Alban for an island to the east of it, where a goddess lived who bore the name of Scáthach, which means Shadowy or Shady: she appears to have been the same who was named Buanann, and described as the nurse of the heroes of Irish mythology.[1] Cúchulainn had not gone far when his companions resolved to turn back; and he felt dejected and uncertain as to the direction to take, when a strange beast came and took him on its back. Thus he travelled for four days, at the end of which the kind beast put him down in an inhabited island, where he received food and drink from a maiden he had met before. He also fell in with a certain Echaid Bairche, who directed him on his way to Scáthach's court. Cúchulainn had to cross the plain, he said, which he saw before him, one-half of which was so cold that the traveller's feet would cleave to the ground, and the other half had the peculiarity that the ground cast him on the points of the spear-like grass which grew out of it; but the friendly stranger gave him a wheel and an apple, which he was to follow across the two dismal tracts respectively.[2] He was then to cross a perilous glen, which was a terrible gulf with no bridge but a slender cord stretched across it from one cliff to the opposite one; and this was not all, for at the end he was to encounter the demons and phantoms sent by Forgall Monach to
- ↑ See the Stokes-O'Donovan ed. of Cormac, p. 17. Compare also the words—'ac scáthaig bhuadaig bhuanand' in the Bk. of Leinster, 88a, quoted in O'Curry's Manners, &c. iij. 454-5, and rendered 'With Scathach, the gifted Buanand.'
- ↑ The story occupies fol. 82c, and the following ones in the Ashburnham MS., and the curious passage about the wheel and the apple, will be found at 83a, while the Harl. MS. 5280 has it at 32b.
