Ranke de Vries
Medieval Irish stories can seem fantastically strange to a modern reader – there are examples of singing disembodied heads that make people cry uncontrollably; kings who can travel underwater after stuffing their ears with herbs; heroes who, after having been disemboweled, casually gather up their intestines for a quick drink of water before strapping themselves to a rock to die – I could go on. Some of these elements are probably intentionally odd – like a medieval version of, say, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure – but others only seem strange to us because we lack the same frame of reference that a medieval Irish person would have had. Once you discover more about the medieval Irish context, these ‘weird’ elements are no longer quite as outlandish.
For example, the story Aided Echach meic Maireda ‘The violent death of Echu, son of Mairid’ contains a passage in which the hero prepares to spend the night on a piece of land with his men. A tall man comes up to him and tells them all to leave. They stay put, and the next morning, they wake up to find that the tall man has killed all the horses. This seems quite strange – but it is decidedly less so if you are familiar with medieval Irish legal tradition. In the Irish legal procedure referred to as rudrad, a person who wanted a piece of land could lay claim to it by simply occupying it. If the owner did not object within a certain period of time, ownership would pass to the occupant. One of the legal recourses that the owner had if the occupant did not want to leave his land was to wound or kill him (De Vries 2012, 154). In other words, the owner, who might at first glance seem unnecessarily violent, is actually the wronged party, and the killing of the horses is entirely Echu’s fault, because he is trying to usurp someone’s land and refuses to leave – it’s just that this time, he has messed with the wrong person.
This goes to show that it is important to know a bit about medieval Irish law if you want to get a better understanding of medieval Irish stories – and luckily, a number of scholars have looked at this in recent years, with great success. But law is not the only area of knowledge that one should ideally be familiar with. Another often overlooked area is that of medicine. Sadly, we do not know what the exact curriculum of a physician-in-training in, say, twelfth-century Ireland looked like, since we do not possess any Irish medical manuscripts from that time. What is clear, though, is that they were familiar with medical theory current elsewhere in continental Europe.
Central to medieval medical learning was the theory of the four humours – each person’s body was made up of a discreet balance of four different substances: blood, black bile, yellow bile (choler), and phlegm. Some people would have a body naturally balanced to contain more blood than the other humours; other people had more black bile, relatively speaking, and so on. The humour that dominated in a person determined a person’s temperament. Imbalance of the humours resulted in disease, and bringing the humours back into balance was key to curing the ailment. This theory of the humours and temperaments was formulated first in Greek Antiquity, but was revised and refined over time. And lest you think that this is an example of medieval people just being their ignorant medieval selves (an opinion that is still bafflingly common), humoral theory dominated western medicine until the nineteenth century, and the humors are still regularly referenced in pop culture and found in expressions like ‘she was being very phlegmatic about it’ or ‘he sure is a hothead’.
So let’s look at just one example of how knowledge of medieval medicine can help in understanding an ‘odd’ element in medieval Irish literature. Now, speaking of hotheads: the Irish hero Cú Chulainn is probably the most hot-headed person around, and often experiences outbursts of anger and violence, usually on the battlefield. These outbursts can last for a long time – and if he runs out of enemies to fight, there is a real risk that he will turn on his allies. Cú Chulainn himself is aware of this, and he has a special piece of clothing that he can don for exactly this situation: a series of twenty-seven waxed, stiff tunics, which he wears next to his skin, securely fastened with strings and ropes. This is an odd item of clothing in and of itself, but what is even stranger is that this is not meant to actually stop him from engaging in violent acts – in fact, in one episode in the text Táin Bó Cúailnge, ‘The Cattle-raid of Cooley’, he dons the jacket and then immediately enters a rage and slaughters many. So why does he even wear this?
‘Cuchulain in Battle’, illustration by J. C. Leyendecker in T. W. Rolleston’s Myths & Legends of the Celtic Race, 1911
Well, what the contraption is meant to do, so the text tells us, is to allow him to fight while remaining able to distinguish friend from foe (as the text puts it – ‘[so] that his mind and understanding might not be deranged when his rage should come upon him’, arnacha ndechrad a chond nach a chiall ó doficed a lúth láthair, O’Rahilly 1967, 61, tr. 200). But what does that mean?
