CZM Book Club: The Abbot of Druimenach

This feels a little trans to me. And I really was out on a limb there, but I'm pretty comfortable out on limbs. I clamber around a lot. But a friend of mine sent me another fairy tale, this one from Ireland, and I don't think I have to go out on a limb here. When I say that this story is a trans allegory, it might not even be an allegory. It's just kind of a trans fairy tale because this story is the story of the abbot of

Drummech who is changed into a woman. And this story has been written down a lot in different medieval manuscripts in Irish, and there's a couple other versions of it. There's like a whole lot of different written down versions, including some I believe in Scotland. But Ireland and Scotland are the only places in the West where this particular style of fairy tale seems to exist, and I think that's cool. This particular version was translated by Barbara Hillers.

It's pretty short, so I'll probably end up talking about it a bunch. It's called the story of the Abbot of Drummeh who has changed into a woman. A certain young man who held the abbyssy of Drumh endeavored to make a great and fine banquet in observation of Easter. After preparing the banquet, the young man goes out of the house and sits on a big, pleasant hill that

was above the settlement. And it is thus the young man was a very comely linen hood around his head, and a tunic of royal silk closely fitted to his white skin, and an excellent, very beautiful rope on top of that, and a cloak of dark brown scarlet flowing around him, and a gold hilted sword fit for assembly in his hand. And when he had reached the top, he put his elbow to the ground and slept. And after he woke up from his sleep. When he wanted to take his sword, he found only a woman's weapon

in its place, i e. A distaff. And this is how he was. The skirt of a woman's tunic on him down to the ground, and on his head there was a woman's hairdo long, golden, very beautiful hair falling in fine curls from the top of his head. And when he passed his hand over his face, he did not find any hair of a beard or mustache there. And he put his hand between his thighs and he

found the sign of womanhood there. Nevertheless, the young man did not believe those various signs, for he thought it was shape shifting and magic which had been played on him. Then a certain big woman comes past him, and she

was very ugly, brown and exceedingly hideous. I want to point out here that I am under the impression of brown is around, like coloration of hair and stuff like that, although I certainly wouldn't put it past medieval Ireland to just be being blatantly racist here, but I believe it's instead as this. It's so obviously like he's so beautiful, he's so white, and he has blonde hair and then you know it's comparing to this other thing. It's still not like good. But I am under the impression that

is what that particular part means. A certain big woman comes past him, and she was very ugly, brown and exceedingly hideous, an aperation with gray bristles and deep set eyes. And this is what she said, Why are you here, smooth, young blonde girl, alone on this hillock at the end of the day and the very beginning of night. And he was gloomy and tearful and sad at this news. And he said after that, I do not know where

I will go or what I will do. Hence, because if I go to my house, my people would not recognize me, and if I should leave, I'm in danger as a single woman going about on her own. Therefore, then this is best for me to go through the world until God may pass judge on me, for it is he who has distorted my shape in my form

and put me in disfigurement and repulsiveness. But still, although God has given me this change of appearance, I swear in the presence of the Creator that I have not hung a person or wronged anyone, that I have not committed an outrage against bell or relic or staff, nor persecuted a church, nor spoken evil against anyone, Nor has a guest ever gone dissatisfied from my dwelling and my house.

He descended then from the gnoll and from the pleasant, beautifully sloping hill, and he raised a sore lament and a heavy sorrowful cry. And this is what he said going down the hill.

a church that was to the west of Drumaic. After that, she meets a certain tall soldierly young man on the village green, and the young man felt eager excessive love for her and began to entreat her, and did not leave off until he had union and intercourse with her. And after they had slept together, the young man asked the girl from the place she came and who she was, and the girl told him why I'm here selling goods

and services. That's not what she said, but that's what I'm gonna say, because here's a bunch of ads, let's you have cooler zone media, which case you can skip these ads. Well, actually you can skip them anyway, but they're automatically skipped for you. You have cooler zone media. Anyway, here they are, and we're back. And after they had slept together, the young man asked the girl from what place she came and who she was. The girl told him that he would not get that knowledge from her,

