Welcome to my weekly blog,  SATURDAY SESSIONS!

In this blog, for the perusal of all our students, past, present and future, I include an extract from our interactive presentation Course, Ireland and its Culture.

If you wish to ask me any question about the text, by the way, just send me an e-mail at greg@bluefeather.ie

This week, SATURDAY SESSIONS presents The Children of Lir.  It's one of our longer stories (7 pages) so you may need to read it a chunk at a time!

In ancient Ireland, King Lir was Lord of the Sea, like his counterparts Poseidon or Neptune, in Ancient Greece and Rome.

Lir's wife, Eva, gave birth to two beautiful children, Fionnuala and Aodh. The children's favourite pastime was swimming in a small lake near the castle. But Fionnuala and Aodh were no ordinary swimmers; they had gills for breathing and webbed feet! They were, after all, the offspring of the Ruler of the Land Beneath the Waves. 

One day, while they were swimming, a messenger came to them, urging them to return home as quickly as possible. When they got home, they were met by their broken-hearted father who told them that their mother had fallen into a long sleep. The children of Lir couldn't understand what their father meant by a long sleep. The King's wife was a mortal and so Lir tried to explain to the children all about what mortal humans called 'death'.  Eva had died giving birth to twin boys, Fiachra and Conn.

As the children were growing up,  Lir was becoming more and more lonely and depressed until one day he went for a stroll with Aoife, his wife's sister. Aoife had borrowed a magic cloak from her father and used this cloak to win the King's heart. The two fell in love and eventually they got married.

The King was a happy man again and the family thrived. Aoife, however, felt that she could not replace her sister, Eva. The King and his children would never stop talking about their memories of Eva.

Aoife's jealousy affected her sleep and her health in general, so that the palace doctor advised her to stay in bed until she showed some signs of improvement.   

After a year, Aoife recovered from her illness, but the experience had changed her. Staring into the mirror, she saw that her skin had aged and that she had lost her figure and her beauty.
Aoife was a changed woman now. She never laughed and played with the children any more and she and the King slept in different rooms in the echoing palace.

Indeed, her jealousy never left her because now she felt that the King and his children had cut her off from the family, as they hunted and travelled together without her. Like all jealous people, she blamed everybody else for her own failure to live her life with joy and gratitude.

One day, Aoife suggested visiting their grandfather and the children were surprised and delighted that their stepmother was becoming part of the family again.

On the journey, they stopped by a lake and she suggested the children go for a quick swim while she had a rest. The four children played happily in the water, not noticing that their stepmother was now standing at the water's edge, wearing her father's magic cloak. 

'I'm afraid I'm going to have to let you go, dear children. The only way I can get well and recover my self-worth is if I can be with your father again, like it was at the beginning. Look at me! It is you who have brought this sickness upon me, you who came between me, my happiness and my health. I am sorry, I am going to have to let you go!'

The children listened to her in shock and silence.

Then Fiachra said, 'What do you mean by letting us go? What do you mean by that?' 

Then Conn burst out, 'She wants us to die! That's what she means! She wants to kill us!'

 'But she can't do that,' said Fionnuala, about to cry, 'she can't kill us, Conn, because we cannot die!' 

'You mean die like Mom?' asked Fiachra, in his innocence.

'Mom was a mortal,' replied Fionnuala. Then she pointed to Aoife, 'Just like she is!'

'I have no intention of harming you' said Aoife, 'even if I could. But I am going to change you now so that you will not come between me and my husband ever again.'

She bowed her head and started chanting. The children, still in the water, looked at each other in fear as they saw a large red and golden circle floating down onto the lake. Then Aoife opened her cloak from which a great fireball emerged and hurtled towards them.

The fireball hit the water with a loud splash and a hiss and huge billows of steam rose over the children as they gradually lost all feelings in their fingers, hands, arms, toes, feet, legs and bodies.

The eldest boy, Aodh, tried to lift himself out of the water and attack Aoife but he felt as if he was in a dream. His arms flailed about furiously, but nothing happened, nothing except the splashing of water. Then he turned to look at his brothers and sister, only to see that they had all been turned into the most beautiful swans he had ever seen. 

He too had become a swan.

