Chaucer and Old Norse Mythology
Rory McTurk
School of English, University of Leeds
In a paper currently awaiting publication1 I have argued that the story in
Skáldskaparmál of Ó: inn s theft of the poetic mead is an analogue to the story
told in Chaucer s House of Fame, for three main reasons. First, both stories may
be said to involve an eagle as a mediator between different kinds of poetry: in
Snorri s account Ó: inn in the form of an eagle expels, apparently from the front
and back ends of its body, two portions of the mead, which represent poetry and
poetastery respectively, while Chaucer s poem, which takes the form of an
account by the narrator of a dream he has experienced, deals largely with two
different places visited in the dream: the Temple of Venus in the first of the
poem s three books, and the House of Fame in the third, at which literary and
oral poetry, respectively, are given prominence; and it is an eagle, moreover,
that conveys the narrator (himself a poet) from one place to the other. Secondly,
Snorri s account hints at excretion in this context (Ó: inn apparently excretes
some of the mead: sendi aptr suman mjö: inn , I, p. 5, l. 4),2 while Chaucer s
1
This paper, Snorri Sturluson s Skáldskaparmál and Chaucer s House of Fame is at the time of writing still
awaiting publication in the Proceedings of a conference entitled Ancient and modern: Old Norse myths and
mythological poetry then and now , and held at Edinburgh University in September 1997.
2
References to Snorri s account are to Snorri Sturluson, Edda: Skáldskaparmál, ed. by A. Faulkes, 2 vols
264
11th International Saga Conference 265
hints at flatulence (the eagle speaks of eyr ybroken , l. 765, which may be an
allusion to broken wind);3 these two phenomena are not identical, of course, but
are closely interrelated. Thirdly and finally, Snorri s account presents Ó: inn as
collecting the mead from a mountain called Hnitbjörg, one meaning of which is
apparently clashing rocks ,4 whereas in Book III of Chaucer s poem the eagle
and the narrator enter the House of Rumour by a window in a whirling wall;
both types of entrance are typical of the other world as this has been presented
in different mythological traditions.
In another paper, published in Leeds studies in English in 1998,5 I have
argued that the Topographia Hibernie (c.1188) of Giraldus Cambrensis was a
source for Chaucer s House of Fame. The main argument here involved the fact
that, in his portrayal in the Topographia of eagles flying dangerously near the
sun, Giraldus compares the eagle not just with contemplatives who can gaze
without flinching at the nature of the divine majesty, but also with people who
meddle in what they do not fully understand, and thus come to grief in a manner
comparable to that in which the eagle s wings are burnt by the sun s rays.
Giraldus, it seems to me, is here giving a rather less respectful picture of the
eagle than emerges from the other writings which have been pointed out as
possible sources for Chaucer s presentation of this bird in The House of Fame:
the Bible; certain works of classical literature; the works of Dante; and the
bestiary tradition. In all of these, the eagle is an august and serious figure,
clearly meant to be treated with respect, whereas the eagle in The House of
Fame is predominantly a comic figure not least in making the unwarranted
boast of having flown close to the sun. This, as I have indicated above, was my
main argument for suggesting that Chaucer, who is believed to have been
acquainted with other works by Giraldus, might have been influenced by the
Topographia Hibernie in his portrayal of the eagle in The House of Fame.
In the same paper of 1998 I also suggested, however, that additional
evidence for the influence of the Topographia on The House of Fame could be
found in certain further similarities between the two works, emerging when
Chaucer s account of the Houses of Fame and of Rumour is compared with the
description in the Topographia of the fire of St Brigid in Kildare. This occurs
considerably further on in the Topographia (in chs 67-72; 77) than the chapter
(9) about eagles, but is linked to it by the fact that a falcon features in it (in ch.
70), and that Giraldus immediately precedes his chapter about eagles with one
(London, 1998). At the conference referred to in note 1, above, Hermann Pálsson cast doubt on the excretion
interpretation of this passage. Vésteinn Ólason, however, at the same conference, defended it.
3
See Oxford guides to Chaucer: the shorter poems, by A.J. Minnis et al. (Oxford, 1995), 223-27. References
to The House of Fame are to The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., general editor L.D. Benson (Oxford, 1988), 347-
73. The eagle is here explaining that sound, which is really broken air, travels by a natural process upwards
from its place of occurrence to the House of Fame, which all sounds eventually reach.
