Page 55 - Demo

Chapter two 55
When the champions in the pauses of the deadly combat kiss’d.
“Now, for love of land and cattle, while Cuchullin in the fords
Stays the march of Connaught’s battle, ride and rouse the Northern Lords;
Swift as angry eagles wing them toward the plunder’d eyrie’s call,
Thronging from Dun Dealga bring them, bring them from the Red Branch hall ! “ ‘Cups,’ she cried, ‘of bitter drinking, ling them far as arm can throw !
Let them in the ocean sinking, out of sight and memory go!
Let the joinings of the rhythm, let the links of sense and sound
Of the Tain-Bo perish with them, lost as though they’d ne’er been found !’
“So it comes, the lay, recover’d once at such a deadly cost,
Ere one full recital sufer’d, once again is all but lost:
For, the maiden’s malediction still with many a blemish-stain
Clings in coarser garb of iction round the fragments that remain.”
The principal actors in the stories of the third cycle, The Fenian Cycle, are the Fiann na h-Eireann, ‘the Fenians’, The Soldiers or Warriors of Ireland, also sometimes called the Warriors of Druidism, the most renowned body of ighting men in ancient Ireland, after the Red Branch Knights.
Founded by King Cormac mac Airt in the 3rd century as a standing army, the Fianna were employed by him to defend and protect the country against foreign invaders-possibly against the Romans. As well as guarding the harbours against invasion, the Fiann or al- ternatively Fianna were also, in the words of an ancient chronicler ‘oath bound to uphold justice and put down injustice on the part of the kings and lords of Ireland’. So it could be suggested, that the Fiann, who give us a ine example of the singularly noble character of