Skáldskaparmál - 01.01.1997, Síða 172

170
William Sayers
tales in the Irish tradition assign the bruiden or hostel a rather different role than
do the Ulster and kings’ cycles.21 On entry the hero passes a threshold into the
Otherworld and may fmd both magnificent halls and sumptuous banquets, and
monsters and other enemies. In this romance dimension it is expected that the
intruders or beguiled will win their way back to this world, with treasures, magical
artifacts, preferential knowledge, or possibly suddenly burdened with the weight
of age that had accumulated unknown to them while feasting in the mountain
or island hall. Food and culinary procedures, sometimes turned against the
intrusive humans (e.g., flaying, grilling), are a common feature of the tales. The
reladonship with the women of the bruiden is ambivalent, as it is with the
Otherworld generally in the Finn tales.22 One mortal, Cáel, who was favored with
the attention of an Otherworld woman, Créide, opens his later description of her
hall as follows:
‘Pleasant is the house in which she is, both in regard to men and boys and women,
druid, musician, butler, doorkeeper, smoothly-moving horse-boy, and carver for
distributing meat: fair yellow-haired Créide rules all those.’23
Somewhat later in the poem the house is described as one hundred feet long,
with ‘fifty measured feet in the breadth of her good doorway’ (st. 17). Later Irish
tradition has called ‘fairy wives’ those women from the other side, Otherworld,
or ‘fairy mounds’ (síd). Þórgunna of Eyrbyggja saga (called ‘Hebridean’) and
sometime wife of Leifr Eiríksson in Eiríks saga rauöa (there presented as Hiber-
no-Norse), whose fine bedding is a partial source of the Fróðá Marvels, is a good
example of such ambivalent but powerful females. No single tale from the Fenian
cycle offers a match to the details of Eyrbyggja saga and Landnámabók but the
motif of the woman inviting the traveller to a meal in her hall is certainly
consonant with Irish tradition, even if not necessarily dependent on it.
Despite the concentration of early evidence in the stylized forms of law and
story, it is clear that the ancient institution of briugu lasted well through the period
of Norse contacts with Ireland until the collapse of the Gaelic order in the
21 General orientation to the Fenian cycle in Murphy 1955, Nagy 1985 and Ó hÓgáin 1988;
attention to the Otherworld hostel in Nagy 1981.
22 See Nagy 1981, 315ff.
23 Aíbinn in tech ina tá,
itir ira is maca is mná,
itir druíd ocus áes céoil,
itir dáilem is doirséoir,
Itirgilla scuir nách scéinn
ocus ronnaire re roinn:
a-tá a commus sin uile
ac Créide inn oltbuide.
(Murphy 1956, ed. and trans., 142f., sts 3-4).