[13] These are the three blisters mentioned in Cormac's Glossary under the word gaire. Nede satirises—wrongfully—his uncle Caier, king of Connacht; "Caier arose next morning early and went to the well. He put his hand over his countenance, he found on his face three blisters which the satire had caused, namely, Stain, Blemish, and Defect [on, anim, eusbaidh], to wit, red and green and white."
[14] I give here, for the most part, the translation given by Sullivan in his Addenda to O'Curry's "Manners and Customs," but it is an exceedingly faulty and defective one from a linguistic point of view. However, even though some words may be mistranslated or their sense mistaken, it is immaterial here. Windisch is said to have finished a complete translation of the Táin, but it has not as yet appeared anywhere. Max Netlau has studied the texts of the Ferdiad episode in vols. x. and xi. of the "Revue Celtique."
[15] This is the metre of the original. The last lines are literally, "A man is constrained to come unto the sod where his final grave shall be." The metre of the last line is wrong in the Book of Leinster.
[16] Tortbullech = toirt-bhuilleach.
[17] A common trait even in the modern Gaelic tales, as in the story of Iollan, son of the king of Spain, whose sweetheart urges him to the battle by chanting his pedigree; and in Campbell's story of Conall Gulban, where the daughter of the King of Lochlann urges her bard to exhort her champion in the fight lest he may be defeated, and to give him "Brosnachadh file fir-ghlic," i.e., the urging of a truly wise poet.
[18] Compare this with the Berserker rage of the Northmen.
[19] Cf. the common Gaelic folk-lore formula, "they would make soft of the hard and hard of the soft, and bring cold springs of fresh water out of the hard rock with their wrestling."
[20] Or Findabar, the fair-eyebrowed one.
[22] I do not think this is rightly translated, but the passage is obscure to me.