Page:The Celtic Review volume 3.djvu/154

Rh words of Diodorus Siculas: ‘For stature they are tall, but of a pale complexion, red-haired, not only naturally, but they endeavour all they can to make it redder by art. They often wash the hair in a water boiled with lime and turn it back from the forehead to the crown of the head, and thence to their very necks, that their faces may be more fully seen, so that they look like satyrs or hobgoblins. By this sort of management their hair is as hard as a horse’s mane.’ Diodorus adds that ‘persons of quality shave their chins close, but their mustachios they let fall so low, that they even cover their mouth. Some shave the beard ; others let it grow a little.’

We do not hear in Ireland of the dyeing of the hair, so far as I am aware, though ladies of quality dyed their eyelashes black and their finger-nails red, but if it was the custom to dye the hair, it would afford a natural explanation of the three shades of Cuchulain’s hair, which is so often insisted upon. ‘Three hues were in the hair of Cuchulain; close to his head it was brown, ruddy in the middle, and on the outside golden; like a diadem of gold it covered him, as it fell down free and loose between his shoulders’ (Táin, line 2713). Elsewhere, when excited by battle, it is said that his hair stood up or became tangled about his head, so that had an apple-tree been shaken over it never an apple would have fallen to the ground, but would have been caught and held on each separate hair of his head. This, in the Irish writer’s exaggerated manner of expressing things, seems to bear out the remark of Diodorus about the stiffening of the hair with lime so that it became hard as a horse’s mane, and the flinging of it back away from the forehead (Táin, line 2617; cf. Tógail Bruidne Dá Derga, Stokes, p. 73, § 85; p. 87, § 97; p. 103, § 105).

The fairness or ruddiness of the Irish heroes is constantly insisted upon. The hair is usually spoken of as red or golden, whether the description be that of a man or of a woman, and the same characteristic is retained in the accounts of the sídh or ‘shee-folk,’ or early gods; red or yellow is evidently the favourite colour. A black-haired person is usually possessed of some corresponding dark and evil qualities. That Cuchulain