Supernatural Medieval Ireland

In early Medieval Ireland, supernatural beings moved in and out of our world, unseen. These were the residents of the Otherworld – the síd. Dr. Eleanor Janega is joined by historian and novelist Lisa M. Bitel, author of Otherworld, to explore the sexy, funny, and bloody Irish stories that outshine the better-known European myths. From supernatural beings of medieval Ireland to tales of love, gender dynamics, and humorous retellings, these ancient myths connect to modern literature and culture and uncover ancient Ireland's mystic allure. Gone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega. Edited by Amy Haddow, the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Matt Lewis?

  From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Yanega, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:42Speaker 01

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• 1:16Speaker 02

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• 1:36Eleanor Janega?

  Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanega, and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were and how we got here.

• 2:12Eleanor Janega?

  In early medieval Ireland, supernatural, immortal beings moved unseen in and out of our world. These were the residents of the Otherworld, the She, who crossed over through concealed portals. Their stories were set down in Ireland's monastic libraries, tales that told of what happens when human and supernatural lovers cross boundaries. Who was the mysterious woman who appeared each night and sung at the bedside of a prince until he fell sick in love with her? And what about the determined hero who tracked his beloved through several incarnations, determined to win her back?

• 2:55Eleanor Janega?

  Or the young warrior seeking an elusive woman who turned into a swan? You know, as you do. These tales of heroes, demigods, warrior queens, and other folk inspired some of the earliest fairy tales of France and England. But it has to be said, the Irish ones are sexier, funnier, and bloodier than many of the better-known medieval myths and romances. For example, this is the oldest existing story about love and the Otherworld, probably written about 1,300 years ago. But the action described took place five centuries before that.

• 3:44Speaker 04

  One day, Conla Ruadh, son of Con Kedhach, was standing next to his father on the top of the hill at Ischnach, in the very centre of Eire. When he saw a woman in unusual clothing approaching, he asked her, "Where have you come from, unearthly woman?" She responded, "I have come from lands of the living, where there's no death, no sin, no guilt." "Who are you addressing?" asked Con Kedhach, for no one could see the woman except Conla.

• 4:22Speaker 04

  The woman replied,

• 4:25Speaker 04

  "He is speaking to a lovely young lady who does not expect death or age. I have always loved Conla the Ruddy. I summon Conla to the plain of delights, where Bauduc, the immortal, reigns. No woe or weeping exists in his land since that king began to rule. Come with me, O Conla Rua, you with the red-freckled neck, gold and curls above a blushing face. Your kingly appearance marks you. If you come with me, your youth will not wither until the dreamed-of doomsday."

• 5:05Speaker 04

  Everyone heard the woman, but no one could see her. Con, the king, said to Coran the druid, "I beseech you, O Coran, of great song and skill. An undue demand is being made, beyond my wisdom, beyond my power, as has never afflicted me since I began to rule. Can ye phantoms constrain me while snatching my splendid son, taking him for my royal hand with the wily spells of women?"

• 5:39Speaker 04

  The druid then chanted protective magic over the place where the woman stood, so that her voice could not be heard, and so that Conla could no longer see the woman.

• 5:52Speaker 04

  As she fled the druid's chanting, she grew an apple to Conla.

• 6:05Eleanor Janega?

  That story is just one of nine included in the book Otherworld by historian and novelist Lisa M. Batel, in which she retells nine magical Irish myths, drawing upon all her expertise in Irish history and literature.

• 6:20Eleanor Janega?

  I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanaga, and today on Gone Medieval from History Hit, I am delighted to be joined by Lisa Batel.

• 6:28Eleanor Janega?

  Lisa, welcome to Gone Medieval.

• 6:30Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me.

• 6:31Eleanor Janega?

  I am absolutely delighted to have you because I have learned so much from Otherworld recently, and I bothered all of my relatives about it all through December, which was fantastic. You know, you are in this really enviable position because you have this great academic background that lets you not only bring us great new translations of Irish stories, but you're able to do it in this really entertaining way because fundamentally, there's great history here, there's a lot to learn. But this is also something that people did for fun, and these are stories that people were telling because they're really quite interesting.

• 7:12Eleanor Janega?

  So what inspired you to bring these particular stories together in Otherworld?

• 7:17Speaker 05

  My husband.

• 7:18Eleanor Janega?

  Ah, I love that.

