A woman is turned into a puddle, then a worm, then a fly. She is blown around Ireland by a magical wind for fourteen years, swallowed in a cup of drink, and born again a thousand and twelve years after her first birth. Then a man wins her back from her second husband over a board game. The Irish told this in three linked parts, and it is the most sustained piece of enchantment in the medieval literature of these islands.
Part one: how Óengus got a house, and how Midir got a bride
It starts with a different seduction. The Dagda wanted Boand, who was married to Elcmar of the Brú — the great mound on the Boyne. He sent the husband away on an errand and stopped the sun in the sky, so that nine months went by inside what everyone experienced as a single day, and the child was conceived, carried and born before Elcmar came home to his dinner.
That child was Óengus, fostered out to Midir at Brí Léith. At nine he was taunted for having no known family, and his father's advice was a piece of legal sharp practice: go to Elcmar at Samhain, when nobody carries weapons, take weapons, and demand the kingship of the Brú for a day and a night. When the day and the night were up and Elcmar asked for his house back, Óengus refused on the grounds that all of time is nothing but days and nights, and kept it.
Midir came visiting and was hurt in a boys' quarrel — a holly rod thrown at random took out one of his eyes. The physician Dian Cécht put it back, but Midir demanded compensation anyway, and his price was a chariot, a cloak, and the most beautiful woman in Ireland.
That was Étaín, daughter of Ailill. Her father set a bride-price that could not be met — plains cleared of forest, rivers made to run where there were none, and the girl's own weight in gold and silver — and Óengus, with his father's help, met all of it. Midir took her home.
The three shapes
Midir already had a wife. Fúamnach had been trained in magic by a druid and she understood exactly what had arrived in her house.
She struck Étaín with a rod of scarlet rowan, and Étaín became a pool of water on the floor. The heat of the fire and the air worked on the water and it turned into a worm, and the worm turned into a fly — and here the story does something unexpected, because the fly is the best thing in it. It was the size of a man's head, purple, with eyes that shone in the dark; its wings made music sweeter than pipes and harps; its scent kept off hunger and thirst; and anyone it flew around was healed of sickness. Midir knew perfectly well who it was, took no other wife, and was content to have her near him.
So Fúamnach raised a wind that would not let the fly settle for seven years, until it came down exhausted on Óengus's chest. He could not undo the spell, but he made her a glass bower filled with flowering herbs, carried it wherever he went, and she recovered her strength inside it.
Fúamnach raised the wind again, and blew her about for another seven years, until she fell into a golden cup in the house of a warrior called Étar, and the warrior's wife drank her down without noticing. The woman conceived and gave birth to a daughter, and the daughter was Étaín — the same Étaín, one thousand and twelve years after she was first born, with no memory of any of it.
Óengus, when he found out, took Fúamnach's head off.
Part two: the High King's wife
Eochaid Airem became High King and summoned Ireland to the assembly at Tara, and Ireland declined to come, on the grounds that a king with no queen is not a functioning king.
Messengers went out and found Étaín at a spring, washing her hair, and the description that follows is one of the set pieces of Irish literature — the ivory comb, the two silver basins, the hair in two braids each plaited in four, the arms as white as snow, the whole thing catalogued from her feet to her hairline with an inventory-keeper's patience. He married her.
Then his brother Ailill fell ill with a sickness no physician could name, which was love for her, and admitted it only when he was dying. Étaín, to save his life, agreed to meet him. Three times she went to the appointed place. Three times a heaviness came over him and he slept through it — and three times a man came in his shape and talked with her.
The fourth time the man told her who he was: Midir of Brí Léith, her husband, from a life she had no memory of. He told her the whole story of the rowan rod and the fly and the wind. And he told her she could not come with him unless the king she was married to gave her up, because she would not go otherwise and he would not take her otherwise.
Ailill, incidentally, recovered the moment the thing that had been draining him left the district.
Part three: the board game
Midir came to Tara and challenged Eochaid to fidchell, the board game Irish kings played and Irish literature uses whenever a contest of wits is required.
He lost the first game and paid a stake of fifty dark-grey horses. He lost more and paid in pigs, in cattle, in a cauldron, in swords, and then in labour: clearing the stones from the plain of Míde, cutting the rushes off Tethbae, laying a causeway across the bog of Lámraige. The building of the causeway gets its own passage, with Eochaid's steward hiding in the dark to watch the work being done, and the text preserves what the workers sang while they laid the timber — the only reason we know the Irish put oxen's yokes under the roadbed.
