Ériu

Key takeaways: Ireland is named after a goddess: Old Irish Ériu gives Éire, Erin and Ireland; Ériu and her sisters Banba and Fódla each met the Milesian invaders at a sacred hill and won the promise of the island’s name; Ériu’s prevailed because she welcomed, prophesied and punished arrogance; the three sisters are the clearest expression of the sovereignty-of-the-land tradition; and tradition buries Ériu at the centre of Ireland, beneath the Stone of Divisions at Uisneach.

Who are Ériu, Banba and Fódla?

Ériu, Banba, and Fódla are the daughters of Delbáeth (son of Eladu of the Tuatha Dé Danann) and Ernmas, a mother whose other daughters include the dread war-trio Badb, Macha, and the Mórrígan (also called Anand). The three sovereignty sisters are thus siblings, within the same generation, of the goddesses of battle and death. Macalister’s Lebor Gabála Érenn §64 gives the lineage precisely: “Those were the three daughters of Fiachna son of Delbaeth. Ernmas daughter of Etarlam son of Nuada Airgetlam was mother of those three women.” (§64 also cites Delbáeth directly as father elsewhere in the same text, a minor variant common to composite manuscripts.) Their three husbands are Mac Cuill (‘Son of the Hazel’), Mac Cécht (‘Son of the Plough’), and Mac Gréine (‘Son of the Sun’), named in §62 as the sons of Cermait son of the Dagda, whose personal names before they took these sobriquets were Sethor, Tethor, and Cethor. Mac Gréine, whose divine function is solar, was married to Ériu; Mac Cécht to Fódla; Mac Cuill to Banba. The Banshenchas (‘Lore of Women’) preserves a divergent tradition, giving Ériu’s husband as Cetar, Banba’s as Etar, and Fódla’s as Detar, names that are likely variant forms or scribal errors rather than genuinely different personages.

These three couples constituted the last ruling triumvirate of the Tuatha Dé Danann before the coming of the Milesians. According to tradition preserved in the Tochomlad mac Miledh, the three brothers rotated the high kingship between them, and in the year each one reigned, the island was called by his wife’s name, Ériu, Fódla, or Banba, so that the name of the land itself shifted with the cycle of sovereignty. The arrangement knits the triple goddess tightly into the political and sacral structure of the divine order.

How did the three goddesses meet the Milesians?

The encounter of the Milesians with the three sisters is narrated in terse, formulaic prose in Macalister’s translation of Lebor Gabála Érenn:

§77, Banba at Sliabh Mis. The sons of Míl met Banba at Sliabh Mis (the Slieve Mish Mountains on the Dingle Peninsula, Co. Kerry). She challenged them: “If it be to take Ireland ye have come, not right were the good-fortune in which ye have come.” Amergin, the Milesian poet-bard, replied that it was by necessity. Banba asked her gift: that the island bear her name. “What is thy name?” “Banba,” she said. “Let it be a name for this island,” Amergin replied.

§78, Fódla at Eblinne. At Eblinne (Naini Mountain, identified as the Slieve Felim Mountains on the Limerick/Tipperary border, per Tochomlad mac Miledh), Fódla made the same request in like manner, and Amergin granted it: “Let Fotla be a name upon this island.”

§79, Ériu at Uisneach. The longest and most charged exchange occurs at Uisneach (Hill of Uisneach, Co. Westmeath), the symbolic centre of Ireland. Ériu’s welcome is warm and prophetic: “Warriors, said she, welcome to you. Long have soothsayers had [knowledge of] your coming. Yours shall be this island for ever; and to the east of the world there shall not be a better island. No race shall there be, more numerous than yours.” Amergin praised the prophecy, but Éber Donn, eldest of the sons of Míl, broke in: “Not right were it to thank her; thank our gods and our own might.” Ériu’s response is swift and fatal: “To thee ‘tis equal; thou shalt have no profit of this island, nor shall thy progeny.” She then made her request: that her name remain on the island as its principal name. Amergin confirmed it.

The distinction is telling. Banba and Fódla ask for naming rights and receive them without ceremony. Ériu does more: she prophesies, she welcomes, she offers the land, and she punishes arrogance. Éber Donn’s contemptuous dismissal of her divine gift seals his doom; his ship is later wrecked on the rocks, and he is buried on the rocky island Teach Duinn (Bull Rock, Co. Kerry), which became a liminal gathering-point for the Irish dead. Because Ériu coupled her gift with the most active assertion of the land’s sovereignty, her name became the island’s principal name.

A subsequent verse in §64 records the deaths of the three couples in the aftermath of the Milesian conquest, in the Battle of Tailtiu: “Mac Cecht at the hands of noble Eremon: / Mac Cuill, of perfect Eber: / Eriu yonder, at the hands of Suirge / thereafter: Mac Greine of Amorgen. / Fotla at the hands of Etan with pride, / Of Caicher, Banba with victory.”

Why is Uisneach Ériu’s place?

The Hill of Uisneach (Co. Westmeath) functions as an Irish omphalos: medieval texts describe it as the meeting-point of the five provinces, with the Ail na Míreann (‘Stone of Divisions’) marking the exact centre. The Dagda was said to have made his home here, “Ireland stretching equally far from it on every side.” Later tradition holds that Ériu is buried beneath the Stone of Divisions, the goddess of the land resting in its heart. The hill was a Beltane fire-festival site, reinforcing its solar, royal, and seasonal ritual character. [Ériu’s burial at Uisneach is attested in site tradition and later medieval syntheses rather than in a single identifiable early manuscript; it is best treated as strong vernacular tradition.]

Does Ériu appear in other tales?

