An Chraobh Airgid

Person

Máel Dúin

Maol Dúin · Old Irish Máel Dúin

The son of a raider and a nun, who put to sea to avenge his father and was three years and seven months among the islands of the ocean.

Open it on the full site There every name opens, and a web shows who is kin to whom.

His father was Ailill of the Edge of Battle, of the Eoganacht of Ninuss; his mother was a young nun, the prioress of a church of nuns, and the king’s queen reared him in secret with her own three sons. Taunted that no one knew his kindred, he learned his father’s name, and then how raiders had burned his father in the church of Dubcluain. In The Voyage of Máel Dúin he finds the killers’ island and loses it in a storm, and wanders the ocean for three years and seven months, losing his three foster-brothers one by one. A hermit on a rock tells him to forgive, and at the end he comes back to the killers’ island, knocks at its fortress door, and is made welcome.

In the tales

  • The Voyage of Máel Dúin He set out to avenge his father and found the killers’ island in the dark. Then a wind took him, and for three years and seven months the ocean showed him wonders.

See also

  • Corco Modhruadh Corcomroe. Where Máel Dúin went to the druid Nuca for a charm and a blessing on his boat.
  • Diurán Diurán the Rhymer, who cut a piece from the silver net and laid it on the altar of Armagh.

Sources

Medieval manuscript. Written down by Irish scholars between the eighth and seventeenth centuries.

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