interview #2: roan m. runge on 'the colloquy between fintan and the hawk of achill'
animal transformations, affect, and referentiality in a medieval irish text
I like to go down some rabbit holes in this newsletter. I instinctively focus on the weird, the niche, and the hyperspecific when it comes to my media consumption, let alone the kinds of stuff I care about enough to write about. One of the things I most enjoy about interviewing people for this newsletter, then, is that they end up taking me down rabbit holes of their own, into fascinating niches I didn’t know existed.
That’s the case for this week’s interview with Roan M. Runge. Ze’s a PhD student at the University of Cambridge studying interspecies transformation in medieval Irish literature, and we talked about a specific poem they’re exploring in their research, ‘The colloquy between Fintan and the Hawk of Achill’. Even though I do have some background in medieval Irish literature, I was unfamiliar with this specific text, and I found talking about it with Roan fascinating. If you want to check the poem out yourself, ze’s created an amazing interactive twine translation, including their own translation and annotations. It’s an amazing piece of work, and you can find it here.
(Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity)
Ellie: Thanks so much for doing this. Without trying to pitch it, why do you love 'The colloquy between Fintan and the Hawk of Achill' and medieval Irish literature so much?
Roan: There’s quite a lot that draws me to ‘The colloquy’. It’s strange because this time last year, it really wasn’t on my radar, and I didn’t realise how central it was going to become to the first portion of my PhD. The prevalence of interspecies transformation is one of the things I love about medieval Irish literature. Many of the stories that I now recognise to be part of this literature that I knew as a kid featured this transformation, and I always found that a really fascinating part of it. These days, I understand that some of my attraction to interspecies transformation is because of my academic/personal interest in the instability of the body and the signification of the body. This is difficult to express, but I’m glad I’m speaking to you about it because I know you know what I mean. Certainly some of my interest in transforming creatures is because there’s a sense of recognition between me and them.
Right now, one of the things that’s drawing my interest is the emotional side of transformation, and that’s where I can get back to ‘The colloquy’. I started working on ‘The colloquy’ because there wasn’t a full translation of the poem, and the partial translation that exists is fairly out of date and shaky in places. When I started working on it, I thought I’d just do a translation but it might not really be a central part of my work. But as I got into it, it became more and more fascinating. Some of this background is in the twine, but basically (oh god where to start): there’s a complex of medieval Irish stories about this person called Fintan mac Bóchra, who is supposed to have arrived in Ireland trying to escape the biblical flood. This is a vague outline because the stories really do vary quite a lot, but this is the gist, especially as ‘The colloquy’ is understanding it. Anyway, it seems rather like transformation attaches itself to him over time — that he just starts out being depicted as a long-lived human but then later he’s depicted as changing shape a few times. So in ‘The colloquy’, he’s changed into a salmon (by God) in order to survive the flood. A little later, he’s a hawk, and an eagle.
But the thing that has really drawn me in to the poem is how emotional it is. Fintan repeatedly laments his age, the deaths of loved ones, and his ageing body, as does his interlocutor, the Hawk, who towards the end of the poem narrates how age has weakened it so that it struggles to carry home prey. There’s also a section closer to the beginning where Fintan describes the worst night of his life, which is a beautiful passage about trying to escape an icy river and getting trapped, at which point a bird swoops down and eats one of his eyes (which is, of course, immediately revealed to be the Hawk of Achill). Now there’s a lot of other points in different texts where emotion isn’t mentioned — sometimes we get the sense that transformed figures are revelling in their new shapes…and sometimes they seem unhappy. We also don’t get a sense of whether the human Fintan who is speaking in the poem misses his creature-shapes and wants them back.
And then there’s the ways in which the poem relates to modern life, including in the difficulty that medieval Irish literature has with pop culture. Another point is the proximity of transforming characters to the land: Fintan, for example, has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Ireland’s waterways because he is able to experience them as a fish. The emotive side of this is that some of the rivers are not as Fintan knew them—not only ‘you never swim in the same river twice’, but, for example, Ess Rúaid/Assaroe, the place where Fintan is trapped by the icy river, no longer exists in the same way. Once a famous salmon run, mentioned not only in this text, but in a number of others from the medieval period, it was dammed in the early 20th century to become a hydroelectric power station. This felt like a loss to me when I found out, but it’s hard for me to say why.
