The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne

I The Goblet

One morning at first light Fionn mac Cumhaill rose in Almu, the broad great fort of Leinster, and went out to sit alone on the green. His son Oisín followed him out with Diorraing son of Dobhar, and asked what had him up so early.

I have had no wife since Maighneis died, said Fionn, and a man without a fitting wife gets little sleep.

I know the woman for you, said Diorraing: Gráinne, daughter of Cormac mac Airt, the fairest in form and feature and speech of all the women of the world.

Fionn and Cormac had long been at odds, and Fionn would sooner be refused by messengers than to his face. So Oisín and Diorraing went to Tara to ask for her. Cormac said his daughter had refused every prince in Ireland, and he got the blame for it: let them ask her. Her answer was short. If he is a fitting son-in-law for you, she told her father, why would he not be a fitting husband for me?

A fortnight later Fionn came to Tara with the seven battalions of the Fianna, and Cormac feasted them in his great hall. A druid of Fionn’s people, Daire of the Poems, sang Gráinne the songs of her fathers, and she asked him why Fionn had come. To ask for you as his wife, said the druid.

It is a wonder to me, said Gráinne, that he is not asking for me for his son. Oisín would be fitter than a man older than my father.

She asked him the names of the men on the benches. That is Goll mac Morna, said the druid, and Oscar, Oisín’s son, and Caoilte mac Rónáin. And the freckled, sweet-spoken man at Oisín’s left hand, with the curling dark hair and the two red cheeks, is Diarmuid Ua Duibhne of the white teeth: the best lover of women and maidens in the whole world. ¹

Gráinne sent for a jewelled golden goblet that held drink for nine times nine men, and filled it. Take it to Fionn first, she told her maid, and say I sent it. Fionn drank, and a stupor of sleep came down on him. Cormac drank and slept, and the queen, and the goblet went from hand to hand among the king’s people, and each who drank from it slept where they sat.

II The Geis

Then Gráinne rose, softly, and asked Oisín to take courtship from her. He would not meddle, he said, with any woman promised to Fionn. She turned to Diarmuid, and he refused her too.

Then I put you under a geis, said Gráinne, a bond of danger and destruction, unless you take me out of this house tonight, before Fionn and the king wake from that sleep. ²

Why me, said Diarmuid, of all the sons of kings in this house?

She told him. Once, on the green of Tara, the king’s son and the men of Tara were beating the Fianna at hurling. Diarmuid rose from his seat, took the hurley from the man beside him and knocked him down, went into the game, and won the goal three times. Gráinne had watched it all from the blue glass windows of her sunny bower. She had given him her love that day, she said, and she would give it to no other, ever.

Fionn has the keys of Tara tonight, said Diarmuid. We cannot get out.

There is a wicket-gate from my bower, said Gráinne. But Diarmuid was under geis never to pass through a wicket-gate. Then go over the rampart on the shafts of your spears, she said, as any warrior can, and follow me.

When she had gone he asked his friends for counsel. Follow her, said Oisín, and keep yourself well against the wiles of Fionn. Follow her, said Oscar: he is a poor wretch who fails to keep his bonds. Follow her, said Diorraing, though your death will come of it, and I grieve for it.

So he took up his weapons and bade them farewell, and every tear he shed was the size of a crimson whortleberry. He set the shafts of his two spears under him on the rampart and rose in a light high leap, like a bird, and came down on the grass of the plain outside, where Gráinne was waiting.

Go back, he told her, and Fionn will never know.

I will not go back, said Gráinne, and I will not part from you until death parts us.

III The Wood of the Two Huts

A mile out from Tara she was tired. Then go home, said Diarmuid, for I will never carry you, nor any woman. There was no need, she said: her father’s horses were in a fenced meadow, with chariots by them. He yoked two, and they drove west to the ford of Athlone. There he left one horse on each bank of the Shannon, and the two of them went a mile with the stream and came ashore on the Connacht side.

They came to Doire Dhá Bhoth, the wood of the two huts, in Clann Riocaird. Diarmuid cut down the grove around them and made a close fence of it with seven doors of woven wattles, and in the very middle he made Gráinne a bed of soft rushes and birch tops.

At Tara, in the morning, they were missed, and a burning of jealousy came over Fionn. His trackers lost the trail at the ford, until Fionn swore to hang them on either side of it; then they found the horses, and the track coming up out of the water a mile downstream. I know where they are now, said Fionn. In Doire Dhá Bhoth.

Oisín and Oscar sent warnings ahead of him. Bran, Fionn’s own hound, who loved Diarmuid no less than his master, slipped away from the back of the host and found the wood, and put his head into Diarmuid’s breast as he slept. Then Caoilte’s servant, whose shout could be heard across three cantreds, shouted three times. Diarmuid heard both warnings and would not run. We will not leave this wood, he said, until Fionn comes to us. Fear took hold of Gráinne then.

Fionn came, and ringed the wood with the Fianna, and set men at every one of the seven doors.

IV Seven Doors

At the Brú beside the Boyne, Aengus, who had fostered Diarmuid, was shown the danger his foster-son was in, and he came on the pure cold wind. Come under the borders of my mantle, the two of you, he said, and I will take you out unseen. Take Gráinne, said Diarmuid. If I live, I will follow.

