to the devil, and readers who preach heresy.'[1] But what, you may ask, had the three cranes to do with denial and stinginess? Directly, perhaps, they had nothing to do with them; but it is suggested that tiny were stolen by Aitherne to keep people away from his house. They answered that purpose by reason of their association with Mider, who was one of the kings of the fairies and the other world, which nobody would willingly visit. In other words, they were birds of evil omen, and so much so that no warrior who chanced to see them would proceed on his way to battle that day in spite of his having bound himself to go. I should hesitate to extract any more meaning out of the story, especially as one does not read that Mider was reckoned notorious for his churlishness; and if it were asked why the crane should be associated with Mider, we should give the question rather the form. Why a triad of cranes? Even then I could not pretend to answer it; but one might, perhaps, venture to point out that they are not improbably of the same origin as the three cranes perched on the back of the bull on the Paris monument, to which attention was called in the first of these lectures (p. 80). In Welsh they would seem to be matched by the three living things stolen by Amaethon son of Dôn from Hades, a plover, a bitch and a roe, for which Gwydion and he fought with Arawn the king of that country, and beat him in one of the Three Frivolous Battles at the expense of 71,000 lives (p. 245). Here the Welsh story, with its three different kinds of creatures, is possibly less original than the Irish one, with its three cranes or herons; and,
- ↑ Stokes' Fis Adamnáin (Simla, 1870, pp. 14, 15; and Windisch, pp. 187-8; also s.v. diultaim (p. 485).
