I. The Prophecy Before Birth

At the great dún of Emain Macha, seat of Conchobar mac Nessa — High King of Ulster and lord of the Red Branch warriors — a feast was in preparation. The bard Cathbad the druid had come to the house of Feidhlim the harper, whose wife was that evening great with child, and as the company drank and the fire threw long shadows across the rushes on the floor, the unborn child cried out from the womb — a sound so strange and sudden that the cups shook in men’s hands.

Cathbad rose. He placed his hands on the belly of Feidhlim’s wife and stood for a long time in silence, his eyes elsewhere. When he spoke his words fell across the feast-hall like the first cold rain of autumn.

“The child within you is a girl,” he said. “She will be the most beautiful woman ever born in Ireland. She will be called Deirdre, and she will be the ruin of the sons of Uisneach, and the cause of a war between the provinces, and Ulster will not be healed of it in many a long year.”

The warriors of the Red Branch called out that the child should be killed before she drew her first breath. But Conchobar raised his hand and silenced them. He was a king who believed that fate could be managed, if one managed it early enough and kept firm control of the managing. “The girl will be taken from this hall,” he said, “and reared in a secret place, away from the sight of men. When she is grown I will take her as my own queen, and so the prophecy will be confounded — for what harm can come from a woman who is given to the king himself?”

And so Deirdre was taken, as an infant, to a dún hidden in the forest, and reared there by a fostress named Leborcham who was the only woman permitted to see her, and by a handful of trusted servants. No man was allowed to approach. The king visited once a year. Outside the walls, the world went on without her.

II. The Man in the Snow

Deirdre grew. She was, as the prophecy had promised, the most beautiful woman in Ireland — dark-haired, pale-skinned, with eyes the colour of the sea off the coast of Connacht in winter. Her fostress Leborcham taught her the harping and the needlework and the old tales, but she could not teach her ignorance of the world beyond the wall, for Deirdre was quick-minded and curious, and she had spent her girlhood learning to read the light that lay beyond the things she was permitted to see.

One winter day she watched from her chamber window as a raven settled on the snow in the yard below, and a calf was being slaughtered there, and the dark blood ran bright on the white ground. She said to Leborcham: “I would love a man with cheeks as red as that blood and hair as black as that raven and skin as white as that snow.” Leborcham, who knew many things, felt her heart drop in her chest like a stone into a well. “Such a man exists,” she said, before she could stop herself. “He is Naoise, son of Uisneach, and he is one of the finest warriors of the Red Branch.”

Soon after, it happened that Naoise came hunting in the forest near the hidden dún, and Deirdre, watching from the wall, let herself be seen. Naoise saw her and knew at once — as young men of strong imagination will — that this was not an ordinary meeting. He should have ridden on. He did not ride on.

They spoke. He told her his name and she told him the prophecy, and he stood in the forest path with his spear and his hound and weighed honour against love and found, as young men of strong imagination usually do, that love was slightly heavier. “You are Deirdre,” he said. “I know what the druid said. And I will not leave without you.”

III. The Years in Alba

Naoise took Deirdre from the hidden dún that same night, with his brothers Ardán and Ainnle riding at their side, and together the four of them fled Ireland — across the narrow sea to Alba (Scotland), where they lived for years in the wild beautiful country of the western glens, hunting deer and salmon, sleeping beneath the stars, far from Emain Macha and the court of the king who had claimed Deirdre for himself.

The years in Alba were, for a time, everything that a life built on a pure choice could be. Deirdre was happy in a way she had never been behind the walls of her fostress’s dún — not because she had love (though she did), but because she had the horizon. She could see the mountains. She could hear the sea. She composed verse — the Cumha Dheirdhre, her lament for Scotland, which survives in the Irish manuscripts as some of the oldest lyric poetry in the Gaelic tradition:

“A Albain, A Albain, is maith liom thú — is olc liom mo thuras uait.”

“O Alba, O Alba, I love thee well — ill it is for me my journey from thee.”

— Cumha Dheirdhre (Deirdre’s Lament for Scotland), c. 9th century, preserved in the Book of Leinster

But Conchobar mac Nessa had not forgotten. He was a king, and kings have long memories for what is owed them. He sent word to the sons of Uisneach: a guarantee of safe return, a pardon sealed by the honour of the Red Branch. He sent as his messenger Fergus mac Róich — the most trusted man in Ulster, the one man whose word of safe conduct could not be doubted.

Deirdre begged Naoise not to go. She told him she had dreamed three ravens carrying drops of honey in their beaks, and that the honey turned to blood before they could deliver it. Naoise, who was a warrior and not a dreamer, kissed her forehead and said the king had given his word, and the word of Conchobar mac Nessa was good enough for him.

They sailed back to Ireland.

IV. The End at Emain Macha

Conchobar had not forgiven. He had sent the invitation, and sent Fergus as guarantor, but he had arranged matters so that Fergus would be bound by the laws of hospitality to attend a feast en route — the honour-code of the geis that no man of Ulster could refuse — and so it was without their protector that the sons of Uisneach entered Emain Macha.

The betrayal was swift and without honour. Conchobar had hired a foreign warrior, Éoghan mac Durthacht, who owed nothing to the laws of Ulster guest-right, and it was he who drove the first spear through Naoise before the gates of Emain Macha, on a bright morning when the dew was still on the grass and the king watched from the rampart above.

Ardán and Ainnle died beside their brother in the same moment, as the three sons of Uisneach had always said they would — together, and fighting. Deirdre was taken to the king’s hall and kept there as his prisoner and, in name, his queen, though she did not speak to him and did not eat more than she must to stay alive, and she did not smile for the full year of her captivity.

At the end of a year Conchobar, stung by her silence, told her she would be given instead to Éoghan mac Durthacht — the man who had killed Naoise. He put her in a chariot between the two of them — himself and Éoghan — to ride through Ulster as a public display of his power over her. Deirdre, looking at the two men on either side of her, said quietly: “I am a ewe between two rams.” Then she leaned forward and struck her head against the stone post of the chariot-gate as it passed, and died at once, and was buried beside Naoise, and from the two graves grew two trees whose branches grew into each other and could not be separated.