coupled with Balor[1] as one of the stout henchmen of Forgall, and we have to regard him, like Balor, as a Fomorian; but as a messenger of fate and death, it was natural to associate him with Danu in her character of goddess of death, and it was also natural that there should be hostility between him and Lug, who punished him for the death of his father Cian.[2]
The eric imposed by Lug on the three brothers compelled them to procure for him certain fabulous weapons, which he should require in a great battle for which he was busily preparing. The story euhemerizes the conflict into an important historical struggle; but in reality the antagonistic parties were the powers of evil and darkness under the name of the Fomori, or the dwellers in the sea, and the Tuatha Dé Danann under the rule of Nuada of the Silver Hand, whose connections were of a very different kind. His subjects were under tribute to the Fomori, who oppressed them in various ways, until the hero Lug successfully led his host to their attack. But one day previous to that event, the Tuatha Dé Danann happened to be holding an assembly, when they beheld coming towards them Lug and his followers. This is the description given of them: "One young man came in the
- ↑ Bk. of the Dun, 123a, where they are called 'Brion ⁊ Bolor.'
- ↑ A different account from the foregoing of the death of Cian was known to the Four Masters, who say that he fell in the year 241 at the Battle of Samhain, which the learned editor O'Donovan would identify with a Cnoc-Samhna near Bruree in the county of Limerick; but this is quite consistent with the more usual meaning of Samhain as the Irish name for November-eve. A Samhain battle would point to a time notoriously inauspicious to Celtic solar heroes, and such a conflict might obviously rage at more than one spot and in more than one story.
