Hello and welcome to Queer as Fact, the podcast bringing you queer history from around the world and throughout time.

I'm Irene. I'm Alice and I'm Eli.

Today we'll be discussing the Irish mythological figure Kukhawan.

First, I'd like to acknowledge the Boon-Wong-Bunnerong people of the Kulin Nation on whose land we record this podcast,

and I realised the other day that I probably should also acknowledge the Waurundri Woiwong people on whose land I researched this podcast.

We pay respect to their elders past and present. They are custodians of an oral history tradition far older

than this podcast. We've got some content mornings for this episode. It contains misogyny,

including mistreatment of a pregnant woman and situations with the potential for sexual assault,

human and animal deaths, including the deaths of children, physical violence with sexual overtones,

and homophobia, including within the Catholic Church.

Coochhollen is a major character in the Ulster Cycle, which is a collection of kind of

interlinked stories that makes up one of Irish mythology's kind of great epics.

A lot of times I saw people refer to it as the Irish Iliad.

I think this is kind of silly, but it does at least give you an idea of sort of like the scope

and the tone of the work.

And the prominency, I suppose.

Yeah.

But I also understand why a person could be annoyed and be like, this isn't the Irish Iliad. The Iliad is the Greek Ulster cycle actually. Perhaps so. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, is the problem that it's Greco-Roman-centric, or is the problem that these two pieces of literature have different places in their respective cultures, and it's a bit of a forced analogy. I think it's a fairly, like, I think it's a fairly

reasonable comparison in terms of the, like, the place that they hold. Okay. In the cultures. I

think that that part is reasonable. I just, you know, it feels the same as when somebody calls,

if you called noodles, Chinese pasta.

Yeah.

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