THE WARRIOR WOMAN PRECEDENT II: FINDABAIR: WHITE PHANTOM OR WOMAN WARRIOR? PART III: THE MORRIGAN

"The Twa Corbies (The Two Ravens)", by Arthur Rackham, from Some British Ballads, 1919

The Morrigan…another weird, old, Irish name.  The Morrigan was a war deity, one-third of a triple goddess (some say), and a washer-at-the-ford, or banshee.  Like the banshee, she was occasionally seen washing the armor – or in a more gruesome version, the entrails – of a warrior at one of the many fords over which the ancient Celts so often fought.  (If you could hold the ford, you could hold the land on at least one side of it.  This held true in Britain as well as in Ireland; when the Roman bridge builders and road repairers left in 410 AD, the roads and bridges fell into disrepair, and the natives took to the ancient fords and byways).  When a warrior saw the Morrigan washing his armor, he knew he was fated to fall in the coming battle.

Unlike the banshee, the Morrigan sometimes caused, or tried to cause, a death.  Banshees were heralds of death.  They didn’t cause it; they just predicted it.  Don’t shoot the messenger.  (I believe that the banshee had other functions, but I’ll discuss it in a later blog).

Not so, the Morrigan.  She was an active player.  Like the gods in the Iliad, she took sides, played power politics, and fought in battles, often deliberately tripping up prominent warriors.

Being raised in a partly Irish society so close to Ireland itself, Queen Guinevere would have known of the Morrigan.  (She may even have been educated in Ireland or in Irish territory.  In the fifth century, the first crop of Irish saints sprang up from the green soil of Ériu.  Mostly educated in Gaul, which was the go-to place for instruction in those days, many of them – like Patrick, Declan, and Ailbe – returned to Ireland to convert their contrary compatriots.  Soon thereafter, Ireland became a mecca of learning and Gaul began sending her children there for schooling.  The student becomes the teacher, Grasshopper).

Guinevere’s associates, the Irish Lancelot and her part-Irish cousins and uncles, would have known of the Morrigan.  They would have hoped that she fought beside them in battle and watched over them on campaign.  They may even have prayed or made sacrifices to the fearsome goddess to ensure their continued good fortune in war.

Sketch of the Tara Brooch,
By William Frederick Wakeman

The Morrigan’s name resembles that of another, very famous Arthurian player: Queen Morgan le Fey, King Arthur’s half-sister and sometime political adversary.  As Norma Lorre Goodrich states, Morgan is a man’s name in Welsh and was, in fact, the name of Arthur’s physician.  So, his much-maligned older sister’s original name was not Morgan, but probably a title or honorific closer to Morrigan.  Mór Rígan means “Great Queen”, which becomes both ladies beautifully.

But mor has a darker connotation, which also suits these two queens, with their sinister associations and shadow selves.  It may have stemmed from the same old Indo-European root as the Anglo-Saxon word mære: as in Cwen-Mære, “Nightmare-Queen”.  (See previous blog post).  If so, the name was intended to convey “terror” or “monstrousness”.  And if that is true, then Mor Rígan meant something like “Queen of Terror” or “Monster-Queen”.

(Hell, Wikipedia even says that her name is usually rendered as “Phantom Queen”.  Sound familiar)?

So, maybe the infamous Morgan le Fey, with her shockingly independent, often belligerent, behavior – she once sent Arthur a poisoned apple, mailed a burning smock to Guinevere, and tried to kill Gawain and/or Lancelot – is related to or derived from the more ancient Morrigan.

Like her associates – Guinevere, Morgan, Medb – the Morrigan was linked to various animals.  Medb, for instance, was connected to the stoat.  It was known through the ages that only royalty was ever permitted to wear its lush winter fur: ermine.  Although stoats were not native to Ireland, Medb is said to have kept one as a pet.  Cú Chulainn killed it with a sling-stone while it sat upon her shoulder.  (He really was a snarky teenager).

A Stoat, or Ermine

Medb was also – obviously – connected with cattle.  (How could she not be, after her record-making cattle raid amongst a people notorious for cattle thieving)?  So was the Morrigan.  In the Ulster Cycle, the goddess of war and fertility transformed into numerous animals – the crow or raven, the eel, the wolf – and, of course, the cow.

She had a number of altercations with Cú Chulainn before the war even got started, which ended with him saying that if he had recognized her, they would have got along better.  (And he goes for the save)!  The Morrigan told him that nothing he could have done would have made them get on any better, and that nothing could save him.  He would fall in a future battle.  She told the boy-hero, “I guard your death.”  Which sounds like a banshee…and something more.

Several times during the Cattle Raid of Coolney, she appeared to Cú Chulainn, trying to trip him up.  She first manifested in the form of a lovely maiden, offering him her love and her aid in the coming fight.

He rejected her.  That made her mad.

So, she morphed into an eel and tripped him in the ford.  She transformed into a wolf and stampeded cattle across the ford.  Then, she turned into a red heifer leading the fleeing herd.  In each of these encounters, Cú Chulainn wounded her, defeated his opponent, and still managed to hold the ford.

Later, he came across a crone milking a cow.  It was the Morrigan.  Her body showed the same wounds he had inflicted upon her in the form of an eel, a wolf, and a cow.  Surprisingly, she offered her enemy three drinks of milk.  Even more surprisingly, he took them.  (I would automatically have assumed they were poisoned and politely declined).  But with each drink, Cú Chulainn blessed and thereby healed each of the old goddess-harpy’s wounds.

And then she went right back to her old battle-hardened self.  As the armies gathered for the final battle of the Cattle Raid of Coolney, the Morrigan prophesied the horrible bloodshed to come.  You can almost see her storm-crows darkening the Irish sky with their blood-black wings.

Cú Chulainn survived that battle.  But he couldn’t live forever.  And sure enough, as he rode to what was to be his final fight, he came across the Morrigan, washing his armor in a ford.  The waters swirled red with his blood.  He knew he would die that day.  And he did.

As Cú Chulainn was dying of his wounds, he tied himself to a standing stone with his own entrails, so that he would die on his feet, facing his enemies.  Sounds a lot like the way his old enemy, Queen Medb, was buried, huh?  But, even after the fierce warrior passed, none of his enemies dared come anywhere near him, until…

…Enter the Morrigan.  She alighted on Cú Chulainn’s shoulder in the form of a raven.  Only then would the great warrior’s enemies accept that he was truly dead.  None could touch him in life.  It seems only right that none but the ferocious goddess of war should touch him in death.