August | Tailtiu and the HAG
Has the queen of first harvests been misunderstood?
Great that deed that was done with the axe's help by Taltiu, the reclaiming of meadowland from the even wood by Taltiu daughter of Magmor. 1
Queen of Teltown
In Irish mythology, Tailtiu was the last Queen of the Fir Bolg. Her husband, Eochaidh mac Eirc, was killed by the Tuatha de Danann in the First Battle of Moytura. After their victory, in order to establish good relations with the Fir Bolg people, the Danann gave her one of their noble-born sons, Lugh, to foster. Fosterage was common practice in ancient Ireland.
Tailtiu retired to the area located on the River Blackwater between Navan and Kells, now known as Teltown. In Irish, its name is Tailten. Here she established her home, and set about the back-breaking task of clearing the land.
Meanwhile, she raised Lugh as if he were her own. She found for him all the best tutors, and had him trained not just in the arts of battle and strategy as befitted a high-born son, but in music, poetry, healing, the secrets of the forge, and many other skills besides.
When Tailtiu died, Lugh buried her beneath a great mound at her beloved Teltown, and set up the Tailten games, known as the Oenach Tailten, in her honour every year at Lughnasadh (August 1st), that she might never be forgotten. This festival continued on, in some form or other, well into the nineteenth century.
A Complex Archaeological Landscape
Teltown is a vast and complex ancient site of some significance dating to the Iron Age. Features include the remnants of mounds, ring forts, earthen ramparts, artificial lakes, and an ancient roadway, but much of these have been erased from the landscape through centuries of farming.
I came to see Donaghpatrick Church, and Rath Airthir, which means ‘the Eastern Fort’. Donaghpatrick, from Domnach Pádraig, means the ‘church of St Patrick’. According to legend, Conaill, brother of High King Laoighre, gave the land to St Patrick after his baptism.
It’s hard to imagine that the Irish would have handed over such an important site so willingly, but not so hard to imagine why Patrick would have wanted it. What better way to stamp out pagan activities than to establish a Christian church right there in the middle of such an ancient sacred landscape?
Donaghpatrick Church
In fact, there are six churches in total, though not all are still in use. Donaghpatrick is itself very intriguing. Built in 1896, it appears to be constructed upon a mound or platform, possibly an earlier ancient one, and contains a standing stone, and the old medieval font from the previous church in its grounds. It has been attached to a medieval tower house, which has a strange stone head embedded three quarters of the way up one wall, slightly offset to the right. Could this be the weathered remains of a Sheelanagig figure?
Rath Airthir
If you stand with your back to the church, Rath Airthir faces directly opposite, in a field just across the road. It is a trivallate ringfort, meaning it has three ramparts circling it, and stands at around 30m (98ft) in diameter. The ramparts could not be seen from this angle, but even so, it really is quite spectacular.
Apparently, Rath Airthir has been identified by archaeologist Michael Herity as the Tredua (triple rampart) fort of Tailtú, as noted in an early Irish text known as the Metrical Dindshenchas, or ‘lore of places’, some of its content dating as early as the eleventh century. 2
The triple rampart of Tailtiu, famed beyond all lands, the spot where the kings used to fast, with laymen, with clerics, with hundreds of headmen, that no disease might visit the land of Erin.
The author of the Metrical Dindshenchas clearly associates this site with ancient Kingship purification rites. The triple rampart certainly marks the site as a place of particular significance, and reminds me of the Hill Of Ward, which is the location of a quadrivallate enclosure associated with another goddess, Tlachtga.
I was gutted when I walked up the road and found a sign on the gate prohibiting entry, but one has to respect the wishes of private landowners; trespassing does no one any favours.
Rath Airthir was, on this occasion, only to be admired from afar. 3
WISDOMS
1.
They broke my heart and they killed me, but I didn't die. They tried to bury me, they didn't realize I was a seed.
