Cu Chulainn

Cu Chulainn was born Setanta, son of the god Lugh and the mortal Deichtine, nephew of King Conchobar of Ulster. At six, arriving late to a feast at the smith Culann's house, he was set upon by the smith's great watchdog and killed it by driving his hurling ball down its throat. In compensation he offered to guard the house himself until a new hound was reared, and so became Cu Chulainn, 'the Hound of Culann'. Beautiful in repose, in battle he was seized by the riastrad, a warp-spasm that turned him monstrous: his body revolved within its skin, one eye sank into his skull while the other bulged onto his cheek, and his hair stood stiff with a drop of blood on every strand.

He was trained in arms by the woman-warrior Scathach in Alba, from whom he received the gae bolga, a barbed spear cast from the fork of the foot that opened inside a body. The Tain Bo Cuailnge records his defining feat: when Queen Medb of Connacht marched to seize the Brown Bull of Cooley and the men of Ulster lay helpless under Macha's curse, the seventeen-year-old held the fords alone through a winter, invoking the custom of single combat and killing champion after champion, hardest of all his foster-brother Ferdiad.

His death completed the image: tricked into breaking his personal taboos and mortally wounded, he lashed himself to a standing stone to die on his feet, and his enemies dared close in only when a crow, taken to be the Morrigan, settled on his shoulder. Oliver Sheppard's bronze of the dying Cu Chulainn stands in the General Post Office in Dublin as the memorial of the 1916 Easter Rising.