Oidheadh Chlainne Lir

Key takeaways: the Children of Lir is one of the Three Sorrows of Storytelling; Aoife’s spell holds for nine hundred years across three waters; Fionnuala shelters her brothers through every storm; the tale ends not with restored youth but with baptism, death, and burial on Inishglora off the Mayo coast; and the island’s monastic ruins still carry the legend.

The quarrel of the kings

Of the three tales the old Irish storytellers counted as the Sorrows of Storytelling, this is the one the west of Ireland has never let go.

After the defeat of the Tuatha Dé Danann and the coming of the Milesians, the divine race withdrew beneath the hills of Ireland and chose a single king. Among the claimants were Bodb Dearg, son of the Dagda; Ilbhreach of Eas Ruaidh; Midhir of Brí Léith; and Lir of Sidh Fionnachaidh in the north. The assembly elected Bodb Dearg. Every disappointed chief accepted the decision but Lir alone, who rose in fury and drove his chariot northward without a word of leave-taking. Bodb Dearg restrained those who wanted to burn Lir’s house: “I am none the less your king because he has not submitted to me.” The quarrel stood unresolved for a long time.

Then Lir’s wife died after three nights of illness. Bodb Dearg offered one of his three foster-daughters in marriage if Lir would submit, Aobh, Aoife, and Ailbhé, daughters of Oilioll of Ara. Lir chose Aobh the eldest. She bore him four children: first, twins, a daughter, Fionnuala, and a son, Aodh; then two more sons, the twins Fiachra and Conn. She died at their birth. Only love for his four children kept Lir alive.

The stroke of the wand

Bodb Dearg gave Lir his second foster-daughter Aoife, Aobh’s own sister and therefore the children’s aunt, in marriage. Aoife nursed them tenderly at first, for no one who saw the four could help loving them. Lir himself would rise at the first grey of morning and lie down among them before the day began. But jealousy entered Aoife: she saw her husband’s love poured entirely on the children and felt herself overlooked. She brooded for the greater part of a year, feigning illness, until hatred hardened into purpose.

One day she yoked her chariot and took the four children with her, telling Lir she was going to Bodb Dearg’s hall. [O’Curry/O’Duffy: Fionnghuala refused at first, sensing danger; Joyce likewise.] On the road she ordered her attendants to kill the children; they refused. She drew her sword but could not strike. They came to the shore of Lough Derravaragh. She sent the children into the lake to bathe, and as soon as they were in the clear water she struck each one with her druidical wand. The four children vanished; in their place swam four perfectly white swans. It had taken a moment. It would hold for nine hundred years.

Aoife declared their sentence in verse: three hundred years on the smooth water of Lough Derravaragh; three hundred years on the fierce Sruth na Maoile between Ireland and Scotland; and three hundred years at Irrus Domnann and Inis Gluairé on the western sea. The enchantment would not end until Deoch, daughter of the King of Munster, was wed to Lairgréan, son of Colman, the woman from the south and the man from the north, and until the ringing of a Christian bell was heard. Relenting a little, she allowed them their human speech, their reason, and the power to sing unearthly music; no sound in the world, it was said, could equal it. Then she drove away.

The music of Lough Derravaragh

When Bodb Dearg learned what had happened he struck Aoife with his own wand and changed her into a demon of the air, in which form she would wander for ever. [Joyce and O’Curry agree on this punishment.] Lir came to Lough Derravaragh and heard his children’s voices. Could they be restored? Not, Fionnuala told him, until the full nine hundred years were run and the faith of Christ had come to Ireland. Bodb Dearg, the Tuatha Dé Danann, and the Milesian people all encamped around the lake, for it was said the swans’ music was the sweetest ever heard in Ireland: whoever listened forgot sickness and sorrow and slept peacefully. The swans conversed with their people by day and sang by night, living almost as happily as before for three hundred years. When those years ended, the men of Ireland made a law that no swan should ever be killed.

The Sea of Moyle

Then Fionnuala led her brothers north to the Sruth na Maoile, the sea-current between Ireland and Alba. The sea was far worse than Lough Derravaragh: cold, hungry, and full of fear. One night a great tempest descended. Fionnuala urged that they appoint a meeting-place in case the storm scattered them, and her brothers chose Carraig na Rón, the Rock of the Seals [Joyce: Carricknarone; in Joyce it is the brothers, not Fionnuala, who name the rock]. At midnight the wind howled, the waves thundered, and the storm swept the four swans apart across the dark sea. When it eased, Fionnuala reached the rock alone. Then Conn arrived, his head drooping, feathers drenched; she drew him under her right wing. Then Fiachra, barely able to fly; she drew him under her left wing. Then Aodh, head erect and feathers unruffled; she spread her breast-feathers over him before her face. [O’Curry gives Fionnuala’s lament: “Where they have lain together is / Under my graceful wings, / The wave beating violently upon us, / Conn and comely Fiachra.”] Their worst night came at the Calends of January when the sea froze and their feet, feathers, and wing-quills stuck fast to the rock; tearing free, they left behind the skin of their feet and the feathers of their breasts. Their wounds healed in time and they endured the full three hundred years.

The Erris coast

When the Maoile exile ended, Fionnuala led her brothers westward to Irrus Domhnann, the headlands of Erris in County Mayo, and to the waters around Inis Gluairé on the Atlantic coast. [O’Curry/O’Duffy name the third period as time on “Iorrus Domhnann and Inis Gluairé of Brendainn”, Brendan’s name in the place-name reflects the saint’s traditional association with the island monastery, distinct from the narrative’s named cleric. Joyce identifies Irros Domnann as Erris, County Mayo, and Inis Glora as the island west of Belmullet.] The Atlantic was fiercer than the Maoile. On one savage winter night when the sea between Irrus Domhnann and Achill froze solid, the brothers said they could endure no more. Fionnuala urged them to believe in the God who made the earth and sea. They believed, and from that time the Lord sheltered them from the cold and the storms. [This episode of renewed faith appears in Joyce; a comparable passage is in the CELT edition.]