Cú Chulainn’s rage can in part be connected with a medical condition known as mania, a mental affliction described frequently in medieval medical literature. Mania was defined as ‘a disorder of the imaginative faculty in…the brain… characterized by fury and explosive energy’ (Demaitre 2013, 135). Thoughts differed on what exactly caused mania: it might for example be due to an excessive amount or inflammation of yellow bile as a result of poor diet, or experiencing strong emotions like anger (ibidem); it could grow out of a different mental state, that of melancholy (Trembinski 2011, 89); or maybe it was the result of a conflict between the three parts of the soul, in which one or both of the irrational parts of the soul, that is, the emotions and appetites, governed by the heart and the liver respectively temporarily dominated the rational part of the soul, governed by the brain (Hachler 2013, 57–8).
Medieval physicians further distinguished between a wolfish type of manic rage (mania lupina), and a dog-like manic rage (mania canina). This second kind of rage was more obedient and less untamed than wolfish rage, and patients suffering from mania canina appeared to be able to still retain some sense of right and wrong, as opposed to those afflicted by mania lupina. This wolf-like rage appears to be associated with wild movement, and limiting movement and agitation brings the patient under more control (Bertochus 1489–90, 286). And that is what the jacket does: limiting movement, which allows Cú Chulainn to keep his wolf-like mania just enough in check that he can still inflict slaughter, but do so discriminately.
Incidentally, this concept of dog-like and wolf-like mania ties in very well with the character of Cú Chulainn himself by virtue of his name, which means ‘Culann’s Dog’. Earlier in Táin Bó Cúailnge, we learn that he receives this name after killing the guard dog of the smith Culann. Culann is distraught, as his home is now defenseless. Cú Chulainn proclaims that he will serve as a guard dog until a new dog can be reared for Culann the smith – so he quite literally becomes Culann’s Dog (O’Rahilly 1967, pp. 25, 162). If Cú Chulainn wants to remain a guard dog, rather than becoming a cú allaid, a wolf (literally a ‘wild dog’), who slaughters friend and foe, he needs his fancy jacket. And while wearing twenty-seven layers of waxed tunics might never not be slightly odd (and decidedly less stylish than, say, Giorno Giovanna or Jolyne Cujoh’s threads), it certainly makes more sense as to why Cú Chulainn does it.
Knowing the potential reason behind narratorial elements like these helps make medieval Irish literature a little more accessible and a little less bizarre than it might at first glance appear. But not to worry, even with explanations like these, there is still enough outlandish material left in medieval Irish literature to rival the shenanigans of Dio Brando.
‘Setanta Slays the Hound of Culain’, illustration by Stephen Reid from Eleanor Hull, The Boys’ Cuchulain, 1904
Further reading:
- Bertochus, Dionysius (ed.), Canon medicinae/Libellus Avicene de viribus cordis translatus ab Arnaldo de villa nova (Venice 1489–90). Available online at https://findit.library.yale.edu/catalog/digcoll:187915 (consulted 8 December 2023)
- Demaitre, Luke, Medieval Medicine: The Art of Healing, from Head to Toe (Santa Barbara, CA, 2013)
- De Vries, Ranke, Two texts on Loch nEchach: De causeis torchi Corc’Óche and Aided Echach maic Maireda, Irish Texts Society 65 (London, 2012)
- Hachler, Nikolas, ‘Galen’s Observations on Diseases of the Soul and the Mind of Men: Researches on the Knowledge of Mental Illnesses in Antiquity’, Rosetta 13 (2013), 53–72
- O’Rahilly, Cecile (ed.), Táin Bó Cúailnge from the Book of Leinster (Dublin, 1967)
- Trembinski, Donna, ‘Comparing Premodern Melancholy/Mania and Modern Trauma: An Argument in Favor of Historical Experiences of Trauma’, History of Psychology 14.1 (2011), 80–99