After some flimflam, the people who decide these things settle on Bres, an illegitimate child of Eiru. The author then describe Bres' conception. Eiru is coolin out on the beach when a silver boat pulls up. On closer examination, the boat turns out to be a man who wants to have sex with Eiru.
The courtship is short:
The man said to her: "Shall I have an hour of lovemaking with you?"
"I certainly have not made a tryst with you," she said.
"Come without the trysting!" he said.
One Hour Later:
"Why are you crying?" he asked.
"I have two things that I should lament," said the woman, "separating from you, however we have met. The young men of the Tuathe De Danann have been entreating me in vain -- and you possess me as you do."
"Your anxiety about those two things will be removed," he said.
The ship-man (who finally tells Eiru he's Elatha mac Delbaith, king of the Fomoire) goes on to tell Eiru that she will bear a child who will rule Ireland and drive out invaders.
Assuming the sex was consensual (maybe a big assumption, but Elatha does have "golden-yellow hair down to his shoulders"), this passage adds to a long list of sex scenes from the sixteenth century and before where a god or king comes along and gets busy with a fine woman. Elatha doesn't have to say or do much to convince her, and the news of pregnancy either isn't a big deal to Eiru or is not discussed as such. Nota bene: she says specifically the two things that are bothering her, and neither one has to do with the act of sex itself; that appears to have gone off fine.
Instances of this kind of encounter abound. Courtly love stories in chivalric tales, Leda and the Swan, the Immaculate Conception, etc. all play with this notion of impulsive sex whose consequences are either neutral or incredibly positive. Again, the line between rape and sex here is poorly drawn. All I'm saying is it's conceivable within these stories' frameworks that the sex was consensual (so don't come bangin at me about Leda -- I'm well aware). Because the discussion of these scenes is so offhand, there's some reason to believe that the audience understood sex in a similar way.
I'm picturing a time before there was much to do but work in a field or be a landowner who had to fight to protect his land. Men and women just sort of got together and had sex, and if there was conception, they either got married or otherwise went along. The Church had ideas about feminine purity, whatever, but as a practical matter people probably did the deed a fair amount.
The coupling is important mainly as a generative act in these tales, as opposed to an act of any other kind. The window dressing around it is not that important to the narrator or to the audience; the important thing is that it did happen.
This is a very different approach to sex.
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