Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/180

148 the ancient time were relegated as obstinate unbelievers by the religious of later days. He is there said to be usefully employed in plying his renowned weapon, the Gae bolga, on the demons; while they, on their side, are scourging the hosts of Ulster around King Conor (Conchobhar), the king himself only being preserved by the special intervention of Mary's Son. This account of the doings of Cuchulain in hell is mixed up with a vivid description of a raid made by him in his lifetime into the Land of Scath, or 'Shadow,' in order to secure for himself a special cauldron with the treasures of gold and silver which it contained, as also three cows of wonderful properties kept in a fortress "vast by the north."

The poem seems to be a confused reminiscence of three events in Cuchulain's career, all attended with difficulty and danger, viz. his journey as a youth to the fort of the Amazon Scathach; his rape of Blathnat, wife of Curoi and daughter of Midir, from Midir's palace in Inis Falga (the Isle of Man or the Hebrides), along with his magic cauldron and three cows; and his carrying off the white red-eared cows of Echaid Echbel of Alba, which used to come and graze in Co. Antrim, evidently another version of the same incident.

Though the incidents in this story seem to be preserved in a very archaic form, the tone and setting have been coloured by Christian ideas, just as Cuchulain, when he asks St. Patrick to take him with him to the "Land of Promise," means not the Pagan Paradise, but the Christian heaven.

Such efforts to enter by force and carry off the treasures of the unseen world seem to have been one of the feats demanded of a warrior of renown as a final test of prowess, being, as it was, attended with so much peril and difficulty.

I think it is unfortunate that the word "Hades," with