Cú Chulainn choosing fame over long life

At a Glance

• Central figures: Setanta, a boy of seven who would become Cú Chulainn; Cathbad the druid, chief seer of Ulster; Conchobar mac Nessa, king of Ulster.
• Setting: The court of Emain Macha, seat of the Ulster kings, in the earliest stratum of the Ulster Cycle.
• The turn: Cathbad prophesied that any boy who took up arms that day would win everlasting fame but die young; Setanta, overhearing, went immediately to the king and demanded weapons.
• The outcome: Conchobar armed the boy, who broke fourteen sets of weapons before accepting the king’s own chariot and gear - and before nightfall had already proved himself in combat, sealing the bargain he had made with fate.
• The legacy: The name Cú Chulainn - the Hound of Culann - which Setanta earned that same period of his boyhood, and which became the name by which all of Ireland remembered him.

Cathbad the druid was teaching in the open court at Emain Macha, and around him sat his students - boys of good families, sons of warriors, all of them older than seven. One of them asked what quality the day held. It was the kind of question druids were asked constantly, the way a farmer might glance at the sky. Cathbad considered it. He said that any boy who took up arms for the first time that day would have a name greater than any name in Ireland. He said it plainly. Then he said the rest: that boy’s life would be short.

The students nodded and went back to their lessons. None of them moved toward the weapon-racks. But Setanta, who was not among the students - who had been playing hurling against the wall of the court, alone, beating the ball and catching it before it hit ground - had heard every word.

The Boy at the Weapon-Rack

Setanta was seven. His father was Sualtam, a minor lord, but his mother Dechtire was Conchobar’s own sister, and by some tellings his true father was Lugh Lámfada himself, the long-armed god. None of that mattered to the boy at that moment. What mattered was the prophecy, and what it offered.

He went to find Conchobar.

The king was in his hall. Setanta walked in and said he wanted arms. Conchobar looked at the child - small for seven, dark-haired, with eyes that did not flinch - and asked who had put the idea in his head. Setanta said Cathbad had spoken the prophecy and he intended to claim it. Conchobar, who loved his sister’s son, did not refuse. A king who refuses a boy his fate insults both the boy and the fate.

He gave Setanta a spear and a shield from the stores. Setanta tested the spear’s shaft against his knee. It broke. Conchobar gave him another. Setanta bent the shield-rim. He broke one set of weapons after another - the javelins snapping, the sword-hilts cracking in his grip, the chariot-poles splintering when he braced against them. Fourteen sets in all. The armorers stared. The king watched without expression.

Finally Conchobar gave the boy his own weapons - the king’s spears, the king’s shield, the king’s chariot with its iron-rimmed wheels. Setanta tested them. They held.

Ibar and the Chariot

Conchobar’s charioteer Ibar was told to drive the boy. Ibar was not pleased. Driving a seven-year-old to war was not what he had trained for. But Conchobar ordered it, and so Ibar yoked the horses and Setanta climbed aboard, standing in the car the way he had seen warriors stand - feet braced, one hand on the chariot-rail, the other holding a javelin.

They drove out from Emain Macha. Setanta wanted to see the border forts, the places where Ulster’s enemies tested her edges. Ibar named the hills and rivers as they passed. Every landmark had a story. Here Fergus had fought. There a cattle-raid had been turned back. Setanta listened and remembered. He had the kind of memory that holds a landscape after one seeing.

At the ford of a river whose name the later manuscripts leave unclear, they found three sons of Nechtan Scéne - warriors who had boasted that more Ulstermen had died at their hands than were currently alive in the province. It was an exaggeration, but not by much. They held the ford and challenged anyone who crossed.

The Ford

Setanta crossed.

The first son came forward. He was a grown man, armed, experienced. Setanta killed him. The method was quick and ugly - the boy’s javelin-throw had a force behind it that did not match his size, and the man went down in the water of the ford. The second brother came. Setanta killed him in the shallows. The third engaged him at close quarters, and Setanta drowned him, holding him under the surface of the river until he stopped moving.

Ibar, watching from the chariot, said nothing. The horses stood in the traces and flicked their ears at flies.

Setanta cut the heads from the three brothers and fixed them to the chariot-rail. This was custom. A warrior’s first trophies rode home with him. The blood ran down the wicker frame and pooled in the floor of the car, and the boy stood in it and told Ibar to drive back to Emain Macha.

The Warp-Spasm

But the killing had woken something. On the road back, the battle-fury rose in Setanta - the ríastrad, the warp-spasm that would become his signature and his curse. His body contorted. One eye sank into his skull; the other bulged outward. His jaw wrenched open. His hair stood rigid, and a drop of blood appeared at the tip of each strand. The heat of him was such that the air above the chariot shimmered.

Ibar drove hard for Emain Macha and shouted ahead. The boy was in his fury and could not tell friend from enemy. Conchobar, who understood what was happening, sent the women of the court out to meet the chariot. They went bare-breasted, a hundred and fifty of them, into the road. The shock of it - the strangeness, the disruption of battle-logic - made Setanta turn his face away. In that moment of confusion, warriors seized him and plunged him into a vat of cold water. The vat burst its staves. They put him in a second vat. The water boiled. The third vat grew hot to the touch, but held. Setanta came back to himself, small and dark-haired and seven years old, standing in warm water in the wreckage of two barrels.

Conchobar’s court looked at the boy. Three heads on his chariot-rail. The king’s own weapons unbroken in his hands. The body of a child who had just killed three grown warriors at a ford and survived his own rage.

The Name That Would Not Be Forgotten

Cathbad had said the name would outlast the life. He had not said how short the life would be, only that it would be short. Setanta heard this and did not ask for the number of his years. He never asked. That was the bargain, and he had taken it with his eyes open, at seven, in a courtyard where he had been playing hurling against a wall.

The fame came. Before the season turned, the boy killed the great hound of Culann the smith - slew it with his hurling ball driven down the animal’s throat - and took its place as guardian of Culann’s house until a new hound could be raised. From that night he was Cú Chulainn, the Hound of Culann, and Setanta was the name only his mother used.

He did not grow old.