An Chraobh Airgid
In a firelit house warriors start up as a druid lays his hand on the belly of a woman heavy with child.

The Ulster Cycle

The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu

Longes mac nUislenn

Deirdre was reared in secret to be the king’s wife. Then one winter she saw a raven drinking blood on the snow, and chose another man.

Medieval manuscript · 9 minutes to read

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I The Cry in the Womb

Why did the sons of Uisliu go into exile? The old book asks it plainly, and then it tells. 1

The men of Ulster were drinking in the house of Feidlimid mac Daill, the storyteller of Conchobar the king. Feidlimid’s wife was on her feet among them, serving the company, and she was heavy with child. When it was time for sleep, she went across the floor to her bed.

As she passed through the middle of the house, the child screamed in her womb. The scream went through the whole house and out across the yard. Every man there leapt up, and they crowded together.

Let no one stir, said Sencha mac Ailella. Bring the woman here, and we will know what that cry was.

Feidlimid asked his wife what it meant, and she could not tell him. She turned to Cathbad, the fair-faced druid, who was there among them, and Cathbad answered her in a poem. It was a woman who had cried out in her womb, he said: so beautiful that queens would envy her and kings would want her, and heroes would die for her. Then he laid his hand on her belly, and the child stirred under his hand.

It is a girl, he said. Deirdre will be her name, and evil will come of her.

Then the girl was born, and Cathbad spoke a poem over her, of all that was to come. The three sons of Uisliu would be driven out. Fergus would go into exile. A son of the king would be killed, and a fierce deed done in Emain Macha. And at the end of it all, they would dig a small grave for her.

Kill her, said the young warriors.

No, said Conchobar. Bring her to me in the morning. She will be reared the way I say, and she will be my wife.

The men of Ulster did not dare to turn him, and it was done as he said.

On a snowy winter hill a black raven drinks red blood from the snow while a long-haired girl watches from a doorway.

II Raven, Blood and Snow

Conchobar had her reared in a house of his own, set apart from the court, so that no man of Ulster would see her before she was old enough to be his wife. No one was let into that house but her foster-father, her foster-mother, and one other: Leborcham. No door could be shut against Leborcham, for she was a satirist. 2

So Deirdre grew up there, seeing no one but those three.

One winter’s day her foster-father was out on the snow, skinning a calf to roast for her. The calf’s blood lay red on the snow. A black raven came down and drank it.

Deirdre watched. Then she turned to Leborcham.

That is the only man I will love, she said: a man with those three colours. Hair as black as the raven. Cheeks as red as the blood. A body as white as the snow. 3

Leborcham did not tell her there was no such man. She told her where he was. He is near you, she said, in the fort beside you. His name is Naoise, son of Uisliu.

Then I will never be well again, said Deirdre, until I see him.

At dusk a black-haired young man sings on the rampart of a great ring-fort as a girl runs across the grass toward him.

III Two Ears of Shame

One day Naoise was alone on the rampart of Emain, singing. The sons of Uisliu had a chant of their own, and it was sweet. Any cow that heard it gave two-thirds more milk, and any man who heard it was glad. They were fighters, too. If the whole of Ulster had come against them in one place, the three brothers would only have had to set their backs together, and Ulster would not have beaten them. And they were swift: they hunted on foot and ran their quarry to its death.

Deirdre slipped out of her house and ran past him. He did not know who she was.

That’s a fine heifer going by, said Naoise.

Heifers grow big, said she, where there are no bulls.

You have the bull of the whole province, said Naoise: Conchobar, the king of Ulster.

I would take a younger bull, said she. One like you.

No, said Naoise. There is Cathbad’s prophecy, and I am afraid of it.

Deirdre sprang at him and caught him by his two ears. Two ears of shame and mockery, these, she said, unless you take me away with you.

Naoise raised his chant. All over Emain the men of Ulster heard it and started up, and his brothers, Ardán and Ainnle, came running out to him. What are you doing? they said. Don’t let it be your fault that war comes between us and the men of Ulster.

He told them what had happened.

Evil will come of this, they said. But we will go with her to another country. There is no king in Ireland who will not make us welcome.

That same night they went: three times fifty warriors, as many women, as many hounds, as many servants, and Deirdre with them.

In a mountain glen a long-haired woman tends a cooking fire as three hunters with spears come home with a deer.

IV Alba

For a long time they wandered Ireland, under the protection of one lord and then another, and Conchobar was always trying to kill them, by ambush or by treachery. They went from Assaroe by Ballyshannon in the west to Benn Étair, which is Howth, in the north-east. But in the end the men of Ulster drove them out of the land, and they crossed the sea to Alba, which is Scotland.

