Cú Chulainn

Key takeaways: Cú Chulainn is the central hero of the Ulster Cycle, born Setanta and renamed for killing the smith Culann’s hound; the texts describe him as small and young, not a giant; his battle distortion, the ríastrad, is a supernatural transformation rather than simple rage; he chose everlasting fame over long life; and his staged death, tied upright to a pillar-stone, became Ireland’s defining image of heroic sacrifice.

How was Cú Chulainn born three times?

Cú Chulainn enters the world not once but three times, and the earliest version of the conception-tale (Compert Con Culainn, preserved in the Irish text at CELT from a tradition that goes back to the lost Book of Druim Snechta, c. 740–860) is itself unstable. In one strand Dechtire, king Conchobor’s sister [other versions make her his daughter, which introduces an incest anxiety the texts handle uneasily], drinks from a vessel and swallows an insect in which the god Lug is riding; a son is born and dies; in a second dreaming-version Lug himself comes to Dechtire and reveals he has taken the dead child and placed it in her womb once more; finally the child is born from Dechtire after her marriage to the mortal Sualdam mac Roich. A mare foals twin horses at the same moment, Liath Macha and the Black of Saingliu, and they will belong to no other person. Three conceptions, three possible fathers (god, king, mortal), one hero: the multiplication is deliberate, staking the largest possible supernatural claim. The boy is given the name Setanta.

How did Setanta become the Hound of Culann?

His boyhood deeds (macgnímrada), told in retrospect by Fergus mac Róich as a series of wonder-tales within the Táin, establish the pattern of the rest: Setanta arrives at Emain Macha without an escort and without asking the boy-troop for protection, triggering a battle in which he fights a hundred and fifty boys alone and undergoes the first ríastrad, hair standing on end with a drop of blood on each strand, one eye sucked back into his skull, the other swelling enormous, mouth stretched to show his organs, a column of dark blood rising from the crown of his head. The king cools him in three vats of water (the second explodes the wood; the third merely boils). He is then invited to a feast at the forge of the smith Culann; arriving late, he kills Culann’s guard-hound, three chains and nine men had held it, by smashing it against a standing stone. He offers to serve as Culann’s hound himself until a pup can be reared. The druid Cathbad names him Cú Chulainn, Hound of Culann. On the same morning Cathbad tells his pupils that whoever takes arms that day will be famous throughout Ireland forever, but will not live long. The boy, overhearing this, tricks Conchobor into giving him spear and shield immediately, shatters fifteen lesser sets before the king’s own weapons endure him, and then sets out to raid the border. He is seven years old. When Cathbad’s prophecy is repeated to him, fame, but a short life, he answers that he would rather live one day and be remembered forever.

Where did Cú Chulainn train as a warrior?

The overseas training belongs to the Tochmarc Emire, the Wooing of Emer (translated by Kuno Meyer, 1887; CELT T301021). Emer, daughter of Forgall of Luglocht Loga, will only accept a husband who has matched her in her six gifts: beauty, voice, sweet speech, needlework, wisdom, and chastity. She sets near-impossible bride-price conditions and Forgall, hoping to remove Cú Chulainn from Ireland entirely, sends him to study with the warrior-woman Scáthach in Alba (Scotland). The path to Scáthach’s island requires a leap across a bridge that tips any ordinary traveller into the gulf; on his third attempt Cú Chulainn uses the salmon-leap and crosses. He trains with Scáthach and also fights Aife, her rival, a battle that ends when he distracts Aife by crying out that her horses and chariot have fallen from the cliff, then holds his sword at her throat and extracts from her both a peace with Scáthach and his child. He leaves Aife pregnant and gives her a gold thumb-ring for the boy: when it fits him, send him to Ireland; let him not make himself known to any single person; let him refuse no fight. The child will be named Connla.

What does Cú Chulainn do in the Táin Bó Cúailnge?

The Táin Bó Cúailnge, surviving in two major recensions, Recension I edited by Cecile O’Rahilly (DIAS/CELT) and the Book of Leinster version (O’Rahilly 1967), and rendered in modern English by Thomas Kinsella (Oxford, 1969/2002), is the largest canvas. Ulster’s men lie incapacitated by the pangs of Macha’s curse while Medb of Connacht drives her armies northward to take the Brown Bull of Cúailnge. Only Cú Chulainn, who does not share the debility, stands in the gap. The ríastrad or “warp-spasm”, which Kinsella’s translation renders at full, grotesque length: the body twisting inside its own skin so that heels face forward and shins face back, an eye buried to the cheek, the other pushed down the face, organs visible through the screaming mouth, a black jet of blood rising from the skull-top, is not rage in any ordinary sense. It is a profound physical distortion, an inhuman state that erases the distinction between friend and enemy. The Morrigan enters the narrative first through the remscéla: in Táin Bó Regamna she encounters Cú Chulainn driving a heifer from the síde of Cruachan, insults him in riddling language, transforms into a raven on a branch when he attacks, and delivers the prophecy: “It is at the guarding of thy death that I am.” In the Táin itself she appears as a beautiful woman offering love and military aid; he refuses, not recognizing her; she attacks him during his next ford-combat as an eel, then a wolf, then a heifer, and he wounds her in each form. Afterward, not recognizing her in the guise of an old woman milking a cow, he accepts milk from her and blesses the gift, inadvertently healing each of her wounds. She will not be the direct cause of his death, but she will be the witness of it.

