Once in a while we get to sit around and muse: if a medieval Irish saga were to take the title of a hit Broadway play from the 1990s, which and which? For The Wooing of Étaín, no question: Blown Sideways Through Life.
OK, up front the comparatist has to concede a few things. That one-woman New York show of 1993 was a breezy autobiographical comedy about the playwright, Claudia Shear, and the 64 jobs she held, from nude model to pastry chef to translator of Italian. The Irish story (to name it neutrally—“saga” sounds too Norse, “myth” too Greek—it’s something in between) revolves around one woman with three (maybe four) identities and one main job: to be the object of desire for immortal beings and kings over the course of several thousand years. The play had a pretty good off-Broadway run of more than 200 performances. Tochmarc Étaíne has endured in manuscript since at least the 12th century.1 For staying power, the Irish tale clearly wins, but it’s still not sufficiently celebrated.
The Wooing of Étaín starts like many an Irish tale: Bai ri amra for Eirinn, “There was a famous king of Ireland….” This particular king is special. He is one of a mysterious race of supernatural beings, the Tuatha Dé Danann (“tribes of the goddess Danu”) that came to Ireland by way of dark clouds, or (in some versions) over the sea, becoming the penultimate sovereigns over its mountains and fields until a final wave of newcomers arrived, the all-too-human “Sons of Míl” of Spain (“Milesians”). In the medieval stories, these two populations mix it up in complex interactions. On occasion, the Milesians disappear into the underground dwellings of the earlier Tuatha and come back years later as if time has never passed for them. Sometimes, the Tuatha fall for Milesians and contrive to sleep with them, creating hybrid heroes, or one side deceives the other through attractive disguises and havoc ensues. The Wooing tries out most of those possibilities over the course of its narrative.
It starts with primeval sex between two divinities of the Tuatha Dé, namely Eochaid Ollathair, the “king” mentioned above, and Eithne. Their other names reveal the cosmic nature of this coupling: he is also called the “Dagda”—the “good god”—for his wondrous production of weather and crops; she is also “Boand”—in other words, the River Boyne, a real river that runs through east-central Ireland. It’s not accidental that the valley of the Boyne boasts of more important Neolithic underground passage tombs and mounds than any other place on earth. It’s deep in archaic Irish memory, and when Dagda gets together with Boand it’s as if sky and earth mate—think Ouranos and Gaia in Greek myth. Each of these characters is elemental.
At the same time, however, each is also entangled in a web of human relations, which makes the story more relatable while stopping just short of soap opera. For one thing, Eithne… is already married, to another of the Tuatha Dé, one Elcmar of the Brúg. (A “Brúg” is an underground dwelling.) She is terrified that he’ll get angry if she has sex with the Dagda (as both really want), so the Dagda gets Elcmar out of the way by sending him on a journey, sleeps with Eithne, and fathers a son with her, Óengus. The boy is sent away to be fostered by another family—something aristocrats customarily did in early Irish society as a kind of cross-training that also forged bonds among elite clans. Óengus, also called Mac Óc, “Young Son”, ends up at the house of Midirin, Brí Léith.
Óengus doesn’t know he is in fact neither Midir’s nor Elcmar’s son until another kid mocks him for being a bastard, and Midir has to reveal the truth. He takes Óengus to meet his real dad (Eochaid/Dagda).
Now, if this tale followed the expected pattern, we know what comes next: boy is welcomed by actual father; kingdom is handed over to him; local resistance is overcome (some other aspirant often has been hanging around the real father’s house); all is hunky-dory. In some Classical variations, the newly-recognized royal son is given an ordeal to overcome (Theseus is nearly killed by his stepmother and has to go defeat the Minotaur before inheriting rule over Athens, for example) and prove himself worthy. But the Irish story goes further in terms of complication—with a heavy dose of the sort of legal drama audiences seem to have craved.
I should explain here that mythical events were fully incorporated into early Irish legal texts as valid precedents. There were a number of overlapping functions among the learned elite of traditional poets, storytellers, “brehon” lawyers (and, going back far enough) druids. Because of this, tales that we would consider fully fictional, and real-life, binding law are often intertwined in early Irish society.
And seemingly, the Irish loved hashing out legal minutiae in their lore.
