4 - How Time Flies in the Cath Maige Tuired
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 October 2021
Summary
Abstract
The Túatha Dé Danann are seemingly a pre-Christian survival in early medieval Irish literature, where they are portrayed as magicians, druids, or powerfully knowledgeable artisans. Traditionally slotted into the ‘pseudohistorical’ scheme, thus constituting one of the primeval waves of invaders who shaped the land and institutions of Ireland, the Túatha Dé Danann (and their opponents, the Fomoiri) have a narrative space to themselves in the text known as the Cath Maige Tuired‘ (Second) Battle of Mag Tuired’. The characters Lug and the Dagda, ‘Good God’, represent contrasting perspectives on the struggle taking place, which I argue is primarily concerned with the question of whether, after the Battle, the Túatha Dé Danann will continue resisting time and death, or will embrace these quotidian realities.
Keywords: Túatha Dé Danann, the Dagda, Lug, time, death
Elizabeth A. Gray, the editor/translator of the Cath Maige Tuired (‘The Battle of Mag Tuired’), a medieval Irish saga that will be the focus of this study, formulated in an article on this text an eloquently compact functional definition of the kind of narrative that concerns us in this essay. ‘In structural terms, the function of a myth is to present issues and problems raised by conceptual categories in order to clarify – if not necessarily to resolve – the tensions inherent in any ordered perception of human experience.’ From the perspective provided here by Gray, ‘myth’ and ‘history’ are not at all incompatible or mutually exclusive genres of storytelling. A ‘myth’, fulfilling the function described above, might be presented by a storyteller (oral or literary) and received by the teller's audience as a striving-to-be-faithful or approximate account of the events of the past. Or a story fitting Gray's description may be presented as an account of events that preceded the past of living memory or that takes place outside a temporal framework.
As different as their orientation and points of reference might be, both types of narrative can persist in and pervade a culture because they serve to express key ‘issues and problems’ with which it is important for the people in that culture to be familiar.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Myth and History in Celtic and Scandinavian Traditions , pp. 95 - 116Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2021