#and someone had claimed that Carson was all wrong for not trusting barrow about the Andy thing

[mrburnsnuclearpussy]

The YouTube commenter who said that Carson was responsible for Barrow’s suicide attempt owes me £1000000 in cash!!!!!!! :’(

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Of Gods and Mice: The Morrígan

So, today we are looking at the final Celtic Deity that has been put out by High-Rez for their game Smite. I am not entirely sure what I am going to start looking at next. I have an old Dungeon article with someone trying to ‘correct’ the Túatha Dé Danann’s depiction in... I think it was ADnD, but I am less certain of that since it is from the 1980s, and thus most of it would be me throwing rocks at Robert Graves. I think I would like to continue looking at video games for a bit, but I am not certain for a direction to go from here. I will work something out, but if any of you lot have an idea, feel free to toss suggestions for Celtic inspired media for me to pick at.

Anyways, today we are looking at The Morrígan who is the first deity I have talked about in regards to Smite who has come up elsewhere already. I am sorry if a lot of this is repetitive from what I talked about for Dungeons and Dragons here, but I think it will be different enough to be interesting. Anyways, The Morrígan is given the title, “Phantom Queen,” which is alright, but not the normal translation anymore. Anyways, let’s get into it!

So, The Morrígan is a deity who has caught a lot of people’s imaginations, and when this desire to know stuff is coupled with Celtic Study’s inability to put out accurate information, people have unwittingly in many cases drawn on super dodgy information about her. There is a ton of really dodgy stuff out there about The Morrígan, as well as Danu, and Brigid. If you want to look into Irish mythology, in general don’t trust anything you read on the internet about them. Including this, always go read sources yourself and don’t just arbitrarily believe me.

Anyways, The Morrígan is a character who shows up in a lot of Irish literature, sort of. There is this issue where The Morrígan is of uncertain... number? She is (probably) a triple goddess, except the identity of who is a part of this trinity is up in the air. The Morrígan is one of the three, and then Badb is the second. However, the third is sort of a toss up between Macha, Anu, Nemed, and any one of a number of others depending on the manuscript you are reading. Sometimes it looks like The Morrígan is the “whole” entity, while other times it seems more like she is an individual figure of the three. I personally support the identification of her as a part of a group, rather than the group itself for several reasons I will not go over since I just tried to write it all out and it became absolutely massive. She is a War deity of some sort as The Morrígan, but details past that are a bit tricky asides that she’s doing something with cattle. The other parts of the triad deal with most of the other functions. She shows up in Cath Maige Tuired, various Dindsenchas stories such as the one of Barrow River, and she pops up through the Ulster Cycle, the most infamous appearance being in the Táin Bó Cúailnge.

Now, let’s check out Smite’s lore about her. If you want to read along, you can check this out here in the Lore tab.

So, right off the bat we are in a not-great spot since ‘Fate’ is a very badly defined notion in Irish mythology, and The Morrígan is certainly not manipulating it. This is often a misunderstanding of the final prophecy she gives in Cath Maige Tuired, or thinking she has something to do with the death of  CúChulainn. She is not manipulating or changing Fate in these stories, we don’t have any solid evidence that the Irish believed that it could be altered, or if it was ironclad, or anything like that. We as an audience tend to assume that everyone functioned on the Norse Fate system, Wyrd, which can confuse a lot of people reading mythology. Many Pantheons, such as the Greeks (at times) are beyond Fate, or serve to enforce it, or for others such as the Mesopotamians, it is a tool the gods use. So, the notion that The Morrígan is manipulating Fate is right out. 

Next, quick aside. “There are none, save one, that claims mastery over [Fate]” is a flat-out silly thing to write since this is going to become (and already is) incorrect as you introduce new Deities. Tezcatlopoca for the Mexica is someone I would rank as claiming mastery over it. The entirety of the Mesopotamian Pantheon, the Hindu Pantheon who already exist in game have ascended beyond the function of Fate, the Japanese and Chinese don’t really have a notion that fits nicely enough. So, that’s a weird boastful statement that doesn’t make sense.