4
See Ásgeir Blöndal MagnÅ›sson, Íslensk or: sifjabók (Reykjavík, 1989), 349.
5
R. McTurk, Chaucer and Giraldus Cambrensis , LeedsSE, n.s. 29 (1998), 173-83.
266 Rory McTurk
about hawks, falcons and sparrowhawks (ch. 8).6 These further similarities,
some of which are more striking than others, are five in number. I give them
here in the order in which they occur in the Topographia: first, the fact that in
the Topographia (ch. 67) St Brigid s fire is described as reputedly (though not
in fact) inextinguishable, and that in The House of Fame (ll. 2075-80) the power
of rumour is compared in a simile to that of a fire beginning as a spark but
increasing until it is large enough to burn a city; secondly, the fact that in the
Topographia (ch. 69) St Brigid s fire is surrounded by a circular hedge of
withies, and that in The House of Fame (ll. 1935-40; 1985) the House of
Rumour, which is shaped like a cage, is made of twigs; thirdly, the fact that in
the Topographia (ch. 70) a falcon perches frequently on the top of a church
tower near St Brigid s fire (until it is eventually killed by a rustic with a staff),
and that in The House of Fame the eagle perches faste by [...], hye upon a
stoon (ll. 1986-92), before lifting the narrator into the House of Rumour by a
window (ll. 2027-30); fourthly, the fact that in the Topographia (ch. 71) there is
said to be a miraculous book at Kildare containing illustrations of the four
creatures representing the Evangelists, and depicting them in such a way as to
make their wings appear to change in number, and that in The House of Fame
(ll. 1368-92), when the goddess Fame is described as appearing to change in
size, she is said to have as many eyes as there were feathers on the four beasts
that honoured God s throne in the Book of Revelation; and fifthly and finally,
the fact that in the Topographia (ch. 77) the archer who went mad as a result of
blowing on St Brigid s fire is described as blowing upon every person he meets
by way of demonstrating how he did so, and that in The House of Fame (ll.
1615-88) good and bad reputations are described as spreading as a result of the
god Aeolus blowing one or the other of his trumpets.
None of these five similarities (with the possible exception of the second
and fourth) is particularly striking on its own, but if they are viewed together,
and in combination with the one involving the eagle, discussed above, they have
a certain cumulative quality which suggests, to me at least, that Chaucer did
indeed have the fire of St Brigid in Kildare in mind when he wrote The House
of Fame. The similarities are perhaps not so great, however, as to suggest, as I
did in 1998, that Giraldus s Topographia Hibernie was itself a source for
Chaucer s poem. In the present paper I should like to modify that view, and to
suggest instead that both Giraldus s account of St Brigid and Snorri s account
of the theft of the poetic mead reflect a story that became known to Chaucer
most probably in oral rather than written form, and influenced his composition
of The House of Fame. It was probably in oral form also that this same story
influenced both Snorri s and Giraldus s accounts, though it has clearly done so
in different ways. Since its influence on Snorri s account and on Chaucer s
6
References by chapter number to the Topographia are to Gerald of Wales, The history and topography of
Ireland, trans. by J.J. O Meara (Harmondsworth, 1982). References to the Latin text are to O Meara s edition
of the Topographia in PRIA 52C (1948-50), 113-78.
11th International Saga Conference 267
poem is in my view more readily apparent than its influence on Giraldus s
account, I shall argue my case, for the sake of clarity, in three main stages, as
follows: first, I shall identify and briefly describe the story as it is preserved in
ancient Indian texts; secondly, I shall argue for its influence on Snorri s account
of the theft of the poetic mead and on Chaucer s House of Fame; and thirdly, I
shall argue for its influence on Giraldus s account of the fire of St Brigid in
Kildare. Then, in a brief conclusion, I shall deal with the question of the form in
which this story is most likely to have become known to Chaucer.
