Deirdre of the Sorrows

Among all the stories the old Irish kept and carried down the centuries, none was guarded more carefully, or told with more reluctance, than the tale of Deirdre. It belonged to the Ulster Cycle, that great body of heroic legend gathered around Conchobar mac Nessa, the king at Emain Macha, and his restless warriors of the Red Branch. But where most of those tales ring with the clash of chariots and the boasting of champions, the story of Deirdre is quiet, and it is sad, and it ends without a single victory. The Irish themselves named it for what it was. They placed it among the Trí Truaighe na Scéalaíochta — the Three Sorrows of Storytelling — the three tales whose grief ran so deep that a master storyteller kept them for the hours when sorrow itself was the thing the listeners had come to hear.

Deirdre’s tragedy begins, as such tragedies so often do, with a prophecy — and with the long, doomed effort of powerful men to outwit it. Before she was born it was foretold that her beauty would be the ruin of Ulster, that armies would fall and friends would be divided and the king’s own house would be broken because of her. The men of Ulster heard the warning. And from that hour, every choice they made to keep her safe, to keep her hidden, to keep her theirs, carried the tragedy one step closer to the very ruin they hoped to prevent.

The Child of the Prophecy

The tale opens, fittingly, at a feast. Deirdre’s father, Fedlimid, was a storyteller in the household of King Conchobar, and one night he was hosting the king and his nobles in his own hall. Fedlimid’s wife was heavily pregnant, and as she crossed the floor to refill the cups, the unborn child cried out from within her — a cry so loud and so strange that it silenced the whole company. The warriors started up in alarm, and the druid Cathbad was asked to say what such an omen could mean.

Cathbad laid his hand upon the woman and spoke the future plainly. The child was a girl, he said, and she would be the fairest woman ever born in Ireland: golden-haired, grey-eyed, her cheeks the colour of foxglove. Kings would fight for her. But because of her, he said, slaughter would come upon the Ulstermen, heroes would be exiled, and the three sons of Uisliu would fall. The warriors, hearing this, shouted that the infant should be put to death the moment she was born. But Conchobar refused. He would not have it said that he had murdered a child — and besides, a colder thought had already taken hold of him. The girl would be reared apart, he ruled, hidden away from every eye, and when she was grown he himself would take her as his wife. That way no other man could ever claim her, and the prophecy, he believed, would be safely locked away with her.

She was named Deirdre, and the medieval scribes liked to gloss the name from an old word for alarm or trouble — a sign of how completely, in the tradition, her name and her doom had grown into one thing. She was raised in a hidden enclosure with an earthen rampart about it, fostered by a nurse and watched over by a wise, sharp-tongued woman named Leborcham, a satirist whom no one could keep out and who alone was allowed freely in and out. Conchobar meant that Deirdre should see no man at all until the day he married her. For years it worked. She grew into exactly the beauty Cathbad had foretold, and she grew up knowing nothing of the wide world beyond the green walls of her enclosure.

Blood Upon the Snow

It was the small accident of a winter’s day that undid all of Conchobar’s careful walls. Deirdre stood watching her foster-father skin a calf he had killed in the snow outside, and a raven came down to drink the blood that lay bright upon the white ground. Deirdre watched the three colours together — the black of the bird, the red of the blood, the white of the snow — and she said to Leborcham that she could love a man who had those three colours in him: hair as black as the raven, a cheek as red as blood, a body as white as snow. It is one of the most famous images in all of Irish literature, and it is the moment the prophecy slips its lock.

For Leborcham loved the girl, and could not bear her longing, and told her the truth that had been kept from her: that such a man was real, and was near. His name was Naoise, a son of Uisliu. Naoise and his two brothers, Ardan and Ainnle, the three sons of Uisliu, were among the finest of the young warriors of Ulster — swift, fearless, and famed for their singing, for it was said that the cattle of any field gave a third more milk for the sweetness of the sons of Uisliu’s voices.

Deirdre contrived to meet Naoise, and when she did she would not let the chance go by. She knew what the prophecy said; she knew what Conchobar intended for her; and she chose, with her eyes open, the young warrior over the old king and a present love over a safe and joyless future. Naoise hesitated — he knew exactly what taking the king’s chosen bride would cost — and so Deirdre bound him. She placed him under a geis, one of those binding obligations of honour that no warrior of the cycle could refuse without disgrace, and the geis was that he must take her away with him. Naoise would not break his honour, and would not abandon her to Conchobar. His brothers did not hesitate for a moment: whatever danger Naoise walked into, Ardan and Ainnle would walk into it at his side. And so the three sons of Uisliu, with Deirdre among them and a company of loyal followers, slipped out of Ulster and away into the night.

The Exile in Alba

At first they could find no rest even in Ireland, for Conchobar’s reach was long and his anger longer, and they were hunted from district to district. At last they crossed the sea eastward to Alba — to Scotland — and took service there as fighting men with a king of that country. For a while there was something like peace. But Deirdre’s beauty was a danger that travelled wherever she travelled. When the Scottish king’s steward caught sight of her, the king resolved to have her for his own, and pressed the sons of Uisliu into the most dangerous fighting in the hope that they would not return from it. Once more the brothers found a land turning hostile around them, and they withdrew with Deirdre to an island and lived as they could, hunting the deer and fishing the cold water, exiles with no lord to shelter them.

