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Óengus, son of the Dagda and the Boann, sees a young girl in a vision each night, playing upon a stringed instrument by his bed. He tries to draw her to him but she vanishes. He becomes increasingly sick, and his mother decides they must find this girl. After various obstacles are encountered along the way, and the help of various people, including, strangely in this "mythic cycle" tale, Medb and Ailill, is obtained, the girl is found. The girl, Caer, takes the form of a swan on alternate years, and he learns that on Samhuin, he must call to her when she is in swan form on the lake. He does so, and they are united. They return to the lake, then take flight, returning to Óengus' home. They sing so beautifully together that they put everyone there in trance for three days and they stay together thereafter.
This text exists only in British Museum MS. Egerton 1782, folio 70 b. written by scribes of the Ó Maoilchonaire family about 1517. However, this tale, as well as the previous, appears in various older tale lists as a rémscel of the Táin Bó Cúailnge.32 This may be the reason for the strange appearance of Medb and Ailill side by side with the Dagda and the Boann. A scribe may have inserted them as a pretext to add it to the MS of the Táin. References to the text are to Kenneth Jackson's translation in A Celtic Miscellany. I note where I differ from his reading. For my own, I used Fr. Francis Shaw's 1934 edition. Shaw felt it was an early text, of approximately the eighth century. Thurneysen felt it was a ninth to tenth century tale. Ó Cathasaigh has also done a recent article relating to issues of power in the text, which I will reference below. One can also see in this text what might seem like a conventional romance influenced by tales of courtly love. I think one reason for this might be that courtly love tales themselves, such as Tristan and Isolt, were based in part on Celtic sources.33 Joseph Campbell has said that he felt that the troubadours were going back consciously to pre-Christian, primal European spiritual views.34 The phenomenon of courtly love is often treated as a revolution in human thought, unrelated to what went before. Yet the precepts of courtly love, the authority and the idealised nature of the beloved, and the religious quality of the verses offered to her, seem to me to bear a sense of the connection to the spirit mate in shamanic traditions. This idea is beyond the scope of the present study to explore, but might be borne in mind in relation to this story in particular.
Footnotes
32 Shaw, pp. 23-24 |
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