into action by Medb, who displays to the full her wonted magnificently resourceful unscrupulousness, regardless of any and every consideration, so long as she can achieve her purpose.  The action of Fergus is far more fully dwelt upon, and the scones between him and his charioteer, as also between him and Cuchulain, are given with far greater spirit.  The hero is indignant that Fergus should think it necessary to warn him against a single opponent, and says roundly that it is lucky no one else came on such an errand.  The tone of the older redaction is as a whole rough, animated, individualistic as compared with the smoother, more generalised, less accentuated presentment of the Leinster version.  But to conclude from this fact that the older redaction of the actual combat, if we had it in its original fulness instead of in a bald and fragmentary summary, would not have dwelt upon the details of the fighting, would not have insisted upon the courteous and chivalrous bearing of the two champions, would not have emphasised the inherent pathos of the situation, seems to me altogether unwarranted.  On the contrary the older redaction, by touches of strong, vivid, archaic beauty lacking in the Leinster version leads up to and prepares for just such a situation as the latter describes so finely.  One of these touches must be quoted.  Cuchulain’s charioteer asks him what he will do the night before the struggle, and then continues, “It is thus Fer Diad will come to seek you, with new beauty of plaiting and haircutting and washing and bathing....  It would please me if you went to the place where you will got the same adorning for yourself, to the place where is Emer of the Beautiful Hair....  So Cuchulain went thither that night, and spent the night with his own wife.”  There is indeed the old Irish hero faring forth to battle as a lover to the love tryst!  How natural, how inevitable with warriors of such absurd and magnificent susceptibility, such boyish love of swagger, how natural, I say, the free and generous emotion combined with an overmastering sense of personal honour, and a determination to win at all costs, which are so prominent in the Leinster version of the fight.[FN#68]

[FN#68] The trait must not be put down as a piece of story-teller’s fancy.  In another text of the Ulster cycle, Cath ruis na Rig, Conchobor’s warriors adorn and beautify themselves in this way before the battle.  The Aryan Celt behaved as did the Aryan Hellene.  All readers of Herodotus will recall how the comrades of Leonidas prepared for battle by engaging in games and combing out their hair, and how Demaretus, the counsellor of Xerxes, explained to the king “that it is a custom with these men that when they shall prepare to imperil their lives; that is the time when they adorn their heads” (Herodotus vii. 209.)