LHMP #467 Ó Síocháin 2017 The Case of The Abbot of Drimnagh

We start with an overview of the events of the story. A medieval Irish abbot falls asleep on a hill at Easter, wakes up as a woman, encounters a supernatural female figure, goes to a nearby monastery where he meets, marries, and has children with the “erenagh” of the monastery. [Note: “erenagh” was a post, often hereditary, that served as a sort of business manager for the monastery.] On another Easter, he falls asleep on the same hill as previously and wakes up as a man. He returns to his original home and is told by his wife that he’s only been gone an hour. But the erenagh that he married, and their seven children exist at the neighboring monastery and they arrange for shared custody of the children.

The earliest manuscript versions of the tale date to the 14th century, but linguistic and cultural aspects of the text suggest the original date of composition to be in the early 13th century.

There follows a critical edition of the text with English translation. The focus is on trying to untangle the linguistic and cultural nuances of this anecdote. What did it mean in context? How do the supernatural/otherworldly elements contribute?

The protagonist is described as a beautiful and richly-dressed man, carrying a sword. (Keeping in mind that he’s the abbot of a monastery.) When he wakes as a woman, she is equally beautiful, dressed in women’s clothing, and carrying a distaff. [Note: the sword and distaff are both highly gendered attributes.] While the protagonist is trying to figure out what happened, a large, frightening, ugly woman wearing armor comes along and the protagonist explains her predicament, expressing sorrow and gender dysphoria. (The armor-wearing woman then disappears from the story.) The protagonist travels to a nearby monastery and encounters a tall, martial man who falls instantly in love with her and has sex with her. The protagonist refuses to explain her background or history. This new man says he is the erenagh of the monastery and a widower and that it makes sense for them to marry. The protagonist goes to live with him as his wife for seven years and bears seven children.

At the end of seven years, their entire household is invited to an Easter celebration at the original monastery, resulting in the protagonist falling asleep again on the very same hill. This time he wakes up as a man, with his original sword beside him. He goes to his old home and tells his wife the tale, but she says he’d only been gone less than an hour. The tale now jumps to a legal judgement between him and the erenagh, in which it is decided that they would divide custody of the seven children.

[Note: In some ways, this is structured as a “dream story”—a common context for otherworldly tales. Except that the events in the dream appear to have actually occurred in the “real world” through a warping of time.]

The analysis looks at various other folk tales involving sex change, including the Greek myth of Tiresias and an Urdu legend (from India), among others. In general, fanciful tales of female-to-male change focus on the social role of the protagonist, while these tales about male-to-female change focus on sex and the experience of gender. For them, the sex change is presented as a curse or a catastrophe. The Urdu tale has several striking parallels, in the encounter with an ugly woman (who forcibly marries the protagonist during an interim transformation to a different male body) and the motif of discovering a gendered object associated with the change episode.

Sex change is a frequent motif in Hindu tales, especially triggered by bathing in a magical pool. Sometimes the reverse change happens in the same location, similarly to what happens in the Irish tale. In some of the comparable tales, the male-to-female sex change is a divine punishment.

The motif of no time elapsing (despite pregnancy and childbirth) also occurs in comparable material.

More modern Irish and Scottish folk tales with a sex change motif are not close parallels to this medieval text. They lack the monastic context, the ugly woman, and the fairy hill. [Note: The text rather assumes that the reader is familiar with the “fact” that if you spend the night on a fairy hill, weird stuff is going to go down.] Rather than looking for direct transmission connections to these more recent tales, the author suggests that all of the sex-change tales may be elaborating on an “ancient international motif.”

The article spends a while examining the concept of authorship and narrative voice.

The next section of the text looks at the historic/cultural context of the story and what relationship the story’s characters, places, and events might have to historic “reality.” Both the positions of abbot and erenagh had authority over religious institutions, but were not necessarily clerics (in medieval Ireland), but could be held by secular members of families that had hereditary authority over the religious institutions.

The protagonist is described in heroic terms, not religious ones. Despite his initial anxiety and dysphoria, the protagonist embraces (literally) life as a woman, but retains the same internal consciousness and memories through both changes. Despite this, he has no emotional reaction to leaving/losing a spouse at either of the transformations.

The “ugly woman” that the protagonist first encounters serves no obvious narrative role except possibly to signal the shift to the otherworldly setting that the protagonist has clearly entered. Though one may speculate that she may have effected the change as punishment for him trespassing on a fairy mound. (A motif that occurs in other tales.) The time slippage clearly indicates that the seven years were spent in the otherworld. But the “ugly woman” need not be a malevolent figure if she is seen, instead, as precipitating a necessary hero’s adventure, leaving him with the gift of offspring. (There’s no mention of children from his original wife.) [Note: although the author doesn’t say it in as many words, we may be dealing here with a fragmentary text of an original that included more context and details that would make better sense of these points.]

The next section of the article examines the motifs of metamorphosis and how female symbolism is used. Philosophical and religious misogyny are reflected in all types of sex-change motifs. Male-to-female change is humbling and humiliating; female-to-male change is empowering and ennobling.

The next section discusses the motif of marriage and sexual relations and how they function in the story. This is complex in early Irish society, as a variety of types of unions and relationships had legal status and definition, though all might fall under the umbrella of “marriage.” Clerical marriage was allowed in the early church (and even when later discouraged, might be prevalent).

The next section discusses genre distinctions—oral versus literary, Pagan versus Christian, and how they manifest in the text. “Wonder tales” were universally popular, though they might take different forms in Pagan and Christian culture. (E.g., fairy magic versus saints’ miracles.)

A concluding section sums up the author’s take on this text.