Longes mac nUislenn

Key takeaways: Longes mac nUislenn is the oldest version of the Deirdre story, an eighth- or ninth-century tale preserved in the twelfth-century Book of Leinster; the raven-blood-and-snow vision and Deirdre’s year of sorrow are its defining scenes; the betrayal of Fergus’s safe-conduct drives the exile to Connacht that makes the Táin Bó Cúailnge possible; and the tale’s later retelling stands among the Three Sorrows of Storytelling beside the Children of Lir and the Children of Tuireann.

The scream in the womb

The tragedy that drove three thousand warriors out of Ulster began with a cry from a child not yet born.

The men of Ulster were at a feast in the house of Feidlimid mac Daill, the king’s storyteller. Feidlimid’s wife was with child and moved among the company serving them, and as the night deepened and the guests lay down to sleep, she rose to go to her bed. As she crossed the floor the infant in her womb let out a shriek so terrible it rang through the whole enclosure and woke every man in the house.

Sencha mac Ailella called for quiet, and the woman was brought before the assembly. Feidlimid himself, bewildered, spoke a verse asking what had cried out from within her. She could not answer him, for no woman can know what passes inside her own body. Cathbad the druid was called, and he placed his hands on the woman’s belly and pronounced what he saw:

A woman with golden hair and grey-blue eyes is in that womb. Her lips will be scarlet, her teeth like a ridge of snow, her cheeks the colour of foxglove. Her beauty will be such that kings and champions will contend over her and slaughters will follow in her wake. Her name will be Derdriu, and it will be an evil name for Ulster.

When the girl was born the druid spoke again directly to the child: that in her time there would be the exile of the three sons of Uisliu, that through her crime Fergus himself would be driven from the Ulstermen, and that the deed would be wept over long after. The warriors said: kill her now, before she brings the ruin on us. But Conchobar said no: he would take the girl away, rear her himself in seclusion, and in time she would be his own wife. No man dared contradict the king.

Raven, blood and snow

Derdriu was raised apart from the world in a secluded court. Only three people were allowed to enter: her foster-father, her foster-mother, and Leborcham, a woman of satirical wit whom Conchobar could not bar because a satirist’s access cannot be denied without bringing shame on the one who denies it. Leborcham taught the girl everything she knew, and Derdriu grew into a woman of extraordinary beauty, exactly as Cathbad had foreseen.

One winter’s day her foster-father was skinning a weaned calf in the snow outside to cook it for her. A raven came and drank from the blood pooling on the white ground. Derdriu watched from the doorway and spoke quietly to Leborcham: I would love a man who had those three colours, hair as black as a raven’s wing, cheeks as red as that blood, and a body as white as the snow beneath it. Leborcham told her: he is not far from you, he is here, close to you, and his name is Noisiu son of Uisliu.

From that moment Derdriu could not rest until she had seen him.

The flight from Emain

Noisiu was alone on the rampart of the earthwork of Emain one day, sending his musical warrior-cry abroad. In Leahy’s 1905 translation Noisiu’s voice is the deep one, “like sound of wave, rolled Naisi’s bass,” while the tenor belongs to his brother Aindle. The Sons of Uisliu were famed for their singing: every cow that heard them, it was said, gave two-thirds more milk; every person who heard them was filled with peace. They were also great warriors: if all the province came against them together and the three brothers stood back-to-back, none could overcome them.

Derdriu slipped out to the rampart. Noisiu did not know who she was and, seeing a fine young woman go past, called out: “A fine heifer that goes past me.” She said: “Heifers are apt to be large where bulls are not kept.” He said: “You have the bull of the whole province, the king of the Ulstermen.” She replied: “I would choose between you, and I would take a young bullock like yourself.” He refused her, knowing Cathbad’s prophecy. She leapt at him and seized both his ears: “These are two ears of shame and mockery, unless you take me with you.” In Leahy’s translation Noisiu then says “Release me, O my wife!”, she releases him, and he raises his musical warrior-cry. The sound was heard by the Ulstermen, and his brothers came running to restrain him.

When Noisiu told his brothers what had happened, they said: it will be evil, what follows from this. But they would not leave their brother under dishonour while they lived. That very night they departed, Noisiu, Derdriu, Aindle and Ardán, with one hundred and fifty warriors, fifty women, fifty servants, and their hounds and possessions.

