Cailleach Bhéirre

Cailleach Bhéirre, Cailleach Béirre, Cailleach Béarra, Cailleach Bheare, Cailleach Bhéara, Cailleach Beare, Cailleach Beara, Cailleach Bhérri, Calliagh Birra [Ir., old woman, hag, nun of Beare]. The Irish sovereignty figure, whose Scottish Gaelic counterpart is Cailleach Beinne Bric. The Cailleach Bhéirre is usually associated with Munster, especially the Beare peninsula in south-western Ireland, between Bantry Bay and the Kenmare estuary, in counties Cork and Kerry; also known as Dígde, Díge, and Duineach; a Connacht variant locates her at Slieve Daeane, a hill 4 miles SW of Sligo town. She also appears to be identical with Buí or Boí, the wife of Lug Lámfhota. As the allegorical sovereignty figure, she appears to a knight or hero as an ugly old woman asking to be loved. When she receives love, she becomes a beautiful young maiden. The Cailleach Bhéirre passes through at least seven periods of youth, so that each husband passes from her to death of old age. She had fifty foster-children in Beare. Her grandchildren and great-grandchildren were peoples and races. A note in the Book of Lecan (c.1400) says that the Cailleach Bhéirre was of the Corcu Duibne, a people of south-western Ireland in pre-Norman times. The notion that she is a nun who has taken the veil is a Christian fiction, probably dating from the 8th century.

The Cailleach speaks in her own voice in a well-known dramatic monologue, widely translated under different titles. In the poem she says she is not the king's but the poet's mistress, and that she admires the plain of Femen in Tipperary, which may have controlled power and wealth. See Jo Radner, ‘The Hag of Beare: The Folklore of a Sovereignty Goddess’, Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin, 40 (1974), 75–81; Donncha Ó hAodha, ‘The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare’, in Sages, Saints and Storytellers: Celtic Studies in Honour of Professor James Carney, ed. Donnchadh Ó Corrain (Maynooth, 1989), 308–31.

The Cailleach Bhéirre has several counterparts in English, notably loathsome ladies in the Child ballad ‘King Henry’ and Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale. See Sigmund Eisner, A Tale of Wonder: A Source Study of the Wife of Bath's Tale (Wexford and New York, 1957). See also CAILLEACH BHEUR; CAITLÍN; CERIDWEN; SEANBHEAN BHOCHT. W. B. Yeats used the spelling Cailleach Buillia for this figure, and may also have implied her in his creation Clooth-na-Bare.