The Fate of the Children of Tuireann

Key takeaways: the Fate of the Children of Tuireann is one of the Three Sorrows of Storytelling, alongside the Children of Lir and the Deirdre tale; the murder of Cian, Lugh’s father, sets off a blood-fine quest framed as law but calibrated as a death sentence; the brothers win every treasure, from the apples of the Hesperides to the forbidden three shouts, and die for it; the surviving romance is Early Modern Irish, though the myth is attested by about 1130; and the precipitating muster ties the story to Moytura on the Mayo and Sligo borders.

The feud and the muster

Of the Three Sorrows of Storytelling, this is the one that begins with a murder and is paid for like a debt.

There was long-standing private enmity between the three sons of Tuireann, Brian, Iuchar, and Iucharba, and the three sons of Cainte: Cian, Cú, and Cethé. Whenever the two groups met, fighting followed. The tale’s surviving form gives no origin for this feud; it is simply there, like a fault line in the earth.

The story opens on the eve of the Second Battle of Mag Tuired, the great war in which the Tuatha Dé Danann must break the oppression of the Fomorians. Lugh Lámhfhada, divine champion, son of Cian and of the Fomorian princess Ethlinn, master of every art, is at Tara mustering the gods of Ireland. He sends messengers to gather his father’s people across the land, and among those messengers is Cian himself.

The killing of Cian

Cian was crossing the Plain of Muirthemne when he saw three armed warriors on the road: Brian, Iuchar, and Iucharba. Alone and outnumbered, he looked at a herd of pigs grazing on the plain, struck himself with his druidic wand, and joined the herd. Brian had seen the transformation and named the enchanted pig to his brothers. He struck Iuchar and Iucharba with his own wand and turned them into two swift hounds; they swept through the herd, separated Cian’s pig-form, and drove him out across the plain. Brian threw his spear and pierced the animal’s body.

A human voice came out of the wound. Cian named himself and begged quarter; he asked only to return to his own shape before dying. Brian agreed, he would rather kill a man than a pig. Cian changed back. But he also issued a warning: kill him in pig-form and the blood-fine is a pig’s fine; kill him as the man he is and the éraic demanded will be the greatest in memory.

Brian’s answer was that they would not use weapons on him at all, but the stones lying on the ground. This detail appears in Joyce’s translation: by killing Cian with stones rather than weapons, Brian calculates that no weapon can later bear witness to the deed, though the stratagem fails when the earth itself speaks to Lugh. They beat Cian to death with stones until nothing was left of him but a broken heap, then tried to bury him. The earth rejected the murder and cast the body back up. Six times they buried him; six times the earth threw him out again. The recurring rejection is explicit in Joyce’s translation; Lady Gregory has the earth later speak to Lugh, but does not foreground the repeated burial as a separate episode. The seventh time the ground held. They piled stones over the grave and went on to Tara.

The ground kept the body. It did not keep the secret.

Lugh names the blood-fine

After the battle of Magh Mór an Aonaigh, Lugh could not find his father among the living. He traced Cian’s route until, at the place of the murder, the earth itself spoke and told him everything. He had his people dig. The body came up, all one bed of wounds, as Lady Gregory renders it. He lamented, had Cian re-buried with proper honour, and cut his name in Ogham. Then he went to Tara and kept silence.

At the assembly he saw the three sons of Tuireann. Before the king and the full company of the Tuatha Dé he asked what punishment each man would visit on one who had murdered his father. The king said he would hew such a man limb from limb by instalments. Every chief in the hall agreed. The sons of Tuireann agreed with the rest. Lugh then named them as the killers. Brian stepped forward and, rather than remain under Lugh’s anger, acknowledged the act and offered to pay the blood-fine.

Lugh named the éraic: three apples, a pig’s skin, a spear, two horses and a chariot, seven pigs, a hound-whelp, a cooking-spit, and three shouts on a hill. It seemed light. The brothers bound themselves before the king and accepted. Then Lugh explained what each item was.

The treasures of the fine

The three apples were from the Garden in the East of the World, the Hesperides, golden, honey-tasting, inexhaustible, healing every wound that touched them. The pig’s skin belonged to Tuis, King of Greece, and healed every wound and sickness; every stream the pig had swum in, it was said, ran as wine for nine days after. The spear was the poisoned weapon of Pisear, King of Persia, whose head had to be kept in a cauldron of water or it would burn down the building housing it. The horses and chariot belonged to Dobhar, King of Siogair, and ran as easily on sea as on land. The seven pigs of Easal, King of the Golden Pillars, were killed each night and alive again each morning, keeping all who ate of them from disease. The hound-whelp Fáil Inis, owned by the King of Ioruaidh, made all the wild beasts of the world fall at her glance. The cooking-spit was one of the spits of the women of Inis Fionnchuire, an island that lay under the sea. And the three shouts had to be given on Miodhchaoin’s Hill in the north of Lochlann, where Miodhchaoin had trained Cian in arms, and where the guardian and his sons were bound never to permit a shout.

