Manifestations of Sovereignty in Medieval Ireland

Description

The sovereignty goddess is perhaps the most enduring image in the Irish tradition. It is widely believed that she is inherited from native religious belief about the sacral nature of kingship in which the Otherworldly woman weds the incoming king and ensures fertility of the land and the success of his reign. However, she survives only as a trope in medieval literature, a narrative element marking the success of kingship. Herbert argues cogently that the myth is merely literary in the historical period and has no function within society beyond that. Most scholars now eschew the term 'sovereignty goddess' when dealing with the literature, preferring the more neutral terms 'sovereignty figure' or 'sovereignty woman', as in most cases she is not depicted as a goddess at all but rather as a mysterious or otherworldly figure. There has been a tendency to treat a wide variety of female figures associated with kingship as sovereignty goddesses, often without much justification, and in reality we must distinguish a range of characters not all of whom can be linked to sovereignty at all.What I would like to do in this contribution is to look again at some of the narratives about hideous hags who appear in tales to do with sovereignty. I hope to show that the hag is a far from static figure, and that there is considerable variation in her representation and meaning in different texts. There has been a tendency in some quarters to treat all stories as of equal value when assessing the sovereignty myth, and a surprisingly large edifice has been built from very late material. I hope to bring some historical perspective to the texts and thereby shed light on how the figure has emerged and developed over time.