Cuchulainn Reinvented: Guardians of the Galaxy, Manga and 5 more bizarre appearances.

Most people know Cuchulain as Ireland's most famous mythological hero, defender of Ulster, warrior against armies and international lover ( he had a thing going on the side with a Scottish girl - worth looking up) but what most people don't realise is how Cuchullain has been re-imagined in modern pop culture. I've just written a novel re-imagining the different 
cycles of Irish mythology into one small modern Irish town, so I thought I'd look this up and I wasn't disappointed.

1) Guardians of the Galaxy.
In the original comics on which the movie was based, Cuchulainn ( pictured above), The Irish Wolfhoud, is resurrected in the 31st century ( thanks to magic from the Book of Kells no less) to  fight alongside the Guardians and protect the earth into infinity. 

First appearing in Guardians of the Galaxy Annual #3, he's a "master of all forms of archaic combat" and on at least one occasion has to actually defeat the Guardians themselves in combat. His weapons appear to be what he calls his "throwing stick" ( the Gae Bolg ) and his ignorance of 31st century culture seems to be his only weakness.

Photo courtesy of Marvel Comics.




2) Slaine.

Photo Courtesy of 2000 AD

Slaine is an impossibly muscular and singularly brutal warrior from the pages of 2000 AD in Britain. In truth, Slaine is a mixture of both Conan the Barbarian and Cuchulainn, but the entire strip is set against a backdrop of Celtic mythology and in moments of particular trouble, Slaine descends into what he calls his 'warp spasm' which is unmistakably the ríastrad of Cúchulainn ( down to the one protruding eye ), as well as carring his barbed spear the Gae Bolg.

Slaine has been hand painted by a slew of impressive comic-book illustrators, none as famous as Simon Bisley, who imagined Cuchulainn as a monstrous landscape of blood flecked muscles and unkempt hair.


3) Final Fantasy.

Image Courtesy of  Square Enix

Cuchulainn makes a pretty bizarre appearance in Final Fantasy XII as a bloated green monster, though his profile does say he was once fair and beautiful. He's the first demon players have to defeat. Despite his nickname being 'the impure' he actually becomes an ally if you defeat him. 

You kinda get the impression the game developers randomly looked up International mythological hero names and went at re-purposing them without even a glance at who they actually were ( Shiva seems to have been done a particular injustice ). 



4) Gargoyles.

Image Courtesy of Disney

This is the Disney version of the Hound of Ulster. In the second season of the Disney cartoon, the characters encounter a young Irishman who turns out to be Cuchulainn reincarnated. There's a bit of weirdness then with a Banshee and a giant worm and defending something that seems to follow the kind of lines only children are sophisticated enough to grasp. 

Pretty dull rendition when compared to the previous though. 





5) Political Murals. 

Photo courtesy of Norman Craig ( Flickr) 

It's perhaps not surprising for a hero credited with defending Ulster against all the other armies of Ireland ( often single-handedly) that he'd eventually be claimed by the politics of his home province. Often used in some pretty spectacular looking loyalist murals, Cuchulainn takes on an almost martyr like appearance but one of pretty big, if divisive, cultural significance. 



6) Megami Tensei 

Photo Courtesy of Atlus, Cave 

Another pretty bizarre Japanese video game, Cuchulainn is a demon who can be summoned to defeat other enemies. He actually appears in many, many versions of this game ( even once as Setanta, his boyhood name ). You'd really have to wonder at the thinking behind leveraging the character for this kind of thing. 



7) Tir Na Nog

Photo courtesy of Gargoyle games. 

Yet another weird video game, this one for the Commodore 64 all the way back in 1985 ( before that for the Spectrum and Amstrad). Cuchulainn essentially has to wander Tir na Nog collecting items and solving puzzles. Dun Darach is another game released in 1985 for the Spectrum which was essentially a prequel to this. 



To be honest, I'd imagine there are even more out there. In my own novel, Cuchulainn is reinvented as a traveller, Cuckoo, living peaceably with his wife after a lifetime of incredible fighting feats, which I thought was odd enough before discovering Final Fantasy. This has all prompted me to check out how other Irish Mythological characters have fared across popular media. I'll be posting more soon hopefully. Has anyone else seen anything out there? 
  








If you're interested in this, maybe you'll like my own novel, Sour, which retells an old Irish myth as a modern murder mystery:

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How modern mythology connects people from different cultures

I was living in London when I started reading the old Irish stories again. I had gone there for work and had started missing home pretty hard. It’s a common thing for expats to try to reclaim a little of their identity by tuning into the radio for familiar accents, or listening to the bands making their name back in Whelan’s. I did both anyhow.

When I mentioned I was reading the old stories again, people would invariably ask me to tell one. This could be in a pub, in a friend’s flat late at night, on a park bench. I was working at a small design company at the edge of Soho. I was working mainly on code, which I hated, being a designer, and was finding myself a little out of place in the city.

The work was pretty intensive but the people were unusually friendly and at lunchtimes some of us might venture down to a pretty little park just off Tottenham Court Road and take our sandwich in the sunshine. They were from all over, South Africa, New Zealand, Pakistan, Slovenia, and they all took a particular interest in my book of stories. They all missed their homes the same way.

