Ever heard the story about those days when a sea mist seems to surround the Island, that it’s Manannán using his magical cloak to hide it?

Of course you have. Everyone on the Island has heard that one. You grow up with it. The fog comes in, settles along the coastline and someone says it, Manannán’s cloak. And that’s that, people smile, and agree and carry on with their days.

But have you ever asked yourself: who was Manannán? Not what was he — a sea god, a magician, the first ruler of Mann, a figure from the old stories. But who was he? Where did he come from? And how did a god end up on a small island in the middle of the Irish Sea, where people pay him in rushes and he hides his kingdom in fog?

Well, you know us cats, always inquisitive we are. I have some thoughts on this. I’ve had a long time to think about it.

Let’s start with what the Manx sources actually say, because they’re rather specific.

The Traditionary Ballad — that’s the oldest surviving piece of Manx historical verse, composed between 1504 and 1522 — puts it plainly:

Manannan beg va Mac y Leirr
Shen yn chied er ec row rieau ee

“Little Manannan was a son of Leirr; he was the first that ever had it.” The Island, he means. Manannán was here first. Before the Norse, before the Celts, before the monks and the missionaries and the kings and the bishops and Parliament. First.

The Ballad also tells you how he kept it. Not with a sword. Not with arrows or a bow. “But when he would see ships sailing, he would cover it round with a fog.” There it is — the cloak of mist, written down in Manx Gaelic over five hundred years ago. And the rent he charged was a bundle of coarse meadow grass from every landholder, carried up to South Barrule at Midsummer.

The Supposed True Chronicle of Man (which if you didn’t know, is a completely different Chronicle than the more famous earlier one still held in the British Library) fills in a little more. Manannán “was a paynim” (a pagan), “and kept, by necromancy, the Land of Man under mists.” If he feared an enemy, “he would of one man cause to seem an hundred, and that by art magic.” The Manx Gaelic word for that, if you’re interested, is cloagey druiaght — the invisible cloak. Roeder recorded it in 1904. Not borrowed from the Irish. A Manx word for a Manx thing.

The Book of Fermoy, an Irish manuscript from the fourteenth or fifteenth century, calls him “a pagan, a lawgiver among the Tuatha Dé Danann, and a necromancer possessed of power to envelope himself and others in a mist, so that they could not be seen by their enemies.” Lawgiver. That’s worth noticing. Not just a magician. A lawgiver. Someone who made rules and expected them to be kept.

And Sacheverell, who wrote the first English-language account of the Island in the 1690s, calls him “Mannan-Mac-Lear, whom they believe the father, founder, and legislator of their country.” The only tax Sacheverell could find any record of was “a quantity of rushes, which were brought him on Midsummer day.” A god whose rent was grass. A legislator whose tax was something you could pull from a ditch.

South Barrule

South Barrule. That’s where the rushes went.

It’s the Island’s second-highest peak, 483 metres, and it was Manannán’s stronghold. His summer place, Sophia Morrison calls it, though I suspect he was there rather more often than that. From the summit you can see Ireland on a clear day. Morrison says young Lugh, Manannán’s foster-son, could see his own country from there — Erin, across the water, where the Fomorians were making life difficult for the Tuatha Dé Danann.

The Traditionary Ballad names two destinations for the rushes: some went “up to the great mountain above Barrool” — South Barrule — and some to “Mannanan above Keamool” — Cronk y Voddy, Manannán’s Chair. South Barrule was the stronghold. Cronk y Voddy was the seat of judgement. Between the two, he governed the Island from its high ground.

The rush tribute is the remarkable thing. Even up until a couple of hundred years ago, people were still carrying bundles of green rushes to the summit of South Barrule on Midsummer Eve. Culture Vannin confirms it. Some Manx people still make the gesture today. And Morrison draws the line that nobody else quite spells out: Manannán received the yearly rent of green sedge at the Festival of the Sun on Midsummer Eve, and “as they sat on the slopes of his mountain, they would weave mats for his palace, for they were clever plaiters of rush. And that is why to this day rushes are strewn on the path to Tynwald Hill on Midsummer Day.”

Think about that. The rushes on the path to Tynwald Hill — the ones you walk on every fifth of July — are the same tradition as the rent paid to Manannán on South Barrule. A farm adjoining the Tynwald grounds held its tenure tithe-free on the condition of providing rushes for the ceremony. The roads to Tynwald carried his name: Bayr ny Managhan, Manannán’s Road. The oldest parliament in continuous existence, and its annual ceremony still carries a trace of a tribute to a pagan god. Nobody planned that. It just survived. Things do, on this Island, if they matter enough.

Morrison also places Manannán at Peel Castle, where he once caused a single man standing guard on the battlements to appear as a thousand, sending the enemy fleet away in terror. In another version, he made boats from sedges — grass again, always grass — creating the illusion of a great fleet in Peel Bay.