• 7:21Speaker 05

  Not for any deep reason, just because we had the year in Oxford, he was in a visiting professorship, and I had nothing to do. I was between books, and he said, "Ah, just translate something." You know, my field, Irish history and literature and stuff, it's a very insider-outsider field. And so if you're not first-rate philologist of Irish birth, growing up speaking the language, there's a little suspicion in the field about translations by people like them. So I did actually translate these tales. It took me a couple of years, and then the editor said, "You know, you cannot call them translations because you'll get nailed." So they are, in fact, retellies, but I chose these ones because I'm working on the religious

• 8:06Speaker 05

  supernatural in my other life.

• 8:08Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, I love that. I mean, I'm afraid that I... You saw me coming from a mile away with this book. I'm such a mark because I too am a huge fan of the religious supernatural. And you know, I think that it really comes across in these retellings how much fun you're having. And I mean, because it's really, really fun to read, and you've got this really...

• 8:34Eleanor Janega?

  Great way of presenting these specific Irish tales where they have an interesting cosmology, right? Because you've called the book itself Otherworld. And they all hinge on the fact that there is, in Irish mythology, this other world. I suppose a great question to ask here is, can you explain that concept?

• 8:55Speaker 05

  Good question.

• 8:56Eleanor Janega?

  Within these Irish stories? I mean, can anyone?

• 8:58Speaker 05

  Loads of scholars have tried, yeah. And it's not just in the mythology. These stories were written by educated men in Christian communities, religious communities. So they were recording a sort of heritage, really. Something that wasn't quite history, wasn't quite biblical, but it was there and it was in the landscape, you know? So these are stories that were well thought out and carefully crafted, even if they had some oral origins. And so the other world to an Irish, what, an ordained man, a monk in the early Middle Ages, what would the other world have been? It was a different reality. It was like an alternate reality.

• 9:39Speaker 05

  And yet, at the same time, it wasn't necessarily true to everyone. And it functioned at once as a device and as an imaginative place, I think, as well as to some people being real. I mean, you still go to Ireland, people would tell you to stay away from that mound or that lone tree, you know? They might be having you on because you're American, but, you know, there is still stories about people who don't want to pull out a tree or level a mound because it's important, it's a connection to the other world. So, I mean, I've always thought that maybe the other world was and wasn't real to people. But it's not Christian, and it's certainly not religious in any way that's obvious. It's just other.

• 10:24Eleanor Janega?

  I mean, that's the thing about something being other, right? Is it exists in these cracks in between, you know, what historians want, which is nice, clear, concise boundaries, which we very rarely get, no matter how much we want them, right? I mean, I suppose one thing that's happening with the other world is that it's also home to other people, right? You have this group of sort of supernatural beings. And I mean, this is another one. I mean, how do we define these guys? I think the thing that people tend to say now is they'll say, oh, these are the fae

• 11:04Eleanor Janega?

  or the fair folk or something like that. But that's also not quite exactly right either. And so we get this really very specific, interesting set of Irish beliefs around the people there.

• 11:15Speaker 05

  This is something I've been working on for a while and I'm going to work on some more. When did they turn into fairies? I mean, some of these stories, as I suggest and other people have written, were the basis for what became fairy tales, you know, especially the French ones, the fae, as you said. But they weren't. They weren't fairy tales. These were larger-than-life people. They weren't the little fella. And they were sort of immortal, except you could chop their heads off or kill them in some instances. But they were beautiful and long-lived and they could disappear and appear and like do magical things. And, you know, people have theorized that these guys were a pantheon at some point, or some of them were, or really got. But, you know,

• 11:56Speaker 05

  who's to say? We can't say. We don't know. There's no evidence really for religion before Christianity in Ireland. So they're sort of like the other world itself. By the time we get them, they're other. They're what it would be cool to be if you had a clue, you know?

• 12:11Eleanor Janega?

  Well, yeah, I mean, they almost function kind of as superheroes, right? You know, they're these people who can come in and do these great works. I mean, you know, now we might not say, oh, wow, this guy really built some great bridges, you know? I thought that might not seem-

• 12:24Speaker 05

  He laid down that drag over the cog that opened the bog.

• 12:26Eleanor Janega?

  Wow. That might not be things that we find really impressive now. But I guess one of the recurring things that I really picked up on is this- Idea, though, that these are a bunch of really sexy, cool people. And one of the things that they do is they show up and they make you go, "Oh, man, am I gonna abandon my family?"

• 12:49Eleanor Janega?

  And like, they're these kind of like dangerously attractive people that make you risk it all, kind of.

