Page:The Celtic Review volume 3.djvu/164

Rh warriors were exhibited as tokens of valour. So anxious were they to produce a sufficient number of these ghastly memorials, that when the number was smaller than usual, or some warrior had been less lucky than his wont, he would endeavour to conceal the deficiency by adding the tongues of animals, in the hope that in the reckoning it might pass unobserved. The accounts of Diodorus in these respects are by no means overdrawn (see also Livy, Bk. X. chap. xxvi.). On the return of the young Cuchulain from his first day’s combat, his chariot is said to be ‘graced with the bleeding heads of his enemies.’ Conall Cernach comes to a feast carrying the dripping head of Aluan of Connaught in his hand, and on another occasion, when he meets the wife of the King of Leinster, his enemy, he plucks the head of her husband from his belt and holds it up before her; at the king’s palace in Ulster, a whole hall was set apart for the preservation of these horrid trophies, which were, as Diodorus says, carefully preserved and named (see also Strabo, Bk. IV. chap, iv., § 5. Strabo, quoting from Posidonius, says that he was at first shocked at these spectacles, but that they were so common that he became, in the end, hardened to them. It would seem, too, that Diodorus is perfectly correct in his observation that the names of the slain warriors whose heads were kept was recorded. In the Scoto-Irish poem called ‘The Lay of the Heads’ uttered by Conall Cernach after his ‘Red Rout’ made to avenge the death of his comrade, Cuchulain, he brings in the heads of those he has slain on a withe, and recites to Emer, wife of the dead hero, the names and accomplishments of each warrior in turn, as he holds up the scalp before her. A very similar poem is to be found in the historic Irish romance, The Wars of Cellachan of Cashel against the Danes, recently published by Dr. Alexander Bugge. Here, so late as the middle of the tenth century, we have exactly the same thing represented as taking place. Cellachan has been taken prisoner by the Norsemen of Dublin, and is brought to the ‘green of the city’ (still called College Green), when he sees a number of the enemy coming in, each with