Chlíodhna

Chlíodhna (Clíodhna, Clíona) is one of the great female figures of Irish mythology — queen of the banshees of the southern half of Ireland, ruler of the sióga (fairies) of Munster, and in some tellings a full goddess of love and beauty.

She kept her palace in a pile of rocks five miles from Mallow, in County Cork — the place is still called Carrig-Cleena after her. She kept three brightly-coloured birds who fed on the apples of an otherworldly tree and whose song could heal the sick. Sickness, in her court, was something you could sing out of someone.

She fell in love with a mortal: Ciabhán of the Curling Locks. To be with him she did the unthinkable — she left the Tuatha Dé Danann and the Otherworld behind for a life in the mortal realm. Manannán mac Lir, sea-king of the Tuatha Dé Danann, was not having it. He called up a wave with his music and it took her. The place where she drowned is still named for her: Tonn Chlíodhna — Chlíodhna's Wave — near Glandore harbour in Cork. She is one of the three great waves of Ireland.

There's a second legend with her name on it. Cormac Laidir MacCarthy, builder of Blarney Castle, was facing a lawsuit and prayed to her for help. She told him to kiss the first stone he saw on his way to court the next morning. He did. He won, and he pleaded his case with the kind of eloquence that gets named after a stone. That stone is the Blarney Stone. Every tourist who has ever kissed it has, technically, kissed something Chlíodhna touched first.

So: a fairy queen who chose love over her own kind, who heals with song, who drowns for trouble, and who is the reason a small piece of rock in Cork is the most-kissed object in human history. Bad-ass, confirmed.

Sources: Wikipedia — Clíodhna · RTÉ Brainstorm — Clíodhna of Cork · Tales From The Wood