A ninth-century Irish scribe, annotating a Latin Bible, needed a word for the Hebrew night-demon Lamia in Isaiah. He wrote Morrígan. That gloss is one of the earliest datable appearances of her name in writing, and it tells you what an early medieval Irish churchman thought she was: not a stately goddess of battle, but a monster who haunts ruins.
Almost everything popular writing says about her runs in the opposite direction, so it is worth starting from the manuscripts and working forward rather than starting from the modern devotional figure and working back.
Great queen or phantom queen — the vowel that decides it
The second element of the name is rígan, queen; nobody disputes that. The first is the problem. If it is mór, with a long vowel, the name means "great queen". If it is a short mor related to a Germanic and Slavic root for a night-terror — the same one that survives in English night-mare — the name means something closer to "phantom queen" or "terror-queen".
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century translators generally chose "great queen", which is why that reading dominates popular sources. Modern Celticists have leaned the other way, partly because Old Irish spellings mostly show the short vowel and partly because of glosses like the Lamia one, where she is plainly being used to render something spectral. Both readings are defensible. The site's position is that the choice is not neutral: "great queen" produces a sovereignty goddess, "phantom queen" produces a battlefield haunting, and popular accounts pick the first without saying that they picked.
The one, the three, and the four
She is listed among the daughters of Ernmas in Lebor Gabála Érenn, alongside Badb and Macha — the same text elsewhere naming Anann in the trio, and elsewhere again naming Ériu, Banba and Fódla, the three land-goddesses of Ireland, as Ernmas's daughters too. A medieval glossary explains Macha as a word for a crow and calls her one of three morrígna, plural, and glosses the phrase "the mast of Macha" — mast being the acorn-crop that feeds pigs — as the severed heads of the slain. Nemain, whose name means frenzy or panic, appears in the Táin screaming over armies until men drop dead of terror, and is given elsewhere as a wife of Néit, a war-figure.
So there are four names, appearing in threes, in combinations that do not agree between texts. The two coherent readings are that a single goddess is being triplicated in the Irish manner — triads are everywhere in this literature — or that several regional war-and-sovereignty figures were being pulled together by scribes who wanted a tidy pantheon. There is no way to decide from the evidence we have, and the Celtic family tree draws the node accordingly.
What can be said flatly is that none of this resembles maiden-mother-crone. That triad is Robert Graves's, from The White Goddess in 1948, generalised from Greek and modern material and then applied backwards to Ireland by writers who took Graves for a scholar. He was a poet writing a poetic argument, and he said so. The Morrígan's threes are not stages of a woman's life; they are three names for something that comes to a battlefield.
What she actually does in Cath Maige Tuired
The second battle of Mag Tuired gives her two of her most important scenes. At Samhain, before the fighting, she is found at the river Unius in Connacht with one foot on either bank, washing. The Dagda meets her there, they couple, and she then tells him she will go against Indech mac Dé Domnann and take the blood of his heart and the kidneys of his valour — and she does, handing the Tuatha Dé Danann two handfuls of the enemy king's blood before the battle starts. That is not a goddess presiding over war from above. It is an intelligence asset with a body count.
The second scene closes the text. When the Fomorians are beaten she goes to the high places, the river mouths and the hollow hills to proclaim the victory — and then delivers a second poem, a prophecy of a degenerate age ending in the collapse of the world: summers without flowers, cattle without milk, men without truth. Irish literature has nothing else quite like it. Whatever else she is, the last word in the mythological cycle's central battle-text is hers, and it is about the end of everything.
The Táin: refused, defeated, and healed by the man who wounded her
In the Cattle Raid of Cooley she first appears not to a warrior but to a bull, perching on the Donn Cúailnge as a crow to warn him. Later she comes to Cú Chulainn as a young woman offering herself, wealth and her aid; he is busy and turns her down rudely. She promises to hinder him, and does — as an eel that trips him in a ford, a grey she-wolf that stampedes cattle across him, a hornless red heifer at the head of the herd. He injures her each time.
