Fergus mac Róich

Worth knowing: Fergus mac Róich is the Ulster Cycle’s exemplar of compromised honour, a former king of Ulster undone twice by trickery; he loses his throne through Ness’s stratagem and his honour through a betrayed safe-conduct, then lives fourteen years in Connacht exile as Medb’s lover; his sword Caladbolg is stolen as proof of the affair and a wooden dummy left in its place; he dies in a lake on Mag Aí, killed by a blind poet’s misdirected cast; and in the frame legend it is his ghost, not the living man, that dictates the whole Táin Bó Cúailnge.

The loss of the kingship

Fergus was king of Ulster, Fergus son of Ross, and he desired Ness, a formidable woman who had taken up arms and gone soldiering. Ness agreed to marry him on one condition, that her son Conchobor be given the nominal kingship of Ulster for a single year, so that Conchobor’s children might call themselves the children of a king. The Ulstermen assured Fergus this would cost him nothing. But over that year, as the Tidings of Conchobor son of Ness records in Whitley Stokes’s edition, Ness systematically bought the loyalty of the Ulster warriors with her own gold and silver, and Conchobor ruled so well that when the year ended the Ulstermen refused to undo the arrangement. Their verdict was blunt: what Fergus sold, let it part from him; what Conchobor bought, let it stay with him. So Fergus became Conchobor’s loyal retainer, and foster-father to Conchobor’s heir Cormac Cond Longas and to his nephew Cú Chulainn.

The safe-conduct and the exile

The decisive betrayal came through Deirdre and the sons of Uisliu. Conchobor sent Fergus, whose word was the surest surety in Ulster, to Scotland to bring back the exiled Naoise and his brothers under a guarantee of safe-conduct. Conchobor then arranged for Fergus to be delayed at a sequence of obligatory feasts, since to refuse hospitality was dishonourable, leaving his son Fíachu to escort the brothers home. Fíachu and the sons of Uisliu were murdered on arrival. The safe-conduct had been used and discarded. Fergus burned Emain Macha in his rage and led three thousand followers west to Cruachan, the royal seat of Ailill and Medb in Connacht. This is the central matter of the Exile of the Sons of Uisliu, in Vernam Hull’s edition, and a related account survives in the Glenmasan Manuscript under the title Fochond Loingse Fergusa.

The essential fact of his later life follows from this. Fergus lives at Cruachan, in Ráth Cruacháin in what is now County Roscommon, for fourteen years in exile (the figure of the death-tale; the Exile of the Sons of Uisliu reckons sixteen years of unbroken mourning in Ulster after his going). He serves in Ailill’s household, he is Medb’s lover, and he is the most prominent of the Ulster exiles who give Connacht its military edge. Everything that follows, the great cattle-raid, the Mayo raid, his death, radiates outward from Cruachan.

The Mayo cattle-raid: Táin Bó Flidais

Before the great cattle-raid that defines the Táin Bó Cúailnge, Fergus is already pursuing cattle and women in his adopted province. Flidais, called Foltchaín for her lovely hair, was the wife of Ailill Finn, a petty king of the Gamhanraidh of Erris in north-west County Mayo, and she had fallen in love with Fergus through reports of his fame. The tale places her fort near the mountain of Nephin, around Ráth Muireagáin near Carrowmore Lake in Iorras. The shorter version in the Book of Leinster presents a swift campaign; the longer version in the Glenmasan Manuscript, edited by Donald MacKinnon, brings the full army of Connacht west. Ailill Finn proved difficult, Fergus lost a battle and was imprisoned, and Flidais finally drugged her husband to free him, after which Ailill Finn was killed and Flidais taken. Her hornless cow the Maol came with her, and her herd would provision the Connacht army every seventh day during the great cattle-raid that followed. This is the genuine Mayo anchor in Fergus’s story, set in the Bangor Erris landscape and carried in a manuscript tradition that links Scotland and Connacht.

