Flidais

Worth knowing: Flidais is a Tuatha Dé Danann goddess of abundance who milks wild does and domestic cows alike; her hornless cow the Maol, with her herds, could supply the men of Ireland every seventh night; the Táin Bó Flidhais, the Mayo Táin, roots her story in the Erris landscape around Carrowmore Lake; and the famous deer-drawn chariot has no basis in any primary Irish text.

Who is Flidais, and is she goddess or queen?

Flidais, spelled variously Fliodhas, Fliodhais, Flidhais, is one of the Tuatha Dé Danann. Her epithet Foltchaín means “beautiful/soft hair” and appears consistently across all major sources. The Cóir Anmann (ed. and tr. Whitley Stokes, Irische Texte III.2, Leipzig, 1897) is the clearest statement of her divine status: “Flidais the queen, one of the Tuath Dé Danann.” She was wife of the king Adammair son of Fer Cuirp; the phrase Buar Flidaise, “the Cattle of Flidais”, was proverbial enough to be glossed as a standard formula.

The question of her divine status is genuinely complex. The Táin Bó Flidhais presents her as a mortal queen who ages and dies; the Book of Leinster short version records her death at Trag Báli (the Shore of Bali, Ulster), with the note that “the state of Fergus’ household was none the better for that.” Yet the Glenmasan manuscript version and the Cóir Anmann both cast her as a woman of the Síde who crosses into the human world. The Lebor Gabála Érenn places her descendants among the Tuatha Dé, and two daughters fight as supernatural forces in the Second Battle of Moytura. The invocation of the three daughters of Flidais (teora ingena Flithais, in Meyer’s reading) in a medieval healing spell implies active apotropaic status. Modern scholarly consensus, following the Cóir Anmann testimony, treats her as a genuine Tuath Dé goddess later euhemerised into a mortal queen.

What happens in the Táin Bó Flidhais, the Mayo Táin?

The Táin Bó Flidhais is one of the Remscéla, the fore-tales preceding the Táin Bó Cúailnge, and the short version is believed to predate it. It survives in two substantially different forms.

The short version (Old Irish, preserved in Lebor na hUidhre, the Book of Leinster, and the Egerton manuscript) is spare and swift. Flidais is the wife of Ailill Finn (Ailill the Fair-haired), lord of Kerry [the note in the translation identifies “Kerry” as Castlereagh, in the west of present Roscommon, not modern Kerry]. She sends weekly messengers to Fergus mac Róich, drawn by reports of his prowess. Fergus arrives with thirty warriors seeking a gift of cattle; Ailill Finn refuses and drives them out. Violence breaks at the fort’s ford; Flidais throws her cloak over the wounded men, a gesture of shelter and sovereignty. Seven of Fergus’s men escape to Cruachan; Medb and Ailill march with the nobles of Connacht and the Ulster exiles. After a week-long siege, seven hundred are slain inside, including Ailill Finn and thirty sons. Flidais is taken. The text then supplies the crucial link to the main Táin: “Flidais was accustomed each seventh day from the produce of her cows to support the men of Ireland, in order that during the Raid she might provide them with the means of life. This then was the Herd of Flidais.” She dies at Trag Báli, and “Fergus died after some time in the land of Connaught, after the death of his wife.”

The long version (Middle Irish, the Glenmasan Manuscript, 15th c., believed copy of an exemplar dated 1238, held at the Advocates Library in Edinburgh) is far richer in Mayo geographic detail and presents Flidais explicitly as an otherworld figure. Flidhais Fholtchain is the wife of Oilill Fionn, a king of the Gamhanraidh, the tribe the short version calls one of the three races of heroes in Ireland, whose territory modern accounts place from North Mayo to County Clare, west of the Shannon. The couple hold two forts: Dún Flidhais, called Fort Morgan in the tale and set on the hill above Loch Letriach (modern tradition identifies it with Rathmorgan at the southern end of Carrowmore Lake in Erris), and Dún Átha Féan (identified locally west of Lough Conn near the Nephin). Flidais keeps her Maol penned at Dún Flidhais while Oilill favours the other fort.

