Síle Ní Bhriain

Síle Ní Bhriain tells Saint Aoife for children. The reader-schools of the Aethelrock valleys have a press at the Ridgemoot, the Ridgemoot Readers, and Ní Bhriain's telling of the Legend went through three reader-school editions; the 2823 UCSD printing of the third sits on the young readers' shelf of the Ceridwen Archive, beside Brother Daire's Life, for any reader who wants the rest.

The telling opens with a warning that the story is often told badly and that the reader should know how it goes when it is told well, "because Aoife herself took trouble over the difference". What follows is the ships' telling, as the teller says it was told to them: the nurse before the saint, the sixteen years with the sick before anything happened that anyone would put in a book, the night the air folded and did not tear, and the two things Aoife said in one breath and would not pick between.

Known History

• Teller for the reader-schools of the Aethelrock valleys, published by the Ridgemoot Readers. The third reader-school edition of the telling was printed in 2823 UCSD. The Legend of Saint Aoife.
• The telling follows Brother Daire's account in every particular it reports and adds nothing to the vision. The Archive note at its foot says its one liberty is the teller's, in choosing what to leave out.
• It gives the dates in both counts — about 1200 AD, 1400 UCSD, for Aoife's coming to the well at fourteen; 1241 AD, 1441 UCSD, for her death — and names the grown-ups' argument, the scholars' Levril reading and the Ridgemoot chaplains' answer to it, without settling it: "I am not going to settle it for you. Aoife would not have."

Character Notes

The telling shows a teacher who trusts the reader with the difficult part. It slows the page down exactly once, at the place the tellings go wrong, and keeps both halves of what Aoife said, shown and not healed, as the whole point rather than a complication to be smoothed. Its moral is Aoife's discipline handed on: say what you saw, say what did not fit, and do not let anyone, not even yourself, make it tidier than it was. Ní Bhriain speaks of the Union in the first person plural — "somebody's grandmother's saint, and the grandmother was on the ship" — and of the thorn well as a thing the ships told before there was an Aethelrock to tell it on.

The record holds the name, the press and the telling. It does not give the teller's valley, clan, age or pronoun, who told them the story, or anything about them outside the reader-schools. What the record has of Ní Bhriain is the voice on the page and the shelf the book sits on; whether the teller was still telling in 2826 UCSD it does not say.

See also

• The Legend of Saint Aoife
• The Life of Saint Aoife — the account the telling follows
• Saint Aoife and Aoife (character profile)
• Brother Daire
• Aethelrock and The Celtic Union of Planets