Ní chífimíd a leithéid arís

By a happy coincidence, Angus Peter Campbell's Invisible Islands arrived the same day as I finished reading the Táin. I hadn't expected it to get here from the UK so quickly. It also hadn't been my intention to start reading it, as I'd ordered it not for myself but as a gift for monshu. (Well, let's be honest: mostly as a gift for monshu.) But I've pretty poor luck picking books for him in the past, so I thought I'd better read a bit of it first.

I'm glad I did; definitely not his thing. As the title make's clear, Campbell's aim is to be a Caledonian Calvino, and from what I've seen the Old Man just isn't down with postmodern fabulism. Worse, a lot of his riffs are explicitly linguistic and all but the most banal really benefit from some knowledge of the modern Scottish cultural industry. So you'd think it would be totally up my alley. There were certainly parts which I enjoyed very much, but I felt that overall the vignettes lacked imagination.

It probably suffers a bit being read so soon after something as loopy as the Táin, which ends with the brilliant addendum:

Sed ego qui scripsi hanc historiam aut verius fabulam quibusdam fidem in hac historia aut fabula non accommodo. Quaedam enim ibi sunt praestrigia demonum, quaedam autem figmenta poetica, quaedam similia uéro quaedam non, quaedam ad delectationem stultorum.

But I who have written this history, or rather this fable, give no creedence to certain things in this history or fable. Some things in it are the trickery of demons; some are poetic figments; some seem true, some not; and some are for the amusement of idiots.

(Frankly, I could well see this being appended to nearly any work of imaginative fiction.)

It's interesting to me that the two characters I found myself most interested in were two I don't recall having heard of before. The first is Fionnabhair (= Gwynhwyfar, i.e. Guinevere), daughter of Meadhbh (i.e. Queen Maeve) and Ailill. She's more pawn than person, being offered to successful heroes as a prize for dispatching Cú Chulainn. But this all changes in an instant when a battle breaks out between "seven kings of Munster"--all of whom have been promised her hand--and the sons of Ailill, which results in 700 deaths. When Fionnabhair hears of this, she dies of shame. That one sentence brought home to me what it must have been like for her, forced by her parents to seduce young men to their deaths in order to win revenge for a dead husband who she probably didn't care much for anyway.

The other is Láeg mac Riangabra, Cú Chulainn's charioteer. He calls to mind that feminist line about Ginger Rogers having done everything that Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels. During the half year the great hero spends harrying the "men of Ireland", Láeg never leaves his side. He's more than a driver; being responsible for Cú Chulainn's weapons means that even during stationary combats, he must stand at the ready. (There are several mentions during the single combats of Cú Chulainn--a brute capable of punching through stone--tossing his weapons to Láeg and demanding others.) We never learn how much older Láeg is, but he obviously functions as a sort of mentor to the teenaged hero, as well as a second set of eyes, spotting and identifying approaching combatants. Although it seems it was considered unsporting to target a man's charioteer, they can be and were attacked. Like Cú Chulainn, Láeg survives the Táin, but his is ultimately taken out by a spear meant for his master.

He's consistently sympathetic in a way that the "poetic figment" Cú Chulainn is not. The most striking thing to me about the sage, in fact, is how it glorifies a figure who is a mortal threat to all around him. When still a child, he kills a man sent to wake him up by smashing his head in. The response of King Conchobhar's court is not, "For the safety of us all, we'd better kill him before he gets any bigger" but "We'll let him sleep in from now on." The lengthy description of him as he entres his "battle-warp" could've been a template for the appearance of Large Marge in Pee-wee's Big Adventure. He is, in a word, monstrous. Not bereft of humanity--his laments at the death of Fear Dhiadh are genuinely touching. But that sequence is a later addition and, like most all of the tales concerning his loving wife (who he pledges eternal faithfulness to before leaving for training, only to cheat on her with his trainer and her daughter) doesn't belong to the Táin proper.