Whatever themes sprang from the pagan age, probably nothing was written down before the Christian time, when Christian matter might be foisted into the pagan story. The Sagas belonging to the so-called Ulster Cycle afford the best illustration of early Irish traits.[150] They reflect a society apparently at the “Homeric” stage of development, though the Irish heroes suffer in comparison with the Greek by reason of the immeasurable inferiority of these Gaelic Sagas to the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. There is the same custom of fighting from chariots, the same tried charioteer, the hero’s closest friend, and the same unstable relationship between the chieftains and the king.[151] The Achilles of the Ulster Cycle is Cuchulain. The Tain Bo Cuailgne (Englished rather improperly as the “Cattle-raid of Cooley”) is the long and famous Saga that brings his glory to its height.[152] Other Sagas tell of his mysterious birth, his youthful deeds, his wooing, his various feats, and then the moving, fateful story of his death. Loved by many women, cherished by heroes, beautiful in face and form, possessed of strength, agility, and skill in arms beyond belief, uncontrolled, chivalric, his battle-ardour unquenchable, he is a brilliant epic hero. But his story is weakened by hyperbole. Even to-day we know how sword-strokes and spear-thrust kill. So do great narrators, who likewise realize the literary power of truth. Through the _Iliad_ there is no combat between heroes where spear and sword do not pierce and kill as they do in fact. So in the Sagas of the Norse, the man falls before the mortal blow. But in the Ulster Cycle, day after day, two heroes may mangle each other in every impossible and fantastic way, beyond the bounds of the faintest shadow of verisimilitude.[153] In this weakness of hyperbole the Irish Sagas are outdone only by the monstrous doings of the epics of India. Besides hyperbole, Irish tales display another weakness, which is not unpleasing, although an element of failure both in the people and their literature. This is the quality of non-arrival. Some old tales evince it in the unsteadfast purpose of the narrative, the hero quite forgetting the initial motive of his action. In the _Voyage of Mældun_, for instance, a son sets out upon the ocean to seek his father’s murderers, a motive which is lost sight of amid the marvels of the voyage.[154] As may be imagined, qualities of vanity, truculence, irrationality, hyperbole, and non-arrival or lack of sequence, frequently impart an air of _bouffe_ to the Irish Sagas, making them humorous beyond the intention of their composers.[155]