Sinead O’Connor
There is nothing more fragile, more vulnerable than a seed. Dropped or expelled from its mother-plant, blown hither-thither by the wind, finally coming to rest in the earth, where it may lay dormant for years, or begin to sprout. It will only thrive if the conditions are exactly right. It has no choice in where it lands, the patch of ground charged with beginning its transformation. It has no choice in anything. It simply lodges where it falls, puts out its root and its shoot and brings life to the planet. This tiny seed has the power to transform itself, and its surroundings. In its vulnerability lies its strength. In its resilience, there is hope. We think that what we can’t see doesn’t exist. But beneath the surface of the land upon which our feet tread, the soil teems with life, teems with hope, teems with future. Everything comes back to this, to the land. Our Mother Earth may be broken, but she is not dead, and we are all seeds.
2.
The whole time, I’d never seen, all you had spread before me. The whole time, I’d never seen, all I need was inside me
Sinead O’Connor
I sometimes feel that I have been sleepwalking through my life, that important events that happened during this incarnation of my being passed me by without lodging in my consciousness so that now, they seem vague and under water, until I see them re-lived in a movie or a book or a documentary. I saw but I did not look. I heard but did not listen. I was there but I was not present. I think now that it was self-preservation, a way of surviving relentless waves of trauma that made me feel powerless and vulnerable at the time. A switching off. Lying dormant. A way of being invisible. But being locked inside oneself is not a good way to be. Living only with one’s own thoughts, vulnerabilities, flaws and failings, with that one voice telling you that one story, over and over, is limiting, and damaging. Emerging truly is painful and slow, like climbing a mountain with the landscape exposed bit by bit, from different angles, until it is revealed from the summit in its 360 degree glory and wholeness, stopping my breath with its savage beauty. My personal landscape has its own rugged terrain and barren deserts, but I realise there are fertile plains, too. If only I could have seen that sooner.
3.
I have all that I requested and I do not want what I haven’t got.
Sinead O’Connor
I have asked recently for things that I thought were unattainable, and they came to me. The universe, your spirit guides, God, whatever you believe in, delivers, but not necessarily in the chronological order you might hope for. Here’s the thing, though: you will get only what you ask for, even if you are hoping for more. You have to get good at defining what exactly it is that you want. You also have to believe that you are worthy of it. And you have to put the work in.
You have to accept though, that some things can never be given. Let me offer a personal example. Carys’s syndrome cannot be cured; the affected gene is threaded through every cell in her body, there’s no unravelling that. Instead, I asked that she would be born alive, despite the medical prognosis. She was. I asked for five minutes of life. It was granted. I asked for more, a lifetime free from pain and filled with love and happiness. She turns 18 this December, and she is the happiest child, and the most loving. I don’t know how long her life span will be, but she is content, and I don’t want or need more than that.
4.
The important thing about “brave” is, it doesn’t mean you’re not terrified
Sinead O’Connor
According to Merriam-Webster, “the meaning of ‘brave’ is having or showing mental or moral strength to face danger, fear, or difficulty : having or showing courage”. 4 It implies having no fear, or having some degree of control or choice over one’s circumstances. It is not for me to speculate over Sinead’s life and judge if she was brave or not, but I can give examples from my own childhood: of parents who went out at night leaving warnings not to open the door to anyone; of periods of time when my sister and I as small children raised ourselves because our mother was not able to mother; a teacher with anger issues who screamed abuse into our faces if we got a sum wrong.
As children, we were not brave, we did not show mental or moral strength… we were fucking terrified, we cried and hid and took comfort from each other when our adults withheld or were unable to give it. We endured and we survived, because we had no choice. When people say, “Oh, you’re so brave, I don’t know how you cope, I couldn’t do it”, they are only making themselves feel better about your situation, not you. Having been on the receiving end of that very comment many times, I can attest to that with certainty.
5.
At some point the entire population of the earth is gonna have to look back at the kind of essence of spirituality which is basically caring about each other.
Sinead O’Connor
We are very blasé about the word ‘care’. We claim to care about many things: homelessness, refugeeism, child poverty, climate change, but what do we actually do about these issues? We throw the word ‘care’ around like some abstract concept, but did you realise its actually a verb? ‘To care’ or ‘the care of’ or ‘take care’ means to actually do something, but do what exactly?
I am a ‘carer’; I provide for my disabled daughter’s every need, and its 24-7, not just when I feel like it, not just when it makes me look good. What does that care look like? Well, it would take more than a paragraph to describe it, but basically, think of the care a baby needs, then add in medical needs, physiotherapy, speech therapy, occupational therapy as well. Being a carer is not something new to our age, its not about claiming benefits and being a ‘scrounger’ (most carers including myself get nothing for it, but even the ones that do don’t get enough to lift them out of poverty); go online and look up Shanidar 1, a neanderthal man who survived until the age of 40 (geriatric by neanderthal standards) whose disabilities were so profound that he could not have survived without being cared for by his community.
