Conall Cernach

Worth knowing: Conall Cernach is the supreme head-taker of the Ulster Cycle and the second warrior of the Red Branch after his foster-brother Cú Chulainn; his life is organised around the severed head as the currency of honour, from the prophecy at his birth to the head he hurls at Mac Dathó’s feast; he keeps a boyhood oath to avenge Cú Chulainn and kills the slayer Lugaid; the epithet cernach is genuinely uncertain rather than securely the Victorious; and he ends not in battle but old, leprous and pensioned by the Connacht enemies he had spent his life destroying, cut down at a ford by a prohibition that had governed his every crossing.

The head-taker of the Red Branch

Conall Cernach is the foremost champion of the Ulster Cycle after Cú Chulainn, to whom he is foster-brother, cousin and lateral kin. His defining practice is announced in the prophecy at his birth and kept without exception: he never spends a night without the severed head of a Connachtman on his belt or beneath his knee. The whole arc of his life runs on the head as trophy and as the arithmetic of honour, and it closes with his own head taken as a prize. Where Cú Chulainn burns brief and bright, Conall is the warrior who endures, outlasts his kin, and is finally undone by the very compulsions that made him.

Birth, lineage and the worm

His birth is preserved within the Cóir Anmann, a late Middle Irish collection of name-lore edited by Whitley Stokes. His father is Amergin mac Echit, a poet of the Ulaid; his mother is Findchóem, daughter of the druid Cathbad and half-sister of King Conchobar mac Nessa, which makes Conall close kin to both Conchobar and Cú Chulainn. The foster-household on the plain of Muirthemne is the crucible of the Ulster heroic generation.

Findchóem was childless until a druid took her to a sacred well, sang spells, and had her drink, and she swallowed a worm with the water. In the womb the worm pierced and consumed one of the unborn boy’s hands. When Cet mac Mágach, Findchóem’s own brother, heard the druids foretell that this child would kill more than half the men of Connacht and never sleep without a Connachtman’s head on his belt, he waited for the birth and then crushed the infant’s neck under his heel, though without breaking the marrow. Findchóem named the deed wolfish treachery. Cet handed the child back and named him Conall, and the boy grew up with a crooked neck.

The epithet cernach is genuinely contested rather than settled. The Cóir Anmann offers several competing explanations side by side: a swelling, cern, on the side of his head the size of a shield-boss, from a blow taken in Scotland in a quarrel over a woman; cern as victory; cern níad as strong man. The Irish-language dictionary lists cernach as an obscure adjective meaning victorious or triumphant, angular or having corners, and swollen. The medieval scholars recorded every reading without choosing between them, and victorious is convention rather than proof.

Mac Dathó’s feast and the thrown head

The tale most bound to Conall is Scéla Mucce Meic Dathó, the story of Mac Dathó’s pig, composed around the year 800, edited by Rudolf Thurneysen and translated by Jeffrey Gantz. Mac Dathó of Leinster, pressed at once by Connacht and Ulster to surrender his famous hound, invites both parties on the same day and sets before them a colossal pig fattened on the milk of sixty cows for seven years. The right to carve it, the champion’s portion, is to be settled by competitive boasting. The Connacht warrior Cet mac Mágach takes the knife and silences seven Ulster champions in turn, naming with precision the wound he dealt each. Then Conall enters.

Cet greets him in archaic verse and grants his quality but keeps his hand on the knife. Conall answers in kind and declares his lifelong practice: since first taking a spear he has never passed a night without a Connachtman’s head beneath his knee. Cet concedes that Conall is the better warrior, but adds that his brother Anlúan, were he present, could best him. Conall answers that Anlúan is present, draws the man’s severed head from his belt, and hurls it at Cet’s chest so that blood bursts from Cet’s mouth. Cet surrenders the pig. Conall takes the hindquarters, a load for nine men, leaving the Connacht side only the fore-trotters, and a brawl erupts that spills into the courtyard. The text is the work of a sardonic Leinster author, as Kim McCone has noted, yet within that irony the duel of Conall and Cet is played entirely straight.

The beheading test at Bricriu’s feast

In Fled Bricrenn, the feast of Bricriu, of the eighth or ninth century, translated by George Henderson, the troublemaker Bricriu sets three Ulster heroes against one another for the champion’s portion: Cú Chulainn, Conall, and Lóegaire Búadach. The contest comes down to a beheading test. A giant churl, the king Cú Roí mac Dáire in disguise, offers each man the chance to behead him in exchange for submitting to a return blow. Munremur mac Gerrcind strikes off the churl’s head, and the churl rises and carries it away; on the following nights the churl binds first Lóegaire and then Conall to the covenant, and each fails to appear for the return blow. Only Cú Chulainn lays his neck on the block and is named champion without peer. Conall holds second rank in the explicit order of the tale. The episode is recognised as a formal analogue of the beheading game in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

The Táin: exile and a limited role

In Táin Bó Cuailnge, the great epic of the cycle, edited by Cecile O’Rahilly and translated by Thomas Kinsella, Conall stands in the Connacht camp among the Ulster exiles, alongside Fergus mac Róich, who had been expelled after the affair of the sons of Uisnech. The Ulster warriors who remained at home are struck by the childbirth debility, Macha’s curse, which leaves them unable to fight; Conall, as an exile with the Connacht host, sits in a different position altogether and is not subject to it. He has no major individual combat in the central narrative, where the defence of Ulster falls to Cú Chulainn alone and then to the roused Ulster muster.

