of one dart in entering the body; but it presented thirty inverted points against coming back, so that it could not be drawn from a person's body without opening it.

It is this archaic weapon which compasses the death of Ferdiadh in the fearful struggle at the ford when Cuchulinn and his old schoolmate are forced to fight each other to the bitter end. Cuchulinn was the only hero who could wield this water-dart. To extract it from the body of his friend, Cuchulinn had to cut him open. Plainly we have here a barbarous weapon managed with the foot, an Indian or Eskimo salmon-spear, the several barbs of which are detached in the flesh of the prey. Yet a spear propelled by the foot was, and perhaps still is, part of the gear of a Lapp, and has found its way into print among the meager remains of Lapp songs collected by Professor O. Donner. A descendant of the sun, whose father, the sunprince, has been slaughtered just as Fion's father was, approaches the old slayer of his parent, and a combat ensues like that between Cuchulinn and Ferdiadh in the main, but full of the utmost barbarism, while the Irish battle has along with its wild traits a host of chivalric ideas. The old enemy of the sunchild attempts to kill him with many weapons, among which is a poisonous spear driven by the foot from a bow:

With his footbow from the window

Casts the old one

At the youth a poisoned javelin.

Doubtless this represents

Japan, whose legendary preserves the curious story of the sun-goddess sulking in the cave and lured out by dances which we see so often depicted in the art of Nippon. The story is very different in the cycle that includes Cuchulinn; there it is the Spring who elopes with the hero. Thereby hangs this tale:

In a campaign undertaken against an island, said to be the Isle of Man, a "gray fighter" takes part with the heroes of Conchobar, and is so extraordinary in valor and efficiency that he is allowed what he stipulated as his own part of the spoils, namely, the finest gem. Instead of a jewel, however, he selects from the spoil Blathmat, the "blossom," a lovely princess

a weapon of the chase and of war, once known in Ireland, the tradition of which adheres to Cuchulinn, a Finno-Ugrian demi-god accepted and explained by the Gaels in their own tongue.

The sun-heroes of Ireland may be sought in a more primitive form in the Kalewala, while the Lapps show the same legends in the most primitive shape. Yet the sun is by no means always masculine in sex. Diarmait the Beautiful is forced by Fion's bride to elope with her, and Fion sends his unwilling heroes in pursuit. She is the humanized Sun, feminine in old Ireland as still among the Germans, who say Die Sonne but Der Mond, as also in

whom Cuchulinn intended for his own. Being pursued by that champion he turns and defeats him, binds him hand and foot, cuts off his long hair and rubs his head in filth, then disappears to the westward. Afterwards Cuchulinn visits one Curoi mac Dairé in Kerry, and discovers that the "gray fighter" who overthrew him has Blathmat to wife. Like Grainné, bride of Fion in the later cycle, she hates the man Fate has assigned to her, and concocts a plot. Cuchulinn returns to the wild mountain stream that rushes down past the fort of Curoi on a peak of the Kerry hills, and waits for the signal. At last he sees the water of the brook turn

ARMLET OF BEATEN BRONZE.

white; Blathmat has caused vats of milk to be emptied in the stream. The champion and his men rush up to the fort, burst open the gates, and murder Curoi as he lies with his head on his wife's lap; then he carries off Blathmat and various wonder-working objects that belonged before to Midir, the fairy-king.

The name of this blossom princess, the stream white from the freshet, the traits of Cuchulinn which ally him to male representatives of summer and the sun, are indications of the seasonal element in the story. The blossoms of Spring are rescued from the frosty arms of Winter. But Finnic legends show in Kuura, the hoarfrost, the same person as Curoi, and prove the "gray fighter" to be, like Fion, one of the original Turanian gods taken up into Gaelic legendary. Cuchulinn, on the other hand, though undoubtedly at bottom Turanian, has been so amplified by the Kelts that he is more national, perhaps, than any other hero. If he can be identified with the Gaulish god of war Cocidius, found on votive stones, his cult must be extremely ancient among the Kelts. Professor John Rhys has very acutely pointed out a Welsh parallel to the story of the frail Blathmat, the false one having a name also meaning the Blossom.

The hero Cuchulinn seems to unite in his story the strains of many traditions both human and divine. Perhaps no other hero famous in Irish song and prose legend takes up in himself so complicated a skein of threads from the Keltic and Turanian past. It may be remembered from an earlier paper that his name was elaborately explained by the Gaels to mean cu the dog, culainn of Culann, a certain smith whose watch-dog he slew with his childish hands. The Welsh parallel of Cuchulinn serves among others to expose the fallacy of this translation, for in Welsh legend he is associated with King Arthur under the

name of Kulhooch. Just as the champions of Ulster search all Ireland for a wife befitting Cuchulinn, so the knights of King Arthur of Wales search Britain for a wife for Kulhooch. She is Olwen, the "wheel" of the seasons, and her father is a giant named Hawthorn who represents Winter. The combat between him and Kulhooch has remarkable points of resemblance to that of the Lapp hero just mentioned. Great is the rejoicing when Kulhooch, the sun-hero, storms the fortress of Winter, and seizes his bride, the Spring. It is the same idea we have just seen in the story of Cuchulinn storming the castle of the "gray fighter" at the signal of the whitened stream, slaying him and tearing Blossom from his embrace. Of Olwen it is said that clover-blossoms sprung up wherever she walked. Eimer, Cuchulinn's first wife, is seized in much the same way.

