My grandmother – ‘granny’ to me – was an Irish woman who had been a school teacher before retirement, but in her last years, liked nothing better than to fill my young head with tales from Irish mythology. Norma McMahon (born McEnhill), 1909-1975, was a fiery product of Ulster (Omagh, county Tyrone to be exact). Gazing down at me with piercing blue eyes, she would take me on imaginary journeys to fantastic realms via the medium of Irish myths.
Heavily involved in Irish politics in the 20th century, Norma had been friends with Sinéad De Valera, wife of the Irish president Éamon de Valera. Sinéad wrote anthologies of Irish fairy stories and I was given a copy of The Verdant Valley as a child. This was my introduction to the Emerald Isle’s pantheon of Gods that are older than Christianity.
Heroes who were also monsters – and monsters who could be surprisingly empathetic. Let’s go meet some leading characters and creatures from the Irish myths.
The Tuatha Dé Danann: The Gods Who Became Fairies
Before I was old enough to ask hard questions, my granny told me that the old Irish gods didn’t die — they just went underground. She meant that literally.
The Tuatha Dé Danann were the divine race of ancient Ireland, beings of extraordinary beauty and power who arrived on the island shrouded in magical mist. They were the children of the goddess Danu, masters of craft, poetry, healing, and war. Among them were some of the most compelling figures in all of world mythology: the Dagda, a great father-god who carried a club that could kill nine men with one end and resurrect the dead with the other, and who owned a cauldron of inexhaustible plenty. His daughter Brigid, goddess of fire, healing, and poetry — so beloved that the Catholic Church eventually absorbed her as a saint rather than attempt to erase her. Lugh of the Long Arm, god of light and skill, who was master of every craft ever attempted. Manannán mac Lir, god of the sea, who rode the waves in a chariot and whose cloak could make the invisible visible and the visible invisible.
They fought. They intrigued. They made catastrophic mistakes and brilliant gambits. But eventually, they were defeated by the Milesians — the ancestors of the modern Irish — and rather than be destroyed, they retreated into the síde, the fairy mounds. The hills of Ireland, in other words. They became the Aos Sí, the fairy folk, and they have been there ever since, just out of sight.
My granny always said that was why you never built on a fairy mound. Not superstition. Respect.
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The Cattle Raid of Cooley: Cú Chulainn and the War That Couldn’t Be Won
If the Greeks had Achilles, the Irish had Cú Chulainn, and I would argue he is the stranger and more terrifying of the two.
The Táin Bó Cúailnge — the Cattle Raid of Cooley — is Ireland’s great epic, and it begins, as so many great disasters do, with a domestic argument. Queen Medb of Connacht and her husband Ailill are lying in bed comparing their respective wealth and discover, to Medb’s fury, that Ailill owns a magnificent white bull that she cannot match. She learns that Ulster possesses an equally magnificent brown bull, the Donn Cúailnge, and resolves to have it — by negotiation if possible, by war if necessary. Negotiation fails. War follows.
Here is the terrible twist: the men of Ulster have been cursed by the goddess Macha to suffer the pains of childbirth for five days and four nights whenever Ulster faces its greatest danger. Every Ulster warrior is struck down. Every warrior, that is, except Cú Chulainn — a seventeen-year-old boy, half-divine, who stands alone at the ford to defend the province.
He holds them off for months, fighting champion after champion in single combat, his body covered in wounds, held together by bandages and iron will. But what made my granny’s voice go quiet when she told me about Cú Chulainn was the ríastrad — the warp spasm. In the heat of battle, Cú Chulainn transforms. His body inverts. One eye retreats deep into his skull, the other bulges out. His muscles rearrange themselves. He becomes something that isn’t a man anymore, a killing machine, a force that cannot distinguish friend from enemy. He is capable of unimaginable violence and he knows it. That knowledge is part of what makes him tragic.
The story ends badly for almost everyone, including the bulls themselves, who fight to the death. Irish mythology doesn’t really do triumphant endings. My granny always said that was the most honest thing about it.
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The Children of Lir: What Grief Sounds Like
This one made me cry as a child and it still does.
