The First Who Ever Had It

The oldest surviving piece of Manx historical verse — the Traditionary Ballad, composed in Manx Gaelic between 1504 and 1522 — names him plainly: Manannan beg va Mac y Leirr, shen yn chied er ec row rieau ee. Little Mannanan was son of Leirr; he was the first that ever had it.

Before the saints came, before the Norse, before any of the powers that would claim the Island in turn, Manannán mac Lir was there. The old saying goes that you can see seven kingdoms from the summit of Snaefell: the Kingdom of Mann, the four surrounding countries, and Heaven. The seventh is the Kingdom of Manannán, god of the sea, whose domain surrounds the Island on every side. Sacheverell, writing the first English-language account of the Island in the 1690s, called him “Mannan-Mac-Lear, whom they believe the father, founder, and legislator of their country.” The Book of Fermoy 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.”

He is not solely a Manx figure. Manannán appears in all four cycles of Irish mythology, which is unusual — most figures are confined to one or two. In the Voyage of Bran he rides a chariot across the ocean and sees flowery plains where mortals see waves. In the Wasting Sickness of Cúchulainn he shakes a cloak of invisibility between his wife Fand and her lover, so they can never meet again. He equipped Lugh with the sword Fragarach — the Answerer, at whose point no one could lie — and the boat Scuabtuinne, the Wave-sweeper, which moved according to the thoughts of whoever stood in it. His Welsh counterpart, Manawydan fab Llŷr, appears in the Mabinogi as a quiet craftsman and problem-solver, the storms and the sea fallen away, the intelligence underneath retained.

But Mann was his home. And on Mann, his story is not mythology in the distant sense that the word implies. It is local. It is in the ground.

The Cloak of Mist

Manannán did not defend his Island with weapons. The Traditionary Ballad is specific: “It was not with his sword he kept it, neither with arrows or bow, but when he would see ships sailing, he would cover it round with a fog.” If he feared an enemy fleet, he would set a single man standing on a hill and cause him to appear as a hundred. The Island disappeared when it needed to. The enemy sailed past without knowing what they had missed.

The Manx Gaelic word for this power is cloagey druiaght — the invisible cloak. Roeder recorded the term in 1904, sitting in a list alongside fer obbah, pishag, and guesag — the wider Manx magical vocabulary still in living use at the turn of the twentieth century. It is not borrowed from the Irish féth fíada tradition. It is a Manx word for a Manx thing.

Whether anyone still believed in the cloak of mist by the eighteenth century is another question, but the old sense persisted that the Island was a place apart — sheltered, hidden, answerable to its own customs. Hall, writing in the 1880s, put it simply: the mists of Little Mannanan did not forsake the Island when Saint Patrick swept him out of it. They continued to come up from the south, conspiring with the rapid currents from the north to drive ships onto the rocks. The mist outlasted the god. Or the god outlasted the saint.

The God in the Landscape

Manannán’s presence was written into the physical Island. Cronk y Voddy was his chair, his seat of judgement. South Barrule was his stronghold, two thousand feet above the sea, the whole Island visible from its summit. The Traditionary Ballad names both as destinations for the rush tribute: some went “up to the great mountain above Barrool” and some to “Mannanan above Keamool.” Between the two, Manannán governed the Island from its high ground.

The roads to Tynwald carried his name: Bayr ny Managhan, Manannán’s Road. The midsummer gathering, the constitutional ceremony, and the rent to the sea god all converged at the same sacred site. Morrison draws the line that matters: Manannán received the yearly rent of green sedge at the Festival of the Sun on Midsummer Eve, and as the people 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.

O’Donovan recorded a tradition from the Isle of Man and eastern Leinster that Manannán “rolled on three legs like a wheel through the mist.” Whether the god gave rise to the triskelion or the triskelion to the god is anyone’s guess, but the Manx people who carved three legs on their crosses and their coins knew the story.

The Merchant Who Was Once a God

Cormac mac Cuilennáin, king-bishop of Cashel, compiled a glossary around the year 900 — the earliest dictionary in any non-classical European language. In it, he 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.”

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 could not 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.

