Previous chapters have demonstrated that fosterage can be created outside the traditional legal bonds of the expected foster family. The language is pushed particularly far when Íte refers to the giant beetle eating her side as her dalta (fosterling). In this chapter I investigate just this kind of relationship; where fosterage is used to describe the close emotional bond between humans and animals. Tales of animals and humans tightly bound by shared emotions are, of course, common in the Middle Ages. As Bintley and Williams have recently commented, ‘[T]his was an age better acquainted and more comfortable than our own with shape-shifters, monsters, talking animals, and the repeating cycle of the agricultural year: the boundaries observed between humans and animals throughout much of the modern world would have been far less rigid to many in the early Middle Ages.’ It has often been said of medieval Irish literature, especially the hagiographical work, that it particularly values interactions between humans and animals. This is certainly a powerful perception, fuelled by the popularity of such famous poems as Messe ocus Pangur Bán. I do not wish to say that writers in Ireland were any more zoocentric than those in other European literatures, but they clearly used human/animal interactions in their thinking.

One of the things that these authors thought about with regard to animals was the foster relationship. Sometimes animals fed humans and that was as far as it went, but other times this was the beginning of an emotionally nuanced foster relationship.