The Morrigan is a supernatural woman of medieval Irish literature, and the one-line label she usually gets, war goddess, is a modern shorthand. In the texts she sleeps with the Dagda at a river a year before a battle, promises to take a king's heart blood, sits on a standing stone as a bird, trips a hero as an eel, is healed by his blessing, and speaks two prophecies, one of peace and one of the end of the world. Even her name is read two ways, phantom queen or great queen. This article stays with what the manuscripts say and marks the places where they contradict each other.
Where does the Morrigan appear, and what does she do there?
Four medieval texts and one glossary tradition carry almost everything known about her. The retellings most readers meet first, Lady Gregory's above all, rearranged that material, so the table keeps them apart.
| Text | What she does | What the text calls her |
|---|---|---|
| Cath Maige Tuired, the Second Battle of Mag Tuired | Meets the Dagda at the river Unshin around Samain, promises to take the Fomorian king's heart blood, incites the battle, announces the victory, prophesies peace and then the end of the world | "The Morrígan, the daughter of Ernmas"; the text ties the victory speech to Badb |
| Táin Bó Cúailnge, Recension I | Warns the brown bull as a bird on a pillar-stone, offers herself to Cú Chulainn, attacks him as an eel, a wolf, and a heifer, and is healed by him as a one-eyed old woman milking a cow | "Allecto ... that is, the Mórrígan"; a bird; an old crone |
| Táin Bó Regamna | Quarrels with Cú Chulainn over a heifer, becomes "a black bird on the branch near him", and tells him she is at work on his death | A red woman, then a black bird |
| Lebor Gabála Érenn, the Book of Invasions | Listed as one of three daughters of Ernmas with Badb and Macha; Macha dies in the battle her sister announces | "Morrigu, whose name was Anand" |
| Cormac's Glossary and a Vatican Isaiah gloss, ninth century | Her name explains other words: "false demons" are terrors and morrígna, and the biblical lamia is "a monster in the form of a woman, that is, a morrígain" | A common noun, in the plural |
| Lady Gregory, Cuchulain of Muirthemne, 1902 | A girl washes the hero's bloodstained clothes at a ford before his last battle; a bird lands on his shoulder as he dies | "The woman of the Sidhe"; the bird is not named |
The rows do not add up to one tidy character. The text that has her promise a king's death also has that king die in single combat with somebody else, and a name that one source treats as a goddess, a ninth-century glossary treats as a word for a kind of monster. Both problems are taken up below.
What does the name Morrigan mean?
Two readings survive, and they disagree about the first syllable. The Dictionary of the Irish Language gives the first element as cognate with Old High German mara and Anglo-Saxon maere, the word that survives in English nightmare, and the second element as identical to rígan, "queen". That reading gives phantom queen, or nightmare queen. R. A. S. Macalister, editing the Lebor Gabála in 1941, took the first element as mór, "great", and called Morrígu "merely an epithet ('great queen')" worn by a goddess whose real name was Anand. Both readings are still in print.
What the glossaries do settle is that the word was more than a personal name. A gloss on Isaiah 34:14 in Vatican Library, Codex Reginae Lat. 215, written in 876 or 877, explains the Latin lamia as "monstrum in feminae figura .i. morigain", a monster in the form of a woman, that is, a morrígain. Cormac's Glossary, a ninth-century Irish word list, explains gúdemain, "false demons", as "úatha 7 morrígnae", terrors and morrígna, in the plural. When John O'Donovan translated that glossary in 1868 he rendered the entry as "spectres and fairy queens". The name could stand for a class of frightening female beings, and Jacqueline Borsje, who quotes the Isaiah gloss in her 2007 study of the figure, reads it as an equation of the Morrigan with Lilith, the nocturnal terror of Jewish tradition.
Is the Morrigan a crow or a raven?
A crow. The bird attached to her in the texts is the badb, which the dictionary glosses as the scald-crow or hooded crow, and also as the name of a war goddess who appeared in that form. In the Táin Bó Cúailnge she arrives "in the form of a bird which perched on the pillar-stone in Temair Cúailnge" and warns the bull in a chant that includes "Fierce is the raven, men are dead", one of the few places the larger bird is named, and there as a figure of speech rather than as her own shape. In Táin Bó Regamna, after the roadside quarrel with Cú Chulainn, "she was a black bird on the branch near him".
