So, my name is Jane Shore, and I'm the Provost, and it is my enormous pleasure. Uh, well, it's but it's a mixed occasion, shall I say. It's my enormous pleasure to welcome Ronald Harton back, our wonderful Grescian Professor of Divinity. But it's a rather sad occasion in another way because it's his very last lecture as the Grescian Professor of Divinity. And we will be marking that in a small way at the end of the lecture. But for now, I'm simply going to say over to you, Ronald.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, good evening again. The Morrigan is the best of all, the best known of all the goddess figures in medieval Irish literature next to Bridget. Indeed, she often functions as a dark altar ego to Bridget, standing for all the things that Bridget does not. Violence, sex, shape-shifting, and sorcery are at the top of the list. She has more interest in her now than she has enjoyed for at least one and a half thousand years, having gained a truly international following, above all in America, but also in many other countries, including a lot of Europe. We do not have a single depiction of her which can be ascertained from the ancient and medieval periods. And so for illustrations, I am reliant on the ever-increasing number of modern depictions of her and related Irish goddesses. But these are not just window dressing for me. They are quite important as modern icons. And as we go through, I invite you to note the similarities and also the differences between them. And I shall come back to the significance of those near the end of the talk. With regard to the Morrigan in particular, since the 1960s, she's earned a notable presence as a villainess in children's literature, above all that of Alan Garner's Alderley Edge novels and Pato Shea's Hounds of the Morrigan. She's found her way into the pop music industry, as Madonna's video for her hit single Frozen strongly featured her imagery. Like Madonna, the Morrigan has become an iconic contemporary figure, with, as I've said, a huge fan club. Unlike Madonna, many of her devotees now actually worship her explicitly, or at least work with her as a powerful spiritual being. She is coming to represent brilliantly the scary side of female power. This has an especial resonance in an age which seeks to redeem all aspects of humanity and to explore the limits of all aspects of humanity. And this talk is designed to go back to her Irish roots in quest of her, to explain her modern prominence and to get to know her better. A quest for her, like many quests for historical origins, reveals a more complicated story than may at first have been expected. First, a word about language. Pronouncing medieval Irish is virtually a blood sport for scholars. It is very, very difficult. And I'm going to translate the titles of the Irish texts concerned into English while putting the Irish names into my slides to show the uninitiated the difference. I've already started that process of anglicisation by calling the lady herself the Morrigan, as she almost always is nowadays, and not the Mauryan as she was in medieval Irish. We're not quite sure what her name meant. If it has an accent over the O, then it means the great queen, no problem. The trouble is, she has an accent over the O in a minority of medieval manuscripts, and they tend to be those that are later in the tradition. In Most and the earlier, her name hasn't got an accent. Moreover, she's not the great queen of Irish goddesses, but one among the most important. She's certainly some kind of queen. She's a Rian, but the first part of her name seems to be a word cognate with the old High German Mara and the Anglo-Saxon Mera. This means a really frightening, superhuman female. We preserve it in the modern term nightmare. Most scholars therefore now translate her as the Phantom Queen or Queen of Phantoms. Trouble here is she's not very ghostly and she isn't interested in ghosts. So perhaps the simplest and most accurate meaning of her name is the Nightmare Queen. This certainly suits her as the most important of scary Irish goddesses, although, as we shall see, there was a lot more to her than nightmare. And the confusion over her name is matched by a complete lack of consensus among experts concerning her identity. Just over the last 43 years, John Carey saw her as but one aspect of a unitary Irish goddess, a goddess of war with many names, both nourisher and destroyer. To Rosalind Clarke, followed by Miranda Oldhouse Green, she was at once a representative of war, fertility, and sovereignty. To Moya Herbert, she was more a tutelary, a protective deity, with an especial gift for prophecy. Diteo Hogan made her represent soil and its irrigation as partner of an ancestral sun god. Angelique Galermovich Epstein reasserted her role as a war goddess, representing armed conflict in all its complex guises. There seems to have been no significant scholarly work of which I know since these scholars. Perhaps it was because they covered pretty well all the possible options between them. So, what do I want to do tonight? I want to look at the figure of the