E: Your point about rivers reminded me somewhat of Elizabeth Povinelli's article 'Transgender Creeks and the Three Figures of Power in Late Liberalism' — it uses the figure of a tidal creek called Tjipel, so-named by Indigenous communities in Australia. I found this passage in particular extremely interesting:
This critique of the force of Tjipel makes a fundamental mistake in that it emphasizes the wrong angle of Tjipel’s difference. It closes off what she opens (blocks its ear, tjeingithut), namely, that she is not like us. Her existence is not there to make her like us — to make her have intention, agency, and purposeful action like we do. Her existence insists that we are like her, multiple and radically external to our skin sacks. If we demand that participants of governance speak and intend like us, then yes, we ban everything that does not conform to us from the hallways of the demos. If she is a creek or ecosystem, and thus outside the typical domains of sovereign forms of life, can she find a place in the politics of the demos on an equal footing with other entities found there? Can she differ — can she make herself a difference by differing from the given arrangements of existence — by disturbing the distribution of the sensible, that “system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions in [the common]” (Rancière 12)? Or will Tjipel stand outside the demos, denuded of her normative force, a part that seems to play no part, although her part will be to turn away from the demos, refusing to nourish it.
The odds that Tjipel, a composite non–life entity that can neither speak nor intend, will survive these forces are low. She nevertheless demands a new accounting of the formation of power in which she does and might potentially exist.
Anyway, that just occurred to me as both your and Povinelli’s accounts are interested in bodies of water which aren't (or won't be) there anymore, although of course the Indigenous specificity of the example of Tjipel limits its applicability to your work. How do you think you’d position your analysis in relation to work like Povinelli’s?
R: I think the very specific Indigenous context of Tjipel puts her outside of what I’m doing, and I don’t think it would be right for me to apply this analysis to my work on Fintan. However, as you point out, approaching something that late liberal/Western structures don’t see as alive as a positive actor is something that I feel is quite important, and Povinelli and I share this. For me, I see a figure like Fintan as someone/thing with agency even though he never really existed and isn’t alive. This is an idea that I feel has come via ecocriticism from writers like Donna Haraway. I feel I can be in conversation with Fintan, as a proper interlocutor.
E: I'm very interested in that moment of recognition you suggest in your first answer, and particularly in the sense I got reading it that a lot of these texts and transformations appear to slip beyond how we might attempt to pin them down. You mentioned, for example, that you had thought translating 'The colloquy' would just be an interesting task, but it ended up becoming something bigger. Within 'The colloquy' itself, too, I'm interested that Fintan's story has these Biblical origins, but obviously doesn't quite fit in the Bible's account of Noah and the ark — could you understand the animal transformation as an attempt to make him not contradict that original narrative, so his slipping outside of humanity comes from an attempt to fix him slipping outside of the narrative? (And so on: you could maybe say similar things about affect, for example.) My question is, then, do you think that part of the appeal of this text/these texts — and maybe where the recognition comes from — is in this slipping outside? Or am I missing something?
R: One of the really fascinating aspects of Celtic studies (and indeed other medieval studies), is the way we are able to track, or the way we can attempt to track, the changes to stories over time. So some people (like John Carey) have proposed that Fintan was not initially associated with the biblical story I mentioned before, that he was something separate, associated with longevity and maybe a flood legend, and then later was associated with Cessair, Noah’s granddaughter (who, again, is not in the Bible). Transformation, as well, seems like a later edition to the Fintan-story—the earliest narrative in which I can find him mentioned has no transformation, but a century or two later there he is saying he used to be able to transform. On the other hand, we don’t know what we don’t know, and we’re piecing all this together from an incomplete record. I suspect the transformation is there out of analogy with the story of Tuán mac Cairill, whose transformations are also associated with longevity, and that in turn is modelled on an older text.
