extreme cases he used with the same effect a barbed weapon called the gái bolga, which he brought to bear on his foe from below or from above.[1] He rode forth to battle in a scythed chariot,'[2] and his charioteer was Loeg son of Riangabra, who with his wife and kindred lived in an island which Irish mythology places in the neighbourhood of Hades.[3] The chariot was drawn by two horses of no ordinary breed: they were called the Grey of Macha and the Black Sainglend; and they gave their names to two Irish lakes whence they emerged when Cúchulainn caught them respectively,[4] and whither they returned when his career was over.[5] They had the peculiarity, that, wherever they grazed, they ate the grass root and stem, licking bare the very soil.[6] They were swifter than the cold blasts of spring,[7] and the sods from their hoofs as they galloped over the plain looked like an army of ravens filling the sky above the chariot,[8] the iron wheels of which sank at times so deep into the soil as to make ruts ample for dykes and
- ↑ O'Curry's Manners, &c. iij. 451; Stokes & Windisch, Irische Texte, pp. 184, 206.
- ↑ Bk. of the Dun, 79a, 80a: see also 125b.
- ↑ Stokes & Windisch, Ir. Texte, pp. 178-80, 196—200.
- ↑ Windisch, p. 268.
- ↑ Rev. Celtique, iij. 180-1; Bk. of Leinster, 121a, 121b. The lake called after the Liath (or Grey) of Macha was Linn Léith, in Sliab Fuait or Fuad's Mountain, near Newtown Hamilton, in the county of Armagh; and the one called after the Dub (or Black) Sainglend was the Loch Dub or Black Lake, in Museraige-Thire, a district consisting of the Baronies of Upper and Lower Ormond, in the county of Tipperary.
- ↑ Bk. of the Dun, 57b.
- ↑ Windisch, p. 221.
- ↑ Bk. of the Dun, 113a.