The story which came to me the easiest and I told the best each time was Deirdre of the Sorrows. Probably because it’s so evocative of so many other tales: Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, practically any story where there’s a damsel rescused by a young prince, only in the Irish version Deirdre is no mere damsel, she’s not rescued by any prince and it certainly doesn’t end happily.

Maybe it was the finale that made me enjoy the telling of it. How people would recoil, shocked. How they’d comment on the bleak Irish outlook.

There was that moment of silence after the end of it, in the sunshine, with the bees hovering by our half-eaten salad rolls. People were waiting to be told everything was going to work out. Perhaps it was this which inspired me to take the story and place it in today’s Ireland, which hasn’t seemed quite as bleak in quite a time.

I wanted to write a thriller, I wanted it to talk about the country today, the issues at hand, but I wanted it to remain faithful to the strangeness and shock of the original. For this reason I had the story told by a Puca, a supernatural creature from mythic tales, who speaks coarsely but objectively.

The story of Deirdre tells of a very young girl promised to the high king, Conchobor, who raises her from infancy to be his wife. Deirdre runs away from the king having met a young man and the king chases the couple, along with his brothers, as far as Scotland. He promises them safe passage home only to murder all the young men when they get there. The king then asks of Deirdre who it is she hates most in the world and she answers Fergus, the man who killed her beloved. He tells her that the punishment for her flight will be that he will share her with Fergus. Her reaction to this, and the end of the tale, comes when she’s riding in a chariot with both men and raises her head in sight of a low hanging rock , so that she’s decapitated.

The story deals with youth, in particular the mistreatment of the young, power, property and oppression. These are ordinary enough themes, but seem especially relevant in the Ireland of 2014. It’s relevant enough that another writer, Eamon Carr, was publishing another modern retelling of it, Deirdre Unforgiven, with the Doire Press at the same time I was with Creativia. His version is in verse and uses Deirdre to convey his outlook on the Troubles.

More interesting again is how these two reinventions are actually just the tip of the iceberg. People are retelling the old stories over and over in newer and more diverse ways. Last year Will Sliney wrote and illustrated Celtic Warrior: The Legend of Cú Chulainn, a graphic novel telling the story of the Táin Bó Cúailnge for a young generation. This followed on the heels of previous publications like Brian Boru: Ireland’s Warrior King by Damien Goodfellow and Tomm Moore’s Oscar-nominatedSecret of Kells, An Táin by Colmán Ó Raghallaigh and Róisín Dubh by Rob Curley and Maura McHugh.

There’s a sense that this isn’t simply a rehash of the leprechaun museum or twee Temple Bar bodhráns reeling in the tourist pennies, but that people are telling the stories as a part of who they are, the same way I was in the park, or when a few visiting friends from home in Greystones and I tried patching together the story of Oisin and Tir na nOg on the last Tube home to Bayswater to the bemusement of an otherwise sober carriage.

These stories were crafted over centuries by master storytellers. They come laden with historical and cultural significance and work as a touchstone for something real, a foundation speaking to us about ourselves whereas so much of modern storytelling, in whichever form, comes over as purely commercially driven or as a mere lightweight escape.

After I had finished in the park that day, Amir, who was from Pakistan, told a tale from his own culture. I don’t want to give the impression here that we habitually sat in circles on the grass, singing one another the songs of our people. These were guys who spent hours arguing over why Aaron Lennon wouldn’t ever make it into the Spurs first team or rating girls in the park out of 10 (I know).

We were by no means cultural attachés, but that particular lunchtime something struck which left us feeling a little closer to one another and nourished for the experience. Amir told the story of Heer and Ranjha. It’s a Punjabi tale, from his district, and is one of the world’s most famous and tragic love stories. Naturally I was too ignorant to ever have heard of it. In fact, none of us had. He told it fantastically. It’s about young lovers kept apart by a powerful, jealous rival, and it ends just as tragically as Deirdre. It’s well worth looking up online. Heer and Ranjha was remade as a film called Rockstar a couple of years ago in Bollywood.

Mythology and folklore are enjoying a resurgance internationally also. Guy Ritchie has just been taken on to direct a series of King Arthur movies. Television shows like Once Upon a Time and Grimm are reimagining the familiar fairytales of Europe in modern, urban settings. The latest series of Percy Jackson books from Rick Riordan tell tales from Greek mythology from the point of view of Percy. Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes by Cory O’Brien, which retells myths in casual online IM speak, became an Amazon bestseller (his website is well worth checking out incidentally: bettermyths.com – even though he doesn’t have any Irish ones on there). I watched an episode of Supernaturalrecently which featured changelings, a staple of old Irish fairy stories, as wicked mother-eating monsters. I won’t even talk about Thor and Loki.

There might be a strong smack of fan-fiction to all of this. Tapping a cultural heritage already very familiar feels quite like standing on the shoulders of giants. It certainly felt that way to me when I wrote It’s The Stars Will Be Our Lamps. At the same time I don’t happen to think it’s all that far from people sat around fires listening to the storyteller down the centuries. The good stories stick around and they always will in some or other form. It’s up to us to find new ways to tell them.

This article was originally published in The Irish Times website

If you're interested in Irish mythology, maybe you'll like my novel, Sour, which retells an old Irish myth as a modern murder story:

Read More

Posted by : Unknown

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