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Updated: June 26, 2025
But lone white swans though ye be, ye shall keep for ever your own sweet Gaelic speech, and ye shall sing, with plaintive voices, songs so haunting that your music will bring peace to the souls of those who hear. And still beneath your snowy plumage shall beat the hearts of Finola, Aed, Fiacra and Conn, and still for ever shall ye be the children of Lir.
That was the last story the King's Son told from Maravaun's book, "The Breastplate of Instruction." They had another little field of blue flowers to cross, and as they went across it Fedelma told the King's Son The Cloud-woman, Mor, was the daughter Of Griann, the Sun, well, and she Made a marriage to equal that grandeur, For her Goodman was Lir, the Sea.
But it is what came of all this, that a fire of jealousy was kindled in Aoife, and she got to have a dislike and a hatred of her sister's children. Then she let on to have a sickness, that lasted through nearly the length of a year. And the end of that time she did a deed of jealousy and cruel treachery against the children of Lir.
And she began to make a song for Bran, and all the people were looking at her and listening to her, and it is what she said: I bring a branch of the apple-tree from Emhain, from the far island around which are the shining horses of the Son of Lir. A delight of the eyes is the plain where the hosts hold their games: curragh racing against chariot in the Silver-White Plain to the south.
Over the waters of the wee river Margy, with its half-mile course, often sailed the four white swans, those enchanted children of Lir, king of the Isle of Man, who had been transformed into this guise by their cruel stepmother, with a stroke of her druidical fairy wand.
It is downhearted and sorrowful Lir was at that news, for he understood well it was Aoife had destroyed or made an end of his children. And early in the morning of the morrow his horses were caught, and he set out on the road to the Southwest.
Yet was Lir glad that his children were alive, and he thought of the day when the magic spell would be broken, and those so dear to him would be freed from their bitter woe. Once more were ended three hundred years of doom, and glad were the four white swans to leave the cruel sea of Moyle.
In the beginning they are, to children, only stories, but we know ourselves that we can never exhaust the value of what came to us through the story of the wanderings of Ulysses, or the mysterious beauty of the Northern and Western myths, as the story of Balder or the children of Lir.
Therefore Bove Derg asked, 'Wherefore, O Eva, come not Finola and her brothers to the palace this day? And Eva answered, 'Because, O King, Lir no longer trusteth thee, therefore would he not let the children come hither. But Bove Derg believed not his foster-daughter, and that night he secretly sent messengers across the hills to the dwelling of Lir.
And Mochaomhog was listening to them, and he prayed to God to show him who was singing that music, and it was showed to him that the children of Lir were singing it. And on the morning of the morrow he went forward to the Lake of the Birds, and he saw the swans before him on the lake, and he went down to them at the brink of the shore. "Are you the children of Lir?" he said.
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