The Herds That Answer to No One

Cormac Deane
Field Correspondent, The Isles & the Otherworld

Fieldnotes — an oakwood in Connacht, late autumn

I came to Flidais the way most people do, sideways, through a story that is not really about her at all. The great cattle raid of Irish tradition, the Táin Bó Cúailnge, has a quieter cousin called the Táin Bó Flidhais, and it is there that her name survives in any real detail. The tale concerns cattle, as its title insists, but the woman at its centre is a figure of the wild herds rather than the tame ones. She is said to keep deer as another woman might keep cattle, milking them, moving among them, calling them from the trees when she has need of them. That single image, a woman milking a stag as though it were placid livestock, has stayed with every scholar and every casual reader who has ever come across it, and I understand why.

The genealogies place her among the Tuatha Dé Danann or close enough to them, and she is given a husband, Ailill Finn, before the story sends her off with Fergus mac Root, one of the great restless men of the Ulster Cycle. The medieval redactors who wrote her down seem almost embarrassed by her, or perhaps just fascinated. Some of the texts dwell on her appetite, on the claim that she required more of a man than one man alone could easily give, and it is tempting to read this the way later folklore reads such women, as a warning. I am not sure that is fair to her. Older layers of the story feel less like caution and more like description of a force that simply exceeds ordinary measure, the way a river exceeds a well.

What interests me more than the raid itself is what she does when she is not the object of somebody else's plot. She is consistently a keeper of wild abundance, the deer chief among her charges, and in a landscape where cattle wealth was the measure of a household, to command a herd that could not be fenced, bred, or fully owned was to hold a different kind of power altogether. The forest herds are hers in a way no lord's cattle are his. Some versions have her driving a chariot yoked to deer rather than horses, which is the detail I keep returning to when I walk oak woods in the west of the country. It is not hard, at dusk, with the light going copper through the leaves, to understand why a community watching hinds move through the trees without any visible master might reach for a name like hers to explain it.

The oak itself carries its own old weight in this landscape, sacred long before anyone wrote Flidais down, sheltering the kind of grove where a goddess of wild things would be imagined to keep her council. I would not claim the two are formally bound in any single surviving text, only that they belong to the same order of things, the standing tree and the herd that will not be caught, both answering to older arrangements than a farmer's fence. The versions of her story disagree on almost everything except this: that she is not fully domesticated by the tale that contains her, and that somewhere behind the raid and the marriage and the appetite is a woman who simply owns the wood, and everything that runs through it.

Cormac Deane is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Isles & the Otherworld. Passage tombs, place-names, and the long argument between them; a habit of reading the landscape through the Irish in it, and of pointing out where a translation has quietly invented a story the original never told.