Eochaid’s incestuously begotten daughter is put out to die, but she is rescued by a herdsman and his wife. Reaching maturity, she exudes the stateliness of her royal forebears and is renowned for her fine embroidery. Another king of Tara, Eterscél, takes her for his queen. According to the Tochmarc Étaíne, Eterscél and the daughter of Eochaid’s incest give birth to Conaire Mór, the young ard rí who meets a tragic and untimely death. This is but one of three versions of Conaire Mór’s lineage, the best known of which comes in his own narrative, as follows.
CONAIRE MÓR AND DA DERGA’S HOSTEL
The story of beneficent high king Conaire Mór, the innocent victim of relentless fate, is a kind of sequel to the story of Midir and Étaín, though compiled by a different hand and in a different style. It is found in the eleventh-century text Togail Bruidne Da Derga [The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel], antecedents of which exist as early as the eighth and ninth centuries. Although the action is set in what is now Leinster, the story is often classed with the Ulster Cycle, in part because several Ulster heroes appear in it, perhaps inserted by later redactors. Étaín, lushly described, also appears, but now she is depicted as married to Eochaid Feidlech, a brother of Eochaid Airem. Their stepdaughter Mes Buachalla [cowherd’s fosterling] marries Eterscél, but as she is already pregnant, the true father of Conaire is a mysterious man who appeared to her in bird form. At the moment of conception he declared, ‘You will bear me a son, and that son may not kill birds, and Conaire shall be his name.’
Such a command is called in Irish a geís (pl. gessa), an idiosyncratic form of taboo found widely in early Irish literature. The unfortunate person receiving the geis may have done nothing to merit such a burden, and the person or forces applying it may appear wilful or capricious. Yet the geis is not to be escaped. To violate it is to risk death or catastrophe for one’s entire family. And so it is with the well-intentioned king Conaire Mór, whose just and prosperous rule is threatened by the outcome of a host of gessa; all but one are prohibitions. (i) Birds must always be privileged in his kingdom. (ii) He may not pass sunwise or righthandwise around Tara nor lefthandwise, withershins, around Brega, the plain between the Boyne and Liffey rivers. (iii) He may not hunt the cláenmíla [crooked beasts]. (iv) He may not stay away from Tara on any ninth night. (v) He may not sleep in a house from which the light of a fire is visible after sunset and into which one can see from the outside. (vi) He shall not allow three red men to go before him into a red man’s house. (vii) He must not allow plundering raiders to land during his reign. (viii) He may not allow a lone man or woman to visit his residence after sunset. And finally (ix) he may not try to settle a conflict between two of his subjects. In the run of Togail Bruidne Da Derga, however, Conaire Mór will unintentionally violate every one of these gessa.
Trouble begins when Conaire’s three foster-brothers, Fer Gair, Fer Lí and Fer Rogain, all sons of the champion hunter-warrior Donn Désa, start to raid and plunder the countryside. Conaire banishes all of them from Ireland, as he does again with another band of brigands, the three Ruadchoin of the Cualu south of the Liffey, when they too begin to harass Conaire’s subjects. At sea these unwanted exiles meet a band of despoilers or reavers led by the one-eyed Ingcél Cáech, a Briton, and together with the banished, outlaw sons of Queen Medb of Connacht – seven men all named Maine – they pillage first Britain and then Ireland. In Britain they slaughter a local king along with Ingcél’s parents and brothers. Meanwhile, Conaire Mór is in Thomond in the south of Ireland, where he settles a dispute between two of his foster-brothers, two Corpres, an act of justice that is his first violation of the gessa that will lead to his own downfall. Accepting the hospitality of both foster-brothers, he stays five nights with each, breaking a second geis.
Ingcél Cáech and the other brigands land with 150 boats at Howth, northeast of what is now Dublin. Conaire, at the same time, is travelling south from Tara, in what is now Co. Meath, passing to the left of Tara and the right of Brega, and unwittingly hunting the forbidden cláenmíla of Cerna. His goal is the hostel of Da Derga, a friend on whom he has bestowed many gifts and who can be expected to welcome him. The hostel bestrides the small river Dodder to the south, which is perhaps Bohernabreena or Donnybrook in south Co. Dublin. En route Conaire meets a forbidding churl, Fer Caille, a dark man of the wood with one eye, one hand, and one foot who carries a black pig on his back. Approaching the hostel Conaire sees before him three horsemen dressed in red, and, recognizing another possible violation of a geis, asks his son to drive them off. The son fails, and the party enters the residence of Da Derga, which means ‘red man’.
