The quiet of wolves

January's full moon folklore

Late January in Ireland. The snow came like a charm, just hours after I published last weeks, Writing Down the Weeds post. It lay until late Friday night. More ice than anything else, but all was hushed and white. It is unusual for it to stay so long here, perched on the edge of trade winds from the Caribbean as we are, coconuts washed up on the western shore. But it is gone now, as I write everything is damp and grey. A cold wind prowls around the house, it came with the thaw in the night. The Cailleach indoors beside her fire a few weeks more.

We woke early on Monday morning, my boy and I, to check if the promised snow had arrived. We opened the blinds and climbed back into bed, snuggled against the frost outside. There, for the first time in ever such a long time, he fell back to sleep in my arms. His head on my shoulder, tucked under my chin, he slept. Hot little breaths on my neck like when he was a baby, his hand holding onto my shirt. And so, I held him as I watched the snow clouds move across the pale sky, that morning star still bright. I held him close.

We’ve played all week in it, snow men and sledding and wanders through those still sleepy birch woods. Tracking rabbits across the meadow, their trails so crisp in the snow. Identifying bird tracks in the garden, a rook now coming for food each day and the blue tits come to the windows looking for me.

January’s moon will be full around dinnertime here on Thursday (Burn’s Night in Scotland), the Quiet Moon, the Wolf Moon and I am posting today as I wanted you to have the folklore before then. I’ll write with the lore as prompts over the nights of the full moon and bring you the fiction this day next week.

January’s Full Moon is called the Quiet Moon as there isn’t much happening in the agricultural calendar. The ground is frozen, too cold yet to plough or sow. The seeds planted in the Autumn have not yet sprouted and so aside from milking and feeding livestock all is quiet. A time for mending, resting, readying, and waiting for spring.

By the Celtic calendar Spring comes with Brigid’s Day or Imbolc at the start of February. The halfway point between Solstice and equinox, when we celebrate the return of the light, the birth of lambs and the first budding of the green. When we move from the stillness of winter into the fizzing busyness of spring. It won’t be long now.  

The name Wolf Moon is an ancient one, thought to be named so for the hungry cries of wolves in this lean belly of year. Wolves are now extinct in Ireland, but they were once so rampant we were known as wolf-land for a time. They feature heavily in our myth and folklore, place names and historical references and were a major part of our ecosystem for thousands of years.

The modern words for wolf in gaeilge are faoil, nó (nó means or in gaeilge) cú allaidh translating as wild dog, however it is the old Irish name which rings closer to truth; Mac Tíre, son of the land. The earliest radiocarbon dating for Irish wolf remains come from caves in County Cork at the southern tip of the island and are dated around 34,000 BCE. More bones again from southern counties indicate the presence of wolves throughout the Midlandian ice age. And when Ireland separated from Mainland Europe around 14,000 BCE becoming an island, wolves were one of the few species to survive into the postglacial period.

In our heavily forested lands, they thrived. Living alongside the ancient Irish, the gods and warriors of myth and legend until the English came.

Indeed, the gods of the Tuatha Dé Danann were said to roam around Ireland in the guise of wolves. The Morrigan herself attacked Cú Chulainn as a red furred wolf, and was often seen in wolf form, ears tinged red from the otherworld. Queen Meadhbh (Maeve) too was described as a ‘fair-haired, wolf-queen.”

Like Romulus and Remus of Roman fame the great king Cormac Mac Airt was said to have been raised by wolves and kept several of them in his company as an adult. “Mad Sweeny” king of Dalriada, Dál nAraide (where I live) also lived in the company of wolves during his frenzied madness in the forest and pronounced on his deathbed “More melodious to me once was the yelping of the wolves than the voice of the cleric indoors a-baaing and a-bleating.” A sentiment seemingly shared across the island where the howling of wolves was thought of as a stirring and melodious sound. The Fianna too, and Fionn Mac Cumhaill himself, had an affinity with wolves and there are a multitude of myths regarding lycanthropy amongst the population, including one of Airiteach, a strange creature whose daughters were all werewolves.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Ireland sustained a population of wolves estimated to be between four hundred and one thousand at any given time, leading to the nickname ‘wolf-land’. Our national dog breed, the Irish wolfhound (bred for the hunting of wolves) bears testament to this history. However, as the English lead a campaign of bloody colonialism in Ireland, they sought to tame both the resistance of the native population and the land itself. Having murdered all their wolves centuries earlier the English settlers were horrified to discover the creatures still roaming wild on our land. The wolves made easy targets of the newly farmed livestock and the planters found the loss in profits untenable and so their bloody crusade against all that was wild and native on the island of course included the wolves.

Whilst in the late 1500’s and early 1600’s there were a multitude of armed English schemes to deal with the ‘wolf-problem’, including at one time four men with twenty-four hounds residing in each county specifically to hunt wolves for bounty, most of the wolf legislation came on the heels of Cromwell’s barbaric conquest in Ireland. His deadly, destructive campaigns spilled enough blood to allow the wolves to thrive and the colonial settlers following in his wake found both the forest and the wolves bad for business. Substantial rewards brought armed Englishmen working as professional wolf hunters to Ireland and between them and the wholesale settler destruction of our wild forests it took only a little more than a century to kill every last wolf on the island.

As a child my paternal grandfather used to take me to the church in his village, Presbyterian, and towering towards the sky. He would tell me that one of the gargoyles on its spire was a wolf. The stone mason working on it had shot the last wolf from the scaffolding as it hunted his daughter bringing him his lunch. However, whether this is a local tale or one he just made up to entertain me I do not know, but official records state that the last reliable sighting of a wolf in Ireland was in county Carlow in 1786, one hundred years before construction began on that Cullybackey church. The last wolf in Ireland was hunted to its death for attacking sheep. Three hundred years after England, one hundred years after Scotland, the land of wolves fell silent.  

Now the only wolves here are in Wild Ireland Sanctuary and Dublin Zoo. I find it unfathomable that my son and I have seen every wolf in the land. Tamed and playful, like puppies with their keepers. One even shares a name with my son, with the leader of the Fianna who admired them so. My son, too, adores them. There is a pack of toy wolves currently living under my bed, placed there so gently, and tended to with the wild imagination of a four-year-old. An imaginary wolf comes nightly, inexpiably through the upstairs window to sleep on his bed, and he insists we look in the forests for his “friends, the wolves!” They will never be there of course, despite calls for them to be reintroduced to quell the huge problem of a rampant deer population, we are one of the most heavily de-forested places in Europe, our wild spaces destroyed, and so there is nowhere for them now.

When I first saw them in Wild Ireland with my boy I stood before them and wept. There is an ancestral ache in their loss, sons of the land, for they represent the wild that once was, the resistance beaten bloody and the deep throated howl of grief for it all.

I’ll write with them for the moon, a howl in my chest, furred and furied at the state of the world. So, keep a weather eye on your inbox next week for the fiction, soaked in folklore and moonlit lycanthropy.

Thank you, as always, for being here. I know we are all world weary; I know there are far, far more important things to hold our attentions and our time. Please know how deeply I appreciate your time here and your company on this journey of sharing my words in this tiny corner of the internet. If you’d like to write of wolves with me for the moon, I would love to read your words or hear of you experience with the folklore.

I hope the rest of your January is quiet and safe.

Siobhán Xx