When they had gone Diarmuid went round the seven doors, asking at each who was there. At one were Oisín and Oscar, at another Caoilte, at others the Fianna of Munster and of Ulster, and they called on him to come out to them: no one would dare to harm him. He would not bring Fionn’s anger down on his friends. At the last door Fionn himself was waiting, with four hundred hirelings.

That door, said Diarmuid, is the one I will go out by.

Fionn told his men their lives were on it. But Diarmuid rose on the shafts of his spears and went over their heads, far out beyond them, and called back to tell them so. Then he slung his shield on his back and went west, and was soon out of their sight.

He found Aengus and Gráinne at Ros Dá Shoileach, which is called Limerick now, in a warm hut with a great fire and half a wild boar on the spits.

In the morning Aengus left them a counsel before he went home. Never go into a tree with one trunk, he said, when you are fleeing Fionn; nor into a cave with one door; nor onto an island with one way in. Where you cook your meal, do not eat it. Where you eat, do not lie down. And where you lie down, do not rise in the morning. ³

V Where to Eat, Where to Sleep

They kept that counsel. By the Leamhan in Kerry Diarmuid killed a salmon and broiled it on a spit, and they crossed the river to eat it on the far bank.

And all that while, the tale says, Diarmuid kept himself from Gráinne. In the wood of the two huts he had left a spit of meat uncooked for Fionn to find, and on the bank of the Leamhan seven salmon uncooked: a sign that he had not touched the king’s daughter.

In the west a young warrior called Muadhán took service with them. He carried them over the rivers on his back, caught fish for them with a holly berry on a hook, and watched over them at night. When Fionn sent over the sea for three chiefs, with their host and three hounds that fire would not burn nor water drown, Diarmuid cut down their men day after day; and when the hounds were loosed on his track, Muadhán took a whelp from his belt that leapt down the first hound’s throat and tore out its heart. Diarmuid killed the other two.

At Limerick Muadhán took his leave, and they grieved after him. They went north past Sliabh Echtghe into Uí Fhiachrach, and Gráinne grew tired; but seeing that she had no one now to carry her but Diarmuid, she took heart and walked boldly at his side. Somewhere on that road he stopped keeping himself from her. ⁴ In the forest of Dubhros, near the river Moy, she was carrying his child.

Diarmuid made a hunting booth in the middle of the forest. No one else hunted there. In that forest stood a tree, and at its foot sat a giant.

VI The Quicken Tree of Dubhros

Long before, the Tuatha Dé Danann had played three days and nights of hurling against the Fianna by Loch Léin, and neither side won a goal. Going home, they passed through Uí Fhiachrach with food they had brought from Tír Tairngire: crimson nuts, and apples, and fragrant berries. One berry fell by the Moy, and a quicken tree grew from it. Whoever ate three of its berries would feel no sickness, and would have the cheer of wine and old mead in them, and a man of a hundred who tasted them would be thirty again.

So the Tuatha Dé set a guard over it: the Searbhán Lochlannach, thick-boned and crooked-tusked, with one eye in the middle of his black forehead and a collar of iron about him. No weapon wounded him and no fire burned him, and he could not die until he was struck three blows of his own iron club. By night he slept in the top of the tree, and by day he sat at its foot. ⁵ Diarmuid made a pact with him: leave to hunt the forest, and never a berry touched.

Then two young men of Clann Morna came for Diarmuid’s head. Their fathers had been at the killing of Fionn’s father, Cumhall, and Fionn would not take them into the Fianna without a price for it: Diarmuid’s head, or a fistful of the berries of Dubhros. Diarmuid overcame the pair of them and bound them. But now Gráinne had heard of the berries, and she longed for them.

Diarmuid went to the giant, who was asleep, and woke him with his foot. Gráinne is carrying a child, he said, and she has a craving for your berries.

Though she die bearing that child, said the Searbhán, she will never taste one.

He struck Diarmuid three great blows with the club, until Diarmuid threw down his own weapons, sprang in, caught the club in his own two hands, and struck him the three blows.

Pick what you like, Diarmuid told Gráinne. I will eat no berry, she said, but one your hand has plucked.

VII The Game in the Tree

Diarmuid gave the men of Clann Morna a load of berries and told them to say they had killed the giant themselves. Then he and Gráinne climbed into the Searbhán’s bed in the top of the tree, where the berries were sweeter than any below.

Fionn put the berries to his nose. I smell the skin of Ua Duibhne on these, he said. He went to Dubhros with the Fianna, sat down under the tree, and called for a chessboard. ⁶

He played Oisín, with Oscar and Diorraing at Oisín’s side of the board, and he pressed him until one move alone could save the game. There is a move to win it, said Fionn, and I dare any of you to show it to him.

Up in the branches Diarmuid said, I grieve that Oisín is stuck for a move, and I not there to show him. You are in a worse strait yourself, said Gráinne, in a giant’s bed with seven battalions of the Fianna round you.