Lir was one of the Tuatha Dé Danann, a lord of great standing, who had four children — Fionnuala, Aodh, Fiachra, and Conn — with his wife, who died. He remarried a woman named Aoife, who loved him but could not manage her jealousy of his devotion to his children. One day she took them to a lake and, using dark magic, turned them into swans.
She gave them 900 years. Three hundred years on a lake in Leinster. Three hundred years on the Straits of Moyle between Ireland and Scotland, battered by cold and storms, unable to find shelter, barely surviving winter after winter. Three hundred years on the waters off the west coast of Ireland, near Erris. Their only gift, if you can call it that, was their voices — they could sing with an inhuman beauty that made all who heard them weep.
When the 900 years ended and they were finally released from the spell, they were ancient — wizened, skeletal, the oldest creatures in Ireland. They were baptised by a Christian monk and died almost immediately, finally free.
What strikes me about this story, what struck me even as a child, is how much of it is about endurance without hope. The children of Lir do not spend 900 years trying to break the curse. They cannot. They simply survive, together, singing. I think my granny used it to teach me something about the Irish relationship with suffering — not defeat, not even acceptance exactly, but an insistence on continuing to sing regardless.
The Banshee: She Who Cries Before Death
My granny did not call the banshee a monster. She called her a sign.
The bean sídhe — woman of the fairy mound — is one of the most distinctive figures in Irish folklore, and she is almost entirely misunderstood outside Ireland. In films and stories written by people who don’t know better, she’s a screaming horror. In the tradition as my granny understood it, she is something far more complicated.
The banshee is attached to specific Irish families — the old Gaelic families, whose names begin with Ó or Mac. When a member of that family is about to die, she appears, usually at night, combing her long hair and keening — the ancient, wordless, wailing grief-cry that was the Irish form of mourning. She isn’t causing the death. She’s grieving it. She loved the person who is dying, or she loves the family, and her cry is the sound of that love meeting loss.
My granny told me that her own mother, back in Tyrone, had heard the banshee the night before her father died. She described it not as terror but as a kind of terrible comfort — a confirmation that the universe had noticed, that this death mattered, that someone or something beyond the human world was already in mourning.
I have never heard it. But I know what family I belong to, and I know what it would mean if I did.
The Selkies: The Ones Who Long to Go Back
Along the coasts of Ireland and Scotland, the seals were never quite only seals.
Selkies are seal-folk who can shed their skins and walk on land in human form. The stories about them share a common and heartbreaking shape: a fisherman finds a selkie woman’s skin while she is on land, hides it, and she cannot return to the sea without it. Unable to go home, she marries him. She loves her children. But she never stops watching the water. And if she ever finds her skin — hidden in a chest, tucked in a thatch roof, wherever her husband concealed it — she will go back. Not because she doesn’t love her family. Because the sea is what she is.
What I find devastating about the selkie stories is that no one in them is exactly a villain. The fisherman is lonely and in love. The selkie is a good mother and wife but also, always, a creature of another world. The children are left on the shore watching their mother swim away and knowing, in some animal part of themselves, that they are half that other world too.
My granny told me these stories with a kind of wistfulness I didn’t understand as a child. I think I understand it better now. There’s something in the Irish psyche — sharpened by centuries of diaspora — about belonging to a place so deeply that leaving it is a kind of amputation, and the longing never fully heals.
Cú Chulainn and the Morrígan: The God He Refused
The Morrígan deserves her own entry because she is, in my opinion, the most fascinating figure in the entire Irish pantheon.
She is a goddess of fate, war, and death — a shape-shifter who appears as a crow, an eel, a wolf, a beautiful woman, an old hag. She moves through the great stories as a force of destiny, washing the bloodstained armor of warriors who are about to die. She is terrifying and magnificent and not remotely interested in being liked.
Her encounter with Cú Chulainn is one of the great scenes in Irish mythology. She approaches him, disguised as a beautiful woman, and offers him her love. He rejects her — not cruelly, but thoughtlessly, in the way of young men who don’t recognize what they’re refusing. She tells him who she is. He is not intimidated. She tells him she will come against him in battle. He says he can handle it.
