THE WARRIOR KING

Not surprisingly in a society which held warfare and battle skill in such esteem, it is the fighting qualities of the king or potential king which are first reported in many of the tales. As we saw in the stories of Vercingetorix and Vortigern, and to some extent of Arthur, the king is first and foremost the military leader. Like Maelgawn or Brian Boru, he has to swing his sword in battle even if he is 80 years old or more; wisdom, experience or title alone are not sufficient unless the king is also a warrior in every sense.

Cu Chulainn’s training includes the Pierced Flagstone, which, as the name suggests, consists of a holed flagstone set over a fire with bellows; he performed on it ‘until his soles were blackened and discoloured’. He also learns how to climb a spear and stand on its point without making his feet bleed. He conquers the test of the Pupils’ Bridge by going into his famous rage or ‘warp-spasm* and performing the ‘salmon-leap’. The warp-spasm or riastradh (literally, ‘contortion’) was a battle rage of such proportions that he was no longer recognizable:

His shanks and his joints, every knuckle and angle and organ from head to foot, shook like a tree in the flood or a reed in the stream. His body made a furious twist inside his skin, so that his feet and shins and knees switched to the rear and his heels and calves switched to the front. . . . His face and features became a red bowl: he sucked one eye so deep into his head that a wild crane couldn’t probe it onto his cheek out of the depths of his skull; the other eye fell out along his cheek. . . . His cheek peeled back from his jaws until the gullet appeared, his lungs and liver flapped in his mouth and throat. . . . His heart boomed loud in his breast like the baying of a watch-dog at its feed or the sound of a lion among bears. . . . The hero-halo rose out of his brow, long and broad as a warrior’s whetstone, long as a snout, and he went mad rattling his shields. . . .