They lived in the wild places there. When the hunting on the mountains failed them, they took the cattle of the men of Alba, and the men of Alba gathered to wipe them out. So they went to the king of Alba, and he took them into his household to fight for him. They built their houses out on the green, apart from everyone, because of Deirdre. They were afraid that if men saw her, they would be killed for her.

Early one morning the king’s steward went round Naoise’s house, and he saw the two of them asleep. He went to the king.

There is a woman with Naoise son of Uisliu, he said, fit for the emperor of the western world. Have Naoise killed, and take her for yourself.

No, said the king. Go to her every day and woo her for me, in secret.

The steward did. And every night Deirdre told Naoise every word.

When nothing came of it, the king sent the sons of Uisliu into every war and fight and danger there was, so that they would be killed. They came through them all. So at last the men of Alba were called out to kill them.

Deirdre heard of it. Go, she told Naoise. If you are not gone tonight, you will be dead tomorrow.

That night they went, and they came to an island in the sea.

At dawn a currach of rowers crosses the swell toward an island shore where a woman and three warriors wait.

V The Guarantee of Fergus

Word of it came back to Ulster.

It is a pity, Conchobar, said the men of Ulster, that the sons of Uisliu should die in an enemy’s country because of a bad woman. Better to take them under your protection and bring them home. If they must die, let it be here, and not at the hands of strangers.

Let them come, then, said Conchobar, and let men go to them as sureties.

The word went over the sea to the island. We will come, said the sons of Uisliu. Let Fergus be our surety, and Dubthach, and Cormac, Conchobar’s own son.

So Fergus mac Róich went for them, with Dubthach and Cormac, and they came back over the sea together.

But Conchobar had his own plan. On his advice, the men of Ulster were pressing Fergus to their ale-feasts, each of them wanting him before the rest. 4 The later tellers say it was a geis on Fergus that he could never refuse a feast. The sons of Uisliu could not wait with him. They had sworn to eat no food in Ireland until they had eaten Conchobar’s.

So Fergus stayed behind, and Dubthach and Cormac with him. His son Fiachu went on with the sons of Uisliu instead, and they came to the green before Emain Macha.

At night flames run along the palisade of a great ring-fort as riders turn away into the dark.

VI The Green of Emain

Now Eogan mac Durthacht, king of Fernmag, had come to Emain at that time to make his peace with Conchobar, for they had long been at war. He was given the task, he and the king’s own soldiers: to kill the sons of Uisliu.

The sons of Uisliu stood out on the level green, and there were women sitting along the rampart above. Eogan came at them with his men, and Fergus’s son went to stand at Naoise’s side. Eogan greeted them with his spear. He drove it into Naoise, and it broke his back and went through him.

Fiachu threw both arms round Naoise and pulled him down under himself, and lay over him to shield him. They killed Naoise through the body of the son of Fergus.

Then the killing went from one end of the green to the other, and no one there escaped the spear-point or the sword’s edge. Deirdre was brought to Conchobar with her hands tied behind her back.

When Fergus and Dubthach and Cormac heard of it, they came to Emain in fury. Dubthach killed Maine, the king’s son, and with the same thrust Fiachna, son of the king’s daughter. Three hundred of the men of Ulster fell that day. Dubthach killed the women of Ulster, and before the next dawn Fergus had set Emain on fire.

Then they went west into Connacht, to Medb and Ailill. Three thousand men went into exile with them. For sixteen years after that, they never let the weeping and trembling stop in Ulster. 5

In a king's hall at night a long-haired woman sits apart by a low fire, head bowed on her knees, while musicians play.

VII A Year Without Laughter

Deirdre was a year with Conchobar. In all that year she did not smile once. She did not eat her fill or sleep her fill, and she never lifted her head from her knee.

When they brought musicians and players in to cheer her, she would answer them with a lament. Their horns and pipes might please the king, she said. The sons of Uisliu had sung sweeter.

Like sound of wave, rolled Naisi’s bass;
We’d hear him long, so sweet he sang:
And Ardan’s voice took middle place;
And clearly Aindle’s tenor rang. 6

She remembered their life in the wild: the table spread under a tree, the cooking-fire that Naoise raised, the meat of his hunting that was sweeter to her than honey. She did not sleep now, she said. She did not redden her nails. And Fergus had sold his honour for a cup of ale.

When Conchobar himself tried to soothe her, she turned on him. Conchobar, what are you doing? she said. You have given me sorrow and weeping. Do not break my heart today. I will be in my grave soon enough, and my grief is stronger than the sea. 7

On a bright morning a chariot carrying a dark-haired woman between a king and a hard-faced warrior drives along a road toward a tall grey stone.

VIII Between Two Rams

What do you hate most, of all that you see? Conchobar asked her.

You, she said. And Eogan mac Durthacht.

Then you will be a year with Eogan, said Conchobar, and he gave her into Eogan’s hand.