In his portrayal of the eagle in The House of Fame Chaucer differs from the
four categories of writings most often adduced as sources for this aspect of the
poem, and listed above, not only in presenting the eagle as a comic figure, as
already indicated, but also in associating the eagle with poetry. As well as
conveying the narrator of the poem, Geffrey (whose name is of course the same
as Chaucer s) from one poetic environment to another, as shown above, the
eagle presents himself as something of an authority on poetry, accusing
Geffrey, for example, of composing poems on the subject of love while lacking
in personal experience of it (see The House of Fame, ll. 614-28). The
association of an eagle with poetry is in fact a very ancient one, even though it
may be hard to find parallels for it in the works most often cited as likely
sources for the eagle in The House of Fame. Writers on Snorri s story of the
theft of the poetic mead have in fact shown more awareness of this association
than have writers on Chaucer s poem. It has long been recognised, for example,
that there is a relationship of some kind between this story of Snorri s and a
story which may be pieced together from various ancient Indian texts the
dating of which is a complex and difficult business, but which clearly preserve
traditions dating from well before the time of Christ7 about how a winged
figure, identifiable as an eagle in some of the texts, brings from heaven to earth
the drink known as Soma, believed to confer, among other things, the gift of
poetry.8 The Soma is well protected and hard to obtain, which means that,
according to the Mahabharata, the winged messenger has to slip through a
wheel of flame, as bright as the sun, in order to reach it;9 in another version of
the story, told in the Satapatha Brahmana, it has to fly between two gilded
razor-sharp leaves, which may suddenly snap together.10 In the Rig Veda,
moreover (cf. also the Satapatha Brahmana), it is told that, as the eagle flew off
with the Soma, an archer shot an arrow after it with the result that it lost one of
7
See J. Puhvel, Comparative mythology (Baltimore, Md, 1989), 68-69.
8
See, for example, A.A. Macdonell, Vedic mythology (Strassburg, 1897), 104-15, esp. pp. 109, 111-12, and
114; A. Olrik, Skjaldemjoden , Edda 24 (1925), 236-41; E.O.G. Turville-Petre, Myth and religion of the
North (London, 1964), 40-41; Svava Jakobsdóttir, Gunnlö: og hinn d! ri mjö: ur , Skírnir 162 (1988), 215-
45. Laurence K. Shook, writing on The House of Fame in Companion to Chaucer studies, ed. by Beryl
Rowland, rev. ed. (New York, 1979), 414-27, p. 420, recognises the antiquity of the association of the eagle
with poetry, but does not mention India in this context.
9
See Svava Jakobsdóttir, 238-39 and cf. A.K. Coomaraswamy, Symplegades , in Studies and essays[...]
offered in homage to George Sarton[...]., ed. by M.F. Ashley Montagu (New York, 1944), 463-88, p. 481.
10
See Svava Jakobsdóttir, 239, and Coomaraswamy, 466-67.
268 Rory McTurk
its wing-feathers.11
As indicated above, I shall argue here that the story thus represented in
Indian texts is reflected in different ways in Snorri s account of Ó: inn s theft of
the poetic mead, in Chaucer s House of Fame, and in Giraldus s account of the
fire of St Brigid in Kildare. Before doing so, however, I should like to abstract
from the various manifestations of the Indian story, very cursorily reviewed
above, a sequence of four topics which may be used as headings under which to
conduct the argument. These are: poetry; the bird as messenger; the perilous
entrance; and the penalty of loss. To these four topics a sub-topic, the archer,
may be added under the heading of the fourth, since in the Indian story, as we
have seen, the penalty suffered by the eagle for taking the Soma is the loss of a
feather, caused by an archer s arrow.
These four topics (though not the archer) are, I believe, all present in both
Snorri s story of the theft of the poetic mead and the story told in Chaucer s
House of Fame. Both stories are about poetry, as has already been shown; in
both a bird (in fact an eagle) functions as a messenger, as has also been shown;
and in both a perilous entrance is involved. In Snorri s account, as we have
seen, the name of the mountain from which Ó: inn collects the mead is very
possibly to be interpreted as clashing rocks (compare the snapping leaves of
the Indian story); and entry into the mountain is in any case made difficult and
dangerous for Ó: inn by the giant Baugi, who, after finally, under pressure from
Ó: inn, boring a hole for him in the mountain, tries unsuccessfully, once Ó: inn
has entered the hole, to stab him with the auger he had used to bore it. It should
be noted, incidentally, that Ó: inn at this stage of the story is not yet in eagle
form; before entering the hole he changes into serpent form, a point which
serves to underline the narrowness of the hole and the difficulty of entry; it is
not until the return journey that he adopts the form of an eagle.12 In Book II of
The House of Fame (ll. 904-59) the eagle in the course of carrying the narrator
from the Temple of Venus to Fame s house boasts of having brought him on
this journey closer than Icarus came to the sun on his ill-fated flight with wax
wings; the eagle refers also the myth of Phaeton borrowing and failing to
control the chariot of the sun god, his father. This may recall the wheel as bright
as the sun through which the winged messenger has to pass in the Indian story
summarised above. This wheel, according to Coomaraswamy, who refers to it
as the Wheel of the Sun, symbolises the sun itself, thought of as a door in the
sky through which it is possible to enter the other world, though entry is made
difficult by the revolving of the wheel and the danger of being cut to pieces by
its spokes, which represent the sun s burning rays. The sun thought of in this
way is just one example of what Coomaraswamy calls the Active Door, by
which entry to the other world is possible, but made difficult by the door s
11
See The Rig Veda: an anthology, [...] trans.[...] by W. D. O Flaherty (London 1981), 128-31, and cf. Svava
Jakobsdóttir, 239.