Morrigan in the original text. I want to make some general reflections on medieval Irish mythology. I want to make some comparisons between it and others, and I want to explain the Morrigan's great modern popularity compared with other Irish goddesses. And I'll make an attempt now to explain the disagreements among experts, and also to propose a way of understanding the sources further. It rests upon the following proposition. The medieval authors have often been treated as Christians who, when writing about the pagan past, were rummaging among the ruins of a collapsed structure of belief. I'd propose instead that they were rummaging among the building blocks of a structure which had never actually been constructed. In other words, they weren't operating with vestiges of a coherent mythology and a coherent pantheon of deities, but with diverse traditions which had not been given the time or opportunity to become either. In cases where historians are able to trace the formation of a coherent pagan mythology, as in Mesopotamia and Egypt, the following process has been observed. It begins with a variety of unrelated and strongly localized groups of deities honored by different communities, cities, or tribes. Once those communities had been unified into centralized kingdoms, the work began of assimilating their deities into a framework suitable for a big state and which legitimized its rulers. This meant fitting the huge number of local deities into families, hierarchies, and relationships with particular roles and common stories. It was a process that took thousands of years. Pagan Ireland never achieved such a political unification, having an extreme pattern of decentralization into six or seven hundred kingdoms. As such, it's best not to compare Ireland with the huge imperial monarchies of the ancient Near East, but with Greece, which was divided into a large number of independent city-states. Nevertheless, the Greeks did develop a strong sense of distinctive and shared cultural identity with a common set of deities. The construction of one was carried out by oral storytellers and then literate poets and playwrights. But it was never complete or entirely coherent. When the Roman intellectual Cicero wrote his book on Greek and Roman deities, he made one speaker conclude there must be at least five different gods called Dionysus. They were too unlike to make up a single figure. This diversity was certainly much more apparent at the level of actual worship than that of literature, because literature had a vested interest in harmony to achieve wide circulation. Nevertheless, Greek writers never managed to agree entirely upon the family relationships and natures of their divine beings. In many ways, these disparities are part of a wider feature of literature before the invention of printing tended to fix and canonize traditions of fiction. Both ancient and medieval writers regularly accorded legendary characters, relationships, backgrounds, personalities, or names that were different from those accorded to the same characters by other authors. And this goes on a long time in the medieval Arpherian legend, the constantly changing nature and relationships of Morgan Le Fay over the years, or the wide variety of names and character given to the treacherous female pupil of Merlin, the one who gets him imprisoned, are obvious examples. But medieval Irish mythology took this disparity to an extreme degree. This suggests that by the time of Christianization, the work of rationalization and combination of different sets of divinities had hardly begun. The subsequent medieval writers attempted to undertake it at times as medieval Ireland, like ancient Greece, possessed a powerful sense of common cultural identity that overlay political decentralization. But the result was never a coherent national mythology. It needed modern times to construct that, but a confused medley of characters or stories on which different medieval writers drew in different ways for different purposes. Let me suggest now how this might have operated in the case of the Morrigan. It's generally acknowledged that she featured in the texts within an inner and an outer penumbra of associations with other beings. The outer one consisted of generalized spirits of battle and the inner one of named goddesses associated with war. The battle spirits were generic, not individual, and they're expected to swarm around major classes of armies, looking terrifying, like the one depicted by the modern artist, anticipating, encouraging, and then enjoying the slaughter. They could also accompany notable heroes to fights, because notable heroes notched up satisfying body counts. There was a fairly standard repertoire of them, though we're not exactly sure what it meant. They comprised Uafa or Adrecha, usually translated vaguely as spectres, bananach, which could mean pale spirits, or might not, Bokanach, which might have had something to do with goats, or might have had something to do with bogs. You're starting to see the problem. The Gelch Glinak, or Genitchich Glinak, which means the wild girls of