Anne Lucey: Farewell, mummy, and thanks for the company in the depths of UCC library

Now about to be repatriated to Egypt, the mummy was a familiar and even friendly sight to University College Cork students and staff in the 1980s

'Mid 1980s, I was head-down in the documents library in the basement when the mummy appeared in a dim corridor where he had been deposited without fuss.' Picture: Denis Mortell

I can’t be the only one who has had a conversation with the UCC mummy, I reflected this week as news broke somewhat regrettably that the lodestar of my 1980s was going Nileside.

Most English graduates of UCC in the 1980s would confess to having close relationships with dead as well as living authors. It was that kind of era. A tumultuous time. A lively time. The difficult decade mostly glossed over now but canyon-deep in its divisions. An era before Instagram or even the internet. A reader’s paradise.

Public hiring embargos, emigration, unemployment, worsening Troubles, marches, Maggie Thatcher, and Charles Haughey. Crumbling student flats. Kerry Babies, women with rosaries outside cinemas daring to show The Last Temptation of Christ; Brian Lenihan Sr telling us: “We can’t all live on a small island.”

The down-at-heel mummy — broken and faded, no glittering Tutankhamun, but still hanging in there with a bit of faraway style — became a symbol and a serene comfort. Éamonn Ó Carragáin, professor of Anglo Saxon and head of UCC’s English Department, would remind us that we in Cork and Kerry had a unique understanding of the Middle Ages. We still grasped both the eschatology and the earthy humour of Geoffrey Chaucer’s world. We had lived the ancient rituals of Good Friday and Easter Sunday of medieval miracle plays.

Living legends stalked the grass, and most of us, steeped in superstition of place, kept off the Quad.

Seamus Heaney was a regular at English lectures. Wearing white trousers and smoking a long cigarette after a good lunch with his friend John Montague, the laughing pair would hit the lecture halls. On occasion, a bottle of whiskey was brought out in a room in Bloomfield Terrace and the great Seán Ó Riada remembered.

The urbane Seán Ó Tuama brought the troubadours of Provence to life in a mixture of French and Gaeilge. Sean Lucy threw light on the mad world of Tam o’ Shanter in imitating Scottish poet Rabbie Burns.

People sneaked into the lectures of John A Murphy.

Sean Dunne, poet and later literary editor of this newspaper, would wander through. Theo Dorgan and his rich Cork accent was in the tutors’ rooms.

It was a tense world too. The cold winds of recession and the even colder divisions of the North were blighting the island. The hunger strikes drove deep wedges.

“George Sands, we will remember you forever!” was written irreverently, poisonously perhaps, on the back of a toilet door. “‘Balls!’, said the Queen, ‘if I had them I’d be King!”, went the college rag mag. Later, a taoiseach, a classmate in Irish, the primly-dressed passionate Haughey supporter Micheál Martin, would emerge, unexpectedly, from the cauldron of divisiveness. But that was later.

Mid-1980s, I was head-down in the documents library in the basement when the mummy appeared in a dim corridor where he had been deposited without fuss. He had been moved from the Lee Maltings where he had resided with the documents. The constant temperature of libraries suited him, I was told.

That UCC had a mummy was news to me. But a thesis in Anglo Saxon on a long poem by Cynewulf, a saint’s life, signed in runes, felt fitting symmetry with a dullish mummy covered in hieroglyphs.

I may have strung the research out a bit longer than was necessary. There was Old Norse and Old French sources to be studied (Ó Carragáin was my supervisor and he encouraged scholarship).

Occasionally, I poked my head up into the bitter recessionary 1980s but it was warmer in the basement with the mummy. I took the lead from him and strung it out a bit longer. Unknown to me in 1989 when I finally handed in my thesis, librarian Helen Moloney Davis had established that that mummy was not the Hor on the lid at all. The sarcophagus was older by 300 years than its contents and I had been talking not to a high priest of Thebes — nor to Thoth, the god of writing and magic mediating between the worlds — but to an unknown.

It didn’t matter.

John Fitzgerald, recently retired Boole librarian and poet, a humanities graduate of 1980s UCC, has made the repatriation of the mummy a personal project. The objects have been at UCC since 1928 when donated by a priest of the African missionaries, during the rage for Egyptology, he explained.

“In 2005, as librarian I said some day I will get him home!” John said.

There is a sense of isolation to the UCC mummy, lonely like the Anglo Saxon ‘Seafarer’, John says.

The original mummy was one of a family of priests at the temple of Amun in Thebes and there are matching sarcophagi. It may well be that the the sarcophagi at least will finally all be together now, John thinks.

There will be “a sense of closure” in returning the mummy to his “áit dúchais”.

“The Egyptians are very appreciative,” he said. “No one will miss him from UCC.”

I wouldn’t be sure, I tell him.