The Cattle Raid of Cooley

At a Glance

Central figures: Cú Chulainn, the seventeen-year-old champion of Ulster; Queen Medb of Connacht and her husband Ailill; the brown bull Donn Cúailnge and the white-horned bull Finnbennach.
Setting: Iron Age Ireland, primarily the borderlands between Connacht and Ulster, with the ford-crossings of the River Dee in what is now County Louth.
The turn: Medb raises an army from four provinces to seize the brown bull of Cooley, and a curse leaves every fighting man of Ulster unable to rise from his bed - except Cú Chulainn.
The outcome: Cú Chulainn holds the army at the fords through weeks of single combat, buying time until the Ulstermen recover; the bulls finally meet and destroy each other.
The legacy: The Táin Bó Cúailnge survives as the central epic of the Ulster Cycle, the oldest vernacular epic in Western European literature, preserved in manuscripts from the twelfth century but composed centuries earlier.

It started with a conversation in bed. Medb and Ailill lay together one night in Cruachan and began to count their wealth against each other - herds, gold, land, cloth. Item for item they matched, until Ailill named the white-horned bull Finnbennach. That bull had been born into Medb’s herds but had walked away to Ailill’s side, because it would not be owned by a woman. Medb had no answer for it. She had nothing to equal that bull.

By morning she knew where to find one. In the territory of Cooley in Ulster, there was a brown bull called the Donn Cúailnge, the finest animal in Ireland. She sent messengers north to borrow it for a year. The men of Cooley agreed - until the messengers got drunk and boasted that if the bull had not been given freely, Medb would have taken it by force. The deal collapsed in a single night.

The Curse of Macha

Medb called her allies. Connacht marched, and with it came warriors from Leinster, Munster, and Meath - the whole weight of Ireland outside Ulster. What should have stopped them was the army of Conchobar mac Nessa, the greatest fighting force in the island. But the Ulstermen could not rise.

Years before, a woman named Macha - pregnant, forced to race against the king’s horses - had cursed the men of Ulster. In their hour of greatest need, the pangs of a woman in labor would strike them all, and they would lie helpless for five days and four nights. The curse held. When Medb’s army crossed the Shannon and turned north, every warrior of the Red Branch lay groaning on his bed, arms useless, legs folded beneath him.

Every warrior except one. Cú Chulainn had been born outside the terms of the curse. He was seventeen years old.

The Boy at the Ford

He went out alone, with his charioteer Láeg, and began killing. Not in open battle - he could not face an army - but by invoking the old law of single combat at the fords. Any army that wished to cross running water could be challenged by a lone champion, and honor required that the army send one man to answer.

Medb sent man after man. Cú Chulainn killed them at the water’s edge, day after day, standing knee-deep in the current with his sword or his sling or the barbed spear called the gáe bolga that entered the body as one point and opened into thirty. Some days he killed three or four before noon. Some days a single fight lasted from dawn to dark. His arms were cut to the bone and Láeg bound them with grass and strips of cloth so he could grip the weapons again the next morning.

Medb kept the army moving when she could, sending raiding parties around the fords by night, but Cú Chulainn rode after them and left their heads on stakes along the road. The army’s advance slowed to a crawl. Snow came. The Connacht men sat in their camps and listened to the sounds that carried across the water.

Ferdia

Then Medb did the one thing that could break him. She sent Ferdia to the ford.

Ferdia was Cú Chulainn’s foster-brother. They had trained together under Scáthach in Alba, slept under the same cloak, learned the same killing strokes. They loved each other the way men love who have bled together young. Medb plied Ferdia with wine and promises and the hand of her daughter Finnabair until he agreed.

They fought for three days. Each evening they sent food and medicine across the ford to each other. Each morning they took up weapons again. On the third day Cú Chulainn, broken and bleeding, called for the gáe bolga. Láeg floated it downstream to him under the surface. Cú Chulainn caught it with his foot and drove it upward into Ferdia’s body.

Ferdia fell in the water. Cú Chulainn waded to him and carried him to the Ulster side of the ford so he would not die among enemies. He held him there and spoke over him. The words the manuscripts record are a lament - not a boast but a grief. He called Ferdia his pillar, his half in battle, the man whose shield had covered him. Then he collapsed beside the body and did not move for a day.

The Ulstermen Rise

The curse broke. Conchobar mac Nessa stood up from his bed, and behind him every warrior of the Red Branch rose and reached for weapons. They came south in force - Fergus mac Roich among them, fighting on Medb’s side out of exile but pulling his blows against his own people. The final battle was vast and ugly and Medb’s army broke.

But Medb had already gotten what she wanted. While the fighting raged, her people had driven the Donn Cúailnge south into Connacht.

The Two Bulls

The brown bull smelled the white-horned Finnbennach across the plains and went to find him. They met and fought through the night, tearing across Ireland from one province to the next - the ground shaking, the herds scattering. By morning the Donn Cúailnge walked back toward Ulster carrying pieces of Finnbennach on his horns - a shoulder-blade at Áth Luain, a rib at a hill in Meath, the liver in another place. The landmarks took their names from the body parts left there.

The brown bull reached the border of Cooley. His great heart burst inside his chest. He fell where he stood, and his blood ran into the ground.

Medb went home to Cruachan. The wealth was even again. Neither she nor Ailill had a bull worth naming.