Minona

Minona is a singer whose beauty and visible grief frame two linked Ossianic laments: the story of Colma and the mourning for Morar. Her voice gives the dead a place in song, while her tears and retreat show how the songs’ inherited losses continue to wound those who remember them.

Identity and Appearance

Minona is identified as the daughter of Torman and the sister of Morar. When she comes forward to sing, she is described as beautiful, with downcast eyes and tears; her hair moves in the intermittent wind from the hill. Her presence is not merely ornamental: the heroes listening to her become sad as she raises her tuneful voice, and the grief of the song passes into the gathering.

The Song of Colma

Minona’s song recounts Colma alone on a storm-swept hill, waiting for Salgar, who had promised to meet her. Colma seeks a light to guide her to him, but finds herself exposed to the rain, with no shelter and only the rock, tree, stream, and wind around her. The landscape makes her isolation palpable: the roaring stream and storm answer the absent lover where his voice should be.

The lament turns from uncertainty to recognition when Colma finds Salgar and her brother dead beside her, their swords red from their fight. Each has killed the other, making her beloved and her kin inseparable in death as they were divided by their families’ enmity. Colma mourns them both, calls into the storm without receiving an answer, and imagines joining them in the grave. She asks that the tomb remain open until she comes, and pictures her ghost’s voice returning to the hill’s winds. Minona’s song thus carries a story in which grief has no living interlocutor: the dead remain silent, and song becomes the only continuing voice for them.

Mourning for Morar

After Colma’s lament, Minona is herself shown in mourning. Ullin sings of the dead and of Morar’s fall, and Minona’s eyes fill with tears for her brother. The account marks her as Morar’s sister and associates her sorrow with the loss of a celebrated warrior whose death leaves his father grieving. When Ullin’s song continues, Minona withdraws from it, compared to the moon hiding behind a cloud at the approach of rain. The gesture makes her grief visible without giving her another speech: she leaves the song’s company rather than remain within its unfolding lament.

Narrative Role

Minona links two losses through the act of singing and listening. First she gives voice to Colma’s desolation; then the songs of the dead turn her own kinship with Morar into a source of sorrow. Her beauty, tears, voice, and retreat form a recurring pattern in which public song opens a private wound. The movement from Colma’s imagined reunion with the dead to Minona’s silent withdrawal also makes remembrance double-edged: song preserves the fallen, but it cannot restore them or spare the living from grief.