Na Scéalta

June's tale of freedom, swans and stormy seas

Sea birds and summer skies above the Sea of Moyle

Late June, in Ireland. The solstice has come and gone. The longest day coincided with June’s full moon, giving us days of permanent light. The weather has been warm and grey, sticky even in the wee hours. We missed the St. John’s Eve bonfires^[1] in the west, but we had both the fireplaces in our new house fixed on the solstice and we lit our own bonfire in the heart of County Antrim.

This post is very late. A very sick little boy who clung to me for days, light induced insomnia, renovation stresses, and travel all took me too far from my desk for too long. But I promise to play catch up, this Na Scéalta post today, and July’s Writing Down the Weeds post back on our regular schedule.

I’m writing from County Clare. We’re here to celebrate the incomparable

Kerri ní Dochartaigh

and decided to make the most of the trip, staying for a few days in a rented farmhouse high above Lough Derg. There are chickens who scratch in the yard and wander around the house, fresh bread and homemade jam, and strawberries ripe and ready in my little boy’s hands. We are playing tourist for a few days and Clare has been lending us her magic in spades. But more on this another time, today we turn our attention to the tale I promised in my last post. A tale which weaves through the fairy tale I told there, and one which could claim to be Ireland’s best-known story, The Children of Lir.

The Children of Lir sculpture, Ballycastle County Antrim.

This Na Scéalta, project, is of tales rooted in the landscape of our new home on the north coast of Ireland, and this particular tale is marked in the town we are moving to by a seaside sculpture of four swans in flight. Indeed, from my front windows I can see the turbulent waters where the Children of Lir were said to have spent three hundred years of their banishment. The Sea of Moyle is a stretch of water swirling between the north of Ireland and Scotland’s Mull of Kintyre. It is where the north channel and the north Atlantic meet and is notorious for its treacherous tidal currents, sudden squalls and sea fog which closes in for days at a time.

So, settle in and let me tell you a tale…

The Chirldren of Lir

Lir it is said, was a great Irish king and was in the running for Ard Rí, High King, of the Tuatha Dé Danann. Kingship was a democratic business in old Ireland and Bodb Derg was elected instead. Lir felt usurped and so as consolation Bodb Derg offered one of his daughters in marriage. Lir chose the eldest Aoibh (pronounced Eve) and was contented. They lived as happily as any husband and wife can and welcomed first a daughter, Fionnuala, and then a son, Aodh. Lir’s heart was fit to burst with love and pride for his beautiful wife and wonderful children. However, following Aoibh’s third pregnancy, disaster struck, as it must in these tales. After birthing twin boys Fiachra and Conn, Aoibh succumbed to a childbed fever and died. Lir was distraught, so deep in his grief only his children gave him a moments joy.

It does not do for a king to wallow in grief. Grief does not tend to land nor people. Grief only tends to memory. And so, the Ard Rí determined something must be done. But being wise in most things but the ways of the heart he sent his second daughter Aoife to replace the first. Lir married Aoife as he was bid but stayed so deep in his grief for her sister that he paid her no mind. He had eyes only for his children and the memory of their mother. And despite all Aoife tried an inattentive husband soon wears weary on a wife.

Aoife took to her bed, in her own grief and in a simmering jealousy towards Lir’s children. The longer it festered the more poisonous it became until one day she arose determined to do away with the children entirely. So, she arranged a trip, home to her father and petitioned Lir to allow all four of the children to accompany her, they would do well to see their grandfather after all. Lir could not bear to be parted from them but he could not refuse the High King and so he let them go with their stepmother. Aoife, of course, had no intention of allowing the children to reach Tara and commanded the chariot stop on the banks of Loch Dairbhreach.^[2] There she sent the children into the water to bathe and used her magic to transform them each into swans.

Fionnula bargained with the sorceress and the limits to the spell were set. As swans the children would spend three hundred years on the tranquil waters of the Loch, three hundred years on the stormy seas of Moyle (Sruth na Maoilé)^[3]and finally three hundred years at lorrus Domnann and Inis Gluairé.^[4] After these nine hundred years, and when a King from the North married a Queen from the South the spell would be broken. She also left the children with their power of speech and reasoning. Aoife then carried on to her father’s court, leaving the swan-children adrift on the loch.

Bodb Derg, knowing his daughter well enough, became suspicious when the children did not arrive with her and sent a messenger to Lir. Upon receiving the message Lir knew instantly that Aoife had cast his children to some awful fate and set out to find them. On the banks of the loch, he heard the most mournful song he had heard in his life and there in swan form his four children recounted the evil their stepmother had done to them and wept with their people.