Why did Cú Chulainn have to kill Fer Diad?

The ford combats are the spine of the narrative: a succession of Connacht champions cross to fight Cú Chulainn alone while the main army halts. Lug appears to him between combats, heals his wounds, and confirms his divine paternity. The combat with Fer Diad, his foster-brother from Scáthach’s training, runs across three days of escalating weapons, light throwing spears, long lances, heavy swords, with the two men sharing food and healing herbs each night across the ford. It is on the fourth day that Fer Diad, his horn-skin giving him the advantage, drives Cú Chulainn back; at the point of defeat, Cú Chulainn sends for the Gáe Bolga, floated downstream by Láeg his charioteer, and drives it through Fer Diad’s body with his foot, the barbs spreading through every limb. [The Fer Diad episode is regarded by scholars as a late addition to the Táin, likely originating no earlier than the eleventh century.] Cú Chulainn carries the body to the north side of the ford, the advancing side, and laments: “All games, all sport, until Fer Diad came to the ford.”

What was Cú Chulainn’s wasting sickness?

The Serglige Con Culainn (“Wasting Sickness”) is itself a composite text, explicitly noted by scholars as joining two once-separate versions with an imperfect seam. At Samhain on Mag Muirthemne, two swans linked by a silver chain sing Cú Chulainn to sleep; two otherworld women whip him senseless in a vision; he lies in a wasting illness for a year. He is eventually lured to the otherworld to fight on behalf of Labraid Luathlám ar Claideb; the price is the love of Fand, wife of Manannán mac Lir, who has deserted her. Cú Chulainn and Fand meet in the otherworld, but Emer follows and confronts them. The two women’s exchange is remarkable: both claim the right, both offer to yield. Manannán mac Lir returns, shakes his cloak between Cú Chulainn and Fand so that they may never meet again, and takes Fand away. The druids give Cú Chulainn and Emer a drink of forgetting.

Did Cú Chulainn really kill his own son?

The Aided Óenfhir Aífe (“Death of Aife’s Only Son”), edited by A. G. van Hamel (DIAS, 1933) and translated by Kuno Meyer (Ériu 1, 1904), turns the ring-gift into a tragedy. Connla arrives at the Ulster shore seven years later, defeats all challengers, refuses to name himself, and is only stopped when Cú Chulainn uses the Gáe Bolga, the one weapon Scáthach never taught Connla. As he dies the boy identifies himself: “Now this is what Scáthach never taught me.” Emer had warned Cú Chulainn before he went down to the strand. He went anyway, for the honor of Ulster.

How did Cú Chulainn die?

The death, told within Brislech Mór Maige Muirthemne (Meyer’s translation in The Death-Tales of the Ulster Heroes, 1906; CELT T301037) [edition attribution to be confirmed; Stokes, Revue Celtique 3 is the standard edition], is systematically prepared. Medb, having lost the Táin, commissions the sons and daughters of the druid Calatín to train for seventeen years in the arts of destruction. Cú Chulainn’s geasa are used as weapons against him: he must not eat dog-flesh; he must not refuse hospitality. Three hags at a fire offer him a meal of dog stew. He hesitates between the two prohibitions, chooses hospitality, eats, and is disfigured, one hand and one leg losing their strength. Multiple portents precede the final battle: Liath Macha weeps tears of blood and will not be harnessed; Cú Chulainn’s cloak-pin falls and pierces his foot; a washer at the ford is seen laundering his bloodied war-gear, an omen of death. In the battle on Mag Muirthemne, Lugaid son of Cú Roí casts three magical spears, each foretold to slay a king: Láeg dies (king of charioteers), then Liath Macha (king of horses), then Cú Chulainn takes the third spear in his side. He ties his own intestines back inside his body, walks to a nearby lake to drink, kills an otter at the water’s edge, completing his career as it began, with the death of a hound, then ties himself upright to a pillar-stone with his own belt so that he may die facing his enemies. The hero-light burns around him and no warrior dares approach. It is only when a raven or crow lands on his shoulder [the text uses the word ennach, a bird of carrion; whether it is the Morrigan in that form is disputed in the scholarship, the crow is not explicitly identified as the Morrigan in all versions, though the association is very old] that Lugaid advances and strikes off his head. As the sword falls, Cú Chulainn’s own blade drops from his hand and severs Lugaid’s hand at the wrist. Conall Cernach avenges him before sunset, as he had sworn. Emer dies on his grave.

Where in Ireland is Cú Chulainn’s landscape?

Cú Chulainn’s geographic world is entirely in Ulster and on the Ulster–Connacht border: Mag Muirthemne and his stronghold Dún Dealgan around modern Dundalk in Co. Louth, the royal seat of Emain Macha (Navan Fort) in Co. Armagh, and the ford of Fer Diad preserved in the name of Ardee (Áth Fhirdia), Co. Louth. Connacht enters his story only as the territory of his enemies: across every ford he faces south and west toward Cruachan (Rathcroghan, Co. Roscommon), the royal seat of his great antagonist Medb. No primary source places his episodes in the west of Ireland; his connection to Connacht is real but adversarial, the hero standing in the gap against the province’s advancing army.