You asked about whether Fintan’s animal transformations might have resulted from narrative concerns, and about whether this ‘slipping outside’ is part of the appeal of the text, and I’m afraid to say I don’t think the answer to either of these questions is a simple yes or no. I do think transformation is slippery, but I think that as much as Fintan’s transformation helps him slip out of humanity, it also brings animality into the text. And the particularly interesting thing about ‘The colloquy between Fintan and the Hawk of Achill’ is that neither of the speakers in the text is fully human, really. As much as Fintan is in a human shape while he speaks to the Hawk, his salmon-ness is incredibly present: he spends a good amount of time talking about his experiences as a salmon, and he brings a particularly salmon emotional slant to it. Life as a salmon for him was difficult, but it’s described in such incredibly beautiful terms that it’s hard for me not to feel that he misses it. This is a big affective leap! And more than likely projection on my part. But I think it’s still critical to my project that I examine all the emotional possibilities of Fintan’s time as an animal (and that of his peers, who I’m happy to talk about as well!). You can see this in the stanza where Fintan describes being trapped at Ess Rúaid in the cold:
My breath is taken away every time by the line ‘ticc in t-aighredh mur ghlain nguirmm’ (‘The ice comes like deep-blue glass’). I feel that the stanzas where Fintan talks about his salmon shape are some of the most resonant and most affective of the poem, which is one of the things that ultimately makes me so interested in it.
There’s two other things that draw me to it that I’d like to raise, both of which I’ve written a good deal about in my thesis. The first is that we’re told the poem is spoken in énbérla (bird language) in the first stanza — that Fintan remembers how to speak in the Hawk’s language from his own time as a bird and the poem is conducted in that speech, not in Irish, or Latin, or any other human language. The second is how referential the poem is: because both Fintan and the Hawk have survived all of Irish history, they are qualified to speak about pretty much every event in its history (the Hawk is not mentioned in any earlier texts, so it can be placed anywhere, basically because there’s no mention of it being somewhere else at any given time). As a result, a huge number of narratives that we see in other medieval Irish texts are referenced in this poem. It’s basically ‘Irish pseudohistory condensed into 116 stanzas’. And this is why I felt that I needed a good way of annotating it, because it is so incredibly referential. Most stanzas allude to something else, and some of the allusions needed a good deal of unpicking. And this is how, ultimately, I lit on the idea of the twine, because it would allow me to present the poem and its translation, with manuscript variants and annotations, in a way that isn’t a few lines of text and half a page of footnotes!
E: I'm fascinated by the referentiality here, but I wanted firstly to ask you about affect and emotion in the context of animal transformations. You talk about the 'particularly salmon emotional slant' to Fintan's accounts, and describe these feelings as both 'resonant and affective', but I think people might ordinarily expect non-human emotions to be more difficult to encounter or find resonant. Do you think that your/readers' emotional reaction to these accounts (either Fintan's or in other texts) is deepened by the animality of the affect? In what ways might this be the case?
R: So I think basically yes! Although I think part of it is to do with the fact that transformation and animality tends to be a site of emotion in the texts I’m looking at. What you seem to be asking is whether people respond to it more emotionally because it’s animal — and I think I certainly do — but I think in answer I would say that in fact part of this is because transformation usually has a lot of emotion involved. The transformations I’ve been looking at so far are associated with or triggered by a traumatic event — for Fintan, the biblical flood; for two others, local floods; and for a fourth, a plague. These threats to their lives don’t always cause immediate change, but in a number of texts there is a correlation between “life-altering event” and “change of body”. This is of course most famously seen in the case of Suibne Geilt, who is cursed by a saint, but the curse doesn’t totally kick in until he’s in a battle, and the noise of the battle drives him mad and then he sort of turns into a bird. We’ve all been there! Similarly, a different account of Fintan’s life specifies that it was the sound of the wave that made him mute, and which only God can resolve (in this account he doesn’t transform but the somatic change of inability to speak is also interesting). Basically, my point is that physical change in these texts is often associated with a difficult/tragic/traumatic event, so there’s emotion prior to transformation. For Fintan in this text, as well, the flood also causes the death of his [wife/girlfriend/well anyway they’re lovers], Cessair, so he speaks emotionally about that.
