Sarah Künzler

Although at times despicable to modern tastes, violence, killing and death are essential parts of medieval heroic literature and integral in shaping the heroic world of a text. This article investigates how certain dead bodies in Recension II of Táin Bó Cúailnge (TBC II) are read within the heroic discourse of fír fer and in relation to the posthumous reputation of a warrior, his fama. It argues that some corpses can become signs, purposefully 'installed' by Cú Chulainn and read (that is, interpreted to deduce information) by his adversaries, and that these episodes may instigate a critical engagement with the idea of reading bodies in TBC II. In order to contextualise the close readings of four carefully selected passages, some remarks on the discourse of violence and heroic combat in TBC II precede the individual analyses. To conclude, the importance of visually observing the dead bodies is stressed and paired with the idea of 'specularity', recently introduced to Irish studies by Sarah Sheehan (in relation to live bodies). The article thus discusses not just individual textual passages but also more general ideas about reading bodies in early Irish literature. In the past decade, academic discourses of various disciplines have discussed bodies and the related concept of embodiment as the 'existential ground of culture and self', as Thomas J. Csordas (1994, 4) has phrased it.

The nexus between landscape, identity formation(s) and cultural memory has long been of interest to archaeology, cultural geography and various disciplines in the humanities. This article suggests that in medieval and early modern Irish texts, the depiction of monuments addresses precisely this complex relationship. On the basis of close readings of textual evidence and a critical engagement with Pierre Nora’s idea of lieux de mémoire, it will be argued that the cognitive interplay between literary-imagined and archaeological-material monuments enabled the medieval Irish literati to situate themselves within the world they inhabited both spatially and culturally. The article thus contributes substantially to our understanding of the material aspects of social remembrance and advocates the potential benefits of including the extremely rich Irish textual and archaeological sources into broader, interdisciplinary discussions.

In Táin Bó Cúailnge (“The Cattle Raid of Cooley”, TBC), the warrior Cú Chulainn (“The hound of Culann”) excels through his martial abilities and heroic conduct. Yet Cú Chulainn is by no means an unproblematic hero as at times he suffers from his ríastrad, a battle-rage which makes him lose the ability to distinguish between friend and foe. This creates a heroic crux: what if the invincible hero at times turns against his own people? In a contextualised close reading of the text, the paper raises general questions about the construction of heroic identity in medieval text and exemplifies these concerns on the exciting and incredibly challenging body of Cú Chulainn.The paper is available open access at https://www.sfb948.uni-freiburg.de/en/publications/ejournal/editions/1.1.2013/07/?page=1

The Íslendinga sögur are a group of sagas which had traditionally been perceived as mainstays of early Icelandic historical writing because their convincing use of literary realism avant la lettre. Recent research inspired by Memory Studies approaches has, however, opened up the possibility that these texts were consciously composed in order to equip a young nation with a past. It may be argued that it was the particular circumstances of a relatively recently founded society which engendered such interest in ‘historical’ questions: where exactly did our ancestors come from, how and where did they settle on the land, and how did they create this unique society that we now inhabit? Icelandic society, as well as Iceland itself, could have seemed to subsequent generations more than just metaphorically out of place with Europe. Their lack of a king until 1262 and their cultural as well as spatial claiming of ‘no-man’s-land’ may have inspired questions as to how a group of settles arranged itself to form a nation. This paper suggest that the Íslendinga sögur draw on ‘historicising elements’ i.e. narrative strategies and figurae that evoke a sense of historicity, in order to convey a fictional historical setting important for generating a sense of national and cultural identity. Such deliberate attempts to create authenticity in narrative texts have only recently been proposed in relation to Irish sagas and it remains to be seen whether they are equally applicable to Nordic sources. Yet they may be central in facilitating the formation of memories pertaining to the recent or distant past. Through this, the text are able to fulfil the role of myths by convincingly creating connections between the present of the sagas written emergence and the past of which they narrate. Such ‘connective structures’ were proposed by Jan Assmann as a meta-network which allows a group of people to develop a self-awareness as a culture. This study will thus argue that viewing the sagas from a Memory Studies perspective and focussing on the narrative strategies they use to appear ‘historical’ can add new dimensions to our reading of the texts. Ultimately, this will enrich our understanding of the role of literature in the formation, and continuation, of a unique culture at the fringe of Europe.

It is astonishing but perhaps no coincidence that one of the most renowned characters in early Irish literature, Cú Chulainn, stands out physically because he lacks a beard. Despite his highly esteemed status amongst his own people, the problematic issue of his beardless face can lead to Cú Chulainn’s identity as an adult male – and hence as an honourable opponent - being questioned by his Connacht adversaries. Since this aspect of the hero has never been addressed in its own right, this paper will examine on what narrative levels (description and/or spoken discourse amongst other characters), at which points in the texts and for what possible aim(s) this ‘flaw’ is pointed out in TBC I and II. By contextualising Cú Chulainn’s beardlessness with that of other Irish heroes such as King Conaire, the importance the growth of facial hair held for literary characters can be shown and it can be examined what role this motif played in constructing and/or deconstructing a particular character. Through such close readings, basic questions about the discoursive construction of heroic identities in medieval Irish texts will be raised in relation to TBC I and II.

The monumental and apparently eternal nature of stone monuments has attracted considerable attention from archaeological and memory studies perspectives in recent years, yet few studies have yet examined the literary representations of such monuments in medieval texts. This paper examines the representations of ogam stones in a variety of saga texts and tries to outline the mnemonic functions and aspects which are connected to ogam inscribed pillar stones in the texts. The aim is a twofold one: to explore the importance of the stones within the textual world, but also to investigate what cultural meaning these representations could have held for the medieval mind. This investigation will draw heavily on ideas about the role of monuments within cultural memory and ask if these literary monuments could reflect medieval ideas about ‘places of remembering’ in which memory crystalizes and manifests cultural continuity and identity.
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