THE WARRIOR QUEEN

There is a legend concerning the well of St. Keyne, in Cornwall. When a couple are newly married, whoever drinks first from the well will rule the household throughout the remainder of the marriage. It is a charming piece of folklore, which has generated some amusing poems and songs. The well is said to have attained its power from St. Keyne, a fifth-century female hermit who tortured her body for the good of her soul. At her death, according to the legend, forgiving angels came down and removed the hair shirt which she had worn for years and replaced it with a heavenly white robe. In fact, Keyne was a queen before she was a saint, and it may be that the legend comes more from remembrance of her as a warrior queen than as a Christian hermit. She was the daughter of King Brycham of Brecknock, the tiny kingdom in the south of Wales which maintained an independent line of succession all the way from the fifth century to the tenth century. As with so many of the early Celtic saints, there is very little evidence for the historical facts of her life, since all the hagiographies are extremely fanciful and unreliable. However; we do know that Brecknock survived many attempts at conquest or violent assimilation, and we can reasonably infer that the royal dynasty of Brecknock would have been very familiar with the arts of war. It would be very interesting to go back in a time machine and see how Princess Keyne of the royal family of Brecknock in Wales ended up living the desperately poor and lonely life of a hermit in the remoteness of Cornwall. Her legend - which is virtually all we have left of her - seems to suggest that she was a woman of great power at some time in her life.

Celtic queens were clearly expected to demonstrate just as much physical fortitude as Celtic kings. Even those who did not become commanders in war, like the well-attested Boudica and Cartimandua, were expected to have warrior-like qualities. When the Irish goddess Macha gives birth to her famous twins, it is in the most strenuous physical circumstances:

Soon, a fair was held in Ulster. . . . Crunniuc set out for the fair with the rest. . .

‘It would be as well not to grow boastful or careless in anything you

Say,’ the woman [Macha] said to him.

‘That isn’t likely,’ he said.

The fair was held. At the end of the day the king’s chariot was brought onto the field. His chariot and horses won. The crowd said that nothing could beat those horses.

‘My wife is faster,’ Crunniuc said.

He was taken immediately before the king and the woman was sent for. She said to the messenger:

‘It would be a heavy burden for me to go and free him now. I am full with child.’

‘Burden?’ the messenger said. ‘He will die unless you come.’

She went to the fair, and her pangs gripped her. She called out to the crowd:

‘A mother bore each one of you! Help me! Wait till my child is born.’ But she couldn’t move them.

‘Very well,’ she said. ‘A long-lasting evil will come out of this on the whole of Ulster.’

‘What is your name?’ the king said.

‘My name, and the name of my offspring,’ she said, ‘will be given to this place. I am Macha, daughter of Sainrith mac Imbaith.’

Then she raced the chariot. As the chariot reached the end of the field, she gave birth alongside it. She bore twins, a son and a daughter. The name, Emain Macha, the Twins of Macha, comes from this. As she gave birth she screamed out that all who heard that scream would suffer from the same pangs for five days and four nights in their times of greatest difficulty. This affliction, ever afterward, seized all the men of Ulster who were there that day, and nine generations after them.

The tale is reminiscent of American Indian legends about Apache women giving birth on horseback while the rest of the tribe kept on going. There is a similar theme of a scream as an omen in the story of Derdriu or Deirdre of the Sorrows, whose scream from the womb before her birth presages great evil. Derdriu’s death is also as wilful and violent as any warrior’s:

‘What do you see that you hate most?’ Conchobor said.

‘You, of course,’ she said, ‘and Eogan mac Durthacht!’

‘Go and live for a year with Eogan, then,’ Conchobor said.

Then he sent her over to Eogan.

They set out next day for the fair of Macha. She was behind Eogan in the chariot. She had sworn that two men alive together in the world would never have her.

‘This is good, Derdriu,’ Conchobor said. ‘Between me and Eogan you are a sheep eyeing two rams.’

A big block of stone was in front of her. She let her head be driven against the stone, and made a mass of fragments of it, and she was dead.

Cu Chulainn’s trainer in arms, mentioned above, was Scathach, a female warrior and prophetess. Even more ferocious than Scathach is Aife, ‘the hardest woman warrior in the world’, who challenges Scathach to single combat, which Cu Chulainn accepts in Scathach’s place. Even so, Cu Chulainn has to use trickery to win the fight, not to mention a handhold which modern wrestling would certainly not approve:

Cu Chulainn went up to Scathach and asked her what Aife held most dear above all else.

‘The things she holds most dear*, Scathach said, ‘are her two horses, her chariot and her charioteer.’

Cu Chulainn met and fought Aife on the rope of feats. Aife smashed Cu Chulainn’s weapon. All she left him was a part of his sword no bigger than a fist.

‘Look! Oh, look!’ Cu Chulainn said. ‘Aife’s charioteer and her two horses and the chariot have fallen into the valley! They are all dead!’

Aife looked around and Cu Chulainn leaped at her and seized her by the two breasts. He took her on his back like a sack, and brought her back to his own army.

When Queen Medb is reviewing her armies with her consort. King Ailill, she is concerned about the Galeoin, a troop of three thousand men of Leinster. When Aillill asks what fault she finds with them, she answers that she finds none, and then lists their excellent soldierly qualities. The problem, she says, is that if they go with them they will get all the credit:

‘But they are fighting on our side,’ Ailill said.

‘They can’t come,’ Medb said.

‘Let them stay, then,’ Ailill said.

‘No, they can’t stay either,’ Medb said. ‘They would only come and seize our lands when we are gone.’

‘Well, what are we going to do with them,’ Ailill said, ‘if they can neither stay nor come?’

‘Kill them,’ Medb said.

‘That is a woman’s thinking and no mistake!’ Ailill said. ‘A wicked thing to say.’

In the event, the Galeoin are scattered to different parts of the army, but the point has been made that a warrior queen can be even more ruthless than a warrior king, and much less susceptible to trivial questions about honour or loyalty.

The most powerful examples of the warrior queen are the Irish battle-goddesses, the Morrigan, Badbh, Macha (who gave birth to the twins, mentioned above) and Nemhain. In the tales, the goddess appears as a washer-woman at a river ford, washing the hero’s weapons and armour in preparation for his departure from this life. She, or they (this is one goddess with many aspects), can shape-shift at will. Her favourite form is that of the crow or raven, picking among the corpses when the battle is done, the limbs are twitching, and the blood is growing cold and black on the ground. Nemhain, whose name means ‘Frenzy’, kills a hundred warriors just by shrieking her hideous scream at them. The Badbh, frequently called Badbh Catha or the Battle Crow, appears in the Tale of Da Derga’s Hostel as a hideous, crow-black hag, bleeding, and with a rope around her neck, to foretell Conaire of his death. The Morrigan or Great Queen is an instigator of war, a bringer of death and destruction as well as, seemingly incongruously, a powerful goddess of fertility. She is fickle: loving and supporting the warrior-hero when she favours him, vicious and destructive when he is out of favour. When Cu Chulainn finally dies, the Morrigan is seen perched on his shoulder.

The ‘banshee’, which is the English pronunciation of Irish bean sidhe (‘faery woman’), is a generic type of the war goddess or death goddess. Her wailing cry, which foretells death, is called in Irish the caoin, pronounced ‘keen’, which is the origin of the English use of ‘keen’ to mean ‘mourn* or ‘weep for’. There are various Irish folk legends about the bean sidhe. One is that she leads ghastly funeral processions, with an immense black coach drawn by four headless black horses, and that if any residents of a house are foolish enough to open the door when the bean sidhe knocks at it, they will receive a bowl of blood thrown into their faces.