Analecta Hiberniae, Fasciculus IX
On the Cessation of Augury at Tulach na Fios, with Commentary on an Irrecoverable Verse
The following fragment is preserved in an imperfect state and presents certain difficulties of interpretation. Cathbad appears here not in his customary prophetic capacity but as the subject of counsel, a role without direct parallel in the Ulster material as it has come down to us. The figure who addresses him displays several attributes consistent with the Morrígan, though the text does not name her directly, which is unusual; the predicament described has some formal affinity with the Tiresian tradition in which prophetic overreach attracts divine correction, though the mechanism here is quite different and any such comparison must be offered with appropriate caution. The present writer has tentatively placed the fragment in the period between the Flight of the Sons of Uisneach and the beginning of the Cattle Raid, though this is speculation and the internal evidence is ambiguous. The fragment's interest is chiefly anthropological, touching as it does on known ritual cautions against excessive augury and the recognised danger of what the Old Irish sources elsewhere call éolas gan críoch — knowledge without limit. The linguistic archaisms are consistent with a pre-Norman stratum.
Recovered from the lower leaves of the Brega Psalter, MS. 1437, in the care of the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin. The hand is a careful Insular minuscule, somewhat abraded at the outer margins, consistent with a principal copying hand of the early tenth century. A second, more cursive hand has added the verse passage and both marginal notes; the ink is appreciably darker, suggesting a later insertion, possibly from a different scriptorium. Eleven words at the close of the third section are irrecoverable due to water damage.
Cathbad had not slept in nine nights. He had read the birds at dawn and read them again when the sun was at its height and read them again at dusk. He had opened three hares and two ravens and the news was the same each time and it was bad.
He sent for the old woman who kept the entrails of the sacred bull and she came and showed him what she found. He asked her had she seen wrong and she said she had not. He gave her silver and she went without looking at him.
He did not eat. He kept the fire burning and sat near it and watched the smoke. The smoke showed him what the birds had shown him and what the entrails had shown him. His student Fergach brought water and set it down quickly and did not speak. The other druids did not come near. The skin around Cathbad's eyes had gone the colour of old linen and his hands shook when he reached for the cup.
On the ninth night a woman stood at the edge of the firelight. She was not in any shape he had seen her in before. The fire did not reach her.
She said: You have eaten the news of every tomorrow and the news has eaten you.
He said: I know what is coming.
She said: You know the shape of what is coming. The knowing has kept nothing from coming.
He said: I cannot stop.
She was quiet for a long time. Then she said: I give the prophecy that is given through me. Then I am gone. I do not sit at the fire and ask again.
He had nothing to say to this.
She said: A man who swallows the river has not learned to swim.
Then she was not there.
In the morning Cathbad let the fire go out. He did not read the birds. He sat without looking at anything until the sun had crossed the sky. His hands had stopped shaking by evening. He ate bread.
The place where he kept that fire has been called Tulach na Fios since that day. It means the hill of knowledge. The hill is there still and it is unremarkable.
Ithid cach fáith a fhís go bráth. Bíd fás ina broinn — [third line unclear in the original; approximately five to seven words; the final word may be caillid or a related form]
Post vesperas scripsi; nox frigida. Membrana hic attrita — exemplar vix legivi. Scribo haec et intellego. Per septem noctes quaesivi signa — in chronicis, in nuntiis de Nortmannis, de morbo, de rege novo — et nihil mutavi. Manus meae tremunt sicut manus Cathbadi, et forsitan Morrigain de me quoque hoc dixit. Pagana, Domine. Et tamen vera. Ponam pennam. Non ponam.
—Mael Ísu
Footnote: The monk's note translates approximately:
After vespers I wrote; the night is cold. The parchment here is worn — the exemplar was barely legible. I copy this and I understand. For seven nights I sought signs — in the chronicles, in the reports of the Norsemen, of the sickness, of the new king — and I changed nothing. My hands shake as Cathbad's hands shook, and perhaps the Morrígan also said this of me. It is pagan, Lord. And yet true. I will put down the pen. I will not.
The monk locates himself in the manner conventional to Hiberno-Latin marginalia, noting the hour and the condition of his exemplar. The self-comparison to a pagan druid is a conventional expression of scribal humility, common in the copying tradition of this period, and should not be taken as evidence of genuine identification with the subject of the text; his closing pagana, Domine is a routine protective formula of a type frequently appended to pre-Christian material in manuscripts of this provenance.
The note is signed Mael Ísu, a name common to several Leinster houses of the ninth and tenth centuries; the same signature appears in a marginale of MS. 1441, though whether this represents the same hand is a matter on which the present writer would not venture an opinion. His anxieties regarding the Norsemen and the unnamed sickness are consistent with conditions in a Leinster scriptorium of the early tenth century.
The rosc remains problematic. The third line is irrecoverable. The application of the verb ithid — eats, devours — to the prophet's own vision is an unusual construction for which I have found no parallel in the augury literature; Stokes, in his notes to the Cath Maige Tuired, records a related verbal use, though the sense there is not precisely analogous. The fragment caillid, meaning loses or forfeits, has been proposed for the final word of the damaged line; this is plausible but cannot be confirmed.
The plain notation at the close of the main text that Cathbad resumes ordinary sustenance is consistent with the recognised protocols governing the termination of ritual fasting in the druidic tradition, as Zimmer has observed in a related context.