• 12:54Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, that, I think that's part of the point, actually. Well done. Yeah, it's like, besides being another reality there, like in the very first tale, Kamla's story, you know? Do they represent something that is better than real life? Or just, again, other, are you wise if you wanna chase it? Are there repercussions? Yes, there are, to your, you're going away with these guys. Is it good or bad? It's never quite clear.

• 13:20Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah. Are there any other big motifs that you sought to bring out across these nine stories? I mean, you know, hot people who can do cool things, being kind of sexy notwithstanding.

• 13:33Speaker 05

  Yeah. You know, one was the gender aspect of these stories. I've always been amazed at the way that the female characters are, they're often, the human ones anyways, are quiet, or have no agency, or seem to have no agency. And, and yet, the story itself makes you aware of that. So it's not like the writers and the audiences were insensitive to the gender issues in here, maybe to some of them. But it's also not like anybody's rooting for the girls in these stories. But I really wanted to bring out some of those hints in the stories, that women were getting a, a rough deal, this society. And then the other thing was the humor of these tales.

• 14:17Speaker 05

  That's the first thing that drew me to these stories when I was just in college, you know? Okay, the first joke for me was a mistranslation, but the story was funny even without it. And so, you know, I realized, what a, what a great sense of humor lies in these stories.

• 14:35Eleanor Janega?

  Okay, wait, I can't let you get away without telling me what the mistranslation was now.

• 14:39Speaker 05

  It's not a story in this volume, but it's called "The Tale of MacDatho's Pig." It was just a line about each warrior getting his cut of the meat, but, the pig, but I thought it was each warrior went up and gave it a whack on the nose. I don't know what I was thinking. Whack, roasted pig. But, you know, it was an exotic society. What did I know?

• 15:01Eleanor Janega?

  Although I love that, that's fantastic.

• 15:03Speaker 05

  Whack right on the wrist, Ping.

• 15:05Eleanor Janega?

  Well, I mean, I guess that is one of the things that I really thought was cool, actually, across these stories, though, is that there is still this kind of like mundanity that happens. I mean, even if you go to the other world, like, you still have to milk the cows. You know, you still have to, it's like, you know, oh, well, it's really great. You get a really good wife in the other world, and she's super hot, but she could also, like, bring the cows in on her own, and she's gonna get all the milking done. And you're like, great, cool. Yeah, I mean, you are just in other world, and it's one where, you know, the cows are very tractable, and the milk is really good, and your wife can handle it when you skive off for a year or something like that.

• 15:42Speaker 05

  They're probably your red-eared white cows. No, but I mean, you know, you gotta wonder, what were they seeing? Like, what did the writers not notice was so ordinary about their world, right? They were taken a lot for granted, that we see as exotic, the cows. So like, if we were imagining our other world, I don't know, would it be, you know, like in the Marvel movies or something? Would it be, you know, Asgard as in the films or something? I don't know. So some of that stuff is just our distance from them, I think.

• 16:14Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah. I mean, speaking of that, right, you, because you have this background in history and religion already, are able to approach these stories in a really interesting way, because we do have this distance. It doesn't necessarily work as instantly recognizable literature, in the same way that, I don't know, Arthuriana is. You know, we're used to the Knights of the Round Table when they show up. But, you know, even when you have kind of the more household-y names, like, I don't know, Finn McCool, or like Cook Lane, or so, you know, you know, the ones that, like, people can rattle out their tongues, it still kind of exists over here.

• 16:59Eleanor Janega?

  So how were you able to kind of capture these and bring them out using your historical background, I guess?

• 17:05Speaker 05

  These stories are such a source of argument and have been for more than a century in Ireland by the experts, you know, and we've seen them go through so many different interpretations. And what else has gone through different interpretations is the idea of who wrote and for whom and, you know, are they hiding their paganism in there or, you know, is it all a Christian allegory or like all this stuff? Just knowing about what the houses were like, as I say in the intro, or, you know, what gender relations were like in the sources and probably on the ground and, you know, what the weather is like, you know, it rains a lot.

• 17:47Speaker 05

  Knowing the fights about them over where they came from and knowing where they were written and who probably wrote them and then what the world was like, that helped a lot. It helped make more clear what was cool about the stories to people at the time.

• 18:03Eleanor Janega?

  I have to say some of my favorite parts were the descriptions of the halls and things like this where you're like, oh, wow, and they've got, they've got gold on the ceiling and how big is this hall?

• 18:13Speaker 05

  Those descriptions go on and on, you know, you see some of that in Beowulf, but not this much, you know? And it took me years and years, I still don't know if I have it right, to figure out what those couches were like, you know, and they've got concentric rings of couches or something, you know? How the heck did that work? Especially with the partitions and the bronze beds and so forth and, you know, there is still some mysteries about these stories.

