Lines 5, 6 of dialogue. "O Cuchulain! who art a breeder of wounds"
(lit. "pregnant with wounds"); "O true warrior! O true" (?accent
probably omitted) "champion!"
Lines 7, 8. "There is need for some one" (i.e. himself) "to go to the
sod where his final resting-place shall be." The Irish of line 7 is is
eicen do neoch a thecht, which O'Curry translates "a man is constrained
to come," and he is followed by Douglas Hyde, who renders the two lines:
Fate constrains each one to stir,
Moving towards his sepulchre.
But do neoch cannot possibly mean "every man," it means "some man;"
usually the person in question is obvious. Compare page 125 of this
romance, line 3, which is literally: "There will be some one who shall
have sickness on that account," biaid nech diamba galar, meaning, as
here, Ferdia.
The line is an explanation of Ferdia's appearance, and is not a moral
reflection.
Line 29. "O Cuchulain! with floods of deeds of valour," or "brimming
over with deeds, &c."
PAGE 141
Line 9. "Four jewels of carbuncle." This is the reading of H. 2, 17;
T.C.D; which O'Curry quotes as an alternative to "forty" of the Book of
Leinster. "Each one of them fit to adorn it" is by O'Curry translated
"in each compartment." The Irish is a cach aen chumtach: apparently
"for each one adornment."
PAGE 144
Line 8 of poem. "Alas for the departing of my ghost."
PAGE 146
Lines 1, 2. "Though he had struck off the half of my leg that is
sound, though he had smitten off half my arm."
PAGE 148
Line 5. "Since he whom Aife bore me," literally "Never until now have
I met, since I slew Aife's only son, thy like in deeds of battle, never
have I found it, O Ferdia." This is O'Curry's rendering; if it is
correct, and it seems to be so substantially, the passage raises a
difficulty. Aife's only son is, according to other records, Conlaoch,
son of Cuchulain and Aife, killed by his father, who did not at the
time know who Conlaoch was. This battle is usually represented as
having taken place at the end of Cuchulain's life; but here it is
represented as preceding the War of Cualgne, in which Cuchulain himself
is represented to be a youth. The allusion certainly indicates an
early date for the fight with Conlaoch, and if we are to lay stress on
the age of Cuchulain at the time of the War, as recorded in the Book of
Leinster, of whose version this incident is a part, the "Son of Aife"
would not have been a son of Cuchulain at all in the mind of the writer
of this verse. It is possible that there was an early legend of a
fight with the son of Aife which was developed afterwards by making him
the son of Cuchulain; the oldest version of this incident, that in the
Yellow Book of Lecan, reconciles the difficulty by making Conlaoch only
seven years old when he took up arms; this could hardly have been the
original version.
Line 23 of poem is literally: "It is like thrusting a spear into sand
or against the sun."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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