Page:The Celtic Review volume 3.djvu/165

150 a head in one hand and spoils in the other, to present to the Danish chieftain the trophies of war. In a poem probably formed consciously on that of the ‘Lay of the Heads,’ the warriors ask Cellachan in turn whose is the head he is carrying, and the Munster prince is forced to give the name and description of each of his own followers, who has fallen in the battle. At length, able no longer to bear the dreary recital, he exclaims, ‘Show me no more of the heads, for I cannot endure to look on them. And although I have not been wounded by you, I am killed through the wounds of yonder men. Alas! that I have not found death in their company.’

The brains of the slain warriors were sometimes taken out and made into ‘brain-balls,’ but even then they were evidently labelled before being stored up, for when King Conor was killed by being hit with such a ball, it was known from whose head the ball had been made (see O’Curry, Manuscript materials, Appendix cxvi., and Hull, Cuchullin Saga, pp. 267-9).

Women fought as well as men. As Boadicea, in the well-known passage in Tacitus (Annāls, Bk. XIV. chap, xxxv.), went forth, seated in her chariot, at the head of the armies of the Iceni, calling on the tribes ‘to notice that it was usual for Britons to war under conduct of a woman,’ so Queen Meave of Connaught goes forth at the head of her hosts, gathered from all the provinces of Erin. She not only led her army, or accompanied them, but on an occasion of urgency she donned her weapons and went forth, like any other chieftain, to the conflict. Like Fergus and King Ailil she equips herself for fight in the final battle of the Táin, and goes forth beside them in full armour (Táin, p. 862, line 5965; see also in Miss Faraday’s translation of the T. B. C. from the LU. version, p. 8). It is she who leads the disastrous retreat when her forces, confused and routed, turn and fly before the Ulstermen, making their way as best they can across the Shannon.

In Ireland, as in Britain, in Greece, in Scythia, in Palmyria, in Norway, women headed armies and women-battalions took