Fearful portents do not end at the doorway. A lone female seer of breath-stopping hideousness confronts Conaire. Each of her beetle-black shins is as long as a weaver’s beam. A greyish woollen mantle does not cover her lower (i.e. pubic) hair, which reaches as far as her knee. Her lips are on one side of her head. They do not prevent her from speaking, as she puts her shoulder against the doorpost, casting an evil eye upon the king and the youths surrounding him. She is Cailb, and she prophesies that all the defenders will be destroyed except for what the birds can take away in their claws.
Eager for both revenge and booty, the invading reavers led by Ingcél Cáech and the three foster-brothers advance inland with 5,000 men. Da Derga’s Hostel is in many ways a magical dwelling, described as having seven doorways (in some texts nine), but this does not mean it is invincible. Ingcél can spy upon the residence, describing the inhabitants to his fellow brigands. Fer Rogain, Conaire’s foster-brother, identifies the defenders from the descriptions and predicts which among them will survive.
In three assaults on the hostel the attackers set it on fire, and three times the flames are extinguished. Many in the hostel are slaughtered, the first being Lomna the fool, as he had predicted for himself. The defenders, including Conaire, counterattack, slaying the thieving bandits left and right. Then the battle turns on a matter of water. Druids with the marauders cast an exhausting thirst upon Conaire, which he cannot slake as so much of the hostel’s water has been thrown on the flames. The Dodder, flowing below, offers no help, and so the hero Mac Cécht searches Ireland for a drink for the king. (He is not identical with the Mac Cécht of the Tuatha Dé Danann; in some texts the Ulster hero Conall Cernach assists Conaire instead of Mac Cécht.) As he is returning with water from faraway Roscommon, two invaders are decapitating Conaire. Mac Cécht quickly dispatches both killers and pours the water he has brought into Conaire’s headless neck. Astonishing all, the severed head then speaks: ‘Excellent is Mac Cécht; good is Mac Cécht, who brings a drink to a king and does the work of a warrior.’
Despite the destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel, Conaire’s side suffers minimal losses, while of the brigands only five escape out of 5,000.
SWAN CHILDREN OF LIR
The story of Lir’s four children magically transformed into swans could easily be mistaken for a fairy-tale until we note that father and children are all members of the Tuatha Dé Danann. The action is set during the period when the semi-divine Dé Danann are losing ground to the mortal and more prosaic Milesians. Despite this asserted link with events in the twelfth-century Lebor Gabála, the narrative appears to be of much later composition, the manuscript dating from about 1500. Events in Oidheadh Chlainne Lir [The Tragic Story of the Children of Lir] were not much celebrated in oral tradition but have more recently become among the best known from early tradition through the efforts of cultural revivalists and educators. Oisín Kelly’s huge sculpture of the children changing back from swans into elderly humans is the focal point of the Garden of Remembrance, Parnell Square, Dublin. Oidheadh Chlainne Lir is one of the ‘Three Sorrows of Storytelling’, along with the Deirdre story (Chapter 4, pp. 80–83) and Oidheadh Chlainne Tuireann [The Tragic Story of the Children of Tuireann] (pp. 153–5 above).
When the Tuatha Dé Danann are defeated by the Milesians at the battle of Tailtiu, they seek out a new king so they will not be ruled by
their conquerors. Two of the five candidates are Bodb Derg of Connacht and Lir of what is now Co. Armagh; he is not the Lir of Manannán’s patronymic, mac Lir. Bodb Derg’s selection disappoints Lir, who retreats to his sídh of Finnachad, where his unhappiness is compounded by the death of his wife. Magnanimously, Bodb offers the hands of his foster-daughters, and Lir chooses the eldest, usually named Aeb. In quick succession she bears two sets of twins, first the daughter, Finnguala, and son, Aed, and then two sons, Fiachra and Conn, after whose birth she dies. To compensate Lir for this loss, Bodb Derg offers the hand of a second daughter, Aífe, who cherishes her stepchildren, at least at first.
