Queen Medb (Méabh)

Queen of Connacht, who started a war because her husband owned one better bull, and who was killed with a piece of cheese.

Medb is the most forceful character in early Irish literature and she is not written as a villain, which later readers often find surprising. She rules Connacht in her own right. She takes and discards husbands. She is explicit that she requires a man without meanness, without fear and without jealousy, the last because she will never be without a man in the shadow of another.

Scholars generally read her as having begun as a sovereignty goddess, the figure a king ritually married to become king at all. Her name is usually glossed as she who intoxicates, which belongs to the same idea: the drink of sovereignty handed to the rightful king. Medb Lethderg of Tara may be the same figure under another name.

In the Táin it is her pride that starts everything. Comparing possessions with her husband Ailill, she finds herself one bull short, and rather than accept it she raises the armies of four provinces to take the Donn Cúailnge out of Ulster. She is competent throughout, and ruthless, and in the end she gets the bull and loses everything else.

Her death is the strangest thing about her. Her nephew Furbaide, whose mother she had killed, measured the distance across the water to the pool on Lough Ree where she bathed, and practised with a sling until he could hit an apple on a stake of her height. When the chance came he killed her with a piece of hardened cheese. She is said to be buried standing up in the cairn on Knocknarea, facing Ulster.