The Two Trees are old in the oral poetic traditions of Western Europe. Outside of Britain, they appear for example in such early traditional tales as the Irish “Wasting Sickness of Cú Chulainn” (Serglige Con Culainn), a story from before a. D. 1100 that is preserved in Old Irish in a composite manuscript of mostly narrative content, the Lebor na hUidre. One multiform of the Two Trees occurs in this instance as a mere vignette embellishing a long and stately tale; the manner of their deployment in this Irish example is highly reminiscent of the similar vignette of fir tree and pine which the modern Balkan bard Avdo Međedović used in 1935 to close his grand epic The Wedding of Smailagić Meho. The trees are, however, introduced in the midst rather than at the end of the Irish story:
The great hero Cú Chulainn sickens when an otherworldly lady named Fann puts an enchantment upon him. An ogress at one moment, Fann is Cú Chalainn’s gratuitous benefactress the next, for having made him sick, she then entices him with promises of sensuous pleasure to her marvelous demesne at the place called Mag Mell. Before accepting her invitation, Cú Chulainn distrustfully sends his chariot-driver Lóeg to see whether Mag Mell is really what its Irish name says it is, a ‘Plain of Delights.’ Lóeg obediently visits the place and returns to give Cú Chulainn a description of its splendours in verse. Among these, a certain mast-like tree (crann) standing at the boundary of Fann’s temenos or fane is notable for the metaphors Lóeg uses to describe its particular beauty. They are the essence of conventional fungible value and exchange, the precious metals silver and gold:
A-tā crand i ndorus liss
(nī hétig cocetul friss),crand airgit ris tatin grían
There is a tree before the enclosure
(cosmail fri hór a roníam).135
(to sing in unison with it is not unpleasant),a silver tree upon which the sun shines
(its brilliance is as that of gold).136
Were it possible to take any part of this tree’s glitter literally it would be a perfect Irish multiform of the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean hewn and banded posts standing at doors and gateways.
The contrasting green wood follows promptly, in the very next verse of Lóeg’s report. As though to give appropriate scope to the requisite munificence of the living wood, not one but an entire grove of sixty fruiting green trees appears. Unlike the infertile, lone tree that precedes it, the grove requires no human acts of reciprocity such as singing in unison with it to realize its full utility. Although the first tree makes a fine display suggestive of wealth, it does not gratuitously bestow that wealth on men; the grove however gives up its largesse unconditionally and without stint. And finally, whereas the former tree suggested fungible value and exchange, the green grove’s bounty is in a strictly unfungible form. Lóeg tells his master Cú Chulainn:
A-tāt and tri fichit crand
(comraic nād chomraic a mbarr);bíatar tri chét do cach crund
There are sixty trees there
do mes ilarda imlum.
(their branches almost meet);three hundred are fed from every tree
with abundant huskless mast.137
Elsewhere in the writings that survive from the same era of traditional Irish story-telling, the Two Trees figure more familiarly as the warp-beams sustaining a considerable web of narrative rather than as mere self-contained vignettes. The so-called Yellow Book of Lecan (Leabar Buidhe Leacain), a putatively fourteenth-century manuscript, preserves a long tale entitled “The Voyage of Máel Dúin” (Immram curaig Máele Dúin) which is full of paired trees. Although the manuscript is younger, the tale of Máel Dúin’s voyage itself belongs to the same era as does the “Wasting Sickness of Cú Chulainn;” indeed, most of the story about Máel Dúin was originally also in the same manuscript, the Lebor na hUidre, that contained the tale about Cú Chulainn. A single pair of examples will suffice to show the presence of the Two Trees with their usual generic meanings in the “Voyage of Máel Dúin;” a reader of the entire “Voyage” will find himself travelling with Máel Dúin through a veritable forest of motifs which have arisen in this tale from the seed of the Two Trees’ pattern. 138
Máel Dúin is the son of a nun by rape. Fostered by a kindly queen who is the nun’s friend, he grows to become a mighty warrior who excels all his peers in games of strength. They insult him for his doubtful parentage, and he goes away to his father’s estate. There he is insulted again for negligence of his duty to avenge the previous violent death of his father. He decides on a sea voyage with a retinue of other young braves to carry out his vendetta obligation. Argonaut-like, Máel Dúin and his men sail from one wondrous land to another in their quest after his father’s killers. Their twelfth landfall is an island where the principles of the hewn wood reign:
Early in the morning of the third day thereafter they saw another island and a brazen fence over its middle which divided the island in two and they saw big flocks of sheep therein: a white flock on this side of the fence and a black flock on the other side, and a big man separating the flocks. Whenever he threw a white sheep over the fence to the black sheep it became black at once. Whenever the black sheep were put over the fence to the far side to the white ones they became white at once. They were adread at seeing that.
