Boann

Also Known As: Old Irish Bóand, Bóinn; glossed in the Dindshenchas as bó find, “white cow”; recorded by Ptolemy in the second century as Bouvinda, from Proto-Celtic *Bou-vindā
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Irish Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: She holds the waters of the River Boyne and the wisdom that the well at its source pours into them.
Role in Mythos: She breaks the prohibition on Nechtan’s well and is destroyed by the flood that becomes Ireland’s most storied river.
Relation to Humans: Mortals meet her as the river itself, fished, forded and farmed along its whole length from Meath to the sea. In Táin Bó Fraích she also steps out of the water to arm and enrich a mortal nephew, handing over horses, spears and hounds that make him look like something out of the Otherworld, which he half is.

The well sat inside a mound in Meath, and it had a rule. Look into it and both eyes burst in your head. Step wrong at its edge, left or right, and you would not walk away unmarked. Nine hazels leaned over the water and dropped their nuts into it, and the salmon below ate them and went speckled with the knowledge that came off the shells. Three men were permitted to draw from it, cup-bearers named Flesc, Lam and Luam, and the poem that preserves their names says nothing else about them ever again. Everyone else in Ireland was kept back, including the woman who lived there.

Boann went anyway. She was not thirsty. She wanted to see whether the thing was as strong as her husband said.

Her husband was Nechtan, son of Labraid, and the mound was his: Síd Nechtain, a green swelling of ground with a spring underneath it and no river running out yet. Other tellings marry her instead to Elcmar and call her Eithne, and the Irish material has never much minded holding two answers at once. What the genealogies agree on is her stock. She was a daughter of Delbáeth, son of Elada, one of the Tuatha Dé Danann, and sister to Befind. Her name meant white cow, or came from the joining of a stream off Sliab Guaire with the water of the mound, depending on which stanza you trust. Long before any monk wrote either version down, Ptolemy’s geography of the second century listed a river in Ireland called Bouvinda. The name is older than the story that explains it.

There is no description of her body in the sources, and the absence sits oddly in a tradition that will tell you the exact number of jewels on a spear. She is white. She is soft-blooming. She has, the poem notes on its way past, noble pride, which is the only interior thing anyone records about her. Everything else physical arrives in the moment of its removal, and by then it is a list of injuries rather than a portrait.

Before the well there was the other transgression, the one that produced a god. The Dagda wanted her, and she wanted him, and Elcmar was in the way. So the Dagda sent him off on an errand meant to take a single day and then leaned on the sky. He held the sun still. Nine months passed inside that stalled afternoon while the light did not move, and Boann bore a son and had him fostered out before her husband came home to a day that had never ended. The child was Aengus, and the Dindshenchas explains his name as one desire, because the Dagda had been hers. Modern readers have pointed out that the Boyne valley contains Newgrange, whose passage fills with light at midwinter, and that the Irish for solstice, grianstad, means sun-standstill. Robert Hensey and others have argued the tale encodes that alignment. It is a good reading and a recent one, offered by archaeologists rather than by anyone medieval, and the poems themselves make no such claim.

Then she walked to the well. Three times around it, and the wrong way, tuathal, against the turn of the sun. On the third circuit the water came up at her in three waves. They did not strike at random. One went for her foot, one for her eye, and the third broke her hand, and the poem says flatly that they disfigured the soft-blooming woman. She ran for the sea, wanting salt water to close over the damage before anyone could look at her, and the cold white water came after her the whole way, out of the mound and across Meath and down to the coast, and did not stop. That is the river. The Boyne is a goddess running from the sight of herself.

Her lapdog ran with her. Dabilla went into the sea current and was carried against the crags and broken in half, and the two pieces stand east of Breg as stones in the water, called Cnoc Dabilla after him. The detail is unnecessary and it is the reason the poem hurts.

A second version tells it differently and no better. In that one she goes to the well to wash the Dagda off her, to sluice away an infidelity, and the water rises and takes her before she can finish. Either way she drowns. Either way the water is not punishing her so much as behaving exactly as advertised.

What she does afterwards is become enormous. The Dindshenchas gives the river fifteen names along its length, and reciting them is a way of walking Ireland. She is Segais in the mound and River of Segais as far as Mochua’s pool. Between there and the edge of Meath she is the Arm of Nuadu’s Wife and her Leg, the two lost limbs laid out as geography. Across the plain she is the Great Silver Yoke and the White Marrow of Fedlimid. Then Stormy Wave, then River of the White Hazel through Cúailnge, then Banna out of Lough Neagh, then Roof of the Ocean, then Lunnand or Torrand in Scotland. The poet does not stop at the coast. She is the Severn among the Saxons, the Tiber in Rome, the Jordan, the Euphrates, and the Tigris in paradise, and then she turns and comes back to the little mound in Meath where she started. A woman went into the water and every river on the map came out.

The one gift she gives without cost is to a mortal. In Táin Bó Fraích her nephew Fráech needs to arrive at Cruachan looking like a god, and she opens the sídhe for him: fifty worked mantles, fifty spears that light a room at night, fifty dark horses with gold bells at the bridle, seven hounds on silver chains, harpists and trumpeters and jesters. Medb and Ailill do not know where to put their eyes. It is the only scene in which Boann simply hands something over and nothing is taken back.

Her power is the water and the knowledge dissolved in it, imbas, wisdom that comes off nine hazels and through the flesh of a salmon and into anyone who drinks at the right place. She made the channel that carries it out of the mound and into the country, which is a larger act than anything the well’s rightful keepers ever managed with their three cups. Her limit is the same water. It does not distinguish between a queen of the Tuatha Dé and a curious stranger, it answers trespass the way a lock answers a wrong key, and it cannot be outrun by the person who released it. The poem is blunt about where the fault lies and refuses to make her a victim: on herself fell her reproach. She took the risk, she was maimed for it, and Ireland got a river out of the bargain.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Boann in Irish mythology?

Boann is the Irish goddess of the River Boyne, a member of the Tuatha Dé Danann and a daughter of Delbáeth son of Elada. She is the wife of Nechtan, keeper of the forbidden well at Síd Nechtain, and the mother of Aengus by the Dagda. Her name is glossed in the Dindshenchas as “white cow”.

How did Boann create the River Boyne?

Boann walked three times around Nechtan’s forbidden well in the wrong direction, counter-sunwise, to test its power. Three waves burst out of it and struck her foot, her eye and her hand, and she fled toward the sea with the water pursuing her the entire way. That pursuing water became the Boyne.

How did Boann die?

She drowned. The Dindshenchas gives two accounts: in one she is maimed by the three waves and swept to the sea as she runs from the sight of her own injuries, and in the other she goes to the well to wash away her affair with the Dagda and the water overwhelms her before she finishes.

Why is Boann the mother of Aengus?

Boann conceived Aengus with the Dagda while her husband was sent away on a one-day errand. The Dagda held the sun still so that nine months passed within what seemed a single day, and the child was born and fostered out before the husband returned. The Dindshenchas reads the name Aengus as “one desire”, because the Dagda was hers.

What is the Well of Segais?

The Well of Segais, also called Connla’s Well, is the source of the Boyne inside Síd Nechtain, ringed by nine hazels whose nuts fall into the water and are eaten by speckled salmon. Only Nechtan and his three cup-bearers, Flesc, Lam and Luam, were permitted to approach it. Anyone else who looked into it lost their eyes.