Bodb Derg

Also Known As: also Bodb Dearg, Bodhbh Dearg, Bodb of the Mound on Femen; Irish *derg*, “red”, the first element possibly cognate with *badb*, the scald-crow, giving something like “Red Crow”
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Irish Mythology, Celtic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He carries a druid’s wand and a reputation for finding out what nobody else can, and his judgements on the other gods hold.
Role in Mythos: Elected king of the Tuatha Dé Danann after their defeat, he governs the sídhe from his mound at Slievenamon.
Relation to Humans: Mortals rarely deal with him directly, since his court is the hollow hill and his subjects are the gods who withdrew into it. What reaches the human world instead are the consequences of his rulings, above all the quarrel between two of his herdsmen that ended in the war of the Táin.

The swans came in on chains of silver, a hundred and fifty of them, and the man who had spent a year of his life looking for one particular bird picked her out at once by the gold at her throat. Bodb Derg had ridden the length of Ireland for that sighting. He had asked at every mound and every lake shore, and when word finally went back to Brug na Bóinne it was not a guess. It was a name, a lake, and a date.

That is the shape of him in the oldest telling. Not a thunder god. Not a warrior with a famous spear. A king who finds things out.

Bodb Derg is the son of the Dagda, though the pedigrees wobble: one line makes him a son of Eochaid Garb instead, and a few make him the Dagda’s brother rather than his child. The byname is plain enough. *Derg* is red. The first element is the awkward one, since it may share a root with *badb*, the scald-crow that settles on Irish battlefields, which would put a carrion bird in the middle of an otherwise unbloody career. Nobody has settled the question. The name sits there like a bruise on a diplomat.

His kingship begins in defeat. After the Tuatha Dé Danann lose at Tailtiu and the old gods go down into the hollow hills to become the people of the sídhe, they need someone to rule the new arrangement, and they elect him. The reason given is dynastic and slightly deflating: he is the Dagda’s eldest son. Every rival accepts it except Lir, who believed the crown should have come to him and who simply stays away. Bodb’s followers want to march on him. Bodb tells them to leave it alone, and then does something cannier than a punitive raid. He offers Lir one of his own foster-daughters in marriage, and when she dies he offers a second. Peace bought with women, in the manner of the age.

The second offer is where it goes wrong. That daughter is Aoife, and Aoife grows to hate the four children her sister left behind. She takes them to a lake on the road to Bodb’s own house, drives them into the water, and strikes them into swans for nine hundred years. When Bodb learns what she has done he asks her what shape in all the world she would least like to wear. She tells him: a demon of the air. He raises the wand and gives her exactly that, and she goes up out of the story on wings she never wanted, screaming. The children stay swans. His justice is precise and it fixes nothing.

The wand is the recurring instrument. He is a king of the síde in a tradition where that means druidic knowledge as much as territory, and his household reflects it. His smith is Lén Línfíaclach, who worked at the lake in Killarney that still carries the smith’s name, and whose forge threw rainbows over the water at nightfall. His own residence is disputed in a way that has made some readers suspect two different men wearing one name. Sídh ar Femen, the mound on the slope of Slievenamon in Tipperary, is the usual answer. Another tradition puts him near Killaloe on the west bank of the Shannon. In the Fenian material he turns up at Brug na Bóinne altogether, a handsome young man with long fair hair and a two-forked brown beard, which is as close to a portrait as the sources ever give him.

For all the wand-work, the most consequential thing in his court happened at the bottom of the hierarchy. Bodb kept a swineherd named Friuch. Ochall Ochne, his opposite number among the síde of Connacht, kept one named Rucht. The two men had the shape-changing craft their masters employed them for, and they fell out over whose was stronger, and they spent an extraordinary stretch of time proving it. They fought as ravens. They fought as sea beasts, as stags, as warriors, as phantoms, as water-worms. In the end each worm was swallowed by a cow drinking at a river, and each was born again as a bull: Donn Cúailnge in Ulster and Finnbennach in Connacht. Medb of Connacht went to war over the brown one. That is the Táin, the largest story in Irish literature, and it starts as a workplace dispute in Bodb Derg’s piggery.

Bodb’s own great success is quieter and comes in the Dream of Aengus. His half-brother Óengus has been sickening for a year over a woman he has only seen while asleep, and the Dagda and Boann cannot find her. They send to Bodb, king of the síde of Munster, because if she is in Ireland Bodb will locate her. It takes him a year. He comes back with the whole answer: she is Caer Ibormeith, daughter of Ethal Anbúail of Síd Uamain in Connacht, and at the coming Samain she will be at Loch Bél Dracon in the form of a bird among a hundred and fifty others, all of them yoked in silver, and she alone wearing gold.

That is the range of his powers. He sees where others cannot, he transforms with a touch of the rod, he holds the confidence of a defeated people, and later tradition gives him a daughter, Sadb, whom the Dark Druid turned into a deer and who bore the poet Oisín to Finn mac Cumhal. The limits are just as clear. His crown is elective, which means it can be withheld, and Lir withholds it. His transformations punish but never restore. He can name Caer Ibormeith and find the lake she will be swimming on, and he still cannot fetch her; Óengus has to go himself and become a swan to do it. Bodb Derg is the god you send for when you need to know something. What happens after you know is somebody else’s problem.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Bodb Derg in Irish mythology?

Bodb Derg is a son of the Dagda and the elected king of the Tuatha Dé Danann, chosen after their defeat at Tailtiu when the old gods withdrew into the sídhe. He rules from the mound at Slievenamon in Tipperary, though other traditions place his residence near Killaloe on the Shannon. His name means roughly “Bodb the Red”.

Why did Bodb Derg turn Aoife into a demon of the air?

Aoife was Bodb Derg’s foster-daughter, married to Lir to keep the peace, and she transformed her four stepchildren into swans for nine hundred years out of jealousy. When Bodb Derg discovered it, he asked her what form she would least like to take, and she answered a demon of the air. He struck her with his druid’s wand and gave her that shape permanently. He could punish her but he could not undo the spell on the children.

What did Bodb Derg do in the Dream of Aengus?

In *Aislinge Óenguso*, Óengus falls ill with love for a woman he has only seen in dreams, and the Dagda and Boann ask Bodb Derg to find her. He searches Ireland for a year and identifies her as Caer Ibormeith, daughter of Ethal Anbúail, who would be at Loch Bél Dracon at Samain in the form of a swan among a hundred and fifty birds, distinguished by a gold chain rather than silver.

How is Bodb Derg connected to the Táin Bó Cuailnge?

Bodb Derg’s swineherd Friuch quarrelled with Rucht, the swineherd of Ochall Ochne of the Connacht síde, and the two fought through a long series of animal shapes before being swallowed by cows and reborn as the bulls Donn Cúailnge and Finnbennach. Medb of Connacht went to war to take the brown bull, which is the cattle raid at the centre of the Ulster Cycle. The dispute began among Bodb Derg’s own herdsmen.

Was Bodb Derg the father of Sadb?

Later Fenian tradition names Sadb as a daughter of Bodb Derg, though other versions give her a different father. She refused the Dark Druid, Fer Doirich, who turned her into a deer, and in that form she bore the poet Oisín to Finn mac Cumhal. The link ties the Tuatha Dé Danann directly to the ancestry of the Fianna.