Banba

The sisters Banba (Banbha in modern spelling, pronounced BAHN-va), Ériu (Éire or Erin in modern Irish), and Fódla (or Fótla, modern Fódhla or Fóla) were members of the supernatural race of heroes and magicians called the Tuatha Dé Danann. According to the Lebor Gabála (Book of Invasions), they constituted the fifth wave of invaders in Ireland. When the sixth and final wave, the Milesians, conquered the island, they encountered three regal sorceresses, each of whom wanted the land named after her. After entertaining offers from Banba and Fódla they agreed to name the country after the more opulent and powerful Ériu (hence, Éire-land). Many ancient people invoked the name of Banba, however, and that name persisted through the centuries. Patricia Monaghan's Encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology and Folklore (2004) observes that "The name Banba remains today as a poetic term for Ireland" (34).

Joyce could have encountered references to Banba in various 19th century Irish writers. One was James Clarence Mangan, whose poems he devoured as a young man and whom he praised extravagantly in an early essay. He must have known the Lament for Banba, which mourns Ireland's "bondage" as a death:

O my land! O my love!
What a woe, and how deep,
Is thy death to my long-mourning soul!....

Other lands have their chiefs,
Have their kings, thou alone
Art a wife, yet a widow withal!
Alas, alas, and alas!
For the once proud people of Banba.

The high house of O'Neill
Is gone down to the dust,
The O'Brien is clanless and banned....

The language here is very different from the sentences in Cyclops, but one or two details suggest possible connections. Mangan mourns the death of Banba while Joyce has her mourn the death of Dignam. Mangan mentions Ulster's great O'Neill clans and Munster's O'Brien dynasty, while Joyce evokes the Gaelic past by mock-heroically transforming Paddy into the noble "O'Dignam." While he does not attempt anything like an imitation of the Lament for Banba, it seems possible that he was thinking of it.

His imagination might also have been stimulated by reading scholarly studies of the ancient legends. Slote, Mamigonian, and Turner note that Standish O'Grady, an Irish historian whom he seems to have consulted when writing about Cuchulainn, liked to refer to Ireland as Banba. The annotators observe that in The History of Ireland (1881) O'Grady wrote, "A writer of to-day will employ Erin where the bards used Banba" (174). It is not difficult to imagine Joyce encountering a sentence like that and spinning out of his teeming linguistic brain some lines that sounded bardic.

Nowhere else in Cyclops does one parodic aside immediately follow another. That Joyce chose to do so here suggests that, after exploring Theosophical ideas of an afterlife in which the human spirit prepares for reincarnation, he had more to say about non-Christian eschatology. Dignam is now said to be, not exactly dead, but "gone from mortal haunts," evoking the ancient Celtic idea of an Otherworld. According to a popular belief that has persisted through many centuries of Christian teaching, after the Milesians conquered Ireland the Tuatha Dé Danann went underground and became known by the term for earthen mounds, sidhe. Their descendants, the "fairies" known as sidhe or aos sí (pronounced SHEE) dwell in Tir na nÓg, the Land of the Young, and legends say that some human beings have visited that place in which time stands still. Perhaps Paddy, like Oisín, has left "mortal haunts" for immortal ones.

One more irregularity follows. Some dialogue about Paddy Dignam's death succeeds the parody, concluding in Bob Doran's slobbering drunken praises of "The finest man," "the finest purest character," "The noblest, the truest." This talk is the object of the parodic mockery, and a brief reprise of the Banba language follows it: "And mournful and with a heavy heart he bewept the extinction of that beam of heaven." Clearly this is the same voice that praised Dignam as the "sun of our morning," "Patrick of the beamy brow," but that parodic voice has been absent for quite a while. Joyce pulled the same trick while singing the praises of the produce markets, but in that instance only a short two-sentence paragraph interrupted the interruptive parody. Here seventeen such paragraphs of conversation intervene.

Slote and his colleagues note that the language in this part of the parody resembles a sentence in Hugh Blair's late 18th century "Critical Dissertation" to the Poems of Ossian: "But the poet's art is not yet exhausted. The fall of this noble young warrior, or, in Ossian's style, the extinction of this beam of heaven, could not be rendered too interesting and affected." Ossian (Oisín) is a legendary Irish bard, the son of Finn McCool, but in the 1760s Scottish poet James MacPherson claimed to have collected and translated a cycle of his heroic poems that had been kept alive in the Scottish Gaelic oral tradition. The poems were probably a hoax, composed by MacPherson himself, but they gained international renown in the 19th century and sparked interest in the revival of Gaelic language and culture in Ireland at the end of the century, helping return Oisín to his native land. Joyce's parodic mockery of Irish Literary Revival tropes here probably reflects awareness of this pan-Gaelic ping-pong and the alleged fraudulence of MacPherson's famous translations.