‘It would be well for us,’ Máel Dúin said, ‘to throw our sticks onto the island. If they change colour we shall change [as well] if we go into it.’
They threw rods with black bark onto the side where the white sheep were and they became white at once, and they threw white rods onto the side where the black sheep were and they became black at once.
‘We were wise to make that test,’ said Máel Dúin. ‘Our colour would not be better than the colour of the rods.’ They retreated again although they were worn-out, tired, fearful, and although they were famished and hungry.139
This island is ruled by an absolute law of exchange. We see no consumption of the animal wealth represented by the two flocks of sheep; the man standing at the fence is wholly absorbed in acts of managerial severance and government, not exploitation. He neither gives nor takes anything without immediately evident compensatory consequences. The voyagers who observe him at work would be happy to appropriate some of his wealth to their own use, but they can do so only at the prohibitively high price of submitting to the law which he serves and becoming themselves indistinguishable in hue from whichever flock they might exploit. It is a vivid representation of the principle that a buyer must in the nature of purchase give something of himself in exchange for what he buys.
The island is a place perfectly divided where nothing can change sides or change hands without a corresponding, completely predictable addition t or subtraction from itself. Appropriately, it is the voyagers’ own sticks of cut wood that prove to them the inexorability of the laws of separation and compensation. Despite their fear and disappointment, it is a place of fundamental civility which Máel Dúin and his men leave behind at their departure from this island.
Their twenty-third landfall brings them to a place of diametrically opposite character, though it may be debated whether it is correct to call it a ‘landfall.’ They approach this new place vertically rather than horizontally, and instead of fearing some obstacle to a desired landing as they did at the island of black and white sheep, this time they fear lest there be no way to avoid plunging to a landing which they do not desire.
Thereafter they came into another sea like a cloud and it seemed to them that it would not support themselves nor the boat. Then they saw under the sea below them ornamented forts and a lovely country and they saw a big, awful, monstrous ammal in a high tree and a drove of herds and flocks round about the tree and an armed man near the tree with shield, spear and sword. When he saw that big animal that was in the tree he went at once in flight from there. The animal stretched forth its neck out of the tree and set its jaws into the back of the largest ox of the herd and dragged it with him into the tree and devoured it at once in the twinkling of an eye. The flocks and the herdsman fled away at once. When Máel Dúin and his crew saw that, equally great terror and fear took hold of them for they supposed that they could not pass without falling down through it because of its thinness like mist.140
Despite its evident prosperity, the strange netherworld which the voyagers have passed over is a wilderness, not a place of civilization. Here there is no simple sorting of animal wealth, but an unopposed, lawless, violent consumption of it by the familiar ogre at the green tree. A cosmotactic hewer is at hand with his instruments of division and severance—sword, spear, and shield—but unlike his counterpart on the tranquil island of the black and white sheep, this one does not exercise his divisory skills and implements to protect his animals against uncompensated appropriation. Like the Garden of Eden, this ‘lovely country’ too is one from which all are ultimately obliged to depart in fear by the capricious lawlessness of the monster at the green tree. It is a land without established and enforced rules of fair exchange to make it habitable.
A congener of such voyaging heroes in other traditions as Odysseus and Asdiwal, Máel Dúin is also a precursor of modern folktale heroes in Irish like Art, the fabulous King of Leinster, who also had his share of dealings with the Two Trees. A tale recorded in county Kerry in 1946 from a seventy-six year-old man named Muiris Conner is a case in point.141
An only son conceived after many years of his parents’ infertility, Art determines when he is grown that he will marry exogamously. When he is advised where in foreign lands he can find the most beautiful bride, he sets out on a voyage to her land. There he is given lodging by a kindly old man who explains to him the hideous price which the girl, the daughter of the king in that land, has set upon herself. She will marry no one except a man able to bring her “the head of a warrior in the eastern world;” those who fail forfeit their own heads when they return to her empty-handed. She has impaled her collection of heads on iron spikes stuck in the wall of her father’s castle, and all but one of the spikes now has the head of an unfortunate suitor on it.
Outraged by the girl’s exorbitant price, the cosmotact approaches hewn wood intent upon curtailing her monstrous tax on unmarried manhood:
When he had eaten his breakfast, Art went toward the king’s castle. He walked around, looking at the wall and the heads and the castle. His blood was rising at what the old man had told him. At last he went up to the challenge pole and put all the strength he had and he hadn’t into the blow he gave it with the palm of his hand. The king felt the castle shake as well as the chair he was sitting on.
“Heavens! that’s the heaviest blow that has been struck on that challenge pole since it was erected,” said he. “Whoever struck it must be a terrible strong man, the blow he gave it. I thought I felt the chair shaking under me.”