Aoife then told them solemnly that they would spend nine hundred years in their present form as swans; three hundred years on Lough Derravaragh, three hundred year on the Straits of Moyle and three hundred years on the Isle of Inish Glora. But she also told them that the spell would end suddenly one day after the nine hundred years had passed, when out of the blue they would hear the toll of a church bell.

'I am sorry that it has come to this, my dear children,' said Aoife. 'I will leave you know.' 

Lir didn't know where his family had gone, so he mounted his horse and accompanied by his knights, searched all over the palace grounds. When they found Aoife, she told him that the children had been playing in the woods and that they were attacked and killed by wild boars. They had been eaten by the wild animals of the wood by the time she knew what had happened.

This made no sense to the King. He was now tortured with doubt. Could his children, the sons of Eva, have been mortal after all? Could they have really died? And if not, what could have really happened to them? Could Aoife...no, such a thought was insane! Aoife loved the children, even though her illness had kept her away from them for so long.

Time passed and the King had once again fallen into a deep sadness. Nothing in Aoife's power could restore the love they'd once had for one another. Love was her only hope of feeling young and restoring her good looks again, but alas, instead she seemed to be ageing by the day.

One day, the melancholic King was walking with his knights along Lake Derravaragh which was just a few miles from the palace. As he stood in silence by the lakeshore, a beautiful swan gracefully approached him on the water and looked at him lovingly in the eye. The knights could see that the swan was silently communicating with the King. Fionnuala, now in swan form, was telling him what Aoife had done to them.

In a rage, Lir returned to the palace with his knights and had Aoife arrested and banished into exile for the rest of her mortal life.  

Every day, Lir faithfully visited his children and swam and played with them in the lake. He had found some happiness again, although his heart was heavy that he had lost his children, the children of his beloved Eva.

Time passed, and the 300 years of the first phase was over.  The next phase of the terrible spell was about to begin. The swans beat their wings along the water and lifted tearfully into the sky, bound for the Straits of Moyle.  They would never see their father again. 

Their time on the Northern Straits of Moyle was more challenging. There were frequent storms which often separated them for days at a time.

Another 300 years passed and the children of Lir left the cold and windy Straits of Moyle, making their way westwards over Lough Derravaragh, where they had played with their father so many years before. They flew over the land, hoping to find their father's castle, but it was now nothing more than ruins. They wept as they flew because they knew the time of Lir and the Tuatha De Danann was gone. 

On and on they flew until they reached the waters of Inish Glora. It was quieter here but time passed slowly.

One day, an old man named Mochua visited Inish Glora and became friendly with the new and beautiful arrivals on the lake.   Mochua was a holy man and he built a small chapel beside the lake. The swans would waddle up to the chapel where Mochua gave them some bread crumbs. He had been collecting old swords, shields and other bits of metal from around the countryside to make a bell for his little church.

Some years later, Mochua finished making his bell which he mounted outside the front door of the church.

One morning, before the sun rose, he looked out over the lake and could not see the swans. He wondered if, by ringing the bell, he could call them in for some bread crumbs. He decided to wait until sunrise. That's when he would ring his bell for the first time.

As the tip of the great orange disc of the sun slowly rose up over the lake's horizon and shone through the morning mist and the haze, Mochua rang his bell.

Dangggggg....

Suddenly the swans appeared in the sky, landed briskly on the lake and floated rapidly towards the shore.

Time seemed to stand still, as Mochua gazed at a red and golden circle which suddenly transformed into all the colours of the rainbow, followed by a thick, white mist which rose up after it into the blue sky and disappeared.

As all four swans emerged from the water and stood erect on the shore, Mochua fell to his knees as he saw, in awe and shocked astonishment, the webbed feet of the swans change into human feet, and the bodies of the swans transform into human bodies - an old but beautiful woman and three frail, wise-looking old men!

Mochua got on his feet and ran to the shore to embrace them. He helped them make their way to his little church where each of them, like children, took turns to ring his precious bell. Danggggg!....

Then they all went into the church together. Mochua was on his knees praying and the four siblings sat peacefully beside one another on the church pew. 

Then, as a sunbeam shone through the dust from a little hole in the roof, all four children of Lir, the oldest people in the whole world, looked up and smiled, held each other's hand, drew one long deep and final breath, slowly exhaled, and died.

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