The Morrigan

The Morrigan is a goddess of war, fate, sovereignty and death in Irish mythology, whose name is read as Great Queen or Phantom Queen, and who is one of the most powerful and enigmatic figures of the tradition. She appears sometimes as a single goddess and sometimes as one of a trio of related war-goddesses, most often named with Badb and Macha (and sometimes Nemain), so that she is at once an individual and a collective, a characteristically Celtic ambiguity. She is above all a shape-shifter, and her power is exercised less through fighting than through the shaping of the outcome of battle and the foretelling of death. She takes many forms: most famously the crow or raven, wheeling over the slaughter, but also an eel, a wolf, a heifer, and a woman young or old at will.

One of the Morrigan's most enduring appearances is as the Washer at the Ford, a recurring figure in Irish tradition seen washing bloodstained armour or garments at a river crossing, an omen understood to foretell the imminent death of whoever sees her; in the Ulster Cycle epic Tain Bo Cuailnge she appears to the hero Cu Chulainn in this guise not long before his own death, washing clothes and gear that are unmistakably his. The motif proved remarkably durable in Irish and wider Gaelic folklore, surviving into much later folk belief as the bean nighe or washer-woman, a death-omen figure recorded by folklorists in Scotland and Ireland well into the modern period, long after the Morrigan's own name had faded from everyday belief.

The Morrigan's most memorable appearances are in the great Ulster epic, the Tain Bo Cuailnge, in her dealings with the hero Cu Chulainn. She comes to him in the form of a beautiful young woman and offers him her love; when he, intent on battle and not recognising her, refuses, she turns against him, and in the fighting that follows she attacks him in the shapes of an eel, a wolf and a heifer, each time to be wounded by him, a hostility born of the slight. Elsewhere she is the washer at the ford, the terrible figure a warrior sees washing bloodstained armour and weapons in a river before a battle: to see her at her washing is to know that the arms being washed are one's own, and that one is going to die.

In this guise she is the very image of foreknown death. Yet the Morrigan is also bound up with sovereignty and with the fertility of the land: she unites with the Dagda before the Second Battle of Mag Tuired, and afterwards she pronounces a prophecy of peace and plenty and, in the same breath, of the strife and the end of the world to come. She is not simply malevolent; she is the divine embodiment of the terrible and fated dimension of war and kingship, the queen who decides who will fall, who foretells the slaughter, and who wheels over the battlefield in the form of the carrion crow.