Then an old woman appears, milking a cow with three teats. Cú Chulainn, thirsty, asks for a drink and blesses her three times over, once per teat — and the injuries he dealt her close one by one as he speaks. The episode is the tightest thing in the whole cycle: he cannot un-refuse her, but the courtesy he owes a stranger is enough to undo the damage. Modern retellings that make her simply his enemy lose the point of the scene.
At his death she is present again, in the form the folklore of Ireland and Scotland later fixed on — the woman washing bloodstained gear at a ford, so that a warrior sees his own equipment being cleaned before a fight he will not survive. The Scottish bean-nighe of much later tradition grows out of this, and it is genuinely continuous, which cannot be said of most claimed survivals.
What survives from outside Ireland
Very little, and it should not be oversold. A single Gaulish inscription from Mieussy in Haute-Savoie is dedicated to Cathubodua, "battle-crow", and the name is a clean linguistic match for Badb Catha. That is one stone. It is enough to show that a battle-crow goddess existed on the Continent under a cognate name and is not a medieval Irish invention, and it is not enough to import any Irish narrative onto Gaul. Anyone telling you what Gaulish worshippers of Cathubodua believed is inventing it.
The Macha material is anchored differently — in a place. Emain Macha, now Navan Fort in County Armagh, is a genuine Iron Age royal site with a spectacular excavated timber structure, and three separate Machas are given three separate origin-stories for its name. One of them, the pregnant woman forced to race the king's horses who curses the men of Ulster with the pains of labour in their hour of need, is the mechanism that makes the Táin possible at all.
Morgan le Fay is not her, and the crow is not a symbol set
Two claims to retire. First, the Morrígan is not the origin of Morgan le Fay: Morgen derives from a Brittonic form meaning "sea-born", and the resemblance in English spelling is coincidental. Later Arthurian writers may well have borrowed traits, but the name is not hers. Second, the neat lists of her "correspondences" — colours, herbs, festival days, tarot cards — that circulate online are modern devotional constructions, sometimes only a few decades old. The medieval material gives her crows, fords, rivers, prophecy and blood, and gives no calendar of observance at all. On what the crow has meant to other cultures and periods, symbol traditions is the wider survey; none of it is evidence for early Ireland.
Her modern life is nevertheless real and worth stating plainly. She is one of the most-worshipped deities in contemporary Irish polytheism, with a substantial devotional literature written since the 1990s. Fantasy took the name early — the shapeshifting witch Morrigan in Dragon Age: Origins, a playable Morrígan in SMITE — and generally kept the crows while dropping the sovereignty. Readers who arrive from a game and want the pantheon around her should start at the Celtic tradition hub.
Was she a goddess of war or of sovereignty, and can she be both?
Both, and the split is a modern administrative habit rather than an Irish one. Sovereignty in this literature is conferred by a woman and is expressed as a marriage; a king who rules well makes the land fertile. A figure who sleeps with the Dagda on the eve of battle and then guarantees the outcome is doing sovereignty and war in one action. Queen Medb, whose name means something like "she who intoxicates" and who describes her own husbands as a qualification for kingship, is the clearest surviving case of the same logic in a human register.
Why do the texts keep calling her a crow rather than a raven?
Old Irish badb and bodb denote a carrion crow, and the hooded crow of Ireland is the bird actually meant — grey-mantled, aggressive, and the one you see on a battlefield. English translators reached for "raven" because it sounded grander and because Norse literature had made the raven the battle-bird of choice. The mistranslation quietly germanises her.
Is there any archaeology for the washer at the ford?
Not directly, but the ford itself is not a literary invention. River and bog deposits of weapons and human remains are among the best-attested ritual practices in Iron Age north-western Europe, and boundary water — the edge of a territory, the place two armies meet — was where such deposits were made. A goddess encountered at a crossing, handling bloody metal, sits on top of a real practice even though no text from the period explains it.