At only three pages in length, the ancient Irish tale, “The Adventures of Connla the Fair,” presents its readers with a seemingly straightforward account. Here, a king’s son defies his father’s wishes by abandoning his homeland alongside a beautiful woman. However, as the story’s introduction in Ancient Irish Tales warns, focusing merely on the surface story leaves readers in “danger of mistaking the economy and terseness of this story for barrenness of imagination” (Cross and Slover, 488).
Upon closer examination, a more compelling and multidimensional metaphorical aspect of the story emerges, as the role of its mysterious female figure comes into question. Considering her substantial contribution to the story’s magical nature and the metaphysical suggestiveness of the details surrounding her actions, she appears to embody the violation of the physical, which the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines as something “having material existence; perceptible especially through the senses and subject to the laws of nature.
More specifically, “The Adventures of Connla the Fair” exemplifies the representation of this woman as mediator between the physical and the metaphysical by serving as a vehicle by which the act of transcendence occurs and through which transcendental forces act in the world of mortals. In order to delve into this disguised metaphorical component, it is important to explain exactly what this ancient text’s concrete events entail. The story begins by describing the appearance of a beautiful woman before Connla the Bold, son of high-king Conn the Hundred-Fighter.
This woman, whose name is never specified and who claims to hail from the Land of the Living, is only visible to Connla and requests that the young prince accompany her to Mag Mell, a land with “no weeping and no sorrows” (488). Conn, who can hear but not see the woman, commands his druid to cast a magical spell to banish the woman’s “heathen words of magic” (488). However, before being driven away by the druidic chant, she tosses Connla an apple, which becomes his sole and inexhaustible source of nourishment for a month.
After this month full of yearning for this enigmatic female visitor, she reappears; this time, she summons Connla to a land inhabited only by women. Then, in a sudden and abrupt turn of events, Connla decides to abandon his home in Ireland. The story then concludes, leaving its readers with an image of the young prince sailing away with the woman on a crystal boat, never to be seen again. The next question that arises in attempting to dissect the woman’s role in this concise sequence of events is how the minimal amount of information given about her identity could possibly point to a more deeply rooted metaphorical relationship.
In answering this, the best place to begin is with the most salient aspect of this woman’s otherwise unspecified identity, the fact that she hails from the Otherworld. In Irish literature, this is the broader term for the realm that encompasses the Land of the Living, the Land of Women, and Mag Mell. In addition to the regions it includes, the Otherworld, as defined more generally by the Dictionary of Celtic Mythology, is a “realm beyond the senses, usually a delightful place, not knowable to ordinary mortals without an invitation from a denizen” (MacKillop, 317).
Considering this definition, the Otherworld undeniably qualifies as one of the components of this story that goes beyond the physical. More significantly though, Connla’s mystical woman serves as the only source of evidence of, knowledge of, and communication with this unseen place. By acting not only as an informant and mediator for the Otherworld, but also as the ‘denizen’ alluded to in the Dictionary of Celtic Mythology, the story’s female visitor represents a vessel by which a mortal enters this domain exempt from physical constraints and the laws of nature.
Thus, it is her relationship to the Otherworld, which establishes the first way in which she aids in the process of a mortal’s transcendence. Moreover, the fact that this theme is not unique to “The Adventures of Connla the Fair” further supports its claim. The idea of female representatives from the Otherworld who grant mortals knowledge and passage into the Otherworld is also a central theme in the Ulster cycle tale, “The Wasting Sickness of Cu Chulainn. Though her power to allow mortals to transcend the physical by entering the Otherworld appears to be a theme supported by another story, the mechanism of transcendence offered by the female figure in “The Adventures of Connla the Fair” is of a more permanent nature. Specifically, she enacts this process via death. As Anne-Claire Mulder states, the divine is “an ambiguous force: a life-giving and life-sustaining force as well as a destructive power” (359).
The woman in this story serves as a proxy for both of these facets of the divine, but in keeping with the ways in which she facilitates the process of transcendence, the death aspect of her metaphorical role in the text is discussed first. The claim that she brings about ascendance of a mortal by bringing death is conditional upon the existing notion that the Otherworld acts as the Irish analog of the afterlife (MacKillop, 317). Considering that this mysterious woman serves as Connla’s means of exit from the mortal world and entry to the Otherworld, her representation as a death bearer and afterlife liaison begins to take shape.
