Eigse Paged 2004 - National University of Ireland

ENCOUNTER AT THE FORD 23
Here we are only a step removed from tales in which the hero is the
victim of such a sexual encounter rather than its beneficiary. The
woman displays Indech’s blood at the ford of the same river beside
which she has coupled with the Dagda. I am grateful to Morten
Warmind for calling my attention to a Norse parallel, in which a
female figure similarly described is presented in a purely negative
light. Thor, almost overwhelmed by the rising waters as he is trying
to cross the river Vimur, recites a verse exhorting them to subside; he
then sees that this flooding is being caused by the giantess Gjálp,
who is standing upstream with one foot on each of the river’s banks.
He brings the water under control by throwing a stone at her, remarking
that a river must be stopped at its source. 39
The anxieties which have been examined in this paper may also be
reflected in strategies for avoiding women entirely. There are traces
of an ancient Irish custom whereby one man indicated his fealty to
another by sucking the latter’s nipples. Here, in a male group in
which the leader is symbolically regarded as ‘mother’, a ritual reality
is created in which women – with all the dangers which they pose
for warriors – are no longer necessary. Interestingly, both of the primary
items of evidence for this behaviour are associated with water.
When Patrick was escaping from slavery in Ireland, the men with
whom he was seeking to take ship expected him ‘to suck their
breasts’ (sugere mammellas eorum): when he declined to do so
‘because of the fear of God’, they relented and allowed him to ‘make
friendship with us in whatever way you wish’ (fac nobiscum amicitiam
quo modo uolueris). 40 James Carney has plausibly suggested
that these sailors were ‘a band of roving adventurers, otherwise a
fian, bound together in mutual loyalty under a leader, and admission
to whose company involved the Irish pagan rite of breast-sucking’. 41
And in the Old Irish account of his adventures, the warrior king
Fergus mac Léti is said to have received submission in this form
from a diminutive water-spirit (luchorpán, abacc). This being had
attempted to drag him into the sea, and subsequently gave him the
ability to travel underwater. 42
39
Snorri Sturluson, Edda: Skaldskaparmál, ed. Anthony Faulkes, 2 vols (London,
1998) I 25.
40
Confessio §18 (Libri epistolarum Sancti Patricii Episcopi, ed. Ludwig Bieler, 2
vols (Dublin 1952)).
41
James Carney, The problem of St. Patrick (Dublin 1973) 67.
42
dide a cichesom Fergusa ‘who sucked his, Fergus’s, breasts’: D. A. Binchy, ‘The
saga of Fergus mac Léti’ Ériu 16 (1952) 33-48 (at pp 38 (§5), 42). This is in fact said
to have been the occasion when the custom was first instituted: ‘Thence there is