During the Tain, Cuchulainn slaughtered the wizard Calatin and his daughters.  But Calatin’s wife bore three posthumous sons and three daughters, and through their means the hero was at last slain.  Everything was done to keep him back from the host which now advanced against Ulster, but finally one of Calatin’s daughters took the form of Niamh and bade him go forth.  As he passed to the fight, Calatin’s daughters persuaded him to eat the flesh of a dog—­a fatal deed, for it was one of his geasa never to eat dog’s flesh.  So it was that in the fight he was slain by Lugaid,[463] and his soul appeared to the thrice fifty queens who had loved him, chanting a mystic song of the coming of Christ and the day of doom—­an interesting example of a phantasm coincidental with death.[464] This and other Christian touches show that the Christian redactors of the saga felt tenderly towards the old pagan hero.  This is even more marked in the story in which he appears to King Loegaire and S. Patrick, begging the former to believe in God and the saint, and praying Patrick to “bring me with thy faithful ones unto the land of the living."[465] A similar Christianising appears in the story of Conchobar’s death, the result of his mad frenzy on hearing from his Druid that an earthquake is the result of the shameful crucifixion of Christ.[466]

In the saga, Cuchulainn appears as the ideal Celtic warrior, but, like other ideal warriors, he is a “magnified, non-natural man,” many of his deeds being merely exaggerations of those common among barbaric folk.  Even his “distortion” or battle frenzy is but a magnifying of the wild frenzy of all wild fighters.  To the person of this ideal warrior, some of whose traits may have been derived from traditional stories of actual heroes, Maerchen and saga episodes attached themselves.  Of every ideal hero, Celtic, Greek, Babylonian, or Polynesian, certain things are told—­his phenomenal strength as a child; his victory over enormous forces; his visits to the Other-world; his amours with a goddess; his divine descent.  These belong to the common stock of folk-tale episodes, and accumulate round every great name.  Hence, save in the colouring given to them or the use made of them by any race, they do not afford a key to the mythic character of the hero.  Such deeds are ascribed to Cuchulainn, as they doubtless were to the ideal heroes of the “undivided Aryans,” but though parallels may be found between him and the Greek Heracles, they might just as easily be found in non-Aryan regions, e.g. in Polynesia.  Thus the parallels between Cuchulainn and Heracles throw little light on the personality of the former, though here and there in such parallels we observe a peculiarly Celtic touch.  Thus, while the Greek hero rescues Hesione from a dragon, it is from three Fomorians that Cuchulainn rescues Devorgilla, namely, from beings to whom actual human sacrifice was paid.  Thus a Maerchen formula of world-wide existence has been moulded by Celtic religious belief and ritual practice.[467]