In Cath Maige Tuired, a woman named Eri daughter of Delbáeth watches the sea at Máeth Scéni and conceives Bres with Elatha, a Fomorian prince, Bres later becoming king of the Tuatha Dé Danann. (Whether this Eri is the same sovereignty Ériu is debated; the patronym Delbáeth attaches to multiple figures, and the text does not explicitly equate them.) In Baile in Scáil (‘The Phantom’s Vision’), the sovereignty goddess appears as Flaith Érenn (‘the sovereignty of Ireland’), seated beside Lugh in an Otherworld hall and offering Conn of the Hundred Battles a golden cup of red liquor while prophesying his successors, one of the most explicit sovereignty-cup ceremonies in the corpus. Michael Enright (Lady with a Mead Cup, 1996) identifies this function as parallel to the continental goddess Rosmerta.

What is the sovereignty of the land, the banais ríghe?

The three sisters are the most concentrated mythological expression of what scholars call the sovereignty goddess tradition, the idea, documented across Celtic and related Indo-European material, that the land is a goddess and that a king’s legitimacy depends on her consent, formalised as a symbolic or literal marriage. Proinsias Mac Cana’s chapter on the sacral king in Celtic Mythology (Hamlyn, 1970) provides the foundational articulation in English: “The sacral king is the spouse of his kingdom and his inauguration ceremony is known as banais ríghi, wedding-feast of kingship; in other words he is then ritually united with the sovereignty of the territory over which he rules.” The term banais ríghe (earlier banais ríghi) is attested in Old and Middle Irish texts; eDIL records banais as ‘wedding-feast’ and ríghe as the genitive of rí, ‘king’. The Feast of Tara (Feis Temhrach), whose convening required the king to have obtained his rightful queen, is one institutional form of this; the feis rituals described by Giraldus Cambrensis (with a white mare, 1188 Topographia Hibernica) are another, however controversial.

Mac Cana further argues, in ‘Aspects of the Theme of King and Goddess in Irish Literature’ (Études celtiques 7-8, 1955-1959), that a rightful king’s rule can only be prosperous “if he is accepted as her legitimate spouse by the goddess who personifies his kingdom.” The three sisters embody this institutionally: the island was called by the name of whichever of them was queen-in-title that year. The Milesians must therefore seek out all three before legitimate possession is possible. Amergin’s courtesy and Éber Donn’s contempt dramatise the concept directly: sovereignty is not seized, it is granted.

Medb of Connacht, seated at Rathcroghan (Co. Roscommon), is the sovereignty figure most closely associated with the western province, requiring her husbands to be “without niggardliness, without jealousy and without fear”, the canonical kingly virtues. Recent scholarship (Britta Irslinger, Gregory Toner) has rightly cautioned against reading every strong female character as a sovereignty goddess; but Ériu, Banba, and Fódla represent the clearest case in the corpus, explicitly named as such, explicitly married to the rotating kings, their names explicitly those of the land.

Where does the name Ireland come from?

Ériu (Old Irish, approximately AY-ryoo) derives via Proto-Celtic *Φīwerjō from Proto-Indo-European *piHwer- (‘fat, fertile, plentiful’), cognate with Ancient Greek píeira and Sanskrit pīvara. The earliest external records of the island, Ancient Greek Iernē / Iouernia, Latin Hibernia, are borrowings from this same Archaic Irish root. Modern Irish Éire (genitive Éireann, giving Erin and Éire go Brách) descends directly; English Ireland adds the Germanic land. Banba’s etymology is uncertain but has been linked to earth-goddess traditions. Fódla (Old Irish Fótla) derives most plausibly from fót, ‘sod, land’; she is, at the most literal level, ‘the sod itself.‘

How did Banba and Fódla survive as names for Ireland?

Though Éire displaced the other two names in everyday usage, Banba and Fódla survived as literary synonyms throughout the bardic tradition and into the modern period. The aisling genre (late 17th-18th centuries), in which Ireland appears to the poet as a vision-woman (spéirbhean, ‘heavenly woman’), personified the land as Érin lamenting colonial subjugation. Banba and Fódla served as learned, elevated alternatives in this tradition, invoked in political speeches and nationalist verse to evoke the full mythological depth of Ireland’s identity. In the Celtic Revival, phrases such as “Banba’s isle” and “Fódhla of the sorrows” appear in both Irish-language and English-language writing. [Specific late-nineteenth-century examples from named primary sources to be confirmed; the poetic usage is attested in the eDIL citation-tradition.]

Do the three sisters have a Connacht connection?

The primary sources place Ériu, Banba, and Fódla firmly in Leinster and Munster topography: Uisneach (Co. Westmeath), Sliabh Mis (Co. Kerry), and Eblinne/Slieve Felim (Co. Limerick/Tipperary). No primary-source text places any of the three sisters in Mayo, Connacht, or the west, and this entry does not claim one.

The thematic connection to Connacht is, however, substantial and well-attested. The sovereignty goddess tradition that Ériu, Banba, and Fódla most purely embody is the same tradition that produces Medb of Connacht, seated at Rathcroghan/Cruachain, the great Connacht royal site in Co. Roscommon; Mac Cana himself uses Medb as a central illustration of the sovereignty concept. Connacht, as the province most closely associated with sovereignty mythology in the Ulster Cycle, participates fully in the world that Ériu, Banba, and Fódla define. The blind Mayo poet Antoine Ó Raifteirí (Raftery, c. 1779-1835), born in Killedan, Co. Mayo, worked squarely within the Irish-language bardic inheritance of which the sovereignty tradition is a constitutive part, though his surviving poems, on the evidence of Lady Gregory’s Poets and Dreamers (1903), do not invoke Banba or Fódla by name.

In the end the sovereignty concept belongs to no single county. Every Irish landscape is, in the mythology’s own terms, Ériu’s land: the island’s very name is a goddess, and that claim underpins the whole of Irish sacred geography.