These years of exile are, in the older telling, almost the only contentment the tale allows the lovers, and it lets them have it: a hard, free life on the shores of a foreign sea, Naoise and Deirdre together and the brothers near. But exile is not a home, and the sons of Uisliu were Ulstermen to the marrow. The early Irish tradition always granted the exile a particular ache — the longing for one’s own country, one’s own people, the very birdsong of one’s own glen — and that ache worked steadily in the three brothers. Across the sea, in Emain Macha, Conchobar knew it would. He had only to be patient.

The Broken Guarantee

Conchobar made his move by pretending, at last, to relent. He told the assembled nobles of Ulster that it was a shameful thing for warriors as fine as the sons of Uisliu to grow grey in exile over the matter of one woman, and he sent word across the sea inviting them home in friendship and full peace. The exiles were not fools, and they were wary of the offer. So Conchobar did the one thing that made the invitation impossible to refuse without dishonour: he sent, as sureties for the safety of the sons of Uisliu, three of the most trusted men in all Ulster — and chief among them Fergus mac Róich, a former king, a warrior whose sworn word was, to the entire heroic world of the tale, beyond any question absolute.

To travel home under the guarantee of Fergus was to travel home under a protection that no one in Ireland would dare to violate, for to harm a man whom Fergus had pledged to protect would be to destroy Fergus’s honour utterly — and that, surely, no king would dare to do. The sons of Uisliu agreed to come home. Deirdre alone did not want to go. She had dreamed dark dreams; she warned Naoise; she begged him to stay one more season in Alba. But the pull of home and the iron of Fergus’s pledged word together outweighed her dread, and the company took ship for Ireland.

Conchobar had planned every step of it. He arranged for Fergus to be met on the road by a chieftain who invited him to an ale-feast — and Fergus was bound by a geis of his own never to refuse such an invitation. So the guarantee himself was held back, feasting, honour-bound, while the people he had guaranteed walked on toward Emain Macha escorted only by Fergus’s sons in his place. When the sons of Uisliu reached the king’s stronghold, the trap closed. Conchobar set a force against them under the warrior Eogan mac Durthacht. Naoise, Ardan and Ainnle — the three singing brothers — were cut down, and Deirdre was seized and brought before the king.

What followed broke Ulster apart, exactly as Cathbad had foretold. Fergus returned from the feast to find that the men whose safety he had pledged his honour upon had been murdered while he was kept from them by a trick. His word — the very thing Conchobar had used as bait — had been made worthless, and now that ruined honour turned against the king who had spent it. Fergus, with Conchobar’s own son Cormac and a great body of warriors, fell upon Emain Macha with fire and sword, and then left Ulster altogether. He took some three thousand fighting men south and west into Connacht, into the service of Conchobar’s enemies, Queen Medb and King Ailill. That defection — born entirely of the broken guarantee given over Deirdre — would in time bring the whole army of Connacht down upon Ulster in the great cattle-raid the Irish remember as the Táin Bó Cúailnge.

As for Deirdre, she lived a year in Conchobar’s house, and in that year she never once smiled, never raised her head, never ate or slept enough to call it living. She made only laments, grieving for Naoise and for the bright life cut down with him. Conchobar, unable to win so much as a look from her, asked her at last whom in all the world she most hated. She named two without hesitation: Conchobar himself, and Eogan mac Durthacht, the man whose hand had killed Naoise. So the king, with a deliberate and final cruelty, declared that since she so hated Eogan she would go and live the next year with him, and he set her in a chariot between the two men she loathed above all others on earth. As the chariot drove, Deirdre — who had been promised to a king and had chosen instead one season of love and a lifetime of grief — let her body fall, and struck her head against a standing stone that the road passed, and died. In the later, early modern retelling she needs no stone at all: she goes to the open grave where the sons of Uisliu are being buried, lies down beside Naoise, and her heart simply breaks; and from the lovers’ graves, the tale says, there grew two yew trees, whose branches reached across the churchyard until they met and twined and could not be parted.

The Moral of the Tale

Deirdre’s story is not a tale of a lesson neatly learned and rewarded. It is a tragedy, and a tragedy teaches by showing the wreckage rather than the repair. But the wreckage here is not arbitrary, and the listener is not left without instruction. Two failures drive the entire disaster from beginning to end, and both of them belong to Conchobar — not to the lovers who are usually blamed.

The first is the failure to understand that another person’s heart cannot be owned, hoarded, or set aside for later use. Conchobar’s decision to cage Deirdre — to have her reared in secret, unseen, kept like treasure against the day he would want her — is the original wrong of the whole story, older and colder than any choice Naoise or Deirdre ever made. A love kept under lock does not thereby become yours. It only waits, as Deirdre waited, for a window and a winter morning and the sight of a raven on the snow.