• 18:40Eleanor Janega?

  Well, I think it's nice to have mysteries, you know, and I think it's also interesting, you know, we get these great descriptions of, you know, couches and molding and all of these things.

• 18:51Speaker 05

  Laying.

• 18:52Eleanor Janega?

  And I'm thinking about The scribes who are writing this down, and it's really interesting. You've got these Christian, usually monks, who are in theory, you know, really devoted to asceticism and living a very austere life where they think about God. And then you give them five seconds and they're like, yeah, man, they've got the best couches over there. And also, all the chicks are hot. And I, so I mean, I-

• 19:17Speaker 05

  You know, but there's been a lot of work too on that. And our idea of monks in Ireland is a little, a little too continental and a little outdated, you know? I'm just reading this excellent book by Edel Renak about monasticism. And, you know, these were big communities, the ones that were wealthy enough to have scriptoria, big communities with all sorts of people going through them. And even the word for monk in Middle Irish, you know, which comes from Monica's. Monarch didn't necessarily mean a guy in orders, a bowed guy. It might have meant a tenant of the community or somebody sort of attached to it in one way or another. Some of them, I suppose, could have been well-educated. They could have been the storytellers and/or the writers. We don't know. We have no clue.

• 20:01Speaker 05

  So these were quite mixed communities. How word got around and who told the stories to whom is a, is a question.

• 20:06Eleanor Janega?

  And I mean, I guess within that, there is of course, the eternal question of like, what, what are we supposed to make of these blendings of stories? Because you have people doing these big supernatural things, but there's also these Christian contexts within that, you know, where people are still having to make it to mass on a Sunday after, you know, carrying dead guys around all night and, you know, things, things like this. And everybody seems fairly comfortable with this idea. And, you know, I think there's kind of a modern desire to see things as either pagan or Christian. And, you know, here, what do we even mean by pagan? You know, it's a mess. It's a mess.

• 20:49Eleanor Janega?

  And they seem so comfortable with that. But, you know, we kind of want to sieve these things out. I mean, do we get any kind of insight? Does this actually tell us about what's going on with society? Or- Am I just being too modern, looking at it that way at all?

• 21:04Speaker 05

  Yes and yes, or no and no.

• 21:07Eleanor Janega?

  Okay.

• 21:07Speaker 05

  I mean, one thing, I think, you know this well. One thing we forget about people in the Middle Ages is they had imaginations. Like, you know, they could think up cool stuff. There's a lot of looking back at an imagined past in these stories. Obviously, it's like if we write another retelling of King Arthur, right? Our own lives creep in there and our own, as you point out, you know, our own ideas about how things should work and our own attitudes creep in there too. So it's useful to read these stories for what little they can tell you about the period when they were written. If only we knew when they were written.

• 21:48Speaker 05

  Because, you know, they were written and written and written and written again. So, and so, you know, it's hard to sort, really, through what they're making up and through what they're just assuming. That's where being an historian comes in. But I think I and others get a lot of it wrong.

• 22:04Eleanor Janega?

  Well, I mean, I suppose that we're never going to be able to get it perfectly right. I mean, even considering, as you say, you have iterations upon iterations of written forms of these stories. And in theory, maybe they've also come out of oral traditions. And then we don't know how far back that goes. But can we use these to kind of excavate some understanding of oral tradition? Or is that just a pipe dream?

• 22:29Speaker 05

  That's a big fight in fact. And less so now than it used to be. But, you know, there used to be, especially around the beginning of the 1900s, nationalist interpretations of these as sort of a, like a fly in amber. You know, here's your paganism, here's your pantheon, here's your religion. Druids, oh, great. And now we don't think so so much. But, you know, I have to keep asking myself, even if they're reconstructing a vaunted past, these writers, why tell the stories in this way? Why tell the stories about these figures that? Some people knew of and other people didn't. Some famous, some not so famous. You know, with weird sort of magic all over the place. I mean, granted, they're really entertaining. We know that.

• 23:15Speaker 05

  So, I mean, if you needed a story on a cold night in a rainy season, then yeah, these are good entertainment. But why the elaborate, seems like mythology behind them? You know, there are folks who have gone through and pointed at some of the figures in these tales who actually do turn up in other places like inscriptions in Britain or in Gaul, France, like Luke, for example, the many skilled. So obviously there are hints here. There are hints, but there's nothing we can use, I think, to reconstruct beliefs or religion, per se, whatever religion is.

