The first which naturally occurs to us is the story related in Cormac’s Glossary, s.v. Orc Treith, to which we have just referred. We have seen that Finn identifies the dismembered body of his ‘fool’ (druth) Lomna by chanting through tenm laida. We next hear in the same version of the story that Finn goes to seek the missing head, and finds the murderer Cairpre, in an empty house, cooking fish on a gridiron, and distributing it, and Lomna’s head on a spit beside the fire. The head is reported to have been speaking rhetorics, and the storyteller specially notes the fact that no food is offered to the head, as if the omission were something unusual. The story is told more fully in one of the extracts from the laws recently published (with translations) by Myles Dillon, where the actual words spoken by the head are quoted. These words make it quite clear that the severed head has the right to expect its share of the feast, and protests against its deprivation of its mÃr.
The story is very much like the fate of Finn’s own head, as related in a fragment of an Aided Finn story, believed by Meyer to date from the tenth century. Here we are told that Finn is killed while trying to leap across the Boyne, and his body is found by four fishermen, viz., the three sons of Urgriu, and Aiclech, the son of Dubriu. Aiclech cuts off his head ; but the sons of Urgriu slay Aiclech, and take Finn’s head to an empty house, and place it before the fire, and then proceed to cut and divide their fish. A black, evil-jesting man (fer dubh docluiche) bids them give a bite (dantmÃr) of fish to the head. It is not explained who the black man is, but the description suggests that he is a bachlach. The sons of Urgriu, however divide the fish into two portions only. But as often as they divide the fish into two portions, three portions are found, and the head beside the fire explains to them that it is in order that it may have its portion (mÃr) itself that the fish have been divided into three portions.
The association of these talking heads with the cooking of food is curious. And it is interesting to find the persistence with which a head is said to have its right to a mÃr ,or portion. The head is evidently habitually placed beside the fire, perhaps for the purpose of smoking and drying it for preservation. Can its proximity to the fire have anything to do with the term, tenm loida, which is usually given to the songs chanted by such heads? The word tenm is generally regarded as derived from a root, tep -, ‘heat.’ Is it possible that in the first instance a tenm loida was the chant of a severed head beside the fire at a feast?
It is, of course, possible that the stories of the severed heads of Lomna and of Finn are not independent of one another. It is more probable,however, that the two stories are only single instances of a whole series of such stories associated with the severed heads of mantic persons which were preserved for purposes of divination. In this connection we may refer to other stories in which reference is clearly made to the presence of such heads at feasts. One of these again has reference to Finn himself, and is known as the Brudan Atha. In this story we are told that after Finn has made peace with Fothad Canainne, with whom he has been at feud, he invites him to an ale-feast. Fothad, however, replies that it is ‘ geis to him to drink ale without dead heads in his presence ‘ (Fa geis inmorro do Fothad Canainne ól corma cin chinn marbu ina fhiadnaise).
The most interesting instance of a talking head occurs in the story of the Battle of Allen, which is found in Y.B.L. and elsewhere. The story relates to a battle which took place during a raid made by Fergal, son of Maelduin, high King of Ireland, against Murchad Mac Briain, King of Leinster. In this battle was slain DonnBo, an excellent reciter of poetry and saga (as uadh budh ferr ra(i)nn espa ocus rigscela for an domhon.) It may be suspected that Donnbo possesses second-hand sight, and is aware of the impending disaster to Fergal’s party, for though the story emphasisesthe excellence of his skill and of his répertoire, and the extent to which Fergal’s men depend on him to amuse and distract their thoughts, yet when Fergal asks him to make minstrelsy for them on the night before the battle, he replies that he is unable to utter a word on this night, and someone else must amuse them – to-morrow evening he will make minstrelsy. In the battle which follows both Fergal and DonnBo are killed. In the feast which the victorious Leinstermen hold that night, one of their party is told to go the battlefield to fetch a man’s head. Baethgalach, a valiant Munsterman, volunteers, and as he comes near to where Fergal’s body lies, he hears a voice and sweet music (apparently resembling that of an orchestra). He learns that a head in a clump of rushes is addressing him: “I am DonnBo,” says the head ; “I have been pledged to make music tonight for Fergal.” The head consents to allow itself to be taken on condition that it is afterwards brought back to its body. Baethgalach promises, and returns to the feast with the head, which is then placed on a pillar in their midst. Baethgalach orders the head to make music for them, as it has been wont to for Fergal. But DonnBo “turns his face to the wall of the house, so that it might be dark to him;” and he sings a sweet melody, but so plaintive that the Leinstermen weep bitter tears, and presently the same warrior takes back the head of DonnBo to his body, and fits it to its trunk.