Care has become something measured today by what it costs rather than what it does, and to care is seen as weakness. Humanity seems to have gone full circle, resorting to an attitude which supports the primitive and outdated ideal of ‘survival of the fittest’. Well, it seems our lack of care is about to lead us into our own undoing. Personally, I believe care is love, and as Massive Attack claimed in their song, Teardrop, back in the 1990’s, “Love, love is a verb, Love is a doing word”. (Song still gives me shivers!)
Queen of first harvest… right?
I had never previously looked that deeply at Tailtiu’s story; another selfless hard-working mother, I thought. But when I approached this story anew for H A G, I felt as if all the disinformation fell away, leaving the bones sharply exposed. Let me explain.
Firstly, Tailtiu is vaguely described as the King of Spain’s daughter. HIs name is given as Mag Mór; this is Irish for ‘the great plain’. It would be an unusual name for a king. It could equally be the name of a place. Patricia Monaghan describes the great plain as a place in the Otherworld inhabited by the dead; 5 this seems strange to me, as Tir na n’Óg is translated as ‘the land of the ever-living’ or ‘ever-young', and is associated with the Danann, not the dead or Fir Bolg - although if Tailtiu was the king of Spain’s daughter, she was likely not Fir Bolg, either. I think there is some confusion here, because Tailtiu gave her life to clearing ‘a great plain’. To me, it seems possible that the great plain referred to signifies the landscape; Tailtiu came from the great plain and spent her life serving it, and returned to it after death. She is a daughter of the landscape. In other words, not a harvest goddess, but an earth goddess. She shaped the land just as the Cailleach did.
I had always assumed her to be fairly young when she fostered Lugh. But she had a family of her own, and adult grandchildren. Her husband was High King Eochaid mac Eirc of the Fir Bolg people, and in the First Battle of Moytura, their son, Slainge the Fair, fought by his father’s side against the Tuatha de Danann. Slainge had four sons of his own, who also fought with great accomplishment in the battle with their father and grandfather, so they must have at least been in their late teens. 6 Bearing in mind that in ancient times, people married much younger than we do today, and so women would have borne children from their mid to late teens onwards, I estimate that Tailtiu must have been around the age of 50. An older woman who shaped the land. She was a Cailleach.
After her husband, son, and grandsons were slaughtered by the Danann, so the story goes, the victors gave her one of their high-born sons, Lugh, as a foster-child, and she retired to Teltown, where she devoted herself to raising Lugh and clearing the land to form the great plain of Brega, now known as County Meath. She transformed the land from a wild tangle of forest into a fertile plain, even pulling up trees by the roots. Two reasons are given for this; she was clearing a space for planting, or she was clearing a space for the Tailten Fair. In any case, she seems to have been a free woman in charge of her own lands and destiny.
However, she was not free. The Dindshenchas state that Tailtiu was “in bondage” (p. 150) to the Danann. This means that as a bondswoman, she was locked into servitude without remuneration, although clearly she lived well and not as a slave. Her task, then, was to clear the land for the Danann, and they were not an agricultural people. They did not grow crops, they farmed cattle. According to the Dindshenchas, Tailtiu spent a year clearing forest to make way for a “plain blossoming with clover” (p.150). She shaped the land to create a meadow for grazing Danann cattle. Even today, the Department of Agriculture and Food Development in Ireland recommend grazing cattle and sheep on clover, claiming, “the benefit of clover in grassland has previously been reported through increased animal performance, increased herbage production and potential saving in fertiliser”. 7
The physical work of clearing the plain in combination with the grief of losing her husband, son and grandsons, as well as her new lower status presumably, took its toll. Tailtiu grew ill; “[l]ong was the sorrow, long the weariness of Tailtiu, in sickness after heavy toil”, according to the Dindshenchas (p. 150). From her deathbed she requested that “funeral games” (MD p. 151) be held in her honour. She died at Lughnasa, and so the sports became part of the annual Lughnasa celebrations at Teltown, where the fair took place “round her grave” (MD p.151). 8 The coincidence of her death with the festival of Lughnasa does not suggest the role of harvest goddess to me; on the contrary, the ‘evidence’ such as we have, 9and such as I have interpreted here, indicates that Tailtiu may originally have been an earth goddess, and is therefore more closely aligned with the Cailleach and the land rather than the harvest.
