Children of Lir
At a Glance
- Central figures: Lir, a chief of the Tuatha Dé Danann; his four children - Fionnuala, Aodh, Fiachra, and Conn; and their stepmother Aoife, who cursed them.
- Setting: Ireland, in the age after the Tuatha Dé Danann withdrew into the sídhe; the lakes and seas of Lough Derravaragh, the Straits of Moyle, and Inis Glora off the western coast.
- The turn: Aoife, consumed by jealousy of Lir’s love for his children, struck them with a wand of the sídhe and turned them into four white swans, bound to the waters for nine hundred years.
- The outcome: The children endured three centuries on each of three waters, and when the spell broke at last, they were ancient and withered and died almost at once.
- The legacy: The children were baptized before they died, and their grave was raised on Inis Glora. The story entered Irish tradition as one of the Three Sorrows of Storytelling - Trí Truaighe na Scéalaíochta.
Lir had four children, and he loved nothing else as much. Fionnuala was the eldest, then Aodh, then the twins Fiachra and Conn. Their mother - Lir’s first wife, daughter of Bodb Derg, king of the Tuatha Dé Danann - had died bearing the twins, and the house at Sídh Fionnachaidh had gone quiet in a way that four small children could not fill.
Bodb Derg, seeing his daughter’s husband in grief, offered another daughter. Her name was Aoife. She came to Lir’s hall and for a time she was good to the children, and Lir was glad. But the gladness was the problem. He spent every hour with them. He slept with the four of them around him. When visitors came to the hall, it was the children he showed them, and Aoife stood to one side of the room.
The Wand at the Lake
Aoife took the children out one morning toward Lough Derravaragh. She had considered killing them on the road but could not do it. Instead, when they reached the lake and the children ran in to bathe, she raised a wand - a rod of druidry - and struck each of them once. The water closed over four children and four white swans broke the surface.
Fionnuala’s voice came from one of them. She asked Aoife to undo it.
Aoife could not. Or would not. She told them the terms of the curse: three hundred years on Lough Derravaragh, three hundred years on the Straits of Moyle between Ireland and Alba, three hundred years on Inis Glora in the western sea. Nine hundred years. The spell would hold until a woman from the south married a man from the north - and until the bell of a new god rang across Ireland.
Then Aoife went home and told Lir the children had drowned.
Lir at the Water’s Edge
Lir ran to Lough Derravaragh and found four swans singing in voices he knew. He stood in the shallows calling their names. Fionnuala answered. She told him everything.
Lir went to Bodb Derg. The king struck Aoife with his own power and turned her into a demon of the air - a sharp wind that would howl forever and belong to nothing. Then Bodb Derg and all the Tuatha Dé Danann came to the lake and camped along the shore, and the swans sang to them. The music of the children of Lir was the most beautiful sound in Ireland. Anyone who heard it slept peacefully, and those who were sick forgot their pain. The Tuatha Dé Danann stayed at Lough Derravaragh as long as they could, but three hundred years is a fixed thing.
The Straits of Moyle
When the time came, the swans flew north to the Straits of Moyle - the cold channel between Ireland and Scotland, open to Atlantic storms. There were no Tuatha Dé Danann camped on those rocks. There was no audience for the singing. The water froze around them in winter, and the four were separated by storms and had to find each other again on a rock called Carraig na Ron, the Rock of the Seals.
Fionnuala gathered the younger three beneath her wings on the worst nights. Aodh sheltered under her right wing, Conn under her left, Fiachra against her breast. She could not keep them warm. She could keep them together.
Three hundred years on the Straits of Moyle. Then west.
Inis Glora
The third water was Inis Glora, a small island off the coast of Erris. The swans settled there and the centuries turned. Ireland changed beneath them. The Tuatha Dé Danann withdrew further into the hills. New people came. The old names were forgotten or half-remembered.
One morning a sound crossed the water that none of them had heard before - a bell, thin and clear, ringing from a stone chapel on the shore. A holy man lived there. His name was Mochaomhóg.
Fionnuala heard the bell and knew. She told her brothers the end was near.
Mochaomhóg’s Chapel
Mochaomhóg found the swans and understood what they were. He made a thin silver chain and linked the four of them together so they would not be separated again - a kindness, not a binding. He brought them into his chapel. He told them about the new faith.
Then a king of Connacht - Lairgnen - came to the island with his new wife, a woman from Munster. A woman from the south married to a man from the north. Lairgnen heard about the miraculous swans and demanded them. Mochaomhóg refused. Lairgnen seized the chain and dragged the swans from the chapel.
The feathers fell away. Four swans became four people - but not children. They were nine hundred years old. Fionnuala’s hair was white as the feathers she had lost. Aodh could not stand. The twins were shriveled and small, their skin transparent over the bone.
Lairgnen let go of the chain and backed away.
Fionnuala asked Mochaomhóg to baptize them. He did, quickly, because they were dying as he watched. She asked him to bury them together the way she had held them on the Straits of Moyle - Aodh at her right, Conn at her left, Fiachra against her breast.
The Grave on Inis Glora
Mochaomhóg buried them that way. He raised a stone and carved their names in ogham. The story passed into the keeping of the filí, who named it among the Three Sorrows - beside the tale of Deirdre and the sons of Uisneach, and the tale of the sons of Tuireann.
The bell still rang from the chapel. The chain lay on the altar. On the island there was a grave with four names, and the sea around it was very quiet.