Page:The Celtic Review volume 3.djvu/158

Rh wretch; even though I fled from battle I must none the less find death elsewhere; and it were better for me to fall fighting with a good king like Donnell, and for the chiefs of Ulster likewise.’ To the Irish warrior, and the whole race were warriors, to die on the battlefield was the only worthy way of departing from life, to die tamely in one’s bed a shame and a disgrace. It was by no means in the way of congratulation, but in the way of reproach, that one monarch of Erin in the seventh century is chronicled to have died in this ignominious manner. I was struck the other day in reading the Irish historic romance of Cellachan of Cashel, a Munster prince in the Danish period, at the remark made on the death of a prince who reigned for twenty-seven years over Munster, that ‘he died a natural death through the curse of great Ciaran the son of the Carpenter,’ i.e. St. Ciaran of Clonmacnois. Such a death was evidently regarded as a misfortune.

‘What do you fear the most?’ was the question of Alexander the Great to some Celts (of Thrace) whom he had warred against by the Adriatic Sea, anticipating that they would reply, ‘Yourself.’ ‘We fear nothing,’ was the unexpected answer, ‘unless it were that the heaven should fall upon us’ (Strabo’s Geography, Bk. VII. ch. iii 8).

This primitive dread of a primitive people of the unknown and to them uncertain powers of nature, which alone they feared, is exactly paralleled by expressions in early Irish literature. It represents, indeed, a sort of proverbial manner of expressing their contempt of personal danger, and it is curious to find it so accurately reproduced in the writings of a Greek geographer, writing in the East in the first century. The habits and ideas of the wide-spread Celtic race seem to have been singularly homogeneous. Five times over in the Táin we have this precise expression, which also occurs in other semi-historic romances in Irish literature. When Sualtam, the mortal father of Cuchulain, hears of the distress that his son is in, under the pressure of long-continued and unequal combat, he exclaims, ‘It is as though in the distance