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• 26:24Speaker 07

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• 27:08Speaker 07

  Brought to you by the award-winning network, History Hit.

• 27:26Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, I'm constantly having to let people down with that. I get lots of questions about it. And also lots of questions from interested people who are specifically wanting to know about the place of women in pagan society and what...

• 27:42Speaker 05

  I like the way you roll your eyes when you say pagan.

• 27:44Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, well, I mean, what does that mean?

• 27:46Speaker 05

  I know. Some people won't use the word anymore, so I don't know.

• 27:50Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, I think it's very difficult because it's such a term used by Christians to describe such a huge number of things that it's really difficult. So oftentimes, I like to say something like "pre-Christian religion", you know, just because...

• 28:05Speaker 05

  Heliological.

• 28:06Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, there you go. I'm a historian, I can't help myself, okay?

• 28:09Speaker 05

  So what are you gonna say, "Christian, everybody but..."

• 28:12Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, I know, I know. You know, I think one of the things you do really well here, and you've already touched on this, is look at the gender dynamics of Ireland at this time here. Because you have women who are integral to most of these stories, but they're often quite silent. You know, we hear very, very little from them. You know, when we get women who've come over from the she, you could sometimes hear them but literally not see them.

• 28:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:42Eleanor Janega?

  Which I think is quite funny. So it's like, I feel like there's either the women are incredibly visible and don't say anything, or they're invisible and they talk and cause problems.

• 28:54Speaker 05

  Sometimes they're both, if they come from the she.

• 28:58Speaker 05

  No, no, it is interesting. And women are sort of the most exotic, I think, of the she. But maybe that's just because the dynamic of the story is, you know, to have these hero figures usually who interact with the exotic and overcome it or succumb to it, it's never quite clear. But you know, in the one tale you were referencing there, the Dream of Khana, the Vision of Khana, the woman is invisible. And there's something going on with seen and unseen in all these stories. You know, that's what I first wanted to work on with these stories. And I got led away into retelling them is the unseen. What's unseen? You know, there's the woman who cannot be seen by the king and the druid in the first story.

• 29:43Speaker 05

  Only Kamla being seduced can see her. Of course, people think that story might be a Christian allegory. Who can see heaven? But then you have Mither in the wooing of a dean. He's a supernatural figure, obviously, but he tells humans at one point, "You can't see us. We can see all of you, and you can't see us because your vision is obscured." By what original sin? Wait a minute, you're from the sea. What are you telling me that for? There's something about who can and cannot see that's really interesting. You know, Nara in The Adventure of Nara can follow these guys from the she into the she. Nobody else can, you know? So who can see? I don't.

• 30:27Eleanor Janega?

  You describe in your introduction, these stories, and I think quite rightly, as sexier, funnier, and more exotic than fairy tales generally. And I guess, how like, how do we define this? And like, what are like, for example, like, concepts of love and desire, I think, are really, really different? You know, you have lots of couples, for example, who are like, oh, well, we're married to other people, but we really want to have sex, so I'm going to like, contrive strange magic using time so that we can hang out for a year, get pregnant, have a baby and conceive.

• 31:06Speaker 05

  Well, not fair. Those guys were definitely the two of the day, so they don't.

• 31:09Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah. But, you know, you have these things. And does this like, tell us, I don't know, is this something particular to Irish culture, do you think? Or is this just, hey, if you could do anything and wave a magic wand, what would you do? And people are like, ooh, I've got a new way to cheat on my wife.

• 31:28Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, to be fair, there does seem to have been a, I don't know, was this true of all your? You know, I mean, if you have the money, you can have as many chicks as you want. You know, it's resource belligerent. But for women to have the same sort of possibilities is really interesting. People used to think maybe Ireland had less strict rules about that kind of thing. I don't know, if you read the monastic documents, the Christian canons and stuff, that's not the case. But there does seem to have been, at the most elite levels, sort of looseness about who fell into bed with whom. And I don't know if that's supposed to be the effect of the other world. You know, chicks from the other world, they're easy, you know?

• 32:11Speaker 05

  Or, you know, you meet someone from the other world, it's like, yes, of course, I'm gonna fall at your feet, because you're from the other world. So I don't know what's at work there. Or if it's the story, so like, people gotta get it on.

• 32:22Eleanor Janega?

  I mean, like, otherwise, what's the point of a story?

• 32:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 32:25Eleanor Janega?

  I mean, come on.

• 32:26Speaker 05

  Just fighting? Come on, that's boring.