Bodb Derg, on understanding the depths of his daughter’s treachery turned his own magic upon her, changing her into a demon of the air, constantly pulled about the island wailing on the wind.

And, so it was, the children of Lir lived out the days of their lives as swans. The people of the Tuatha Dé Danann live longer than humans can and so they were kept company the first three hundred years on the Loch. Fionnula sheltering her brothers under her great white wings when storms raged by. But soon their time was up, and they felt an undeniable pull northward. On the Sea of Moyle no one knew them, and they rarely got a moments peace, pulled by the currents, and knocked by the waves they were too often separated and desperately searching for each other amongst the swells. Three hundred lonely and battered years they spent in those waters before they flew south once more. Three hundred years more they sang and treaded water, three hundred years more they lived as swans battered by the North Atlantic off the Western coast.

Then one day, they heard a sound they had never known. A high, clear sound. Metallic and sweet. It had come from one of the islands. They went ashore to investigate. As their feet touched the earth they transformed, again, near a millennium later, back into their first forms. Except, they were no longer children, now they were ancient and weak with age. They died together and were buried as Christians, baptised on their deathbed by the holy man who had rung the bell as a call to prayer. The Children of Lir were buried together, Fionnula still holding her brothers in her arms.

* * *           

The Children of Lir is most often found labelled as an Irish myth or legend, and thus found in books of that nature, as one of the Three Sorrows of Storytelling. However, the manuscript containing the tale most well-known today uses language dating it from the 14-16^th centuries. Most modern Folklorists surmise that the Children of Lir is actually a fairy tale with French roots and thus classified under the same Aarne-Thompson tale type as The Twelve Wild Geese.^[5] And, as with that Irish retelling, The Children of Lir should be regarded and most importantly read, as the political literary fairy tale it is.    

This Christianised fairy tale is not at all subtle in its politics. The motif of pagan suffering eased by conversion to the new faith is one the monks who transcribed our tales made much of. In this version of the fairy tale the sister is stripped of all her agency, she has no power to break the spell either by her skill, hard work or wit. Instead, she is reduced to the archetypal virgin mother, nurturing her brothers, and suffering with serene grace.

The children are members of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the magical race who are said to have lived in Ireland before the Celts. The Tuatha Dé Danann are often depicted as having the ability to transform into swans at will. Indeed, Cú Chulainn’s mother spent her pregnancy on the wing as a great white bird, and his would-be lover pursued him in Swan form. Óengus’s lover Caér could change from a swan to a woman year about and so Óengus too became a swan.

In Donegal swans were believed to be humans under an enchantment and there are fairy tales of swan maidens from all over the island (as there are all over Europe). Indeed, one tale local to Clare follows a Selkie tale format with the would-be lover stealing the maiden’s feathers in a bid to marry her. All these Sidhe swans are said to wear golden chains to mark them from swans of the animal kind, and the Children of Lir are no different.

Therefore, the Christian tale further punishes the children for their pagan origin by removing their ability to transmute at will, cursing them instead to nine hundred years of suffering, relieved only by the Christian call to prayer and death-bed baptism at the end. Stripped of their own magic and the sister entirely separated from her own agency, suffering makes up the majority of the tale.

Modern adaptions too have been blatantly political. Lady Gregory, as part of the Celtic Revivalist movement, made much of the swans being left with their Irish language intact, whilst keeping the Christian motif of virtue through suffering. Whilst the nationalist movement used the tale to symbolise the nation casting off near nine hundred years of English oppression, even erecting a statue of the Children of Lir in Dublin to commemorate those rebels executed following the 1916 Easter Rising. They too kept the Christian imagery, which gained new fervour as the imperialist Catholic Church took hold in Britain’s stead. The vice grip of Christianity and “good suffering” held sway in Ireland for almost a century, popularising the Children of Lir as both an Irish and a Christian fairy tale.

I say it’s time we cast it off. Freedom gained by forsaking our power or our roots is no freedom at all, and suffering is no virtue. Give us the agency to weave our own freedom, on our own terms, drawn from the land itself and made with our own hands. Give us bog cotton…

St. John's Eve Bonfires in County Donegal

---

^[1] St. John’s Day/Eve is how the Catholic Church chose to paint over pagan celebrations of midsummer. Traditionally held on 23^rd June, St. John’s Eve is still marked with the midsummer bonfires in the West of Ireland.

^[2] Lough Derravaragh (Anglicised), County Westmeath.

^[3] Between Ballycastle, County Antrim and The Mul of Kintyre in Scotland.

^[4] The Bay of Erris, County Mayo.

^[5] ATU 451, The Maiden who Seeks her Brothers.