A god who fought with fog and grass. You’d think that would make him easy to dismiss. It doesn’t. It makes him hard to forget.

The Irish Claim

Now here’s where it gets complicated, because Manannán isn’t only ours.

The Irish claim him too, and their claim is older and far more detailed. He appears in all four cycles of Irish mythology — Mythological, Ulster, Fenian, and the Cycles of the Kings — which is unusual. Most figures stick to one or two. Manannán turns up everywhere, in different guises, across centuries of storytelling.

In the Voyage of Bran — eighth century, one of the earliest texts — he appears riding a chariot across the sea, and tells Bran something extraordinary: that where Bran sees waves, Manannán sees a flowery plain. The sea isn’t water to him. It’s land. His land.

In the Wasting Sickness of Cúchulainn, his wife Fand has an affair with the great Ulster hero. Manannán arrives “in a magic mist,” takes Fand back, and shakes his cloak between her and Cúchulainn so they can never meet again. Cúchulainn takes a draught of forgetfulness. The cloak doesn’t just hide islands. It separates lovers. It erases memory. That’s a different kind of power from the one the Manx stories describe, and rather less comfortable.

He equipped Lugh with the sword Fragarach — the Answerer, which could cut through any armour and at whose point no one could lie — and the boat Scuabtuinne, the Wave-sweeper, which needed neither oar nor sail but moved according to the thoughts of whoever stood in it. He owned a horse called Enbarr that galloped across the sea as if it were dry land. He had seven magical pigs that could be eaten and would reconstitute themselves for the next meal.

(I’ll confess I spent longer thinking about those pigs than about anything else in the Irish sources. Self-replenishing food. The implications are... significant, from my perspective.)

He was a trickster, too. In the Pursuit of the Gilla Decair he appears as a monstrous servant whose horse kills the Fianna’s mounts and carries fifteen warriors across the sea on its back. In the Bodach an Chóta Lachtna — the Churl in the Drab Coat — he wins a foot race against a prince of Thessaly, taunting him at every stage, then overpowers him single-handed. In a Donegal story he turns up at O’Donnell’s feast as a bedraggled clown, plays music so beautiful the hall falls silent, turns invisible, causes chaos, and leaves the gatekeeper rich.

Morrison, who knew her sources, put it simply: “He could be one thing one day and a different one the next. It depended on the mood he was in.”

I know the feeling.

The Otherworld

He ruled the Otherworld — or rather, the Otherworlds, because there seem to be several.

Emain Ablach, the Isle of Apple Trees. Mag Mell, the Plain of Delights. Tír Tairngire, the Land of Promise. Tír na nÓg, the Land of Youth. Tír fo Thuinn, the Land under Waves. Whether these are the same place seen from different angles or genuinely different realms depends on which story you’re reading and when it was written down. The Otherworld is like that. It shifts.

W. Walter Gill, who knew the Manx landscape better than most and whose Manx Scrapbook is full of things other scholars missed, wrote about “very ancient beliefs that both the Kingdom of the Dead and the Fairy Kingdom, two spheres which extensively intersect, were reached by a water-transit — a sea-strait, a lake or river, and sometimes a well.” A well. The coins dropped into the holy wells at the keeill sites, the pins and the rags and the sunwise walking — all of it directed downward, into the water, toward whatever lay beneath. And if Manannán ruled what was beneath the water, then every holy well on the Island was, at some level, a threshold to his domain.

The wells sat in church grounds, remember. Pre-Christian practice operating inside Christian space, with the knowledge and consent of the clergy. The rushes still going up South Barrule. The coins still going into the wells. Nobody saw a contradiction, or if they did, they kept it to themselves.

The Welsh

Then there are the Welsh, and the Welsh are interesting because they seem to have forgotten most of it.

Manawydan fab Llŷr — the name is the same, the patronymic is the same (Llŷr is Old Welsh for “sea,” just as Lir is in Irish) — appears in the Second and Third Branches of the Mabinogi. But he’s barely recognisable. No sea. No storms. No cloak of mist. No magical possessions. No Otherworld.

Instead, Manawydan is a quiet, patient man. In the Second Branch he’s the brother of Brân the Blessed, King of Britain, and serves as his advisor through a catastrophic war in Ireland. Seven survivors come home carrying Brân’s severed head, which continues to talk. In the Third Branch, Manawydan settles in Dyfed, where a curse renders the land barren and all the people vanish. He solves the problem not through magic or force but through craft and cunning — he discovers the enchanter responsible and outmanoeuvres him.

The same god, taken across the water to Wales, and he becomes a craftsman. A problem-solver. A man who works with his hands and waits for the right moment. The storms and the sea and the Otherworld fell away, and what remained was the intelligence underneath.