The Táin Bó Cúailnge: guide, double agent, and the stolen sword

In the Táin Bó Cúailnge, in Cecile O’Rahilly’s editions of both recensions and Thomas Kinsella’s translation, Fergus is chosen to lead Medb’s army into Ulster because he knows the country and because the hosting is, as the text says, a hostile one for him personally. His divided loyalties shape every move. He leads the army astray to the north and the south, wasting time and sending warnings ahead to Cú Chulainn, who begins his single-handed defence of the province. Medb sees the misdirection and challenges him, but he never stops protecting his people.

The affair between Fergus and Medb comes to a crisis when Ailill’s charioteer spies the two together and steals Caladbolg, the great sword described as the sword of Leite from the elf-mounds, said to grow to the size of a rainbow when swung. Ailill keeps it as evidence, and Fergus, stripped of his true blade, carries a wooden dummy in its place. The two recensions name the weapon differently, Caladbolg in Recension One and Caladcholg in the poem spoken over it in the Book of Leinster, and both forms are attested.

The bond between Fergus and Cú Chulainn runs through the epic as a parallel to the war. Cú Chulainn is his foster-son, and the two enter a pact of mutual yielding, each agreeing to give way to the other in turn. At the final muster Cú Chulainn calls in that debt; Fergus orders his men to stand down, the Connacht allies break, and the battle dissolves. Fergus has effectively ended the war he was sent to fight. Before this, Ailill returns Caladbolg. Fergus meets Conchobor on the field and has him at his mercy, but is stopped by Cormac Cond Longas, Conchobor’s son and his own foster-son. Unable to strike the man he most wants to kill, he turns his fury on the land itself, shearing the tops from three hills in Meath, the Three Formaela, with three sweeping blows. The hills, the text says, remain to this day.

Death on Mag Aí

After the Táin the exile goes on. The Death of Fergus mac Róich, edited by Kuno Meyer in his Death-Tales of the Ulster Heroes, records that after fourteen years in Connacht, Fergus and Medb were swimming together in a lake on Mag Aí while Ailill watched from the bank. Overcome by jealousy, Ailill told his blind brother Lugaid, a poet who had never once missed his aim, that deer were sporting in the water, and persuaded him to cast a lance. Lugaid drove it clean through Fergus. Fergus pulled the spear from his own body and hurled it back; it missed Ailill but killed his hound. He hauled himself from the water, lay down on the hillside above the lake, and died. His grave is there on Mag Aí in Roscommon, and the death-tale opens by saying he was in exile because his honour had been violated. Later tradition identifies the lake as Loughnaneane, the Énloch or Lake of Birds, the same place named in the frame legend below.

The ghost at the grave

The death of Fergus and the recovery of the Táin are inseparable. In the medieval frame legend, How the Táin Bó Cúailnge was found again, included in Kinsella’s prefatory matter and attested in the manuscript tradition, the poet Senchán Torpéist assembled the poets of Ireland but found that none could recall the complete Táin; only fragments survived. His son Muirgen travelled to Fergus’s grave-stone at Énloch and sang a poem addressed to Fergus himself. A great mist closed around him for three days and three nights. Then Fergus appeared, in a green cloak and a red-embroidered hooded shirt, with a gold-hilted sword and bronze shoes, his brown hair spread behind him, and dictated the whole Táin from beginning to end. The text records an alternate tradition in which the recitation was given to Senchán himself, after he had fasted against the saints of Fergus’s line. Either way, the epic comes to us, in its written frame, from a dead man’s voice.

The name and the heroic register

The name Fergus comes from Old Irish fer-gus, conventionally read as man-vigour or manliness. The patronymic mac Róich may carry the sense son of the great horse or great stallion. The Tidings of Conchobor records measurements of impossible scale for his physical proportions and notes that it took seven women to satisfy him unless Flidais were at hand. These details belong to a mythological register of sovereignty and fertility rather than to biography; the sources handle them as markers of a figure whose appetites were on a heroic scale. They also describe the pattern of his life, for his desire for Ness costs him the kingship, and his desire for Medb costs him his sword and at last his life.