Bánánach

What it is

The bánánach is an uncanny figure from the storytelling of early Ireland, one of a small set of spirits imagined over ground where armies met. It belongs to a company of four named together in the Táin Bó Cúalnge: the bócanach, a goat-shaped war haunt; the geniti glinne, glen-dwelling female spirits; and the demna aeóir, demons linked with the open air. In the tale these beings do double duty. They are agents of terror, sent out against the enemies of the hero Cú Chulainn, and they also work as a figure of speech, a way for a teller to render the ring and clash of weapons without naming every sound.

Where it comes from

The figure belongs to the storytelling of early Ireland, and its chief written home is the Táin Bó Cúalnge, where it appears in a list of battlefield beings. Later readers kept the group in view: two twentieth-century studies, William Sayers's survey of early Irish battlefield spirits in the journal Éigse and P. L. Henry's piece on what he called the goblin group in Études Celtiques, treat the bánánach and its cousins as a set worth comparing. Both papers appeared within a few decades of each other, the first at the close of the 1950s and the second in 1991.

What people believe

The setting behind the being is a view of war as crowded with unseen company. In the Táin, the otherworld folk called the Tuatha Dé Danann take a hand in the fighting, and fear itself can be sent out like a weapon: the spirits they loose are felt in the minds of the enemy before any blow lands. The din of arms counts as presence rather than empty sound, for the tale treats it as these spectres at work, and the haunts come when Cú Chulainn lifts his war cry. One counterweight stands in the same story: the bull Dond Cúalnge, whose might is said to keep the three haunts far away.

How scholars and sceptics see it

Students of Irish literature have handled these beings as a group with a name of its own. William Sayers wrote a survey of early Irish battlefield spirits for Éigse in 1991, and P. L. Henry had earlier described what he titled the goblin group in Études Celtiques in the late 1950s. A second line of reading is more matter-of-fact: the bánánach and its cousins are sometimes taken as personifications, not of persons but of sound, so that naming them was a way of putting the noise of a fight into words. On that view the spectre is the clash of weapons given a shape.

Compare and confuse

Confusion is easy among the four field haunts of the Táin, since the bócanach, the geniti glinne and the demna aeóir share the bánánach's ground and its work. Beyond that circle, reference lists set the name beside Badb and the banshee, two other figures of Irish story, without joining them into one.

Questions people ask about Bánánach

Good reading and sources

• Bánánach on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• Wikidata recordOpen data