whether they would be together for long or short. I, however, he said, will tell you my name for I'm Ernech of this church. And then Erneck is. I had to look this up so I couldn't find a lot of the pronunciations for a lot of the Irish. And I'm very sorry, but medieval Irish is hard for me to find pronunciations of. And Erneck is the person who kind of like handles a lot of the day to day

stuff at a medieval Irish monastery. It's a role that went away I think in like the fifteen hundreds or something. Because this story is old as shit, which is cool as hell. Anyway, I will tell you my name for I Aernach of this church which is called Cromglen, and my wife died two years ago, and you will be my harmonious and well matched wife. And they went together then to the Aernach's house, and the people of the

house bade her a friendly and courteous welcome. And she was with him for seven years as his wife, and his spouse and seven children she bore him during that time. After that, a messenger comes to the Airnech from the congregation, an assembly of Drummech, to invite him for Easter. And she goes together with the Aernak to the hill on which her shape was first transformed, and she falls immediately asleep on the hill, and the Airnch goes with his

people to the church. And after the girl woke up from her sleep, it was thus she was a man with the same appearance she had in the first place. And she found her gold hilted ornamented sword on her knee. And this is that's what she said, Oh powerful God, the lamenting in which I am is great. And after a great lamentation, he went to his original home and his wife says to him, then it's long that you

are absent from home. Then the drinking hall had been arranged, and that strange story was told to the people of the house. However, that story was not believed by them, for his wife said that he had not been absent for more than an hour of that day. Finally, after giving them many various proofs, his case is presented and a judgment made between him and the Airneck of Crome Glen. And this is the judgment that was made between them to divide the children in half, giving the extra son

to the Airneck for fosterage. And this is how they parted from each other. Etc. You know, a story is good when it ends with etc. Okay. I always say I like that story so much.

just like general living in very different ways. Like when I traveled full time, you know, only a summer had passed the first summer I was traveling, only a summer had passed, and it felt like an entire lifetime. I felt like half of my life had been led before that, and the other half had been lived during those like three or four months. And so I was like that thing about fairy But overall, this isn't a very fairy

tale feeling story. It doesn't have a lot of the sort of repetition and kind of a lot of the things you expect out of certain types of oral tradition. But this story is absolutely part of the oral tradition

as well. There's actually a lot of like This particular translation was written as part of an academic piece by Barbara Hillers called The Abbot of Dromaic Gender Bending and the Gaelic Tradition, and it's specifically around whether or not medieval Irish literature is rooted in the oral tradition or not. Because people were like, nah, there's no way that all of the stuff in the medieval manuscripts is actually what

people were saying around that time. But there actually seems to be a lot of evidence that this particular story does come close to what people were saying around the time, and that fascinating. But you know what I find even more fascinating the fact that goods and services are available for purchase by you through our advertisers. I find that endlessly fascinating. You can tell by the tone of my

voice how enthused I am about all of this. And we're back, Okay, more things that are interesting about this. When I did episodes about medieval Ireland on my podcast, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, and if you're listening to this on it could happen here, why aren't you also listening to cool People who did cool stuff? Where

I talk about history. When I did episodes around medieval Irish history, especially around Grace O'Malley, the Pirate Queen of Ireland, one of the things that came up is that we have these assumptions about medieval Ireland that it was this very Catholic place right after the Irish Revolution of nineteen twenty one. Unfortunately, despite that being a pretty cool and lefty revolution. The Catholic Church kind of stepped in in a sort of theocratic mode and pushed Ireland towards a

certain cultural conservatism. But that's not actually Ireland's heritage even as a Catholic country. For example, in medieval Ireland, women were getting divorced and like initiating divorce and that's not supposed to be the case if you're like super Catholic, but it was just normal. And it's worth pointing out here that the abbot here is fucking married. Like in this case, that bitch gets married twice. She's married as a man and then she's married as a woman, you know,

and it's like kind of chill. They just gotta split the kids in the end. And okay, but another thing, isn't that weird that you know, it doesn't work out for it doesn't work out like time wise, right, like oh, you were only gone an hour, but like the airneck is like, what are you talking about? I was married as lady. Here are my seven children with her? You know. But also like no one's like mad. He's not like what you were a man all along. He's just kind

of like sad. He doesn't get to be married to her anymore. And so gender bending in this context is presented as a curse at first, right, and it uses he pronouns for the protagonist until she starts accepting what's happened, you know, he wakes up and curses God, and then and it uses the trope of like an ugly woman as like a sign that magic has happened, which I'm

totally down with. I know, there's a lot of shit that's like rooted and misogyny that sometimes I'm like, whatever, we can own that shit, Like, you know, we can be like spooky signs of magic. That's fine. But you know, as soon as she is used to the idea of being a woman, suddenly she's she in the story and she's used to it, and then she feels just as much cursed when she is transformed back into a man.