The revenge for Cú Chulainn

The defining act of Conall’s life is his vengeance for Cú Chulainn, told in Aided Con Culainn, the death of Cú Chulainn. The boyhood oath between them was absolute: whichever died first, the other would avenge him before nightfall. Cú Chulainn is killed through the conspiracy of Lugaid mac Con Roí, Erc son of Cairbre, and the sons of Calatín, his body bound upright to a standing stone on the plain of Muirthemne. His horse, the Líath Macha, leads Conall to the place.

Conall pursues Lugaid. When Cú Chulainn fell, his sword had slipped from his dying grip and struck off Lugaid’s right hand, so Conall, honouring the code of equal combat, has his sword-hand bound to his side with ropes and fights one-handed. They are evenly matched all afternoon, until Conall’s horse takes a bite from Lugaid’s side and turns the contest. Conall kills Lugaid and takes his head and, in the later recension of the tale, kills Erc son of Cairbre as well; Conall carries Erc’s head to Tara, where Erc’s sister Achall dies of grief. The death-tale of Conall opens with a ledger of the heads he took: three sons of Ailill and Medb; Bélchú of Breifne and his three sons; the seven sons of Mágu of Connacht; and Ailill son of Mata of Connacht. The birth-prophecy was kept without a single exception from childhood to old age.

Old age and death at Cruachan

The strangest thing about Conall is where he dies. The most prolific head-taker of the Ulster heroes ends his days as a dependant at Rathcroghan, Cruachan in County Roscommon, the royal seat of Connacht itself, the very household against which he had waged personal war since boyhood. The death-tale, Goire Conaill Chernaig i Crúachain, edited by Kuno Meyer, opens with the warrior already broken: after his foster-brothers Conchobar and Cú Chulainn have been slain, sorrow, misery and leprosy fall upon him, and there is no strength in his feet to carry him about. He turns to Ailill and Medb as the only household able to sustain him, and the text does not soften the irony, recording that his enmity toward them is great even as he depends on their table.

He arrives alone, is welcomed by both Ailill and Medb, and is housed on the rampart. For a full year the arrangement holds: a nightly feast of a pig, a calf, the royal couple’s leavings, cakes, a wether and a cauldron of broth, all at one sitting; daily spear-sharpening; and what most amuses the Connachta, his daily storytelling about how he killed their sons, brothers and fathers.

Medb’s true motive is to use Conall as a watcher over Ailill, who is conducting an affair. On a morning at Beltaine, Ailill goes out to meet a woman at the side of the fortress while Conall is on the rampart setting spears, and Medb goes out too, knowing what is afoot. At the most violent moment the text is compressed, and the tale itself offers two alternatives, the spear passing through Ailill from side to side or wounding him in an empty house through the thatch above, and does not reconcile them. Ailill, dying, warns Conall to flee, for the men of Connacht will kill him. Conall answers that it is enough if he reaches his chariot. Ailill dies, and Conall reaches his chariot.

The men of Connacht hurl their spears. Conall kills many and drives for a ford, but a prohibition binds him: he may not enter a ford unless its water has first run clear. Miners washing ore upstream have muddied the current, and the water holds him fast. He falls, having slaughtered many, caught at last by the prohibition that had governed every crossing of his life. The Red-wolves of Martine, from Fermoy, cut off his head in revenge for Cú Roí, whose head the men of Ulster had once carried north. Medb arrives as he dies, and the text closes with a lament over the head of Conall, son of Amergin, a head said to be large enough for four men to play a board-game inside, with a prophecy clinging to it that if the men of Ulster drink milk from it their full strength will return.

Place-name and the question of a god

Ballyconnell in County Cavan takes its name from Béal Átha Conaill, the mouth of Conall’s ford, the point on the Woodford River where tradition holds he was killed; a place-name record places his death there. Whether the legend produced the place-name or the place-name drew the legend cannot now be determined, though scholarship confirms the death-narrative’s particular connection to that eastern Breifne country.

Some scholars, among them J. A. MacCulloch and Anne Ross, have set the sound of cernach beside the root in Cernunnos, the horned Gaulish deity, and cited an episode in Táin Bó Fraích, where a serpent guarding a fort in the Alps leaps into Conall’s belt and does him no harm, as suggestive of horned-serpent imagery. Conall is never described as horned in any Irish text, and this remains citable speculation rather than established fact. The biographical reference works call him probably an ancestor figure, perhaps a deity, of the Conaille, leaving the divine question open. A separate folk tradition associated with Dunseverick in County Antrim places Conall at the Crucifixion of Christ, a Christianising layer shared by several Ulster heroes and absent from the Old Irish core texts.