Morrígan

Overview

Who she is

Kinsella's note names three goddesses of war: Nemain (Panic), the Badb (Scald-crow) and the Morrígan (Great Queen or Queen of Demons). In the story they are three separate figures, each doing different things. The Morrígan turns up three times: on a standing stone, at the ford and between the camps.

The bird on the stone

As the army crosses Breg Plain, killing as it goes, the Morrígan settles in bird shape on a standing stone in Temair Chuailnge and speaks to the Brown Bull. She asks if he is restless and tells him the hosts are gathering to certain slaughter. The wise raven groans aloud, she says, and the Badb groans among the cattle. She ends on the cry of death, death. After that the Bull leaves for Sliab Cuilinn.

King Buan's daughter

Later, with Cúchulainn holding the fords alone, a young woman in garments of many colours walks up to him. She says she is King Buan's daughter and has brought her treasure and cattle, because of the great tales she has heard. He tells her she comes at a bad time and that it was not for a woman's backside he took on this ordeal. She offers to hinder him instead. She will trip him in the ford as an eel, stampede the beasts against him as a grey she-wolf, and trample him with the herd as a hornless red heifer. He answers each threat with a promise. He will crack the eel's ribs with his toes, burst the wolf's eye with a sling-stone and shatter the heifer's leg with another, and she will carry each mark forever unless he lifts it with a blessing. He tells her she is no king's daughter. The text names her only as King Buan's daughter there, and calls her the Morrígan once it comes to the fighting.

At the ford

When Cúchulainn meets Lóch mac Mofemis, an eel flings three coils about his feet and he falls back in the ford. Lóch cuts at him until the water is blood-red. Fergus tells his followers to put heart in him, and Bricriu taunts him from the bank. Cúchulainn gets up, smashes the eel's ribs, bursts the she-wolf's eye with a stone, and when the heifer leads the cattle through the pools so that he cannot tell ford from flood, breaks her legs. The text says he did to the Morrígan the three things he had sworn. Then he kills Lóch with the gae bolga that his charioteer sent along the stream.

A great weariness comes on him afterward. The Morrígan appears as a squint-eyed old woman milking a cow with three tits. He asks her for a drink and she gives him milk from the first tit. He blesses her, and her head is healed. The second tit heals her eye and the third her legs.

‘You said you would never heal me,’ she tells him. He says that if he had known it was her, he wouldn't have done it. Kinsella's note says the meeting looks as if it was added to the Táin at the last moment, and belongs to a separate tale, Táin Bó Regamna.

Between the camps

On the eve of the last battle, in the half light between the two camps, the Morrígan chants again, of ravens gnawing necks and blades in bodies. She ends with four lines: hail Ulster, woe men of Ireland, woe to Ulster, hail men of Ireland. The line about woe to Ulster she says in the Connachtmen's ears only, to hide the truth from them. That same night Nemain and the Badb, Nét's wives, cry out to the men of Ireland and a hundred warriors die of fright.