Conchobar pursued them by guile as they moved around Ireland under the protection of one lord after another, from Ess Ruaid in the west round to Benn Étair in the north-east. The text does not name the kings who sheltered them; it says only that they wandered “in homage to this man or that” while Conchobar sought to slay them by ambush or treachery. The Ulstermen chased them finally over the Irish Sea into the territory of Alba, Scotland.

Exile in Alba

In Alba the brothers lived first as hunters in wild country, taking game from the mountains. When the game failed them they began to lift cattle from the local men. The Albanians gathered to destroy them. The Sons of Uisliu went to the King of Alba, who took them into his household as mercenary warriors. Their camp was arranged so that Derdriu could not be seen from outside, for they feared that any king who saw her would want her for himself.

In time the king’s steward made his way around the house before dawn, saw Noisiu and Derdriu sleeping, and brought word to the king: I have never found, until this day, a woman worthy of you, this one beside Noisiu is fit for the king of the Western World. The king told the steward to approach her each day with secret offers. Each time he did so, Derdriu told Noisiu that same night. The king then sent the brothers into ever more dangerous raids and battles, hoping one of them would be killed; but their skill in arms was too great. Finally the king assembled the men of Alba to kill them outright. Derdriu heard of it and told Noisiu: go tonight or you will be dead by morning.

That night they slipped away to an island of the sea.

The safe-conduct undone

Word of their plight reached Ulster. The Ulstermen said to Conchobar: it is a grief that the Sons of Uisliu should perish in foreign lands for the crime of a bad woman. Better to forgive them and let them return. Conchobar agreed, or said he did, and sent messengers to offer safe passage home. The sons of Uisliu welcomed the offer. They named three conditions: Fergus mac Róich must come as one of the guarantors of their safety; Dubthach Dóeltengae must come as the second; and Cormac mac Conchobuir must be the third.

All three agreed and set out across the sea to bring them home. But at Conchobar’s contrivance, Fergus was pressed to join in an ale-feast. The earliest text mentions a single ale-feast, not a sequence of feast-houses; the tradition that Fergus was bound by honour or geis never to refuse a feast belongs to later versions. And the Sons of Uisliu had sworn an oath that on returning to Ireland the first food they ate would be Conchobar’s own. So Fiachu mac Fergusa, Fergus’s son, was sent forward with the party in his father’s stead, while Fergus tarried behind with Dubthach and Cormac. In the earliest text all three guarantors remained at the feast, and none was present at the killing.

The killing on the green

The Sons of Uisliu arrived on the green of Emain Macha. At that moment Éogan mac Durthacht, King of Fernmag, was at Emain making his peace with Conchobar after a long enmity between them, and Conchobar had secretly engaged him to do what the other warriors could not bring themselves to do.

Conchobar’s mercenaries surrounded the green so there was no way through to the king. Derdriu and the women were seated on the rampart above; the brothers stood in the open space below. Éogan walked toward them across the green with his warriors. Fiachu mac Fergusa moved to Noisiu’s side.

Éogan greeted Noisiu with a thrust of a great spear that broke his back. Fiachu threw himself over Noisiu with both arms around him, taking the next blow himself and dying across Noisiu’s body. So Noisiu was stabbed through Fiachu’s body from above. The other sons of Uisliu were cut down across the green. None escaped.

The guarantors were still at the feast.

Derdriu was taken to Conchobar with her hands bound behind her back.

The year of sorrow

In the manuscript order, the vengeance of the guarantors, the burning of Emain and the exile to Connacht follow immediately after the killing, before Derdriu’s year of grief; this retelling holds that section until after her death.

For a full year Derdriu lived at Conchobar’s side. During that time she never smiled; she ate and slept no more than she had to; she never lifted her head from her knee. When musicians were brought to entertain her she recited aloud instead:

Though fair you deem the eager warriors / who stride about in Emain after an expedition, / more nobly used to march to their dwelling / the three very heroic sons of Uisliu.

Though sweet you deem the goodly mead / which the battle-glorious Mac Nessa drinks, / I had heretofore ocean over its brink, / a frequent draught that was sweeter.

Noisiu’s voice, the sound of a wave; to hear it was always like melodious music. / The baritone of Ardán was good; / the tenor of Aindle going home to his shieling.

