Lia Fáil

Also Known As: the Stone of Fál; Old Irish Lie Fáil, Middle Irish Lía Fáil; called simply Fál in the oldest sources and in Lebor Gabála Érenn the Fál Mór, the Great Fál
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Irish Mythology, Celtic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Objects
Mythical Attributes: It cries out beneath the man the sovereignty of Tara will accept as king, and stays silent beneath everyone else.
Role in Mythos: It is the test that turns a claimant into a king of Tara, and the object from which Ireland takes the old name Inis Fáil.
Relation to Humans: Kings and would-be kings come to it, stand on it or drive a chariot past it, and wait to hear whether it will speak for them. It also answers women who step on it, and the sources say it once refused a hero of Ulster and never fully recovered its voice.

Before sunrise Conn of the Hundred Battles walked the royal rampart at Tara with his three druids and his three poets, as he did every morning, watching for the men of the síde in case they took Ireland while nobody was looking. His foot came down on a stone he had not noticed. It screamed. The noise went out over the whole of Tara and across the plain of Brega, and his druids could not tell him for fifty three days what it meant.

When they finally could, the answer turned out to be arithmetic. The stone’s name was Fál. It had come from Inis Fáil and it would rest in the land of Tailtiu until Doomsday. And the number of cries it had given under his foot that morning was the number of kings who would come of his blood.

That is the Lia Fáil at its most famous, in the vision tale Baile in Scáil, and almost everything about it is contested except the noise.

Start with the shape, because the thing standing at Tara today is probably not the thing the texts describe. On the mound called the Forradh there is a white granite pillar taller than a man, weathered smooth, unmistakably phallic in outline, and photographed more than any other stone in Ireland. George Petrie argued in 1839 that this pillar was the Lia Fáil, carried across from the Mound of the Hostages. Patrick Weston Joyce, writing in 1911, had spoken fifty years earlier with one of the men who set it up around 1821, and was told it had come out of the trench at the bottom of the Forradh itself, where it had been lying flat for generations. Joyce then did the measuring Petrie had not. Gaelic inauguration stones were small and portable, he pointed out, like the flag under the coronation chair at Westminster, twenty five inches by fifteen by nine. The Tara pillar is twelve feet long and nearly two feet through, and weighs well over a ton. Nobody stands on that to be made a king.

The medieval texts side with him. The prose Dindshenchas places Fál beside the Mound of the Hostages on the north. A gloss attached to the name in both Baile in Scáil and the Dindshenchas reads it as fo-ail, a stone under a king, which describes something you tread on rather than something you look up at, and both Ó Broin and John Carey have taken the original for a flagstone low enough to step on and to drive a chariot over. Thomas Westropp collected a local account of a stone near the mound with rounded ends and about six feet long, plainly made to lie down, which had been stood on end over the graves of the men killed at Tara in 1798 and which fell some years afterwards and showed what it really was.

The phallic reading has outlived all of this, and it rests on less than it appears to. It goes back to Lucius Gwynn, who in 1912 translated the phrase ferp cluche as a stone penis, taking the first word from Latin uerpa, and who cited Petrie in support. What Petrie actually recorded was a popular name attached to the mound, Bod Fhearghais, and Petrie himself rendered ferb cluiche as a rounded lump of a stone. Carey later read cluche as the genitive of cluiche, game or contest, and Grigory Bondarenko takes ferb in its other and commoner sense, a weal or a blister, and arrives at a bump in the ground: the marker at the end of a race.

That fits the strangest and probably the oldest description of what the stone did. In the tale De Síl Chonairi Móir two stones stood at Tara called Blocc and Bluigne, set so close that a hand could pass between them only sideways, and for the man they accepted they opened wide enough to let a chariot through. At the far end of the chariot course lay Fál. If the sovereignty of Tara would have him, the stone shrieked against the iron rim of his wheel, so that everyone heard. If it would not, the stone said nothing. It said nothing for Lugaid Ríab nDerg, after Eterscél had been killed.

Read that without the mist and the miracle is a driving test. An iron tyre, a gap it barely fits, and a low stone grazed hard enough and cleanly enough to make it sing in front of a watching crowd. The oldest version of the wonder is a man who could drive.

The earliest mention of the stone anywhere is older still and has no king in it at all. A Leinster genealogical poem of roughly the seventh century describes the Gailéoin storming Tara, and the stone of Fál wailing at the overthrow of the host of Fairéoin. No foot, no chariot, no candidate. It is a lament for the beaten.

The Túatha Dé Danann brought it, and in the earliest telling in Lebor Gabála it is the only thing they brought, carried from islands in the north with no city named and no craftsman credited. The tidy set of four came afterwards. Falias, Gorias, Findias and Murias, four sages, four treasures, the stone in company with Lug’s spear, Nuadu’s sword and the Dagda’s cauldron. Falias reads like a place invented backwards out of the stone’s own name, and the two medieval witnesses that print the set cannot even keep it straight, since Cath Maige Tuired and the Yellow Book of Lecan swap the sword and the spear between cities. The stone and its city are the one pairing that never moves.