Their father Tuireann wept and told them this would be their deaths unless Lugh or Manannán helped them. Lugh refused the loan of Manannán’s horse, which he held only on loan himself; he did lend them Manannán’s curragh, Scuabtuinne (Wave-Sweeper), which could find any harbour. Their sister Ethnea lamented them at the shore.

Six treasures won

The Wave-Sweeper brought them to the Eastern Garden. Brian turned his brothers and himself into hawks with his wand; they swooped on the trees, each taking an apple, then fled the king’s daughters who transformed into ospreys and hurled lightning at them over the sea. Brian changed them all to swans and dived under the waves; the ospreys left.

In Greece they entered as poets from Ireland, and Brian composed a riddle-poem praising the pig-skin without naming it. When the king finally grasped what was being asked and refused, Brian seized the skin by force, fought through the court, and killed the King of Greece. In Persia the same stratagem: poets, a riddling poem, a refusal, and Brian killed Pisear with one of the golden apples thrown to his forehead. At Siogair they entered as soldiers for hire; after six weeks Brian provoked a display of the chariot, seized it mid-display, drove the Persian spear through the king’s heart, and his brothers killed the guards. Easal of the Golden Pillars had heard of their deeds by the time they arrived; he handed the seven pigs over at the harbour rather than fight. Easal then came with them to his son-in-law, the King of Ioruaidh, and tried to negotiate. The king refused him. The brothers fought through the king’s army, Brian overcame the king hand to hand, bound him, and brought him to Easal; the hound-whelp was then surrendered.

The spell of forgetfulness

When word reached Lugh that the brothers had gathered six of the elements, he cast a druidic spell over the sea upon them: a great longing for Ireland and forgetfulness of the two remaining tasks. The brothers turned for home believing the fine complete. At the fair outside Tara, Lugh received the treasures on the lawn and then, quietly, asked where the cooking-spit was. And where were the three shouts on the hill?

Clouds of weakness fell over the brothers. They set out again without the Wave-Sweeper and searched a quarter of a year without finding Inis Fionnchuire. (The tale does not explain why the Wave-Sweeper, which had unerringly found every other destination, was unavailable for this second voyage.) Brian put on a water-dress, a glass diving helm in Joyce’s translation, and walked for a fortnight along the sea-bottom until he found the island. Fifty women sat doing needlework around a fire. Among their tools was the cooking-spit. He picked it up; the women laughed, saying the least of them would not let a spit leave that hall. They let him take it anyway, for the audacity of the attempt.

Miodhchaoin’s Hill

They sailed north to Miodhchaoin’s Hill. Miodhchaoin came out and Brian killed him in single combat. Then Miodhchaoin’s three sons, Corc, Corm, and Aedh, drove three spears through the bodies of the brothers. The brothers drove three spears back, and all three sons of Miodhchaoin fell. But the brothers’ wounds were mortal.

Brian asked how his brothers fared. Near death, they said. He told them they must give the three shouts while there was still life in them. They said they could not rise. Brian lifted each of them in turn, shedding blood heavily as he moved, and held them upright, and they raised the three feeble shouts on the hill.

The last of the éraic was given standing, held upright in the arms of a brother.

Then he brought them back to the boat.

On the sea-road home Brian saw Beinn Éadair and then Tara and raised his brothers’ heads on his breast so they could see Ireland. At their father’s house he gave Tuireann his last errand: go to Tara, give Lugh the spit, ask for the healing pig-skin in the name of friendship and shared blood, and do not be long.

The healing skin withheld

Tuireann went. Lugh refused the skin. Tuireann returned empty-handed. Brian had himself carried to Tara to ask in person. Lugh refused again: not for the breadth of the earth in gold would he give it unless he was certain their deaths would satisfy him for what they had done.

Brian went back to where his brothers lay and lay down between them, and his life went out of him and theirs at the same moment. Tuireann threw himself on the three bodies, lamented each as one who had had the making of a king of Ireland in him, and then his own strength left him and he died. They were buried in the one grave.

Lugh had his satisfaction. The éraic was paid.

The tale and the Three Sorrows

The surviving text is a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century Early Modern Irish romance; extant manuscripts date no earlier than the seventeenth century. The core myth is older: lists of Lugh’s éraic items appear in Middle Irish Lebor Gabála Érenn redactions and in Cath Maige Tuired, and a Book of Leinster catalogue entry (c. 1130) attests the tale’s existence in some form. Robin Flower’s proposal of a fourteenth-century Mac Fhirbhisigh shaping hand in north-west Connacht for all three Sorrows is a scholarly hypothesis, not a proven fact.

In the storytelling tradition the tale is grouped as one of the Trí Truagha na Scéalaíochta, the Three Sorrows of Storytelling, alongside the Fate of the Children of Lir, in which Lir’s children spend nine hundred years as swans, and the Fate of the Children of Uisneach, the later form of the Deirdre story. Eugene O’Curry published all three together in 1863 as The Three Most Sorrowful Tales of Erinn.