Scrum in
Scrum
in
In Brief
After marching down Holles Street to pseudo-military
cadences, the young men suddenly come to a stop because they
have arrived at the door of Burke's pub: "Halt! Heave to.
Rugger. Scrum in. No touch kicking. Wow, my tootsies! You
hurt? Most amazingly sorry!" The language here calls attention
to the fact that the marchers have been linked arm-in-arm
throughout this paragraph of Oxen of the Sun. As they
lurch to a halt a new metaphor suggests itself: instead of a
phalanx, a rugby scrum to get into the bar.
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After some infractions in rugby ("Rugger"), play is
restarted with a "Scrum." The eight forwards on each
side come together in massed formations of three lines, backs
parallel to the ground and bodies tightly locked together, and
the three players in each front row link arms with their
counterparts on the opposite side. A player called the
scrum-half on the team that did not commit the foul feeds the
ball into the gap between the two massed groups, and they
struggle to gain possession by pushing the pile forward and
hooking the ball backward with their feet. "Scrum in"
is not a term used for forming a scrum, so the narrative
context seems to be that the bar is crowded and a massed
formation of bodies will enable the men to force their way
inside. Being ten in number (Stephen, Lynch, Lenehan,
Mulligan, Bannon, Costello, Crotthers, Dixon, Madden, and
Lyons––Bloom is in tow, but presumably not arm-in-arm with the
others), they have more than enough for the job.
Someone in the improvised scrum shouts, "No touch kicking"––a
more difficult detail to make sense of. "Touch" has a
technical meaning in rugby: it is the out-of-bounds space past
the sidelines, and a ball carried or kicked over these lines
is "in touch," or dead. Players can kick the ball into touch
to avoid being tackled by an opposing forward, so the
statement could mean, "Don't be afraid of getting physical.
Keep scrumming in!" An alternative gloss by Gifford is also
worth considering: "Kick the ball and not the other players."
Feet are moving vigorously in the doorway, and someone might
get hurt. A moment later, someone (the same man, or another?)
yells that his feet have been stomped: "Wow, my tootsies!"
The stomper promptly apologizes: "You hurt? Most amazingly
sorry!" In the next sentence the men are inside the pub
and someone is asking who's going to pay for the drinks:
"Query. Who's astanding this here do?"
Thanks to rugby (and pub) enthusiast Senan Molony for talking
over the details of this note with a foreigner. In defense of
his credentials he notes that "I have scrummed into many a
bar. Often after international rugby matches!"
