Midir

A spit of holly came out of a knot of brawling boys and took one of his eyes clean out of his head. He picked it up off the grass at the Brug and carried it across the mound in his closed fist, and the thing he complained about was not the pain. With a blemish on him he could not look properly at the land he had come to visit, and he could not go home to the land he had left. He had stepped into the fight only to stop it. Dian Cécht was fetched, the eye was made whole, and Midir, having been maimed at a children’s game, immediately named his price for the inconvenience: a chariot worth seven bondmaids, a mantle fit for him, and the most beautiful woman in Ireland.

He belonged to the Tuatha Dé, and his household sat in the síd of Brí Léith in Tethba, a hill that later writers place at Ardagh in County Longford. He kept a playing field there, thrice fifty boys of the noble families of Ireland on one side and thrice fifty girls on the other, and among them for nine years he raised the Dagda’s secret son. It was Midir who finally told the boy whose child he was. The old genealogies call him Midir mac Indui and give him rule over Mide; the tale that made him famous never troubles to name his father at all.

The woman he asked for was Étaín Echraide, daughter of Ailill, and the price her father set was a landscape. Twelve plains cleared of waste and woodland in a night, twelve great rivers dragged out of wells and bogs to the sea, and then, when that was not enough, Étaín’s own weight in gold and silver piled up on the floor of her father’s house. The Dagda did the digging. Midir took delivery, spent a year in the Brug with his foster-son, and went home with her.

Waiting at Brí Léith was Fuamnach, his first wife, reared by the wizard Bresal and versed in everything her people knew. She was courteous. She walked her husband over his own land, brought the new woman into the sleeping chamber, told her she had come into a good woman’s seat, and when Étaín sat down struck her with a rod of scarlet rowan. Étaín became a pool of water on the floor. The heat of the fire and the working of the ground turned the pool into a worm, and the worm into a purple fly the size of a man’s head, and this is where the story stops behaving like a punishment. The hum of her wings ran sweeter than pipes and harps and horns. Her eyes threw light in a dark room like set stones. The scent that came off her took away hunger and thirst from anyone she circled, and the spray from her wings cured sickness.

Midir knew perfectly well who she was. He walked his borders with the fly beside him and took no other wife the whole time she stayed. He slept to the sound of her and woke when she wanted him awake, because she would rouse him whenever someone came near who did not love him.

Fuamnach came back with the three gods of Dana as her sureties, said plainly that she did not regret it, and raised a wind. For seven years Étaín could not settle on a hilltop or a tree or any height in Ireland, only on sea rocks and the backs of waves, until she fell against the Mac Óc’s breast at the Brug and was kept in a crystal sun-bower packed with sweet herbs. Fuamnach found her there too. The second wind blew her into a golden cup in an Ulster drinking hall, where the wife of Étar swallowed her and carried her nine months. A thousand and twelve years lie between Étaín’s first begetting and her second.

She came back into the world as a mortal girl and married Eochaid Airem, king of Tara. Midir waited. He put love for her into the mind of Eochaid’s brother, then took the desire back out again so that nothing would touch her honour, and used the borrowed face to talk to her at three trysts on a hill above the court. She did not know him. When he gave his name she told him she would not trade the king of Ireland for a man whose kindred she could not place.

So he went to Tara in daylight instead. Eochaid was on the terrace one summer morning looking out over Mag Breg when a stranger was simply there beside him, though the courts had been locked all night and nobody had seen him come in. He had brought a board: silver, with gold men, a precious stone burning at each corner and a bag of plaited bronze links for the pieces. They played for stakes. Midir lost, and paid fifty grey horses with blood-red dappled heads. They played again, and he lost again, and paid boars and swords and red-eared cattle and speckled cloaks. Eochaid’s foster-father told him what he was dealing with and advised him to load the man with impossible work. Eochaid did: clear the stones off Meath, put rushes over Tethba, lay a wood across Bréifne, and drive a causeway through the bog of Móin Lámraige, where no road had ever run.

Midir asked only that nobody be out of doors until sunrise. Eochaid sent his steward anyway. What the steward saw in the bog that night was every man in the world stripped and working, their clothes heaped into one mound with Midir standing on top of it driving them on. They fed whole trees into the bottom of the road, roots and all, then clay and gravel and stone, and they chanted while they did it about oxen and hard exactions and nobody knowing who gains and who loses. The people of the mounds yoked their beasts across the shoulders rather than the forehead, and Eochaid copied them, which is why he is called the Ploughman. There has never been a better causeway in the world, and there would have been one, if he had not sent a man to watch. Defects were left in it on purpose. Two thousand years later a Longford bog gave up an oak trackway felled in 148 BC, excavated by Barry Raftery, the largest of its kind found in Europe, laid down in what looks like a single season.