Bricne Nimhtheanga (Bricne of the Poisoned Tongue), a guest at Cruachan, travels to Dún Átha Féan, is feasted royally, and praises Fergus mac Róich to Flidais. He then inflames Fergus with accounts of Flidais’s beauty, making Medb jealous. Ailill mac Máta steals Fergus’s enchanted sword and replaces it with a wooden replica, stripping him of power before the contest.

Fergus is defeated and captured at the battle of Áth Féan; not less than a thousand of his men are killed after his sword proves wooden, and he is imprisoned in Flidais’s castle, tied to its great pillar. Medb advances on Erris, her daughter Red Cainner falling en route to a spear cast at Medb. Medb offers the Gamhanraidh leaders, each in secret, the kingship of their tribe and quarters at Cruachan to change sides; many accept. At a feast where the nobles are plied with drink, messengers from Flidais and Fergus reach the men of Ireland, charging them to attack the fortress; stung by Fergus’s taunting, Oilill himself strikes the fetters from Fergus and his companions, and falls in the unequal fight that follows against Fergus and the men of Ireland. Fergus afterwards lays Oilill’s head on the ground before Flidais as a love-token; she weeps and has the head dressed for burial, a moment of genuine grief that distinguishes this version’s moral texture. [A modern Mayo retelling instead has Flidais drug Oilill’s drink and free Fergus herself, gives Oilill ninety-seven warriors on the ramparts, and places his grave in a tumulus just north of Inver; none of these details is in the Glenmasan text.]

Fergus carries off Flidais, the Maol, and her entire herds of cattle and deer. The retreat to Cruachan is harried at every pass by Gamhanraidh warriors; the Glenamoy Hills (the tale’s Glen Mughaighe) see renewed full-scale fighting, and warriors muster from the direction of Croagh Patrick (the tale’s Cruachan Oighle). Domhnall Dualbhuidhe (Donal of the Yellow Locks), Oilill’s father, whose seat local tradition places at Glencastle, arrives with wolfhounds that tear through Medb’s troops; after an earlier single combat between them ends in a draw, Fergus kills him at the Ford of the Champions during the retreat. Muireadhach the Stutterer, Domhnall’s grandson, leads the Gamhanraidh and recovers both Flidais and the Maol. [Version conflict: some versions have Medb’s force retaining Flidais and returning to Cruachan; the Glenmasan ending has Flidais living with Muireadhach for a season before withdrawing to Loch Letriach, after which nothing is known of her.]

The Maol’s reluctance is a key grace-note: the cow refuses to follow Oilill’s killer. Fergus strikes her nine blows until her groaning is heard across Ireland, then sets Bricne to address her in verse: “Rise, marvellous cow, / Maol Flidais whose milk is sweet … / For the wife of Ailill also comes … / And if report be true, / You and she came together out of fairy dwellings.” The verse confirms that both the Maol and Flidais arrived from otherworldly origins.

Where does the tale survive in the Mayo landscape?

The geography of the long version is precise and survives in the physical landscape. Dún Flidhais at Rathmorgan sits on the southern shore of Carrowmore Lake in Erris, a ringfort location identifiable on modern maps (the manuscript itself sets the fort above Loch Letriach; the Carrowmore identification is modern local tradition). [Note: the identification with “Kiltane” appears in some secondary sources but is not confirmed in the primary manuscript texts examined; omitted here pending verification.] The bay between Barnatra and Inver on Broadhaven Bay is called Trá Chiortáin because of the treachery of Ciortán’s boat in the tale. The Munhin River (Munchinn), running from Carrowmore Lake into the Owenmore, preserves Flidais’s local folk name, Munhin (Muinchinn); the river is said to take its name from her drowning there after Fergus, fearing faithlessness, pushes her into the flood, an oral tradition noted by Dáithí Ó hÓgáin as a genuine residual folk memory in Co. Mayo. The Glenmasan detail that warriors come “from Croagh Patrick” situates Flidais at the heart of a mythological territory running from Croagh Patrick north through the Nephin range to the Erris coast.

What is the Maol, and why do deer count as her cattle?