The bird is the part of her that the medieval texts and the modern designs agree on. If you want to tell the two corvids apart in the field, our raven vs crow guide covers the bill, the tail, and the voice, and the crow's reputation as a battlefield bird is the subject of why a group of crows is called a murder. The other war god with corvids on his shoulders is Odin, and what the Eddas say about Huginn and Muninn makes a useful contrast: his birds are ravens, named, and they report to him. Hers is a crow, and the texts say the bird is her own shape.
What does the Morrigan do at the Second Battle of Mag Tuired?
Cath Maige Tuired, in Elizabeth Gray's 1982 translation, gives her more to do than any other text. A year before the battle, near Samain, the Dagda finds her "at the Unshin in Corann, washing, with one of her feet at Allod Echae south of the water and the other at Lisconny north of the water", with nine loosened tresses on her head. "The Dagda spoke with her, and they united", and the place is named the Bed of the Couple. She then tells him where the Fomoire will land and promises to go into Scétne "to destroy Indech mac Dé Domnann, the king of the Fomoire", and to "take from him the blood of his heart and the kidneys of his valour". Later she gives two handfuls of that blood to the waiting hosts.
When Lug asks each of his people what power they bring, her answer is: "I have stood fast; I shall pursue what was watched; I will be able to kill; I will be able to destroy those who might be subdued." She comes to the field "strengthening the Túatha Dé to fight the battle resolutely and fiercely" and chants "Kings arise to the battle". After the victory she announces it "to the royal heights of Ireland and to its síd-hosts, to its chief waters and to its rivermouths", and the text adds, "that is the reason Badb still relates great deeds". Two poems follow. The first begins "Peace up to heaven. Heaven down to earth." The second, which the text says foretells the end of the world, begins "I shall not see a world which will be dear to me: Summer without blossoms, Cattle will be without milk, Women without modesty, Men without valour."
Now the contradiction. The text that has her promise Indech's heart blood reports, in the battle itself, that "the champion Ogma son of Elatha and Indech mac Dé Domnann fell together in single combat". The Lebor Gabála says that Ogma fell "at the hands of Indech son of Dé Domnann, king of the Fomoire". So one passage gives Indech's death to the Morrigan, one to a mutual kill with Ogma, and one leaves Indech standing long enough to kill Ogma. A sentence that begins "the Morrigan never killed anyone", or "the Morrigan killed the Fomorian king", has picked one manuscript and hidden the others.
Why does the Morrigan fight Cú Chulainn?
Because he turns her down. In Recension I of the Táin Bó Cúailnge, translated by Cecile O'Rahilly, a woman comes to Cú Chulainn during the cattle raid and offers herself. He refuses, and she answers with three threats. "I shall go in the form of an eel under your feet in the ford so that you shall fall." As "a grey she-wolf" she will drive the cattle over the ford at him. Then she will come "in the guise of a hornless red heifer in front of the cattle". He answers each threat with the injury he will give her in return: crushed ribs, a smashed eye, a broken leg. In the fight with Lóch at the ford all three happen in order. "The eel twined itself in three coils round Cú Chulainn's feet so that he fell prostrate athwart the ford", the wolf drives the cattle west and takes a sling stone in the eye, and the heifer stampedes the herd and takes one in the leg.
The healing follows, and it is the strangest scene she has. She comes to the exhausted hero "in the guise of an old crone, one-eyed and half-blind and engaged in milking a cow with three teats". He asks for a drink. She gives him the milk of one teat, he blesses her, and her head is made whole; the second teat heals her eye, the third her leg. He has repaired the three wounds he gave her, and the text does not say whether he knows it. Earlier in the same recension, when she perches on the pillar-stone to warn the bull, the scribe introduces her as "Allecto ... that is, the Mórrígan", borrowing the name of a Roman Fury. Irish translators of Lucan made the same swap in the other direction and turned his Furies into the Badb of battle.
Is the Morrigan the Washer at the Ford?
Partly, and the part matters. The dictionary lists "the washer at the ford" among the ways the medieval texts describe her, and the Second Battle finds her washing in the Unshin, one foot on each bank, when the Dagda meets her. The image of the Morrigan at a river crossing is old. The specific scene most people mean, though, is the one before Cú Chulainn's last fight, and in the version most readers know, Lady Gregory's Cuchulain of Muirthemne of 1902, the washer has no name. Cathbad and the hero "came to a ford, and there they saw a young girl, thin and white-skinned and having yellow hair, washing and ever washing, and wringing out clothing that was stained crimson red". Cathbad says, "It is your red clothes she is washing", and Cuchulain calls her "the woman of the Sidhe". When he dies, "a bird came and settled on his shoulder", and the bird is not named either. Our own Washer at the Ford design reads a tradition that the sources support in outline. It should not be read back into Lady Gregory's page as a quotation.
