On Scathach

It is my brother and sister-in-law’s anniversary! I must wear the socks.

My computer had a complete nervous breakdown on Thursday, which was quite infuriating and I want to fight someone at Microsoft. However! It seems to be (mostly) behaving right now. 

I don’t know if I’ll have a Note for next week, as I will be out of town. I’ll try, though.

Hopefully, I’ll get to see “Dune: Part 2 - Dune Harder” this weekend. Either way, I got to see The Play That Goes Wrong this week, and that was quite a bit of fun.

Now let’s talk about Irish mythology!

On Scathach

There’s an accent in there, but I don’t know how to do that on Google Docs.

In Irish mythology, in the tale of Cu Chulainn, early in his career the Hound of Ulster sails east to get some training from the warrior woman Scathach–whose name means ‘Shadow’, because why not--in her fortress (which is on the Isle of Skye, probably?). She teaches him about combat and warfare, and gives him his signature spear, Gae Bolg. Cu Chulainn also fights against Scathach’s sister Aiofe (I don’t have a clue how to pronounce that). When Cu Chulainn sails home, while his training with Scathach is important, she herself is gone from the story. I find this odd, because what we learn about this character thus far is really interesting, and I think that’s ripe for exploration and character work. Obviously, other authors can take this mythological character and do something cool when putting her in their own stories.

Which is why what little I have seen by a couple of other authors can be so flipping weird.

Alright, so right out the gate: Stephen Lawhead’s take is not going to be discussed too much. In his Song of Albion trilogy, Lawhead basically drops Scathach as she is into the story. She (Scatha, in this series) runs a training school for warriors. The main difference is that she actually has a role in the story after the protagonist leaves her school, and that one of her daughters is the love interest of our main hero.

It’s fine. Lawhead, we’re cool.

My first introduction to the character was in The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel by Michael Scott, in which she’s one of the Second Generation Elders who appears. In the series, the Elders are mythological gods who are both magical and technologically advanced, and many of them, the Dark Elders, wish to go back to ruling the world. We’re told that the Elders aren’t separate pantheons, but one pantheon that got misunderstood over the eons, though in practice it just means that Scott usually pulls random mythological figures he likes and makes them related or not. Scathach is the twin sister (and rival) of Aiofe, which makes sense with the story, but somehow she’s also the granddaughter of Mars and the Witch of Endor?

Scott also makes her out to be the one who trains all heroes, which… uh, she isn’t. Unlike Greek mythology, where the teacher Chiron is connected with several prominent heroes, Scathach has basically only one big-name pupil. Scott claims that all heroes learned with Scathach, but off the top of my head the only other one I recall in his series was Joan of Arc, who in real life actually never killed anyone because she preferred not to actually physically harm people herself (though she led armies that did).

[We might circle back to how Joan of Arc was included in the series another time. I have issues with it.]

Scathach is also presented in the story as the origin of all martial arts in the world, and a vampire, albeit one from a clan that feeds on emotions rather than blood. In appearance and demeanor, while she knows when to be serious, she seems to be a young woman; she talks about having been in a girl band at one point, she has a short haircut, fangirls over certain things, and she goes by ‘Scatty’, a nickname that always bothered me because it reminds me of ‘scat’, a term for poop.

To be fair, SotINF runs with the idea that mythology is, at best, a misunderstanding of the figures and their histories. But it’s so weird that he took a figure from a story where she mentors exactly one famous hero, is clearly an adult with adult or nearly-adult daughters… and makes her into the ultimate hero teacher and martial artist. I think we can probably chalk this up to Michael Scott being Irish, and so he wanted to include and highlight a figure from his country’s mythology. Still, while it’s likely he deliberately took a lot of liberties, it feels at times as if he skimmed the Wikipedia article and then put what he barely remembered into the story.

Henry Neff, on the other hand, did something that’s kind of weirder? In The Tapestry, our main character, a teenage warrior named Max, is more or less Cu Chulainn reborn. When he goes and visits his divine father Lugh in Faerie, Lugh immediately sends Max to be trained by Scathach. He does, and because time works differently in Faerie he leaves as a hardcore warrior. She appears later in an audience when he’s forced to fight in an arena, and from then on, it turns out that… she’s the main love interest.

What the huh.

[This is also the point where I realized that she’s supposed to be the same-ish age as him in this book, albeit immortal because she’s been around a while.]

This, we can chalk up to Neff not being fantastic at writing female characters or relationships. Max thinks about his time training with Scathach while fighting for his life in the arena, and later this is used as an indication that he’s in love with her. Silly me, for thinking that Max recalling his combat teacher’s lessons during a duel to the death only meant that he was trying to remember how to not die! It threw me off, let me tell you. Scathach later gives up her immortality to be with Max, because she apparently fell in love with him during their time together in Faerie.

I’m not saying this makes The Tapestry a bad story; it doesn’t. I just think it’s a really, really weird choice to make with this character.

Mythology is a thing that’s ripe for reinvention for authors. You can grab mythological characters and apply them however you want. People do it all the time. I’m not someone who thinks that every time you use a mythological character or monster, you have to stick strictly to the original stories in your depiction. You don’t! Go nuts! It is a little strange, though, when you pick a somewhat obscure one and then proceed to not to go with what’s in the original texts.

I am reminded a little bit of Irene Adler–a female character from a text that has a specific role, and then disappears. And yet she’s made into something else entirely in the adaptations, mostly to be Sherlock Holmes’s love interest. That’s not who she was in the text, but that’s how most people remember her, because that’s how films and television depict her.

Scathach isn’t that popular, not yet anyway, and thankfully she hasn’t been pigeonholed into just being a love interest. I wonder, though–this is a really cool idea for a character, a woman running a combat school for warriors. And I’m confused as to why people don’t take this character as she is and adapt her more often. What does she do when she’s not training warriors? If she’s an immortal, then what did she do after that school closed? What happened to her daughters? How does she react to her nephew’s death later in the story? And so on, and so forth.

I don’t know. Someone write that epic.

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