• 32:28Eleanor Janega?

  All right, well, one of my favorite stories was, I really enjoyed The Adventure of Nara. And what I thought was really interesting in this is, it kind of hinges on these ideas about the portals to the Sheed can get blown open, and, you know, you can then be brought into the other world, or, you know, kind of vice versa. So, this is an interesting way, I think, to kind of think about the relationship between the other world or the Sheed and normal earthly power. So what can we tell about this dynamic from the story itself?

• 33:05Speaker 05

  About the way people can just sort of stumble into the Sheed, or about, you know, where the Sheed is in earthly form. I mean, I like the idea that, you know, that story takes place on Samhain, right? So-called modern Halloween. And that's the time of year, one of the times of year when those portals to the Sheed open, and things come out and things go in. And I always tell my students, you know, "It's Halloween, don't go out tonight, you might wander into the Sheed, never come back." They're like, "What?" But there is this notion that every now and then, you're not gonna be able to tell. You know the days, so be careful. And if you're not careful, who knows what'll happen, where you'll end up. There's a regular season, right, when the other world is available, or even stalking you.

• 33:50Speaker 05

  The other part is that it's a normal landscape. You're looking around, like, the portal in the story of Nara, that he stumbles into, or follows the guys into, it's a little... Cave opening behind Rothkrone out in the west, you know? And you can crawl in there, you can go there now and crawl inside if you're not claustrophobic and aren't scared of the dark and wild animals. And so, you know, it was a landscape you lived with. But every now and then, it might open up and snatch you if you weren't watching out.

• 34:24Eleanor Janega?

  See, and I find that so interesting, right? Because there's also almost this interplay with, I guess, the concept of social norms here. Because, you know, we have this way of living our life here in the regular old world. And, you know, we have certain customs. One doesn't go out on Halloween and you go to mass on Sundays and you try your very best to be this sort of person. But it's almost like you might just stumble into doing the wrong thing, or not even the wrong thing, just a different thing, right?

• 35:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, you make it sound like life was kind of orderly, but it wasn't. It was probably terrible for most people, you know? Die young, either because you didn't get enough to eat, or, you know, raiders came through when you happened to be out in the field, or, you know, your king was mad at another king and so they burned everything. And especially for women, you know, where, I mean, even in later medieval society, I'm sure you know, like infant mortality, half the kids died before they were the age of one, probably. So, and women died all the time of birth-related, you know, issues and not being fed enough and stuff like that. So, I mean, yeah, it kind of sucked to live in early medieval. Plus, the weather wasn't good, you know?

• 35:42Speaker 05

  And it was a very poor, relatively poor compared to the other parts of Europe, I think. Pastureage-based society, agriculture on the side. So here are these stories where anybody, anybody could be from the other world, or anybody could stumble in there. And I think that's how we have to receive them.

• 36:04Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, are we talking about the she? Or are we talking about literally the afterlife? You know, this is kind of a, you know.

• 36:12Speaker 05

  There is some association. There are a couple of scholars who argued about the she, the other world being the afterlife. And I don't know, it seems pretty lively to me in most of these stories.

• 36:22Eleanor Janega?

  I know, it's pretty lifelike, isn't it? Yeah, they're doing pretty.

• 36:25Speaker 05

  And they knew, I mean, these guys, they knew what heaven was and hell, and this wasn't either of them.

• 36:30Eleanor Janega?

  Mm-hmm, I love that for them.

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• 38:00Eleanor Janega?

  Well, okay, but here's the thing, right? You've mentioned that you, as an ordinary person, which we all would have been, you know, we would have just been peasants out there slogging in the field. But your king might, at any point in time, get in a fight with another king and just do something wild that results in all of your crops being burnt and your child dying, right?

• 38:20Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 38:21Eleanor Janega?

  And I think that it's possible to look at some of these stories and kind of understand a little bit about kingship and governance, or at least maybe some hope that you can influence that a little bit with literature.

• 38:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's an excellent point, maybe. Yeah, you can learn about kings from these. You can learn about bad kings and good kings. And there's even one of the stories, as you know, has a long list of rules, sort of advice from Caocholain about how to be a good king, as if he knew he was never a king, but anyway.

• 38:53Eleanor Janega?

  He was never a king.

• 38:55Speaker 05

  Now, what's he got to say about this? Which is part of the whole, you know, speculum thing, like, you know, lists of what good kings should be like. And there are other texts like that and Irish stuff in other cultures. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if they thought they could make good suggestions to kings, the writers of these tales, because they had other genres in which to do that, right? You know, "You'll go to hell if you burn my crops again." "Come and say you're sorry." But they certainly did know how to represent good kings and bad kings. And there are a lot of stories about good and bad kings that are more sort of pseudo-historical in the Irish canon.

