"Hound Dog's Ear" (1973/1991)

Alas, we have the terminal report of him! The coded chatter gives the sighted mort of him, How out beyond the orb of Di Carissimus His sundered ship became a novanissimus. His soaring vaunt escapes the blooming ears of us, He’s gone, he’s dead, he’s dirt, he disappears from us! Be this the death of highest thrust of human all? The flaming end of bright and shining crewmen all? Destroyed? His road is run? It’s but a bend of it; Make no mistake, this only seems the end of it.

So ends Lafferty’s 1968 mock-heroic retelling of The Odyssey—one of his most beloved books and, alongside The Reefs of Earth, among the easiest entry points into his larger fiction. In 1973, he made good on the “make no mistake” with a follow-up, the short story “Hound Dog’s Ear.” The story survives in two forms: a draft and a later revision. I’ll focus on the revision, though (oddly enough) it was the draft that appeared in Strange Plasma #4 (1991). I prefer the revision not only because it is the stronger story, but because it more elegantly fits Roadstrum and his crew into Irish myth—connections that in turn link to the Argo cycle and to Lafferty’s own Finn. The main challenge is that the short story draws on Irish story cycles far less familiar than Homer, so I’ll sketch the Ulster and Fenian cycles, summarize the story, and close by considering how Lafferty ties his fiction to the Finnian material while leaving the Ulster Cycle behind.

The Ulster Cycle is set at around the time of Christ. It tells of the Heroic Age of the Irish and depicts a brutal, aristocratic society obsessed with status, lineage, and what sociologists now call “face.” In it, a reader will learn about the Ulaid people of the north and their conflicts with Connacht. The stories are dominated by Cú Chulainn. He is a demigod warrior prone to monstrous warp-spasms (ríastrad), who single-handedly defends his province in the epic Táin Bó Cúailnge. The stories themselves are bloody and somber. There is chariot warfare, grand single combat at river fords, and the trophy-taking of enemies' heads. There is something inflexible about its world, which is obsessed with honor and geasa (supernatural taboos). In the Ulster Cycle, cruel deities like the Morrígan make sure that glory usually comes with a big helping of tragic, premature death.

The Fenian (or Ossianic) Cycle is very different. It is set around the 3rd century AD. The Ulster Cycle gives us the tribal fort, but the Fenian Cycle gives us untamed wilderness. It follows the exploits of the Fianna. They’re a standing army of hunter-warriors led by the seer Fionn mac Cumhaill. The pieces in it aren’t war epics but more like Arthurian romances or folklore. They focus on the camaraderie of a band of brothers who live on the margins of society. Together, the Fianna act as guardians of Ireland—that is, when they aren’t having fun hunting and feasting. The tone is far lighter than the Ulster Cycle. The world is magical. Everything is tied to the landscape. There are many encounters with the Tuatha Dé Danann (fairies), and there are journeys to the Otherworld. A melancholy does hang over the cycle, with it being told by Fionn’s son, Oisín. He has survived into the Christian era to recount the glories of the pagan past to Saint Patrick.

Laffery’s story starts with ten fireballs landing on the surface of the planet Tír Tairngiri, while Roadstrum’s Hornet craft orbits overhead. The archive world where the fireballs have landed is populated by figures from Irish legend. There are Fergus McRoy (Fergus mac Róich) and Sencha McAllen (Sencha mac Ailella) from the Ulster Cycle. They reject the weird objects as unscientific and refuse to believe they contain living beings. Next, the locals perform a ritual fast against the objects to compel them to follow the law. After forty days of this, one of the stone shells bursts open: it is Captain Roadstrum. The cooled fireballs house the Space Chantey crowd. They have somehow survived the nova at the end of Space Chantey by hiding themselves in asteroid cores. Over the course of the story, the crew members hatch out of their asteroids, but the action centers on Roadstrum, who breaks out first. Roadstrum might have survived, but there is a major problem. The heroes of Tír warn that the Space Chantey people’s existence is not yet an established fact. It must be verified by the omens of a sleeping hound and the crows of the Morrígan from the Ulster Cycle.

Enter Finn McCool. Roadstrum and his crew attend a banquet accompanied by the local hero Finn (Fionn mac Cumhail) of the Fenian Cycle and a version of Lafferty’s own Finnegan. He explains that he keeps a low profile. There are extraordinary giants in the realm. As they feast, the authorities of Tír, including a "scientialist" and a news reporter, convene a hearing to disprove the existence of the spacefarers. Finn testifies that he found nothing real about his dinner companions. The auguries officially pronounce the visitors non-existent: the hound signals he cannot hear them, and the hooded crows descend to signify they cannot see them. Consequently, the assembly orders the "false evidence" of the crew’s bodies to be obliterated by a force of one hundred strong men.

Then Finn McCool whispers, and Roadstrum and his crew flee the tribunal before the executioners can act, racing like mad toward Razor-Back Hill. Finn joins them, deciding to defect from Tír because the planet is too narrow for a man like him. Reaching the hill, they meet the friendly giant Gigantipanteloni, who was at the Fenian feast (the giant is Lafferty’s homage to Rabelais). Gigantipanteloni sets his massive spear and uses it as a lever to catapult the eleven adventurers—the crew, plus Finn—off the planet’s surface and into the sky. Do they make it?

You're pterodactyl-plucking right they made the thing, Like A-Class melodrama's end, to grade the thing.

So what’s going on here? I think Lafferty is riffing on the Otherworld (Tír Tairngiri), reimagining it as a mytic bureaucratic planet where the Ulster Cycle’s rigid laws have calcified into what its self-important characters proudly call science. In the Ulster spirit, Fergus and Sencha cling to rites and fatalistic auguries (the Morrígan’s crows) to ward off a new mythic reality.

Lafferty uses Finn McCool’s mythological role as the paradigmatic outsider to laugh at the sobriety of the Ulster Cycle, the way Lafferty twits the stern-faced sobriety of the Greek mania for honor and glory in Space Chantey. Unlike the fort-dwelling Ulster aristocrats who try to legislate our heroes out of existence, Finn treats Roadstrum with the hospitality typical of the Fenian hunting lodge. By the end of the story, Lafferty has affirmed what he likes most in the Irish myths: the Fenian spirit—what is adaptable, mobile, wily, fun, tricksterish, and adventurous. It is the mythogenic force capable of bridging the gap between the ancient Celtic past and Space Chantey.

Hound Dog's Ear Notes.pdf

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