Deirdre

Worth knowing: Deirdre is the heroine of the oldest Ulster Cycle sorrow-tale, doomed by prophecy before her birth; she is reared in seclusion as a king’s intended bride and escapes by choosing the warrior Noísiu for herself; the tragedy turns on a guarantee of safety that Conchobor breaks; the sources give two separate traditions with two different deaths, and the entry keeps both; and the popular image of Deirdre as a stolen wife reverses a story that is really about a woman escaping a captivity built for her.

The scream before birth, and the naming

The story opens with a sound rather than a sight. The men of Ulster are drinking at the house of Conchobor’s storyteller Feidlimid when Feidlimid’s pregnant wife crosses the floor and the child in her womb screams loud enough to be heard through the whole enclosure. Every man springs up. The chief druid Cathbad reads the sky and gives his judgment: the woman carries a girl of radiant beauty who will bring ruin, the sons of Uisliu sent into exile, warriors dead, and Fergus himself driven from Ulster. He names her on the spot, Derdriu, and says there will be evil because of her. In a final verse spoken to the unborn child he tells her that her little grave will lie everywhere and her tale will be famous.

The warriors demand that the infant be killed before she can do what is foretold. Conchobor refuses. He will rear the girl himself, he says, and she will be the woman who lives at his side. No man dares contradict the king, and the prophecy is left to work itself out rather than cut off, which is the first of the tale’s many choices that prefer power and possession to mercy.

Seclusion, the tutor, and the raven-image

Deirdre is raised in a fortified enclosure attended only by her foster-parents, a tutor, and the satirist-poetess Leborcham, who appears as Lavarcam in later retellings. No man of Ulster is allowed near her, because Conchobor intends her for himself and will not have her seen. This is the heart of the tale’s politics: a child is sealed away from the world to be kept for a man who has decided she is his.

One winter day her foster-father kills a calf in the snow, and a raven comes down to drink the spilled blood. Deirdre watches through her window and tells Leborcham that she could love a man of three colours, hair as black as that raven, cheek as red as that blood, and body as white as that snow. Leborcham answers that such a man is near at hand, Noísiu son of Uisliu. The detail matters. In the Old Irish text Deirdre builds the image herself from what she can see, and her tutor only names its living match. The desire is hers first, not handed to her from outside.

The elopement and the exile in Scotland

Deirdre finds Noísiu alone on the rampart of Emain Macha and presses him to take her away. He resists, knowing the prophecy, until she takes hold of him and warns him that he will carry lasting shame if he refuses, which is the working of a binding obligation he cannot honourably break. His brothers Ardán and Ainnle come running at his alarm, and the three carry Deirdre off, fleeing with a company of warriors and crossing at last to Scotland, where they settle by Loch Etive in Argyll.

They take service with the king of Scotland but keep Deirdre hidden, for her beauty is known to be dangerous. One dawn the king’s steward circles their dwelling and sees her sleeping beside Noísiu, then wakes his master with the news that here is a woman worth the whole western world, and the king need only kill Noísiu to take her. The king sends the steward to press Deirdre in secret, day after day; she tells Noísiu everything, and when the king finally raises his host against them she warns the brothers in time and they escape to an island in the sea. The pattern of the opening returns: wherever she goes, a man in power decides he must possess her.

The broken guarantee and the killing

Word reaches Ulster that the sons of Uisliu are in danger abroad, and Conchobor sends Fergus mac Róich with Dubthach and his own son Cormac as guarantors of a safe return. Deirdre distrusts the offer and warns Noísiu again and again; he does not listen. Conchobor then engineers Fergus out of the way by compelling him to a feast he is bound by obligation never to refuse, so that the guarantor cannot stand beside the men he has guaranteed. Fergus’s son Fiachu goes in his place.

At Emain Macha, Eogan mac Durthacht meets the brothers on the green with hidden mercenaries and drives a great spear through Noísiu. Fiachu throws himself over the body and is cut down with it; Ardán and Ainnle are killed on the green. When Fergus learns how his word has been broken, he burns Emain Macha and departs to Connacht to join Medb and Ailill, and this is the reason he stands on the opposing side in the great cattle-raid, The Cattle Raid of Cooley. The whole catastrophe rests on a promise of safety made only to be betrayed.

The silent year and the death

Conchobor takes Deirdre. For a full year she lives in his house and does not smile, barely eats, barely sleeps, and will not lift her face from her knee. When musicians play she answers with laments for the sons of Uisliu, saying their music was sweeter, their company finer, and that their brightness is gone out of the world. The lament tradition that praises the three brothers and turns at the last to the gravedigger, asking him not to make the grave too narrow because she will lie beside the noble ones, belongs to this moment of the story.

Conchobor asks her what she most hates of all she sees, and she names him, and Eogan mac Durthacht who killed Noísiu. He answers that she will spend a year with Eogan, since she hates the two of them alike, and sets her in Eogan’s chariot behind him. As it moves, Conchobor taunts her that she casts a sheep’s glance between two rams, looking from one man to the other. She sees a great rock ahead, throws herself against it head first, and dies. The escape she could not win in life she takes at the end on her own terms.

The later tradition: the Scottish and Early Modern version

A second tradition survives in manuscripts from the sixteenth century onward. One witness is the Glen Masan manuscript, a late medieval Gaelic vellum held in the National Library of Scotland that may copy a much older exemplar, though it is imperfect at both ends: it runs only from Conchobor’s feast to the death of Illann the Fair, about three-eighths of the tale, and so preserves the opening but breaks off long before Deirdre’s death. The fuller close survives in the Early Modern Irish recension, the version Theophilus O’Flanagan first printed in 1808. This tradition drops the whole first half of the older tale: there is no scream, no prophecy from Cathbad, no seclusion, and no raven-image. In its place Deirdre is given her own visions, among them three birds that come from Emain Macha bearing three sips of honey and carrying away three sips of the exiles’ blood in their place, a foreboding of the embassy that will lure the brothers home. Her part is enlarged, and the theme shifts from fate set against helpless people toward personal choice and the conflict of men.

Her death changes most of all. She does not die in a chariot after a silent year. Instead she goes to Noísiu’s freshly dug grave, looses her hair, drinks his blood, kisses him, speaks her laments, and casts herself into the grave to die with him; some later manuscripts have her stab herself. These are separate literary choices belonging to separate traditions, not two reports of one event, and the honest course is to keep them apart rather than fuse them.

Deirdre after the Middle Ages

Deirdre became a central figure of the Irish Literary Revival. George Russell, who wrote as AE, staged a Deirdre in 1902 alongside Yeats’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan, in performances often counted among the foundations of the Abbey Theatre. Lady Gregory built a composite Deirdre into her Cuchulain of Muirthemne in 1902, drawn from many manuscripts. Yeats wrote his own Deirdre in 1907, doom-laden, with the heroine meeting her fate in composed defiance, and Synge left Deirdre of the Sorrows unfinished at his death in 1909, completed by other hands and first staged in 1910, with Deirdre stabbing herself over Noísiu’s open grave. All four recentred the tale on Deirdre’s inner life, and scholars have noted that in romanticising her they often softened the stark original whose plainness is its real force. These are literary descendants of the story, not sources for it.