Feasts for the Eyes: Visuality and Desire in the Ulster Cycle

Abstract

For at least one early Irish writer, it was Paris’s face that launched a thousand ships. According to the twelfth-century Irish dynastic poem Clann Ollaman Uaisle Emna [Children of Ollam, the nobles of Emain] male beauty was the cause of the Trojan War and the war in Táin Bó Cúailnge, the central martial narrative of the Ulster cycle. The poem’s prologue, which pairs characters from the Ulster sagas with counterparts chosen from the matter of Troy, equates Derdriu’s lover Noísiu with Paris since “their beauty caused Troy and the Táin” [rena néim Troí ocus Táin]. (Alexander is the usual name for Paris in medieval Irish versions of the Trojan narrative.) Just as Paris’s beauty caused the Trojan War, so Noísiu’s beauty caused the war of the Táin.1 Clann Ollaman Uaisle Emna’s radical revision of the Helen of Troy trope—changing the sex of the beautiful, blameworthy, object of desire—typifies the difference encountered by modern readers of Irish heroic literature. Irish sagas consistently represent beautiful male characters as objects of the gaze, but what this implies for structures of gender in medieval Irish culture is unclear. A useful point of departure for the study of gender and visuality in early Irish literature may be found in three sagas of the Ulster cycle that give special prominence to scenes of desirous looking: Táin Bó Fraích [Fráech’s cattle-raid], Longes mac nUislenn [The exile of the sons of Uisliu], and Táin Bó Cúailnge [The cattle-raid of Cooley].KeywordsScopic EconomyMarriageable GirlDark PoolNarrative CinemaVisual PleasureThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.