12
See Snorri Sturluson, ed. Faulkes (as cited in note 2, above), I, pp. 4-5.
11th International Saga Conference 269
active quality; it may, for example, suddenly slam shut or move away, so that
the moment of passing through it has to be carefully judged in advance. The
Clashing Rocks, or Symplegades, of Greek mythology are another example.13 It
is in Book III of The House of Fame, however, that the idea of the perilous
entrance in the form of an active door is approached most closely, at the point
where the eagle, after perching nearby on a stone, carries the narrator by a
window into the rapidly revolving, sixty-mile long, wickerwork House of
Rumour, which, as soon as they have entered it, stops revolving.
Coomaraswamy does not mention The House of Fame, but gives other
examples of revolving barriers with doors or windows in them, in which, he
claims, the barrier symbolises the sky, and the door or window symbolises the
sun.14
As for the fourth topic, the penalty of loss, this is more clearly evident in
Snorri s account than in Chaucer s poem. In Snorri s account, Ó: inn loses a
portion of the poetic mead by apparently excreting it in his nervousness at being
closely pursued in his eagle form by the giant Suttungr, also in the form of an
eagle. In The House of Fame the loss in question is the loss of intestinal wind,
and this, it must be emphasised, is hinted at rather than explicitly mentioned; it
should also be noted that whereas in Snorri s account and the Indian story the
loss takes place after the messenger has passed both in and out through the
perilous entrance, in Chaucer s poem the hints at flatulence occur before the
eagle has entered the House of Rumour, and partly also before it has entered the
House of Fame; there is in any case no account of a return journey in the poem,
which may have been left unfinished.15 A further point is that the idea of
flatulence, if it can be accepted that it is indeed present in The House of Fame,
is associated there not exclusively with the eagle, whose reference to broken air
(at l. 765) occurs relatively early on in its conversation with the narrator (before
its talk of flying close to the sun), but also at least arguably with the wind
god Aeolus: A.J. Minnis has recently suggested that the description of the
trumpet used by Aeolus to blow slander throughout the world from Fame s
house (see ll. 1623-56) is strongly suggestive of the alimentary canal.16 For
these reasons, and also because the eagle in The House of Fame is not actually
stated to have broken wind, the poem s hints at flatulence cannot be said to
exemplify the penalty of loss in the same obvious way as the aquiline Ó: inn s
predicament seems to do in Snorri s account unless it can be argued that the
irony at the expense of Chaucer s eagle arising from its apparently unconscious
hint at farting can be seen as a kind of penalty for its subsequent boast of having
flown close to the sun. It is possible, indeed, that the loss of dignity to the eagle
in the Indian story that is perhaps implied by its loss of a wing-feather
13
See Coomaraswamy, passim.
14
See Coomaraswamy, 479-80. Cf. note 27, below.
15
See The Riverside Chaucer (1988), 990.
16
See Oxford guides to Chaucer: the shorter poems (1995), 224.
270 Rory McTurk
represents an early stage in the development of the presentation of the eagle as a
comic figure that distinguishes Chaucer s House of Fame, as already indicated,
from the works most often adduced as sources for his portrayal of the eagle in
that poem; Ó: inn in his role as an eagle in Snorri s account is of course also
something of a comic figure. It must be acknowledged that the loss of a wing-
feather (or even a tail-feather) is not the same phenomenon as excretion; and
that excretion and flatulence, albeit closely interrelated, are not identical
phenomena either. Nevertheless there are, I suggest, sufficient similarities
involving these phenomena between the Indian story on the one hand and
Snorri s and Chaucer s accounts on the other to support the argument I am
offering here under the heading of the penalty of loss; and even if this is not
accepted, the argument is, as I believe I have shown, well enough supported
under the headings of the first three topics in the sequence of four, given above,
namely: poetry, the bird as messenger, and the perilous entrance.
