If you don’t like entertaining people in your home you will love this weird little tale from the twelfth century called Tromdám Gúaire (Gúaire’s Burdensome Poetic Band which sounds like an excellent title for an album btw).

In it a troupe of travelling entertainers arrives uninvited at the house of a man named Marbhán, expecting to be fed, housed, and entertained in return. In medieval Ireland, this was not optional: poets, musicians, and general entertainers had a legal right to hospitality, and they enforced it with the threat of curses that could leave blisters on your face or, in extreme cases, kill you. Poets were hard as nails back then.

So poor old Marbhán can’t refuse them.  Even if they’re rubbish and it’s been a long week and he just wants to put the medieval equivalent of his fat pants on and relax. But he chose violence that night anyway.

He kept requesting they perform the crónán snagach, an exhausting dance, that he ardently hoped would break their heads and their feet and their necks. He definitely had a bad week that week. Seems extreme but I imagine laying on lashings of food and drink for poets and other entertainers got pretty stale sometimes.

He didn’t get his full wish. But one performer at least danced with such exertion that his eyeball shot straight from its socket and landed in his hair. End of the ‘entertainment’. I do hope Marbhán called the doc and then went straight to bed, a happy man.