But after the change too there is often emotion involved. Some transforming figures, by virtue of what kind of animal they are, live in more difficult conditions than humans — at least three cases I can think of off the top of my head a transformed creature laments the cold of rivers of the sea, including Fintan. So there is often emotion surrounding the living situation they find themselves in. In some texts, too, you get some joy associated with animality, and I read that into this text. Fintan describes his time as a hawk as ‘fa muirn’ (in high spirits). The Hawk itself (though I would like to be clear there’s no suggestion that the Hawk transforms at all) also takes quite a lot of joy in its shape. I also feel that both of them describe many places with a lot of love. That’s undeniably true of the Hawk, anyway.
I think, to sum up, that certainly I may be reading some of my own emotions into this, but that in a lot of these texts, transformation itself is associated with emotion, but also animality itself can also be a route to the expression of emotion.
E: You talk about how you might be reading your own emotions into the text as something which might be obscuring/adversely affecting your analysis of what they're doing, but I’m interested in your affective response to it. What do you think your own feelings about and outside of the texts informs about your response to them? Or, a slightly different question, but what do you think these texts offer you as a reader?
R: I would certainly argue that the affect I am bringing to these texts — and the reciprocity they’re bringing to me — helps me understand them better. But it’s scary to say it so boldly because I think I might (understandably) be accused of bias, or show the flaws in my readings. We’ve spoken before of course about this, and I think this has even made it into one or two of my research proposals, but there’s a real trend in trans literature and media for unhuman/interspecies transness. When I was writing my master’s dissertation, Shape Shift with Me! by Against Me! was on heavy rotation, just for one little example. So I think that for me, bringing this kind of trans animality to the text helps me poke at the ways transforming figures exist in a social space. It has also helped me with having a look at gender and transformation — although none of my creatures change gender, and the few gender-change narratives in Irish that I know of have stable species. But it has helped me to think about another character who has a sort of transformative femininity, even though that transformation is in species, rather than, for example, physical change through hormones. My transness helps me look in novel ways at these texts, and I do believe that very firmly, even though my reading approaches are still evolving. I’m not trying to claim any of these creatures are actually trans, I want to make this clear. But I think reading them with a trans eye helps bring new aspects to light.
But this is a bit theoretical so maybe I’ll tie it back to Fintan here. I think for me one of my personal investments is in relationality, so I felt that bringing my own feelings about that to the text sent me to explore how the character Fintan in ‘The colloquy’ connected to other characters within that text, but also how his character in that text relates to him in other texts. I’ve spoken about the referentiality of ‘The colloquy’; and also that Fintan does appear in a number of other texts, but his transformation is less emphasised in these other texts. That basically means that there are a number of different Fintans, as well as the sort of Overarching Fintan who is an unstable pile of all the things that make up the individual Fintans. Obviously on the one hand this is a basic theoretical idea about literature — I think, for example, about our friend Kimberley Chiu’s work on fanfiction, and as well about comic theory where you have one character interpreted by a number of authors — but it’s my affective commitment to relationality that leads me to follow these threads.
Ah, and another thing. I’ve spoken about how emotional it was for me to find out that the falls at Ess Rúaid are different now, because of how significant they are in this poem, and after identifying that emotion I realised that I needed to examine how important place was in this text, which has been a really interesting and helpful strand to follow.
E: I really love how you think about relationality and connection here, and how, I suppose, that analysis is informed by your own relationship with the text — you mentioned above that you feel like you can engage with Fintan as an ‘interlocutor’, and that feels relevant here. Staying with the topic of relationships beyond the text, let’s return to the text’s referentiality. How do you think intertextuality functions here in informing how you/we/readers respond to the Colloquy, and how do you think it connects to the broader theme of animal transformation both in this text and across the literature?
R: I think intertextuality in this text is so central for a lot of reasons. The first, really, is that the intertextuality of the medieval audience for this tale would have been very different than that of the modern audience. We can’t say for sure, of course, what particular sections of Irish society would have connected in this text, but the ways in which the other narratives are embedded suggests that the poet expects an audience to understand at least some of them. Again, we can’t necessarily know the audience, but the references in the poem tie in with ideas and narratives that are being produced by a learned audience, in an ecclesiastical setting. However, I think that even a more casual medieval audience would have recognised far more in this poem than a casual modern audience. These references are a really central part of the poem, and a part of Fintan’s transformation.
