Extended Paul Bolger Interview

Paul: …it's very easy to take Cuchulain and make him Thor you know, or some Asgardian super God or whatever. I didn't want to do that, you know, because I read the story, called The Phantom Chariot of Cuchulain where he comes back in later times and helps I think not against the Vikings, but in some other fight with a later cycle in the timeline of Irish mythology, and he's portrayed as a dark-haired guy, small, and, you know, like, so I just thought, well, that’s Bruce Lee. He'd just as easily kick the crap out of you as, you know, some six foot 10 blonde giant, you know?  So all of that stuff started to come together. And then I hooked up with this other chap who's a very well known musician here, Barry Devlin, who became the co-writer. He's also a screenwriter now and he was a bit of a big rock star in the 70s in Ireland, and he would have done music. They had a band called The Horslips and they did an album called The Táin which is the Cuchulain story. He helped U2 to get started and he's a brilliant writer and he brought a great angle to it with the characters. So all this stuff was kind of coming to a place at the top of the pyramid of like years of trying to get this going. But I always wanted to have that authentic feel. So we wrote a screenplay, which is fine and we got some funding to develop the movie but still couldn't get it going because it's hard to sell real Irish stories.

Ariel Baska: I’m well aware, as a filmmaker, that it's hard to sell anything authentic, basically. 

Paul Bolger: Well, exactly. I mean, any culture. Maoris could probably say the same thing. And indigenous people in New Guinea probably say the same stuff, because it doesn't fit into the paradigm of what's acceptable, especially in the commercial world. So what I decided to do was, I don't care. So what we're going to do here is we're going to try to find a way into the story. And that was through the Morrigan. And I think then, that gave us a dramatic angle on the story. It was her version of events. It's not exactly 100% A myth, but what is the real myth? Any myths not real so that's a stupid question, but you know what I mean? What's the accepted? What's the accepted version?

Ariel Baska: There is no accepted version when you get right down to it. 

Paul Bolger: Yeah, and then all the other stuff you're talking about there, about the peoples of these islands… I was very careful not to get caught up in the idea of, you know, hairy bikers and sackcloth and using the word tribe too much. I started going back into the regions or nations or peoples or kingdoms or whatever the hell. I was always trying to get away from that. You know, idea of guys in loincloths beating each other with sticks, you know? I was in the Museum on Saturday in Dublin, actually, and I was looking at stuff again, and you know, the stuff that was made here 4000 years ago is insane. You know, they got goldwork on those swords and, you know, even if they never had the architecture of the buildings of the Romans, the Greeks of Egyptians, their goldwork was pretty amazing so I put all that in, but that's only veneer, a kind of a decorative nod to the artifact. But the story was the hard one. That was what we spent a lot of time on.

Ariel Baska: It's also really interesting to me to see how you shaped the story of Cuchulain and put all of that together. I also have to say, first of all, with the name, you know, choosing to go with Cuchulain and making it a more approachable version of the name, [Cu Cullan] than I'm used to - calling it out in the comic book to make it very specifically understandable for more public audiences, in and of itself is kind of a radical act, right? 

Paul Bolger: Well, we got into trouble with the purists. I won't tell you what I think of that - it involves four letter words, which I won’t say, but one thing where I did slip up - I wish I put it in at the back an opposite glossary. A lot of the time when you publish little books with these stories they have the Gaelic names to give a meaning and then they give you a pronunciation. I should have done it in reverse. Here's the phonetics. According to me. Here's the Gaelic. And here's the meaning. But I'm kicking myself I didn't put that in the back of the book. But yeah, the reason I did that was because if I was to translate the names, right from the old Irish, there's a debate because we have four or five dialects of Irish, I mean, so and if you've taught languages, you'll know what I'm talking about, but certain translations can be swayed in different ways in different parts of the island. I was at a talk given by a professor who unfortunately died a few years ago, Daithi O’Hogan. He wrote a couple of great books on the Celtic and Irish period. And then he was telling me some really interesting things but if you look at some of the old books, Cuchulain is translated as The Hound of Cullan, which is fine, which is what it is. But nobody will tell you what Cullan means. Right? Oh, it's just the guy's name. Well, no, not really. Like my name Bolger, in Irish, it actually can mean two different things. It can mean yellow bag or yellow belly. Right. And it comes from my people who were in the southeast of Ireland, supposedly, and they were all physicians, and they wore yellow sashes around their waist. Simple as say what you see, right? But the current idea of the yellowbelly comes from a Napoleonic British war that has nothing to do with us, it was just because the French who ran away happened to wear a yellow sash, so that’s nought to do with us. But so when you get into translating Irish words and Irish surnames, like the name Doyle, for example, is Dubhgall in Irish. Dubh is the Irish for foreigner and Gall is black so they were the dark foreigners which are the Danish so that the people with that name are probably descended from Danish Vikings. So when you get into that, then I had all these names to deal with, Connor you know, and like if you look at Connor and somebody who doesn't speak Irish will say “conquer bar” and all this.

