"The Brave and the Bold" - The Scholarly Review IV
A Celtic Studies scholar reviews Batman and Wonder Woman's caper in the Celtic Otherworld
The truth of Elatha’s murder still eludes Batman and Wonder Woman! Now, they seek out the person closest to him who may provide answers. However, there is yet more to this mystery than they could ever have anticipated.
This part of the review is probably some of the most fun I’ve had with any scholarly review because I got to do some actual translation work in addition to analyzing the literary inspirations of the story.
Batman and Wonder Woman continue their investigation of King Elatha’s murder following their failed interrogation of several of his loyal Fomorian subjects. There is a brief scene in the Dé Dannan court where the Fomorian Captain Furf raises his issues with the formal investigation. They request for “Fomorian martial law” to be implemented. This reference is likely an invention of the author but does make for an interesting distinction between the more refined culture of the Dé Dannan. I have mentioned before that scholars theorize the Fomorians, as they appear in stories written during the Viking Age, may be stand-ins for the Norse raiders who were upturning Irish society at the time. Although the Norse had their own complex legal system along with storied arts and crafts, it is possible the native Irish nobility saw them as lacking any culture aside from warfare and simple farming. This hostile, degrading perception assigned to Fomorians (if they are indeed parallels for the Norse) have carried over into modern fiction, evidenced on the surface by their regular portrayal as monsters (however, they may have been considered monstrous beforehand). The Brave and the Bold continues this trend by making the traditional Fomorian legal system “martial law” as opposed to potentially more bureaucratic institutions perpetuated by the Dé Dannan.
In order to acquire more time for their investigation, Wonder Woman secures permission for she and Batman to visit the castle of Dagda’s Keep to meet the King’s wife Ethné. The castle is located on a skellig on the sea, connected to the mainland by a bridge and is seemingly carved out of the rock itself. The architecture somewhat resembles a gothic castle with some signs of overgrowth and decay. Inside the castle itself, Queen Ethné reinforces truth about the Fomorian crafts behind Tir Na nÓg and that the Dé Dannan are also descended from the same race. She also unveils a more detailed account of The Brave and the Bold’s interpretation of Cath Maige Tuired (which she calls “The Battle of Moytura”). This version definitely puts more focus on the alliance between the Fomorians and Dé Dannan as well as the key players in the unsteady peace and eventual conflicts: Elatha, Nuada, Breas, and Balor.
I’ve already written at length about Cath Maige Tuired in several articles beforehand, but there are a number of marked differences I’ll point out here. First is that Balor is present in both the first and second battles, with there being a clear distinction that he rules the “Sea Fomorians.” It is not made clear in the chapter or elsewhere what the distinguishes his Fomorians. Ethné is also said to be “a daughter of the Dé Dannan,” although the character she likely takes her name from (Ethniu) is Balor’s granddaughter, which would make her a Fomorian. Additionally, Elatha is made Balor’s brother, which it is not entirely clear if the two are related in the original story other than both of them being Fomorians. Lugh is also entirely absent from this version and elevates Elatha to the role of the protagonist and leader of the sidhe forces. Nuada’s trajectory follows a similar path of initially losing his arm then regaining his kingship after acquiring a new silver one. Furthermore, he is also given deeper characterization as functioning like a son for Elatha.
Unsatisfied with their meeting with the Queen, Batman and Wonder Woman search the grounds of the castle and located the tomb of Nuada. Batman manages to open the tomb using the phrase, “Oscail do mo mhac Nuada…” I spent an inordinate amount of time on this one phrase as I both understood why the author would use it but also knew it did not quite line up with what makes sense for the Irish Otherworld. The phrase is in Irish, but more specifically in Modern Irish. The stories of the Tuatha dé dannan are mostly in Old Irish, which developed and was used after the fall of Rome and into the Early Medieval Period. What’s even more confusing is that whatever people the Tuatha dé dannan were based off likely would not have spoken Irish or any Celtic language period. Even with that in mind, I wanted to try an alternative phrase that would be a bit closer to the antiquated Irish used in the sagas of the Mythological Cycle.
To start, the phrase means “Open for my son Nuada.” Grammatically, the phrase works for the purposes of this alternative as it follows the standard Verb Subject Object order for the Irish language. The first word, oscail (meaning “open”), needs to undergo some change not only to regress it to the Old Irish word but to change its case entirely. The standard Old Irish form of “open” in the present, third-person tense is osclaid, however, since Batman is using it as a command, it would need to be conjugated for the second-person imperative (this is the case used whenever you ask or wish for something). The new form would be oslaic which can be translated as “you open.”
What makes things slightly more interesting is that the verb is immediately followed by a preposition, which normally puts everything after it in the dative case. The preposition in question is do (“to/for”) which has not changed much since its use in Old Irish. Next is the personal pronoun for “my” which is mo, this also has not altered much in the last thousand years. Following that we have (in the modern Irish) mac, which is the word for “son,” which we see a lot of in Irish surnames and is commonly contracted to “Mc.” The alterations to this word in the Old Irish context are minimal but still change a bit of how it looks at a glance. First, the normal Old Irish spelling of the word is macc however sometimes the second -c is dropped in some writings. Second, we would remove the -h- as it does not often show up in Old Irish words (in original manuscripts at least) since it is not something native to the Gaelic alphabet. The inclusion of -h- is a more recent standardization in the language to distinguish particular sounds, namely those affected by lenition where a consonant becomes softened in certain cases. In the instance of mac/mhac, the latter form would be pronounced like “vahk” as when -m- is lenited it sometimes sounds like a -v- (or a -w- depending on the word). In Old Irish, lenition isn’t always apparent at first glance (except usually with -th-), you just have to know what words cause lenition and what words sound like when they are lenited. Mo for example causes lenition, so the first consonant of any word that comes after it would be lenited (e.g., mo m(h)acc).
Before I get too caught up in the complexities of Old Irish grammar, I’ll conclude this alteration by looking at the last word, Nuada. The Old Irish form of Nuada is Núadu, but since its placement after a preposition would put in the dative case we get it as Nuadait.
All together, the alternative I would suggest for the pass phrase would be “Oslaic do mo macc Nuadait.”
Batman is acquires this phrase by closely examining Ethné’s ring, which has it engraved in the Latin script. Although this makes sense for convenience sake, it does not make a lot of sense for the Dé Dannan to use the Latin alphabet. The character Ogma of the Tuatha dé dannan invented the ogam alphabet so if anything the dé dannan would be using that. Ogam was used in Primitive Irish inscriptions but can, in some cases, be used for Old Irish. I’ll be brief with this alternative offering and just show a picture of how the phrase (in Old Irish) would look when written in ogam:
In addition to being slightly more faithful to the setting, this would look nicer when engraved on a ring.
In Nuada’s tomb, Batman and Wonder Woman discover the silver arm missing. They return to the court of the Dé Dannan with news of its disappearance, but King McCool declares that the Fomorians will receive the war they seemingly desire so much.
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