This is one of the reasons why I felt so compelled to make the twine, because it allowed me to elucidate and showcase the references, including those I don’t understand. It makes a big difference to the poem whether you understand references or not. One I only understood recently was to ‘Illann’. In stanza III, Fintan says ‘mó rom-chraidh aidhedh Illainn’ (the death of Illann tormented me even more). Later, in stanza XXXI, Fintan refers to this person as Illann mac Scannláin, and says that he was Fintan’s foster-son. Illann mac Scannláin is a king in another Irish text (Scéla Cano meic Gartnáin), in which he is ultimately killed by his subjects for being a bad king. But Fintan doesn’t figure in that text, and it doesn’t really tie in with the Big Pseudohistorical Themes that come up in ‘The colloquy’ and other stories of Fintan.
Anyway, I eventually found a reference in an article which suggested that this wasn’t Illann mac Scannláin — that this was a conflation on the poet’s part, and that the Illann associated with Fintan was an Illann, ‘son of the king of Sorcha’, who was in a poem by a certain 14th century poet. The article suggested that this Illann was ‘elsewhere said to rejuvenate Fintan’ (Seán Ó Coileáin, ‘The Structure of a Literary Cycle’ Ériu 25 (1974), pp. 88–125, at 110). Worth following up, I thought! Anyway, with the help of some of the others in my department, I worked through this second poem, only to discover it wasn’t a young man, as I’d assumed, but an infant, whose breath gives Fintan youth. There’s no suggestion of Fintan’s many shapes in this poem, interestingly. However, Illann is described indeed as being the son of the king of sorchae, that is, brightness or light—which makes the baby, implicitly if not explicitly, Jesus. So I think this example is one where intertextuality is muddled, both for the poet and for us. Fintan mourning the son of the king of lightness might, in fact, be a reference to Christ’s crucifixion. Of course, it would also give Fintan extra contact with the divine if he can describe himself as being foster-father to Christ. But somewhere along the line, the composer of this poem has gotten mixed up with a different Illann.
Ultimately, however, what the referentiality in the text does is prove Fintan’s long life. He can mention all the places he’s visited and the people he’s seen, and this demonstrates that he really has been there and seen it. His aged body becomes physical evidence. It ties him in with this long and complex history, and also shows him as an arbiter of that history, because he can recite all of it. This is common across a number of the transforming figures I’ve been studying lately; they can repeat the history, which shores up their own authority at having experienced it. But this text is really over-the-top about it, which is one of the reasons I love it so much. Whereas Tuán, another transforming figure who recounts history, mostly sticks to the new groups of people who settle in waves over Ireland’s history, and Lí Bán and the Youth at Carn Eolairg (both also transforming ancients) mostly repeat information about the specific lakes with which they are associated, Fintan gives ALL of the history, including detailed accounts of some major battles. He mentions heroes across a number of narrative groups, both those more associated with the pseudohistorical tradition, those associated with the court of Conchobor (Cú Chulainn, Conall Cernach, etc), and early Irish kings.
There isn’t really any need for this, as the example of Tuán shows — he really could just rattle off the names of the settling groups and be done — but instead Fintan and the Hawk together work through a huge amount of information. This made the task of tracking down this information rewarding, but also frustrating. Illann is not the only place where the text has gotten a little bit stuck (see also the note to Druimm bFingin in stanza LX, for example). For me though, it was important to put all these references out in the public sight, so that the casual reader, and not just the PhD student, can get to grips with all the narratives that Fintan is referencing. It’s also worth saying that there’s still things that I haven’t figured out, and the beauty of a digital platform is that I can update when I have new information. So if you’re a person with knowledge about medieval Irish literature, and you find a gap in the twine, please do get in touch !
Well, having written another novel, I’m going to turn the tables and ask you a question! You have some familiarity with this literature, and I expect you’ve looked through at least some of the twine (it’s an absolute monster in length, I know!). What jumps out at you about this poem? What parts of it resonate with you?
