Lá Lúnasa 2010

(To anyone who reads via RSS, I apologize for the post that went through Sunday. I was trying to work on a draft and schedule it ... and ended up clicking publish instead before the post was even finished. *headdesk* Even after I deleted it, it was still showing up on RSS :/ So, please ignore that post as the following was what I was going for.)

Lá Lúnasa was a great success this year.

Saturday, I finished the cleaning I had started on Friday night, and baked some blueberry cream cheese pound cake (from a dear friend's recipe which you can find here), with the blueberries harvested at my grandfather's house. The blackberries were already gone, eaten by the family with some cream when Lúnasa arrived in our locale, so I had none for this celebration.

Long was the sorrow, long the weariness of Tailtiu

"Great that deed that was done with the axe's help by Tailtiu, the reclaiming of meadowland from the even wood by Tailtiu daughter of Magmor.

When the fair wood was cut down by her, roots and all, out of the ground, before the year's end it became Bregmag, it became a plain blossoming with clover. Her heart burst in her body from the strain beneath her royal vest; not wholesome, truly, is a face like the coal, for the sake of woods or pride of timber.

Long was the sorrow, long the weariness of Tailtiu, in sickness after heavy toil; the men of the island of Erin to whom she was in bondage came to receive her last behest. She told them in her sickness (feeble she was but not speechless) that they should hold funeral games to lament her - zealous the deed.

About the Calends of August she died, on a Monday, on the Lugnasad of Lug; round her grave from that Monday forth is held the chief Fair of noble Erin. White-sided Tailtiu uttered in her land a true prophecy, that so long as every prince should accept her, Erin should not be without perfect song.

A fair with gold, with silver, with games, with music of chariots, with adornment of body and of soul by means of knowledge and eloquence. A fair without wounding or robbing of any man, without trouble, without dispute, without raping, without challenge of property, without suing, without law-sessions, without evasion, without arrest.

A fair without sin, without fraud, without reproach, without insult, without contention, without seizure, without theft, without redemption: No man going into the seats of the women, nor woman into the seats of the men, shining fair, but each in due order by rank in his place in the high Fair."

— excerpted from Metrical Dindshenchas. ed and trans. Edward Gwynn. 1925. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies: 1991. (Read Online Here.)