Note 18 — Chapter XXIX

This passage and that about the crane are not explained in the "Colloquy," but curiously enough I find the same passage in the saga called the Battle of Ventry, which Kuno Meyer published in "Anecdota Oxoniensia" from a fifteenth-century vellum in the Bodleian. The lady is there called Gelges [white swan], and as she sought for Cael among the slain "she saw the crane of the meadow and her two birds and the wily beast yclept the fox a-watching of her birds, and when she covered one of the birds to save it he would make a rush at the other bird, so that the crane had to stretch herself out between them both, so that she would rather have found and suffered death by the wild beast than that her birds should be killed by him. And Gelges mused on this greatly and said, 'I wonder not that I so love my fair sweetheart, since this little bird is in such distress about its birdlets.'" She heard, moreover, a wild stag on Drum Reelin above the harbour, and it was vehemently bewailing the hind from one pass to the other, for they had been nine years together and had dwelt in the wood that was at the foot of the harbour, the wood of Feedesh, and the hind had been killed by Finn, and the stag was nineteen days without tasting grass or water, mourning for the hind. "It is no shame for me," said Gelges, "to find death with grief for Cael, as the stag is shortening his life for grief of the hind," etc.