Cast 70. Page 139, line 666
O! A bone! That last pagan king of Ireland Cormac in the schoolpoem choked himself at Sletty southward of the Boyne. Wonder what he was eating. Something galoptious. Saint Patrick converted him to Christianity. Couldn’t swallow it all however.
—Roast beef and cabbage.
—One stew.
This is from Episode 8. Bloom has gone into Burton’s restaurant on Duke Street in search of lunch. It comes just before the passage discussed in Cast 3 of this blog. He is watching the vulgar way the customers are eating. One of them has just gnawed down to the bone.
The red circle marks Burton’s at 18 Duke Street. Bloom dislikes the place and instead goes to eat at Davy Byrne’s at No. 21, marked in blue.
Cormac mac Airt was a High King of Ireland in medieval Irish legend. Depending on the source, his reign is placed anywhere from the beginning of the second century to the end of the fourth.
The poem Bloom is recalling from school is thought to be The Burial of King Cormac by the nineteenth-century Irish poet Sir Samuel Ferguson.
Anon to priests of Crom was brought —
Where, girded in their service dread,
They minister'd on red Moy Slaught —
Word of the words King Cormac said.
They loosed their curse against the king;
They cursesd him in his flesh and bones;
And daily in their mystic ring
They turn'd the maledictive stones,
Till, where at meat the monarch sate,
Amid the revel and the wine,
He choked upon the food he ate,
At Sletty, southward of the Boyne.
High vaunted then the priestly throng,
And far and wide they noised abroad
With trump and loud liturgic song
The praise of their avenging God.
According to the legend, Cormac converted from Druidism to Christianity, and the Druids, resentful of this, cursed him so that he died by choking on a salmon bone. Since the poem itself does not specify what kind of bone it was, Bloom is presumably wondering what exactly lodged in his throat.
Saint Patrick (c. 387?–461) was the missionary and bishop who spread Christianity in Ireland and became the country’s patron saint. Historically, however, the dates do not match, so he cannot literally have been the one to convert Cormac.
Bloom’s joke is that the High King of Ireland never fully accepted Christianity: playing on the image of choking on a bone, he says Cormac “couldn’t swallow it all.”
“galoptious” is an unfamiliar word, but it belongs to a whole family of odd spellings—galumptious, galuptious, galloptious, galluptious, goluptious, golopshus, and so on. It means something like “splendid” or “temptingly delicious.” It is said to derive from the Latin voluptuous.
The person ordering the stew is, of course, just another customer at Burton’s. One naturally assumes it would be Irish stew.
The whole paragraph containing this line is a vivid description of filthy eating habits, and one of the standout pleasures of reading Ulysses.
For the method behind this blog, seeHere.
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