Early Irish Myths and Sagas by Jeffrey Gantz

Author:Jeffrey Gantz
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780141934815
Publisher: Penguin Adult
Published: 1981-07-17T10:00:00+00:00

The Death of Aífe’s Only Son

Introduction

‘The Death of Aífe’s Only Son’ is an Irish Sohrab and Rustum story, more international than Irish in feeling and probably not very old. It is the title that is distinctively Irish; one would expect ‘The Death of Cú Chulaind’s Only Son’, but this title may reflect an older, matrilinear system of descent – just as the son of Deichtine is Conchubur’s heir, so the son of Aífe might be Cú Chulaind’s. The home of Scáthach and Aífe, not given here, is presumably in the north of Britain.

That Cú Chulaind has a son at all further suggests that the tale is late, for he is only a boy when he goes away to learn weaponry from the warrior-woman Scáthach, and at the time of the cattle raid of Cúailnge he appears to be only seventeen. Condlae, moreover, is simply a regenerated version of his father: he demonstrates the same arrogance, performs the same feats and is fully a match for Cú Chulaind in combat save for mastery of the gáe bolga, a kind of spear thrust. The reference to Rome and the un-Celtic lack of emotional restraint at the end of the tale also point to a late formulation. Even the rhetorical sections – where Condere calls Condlae ‘the stuff of blood’ and warns him against turning his ‘jaws and spears’ (turning the left side of one’s chariot towards an enemy signalled hostile intent), or where Cú Chulaind describes Condlae’s gore upon his skin as a ‘mist of blood’ and predicts that his spears will ‘suck the fair javelin’ – do not seem very old, though in some phrases they are quite corrupt.

‘The Death of Aífe’s Only Son’ is the source, at some distance, for Yeats’s play On Baile’s Strand.

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