and Thetis, who gave him shelter.[1] He had been thrown into the sea by his mother Here, who was ashamed of his ugliness: compare the drowning of Lug's brothers (p. 316), the taking of Corc into a small island outside Erinn (p. 309), and the haste with which Dylan made for the water-world (p. 307). The dark nature of Hephæstus may also be inferred from his union with such goddesses as Charis, Aglæa and Aphrodite, also Athene, the quasi-mother of Hephæstus' monster son Erichthonius. The same remark applies to his struggle with Zeus, who hurled him from Olympus, a nature myth otherwise expressed by the story of his accident with the fiery steeds of Phœbus; and we have the other side of the picture in the return of Hephæstus to Olympus with Dionysus, at the head of a following of silens and nymphs, that challenged comic treatment at the hands of poets and artists. The masterpieces of his art were, as in the case of the mob of lesser spirits associated with working in metals, not unfrequently wrought in malice and fraught with misfortune for those who accepted them. It was to the hall of Culann, then, a dark divinity corresponding to Hephæstus, that Conchobar and his court, that is to say the gods of the Ultonian cycle, resorted for a night's entertainment, which originally appears to have meant their sinking into the sea. In Norse mythology this has its counterpart in the Anses and Ansesses banqueting in the hall of the brewer of the gods. He was not one of them, but a sort of giant called Ægir.[2] The Greek
