Ailill mac Máta

Two people lie awake in the dark at Cruachan, matching their wealth object for object, and neither can find where they differ. Ailill mac Máta and his wife Medb had played this game before, half provocation and half genuine curiosity, and by the time the tally reaches the livestock it has stopped being a game. Every cauldron Medb names, Ailill has one to match, their weight and worth counted out piece by piece while the household cattle low somewhere beyond the firelight. Every gold ring, every bronze vessel, every herd of sheep and drove of swine, they run even. Then a bull steps into it: Finnbennach, the great white-horned bull, born into Medb’s own herd and grown too proud to be led by a woman, had walked out of her byre years before and taken his place among Ailill’s cows instead. Nothing she owns can answer that animal. The text says it plainly: it was to Medb as if she owned not a penny, since she had not a bull as great as that among her kine. Ailill did not gloat about it, or so the story insists, but a king cannot be modest about the one possession that makes his wife feel poor, and Medb spent what was left of that night working out where in Ireland a bull to match Finnbennach might still be found.

That is the version most people meet him in, and it suits him, because Ailill’s whole career runs on the fact that he is almost, but not quite, Medb’s equal. Two different genealogies argue about how he got there. One strand of the Táin’s own tradition makes him the son of Rus Ruad, king of the Laigin, and names his mother as Máta Muirisc, daughter of Mága of the Connacht Fir Ol nEchmacht, from whom, tellingly, he takes his name rather than from his father. Another telling, Cath Bóinde, gives him a different father entirely, Mata mac Sraibgend of the Érainn, killed alongside his own father at the Boyne, and has the orphaned young Ailill arrive at Cruachan to be fostered, where Medb comes to love him and takes him as her lover in place of her previous husband, Eochaid Dála. In that telling the succession is settled by combat rather than birth: Eochaid Dála challenges him for the kingship and for Medb, and Ailill kills him in the fight. Both accounts cannot be literally true at once, and nothing in the surviving record adjudicates between them. What both agree on is the shape of the outcome: a man who arrives from outside Connacht’s old bloodline and ends up ruling it, married to the woman who is the kingship’s living embodiment, on terms she largely sets.

Medb is said to have chosen him for one quality above his birth or his fighting: he was, of everyone who wanted her, without meanness, without jealousy, and without fear. It is an odd boast to make about a husband, and Ailill spent much of his marriage testing whether it held. He tolerated her lovers, Fergus mac Róich foremost among them, with a patience that reads either as wisdom or as something closer to exhaustion. Then one night, out hunting, he came upon Medb and Fergus together at the edge of a lake, the water black and cold under a low moon, and the patience ran out. He did not confront them himself. He turned to his blind brother, Lugaid Dalléces, told him where to aim, and had him throw a spear into the dark. Fergus died for it. Even after that Ailill’s restraint held in its own way: when his charioteer Cuillius crept up on Medb and Fergus a second time and came back with Fergus’s own sword as proof, Ailill weighed the blade in his hand, decided his wife had only been keeping her general loyal for the war ahead, and forgave her. He carried that sword through the whole campaign and pressed it back into her hands himself before the last battle. He said nothing else about it.

The war he is best remembered for started as an argument and grew into an invasion. To match Finnbennach, Medb needed Donn Cúailnge, the Brown Bull of Cooley, and the army Ailill led into Ulster to take it is the spine of the Táin Bó Cúailnge, the longest surviving tale of the Ulster Cycle. He and Medb offered their daughter Findabair in marriage to any champion who would meet the boy Cú Chulainn at the river fords and clear the road north, and one after another those champions went down to the water and did not come back. The bulls the whole war was fought over both died in the end, locked together and goring each other the length of Ireland until Donn Cúailnge killed Finnbennach and then, carrying pieces of him scattered on its horns, died of its own wounds on the road home. Nobody in the story got to keep the thing they went to war for.

No source troubles to describe what Ailill actually looked like. He moves through the whole cycle as a voice and a series of decisions: not a face, not a build, not a single scar. That silence is worth sitting with rather than filling in, because it says something about what the storytellers thought mattered in him, which was judgment and restraint under provocation, not the shape of his shoulders or the color of his hair.

Old age brought him no peace. The Ulster champion Conall Cernach came to lodge with Ailill and Medb late in his life, drawn as much by their table’s ability to satisfy his famous appetite as by any old alliance between their houses. While he was there, Medb learned that Ailill had taken another woman, and her response was immediate: she asked Conall to kill her husband, and Conall, who had never forgiven him for Fergus’s death, agreed without much persuading. Ailill was killed on the first of May, on Bealtaine, which fell that year on a Tuesday, a detail some scribe thought worth keeping amid everything else that got lost along the way. His own people did not let it go unanswered. They hunted Conall down and killed him at a ford in what is now County Cavan, closing a debt that had stood open since the night by the lake. Medb, who had a hand in both killings at either end of the story, simply outlived them.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ailill mac Máta?

Ailill mac Máta is the king of Connacht in Irish mythology and the husband of Queen Medb. He rules from Cruachan (Rathcroghan) in what is now County Roscommon, and his marriage to Medb, together with their rivalry over which of them owns more, drives the central conflict of the Táin Bó Cúailnge, the longest tale of the Ulster Cycle.

What started the Táin Bó Cúailnge, the war Ailill and Medb fought?

Ailill and Medb compared their wealth item by item one night and came up equal except for one bull, Finnbennach, which had left Medb’s herd for Ailill’s because it refused to be owned by a woman. To match him, Medb needed Donn Cúailnge, the Brown Bull of Cooley, so Ailill led an army into Ulster to seize it, an invasion that became the Táin Bó Cúailnge.

Why did Ailill have Fergus mac Róich killed?

Ailill tolerated Medb’s affair with the exiled Ulster warrior Fergus mac Róich for a long time, but his patience broke after he found the two of them together at a lake. Rather than confront them himself, he directed his blind brother, Lugaid Dalléces, to throw a spear at Fergus in the dark, killing him.

How did Ailill mac Máta die?

Ailill was killed by the Ulster hero Conall Cernach, who was lodging with Ailill and Medb in his old age. When Medb discovered Ailill had taken another woman, she asked Conall, who had never forgiven Ailill for Fergus’s death, to kill him, and Ailill was killed on the first of May.

Was Ailill really without jealousy, as Medb said when she chose him?

Medb reportedly chose Ailill as her husband specifically because he was without meanness, jealousy, or fear, and for years he tolerated her other relationships, including with Fergus mac Róich. That reputation held only up to a point: when he caught Medb and Fergus together at a lake, his restraint ended and he arranged Fergus’s killing.

Related Entries

Medb, Cú Chulainn, Donn Cúailnge (The Brown Bull of Cooley), Fer Díad