Manannan mac Lir

Manannan mac Lir, Manannan son of the Sea, is the Irish god of the ocean and of the Otherworld, one of the most vivid and beloved figures of Irish and Manx tradition. He rides across the waves and over the land in a self-guiding boat that needs neither oar nor sail, and drives a chariot drawn by a horse, Enbarr of the flowing mane, that runs as easily over the sea as over the plain; to him the sea is a flowery, fertile plain, and its waves are his herds. He is lord of the blessed islands beyond the water, the paradisal lands of the Otherworld such as Emain Ablach, the Isle of Apples, and he moves freely between that world and this.

The Isle of Man takes its name from him, and Manx tradition remembers him as its first ruler and guardian, to whom offerings of rushes were once made. Manannan appears in some of the earliest surviving Irish literature. The ninth-century Sanas Cormaic (Cormac's Glossary), attributed to Cormac mac Cuilennain, king-bishop of Munster, already euhemerizes him as a famous historical merchant of the Isle of Man, the best sailor in western Europe, who read the weather by studying the sky, showing the god being reinterpreted as a skilled human even in an early medieval Christian-scholarly setting. In the earlier voyage-tale Immram Brain, Manannan appears riding his chariot across the waves to greet the hero Bran, identifying himself by name and foretelling the birth of his own son, Mongan, one of the oldest literary appearances of the god as a divine rather than euhemerized figure.

Manannan is above all a master of magic and illusion, and he possesses a wealth of wonderful objects that he lends and gives to the heroes and gods of the tales. He owns a cloak of mist that he can sweep between two people to part them forever, and which he shakes to raise concealing fogs; a crane bag that holds his treasures, full at high tide and empty at the ebb; a sword named Fragarach, the Answerer, that no armour can withstand; and magical swine that can be eaten and yet are alive again the next day, providing an endless feast. He gives the god Lugh his marvellous horse and boat, and he fosters and protects heroes, appearing and vanishing in disguise.

In the later tales he is a trickster and shape-shifter as much as a sea-lord, a figure of glamour and enchantment who tests and aids mortals and gods alike. Manannan mac Lir gathers into one figure the Irish imagination of the sea and of the enchanted lands beyond it, generous, magical, elusive, the ferryman and guardian of the passage between the ordinary world and the Otherworld.