Proving childless in her own marriage, Aífe’s attitude toward the four children takes a dark turn. Overcome with a debilitating jealousy, she takes to her bed, pretending sickness for a year. Brusquely pronouncing herself cured, she declares she will visit her father in Killaloe in what is now Co. Clare, taking the children with her. A wary Finnguala, who has seen evil portents in a dream, resists. On the way to the west, Aífe begins to rant against the children on patently false charges, claiming that they are depriving her of her husband’s love. She orders her servants to butcher them on the spot – Lough Derraveragh [Ir. Dairbhreach: with an oak plantation] in what is now Co. Westmeath. When the retainers refuse, Aífe shoves the children into the water and produces a druidical wand (or sword) to metamorphose the children into swans. Finnguala, who like all the children has retained the power of speech, protests their blamelessness and asks Aífe how long their unjust punishment will last. The stepmother answers: 900 years in three sentences of increasing misery – 300 years here at Lough Derraveragh; 300 years in the North Channel, the narrowest passage between Ireland and the Mull of Kintyre in Scotland, sometimes called the Sea of Moyle; the last 300 years on the stormy west coast of Ireland between Erris and the small island of Inishglora, Co. Mayo. Aífe’s spell upon the children, she explains, will end when a woman from the south, Deoch daughter of Fingen, king of Munster, unites with a man of the north, Lairgnéan, son of Colmán of Connacht. Now that Finnguala has asked the terms of the curse, any power of the Tuatha Dé Danann to lift it has been nullified. Aífe does allow, however, along with their power of speech, the children as swans to retain their senses and faculties, as well as an ability to sing, supremely among mortals. Leaving the children at Lough Derraveragh, Aífe proceeds to Bodb Derg’s palace where her treachery is soon discovered and she is punished by being transformed into a demon (sometimes vulture) of the wind, condemned to wander through air until the end of time.
In the midst of their pain and sorrow, the child-swans can indeed sing and with eloquence, poetry and fine speech. People from all over Ireland flock to Lough Derraveragh to hear them. Bodb, Lir and other prominent figures attend. The original text includes many verse passages of their songs. At the end of each 300-year term, Finnguala reminds her three brothers to move on. During their second exile they encounter a party of horsemen, including two other sons of Bodb Derg, near an estuary of the River Bann. The men have been looking for the children and give them news of the Tuatha Dé Danann. Such fleeting gestures of good will are of little avail. Eventually the people of Ireland forget about Lir’s offspring.
In their third exile the children’s songs reach the ears of a new character introduced to the story. The young man is named Aebhric and appears to be a well-born cleric living in self-sustaining isolation near Erris [Ir. Irrus Domnann, Iorras Domhnann]. Like all the others, Aebhric is entranced by the children’s singing, but he decides to write down their story so that we may read it now. Their 900-year exile complete, the children return to the sídh of Finnachad only to find it abandoned and desolate. Their only hope now is to wait at Inishglora [Ir. Inis Gluaire: island of Brightness] until Mo Cháemóc, a disciple of St Patrick, brings the Gospel of Christianity to the island. Hearing the evangelist’s bell, the swan children begin to sing with it, making themselves known to him. To help the children forget their suffering, Mo Cháemóc brings them into his household and there links them together with a silver chain.
Meanwhile, without the children’s knowing it, Aífe’s prophecy is fulfilled. South and north are united with Deoch of Munster’s marriage to Lairgnéan, and they now reign in Connacht. Once introduced to the reader, Deoch proves vain and grasping. She covets the singing swans for herself and demands that the king secure them for her. Bowing to her command, Lairgnéan tries to pull them away from Mo Cháemóc by yanking their silver chain, and in so doing unwittingly returns them to human form. That form is no longer childlike, of course. After 900 years of exile the four offspring of Lir are virtually pillars of dust. Mo Cháemóc baptizes them immediately, just in time to save their immortal souls.
