Echtra Nerai (The Adventure of Nera)

Key takeaways: Echtra Nerai is the great Samhain story of Connacht’s royal site at Rathcroghan; its hero passes a midnight test at a gallows, enters the Otherworld through the real cave of Oweynagat, and discovers that time runs differently inside; his summer flowers carried out on a winter night are the tale’s signature image; the bull-calf fight at its close provides an alternative origin for the Táin Bó Cúailnge; and Nera himself never comes back.

Samhain night at Cruachan

This is the story of the one man at Cruachan who went out into the Samhain dark and kept going.

On the eve of Samhain, the feast marking the end of summer and the beginning of the dark half of the year, King Ailill mac Máta and Queen Medb hold court at their royal dun of Ráth Cruachan in Connacht (Rathcroghan, near Tulsk, County Roscommon). Their entire household is assembled. The cauldron is on the fire. The text records that the night was of great darkness and horror, and that demons appeared always on that night.

The previous day, two captives had been hanged outside the dun (Meyer’s text says only that they were hanged the day before; later retellings place the gallows on the boundary road). Ailill proposes a dare: whoever goes out into the Samhain dark and binds a withe around the foot of one of the hanging men shall have any prize he names. One by one the warriors go out and quickly return, defeated by the dark and whatever moves within it.

The hanged man’s thirst

Only Nera, a warrior of the household, volunteers and endures. He goes to the gallows with a withe, but each time he attempts to fasten it, it springs loose, a detail the text underlines three times in the repetition-of-three structure typical of early Irish narrative. The corpse speaks, giving practical advice: the withe will not hold without a proper wooden peg. Nera follows the instruction and succeeds.

The revenant then demands of its own accord that Nera carry it on his back to a house where it might get a drink of water, explaining it was very thirsty when it was hanged. Nera, bound now by the logic of reciprocity, hoists the dead man onto his shoulders. (Thurneysen and Ó Duilearga both noted that this revenant episode appears to derive from an independent folklore strand; whether it belonged to the original echtrae or was grafted on is disputed.)

They approach the first house; a lake of fire surrounds it. In that house, the captive explains, the fire is never left without banking, so there is no drink for them there. They try a second; a lake of water stands around it: that house never leaves a washing-tub, bathing-tub or slop-pail standing at night after sleeping. At the third house there is no such protection: inside are tubs for washing and bathing with drink in them, and a slop-pail on the floor. The corpse drinks and spits the last mouthful at the faces of the sleeping household; they all die. The text draws an explicit lesson: it is not good to have a fire without banking, nor standing wash-water, nor a slop-pail in a house after everyone has gone to sleep. Disorder invites destruction. Nera returns the dead man to the gallows.

Through the cave of Oweynagat

When Nera reaches the dun, he finds it burnt. A heap of heads has been cut from its people and stacked by warriors who are now retreating into the cave beneath the hill, Oweynagat (Uaimh na gCat, “Cave of the Cats”), also known as Úaim Crúachain and Síd Crúachan. The cave is a real archaeological feature at Rathcroghan: a natural limestone cave approached through a souterrain whose lintels include re-used ogham stones, one reading VRAICCI MAQI MEDVI, “Fráoch, son of Medb.” It has been associated with the Otherworld from at least the ninth century; Cath Maige Mucrama calls it “Ireland’s gate to Hell.”

Nera follows the host inside. The last man in the troop tells the next that there is a man on the track; the message passes forward: “The heavier is the track.” No alarm is raised. The detail points to the lightness of síd beings; a mortal’s footfall makes the difference. They reach the síd of Cruachan. The severed heads are arranged for the king’s inspection. The king of the síd summons Nera and, rather than killing him, installs him in a house with a woman and charges him to bring a burden of firewood to the fort each day. Scholars read this as a fateful error of sovereign judgment: the king gives Nera the very woman whose warning later brings about the síd’s destruction.

Inside the síd

Nera takes up his assigned life in the Otherworld. Each day, before he arrives at the fort, he observes a blind man bearing a lame man on his back walking to a well nearby. The blind man asks: “Is it there?” The lame man says: “It is. Let us go.” Nera asks the woman to explain. She tells him they visit the king’s crown, a golden diadem kept in the well. Meyer’s text says only that the two are trusted by the king to visit the crown and that one was blinded, the other lamed; the common reading that each was mutilated so neither could steal it alone is interpretive. Scholars have also read the episode as a sovereignty theme: the diadem in clear water standing for just kingship.

Nera then asks about the vision of the burning fort. The woman tells him it was not true, it was a phantom host, but it will become true unless he warns his people. She instructs him to go back now: in the human world his friends are still seated around the same cauldron and the food has not yet come off the fire. Though three days and three nights have seemed to pass for Nera in the síd, no time at all has elapsed at Cruachan.