In this case, two lawyerly moments spice things up. First, when Eochaid (aka Dagda) acknowledges his son Óengus, the usual land-handover, father to heir, can’t happen because the intended parcel is still inhabited by the cuckolded Elcmar, whom Eochaid chivalrously refrains from further annoying. But he thinks of a work-around—Eochaid (not so chivalrously) advises Óengus to threaten to kill Elcmar on Samain, the spooky day when Otherworld people intermingle most intensely with humans. The young man is instructed to extort a promise of obtaining kingship “for a day and a night.” When the naive Elcmar subsequently tries to get back his land and lordship (after one day, plus one night) a piece of verbal jiujitsu shreds his case. Eochaid (conveniently, now the judge in his son’s dispute) declares that “day and night” is basically all that time ever consists of—so Óengus in effect possesses the eternal deed to Elcmar’s land.
The second legal judgement (remember that we’re still in the build-up to the main narrative) revolves around personal injury rather than land titles. After a year, Midir comes to visit his foster son in his new home. When he tries to resolve a sport dispute between two groups of young men at the Brúg, someone in the fray throws a thin holly stick and knocks out one of his eyes—signaling more than a medical emergency. In Irish society, kings had to be physically perfect, and any blemish means that Midir has to give up ruling his territory. The divine physician Dían Cécht heals him, but Midir makes a few further requests of his host: a great chariot, a beautiful cloak and the fairest woman in Ireland: Étaín of Ulster.
Oengus honors his injured guest’s demands, and goes to negotiate the marriage. He carries out the ordeals demanded by Étaín’s father (clearing 12 plains, diverting 12 rivers and so forth) and forks over gold and silver equivalent to Étaín’s weight.
The story is already spinning out of kilter, at least in terms of the plot-points modern readers expect. The wooing, for instance, does not involve besting other suitors; proving oneself worthy to win a bride (a staple rom-com formula: think Meet the Parents) ends up merely as a transaction (a trade in precious metals); and the wooer here is not the aspiring husband but his proxy and foster-son.
It gets stranger when we learn that Midir, who takes Étaín home and sleeps with her, already has a wife (legally, even in early-Christian Ireland). What is worse, this woman, Fuamnach, is skilled in the dark druidical powers of the Tuatha Dé. After a show of hospitality and a house tour, Fuamnach strikes Étaín with a scarlet rod and turns her into a pool of water. The water evaporates into a worm which then morphs into a purple fly as big as a man’s head. The fly’s wings and voice produce sweet music; the dew drops shed from its wings are capable of curing every sickness.
The fly becomes Midir’s constant companion (he falls asleep to her humming each night) and he knows it is really Étaín. Unfortunately, so does the wicked Fuamnach, who stirs up a magic wind that whirls Étaín without rest all over Ireland for seven years. Exhausted, Étaín ends up alighting on the cloak of none other than Óengus (the young man who had once courted her on Midir’s behalf). He keeps her safe in a sun-bower—something like an herb-filled greenhouse—until Fuamnach catches on, and blasts Étaín with another squall. The woman-fly’s final resting place (at least for this bit of the tale) is the rooftree of a house in Ulster. In the midst of a drinking-bout Étaín falls from her perch into the beaker of another woman (the wife of a champion named Étar). Étar becomes pregnant, and eventually Étaín—human again—re-emerges as the couple’s baby daughter. Naturally, they call her Étaín. At this point the tale-teller reveals that 1,012 years have passed since the conception of Étaín #1. (He also reports, satisfyingly, that Óengus meanwhile tracked down Fuamnach and cut off her head.)
The medieval Irish did not go in for organized theater (it’s a rarity when you don’t have any cities) but did possess an intuitive sense of dramatic structure. If this were Broadway, we’d be opening Act 2, with another wooing.
This time it’s the king of all Ireland, Eochaid Airem. (This is not the same Eochaid as Eochaid Ollathair, the Dagda.) The new Eochaid needs a wife for political propriety, so he weds the latest incarnation of Étaín (Étaín #2—the one who was reborn as the daughter of Étar), because she matches him in beauty and lineage.
Back home, however, his brother falls hopelessly in love with the new bride and soon is dying from the pain of unfulfilled eros. Left behind with him when her husband Eochaid is away for some months, Étaín nurses her brother-in-law, soon learns the cause of his malady, and offers to cure it for good. She goes out to meet him for a tryst, three days in a row, only to discover that he never really showed up: each time the real brother had overslept and Étaín had made love to some look-alike. She finally asks the impostor what’s going on; he identifies himself as Midir, her long-lost husband from the earlier part of this tale. (Of course the new Étaín has no memory of him, or the sorceress Fuamnach, or the magic winds, or her former life as an exquisite fly). Étaín takes pains to clarify that her generous trysting was solely for medicinal purposes. Her latest husband Eochaid comes back and is well pleased to find his brother healed.
