Aislinge Meic Con Glinne is an early twelfth-century Middle Irish
tale that is funnier than anything else I can think of right now. It has that
peculiarly Irish/Highland tongue-in-cheek extravagant humour that lets
self-important characters do pompously stupid things: a humour that uses
language to intensify the contrast between characters’ self-identified “heroic”
behavior and absurd reality. It does not say “Hey, let's laugh at this moron!” but
allows the reader or listener to draw their own conclusions, and it does all this
while also drawing attention to the poignant reality of life.
Part of its effect is contingent on the reader being
familiar with the literature as a whole. Aislinn Mac Con Glinne and
similar texts use many elements from serious literature (preparation for a
journey, blessings, battle fury, formal heroic dialogue, etc. etc.), but in
mock-heroic ways. Even so, I think something does come through, even if you
don’t know the context.
The tale is also a guide to traditional Irish foodways.
Anier Mac Con Glinne is bored studying in a monastery and
goes off to be a wandering bard instead, but ends up in a tight place after
satirizing the abbot of Cork monastery for niggardly hospitality to strangers.
In order to save his life, tells the assembled monks that while tied up
overnight, he had an otherworld vision telling him how to banish the demon of
gluttony that has possessed the King of Munster province: a demon that is
beggaring everyone else as they try to satisfy his hunger.
The abbot is unwilling to believe him, but the monks insist,
and Mac Con Glinne tricks the King into agreeing to fast for several days. Mac
Con Glinne then describes his vision of a journey to an Otherworld land where
everyone and everything is put together from the richest and most tempting
foods. The demon is tempted too and half-emerges. Mac Con Glinne captures and
banishes it, and everyone solemnly takes up their normal lives once more.
One of the reasons Mac Con Glinne headed to Munster was that
he’d heard he could get plenty of “bán bia” there, what English commentators in
the 16th and 17th centuries called “whitemeats”: milk and foods made from milk. His Otherworld
vision is therefore rich with bán bia. (Other prominent foods in it are bacon,
sausages and various pig products, porridge and some vegetables mostly
leek-like.)
Like most of the English commentators, Fynes Moryson did not like the Irish at all, but he sometimes describes aspects of Irish life dispassionately. “They feede most on Whitemeates and esteem for a great daintie sower curds vulgarly called by them Bonneclabbe (bainne clabhair). And for this they watchfully keepe their Cowes, and fight for them as for religion and life; and when they are almost starved, yet they will not kill a Cow, except it bee old and and yeald no Milke.”
Mac Con Glinne describes various types of milk he is offered in the vision (page 100 of Kuno Meyer’s edition, London, 1892): “ass rothècht, ass nát rothecht, ass learthecht, ass eter dáthecht, ass buide bolcachfoloing in slucad chocnumm, lomum daní in slaimegil rèthid od dul darsin m-brágait sis, co n-apraí in bolcum tóisech frisin m-bolcum n-dèdenach: “Fortgillim a charrmatraid,i fiadnaise in dúilemun, cia tís anúas, regutsa súas, ar ní thalla ar mataidecht ar n-dís isin istaduc sa.”
(In modern Irish, from Tomás Ó Floinn’s “translation”,
Aisling Mhic Conglinne, Officina Typographica, 1980): “Baiine an-tiubh, bainne
nach ró-thiubh, bainne fada-thiubh, bainne idir dhá thiús, bainne buí
logánach ar gá an chogaint chun è a
shlogadh, bainne a dhèanann gliogál is sránnmheileach reithe ag duk thar an
bhrád síos, I dtreo go n-abrann an bolgam tosaigh leis an mbolgam dèanach,
“Geallaim duit, a charrmhadra, i bhfianaise an Dúilimh, má thagann tú anuas,
rachadsa suas, ór níl slí dár madraíocht araon san ionad seo.”
Or in Meyer’s English”
“...very thick milk, milk not too thick, milk of long thickness, milk of
medium thickness, yellow bubbling milk
the swallowing of which needs chewing, milk that makes the snoring bleat
of a ram as it rushes gown the gorge, so that the first draught says to the
last draught “I vow, thou mangy cur, before the Creator, if thou comest down,
I’ll go up, for there is no room for the doghood of the two of us in this
treasure house.”
One method of making curds as described in 1698: “The next
morning a greate pott full of new milk was sett over the fire, and when it was
hot they pour’d into it a pale full of butter milk, which made a mighty dish of
tough curds in the middle of which they places a pound weight of butter.”
There is a long list of common cheeses too and I will list
them as A.W. Lucas gives them in his article Irish Food Before the Potato, published
in the periodical Gwerin. I don’t have the date of publication, but it is a
good article:
Fáiscre grotha
pressed curds (pressed in a bag, maybe, since contexts suggest this was
an individual noun and thing, not an amorphous mass)
Tanach/tanag a
harder cheese. “Harder” because in another tale, a person is killed by being
hit in the head by one shot from a sling
Maethal Maoth
is soft, but Maethal makes a house wall in Aislinn Meic Con Glinne, and
individual Maethal are described as being carried in a woman’s cloak
Grús A
hard cheese?
