Étaín

Worth knowing: Étaín is the supreme beauty of the Tuatha Dé Danann and the heroine of the Wooing of Étaín, one of the oldest and richest tales of Irish myth; the jealousy of Midir’s first wife turns her into a fly and blows her about Ireland for years until she is swallowed in a cup and reborn a thousand and twelve years later as a mortal with no memory of her divine life; her story is widely read as the clearest Irish account of rebirth, distinct from ordinary shape-shifting; she is reclaimed from the High King’s court at Tara when Midir wins her in a board-game and flies off with her as a swan; and her line carries the High Kingship down to Conaire Mór.

Beauty and a name made of jealousy

Étaín’s name comes from a small form of the Old Irish word for passion or jealousy, so that the woman who gives jealousy its name becomes its chief object. She carries a second name, Étaín Echraide, where echraide means roughly horse-rider or of the horses, a by-name that has drawn comparison with horse-linked goddesses elsewhere, though the texts never act on it. When Midir wins her he calls her Bé Find, Fair Woman. In Modern Irish her name is Éadaoin.

In the Wooing of Étaín, edited and translated by Osborn Bergin and R. I. Best, she is the daughter of Ailill, king of the Ulaid in the north-east of Ireland. The bride-price for her is set in a cosmic register: Aengus must clear twelve plains and open twelve rivers and weigh out her worth in gold and silver before Ailill yields her, so that her value is paid in the reshaping of the land itself. A second genealogy, in the Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel, makes her instead the daughter of Étar, in keeping with her reborn identity. That same text gives one of the most celebrated descriptions of beauty in early Irish literature, in the scene where she washes at a well, yellow-haired and white as sea-foam, ending with the proverb that everyone was lovely until Étaín, everyone fair until Étaín.

The jealousy of Fuamnach and the three transformations

After a year of hospitality at Brú na Bóinne with Aengus, Midir takes Étaín home to his síd at Brí Léith in County Longford. Aengus warns him that Fuamnach, Midir’s first wife and a woman trained by a wizard, will be dangerous. So it proves. Fuamnach welcomes the couple, then, alone with Étaín, strikes her with a rod of scarlet rowan and turns her into a pool of water on the floor of the house. From the pool, by heat and the working of the ground, comes a worm, and from the worm a fly of supernatural beauty, as large as a man’s head, its hum sweeter than pipes and harps, its eyes bright as gemstones, the drops from its wings able to heal sickness. Midir knows Étaín in the fly and keeps her by him, taking no other wife while she attends him.

The surviving text is damaged here and elsewhere. The oldest manuscript, the Book of the Dun Cow, preserves the tale with the opening of the first part and the middle and end of the third part lost to missing leaves. The complete three-part text came to light only when a section of the Yellow Book of Lecan, which had lain in a private English collection at Cheltenham until the National Library of Ireland acquired it, was recovered and collated by Bergin and Best in their standard edition. The language of the tale is dated to about the ninth century, the surviving redaction later.

Fuamnach returns under the protection of the gods Lug, the Dagda and Ogma, so that Midir cannot harm her, and she raises a wind that blows the fly out of Brí Léith. For seven years Étaín finds no rest anywhere in Ireland, until she lights on the breast of Aengus at the Brú. He shelters her, building a sun-bower of crystal filled with fragrant herbs, which he carries with him and sleeps beside until her colour returns. But Fuamnach lures Aengus away and sends the same blast again, and for another seven years Étaín is driven on the wind until at last she falls into a golden cup before the wife of Étar at Inber Cíchmaine in Ulster. The woman swallows her in the drink and conceives, and bears a daughter named Étaín. The text records that a thousand and twelve years passed from the first begetting of Étaín by Ailill to her last begetting by Étar, and it notes a variant in which Manannán, rather than Aengus, kills both Fuamnach and Midir at Brí Léith.

Rebirth and the horseman by the water

Étaín grows up at Inber Cíchmaine, raised by Étar among fifty daughters of chieftains. The text shows the company bathing in the estuary when a horseman in a green mantle, bearing a silver shield, appears on the bank and speaks a prophetic verse that names her: this is Étaín, once swallowed in a drink from a cup by Étar’s wife. Then he vanishes. So at least one of the Tuatha Dé Danann knows who she is, even while she herself carries no memory of her former existence. The amnesia is the heart of the tale: this is not a goddess wearing a disguise but a soul born afresh, who has genuinely forgotten that she was ever divine.

