Mythology
The Heroic and Magic Myths
Any one of these tasks is nearly impossible to accomplish, but the men set about it, nearly manage, return, but then Lug causes forgetfulness to fall on the men and grabs the spoils himself so that he can do magical warfare with the Fomorians. The story is not yet over. Dejected, Thier blood fine not completed, and still held to it despite the dupl-icity of Lug, they carry on their task, seize the spit from the underwater kingdom, shout from the hill, being forced to kill the owner and his sons though they too are mortally wounded in the conflict. The blood fine now paid, honour restored, they return, and their aged father begs Lug for the loan of the healing pig-skin to restore them to life, but Lug refuses and they die, together with the father. There are myths that explain place names. The River Shannon was named from the goddess Sinend, who went to a magic well under the sea ( in the other world ). She omitted to enact some ritual, and the well water surged up and overwhelmed her, washing her on to the shore, where she died, giving to the new river her name. There are fragmentary myths. In an account of one of the innumerable battles the warriors on one side build a cairn, each man contributing one stone, so that there will be a memorial of the fight. The survivors remove one stone each, so that the numbers of the slain will be known by the amount of the stones left in the cairn. There are spears which have to kept in a brew of soporific herbs or they will massacre anything in their path ( an allusion perhaps to the spear as symbol of light-ning ). There are fantastic creatures such as the 3 giants from the Isle of Man with horses manes reaching to their heels. and there are macabre scenes - the three naked and bleeding female forms hanging by ropes from a roof, the daughters of the Bav, an-other name for the Morrigan, or war goddess. Their presence is enigmatic: " three of awful boding; those are the three that are slaughtered at every time." Every what time? Who can say? What bastardized text has this come from? Transformation scenes abound Gods, goddesses, heroes, amnbiguous characters who may be human, semi-human, or supernatural, change into almost every conceivable shape. Shape - changing was a strong feature of the repertoire of the story teller. One of the most trenchant, if pre- dictable, is contained in the epic Fitness of Names.
There is a preamble in which Daire, the father of Curoi, one of the several sun gods, asks a druid which of his sons will take the kingdom after he has died. The druid replies that a fawn with a golden lustre upon it will appear, and the son who catches it will be the successor. The brothers go out to seek the fawn. As is often the case in such parables, the chase is interupted by strange mists and snow and eventually one of the hunters finds a house, magnificent, with plenty of food, drink and a blazing fire. There he meets an old woman with spears of teeth outside her head and wearing old, foul, and faded clothes. She refuses to give him shelter unless he sleeps with her, and, aghast, he refuses, as do three other brothers. But Lugaid, one of the brothers, agrees, and when she leads him to the bed, she is transformed in a gorgeous maiden in a purple bordered gown. Afterwoods Lugaid fetches his brothers, no doubt somewhat envious, and they eat and drink with the help of " self moving drinking horns." There is a variant of this where the sons find the deer near Tara, kill it, and while resting are approached by a monstrous hag, ugly and bald, as high as a mast, her ear as large as a hut, her front tooth bigger than the square of a chess board. The hag was a continuous belly without ribs, and she had a rugged, hilly, block head, set upon the body like a " furzy " moun-tain. Trying unsuccessfuly to exit their passions, she threatens to turn them into monsters if one of them would not sleep with her. One of them does, and she is trans-formed into a beauty. In yet another version of The exploits of the sons of Eochaid Mugmedon, the five brothers are camping after slaying a boar. One of them, Fiachna, goes to fetch water from a fountain, but on the brink is a sorceress - " a mouth she had into which a hound would fit; the spiked tooth - fence about her head was more hideous than all the goblins of Erin." It has been speculated that these transfiguration myths are emblematic of the changes of the seasons. And, of course, sexual symbolism has been sought in Irish mythology, a dificult task as the Irish had no difficulty is spelling out sexual activity, and there is a refreshing candour in the absence of prurience. Sex, fighting, the chase, the alliance between humans and the people of the other world whe-ther they be demons, gods, tribes who may or may not be superhuman - all these are combined with commentary on the nature of existence, on whether the sun is an individ-ual and why the stars are set in the heavens in that particular configuration. And whet-her they move of their own volition or forced on their endless round by unseen forces that can only be dimly imagined. Though those too would be defined by someone, a story-teller, a scholar, or a druid.