She described the three men in their beauty, Naoise’s raven-black hair, his red lips, his white skin; the harmony of their voices; their arms and adornments; their manner in the forest and on the march, and she would not be consoled.

When Conchobar pressed her, she spoke plainly: “What I deemed most beautiful on earth, and most beloved, you have carried it from me. Do not break my heart today. Sorrow is stronger than the sea.”

The boulder in the path

Conchobar asked her: what do you see that you hate most? She said: you, and Éogan mac Durthacht. He said then: you shall be a year with Éogan. He brought her to Éogan.

The following day they were going to the great assembly at Macha. Derdriu was behind Éogan in the chariot, with Conchobar beside her. She had vowed that she would never look on the two men she hated together. Conchobar looked at her between him and Éogan and said: “Well, Derdriu, it is a sheep’s eye between two rams that you make between me and Éogan.”

There was a great boulder standing in the path. Derdriu leaned forward and dashed her head against it, shattering her skull, and died.

The versions conflict here, and the difference matters. The Book of Leinster text, followed by Hull’s translation, has Derdriu dash her head against a standing stone or boulder on the road: it is explicitly a rock in the ground, not the chariot side. The later Early Modern Irish recension, Oidheadh Chloinne hUisneach, edited by Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith (Irish Texts Society vol. 56, 1993) and transmitted in around ninety manuscripts from the seventeenth century onward, presents a differently structured narrative in which death by leaping from the chariot against a rock became more prominent, and that image circulates widely in retellings. The foundational Book of Leinster text has her remain in the chariot and drive her head into the stone before her. Both amount to deliberate self-destruction in transit between Conchobar and Éogan.

The burning of Emain Macha

When the news of what had happened reached Fergus, Dubthach, and Cormac, they acted immediately. With a single thrust of his spear Dubthach killed Mane, Conchobar’s son, and Fiachna, son of Feidelm, Conchobar’s daughter: one thrust dispatched both, in Leahy’s translation. Fergus slew Traigthren son of Traiglethan and his brother. Three hundred of the Ulstermen fell among them in the fighting that followed. Before morning the maidens of Ulster were put to the sword by Dubthach. Fergus burned Emain Macha.

Thereupon Fergus, Dubthach, and Cormac mac Conchobuir led their following west, to Ailill and to Medb in Connacht, for they knew that couple could sustain them, and because Ulster offered them no shelter of love. Three thousand was the number of those exiled.

For sixteen years thereafter, neither weeping nor trembling ceased in Ulster on their account; each single night there was wailing and trembling through them.

What follows is bridging context from the Táin Bó Cúailnge tradition rather than the Longes text itself; the fourteen-year figure and the phrase about Fergus’s violated honour derive from the Táin. Fergus remained in Cruachan in Connacht, in the service of Ailill and Medb, for fourteen years. During that time he carried out many deeds from Ailill’s household and ranged widely across the land. He was one of the three guarantors who had been dishonoured, “his honour was violated in the matter of the sons of Usnech”, and that dishonour became the engine of Connacht’s war machine. When Medb assembled her great hosting for the Cattle Raid of Cooley, Fergus marched with her as one of her principal commanders, bearing the accumulated rage of a man who had watched his word and his wards destroyed. His inside knowledge of Ulster’s geography, customs, and warriors gave Medb strategic advantage she could not have had from any other source.

This is the exile of the Sons of Uisliu; and the exile of Fergus; and the violent death of the Sons of Uisliu and of Derdriu.

Among the Three Sorrows

The Deirdre story lived two lives. The early Longes mac nUislenn, composed around the eighth or ninth century, is the stark political tragedy retold above. The Early Modern Irish recension, Oidheadh Chloinne hUisneach (The Violent Death of the Children of Uisneach), reshaped the tale for a later audience, and it is in this form that it came to be counted among the Trí Truagha na Scéalaigheachta, the Three Sorrows of Storytelling, alongside the Fate of the Children of Lir and the Fate of the Children of Tuireann: the three great tragic set-pieces of the Irish storytelling tradition. The tale also became a touchstone of the literary revival, retold by Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory, where the modern title “Deirdre of the Sorrows” took hold.

The first scribes had called the tale an exile. The centuries that followed called it a sorrow.