The Maol (Irish maol, “hornless”) is Flidais’s most celebrated possession. In the Glenmasan Táin Bó Flidhais, Flidais says that her herds and the Maol “will amply supply the men of Ireland every seventh night”; a modern Mayo retelling makes the Maol feed three hundred men, their women, and their children in a single night’s milking. In the Táin Bó Cúailnge (Book of Leinster), Flidais, “who had slept with Fergus on Táin Bó Cúailnge”, “every seventh night on that hosting quenched with milk the thirst of all the men of Ireland, king and queen and prince, poet and learner.” The Maol’s name has been connected with the Moylies, the hornless breed of cattle associated with the west of Ireland. [Connection reported in secondary sources; not located in a primary text.]

The defining mythological concept is the equation of wild deer with domestic cows. The Cóir Anmann makes this explicit: in the reign of her son Nia Ségamain (ség, “deer,” is máin, “his treasure”), “double cattle, cows and does, were milked in the same way every day.” Deer are Flidais’s wild cattle. The power she transmits to Nia Ségamain, dissolving the boundary between wild and tame, bringing the forest’s bounty into the same circuit of gift and sustenance as the farmstead’s, is the same power the Maol embodies. Sjoestedt captured it: “She reigns over the beasts of the forests ‘the herds of Flidais’ as Tethra reigns over the creatures of the sea ‘the herds of Tethra’.”

Who are Flidais’s family?

Flidais has two distinct genealogical traditions reflecting her dual presence in the Mythological and Ulster cycles.

In the Cóir Anmann tradition, her husband is Adammair (Adhamair), son of Fer Cuirp, called simply “the king” in the Cóir Anmann and presented in later tradition as a king of Ireland. Their son is Nia Ségamain (“champion of the deer’s treasure”), who inherits her power over cattle and deer.

In the Ulster Cycle, her mortal husband is Ailill Finn / Oilill Fionn, and her passion for Fergus mac Róich drives the narrative. The Táin Bó Cúailnge confirms she slept with Fergus during the campaign.

The Lebor Gabála Érenn (Macalister translation, vol. 4, Irish Texts Society, 1941) names her as mother of four daughters: Argoen, Bé Téite (name possibly meaning “wanton” or “of the assembly”), Dinand (Dianann), and Bé Chuille. Dinand and Bé Chuille appear as “she-farmers” in one passage and as Lugh’s two witches in the Second Battle of Moytura, enchanting the trees, the stones, and the sods of the earth to rout the Fomorians, their mother’s sovereignty over the natural world ramifying into battlefield earth-magic.

The Metrical Dindshenchas (poem “Loch Léin”, Gwynn vol. 3: “the shining vessels of Fand daughter of Flidais”) adds a fifth child: Fand, the sea-goddess associated with Manannán mac Lir and Cú Chulainn’s otherworld sickness. [Version conflict: this maternity is not attested in the Lebor Gabála tradition; both are noted as distinct textual traditions and should not be harmonised without caveat.]

Does Flidais really ride a deer-drawn chariot?

Flidais’s name is of uncertain etymology. Thurneysen (Die irische Helden- und Königsage, 1921, p. 318) took the second element to be the genitive of os, “deer,” grounding her in the wild. Ó hÓgáin suggested a reading in which the first element denotes wetness, referring to milk and connecting her to abundance and nurture. Both readings are plausible.

The image of Flidais riding in a chariot drawn by deer, repeated in MacKillop, Sjoestedt, Ross, and Monaghan, has no direct textual attestation in any primary Irish source. It is absent from both versions of the Táin Bó Flidhais and from the Táin Bó Cúailnge. The tradition derives from comparative mythology (analogies with Artemis/Diana, the Strettweg cult wagon) and from the deer etymology of her name, not from native Irish evidence. Modern depictions of Flidais as an exclusively woodland hunting goddess modelled on Artemis should be treated with caution; her native mythology overwhelmingly emphasises cattle, milk, sovereignty, and the Otherworld, not archery or forest solitude.

How did Flidais survive in folklore?

The most robust Mayo folk survival is the Munhin River tradition: the Munchinn, running from Carrowmore Lake, carries Flidais’s local name, and the drowning folk etymology is documented in oral tradition in Co. Mayo. Ó hÓgáin notes the related tale of Dónall Dualbhuí and Muinchinn as a living recasting of the Táin narrative with Dún Domhnall in Glencastle replacing the main-text’s fort hierarchy. The invocation of the three daughters of Flidais (teora ingena Flithais) in a medieval healing spell is a further residual trace.