The second failure is the graver one, and it is the failure the tale punishes most visibly: the breaking of a sworn guarantee. In the heroic world of early Ireland the pledged word — and above all the formal guarantee of a great man’s honour — was the load-bearing beam of the whole society; it was what made peace, trade, fosterage and truce possible at all. Conchobar spent that word like a coin to win one small, bitter thing back, and the tale renders its judgement on him in the form of a proverb the Irish use to this day:

Filleann an feall ar an bhfeallaire.
“The treachery comes home to the traitor.”

Conchobar’s treachery came home. It came home as the defection of Fergus, as the burning of Emain Macha, as the loss of three thousand of his best warriors to his deadliest enemy, and at last as the long ruinous war of the Táin. He had got Deirdre back into his house and lost his kingdom’s strength to do it. That is the teaching the tale leaves in the listener’s hands: that honour is not an ornament upon power but the timber that holds power up, and that a ruler who spends his word to win a small thing will find, too late, that he has paid for it with a very large one.

Origins, Sources, and Attribution

The earliest surviving form of the story is the Old Irish tale Longes mac nUislenn — “The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu.” It belongs to the Ulster Cycle, the oldest of the great cycles of Irish heroic literature, and on the evidence of its language scholars date its composition to roughly the eighth or ninth century, within the Old Irish period. The fullest early copy is preserved in the Book of Leinster (Lebor Laignech), the great manuscript compiled around the year 1160, now Trinity College Dublin MS 1339; the tale also survives in the fourteenth-century Yellow Book of Lecan and in the manuscript British Library Egerton 1782.

In the native Irish scheme of tale-types, Longes mac nUislenn is a longes — an “exile” tale — and it carries a particular structural weight within the cycle. It is one of the remscéla, the “fore-tales” or prequels, to the Táin Bó Cúailnge, the central epic of the Ulster Cycle. The story of Deirdre exists, in part, to answer a question the great epic raises: it explains why Fergus mac Róich and three thousand Ulster warriors are found fighting on the Connacht side in the war against their own homeland. Deirdre’s tragedy is the hinge on which that defection turns. As a “fated woman” whose doom is spoken before her birth, she also stands within a wide international pattern of tragic love and prophecy; but the specific architecture of this tale — the druid’s word, the hidden fosterage, the broken guarantee, the war that follows — is distinctively and deeply Irish.

Centuries after the Old Irish text, the story was reshaped into the early modern Irish version known as Oidheadh Chloinne hUisneach — “The Violent Death of the Children of Uisneach” — composed in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. In this retelling Deirdre’s role is greatly enlarged, the brothers grow more shadowy beside her, and pathos becomes the dominant note: here Deirdre does not need a standing stone, but dies of pure grief in Naoise’s grave. It was this lyrical, sorrowful version that became enormously popular with audiences, and by the early eighteenth century, if not before, it had been grouped together with Oidheadh Chloinne Lir and Oidheadh Chloinne Tuireann as the three Trí Truaighe na Scéalaíochta, the Three Sorrows of Storytelling.

The tale’s modern fame was made by the Irish Literary Revival, for which Deirdre became something close to a national symbol. Lady Augusta Gregory set a prose retelling of it at the head of her influential Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902); W. B. Yeats wrote a verse tragedy, Deirdre (1907); George Russell (Æ) wrote a Deirdre of his own; and J. M. Synge — who gave the modern world the title by which the story is now best known — was at work on his play Deirdre of the Sorrows when he died in 1909, leaving it almost but not quite finished. It was staged at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1910. For the writers of the Revival, Deirdre was easily read as Ireland itself: a beauty doomed by the broken promises of the very men who claimed they only wished to protect her.

Why the Tale Has Lasted

One reason the story has held its grip for more than a thousand years is that Deirdre, alone among the women of the early sagas, so plainly chooses. She is born under a prophecy, raised in a cage, and promised to a king she never wanted — and yet the decisive act of the tale is hers. She looks at the raven on the snow, she names the man she will love, and she binds Naoise to carry her off knowing the full price of it. The tragedy that follows is terrible, but it is not the tragedy of a passive victim swept along by fate. It is the tragedy of a woman who reached for a real life inside a doom built to deny her one, and the tale honours that reaching even as it mourns the cost.

The other reason is the shape of its villain. Conchobar is not a monster or a demon; he is a king, doing what kings of his world were entitled to do, observing the forms, never once acting in a way the rules of his society would call illegal. And he is ruinous all the same — ruinous precisely because he treats honour as a tool to be spent rather than a trust to be kept. That makes the tragedy adult, political, and uncomfortably recognisable, age after age. Add to this the sheer, unkillable strength of the tale’s images — the raven drinking blood on the snow, the three singing brothers, the two yew trees joining their branches above the lovers’ graves — and it is no wonder the story outlived the language it was first told in. Fifteen hundred years on, the Three Sorrows of Storytelling still earns its name, and of the three, it is Deirdre’s that the storytellers kept for last.