But how are we to account for that first syllable cu in the Irish hero's appellation which rationalizing Gaels translated "dog"? Kulhooch explains Culinn, but not the whole name.

Here we come upon a most curious matter, which shows another strand in the parti-colored thread of Cuchulinn. For that special mystic bird of spring, the ventriloquist cuckoo, was mixed up with the legends about Cuchulinn long before the explanation "dog of Culann was dreamed of. In Wales the cuckoo, coocoog (in Irish cúach), held the same position in popular lore as it does to this day in Roumania and Finland, on the one hand as the harbinger of spring, on the other as an oraclemoreover, a bird of sly immoral habits, difficult to see, and hard to locate in the woods owing to the peculiarity of its song. English children sing:

into merlin hawks at midsummer. Its brown back seems to have given a name to an article of dress common in Ireland when we first get authentic accounts of the national garb from historians, namely, the cuchul, Latin cucullus, the hooded cloak which the old Romans found among the Gauls and borrowed from them. In Cichol Gri the footless, whose name from the very earliest Gaelic records has been suggested in a former paper for the earlier aspect of Cuchulinn, we get a point where the cuckoo legend and the meaning of hood coalesce.

The rude piece of carving found in the Vosges district in ancient Belgium which has been called a Hercules appears to give this god, from whom Cuchulinn got his name. Keating quotes from an old poem:

The seventh people that possessed
The beauteous Eri of high plains
Came with curt Kical, the short-legged,
To the fair fields o'er Inber Domnan.1

He represents the piratical tribes who lingered longest on remote islands west and north of Britain, and, from constant use of the small skin-boat, were fabled to be like seals, without true feet. The Aryan on his horse who is smiting down this monster must have been the sculptor, for the same reason given by the lion in the fable. In this connection we must recall the Shetland ballad already quoted, in which the seals that turn into men and women are called Finns. They are the same as the Fomoraigh (now pronounced Fowri), and are still thought of as monsters as well as pirates. But the old idea of Cichol must have become blended with ideas of "cuckoo" and "hood" at a very remote period, probably during the amalgamation between a mixed immigration from Britain and the pure Turanian aboriginals.

The Welsh word coocooll, "hood," has come into our tongue as "cowl," while in modern Welsh coocoog, "cuckoo," has been contracted to cog, and has entered English with the meaning "to cheat" as used by Shakspere. The pedigree of Cuchulinn in his connection with the bird of magic may be run back to figures like two in the Kalewala of the Finns, who show in a tragic way those traits of immorality which popular observation associates with the cuckoo, the bird that has no nest: one is a gay, reckless libertine, who loses and gains with equal light-heartedness; the other is guilty of worse crimes than Cuchulinn, without having any of his success or his virtues.

One Finnish equivalent of Cuchulinn, a figure in the Kalewala that springs from the same stem in the Turanian past, is the luckless Kullervo, to dishonor his own sister. But first note that the cuckoo is a sacred bird among the

Finns, associated with misfortune, and particularly with unhappy lovers.

When I hear the cuckoo calling Then my heart is filled with sorrow; Tears unlock my heavy eyelids, Flow adown my furrowed visage, Tears as large as silver sea-pearls ; Older grow my wearied elbows, Weaker fall my aged fingers, Wearily in all my members Does my body shake in palsyWhen I hear the cuckoo singing, Hear the sacred cuckoo calling.2 Cuchulinn is, like Kullervo, a son of Bond

age, all his family being destroyed while he is

a baby, and he is saved with difficulty from the foe. Hardly more than a boy, he develops the strength of a giant. The story of the cheat practiced by the wife of the wondersmith Ilmarinen on Kullervo, namely, the stone baked in the cake, is not told of Cuchulinn, but crops up in a late legend of Fion mac Cumhal. Many of the early legends of Fion are found in the story of Kullervo, where he takes the place of Cuchulinn. But neither can be carried far as a parallel to the Finnic child of ill-luck, whose adventures belong to a very much more primitive state of society than those of the Irish heroes. It must suffice here to say that the name of Kullervo and that of Kulhooch of Wales are the same in probable derivation. Kulhooch has a Welsh explanation in culhan, to grow lean, coola, faltering, languid. Chullinn may be traced to Finnic kulun, to lessen, decline. Several Tatar languages have kul in the meaning of evil demon. Kindred terms are Finnic kuolen, to die, Hungarian hulla, corpse, Etruscan and Finnic kalma, death. So far as his name is concerned, Cuchulinn harks back 1 John O'Mahony's translation.