Moore, writing in 1891, traces the process clearly: as early as the ninth and tenth centuries Manannán “had suffered the change known as euhemerisation, from an immortal he had become a mortal.” Yet 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 reduction came afterwards, deliberately. Someone decided to make the god smaller.

It did not work. The fog still comes in from the south. The rushes still go up the hill.

The God Across the Irish Sea

Manannán’s reach extended far beyond Mann. He had another name — Orbsen — and from Orbsen, Lough Orbsen in Galway took its name, because when his grave was being dug the lake broke forth from the earth. Under the deep water of our lakes, Keating writes, the Tuatha Dé Danann are still believed to reign. Wells and lakes as thresholds to the Otherworld, and Lough Corrib as one of them.

Cuillean the Smith resided on the Isle of Man — a supernatural forger “of so long-lived or mythic a nature as to be found living in all ages of pagan history.” He forged the magic sword, spear and shield for the king of Ulster. Brash argues that Cuillean may be identical with Manannán himself: both intimately connected with Mann, both forgers of supernatural weapons, both located in the province where Manannán reigned over the fairy kingdom. The Manx Gaelic phrase giolla Guillen — the servant of Guillean — survived into modern usage as a synonym for an imp, carrying the memory of the old smith long after the stories themselves had faded.

In 1896, a gold model boat was found at Broighter on the shore of Lough Foyle in County Derry. Eighteen centimetres long, with two rows of nine oars, benches, a paddle rudder, and miniature tools. It was buried in a salt-marsh around the first century BC, probably as a votive offering to a sea god — probably Manannán. O’Donovan recorded that Manannán was still vividly remembered in the mountainous district of Derry and Donegal, and was said to have an enchanted castle in Lough Foyle — the same stretch of water where the boat was buried. It is the earliest known physical evidence of devotion to a sea god in the Irish Sea world, and it predates the written sources by a thousand years.

The Saint and the Song

Christianity arrived and Manannán did not leave. The Pagan Lady of Peel — a Norse völva buried around 950 AD with the tools of her craft — was laid to rest inside a Christian cemetery. At Kirk Andreas, Thorwald’s Cross carries Odin devoured by Fenrir on one face and Christ triumphant on the other. Two religions on the same slab of stone. The accommodation ran deeper than theology.

The fishermen of Peel and Port St Mary knew this instinctively. Before putting to sea they prayed to Saint Patrick: Dy bannee Noo Parick shinyn as nyn maatey — St Patrick bless us and our boat. That was the formal prayer, spoken at the harbour, addressed to the saint. But a song called Mannanan Beg Mac y Leir also circulated among the fishing communities. The formal prayer went to the saint. The song remembered the god. Both lived in the same boat, and nobody saw a problem with that.

Teare’s daughter was still charming fishing nets in the late nineteenth century, the power passing man to woman to man through the generations. Bishop Wilson knew about the older beliefs and did not try to root them out. He understood that a bishop who tried to abolish the fairies would have lost his congregation. And the herring — the fish that was elected king of the sea — governed the courtroom as well as the water: the Deemsters swore to judge “as indifferently as the herring’s backbone doth lie in the midst of the fish.” The same fish. The same balance. The myth and the law running through each other.

The Rushes That Survived Everything

Manannán’s rent in rushes continued after the Revestment of 1765. Bundles of meadow grass carried to the summit of South Barrule, the old god’s seat, paid in darkness by people who were Christians in the daytime and something older at night. The Revestment did not know about the rushes and the Treasury had no line item for offerings to a Celtic sea-god.

A small farm adjoining Tynwald grounds still held its tenure on condition of providing rushes for the ceremony — a rent older than the lordship Parliament purchased, older than the Act of Revestment, older perhaps than the written record of the Island itself. Some said the rushes were for Manannán, though by the eighteenth century most people had forgotten why, if they had ever known. The ceremony continued anyway, because it had always continued, and the customs of the calendar year persisted with the same stubbornness as the wells and the keeills and for the same reason — they required nothing from the institutions the Revestment had captured.

Some Manx people still carry rushes to South Barrule at Midsummer. The fog still comes in from the south. The oldest parliament in continuous existence still lays rushes along its procession way, and the trace of the old god is in every bundle. Nobody planned that. It survived because it mattered.

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