Epik Ijodi — Kelt Xalqlari

Then a seal lifted its woman’s face— the Morrígan in her third skin— and she laughed like stones in a frozen river. “You go to the hall of the tongueless king, where heroes are hung by their own shadows. Give me your little finger for a bridle, and I will show you the door that is not a door.”

No chieftain answered. The hearth-smoke lay flat. Then Branán—last son of the broken line— took his spear that wept at the touch of blood, and his hound that had dreamed three winters of fire. For nine days he sailed in a skin boat, sewn with the hair of his mothers’ mothers. The sea grew white as an old man’s eye. The sea grew black as a toothless mouth. And the tide spoke in a language without vowels: Turn back, son of earth. The otherworld eats names. kelt xalqlari epik ijodi

(An epic fragment from the Cycle of the Western Isles) I. The Gathering of the Fianna When the salmon leaped in the speaking wave, and the hazels dropped their nuts of knowing, the high king sat on the hill of Emain, his cloak of stars pinned with a thorn of lightning. Then a seal lifted its woman’s face— the

Branán raised his broken hand. He sang not of battles, nor of women’s hair, nor of cattle, nor of the sun’s golden tether. He sang of the silence inside the harp’s wood before the strings were born. He sang of the darkness inside the flint’s heart before the spark remembered its name. The hearth-smoke lay flat

“You came for speech,” she said. “But speech is a debt. Every word you have spoken was borrowed from the dead. I have taken the tongue of your tribe. It hangs in my cage made of rib and thistle. Sing me a song that has never been sung, and I will give it back—with interest.”