She does exactly what she promised. She comes at him as an eel, tripping him in the ford. As a wolf, stampeding cattle against him. As a heifer, charging into the battle. He wounds her each time, and each time she withdraws.
Later, she approaches him again — as an old woman milking a cow — and he, unknowingly, accepts three drinks of milk from her and blesses her for each one. Each blessing heals one of the wounds he inflicted. They have, in this strange sideways way, made peace.
But the Morrígan has already decided the shape of his fate. When Cú Chulainn is finally dying — tricked by his enemies into violating his sacred taboos one by one until he is stripped of his power — she lands on his shoulder in the form of a crow. His enemies know, then, that it is safe to approach. He tied himself to a standing stone so he would die upright, and he did.
My granny always made clear that the Morrígan wasn’t the villain of that story. Fate isn’t a villain. It just is.
Fionn mac Cumhaill: The Other Great Hero
Alongside Cú Chulainn stands Fionn mac Cumhaill (pronounced, approximately, “Finn MacCool”), leader of the Fianna — an elite warrior band — and the subject of a vast cycle of stories that are warmer, stranger, and often funnier than the Ulster cycle that gave us Cú Chulainn.
Fionn gained his wisdom accidentally. As a boy, he was apprenticed to a poet who had spent seven years trying to catch the Salmon of Knowledge — a fish that had eaten hazelnuts from the nine hazel trees of wisdom that grew around the Well of Segais, and which contained all the knowledge in the world. The poet caught the salmon at last and told Fionn to cook it but not to eat any. While cooking it, Fionn burned his thumb on the fat and instinctively put it in his mouth. That was enough. From that moment on, whenever Fionn needed knowledge or wisdom, he put his thumb in his mouth and the answer came.
He went on to lead the Fianna through generations of adventures — fighting giants, navigating the politics of the Otherworld, falling in love in complicated and usually catastrophic ways. His greatest tragedy was Diarmuid and Gráinne: his young lieutenant Diarmuid, who bore a love-spot on his forehead that made any woman who saw it fall immediately in love with him, and Gráinne, who was betrothed to Fionn but fell for Diarmuid at their betrothal feast and put him under a geis — a magical compulsion — to run away with her. They spent years as fugitives, Fionn pursuing them across Ireland with the Fianna.
In the end, Diarmuid was killed by a magical boar — the same one Fionn’s half-brother had been transformed into years before, by a curse, completing a prophecy that had always been coming for them. Fionn had the power to save him, with water cupped in his healing hands, but he let it spill twice before bringing it, and Diarmuid died. Whether Fionn meant to let him die, my granny never said. She thought that ambiguity was the whole point.
The Otherworld: What Lies Beneath
All of this — the gods, the heroes, the creatures — orbits around the concept of Tír na nÓg, the Land of Youth, the Otherworld: a place that is not heaven, not hell, but something stranger. A world of eternal youth and beauty that exists alongside our own, accessible through fairy mounds, through certain lakes, through mists off the sea. Time moves differently there. A day in the Otherworld can be a century in ours.
Oisín, son of Fionn, rode there with a woman called Niamh of the Golden Hair and spent what seemed to him three years in perfect happiness. When homesickness finally drove him back to Ireland, he found that 300 years had passed and everything he knew was gone. She had warned him never to touch Irish soil. He fell from his horse, and when he hit the ground, he aged 300 years in moments.
My granny told me that story last, usually. I think she knew it was the one that cut deepest — the idea that you can go to paradise and still pine for home. That homesickness is not a weakness but something almost sacred, a love so fierce it makes even paradise feel insufficient.
Half my blood comes from a small island on the western edge of Europe, a place that spent centuries under occupation and still somehow never let its stories die. They went underground, the way the Tuatha Dé Danann did — into the hills, into the oral tradition, into the kitchens of grannies who told them to children who were half something else and needed to know where the other half came from.
I know where it comes from. I know what moves in the fairy mounds and who wails before a death in my family and what creature watches from the standing stones and what burns at the bottom of every story my granny ever told me.
It burns like the Dagda’s cauldron — always full, always warm, feeding whoever comes to it hungry.
I come to it hungry still.
(And by the way – my other half, on my mother’s side, is Portuguese – what a combination!!!)