the Glen, they sound wonderful, don't they? Believe me, they're not. Just keep your distance. And the Joyevnach Eachra, the demons of the air. Kristen Mills, a good modern author, has suggested the air demons are borrowed from Christian demonology. But the really interesting thing is that all Christian cultures believed in demons, obviously, but no others than the Irish gave them that a constant association with battle. Moreover, all these beings seem airborne in most appearances. They swarm like birds or mosquitoes. There may be a feature of natural history behind the tradition, that carrion birds, used to the bounty of a stricken battlefield, would recognize warbands on the move as harbingers of one. And there's some evidence that they flew above warbands, following them from above, expecting to get a feast from the people the warbands were going to kill. So if you're on the receiving end of a medieval Irish warband, the first sign of disaster coming is a cloud of crows and ravens flying in a bunch towards you slowly. Nevertheless, while ancient and medieval literature across Europe associated scavenging animals with battlefields, none had war spirits of the Irish kind. The Irish kind neither carry off the souls of the dead like Norse Valkyries, nor do they go on individual missions like Roman Furies, nor do they actually eat the dead like animals. To them, battle is a spectator sport without apparent team loyalties. They just want to see human beings die horribly. They enjoy it. The point here is that in many respects, Irish war goddesses are the generic Irish war spirits, writ large. So we come to those goddesses and the mythological tangle that they represent. Strictly speaking, there are 43 of them mentioned in the medieval text, but don't panic. Thirty-eight of them are merely names appearing in lists. When they're discounted, there are only five who feature as personalities, and they're realized there by another modern artist. They are Bainade, Macha, the Nevan, the Bhavav, and the Morrigan herself. The medieval authors believe that they formed some kind of group, but had no common idea of what kind of group that was. Three major literary enterprises in particular attempted to synthesize inherited mythology. The Book of Invasions, the Place Name Law, or Din Henachas, and the Law of Famous Women, or Barn Henachas. In these texts, the five characters are shuffled like cards in a deck, or rearranged like markings in a kaleidoscope. They are formed into duos or trios and given siblings of both sexes and parents and husbands, but the nature of all these relationships alters not only from text to text, or even from one version of the same text to another version, but sometimes within the same version of the same text. Further variations are found in other kinds of literature. In other words, this is total chaos. Sometimes the characters concerned are identified with each other, or individually with other goddesses who are usually outside the group, such as Anu or Anan and Danan. There's no coherent mythology here, therefore, but a set of names with powerful associations attached, who are arranged in different ways by different authors or different local traditions. But the associations that are attached to these goddesses are very strong and largely uniform. They're all personally terrifying and they're all connected to war, which they encourage and enjoy exactly as the collective groups of battlefield spirits do. Like those spirits, they have no interest in dead warriors, either as food or as heroic souls to be carried to an afterlife. Like them also, they never fight physically themselves. In the texts about the two battles of Moitira, however, they do deploy magic to defend their own people. That people is the main grouping of Irish gods, the Tuatha Dei, among whom they are numbered in those tales and in the Book of Invasions. The first Battle of Moitira makes the Bavav, Macha, and the Morrigan the three sorceresses of those deities, and so they are depicted by the artist on the screen. They use magic, literally Dridecht, Druid craft, to reign fire and blood and raise mists in order to spread confusion among the enemy, and believe me, having fire and blood. Rained on you from nowhere is a very good way of getting confused. In the second battle of Moitira, the Morrigan kills the opposing king by draining him of blood and strength, again apparently by sorcery. This answers to another remarkable feature of Irish myth, which is not found in Norse, German, Greek, or Roman cultures, but is present in very similar form in ancient Egypt. It is the concept of magic as being a neutral power embedded in the cosmos. As such, it's employed by the deities routinely as part of their superior abilities and wisdom. They use it to run the cosmos. But it may also be as legitimately employed by humans who are clever enough, in Ireland druid enough, to know how to do so. This legitimacy extended in both Ireland and Egypt to the use of destructive magic without too much inhibition. You think somebody's bewitched you? Bewitch them back, or find a good witch to