Then Midir came back with an evil look on him, complained about the treatment, and asked for one more game. This time the stake was not named until he had won it. He wanted his arms around Étaín, and a kiss. Eochaid gave him a month and spent it filling Tara with the best fighting men in Ireland, ring inside ring, every door locked, the king and queen in the middle of the house. Midir walked into the middle of the royal house anyway, fairer that night than anyone had ever seen him. He took his weapons in his left hand and the woman under his right arm and went out through the skylight. When the hosts got outside there were two swans circling the roof.

He never once takes her by force.

Eochaid tore open every fairy mound in Ireland looking for her. A year and three months of it, and whatever was dug out by day was back in place by morning. Two white ravens came out of one mound and two hounds out of another. When Midir finally offered terms, what arrived at the third hour was fifty women identical in face and dress, and Eochaid picked the one who poured drink like his wife, and picked wrong. The woman he took home was his own daughter, and by the time Midir came back to tell him so, Eochaid had a child by her. That child was left in a herdsman’s kennel, raised without anyone knowing whose she was, and became the mother of Conaire Mór.

What Midir has is not strength. It is the ability to make a landscape move overnight, to hold a shape or hand one to somebody else, to plant a longing in a man’s chest and lift it out again, to put fifty perfect copies of a woman in a room. The country he sings about to Étaín has no mine or thine in it, warm sweet streams running through it, cheeks the colour of foxglove, and nobody there grows old before their time. His own account of why the living never see his people is theological and slightly smug: the dark of Adam’s fault is on human eyes, not on his.

His limits are all self-imposed, which is why they hold. A blemish would have cost him his kingship, so the eye had to be healed before anything else. His work spoils when it is watched. He cannot take Étaín until Eochaid gives her up and she agrees to go, so he spends a year courting, loses two games on purpose to manufacture a grievance, and only then names a price with nothing written on it. Once Eochaid accepts the settlement, Midir is bound by covenant too and never has to be dug for again. And Brí Léith was never safe ground for him; the damage that mattered was done inside his own house, by his own wife, while he was showing her the fields. One strand of the manuscript tradition has Manannán burn Fuamnach and Midir together at Brí Léith. Another says that was Sigmall, Midir’s grandson by his daughter Oicnia, and not Midir at all. The sources cannot agree on whether he dies.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Midir in Irish mythology?

Midir is a king of the Tuatha Dé Danann who rules the síd of Brí Léith in Tethba, a hill usually placed at Ardagh in County Longford. He is best known as the foster-father of Aengus, the Mac Óc, and as the husband of Étaín in the tale Tochmarc Étaíne, “The Wooing of Étaín.” The Dindshenchas calls him Midir mac Indui and gives him lordship over Mide.

What happened between Midir and Étaín?

Midir took Étaín as his wife, and his first wife Fuamnach struck her with a rod of scarlet rowan, turning her into a pool of water, then a worm, then a purple fly. Fuamnach later raised a magical wind that blew Étaín around Ireland for seven years at a stretch, until she fell into a cup of drink, was swallowed by the wife of Étar, and was born again as a mortal woman more than a thousand years later.

How did Midir win Étaín back from Eochaid Airem?

He beat the high king at fidchell, a board game, on a silver board with golden pieces. Midir deliberately lost the first two games and paid extravagant stakes, then accepted four impossible labours before winning a third game whose prize he had refused to name in advance. The prize was his arms around Étaín and a kiss, and when he collected it he carried her out through the skylight of Tara, after which two swans were seen circling the fortress.

Why did Midir lose his eye?

A spit of holly was thrown at him while he was trying to break up a fight between boys at Brú na Bóinne on the feast of Samain. The wound mattered because a blemish disqualified him from his own land and his own kingship, so his foster-son Aengus fetched the physician Dian Cécht, who healed the eye completely. Midir then demanded a chariot, a mantle and the most beautiful woman in Ireland as compensation.

What is Brí Léith?

Brí Léith is Midir’s fairy mound in Tethba, generally identified with Ardagh Hill in County Longford. A Dindshenchas poem says the place takes its name from Brí, Midir’s daughter, who died there after her father refused to let her lover Liath mac Celtchair come near his house. It is the destination Étaín is carried to and the last of the mounds Eochaid Airem attacks.

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Aengus Óg, Dagda, Boann, Dian Cécht, Bodb Derg, Manannán mac Lir, Lug, Nuada, Goibniu, Bres, Sídhe, Fir Bolg, Swan maiden