At a later stage in the same story we are told that the Leinstermen also carry Fergal’s head to Cathal mac Findguini, king of Munster, as a trophy. Cathal has it washed, and plaited, and combed smooth, and a cloth of velvet put round it, and a great feast brought and placed before it (ar belaib cind Fergail). The men of Munster then ‘see red’ round about the head, which opens its eyes to render thanks to God for the honour and respect which has been shown to it. Then Cathal distributes the food to the poor and the neighbouring churches. The phrase ro himdergad iarsin imon ceand a feadnaisi fer Muman uili, which I understand to mean that the men of Munster see red round about the head, is translated by Stokes : ‘The head blushed in the presence of all the men of Munster.’ The expression derg or forderg is, however, commonly used of mantic visions, and it is to be suspected that himdergad has a similar significance here also – ‘Red was revealed,’ i.e., a mantic vision was revealed to the men of Munster by means of the head. For the association of derg with such visions we may refer to the phrase atciu forderg used by Fedelm of her mantic vision in the Tain, when, through Imbas forosnai, she looks (deca) by Medbs’ request, an reports her mantic vision of the future of the host. Again, in the Togail Bruidne Da Derga Conaire Mor has a supernatural vision of three beings in the form of three horsemen in red riding before him.
The presence of the two talking heads at the two feasts is a striking picture. The head of DonnBo, like those of Lomna in Orc Treith, and of Finn in the fragment cited above, is manifestly the head of a mantic person. Lomna is called a druth. DonnBo is a person of not very dissimilar character himself, for when he refuses to amuse Fergal’s host on the night before the battle, he suggests that Hua-Maiglinni, the rig-druth Erenn, ‘the cheif druth of Ireland,’ should amuse them in his stead. DunnBo, Hua-Maiglinni, Finn and Lomna all appear to practice an art which the author of our passage in the Glossary would have included i corus cherddae, ‘under the heading of art.’
With the incident of the replacing of the severed head on its trunk, and the mournful strain chanted by the head itself, we may compare the closing lines of the story introducing the Reicne Fothaid Canainne, attributed by Meyer to the close of the ninth, or the beginning of the tenth century. The poem (reicne), which is quoted at length, is said to be chanted by the severed head of FothadCanainne to the wife of Ailill Flann Bec mac Eogain, with whom he has made a tryst, and by whose husband he has been killed ; and the mournful lay is said to be chanted to the woman as she comes to fufill her tryst in death, carrying the head to the grave where the body lies. Reference may also be made to the lament chanted by the severed head of Sualtam, CuChulainn’s father, in the Tain Bo Cualinge.
All these people, then, are represented as performing after death an artistic feat which may be described as ‘singing from the head.’ This art, however, is not confined in the stories as we have them to heathen mantic sages. The head of Fergal, when taken from its covering at a feast (exactly like the one at which DonnNo chants his dirge) performs a Christian dicetal or asneis. The head of the sage Morann is said to have performed a Christian dicetal or asneis when its covering falls off. It is not stated that his head was severed. The whole story is, indeed, very obscure ; but it is clear that the sage was virtually headless so long as his head was covered with its ‘hood’ (con-aices rop æn pait uili o dib guaillibh suas, – ‘ni facas bel fair no sineistri etir).
We may suspect that it is because these utterances from heads were clearly capable of transformation into Christian hymns and testifyings (dicetal, asneis) at the hands of Christian redactors that they are said by the author of Cormac’s Glossary to be left i corus cherddae – though whether he intends to ascribe this tolerant attitude to Saint Patrick, or whether the statement is an afterthought, a kind of colophon of his own, is not clear. That the old mantic art was sometimes well-known to Christian clerics we have clear testimony.The title Mac da Cherddae (‘Boy of two arts’), borne by the famous cleric and scholar of Armagh, who is mentioned in Cormac’s Glossary (s.v. ana) and elsewhere, appears to have reference to his proficiency in both mantic (imbas ?) and Christian (i.e., Latin) learning ( sous ?). The author of the Aislinge meic Conglinne, albeit his devoutness has been questioned, was clearly himself a man of both arts, and it is curious to observe that he is represented as a contemporary of Cathal mac Findguini, whose men brought DonnBo’s head to their feast, and who himself treats in a similar manner the head of Fergal, though a Christian colouring has been given to this narrative. It is tempting to pursue our enquiry into imbas further, and to examine the relationship of ‘nuts’ or ‘hazels’ of imbas, to which reference was made in the first part of this paper, and which are associated with the Springs of Shannon and Boyne in the Dinnsenchas and elsewhere, to the imbas and the tenmlaida of the stories which we have already considered. In regard to Finn, the imbas derived from eating salmon fed on the hazel nuts of the spring at the source of the Boyne appears to represent a variant tradition from that which associates his imbas with the slaying of Culdub. But the nuts of imbas are a curious and interesting subject deserving of a fuller treatment than space permits of here, and I hope to make them the subject of a separate study.
Pingback: Folk Art Cat