One piece of evidence, which suggests that Connla’s crystal boat voyage to the Otherworld equates to his death, appears in the woman’s description of what he will find when he arrives. She explains that Connla will find “assemblies of your native land, among you beloved kinsmen” (489). The suggestion of encountering ancestors serves as a telltale sign of the Otherworld’s postdeath nature in this text and falls right in line with Hull’s ideas in “The Development of the idea of Hades in Celtic Literature” (Hull, 134). The fact that he is never seen again further establishes this notion that the woman’s actions result in
Connla’s entering of a world beyond the senses via the irreversible process of death. Moreover, the use of this specific female figure as the link between death and the afterlife parallels the more general notion of the Morrigan and the Badb as the goddesses of death throughout Irish literature. Along with serving in this intermediary role between life and death, this female figure also embodies the means through which the “lifegiving and life-sustaining” transcendental forces operate in the mortal world (Mulder, 359).
The most evident observation in beginning to unravel this association lies in the information directly given in the text. More specifically, the knowledge that she originates from the Land of the Living, “will know neither death nor old age”(488), and speaks on behalf of the immortals establishes the foundation for this claim by demonstrating that she is privy to the metaphysical concept of immortality. This given information, along with other less easily discernable details about her actions, make a case for her serving as a symbol related to the creation and maintenance of a life.
Among these details, which the story presents in a trivial and easily overlooked fashion, the most important is the apple given to Connla by the female visitor. The Dictionary of Celtic Mythology describes the apple in Irish literature as “an emblem of fruitfulness and sometimes a means to immortality” (MacKillop, 19). Moreover, the fact that this woman’s apple is undiminishing, much like the ‘wellspring’ from which all life originates, and Connla’s only means for sustenance further suggests that its female provider is a proxy for the transcendental forces responsible for life.
Aside from serving as the vehicle for life-and-death processes, the woman in “The Adventures of Connla the Fair” functions as the sovereignty goddess, a female figure “whose union with the prospective king ensures his sovereignty” (Ni Bhrolchain, 12-13). By dictating a king’s right to rule, the goddess figure is effectively in full control of a mortal’s elevation achieved by becoming a rightful ruler.
This mediation between royal authority and the ivine by a woman figure is well explained in the “Transcendence for All” chapter of Goddesses Who Rule, which states that “the goddess of sovereignty then bestows her gifts on all who are worthy, transforming what is limited, mortal, and human into what is beyond death, blessed, god-like” (Benard, 258). A key aspect of the sovereignty goddess is the great power associated with her volition. In this story, the mere act of her choosing Connla has significant consequences for his mortal existence.
After having had only two brief encounters with the mystical female visitor, Connla claims that “longing for the woman has seized” him (490). The true extent of the power associated with her decision appears when Connla chooses to abandon all that is known to him as a result. Moreover, the language she uses to describe Connla makes the royal aspect of his being salient, and thus suggests that sovereignty forms the basis for her particular choice. As evidence for this, she states that, “the fair crown that sits above thy ruddy countenance is a token of thy royalty” (489).
Thus far, all of the evidence discussed seems to point the woman’s association with deciding rightful sovereignty as an example of her facilitation in the process of transcendence. However, by stating that she speaks for the immortals who “call on” Connla and “summon [him] to the people of Tethra” (489), the un-named woman suggests that she carries out the will of these divine beings. Thus, the idea of this woman as the goddess of sovereignty in this story exemplifies both the facilitation of the transcendental process and acting as the medium for transcendental forces.
One issue that arises when equating this female figure with the sovereignty goddess lies in the fact that there is little suggestion of Connla’s becoming a king due to her choice. However, this may simply be an artifact of the story’s abrupt and inconclusive ending, which does not exclude the possibility that Connla exercises his given royal right once he reaches the Land of Women. Through her various connections to the transcendental, the female figure in this brief, ancient text serves as mediator for the realm beyond mortals.
What her existence symbolizes provides a way to blur the lines of the strict dichotomy of physical vs. the metaphysical suggested by the story’s concrete events. Thus, the warning presented in its introduction does readers justice, for taking the text as merely a sequence of events precludes this important theme embedded within. Moreover, even though this female figure’s actions are specific, her lack of name suggests that her identity, and what it represents here, is the manifestation of a more general theme. This particular instance of symbolism not only adds a new level of complexity to this tale’s simple plot, but may also offer an indication to the role of women in medieval Irish literature as a whole.