2 Kalewala, Rune IV. Crawford's translation.

to the gods of night and death. This seems to have been his primitive aspect; but under successive alterations by Turanians and Kelts, particularly those made by the purer Gaels, he became a god of the sun and summer, with the sacred cuckoo merely as a herald and the blossom as his partner for a season.

The other parallel of Cuchulinn in Finnic legend is Lemminkaïnen, often called Kauko, a name in which we see a common term for the cuckoo-Irish cuach, Lettish kauk, Norse gaukr, German gauch, English gowk. In him appears the less tragical side of the sun-god symbolized by the cuckoo. He seduces all the women, carries off a bride, plays havoc in Pohjola with the magic of his songs and harp-tones, goes like Cuchulinn to remote islands in the West, and is habitually at war with the peoples who represent night and winter. Longfellow has introduced some of his sportive, unstable nature into Paupukkeewis, the gambler, in "Hiawatha."

Those who are so wedded to Greek and Latin mythology that they have little patience with that of barbarians, whether Teutonic or Keltic or Turanian, may be glad of a parallel drawn from the old stores. They will find a plain one in Picus (the woodpecker), the father of Faunus. And if, surprised at the appearance of deified birds among the barbarian as well as classic peoples, they study deeper into the matter, other surprises are in store. Thus Fion is not only the equivalent of Vaino, but is also the equivalent of Faunus among the Latins, and explains that Faunus also once meant, in a language that held Italy before Latin, "the old one." Now the identity of Faunus and the great god Pan, or Phan, is an old story; so that we are able, starting from Ireland, to teach the Greeks what their forefathers of the time of Pericles did not know, namely, that Pan, the old nature deity of the Arcadians, can be explained by languages similar to those spoken by the inhabitants of Greece before the Aryan tribes overran it. As we know, the attempt of the Greeks to explain the name by their own dialects was more in the nature of a pun than serious; but when there is chance to show the analogies between the name and characteristics of this old Greek god and those of Turanian nations, his place and meaning will become clear.

The "Book of Rights" presents a very singular mass of laws mixed with superstitious observances in alternate passages of prose and verse, meant as aids to the memory of those bards and seannachies whose duty it was to prompt the provincial kings by quoting custom and precedent. The strangest, wildest things are taboo to this or that provincial king of Ireland. It also has mention of many articles of luxury

and common use which we may confidently assign to those periods when the heroes of Fion and those who fought for or against Conchobar are supposed to have lived. Cloaks, saddles, bridles, querns for grinding grain, coats of mail, belts, red, black, green and blue shields, tunics, helmets of brass, rings of gold and other metals (a primitive form of wealth before coins were known), mugs carved of wood and the same imitated in precious metals, drinkinghorns richly ornamented, spears, chariots, enormous pins of bronze inlaid with silver, boats, ships large enough to have sleeping-berths, armlets, bracelets, gold spirals to wind about the hair, broad crescents of gold to decorate the head or lie upon the breast, baldrics highly decorated, a great variety of missile weapons defined by extraordinary names-these are some of the furniture of a rich farmer's home and of a chieftain's fortress. They played with a ball and sticks a game like the "hockey" our boys play on the ice. The chiefs were fond of a game of checkers or chess—one that demanded much pondering, at any rate, and required a board covered with squares, movable pieces, and a system of attack and defense of positions, ending in the capture of a last man by moves long foreseen.

In some respects the ballads yield nowise to the songs of Asia Minor and Greece molded into the incomparable poems of Iliad and Odyssey. They seem to be at the stage just preceding that reached by the Greek epics, needing only some Homer to cast them into undying flawless form. There is the same fighting of individual heroes with spear and sword, on foot or from chariots; the same boasting and superhuman feats of prowess; the same well-nigh invincible champions who succumb at last, Cuchulinn falling by a little warrior lad named Erc, as Achilles fell by the smooth-faced Paris.

The feats which these early heroes performed to show their expertness in the use of their weapons are many and singular, but they cannot be given here. There is an analogy between the relations heroes bore to the invisible beings, the fairies and ogres in hills, lakes, and distant islands of the sea, and that borne by champions at Troy to the minor gods of Olympus; but of course the Irish is far more crude and primitive than the Greek thought. Human heroes attack and wound supernatural beings; sometimes they aid them, as Venus was wounded before Troy and the gods were defended by Hercules. In the delectable story of Bricriu Poison-tongue, a big island is visited by Cuchulinn, who kills Eocho Glas, a ruler who keeps the sidhaighe, or fairy-folk, in subjection. As soon as he is dead the vengeful race of beings whom he oppressed appear.