Then Midir won a game, and named his stake afterwards: his arms round Étaín, and a kiss.
Eochaid put him off for a month. On the appointed evening Tara was ringed with armed men, the doors were locked and guarded, and the king sat in the middle of his hall with the queen beside him.
Midir was standing in the centre of the floor. He was the most beautiful thing anyone there had seen, which is the story's way of saying nothing could have kept him out. He put his weapons in his left hand, put his right arm round Étaín, and lifted her through the skylight.
The whole company ran outside and looked up. Two swans were circling the fort, joined at the neck by a golden chain, and then they went away towards the mound of the white-haired women.
The end, which is worse
Eochaid did not accept it. He spent nine years digging up the mounds of Ireland, one after another, until the people of the mounds gave in and produced fifty women, every one of them identical to Étaín, and told him to pick.
He picked. He got it wrong. What he took home was his own daughter — Étaín's child by him — and Midir came back afterwards to tell him so, and to tell him she was pregnant.
The child of that union was exposed, found by a herdsman, and raised in secret; her name means something like the cowherd's foster-child, and her son was Conaire Mór, the doomed High King whose destruction is told in another and equally famous tale. This is how Irish literature works. A love story that has run for a thousand years ends by generating the ancestry of a king who dies breaking his own taboos.
The manuscripts, and the gap
The tale is Tochmarc Étaíne, and its transmission is a small drama of its own.
Part of it is in the Book of the Dun Cow, compiled at Clonmacnoise around 1100, which is one of the oldest Irish manuscripts in existence — and the leaves carrying the middle of the story were lost. For centuries the tale was known only in fragments, and scholars worked with a mutilated text.
Then in the 1930s the missing material was identified in the Yellow Book of Lecan, and an edition of the whole three-part narrative was published for the first time in 1937 by Osborn Bergin and R. I. Best. Everything above, in continuous form, has been readable for less than a century.
The language of the oldest layer points to composition well before the surviving copies — the eighth or ninth century is the usual estimate — which makes this material considerably older than the Welsh prose tales it is often shelved beside.
How to read it
The sovereignty argument. A woman who passes from a supernatural husband to a High King, whose possession appears to be bound up with legitimate rule, and whose loss costs the king everything, looks a great deal like the Irish sovereignty figure — the land personified as a woman who chooses her king. It is the standard reading and it is worth holding lightly, because the tale never says so and because the sovereignty template has been applied to almost every woman in early Irish literature, sometimes on very little.
The Otherworld. Midir's people are not gods in this text and not demons either. They are the síde, the people of the mounds, living in a parallel Ireland at parallel courts, playing the same board games, subject to the same conventions about compensation and stakes and honour. What makes them dangerous is that they are patient. Midir waits out a thousand years, two marriages and a fourteen-year enchantment, and then wins her back inside the rules.
The rebirth. Étaín's passage through water, worm, fly and human birth is one of the clearest statements of transformation-and-rebirth in Irish literature, and it has been used — cautiously — in arguments about pre-Christian Irish ideas of the soul. It also has a straightforward literary function: the woman Eochaid marries genuinely does not know who she is, which is what makes part two work at all.
Points that puzzle readers
Is Étaín a goddess? The text never calls her one. She belongs to the síde by her first marriage and to humanity by her second birth, and the story is interested in exactly that ambiguity. Later Irish learned tradition tried to sort the síde into a euhemerised history of invasions; this tale predates the tidying.
Why does Midir play so many losing games? Because he is establishing that he can pay any stake, and because he is putting the king under obligation. Losing generously to a man before you beat him is how you make the final stake unrefusable. The causeway across the bog, built as a gambling debt, is the same move at scale.
Was there a real causeway? Bog trackways of exactly the kind described have been excavated in the Irish midlands, including a substantial oak roadway in County Longford dated by tree-rings to the Iron Age. Whether the tale remembers a specific structure or simply knows how such roads were built is unresolvable, and the description is technically accurate either way.
Why does Eochaid choose wrongly? Because the síde set the terms and the terms were designed to defeat him. Fifty identical women is not a test he can pass; it is a punishment dressed as a concession, and it lands on his own daughter.
Continue with Óengus, the Dagda, Boann, the Tuatha Dé Danann and Tír na nÓg; the Welsh Otherworld at Pwyll and the Otherworld; and the Celtic hub.