cruel rites. She is represented as going fully armed, and carrying two spears in her hand. As with Arês[68] and Poseidon[69] in the “Iliad”, her battle-cry was as loud as that of ten thousand men. Wherever there was war, either among gods or men, she, the great queen, was present, either in her own shape or in her favourite disguise, that of a “hoodie” or carrion crow. An old poem shows her inciting a warrior: “Over his head is shrieking A lean hag, quickly hopping Over the points of the weapons and shields; She is the gray-haired Morrígú”.[70] With her, Fea and Nemon, Badb and Macha also hovered over the fighters, inspiring them with the madness of battle. All of these were sometimes called by the name of “Badb”[71]. An account of the Battle of Clontarf, fought by Brian Boru, in 1014, against the Norsemen, gives a gruesome picture of what the Gaels believed to happen in the spiritual world when battle lowered and men’s blood was aflame. “There arose a wild, impetuous, precipitate, mad, inexorable, furious, dark, lacerating, merciless, combative, contentious _badb_, which was shrieking and fluttering over their heads. And there arose also the satyrs, and sprites, and the maniacs of the valleys, and the witches and goblins and owls, and destroying demons of the air and firmament, and the demoniac phantom host; and they were inciting and sustaining valour and battle with them.” When the fight was over, they revelled among the bodies of the slain; the heads cut off as barbaric trophies were called “Macha’s acorn crop”. These grim creations of the savage mind had immense vitality. While Nuada, the supreme war-god, vanished early out of the Pantheon—killed by the Fomors in the great battle fought between them and the gods—Badb and the Morrígú lived on as late as any of the Gaelic deities. Indeed, they may be said to still survive in the superstitious dislike and suspicion shown in all Celtic-speaking countries for their _avatar_, the hoodie-crow.[72]