Boann

Worth knowing: Boann is the Tuatha Dé Danann goddess of the river Boyne, and her central act is to become that river by breaking the prohibition of the otherworld well of wisdom; the place-name lore gives two contradictory reasons for her approach to the well, and the entry keeps both; she is also the lover of the Dagda and the mother of Aengus Óg, conceived under a sun held still for nine months; her name means white cow and is recorded as far back as Ptolemy in the second century; and her well of Segais is the eastern twin of the Shannon’s well, the same wisdom-lore told of two rivers.

The white cow: name and antiquity

Boann is the tutelary goddess of the river Boyne, Old Irish Boand, Modern Irish Bóinn. The place-name lore reads her name as bó find, joining the word for cow with the word for white, bright or wise, and a verse in the first poem turns it over: Boann is Bó and Find, from the meeting of two royal streams. The geographer Ptolemy, writing in the second century, records the river as Bouvinda, from an early Celtic form meaning white cow, which sets the goddess-name among the oldest recorded names in Ireland. Because the word find carries brightness and wisdom as well as whiteness, the name can also be heard as the enlightened or wisdom-giving cow, which suits her place as guardian of a well of knowledge.

She carries a second, otherworld name. In the lore she is also Segais, her name in the síd, the mound, and that name passes to the well of Segais and to the river’s first reach: Segais was her name in the síd, the verse says, to be sung in every land. Before the water bursts out into the world, the goddess is the spring itself. The genealogies of the Book of Invasions place her among the Tuatha Dé Danann as a daughter of Delbáeth, son of Elada; the cattle-raid of Fráech names her a sister of Befind, Fráech’s otherworld mother.

The husband problem: Nechtan or Elcmar?

The sources do not agree on who Boann’s husband is, and the disagreement is never resolved. In the first place-name poem the husband is Nechtan, and the well is his: only Nechtan and his three cup-bearers may go near it. In the second poem she is still called the wife of Nechtan, yet she comes to the house of Elcmar, lord of horses, who appears as a separate figure. In the Wooing of Étaín, in the edition of Osborn Bergin and R. I. Best, the husband is plainly Elcmar, lord of the Brú, and Nechtan is not named at all; this is also the only text that gives Boann the further name Eithne.

So the texts hold two different husbands, Nechtan and Elcmar, sometimes as distinct figures and sometimes seemingly confused. Later scholarship has at times tried to bridge the gap by identifying Elcmar with Nuada of the Silver Arm, which would tie a place-name in the first poem, the Arm of Nuadu’s Wife, to Boann’s own maimed limb, but no source equates the two husbands outright, and the link is best left as a genuine variant. The well, at least, is constant: it is Nechtan’s well, the well of Segais, whichever husband tradition is in play.

How she became the river: the first account

The fullest account of Boann’s transgression is the first of the two Boyne poems in the Metrical Dindshenchas, in Edward Gwynn’s edition. The well stands inside Síd Nechtain, Nechtan’s otherworld mound, on a height whose waters feed the Boyne. It is a source of mysterious harm: whoever looks into its depths has their eyes burst, and whoever moves to the left or right of it is left maimed. Only Nechtan and his three cup-bearers, Flesc, Lam and Luam, are permitted to approach.

Boann comes to it on a day, her noble pride lifting her, to make trial of its power. She walks three times around the well, heedless. The prose version in the Rennes Dindshenchas makes the direction explicit: thrice she walked withershins round the well, the leftward turn against the sun’s course, the direction of transgression. The prose also gives her wounds as thigh, hand and eye where the poem gives foot, eye and hand. Three waves break from the well, and each takes a limb: a wave against her foot, a wave against her eye, and a third that shatters one hand. Disfigured, she flees toward the sea so that no one might see her mutilation, and the cold white water follows her the whole way, from the síd to the sea, and that pursuit becomes the river Boyne. Her lapdog Dabilla, who runs after her, is caught and torn apart by the sea-current, and the two pieces of his body become the stones called Cnoc Dabilla, standing in the water east of Breg.