In turning now, with all four topics in mind, to Giraldus s account of the
fire of St Brigid in Kildare, I must acknowledge at once that there is (as far as I
can discover) no explicit reference to poetry anywhere in this account. It is
likely, however, that the name of Brigid carried associations of poetry, if not for
Giraldus himself, then for those who preserved the traditions he records. As will
become increasingly clear below, traditions of St Brigid, about whom as a
historical figure very little is known, tended to combine with and be influenced
by traditions of her pagan namesake, the Celtic goddess Brigid, who was
believed to be, among other things, a patroness of poetry. She is also the Irish
counterpart of the Gaulish Minerva, who was regarded as a patroness of arts and
crafts.17 Brigid s association with poetry is strongly emphasised in Cormac s
Glossary (c.900), where she is described as a poetess, daughter of the Dagda ,
and as the goddess whom poets adored to the extent of calling her goddess of
poets ; and where she is also said to have had two sisters and namesakes,
associated with healing and the smith s craft respectively.18 It is not without
interest in the context of the goddess Brigid s association with the arts to note
that Giraldus, in his account of St Brigid in the Topographia Hibernie, devotes
two chapters (71 and 72) to the miraculous book at Kildare, paying particular
attention to the artistry of its illustrations, and telling how the scribe responsible
for these was assisted in his work by an angel who appeared to him in dreams
on successive nights, producing drawings for him to copy, and in the first dream
successfully exhorted him to obtain the help of St Brigid s prayers. This may
recall the dream setting of The House of Fame, in which a heavenly messenger,
the eagle, who claims to have been sent by Jupiter (ll. 605-13), advises the
dreamer-narrator, as we have seen, on poetic composition. The Dagda, of whom
Brigid is said to be the daughter in Cormac s Glossary, is known from other
17
See P. Mac Cana, Celtic mythology (London, 1970), 34-35.
18
See Sanas Chormaic: Cormac s glossary, trans. [...] by J. O Donovan: ed. [...] by W. Stokes (Calcutta,
1868), 23.
11th International Saga Conference 271
sources as the father god of the TÅ›atha Dé Danann, or people of the goddess
Danu , a divine people who were believed to have lived in Ireland before the
ancestors of the Irish, the Milesians or Sons of Míl, arrived there and drove
them into the subterranean otherworld of the síde, or fairy mounds, from which,
it was believed, they continued to exert their influence.19 The very name of
Kildare, Cill Dara, the church of the oak , specifies the kind of tree which, the
Celts believed, provided access to the invisible world.20 With these various
considerations in mind, we may venture to suggest that, both before and after
the time of Giraldus, St Brigid s shrine at Kildare was associated with traditions
of poetic knowledge gained as a result of entry to the other world.
With regard to our second topic, the bird as messenger, it has already been
noted that Giraldus (in ch. 70) gives an account of how a falcon perched on the
top of a church tower at Kildare. This falcon, known as Brigid s bird , was
used by people in the neighbourhood to hunt other birds, which it did expertly,
just as if it had been tamed and trained for the purpose; it also showed a
tyrannical superiority to lesser birds. During the mating season it chose to mate
near Glendalough rather than in the precincts of the church at Kildare, thus
showing respect for the local ecclesiastics. After a long life it was eventually
killed by a rustic with a staff. Giraldus sees its death as a lesson in the dangers
of over-confidence; his tone here is reminiscent of that in which he had earlier
(in ch. 9) compared the scorching of the eagle s wings when it flies close to the
sun with the dangers of trying to acquire knowledge that is beyond one s grasp.
This falcon, as will be evident, suffers in death a worse fate than the eagles
described by Giraldus or the ones that figure in the Indian story and in Snorri s
and Chaucer s stories; nor is it sent on such a specific errand as the eagles in
those three last-named stories seem to be. Nevertheless, what is said about it in
Giraldus s account is enough, I suggest, to support the idea of a relationship
between that account and those same three stories, provided that other features
of the account can be found to do so as well.
