Fer Díad mac Damáin

The four provinces of Ireland sat down together and worked out which man could kill Cú Chulainn. They settled on a Connacht warrior whose skin had gone to horn, a man no edge had ever opened. Their reasoning was sound as far as it went. The one weapon that could get through him was a barbed spear thrown from between the toes, and the four provinces agreed, over their cups, that a man of that quality would surely see it coming.

He was Fer Díad mac Damáin, son of Damán son of Dáire, out of the Fir Domnann of Irrus Domnann on the western coast. The hardening on him is called conganchnes in the Irish, horn-skin, and the tellings treat it as a fact of his body rather than a gift or a curse. Nobody in the story asks how he came by it. What they do dwell on is where he learned to fight, because he learned it in the same house as the man he was being sent to kill. Fer Díad and Cú Chulainn had crossed to Scáthach together and trained under her together, two boys among her pupils, and they came home foster-brothers with the same repertoire of feats in their hands. Cú Chulainn had nothing Fer Díad did not have. Except the gáe bolga.

Medb sent messengers. Fer Díad did not come. So she sent poets, bards and satirists, the aes glamtha gruaidi, the people who raise blisters on a face, and the threat worked where the invitation had not. In early Ireland a satire could ruin a man more completely than a spear, and Fer Díad came to the tent because he could not afford to be laughed at. He was not bought. He was frightened into it.

The bribing came afterwards, and it was thorough. Findabair, daughter of Medb and Ailill, was seated at his side with her hand on every goblet, three kisses given with every cup, apples spilled over the front of his tunic, and the words spoken loud enough for the tent to hear: that he was her darling and her chosen among the men of the world. Medb piled the rest on top. A chariot worth three sevens of bondmaids. Land the equal of Mag Murthemne. His descendants free of tribute for ever. A leaf-shaped brooch of gold with ten score ounces in it. And Findabair herself. Fer Díad, warm and happy and very drunk, told her to keep all of it rather than send him against his foster-brother, and Medb, who had heard this refusal before from better men, simply talked past him until he had sworn to be first at the ford in the morning.

He did not sleep that night. His own charioteer, watching him turn on the cushions with the skin-cover bunched under his head, told him plainly what it was: the sleep of a fey man before deer and hounds. The lad had already reminded him of the day he lost his sword to the host of German Garbglas by the Tyrrhene Sea and Cú Chulainn cut down a hundred warriors to fetch it back, and of the night at Scáthach’s steward’s house when the churl put a three-pointed flesh-hook into the small of Fer Díad’s back and pitched him out through the door, and Cú Chulainn came in behind him and cut the man in two. Fer Díad’s answer was that if the boy had said all this earlier he would never have come at all.

The first days at the ford were almost warm. In the Book of Leinster telling they fight three full days and go on being friends every evening, casting their weapons to the same servants, sharing one fire, sleeping close. Whatever herbs and healing charms were laid into Cú Chulainn’s wounds, an equal share went west across the water to Fer Díad, and whatever food came east from the men of Ireland, half went the other way. They kissed each other three times at the end of each day. Then came the third evening, fought out with heavy swords and heavy shields, and afterwards the horses were stabled apart and the fires were built apart, and neither man crossed the water to the other.

Fer Díad dressed for the fourth morning like a man who knew exactly what was coming. Over the horn-skin went a kilt of iron and a flagstone the size of a millstone laid over his belly, and he spent the waiting time throwing up his feats and catching them again, spinning weapons in the air above his head, because he had woken certain that the gáe bolga would be used on him that day and the belly is where it goes. Cú Chulainn watched him do it from the far bank and told Láeg to have the spear ready in the stream.

What followed is told two ways. The older Recension I version is short and strange: Cú Chulainn springs up onto Fer Díad’s shield and is thrown off into the water three times, until Láeg’s insults do their work and he swells like breath filling a bag until he stands taller than the man opposite. The Book of Leinster gives Fer Díad the better of it for most of the day, and has him kill two of Cú Chulainn’s supernatural helpers in a rage when he realises they are there. Both versions end the same way. The gáe bolga came down the current, Cú Chulainn caught it between his toes and cast it, and it went in as one spear and opened inside him into twenty-four points. In one telling it breaks the shaft of his ribs and takes his heart. In the other it goes through the iron kilt and the flagstone and fills him from the inside.

