Cú Chulainn and Il'ya of Murom: Two Heroes, and Some Variations on a Theme
Dean Miller
University of Rochester
Abstract
Cú Chulainn and Il’ya of Murom can be identified as emblematic heroes of the old (or early medieval) Irish and the medieval Slavo-Russian narrative contexts. They are drawn together most particularly because both are intimately involved in the scenario we call the “Father-son conflict,” a widely occurring Indo-European theme where the hero (knowingly or unwittingly) kills his heroic son.
In terms of this theme both of these figures resemble one another because of the violence of the combat and the un-warrior way in which it is resolved; Cú and Il’ya also show other resemblances: in physical size, ferocious temper, and some other characteristics. Il’ya is shown (by de Vries, e.g.) to have found a place in the German medieval narratives; the direct Celtic connection may not be far to seek.
However, this paper is most concerned with that combat of father against son, and here I must extend (and complicate) the context and bring in the Greek mythic material, most obviously the “Oedipal shift,” where son slays father. How can this shift be explained? The most believable explanation would seem to point to the “political” development of Greek society; the archaic mobility of the old (archaic) hero is caught and stabilized in the polis (heroic foundation of this or that city-state is widely seen — the hero's death is fatal but not final, and it “fertilizes” civic society). Oedipus may not be as important here as, in mythic terms, a pivotal figure such as the hero-king Theseus or (less pertinently) Herakles.
Another movement away from the archaic, pre-civic (pre-political) IE pattern might have to do with the importance of the Sovereignty Goddess figure: she is explicit in the Irish material (most famously, Queen Medb) and implicit in the Russo-Slavic context, while in ancient Greek myth Hera, surely a sexually potent Sovereignty Goddess if only in vestigial form, significantly gave way to the virginal Political Goddess, Athena.
My conclusions will necessarily be tentative, but will have to do with the complex interplay of individual, family, tribe (or community) and proto-polity as dramatized in hero-tales from the Celtic, Slavic, and Greek narrative contexts; we will see the “Father-son conflict” re-plotted (and re-cast) and we will look for further illumination here, where the importance of absolute temporal identification (we are dealing with different time periods as they generate our three groups of sources) gives way to thematic congruence — or variation.