The third topic, the perilous entrance, is well illustrated by St Brigid s fire
itself, which is described in three brief chapters (67-69) immediately preceding
the relatively lengthy one about the falcon, and which also features again in ch.
77. In chs 67-69, Giraldus describes how in St Brigid s time twenty nuns, of
whom she herself was one, kept the fire perpetually burning, and how since her
death only nineteen have done so. No male is allowed to cross the circular
hedge of withies which surrounds the fire, though some have rashly tried to do
so. Only women are allowed to blow the fire, and then not with their mouths,
but only with bellows or fans. A curse of the saint means that goats never have
young in the area; on the other hand, the grass in the nearby pastures is
miraculously restored overnight after grazing animals have consumed it. In ch.
19
See Puhvel, 176-78.
20
See S. Catháin, The festival of Brigit: Celtic goddess and holy woman (Dublin, 1995), 16, 26 (note 140).
272 Rory McTurk
77, Giraldus gives two examples of what has happened to males who have
attempted to cross the hedge round the fire. One of these is the archer,
mentioned above, who, after crossing the hedge, blew on the fire, and at once
went mad, and then went around blowing on everyone he met, saying that this
was how he had blown on Brigid s fire; he also blew on every fire that he
encountered. In the end he drank so much water in his desperate need for it that
he burst and died. Another person (alius; presumably also an archer), who was
restrained by his companions before he had crossed the hedge completely,
nevertheless lost the foot and shank that did cross it, and was lame ever
afterwards.
St Brigid s fire, which, since the hedge around it is circular (orbicularis), is
presumably itself circular in shape, is surely reminiscent of the Wheel of the
Sun, discussed above. Celtic scholars seem reluctant to describe the pagan
goddess Brigid as a sun-goddess, but they readily acknowledge her association
with fire and also, though perhaps rather more cautiously, with fertility;21 and
Giraldus s account of her Christian namesake, just summarised, clearly links
her with both. It was in the light of a consideration of this account, among
others, that Mac Cana maintained that no clear distinction can be made
between the goddess and the saint ;22 in other words, traditions of the saint have
been so heavily influenced by traditions of the goddess that it is hard to
disentangle one set of traditions from the other. St Brigid s feast-day, February
1, coincides with Imbolc, the pagan Celtic festival of spring, which celebrated
the promise of the return of the sun s brightness after the darkness of winter,
and Mac Cana and others have drawn attention to a number of sources which
associate St Brigid with fire and brightness, not least the brightness of the sun.23
One of these is the anonymous Vita prima Sanctae Brigitae (known as Vita I),
dating most probably from the mid-eighth century at the earliest, according to
which St Brigid, who it was foretold would shine in the world like the sun in the
vault of heaven, was born just after sunrise neither within nor outside a house (a
borderline location which perhaps parallels the temporal borderline between
winter and spring that her feast-day represents). It also relates that, on different
occasions when she was a child, a house in which she was sleeping appeared to
be ablaze; a piece of cloth touching her head was seen to glow with a fiery
flame; and a column of fire was seen rising from the house in which she slept.24
Another source, Cogitosus s Vita Brigitae (known as Vita II), dating most
probably from early in the second half of the seventh century, tells how she
21
See Catháin, 2; cf. also Mac Cana, 34-35, 94-95, and D. h gáin, The hero in Irish folk history (Dublin,
1985), 16-26.
22
See Mac Cana, 35.
23
See Mac Cana, 34-35; h gáin, 19-23; and the references given under fire and sun in the Index to
Catháin.
24
See S. Connolly Vita Prima Sanctae Brigitae: background and historical value , JRSAI 119 (1989), 5-49,
pp. 6, 14-15.
