Cú Chulainn

The hound came out of the dark already running, a black weight of muscle and sound, and the boy at the gate had only a hurling stick and a ball. He drove the ball down the animal’s throat as it leapt, or he caught it by the hind legs and dashed it against the doorpost; the old tellings never quite agree on the method, only on the result. Culann the smith stood in his doorway and wept, because the hound had been worth an army to him. The boy, Sétanta, offered the only restitution that made sense to a child who had just killed something enormous: he would guard the smith’s house himself until a new pup could be reared to take the post. From that night he was Cú Chulainn, the Hound of Culann, and the name fit a boy who would spend his life as something kept on a chain for other people and loosed when the killing needed doing.

His beginnings are tangled in the way the oldest stories tend to be. His mother was Deichtine, sister to Conchobar, king of Ulster; his father was either a mortal named Sualtam or the god Lugh of the Long Arm, who came to Deichtine in a dream and claimed the child as a piece of himself walking the earth. The tellers usually let both fathers stand. It made him a creature of two worlds, mortal enough to bleed and die, divine enough that ordinary measures never quite held him.

As a small boy he walked alone to Conchobar’s court at Emain Macha and beat the king’s hundred and fifty youths at their own games before any of them could lay a hand on him. When he was old enough to want a wife, he set his heart on Emer, daughter of Forgall the Wily, who tried to be rid of the suitor by packing him off to train with Scáthach, a warrior-woman on a shadowy island reachable only by a leaping bridge that flung the unworthy back. The plan failed. Cú Chulainn cleared the bridge with a salmon’s leap, learned everything Scáthach had to teach, and came home with the one gift that would both define and doom him: the Gáe Bolg.

The Gáe Bolg was a spear and also a sentence. Cast along the surface of a stream and driven home with the foot, it entered a body through a single wound and then opened inside it into thirty barbs, so that the only way to retrieve it was to cut the dead man apart. He kept it for the moments when nothing else would serve.

In repose he was almost embarrassingly beautiful, a slight dark youth that grown men underestimated until it was too late. In battle he became something else. The ríastrad, the warp-spasm, took him like a fit: his body turned within its own skin so that his feet and knees faced backward, one eye sank into his skull while the other bulged out onto his cheek, his hair stood stiff with a bead of blood at each point, and a column of dark heat, the hero’s light, rose smoking from the crown of his head. Heat came off him in visible waves. In that state he could not tell a friend from an enemy, and the men of Ulster learned to meet him on his way home with vats of cold water, plunging him into one after another until the first vat burst into steam, the second boiled, and the third merely scalded. Only then was it safe to bring him indoors.

His great labour was the Táin Bó Cúailnge, the Cattle Raid of Cooley. Medb, queen of Connacht, marched on Ulster to take a prize bull, and she timed it well, because the fighting men of the province lay helpless under an old curse that struck them with the pangs of childbirth whenever they were needed most. Cú Chulainn, untouched by the curse, held the invading army by himself. He invoked the right of single combat, an ancient law that let him face one champion a day at the ford while the rest of Medb’s host waited, and he killed them one after another through a long winter, sleeping little and eating less. The hardest came when Medb sent Ferdiad against him, his foster-brother, the man he had trained beside under Scáthach. They fought for three days across the ford, resting at night, sending each other food and physicians, until Cú Chulainn at last called for the Gáe Bolg and let the river carry it home. He carried Ferdiad’s body to the northern bank himself and grieved over it. The victory tasted like nothing.

What kills a man like this is never a fair fight. The Morrígan, the war-goddess who haunts the cattle raid as crow and eel and grey heifer, had offered him her love in the middle of one battle and been refused, and a goddess scorned keeps accounts. His undoing came through his own honour. He lived bound by geasa, sacred prohibitions: he could never refuse food pressed on him by a woman, and he could never eat the flesh of a dog. On the road to his last fight he passed three hags roasting a hound over a fire, and they invited him to share it. To refuse the meal broke one taboo; to eat broke the other, and worse, made him eat his own namesake. He ate, and felt the strength go out of the hand and the thigh that touched the meat.

Wounded with his own returned weapons on the open plain, his entrails loosening, he dragged himself to a standing pillar of stone and lashed himself upright against it so that he could die on his feet, facing the enemy. They circled at a distance for a long time, unwilling to come near while there was any chance he still lived. They knew him dead only when a raven settled on his shoulder and his blood ran cold, and even then the man who came to take his head paid for it, the slack sword-arm falling one last time to cut off the hand that reached for him.

His strength was never really the warp-spasm or the spear. It was that he could not stop. As a boy he had heard a druid foretell that whoever took up arms on a certain day would win undying fame and a short life, and he had taken up arms that very morning, a child bargaining glory against years. Everything after followed from that. The same refusal to yield that let one youth hold a province against an army left him no way to grow old and no exit that was not the pillar and the bird. He was made for the single combat at the ford and useless at the long ordinary business of staying alive. The chain that made him a guard dog was also the thing that kept him from ever lying down.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Cú Chulainn?

Cú Chulainn is the greatest hero of the Ulster Cycle of Irish mythology, a demigod warrior born as the boy Sétanta and widely regarded as an incarnation of the god Lugh. He is best known for single-handedly defending the province of Ulster against an invading army in the Táin Bó Cúailnge. He also appears in Scottish and Manx folklore.

Why is Cú Chulainn called the Hound of Culann?

He earned the name as a child after killing the savage guard dog of Culann the smith in self-defence. Because the smith had lost a protector worth an army, the boy offered to guard Culann’s house himself until a replacement pup could be reared, and from then on he was called Cú Chulainn, “the Hound of Culann.”

What was the Gáe Bolg?

The Gáe Bolg was Cú Chulainn’s signature barbed spear, given to him by the warrior-woman Scáthach who trained him. It was thrown with the foot along the surface of water, and once it entered a victim it opened into many barbs inside the body, so it could only be removed by cutting the corpse apart.

What is the ríastrad or warp-spasm?

The ríastrad was Cú Chulainn’s monstrous battle frenzy, in which his body grotesquely distorted: one eye sank into his head while the other bulged out, his frame contorted within its own skin, and a dark “hero’s light” rose from his crown. In this state he became unstoppable but could not tell friend from foe, so the Ulstermen had to cool him in vats of water before he was safe to approach.

How did Cú Chulainn die?

Cú Chulainn died after being tricked into breaking his sacred geasa, including eating the flesh of a dog, which drained his strength. Mortally wounded in his final battle, he tied himself to a standing stone so he could die on his feet facing his enemies, who only dared approach once a raven landed on his shoulder.

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Medb, Scathach, Emer, Lug, Morrigan, Nuada, Balor, Fomorian, Dagda, Manannán mac Lir, Oisín, Diarmuid Ua Duibhne