ANGUS ÓG AND CÁER
The motif of swan transformation appears in yet another story from the Mythological Cycle, that of Angus Óg’s impossible love for the beautiful Cáer. Angus’s usual role is to aid imperilled lovers, as he does in the tale of Midir and Étaín (above). His own love for a woman he has never met presents his wit and inventiveness with its most ticklish challenge. The Old Irish version of the story (c.1150) is titled Aislinge Óenguso [The Vision of Angus], and the key elements of the narrative persisted in oral tradition until modern times under the title Angus Óg agus Cáer [Angus Óg and Cáer]. It is an Irish instance of the international tale type 400, the swan maiden.
A figure of youth (literal translation of Óg), beauty and poetry, Angus has the best claim to be the god of love among the Tuatha Dé Danann. Introduced in the Lebor Gabála (Chapter 7) he remained popular with storytellers in different cycles over the centuries. Stories of his conception and birth are extraordinarily complex and vary from text to text, as alluded to at the beginning of the account of Midir and Étaín (above). The most usual is that his father is the Dagda, ‘the good god’, who slept with Boand (the Boyne River) while she was still married to Nechtan. The Dagda had sent the cuckold Nechtan on a journey while the poor man was under a spell that took away his sense of time and hunger. When he returns in nine months he is deluded into thinking he had been away only a day. The parents of the newborn Angus ask Elcmar to be the child’s foster-father as a means of hiding their infidelity. In rival versions, the Dagda is known by the name Eochaid Ollathair when he is seduced by the wife of Elcmar, one Eithne, probably an alternative name for Boand. In any case, Angus Óg displaces either Dagda or Elcmar to assume his usual residence, Brug na Bóinne [house, hostel of the Boyne]. The Irish phrase denotes the passage-graves at the bend of the Boyne River, Co. Meath: Dowth, Knowth and most famously Newgrange. People composing and recording early Irish narrative had no access to knowledge of the great antiquity (c.3200 BC) and functions of these monuments (e.g. the shaft of sunlight on the winter solstice), which is widespread today. At Brug na Bóinne, whichever monument was implied, trees are always in fruit, and a cooked pig is on the spit, always ready for eating. Angus Óg is given credit for bringing the first cows from India to Ireland, a feat attributed elsewhere to Manannán mac Lir. So blessed is Angus that four swans circle over his head when he travels, and while at home he drinks the ale of immortality. A protector of many male lovers, most prominently Diarmait Ua Duibne of the Fenian Cycle, Angus may intervene by interposing his cloak of invisibility; one wave of the cloak and the protected one cannot be seen by enemies.
Despite the efficacy of his help to other lovers, the torment of Angus’s own love is hard to remedy. He is smitten by the beauty of a young girl he sees in a dream, a girl he has never met and cannot identify. The longing for her afflicts him with an ailment that demands he find her. He searches for her one full year. With the help of Bodb Derg, Angus learns that her name is Cáer, and that she is the daughter of Ethal Anbúail, the prince of a sídh in Connacht. Her nickname Ibormeith [yew berry] implies something of the nature of her character. The long-living evergreen yew is commonly a symbol of immortality in European tradition and is still often seen in Christian cemeteries. Wood from the tree is hard to
burn and was the favoured material in druids’ wands.
The girl’s father Ethal reveals that Cáer is more powerful than Angus Óg. Further, if he were to win her, he would have to accomplish the conquest with assistance from the many Tuatha Dé Danann. Complicating matters even more, Ethal explains that his daughter is a shape-shifter, spending alternate years as a swan and in the form of the beautiful woman of Angus’s dream.
She is in swan form when Angus finds her at a lake where she is surrounded by many other swans. Each of the other swan maidens is linked to another with a silver chain; only Cáer’s chain is gold. Gifted with human speech, Cáer promises to join Angus if only he will let her return. Her transformation to and from swan form, as well as that of the other women, takes place at the festival of Samain. And, it appears, the only way for Angus to be with Cáer is when this metamorphosis is taking place. On the next Samain, then, Angus approaches Cáer’s lake, embraces her, and then takes flight with her. He too has changed himself into a swan. The pair then fly three times around the lake, their enchanting song sending everyone who hears it into blissful sleep for three days and three nights. United at last, Angus Óg and Cáer take wing for his palace at Brug na Bóinne. While he lives at the bend of the Boyne, Angus Óg never ages, and his songs and poems remain as clear and fresh as the day he writes them.
9
The Ulster Cycle
Part I
Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) Page 22
