Returning to the mystery of Dublin’s “three castles burning” emblem and what if anything it means (Diary, July 27th), I can report a possible breakthrough in the investigation.
As noted here last week, not even Dublin City Council seems to know what its own symbol represents, one of several guesses on the official website suggesting that – the flames issue aside – it features Dublin Castle in triplicate “because of the mystical significance of the number three”.
That sounds like the theory of a Flann O’Brien enthusiast, or at least a fan of the novel At Swim-two-birds. Which, as all Flannoraks will know, has three beginnings, three distinct plots, and three endings, the last of which includes a reflection on numerical obsession itself: “Numbers, however, will account for a great proportion of unbalanced and suffering humanity . . . Well known, alas, is the case of the poor German who was very fond of three and who made each aspect of his life a thing of triads. He went home one evening and drank three cups of tea with three lumps of sugar in each cup, cut his jugular with a razor three times and scrawled with a dying hand on a picture of his wife good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.”
But getting back to the emblem, it is from a Joycean – regular correspondent Senan Molony – rather than a Flannorak that I have been offered an unmystical explanation for the burning castles: namely that they represent “the three sieges of Dublin”, in 1171, 1534, and 1649.
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The first of those occurred when the last High King of Ireland, Rory O’Conor, attempted to seize the city from the newly arrived Normans.
The second was part of “Silken Thomas” Fitzgerald’s rebellion. The third happened during the War of the Three Kingdoms, when Irish Royalist and Confederate forces tried to capture the city from English republicans under Michael Jones.
All were repulsed, hence the three castles and the flames. Mind you, as both Senan and another reader, Ed Coghlan, have pointed out, there is a 13th-century city seal depicting a single, three-turreted Dublin Castle.
And instead of flames, that has two sentries blowing their horns form the middle turret, while archers fire at the enemy from the other two. But perhaps with the sieges in mind, the turrets were separated and promoted to full castle status in later versions.
Senan in any case comes to this subject from the perspective of a fourth, more literary siege. In his 2022 book Helen of Joyce, he argues that Joyce’s Ulysses, rather than being inspired by Homer’s Odyssey alone, is also shot through with another Homeric epic, the Iliad, and thereby with the Trojan War itself.
“Dublin is Troy”, he states baldly in the book’s opening sentence. Hence the many Trojan Horse references in Ulysses, including the bit on page one where Buck Mulligan is said to have a face “equine in its length” and hair “grained and hued like pale oak”.
Later in the novel, the role of wooden horse appears to devolve to another character, Blazes Boylan, while the home of Leopold and Molly Bloom at No 7 Eccles Street becomes Troy in microcosm. In bed that night, Helen aka Molly will remember her adulterous tryst earlier in the day and call Boylan a “stallion”.
So much for WB Yeats’s suggestion, in lamenting what he saw as Maud Gonne’s waste of her talents, that early 20th-century Dublin was “No Second Troy”.
In an intriguing side note, Senan also refers me to Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s 1863 portrait of Helen, in which she fingers a locket featuring a single burning castle, its red flames uncannily like the ones that now appear on Dublin lampposts and elsewhere.
Getting back to Ulysses, there are many references in the book to the “City Arms”, thanks in all cases to the hotel of that name, now a pub, in what used to the Dublin cattle markets.
Are any of these coded references to the other city arms and its burning castles? Well of possible interest to our inquiries is the bit in Barney Kiernan’s pub, where the narrator sneers:
“Time they were stopping up in the City Arms Pisser Burke told me there was an old one there with a cracked loodheramaun of a nephew and Bloom trying to get the soft side of her playing bézique to come in for a bit of wampum in her will . . .”
Then, a little later in the same passage, there is this:
“And one time he led him the rounds of Dublin and, by the holy farmer, he never cried crack till he brought him home as drunk as a boiled owl and he said he did it to teach him the evils of alcohol and by herrings if the three women didn’t near roast him it’s a queer story, the old one, Bloom’s wife and Mrs O’Dowd that kept the hotel.”
So there you have it: a tale that starts with the City Arms and ends with Bloom being “near roasted” in triplicate, albeit by angry women rather than burning castles.
But maybe that’s just a coincidence.