The Children of Lir

Lir was a chieftain of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the old people of Ireland. He had four children, three sons and a daughter, all of them beautiful, all of them gentle. Their mother died young, and Lir grieved hard.

He married again, taking his dead wife's sister Aoife, because he thought the children would love her as they had loved their mother. For a time it was so. But Aoife, watching how Lir loved his children more than anything, grew jealous. She fell sick with envy. She thought, if I am rid of them, my husband's whole heart will turn to me.

One day she put the children into her chariot and drove them out toward Lake Derravaragh. She told them they were going to visit their grandfather. When they came to the shore, she ordered her servants to kill them. The servants refused. She drew her own sword. Her hand failed her. She was not enough of a murderer for that.

She did not turn back. She made them step into the water of the lake. Then she struck them with a druid's wand and chanted the spell of changing.

The four children of Lir became four white swans.

She had not unmade them. She had not killed them. She had taken away their human shape, but she could not take away their voices or their minds. They could speak. They could think. They could remember. They were going to be swans for nine hundred years.

Three hundred years on Lake Derravaragh, three hundred years on the cold sea between Ireland and Scotland, and three hundred years on the western sea, a thousand miles from any home. Then their feathers would fall away, and they would be human again, and old, and ready to die.

Aoife went home alone. When her husband asked where the children were, she said they had drowned. Lir did not believe her. He went to the lake. He came down to the water and called their names, and four white swans came swimming to him, and the eldest, Fionnuala, opened her beak and answered him in his daughter's voice.

Lir stood on the shore and wept. He could not undo what had been done. The spell was bound to the place and to the years. All he could do was come and listen.

He came every day for the three hundred years that they were on Lake Derravaragh. People came from all over Ireland to listen to the children of Lir, because their voices, even as swans, were the most beautiful in the world. They sang in the night. People sat by the lake and forgot their own troubles for hours, listening. There were no quarrels in Ireland in those years that could not be put down by the sound of the swans of Derravaragh.

When the three hundred years were finished, the children rose and flew north, to the cold sea. There they suffered. There were storms that drove them apart. There were nights when ice closed on their feathers and they had to break it with their wings. Once Fionnuala thought all three of her brothers had been killed in a storm, and she sang a lament so terrible that even the seabirds wept. They came together again at dawn. She wrapped her wings around them. She had three brothers and only her own warmth to give them, and she gave it to them all the rest of that long winter.

When the second three hundred years were done, they flew west, to the open sea where the sun set. There no one came to listen. There was no one to remember them. They sang for themselves. They sang for the sea.

When the last three hundred years were over, the spell ended.

The world had changed. The Tuatha Dé Danann were gone. There were churches in Ireland now. There was a man called Patrick who had brought a new god, and a bell that rang in the morning. The four swans flew east toward home, but home was not there anymore.

A holy man called Mochaomhog had a small church on an island. The four swans came down on his lake. He took them in and was kind to them. He made silver chains to link them, two and two, so they would never again be separated by storms. They lived with him in peace for a while.

Then the spell ended. The feathers fell off them. They became human again, four shrunken old people, more than nine hundred years old, with their hair white and their bodies wasted away. They lay on the floor of the church. The holy man baptized them in the new faith. They died together, the four of them, and were buried in one grave, with Fionnuala in the middle and her three brothers around her, the way she had held them through the cold winters.

The old people who tell this story say that on quiet nights you can still hear the children of Lir singing on the lakes of Ireland, four white voices in the air. They say it is a lonely sound, but a sweet one, and it is hard to leave once you start listening.