Tara, the lovesick brother and the return of Midir

The men of Ireland refuse to hold the Festival of Tara unless the new High King, Eochaid Airem, takes a queen, and his messengers find Étaín at Inber Cíchmaine. Eochaid pays her bride-price and brings her to Tara. There his brother Ailill Ánguba falls sick with hidden love for her and wastes away in silence. While Eochaid is away circuiting Ireland, Étaín tends the dying man, washing his head and carving his food, and draws the truth from him. She agrees to meet him to cure him, but on each of three mornings a stranger comes in Ailill’s place while Ailill himself sleeps under enchantment. On the third meeting the stranger reveals himself as Midir of Brí Léith: he had caused the brother’s love-sickness only to engineer these meetings, and he tells Étaín she was once his wife, Étaín Echraide, bought with a great price. He asks her to come to him if Eochaid consents. She refuses to go without her husband’s leave, and returns to find Ailill healed, his honour and hers intact.

The chess games and the swan-flight

In the third part Midir comes openly to Eochaid at Tara with a silver board and golden playing-men lit by precious stones. They play for rising stakes, fifty grey horses, then boars and swords and cattle and cloaks, and Eochaid keeps winning and laying heavy tasks on Midir: clearing plains, planting a forest, building a causeway across a bog. These tasks echo the labours Ailill once set on Aengus in the first part, binding the long tale together. In the final game the stake is left unspoken. Midir wins, and claims as his prize an embrace and a kiss from Étaín. Trapped by his own pledge, Eochaid agrees but sets a month’s delay.

On the appointed night Tara is packed with the warriors of Ireland and every door is locked, yet Midir appears inside the hall by magic, puts his right arm around Étaín, and the two rise through the skylight as a pair of swans and fly to Síd ar Femuin (Síd Ban Find), the elfmound associated with Slievenamon. The hosts see only two swans circling Tara before they are gone. Eochaid and the men of Ireland dig up every fairy mound in Ireland in pursuit. After more than a year of excavation Midir produces fifty women all identical to Étaín and tells Eochaid to choose; the king picks the one who is in fact his own daughter, the child Étaín had been carrying when Midir reclaimed her.

The line to Conaire Mór

That daughter bears a daughter to her own father Eochaid, a child he orders exposed to die. She is found and raised by a herdsman and known as Mess Buachalla, the cowherd’s fosterling. She marries the High King Eterscél and becomes the mother of Conaire Mór, the central figure of the Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel, whose otherworld father visits through the roof in bird-form. Bergin and Best note that the first and third parts of the Wooing of Étaín stand as foretales to the cycle of Conaire Mór. Across three generations of divine rebirth, exposure and bird-visitation, the sovereignty of the High Kingship is channelled down through the female line. The first and third parts of the tale survive only because they were recovered from the Yellow Book of Lecan; a variant noted in the editions adds that Midir’s forces later burn Eochaid’s fort at Dún Frémainn and kill the king.

How scholars read her

Étaín has drawn several competing readings. T. F. O’Rahilly took her for a sun-goddess on the strength of the brilliance and light around her, though that view has not been widely accepted. The sovereignty reading sits closer to the text: she passes from an otherworld king to the mortal High King, and she makes her own going conditional on the king’s consent, so that she is the prize through which kingship is held. Gregory Toner notes a scholarly debate over whether the redactor of the Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel sets Étaín, the beautiful and life-giving figure, against the destructive hag Cailb as two faces of one sovereignty goddess. J. A. MacCulloch reads the tale as the clearest Irish case of transmigration, carefully distinct from shape-shifting: the soul is genuinely reborn and the new Étaín has wholly forgotten her past, unlike figures who keep their memory across transformations. The by-name Echraide has tempted comparison with the horse-goddesses Rhiannon and Epona, but since the texts never place Étaín with horses, that link stays speculative.

What Étaín is not

Two clarifications keep the figure honest. She has no genuine foothold in Mayo or Connacht: every place in her story lies in Leinster, Meath, Ulster or the Midlands, and her father Ailill, king of the Ulaid, is a different man from the Connacht king Ailill mac Máta of the Ulster Cycle. And the Aideen of the legend of Aideen’s Grave at Howth, though her name is a later form of Étaín, belongs to a separate medieval tradition about a woman who died of grief for the warrior Oscar; it is attached to a real tomb but has no demonstrable connection to the Étaín of the Mythological Cycle. Beyond that single namesake, Étaín leaves little trace in collected later folklore.