Page:The Celtic Review volume 3.djvu/167

152 battle were female. There were three Goddesses of War, named The Morrigan (‘Great Queen’), Badb, and Macha, who appear frequently either before or during the course of a battle, and who show their partiality or dislike to the warriors by fighting for or against them. A battle-field is called in one piece ‘the fold of Badb’ (Battle of Moira), and in the Battle of Magh Lena we read that ‘the blue-mouthed, loud-croaking Badb rejoiced at the extent of the banquet she found on the dead men.’ These three fierce terrific goddesses were capable of changing themselves into black birds or scall-crows. They may possibly be cognate with the Norse Valkyre maidens.

Strabo mentions, among the products of Britain, their hunting-dogs, which, he says, are used by the Celts along with their own dogs for purposes of war (Book IV. chap. v.). These dogs, or wolf-hounds, reared in Ireland and apparently also in Britain, formed, as we know from native sources, a regular staple of commerce between Ireland, Britain, and the Continent. They were of great size, and seem to have been still reared as late as the age of Elizabeth, for the historian Campion, writing about 1571, says: ‘The Irish are not without wolves, and grey-hounds to hunt them, bigger of bone and limme than a colt.’ This bears out the earlier (fifteenth century) Irish record in the Book of Lismore, which says that ‘each of these hounds is as big as an ass.’ These huge dogs were noted all over the world from the earliest times of which we have any record, to the eighteenth century, when the gradual extinction of the wolf made it no longer a necessity, and the breed was allowed to die out.

A gift of seven Irish wolf-hounds from Britain, presented by a Roman citizen named Flavianus to his brother, Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, Roman Consul, in 391 A.D., for the games at Rome, excited astonishment by their remarkable size. ‘All Rome,’ he says in a letter still extant, ‘viewed them with wonder, and thought they must have been brought hither in iron cages’ (Symmachus, Epistolæ, 1598, p. 129). When St. Patrick, escaped from youthful slavery, set sail in