The Legend of Enya, the Voice of Irishness, and Queen of "The People from Under the Sea"

Enya's songs of lost-ness, of wandering, betray the deep longing of a people borne to the waters, of Irishness, of the power of remembrance and nation.

Carry me on the waves to the lands I've never seen/We can sail, we can sail with the Orinoco Flow.

Enya, born Eithne Pádraigín Ní Bhraonáin, arrived at any corporate record store from the torn cliffs of Donegal that line Ireland’s Atlantic coast, a homeland she tells us is “quite wild, with mostly mountains, moors, and brown bogs filled with rushes.” It is so breathtaking and intense, Enya tells us, that it both inspires her music and brings her to emotional exhaustion.

Eithne is also the name of the princess of a legendary semi-divine race called Fomor: “the people from under the sea.” Her father, King Balor of the Evil Eye, flung her to exile on a wind-whipped isle to keep her from conceiving a baby, who, it was prophesied, would one day kill the great king. Evil Eye circled Eithne with twelve maids who were instructed to keep her from ever seeing or speaking about a lover of any kind.

With the help of a Druidess, Eithne’s lover Cian snuck into her tower and gave to her triplets, two of whom were drowned in a whirlpool, and one of whom grew to murder his grandfather, the failing patriarch.

And what followed was a golden era of peace. And the people found abundance, hope.

Despite it all, the brave mother Eithne was thrown to in the rapids, and was drowned. Soon, Eithne transformed into the river Inny herself. Running from the East of Ireland to the west, she becomes one with the great River Shannon, who, in turn, leads to the Atlantic Ocean. Shannon, too, is named after a mythological goddess, as are most of the waterways of the island. One of these figures found a magic well; another ate of the salmon of knowledge and became wise; another drowned in tears. The Irish know: women are like water. We wander, live, flow and we sing, like water.

Here, Irish group Clannad (with Enya) sing the Gaelic song from their native homeland of Donegal. The title translates as 'Virgin of the Sea' or 'Mermaid'.

Enya sang of the waters from her earliest days of performing with her uncle’s band, Clannad, in the intricate Irish language, tales of the sea, of the Druids, and of the mermaids. Like this one, “Mhaighdean Mhara,” a ballad drawn from the Irish story in which a fisherman begs marriage from a selkie, who, after raising a beautiful family on land, disappears back into the sea, forever. The song is a call-and-response between mother Mary and her namesake daughter, who waves farewell to her seaward mother with pride.

It seems that you have faded away and abandoned the love of life
The snow is spread about at the mouth of the point
Your yellow flowing hair and little gentle mouth
We give you Mary Chinidh to swim forever in the Erne

"My dear mother," said blonde Mary
By the edge of the shore and the mouth of the sea
"My noble mother is a mermaid"
We give you Mary Chinidh to swim forever in the Erne

We hear of the Irish sea shanties, the work songs that put all the sailors on deck in sync. But what about the forecastle ballads, the songs of losing the ones they loved, and of return, that they sang to themselves in the sleeping quarters at night?

Home, dearie, home. These are Enya’s songs.

The sound of in-betweenness: the voices of the seafarers who used song as a medium for the function of reunification, for continuity. For travel away from homelands that had become infested with murderous landlords who would steal the food form the mouths of Catholic babies. The soundscape of Celtic-ness was the essence of political resistance for Irish nationals beset with the ongoing violence of the anti-colonial Troubles, which were met with heavy urban bombing in the year of the album’s release.

American critic Robert Christgau dogged Enya’s breakthrough album. Her voice repulses him, he tells us: hopelessly ethereal, politically toothless, and naively antifeminist, ripe for objectification, even asking for abuse:

“Whilst…perpetrating banal verse in three languages…[Enya] makes hay of pop's old reliable women-are-angels scam. At least the Cocteau Twins are eccentric. At least [Emerson Lake and Palmer] were vulgarians. D+”

Remembrance, remembrance, this is the reason Enya makes her music. “The purpose of art is to bind people around a belief in continuity,” she tells us. “This music is the sound of something that is passed on.” Remembrance is a political act for we who fought and won a thousand years’ war against the erasure of our language, our music, our way of being. For the Irish, song was the sound of rebellion. Why else did so many Troubles-era guitarists fashion guitars their instruments from the bodies of guns. Enya’s voice, the materialization of this remembrance, is rebel music.

Enya’s producer, Nicky Ryan, sounds this sublime interpretation of his wife, lyricist Roma Ryan’s verse, in the studio, where he layers up to 500 takes. This intricacy, composition, movement is elemental and atmospheric, like the cliffs and waters. It has depth. A mermaid song, soaked in the cool damp of the sea, signals longing, anger, and resistance. A siren, a siren.

“My taste in music is like my choices of where I want to spend my time: climbing a hill overlooking the ocean or visiting Spain to see flamenco dancing because of my mother’s Spanish roots, dating back to when ships of the Spanish Armada were wrecked off Ireland [in 1588] and her ancestors settled on Tory Island. —Enya

The waters are political. The atmosphere, and the atmospheric, are political. Faeries are Druids who harness the elemental powers to thrive; faeries are Banshees who keen, wail, sing, scream out the death of a member of an ancient Irish family. They are here to make things right again.