As always, the women of Ireland’s mythological past circle back to the land, to the fertility of the earth, where their names are remembered in the features of the landscape.
What can Tailtiu teach us?
Firstly, always seek the truth. Think critically, and ask questions of what I am being asked to believe. Of course, the writers of ancient texts had their own agendas, they may be avoiding or distorting the truth. In Ireland, early scribes were born into a patriarchal society and educated through a religious perspective. With the best will in the world, their ideas and writings are going to be impacted by that. Perhaps Tailtiu was a version of the Cailleach local to Teltown, after all, she bore different names in different regions. Perhaps she was an earth goddess euhemerised into a mortal queen. Perhaps she never existed at all outside of her legend, who can say? Regardless, there is much she can teach us.
Secondly, despite the murder of all her male kin by the Danann, she reared Lugh as befitting a prince and future king, and in return he honoured her dying wishes. If there was no love between them there was at the very least an extraordinary level of respect. She brought him up as if her were her own son, he honoured her as he would have honoured his own mother. That speaks of love to me, and forgiveness.
Work ethic. She led by example. As a queen, she probably did not have to personally labour in the field, yet she chose to. Her people were as broken by their losses as she, and probably resentful and unwilling to serve their new masters. She showed her people how to accept their fate and shoulder their burden with dignity. She did not give up, even when her labour brought on her death. She was proud and she was courageous.
She recognised her worth, and the value of her work, and she called upon the Danann from her deathbed to recognise and honour it. This is a huge lesson for us as women of the 21st century.
Finally, transformation; whether it be of oneself, or of the land, it takes time and work and dedication.
We are all of the land, we must never forget that.
Inside Cairn T, Loughcrew
I shot this short video on my phone whilst inside Cairn T at Loughcrew in July 2018. I did not know then that Cairn T would soon be closed indefinitely, perhaps permanently, by the OPW. I had often snapped photos, but on this occasion, I felt compelled to record the experience on film. With hindsight, the reason seems clear. What an honour and a privilege it was to be able to visit this sacred space so freely. What a loss to Irish cultural heritage and Ireland’s future generations that this community space has been denied them.
Please support Grandma’s Call this Lughnasadh.
Grandma’s Call, Loughcrew, Lughnasadh, Monday 7th August 2023, 7pm.
Don’t forget this is happening in less than a week! We would love to see you there!
Finally, I have launched my second newsletter and the Cailleach’s Circle, which is a live-feed chat function, just like having our own social media platform but without the annoying trolls, ads and algorithms! You can join in by logging into Substack on your desktop, or by downloading the Substack app to your smartphone.
Patricia Monaghan, The Encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology and Folklore, p. 308, now unfortunately out of print, I believe.
There is so much made-up nonsense online, ie that Tailtiu is associated with wheat, bread and apples, that she is buried in Cairn T (Loughcrew) and in the Mound of Hostages (Hill of Tara).
The earliest poems in the Metrical Didshenchas date back to the eleventh century, well over a thousand years after many of the stories it recounts took place. Like any early medieval text, it cannot therefore be relied upon as an accurate or reliable source of information, but rather as an interesting window into the early medieval world view. For all we know, it could be entirely fictitious, which is how these texts are generally understood in present-day academia. Personally, I like to think they are based on an earlier oral culture; to believe otherwise is to believe that the early Irish people had no culture, no art, no creativity at all. I choose to believe the opposite, but oral being unrecorded, there is of course no evidence to prove that. However, as Carl Sagan claims, lack of evidence does not equal evidence of lack.
I was hoping you would publish something wonderful about Tailtiu ... and here it is. Lovely for this time, and an important component to your HAG environment here. Sharing this ...
Thanks for the Sinead O’Connor quotes, RIP. If only we could go, as supporters of the purpose of "Grandma's Call." Just impossible now. But appreciated John's repost of this Substack.