From Punished Tyrant to Enchanted King How King Herod’s Diseases Came to Include an Irish One

Within Christian traditions, Herod – no matter which one – counts as a cruel and infamous tyrant. My contribution explores the afterlife and transformation of this image in medieval Irish literary traditions. Here, Herod is said to suffer from an enigmatic entity called lon craís, literally “the blackbird of gluttony”. Irish authors will have associated Herod’s ailment of insatiable hunger, as reported by Josephus and Eusebius, with the similar affliction of an enchanted Irish king in the parody The Vision of Mac Conglinne. By comparing this Irish text with The Leabhar Breac Infancy Narrative, an apocryphal work about the birth and childhood of Jesus of Nazareth, its sources and other biblical, ancient, and medieval traditions, I will demonstrate that although the kings suffer from the same enigmatic entity, we should envisage each differently. Refraining from translating lon craís helps in unpacking this complex, fascination tradition.