Three nights inside the hill, and outside not a moment gone.

She tells him to warn his people to destroy the síd before the coming Samhain, for it has been foretold that Ailill and Medb will do so and carry off the crown of Brión. She names the three treasures of the síd: the mantle of Lóegaire (destined for Armagh), the crown of Brión (symbol of Connacht royal legitimacy, associated with the Uí Briúin dynasty), and the tunic of Dúnlang (destined for Kildare). This triad appears twice in the text, here and again at the raid, which Thurneysen took as evidence of structural duplication, two originally separate narratives imperfectly fused.

Summer flowers in winter

As proof of his passage, Nera is to take summer fruits: wild garlic (crem), primrose (sobairce), and golden fern (buiderad). John Carey notes these plants bloom at Easter, May, and early summer respectively, not at Samhain; their presence in Nera’s hands on a winter night is unmistakable proof that he has been somewhere subject to a different season. The woman also tells him she is pregnant with his son and asks him to warn her when his people come to destroy the síd, so she can bring their family and cattle out in time.

Nera goes back through the cave and finds the household exactly as the woman said, still at the cauldron, the meat not yet done. He reports everything and presents his summer fruits: wild garlic, primrose and golden fern, a handful of summer carried out into the dark half of the year. Ailill gives him the promised gold-hilted sword. The household prepares, and Nera waits a full year. The text marks this as the year Fergus mac Róich came from Ulster to live in exile with Ailill and Medb, a cross-reference that situates Echtra Nerai firmly in the pre-Táin period, among the preparatory remscéla listed in the Book of Leinster.

The Morrígan and the cow

As the second Samhain approaches, Ailill tells Nera to retrieve his family and cattle before the raid. Nera re-enters the cave and finds the woman, who has been carrying his firewood duty and explaining his absence as illness. She shows him their son. He resumes his daily work. While he sleeps, the Morrígan steals the cow belonging to his son and drives her east to Cuailnge to be bulled by the Donn of Cuailnge, the Brown Bull. On her way back, the Morrígan is intercepted by Cú Chulainn in the plain of Murtheimne, who challenges her under his gessa: it is geis for any woman to leave his territory without his knowledge. (Ó Flaithearta notes that the list of Cú Chulainn’s gessa given here is not found elsewhere in the same form and may be a later interpolation linking the tale to the Ulster Cycle.)

The cow returns that evening. Nera’s wife explains where it has been and tells him to leave now, before the warriors come. The text’s structural oddity is most apparent here: a third visit to the síd seems to follow, presenting as a separate event what may be a variant of the same episode. Thurneysen located the fusion-point of two originally separate narratives at approximately this juncture.

The bellowing calf

Nera returns to the human world and is questioned by Ailill and Medb. He speaks the conventional eulogy of the Otherworld, fair lands, great treasures, abundance, and warns them: the síd army will come to destroy Cruachan on the next Samhain unless they strike first. Three days before that Samhain, he brings the cattle out of the síd. (Meyer’s text says only that Nera “brought her drove out of the sid”; the wife and son are not said to come out.)

As the bull calf emerges onto the plain of Cruachan, it bellows three times. Ailill and Fergus are at a game of fidchell when they hear it. Fergus speaks an ominous verse, in Meyer’s rendering: “I like not the calf / bellowing in the plain of Cruachan, / the son of the black bull of Cualgne, which approaches, / the young son of the bull from Loch Laig.” The calf and Ailill’s Findbennach, the Whitehorn, fight for a day and a night, and the calf is beaten. Bricriu makes a sarcastic remark; Fergus strikes him so hard that five fidchell-pieces are driven into his skull, a lasting wound. Medb asks her neat-herd Buaigle what the calf bellowed. Buaigle says: if the Donn of Cuailnge came to fight the Findbennach, the Findbennach would not be seen in the plain of Aí. Medb swears she will not sleep on down, nor drink buttermilk, nor taste food, until she has seen the two great bulls fight before her face. This oath is the proximate cause of the Táin Bó Cúailnge in the version derived from Echtra Nerai, an alternative to the pillow-talk origin in the Book of Leinster recension of the Táin.

Nera stays till Doom

The men of Connacht, together with the “black host of exile,” Fergus mac Róich and the Ulster exiles, enter the síd of Cruachan, destroy it, and carry out everything of value, including the crown of Brión, one of the three wonders of Ériu.

But Nera remains behind with his wife and son and cattle in the síd. In Meyer’s translation: “Nerae was left with his people in the síd, and has not come out until now, nor will he come till Doom.” The hero’s permanent residence in the Otherworld is neither punishment nor reward, simply the consequence of having crossed the threshold.

The síd was destroyed; the door to it was not. Oweynagat can still be entered at Rathcroghan.