Are there three Morrigans?
The texts give three sisters and a plural noun, which is not quite one goddess in three persons. The Lebor Gabála Érenn, in Macalister's translation, says "Ernmas had other three daughters, Badb and Macha and Morrigu, whose name was Anand", and a verse in the same section names "the three daughters of Ernmas the she-farmer". Macha dies at Mag Tuired "at the hands of Balor", in the battle her sister announces. O'Mulconry's Glossary, quoted in the dictionary entry for Macha, says "Machae .i. badb nō asī an tres morrīgan": Macha, that is, Badb, or she is the third Morrigan. A medieval glossator could already count Morrigans, and could already lose track of which sister was which. The modern phrase triple goddess is a tidier system than the manuscripts hold.
Is the Morrigan a war goddess?
That is where the dictionary files her: "name of an ancient Irish war-goddess". Battle is the setting for most of what she does, and the badb that shares her shape is a carrion bird. Jacqueline Borsje opens her study by noting that the Morrigan "is usually classified as a War Goddess" and then follows Máire Herbert's plea for reading the primary sources "without preconceived ideas about their function". Read that way, the material above holds a lover, a prophet of peace and of ruin, a river, a cattle raid, a bird, an old woman with a cow, and a word for a monster that walks at night. War is where she is found most often, and it is a thin summary of what she does there.
From the archive
Three of our Morrigan designs pick moments from the texts above. The Morrigan Heart Hands gives her feathers for hair and a crow perched on her hands. The Morrigan: Washer at the Ford puts her at the river crossing with a crow on the rock beside her. Morrigan: Wings Open is the crowned figure under a crescent with a crow breaking into flight on either side. The rest of the Irish and Celtic material, including Cernunnos, the horned god named on one stone, and Elen of the Ways, sits in Folklore.
Sources
- Cath Maige Tuired: The Second Battle of Mag Tuired, edited and translated by Elizabeth A. Gray, Irish Texts Society, 1982. Supports the Samain meeting at the Unshin, the promise of Indech's heart blood, her answer to Lug, the incitement, the victory announcement, both prophecies, and the death of Ogma and Indech in single combat. CELT text
- Táin Bó Cúailnge Recension I, translated by Cecile O'Rahilly, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1976. Supports the bird on the pillar-stone, the "Allecto" gloss, the three threats, the fight with Lóch, and the healing with the three-teated cow. CELT text
- Táin Bó Regamna, Old Irish Online lesson by Patrizia de Bernardo Stempel, Caren Esser, and Jonathan Slocum, Linguistics Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Supports "a black bird on the branch near him" and her statement that she is at work on his death. Lesson text
- Lebor Gabála Érenn: The Book of the Taking of Ireland, Part IV, edited and translated by R. A. S. Macalister, Irish Texts Society, 1941. Supports the three daughters of Ernmas, "Morrigu, whose name was Anand", Macha's death at Balor's hands, Ogma's death at Indech's hands, and Macalister's "great queen" reading in his introduction. Internet Archive
- eDIL: Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language, entries for Morrígan, badb, and Macha. Supports the mara and maere etymology, the "war-goddess" heading, the scald-crow and hooded crow meanings, the O'Mulconry gloss on Macha, and the "washer at the ford" description. Morrígan, badb, Macha
- Jacqueline Borsje, "The 'terror of the night' and the Morrígain: shifting faces of the supernatural," in Proceedings of the Seventh Symposium of Societas Celtologica Nordica, edited by Mícheál Ó Flaithearta, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2007, pages 71 to 98. Supports the Vatican Isaiah gloss and its date, the Cormac's Glossary entry on gúdemain, the Lilith comparison, and the "War Goddess" caution. University of Amsterdam repository
- Sanas Chormaic: Cormac's Glossary, translated by John O'Donovan, edited by Whitley Stokes, Irish Archaeological and Celtic Society, 1868. Supports the 1868 rendering "spectres and fairy queens". Internet Archive
- Lady Gregory, Cuchulain of Muirthemne, 1902, "Death of Cuchulain." Supports the unnamed girl washing red clothing at the ford, Cathbad's warning, "the woman of the Sidhe", and the unnamed bird on the dying hero's shoulder. Full text