The second account: a birth to be hidden

The second Boyne poem braids the river’s making together with the birth of Aengus and gives the approach to the well a different reason. Here Boann does not go in pride or to test the well, but to wash away the guilt of a secret birth: she went from the house in haste, sure of hiding her wrong if she could reach the well and bathe in it. The cup-bearers, named here as Flesc, Lesc and Luam, stand guard; the fountain rises against her and drowns her at last.

The two accounts cannot be smoothed into one. In the first she is a transgressor punished for defying a prohibition; in the second she is a woman destroyed while trying to conceal an adulterous pregnancy. The moral frame shifts, and even the cup-bearers’ names shift, but the river at the end is the same. The entry keeps both rather than choosing.

Mother of Aengus Óg: the sun stood still

Boann’s other great role is as the mother of Aengus Óg, the god of love and youth, and the fullest account is in the Wooing of Étaín. The Dagda, here named Eochaid Ollathair and glossed in the tale as the good god, desires her while she is the wife of Elcmar. To make the union possible without discovery, he sends Elcmar away on an errand and works great spells on him so that nine months pass as a single day, holding off the darkness of night and keeping hunger and thirst from the absent husband. In that suspended day Aengus is conceived and born, and Boann is recovered from her labour before Elcmar returns to notice anything.

The second Boyne poem adds the image that has drawn most attention: it was then they made the sun stand still to the end of nine months, warming the fine grass in the roof of the firmament. At the conception Boann speaks, union with thee, that were my one desire, and from her words the Dagda names the child Aengus. The lore links the name to óen gus, one desire or single vigour, echoing her declaration, though this is the poem’s own wordplay rather than settled scholarship. The midwinter alignment of Newgrange, where the rising sun reaches the inner chamber at the shortest day, has been read as the mythic background to the scene, with the Dagda as the solstice sun and Boann as the enclosing earth. That reading is current but contested, and is offered here only as one interpretation.

The well of wisdom: Segais, the nine hazels and the salmon

The well of Segais is the heart of Boann’s mythology. As the poems on Sinann describe the well of Segais, it is ringed by nine hazel trees whose nuts fall into the water; the salmon there eat them, and the water carries imbas, the inspired knowledge of poets. The same sequence of hazel, nut, salmon and wisdom appears in the tale of Sinann and again in the separate tradition of Fionn and the Salmon of Knowledge.

The lore sometimes runs Boann’s well of Segais together with Connla’s well, the source of the Shannon. The poem on Sinann places Connla’s well beneath the ocean, with six streams rising from it and a seventh that becomes the Shannon, and the nine hazels stand at Connla’s well in the poems on Sinann, while the Boyne side carries the Segais name and its nut-lore, so that some later writers treat the two as a single well from which both rivers spring. The sources disagree, and the two are best understood as parallel traditions, identical in shape and perhaps once one, rather than a single settled narrative. The clearest expression of the pairing is Sinann herself: a woman who goes to a well of otherworld wisdom, is met by the rising water, is swept away and drowned, and becomes a river. Her story and Boann’s are near-identical, the Shannon to the west and the Boyne to the east, two rivers carrying the same logic.

Brú na Bóinne and the family of the river

Brú na Bóinne, the mansion or womb of the Boyne, is the great passage-tomb complex on the river’s north bank in County Meath, Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth, and an otherworld dwelling in the mythology. In the Wooing of Étaín it is the home of Elcmar, and Aengus later wins it from its holder by a trick of words, asking for a day and a night and then claiming that all time is made of days and nights. Boann is the river that draws the valley itself: the mounds sit within her bends, and the three figures most bound to the site, the Dagda, Boann and Aengus, are joined through her. Her son Aengus is fostered by Midir at Brí Léith and does not learn his parentage until he is taunted in a game.

Boann leaves little trace in later folk tradition; her name survives chiefly in the river-name An Bhóinn and in Brú na Bóinne, with a Christian holy well at Carbury in County Kildare kept as a source of the Boyne. The modern identification of her with Brigid has no medieval warrant and is noted here as a later addition, not part of the early tradition.