The Tradition of Medieval Gaelic Storytelling by James Acken

When sitting down to write this article I suddenly remembered the opening credits to Steven Spielberg’s 1985-1987 television series Amazing Stories.

Its first enthralling image showed a group of Neanderthal like humans around a campfire while a storyteller, lit from below by firelight, gesticulated wildly, weaving some truly ‘Amazing Story’.

The image carried all the power and significance of narrative or storytelling. We live by stories. They provide the glue for our culture and act as the backbone of almost every religion that exists. The unique traditions of storytelling can thus often act like a cultural thumbprint.

The word saga, for example, is a Scandinavian term that has its roots in their verb ‘to speak’ and is cognate with our verb ‘to say’. It suggests the oral origin and nature of the Norse and Icelandic sagas, each of which is divided into a number of short chapters not unlike episodes of The Sopranos or Lost and advance the fairly linear story often through multiple generations.

The shape of these large narratives is close enough to our modern novel that students usually find the sagas easier to engage with than Gaelic sgeula or scéalta, even though these latter are only the length of a single chapter of the sagas.

Numerous collections of scéla (and from here on I use the neutral medieval word) have appeared over the last century. Tom P. Cross and Clark H. Slover’s Ancient Irish Tales is robust though slightly archaic in language, while Geoffrey Gantz’s Early Irish Myths and Sagas is a clear modern translation but hardly complete. Myles Dillon’s The Cycles of the Kings is perhaps a better representation of how the medieval Gael would have thought about these tales.

The great difficulty of the scél tradition is that it seems so transparent in translation. Certainly there are odd moments, as when the jealous wife of Mider, one of the Tuatha Dé Danann, transforms his lover-to-be, Etaín, into a giant, musical fly, the water and music from whose wings could heal the sick and sustain warriors better than food; and certainly, the tales make a strange kind of fairy-tale sense, as when Cú Chulainn must perform a number of heroically difficult tasks to win his wife Emer, and then, having fathered a son by a different woman overseas, unknowingly kills him when the boy comes to find his father. Still, there are some moments when the tales present seemingly impossible difficulties for the modern reader.

One example is in the death-tale of the legendary Irish king, Conaire Mór mac Eterscél, entitled Togail Bruidne Dá Derga, or ‘The Destruction of Dá Derga’s Hostel’. The story is simple.

After a long and peaceful reign, Conaire breaks his gessa, the semi-divine taboos set on him at birth, and falls prey to his treacherous foster-brothers who ally themselves with the British king, Ingcél Cáech.

The great confrontation between Conaire and his foster-brothers - a kind of an early Irish Showdown at the O.K. Corral - takes place at one of the great guest-houses in Ireland: the bruiden of Dá Derga.

If the plot is simple, the scél is not. A maddeningly repetitive series of descriptions occupies almost half of the tale - some 24 pages of Gantz’s 51 page translation - wherein Ingcél spies on Conaire’s retinue in the bruiden and describes them to the foster-brothers.

The list of names and increasingly bizarre descriptions, one of which shows Conaire’s otherworldly champion Mac Cécht as a landscape complete with hills, forests and lakes, is so interminable that students invariably skip at least a third of them.

Nevertheless, these descriptions were central to the purpose of the scél. A Gaelic nobleman’s greatness was expressed in his (or her) entourage, and Conaire’s boasted fantastic individuals from every corner of Ireland and Scotland - half of them from the síd, the infamous fairy-mounds. Mac Cécht himself, described as a landscape, is from the síd and thus, when Mac Cécht fights, it is as though the land itself fights for Conaire.

The true power of the Gaelic scéla, though, is in how they mirror our human experiences. Each scél elucidates a single or short series of events where several characters meet. Each of these characters feature in any number of other scéla so that the events of one scél resonate throughout the entire corpus of scéla like ripples in a lake.

Without reading these, it is difficult to really grasp how this works, but the effect is that the more you read, the more significant each little thing becomes. With this in mind the scope of the scél tradition, extending in written form from the earliest Gaelic sources of the seventh century to the present day, collections of oral tradition like Joe MacNeil’s Tales until Dawn: Sgeul gu Latha, cannot but instill awe in the most jaded of us.