Diarmuid plucked a berry and dropped it on the piece that should be moved. Oisín moved it and won. Twice more the game went the same way, twice more a berry fell, and the Fianna gave a great shout.

No wonder, said Fionn, with the prompting of Ua Duibhne. Oscar said it was jealousy to think Diarmuid would sit in a tree with Fionn waiting under it. Which of us has the truth, Diarmuid? said Fionn.

You never erred in your good judgement, Fionn, said Diarmuid. Gráinne and I are up here. And he kissed her three times in front of them all.

Fionn set his hired men round the tree, hand in hand. Nine men called Garbh went up after the head, one after another, and each was kicked down; and each time Aengus, who had come unseen, put Diarmuid’s shape on the falling man, and Fionn’s own people cut off his head. Then Aengus wrapped Gráinne in his mantle and took her home to the Brú.

Unless the sky falls on me, said Oscar, or the earth opens under my feet, no one here will give Diarmuid cut or wound. Diarmuid leapt from a high bough, out beyond them all, and he and Oscar went away together.

VIII The Boar of Binn Ghulbain

It was sixteen years from the night at Tara before the pursuit ended. Fionn brought a host from Alba, and Diarmuid and Oscar killed it; he brought a hag from Tír Tairngire who flew over Diarmuid on a water-lily leaf, until Diarmuid put a spear up through the hole in it. At last Aengus made the peace. Diarmuid had his father’s lands back, Cormac gave Fionn his other daughter, and Diarmuid and Gráinne settled at Ráth Ghráinne in Céis Chorainn, far from both. She bore him four sons and a daughter.

In time Gráinne said it was a shame that the two best men in Ireland had never been under their roof. She made a feast that was a year in the preparing, and the king and Fionn and the Fianna came, and feasted a year.

On the last night of it Diarmuid heard a hound’s voice in his sleep. Gráinne put her arms round him and said it was the Tuatha Dé working against him, and he lay down. It came again, and again she kept him. The third time it was day, and he would go. Take the great sword and the red spear, then, she said: the Moralltach and the Ga Dearg. He took the little sword and the yellow spear, the Beagalltach and the Ga Buidhe, and his hound Mac an Chuill on a chain.

On the top of Binn Ghulbain he found Fionn alone. The Fianna are out after the boar of Binn Ghulbain, said Fionn. It has killed thirty of them this morning. Come away: you are under geis never to hunt a pig.

Then Fionn told him why. When Diarmuid was a child in Aengus’s house, the steward’s son was there too, born to the same mother. In the uproar of a dogfight Diarmuid’s father, Donn, caught the boy between his knees and crushed him to death. The steward struck the dead child with a druid’s wand and made him a boar, cropped and green, with no ears and no tail, to have the same length of life as Diarmuid and to be his death at last. And Aengus laid a geis on Diarmuid never to hunt a pig.

I never knew of that geis until now, said Diarmuid. I will not leave this hill for fear of him.

Fionn went, and left him alone on the summit. It is to kill me you made this hunt, Fionn, said Diarmuid.

IX The Water

The boar came up the mountain, and Mac an Chuill ran from it. Woe to the man who does not take a good wife’s counsel, said Diarmuid. The yellow spear struck its forehead and did not cut one bristle, and the little sword broke in two on its back. The boar tripped him; he came up astride it, facing its tail, and it ran with him down to the falls of Eas Ruaidh and back. At the top it threw him and ripped him open, and as it turned away Diarmuid hurled the broken hilt and dashed out its brains. ⁷

Fionn came up with the Fianna. I like to see you so, Diarmuid, he said. I am only sorry the women of Ireland cannot see you now.

You could heal me, said Diarmuid: whoever drinks from your two hands is made whole. That was your gift at the Boyne. He reminded Fionn how often he had saved his life. You took Gráinne from me, said Fionn, the night you were my guard. The fault was not mine, said Diarmuid: she put me under geis, and I would not have broken it for the gold of the world. There is no well on this mountain, said Fionn. There is, said Diarmuid, nine paces from you: the best well of pure water in the world.

Fionn lifted the water in his two hands, and halfway back let it run through his fingers. You let it go on purpose, said Diarmuid. The second time, halfway back, he thought of Gráinne, and let it run. Diarmuid sighed. Oscar swore that if the water did not come, only one of the two of them would leave that hill. The third time Fionn brought it, and as he came up, the life went out of Diarmuid. ⁸

At Ráth Ghráinne, Gráinne saw Fionn coming, leading Mac an Chuill, and knew. She fell from the rampart, and the three sons she was carrying were born dead.

Aengus came on the pure cold wind. Not a night since I took you to the Brú at nine months old, he said, did I fail to watch over you, until last night. I cannot bring him back to life, but I will send a soul into him, so that he can talk to me every day. He carried Diarmuid home on a gilded bier, his spears over him pointing at the sky.

Gráinne sent her sons over the world to learn war and avenge their father. But Fionn came to her alone, with sweet words, and though she told him to leave her sight he stayed until he had brought her round. When the Fianna saw them coming together they gave one shout of mockery, and Gráinne bowed her head. She made the peace between Fionn and her sons herself, and she and Fionn stayed together until they died.