Táth A
soft cheese?
Millsèn A
semi-liquid cheese?
Mulcháin Well,
in the History, Topography and Antiquities of the County and City of Waterford,
Ryland, 1824, the author says “Cheese, made from skimmed milk, and called
Mullahawn, was formerly an article of commerce in Waterford...but it was of
such a hard substance that it required a hatchet to cut it.” (reference from
Lucas.)
Mulcháin is the only cheese that survived into modern times:
all knowledge of the others was lost in the wave of potatoes that swept over
Ireland and the Highlands in the late 18th century, and the cheese
that is made in Ireland today derives from a tradition introduced from England
in the late 20th century, or in the case of artisan cheese, from the
Netherlands, France etc.
Things were not quite as desperate in the Highlands. Isobel
Grant, in her book Highland Folk Ways, Routledge, 1961, comments: “Cheese
making was universally carried on. I have been told how it was made on the
smaller holdings in the days of older people’s grandmothers—about fifty years
ago. The curd, wrapped in a cloth, was put on the top shelf of a cheeser, a round staved vessel with a partition with many small holes bored in it about
two-thirds of the way down. A heavy stone was put on top and the whey drained
away through the holes. On larger farms, the cheeses were put into cheese
presses consisting of heavy blocks of stones in an iron frame...(page 216). She
comments later that that has all passes away, though “before the war, one could
meet with excellent home-made cheeses.”
This is another instance in which traditional practices lasted in the Highlands a few centuries past their extinction in Ireland. This was not because the Highlanders were more conservative, but because the English and Lowland Scots left them alone a bit longer.
Back to Meic Con Glinne.
Here he arrives at the Wizard Doctor’s house in the
Otherworld (In Fáthlega), or in Meyer’s English:
“Then we rowed across the expanse of New-Milk Lake
(lemnacht), through seas of broth, past river mouths of mead, over swelling,
boisterous waves of buttermilk, by perpetual pools of gravy, past woods dewy
with meat juice, past springs of savoury lard, by islands of cheeses (maethal),
, by hard rocks of rich tallow, by headlands of old curd (grothal), along
strands of dry cheese (tanach), until we reached the firm, level beach between
Butter Mount and Milk Lake and Curd Point ( grotha) at the mouth of the pass to
the country of O’Early-Eating in front of the hermitage of the Wizard Doctor.
Every oar we plied in New Milk lake would send its sea sand of cheese curds to the surface.”
Well, this is not all that tempting to me, but remember the
picture is calculated to excite a starving demon of gluttony. Irish people
actually ate a lot more oats and vegetables and milk products than they did
broth and tallow, and that is what I will focus on next week.
To finish, here is another snippet from the story.
“Then he (Mac Con
Glinne) sold the little stock he had for two wheaten cakes and a slice of old
bacon with a streak across its middle. These he put in his book satchel. And on
that night, two pointed shoes of hide, of seven-folded dun leather, he shaped
for himself.
He rose early on the morrow and tucked up his shirt over the
rounds of his fork (rear end) and wrapped him in the folds of his white cloak,
in the front of which was an iron brooch. He lifted his book satchel on the
arched slope of his back, In his right hand, he grasped his even-poised knotty
staff, in which there were five hands
from one end to the other...”( Meyer, p 8)
He arrives in Cork:
“This was one of the days of the three things, viz. wind and
snow and rain about the door: so that the wind left not a wisp of thatch, nor a
speck of ashes that it did not sweep with it through the other (opposite)_door,
under the beds and couches and screens of that princely house.” (Meyer p 10)
Hil-lathai na teorai in lá sin i. gaeth ocus snechta ocus
fleochud ina dorus , coná fárcaib in gaeth sifand tuga nó minda luatha cen
scuabad lee dar in dorus aile fo chólbaib ocus fo immdasdaib ocus fo cliathaib
in ríthighe.) (Meyer p11)
“Aimsir na trí síon anm lá sin: gaoth agus sneachta agus
fleachadh trí an doras isteach, ionas nár fhág
an ghaoth sifín tuí ná cáthnín luaithe gan scuabadh leí tríd an doras eile faoi cholbhaí agus faoi
iomhdhaí agus faoi cleathacha an rí-thighe.” (Ó Floinn, p. 5)
The tale is in Middle Irish, but survives in two later manuscripts:
a long version in An Leabhar Breac, written between 1408 and 1411 in one of the
MacEgan family school of traditional law in north Tipperary or east Galway: and
a short version in Trinity College H.3.18, a 700 page collection of various manuscripts
bound together. The section containing Aislinge Meic Conglinne might have been
written about 1700, maybe in Antrim or Roscommon, but the Trinity catalogue was
published in 1921 and the editors were not well-informed.
Making goat whey cheese in the mountains of Norway
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