Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 3 (Celtic and Slavic).djvu/203

In still another instance Derbrenn, Oengus's first love, had six foster-children; but their mother changed them into swine, and Oengus gave charge of them to Buichet, whose wife desired the flesh of one of them. A hundred heroes and as manyhounds prepared to hunt them, when they fled to Oengus for help, only to find that he could not give it until they shook the tree of Tarbga and ate the salmon of Inver Umaill. Not for a year were they able to do this, but now Medb hunted them, and all were slain save one. Other huntings of these swine, less fortunate for the hunters, are also mentioned, and in one passage Derbrenn's swine are said to have been fashioned by magic.¹⁰ Both in Irish and in Welsh story pigs are associated with the gods' land and are brought thence by heroes or by the gods. The Tuatha Dé Danann are said to have first introduced swine into Ireland or Munster.¹¹

The mythic bulls of the Táin Bó Cúalgne were reincarnations of divinities, whence enormous strength was theirs, and the Brown Bull was of vast size. He carried a hundred and fifty children, until one day he threw them off and killed all but fifty; a hundred warriors were protected by his shadow from the heat, or by his shelter from the cold. His melodious evening lowing was such as any one would desire to hear, and no eldritch thing dared approach him; he covered fifty heifers daily, and each next morning had a calf.¹² Two gifts given to Conn by a princess who was with the god Lug were a boar's rib and that of an ox, twenty-four feet long, forming an arch eight feet high; but nothing further is told of the animals which owned these huge bones.¹³

Cattle were a valued possession of the gods' land and, like swine, were brought thence by heroes. Man easily concluded that animals useful to him were also useful to the gods, but he regarded these as magical. The divine mother of Fraoch gave him cows from the síd. Flidais, "one of the tribe of the god folk," was wife of Ailill the Fair and had a cow which supplied milk to three hundred men at one night's milking;