I won't get into the lesson of Irish language but there's a few simple tricks that if you know how to say some of the words and how the adding of a letter changes the pronunciation so it's very different than English. So I just went with the phonetics I simply said King Conn or Queen Maeve and I wrote it like I said it as best I could. And I took some of the phonetics from existing books, like Connor, for example is an interesting name because it means Wolfhound keeper or Hound Lover. And Conn is another Irish name for hound as well. It's cool. Conn would be like the leader of a pack. If you had a pack of Huskies, the main dog would be called Conn and the rest of them Cu I think. O’Hogan told me this- it’s really interesting, not to bore everybody with this stuff, but your warriors were hounds. The enemy's warriors were wolves. So your warriors defended and their warriors attacked. So the hounds defended against the wolves. So basically what Connor was - he might have loved dogs and had a lot of them but he actually was a warrior keeper. So if I had translated King Connor is King Warrior Keeper. And Cu Cullan as well. What's Cullan? Well, according to Dr. O’Hogan, he said a Cullan was translated from labor types, people say it means blacksmith but it's not true. It's a chariot maker. He was everything. He said it's from old, old Irish, pre-sixth century. And his argument, I kind of liked it, was those guys were like magicians in their time. They could turn metal into anything, so they were seen as like, next to the Druids, really prized people. So the guy who could make a chariot or a weapon or a crown or whatever the hell it was, they would have separated out into different castes and classes. So I kind of thought, Okay, well if I call Cuchulain the Hound of the Chariot Maker. Jesus, imagine writing that every time his name comes up. So that's a long way of saying, let's just do phonetics and everybody, no matter where they are in the world, hopefully will just go along with it, you know, like Eva. But if you see it written down (Aoife), it looks like a Eye Fi or something. Yeah. Yep. So I called her Eva in the book. I probably should have written it I-F-A to make it more like the real name. But I just figured you know what, I'm going to just take a chance. So yeah, there'll be some people who weren't too happy with us doing that, but okay.

Ariel Baska: Honestly, I think I think for the audience you were going for, it's perfect to do it that way. I mean, I was a little thrown off at first because I expected a certain thing but it obviously makes it more accessible. 

Paul Bolger: With the book, even before we got to doing it, one of the first reasons I wanted to do it actually, was because I always wanted to do a comic that will be translated into Irish that people could read in the Irish language. And that's happened. There is an Irish edition out actually. There's a trilogy that was originally done as a trilogy, but you know, for anybody who speaks Irish, they can say those words they can say those names without a problem. But if I had written all the right spellings, let's say for an English or a more international version, I guess which ours is, we would have probably hit the same problem that Russian novels might have hit with the Dostoevskys and the Alexandrevitches. You start to forget the names because they suddenly seem so out there. I hear something I don't know, like if you read a novel, but in another language that's been translated in English, not that everybody needs to make a phonetic, but a person once told me that they found some of the Russian books, for example, are gone because they suddenly started forgetting names and who people were because it became tough to follow. And if you're not familiar with it, like you can probably only remember parts of the words and then it gets confusing. And a comic is easy, because you have the visual, you always have the representation of the person. So you don't have that problem. That was one of the reasons that I did that. And even the name Setanta is interesting because there's nobody knows what that means. 

Ariel Baska: Yeah - I looked it up actually because I wasn't used to the to the form of the name Setanta. And so I looked it up and there was nothing.

Paul Bolger: Again, that professor told me a very interesting take, which, again, some of your listeners might like it, or readers might like it. He said that he had looked into how that story was saved, you know, because there's lots of theories about it. And one of the theories was that it's a conglomeration or a mixture of two ancient legends. In the sixth century, the people that are now called O'Neill would have moved from the south into the north and started to take over the island, and they eventually faced down Vikings, up until the time of final conquest about 500 years ago, but he reckons that there was a story existing in the northeast of Ireland about a defeat at some point in the past, that the people from the west of Ireland had defeated the people in the north and have poems, excuse me, songs about it. And it was just a big, like, folk memory of something that might have happened in their past. And then the Romans kicked the crap out of Britain and certain people were starting to come over to Ireland to get away from the Romans, from Wales and places around Liverpool. There was a bunch of people called the Setanti who lived near what is now Liverpool or Cumbria, and that's directly across from Dundalk, which is where Cuchulain’s fort is. O’Hogan had a feeling that something must have happened. Basically, he thinks that those British Celts came over to Ireland to mix and were accepted in over here to get away from Rome, and they had an folk memory of the last stand against the Romans, which was their Superman or their hero that made the last stand and then that got married with the north eastern legend of a Western attack. And it became a new poem. And Setanta is just a reflection of those people because it's not a Gaelic word at all. Nobody knows what it means.That all fit into my thinking, you know, that's why I have him a little bit different than the rest of the people in the place. And I also suggest in the book that he's supposed to be the son of Lu the Son God, which has belonged to the earlier people that came here. And when his mother says that to her brother, who was the king, he's almost dismissive. Yeah. And we don't need to know who the father is like, yeah, yeah. Right. Whatever you say, though, you know, if you think he's a son of a god, it doesn't matter. He's family. But the thing is, there's a much darker force at play in the world, which is this malevolent warrior goddess [Morrigan] and she's a kind of an amalgamation of all the different female antagonists that would have been in all the area’s legends, and they usually switch sides. They're not really good or evil. They're just trying to survive. She's a metaphor for the survival of the matriarch. Morrigan says I'm going to manipulate these situations and these people because I can't do anything else. The power center of the book is Newgrange so a lot of it is in this place, which is our Stonehenge. So there's a lot of stuff going on in the book that I think if you don't know that doesn't matter. Hopefully, it's just a good adventure. If you do know a bit about it, you know, yeah, you might enjoy it. You might enjoy it more.