Author: Michelle Franklin, Word Count: 624
Featured in Spooky Archaeological Tales: Live Stream – BonFire Night 2022
Death is something everyone has to do at sometime or other, but the service to the Lords of the Otherworld need not be that terrible; it offers the chance of being undead, which is rather pleasant much of the time.
It is only the living who dislike the undead, because there were only so many names to go round back then; when a person died, a living relative took on their name, sons inheriting the names of their grandfathers, as not to get confused with their fathers. The dead returning meant there were now two living Mìcheils in a given family, and as the concept of a junior and senior had not caught on yet with any regularity, this kind of goings-on simply would not do.
Name envy was a worse epidemic than the undead suddenly roaming about.
The Irish did not invent death; they only refurbished it a bit.
Almost every one was expert at dying in the Early Middle Ages, because dying was generally free of charge to those who were doing it. The mourners were the ones who had to handle all the paperwork and funeral rites, which is why most people ended up spending their afterlife in the snug corner of a ditch. Ditches and the cartmen who managed them had a natural allergy to keeping records, the allergy developing when there was no money involved. Bones and bodies were such a bother, as good burials came at such a pass, but souls were well cared for and curated on the isle of Eire, ushered to the underworld by Donn.
Donn had little command over the actual dying business—people generally got on with that by themselves—but he figured that a persona’s time would be up eventually, and that time might as well be now. Death was not an attractive business: there was all the decomposition to work through, and then it took an age to accept that it was no longer attached to its vessel, and it was a dashed hard time convincing the most obdurate of souls that it was time to go.
Donn had to work through a barricade of ‘Oi down’t wanna’s. Some people did not get on with his deathly appearance and tattered brown robes, but the scythe often charmed the farmers, and the white draught horse did something for women with imaginations. Donn, however, had grown tired of chasing after the runners; his horse could outrun the wind, but ushering the dead was a taxing job, and he thought it best to appoint others for the office, to give wayward souls a something to do.
They had no means of refusal, but the promise of spine whips and flaming skulls did something to excite the morbidly inclined.
Death was made more attractive by the addition of the dullahan. The bean sídhe was always by, ready to herald a new addition to the family, but she was occupied with combing her hair much of the time and only followed certain families, and so it was decided by the Powers That Were to make the ceremony more inclusive. Unlike burials and funeral rites, the sending of the dullahan was free of charge, a delightful welcoming committee sent by Donn by way of a ‘congratulations! You’ve died!’ before introducing newly deceased to the otherworld. The long march westward to Teach Duinn, the great stone doorway to the underworld, rising out of the sea and swallowed by the tide, never opening again until Samhain, was a long journey even for the dead to make, but it was made faster by the dullahan, whose skull whip licked at the heels of those who dragged their feet, whose severed head laughed at those who cried over their mortality. A few souls who had merited the office were permitted to remain as ghosts, to haunt the deserving and the lonesome, but those who were restless and got on Donn’s on nerve were reforged for service.
It made Donn happy to furnish a soul with a new purpose. It made the restless souls less so.
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