Emer

Worth knowing: Emer is the wife of Cú Chulainn and the strongest female voice of the Ulster Cycle; she is chosen for the six gifts of womanhood and controls the terms of her own riddling courtship; her great speech in the Fand episode is the philosophical heart of the cycle, a diagnosis of how desire prizes the new over the familiar; her origins lie in north County Dublin, not in Dundalk where she is buried; and she gives the cycle its closing elegy before dying at her husband’s grave.

Origins and the six gifts

Emer, daughter of Forgall the Wily, is first found at Luglochta Loga, the Gardens of Lugh, identified with Lusk in what is now County Dublin, in the old plain of Bregia. This is not the Ulster heartland but the country of Leinster’s border lords. Forgall is a wealthy and cunning chieftain who objects strongly to Cú Chulainn as a son-in-law, and that opposition shapes the whole story.

When the men of Ulster decide their hero needs a wife, partly to protect their own women and partly because they fear he will die young, their messengers search every province without finding a woman he will accept. He chooses for himself, and the reason is stated plainly in Kuno Meyer’s translation of the Wooing of Emer: she was the only maiden in Ireland he would address and woo, because she alone had the six gifts, the gifts of beauty, of voice, of sweet speech, of needlework, of wisdom, and of chastity. These are not ornament. The first three describe presence and expression, the fourth marks courtly accomplishment, and the last two establish the qualities that make her his true match, a mind to equal his and a self-possession that mirrors his own.

The riddling courtship

When Cú Chulainn arrives at the fort, he finds Emer on the playing-field with her foster-sisters, teaching needlework and fine crafts. The courtship that follows is one of the strangest in early medieval literature. It runs entirely in coded speech, both parties aware that Forgall’s household must not understand a wooing is under way. Emer asks where he has come from, and he answers in mythological kennings; she asks what he has eaten, and he replies in riddles. She identifies him regardless, blesses his road, and is met with a veiled compliment that is also a statement of intent.

Her response is not surrender. She names the feat required of any man who would come to her, the slaying of great numbers at every ford along a named route. He repeats his suit; she names a second condition, a feat of arms sparing one man in the centre of each group of nine. He repeats again; she names a third, a long vigil through the turning of the seasons. Only then does she give the formal acceptance. The riddling is a guard against Forgall, who soon acts: disguised as a foreign envoy at Emain Macha, he praises the chariot-chiefs and urges that Cú Chulainn be sent to Scotland to train under the warrior-woman Scáthach, reckoning he will die there. When Cú Chulainn comes to say farewell, Emer names the scheme to his face, telling him Forgall wished him gone so that the two of them could not meet. He goes anyway, trains under Scáthach, and returns to find Forgall still refusing the match. He storms the ramparts in the hero’s salmon-leap, dealing blows that fell eight men each while sparing one from every nine, exactly as Emer’s tests had required, and carries her off, fighting at each ford she had named, until they reach Emain Macha under cover of dark.

The wasting sickness and Emer’s great speech

The Wasting Sickness of Cú Chulainn, which survives in the Book of the Dun Cow and also carries the title the Only Jealousy of Emer, is a composite narrative; the wife of its hero shifts between Eithne Ingubai and Emer, a sign of two source-layers joined together. Cú Chulainn strikes a pair of Otherworld birds linked by a golden chain, and the birds, who are Fand and her companion transformed, beat him senseless, so that he falls into a year-long wasting sickness. Emer is summoned, rebukes the men of Ulster for their inaction, and recalls how Cú Chulainn once rescued each of them, yet still he does not recover. At length, through his charioteer and Otherworld mediation, he goes to the plain of Mag Mell, fights for Fand’s realm, and takes her as his lover.

When word reaches Emer, she comes to the agreed meeting-place with fifty women bearing whetted knives. What follows is not a charge but a contest of words that shifts the whole moral ground. Emer shames Cú Chulainn before the women of Ulster, and he answers by praising Fand’s beauty and accomplishments, a list that nearly matches the six gifts that once made Emer singular. Her reply, in the version of Cross and Slover and of Myles Dillon, is the speech that has made her famous: the woman to whom he clings, she says, is in no way better than herself, for all that is red seems fair and only what is new seems white and only what is overhead seems bright, while things well known seem sour; people prize what they lack, and what they hold seems weak; and once the two of them dwelt in honour together, and would again if she could find favour in his sight. This is not a plea but a diagnosis, of human nature, of her husband, and of the entire structure of desire that Fand represents.

Cú Chulainn answers that she does find favour. Fand then withdraws of her own accord, moved by Emer’s grief and her recognition that Emer has no equal elsewhere. Manannán mac Lir shakes his cloak of mist between Fand and the hero so that the two will never meet again, and the druids give a drink of forgetting to both Cú Chulainn and Emer, the text saying explicitly that her state was in no way better than his. Both forget everything. The potion is not a reward for Emer but a mercy extended to equal suffering, which complicates any reading of the episode as a simple victory. She keeps her husband, but she is not restored so much as erased back to her state before the grief.

The contest of women and a son’s death

In the Feast of Bricriu, the troublemaker Bricriu sets the three chief women of Ulster against one another, telling each that whoever enters his hall first will hold the precedence of Ulster’s women. Emer wins the footrace. In the battle of words of the women that follows, she speaks last and most forcefully, calling herself the standard of women in figure, in grace and in wisdom, praising Cú Chulainn’s feats at length, and warning the company with characteristic edge that if she were a welcoming wanton none of them would keep a husband. The judgment, recorded in George Henderson’s edition, gives the champion’s portion to Cú Chulainn and the lasting precedence of the women of Ulster to Emer.

In the Death of Aífe’s Only Son, Emer is the one who sees what no warrior sees. When a young champion arrives in a bronze boat with golden oars and defeats every Ulster hero sent against him, Emer suspects the truth and warns Cú Chulainn that the boy is his own son. He fights on regardless and kills the youth with the gae bolg before recognition comes. Her warning, unheeded, is one of the cycle’s most painful moments of clear-sighted grief.

The grief and the shared grave

The death of Cú Chulainn is told in the Great Rout of Muirthemne, found in the Book of Leinster, and Lady Gregory’s retelling follows the medieval tradition closely. Emer comes with her women to the body, takes Cú Chulainn’s head in her hands, washes it, wraps it in silk, and presses it to her breast. Her lament runs as a series of addresses to his attributes in turn. Of his head she says it dealt death to many hundreds of heroes, and that her own head will lie in the same grave, one stone made for them both. Of his hand she says it was often set under her head and was dear to her. Of his voice she says it was a kind mouth, sweet-voiced in telling stories, that never refused weak or strong. She ends saying she is carried away like a branch on a stream, and will not bind up her hair that day.

She bids Conall make a wide, deep grave, then lays herself down beside Cú Chulainn and puts her mouth to his, and her life goes out of her. In Gregory’s telling she and Cú Chulainn are laid in one grave by Conall, who raises a single stone over them and writes their names in Ogham. The shared grave lies at Dundalk, in the plain of Muirthemne.

Her standing in the cycle

Emer’s claim to be the strongest female voice of the Ulster Cycle rests on a consistent pattern: she is never merely reactive. In the Wooing of Emer she controls the terms of her own courtship and warns Cú Chulainn against his enemy. In the Wasting Sickness she speaks the philosophical heart of the tale. In the Feast of Bricriu she wins both the race and the war of words. In the Death of Aífe’s Only Son she sees what no warrior sees. At the death she gives the cycle its elegy. No other woman in the Ulster tradition spans this range, and her ancient epithet as the standard of women is earned at every stage.