That tells you something about how mythologies work. They’re not fixed. They travel, and they change shape as they travel, and they keep the parts that matter to the people who carry them. The Irish kept the sea god. The Welsh kept the wise man. The Manx people kept the protector — the one who hid the Island in mist when enemies came, who asked for nothing but grass, who was here first.

What Happened to Him

And then there’s the question of what happened to him.

Morrison tells the story. Saint Patrick came to the Island and drove Manannán and his men out “in the form of three-legged creatures.” They “whirled round and round like wheels before the swift wind” until they came to Spanish Head, then across the Irish Sea to an enchanted island fifteen miles south-west of the Calf. Manannán sank this island beneath the sea and has ruled it ever since.

Three-legged creatures, whirling like wheels. If you’ve read the last tale in this series — about the triskelion, and the three legs, and how nobody can agree which way they run — that should ring a few bells. O’Donovan recorded a tradition from the Isle of Man and from eastern Leinster that Manannán “rolled on three legs like a wheel through the mist.” Walpole wrote that “the three legs, the arms of Man, proceeded out of the Tynwald Hill, with a little man, who was Manninagh Mac-ee-Lheir, who rolled the emblem as a wheel before him.”

The god and the symbol. The symbol and the god. Whether one came from the other, or both from something older, is anyone’s guess. But the Manx people who carved three legs on their crosses and their coins and their seals knew the story. The legs were Manannán’s legs. They were his shape when he left.

And once every seven years, Morrison says, when Old May Day falls on a Sunday, the enchanted island rises from the sea before sunrise and Manannán looks once more at Ellan Vannin.

I’ve no comment on that.

The Merchant

There is one more thing to mention, and it’s the awkward one. Somebody — a bishop, writing in the ninth century — decided Manannán wasn’t a god at all.

Cormac mac Cuilennáin, king-bishop of Cashel, compiled a glossary around the year 900. It’s the earliest dictionary in any non-classical European language, which makes it important regardless of whether it’s right. And in it, Cormac describes Manannán as “a celebrated merchant who was in the Isle of Man. He was the best pilot that was in the west of Europe. He used to know by studying the heavens the period which would be fine weather and the bad weather, and when each of these two times would change.”

A weather forecaster. The god of the sea, the ruler of the Otherworld, the one who could make a single man look like a thousand — reduced to a merchant with a knack for reading clouds.

This is what scholars call euhemerisation: taking a divine figure and rewriting him as a historical person. Christian scribes did it routinely. They couldn’t have pagan gods in their manuscripts, so the gods became kings, or merchants, or clever men who could read the sky. The storms became weather forecasting. The Otherworld became a trade route. The Voyage of Bran, written a century before Cormac, has Manannán riding a chariot across the ocean and seeing flowery plains where mortals see waves. The earlier text is more mythological, not less. The euhemerisation came afterwards, deliberately. Someone decided to make the god smaller.

It didn’t work, of course. The fog still comes in from the south. The rushes still go up the hill. The fishermen of Peel and Port St Mary, for centuries, went to sea with a knowledge of the tides and the weather that owed nothing to Cormac’s merchant and everything to the understanding that the sea belonged to someone, and you didn’t go out on it without acknowledgement.

The Manx Heritage Foundation’s schools resource card records that fishermen “in early times” prayed to Saint Patrick before putting to sea: “Dy bannee Noo Parick shinyn as nyn maatey” — “St Patrick bless us and our boat.” But a song called Mannanan Beg Mac y Leir also circulated among the fishing communities, collected in Kiaull yn Theay — the Music of the People. The formal prayer went to the saint. The song remembered the god. Both lived in the same community, often in the same boat, and nobody saw a problem with that either.

Who Was He?

So who was he?

A sea god. A lawgiver. A trickster. A foster-father. A merchant. A weather-reader. A protector who asked for grass and gave back safety. The first ruler of an island that remembers him every time the mist comes in. A figure so old that four different Manannáns are listed in the Yellow Book of Lecan, as if the scribes couldn’t quite believe one figure could carry all those stories across all those centuries.

Hall, writing about the Island in the early twentieth century, put it well: “The mists of Little Mannanan, son of Lear, did not forsake our island when Saint Patrick swept him out of it.” The saint came and went. The churches rose and fell. The lords and the governors and Parliament and the Crown all had their turn. The mist stayed.

There’s a gold boat in the National Museum of Ireland — found in 1896 at Broighter, on the shore of Lough Foyle, eighteen centimetres long, with two rows of nine oars, benches, a paddle rudder, rowlocks, and miniature tools. It was buried in a salt-marsh, probably as an offering to a sea god, probably Manannán, sometime around the first century BC. The craftsmanship is extraordinary. Someone spent weeks on it, getting every detail right, and then put it in the ground where nobody would ever see it again.

That’s what an offering looks like. Not showy. Not loud. Just the best work you can do, given to the sea, in the dark, and trusted to reach where it’s going.

Rather like a bundle of rushes carried up a hill at Midsummer.