Kelt Xalqlari Epik Ijodi -

Branán of the silver torque came forward, his shield bitten by a hundred serpent-edges. “Who will cross the nine waves of forgetting,” said the king, “and bring back the cauldron of tongues? For the hag of the gray rock has stolen our speech, and our poets sing only the sound of rain.”

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

But Branán cut his palm and fed the sea. He sang the géiss of his grandfather’s sword: “I am the knot the noose cannot tighten. I am the step the wolf-track does not follow.” Branán of the silver torque came forward, his

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

Branán broke the bone and gave it. The sea opened like a wound in a dream. No fire. No window. Only a ceiling of roots and a floor of old bones sewn into sentences. In the center: the cauldron, upside down, and beside it the hag—Caillech of the slack jaw— weaving a net from the spit of orphans.

(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.