E: So I think the first thing I noticed reading this (and I haven't yet got through the whole thing), compared to my admittedly quite limited knowledge of medieval Irish literature, was its intimacy — and, relatedly, its difference from what I've read elsewhere. The Irish narrative texts that I've read a) have been either entirely or primarily prose and b) generally don't leave much room for reflection and intimate connection — perhaps the Acallam na Senórach is an exception, but in many respects it's really quite different from this text. In that, I feel like it reminds me of the poetry I've read, all of which seems obsessed with moments of stillness and contemplation in much the same way as this — but again, it differs. I think I remember our old tutor Mark commenting that the difference between medieval Irish poetry and medieval English poetry (particularly Old English) is that in the former, it's always sunny, while it never stops raining in the latter. But in this there's tons of rain, and it shares the referentiality, historical sweep, and interest in animality which I more instinctively associate with the prose.
I suppose what I'm gesturing at, perhaps poorly, is that what struck me most of all was how different it was from what I've read elsewhere, not necessarily because it has anything that's not present in the rest of the literature, but because it combines multiple elements in ways I'm not familiar with. Which, I suppose, is oddly appropriate for a text about strange combinations and sometimes-confounding experiences and transformations. Does that track with your opinion of the text? Is there anything I'm missing?
R: Oh I’d forgotten that saying of Mark’s! It is true that the tone of (especially earlier) medieval Irish poetry can be quite a lot different from English poetry of the same period. I imagine this is particularly in reference to those poems in the medieval Irish corpus about nature and all the beauty of nature. You’re right that this poem differs quite a lot in tone from some of those, but it’s not alone in that. There’s actually a group of poetry like this, in particular that which discusses ageing—and some of those themes are present indeed in Acallam na Senórach (The colloquy of the ancients). I mentioned in my last answer the confusion between the two Illanns, and actually the article that sorts those two out (Ó Coileáin, ‘The Structure of a Literary Cycle’) suggests that Illann mac Scannláin gets knotted into this poem because of comparison with a complex of texts associated with part of Cork. One of these texts, Aithbe dam-sa bés mara (usually titled ‘Lament of the Cailleach [Old Woman of] Beare’ in English), is also about a person lamenting the passage of time and the changes to the body that come with old age. Ó Coileáin writes of ‘The colloquy’ that 'in general themes the poem is reminiscent of the lament and traditions of the Caillech reflecting as it does on the ravages of time, the processes of aging and renewal, the great antiquity of its subjects, the alternation of joy and suffering, and the loss or threatened loss of sight (Structure, p.110–11). He goes on to note that Fintan is sometimes described as the Caillech’s son, but I haven’t followed up that reference. This, he says, is why the two Illanns got confused. But beyond any supposed genealogical relation between two of their speakers, there is a link in theme. We might say that for Fintan and the Caillech, it used to be sunny, but now it’s raining. Although I think even there, there’s some room for more nuance. Fintan describes tragedies in his past, and even at this point where his body does not have its youthful strength, he is looking forward to a future where he will be in heaven. The end of ’The colloquy’ does explicitly say that both Fintan and the Hawk will be going to heaven upon their deaths the next day.
But you’re right, the poem does combine quite a lot of different elements to particular effect. As I’ve said above, I think one particularly interesting part of this poem is that it’s conducted in énbérla (bird-language) — I can’t think of another text where we’re told it’s going on in an unhuman language — and that the other speaker is an animal.
I think some of the intimacy you describe has to do with the poetic medium — you can certainly get this kind of recollection in direct speech in prose (see some of the other stories about Fintan, for example), but there’s quite a lot of medieval Irish poetry in the first person. I imagine that some of what you haven’t seen is just based on the selection of texts you’ve been taught, and I imagine you’ll have mostly seen much shorter and earlier poems. I certainly wouldn’t associate the animal entirely or even slightly more strongly with prose — I think, for example, of Suibne Geilt, the notorious birdlike man of Buile Ṡuibne, whose prophetic madness extends to long poems. Likewise, Fintan himself narrates a few poems in dindsenchas (place-name lore) materials, where he recounts how a place gets his name, and in one of these he mentions that he’s been a salmon.
But I do think that this text, maybe especially because it’s a bit later, is able to draw on quite a lot of different sources and material of various genres in order to create this text that a) recounts a history of Ireland, b) is very emotional, c) works within a frame of the early Christian period, and d) follows a strict poetic metre, alliteration, and rhyme scheme! I think looking at the poem from a lot of different angles can bring more out of it, and I’ve really enjoyed this chance to talk about it with you and try to see more of those angles.