was permitted to change himself back into the human form, when he in vain repeated his previous request. Then he told his foes that he had outwitted them, as they would now have to pay the eric for killing a man and not a beast, adding that their arms would betray the deed to his son Lug. But Brian said that they would use no arms, so they began stoning Cian until they had reduced his body to a crushed mass. When they proceeded to bury it, the earth would not retain it; they tried it six times, and the earth cast it up each time; but when it was buried the seventh time, it was not cast up. Cian told Brian before he died that there never had been slain, and never would be slain, anybody for whom a greater eric would have to be paid than for him: it turned out so; for Lug discovered the murderers, and cunningly imposed on them, with the approval of the Tuatha Dé Danann, an eric which looked a trifle, but was soon found to involve the sons of Tuirenn in adventures of unheard-of toil and danger, at the close of which they died miserably of their wounds. The tale is one of the most famous in Irish literature;[1] but another account[2] makes Lug slay the three with his own hand in Man beyond the Sea. Brian and his brothers are sometimes called tri dee dána,[3] or the three gods of dán, that is to say of professional skill or talent, as the term dán is commonly
- ↑ It is known as the Death of the Children of Tuirenn, and will be found edited, with an English translation by O'Curry, in the Atlantis, Vol. iv. 159, &c.; see also an English version in Joyce's Old Celtic Romances, pp. 37—96.
- ↑ Only known to me from a verse quoted by Keating, p. 122.
- ↑ Bk. of Leinster, 10a; Keating, p. 122; compare Cormac's Glossary, the Stokes-O'Donovan ed. p. 145.
