Note 50.1 — Chapter XVII · THE RESCUE OF ANDROMEDA IN SAGAS.

Before leaving the subject of European sagas one important Rescue story must, however, be mentioned. It forms part of the Irish tale of The Wooing of Emer, and is to this effect: Cuchulainn, coming to the house of Ruad, king of the Isles, on Samuin night (Hallowe’en), hears wailing in the dun of the king. Inquiring the cause of the lamentations, he is told that Devorgoil, the king’s daughter, has been taken as tribute to the Fomori, a monster race dwelling beneath the sea, and she is exposed on the sea-shore that they may fetch her. He goes down to the strand and there finds the maiden. “He asked tidings of her. The maiden told him fully. ‘Whence do the men come?’ said he. ‘From that distant island yonder,’ said she; ‘be not here in sight of the robbers.’ He remained there awaiting them and killed the three Fomori in single combat. But the last man wounded him at the wrist. The maiden gave him a strip from her garment round his wound. He then went away without making himself known to the maiden. The maiden came to the dun and told her father the whole story.… Many in the dun boasted of having killed the Fomori, but the maiden did not believe them.” So the king prepared a bath, to which every one was brought separately. Cuchulainn came, like everybody else, and the maiden recognised him—doubtless by the strip of her garment on his wound. The king offered him the damsel to wife, but he said: “Not so. Let her come this day year to Erinn after me, if it be pleasant to her, and she will find me there.” “He ought of course to have married her,” as Mr. Nutt, commenting on the story, remarks; “but this would have conflicted with the purpose of the tale… which is to celebrate the heroic loves of Cuchullainn and Emer.” So the marriage is prevented by a device mentioned in one of our earlier chapters. Devorgoil came with her handmaid in bird-form, and Cuchulainn, not recognising her, struck her with a stone from his sling, which he afterwards sucked from the wound, thereby becoming her blood-brother.50.1 Here it is plain, as has been noted by both Professor Rhys and Mr. Nutt, that we have a variant of the incident under consideration. The manuscript containing the story was compiled in A.D. 1300; and there are reasons for thinking that in its present form the story is at least as old as the early part of the eleventh century. It is probable that the incident is “a folktale arbitrarily altered in order to be introduced into the” saga of Cuchulainn. This at least is Mr. Nutt’s acute conjecture; and I scarcely know how else to account for the resemblance the incident bears to that found in stories of the Herdsman type. The Herdsman type, as we have seen, appears to have originated among the Celts, or rather perhaps among that Iberian race which overspread in far prehistoric times the whole of the west of Europe, and after the Celtic conquest of these islands formed the substratum of the population. We shall hereafter see the bearing of this fact on the question of origin. Meanwhile, we may turn to other variants.