Thornton notes that "five lines of text and ten pages
of notes" seems to refer to "the work of the
antiquarians who were editing, explaining, and annotating
early Irish literature and folklore at this time"; Gifford
says of the overall movement, “At times this interest ran to
hairsplitting scholarship and at times to gross
sentimentality.” For Haines' benefit, Mulligan adopts the
persona of a hairsplitting pedant, and proceeds to demean the
seriousness of the scholarly enterprise by citing all sorts of
inauthentic arcane beliefs.
A central figure in his mockery is Yeats, who joined the
ranks of the scholars when he edited a collection titled Fairy
and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry in 1888. Yeats'
poems in the 1880s and 1890s show how extensively and
beautifully these myths could shape a vision of Irish life,
and at the same time how readily they could encourage
escapism, freefloating sentiment, and vague substitutes for
thought.
“The fishgods of Dundrum” ridicules Yeats'
obsession. Gifford notes that fish gods “are associated with
the Formorians, gloomy giants of the sea, one of the legendary
peoples of prehistoric Ireland.” But Dundrum makes no sense in
connection with them. One Dundrum, north of Dublin, was the
place “where ancient Irish tribes held a folk version of
Olympic games.” Another, south of Dublin, was both the site of
an insane asylum, and the village where Yeats’ sister
Elizabeth established the Dun Emer press in 1903 to publish
his “new works and works by other living Irish authors in
limited editions on handmade paper.” Her sister Lily became
involved with the Dun Emer Guild, “which produced handwoven
embroideries and tapestries.”
So a piece of authentic mythology (fishgods) is mixed up with
some unrelated ancient customs, and both are attached to the
Yeats family enterprise of reviving Irish art, with the
implication that all these cultural enterprises, and all three
Yeats siblings, belong in a lunatic asylum. At the end of
Oxen of the Sun, Mulligan can be heard continuing to
mock the Yeats sisters' publishing enterprise, now as the "Druiddrum press": "To be
printed and bound at the Druiddrum press by two designing
females. Calf covers of pissedon green. Last word in art
shades."
“Printed by the weird sisters in the year of the big
wind” establishes another chain of bizarre and
wildly funny associations. The “weird sisters” have
nothing to do with Irish mythology; they appear in
Shakespeare’s Macbeth as Scottish witches whose name
may owe something to the Old English concept of wyrd
or fate. But we have just had a glancing allusion to two
sisters involved in the publishing business, so now it would
seem that Yeats’ sisters are a bit “weird.”
And indeed these sisters have used the phrase "the
big wind." The Dun Emer edition of Yeats’ In
the Seven Woods announces that the book was completed
“the sixteenth day of July in the year of the big wind, 1903.”
This phrase usually refers to 1839, which saw a terrible
windstorm that destroyed hundreds of houses. There was another
formidable tempest in 1903; but there is nothing ancient or
mythological about it. In Aeolus it is referred to
as "that cyclone of last year," and Oxen of the
Sun mentions "the big wind of last February a
year that did havoc the land so pitifully."
In his final sally, Mulligan gives up slandering Yeats and
his family, and riffing on mythology; now he directs his
attention to mocking the more pedantic scholars. Turning to
Stephen, his professorial colleague in crime, and imitating
academic affectation “in a fine puzzled voice, lifting
his brows,” he asks for assistance with a
bibliographic citation: "is mother Grogan's tea and
water pot spoken of in the Mabinogion or is it in the
Upanishads?"
The question is as absurd as Shakespeare’s Feste asking, “For
what says Quinapalus?” Mother Grogan is a character in a
silly contemporary Irish song rather than a figure of ancient
folklore. The medieval Mabinogion contains many ancient Celtic
legends, but it is Welsh rather than Irish. And the Upanishads
are ancient Vedic texts of Hindu spirituality and
philosophy—of great interest to Theosophists, but
otherwise completely unconnected to Ireland. Stephen,
“gravely” participating in the scholarly charade, ends the
mockery with his own very funny reply to Mulligan’s question.
The humor may be aimed at more than just Irish revivalists,
however. On ulyssesseen.com, Andrew Levitas argues that
Mulligan invokes this song "to skewer Haines’ attitude toward
Ireland and things Irish. Haines is collecting 'exotic' Irish
sayings and other folk esoterica, in the same way Bartok,
Dvorak and Smetana collected ethnic folk tunes from the
backwaters of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as modernity began
to overtake these regions." Since Wales is "another Celtic
nation incorporated into Great Britain," and India is
"Britain’s leading colony," Mulligan may be mocking the
Englishman's project of cultural appropriation.