11th International Saga Conference 273
hung her wet clothes on a sunbeam to dry.25 Many more examples could be
given, but I shall content myself here with quoting from a statement by another
Celtic scholar, Miranda Jane Green, which is particularly useful for the
purposes of this part of my argument: according to Green, the Celts
acknowledged fire as the terrestrial counterpart of the sun in the sky. 26
If, as I suggest, St Brigid s fire as described by Giraldus may be taken as an
example of the Wheel of the Sun, this would help to explain why people were so
rash as to attempt to enter it by crossing the hedge surrounding it. Giraldus
himself gives no explanation for this. What he seems to be recording here,
apparently without fully understanding it, is a tradition comparable to that
preserved in the Indian story discussed above (and I believe also in Chaucer s
House of Fame), according to which the other world could be entered by way of
the sun. In the Indian story, as we have seen, it is a bird who enters (cf. The
House of Fame) and returns from the other world, though not without difficulty;
and a recollection of the bird s part in the story may lie behind Giraldus s
account of the falcon (perched on high at first and later falling to its death),
reminiscent as this is of his previous account of eagles flying dangerously near
the sun, and close as it also is to his account of St Brigid s fire. The purpose of
entering the other world in the tradition he preserves may well have been the
acquiring of poetic knowledge, as the Indian and Chaucerian accounts, as well
as Snorri s, all suggest in different ways. Alternatively, or additionally, it may
have been the reconciliation of opposites, which Coomaraswamy sees as the
fundamental purpose of visits to the other world as these have been represented
in different mythological traditions; the other world, according to him, is
believed to lack the oppositions such as Fear and Hope, North and South, Night
and Day, etc., which trouble us in this world, and the purpose of visiting the
other world is to find a way of negating or neutralising these contrasts. Linked
with this belief is the notion that the ideal time for entering the other world is at
a temporal borderline, such as that between winter and spring, with which, as
we have seen, St Brigid is associated. He refers to the account in the Old Irish
saga Fled Bricrend (probably originally from the eighth century) of how the
chieftain CÅ› Ruí possessed a stronghold over which he sang a spell each night,
whereupon it started revolving as swiftly as a mill-wheel, so that its entrance
could never be found after sunset. Behind this, according to Coomaraswamy,
lies the idea of the sun as the Active Door.27 It is surely not unreasonable to
suppose, in any case, that a house which starts revolving at sunset would stop
doing so at sunrise. Here it may be pointed out that the narrator of The House of
Fame twice mentions (at ll. 63 and 111) that his dream befell him on December
10; and it may be recalled that when, in the course of his dream, the narrator
25
See S. Connolly and J.-M. Picard, Cogitosus s Life of St Brigit: content and value , JRSAI 117 (1987), 5-
27, pp. 5, 15.
26
See M. J. Green, Celtic myths (London, 1998), 46.
27
See Coomaraswamy, 480. Cf. note 14, above.
274 Rory McTurk
enters the House of Rumour with the eagle s help, this house, which had been
revolving, stops doing so. The House of Fame is thought to have been
composed very soon after 1376, a year in which, according to the Julian
Calendar, the winter solstice fell on December 11.28 It may thus be suggested
that the eagle and the narrator of The House of Fame enter the House of
Rumour at sunrise on the morning of the winter solstice of 1376, December 11,
that is, on the borderlines between night and day and between the shortening
and lengthening of the days of the year, at the time when the first hint of spring
comes in the middle of winter a highly suitable time, as Coomaraswamy
would surely accept, for visiting the other world.29 However this may be,
enough has been said here, I trust, to establish the presence in Giraldus s
account of the topic of the perilous entrance.
Enough has probably also been said above to indicate how the fourth topic,
the penalty of loss, manifests itself in Giraldus s account. The falcon suffers the
penalty of loss of life not, it is true, for attempting to enter St Brigid s fire,
but rather, as Giraldus puts it, for having occupied itself without sufficient
caution with the prey which it had caught, and having too little feared the
approaches of men 30 in other words, for becoming over-confident; and the
penalties suffered by the two men who attempt to cross the hedge surrounding
the fire involve loss of wits and of a foot respectively. The archer was
mentioned above as a sub-topic under this heading, and it is of some interest to
note that of these two men the first to be mentioned is certainly an archer
(sagittarius), and the second (alius) very possibly is as well. It is true that the
archer in the Indian story has the opposite function from that of the archer in
Giraldus s account; in the former it is the archer who inflicts the penalty of loss,
whereas in the latter it is the archer who suffers it. The loss of wits and/or of a
foot in Giraldus s account corresponds to the bird s loss of a feather in the
Indian story. It is nevertheless noteworthy that an archer is specified in both
Giraldus s account and the Indian story; and if it can indeed be claimed that the
second of the two human sufferers in Giraldus s account, the one who loses his
foot, is, like the first, an archer, it is also of interest to note that Krsanu, as the
archer in the Indian story is called in the Rig Veda, is apparently also known as
the footless archer in Indian sources.31 The similarities and differences
between Giraldus s account and the Indian story in this and other respects may
be compared with those that have been pointed out between, on the one hand,
Giraldus s account, also in the Topographia Hibernie (ch. 102), of a horse
sacrifice, and, on the other, ancient Indian traditions of such a sacrifice. Ritual
intercourse is involved in both cases, but in Giraldus the coition is between a
28
See The Riverside Chaucer (1988), xxiv-xxv, and [Geoffrey] Chaucer, The House of Fame, ed. by N.R.