The lore also supports the notion that The Morrígan is a title of many different goddesses, but that is not actually regarded as a solid idea any more. More like The Morrígan is part of a group. I expect they did this because they encountered the problem where they saw more than three people in a trinity. They are using Anu, Macha, and Badb as their trinity here. These goddesses are not sisters, certainly not Anu who is (probably) the ancestress of the entire Pantheon. They were never the caretakers of Ireland, and certainly were not Psychopomps based on any evidence we have left. It is true that she takes many forms, specifically The Morrígan does that not the other entities. There are certainly wars she did not incite since there are several in Ireland before she, or the Irish Gods in general, bother to show up. She’s certainly not subtle, about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the sternum.

This lore is really interesting since it is pretty heavily drawing on modern interpretations of The Morrígan which are not totally solid. Mostly the fault of Robert Graves poisoning a bunch of wells early on. She really is not an evil deity, just rather self-centered which is rather normal for deities. She’s less anti-socitial than Lugh is in the very least, she comes to the aid of her people several times. Herself, and the other parts of her trinity help CúChulainn in his stories. She seems to like him since he’s a little slaughter machine, and that’s appealing when you’re a deity of that stuff. That work on the story of CúChulainn and Fand I mentioned yesterday has some interesting implications for the original meaning of the conflict between himself and The Morrígan.

Now, on to her artistic depiction. You can check it out here if you would like.

So, right off the bat, that clothing is entirely inappropriate for Ireland, you would be really quite cold in that little clothing. I know it’s just to make her sexy to sell her, but that’s not great so I’m going to pick at it to point out how little sense it makes. Now, I will say that the cloth looks like silk, which technically we do have evidence was reaching the Celtic regions so I’ll let that pass. And technically, she, as a queen (her name) she would be allowed to wear purple, so that’s okay. But she should really be wearing extravagant clothes, the text says that she was wearing “a dress of every color,” when she came to... like demand CúChulainn sleep with her.

The belt is very elaborate, which actually makes me think back on the other three Celtic designs all of which have had these odd looking gut-belts. No idea where this is coming. She is wearing some sort of collar or necklace it looks like, and has an arm-band. I would probably have made both of those to be torcs, it would be an accurate artistic link between all of the deities thus far. Lastly that spear is super wrong but the weapon is a big point to be artistic and dramatic, so I get that one. Oh also the tattoos again, none of that.

Her voice lines are really drenched in the notion of her being multiple entities folded into one. They’re pronouncing Badb wrong, should be Bathv, but I don’t hold not pronouncing Old Irish correctly against anyone in the hope that my adviser won’t hold it against me. The accent once again sounds Scottish, so I guess that might be intentional at this point, I’m not sure. I would need the input of someone who actually knows the game better than I do. Her voice actress is really good though, does voices for Rooster Teeth.

Her powers I can’t really say anything about, no links to mythology there. 

So, in conclusion! Once again we see The Morrígan as being marred as evil which is a big misunderstanding of her character, but an understandable one since it is what the dominant image of her that is accessible to the public insists. Celtic Studies looks at her as a more complex character, but this complexity is not represented in the sources the general public has access to. Her lore is heavily based in these dodgy depictions of her, part of me suspects that this sort of is pointing towards a bad encyclopedia being on the shelf in High-Rez’s studio somewhere. Her art once again points to this really interesting notion of being “Abstractly Celtic” which is showing up enough that I might make a note to talk to someone about since it is interesting at this point. If I can find some examples from outside of Smite in video games I certainly will. And of course she is being hyper sexualised to draw people’s attention which is not super cool to say the least. It’s too bad, Artio was pretty decent in how her depiction wasn’t hyper sexualised. In summery, it’s what we have seen before, abstractly ‘Celtic’ artistic direction, Scottish accents (I think?), and lore being drawn from imaginative interpretations.

Carson, Ciaran, trans. The Táin: A New Translation of the Táin Bó Cúailnge. London: Penguin Books, 2008. 

James, Simon. The World of the Celts. New York, NY: Thames & Hudson, 1993.