• 39:32Eleanor Janega?

  And so, like, the bad kings are the ones who are simply out cattle rustling and, you know, ignoring things. And the good kings seem to be those who are like, "Oh, no, I do actually have people that I'm responsible for."

• 39:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, except that, you know, the tale of the wooing Lady Deane, and she's a character herself. And in her last iteration, she's married to Edin, the plowman. They thought maybe he was an historical king. And he does what's necessary, you know? His people say, "We can't make you king till you have a queen." So he gets one, you know? And his name is the plowman. Obviously, he's responsible for, you know, making the land prosperous and so forth. So he is a good king, but he doesn't win the girl anyways because he's a bad fateful player. He just is not, you know, from the other world. He's not Mithler.

• 40:23Eleanor Janega?

  Well, this is one of the things that I think is quite interesting. And, you know, we see these kings who are, oh, he's a good plower. So this is like some guy who's good at agriculture. I think that one of the real characters in Otherworld is the Irish landscape itself. You know, it's so significant, you know, these demands that people from the Otherworld make causeways or, you know, clear forests. There's all this direct talking about what the landscape does and how significant it is.

• 40:56Speaker 05

  I come to see that as more and more the guiding principle of a lot of this literature. It's like people in Ireland were and still are living amongst these unignorable, unavoidable mounds, burial monuments from the Neolithic and the Bronze Age and the Iron Age that remained in use sporadically. People knew they were sacred places, whether they knew they were the places of the dead. I think so, yeah. And these were the she as well. And so you can't avoid the past. You can't avoid so-called paganism, you know, the ancestors' religion and what they believed in. So how do you live with that if you're a good Christian?

• 41:40Speaker 05

  You turn it into the past, but still it's there. And, you know, Irish literature is infamous, I think, the early stories for their endless mention of place names. Why is it called the Ford of so-and-so? Because so-and-so had a battle here and he got his head chopped off and they buried him and so it's his Ford. And there's a whole genre of literature, onomastic literature, the denhanechus, that are just place names. It was called this for this reason, or maybe this reason, but it was also called this for this reason, and the later on they changed the name to that for that reason. And, you know, there's this endless fascination and it's where the history and the myth were located, quite literally, I think, in the land. That's how you knew of the past because you saw it.

• 42:25Eleanor Janega?

  Which is really interesting because I think that we still have that. I mean, you and I both as, well, I like to think of myself I was formerly North American. Thank you very much. You know, I do think that there is something about being around sites of history. And certainly, I find it useful when I'm trying to imagine the historical past to look at a castle. And I think it's important and what other world manages to do really well is point out that this isn't kind of a new and modern thing. You know, where we're all living in a historical context and people seem to see that.

• 43:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think they were very much aware of it. And I suppose it was like this in other parts of Europe. I don't know for sure. You know, there's been work, as you know, on English places and not as many mounds still there, not to say. But lots of monuments and, you know, how people in the early Middle Ages understood them. They used them for different purposes. They executed criminals on top of the mountains, you know, or they had judgment or whatever. So it was clear to people all over the place where the past lay. It's just like in Ireland, it was more obvious or something.

• 43:42Eleanor Janega?

  I also noticed just, you know, though, I do occasionally pick up some, I guess, echoes in other mythologies. So, you know, famously, some of my grandparents were Czech and Slovak on one side and Irish on the other. You can tell by the accent, obviously. But so over in the Czech lands, one of their big mythologies, the story of the ruling dynasty over in the Czech land. They're called the Pšemišli, and they are the descendants of a plowman called Pšemišl and a fairy named Lebujš. And they get together and then he becomes like this great king of the Czechs. And it's, you know, this farming prowess and, you know, he got a hot babe from the other world.

• 44:26Eleanor Janega?

  You know, and I was like, oh, look, it's the same, you know? And I'm like, finally, you know, I'm getting together both sides of my heritage. And they go, we can all agree that, you know, plowmen are kind of hot with it.

• 44:40Speaker 05

  Although, you know, it reminds me of Melusene, right? The story of Melusene. It's handy to have a fairy or someone from the other world or a god, the genealogy, like the Lombards and the Franks. And everybody had them. If they didn't have Adam, they had a god. Or maybe they had Adam too, like Charlemagne.