The next day they drove out to the assembly at Macha, and Deirdre rode behind Eogan in the chariot. The two men with her were the two she would never willingly have seen together on the earth. Conchobar was watching her.

Deirdre, he said, that is the look of a ewe between two rams, that you are giving me and Eogan.

There was a great boulder of stone ahead of them. Deirdre drove her head against the stone. She broke her head on it, and she was dead.

That is the exile of the sons of Uisliu, and the exile of Fergus, and the death of Deirdre. 8

Snow falls at dusk over empty hills, with a bare thorn tree and a single raven flying low.

What the tale keeps

A raven, a calf’s blood, a fall of snow. Out of the three colours of one winter’s day, a girl who had been kept from the world chose her own life, and she never went back on the choice.

Around her, the pledges break one by one. A king’s guarantee is worth nothing, a hero’s word is lost at an ale-feast, and a province pays in fire and sixteen years of weeping. Deirdre does not break. No music reached her, no food, no king’s comfort. The oldest telling does not even lay her in a grave beside Naoise. Later tellers could not leave her like that, and gave her one. The old book gives her something harder: her grief, whole, and her own to the end.

Notes

  1. The Book of Leinster opens with the question “Cid dia mboí longes mac nUsnig?”: what caused the exile of the sons of Uisnech? The same text also calls them maic Uislenn, “sons of Uisliu”. Later Irish has Uisneach, and older English books Usnach or Usna. ↩
  2. The Irish says no one could keep her out, “ar ba ban-cháinte”: for she was a woman-satirist, and a satirist’s verses could shame. Leahy’s English (1905) calls her “a witch”. ↩
  3. In A. H. Leahy’s translation (1905): “that man only will I love, who hath the three colours that I see here, his hair as black as the raven, his cheeks red like the blood, and his body as white as the snow.” ↩
  4. The Book of Leinster says only that “at the contrivance of Conor, Fergus was pressed to join in an ale-feast” (Leahy, 1905). The later telling names the host, Borrach, and gives the reason: “one of his prohibitions is to refuse a feast” (Eleanor Hull, The Cuchullin Saga, 1898). The Irish for such a prohibition is geis. ↩
  5. The Longes is one of the remscéla, the “fore-tales” of the Táin Bó Cúailnge. It explains why Fergus and three thousand Ulster exiles are in Connacht, marching with Medb, when the great cattle raid begins. ↩
  6. From Deirdre’s lament in A. H. Leahy’s verse translation, Heroic Romances of Ireland (1905). Naisi and Aindle are his spellings of Naoise and Ainnle. ↩
  7. The Irish has “Is tressiu cuma in-dá muir”: grief is stronger than the sea. In verse: “My grief is stronger than the strength of sea” (A. H. Leahy, Heroic Romances of Ireland, 1905). ↩
  8. The last line of the Book of Leinster text, in Leahy’s translation (1905): “This then is the tale of the exile of the sons of Usnach, and of the Exile of Fergus, and of the death of Deirdre.” ↩

Where the tale comes from

Medieval manuscript. Old Irish prose and verse, probably of the 8th or 9th century. The oldest copy is in the Book of Leinster, written in the 12th century.

  • The oldest telling, Longes mac nUislenn, is Old Irish prose and verse, probably of the 8th or 9th century. It survives in the Book of Leinster, written in the later 12th century, in the Yellow Book of Lecan, from about 1400, and in later copies. Like nearly all these tales, it was set down by Christian scholars centuries after the conversion.
  • The Early Modern Irish telling, Oidheadh Chloinne hUisneach, “the Fate of the Children of Uisneach”, was composed in the 14th or 15th century. It adds the brothers’ home by Loch Etive; Deirdre’s farewell to Alba (“A lovable land is yon eastern land, / Alba, with its marvels”); Borrach’s feast; and Maine Red-hand, son of the king of Norway, who takes the three brothers’ heads with a single stroke (Eleanor Hull, The Cuchullin Saga, 1898).
  • In that telling Deirdre does not live out the year. She laments over the grave of the three brothers and dies in it: “Deirdre flung herself upon Naisi in the tomb and gave three kisses to Naisi, and died forthwith.” (Eleanor Hull, 1898)
  • The later telling is counted among the “Three Sorrows of Storytelling”, with the Fate of the Children of Lir and the Fate of the Children of Tuireann. Whitley Stokes edited it from the Glenn Masáin manuscript in 1887.
  • Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902) follows the later telling and ends differently again: Deirdre laments at the grave, then goes down to the strand and drives a knife into her side.
  • Later writers made her famous again: Samuel Ferguson’s poem “Deirdre’s Lament for the Sons of Usnach”, W. B. Yeats’s play Deirdre (Abbey Theatre, 1906), and J. M. Synge’s Deirdre of the Sorrows (1910).

Sources

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