Morrígan

The Morrígan is one of the figures of the Tuatha Dé Danann, and in Old Irish she is almost always named with the definite article, as though the word were an office rather than a personal name. It is not true, though often repeated, that she lacks a birth and a lineage. The Lebor Gabála Érenn gives them plainly: she is the daughter of Ernmas, and her sisters are Badb and Macha. The same text adds that her other name is Anand, and that from her are named the Dá Chích Anann, the twin hills in County Kerry that maps still call the Paps of Anu. Her name is what is most disputed. It can be read with a long vowel, "great queen", or with a short one, "phantom queen": on the second reading the first element would be the same that yields Old English mære, the creature that sits on the chest of the sleeper and that left its trace in the second half of the English word nightmare. Both etymologies have been defended since the nineteenth century and neither has been ruled out. That her rank here should be phantom queen is not a poetic licence: it is one of the two possible readings of her name.

Her transformations are not a generic list of powers but concrete episodes that can be cited one by one. In the Táin Bó Regamna she appears to Cú Chulainn as a woman dressed in red in a chariot drawn by a one-legged horse, and announces in advance the shapes in which she will return: an eel to twist about his feet while he fights at the ford, a she-wolf to drive the cattle onto him, and a hornless red heifer at the head of the stampede. In the Táin Bó Cúailnge she carries out all three threats, and all three times he wounds her: he breaks the eel's ribs, bursts the she-wolf's eye and breaks the heifer's leg. Shortly afterwards she comes to him as an old woman milking a three-teated cow, and for each draught of milk she offers he blesses her without recognising her, and each blessing heals one of the three wounds. She is also the carrion crow, and in that shape she settles on his shoulder when at last he dies. The washer at the ford, the woman who washes in the water the bloody garments of one about to die, appears in the Irish texts chiefly under the name of Badb, who is her sister; in time the three were read as one and the image stuck to her. What no source contains is that she seduces kings to test their virtue: the motif of the maiden who confers kingship belongs to other figures, such as Ériu or Medb.

The encounter with the Dagda is not a marriage, and it is worth telling as it is written. In the Second Battle of Mag Tuired, a year before the battle and on the eve of Samhain, the Dagda goes to Glenn Étin and finds her in the river Unius, in Corann, washing herself with one foot on each bank. The text says, with striking brevity, that they conversed and made a union. And what she gives in return is military intelligence: she tells him where the Fomorians will land, bids him summon the men of art of Ireland to the ford of the Unius, and promises to go herself against Indech son of Dé Domnann, king of the Fomorians, and take from him the blood of his heart and the kidneys of his valour. She keeps her promise and carries what she has taken to the ford, and there hands it to the hosts. The battle is won by what she knew, not by what she fought. With Cú Chulainn the relation is enmity, and it begins because he refuses her: she offers herself at the worst possible moment and he spurns her without recognising her, and from that come the three assaults and the three wounds. One son is known to her, Meiche, who appears in the traditions about the name of the river Barrow: he had three hearts with serpents inside them, and Mac Cécht killed him and burned the hearts before the serpents grew large enough to lay Ireland waste.

She is called a goddess of war and the word misleads, because in the texts she wields no weapon at all. The Morrígan does not fight: she incites, prophesies and terrifies. In the Second Battle of Mag Tuired her part in the combat is summed up in a single line, the one saying that she came and was heartening the Tuatha Dé to fight the battle fiercely and fervently; and afterwards, once the battle is won, it is she who proclaims it to the royal heights of Ireland. When she does act physically she does so in animal shape, and comes off badly: Cú Chulainn breaks her ribs as an eel, bursts her eye as a she-wolf and breaks her leg as a heifer, and she has to go begging three blessings disguised as an old woman to heal the three wounds. It is a different way of understanding war, and it deserves to be stated in its own terms. She is what decides a battle before it begins: the panic that undoes a formation, the omen that drains the will to fight, the intelligence one host has and the other does not. A power that wins battles without striking a single blow, and which for that very reason can be wounded by anyone who lands one.

The Second Battle of Mag Tuired ends with two poems of hers, and they are among the strangest things early Irish literature left behind. In the first she proclaims the victory to the hills and the estuaries, and her most quoted line runs: peace up to heaven, heaven down to earth, the earth beneath heaven, and strength in every one. In the second, spoken immediately after and with no transition at all, she announces the exact opposite: I shall not see a world that will be dear to me. And she describes an age in which summer will bring no flowers, cows will give no milk, women will have no modesty and men no valour, the wood will fall, the sea will bear no fruit and the son will lie in his father's bed. Both poems are damaged in the manuscripts and there are passages no editor has managed to translate with confidence, but what can be understood is more than enough. It is, as far as the surviving sources reach, the oldest prophecy of the end of the world preserved in Irish, earlier than the spread of Christian eschatology on the island, and it is uttered by no prophet and no saint: it is uttered by the goddess who has just announced peace, in the same breath.

When Christianity settles in Ireland, the Morrígan does not disappear: she is demoted. The medieval glossaries begin explaining her as a demon or a witch, and translate her name and her sister Badb's with the Latin words used for furies and spectres. From then on what survives in folklore is not the goddess but her separated functions. The badb, the crow of the slaughter, becomes the woman of the burial mound who wails before a death, the one English calls the banshee. The washer at the ford remains in Scotland as the bean nighe, in Galicia as the night washerwoman and in Brittany as the night washers, and everywhere she does the same thing: she washes bloodstained clothing, and whoever sees her recognises his own. The way back was made in the nineteenth century. When William Hennessy published his study of the ancient Irish goddess of war in 1870, he gathered for the first time the passages scattered through the manuscripts and gave them a single name again; and from there, by way of the Irish literary revival, comes the Morrígan recognised today. It is worth keeping in mind when reading about her: much of what is taken for immemorial was fixed a little over a century ago.