Today, I want to talk about a common theory – the idea that Cú Chulainn is not merely the son of Lug mac Ethlenn, but an incarnation of him. It’s not a new idea, as you’ll see: it dates back to a verse in the Book of Leinster. But is it ‘true’? What does ‘true’ even mean, in this context, and does it matter how authentic this idea is?
(An earlier version of this post appeared on Tumblr in April 2019. To all intents and purposes, this is the same as the Tumblr post, but more articulate and with capital letters.)
For those who aren’t familiar with the story of Cú Chulainn’s conception and heritage, it’s both weird and at the same time utterly conventional for medieval Irish literature, because he’s conceived multiple times. First, his mother Dechtire adopts a boy who later dies. While she’s mourning this child, she takes a drink, and swallows a small ‘creature’; at this point, Lug mac Ethlenn comes to her in a dream and explains that because of this, she’ll conceive and give birth to his son, Sétanta. He also explains that the boy who died was his son, too.
So far, so godly. Dechtire is due to marry Súaltaim, however, and is ashamed to go to him already pregnant with this unknown child, so she induces a miscarriage. She marries Súaltaim, and gets pregnant again – and it’s this third child that is Cú Chulainn. (Well, Sétanta; he gets his other name later.) This is how we end up in the fun situation of Cú Chulainn having both a divine father and a human one, although arguably only one or the other of them is ever involved in his conception at a time.1
We’ve seen how he was conceived; the circumstances concerning his birth are likewise complicated, and vary according to different stories. Inevitably, they’re also sometimes contradicted by references to his childhood in other stories. The Boyhood Deeds in the Táin say that Cú Chulainn was raised by his mother and father, and then set out for Emain Macha at the age of about five, but versions of his birth story have him being immediately fostered by the Ulaid. Meanwhile, yet another story has it that he’s nursed by Láeg’s parents (Láeg being his charioteer), so that the two of them are raised together from infancy.2 Personally, I think this is adorable and I wish we talked about it more.
So what does any of this have to do with whether or not he’s an incarnation of Lug mac Ethlenn? Well, it looks like the scribe/author of one of these conception stories got a little confused between two separate lines – one in which Lug identifies himself to Dechtire, and one in which he identifies his son. From this confusion, the scribe then concluded that Lug-Cú Chulainn was an incarnation situation, and wrote a verse accordingly… which has confused people ever since.3
Of course, it’s always dodgy to ‘correct’ medieval texts according to what we think they should say, but in this case we can be fairly confident that this is what happened because there is more than one version of the story, and by comparing them, it’s possible to come up with a working hypothesis of how this idea entered the tradition.
We’re looking here at the version from the Book of Leinster (LL) and the version from Lebor na hUidre (LU). LU is slightly older, and contains a verse which tells us, ‘and he [Lug] himself was Lug mac Ethlenn’, and then, ‘and the child would be called Sétanta’ (to paraphrase slightly). The author of LL seems to have read the first of these lines as, ‘and he [the child] himself was Lug mac Ethlenn’, so inserts a verse after that which reads, ‘And Lug mac Ethlenn was in the form of the child […] he was Cú Chulainn.’
Because this idea isn’t in the other versions of the story, it suggests that LL is doing something strange – and if you’ve ever seen a medieval manuscript, you can imagine how easy it would be to confuse two lines while reading and draw the wrong conclusions. I mean, I’ve done that while reading Tumblr posts, and those aren’t written in insular miniscule.
It looks, therefore, that this whole idea originates from what we call ‘scribal eye-skip’ – a scribe was tired while reading the story, got muddled, and attempted to explain the text based on how they’d read it, resulting in several hundred years of people trying to argue that Cú Chulainn is an incarnation of Lug.
There may be other factors at play, of course, especially once you begin trying to draw parallels between Cú Chulainn and Jesus (a surprisingly popular pastime). If it’s not enough that Cú Chulainn died aged 33, and also once slept for three days – possibly in a tomb – while being healed by his divine father, then being able to argue that he is an incarnation of that divine father will help your case considerably. Cú Chulainn as ‘cut price Jesus’ isn’t something I particularly want to get into right now, though, so let’s move on.
