Foreword
Some of the stories retold in this book are among the oldest in Europe. They belong to a culture and language with a long, unbroken, and highly elaborate oral tradition, one of the most venerable in Europe. (p.ix)
 [...]
 I have included stories from the first three cycles [Mythological, Ulster, & Fenian but not historical] in this collection but have replaced the tales of the medieval kings with stories about the three patron saints of Ireland, Patrick, Brigid and Columbcille. The legends surrounding these saints belong more intimately to the folk tradition; yet they are as old as many of the earlier secular stories and are found in the same manuscripts.
 It was extremely difficult to decide what to include or exclude from the book. In the end I opted for the better-known stories, the ones that I felt should be available to anyone who wants to have a [x] general knowledge of the scope and variety of Irish legend.
 I worked at all times from translations, usually from a single text, but here and there inserting a detail from another source if I thought it would benefit the story. In some of the stories I had to lose certain incidents and details because of considerations of length. In others, notably the legends of the saints, I had to stitch together a narrative from several sources. My aim has been to make the material acessible to the general reader while remaining as faithful as possible to the texts.
 I have already mentioned the antiquity of these stories but it is not their historical or mythological value that gives them their significance and interest. Indeed it is almost the reverse. What ensures their place in world literature is their agelessness, their value as expressions of the perennial art of the storyteller. The societies and traditions that these stories reflect have long gone, but the characters from them, the heroes, the tyrants, the troublemakers, the passionate headstrong women and men have survived.’

[Signed August 1993; Dublin.]

[...] At first they stayed apart and hurled spears and darts at each other across the ford. By midday they were both inflamed by the fight and as the battle fury rose in them, they moved closer for hand-to-hand combat. Cuchulainn sprang to the boss of Ferdia’s shield to strike him from above. Ferdia gave the shield a mighty heave with his forearm and set Cuchulainn spinning like a stunned bird to the bank of the ford. Again Cuchulainn leapt from the bank to the boss of the shield to reach over the rim and strike at Ferdia’s head. With one thrust of his knee, Ferdia tossed him off the shield as if he were a baby.
 Laeg saw that Cuchulainn was in trouble.
 ‘What’s this, Cuchulainn! Ferdia has tossed you in the air like a mother tossing her baby. He has flung you away from him like water out of a cup. He has drilled through you like an awl through wood. He has tied you up in knots like a creeper choking a tree. He has dropped on you like a hawk on a sparrow. You’re grist to his mill. From now on you can make no claims as a fighter, you spoilt little sham!’
 Wild with rage at Laeg’s taunts and Ferdia’s mastery, Cuchulainn sprang into the air with the speed of a swallow in flight and lit on the boss of Ferdia’s shield for the third time. Ferdia gave the shield a strong, disdainful shake as though nothing had landed on it and flung Cuchulainn backwards again across the ford.
 Then Cuchulainn’s war warp contorted him. He swelled up in his spasm like a huge bladder full of wind. He changed colour and his face became mottled and distorted. He arched his deformed body like a grotesque bow and towered over Ferdia, huge and terrifying as a Fomorian giant.
 They began to fight. Their foreheads met above and their feet met below and their hands met in the middle, hacking and stabbing at each other over their shields. They fought so closely that their shields split with the impact. They fought so closely that their spearheads bent in their staves and the rivets burst out. They fought so closely that demons shrieked from the hilts of their, swords and the points of their spears and the rims of their shields. They fought so closely that their trampling feet forced the river off its course. The riverbed became dry enough to sleep in and the only water that fell round them poured from the combatants themselves. The battle was so intense that,the chariot horses reared in a frenzy and bolted, ripping free from their chains and tearing their traces apart. The struggle was so tumultuous that there was panic in the camp of the men of Ireland. The camp followers, the women and children, the old, the weak and the mad were crazed with fear and broke headlong out of the stockade and fled southwestward for Connacht.
 Then Ferdia found a gap in Cuchulainn’s defence and thrust his sword into his chest. Blood spouted from the wound, and the fighters at the ford slithered in the blood. Ferdia struck again and again until Cuchulainn could bear the thrusts no longer and he yelled at Laeg to get the Gae Bolga. Ferdia heard the name of the weapon he dreaded and he dropped his shield to protect his lower body. As he did so Cuchulainn cast his spear at Ferdia’s chest and it went through his heart and halfway out of his back.
 Laeg hurled the Gae Bolga downstream to Cuchulainn and he caught it with his foot. Ferdia thrust up his shield to protect his chest but it was too late. The Gae Bolga cast from Cuchulainn’s foot smashed through the iron apron and split the huge stone under it into three parts. It drove into Ferdia’s belly and the barbs opened out, filling every crevice and cavity of his body.
 ‘You’re killed me with that, Cuchulainn!’ Ferdia cried out. ‘My ribs have been shattered and my heart has burst. It was treachery that brought me here but it was you who killed me. My blood is on your hands!’
 Cuchulainn ran towards Ferdia and caught him as he fell. He carried him and all his gear across the ford so that he would die on his territory and not on Medb’s. He laid Ferdia down on the ground and collapsed beside him. He lay in a faint beside Ferdia’s head, overcome with grief.
 [...] (pp.139-40.)

Note on Gae Bolga: In the classroom I suggested that the “gae bolga” - a trident weapon the enters into the enemy’s body and breaks up into numerous organ-splitting prongs inside - invariably passing through the anus. I inferred this from the stone that Ferdia uses to gird his lower regions. Understandably, one student quizzed me about it and asked for sources. ...

  After much enquiry, I was lucky to receive an answer from Dr. Jim Doan, a Middle-English and Celtic-languages scholar based in Florida University, who confirmed that this was the meaning of the original held in the Royal Irish Academy.

Dear Bruce [...] You’re absolutely right: both the Book of Leinster and Yellow Book of Lecan versions indicate that Cu Chulainn threw the gae bolga so it entered Ferdia’s anus (timthirecht, which the Dictionary of Irish Literature translates as “anus”) and filled every one of his joints and limbs with its barbs. I hadn’t realized it since Kinsella bowdlerized the passage somewhat.

—James E. Doan, Ph.D., Professor of Humanities, and President, S. Florida Irish Studies Consortium, Farquhar College of Arts and Sciences Nova Southeastern University 3301 College Ave., Davie-Ft. Lauderdale, FL.)

Hence the gae bolga does enter the human body through the “erse-hole”. (Forgive my little joke!) Finally, compare the above episode with “The Death of Connla”, in which the gae bolga is also used in a fight under water - to equally deadly but more graphically described effect (Heaney, pp.113-16).