do it. That's why both cultures were unusual in the ancient and historic worlds as having no concept of the witch as a dangerous antisocial figure within human society. Despite their interrelation, there are also some distinct differences between the big five Irish war goddesses. Baymaid can be disposed of swiftly. Though she is well cited, she's barely a personality at all, which is why it's nice to get such a fine modern realization of her. In fact, she's really an add-on, she's a plus one. Her name means the wife of Nade, and that's what she is, consort, or one of the consorts, of the war god Nade. The couple share no actual stories, save that they build a grim fortress together as a home. Ah. Nade is no more of a character than his wife, save for once being called Surly. He seems to have been viewed as an unpopular curmudgeon, like the Greek Ares. Together they are summed up as venomous in one glossary, and it's not supposed to be a compliment. There is a chance indeed that Bay Nade was not a name but a title, for another of the big five, the Nevhan, who's also married to Nade. One glossary, dictionary, that of Cormac certainly thought so, but the medieval Irish epic Par excellence, the Cattle Raid of Cooley, was clear that they're separate beings. So once again, disagreement. The Cattle Raid of Cooley indeed made the Nevhan one of four leading Irish war goddesses with Bainade, the Bavav and the Morrigan, and gave her an active role. This consisted not of appearing at actual battles, but disrupting the camp of a particular army, destined to be the losers, on three different nights. Her attacks consist of raising shrieks that throw the warriors into panic and cause a hundred each night to die of fright. That clearly is softening up the doomed army. In her third attack, she is joined by the Bathov and Bay Nade in screaming above the camp and producing a similar body count. This facility to create panic seems to be the main defining characteristic of the Nevhan. One of the metrical place name collections calls her Nevan of the Anguish Cry. As said, the first Battle of Moitira made the Bavav, Macha, and the Morrigan the grand trio of war goddesses and sorceresses, as did some versions of the Book of Invasions. So next we come to Macha, and this is where it gets quite Game of Thrones. Her identity in the literature seems to come from a simple political need, which is to explain the name of the main legendary royal center of Ulster, Evans Macha. Medieval writers thought that this meant either the twins or the brooch of somebody called Macha, which is a female name. So you can now see the kings of Ulster hiring storytellers to come up with good explanations for the name. And of course, they came up with two completely different and incompatible origin tales. One was of a superhuman woman called Macha, who has no backstory, and who, for utterly incomprehensible reasons, marries a dim-witted Ulsterman. She then gives birth to twins in traumatic circumstances after being mistreated by the King of Ulster because of her husband's stupidity and tactlessness, and she then either dies or departs, according to the version. But the other is of a ruthless human warrior queen, red-haired Macha, that's her on the screen, who traces the boundary of the royal residence with her brooch pin, hence brooch pin of Macha, and hence the other one being the twins of Macha. She's married to the king, and she subsequently rules Ulster alone and splendidly after he died, until she gets killed, too. A third and yet different Macha crops up in the Book of Invasions and the Din Henakas, as Macha the Wimp. There could hardly be a greater contrast with the others. Wife of the ruler of a race of beings who preceded the Tuatha Dei in occupying Ireland. She dies of distress after having a bad dream. I ask you. How any of these relate to Macha the War Goddess, one of the later Tuatha Dei, one of their sorceresses, is anybody's guess. That goddess is actually just a name in a list. She's given a divine lineage, but only because she's made a sister of other war goddesses who have actual stories. And the second battle of Moitira makes her die in the battle before human beings reach Ireland, so she can't be the Macha of the Twins or the Macha of the Brooch, red-haired Macha. A gloss on a text states that the severed heads of warriors were known as Macha's pig fodder. This chilling observation could, however, equally refer to red-haired macha, the human warrior queen. There is a suspicion that queen and war goddess are sometimes connected and that one lies behind the other, but it remains unconfirmed. Is everyone now thoroughly confused? Well, it is. One solution to the problem employed by some scholars has been to cut through the whole tangle by declaring that it all must refer to one being who was the patroness of Ulster. This is, however, no more than a speculation imposed upon the evidence rather than based upon it. So we come to the Bhav, who's already been much mentioned, and here there is a different sort of tangle. It's created of singulars, plurals, and articles. In one