Jessie Monk

“Mis O’ The Mountains” is a concept album based on the Celtic myth of Mis (pronounced Mish), after whom the Sliabh Mis Mountains in Co. Kerry are named. Her story has been passed down through generations of storytellers, weaving itself through the ancient corridors of time. It goes something like this:

Mis was the daughter of Dair Doidgheal, who was slain in battle by Fionn mac Cumaill. Searching through the battlefields, Mis finds his bleeding body and performs a soul-retrieving ritual, common to ancient goddesses of the Celtic diaspora: she drinks his blood. In this instance, however, despite her deep power and best efforts, her father’s soul is not retrieved, and he is handed over to the great black hands of death. Blood-stained and broken, Mis begins to metamorphosize into a monster. Thick black hair sprouts through all of her pores, nails grow and curl into claws, and feathers fold into great wings on her back. She cries, but only a rumbling groan emerges from her once melodious mouth, and she begins to fly, seeking refuge in the wild ruggedness of the Sliabh Mis Mountains. Here she will dwell for hundreds of years, milky-eyed and hungry for flesh, unrecognizable to the person she knew before this great loss.

Until… the local monarch offered a reward to anyone who could capture this mountain-dwelling monster alive. Many tried and many failed, and Mis’ dwelling became decorated by the bones of those she had devoured in her primal despair. There was but one person who imagined that this monster might be the fierce guardian to a great and broken spirit, buried deep within – Dubh Rois, the ‘gentle harpist’. Dubh entered the mountains of Mis, harp in hand, and sat himself down on a log within earshot of her. Opening himself up to that same channel that delivered the muses unto Orpheus, he played on his harp the most soothing and delicate of melodies. Mis, upon hearing him, felt something echo in the deep abyss of her heart and the milky mist in her eyes, for a moment cleared. She could see again. As if meeting a part of herself she’d never met, yet faintly remembered, she wandered closer to this strange man, letting his melodies caress a part of her spirit that was deep in slumber. Dubh played and played and played, Mis moving closer and closer until the healing bond between them perfumes the air.

Dubh then opens his cape to reveal himself to Mis, and the two make love upon the forest floor; Mis as monster – Dubh as man. And slowly their love becomes a place where Mis’ grief can melt into. Dubh bathes her in warm spring water and very slowly and ceremoniously over time, brushes away the claws, feathers, and fur that protected and cloaked her fragile, new and naked skin. And like a snake newly shed, Mis is returned to her human form; The daughter of Dair Dodgheal, brought back into her humanity by the love of Dubh, by the one who did not look away, a woman who has traversed the dark night of the soul and emerged like Inanna from the underworld, a woman called Mis, whose tail people will tell for thousands of years.

On the 25th of November 2021, Mis’ story became a lot more relevant to me, although I didn’t know it at the time. My father, who is to me a true Anam Cara, suffered an unforeseen heart attack on a morning ride with his friends. I had the night before dreamt that my brother and I were in a room with great windows, that was dislodged from the ground and spun into the air as though on a bungee rope. The next day I got a phone call asking me to ‘sing for your father’. Myself, through the phone (being 16,000 kms from his body), and his most beloved friends and family courageously fought with spirit and medical care to keep him alive, you could say we ‘drank the blood’, and if it his path to stay in his body, we must have held that gate open long enough, but his way was another, and on he went.