The King’s Question
How a high king solved a same-sex paternity case with good manners in medieval Ireland
An Irish tale, written down somewhere between the tenth and twelfth centuries but set in the 760s, has a woman walking into the high king of Ireland's assembly at Tailtiu with a baby in her arms and a problem only he could solve. She hadn't slept with a man in years, she said, and yet she had just given birth to this child. She wanted the father named but how to know who he was?
The king was Niall Frossach, high king from 763.1 His name meant “showery,” because at his birth showers of silver, wheat and blood were said to have fallen over Fahan in Inishowen, in Donegal. The sky, in other words, had announced in advance that here was a king under whom the country would prosper. The portents seem to have held up, since Ireland in his reign was remembered as a place of plenty. So the woman had come to a king with a reputation for getting things right, and she asked him to use his fir flatha, his “ruler’s truth,” a power that only a just Irish king possessed, to find the father of her child.
He listened to her story. Then he asked her a question.
“Have you had playful mating with another woman?” said he, “and do not conceal it if you have.”
She said she had. The king then worked out the rest with what we can charitably call a confident grasp of biology. A man’s seed had passed to his female partner, and from that partner to this woman, and that, he declared, was how the child came to be. He named the father on that basis, and everyone went home satisfied.
Read one way, the judgement is a model of ideal Christian kingship. A good king needs a hard case to be wise about, and a mysteriously conceived baby is about as hard as they come. The whole tale becomes a portrait of the ruler who sees what other men cannot, whose judgement is fine enough to reach the truth lying under a tangled problem. That’s the old doctrine of fir flatha at work, rooted in a pre-Christian sense that a just king and a thriving land were bound together at something close to the cosmic level. Under a true king the cattle gave milk, the harvest came good, and even a baby of unknown origin could be traced to its father. Anyone who has ever seen Excalibur will have seen a pretty good modern rendering of what happens when a king fails.
What interests me more, though, is the shape of the question itself, and what it lets us see about how sex and intimacy were understood in medieval Ireland.
Notice that he asks whether she’d had “playful mating” with another woman, and then warns her not to hide it. The warning probably has less to do with suspicion than with privacy. Medieval Irish society didn’t much care for public talk about people’s sex lives, and a wife actually had grounds for divorce if her husband discussed their relations in public.2 A royal judgement couldn’t be held in private, since the whole point was that it be witnessed, so the king may simply have been pressing her to be honest while acknowledging the awkwardness of doing so in front of a crowd. The text even describes him as “reddening,” imdergad, which scholars take to mean he was embarrassed at having to ask about sexual matters at all, rather than scandalised by the particular kind of sex involved.3
It’s the asking that makes him blush, not the answer.
The king already knows that sex between women happens. So, the writer assumes, does the audience. Nobody stops to explain it or flag it as strange because it isn’t the revelation of the story. It’s just the door the answer walks in through.
The words used for what the women did are worth considering. Lánamnas can mean any kind of legal partnership, though it usually refers to a lawful marriage between a man and a woman. Here it’s qualified, “with another woman” (ri mnat aile), and paired with a form of rebrad, which means “sport, diversion, frolic,” and carries a sense of pleasure-seeking. So this is coupling, but not a sanctioned relationship. It’s co-pleasuring, and only by accident has anything to do with conceiving a child. The other key term, comshúathad, means a jostling or pressing together, and can shade into “wrestling,” “meeting,” “combat,” or “sexual encounter.” Phillip Bernhardt-House has suggested it works as a rough equivalent of the Latin fricatrix, though without the usual implication of substitute penetration. What’s implied here is a rubbing together of female genitalia, with a secondary sense of “mixing,” as of liquid poured from one vessel into another, and no notion of penetration at all.4
None of these words condemn. They’re playful and practical and there isn’t a trace of sin or transgression in any of them. And the later versions, because in Irish literature there are always later versions, tell us even more. A version from the sixteenth century for example, fills in the details the earlier telling left us to guess at.
