The Cairn on the Headland

Plot summary

James O'Brien is an Irish-American academic who specializes in the history of Medieval Ireland - a subject on which he is highly well-informed and about which he has a passionate feeling of partisanship. He speaks Gaelic fluently, can read ancient Irish manuscripts and inscriptions in the original, and is thoroughly familiar with such works as The Book of Leinster, The Great Book of Lecan and The Annals of the Four Masters.

O'Brien's promising academic career, and his entire life, is blighted by an insidious blackmailer named Ortali. Ortali is in possession of evidence which might implicate O'Brien in a murder he did not commit. With this threat hanging over his head, O'Brien must give Ortali much of his salary and the money he got from various academic awards. Ortali enjoys taunting O'Brien and humiliating him.

While visiting Dublin, O'Brien and Ortali encounter an ancient cairn on a headland. The area is shunned by the local people, and therefore remained nearly unchanged since the Middle Ages - though the bustle and bright lights of modern Dublin are just around the corner. It is known that the cairn was erected in the aftermath of the 1014 Battle of Clontarf when the Irish King Brian Boru decisively defeated the Vikings, but it is not sure if it was erected by the victorious Irish or by the defeated Norse, and who is buried under it.

Ortali proposes to come back late at night and dismantle the cairn, in the hope of finding treasure under it. O'Brien strongly objects, both because it is a centuries-old Dublin landmark and because he feels a premonition about what may lay under it. Ortali scoffs at O'Brien's "superstition", and when O'Brien mentions that local people believe mistletoe must not be brought near the cairn, Ortali laughs and says he would wear mistletoe on his lapel when he comes back.

The two also argue hotly about the Battle of Clontarf - O'Brien regarding King Brian Boru as not only having liberated Ireland from centuries of Viking oppression, but also having saved the whole of humanity from the evil worship of the Norse god Odin, whose defeated adherents lost heart and eventually embraced the White Christ. Ortali laughs and scoffs about that, too. The two part in great anger, separately making their way back to their hotel. O'Brien picks up a great jagged stone and conceives the idea of killing Ortali with it - even though he would then be charged with a murder of which he would be truly guilty.

Suddenly O'Brien meets a strange woman, who wears archaic clothing and speaks a very archaic form of Gaelic. She introduces herself as Meve MacDonnal and gives O'Brien a crucifix of curiously worked gold, set with tiny jewels, of an extremely archaic and unmistakably Celtic workmanship. After a moment he recognizes it as an old relic, the Cross of Saint Brandon, which was considered irrevocably lost centuries ago.

Shocked that the woman would give away such a rare item to a stranger, he points out its priceless value. She, however, chides him for putting a monetary value on the Cross, and tells him that it is given him as a free gift since he would have need of it - and then she disappears. As would turn out later, Meve MacDonnal had been three centuries dead and buried in a nearby old cemetery. The Cross, buried with her, had been given to her safekeeping by her uncle, the Bishop Liam O'Brien who died in 1655.

Returning to his hotel and falling into troubled sleep, O'Brien relieves the Battle of Clontarf - in which he had himself taken part in his earlier incarnation as the Irish warrior Red Cumal, a kern of King Brian Boru (his nickname derived from his having red hair and beard). Following the Irish victory, Cumal looted the armor and helm of one of the dead Vikings. Ranging the field, Cumal came upon a severely wounded, one-eyed Viking chieftain, who turned out to be none other than the god Odin, who had taken a human form in order to help his followers. However, taking a human form made Odin vulnerable, and he was severely wounded by a spear bearing a cross, trapped in the human body and unable to resume his form true form as a malevolent wild spirit.

Mistaking Cumal for a Viking, due to his having red hair and beard and wearing a Norse armor, Odin begged Cumal to provide him with a bit of mistletoe - the only substance which could restore him to the spirit form. Odin then died (or at least went into a kind of suspended animation). Red Cumal quickly alerted the other Irish warriors. Together they erected the cairn on the on headland, completely covering Odin's body. Cumal then warned everybody around that the cairn must never be disturbed and that no mistletoe must ever be brought anywhere near it - thus originating the "superstition" which would survive into the Twentieth Century.

Waking up and finding Ortali missing from the hotel, O'Brien realizes that he might have gone back to the cairn and himself hastens back there. He gets to the spot just in time to see Ortali uncovering the body of Odin, which remains exactly the same as it was when Red Cumal and his fellows erected the cairn nearly a thousand years before. As Ortali bends, the sprig of mistletoe drops from his lapel onto Odin's body. Odin immediately rises and comes to monstrous life, shedding his human appearance and becomes "a fiendish spirit of ice and frost and darkness", with "lightnings and the shuddering gleams of the aurora playing around his grisly head". Feeling no gratitude to Ortali, but rather a blind hatred of all humans, Odin proceeds to kill Ortali with a single blast of lightning.

Odin then turns towards O'Brien - but he remembers in time the Cross which Meve MacDonnal gave him, holding it high and pointing it at Odin. From the cross is shot a single shaft of white light - "unbearably pure, unbearably white" - and the demon Odin shrieks, shriveling and then with a great rush of vulture-like wings, he soared into the stars, dwindling and disappearing.

Thus, O'Brien has survived, saved the modern Dublin and the whole world from the demonic fury of Odin, and also got free of Ortali's blackmail - since police would later determine that Ortali was struck by lightning and no blame attaches to O'Brien. The story does not tell what O'Brien did afterwards with Saint Brandon's Cross.

Themes

Essential to the story are very sharp, polar value judgements. The conflict of Christianity vs. Norse Religion – specifically, Irish Christians vs. Odin-worshiping Vikings – is depicted as no less than Good vs. Evil or Light vs. Darkness. As presented here, Clontarf defined not only the future of Ireland but also the fate of the entire world, the whole of humanity - though other Christians in other places failed to appreciate what Brian Boru and his warriors had done for them. The same point was made by Howard in the related story, The Twilight of the Grey Gods, whose plot all takes place in 1014 and where the participation of Odin in the battle makes it a Wagnerian Götterdämmerung or Ragnarök.

This perception of Vikings and of the Norse religion as utterly evil is quite at variance with that presented in Tigers of the Sea, where Howard's earlier Irish protagonist Cormac Mac Art joins a Viking band, feels no objection to his Danish comrades-in-arms worshiping Odin, and conversely is not particularly fond of Christianity.

Dorothy Sayers noted the trend of pagan deities sometimes degenerating into Christian demons, as for example the Greek Apollo becoming "The Foul Fiend Apollyon" of The Pilgrim's Progress. Clearly, Odin went through a similar transformation in Howard's story.

Odin being in Howard's interpretation a demon, his banishment at the climax of the story is an effect an exorcism, and it includes many elements of an exorcism as depicted in Christian tradition. Holding out a crucifix is commonly mentioned as an effective method of confronting a demon. According to Christian theology - specifically, Catholic theology - one need not be a clergyman in order to perform an exorcism. However, if one is not especially holy oneself, the chances of overcoming the demon are much increased if one has a holy relic connected to a venerated Saint, thus being able to draw on that Saint's holiness. In all that, O'Brien follows on the well-established rules for carrying out an exorcism - and it works.