context, a bath is simply one of a particular kind of battle spirit, the badva, regularly entered in the roll call of the spectral horrors gathering to enjoy a fray. They had a specific identity, however, because a bathav was and is also the name for a real species of bird, the hooded crow, which is mostly grey but has black wings, chest, and head since hooded. It's the most common kind of scavenging bird in Ireland. It's the equivalent of the British carrion crow. Batva are therefore crow spirits, a very suitable kind to attend battlefields. The identification is closer in that they're regularly represented as flying over things, crying out, and having red mouths, all traits of the hooded crow. But they do more things than other battlefield spirits do. A bathov in the singular is often described as flying over an army and predicting its doom. And in this setting, therefore, the Batov may be regarded as the super batho, the divine queen of the whole group. She was, as has been seen, treated as a major war goddess, and she has constant interaction with humans in the stories, but they don't enjoy it because she does three things. She prophesies slaughters, she incites slaughters, and then she enjoys slaughters. Again, this modern representation captures that rather nicely. Storytellers imagined her in different guises, most unsurprisingly, made her a hideous hag. But the author of the courtship of Ferb, on the other hand, made her a divinely beautiful, pale-skinned, natural blonde in royal apparel. She has a nice line in green velvet dresses. Her mission, however, is still to raise hell by appearing in dreams to people in neighbouring kingdoms and stirring up war between them very successfully. A crucial question is whether the Bathov does anything else, such as engaging in amorous trysts or encouraging and inspiring heroes as well as depressing them. One writer inevitably married her to Nade, but usually the idea of a sexualized Bathof relies on one story. That is my favourite Irish medieval tale of all time, the famous destruction of Dardega's hostel, where anotherworldly woman turns up at the residence of a doomed king. Her mission is to seal his fate, of course. She provides a long list of names for herself, two of which are Batov and Nevan. At one point the king, reasonably, asks her what she wants, and she replies she wants whatever pleases him. This could be taken as sexual innuendo, but it's deeply ambiguous. The woman is described as having bony blackened legs, a mouth on the side of her face, and pubic hair hanging to her knees. Now, call me old-fashioned, call me unimaginative, call me pure vanilla, but I don't view all this as a turn-on. If her reply includes an invitation to sex at all, then its import is surely mocking. The episode which might show her assisting a hero is likewise taken from only one text. This is among the boyhood deeds of the supreme Ulster hero, Kuhulen, in the Cattle Raid of Coolie. One of them is to fight the reanimated corpse of a warrior encountered on a real recent battlefield. It's a Knight of the Living Dead moment for young Kuhulin. Initially, the zombie gets the better of him. Kuhulin then, however, hears the Batov speak from among the nearby corpses, mocking him for being defeated. This gives him the fury needed to fight back and win. Again, however, the import is ambiguous. She may genuinely have thought him finished. When those two references are removed, then the Bhav only appears as a predator on and instigator of violence. She has no redeeming features except possibly as an early warning system of disaster that's going to come anyway. She has no human devotees. Then or now, as far as I can tell. Okay, so we come to the star of our show, the Morrigan herself. Our mission now is to determine what it was about her that makes her stand out in this literature and explains her modern fame and band of devotees, while her sister goddesses remain known only to specialists. The first point is to determine whether she was a distinct character or interchangeable with other goddesses of her kind. Certainly some medieval authors blended her with the rest. One version of the cattle raid of Regavon calls the goddess in it the Morrigan, and another version calls her the Bavav. So they could regard her the same, or simply different storytellers were using different goddesses. The Morrigan also commonly features in lists partnered with the Bavav, Macha, etc., as one of a kind. More generally, goddesses of this sort were commonly referred to as Moriu or Marina, the Morigans. So she's clearly one of a genre, even though her definite article indicates she stands out in it, the super Morrigan. Certainly, for a lot of the time, she behaves in the text like all the others, predicting or inciting military mayhem and then enjoying it. However, she's different from the others in three important ways. The first is she doesn't merely prophecy battles, but greater things as well. At the close of the Second Battle of Moitira, she predicts both the golden age, which is to follow the victory, and the eventual decline and end of the