He had time for a few words. Strong is the ash from your right hand, he said. My heart is blood. You have given battle well. I fall, O Hound. Then Cú Chulainn waded over, lifted him, and carried him to the north bank so that he would lie on the Ulster side of the water and be counted as a man who died going forward. The lament he made over him is not about the fighting at all. It is about a gold brooch, a shield with a rim of gold, a silver ring on a good arm, yellow curling hair, a soft folded girdle, and the fact that Fer Díad had been very good at chess.

His powers were never mysterious. The horn-skin made him the only man in the army who could stand in that ford without being opened in the first exchange, and Scáthach’s training gave him the same feats Cú Chulainn used, so the two of them could counter each other move for move until one of them ran out of moves. His limits were just as plain. He had no answer to the gáe bolga, and everybody including Fer Díad knew it before he ever yoked his chariot. The deeper limit was the one Medb found first. A man who can be shamed into a fight he does not want is a man who can be steered, and Fer Díad went to the ford already half beaten by a threat that never touched his skin at all.

There is one more thing worth saying about him, and it is the sort of thing the story itself would rather not admit. Scholars have long doubted that the Fer Díad episode belongs to the original Táin. Its language is younger than the material around it even in the older manuscript, its style runs to the piled-up epithets of eleventh-century narrative, and every major beat in it, the bribed foster-brother, the reluctant champion, the ford, the gáe bolga, has already been used earlier in the tale on Ferbaeth and on Loch. His name may not even be his: Áth Fhir Diad, the ford of Fer Díad, is a real place, and the man may have been reverse-engineered out of it to explain the name. Which would mean that the most famous death in Irish literature is quite possibly the youngest thing in the book, and that the ford came first and the hero was fitted to it afterwards.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Fer Díad in Irish mythology?

Fer Díad mac Damáin is a Connacht champion of the Ulster Cycle who fought and was killed by his foster-brother Cú Chulainn at a ford during the Táin Bó Cúailnge. He was of the Fir Domnann, and he and Cú Chulainn had trained together in arms under the warrior-woman Scáthach. He is best known for his horn-hard skin, which no weapon could pierce.

Why did Fer Díad fight Cú Chulainn if they were friends?

Queen Medb wanted Cú Chulainn stopped and Fer Díad was the only warrior thought capable of it, but he refused her outright. She then sent poets and satirists to shame and ridicule him, and in early Ireland a satire could destroy a man’s standing completely. He agreed to fight to escape that disgrace, and only afterwards accepted her offered rewards, which included her daughter Findabair.

How did Fer Díad die?

Cú Chulainn killed him with the gáe bolga, a barbed spear that was floated down the river by his charioteer Láeg and cast from between Cú Chulainn’s toes. The weapon entered as a single spear and then opened inside Fer Díad’s body into twenty-four points. Afterwards Cú Chulainn carried the body to the north bank of the ford so that Fer Díad would lie on the Ulster side.

What was Fer Díad’s horn skin?

Fer Díad had a natural hardening of the skin called conganchnes in Irish, meaning horn-skin, which turned aside weapons and edges so that ordinary blades could not wound him. It is why the four provinces chose him to face Cú Chulainn, since the only weapon reckoned able to defeat it was the gáe bolga. The sources treat it as simply a feature of his body and never explain how he came by it.

Is Fer Díad connected to a real place in Ireland?

Yes. The town of Ardee in County Louth carries his name in Irish as Baile Átha Fhirdhia, the town of Fer Díad’s ford, and the combat is set at that crossing. Some scholars think the direction of the connection runs the other way, and that the character was invented to explain an existing place-name.

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Cú Chulainn, Medb, Scathach, Morrigan, Deirdre, Fir Bolg, Lug, Diarmuid Ua Duibhne, Achilles, Hector, Arjuna, Enkidu