The real question is: does it matter if this was a scribal error? Does that make it less genuine as part of the tradition?
The Book of Leinster was compiled some time in the twelfth century, probably by around 1160. It’s our major source for various texts, including one of the two main recensions of the Táin. Because of this, we have to ask ourselves whether it’s really appropriate to try and make a value judgment on how valid this interpretation is. For all we know, there are a dozen such ‘errors’ now shaping our understanding of these texts, and the only real difference between those and this one is that we can see where this idea entered the story, and how.
After all, there are considerable differences between the version of the Táin found in LL compared to the one in LU, but we don’t argue that those are errors: we classify the two texts as different recensions, and move on. If a large amount of our knowledge about Cú Chulainn comes from the Book of Leinster and this is what the Book of Leinster says, then isn’t it as valid as the rest?
On the other hand, this is a particularly interesting change because it involves Lug, and whenever anything involves gods it starts becoming A Thing. Despite the difficulty in doing so, people are intent on extricating pre-Christian mythology from medieval texts, and the question of whether or not Cú Chulainn is an incarnation of Lug has important implications for those interpretations. In turn, that has a bearing on how you read Lug, and indeed, whether you consider Cú Chulainn himself to be a god of any variety. When it comes to looking for the ‘true’ version of a story (or as close to one as you can get), knowing that something is an error or addition is important.
If you’re reading these texts in search of mythology, or trying to find the oldest and most ‘genuine’ version of the Táin, then you would probably argue that no, this idea doesn’t belong, and is just a mistake on the part of LL’s scribe/author. If you’re reading the text solely as literature, on the other hand, and are more interested in understanding how Cú Chulainn has historically been perceived and understood by different writers… well, then, this interpretation could be considered as valid as anything else contained within the Book of Leinster.
(I won’t get into the question of whether or not we should try and reconstruct mythology and/or an oral urtext of the Táin from the material we currently have. That’s a whole can of worms, and probably a blog post in its own right. But your approach to those questions will alter how relevant you see this ‘scribal error’ to be.)
Now, for me, I don’t tend to engage with the texts on a mythological or religious level – I just treat them as literature. And since that’s the angle I’m coming at, it doesn’t particularly matter to me whether or not Cú Chulainn is an incarnation of Lug. However, the fact that this interpretation hinges on what looks to be a very simple scribal error, rather than being corroborated by other material, means it’s not one I find convincing. Though I’m not particularly attempting to uncover the ‘true’ version of the Táin and will happy compare and contrast recensions all day without worrying about which one is more ‘authentic’ by some arbitrary standard of authenticity, you won’t see me writing about Cú Chulainn as if he is an incarnation of Lug, because I simply don’t think it stands up to scrutiny.
I do think if you’re studying how people’s understanding of Cú Chulainn has changed over time, or something to that effect, then there’s reason to pay attention to this claim in LL, and generally speaking I would also not condone ‘correcting’ medieval texts so that they say what we expect them to say. But in this particular case, I’m going to have to conclude that no, Cú Chulainn is not an incarnation of Lug.
I hope all of that made sense, but let me know in the comments if you have any questions and I will attempt to clarify.
Until next time,
― Néde
1 Interestingly, Súaltaim is elsewhere referred to in terms that suggest his humanity is… a little dubious, but that may be due to scribal confusion. And as we see here, scribal confusion is the name of the game when it comes to baby Cú Chulainn.
2 See Hollo, Kaarina, ‘Cú Chulainn and Sid Truim’ in Ériu 49 for discussion of this version of the story.
3 This is an observation shamelessly nicked from Ó Concheanainn, Tomas, ‘The textual tradition of Compert Con Culainn’, in Celtica 21 (1990). For a more academic breakdown of this scribal error and/or to check that I’m not talking complete nonsense, I’d highly recommend checking out that article – if, of course, you have academic library access and can actually get hold of it.
Old Knowledge From A Young Poet 