world. That gives her the status of a cosmic CRS. Her second and third distinguishing features are that she has a distinctly amorous aspect to her, and that she promises assistance in victory to particular heroes. The two traits are associated, and as such are pivotal to two famous stories. The first is the Second Battle of Moitira, in which she meets and makes love with one of the leaders of the Tuafa Day, the earthy presiding generous god, the Dachta. In return, she brings about the death of the king of his enemies, and so helps ensure him and their people success in their war with them. The Din Halahus actually has the Morrigan and Dhakta marry each other and set up home in the bend of the River Boyne. Their union was embedded in names for natural features in the region. One place was known as the Morrigan's Garden, and a proverb awarded her a cooking hearth there. At times she was getting to look almost domestic, the Morrigan at home. She even had a son, though admittedly he's not just any son, he has three lethal serpents writhing inside him. The other text which shows her as a lover and giver of victory is the cattle raid of Cooley, where she accosts Kuh Hulin, the great hero of Ulster, in the guise of a beautiful royal woman and offers him help in war in exchange for sex. He refuses rudely. Kuhulin is a surly adolescent, so being rude is one of the things he does best. And she tries in revenge to get him killed by hampering him in combat in the shapes of an eel, a she-wolf, and a heifer. He beats her off and wounds her each time, and then she tricks him into curing each of her wounds with a blessing. This famous episode may have been a parody of the account of the way in which the goddess Athene aided Greek heroes in Homer's Iliad, which might have been known to the author in Latin translation. In that case, the Kahulin version could function as a Christian alternative of how a proper hero should treat a pagan goddess. On the other hand, it could just be a way in which some authors thought a true hero should behave generally. There's an exact parallel to this story in a text which its composer could not possibly have been read, the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, which was written around 1800 BCE or BC, and was lost to scholars or anybody throughout the entire Christian era right up to the 19th century. In the tale, the eponymous hero Gilgamesh is propositioned by the goddess Ishtar, who is a babe, a love and a war goddess. She promises him earthly success in exchange for great sex and is also contemptuously rejected. In revenge, she sends a monster against him, which he has to kill. A transcultural motif, therefore, not universal or sporadic, is that a superhero must go it alone. This episode, moreover, was not canonical. The tale of the Morrigan's attempt to get Kuhulin killed by distracting him successively in the form of three animals was widely known. But two other texts provided a different motive for her doing so. These were the cattle raid of Regavon and The Adventures of Nera. In both of them she takes against him because he rudely tries to prevent her from crossing his land with a cow of hers. It's Kohulin being obnoxious as usual. The two versions, the cattle raid and this other one, are not compatible. A reminder that the stories about Kahulin may have been part of a cycle, but they're not a single epic. And this has a bearing on the final one that features the Morrigan, the death of Kohulin. In it, the Morrigan attempts to save the hero's life by wrecking his chariot overnight and so preventing him from going on his fatal mission, but it's repaired, and he does so. All versions have this, but there's more difficulty with the common modern impression that she flies onto his shoulder at the moment of his death in the shape of a bird, usually a raven, and his enemies know the great hero is dead when they see a bird perching on his shoulder without being swatted off. This is one of the great icons. Scenes of endearing Irish culture. Kohulin dying with the burden his shoulder is the monument to the Easter Rising in Dublin. It's portrayed in murals in uniist areas of Northern Ireland. It's represented by artists again and again. But it's represented differently, you can see this coming by now, in different versions of the medieval story. The one that seems to be by far the earliest simply has an ordinary hooded crow come and sit in his shoulder. A different and later version makes this bird a human witch in disguise, who is confusingly given the name Bavan, a goddess's name, even though she's clearly a woman. Later still, the bird on the shoulder becomes the Morrigan in disguise, but not until much later. The point here is the instability and creativity of the tradition should warn us against trying to unify it. If the Morrigan is a friend to Kuhulin later in his career, trying to stop him getting killed, but an enemy earlier in it, trying to kill him, it's unlikely to be because she's forgiven him in the interim. It's much more probably because we're dealing with different storytellers with different