Act 3 begins with Eochaid welcoming a splendid blue-eyed blond warrior to Tara. It’s Midir, who has come back because Étaín encouraged him to negotiate her return from husband #2, even if it means being sold off to him. But instead of getting right to the point, Midir challenges Eochaid to repeated games of fidchell (it’s similar to chess) and keeps losing, forfeiting ever more extravagant stakes (50 steeds, 50 boars, cows, sheep, swords, cloaks—like all Irish tale-tellers this one delights in flashy catalogues). Finally, Midir wins and demands as his prize an embrace and kiss from Étaín. Come back later, says her current husband Eochaid, and he sets about gathering all the war-bands he can muster, posts them around his house, and locks everything down. Midir nevertheless appears suddenly in the midst of the royal court. Taking advantage of the promised embrace, he levitates with Étaín through the roof-hole and the couple disappears into the sky as swans in flight.
The conclusion once more pits the world of humans against the preternatural Tuatha Dé Danann, in over-the-top style. Eochaid, increasingly frantic to find Étaín, starts digging up every Tuatha underground dwelling (sometimes translated “elfmound” but called síd in Irish, which eventually gave us the compound “banshee”—literally “woman of the síd”). At last Midir, disturbed by all the excavation, emerges and relents: if Eochaid comes back tomorrow, he can retrieve Étaín.
If only it were that easy.
Next day, Eochaid goes to Midir’s mound and finds, lined up, fifty identical women, all resembling Étaín. Pick the right one, he’s told. After elaborate testing (based on Étaín’s distinctive style in pouring wine) Eochaid takes “Étaín” home; in time she bears him a daughter. Then Midir appears one last time, to reveal that when he first flew off taking Étaín from Eochaid she was already pregnant; in a telenovela twist, it turns out that Eochaid has now chosen his own daughter, who had been born and grown up in Midir’s síd. Eochaid is thereby father and grandfather to the latest baby.
Accidental-incest tales attracted medieval narrators as much as they did Sophocles, and the script starts sounding familiar. Eochaid determines to do away with the disgraceful baby but the solution of his servants (to toss her to hungry whelps in a kennel) fails after the dog-owners (a herdsman and his wife) return home and find the girl. Rescued and coddled, the peasant princess grows up in the wilderness; she excels at embroidery; one day she is seen by the retinue of Étarscel (another king) who takes her as wife. She gives birth to a famous warrior. Whether yet another Étaín is born to this pair is (perhaps mercifully) left unexplored.
Why is The Wooing of Étaín the perfect introduction to medieval Irish storytelling? First, because we are not even sure it’s one story. Given their linguistic features and manuscript history, these episodes might have been originally self-standing—maybe going back to AD 900 or so—and somehow got compiled into this somewhat Cubist production sometime in the 12th century. That’s par for the Irish course: hardly any major story occurs in just a single version and texts of the “same” story can vary widely. Next, questions about the agency and value of women take center stage. While it might seem Étaín is at the mercy of any wind, blown sideways through her millennia-old existence, she can still, to a surprising extent, control her situation, whether in choosing to heal a lover or to demand that her latest husband Eochaid sell her back to Midir, when it looks like she’s going to become an object of exchange. Then, there’s the deeply weird feeling that time and space in this world are entwined in ways that totally defeat linearity. Is that some Ur-Celtic throwback? Or a later medieval narrative logic?
This tale and others (like the Book of Invasions, another 12th-century production) imagine waves of previous inhabitants of the island, exhibiting various degrees of non-humanness, not all of whom disappear. The Tuatha Dé Danann, the people of the Neolithic síd, are a mainstay, haunting the present with their eternal past. Irish tale-telling—here as elsewhere—is enamored of reincarnation, transformation, and returns. Legendary narrators like Tuan mac Cairill and Fintan mac Bóchra are shape-changing survivors, offering living cognitive connection with a mythical age. Étaín, an emblem for this sort of peculiarly Irish continuity, nevertheless still waits to tell the story her way.
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