And I mean, I think what happened. I'm willing to bet what happened is this story is about like an abbot. Like the real thing that happened. I bet an abbot like was like, oh, I'm wearing my prettiest clothes. I'm gonna go take a nap in the sun. And then like had like a day dream or a normal nap dream where she woke up a woman and was like, this fucking rules, I'm gonna go around to sleep with people as a girl. I'm gonna have babies and shit.

And then like woke up and was like it was all a dream and was kind of bummed, and then told everyone the story, and then it slowly became that's that's what I bet happened, because trans women have been part of society forever. But what's interesting is that so much folklore across Western Europe, and I think actually extending into Eastern Europe, but I'm not as certain about that. There's just certain tropes that are repeated over and over

and over again. But there's only a couple stories, and I believe they are only found, according at least to some of the stuff that I read, they're only found in Ireland and Scotland about a man being turned into a woman and the other place that you find this apparently and I haven't read these stories yet, but I want to go find them soon. The other place where you find this style of folk tale is India. And okay, this is now I'm back on a limb. I'm completely

on a limb here. I am probably wrong about this, but one of the things that this reminds me of is something that came up. I did episodes about hunger strikes a long time ago, and how the tradition of hunger strikes as a sort of legal idea, as a way to get recourse from someone who is like a rich person who owes you money, for example, is that you go to their door and you starve yourself. And this is found in two cultures. It is found in Irish traditional law and it is found in parts of

northern India. And the argument that I ran across for that is the same reason that you have some language similarity between Irish and I don't remember what language. I don't have notes in front of me. I'm totally doing this for a memory and some language in India is that the culture that both of those come from the language group of Indo European comes from this like proto Indo European language and culture, which started in the kind of middle of Asia, and then it made its way

west and east. And stuff often lasts the longest at the fringes of culture, you know. So if you have like a culture and empire and it extends out super wide. Well, then the next thing that comes along is also going to extend out and extend out or whatever. But the very fringes sometimes hold on to the stuff from the earlier culture. And so this is theoretically why there's hunger strikes in both of those places. A sort of a legal idea is that they come from this same source.

And it's cool because it means that these places that are thousands and thousands of miles apart and are like on different continents, are coming from the same place. And as a side note about multiple continents, whenever people are like I just don't understand the idea of social constructs. How can gender be a social construct? They probably believe

that Europe and Asia are two different continents. And the reason that Europe and Asia are two different continents is the social construction they are, and they are different continents. You know, geographically they are not separate continents, but culturally they are. So I could not actually tell you I am completely on a limb is a conjecture that I'm

probably wrong about that. The fact that you're going to find this like folklore around men becoming women in Ireland and India is from the same idea of it coming from a proto culture. That's probably not the case, but it's like neat to think about, and I like thinking about neat stuff. And it's also a curse, right, This is a very important part that this is like a curse.

Whereas you do find folklore and cultural stuff happening a little bit more the other way around, where people are talking about girls becoming boys in folklore, and that almost always is actually very specifically as babies, and it's because like, oh, we kind of like need a man, We need to have a man show up, and so we're gonna, you know, decide that this girl is going to have the social roles of masculinity. Thousands of years and thousands of miles of culture is too large of a place to make

generalizations about the mutability of gender. But gender has been mutable in different ways, in different directions, across the world, in different ways, and I don't know, so hopefully I'll slowly learn more about gender bending in history and specifically folklore,

but for now, this is what I've got. If you knew how to pronounce those words properly, I am sorry, but I could not find pronunciations online because they are medio Irish And I'll talk to you next week when I'll have more stories, because that's what this is, a storytelling podcast. It's cool Zone Media book Club. Talk to you soon. It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.