Battle of the Bulls

Following up my interest in Welsh and Irish mythology from last week, I've been re-reading The Tain, Thomas Kinsella's translation of the great Irish epic, Tain Bo Cuailnge. The story concerns a great cattle raid in which Ailill and Medb, king and queen of Connacht in west Ireland, attempt to steal the Brown Bull of Cuailnge from Ulster in the east. (I wrote about bulls recently in recounting the story of King Minos and the white bull from Greek mythology; a bull is a potent symbol in both stories, though I wouldn't say it necessarily represents the same thing in both cases.)

The idea of stealing a bull stems from an argument Medb has with Ailill concerning which of them is worth more. She's greatly displeased at finding, after an exhaustive inventory, that no matter how closely her wealth matches that of her husband, she is one down because of the defection of a prize bull, Finnbennach, the White Horned (which, we're told, didn't care to be ruled by a woman), to the king's herd. Determined to fix this, she sends around the whole of Ireland to find a bull to replace it. After being told that Donn, the Brown Bull of Cuailnge, has no equal in the land, she decides to get him for herself. When the owner balks at lending him to her, Ailill and Medb amass a great army to go after the bull, despite omens of certain disaster for their warriors.

When I started the story the other night, I sat up in disbelief at the part where Medb and Ailill agree to go war to obtain the bull. What started as a marital disagreement quickly turns into a full-fledged military campaign, with Ailill's full participation. I'd forgotten how foolishly it all started . . . though the reasons for fighting in many of the old Irish stories (and not just the Irish ones) often turn on something this seemingly insignificant.

The story is full of death, destruction, foul deeds, and the exploits of the hero Cuchulainn, the famous Hound of Ulster, a one-man fighting machine who adroitly destroys a whole host of Medb's and Ailill's warriors. Despite the epic's bloodiness, the story is told with great humor and wit; Cuchulainn's outsize accomplishments and outrageous feats of arms provide, in my reading of it, an ironic commentary on the supposed heroism of the entire affair. So much is attempted for so little, and so many lives lost; the countryside is hacked and hewn so that ever afterward place names reflect the deadly events that took place there; friend fights against friend and alliances are broken--but Cuchulainn's superhuman acts will never be forgotten.

That the war comes to nothing in the end is no great surprise. As the Connacht faction attempts to escape with the Brown Bull, they come across his counterpart, Finnbennach, and it is the two beasts' turn to give battle. Following an epic struggle, the Brown Bull shows up the next morning bearing the mangled remains of his enemy, and after staggering about for a time, mortally wounded, gives up the ghost. Ailill and Medb make peace with the Men of Ulster, and everyone goes home. So much for the urgent imperatives and well-reasoned arguments of war. This is one epic that seems to turn on the futility of war, not its nobility.

When I first read this story a few years ago, it was entirely new to me, or so I thought at first. At some point during or after my reading of it, the phrase, "the Brown Cow of Cooley," surfaced from somewhere in the past. It was a phrase I remembered hearing my mother (who was Irish) say when I was little, and it occurred to me that her Brown Cow and this Brown Bull must surely be one and the same. I can't remember the exact context in which she spoke of it, but I seem to remember some exasperation in her tone that went with the phrase, as if it represented some great undertaking that was either impossible, not worth the effort, or both.

The story itself, if not the battle, is well worth pursuing for the verve and humor of the telling. When Medb, who does not know Cuchulainn, asks who he is, she is told, matter-of-factly, "You'll find no harder warrior against you--no point more sharp, more swift, more slashing; no raven more flesh-ravenous, no hand more deft, no fighter more fierce, no one of his own age one third as good, no lion more ferocious; no barrier in battle, no hard hammer, no gate of battle, no soldiers' doom, no hinderer of hosts, more fine. . . ."

"Let us not make too much of it," Medb said.*

*(Quotation from The Tain, translated by Thomas Kinsella from Tain Bo Cuailnge. Oxford University Press.)