He sent out a messenger to see what the man outside wanted.142
The challenge pole, a mast-like post set in the earth outside the wall of the girl’s temenos, designates a zone suited to bargaining and the enforcement of rules, but not for gratuitous kindness. There is no free entertainment for Art at the hewn wood:
The messenger asked Art what was troubling him.
“I want the king’s daughter or fight,” said Art.
The messenger returned to the king.
“What does he want?” asked the king.
“He wants your daughter or fight.”
“...Go out to him and tell him he’ll get his answer before long.”
The messenger went out, and Art waited. It wasn’t long until the king and queen and their daughter went out to him, and if they did, none of them invited him in for a bite or a sup or worried whether it was long or short since he had eaten. The daughter told him that it wasn’t fighting or quarreling she wanted but the head of the warrior from the eastern world, that she would marry only the man who could do that and that the man who failed to bring it would have his head cut off.143
Cosmotact that he is, Art insists upon a clean separation between the procedures of enmity and those of courtship. He declares himself ready to enforce the distinction:
“And do you imagine that I’m so foolish as to come back to you to have my head cut off, if I don’t have the warrior’s head for you?” asked Art. “If I return at all without the head, I’ll come, not to have my head cut off, but to challenge you to fight.”
Faith, that answer from Art took the edge off her grandeur and haughtiness.144
The price of severing the girl socially from her parents—taking her away as a wife to live in her husband’s land—is an act of physical severance: beheading the warrior of the eastern world. Once this system of price and reciprocity has been established at the sign of the hewn wood, Art is ready to resume his voyage toward the predictable encounter under green wood. So he comes to another foreign land where another helpful old man directs him to the live tree and a proper monster who is gentle and fierce by turns:
Art went toward the tree and stabbed the warrior in the leg with his sword. He rose up and asked Art what he wanted.
“I want your head in a fair fight,” said Art.
“’Tis the devil’s own work that ye are all coming for my head,” said the warrior. “Here I am, interfering with nobody nor going to make trouble for ye. Why are ye all after my head?”
“We have nothing at all against you,” said Art. “A young woman’s geasa [spells] are the cause of it all.”
“I’ll be ready for you in a minute,” said the warrior.
He rose up and got ready for the fight. Any man who wished to see a hard struggle should have watched Art and the warrior fighting. The frightening thing was that, so well trained were they both, neither of them could get in a blow at the other. Fiery sparks flew from their swords. Late in the day, when both were tiring a little, Art struck a powerful blow with all his might and turned the warrior about so that he fell on his back on the ground.
“I’ll have your head now,” said Art.
“Take it and welcome,” said the warrior. “Only for being able to take it, you wouldn’t get it. Neither would I get yours, if I weren’t able. Take it now.”145
The cosmotactic hewer does his prescribed work of cutting, but no property obtained from a denizen of the green wood is a secure possession:
Art drew a great blow at the warrior and struck him on the neck, cutting off his head. He took the head in his hand and was going toward the tree, when three grey crows flew over him, as if they were trying to snatch the head from him. Art became afraid that they would peck out his eyes, so he threw the head on the fence, in order to pick up a stone to throw at them. When he raised his head again with the stone in his hand both the warrior’s head and the crows had vanished.146
The district of the live tree is a zone of lawlessness, a lawlessness expressed in this case in the person of the monster who will not obey the usual law of life and death. Art goes to the green wood again on the morrow and finds the weird warrior alive and whole, just as he had been the morning of the previous day. Again they fight, and again Art beheads him, but still Art has not learned that he must shun the green tree in order for any of his accomplishments to he final:
With a strong blow, Art cut off his head and took it up in his hand. He was going toward the tree when he met four men, who were carrying a coffin.
“Where are ye making for, good men?” asked Art.
“We’re burying a headless body,” said one of them.
“A headless body,” cried Art. “Show it to me.”147
Just as, on the previous day, the impulsive acquisitiveness of the three crows robbed Art of his prize, so on this day his own impulsive generosity nullifies the profit he has realized from a day of violence:
“We will and welcome,” said the men, laying down the coffin.
When Art saw the headless body, “That’s as fine a warrior as my eyes have ever seen,” said he. “If this head which I have here fits him, he won’t have to be buried without a head.”
He put the head on the lifeless body and it fitted exactly. The next moment, the coffin, the body, and the four men had vanished from sight.148
Unpredictable concealments and discoveries characterize the precinct of this Irish tree no less than its counterparts in other traditions of oral fable the world over. Only the manner of the hiding and disclosure are peculiar to the tradition in county Kerry. Art returns from the green tree to the old man who has been his host in this strange country:
They spent a long part of the night talking, and next morning, when they had eaten their breakfast, the old man said, “I knew well, Art, that you were like your father. It was I who took the warrior’s head from you during the past two days to see what kind of man you were. I have the head here in my room, and I will give it to you now.”149