#trwth

Love to put placenames in the Táin into Google Maps to see whether it's plausible for Cú Chulainn to get somewhere and back in the time given and It Is Not but ☝️ there is a bus route.

i made a new addition to my cu chulainn / fer diad playlist:

The trouble with paying attention to all the tiny details of TBC that I missed last time I looked at these passages is that I don't really have anything to do with most of these observations. What does it mean that the woman Cú Chulainn runs off to meet at the beginning is identified as his 'concubine' in R1 but not in LL? And that some of the manuscripts imply this was a secret/hidden relationship? Is it significant that this is also the recension that mentions Emer, and so he has both a concubine and a wife in this one, whereas neither label is used in LL? Does it matter?

One thing I love about Táin Bó Cúailnge is that I've lost count of the number of times I've read it, the amount of hours I've spent poring over different recensions, all the details I've spent weeks teasing out -- and still, I can pick it up and notice something new about it almost immediately. It's been one of my main academic focuses for eight years now and I am still spotting things I never noticed! And will probably continue to do so forever!

"Do you not remember when you were fighting the harsh and grizzled Germán Garblas above the borders of the Tyrrhene Sea, and you left your sword with the enemy army? It was Cúchulainn who killed a hundred warriors to reach it and bring it back to you."

I am not actually currently writing TRWTH, but my brain was feeling sad because I haven't drafted anything new for over a year, and I wanted to scratch the itch without getting sidetracked by something completely new (especially as I'm supposed to be focusing on academic work at the moment). Since this is my next contracted book, and since I can already tell it's going to be an incredibly slow and difficult writing process with a lot of backtracking and rewriting, I figured I might as well play with some opening chapters (that I will probably subsequently delete). In case you were wondering.