Havely (Durham, 1994), 10, 137 (note to l. 63).
29
See Coomaraswamy, 470 (note 13).
30
Quoted from O Meara s translation (1982) as cited in note 6, above, p. 83.
31
See R. Calasso, Ka, trans. by T. Parks (London, 1999), 14, 419. Svava Jakobsdóttir, 239, implies that the
guardian of the Soma, who shoots an arrow after the eagle, is a snake. Cf. Calasso, 14-16.
11th International Saga Conference 275
man and a mare, whereas in the Indian traditions it is between a woman and a
stallion.32
In concluding this paper I shall need to rearrange to some extent the order
and emphases of the foregoing remarks. The accounts by Snorri and Giraldus
preserve two somewhat different versions of a story in which a bird seeks to
bring knowledge of poetry from the other world. I shall call these two versions
the Norse and the Irish versions respectively. Since this story is also preserved
in ancient Indian texts, it must be of great antiquity. Chaucer, I am arguing,
made use in The House of Fame of a version of the story falling somewhere
between the Norse and the Irish versions, the latter of which, as I hope I have
produced sufficient evidence to show, had become combined with traditions
relating to (St) Brigid well before the time of Giraldus (d.1223), who in turn
was writing well before the time of Chaucer (d.1400). The Norse version of the
story is relatively close to Chaucer s in having both an explicit concern with
poetry and (apparently)33 a scatological element; on the other hand, it differs
from Chaucer s in reflecting the idea of the entrance to the other world as a
narrow opening between rocks in a mountain. The Irish version is relatively
close to Chaucer s in reflecting the idea of the sun as the entrance to the other
world, and in linking this idea to the concept of an enclosure of withies or
twigs; on the other hand, there is no mention of poetry in the Irish version of the
story in its preserved form. The goddess Brigid s association with poetry
nevertheless makes it likely that this, too, was an element in the Irish version.
On balance, it seems to me that Chaucer s poem, with its references to the sun
and to a house of twigs, reflects a version of the story marginally closer to the
Irish than to the Norse version. There is moreover one particular similarity
between Giraldus s account and The House of Fame that strongly suggests to
me that Chaucer knew the story in question in a version that was linked to
traditions of the shrine of St Brigid in Kildare. This is the reference to the
mystical representations (as composite beings) of the four evangelists, which in
Giraldus s account (ch. 71) occurs in connection with the miraculous book at
Kildare, with its depiction of the beings in question as having wings that appear
to change in number, and which in Chaucer s poem (ll. 1368-85) occurs in
connection with the goddess Fame s apparent ability to change in size: just after
saying that Fame at first looked no taller than a cubit s length but subsequently
seemed to stretch from earth to heaven, the narrator says she had as many eyes
as there were feathers on these same four beings, as described in the Book of
Revelation.34 The reference thus occurs in both accounts in a context of what
the onlooker in each case the peruser of the book in Giraldus, and the
32
See Puhvel, 273-76.
33
I add apparently mainly because of the difference of opinion recorded in note 2, above, but also because
of the doubt as to whether there really is a scatological element in The House of Fame. See the reference given
in note 16, above.
34
See Revelation, 4: 6-11, and cf. Ezekiel, 1: 4-28.
276 Rory McTurk
narrator in Chaucer perceives as miraculous physical change, and together
with the motif of the enclosure of twigs is a relatively specific similarity
between the two accounts, as indicated above. While I do not now believe, as
also indicated above, that it is so specific as to justify my earlier expressed view
that Chaucer was indebted to Giraldus s account itself in composing The House
of Fame, it may, I suggest, be used as evidence, along with the other similarities
and possible connections that have been pointed out here, that Chaucer in
writing that poem was influenced by oral traditions relating to the shrine of St
Brigid in Kildare.35
35
I am grateful to Gu: ni Elísson for reading through this paper and suggesting a number of changes, most of
which I have implemented. Needless to say, the paper as it now stands is entirely my responsibility.
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