Well, as you can guess, we didn't get the day off for Independence Day. We did get jelly beans from one of the program directors though. :)
We have different professors for the same class sometimes, but today for Gaelic Culture we had the head of the Irish Department at UCD (University College-Dublin) again. He is, well, like one of my classmates described him: a foulmouthed, belligerent little hobbit, but not in a way that's offensive. I just wish that I could take credit for that moniker!!!
We learned about the great Irish Epic, Tain Bo Cualnge or The Cattle-Raid of Cooley. A brief way to describe it is that it's about a fight between two bulls......
Obviously there's more to it than that, but it would take WAY to long to explain it and it's nearing 2300 my time here.
The main characters are Queen Mebd (pronounced Maeve); Aillel, her husband and the great Irish hero: Cuchulain (Coo-hulan). Mebd is Queen of Connaught and Cuchulain is a warrior of Ulster.
It's starts with a dispute between Mebd and her husband about how much wealth they each have and they discover that they have exactly the same amount of wealth, except that Aillel has a bull where Mebd does not.
Queen Medb of Connaught gathers an army in order to gain possession of the most famous bull in Ireland, which is the property of Daire, a chieftain of Ulster. Because the men of Ulster are afflicted by a debilitating curse, the seventeen-year-old Cuchulain must defend Ulster single-handedly.
The interesting thing about The Tain is that it was written in prose, whereas the other epics, The Illiad, The Odyssey, were written in poetry. This just goes to show how intelligent and advanced the Irish were!
It's impossible to date it as it was at first an oral story, passed down through the generations, but within The Tain there is no mention of Christianity at all. It is entirely pre-Christian. It wasn't written down until Saint Patrick came to Ireland, bringing the art of writing with him.
It's a pretty cool tale with some very nice writing in it. You can google The Tain and come up with a good number of hits, if you're interested.
As far as the rest of my forth went, it was relatively uneventful. The girls downstairs in house 61 made this huge American-style meal...burgers, corn-on-the-cob and all, which was very nice of them.
Until later!