There once was a poet of great skill and fame. Ireland, of course, was a country known for its poets. It’s filid.
And, Ireland was known for its banfhile, too. The story I shall tell you is of Cana Cludhmor. Cana Cludhmor was a banfhile.
Cana Cludhmor was a woman, a poet, and a person of great skill and great renown.
Her story was folded into a couple dozen lines. Her story has left much room for interpretation. And yes, misinterpretation, too. If your passions tend toward the mythic, the Celtic, and the obscure, you might have heard that Cana Cludhmor was an Irish goddess of poetry and inspiration. You might have heard she’s the inventor of the harp.
In the great modern quest for goddesses and a deep desire to resuscitate ancient magic, someone not so very long ago spun such a tale by editing the very last line of what we find in a medieval book called Imtheacht na Tromdháimhe, or The Proceedings of the Great Bardic Institution. That modern twist on the story endures, making a woman a goddess and crediting her with the creation of Ireland’s most powerful symbol and most beautiful instrument.
(I’m grateful to Morgan Daimler for tracing the origins of this revised Cana Cludhmor tale, which recasts the poet as “Canola,” and refers to her as inventor of the harp and Irish goddess of poetry and inspiration. I was able to find what seems to be the first mention of “Canola” - a 1916 book called called Celtic Mythology, that offered no traceable citations - but the choice to credit Cana Cludhmor with harp making and divinity seems a totally new invention.)
This is all a lot of “inside baseball,” falling into the research rabbit hole and getting into the nit-picky details that can make scholarship (and scholars!) so tedious, bear with me.
Honoring the sources of the stories and mythology we love matters. If we all pass our inventions off as “fact” we end up destroying (and colonizing) the precious, fragile traditions we purport to love.
I believe the “real” tale of Cana Cludhmor is actually even richer and more full of possibility. Even more because it’s true. Well, true in the sense that it has endured for eight hundred years, and likely long before the monks recorded it in the Book of Lismore in the fourteenth century. It’s up to you if you want to believe what the lads inscribed on vellum or you feel more comfortable with what you find on Wikipedia.
In my story, I will rob this mythic woman of none of her power, even as I strip her divine status and place the harp-maker’s tools in the hands of another. I promise. We’ll land at a different place. A place that feels a bit more human and a bit more like what we need right now.
The Poet Asked Me to Tell (and Heal) Her Story
The paragraphs above serve as the beginning of my telling of Cana Cludhmor’s story, which you can hear in Episode 13 of the Knotwork Storytelling Podcast, “How to Heal a Poet’s Heart, or The Invention of the Irish Harp.”
I discovered this story because I wanted to tell a story about the Irish harp but knew a tale of the Dagda, the Good God, with his deadly war harp was not the story for Maureen Buscareno and me to explore together. It’s an art, matching a story with a guest, and not all harp stories hit the same notes. (Sorry… the pun was inevitable!)
This great female poet, or banfhile, Cana Cludhmor is mentioned only briefly in a long, sprawling satire about the annoying habits of the bards who hang about, taking advantage of the king’s hospitality. This is a lot left to the imagination.
Below is an excerpt from the manuscript, which includes the dialog that frames this tiny scrap of story:
"I question thee, Casmael,” said Marvan, " whence originated the science of playing the harp; who was the first that composed poetry, or whether the harp or the timpan was the first made?"
"I don't know that, prime prophet," said Casmael.
"I know it," says Marvan, “And I will tell it thee. In former times there lived a married couple whose names were Macuel, son of Miduel, and Cana Cludhmor (or, “of great fame”) his wife. His wife, having entertained a hatred for him, fled before him through woods and wildernesses, and he was in pursuit of her. One day that the wife had gone to the strand of the sea of Camas, and while walking along the strand she discovered the skeleton of a whale on the strand, and having heard the sound of the wind acting on the sinews of the whale, she fell asleep by that sound. Her husband came up to her, and having understood that it was by the sound she had fallen asleep, he proceeded into an adjacent forest, where he made the frame of a harp, and he put chords in it of the tendons of the whale, and that is the first harp that ever was made.”
When you listen to the story, you’ll hear my inventions, including the curse, the bloodied hands, and the moment of healing. You’ll note how I inject motivation and emotion into the tale, as is the storyteller’s way.
This is an old story of mysterious origin–how did the monks receive this particular bit of narrative? why did they decide it worth their scribal time? But still, this isn’t a particularly mystical story, at all.
I’m all for the magical and the divine, but I think we do a disservice to the goddesses, as well as the culture, the history, and the mortal human condition, when we force women out of this world and into the otherworld to serve our desire for life on the other side of the veil.
The Work of Remythologizing is Delicate, and Important
"In order to remythologize their heroines' stories, the authors must retain basic aspects of the tales and characters and infuse them with fresh energies that comment on the age in which they were written."
Oh, from the mouths of baby academics!
That line is from my 2003 essay, Dethroning the Goddess, Crowning the Woman: Eva Gore-Booth and Augusta Lady Gregory's Mythic Heroines, which was published in New Voices in Irish Criticism 4, published by Four Courts Press in Dublin.
While I wouldn't construct a sentence like that now (and would ask my writing coaching clients to dial back the scholarly rhetoric and speak to the heart), I am proud of my young grad student self.
And I would love her to know that I am actively doing the work of "remythologizing" those beloved stories almost half a lifetime later,