"Balor had an evil eye, that eye only opened itself upon the plain of battle. Four men had to lift up the eyelid by placing under it an instrument. The warriors, whom Balor scanned with that eye once opened,[13] could not--no matter how numerous--resist their enemies." When Lugh had met and exchanged some mystical and unintelligible language with him, Balor said, "Raise my eyelid that I may see the braggart who speaks with me." "His people raise Balor's eyelid. Lugh from his sling lets fly a stone at Balor which passes through his head, carrying with it the venomous eye. Balor's army looked on." The Mór-rígu, the goddess of war, arrives, and assists the Tuatha De Danann and encourages them. Ogma slays one of the Fomorian kings and is slain himself. The battle is broken at last on the Fomorians; they fly, and Breas is taken prisoner, but his life is spared. "It was," says the saga, "at the battle of Moytura that Ogma, the strong man, found the sword of Tethra, the King of the Fomorians. Ogma drew that sword from the sheath and cleaned it. It was then that it related to him all the high deeds that it had accomplished, for at this time the custom was when swords were drawn from the sheath they used to recite the exploits[14] they had themselves been the cause of. And thence comes the right which swords have, to be cleaned when they are drawn from the sheath; thence also the magic power which swords have preserved ever since"-- to which curious piece of pagan superstition an evidently later Christian redactor adds, "weapons were the organs of the demon to speak to men. At that time men used to worship weapons, and they were a magic safeguard." The saga ends in the episode of the recovery of the Dagda's harp, and in the cry of triumph uttered by the Mór-rígu and by Bodb, her fellow-goddess of war, as they visited the various heights of Ireland, the banks of streams, and the mouths of floods and great rivers, to proclaim aloud their triumph and the defeat of the Fomorians. M. d'Arbois de Jubainville sees in the successive colonisations of Partholan, the Nemedians, and the Tuatha De Danann, an Irish version of the Greek legend of the three successive ages of gold, silver, and brass. The Greek legend of the Chimæra, otherwise Bellerus, the monster slain by Bellerophon, he equates with the Irish Balor of the evil eye; the fire from the throat of Bellerus, and the evil beam shot from Balor's eye may originally have typified the lightning.[15] [1] "L'yowar (rhyming to _hour_) gow-awla," the "book of the takings or holdings of Ireland." [2] Keating derives it from _foghla_, "spoil," and _muir_, "sea," which is an impossible derivation, or from _fo muirib_, as if "along the seas," but it really means "under seas." [3] Also Fir Domnan and Fir Galeóin, two tribes of the same race.