• 44:58Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, you can always get yourself a Roman too, Cat U, or like, you know, someone from Troy.

• 45:02Speaker 05

  You're not nearly as good. That's the Brit.

• 45:05Speaker 05

  You do wonder if the past is necessarily then mythological.

• 45:12Eleanor Janega?

  So when you were going through all these stories, was there anything in particular that really surprised you when you were putting these together? I mean, there must have been eight million things, but.

• 45:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, and it wasn't so much plot or character, although I began to see similarities and themes and so forth through the stories that I hadn't thought about before. I'll tell you what really surprised me, though, was going back and actually, I did translate them all before I retold them. And, you know, it's a devilish language. It's really horrible and difficult. And it can be pretty, but it's hard for, certainly for me, to appreciate the beauty sometimes. But realizing that a turn of phrase carried such weight that I didn't appreciate before, or that a word could be so full of connotations that I hadn't thought of, really just puzzling word by word

• 46:07Speaker 05

  opened the tales to me and made me think about things like, well, silence, about who didn't get the words and stuff like that.

• 46:18Eleanor Janega?

  Well, that's always the question, isn't it? And the problem with doing medieval history, and certainly early medieval history, is that silence. You know, all the people that were not hearing Fub, you know, for every great king who has a wonderful cattle raid, you know, there's a normal guy on the other side who's lost his cows, you know?

• 46:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, right. Well put. Well put. I like that. I'm gonna start telling that to my students.

• 46:41Eleanor Janega?

  Well, so I suppose there are kind of an obvious question here, perhaps, is, do you think that these stories, you know, these quite old, very Irish, quintessential stories have any influence now on modern Irish literature? Or are we being too romantic when we say things like that?

• 47:04Speaker 05

  I already mentioned the sort of nationalist revival, the cultural revival. You know, they put a statue of Cao Cao in the post office, for heaven's sake. May was on the buy pound note or something, I forget which. So, no, they're very alive in the culture and in the literature too. And not just because of the revival, although that's a lot of it. How could you avoid such great characters, you know, in writing? So there have been some really terrible novels and things based on whole new stories. I'm just waiting for the anime film of the time. I think that would be brilliant, but uh.

• 47:38Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, wow, yeah.

• 47:39Speaker 05

  No luck so far.

• 47:41Eleanor Janega?

  They could take my money right now.

• 47:42Speaker 05

  I have my idea, hello, anybody out there?

• 47:45Eleanor Janega?

  Copyright, Lisa.

• 47:46Speaker 05

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 47:47Eleanor Janega?

  Absolutely. All right, well, I mean, I guess to finish this off. What do you hope that readers are going to take away from Otherworld about, I guess specifically medieval Irish culture and literature?

• 48:01Speaker 05

  I love, I love that question. I think about it a lot. My great hope for the book was that people other than medievalist nerds were gonna read it. I really hope they do, and I think that's happening. And that they would appreciate that, wait a minute, you know, fairy stories aren't like, you know, the only source of our fantasy here. Something was happening a long, long time before that. And these stories are more beautiful and touching and exciting. And as I said in the book, bloodier and sexier and funnier. Here's a literature you don't know about, and it's so cool. Couldn't you please, you know, dip in?

• 48:35Eleanor Janega?

  I think that is such a good way of putting it. I think that people forget that fairy tales, these are early modern inventions about what they think the medieval period was like. But we've got real medieval stories about real weird things. And they don't have the romanticism and they're.

• 48:52Speaker 05

  And you know what? Grimsden and screw with those stories, we have them. Yeah.

• 48:57Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, there's a place to go if you really, if you want the good stuff.

• 49:03Speaker 05

  Right.

• 49:03Eleanor Janega?

  You know, all you gotta do is go check out Ireland, it's uncut, baby.

• 49:09Speaker 05

  I'm not sure they'd appreciate that, but heck.

• 49:15Eleanor Janega?

  Lisa, thank you so much. It's been an absolute delight talking to you. As I say, this book was just such a highlight of my reading last year. So, thank you so, so much for coming along to talk about it.

• 49:27Speaker 05

  Thank you and thanks for getting your relatives copies. Yay.

• 49:30Eleanor Janega?

  Yay.

• 49:32Eleanor Janega?

  Thanks to Lisa Batel and to you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries, including my recent series, Meet the Normans, and ad-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com/subscription. You can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can leave us comments and suggestions, or wherever you get your podcasts. And tell all your friends and family that you've Gone Medieval. Until next time.

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• 50:49Speaker 01

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• 51:23Speaker 01

  The.