takes on the relationship. And there's equal lack of unanimity on the Morrigan's physical characteristics. As with the Batav, storytellers visualized her as they chose. Some made her a withered crone, others a beauty, others demonic, and yet others a regal red-haired lady. Absolutely none of them ever portray her as dark-haired or wearing black, like 90% of the modern representations, and none associates her with crows or ravens, like 90% of the modern representations. Her role as a benevolent patroness of particular people and groups is quite widespread in the literature, though it's not omnipresent. One of the Bar Nahenach calls her Morigou who brings victory. One of the Dinhenach recounts of how she answered the prayer of a druid to help him win the hand of a fair maiden. It's time to draw conclusions together by asking if all these aspects of her add up to a consistent portrait of the goddess, and if so, of what kind. There are some interpretations of her that should now probably be discarded. She's not a convincing fertility or earth deity. She doesn't give lands or people abundance or increase the fecundity of crops, livestock, or marriages. Her interest in cattle, which features in some tales, is as wealth or triggers for war. Overwhelmingly, she doesn't breed cattle, she steals them. She is not a convincing tutelary goddess either, a protective goddess. She is not associated with the protection and well-being of particular provinces, kingdoms, or peoples. Nor does she match up well as a sovereignty goddess. She doesn't bestow kingship and rulership on anybody, just helps certain people win success in war or love. She's most definitely a war goddess, but of a very particular kind, which distinguishes her from the other figures which the medieval Irish placed in this category. She not only provokes and revels in war, but she gives success in war and in love to favoured people. And her favours are sometimes strongly amorous and erotic. Sex is one of her interests and pleasures. She is not the wife or lover of the war god, Nade, but of the good god, the Dukta, associated with good living, leadership, and earthy vitality. In this combination of traits, she makes up a clear group, I suggest, not with other Irish goddesses, but with major figures from other pantheons, the Mesopotamian Inanna and Ishtar, the Syrian Astarte and Anat, the Roman Venus, the Norse Freya, and in a few places the Greek Aphrodite. All were associated with war and love, or at least sex. This combination, so counterintuitive to modern sensibilities, may be accounted for in different ways. One is that all the societies concerned were dominated, at least in public life, by men. War and sex were two of the most exciting activities of testosterone heavy elite males in ancient societies. They may have felt inspired economically to conjoin them. But I think there's a deeper reason for the association. Love making and armed combat are both activities that make the blood pump and the adrenaline flow. Both can induce an ecstatic frenzy, in which inhibitions and reason are equally lost. Both involve a dramatic conjunction of bodies. Perhaps both were the more easily distributed to the same divine source. Remembering that ancient societies are cultures in which war is a series of single combats. On coming to battle, you pick the opposite number you're going to be fighting. The unanswerable question is how the Morrigan got so distinctive. It's unanswerable because we cannot place the stories as a body in a proven chronological order. We can roughly date manuscripts and also by their form of Irish, the texts within them. Almost all the texts cited in this lecture seem to derive from the 9th to the 12th centuries, with one or two possibly a little earlier, and only a couple that are late medieval or early modern later. The stories themselves, however, may or may not be significantly older than the earliest extant versions of them. As a result, it is impossible to say whether the distinctive identity of the Morrigan among Irish war goddesses was already present before history or whether it was developed by medieval writers. That reflection leads us to another: whether the modern Morrigan, usually portrayed as a black-haired woman wearing black and associated with crows or ravens, is an inaccurate one. After all, these trappings were not part of her medieval persona, though they were associated with other Irish war goddesses. I'd suggest not, because of the factor which I have repeatedly stressed, that the medieval authors repeatedly showed us different versions of her within the same broad associations, according to their tastes and those of their audiences. We should therefore be free to do the same. I think that black clad morigons with ravens on the shoulder are great. But we shouldn't back project our morigans into the Middle Ages and earlier. After all, the Morrigan throughout retains the essential elements of majesty, menace, love, and war. And it's that particular combination, as is suggested, that has ensured her survival and her modern fame. And it's one heck of a combination.