The Morrigan is a goddess of war, fate, sovereignty and death in Irish mythology, whose name is read as Great Queen or Phantom Queen, and who is one of the most powerful and enigmatic figures of the tradition. She appears sometimes as a single goddess and sometimes as one of a trio of related war-goddesses, most often named with Badb and Macha (and sometimes Nemain), so that she is at once an individual and a collective, a characteristically Celtic ambiguity. She is above all a shape-shifter, and her power is exercised less through fighting than through the shaping of the outcome of battle and the foretelling of death. She takes many forms: most famously the crow or raven, wheeling over the slaughter, but also an eel, a wolf, a heifer, and a woman young or old at will.
One of the Morrigan's most enduring appearances is as the Washer at the Ford, a recurring figure in Irish tradition seen washing bloodstained armour or garments at a river crossing, an omen understood to foretell the imminent death of whoever sees her; in the Ulster Cycle epic Tain Bo Cuailnge she appears to the hero Cu Chulainn in this guise not long before his own death, washing clothes and gear that are unmistakably his. The motif proved remarkably durable in Irish and wider Gaelic folklore, surviving into much later folk belief as the bean nighe or washer-woman, a death-omen figure recorded by folklorists in Scotland and Ireland well into the modern period, long after the Morrigan's own name had faded from everyday belief.