Weapons, feats and the warp-spasm

The gae bolga

Kinsella's note calls the gae bolga a terrible javelin used by Cúchulainn, and quotes the Book of Leinster on how it works. It had to be made ready for use on a stream and cast from the fork of the toes. It entered a man's body with a single wound, like a javelin, then opened into thirty barbs. Only by cutting away the flesh could it be taken out.

Scáthach taught it to no one but Cúchulainn. He uses it on the water against his son, the boy from Aife, and brings the boy's bowels down around his feet. Ferdia has every feat Cúchulainn has except the gae bolga, and puts a stone the size of a millstone and an apron of twice-smelted iron on his body for fear of it. The charioteer sends it down the stream, saying "Beware the gae bolga." Cúchulainn catches it in the fork of his foot and casts it. It goes through the iron and shatters the stone in three, and every joint of Ferdia fills with barbs. Afterward Laeg cuts Ferdia open to take it out, because Cúchulainn needs his weapon. A note says the source gives a brief description of it at this point, which Kinsella omits and includes in the notes to the courtship of Emer.

The feats

The training with Scáthach ends with a list. Kinsella's note says the exact nature of these feats is not clear, and that a few of the commentators' more reasonable guesses are embodied in the translation. The list runs: the apple-feat, juggling nine apples with never more than one in the palm; the thunder-feat; the sword-edge and the sloped shield; the javelin and rope; the body-feat; the feat of Cat; the heroic salmon-leap; the pole-throw; the leap over a poisoned stroke; the chariot-fighter's crouch; the gae bolga; the spurt of speed; the chariot-wheel thrown on high; the shield-rim; the breath-feat, with gold apples blown into the air; the snapping mouth and the hero's scream; the stroke of precision; the stunning-shot and the cry-stroke; stepping on a lance in flight and standing erect on its point; the sickle-chariot; and the trussing of a warrior on the points of spears.

The salmon-leap is in constant use. Emer demands it, carrying twice his weight in gold. Cúchulainn leaps onto the middle of Scáthach's bridge, up to the yew tree where she rests, across the three enclosures into the middle of Forgall's fort, and upward off a sea-cliff path when a one-eyed hag kicks at his toe. The thunder-feat kills three hundred and nine men in one drive. The stunning-shot brings down eight swans, then twelve more. His son from Aife cuts him bald-headed with the stroke of precision. Cúr mac Daláth attacks him for a third of a day while he practises the apple-feat, and the last apple in his hand goes out through the back of Cúr's head.

Kinsella's note gives the del chliss, which Cúchulainn promises will red-riddle Tuachell, as literally "the dart of feats."

The warp-spasm

Kinsella's note says the reason for the nickname "the warped one" becomes clear in the Táin. When Scáthach's pupils jeer at him on the bridge, he "went into his warp-spasm" and crosses. As a boy he runs at Conchobor's boy-troop, and Fergus reports that each hair hammers into his head with a fire-speck on its tip, one eye squeezes narrower than a needle's eye, the other opens wider than a goblet, and the hero-halo rises from his crown. He lays out fifty of them before they reach the gate.

The full description comes when he arms for his first full battle with the provinces. The spasm shakes him from head to foot like a tree in a flood. His body twists inside his skin, so that his feet and shins and knees face the rear and his heels and calves face the front. The sinews at his temples stretch to the nape of his neck, each knob as big as the head of a month-old child. His face becomes a red bowl. He sucks one eye so deep into his head that a wild crane could not probe it out onto his cheek, and the other eye falls out along his cheek. His cheek peels back from his jaws until the gullet shows, his lungs and liver flap in his mouth and throat, and his lower jaw strikes the upper a lion-killing blow. His heart booms like a watchdog at its feed. His hair twists like a thornbush stuck in a gap, and if an apple tree were shaken above him scarcely an apple would reach the ground, each being spiked on a bristle. The hero-halo rises from his brow. A straight spout of black blood rises from the centre of his skull, high as the mast of a ship, smoking like the smoke from a royal hostel when a king is coming to be cared for at the close of a winter day.

Before it comes he puts on twenty-seven tunics of waxed skin, tied with straps, so that his senses and brain will not burst their bonds. When the spasm has run through him he steps into his sickle-chariot. The next morning he shows himself to the armies in a handsome shape, because the unearthly one of the night before did not do him justice. At the last battle his wounds open afresh, the warp-spasm seizes him again, and the twenty-seven tunics go back on.