An Chraobh Airgid

Treasure

The Gae Bulga

Gae Bulga · also Gae Bolga

Cú Chulainn’s barbed spear, cast from the fork of the foot.

Open it on the full site There every name opens, and a web shows who is kin to whom.

Of all the feats Cú Chulainn and Ferdiad learned together, it was the one Ferdiad did not have. In the Táin Láeg sends it down the stream to his master, who catches it in the fork of his foot and casts it: so Loch fell, and so did Ferdiad, though he had put a flat stone the size of a millstone under his iron apron against it. A verse of the Book of Leinster calls it Aífe’s spear. In the older telling it “became twenty-four points” (L. Winifred Faraday, 1904).

In the tales

  • The Cattle Raid of Cooley An argument in bed over who is richer ends in a war for a brown bull, and one young man holding a ford against all Ireland.

See also

  • Baile Átha Fhirdhia Ardee. The town of Ferdiad’s ford, where Cú Chulainn and Ferdiad fought.
  • Cú Chulainn The Hound of Culann: the great hero of the Ulster tales.
  • Ferdiad Cú Chulainn’s foster-brother, who fought him for four days at the ford.
  • Láeg Cú Chulainn’s charioteer.

Sources

Medieval manuscript. Written down by Irish scholars between the eighth and seventeenth centuries.

Each tale above lists the sources it is retold from. Every source the site draws on is listed on the full site.