Fedelm to have a bath got ready for him in order to prepare him for the morrow and his first encounter with the invading army. Fedelm, according to some accounts,[1] was the mother of Erc and Acall (p. 483); nor is she usually associated with Cúchulainn; and she is so abruptly introduced into the epic tale that the passage was a puzzle, some eight hundred years ago, to the writer of the oldest text now known of it. But, treated comparatively, it becomes intelligible, and carries us back a distance of time which might almost be characterized as geological.
All that we have thus far found with regard to the contests of the gods and their allies against the powers of evil and theirs, would seem to indicate that they were originally regarded as yearly struggles. This appears to be the meaning of the foreknowledge as to the final battle of Moytura, and as to the exact date of the engagement on the Plain of Fidga in which Cúchulainn assists Labraid of the Swift Hand on the Sword, a kind of Celtic Zeus or Mars-Jupiter as the ruler of an Elysium in the other world (p. 342). It was for a similar reason that the northern sibyl could predict that, after the Anses had been slain by Swart aided by the evil brood, Balder would come to reign, when all would be healed, and the Anses would meet again in the Field of Ith. Nor can the case have been materially different with the Greek gods, as proved by the allusion to the prophecy about the issue of the war with the giants. And this was not all; for we are told that the Cretans represented Zeus as born and bred and also buried in their island, a view sometimes formerly regarded as confirming the
- ↑ O'Curry, p. 514.
