia. For the Latin-based narratives, translation and modification adjust the discourse in each case to produce a more-or-less consistent stylistic level despite the heterogeneous range of underlying sources. Some, like In Cath Catharda (The Civil War) or Togail na Tebe (The Destruction of Thebes), are founded on high epic poetry with elaborate artistic and mythical embellishments, while others like Togail Troí (The Destruction of Troy) derive from prose accounts whose authority came originally from the very fact that they were plain and unadorned; others again, notably Imtheachta Aeniasa (The Adventures of Aeneas), minimize the artistry and rhetoric of the poetic original to produce a more down-to-earth account of events.