Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Charles Bowen

Critical Essay by Charles Bowen

SOURCE: "Great-Bladdered Medb; Mythology and Invention in the Táin Bó Cuailnge," Éire-Ireland, Vol. 10, No. 4, 1975, pp. 14-34.

In this essay, Bowen examines the interaction of "mythology and invention" in the character of Queen Medb, claiming that "she has become a queen who, in spite of being human and fallible, is never quite free of her former divinity."

"Probably the greatest achievement of the Táin and the Ulster Cycle," says Thomas Kinsella in the preface to his recent translation, "is the series of women, some in full scale and some in miniature, on whose strong and diverse personalities the action continually turns.… It may be as goddess-figures, ultimately, that these women have their power; it is certainly they, under all the violence, who remain most real in the memory."¹ Queen Medb is often said to be a goddess, or a goddess-figure; probably no one who reads Irish literature will find the notion unfamiliar. But having made the assertion, what in fact have we said? The modern reader who attempts to understand the Táin Bó Cuailnge in the light of it is left somewhat at a loss. Medb is not presented there as a goddess, but as a human queen. To what extent is this headstrong, savage, powerful, wrongheaded woman, who by her wilfulness turns all established values upside down and causes a slaughter unprecedented in Irish memory, behaving as a divinity rather than a human being? The Táin, after all, is not a book of mythology, but an epic. The pious scholars who handed it down certainly did not do so in the belief that they were saving for posterity the primordial shenanigans of pagan gods and goddesses. Is that what they were doing, in spite of themselves?

Obviously such questions cannot be answered unequivocally. The storytellers and redactors who gave the Táin its present written form, or forms, in the 8th or 9th century, were influenced by the traditions of the past, many of them in origin mythological, and they were also capable of making their own contributions.² Queen Medb, as we encounter her in the Táin, presents an opportunity to examine the interaction of these elements—mythology and invention—in the formation of her literary character, and to observe the continuing power, some four or five centuries after its...
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