Every Irish word used of it is grammatically feminine, and the tales lean on that hard. Cóir Anmann says that a king called Núadu Finn Fáil used to visit the Lia Fáil often, playing with her and courting, because the prophets had told him he would be king of Ireland. In the Acallam na Senórach, Oisín tells Díarmait mac Cerbaill that when a barren woman stepped on the stone a dew of black blood broke through it, and when a fertile woman stepped on it a many coloured moisture came through instead.

Then Cú Chulainn. In the older recension of Lebor Gabála he put in a claim on the stone and it made no sound, not for him and not for his fosterling Lugaid, son of the Three White Ones of Emain. The later recension supplies the detail everybody now repeats, that he struck it with his sword. The sword is a clarification, added by a redactor who wanted to know what putting in a claim had meant. After that the stone was silent except once, under Conn, and its heart flew out of it and travelled from Tara to Tailtiu, which is why the Heart of Fál is at Tailtiu. And then the compiler of the Book of Leinster stops himself and corrects the record. It was not Cú Chulainn who did it, he writes, but the birth of Christ, and that is what broke the power of the idols.

Its other reported death was political. Scottish chroniclers from the late thirteenth century onward told how Fergus son of Erc had the stone shipped to Alba for his own crowning, that it stood at Scone until Edward I carried it to Westminster, and that a prophecy went with it promising the Scots a king wherever it lay. That story surfaces in the Rhythmical Chronicle exactly when the Scottish succession was in dispute, passes to John of Fordun and Hector Boece, and reaches Ireland with Geoffrey Keating in the seventeenth century, who names Boece as his source for the prophecy and had Stuarts of his own to flatter. No Irish authority before Keating knows anything about a removal or a prophecy. What Irish authorities do record is Cináed úa hArtacáin, who died in 975, writing that the stone which is under my two feet is the one Inis Fáil is named from, and Cuán ua Lothcháin, who died in 1024, placing Fál by the Mound of the Hostages, on the north, and calling it the stone that roared under every king who took the throne of Ireland.

Whatever the pillar on the Forradh is, it has been attacked three times in eleven years: chipped with a hammer in 2012, daubed with paint in 2014, and in February 2023 sprayed in capital letters on all four faces with the word FAKE. The Office of Public Works brought a steam cleaner up the hill and took it off. Nobody has yet dug on the north side of the Mound of the Hostages, where the old writers put the stone and where Joyce believed it was still lying.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Lia Fáil?

The Lia Fáil is the stone of Fál at the Hill of Tara, the object by which a king of Tara was recognised in Irish tradition. Medieval texts say it cried out under the man the sovereignty of Ireland would accept and stayed silent under anyone else. Ireland’s old poetic names Inis Fáil and Mag Fáil come from it.

Is the stone standing at Tara today the real Lia Fáil?

Probably not, and the doubt is old. George Petrie identified the tall granite pillar on the Forradh as the Lia Fáil in 1839, but P. W. Joyce spoke to one of the men who erected it around 1821 and was told it came from a trench at the bottom of that mound, and he objected that a pillar twelve feet long weighing over a ton could not be a stone anyone stood on. The medieval sources put Fál north of the Mound of the Hostages and gloss its name as a stone under a king, which suggests a low flagstone rather than a pillar.

What did the Lia Fáil do when a king came to it?

It made a noise, and the sources describe that noise differently. In Baile in Scáil it screams under Conn of the Hundred Battles when he treads on it, and the number of cries equals the number of kings who will descend from him. In De Síl Chonairi Móir it shrieks against the iron rim of a chariot wheel at the end of the chariot course, loud enough for the whole assembly to hear.

Is the Lia Fáil the same as the Stone of Scone?

No Irish source written before Geoffrey Keating in the seventeenth century says the Lia Fáil ever left Ireland. The claim that it was sent to Scotland for Fergus son of Erc and ended up at Scone and then at Westminster comes from Scottish chronicles of the late thirteenth century onward, and Keating names Hector Boece as his source for it. Irish antiquaries were describing Fál standing at Tara in the tenth and eleventh centuries, four hundred years after the alleged removal.

Why did the Lia Fáil stop crying out?

Lebor Gabála Érenn says the stone fell silent after Cú Chulainn, when it refused to speak for him or for his fosterling Lugaid, and afterwards cried only once more, under Conn. Its heart is said to have left it and gone from Tara to Tailtiu. The compiler of the Book of Leinster then adds that Cú Chulainn was not really the cause, and that it was the birth of Christ that broke the power of the idols.