During these years on the Erris coast the swans met a young man named Aibhric [O’Curry: Aibhric; Joyce: Ebric; Gregory: Aibric], a man of good family who lived along the shore. He was drawn to the birds day after day by their music and their human speech; he loved them, and they loved him. It is Aibhric who, the text declares, arranged in order and narrated all their adventures, he is at once the witness within the story and its first keeper outside it.

The ruins of Sidh Fionnachaidh

When the Erris term was done, they flew east to Sidh Fionnachaidh, Lir’s home, hoping to find their father. They found it empty and desolate: no house, no hearthstone, no fire, nothing but green hillocks and nettles. [Gregory: “empty before them, and nothing in it but green hillocks and thickets of nettles, without a house, without a fire, without a hearthstone.”] They raised three long cries of grief. Fionnuala lamented that the drinking-horns, the mead, the hall, the cavalcade, their father, all gone beyond return. They spent one night singing in the ruins and left in the morning.

They settled on a small lake on Inis Gluairé. Birds flocked to them from across the western coast until the place was known as the Lake of the Bird-Flocks. By day they flew to nearby islands, Inis Geadh, Achill, Teach Duinn [the source text names Teach Duinn, though Tech Duinn is traditionally located off the Kerry coast, so “nearby” is doubtful; to be confirmed], returning to Inis Gluairé each night, and waited until Patrick brought the Christian faith to Ireland and the time Aoife had foretold arrived.

The bell of Inishglora

One night the children of Lir heard a sound they had never heard in nine hundred years: a bell ringing faint and clear on the island. They trembled. Fionnuala told them not to be afraid: “That is the bell of Mochaomhóg, and it is through that bell that we will be set free from our pain and misery, according to the will of God.” She sang: “Listen to the Cleric’s bell. Elevate your wings and arise. Give thanks to God for his coming.” [Joyce: “the voice of the Christian bell”; O’Curry and Gregory both name Mochaomhóg; local Inishglora tradition substitutes Brendan the Navigator, who founded the island monastery, and tells that the swans attended Mass each Sunday on the roof of Teampall na bhFear, drooping their wings when the host was raised.]

In the morning Mochaomhóg went to the lake and called out: were they the Children of Lir? They answered yes. He gave thanks to God and asked them to come ashore, for it was for their sake he had come to this island above any other. They came to land. He had a smith make two chains of bright white silver, one between Aodh and Fionnuala, one between Conn and Fiachra, linking them in pairs. They kept the canonical hours with him, heard Mass, and became the joy of his life.

Now the last piece of the prophecy fell into place. Lairgréan, son of Colman, son of Cobthach, was King of Connacht; his wife was Deoch, daughter of Finghin, son of Aodh Alainn, King of Munster, the man from the north and the woman from the south, the very pair Aoife had named. Deoch heard of the singing swans and was seized with longing for them. She told Lairgréan she would not remain with him unless he brought them. He refused to beg them from a cleric, and she left the palace for her father’s country. Messengers overtook her at Cill Dalua [Joyce: Killaloe] and she returned, but Lairgréan now sent a demand to Mochaomhóg: give up the birds. Mochaomhóg refused. Lairgréan came himself, and when the cleric refused again he seized the four swans from the altar, two in each hand, and dragged them away.

The moment his hands touched them, the feathery coats fell away. In place of the swans stood three withered, bony old men and a lean, withered old woman without blood or flesh on them. Lairgréan dropped them in terror and fled without a word.

Baptism and burial

Fionnuala said to Mochaomhóg: “Come and baptise us now, for our death is near.” She told him how to make their grave: “Lay Conn at my right side, and Fiachra at my left side, and Aodh before my face, between my two arms.” [O’Curry, Joyce, and Gregory all give this identical burial arrangement. O’Curry has Fionnuala sing a final lay of petition before they die.] Mochaomhóg baptised them. They died at once, nine hundred years of deferred mortality resolved in a single moment of grace. Joyce records that Mochaomhóg looked up and saw four children with silvery wings and radiant faces ascending toward heaven.

He dug a wide grave near his church on Inis Gluairé and buried them exactly as directed: Conn at Fionnuala’s right hand, Fiachra at her left, and Aodh standing before her face. He raised a grave-mound and set a stone inscribed in Ogham with their names. Their funeral rites were performed, and heaven was obtained for their souls.

Inishglora today

Local tradition on Inishglora preserved the site. The Gaughan family, among the island’s last inhabitants, kept the graves covered with white stones; the small rocky island to the south is still called Carraig Aoidh, Hugh’s Rock. Medieval tradition, cited in the Book of Ballymote as one of the Wonders of Ireland and recorded by Giraldus Cambrensis (Topographia Hibernica), held that bodies left on Inishglora did not decay: people could see their grandparents lying above ground as if freshly dead. O’Flaherty noted the same in Ogygia. Local lore held that rat or mouse could not live there, and clay from the island would banish them on the mainland. St Brendan’s Well, the ruins of Teampall na bhFear and Teampall na mBan, beehive oratories, and the pilgrimage bed Leaba na hAthchuinge (the Bed of Petition) confirm Inishglora’s layered sacred history, in which the Children of Lir legend and the early Christian monastery remain inseparably joined. The island is still there, off the Mullet Peninsula, and the story has never left it.